Lot(e)ophagi: Lotus Eaters in Shola von Reinhold's LOTE (2020)

 

Last term, I was fortunate enough to lecture the English Literature undergraduates at the University of Glasgow. Not only that, I was able to give a lecture that encompassed all of my academic interests: contemporary literature, feminist and queer theory, and, of course, classical reception and adaptation.

The lecture was on Shola von Reinhold’s novel, LOTE (2020) and, more specifically, the motif of the lotus eaters in the novel. I basically got to introduce the students to the concept of classical reception in English Literature, and how you can use the myth to access some of the more difficult textual devices at play in the novel. 

I really enjoyed giving the lecture and I think the students found it useful, so I thought I would adapt it into a blog post for you, dear readers, interspersed with the powerpoint that I spent almost as much time and attention on as I did on writing the lecture itself! 

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Tell me about a complicated man. 

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy

and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home.
He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died. 

They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, 

tell the old story for our modern times.
Od. I.1-11 (trans, Emily Wilson 2018) 

I started with a quick overview of the plot of the Odyssey, before focusing specifically on the lotus eaters in the poem. 

The myth of the lotus eaters is not only about the seductive power of narcotics and the desire to forget your troubles. They are the epitome of exoticisation. They are seductive because they are exotic, and their ethics are so antithetical to the civilised hero: while Odysseus is motivated, driven by a desire to be a hero and to do the right thing and to be clever, the lotus eaters are lethargic, apathetic, intoxicated. Indeed, in Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece, it is argued that the lotus eaters are dehumanised to the point of being comparable to the monsters in the Odyssey, like Scylla and Charybdis, or even the Cyclopes. 

We should, however, be suspicious of narrators in classical epic poems. In the Odyssey, we don’t hear the lotus eaters speak, we don’t even really see them. The scouts tell Odysseus what they saw, and he tells the Phaeacians, and Homer — who represents centuries of oral storytelling traditions — tells us. 

Nevertheless, the lotus eater has become a symbol of a person who spends their time luxuriating, indulging in pleasure, with no concerns of practicality. The Cambridge Dictionary, for instance, defines a lotus-eater as ‘someone who has a very comfortable, lazy life and does not worry about anything’. 

The lotus eaters have really captured the imagination of later writers, as symbols of the exotic and the luxury, as opposed to responsibility, civilisation, and order. This is most apparent in Lord Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos Eaters’ (1832) – a poem all about the conflict between one’s responsibility to heroism and the desire to take pleasure. 

The lotus eaters are referenced in works as far-ranging as Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence to Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. 

Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief (2010)

(Side note: I’ve been reading the Percy Jackson books lately and I am really enjoying them! I’m really looking forward to the new TV series.)

"Leah is *exactly* the way I imagined Annabeth in the books: smart, strong and courageous, a true daughter of Athena who has zero patience for the foolishness of a certain Seaweed Brain." - Rick Riordanhttps://t.co/vzGcJ0d43j

— Rick Riordan (@rickriordan) May 5, 2022

I explained in my lecture that Alfred Tennyson, Edith Wharton, Rick Riordan, and Shola von Reinhold are all engaging with the classical tradition. I then, of course, provided some useful definitions of the classical tradition, classicism, neo-classicism, and so on. (See the bibliography of this post if you would like further details on these terms!)

To read Shola von Reinhold’s ornate, multi-layered novel LOTE (2020) is to encounter a baroque mind. It tells the story of a queer Black thinker named Mathilda, in the present day, who is transfixed by an historical era that does not adequately represent her. Via diaries, letters and photographs she discovers the Bright Young Things, as they were fondly known, a set of decadent and disobedient socialites who threw elaborate, drug- fuelled parties across the 1920s and 30s. Through a cocktail of hedonism, androgyny and queer love, this group — along with their counterparts in the Bloomsbury Group — began to deconstruct patriarchy a century ago, and seem to offer Mathilda an escape from the present, with all its social and racial barriers – except they don’t. The catch is that members of both groups were, by and large, spoilt, white and rich. Despite their experimental poetry, queer lifestyles, and self-fashioning (‘frock consciousness’, as Virginia Woolf called it), radicality is countered by entitlement; after all, rich people have always made exceptions of their own kind. (Scott 2020) 

The appeal of the Lote-Os to Mathilda is akin to the appeal of the Lotus Eaters to Odysseus’ men and, later, to Tennyson. They offer a sedentary escape from the toils of the real world: for the Ithacans, that was the struggle of getting home after war; for Tennyson, it was the pressure of productivity and technological advancement in the Victorian era; and for Mathilda it is the rich, white, cisgendered, heteropatriarchcal society that oppresses and exhausts her. 

Mathilda’s narrative is supplemented with passages from BLACK MODERNISMS as well as recollections from Druitt’s own story. Both Druitt and the monograph are inventions by Reinhold –– symbolic of the other Black Anons that have been irretrievably lost in history and academic works that have been kept out of libraries. This is particularly symbolised by Hermia Druitt’s final living space being bricked off and hidden, overwritten by the white artists in residence, with their white books, in the white room. 

As Mathilda reads from BLACK MODERNISMS: 

This literary fade to black, as Mathilda gets distracted — indicative of the stream of consciousness narration — really does not need to be finished at all. The Lote-Os are worried that they will be persecuted for being queer, like Oscar Wilde, and they are concerned about being so intimately involved with a woman of colour.

Also, as Mathila concludes from her research: 

And, as Erskine-Lily reads and paraphrases from his translation of The Book of the Luxuries: 

 

Now that we understand the myth of the lotus eaters and what they symbolise, we gain greater understanding of the novel. You may have found it frustrating — or, maybe, relatable — when Mathilda repeatedly procrastinated her assignments by going to sleep or reading for fun instead of from her textbook, thus putting her funding and housing in jeopardy. But if we understand her as an acolyte of the lotus eaters, she is acting in-line with the lotophagic beliefs that prioritise rest and luxury over real-world demands. 

Equally, if we understand the lotus eaters as a femme-presenting gender-fluid people, Mathilda, Malachi, and Erskine-Lily’s refusal to conform to a binaristic understanding of gender — and, even more than that, a refusal to label themselves within accepted LGBTQ+ genderqueer frameworks (none of them, for instance, call themselves trans or non-binary or gender-fluid) — is in line with the lotus eaters’ rejection of so-called civilised norms in favour of authentic presentations of the self. 

***

Moreover, we can use the myth of the lotus eaters to access and understand some of the more complex themes of the novel. 

fin-de-siècle aestheticism & philosophical Beauty

To condense the definitions that I gave in the lecture: 

Aestheticism is a doctrine that regards beauty as an end in itself, and attempts to preserve the arts from subordination to moral or political purposes. Devotees of pure beauty advocate for “art for art’s sake”. Devotees include Beudelaire, Flaubert, and Oscar Wilde — they were often called aesthetes. 

Related to this is ‘decadence’, a term used to denote the decline in cultural standards that was adopted to name an aesthetic style in the latter part of the 19th century. Decadence often takes as its subject matter ancient myths and supernatural tales, although it also — somewhat paradoxically — is a kind of proto-modernism, since it marked a break from the established aesthetics of its own time. 

Beauty, to philosophers, is traditionally held as among the ultimate values, along with goodness, truth, and justice. One of the foundational debates about Beauty is whether Beauty is subjective (that is, in the eye of the beholder) or whether it is an objective feature of beautiful things. 

To return to LOTE, the modernist society dedicated to “The Luxuries” is in fact a revival of the fin-de-siècle aestheticism that aesthetes such as Wilde and Baudelaire proffered. The name “Lote-Os” not only has a decadent appeal — recalling, as it does, the lotophagi — it also works to effectively communicate the queer significance of these aesthetic groups. If we remember that the lotus eaters in greek myth and later reproductions were, themselves, somewhat countercultural, opposing civilised rigidity in favour of erotic luxuries, the lotophagi become symbolic of the ultimate devotees to beauty. 

Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is a verbal description of, or mediation upon, a non-verbal work of art, real or imagined, typically a painting or sculpture. 

Ekphrasis has its roots, again, in Classics. The first, or most famous, case of ekphrasis in literature is found in Homeric epic. This time in the Iliad, book 18, with the description of Achilles’ shield, forged by Hephaestus. 

In line with the novel’s concerns with beauty, art, aesthetics, and decadence, LOTE is rife with ekphrastic descriptions. Indeed, taking into account Mathilda and Erskine-Lily’s commitment to demonstrating their aesthetic devotion to Beauty in their clothing perhaps means that any description of their appearances becomes ekphrastic. Since they also live by these precepts, the descriptions of Erskine-Lily’s baroque apartment, and (of course) his artwork are ekphrastic. 

Angelo Monticelli's Shield of Achilles (c.1820)

***

To sum up, the myth of the lotus eaters is told in Book 9 of the Odyssey, and it is not only about the seductive power of narcotics and the desire to forget your troubles. They are the epitome of exoticisation. They are seductive because they are exotic, and their ethics are so antithetical to the civilised hero, since the lotus eaters are lethargic, apathetic, intoxicated.

In LOTE, Mathilda follows the lotophagic ethics in her sedentary pursuit of the Luxuries. We can use the myth of the lotus eaters to access some of the more complex principals in the novel, such as fin-de-siècle aestheticism and decadence, philosophical Beauty, and ekphrasis. 

Cover image: Theodor Van Thulden 'Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters' & Shola von Reinhold's LOTE 

Bibliography

Burke, Edmund, 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 4th edition, 2015.

Dinah Birch & Katy Hooper, ‘Classicism, Classic, and Classical’ & ‘Neo-Classical’, Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature, 4th edition, 2012.

Homer, Odyssey, trans. Wilson, Emily, (London: W.W. Norton, 2018)

Hume, David, 1757, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Essays Moral and Political, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1894.

Kant, Immanuel, 1790, Critique of Judgement, J.H. Bernard, trans., New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Marlowe, Christopher, 1564-1593. Dr Faustus, The A-Text. (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1985)

Morford, M.; Lenardon, R.; Sham, M; Classical Mythology, 9th edition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Sartwell, Crispin, "Beauty", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/beauty/>.

Scott, Izabella, 2020. 'Review: Lote' The White Review, <https://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/shola-von-reinholds-lote/>

Tennyson, Alfred, 1832. 'The Lotos-Eaters', < https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters>

Valentine, Jody, Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece, (California: Claremont College Libraries, 2020)