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A Quest for Remembrance

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern

Literature brings together a range of arguments exploring
connections between the descent into the underworld, also known
as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate
the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception
of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In
the process, the volume explores how the hero’s quest into the
underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from
the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative
format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging
from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and
intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events
that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality
this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own
literary genre, a ‘memorious genre’ related to but distinct from the
quest narrative.

Madeleine Scherer is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of

Advanced Study and the Department of English and Comparative
Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK.

Rachel Falconer is Professor and Chair of Modern English

Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Warwick Series in the
Humanities
Series Editor: Christina Lupton

Titles in this Series

Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe

David Beck

New Jazz Conceptions

History, Theory, Practice
Edited by Roger Fagge and Nicolas Pillai

Food, Drink, and the Written Word in Britain, 1820–1945

Edited by Mary Addyman, Laura Wood and Christopher Yiannitsaros

Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain

Edited by Berenike Jung and Stella Bruzzi

Mood
Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Theories
Edited by Birgit Breidenbach and Thomas Docherty

Prohibitions and Psychoactive Substances in History, Culture

and Theory
Edited by Susannah Wilson

Archaeology of the Unconscious

Italian Perspectives
Edited by Alessandra Aloisi and Fabio Camilletti

A Quest for Remembrance

The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature
Edited by Madeleine Scherer and Rachel Falconer

For more information about this series, please visit:

https://www.routledge.com/Warwick-Series-in-the-Humanities/book-
series/WSH
A Quest for Remembrance
The Underworld in Classical and Modern
Literature

Edited by
Madeleine Scherer and
Rachel Falconer
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa

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© 2020 Taylor & Francis

The right of Madeleine Scherer and Rachel Falconer to be identified

as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
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explanation without intent to infringe.

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Contents

1 Introduction: The Long Descent into the Past

MADELEINE SCHERER

2 The Even Longer Descent: Notes on Genesis and

Development of Ancient Egyptian Underworld
Conceptions and Their Interplay with Funerary Practice
JAKOB SCHNEIDER

3 Remembering in the Real World: Katabasis and Natural

Deathscapes
JOEL GORDON

4 Lucretius’ Journey to the Underworld: Poetic Memory and

Allegoresis
ABIGAIL BUGLASS

5 Memories of Rome’s Underworld in Lucan’s Civil War

Narrative
ELEONORA TOLA

6 The Open Door to Elysium in Lucian’s True History

A. EVERETT BEEK

7 The Politics of Forgetting: Descents into Memory in

Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
 KAREN BORG CARDONA

8 In the Depth of Water and the Heat of Fire: T. S. Eliot’s

The Waste Land as a Modern Descent into the
Underworld
YI-CHUANG E. LIN

9 Homer and LeGuin: Ancient and Modern Desires to Be

Remembered
FRANCES FOSTER

10 “An Australian-made hell”: Postcolonial Katabasis in

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book
ARNAUD BARRAS

11 Memory and Forgetfulness: in Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian

Underworlds
RACHEL FALCONER

12 ‘All must descend to where the stories are kept’:

Katabasis and Self-Reflexive Authorship in: Margaret
Atwood’s Surfacing and The Penelopiad
MADELEINE SCHERER

List of Contributors
Index
1 Introduction
The Long Descent into the Past
Madeleine Scherer

μνήσασθαι ἐμεῖο
Odyssey 11.71

When Odysseus’s helmsman Elpenor bids the hero to ‘remember

me’, he not only speaks to the protagonist of Homer’s epic but also
utters a plea to the audience. Odysseus’s own listeners at the
Phaeacian court and the rhapsode’s audience listening to the
Homeric epic are asked with equal fervour to commit the helmsman
into their communal memory, to continue talking about him and
disseminating his story.1 Elpenor’s wish came true, perhaps by no
merit of his own, rather marginal role in the Odyssey, but through
his being commemorated into one of the most famous necromantic
narratives of Western literary history. Did this line in the epic self-
consciously foresee Elpenor’s prominent place within the cultural
memory of the generations still to come? In other words, was Homer
aware of the commemorative power of the myths he was collecting
and adapting in his poetry? And why did he draw his audience’s
attention to their own, meta-fictional memories of the epic narrative
just as they became immersed in Odysseus’s quest to confront his
past?
Questions such as these draw attention to the connections
between the appearance of spirits, the recovery of memories, and
the transmission of narratives that are established in many stories of
spectral haunting and necromantic summons. The Greek literature
that followed the Homeric epics is filled with ghostly apparitions,
wherein the dead remind the living not only of their existence but
also of their wishes and their fortune (or, often lack thereof). To this
day, few spectres are remembered as well as Elpenor, Anticleia,
Teiresias, Anchises, Dido, and Eurydice, their tales inseparably
connected with both their ancient origins as well as the long
tradition of the ghost story.2 The most famous spectral appearances
of literary history can be found in the canonical descent narratives
that describe the pursuits of the living who choose to seek out the
dead of their own accord, undergoing the dangerous journey into
the underworld. The earliest known descent appears in the Sumerian
and Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, written around 2100 BCE, and the
trope later resurfaced in the Homeric and Virgilian epics of ancient
Greece and Rome, most commonly dated around the seventh or
eighth century BCE, and between 29 and 19 BCE respectively.3 Other
well-known descent narratives centre on heroes such as Inanna,
Orpheus, Theseus, Jason, Heracles, and Demeter, while the
underworld also plays an important role in ancient Egyptian
eschatology.4 The motif of an underworldly descent was not unique
to the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome,
however – across the world, it has long been part of different
religions and mythological frameworks.

1 The term rhapsode (ancient Greek: ῥαψῳδός) refers to the bards who would
perform epic poetry in antiquity, largely in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

Within the descent tradition known also by its Greek term

katabasis, a typically male hero travels to the land of the dead to
gain a piece of information that is vital for the continuation of his
quest; whether this information pertains to the self, superhuman
powers, a forgotten object, or a lost person.5 It is on these descents
where both the hero and his audience are most keenly made aware
of the fleeting memory of the dead, of the knowledge which their
ancestors held, and where the need to preserve what had been lost
becomes most profound. In the katabatic narratives of Graeco-
Roman antiquity, the hero’s descent often involves a reunion with a
dead family member, his former loved ones, his companions, and
other heroes of a mythical age, reunions that remind him of his past
and which are contrasted with the future he needs to embrace.6 This
tension between past and future consistently returns as the
conceptual core of katabatic narratives throughout the ages: the
hero’s struggle to regain what he has lost and his strife to be
transformed into a man able to proceed on his journey. And what
the heroes always return with, no matter what occurs after their
perilous crossing of the boundary between the living and the dead,
are the memories of the deceased, and the tales they bid us
remember.

2 Johnston (1999, ix).

3 One important distinction needs to be made between Homer’s Odyssey XI and
the other epics in which an underworld narrative dynamic is used; unlike Aeneas
and others, Odysseus does not actually enter the underworld but rather he
summons the spirits of the dead by sacrificing a ram. Odysseus’s encounter with
the dead is termed a nekyia, a necromantic encounter, rather than a katabasis in
which the hero literally descends into the realm of Hades. Because of their
frequent aesthetic and thematic overlap, the two formats are commonly studied
together in classical scholarship.
4 Cf. Falconer (2007, 2). Many of these stories reached literary fame and cultural
pervasiveness through referencing and drawing on one another: thanks to M.L.
West’s The East Face of Helicon we know about the influence of Sumerian and
Babylonian works on ancient Greek culture, for instance. Along similar lines,
Virgil’s Aeneid is thoroughly indebted to the Homeric epics and Plato’s Myth of Er
from the Republic, as well as the Greek concept of metempsychosis for his
famously intricate version of the underworld. For important scholarly works on
descent narratives, cf. the work of Friedrich Slomsen on the afterlife (1972, 31–
41), and also Nicholas Horsefall’s 2013 commentary on the Aeneid.
5 Falconer (2007), 3.

The katabatic journey into a space filled with the ghostly

embodiments of his past ends in the hero’s metaphorical
transformation and rebirth, after which he leaves the underworld a
different person from the one who first entered. Memories of and
confrontations with the past are used to prefigure a dramatic
development in the story, as the past turns into the future and
memories are transformed into possibilities, predictions, and visions.
It commonly begins with the descending hero setting out to visit or
even rescue a deceased soul, a quest tied to his sore need for
information – Odysseus seeks out Teiresias for guidance on the way
back to Ithaca while Orpheus hopes to rescue his wife from the cold
grasp of Hades. At times, these quests fail as much as they succeed,
as in the Odyssey an empty, unfulfilling embrace with his beloved
mother is placed immediately after the hero’s acquisition of a
prophecy vital for his continuing journey, and Orpheus’s success in
negotiating the release of his wife is followed by her loss as he
breaks the rules of the underworld. As the heroes descend ever
further into the past, success and failure exist in a close double-bind
in the unforgiving terrain of Hades.
While in antiquity, the most famous descent narratives both
describe the perils of the underworld and end with the prophetic
revelation which awaits its heroes, katabasis fundamentally was and
continues to be a tale of recollection. Although it is the oracular
knowledge bestowed on them by the sage Teiresias and by Anchises
that ultimately allows Odysseus and Aeneas to return to their quests
for (a new) home, the largest parts of the heroes’ descent are made
up of their fleeting reunions with dead loved ones, friends,
comrades, and even enemies. These encounters force the heroes to
remember and accept the misfortunes and mistakes that have led
them to the underworld, the lowest point of their journey, as the
future that awaits them can only be realised after they have
confronted their past. Odysseus is forced to face Ajax, whose death
he inadvertently caused by tricking him out of Achilles’s armour,
while Aeneas is reminded of his former lover Dido when he passes
by her shade in the underworld – both heroes feeling a sense of
responsibility for the spirits’ presence in Hades. Both the ghosts of
Ajax and Dido refuse to speak to the protagonists, their silence
emblematic of the divide and enmity which the heroes’ deceitful
actions caused: while Odysseus tricked Ajax out of his spoils of war,
Aeneas left the queen of Carthage after she believed them to be
bound by ties of marriage. Apart from these poignant reminders of
the heroes’ often less than noble past, katabasis also evokes familial
and personal recollections through the heroes’ fleeting encounters
with a dead family member, recollections that are shaped by
bittersweet and nostalgic regret for a nostos the heroes have lost.7
Finally, catalogues of the dead serve as commemoratives of some of
the most famous departed heroes of a recent or even mythical
history, commemoratives that are largely unrelated to the epic
narrative itself and instead provide an intermission in which popular
myths are recounted to the audience.8

6 For instance, Dido turning away from Aeneas in Aeneid VI foreshadows his
political marriage to Lavinia, a marriage driven by Aeneas’s duty, his pietas,
which contrasts his passionate affair with Dido, itself characterised largely by
furor, violent emotions.

The haunting spirits of the deceased turn into potent memories

once the heroes ascend back to the overworld, and what they have
seen continues to haunt them for the rest of their journey. Their
encounter with the dead not only shapes the structure of katabasis
but also makes up the journey’s emotional core, and the memories
of their loved ones become a form of compensation for their
permanent loss. In the end, all that remains of them are memories,
which to this day is a common comfort given to those who have lost
a friend or a family member. It is no surprise therefore that some of
the most memorable and commonly adapted parts of the katabasis
narratives in both the Odyssey and the Aeneid are the heroes’ thrice
failed embrace of their deceased family members; a moving
reminder of the missing connection between the living and the dead,
and the permanent boundary that now separates them.
There exists a twofold dynamic between remembering the dead
and remembering the past in the katabasis narratives of antiquity: at
the same time that the spectral embodiments of their past force the
hero to remember and reflect, the descent narrative serves as a
meta-fictional reminder to its readers or audiences of the very
existence of the unquiet dead, and of the histories they were a part
of. In antiquity, reminding the living of their stories and
accomplishments was one of the spirits’ main concerns: when
Elpenor asks Odysseus to remember him in the introductory
quotation, it is a plea for Odysseus to remember to bury his body, an
important practice in the ancient world as it creates a visible
monument for the life of the deceased.9 But in a meta-fictional
sense, Elpenor also asks the hero to commit his tale to his own
memory and – inadvertently or not – that of the people listening to
the epic narrative, both at the fictional Phaecian court and wherever
the ancient Greek rhapsodes chose to perform the Homeric epics.
Memory became a multifaceted preoccupation of the hero’s descent,
one whose significance extended both to the memory that is
obtained within the world of the story, memories of the story and of
its characters, and to cultural commemoration within the ancient
world.

7 Nostos can roughly be translated as ‘the journey home’ or ‘homecoming’.

8 Cf. Davide Susanetti, who writes ‘[t]he entire archive of stories and legends, the
mythological arsenal from which Greek poetry takes it tales, comes to life in a
sort of symbolic recapitulation, in a paradigmatic catalogue of all that is
memorable and worthy of celebration’ (2016, 256). Susanetti’s chapter in Deep
Classics discusses classical descent narratives and its spectres as a model for
our relationship with the past.

For another example of what I tentatively call a meta-fictionality of

remembrance within katabasis, we may look to Orpheus’s descent,
most famously discussed in Plato’s Symposium, Virgil’s Georgics, and
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Orpheus, a famous singer in antiquity, travels
to the underworld to plead for the life of his deceased wife Eurydice,
whereby the beautiful music he plays for Hades and Persephone
convinces the underworldly rulers to release her spirit – under the
condition that Orpheus travels back to the realm of the living without
looking back at his wife. Orpheus fails to obey this rule, glancing
back at Eurydice just as they begin to see the light of the overworld,
and thus seals his wife’s fate for all eternity. While she remains lost
to her living husband, however, Eurydice enters the realm of
mythology through the singer’s katabatic quest: although Orpheus
disobeys the laws of the underworld and thus fails to revive the spirit
of his wife, her memory is saved through the act of narration itself,
as the tale of the famous bard’s descent becomes a memorial to her
existence. While Orpheus’s story has since been adapted to mean
various different things to different writers, many of these
adaptations continue to centre on the importance of memory, both
in the literal and in the meta-fictional sense. In Rainer Maria Rilke
sonnets, for instance, the Orphic hero descends into the underworld
for artistic inspiration, an underworld filled with poetic song in which
there exists ‘enough memory to keep/ the one most delicate note’.10
As Rilke’s poetic persona descends into the depths of Hades, it is
literary and creative memory he searches for, the poetic voices of the
past that, in a Dantean fashion, congregate within the underworld
and provide the poet with inspiration.
Returning to antiquity, katabasis was not only a narrative dynamic
in which the heroes’ own memories could be retrieved, but the
descent also framed more varied and, at times, meta-fictional
processes of memorialisation, which restored or at least engaged
with those stories the authors deemed important to revive.
Intertextual and cultural memories of katabasis found their way into
all manner of textual sources, including philosophy and even satire,
where the conceptual core of remembrance continued to shape
adaptations of the narrative dynamic in a variety of different
contexts. The case-studies in this collection show that ancient
descent narratives which explore themes of both individual
remembrance and cultural commemoration were not limited to epics
like Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, the Orphic myths, or Virgil’s
Aeneid but extended to sources like Egyptian funerary iconography,
Herodotus’s histories, the Epicurean philosophy of Lucretius, Lucan’s
civil war narratives, and the satires of Lucian.

9 Many references to the importance of a proper burial can be found in both the
Iliad and the Odyssey. Cf. for instance Grethlein (2008, 27–51).
10 Rilke (1987, IX).

In ancient Greece the Homeric epics served as a particularly

prominent source of generic memory traditions. They collected
popular myths of the Iron Age and took the form of, as Jan Assmann
phrases it, an ‘organizational form of cultural memory – as a
reconstruction of the past that supported the self-image of a
particular group’.11 As they brought together multiple, fragmented
traditions, the Homeric epics served as the starting point for new
memories that were adapted into the Greek polis and beyond, and
served as an ‘archive for exempla a maiore ad minus’.12 The Greeks,
as Assmann adapts the famous line from German author Thomas
Mann, ‘liv[ed] in quotations’, in an environment of ‘critical
intertextuality’ and ‘of cultural memory as scholarship or science’.13
In this fertile mnemonic environment, many ancient thinkers and
writers refigured the myths they had become familiar with through
or around the Homeric poems, often keeping underlying ideas while
substantially changing the context and resolution of the original
narrative. One of the most popular tales introduced into the cultural
memoryspheres of ancient Greece by this way of ‘living in
quotations’ was the descent narrative, and while the myth
continuously changed in thematic, aesthetic, and overall storyline,
we can see throughout this collection that it retained a conceptual
interest in remembrance and transformation.
By the fifth century BCE, myth and memory had become shifting
notions in Greece, as it became increasingly difficult to untangle a
past woven out of ‘historical’ accounts, word-of-mouth stories,
legends, fables, and, of course, epic narratives.14 Especially in a
society in which writing was never more than a new medium
reserved for an elite minority, many a story would have been
remembered more than it was read, and remembered in perhaps a
different version to the one(s) committed to written form.15 In this
environment, katabasis held a unique place as a narrative dynamic
that, while thematically concerned with the past and its haunting
influence, was also itself a commonly reimagined myth that
‘haunted’ the cultural imaginations and memoryspheres of antiquity.
The realm of mythology has long caught the attention of memory
scholars as a particularly fertile ground for mnemonic traditions.
Stephanie Wodianka, for instance, frames adaptations of mythology
not as modifications of older stories but as a semantic, retroactive
process which mnemonically ‘actualises’ the original story.16
Psychoanalysis, too, holds that memorised myths act as mediators
that help both individuals and communities understand their
histories and the world around them; myth’s role in cultural memory
thereby fulfils a practical social function.17 Based on these important
understandings of the interconnected roles of myth and memory, in
this collection due attention is paid to the role of memory in order to
highlight the socio-cultural and symbolic functions descent narratives
held in ancient history and culture – and, as we will see, in later
centuries alike – as popular myths that were used to negotiate ideas
of the past, the present, and even, at times, the future.

11 Assmann (2011, 250).

12 Grethlein (2014, 236).
13 Ibid, 274.
14 Cf. Gould (2001, 408, 414); Grethlein (2014, 236). On the intertwined
relationship between history and myth, cf. Saïd (2007, 76–89).

This collection takes note of the complex relationships that exist

between katabatic narratives and various forms of remembering:
both the memories that are recovered by the heroes within their
underworldly descents, the authors’ and their audiences’ mnemonic
relationships to the stories that precede their own narrative, and a
general interest in the workings of memory on socio-cultural levels.
This memory-driven analysis is not a replacement for the study of
intertextual adaptations; in fact, an understanding of intertextual
relationships in the ancient world often underlies and informs the
readings of the chapters. What this collection highlights are the
multifaceted and complex engagements with both fictional and
meta-textual remembrance, which ancient descent narratives are
often entangled with, drawing attention to the importance of
memory both for the ancient world at large and for the katabatic
genre and its reception.
The story of the descent into the underworld did not cease to
inspire writers in later periods of history. Graeco-Roman katabasis
shaped the works of authors like Dante and Milton, who adapt the
katabatic narratives of epic into Christian frameworks, to Derek
Walcott, who places his underworld within the Atlantic Ocean, and
J.M. Coetzee, who locates Hell within a South African Township. Not
only within a Western literary tradition but all across the world, the
descent into the underworld has held a prominent place within the
human imagination as a narrative dynamic that foregrounds
conversations with the ghosts of the dead, holding long forgotten or
repressed secrets, information, and creating memories that remain
with the hero long past the end of his quest. Its seeming universality
in being adapted, drawn on, or refigured globally has led to scholars
such as Rosalind Williams to describe the katabatic journey as an
‘enduring archetype’,18 while Rachel Falconer has previously
described the idea of a journey to the underworld and the ensuing
return as even more entrenched in the Western imagination than the
notion of Hell itself.19 While the descent narrative has been tied to
preoccupations of both fictional, intertextual, and cultural
remembrance in the memory cultures of antiquity and beyond, in the
twentieth-century memory explosively resurfaced as a central
concern both in the West and beyond, and came to define the shape
katabasis would take from then onwards. As a symbol that frames a
quest for the recovery of traditions, an exploration of an uncertain
history, and a spiritual journey to confront trauma, one of the most
important twentieth-century katabatic texts was written by Joseph
Conrad at the very start of the century with his seminal 1899 Heart
of Darkness, then remained, a pervasive literary and cultural motif
centred on the excavation and interpretation of the past. From T.S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, the war poetry of
Wilfred Owen, Zbigniew Herbert’s postwar poetry, and Seamus
Heaney’s early bog poems as well as later translations and
transfusions of Virgil’s underworld to Wole Soyinka’s Season of
Anomy, Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, Kazuo Ishiguro’s
memorious novels, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and popular
fantasy novels such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Ursula
LeGuin’s Earthsea, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have
turned repeatedly to the trope of a descent into the past.
15 On the development of writing in ancient Greece, and its influence on ancient
Greek culture, cf. Thomas (1992), esp. chapter 4.
16 Wodianka (2006, 5–6).
17 Renard (2013, 63–64). Jan Assmann draws comparable conclusions on the
relationship between cultural memory, history, and myth in antiquity: ‘cultural
memory transforms factual into remembered history, thus turning it into myth’
(2011, 38).

The number of catastrophic developments in the history of the last

century played a particularly important role in shaping the
imagination of many authors and drew them to the katabatic motif,
as the unfolding events ‘convinced many people of the view that
Hells actually exist, and survivors do return, against all probability, to
pass on their experience’.20 Historians, authors, journalists,
politicians, and philosophers alike turned to pre-existing images of
the underworld as the symbolic expression of displacement,
nostalgia, and trauma. Edith Hall has summarised the importance of
the conversation with the dead in Odyssey XI for the literature of the
twentieth century when she writes ‘the poem’s status as an
“aftermath” text, a post-war story, has had particular resonance for
an age that has defined itself as post-everything: postmodern, post-
structuralist, post-colonial’.21 Beyond the confines of katabasis itself,
the stories of refuge, loss, displacement, recovery, and homecoming
of ancient epic have become evocative narratives in the context of
many political developments of the twentieth century; from the
Odyssean journeys of Aimé Césaire’s poem on diasporic identity,
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, to Patrick Kingsley’s The New
Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis, an account of the
Syrian refugee movements of 2016, framed by the narrative
template of Odyssean travels.

18 Williams (2008, 11).

19 Falconer (2007, 1).
20 Ibid, 3.

In the apocalyptic history of the twentieth century, classical

antiquity resurfaces from the depths of Hades; in the words of
Williams, images of Pompey become the photographs of ruined
Warsaw and Dresden as modern culture is ‘haunted by a remnant of
the mythical’.22 But why is it that the symbol of the underworld has
had such a unique importance for the twentieth century that it
inspired so many writers to try and capture its elusive essence?23
How did the catastrophes and social upheavals of the time inspire
this almost singularly prevalent return to an ancient myth that
katabasis became a central motif within many re-imaginings of both
present and past? This volume explores the idea that it is an
inherent and self-conscious preoccupation with processes of
remembering and commemoration that continues to draw authors to
the descent narrative dynamic.
The question of how to remember the past is one that the
twentieth century has been particularly gripped by.24 The number of
global massacres, wars, and genocide occurring in such a short span
of time, combined with increasingly quick ways of distributing
information about these horrors from around the globe, has formed
a ubiquitous and self-reflexive memorial culture, overwhelmed with
the dilemma of having to commemorate often unspeakable
atrocities. At both the 2017 and the 2019 Memory Studies
Association conferences, a majority of papers focussed on memories
in or of the twentieth century, many of which were of a traumatic
nature. The ‘memory boom’ of the 1970s is a consequence of this
Benjaminian history of repeating catastrophes, one which
necessitates an exploration not only of the events that themselves
occurred, but of how they are remembered by individuals, nations,
and within global, inter-, and transcultural frameworks. Irish memory
culture, for instance, came into being out of this ‘obsess[ion] with
the past. […] While representations of the past have always been an
integral element of Irish culture, they are now one of its most
compelling subjects. And the tone that characterises this subject is
trauma’.25 In Graeco-Roman antiquity as well as in the twentieth
century the concept of memory lay at the forefront of cultural
consciousness. Remembering the past – and the question of how to
remember – assumed such a fundamental importance in people’s
lives at the time that perhaps the central myth around memory
became one the most popular tropes to draw inspiration from.

21 Hall (2008, 214).

22 Williams (2008, 189).
23 This is not to suggest that the reception history of katabasis was not bound up
in concerns with memory up until the twentieth century, but the sheer mass of
new adaptations of the descent narrative, many of them explicitly meta-textual
in its preoccupation, is worth remarking upon and trying to unpack.
24 The twentieth century is the first to have pioneered the scientific study of
memory. As Astrid Erll writes:

Acts of cultural remembering seem to be an element of humans’ fundamental

anthropological make-up, and the history of creating a shared heritage and
thinking about memory can be traced all the way back to antiquity, for example
to Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. However, it was not until the beginning of the
twentieth century that there developed a scientific interest in the phenomenon.
(Erll 2011, 13)

Memory studies provide important tools for an understanding of

the katabasis genre across history, both in terms of the memories
that are uncovered within the narratives themselves, the memories
that exist of the descent genre, and the underworld’s symbolic
importance in (trans-)cultural commemoration. By now, many
narratives, images, and events have come to exist as
(trans-)culturally pervasive mythologies, as ‘foundational myths’ or
‘myths of origin’ for the identity of certain groups.26 Stories from
across history have gained renewed significance within increasingly
global mnemonic frameworks: Astrid Erll, for instance, has described
Homer as one of Europe’s earliest founding myths whose ‘(ultra)
long-term mnemohistory’ can be traced back to the foundations of
European culture and identity. She describes the Odyssey as a
‘powerful source for premediation’ and Homer as a travelling
‘transcultural schema’, sources which contain a narrative kernel of
references which are continuously adapted and re-appropriated.27
And while these myths are often (artificially) bound up with the
identity of certain groups, ‘global icons’ such as Odysseus are used
in narratives all across the world, either drawing on or
deconstructing their supposed cultural associations.

25 Pine (2011, 3).

26 Cf., for instance, Virginie Renard on the First World War as a foundational myth
in Great War and Postmodern Memory, 30.
27 Erll (2018, 275, 283).

Katabasis is another narrative with such a long, multidirectional

mnemohistory, one that has assumed many different shapes, but
whose core appeal has been an inherent preoccupation with memory
and commemoration from its oldest incarnations onwards. Just as
Odyssean travels continue to reappear in various forms, the descent
into a subterranean past is a motif that has fundamentally taken
hold within the consciousness of many different societies and
cultures – spread either in its ‘classical’ guise through a colonial
education system, or born out of local eschatologies. As the figure of
Odysseus returns as a uniquely resonant comparison for the
diasporas and displacements of modernity, Peter Chils notes that

[t]he idea that the dead, in general or in specific circumstances, may not
have fully passed from the world of the living underpins so much Western
history and culture, spanning ancient folklore and urban myth as well as
traditional religion and contemporary literature.28

This collection also includes chapters that show how the importance
of the descent narrative as a resonant myth is certainly not limited
to the West.
The underworld and its ghosts have turned into a lasting,
traveling, and perhaps even universal symbol for the ways we
imagine the relationship between life and death, between present
and past, and between memory and forgetfulness. Carl Jung even
named the underworld part of an archetypal mythic unconscious,
emphasising its centrality to human thought and imagination. Rather
than returning to Jung’s essentialist ideas about the subconscious
and its archetypes,29 this collection utilises recently developed
methods from memory studies to better understand the transcultural
travel of the descent narrative, and to outline some of the ways in
which katabasis has throughout its genre history been tied to meta-
textual and (trans-)cultural preoccupations with memory.
As a prominent number of famous descent narratives were written
at the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, some of
the most famous studies of the katabatic genre have focussed on
the modern and postmodern eras. Such studies include Falconer’s
Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since
1945 (2007), Michael Thurston’s The Underworld in Twentieth-
Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott
(2009), and Gregson Davis’s (2007) ‘“Homecomings without Home”:
Representations of (post)colonial nostos in the lyric of Aimé Césaire
and Derek Walcott’. Williams’s Notes on the Underground: An Essay
on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (1990) in many ways
prefigures the research on katabatic literature in modernity as she
focusses largely on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, relating
the technological and archaeological advancements of its time to the
prominence of underground imagery.30 In Passage Through Hell,
David L. Pike discusses the descent topos as a central self-
authorising strategy of modernist texts, one that is considerably
complicated and redefined by writers like Céline, Peter Weiss,
Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin. Ronald R. Macdonald’s The
Burial Place of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and
Milton (1987) selects earlier case-studies still, providing an essential
reading of the complex and manifold relationships between some of
the most important canonical epics.

28 Chils (2016, 268).

29 Cf. Jung (2014 [1959], 81–82, 186). On the essentialism of Jung’s approach, cf.
Hauke (2000), esp. ‘Dealing with the Essential’ 114ff.

All these studies frame memory as of either central or at least

tangential importance to the descent motif. While studies like
Macdonald’s emphasise the importance of remembering within the
narrative itself,31 Williams elaborates on memories of the underworld
myth itself, arguing that ‘the metaphor of death is a primary
category of human thought’:

Long before Virgil’s Aeneas was guided by a Sibyl to the infernal regions
through a cave on the leaden Lake Avernus, long before stories of
Proserpine’s abduction to the underworld by Plato or of Orpheus’s descent to
the Stygian realm to bring back Eurydice, and long before recorded history,
when the earliest humans drew the bison and bears they hunted on the walls
and ceilings of caves, they must have told stories about the dark underworld
lying even deeper within the earth. Even in environments that lack caves –
the Kalahari Desert, and the flat open landscapes of Siberia and Central Asia
– the preliterate inhabitants assumed a vertical cosmos: sky, earth, the
underworld.32

The descent narrative is one that has existed as long as the first
stories of mankind, in both literary and oral formats. To comprehend
and usefully analyse such a long mnemohistory, not only does each
descent narrative’s context invite close analysis, but the intertextual
relations between katabasis narratives become important subjects
for study in themselves. More than a mythical trope with a long
reception history, the journey to the underworld has become what
Falconer names a ‘memorious genre’, wherein the narrative structure
of katabasis resonates with memories of previous descents, which
are revisited throughout – and outside of – the Western literary
canon and cultural imagination.33 Each version of a descent narrative
therein resonates with the canon that precedes it but, more than
this, it serves to perpetuate an intertextual tradition that has come
to assume a recognisable place within literary memory.34 Memory
scholars like Renate Lachmann have long called literature a
‘mnemonic art par excellance’, proposing that

30 Williams (2008, 16).

31 Cf., for instance, Macdonald (1987, 31).
32 Williams (2008, 8).

[l]literature is culture’s memory, not as a simple recording device but as a

body of commemorative actions that include the knowledge stored by a
 culture, and virtually all texts a culture has produced and by which a culture
is constituted.35

The narrative dynamic of remembering is crucial both within the

descent narrative itself and as part of the meta-fictional and
intertextual authoring process, as the negotiations of context,
creative agency, and relationality within such a prominent genre are,
in effect, acts of intertextual remembering. Due to this combination
of katabasis’s long-standing preoccupation with memory and
commemoration, and its prominent history of intertextuality, it exists
in a unique double-bind, not only an easily communicable ‘global
icon’ but also a narrative dynamic that is intrinsically bound up in
complex negotiations of ‘remembering’ – adapting, refiguring,
alluding to – textual, intertextual, and meta-fictional versions of the
past.
Pike has previously alluded to the self-reflexive dimension of the
descent narrative when he notes that

[t]he lore of the nekuia is presented as a repository of the past from which
each poet draws whatever mythic or historical personages are required by
each audience and context. In a broader sense, the descent to the
underworld reveals itself as the site where the means and intentions of
representation may be expressed and contextualised.36

33 Falconer (2011, 405).

34 On genre memories and their potential to generate cultural memory, cf. Erll
(2011, 74).
35 Lachmann (2010, 301). This claim is echoed in Liedeke Plate’s assessment of
women’s rewritings of the classics, wherein she sees specifically classical
reception as a ‘process and product of cultural remembrance’ (Plate 2011, 3).

The descent to the underworld thus becomes an ‘allegorical mode

[…] emblematic of metaliterary motifs in general’.37 This collection
draws on conceptions of katabasis as a ‘memorious genre’ to explore
the connections that exist between the descent and the various
ideas around ‘remembering’ which we find both in antiquity and in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And, at its core, the
suggestion it tentatively puts forward is that the popularity of the
katabasis motif in both these eras originates from the descent
narrative’s textual and meta-fictional preoccupations with different
forms of remembrance, a preoccupation that fundamentally
resonates with and is shaped by its respective socio-cultural
environments.
In the second chapter, entitled ‘The even longer Descent: Notes
on Genesis and Development of Ancient Egyptian Underworld
conceptions and their Interplay with Funerary Practice’, Jakob
Schneider reads the emergence and transformations of ancient
Egyptian underworld mythology as continuous acts of remembering,
preserved, and encapsulated in funerary practices. The next chapter
retains the toponymical focus as Joel Gordon’s ‘Remembering in the
real world: katabatic and natural deathscapes’ investigates numerous
locales across the Graeco-Roman world at which the descent into the
underworld became manifest within reality, sites identified by the
ancients as nekuomanteia, charonia, and plutonia. Moving from
underworldly landscapes to epic, Abigail Buglass discusses
Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in the fourth chapter, ‘Lucretius’
Journey to the Underworld: Poetic Memory and Allegoresis’,
focussing on the important roles that cultural memory, the
remembrance or forgetfulness of the characters in the narratives
themselves, and broader networks of remembrance in intertextuality
all play in ancient depictions of hell and misery. Chapter 5,
‘Memories of Rome’s Underworld in Lucan’s Civil War Narrative’ by
Eleonora Tola, discusses Lucan’s Bellum Civile in connection to
Roman cultural memory and attempts to preserve the city’s moral
traditions. The chapter that follows, ‘The Open Door to Elysium in
Lucian’s True History’, is A. Everett Beek’s discussion of the sea
voyage to Elysium described in Lucian’s collection of parodic tales as
a literary engagement with several katabatic narratives.
After the first six chapters, this collection moves from antiquity
into modernity, where it uncovers adaptations and refigurations of
Graeco-Roman as well as other descent traditions. Chapter 7,
entitled ‘The Politics of Forgetting: Descents into Memory in Joseph
Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness’’: the katabatic wisdom tradition in
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ is Borg Cardona’s exploration of
several interconnected acts of remembering in Conrad’s seminal
novella. In the eighth chapter, ‘In the Depth of Water and the Heat
of Fire: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Modern Descent into the
Underworld’, Yi-Chuang E. Lin discusses Eliot’s poem within the
cultural context of post-World War I Britain. Chapter 9, ‘Homer and
LeGuin: Ancient and Modern Desires to Be Remembered’, is Frances
Foster’s comparative investigation of Odyssey XI and Ursula LeGuin’s
Earthsea. Arnaud Barras’s subsequent chapter, ‘“An Australian-made
hell”: postcolonial katabasis in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book’,
discusses Australian Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright’s third novel,
which depicts a world deeply imbued with an Australian Aboriginal
ontology in which materiality and spirituality, life and death, and
knowing and being are all entangled. The eleventh chapter, ‘Memory
and Forgetfulness: In Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian Underworlds’, is
Rachel Falconer’s investigation of Seamus Heaney’s poetic descents.
And Chapter 12, entitled ‘“All must descend to where the stories are
kept”: Katabasis and Self-Reflexive Authorship in: Margaret Atwood’s
Surfacing and The Penelopiad’, is Madeleine Scherer’s discussion of
Atwood’s novella as an authorial descent into a past commemorated
by the classical canon within a transcultural mnemonic hemisphere.

36 Pike (1997, 9).

37 Ibid, 2.

Most of the chapters from this collection are based on papers

presented at the 2017 conference ‘“A Quest for Remembrance”: The
Descent into the Classical Underworld’, organised by Madeleine
Scherer and held at the University of Warwick, and all chapters have
been selected and edited by Scherer and Falconer. The fact that only
three female authors are discussed here should briefly be addressed.
It is undeniably the case that the history of katabatic narratives
features many more male than female authors, particularly in the
literature of antiquity. Moreover, as Falconer writes,
 [f]emale characters, by definition, are usually excluded from descent because
they are already in the underworld; indeed, the underworld is symbolically
what they are. Narratives of the Orpheus myth, for example, usually dispatch
Eurydice to the underworld in the opening lines or paragraphs, if she is not
discovered there already from the outset; in a sense, she has always already
died.38

38 Falconer (2007, 144). As a notable exception from this trend in antiquity,

Falconer names Inanna, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess who descended to
the underworld to wrest power from the underworld goddess Erishkigal (ibid,
144).

To counter this tradition, many female writers have adopted the

descent narrative structure, especially from the late nineteenth
century to the present day. Falconer devotes one chapter of her
study, Hell in Contemporary Literature to female writers who have
engaged directly in the inherited gender dynamics of the tradition.
And in this collection, we find Atwood and LeGuin changing the
shape of that tradition from within. But many more could be
discussed, from Virginia Woolf to Eavan Boland, and it is to be hoped
that the present volume will prove to be a stimulus for further
research in this direction.
Through these case-studies this collection hopes to explore
katabasis as a sub-genre of the quest narrative; as a narrative
dynamic that stretches from antiquity to the contemporary world and
that, although it has varied over time and within its many adaptation
contexts, has stayed continuously resonant through its strong
thematic preoccupations with both memory and commemoration.
The diversity of examples aims to reinforce the sense of memory as
a persistent preoccupation of ancient as well as modern descent
narratives, comparisons between katabasis narratives that would
otherwise be difficult to frame contextually. As this volume aims to
demonstrate, the long intertextual history of one of the most
consistently popular tropes is best explored through a conceptual
lens that appreciates katabasis’s central narrative preoccupation with
textual, intertextual, and cultural memory. The history of literature
and intertextuality has long been conceptualised as a mnemohistory,
and the long mnemohistory of myth provides a wide scope of case-
studies to map the multidirectional travel, local integration, and, at
times, the universalising and competitive nature of travelling
memories. Here, the reader is invited to embark on their own
katabatic descent through the following chapters, to investigate the
darkness of Hell in which, in the words of Boland, ‘[m]emory was a
whisper, a sound that died in your throat’.

Works Cited
Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing,
Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Boland, Eavan. 1995. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our
Time. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Chils, Peter. 2016. ‘Remembrance in the Twenty-First Century.’ In Memory in the
Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and
Sciences, edited by Sebastian Groes, 268–271. Basingstoke: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture, translated by Sara B. Young. Basingstoke;
New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
———. 2018. ‘Homer – A Relational Mnemonhistory.’ Memory Studies 11 (3): 274–
286.
Falconer, Rachel. 2011. ‘Heaney, Virgil and Contemporary Katabasis.’ In A
Companion to Poetic Genre, edited by Erik Martiny Erik, 404–420. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
———. 2007. Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since
1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gould, John. 2001. Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek
Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grethlein, Jonas. 2008. ‘Memory and Material Objects in the Iliad and the
Odyssey.’ The Journal of Hellenic Studies 128: 27–51.
———. 2010. The Greeks and Their Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2014. ‘The Many Faces of the Past in Archaic and Classical Greece.’ In
Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, edited by Kurt A.
Raaflaub, 234–255. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Groes, Sebastian. 2016. ‘Introduction: Memory in the Twenty-First Century.’ In
Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts,
Humanities, and Sciences, edited by Sebastian Groes, 1–6. Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan.
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