Sex & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll A moral Odyssey retold by Homer, Joyce and Duchamp

In 2023, one century after Marcel Duchamp completed his work on the Large Glass, a book comes to suggest that it is not self-referential but has specific protagonists, locations and details that convey a timeless moral lesson about archetypal issues that human nature is perpetually tormented with – Sex (lust) & Drugs (intoxication) & Rock’n’Roll (violence). By choice, Duchamp never directly referred to Homer regarding the Glass, and this work has been analysed by many scholars in different ways. When Dr Megakles Rogakos came across the work in 2000, the detail of the Oculist Witnesses on it prompted him to sense their possible connection with the Trial of the Bow in Homer’s Odyssey, and he spoke about it in a related talk at London’s Tate Gallery on 10 August of the same year. He made this theory the subject of his PhD thesis (2012-2016) at the University of Essex entitled “A Joycean Exegesis of The Large Glass: Homeric Traces in the Postmodernism of Marcel Duchamp”. The Homeric exegesis of Duchamp’s Glass through Joyce’s Ulysses aims to confirm the atavistic theory that the ancient is present in the contemporary. The Glass, like the Homeric Odyssey, as revisited in Ulysses, may be thought to be some kind of moralising treatise on the temptations of man to fall prey to the three deadliest sins throughout human history – lust of flesh; indulgence in drugs; craving for power, as discussed separately in chapters of the book (see III.9; III.8; III.12) and gave its title – “Sex & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll”, after Ian Dury’s censored song of 1977. If its Joycean exegesis is proven, then the Glass may enigmatically emerge as a Homeric paradigm of man’s initiation to inner freedom, which Duchamp called the “beauty of indifference”. Dr Eleftherios Anevlavis, translator of Joyce’s Ulysses and Wake, writes: “Dr Rogakos’ exegesis is an impressive intellectual creation, enriched with the practices of decipherment and the art of writing, but at the same time created by the experiences and exhaustive study of culture from Homer to Yoko Ono and of the cosmos from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the constellation of the Pleiades.” Remarkably, with his theory of the appropriation of Homer’s Odyssey in Duchamp’s Glass, Dr Rogakos offers a refreshingly tongue-in-cheek explanation of postmodernism’s relationship to antiquity.