Samuel Butler: the Odyssey and the future of machines

When I returned to Trapani in the winter of 2015, I began gathering some information about the town’s past and came across a book by Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897).⁠ I was surprised to discover that such a well‑known figure in England had stayed for months in Trapani at the end of the nineteenth century.

Through Peppe Occhipinti I learnt that Butler, during one of his several stays in Trapani, had lived on the upper floors of this very building—today’s Bar Piccadilly. When I later met Antonio Maccotta, the manager [2022], I decided to share this information with him. From there, over time, the idea grew of making Butler’s presence in this place more visible. The small plaque that I have now donated to Antonio and that we have affixed to the façade is not only a symbolic reminder, but also a way of filling a serious gap: the absence, for decades—perhaps for over a century—of a civic memory of Samuel Butler in Trapani.

I would therefore like to sketch, albeit briefly, the figure of Butler.

Butler lived in the nineteenth century. An Englishman, he studied classical literature at St John’s College, Cambridge. His father, a stern clergyman, wanted him to become an Anglican minister. To escape this imposition, Butler set sail for New Zealand—a journey that at the time took about a month. There, in circumstances very different from Victorian England, he devoted himself for four years to sheep farming. It is striking to think that a young man trained in the classics would accept such a sacrifice simply to win his freedom.

Through careful management he succeeded in selling the farm he had established and, once back in England, gained a degree of financial independence from his father. This allowed him to devote himself to writing and to publishing his research.

Butler was a writer, but also a passionate scholar of diverse disciplines: from biology to religion, from anthropology to Darwinism, and classical literature. He is remembered, among other things, as one of the first to translate the Iliad and the Odyssey into prose—a contribution still regarded as significant today.

Around the age of thirty, on his return from New Zealand, he anonymously published the novel Erewhon (1872)⁠—a title that is an imperfect anagram of nowhere. The book recounts the journey of a protagonist who, arriving in a remote place on the planet Earth, discovers an unknown civilisation, technologically some three centuries ahead of Victorian England. Yet in this society everything considered normal in England appeared inverted. The novel, a fierce satire of Victorian society, aroused both interest and unease.

One of its best‑known sections is the ‘Book of the Machines’, in which Butler hypothesises that, three centuries earlier, in that civilisation machines had been banned because they were thought capable of developing consciousness and of reproducing themselves. This intuition, which seems to anticipate concepts of cybernetics (formalised only in the twentieth century), also struck George Orwell, who in 1939 presented Erewhon in a radio broadcast.⁠ Butler, polemically applying Darwinian theory to machines, suggested that if evolution applies to living organisms, then it might also apply to machines: they could one day develop autonomy and consciousness, to the point of threatening humankind.

Some have seen in this idea a narrative nucleus that echoes in much later works, such as the film The Terminator (1984),⁠ or in Frank Herbert’s Dune saga,⁠ where reference is made to the ‘Butlerian Jihad’, a war against thinking machines. Aldous Huxley too, author of Brave New World (1932),⁠ seems to have been influenced by Butler, especially in the idea of dystopian worlds in which society is inverted or controlled by repressive powers.

George Bernard Shaw described Butler as ‘one of the most suggestive and brilliant writers of the nineteenth century’,⁠ while recognising that he was never fully embraced in his homeland, perhaps owing to the English reluctance towards philosophical introspection compared with the German tradition.

In any case, Butler possessed an extraordinary capacity for projection, anticipating issues that today touch us closely. Think, for example, of modern processors endowed with machine‑learning capabilities: systems that analyse users’ behaviour and learn from it. We do not yet know where all this will lead, but the question Butler posed remains current: if machines learn from us, what will be the next step?

The central point, in my view, remains that of self‑awareness. The question of cybernetics—and today we would say of artificial intelligence—always seems to return to one enquiry: to what extent can a system evolve to the point of generating a form of consciousness and, consequently, a power of control?

A pertinent example might be Google. We know that the search engine is based on complex algorithms, which self‑modify and improve according to users’ searches. But to what extent could such a system acquire its own consciousness, or even replace that of human beings?

Here one inevitably trespasses into psychology. According to Erich Neumann,⁠ consciousness is not an original given, but the result of a long process of differentiation from the collective unconscious. In a primordial stage—which he describes through mythological symbols such as the ‘Uroboros’ or the ‘Great Mother’—the human being lived in a condition of undifferentiated fusion with the world, lacking clear boundaries between self and environment.

Only gradually, through images and myths reflecting universal archetypes, was an ‘I’ formed, capable of distinguishing itself, of reflecting upon itself, and of placing events in a temporal sequence. Consciousness, therefore, did not always exist: it would emerge as a historical and psychological achievement, the fruit of a process of separation and individuation.

If a machine were able to elaborate a form of consciousness analogous to that which, according to Neumann, humankind achieved only through a long process of differentiation from the unconscious, then it might perhaps also develop a temptation towards domination or power. On this theme, of course, there exists a vast science‑fiction narrative; but what I wish to emphasise is that already Samuel Butler, with Erewhon, had intuited the question. I invite you, if you can, to read this novel: the Biblioteca Fardelliana in Trapani preserves a splendid antique edition, donated by the author.

Erewhon was published anonymously in 1872 and aroused curiosity about the author’s identity. Only later did Butler claim authorship, surprising certain literary circles, since he was not yet a well‑known name. His critical stance brought him into conflict both with the Darwinians and with the defenders of creationism linked to the Anglican Church: he considered both views too dogmatic and sought a more complex perspective. His education at Cambridge had left its mark. Erewhon was a satire of Victorian society as a whole.

And this brings us to Trapani. Butler, interested in the Iliad, the Odyssey and the cartography of portolan charts, began to develop an idea: there was too marked a difference—we would say today psychological—between the two poems. The Odyssey describes domestic, everyday places and situations, whereas the Iliad is martial, celebratory, heroic. Even the protagonists display very different psychological traits.

From this observation Butler hypothesised that the two poems could not be the work of a single person. At the time it was believed that Homer was a real author; today we know that the question is more complex, and that ‘Homer’ may be a collective construct. Butler went so far as to propose that the author of the Odyssey was a woman. For Victorian England this was a scandal: it was inconceivable that a woman could be the author of such a central work.

Starting from this hypothesis, Butler began to elaborate a psychological reading of the Odyssey, which he progressively combined with a geographical investigation of the poem. Already in his early writings of 1892, published in English and Italian journals, both components can be found. He observed that the places described in the text did not correspond to the localities that today bear those names. Studying nautical charts and travelling along the western coast of Sicily—from the Mangiapane cave at Custonaci to the lagoon of the Stagnone—he believed he recognised correspondences with the places narrated.

He even wrote to the mayor of Trapani to announce his interest in moving here and conducting a systematic investigation. From these researches came The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), in which he argued that the author was a woman, identifiable with the figure of Nausicaa, the young woman who welcomes Odysseus on the shores of her city of the Phaeacians. Butler hypothesised that this city was none other than Trapani. The place of Odysseus’s shipwreck, where he meets Nausicaa, according to Butler corresponded to the mouth of a river now vanished, situated on the eastern side of the harbour.

In Trapani he conducted a research that we might call almost anthropological: he did not limit himself to a historical enquiry, but collected materials in the field, photographed places and people, interacted with locals, noted legends, food customs and toponyms. For the late nineteenth century, this method of historical investigation—which established a dialogic relationship between an anthropological present and an archaeological past—was extraordinarily innovative.

One of his most suggestive readings concerns the Scoglio del Malconsiglio, the extreme tip of the sickle‑shaped peninsula of Trapani, behind the Torre di Ligny. A local legend recounts that it was a Turkish ship petrified by the Madonna of Trapani. Butler hypothesised that in this legend there might survive an echo of the Phaeacians’ ‘petrified ship’.

Today, beyond the validity of his hypothesis, what strikes us is the method: Butler did not accept history as it had been handed down, but questioned it. The academic philology of his time tended to consider the Odyssey as a canonical Greek text, to be interpreted within the confines of the classical tradition. Butler, on the other hand, suggested that every document was ambiguous, subjective, the expression of a point of view. In this sense, his operation of ‘relocating’ the Odyssey in Sicily was an exercise in hermeneutics: giving the work a new meaning, almost as if it were a film set transposed into another place.

This intuition appears today extraordinarily anticipatory. Butler did not yet have at his disposal the tools of psychology, which only in the twentieth century would take shape as a discipline, but his work anticipated a psychological reading of texts.

When he died, Butler left his friend Henry Festing Jones a sum of money with the task of returning to Trapani and donating to the Biblioteca Fardelliana the manuscript of The Authoress of the Odyssey. This gesture of gratitude is significant: he could have kept the manuscript in England, where it would have been better protected, but he preferred to leave a trace of it in Trapani. Festing Jones, in turn, wrote a diary of that journey in Sicily.⁠

Butler was posthumously appreciated by writers such as George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Frank Herbert and others, who recognised his importance. But the wider public did not immediately understand him. To give an idea: even Shakespeare, who today is considered the symbol of English literature, experienced a long period of decline after his death in 1616, and was rediscovered only between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thanks to Romanticism and German criticism. This reminds us that the recognition of a radical author often requires long spans of time.⁠

Thus, the manuscript was unfortunately neglected by local institutions. And yet, even if Butler had been a minor author, it would still have been right to remember him at least with a street name or a toponymic sign. All the more so since we are speaking of a thinker who anticipated crucial themes of contemporaneity: the risk that technological progress might turn into a system of control.

In this sense, Butler seems to have issued a warning: what appears as progress can become an infernal machine of domination. Information technology, of course, is an extraordinary instrument of democracy and participation, but without adequate counterbalances it risks being governed by capital and by logics of possession.

Here Butler railed against the very idea of ethnic and national identity, which he considered a form of collective infantilism. Only by questioning what one possesses—even one’s own identity—can one grow. This is what Victorian England did not forgive him: having laid bare its contradictions.

And yet, what at the time appeared as a provocative stance can today be read as prophecy. Butler, regarded as an uncomfortable critic by his contemporaries, now appears as a thinker capable of having identified the roots of the dilemmas of our own time.