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The Massachusetts Medievalist on Odysseus’s wondrous adventures and self-promoting narrative (Odyssey, Books 9-12)

The impetus for this online reading group was my realization this past year that most of my undergraduate students hadn’t read Homer’s Odyssey, although some of them said that they had read excerpts from it.  The episode with the Cyclops (Book Nine) is without question the most frequently-anthologized section of The Odyssey, as it stands on its own pretty well and showcases Odysseus’s character — his cleverness (the scheme to blind the Cyclops and escape from the cave) as well as his arrogance (his continued taunting after they’ve barely escaped).  Most undergraduates have probably read a version of Book Nine somewhere in their academic pasts.

The Cyclops episode kicks off Odysseus’s narrative in Books 9-12, which is something of a travelogue of miraculous, supernatural adventure – every book in this week’s reading focuses on episodes outside of mortal, human experience so that the settings and characters seem like an endless parade of wonders: the drugged-up Lotus Eaters; the one-eyed, monstrous Cyclops; Circe the powerful, sexy witch; the ghosts of the land of dead and Odysseus’s maneuverings to call them; the seductive and deadly Sirens; the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis…… you may feel like you already know many of these archetypal figures, as they appear in a variety of retellings of the Greek myths, not just here in the epic.

In the midst of Odysseus’s flashback, Homer has a fabulous moment when the framed narrative breaks (Fagles XI.378, Wilson XI.335), when he reminds us that Odysseus is sitting in Alcinous’s hall and telling his story. Odysseus stops at what could be called a cliff-hanger; he has told us how he has spoken with Tiresias and some ghosts of women in the land of the dead, then states that “I cannot name each famous wife and daughter / I saw there; holy night would pass away / before I finished” (Wilson XI. 330-332).  The voice of the poet/narrator returns to remind us that the Phaiacians are Odysseus’s ‘real’ audience: “They were silent, spellbound, / listening in the shadowy hall” (Wilson XI.335-336). Odysseus allows himself to be convinced to continue, with the promise of even more, and more elaborate, parting gifts when the Phaiacians take him home.  The moment can come as something of an interrupting jolt, as Odysseus has “spellbound” us, the modern readers, as well as the Phaiacians — we have forgotten that he is safely in a palace, drinking wine and recounting his adventures.

A point which leads me to a warning about Odysseus and his famous flashback in Books 9-12: he is not an objective narrator.  The poet/narrator isn’t objective either (can any narrative voice be objective? A philosophical question for another time, perhaps), but Odysseus is definitely telling the story the way he wants it told. It’s convenient that everyone else who journeyed with him from Troy is now dead – there is no one to contradict him, or correct a faltering memory, or to provide information about events that occurred when he was absent.

Just as an example, Odysseus relates his conversation in Hades with Agamemnon about the horrors inherent in women (on his homecoming from Troy, Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus). Agamemnon says that “there’s nothing more deadly, bestial than a woman / set on works like these — what a monstrous thing / ……the queen hell-bent on outrage” (Fagles XI. 484-490); Odysseus agrees with and expands upon this point, stating that “Zeus from the very start, the thunder king / has hated the race of Atreus with a vengeance — / his  trustiest weapon women’s twisted wiles” (Fagles XI.494-496).

Odysseus and Agamemnon both fail to mention the extremely legitimate causes of Clytemnestra’s anger. Before the war, Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to get the right wind to blow the fleet to Troy. After the war, Agamemnon brought home as captive war-prize and concubine the Trojan princess Cassandra, who had been a priestess of Apollo. So while maybe Clytemnestra wasn’t justified in murdering her husband, she certainly had reasonable grievances that Agamemnon and Odysseus don’t mention.

We have to trust Odysseus, but (and here again is Homer’s brilliance) we already know that Odysseus is wily, clever, manipulative. Be careful: He’s messing with us in the same way that he messed with the Trojans, with the Cyclops, and now with the Phaiacians. He’s very seductive and very good at getting what he wants. He will need all of these skills when he finally gets home; meanwhile, he has seduced us, his audience, and we are rooting for him, knowing that he will have to get back to Ithaca and deal with the upstart suitors, his adolescent son, and his grieving wife.

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The Massachusetts Medievalist contextualizes Odyssey 5-8

This week, #LesleyHomer will investigate books V-VIII of theOdyssey, which introduce the hero and set the stage for the most famous flashback in literary history.  We finally meet Odysseus, four books in, and he’s NOT super heroic when we first see him — in fact, he’s crying for home. Wilson tells us that “By day he sat / out on the rocky beach, in tears and grief, / staring in heartbreak at the fruitless sea” (V.157-159).  He does perform some more standard masculine achievement later in book five — he single-handedly builds an amazingly seaworthy raft, and then sails it expertly, unsleeping. Fagles provides this stunning image:

The wind lifting his spirits high, royal Odysseus
spread sail — gripping the tiller, seated astern —
and now the master mariner steered his craft,
sleep never closing his eyes, forever scanning
the stars…..  (V.295-299)

The contrast between the man crying on the beach and the man sailing the raft emblematizes Odysseus’s character. In the epic’s famous first line, Wilson calls Odysseus a “complicated man” (Fagles says “the man of twists and turns”), and he is indeed complicated.  He is mourning the loss of his home and family, but this heartbreak doesn’t keep him from sleeping with Calypso on a regular basis.  He initially ignores the advice of the sea-nymph Ino, but eventually realizes he’ll need to do as she instructed, leave his wrecked raft, and swim for shore with only her scarf to protect him. He cries some more at the various festivities at Alcinous’s palace, but rises to the challenge of masculine performance in athletics, easily beating all of the young whippersnappers at the discus throw (Wilson VIII.187).

I’d venture that it’s precisely this complicated-ness that makes Odysseus so appealing to us, thousands of years later.  He’s full of contradictions in his thoughts and actions, and those contradictions make him seem human. I certainly wouldn’t say that Odysseus is realistic but he does seem real to me. There are a number of moments in the epic when I’d like to strangle him for his arrogance and sexism, and an equal number where I’m cheering him on and would fight next to him if I could.

I mentioned in the intro post that Homer uses epithets throughout the epic both as mnemonic devices and as literary descriptors. While Athena is always “gray-eyed” and the sea is always “wine-dark,” Odysseus’s epithets change according to the the rhythm needed in the poetic line and according to the translator’s choices.  For instance, Fagles uses “long-enduring Odysseus” (V.190) and “worldly Odysseus” (V.237). Wilson seems to avoid epithets in their classic adjective-noun pairing as much as possible; for instance, she refers instead to “Odysseus, / informed by many years of pain and loss” (V.169-170). Other translators have settled on “crafty,” “clever,” “wily,” or “wise.”   Overall, Odysseus is characterized not by his martial skills or physical strength but by his experience, his wisdom, and his creative thinking (in book eight, we hear the Bard sing of Odysseus’s plan to construct the Trojan Horse – the tactic that won the Trojan War when more traditional military strategies had failed). His is heroism of brain, not brawn.

Finally, Books V-VIII set up Odysseus’s narration recounting his last ten years.  Book VIII ends with Alcinous asking Odysseus who he is, where he’s been, and where he’s going. The last time anyone saw Odysseus was at the end of the Trojan War, and the next set of books will provide Odysseus’s answers to those questions in flashback – thus providing one of the first framed narratives in western literature.

 

I’m hoping for some more comments and questions on this post than last time (thanks, Colin!), so here are some starter ideas- please use the comments function to ask questions and share ideas!

What are you thinking about Athena’s character and her role in the narrative? How does she inform your ideas about the gods in this text/culture? Can we discuss her as a “female character” (like Penelope or Nausicaa) or does divinity trump gender?

The nymph/minor goddess Calypso: does she qualify as an antagonist? Is she a positive or negative character? Or maybe both simultaneously?

Any ideas about the character Demodocus, a blind poet (just like Homer????), and his role in Odysseus’s diplomatic maneuverings?