The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer's Odyssey

161 Pages·2008·1.35 MB·English

by  Thomas Van Nortwick

the unknown odysseus

the unknown odysseus
Alternate Worlds in Homer’s
odyssey
Thomas Van Nortwick
The University of Michigan Press • Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2009
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
cPrinted on acid-free paper
2011 2010 2009 2008 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Van Nortwick, Thomas, 1946–
The unknown Odysseus : alternate worlds in Homer’s Odyssey /
Thomas Van Nortwick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-472-11673-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-472-11673-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Homer. Odyssey. 2. Odysseus (Greek mythology) in literature.
I. Title.
PA4167.V36 2009
883'.01—dc22 2008017340
ISBN13 978-0-472-02521-3 (electronic)
for mary
who has taught me the
meaning of homophrosyne

preface
Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe?
Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.
Thomas Merton
F
or the Greek hero, to be unsung is to be as good as dead. Nowhere
does this equation seem to be more true than in the Odyssey,where
a major theme is the equation of anonymity with nonexistence. Not only
must Odysseus escape physical destruction on his way back from Troy; he
must also avoid being permanently trapped in various kinds of name-
lessness that the poem portrays as death. This imperative is in keeping
with the dominant perspective of the story. “Everybody knows” that
Odysseus lives only to get back home to Ithaka. In the Odyssey,we see him
‹rst on the shore of Calypso’s island, looking woefully to sea, longing to
see his wife and family. So strong is his loyalty that not even a sexy god-
dess, with whom he has been sleeping—not always unwillingly—for
seven years, can tempt him to forgo permanently the varied pleasures of
conjugal union. And homecoming will restore him not only to the roles
of king, husband, father, and son but to his identity in an existential
sense. By killing the suitors he emerges from anonymity to become
“Odysseus” again.
This is where the main plot of the poem aims the hero. The man him-
self, however, sometimes strays from the path. From his own mouth we
preface
viii
hear that he went looking for trouble on the Cyclops’ island and caused
several of his men to be eaten by the monster, then insisted on sending a
scouting party to Circe’s lair, where the hapless men (Odysseus not
among them) were turned into pigs. Neither detour was necessary for
the trip home, and both led to disaster. Worse yet, once he’d defeated
the witch with the help of Hermes’ magic drug, he dallied with her for a
year before his men convinced him to start again for home. These are
not the acts of a man possessed by only one aim in life.
Things get yet more complicated when we note that in order to re-
gain his full identity in Ithaka Odysseus literally becomes “nobody” and
assumes various false, contingent identities and that in order to
reemerge as the noble king whose spotless character contrasts so
markedly with the duplicitous louts besieging Penelope he lies inces-
santly to friend and foe. Much recent commentary on the Odyssey by clas-
sical scholars, in particular the work of Murnaghan, Peradotto, and Fel-
son, has focused on the ways in which the poem accommodates this
rogue hero and, by extension, two different visions of human experi-
ence.1 Peradotto, working from the Russian theorist Bahktin, calls the
two visions “centripetal” and “centrifugal,” the “center” in this formula-
tion representing the goal of forces in a language or culture that exert a
unifying, homogenizing, and hierarchical in›uence.2Finally the Odyssey
seems to tame the urges to ›ee the respectable center. Odysseus comes
home, reveals himself, kills the suitors, and presumably lives out his life
in settled marital bliss. Doing so, he reinforces the ‹rm identity, fueled
by fame, that only being at home can—in the poem’s dominant per-
spective—ensure. He is now safe from the annihilating forces of perma-
nent namelessness; his contingent identities are safely put aside.
Apparently not all who heard the story found the domestic version of
Odysseus believable since most of the sequels we know about in the epic
tradition of ancient literature have the hero setting out for more adven-
turing.3 It is as if Homer created a character who was too complex and
unpredictable for the story: we ‹nd it hard to believe that he’d really be
satis‹ed with Ithaka. He is, as has been said recently of another leader, a
hard dog to keep on the porch.
The subversive, centrifugal aspects of Odysseus’ character take us
into the deeper implications of both namelessness and a shifting iden-
tity. While withholding his name and assuming disguises gives Odysseus
immediate tactical leverage in various venues throughout the poem—he
Preface ix
knows more about others than they do about him, and knowledge is
power in the Odyssey—anonymity and disguise are also often the way of
the trickster, the wandering, homeless ‹gure who can gain entrance to
the closely guarded precincts of the powerful. Relying on duplicity and
generally unheroic behavior, the trickster can, as Lewis Hyde has lately
reminded us, pierce through the permeable places in the membrane of
established structures to a wider plenitude of existence that remains oth-
erwise hidden to us.4Certainly Odysseus is akin to the trickster when he
gains entrance to his own home disguised as an aged beggar. The further
question would be whether his inhabiting of that role serves to open up
the world of the poem in ways that would elude the more straightforward
hero. To put it the other way around, what aspects of experience are ex-
cluded by the centripetal drive of the plot, and how does the poem ac-
knowledge and—at least by implication—evaluate the loss?
As my title suggests, the two perspectives I trace are linked to
Odysseus’ return to his former status in Ithaka and, by implication, to his
full identity as king, husband, father, and son. As he labors across the
Mediterranean, his adventures repeatedly have him arriving at a new
place as a nameless stranger, working his way to a more secure position,
and then revealing his name in a triumphant reaf‹rmation of his heroic
identity. Each cycle builds toward the ‹nal crescendo in Ithaka. Along
the way, Odysseus’ divine protector, Athena, orchestrates his progress,
sometimes in ways that the poet likens to an artist creating a masterpiece.
Athena’s agency is only one of many examples in the Odyssey of artistic
creativity, the most common being, of course, storytelling. In this sense,
the return of Odysseus can also be seen as the making—or remaking—
of Odysseus, through his own efforts and the interventions of Athena,
beginning with his captivity in Calypso’s oblivion and ending with his re-
turn to power in Ithaka.
The story of Odysseus’ heroic return is also a story about the remak-
ing of a particular heroic world in Ithaka. To live in this world is, as we
will see, to inhabit a kind of fairy tale. But not all the characters in the
Odyssey‹t comfortably into this world. The most prominent mis‹t is, in
fact, Odysseus himself when he assumes one of his various disguises. The
disjunction can be discounted as long as we understand that the “real”
Odysseus is never affected by the disguise but rather lurks undercover,
manipulating others. But I will argue that the poet’s insistent pointing to
Athena’s agency, in the context of other paradigms for artistic creation,