A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (9 page)

I suggested that
The Odyssey
centers its treatment of the passage of time on the theme of fathers and sons, but even though the culture of Homer’s time led him to display issues in terms of generations of
males
, there is no reason for us not to read
The Odyssey
as a poem more justly about generations, about memory and ideals, and about each generation growing into the ideals it claims to have inherited from its predecessors. As we know from our own century, memories, regrets, and ideals tend to crystallize around wars. Earthquakes and other disasters, however destructive, may punctuate the otherwise undifferentiable flow of time more neatly, but wars and other cataclysmic events of some duration (plagues, famines) seem to gather larger swatches of time into a bundle. It is said of certain countries that they suffer from an excess of history. Wars too seem to pull into their wake more than their share of history, as if time were passing by a vortex or black hole—the new Kharybdis of space—and bent toward it. What wars mean to those who fight them is one thing;
The Iliad
is the first and will ever be the supreme poem about war. Its presentation of the heat of battle, of death of comrades in combat, and of siege and sack ring true, say those who have experienced these things. Digging archeologically into recent response to
The Iliad
, we note that scholars, readers, and poets touched by the epic struggle of World War II have a special appreciation of
The Iliad
—earned at a terrible price.
¹⁹

The Odyssey
is set at a cooler pitch, representing a more domestic world, less tragic but no less subtle. As
The Iliad
presents—in the figures of Akhaians—Greeks at war and—in the figures of Trojans—Greeks
at home, the first group ravaging and at the edge of order, the latter defending their home and city, a city still very much in order,
The Odyssey
presents the Greek man traveling and at home. In other words,
The Odyssey
is a postwar poem. If World War II is the war that most readily comes to mind to readers of the previous generation when they read
The Iliad
, for my generation (of Americans)
The Odyssey
speaks to many issues that seem to engage us in a society still obsessed with Vietnam and its aftermath. The post-Vietnam War era is doubly postwar: most obviously, the end of that conflict lies now some decades in the past, but, more subtly, that war was already post-World War II. However unjustly, the country constantly compares the two wars. In its own eyes, America emerged victorious over unambiguous evil in the first, but in the second it was forced to walk away from a conflict which was considerably more controversial. The debates that still swirl around our involvement in Vietnam, the wounds and losses still unhealed, sensitize us to a certain dimension of
The Odyssey
which addresses a similar issue, so that we would not be wrong in seeing
The Odyssey
as the quintessential postwar epic.

We can see Odysseus’ challenge as that of readjustment to a civil society. Perhaps ten years of decompression is not so bad an idea; perhaps Agamémnon would have acted less arrogantly had he not come directly from the high command at Troy to Argos (not that this would necessarily have saved him from Aigísthos or Kassandra from Klytaimnéstra’s ax). Returning veterans too need to become reacquainted with their country, which will have undergone its own development while the fighting forces were away. They need to reestablish contact with their spouses and parents, and often to establish contact with children for the first time. The emotions of those left behind also need to be addressed. Those (usually males) who are too young to have gone to the war or were otherwise unfit for military service need to deal with their diminished prestige. Telémakhos looks up to his heroic father. The suitors, by contrast, while they are not “protesters,” are in the awkward position of
seeking honor and glory in a sphere where it cannot be obtained, and for personal reasons it is not in their interest to remain ever subordinate to the absent Odysseus. Political candidates whose war records (or lack thereof) remain the subject of public debate will be sensitive to the feelings of all the Ithakans. I take it that the reason feelings run so high in every postwar generation is that all of us are haunted by the question: Would we have measured up?

The Odyssey
, which literally brings Odysseus back from the dead after ten years, almost seems calculated to be the perfect story for our time, when stories about those missing in action fill the popular press. The poem offers a way of healing, both for those who come back and for their families. And there are many moments when we see
The Odyssey
healing wounds opened by
The Iliad
. Early on there is the magical, somewhat mysterious visit by Telémakhos to Meneláos and Helen in Sparta. The woman whose abduction started the Trojan War is now back home, at her husband’s side. Questions of guilt and responsibility are glanced at ever so slightly and always politely, and Helen herself administers a drug that can ease the suffering of memory. The action of retaking Odysseus’ home offers roles for all those who stayed behind. Telémakhos, though too young to have participated in the Trojan War, can fight at his heroic father’s side and win renown. Odysseus’ loyal retainers can do the same. The suitors can fight but can hardly win glory; they missed their chance for recuperation into the postwar polity by pursuing the wife of the absent general. The final book of
The Odyssey
offers two moments of closure to this theme. First, in the second underworld scene, the dead from both conflicts (the one for Troy, the other for Odysseus’ hall) meet. This is not a happy moment for the suitors’ shades: they are condemned by the ghosts of the Trojan heroes to a perpetual belated status. But in the final skirmish, warriors from three generations can stand shoulder to shoulder, and Telémakhos is now not too late to join his father and his grandfather, the latter a veteran from an even earlier set of conflicts.

*  *  *

What about memory in the poem itself? The Muse, invoked at
Book I
.1, is, as repository of the community’s memory and the acknowledged source of the bard’s song, the guarantee that
The Odyssey
draws on and transmits communal truth. The Muse represents sung tradition itself and guides the epic singer in the right paths as he chooses elements from the vast ocean of memory and song.
²⁰

Along with the invocation to the Muse, which is the traditional appeal to and seal of memory, there are specific epic features woven deeply into the narrative pattern of
The Odyssey
which may be taken as metaphors for the interpenetration of past and present. A visit to the land of the dead and the ghosts of characters past appears in all epics in one form or another; it is the ultimate epic scene of commemoration. In
The Odyssey
, Odysseus evokes and addresses a select group of ghosts in
Book XI
, and the narrator takes us for a reprise in
Book XXIV
. It is the function of epic to memorialize the history of a people, and these “descents” to Hades keep the exploits of forebears alive. In such moments the poet records a supreme adventure of his hero and at the same time has him acknowledge the heroic achievements of predecessors. Previous heroes, such as Heraklês, Iason, or Akhilleus, were already the subject of song, and by including them in this way in his poem, the poet also keeps the older songs alive, adding his to their company. The fact that less famous forebears and their exploits are constantly evoked as examples for emulation (or avoidance) further keeps the past a living part of the present.

The Odyssey
gives us another image of memory which is no epic commonplace, but one specific to hero and poem. In perhaps the most famous and oft-praised episode in
The Odyssey,
²¹
the disguised Odysseus’ identity is discovered and his own strategy put at risk when his old nurse Eurýkleia, washing his legs in the footbath Pénélopê had ordered for the Cretan visitor, feels a scar on his thigh. She knows this scar, from the past, and it tells her that the
man above her is the same man who left the house some twenty years before. Indeed, she knows this scar from a still more distant past, Odysseus’ boyhood. Moving the narrative the way I have just described Eurýkleia’s mind as moving, Homer leaps back from the moment of discovery, before the discovery becomes word, to the story of how Odysseus received the original wound: on a boar hunt on Parnassos when visiting his maternal grandparents.

A scar is the reminder and the remnant of a wound, and the individual marking of a body. Odysseus’ scar as it is rubbed and recognized by his nurse provides Homer the opportunity not just to recall one incident in Odysseus’ past but to return to the very roots of his name. For before fulfilling the narrative promise he has made by mentioning the hunting episode, Homer leaps to the time of Odysseus’ naming, when Autólykos, Penélopê’s father, was visiting Ithaka. Eurýkleia—the person holding Odysseus’ leg over the wash-tub in the narrative present but perhaps forty or forty-five years younger—placed the baby on his grandfather’s lap and is reported to have said, “It is for you … / to choose a name for him” (XIX.473–74). Drawing on his own experience of “odium and distrust” (XIX.480), Autólykos, via a wordplay, names his grandson Odysseus. (For the details, see notes on XIX.328, XIX.477–81, and XIX.480, the second for a possible additional wordplay involving the Greek for “wound.”) As the process of naming described makes clear, one’s name is meant as a sign of one’s identity. One bears one’s name as one bears a scar, sign of the original wound. Homer has created a wound in the narrative body of
The Odyssey
, so to speak, in order to go back to Odysseus’ naming, the formative moment of his identity.

There is at least one more identifying characteristic of Odysseus—and the Odyssean Homer—to be discovered as we by reading rub our figurative hands back and forth over the textual wound. Before returning to the narrative present to describe Eurýkleia’s and then Odysseus’ reaction to this unexpected discovery, Homer’s narrative moves to a detailed description of the boar hunt on which
the young prince received the wound. As soon as Odysseus arrives back at Ithaka, so Homer tells us, his parents “[want] all the news / of how he got his wound” (XIX.538–39). In what is biographically, according to
The Odyssey
, Odysseus’ earliest narrative, “he spun out / his tale, recalling how the boar’s white tusk / caught him when he was hunting on Parnassos” (XIX.539–41). As much as odium, a wound on the thigh, and the name “Odysseus” constitute the hero’s identity, so does his readiness to “spin out” memorable tales.

Interrupting the present to bring to light the past through tale-telling is not only a characteristic trait of Odysseus: it is the task of the epic singer in all his endeavors, and it is a defining characteristic of the poet of
The Odyssey
, who has so constructed this work that Books IX-XII constitute a similar but larger-scale narrative flashback. In these books, Homer’s singing and Odysseus’ recounting voices are one. In telling tales, both singer and hero are meant to be transmitting the past, thereby serving and preserving memory. What is left open to doubt is how much of what is passed on as “memory” is in fact invention. Odysseus is presented as a perennially lying narrator, most evidently in the series of tales in and by which he first assumes a Cretan identity and then alters it in subsequent tellings. Who knows exactly when faithful memory stops and exaggeration or even fabrication starts in the tale of exotic travels that Odysseus told to the Phaiákians? Indeed, if Odysseus has always been Odysseus, how are we to be sure that what he told his parents about the “boar’s white tusk” was the unvarnished truth?

But the tale told as memory
is
memory. As such, it can grow and change to meet the needs of the present, just as Odysseus’ scar is now an adult version of the scar that first formed over the original wound. Written documentation not only kills the faculty of memory, as Plato’s wise king pointed out, it also falsifies memory in two senses: it can prove it false and, by holding it to a literal truth, can render it less suitable for the present. For the present needs its own past, and it is that past that the epic Muse always provides.

It is the business of Homeric scholars and literary critics to make fine distinctions. Some scholars distinguish among multiple historical levels they have discovered in Homer’s texts; others make a distinction between an oral and a literate Homer, or between the author of
The Iliad
and that of
The Odyssey
. As students and scholars we can, and should, explore all the byways of the Homeric question. As readers, however, it is our duty to be sure that we subordinate the results of our study to our appreciation of the text before us.
²²
Whatever our views on the history of the poems’ genesis, and however often we may pause to observe the traces of that history in the text, there are good reasons to read and interpret the text we have as a whole.

Paradoxically, this seemingly ahistorical approach will replicate at least in one important aspect the experience of Homer’s first audience. As we now understand the system of oral poetry, the singer is always involved in re-creating the poem for his audience. The singer believes he is singing it exactly as he did before, and as others sang it before him, while the members of the audience believe they are hearing it exactly as they and their forebears heard it before (no matter if in the situations where modern scholars can run tests, it is clear there have been extensive changes). No one would say, “But this telling varies in this or that detail from the last time I heard it,” and no one could claim that “three generations ago the story ran otherwise.” Given our text-based overview of the tradition, we might well be in a position to make such observations, and as students of the tradition we must. As archeological readers, we can discriminate among the various levels in the textual dig before us. Reflection on the layering lets us read another, more than Homeric text: the text of the tradition. Yet the final demand made of the archeological reader is to put down his or her trowel and, with knowledge, perceive that the most authentic and most Homeric way to appreciate Homer is to believe that the teller of the tale now
before us
is
Homer, the only Homer, who tells the tale as it has always been told.