Why Read the Classics? (3 page)

I notice that Leopardi is the only name from Italian literature that I have cited. This is the effect of the disintegration of the library. Now I ought to rewrite the whole article making it quite clear that the classics help us understand who we are and the point we have reached, and that consequently Italian classics are indispensable to us Italians in order to compare them with foreign classics, and foreign classics are equally indispensable so that we can measure them against Italian classics.

After that I should really rewrite it a third time, so that people do not believe that the classics must be read because they serve some purpose. The only reason that can be adduced in their favour is that reading the classics is always better than not reading them.

And if anyone objects that they are not worth all that effort, I will cite Cioran (not a classic, at least not yet, but a contemporary thinker who is only now being translated into Italian): ‘While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. “What use will that be to you?”, he was asked. “At least I will learn this melody before I die.” ’

[1981]

How many Odysseys does
The Odyssey
contain? The Telemachia at the beginning of the poem is really the search for a story that does not exist, the story that will become
The Odyssey
. The bard Phemius in Ithaca’s palace already knows the
nostoi
(poems of return from Troy) of the other heroes. There is only one he does not know: the
nostos
of his own king; that is why Penelope does not want to hear him sing any more. And Telemachus sets off in search of this story and heads for the Greek veterans of the Trojan war: if he can get hold of the story, whether it has a happy or sad ending, Ithaca will at last emerge from the disordered, timeless, lawless situation in which it has languished for so many years.

Like all veterans, Nestor and Menelaus have lots to tell; but not the tale that Telemachus is looking for. At least until Menelaus comes out with his tale of fantastic adventure: after disguising himself as a seal, he captured ‘the old man of the sea’, Proteus of the thousand metamorphoses, and forced him to tell him both the past and the future. Proteus certainly already knew
The Odyssey
inside out: he starts narrating the adventures of Ulysses from the very point at which Homer starts, with the hero on Calypso’s island; then he stops. At that point Homer can take over and provide the rest of the tale.

When he arrives at the court of the Phaeacians, Ulysses listens to a blind bard just like Homer who is singing the adventures of Ulysses; the hero bunts into tears; then he decides to start narrating himself. In his own account, he journeys as far as Hades to interrogate Tiresias, and Tiresias tells him the rest of his story. Then Ulysses meets the singing Sirens: what are they singing? Once more
The Odyssey
, possibly identical to the poem we
are reading, possibly very different. This ‘story of Ulysses’ return’ already exists even before the return has been completed: it predates the actual events it narrates. Already in the Telemachia section we encounter the expressions ‘to think of the return’, ‘to speak of the return’. Zeus did not ‘think of the return’ of the Atrides, Agamemnon and Menelaus (3. 160); Menelaus asks Proteus’ daughter to ‘tell [him] the story of the return’ (4. 379) and she explains how to force her father to tell him (390), so that Menelaus can capture Proteus and ask him: ‘Tell me how I can return over the sea teeming with fish?’ (470).

The return must be sought out and thought of and remembered: the danger is that it can be forgotten before it even happens. In fact one of the first stops in the voyage recounted by Ulysses, amongst the Lotus-eaters, carries the risk of memory loss after eating the sweet fruit of the lotus. That the danger of forgetting should occur at the beginning of Ulysses’ journey rather than at the end might seem odd. But if after coming through so many trials, and having borne so many afflictions Ulysses had then forgotten everything, his loss would have been even greater: he would not have derived any experience from his sufferings, or any lesson from what he lived through.

But on closer examination, this risk of forgetfulness is one which is threatened several times in books 9-12: first in the invitation of the Lotus-eaters, then in Circe’s drugs, then again in the Sirens’ song. On each occasion Ulysses must take care, if he does not want to forget in an instant… Forget what? The Trojan War? The siege? The Trojan horse? No: his home, his return voyage, the whole point of his journey. The expression used by Homer on these occasions is ‘to forget the return’.

Ulysses must not forget the road he has to travel, the shape of his destiny: in short, he must not forget
The Odyssey
. But even the bard who composes an improvised poem, or the rhapsode who recites from memory sections of poems that have already been sung by others, must not forget if they want to ‘tell of the return’; for someone who sings poems without the support of a written text, ‘to forget’ is the most negative verb in existence; and for them ‘to forget the return’ means forgetting the epic poems called
nostoi
, the highlight of their repertoire.

On this theme of ‘forgetting the future’, I wrote a few thoughts some years ago (in the
Corriere delta sera
, 10 August 1975) which ended: ‘What Ulysses saves from the power of the lotus, from Circe’s drugs, and from the Sirens’ song, is not just the past or the future. Memory truly counts — for an
individual, a society, a culture — only if it holds together the imprint of the past and the plan for the future, if it allows one to do things without forgetting what one wanted to do, and to become without ceasing to be, to be without ceasing to become.’

That article of mine elicited a response by Edoardo Sanguined in
Paese sera
(now in his
Giomalino 1913-1915
, Turin: Einaudi, 1976), followed by a succession of further responses from each of us. Sanguined objected in these terms:

In reply to Sanguined I pointed out (in the
Corriere della sera
, 14 October 1975) that ‘in the language of myth, as in that of folktales and popular romances, every enterprise which restores justice, rights wrongs, and rescues people from poverty, is usually represented as the restoration of an ideal order belonging to the past; the desirability of a future that we must conquer is thus guaranteed by the memory of a past we have lost’.

If we examine folktales, we shall see that they present two types of social transformation, both with a happy ending: either from riches to rags then back to riches again; or simply from rags to riches. In the first type it is the prince who because of some misfortune is reduced to being a swineherd or some other lowly person, only to recover his royal status in the end; in the second type there is usually a youth who is born with nothing, a shepherd or peasant, someone who maybe even lacks courage as well, but who either through his own resources or helped by magic beings manages to marry the princess and become king.

The same schemes apply to fables with female protagonists: in the first kind the girl falls from a royal or at least privileged condition to being poor
through a stepmother’s or stepsisters’ jealousy (like Snow White and Cinderella respectively), until a prince falls in love with her and returns her to the top of the social ladder; in the second type there is a real shepherdess or country girl who overcomes all the disadvantages of her humble origins and ends up marrying royalty.

You might think that it is the second type of folktale that articulates most directly the popular desire for a reversal of roles and of individual destinies in society, while those of the first kind filter them into a more attenuated form, as the restoration of a hypothetical preceding order. But on closer reflection, the extraordinary fortunes of the shepherd or shepherdess reflect merely a consolatory miracle or dream, which will be broadly taken up by popular romances. Whereas the misfortunes of the prince or the queen connect the idea of poverty with the idea
of rights that have been trampled on
, of an injustice that must be avenged. In other words this second kind of tale establishes (on the level of fantasy, where abstract ideas can take the form of archetypal figures) something that will become a fundamental point for the whole social conscience of the modern age, from the French Revolution onwards.

In the collective unconscious the prince in pauper’s clothing is the proof that every pauper is in reality a prince whose throne has been usurped and who has to reconquer his kingdom. Ulysses or Guerin Meschino or Robin Hood are kings or sons of kings or noble knights overtaken by misfortune who, when they eventually triumph over their enemies, will restore a just society in which their true identity will be recognised.

But is this still the same identity as before? The Ulysses who returns to Ithaca as an old beggar whom nobody recognises is maybe not the same person as the Ulysses who set out for Troy. It was no accident that he had saved his own life by changing his name to Nobody. The only one who instantly recognises him unprompted is his dog Argos, as if to suggest that the continuity of the individual is only evident in signs recognisable by an animal’s eye.

For his old nurse the proof of Ulysses’ identity is the scar made by a boar’s tusk, for his wife it is the secret of the marriage bed made from the root of an olive tree, for his father it is a list of fruit trees: all signs that have nothing to do with the kingly, but rather link him with a hunter, a carpenter, a gardener. On top of these signs there is his physical prowess and his ruthless attack on his enemies; and above all the evidence of the
favour of the gods, which is what convinces even Telemachus, though only by an act of faith.

Conversely the unrecognisable Ulysses, on awakening in Ithaca, does not recognise his homeland. Athena herself has to intervene to reassure him that Ithaca really is Ithaca. There is a general identity crisis in the second half of
The Odyssey
. Only the tale guarantees that the characters and the places are the same characters and places as before. But even the tale changes. The story that Ulysses tells first to the shepherd Eumaeus, then to his rival Antinous and Penelope herself, is another, completely different Odyssey: it is a tale of wanderings which have brought the fictitious character which he pretends to be from Crete all the way to Ithaca, a tale of shipwrecks and pirates which is much more credible than the one Ulysses himself had told the King of the Phaeacians. Who is to say that this tale is not the real Odyssey? But this new Odyssey leads on to another Odyssey still: on his travels the Cretan wanderer had met Ulysses. What we have here then is Ulysses telling a tale about Ulysses wandering through countries where the real
Odyssey
, the one we regard as genuine, never says he wandered.

That Ulysses is a great mystifier is something that is well known long before
The Odyssey
. Was he not the person who came up with the famous trick of the Trojan horse? And at the beginning of
The Odyssey
, the first mentions of him occur in two flashbacks about the Trojan war narrated one after another by Helen and Menelaus: and they are two tales of deception. In the first he steals into the besieged city in disguise and carries out a slaughter; in the second he is inside the horse with his comrades and manages to prevent Helen from forcing them to speak and thus to reveal their presence.

(In both episodes Ulysses encounters Helen, first as an ally who is an accomplice in his disguise, but in the second she is an enemy, who impersonates the voices of the Achaeans’ wives in a bid to get them to betray their presence. Helen’s role is thus contradictory, but it always involves deception. By the same token Penelope too is presented as a deceiver, in her stratagem with the tapestry; Penelope’s tapestry is a stratagem which is symmetrical to the Trojan horse, and which like the latter is a product of manual skill and counterfeit: thus the two qualities which distinguish Ulysses are also characteristic of his wife.)

If Ulysses is a deceiver, the whole tale he tells the King of the Phaeacians could be a tissue of lies. In fact these maritime adventures of his, packed
into four central books of
The Odyssey
, and containing a rapid series of encounters with fantastic beings (which appear in the folktales of all countries and epochs: the ogre Polyphemus, the four winds trapped in the wineskin, Circe’s spells, the Sirens and sea-monsters) contrast with the rest of the poem, which is dominated by more serious tones, psychological tension, and the exciting climax that leads towards the conclusion: Ulysses’ recovery of his kingdom and his wife from the clutches of the Suitors. Even in these other parts we find motifs common to folktales, such as Penelope’s tapestry and the contest to shoot the bow, but we are closer to modern criteria of realism and verisimilitude: supernatural interventions here are limited to the appearance of the Olympian deities, and even they are usually concealed in human guise.

However, we must remember that these same adventures (notably the one with the Cyclops Polyphemus) are evoked in other parts of the poem. So Homer himself confirms their authenticity; not only that, but even the gods discuss them on Mount Olympus. Nor should we forget that Menelaus too, in the Telemachia, recounts a story (the encounter with the old man of the sea) of the same folktale-type as those narrated by Ulysses. All we can do is to attribute this diversity of fantasy styles to that fusion of traditions of different origin which were handed down by the ancient bards and came together in Homer’s poem. The most archaic level of narrative would thus be in Ulysses’ first-person account of his adventures.