Day 8, Book 8

Hans Erni, Demodokos singing

Framing Book 8 are two songs by the blind poet Demodokos, both about the Trojan war. The first song (75–95), regarding a supposed quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, makes Odysseus break down into tears. The second, recounting the ruse of the Trojan horse, comes in response to the rather intrusive request of Odysseus (485–93). (In-between is inset a third song, about the adulterous love of Ares and Aphrodite [266–366].)

Peculiarly, there is no other classical source for this purported quarrel – at best, it echoes a similar dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon at the outset of the Iliad. 

And what is the point of the final song, in relation to the first? 

One critic, Clifford Broeniman, has posited that "Odysseus needs to have his most famous deed recounted for all to hear. This subtle maneuvering is used by the stranger to gain a favorable reputation and, if need be, identify himself after such a glorifying story." 

When we have a poem within a poem, or a play within a play, or a painting within a painting, we call this recursively embedded sequence a mise en abyme, French for "placed into abyss." The inset songs within Book 8 have been characterized by some scholars as a mise en abyme.

Day 7, Book 7

At the threshold of entering Phaeacia's halls, Odysseus is arrested by the space – a stay in his forward motion that endures for over 50 lines [Fagles]:

"Now as Odysseus approached Alcinous' famous house
a rush of feelings stirred within his heart,
bringing him to a standstill,
even before he crossed the bronze threshold . . ." (94–97)

"And there Odysseus stood,
gazing at all the bounty, a man who'd borne so much . . . " (156–58)

He pauses, as do we, suspended. In the midst of this parenthesis, we partake in an ekphrastic description of the space, a well-ordered and flourishing palace (in contrast to his palace back in Ithaca). 

The "man who'd borne so much": as we've seen, Odysseus is often described as crafty, or wily, or cunning ("the man of craft" [277]); just as often, his is given the epithet "long-suffering." In Book 7, we have "how long have I suffered!" (181); "long-suffering great Odysseus" (210); "all I've suffered" (249); "How much I have suffered" (259); "doomed to be comrade still to many hardships" (310); "after many trials" (394). 

As the classicist W. B. Stanford suggests in "The Homeric Etymology of the Name Odysseus":

Laocoon by Charles Bell (1806), Wellcome Library

The whole career of Odysseus in European literature from the Epic Cycle to James Joyce's "Ulysses" demonstrates this nemesis of the man with Autolycan heredity, this man who suffers from the disadvantage of intellectual superiority. The Cyclic stories of the death of Palamedes and the deception of Philoctetes (which Homer ignores), the anti-Ulyssean plays of Euripides and Sophocles, the strictures of Socrates and Plato, the antipathy of Virgil together with the Latin and Romance writers on the Troy Tale, the condemnation in Dante's "Inferno," the scurrilities of Thersites in "Troilus and Cressida" . . . all attest the latent truth in the title "the man doomed to odium." Autolycus in naming his grandson showed himself a prophet as well as a humorist.

It sounds as if suffering is not unrelated to his craftiness . . . 

Day 6, Book 6

Henri Matisse, 1935

[from the translation by Robert Fitzgerald]

"Now by my life, mankind again! But who?
Savages, are they, strangers to courtesy?
Or gentle folk, who know and fear the gods?"

Odysseus is awakened by the sound of shouts from Nausicaa and her maids. His first thought: savages, or gentle folk?

We'll find this anxiety – friend or foe? – reiterated throughout the semester, whether in More's Utopia, Montaigne's essays, Shakespeare's Tempest, Defoe's Crusoe, Equiano's Interesting Narrative, Cook's voyages, Coleridge's Rime, Bishop's poems, or Coetzee's Foe. 

Day 5, Book 5

Shakespeare's contemporary George Chapman's (1559–1634) translation of The Odyssey celebrates its (likely) 400th anniversary this year (1614–15). He writes in rhyming iambic pentameter lines, known as heroic couplets. 

Chapman takes lovely liberties with Homer, elaborating upon images, even adding his own indirect commentary on occasion. Listen to his version of Athena's complaint on behalf of Odysseus, left on "an island suffering strong pains" (Lattimore 13):

Thralld in an Iland, shipwrackt in his teares (Chapman 23)

Shipwrecked in his tears! The island that holds him in thrall sounds like it is almost an island of his own making, isolated by  the flood of his own sorrow – or, as Chapman later puts it, "drowned in discontent" (201).

The generalist critic George Steiner characterizes this translation as "spendthrift, inebriate with waste motion, at times precious and as yet uncertain of its coruscating force."

There is much to marvel at here – the complicated dialogue between Odysseus and Calypso, where he must flatter her ageless beauty while reaffirming his desire to return to Penelope; the careful construction of the raft; Poseidon's storm; Odysseus' near-drowning; the pity Ino feels for Odysseus; another wave that finally impels Odysseus to leave the wreckage of his ship to go "wrestling with the sable seas" (505); his ultimate collapse upon the "unhop't for shore" (538). Throughout, Chapman emulates and amplifies Homer's mimesis of the action. 

Day 4, Book 4

[back to the Lattimore translation]

What a tender pause Menelaos makes, out of respect for Telemachos' tears:

He spoke, and stirred in the other the longing to weep for his father,
and the tears fell from his eyes to the ground when he heard his father's
name, holding with both hands the robe that was stained with purple
up before his eyes. And Menelaos perceived it,
and now he pondered two ways within, in mind and in spirit
whether he would leave it to him to name his father,
or whether he should speak first and ask and inquire about everything. (113–19)

"craftiness" (251): another word for Odysseus' "wiliness," or "resourcefulness." In "The Iliad," this comes across rather less favorably, more like "scheming," especially in contrast to Achilles' valor. But here, in a narrative beset by catastrophes, it seems more apt, and more laudable.

Menelaos relates a fascinating anecdote about how Helen circled the wooden horse, calling out the names of the Greek soldiers, even emulating "the voice of the wife of each of the Argives" (279). Odysseus, too, will try on different 'voices' throughout the poem, including pseudonyms.

385ff: Menelaos' tale of wrestling knowledge from Proteus.

Giulio Bonasone, 1555, "Menelaus Binding Proteus"

625ff: "meanwhile before the palace of Odysseus the suitors / amused themselves . . ." A kind of cinematic moment here, as we are presented with a simultaneous scene in another location: Antinoos plots an ambush for Telemachus' return.

810ff: Penelope's lament, to the dreamed-induced image of her sister, anticipates the piteous letter that Roman poet Ovid crafts for the voice of Penelope in his Heroides.

An interlude on our theme of 'islands,' by physicist Marcelo Gleiser:

So, the image of an island captures our struggle to make sense of things, surrounded by an ocean of the unknown. As the island grows, so do the shores of our ignorance: as we learn more about the world we are able to ask questions we couldn't have anticipated before.

Day 3, Book 3

"There was a tale, old soldier, so well told" (372). Being able to weave a captivating story is highly prized in this poem. Indeed, one of the characteristics of Odysseus, as we will later find, is his facility with telling tales (whether fictive or true). 

Telemachus' confidence in speaking serves as yet another sign his father's legacy. As Nestor marvels: "Your father, yes, if you are in fact his son . . . / I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me. / Your way with words – it's just like his – I'd swear / no youngster could ever speak like you, so apt, so telling" (137–40). 

And yet, Telemachus initially conveys deep hesitancy about his speech, confessing to Mentor(/Athena): "How can I greet him, Mentor, even approach the king? / I'm hardly adept at subtle conversation" (24–25).

(Recall Moses' similar hesitation at the call to approach Pharoah:

And Moses saide vnto the Lord, O my lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken vnto thy seruant: but I am slow [kaved] of speach, and of a slow tongue. (Exodus 4:10; 1611 KJV)

Did Moses have some kind of speech impediment (a stutter)? Was he simply reluctant to take on this enormous task? Was he divinely assisted? Or did he not know he could do it until he made himself do it?)

 Attic red figure pelike vase, 510 - 500 BC.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 

The counter-model of the vengeful Orestes keeps haunting Telemachus: "Ah, how fine it is, when a man is brought down, / to leave a son behind . . . And you, my friend – / how tall and handsome I see you now – be brave, you too, / so men will sing your praises down the years" (222–23; 225–27).

Day 2, Book 2

A few comments, drawn from the Fagles translation – a bit more stylistically loose, or rough, than the Lattimore cited for Book 1.

48: "No, the crisis is my own." Telemachus curtly proclaiming to the assembly that the absence of his father and, the "worse disaster," the brazenness of the suitors, are what impel him to address them. 

91–122: the insolent Antinous (wouldn't you like to see him get his comeuppance?) sneers at Penelope's stratagem of delay, the daily weaving and then nightly unweaving of the "shroud for old lord Laertes" until they "caught her in the act – unweaving her gorgeous web." There are many classical instances of a women using a domestic practice as a vehicle for resistance. According to the great critic Geoffrey Hartman,

Edward Burne-Jones, "Philomene" (1896).

Aristotle, in the Poetics (16.4), records a striking phrase from a play by Sophocles, since lost, on the theme of Tereus and Philomela. As you know, Tereus, having raped Philomela, cut out her tongue to prevent discovery. But she weaves a telltale account of her violation into a tapestry (or robe) which Sophocles calls "the voice of the shuttle." If metaphors as well as plots or myths could be archetypal, I would nominate Sophocles' voice of the shuttle for that distinction.

178: being skilled at "reading bird signs" vs. the skepticism that "not all are fraught with meaning" (204). Throughout the epic, there are many portents from the gods, some more ambiguous than others. They are sometimes misread, ignored, denied. Usually, we (as listeners) know whether these signs and wonders are genuine, which gives us an ironic superiority in knowledge over some of the characters within the poem itself. 

250: "Mentor took the floor." 'Mentor' starts here as a character, and by the 18th century becomes what's called an 'eponym' – a noun formed after the name of a person (a 'mentor'). See the Online Etymology Dictionary:

mentor (n)

"wise advisor," 1750, from Greek Mentor, friend of Odysseus and adviser of Telemachus (but often actually Athene in disguise) in the "Odyssey," perhaps ultimately meaning "adviser," because the name appears to be an agent noun of mentos "intent, purpose, spirit, passion" from PIE *mon-eyo- (cognates: Sanskrit man-tar- "one who thinks," Latin mon-i-tor "one who admonishes"), causative form of root *men- "to think" (see mind (n.)). The general use of the word probably is via later popular romances, in which Mentor played a larger part than he does in Homer.

306–13: So how can your journey end in shipwreck or defeat?

Only if you were not his stock, Penelope's too,

then I'd fear your hopes might come to grief. 

Few sons are the equals of their fathers; 

most fall short, all too few surpass them.

But you, brave and adept from this day on —

Odysseus' cunning has hardly given out in you —

there's every hope that you will reach your goal.

"Your goal" is both a geographical destination as well as a kind of 'telos,' the ultimate 'goal' or 'end' of Telemachus' development into a man, a man worthy of being the son of Odysseus. In a way, his paternity (think back to Book 1) will be proven by his own performance. 

378: [wine] waiting the day

Odysseus, worn by hardship, might come home again.

What do you make of Telemachus drawing this wine reserved for his father's homecoming? Premature? Prolepsis? 

468–71: Suddenly wind hit full and the canvas bellied out

and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow,

sang out loud and strong as the ship made way,

skimming across the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal.

And with that lyricism, we have launched. At last.

24 books in 24 days

I've challenged my humanities students to commit to (re)reading Homer's Odyssey, slowly and pensively. It's a foundational narrative for our seminar on islands, shipwrecks and disasters.  

Book 1 commences with an Olympian debate, while Odysseus' tormentor Poseidon happens to be away in Ethiopia. Athene makes her way to Ithaka, to spur on Odysseus' son, Telemachos. Where's Odysseus? "detained" by the nymph Kalypso (although in some post-Homeric accounts, Odysseus is rather less "unwilling," as he fathers children by her!). In fact, these first few books are sometimes characterized as "The Telemachy," since they concentrate on this young (approximately your age) man's "heart grieving deep within him" (114). His life is overshadowed by his father's absent but looming legacy. (It's also overshadowed by the example of a righteously vengeful son, Orestes.) The ever-present obligation of hospitality, so rudely abused by the suitors ("eating up my substance" 250), is rightly extended by the "thoughtful" Telemachos to Mentes(/Athene). 

There's much to be said about long-suffering Penelope, who is introduced at the close of the book. The purpose of lyric – and of artistic creation more generally (including this very poem) – is self-reflexively staged through her disagreement with her son about "this sad / song" (340–41).

My favorite lines: "My mother says that indeed I am his. I for my part / do not know. Nobody really knows his own father" (215–16). In part, Telemachos is simply repeating a truism, invoked in a debate about Shakespeare in James Joyce's Ulysses (itself a retelling of the Odyssey, set in modern-day Dublin): "A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil . . . Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?"

On a deeper, less forensic level, Telemachos is taking a factual statement (about the father who has literally been absent for two decades) and spinning it into a philosophical meditation: can one really ever know one's parents? As Telemachos sets off in search of his father, this journey will also, predictably, entail a search for himself as he is coming into adulthood. He, too, will need to depart his island home before he can return to it, no longer stuck in stasis. 

(In these notes, I cite  the Lattimore translation.)

Meditations on the flood

Marina Warner at The London Review of Books:

Versions of the Flood from around the world record memories of different disasters, not one single universal deluge – this is accepted now even by Biblical scholars. But the different accounts share several dramatic elements: the figure of the one man who is chosen to survive, the extraordinary hope placed in the building of a boat, its measurements and vast size, and the processes of caulking and stocking it. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ark is a six-decker vessel; in the Bible, the specs seem so exact they inspired many believers to attempt to make models. Atrahasis is the name of the hero who is spared and wins eternal life in the poem that Ipiq-Aya, Junior Scribe, pressed into the wet clay with his reed pen. In Gilgamesh, the survivor is called Uta-napishti, and Gilgamesh meets him when he is travelling to the underworld in order to bring back from the dead Enkidu,the wild man whom he loves. But the half-divine hero fails, and although he is told how to pick a magic coral-like plant from the seabed, which will guarantee his immortality, he loses it when he is bathing in a pool: a snake comes by and takes it.

The Babylonian Noah tells Gilgamesh how he survived the rains; in Atrahasis he sees in a dream that he must build an ark; in the later Gilgamesh, the counsellor god Enlil whispers the warning in secret:

     Load the seed of every living thing into your ark,
     The boat that you will build.

(John Gardner’s version, 1984.) 

The animals do enter two by two in some versions, but here the ark is a sperm bank, a granary. 

A Singapore Ramayana

The new Yale-NUS college in Singapore has "decided to teach the Indian epic known as the Rāmāyaṇa as the inaugural text in our Literature Humanities core curriculum . . .  the Rāmāyaṇa, one of the most important texts of premodern India, is missing from general education curriculums in Indian institutions of higher education. Even when the text is taught, it is largely as an expression of Hindu values rather than as a contribution to world literature. . . . Instead of being taught as a literary text, the epic is made to serve agendas promoting violence. . . .  national discomfort with the Rāmāyaṇa as a literary text erupted in 2011, when Delhi University’s academic council voted to remove A. K. Ramanujan’s essay, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” (1991), from its undergraduate history curriculum. . . .  those who advocated for its removal were really objecting to what Vinay Dharwadker has called “the actual history of the story of Rama in the world.” The academic council’s vote exposed a nationalist discomfort with the many retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa story in Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan, each of which represents Ram differently, and less reverently, than in the modern Hindu imagination. The Rāmāyaṇa’s tumultuous life in contemporary India is a case study in how an epic that has inspired more retellings in more languages than any other work in world literature can be domesticated for narrowly nationalist and sectarian ends, and how institutions of higher education can be complicit in that process."

Read more.