The Limits of Heroism: Homer and the Ethics of Reading (review)

Buchan's introduction challenges the critical consensus on the Odyssey as both "too teleological" and "not teleological enough." The epic's partisan perspective on its hero, with an ethical universe designed to exculpate his violence, has been too long taken for granted. Meanwhile, critics do not take seriously enough the epic's insistence that Odysseus' return to his home is not the end he longs for. Buchan thus raises the hope for a genuinely new reading of the Odyssey, and to a great degree, the book lives up to its promise with close textual studies framed by Lacanian theory on human desire. Buchan's opening gambit of defining his ideas against a consensus grows less appealing, however, when it becomes a trope that cites only two or so scholars on any issue. The gesture conforms to Buchan's method of textual analysis, which exploits the provocative detail or juxtaposition, and his approach suggests how fruitfully psychoanalytic readings can expose a text's unconscious universe. But the lure of the big picture—the telos of the epic—irresistibly draws Buchan onto less yielding interpretive ground. Still, his results are illuminating for Homer and instructive about the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation.

Buchan studies the "dangers of certain fantasies of the self" exploited by Odysseus in his return home (4). The fantasies that define the Phaeacians and Cyclopes are exposed and ruined through their encounters with Odysseus, in part because these peoples arrive at a correct interpretation of themselves too late. Odysseus has already gotten what he needs and left his victims with rocks hanging over them and a new sense of identity wrought by loss. Buchan's view of Odysseus is unexpected and provocative; it rejects his ethics and reads him purely as the agent of trauma that introduces those he meets to the human condition of desire. This style of analysis yields its best results in the early chapters on the "victims" of the returning hero: the Cyclops, the Phaeacians, and, with Menelaus, the sea-god Proteus.

Each of these chapters reveals an artifact of human culture that comes into being at a moment of loss and thus marks an awakening to self-consciousness. These artifacts represent for the newly acculturated their loss as a predication of their humanity. Polyphemus' blinding causes the Cyclops to name him for the first time, creating social language as a symptom of his loss and a concomitant desire for the Father as authority. Competition with Odysseus is the beginning of a truly human culture for the Phaeacians, who were formerly self-sufficient, never doubting themselves as contestants or fathers. When Odysseus defeats their athletes, they learn that their "games-without-loss" culture is no longer a sustainable system. Buchan's perspective yields arresting insights on both episodes, including a suggestive dialectic among the images of stone imperiling the Phaeacians, from the discus throw that opens an insurmountable gap to a mountain hanging over them when they vanish from our view. But Buchan's insights come at a cost of readerly indulgence, because they depend on a decidedly selective treatment of the text. For instance, he insists on Polyphemus' namelessness before he meets Odysseus and the lack among the Cyclopes of a father as an authority figure. His discussion of the Phaeacians requires the assumption that they have never lost a competition, although they compel every visitor to participate (197 and n. 29).

Buchan's final study of a victim of an heroic nostos best illustrates the gains and costs of his method. Menelaus tricks Proteus into human desire by disguising himself and three comrades as seals: the god is compelled to count himself , a deft double entendre (4.453) to make up the counting unit of five by which he keeps track of his seals Proteus thus confounds...