The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer's Odyssey

Chapter Three: Subversive Anonymity

Chapter Three subversive anonymity My place is in reality no place, and I hesitate to act as if I were anything but a stranger anywhere . . . I am an alien and a transient , and this is the last happiness that is possible to me . . . Thomas Merton A nonymity carries a potent meaning in the Odyssey. To the hero intent on winning kleos, being nameless is the same as being dead. If the time for dying has come, then better always to leave this world in the presence of others, winning fame on the way out, than to disappear anonymously, smothered by some amorphous force. Then, at least, one lives on in heroic song. Yet because kleos can not only confer power but also prompt challenges to that power in the intensely competitive heroic world, to control access to one’s own identity can create leverage in a new place: knowledge brings power in the Odyssey, and to be a stranger relieves one of the burdens and potential dangers of fame. Odysseus is the master of namelessness, and this expertise is crucial to understanding the centrifugal aspects of his character. In this chapter and those that follow, we will be giving ourselves permission to detach somewhat from the imperatives of the return plot. As he makes his way across the seas toward home, Odysseus both embodies and encounters ways of being that lead away from the centripetal agenda, suggesting a wider perspective on the nature of human experi45 ence than is implied by the traditional heroic scale of values. Viewed through the lens of Athena’s return plot, these ways of experiencing life look dangerous for Odysseus because if he followed out their implications he would not make it back to the goddess’s olive tree, would not restore the world as it has been and should be, would not be the hero he must be. The dominant rhetoric of the poem urges us to accept Athena’s view, to understand the centripetal aspects of the story and its hero as more genuine, re›ecting how the world ought to be ordered. But the Odyssey has a richer understanding of the nature of human life than what is implied by the fairy-tale return plot. This richness comes into bloom through the poem’s characteristic ironies, which are generated by the clash between centripetal and centrifugal perspectives. To hear these ironies, we must be attuned to both views; we must recognize that unmaking Odysseus opens the way to a more spacious world. the arrival of the stranger The story begins in the shadow of evil done in the past. A stranger arrives in town, and death comes in his wake.1 This pattern recurs frequently in Greek epic and dramatic literature: the Iliad, all the Orestes plays, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Medea, The Bacchae, and many more are based on it.2 The allure of the story is clear enough. First of all, there is displacement : the protagonist has left his customary venue and encounters new and perhaps strange people and situations. He, in turn, injects himself , as a source of the new and unfamiliar, into a tightly knit social group and creates by his presence a ripple in the fabric of others’ lives. Since the entire sequence of events plays out against the background of earlier disturbances of right order, the effects of which are somehow still active, there is an air of apprehension and irresolution built into the story: something is out of joint, and the energy of the plot comes from the strains this warping creates. And because the unwinding of this dramatic spring brings death, the story confronts us with a de‹nitive element in human life, mortality. These elements are present not just in Greek literature but in the art of myriad cultures, ancient and modern. Both the typical American cowboy myth of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Epic of Gilgamesh, much older than the Iliad, are shaped by the same sequence . That the pattern should be especially arresting to Greeks of the Archaic and classical periods is not surprising. The xenophobia com46 the unknown odysseus mon to Greek towns in antiquity, along with a curiosity about things new that characterizes ancient Greek intellectual life, would combine paradoxically to foster an intense interest in strangers and their effect on a close-knit society based on kinship ties. The Odyssey in...