The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer's Odyssey

Epilogue

epilogue wor(l)ds I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word? James Joyce, Ulysses T o make one’s way in the Odyssey requires a good story. Escaping a monster’s cave, angling for a boat ride, earning a meal all depend on creating a world with words. Not surprisingly, the best storyteller in the poem is Odysseus, but many other narrators pass before us: Phemius, “Mentes,” Nestor, Menelaus, Helen, Demodocus, Eumaeus, Theoclymenus , Penelope. Some tell stories about themselves, some about others . Some of their work is presented by the poet of the Odyssey as “true,” some “false,” but the stream of stories is constant. We might say that the most characteristic act in the poem is creative storytelling. We also discover early on another layer of narration inside the frame of the poem but once removed from the stories the other characters tell. Athena has her own tale, which she must have told at least to Zeus, about how Odysseus would return home and vanquish the suitors.1 She comes to complain in book 5 because the happy ending she has envisioned is imperiled by Calypso. Her father is surprised at her anxiety: hasn’t she arranged all this beforehand? Make it happen! The poem ends with Zeus repeating his injunctions in the same words and Athena promptly dis121 posing of events (6.22–24; 24.478–80). And so we learn that however the mortal characters in the story may be shown to experience their lives, from the perspective of Olympus, they are all part of a prearranged game. There is nothing unusual about this dual perspective for the characters or for us as readers. Greek literature is founded on ironies generated by the divide between divine and human existence. And yet, the poet of the Odyssey seems especially intent on emphasizing that the return plot is, literally, arti‹cial, that it implies a ‹ctive world that is neither identical to nor coextensive with “the Odyssey.” We see the goddess as artist come to prominence—working in these cases in a different artistic medium—at moments when her creation is under particularly strong pressure to be alluring, before Nausicaa on the beach and before Penelope after the slaughter of the suitors (6.229–35; 23.156–62). The simile is explicit: As when some skilled man, whom Hephaestus and Athena taught every technique, pours gold over silver, and brings to perfection his graceful art, so she poured grace over his head and shoulders. The Odyssey is, as we have said, unusually self-conscious about itself as arti‹ce. At the center of all its creativity is the return plot itself and within that arti‹ce another creation, the returning hero, triumphant over all that would block the proper ending for his story. Next comes the story told by the poet of the Odyssey, structurally sophisticated , complex in its presentation of multiple ‹ctive worlds. The return story of Athena is embedded in this layer of narration along with other tales, variously told, some of which belong to a different world than that which the goddess requires for her story. Which brings us ‹nally to the last layer of storytellers, all of us who have heard or read the poem in the last three millennia. We tend to think of ourselves, when reading, as passively receiving the text. But, as theories of “readerresponse ” would argue, every reader of a text participates in the creation of the narrative.2 If the storyteller is Virgil or James Joyce, the retelling can become itself a new work of art. But all acts of interpretation can be understood for our purposes here as a retelling. By focusing on the centrifugal aspects of Odysseus’ character, I have been arguing for a different relationship among the three outermost lay122 the unknown odysseus ers of storytelling than has been customary among readers (or perhaps I should say narrators) of the Odyssey. I have suggested that by detaching ourselves from the imperatives of Athena’s story we open ourselves more fully to a wider perspective, one that implies quite a different world, structured by an alternate set of assumptions about human life and death. Such a perspective does not challenge what the poet presents as true or false but simply acknowledges other stories as part of the full representation...