Literature and Human Equality

Chapter 1: The Odyssey: Inequality of Knowledge

1 The Odyssey: Inequality of Knowledge Knowledge in the Odyssey is distributed unequally, like privilege, as the bestowal and concealment of information are acts of privilege. Only a few pages into War and Peace, at Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s soirée, an elderly woman approaches Prince Vasili on behalf of her son. “What would it cost you to say a word to the Emperor, and then he would be transferred to the Guards at once?” (15). In this social world depicted as if through the lens of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, it seems that all depends on having friends in high places. In Athena Odysseus has an ally in the highest of places, and we might read the transaction in the drawing room as a travesty or reduction of Athena’s appeal to Zeus on her favorite ’s behalf at the beginning of the Odyssey (a reduction on a par with the shrinkage of Helen to the beautiful and odious Hélène). In the one case a woman asks a prince to use his influence with the emperor, in the other Athena uses her own influence with her father, the mightiest of the gods. Had Athena not exploited the absence of Poseidon to make this appeal to Zeus, Odysseus would presumably have remained in a kind of living stasis on Ogygia. In the sense that Athena’s appeal breaks the impasse and sets events in motion, the Odyssey thus hinges on the hero’s passage from the status of one who, like any other mortal, has no divine protector or patron, to one who acquires these privileges. Later in the Odyssey, with the hero working in concert with Athena, the secret of his identity is his to keep to himself or to bestow on others, like a privilege in its own right. By sheer power of antithesis, Tolstoy, a rival Homer, brings out the unusual distribution of knowledge in the Homeric world. It has been said that Tolstoy denies the characters, the reader, and even himself, the author of War and Peace, any “privileged vantage points.”1 In the charged world of literary study, the word “privileged ” is often loaded with strong if vague political associations, and in this case we need to ask whether the elimination of special or privileged knowledge argues some actual belief in human equality. I believe it does. War and Peace demands to be read as a challenge to all the received structures of narrative, both historical and lit23 erary, and included in this is a challenge to the original poet of the West, who predates the distinction between historical and fictional narrative itself. In the Homeric world not only do higher vantage points exist, and not only are we let into them, but we are precluded from sharing the ignorance and delusion of mortals unaware of the gods’ intentions. In contesting Homer, Tolstoy discards the picture of a universe where knowledge is distributed unequally, like privilege or power. The simple question of who knows what takes on real interest in the Odyssey not just because it is handled by the poet with technical skill but because the disposal of information in the poem reflects the very structure of the Homeric world. That world is so ruled by inequality that the only ones truly “equal” may be slaves, and what they are equal to is a certain sum of money, their purchase price. Eurycleia was purchased long ago for twenty oxen. Eumaeus was kidnapped by a Phoenician woman who herself had been kidnapped and sold for “a fair price” (15.429). The suitors threaten to sell the beggar Odysseus for “a good price” (20.383). By contrast, possessions of the highest value in the Odyssey are beyond price, either because they were given as a gift (like Odysseus’s bow or the mixing bowl fashioned by Hephaestus and bestowed on Telemachus by Menelaus) or because they are one of a kind (like Odysseus’s pin or even his bed) and thus inexchangeable —outside the exchange economy that includes a traffic in slaves. Such possessions are not equal to anything. Equality in the Odyssey seems to be for the devalued. Those with value stand above some and below others (even Athena appears as a petitioner in one case, and even Eumaeus owns a slave [14.449–50]); and perhaps because it too is a thing of value, knowledge itself is unequally apportioned in the poem’s world. Not until the middle of the fifth...