The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer's Odyssey

Chapter Four: Constructed Lives

Chapter Four constructed lives For what is “identity” but our power to control others’ de‹nitions of us? Joyce Carol Oates B ook 13 marks the return of Odysseus to Ithaka and the return of Athena to the story. As she becomes more visible, the goals of the return plot come to the fore. From now on, we will be reminded frequently of the nefarious suitors, gluttonously devouring Odysseus’ goods, of Penelope’s struggle to hold out against their importunities. As Odysseus schemes in book 13 with his divine protector and then in book 16 with his son, we experience all the vicarious pleasures that accompany the revenge plot, cheering for the hero, watching his benighted enemies as they march unknowingly to their doom. Secrecy, disguise, lying, manipulation of the innocent and the evil, all are welcome to us if we give ourselves over to the imperatives of the restoration. Because we are impatient for the action to begin, the interlude at Eumaeus’ outpost can seem tedious, uneventful.1 But there are other pleasures available to us in books 13–16 and other ways to understand what is at stake when Odysseus ‹nally returns. The key to this alternative perspective is in the many biographies and autobiographies , true and false, that we hear in this part of the poem. Relationships develop before us between Athena and Odysseus, Eumaeus 65 and the old stranger, Telemachus and Theoclymenus, Telemachus and Odysseus. Nearly everyone in this section of the poem is initially a stranger to those he meets and comes into being, for them and us, through the stories he tells. Whereas the return plot depends on a model of the self as ‹xed and unchanging, the personae we encounter in the countryside are created relationally through narratives. In this milieu, we see most clearly the poem’s alternate vision of human life as uncertain , dif‹cult, limited by time, chance, and the ordinary frailties that beset us all. The people we meet here—as opposed to the invincible hero sheltered by a goddess—need each other to survive. Odysseus’ drive toward continuing self-de‹nition is part of this other world, and as he draws ever closer to the triumphant af‹rmation of his unchanging status in Ithaka, his urge to create himself anew becomes—as if in response— yet more assertive.2 ithaka revisited When the Phaeacians leave the sleeping Odysseus on the shores of his homeland, we, along with the hero, return to much that is by now familiar . Odysseus is symbolically reborn yet again: he falls into a deep sleep, “like death,” on the Phaeacians’ boat (13.80); he awakens to a seemingly new world, full of anxiety about who lives there: Oh no, what sort of people are these, whose land I’ve reached? Are they arrogant, ‹erce, and lacking in justice? Or kind to strangers, with intelligence like the gods’? These lines repeat verbatim his exclamation when he awakens on Scheria, with the voices of Nausicaa and her friends wafting around his head (13.200–202 = 6.119–21). He is, as far as he can tell, once again a stranger in a strange land. He meets a young man, apparently noble, just as he meets a well-mannered young woman on the beach at Scheria. This time, however, it is Athena in disguise. In response to his questions, the young man exclaims that he must be a fool if he has not heard of Ithaka (13.237–49). “Why yes,” he replies, “I seem to remember hearing something about it when I was in Crete . . .”3 So begins the ‹rst of Odysseus’ “false tales.” He is from Crete (famous in antiquity as the nurse of liars);4 he is on the run now, having 66 the unknown odysseus murdered a fellow countryman under whose father he refused to serve at Troy, preferring to captain his own troop; he is in Ithaka by accident, having set out as a passenger on a Phoenician ship headed for Pylos or Elis; and a storm blew them off course and they arrived in Ithaka instead (13.256–86). The story has many features that will be become familiar in the next few books: a traveler from Crete, the Phoenicians providing transport, a fugitive murderer. Indeed, some of this history also recalls stories about Patroclus and Phoenix in the Iliad (Iliad 9.444–79; 23.83–92). Odysseus is...