The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer's Odyssey

Preface

preface Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe? Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it. Thomas Merton F or the Greek hero, to be unsung is to be as good as dead. Nowhere does this equation seem to be more true than in the Odyssey, where a major theme is the equation of anonymity with nonexistence. Not only must Odysseus escape physical destruction on his way back from Troy; he must also avoid being permanently trapped in various kinds of namelessness that the poem portrays as death. This imperative is in keeping with the dominant perspective of the story. “Everybody knows” that Odysseus lives only to get back home to Ithaka. In the Odyssey, we see him ‹rst on the shore of Calypso’s island, looking woefully to sea, longing to see his wife and family. So strong is his loyalty that not even a sexy goddess , with whom he has been sleeping—not always unwillingly—for seven years, can tempt him to forgo permanently the varied pleasures of conjugal union. And homecoming will restore him not only to the roles of king, husband, father, and son but to his identity in an existential sense. By killing the suitors he emerges from anonymity to become “Odysseus” again. This is where the main plot of the poem aims the hero. The man himself , however, sometimes strays from the path. From his own mouth we hear that he went looking for trouble on the Cyclops’ island and caused several of his men to be eaten by the monster, then insisted on sending a scouting party to Circe’s lair, where the hapless men (Odysseus not among them) were turned into pigs. Neither detour was necessary for the trip home, and both led to disaster. Worse yet, once he’d defeated the witch with the help of Hermes’ magic drug, he dallied with her for a year before his men convinced him to start again for home. These are not the acts of a man possessed by only one aim in life. Things get yet more complicated when we note that in order to regain his full identity in Ithaka Odysseus literally becomes “nobody” and assumes various false, contingent identities and that in order to reemerge as the noble king whose spotless character contrasts so markedly with the duplicitous louts besieging Penelope he lies incessantly to friend and foe. Much recent commentary on the Odyssey by classical scholars, in particular the work of Murnaghan, Peradotto, and Felson , has focused on the ways in which the poem accommodates this rogue hero and, by extension, two different visions of human experience .1 Peradotto, working from the Russian theorist Bahktin, calls the two visions “centripetal” and “centrifugal,” the “center” in this formulation representing the goal of forces in a language or culture that exert a unifying, homogenizing, and hierarchical in›uence.2 Finally the Odyssey seems to tame the urges to ›ee the respectable center. Odysseus comes home, reveals himself, kills the suitors, and presumably lives out his life in settled marital bliss. Doing so, he reinforces the ‹rm identity, fueled by fame, that only being at home can—in the poem’s dominant perspective —ensure. He is now safe from the annihilating forces of permanent namelessness; his contingent identities are safely put aside. Apparently not all who heard the story found the domestic version of Odysseus believable since most of the sequels we know about in the epic tradition of ancient literature have the hero setting out for more adventuring .3 It is as if Homer created a character who was too complex and unpredictable for the story: we ‹nd it hard to believe that he’d really be satis‹ed with Ithaka. He is, as has been said recently of another leader, a hard dog to keep on the porch. The subversive, centrifugal aspects of Odysseus’ character take us into the deeper implications of both namelessness and a shifting identity . While withholding his name and assuming disguises gives Odysseus immediate tactical leverage in various venues throughout the poem—he viii preface knows more about others than they do about him, and knowledge is power in the Odyssey—anonymity and disguise are also often the way of the trickster, the wandering, homeless ‹gure who can gain entrance to the closely guarded precincts of the powerful. Relying on duplicity and generally unheroic behavior, the...