The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer's Odyssey

Chapter Two: Odysseus At Work

Chapter Two odysseus at work H aving brought him into being, the poet sends his creation back into the world of time and change, where who he is will always be at issue on more than one level. Odysseus faces death in a physical sense many times, in the sea, in the cave of Polyphemus, amid the suitors. But for our purposes here, it is the other kind of threat to his existence, of being made nothing in some way analogous to what he faces with Calypso, that is of particular interest.1 Book 6 begins a series of episodes, some lengthy, some brief, culminating in his reentrance into Ithaka; in each of these, Odysseus arrives in a new society as a stranger. Circumstances and details vary, but the basic dynamic of these episodes remains: Odysseus withholds his identity until he chooses to reveal it, hoarding leverage in a world where knowledge is power. In each place he encounters potential threats to his return, and since his full restoration as “Odysseus” depends on that return, his identity is also at stake in each place.2 In this sense, the entire poem is about who Odysseus is at any given point. As he makes his way home, he moves closer to being fully himself again, but what exactly it means to “be himself ” is complicated by those tensions we have noted in the plot and his character. In the articulation of this succession of episodes, we can see another aspect of the tension between linear and circular movement in the plot of the poem. Each “return” completes a cycle in which Odysseus begins as “nobody” and ends as Odysseus. But from the perspective of 24 the return plot, with its relentless center-seeking momentum, he is not fully himself until the last cycle is complete in book 24. plot and identity Another aspect of the shape of the Odyssey’s plot further complicates our apprehension of its hero’s journey back to himself. Books 1–5 proceed temporally in a more or less linear way, bringing Odysseus back into being from his enforced oblivion with Calypso while simultaneously propelling Telemachus from mooning adolescence to the threshold of manhood . When Odysseus crawls onto the shore of Scheria at the beginning of book 6, he begins a new phase of his return. Now he has some greater degree of autonomy, able voluntarily to forsake his identity for self-protection . We will never again see him existentially erased as he was on Calypso ’s island, though he faces, or has faced, analogous threats in many forms. He is, with Athena’s help, proof against all—or nearly all—of these forces. But of course the story does not unfold in linear fashion after book 8. When Odysseus reveals himself to the Phaeacians and tells them of his adventures in books 9–12, we see him as he was—or as he says he was— before arriving at Calypso’s island. It has often been said that through this ›ashback the poet shows us how Odysseus has changed over the course of his long journey.3 His rash behavior while leaving the island of the Cyclops, his miscalculation, which results in the crew loosing the bag of winds, perhaps even his dalliance with Circe all show that he had not yet evolved into the peerless strategist we see among the Phaeacians and later on in Ithaka.4 Perhaps Odysseus can be seen in this way to have evolved into a more accomplished manipulator of the world around him as a result of his trials . This kind of development, however, is not the same thing as the kind of profound change in perspective on life that we see in the Achilles of the Iliad. The Odyssey needs what we have come to call a “comic” hero, one who remains detached from others and emotionally inaccessible. His treatment of Laertes in book 24, unmotivated by the compelling exigencies that require deceit earlier, only seems to underscore the fact that in terms of his emotional isolation Odysseus has not changed at all. A further complication arises when we consider that Odysseus tells his story in books 9–12 with a view to getting something in particular Odysseus at Work 25 from his hosts: a ride home.5 Ought we trust Odysseus as a narrator? His record in the area of truth telling is not impressive elsewhere...