Rewind: An Odyssey of Homecoming
Conquest, colonisation, governance and politics are central to The Odyssey. The capture of households, women, slaves, mass killings and destruction make Homer’s epic a horrific tale of human hubris
By Pramod K Nayar
The tale comes to us from about the 8th century BC, and the spectacle unfolding across 12,000 lines of poetry, and now the screen, includes a wooden horse in a war, pillage and plunder, wives and nymphs, monsters and heroes, and a traumatised veteran and a series of unfortunate climatic incidents at sea.
When Christopher Nolan presents Odysseus as a man haunted by memories of his deceptions, his hubris (‘Defy the Gods’ as the film’s tagline has it), and a yearning for belonging, he tries to humanise a war hero with PTSD. The haunted hero originates in a very old, and grand, poem.
Homer’s epic, 12,000-plus lines of poetry set in 24 books, is about a man who tries to find his way back home. The Odyssey has uncertain origins (it was a piece intended to be sung, before it took the form of a written text around the Byzantine period) and in our time, the EV Rieu (prose), Robert Fitzgerald (poetry), the Daniel Mendelsohn (poetry) and the more popular Emily Wilson (poetry) translations have delivered some outstanding versions for both, the specialist reader as well as the interested but non-specialised reader.
The Odyssey’s massive canvas is distinct from genres like comedy, novels or plays. The epic was marked by form, function and content, where the form was verse cast in metrical lines, the function was singing, and the content made of larger-than-¬life events, the merger of the human and the divine, the fantastic and the nearly-impossible-human.
Finally, The Odyssey is about story-telling. The principal adventures of the voyage are narrated by Odysseus to King Alcinous and the people of Phaeacia (Books 9-12). It is in this narration that Odysseus invents his self, it is the sharing of this narrative before an audience that creates the ‘figure’ of the man for whom one is supposed to feel sorry and admire at the same time.
The Fantastic Voyage
Homer’s is a world of marvels: of monsters, gods, magic and, caught in the midst of all this, a man and his team of war-weary soldiers. As in contemporary sci-fi or fantasy (and The Odyssey has been seen by critics as the originator of these genres) we have monsters like Scylla:
howling and barking horribly; her voice
is puppylike, but she is dangerous;
———————————————-
She has twelve dangling legs and six long necks
with a gruesome head on each, and in each face
three rows of crowded teeth…
There are terrifying whirlpools, like Charybdis:
Beneath,
divine Charybdis sucks black water down.
There are one-eyed monsters like Cyclops:
he reached his hands towards my men,
seized two, and knocked them hard against the ground
like puppies, and the floor was wet with brains.
He ripped them limb by limb to make his meal,
then ate them like a lion on the mountains…
The Laestrygonians are ‘not humanlike, but giants’. There are the ‘otherworldly Sirens’ who lure men in with their strange music (in the film, for some reason, they are shown from a distance), Circe who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, and Calypso whose potent lotus flowers mesmerize men (the subject of Lord Tennyson’s poem), among others.
The fantastic is, of course, a world in which existing laws do not apply, whether these are moral codes or the laws of physics. And yet, even in the space of the fantastic and the marvelous, Homer’s text puts in interesting observations. In the Wilson translation, for example, the men are rendered into pigs by Circe:
She added potent drugs
to make them totally forget their home.
They took and drank the mixture. Then she struck them,
using her magic wand, and penned them in
the pigsty. They were turned to pigs in body
and voice and hair; their minds remained the same.
Whether this inaugurates the trope of men as pigs is anyone’s guess, but in Homer’s vision, the personality of the pig is the same as that of the human male. Then there is the temptation of cohabitation with a goddess, Calypso. Odysseus refuses eternity with Calypso, opting for mortality with Penelope.
Part of the charm of the fantastic is the intersection of the human and the nonhuman and the unresolvable geography of the tale’s many settings (the geography of The Odyssey is a field of study in itself). The eponymous hero himself appears only in Book V, although the scene is remarkably well set for us in the first four.
Gods flit in and out of the narrative and Athena the goddess is present in almost every book of The Odyssey, planting ideas into humans’ heads, transforming their personalities and appearance and, in short, interfering with human ‘free will’.
A History of the Human
Even with the gods and monsters, The Odyssey is a firmly human-centred world. In his Introduction to The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, Joel Christensen notes: “Odysseus’s Ithaca is one step closer to the world of its audiences, and completes a story that helps to explain not just where the worlds of gods and mortals came from but why they are separate and why the mortal realm might just be better off this way…”
This mortal realm is strictly hierarchic. Labour in the kingdoms is undertaken by faceless slaves:
The slaves brought out a piece of meat for him,
and a submissive house girl brought him bread
Homer shows multiple types of slaves: those by birth (the children of Dolius, Melanthius and Melantho), by purchase (Eumaeus and Eurycleia), or as gifts (Dolius). We also ‘know’ slaves by their assigned tasks: Eumaeus the swineherd, Philoetius the cowherd, Melanthius the goatherd, Eurycleia the nurse, and others.
When Odysseus massacres the suitors, he also asks Telemachus to kill the slave women who he believes had entertained Penelope’s suitors (but who were probably really victims of sexual assault by the men haunting the house). Telemachus also believes this:
I refuse to grant these girls
a clean death, since they poured down shame on me
and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors
The result is:
[the] girls, their heads all in a row,
were strung up with the noose around their necks
to make their death an agony. They gasped,
feet twitching for a while, but not for long.
The text constructs a civilisational scale where the non-Greeks occupy the lower end, and are termed ‘barbaric’.
Under siege from a group of unscrupulous suitors, Penelope devises a method to keep them at bay: weaving by day, unravelling by night, until the persistent suitors discover her secret. Penelope serves, as Emily Wilson notes in her Introduction, as a double to Helen of Troy: “Much-courted Penelope resembles Helen … and whom Paris, Prince of Troy, later stole away. Like Paris, Penelope’s suitors threaten to steal away a married woman as if she were a bride. Penelope’s house also echoes the besieged town of Troy…”
Conquest, colonisation, governance, and politics are central to the tale. Odysseus records how certain lands would be so much better under colonisation:
Countless goats
live there but people never visit it.
No hunters labor through its woods to scale
its hilly peaks. There are no flocks of sheep,
no fields of plowland—it is all untilled,
unsown and uninhabited by humans.
—————————————————–
With boats they could have turned this island into
a fertile colony, with proper harvests.
This is pristine nature, untouched by the human hand or device, and Odysseus mourns that this is not a ‘colony’!
In the case of Odysseus’, Ithaca politics has to do with the laws of hospitality. The book’s theoxeny (hospitality to a god) conflates with the more mundane hospitality towards humans. Homer’s text layers the theme in the form of the Trojan Horse incident: taken into the city as a surprise gift, the enemy soldiers inside it enable the seizure of the city. The Horse is hosted, so to speak, by Troy, and then the gift destroys the city from the inside.
Then, of course, the suitors living off Odysseus’ wealth are guests who insult the host. The Odyssey hinges on the laws of hospitality, of welcoming the stranger-guest and of course of not overstaying the welcome. The guest is also an enemy (the root of the word host and guest is the same, hostis), as we know from the other epic, The Iliad: the seduction of Helen in her own home by a guest, Paris.
Deception, Revenge, Justice
Odysseus is described throughout as ‘godlike’, a master strategist and ‘the master of deception’, one not averse to taking recourse to deceit. When he arrives in Ithaca, he has to fool the men challenging him:
The strategist Odysseus deceived them,
saying, “My friends, there is no way a man
as old as me, worn down by suffering,
can fight a younger man. My hunger forces
bad choices, tempting me to take the beating.”
This self-representation is a deception: he is not old and worn. Penelope manages to deceive the suitors for years: ‘she offers hope to all, sends notes to each, / but all the while her mind moves somewhere else’.
The Odyssey is finally a revenge tale mixed with themes of moral crisis, duty and honour. We are told that the actions of the suitors merit vengeance by Odysseus. As Zeus tells Athena:
The plan was your idea,
to have Odysseus come take revenge.
Do as you wish. But here is my advice.
He has already punished all the suitors,
so let them swear an oath that he will be
the king forever, and let us make sure
the murder of their brothers and their sons
will be forgotten.
The acts of Odysseus and his men (his companions’ eating the cattle of Helios, and the blinding of Poseidon’s son) elicit revenge from the gods. Odysseus acknowledges that he is at risk of revengeful acts by the families of the suitors he executed (implying, in contemporary Hollywood style, the possibility of a sequel: the revenge of the families!).
The tale ends with Athena, Odysseus’ constant companion, admonishing and advising him to restore peace:
Odysseus, you are adaptable;
you always find solutions. Stop this war,
or Zeus will be enraged at you.
He was
glad to obey her. Then Athena made
the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace
for future times…
Odysseus assays many identities throughout. Indeed, as Daniel Mendelsohn, whose translation of The Odyssey is the newest in an opinion piece in The New York Times described Odysseus’ ‘multifaceted and sometimes slippery self … altering his appearance and lying about his life story’, thus raising the question: ‘how could he be the same person after two decades of life-changing experiences and suffering?’ Mendelsohn argues that The Odyssey speaks to multiple generations precisely because it is about identity and the ‘right to self-invention’.
*
Readers return to The Odyssey because it always throws up something new, each time. Reworkings, including Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, fragments of it in Seamus Heaney, John Keats, WB Yeats and dozens of others, note the difficult questions Homer’s text raises for our age too: is there ever a ‘just’ war? Do civilisational values, such as that of hospitality, extend to migrants and slaves? Is deception acceptable if the stakes are high enough? Why is a woman-run household deemed to require a male head of the family?
The question of Odysseus’ ‘heroism’ is raised throughout the tale. He admits:
I sacked
the town and killed the men. We took their wives
and shared their riches equally among us.
There is clearly no ethics in wartime in this poem about the male ego. As Wilson writes in her Introduction: “It is more plausible to view The Odyssey as the product of archaic male imaginations, questioning and defending the inequalities of male dominance within the status quo. The poem meditates on what women might be capable of, and the degree to which their potential can or should be suppressed.”
Despite its cultural stereotyping and moral ambiguities, The Odyssey has something for everyone, the ideologue-academic, the quester of dramatic tales, the lover of the fantastic. This forerunner of our era’s tales of thrones, games, dunes, horcruxes, curses and blessings, remains a story told, read, and now screened, far into the future. In a tale full of prophecies, curses, benedictions, the poet seems to have predicted the work’s longevity for it was composed for our times and for the future, says the prefatory note of the poem:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
The critic Wayne Booth argued that ‘What is essential about that self is not found primarily in its differences from others, but in its freedom to pursue a story line, a life plot, a drama carved out of all the possibilities every society provides’. Odysseus chooses to storyline a brave but not always noble self.
A man went wandering.
The urge to tell that tale brings him home.
(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)
