from The Yale Review, April 2010
Sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani.
[So he speaks and pastures his soul on an empty picture.]
—Virgil, Aeneid, I.465
Nostalgia! Now there's a theme that calls for high poetry. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton—remove nostalgia from their palette and what would we have? Some noble sentences no doubt, but dry as a biscuit when what we crave is cake, Proust's madeleine, dipped in Madame's tisane, which crumbles in our mouth and from the crumbs our whole village rises up before our eyes, house by house, street by street, dog by dog, and oh yes, there's Her Serene Highness, Mrs. Kandinsky's soporific calico presiding over the scene from her parlor window.
Nostalgia is not an ancient word. Webster's dictionary informs us that it was coined in 1688 by a certain Swiss scholar, J. Hofer, to translate the German heimweh, "homesickness." The word is built from two Greek words, nostos (homecoming) and alga (pain). But if the word is modern, the idea is as ancient as poetry itself.
Virgil gives us one of the great moments of nostalgia in ancient poetry when he has Aeneas flee Troy as it goes up in flames, driven off course by a storm at sea, and cast ashore on Libyan soil. There Aeneas is amazed to find a new city under construction—Dido's Carthage. In a grove a temple is being built, and Aeneas is even more amazed to see on its walls scenes depicting the fall of Troy. The sight fills Aeneas with unbearable grief. These scenes, like those on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, are described as if in motion, a cinematic technique that transforms a series of still-life pictures into a living memory, or as if we were turning the pages in the family photo album. The effect is enhanced by the fact that among the figures in those tableaux is Aeneas himself. How strange to find himself preceding himself, himself already an icon but in an alien land.
The nostalgia in this scene is multi-layered, a welter of emotions that arises first in the poet and then is projected into his fictional hero. Aeneas, the fictional character, having just lost his own city and watching an industrious people building a new city from the ground up, would undoubtedly feel some sorrow mixed with envy. But the city under construction is on foreign soil, which would be a reason for alienation rather than joy. At the same time, seeing his own city's destruction inscribed on the temple walls in this new city gives Aeneas confidence that here his own city is known and loved and its fate treated with religious veneration. Our dictionaries define nostalgia as a bittersweet feeling, and certainly that is the feeling here. "Put away your fear," Aeneas says to his friend Achates when they see the panorama of their own city; "our fame will give you security." But as he speaks these comforting words, "his face is wet with a large river of tears," as Virgil puts it. There may be some joy in these tears, but mostly they are tears for le temps perdu, to borrow from the title of Proust's great novel, grief for "lost time." As Virgil expressed it, while he was comforting his friend Aeneas fed his soul on the empty picture. (Author's translations throughout.)
The Trojan scenes in the Carthaginian temple are not of a city in a time of peace, with weddings and harvests, like the scenes depicting a city at peace on the shield of Achilles. These are all pictures of defeat, an empire overthrown, a city burned to the ground, everywhere slaughter, mayhem, and sacrilege. Where is the comfort in seeing your own civilization's desecration celebrated in a foreign land? These tableaux may be executed with lifelike realism, but they are empty. There is no Troy—it is a ghost town, and Aeneas, too, is a ghost. The temple, even as it is being built, is haunted by ghosts, and if it is haunted, Aeneas is haunted too. He is one of those who in Shelley's phrase walk "within the gloom of their own shadow."
Aeneas's pain is also the poet's pain. Virgil too was a haunted man. Why could he not begin his epic of Rome with scenes of Troy in its glory? Because no such picture existed. If he is to find Rome's origin in Troy, he must take his story from the Greeks, but their epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, had sung only of Troy's destruction. Steeped in Greek culture, whether visible in the monuments all around him or in the libraries of every educated Roman gentleman, as a poet Virgil must have felt a certain nostalgia for a time and a culture that were never his and never could be. If Virgil was to create an authentic Roman epic he would have to graft it onto the Greek originals, but Homer was as much a ghost as the Homeric figures on the temple walls in Carthage. Later in the poem Virgil has Aeneas make a journey to the Underworld in imitation of Odysseus's visit to the Underworld in the Odyssey; but the Aeneid itself opens with a descent into the world of the dead, as Aeneas sees himself and his friends translated into ghostly images in a foreign city.
Virgil must have felt personally the nostalgia that he attributes to his hero. When he came to compose the Aeneid, the Carthage with which the poem opens was no more, destroyed by Roman legions. Long gone was that energy and promise that he has Aeneas envy at the beginning of the poem. Gone too was the Rome that Virgil himself might have known or heard of as a boy, the city of sturdy yeomen like Cincinnatus who could be, as occasion demanded, a farmer, a soldier, or a senator. Reared in the homely religion of the Italian soil, Virgil had seen that rural culture ravaged in the civil wars waged by Rome's warring consuls and generals, of whom one was to become his patron, the emperor Caesar Augustus. All these nostalgias feed his river of tears and flow into the words Aeneas speaks, perhaps the most famous sentence in the Latin language, and the most untranslatable: Sunt lacrimae rerum, "Here are tears for things."
The Aeneid is heavy with nostalgia, but for its prototype we should go back to Homer's Odyssey. Nostalgia is as strong an emotion in the Odyssey as in the Aeneid, though it is perhaps easier to overlook since the first half of the poem spins us out to the far edges of our imagination and the second half engages our delight by giving us something of a spy story as Odysseus, like a secret agent who has infiltrated the enemy camp, scans every face, peers into every nook and cranny looking for the weak links in the enemy's line of defense. Perhaps the fierce Hellenic light also prevents our noticing the heavy melancholy of the poem. The Italian sun can be as merciless as the Aegean light, but the Italian landscape has softer contours and softer colors. Chiaroscuro is an Italian light, and Virgil is a master of chiaroscuro.
The Odyssey, too, is a haunted poem, even more so than the Aeneid, we might think, since the Aeneid is devoted to a new beginning, to "that great order of the ages being built anew," announced in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, while the Odyssey looks forward to no new beginnings. There is only the past. The Odyssey broods on the past. We can sympathize with the later poets—Dante, Tennyson, Kazantzakis—who must give Odysseus a future. All that daring, that intelligence, that charm, that obsession to explore and discover, such panache—surely this energy is not to be spent solely in getting the hero back to his own house. Surely he must be striving ever forward, into something new, something beyond the setting sun.
The Odyssey is generally recognized as a quest poem, and one of the greatest. But it is a strange quest that has the hero at the end of his epic journey reaching his own bed. We know, of course, that his quest is to arrive home, and we understand home to mean his lands, his slaves, his flocks, his house and family. But the last great obstacle standing between him and his homecoming is the test of the bed, and only when he has passed this test can he claim both the bed and with it everything else that belongs to him. This is the challenge that the Odyssey faces. The tale of a brave man coming home at the end of the day to his own wife and his own bed may gratify our instinct for romance, but it is not a great theme for epic.
In the Iliad, when Agamemnon's ambassadors call on Achilles to present him with Agamemnon's offer of reparation, they find him seated in his tent singing klea andron, "the deeds that bring men kleos." Kleos is fame, and klea, the noun in the plural, are the heroic deeds through which heroes win their fame. Achilles refuses Agamemnon's offer. Other considerations weigh on him more heavily than any rapprochement with Agamemnon. Achilles tells of the two choices facing him as he has learned of them from his mother, Thetis, which he states in the two terms that between them define the Iliad and the Odyssey: kleos, "fame," and nostos, "homecoming." Gregory Nagy, who elucidated this choice and its effect on the formation of the two Homeric epics in The Best of the Achaeans, translates nostos as "safe return home." As Achilles frames the issue, the two are irreconcilable opposites. If he chooses to return home, he will lose his kleos but will have a long period of life at home and an easy death. If he remains at Troy and continues to fight the Trojans, his nostos will be lost, but he will have kleos aphthiton, "fame imperishable." Nagy translates this verse as "I have lost a safe return home, but I will have unfailing glory." To achieve his glory, Achilles must forfeit his life.
The Achilles of the Iliad personifies the warrior's ethos in its boldest form. The death of a young man killed on the battlefield in the prime of life is tragic and must be wrapped in beauty and glory since every society must have its ephebes, radiant youths willing to risk their lives in war, young people who count honor more valuable than life. As Achilles understands life, survival would be an extension of biological time, but mere time in itself is valueless. Kleos is what gives the warrior's life meaning and value. A culture, however, needs its survivors, too, if it is to survive. And so the Odyssey evolved as a complementary poem presenting a different ethos, treating survival as not only honorable but indeed an epic virtue.
But heroes win their fame by noble exploits abroad. Jason takes the Argonauts into the Black Sea to obtain the Golden Fleece. Theseus sails from Athens to Crete to slay the Minotaur. Heracles must go to the Garden of the Hesperides to find the Golden Apples. Their homecomings may give rise to poems and legend in their hometowns, but for the tribal poets, whose appeal is to a broader audience, they are of secondary interest. If not for Euripides' Medea, who today would remember Jason's return to Corinth after his exploits in the Black Sea? Few of our modern astronauts are remembered for their safe arrival back on earth or for their exploits on earth after their brave missions into space.
The Odyssey is a conglomerate of many folktales. One of these outlines the plot of the poem itself. A man goes abroad, is absent from his home for a long period, then returns home to find his wife besieged by men importuning her in her husband's absence. The man kills his rivals and regains his wife and home. This tale might make for good entertainment in the tavernas on the harbor front, but it is hardly of sufficient weight for epic, especially if its ambition is to gain entrance into the Homeric repertoire, where epic is reserved for the supremely heroic. If the Odyssey is to be a true rival of the Iliad, the challenge is to make nostos, the safe homecoming, as sublime a theme as the hero's kleos on the battlefield. The hero's survival cannot be a mere addendum to his exploits on the battlefield. It must become his greatest glory, as it must become also the glory of his son and wife. If, for the Iliad, kleos gives a hero's life meaning, as his society's validation of his noble sacrifice, in the Odyssey survival has an equal value.
To become the indispensable complement to the Iliad, the Odyssey must fasten itself to the Iliad so tightly that an Iliad without the Odyssey would be unthinkable. It must be made into history—history as understood in an oral culture. Denys Page, noting that the Odyssey seems ignorant of the story told in the Iliad, speculated that it had grown out of a different tradition. But the two poems grew up concurrently over centuries in the same bardic repertoire, and the more likely interpretation, as Nagy has argued, is that the Odyssey was intended from the start to serve as history, completing and bringing to a conclusion the story begun in the Iliad. The Odyssey tells certain stories not included in the Iliad such as the adventure of the Wooden Horse and the funeral of Achilles. It also gives the stories of the various heroes' homecomings and tells of those who failed to make a safe return home. For the Greeks of the archaic and classical period these stories had a genuine historical function since each of the heroes of the epic tradition was honored, even worshiped, in a religious cult in his own city. Their exploits at Troy and their postwar fates were all part of the history that sustained their cults at home. Furthermore, after the collapse of the great cities of the Mycenean world, the Greek world went into a steep decline and faced imminent extinction. Its survival is due in large part to the collective memory encoded in the Homeric epics, which sustained the Greek cultural identity through the four centuries of what we call the Greek Dark Ages.
The historical aspect of the Odyssey is obvious in the stories told of the various heroes who had fought at Troy. But the sailors' yarns that make up the first half of the poem are far removed from the matter of the Iliad. They have nothing to do with Troy or the Trojan War; they belong to folktale and romance. But they too must be poured into the mold of the postwar history. As stories told of a man's crossing the Aegean Sea sailing from Troy to Ithaca, they are highly implausible. The Aegean Sea is not a vast ocean but a relatively small, well-known body of water. Achilles, pondering in the Iliad whether to leave Troy and sail home, says that with a good wind he could be home in three days. Add another week or so for Odysseus to sail around the Peloponnese and then northward to Ithaca, and we could have him home in a fortnight. The dreaded fate for a sailor crossing the Aegean would be to be caught in a storm and lose his ship, his comrades, and, in the worst case, his own life. The currents and winds around Cape Malea, the southernmost point of the Peloponnese, also offered a serious challenge for the western Greeks who needed to round the Cape. Here a ship could be blown off course, as both Menelaus and Odysseus claim happened to them, but Menelaus gives the more realistic narrative while Odysseus is allowed to take us deep into fantasy. A ship blown southward from Cape Malea could be driven to Libya or to Egypt, as happened in Menelaus's case. But Odysseus is driven westward to the farther extremities of the world, to Gibraltar, to Britain, to the Baltic, to the land of the midnight sun, to who knows where else? The Odyssey has taken yarns that tell of travels far beyond the Aegean into the western Mediterranean and even far beyond the Mediterranean, stitched them together to make a single poem, and then, in a second stitching, made them seem to be the natural sequel to the Iliad. Thus the hero of this magnificent yarn gains greatly in kleos, traveling in seas and climes never visited by any sailor sailing from Troy to Greece, and nostos itself is taken to a much higher level than mere adventure. Menelaus took three years to complete his journey home from Troy to Sparta, but his adventures abroad are all realistic, with the exception of his consultation with Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea. Only one man's homecoming ventures beyond the realistic, to places deep in a world of fantasy and magic.
The Odyssey uses a number of strategies to legitimize itself as the Iliad's equal and complement. One is to spin the narrative's length far beyond what would be plausible for that short sea voyage from Troy to western Greece. But expansion will soon bring ennui unless the endless story is made endlessly fascinating. To hold our interest, the central tale and the folktales embedded within that tale must foam with elements of the marvelous. This man's homecoming must seem a marvel almost beyond credibility. But there are grades of magic. Some belong to the nursery, like the wicked witch in the woods whose wand can turn men into pigs and vice versa. If this odyssey is to rise above the elementary forms of magic it must be made to serve theology. However obliquely, however mystically, it must, like Milton's Paradise Lost, justify the ways of God to man. To give a soul-satisfying explanation for a man's disappearance and his twenty-year absence from home, it will not be sufficient to have him become an entrepreneur in Egypt, as happened to Menelaus, piling up honors and wealth, and perhaps building himself a harem at some Pharaoh's court. A divine adversary is needed; in this case, two adversaries, Poseidon and Helios, Sun and Sea, two mighty forces on which the survival of Greece itself depended. Odysseus must be made the icon of the soil so that the name "Odysseus" not only signifies one man's survival but can stand by metonymy for the survival of Hellas itself. For this adversary to interpose himself into the narrative, a human error must be found such as would provoke an Olympian rage. Nagy, writing on the hero in ancient Greek myth, notes that the antagonism between the hero and the god in the myth, which we see in literature, represented a trace of what he calls the ritual symbiosis of the god and the hero in religious cult.
Odysseus must be made to disappear by divine will, and his disappearance must be total and unfathomable. His disappearance would then allow for the gracious intervention of another great deity—in this case, several deities: first Athena, then Zeus, then Hermes, and finally various nymphs of high station. Nestor tells Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, that he never saw Athena love another man as she loved Odysseus at Troy. To which we can add that never again in Greek literature was such love shown by god to man until we reach the New Testament. Athena's extraordinary solicitude extends to the man's wife and son. She hovers around all three, guiding them with suggestions, seeding them with ideas, dreams, plans. In the Iliad, Athena is more conspicuous as the war goddess, but in the Odyssey she shows her other face, as intelligence. She is the god of ideas; she creates ideas and nurtures them in those whom she loves. Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, all are gifted with a high degree of intelligence, and their intelligence is reflected in the intelligence of their loyal servants, Eumaeus, the keeper of the hogs, and Eurycleia, the housekeeper. Intelligence, as the power of imagination, the ability to perceive a situation, to build, to formulate and execute plans, to make judgments, to penetrate disguises—human cognition—is made a truly heroic virtue. This in turn enhances the nostos, making it the supreme achievement of intelligence. At the same time the homeliest aspects of daily life—spinning and weaving, carpentry, housekeeping, herding pigs, and telling stories around the fire—are made into virtues. The hearth is celebrated, and the house and even the bedroom, that smallest and most intimate private space, are made heroic.
Yet another quality is needed if the Odyssey is to rise above entertainment to become the repository of the archaic Greek ethos. It must have its adequate pathos. The pathos of the Iliad is plain to see; it is named in the opening line of the poem, "the wrath" of Achilles. The consequences of this wrath are loss in every direction. In the Iliad everyone loses except Menelaus, who has the extraterritorial privilege of being Helen's husband. When Priam comes to Achilles to beg for Hector's body, Achilles must first learn that though he has sacrificed his honor and the life of his dearest friend in his need for revenge against first Agamemnon and then Hector, even anger is not allowed. Passing beyond anger, honor, and revenge, Achilles meets Priam as an equal. They are both losers.
The pathos of the Odyssey is nostalgia, as deep in its influence on this poem as anger is on the Iliad. It colors every scene of the poem, though we are likely to overlook it and focus more on the upbeat message of the triumph of fortitude and intelligence over every adversity. The Odyssey is an excellent case study of this condition in its depth and its various shades of feeling, from wistfulness to melancholy to inconsolable grief, depression, and even death.
A person could have coined the word simply by reading the Odyssey; if the word itself does not appear there, certainly the poem is the first document in our tradition to articulate the idea. Nostos is one of the most frequently used nouns in the poem. It occurs some one hundred times; in addition to the simple noun, the poem has the adjective nostimon, as in nostimon emar, one's "day of homecoming," and the verb nosteo, "to make a homecoming." Grief is almost always the prevailing emotion that accompanies the word. In one instance nostos and algae (pains) are brought together in the same verse, though not yet joined into a single noun. So often is nostos used in a context of sadness, grief, and loss that nostos and nostalgia become almost synonymous. Joy is a rare emotion in the poem; even when Odysseus is loved and promised immortal life by an immortal nymph, his life with her is joyless. VVhenever a character in the poem uses the word nostos, that person speaks from a core of pain.
At its simplest, nostalgia is homesickness (the desire to return home), but usage over time has expanded its semantic field to mean any kind of longing for the past. The nostalgia of Odysseus for his home is an obvious element in the Odyssey, but if we expand the word to its broader sense, we can see it as a pathos that afflicts every character associated with Odysseus. The Odyssey is built around memory, and every memory is nostalgic. In the Iliad characters come to the tragic consciousness that all life ends in loss. The Odyssey represents the alternative that, given intelligence and the favor of the gods, a person may survive. But survival too has its cost, which is the loss of the past, Proust's temps perdu.
The most poignant image of nostalgia in the Odyssey occurs in book 5, in the scene that first brings Odysseus in person into the poem. Hermes has been told by Zeus that he is to "convey to the goddess the plan of Zeus; namely, the nostos of Odysseus, how he may make his return home, with no escort of any kind, neither from the gods or from human beings" (5.30-32). Now he has arrived on Calypso's island to inform her that she can no longer detain Odysseus but must allow him to leave and even assist him in his departure. While Hermes and Calypso are holding their conversation in her cave, the subject of their conversation is seated in solitude on a promontory on the shore, gazing out over the barren sea. His eyes never had their fill of tears, the poet says, as he grieved for his nostos (5.151-58). The nymph no longer pleased Odysseus. He would sleep with her at night but by necessity. The poem adds that his sweet aion was draining away. We usually translate aion (Latin aeon) as his lifetime, the time allotted to him, but R. B. Onians, tracing the word back to its origins, argues that it is to be understood as his spinal fluid. This aion, which can seep away in tears, is a person's vital fluids, which were thought to dissipate drop by drop through the person's life. Here is nostalgia in its full medical sense, an emotional fixation on the past that drains not only Odysseus's physical being but also his will, his pleasure, his desire.
In Calypso's cave that evening, as Calypso and Odysseus hold their last conversation, Calypso asks whether Odysseus would really prefer his own home and his own wife when he could remain with her and become immortal. Odysseus acknowledges that Penelope could never match Calypso: "She is mortal and you are ageless and deathless. Even so, I long all my days to return and to behold the day of my own nostos" (5.215-20). What Calypso offers Odysseus is to free him from aging. In accepting aging, Odysseus accepts that he belongs to nature, but he also accepts the emotional consequences. The irreversible movement of time translates in the body into aging: aging translates in the mind into memory; memory translates in the emotions into nostalgia.
Later in the poem, among the Phaeacians, another life is available for Odysseus, not immortal perhaps, but certainly richer by far than anything that Ithaca has to offer. Were he to remain with the Phaeacians and marry Nausicaa, he would enjoy the ravishments of a young bride almost as beautiful as a goddess and become heir to the throne of perhaps the most luxurious kingdom he has ever seen. But even the otherworldly prospect of an almost magical escape from humdrum life on a small, humdrum island cannot compete with his nostalgia. As he begins to tell the Phaeacians his story, Odysseus first names himself and then describes his island (9.19-28): "It is rugged," he says, "but a nurse of youths. For myself, I cannot look upon anything sweeter than one's own soil."
Later, at the end of his stay among the Phaeacians, when all preparations have been completed for a ship to take Odysseus back to Ithaca, King Alcinous arranges for him a final feast. The singer Demodocus provides the usual entertainment, but Odysseus has no interest now in stories (13:29-35): "He turned his head again and again toward the all-glowing sun, longing for it to set; he yearned for his homecoming." He is likened to a farmer, tired from plowing all day in the field, who longs for his dinner: "Gladly for him sets the light of the sun so that he may go to his dinner, and his legs totter as he walks. So set the light of the sun for Odysseus and brought him joy" (one of the few moments of joy in the poem). Odysseus, watching the setting sun, timing his journey by its fading light, is a fine image for the man who has traveled the world, and even into worlds beyond our world where ordinary terms like day and night begin to lose their meaning, and now in his maturity accepts his own setting sun. In watching that western sun, marking his hours by its descent, Odysseus is also facing toward Ithaca, an island he describes as lying low on the horizon in the western dusk. Facing both his own setting sun and the sun on the western horizon, Odysseus is a proto-Wordsworth, feeling a presence
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
When the Phaeacian ship has brought Odysseus to Ithaca, Odysseus awakens on his own island but cannot recognize it. As sometimes happens in Homer, the poem offers us a double motivation, both a natural and a supernatural explanation. Athena, we are told, has shrouded the island in mist so that Odysseus would not recognize it until he and she have had their necessary conversation. At the same time, the poet tells us that Odysseus failed to recognize the island because he had been away for a long time. This is certainly a credible explanation: that a man, absent from home for twenty years, might fail at first to recognize that the scene before his eyes exactly corresponded to the scene he remembered from years earlier. The mist is Athena's addition of atmosphere to give outward and visible expression of the man's inner state of confusion. Taking on the disguise of a shepherd boy, Athena now comes up to Odysseus and in response to his questions as to his whereabouts marvels that any person would not know Ithaca, "a rugged island but fertile, whose name is known far and wide, even as far abroad as Troy." Athena's praise of Ithaca for its worldwide renown is part of the poem's agenda of integrating this insignificant island into the epic of Troy. The reputation of Odysseus is such that it always precedes him. Odysseus rejoices at being told that this land is indeed Ithaca, but another reason for delight, whether it be his or ours, is watching Athena magnifying this small island on the remote western frontier of Greece to the status of Mycenae or Troy.
Holding in his joy, Odysseus remains cautious. Instead of immediately identifying himself, he claims that indeed he has heard the name "Ithaca," and then he tells the first of his fictions, inventing for himself a Cretan persona, explaining that he is in exile from his homeland for having killed the son of the Cretan hero Idomeneus. Athena laughs (that a man would think to deceive a god!). She then reveals her true identity and gives a remarkable speech expressing a relationship between Odysseus and herself that is like nothing else in ancient Greek literature. She is bound to him in love and respect; he is, as it were, her other self, to the degree that a god could accept any human as made in her image. She then removes the mist and unveils the island, disclosing its topography feature by feature. Odysseus, rejoicing to be again on his own soil, kisses the ground and prays to the nymphs whose cave is on the shore.
Odysseus is now reunited both with his personal goddess, who has been mysteriously absent for the ten years of his wanderings, and also with the nymphs of the island, the tutelary daimones who seem to be almost divine personifications of the island itself. Their cave on the shore has two entrances; one, facing north, for humans; the other, facing south, for the gods. When Odysseus and Athena hide the goods that the Phaeacians have given him in this cave, the episode symbolizes the fusion of human and divine in the same space, as well as the intersection of the present and the past. Odysseus is now truly home again, in the place of his memory and imagination.
Nostalgia, we might think, has now played its part, but that would be to consider it as a pathos only of the hero. All the characters with close connections to Odysseus have their form of nostalgia; his absence casts a melancholy shadow even over their happy moments. When Odysseus meets the ghost of his mother, Anticleia, in the Underworld, she tells him that she did not die of a disease, "but my longing for you and your thoughts, glorious Odysseus, and your kindness—this took from me my sweet spirit" (11.202-3). William B. Stanford in his note at 11.198 suggests an alternate translation: "yearning for you, thinking of you, and tenderness for you." Where the grammar is ambiguous, we are not obliged to forfeit one reading in favor of another. Tenderness, sweetness, kindness, love—all are ingredients in this nostalgia. They all refer to the mother-son relationship itself. This is an extraordinary passage. Nowhere else in ancient Greek literature does a mother speak of the love between her and her son in this way, and of the joy his presence gave her. This is nostalgia at a deep level indeed, that someone could die of such an emotion.
In Laertes, Odysseus's father, we are given another vivid picture of nostalgia. His feeling of loss has not led to his physical death but to a state that is a death-in-life (U.187-97). He has abandoned the palace; he no longer comes to the city but lives in the fields. He does not sleep in a bed as other humans do. In the winter he sleeps on the ground beside the fire (in some primitive hut on the property, we are to infer); in summer and fall, he sleeps on the ground, with leaves for his bed and leaves for his coverlets. Why should any human, especially one of the wealthiest aristocrats on the island, live in this degraded fashion? "This is his grief," Anticleia explains to Odysseus (u.195-96). "A great sorrow [penthos] grows in his heart in his longing for your nostos." These two images of the mother and the father show the pathology in its most acute states. In Anticleia it is the direct cause of her death. Laertes' condition is not as extreme, but his rags, his sleeping on the ground with only the fallen leaves for his bed, his forgoing all human amenities and all human contact—these are the clinical symptoms of extreme depression.
For the other characters in the poem, emotions may be less extreme but they are certainly powerful. When Telemachus meets Nestor at Pylos, Nestor is extravagant in his praise of Odysseus's intelligence. The obvious aim here is to build up Odysseus as Achilles' only true competitor, but a secondary aspect of this tribute is the focus on Nestor's own feeling of loss. "Would that"—the wistful optative mode arises to Nestor's lips as he remembers Odysseus "Would that Athena might love you," he says to Telemachus, "as she cared for Odysseus at Troy" (3.218-20). Then again, "If only Athena would love you and care for you in the same way, then Penelope's suitors would soon forget the marriage" (3.223-24).
From Pylos, Telemachus travels to Sparta to meet Menelaus and, of course, the fabled Helen. The scene in Sparta adds one more link between Odysseus and the Trojan expedition as part of the broader objective to make the Odyssey part of the history and so to magnify Odysseus as to make him indispensable to the Greek cause—indeed, the chief architect of Troy's defeat. Menelaus tells Telemachus the story of the Wooden Horse, a stratagem devised by Odysseus, and Helen tells a more intimate story of wily Odysseus slipping into Troy one night in disguise and being recognized by Helen herself. These stories are not given to us as items in a chronicle but as memories. They are Odysseus remembered. And memories always carry an emotional value.
Even before Menelaus has recognized his newly arrived guest as the son of Odysseus, his memory of Odysseus fills him with grief: "Of all my comrades, I grieve for none," he says, "as for one who makes my sleeping and my eating hateful to me, while I remember him" (4.106, trans. Stanford). These are strong words indeed, that nostalgia could take away a man's appetite and ruin his sleep. Moments later, when Helen guesses the identity of Telemachus, seeing in him the very image of his father, Menelaus is even more effusive, saying that he loved Odysseus above everyone else, and would have showered him with gifts, "but a god must have begrudged him this happiness, who has made him a man without a nostos."
We are watching the process by which nostos is being raised to monumental stature, and the nostos of one man in particular, which, when it is completed, will mark him as the superhero above all others. But in addition, nostalgia is being made the primary emotion, and an emotion rich and deep enough to sustain an epic. Helen walks into the room where Menelaus is receiving Telemachus and at once recognizes him as the son of Odysseus; he is the exact facsimile. Menelaus, once this resemblance is pointed out to him, sees it too—the boy's hands, his feet, his eyes, his head—this is Odysseus returned from the dead. This facsimile of the youthful Odysseus stirs another round of memories, which become inconsolable for everyone in the hall, including Helen.
Only when Helen drops her Egyptian anodyne into their drink, her pharmakon nepenthes (the drug No Pain) does their grief become manageable. This medication is said to take away anger and to bring forgetfulness of all evils.
Robert Fitzgerald, in his translation of the Odyssey, mistranslates Helen's drug as "the mild magic of forgetfulness." Forgetfulness is not magic in the Odyssey. It is the greatest calamity short of death; in fact, it is death. When Odysseus's sailors eat the lotus, he must drag them away by force, since ingesting the plant makes them forget their nostos. Memory in this poem is mostly painful, but it is essential for a safe homecoming. This hero's nostos depends on his intelligence but almost as much, perhaps equally so, on memory. Odysseus would not have survived nor made a safe homecoming if he had not been sustained by his own memory and the memory of his friends. Helen's drug induces not forgetfulness but "forgetfulness of evils." Like a strong sedative, it removes the pain but keeps the memory intact.
As an adventure book, the Odyssey gets off to a slow start. "Sing, goddess, the wrath of that man," the Iliad begins, and Achilles forthwith appears as if on cue. The Odyssey, however, opens with the poet's invocation to his Muse to sing the song of the man who wandered far and wide and saw many cities, but the man himself does not make his appearance until book 5. The man who is to be the center of our attention is mentioned in the first verse, but we must then read 2,370 more verses before we are allowed to see him. (This would be several hours in oral performance time.) This retardation is reproduced on a small scale in the opening lines of the poem's introduction. The words andra polutropon, "the man of many turns," are given to us in the first verse; indeed, andra, "the man," is the first word of the poem, but the name of this man is withheld until we reach verse 21.
This procrastination of the plot, mirrored in the smaller procrastination of the introduction, serves several purposes, but its astonishing effect, which makes the Odyssey unique in Greek literature, is to turn Odysseus into an idea. The poet might well have begun with the invocation, "Sing, Muse, the idea of Odysseus." Odysseus begins his career as an idea in the opening lines of the poem, in that gap where the poem meanders for the first twenty-one verses, between "man" in verse one and "Odysseus" in verse 21. By the time the name is announced at the conclusion of this periphrasis, the man has already become an idea in our mind. His name is the summation of the idea, and the rest of the poem is its development.
When the introduction is done and the narrative begins, Odysseus looms up as an idea first in the mind of Athena. In the assembly of the gods with which book 1 begins, while Zeus is pondering the fate of Aegisthus, Athena takes this opportunity to interject the name of Odysseus into his thoughts, which she does very artfully with a pun (1.62): "Zeus, why do you odysseus [trouble] this man?" Her pun is our first explicit indicator of the shaping of the man into an idea. As we learn later in the poem, this name is far more than a mere label; it is the signifier expressing the man's nature, his entire being. When the poem leads us through the first twenty verses before the name is given, we are being coached to enter into the spirit of the work, to create the idea of Odysseus in our own imagination. We are being advised that the song we are about to receive from the Muse is to be an exegesis on a single word, "Odysseus."
Zeus replies to Athena in some astonishment (1.64-67): "How could I forget godlike Odysseus, who excels all mortals in intelligence and also excels in his gifts to the gods?" The emphasis here is, how could such excellence ever be forgotten? Athena then suggests that if Odysseus is dear to the gods, Zeus should send Hermes to Calypso with orders that she must now arrange for the man's nostos, while Athena herself will work on the idea in Ithaca. She will send Telemachus abroad for news of the nostos of his dear father, and thus he will gain his kleos among humans. Here the two terms that Achilles had polarized in the Iliad are brought together in sympathetic vibration. Both his father's nostos and his own kleos are to be made the responsibility of the son. But, to take the idea one step farther, Telemachus will gain his kleos through his father's nostos. Searching for news, gathering information—these are part of the hero-making process, transforming the man into an idea.
Book 5 opens with another assembly of the gods, and once again Athena takes the moment to introduce the idea of Odysseus into the mind of Zeus, as if he had forgotten their earlier conversation (5.11ff.). "No one remembers Odysseus," she complains. We might at first take her to be referring to the gods, and indeed, that is her oblique message, but she specifies the humans, "those whom he ruled, how he was as gentle as a father." Zeus is understandably astonished, given the arrangements made between him and Athena four books earlier in the poem that she was to take her own share of the responsibility for the man's nostos. But fulfilling his part in the arrangement, he now sends Hermes off to Calypso to inform her that the time has come for Odysseus to be allowed his homecoming. Thus the idea is passed from Athena to Zeus, from Zeus to Hermes, and from Hermes to Calypso.
Now we are ready to see the idea passed from the gods into human minds. The process calls for our patience as we proceed through the first four books of the poem to give the narrative space to develop the idea to sufficient stature and meaning in several human minds. To return to book 1, after Athena has set certain thoughts in motion on Olympus, she initiates the same process on earth by visiting Telemachus in Ithaca, where she finds him sitting among his mother's suitors, grieving and "beholding his father in his mind." This sets the tone and theme for the rest of the so-called Telemacheia, the first four books of the poem, devoted to Telemachus and his quest to find news of his father. In her conversation with Telemachus, Athena adds some substance to the vague image drifting idly in Telemachus's mind, then sends him abroad in search of those who could add more substance to the idea, or rather the two ideas, which, thanks to the success of this poem, are to be inextricably linked for all time—nostos and Odysseus.
First in Ithaca, under Athena's mentoring, then in Pylos, and next in Sparta the idea of Odysseus is progressively enlarged as each new character—Nestor, Menelaus, Helen—adds details of that image indelibly etched in their memories, each detail adding to our knowledge of the man's deeds and revealing more of his character. By the end of book 4, we still have not seen the hero of this huge epic, nor has his son, nor has his son learned much about his father's condition except rumors, but we certainly know that the idea of Odysseus is an obsession. He is the unforgettable man. When he has been sufficiently remembered, the man himself can then step into that space configured for him by everyone else's memory.
When in book 5 we are given to see Odysseus himself (at last!), seated on the shore of Calypso's island, what can he be thinking of but the idea of himself, that being the thought uppermost in everyone else's mind in the poem? What can be draining from him drop by drop, hour by hour, but the idea of himself? On Calypso's island all nature nurtures him and the bountiful goddess offers him everything; only one element is lacking, which is himself in real time.
When Odysseus leaves Calypso's island, after one last great storm he is swept ashore on the Phaeacian land. Here the idea is further developed but from two fronts, through the singer's songs at the Phaeacian court and from the mouth of the hero himself. Odysseus begins the story by telling the Phaeacian king and queen some part of his life, specifically of the events that brought him from Calypso's island to their shores. The next day the Phaeacians prepare a ship to take Odysseus back to Ithaca. A feast is then held in the palace, with their singer Demodocus providing the entertainment. Strange to say, the subject of his song is—Odysseus. He sings of a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, which, the poem says, was the beginning of the troubles between the Trojans and the Greeks. Everywhere the name of Odysseus seems to be on every person's lips, even among those who have never met him.
Glorious as his past may be, the telling of it stirs in Odysseus a great grief. He weeps and to hide his tears covers his face with his purple mantle. King Alcinous, seeing his guest's pain, suggests moving out of doors, where the young bloods can entertain their guest with athletic contests. After some contests have been completed, one of the youths suggests that Odysseus too should participate in the contests. When Odysseus demurs, another hot blood tries to provoke him with an insult, saying he looks more like a merchant seaman than an athlete. To which Odysseus replies with some judicious remarks on the disparity between looks and accomplishments, taking this youngster as a case in point, noting that he has a handsome body but a stupid mind. Then to illustrate his point, Odysseus lifts a great rock like a discus thrower and hurls it far beyond the marks of any of the handsome young athletes of the realm, thus demonstrating that mind plus muscle wins over mere muscle. His victory puts an end to any further athletic competitions, and the Phaeacians then stage for their guest an entertainment in dance while Demodocus, to change the subject, sings the song of the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite.
Soon it is time for the evening feast, and again Demodocus provides the entertainment. On this occasion, however, the choice of his song falls to Odysseus. Sending the bard a good cut off the roast, Odysseus asks for the song of the Wooden Horse, taking it for granted that every major episode in his life is in every singer's repertoire. Odysseus has not yet identified himself; he has remained the enigmatic guest despite various hints from the court that good manners call for a guest to give his name. Thus, while Odysseus remains incognito, more substance is given to the idea of Odysseus through other people's memories, memories now transformed into heroic song. Demodocus complies with the stranger's request, but the song, even though it tells of the hero's greatest triumph (short of his homecoming), stirs in Odysseus another round of tears, which he again tries to conceal. His pain is given in a simile of extraordinary emotional depth (8.521-31): Odysseus is likened to a woman embracing the corpse of her husband who has fallen in battle while defending their city and their children. The woman, seeing her husband dying, pours herself over his body, shrieking and wailing. The enemy, beating her about the body with their spears, drag her away from the corpse in fetters, no doubt to become some man's slave. In his edition of the poem Stanford calls this a "rambling, half ornamental Simile," but Homeric similes are wont to ramble, and in their rambling they gather emotional force from the kaleidoscopic points in their comparison. The rambling of this simile, to call it that, has at its core nostalgia as an acute form of pain, as acute as the pain felt by a woman seeing her husband killed and herself being dragged by force from his fallen body.
King Alcinous, observing his guest's grief, has Demodocus end his singing and calls for Odysseus to identify himself. Now Odyssseus moves into the singer's role as the storyteller; at the same time he is the principal character in the song of himself. "Where shall I begin?" he asks rhetorically, and begins with his name (9.19-20): "I am Odysseus son of Laertes, a burden to humans for every kind of deceit and my glory reaches heaven." Virgil's Aeneas may forever walk within the gloom of his own shadow, but not so Odysseus. His shadow is his glory. It is more halo than shadow. Odysseus understands the task at hand: to enter into the idea himself as it is registered in other minds and carry it forward. The first four books were devoted to the memories of others, but here, as the ninth book begins, we are ready to hear the tale from Odysseus himself. He himself is the idea and he knows it.
The transformation of Odysseus from person to icon, from icon to myth, proceeds apace when Odysseus arrives on his own island. It is begun by Athena, who talks of the worldwide fame of the island. The theme is picked up by Eumaeus, the swineherd, who shares with the stranger in his hut the grief he feels at his master's absence, expressing his affection in terms that border on rank sentimentality. Later, Eurycleia, the housekeeper, continues to build the idea; she likewise mourns the loss of her master, especially when she discerns the resemblance between her master's hands and feet and those of the stranger she is asked to bathe.
In Ithaca the idea of Odysseus is constructed through a folding of his actions and stories as he tells them through his fictive Cretan persona into the memories of others. All flow into the paramount theme, Penelope's idea of Odysseus. Her contribution to the process is first broached in book 1 when Phemius's song of the "grievous nostos" of the heroes from Troy feeds painfully into her longing for the man "whose kleos is spread through Hellas and reaches into the middle of Argos," Hellas signifying northern Greece and Argos that part of Greece south of the Isthmus; in short, his glory is known throughout Greece, from north to south. At the end of book 4, with Telemachus safely cared for in Sparta, the scene shifts back to Ithaca. Athena sends a dream to Penelope to reassure her that her son is safe and well; then Penelope asks for information about her husband, using the same formula, the man "whose kleos has spread through Hellas and deep into Argos," and adds further details to the portrait, calling him a man "with the spirit of a lion," a good husband, and one who excelled among the Achaeans in every kind of excellence" (4.814-16).
For the further elaborations of Penelope's emotions, we go to the later books, where Odysseus, ignominious as he is in his appearance, arouses her curiosity if only because he provokes violent hostility among her unwelcome suitors. When she decides to make an appearance before those suitors (to scold her son for ignoring the stranger in their hall), her maid urges her to bathe and freshen up, to which Penelope replies (18.178-81): "Do not counsel me to bathe and anoint myself. The gods took away my beauty when my man left for Troy." She repeats this lament later in her private conversation with the enigmatic stranger (19.124-26): "Stranger, the immortals destroyed my excellence and beauty when the Achaeans sailed for Troy, and my husband Odysseus with them. But if he should return and minister to my life, then my kleos would be magnified and made more beautiful."
For Penelope, her sense of loss is such that it has robbed her of both her beauty and her good reputation. We might assure her that in resisting her suitors she has lost none of her reputation, but that is not the code of her society. Where is the nobility of a married woman living alone, whose husband has been absent for twenty years, presumably dead, or, if alive, undoubtedly married to some other woman and making a new life for himself elsewhere? If Penelope were to assume him dead and select one of her suitors as his replacement, she would certainly lose whatever was left of her good name. Her kleos depends on her husband's return, and it steadily erodes with every day of his absence.
Penelope's nostalgia is not packed into a single episode but is diffused through the poem, setting the dominant tone wherever she appears. The longest treatment comes in her conversation with Odysseus in book 19, in which his nostos is their constant theme and Penelope's sense of loss the overwhelming emotion. Through this artful scene Odysseus plays on his wife's nostalgia, inventing stories as if to exacerbate her feelings. Entering into the spirit of the poem, Odysseus invents himself with considerable ingenuity, lacing fiction with fact. If he had arrived in the palace and without more ado, by some miracle, had rid the house of Penelope's suitors, his nostos would certainly be praiseworthy, but it would still be only two or three grades above the ordinary. By presenting his nostos as it is presented in this poem, as an idea to be entertained, developed, rejected, re-affirmed, problematized, the poet makes it extraordinary.
The obvious function of the conversation in book 19, at least as Odysseus steers it, is to give him time to sound out his wife's feelings and test her loyalty, but the chief effect of his strategy is to give Penelope the opportunity to add from her store of ideas and memories to the general store already given by several earlier characters. In fact, Odysseus and Penelope collaborate, to some degree knowingly and to some degree unknowingly, in constructing an idea in common. At the same time, while Odysseus remains incognito, speaking through his fictive identity, the conversation only enhances Penelope's melancholy. For her, this is a conversation haunted by absence.
The fantasy Odysseus, as created by himself, and the Odysseus of Penelope's memory merge ever closer until they would have fused into one, except that the fusion takes place not in Penelope's mind but in the mind of her servant Eurycleia when she gives the stranger his footbath. Just as Penelope is on the point of recognizing the stranger as Odysseus, the inevitable recognition is deflected onto Eurycleia, whose entrance into the scene at this moment allows for another great story to be added to the idea. This story takes us back to a time long before Troy, to Odysseus's birth and the ceremony of his being named by his trickster grandfather Autolycus, then to the boar hunt in his adolescence when he was wounded in the leg. From this story, we learn that Odysseus began his career as an idea almost at birth, on the day when his grandfather named him "Trouble," saying that he himself had been up and down in the world, being a trouble to others; let, therefore, his grandson bear the name that would broadcast this idea wherever it was spoken.
For Penelope, her idea of the man and the man himself must be still kept separated; their fusion must wait on other tests, "signs" as she is to call them later. Instead of reaching the obvious conclusion in her conversation with Odysseus—that this man is her husband—she appears to follow a more circuitous route. When the stranger swears an oath by the very hearth where he is now sitting that her husband will be home at the dark of the moon (tomorrow!), Penelope acts as if such promises were mere moonshine. Instead, she will now take matters into her own hands and arrange for her own remarriage, via the contest of the bow. So saying, Penelope retires to her own room and there she weeps, the poet says, for her dear husband until Athena sheds sleep on her eyes.
A poignant image of Penelope's nostalgia occurs in book 21, when she goes to the storeroom to fetch Odysseus's bow. This episode opens the space for yet another Odysseus story, to add yet more data to the character study. It tells how he received the bow in an exchange of gifts between him and Iphitus when they first met, both of them on an expedition to round up cattle stolen from their respective lands. It next explains why this bow did not go with Odysseus to Troy but remained locked away in his palace, to be a memorial of his friendship with Iphitus. The story is not told as Penelope's memory, but it has that effect. We might call this episode "Penelope visits the private chamber of her own memory." She carries a special key to the room in her "thick hand."
Scholars since ancient times have taken umbrage that this epithet formula, used in the Iliad of mighty heroes in the rush of battle, should be applied to a beautiful woman's hand. It is taken as a flaw of the oral style, where the poet takes up whatever formula might come conveniently to his memory, regardless of the epithet's incongruity in the context. This formula, however, though it might sound indelicate when used of Penelope's hand, is never used in the Iliad in a random or careless way. It is used of male heroes on the battlefront or of Athena the war goddess when she goes on a rampage, acting in the ruthless manner of a berserk warrior. It expresses extreme force, the force a warrior expends in hurling a weapon or in raising himself from the ground when he has been felled by the enemy. Penelope needs a strong hand in this episode, call it "thick" if we must or, as some translators prefer, "stout," not because the key is heavy, as some have speculated, but because Destiny itself weighs so heavily on her soul. To open this door calls for every ounce of her stamina, all her cognitive skills, every atom of her will, and her deepest trust in the unknown. Once the bow is taken from the room, the die is cast. Penelope will be married the next day, whether re-married to her lawful husband or lawfully bound in a new marriage to one of his odious competitors.
As Penelope opens the door, the hinges groan like a bull in the meadow. This sound is primeval, an animal sound below the threshold of language, the emotion itself. It expresses Penelope's whole being at this awful moment, but it is also Odysseus's groan, the sound of an animal about to be let loose to go on its rampage, yet another token of the immensity of the man's nostos. Penelope, taking the bow down from its peg, places it across her knees and weeps copiously. Here past and future are fused into a single image, which captures the whole story that has been Penelope's in the twenty years of her husband's absence. With the bow on her knees, she wavers for a moment, caught between hope and despair, fear and trust. She is now either forcing the nostos of her husband to its proper conclusion or, to frame her action in terms of magic, aborting it. Nostalgia could not be more deeply troubled.
The archery contest proceeds as the nostos poem requires. Odysseus alone can string the bow and accurately fire the arrow through all twelve axes. He has now proven himself either Penelope's true husband or, if not her husband, then certainly the man who has won the contest, and therefore the right to claim her as his bride. Even so, the nostos is not complete. Penelope, understandably amazed at what her own mind has wrought, is necessarily cautious. She needs some more definite sign, as if any sign could be more definitive than this extraordinary victory in the archery contest and the massacre of everyone of her unwanted suitors. When her son chides her for not throwing herself into her husband's arms, she assures him that if he is truly Odysseus they have their private "signs," and Odysseus smiles! The master of signs—here is an unexpected pleasure, to have his wife put his semiotic skills to the test, as he had put hers to the test the night before.
When Odysseus has been bathed and clothed, with Athena stepping in as his hairdresser to give him a full head of hair, as luxuriant as when once before he was Penelope's handsome young bridegroom, he sits across from Penelope, ready now for the denouement, but she still acts as if he were a cunning impersonation, perhaps sent by some god, it being one of their pleasures to sport with their darlings in this way. Persisting in her obstinacy, she orders the maid to make up a bed for this man "outside the well-built room, which he made himself," the poet's manipulation of the grammar allowing for a nice ambiguity as to whether the "he" who made the room is also the "he" who sits across from her.
What a coup. This must be the mother of all denouements. The audacity! That Penelope, the soul of rectitude, would dare to trick the master trickster himself, and with the trick most likely to break a returning soldier's heart. From the beginning of the poem, wedding has been a persistent theme. When Penelope appears before her suitors in book 18, intending to scold Telemachus but finding herself unexpectedly in a bridal shower, with gifts coming in from all directions, it is one stage in the courtship ritual, the first step in the traditional bride contest but modified, of course, by the circumstances, Penelope being already a married woman. The archery contest is the final and decisive moment in the bride contest, again modified by the circumstances, since in the absence of her male parent the bride has organized the contest herself, and with herself as the bride. Odysseus has won the contest, eliminated his competitors, and now, dressed as the bridegroom, is ready to claim his bride. Downstairs, at his command, Telemachus has begun the wedding feast and the singer has struck up the wedding song. All that awaits is the bridal couch. But there is to be no bridal couch, Penelope says. This is coitus interruptus on an epic scale. Who would have guessed that the man's identity was so fragile? One small tug on the string and the whole house tumbles down.
Earlier Penelope had assured her son that if the man really is Odysseus, she and her husband had "our signs," known only to themselves (23.108-10). But when Odysseus in his anger describes what he calls the "sign" (serna), it seems not to be "ours" but only his. The poet gives him twenty verses in which to describe his sign, which is his bed—no doubt the matrimonial bed, as the double bed is called in Europe—to which, once it was built, he would introduce his newlywed bride. This is the longest passage given to any article of furniture in the poem. Odysseus describes first how he used the bole of an olive tree to be the central pillar of his bedroom and at the same time the one fixed bedpost, then how he built a room around this tree, then sheared off the top branches of the tree, then constructed his bed extending out from that bedpost, then inlaid the wooden bedframe with gold, silver, and ivory and, finally, stretched across the frame leather thongs, dyed with crimson. "This, I say, is the sign," Odysseus concludes, "and I know not if that bed of mine is still in place or if someone has sawed it from the olive trunk and moved it elsewhere."
The passion of his outburst is extreme. Little as we might have expected it earlier in the poem, this bed is the one fixed point in a swirling vortex of time and space, but now Penelope with the insouciance of a good housekeeper has swept it into the dustbin of history. Of course Penelope apologizes for the trick, and they both weep for joy at their reunion but also with a flood of tears for Ie temps perdu.
And so it is that the hero's quest finds its telos in the hero's own bed. Who would think that the memory of a man's bed could provoke such anxiety? But in this poem the bed is set at the intersection of so many vectors—space and time, solitude and society, war and peace, the foreign and the domestic, man and woman, memory, the imagination, the intellect, the emotions—that when it arises before us like a hologram it seems as logical as it is necessary.
If we could read Penelope's thoughts as she listens to her husband describe their sign, which he calls his sign, we might find her thinking much as Mrs. Ramsay did in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: listening to the men's conversation at the dinner table, she "let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly." Those girders spanning the swaying fabric, transposed into the Odyssey, are the bed itself and the leather network crisscrossing the frame. These are his sign, and in them is the proof of his mind. In the invocation, the poet calls on his Muse to tell the tale of that man who wandered far and wide, saw many human cities, and came to know "mind." The word used for "mind" is noos (to become in later Attic Greek nous). Homeric vocabulary has several words for the various cognitive functions but noos is probably the most frequently used, with some two hundred occurrences in the Odyssey, if we include among the instances names like Antinous (AntiMind), the chief of Penelope's suitors; or Alkinous (Sharp Mind), the king of the Phaeacians; or Pontonous (Mind of the Sea), one of the princes in Phaeacia. To these we should add the adjectives noemon (mindful) and its antonym anoemon (mindless). The ship that takes Telemachus from Ithaca to Pylos was loaned to him by Noemon son of Phronius, Mindfulness son of Thought. Sailing in such a ship, with Athena in charge, the sharpest mind on Mt. Olympus, Telemachus surely is destined to become a second Odysseus, as mindful as his father. By contrast, Nestor informs Telemachus that Zeus devised a terrible nostos for the Achaeans because they were "neither mindful nor righteous."
The word is used in so many contexts that it comes close to what we mean by mind. In The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic, Douglas Frame has added considerably to our understanding of the word by pursuing one suggested etymology, that noos (mind) and nostos (a safe homecoming) are cognate, both derived from a root meaning "to return home" (which appears in the name Nestor). He argues that nostos is not simply homecoming, but means "to return from the dead." The Odyssey never makes explicit the connection between the two words, but their frequent use in the poem and the dependence of homecoming on intelligence makes their association almost inevitable. For any Greek hearing this poem, the one word would surely suggest the other. This hero's nostos depends on his noos, and his homecoming is certainly a return from the dead.
When Odysseus calls his bed his sign, it signifies for him his intelligence—his understanding of nature, his imagination, his skills as a builder and carpenter, and his piety (in anchoring the bed to Athena's sacred tree). He first selects the tree to be the pillar of the room, then builds a room around the tree, and finally constructs the bed within the room, as if building a tabernacle to house a sacred object. Odysseus's grandfather had first made him into an idea by naming him Odysseus. In his construction of his bed, Odysseus takes ownership of that idea. It is his first idea of himself, the signifier of his own self-consciousness. The romance of a man who wanders abroad but in the end, through the power of memory and intelligence, makes his way back home, to find his sign unmoved and unchanged, is elevated into the epic of the mind coming home to itself.
About the Author
Norman Austin was born to missionary parents in China and was educated at the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught classics at several U.S.universities, including some twenty years at the University of Arizona. He has written extensively on classical Greek literature, Homer being his special love. Currently he is Visiting Distinguished Professor at Florida Atlantic University.
Yale University
Editor: J. D. McClatchy
Associate Editor: Susan Bianconi
Copyright © 2010 by Norman Austin
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
