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Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations
Homer's the Odyssey
A collection of seven critical essays on Homer's epic poem, arranged chronologically in order of their original publication.
167 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,708 books2,094 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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March 19, 2024
The most fascinating essays in the book are “The Wanderings”, “Penelope as Moral Agent”, “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot”, and the one that will totally blow your mind: “In the Beginning Was Proteus” by Mark Buchan.
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0. Harold Bloom’s introduction, albeit short, strikes one particular note hard enough to make it reverberate throughout the remainder of the essays, and pinpoints a fundamental element of the Odyssey, possibly one of its strongest sides: Odysseus is free of ideology, contrary to – an example that Bloom gives – Aeneas in the Aeneid.
----------
1. The first essay is Charles Segal’s “Transition and Ritual in Odysseus’ Return,” delving deep into the symbolic and religious (ritualistic) worlds, focusing on the literary and folk motifs used in the poem to show changes of state: “In most societies, changes of state are marked by rituals that define change, visibly confront its reality, and orient the individual in the new world he or she has entered.” The essay names the three elements of a rite of passage: the rite of separation, rite of transition and rite of incorporation.
In the Odyssey in particular, Segal argues that those motifs that involve or accompany transition are sleep, the bath, purification and the threshold – all of which are “associated with the mystery of passage between worlds, and all belong to the realm of experience where known and unknown cross.”
----------
2. Then follows Margalit Finkelberg’s “Odysseus and the Genus ‘Hero’” which explores the different definitions of “hero”: where in the Iliad being a hero amounts to readiness to meet death on the battlefield (“the sense in which the words ‘heroism’ and ‘hero’ are used today ultimately descends from this concept”), in the Odyssey a hero is one who is prepared to go through life enduring toil and suffering. Finkelberg looks at other ancient Greek texts to make the argument that the latter definition is the widely accepted one in the Greek society of old, rather than Achilles’ one in the Iliad:
----------
3. In an essay titled “The Wanderings”, S. Douglas Olson poses fascinating questions about the implied meaning of Odysseus' relationship with his shipmates and the juxtaposition of that of the suitors in the second half of the poem. Olson almost implies that Odysseus could be outright lying, or at least heavily tilting his story to serve his own interests (no wonder why latter writers in the centuries to follow – including Plato and Dante – hold Odysseus not as a hero in their minds, but rather as a lowly deceiver), when he is telling his retrospective tale to “an audience (the Phaeacians) which holds his future in its hands”:
He therefore presents his other sailors as fools who, if only they had listened to his good advice, “and instead gave in to their own misguided appetites, bringing destruction upon themselves as a result,” would now still be alive. At the same time Odysseus aggressively defends himself: he shifts the blame and presents himself in good light. One very precise observation that Olson shares is that even though, in his tale, Odysseus saved himself and his comrades from Polyphemos, it was also his decisions which got them into trouble in the first place: “His story falls apart at once under hostile scrutiny, of course, for he and his men consistently played the part not of guests but of pirates or burglars.”
The author argues that the wanderings describe a series of political, rather than personal developments, also seen back in Ithaca, where in both cases only a few people actually continue to respect his rightful authority, which, the poem emphasises, is the only socially and individually beneficial behaviour: “The punishments dealt out to the Suitors and their families at the end of the poem thus pick up themes already established in the first half of the Wanderings and illustrate again and even more emphatically the danger of ignoring a legitimate leader’s authority, regardless of how safe or appealing revolt might seem to be.”
----------
4. In Lillian Eileen Doherty‘s essay “Internal Narrators, Female and Male”, the premise is that all female characters in the Odyssey are either allies or enemies to Odysseus. Which is a nonsensical proposition, because all characters in the poem – male or female – are either allies or enemies to Odysseus. But that’s what the progressive liberal feminists do: they dig until they find a word they can hang on to, and they twist and present reality in a way which would fall in line with their limited, bigoted, narrowminded and anti-human point of view (all males ever since Homer are inherent oppressors, all women are objectified victims). Very boring, feel free to skip.
----------
5. What a great and gripping intro Helene P. Foley’s “Penelope as Moral Agent” has: “In his Poetics, Aristotle defines tragic character in relation to tragic choice. Character, Aristotle argues, reveals a prohairesis or a process of undertaking moral commitment in which a person chooses to act or to abstain from action in circumstances where the choice is not obvious (Poetics 1450b8–10).” The whole essay is awesome in a true woman-valuing way, not the shallow feminist drivel that we see nowadays which often strives to make men of women, while hating men.
The essay tunnels deep into the character of Penelope, often misrepresented by literary critics or shown in an incomplete light, where Foley shows the incredible richness of said character, the thoroughly dramatic tragedy of the choice she has to make (one might even argue that she undertakes a higher – or at least a different, but equal – degree of suffering than Odysseus himself), her endurance and her troubled, strong and persevering psyche. She explores women’s sexuality, emotionality, the changing (and natural) way of a woman’s heart, while also commenting on the similarities between Odysseus’ journey and Penelope’s, and how they are the ideal couple who share homophrosynê (like-mindedness). A strong female character about 2,800 years before the modern feminist movements. Wow, who would’ve thought!
Joke aside, the essay is indeed beautiful. Foley thoroughly examines the whole suitors’ situation from all the various stakeholders’ points view, in order to show how truly dramatic – caged like a wild animal by the monstrous pressure of the unfavourable circumstances – Penelope’s character is, and how she acts as moral agent, contrary to what is widely believed that only male heroes have been such in literature. The Odyssey “gives its audience the opportunity to observe a mature female moral agent making a critical and autonomous ethical decision.”
----------
6. In Frederick Ahl and Hanna M. Roisman essay titled “Rival Homecomings”, I learned that “to work the loom of Penelope” used to be an expression in the Greek societies after Homer, which signified “an exercise in futility.”
A cornerstone in the essay is the argument that “the Odyssey is too familiar to scholars: we do not let ourselves get caught up in the intricacies of its possible (but unfulfilled) developments. It is precisely in the element of narrative suspense generated by the active search of Telemachus for Odysseus that the dramatic tension […] lies.” An examination then follows of an often-overlooked part of the poem: Telemachus’ visit to Menelaus and the intricacies and sheer suspense of their conversation: “Heroism in the Odyssey is to some degree determined by one’s ability to seize and exploit the narrative initiative. Helen attempts and fails. Menelaus seems to succeed, momentarily […] But he has not persuaded Homer’s muse to invert the Odyssey and make it the tale of Menelaus.”
A parallel of Menelaus’ suspicion and tests of his guests is made with Penelope in the later chapters: “She almost certainly figures out who [Odysseus] is well before she actually acknowledges him; the test of the bow she proposes (and he accepts) is not so much to see if he is Odysseus, but whether Odysseus is the man he was twenty years ago.”
A juxtaposition between Helen’s and Menelaus’ tales of Odysseus is made, in which the essay presents the phenomenal intricacies and masterful construction by Homer of the dialogue in that section – two vastly different tales where Menelaus “shuts down” Helen, not having forgotten the pain of her betrayal, but although he refutes her account of her longing to return to Greece, “he never outrightly calls her a liar.”
----------
07. In “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot” by Nancy Felson-Rubin comes another great essay on the character of Penelope, with a focus on the various inherent plots present from her perspective. The starting point is the following argument: “She is unremittingly vexed by the question, ‘Am I moving toward new union or toward reunion?’”
On a similar tone as in Foley’s essay above, Felson-Rubin suggests) that “it is not the betrayal itself, but ignorance about the future that is ruinous folly” – hence the big tragedy of Penelope’s situation. The essayist, however, shares a revealing observation. Through Penelope’s conscious omitting of the fact that Helen abandons Menelaos “out of sheer desire”, she argues that it shows that Penelope understands how dangerously close she herself came to marrying a suitor, “with her husband already nearby!”.
The author argues that the “deferral tactics of Penelope the weaver serve two functions”: they both prolong the courtship for his sake (i.e. for Odysseus and the reunion), but also for her sake (i.e. for her own pleasure). In a penultimate passage, that parallel is summarised. A strong parallel is made between how both Odysseus and Penelope share their stories:
----------
08. In the eight essay, “The Structures of the Odyssey” by Stephen V. Tracy the different structural elements are explored from a linguistic, poetic and symbolic perspectives. While the essay certainly has a lot of merit, I am not its ideal target audience and hence it didn’t hold that much of an interest to me. Death and rebirth is a recurrent allusion seen in the first essay.
Further down Tracy presents a similar argument as some of the other authors do in the book: that Penelope is the only true match for Odysseus’ wit and qualities.
My biggest takeaway from the essay is one that doesn’t necessarily revolve around the poem itself: “[…] Homer here portrays via a concrete example what, thanks to relatively recent psychological theory, we can characterize as the notion that if a person can talk about his past, he has come to understand it.”
The essay’s concluding sentence sums it up nicely: “After all, we have a sense at the end of having experienced not chaos, but rather a beautifully crafted, monumental work of art.”
----------
09. “Kalypso and the Function of Book Five” by Bruce Louden is another rich and intriguing undertaking. While the characters of Kalypso and Kirke are often taken as very much identical and of going hand in hand, the author presents a thorough and beautiful examination of why they are vastly different and why they serve different purposes in the overall plot and character progressions, and in the explored topics. The Kirke storyline unfolds in almost exactly reversed order than Kalypso’s.
Kalypso threatens not only to hide the hero, but to “conceal the plot as well,” the author states at one point: “Kalypso is therefore concealing Odysseus from the tradition itself […] to stay with Kalypso, therefore, would mean no epic is possible, that there would be no outside knowledge of any of the Aiaian sequence…” He says that while with her, “Odysseus is, in effect, between everything, between the states of mortal and immortal, between the heroic wanderings and the return to Ithaka.” Other than that, compelling arguments are made that Kalypso is a rapist, parallels with the sexually aggressive goddess Eos are made, and all sorts of other differences between Kalypso and Kirke are emphasised.
Another key argument that the author makes is that “the poem’s central tests [are] self-control as evident in the ability both to observe a divine interdiction and uphold the gods’ behests in the face of adversity.”
----------
10. “In the Beginning Was Proteus” by Mark Buchan is the unmistakable highlight. This essay is fantastic.
Some of the symbolism explored in the essay includes:
-> The meaning of the sequence 3-4-5: i.e. the passage from the three to four symbolically defines the difference between man and god.
-> The laws of xenia: both the suitors and the actions of the Cyclops are paralleled; both indulge in socially prohibited forms of eating.
-> The polytropic nature of both Proteus and Odysseus: “when attacked, he has the ability to alter his appearance in order to scare off his attacker” while Odysseus seems to be “the deceiver par excellence.”
-> Proteus’ counting in fives. Proteus’ infallibility, and the poetic and symbolic absolute masterpiece of the trick that is played on him.
-> The ideological problem of what must occur for a group to be constructed symbolically as a group, and what happens if the master of that group doubts his mastery.
-> Language construction dependent on signifier and signified: “How can we ever be sure that any signifier refers to any signified? For if we acknowledge (as we must) that the process of meaning is inexhaustible, that there will always be the possibility of the arrival of another signifier that will retroactively change all that went before, are we not confronted with an endless deferral of sense?”
-> The poem’s structure of a riddle, an enigma, a griphos: it opens the possibility of endless definitions and the allowing of the main hero to “experiment with different masks, alternative options for being in the world.”
The cornerstone of the essay is Lacanian philosophy:
Then:
And:
I.e. he is no longer perfect, timeless and self-sufficient. But the argument goes a step further:
And most importantly the inversed argument about the seals here:
Liberal dogmatists beware, this is for you.
----------
11. “The Stakes of the Plot” by Richard Heitman is not a bad essay, but I don’t have any highlights to point out.
----------
0. Harold Bloom’s introduction, albeit short, strikes one particular note hard enough to make it reverberate throughout the remainder of the essays, and pinpoints a fundamental element of the Odyssey, possibly one of its strongest sides: Odysseus is free of ideology, contrary to – an example that Bloom gives – Aeneas in the Aeneid.
----------
1. The first essay is Charles Segal’s “Transition and Ritual in Odysseus’ Return,” delving deep into the symbolic and religious (ritualistic) worlds, focusing on the literary and folk motifs used in the poem to show changes of state: “In most societies, changes of state are marked by rituals that define change, visibly confront its reality, and orient the individual in the new world he or she has entered.” The essay names the three elements of a rite of passage: the rite of separation, rite of transition and rite of incorporation.
In the Odyssey in particular, Segal argues that those motifs that involve or accompany transition are sleep, the bath, purification and the threshold – all of which are “associated with the mystery of passage between worlds, and all belong to the realm of experience where known and unknown cross.”
These are modes of thought in which recurrent cycles of loss and regeneration, alienation and rediscovery, and death and rebirth are celebrated as the fundamental facts of existence and form an organic link between human life and the natural world.
----------
2. Then follows Margalit Finkelberg’s “Odysseus and the Genus ‘Hero’” which explores the different definitions of “hero”: where in the Iliad being a hero amounts to readiness to meet death on the battlefield (“the sense in which the words ‘heroism’ and ‘hero’ are used today ultimately descends from this concept”), in the Odyssey a hero is one who is prepared to go through life enduring toil and suffering. Finkelberg looks at other ancient Greek texts to make the argument that the latter definition is the widely accepted one in the Greek society of old, rather than Achilles’ one in the Iliad:
The Heracles of Bacchylides comments on the sad life story of Meleager […]: ‘For mortals it would be best not to be born nor to look at the light of the sun. But those who grieve about this cannot act, and so one must talk about what can be done.’ True, life is full of toil and suffering, but man should be able not only to endure but also to transform this toil and suffering into a supreme achievement. ‘To make of this suffering a glorious life’—these words of the deified Heracles of Sophocles, addressed to his friend Philoctetes when the latter is sunk in the agony of despair, sum up everything the heroic life is about.
----------
3. In an essay titled “The Wanderings”, S. Douglas Olson poses fascinating questions about the implied meaning of Odysseus' relationship with his shipmates and the juxtaposition of that of the suitors in the second half of the poem. Olson almost implies that Odysseus could be outright lying, or at least heavily tilting his story to serve his own interests (no wonder why latter writers in the centuries to follow – including Plato and Dante – hold Odysseus not as a hero in their minds, but rather as a lowly deceiver), when he is telling his retrospective tale to “an audience (the Phaeacians) which holds his future in its hands”:
He must offer them some explanation of how he spent the preceding nine years and of why he has arrived in their country friendless, shipless and utterly impoverished. In all other ways he is free to shape his tale as he will, however, and his apology therefore cannot be read as a simple documentary source for his past, and any ‘development’ which took place in him over the course of it would have to be understood as in the first instance a product of his own intentions as a narrator.
He therefore presents his other sailors as fools who, if only they had listened to his good advice, “and instead gave in to their own misguided appetites, bringing destruction upon themselves as a result,” would now still be alive. At the same time Odysseus aggressively defends himself: he shifts the blame and presents himself in good light. One very precise observation that Olson shares is that even though, in his tale, Odysseus saved himself and his comrades from Polyphemos, it was also his decisions which got them into trouble in the first place: “His story falls apart at once under hostile scrutiny, of course, for he and his men consistently played the part not of guests but of pirates or burglars.”
The author argues that the wanderings describe a series of political, rather than personal developments, also seen back in Ithaca, where in both cases only a few people actually continue to respect his rightful authority, which, the poem emphasises, is the only socially and individually beneficial behaviour: “The punishments dealt out to the Suitors and their families at the end of the poem thus pick up themes already established in the first half of the Wanderings and illustrate again and even more emphatically the danger of ignoring a legitimate leader’s authority, regardless of how safe or appealing revolt might seem to be.”
----------
4. In Lillian Eileen Doherty‘s essay “Internal Narrators, Female and Male”, the premise is that all female characters in the Odyssey are either allies or enemies to Odysseus. Which is a nonsensical proposition, because all characters in the poem – male or female – are either allies or enemies to Odysseus. But that’s what the progressive liberal feminists do: they dig until they find a word they can hang on to, and they twist and present reality in a way which would fall in line with their limited, bigoted, narrowminded and anti-human point of view (all males ever since Homer are inherent oppressors, all women are objectified victims). Very boring, feel free to skip.
----------
5. What a great and gripping intro Helene P. Foley’s “Penelope as Moral Agent” has: “In his Poetics, Aristotle defines tragic character in relation to tragic choice. Character, Aristotle argues, reveals a prohairesis or a process of undertaking moral commitment in which a person chooses to act or to abstain from action in circumstances where the choice is not obvious (Poetics 1450b8–10).” The whole essay is awesome in a true woman-valuing way, not the shallow feminist drivel that we see nowadays which often strives to make men of women, while hating men.
The essay tunnels deep into the character of Penelope, often misrepresented by literary critics or shown in an incomplete light, where Foley shows the incredible richness of said character, the thoroughly dramatic tragedy of the choice she has to make (one might even argue that she undertakes a higher – or at least a different, but equal – degree of suffering than Odysseus himself), her endurance and her troubled, strong and persevering psyche. She explores women’s sexuality, emotionality, the changing (and natural) way of a woman’s heart, while also commenting on the similarities between Odysseus’ journey and Penelope’s, and how they are the ideal couple who share homophrosynê (like-mindedness). A strong female character about 2,800 years before the modern feminist movements. Wow, who would’ve thought!
Joke aside, the essay is indeed beautiful. Foley thoroughly examines the whole suitors’ situation from all the various stakeholders’ points view, in order to show how truly dramatic – caged like a wild animal by the monstrous pressure of the unfavourable circumstances – Penelope’s character is, and how she acts as moral agent, contrary to what is widely believed that only male heroes have been such in literature. The Odyssey “gives its audience the opportunity to observe a mature female moral agent making a critical and autonomous ethical decision.”
----------
6. In Frederick Ahl and Hanna M. Roisman essay titled “Rival Homecomings”, I learned that “to work the loom of Penelope” used to be an expression in the Greek societies after Homer, which signified “an exercise in futility.”
A cornerstone in the essay is the argument that “the Odyssey is too familiar to scholars: we do not let ourselves get caught up in the intricacies of its possible (but unfulfilled) developments. It is precisely in the element of narrative suspense generated by the active search of Telemachus for Odysseus that the dramatic tension […] lies.” An examination then follows of an often-overlooked part of the poem: Telemachus’ visit to Menelaus and the intricacies and sheer suspense of their conversation: “Heroism in the Odyssey is to some degree determined by one’s ability to seize and exploit the narrative initiative. Helen attempts and fails. Menelaus seems to succeed, momentarily […] But he has not persuaded Homer’s muse to invert the Odyssey and make it the tale of Menelaus.”
A parallel of Menelaus’ suspicion and tests of his guests is made with Penelope in the later chapters: “She almost certainly figures out who [Odysseus] is well before she actually acknowledges him; the test of the bow she proposes (and he accepts) is not so much to see if he is Odysseus, but whether Odysseus is the man he was twenty years ago.”
A juxtaposition between Helen’s and Menelaus’ tales of Odysseus is made, in which the essay presents the phenomenal intricacies and masterful construction by Homer of the dialogue in that section – two vastly different tales where Menelaus “shuts down” Helen, not having forgotten the pain of her betrayal, but although he refutes her account of her longing to return to Greece, “he never outrightly calls her a liar.”
----------
07. In “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot” by Nancy Felson-Rubin comes another great essay on the character of Penelope, with a focus on the various inherent plots present from her perspective. The starting point is the following argument: “She is unremittingly vexed by the question, ‘Am I moving toward new union or toward reunion?’”
On a similar tone as in Foley’s essay above, Felson-Rubin suggests) that “it is not the betrayal itself, but ignorance about the future that is ruinous folly” – hence the big tragedy of Penelope’s situation. The essayist, however, shares a revealing observation. Through Penelope’s conscious omitting of the fact that Helen abandons Menelaos “out of sheer desire”, she argues that it shows that Penelope understands how dangerously close she herself came to marrying a suitor, “with her husband already nearby!”.
The author argues that the “deferral tactics of Penelope the weaver serve two functions”: they both prolong the courtship for his sake (i.e. for Odysseus and the reunion), but also for her sake (i.e. for her own pleasure). In a penultimate passage, that parallel is summarised. A strong parallel is made between how both Odysseus and Penelope share their stories:
Consider, too, the sustained parallelism between her and Odysseus: just as he enjoys his adventures even though they delay his homecoming, so she “loves to “watch” (iainomai eisoroôsa) her pet geese […] Neither of these two plots moves rapidly toward closure; part of our fascination with the Odyssey is seeing them leisurely unfold.
----------
08. In the eight essay, “The Structures of the Odyssey” by Stephen V. Tracy the different structural elements are explored from a linguistic, poetic and symbolic perspectives. While the essay certainly has a lot of merit, I am not its ideal target audience and hence it didn’t hold that much of an interest to me. Death and rebirth is a recurrent allusion seen in the first essay.
Further down Tracy presents a similar argument as some of the other authors do in the book: that Penelope is the only true match for Odysseus’ wit and qualities.
My biggest takeaway from the essay is one that doesn’t necessarily revolve around the poem itself: “[…] Homer here portrays via a concrete example what, thanks to relatively recent psychological theory, we can characterize as the notion that if a person can talk about his past, he has come to understand it.”
The essay’s concluding sentence sums it up nicely: “After all, we have a sense at the end of having experienced not chaos, but rather a beautifully crafted, monumental work of art.”
----------
09. “Kalypso and the Function of Book Five” by Bruce Louden is another rich and intriguing undertaking. While the characters of Kalypso and Kirke are often taken as very much identical and of going hand in hand, the author presents a thorough and beautiful examination of why they are vastly different and why they serve different purposes in the overall plot and character progressions, and in the explored topics. The Kirke storyline unfolds in almost exactly reversed order than Kalypso’s.
Kalypso threatens not only to hide the hero, but to “conceal the plot as well,” the author states at one point: “Kalypso is therefore concealing Odysseus from the tradition itself […] to stay with Kalypso, therefore, would mean no epic is possible, that there would be no outside knowledge of any of the Aiaian sequence…” He says that while with her, “Odysseus is, in effect, between everything, between the states of mortal and immortal, between the heroic wanderings and the return to Ithaka.” Other than that, compelling arguments are made that Kalypso is a rapist, parallels with the sexually aggressive goddess Eos are made, and all sorts of other differences between Kalypso and Kirke are emphasised.
Another key argument that the author makes is that “the poem’s central tests [are] self-control as evident in the ability both to observe a divine interdiction and uphold the gods’ behests in the face of adversity.”
----------
10. “In the Beginning Was Proteus” by Mark Buchan is the unmistakable highlight. This essay is fantastic.
Some of the symbolism explored in the essay includes:
-> The meaning of the sequence 3-4-5: i.e. the passage from the three to four symbolically defines the difference between man and god.
-> The laws of xenia: both the suitors and the actions of the Cyclops are paralleled; both indulge in socially prohibited forms of eating.
-> The polytropic nature of both Proteus and Odysseus: “when attacked, he has the ability to alter his appearance in order to scare off his attacker” while Odysseus seems to be “the deceiver par excellence.”
-> Proteus’ counting in fives. Proteus’ infallibility, and the poetic and symbolic absolute masterpiece of the trick that is played on him.
-> The ideological problem of what must occur for a group to be constructed symbolically as a group, and what happens if the master of that group doubts his mastery.
-> Language construction dependent on signifier and signified: “How can we ever be sure that any signifier refers to any signified? For if we acknowledge (as we must) that the process of meaning is inexhaustible, that there will always be the possibility of the arrival of another signifier that will retroactively change all that went before, are we not confronted with an endless deferral of sense?”
-> The poem’s structure of a riddle, an enigma, a griphos: it opens the possibility of endless definitions and the allowing of the main hero to “experiment with different masks, alternative options for being in the world.”
The cornerstone of the essay is Lacanian philosophy:
Proteus does not recognize the internal limit of the symbolic, which is the only way of ensuring the possibility of meaning [..] For insofar as he is an infallible god, he is not a creature subject to language and the necessary possibility of deception that language brings with it […] The Proteus tale suggests that some limit is necessary for language to make any sense at all and that this limit brings with it a necessary loss, a prohibition of whatever is beyond the limit.
Then:
Compare Lacan’s comment on the way the sense of a sentence is retroactively constructed […] Before the trick, this retroactive construction of a beginning of a sentence never occurred within Proteus’ universe. Proteus indulged in an impossible counting, a counting without a beginning or end; and because the symbolic can only create meaning by imposing limits and boundaries on reality—indeed, what we call “reality” is itself a product of these socially constructed, defined spaces—Proteus had no symbolic existence at all.
And:
The act of speech itself is enough to guarantee that he can no longer be infallible. To enter language is to admit the possibility that one can be in error or deceived […] the loss of the seal now makes sense to Proteus because of the system of counting up to five that determines it as lost. This loss opens up a space for Proteus to come to be as a desiring subject: he desires because there is now a lack within his universe.
I.e. he is no longer perfect, timeless and self-sufficient. But the argument goes a step further:
I suggest that Odysseus, in his encounter with the Phaeacians and Cyclopes, performed a similar role to the lost seal. He forces the Phaeacians and Cyclopes to come to terms with the possibility of loss […] He is not simply a human survivor; he is someone who brings the concept of loss to others.
And most importantly the inversed argument about the seals here:
The way that groups are formed through their common allegiance to a master […] whose power can only function while it is unchallenged, because the mastery itself is inherently senseless. […] Before the trick, Proteus never questioned his identity as master of his seals. If we are told that he is an unerring god, nevertheless his failure to question his own role suggests that he may only be a human fool who thinks he is a god. […] But the emptying out of the identity of Proteus also leaves a question mark over the identity of the seals. […] If Proteus is a human who unsuccessfully fantasizes that he is a god, perhaps the seals are humans who prefer to act as a herd of seal […] And it leaves them two choices: they can either confront the contingency of their identity, or try to return to the safety of a fixed identity.
Liberal dogmatists beware, this is for you.
----------
11. “The Stakes of the Plot” by Richard Heitman is not a bad essay, but I don’t have any highlights to point out.
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