An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

(Book 24):

These elaborate circlings in space and time are mirrored in a certain technique found in many works of Greek literature, called ring composition.

ring composition undoubtedly arose much earlier than Herodotus and his Histories, clearly before writing was even invented. The most famous example of the technique is, in fact, to be found in the Odyssey:

ring composition, which might at first glance appear to be a digression, reveals itself as an efficient means for a story to embrace the past and the present and sometimes even the future—

So used was I to my father’s habit of silence that it didn’t occur to me until fairly recently to ask why, for him, the obvious way to deal with people who had disappointed his expectations was to act as if they no longer existed.

I opened one of the volumes in the four-volume set at random and read a speech that turned out to be from Sophocles’ Antigone, a play about a conflict between a headstrong young woman and her uncle, the king, who has issued a harsh new edict that she intends to defy.

here at last was the bone beneath the flesh: a play in which x was x,

my instinct about the “hardness” of Classics itself had been right. The discipline traces its roots back to the late eighteenth century, when a German scholar named Friedrich August Wolf decided that the interpretation of literary texts—an undertaking that many people, among them my father, casually think of as subjective, impressionistic, a matter of opinion—should, in fact, be treated as a rigorous branch of science.

Locke, like many parents today, derisively wondered why a working person would need to know Latin. Wolf’s answer was, Human nature.

Wolf argued, meaningful study of classical civilization could arise only from mastery of many essential and interlinked disciplines: immersion not only in Ancient Greek and Latin (and, often, in Hebrew and Sanskrit), in their vocabularies and grammars and syntaxes and prosody, but in the history, religion, philosophy, and art of the cultures that spoke and wrote those languages. To this immersion, he went on, there had to be added the mastery of specialized skills, such as those needed to decipher ancient papyri, manuscripts, and inscriptions, such mastery being as necessary, ultimately, to the study of ancient literature as the mastery of plane and solid geometry, of arithmetic and algebra, and, indeed, of calculus is to proper study of the field we call mathematics.

And so classical philology was born. When I learned about this in graduate school, I shared it with my father. He winced and shook his head and said, Only science is science.

Book 2 is the part of the epic in which the Fall of Troy is recounted in harrowing detail: the awful climax to which the Iliad and Odyssey allude but never fully describe, the one peering into the future toward the devastating event, the other gazing backward at it. It is Virgil, the Roman, who gives us the whole story at last: the Greeks hidden within the gigantic Trojan Horse, which the Trojans have taken inside their city’s walls; then the ambush in the dark, the smoke from the burning city, the panic and the flames; the image of the headless trunk of the murdered Trojan king, Priam, a pitiable old man, the quintessential epic father, who is slain before the altar at which he desperately prays for the safety of his city by Neoptolemus, the son of the now-dead Achilles—a youth who, by killing the elderly king, seeks to outdo his own father in cruel bravery.

aporia, “helplessness.” (The word literally means “without a path”; “a feeling of being stranded” would be one way of translating it.)

Daddy Loopy!

That’s okay, you’ll read it for me, I heard him say, this sweet thing he said one autumn evening half a lifetime ago, and I thought, not for the first time, Who is this man?

Unlike the tightly focused proem of the Iliad, the proem of the Odyssey rambles, is filled with ambiguity.

we know that “the man” is Odysseus; so why doesn’t Homer just say so?

What is the difference between who we are and what others know about us? This tension between anonymity and identity will be a major element of the Odyssey’s plot. For its hero’s life will depend on his ability to conceal his identity from enemies—and to reveal it, when the proper time comes, to friends, to those by whom he wants to be recognized: first his son, then his wife, and finally his father.

The poet of the Odyssey, by contrast, doesn’t seem to care particularly about where his epic ought to begin. He asks the Muse to begin telling her story at “some point or another,” hamothen—anywhere in Odysseus’ journey that suits her. But hamothen also has a temporal overtone: “from some point in time or another,” “at any random moment in the narrative.” In the Odyssey’s opening lines, space and time are themselves suggestively vague, indistinct from each other. This strangely tentative careering between concrete specifics and unhelpful generalities gives you a familiar feeling: the feeling of what it’s like to be lost.

Sometimes it’s as if you’re on familiar territory; sometimes you feel at sea, adrift in a featureless liquid void with no landmarks in sight. In this way, the opening of this poem about being lost and finding a way home precisely replicates the surf-like oscillations between drifting and purposefulness that characterize its hero’s journey.

I’ve always found this etymology of the word “proem” interesting because it takes you down a road from introductions to songs to the elemental idea of movement itself: the idea of, quite simply, “going.” For the Greeks, poetry was motion. In every sense, it is supposed to move you.

Such is the Odyssey, which my father decided he wanted to study with me a few years ago; such is Odysseus, the hero in whose footsteps we once traveled.

the almost unbearable image of a teacher filled with knowledge that no one wanted, that it never occurred to me to ask why my father would have given up studying a subject at which he had excelled, had been a star; just as it hadn’t occurred to me to ask why such a star had ended up in the second-best school.

Odysseus’ son, Telemachus.

Odysseus’ careworn father, Laertes,

This is how the Odyssey begins: the hero himself nowhere in sight, the crises precipitated by his absence taking center stage.

the fact is that this man appears at first only as a memory, a ghost about whom we hear stories, reminiscences, rumors.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by the Netherlandish master Pieter Brueghel,

In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.

The character who stands front and center as the Odyssey begins, and who remains the center of our attention during its first four books, is the person who slowly gathers all the rumors, gossip, and stories: Odysseus’ son.

Telem...

The problem is not simply that no one knows for sure just where his noble father is; the greater dilemma is that nobody knows if he’s even alive.

This uncertainty triggers further questions: whether Penelope is a wife or a widow, still married or now marriageable; whether the hero’s son can, if necessary, be the king and man his father had been. At present, the answer to this last question is clearly no.

the weaving and unweaving, knotting and then loosening, speeding and then delaying, beautifully capture the torpor, the lack of forward motion, that characterizes life on Ithaca during Odysseus’ long absence.

This seesawing, the surf-like back-and-forth, is, too, the rhythm of the Odyssey itself: the forward push of the plot, the backward pull of the flashbacks, of the backstories and digressions without which the main narrative would seem thin, insubstantial.

So the great epic of travel, of voyages, of journeying, begins with its char...

Telemachus. (The youth’s name means “the far-off warrior”: the son who defines himself by the absence of his father has a name that recalls both the absence and the reason for it.)

during the first four books of the epic, Odysseus’ son will have his own adventures at last. These travels will allow him to share in the experiences that, according to the proem, Odysseus has had: “to see the cities and know the minds of men.” In this way, the poem ingeniously reassures Telemachus that he is, indeed, his father’s son.

the trajectory of these four books suggests, they tell the story of how an absent father’s child starts to learn about his parent, and about the world. It is the story of a son’s education.

If it isn’t hard, it’s not worth doing. I could already hear the boastful complaint that he’d be making the following week

pitons

the Homeric Question, a centuries-old debate about how Homer’s epics had come into being—

whether they had started as written texts or as oral compositions.

Wolf’s hypothesis ultimately paved the way for what is now known as the oral theory of Homeric composition, to which most classicists today adhere. According to this theory, there was no single Homer:

One advantage of the oral theory was that it explained a number of inconsistencies and oddities in the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey.

story of Odysseus himself and his homecoming, which begins in Book 5, was proof that Books 1 through 4 had once been a separate lay, eventually tacked onto the larger story by a later editor,

By contrast, those who wanted to see the poems as the product of one creative genius called attention to what they argued was an obvious series of continuities between the Telemachy and the rest of the poem.

the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—

Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

disquisition