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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

it’s important to have a sense of how these poems probably came together as you go through the Odyssey, since you should be looking out for the kinds of inconsistencies and unities that these scholars have been arguing about.

the Circe story for them: the arrival on the island, the transformation of the men into swine, how a helpful god gives Odysseus a rare herb that foils the witch’s magic. (The episode ends with Odysseus and Circe sleeping together, but I left that part out.)

special features of Homer’s poetry, starting with the long, six-beat, oom-pah-pah meter, called dactylic hexameter, to which every one of the Odyssey’s twelve thousand one hundred and ten lines dances:

stock epithets, so useful for quick identification

look out for “epic similes”:

ring composition, that remarkable narrative technique that weaves the present and the past together, that allows the account of a specific episode in a character’s life to expand to encompass his entire life.

OCTs

Oxford Classical Texts,

a nimbus of acute and grave and circumflex accents hovering over each word like clouds of angry gnats.

apparatus criticus,

buckram

the Telemachus of the first few books of the Odyssey can remind you of a college freshman.

Antinoüs, the leader of the Suitors and

the most hateful of them,

(His name means “an...

he’s marked not only as the epic’s archvillain but as the enemy spec...

Athena returns toward the end of Book 2 to give the youth some encouragement. She appears this time in the guise of yet another of his father’s old friends, a man called Mentor.

(It is, in fact, this scene in the Odyssey that launched the word “mentor” on its long career as a synonym for “an experienced and trusted adviser.”)

Why does the poet devote so much space to scenes in which Telemachus fails to speak well, confuses private and public, loses control of himself and the situation? There are several possible reasons.

By emphasizing the inadequacies of the son, the poet makes us, too, long for the appearance of the father, whose authority and competence are beyond dispute.

“Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.”

Impatiently, he dismissed any notion that Telemachus was in fact maturing, was really learning something, during the course of the first books of the Odyssey.

Telemachus is always getting help. Athena always swoops down to save him.

He just has it so easy.

I think my father’s reverence for struggle, for difficulty, also owes much to the circumstances in which he grew up. His earliest childhood coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression.

he hated the Yankees because he considered them a rich man’s team. They buy their success, he would say dismissively.

Telemachus has it too easy, he was saying that night at Flatiron. All he has to do is follow Athena’s orders. I said, Well, why can’t you just think of her as a teacher? She’s instructing him.

Because a good teacher doesn’t just tell you what to do, or what to think. A good teacher shows you how, explains things to you. A teacher doesn’t just boss you around, he should help you come to your own conclusions.

the point of many stories told by old men to their sons) men were braver and heroes were greater. Small wonder that the Greeks, hearing such tales so often, were plagued by the anxiety that few sons are the equal of their fathers.

Telemachus learns how Agamemnon, upon his return home, was murdered by his unfaithful wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, a crime that would eventually be avenged by Agamemnon’s dutiful son, Orestes.

nostos narratives. Nostos is the Greek word for “homecoming”; the plural form of this word, nostoi, was, in fact, the title of a lost epic devoted to the homecomings of the Greek kings and chieftains who fought in the Trojan War.

Odyssey itself is a nostos narrative,

algos, to give us an elegantly simple way to talk about the bittersweet feeling we sometimes have for a special kind of troubling longing.

Literally this word means “the pain associated with longing for home,” but as we know, “home,” particularly as we get older, can be a

time as well as a place. The word is...

nostos

perfidy

Deathbed and Beyond,

I was with her the time she went to the local bakery and distractedly ordered a dozen Lafayettes, and the baker gazed at her blankly until he suddenly brightened and said, You mean “napoleons”?!

Brendan said smoothly, what struck me in these first few books is that Telemachus keeps wobbling in his attitude about his father.

I’m starting to wonder if he actually prefers Mentes or Mentor or whoever to Odysseus. Maybe, for him, the father figure is actually preferable to the real thing. I didn’t say anything. I’d never thought of this.

For a boy who never even met his father, the question is, Which is the larger crisis: living out your life without a father, or actually meeting him for the first time twenty years later and having to get to know him?

looked at him and said, Now that is scathingly brilliant.

The description of the court of Menelaus and Helen also provides a compelling contrast with Odysseus’, she said.

Homer’s skillful manipulation of the parallel homecomings reminds us of a familiar psychological truth: that a strong sense of what our own family is like, what its weaknesses and strengths are, the relative degrees of its conventionality and eccentricity, its normalcy or pathology, is often impossible to establish until we are old enough to compare it intelligently with the families of others; something we start doing only when we begin to perceive, as happens at the end of childhood, that our family is not, in fact, the entire world.

there were certain occasions to which he tried never to arrive late, occasions on which we were going to visit one of “his” people.

Uncle Howard

he would make his way around his own home tentatively, as if it were a house he was only visiting and the host had gone upstairs to take a nap.

So Howard was quiet and seemed to enjoy quiet times. How different he was from raucous Aunt Claire! As different as my father was from my mother.