Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others. She writes about a scene in The Odyssey where Ulysses sits incognito in the court of the Phaeacians, listening to a blind man sing about the Trojan War. Having never heard his own life articulated by another person, Ulysses starts to weep. Hannah Arendt called this moment, “poetically speaking,” the beginning of history: Ulysses “has never wept before, and certainly not when what he is now hearing actually happened. Only when he hears the story does he become fully aware of his significance.” Cavarero writes, “The story told by an ‘other’ finally revealed his own identity. And he, dressed in his magnificent purple tunic, breaks down and cries.”