Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  When Odysseus crawls up on the Phaeacian beach, he has two urgent needs: first, his immediate safety—that he not starve or be killed by the natives as a dangerous intruder—and second, help to get home. With a hand from the goddess Athena (6:15ff, Fagles) he comes face-to-face with the king’s beautiful young daughter. Odysseus charms Nausicaa, manipulates her to get past the rough sailors who would willingly snuff his life, and into the palace of her parents. Once safely inside and courteously granted asylum by the king and queen of the Land of the Phaeacians, Odysseus keeps his eyes and ears open. What sort of people are these?

  High rooms he saw …

  with lusters of the sun and moon …

  The doors were golden …

  (7.89ff, Fitzgerald)

  The Phaeacians are rich and secure. Odysseus identifies himself as a “man of pain” without saying anything specific about his identity. His host shows him every Mediterranean courtesy and doesn’t press on the details. Always alert, Odysseus learns a great deal more about the Phaeacians.

  They are—in the manner of today’s luxury health club habitués—avid athletes, but not in the combat sports. Odysseus finds them not serious. When he is pushed to compete with the sleek young runners and throwers, he says:

  I have more on my mind than track and field …

  hard days, and many, have I seen, and suffered.

  I sit here at your field meet, yes; but only

  as one who begs your king to send him home.

  (8:162ff, Fitzgerald)

  Even more, Odysseus finds them self-indulgent, avid in the pursuit of luxury and entertainment. The king says:

  … we set great store by feasting,

  harpers, and the grace of dancing choirs,

  changes of dress, warm baths, and downy beds.

  (8:261ff, Fitzgerald)

  They are also connoisseurs of the arts: the court boasts the services of the great minstrel Demodocus. The Phaeacians are, in a word, civilians.

  The gulf between Odysseus and his civilian hosts is visible in their drastically different responses to the songs of Demodocus. This bard is the genuine article—the Muse whispers the truth of the war at Troy in his ear when he composes his songs. His songs, narrative poems like the Iliad, reduce Odysseus to tears, which he tries to hide. Afterward he proclaims that Demodocus sings with the truth of someone who was there himself. The Phaeacian civilians love these epic poems of war (8:98)—along with the harper’s dance music (8:265ff) and his bedroom farces (8:280ff).3 It’s all the same to them. It’s all entertainment. But for Odysseus, the truth-filled stories of the Trojan War open the gates of grief.

  Demodocus sings of the clash between Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, who embodies biē— violent force—and Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, who embodies mētis— cunning tricks and strategy.4 The bard sings about how their insecure and incompetent commander, Agamemnon, delights in this clash. This provokes Odysseus’ reaction:

  [Odysseus] with massive hand drew his rich mantle down

  over his brow, cloaking his face with it,

  to make the Phaiacians miss the secret tears …

  (8:90ff, Fitzgerald)

  Odysseus makes every effort to hide his anguish from the complacent audience. But every time the poet resumes, emotion overcomes Odysseus. Only the king at his elbow is aware. A tactful host, the king rescues Odysseus by interrupting the poet to suggest an athletic exhibition.

  After athletics, the feasting and entertainment resume with dancing and comic poetry. Odysseus publicly praises the poet, sends him a splashy tip, and asks for a “request number.” He tells Demodocus:

  Now … sing that wooden horse

  Epeios built, inspired by Athena—

  the ambuscade Odysseus filled with fighters

  and sent to take the inner town of Troy.

  (8:526ff, Fitzgerald)

  Thus far, Odysseus has not told his hosts who he is, but he knows he must do it soon. Perhaps he wants the poet to sing this episode in which Odysseus himself is the star. This would set the stage for him to reveal himself in the most impressive light. Or perhaps Odysseus thinks the poet is a phony and wants to see if he really knows what he’s talking about. But it is Odysseus himself who is tested—and ambushed by his own emotional reaction.5 A surprising and powerful simile is the tip-off that he is not the master of this situation:

  … the famous harper sang

  but the great Odysseus melted into tears,

  running down from his eyes to wet his cheeks …

  as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband,

  a man who fell in battle …

  trying to beat the day of doom from home and children.

  Seeing the man go down, dying, gasping for breath,

  she clings for dear life …

  and the most heartbreaking torment wastes her cheeks.

  (8:585ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

  Again the king interrupts the performance to spare his guest’s feelings.

  Homer makes the same point twice, as if to drive it home. These stories rip Odysseus’ heart out, while for the Phaeacians, they are never more than entertainment. Homer doesn’t show the king and his people as monsters; they are just limited, unable to offer Odysseus what he needs in his soul. They give what he needs physically—plenty of food for his belly, clothing, and a ship to take him home. But at this moment the most the king can offer him is courteous sympathy:

  … let Demodokos touch his harp no more.

  His theme has not been pleasing to all here.

  During the feast, since our fine poet sang,

  our guest has never left off weeping. Grief

  seems fixed upon his heart. Break off the song!

  (8:576ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

  King Alcinous now presses Odysseus to reveal his identity—which surely Odysseus saw coming, and for which he was perhaps preparing himself. Quite reasonably, his host asks him to explain his emotional reactions, the “grief … fixed upon his heart.” But in the very next breath, he tells Odysseus what Odysseus’ own experience means:

  That was all gods’ work, weaving ruin there

  so it should make a song for men to come!

  (8:619f, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

  The king asks Odysseus why he grieves, but then doesn’t give him even a moment to answer before he negates Odysseus’ grief by explaining that the “big picture” justifies the suffering—as entertainment! Granted, Homer’s epics are more than just entertainment; they are art at its most enduring. To the ancient Greeks they were also Bible, history, and philosophy, all in one. But here Homer shows us the Phaeacians as rich tourists in the landscape of suffering.

  Picture this scene: A Vietnam combat veteran goes to a family wedding some ten years after his service. (Odysseus is ten years out from Troy.) The band plays a Jimi Hendrix piece that reminds him of a dead friend, blindsiding him with emotion. He tries to conceal his tears, but a rich relative notices and says, “Why aren’t you over that Vietnam stuff yet? Anyway, that war was all about oil—and damn right, too, or we’d be paying $5 a gallon for gas.”

  Saying that to one of the veterans I work with at such an emotional moment would provoke an explosion of rage. He might tip the table over in the man’s lap. The veteran’s relative is intimidated, stammers an inaudible apology, and rushes away. The veteran looks around feeling like someone has just peeled his skin and every nerve ending is naked and exposed. Everyone in the church social hall is silent; everyone is watching him, just as everyone stares at Ernst in Remarque’s The Road Back. He walks slowly from the room and out of the church. His wife is weeping with mortification, fury, and self-blame that she didn’t catch this in time. She is torn between her love for and loyalty to her husband and the ten-year family consensus that the veteran is a dangerous psycho.

  Odysseus does not have the luxury of “losing it.” He must keep a grip on his emotions to stay alive and must stay on the Phaeacians’ good side to get ho
me. Elsewhere, Homer describes Odysseus’ capacity to suppress and conceal his emotions as a part of his guile, dolos (19:212, orig.).

  Odysseus has also found he cannot talk about the war at Troy at this moment—at least not to people who show themselves incapable of hearing the stories with their heart. The combat veterans I have known fly into a rage when a civilian tries to tell them the meaning of their own experience. For Odysseus there can be no communalization of his experience here—not with this audience.

  Whether Odysseus made up his mind in an instant or over the thirty-six hours of watching his hosts, he decides three things about revealing himself: First, he will not tell these civilians anything about Troy—although his host, the king, has implicitly asked him to do just that, by inquiring whether he weeps for a “comrade” (hetairos— 8:584, orig.) who died at Troy. Second, he will correct the implied civilians’ misconception about combat veterans—that once the war ends, the losses and suffering end, too. The king assumes that Odysseus is tormented with grief only for deaths that occurred during the war. And third, he decides that he will fully satisfy the king’s request to tell his story, “Where have your rovings forced you?” (8:643, Fagles) and will tell it in the only form that they are capable of taking it in: entertainment.

  He reveals his identity: “I am Odysseus son of Laertes …”—his next words are extraordinarily ambiguous and surprising: “… who am a worry [or concern, or problem] to all men by my wiles” (9:19-20, orig., Segal, trans.).6

  What a way to introduce himself to powerful strangers he desperately needs! Odysseus is not quite so raw as this one line, taken out of context, suggests. Nonetheless the first thing he declares about himself is the cunning, guile, and trickery that make him famous “to the sky’s rim.” Imagine you have taken in a complete stranger as a houseguest. He evades identifying himself for a day and a half, and then he boasts that he is famous the world over as a con man! What’s more, you’ve heard of him, and of some of his more spectacular scams.

  Odysseus is not quite so “in control” as he is usually pictured. He desperately manages his own emotions at the same time that he woos his hosts to give him quick passage home. He cannot tell the truth about “what it was really like” at Troy without risking his own composure. Odysseus could have introduced himself in any of a hundred flattering and safe ways, such as “architect of the Greek victory at Troy,” or “courageous fighter and master bowman,” or as the person to whom the Greek army awarded Achilles’ armor as a prize of honor, or simply “the best of the Greeks.” But none of these would have created the diversionary distraction of his boastful, somewhat off-color self-introduction. It allows him the sleight-of-hand shift from the king’s actual question about the war to, “What of my sailing [nostos = homecoming], then, from Troy?” (9:41, Fitzgerald). Without missing a beat he launches into the adventures that will entertain, enchant, and dazzle his royal listeners for the rest of the night.

  3 Pirate Raid: Staying in Combat Mode

  Just as some thieves are not bad soldiers, some soldiers turn out to be pretty good robbers, so nearly are these two ways of life related.

  —Sir Thomas More, Utopia, published in 15161

  But will warriors lay down, together with the iron in which they are covered, their spirit nourished … by familiarity with danger? Will they don, together with civilian dress, that veneration for the laws and respect for protective forms …? To them the unarmed class appears vulgar and ignoble, laws are superfluous subtleties, the forms of social life just so many insupportable delays.

  —Benjamin Constant, Swiss, 1767-18302

  But all was not right with the spirit of the men who came back. Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again, looked to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone…. But they had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to queer moods, queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many of them were easily moved to passion when they lost control of themselves. Many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening. For some time while they drew their unemployment pensions, they did not make any effort to get work for the future…. Young soldiers who had been very skilled with machine-guns, trench-mortars, hand-grenades, found that they were classed with the ranks of unskilled labor in civil life.

  —Philip Gibbs, British, 19203

  Odysseus’ first adventure after he leaves Troy with his squadron is the sack of Ismarus. It’s a pirate raid—there’s nothing particularly amazing or fairy-tale-like about it.4 No one-eyed or six-headed monsters show up here, no witches, no gods either. The crews get drunk on captured wine and Odysseus loses control of them. They go wild and run riot in the town. This reflects no credit on the troops—they indulge themselves and put themselves in a weak position. The victims of this raid and their kin counterattack and inflict serious losses on the boat crews before they can escape out to sea.

  Hardly what we expected! But here Homer shows us the first way that combat soldiers lose their homecoming, having left the war zone physically—they may simply remain in combat mode, although not necessarily against the original enemy.

  Once discharged from the military, what civilian occupations are open to a veteran that employ the skills and capacities he has developed? While former military pilots may find civilian employment as airline, charter, or corporate pilots, what work does the combat infantry look for? In the course of my work I see many Vietnam War military discharge papers—Department of Defense Form 214—and always experience a sour amusement at item 23b, “RELATED CIVILIAN OCCUPATION.” For every veteran with Military Occupation Specialty 11B, “Infantry light weapons specialist”—a “grunt” infantryman—the related civilian occupation is given as “Firearms Proof Technician,” i.e., someone who test fires guns for their manufacturers. So just how many of the hundreds of thousands of infantry veterans were able to find employment in gun manufacturing? Very few, of course. And how much does this civilian occupation actually resemble the work of the combat infantryman?

  A bitter joke.

  Phaeacian Court

  Raid on Ismarus

  Lotus Land

  Cyclops

  King of the Winds

  Deadly Fjord

  Circe

  Among the Dead

  Sirens

  Scylla and Charybdis

  Sun God’s Cattle

  Whirlpool

  Calypso

  At Home, Ithaca

  For which civilian careers does prolonged combat prepare a person? Let’s look at the strengths, skills, and capacities acquired during prolonged combat:

  • Control of fear.

  • Cunning, the arts of deception, the arts of the “mind-fuck.”

  • Control of violence against members of their own group.

  • The capacity to respond skillfully and instantly with violent, lethal force.

  • Vigilance, perpetual mobilization for danger.

  • Regarding fixed rules as possible threats to their own and their comrades’ survival.

  • Regarding fixed “rules of war” as possible advantages to be gained over the enemy.

  • Suppression of compassion, horror, guilt, tenderness, grief, disgust.

  • The capacity to lie fluently and convincingly.

  • Physical strength, quickness, endurance, stealth.

  • Skill at locating and grabbing needed supplies, whether officially provided or not.

  • Skill in the use of a variety of lethal weapons.

  • Skill in adapting to harsh physical conditions.

  This is a chilling picture. World War I veteran Willard Waller remembered what it was like on street corners after that war. In 1944 he wrote in anticipation of the return of the troops from World War II:

  There is a core of anger in the soul of almost every veteran, and we are justified in calling it bitterness, but the bitterness of one man is not the same thing as the bitterne
ss of another. In one man it becomes a consuming flame that sears his soul and burns his body. In another it is barely traceable. It leads one man to outbursts of temper, another to social radicalism, a third to excesses of conservatism.5

  Most of the skills that soldiers acquire in their training for war are irrelevant to civilian life…. The picture is one of men who struggle very hard to learn certain things and to acquire certain distinctions, and then find that with the end of the war these things completely lose their utility…. Digging a fine fox-hole or throwing hand grenades with dexterity, they are entirely valueless….

  The boss, who hires and fires him, writes recommendations for him, raises or lowers his pay, and otherwise disposes of his destiny is nothing but a soft civilian. The foreman thinks he is tough…. While the veteran was risking his life for his country, the boss and the foreman were having an easy time of it…. The veteran cannot help reflecting that a smash of a gun-butt, or even a well-directed blow at the bridge of the nose … might easily dispose of such a man forever.6

  Very few combat veterans have become mercenaries or “civilian defense contractors” who train, support, and/or fight for foreign governments or for insurgents at the behest of the U.S. government, such as for Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets. These ways of staying in combat mode have captured the public imagination in film and pulp fiction, as well as magazines such as Soldier of Fortune. As sociologist James William Gibson has described in Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America,7 this fascination with the mercenary shows us much more about ourselves as civilians than it tells us about veterans. I am less interested in the exotic and the glamorous than in what matters every day in South Boston, Somerville, or Quincy, Massachusetts.

  Law enforcement in all its varieties has some military traits, and might seem most to resemble the occupation of the combat infantryman. Policemen carry guns. They wear uniforms. The images of the embattled inner-city cop whose precinct is a war zone, and of the specialized “tactical” unit, both suggest similarities. Many combat veterans have, in fact, joined the civilian uniformed services. Bear Mercer (a pseudonym) was one of these. He became an officer at a maximum-security prison.