Enough for the present of the world of Odysseus; what of his poem’s artful plotting and structure? A fine literary scholar of an earlier day, W. P. Ker, wrote soberly: “The labour and meditation of all the world has not discovered, for the purpose of narrative, any essential modification of the procedure of Homer.”1 And yet many scholars have taken “our seamless Odyssey,” as Norman Austin called it, to be a conflation of shorter preexisting tales—no doubt to some extent it is: a great creator seldom creates ex nihilo—stitched together by a character known to German learning as the Bearbeiter, a redactor or editor who did the work skillfully, some have held, clumsily according to others, and left inconsistencies that careful analysis has revealed—inconsistencies, it must be said, that are bound to occur in any long work. These lines of inquiry are no longer so widely pursued, and The Odyssey is recovering its status as a finely unified poem. Yet there are still Homerists who would parcel it out to a number of hypothetical authors, an A poet who created an ur-Odyssey, a T poet who composed a poem about Telemakhos, and then B (the Bearbeiter) who fused the productions of poets A and T—and so forth.
Those who continue to find in Homer the virtues possessed by the great poets of later days, however, are more seriously challenged by the view, now generally held, that the author (or authors) of our poem belonged to a long tradition of oral poetry. From an oral poet composing at speed the refinements of pen-and-paper composition cannot be expected. A brilliant Scottish scholar Douglas Young proposed a different scenario, coming up with an unlettered eighteenth-century Gaelic bard called Duncan Macintyre capable of composing orally poems of up to five hundred lines as carefully considered as one could wish. Earning his keep as a game warden, Macintyre roamed the mountainous borders of Argyll and Perthshire meditating his poetry at leisure. Possessing a trained memory he was able to hold in his head what he had composed, going over and reshaping his verses until he had them the way he wanted.2 Nothing prevents us from supposing that Homer worked in the same way as the wandering Gael.
The general reader will do well to leave these learned preoccupations to the learned and attend to The Odyssey as it has been handed down.3 He will not go far wrong—indeed he will hardly go wrong at all—if he brings to Homer the same expectations that he brings to pen-poets like Virgil and Shakespeare. Immediately he comes on the evidence of design. Why, he may wonder, does the poem of Odysseus’ homecoming leave him and turn to his son Telemakhos in Ithaka? In order that we may see through Athena’s eyes the misrule in his house that he will eventually correct. The poem begins by pointing straight to its conclusion. Again, with a structural elegance that the reader can only admire, the poem at once sets in motion two parallel actions. On the orders of Zeus, Odysseus sets out on a journey that with one stop on the way will take him back to Ithaka. Telemakhos is sent by Athena to look for his father and when he has found him, we must suppose, bring him home.
Telemakhos’ journey takes him first to Nestor, the veteran warrior of The Iliad, then to Menelaos, the husband of Helen, for whom the long war was fought. On neither visit does he learn much about his father except that he is still alive—Menelaos says that the sea-god Proteus saw him in Kalypso’s island, held there against his will and unable to return home—but both visits tell the reader a good deal. The two men speak of their difficult voyages over seas that Odysseus sails on his far more difficult return, giving us a sense of the poem’s geographical reach. And both houses serve to affirm the great theme of order and decorum. Telemakhos, accompanied by the disguised Athena, is received with a courtesy so lacking in Ithaka. The second visit is particularly rich—here is Homer the novelist showing us the fine manners of this great house and not at all overawed by the task of presenting a legendary beauty like Helen. She duly appears, a domestic figure but no doubt dressed in full rig and accompanied by two maidservants bringing her golden distaff and a silver basket holding her yarn. At once she guesses the young visitor’s identity:
“This boy must be the son of Odysseus,
Telémakhos, the child he left at home
that year the Akhaian host made war on Troy—
daring all for the wanton that I was.”
She is still as full of herself as she was in The Iliad and freely admits, not without satisfaction, that her conduct has left much to be desired. Oh I was terribly wicked, I know, but how bravely they all fought for me! She recalls how when Odysseus came on a mission to Troy disguised as a beggar, she alone was clever enough to recognize him. Menelaos takes over and describes another of her performances: on the evening of the night when Troy was to be sacked she was out with a new boyfriend and to amuse him as they strolled round the wooden horse in which the Akhaian commandos were crammed she imitated the voices of their wives. A writer like Flaubert would have seen this as a mark of the incurable bêtise of our species, and few writers would have cared to introduce this little scene at such a point, just before the tragic fall of the great city that was to reverberate through Western poetry. Homer takes it in his stride. He finds people too interesting to be shocked by the things they do.
A curious feature of the life in Menelaos’ mansion is the note of sorrow that lies just below the surface. As the episode opens, the marriage of his son is being celebrated. His name is Megapenthes, Great Sorrow. Later, as the company sits drinking wine before dinner, Helen pours into their cups a few drops of a drug described as npenthes, which allays pain and makes men forget their sorrows. Why is it needed? It is natural that Menelaos should feel sad about the comrades he lost in the great war, yet this happened years ago and on the face of it he has much that should make him content. Enormously rich, he enjoys a princely style of life and is married to the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, daughter of Zeus. True she deserted him and ran off with a colorful playboy, Paris, but this too is past history and she is now a respectable married lady. Thanks to this alliance, moreover, he is strangely privileged. On his way home he spent some time in Egypt, where he was told by Proteus, Homer’s Old Man of the Sea:
“‘you shall not die in the bluegrass land of Argos;
rather the gods intend you for Elysion
with golden Rhadamanthos at the world’s end,
where all existence is a dream of ease.’”
No really satisfactory explanation is offered of the note of sorrow that is felt here, and to understand it we must turn—a deft transition linking the Telemakhy to the Odyssey—to the next book, which at last lets us meet face-to-face the hero of the poem, much-enduring, resourceful Odysseus. He too is living with a beautiful companion, the goddess Kalypso, who can grant him a life that will not end in death. “‘I fed him, loved him, sang that he should not die,’” she says, “‘nor grow old, ever, in all the days to come.’” Her island of Ogygia is as lovely and as easeful as the Elysion that awaits Menelaos, so beautiful that “Even a god who found this place/would gaze, and feel his heart beat with delight.” Yet there is something disquieting even sinister about it. Black poplars grow there, trees that, as we hear later, are also found in Persephone’s grove in the world of the dead (Book 10, 565—66). Cypresses too, funerary trees in the Mediterranean.4 Her name suggests that she is the Hider (kaluptein, to hide), fittingly so called, for she has hidden Odysseus, withdrawing him from the life of heroic action. He was happy there at first and we can understand why. After his trials at war and at sea, her island paradise must have come as a blessed relief, but her spell has worn off and she “had ceased to please,” Homer says laconically.
We would like to know more of how he spent his earlier years with Kalypso, but only the bare outlines of the story are given and we are left to imagine our way into it as best we can. There may be something to learn from the name of her island, Ogygia. The adjective gugios means in Greek “primeval.” It is an ancient place belonging to another time zone where, we guess, human life was part of the circular life of nature that men left behind them when they set out on their restless linear course. What did they do, this odd pair,
what did they talk about? Cautiously we may seek help from a modern writer with a sense of ancient things, Cesare Pavese. Scholarship provides the approved highway to our older literature, but there are unlicensed byways that may lead there too. In his Dialogues with Leucò Pavese gives us a snatch of their conversation. His Kalypso speaks of herself as one of the pre-Olympian gods forgotten by the world. Once, she tells her Greek friend, “I had terrible names … The earth and sea obeyed me. Then I grew tired. Time passed. I lost the will to move.”5 Odysseus too lost it and let himself be lulled into an endless life of slothful ease. But mere existence denied the outlet to action could not long satisfy Odysseus, and upon his arrival Hermes bid Kalypso send Odysseus on his way again. He recovered his will and with it the noble virtue which the Greeks called sphrosun, not “moderation,” the lackluster sense to which the word was reduced when poetry ceded its place as the magister vitae to prose and philosophy, but rather “man’s pride,” as Camus understood it, “fidelity to his limits, lucid love of his condition.” Had he stayed with Kalypso, he would have been not a god but godlike in his freedom from death. But Odysseus wanted to be a man, what Greek poetry calls a thntos, a mortal being subject to death, thanatos, as distinct from the gods, the athanatoi, whose differentia is that they do not die.
Here we need no help from a modern writer, for Homer gives us what we want in the conversation between Odysseus and Kalypso when she learns that he is resolved to leave her. She addresses him in full heroic style:
“Son of Laërtês, versatile Odysseus …”
Fifteen times in the poem he is addressed in this way. It is used here for the first time. She continues:
“after these years with me, you still desire
your old home? Even so, I wish you well.
If you could see it all, before you go—
all the adversity you face at sea—
you would stay here, and guard this house, and be
immortal—though you wanted her forever,
that bride for whom you pine each day.
Can I be less desirable than she is?
Less interesting? Less beautiful? Can mortals
compare with goddesses in grace and form?”
To this the strategist Odysseus answered:
(Literally, the Greek reads: “The resourceful Odysseus spoke in turn and answered her.” Fitzgerald regularly refashions lines of this sort to suit the context.) This introductory verse will be used repeatedly; it is used here for the first time and marks Odysseus’ recovery of heroic status. Homer’s formulaic style, as it is called (an adjective better suited to chemistry than to poetry), can be beautifully functional. He replies:
“My lady goddess, here is no cause for anger.
My quiet Penélopê—how well I know—
would seem a shade before your majesty,
death and old age being unknown to you,
while she must die. Yet, it is true, each day
I long for home, long for the sight of home.
If any god has marked me out again
for shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it.
What hardship have I not long since endured
at sea, in battle! Let the trial come.”
Gracefully the goddess yields and provides him with the tools and timber that he needs to build a boat. A man of parts if ever there was one, he makes a very professional job of it, the first bit of real work he has done for seven years. Where Menelaos surrendered and paid the price of surrender by the sadness that underlies the account of his splendid life with an easeful immortality to come granted him through his wife, Odysseus recovers his will and rejects what Kalypso offers him in favor of full human life with death at the end. He could do nothing else and still be Odysseus. Keeping faith with our great and in some ways disastrous tradition, he pursues his linear course and sets out once more on the cruel sea.
It is an old story. The Elizabethan poet Daniel, with the fervor of the Renaissance in his veins, gives it lyrical expression in his poetic dialogue “Ulysses and the Syren.” He might equally have called her Kalypso. She begins:
Come worthy Greeke, Ulysses come
Possesse these shores with me;
The windes and Seas are troublesome,
And heere we may be free.
Here may we sit, and view their toile
That travaile in the deepe,
And ioy the day in mirth the while,
And spend the night in sleepe.
He replies:
Faire Nimph, if fame or honor were
To be attayned with ease
Then would I come, and rest me there,
And leave such toyles as these.
But here it dwels, and here must I
With danger seek it forth,
To spend the time luxuriously
Becomes not men of worth.
The temptress tells him that the dangers he pursues lead only to human misery and war. Her pleas have no effect on him:
But yet the state of things require
These motions of unrest,
And these great Spirits of high desire
Seeme borne to turne them best.
A run-of-the-mill narrator would probably have sent Odysseus straight home at this point, but to pass directly from Kalypso’s enchanted realm to the everyday bread-and-butter world of Ithaka would have been jarringly abrupt, so—a beautifully pivotal transition—he is sent to the happy land of the Phaiákians, human beings but kinsmen of the gods, Zeus calls them, and free from the normal constraints of mankind. Remote enough not to be threatened by enemies, blest with a climate that allows trees to bear fruit twice a year, possessing uncannily clever ships that know where to go without the aid of a pilot, they indulge in the pleasant rivalry of athletics, and the upper crust listen to a minstrel singing songs of love and war while they sit feasting. Before reaching this haven, however, Odysseus has one more trial to endure. His voyage from Kalypso’s island begins well and for seventeen days his little craft speeds on, driven by favoring breezes sent by the goddess until his old enemy Poseidon, still angry with him for putting out the eye of his son Polyphemos, wakes up to what is happening and launches a storm that sinks his boat, leaving him to swim for his life to shore. Worn out, naked, he covers himself with leaves and sinks into the long sleep of exhaustion.
His awakening could hardly be more pleasant. This ancient poem shrugs off its years and like nothing in classical and little in later poetry comes to us fresh as paint in the colors of morning. The narrative moves so easily that it seems to tell itself, bringing the goddess Athena to visit Nausikaa in a dream. You will soon be married, she says, and should see that your linen is freshly washed. So next morning the girl has a word with her father, King Alkinoos—papa phile she calls him, “my dear Papa,” Fitzgerald translates with a touch of the right formality, not today’s homespun “daddy dear” with Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fagles—and asks if she may have a wagon to take the family laundry to the shore to be washed. Alkinoos can deny her nothing and her mother is equally accommodating. For their luncheon she packed a hamper
with picnic fare, and filled a skin of wine,
and, when the princess had been handed up,
gave her a golden bottle of olive oil
for softening girls’ bodies, after bathing.
Nausikaa took the reins and raised her whip,
lashing the mules. What jingling! What a clatter!
Nausikaa and the party of girlfriends who come with her get busy on the washing, take “a dip themselves,” then play ball. At one point Nausikaa throws the ball too far and the girls’ cries wake Odysseus up. He handles the situation with his usual aplomb. He is famished and badly needs help, but how to get it? Act as a suppliant and clasp her knees? No, that might offend her, so he stands a little distance away and
let the soft words fall:
“Mistress: please: are you divine, or mortal?”
He begins by comparing her beauty to that of the goddess A
rtemis, then hits on a trope that touches us more directly, one that by the happiest of chances was to occur to the first great poet of our language:
“Never have I laid eyes on equal beauty
in man or woman. I am hushed indeed.
So fair, one time, I thought a young palm tree
at Delos near the altar of Apollo—”
Chaucer says of the frisky young woman in “The Miller’s Tale”:
She was ful moore blisful on to see
Than is the newe pere-jonette tree.
Rather calculatingly Odysseus ends by putting into her head the idea of marriage. It distinctly appeals to her—this stranger is a most interesting man, good-looking too (Athena gives him a head of red-golden hair with curls like petals of the wild hyacinth). Nausikaa has enchanted many readers, but there is no indication that this young beauty interested Odysseus. All in all he probably preferred his goddesses, more experienced ladies.
She tells him how to make his way to her father’s grand house. He will be in his great chair facing the fire: “‘there like a god he sits and takes his wine.’” Odysseus is to go past him and make his appeal to Queen Arete:
“cast yourself before my mother,
embrace her knees—and you may wake up soon
at home rejoicing, though your home be far.
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 44