Misguided study of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’

Jonas Grethlein writes in Reading the Odyssey: A Guide to Homer’s Narrative (Princeton UP), “It is the aim of this book to make [the Odyssey ] accessible to today’s audience in a new way . . .  and show why the study of Homer continues to be worthwhile.”  Though he’s been studying Homer all his life, he doesn’t explain some crucial points.  His statement that “Odysseus has no difficulty in recognizing Laertes as his father, while the latter does not recognize him,” ignores the fact that Odysseus knows that Laertes is in Ithaca, while Laertes does not expect to see his son.

I’ve always been troubled by the capricious Greek gods, who have nothing better to do than interfere disastrously in the affairs of helpless and often innocent men.  Like Donald Trump, they combine extraordinary power with stupid behaviour.  Grethlein contradicts himself by saying “the gods only punish offences against the divine order” and, more accurately in the same paragraph, “the gods are still capricious and human beings the hapless victims of their amoral intrigues.”  

He contradicts himself again by stating, “The killing of the suitors appears above all as a well-deserved punishment” and that the furious Odysseus “answers a material loss with a mass execution.”  Odysseus’ behavior is savage when he, like bloodthirsty Polyphemus devouring the sailors, is seen “among the slaughtered dead men, / spattered over with gore and battle filth . . . covered with blood, all his chest and his flanks on either / side bloody, a terrible thing to look in the face.”  (The translator of this book uses Richmond Lattimore’s English version.)  Odysseus’ revealing his identity enables Polyphemus to invoke the wrath of his father, the sea god Poseidon.  

For several years “Penelope has so far succeeded in stalling the suitors by a ruse” and, like Scheherazade’s stories in One Thousand and One Nights , manages to delay the fatal conclusion.  But the young aristocratic suitors—uninvited guests who’ve occupied the house for three years—are surely not deceived by Penelope’s transparent ruse, and it can’t take all night to unravel her weaving.  The suitors all want to prolong their passive courtship for as long as possible at Penelope’s Club Med, which features an open bar, free feasts, luxurious accommodation, room service and sexually obliging servants.  The suitors don’t fight with each other to win Penelope, as we would expect, but survive until Odysseus returns to punish their transgressions.  He seems to slaughter them, a harsh punishment, because they had maxed out their credit cards.

Unlike Agamemnon, who is murdered by his unfaithful wife, Odysseus is welcomed home by the faithful Penelope.  Like Othello’s Desdemona, “She loved him for the dangers he had passed, and he loved her that she did pity them.”  Grethlein does not mention that Odysseus must have been shocked to have his ideal vision of Penelope shattered when he sees his aged wife twenty years later.  

In his too-brief survey of Homer’s influence, Grethlein does not mention some of the most important works: Claudio Monteverdi’s opera The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland (1639); Tennyson’s “The Lotus-Eaters” (1842) and “Ulysses” (1843), who must “follow knowledge like a sinking star . . .  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”;  Ezra Pound’s translation of the Odyssey in the opening of Canto I (1915): “And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breakers”;  Derek Walcott’s poem Omeros (1990); and the film of Joyce’s Ulysses (1967).  Odysseus was wounded by a boar; in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), Adonis is killed by that dangerous pig.  The wild boar hunt influenced the similar chase in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867).  Today, even a casual trip to the grocery store is called an “odyssey” to heighten its trivial significance.

Grethlein also misinterprets modern literature.  Anton Chekhov’s pistol mentioned in the first act must not only be fired in the play, but every detail must also have a significant dramatic effect.  It’s absolutely wrong to claim that Hemingway “gives little insight into the inner life of his characters”.  And when people read a James Bond novel they know before they begin that he will ultimately prevail.

Knowledge of Homer gives greater insight into James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Stephen Dedalus is alienated from his drunken and irresponsible father, Leopold Bloom’s infant son has died, both men are searching for a paternal replacement.  Odysseus’ moribund dog Argos recognizes him when he returns to Ithaca.  In his suicide note Bloom’s father—neglected and subject to dismal old age like Laertes–asks him to be kind to his dog Athos.  Odysseus is “cunning, prudent and cold-blooded”; Bloom, the sensitive and victimized modern man, is not.  The rock that Polyphemus hurls at Odysseus’ ship becomes the biscuit tin hurled at Bloom by the Citizen in Ulysses .  Bloom doesn’t kill Molly’s lover Blazes Boylan, but replaces him and resumes his rightful position as the well-beloved husband.  Odysseus and Bloom triumphantly survive their misfortunes.  As Homer perceives, “For afterwards a man who has suffered / much and wandered much has pleasure in his sorrows.” 

Grethlein’s distracting and toxic footnotes on almost every page (“See Cook on eating”) clash with his attempt to reach a popular audience, who will not rush to the nearest library to check out his sources,  The articles in Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German shed more Dunkel than Licht .  He uses Greek instead of English words: anagnorisis for recognition, mnesterophony for slaughter, and overlooks a typo on 75:6.  He emphasizes the history of Homeric scholarship, lists 18 of his own articles and ticks off scholars whose interpretations he dislikes.  

This awkward translation combines the passive voice and future tense: “The question of the genesis of the Homeric epics will be examined. ” Grethlein tortuously writes, for example: “It is appropriate to speak of a paradigm shift, since similar developments can also be observed in other fields of classical philology, albeit not necessarily concurrently.”  Tediously repetitive, he is ponderous, pedantic and painfully obvious: “the idea that the Odyssey shows character development should not be ignored”; “The Odyssey, therefore, presents the type of adventure story that lets a hero suffer, yet ultimately triumph over villainous adversaries”; “the ending has a special significance—it marks the point at which the narrative terminates.”  His 19-page digression on vase art reads like a separate article and doesn’t fit into this poorly structured book.  It’s surprising that Princeton thought this handsome omnium gatherum was worth translating and publishing.

The most helpful works on the Odyssey are W.B. Stanford’s The Ulysses Theme (1954), Cedric Whitman’s Homer and the Homeric Tradition (1958) and Bernard Knox’s Introduction to Robert Fagles’ translation (1996).  While serving in the RAF, T. E. Lawrence made a prose translation  of the Odyssey .  His description of the hanging of the faithless serving women who consorted with the suitors is superb: “Exactly thus were the women’s heads all held a-row with a bight of cord drawn round each throat, to suffer their caitiff’s death.  A little while they twittered with their feet—only a little.  It was not long.”

In the “sole unitarian” versus “several oralists” controversy, Lawrence agrees with the former and perceptively writes that the Odyssey is “a single, authentic, unedited work of art, integrally preserved. . . . It is  neat, close-knit, artful, various and nearly word-perfect.”  He perceptively describes Homer as “a book-worm, no longer young, living from home, a mainlander, city-bred and domestic.  Married but not exclusively, a dog-lover, often hungry and thirsty, dark-haired.  Fond of poetry, a great if uncritical reader of the Iliad , with limited sensuous range but an exact eyesight which gave him all his pictures.   He is all adrift when it comes to fighting, and had not seen deaths in battle.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published articles on Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon.

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