Odyssey 8.1-95

The dawn rises now upon the most extraordinary book, Book 8 of Homer’s Odyssey. We finally start to peel the onion. Athena somewhat comically announces Homer’s programme as the town crier, more of a carnival barker: come have a look at the mysterious wanderer who’s just showed up at Alcinous’ house. He’s built like the immortals! It’s said she thus aroused the Phaeacians’ fighting spirit (μένος) and heat (θυμός, ‘life’s breath’), suggesting a kind of competitive emulation. She sheds grace (χάρις) upon the stranger, however, making him seem taller and more solid, to help him withstand the trials his hosts will make of him. But it turns out it is the inner trials which will take centre stage, as Odysseus undergoes the torture, as we colourfully describe some kinds of emotional torment, simply of hearing his own story in song. We are invited, almost for the first time after seven books, to come along with the Phaeacians and have a good look at the prodigy who clothes in flesh the all-this-time hidden heart of our story.

We also meet Demodocus, since ancient times taken (by some) to be Homer’s alter ego. The Muse loved him wisely and too well, it seems, in that she gave him a good thing and a bad one. She robbed him of sight in his eyes, but granted him ‘pleasing song’. One doesn’t know if the pleasure of song resides in the singer, the audience, or both? Does the loss or lack of sight by itself impregnate the power and meaning of music? Homer’s parataxis simply lays out one bad thing and one good one; we are left to ourselves to synthesise causal connections and conspiracy theories. At any rate, it seems likely that Homer’s own depiction of Demodocus is itself the source and inspiration, when Homer’s ancient hymnodists and late quasi-biographers describe ‘him’ as a blind bard, and we continue to so imagine Homer.

I have called attention to a number of the potent women in the Odyssey, how they appear to express their power and centrality by stationing themselves adjacent to a fixed pillar of the household. Such a pillar connects the earth to the roof, or in Calypso’s case (if she borrows Daddy’s keys) the earth to the heaven. Much is made in this passage that Demodocus also is stationed by the pillar, and that his kithara hangs from a peg on it. He reaches above and behind himself to pluck it down from there to play and sing, once he’s had his fill of the food and wine in front of him. A cosmic source and significance for his singing seems evident, if there is anything to Homer’s symbolism. I am curious what connection might be drawn, however, between the blind bard and an axial feminine power. Or is Homer a woman?

Demodocus sings the latest song on the airwaves, ‘The Quarrel of Odysseus and Peleus’ son Achilles’. How he knows it, isolated as Phaeacia is, remains a mystery. I believe there is something mysterious in general about things ‘going viral’, even if the means of transmission is evident. That is, on Scheria, even if we can solve the problem of how the new songs could reach their distant market, there is still the problem of what makes a hit a hit. There seems to be something galvanising about certain songs or trends or news stories, so that the magnetic metaphor becomes physics: there is in fact an action effected at a distance, sometimes in a sense orthogonal to the direction of the magnetic force.

Let us hypothesise that the Iliad was already a ‘hit song’ in the world of the Odyssey’s composer. It begins with a quarrel between Agamemnon, king of men, and radiant Achilles. This is a quarrel between a King by right, a potency defined somewhat by circumstance, and a male warrior who is supreme by nature. What, by contrast, is a quarrel between two subordinates, while the King looks on approvingly? Is this Homer being ‘meta’? Is this some kind of joke?

The problem with recognising the Odyssey as comedy, is that it makes life perilous for a critic. There are broad, general patterns of action which make the identification secure: the hero begins his journey out of his natural place and merited station, but spends the plot regaining his stature and proving himself worthy of, or at least suited to, the exalted woman he marries at the end. At this level of generality we encompass not only the Odyssey but Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s comedies, and (sometimes with gender switches) Austen’s novels. But scene by scene, detail by detail, we are never on sure ground. Even among contemporaries, a sizeable proportion of any audience is not in on the joke, and there is no shame in having punch lines explained to you. In point of fact, this generally makes the explainer feel very clever. But our grammars and lexica do not even put us in the room with Homer’s crowd. We would not get the vibe, even if we could be there. We are in a lower rung of desolation than the stupid fuck who needs everything explained to them. (He, at least, speaks our language.)

It is possible, for example, that the very idea of Odysseus being a hero worthy of his own epic, was once a joke. If so, it must have been a joke lost on the classical Greek writers we have left, as it is lost on most of us, but the fact remains that polymētis Odysseus was a liar and a schemer who became the machiavel of the Athenian stage. Definitively a subordinate, not the prince but adviser to the prince, he was in the Iliad an enforcer, and Agamemnon’s trusted yes-man and negotiator. The Odyssey poet does of course seem to have great sympathy for his hero. This is nowhere better expressed than by his extraordinary scenes with Athena, who is like a Penelope who can go where she wants, be who she wants, and do what she wants (avoiding Poseidon), with a magic wand in her pocket. It is hard to deny the love there, almost a love triangle or prism, if one includes author and audience among the lovers. But how do we know this plot schematic is not Homer’s own fantastic innovation? The fact is that the tragedians never forgot the scheming devil. Was it Homer himself who made Odysseus a hero—albeit a comic one—just as Plato heroised Socrates?

To cast Achilles as the opponent of Odysseus, while Agamemnon delights in his cabinet of rivals, fulfilling an Apolline oracle, is very much to bring Achilles down to earth. He is a force of nature, in fundamental conflict with any political would-be monarch. It is also very much to elevate Odysseus. Agamemnon may think these two are the “best of the Achaeans,” but there would be a number of other claimants for being the best after Achilles, ahead of Odysseus. Agamemnon may in fact miss entirely the point of Apollo’s riddling oracle, like Croesus in Herodotus. There Croesus was told that if he invaded Persia, a great empire would fall. It did not occur to him that it could be his own one. In Agamemnon’s case, he does not see that as king, he is the ‘best of the Achaeans’ in a way that even Achilles cannot rival. It is that conflict between the best of the Achaeans, between the great king and the greatest warrior, which the oracle is most likely to intend, as to be the beginning of suffering for the Trojans and the Danaans alike. Cf. the Iliad. Hence even if there was a poem there about a real conflict between Achilles and Odysseus—and Homer’s lines surely read like the proem to such a poem—the Iliad and its quarrel would trump it, on the very same terms Demodocus’ proem delineates. The Iliad sings Apollo’s prophecy fulfilled, this time with the true duo, paired in strife, who were the ‘best of the Achaeans’.

The simplest meta-reading of Demodocus’ song is that a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus is really about a quarrel between the Iliad and the Odyssey, via the proxies of the human subjects at their centres. I have already made a case that there is such a quarrel from the point of view of the later poem. It sometimes seems that the Odyssey means to resolve somehow or atone, even, for a disruption of the cosmic order and the balance between male and female. The first marker for this to catch my eye was the sacrifice of the heifer to Athena, at the hands of Nestor’s sons. The women surrounding ululate for their own sacrifice, as well as for the unfortunate freshly-gilded cow. Something needs to be reconciled, or otherwise dealt with, at this halfway house Phaeacia, before Odysseus returns home.

And of course he cries about it. The sobbing Odysseus from Calypso’s Isle has already become an icon. One literally does not know whether to laugh or cry—that is, to feel sympathy or to keep our distance from the crybaby. This time Odysseus hides his ‘beautiful face’; so cloaked, we can only imagine what is going on within. But that very often is Homer’s art, to delineate quite vividly the exterior, an outside, the sobbing figure enveloped in a purple cloak, so only his physical neighbour could intuit any discomfort, while prompting our own imaginations and projections to fill the space behind the mask. What is it about Demodocus’ song and art that has so infiltrated behind the beautiful face, so that hidden tears stream out the eyeholes like water through a leak?

She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet—Elvis Costello

Is it simply the memories that cause pain, about the passage of time, the loss of companions, all of it threaded through by bad decisions? There was plenty of crying at Menelaus’ table, ostensibly prompted by the thought of Odysseus, although Telemachus had never met the man, and his bedmate Peisistratus was crying for the brother he lost to the war (again whom he’d never met). The representation of tears of loss in such cases, as facts of the psyche despite their being no memory of the lost father or brother, seems to me to ...