Odyssey 11.20-89

[Part 2 of ‘The Haunted Text’, on Persephone herself—perhaps the ultimate ‘background’ figure of those named in Homer’s foreground—will resume when she herself prompts the interrogation. For now we return to the banks of Oceanus, to sing a bit of Homer.]

Odysseus says that he and his men came to the place Circe had pointed out. He does not describe it again. We should recall what Circe had said, but it must be acknowledged that a performer takes the path of prudence in not revisiting her words, as they seem a little difficult to embody coherently on a stage:

There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—

Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit—

That’s the spot, first off, to put the ship in—by Oceanus, Deep-Eddies;

But go by yourself into Hades’ place, the mouldy house. (Od.10.509-12)

Even though it’s supposed to be very dark outside in the Cimmerians’ land, it seems possible to imagine the grove and the trees; but what sort of thing is Hades’ mouldy house? Does it have a door and windows, inner rooms and porticoes? A δόμος needs to be some sort of building. The following vista somehow unfolds inside, as though one had entered an IMAX theatre:

Now, there, into Acheron Pyriphlegethon flows,

Along with Cocytus, which is a branch from the water of Styx.

And there’s a cliff and the coming together of two thunderous rivers … (10.113-15)

The performer does not put us in mind of this fantastic and dimly lit landscape. Instead, as is his wont, he focalises his body and his prop. Recall that Odysseus the character has received a sword from a Phaeacian lad in Book 8, in compensation for his rude challenge to the hero in the lists. I suspect that one purpose of this gift of a sword, which he straps over his shoulder and forgets, was plausibly to equip Odysseus the narrator, who was about to take the stage, with the rhapsode’s prop, the magic staff, which of course Homer’s performer had already in hand. I have pointed out a running joke in the Odyssey, where a line from the Iliad, ‘he drew the sharp sword from by his thigh,’—invariably followed in that poem with a masculine martial exploit—is in this poem followed by some incongruous action which tends to make the armed man look awkward or silly. Circe had instructed Odysseus to ‘draw the sharp sword from by your thigh/And sit …’ (10.535-6). Not ‘attack’ or ‘spill the blood of your foe,’ but sit … to guard already spilt sacrificial blood from a thirsty queue of ghosts. Now, at or within Hades’ door, he follows Circe’s instructions to dig a trench for that sacrifice, but innovates in the means, which she had not thought to mention.

… but me, I drew my sharp sword from by my thigh

And dug a trench as much as an arm’s length over here and over here … (11.24-5)

The lines seem designed for an actor’s gesture with his prop, blocking and animating a stage. But to dig a trench with a sword? Recall the demand on King Arthur from the Knights who say ‘Ni!’, that he must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring. I suppose in life as well as in performance art, one has to make do with what is to hand.

… and they gathered,

Souls out from Erebus below, of the corpses of the dead and gone.

There’s brides and lusty boys, much-endured old men,

Tender virgins whose life’s breath is new to sorrow,

Many wounded by copper-tipped spears,

Men slain by Ares wearing equipment covered in human gore:

These began coming in numbers, from one side and the other,

In a supernatural uproar: the yellow-green fear got hold of me. (10.36-44)

I think it bears repeating, and then contemplating and diagnosing, this vision of the dead streaming forth from some hidden location behind the screen of reality, where they are thought to remain in some sort of half-aware relation to our history and consciousness. I suppose there is nothing unusual about this idea by now, nothing that offends our sense of realism or plausibility, at least when we are telling stories or saying prayers. One accommodates this parallel reality, at least at certain times, when it comes to grandparents and parents and children and dead presidents and saints, and of course beloved pets. But I find myself wondering, would there ever have been such things as ghosts without ghost stories? Our susceptibility to stories and storytellers, to their ability to conjure the absent and make it act and speak before our eyes, may well be of a piece with our susceptibility to the belief, or even the perception, of ghosts. The dead, after all, are merely one species of the absent and missed. Of course this passes onward to the fear of their noxiousness or malevolence as independent agents, who might attend you even if they don’t know you; the success of horror films and stories bespeaks this extension of the realm of the dead beyond a space of sanctuary for the beloved and the missed. Odysseus describes a terrifying sensurround experience (θεσπεσίηι ϝἰϝαχῆι); his response describes the one in the movie theatre at a horror show: ‘the yellow-green fear got hold of me.’ It is not finally clear how they make the sound that terrifies him. Perhaps with their feet? Perhaps they moan and clank in their armour, like Marley’s ghost? We learn later on—from Teiresias—that they cannot speak articulately or thoughtfully until they drink of Odysseus’ blood sacrifice.

From T. S. Eliot—who may be the man in the hat in front of the bicyclists—quoting Dante—‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ The sentiment morphs into David Bowie’s ‘I never thought I’d need so many people …’ A vision of the dead becomes at once a vision of the almost burdensome immensity of human population. Bowie’s doomed cityscape (Five Years) and Eliot’s vision of a busy London Bridge (The Waste Land) are of a piece with the earlier infernal visions in that the realisation that these people had stopped living is at once a taking in of their sheer number. Odysseus’ vision here, which inspired so many different kinds of poet across the ages, may in fact be the origin of them all. My only hesitation when it comes to Homer’s originality, is the hint at parody and sendup which runs through the veins of the Odyssey, including in this episode of Odysseus in Hades, whose undercurrents are felt despite our lack of objects for their direction (outside the Iliad). Perhaps, for example, there were stories and perhaps also rites due to Orpheus, or about him, to which Homer was responding in a somewhat parodic way, but there is no evidence for their priority. There seems to be only genuine sentiment running through Homer’s lines. We do not know how the brides and grooms came to their presumed sudden end—must have been horrible—nor the virgins new to sorrow. But they all died untimely, like men killed in battle, and evidently keep the semblance with which they died; the soldiers’ ghosts’ equipment is still covered, rather gratuitously, with real gore.

The odd ones out are the old men who have endured much (πολύτλητοι); they must be wearing their endurance in their posture and gait. Perhaps they also died at a wedding, like the people killed by drones in Afghanistan? It does not seem that we are shown people who died of old age, or disease. There are no old women mentioned, for example, nor cripples, nor others who might not elicit the sought-for poignance in the sense of lost opportunity and bloom. These are sad songs in a comedy, not tragic eruptions into the score. The ghosts are Homeric psyches who lust for the blood from which they have been forever separated. We are supposed to think that they would fear Odysseus’ sword, which stands brandished in their way. ‘Wot are you gonna do, kill me?’

Odysseus draws his sword anyway, and repeats, in his own assertive voice, Circe’s command that he will not let the ‘corpses’ powerless heads’—which sound like ‘skulls’, but must be recognisable, like zombies’ faces—approach the sheep’s blood before he can question Teiresias. The rule is immediately broken, however, when the ghost of Elpenor shows up first. He does not take a drink, but starts right up talking in response to Odysseus’ question. No explanation is given for his ability or privilege in line, unless it can be found in the fact that he’s not yet been acknowledged in death, but lies there ‘unwept and without a funeral’ in Circe’s house. But this seems, rather, to be an explanation of why he is dead at all. Elpenor tells the story of his drunken misadventure. Odysseus’ question of him had served as a chance to repeat a joke which doesn’t, perhaps, improve with age: how’d you get here so fast, the quickest way to Hades? ‘You beat me here on foot, though I came with my black ship.’ (11.58)

Elpenor’s presence in the story, at first blush anyway, seems in every way a contrivance. Unkind people would call him an insertion. My own sense is that the poet of the Odyssey, who is scripting a one-man show on a bare stage, is someone who embraces both the imaginative challenges placed upon him by the conditions of his art, and a performer who must be more a medium than an actor, a necessarily multilayered vehicle who will not be shy to indulge things ‘meta’. This layering will include breaking what we call the ‘fourth wall’; we have seen this already in his use of the figure of Mentor, who is at times the performer’s alter ego rather than an assumed character. (I here anticipate the rich examples to come at exciting moments.) I have suggested that in Elpenor’s case, the manner of his death, which he now recounts in his own voice, stands as a sort of parable for an ‘epic movement’. Instead of retracing his steps down the long staircase, he falls straight through the roof, which resu...