Odyssey 11.152-224

Odysseus’ encounter with his mother begins in the same hideous way in which, one presumes, all his encounters with the souls of the dead and gone begin. All that is said is that she came up and drank the dark animal blood. Who knows what the performer mimes or enacts. But if we let our imaginations work, we see a sad old woman squatting down or on all fours, lapping up spilt blood like a dog, or perhaps she cups her hands and draws from the pool. Either way there’s blood dripping down her face, and maybe staining her motherly hands as well, the while she talks to her son. Or where does the blood go in an insubstantial thing? What does it become? Clearly it is up to the performer how far forward in our imaginations to bring the clumsily gory possibilities, but it is Homer himself who has prescribed the bloody ritual, overseen by Odysseus’ sword, as a precondition of any dialogue. Homer has no interest in hiding the deadness of the dead; he wants the disquieting sensual ambience, a slightly farcical macabre, to frame and colour his scene.

Homer seems to suggest that the quaff of blood causes the instant recognition of Odysseus in his mother (αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω), but it seems she must have been aware of who he was to have been hanging around already, first in line for a drink. Odysseus had to fend her off with his sword, remember, so Teiresias could go first. Perhaps among human souls, Odysseus’ mother was an exceptionally thirsty one. I don’t think this would be a profitable comic implication, however. It seems rather that Homer has gone out of logic’s way to emphasise, at least here, a kind of unawareness in the psyche prior to the tasting—or ingestion?—of fresh blood. It is not even human blood in the communion, but sacrificed blood of the flock. It seems there is no life after death, properly speaking; the souls have no strength, even to communicate, except with fuel they cannot procure by themselves. Teiresias is exceptional among them in being able to prophesy truth. The others seem able only, when prompted, of memories and renewing old interests or old stories. We shall see, however, that Odysseus’ mother, who remains nameless after her introduction as ‘Anticleia’ (Od.11.85)—she’s simply ‘Mother mine’, μῆτερ ἐμή—may prove uniquely and movingly capable. But there is no question of an Homeric theology or a consistent eschatology, beyond the proximate needs of the story; the rules of engagement Teiresias expounds have been preemptively broken by the insertion of Elpenor who has already spoken first, against Circe’s instructions, and without a hint of blood on his ghostly lips. Homer has therefore created an air of ambiguity about the rules, which is generally a feature rather than a bug in horror films.

‘How’d you get here?’ says Mum, like anyone who meets a traveler in Homer; ‘you must have had some ship! There’s that cosmic Ocean in between. Are you fresh from Troy, or did you manage a stop-in at home?’ (I paraphrase.) Odysseus tells her his story, as would any other soul over there. There’s no lack of self-pity: ‘always clinging to sorrow I’ve wandered …’ (αἰὲν ἔχων ἀλάλημαι ὀϊζύν, 11.167). No, he’s not had a chance to go home. He’s been forced to come here to consult the soul of Teiresias. He’s not come down—or over, or up beyond the sky—in order to see his Mum. (It must be said, Hades lives in a dark place, like the adjacent land of the Cimmerians, but in Homer it does not seem that we are prompted to imagine an ‘under’ world; on Achilles’ shield the stream of Oceanus encircles the cosmos, and seems, therefore, to be celestial. Hades is somewhere beyond its farther bank.) Now, is there a joke in this? Dionysus, in one of his manifestations anyway, is famous for braving Hades’ realm precisely in order to rescue his mortal mother Semele. Such a motive must surely resonate with humanity in general, as well as Greek speakers, both of whom tend to miss their mothers. To be sure, our Odysseus does not know beforehand that his mother is dead. But Homer rather moots this point, in the sense of making it irrelevant, by going out of his way to show that even if he’d known about her plight, Odysseus would not have attempted a voyage to Hades to find his mother—if not to rescue her, at least to meet her one last time—like Dionysus to save his mother, or Orpheus his Eurydice—before he would do so to consult Teiresias:

On there came the soul of my mother, dead and gone,

Daughter of Autolycus Great-Heart—Anticleia.

I left her behind alive, when I went to sacred Ilium.

Now, I burst into tears soon as I saw her, and pitied her in my life’s breath:

But no way was I for letting her in early—no matter the density of my grief—

To get near the blood, until I heard from Teiresias. (11.84-89)

The man had ‘burst into tears’ upon seeing Elpenor’s ghost as well, but there was no scruple then about remembering his mission or following Circe’s orders. There is a bloody-minded determination that rules and characterises this hero. There is not sentiment or romance. It seems to me that Homer makes him look a bit ridiculous, all in all. Wait your turn, Mum. I’m not here for you.

Of course we have no idea if Odysseus is an avatar of Dionysus, or whether Homer’s story about the sea journey south to Hades is instead the original for Dionysus’ descent to his mother. It does seem odd that the parody or sendup should appear before the religious tale, but there is no use in presuming about the mysteries of history—especially when there are more lacunas than continuous or contiguous wholes in the data—or the unpredictable twists of religious and cultural development. Few in the ancient world seem to have registered the Odyssey as comedy, with the conspicuous and notable exception of Aristotle (Poetics 1453a36). But perhaps we should consider that from our position, and more importantly our disposition, not a single joke would seem to have been told in the entire Judaeo-Christian corpus. The cultural sway of that corpus perhaps prevents us from best assessing what’s actually there, in the wrinkles of the flesh. If there’s jokes, we’re not in on them. What can I do but bear witness to what I experience in Homer’s Invisible Realm, rather than dismiss the macabre, the surreal, and the flat-out ludicrous, as unsuited to the ceremonies at the altar to that stately unicorn the professors call ‘epic’?

Let us look again at Odysseus’ responsive self-pity:

For I have not yet come near her, Achaea, nor yet have I set foot

On my own mother earth, no; always clinging to sorrow I’ve wandered,

From the very first I began to follow radiant Agamemnon

To Ilium of the fine foals, so I might do battle with Trojans. (11.166-9)

I hope my reader will correct me if I’m wrong, but this may be the first hint at an expression of regret from Odysseus about his decision to go to Troy. To be sure, there has been plenty of sadness in Odysseus’ story so far, perhaps even second-guessing. There has been the mourning over the men lost, several times repeated, a general air of mourning settled upon the whole voyage. The debacle in the Cyclops’ cave seems told in a tone, meanwhile, in equal parts confessional and proud. It was foolish and fateful for the rest of his journey, but in the consequence Odysseus announced himself by his name: no regrets, I should have thought. At the banquets in Phaeacia, tales of brave Ulysses, among other famous Achaeans, have been sung to men in their cups; they are evidently fascinating and entertaining in the Scherian theatre, these exploits of foreign heroes in foreign lands. Clearly they have been rather more complex experiences for Odysseus himself, also in audience. But I should not characterise that experience as one of regret. He sobs uncontrollably, until finally Alcinous demands his identity and Odysseus’ cover is broken. His tears are then compared to those of a widow fallen over her Trojan husband, as spears prod her in the back to join the chain of the enslaved. (One responds to this simile differently if one thinks of the newly widowed Andromache, or the newly re-widowed Helen.) At the very least, Odysseus is ‘going through’ something he must have to, in order to cope with hearing his story, where the experience of his many victims, and possibly one in particular, are made present to his consciousness as though he were reliving trauma in therapy. He goes so far as to bribe the singer to sing the slaughter after the Horse, the very episode of his butchery which traumatises him. But that does not suggest by itself, of necessity, that he feels regret. His seeking the means for a good cry seems to answer a larger and less focussed need, like choosing to see a tragedy. Grand releases of psychic energy, from diverse people of diverse backgrounds, explode in the stands at a home game. I suppose that’s why we go?

But when confronted by the soul of his dead mother, there is a glimpse of an almost nihilistic resignation to futility. Odysseus says he has been united with grief ‘from the very first’ he followed Agamemnon, so he ‘might do battle with Trojans.’ ‘From the very first’ (ἐξ οὗ τὰ πρώτιστα) takes us to the very beginning of a catalogue of consequent events, the beginning before the beginning that he makes to his Phaeacian audience with his first stops after leaving Troy. The phrase recalls the opening of the Iliad (I.6), when Homer asks the goddess to begin singing from the time when (ἐξ οὖ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα) first Agamemnon and Achilles ‘stood apart, paired in strife.’ One suspects that for the first time Odysseus, as a consequence of this encounter with his mother, sees his decision to follow Agamemnon and fight his war as the moment that began his catalogue of pain and grief. This catalogue now goes much further back th...