By Professor Ella Haselswerdt
It’s easy to take for granted that we know what the Odyssey is about, at least on the most straightforward, narrative level: a man leaves his fatherland for a long time, and faces many challenges that prevent him from returning, but he toils and strives and finds his way back home, where he is reunited with his family and reestablishes his household. And yet the distance between these last two steps is oddly protracted. To this day I find myself surprised to remember that the storm-tossed Odysseus sets foot on the island of Ithaca in Book 13 of the 24-book epic. It takes him 10 more books to fully reveal himself to the people of Ithaca, and one more book to prove his identity to his wife’s satisfaction. And then we reach the final book, the strangeness of which has been difficult to integrate into the popular conception of the poem. A second catalog of ghosts from the underworld, a near-battle with the relatives of the suitors, thwarted by Athena’s intervention. And after all this, Odysseus doesn’t stay home for long: in the underworld Tiresias has told him that after he reaches Ithaca he has to undertake another, overland journey. He tells Penelope “we have not yet come to the end of all of our trials, but from here on out will be measureless toil, long and hard …” (Od. 23, 248-250). Viewers of Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey may have been surprised to see the hero immediately moving on from Ithaca, but this captures something of the restlessness of the poem – though in the movie, he brings Penelope along, who keeps him tethered to his real identity.
I think that the Odyssey’s inability to really end is tied up with Odysseus’s inability to really go home, and that all of this has to do with Odysseus’ pathological inability to be who he is – to return not only to Ithaca but to himself. Odysseus projects and inhabits new identities in the form of his incessant storytelling and his propensity for taking up disguises. The proverbial man of many ways refracts his subjectivity all over the Mediterranean, in the guise of aristocrat and a vagabond, an anonymous man from Crete and an adventurer among fantastical monsters, or a long-lost hero on the brink of returning home from a layover with the Thesprotians. Even before we meet him directly, we hear Helen’s story of his disguised incursion into the Trojan camp, an early rehearsal of the role of the beggar that he will play upon his return to Ithaca. Odysseus can be both everyman – the anonymous foreigner that he plays to the Phaeacians for several books before revealing himself – and “No-man,” as he ingeniously identifies himself to the Cyclops. Once home, he juggles three identities at once: the “real” Odysseus, whom the audience knows is hidden under the beggar’s rags; the beggar himself, for whom Odysseus invents a series of elaborate Cretan lineages and backstories; and, third, in an impressive display of dissociation, the imaginary version of Odysseus who Odysseus-as-beggar claims will be returning imminently. The most shocking instance occurs in that strange final book: Odysseus goes out into the countryside to find his father, who, crushed by grief for his long-lost son, has withdrawn from the city and is living like a poor farmer in a modest hut. Odysseus comes across the piteous sight of Laertes digging in the field, dirty, garbed in goatskins and ox hide. Odysseus debates in his mind whether the better course is to approach his father and embrace him, or “to test him first with mocking words” (Od. 24, 240), and, inexplicably to most, chooses the latter. Here he invents yet another new identity with its own elaborate backstory, totally distinct from the variations on the Cretan theme he has developed and embroidered in earlier lying tales.
It takes a strange, forgotten epic, a sequel to the Odyssey, to finally fix the hero to his identity, with recourse to some Oedipal logic. The Telegony (whose text is lost but of which we have an ancient summary and various ancient scholarly references) seems to pick up
immediately following the events of the Odyssey, ruminates on the lingering instability of Odysseus’s identity and its effect on stories told about him. Among other adventures, Odysseus enjoys an extended sojourn in Thesprotia (living out a lie he tells while in disguise in Ithaca), in which he takes another wife, sires another child, and fights as a favorite of Athena in yet another war. But in this story, Odysseus has also had a child by the witch Circe (Telegonus, literally ‘born far away’), who goes seeking his father when he comes of age. In a tragic twist, he kills Odysseus before realizing who he is while undertaking some mundane pillaging. Of course, killing Odysseus off in any way would effectively put an end to his wanderings and proliferations. But to do so by patricide is to emphatically and irrevocably circumscribe him into one role. Patricide differs from mere homicide in that the horror of the crime, and the pollution attendant upon it, depends entirely upon the singular and reciprocal identities of the victim and the perpetrator. Readers of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King will remember that Oedipus’ murder of the old man at the crossroads seemed hardly worth recalling until he realized that the man he killed was Laius, and, ultimately, that Laius was his father. Death by patricide posthumously confines Odysseus within the boundaries of his identity. Like Menelaus dauntlessly wrestling the shapeshifter Proteus until he succumbs to the inhabitation of his true identity, the old man of the sea, Telegonus’ unwitting murder of Odysseus cements him once and for all into his true shape.
