English 2332
An examination of literary criticisms of the Odyssey by Homer, who many consider the greatest author of the Greek empire, demonstrates that the fundamental nature of humanity has not changed in three thousand years. This epic poem must have been dissected and analyzed hundreds of times, if not thousands of times, since it was written. It is a timeless work because it reflects, among other things, how human nature has changed very little over time. The events and characters in this epic do portray, in many ways, the continued infatuation with war and killing, especially in the twentieth century. Many of today’s heroes are those who represent success in mortal combat in some form or other. Heroes are those who can destroy their adversaries most utterly and violently. The other characteristic highlighted in the Odyssey is people’s insatiable greed for wealth and possessions, even if these features do not belong to them. All of this is fair in business and war, so long as the individual comes out the winner. The poem The Odyssey, attributed to the blind old man Homer, had a huge, incomparable impact on the entire history of ancient culture and later on the culture of the new times. For example, many skills of Homer’s poem, its epochal, colorful nature attract readers to this day, despite the existing huge time gaps.
The Odyssey is one of the greatest of the world's hero tales. In the classical society contemporary dispute about what composes relevant scholarly texts, is as a rule represented in two forms. One stands toward the past and treats itself with sources, origins, classical ideas. The other views forward and indicate the context and conditions of the contemporary reader (Morris 383).
Because it contains so many memorable adventures, some have called it an adventure story. As a military hero Odyssey, it is true, ranks far below Achilles, but he is a much greater figure. He is one who can endure without despair, even the disfavor of the gods, and can by the strength of will and the guidance of reason eventually triumph against unbelievable odds. This quality of the hero and the story led Aristotle to term The Odyssey "ethical," as contrasted with the "pathetic" Iliad. So much did this character appeal to the Greek people, that Odyssey became a favorite in their later literature, whereas Achilles failed this distinction (“The Study Club” 115).
It is interesting to note that even the poems first known as Homeric had traditional stories behind them incorporated into new fiction. The whole framework of The Odyssey has been conjectured to be a sun myth. The archer hero being absent from his wife for as many years as the sun was absent from the earth (“The Study Club” 117).
The narrator of the Odyssey is devious. Initially, he appears objective and reliable but frequently misleads his readers by raising false expectations, making surprising shifts. This impermanence is very typical of Odyssey himself. The instability gives us a sense of uneasiness and insecurity as we travel through the world of the Odyssey (Richardson 337). Reader beware!
The writer Seth L. Schein, in his book Reading the Odyssey, presents numerous analyses of Homer’s work, which we are discussing today. The object is used here to summarize those analyses that point to the illustrations of greed and infatuation with war, and its heroes, in Greece at the time of Homer. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in his essay Land and Sacrifice in the Odyssey (Schein 33), is pointing to the fact that the Odyssey is a mythical epic about land in the golden age in ancient Greece. It was a time in life of Odyssey, when all was well in Greece. The wealthy landowners and their faithful servants were all content. The main character was one of such prosperous people and mentioned once:
You know, I too once lived in a house in a city,
A rich man in a wealthy house (Homer, and Lombardo 167).
The heroes of the time were treated like gods. Odyssey himself is often referred to as godlike in his features, as well as his heroic character. And he loves his motherland as a real patriot. The protagonist can’t remember all the details, if he was asleep the entire journey. But it is the land of Ithaca that he kisses when he realizes that he has arrived home after the voyage from Scheria. Thanks to Athena, he arrives safely in his homeland where he owns a sizeable property. At that time in Greece, heroes were not only decorated with medals, but their wealth and status in Greece were also increased. Today, war heroes in some countries are lucky to get everything they need from the country they served. It is quite important in what way the citizens may pay back.
Land and greed are also highlighted in the land grab that Penelope’s suitors are attempting. They are not courting her only for her looks but for her inheritance. They are convinced that Odyssey is not returning from the Trojan War. He is either dead or lost on some deserted island. They believe that they are in the age of Chronos and that Zeus are on their side (Schein 34). Nothing can keep them from claiming the prize – Penelope and the spoils of war that go with her. To the victor go the spoils. But if the victor does not show up at home, the spoils go to the highest bidder. However, there was the supernatural to contend with at the same time. They were very much part of the daily life of Greeks. Only the gods could prevent annihilation in Greece, and they did. Poseidon was not able to unleash his wrath against Homer, but he was able to do it against the Phaeacians. Zeus did not prevent the latter. Perhaps diplomacy was needed towards such wrathful spirits.
Religious sacrifice was also very prevalent in the Odyssey as it is pointed out in the critical essay (Schein 35). Whenever Odyssey met someone of significance, an animal sacrifice was offered either celebrating him or as a sacrifice to the gods. Bulls, sheep, goats, and rams were torched. Everything that was available nearby ended up in fire. Sacrifice was often done also in fear of the gods. If one felt that the gods had been offended, an animal sacrifice would do to appease the anger of the deity like an angry parent that demands not only an apology but penance as well. It sounds somewhat unusual as in the modern institutional religious sense.
Jean-Pierre Vernant sheds interesting light on what he calls “Death with Two Faces” in the epic of the Odyssey. Vernant points to the fact that death appears disconcerting. “It has two faces. The first face is a glorious one: death shines out as the ideal to which the true hero devotes his existence. With its second face, death embodies the unsayable, the unbearable; it manifests itself as a terrifying horror” (Schein 55).
Odyssey has a naïve interpretation of mortality. When he descends to Hades, he discovers the reality of death. Achilles sets him straight when he tells Odyssey that he would rather live as the least of the servants of a poor peasant than reign as master over the masses of the dead. For Achilles, as for most Greeks, to exist as an individual meant to escape anonymity and to remain memorable until death so that his social existence acquired meaning, value, and continuity not only in his family but also in the Greek community as a whole (Schein 56). The ideal Greek concept of death is to avoid the horror of chaos, the horror of what has no form or meaning. This meaningless individuality must be destroyed and disappear (Schein 62).
Death has some very gruesome images in the epic of The Odyssey. Sailors are plucked from their ships and devoured by monsters. Ships sink and the crew meets a grisly end at the bottom of the sea. Warriors are impaled with spears, and arrows described in a violently graphic way sometimes hard to read without squirming. Furthermore, Odyssey describes how, in a storm, his comrade dies when a mast falls and crushes his skull until his soul leaves his bones. These are but a few of the troublesome images.
Revenge is the motive for all this violence in this Greek epic. Revenge came to be regarded, in Homer's time, not as the flat response of the brute but as a sacred duty owed one's kin and friends, and as proof of personal honor. In the days of Odyssey, it was the duty of the male members of the family to exact retribution. It was regarded as despicable and cowardly to shirk that obligation. The justice exacted through retribution was largely a private affair. For example, if someone had killed a member of your family group or had invaded your home with the clear intent of taking it over and killing you, you had the right to retaliate without being punished. This rough justice could be compared to legalized dueling in Europe in the early centuries of royal rule. There is, in the Odyssey, no written law, no police officer on the corner, and no system of justice to handle retribution. Justice is personal, tribal, and has the support of divine law. Revenge in the poem is also of great importance. “Its author used the two older
epics freely, and also, for the Odyssey and Penelope recognition, still another source, a very old one, in which Odyssey first slays the suitors, and then makes himself known to his servants by the scar” (Perrin 417).
In Homer's epics, the heroes learn from the gods to exact vengeance or divine retribution to defend their honor. Thus, Athena sides with the Greeks in the Trojan War purely for revenge against Paris because he had not awarded her the golden apple in the beauty contest, and Poseidon, seeking vengeance against Odyssey for blinding his son Polyphemus, throws up every possible obstacle to Odyssey in his long attempt to reach home. The most notable acts of revenge, however, are played out in blood, in the story of Agamemnon and the story of Odyssey and Penelope's suitors (Johnson and Johnson). Against the suitors, Odyssey is merciless and exacts revenge even against those who were not directly involved in the seduction of Penelope.
The revenge of Odyssey is, however, not only for the attempt of stealing his wife from him but also trying to acquire his land and possessions. With his son Telemachus, Odyssey annihilates all the suitors brutally in very short order. They were not even given the opportunity to beg for mercy. They were all guilty as charged and executed where they stood. These acts of murder were of honorable revenge, privately executed as was expected at that time. It would be dishonorable and cowardly to do otherwise (Johnson and Johnson 144). The music of poetry (Denham and Willard 24), as Northrop Frye puts it, in the Odyssey is thunderous and very military with the percussion of war around every corner. A funeral march, after every battle, is not far behind. From pianissimo to crescendo, the drumbeat is always the graphically violent whether it comes from the gods or is the work of human hands.
On account of the Odyssey, no author could make a new beginning when describing a story or visual representation of a trip, a transformation, running in with savages, an experience with anybody dead, a father and son relationship, an acknowledgment symbol, or a meeting of a husband and a wife after a long period of separation (Hall 8).
Another remarkable feature of the Odyssey is its tense sophistication, their quality as stories held together over a large number of lines by major, binding together topics. What's more, Homer summoned the extensive scale structure, as well as moment points of interest and subplots that repeat a huge number of lines later and double-cross amazingly couple of irregularities. No other illiterate societies produced legends equaling the Homeric poems in ability or sheer size. Besides, Homer lived in the end of the Greek dull age. The archeological confirmation shows that it was a poor, provincial society. The impression, in this way, is that this work of complex nature showed up truly out of nowhere. Homer's language is additionally exceptional, the linguistic use and phrases are complicated, and the vocabulary is huge (Gress 530).
The Odyssey was also the source for different other writings with foundational rank. Creative people initiating other trends have found a suitable content in the Odyssey. The best illustration is Joyce's Ulysses, an establishing writing of Modernist fiction. Any aspiring writer since Joyce had to deal with The Odyssey just due to the greatness of Ulysses in the development of contemporary fiction. Ulysses has itself been translated into various languages, including Malayan and Arabic. And in 1994, this bestseller appeared in Chinese, but it was banned beforehand as excessively obscene. In any case, the list of open reactions to the Odyssey can be interminably extended. “In the special effects in early cinema, in the early nineteenth-century emergence of children’s literature, in the post-colonial revision of the Western canon, the Odyssey is invariably to be found in the cultural cauldron when anything interesting is cooking.” Its conventional sort scenes (friendliness, showdown, temptation by Sirenic females) have even been investigated as a precursor of Dallas, the American TV musical drama of the 1970s and 1980s. These circumstances become permanent. This circumstance gets to be self-propagating. The more prominent scholars and artists guide their audience’s attention toward the Odyssey, the more probable it turns into the fact, that interest in the poem will increase. Readers get to be occupied with the Odyssey since they are involved in Modernist fiction, Venetian musical show or sci-fi (Hall 9).
There is an interesting close to the Odyssey. It is not the scene with Odyssey and Penelope, as we would expect. There is more concern on the part of Odyssey about the health of his father Laertes than the condition of his wife. Homer plays with our anticipation of what Odyssey will do to the suitors by delaying the appearance of Odyssey. He is not mentioned much after he arrives on the shores of Ithaca. There is much discussion of Telemachus and Laertes by Odyssey when he shows up, but little interest in his wife. The reason for this is perhaps to create suspense before he deals with his enemies. We eagerly anticipate what will become of them and how Odyssey will dispense with them at the end of the story. Finally, the decisive moment occurs for the suitors, and they all perish. But the curtain closes not with Odyssey and Penelope hand in hand. Close by is the aged father. Front and center are Odyssey, his son, and Athena. His wife Penelope is nowhere to be found. The tale has been told, the actors take their bows, and the Odyssey has ended (Scott 405).
So there you have it. The curtain closes leaving us wondering what true or merely fiction in the tale we just read is. In fact, much of the Odyssey is fictional. But it is a nonfictional event mainly because the third person narrator tells us it is true. As a faithful audience, we accept what the narrator tells us as authentic. Why? Because he is the narrator and whether he is telling a lie or his characters are means little. We are wrapped up in the fictional facts of the tale. The story is a good one. Who cares whether it contains historical truth. The truth lies in the theme or themes of the work: the struggle of humanity to survive under daily war conditions. We identify with the heroes and their struggle. We see many things happening in the world today that Homer presents in his fictional facts. The tale speaks to us.
What is going on in the epic is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is playful. The narrator enjoys putting us in an audience identity crisis. The effect on the audience of outright lies alerts us that the actual truth value of this narrative is not so meaningful (Richardson 405). The message that it conveys about the fact that the manner in which people relate to each other has not changed much in the past three thousand years. The more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same. That archetypal truth in itself is valuable even though it is fictional truth.
This concept of truth, stranger than fiction, leaves us with the initial assumption, that humanity has not changed. The gods of Mount Olympus are no longer around in our human consciousness, but the reality of the pain and suffering that war causes is still very real. This pain is neither fictional nor a figment of our imagination, although Hollywood would prefer it to be to increase their financial bottom line. Today, the pain of war is as real as the refugees who are on their own epic journey to escape the ravages of war on our globe. The pain and reality of suffering caused by it can be as graphic as in the Odyssey. There is no Athena to protect the innocent or the heroic. There is no Zeus to negotiate peace. There are no gods to invoke safety in the nuclear age. We stand alone as humans before the abyss of annihilation on our own with no help from Olympus. Odyssey had a decided advantage.
Works Cited
Denham, Robert D., and Thomas Willard. Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye's Criticism. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Print.
Gress, David R. "The Drama of Modern Western Identity." Orbis. 41.4 (1997): 525-544. Print.
Hall, Edith. The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey. London: I.B. Tauris,2008. Print.
Homer, , and Stanley Lombardo. Odyssey. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 2000. Print.
Johnson, Claudia, and Vernon Johnson. Understanding the Odyssey: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Print.
Morris, Ian, and Barry B. Powell. A New Companion to Homer. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Print.
Початок форми
Perrin, B, "The Odyssey Under Historical Source-Criticism." The American Journal of Philology. 8.4 (1887): 415-432. Print.
Кінець форми
Richardson, Scott. “The Devious Narrator of the ‘Odyssey’.” The Classical Journal 101. 4 (2006): 337. Web. 6 Feb. 2016. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/30038015>.
Richardson, Scott. “Truth in the Tales of the ‘Odyssey’.” Mnemosyne 49.4 (1996): 393–402. Web. 6 Feb. 2016. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/44326333>.
Rutherford, R. B. “Homer's Man of Pain.” The Classical Review 41.1 (1991): 9–10. Web. 6 Feb. 2016. < http://philpapers.org/rec/RUTHMO>.
Schein, Seth L. ed. Reading the Odyssey. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1996. Print.
Scott, John A. “The Close of the ‘Odyssey’.” The Classical Journal 12.6 (1917): 397–405. Web. 6 Feb. 2016. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/3288384>.
“The Study Club: Odyssey as a Hero.” The English Journal 11.2 (1922): 115–117. Web. 6 Feb. 2016. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/802063>.
