An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn

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СКАЧАТЬ math and science whizzes went. But I couldn’t remember the rest of the story, and didn’t know why he hadn’t gone to the best school.

      So it was a very good school, my father was saying. There weren’t many of us who were taking Latin, so the program depended on us! But we didn’t go the distance. And I think that a couple of years after that spring, Latin just petered out and died.

      You could see that it still bothered my father, after all those years—the way he and his classmates had rejected the teaching of the mild-mannered German Jew who’d come so far with only this rarefied knowledge to give. You could see, when he told this story, that he was still angry with himself for the way in which, having come so far himself in his study of the ancient language, he’d failed to travel the final leg of his classical journey and read the greatest work in that language—a work about a man who rescues his aged father from the burning ruins of his vanquished city and then travels far to a new and unknown land, carefully keeping both his father and his young son in tow, in order to make a new life with them there. Aeneas, that paragon of filial dutifulness; which quality, as my father knew well, is no trivial thing.

      When I was a child and first heard the story of my father’s failure to pursue Latin—and, even later, when I was in college and then graduate school and the subject of higher education or advanced degrees or Classics would come up, which would occasion his telling this tale again, speaking in the slightly musing way that he had, almost as if by telling it over and over he might finally understand why the rest of his life had come out the way it had—when I was young and used to hear this story, I was so taken with the drama and the poignancy of it, the poor German Jew and his narrow escape, the heedless teenagers looking longingly out the windows on a warm day in New York City just after the end of the war, indifferent to the riches of the past, above all the almost unbearable image of a teacher filled with knowledge that no one wanted, that it never occurred to me to ask why my father would have given up studying a subject at which he had excelled, had been a star; just as it hadn’t occurred to me to ask why such a star had ended up in the second-best school.

      A lonely boy sits off to the side of a crowded room, dreaming of his absent father.

      The boy is Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. Two decades have passed since his father left for Troy, never to be heard from again. Since then, the palace has been overrun by dozens of young men from Ithaca and the islands beyond who, assuming that Odysseus is long since dead, are courting the still-beautiful Penelope, hoping to become her husband and assume the kingship of Ithaca. But their presence there constitutes a grotesque violation of the laws both of courtship and of marriage: for instead of observing custom, instead of bringing offerings and bride gifts to Penelope, they have made themselves at home in her palace, draining its stores of food and wine, carousing day and night, seducing the servant girls. The social fabric of the island kingdom has frayed, too, its government ground to a standstill. Some citizens are still loyal to the absent king, but others have chosen to throw their lot in with the Suitors; meanwhile, no assembly of the island’s citizens has been held since Odysseus left.

      The missing king’s family is falling apart. The dejected queen has withdrawn to her chambers above the banquet hall, having long since exhausted her repertoire of tricks designed to keep the Suitors at bay: as the pressure mounts daily for her to make a choice, she swoons and weeps. As for Odysseus’ careworn father, Laertes, he is so disgusted by the mayhem in the palace that he

       no longer comes down into town,

       but toils alone in the countryside, far from men;

       an old woman-servant is there to serve him food and drink

       when his arms and legs are gripped by weariness

       from scrabbling up and down the vineyard’s slopes.

      So not only is Telemachus’ father gone, but his father’s father has vanished, too. The melancholy youth now teeters at the brink of manhood with no one to show him the way.

      This is how the Odyssey begins: the hero himself nowhere in sight, the crises precipitated by his absence taking center stage. However long the proem of the Odyssey actually is—ten lines, twenty-one lines—it turns out to be misleading: despite its promise to tell us about “a man,” the fact is that this man appears at first only as a memory, a ghost about whom we hear stories, reminiscences, rumors. He’s on his way home, someone says; someone else recalls having glimpsed him back in Troy, disguised as a beggar on a spying mission. Another, rather unsavory story surfaces: Ah yes, Odysseus, he once came looking for some poisoned arrows. (These, we understand, are not at all the weapons that noble warriors are supposed to use.) The rumors whirl and eddy, but the hero himself—“the man”—is nowhere to be seen, either on Ithaca or in Homer’s narrative. And all the while, the wife weeps, the populace seethes, the son daydreams hopelessly. It’s as if the Muse had mischievously decided to take the words of the proem literally—to begin at random, at “some point or another,” and that starting point turns out to be a different one altogether from the one we had expected.

      It is hard not to feel that Homer’s decision to obscure and blur and postpone our view of the epic’s main character is designed to pique our curiosity about this shadowy figure, who, in these crucial first pages, seems to lurk at the far edges of his own story, curiously small and difficult to make out, like one of those tiny figures in a Dutch painting that you risk not noticing at all because your eye is drawn to the painting’s ostensible subject, the figure in the foreground, and only when you peer at the picture more closely do you realize that this smaller, more distant, even partial shape is of deeper interest after all, is the element that will reward the closest study—is, perhaps, the painting’s true subject. The most famous example of this visual sleight of hand is a painting called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by the Netherlandish master Pieter Brueghel, which hangs in a museum in Brussels and takes as its subject another of antiquity’s many father-son dramas: the myth of the great inventor Daedalus and his son Icarus, who sought to fly on artificial wings made of feathers bound by wax. In the best-known version of the myth, which appears in a poem by Ovid, Daedalus warns his son not to fly too high, since the sun’s warmth will melt the wax; but the heedless son, giddy with excitement, disobeys his father, soars too high, loses his wings, and crashes into the sea. With poignant irony, Brueghel’s canvas illustrates the split second in time just after Icarus has fallen: the painting is almost entirely taken up by the shore and the sea and, especially, by three peasants who go about their business, plowing, herding, and fishing, utterly unaware of the catastrophe—the only sign of which is a tiny detail off in the corner, which turns out to be poor Icarus’ legs waggling pathetically just above the waterline. In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.

      The character who stands front and center as the Odyssey begins, and who remains the center of our attention during its first four books, is the person who slowly gathers all the rumors, gossip, and stories: Odysseus’ son. When we meet him, a little after the proem ends, Telemachus cuts a melancholy figure. He is, Homer says, “sorrowing in his heart” as he sits forlornly in the great hall of the royal palace at Ithaca, watching powerlessly as the Suitors laugh and feast uproariously around him. Having no idea how to assert himself, Odysseus’ only child is reduced to helpless fantasies,

       picturing his noble father in his mind, wishing that

       he’d come and sweep the Suitors from the house!

      The problem is not simply that no one knows for sure just where his noble father is; the greater dilemma is that СКАЧАТЬ