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

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      The agonizing suspense in which the royal family, the Suitors, and the populace have been languishing is vividly evoked by means of a story we hear during these first few books of the Odyssey, the books from which Odysseus himself is absent. The tale, which concerns the best known of the ruses that Penelope has employed to keep the Suitors at bay, has an obvious symbolic meaning. The queen, one of the Suitors angrily complains, had once promised to marry one of them at last, but only after she finished weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, the decrepit old man who now glumly tends his farmstead far from the scene of his absent son’s humiliation. The Suitors agreed to her plan; but every night, in secret, the cunning queen would unravel what she had woven during the day, thereby indefinitely postponing the completion of her handiwork. This deceit worked for several years, until one of Penelope’s maids, a faithless girl who’s been sleeping with one of the Suitors, exposed the ruse. The Suitors confronted the queen, who was then forced to complete the shroud. Since then—all this, we learn, took place three years before the Odyssey begins, three years before the moment when the prince sits helpless and forlorn in his hall, wishing his father could miraculously appear—the queen has disappeared into her chambers.

      This story tells us a great deal about Penelope’s desperation—and about her cunning, which is every bit a match for her husband’s well-known wiles. But even more, the weaving and unweaving, knotting and then loosening, speeding and then delaying, beautifully capture the torpor, the lack of forward motion, that characterizes life on Ithaca during Odysseus’ long absence. This seesawing, the surf-like back-and-forth, is, too, the rhythm of the Odyssey itself: the forward push of the plot, the backward pull of the flashbacks, of the backstories and digressions without which the main narrative would seem thin, insubstantial.

      So the great epic of travel, of voyages, of journeying, begins with its characters frozen in place. The unwholesome sense of stalemate that characterizes that state of affairs on Ithaca also raises a number of questions that are, in essence, literary. How to start the poem? Where does a story begin? How do you put an end to the past and turn it into the present?

      One answer to that question is, By an act of will. After the proem ends, the action moves to the lofty peaks of Mount Olympus, the heavenly home of the gods, where Athena, moved by pity for her favorite mortal, prods her father, Zeus, to break the ten-year-long deadlock. Recalling his affection for the wily mortal, the king of the gods agrees. The divine plan to get Odysseus home will have two parts. First, Hermes, the messenger god, will hasten to the island where the lovesick nymph Calypso has been holding Odysseus captive for the past seven years, and there he will order her to let her prisoner go. But this scene is, in fact, postponed until Book 5—the book in which the action will finally pick up Odysseus’ story. Until then, the poem is preoccupied with the other part of the divine plan, which unfolds on Ithaca and involves the hero’s son.

      After flying down to the island kingdom, Athena infiltrates the palace disguised as an old friend of Odysseus’ called Mentes; slipping into the banquet hall where the Suitors are feasting and dancing, she contrives to meet Prince Telemachus. (The youth’s name means “the far-off warrior”: the son who defines himself by the absence of his father has a name that recalls both the absence and the reason for it.) As he politely converses with the disguised Athena, Telemachus bitterly betrays his insecurities, which run very deep indeed: at one point, he sulks that although his mother, Penelope, has always insisted that Odysseus is his father, he can’t know for sure. After pausing to remark on the “outrageous arrogance” of the Suitors’ insulting behavior, Athena seeks to assuage the young man’s anxieties. She assures him, first, that Odysseus is not at all dead but in fact alive on an island, being held captive by “savage men” (with amusing delicacy, she edits out the lovely nymph Calypso); she comments, too, on the young man’s strong physical resemblance to his father: the head, those fine eyes …

      But the best medicine for him, she knows, would be to act, and so she takes him in hand. First, she says, he should call a council of Ithaca’s citizens and “speak his mind” to them: “command the Suitors to scurry back home!” Then she tells him to get hold of a ship and travel to the homes of two of his father’s wartime companions, Nestor, the elderly king of Pylos, and Menelaus, husband of Helen and king of Sparta:

       If you hear your father lives and is returning home,

       then have the patience to wait out one full year:

       but if you hear that he has died and is no more

       then come you home to your beloved fatherland

       and build a tomb for him and heap it high

       with grave-goods, as befits him, and marry off your mother.

      This passage, in fact, lays out the plots of the Odyssey’s next three books. In Book 2, Telemachus will call the long-overdue assembly of the citizens of Ithaca and confront the Suitors in the presence of the people. In Book 3 he leaves home for the first time in his life, sailing to Pylos, where he meets Nestor and learns a little about his father’s wartime activities; in Book 4 he travels from Pylos to Sparta, where he finds Menelaus and Helen living in great splendor, both of them full of reminiscences about Odysseus’ cleverness and gumption.

      All of which is to say that during the first four books of the epic, Odysseus’ son will have his own adventures at last. These travels will allow him to share in the experiences that, according to the proem, Odysseus has had: “to see the cities and know the minds of men.” In this way, the poem ingeniously reassures Telemachus that he is, indeed, his father’s son.

      To this unexpected but suggestive opening section, as to certain other episodes of the Odyssey, tradition has assigned a name. Just as Ilias, the Iliad, is a song about Ilion (another name for Troy), just as Odysseia, the Odyssey, is a song about Odysseus, so Telemakheia, the Telemachy—the title of the epic’s first major section—is a song about Telemachus. As the trajectory of these four books suggests, they tell the story of how an absent father’s child starts to learn about his parent, and about the world.

      It is the story of a son’s education.

       I just don’t see why he’s supposed to be such a great hero!

      It was eleven-fifteen on the morning of January 28, 2011, about an hour into the first meeting of Classics 125: The Odyssey of Homer. Since we’d sat down, my father hadn’t stopped complaining about Odysseus.

      He’d gotten to my house at nine. Although the weather was bad, he’d insisted on driving. It would be easier to drive than to take two trains, he’d said over the phone a few days earlier, which of course wasn’t true; but then, my father had never liked being a passenger. Earlier that morning, as I waited for him to arrive, I’d pictured him moving cautiously through the heavy snow in his big white car, wearing one of the baggy white sweaters that he favored. In order to get to campus with a little time to spare before class started, at ten past ten, he would have had to leave his house on Long Island well before seven; and although he didn’t say so, I was aware that this added element of hardship, of discomfort, made the idea of driving more attractive to him. If it isn’t hard, it’s not worth doing. I could already hear the boastful complaint that he’d be making the following week to his buddies at Town Bagel, Ralph and Milton and Lenny and the others, as they sat at the bright orange Formica tables, the giant Styrofoam cups of coffee steaming in front of them while they talked, as they had done every morning for many years, about the usual things: their wives and children and divorces and grandchildren, the Mets and the Giants, the arthritis СКАЧАТЬ