The Odyssey by Homer: Day 11
Book 8, lines 255-586
“It is funny—and unbearable.”
Hephaestus is emotionally ensnared by the painful success of his brilliant trap. Across these books, that relentless question persists: stories of our own suffering and the suffering of others—what do they have to do with one another? What are we to do with them?
I shudder at Arete’s helpful advice and its chilling premonition. Is Homer foreshadowing?
“Watch the lid, and tie it closed, / so nobody can rob you as you travel, / when you are lulled to sleep on your black ship.”
Odysseus uses the poet Demodocus as both his personal vessel of catharsis and his instrument of revelation. Here, the famed storyteller directs, even, the stories told by others. He is agent and subject of the tale. And his tears unleash one of the epic’s most involved similes: the explosive emotion of a new widow behind the studied self-possession of a man. Emotion here is at once private and public.
Join us on March 18 for a virtual discussion of The Odyssey with Stefania Heim
It's absolutely outrageous to me that the poet compares Odysseus' tears to that of a widowed woman about to be enslaved. Odysseus himself tells everybody that he was one of those widow-makers: he invaded the home of the Cicones, killed the men, and carried off the women. It's hard to have much empathy for this guy.
On the other hand, some of the worst cases of PTSD occur in men who have perpetrated atrocities and can't stop remembering them. We assume that Odysseus' tears are about his own losses, but maybe they are also tears of a man who has had time, like many vets, to consider what he did to other people. The books about American vets--Odysseus in America, and Achilles in Vietnam, by Jonathan Shay--explain this pretty well.
It may be that this is one of the most brilliantly ironic similes of all time: comparing a killer's tears to the tears of his victim. It implies that nobody wins, even the winners, in a war.
One aspect of this simile is pretty unbearable: the fact that even while the bereaved woman is screaming, the soldiers who killed her husband don't have time for it. They're already nudging her with spears to move along. This speaks to the fact that the born servant class, whoever they are, is never given time to grieve: get back to work immediately!
Sometimes soldiers are also not given time to grieve the loss of comrades, at least in modern warfare. Elite soldiers in Odysseus' time did take time off from war to stage elaborate funeral rituals, as Jonathan Shay notes. But Odysseus is not over it, because it's not about the death of comrades this time: it's about his own crimes. There is no ritual for that.
There's a passing mention of Deiphobus, one of Priam's sons, in the poet's song. I looked up Deiphobus. It seems that Odysseus and Menelaus went berserk and horribly mutilated the body of Deiphobus while killing him. Right after the poet mentions Deiphobus, Odysseus melts into tears. This is exactly the kind of memory, according to Shay, that vets can't shake: when they perpetrate unusual violence on the enemy, beyond that which is strictly necessary. In other words, when they commit atrocities. But again, somehow the blame is on the gods, in this case Athena.
The charming song about Aphrodite and Ares underlines Anne Carson's observation: "Gods, to their eternal chagrins, are comic." (Though, of course. Can Anne Carson ever be wrong!?)