What is the Odyssey about?

Fathers & Sons

This piece would usually be paywalled, but while I work out the conditions of my visa I am keeping the paywall off of posts like this for now. I shall update you soon. My thanks for your forbearance.

The next Jane Austen book club will now be on 28th September not 7th September. On 14th September the Shakespeare book club will discuss All’s Well That Ends Well.

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Summarising the Odyssey, Aristotle wrote:

Thus the story of the Odyssey can be stated briefly. A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight—suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tost, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them. This is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode.

This is all well and good as far as it goes; but it is missing the most important thing about the Odyssey: it is a quest in which sons go in search of their fathers. Peter Leithart, summarising Ulysses, an Odyssean novel, says this:

Stephen is looking for a father, and Bloom has lost his son. That broken paternal-filial setting comes from the Homeric background, with Stephen playing the role of Telemachus mourning an absent father. Throughout this book, this is overlaid with constant references to Hamlet. Stephen is a brooding Hamlet at the beginning of the story. He has lost his mother rather than his father, and sees her ghost. Stephen’s family situation continues the story of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen’s search for a father, the rupture and reconciliation with a father is a key to his artistic development.

Joyce understands. The Odyssey is about the fact that, in Athena’s words, (in Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation),

Few are the sons and heirs who can measure up to their fathers;
Most are worse by far, and few are those who can best them.

We think of the Odyssey as the tale of Odysseus’s thwarted journey home. We think of him as the figure of the Tennyson poem,

For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

This complicated man: he must love the journey. One reason he doesn’t go back to Penelope more quickly, is because he is also going back to Laertes, his father. Once he has killed the suitors occupying his home, Odysseus continues his journey to Laertes.

Meanwhile, Odysseus
Drew close to the flourishing vineyard as he continued his search.
But as he went down to the great orchard he failed to find Dolios
Or his sons, or a single slave—it turned out they had gone off
To gather up stones from the field for a wall that would enclose
The orchard, and the old man was leading the way for them.
But he did find his father, alone…

His father, alone. Before going to look for his father, Odysseus tells his companions, “I will go and put my father to the test/ To see if he’ll recognise me…” Odysseus finds Laertes, a former king, old and bent, wearing protective clothes while he gardens. This is one of the most moving passages in the whole poem. I shall quote first Samuel Butler’s version

He had on a dirty old shirt, patched and very shabby; his legs were bound round with thongs of oxhide to save him from the brambles, and he also wore sleeves of leather; he had a goat skin cap on his head, and was looking very woe-begone. When Ulysses saw him so worn, so old and full of sorrow, he stood still under a tall pear tree and began to weep. He doubted whether to embrace him, kiss him, and tell him all about his having come home, or whether he should first question him and see what he would say. In the end he deemed it best to be crafty with him…

There is a plangent beauty to the plainness of this translation: to save him, woe-begone, so old and full of sorrow. But this scene can work, too, in a more highly wrought manner. Here is Pope.

But all alone the hoary king he found;
His habit coarse, but warmly wrapp’d around;
His head, that bow’d with many a pensive care,
Fenced with a double cap of goatskin hair:
His buskins old, in former service torn,
But well repair’d; and gloves against the thorn.
In this array the kingly gardener stood,
And clear’d a plant, encumber’d with its wood.

Beneath a neighbouring tree, the chief divine
Gazed o’er his sire, retracing every line,
The ruins of himself, now worn away
With age, yet still majestic in decay!
Sudden his eyes released their watery store;
The much-enduring man could bear no more.
Doubtful he stood, if instant to embrace
His aged limbs, to kiss his reverend face,
With eager transport to disclose the whole,
And pour at once the torrent of his soul.—
Not so: his judgment takes the winding way
Of question distant, and of soft essay;
More gentle methods on weak age employs:
And moves the sorrows to enhance the joys.

Hardly Pope’s best work: but oh how moving! Odysseus plays a trick on Laertes, pretending to be someone else, and Laertes does not quite recognise him at first, due to all the time that has passed. Laertes asks this traveller if he has news of his son, and, hearing that he may be dead “the father, with a father’s fears” says,

That hapless guest, alas! for ever gone!
Wretch that he was! and that I am! my son!
If ever man to misery was born,
’Twas his to suffer, and ’tis mine to mourn!

Poor Laertes! If only the ingrate Odysseus knew what he was putting his father through! My favourite translation, E.V. Rieu shows the scene thus:

When Laertes heard this, a black cloud of misery enveloped him. Groaning heavily, he picked the black dust up in both his hands and poured it over his grey head. Odysseus’ heart was touched, and suddenly, as he watched his dear father, a sharp spasm of pain shot through his nostrils. He rushed forward, flung his arms round his neck, and kissed him. ‘Father,’ he cried, ‘here I am, the very man you asked about, home in my own land after twenty years. But no more tears and lamentation, for I have news to tell you, and there is need for haste.’

Odysseus has come home, seen his wife, established himself, and now, after his final honourable task—the killing of the suitors who are parasites on his house—he has come back to his father, the model of honour and kingship. Just as Telemachus looks to Odysseus, looks for Odysseus, so Odysseus ends up looking to Laertes. His pity is evoked because he suddenly sees himself in his father. Look again at these four lines from Pope.

Beneath a neighbouring tree, the chief divine
Gazed o’er his sire, retracing every line,
The ruins of himself, now worn away
With age, yet still majestic in decay!

See what Pope is saying: “retracing every line,/ The ruins of himself”. Himself is presumably Laertes, a reference back to “sire”; but it can also be read as a reference to Odysseus, seeing himself in his ageing father. All the time that has passed is suddenly witnessed in the majestic decay of the old man. In Laertes ageing, Odysseus sees his own ageing. This ambiguity is missing from Butler, and from Mendelsohn, in their plain translations. Mendelsohn has:

Thus, when the noble Odysseus, who’d endured so much, saw him
Worn down by old age, his mind weighed down by grief,
He went and stood by a lofty pear tree as his tears began to flow.

Pope may not have intended the ambiguity, but it is surely there; even though Mendelsohn provides a standard account, it is missing this crucial element. The rest may be accurate to the passage, but Pope is true to the spirit of the whole poem.

Tennyson’s Ulysses says, of Telemachus, “He works his work, I mine.” But in fact, one of the final things written in the Odyssey is of the reunion of Odysseus, Laertes, and Telemachus, fighting together, as honour dictates.

They were now joined by Athene, Daughter of Zeus, who had assumed Mentor’s appearance and voice. The patient, good Odysseus was overjoyed to see her. He turned at once to his dear son and said: ‘Telemachus, when you find yourself in the thick of battle, where the best men prove their mettle, you will soon learn how not to disgrace your father’s house. In all the world there has been none like ours for courage and manliness.’

And the thoughtful Telemachus replied: ‘If you care to, father, you will see me in my present mood by no means disgracing my father’s house, as you put it.’

Laertes was delighted. ‘Dear gods!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a day this is to warm my heart! My son and grandson competing in valour!’

Fathers and sons are the predominant relationships of the Odyssey. The Odyssey begins with Telemachus deciding to go on a journey to find his father; indeed this is the subject of the first five books; and it ends with Odysseus coming home to discover his father, and all three of them united in valour. The first four books are full of discussion about Telemachus finding his father. At the end, when Odysseus tells Penelope the tale of his adventures — Kikones, Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, Aiolos— he says that “fate would not yet let him reach/The beloved land of his forefathers”. When they fight the suitors, there is a small sequence that re-enacts in miniature this idea that the journey is towards the father:

Amphinomos then burst out at glorious Odysseus.
Darting in front of him, he pulled out his sharpened sword,
Hoping to get Odysseus away from the door. But Telemakhos
Was too quick: he dealt him a blow from behind with his bronze-tipped spear,
Right between the shoulders, driving it straight through his chest.
With a thunderous thud he fell, flat on his face, to the ground.
Telemakhos sprang back up, leaving his long-shadowed spear
Right there, inside Amphinomos—for he was terrified: what if
Some Achaean came out of nowhere and ran him through with a sword
As he pulled out the long-shadowed spear, or struck him down as he stopped there?
So he started to run, and swiftly reached his beloved father.

In his Introduction, Mendelsohn lists the other father-son relationships: Poseidon makes trouble for Odysseus because the Cyclops is his son; in Hades, Achilles asks Odysseus whether his son Neoptolemos has lived up to his expectations: “Did he follow me into the war as the foremost fighter, or not?” The final scene includes the fathers of the slain suitors, asking for justice. Mendelsohn calls this patriarchal, and perhaps it is; but that has been too much discussed in recent years; of course it is patriarchal: criticism wishes for knowledge that inhabits the poem, as well as taxonomising judgement.

The Odyssey’s many quests are one of literature’s earliest instances of the great theme: the pursuit of happiness. And that pursuit is centred on what, from Athene’s perspective in the first few books, is the whole impetus for the tale, and thus the aim of the poem: “To learn something of your father”.

As with all quests, the hero must come home, and see it all again as if for the first time, and know himself and it to be the same but also changed. He must see himself in his father and learn something of them both.