The Odyssey Reconsidered

Questions abound regarding the authorship of this most famous of clasical texts.  What strikes me most immediately, having just read The Odyssey for the first time in nearly twenty years, is the deliberate artfulness at work in the narrative framework of the story, which seems instinctively to me to be the handiwork of a single visionary poet.  "Homer," I would guess, is not just a concept, but a real person who once lived and breathed as you and I do.  Whether his name was really Homer and whether he was really blind -- those issues may be uncertain, but they are also more or less irrelevant.  What we have here is a fine display of the poetic craft, and poetry is written by a poet.

My own relatively uneducated guess (I haven't read up on this topic) would be that Odysseus' recounting of his travels in Books 9 to 12 -- the most famous stuff, about the Cyclopes and the Sirens and dreadful Scylla and Charybdis -- is lifted pretty straight from the oral tradition.  Much of the narrative is clipped and lacking in the rich descriptive detail that characterizes the rest of the poem.  It's especially interesting to note that the episode with the Sirens is given a few brief and relatively straightforward stanzas.  The destruction of three-fourths of Odysseus' men at the hands of the Laestrygonians occurs in the blink of a poetic eye.

Perhaps, then, the project that Homer engaged himself in was that of constructing an elaborate framework to embellish the meaning of the pre-existing text, which was perhaps an oral and never, to this point, a written text.  Another possibility is that someone else added the material in books 9 to 12 after Homer had written the rest, with the goal of making sure that the popular elements of the story left out by the poet made their way into the text.  We can never know, but it is certainly true that the style is flattened out greatly in this section of the poem, and there is little of the distinguishing genius of the rest of the story at work here, a lesser expenditure of poetic energy.  What is present, however, is archetypal story material with a tremendously enduring appeal.  Maybe the events recounted have enough to them to speak for themselves.

Other epics begin in medias res, but The Odyssey takes things a step beyond that by giving us the Telemachiad and then, after Odysseus' return, the lengthy matter of our hero reclaiming his wife and his home.  The most powerful literary element of this epic, though, is the constant presence of Agamemnon -- in flashback, or as a ghost -- to remind us of what is at stake for Odysseus.  Agamemnon is a richly developed foil for Odysseus, and among the highlights of The Odyssey are Odysseus' encounter with Agamemnon in Hades and the conversation between Agamemnon and the ghosts of the dead suitors in Hades.  Agamemnon's tragedy highlights the poignancy of Odysseus' comedy and gives it a greater sense of dimension.

The soldier coming home, we are well aware now, faces challenges of all kinds in readjusting to life at home.  Things have changed while the warrior was away.  What is moving to me about the story of wily Odysseus is the nature of his quest.  Other options -- including immortality -- present themselves to him, but all he wants is to return home, to his family, to his people -- to his birthright, his identity.  There's a timeless appeal to this notion, which is at the heart of all adventures.