Odysseus in America (15 page)

(10:484ff, Fagles)

And it is impossible to avoid the emotional impact of the cosmic she-evil of Scylla, the six-headed man-eating monster in the narrow strait across from a giant whirlpool, Charybdis, also gendered female. When facing such powerful female malevolence, Circe says—run for your life:

That nightmare [Scylla] cannot die, being eternal
evil itself—horror, and pain, and chaos;
there is no fighting her, no power can fight her,
all that avails is flight.

(12:139f, Fitzgerald)

Our encounter here with Circe merely opens a theme we shall meet again and again in the chapters that follow.

Veterans carry the weight of friends' deaths
in
war and
after
war, and the weight of all those irretrievable losses among the living that, like the dead, can never be brought back. When Circe tells Odysseus that their homeward route takes them through Hades, the House of Death, Odysseus says, “So she … crushed the heart inside me” (10:546, Fagles). Who has ever heard of anyone coming back alive from Death? It is his longest single “adventure.”
¹

Homer enlarges our understanding of what is conventionally called “survivor guilt “
²
—the lesson being in the contrast—Odysseus' almost complete
absence of moral pain, guilt, self-reproach, and self-criticism.

His encounter in the Underworld with the great Ajax is particularly revealing. In courage, self-sacrifice, combat leadership, fighting skill, and fortitude, Ajax was second only to Achilles in the entire Greek army His strength and giant stature were legendary, as was his unadorned, simple, and almost tongue-tied manner of speech. By contrast, Odysseus is glib and tricky-tongued. Ajax was a man of deeds, not words. When Achilles was killed, his corpse and armor were saved from the enemy. The armor was awarded during a grand assembly as a prize of honor to—honey-tongued Odysseus! Afterward, in humiliation and rejection, Ajax suffers a psychotic break in which a corral full of consecrated animals becomes—in his delusion—the hated top leadership, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and their henchmen. He kills them all. When he snaps out of his delusion surrounded by the slaughtered sacred animals, he is doubly humiliated, religiously defiled, and kills himself by falling on his sword.
³

Phaeacian Court

Raid on Ismarus

Lotus Land

Cyclops

King of the Winds

Deadly Fjord

Circe

Among the Dead

Sirens

Scylla and Charybdis

Sun God's Cattle

Whirlpool

Calypso

At Home, Ithaca

This is how Odysseus tells his encounter with Ajax, the suicide, in the underworld:

Only the ghost of Great Ajax …
kept his distance, blazing with anger at me still
for the victory I had won … that time
I pressed my claim for the arms of Prince Achilles.
…

(11:620-43, Fagles)

Would to god I'd never won such trophies!
All for them the earth closed over Ajax,
that proud hero Ajax …
greatest in build, greatest in works of war….
I cried out to him now, I tried to win him over.
‘Ajax … still determined,
even in death, not once to forget that rage
you train on me for those accursed arms?
The Gods set up that prize to plague the [Greeks]—
so great a tower of strength we lost when you went down!
…

Zeus sealed your doom.
Come closer, king, and listen to my story.
Conquer your rage, your blazing, headstrong pride!'
So I cried out but Ajax answered not a word.

In the value system of warrior heroism constructed by the
Iliad—
which Achilles and Ajax embodied—there was only one choice for who should receive the arms of the dead Achilles as the army's prize of honor, and that was Ajax. Exactly how Odysseus weaseled it for himself doesn't matter. He never should have competed for them, and never should have used his
mētis
to win them.
⁴
I hear his apparently large-spirited attempt to make peace with the shade of Ajax—he cannot bring him back to life!—as posturing for the Phaeacian audience to show his superiority to Ajax. In the honor code of the
Iliad,
Odysseus' generosity to his defeated rival is actually a kind of further put-down.

The lyric poet Pindar, who is closely associated with the pan-Hellenic athletic “tour,” of which the Olympic Games are the best known today,
composed the following bitter lines about Odysseus' “sophistry” in cheating Ajax out of his arms:

Sophistry [lit., “persuasion with hostile intent”] was rank then too,
Mongering fictions, two-hearted, cultivating its vile sleights.
It desolates all splendor, then for obscurity
Raises some hollow monument.
⁵

(
Nemean
8, lines 32-34, Mullen, trans.)

The Olympics were contested with Achilles, so to speak, as their tutelary spirit. Professor Gregory Nagy writes,

We know from ancient sources that the traditional ceremony inaugurating … [the Olympic Games] centers on Akhilleus: on the day before the Games are to begin, the local women of Elis, the place where the Olympics were held, fix their gaze on the sun as it sets into the Western horizon—and begin ceremonially to weep for the hero.
⁶

Pindar glorifies Achilles and treats us to visions of Achilles running down deer and lions at age six, and enumerates his combat kills to glorify him.
⁷
Straightforward Achilles survived as the culture hero, not tricky-tongued Odysseus.

Sophocles, and the other Athenian tragic poets, detested Odysseus as a sleazy ass-kisser to the powerful Agamemnon and Menelaus, according to Homer scholar W. B. Stanford.
⁸
In the Athenian poets' eyes he is “quibbling, unscrupulous, corrupt, ambitious, self-serving, sophistic, rejoicing to make the worse argument appear the better.”
⁹
Stanford's chapter title on how the Athenian tragic poets presented Odysseus says it all: “Stage Villain.” Their hostility has been attributed variously to the politics of the day, pandering to popular prejudice, and dramatic utility. Euripides' portrait of Odysseus is “without a redeeming feature.”
¹⁰
However, I believe much of this attitude is explained by the simple fact that
all
the practitioners of Athenian tragedy—as indeed was everyone in the audience—were themselves combat veterans. Aeschylus fought at Marathon (his brother was killed there), Plataea, and Salamis; Sophocles was elected general at least twice—and this was no mere popularity contest, slanted by his successful theater pieces. The voters' lives depended on his skill and leadership during the revolt of Samos in 441.
¹¹

Having rejected Odysseus' remorse over Ajax's suicide as insincere, I cannot use his visit to the Underworld as a metaphor for survivor guilt—except
by way of contrast Typically, survivors of horrible trauma consider their
own
pain unworthy compared to that of others who “had it worse.” According to Army veteran Mary Garvey, women who served in the Vietnam era, but who were never in country, include women who—

are very very affected … and not just the women who were there … who are of course very very very affected … but women who weren't … and feel that therefore their feelings, in fact their PTSD, are not legitimate….” I only was a nurse in a burn unit in Japan.” I only was a nurse in a psychiatric ward in the States. I only met the coffins at the Air Force base. I only worked with the medical films taken of the wounded. I only was a stewardess and delivered them there. I only typed up the lists of the dead. Or from yours truly, I only sent them off to die.
¹²

Placing one's self in a “hierarchy of suffering” to ones own disadvantage is widespread among trauma survivors. I have written about this phenomenon among Vietnam combat veterans in
Achilles in Vietnam.
¹³

Elpenor, the most recently dead among Odysseus' crew, greets him in the Underworld. He has died unheroically the morning of Odysseus' departure from Circe's palace, snapping his neck in an accidental fall from the flat roof where he had been sleeping. Either Odysseus was unaware of his death, or after lingering a year at Circe's table and in her bed was suddenly in too much of a hurry to give him a proper cremation and burial.
¹⁴
The ghost of Elpenor begs Odysseus to give him these rites, which will allow him to rest in death, rather than wander painfully through all eternity:

You and your ship will put ashore again
… [at Circe's island] … then and there,
my lord,
remember me,
I beg you! Don't sail off
and desert me, left behind unwept, unburied, don't….
No, burn me in full armor, all my harness,
heap my mound by the churning gray surf—
a man whose luck ran out—
so even men to come will learn my story.
Perform my rites, and plant on my tomb that oar
I swung with mates when I rowed among the living.

(11:77ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, no matter how humble and undistinguished, abhor being
forgotten.
Elpenor wrests a promise from Odysseus to cremate and bury him with full military honors. Odysseus can't brush this aside, coming from a ghost:
¹⁵

‘All this, my unlucky friend,' I assured him, ‘I will do for you.
I won't forget a thing.'

(11:87f, Fagles; emphasis added)

The families of combat veterans, and sometimes even their therapists, demand in frustration, “Why can't you put it behind you?
Why can't you just forget it?”
Odysseus' vow, “I won't forget a thing,” is the vow of a combat soldier to his dead comrades to keep faith with them, to keep their memory alive. Bewildered families, hurt and feeling cheated by the amount of energy their veterans pour into dead comrades, apparently do not realize that to forget the dead dishonors the living veteran. In asking the veteran to forget, the family asks him to dishonor himself. For anyone, civilian or veteran, to be told to do something dishonorable usually evokes
anger.
Imagine, for example, that your mother has died within the last year or so, and your spouse or your employer says to you, “Just forget about her.”

The resuscitative function of memory—bringing the dead back to life—takes many, often unrecognized forms. Intractable guilt, rage, or grief, sometimes serves this honorable purpose of keeping faith with the dead. Many a well-meaning therapist has stumbled onto an exploding land mine of rage from a veteran by making the well-intended, supportive remark, “You don't have to feel guilty about that.”

One of the founders of the modern trauma field, Yael Danieli, who has worked mainly with Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren, observed the four “existential functions of guilt”: to deny helplessness; to keep the dead alive by making them ever present in thought; to sustain loyalty to the dead; and to affirm that the world is still a just place where someone (even if only the guilt-ridden survivor alone) feels guilt at what was done.
¹⁶
Danieli's observations on guilt can equally be extended to grief and to rage. Grief rejects helpless acquiescence to the rupture of attachment and affirms that someone is still attached to the dead and still cares that they ever lived. Rage affirms that someone will still avenge the dead or at least never forgive those responsible. The other three functions are the same as for guilt.

Odysseus' encounter with dead comrades in Hades can be seen as a
metaphor for the pervasive presence of the dead in the inner worlds of some combat veterans. They are truly “haunted.” I have thought long and hard about how such haunting can be prevented, and now believe that the answer lies in changing the modern American military culture on grief. After battle, once it is safe enough for everyone to sleep, it's safe enough to grieve; and the unit should do this together, with the unit's direct leaders setting an example with their own tears.
¹⁷

What follows is my own narrative of a recent encounter with a veteran I have known for all fourteen years I have been with the VA.

The thirty-five-year-old flashbulb snap has a slightly greenish hue that makes the five young men look a bit sickly. In black-and-white photocopies that I make from it with the veteran's permission, the youth and health of these men is easier to see. They are unmarked, unscarred. It was taken five or so days before Christmas 1967 and a small plastic Christmas tree is just visible at the bottom of the photo like the trunk of a tree—the five young men arranged in a triangle above it are the tree's crown. The tropics—two of the five are not wearing; shirts. The flash picture, indoors, washes out the youngster closest to the lens, so I have to make the photocopies darker to see the trooper in front and lighter to see the one in back.