Odysseus in America (26 page)

Did he experience any betrayal by his boss, Agamemnon, whom he served so loyally and so well? We don't know, but there's a hint that something went sour between Odysseus and Agamemnon after the fall of Troy, but before the fleet departed for home. Did Odysseus feel cheated in the division of the spoils? He was every bit as greedy for gain as his boss.
²⁶
We have to put two and two together ourselves. Here are the pieces:

In
Odyssey
Book 3, when Telemachus visits Nestor, we learn that a great split developed in the army after the fall of Troy over when to leave for home. Half, including Nestor and Odysseus, said, “We're outta here!” and sailed away, with Menelaus and Diomedes joining them. The other half stayed behind with Agamemnon to perform further sacrifices to Athena. The group that had headed home got only as far as Tenedos—an island about two and a half miles off the coast—before this group started to argue among themselves, too. Nestor speaking:

But Zeus, not willing yet,
now cruelly set us at odds a second time,
and one lot turned, put back in the rolling ships,
under command of the subtle captain, Odysseus;
their notion was to please Lord Agamemnon.

(3:173ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

We don't know what happened when Odysseus and the others who followed him got back to Troy, but
something
happened, because Odysseus leaves Troy a second time with only the ships of his own flotilla from Ithaca (9:44, Fagles). No other contingent leaves Troy with him, nor does Odysseus himself ever mention the contretemps with Agamemnon that Nestor recalls ten years later. Considering Odysseus' unswerving loyalty to Agamemnon throughout the
Iliad,
something very serious must have blown up between them before Odysseus' first departure from Troy. His final attempt to patch it up apparently failed.

To summarize the Trojan War-related “exposures” that Odysseus experienced that might plague him later as the constellation of symptoms designated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD:

• Many firefights involving both killing the enemy and witnessing combat deaths on his own side.

• One combat death of someone described as close.

• Two high-risk “special ops,” one involving his murdering a disarmed prisoner during interrogation behind enemy lines, and the other involving his self-injury to evade detection.

• An unclear history of being betrayed by his own commander after the fighting was over.

• After demobilization, but before reaching home, many personal close brushes with death, during which he witnessed the grisly end of more than six hundred men of his own squadron, some of whom were relatives. He inconsistently acknowledges and denies command responsibility in these deaths.

This litany of death could produce full-blown PTSD, as defined by the American Psychiatric Association, in just about anyone.

Did Odysseus have PTSD as the APA defines it? The simple answer to the question is—no. Neither the text of the
Iliad
nor of the
Odyssey
gives us evidence that Odysseus is having
symptoms
related to any of the above experiences. Nor do we have evidence that, despite these terrible
experiences, he responded to them with “intense fear, helplessness or horror.”
²⁷
Nor is it clear that the official definition of PTSD sheds much light on how horrible experience can deform character. In the Introduction I voiced my dissatisfaction with the official terminology.

I don't pretend to have infallible intuition about people, but sitting across from Odysseus in the VA Clinic, knowing his war history and his life afterward as a veteran, I have a whiff of something else, of pre-military trauma that settled him firmly in an I'll-get-them-before-they-get-me mentality before he even left for Troy. The most violent and intractable cases of combat trauma we have worked with in the VA Clinic have frequently experienced rapes or other severe abuse and neglect in childhood and/or adolescence prior to military service.

The scar on Odysseus' thigh, by which Eurycleia penetrates his cover, and by which he identifies himself to his father, strikes me as central to understanding Odysseus.

The recognition between the nurse and Odysseus is one of the great dramatic scenes in all of literature. It also gives us, with considerable detail, essential family and childhood background for Odysseus.
²⁸

Homer builds the suspense—will she? won't she recognize him?—she comments on his build, voice, and his feet, and says, “You're like Odysseus to the life!” as she adjusts the temperature of the foot bath. Odysseus has sudden misgivings about the risk of exposure and twists his body away from the firelight.

Bending closer
she started to bathe her master … then,
in a flash, she knew the scar—

(19:443ff, Fagles)

that old wound
made years ago by a boar's white tusk when Odysseus
went … to see Autolycus….

The man was his mother's noble father, one who excelled
the world in thievery, that and subtle, shifty oaths….

[The god] Hermes the ready partner in his crimes.

In a feat of dramatic chutzpah, Homer suspends the action for almost seventy lines in the original poem to tell the story of Odysseus' naming by his career-criminal grandfather Autolycus, and Odysseus' puberty (
hēbēsas,
410, orig.) visit with this same grandfather who nearly gets him killed on a boar hunt.
²⁹
Autolycus' name means “Lone Wolf” or “the Wolf Himself,”
³⁰
and as I pointed out above in the Introduction, the name that he gave the baby
means
“man of hate” or “he who sows trouble,” or simply “hate.”
³¹
The alternate name, Ulysses (in Greek, Oulixes), comes from his scar,
oule,
so he also has the name “scar.” Scholar Nancy Felson-Rubin calls the wild boar wounding episode as “the transformative moment in Odysseus' life-history,” relating it to culturally mandated rites of passage, and thus—we want to believe—essentially benign. The text supports this benign spin by reporting the splendid gifts showered on Odysseus afterward by his grandfather and the jolly celebration that his “happy parents” made when he got home. While I agree with Felson-Rubin that this episode was transformative, I see it as a darker transformation, when Odysseus concluded that
no one
is to be trusted, when he concluded that unless you beat them to it or get over on them first, other people only want to hurt, exploit, or humiliate you. Scholar Nancy Sultan frames it in a manner closer to how the ancient Greeks considered such things, as a matter of inheritance:

Indeed, Odysseus has acquired his thirst for “all kinds of
dolos
[cunning]” directly from his divine ancestors. He is descended from Hermes, the god of thieves, being born the grandson of Autolykos, the one who surpassed all men in the art of thievery (
Od.
19.394-397). In fact it would not be too difficult to see Odysseus as many of the
lēistores,
“pirates, robbers” we find in Homer. Telemachos tells us that Odysseus procured his entire estate by “raiding” (
lēissato Od.
1.397-398). In the male heroic society of Homeric poetry, it is expected and accepted to obtain anything, including women, by raiding.
³²

Scholar Erwin Cook ties it all together by pointing out that the darkly ambiguous “man of pain” designation for a hero crystallizes in the scarname Oulixes. He is named and defined by this scar. Cook proposes that we hear the name Ulysses as “He who was permanently scarred in youth.”
³³

The story of the scar may finally provide the answer to the much vexed question of Odysseus' cruelty to his father, Laertes, which seems completely unmotivated to many scholars and readers. A surprising, but extremely common, phenomenon arising from childhood trauma is the misdirection—or so it seems to most outside observers—of the most intense anger at the ineffectual bystander, rather than at the perpetrator of the trauma. Thus a woman who as a child was the target of incest by her father may hate her
mother
who failed to protect her with more vitriol than the father who raped her. Some Vietnam veterans, who volunteered to return to Vietnam after their first, not-voluntary combat tour, have told me
that they hated American civilians after their initial return far more fiercely than they hated the Vietnamese enemy in the war zone. The scar on Odysseus' thigh by which he identifies himself to his father
explains
his cruelty to his father. The scar is the lifelong and to him still valid token of his rage that his father failed to protect him from his villainous maternal grandfather.

The impact of these childhood experiences, and of the family system that produced them, was evident even before Odysseus left for Troy. There are dark shadows even then in his character. The opening scene of the
Odyssey
has the goddess Athena visit Telemachus disguised as Mentes, the lord of a nearby island. Mentes offers the boy advice and cheerful reminiscences of his father, including this one of Mentes' first meeting with Odysseus more than twenty years before:

[Odysseus had] just come in from … visiting Ilus …
hunting deadly poison to smear on his arrows' bronze heads.

(1:302ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

Ilus refused—
he feared the wrath of the everlasting gods—
but [Mentes' own] father … gave him all he wanted.

This passage is loaded with puzzles and ironies. The goddess, who has a special soft spot for Odysseus, tells this story about Odysseus doing something that is anathema to the gods, poisoning his arrows. What's more the story is told to Telemachus his son as an example of how praiseworthy his father is.

In this book and in
Achilles in Vietnam,
I have been far more interested in the effect of trauma on character and on the capacity for social trust than in lists of symptoms. The American Psychiatric Association has held out against the idea that horrible experience, especially caused by other people's betrayal, coercion, cruelty, or injustice, can wreck good character or produce bad character. If the expectation that other people plan only harm, exploitation, and humiliation produces a cynical “strike first” attitude, trauma can produce an active, self-starting predator. Odysseus' scar alerts us to the interconnection of childhood trauma, combat trauma, and a veteran's adult character.

The poem as we have it ends in Book 24 with the face-off between the posse of townsmen looking to carve up Odysseus for the two generations
of youth he has killed off or let die. They are roused by Eupithes, the father of the most vicious suitor, Antinous. His appeal to the townsmen is this:

My friends, what a mortal blow this man has dealt
to all our island people! Those fighters, many and brave,
he led away to his curved ships—he lost the ships
and he lost the men and back he comes again
to kill the best of our princes.

(24:471ff, Fagles)

Quick, after him! …
Up, attack! Or we'll hang our heads forever,
all disgraced, even by generations down the years,
if we don't punish the murderers of our brothers and sons!

He speaks the simple truth about the facts, and his appeal is to
tisis,
blood vengeance.
³⁴

On Mount Olympus, Zeus tells Athena, enough is enough, wipe everyone's memory and “Let them be friends…. Let peace and wealth come cresting through the land” (24:536ff, Fagles).

Against the posse three generations—Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus—stand shoulder to shoulder, with a few loyal retainers to back them up. Athena, of course, is on the scene in the guise of Mentor, but Odysseus recognizes her immediately. Despite Zeus' orders to her to force the two sides to make peace and an amnesty (amnesty literally means “forgetting”), Athena pumps up old Laertes to get off one shot that takes down Eupithes—“brandish your long spear and wing it fast” (24:572, Fagles). Odysseus and Telemachus charge, but now Athena uses her 250-decibel voice to stop everyone cold. The posse turns tail and runs. When Odysseus charges after them Zeus lands a lightning bolt and he stops. The last few lines tell us that peace reigns for years to come.

But the attentive listener/reader still remembers that in the Underworld, Teiresias had told Odysseus that he must leave again once he gets home, to tramp inland till he finds a place where the sea is unknown to perform sacrifices to his god-enemy, the sea god Poseidon. Odysseus has somberly repeated this to Penelope the previous night—their first and only night together in the whole epic. What a heartbreaking insight! After so much struggle, suffering, and loss to
get home,
he cannot
be home.

The prophet Teiresias has promised that the final trial done, he will enjoy a “ripe old age, with all your people there in blessed peace around
you” (11:155f, Fagles). Some of the men I work with, astonished to be alive now in their early to mid-fifties seem on the verge of finding this ability to be at home, here, now, with their partners, their grown children, and especially
grandchildren.

Odysseus has shown us how
not
to return home from war. It's been a grim picture with all the worst elements of the prejudiced Vietnam veteran stereotype. In this part of the book I will introduce two pictures of how those veterans who have been psychologically injured in combat can recover from those injuries.

The symptoms caused by psychological injury that the American Psychiatric Association calls PTSD
²
in its
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM) can be understood in one clear and simple concept: persistence of
valid adaptations to danger
into a time of safety afterward Reexperiencing symptoms of PTSD are varied outcomes of the capacity to learn about danger, so as to be able to anticipate it, to prepare for it, or to avoid it. The mobilization of the mind and body to meet danger,
and
the shutting down of mental and bodily functions not required to survive in mortal danger, become harmful and dysfunctional if they persist long after danger has passed. I invite the reader to look up this list of symptoms in the light of the simple concept I offer here, to see for themselves that these represent the persistence of no longer needed adaptations. Almost all of them fit this simple concept.