Odysseus in America (4 page)

Further up the table the accountant has just been explaining how, if only we had held out a bit longer, the war would have been won…. Lower down, they are talking about stocks and bonds and peace terms, and all of them, of course, know much better what should be done….

—Erich Maria Remarque,
The Road Back
¹

All the talk makes me stupid in the head, and I am soon unable to follow any longer….

At this moment—God be praised!—crisp, grilled chops appear on the table. I sniff. Real pork chops they are, fried in real fat too. The sight of them consoles me for all the rest. I lean over and secure a good one and begin chewing with relish. It tastes marvelous. It's a power of time since I last ate a fresh chop. In Flanders…. I neither hear nor see anything now; I lose myself in memories—

A giggle awakens me. About the table is dead silence. Aunt Lina has a face like a bottle of acid. The girl beside me is stifling a laugh. Everybody is looking at me.

Sweat breaks out on me in streams. Here I sit, just as we did then out in Flanders, absent-minded, both elbows on the table, the bone in my two hands, my fingers covered in grease…. But the others are eating cleanly with knife and with fork.

Red as a beetroot, I look straight ahead and put down the bone. How could I have so forgotten myself?….

But there is anger too in my embarrassment,—anger against this Uncle Karl, now beginning to talk so loudly of war loans; anger against all these people here that think so much of
themselves and their smart talk; anger against this whole world, living here so damned cocksure with their knickknacks and jiggery-pokery, as though the monstrous years had never been when one thing and one thing only mattered,—life or death, and beyond that nothing.

Odysseus' return to “the world,” the civilian world, has a very rough start. A storm has pounded his homemade raft to pieces, half drowned him, and washed him up literally naked on the shore of a strange land. He and we learn it is the Land of the Phaeacians. He is
not
home yet; he is alone; this isn't Ithaca. It's someplace else yet again, his fourteenth stop since Troy, which he departed ten years earlier commanding a squadron of twelve ships.

In addition to being Odysseus' last stop in the decade of wandering since Troy, this Land of the Phaeacians also brings a particular kind of encounter with civilians, with rich and complacent civilians. Ernst from
The Road Back,
sequel to
All Quiet on the Western Front,
has this kind of encounter at Uncle Karl's dinner party. Ernst can go home to his mother after the humiliation, but Odysseus is still on the knife edge of survival. He's a castaway on civilian shores, alone with his
gastēr,
his “ravenous stomach.” Figuratively Odysseus'
gastēr
is his gluttonous will to acquire and control.
Gastēr
brings to mind stealing and lies, as well as hunger, greed, and compulsive self-gratification. What has happened to his noble fighting heart, his
thumos?
²

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

The opposition between
thumos
and
gastēr,
heart and belly, is also that between wartime and peacetime, between the different civilian perceptions of the men they send to fight for them and the men who return home to them. What in wartime is a heroic amphibious landing, is in peacetime a criminal pirate raid. What in war is bold and courageous, in peace is reckless and irresponsible; in wartime resourceful, in peace lawless. Achilles and Odysseus might have been the same person—Achilles
in
war, Odysseus
after
war.

We should also reflect that the difference Homer shows us between
thumos
and
gastēr
may
be in ourselves—between what we as civilians, who are terrified and enraged by an enemy attack,
value
in soldiers, and what we
fear
in them when the enemy no longer scares us, and the soldiers come home as veterans. When we are in fear of the enemy, nothing is too much or too good for the “greathearted spirit” (
thumos
) of our fighting men; when they return as veterans we see their needs as greedy, demanding, uncultivated belly (
gastēr
).

When Odysseus crawls up on the Phaeacian beach, he has two urgent needs: first, his immediate safety—that he not starve or be killed by the natives as a dangerous intruder—and second, help to get home. With a hand from the goddess Athena (6:15ff, Fagles) he comes face-to-face with the king's beautiful young daughter. Odysseus charms Nausicaa, manipulates her to get past the rough sailors who would willingly snuff his life, and into the palace of her parents. Once safely inside and courteously granted asylum by the king and queen of the Land of the Phaeacians, Odysseus keeps his eyes and ears open. What sort of people are these?

High rooms he saw …
with lusters of the sun and moon …
The doors were golden …

(7.89ff, Fitzgerald)

The Phaeacians are rich and secure. Odysseus identifies himself as a “man of pain” without saying anything specific about his identity. His host shows him every Mediterranean courtesy and doesn't press on the details. Always alert, Odysseus learns a great deal more about the Phaeacians.

They are—in the manner of today's luxury health club habitués—avid athletes, but not in the combat sports. Odysseus finds them
not
serious. When he is pushed to compete with the sleek young runners and throwers, he says:

I have more on my mind than track and field …
hard days, and many, have I seen, and suffered.
I sit here at your field meet, yes; but only
as one who begs your king to send him home.

(8:162ff, Fitzgerald)

Even more, Odysseus finds them self-indulgent, avid in the pursuit of luxury and entertainment. The king says:

… we set great store by feasting,
harpers, and the grace of dancing choirs,
changes of dress, warm baths, and downy beds.

(8:261ff, Fitzgerald)

They are also connoisseurs of the arts: the court boasts the services of the great minstrel Demodocus. The Phaeacians are, in a word,
civilians.

The gulf between Odysseus and his civilian hosts is visible in their drastically different responses to the songs of Demodocus. This bard is the genuine article—the Muse whispers the truth of the war at Troy in his ear when he composes his songs. His songs, narrative poems like the
Iliad,
reduce Odysseus to tears, which he tries to hide. Afterward he proclaims that Demodocus sings with the truth of someone who was there himself. The Phaeacian civilians love these epic poems of war (8:98)—along with the harper's dance music (8:265ff) and his bedroom farces (8:280ff).
³
It's all the same to them.
It's all entertainment.
But for Odysseus, the truth-filled stories of the Trojan War open the gates of grief.

Demodocus sings of the clash between Achilles, the hero of the
Iliad,
who embodies
biē—
violent force—and Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, who embodies
mētis—
cunning tricks and strategy.
⁴
The bard sings about how their insecure and incompetent commander, Agamemnon, delights in this clash. This provokes Odysseus' reaction:

[Odysseus] with massive hand drew his rich mantle down
over his brow, cloaking his face with it,
to make the Phaiacians miss the secret tears …

(8:90ff, Fitzgerald)

Odysseus makes every effort to hide his anguish from the complacent audience. But every time the poet resumes, emotion overcomes Odysseus. Only the king at his elbow is aware. A tactful host, the king rescues Odysseus by interrupting the poet to suggest an athletic exhibition.

After athletics, the feasting and entertainment resume with dancing and comic poetry. Odysseus publicly praises the poet, sends him a splashy tip, and asks for a “request number.” He tells Demodocus:

Now … sing that wooden horse
Epeios built, inspired by Athena—
the ambuscade Odysseus filled with fighters
and sent to take the inner town of Troy.

(8:526ff, Fitzgerald)

Thus far, Odysseus has not told his hosts who he is, but he knows he must do it soon. Perhaps he wants the poet to sing this episode in which Odysseus himself is the star. This would set the stage for him to reveal himself in the most impressive light. Or perhaps Odysseus thinks the poet is a phony and wants to see if he really knows what he's talking about. But it is Odysseus himself who is tested—and ambushed by his own emotional reaction.
⁵
A surprising and powerful simile is the tip-off that he is not the master of this situation:

… the famous harper sang
but the great Odysseus melted into tears,
running down from his eyes to wet his cheeks …
as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband,
a man who fell in battle …
trying to beat the day of doom from home and children.
Seeing the man go down, dying, gasping for breath,
she clings for dear life …
and the most heartbreaking torment wastes her cheeks.

(8:585ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

Again the king interrupts the performance to spare his guest's feelings.

Homer makes the same point twice, as if to drive it home. These stories rip Odysseus' heart out, while for the Phaeacians, they are never more than entertainment. Homer doesn't show the king and his people as monsters; they are just limited, unable to offer Odysseus what he needs in his soul. They give what he needs physically—plenty of food for his belly, clothing, and a ship to take him home. But at this moment the most the king can offer him is courteous sympathy:

… let Demodokos touch his harp no more.
His theme has not been pleasing to all here.
During the feast, since our fine poet sang,
our guest has never left off weeping.
Grief
seems fixed upon his heart.
Break off the song!

(8:576ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

King Alcinous now presses Odysseus to reveal his identity—which surely Odysseus saw coming, and for which he was perhaps preparing himself. Quite reasonably, his host asks him to explain his emotional reactions, the “grief … fixed upon his heart.” But in the very next breath, he tells Odysseus what Odysseus' own experience means:

That was all gods' work,
weaving ruin there
so it should make a song for men to come!

(8:619f, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

The king asks Odysseus why he grieves, but then doesn't give him even a moment to answer before he negates Odysseus' grief by explaining that the “big picture” justifies the suffering—as entertainment! Granted, Homer's epics are more than just entertainment; they are art at its most enduring. To the ancient Greeks they were also Bible, history, and philosophy, all in one. But here Homer shows us the Phaeacians as rich tourists in the landscape of suffering.

Picture this scene: A Vietnam combat veteran goes to a family wedding some ten years after his service. (Odysseus is ten years out from Troy.) The band plays a Jimi Hendrix piece that reminds him of a dead friend, blindsiding him with emotion. He tries to conceal his tears, but a rich relative notices and says, “Why aren't you over that Vietnam stuff yet? Anyway, that war was all about oil—and damn right, too, or we'd be paying $5 a gallon for gas.”

Saying that to one of the veterans I work with at such an emotional moment would provoke an explosion of rage. He might tip the table over in the man's lap. The veteran's relative is intimidated, stammers an inaudible apology, and rushes away. The veteran looks around feeling like someone has just peeled his skin and every nerve ending is naked and exposed. Everyone in the church social hall is silent; everyone is watching him, just as everyone stares at Ernst in Remarque's
The Road Back.
He walks slowly from the room and out of the church. His wife is weeping with mortification, fury, and self-blame that she didn't catch this in time. She is torn between her love for and loyalty to her husband and the ten-year family consensus that the veteran is a dangerous psycho.

Odysseus does not have the luxury of “losing it.” He must keep a grip on his emotions to stay alive and must stay on the Phaeacians' good side to get home. Elsewhere, Homer describes Odysseus' capacity to suppress and conceal his emotions as a part of his guile,
dolos
(19:212, orig.).

Odysseus has also found he
cannot
talk about the war at Troy at this
moment—at least not to people who show themselves incapable of hearing the stories with their heart. The combat veterans I have known fly into a rage when a civilian tries to tell them the meaning of their own experience. For Odysseus there can be no communalization of his experience here—not with this audience.