Odysseus in America (48 page)

³
NVVRS,
VI-13-1f, VI-15-1f. Data showing substance abuse rates in combat vets with and without current PTSD and civilian counterparts with and without current PTSD have not been published, to my knowledge. The data mentioned here are for all combat vets, lumped together whether they have current PTSD or not, and for all veterans with current PTSD, whether or not they were exposed to high levels of combat Stressors.

⁴
In this I follow Judith Herman's
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
(New York: Basic, 1992, Part 2, “Stages of Recovery.”

⁵
Self-mutilation, a not uncommon addiction among survivors of childhood sexual and physical torture, is relatively rare among combat veterans. I have had only one patient who used to engage in self-mutilation, and he had a history of being repeatedly raped in childhood by his father. The frequency of severe childhood sexual and/or physical abuse among the combat veterans in our program appears no greater than in the nonveteran population.

⁶
Aphrodite Matsakis,
Vietnam Wives: Facing the Challenges of Life with Veterans Suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,
2nd ed. (Lutherville, Md.: Sidran Press, 1996).

⁷
With the same demographic characteristics as the in-country Vietnam veterans sampled by the
NVVRS.

¹
Jeremy Wilson,
Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence
(London: Heinemann, 1989), p. 771f of Minerva paperback reprint. Lawrence died after six days in a coma from a head injury after being thrown from his motorcycle in 1935, at the apparently sedate speed of 40 miles per hour, but almost certainly too fast to safely deal with the unexpected in the undulations of the country lane (p. 934).

²
See van Wees,
Status Warriors,
for estimates of the number of people on each ship. Odysseus has a dozen vessels at 9:176, Fagles.

³
At what point did Odysseus realize that he was dealing with giants? The whole story is told by Odysseus in retrospect, so clearly at the time he is telling the story he knows they were giants, but did he know it at the time he decided to take the potent wine? The text says that the caves of the Cyclopes were visible across the water on the goat island, but doesn't mention seeing the giants themselves. But he does not decide to take the wine until 9:219 (Fagles) when Odysseus and his crew have already crossed over the water. From the shore he can see that the cave above is a giant's lair. This prompts Odysseus to take the wine, which in retelling he describes as being on a hunch. Hardly a prudent decision by a responsible leader. Why not turn around and leave? A few lines later, at 237, he retells the decision to take the wine, speaking of his “foreboding” that they would shortly meet a giant. Is this Odysseus trying to bury the evidence of leadership malpractice by claiming fame for prescience? Then they enter the cave and there's no more doubt than if we were to enter a house with fifty-foot ceilings and chair seats and tabletops above our heads.

⁴
Stanford,
The Ulysses Theme,
Chapter 5. Homer's epics abound with these precious luxury items that custom required a host to give to a guest according to the respective ranks of the host and the guest.

⁵
Cook,
The Odyssey in Athens.
Cook marshals all the examples of forbidden banquets
and illegal feasting in the Odyssey. See his index entries under “Dietary code” and “Feasting.” The audience for the irony created by the parallel between Odysseus and his men and the suitors would have been Homer's audience, of course, not the internal audience for Odysseus' tales, the Phaeacians.

⁶
6. 9:272f, Fitzgerald; emphasis added.

⁷
A. Dane and R. Gardner, “Violent Acts and Violent Times: A Comparative Approach to Postwar Homicide Rates,”
American Sociological Review
41:937-63 (1976).

⁸
This is the same word that Odysseus uses to introduce himself to the Phaeacian court, and frequently a synonym for, or illustration of,
mētis.

⁹
I thank Professor Erwin Cook for explaining that
mē tis
and
mētis
were not exact homophones, but close enough to make the pun. In the context of oral performance there would have been no sight gag of the words in close proximity.

¹⁰
A few lines later Odysseus attributes it all to Zeus, “Zeus was still obsessed with plans to destroy my entire oarswept fleet and loyal crew of comrades” (9:618f). In the epic's prologue, the narrator blames his comrades' offense against the sun god, “the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return” (l:9ff). The narrator of the prologue seems to have forgotten that eleven out of twelve of Odysseus' flotilla had already been sunk before his one remaining ship reached the island where the sun god pastured his cattle. And when the god Hermes visits Calypso to tell her that she must let Odysseus go, he recites yet a different god's-eye history of the events: “But voyaging back they outraged Queen Athena…. / There all the rest of his loyal shipmates died” (5:121ff). So who's responsible for the holocaust of Odysseus' military contingent of more than six hundred of the flower of Ithaca's youth? Athena? The sun god? Zeus? Poseidon? And who brought down each god's wrath? The Greek commanders? The sailors themselves? Odysseus? Or was it just Zeus' arbitrary will, possibly holding a war to thin the humans who were overpopulating the earth?

¹¹
Cook,
The Odyssey in Athens,
p. 16.

¹²
The text “overdetermines” the divine antagonisms that are in play: not only Poseidon, but also Athena is mad at Odysseus as an individual, with all the dangers that implies about the safety of his men, and Helios the sun god and Zeus also want their hides. How unjust divine justice is in the
Odyssey
has been remarked on many times. The multiple sources of divine enmity are marshaled by Jenny Clay in
The Wrath of Athena.

¹³
Cook, “‘Active' and ‘Passive' Heroics in the
Odyssey
.” Professor Cook would not agree with my connecting “living on the edge” with heroics.

¹
For a fascinating picture of a blood-feuding culture quite distant from the Homeric world, but amazingly similar, i.e., the society of the Icelandic sagas, see William I. Miller,
Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Such societies unmistakably have mechanisms of social control, but cannot be said to have a “government” except by stretching the meaning of the word to include all social control sanctioned by the culture.

²
It's not as though there is no competent helmsman. The nymph/witch Circe also gives them a perfect following wind to take them to the Underworld, and Odysseus trusts the helmsman to stay on course (11:10, orig.)-presumably the same helmsman who would have been aboard, unused, when they sailed for Ithaca from Aeolia.

³
A good example of this is Patroclus, Achilles' foster brother and second-in-command in the
Iliad.
(Iliad 23:100ff, Fitzgerald) Menoitios [Patroclus' father]
… had brought me, under a cloud,
a boy still, on the day I killed the son
of Lord Amphídamas—though I wished it not—in
childish anger over a game of dice.
Peleus [Achilles' father] … adopted me
and reared me kindly, naming me your squire.

⁴
Jonathan Shay,
Achill in Vietnam. Kampftrauma und Persönlichkeitsverlust,
trans. Klaus Kochmann (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998).

⁵
As with so many themes in this book, Willard Waller's 1944 recommendations on the occupational reintegration of returning war veterans in
The Veteran Comes Back
are still worth reading and taking to heart today. For the specific area of occupational readjustment and pensions, see the final sections of the book. However, it should be evident by now that I hope as many people as possible will want to read that book in its entirety. It is still in many libraries and quite findable on the used book market.

¹
As given above in note 2 to Chapter 4 and note 5 to Chapter 5, Homer scholar Erwin Cook sees Odysseus' men as bringing on their own destruction by yielding to physical appetites.

²
John Gardner, in
The Art of Fiction
(New York: Vintage, 1985), calls frigidity “a fault of soul,” rather than of writing technique. But whose soul here—Homer's or Odysseus'? “Strictly speaking, frigidity characterizes the writer who presents serious material, then … fails to treat it with the attention and seriousness it deserves” (p. 118). Gardner attributes this formulation to Longinus.

³
Twelve ships in the
Iliad,
2:636f, orig. Karl Reinhardt, “The Adventures in the Odyssey” (1948), trans. H. I. Flower, in Seth Schein,
Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 69-73. Also Ralph Hexter, “[The episode] provides the narrator a dramatic and economical way to dispatch most of Odysseus' companions and all but one of his ships in one fell swoop, a move that the narrative shape of the Odyssey requires.”
A Guide to the Odyssey
(New York: Vintage, 1993).

⁴
Morally and politically, the storyteller's art can be as explosive as nitroglycerine—witness the power of the nationalistic stab-in-the- back/revenge/rebirth story that the Serbians tell of their fourteenth-century defeat by the Turks in Kosovo, or the power that the stab-in-the-back rhetoric of the German defeat in World War I had in propelling Hitler to power. I believe it's time we gave up the sentimental notion that art is always beneficent. Human art, like human language, is a phenomenon of nature, neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad.

⁵
Scholar Erwin Cook interprets Odysseus' decision to tie up outside in exactly the opposite sense that I do here. He says, “Odysseus begins heroically enough by taking up a ‘wing position' at the mouth of the Laistrygonian harbor analogous to the positions of Akhilleus and Aias at Troy.” Professor Cook sees this as Odysseus taking up the dangerous position on the exposed flank-thus protecting, rather than neglecting, the safety of his command. “‘Active' and ‘Passive' Heroics in the
Odyssey”
pp. 149-67.

¹
Odysseus fears that Calypso plans this in Book 5; Clytemnestra as accessory to Agamemnon's murder, 4:101f and 11:462ff; Penelope as possible threat, see
Chapter 15 below
; Helen spotting Odysseus when he infiltrates Troy in disguise 4:28 1ff; the old nurse Eurycleia identifies him from the distinctive scar on his thigh 19:528ff; the danger to Odysseus from Phaeacian toughs at Nausicaa's beck and call, if she chooses 7:35ff (by inference); Circe—this chapter; Sirens 12:44ff; Scylla 12:94ff; Helen—the whole Trojan War. (All line numbers to Fagles translation.)

²
The portrait of the loyal swineherd, Eumaeus, and the various mentions of livestock and those who tend it suggest the following hierarchy of prestige in the world of Odysseus: beef cattle and horses at the top, pigs next, with sheep and goats at the bottom.

³
In some traditions Odysseus is descended from the god Hermes, through his grandfather Autolycus.

⁴
Copyright © 2002 by Dennis Spector, all rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. From
The Exorcism of Vietnam
[working title], mixed nonfiction history and interviews and pseudonymous autobiography, in preparation.

⁵
Copyright © 2002 by Dennis Spector. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

¹
Large parts of Odysseus' story of Hades are devoted to working his agendas to get his hosts to take him home, to pump up his own image, and to get more and more guest-gifts. Valuable guest-gifts, and “gift exchange,” are perennial subjects of scholarship on the ancient Mediterranean. They apparently represented a significant component of the ancient economy. These so-called prestige goods could be extremely, even obscenely valuable. The long list of famous women Odysseus says he met in the Underworld seems crafted to excite and please Queen Arete. In this he's startlingly successful. When he finishes and says it's time for sleep, she's the first to speak up and mousetraps her noble guests into each bringing guest-gifts for Odysseus. But she still keeps his ride home dangling. King Alcinous finally awakens to the fact that Odysseus has not told him what he asked—Odysseus' story of the Trojan War. The king skates on the thin edge of calling him a liar: (11:411ff, Fagles; emphasis added) “Ah Odysseus … one look at you
and we know that you are no one who would cheat us-no
fraud, such as the dark soul breeds and spreads
across the face of the earth…. Crowds of vagabonds
frame their lies so tightly none can test them. But you,
what grace you give your words….
You have told your story with all a singer's skill….
But come now, tell me truly: your … comrades—did
you see … down in the House of Death,
any
who sailed with you and met their doom at Troy?
The night's still young. Is he setting a trap for Odysseus, hoping to show him up as a scammer? The
Iliad
is the definitive text on the war, which Demodocus, the court bard, knows all about and has sung about for the king. But by this point in Odysseus' story, King Alcinous already knows that more than eleven out of twelve Ithacans have died on
the way home in the charge of their captain—who has survived, but not arrived with even one shipmate from the remaining vessel. Where are they? Odysseus pretends to misunderstand and replies with an account of the senior Greek officers he met in Hades, starting with Agamemnon, and moving on to Achilles and Ajax. In doing so, he not only gives the impression of being their equals at Troy, but also subtly one-ups each of them. If all we had was the
Iliad,
we might remember Odysseus this way: “Mmmm, let me think … Odysseus … oh, yes, he was one of Agamemnon's staff officers, a pretty good one, as I recall.” Nobody would have to stop and think who Agamemnon, Achilles, or Ajax were.