- Poems of Eternal Longing
The Odyssey is an epic poem about return, and it talks about Odysseus’s return to his city of Ithaca after the end of the ten-year Trojan War, which Homer wrote about in his first epic, the Iliad. The Odyssey talks about the journey Odysseus took after his departure from Troy until his arrival in his kingdom of Ithaca. The hero is exposed to several ordeals during his journey, the most important of which are his imprisonment on the island of the nymph Calypso, his fight with the giant Polyphemus, his descent into the underworld and meeting with his companions who died in the Trojan War, then, finally, his arrival in Ithaca and confronting the suitors of his wife, Penelope. What distinguishes the Odyssey from the Iliad is that it deals with a main character in a story that has a beginning and an end, in addition to employing the social fabric of Greek society in the narrative. The Odyssey begins, as is the custom of ancient epics, in the middle of the events, namely, seven years after the end of the Trojan War, or when Odysseus was imprisoned by Calypso. As a result, Athena goes to inform her father about Odysseus’s imprisonment, and then inspires Odysseus’s only son, Telemachus, to inquire about his father by asking his father’s war comrades. The first four parts talk about the story of Telemachus with the warriors, while the story of Odysseus is told in the rest of the story. The hero regains his kingdom and his wife at the end of the poem after killing her suitors.
- The Struggle Between Reality and Myth
When the blind Homer was singing about the Trojan War and the death of its heroes, and the travels of Odysseus and what happened to him until he returned to his kingdom and home, he was not just telling a fictional story that happened and ended without bringing it closer to understanding and making it realistic as a foundational text for the generations that would come after him. The well-known feature of epic poetry is the presence of the gods and their influence on the text and the events of the story directly, without the main characters having any kind of influence on their own destinies. This would be correct if we receive ancient texts only as myths without criticism, analysis, or understanding of the phenomena that occur in them. This leads us to take the words of the poet, or the myth-maker, as saying that what he refers to is true for him but remains meaningless to us. But we forget that he is human like us, searching for the truth in all things, and trying to imagine a world in which he can place phenomena and pattern them according to his own logic. By phenomenon, I do not mean only natural events such as lightning and wind, but rather it goes beyond nature and includes man as a fundamental axis that raises questions about his centrality in this world. This is what Homer was doing in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but he did not create a world in which the gods were rulers over every event or phenomenon without linking it to our real world. Homer used similes drawn from reality to give his listeners and readers of his epics an emotional feeling to relate to current events and to understand why the event was this way and not that way. But he could not write, as writing was a modern tool for the Greeks. The act of writing alone indicates the reality of a person, that he was thinking and installing a logic that the reader can interpret as he wishes, but the language of poetry and epics was an oral language and writing was not yet a tool for literature. If writing had been available to Homer, he would have been able to describe his reality and its realism as he wished, but he used to sing and rely on his five senses, insight, and observations to create a living, natural world, explaining the phenomena in both of his epics by shedding light on a specific phenomenon or pivotal event, and leaving the rest of the events hidden from perception.
- Between Anger and Nostalgia
What distinguishes Homer as a poet is his connection with human feelings, whether they are positive, such as nostalgia, or negative, such as anger. Let us not forget that the first word in the Iliad is “anger” in Greek. This is essentially what distinguished him as a myth-maker by creating these same feelings for the Greek Pantheon. Homesickness is a realistic feeling felt by any person who has been separated from his homeland for any reason. Any reader of the Odyssey will know that its hero longs for his city and repeats its name in various places. Let us go back to the beginning of the Odyssey to see where the feeling of nostalgia is evident. Homer begins his poem by talking about the imprisonment of Odysseus on the island of the nymph Calypso, seven years after the end of the war. But he does not start from the end of the Trojan War, but rather from the middle of the events, as if he is establishing something, so he says that what Odysseus is known as is a man of “many ways,” and this is an introduction to Homer’s realistic method of introducing his characters, so in a realistic way a specific person is known. The first feeling that Homer characterizes in his hero is a feeling of longing for his city. In the opening of his poem, Homer presents the imprisonment of Odysseus as a natural event consistent with his surrounding reality. When we go to the sea and look at the horizon, we feel a sense of distance and a desire to arrive. We find Odysseus doing the same thing and even feeling the same feeling, so we see him sitting on the beach looking at the horizon and longing for his beloved Ithaca. Many artists recreated this scene to reveal that Odysseus does not belong to this place. His feeling of being far from his city and his wife was overwhelming, and the reader can sense Odysseus’s melancholy in these lines from Book V:
“… and the queenly nymph went to the great-hearted Odysseus, when she had heard the message of Zeus. Him she found sitting on the shore, and his eyes were never dry of tears, and his sweet life was ebbing away, as he longed mournfully for his return…”
This feeling contradicts the feeling he felt after the end of the war, or rather the beginning of the actual events. Odysseus emerged victorious, but fate had left him estranged up until this point. Homer interrupts the circularity of events in his talk about Calypso’s island. It is logical that Odysseus will not remain imprisoned there forever, after Athena took action to inform her father of the need for Odysseus to return to his homeland. The hero must return to the starting point, this is what we have learned over and over again in what we read in ancient literature and epics, or inevitably see in the cinema. In his speech, Homer was able to give an explanation for the breaking of this cycle of events. His presence is clear in his epic and his statement that a goddess wanted to break this cycle is a good indication for explaining Odysseus’ inner will to return to his home. At the end of the poem, the hero returns to Ithaca, but this arrival includes an introduction that adds to what will happen in the future in Odysseus’s meeting with his governess.
The change in present reality is accompanied by ignorance, even if – in its content – it is the same. When Odysseus arrives at his island, Athena obscures his vision, changing the features of the island to the point that he no longer recognizes it. Just as a person cannot explain what is surrounding him, if “the surroundings” are obscured, Homer also cannot explain natural phenomena except by humanizing reality. For example, the journey of searching for the truth and explanations for certain phenomena was represented by the character of Telemachus, Odysseus’ only son, when he wanted to search for his father. It makes sense for him to ask warriors returning from war about his father. Here, the poet draws realistic boundaries for the events of the epic, in which Telemachus describes his search for his father with a present tense verb: “I want…”, “I am astonished…”, “I beg of you…”. Homer’s use of the present tense in a past event creates a certain separation between what is happening now (the search for the truth) and what is not happening (anything else). Once Homer finishes his present tense action, he returns to his past event, which is the story of Odysseus (Calypso’s imprisonment). Then the events become present tense, and so on. Homer’s narration revolves around describing event (A), then moving on to event (B), separating the events completely, so we do not find any kind of interaction between them, as if Homer, while he was singing the poem, completely forgot what he was seeking.
Telemachus meets two warriors, Nestor and Menelaus. Both warriors welcome him and start telling him about their homecoming journey. Here the past begins to form into the present tense, and this past event will become the only present for Homer and his recipients, whether they are readers or listeners. Homer did not know about flashback stories; he did not even know what a flashback in a story was. The Odyssey, with its various events, was his only narrative background, as if it were an infinite number of Odysseys waiting for the poet to shed light on them and sing them. Telemachus’ desire – to search for answers – is separated from the underlying event, which is the visit of the two warriors, and my point may seem self-evident with regard to the artistic flashback that Homer did, but he was the one who made it self-evident in the first place. The epics were oral and were not – as now – printed on paper. There was no interaction between one text and another, but rather there was only what those present heard.
- The Scar is an Excuse and an Identity
Odysseus – in the second half of the Odyssey – enters his city as a beggar. People won’t be able to recognize him, due to the difference in his royal form. Homer uses the present tense again, but to describe Odysseus and his actions within the city, transforming the Odyssey – at that moment – from a text that recounts Odysseus’s past travels to a text that the reader follows word for word. His wife, his country, his son, and his governess still remain in their reality as the story unfolds, unless Homer represents reality in his Odyssey and is personally present within his poetry, as he did with Odysseus in Calypso’s prison, and with Telemachus when asking about his father. Homer’s intervention in the epic is necessary, to break the cyclicality of events and make them like real daily life events that every human being lives to continue telling the story.
Then Odysseus enters his house as a poor stranger, asking for the charity of his wife, who does not recognize him. He sees his dog Argos, who has become lethargic and old, waiting to meet his master so that he can die. His dog sees him, recognizes him, and gets up active as if it were the past twenty years in which Odysseus was absent and then died in the sight of his master. Homer presents death here as an indicator of a change occurring within the poem, as it also occurred in Calypso’s prison.
But Homer’s creativity is evident in a scene that occurs in Book XIX, when the beggar Odysseus meets his old governess. Homer sets the scene by having the governess Eurycleia wash the guest’s feet, an actual action that would happen to anyone returning from a long journey. The Greeks honor the guest because they believe he is likely a god who came down from Mount Ida disguised as a human. Homer conveys the image of the governess mixing cold and hot water in a bowl and dipping the guest’s feet in it. The governess’s eyes fall on Odysseus’s thigh, and she recognizes a scar that her master received when he was a boy on a wild boar hunt with his relatives. Any reader would be excited by this encounter and want to know what happens after this remark, but Homer does not do this. Homer deliberately forgets the event and enters into the past of the scar and makes it the only reality of the song, thus leading to the climax of events.
“… and the old dame took the shining cauldron with water wherefrom she was about to wash his feet, and poured in cold water in plenty, and then added thereto the warm. But Odysseus sat him down away from the hearth and straightway turned himself toward the darkness, … as she touched him, she might note a scar, and the truth be made manifest. So she drew near and began to wash her lord, and straightway knew the scar of the wound which long ago a boar had dealt him with his white tusk, when Odysseus had gone to Parnassus …” As I said, Homer does not speak directly about the governess’s reaction, but rather about the event that created this scar.
Homer takes us to the boy Odysseus when he visited his grandfather, and how he got his scar when he was attacked by a wild boar that he wanted to hunt, and the way he followed the boar’s tracks, and the boar’s attack on him and wounding him in his thigh, and in the end his hunting of this beast. The scar here is something created by Homer alone, representing reality and people with a certain quality that distinguishes them from others, whether physical or moral. Homer took a small wound and gave it reality and dimension, so that the scar belonged to Odysseus alone. Homer cannot stay in the story of Odysseus’s scar forever, so he takes us back to the nanny after she recognized Odysseus through his scar by dropping the guest’s feet while she was in a dazed state, letting the water in the pot spill on the floor.
“This scar the old dame, when she had taken the limb in the flat of her hands, knew by the touch, and she let fall the foot. Into the basin the leg fell, and the brazen vessel rang. Over it tilted, and the water was spilled upon the ground. Then upon her soul came joy and grief in one moment, and both her eyes were filled with tears and the flow of her voice was checked. But she touched the chin of Odysseus, and said: “Verily thou art Odysseus, dear child, and I knew thee not, till I had handled all the body of my lord.”
The scar is absent from the text, and Homer does not mention this scene again in the Odyssey. The scar is a real and realistic thing. Homer’s attempt, which seems primitive to us, is one of the first attempts to take the realistic elements that exist in the poet’s surroundings and represent them in literature. Let’s take a recent example. Anyone who has read the Harry Potter series or watched the films knows that he has a scar on his forehead, which in one of the scenes is what Harry Potter is known for, even if he is in disguise, considering that the writer’s imagined world talks about magic and spells, and none of the subject matter can relate to our world realistically, except for the scar.
- Homer’s Skill in Drawing Inspiration from Reality and Imagination
It must be said that the use of the divine element in Homer’s two epics is a subjective interpretation of a phenomenon that affects the poet. For example, he sought help from the goddess of poetry and inspiration, Calliope, to sing epic poems. He could not explain the inspiration he found except through this goddess of poetry.
The poet’s realistic descriptions are not limited to human events – such as Odysseus’s scar – but also include the gods of Olympus. Before Homer invokes a god, he says what he did, or who he loved and hated, complete with physical descriptions and conversations between him and other gods that only occur between humans. For this reason, we can say that the myth-makers owe Homer his humanization of his gods. Zeus, the commanding and forbidding father, Hera, the jealous woman, Apollo, the young man, and Athena, the wise woman. This is in fact a reference to a realistic, daily observation.
For example, Homer describes Athena as “with clear eyes.” And also in describing her movement: “…then she tied to her feet her beautiful, golden, immortal sandals, which used to carry her over the waters of the sea, and over the vast land, at the speed of the wind.” That is why the intellectual Finlay says: “After Homer made the gods human, man began to recognize himself.”
After we read the story of the scar, we go back to the governess, and she is about to scream with extreme joy at the return of her master, but he covers her mouth with his right hand so that she does not expose him, threatening to kill her if she does so. Here, Homer conveys the tyranny of a hero and his use of violence and threats against the woman who raised him when he was young, as a situation that women lived through at that time when they suffered from persecution and objectification. In addition to the spatial descriptions, Homer always depicts the dawn as having pink streaks – if we open our windows at the beginning of dawn and looked at the horizon, we would be able to see these pink streaks.
It is true that Homer purposefully uses repetition so as not to bore his listeners and so they do not forget the events, but his logical narration is renewed every time. Homer did not use the scar to reveal the identity of Odysseus to his wife. Rather, this required the use of another narrative device, which is the character’s knowledge of secret information or what Penelope called “the secret of marriage.” She was not certain of his identity until after he told her this secret, which was that he made their marital bed from olive branches with his own hands. Her reassurance did not require a story from his imaginary travels, or praise for a goddess who came down from heaven to help him. Rather, it required something realistic, as if Penelope was a symbol for us (the readers and listeners) and for Homer’s Odysseus himself (the poet). We need something realistic from time to time to reassure our hearts.
- Extensions of the Eternal Masterpiece
The representation of reality in Homer’s poems is one of man’s first attempts in literature to know himself, which is by describing the relationships that take place between our real world and the written world. When Homer wanted to explain the phenomenon of the governess knowing her master, he did not make her ask him whether he was her master or not, because there is no point in asking while no one knows the answer. But Homer was a minstrel, and it was his duty to make his characters real in his literary space by giving them a sign that made them recognizable. For Odysseus, Homer supported this by giving the scar a story, history, and circumstances that made it realistic and influential to the events, and even enabled listeners and readers to interact with the events of the epic. Homer’s insight was able to describe his reality and benefit from it at the heart of his two poems. The Western mentality was influenced by Homer and his characters until the two poems became an example of the perfection of Western literature in the ancient world. It is no wonder that Alexander carried a copy of the Iliad everywhere he went, and a sign of his great admiration for it was his visit to the tomb of Achilleus, and his tireless search for a rival resembling Hector, because he knew that the Iliad and the Odyssey are reality and that all of Homer’s characters represent us. We are the anger of Achilleus, the longing of Odysseus, the love of Helena, the courage of Hector, and the sadness of Penelope. Who else but Homer can enthuse us with his depiction of war and glory and then interrupt the situation by talking about a beautiful girl pointing to the warriors to instruct an old king about the names of those who will reduce his fortified city to ashes?
In our modern era, there are adaptations of the two epics in literature and the fine arts, and although their contemporary representations have succeeded in some literary productions, they have failed in cinema due to the lack of understanding Homer’s connotations and his presence in his text, which led to producing poor films, such as Troy (2004), whose events take place within a single framework, treating the two poems as two sets of stereotyped judgments in a bygone text, as if Homer did not exist at all, with stereotyped judgments such as Achilles’ desire to fight as only a desire for immortality. We must look at the director’s treatment of Homeric reality to understand how the film is lacking. The director considers that glory necessarily means honor or even immortality, in addition to his interpretation of the events as being known and understood in advance and not as one of ancient man’s attempts to understand his surrounding world. I do not blame modern interpretations for the production of this film, nor do I say that there is no one who understands Homer. On the contrary. For example, the Argentine writer Borges truly understood Homer, so much so that he placed him as a character in one of his stories and described him with descriptions of peace and tranquility, granting him true immortality present not only among people, but in all of history.
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