Terminal Wooings in “The Odyssey” (Part 3 of 3)

0:12 Wes: Okay. We are in our part three discussion of the Odyssey. We got through books one through 12 in parts one and two, and now we're going to get through the final 12 books, all in the third part. Probably. Hopefully.

0:29 Erin: Probably

0:31 Wes: even if we have to rush, which is something Odysseus would never do. In fact, that's kind of the way I wanted to start this episode. Talking about the fact that instead of rushing to see his wife and family, he goes through a lot of disguises and testing, makes use of all his Odysseus powers for deception, I think even more so than he has in the previous 12 books. So even Athena remarks on this. She's very impressed with this. He's dropped off on Ithaca by Alcinous's people, the Phaeacian people. Their magic boat, basically self driving Tesla of boats drops them off.

He's left on the coast in sheets. There's kind of Odysseus is reborn moment. And then Athena covers Ithaca in a mist so he won't recognize it immediately. And she herself shows up as a shepherd. He supplicates himself. Very usual thing. You got to touch their knees, right? If you ever get time transported back to ancient Greece, just remember to touch someone's knees first thing. And then he tells her a lie. She asks, you know, she's acting like she's a shepherd. She actually then tells him it's Ithaca and then asks where. What. What his story is.

And he tells, and he, he tells like some variation on a. I think it's a different life story every time that he tells to people. Just some made up thing. But correct me if I'm wrong about that, but I think he's always from Crete in these stories.

2:04 Erin: Yeah, what he chooses to focus on is slightly different each time. It could potentially be like different, you know, different layers or iterations of the same story. Like I think if you lay them on top of each other, they line up in places. Certain places, not in others.

2:18 Wes: In this one he tells the story of having murdered someone. And then Athena gets excited, changes herself into the form of a beautiful woman, says, oh, aren't you so clever. I really love your ability to lie. And she tells him, you know, you're going to have to go incognito now. Ithaca. And Odysseus himself becomes skeptical that this is even Ithaca and complains about the fact that Athena didn't protect him when they were leaving Troy. This is an interesting part of the story. Athena loves Odysseus and is so on his side in the Odyssey, but she's responsible for the problems of the Greeks had leaving Troy.

Here's what Athena finally says after complimenting him about his skepticism. An ordinary man would rush straight home to see his wife and children. You decided not even to ask about them until you test your wife. This is on page 327 of the Emily Emily Wilson translation. And then she lets him know that Penelope is loyal and that she has always been loyal as well. And that the only reason he's having to go all through all this is there's a delicate kind of dance with her brother Poseidon, who's pissed off at him. So he's going to have to suffer a lot.

But you know, if Poseidon had his way, it would be even worse. First of all, it's interesting that how happy she is about the fact that instead of rushing home to see his wife and children, he's going to be cautious. Unlike Agamemnon, right? Who just waltzes straight up to little red carpet inviting him home and then is slaughtered at the feast. And yet he already knows Penelope is loyal. There'll be a lot of testing in this. He is going to test Penelope. Penelope is going to test him to see if he's actually Odysseus. What other testing is there?

There's the sussing out of who's loyal among the slave women. And there's the fact that Eurycleia the nanny basically has to recognize him by his scar. But here's my question. Why not just go rush in except for planning, making a plan for the suitors. And the bulk of that plan is just that Athena is going to help fight them. Right. And ensure success. So I don't know why that has to be so sophisticated. So the question is, what role does all of this deception play in these last 12 books? Why is it necessary?

4:49 Erin: Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, Telemachus journey at the beginning when he learns that his father is still alive, sort of, you know, but we had the question about this, I think in the first episode of this series about why did Telemachus have to go through that whole little fact finding mission in the first place? When Nestor describes Agamemnon's fate and Orestes returning to avenge the murder of Agamemnon by killing Aegisthus. And I think he kind of belied the fact that Orestes also kills his own mother, Clytemnestra. The shadow story that kind of lurks over the whole Odyssey.

One of the things that Nestor says when he tells this story to Telemachus, is that the moral is, like, don't stay away from home too long, you know, while the suitors are lurking in your house. And, you know, it's funny because it's Telemachus leaves for a blip compared to how long Odysseus has been away, allowing these suitors to lurk there.

5:49 Wes: Right?

5:50 Erin: And also, you know, we already know that Telemachus is unequal to the task of fending off the suitors on his own. He needs to wait for his father to return home. So ostensibly, it doesn't matter that Telemachus is missing. He goes on this trip, which is ultimately sort of fruitless, but he could stay away as long as he wants, because it doesn't matter, because he's not the one that can fight against the suitors. There's also this interesting moment with Mentor in book two that I was thinking of, in which Telemachus is told that it's rare for sons to be like fathers.

Only if you are better, most are worse, I think is the line from book two, this idea of doing the unnecessary thing or taking the unnecessary journey or the long way around, if you will. I don't think that is ever for me, borne out with a kind of purpose. Like Athena tells us that Telemachus had to go through this trip because he had to gain confidence, right? At one point. That's the justification that she uses. And so I don't know if there's a rhyme there with Odysseus, that he has to gain a confidence in the situation, get his footing back home and suss people out for the same reason that he's kind of, you know, though he's not someone we would call lacking in confidence, that he has to make sure that he can trust the people who he wants to trust and gain confidence in other people's fidelity to him.

But for me, the most interesting part of these deceptions is the story that he tells about himself that changes each time. That the deception allows him to come up with this changing story about this other identity that I find really interesting. And that's something that maybe we could talk about in a second, but I don't know that I have an answer to why he has to test everybody out in the first place, except for the opportunity that it gives us to. Much like Telemachus, right? Telemachus, his little journey gives us, the reader, the listener, the opportunity to hear what's going on with Menelaus, what's going on with Nestor.

You know, you have all these kind of side journeys. And in a way that's repeated a little bit with Odysseus, where it feels like vamping, you know, because we just want him to go in and kill the suitors already, and we don't want him to tell another story. But I think that those stories that are embedded in each one of these lies about his identity are interesting in and of themselves and in a way are repeating some of those elements of the Telemachus journey for me.

8:21 Wes: So, yeah, so what he has to do is to test people so he doesn't end up like Agamemnon. But of course, in a way that's. That's all short circuited by Athena, who tells him that Penelope is loyal and tells him about the suitors. And in fact, she does that in this, in book 13, right, when he gets to Ithaca. And then he says, talks about, oh, I would have died like Agamemnon. And then she disguises him as an old beggar. And then she says, I'll go fetch Telemachus. And then you just refer to this. And she says. And he says to her, why didn't you tell him I was alive?

Why did you let him go on this journey? And she says, well, for the glory of it. Yes, and the suitors are plotting to kill him, but they're not going to succeed. So the role of the gods, and Athena in particular, seems to undercut the more realistic aspects of his deviousness or the utility of his deviousness, or the necessity of it, however you want to put it. But I wanted to go back to his complaint to Athena that she hadn't protected him. So he says on page 327, when we Greeks had sacked the town of Priam and we embarked. Oh, Priam, which Penelope, by the way, in Emily Wilson's translation, calls Evilium Priam.

And we embarked, and gods dispersed our fleet. I did not see you there on. On board my ship, daughter of Zeus. You gave me no protection.

9:55 Erin: She says, you're. You're smart. And I. That's why I can't leave you whenever you need my help, right?

10:02 Wes: That's what she says. At first, yeah. Well, no. And then she says. So she does that stuff about him being smart and you not, you know, not going straight home to see the wife and children. And then she says, but I did not want to conflict with my father's brother Poseidon, who resented you because you blinded his beloved son. Now I will show you Ithaca. So you believe. And she ends up lifting the mist.

10:24 Erin: So that's A really interesting moment, by the way. I find that so interesting because, you know, that's a. That move, that godly move of, you know, showing you something so you believe in, you know, the Judeo Christian tradition. That would be like revealing, performing a miracle. Right. Doing something that would. Would beggar belief under ordinary circumstances. Right. But increasing the faith of someone who's maybe, you know, doubting by showing them an indication of something that's supernatural. And instead she's showing him where he is. Right.

She's hidden it in the first place and then is revealing Ithaca to him. But it's not like she's performing some sort of supernatural deed. Right. Like, I'm thinking of the moment early on where she transforms into. Is it an eagle or a hawk? I can't remember. Some bird. Right. And flies away. She does that in front of Telemachus. Right. So that would be in the Judeo Christian tradition, more in keeping with the kind of revelation that would happen under Judeo Christian sort of miracles in which. Right. Like something incredible happens here. It's turned on its head where she's unnecessarily covered it in mist and.

And then just reveals it to him that Ithaca is Ithaca.

11:46 Wes: Well, even more interestingly, she's covered it in the mist. And I, before rereading it and taking notes, I remembered the mist lasting for longer. Cause I thought it had something to do with his staying in disguise. There's another. There's a previous episode where she. I think it's the Phaeacians, where she kind of hides him from people so he can get through town. So I think I was confusing it with that. But yeah, this is very brief. But interestingly, she puts the mist on, makes herself a shepherd, and then changes herself into a woman. So he does see one sort of obvious miracle happen, but he's still skeptical.

So even Athena is being tested and he says, this can't be Ithaca. And that's when she compliments him about not rushing home to his wife and children. And when she lifts the mist and shows him where he is, then he kind of rejoices. Oh, this really is Ithaca. So she's passing his test. These tests are all about recognition. Are you who you say you are? Well, on the one hand, are you who you say you are? And are you trustworthy? Which in a way is a way of saying you are who you used to be. So I've been away for 20 years, right. Is Penelope actually the person that she was when I left?

She could be an entirely different person. I mean, Penelope has to figure out if it's really Odysseus like everyone else. And a scar is good enough. But again, he's testing everyone's trust, even though Athena is Athena, she doesn't really need to be tested. And then she's sort of the guarantor, the underwriter, everyone else, their loyalty, who it is they are. So again, as we've mentioned, this is all kind of all of the testing happens in the context of it seeming to be excessive. Unless you want to think of it as a ritual or I think another way of thinking about it is just getting to know people again, getting to know home again, a transition or an emotional working through of the potential trauma, returning home after all these years.

So in other words, Odysseus is not just going to pull the band aid off, whether it comes to getting revenge or to reestablishing his relationships. He even does this with Laertes after the suitors are dead. Right. Does he really need. And he kind of teases his father, oh, who owns you, slave? You really have stopped taking care of yourself. Until he cries and Odysseus takes pity.

14:28 Erin: Yeah, that's a pretty sick moment.

14:30 Wes: Yeah. Maybe this will get clearer as we look at other parts of these last 12 books. But that getting to know you thing could be an aspect of this getting to re know you.

14:43 Erin: Something that bears out. Your point is, when she does, or rather before she disperses the mist, she says, now I will show you Ithaca. So you believe this is the Bay of Four Phorcys. Okay, this is the Bay of Phorcys, ancient sea God. And at the head there is an olive tree with long leaves. And nearby, the shady cave sacred to nymphs called Nereids, to whom you sacrifice so many hundred cattle. And here is Neritan, or Narraton, the wooded mountain. With that, the goddess made the mist disperse. The land was visible. And then he sees it and is filled with happiness.

But prior, you know, she primes him, you know, she's telling him before she actually lifts the mist, she's telling him what to expect or what to see or what to look for for confirmation. But it's also must be pulling up an image in his mind of familiar landmarks for him to look for. So, you know, I think that provides some evidence for what you're saying, that this is like, you know, he has to be prepared to. To recognize what's right in front of him to properly make that transition.

15:54 Wes: Yeah, and the fact that she's mentioning all those landmarks before she's lifted the mist. Putting that into his imagination and then lifting it and giving him a match.

16:04 Erin: Right. I'm interested, too, in the variation. Or really, there's kind of two varieties of tests that we're talking about here, because they're the tests that reveal. Reveal some truth and provide some psychological role. But then there are the tests of, like the tests of the slave girls, for instance, or even of the suitors. The suitors are tested, in a way, by Odysseus, what, being like an old beggar? But it's just proving to Odysseus something he already knew about the suitors or something that we know about the suitors or believe about them, which is that they're fundamentally, like, morally bad. Right. They're. They're worthless people.

16:43 Wes: Well, at first they passed the test, interestingly. Sorry to interject, but he is testing them, even though, as Homer puts it, you know, they were not. They were fated to all die. So the test is pointless. So here's another pointless test. But he did want to see if any of them were decent. And many of them do in the beginning, pity him and give him food, and then they get riled up by Antinous and others. And there are clear, in the end, moral gradations or moral differences, ethical differences between the suitors. Some of them are better than others, obviously, and yet he's gonna kill them all.

17:24 Erin: That's a good point, because there are those really interesting gradations, but we're told ahead of time. It's like watching an episode of Law and Order in reverse or something. Because we're given the verdict, we know they're going to die. And so we know that even though there are moral gradations there, they've all been found guilty in some fundamental sense. And so it's as if those tests that Odysseus makes them undergo are a kind of formality of a trial, or even like a kangaroo court, right, in which the people who are undergoing the trial don't even know that they're on trial.

So I guess I'm trying to draw a distinction, and maybe it's not quite so black and white, between the tests that serve a kind of psychological purpose and the tests which are actually a kind of concealment. They're like Ithaca in the mist. They're a formality. The tests, the nature of the test, well, it's hidden in both instances. But even the purported utility of the test is not there, so that it seems like it's just an opportunity for Odysseus maybe to feel better when he finally slaughters them or something. The more I talk about this, maybe the distinctions are collapsing because ultimately neither group, whether it's Laertes for instance, or the suitors, neither knows that they're on trial by Odysseus.

But one seems like it's serving a purpose for at least Odysseus own psychology. And the other is just an opportunity for him to exercise his might and just our formalities.

18:59 Wes: A lot of this testing involves him lying, interestingly enough. So he's a lie detector or he's giving people not a lie detector test, but a loyalty test. But his way of doing that is to lie about who he is. And not just by. Not just a lie of omission or by being dressed up as a beggar, but telling elaborate stories. So when the swineherd Eumaeus asks him where he's from, this is book 14, he gives that one of his elaborate I'm from Crete stories and then tells a bunch of adventures that actually sound quite. I think it's here that they sound pretty in parallel to his actual adventures.

And then Eumaeus says, don't stop lying. Part of the story is that Odysseus had, I think it was in Thesprotia where he had been a guest and left treasure. So he's visited a place that Odysseus has been, but not at the same time, but right after. And the swineherd Eumaeus don't lie, the gods detest him. And Odysseus says, well, you can kill me if that's not true. And then Eumaeus gives one of the. There's only two times I see irony used in the book. One was with Helen and we discussed that broadly. The irony of her conflicting the conflict between her story and Menelaus story.

And then Eumaeus will say, so this is at the bottom of 344. Yes, guest, I would be praised enormously among all men now and in times to come, if I took you inside and welcomed you, then murdered you. Not just irony, but sarcasm.

20:49 Erin: I know how he feels.

20:52 Wes: Odysseus is vouching for his honesty by saying, you can kill me if I'm not. And Eumaeus is invoking the fact that Odysseus is a guest, which of course he's not. And I mean he's actually at home, he's pretending to be a guest and he's there to clean up the problem of pseudo guests, the suitors, right, who are actually abusing hospitality or making use of the code of the Guest to eat up all his property, as he often. But anyway, I'm pointing that out because I thought that moment of sarcasm, which is the only one in the entire book, was pretty surprising. But also because it's an illustration of the elaborateness of Odysseus deceptiveness and these long stories, fables that he tells about himself that he seems to really relish telling.

21:55 Erin: Yeah, he does. You know, I wonder, especially with Eumaeus, because of the parallel story of Agamemnon. And just this, I'm thinking about how in book four, when Proteus continues the story of what happened, you know, in that other parallel story, that when Agamemnon lands back at home, he's spotted by a watchman who's been paid off by Aegisthus, who then alerts him to Agamemnon's arrival. And maybe, I don't think get any information about the identity of this watchman and if it's someone who was close to Agamemnon formerly or whatever. But there's a suggestion maybe that anyone could be turned against Odysseus.

I suppose if I had to really find a reason as to why he would be putting Eumaeus through all of this, that Eumaeus might have been turned against Odysseus or paid off by someone to spy on Odysseus and alert someone as soon as he came home or something like that. I don't know. It seems pretty pointless to me overall. But I'm interested in this. These stories about which go on for many pages, actually, which are difficult to kind of summarize, but basically, let's see the story that he tells Eumaeus. What's like a summary of it. Like, he says he comes from Crete, he's the son of a wealthy man who had many other sons by his main wife.

But this Odysseus, false identity. In this identity, his mother is a slave, but his father respected him like his other sons. And then Odysseus, half brothers seize his property and give only a tiny part to him. But then he won a wife with a good dowry, but then he lost it. He wins spoils of war and then he goes to Troy, even though he didn't want to, and stayed for nine years and then sacked the city, returns home. You know, there are all these like, stories of sort of unequal distribution or of earning things by one's own merit that recur in these stories.

Also of kind of doing things reluctantly and also of having continually being steered off course or having to go down these various Other paths, when you have one destination in mind, but you're pulled in other directions. What I find interesting about this is that these stories to me almost have the scrambled quality of a dream, right? In which Odysseus own real life experiences have been kind of broken into bits and then they're sort of reconstituted into these stories that are different from his actual story, but contain, you know, all these pieces so that he's.

It's like he is awake, but his mind, his subconscious mind is trying to work out some problem. Maybe it's a, you know, it's this problem of his own identity, like squaring this idea that for the past 20 years he's been a wanderer and now he has to become, you know, a man with a home again. And so it's as if he's awake, but like I said, trying to kind of work through his own conflict within his identity in his mind, as one does in a dream state.

25:09 Wes: I'm thinking of. You have me imagining a undercover cop type of story where the cop has to be given a backstory. I guess for a spy it's the same thing, right? And then, you know, so his compatriots will quiz him on the backstory. What's your name? What are your parents names? Where did you go to high school? Right. Every detail has to be in there. And it. It cannot be the case that when you are asked about it, you pause and fabricate on the spot. Except Odysseus does seem to be fabricating on the spot. And as you said, he's drawing on all these various experiences he's had and scrambling them up in a dreamlike way.

But you get the sense he does it with complete facility and complete smoothness, or there's not a wrinkle in his ability to fabricate on the spot and just simply to manufacture backstory without a glitch. This is one of the things that Athena seems to admire about him. But I think you're also pointing to the role. So that ability to manufacture backstory and to be many weighed and to be the quote, unquote, Lord of Lies. I think that's one of the epithets, or master of Lies. In a way, it stands in opposition to homecoming. I mean, if we think about home as we could think about it in purely psychological terms, in terms of authenticity and being at home in one self and not putting on all these masks, being transparent to oneself and to other people, in that sense, this deception seems to stand in opposition to homecoming.

And I think we could probably Say similarly that there's an opposition to homecoming in its more literal sense in the long run. But in the short run, it seems to be a means to homecoming. All these tests means to homecoming. But as we pointed out, on one level, that explanation seems to fall apart. On the level of having to test people to figure out if they're loyal because Athena's already told him what's what, or to see, you know, see if there's any danger. He already knows there's danger. Athena's told him what's what. But on the other level, the whole psychological working through and figuring out how to return from being the traveler, the wonder, the deceiver, the warrior, to being in a position after incredible and horrific bloodshed, which we'll get to, to being in a position to be a father and husband again.

Although he does say, you know, is he really going to do that? He has to go take care of some business, including going out and raiding, stealing other people's sheep. So. But anyway, on one level, he has to. He has to navigate the return to domesticity and ironically, deception and not being himself in a way, being traveling away from himself is going to become this means to homecoming. After spending some time with Eumaeus and we shift scenes to Sparta in book 15, Telemachus with Menelaus son. And I guess they are. They're still at Menelaus and Athena appears.

Right. It's easy to forget that Athena is appearing not just to Odysseus, but to Telemachus throughout the poem. And it motivates him to go home by saying Penelope's about to get married. And she even says something like, you know how women are. In fact. Yeah, let's look at page 351. So she's just said her father and her brother's already telling her she should wed Eurymachus, one of the suitors. Top of page 351. You know how women are. They want to help the house of any man they marry. When one darling husband dies, his wife forgets him and her children by him.

She does not even ask how they are doing.

29:11 Erin: Just like a woman.

29:12 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Sexist Athena. Let's pause to talk about our sponsors for this episode, starting with St. John's College, which turns out to be my alma mater. St. John's College is for students who seek meaning in their lives and who want to ask hard questions of themselves and the world. At St. John's students explore 3,000 years of human thought, confronting fundamental human questions while engaging with history's most influential works of philosophy, literature, math, science, music, political, history, and more. At St. John's our vibrant community of learners examine works as divergent as Aristotle and Aquinas, Einstein and Nietzsche, Bach and Baldwin.

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32:51 Erin: Yeah, it's funny, I'm thinking of a parallel now, but what is Athena basically saying, but that Telemachus is going to lose his identity, right? His mother is no longer going to acknowledge him and therefore he's going to be, I don't know, nobody's son. She's going to. You know, there's this smacks of disinheritance, right? Being forgotten, as we've talked about before with Odysseus, right? That's like the worst thing that you can be, you know, is to be forgotten or that people are afraid that someone is going to forget Odysseus, even though he's on everyone's mind constantly, but somehow not occupying space in somebody else's mind.

Or it is literally, it seems, a fate worse than death here. So this bespeaks, I think, you know, like I said, a loss of Telemachus identity on some level, a loss of his relationship with his mother and therefore of a piece of whatever epithet we can assign to Telemachus. He would no longer be her son or a son. And I'm thinking of this in parallel with Odysseus. Many, many identities. You know, Odysseus is kind of overflowing with identity. This is something actually I'm thinking of in relation even to the Tennyson poem Ulysses, which I know pretty well.

The idea that life piled on life were all too little or something like that. The idea that Odysseus has, he's constantly out for the next adventure. He's like a cat times 12, you know, he has hundreds of lives. And that this storytelling that he indulges in with Eumaeus and with everybody else, it seems like it's a part of him and of his own story. Like it seems like something that could have happened to him or, you know, the way his life could have gone had he been born in Crete or something like that, right? Like he has an abundance of identity.

And the loss would be to foreclose some of those possibilities or to shed some of those identities. And that's the threat that motivates Telemachus to return. I don't know how that squares with homecoming, though, or it can run both, I think, in tandem with and at cross purposes with the idea of homecoming. Because you give up, like Odysseus has to give up his identity as a wanderer or, you know, a man of the sea should he return to the plains of Ithaca, but he'd also regain the status as a husband and father. Telemachus, it seems, is like having a good time out there, which is why he doesn't want to come back.

35:16 Wes: Well, it's funny, I guess he is having a good time at Menelaus house and then. And they've just. Just done some good drugs as well, right? But he is getting a little bit of the. Of a taste of his father's life. Not much, but. But a little bit. And then, you know, once Athena encourages him to go back, he. Then he's in an awful hurry. In fact, there's kind of a moment of humor where, you know, he's stopping at Pylos and he's supposed to go visit Nestor again and go through that whole rigmarole with the feasting and the gifts and the jumping out of the bed in the morning.

It's kind of a repeated scene where someone jumps out of the bed in the morning. And this is the one time in the poem where that's just bypassed. Telemachus is like, look, I can't do it again. Just did it with Nestor, did it with Menelaus. Now I'm not going to do it again. I got to get home. And Nestor's son is like, okay, you know, father's gonna be really, really pissed that he's not allowed to give you millions of dollars of gifts. But okay, get out of here and I'll go tell him. And then he takes a murderer aboard his ship who will continue to be a character through the rest of the novel.

Someone's just like, yeah, I murdered someone. I'm fleeing the law. Can you take me aboard Telemachus? Yep, sure. But anyway, so that kind of homecoming is different. And. And I think this is part of what you're pointing out stands in a kind of contra distinction to Odysseus's homecoming, which for Telemachus, now it's more about anxiety. For Odysseus, it's about longing for home and even being methodical about it. He makes up a lie at some point where he says, well, I could have come home earlier, but I was out gathering treasure or something.

I wanted to stay away a little bit longer under one of his. And we get this contrast right after this scene in Sparta and then Pylos, where we go back to Odysseus having dinner with Eumaeus and Odysseus gives one of his speeches about homelessness and what it means to the importance of getting back home. So he says, this is page 361. So basically Odysseus has just said he's going to go to town to beg and then he's going to go to Odysseus's house, right? Odysseus in the guise of the beggar. And Eumaeus says, no, you'll be killed if you do that.

Odysseus says, Odysseus, experienced in pain, answered, I hope Zeus loves you as I do, since you have saved me from the agonies of wandering. The worst things humans suffer is homelessness. We must endure this life because of desperate hunger we endure as migrants with no home. And then he'll say, tell me about Odysseus parents. But this is a really interesting way to put it because introduces this idea that homelessness is the worst form of suffering. So it's not just all the things that he has gone through, including losing all of his men and you know, any of the privation that, that he's gone through in his travels or the risk of death, but homelessness itself is the worst thing.

And then he says, kind of life itself is kind of that way, right? So in a way it's not a problem that can be solved. We must endure this life. We endure as migrants with no home. And why? Because of desperate hunger. I take that desperate hunger to be something broad, right? And not merely literal. So desire in general, whether it's for love or for glory or for food or sex or anything more material or basic, is a form of homelessness to which we are all subject. So we are all in the position of an Odysseus and the task is to get home, if that's possible.

And then it makes me wonder, well, what is the role of this testing and deception and all of that stuff in that process, right? Are we supposed to be telling stories to others, to ourselves? What is the role of that? So a little bit later they will get to the point where Odysseus asks Eumaeus how he became a slave. This is a story, of course, Odysseus must already know. And Eumaeus has a story to tell which sounds a lot like one of Odysseus's backstories where he gets sold and Eumaeus gets sold into slavery. You know, he's from a wealthy family, but he ends up getting sold into slavery essentially because of the deception of one of his nannies.

But before that, and this is page 363, Eumaeus says, but let us, you and I, sit in my cottage over food and wine and take some joy in Hearing how much pain we each have suffered. After many years of agony and absence from one's home, a person can begin enjoying grief. So this highlights the fact that there is no homecoming for Eumaeus. He's stuck, right? He's sort of more literally in the position that we've just heard described as a kind of existential position, right? We endure as migrants from the home. That's just life. Eumaeus, because he's a slave, will never go home.

And Laertes and Odysseus had never offered him the chance, obviously, of going home. He's genuinely stuck in this position. And then finally, the third idea that's introduced there is that storytelling about one's suffering can actually be a pleasurable thing. And again, storytelling is related to this concept of lying and deception. It's what Odysseus is constantly doing. So how do we put all that together? The existential position of homelessness and then the role of storytelling in relation to that.

41:03 Erin: There's a lot there. You know, one of the things I'm thinking about is with these lines that you've referenced about the worst thing humans suffer is homelessness. We must endure this life because of desperate hunger we endure as migrants with no home. You know, I think you're right that he means a deeper hunger there. But the irony also is that right out in the world is where the riches are. That's where the glory is, right? And I mean, even Telemachus has to have his little year abroad, if you will, in order to be able to fight with his father.

At the end of the poem, there's the necessity of leaving to seek one's fortune so that life at home can be, and, you know, know in all senses of the term, life at home can be sustained. Odysseus seems to live off of spoils he gets from other places, right? I mean, it's not. Ithaca is not a wealthy place in and of itself. And if out in the world is where. Where the riches are and, you know, one's needs are satisfied by leaving home, one's physical needs and one's sustenance in old age, I think that probably extends to the storytelling idea as well.

Like, you need to have something to regret, something to mull over in your old age. You need to keep retelling the stories of your youth, the adventures that you have. And had you not left home in the first place and lived to experience this grief or regret or all these sad things that Eumaeus is talking about, then you don't really have a story to tell. And the storytelling seems to be a really important piece of all of this. Though I still haven't worked my way back to your question, which is why that's so important in the first place.

42:48 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it could be that the storytelling is integral. Integral in some way to one's account of oneself, which I'm associating Right. With home in the sense of authenticity. Although if we're telling stories nominally, we're deceiving ourselves. And so the question is, what type of story? In this case, in this scene, it's a story. It's stories they're telling about their own suffering. And the idea is that there's a kind of pleasure in that. And we know there's pleasure in that. Right. This is a classic question when it comes to the enjoyment of tragedy.

Plato addresses this, Aristotle addresses this. But it gets brought up again and again in the history of aesthetics is how is it that we could ever enjoy stories about painful things in which painful things and often horrible things are happening to other people, where we are actually empathizing with the characters to which all this horrible stuff is happening? And there are different explanations for this. You know, Aristotle talks about catharsis. But one of the ways of thinking about it is just that pain and suffering are integral to self organization and, let's say, self integration and to maybe reaching higher and higher levels of psychological organization.

So in a way, pain is growth. So maybe that's the. It's just a trite thing, but the point is that the kind of growth that we're talking about there is a kind of homecoming. So the storytelling, in a way, is. It's a way of maybe integrating experiences of homelessness such that they become the foundation for home. Home is built on top of homelessness in some weird way.

44:36 Erin: I'm curious, though. You said that storytelling is necessarily self deception.

44:41 Wes: Well, not necessarily. Did I say necessarily?

44:44 Erin: Or it's always self deception, or it relies on self deception, or it just

44:49 Wes: using the word story, like telling tales,

44:52 Erin: rather than this idea that making a story out of one's experience is always going to involve some kind of organization which can make sense only in hindsight and which maybe attributes causes to things that, you know, there's correlation and not causation or vice versa.

45:07 Wes: Yeah, to the extent that we organize it and, you know, we might falsify. Right. In giving things a clean narrative when really they're much more like sound and fury. Our daily chaos of our experience is a lot like the travel and homelessness here and their organization into A narrative is a lot more like home. We can't do that organization, we can't engage in that organizing process until we have the raw material of chaos and

45:37 Erin: the organization into something fundamentally repetitive, right? Which is kind of ironic, like the need to tell the repetitive story or to tell the story over and over again, even if it isn't in itself repetitive by its nature. The need to repeat the story is something that I'm interested in too, psychologically. Being very close, as I've been in my life with old men who love telling the same story over and over again, you know, that kind of thing like that repetition compulsion, if you will, is really integral, it seems, to the experience of storytelling.

And I'm thinking about that in relationship to the repetition inherent not only in Odysseus own need to tell his own story over and over, which is how we get the story in the first place, right? This is something we talked about last time, that we're not actually seeing Odysseus experiences firsthand, right? We hearing them told by him. And this is something that we get the impression he's told many times before and will tell many times again, right? His own story. But also something you pointed out about the Groundhog Day like element of, you know, Telemachus and Odysseus as guests, like the ritual of the guest, right?

So even when they're out there having these kind of wild adventures, there's like an inherent repetition because of the formality and the ritual in involved with being a guest. There's a repetition that structures each one of these experiences every single time, whether it's, you know, as I say, the ritual of hospitality or in the thread in a lot of Odysseus stories of him saying too much or having to announce himself and therefore kind of making the same mistake over and over again, or at least displaying the same set of flaws over and over, even if they work out in the end for him, but only at great cost.

So there's the repetition within the stories themselves, which is maybe like the personality element that we're seeing, right? Where we might have a series of experiences that are similar to each other because we're the common denominator, right? So our stories maybe about ourselves, are always going to be somewhat repetitive because we're always going to be working out the same stories, perhaps. But then there's this idea that also the story needs to be repeated over and over again for some psychological need. Once all the stories are over and you're finally back in your house, right.

They need to be Repeated. And then there's this idea that, like, every story has a kind of superstructure above and beyond the fact that, you know, I'm going to. Because I'm Erin and I have my set of characteristics, I'm going to make some of the same choices every time I encounter an obstacle or something. And that's going to be a common theme in my own story. There's this idea too, that lots of stories have the same structure. There's a superstructure about every story. You could argue, yeah, I'm always journeying like a hero. And the idea that you have to leave to come home, the idea that the stories are for a seafaring people, you could argue they're tidal.

They go in and out like the sea. I'm kind of all over the place there, but I'm kind of referencing maybe so three tiers. So like a superstructure that is repeated in all stories in terms of an arc to a story. The repetitions that we have within our own personality to have tendencies towards certain stories that are all alike, and then the need that we have to repeat the same story over and over again verbally, and the recapitulation of that story. I don't know how all of those work together.

49:09 Wes: I mean, you're reminding me of our conversation, our first conversation, the part one of this conversation about the Odyssey, in which we started by thinking about the fact that Odysseus, despite being polutropon, many weighed, resourceful, flexible, can solve any problem, has been stuck for so long, 20 years. I mean, I don't know that we want to blame him for being stuck at Troy, but it was his brilliant Trojan horse solution, right? Solved the problem. It took him 10 years for some reason, to think up, and then he had to spend another 10 years at sea.

So for some reason he's been stuck. And that stuckness is what we think of psychologically as a repetition compulsion. And it's of course related to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. We have a certain narrative, and often it's unconscious. And maybe the stuckness and the repetition come first and the story is emergent upon that. In psychoanalysis, the repetition compulsion, in a way, is about staying home, oddly enough, because it's about staying where it is that we feel comfortable, even if it involves a lot of suffering. And the comfort comes from its association with parental attachment, attachment to an early caregiving situation, such that if we had abusers as parents, we might want to repeat the experience of being abused, even though it's painful, just because it is reminiscent of that attachment of that feeling of being at home.

You just. You're making me think that Odysseus's repetition, which is on a literal level, to be far away from home and his wife and to be adventuring and doing all types of crazy stuff, which I guess can be fun, that feels more like home to him than actual home, such that he has to solve that problem and go from being stuck in the. In the repetition of being at home, away from home, to figuring out how it is that he can actually progress, move forward and really be at home. Give up his warrior identity and even deceiver identity. There's not. Other than raiding other people's farms.

And I guess he has some. One more quest to complete. But it's going to be a very different life domestically than what he's had. I'm sure he'll have his man cave. Right. But it won't be the same,

51:44 Erin: you know, that's why when you mentioned that Telemachus is spurred home by this kind of anxiety, and I think you said something about, you know, Odysseus not having this anxiety. I wonder though, if he does, if this, you know, that's why I'm reading a lot into these stories about him as, you know, this Cretan, this guy from Crete. I don't want to say Cretan. It sounds.

52:05 Wes: Hey, everyone, I'm a Cretan, okay?

52:06 Erin: Yeah.

52:07 Wes: I'm not Odysseus, by the way. I'm just a Cretan. The very opposite of clever. Odysseus, a Cretan.

52:19 Erin: Yeah, that's. But if you're, as you're saying, you know, this, this. I love this idea that, you know, the storytelling is. Is about that desire to live in those experiences again, even if they're unpleasant experiences or they're about danger or they're about not being at home, that there is a home within those stories. And so the telling of the story, the recapitulation of the story that opens up time, I suppose. So you're puncturing whatever your present experience is or present time with the past time with the past experience. And so what Odysseus is maybe doing by telling these stories is another form of delay, which I'm reading as a kind of anxiety, an inability to move forward into his home by continually delaying and puncturing this forward progression of the narrative to the destruction of the suitors and the reunion with Penelope, continually puncturing that with these stories of a false past, like I said, a kind of scrambled identity.

53:27 Wes: Yeah, he's got a delay until he's ready. And at this point, though, this is more about. He's been delaying for 20 years. And the types of delay involved in this disguise and testing. I think, again, we might want to read as the process of psychological re and social reintegration into home and reading it as having solved his problem of the repetition compulsion that required him to be away from home.

53:55 Erin: Does reintegration involve this kind of. I mean, is it like, psychologically like sinking into a hot tub rather than doing a cannonball into the deep end, you know?

54:06 Wes: Right. Well, that's the thing. I mean, a good therapist would just go, kill the suitors now, stop delaying. No, exactly. It is therapeutic. Right? So what he's doing does seem like he's taking the slow road. He's taking the therapeutic road. He's got to get himself right. He's got to get his mind right before he takes action. And usually he's quite impulsive. Despite his cleverness, he couldn't help himself with Polyphemus, gotten himself in huge trouble with Poseidon, but now he's being very disciplined. Athena's help. But also, again, I think you're right.

It's in line with the kind of anxiety where he can't just jump in immediately. He has to go through this therapeutic process of, quote, unquote, testing people unnecessarily, but reacquainting himself with his island and his family. And also, I think building up some of this seems to be about building up the rage to do what he's gonna. This whole thing with Athena, making sure the suitors abuse him, putting him in a position to be directly abused by the suitors, right until he's enraged enough simply to murder them all, which is quite disturbing.

But somehow he's got to go through a process which is going to put him into action, but also get him to the point of being reunited with his wife.

55:28 Erin: I don't know if this is fruitful or not, but this is just putting me in mind of conversations that we had about. Or maybe we didn't. When did we talk about this? I talk about this all the time in my own life and with students, when I would assign them certain short stories on this theme. But the idea of disappearing from your own life, or like George Bailey and It's a Wonderful Life. Have we talked about this? Did we do an episode on this where someone vacates their role in the story, if you will? They step outside of themselves and look at. It's like they're part of a puzzle, you know, and they remove themselves from the larger scene.

Like, they step outside of it and they can see the shape that they've left behind, right? The hole that they've made in the surrounding, you know, but only once they've stepped out of that image can they look back and see what impact they've had on the people around them. Because they see sort of like the outline, you know, the hole that they've left behind. What I'm interested in here is I'm wondering if this testing idea is part of the fact that maybe, like Ithaca being shrouded in mist, Odysseus has been away for too long and can no longer see the hole.

You know, it's closed up, if you will. If it's like a wound, right, it's scabbed over, and he maybe is wondering if there is a place for him. And part of this sussing people out is determining where he fits back in. Or it's even like making that opening for himself to fit back into the ecosystem, if you will, of the island. Because it's had to live without him for so long that it's probably replaced him in the ecosystem. I mean, it's an imbalanced ecosystem because of the suitors and the strain on the household. Right. It's disordered. We already know this quite well.

Right.

57:16 Wes: It's a sort of Ghost of Christmas Future thing going on.

57:19 Erin: Exactly.

57:20 Wes: The part of Clarence is played by Athena, right.

57:24 Erin: And so he has to find a way to make room for himself. Not only that he's been gone and yes, everyone's been miserable, but also they've moved on. And so part of this is like reopening that hole or that, you know, wound sounds painful, but I think there's something of that too, you know, moving, as we already said, moving Laertes to tears.

57:45 Wes: And then I think this is a really good point, because part of what's motivating him, you know, I spoke of him being getting abused by the suitors as a way to motivate him to kill them all. But what you're pointing to is the having to witness what it is that Ithaca and his family have become without him. The hypothetical world in which Odysseus just doesn't exist. I mean, it's the real world as well. But, you know, looking at it from a Christmas Future perspective, such that he can be motivated to fit himself back into the world, see that it needs him.

58:22 Erin: I guess I'm sure I mentioned this in the It's Wonderful Life episode, but there's that short story, Wakefield by Hawthorne which self consciously chimes with the Odyssey because Wakefield leaves for 20 years and then one day he just walks back into his house. He goes one block over and spies on his wife for 20 years and wears disguises and at one point meets her in the street and she doesn't even recognize him, I think somewhere at the midway point. And then after 20 years, he just walks back into his house. You know, he does the cannonball into the hot tub and just walks back in and their life goes back to normal.

The 20 year thing, of course, as I would tell my students, like, that's an obvious reference to the Odyssey. And something about the amount of time that he has been away or, you know, something about the absurdity of it makes it so that he could just walk back in at the end of the story. And we, at least I believe it. But part of the theme of that story, and I don't mean to go down this rabbit hole too far, it's this idea, I think, that Hawthorne is playing with, that the city, this story takes place in London and the city is such a sort of unnatural, unhuman kind of place that someone might be run over by a streetcar one day and you never see them again.

Or someone might just take off and have a new identity and move to another part of the city. And these cities are so large and they're so new at this time and so impersonal that you might just find yourself in a new situation and you might suddenly find that your entire world's changed overnight. The street signs have changed, you've moved to a new part of the neighborhood, you have new acquaintances. You can totally reinvent yourself. This is a sort of terror at the modern world. Kind of underpinnings to the Wakefield story, the Hawthorne story, and in It's a Wonderful Life, which is playing with this small town, everybody knows your name, you have an identity.

It's a different kind of thing. So maybe, or I'll use another metaphor here, like double dutch, right? The city is always playing double Dutch. And you could just as easily jump out and have somebody else jump in and start doing double Dutch as you could just jump back in and start skipping the rope again, right? And the city just keeps going. The machine of the city just keeps going. So maybe Wakefield, because of the nature of his circumstances, can just bam, jump back in. But in Ithaca and in whatever it's called, not Pottersville, Bedford Falls, these are old fashioned places.

These are places where your roles are very clearly defined and where if your mother forgets you, like George Bailey's, mother forgets him, or Telemachus is threatened with his mother forgetting him and moving on. That's a great tragedy. Right. That's something that is going to. I mean, it's a great tragedy in any case, of course. Right. But for the purposes of this old fashioned way of relating this deep human need to know each other in community and in a family structure, to know someone closely, that's something that takes time to reintegrate into, because it's like an organism that you're rejoining, you know, not just something that's kind of already dead or shifting beneath your feet all the time, like you have to.

This is why I think the wound thing maybe is an apt image because you have to, like, reintegrate into this living thing with many moving parts and that that requires a kind of pain and gradual reinsertion and sort of rehabilitation of the whole organism, which now has to work with you grafted back into it. Yeah. I don't know.

1:01:47 Wes: Yeah. The question is, is he. Well, you put it as double Dutch or a cog in the machine. Is Odysseus replaceable?

1:01:56 Erin: Right. Right.

1:01:57 Wes: And he turns out not to be. Not for Penelope, even though she has lots of options over the course of many, many years waiting in her parlor. But she waits out Odysseus, as improbable as that may seem. So I think as we go to. We're going to move into postscript and we can talk about. This is a good time to talk about Penelope and the reuniting of Odysseus and Penelope, which primarily happens in book 19 at first, where she talks to him as a beggar, as she believes him to be, and then in book 23, where they go through their whole personal reacquaintance process, which is really interesting. But I think what we're not going to get to, which I am happy not to get to, is the orgy of violence, which I don't want to relive again, where they just slaughter Everyone, including 12 of the slave girls, for the crime of hooking up with the suitors.

1:03:04 Erin: I'm glad to skip that as well. And I'm really interested, I think, in talking about the bed. Right. Which is maybe further along the lines of how we're thinking here, because even the bed is a living thing.

1:03:17 Wes: Yes, yes. And it's built into the structure. The bedpost is built into the structure of the house in such a way that the bed can't even be moved. Yeah. All right. So we will talk about that in Postscript. Thank you.

1:03:32 Erin: Thank you.

1:03:35 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com to listen. airwavemedia.com.