The Odyssey

One can be rid of a pain by ceasing to care about its cause: the poem takes this solution seriously. Throughout the voyage, the most persistent threat is not dying but no longer wanting to go home. The lotus takes that wish from those who eat it, and whoever listens to the Sirens never sees wife or children again. Odysseus himself feasts for a year with the sorceress Circe, until his companions remind him of his country. Forgetting here is no failure of memory: it is a way of living, gentle and within reach. A man who no longer wishes to return no longer suffers from being away. If this way out is so close, we need to understand what could make anyone turn it down.

This way out has its extreme form: a life without end, offered on condition of giving up the return. Calypso, whose name can be heard in the verb "to hide", has held Odysseus for seven years and offers him freedom from age and death. The poem does not paint a happiness turned down: Odysseus weeps on the shore, and the nymph no longer pleases him. But his answer is what matters. He grants that Penelope is less beautiful and that she will die, and simply repeats that he wants to go home. He offers no argument, and one can see why: he is not comparing two lives, and the one on offer would not extend his own, it would replace it. Bernard Williams would later argue that an endless life would wear out the desires that make each of us who we are. Odysseus shows the other side of that idea: it is attachments already formed, to a mortal wife and an island, that make this particular immortality undesirable. Yet refusing to forget who one is presupposes that one can still be that person, and this is what the voyage denies him.

For holding on to oneself is not enough to survive, and survival sometimes demands giving oneself up. Trapped by the Cyclops, Odysseus gives his name as "Nobody", and the Greek plays on that word, on its variant mē tis, which also says "no one", and on mētis, cunning intelligence. Horkheimer and Adorno see in it a milestone of instrumental reason: the subject saves itself by denying itself, and pays for its preservation with the very thing it meant to preserve. The poem, however, does not leave him at rest in this anonymity. Barely out of reach, Odysseus shouts his real name, and that name is what lets the Cyclops call down Poseidon's anger on him. Being safe, then, is not enough for him: he wants the deed to be his, even at the price of being within reach. But a name alone does not yet say who one is.

What fills that name is a story, and the poem makes us feel that we do not own it. Still anonymous among the Phaeacians, the people who took him in after his shipwreck, Odysseus himself asks the singer-poet, the bard, to sing of the Trojan Horse, and he weeps. The poem then compares him to a woman led into slavery after her husband has died before their city: the man who took the city weeps like those he took. To hear one's own story is to receive it from outside and to find in it what one had not seen. Arendt holds this scene to be paradigmatic for both history and poetry: what was mere occurrence becomes a story once it can be heard again. Odysseus then names himself and recounts his wanderings over four books, as a bard would, as though saying who one is came down to telling what one has lived: this is what Ricœur would call narrative identity. The poem adds two reservations. Elsewhere, the same man effortlessly invents whole lives, lies that resemble the truth: an identity made of narrative can be forged. And Circe, finding Odysseus and his companions broken by dwelling on their wanderings, shows that one can also get lost in one's past. If a story can lie, someone must be able to vouch for it.

No one, then, is oneself alone: others must be able to recognize us, and they cannot do so on our word. His own son says so from the start: no one knows by himself whose child he is. After twenty years, the absent man raises a very concrete question of identity, and the poem tries several answers. An old dog recognizes him. A nurse touches his scar, and the narrative stops at length to tell of the wound and of the name given by his grandfather, drawn from a verb of anger: Auerbach made this pause the model of Homeric style. It can also be read as a thesis: a mark on a body identifies someone only through the story it carries. Penelope, undoing at night what she has woven by day, holds time in suspense so that the question stays open. Spoiler But what Odysseus finds on his return is not a place left intact.

Remembering what was then becomes remembering what is owed. In his absence, the suitors have consumed his goods and coveted his wife, and the poem announces early on that they will pay. Memory changes its nature: it was faithfulness, and it becomes bookkeeping. Penelope reproaches Antinous, one of the two ringleaders, with the ingratitude of a man whose father Odysseus saved. The man who acknowledges no debt and the man who forgets nothing he is owed can only collide. It remains to be seen whether a wrong can be settled by anything other than blood.

The poem does not leave the reader with the mere victory of one side. What it asks holds well beyond epic. What has been done to us is part of what we are: forgetting it would bring relief, and would take that part away. It is for you to say where you would draw the line.