Hits and Misses in the Devious Narrator of the Odyssey

Transcription

1 Austin Herring ENGL 200 Classical to Medieval Literature Dr. Donna Rondolone December 1, 2014 Hits and Misses in the Devious Narrator of the Odyssey Summary Ever since Homer first transcribed his version of the Odyssey in the 8 th century BC, scholars, from Aristotle in ancient Greece to many more across the modern world, have been interpreting the work and offering new perspectives on the themes the poem covers and the feelings it evokes. One person to more recently offer an insight into the work is Scott Richardson, who, in 2006, published an article entitled the Devious Narrator of the Odyssey. In the article, Richardson, as the title implies, explores the narration in the Odyssey, comparing the poem's narrator to the titular Odysseus and his own narration of stories. In his stories and his life, Odyssey tends to lie and deceive others, and Richardson claims the narrator continuously deceives and misleads readers of the Odyssey, therefore placing the reader in the same confused, disoriented position as many of the characters in the story itself. Breaking the narrator's form of deceptive deviousness into five categories, Richardson, occasionally making excellent points and occasionally glossing over other important ones, explains how the narrator of the Odyssey misleads and disorients readers throughout his telling of the epic poem. The first devious behavior that Richardson identifies in the narrator is his giving of false expectations to the reader. He states that on many occasions, the narrator promises, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the story will be heading in some particular direction, but he then either never fulfills or severely delays the fulfillment of that promise. He gives as just one example the opening lines of the poem; the title of the work being the Odyssey, one would expect it to immediately begin with something about the referenced character, and it does recount Odysseus's state, for the first nine lines,

2 Herring 2 but it then immediately jumps to a discussion on Mount Olympus that the gods are having about a different person completely. Athena changes the topic to be about Odysseus, and ultimately, Hermes is sent to Calypso's island, where Odysseus currently is, but the story does not follow him, instead following Athena to Ithaca, where she meets Telemachus. Richardson notes that, from that point, the story does not directly pick back up on Odysseus's journey until book five, delaying the fulfillment of the promise that the work is about Odysseus. Richardson continues to point out many more examples of the narration, as well as Odysseus himself, doing this, and he uses this to conclude that, even if the reader does not consciously realize all of these examples of false expectations, they, in aggregate, at least influence the reader's perception of the narrator on a subconscious level as being dishonest and misleading. The second type of devious behavior Richardson identifies in the narrator is the making of unexpected moves. He defines this behavior as moves that surprise us without any misleading setup, such as unexpected eventualities or sudden shifts away from significant events (345). In other words, the narrator suddenly places focus on some event which was, just previously, not anywhere near the reader's thoughts. The biggest example Richardson gives of this is with the narrator's treatment of the Phaeacians. The Phaeacians, in the poem, have a habit of returning wayward sailors to their homes, and they speak of a prophecy in which Poseidon, having grown angry with them over this habit, will destroy a ship returning from one of these trips and then erect a mountain surrounding their island. Sure enough, after the Phaeacians return Odysseus home, their ship is destroyed on its return trip. After this, however, leaders at home make sacrifices and pray in hopes of sparing themselves from the second part of the prophecy. During this ordeal, suddenly, in the middle of a line, the narrator switches back to the story of Odysseus, and he never returns to tell the readers of the state of the Phaeacieans. Richardson, using many other examples, shows that the narrator often does leave and come back to stories like these, so in the cases where he does not, such as with the Phaeacians, the reader cannot know if he ever

3 Herring 3 will. This behavior, combined with the use of false expectations, according to Richardson, creates a feeling of narrative uncertainty, stimulating in the reader, again, a sense of uneasiness and a distrust of the narrator. The narrator's third devious behavior, according to Richardson, is concealment. Richardson states that, generally, as events happen and narrators come to know them, the narrator relays the information to the readers, but in the Odyssey, the narrator often does not reveal things to the readers. He gives several examples of the narrator doing this, with one being when Athena travels to the palace on Ithaca disguised as Mentes in the beginning of the poem. When she does this, the suitors do not give any sign that they have noticed her before Telemachus whisks her away, but then, slightly later, Eurymachus asks about the visitor and indicates that they have in fact noticed her. That the narrator did not see fit to mention this beforehand is one of the many examples of concealment that Richardson points out in the narration, which he again claims causes readers to feel shock akin to the shock the characters in the work often feel when they are duped by another character's lies and falsehoods. Richardson notes inaccuracies as the fourth form of deviousness displayed by the narrator. Under this umbrella, Richardson places instances where the narrator is off the mark, giving the audience a skewed version of the current scene (349). He gives the examples of when Odysseus makes speeches to Calypso and Nausicca, on separate occasions, sounding as if he is about to leave them, but in both cases, he does major, significant things before he actually departs. Richardson makes the point that, in the Odyssey, the audience generally knows what is about to happen. Because the story reveals it, through prophecy, readers know that eventually Odysseus will return home and that he will slay the suitors, leaving little room for plot twists. He notes that, because of that fact, these inaccuracies are more a way for the narrator to purposefully toy with his audience than they are a narrative device, giving the audience an even greater reason to feel distrust of their narrator. The fifth and final behavior Richardson identifies as devious in the narrator is his leaving of

4 Herring 4 ambiguities in the story. Richardson offers two major examples of ambiguities left when the story is over, those whether Penelope actually knows the beggar is Odysseus before he reveals himself and whether Odysseus's story to the Phaeacians is true or whether it is, at least in part, falsehoods meant only to gain their sympathies. He points out that if Penelope did know who Odysseus is before it is explicitly revealed, a number of Penelope's strange behaviors in the latter books could be explained, and he also states that there is no reason to believe Odysseus's story is actually true, because Odysseus is well-known as a deceiver and liar. To elaborate, in relating Penelope's interactions with the disguised Odysseus, the narrator does nothing to quell any beliefs that she recognizes her husband despite their being many reasons to believe she might, and in relating Odysseus's interactions with the Phaeacieans, he does nothing to indicate that he is telling the truth, despite Odysseus's nature leading one to believe that he very likely could be lying. The narrator does nothing to dispel these notions, and Richardson marks this as a devious behavior because it is very clear that an audience would find these ambiguous, so deliberately avoiding a resolution must be done to purposefully frustrate them. After this analysis of the fifth dimension of the narrator's deviousness, Richardson has exhausted his different perspectives. From here, he simply concludes that Homer must feel a deep affection for Odysseus. Not only does he express the affection through plot, tone, and interactions of characters internal to the poem, he also crafts a narrator who himself imitates Odysseus's deceitful behavior. He finishes his article by stating that with this narrator Homer creates not only demonstrates the affection he feels for Odysseus, he also manages to place the readers into the world of the Odyssey, giving them same experience of constant false expectations, unexpected moves, concealment, inaccuracies, and ambiguities creating a world full of consistent surprise, confusion, and disorientation. Analysis Richardson is clearly in the right when it comes to the devious nature of the Odyssey's narrator

5 Herring 5 and his confusing, often disorienting effect on readers and audiences. With one exception, he provides fairly strong, and plentiful, evidence of all of the behaviors he claims the narrator is exhibiting and the way that reflects the internal behavior of characters. However, despite being largely successful in his argument, in giving some smaller examples, Richardson occasionally glosses over even bigger examples of these devious behaviors that might have spurred even greater agreement with him, and he may also have nearly missed an entire category of devious behavior. In some cases, there is much stronger evidence that Richardson could have provided to make his points. In particular, one of the strangest parts of the poem is how it seems to continue on to a second resolution after it has already had a satisfying conclusion. In particular, at the end of book twenty-three, Odysseus has finished slaughtering the suitors in the climax of the poem, and he is reunited with his wife. The two fall into bed, and after partaking in the joys of love, tell each other of their experiences while Odysseus has been gone, and then they fall asleep. With the suitors gone and Odysseus reunited with his wife, it would be expected that the story is over, Odysseus having achieved his goals and reached a satisfying conclusion. However, the next thing that happens is for Athena to wake Odysseus and for a twenty-fourth book to be started. The above situation is a major, overarching narrative construction, perhaps on par with the delaying of Odysseus's introduction, supporting Richardson's point that he does not include. He does note the guiding of the suitors to the underworld by Hermes at the start of book twenty-four, one of the most jarring, and therefore unexpected, moments in the book, but he does not note that it is nearly doubly jarring because one would expect the story to have ended by this point. This is just one big example of the narrator giving a false expectation that is not fulfilled that could have been included, with others ranging from the continuous prophesying of the suitors deaths without realization of that prophecy after Odysseus returns home to many other examples, that Richardson did not. With the lack of some of these larger examples of devious behavior, Richardson's argument itself lacks quite the

6 Herring 6 convincing power that it could have had, though, with one exception, he still provides remarkably good evidence for his claims. As alluded to, the inaccurate behavior with which Richardson tries to attribute the narrator is not very convincing, the only one of his categories which is so. In this section, Richardson does not do much to differentiate his inaccurate category from his false expectations one. The example given in the summary above is that of Odysseus's apparent farewell speeches after which he does not depart. This is the same thing as setting the reader up with the expectation that Odysseus will leave and then not fulfilling that expectation, by having him remain for slightly longer. None of Richardson's other examples do much to show a different side of deviousness than false expectations either. If the inaccuracy section had been folded into the false expectations one, these examples would be fitting, but, as the article stands, the inaccuracies section stands as a weak link, a poor argument made among many other stronger ones that slightly sours the rest of the article's arguments. Strangely, despite the severe lack of evidence that Richardson gives in his section on inaccuracies, the narrator recounts a number of inaccuracies, or, to use a different word, contradictions, in his story that could have been used, therefore meaning Richardson missed nearly an entire category of devious behavior. The most major example Richardson could have used is the narrator oscillating between referring to weapons, tools, and treasure as bronze and as iron. Each of these types of tools is generally only made in one particular age in the history of a region; during an earlier Bronze Age, bronze is the best metal known, and all tools and weapons are made of it, but in a later Iron Age, all of the bronze tools would be almost completely supplanted by iron, a better, more sturdy metal. Therefore, it would be very unlikely for there to be a mix of bronze and iron technology in a society, but the narrator repeatedly refers to both. For an example, in book one, on page six, when Athena is preparing to leave Olympus, she takes with her a spear tipped with a bronze point, but, in the same book, on page nine, Athena tells Telemachus that his father will return even if iron shackles

7 Herring 7 bind [him] down. In doing this, the narrator clearly, through the relation of Athena's words, reveals that the Greeks, at this point in time, have reached a point where they have created useful iron technology, so there should be no need for them to continue to use bronze technology, which makes the narrator's references to it illogical and out of place. The narrator's references to these two technologies which should not co-exist is an excellent example of inaccuracy or contradiction in the narration. Because bronze and iron technologies would not be used in the same time period, the narrator must either be inaccurately saying that Athena's spear is bronze-tipped or he must be inaccurately saying that Athena uses the phrase iron shackles. Either way, whether it be because of an unintentional slip of the tongue; a historical mistake stuck in an orally composed story, an example of parataxis; or a deliberately-introduced bit of deception, the narration describing both bronze and iron tools, in these and many other places, introduces another level of deviousness into the poem, with a contradictory, necessarily inaccurate portrayal of the events. In turn, this would, following Richardson's observations, further put the reader off-guard, with the dissonance causing something of a temporal displacement; due to the conflict in technology, the reader cannot accurately place the events at any particular point in time, adding to the confusion the narrator has already bestowed upon him as well as adding to the distrust the narrator has caused in him. The bronzeiron discrepancy is extremely prevalent throughout the work, as well as other, more minor inaccuracies and contradictions in the narration, and each instance of one of these further exacerbates the feelings the reader is having in regards to the narrator and narration. Despite these complaints about evidence and his division of the devious behavior, Richardson's article still remains a strong one. He uses, with the exception of the inaccurate section, ample and convincing evidence to support his claims, though he certainly could have used even more strong examples, and even the section on inaccuracies is weak because of its similarities to false expectations and could still have worked well as simply more examples of false expectations. The only major

8 Herring 8 complaint is the way that he completely misses many actual examples of inaccuracies and contradictions in the narration, such as the inclusion of both bronze and iron tools, metals used in very different and very distant eras. Perhaps the things Richardson missed are simply more evidence of hwo devious the narrator is, with its pervasiveness meaning Richardson could not possibly catch every example. Whatever the case, however, Scott Richardson's article, with its explorations of the narrator of the Odyssey, gives great insight into the narrator's devious nature, the way he misleads readers and audiences with a vast variety of deceitful behaviors and brews in them feelings of uneasiness and distrust, bringing them, deep into the world of the Odyssey, where such feelings are ever-present in a world full of deception.

9 Herring 9 Works Cited Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, Print. Richardson, Scott. "The Devious Narrator of the Odyssey." The Classical Journal (2006):