An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn
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man”) and what he knows and we know (Odysseus), the poet introduces an important theme that will continue to grow throughout his poem, which is: What is the difference between who we are and what others know about us? This tension between anonymity and identity will be a major element of the Odyssey’s plot. For its hero’s life will depend on his ability to conceal his identity from enemies—and to reveal it, when the proper time comes, to friends, to those by whom he wants to be recognized: first his son, then his wife, and finally his father.
The proem’s sly refusal to commit itself to a name is mirrored in another bizarre evasion. The Iliad begins with a precisely worded request to the Muse to start singing from a specific moment in the story—from the moment when first the two stood forth in strife, / Atreus’ son, the lord of men, and Achilles, a man like a god. The poet of the Odyssey, by contrast, doesn’t seem to care particularly about where his epic ought to begin. He asks the Muse to begin telling her story at “some point or another,” hamothen—anywhere in Odysseus’ journey that suits her. But hamothen also has a temporal overtone: “from some point in time or another,” “at any random moment in the narrative.” In the Odyssey’s opening lines, space and time are themselves suggestively vague, indistinct from each other.
This strangely tentative careering between concrete specifics and unhelpful generalities gives you a familiar feeling: the feeling of what it’s like to be lost. Sometimes it’s as if you’re on familiar territory; sometimes you feel at sea, adrift in a featureless liquid void with no landmarks in sight. In this way, the opening of this poem about being lost and finding a way home precisely replicates the surf-like oscillations between drifting and purposefulness that characterize its hero’s journey.
The proem’s re-creation of a feeling of movement, of travel, brings you back to the deepest roots of the word “proem” itself. The word literally means “before the song”: pro-, “before,” plus oimê, “song.” This makes sense: the proem is the part that comes before the song proper, the “song” being the epic itself. And yet oimê has a suggestive provenance. It comes from an older word, oimos, which means “path” or “way”—because, possibly, some ancient stock phrase like “the way of song” was eventually reduced, simply, to “the way” and in time came to mean just “song.” That “song” should come from “path” makes a kind of natural sense: any kind of song, from a ballad to an epic of fifteen thousand lines, leads you from the beginning to the end, winds its way through a story to a climax, a conclusion. It is a “way” toward something.
And yet if we travel even further into the heart of the history of these words, more is made clear. For oimos, “path,” is linked ultimately to oima, a word that suggests something like our “impetus”—a rush, a forward spring, a purposeful movement forward.
I’ve always found this etymology of the word “proem” interesting because it takes you down a road from introductions to songs to the elemental idea of movement itself: the idea of, quite simply, “going.” For the Greeks, poetry was motion.
In every sense, it is supposed to move you.
Tell us the tale.
On a Wednesday night in a January half a century after the tediously circling homecoming about which my father, Daddy Loopy, liked to tell his story, I was thinking about long journeys again, and about long silences.
Once again I found myself sitting next to my father without speaking. This time, we were not in an airplane. My father was lying, as imperturbable as a dead pharaoh in his bandages, in a complicated bed in the neurological intensive care unit of a hospital fifteen miles or so from the house that he had moved into fifty-two years earlier, the house he’d continued to live in as it filled with five children and then was emptied of them, leaving him and my mother alone to live their lives, which were, on the whole, quiet and circumspect, at least in part because she never liked to travel, really.
Expect the unexpected. My father had fallen, and it was clear there would be no more educational trips. But we had had our odyssey—had journeyed together, so to speak, through this text over the course of a semester, a text that to me, as I sat there looking at the motionless figure of my father, seemed more and more to be about the present than about the past. It is a story, after all, about strange and complicated families, indeed about two grandfathers—the maternal one eccentric, garrulous, a trickster without peer, the other, the father of the father, taciturn and stubborn; about a long marriage and short dalliances, about a husband who travels far and a wife who stays behind, as rooted to her house as a tree is to the earth; about a son who for a long time is unrecognized by and unrecognizable to his father, until late, very late, when they join together for a great adventure; a story, in its final moments, about a man in the middle of his life, a man who is, we must remember, a son as well as a father, and who at the end of this story falls down and weeps because he has confronted the spectacle of his father’s old age, the specter of his inevitable passing, a sight so overwhelming that this man, who is himself an expert storyteller, adept at bending the truth and at outright lying, too, a manipulator of words and hence of other people as well—this man is so undone by the sight of his failing father that he can bring himself no longer to tell his lies and weave his tales, and has, in the end, to tell the truth.
Such is the Odyssey, which my father decided he wanted to study with me a few years ago; such is Odysseus, the hero in whose footsteps we once traveled.
(Education)
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2011
… the pretext for Telemachus’ journey is the inquiry about his father; but for Athena, who advises it, the aim is education. The son would not have become worthy of his father had he not heard from his father’s companions about his deeds; he knows how to behave toward his father on the basis of the stories that he has heard about him.
—Ancient commentator on Odyssey, 1.284 (“Go first to Pylos and question godlike Nestor”)
(Fathers and Sons)
One of the rare stories that my father liked to tell about his youth—rare, that is, while we were growing up, since as he got older he became increasingly talkative about his past, although it must be said that his stock of anecdotes could never really compete with the funny and dramatic tales that my mother and her father told—was the one about how his classical education had come to an end.
One day, he would begin, one spring day toward the end of the war (my father always referred to World War II simply as “the war,” the way that some ancient bard might say the word “war” and mean “Troy”), it must have been the end of my junior year in high school, my Latin teacher, who was a very natty guy, a European refugee—a German, I remember, he got away just in time—my Latin teacher asked a bunch of us what we were planning to do the next year. We were fourth-year students, we’d been taking Latin since the seventh grade, and that year we’d been reading selections from Ovid.
Oh-vid.
My father might, at this point, clear his throat. He was a German guy, he repeated. I remember he always tried to dress well, although you could see his clothes had been washed a lot, the collar was frayed and the elbows of his suit were shiny. So that day, he asked us who was planning to continue with the Latin language into our senior year. See, senior-year Latin was the climax of Latin study, when you finally got to read Virgil. The Aeneid.
During more recent retellings of this story I would note the way in which he