An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn
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that resulted from Helen’s adultery with Paris has furnished poets and playwrights and novelists with material for the past three and a half millennia: countless deaths on both sides, the shocking sack of the great city, the enslavements and humiliations and infanticides and suicides, and then, finally, the wretchedly prolonged homecomings of those Greeks clever or lucky enough to survive the war itself.
Arkhê kakôn. The second word in that phrase is a form of the Greek kakos, “bad,” which survives in the English “cacophony,” a “bad sound”—a reasonable way to describe the noise made by women as their young children are thrown over the walls of a defeated city, which is one of the bad things that happened after Troy fell. The first word in the phrase, arkhê, which means “beginning”—sometimes it has the sense of “early” or “ancient”—also makes its presence felt in certain English words, for instance “archetype,” which literally means “first model.” An archetype is the earliest instance of a thing, so ancient in its authority that it sets an example for all time. Anything can be an archetype: a weapon, a building, a poem.
For my father, the arkhê kakôn was a minor accident, a single false step that he took in the parking lot of a California supermarket where he and my brother Andrew had gone to get groceries for a long-awaited family reunion. All five of his children were coming with their families to join him and Mother for a long weekend at Andrew and Ginny’s place in the Bay Area; all were traveling great distances to get there. My parenting partner, Lily, and our two boys and I were flying in from New Jersey, my younger brother Matt and his wife and daughter were coming from DC, my youngest brother, Eric, from New York City, our sister, Jennifer, and her husband and small sons from Baltimore. But before any of us got there, my father fell. Like some unlucky character in a myth, he had unwittingly fulfilled his own glum warnings in a way no one could have guessed: for him, a parking lot had turned out to be the most dangerous place of all, but not because of the cars, the people who drive like maniacs. He and Andrew had finished loading the car with groceries, and as Daddy was returning the empty cart he tripped on a metal stanchion and fell. He couldn’t get up, Andrew told me later, he just sat there looking dazed. By the time we all arrived my father was confined to a wheelchair. He’d fractured a bone in his pelvis, an injury from which it would take him months to recover; but of course we knew he would recover, since, as everyone used to say, Jay is tough!
And he was indeed tough, mastering first the wheelchair and then the walker and then the cane. But the fall he’d feared for so long set in motion a series of complications whose outcome was grossly disproportionate to the mishap that had triggered them, the hairline fracture leading to a small blood clot, the blood clot requiring blood thinners, the blood thinners causing, ultimately, a massive stroke that left my father helpless, unrecognizable: unable to breathe on his own, to open his eyes, to move, to speak. At a certain point we were told it would soon be over, but he fought his way back yet again. He was tough, after all, and for a brief period he was well enough to converse about ball games and Mother and a certain Bach piece that he was eager to practice on his electronic keyboard although, he said, he knew it was too hard for him. This last period was one in which (as we would say later on, retelling the remarkable story over and over as if to convince ourselves that it was all real) “his old self” had reappeared: a term that raises questions first posed, as it happens, in the Odyssey, a work whose hero must, at the end of his decades-long absence from home, prove to those who once knew him that he is still “his old self.”
But which is the true self? the Odyssey asks, and how many selves might a man have? As I learned the year my father took my Odyssey course and we retraced the journeys of its hero, the answers can be surprising.
All classical epics begin with what scholars call a proem: the introductory lines that announce to the audience what the epic is about—what will be the scope of its action, the identities of its characters, the nature of its themes. These proems, while formal in tone, perhaps a bit stiffer than the stories that follow, are never very long. Some are almost disingenuously terse, such as the proem of the Iliad, an epic poem of fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety-three lines devoted to a single episode that takes place in the final year of the Trojan War: a bitter quarrel between two Greek warriors—the commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, son of Atreus, and his greatest warrior, Achilles, son of Peleus—that threatened the mission to destroy Troy and avenge the abduction of Helen. (For Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, the war is personal: Helen’s cuckolded husband, Menelaus, the king of Sparta, is his younger brother. Achilles, for his part, fights only for glory. “The Trojans never did any harm to me,” he bitterly remarks.) In the end, the two warriors reconcile and their mission is successful—although it should be said that the destruction of Troy, the ruse of the Trojan Horse, the nighttime ambush, the slaughter of the city’s warriors and enslavement of its women and children, the razing of its once-impregnable walls, an outcome familiar to the Greek audiences of the epic from their real-life wars and made famous through many literary and artistic representations of the Fall of Troy, is not actually narrated in the course of the Iliad’s fifteen-thousand-some-odd lines. Epics, despite their great length, are in fact tightly focused on whatever theme is announced in their proems. The proem of the Iliad is concerned simply with the quarrel between the two Greek warriors, its causes and effects, and what it reveals about the characters’ understanding of honor and heroism and duty and death. But because epic has a sophisticated array of narrative devices—because it can hint, and foreshadow, and even flash forward into the future—the Iliad leaves us in no doubt as to how things will end.
The proem of the Iliad consists of seven lines:
Rage! Sing the rage, O goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles—
devastating rage, which put countless pains upon the Greeks
and hurled to Hades many sturdy souls of
heroes, while making their bodies into pickings for dogs
and all manner of birds, as Zeus’ plan was achieving its fulfillment—
from the moment when first the two stood forth in strife,
Atreus’ son, the lord of men, and Achilles, a man like a god.
In themselves, these seven lines tell us fairly little about the plot of the epic. We know simply that there is rage, death, and a divine plan; Agamemnon and Achilles. The reference to Zeus’ plan is arrestingly coy: what exactly is it? How are the rage and the pain and the dogs and birds helping to fulfill it? We aren’t told right away, and there’s no doubt that part of the reason the poet hints without explaining is to make us keep listening—to make us find out what this plan is. But it’s also hard not to feel that the reference to a “plan” is slyly pointed: for it implies that the poet, at least, has a plan, even though at this early point we have only the dimmest idea of what it might be. In epic, we need the proem because it reassures us, at the very moment we set out upon what might look like a vast ocean of words, that this expanse is not a “formless void” (like the one with which another great story, Genesis, begins) but a route, a path that will take us someplace worth going.
“Someplace worth going” is a good way to summarize the great preoccupation of the Odyssey, which in certain ways is a sequel to the Iliad. A poem of twelve thousand one hundred and ten lines, it takes as its subject the convoluted and adventure-filled return home of one of the Greeks who took part in the war against Troy. This particular Greek is Odysseus, the ruler of a small island kingdom called Ithaca; he is a trickster about whose ruses and ploys, some successful, others not, the Greeks loved to tell tales. One of the most popular of these legends concerns the run-up to the Trojan War. We are told that when the Greeks came asking Odysseus to join their coalition in the war against Troy, Odysseus—“a clever man,” as an ancient commentator on the Odyssey drily observed, “who perceived how vast the conflict would be”—tried to avoid conscription by pretending to be crazy: in the presence of the Greek scout he yoked an ass and an ox together and began to plow salt into his fields. Familiar with his reputation, the scout took Telemachus, Odysseus’ infant son, and placed the baby on