S4, Episode 1: Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey

[00:00:00] Deborah: Welcome to Season 4 of Musings in Greek Literature. I’m Professor Deborah Beck, and this podcast is a co production between me and my classes of advanced ancient Greek literature students here at the University of Texas at Austin. This season, we’re talking about Odysseus, who is one of the most well known heroes of the Trojan War.

And we’re going to look at him as he appears in Homer’s Odyssey. and in two plays of the Athenian dramatists, Sophocles, that are set during the Trojan War. I thought it would be fun to do a course on Odysseus because he is one of the most variegated characters in classical myth. So while the Odyssey admires him, which sort of seems like it’s required since he’s the star of the poem and it’s named after him, He’s a slimy sneak in Sophocles Philoctetes, where he seems like a completely amoral, completely goal oriented guy who has no interest in what’s sort of inherently right or admirable.

And so later in the season, uh, students in the class will be talking about not only the Philoctetes, but also Sophocles Ajax, where Odysseus is kind of an equivocal character. And because of all these different versions of him that we see in different specific tellings, um, Odysseus is a great character for exploring the variants that are the bedrock of classical myth, which is to say there isn’t a right version of a particular myth.

There are several different right versions, and sometimes Two different right versions conflict with each other. And what that means is that individual storytellers can create new details and story features that suit their particular interests and goals, which can range from very specific details, like what order the big events of a character’s life happen in, to basic personality qualities, like whether Odysseus is a good guy or not, and sometimes he’s a really good guy, as he is in the Odyssey, and sometimes he really isn’t at all.

Today, in episode one, we’re going to talk about Odysseus and his character as we’re introduced to him. to them in Homer’s Odyssey. In particular, we’re going to look at the very beginning of the poem, the few lines that set the scene known as the prologue. And then we’re going to skip ahead to Book 13 of the odyssey.

When Odysseus first arrives home in Ithaca after being away for 20 years, first, he spends 10 years fighting with the rest of the Greeks at Troy, and then he spends another 10 years trying and failing to return home to his family and his people on Ithaca. So, today for the introductory episode of our season, I’m extremely excited to be joined by my colleague in the UT Classics department, Dr.

Sean Gurd. Um, and I’m going to invite Sean to, to say hello and tell you a little bit about himself.

[00:02:46] Sean: Hello, I have been teaching Greek lit in translation and in Greek for about 20 years, taught the Odyssey a bunch of times, taught these plays a bunch of times, uh, and I’m a fan of all of them. So I’m just really here to talk about what I like.

[00:02:59] Deborah: Yay. Uh, and that’s what this podcast is really about. It’s a bunch of dweeby Greek literature, fan boys and girls talking about what they like and hopefully reaching some people out there in podcast land who also like them and can enjoy you. their own enjoyment of Greek literature in company with others who feel the same.

Um, so I want to start with, what do we mean by deceptive? Because the course that is producing this podcast is going to be thinking at various different points during the semester about different ways in which the deceptive tendencies in Odysseus character are depicted in a lot of different ways. Um, and they’re embodied in his Epithets.

[00:03:42] Sean: Okay. So I want us to Wait, before we talk about the epithets. Yes. Let’s talk about that. So you call him deceptive. Yes. Why don’t we just call him a liar?

[00:03:48] Deborah: Well, yes. That is what some people call him. Meaning one thing, or knowing one thing to be true, and saying something else, or saying nothing at all, is fundamental to Odysseus character all the time.

So the Odyssey sees that as noble, and even entertaining, as we’re going to see when we look at Book 13. And certainly as necessary, because while Odysseus has been gone all this time, his palace on Ithaca has been overrun by suitors that are trying to marry his wife and take all his possessions. But other tellings are not at all convinced that that kind of behavior is appropriate, is admirable, is anything that we want to be pleased about.

So,

[00:04:26] Sean: what you call him,

[00:04:33] Deborah: So, we’re going to start with the adjectives that most frequently describe Odysseus, which are known in Homeric studies as epithets. And an epithet is an adjective that we think was used not only by the specific poem that we have in Homer’s Odyssey, but by lots of different poets that were telling traditional stories about Odysseus.

So, the most common word that describes Odysseus, both in the Odyssey and in the Iliad, is the adjective polyumatis, which means with lots of matis, sort of plans, strategies, fun ideas.

[00:05:07] Sean: There’s actually Matis.

[00:05:09] Deborah: Right. And is the, who is, Now, Matis is the mother of Athena, right?

[00:05:13] Sean: She is the mother of Athena, right?

That’s

[00:05:15] Deborah: fantastic, because Athena’s going to make an appearance later on in today’s episode in a connection that’s very much about Matis and this kind of clever strategy stuff that Athena is also, that’s one of her areas, is being the goddess of clever, planful stuff like that. So, that’s the most common way of describing Odysseus.

The way he’s described in the first line of the Odyssey is the word polutropos, Um, which means of many, literally means of many turns. Because it appears in the first line of the poem, we think of this as being a more common, uh, widespread way of describing Odysseus than it actually is. And when I looked into this, I was surprised to remember, I must have known this at some point in the past, but I forgot.

Uh, that it’s only used in the prologue and one other time, uh, this word, of many turns. I’m going to come back to the translation of many turns, but for the moment, I, I want to just sort of emphasize that this idea of having many, like, strategies, clever ideas, et cetera, uh, uh, The epithets, these epithets tell us that this feature of Odysseus personality is central to his character and whether it’s good or bad, or some of each, or we don’t know, varies widely, depending, as you said earlier, on who’s telling the story, but because the Odyssey is the earliest and probably the most extensive depiction of Odysseus story.

In Greek literature, the Odyssey makes a kind of mythological and storytelling baseline for all of the later versions of Odysseus and his story. So returning to this word, polytropos, many turns, at the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus is defined by his absence, and we can see that in a couple of ways.

First of all, he’s never named in the prologue. And then as the poem continues, he doesn’t even show up as a character until Book 5, which is to say about 20 percent of the way through the poem. So both on the level of what the individual words for him are or aren’t, and in the characters who show up on the book.

In the story, we can see that Odysseus is important because he’s not there and how he affects the people at home on Ithaca who wish he were there. Um, and this word, Pellutropos, which is our first introduction to the specific nature of Odysseus, even without his name, has, it’s sort of a litmus test. for translations.

It’s one of the first interesting translation choices that you encounter when you’re opening a translation of the Odyssey, of which, of course, there are dozens and dozens in English, of which perhaps the most, uh, well known right now is Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation, in which she rendered Polutropos as complicated.

Uh, a decision for which, uh, a lot, she got both praise and some shade thrown on her. Richmond Lattimore, who is generally the most literal translator of Homer’s poetry, Lattimore translates Polutropos of many ways, which is close to of many turns, and Robert Fitzgerald in the middle of the last century translated it skilled in all ways of contending.

But. What none of these really are able to do is to I’ve got

[00:08:29] Sean: one more, sorry. Oh, good. Tell us one more. So I’m holding Fagel’s translation, which was like big in the 90s, right? Yeah. The Man of Twists and Turns. Yeah. So that’s got that sense of many ways. Right. You’ve got him. Yeah. Wiley and

[00:08:41] Deborah: So what the, what the Greek kind of puts into the one word that’s very hard to capture as concisely and vividly in English is a turn in the sense of a literal turn, because Odysseus is wandering for all these years trying to get home.

So he’s literally on this kind of very, you know, very long and winding road, as a singer might have said, to get back to his home. But he’s also, uh, He’s got lots of twists and turns inside his head as he’s creating or trying to create that way home for himself. So we can see just sort of built into the language how important Odysseus is deceptive, lying, whether, however we were going to characterize this gap between what’s actually the case and what he says.

That gap is fundamental to his character and to the stories about him.

[00:09:30] Sean: Yeah, can I jump in? I was just thinking about this. I think you’re right. Like, it’s actually really interesting. I never really thought about this. It is, he’s not there.

[00:09:37] Deborah: He’s not there. At the

[00:09:38] Sean: beginning of the, at the beginning of the epic, it’s all about his not being there.

Like, that’s the big question. Where is he? Yeah. And his son goes off and looks for him. And it’s a four book long sort of mini epic about him. His absence and his absence dominates, but the other thing that’s in that first line is, and that’s the other choice you got to make right away. If you’re going to translate is how you translate the first word, right?

So like people say, I guess people say that the, the theme of these epics is announced in the first word, right? So the first word of the Iliad is wrath. And the first word of the Odyssey isn’t twisted turns or however you want to translate polytropos it’s man, it’s Andra, right? So he’s, and he’s also not there in that.

Like, all he is there is a man.

[00:10:20] Deborah: Right. And it could be any man. It could

[00:10:22] Sean: be, right.

[00:10:23] Deborah: And it’s every man at the same time. Exactly.

[00:10:26] Sean: So as a translator you’ve got to decide what kind of a man are we talking about, right? The Greek word is gendered, but is the gender important or is he, is he just an everyman or is?

Like, is it about masculinity in some sense? That’s a choice you gotta make. But I think it’s really interesting that it’s, that it’s not Odysseus there. It’s just some guy.

[00:10:44] Deborah: Right.

[00:10:44] Sean: Some tricky guy. Yeah. And maybe the, like the sympathetic ness that the Odyssey has for this character, who is, Often, as you said, like, definitely not sympathetic.

No. Comes from the fact that in the Odyssey, until the very end, he’s rarely fully in control. Like, he’s always in a position of less power in some way.

[00:11:06] Deborah: Yeah, he’s always worried, legitimately worried, that somebody’s gonna kill him. That he’s never gonna get home. that some terrible thing is going to happen to him or someone he loves that he can’t do anything about.

[00:11:16] Sean: At least once he shows up naked on an island, right? I mean, he’s really, he’s got nothing.

[00:11:20] Deborah: He’s got literally nothing. Yeah.

[00:11:21] Sean: So that’s where the need for the trick, for in the Odyssey, the need for the trickiness comes from that underdog position.

[00:11:30] Deborah: We’re going to move now to book 13, which is the sort of, at the halfway point of the poem, Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca and kind of the second half of the Odyssey Is the story of how his deceptions enable him to surmount the considerable problems that he finds awaiting him on Ithaca and basically one of the things that happens there is Athena says, Don’t just tell everybody what’s going on so we can understand.

our own attitude towards his deceptions, in part because Athena clearly thinks this is not only a good idea, but the right idea, um, for what he should be doing once he gets back. So in Book 13, he finally arrives on Ithaca, having been sent there on a boat, uh, by the helpful Phaeacians. Once he arrives on Ithaca, deception and disguise are central to the entire rest of the poem.

So we Uh, Odysseus experiences on Ithaca with a long conversation between himself and Athena who disguises herself as a herder. So there’s disguise as one of Odysseus most important and most prominent forms of deception, and he shares that with Athena because he first meets her here in disguise. Um, and this conversation between the two of them showcases his power of self control, um, which is one of the most extraordinary features of his character in the Odyssey, because characters in the Iliad are really into, really invested in, who am I?

And everybody needs to know who I am and what that represents, and I need to be more valued than everybody else, or as valued as possible. And by definition, if people don’t know who you are, that’s not. And so Odysseus’s capacity to just be nobody, as he says to the Cyclops in Book 9, I am no one, um, is sort of staggering from the point of view of the Iliad and really distinguishes him, uh, from other characters.

[00:13:21] Sean: Yeah. Right. I mean, so you just pointed to the fact that when he meets Athena, Athena’s in disguise, uh, is, Odysseus is just Odysseus at that point.

[00:13:29] Deborah: Yeah.

[00:13:30] Sean: So she has presented herself to him In the form of a man, in the form of a, some random person who’s walked up to him and he lies to her, but he knows who she is.

So the other part of his braininess is he recognizes. So it’s not actually that hard. The gods are amongst other things. They’re not very good at picking good meat and they’re not very good at concealing themselves because They tend to be bigger, even in disguise, and they often smell nice, which is a dead giveaway.

Um, and, so he sees right away that he’s not dealing with just some goat herd, and he then proceeds to behave in a tricky way, because in a sense he knows he’s already being deceived, right? He sees through the disguise. That’s one of the signs of his cleverness is he’s not. Yeah.

[00:14:22] Deborah: So, so what he actually does is really fascinating because it’s not fast, not only fascinating what he does, but the way the poem describes what he does after Athena tells him that he’s on Ithaca, the poem, uh, the narrator is, tells us in great detail.

not just what he does, but like this process that he goes through. This is a very, this is a great example of Matisse actually, the steps that he goes through in his reaction to what she says. So we’ve got six verses to tell us how he responded to a speech, something that’s very common in Homeric poetry and which normally takes one verse and it just says X answered him.

That’s it. So this instead, the first thing we have in, um, verse two 50 is, um, Odysseus smiled and then it says he was so happy to be back home. However, in line 254, instead of speaking out of the full joy of his heart, which is implied what a normal person would have done, clever Odysseus, pulium etis Odysseus, what he does instead, and I’m going to read the Greek and then translate it, Oud hog alethe a epe paline de geladze to muthon.

I, a niece, dey fessy na on pol you care de ah no mon. So what did he just do? He did not speak the truth, always wielding a clever mind in his chest. That’s an unpleasantly literal translation. Wilson has a much nicer way of saying that. His mind was always full of clever schemes. So that’s, again, verses 254 He replies to the speech.

So before he replies, we get this, first he was overjoyed, lots of detail about he was so happy to be home. And then immediately he flips over to, I’m not going to say that. I’m going to do the thing that’s a clever idea instead. And then what he does, what’s his clever idea about what he’s going to do? He tells the first of a lot of the, of the several Cretan false tales, as they’re known, in which he pretends to be somebody else who has been to Crete and other places that Odysseus in the Odyssey didn’t actually go.

So he tells one of these in books 14 and 15. He tells one to Eumaeus, who is this family. slave who has taken care of the herds and is a close companion of Telemachus. Um, he tells some of them to Penelope in book 19, which we’re going to talk about briefly in a minute. Um, and sometimes as he does in book 19, he even tells a story that he, in which he claims to have met Odysseus on his travels.

So after he tells this fake story, Athena smiles. So we take a cue from her. She’s entertained. And she thinks this is great. So when we see them having this conversation where they’re united in their cleverness, where Athena thinks it’s funny, and laudable that Odysseus is making these tricky things, then we’re, we understand how we’re supposed to understand this.

And in verses 3, 30 and following of book 13, Athena tells us that her, uh, connection to Odysseus as his helper and defender in all of his, sufferings, both during the Trojan War and afterward, is because of the similarity between them. And in verse 332, she uses a lot of wacky words, which either appear never any other time in Homeric poetry or rarely, to describe these habits of mind that unite them.

So she says, hunek epeiteis esi kai anxhinoas.

And those first two words, epētēs, people aren’t even sure what that means, maybe courteous or something, ankhinoas is clearer because we know what those two elements mean, it means sort of having a mind or applying your mind to things or something like that. And Echefron, which is an epithet that looks a lot like ones we see also for Penelope, means clever, having good, like being good at thinking, um, and she connects these qualities to Odysseus behavior after he gets home and not, well, he is home, of course, in book 13, but when he starts meeting other people on Ithaca.

So instead of hurrying to greet The rest of the family, she tells him in verse 336 that he should test them. Um, and the rest of the Odyssey is about that, is about how he goes about testing people, about the effects of his deceptions on the various mortals on Ithaca, who can’t see through his deceptions and find them entertaining the way Athena does.

So just parenthetically, one of the things this makes very clear is the difference between gods and mortals. So, for the gods, where there isn’t really any stakes to these deceptions, it’s all just amusing and fun and enjoyable, but it’s very serious for the mortals. They don’t think it’s funny. They don’t

[00:19:13] Sean: necessarily get it.

Yeah. I’m gonna, I’m gonna be difficult on this. Oh,

[00:19:15] Deborah: good.

[00:19:16] Sean: Later. Not yet. Oh. I just want to warn you and everybody else that we do not agree on this. He’s definitely tricky, but I think there’s people that test him.

[00:19:24] Deborah: Oh, absolutely. We don’t disagree about that. Which people were you thinking of?

[00:19:27] Sean: Well, I was thinking about Penelope.

Oh, of course. Yeah.

[00:19:29] Deborah: Penelope. One of the things that’s wonderful about the relationship between Penelope and Odysseus is the kinship of cleverness that unites the two of them and, to some extent, also their young son, Uh, and one of the ways that we see that absolutely is that Penelope is the only character in the Odyssey who turns the tables on Odysseus and tests him.

So Odysseus is constantly kind of like saying things to other characters to try to find out, while he’s in disguise, whether they’re loyal or not. What they really think about the situation and so forth. Um, and this is sort of part of his deceptions, not only that he’s in disguise, but that he’s using the disguise to gain information that he would otherwise either not get at all or would get in a different form.

And Penelope is the only character in the poem who is able to do that. Also to him.

[00:20:19] Sean: Right. And as a result there’s a, like a big question, which I don’t want to like jump ahead ’cause I think we’re not there yet. But there are, there are like, let me put it this way, there’s room for disagreement about when Exactly.

Penelope knows what she’s dealing with Yeah. Or who she’s dealing with. Yeah. Right. And because it, we, there is a definite example where she most finitely tests. SIUs.

[00:20:37] Deborah: Yes. And that’s the one in book 23.

[00:20:38] Sean: The one in book 23. Yes. When she deploys. A piece of information that she knows only he would know is false.

And he says, wait a second, that’s, that’s a lie. Yeah. But once you’ve read that, then you can kind of go back and think about the other exchanges and you wonder, like, when did she start, like, when did she start testing him? Let’s

[00:21:00] Deborah: go to book 19 then, because that’s kind of where this really gets started. So, you know, as we’ve said, the rest of the Odyssey after book 13 is about Odysseus’s interactions.

Uh, with his people on Ithaca and his family when he’s disguised and they don’t know what’s going on, um, and the most important of these people is Penelope, who is often frightened and sad because she’s isolated and surrounded by these nasty suitors who, um, want her to marry them and she doesn’t want to and are eating her out of house and home and Telemachus, her son, isn’t really old enough to do anything, although he gets more powerful over the course of the poem.

Um, and most of Book 19 of the Odyssey is a conversation between the disguised Odysseus and Penelope, in which, among other things, he tells her a story about meeting, uh, a Quote unquote Odysseus, so he claims to be somebody else, but he proves his bona fides to Penelope by telling her true facts about Odysseus and she thinks he knows them because he actually met Odysseus, but of course no he actually knows them because he’s Odysseus and the scene is just full of pathos and irony that arises from the fact that we, the audience, know who Odysseus is, but Penelope doesn’t.

Um, and so one of, my absolute favorite passage in the whole thing, this, this several hundred lines of conversation between the two of them, and to me the sort of climax of that whole thing is verses 203 to 212, which is Penelope’s reaction to hearing about Odysseus, true facts about from this. Sky, whoever he is.

And at the end of the speech, this is what the poem says, his lies were like truth. And as she listened, she began to weep. Her face was melting. Like the snow that Zephyr scatters across the mountain peaks then ristau it and as it melts, the rivers swell and flow again. So were her lovely cheeks dissolved with tears.

She wept for her own husband who was right next to her. Odysseus pitied his grieving wife inside his heart, but kept his eyes quite still without a flicker, like horn or iron, and he hid his tears with artifice. She cried a long, long time, then spoke again. There’s this emphasis here on a bill on Odysseus’s ability to lie.

There’s a very moving and vivid contrast between what Penelope thinks is happening. And the fact that her husband is sitting right there and the compression and emotional power of that Greek phrase and that, uh, Klaiuseis haon andra par amenon. Which is what Wilson translates as she wept for her own husband who was right next to her.

And this word that means sitting next to her is literally sitting next to Penelope in the Greek. There’s a contrast between Penelope’s tears and Odysseus’s lack of visible emotion. And then there’s also a contrast between Odysseus’s lack of visible emotion and his actual feelings. Now, I will go to the stake that Penelope doesn’t know who, who Odysseus is in this moment.

This makes no sense if she actually knows who he is. I just cannot believe that.

[00:24:12] Sean: I’m way too paranoid to let you, let that, I think you can’t tell. Well, okay. Well, let me put it this way. I think it depends on how you tell the story. Say more. I can imagine someone telling this story, saying these words in a way.

moving their head in a way that would imply that she’d already sussed him out and was testing him, or somewhere in here she’d figured out that she was dealing with somebody who was lying and was getting closer and closer to the truth, and it would all come down to the tone of voice and the motion of the head.

[00:24:42] Deborah: I probably don’t agree with you because I don’t think Homeric storytelling does that. That is to say, when people are testing other people, the poem tells you that. There aren’t tests that rely entirely on non verbal cues and that’s a lot of the reason that I don’t agree with the people who think that Penelope recognizes Odysseus very early in the poem.

[00:25:02] Sean: So that is, I would say, indisputable. There’s a lot of, we could call it like, meta performative redundancy in the communication. It’s true in drama as well, right? Like in a Greek tragedy, somebody walks on stage and somebody says, Oh, look, so and so just showed up, right? There’s always extra information that tells you what’s happening and what’s going on.

[00:25:21] Deborah: Yeah.

[00:25:22] Sean: But there’s also always other minds. So, We’re never going to agree because we can’t agree because the claim I’m making depends on no evidence and requires no evidence. All it requires is me.

[00:25:33] Deborah: Okay, excellent. So

[00:25:35] Sean: like, but on the basis, but this is the thing, on the basis of evidence, you, all you’ve got is what the message communicates to you, right?

And the message, here, there’s nothing that would make you think, Oh, Penelope is testing him or tricking him back or something like that. Doesn’t, it’s not in the text. But once you get the idea in your head. Once you get the idea in your head, then your mistrust grows, and then you have, you do this automatically, I would guess, but you have the opportunity to build a world around what’s in the text, right?

Absolutely. So your imagination is there, filling in blanks, playing games.

[00:26:09] Deborah: Absolutely, and now I think we’re at the deceptive, the fundamental deceptive essence of narrative itself.

[00:26:15] Sean: Right.

[00:26:15] Deborah: Um, Penelope is a, is a both an extremely alluring and extremely exasperating character because there is this fundamental opacity at the center of her character.

I think that opacity is not a result of she consciously recognizes him and is simply not telling anybody that. I think it’s the sort of maelstrom of, I don’t know what the heck is going on here. Um, I’ve been influenced a lot in thinking about the experiences of Odysseus’s family. Um, by work that I’ve heard people do on what’s called ambiguous loss.

Um, which is where your family member or someone close to you is present either physically or psychologically, but not both. So people who’ve been kidnapped, people who are, uh, demented, um, people who are missing in action. Um, and this is exactly what happens is when, uh, There’s some vivid reminder of the person either literally because the person came back or because of something like this where Penelope is exposed to someone who’s bringing Odysseus to mind in a way that he hasn’t been for a long time.

You have people in that situation have this very kind of conflicted, paradoxical relationship or reaction to what’s being said to them, and they exhibit these very bizarre kinds of, feelings that don’t exactly seem to make sense. Um, so that’s how I’ve tended to understand her behavior, but I’m so, I’m a huge fan of that opacity at the center for character, which I think is supposed to be there.

I think that’s a feature, not a bug. And as you say, every reader is invited to sort of show up to that opacity and, and decide for themselves what do they think is in there. And this different readers are going to say different things. The same reader is going to say different things at different times.

And one of the most fun things about a text like the Odyssey is the community of readers who we are joining with in reading it. So not only Sean and I, right now, are one community of readers, um, we’re a community of readers with my class, we’re a community of readers with the millennia of people over the years that have read the Odyssey, going back to, you know, classical poets who read it, and medieval people who read it, and we can compare our responses to theirs as part of this, you know, giant community, um, so.

[00:28:36] Sean: So, yeah, right, and that’s all, I’m, I get. A couple of cues in a text and I go down a rabbit hole, and I like the rabbit holes, I think the rabbit holes are fun, but I think in like Odysseus case, this is a guy, this is a world that inspires paranoia. He’s not a guy who tells the truth. So, we should talk about Cretan tales, right?

So, he’s a man from Crete, that’s what he tells people. When he comes back to Ithaca and he tells lies about himself and he gives himself a false genealogy and background, it’s often, oh, I’m from Crete. Right? Yeah. So what do we know about people from Crete?

[00:29:07] Deborah: They’re liars.

[00:29:08] Sean: Cretans are liars. So when he starts telling people he’s from Crete, you get the feeling that he’s also, he’s, he’s messing with people.

He’s saying, look, this is, by the way, everything that’s just, that’s about to come is all just total baloney.

[00:29:19] Deborah: Well, and I think it seems very clear that the Odyssey is interested in narrative as One of the things it’s about, so it’s about a deceptive guy, Odysseus. And at the same time, it’s also about how you tell people’s stories.

And I think the kind of meaning point of those that we don’t think enough about is the idea that narrative has so much potential for deception. For deception. It relies on deception. It relies on our willingness to be deceived.

[00:29:45] Sean: So now we do have to talk about. The Deep Sea Tales books 5 through 12, uh, which you skipped over very tactfully, uh, because you know that I have completely heretical views about the, those books.

Very upsetting views. So, uh, So, uh, And it’s just, it’s about me being deeply paranoid. So there are like stories, and I think the Odyssey is one of them. The other one, the other famous one that, um, was big in the nineties was the return of Martin Guerre. Oh yeah. You remember the return of Martin Guerre? So that they made a, then they made a, there was a book that was written by Natalie Zeven Davis based on some archival research she did in France about a, uh, a soldier who returned 16th century, I think, returned to his hometown.

And, Moved back in with his family and then gradually the town began to suspect that he wasn’t who he said he was, that he was somebody else who had substituted himself for a dead soldier. And they made a movie out of it. And then they made a, uh, they made an American version of it starring Richard Gere, deeply confusing.

Cause the return of Martin Garrett has started

[00:30:45] Deborah: in which, in which

[00:30:48] Sean: he played a soldier returning from the civil war and the town gradually. And in fact, in that movie, he’s executed at the end. They, they. accuse him of being a liar. And

[00:30:57] Deborah: the French one, it’s very, uh, sort of unclear at the end. You never know.

Yeah.

[00:31:01] Sean: Um, and that’s like, you get, once the suspicion starts to breed, the suspicion grows and it feeds itself and eventually everything becomes suspicious, right? Paranoia. And that, that’s the thing about some stories, some narratives develop this feeling. And so with Odysseus, who’s always lying and always making up stuff, especially in Ithaca, you know, tells his wife that he’s not sticking around.

[00:31:22] Deborah: Yeah, he has to take an oar so far inland that people don’t recognize it when they see it.

[00:31:26] Sean: They think it’s a winnowing fan, and then he has to plant it in the ground, and then his voyages will be over, right? You read that with a sense of play, and it sounds like he’s just made this whole big deal to come home, and get back home, and gets home, and then he says, oh, by the way, I can’t, I can’t stay.

And you sort of think, like, so, you know, who is this, who is he, and how important is this business of getting home? So Jenny Stress Clay in the 90s said, late, very late 90s, uh, in a talk that I heard her say that the thing about the deep sea tales is it’s, you can’t avoid the possibility that Odysseus is lying, that it’s all just made up.

There are reasons for him to make it up. First of all, he’s alone. Where’s his crew? Well, turns out there were monsters and they ate his crew, right? So that’s a nice, nice excuse. He’s also not completely settled on the political situation that he’s in. So he has reasons. to be careful. He’s fully

[00:32:21] Deborah: sussed

[00:32:21] Sean: out the Phaeacians.

So he makes up a tall tale and while he’s at it, he manages to, you know, one up the singer who’s there. He does all kinds of other things, but he tells a long tall tale. And that is, uh, I don’t even know if she published that article.

[00:32:35] Deborah: That’s certainly, I mean, a thing that people talk about is, do we believe once it’s in your head, then you’re

[00:32:42] Sean: stuck.

Well, see, this is

[00:32:44] Deborah: a difference between me and you. So, um, I am a. My mother used to say that I not only thought the glass was half full, but I wanted to know where to get the water to fill it the rest of the way. And that applies to my narrative, interpretive proclivities as well. I always want to find out.

That the people in the, in the literature, that the narrator, the characters, that everybody’s acting in good faith, that the manuscript is not corrupt, that the verses are not interpolated, and all that stuff. And you, on the other hand, want the entire thing to be a dumpster fire in every way, shape, or form.

[00:33:15] Sean: You have a stronger imaginative immune system than I do.

[00:33:19] Deborah: I guess so. That’s

[00:33:19] Sean: what it is.

[00:33:20] Deborah: Yeah.

[00:33:20] Sean: Once I get these ideas in my head, they become fixed, and I can’t shake them. Even though I know, like, there’s no reason not to believe them. Yeah.

[00:33:26] Deborah: Yeah. And there are some, and I can’t remember the details off the top of my head, but there are these sort of little references here and there in the poem to things Odysseus talks about from other characters in a way that some interpreters have taken to mean that he is telling the truth.

Yeah. There’s like extra

[00:33:39] Sean: diegetic corroboration, right? So he tells something and then you’ll get something that he doesn’t say, like some part of the story that’s not focalized through him that appears. somewhere else.

[00:33:51] Deborah: Right. So the Odyssey seems to have a consistent understanding of those events, whether they’re being narrated by Odysseus or they’re being narrated by somebody else.

But here’s

[00:33:58] Sean: the thing. So we know that the Odyssey is just one big lie.

[00:34:01] Deborah: Right, well, so there we are, back to this sort of ontological question about the status of literature. Is literature just one big lie, or is it this delightful adventure? Right, full of many

[00:34:12] Sean: tricks and tricks and, yeah. Right,

[00:34:14] Deborah: so kalutropos should be the epithet of literature itself, not just of diseases.

Yeah, why not? Yeah, okay. All right. I think that’s actually a great point to end on. I love the idea of polytropos as an epithet of literature and, um, all of these questions that we’re asking about Odysseus and sort of both our, our attraction to him and our discomfort with him, I think can equally be applied to, um, the magic trick that is literature and telling a story.

And how do we balance our appreciation for the tricks it’s doing with kind of maintaining a grip on ourselves and not simply being totally bamboozled by it and losing our, our sense of ourselves. So, lots more literature. Coming up with lots more hosts and co hosts. So the next several episodes are going to be hosted and produced by individual students in the class.

And then I will be back for the last episode to wrap things up. Thank you so much for being with us for the first episode of season four. We look forward to many twists and turns in the episodes to come.

[00:35:15] Sean: That was great. Thank you, Debra.

[00:35:16] Deborah: Thank you for being here.