BMCR 2009.06.25: King on Doherty, Homer's Odyssey. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies

Lillian E. Doherty (ed.), Homer's Odyssey. Oxford Readings in Classical
Studies.  Oxford/New York:  Oxford University Press, 2009.  Pp. xii,
360.  ISBN 9780199233335.  $59.95 (pb).

Reviewed by Cynthia King, Wright State University
([email protected])
Word count:  1302 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0907/2008035847-t.html)

The Oxford Readings in Classical Studies aim to provide a useful
introduction to recent scholarship on a given author or topic by
bringing together previously published articles which the editor of the
collection deems important. It takes a person of truly heroic
temperament to tackle Homeric scholarship, especially when the series
has already published a collection for the Iliad (Douglas L. Cairns,
editor) in 2001. Lillian Doherty notes that her collection of papers on
the Odyssey complements Cairns's, but that she has chosen to highlight
the importance of articles by women and about the women in the poem.

One of these is Helene Foley's delightful article on "'Reverse Similes'
and Sex Roles in the Odyssey."[[1]] Chris Emlyn-Jones ("The Reunion of
Penelope and Odysseus"), Sheila Murnaghan ("Penelope's Agnoia"), and
Doherty herself ("Gender and Internal Audiences in the Odyssey") study
Penelope's delicate position. The question of when she recognizes
Odysseus (Book 19 or Book 23) is tackled: Emlyn-Jones and Murnaghan opt
for Book 23, but I belong to the Book 19 school.[[2]] Penelope is the
only person in the epic who outwits Odysseus (the trick of the bed),
and I think the poet wants to show us that she could beat him at his
own game!

Doherty's essay is primarily interested in "reception theory": using
the epic's internal audiences to construct its likely "implied
audience" of female listeners as well as men.  She notes, however, that
"a woman's identification with Arete and Penelope also reinforces the
patriarchal norms for female behaviour to which these characters
adhere" (p. 264). Ann Bergren's post-structural study of "Helen's 'Good
Drug'" deals with the ambiguities involved in the Greek idea of
polarities: two kinds of drugs, but not exclusively divided, rather
mixed and moving towards good or "baneful"; i.e., marriage (Menelaus'
bastard son) and funeral (lament for Agamemnon).

Norman Austin's "Name Magic in the Odyssey" and Erwin Cook's "'Active'
and 'Passive' Heroics in the Odyssey" both elegantly work with the
speaking names in the epic. Austin examines striking passages where
loved ones refrain from using Odysseus' name: Telemachos, Penelope,
Eumaios use circumlocutions. Cook focuses on the tension between
trickster and epic hero: Odysseus owes his survival to suppression of
his heroic identity, but he reclaims it in the slaughter of the
suitors. Peter Walcot in "Odysseus and the Art of Lying" illuminates
what Odysseus does in the poem by comparing the function of lying in
peasant societies: "An inferior is vulnerable and must be taught to
protect himself..." (p. 152); "Teasing as much as deliberate lying
trains us to be on our guard, and the Greek peasant today, like the
Homeric hero of the distant past, has a much greater need to remain
vigilant than does the scholar safe in his study" (p. 153). Ouch.

Minna Skafte Jensen's essay, "In What Sense Can the Iliad and the
Odyssey Be Considered Oral Texts?" shows how dictation to a scribe
could have worked by drawing on much fieldwork studying oral epic. She
finds the book divisions significant and suggests that they reflect
breaks during the dictation. "Like epic singers in our day, the poet
took care to bring his story to a natural pause at the end of each
session." The scribe would read the last line of the previous day when
the poet and he started again, and thus the structure of the poems
develops "organically" from the process of recording (pp. 25-26).

Walter Burkert, "The Song of Ares and Aphrodite: On the Relationship
between the Odyssey and the Iliad," uses Demodocus' song to show
connections to specific scenes involving gods in the Iliad and thus
considers the Odyssey later than the Iliad.

Here it is a great pity that R. B. Rutherford's "From the Iliad to the
Odyssey which is in the Cairns Iliad volume could not have been
included in Doherty's volume. Burkert is charming; Rutherford is
thorough. Rutherford's paper in Doherty's collection, "The Philosophy
of the Odyssey," is concerned with "the moral picture of Odysseus which
is presented in the poem" (p. 159): he calls Odysseus "not a tragic
hero." He thinks that Penelope does not recognize Odysseus in Book 19
(p. 178), but notes that his anger, his loss of control, in Book 23 is
what makes Penelope believe him (p. 183).

Both Adolf Koehnken, "Odysseus' Scar: An Essay on Homeric Epic
Narrative," and Irene de Jong, "Between Word and Deed: Hidden Thoughts
in the Odyssey," deal with aspects of E. Auerbach's Mimesis. Koehnken
argues against Auerbach's view that Homer knows no background: "The
narrator introduces the scar where it is first significant for the
plot... [and] interrupts the narrative at its most critical point:
after the recognition, but before its effect." Auerbach was basing his
view on the effect of the "digression" on a modern reader, but the
narrator was using it to provide essential background information for a
listening audience (pp. 53-54). For de Jong Auerbach is wrong in his
view that Homeric characters have no unspoken thoughts. She uses the
narratological theory of "embedded focalization" to show the widespread
existence of unspoken thoughts in the Odyssey. "Embedded focalization
is the narrative situation in which a primary narrator-focalizer
represents in the narrator-text the perceptions, thoughts, emotions, or
words (indirect speech) of characters...." (p. 65).

"The plot of the Odyssey is in its second half," as James M. Redfield
rightly notes in "The Economic Man," (p. 278), and thus he considers it
"a poem of economics" because Odysseus' return is necessary to restore
proper order to his household. Redfield argues also that the poem shows
the danger of "hyper-culture" (as with Helen and Menelaus and the
Phaeacians) "because prosperity, not want, sets the most difficult
ethical problems": koros leading to ate and hubris (p. 285). Peter
Rose, "Class Ambivalence in the Odyssey," finds close parallels between
the poet of the Odyssey and Hesiod. Hesiod is obviously self-conscious
about what he is doing; the Odyssey shows similar concern with the
status of poets (p. 306). Rose also believes that the poet identifies
with Odysseus, the wandering disguised old king, who deserves better
treatment than he receives from the suitors (the audience). This is a
very interesting essay.

Doherty's introduction aims to persuade "students that this is in fact
an exciting time to be a Homerist" (p. 1) and covers Composition,
Transmission, Social and Historical Dimensions, and Literary
Approaches. This thorough overview which covers much more than she is
able to include in her collection is an excellent place for these
students to start. Bibliography is provided here and in some of the
essays in footnotes. Some of the essays have end bibliographies, and
Doherty gives her own helpful Selected Bibliography at the end of the
book. She has been very kind to her readers. She provides a useful
glossary, including both singulars and plurals and even alternative
spellings (caused by the usual problems of transliterating Greek), a
thorough list of abbreviations (almost four full pages), and
translations and explanations are inserted in square brackets into the
various essays for all foreign phrases and quotations. To get an idea
of what she has done, I checked the original publication of one essay
(Norman Austin's "Name Magic"), and indeed her kind insertions make
this wonderful piece even more accessible to today's students. I found
only one term she probably should have glossed: "catachrestic"
("catachrestic conjunction") in Walter Burkert's essay (p. 35). Here we
might fault the English translation of the original German article.
Indeed, this essay reads more like German in English even with her
helpful insertions. The other originally German article (Adolf
Koehnken's) reads much more smoothly. The final essay, Piero Boitani's
"The Shadow of Ulysses beyond 2001," is an elegant translation from
Italian by Boitani himself and surveys how influential the motif of the
wandering dislocated hero has been in recent literature.

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Notes:


1.   My students and I loved this paper whenever I assigned it in
courses on epic and on women in antiquity.

2.   Helpful here would be a reference to John Miles Foley's discussion
of "Penelope's Indeterminacy" in Homer's Traditional Art (Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1999), pp. 142-157. For J. M. Foley, Penelope
"delays because delay is functional" (p. 143). Besides, as I read
somewhere long ago and used to say to my classes, "a good story resists
coming to an end."