Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  2 The words in this epigraph were written in 1996, and Jim Shelby gave me permission to use them the same year. After I recontacted him this year to make certain that I still had his permission, he wrote, “I would be doing a disservice to say that I still felt that way. I am part of a community now, go to church, work a regular job, and am fortunate to have a wife and daughter. There are moments when I actually experience being alive, being vulnerable.” He credited the Kansas City Vet Center, various mental health professionals, and the community of VWAR (see Chapter 18) for assisting in his “return” to life.

  3 Voice-over in Mick Hurbis-Cherrier and Catherine Hurbis-Cherrier, History Lessons. Video, 1992.

  4 George E. Dimock, Jr., “The Name of Odysseus,” Hudson Review 9:52-70 (1956) and “The Man of Pain” in that author’s The Unity of the Odyssey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), pp. 246-63. John Peradotto, in Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 128, gives it simply as “Hate.”

  5 Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 69. For an overview of Greek heroism as dangerous to the people, see Johannes Haubold, Homer’s People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Erwin Cook, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Heroics in the Odyssey,” Classical World 93:2 (1999), pp. 149-67, shows how Odysseus is a man of pain because he is a man of hatred, and how he uses the pain he causes and suffers to identify himself, even to members of his own household.

  6 Cook, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Heroics in the Odyssey” See also Donna Wilson’s “Lion Kings: Heroes in the Epic Mirrors,” Colby Quarterly, in press, 2002, and Haubold, Homer’s People.

  7 We’ve been offered allegorical readings of Homer at least since the sixth century B.C.E. with Theagenes of Regium and the first century C.E. with the Stoic Heraclitus. But also, I acknowledge that I have text-based problems with a strict allegorical interpretation of Books 9-12—the worst of which is the narrator’s several mentions of Odysseus’ marvels outside that framework. For example, Odyssey 20:19, where Odysseus privately thinks of the Cyclops inside his own head during a snatch of interior monologue. These outside-the-frame mentions put these adventures at the same level of narrative reality as the swineherd, the gods, the Trojan War, the bow, and so on. Hugh Parry, “The Apologos of Odysseus: Lies, All Lies?,” Phoenix 48 (1994), pp. 1-20; Scott Richardson, “Truth in the Tales of the Odyssey,” Mnemosyne 49 (1996), pp. 393-402.

  8 Jenny Strauss Clay, The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 198.

  9 The Homeric way of grieving and memorialization were explored in Achilles in Vietnam, Chapter 3.

  10 Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 2002.

  11 New York: Atheneum/Macmillan, 1994; New York: Touchstone, 1995.

  12 Homer’s picture in the Iliad of the love that arises between comrades (cohesion) was fully discussed in Achilles in Vietnam— see index entries there under “philia” and “Comrades, special.” For the relationship between military cohesion and love, see “Cohesion” from the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study, available on the Web at www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm.

  13 I thank Colonel Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. (USAF), an Air Force staff judge advocate, for his comments on Odysseus from a military justice perspective. Any errors in the legal analysis of Odysseus’ conduct are entirely my own.

  14 W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), p. 5.

  15 Thomas G. Palaima, “To Be a Citizen or an Idiot: The Choice Is Ours,” Austin American-Statesman, October 9, 2001, four weeks exactly after September 11.

  2. Odysseus Among the Rich Civilians

  1 This all but unknown sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front follows the surviving men in that unit back to their hometown through their demobilization and their attempts to readjust to civilian society. Published in Germany in 1931 and then suppressed by the Nazis, it was first translated into English by A. W. Wheen, and published the same year in the United States, but forgotten. Fortunately this masterpiece was reprinted in a trade paperback by Fawcett in 1998 and is now for the first time widely available. The epigraph is from pages 115-17.

  2 Pietro Pucci’s Odysseus Polutropos (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) introduced me to the Homeric contrast between gastēr and thumos. His whole Chapter 14 is devoted to exploring this contrast. See also Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), index entries under gastēr, belly, and thumos.

  3 3. All these citations are to the Fitzgerald translation.

  4 An ancient commentary on this passage in Odyssey 8 makes this point explaining why they are at each other’s throats. See Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, p. 45ff. See also Erwin Cook, The Odyssey in Athens: Myths of Cultural Origins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Wilson, “Lion Kings: Heroes in the Epic Mirrors.”

  5 Professor Erwin Cook disagrees: Odysseus’ not-quite-concealed tears engineer his identification as a “man of pain,” i.e., a hero.

  6 Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey, p. 90, says Homer’s words in Greek could equally well mean, “I am Odysseus son of Laertes, who am a subject in song to men by all my wiles.”

  3. Pirate Raid: Staying in Combat Mode

  1 Translated from Latin by R. M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 13.

  2 Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 61. Thanks to Professor Eugene Garver for this quotation.

  3 Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper, 1920), p. 547f, quoted in Willard Waller, The Veteran Comes Back (New York: Dryden, 1944), p. 118.

  4 Odysseus begins his yarn in Book 9. The Ciconians, as the inhabitants of Ismarus were called, were Trojan allies (Iliad 2:846, 7:73, orig.). My calling it a pirate raid may be disputed because of this, saying it was simply a continuation of the war. However, Troy has fallen, and Odysseus offers no political justification for the attack. The booty of an undefended town is apparently all the justification needed. W. B. Stanford, The Odyssey of Homer, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), commentary to 9:39f. See note 8, below, to this chapter.

  5 Waller, The Veteran Comes Back, p. 109.

  6 Ibid., p. 143ff.

  7 Hill & Wang, 1994.

  8 The modern sensibility is shocked by what appears to be a gratuitous raid, but according to the standards of the day, they may have been seen as a legitimate target. In Odysseus’ eyes, if he needs to explain anything, it is failing to pull out with the booty in time to evade the Ciconians’ counterattack. Ancient audiences probably had a less critical reaction to this raid than we do. Piracy was a respectable occupation even into sixth century B.C.E. Athens, when Solon’s law declared that “If … cult followers of heroes, or members of a clan, or messmates, or funerary associates … or pirates, or traders make arrangements among themselves, these shall be binding unless forbidden by public texts [laws].” Justinian’s Digest 47.22.4, quoted in W. R. Connor, “Civil Society, Dionysiac Festival, and the Athenian Democracy,” in J. Ober and C. Hedrick, Dēmokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 219. Thucydides 1.5 gives the following picture:

  For the Hellenes in early times … turned to piracy as soon as they increased their contacts by sea, some of the most powerful men leading the way for their own profit and to support the needy. Falling on unwalled cities consisting of villages, they plundered them and made their main living from this, the practice not yet bringing disgrace but even conferring a certain prestige; witness those mainlanders even of the present who glory in successful raiding, also the request everywhere in early poetry that men arriving by sea say whether they are pirates, as though those questioned would not deny the practice nor would
those who wanted to know blame them. (The Peloponnesian War, trans. Steven Lattimore [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998], p. 5.)

  9 Richard Kulka et al., National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (hereinafter NVVRS) (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990), p. VII-21-1.

  10 L. P. Croker, Army Officer’s Guide, 45th ed. (Harrisburg: Stackpole, 1989), p. 410.

  11 Emphasis added. Tennyson’s Ulysses is widely anthologized. The edition I have used is The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 147f.

  12 Good-bye to All That, revised 2nd ed. (Anchor, 1957), p. 287.

  13 Remarque, The Road Back, pp. 25253.

  14 Mick Hurbis-Cherrier and Katherine Hurbis-Cherrier, History Lessons. Video, 1992.

  4. Lotus Land: The Flight from Pain

  1 Homer calls the inhabitants of the town Ciconians. For ancient Ismarus, see F. H. Stubbings, “The Recession of Mycenaean Civilization,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, 3rd ed., Vol. 3, Part 2, ed. I. E. S. Edwards et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 351.

  2 The word that Fitzgerald translates here as “browsing” is the same as used elsewhere for cows and horses grazing. Scholar Erwin Cook takes this to be a Homeric suggestion that the crewmen who ate the lotus reduced themselves to animals, i.e., dehumanized themselves. See Cook, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Heroics,” p. 57. He finds the whole theme of demeaning or forbidden eating, crystallized by the eating of the sacred cattle of the sun god by the remnant of the flotilla, as the overall ethical fault requiring their destruction. They yield to physical appetites. Of course, Odysseus yields to his sexual appetites and to the luxury comforts of the nymphs’ homes. Are we supposed to see a scale of merit here, that yielding to sex is morally superior (in the world of Odysseus) to yielding to hunger?

  3 NVVRS, VI-13-1f, VI-15-1f. Data showing substance abuse rates in combat vets with and without current PTSD and civilian counterparts with and without current PTSD have not been published, to my knowledge. The data mentioned here are for all combat vets, lumped together whether they have current PTSD or not, and for all veterans with current PTSD, whether or not they were exposed to high levels of combat Stressors.

  4 In this I follow Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic, 1992, Part 2, “Stages of Recovery.”

  5 Self-mutilation, a not uncommon addiction among survivors of childhood sexual and physical torture, is relatively rare among combat veterans. I have had only one patient who used to engage in self-mutilation, and he had a history of being repeatedly raped in childhood by his father. The frequency of severe childhood sexual and/or physical abuse among the combat veterans in our program appears no greater than in the nonveteran population.

  6 Aphrodite Matsakis, Vietnam Wives: Facing the Challenges of Life with Veterans Suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 2nd ed. (Lutherville, Md.: Sidran Press, 1996).

  7 With the same demographic characteristics as the in-country Vietnam veterans sampled by the NVVRS.

  5. Cyclops: The Flight from Boredom

  1 Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1989), p. 771f of Minerva paperback reprint. Lawrence died after six days in a coma from a head injury after being thrown from his motorcycle in 1935, at the apparently sedate speed of 40 miles per hour, but almost certainly too fast to safely deal with the unexpected in the undulations of the country lane (p. 934).

  2 See van Wees, Status Warriors, for estimates of the number of people on each ship. Odysseus has a dozen vessels at 9:176, Fagles.

  3 At what point did Odysseus realize that he was dealing with giants? The whole story is told by Odysseus in retrospect, so clearly at the time he is telling the story he knows they were giants, but did he know it at the time he decided to take the potent wine? The text says that the caves of the Cyclopes were visible across the water on the goat island, but doesn’t mention seeing the giants themselves. But he does not decide to take the wine until 9:219 (Fagles) when Odysseus and his crew have already crossed over the water. From the shore he can see that the cave above is a giant’s lair. This prompts Odysseus to take the wine, which in retelling he describes as being on a hunch. Hardly a prudent decision by a responsible leader. Why not turn around and leave? A few lines later, at 237, he retells the decision to take the wine, speaking of his “foreboding” that they would shortly meet a giant. Is this Odysseus trying to bury the evidence of leadership malpractice by claiming fame for prescience? Then they enter the cave and there’s no more doubt than if we were to enter a house with fifty-foot ceilings and chair seats and tabletops above our heads.

  4 Stanford, The Ulysses Theme, Chapter 5. Homer’s epics abound with these precious luxury items that custom required a host to give to a guest according to the respective ranks of the host and the guest.

  5 Cook, The Odyssey in Athens. Cook marshals all the examples of forbidden banquets and illegal feasting in the Odyssey. See his index entries under “Dietary code” and “Feasting.” The audience for the irony created by the parallel between Odysseus and his men and the suitors would have been Homer’s audience, of course, not the internal audience for Odysseus’ tales, the Phaeacians.

  6 6. 9:272f, Fitzgerald; emphasis added.

  7 A. Dane and R. Gardner, “Violent Acts and Violent Times: A Comparative Approach to Postwar Homicide Rates,” American Sociological Review 41:937-63 (1976).

  8 This is the same word that Odysseus uses to introduce himself to the Phaeacian court, and frequently a synonym for, or illustration of, mētis.

  9 I thank Professor Erwin Cook for explaining that mē tis and mētis were not exact homophones, but close enough to make the pun. In the context of oral performance there would have been no sight gag of the words in close proximity.

  10 A few lines later Odysseus attributes it all to Zeus, “Zeus was still obsessed with plans to destroy my entire oarswept fleet and loyal crew of comrades” (9:618f). In the epic’s prologue, the narrator blames his comrades’ offense against the sun god, “the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return” (l:9ff). The narrator of the prologue seems to have forgotten that eleven out of twelve of Odysseus’ flotilla had already been sunk before his one remaining ship reached the island where the sun god pastured his cattle. And when the god Hermes visits Calypso to tell her that she must let Odysseus go, he recites yet a different god’s-eye history of the events: “But voyaging back they outraged Queen Athena…. / There all the rest of his loyal shipmates died” (5:121ff). So who’s responsible for the holocaust of Odysseus’ military contingent of more than six hundred of the flower of Ithaca’s youth? Athena? The sun god? Zeus? Poseidon? And who brought down each god’s wrath? The Greek commanders? The sailors themselves? Odysseus? Or was it just Zeus’ arbitrary will, possibly holding a war to thin the humans who were overpopulating the earth?

  11 Cook, The Odyssey in Athens, p. 16.

  12 The text “overdetermines” the divine antagonisms that are in play: not only Poseidon, but also Athena is mad at Odysseus as an individual, with all the dangers that implies about the safety of his men, and Helios the sun god and Zeus also want their hides. How unjust divine justice is in the Odyssey has been remarked on many times. The multiple sources of divine enmity are marshaled by Jenny Clay in The Wrath of Athena.

  13 Cook, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Heroics in the Odyssey.” Professor Cook would not agree with my connecting “living on the edge” with heroics.

  6. Odysseus Gets a Leg Up—and Falls on His Face:The Workplace

  1 For a fascinating picture of a blood-feuding culture quite distant from the Homeric world, but amazingly similar, i.e., the society of the Icelandic sagas, see William I. Miller, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Such societies unmistakably h
ave mechanisms of social control, but cannot be said to have a “government” except by stretching the meaning of the word to include all social control sanctioned by the culture.

  2 It’s not as though there is no competent helmsman. The nymph/witch Circe also gives them a perfect following wind to take them to the Underworld, and Odysseus trusts the helmsman to stay on course (11:10, orig.)-presumably the same helmsman who would have been aboard, unused, when they sailed for Ithaca from Aeolia.

  3 A good example of this is Patroclus, Achilles’ foster brother and second-in-command in the Iliad. (Iliad 23:100ff, Fitzgerald) Menoitios [Patroclus’ father]

  … had brought me, under a cloud,

  a boy still, on the day I killed the son

  of Lord Amphídamas—though I wished it not—in

  childish anger over a game of dice.

  Peleus [Achilles’ father] … adopted me

  and reared me kindly, naming me your squire.

  4 Jonathan Shay, Achill in Vietnam. Kampftrauma und Persönlichkeitsverlust, trans. Klaus Kochmann (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998).

  5 As with so many themes in this book, Willard Waller’s 1944 recommendations on the occupational reintegration of returning war veterans in The Veteran Comes Back are still worth reading and taking to heart today. For the specific area of occupational readjustment and pensions, see the final sections of the book. However, it should be evident by now that I hope as many people as possible will want to read that book in its entirety. It is still in many libraries and quite findable on the used book market.

  7. A Peaceful Harbor: No Safe Place