Marriage as the Root of Comedy in the Odyssey: Hard for Mortal Men to Dig Out

Marriage as the Root of Comedy in the Odyssey: Hard for Mortal Men to Dig Out

In the Iliad, Achilles is revealed in his full stature and spiritual depth only in book 24 where, out of all eyes, he is moved to admiration and generosity by the fearless devotion of Priam, the bereft father and humiliated king, in whom he sees his spiritual peer. Achilles recognizes a startling beauty in the actions of this noble enemy—and tells him that life (ineradicably mingled with evil though it is) is a gift to be received, and its loss accepted, with deepening courage and reconcilement. He himself prepares the body of his hated enemy for burial (securing an armisitice of 12 days so that the city can mourn its hero and its own now certain doom), and sits, weeps, and eats with the father, sharing the manly consolation of his hard-earned wisdom. The warrior over whom death hovers (and for whom life had seemed to have nothing further to offer) gazes in wonder at the “brave looks” of the old man and “listen[s] to him talking,” while to Priam, the young man whose death-dealing hands his own appeal has made gentle and generous seems, “in his size and his beauty, … an outright vision of gods.” The glory that Zeus owes Achilles as the counterbalance to his mortality only now finally appears—in the night, in Achilles' shelter, unseen by many. It is only by compelling Achilles to suffer, as none has suffered before, the bitter terms of mortality with deepening rage, sorrow, and final acceptance, that Zeus has made his hero a true revelation of the divine image in man. Out of the inward hollow left by the loss of Patroklos in his soul flows a pure and mysterious kindness. In caring for Priam, he shows man's capacity for goodness. In wondering at him, he sees man's potential beauty. This transformation of Achilles from superb warrior to a soul inwardly open to the divine movements of love is the glory which Zeus, nodding, agreed to bestow on him in book 1—revealing this mortal man to be in the image of the unknown God who, walking mysteriously among heroes and guiding them in the immortal night, dwells beyond Olympus and deeper than the house of death. The Iliad's final revelation of its hero thus comes to pass in the poem's most concealed sheltering—in the night, in Achilles' underground shelter, unseen by any save Priam, Automedon, and Antilochos.

Like Achilles, Odysseus aspires to heroic deeds at Troy. In book 2 when, in longing for homes and wives, the army makes a stampede for the ships, he inspires his own commitment to heroism in them all, reminding them of the gods' promise that the taking of Troy will be “a deed late, late to be accomplished, but whose glory will perish never.” Athena shines at his right hand as he awakens his own resilient courage (lover of home and wife though he is) in the heart of each man, so that “now battle became sweeter to them than to go back in their hollow ships to the beloved land of their fathers.” As with Achilles again though, the steadfast root of Odysseus' shining deeds and the final revelation of his glory, must be sought in a concealed sheltering out of the eyes of many (in the second-to-last book of his own epic). Just as Achilles undergoes a thorough remaking in the crucible of anguish, Odysseus must lose all he has and is, become a kind of nobody among men, a wanderer on land and sea, cursed, pummelled, and scarred, seemingly abandoned by the gods who support him—in order to find and reveal the deepest, most providentially confirming movements of his spirit, shelterered and brought to fruition in his marriage to Penelope.

Concealment seems congenial to Odysseus. Unlike Achilles, he is a man of many turns, a beautiful liar, a spinner of tales—he wears disguises, contrives strategems, gains his goals by dissembling them. His habit is to harbor his thoughts and feelings deep in his chest, to spring from cover and take enemies by surprise. In book 10 of the Iliad, he slips past Trojan lines wearing his grandfather's robber-helmet, extracts information from the cowardly Dolon with false assurances of clemency, spies out the enemy encampment, and steals the shining horses of Rhesus. It is his devices that ultimately take the city, playing cruelly on the unsuspecting piety of the Trojans. From beneath his disguise as “nobody,” his manipulation of anonymous possibilities concealed in the things of the world overpowers the much mightier Cyclops—and helps him escape peril after peril with his skin. But, for nine years, from the fall of Troy to when he is washed up on the shore of Scheria, Odysseus seems to wander farther and farther from his spirit's true home. It is precisely the endless versatility of his mind, both to see through and project persuasive concealments, to deploy appearances to achieve hidden goals, yes, to manipulate the base and noble dispositions of others, that threatens to usurp his inmost being, deplete and frustrate his deepest concealed longings and powers.

Odysseus' affinities for the kinds of concealment that can be practiced on others for the sake of victory, gain, survival, and dramatic effect are his heroic signature. (And wherever the stranger arrives in Homer's world, he is greeted with the challenge, “From where do you come sailing over the watery ways? Is it on some business, or are you recklessly roving as pirates do, when they sail on the salt sea and venture their lives, bringing evil to alien people?”) Yet what distiguishes our hero from a mere predator is his commitment to larger goods that gain and survival subserve—goods that can be prepared for, but cannot be attained by planning and execution alone, goods which surprise the soul in its inmost covert. Ends that the strategist does not give to himself, but the intuition of which transforms the record of his deeds into a story, and reveal a divinely bestowed pattern in his life. Beneath Odysseus the adventurer, the contender, the warrior, the trickster, the thief, the beguiling speaker is Odysseus the man, the sufferer. Not the “famous name” he has made for himself and is as anxious to proclaim to the defeated Cyclops as he is reluctant to share with the kindly Phaiakians. Rather, the nobody who is at the mercy of the elements, vulnerable to the kindness of a host, who—when listening to the words of the poet, cannot hide his tears over the victims of his own famous strategy at Troy but weeps like “a woman weep[ing], lying over the body of her dear husband, who fell fighting for her city and people as he tried to beat off the pitiless day; … she sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body about him she cries high and shrill, while the men behind her, hitting her with their spear butts on the back and the shoulders force her up and lead her away into slavery.” Who, when the girl Nausikaa stands up to his unpromising, near-naked and sea-beaten appearance on the beach, is so moved by her courageous welcome that, even while he takes advantage of her hospitality and plays on her hopes, “wonder takes [him] as [he] looks on her,” and a simile for her person rises unbidden from his memory, “yet once in Delos I saw such a thing, by Apollo's altar. I saw the stalk of a young palm shooting up … and as, when I looked upon that tree, my heart admired it long, so now, lady, I admire you and wonder.” Who tells to Alkinoos and Nausikaa and their people his whole unfinished story, both what is flattering and what is not, trusting in their goodness to help him, and in the gods to give a good ending. Who returns to his home not guided by the steering plots of his conscious mind, but ferried sleeping over sea, so that his return seems to come over him out of the deepest reaches of his heart, the concealed and artless center of his being.

This interior vulnerability, readiness, and receptivity belong to his God-given identity (perduring beneath and darkly shining through every disguise he adopts). It is this which his long trials and sufferings serve to expose, making him fruitful and wise. It is this that makes the man of many similes profoundly like himself in the end, empowering him to take possession of his own being, his household, kingdom, wife, and son. And this identity is protected and guaranteed most of all by his marriage to Penelope, to whom he has entrusted his uninvented being, his heart. His marriage to Penelope embeds his Zeus-like mind in the world, making it fruitfully rooted rather than aimlessly wandering and playing over it. The fact that she—called periphronos, minded all around—keeps the wanderer in the center of her mind as he, wandering all around, longs after her, shelters the inmost man and provides him with inner resilience, genuine invention and intelligence; it gives him something to live for, and preserve in himself. When he washes up naked and gasping on the island of Scheria, it enables him to see the covert made by two olive trees as the place of preserving concealment where a man “buries a burning log in a black ash heap in a remote place in the country, where none live near as neighbors, and saves the seed of fire, having no other place to get a light from,” so burying, preserving the bright seed that is his very self. It extends a saving grip for him in the shape of a fig tree as he hangs for life over the horrible, faceless, feminine mouth of the whirlpool Charybdis. It provides the root out of which the Delian palm shoots forth into his memory when he wonders at the pure-hearted courage of the Phaiakian princess, and it wins him her succour, and his own homecoming.

When Odysseus' wanderings approach their turning point, this concealed rootedness of Odysseus' being—on which the whole poem rests and turns toward comedy—appears in a Hermetic sign which will receive its fulfillment only in the poem's penultimate book. Marooned on a secluded island, unprovisioned, and lost, Odysseus gets word that half his crew have been snared by the goddess Circe, and he sets out to dare the peril alone. He is met by Hermes, the god of double meanings, concealed truths, and the interpretive genius that discloses the nexus of human and divine purposes. “Where are you going, unhappy man, all alone, through the hilltops, ignorant of the land-lay?” says the god, gently mocking the now helpless man of devices. But to secure him against the spells of the witch goddess, Hermes gives him a “good medicine” that “he picked out of the ground”: “it was black at the root, but with a milky flower. The gods call it moly. It is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods have power to do all things.” When Circe tries to enchant Odysseus she is baffled by the moly's counterspell: “There is a mind in you no magic will work on,” she says. “You then are Odysseus.” Where Circe expects Odysseus to become a boar or some other beast, he only turns into himself, Odysseus. This moly is mysterious, and its name only conceals its nature, since “moly” is not a Greek word, or a human word at all, but from the language of the gods. That language's roots are unknown. The roots of the moly too are hidden, “black” and “hard for mortals to dig up,” but they produce a beautiful flower. The moly grants Odysseus the power of remaining like himself. Your cleverness cannot ultimately save you, Hermes suggests, but something hidden, something grounding at the roots of you (deeper than your intentions but giving them sustenance and strength) will allow you to retain the form of your humanity—the white flower of yourself.

The sign of the moly recieves its interpretation in the marriage-chamber of Odysseus and Penelope, a sacrament into which human effort, artifice, and intentions all enter but which is spoken into being by the language of God. When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, converses with Penelope in the night, he sees her melt with the longing his tales stir in her. Then, she weeps for her husband who sits beside her and pities her in his heart but sets his eyes like flint. Thoughout their interview he finds many ways to conjure and probe the memory of Odysseus she preserves within her. When she wakes later that night, she says, “For on this very night there was one who lay by me, like Odysseus as he was when he went with the army, so that my own heart was happy. I thought it was no dream, but a waking vision.” She is full of the memory of the man who left her 20 years ago. But is the stranger-Odysseus that appears the next day in the hall, sitting on his throne, bloody with the slaughter of the suitors—magnificent and somewhat horrifying—her Odysseus? Is he still “as he was when he went with the army”? She will not melt before him again, not until she knows not only that he is the factual Odysseus, but that he is her Odysseus: that he still loves her, that he remains true to the commitment that shelters the root of their shared participation in being. Like Nausikaa, Penelope neither runs nor turns away from Odysseus as he confronts her bloody and sullen—but treats him as the stranger his outward appearance may in fact conceal. Though Telemachos scolds her for having “a heart harder than stone,” Penelope replies that “she is full of wonderment, and I cannot find anything to say to him, nor question him, nor look him straight in the face. But if he is truly Odysseus, and he has come home, then we shall find other ways, and better, to recognize each other, for we have signs that we know of between the two of us only, but they are secret from others.” Odysseus sends their son out. He asks for the sound of wedding music in the hall, buying the time he and Penelope need to renew their marriage. He washes the filth of slaughter off himself, and the gods grace him with the beauty that is his. And when Penelope remains distant, he tells her, “You are so strange,” and then in words that comically echo Achilles' wonderment at Priam, “this woman has a heart of iron within her.”

Concluding in consternation that she will not welcome him that night, he asks the nurse Eurykleia to make a bed for him in the hall. Penelope, matching him word for word, replies, “You are so strange. I am not proud, nor indifferent, nor puzzled beyond need, but I know very well what you looked like when you went in the ship with the sweeping oars, from Ithaka,” indicating that she wishes to test the reality beneath his appearance, to probe the unseen root of this fair-seeming flower of a man. And so, she provokes him, saying, “Come then, Eurykleia, and make up a firm bed for him outside the well-fashioned chamber: that very bed that he himself built. Put the firm bed here outside for him.” Given what Odysseus calls “the character” of his bed, to have had it removed would imply a serious and deliberate act of infidelity on Penelope's part. The very suggestion makes him angry and confused—and shows that he is as much at her mercy, as she is at his. She shows herself his equal, too, in her capacity to “tell lies that are like truth,” lies that bring the heart of things to light. “What you have said, dear lady, has hurt my heart deeply. What man has put my bed in another place? But it would be difficult for even an expert one, unless a god, coming to help in person, were easily to change its position. But there is no mortal man alive, no strong man, who lightly could move that weight elsewhere. There is one particular feature in the bed's construction. I myself, no other man, made it. There was the bole of an olive tree with long leaves growing strongly in the courtyard, and it was thick, like a column. I laid down my chamber around this, and built it, until I finished it, with close-set stones, and roofed it well over, and added the compacted doors, fitting closely together … and decorated it with gold and silver and ivory. There is its character, as I tell you; but I do not know now, dear lady, whether my bed is still in its place, or if some man has cut underneath the stump of the olive, and moved it elsewhere.” Into the construction of the bedchamber goes Odysseus' purpose, pride, and skill. The tree on which it is founded comes not from him but the rocky soil of Ithaca, from the givenness of his native world. This trunk looked to him like a column when he chose it—we remember that Penelope stands, whenever she appears in the hall, beside the household's central column, a formula repeated so often that it becomes an embodied simile or epithet to her person. On the bed is built a sheltering, concealed room where two may welcome and foster each other, and around it the whole noble household builds itself up. Its roots, like those of the moly, are hard for mortal men to tear up, and its language—the language of human lives supporting, ennobling, guarding, and marvelling at each other—is a language spoken only by God. This olive stump is the rooted center of Odysseus' being. It is what gives him the will to survive, and a mind on which no magic will work. It is sacred to him—so that he cannot help but be hurt by Penelope's suggestion that it has been (or could be) uprooted or cut down. This is the proof she needed. She recognizes him. He is her Odysseus in truth. “You then are Odysseus,” as Circe said. Penelope's gladness that her Odysseus has indeed returned is wonderfully compared to the joy of a shipwrecked man who finds himself on home ground once more, for it is only in her welcome that his homecoming is won, even as she returns to herself in him. Athena holds back the dawn for them and, in the communion of their hearts, time opens inward. They go together to bed and to “their old ritual.” After their lovemaking, they tell each other their stories. Penelope recounts everything that she endured in his absence. And Odysseus—ignoring the advice of Agamemnon's shade—tells Penelope all that he has done and endured. He tells her the whole Odyssey. It's the only time in the poem when we hear his whole story in its proper order from beginning to end. In telling all, Odysseus experiences a full and redemptive reordering and release, made possible by the total confidence and total vulnerability of the married couple before each other in their sacramental sheltering. 

The confidence of their encounter is protected by the wise and wonderful disguises and indirections under which they approach each other. Its redemptive power stems from the total honesty with which (led on by nature and their own like-mindedness) they open their hearts, hiding nothing. Here hidden in the heart of their household, apart from their people, their servants, even their son—they shelter each others' souls, and stand before each other like the first couple “naked and unashamed.” This total confidence of Odysseus and Penelope before the stranger each encounters in the other, has power to renew a culture and civilization of hospitality from within, and restore the divine image in it. It is this mutual sheltering that has preserved Odysseus in war and wandering, not only directing his brilliant schemes to a noble end, but also enabling his heroic generosity and graciousness along the way, making him susceptible to divine influences from the minds of the many men and women he encounters. It is his dwelling in the heart's shelter of his marriage to Penelope that enables him to honor Nausikaa, for instance, with words that speak to her heart's desire and reveal his own: “May the gods give you everything that your heart longs for; may they grant you a husband and a house and sweet agreement in all things, for nothing is better than this, more steadfast than when two people, a man and his wife, keep a harmonious household; a thing that brings distress to the people who hate them and pleasure to their well-wishers, and for them the very best glory.”

*Quotations of the Iliad and Odyssey are from Richmond Lattimore's translation (the last slightly adapted). Even though I don't refer to any secondaries above, there are a few that have shaped my reading in substantial ways. I owe my understanding of the Homeric poems as wholes to Glenn Arbery's excellent essays ("Against the Belly of the Ram: the Comedy of Deception in the Odyssey" in a collection called The Terrain of Comedy, and "Odysseus' Nostos: Concealment and Revelation" in Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority, as well as his essay on the Iliad, "Soul and Image: The Single Honor of Achilles" in The Epic Cosmos, and a chapter of his book Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation called "The Sacrifice of Achiles"). My thoughts about the the moly-flower and Odysseus' and Penelope's marriage bed were also helped by two essays of the odd poet, Anne Carson--though she does not connect them herself--"Every Exit is an Entrance" from her book Decreation (essay available here, https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/anne-carson-decreation-every-exit-is-an-entrance-2005.pdf) and "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" (available here, http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_carson.php).