**This lecture was very much composed for oral delivery on a specific occasion. Please keep that in mind as you read along.
Convocation Lecture, Fall 2002
Nathalia King
“Odysseus and the Arts of Memory”
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome
On an occasion of this kind, it may seem very difficult to focus on a lecture
because the mind is so crowded with other thoughts and emotions. Some of you
may be wondering (in awe and trembling) how kids who were bringing home their
first clay turtles and paper flowers only yesterday can already be on the verge
of living and laboring on their own. Some of you may be figuring out how fast
you can get the parental unit into the car and off- campus. Some may be worrying
about how to handle introductions between your new roommate and the stuffed
animal you’ve slept with all your life. And I would bet very good money
that some of us are tossing and turning over what to do on the first day of
class, regardless of whether it’s the first course we’ve taught
at Reed or the 37th.
Well, let me share a secret with you. At Reed, when we get anxious about stuff,
we sublimate. We take all that emotional energy and random mental static and
we focus it on the text or the problem set or the experiment at hand. So I
invite you to focus on what I have to say. And if concentrating the mind on
an intellectual issue because it’ll make you happier, isn’t reason
enough to do so, I’ll give you two other reasons. Reason number one is
that I plan to get a jump start on the semester in Humanities 110 so that if
you think about what I’ll say, Homer might make more sense to you. And
this may hold especially for those who haven’t really exactly quite finished
reading the Odyssey and the Iliad yet. Reason number two is for those going
into conference immediately after this lecture. You know who you are and you
know what we say about conference at Reed: what you get out of it bears an
exact correlation to what you’ve put into it. So listen up.
In a nutshell, the Odyssey is a story about the great warrior Odysseus heading
home from the Trojan War. The seas are treacherous, the natives are mostly
unfriendly, but, after a twenty year absence, he finally makes it back to his
own island of Ithaca. One reading of the Odyssey would have it that Odysseus
is a really smart person, a cunning strategist and a self-knowing man, and
that there’s really no question that he’s going to make it. By
this reading, any suspense in the poem is the product of how monstrous and
unhuman the challenges Odysseus faces might be and the varieties of guile he
uses to overcome them. My argument to you this morning is based on a different
premise: it is based on the premise that Odysseus may well be a very smart
person, but that he may nonetheless have substantial difficulties with knowing
himself very well—that his years of experience as warrior, seafarer and
adventurer have blurred or obfuscated his memories of who he was as a good
landowner or husband or father some 20 years ago. By my reading, the greater
suspense in the poem turns on more abstract and metaphorical challenges: can
Odysseus remember himself? Can he resume his old place on his estate and in
the social hierarchy of Ithaca in a meaningful and fufilling way? Can those
he left behind recognize him for the man they once knew and loved, or will
he appear so much the stranger that he will be condemned to beg at the doorsteps
he once owned?
My general concern, then, is the issue of memory, and in the next 20 minutes,
I want to talk about memory in the context of the Odyssey in three different,
but inter-related ways. First, I want to share with you some of the basic concepts
from recent scholarship about the functions of memory in oral literature in
an oral culture. Second, I want to demonstrate that the Odyssey consistently
places a special emphasis on the role of memory. Third and last, I want to
argue that Odysseus’s restoration to his original identity and social
estate, is A) profoundly influenced by the variety of ways in which his people
remember him and recall him to himself, and B) bears crucial parallels to the
poem’s depiction of Homeric culture and that depiction’s dependence
on the poet’s memory. Certaintly, the members of Odysseus’ family
do not have the same mnemonic skills as the poet; the ways in which they recognize
Odysseus are more intuitive and less surefooted, than the artful and disciplined
ways in which the bard remembers the poem. But in both cases, the uses of memory
has the beneficial consequence of contributing to a shared culture that is
richer and more refined because it is more consensual.
To begin, then, let me make the claim that it is impossible to understand
the Homeric poems without comprehending the fact that they issue from an oral
culture.
This means that rather than being written by an author and read by a group
of readers, these epics were orally composed, orally retained, orally performed,
and orally received. It may seem difficult to grasp the fact that such a
poem, so many lines, so many characters and events, could be held within the
bounds
of a single human memory. To put this claim in perspective, it may help to
know that of thousands of languages that have existed, only about a hundred
have produced a written literature—or that of the roughly 3000 languages
spoken today, only between 70 and 80 have a written literature. In spite
of our preconceptions about the universality of literacy, or about the superiority
of literacy over illiteracy, human experience throughout history demonstrates
that the majority of people have lived in oral cultures rather than literate
ones. This does not mean that they have lived without the benefit of songs,
poems, stories or histories. On the contrary, it means that they have lived
in a different relation to the arts than we have, a relation arguably more
immediate, more sensual, and more intimate to the arts than ours. Or that
they
have lived in a relation to the arts familiar to us from our own experiences
in oral culture: for example as children internally voicing the words of
the bedtime story a parent reads aloud. If we reflect carefully about our
own such
experiences as oralists, we soon realize that our tendency to equate illiteracy
and orality is profoundly mistaken; that rather than signaling a lack of
ability, genuine orality depends on its own set of learned skills, special
competencies,
or what scholars call oral technologies.
What were such competencies in the case of the singer of tales in the Homeric
age? Scholars of orality have identified 4 basic categories of oral technology,
to which I will give the following labels: metrical; phonetic; formulaic;
and thematic. Metrical competence consists of the bard’s ability to sing
his story to a specific rhythm, repeated in every line, and iterated by the
musical accompaniment of the lyre. Phonetic competence consists of the bard’s
ability to construct memorable patterns of sound, such as assonance and alliteration,
or rhyme and off-rhyme. Formulaic competence consists of the bard’s ability
to strategically deploy memorized (prefabricated) units of poetry. These formulae
can be relatively short, like epithets: epithets are those constantly repeated
noun adjective combination such as the rosy-fingered Dawn, or wily Odysseus.
But formulae can also be relatively long, as seen in the deliberate redundancy
that occurs throughout the poem in the descriptions of feasts or libation offerings.
Thematic competence consists of the bard’s ability to exploit traditional
story elements that, strung together, provide the outline of the whole plot;
that conventional themes are still prominent even in our own culture is evidenced
in phrases such as it’s a boy meets girl movie or it’s a rags to
riches novel.
To these four categories of oral technology, present in virtually all oral
cultures, I would add one more which is more specifically characteristic of
the Homeric oral tradition. I call this the ekphrastic or descriptive technology.
Descriptive competence consists of the bard’s ability to create remarkably
vivid mental images, so alive and animate as to make an indelible impression
on the mind’s eye. In the Homeric poems, hundreds of these images take
the form of extended similes. I’ll cite just one based on a parallel
that is interestingly tangential to that in my opening argument. This simile
compares the moment in which Odysseus successfully strings his ancient bow
to that in which the lyre player first replaces and then plucks a string on
his instrument(Bk 21, line 460, p.404).
… The man skilled in all ways of contending,
satisfied by the great bow’s look and heft,
like a musician, like a harper, when
with a quiet hand upon his instrument
he draws between his thumb and forefinger
a sweet new string upon a peg: //that effortlessly
Odysseus in one motion strung the bow.
Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it,
So the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang
A swallow’s note.
In the hushed hall it smote the suitors //
And all their faces changed.
The provocative comparison here between the action hero and the harper is
deliberate and purposeful: the simile specifically makes the point that both
the hero and
the harper practice a discipline; that because of that discipline, both embody
a kind of perfection; and that both can “smite change,” whether
the tool for change be as concrete as a weapon or as ephemeral as a musical
note.
Like the physical skills of the meticulously trained and practiced warrior,
the metrical, phonetic, formulaic and thematic competencies are essential to
the
bard’s livelihood. They perform crucial and complementary functions for
the bard: they help him retain and recall those elements of the tale he has memorized;
and they provide different strategies for improvisation. During a performance,
the bard’s reliance on memorized chunks of poetry gives him the time to
observe his audience, to anticipate what they want to hear, and to respond to
these unspoken requests by improvising on those parts of the tale most appropriate
to the audience’s needs. The bard’s excellence, like that of his
tales, depends upon a combination of learned poetic discipline and constant
practice. By skillfully manipulating oral technologies, the very best bards
can alternate
at will between memory and improvisation; convention and spontaneity; the traditional
and the new.
In turning now to the poem itself, I want to show that, as the bard composes
his tale, so Odysseus’ extended family also pieces together the old and
new, the past and present manifestations of their lost hero. If, in the first
half of the poem, Odysseus travels through a largely fantasmagoric territory,
inhabited by caricatures of human behavior, like the Cyclops, the Sirenes,
or Circe, in the second half of the poem Odysseus confronts the paradoxically
unfamiliar
challenge of re-integrating a human place. If the first half of the poem shows
us Odysseus outside himself, beside himself, or prisoner to a series of exaggerated
aspects of himself, the second half figures his return to the orbits of time
and memory, among those he remembers and who remember him, and thanks to whom
he can take back possession of a gratifying centrality in a familial and social
world.
At the poem’s outset, then, we could say that Odysseus’ condition
resembles that of an epic only vaguely recalled, a poem that is falling beyond
the bounds of human memory. By contrast, once Odysseus sets foot on Ithaca, his
encounters engage him in an elaborate game of hide and seek with his familiars,
involving progressively less self-concealment and more self-revelation. It is
my argument that each of the persons Odysseus encounters on Ithaca, assists him
in shedding the disguises he wears, in coming closer to the origins of his self.
His shepherd, Eumaios, helps him to reject the images of himself as scavenger,
drifter, beggar, slave, in some sense enabling Odysseus to dissolve these fictions
by uttering them [Bk 14]. His son, Telemachus, guided by divine illumination,
helps Odysseus to identify himself for the first time with plain honesty as “that
father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered pain for lack of [16.221-2].” His
old dog, Argos, lives exactly long enough to remind Odysseus of the pleasures
he used to take in the chase and the hunt, in the company of domesticated beasts[17.
375-422]. His nurse, Eurykleia, as she bathes him, startles Odysseus into making
a stunning connection between the body of the aging fighter he is now with
the body of the beautiful hunting youth he once was. I quote:
“ The scar: He had forgotten that. She must not
handle his scarred thigh, or the game was up.
But when she bared her lord’s leg, bending near,
She knew the groove at once [19.456ff].”
[…] She traced it under her spread hands, then let go,
And into the basin fell the lower leg
Making the bronze clang, sloshing the water out.
Then joy and anguish seized her heart; her eyes
Filled up with tears; her throat closed, and she whispered,
With hand held out to touch his chin:
yes! You are Odysseus! dear child! I couldn’t
See you ‘til now—not till I knew
My master’s body with my own hands! [19.541ff]
In each of these examples, a different kind of memory or recognition, be it
informed by divination or premonition, be it made manifest through touch or
creature sense,
confirms to Odysseus with new force that he is indeed the lord returned to
his lands and loyal servants, the father and husband come back to child and
wife.
Ideally, I would want to analyze each of these examples in more detail, but
in the interests of time, I want to reserve my closest focus for the most complex
example: that of Penelope. For it is the pull and tug, the resistance and the
giving in of Penelope’s modes of recognition that best reveal to Odysseus
the real profundity of the emotions that have not only lead him home, but are
home.
It is Penelope who holds the keys to the most hidden recesses in Odysseus’ house
and to the almost irretrievable secrets of their ancient intimacy. Penelope’s
recognition of Odysseus seems at first virtually unconscious; as if her memories
needed to be stirred up from the depths and can surface only slowly before she
is able to deliberately test his identity. To trace this progression from Penelope’s
intuitions to her certain knowledge, I want to look at 3 episodes in the poem:
the dream that Penelope tells and that Odysseus interprets for her; Penelope’s
proposition that she make the suitors undertake the trial of the bow; and finally,
Penelope’s provocation of Odysseus when she deliberately pretends ignorance
of the secret of their bed.
“
Listen, interpret me this dream,” says Penelope to the stranger as they
sit by the fire late into the night. And she recounts the dream of an eagle who
plummets out of the sky to break the necks of 20 geese feeding beside her house
[19.620-650]. Penelope’s account of her dream provides Odysseus with the
perfect setup: his interpretation of her dream allows him to proclaim himself
and his intentions without blowing his cover to anyone, even to her. A few lines
later, when Penelope decrees the contest of the bow, she again provides Odysseus
with advance knowledge of a workable strategy for killing the suitors: she all
but puts his old weapon in his hand. Although in these instances, Penelope seems
to resist full cognizance of her sense that she knows the stranger before her
to be Odysseus, Odysseus still seems to grasp that she has recognized him, and
he rises to the challenge that such recognition entails with the bold and otherwise
unintelligible vaunt that: “Odysseus… will be here long before
one of these lads can stretch the string of that bow.”
It is one of the sweeter ironies of the poem that the task of killing the
suitors is in some sense easier than that of releasing Penelope’s long pent up
love. When the slaughter of suitors and unloyal maids is over, when there is
no longer anything tangible to hold his parents apart, Telemachus reproaches
her bitterly for hanging back: “What other woman could remain so cold?….
Your heart is hard as flint and never changing” and Odysseus echoes these
words when he says: “Her heart is iron in her breast.” But Penelope,
ever cautious and forward looking, needs to put Odysseus to a final test—not
the test of physical prowess, nor that of courage. It is both simpler and more
complicated: it is a test of memory. Can he remember what she remembers? what
only one other person besides them knows? What will he say when she suggests
that his bed be moved? Odysseus’ response is spoken in anger, but specific
and graphic in detail. Only when Odysseus can recount, in specific and graphic
detail. When he recounts how he built their house and bed, incorporating the
trunk of a single tree in the very core of both, Penelope can know with utter
assurance what her 6 senses have already told her. The enormous sense of release
that follows in Penelope and Odysseus’ embrace is cause for one of the
most magnificent and synoptic similes in the whole Homeric corpus. With a new
degree of proximity , the poem reveals to us the state of Odysseus inner being:
Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
Of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
His dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,//
Longed for
As the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
Spent in rough water where his ship went down
Under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
To crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
In joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind…
Since his return to Ithaca, Odysseus has often been provoked to tears before
this moment, but he has never wept as he does here, openly and without restraint.
Perhaps until this moment, Odysseus has yearned for Penelope with an old and
conventional longing; but now he yearns for her with new urgency. Holding her
in his arms, Odysseus yearns for Penelope as he yearns for the fundamental vitality
of his own breath and life. And the abyss that she holds him back from is not
just that of all the engulfing seas he has traversed; it is also the abyss of
the crippling amnesia they have only narrowly escaped; that amnesia in which
they might have come together without really recognizing or fathoming each other.
To conclude, let me rehearse my argument one last time. Just as the bard exploits
a panoply of mnemonic techniques to bring the poem and the culture it represents
into brilliant illumination for his audience, so Odysseus is returned to a complete
sense of his essential self through the different mnemonic processes by which
his son, his nurse, his wife recognize and remember him. If the hero can only
retrieve his own most whole identity because others remember it for him and with
him, so the culture represented in the poem can only achieve its most complete
manifestation when both the bard and his community of listeners participate in
that process. Ultimately, then, the Homeric poem tells us that neither a whole
self nor a unimpoverished culture can be autonomous or independent entities;
neither can come into full being without the creative interventions and interpolations
of the communities surrounding them.
In coming to Reed, you have chosen and are now embarking upon your own kinds of odyssey and homecoming. It is fair to anticipate that you will be entranced, bewildered, challenged and enlightened, in unprecedented and memorable ways. I believe I can say, on behalf of the Reed faculty, that we will do everything we can to make this happen—not only for your sakes, but because we too are most at home in communities of thriving intellect, whether oralist or literate, whether they issue from the past, are those we build in the present, or project into the future. Let’s have a great year.