Do You Know What an Odyssey Is? (Eva Brann, opening lecture for the Honors Program at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington in September, 1993)
Let me tell you what I think about Odysseus’s odyssey. Ask yourself first who its author is. Who is the poet of the odyssey? Is it Homer? Well yes, in some way. But actually it is Odysseus, it is Odysseus who takes the place of the palace-poet in Phaeacia and who tells the story of his adventures there. He is the true teller and poet of his odyssey.
Now there is something we know about this hero: he is a habitual and practiced liar. Wherever he turns up, he tells lying tales. Homer calls them that—”lying tales.” He tells various people, his honest servant Eumaius, his faithful wife Penelope and others, a lot of partial stories about his travels, stories quite different from the grand odyssey he tells those artistic folk, the Phaeacians. His very own goddess Athena encourages him in this rather peculiar tale-telling. Imagine the scene. It happens right after the crew of the magically instantaneous Phaeacian ship has left Odysseus in a deep sleep on the shore of his home Ithaca, together with a heap of loot. He awakes to find that for the first time in decades his own goddess is visibly with him. Here is Athena herself, handsome and tall, the embodiment of all the true womanly virtues, for she is warlike, cunning, and wise. She all but makes love to her protegé. She strokes his cheek and says: “A man would have to be really guileful and rascally to out do you in all sorts of trickery.” She goes on like that for a while in her pleasure with him. He really is an olympic-class liar.
Now what lies has he been telling, according to Homer? He tells all and sundry that he has been here and there, to Crete, to Syria, to Egypt, as a brigand and merchant mariner. What else would an impoverished hero, having wasted ten years of his life to sack one small citadel, do on his way home from Turkey? Of course he would circulate in the Aegean sea, stealing or trading so as not to come home empty-handed. All the Greeks did it on their return trip from Troy.
So here is my interpretation of Odysseus’s odyssey. See if you believe me—it’s pure speculation. I think Odysseus’s lying tales, the supposedly made-up stories he keeps telling, are the simple fact. Of course he went to Crete and Syria and Egypt to accumulate wealth by various peaceful and violent means. What else would he have been doing in the ten years he takes to get home? He is, I say, telling simple facts.
Then what of the wonderful and fantastic adventures that form the odyssey he tells in Phaeacia, the journey that gives its name to the poem? They are not the simple fact. They are instead the utter truth.
This very thing must have happened to you: You go to a place. Certain prosaic things occur, ordinary external factual occurrences. But your trip also has an inward significance: you learn something about yourself or about others; you see the ordinary things in a larger, perhaps in a magical perspective. This view of events, this vision, is the truth of the trip. The mere facts are a kind of correct non-truth.
Here is how it happens to Odysseus. He comes to a place, probably Egypt, where the inhabitants eat the lotus flower, which apparently contains a drug. We know from their frescoes that the Egyptians sniffed lotus flowers at parties. You may have done something like that yourself. Odysseus, a man of independent vitality and imagination, does not join his crew in indulging in this mind-altering activity, and eventually he has to extricate them by force from their spaced-out stupor. This mundane, all-too-factual episode becomes the true mythic adventure of the lotus eaters in Odysseus’ odyssey.
Another time he and his crew come to an island bordello. His men are quite ready to make pigs of themselves. Not he; in fact he masters the madam of this house. The mythic truth of this episode collides out in the adventure on Circe’s Island, where a seductive sorceress turns his crew into a herd of grunting beasts, while he retains his manhood.
In mathematics books there is often an irritating but well-meaning sentence: “The rest of the proof is left to the reader.” I am leaving the rest of this proof, the other ten adventures, to you to interpret.
If there is any sense in what I am saying, Homer will introduce into your intellects and imaginations to what may be a new notion: the distinction between brute, but somehow mendacious, fact and fantastic, but significant, truth. His poem will serve for you as the first and probably the grandest example of the poet’s function, which is to turn mere life into meaningful myth.
The second answer then to the question “Do you know what an odyssey is?” will be: It is that telling of an episode in a human life that gives its incidents magic and meaning.