He was famously a man of many ways, whether we interpret these as abilities or norms; designs or deceptions; reasons or identities. Yet despite such resources, he was also famously stuck, making a 10-year odyssey of his attempt to return home from a 10-year war. What keeps the man of master plans from homecoming and domestic bliss? In the first of a three part discussion of Homer’s classic, Wes & Erin try to figure out what Odysseus really wants, and whether the “lord of lies” can master the trick of entrusting his mind to others.
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Transcript
0:11 Wes: He was famously a man of many ways, whether we interpret these as abilities or norms, designs or deceptions, reasons or character tropes. Yet despite such resources, he was also famously stuck making a 10 year odyssey of his attempt to return home from a 10 year war. What keeps the man of master plans from homecoming and domestic bliss? In the first of a three part discussion of Homer's classic, we try to figure out what Odysseus really wants and whether the Lord of Lies can master the trick of entrusting his mind to others. This is Wes Alwan, this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So today we are discussing The Odyssey first 12 books and the first 12 books. And we're doing the Emily Wilson translation. And we've actually discussed this translation on my other podcast, the Partially Examined Life. We had her on to discuss it, which was, which was interesting. And you know, when I started reading this translation, I'm used to Fitzgerald, which is a very. There's a lot of license taken with that translation and I'd even memorize a little bit of that as a kid and then I'd memorize some of the Greek as well. Although looking at the Greek this time, it's like if I get a lobe out and there's English on one side and there's Greek on the other, I can make some things out, but it's such difficult Greek to try to translate. You know, when I first encountered her translation, because it's so different and it's different because it's much simpler syntactically than most translations. And I was a little bit weirded out by that in the beginning. But then I found the translation to be so readable that it actually increased is the enjoyment of reading it a lot. It's much easier to read than say a Fitzgerald or many of these other translations. And you see the difference where these other translations are. They're often a little bit archaic, maybe a bit ornate or they're. Sometimes they're archaic just because they've been translated a long time ago. Sometimes they're archaic because they're trying to match syntactic formality of the Greek or something like that. Which is not to say, by the way, that she isn't herself taking license. She's taking a lot of license here and she's leaving things out. And it's quite a loose translation in some ways, but I think that's okay. She's trying to capture the essence of it. I'm Beginning this way, just because I was curious about what your history with the text is, what translations you've read and why you suggested this translation in particular and what you thought of her translation compared to the others.
2:45 Erin: You know, I had this translation on my reading list for the summer. It was suggested to me, you know, that I might try it out. I had been, I think the Fagles was my first translation. Maybe some combination of Fitzgerald and Fagles, but I really partial to the Fagles, I think, because that ended up being what I read in college. And it just had a big impression on me. I think it was. It maybe opened, you know, one of my freshman year literature courses with a really wonderful professor who, you know, we spent, I think, like, two weeks just. And we barely got through the first, like, hundred lines of book one. I loved the Fagos. I thought I would try this. I really came around on this at first. I was like, oh, this is so. I found it flat, I think, or like, I could really hear the iambic pentameter. It was like both flat and sing songy. I thought, I think that because of my familiarity with the Fagals or my partiality, I wasn't able to kind of get into the music of it. And so I had actually told a friend, like, oh, I'm reading the Emily Wilson translation, but I really want to switch back to the Fagals. And then, I don't know, something happened, like, around book four, maybe, like, as soon as you get it into the Odysseus stuff. I think, you know, Telemachus is always a little tiresome. But as soon as I got into it or it just took me.
4:00 Wes: He's such a baby.
4:01 Erin: He is. You know, maybe it just took me a little, you know, a few books to acclimate myself to the translation. But then I really started to love it. And I started to feel that the poetry has a really pristine, kind of stark beauty. And I appreciate the fact that the idiom is more contemporary. And. Yeah, I just. I really loved it. And at a certain point, I mean, you can actually sit and read this, you know, in a couple of days. I mean, only for sheer length, would you not be able to read it, like, in one sitting. Right. But, you know, it's really a page turner in this translation.
4:34 Wes: Yeah. So I had very, very similar experience to you. Everything you just described, and down to the whole book four, you know, and then page turner and all that stuff.
4:43 Erin: Yeah. I was even talking about it with a friend on the phone who was like, oh, I was thinking of Rereading the Odyssey this summer, it was like, don't read the Wilson. I'm not liking it. I had to text her and say, I take it back. You know,
4:55 Wes: I would never say it's the only. You know, I would recommend reading it and then. But I wouldn't recommend this be the only translation you read. Sure, if you want something which is a little bit truer to the Greek.
5:07 Erin: I was having lunch with a friend yesterday, and he wants to read Anna Karenina. He knows that's my favorite novel. So he said, you know, what translation would you recommend? You know, I know nothing about Russian, obviously, so I can't speak to that, but I have read several different translations, you know, and I know what my experience.
5:22 Wes: I hope we agree on this, because I'm very opinionated about this, but go ahead.
5:25 Erin: Oh, okay. I actually surprised myself because I said, the Pavira Volkanski translation. And I said, you know, I think that that is better for right now for, like, for someone just getting into it. I said, because I think that if you read something in a more contemporary idiom, you have more of the experience of there's more nakedness about the book or a kind of not nakedness, a kind of. There's less opacity and more clarity where you're having a more direct experience, I think. And I said that the Constance Garnet, you know, that has passages in it that I remember vividly, lines out of. Out of that Constance Garnet translation, and that was the one that I cut my teeth on. It reminds me of what you're talking about with memorizing the Fitzgerald, you know, So I revered the Constance Garnet translation, but now I find myself in this position of recommending the Pavir Volkonsky as, like, a gateway for, you know, especially for an older reader, because the Garnet gives you this sense of, like, oh, this is a grand old novel. You know, this is a. Whatever. Shaggy, baggy monster, whatever the expression is. And that can be fun, you know, and it has a certain austerity or grandeur about it. But I think just recommending it to my friend in terms of, like, what would give him the experience of really coming to Anna Karenina, but just coming to it for the first time and experiencing it almost the way a contemporary would in a contemporary idiom, I think is maybe for me, at this point, worth more, which is why I recommended the Pavir Volkonski and why this Emily Wilson translation, maybe it affected my recommendation.
6:57 Wes: Yeah, all right, well, we're going to have to fight about that when we do the Anna Karenina or some other Russian, because I consider Constance Garnett far superior. And I don't like Peviar Volkonski. And I'll send you some. We had a big fight about this on Pl, and we were doing the Brothers Karamazov, and because Dylan preferred, you know, Paviar Volkonsky to Constance Garnett. And then I tried to convince everyone with very. With specific passage comparisons. And then I found. I went out and I found someone who written this very angry polemic in which they crapped all over Peviar and showed how Garnett was better. And then I was very.
7:37 Erin: Because of the Russian.
7:38 Wes: But. Well, both in a way, because Garnett is rhythmically in the way. She's just a better writer than these guys in English. And the way those two do it, you know, one of them, you know, he knows Russian, but he's, you know, his wife is fluent in Russian. He's fluent in English, and, you know, he does a rough translation and then she corrects things based on. Anyway, I just find it. I find it very confusing to read them, but I find it much harder, actually, to read. And some of the passages are not even. They don't even capture the meaning correctly. But I'll send that article. We don't, unfortunately.
8:11 Erin: Sorry, we already had a.
8:15 Wes: But we will. We will have this.
8:16 Erin: Pardon the word. We already had a Herculean task ahead of us covering the Odyssey or just the first 12 books. And now I've gotten us off course.
8:23 Wes: But back to this question of translation. So she is as far as the meaning sometimes, and then just as far as the way, the sound of the language. She's quite different than the original. And not that you can capture the sound of the original exactly, but just the syntactic complexity. So, for instance, in the beginning. Shall we read the stanza by stanza, by the way?
8:45 Erin: Yeah, right. We'll be done sometime in 2030.
8:49 Wes: I'll read a little bit of the first stanza. Tell me about a complicated man, Muse. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy and where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe, poor fools. They ate the sun God's cattle and the God kept them from home. Now, goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.
9:18 Erin: Spoiler alert.
9:19 Wes: I'll give you first. Yeah, seriously. So let me give you this old Loeb translation, I forget the name of the translator, but some of it is quite archaic. But it's also much truer to the Greek. So tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, ay, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. I want to read the rest of it. And then the original Greek.
9:50 Erin: Oh, that's actually nice.
9:52 Wes: Yeah, yeah, the original Greek. Andromoianipa musa. Polutropon haus mala polyplankthe epetroyes hieron tole ethron epe epperson polon de anthropon iden astea kaino on engno. That's the comparison just at the level of how things sound and then just getting a little bit into the meaning. So this word complicated, this is like a famous. This could be a discussion for the whole episode, and maybe it will be. But that word translates polutropon, like polytropos, many weighed is the way that Fitzgerald translates it. And the man of many devices is the way I had it in the Loeb translation. And I was just thinking about, well, how would I go about this as a translator? How would I try to capture that one word? Because it has several different connotations. One of them is just about the fact that he knows a lot of different things and that he's resourceful, that he can get himself out of a scrape in a way, like being a Renaissance man or a Jack of all trades. The other thing is his ability to be. To disguise his ability to trick his cunningness, that he's a little bit slick, you know, he's willing to lie. And I couldn't think of actually got the thesaurus out and thought about it. And the words multifaceted or many sided, I thought might work because, you know, many ways I like what Fitzgerald did there, but it's not idiomatic. Right. In our language. How do you capture it in English in a way that captures the most of the connotations. So Wilson with complicated is interesting, right? Because what do we mean when we say someone is complicated?
11:45 Erin: First of all, polytropon. I'm guessing that's, you know, the way that trope we get from that.
11:51 Wes: The man of many tropes.
11:53 Erin: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I like that. I mean, polytropon is, you know, that's almost been directly imported into our Language. And I like the idea of, like, there's something about talkiness in that, or talking your way around something, you know, using different tropes to express meaning in different ways. I like Many Weighed because it also captures the wandering in itself. Complicated. I'm trying to think about. So what? That's Latin. So, like, to fold together. Right. That's off the top of my head. If I'm getting that wrong, then I'm sorry.
12:30 Wes: What does plicated come from?
12:34 Erin: It's plicare. To fold. This is. My goodness. If I have this right. I'm so proud of myself because it's been since junior year of high school that I had Latin. But. Yeah. So folded together, complicated maybe works actually for me.
12:49 Wes: I think you're right. Yeah.
12:51 Erin: You know, so that has what? That has entanglement, etymologically speaking? If that's correct, then it has entanglement. It has a folded togetherness that almost reminds me of the Trojan horse itself. Right. I like anything that emphasizes the craftiness as well, because crafty also kind of has this multivalent sense in which you're sly, but you're also, like, crafty, like, physically handy. And what I like in Odysseus is the fact that these things come together. So anything that emphasizes the various threads of his personality or that captures as many of them together, I think I'm convincing myself that complicated works, even if it is a Latin origin rather than something else.
13:35 Wes: My only beef with it is that the connotation in English often has something to do with someone being conflicted or brooding or something like that. I was actually watching Bottle Rocket last night, if you've seen that movie. And, yeah, it had been a long time for me, and I didn't. I hate most Wes Anderson movies, actually. But I enjoyed this. I enjoyed it a lot when I saw it. I enjoyed it less this time. But there's a point in the movie where the Luke Wilson character, who's recently been in a mental hospital, he's being asked by a pretty young woman about that experience. And he doesn't lie about it, as you would expect. He just is very honest about it. And she is actually becoming enamored of him because of it. And she looks at him and says, you're complicated, aren't you? And then I thought of this. I thought of this book. So that's my only problem with the word, is that it implies something that Odysseus is definitely not. And I'm not even sure that Homer or the culture of the time would even conceive of a person like this. It seems like quintessentially modern to be complicated in the way that we often mean. Everything is external in this book. Everything is on the surface in a way. And where there is inwardness, it is because of deception, but it's not self deception. It's not that kind of complication. So he is tricky and deceptive and clever and can put on, you know, many disguises and things like that. But overall he is kind of a simple guy. And, you know, he'll do things like taunt the Cyclops as he's leaving and he can't help himself doing that. So he can be impulsive at times, even. Even after they've got a rock thrown at them and been drawn back into shore. And then he'll taunt again just because he can't help himself. And he can be overtly brutal, right? Just casually kill a town full of people and take their women as slaves or whatever, rape their women. That is the kind of thing that he can mention in passing as perfectly normal. So he's also a man of action and impulse. I wanted to make that observation here at the beginning, that the conflict between those two types of things, his cleverness, but also his. The fact that he's also strong, warrior type guy. And then the other side of this, he failed to keep his people safe, which is, by the way, not the way it's put in the Greek fail. Wilson is more obviously giving him blame for this, but in the original it's just that he wasn't able to save them and the blame is all on them poor fools. But he's complicated and clever, but he's also couldn't save his people and he's kind of stuck. He can't. He's very resourceful, but it takes him 10 years to get home.
16:15 Erin: Anyway, what I like about the bottle rocket example that you gave is the fact that I think what it reveals is complicated usually implies a kind of interesting weakness. And as a character without any weakness, you know, it's something I was thinking about quite a bit. It's like, is Odysseus a likable character? Like, part of me was kind of rooting this time around for the suitors in a way that I. That I didn't anticipate doing. I was like, oh, this is. This is cute. It's like, who's the boss? You know, she could just choose Antinous and settle down with him and it's fine for me. Odysseus came off much less likable than I Remembered. Not that he has an obligation to be likable, but I think that part of that is this quality you're describing of being all surface. And I think that maybe the weakness part of complication is what perhaps gives depth and makes people more likable. And if that is what's. What's lacking in that word, complicated, because he really doesn't have any weakness.
17:11 Wes: There is a lot of crying in this book though. Surprising amount of crying.
17:15 Erin: There's a lot of crying, but it's so as a Mediterranean person, I register the performativity of the crying more intensely than others might. It's like they cry because it's a good thing to do that, you know, keep them juiced up or whatever.
17:30 Wes: Well, it seems very natural to me in a way. It's almost, you know, at one point, I think after a comrade dies, first they have a feast, basically they're sacrificing, quote unquote. But every time they're just having a barbecue, that's what that means. And then they cry. And after they gotten the eating out of the way, then they sit down and cry for their friend and then it's over and then they move on. You know, like I said, everything is more on the surface. Things seem much simpler in a way. And there's no. It's never implied that there's any shame in crying or that. That somehow inconsistent with being warriors or tough guys. There's also never ever any expression of empathy for anyone else that they've killed or hurt. The crying, it's not that type of crying where you. There's not a layer under Magnus is what you're getting at with performative, but there's not some deeper layer where capacity for reflection, where they might say, well, maybe we shouldn't make other people cry. So, yeah, so I think that's an interesting part of this where cleverness and strength and crying, but not the connotation of vulnerability that we might think it would have. As you pointed out, those things all get bundled together in this and in a way it adds a kind of complexity to the character. Right. We're not just getting some sort of heavy handed stereotype with, with Odysseus, despite this well known quality that he has that can be described with one word that has so many different meanings. So for instance, he's not like the mob guy who's wearing the glasses and doing the books. The accountant. Right, the mob accountant. Or who was it in the Advisor and the Godfather?
19:14 Erin: Tom Hagen, Robert Duvall's character.
19:16 Wes: Yeah. Right. So it's not, oh, oh, hey, here's the smart guy. He's all these different things in one.
19:23 Erin: Yeah, I like that.
19:25 Wes: I like the way this transitions in the beginning to the suddenly we're on Mount Olympus, right. Tell me, Muse, about the many weighed men or complicated men. And then suddenly we're on Olympus. And then after that we're going to be with Telemachus for a long time. So we're not going to get to Odysseus for a while, which I guess is fitting, since he can't get home. We're not going to get to him for a while. But I love just the very casual way suddenly we are among the gods. It's a very winning aspect of the narrative. It's hard not to get drawn in. I think in a way it's what makes it so readable, as you put it, a page turner.
19:57 Erin: Yeah. This also introduces the element which for me really stood out to me this time, which is the parallel or the cautionary tale of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Right. They repeatedly. This is referenced over and over and over again as a kind of counterpoint to Odysseus and Penelope. I don't know. Did the translation make this more apparent this time around? Did you notice that counter thread? I wonder too if I was influenced by the introduction, which I really loved and which talks about the parallel story.
20:27 Wes: Yeah, I think I was influenced by that too. And it is a great introduction. And I reread. I've only reread half of it. I'll reread the other half for the next episode. And also, I didn't have enough memory of the book to know whether the Aegisthus story was as prominent or that parallel was as obvious. I don't think I ever thought of that, I think before Emily Wilson mentioned it. So it's interesting because at first. Right. So all the other Greeks who had survived the brutal sack of Troy sailed safely home to their own wives, except this man alone. Not true. Right. And we find that out very quickly afterwards. That's the first thing that Zeus is responding to. Hera. Right? Or no, Zeus is talking first. So, yeah, so Zeus is kind of the one who associates from that. It's almost like Zeus is responding to that remark and saying, oh, it's silly for the mortals to blame the gods. Look at Aegisthus or Aegisthus.
21:23 Erin: I noticed so much this time that. So this is the first time reading the Odyssey since reading Ulysses. In that book, this theme is a little bit more naked to Me. But that book I almost read as, like, a comedy of remarriage. It's easier to read that way because the novel takes place in the course of one day. But this preoccupation with marriage, with what makes a good marriage or, you know, who is a good wife, who is a good husband and by what standard, is something that really attracted my attention, especially in the first half of the book, because we get all of these portraits of other marriages, you know, including Helen and Menelaus. Right. The.
22:01 Wes: Yeah. Which we should talk about at length because that's the best part of the whole thing.
22:05 Erin: Right, right. And the Phaeacian.
22:08 Wes: I think it's Phaeacian. Yeah. I don't know.
22:10 Erin: But, yeah, that couple, whoever they are. The one with the wife.
22:14 Wes: Who's Arete, right?
22:15 Erin: Arete. Yes. Who's whose knees? Odysseus, which means virtue. Yeah. And then this dark side, you know, what can happen to you when things go south. You know, Samuel Butler, of course, said this in kind of a condescending way. But this idea that, like, you know, perhaps a woman wrote the Odyssey, that it seemed like almost like a form of wish fulfillment, you know, for a woman to write this story in which, you know, a man comes back after all those years and everything, everything's okay again. Yeah, I was really. I think I was most interested.
22:44 Wes: And for much of the time, he's just shacked up with two different girlfriends.
22:47 Erin: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's total, total wish fulfillment for a woman. But maybe before we get to Odysseus and his story, we should cover the Telemachiad. Like, what do we think of Telemachus as a character? I find him, you know, he's preserved in amber at the age of 12. I guess, obviously, it's a choice to make him as immature as he is, despite the fact that he's, what, 20? I find everything to be everything about his character to be really unbelievable and uninteresting, but also to question it as kind of beside the point. At the same time, he's kind of exactly what he needs to be. He needs to be really immature and floundering and sent on this journey so that he can kind of grow up. But he can't be too grown up, because when his father comes back, his father has to be in charge. So, you know, he's this sort of plastic figure that has to kind of be unlikable, immature. I don't know.
23:47 Wes: He's immature. He's childlike in many ways. What year of Odysseus absence are we in the 17th or the. Is it closer to the end? Right. We're starting in the middle, in a way, in meteorites, but it's towards the end.
24:02 Erin: Yeah. How long does he stay?
24:03 Wes: Most of the account in the book is just Odysseus doing a flashback, or most of the account of those famous adventures. I mean, all of them are basically flashback.
24:14 Wes: With Telemachus, the poem motivates our interest in sort of two strands reaching out towards each other or, I don't know, two tentacles. It's not just Odysseus trying to get home. It. It's his son now trying to find a father. Trying to find his father, which is dramatically interesting. And he's got a very Luke Skywalker vibe. Right. Very kind of whiny, you know. At some point he says, I wish I were the son of someone lucky instead of the most unlucky man alive. He's not even doing anything until Athena goes and gets him going, tells him Odysseus isn't dead yet, that he's going to find a way home. Telemachus complains. And then Athena inquires about the suitors, and Telemachus makes a speech in which she ends with, you know, soon they will kill me. And then she. At that point, she says, if Odysseus is dead, you're going to have to figure out a way to kill the suitors. And she uses it. She says, in Wilson's translation, don't stick to childhood. And then at that point, she goes away. I think she's been in the. In the guise of who? Mentor. She's been in the guise of Mentor, I think. And then he sees, as she goes away that he's. That Telemachus sees that she's a God because she goes away as a bird or something like that. But anyway, so mostly passive. We do get hints of standing up for himself when his mom comes down and says, tells the bard to stop singing about. It's funny because their entertainment is about the legendary Troy. But for Penelope, it's very personal and painful. So she says, stop it. And then Telemachus says, poets are not to blame for how things are. Zeus is. And he also says it's for men to talk. I am master. Right. So he's trying to stand up to his mom at that point, even though he's not standing up to the suitors, although he does scold them after that. And then he has his first moment where he's deceptive or. I'm not sure if it's here or it's a little later. But anyway, at some point he repeats his complaint about his father not ever coming home, but he knows it's not true. He's just trying to deceive the suitors, you know, even though at this point he's more optimistic, I think that happens later on. So you get little hints of him being more like his father, more assertive, more deceptive. But in many ways, you get a lot of whining and passivity.
26:27 Erin: I found the fact that he can only ever stand up to his mother to be really obnoxious. But now, on further reflection, I'm thinking that that's kind of interesting psychologically, that this is the only one that he is able to exert that or sort of like practice on his mother because of the safety maybe that he feels with her still, you know, these gestures on his part are so immature. I find him just, ugh, he's the worst.
26:50 Wes: Well, he's like an adolescent. He can be annoyed with his mom, but not stand up to the bullies at school, you know?
26:55 Erin: Right, exactly. Just, you know, in talking about Telemachus and the fact that he's not able to stand up to the suitors. What kind of read are we getting on the suitors themselves? Sometimes, as I previously mentioned, I sometimes find them. I don't know if it's by contrast to Telemachus and how annoying he's being, but at least in the first half of the book, I find them more likable. They become caricatures. When Odysseus comes at the end of the book, which we'll talk about later, they treat him really terribly. And it's. It's not a good look. But prior to that, and I know they're. Obviously, they're wasting Odysseus's wealth and blah, blah, blah, all these things that they're doing. But they're also supposed to be, you know, the best young men in Ithaca. I don't know that that speaks so well for Ithaca or if it should, but I don't know. It's like a group of bad boys hanging out at the house, you know, all, like, revving their motorcycles all day long and getting hot and bothered over Penelope.
27:51 Wes: It's kind of looking for a milf.
27:53 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. It's kind of. I don't know. I find it a really interesting dynamic. And obviously Penelope enjoys the attention, so.
28:02 Wes: It's true. Yeah, I like your. I like the staging with, like, a few. If you did a adaptation of this, having them as kind of a biker gang who've just taken up residence in the house.
28:13 Erin: I'm kind of like, okay, Penelope, good for you. She deserves some attention.
28:19 Wes: It is a saloon, kind of a saloon like atmosphere there, right? Because you have all the servants, slaves, and you have feasting. There's a lot of feasting and partying in this book. Eating and drinking and. Which, remember, these aren't just households. These are estates, rich people with lots of means. And so they're abusing. You know, as Wilson points out, there's a whole thing about hospitality and guests in this. And it's highly relevant that the suitors are abusing the abusing hospitality, Right. So these guys are all. And we'll see it many times in the book. You know, they're all supposed to. As the gentry, so to speak, they're supposed to welcome each other and to lavish gifts and feasts on each other when they visit. And that'll happen to Telemachus multiple times. But to abuse it is to stay longer than one ought, right? And then not only that, but they're eating up the wealth of the household, which Telemachus complains about several times. And so I think the idea, there's gift giving and sharing and. But at a certain point, resources are finite. It's interesting, right? There's a. It's like a spectrum between something that bonds people to each other and then something that can become outright exploitative. And what they're doing is on the. On the spectrum of friend, guest type of behavior, but it's gone too far. So it's particularly offensive in that sense. It's, you know, it's. It's offensive to the culture because of this ethos of welcoming guests. I'm trying to get at the sense in which this is so criminal, what they're doing, so offensive. Because it'll seem a little bit odd to us that killing them within the context of the book will seem so obviously justified, just killing all of them and not kicking them out and punishing them in some other way. But they're violating a very sacred norm here.
30:15 Erin: Yeah, it does seem rather justified in the book by the time they're done kicking their last old man. You know, one of the interesting elements about this, and, you know, I think Penelope maybe is someone that we could talk about more in the next episode just because we have so much to get through with these first 12 books, which is really where 90% of the action is in this first half. But one of the things I'll say about the suitors and about Penelope, that occurred to me, the interesting counterpoint that Penelope makes to Odysseus and the setup with the suitors, not just in the fact that she's wily in the same kind of crafty way that Odysseus is with, you know, the famous trick with Laertes burial shroud. And she's. She's deceptive. She's clever, right? She's all of these things that make her a compliment to her husband. But a counterpoint here in that, you know, Odysseus, though he's thought of as a wanderer. When we see him first, he is. It is in the middle of things and he is now trying to get back home. So he's trying to find his way to one particular place. He has a mission and he's going in that direction. He's chosen to go back home, despite what's offered to him by Calypso, and is traveling in that one direction the whole time. What I find really interesting about the suitors and the fact that every once in a while, one of them gets a little bit more attention than the others. And we actually learned the narrator tells us something interesting about their character. Like this one might be actually, oh, well, he's actually the best speaker in Ithaca, you know, and he'll give a little speech and then another one will raise his head above the parapet and become individualized a little bit so that they're not always this. This mass of suitors. And so I get the sense on Penelope's side of actually that she's kind of a bit of a. More of an explorer, if you will, than Odysseus is. Or she's more, you know, she stays in one place, but in terms of her. The possibilities available to her, she's in a sense, more of a wanderer than Odysseus. You know, it's described that if she actually chose one of these men, she would have to then go back to her father's house, right, and kind of move back in with him and then prepare for the, you know, prepare the bridal rituals or whatever it is, and then go to live in, you know, say, Antinous's house with him. And so it would require a kind of regression, giving something up or foregoing all the other possibilities and just making a single choice and then going in that direction. And it would also involve, you know, as I say, a kind of aggression where she has to go back to being a young girl again, essentially living in her father's house and prepare for being a bride all over again. And so she doesn't want to do that and so, so long as all of these suitors are in play, she's kind of like a wanderer, you know, she can imagine herself in each of these various possibilities without having to. Without having to settle on one. She can kind of move all over the board, you know, she can choose any one of these possibilities and chooses none and thereby keeps all of them in play. And so psychologically, I suppose that was interesting to me that if I, you know, I thought to myself, like, if I were writing a poem about each of these two characters, you know, Odysseus would actually be about moving very clearly in one direction, whereas Penelope would be more of the. The mental traveler, which would be backwards of what you might expect. I don't know if that makes sense or if you agree with that, but.
33:34 Wes: Yeah. What I have always wondered when reading this is what is she holding out for? He's been gone for so long, and you would have to assume at that point that he's probably dead. You know, it's a little bit opaque. You know, what are her motivations exactly? Is it expected that she would do that until you see the body, that she's stuck in this position? It sounds like. Not because why would there be suitors, but. And then what is the weaving about? Right. This is Antinous, who tells the story of her weaving and unweaving. What is it she's weaving and unweaving?
34:10 Erin: Laertes burial chapel.
34:11 Wes: I think it's just a. And this is right after, by the way. I think Telemachus has plead for people to help him in the town square. And the suitors are there. And at the end of his speech, he flings his scepter down and bursts out crying, which is a really interesting contrast between the fact that he has a scepter, but. And then Antinous goes, telemachus, you stuck up, willful little boy. How dare you try to embarrass us and put the blame on us and blah, blah, blah. Go blame your precious mother. She is cunning. It is the third year, soon it will be four. That she has cheated us of what we want. She offers hope to all, sends notes to each other, but all while her mind moves somewhere else. And then later on weaving her fine long cloth, she said to us young men, you are my suitors since my husband, the brave Odysseus is dead. I know you want to marry me. You must be patient. I have worked hard to weave this winding sheet to bury good Laertes when he dies. He gained such wealth, the women would reproach me if he were buried with no shroud. Please let me finish it. And her words made sense to us. So every day she wove the mighty cloth and then at night by torchlight she unwove it. For three long years her trick beguiled the Greeks, but when the fourth year seasons rolled around, a woman slave who knew the truth told us and then we caught her there unraveling the cloth and made her finish it. It's interesting that he describes her as beguiling the Greeks, right? As opposed to just them. In particular, it's a little bit reminiscent of Odysseus trick with the Trojan horse of deploying an artifact in some way to in Odysseus case to take Troy in this case just to put off the suitors. So Penelope shares, I think, as you mentioned, some of Odysseus qualities with the deceptiveness, but it's unclear what her actual motives are. Does she just hold out hope that Odysseus is really alive? That's the motive attributed to her by others, I think. Lets pause to talk about our sponsors for this episode, starting with Factor. If you're looking for wholesome, convenient meals, Factor America's number one ready to eat meal kit can help you fuel up fast with chef prepared dietitian approved ready to eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well and stay on track with your healthy lifestyle. I actually used this service in the past during a time when I didn't want to cook. I looked at a lot of alternatives. Factor was by far my favorite. With Factor, you skip the extra trip to the grocery store and the chopping, prepping and cleaning while still getting the flavor and nutritional quality you need. The meals are ready in just two minutes, so all you have to do is heat and enjoy. I like the fact that these are not frozen. These are gourmet meals prepared fresh and they're the right amount of calories at about 550 per meal. And there are 34 meals to choose from every week. Head to FactorMeals.com subtext50 and use code SUBTEXT50 to get 50% off. That's code [email protected] subtext50 to get 50% off. Our other sponsor for today's episode is the Inner Loop Radio. If you're looking for a podcast to keep you writing, tune in to the Inner Loop Radio. Whether you're an aspiring writer or stuck halfway through your next bestseller, Rachel and Courtney talk about how to stay inspired, how to feel focused, and how to Stay sane. Pulitzer Prize winners, poet laureates and NPR contributors join hosts Rachel and Courtney to laugh or cry as they explore the joys and woes of the writing life on the Inner Loop Radio. You'll hear from best selling authors about how they stay inspired, the most productive writing habits and advice on publishing. Learn how to tell a great ghost story from a literary horror writer or how to construct the perfect sonnet from a poet laureate. Episodes include interviews, inspiration, takeovers and casual check ins with their favorite writers. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused and get lit on the Inner Loop Radio.
38:43 Erin: In a way, she, much like Telemachus, is kind of frozen at a kind of prepubescent state. I think this situation allows Penelope to go back in time. You know, should she choose a particular suitor, she would have to regress all the way almost, you know, to girlhood, as I said, and. And go to her father's house. But this way she stays, in a sense, young and sexually desirable forever, you know, so who wouldn't want to not settle down, you know, with anyone? Who wouldn't want to keep that going? So it's clear to me why she retains her beauty or why she also seems to be, you know, just as desirable as she was when Odysseus left. Because the situation, you know, just as it behooves the narrator to keep Telemachus young, the situation keeps her young. A counterpoint to the story that I was thinking about is the Tennyson poem Enoch Arden. Do you know this poem? It must have been a kind of reference to the Odyssey. And of course, Tennyson wrote that great poem Ulysses, which we will have to cover on the podcast at some point. It's a poem about a man who's shipwrecked and believed dead. And there was a law in place, I think, that after seven years you're declared like legally dead. You know, you're considered dead. And so Enoch Arden's wife waits for him and waits for him to return, but then after seven years, he's declared legally dead. And so she marries someone else. And then he comes back. He had been stranded on a desert island but was alive the whole time. So he comes back and in the poem, I think he never reveals himself to her. And then he kind of dies of a broken heart. It was made into several screwball comedies. Actually, the Cary Grant Irene Dunn film My Favorite Wife is a version of this where it's gender swapped and Irene Dunn was stranded on a desert island and comes back and hilarity ensues. But anyway, so there's a. There's this alternate. The story is almost like. It's almost like Odyssey fan fiction, you know, imagining, like, what happened if Penelope actually chose someone. It's really interesting. But anyway, I believe in the poem the wife goes on to, like, have more children and then ends up dying of old age or something like that. And it's boring compared to Penelope, kind of, like I said, keeping herself green and interesting for all those years.
40:54 Wes: The contrast between Penelope and Telemachus, in a way, if she is. If there is, Granting everything you just said about the psychology of staying young and all that. But if there is an element of optimism about Odysseus, it's in marked contrast to Telemachus, who, even when he's with Nestor, he uses these interesting phrases to talk about his pessimism about his father's fortunes, right? He says his mother surely bore him for misfortune. Weird way to refer to your own father, right? His grandma bore him for. For misfortune. So. And in the meantime, Nestor, you know, there's. There's this other aspect where the idea is that it's hard to. Who is it who says it's hard to know who you're your own father is? Or it's a wise man who knows his own father. It might be Telemachus himself. But anyway, at this point with Nestor, it's repeated where Nestor, in talking to Telemachus, says, your father, and parenthetically, if you really are his son, was the best in every trick. And then he says, well, you talk like him, you know, you're so similar to him. But it's interesting for that question to be raised in this context. Right? And so what I'm saying is part of this is about fatherlessness, and Telemachus has essentially had no father since he was a baby. He was essentially abandoned by his father so his father could go off and fight a war. So why would he. Why would he believe in this person that he's never seen? I think there's a. Maybe there's an aspect here, too, of not getting his hopes up, or probably there's even more going on than that. But. So his relationship to Odysseus is much different than Penelope's in that sense, even though they are both, in a way, as you pointed out, I think, stuck. So everyone's stuck, I guess. Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus, it's the gods that get things going. And Nestor himself at one point, Says everyone needs the gods. Everybody needs the gods. Which if you read that as whatever primal thing in us actually gets us going, motivates us, is very apt in the context of people who are just otherwise stuck.
43:04 Erin: What I like about what you're saying too about this idea of Telemachus really being his father's son. You know, there's also so much in here, of course, about recognition or even early on when Telemachus goes out to Menelaus palace, there's this idea of like, you know, do you look like him? Are you like him? And I think it's an interesting question because it also seems to be about like Telemachus own self recognition as being his father's son. That will sort of allow him to finally get the self confidence to tell off the suitors. And also this idea that. It didn't seem to me to be a question of paternity, though I think it does plants that kind of interesting seed in one's mind. But it's also about like, are you like him? Do you take after him? One's worth is determined by whether or not one is like a copy of one's father or reminiscent of him in some way in terms of his character or his appearance and ideally his character and his deeds. Right. And so I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves because this is something we could talk about in the second episode. But you know, I think there's a question of whether or not Telemachus is actually meant to be his father's son. Because Odysseus needs to come back and rule the kingdom. And the extent to which he actually grows up is, you know, open for debate.
44:19 Wes: You know, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the Nestor scene. Just cause you had mentioned the parallel to the Agamemnon Clytemnestra Orestes story. And also because Nestor has so many interesting things that he says. So Telemachus has asked for news about his father and then Estor is going to tell the story of Menelaus and Agamemnon not getting along because Agamemnon wants to. Menelaus wants to leave immediately. Agamemnon wants to stay and make a sacrifice. It's not mentioned explicitly that he's going to kill his own daughter. Right. Horrific story, which is just. It's not even mentioned, which might imply that maybe he ended up getting what he deserved.
45:04 Erin: But it's very selective about what it chooses to highlight.
45:07 Wes: Yeah, yeah. And then he makes that sacrifice and it's Athena's wrath that he's trying to fix and it doesn't work. And Nestor will say, the minds of immortals rarely change. All this sacrificing, they do all this barbecuing for the gods and libations and everything. And then the minds of immortals rarely change. So some of them take off, it doesn't work out. And Nestor says, your father's plans were always flexible, which is really. It's not in the original Greek, that's almost a complete interpolation for one word that Wilson is making. But I love that it captures the spirit of it and I love that phrase. Your father's plans are always flexible. And so, you know, he sailed, got everyone to sail back, I think to make peace with Agamemnon. And then there's no news of what happened next except for the news of what happened to Agamemnon. So everything goes dark. But there's this one story. And then Telemachus says, yeah, you know, I know about that. Orestes took revenge. I wish I could do the same. So we get him directly comparing himself to. To Orestes, and then Nestor basically implies that he's kind of weakly submitting to the suitors and maybe Odysseus will come home and take revenge. And Telemachus then says, I doubt it. I wouldn't be so hopeful even if the gods willed it. So you get this interesting back and forth about the minds of immortals. Right. They rarely change. And now it's. Even if they will something, it might not happen for Telemachus the pessimist. And then we get another interesting comment by Athena in the guise of Mentor, who's like Telemachus. The gods can easily save anyone, no matter what the distance. Except death. Death is universal and even the gods can't protect the people that they love. When fate is cruel. When fate and cruel death catch up to them. Yeah, it's all this ambivalent back and forth about what the gods can do, what they can't do. Whether Telemachus should be the one to take revenge on the suitors or whether it should be Odysseus. Right. So whether Telemachus should step into this Orestes like role. Except that, you know, it's not Orestes kills his mother and her lover. It's a very different story. Right. He's not going to be killing Penelope. He's going to be killing all these suitors. So do you understand what I'm getting at? It's all this jumbled up. The parallel would be Odysseus comes home and Telemachus kills him and Penelope.
47:36 Wes: As a way of assuming growing up. And it's a sick, radical way of doing it. But as a way of coming into his own as a man. So for a father who's been absent. That he hasn't been able to identify with. And perhaps to some extent he's not as detached as he should be with his mother. And makes feeble attempts at that by telling her to shut up, Mom. It's not the poet's fault. Then. Part of that psychology is the overcompensation of. Well, maybe to be a man at this point. I don't need to become my father, identify with my father. I must replace him. Right? So there's this line maybe, fine line sometimes between identification. Taking the father in or just replacing the father. Killing off the father, becoming the father, taking his place. Right. And that, I think, explains some of the ambivalence of Telemachus about the project that he's undertaking. Because is he searching for a father figure with which to identify. Or is he. And is he trying to save his father? Does he want. If his father is alive? It really amps up the conflict, right. Between killing and identifying and dealing with the abandonment. So the pessimism is actually forms of. Is a very protective function. And even. Even as he's out searching for his father, in a way, he has to stay negative about this. Because it's hard to comprehend what's gonna happen when Odysseus actually returns. Where is the violence gonna be? Is it. Telemachus couldn't kill the suitors. He was too passive. And now Dad's gonna do it. Or maybe I should get rid of dad and be the one to get rid of the suitors. You know, all that stuff. So I don't know if I'm getting at that very well.
49:18 Erin: So what you're saying is that, you know, Orestes had an easier job of it because, you know, Agamemnon was killed. And so then he was able to like his process of ma Much simpler. And with Odysseus as like a potential, you know, a shadow we figure out there. Who may or may not be alive.
49:35 Wes: Yeah. Did I say Orestes killed his mother and his father? Did I accidentally say that?
49:39 Wes: Or did I say that his mother and her. So, yeah, it's an interesting slip. Right? So killed his. His mother and her lover after his mother killed the. The father. But anyway, the mother and the father get. So I was comparing Telemachus killing his father too. That's a weird slip to Make.
49:55 Erin: But anyway, I was just clarifying that, you know, that you're saying that Orestes had an easier time of his process of maturation. Because of the fact that his father was already dead. So he was more able to, like, step into that role. And that therefore it's useful psychologically for Telemachus to believe his father to be dead. For his maturation to commence or continue or flower, however you want to describe it. Yeah, that it's psychologically useful to kill off the father. For you to mature is essentially what I'm asking.
50:24 Wes: You know, maturity means. So the classic account is that, right, you're detaching from the mother. And then some paternal principle intervenes and becomes a point of identification. And you don't have to think of it literally as a father. But it's the point at which you identify, you know, for instance, with the norms and of the culture. Or with certain aspirations or peer groups or whatever. But so killing off the father is an extreme exaggeration of that psychological process. Ultimately, in a way, you do replace the parents, right, In a way. By taking them in and then moving on becoming a parent, maybe yourself. And you don't obviously, literally kill off your parents, Although they do get old and die. Right. And they might envy you now being younger and yet in their. In their role. So there's a lot of psychological stuff there. I don't know. I'm trying to think back to what I said and whether I was operating under the delusion that. Whether I was comparing Orestes killing Agamemnon, which he didn't do to Telemachus. But what I was trying to get at is the real parallel there is the suitors are in the position of Aegisthus. Penelope is in the position of Clytemnestra. Penelope is resisting the sort of temptation that Clytemnestra succumbed to. The implication would be that he might have to kill Penelope if she were to succumb to that. Or he can preemptively kill the suitors and prevent that whole situation from happening. Not kill, I guess, this character after the fact. Sorry, but kill him before that tragedy even occurs. And spare himself the trouble. Right?
52:12 Erin: He's like, you know, the world's most extreme. He's like the world's most extreme prophylactic.
52:17 Wes: Yeah, yeah. But he doesn't have to worry about. Since his father is always. Is already dead. And that's the motivation for revenge. He doesn't have to worry about this question of whether it's the father's job to do something or whether it's his job like Telemachus does. And he also doesn't have to worry about the implications of doing the thing that if it is his father's job of supplanting the father in that role, which may be, you know, symbolically. Right. It's a killing off of the father and then the father may not like that. Right. Maybe that is in this case Odysseus job, not Telemachus job.
52:58 Erin: Well, elided also from this story is the fact that, you know, Orestes didn't exactly get away with it, so he was punished as well by the Furies. Right, right.
53:10 Wes: Better to kill the suitor up front and not get into all that mess the family drama. So stand up to the bullies and don't do the school shooting. So. Yeah. Did you have anything more with Telemachus? I mean, I think as far as time wise, we're going to probably have to talk about. I think we're going to do have another episode on just these first 12 books. We should devote an episode to just Odysseus Journeys. Odysseus Journey and stories. And we can call this the Telemachus.
53:43 Erin: Yeah, I was almost going to suggest that we do six. Six and then the back 12.
53:49 Wes: Sure. When does his flashback start?
53:52 Erin: It starts at four. The sea God with Proteus, which is an interesting story in and of itself.
53:59 Wes: I think we should talk about the visit to Telemachus. Visit to Menelaus now and Helen, which is another, you know, so we get another couple and another, you know, cameo from, you know, the heroes of the.
54:15 Erin: Yeah, it's a guest star of the Iliad.
54:18 Wes: Yeah, exactly. This is my favorite part, I think, of the whole story. Probably there's an element of irony in the account of what happens with Menelaus and this visit to Menelaus and Helen that I think is rare because like I said, everything is very surface level for the most part. But there's a bit of humor and irony in this vision.
54:45 Erin: Is this like a rich couple, like they're always drunk and they just don't listen to each other?
54:51 Erin: Is that. Is that an accurate read? Like they're super rich and they just spend all their time like they're both alcoholics. And he comes home from the office and she's been drinking all day and he's had drinks after work. And so she just starts telling him about like all the stuff that she's done that day. And he tells her about whatever he's done, but they're not really listening to each other at all. And then they have friends over and they both tell completely different stories about this thing that happened to them.
55:21 Wes: So she tells the story first. And by the way, I love the part there's a certain point where she just roofies everyone because they're all grieving and crying too much. Just puts drugs in the wine and then everyone passes out. That's the way to cure the blues. But before all that happened. So she tells a story about in Troy. How does she put it? Let's find. I think it's page 160. I think it's worth, actually. So she puts the drugs in the wine at line 220 on page 159. I didn't realize she did that first. Then the child of Zeus, Helen, decided she would mix the wine with drugs to take all the pain and rage away, to bring forgetfulness of every evil. Whoever drinks this mixture from the bowl will shed no tears that day. Not even if her mother or her father die, or even if soldiers killed her brother or her darling son with bronze spears before her very eyes. Helen had these powerful magic drugs.
56:20 Erin: No, I like that. As you're reading it, I didn't notice before the female pronoun. So it's like it's speaking almost from her, you know, it's like free indirect discourse from her own mind.
56:30 Wes: I think that might be Wilson doing that. It's probably.
56:33 Erin: Oh, of course. Yeah. No, I think it's an interesting choice.
56:36 Wes: So then it takes a while for people to pass out, but. So it's very interesting that she drugs them to first and then tells this ridiculous story about how she was really on the Greeks side. I mean, she's run off with Paris, right? She's trying to leave her husband and get with another man. And then he waged a war for 10 years to get her back. A lot of people died. A whole city was razed to the ground. Horrible.
56:59 Erin: But that too was done under the influence, right? If Aphrodite hadn't made her go crazy and taken her away from her country, then she wouldn't have.
57:08 Wes: Is that the way she puts it here or.
57:09 Erin: No. She says, I wish that Aphrodite had not made me go crazy when she took me from my country and made me leave my daughter and the bed I shared with my fine, handsome, clever husband.
57:19 Wes: So in the margin here, I just put a line. I just bullshit. Blames her infidelity on the gods. So now I understand the drugs, right? Just to make this believable. And then. But before that, right, she Says he crept through Troy. So they're telling a story about Odysseus. He gets dresses up as a beggar to get into the city. I guess the horse is already inside. He crept through Troy like that and no one knew him except for me. I saw through his disguise and questioned him. So she's the one who can. She has an Odysseus detector, Odysseus radar that no one else has. He was too smart to talk, acting evasive. But I washed and scrubbed him with oil and dressed him, which apparently is what women do on the first date in ancient Greece. And I swore an oath that I would not reveal him to the Trojans. Before he had got back to his own camp, he told me all the things the Greeks were planning. On his way back, he used his long bronze sword to slaughter many Trojans. And he brought useful intelligence to tell
58:24 Erin: the Greeks, all right, euphemism alert.
58:27 Wes: The Trojan women keened in grief, but I was glad. And then if he had really told her that stuff that the Greeks are planning, I think the Greeks would be dead. But at the very least it sounds quite implausible. And then even more so in the context of what comes after, which is Menelaus saying, yes, wife, quite right. But then he goes on to tell a story in which she tries to out the Greeks by putting on the voices of the men's wives. There's a lot of things which give her a very witch like cast, right? And everything that's come before the drugs and the Odysseus radar. And now this idea that she can perfectly imitate each man's wife, many of whom she would not even have.
59:14 Wes: And she's trying to get them to come out, to reveal themselves in the hollow belly, which if she knows they're in there, she could just tell the Trojans about lots of weird stuff going on there, but she tries to get them all killed. This is the story Menelaus is telling, even though he's just affirmed her previous story. So it's this weird, nutty level of repression of Helen's infidelity and betrayal, let's say, even though he can recount it, it's almost like it's a cute little story about her. I don't know, am I getting it though?
59:49 Erin: That's exactly right. It's also, Helen is half God, right? Like she's half divine. And part of the problem, I think with all of this is that there's so much ambivalence throughout about the role of the gods in terms of their what their abilities are, how well they can intervene or not. You know, Helen can be mortal and subject to the will of the gods, but then she can also do these things, like, as you say, like putting on these voices or behaving in this almost witch like way. And so this story, for me is kind of like an encapsulation of that ambivalence of how you can just not be responsible for your own actions. Or two things can be true at once, or you can just believe two things to be true at once, even if they're completely contradictory. You know, it's like an illustration of the kind of cognitive dissonance that living in this world, world inhabited by these gods, kind of requires of you and maybe of the cognitive dissonance required in marriage. I don't know if we want to draw a larger, you know, larger parallel. Like, obviously, this is an extreme example. Menelaus has now come back and is living with this. He's living with his wife who had this affair for 10 years in Troy with someone else. To me, it's this very modern and extremely dark vision of, like, what happens in a marriage after there's been infidelity and you try to make it work again, basically. And that obviously would take a hell of a lot of cognitive dissonance in order to. And a lot of drugs in this case. Right. In order to get over that. But it's interesting, I think, how that's twinned with the various versions of the story insofar as they relate to, like, the intervention of the gods, which is itself, as I said, very ambivalent.
1:01:38 Wes: Yep. Yeah. And I think.
1:01:40 Erin: What more do I want to say about that?
1:01:42 Wes: So Helen seems to be in the role as siren here. She's putting on the different voices calling to each of the men, and they want to go out, which is a weird thing. Right. Why would they think their wives are there?
1:01:54 Erin: Yeah. Why would they be tempted by this? Yeah.
1:01:57 Wes: So it's almost like a magical kind of lure, like the. The Sirens lure. And then it's Odysseus who prevents them from going. Antichlos still wished to answer. Odysseus hands clamped shut his mouth and saved us all. He held him there like that until Athena led you far away. So Odysseus saved them from Helen. Right. The point of the story is exactly the opposite of the one Helen told. But also he's. You know, the clamping of the mouth shut stands in parallel to the wax and the ears. His ability to save the Greeks here stands in contrast. Right. To what's said at the very beginning of the story, which is that he was unable to save all of his crewmen from his ships. So very interesting foreshadowing of the siren situation later on with Odysseus. So very clever way of representing the relationship between Menelaus and Helen. Right. Complicated, nuanced, humorous. That's incredible irony. But in the contrast between their two stories, really, really, really great.
1:03:03 Erin: Yeah. The more I'm looking at these two things as well. I love this parallel you're drawing to the Sirens. And I also think that there's something. There's actually something true about Helen here that's captured in both of these stories. Now that I'm looking more closely, she sees the Odysseus inside the beggar. Right. She sees through his disguise. In Menelaus story, she seems to be the only one who knows that they're in there. Right. Because it's odd because this moment happens where she's tapping on the belly. So she knows there are people in there, but still the Trojan horse, that plot goes off without hitch. Right? Like, they still come inside and then are able to slaughter everyone. So the fact that she's going around touching the belly, saying, hey, like anybody in there? And going through the trouble of putting on the. The voices of all of these wives is not making the other Trojans go, oh, gee, there's some people in there, you know, like, they just ignore it. And Menelaus attributes her actions in this moment to the gods, just as she attributes her infidelity to, you know, being insane under the influence of Aphrodite. Right. Menelaus says some spirit who desired to glorify the Trojans urged you on. They're kind of mirrors of each other.
1:04:20 Wes: And then in the end, Athena leads her away. In the end.
1:04:23 Erin: Right, right. They're telling opposite stories, but it's like in both stories, this is very much like, this is Helen, you know, this is the same woman in both stories, but in one she's sort of pro Greek and the other she's pro Trojan. But it's the exact same characteristics.
1:04:37 Wes: She sounds like someone who's treating it as a game in a way. Right. So in her story, Odysseus tells her about the plan.
1:04:44 Wes: So this is the backstory to what Menelaus then says. And she's like, and I was glad and I was ready to go home, so I wasn't going to mess them up. And then Menelaus, it's this weird. She doesn't tell the Trojans about the plan. She doesn't explicitly open up the horse and reveal them, but she plays a game in a way, trying to lure them into outing themselves. And so it's maybe somewhat perverse. It's like she doesn't take any of it seriously, which is a. That's an interesting interpretation of her as a character and how she could have ended up launching, you know, being end up in Troy and then also launch. Have a face that launched a thousand ships. It's not just the face. I think it's, you know, that's very good point. That she's half goddess and the gods. That is kind of reminiscent of the way the gods do behave so impetuously and playing with mortals and not in a way not fully comprehending what it is that they're inflicting on mortals. Right. She has one foot in that terrain.
1:05:52 Erin: Well, I wonder if that straddling makes her even more pernicious somehow. But I like what you say, playing with them. I was gonna say she's like toying with them in the sense that they are her toys and in the sense that she's so superior to them that in the story or in Menelaus story, they come across as like little boys who could be convinced by someone doing somebody's voice outside. Oh, come out, come out. You know, like, like they're like, oh gee, that sounds like my wife, you
1:06:17 Wes: know, but there's honey, it's me. I'm come to visit you in Troy while you're in the belly.
1:06:24 Erin: Yeah, like only. Right. Only a child would be. There's just something childlike about being convinced by that. And the fact that some of them are convinced like that it's like, it's really like she's playing with a bunch of, you know, she's playing mind games with a bunch of little boys.
1:06:38 Wes: Or it's magical and it's in the same vein as the sirens having an irresistible call or something.
1:06:44 Erin: Yes, exactly. But I think that that magical quality creates that. That little boy like dynamic. Right. Because you're so. You're so superior to them or you're using. You're using superhuman methods so that you become like the adult playing with the. Or you know, whether it be like the little girl playing with the dolls, right. Or like the adult playing with the little kids minds and freaking them out or something. There's a stark power imbalance that is involved there.
1:07:10 Wes: If you were to naturalize this story and try to give a retell it right. According to simply psychologically in a realistic way. You can imagine shooting a film and they're inside the horse and it's very claustrophobic in there. And one guy's going, I just can't take it anymore, man. I have to get out of here. To Vietnam style Trojan War movie and Odysseus holding him down. And you're not gonna reveal us.
1:07:41 Erin: And Helen standing outside going, ooh, look at all this nice fresh air.
1:07:47 Wes: I just feel like it's gonna be. It's about to be raining men. But her dream, your point about her being half God, in a way, is kind of the key to understanding all of this and her role here and how it is that Menelaus can live with a certain cognitive dissonance and they can tell contradictory stories as if they're in agreement. The drugs, in a way, kind of represent that whole fairy tale quality of the world, right? So they're narcotics. Later on reveal them. And they're kind of in a surreal. I think it's enough to say that she's a goddess or half goddess to say why they're in a surreal realm. You could talk about drugs as well, if you like, or witchery of some sort.
1:08:30 Erin: I'm thinking about this in relationship to the larger, you know, what the larger story is doing with this. With this whole idea of the intervention of the gods, or where the human leaves off and the divine enters. You know, I'm thinking about the fact that where we kind of started the discussion with Mount Olympus and this idea that Zeus and Athena both say, okay, you know, enough is enough. But then there's a part of the. Like, if you think of the gods as kind of having a hive mind, which you kind of have to. In order to get at this idea that, like, it's all kind of divine energy, right? But with all of these different expressions where you have different gods controlling different parts of the world, different parts of, you know, different whatever, different activities, different people having their particular favorites. You know, Poseidon obviously doesn't agree with this, right? So he's working at cross purposes to them in this one part of the realm. And I'm thinking about that dissonance or ambivalence that we're talking about in general, almost like made into a map, if you will, that's then laid on top of the map of Odysseus journey, or of all of all of these things that are happening, including Telemachus as part of. When he's at Helen and Menelaus house or whatever, the ambivalence in the story, or even, like I said, I'll just use this term cognitive dissonance. And hopefully listeners will forgive me for using something so inept, this cognitive dissonance in the story and the fact that the Trojan War breaks up, everybody kind of goes back home, they have this story still inside them in all of its various facets, and they've all spread out over this map, and then we have the gods kind of spread out over the map, and it's all kind of contradictory, right. And it's all working at cross purposes to each other. And so what I like is, or what I see as kind of like this overarching idea that runs throughout the whole poem is this idea that at any moment the landscape could be working for you or against you, you know, depending on what territory you've run into. And it's all part of the same tapestry, if you will. And like, two completely contradictory things can be true at the same time and held together, and it doesn't break apart. Helen and Menelaus can have two different. Completely different ideas about what actually happened, but still they're married to each other. I mean, you know, the marriage is being aided along by this drugs and, you know, as I say, it's like this cognitive dissonance, but that's like part of this whole tension between a world run by men and their wits and a world in which potentially you have no free will at all, and you're all just at the mercy of the gods. And that collapse maybe is best personified in these characters, which are half human and half divine, because they kind of tread that line. I don't mean to be too grand there, but that's kind of how I'm thinking, like two landscapes on top of each other.
1:11:30 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting, you know, especially in light of what Christianity ends up doing with that attempt to combine the mortal and the divine. Right. In one concrete personage.
1:11:41 Wes: What it means in one versus what it means in the other, what it means to the Greeks versus what it means to Christianity.
1:11:49 Erin: Right, Right, Yeah. Helen is, in a way, like an embodiment of that. Of, like the whole world, right. That whole dual landscape, all of its contradictions, all of its complexities and contradictions are kind of embodied in her, in her person, and arguably in other people who are half human and half divine. But it's kind of like subsumes that complexity in the whole world. Whereas in Christianity, it's just absorbed, as you say, in one person.
1:12:13 Wes: I mean, I think with Greek mythology there's this attempt to give some order to things, right? To the chaos of things. And life at a time when life is very chaotic and more capricious than the way we experience it. Although of course it's similarly capricious at the advent of Christianity. But in any case, and yet it's quite disoriented. The mythology itself is quite chaotic and disorganized and hard to make sense of because famously the gods seem to behave like human beings or even worse often and are impulsive and play favorites and this and that. So they're not necessarily there's the will of Zeus, but it's not necessarily justice or the good. You know, he's out raping people, you know, that's not his thing. And so what is the point? There's an element of resignation in a way to the harshness of life. But in any case, I think why don't we so move to Postscript and discuss. I'm not sure how far we're going to get, but we're going to save Odysseus for next time. Fitting once again, waiting for Odysseus. That's the whole name of the game. Okay, so we're going to move to Postscript and we're going to finish discussing this chapter with Menelaus, and I think he's going to tell a story about Odysseus with Proteus and then we'll move on and our next full episode to Odysseus and his adventures. And then there'll be a third episode as well on that, probably concentrating more on the last 12 books.
1:14:01 Erin: So perfect.
1:14:12 Wes: [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.
