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Rediscovering the Classics: Homer's Odyssey
In the first of a new series, Deng Xiao Ping rediscovers Homer's great epic poem.
Posted 27th May 2009 | Author: Deng Xiao Ping
From Issue TT09 of Etcetera (Views: 112)
It’s difficult to deny the magnificence of the Odyssey, both one of the earliest and one of the greatest works of Western literature. Homer’s second epic is endlessly studied and scrutinized, one of the archetypical epic poems and an obscene display of poetry’s power. Its influence spreads through culture like little else, touching Virgil and Walcott, Godard and Nick Cave and a third of an episode of The Simpsons. But I don’t love the Odyssey for any such scholarly or cultural reasons.
I love Homer’s epic because it’s, well, epic. It reads like a poetic checklist of the things I loved when I was fourteen – frequent encounters with fearsome and bizarre adversaries and grizzly deaths in exotic locations, the voyage’s many contortions leading to a supremely violent finale so triumphant that it’s easy to forget that it involves a brutal massacre by an autocratic leader. Most importantly, though, the Odyssey presents a series of awesome monsters.
First we have, and perhaps most famously, Polyphemus, the Cyclops who splices shepherding with cannibalism. The classicist would probably ascribe ancient anxieties and bestial symbolism to the episode, but the Cyclops appears most potent to me simply because he’s a terrifying and exciting monster, a figure with just the right balance of the human and the other to make Odysseus’ encounter with him simultaneously fearful and fun. The triumph of cunning over physical power in the episode, of course, holds its own appeal.
Then there’s Scylla, the six-headed and twelve-legged devourer of men, a grotesque creature that can’t be escaped without falling into the similarly monstrous whirlpool-thing Charybdis. Homer writes of giant cannibals (man-eating is clearly favorite trope of his), witches who turn men into livestock and hazardous sirens, all of whom almost get the better of Odysseus’ crew while begging to be computer animated or turned into action figures. Indeed, it’s the realm of classical epics that one can best enjoy both the affirmably cultured and the fantastically civilized at the same time, a fusion of the high and the low that retains the respectability of the former and the latter’s thrills.
Of course, Homer doesn’t hold a monopoly on monsters. The Argonauts legend has a pretty great stab at them, as does Heracles. Jason encounters harpies and warriors hewn from dragon’s teeth, while Heracles’ quests involve metallic birds and a hundred-headed dragon. Worse than these beasts, however, are the human monsters hidden throughout the classics. Medea, for example, possesses a monstrosity far beyond that of even the one-eyed giant, gorily cutting up her own brother and coercing the daughters of Pelias to viciously dismantle their father. Yet despite her unambiguously horrific actions, we can sympathize with Medea; manipulated by gods and abandoned by Jason, her monstrous traits are not without reason.
Perhaps the one thread that unites all these classical beasts is their resemblance to the normal, their combination of the world’s real objects to create something unsettlingly unreal. The familiar crosses over in unfamiliar ways, creating both beastly constructs and warped humanoids. Homer’s monsters tap into a similar vein as The Island of Dr. Moreau, where the boundaries between species are, at least for a time, broken down to frightful effect. The monsters also maintain that fear and wonder at the mystique of the old, the mystery that the antiquated provides, echoing the “vast image out of Spiritus Mundi” that stalks Yeats’ “The Second Coming”.
Despite their otherness, this familiarity allows the monsters in the Odyssey and its peers to hint at very real threats and to visualize the anxiety that the unknown can inspire. But paradoxically, these creatures are also marked by their unreality, the fantasy that inspires wonder and delight. The monsters Odysseus encounters, and their kin elsewhere, are perils to be faced and aberrations of human traits, but above all this they’re just really, really cool.
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