CHAPTER 1

ODYSSEUS' SCAR

Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touchingscene in book 19, when Odysseus has at last come home, the scenein which the old housekeeper Euryclea, who had been his nurse, recognizeshim by a scar on his thigh. The stranger has won Penelope'sgood will; at his request she tells the housekeeper to wash his feet,which, in all old stories, is the first duty of hospitality toward a tiredtraveler. Euryclea busies herself fetching water and mixing cold withhot, meanwhile speaking sadly of her absent master, who is probablyof the same age as the guest, and who perhaps, like the guest, is evennow wandering somewhere, a stranger; and she remarks how astonishinglylike him the guest looks. Meanwhile Odysseus, remembering hisscar, moves back out of the light; he knows that, despite his efforts tohide his identity, Euryclea will now recognize him, but he wants atleast to keep Penelope in ignorance. No sooner has the old womantouched the scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Odysseus' footdrop into the basin; the water spills over, she is about to cry out herjoy; Odysseus restrains her with whispered threats and endearments;she recovers herself and conceals her emotion. Penelope, whose attentionAthena's foresight had diverted from the incident, has observednothing.

All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion.The two women express their feelings in copious direct discourse. Feelingsthough they are, with only a slight admixture of the most generalconsiderations upon human destiny, the syntactical connection betweenpart and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred. There isalso room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformlyilluminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures;even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit totell the reader that it is with his right hand that Odysseus takes theold woman by the throat to keep her from speaking, at the same timethat he draws her closer to him with his left. Clearly outlined, brightlyand uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm whereeverything is visible; and not less clear—wholly expressed, orderly evenin their ardor—are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.

In my account of the incident I have so far passed over a whole seriesof verses which interrupt it in the middle. There are more thanseventy of these verses—while to the incident itself some forty are devotedbefore the interruption and some forty after it. The interruption,which comes just at the point when the housekeeper recognizes thescar—that is, at the moment of crisis—describes the origin of the scar,a hunting accident which occurred in Odysseus' boyhood, at a boarhunt, during the time of his visit to his grandfather Autolycus. Thisfirst affords an opportunity to inform the reader about Autolycus, hishouse, the precise degree of the kinship, his character, and, no lessexhaustively than touchingly, his behavior after the birth of his grandson;then follows the visit of Odysseus, now grown to be a youth;the exchange of greetings, the banquet with which he is welcomed,sleep and waking, the early start for the hunt, the tracking of the beast,the struggle, Odysseus' being wounded by the boar's tusk, his recovery,his return to Ithaca, his parents' anxious questions—all is narrated,again with such a complete externalization of all the elements of thestory and of their interconnections as to leave nothing in obscurity.Not until then does the narrator return to Penelope's chamber, notuntil then, the digression having run its course, does Eurydea, whohad recognized the scar before the digression began, let Odysseus' footfall back into the basin.

The first thought of a modern reader—that this is a device to increasesuspense—is, if not wholly wrong, at least not the essential explanationof this Homeric procedure. For the element of suspense isvery slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculatedto keep the reader or hearer breathless. The digressions are notmeant to keep the reader in suspense, but rather to relax the tension.And this frequently occurs, as in the passage before us. The broadlynarrated, charming, and subtly fashioned story of the hunt, with allits elegance and self-sufficiency, its wealth of idyllic pictures, seeks towin the reader over wholly to itself as long as he is hearing it, to makehim forget what had just taken place during the foot-washing. But anepisode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be soconstructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put thecrisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader'smind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and thesuspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background. ButHomer—and to this we shall have to return later—knows no background.What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills boththe stage and the reader's mind completely. So it is with the passagebefore us. When the young Euryclea (vv. 401ff.) sets the infant Odysseuson his grandfather Autolycus' lap after the banquet, the agedEuryclea, who a few lines earlier had touched the wanderer's foot, hasentirely vanished from the stage and from the reader's mind.

Goethe and Schiller, who, though not referring to this particularepisode, exchanged letters in April 1797 on the subject of "the retardingelement" in the Homeric poems in general, put it in direct oppositionto the element of suspense—the latter word is not used, but isclearly implied when the "retarding" procedure is opposed, as somethingproper to epic, to tragic procedure (letters of April 19, 21, and22). The "retarding element," the "going back and forth" by meansof episodes, seems to me, too, in the Homeric poems, to be opposedto any tensional and suspensive striving toward a goal, and doubtlessSchiller is right in regard to Homer when he says that what hegives us is "simply the quiet existence and operation of things in accordancewith their natures"; Homer's goal is "already present in every pointof his progress." But both Schiller and Goethe raise Homer's procedureto the level of a law for epic poetry in general, and Schiller's wordsquoted above are meant to be universally binding upon the epic poet,in contradistinction from the tragic. Yet in both modern and ancienttimes, there are important epic works which are composed throughoutwith no "retarding element" in this sense but, on the contrary, withsuspense throughout, and which perpetually "rob us of our emotionalfreedom"—which power Schiller will grant only to the tragic poet. Andbesides it seems to me undemonstrable and improbable that this procedureof Homeric poetry was directed by aesthetic considerations oreven by an aesthetic feeling of the sort postulated by Goethe andSchiller. The effect, to be sure, is precisely that which they describe,and is, furthermore, the actual source of the conception of epic whichthey themselves hold, and with them all writers decisively influencedby classical antiquity. But the true cause of the impression of "retardation"appears to me to lie elsewhere—namely, in the need of theHomeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness andunexternalized.

The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus' scar is not basically differentfrom the many passages in which a newly introduced character,or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in thethick of a battle, is described as to its nature and origin; or in which,upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last was, whathe was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene; indeed,even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceableto the same need for an externalization of phenomena in termsperceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up in thecourse of the narrative; and Homer's feeling simply will not permithim to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; itmust be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero's boyhood—justas, in the Iliad, when the first ship is already burning and theMyrmidons finally arm that they may hasten to help, there is still timenot only for the wonderful simile of the wolf, not only for the orderof the Myrmidon host, but also for a detailed account of the ancestryof several subordinate leaders (16, vv. 155ff.). To be sure, the aestheticeffect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciouslysought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulseof the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalizedform, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completelyfixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychologicalprocesses receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remainhidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderlinesswhich even passion does not disturb, Homer's personages venttheir inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, theyspeak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Muchthat is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takesplace wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to thesuitors when he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length,before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scornthat the particles which express logical and grammatical connectionsare lacking or out of place. This last observation is true, of course, notonly of speeches but of the presentation in general. The separate elementsof a phenomenon are most dearly placed in relation to one another;a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and othersyntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiatedin meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respectto one another, and at the same time bring them together in acontinuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomenathemselves, their relationships—their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive,comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations—arebrought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuousrhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a formleft fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, nevera glimpse of unplumbed depths.

And this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground—thatis, in a local and temporal present which is absolute. One mightthink that the many interpolations, the frequent moving back andforth, would create a sort of perspective in time and place; but theHomeric style never gives any such impression. The way in which anyimpression of perspective is avoided can be clearly observed in the procedurefor introducing episodes, a syntactical construction with whichevery reader of Homer is familiar; it is used in the passage we are considering,but can also be found in cases when the episodes are muchshorter. To the word scar (v. 393) there is first attached a relativeclause ("which once long ago a boar ..."), which enlarges into avoluminous syntactical parenthesis; into this an independent sentenceunexpectedly intrudes (v. 396: "A god himself gave him ..."), whichquietly disentangles itself from syntactical subordination, until, withverse 399, an equally free syntactical treatment of the new content beginsa new present which continues unchallenged until, with verse 467("The old woman now touched it ..."), the scene which had beenbroken off is resumed. To be sure, in the case of such long episodesas the one we are considering, a purely syntactical connection withthe principal theme would hardly have been possible; but a connectionwith it through perspective would have been all the easier had thecontent been arranged with that end in view; if, that is, the entire storyof the scar had been presented as a recollection which awakens inOdysseus' mind at this particular moment. It would have been perfectlyeasy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted twoverses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, where the motifs"Odysseus" and "recollection" were already at hand. But any suchsubjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background,resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past,is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows onlya foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.And so the excursus does not begin until two lines later, whenEuryclea has discovered the scar—the possibility for a perspectivisticconnection no longer exists, and the story of the wound becomes anindependent and exclusive present.

The genius of the Homeric style becomes even more apparent whenit is compared with an equally ancient and equally epic style from adifferent world of forms. I shan attempt this comparison with the accountof the sacrifice of Isaac, a homogeneous narrative produced bythe so-called Elohist. The King James version translates the openingas follows (Genesis 22: 1): ("And it came to pass after these things,that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said,Behold, here I am." Even this opening startles us when we come toit from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. Thereader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found togetherin one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speakto Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthlyrealm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come,whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come,like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoyinga sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons fortempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed themin set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have thedeliberations in his own heart been presented to us; unexpected andmysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depthand calls: Abraham! It will at once be said that this is to be explainedby the particular concept of God which the Jews held and which waswholly different from that of the Greeks. True enough—but this constitutesno objection. For how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained?Even their earlier God of the desert was not fixed in form andcontent, and was alone; his lack of form, his lack of local habitation,his singleness, was in the end not only maintained but developed evenfurther in competition with the comparatively far more manifest godsof the surrounding Near Eastern world. The concept of God held bythe Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehendingand representing things.

This becomes still clearer if we now turn to the other person in thedialogue, to Abraham. Where is he? We do not know. He says, indeed:Here I am—but the Hebrew word means only something like"behold me," and in any case is not meant to indicate the actual placewhere Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God, who hascalled to him—Here am I awaiting thy command. Where he is actually,whether in Beersheba or elsewhere, whether indoors or in the openair, is not stated; it does not interest the narrator, the reader is not informed;and what Abraham was doing when God called to him isleft in the same obscurity. To realize the difference, consider Hermes'visit to Calypso, for example, where command, journey, arrival andreception of the visitor, situation and occupation of the person visited,are set forth in many verses; and even on occasions when gods appearsuddenly and briefly, whether to help one of their favorites or to deceiveor destroy some mortal whom they hate, their bodily forms, andusually the manner of their coming and going, are given in detail.Here, however, God appears without bodily form (yet he "appears"),coming from some unspecified place—we only hear his voice, and thatutters nothing but a name, a name without an adjective, without adescriptive epithet for the person spoken to, such as is the rule inevery Homeric address; and of Abraham too nothing is made perceptibleexcept the words in which he answers God: Hinne-ni, Behold me here—with which,to be sure, a most touching gesture expressiveof obedience and readiness is suggested, but it is left to thereader to visualize it. Moreover the two speakers are not on the samelevel: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it mightbe possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspreadarms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham's wordsand gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward,but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voicecomes to him is not in the foreground.