Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

164HomerIt is not death he must face. From the present time of the poemon, that risk is slight. In this epic, a life rounds itself out by return to anoriginal mature circumstance that the very course of life has altered.Change brings pain, and yet the joy of changelessness amongthe lotus eaters or the Phaeacians lacks the fullness of changeful life.Death may be taken as a fearful circumstance and at the same time asbland fact. The death of his mother Anticleia is spoken of matter-offactly(XIII, 59) in a salutation wishing joy.In the seeming universality of transience, arrival seems foreverdebarred, and Odysseus comes back a second time to Aeolus, who willnot help him; to Circe, who greets him with a warning. Back again hecomes, also, to Scylla and Charybdis. Death lies as a test in the future.Though the hero’s own death is vague and remote, he must risk it andpass its country in order to return. Odysseus can get back only byvisiting the dead, all the way past the eternally shrouded Cimmerians.Even then it takes the escort of the Phaeacians, who are near to gods, toget him back. The Phaeacian vessel, moving like a star, unerringly andeffortlessly swift, bears Odysseus in a sleep “most like to death” (XIII,879–92) to the home he has not been able to sight for twenty years.Odysseus has changed so much himself, and Ithaca has becomeso remote to him, that he does not know where he is when he wakesup there. Of the disguised Athene he asks a question at once obviousand profound: are the inhabitants hospitable or wild?All is old, and all is new. If Odysseus did not recognize oldelements in any new situation, he could not exercise his many wiles.If he did not have to confront the new, there would be less need forany wiles at all.The need dwindles at the end, but it has not disappeared. At theend of his life he must undertake another journey across the sea andset up a tomb to Poseidon among men who do not know the sea (IX,120 ff ).Odysseus stands midway between the easier returners, achieversof a simpler permanence, Menelaus and Nestor, and those who havedied on the return, the victims to change, Agamemnon and Ajax, notto mention all his own followers.Permanence brings joy, transience pain. The living sustain a subtlebalance between permanence and transience, and so between joy andpain. The sea is sparkling but treacherous; to the solitary Odysseus