Stories in Disguise: On Odysseus' Ithacan Lies and Their Relevance ...

even in your own country give over your ways of deceiving
and your thievish tales. They are near to you in your very nature. (XIII. 286-295)
And the reaction of Eumaios has a lot in common with Athena's:
Then, O swineherd Eumaios, you said to him in answer:
'O sorrowful stranger, truly you troubled the spirit in me,
by telling me all these details, how you suffered and wandered;
yet I think some parts is in no true order, and you will not persuade me
in your talk about Odysseus. Why should such a man as you are
lie recklessly to me? But I myself know the whole truth
of what my lord's homecoming is, how all the gods hated him
so much that they did not make him go down in the land of the Trojans,
nor in the arms of his friends, after he had wound up the fighting.
How should this be interpreted? Firstly, it confirms that both episodes are cast in the comic mode.
Secondly, the laughter of Athena and the goodhumoured scepticism of Eumaios could be
regarded as vicarious expressions of the attitude of the reader or listener. Their laughter is the
fictional equivalent of ours, which renders the text in some sense meta-fictional here. That does
not mean, of course, that they are amused by exactly the same things as we are – they are in an
actual (fictive) situation before a real (fictive) person – only that there is some similarity between
our and their reaction to the fun of the situation type.
It is true that a scene like that where Odysseus first learns that he has arrived at Ithaca could
in principle be conceived in many different ways by the storyteller, serious as well as comic. But
it is hard to imagine a solution better than the one Homer is offering here. We are presented with
the two protagonists who will now meet for the first time and together attempt the difficult task:
Odysseus and his guardian goddess. The nature of the task demands the utmost cunning and
caution, which Athena has already foreseen. The audience knows that its hero has thus far amply
demonstrated that he is in possession of these qualities. Whether the joy of realizing that he has at
last reached his home island will lessen his vigilance it is appropriate to question. The narrative
reveals that Odysseus still comes up to expectations. But how smart is the hero? The intertextual
level of this text answers: He is as cunning and cautious as Diomedes of the Iliad is brave and
eager to fight. Diomedes was not afraid of attacking and wounding even the gods; and Odysseus
is trying to outsmart even Athena, the goddess of smartness and cunning. However, having
interpreted the episode in this way, it is hard to think of a more adequte form for it than as a
"story in disguise," i.e. using the device of the "unreliable narrator". For Homer could not let his
hero lie outright to a goddess, who is bound to expose him. Such a scene would have made him
appear ridiculous in the eyes of an audience and contradicted his reputation for cleverness. But by
casting his tale in the form of a parody of serious narration and thereby distancing the teller from
the telling, Homer succeeds somehow in making Odysseus the equal of the goddess of disguise.
Also it is the perfect solution to the delicacy of this situation. No one has reason to feel offended
here. Athena has not, since this is (irrespective of the actual intentions of the liar) a performance
of mere clownishness, that is, not a serious action but a mere representation of one. Nor has
Odysseus, since he will have to take responsibility only for the amusing impersonation of a
rascal; he has not ventured his reputation as a successful liar and failed. All these effects are
brought about by a single device: that of the "unrelible narrator", which separates a primary teller
from a told teller. Accordingly, we may even in this case speak about a vicarious, meta-narrative
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