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

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The Stories Told to Athena and Eumaios Brought to Ithaka put in a magic sleep, Odysseus together with his rich gifts is safely placed on the shore by the Phaiakian sailors. When he wakes up he does not recognize that he has finally reached his home island. Worried, he wishes to inform himself of where he is. He asks a person whom he assumes is a young shepherd, but actually is the goddess Athena in disguise, the name of the place and gets the answer that he is on the island of Ithaka. But then in turn he is asked by the shepherd to reveal his name and his antecedents. Odysseus is, as always, on his guard against being recognized, so he puts on a disguise. His answer therefore takes the form of a narrative about a non-existent person's life – Odysseus is lying: 'I heard the name of Ithaka when I was in wide Crete, far away, across the sea; now I myself have come here with these goods that you see, but leaving as much again to my children. I have fled, an exile, because I killed the son of Idomeneus, Orsilochos, a man swift of foot, who in wide Crete surpassed all other mortal men for speed of his feet. I killed him because he tried to deprive me of all my share of the plunder from Troy, and for the sake of it my heart suffered many pains: the wars of men; hard crossing of the big waters; for I would not do his father favor, and serve as his henchman in the land of Troy, but I led others, of my own following. I lay in wait for him with a friend by the road, and struck him with the bronze-headed spear as he came back from the fields. There was a very dark night spread over all the sky, nor did anyone see me, nor did anyone know of it when I stripped the life from him. But then, when I had cut him down with the sharp bronze, I went at once to a ship [---]. 13.256–272. After this episode there follows an account of how the stranger was put ashore on Ithaca by Phoenician sailors. The text above, I would state, manifests the device of an "unreliable narrator". The reason is not that Odysseus is lying here. For my first claim will be that a character's lying about events is not sufficient condition for us to recognize the text as an instance of "unreliable narration." I will soon try to demonstrate this assumption with the help of Odysseus last three "Ithacan lies" which will be contrasted with this as well as with the lie to Eumaios in song XIV. The Athena and the Eumaios lying episodes have a rather complex structure. They take the form of embedded homodiegetic narratives and remind us so far of earlier first-person relations in the Odyssey, for instance of Odysseus' Apologoi or Menelaos' Proteus episode. Later Eumaios will give the disguised Odysseus an account of how he, only a child, was sold as a slave to Laërtes on Ithaca. But in these narratives the "I" of the experiencing character projects back an "I" which could easily be associated with the fictive speaker, with Odysseus, Menelaos or Eumaios, each of whom have come to wisdom through suffering. In normal cases of "unreliable narration" the "unreliable narrator" will also be associated with the character who speaks, as it is, for instance, in La Chute, in "Haircut" or in the Jason part of The Sound and the Fury. But when Odysseus pretends to be a Cretan fugitive in the Athena episode, he as a speaker is plainly lying 8
to his interlocutors, but the "unreliable narrator" is the persona of the Cretan projected by the narrative. So the "I" of Odysseus' words does not bounce back straight to the speaker but, given a jaunty angle, to a projected character rather dissimilar from him, even his opposite in some important respects. His story will be a story in disguise. And this is constitutive of the notion of an "unreliable narrator" in the sense Booth gave it. It is a dramatizing technique and relies as a consequence on indirect characterization. As readers we are led by implication via the representation of speech and action to the significance of the whole episode, we are not led to it by the storyteller's or "reliable narrator's" explicit direction as in the Ktesippos example given above. Odysseus' speech to Eumaios, where he once again pretends to be a Cretan, this time the illegitimate son of Kastor, displays the same structure as the Athena episode. Odysseus is certainly lying to Eumaios, but the "unreliable narrator" is "Kastor's son," projected by words of the liar. If the speech of a character within a narrative is to be understood as an embedded narrative, the criterion will be that it can display a certain amount of autonomy; in fact an embedded narrative should constitute a digression from as well as a "dissolving" of the story representing the narrator's speech situation as a motif. But then, an embedded narrative will not, logically or "grammatically", be secondary to the primary, embedding narrative. No narrative or formal qualities will, for instance, place the homodiegetic narratives of the Odyssey under the framing heterodiegetic narrative. Rather the work presents a paratactical joining of equivalent elements. The illusion of a hierachy is the result of a trick, it is a motivation, in the sense of the Russian formalists, for the primary storyteller, Homer, to conceal his art and real business, which is to entertain his audience by storytelling. In introducing a fictional motif, a person willing to tell a story, the aoidos thus tricks us into yielding the floor to him for more narration. An embedded "unreliable narration" should also display such an authonomy to be counted as a genuine narrative and not just a piece of unreliable talk from a character. However the similarity cannot be total. If that were the case, there would not be any reason for us to suspect "unreliable narration" as something different from "reliable narration." In the Athena episode the Cretan stranger seems to give a frank characterization of himself. If he is to be taken as an "unreliable narrator" his self-description should turn against himself, in contrast to what ought to be his intention: to impress favourably. So the question is whether he compromises himself telling about his deeds and who he is. He starts by saying that he is a fugitive and mentions the reason for this: he has killed a son of Idomeneus. Being in exile because of manslaughter is not usually anything very remarkable, either in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Several good men share such a fate. Think for instance of Theoklymenos, the fugitive with the gift of prophecy whom Telemachos comes across at Pylos whom he offers a safe escape on his ship (XV.220-286). This Theoklymenos is later to play an important role as a truthsayer once he has landed on Ithaca (XV.529-34, XIX.350-370), so evidently he is to be regarded as a man of quality. The pseudo-Cretan goes on to state the reasons for his deed: Orsilochos threatened to deprive him of his plunder from Troy where he has fought. That he should feel indignation at such a prospect could not surprise any reader of the Iliad where a man's honour is so often measured by the share he gets of the common booty. So, is this homicide not a justified action to save his honour and property? Then the stranger goes on to state his relations to the father of the slayed, Idomeneus. He has not been willing to serve under him but, as he says: "I led others, of my own following". And then comes the rather detailed account of the killing. Here we can note how the narrative really becomes autonomous from the speech situation where it started: it is getting "narrativity". We are presented with a lively account of what it was 9
Page 1 and 2: Stories in Disguise: On Odysseus' I
Page 3 and 4: Such a sense of irony can also be b
Page 5 and 6: Odysseus lets the Phaiakians know t
Page 7: as instrumental in the communicatio
Page 11 and 12: typically again, the means employed
Page 13 and 14: straining to kill me, for they were
Page 15 and 16: even in your own country give over
Page 17 and 18: these three episodes do not resembl
Page 19 and 20: was king for nine-year periods, and
Page 21 and 22: Perspective: Transmission and Recep

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

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