(the) American (Novel of)

224 Thomas Thorp
We are at book 19 of the Odyssey. It is Odysseus who speaks. He
is in his own home, seated beside his own long-suffering wife, and the
man of whom he speaks is Odysseus.
And so the man is safe,
as you can see, and he’s coming home, soon,
he’s close, close at hand—
he won’t be severed long from kin and country,
no, not now. I give you my solemn, binding oath.
(19.345–349) 1
And yet he lies, of course. Odysseus lies. He lies in order, oddly
enough, to invoke a heroic Greek etiquette of hospitality, an ethos
ancient even to the pre-Classical Archaic Greeks. It is a heroic etiquette
binding—through stunning equivocation—the stranger (xenos), who is
the guest (xenos), to the host (xenos), with ties expressed in the currency
of gifts (xenia), gifts that incur, even as they repay, debts expressed in
enduring bonds of friendship, bonds that constitute forms of cohesion
at once domestic and political. 2 In their heroic form, as depicted in
Homer, these bonds and obligations would have held not between
cities but between individual heroes whose guest-friendship obligations
could supersede even the imperatives of battle. And yet Odysseus is
home from war. So, as I want to show here, Odysseus’s Ithaca lies (the
lies he tells from the moment of his return) are meant to recall, recollect,
and then critically to transform that heroic etiquette into a new form
that would make it compatible with the demands of the Archaic Greek
city-state. The Odyssey, on this view, is a performance whose purpose
is to bring about what it describes: the transformation of an etiquette
born in representations of piracy and war into an etiquette that could
provide the cohesion necessary for the new world of the polis. But even
if we locate the Odyssey at this transition, and even if we were to adopt,
provisionally, the distinction between human bonds that are formal yet
equivocal (etiquette) and those that are formally univocal (written law)—
a distinction we are working to put into question—why should an
archaic political logic located at that transition need to resort to lies?
Repetition
In the first place there is the fact of the return or homecoming—a sort
of repetition—and the manner in which this logic of repetition rules