(the) American (Novel of)

Odysseus Lies
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etiquette of hospitality and courtship. Eumaeus, again, has not forgotten
and thus his hut is the occasion for a transitional lie.
Once Eumaeus’s gesture of hospitality had set aside the need for
food and drink, it was time for the stranger to give an account of
himself. The Eumaeus version of the lie involves a new Cretan genealogy
in which, this time, Odysseus would be Castor, the illegitimate son of
a wealthy Cretan, who has been deprived of his rightful share of lands
by the rich man’s “high and mighty sons” (14.238). In the transitional
lie Odysseus becomes one of the transitional princes. So, in his lie, he
turned his attention to piracy, which he found more agreeable than
working land, and became more prosperous than the aristocrats who
had shunned him. This newfound prosperity obliged him, when
Idomeneus and the people called for it, to help organize the Cretan
expedition to Troy. The account of his travails that Odysseus relates to
Eumaeus replicates in some important details the story of how Odysseus
himself survived shipwreck and was taken in by a hospitable king and
then sent home. In the Eumaeus lie, however, what Odysseus had first
feared when he awoke on Ithaca is what he claims to have befallen him:
that the crew transporting him enslaved him instead, forcing him to
escape in rags, only to take refuge here with Eumaeus.
Here at the hut Odysseus meets his son to whom he reveals
himself and is from that moment capable of contacting all who will
eventually stand beside him in his assault on the suitors. Why then does
he continue to lie? An adequate answer to that question would require
a politological account of the normative force of the counterfactually
asserted “truth” in any lie, an account beyond the scope of this chapter.
What can be illustrated here is the critical feature of the normative
force of the lie: the fact that with his lies, Odysseus enacts the genesis/
restoration of a prior/new political order that takes the form of a selfimposed
obligation of etiquette. And it is this seeming contradiction
between genesis and restoration that can be pursued directly to the
third version of the Cretan lie, the lie he tells Penelope.
Third Lie
To recall, in the third version of the Cretan lie, Odysseus is now the
brother of Idomeneus: