(the) American (Novel of)

Odysseus Lies
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believe that the sagas were considered the property of the aristocrats. Only
members of the upper stratum would be permitted to write (or dictate) a saga.
Their position in society gave them liberty to use traditions in a manner
which furthered their own interest. Saga writing was a political act.” Knut
Odner, “P(th)orguna’s testament: A Myth for Moral Contemplation and Social
Apathy,” in From Saga to Society: Comparative Approaches to Early Iceland, ed. Gisli
Palsson, (Middlesex, England: Hisarlik Press, 1992); see as well Vernant’s classic
study of the transition from oral to written logics: Jean-Pierre Vernant, “The
Reason of Myth,” trans. Janet Lloyd, in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (New
York: Zone Books, 1988).
11. Is the establishment of justice just? It must and yet it cannot be; for
to claim that the establishment is just is to presuppose a principle of justice
at the very moment when it is the determination of that principle that is in
question. The solution being traced out here is that every originary political
moment must take the form of a repetition or re-presentation of a prior state,
albeit one that probably never existed. Convincing contemporary political
theorists that this gesture is not vacuous is the task of a forthcoming work.
12. And Odysseus understood the need for duplicity. When he hears of
the disorder at his palace (the suitors consuming his wealth and dishonoring
the etiquette of courtship), when Athena informs him of the suitors who have
abused his home and gone so far as to have plotted to murder his son, the poet
has Odysseus reveal the degree of the danger and disorder: “Clearly I might
have died the same ignoble death/ as Agamemnon, bled white in my own
house too,/ if you had never revealed this to me now, goddess” (13.336–440).
13. The Phaeacians represent, on this reading, the role of the first Ionian
colonists who had fled Attica at the onset of the dark ages and who had,
arguably, preserved in their songs memories of an age that comes to be represented
as Heroic. This is just one reason why Odysseus must return in a
sleep. For he cannot be who he is when he arrives. He is traveling across time,
across epochs. He travels from the ethos of Troy, a time of late Mycenaean
Bronze Age heroes, to a new political order characterized by trade, renewed
prosperity, and the rise of the polis. The poem is, on this reading, a commentary
on the political circumstances at about the time of the Homeric composition
in the late eighth century. So the logic of the temporal sequence is not linear.
It is a dream logic. Odysseus’s return (he is delivered, as if in a dream) invokes
what Freud would call a dream work or dream logic in which the recounting
or repetition of the content of the dream becomes, itself, a formative document
in the dreamer’s life, quite apart from its validity as a report of an actual
dream. See Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer, 1999). Finally, back on Ithaca, it is the Phaeacian culture that
seems to have been a dream, or a colony that had escaped the disorder of
the collapsing Mycenaean palace centers, and that can now contribute to the