That Really Long Journey

I. Summary

The Odyssey is an extensive work, an epic poem that I wonder if high school students, especially freshmen and sophomores, have the patience to navigate. Fortunately (and I won’t be telling my students this), Odysseus provides a succinct summary of his adventures in the 23^rd book.

Upon returning from Troy, Odysseus sacked the city of Ismarus, home of the Cicons (Why you ask? Me too…), but after initial success, his foolish men loitered in the city and the Cicons returned with reinforcements. This is the first time Odysseus loses a significant number of his men. After Ismarus, Odysseus lands among the Lotus-eaters, whose delicious lotus made many men forget their desire to return to Ithaca, but Odysseus bound them to his ship and carried them away when he realized what mischief was afoot. Next comes the famous encounter with the Cyclops, who first knows Odysseus as “Noman (No man).” After the Cyclops eats six of Odysseus’s men, Odysseus rams a large wooden spear (battering ram) into the Cyclop’s eye to blind him. Shortly after, he and his remaining men escape upon the bellies of sheep and a ram, but not before finding out that Odysseus has angered Poseidon by blinding his son the Cyclops. This is the real impetus of Odysseus’s future misfortune. After an insignificant couple of stops in Aeolus, Odysseus’s misfortune carries him to Telepylos, where all of his men and their ships are destroyed excepting his own crew and ship. From here the last remaining crew sails to Circe’s island, where Odysseus rescues all of his men from being turned into swine. Circe then sends Odysseus to the house of Hades to receive a prophecy from Theban. After receiving his prophecy, he passes the Sirens, Charybdis and Scylla, the island of Hyperion (Helios), and is eventually stranded alone with Calypso.

All of this actually happens before The Odyssey begins.

When the story opens, the setting is back in Ithaca, in Odysseus’s house, where Telemachus and Penelope, son and wife to Odysseus, endure the insolence of over a hundred suitors trying to buy the hand of Penelope, and in the process reducing Odysseus’s estate to nothing. Athena comes to Telemachus and sends him to Pylos and eventually to Lacedaemon to inquire of Nestor and Menelaus whether or not they know if his father is still alive.

Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice…

Calypso releases Odysseus by Zeus’s bidding (via Hermes via Athena), Poseidon wrecks Odysseus’s ship (canoe), and he shores up in the land of the Phaeacians, who then guide him home to Ithaca.

Once in Ithaca, he and Telemachus, with the help of Athena and Zeus, slaughter – literally – each and every one of the suitors and maidservants who had offended his land and property.

II. Response

Odysseus is not the perfect hero I expected him to be, and I suspect part of the reason for that is my anachronistic reading. By anachronistic I mean culturally. The treatment of women and the liberties women could take were clearly much different, as evidenced by Penelope being a pushover. The bond of father and son too is much different, much closer, in The Odyssey than we see in contemporary stories. Though Odysseus is absent for all of Telemachus’s memorable life, Telemachus cannot authentically achieve manhood until his father returns. I felt this was a much more subtle and powerful way of conveying the importance of lineage to the Greeks than the numerous spoken family trees.

But I had also forgotten that in Greek mythology the gods are much more human, and the humans are much more stubborn. Taken as a paradigm of the epic hero, Odysseus is a fated man, and yet that does not seem to diminish, or in any way particularly affect, his strength, cunning, and decisions. Much of the book is spent discussing Odysseus’s misfortune, and yet he was clearly blessed from birth.

The most difficult aspect of the poem for me was the long, intricate deceptions. Many times when Odysseus comes upon a new land, especially toward the end when he is back in Ithaca, he must deceive those around him. But it is not enough to simply say where he is from and how he got to where he is. Instead, he is compelled to create an entire history, which we must wade through, although we the readers/listeners already know the truth. While reading, I became more and more annoyed with this, and consequently I began to ponder in earnest the meaning of these digressions. Then, I realized that I received some amusement in reading through the deceptions and picking out the kernels of truth littered within them. Like so many other elements of the book, these digressions must have been a requirement of popular story weaving in Homer’s time.

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

Like The Epic of Gilgamesh, there is a significant amount of repetition in The Odyssey, which is probably due to its development in an oral/musical tradition.

As contemporary readers, we tend to read works like The Odyssey and The Epic as fantasy, but when we remember that the ancient Greeks believed in the gods – Zeus, Athena, and Apollo – in the same way that we believe in God/Yahweh/Allah (and their respective interpretations), the story is much more profound and has more gravity. Through such a lens, one can imagine The Odyssey being one of the books in an ancient Greek equivalent of the Old Testament, as a story of how their gods work through men and women and how humans should interact with their gods and fellow men and women.

Unlike the tragic heroes that would come centuries later, the Shakespearean heroes, Odysseus is never harmed by his own decisions. Though praised for his strength and his counsel, the poem moves by the actions of either the gods or other humans, i.e. the Phaeacians. The line between a great man and a favored man, though discussed a great deal, is taken for granted, and never actually drawn.

There is a great amount of wine and passing around of bread, and there were many times when, due to the translation I read, I questioned the extent to which the seemingly Christian elements throughout the story were from the original or the result of a translator who was the product of a predominantly Christian culture.

As the second extant work of western literature, there are many themes throughout The Odyssey  that will be developed more throughout later western authorship: transitioning from boyhood to manhood, propriety with the gods, propriety with men/women, love and courtship, the power and interference of the gods/God, revenging/avenging, justice, honor, ancestry. Western culture continues to struggle with these concepts. Perspective changes with impetus, or vice versa. Do gods determine our fate, or do our choices? But if our choices determine our fate, where are the gods/God? Odysseus and his fellow players do not ask these questions, but he is the reason authors will ask them later.

IV. Teaching and Learning

After coming so far, I must return to my original question: How do I teach this long, tedious text to a classroom of impatient high school students?

One way to scaffold the text would be with a contemporary young adult (or even adult) hero/adventure novel. The first unit my cooperating teacher at Brentwood Middle School does with her eighth graders is archetypes and the monomyth cycle in hero/adventure novels. She allows each of her students to pick a different hero/adventure story (Harry Potter, The Hobbit, etc.), and then teaches generally about archetypes and the monomyth cycle, enabling students individually to apply that knowledge to their own novels. I could do a similar unit as a precursor to The Odyssey, THE hero/adventure story of all time. By scaffolding this way, students would be familiar with the narrative structure of The Odyssey, which may help them break the large story into smaller morsels. If they get confused as to what is happening structurally, students could go back and ask themselves, “The last section I identified was ‘Crossing the threshold into the unknown.’ Has a helper or mentor come into the story yet? Have there been any challenges yet?” In fact, the students would need prior experience with archetypes and the monomyth cycle because even though Odysseus is revered as the quintessential epic hero, Homer’s narrative timeline manipulates and distorts the cycle quite a bit, to the point that students may need guidance discerning what is happening when, narratively and chronologically.

I mentioned in my earlier response that the most frustrating parts of The Odyssey for me were the disguises and long deceptions that Odysseus weaves along his journey back home. I suspect these moments may also be boring and frustrating to my students as well. One piece of informal teaching advice that I have taken to heart over the years is that if there are sections of a story that you think are going to be especially boring or difficult for students, rather than cut them out, focus on them. I see Odysseus’s tall tales as perfect opportunities to capitalize on the oral/aural nature of The Odyssey. I could plan out students’ reading so that they won’t read those sections for homework, but instead they could take turns – perhaps in pairs – presenting those stories to the class. They could explore the different ways speaking and listening to a story changes the reading experience. And, because there are nuggets of truth in each of Odysseus’s stories, listening to them aloud would help students sharpen their aural attention if I ask them to write down the truths they hear in each different story. This would, in turn, lead to practice with analytic thinking, as students would then explain how Odysseus has disguised the truth, comparing his deception with the events of the story.