Three Lessons from the Odyssey, and a Note

On the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs, which has been running for some seventy years, guests are invited to choose eight pieces of music they would take with them if stranded on a desert island. The program is an opportunity for a wide-ranging interview of the guest’s background and life and the reason for their choices. The program’s own music, which introduces and closes everything is the most utterly soothing and suggestive you can imagine: you really do feel yourself on that desert island with waves coming in, bird calls, trees and sunshine.

Along with the pieces of music, guests also get to choose one book they would take with them in addition to the collected works of Shakespeare and the Bible they are all given. I am unlikely ever to be invited onto the program, but in my mind I am clear: the book I would take with me is the Odyssey. This is for many reasons, but all I’d like to do here is outline three lessons I draw from it, useful things to contemplate whether on an island or in the world we currently inhabit.

Lesson 1: On the Road

The Odyssey is the archetypal story of the wanderer. Odysseus, the man of many ways, has been gone for twenty years, ten of them fighting at Troy, and ten on his circuitous and massively complicated return journey to Ithaca, where he must outwit the suitors who have invaded his home and reunite with his beloved Penelope who has held out waiting for his return. On his journey he is at key moments not so much the conquering hero but the homeless outsider in need of help from others. Not least this is true on his return when he first presents himself as little more than a tramp, a beggar. Others do help him, however, including the Phaeacians, and, when he first returns to Ithaca, the swineherd Eumaeus, whose morals are certainly superior to many of the high and mighty. What is the logic of all this? The Odyssey puts it plainly: ‘All vagabonds/ and strangers are under Zeus’ (Book 14, 56-57, Lattimore translation).

Odysseus and Euryclaeia

All vagabonds and strangers are under Zeus. Therefore, what they are owed is help and hospitality, especially the beggars and the wanderers. Think of our current world and the prevailing attitudes to refugees and migrants for contrast. The Odyssey has this wisdom, not bad for contemplation on a desert island or elsewhere, and it is one borne out in various religions, whether seeing Jesus in the most lowly or the Jewish imprecation to take care of the stranger ‘because you yourself were strangers in Egypt’. Wisdom for all time.

Lesson 2: The Suitors and the Home

In much of my writing over the past number of years I have drawn inspiration from the French-Jewish philosopher, Emanuel Levinas, who for me has provided something of the last word on questions of hospitality. I have quoted him a number of times: ‘The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows’ (Totality and Infinity 173). In saying this, Levinas addresses two related issues: the nature of the home, and the obligation to hospitality. To be sure, there is risk: that person you open up to may take all you have, or commit violence against you and your loved ones. How does this relate to the question of the wanderer and the protections of Zeus?

Such questions are related to another matter that has preoccupied me for more than two decades: what I have called the nature of the boundary. To put it simply, I see the boundary not as a hard line but as a space—the space in which we encounter one another. It is a space that has real challenges: how do we relate to one another in our boundary spaces, what are our tasks and obligations? Since we enter such spaces on uneven ground—some of us have access to money, authority, power, and many don’t—what are the challenges, ethical and otherwise, on both sides? And then there is the question of risk: to open up, to encounter, entails the possibility that things will go badly, that others will take advantage of you. But the boundary itself is what gives our human lives meaning, just as meaning is always created across a space.

And so there are Penelope’s suitors in the Odyssey. They are the home invaders par excellence, eating up Odysseus’ livestock and grain, pursuing his wife relentlessly without any regard for her wishes. No closed doors or windows here. They have obliterated the boundary and crossed it, and surely we need defence against that. In collapsing space they have also collapsed the possibilities of meaning except for their own monological and imperious kind.

For me the answer is that the boundary must be a thick boundary—a place of texture and crossing with its own procedures and protocols, neither a hard, impermeable line nor a totally porous membrane of vulnerability. In short, what the boundary requires is tact, morality, and above all, reciprocity, even across uneven ground. In this regard, human relation is foundational to it all. Entering the boundary is a matter of existential commitment, the right thing to do on its own terms, and we hope that commitment will be answered by the person coming towards us. The suitors override this completely, and for them disaster results. All vagabonds are under Zeus, but invasion without invitation is something else. When the risk produces real encounter, the meanings we find in the boundary are their own, often revelatory, rewards. That is where we discover ourselves as well as others.

Lesson 3: Odysseus’ Scar

The third lesson is a simple one. When Odysseus returns home, he is recognized by the scar on his leg. He had first sustained the scar as a young man when he was hunting with his cousins on Mount Parnassus while visiting his grandfather Autolycus, and a wild boar’s tusk had wounded him. Now, returning home as a beggar, it becomes the sign of his identity to others.

This happens first when his old nurse Eurycleia is washing his feet, at Penelope’s instruction. All vagabonds are under Zeus, especially one who in Penelope’s eyes looks so much like Odysseus—so much so that he could be him. Odysseus, for his part, must restrain the old nurse, so that she does not reveal what she sees: the time for his unveiling has not arrived. Later, however, that time has come, when Odysseus reveals himself to the swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherder Philoetius—again the most lowly—who will be his allies in his fight against the suitors.

As always, there may be many levels of significance. But here is one for me: it is by our scars, our wounds, that we become known. These, a sign of our vulnerabilty, become, if recognized, our means of resilience and endurance. They are inseperable from our identity if we address ourselves to them and understand what they mean. It is not only others who will recognize us by our scars but we may come to recognize ourselves. The recognition of vulnerability becomes a fulfilment, a strength.

A Note: Hamlet

This is not a lesson, but simply an observation that I can’t help commenting on, and that is the inverse mirroring between the Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet is the tale of a son who has lost a father, now responding to the ghost of his absence in melancholy and confusion. His father has been murdered by his uncle, a suitor, as it were, to his mother the queen. We all know how it develops: in the last act they all die, including Hamlet himself. This is tragedy.

The Odyssey, however, is its inverse. Here the mother, Penelope, has resisted the suitors, and stayed loyal to her husband. The son, Telemachus, mourns the absence of his father, but the father will return, and the son find his relation with him again. Here in the end it is only the suitors, the false ‘uncles’ who die, while Odysseus, Penelope and Telemechus are reunited. It is a mythic tale of resurrection, and Hamlet its inverse rendering of loss.