You can’t believe the traffic! my father exclaimed as he pulled himself out of the car that January morning, stomping both feet into the white powder, his footprints like angry exclamation marks in the snow. As I stood on the porch awaiting him, I could see how gingerly he made his way up the steps, because of his great fear of falling. As he gripped the handrail, he looked up at me and asked me what we’d be covering in the first day of class, and I said, The beginning.
Now, an hour into the first session of the class, it was clear he didn’t think much of Odysseus.
One week before the start of classes, I’d sent an e-mail to the students enrolled in the course, asking them to read Book 1 in advance of the first class session and to come prepared to share their thoughts about why the epic begins the way it does. The class would be meeting every Friday for just under two and a half hours, from 10:10 in the morning to 12:30, with a short coffee break around 11:15. On this first day of the semester, I wrote to them, we’d spend the first half of the session talking about Book 1. After the break I’d be lecturing about the basics of Homeric poetry: the history of the debate about how Homer’s poems were originally composed, the nature of oral poetry, elements of epic technique, and my expectations for the course.
I also mentioned that my father would be sitting in on the course. Better to warn them, I thought, so his presence on the first day of class wouldn’t be a distraction.
So, I declared, looking down the length of the seminar table at 10:15, I’ve asked you to think about how the Odyssey begins. We can’t have a full discussion of Book 1 today—next week we’ll be talking about 1 and 2 in detail—but we can at least get the ball rolling. What strikes you right away about the opening of our poem—anything strange, anything worth noticing?
A boy who was sitting at the far end of the table grinned and said, It’s long! He had deep dimples that undercut whatever cool his carefully groomed scruff was meant to convey. As I rolled my eyes, the slender, dark-eyed girl sitting next to him elbowed him sharply. Girlfriend and boyfriend. Her eyes were so black that you couldn’t tell the irises from the pupils.
Try harder, I said drily. What’s your name?
The scruffy boy said, Jack. The girl said, Nina.
On the table in front of me lay the printout of the class roster that the registrar’s office had sent. I scanned it for their names. Next to his I wrote “Jack of the Dimples.” Next to hers I wrote “Nina Dark-Eyes.”
I’d gotten into this habit twenty years earlier, when I was a graduate student instructor. On the first day of class, as the students identified themselves, I’d jot down some memorable physical characteristic next to their names on the roster in order to be able to remember who they were. As a result of these jottings it would often be the case that, even after I knew the students well, I would continue to think of them reflexively as Zack of the Tiny Wire-Rimmed Glasses or Maureen Green-Eyes, as if those physical appurtenances and traits, rather than being superficial, were in fact evidence of some inalienable inner essence, a taste for precision or an irrepressible impishness. This isn’t all that different from the way that, in Homer’s epics, certain characters are identified by stock epithets that refer to a physical characteristic or attribute (“swift-footed Achilles” or “gray-eyed Athena”) or by a particular stance or gesture. For instance, every time Penelope comes downstairs from her bedchamber to the great hall of the palace where the Suitors are feasting, the scene is described in exactly the same way, starting with the first such moment, which occurs in Book 1:
She came down the lofty stairway of the house,
nor was she alone: two maidservants came along.
When this goddess among women reached the Suitors
she stood beside the door-post of the well-built hall,
and held the gleaming veil before her cheeks,
a maidservant standing by on either side.
Some modern readers find the verbatim repetitions of phrases, the oddly mechanical recurrence of gestures and stances, off-putting. But certain scholars have argued that, apart from whatever technical function these prefabricated lines and phrases may have served, they provide insight into the mind-set of the archaic poets—not least, their belief in the underlying consistency of nature and people and objects, whatever the distortions of history and violence and time—a belief in such constancy being of particular importance in this poem, whose characters are striving to recognize one another after decades of separation and trauma. This view of the epithets’ function is rather comforting; and indeed, their recurrence comes to feel reassuring. Like pitons stuck into the vast face of the epic, they give the audience a safe hold as they make their way through the sprawling text.
I looked around the room and repeated my question about what they might have found interesting about the opening of the poem.
After an awkward silence a tall boy with a big Adam’s apple and lots of dark hair, who seemed to be outgrowing his clothes as I stood looking at him—on that late-January morning his wrists were poking out far beyond the cuffs of his sweater—said, I think it’s interesting that Odysseus is barely even present in Book 1.
A cartoonist might do this kid as a dark splotch atop a single vertical stroke. He looked, in fact, just like the Don Quixote in a Picasso drawing my parents had in the house somewhere, one of the reproductions from the Metropolitan Museum that my mother liked to have framed.
Good, I said. Yes. The focus is somewhere else at first.
I asked him for his name.
Tom, he said.
Next to his name I wrote “Don Quixote Tom.”
Good, I repeated. Odysseus is a kind of ghost in Book 1. What’s the book actually focused on?
A gray-eyed girl sitting next to me looked up and said, nodding, I’m Trisha. A mass of fairish curls quivered when she spoke.
I made a mark on the roster. “Trisha of the Botticelli Hair.”
The book’s focused on the situation in Ithaca, she said.
Yes, I said, good. And what exactly is the situation?
It’s like there’s this … stagnation at the beginning, she went on.
Good, I said. So why do you think Homer focuses on the stagnation in Ithaca in Book 1 instead of getting right to Odysseus?
I looked around the table with an encouraging expression, but nobody said anything.
Every now and then when you’re a teacher—not often, but sometimes—you get a group with whom you have no chemistry. You talk and talk, you ask leading questions and feed them half-lines to get them going, but they just sit there, politely taking notes and occasionally venturing a muttered comment with the unconfident, upward intonation of a question. The interactions are inert, one-sided, lacking the fizzy back-and-forth that is the hallmark of a really good seminar. It was too early to tell, but I was worried that this group seemed a little reticent. Oh God, I thought, of course this would be the class that Daddy is observing.