An Odyssey

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

Daniel Mendelsohn (2018, Vintage)

Daniel Mendelsohn is a critic and classics scholar. You can't be surprised that he begins this book with a proem, an explanation of what the book is about; he has to cite the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid to explain what a proem is, and why he needs one. We learn that when he was teaching at Bard College one spring term, he offered a freshman seminar on the Odyssey, and his father asked to audit it. "At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen who were enrolled in the course, seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home."

The Odyssey is the ideal vessel for this journey they make together; the father is a retired scientist, teacher, and autodidact who, it turns out, had studied Latin in his schooldays; but only through Ovid, not scaling the heights of Virgil. But he will trek in from Long Island and up the Hudson, spending the night with his son to make the trip a little less arduous. The two of them will even spend ten days of the next summer on a Mediterranean cruise retracing Odysseus's voyage from Troy to Ithaca. "'Retracing the Odyssey' was an 'educational' cruise, and although he was contemptuous of anything that struck him as a needless luxury–cruises and sightseeing and vacations–my father was a great believer in education."

So this will be the story of a literary journey, and a physical journey, and a journey of understanding between the two men. Mendelsohn is at pains to explain that Homer's storytelling is as full of twists and turns as the journey itself. The technical term is 'ring composition', and it refers to the practice of putting digressions about the past or the future in places where they explain the current action, sometimes at great length. "As complex as it is to describe this technique, the associative spirals that are its hallmark in fact re-create the way we tell stories in everyday life, looping from one tale to another as we seek to clarify and explain the story with which we started, which is the story to which, eventually, we will return–even if it is sometimes the case that we need to be nudged, to be reminded to get back to our starting point." You have to trust that the narrator has control of the direction of the story, the way a captain knows where his ship is, even when the passengers don't.

In a very satisfying way, Mendelsohn is exemplifying everything he's telling us about. He states his major themes and names his characters in his proem, as Homer and Virgil did in theirs. As the class proceeds, week by week, through the Odyssey, he describes the action of the story, and how the class responds to it. His father, who had thought he'd sit quietly, turns out to have definite opinions. Why, he wonders, is Odysseus considered such a hero, when he lost the entire contingent of twelve ships and their men, and staggered home alone after twenty years? As it happens, the first four books of the epic are not about Odysseus at all; he's still imprisoned by Calypso. They're about his son, Telemachus, who was a small child when the Greeks forces were assembled to besiege Troy.

Telemachus has his own voyages to make, and much to learn. Mendelsohn says, "With his unpredictable swings between endearing swagger and utter cluelessness, the Telemachus of the first few books of the Odyssey can remind you of a college freshman." At the same time that we're meeting the (suitably anonymized) freshmen in the seminar, we're getting more of a look at Mendelsohn and his father. The relationship between them is unfolding, and is being set in context of the rest of the family. Mendelsohn, a gay man, has two sons with a friend, and spends most weekends with them in New Jersey. His father grew up in the Bronx, during the Great Depression, which gave him a certain pugnacious prejudice in favor of the little guy. He grew up to be a New York Mets fan, scorning the Yankees for 'buying their success.' And perhaps Telemachus, with the goddess Athena's consistent support, has it too easy...

I'd certainly recommend this book as a companion to a rereading of the Odyssey, but I enjoyed some of its other dimensions even more. We get a glimpse of philology, the 'science' of word origins, and we see a classroom from a skilled teacher's point of view. I especially enjoyed the way Mendelsohn circles around his story like a skilled artist working a sketch up to a finished painting. Done ineptly, ring composition is kind of maddening, but in this case, it's delightful. The proem can tell you what's going to happen, but you still have to read through to find out why it happens, and what it all means. 

 

 

Any Good Books, November 2022