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.
Finally, a large blond kid with a round face and sharp blue eyes behind wide-rimmed glasses raised his hand.
I’m also Tom, he said.
On the printout I wrote “Sancho Panza Tom.” Then I crossed it out and wrote “Blond Tom.”
Is it a kind of setup? He wants to show you how bad things are at home, so when Odysseus finally gets back it feels like a climax?
Nice idea, I said. But let me ask you this: based on our glimpse of Odysseus in Book 1, how likely does that climax seem?
A slender girl down on the right lifted a pale hand about three inches off the surface of the table and gave it a little wiggle, like someone trying to signal to a friend during a church service. Her hair was remarkable: dark red, almost henna-colored, falling straight to her shoulders in a shimmering sheet.
Not very likely! she said. I thought he was kind of mopey, actually—
Excuse me, I said. What’s your name?
She blushed and said, Sorry.
Nothing to be sorry about! Go on.
I’m Madeline?
I found her name on the roster. “Madeline of the Shining Red Hair.”
Okay, Madeline. How, “mopey”?
He’s just very depressed, she went on. When Athena is talking to Zeus at the beginning, when they’re deciding what to do about Odysseus and how he’s stuck on the island with Calypso, she describes him as just moping around the island, crying.
Trisha’s curls bobbled as she wrote in her notebook. Looking up at me, she said, I think the first book is meant to be a kind of surprise. So here we are at the beginning of this big epic about this great hero, and the first reference to him is that he’s a kind of loser. He’s a castaway, he’s a prisoner, he has no power and no way of getting home. He’s hidden from everything he cares for. So it’s as if he can’t go any lower, it can only go uphill from there.
Great, I said. Yes. It provides a baseline for the hero’s narrative arc.
It was at this point that my father raised his head and said, “Hero”? I don’t think he’s a hero at all.
In
