of the students at the seminar table, he’d taken a seat in a corner of the room off to my left and a little behind me, at my eight o’clock, in a blocky wooden chair beneath a window that looked out onto a depressing expanse of gravelly plowed snow. He would sit in this same chair every Friday for the next fifteen weeks.
I’ll tell you what I think is interesting about Odysseus!
I turned and stared at him. When we’d first talked about the possibility of his sitting in on the course, he’d promised me that he wasn’t going to talk in class. Nahh, he’d said at some point not long after the November day in 2010 when he’d called and said, I’ve been reading the Odyssey on my iPad, but there’s a lot of stuff I just don’t get. Didn’t you say you were going to be teaching it next term?—which is how all this began. At first I’d hesitated. Did he really want to come up every week, two and a half hours each way, and sit there for two and a half hours more with a bunch of freshmen? Sure, he’d said. Why not? Don’t forget, I was a professor, too. I know how to deal with college kids! I’d reflected for a moment. Okay, I finally said. But remember, it’s a seminar, not a lecture class—it’s going to be a bunch of kids sitting around a table talking about the text. There’s nowhere to hide. Would you be uncomfortable in that kind of setting? Nahh, my father had replied, I’m just gonna sit there and listen.
Now, on the first day of the class, he was talking. I’ll tell you what I think is interesting, he repeated.
He sat at the desk holding his hand up in the air. A curious effect of his being in the room with these very young people was that now, for the first time, he suddenly looked very old to me, smaller than I remembered him being, paler. The shock of perceiving my father as an old man wasn’t entirely new to me by that point, but sometimes his appearance, because of the light or the circumstances, still had the power to startle me. A few months earlier, in September, I’d taken the train from Manhattan out to the suburbs in order to spend a few days with my parents for my father’s eighty-first birthday. No, he had said, when I called to tell him which train I was going to be on, don’t take a cab from the station, I’ll pick you up myself. When I got out onto the platform at Bethpage I scrutinized the mass of cars in the parking lot below and wondered why a desiccated-looking man in too-large clothes was waving at me and then suddenly I thought, Daddy. With some embarrassment, I went down the steps that led from the platform to the parking lot, and he puckered his mouth in the way he sometimes did when he was exasperated by someone’s inexplicable stupidity—a driver who had cut him off, the checkout girl who made the wrong change—and said, I was standing right there, waving! and I said, Sorry, the sun was in my eyes.
Okay, I was saying to my father now. What do you think is so interesting? Why don’t you think he’s a “hero”?
My father cleared his throat and motioned to Trisha. First, I agree with her that he’s a loser—but not only because he’s a helpless prisoner!
The students looked amused.
Am I the only one, my father went on, who’s bothered by the fact that Odysseus is alone when the poem begins?
What do you mean, “alone”?
I couldn’t see where he was going with this.
Well, he said, he went off twenty years earlier to fight in the Trojan War, right? And he was presumably the leader of his kingdom’s forces?
Yes, I said. In the second book of the Iliad there’s a list of all the Greek forces that went to fight at Troy. It says that Odysseus sailed with a contingent of twelve ships.
My father’s voice was loud with triumph. Right! That’s hundreds of men. So my question is, What happened to the twelve ships and their crews? Why is he the only person coming home alive?
Some students looked around the room at one another. Others ruffled the pages of their copies of the Odyssey and stared intently at the print, as if by doing so they could force an answer from the paper.
I said, Actually that’s a good question. Anyone want to try to answer it?
They watched silently as I scanned the room, wildly hoping that some youngster would handily respond to my father’s question.
After a moment or two I said, Well, I think there are actually two ways of answering that question. The first has to do with the plot. If you read the proem carefully, you’ll recall that it calls his men “fools”—it says they died “through their own recklessness.” As we go through the poem we’ll get to the incidents during which his men perished, different groups at different times. And then you’ll tell me whether you think it was through their own recklessness.
My father made a face, as if he could have done better than Odysseus, could have brought the twelve ships and their crews home safely. He said, So you admit that he lost all his men?
Yep, I said, a little defiantly. I felt like I was eleven years old again, and Odysseus was a naughty schoolmate whom I’d decided I was going to stand by even if it meant being punished along with him.
He was clearly not convinced.
Nina, the dark-eyed girl, looked across the table. You said there were two ways of answering the question about why he comes back all alone. What’s the other way?
Well, I said, that answer has to do with “narrative,” really. When you think of it, he has to be the only one to make it home.
I looked around the room.
Think about it, I went on after a moment. If he’s the only one still standing, then—what?
Trisha looked up from her notebook. Then he gets to be the hero of the story.
Right, I said; and thought, This one is a live wire.
Think, I said to the whole class, think of what the Odyssey would be like if he’d returned with twelve men, or five—even just one other shipmate. It would never work. To be the hero of an epic, you have to get rid of the competition, so to speak.
Again my father said, Well, I don’t think he’s such a great hero!
He looked around the table. What kind of leader loses all his men? You call that a hero?!
The students laughed out loud. Then, as if fearful that they’d overstepped some boundary, they peered inquisitively down the length of the seminar table at me. Since I wanted to show them I was a good sport, I smiled broadly.
But what I was thinking was, This is going to be a nightmare.
They came back from the campus cafeteria a little before half past eleven, clutching their coffee cups and stomping the snow off their shoes. After they’d settled back into their seats, I launched into my lecture. I ended up talking for most of the remaining hour.
This is the last time I’m going to talk so much in this course, I began. The point of a seminar is for you to do the talking. They don’t pay me enough to talk so much!
There were a few nervous giggles.
I started with the controversy known as the Homeric Question, a centuries-old debate about how Homer’s epics had come into being—whether they had started as written texts or as oral compositions. It was important for the students to grasp the fundamentals of the debate, since significant questions of interpretation hang
