four full books (9 through 12), Odysseus himself relates to the Phaeacians all of the adventures he has had since leaving Troy. The narrative then comes back to the son in the present, briefly picking up the tale of the youth’s adventures only to turn once more to Odysseus himself as he finally reaches home; then, at last, it brings the father and the son together as they work to reestablish mastery of their home and punish the Suitors and their accomplices (Books 13 through 22). Only after this does the poem reunite the husband and his wife (Book 23) and conclude, finally, with a vision of the men of the family, the son, the father, the grandfather, standing together after vanquishing the Suitors and their families (Book 24): the future and the present and the past juxtaposed in a single climactic moment as the epic draws to its close.
These elaborate circlings in space and time are mirrored in a certain technique found in many works of Greek literature, called ring composition. In ring composition, the narrator will start to tell a story only to pause and loop back to some earlier moment that helps explain an aspect of the story he’s telling—a bit of personal or family history, say—and afterward might even loop back to some earlier moment or object or incident that will help account for that slightly less early moment, thereafter gradually winding his way back to the present, the moment in the narrative that he left in order to provide all this background. Herodotus, for instance, often relies on the technique in his Histories, that sprawling account of the great war between the Greeks and the Persian Empire (a conflict that Herodotus himself saw as a latter-day successor to the Trojan War). At one point, for example, the historian digresses from his military saga to give a book-long history of Egypt, its government, culture, religion, and customs, because Egypt was part of the Persian Empire, whose invasion of Greece in 490 B.C. and the conflicts that ensued from it are the ostensible subjects of the Histories. The vast length of his Egyptian digression suggests that the ancients might have had a very different idea from our own about what it means for a book to be “about” something.
But ring composition undoubtedly arose much earlier than Herodotus and his Histories, clearly before writing was even invented. The most famous example of the technique is, in fact, to be found in the Odyssey: a passage in Book 19, which I shall discuss in greater detail later on, that begins with someone noticing a telltale scar on Odysseus’ leg, at a moment when he is trying to remain incognito. But when the scar is noticed, Homer pauses to tell us how Odysseus, as a youth, got the wound that would become the scar; then goes back even further in time to provide details about an episode in the hero’s infancy (featuring his mother’s father, a notorious trickster); then returns to the incident during which Odysseus got the wound; and finally circles all the way back to the moment when the scar is noticed. Only then, after all the history, does he describe the reaction of the character who noticed it to begin with. 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. For this reason, ring composition might remind you of nothing so much as a leisurely homeward journey, interrupted by detours and attractions so alluring that you might forget to stay your homeward course.
And so ring composition, which might at first glance appear to be a digression, reveals itself as an efficient means for a story to embrace the past and the present and sometimes even the future—since some “rings” can loop forward, anticipating events that take place after the conclusion of the main story. In this way a single narrative, even a single moment, can contain a character’s entire biography.
Hence the occurrence of the word polytropos, “of many turns,” “many circled,” in the first line of the Odyssey is a hint as to the nature not only of the poem’s hero but of the poem itself, suggesting as it does that the best way to tell a certain kind of story is to move not straight ahead but in wide and history-laden circles.
In twists and turns.
Fools!
The silence in which my father and I sat all those years ago, on the plane coming home from Miami Beach, was to become typical of what went on between us for a long time. For the first half of my life—until I was in my late twenties—there was a long quiet between us. Perhaps because I had once thought of him as all head, all cranium, the word that came to mind when I thought of him was “hard,” and this hardness made me afraid of him when I was a child and teenager and, indeed, a young man in my twenties. He could be hard on people, certain members of my family would say. He did, indeed, have exacting standards for virtually everything. Grades, certainly, where we children were concerned; but there were other things, too. As I was growing up, I came to understand that everything, for him, was part of a great, almost cosmic struggle between the qualities he would invoke when explaining why a certain piece of music we liked or a movie that was popular at the moment wasn’t really “great,” wasn’t really worth the time we were lavishing on it—those qualities being hardness and durability and, as I think he really meant, authenticity—and the weaker, mushier qualities that most other people settled for, whether in songs or cars or novels or spouses. The lyrics of the pop music we secretly listened to, for instance, were “soft.” A rhyme is a rhyme, you can’t approximate! For him, the more difficult something was to achieve or to appreciate, the more unpleasant to do or to understand, the more likely it was to possess this quality that for him was the hallmark of worthiness.
X is x. His sense that there is a deep and inscrutable essence to things, an irreducible hardness that he had intuited but which many if not most other people had failed to discern, informed his dealings with people, too. Because he had these hard standards—or, rather, because so few people ever met them—there were certain holes in his life, holes that had once been occupied by people: his parents, at one point, during those first two years of my life when he and my mother stopped speaking to his mother and father; each of his three brothers, too, for varying amounts of time, from weeks to years to decades, periods when he would simply not speak to this or that wayward sibling. I was in my thirties before I had a real conversation with Uncle Bobby, with whom some violent quarrel with my father (so we imagined: Daddy never discussed it) had exiled from our lives until the two of them reconciled in the 1990s, when they were in their seventies. And we didn’t even know that he had another older brother, the product of Poppy’s brief first marriage, until my grandfather lay dying and this strange new half-uncle, Milton, showed up in the hospital one day. Milton, Milton, where have you been? Poppy croaked from the high hospital bed as my father looked away in disgust.
So used was I to my father’s habit of silence that it didn’t occur to me until fairly recently to ask why, for him, the obvious way to deal with people who had disappointed his expectations was to act as if they no longer existed.
Hence I was afraid of him for a long time. When I was in grade school and middle school and was having trouble understanding my math homework, I would stand nervously in the doorway to his bedroom, where he would sit at the little teak desk going through bills or reading papers for work, getting up the nerve to ask for his help; once I did, his incredulity in the face of my inability to understand something as obvious to him as the math problem that I couldn’t solve would fill me with shame. This shamed feeling colored my dealings with him through much of the early part of my life, making me want to hide from him. It’s true that I was hiding from many things in those days: I was a gay teenager, it was the 1970s, and we were in the suburbs. I lived cautiously. But the fact is that my anguished, furtive grappling with my sexuality was the least part of my fear of my father back then. I knew well that he and Mother were open-minded and without prejudices on that subject. When I was in high school and a succession of charismatic gay teachers became mentors to me, my parents made efforts to demonstrate that they knew what these men were and had no problem with it. Indeed, my father reacted with surprising gentleness when, as a college junior, I finally came out to my parents. (Let me talk to him, I know something about
