Telegonos, That Horse is Your Father
Odysseus, no friend of mine, has what Pamela Dean somewhere defines as the fatal flaw of the novel-reader: which is wanting to know what will happen if you allow a situation to proceed unmolested. This novel-reader’s ailment is a very real thing, outside of epic as well as in, and it pre-exists the novel proper. I have it; you might. [1] It is like but unlike the Biblical vice of being lukewarm, uncommitted; like but very unlike the rhetorical practice of clambering to a third and higher vantage point in order to claim superiority over the two opposing forces left below to fight clumsily but in earnest on the ground. It isn’t neutrality and isn’t apathy. It is pure curiosity, which unrestrained is the mother of all evils (Hesiod says). The most tempting of evils, because if you intervene in a fraught situation, you will never know what would have happened.
and if you remember The Neverending Story or the big lion of sanctimony from children’s literature, you remember that wanting to know what would have happened, wanting to know what happened on the other side of the page, wanting to know what happens between the chapter breaks when the light goes out, when you aren’t there, is the sin of sins that must be chastised out and away from children, in whose souls this desire to know, if it be present at all, flourishes in rude health until repressed. Nobody ever hears any story but his own. That’s another story and will be told another time. (It won’t be.) ‘Did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what would have happened?’ ‘To know what would have happened, child?’ ‘No. Nobody is ever told that.’
But we are not all of us mothers of evils, who have the novel-reader’s complaint. To have total integrity, in the sense of maintaining the same virtues and the same vices in all situations whether reading a novel, telling a long lie, or sailing from island to island, is rare, and the situational nicks and blemishes in our various integrities are what make us tolerable. Odysseus in the Odyssey, having no responsibilities to the extra-epical world and carrying his epithet with him wherever he goes, has total integrity; he acts according to his character as a rule, and is correspondingly intolerable.
The fresh reader of the Story of O is shocked and wounded if not forewarned that the most memorable parts of the Odyssey are told by and about a moral monster who watches his own old dog die of a broken heart, bewildered and uncomforted, rather than do as much as any rough stranger might blamelessly do for a strange dog on his way into the hall. Argos, twenty years a good dog, waits for his master to come home to him and, at the last, when Odysseus in disguise steels himself (allegedly) and strides right past, Argos says to himself, I must have done something wrong, wonder what it was? and then dies, a faithful soul with no foothold left in a world where his master knows him not.
The true cruelty of that episode is that Odysseus’s wily devotion to perfect craft is unnecessary: the disguise is already perfected. Who would suspect a stranger for kindly giving scritches to the dog at whose hearth he warms himself? Nobody! Nobody would have suspected a thing! That’s a normal thing to do for a dog you don’t know! It isn’t for cover that he hardens his heart and turns away; it’s for his actor’s vanity alone, his need to play the part to perfection for an audience of himself, that he denies his dog to death. He only watches, he doesn’t crush the life out of Argos’s mighty heart with his own hands, but watching, as Hannibal says to Gillian Anderson in the television show, is participating.
After that, after he slaughters himself some suitors and has no possible excuses left for this, Odysseus goes to his tired old dad, out re-potting a plant, and plays the same trick a second time. Hey! he says. It’s me! Not your son, just some asshole! (n.b. & FYI, this is my own free translation, not Emily Wilson or Richmond Lattimore or anything.) And by the grace of some god, Laertes doesn’t drop gratifyingly dead from grief like Argos did, so Odysseus has to stop his awful game and admit he’s really there, as he has run out of people to eavesdrop on and must enter onto the stage of Life as a player and not as the watcher he likes best to be, in his own person and with his own name on.
—There is more in him, the watcher, than simple ego and detached malice. I hate him but I admit it. He only wants so much to see what will happen with himself removed from the picture — not only when he doesn’t participate, but when he is not even there, finally free of the observer effect altogether. This is something people are not normally offered or tempted with; even if they want it, they can’t get it. It is exactly the desire of Tom Sawyer to see what people would say about him at his own funeral. Of course Tom Sawyer is a boy of about 11, the age of folly, and Odysseus is an aged grizzly-man with a long boring beard and many years in which he could have learned to behave better, had he cared to. But he did not care to. He has the soul of a voyeur, with the voyeur’s contempt for law. He wants to be the disembodied eye, like a strange balloon, mounting towards infinity. [1]
What do you think he would have done, Odysseus, if he’d had to sail by the sirens with no crew and no masted ship, all alone in a little coracle or canoe, with one paddle and nobody to restrain him and keep him safe? Would he have crammed wax in his ears like a grown-up, or would he have rigged up some kind of kayaker’s safety harness, left his ears open for Sounds, and turned himself over to drown thrashing upside down with his own boat tied to his bottom? You know which! You know he was the kind of man Werner Herzog makes documentaries about.
—Do you know what I do like about Odysseus, is I like the way he died by getting turned into a horse and being fatally stabbed with a stingray spine by his second son, Telegonos, fulfilling the prophecy that his death would come from the sea. It weakens the story only a little that Telegonos did this in ignorance (no one had told him his dad would be swinging by the island, and no one had told him his dad would be a horse that weekend, so he was doubly unprepared.)
If you can’t remember the line in the Tennyson where he mentions that Odysseus is a horse when he sets sail for the star-baths, that is because Tennyson doesn’t mention it; Victorians didn’t like to talk about that kind of thing (horses have four legs, making them twenty-five percent more obscene than pianos, which have three). The horse business is from, I want to say a Servius commentary? and transmitted to us by Sextus Empiricus? [2] He had, as it is said, two sons: Telemachus, the boring one, and Telegonos, the other one, his son by Circe. Think of them as his Kendall and his Roman Roy, or think of them as his Connor and his Kendall Roy if you want to be kinder. Or is that really kind? Think of them as Jo and Meg if you’d rather. Nancy and Jessica! The important thing is Odysseus went back to Circe’s island later, much later. Say he forgot his hat on her hatstand, or he couldn’t find his watch. Whatever it was, he mislaid something, remembered it twenty years later, and went around retracing his steps, like you do. By the time he got there he was a horse. I think Athena did it.
—You don’t like it to be Athena, fine, look, there are a number of sources and variations, you pick the ones you like the best and so will I. But showing up on the island where his son lived, without writing him a letter first to say he was coming or what he looked like, is exactly the kind of thing Odysseus would do, right? You can’t get a good clear objective look at your son and how he turned out without your influence if you warn him in advance you’ll be there. And you can’t get a good clear objective idea of what either of your sons are like if you hang around participating in their upbringing all the time, interfering, like the kind of novel-reader who throws away their sacred right of non-involvement and starts to act like there are more important things in life than finding out what happens when you aren’t there.
anyway Odysseus died like he lived, and if he was unhappy when the stingray spine went in, it was not because he had to die, but because he had to give up this final and most perfect of disguises before he was ready to. People will talk about anything in front of a horse! How he must have liked it.
[1] I have it worse than most people, is my opinion. It can only be tempered by the equal and opposing fatal flaw of the editor, which is the desire to put one’s finger on everything, to leave an identifying print, so that no perfect thing may exist that has not been touched, poked, stained, tilted, adjusted. As the novel-reader finds it intolerable to breathe a breath that might stir one whisker that might alter the course of history, the editor finds it intolerable not to. I have always found it easier to control my editorial vices than my readerly ones, so I have an unbalanced character, but we should all be so lucky as to unbalance our characters and not have them unbalanced for us.
[2] I GUESS. this is all an elaboration on some gossip I heard in grad school more than a tenth of a century ago and checked up on in Walter Burkert, I think. My recollection is Sextus Empiricus doesn’t so much report it as he has this one aside where he says, Will everybody stop saying Odysseus turned into a horse that one time, I hate that story, except he doesn't say what the story is exactly. Listen, I gave up serious scholarship long ago and now I just believe everything I hear. Do not give this to any serious scholars to read unless they promise to read this footnote first and set their expectations accordingly.
[3] like so:
(Odilon Redon, portrait of Odysseus)