Snider, A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - I

From, Homer's Odyssey: A commentary
[Please note that the Table of Contents here published, is created by Elpenor and is not to be found in the print version]

6. The careful reader will also weigh the fact that Ulysses is now the story-teller himself. The entire series of adventures in Fableland is put into his mouth by the poet. Herein, we note a striking difference from the previous Book, the ninth, in which Demodocus is the singer. What is the ground of such a marked transition? Demodocus has as his theme the war at Troy with its lays of heroes, and its famous deeds; he celebrates the period portrayed in the Iliad; his field is the Heroic Epos, or the songs of which it is composed. But he cannot sing of the world outside of the Greco-Trojan consciousness, he cannot reach beyond the Olympian order into the new set of deities of Fableland. Ulysses, however, has transcended the Trojan epoch, has, in fact, reacted against Hellenic life and institutions, though he longs to get back to them, out of his alienated condition. This internal phase Demodocus does not know, it manifestly lies beyond his art. He does not sing of the Return at all, though Phemius, the Ithacan bard, did in the First Book. A new strain is this, requiring a new singer, namely the man who has had the wonderful experience himself.

The result is, another art-form has to be employed, the Fairy Tale, of which we have already spoken. The individual now turns inward and narrates his marvelous adventures in the region of spirit, his wrestlings there, his doubts, his defeats and escapes. For Fableland is not actual like Hellas, not even like Phaeacia; it is a creation of the mind in order to express mind, and its shapes have to be removed from sensuous reality to fulfill the law of their being. Such is plainly Homer's procedure. Once before he sped off into Fairyland, toward Egypt and the East, leaving Hellas and Troy behind, quite as Ulysses here does. It was the story of Menelaus in the Fourth Book, who also found Proteus and Eidothea, a new order of deities, though Olympus and Zeus lay in the distant background. Moreover, Proteus and Eidothea represent the two sides, the supersensible and the sensible, the latter of which must be transcended and the former grasped, ere return be possible.

Nestor also tells his own experience in the Third Book, but he keeps inside of Hellas and under the direct control of the Greek Gods. Hence no Faery Realm rises in his narrative, he needs none for self-expression. But Menelaus and Ulysses, wandering far over the Greek border, reach a new world, and require a new art-form for their adequate utterance. Especially is this the case with Ulysses, who has had a much larger and deeper experience than Menelaus, and who thus stands in strong contrast with Nestor, the old man of faith with his devotion to the old order, who has no devious return from Troy, and continues to live in immediate unquestioning harmony with the Olympians. There is no room in Pylos for a Circe or a Polyphemus.

Ulysses, therefore, having reached the court of Phaeacia, takes a calm retrospect of the past, and recounts the same to the people there; he comes to know himself, and he uses art for self-expression, not for the praise of the external deed of war; his inner life is the theme. In other words, he has become self-conscious in Phaeacia, he knows his own processes, and shows that he knows them. As already pointed out, this internal movement of his spirit is the process of the negative, he has turned denier of the old institutional order of Greece, and he has to work through into a positive world again, which he now sees before himself in Phaeacia.

To be sure, the self-consciousness to which he has attained is not expressed in the language of philosophy, but in poetry, in a transcendental Fairyland. There is as yet no Greek language of philosophy; a long development will bring it forth however; Aristotle will deracinate the last image of Homer, and leave the Greek tongue supersensible.

D. Snider
A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part I

Learned Freeware

D. Snider A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part I

Learned Freeware

D. Snider
A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part I