Nausikaa and the Word that Must Not Be Spoken: A Reading of Homer's Odyssey, Book Six

Abstract

Nausikaa and the Word that Must Not Be Spoken: A Reading of Homer’s Odyssey, Book Six NORMAN AUSTIN The Odyssey is a mystery drama from start to finish. When the poem begins, Odysseus is lost, and in every conceivable way. He is lost to his family and friends, lost to the comrades with whom he fought side by side at Troy, lost to himself, lost even to the gods; or, if not lost, then forgotten . He is sequestered somewhere at the extremity of the world, far beyond human traffic, beyond even the pathways of the gods. He has disappeared, concealed by the nymph whose very name means “I shall conceal.” Odysseus is invisible , even to himself. The mystery begins with the first word of the poem: ἄνδρα (man). “Man, sing in me, Muse.” What a banquet of semiotic delights is spread before us with this one word. Man! We might expect a name to follow this announcement of the poem’s theme, but once we have missed our opportunity to name this man, Homeric diction makes it difficult to insert the desired name into the sentence. The word “man” has its own set of formulas, and the name “Odysseus” has its own cluster of formulas, and the two clusters do not interact; each must be deployed in its own separate context. The significant point here is absence. Just as Odysseus is absent, so also is his name. Reading forward in the poem, we recall that this man gave away his name; or rather, he threw it away, when he had escaped from the Cyclops’ cave in book 9. Who can forget that the hero of this epic is the man who claimed that he was a man without a name. The absent arion 25.1 spring/summer 2017 name is established at the beginning of the poem as one of the poem’s great mysteries; indeed, as the mystery that encloses all the other mysteries that guide us toward a definition of this man. Here is a capital opportunity for our grammatologists to beat every bush to flush out the name that loves to play hide and seek.1 The poem’s invocation, having misplaced the name of its hero, must make do with a descriptive epithet, πολύτροπος (polytropos), “much turning,” or “turning this way and that,” and then adds a sentence to explicate this unusual epithet , “Sing, Muse, Man, much-turned (or much turning), who saw human cities and came to know mind” (noos in Homeric Greek, nous in later Attic Greek). This epic thus announces its theme in a sentence that begins with “Man” and ends with “mind.” Those of us who learned Greek will recall that these positions in a sentence, the first and the last, receive the greatest emphasis. The syntax of this opening sentence makes Man and mind virtually interchangeable. Here at the very fountainhead of our Western consciousness, the external is a metaphor for the internal. The poem announces at the outset and in the boldest font, that this is the epic of mind. We might expect that this poem, having evaded the name of its hero in the opening sentence, would surely proceed to give us the name in the second sentence. But no, the proemium, as we call the introduction, meanders, as if imitating its hero, one hexameter after another in search of his name. How different is the opening of this epic from the opening of the Iliad. That poem hurls us with furious energy into the fray with its first verse. Its hero stands before us without equivocation, ambiguity, or hesitation: “Wrath, O Muse, sing, of the son of Peleus, Achilles.” It is as if we had walked into a gallery, and there, confronting us in the middle of the room, is the man himself, larger than life, as formidable as a statue by Pheidias. The proemium of the Iliad identifies Achilles in the first verse, and then also ends (v. 7) with his name. In between these two names the proem dwells nausikaa and the word that must not be spoken 6 on his wrath (his menis) and its effects. If Odysseus is Absence, Achilles is Presence. The Achilles of...