How Hard Is the Odyssey to Read

The term "classics" both refers to the written report of the Greco-Roman earth and summons the omnipotence of the word "classic." A archetype is a combination of the foundational, exceptional, and influential, something that, as Italo Calvino wrote, "has never finished saying what it has to say." A classic is something that you lot have always experienced, in another style, before you feel the classic itself. And a classic tin can often feel as if information technology has already been experienced for you. The wonder I experienced upon my first readings of Homer, in a college Great Books grade, was the wonder of beingness linked to a chain of readers more than a millennium long. It was a concatenation that I could concur onto, simply whose weight I felt in every line. As Calvino wrote, "If I read the Odyssey, I read Homer'southward text, but I cannot forget all that the adventures of Ulysses have come up to mean in the course of the centuries."

AN ODYSSEY: A FATHER, A SON, AND AN Ballsy past Daniel Mendelsohn

Knopf, 320 pp., $26.95

Some of the adventures of Odysseus—the clever warrior-rex who sacked Troy and spent x years outwitting monsters and surviving shipwrecks to return dwelling—are still fixtures of popular civilisation, identifiable even to those who have never read the actual poem. The Odyssey has exerted, and nevertheless exerts, an undeniable influence on storytelling. Information technology certainly would be hard to phone call yourself a serious student of literature without having read the Odyssey. It's i of those books that seemingly transcends appraisals of "like" or "dislike." It just is. The question: What does the Odyssey notwithstanding take to say?

It says a corking deal to Daniel Mendelsohn, a memoirist, critic and translator, best known for his 2006 volume The Lost, in which he spends years trying to uncover what happened to six family members during the Holocaust. Mendelsohn is besides a classicist and aboriginal texts permeate his piece of work. Whether he'south investigating man fantasies of robots, the controversy surrounding the burial of Boston Marathon Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, or his own double-life as a gay urban center-dweller and suburban father-figure, Mendelsohn often looks to the works of Ancient Greece and Rome to not simply observe answers to mod questions, but to demonstrate that the same questions existed thousands of years ago.

His new book An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic, does more than than reference classics. Here, the deed of reading Homer tests a father-son relationship, and the larger meaning of classics for modern lives. As a kid and teenager, Daniel—romantic, literary, esoteric—had difficulty connecting with his father Jay, a somewhat severe mathematician, prone to grudges (at various points, he broke off contact with both of his brothers). In 2011, Jay has retired and asks Daniel, now didactics at Bard College, if he tin can sit in on his Odyssey seminar. In high school, Mendelsohn senior had read Ovid (Oh-vid, in his Bronx emphasis), but stopped at that, about which he would often express regret to his classicist son. "Speaking in the slightly musing manner that he had," Jay would tell Daniel this story many times, "as if by telling it over and over again he might finally sympathise why the rest of his life had come out the way it had."

Jay's sense of failure comes as a surprise to the reader, given his response to the Odyssey. Sitting in the back of the classroom full of kids a quarter his age, Jay kvetches most how Odysseus is a lying adulterer, Telemachus an obedient weakling, and Homer merely incorrect well-nigh love, war and justice. To his son's annoyance, the other students occasionally concur with Jay. The characters and their actions, the students protest, are inexplicable and off-putting. Their comments, which at first seem so stereotypically stoner-freshman ("Yeah, it's weird that he kind of goes from zero to lx hither—ten minutes ago he was nobody") beguile a real feet. Presented with a work that they're supposed to place with, the students nervously stare into the mirror of The Odyssey and don't run into a reflection.

Mendelsohn Senior begins to capeesh Homer (and maybe his son) more after he and Daniel continue a ten-day "Odyssey Cruise" together, visiting Odysseus'due south various stops in the Mediterranean. The narrative isn't quite so straightforward. The book is divide into three main sections: The first concerns Daniel'southward childhood, the second the cruise, and the third a reflection on the cease of Jay'due south life. This tripartite structure mimics the Odyssey, which starts with Telemachus searching for his father, moves to Odysseus's accounts of his adventures, and ends with Odysseus'south return domicile to his wife Penelope and father Laertes. Woven amongst the sections are scenes from that Bard seminar, also as Mendelsohn's summaries and interpretations of the relevant Odyssey passages. The decidedly non-chronological construction isn't e'er successful—some shifts, especially within the aforementioned judgement, leave i feeling a chip nauseated, similar driving on a switchback road. Overall the scheme works, not because it's an imitation of the Odyssey, but because Mendelsohn is able to embed sure moments inside a deep context that, in a traditional narrative, would have come 100 pages before, and been long forgotten by the reader.

At the cease of the semester, Daniel laments that he "had never found a manner to persuade [his father] of the dazzler and usefulness of this keen piece of work, whose hero he nonetheless didn't observe very heroic, whose structural ingenuities left him common cold, whose famously fascinating protagonist had failed to fascinate him." Daniel's disappointment is double. Even so again the father fails to appreciate something cherished past the son. More disconcerting, though, is that an educated, successful man remains unconvinced of Homer's worth. In Mendelsohn'due south earlier works, classics slip in and out unhampered and unquestioned, like a friend with a cardinal to the business firm. In An Odyssey , a classic frames a story in which i of the characters is skeptical of the work's very value. Likewise creating page-turning narrative tension between the two protagonists, Jay's skepticism raises a question: What good are classics to a modern life?

An Odyssey hints at an answer, both when it is soul-stirring and when it is, on occasion, plodding. Which of these effects Mendelsohn achieves depends on whether he is engaging with the Odyssey or mimicking it. I ground down one-half a pencil underlining Mendelsohn'south cess that "the all-time teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that accept given him pleasure, also, so that the appreciation of their dazzler volition outlive him. In this way—considering information technology arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death—good teaching is similar good parenting." This emerald of an insight doesn't come from a close reading of Homer. It comes from Mendelsohn reflecting on his teachers after he himself has become one, one who struggles with the gap between his love of a piece of work and that of those effectually him. Many other jewel-like moments and meditations arise in a similar manner. Mendelsohn does not then much transmit the importance of Homer as the importance of loving something.

The moments in which Mendelsohn draws parallels between the Odyssey and his own life are, less fruitful. In one section, Mendelsohn relates how Odysseus is a "round" traveler (he started in Ithaca and comes dorsum in a roundabout way) to a moment when, as a kid, he and his father were stuck on a plane that had to fly in circles for hours before beingness allowed to land. The analogy is clever, merely also feels slightly empty. Looking to the Odyssey to give a memory meaning makes the memory seem weak, equally if resemblance to something greater and older was the most it could be. Mendelsohn seems to be trying to collapse the spacetime divide betwixt Homer's world and ours, to modernize the epic and make ballsy the modern. In comparison to those moments of beloved, though, these parallels feel perfunctory.

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The entire value of classical literature is often defended in terms of resemblance and inheritance. In 1991, in the pages of this magazine, Irving Howe defended traditional, Greco-Roman heavy "Not bad Books" courses, arguing: "Such courses, if they are to have any value, must focus primarily on the intellectual and cultural traditions of Western social club. That, similar it or not, is where we come up from and that is where we are. All of u.s. who live in America are, to some extent, Western: information technology gets to united states of america in our deepest and also our almost footling habits of idea and speech, in our sense of correct and wrong, in our idealism and our pessimism." Classics, he implies, are of public, not private, importance.

Talking of Americans as a homogenous "nosotros," and of homogenous origins, feels increasingly fallacious, of course. Even if ane agrees with Howe's appraisal of America, it falls into the familiar trap of "These books are our origins, therefore we seen ourselves in them, therefore they must hateful something." Quite often, Mendelsohn's students don't see themselves in the Odyssey. This should come up every bit no surprise, because the world of Homer—of all classical authors—is radically different than that of the twenty-outset century American reader. It's essential, I believe, to have, even rejoice in, this difference. The joy of reading Classics is the joy of the traveler, who enters a globe unlike their own and decides if this world inspires them. For some, like Daniel Mendelsohn, that foreign globe is a place they want to return to again and once more. For others, it is merely as well afar. Ultimately, the Classics will survive because of the love of the former group, rather than the fealty of the latter.

Should Classics still be taught? Of course. The highest compliment one can pay the Classics, however, is to admit that their strange beauty won't, and needn't, appeal to everyone. Rather than rock telamons that concur society up, Homer and Plato and Ovid are bodies that some embrace and experience, still, a heartbeat. Or, to use a more mod instance, classics are like The Grateful Dead. And we should all recollect what Jerry Garcia said: "Our audience is like people who like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who similar licorice really similar licorice."

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Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/145138/people-just-dont-like-odyssey

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