Odysseus in America (20 page)

The
Iliad
was a masterpiece by artists who themselves personally had “been there, done that” in war and sang about it for their comrades. I believe that the first customers or audience for the
Iliad
were other combat veterans whose wealth and political legitimacy as leaders of an emerging
polis
(“city-state”) were based on their
personal
accomplishments in military prowess and “counsel”—i.e., good tactical and strategic advice. These leaders also had the resources to pay the bards. In this scenario, the audience for the
Iliad
was both the product of and advocate for meritocracy. The people in charge, those getting the most honor and most rewards, had gotten there by showing themselves to be “the best” through their own achievements.

However, an alternative system of fixed, inherited
¹³
status hierarchy was known and available in the world of the
Iliad's
performers and audiences. That's what Agamemnon stood for and embodied as the king of Mycenae. It is reasonable to expect that they were also aware of hereditary monarchies in Egypt and Asia Minor.
¹⁴
Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus were not only “old money” and “royals,” their supporters such as Odysseus also proclaimed divine sanction for their preeminence (e.g.,
Iliad
2:214ff and 236ff, Fagles). These two settings,
polis
and aristocratic court, shaped the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
respectively, according to my speculation, and both poems were performed in both settings by the same itinerant combat-veteran bards.

The
Iliad
painted a very unflattering portrait of Agamemnon and the fixed aristocratic hierarchy.
¹⁵
I imagine the meritocrats lapping it up. Achilles, with whom the meritocrats identified, shines by comparison. In the
Iliad,
Odysseus is Agamemnon's lapdog, carrying out, justifying, and when possible repairing the damage from his boss's caprices. Neither epic shows much interest in a nonelite
dēmos,
the tensions being played out between two competing elites. Members of the meritocratic elite saw themselves as fundamentally one another's equals, who struggled among themselves for
timē,
that is, for status or honor.
¹⁶

However, from roughly 800 to 500
B.C.E.,
the bards who performed the
Iliad
had a
second
customer base made up of those very royals who looked so bad in the
Iliad.
The
Odyssey's
Phaeacian court may be an idealized picture of these royals.
¹⁷
Greece and the Ionian coast were a patch-work
of polis
and monarchy, constantly at war with each other in constantly shifting alliances, with city-states and monarchies sometimes experiencing revolutions from one form into the other.

What's missing from the courtly picture of the make-believe Land of the Phaeacians in
Odyssey
6-13 is the high-performance soldiers who in the real world would have fought its battles and kept it in power.
¹⁸
These same soldiers, fifty miles away, could have been meritocratic leaders of a
polis,
or formerly were such, but had hired out to a king. My just-so story has the same bards circulating between
both
settings. The same seen-the-elephant veterans were present in both settings—as the leaders and bill payers in the
polis,
and as subordinate retainers to the bill-paying kings in the courts. (A veteran who has actually been in combat, not having served only in peacetime or only in the rear during war, is said to have “seen the elephant.”) The great performers played both venues.

This just-so story relates to the present allegorical reading of the
Odyssey
in the following way: in the kings' courts I imagine the bards playing to
two
audiences—the paying audience of rich, Phaeacian-like royals and a wink-and-a-nod audience of former or current fighters in their court who
have
seen the elephant. I imagine a poet winking at some of the grizzled veterans in the course of a performance, much like the veteran in Sonny Hoffman's “The War Story” (quoted above at the beginning of the Sirens chapter) might have winked at another G.I. Bill veteran in the classroom when he said that two amoebae had carried off his buddy in Vietnam. I believe the dual audience for the
Odyssey
gives it its distinctive character.

In the
Iliad,
the gods are arbitrary, heartless, capricious, and unconcerned with justice. The combat vets of the Homeric poets' original audience had no need or desire to justify the ways of the All-Powerful, or the very powerful, to man. To them, the idea of divine justice was a joke. In my clinical practice, veterans of prolonged combat mostly found that the chaos and rolling dice of war made such an idea absurd. However, in a royal court, I speculate that the bards (like Odysseus among the Phaeacians) had to watch their step and play to the ideological self-justification of the kings and their gods. The
Odyssey
proclaims the justice of the gods (and by association the kings who claimed divine descent or saction), and proclaims that if anything went wrong in one of the king's wars, the enlisted men were to blame.
¹⁹

When the bards sang in court, the royals would not have noticed that the bards
showed
Odysseus to be at fault, as long as they loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that someone else was to blame. For this audience, Homer adopts Odysseus' perspective, which is that of the kings. But the old veterans would have noticed and smiled their wry smiles.

If we accept this tension between the powerful paying audience of complacent
hereditary kings and the wink-and-a-nod audience of old veterans listening in the shadows of the great hall, the
Odyssey
can be seen as an
ironic
allegory of exactly what it says it is, a veteran's homecoming. It is entertainment for the royals, and communalization for the veterans.

Odysseus awakes from his pious nap with a sense of dread and hurries back to the sun god's beach where the ship is hauled up. He can smell roasting beef even before he sights the ship. He scolds and upbraids his crew, but the damage is done. The god's sacred cattle lie dead next to the roasting pit. The cuts of meat sizzling on the spit moo spooky reproaches at them all.

Meanwhile on Mount Olympus, the sun god rants and threatens Zeus with cosmic consequences if he doesn't take action. A week later, Zeus quiets the winds that pin Odysseus and his crew to the shore. Like a shot, the men get the boat launched, rigged, and out to sea toward home.

Once they're beyond sight of land, Zeus maked the good on his promise to the sun god and build a giant thunderhead above the ship. The squall hits, shredding the sail and rigging, toppling the mast, then blasting the hull with a giant thunderbolt. Everyone who is not killed outright is drowned in the waves—except for Odysseus. He improvises a life raft from the mast and keel, hanging on till the squall passes. But a powerful wind springs up blowing him back, back—to the narrows between Scylla and Charybdis! Just as the giant whirlpool seizes his raft, Odysseus grabs for the branch of an ancient fig tree overhanging the strait.

like a bat I clung … for dear life—not a chance
for a good firm foothold …
But I held on, dead set …

(12:46ff, Fagles)

There's the image that interests me: the veteran clinging to sanity above the sucking whirlpool of rage and grief, fear, guilt, and despair—
and
of all the destructive ways that humans act on these vehement emotions. What's at the bottom of that vortex? Death by suicide, death from the myriad ways that drugs and alcohol can kill, death from risks gone bad—in fights, crashes, shootouts, falls, death from neglect of self-care, death as the end of a prison life sentence. Yet most of the veterans I have worked with have hung on, or they wouldn't be alive to be my patients thirty-plus years later. Like Odysseus, they are survivors.

Phaeacian Court

Raid on Ismarus

Lotus Land

Cyclops

King of the Winds

Deadly Fjord

Circe

Among the Dead

Sirens

Scylla and Charybdis

Sun God's Cattle

Whirlpool

Calypso

At Home, Ithaca

I believe that nearly every veteran who returns to civilian life after a long time in combat has moments in which he is afraid he is losing his mind. Let me be clear: not everyone carries permanent psychological injuries from combat, but I believe that everyone who makes the transition from battle to home—especially if the transition is made quickly—fears for his sanity at some point This may only be when he awakens from a nightmare, or when he notices that he senses danger around every corner.

The World War II generation is famous for its stoical silence on post-combat thoughts and emotions, a silence that has only recently begun to thaw. There are many reasons for the World War II veterans' spirit of stiff upper lip, or only-tell-the-funny-or-uplifting stories. That generation had spent their formative years in the Great Depression. Their generational experience taught them what Woody Guthrie gave voice in his mistrustful “Dodger Song,” which rings the changes through candidates, lawyers, preachers, farmers, and generals, calling them all dodgers.
¹
This bleak song not only doubts the goodwill and good intentions of society's power holders, but with the words “and I'm a dodger, too,” acknowledges the thousand little and large betrayals of “what's right” that poverty tortures out of the desperately poor. If Woody Guthrie reports truthfully on the Depression, the World War II generation did not go to war thinking itself all that righteous and pure, thinking that it had upheld every word of the Boy Scout Law, “Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, Reverent.” The World War II generation didn't expect as much fairness, rationality, or honesty as their children who went to Vietnam did. It's my impression that the films of the 1930s are full of crooked cops and corrupt public officials who mysteriously disappear from the films and television series of the 1950s that the Vietnam generation grew up watching.

The culture of the post-World War II period also conferred enormous prestige on the model of rationality recommended by the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics:
any
emotion weakens reason and virtue, so root out emotion from your soul. A story is told about General George C. Marshall,
possibly the most admired American of his generation. It goes like this: After some big news (perhaps it was the Berlin Blockade) a reporter asked General Marshall what his feelings were, to which the general is said to have replied, “You ask me about my feelings. I can tell you that I have no feelings on this or any other matter, except for those I reserve for Mrs. Marshall, which I shall not discuss.” I have been unable to verify this possibly apocryphal story, yet I tell it because it distills the Stoic posture toward emotion that ruled the imagination of American elites of that period. Veterans of the time were much more willing to embrace the norms of the elites than their sons were upon return from Vietnam. I speculate that the reasons for this are multiple. The fathers' generation found themselves getting richer in the 1950s than their youth had led them to expect and credited the elites for it; the sons got poorer than they expected and blamed the elites for it. The fathers feared being labeled Commies if they disagreed with the elites and self-censored; the sons had lost their fear and criticized freely.

A major unwritten chapter of the American history of World War II represents another factor silencing its veterans. I believe that the huge “neuropsychiatric” hospitals built by the Veterans Administration after that war loomed as a warning in the minds of World War II combat veterans: “If you talk about what's going on in your head, tell anyone the anger seething in your belly, or what's in your dreams, they'll put you away and you'll never come out.” Most of the story of these multi-thousand-bed hospitals, and particularly their impact on veterans who were
not
hospitalized there, has never been told.

By 1970, when the bulk of Vietnam veterans had already returned from the war, the situation for them was worse than it had been for their fathers, in terms of a supportive community in which to digest their experiences, because of the intense struggle over the wisdom and legitimacy of the war itself and how it was being conducted. So most veterans had to face their nightmares, their storms of fear and rage, their visitations by the dead, their lacerating guilt, alone. Many doubted their sanity and hung solitary above the whirlpool.

Much of what I have reported about veterans' guilt, both here and in
Achilles in Vietnam,
has pertained to veterans' moral anguish over what they did or did not do with regard to their American comrades. Horrific things done to enemy soldiers and civilians have great power to injure the
mind and spirit of those who have done them. The recent controversy concerning former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey's Vietnam service as a Navy SEAL brings many important aspects of this into focus.