Resolving an enigma means shifting it to a higher level, as the first drops away. The Sphinx hints at the indecipherable nature of man, this elusive, multiform being whose definition cannot be otherwise than elusive and multiform. Oedipus was drawn to the Sphinx, and he resolved the Sphinx’s enigma, but only to become an enigma himself. Thus anthropologists were drawn to Oedipus, and are still there measuring themselves against him, wondering about him.
Oedipus was the unhappiest of the heroes and the most vulnerable, but he was also the one who took a step beyond the other heroes. The hero’s relationship with the monster is one of contact, skin against skin. Oedipus is the first not to touch the monster. Instead he looks at it and speaks to it. Oedipus kills with words; he tosses mortal words into the air as Medea hurled her magic spells at Talos. After Oedipus’s answer, the Sphinx fell into a chasm. Oedipus didn’t climb down there to skin it, to get those colorful scales that allured travelers like the rich clothes of some Oriental courtesan. Oedipus is the first to feel he can do without contact with the monster. Of all his crimes, the most serious is the one no one reproaches him with: his not having touched the monster. Oedipus goes blind and becomes a beggar because he doesn’t have a Gorgon on his chest to defend him, doesn’t have the skin of a wild beast over his shoulders, doesn’t have a talisman to clutch in his hand. Words grant him a victory that is too clean, that leaves no spoils. And it is precisely in the spoils that power resides. The word may win where every other weapon fails. But it remains naked and solitary after its victory.
With Oedipus, monster slaying splits in two: on the one hand, we have a perfectly conscious slaying, that of the words that destroy the Sphinx; on the other, a perfectly unconscious slaying, when Oedipus kills Laius in a brawl between travelers. From then on the lucidity we associate with consciousness is turned inside out in a way that can only bode ill. This is the monster’s revenge. The monster can pardon the hero who has killed him. But he will never pardon the hero who would not deign to touch him.
XI
(photo credit 11.1)
THE LONG CHAIN OF THOSE STORIES THAT predate history, and of which the Iliad and the Odyssey form a number of links, opened with the copulation of Uranus and Ge and closed with the death of Odysseus. The circle opened with the mingling of earth and sky and closed with a paltry brawl, a fatal accident, as, in a foreign land, the young Telegonus unknowingly kills his father, the old Odysseus, with the sting of a devilfish. After Odysseus, our life without heroes begins; stories are no longer exemplary but are repeated and recounted. What happens is mere history.
Partly because he is so near the boundary, so near the point where the circle closes, Odysseus is the hero who most often tells stories. The circle began with the majestic and suffocating obscurity of the world’s origins, commanding silence; it ends with this warrior disguised as a Phoenician merchant, who some suspected of being a Phoenician merchant disguised as a warrior. Odysseus invited irreverence, insinuation. Certainly he inspired less respect than any other hero. There were even rumors that he had been Homer’s lover. That was why, detractors said, the poet treated him so well, concealing many of his worst traits and even removing the figure of Palamedes from the Iliad, so as to leave no clue that might point us to his treacherous murder, set up by Odysseus. That was why he said that Odysseus had defeated the Sirens, whereas in fact — some sneeringly maintained — it was the Sirens who disdained this sailor, with his “squashed nose,” as being “past it, erotically speaking.” When, at the end of the Odyssey, Zeus has a temporary harmony descend upon Ithaca to wind up the poem, it does seem that the curtain is being hurriedly lowered before too many questions can be asked. But in the centuries after Homer, people would go on wondering about Odysseus, and question and answer would pass from mouth to mouth, as if in a long stubble fire.
It is part of the essence of Odysseus that he be the last of the heroes, the one who closes the cycle. Being the last, Odysseus is the closest to the life that will follow, a life never more to close in any cycle. His foot treads the boundary line. Thus it was not the Iliad, that erratic rock abandoned on the plain, that bequeathed us the multiform novel but the sinuous Odyssey: “a private not a public affair,” as Telemachus says of his search for his father. And yet, last among the heroes to return, Odysseus is also the one who right up to the end maintains his contact — and what an intimate contact it was — with the primordial powers who appeared in the first phases of the cycle. His wanderings were partly a compendium, a roll call, of all those beings and places that were already growing confused in many a memory, already being removed to the realm of the fabulous. With Odysseus they are present, powerful and whole for one last time, and in Odysseus they salute the last traveler able to see them with his own eyes and bear witness.
While Odysseus was still sailing laboriously back to his island, in the halls of the palace of Ithaca the bard Phemius was already celebrating the deeds of the warriors he had fought with beneath the walls of Troy. Almost everything was already words. Only one blank remained to be filled: the deeds of Odysseus himself, the buckle that would close the cycle. Odysseus, master of the word, was the last to have us believe that not all was words, for as long, that is, as his own sparkling haul of stories was still missing. After his return to Ithaca, after the Odyssey, man’s approach to primordial beings and places could only take place through literature.
Alone among the Achaean leaders, Odysseus keeps his eyes down. But not out of fear. While his gaze is lowered, Odysseus concentrates his mind, isolates it from all around in a way his companions are not used to doing, weaves a plot, gives shape to a mēchan
. He is the opposite of the man who is continually caught between the forces, machines, and mēchanaí of nature and of the gods. To their invisible tangle, Odysseus adds new mēchanaí, ones that he has elaborated himself. Now he has the secret, he need not merely submit to it. Thus he adds to the confusion of elements at play, then takes advantage of that confusion to elude the various traps. The frontal approach of the hero holds no attraction for him. Odysseus takes one step back toward the tortuous mind of Kronos, to get the run-up he needs to leap beyond the heroes. When the heroes are dead, or obsolete, Odysseus will still be looking out to the sea he expects will be the death of him, still dreaming of setting sail again, perhaps toward that land where men know nothing of the sea.