But strangely, Odysseus’ choice to be in the mortal world does not seem to imply any willingness to submit to the exigencies of change. The hero wants to maintain his dominant position in his household, not for a moment but for all time. His choice to be subject to age and mortality is presented as if it were itself a permanent fact, a choice that he might be able to go on making forever. The Odyssey thus makes a paradoxical set of claims about the possibility of permanence, either in relationships or in the lives of any individual person. Odysseus’ choice to be with Penelope is associated not only with an admission of human mortality, but also with its opposite: an insistence that a man (it has to be a man) might be able to claim or reclaim a permanent position at the head of his particular social ladder. Odysseus seems to be magically able to evade the pressure of time on mortals and rise above all challenges of circumstance.
Athena changes Odysseus into a weak, bent old man, as a disguise. But when needed, she changes him back into the physical appearance that is figured as his “true” self, a man of the utmost vigor, in the prime of youth. In real life, a man who had left home in his twenties, spent ten years fighting a war, and then another ten lost at sea, would be more likely to look wrinkled, bent, and old—especially in an archaic society without modern medicine, when life expectancy was far shorter than in most contemporary Western cultures. But The Odyssey insists that Odysseus is fundamentally unchanged by his adventures. Through his determination and smart mind, and with divine help, he can restore his marriage and his household permanently to the state that they were in when he first went away. Leaving Calypso is thus not only a choice to accept mortality and impermanence, but also, incompatibly, a choice to insist on the fantasy of permanent patriarchal dominance over a carefully regulated human household.
Odysseus is an odd figure to represent permanence, since he seems to be constantly changing—in appearance, behavior, and social role. He is able to be, at different times, young or old, strong or weak, a beggar or a home owner, a victim or an aggressor. What makes Odysseus special is that he is, to a far larger extent than most human beings, in control of his various different changes and manifestations. Gods can disguise themselves and walk unseen through the midst of mortals; Odysseus is able to do the same. He switches roles not only through the magical power of Athena, which transforms his appearance, but also through the magical power of his own words, through which he creates multiple different identities for himself.
Most of the epithets applied to Odysseus begin with the prefix poly-, meaning “much” or “many”: he is a figure who possesses many attributes, and possesses them intensely. Far more than other mortals, Odysseus is able to change himself to adapt to changing circumstances. A wonderful simile in Book 5, after Odysseus is shipwrecked and clings, just barely, to the rocks of the Phaeacian shore, compares his skinned fingers to the suckers of an octopus:
As when an octopus dragged from its den,
has many pebbles sticking to its suckers,
so his strong hands were skinned against the rocks. (5.432–34)
In archaic Greek lore, the octopus was known as the “boneless one,” the creature that (supposedly) survives hunger by eating its own tentacles (or “feet,” of which, luckily, it has eight). In the Homeric image, it is a creature defined by its tenacity. It is resistant to change (it has to be dragged from its den), but also changed by its altered environment (the sticking pebbles). Odysseus’ fingers are like the pebbles of the den, ripped by the octopus; but he is also himself octopuslike in his stubbornness, his power of survival, his capacity to adapt to new environments, his multiplicity, and his slippery, boneless, self-devouring ability to change. It is this power of self-transformation that gives him the ability to reinvent himself into the most marvelous persona of alclass="underline" the self he was twenty years ago, before he went to war. The ideal of total autonomy and permanent essence depends on the process of constant self-reinvention.
An essential aspect of Odysseus’ multiplicity is his rhetorical ability and capacity for deceit. He is able to spin tall tales, to take over from the poet Demodocus and tell the fantastic story of his own adventures as an entertainment for the Phaeacians. In Ithaca, he constructs multiple different autobiographies, usually claiming to have come from Crete—the traditional home of liars. Odysseus’ grandfather Autolycus prides himself on “telling lies and stealing”; Odysseus has inherited these traits. He is the hero who always has an answer, a solution, a fix, a good line, a quick reply to any challenge. He is the master of finding the right words in any situation.
Odysseus is in disguise in Ithaca and has to be recognized by a series of different characters in turn. The poem is virtuosic in its variations on the otherwise formulaic “recognition scene”—each character recognizes Odysseus by a different means, and each character recognizes a different Odysseus. Athena, who has no trouble recognizing Odysseus, begins the sequence in Book 13 by allowing him to recognize her and, in so doing, to recognize himself, as the man defined by cleverness and an infinite capacity for scheming and deceit. Argos, the old dog, recognizes Odysseus by his smell and remembers him as the vigorous man who took him on hunting trips. Eumaeus knows Odysseus as a benevolent owner, a quasi-family-member, who may perhaps reward his lifelong loyalty with a short period of freedom before he dies. Telemachus knows Odysseus as his role-model father, the man on whom his own honor and status in the world of adult men depends. Eurycleia, the old slave nurse, remembers Odysseus as a boy wonder, who killed a boar single-handedly even in his earliest youth. Old Laertes knows Odysseus as his son and heir; he is the boy who was taught to name all the trees in the orchard, and he is the man on whom the future of the whole estate depends. Antinous and the other suitors recognize, with horror, that the weak old beggar in their midst is actually a muscular, murderous fighter, the man who will slaughter them all.
The most complex and extensive recognition is that of Penelope. The process by which she comes to acknowledge the old stranger as her difficult, secretive, aggressive husband is extraordinarily long-drawn-out, and the exact moment at which she truly recognizes him remains a mystery—like so much else about Penelope. After the murder of the suitors, she is told by both Eurycleia and Telemachus that the strange old beggar is really Odysseus. To Telemachus’ irritation, however, she refuses to acknowledge him as her husband. “Cautious Penelope” displays her central quality by resisting any quick resolution. Perhaps she suspects or half-knows who he is much earlier than she admits; or perhaps she genuinely remains unsure about who the mysterious stranger is.
But if she does recognize him, or half-recognize him, she also manages to gain an upper hand in the relationship, provoking Odysseus into “proving” his identity. She tells the slave to make up the bed for him outside the bedroom, which devastates and enrages him: “Woman!” he asks, “Who moved my bed?” The bed, it turns out, is not supposed to be movable; Odysseus claims to have built it himself, using an olive tree that grew inside the palace as a bedpost. The bed that can be moved only by cutting down the trunk and destroying the structure is a metonymic symbol for the interdependence of the marriage and the house; the destruction of either means ruin for the other. Odysseus asks, in disbelief as well as horror, what “man” has moved his bed: the quasi-immovable bed represents a fantasy that it would be almost impossible for Penelope ever to sleep with another man. No other marriage would involve such deep roots.