HUMA 1105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Epic Poetry, Odysseus, Simile
22 Jan 2019
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Recap
Introduce us to see the situation at home where penelope is being besieged by all the
suitors. Her young son telemachus is in identity crisis. Social or domestic chaos that is in
oikos in odysseus family.
Then we travelled to ogygia island of calypso, he was as an unwilling partner of a goddess.
Book 5 of odyssey was him being released from prison and into the world
Him leaving the island is the narrative of one man’s journey
To go home - nostos.
Nostos- quest to go home and be safe again
To conclude your journey and be celebrated for all the things you accomplished.
A way to reintegrate back to a civil society ‘where you are not killing
A way of transition from an inflamed bloody war in troy as he travels back to a quieter world
in his home in Ithaca.
He is lost.
He has travelled beyond the borders of a human world
He stays for 7 years cast away on this island no social contact, in isolation.
Story time
Epic poem - long story
Unidentified narrative,
We will have odysseus telling us the story however in book 9
He was sailing with a dozen ships in gold and slaves from Troy
How did he go from ultimate triumph to naked man ?
We will find out this mystery by hearing odysseus talk about it from books 9 -12
In a flashback , how he ended up with nothing,
Odysseus is wryly man, complicated, he is a liar he tells and pays tricks and things that are
not true
The poem is asking us to listen to the story and to kind of consider the story- is it true? is it
one man's skewed perspective? Are we being beguiled by this brilliant charismatic deadly
storyteller? The way the language?
the story-telling is slippery in this text.
we have people telling us all the time who they are and where are they coming from.
But the poem is always asking us to say is this true , how do i know, who is telling me the
story and why,,
Watch slipperiness of language
Second thing is to know the idea that we are going to rehearse this conflict between two
cultures.
Odysseus is our guy, we see from his eyes who travels and everytime he lands on shore if
encounters another group of people. Some are similar to odysseus , they have same rituals
and same god. However, others are different.
The poem stages and asks us to play with this idea.who am i and who are you, whats is the
nature of your community etc.
Safety is most important thing.
Odysseus is a survivor.
He is a vulnerable person, We saw at end of book 5 two wonderful similes describing him
Where he is clinging to the rock like an octopus. From lines 487-490 described the similes
where he scrapes himself with leaves in an unknown shore, described like an ember, a
burning spark.
He is hanging on by a thread
We are staging vulnerability in terms of cultural contact.
Two people, two communities, comes into contact, there is always some element of
danger, recognition and some element of conflict.
When odysseus starts to talk about his journey he will keep hearing how he almost got
home, all the women that were almost like penelope, but not.
Books 6,7,8
We are introduced to new characters called the Phaeacians. They Live on an island called
skuria. Scholars think that it could be up in the atlantic, somewhere in crete or maybe close
to his home, because he was blown close to this home at some point.
We know now that he is washed up with nothing, no resources or clothes,
Sort of like a baby. Washed ashore, sort of like a brand new life.
Reborn out of the sea. He is in state of vulnerability.
We see athena stepping in and help him negotiate a safe landing through done Naesica
whos this young phaeacian unmarried girl.
The phaeacians are civilised not in objective sense but Odysseus recognises a sense of his
own culture in them.
They have same agriculture, the vine, the fruit, they live in palace, they have family units,
they eat the same food. Recognisable to odysseus in terms of his culture,
However there is something magical or mysterious about them.
They used to live next to cyclops, they chased them away so they removed themselves,they
isolated themselves. They are an entire isolated society.
They have no contact with outsiders, they are surrounded and cut off by sea, another culture
for purpose of fiction of the epic are highly concentrated and separated off from any
kind of cultural intermixing.
We focus on nestica, kings daughter, first thing we see is her room.
poem asks us to consider a possible match between nelsica and odysseus, she is a
girl about to be married.
Athena wakes her up, she should go and wash her clothes surely someone wants to court
you.
She wakes up she is ready to go laundry and asks her dad to take the car.
We have here a situation where a young girl is going outside. When a virgin girl travels
beyond the walls of the city or their settlement they are going out to potential vulnerable
spot.
Like Persephone out in the woods in the wild.
Neslica wants to go out in the wild and meet someone, in this case it is in the beach. The
beach is a very interesting place,it's very dangerous, it's a place where you are open for
attack from the sea.
It's a big deal for nestica to take the car from her father because these women are travelling
outside the safe space of their oikos.
but we like her for a potential partner for Odysseus, because when she asks her dad for the
car, she tells him that he should wash his clothes too since he has a lot of meetings and
some of his sons are getting married. Clearly she has a sort of agenda on her mind.
She wants to wash her on wedding clothes, she is manipulating him, not telling him the
truth.
So our first scene of nausica is that she says one thing and thinks another.
To us it's not necessarily a bad quality, it's something we admire in our hero
odysseus.
Naked man holding a stick on the beach in front women, it's a highly sexualised scene
where there is potential mating.
Document Summary
Introduce us to see the situation at home where penelope is being besieged by all the suitors. Her young son telemachus is in identity crisis. Social or domestic chaos that is in oikos in odysseus family. Then we travelled to ogygia island of calypso, he was as an unwilling partner of a goddess. Book 5 of odyssey was him being released from prison and into the world. Him leaving the island is the narrative of one man"s journey. Nostos- quest to go home and be safe again. To conclude your journey and be celebrated for all the things you accomplished. A way to reintegrate back to a civil society where you are not killing. A way of transition from an inflamed bloody war in troy as he travels back to a quieter world in his home in ithaca. He has travelled beyond the borders of a human world.
