In his recent review of my book on the Odyssey (BMCR 1991.06.13), Penelope’s Renown, S. Douglas Olson grants me the validity of only one “point”—the very one which, as it happens, he himself recently has advanced—namely, that the Agamemnon story operates as a disruptive alternative in the poem. Otherwise, he claims, “errors, omissions, and misstatements of fact” (373), along with “careless treatment of the primary text” (377) vitiate “everything else” I have to say about the Odyssey and about Penelope within it.
Ten of these “errors and misstatements of fact” are appended to the review; a few more appear in its body. As comparison with my text shows clearly, they are manufactured either by misrepresenting what I do say, or by construing differences of opinion as factual errors. I have appended below a detailed discussion which will show that the representation of my book in this review is careless and untrustworthy, and that in every case but one the alleged errors do not exist. What Olson’s string of allegations amounts to is this: one minor error of fact, a stylistic infelicity or two, some instances I might have included but whose omission does not materially affect the argument, and a major disagreement about the interpretation of Penelope’s representation in the poem. This certainly does not amount to “a careless treatment of the primary text” which vitiates everything I say about it. So why does Olson claim that it does?
Let me return to my opening observation. The operation of the House of Atreus paradigm in the Odyssey is not a “point” (373, 374) that I make. It is the backbone of a book which argues that this paradigm is the controlling narrative device of the poem. When the page proofs of this book were being returned to the printer last February, the 1990 TAPA arrived containing Olson’s article on “The Stories of Agamemnon in Homer’s Odyssey.” I saw immediately that we had covered the same ground, even to the point of a virtual duplication of secondary sources. We had cited the same lines of the text, and we had drawn many of the same implications from them, albeit in the service of entirely different interpretive enterprises.
Olson’s article aims to show that “Agamemnon’s death and the way it functions in the epic … becomes a paradigm not just of the saga of Odysseus and his family, but also of the complexities of the interrelated processes of telling and listening to stories” ( TAPA 1990: 57-58), and Winkler’s Actor & Auctor is referenced for terminology and inspiration. But Olson’s treatment is ultimately altogether conventional, restricting discussion and analysis to those points in the text where the Atridensage is mentioned explicitly, and concluding that “the Mycenean tales’ most basic and repeated function in the epic … is to create suspense and irony through a series of deceptive hints and foreshadowings, false leads and suggestive dead ends” ( TAPA 1990:70). My book goes well beyond this kind of theme-and-motif analysis, and expands treatment of the Atridensage into a narratological analysis of the poem as a whole. I may have done this well or badly, successfully or not, but I have done it, and in so doing I have completely reconceptualized the interpretive issue of the House of Atreus motif in the Odyssey.
Furthermore, Olson is concerned with “the poetic processes of manipulation of the expectations of an audience listening to an oral poem” (58; cf. 57, 63, 70), and with the “creat[ion of] suspense and irony” (70). I make clear my lack of interest in the functioning of audience reception (17, 17 n.26), and I also state unambiguously that “I do not regard the generation of irony … as an explanatory or interpretive principle that is sufficient to define either the meaning or the function of thematic and structural parallels” (17). So O.’s claim that his objections to my book “do not have to do with … methodology” (377) are disingenuous, to say the least.
I exercised the option available to authors in the final stages of production not to cite new work, because I could not do so without incurring prohibitive costs and seriously disrupting the production schedule. (In addition, it was not my judgment that this article added significantly to the literature on the question.) In reviewing my book, Olson did not have the same opening available to him. Once he took on the responsibility of the review he was obligated to acknowledge that we had simultaneously discussed the same set of texts, and to defend his reading against mine. He has not done this. Instead, he has manufactured a set of errors which do not exist, in the service, it seems, of an attempt to legitimize dismissal of an interpretation that seriously contests both the validity and the importance of his own.
Readers of BMCR unfamiliar with both texts would in fact have no idea that the article of his that Olson cites in his first footnote discusses in detail the same passages that make up the textual basis of my book’s central premise. And so they would have no way of knowing that Olson might have personal reasons for wanting to discredit my book. Fortunately, however, both sets of arguments are now in the public domain, and I invite interested scholars to compare them and to draw their own conclusions.
Olson’s scorched-earth approach to the task of reviewing other scholars’work—e.g., Gentili and Goldhill—does not, in my view, produce results that are useful, although they may be entertaining to those for whom Schadenfreude is still die beste Freude. But reviewers ought above all to feel themselves obligated to the highest standards of integrity and responsibility in reading and reporting. Carelessness in this regard does not bring credit upon an important new journal which has otherwise distinguished itself for its timely, judicious, and informative assessments of new work in Classics.