First published in German in 2017, this important work for Homeric studies will reach a wider audience thanks to this English translation, for which we must thank Princeton University Press. As the title indicates, it is a guide to reading the Odyssey, following a narratological method, and I believe I can say that it is the best book available on the essential text of Western culture that is the Odyssey.
It guides us through this reading in eight very dense chapters, which follow the Homeric narrative, highlighting the important episodes with great insight. The introduction first presents the whole, strongly linking structure and content, the “Homeric Question,” the formulation of language, and typical scenes. Next, Chapter 2 analyzes the first four books of the Telemachy as “Tales of the Father,” with Telemachus listening to the stories (of Phemius in Ithaca, of Nestor in Pylos, of Menelaus and Helen in Sparta), which raises the question of the “coming-of-age novel” (Bildungsroman).
Chapter 3 turns to Odysseus at the court of the Phaeacians, shifting from the role of listener to that of narrator (From Listener to Narrator): for it is indeed Odysseus himself who, after hearing the tales of the bard Demodocus, becomes the storyteller of his adventures in the Apologoi, the quality of which is explicitly praised by the audience, through the voice of the king of the Phaeacians, Alkinoos. Chapter 4 focuses on the character of Polyphemus (Book 9 of the Odyssey), showing the insertion of the Homeric narrative into the history of the great movement of Greek colonization and its very deep relationship with the visual arts through the analysis of vase paintings from the Archaic period that represent this episode.[1]Chapter 5 analyzes the themes of return, recognition, and narrative, which are central from Book 13 onward, emphasizing the aggression that a glance can constitute and the question of identity (episodes of Eurycleia, Penelope, and Laertes). A significant portion of the chapter focuses on the “Tall Tales,” namely the fabricated stories with which Odysseus successively answers questions about his identity. These stories are quite distinct from the Apologoi in their plausibility and are very different from one another, leading to a reflection on truth and falsehood, which in turn raises a fundamental question: is the Odyssey itself a tall tale? The answer is nuanced: the tall tales differ fundamentally from both the stories of the bards and the Odyssey itself in their specific purpose, which is not to entertain. They demonstrate that the opposition between truth and falsehood is not irreconcilable.Chapter 6 addresses the ethical dimension of the narrative, evident from the very first dialogue of the gods on Olympus in Book 1: Zeus’s speech in particular has been interpreted as “the first theodicy in the Western tradition” (p.218). The analysis of the relationship between ethics and narration subtly contrasts the composition of the Odyssey with the tragedy of human fragility in the Iliad, linking them to Herodotus’s vision of the Trojan War in order to refute any evolutionary hypothesis about the Greek worldview.Chapter 7, the last before the Epilogue, presents a crucial reflection on how to end a narrative, fully aware of what narratology has contributed to this field since and from Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967). Unlike the “open” ending of the Iliad, the Odyssey appears closed by its cyclical structure, with a double Ring formed by human and divine assemblies. But the prediction of Tiresias that Odysseus reports to Penelope in Book 23 takes us out of the circle, both on the temporal level (Odysseus’ future journey to a place where the oar he carries on his shoulder would be taken for a winnowing shovel) and spatial level (contrasting the space of wheat cultivation with that of the sea). Odysseus designates this journey as an “infinite task” (ametrētos ponos), which for Grethlein refers not only to the immensity of the journey but also to the fact that it cannot be contained in the epic verse (metron): “The Odyssey grants the audience the satisfaction of a rounded conclusion, yet also signals its provisionality.” (p.251). This final chapter opens with a fine comparison of the relationship between the suspension of narrative time and erotic desire, which involves Proust, the One Thousand and One Nights, and finally Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, the notion of reflexivity linking these major works together.The epilogue goes far beyond a mere synthesis of the whole, showing Odysseus’s tales among the Phaeacians as a demonstration of the means and functions of narrative, its possibilities and its limitations. It is not simply a device for integrating earlier events into the epic; rather, it is through recounting these events that Odysseus demonstrates his ability to overcome monsters and to transform from a nobody to a hero. The retrospective accounts of their misfortunes that Odysseus and Penelope share in Book 23 give them a form of control over events, seen through a distorted mirror. Despite their contingency, the events of the Odyssey are meaningful enough to give rise to a common noun to designate a series of extraordinary adventures: an odyssey. This allows the final pages to move on to the reception of the Odyssey, initially focusing largely on Pindar, Sophocles and Christian authors, then turning to Dante’s Inferno and its heartbreaking echo in Primo Levi, with the evocation of the number tattooed on the prisoner’s forearm becoming a sign of recognition of the trials suffered, like Ulysses’ scar: “Even though Homer creates a world that is alien to us, and speaks a language that is difficult to access, he has constructed a framework that enables even contemporary readers to grasp, contemplate and better understand their experiences.” (p.272). While accessible to the general public, the work is nonetheless grounded in impeccable scholarship. I will take just one example: the analysis by the scholiasts of the Hellenistic period, and then by the Byzantine Eustathius, of the end of the Odyssey (pp. 251-4): does the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope mark the end of the epic (telos) or is it rather its narrative climax? The author leans, with considerable nuance, toward the latter hypothesis.A brilliant and profound synthesis on the Odyssey’s reflexivity this work presents, in a way accessible to a wide audience and without unnecessary jargon, the various questions raised by the epic text, demonstrating a deep knowledge of the scholarship and theories it has inspired, particularly in the English and German speaking world. I noted the inclusion in the bibliography, among other works in French, of Gabriel Germain’s Genèse de l’Odyssée, but it seems to me that it is not discussed in the text itself. And while Dante and Primo Levi occupy a prominent place in the book’s conclusion, none of the Italian specialists such as Privitera, di Benedetto, or Nicosia are cited. Clearly, however, given the abundance of publications, one can no longer expect an exhaustive knowledge of the critical literature on such a work. In any case, the vision of the Odyssey that Grethlein presents to us seems to far surpass previous analyses.
Notes
[1] Taking into account both works on Greek colonization such as those of Malkin and those on vase paintings such as those of Snodgrass, Giuliani etc.