Savitri

  VI

The Odysseus Theme

In a perceptive essay on 'The Odyssey and the Western World', George de E Lord has tried to delineate Odysseus as a middle term between the Achilles of the Iliad and the Aeneas of Virgil's poem. Between Hamlet, father, the old-world heroic hero who smote the sledded Polacks on the ice, and Horatio the self-poised humanist who is not passion's slave, Shakespeare places Hamlet, the Prince, who is both his father's son and the scholar from Wittenberg.⁵² At the risk of oversimplification, it may be said that heroes like Achilles (and Turnus in the Aeneid) fight for personal glory, while Aeneas is able to look beyond himself, and the present, and fight for a cause, and for a future. For a heroic poem, the Aeneid astonishes us by its sudden spiritual insights as, for example, in:

      First you must know that the heavens, the earth, the watery

      plains

      Of the sea, the moon's bright globe, the sun and the stars are all

      Sustained by a spirit within; for immanent Mind, flowing

      Through all its parts and leaving its mass, makes the universe

      work.⁵³

God's ways so obviously mingle with man's that, as one reads the poem carefully, one feels in Tillyard's words that, "the multiplicity of the different manifestations of the numinous in the Aeneid works powerfully in securing for the poem the variety necessary for the true epic effect."⁵⁴ It is George de F. Lord's thesis that, although Odysseus begins as a heroic hero not unlike Achilles or Turnus, his wanderings school him in adversity, give a new dimension to his understanding, and gradually change him into a humane hero not unlike Aeneas. In a way, the turning point in his life is his being cast on the shore of peaceful Phaeacia and meeting the naive and chaste Nausicaa. When he narrates his adventures, and more particularly when he

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hears Demodocus tell the story of the wooden horse and the sack of Troy, he feels almost as Bernal feels in Conquistador when he recapitulates the conquest of Mexico. What price glory! Isn't the mere warrior a destroyer more than a creator? George de F. Lord concludes thus:

This shift from power, which is accidental, to the principle of

justice, which is in the reach of every man, marks the extraordinary

 moral revolution which occurs in the Odyssey and in the character

of its hero... The power and excitement I find in the Odyssey stem

in large measure from its testimony to the birth of civilisation in

the emergence of charity and law and order out of the flux

of passion and aimless brutality.. .The historical circumstan

-ces of Odysseus' situation are so like ours that his restoration of

the waste land within and outside him has the deepest relevance

for ourselves."⁵⁵

      The whole point of the argument is that Odysseus is an evolving, not a static, character; he is ready and eager to experiment, to explore, to suffer, to change; it is only men like him that have the daring and the resilience necessary to carry forward the evolutionary destiny of man. Such are men of action doubled with thinkers, and they can even, if the occasion demands it, transcend both action and thought. It is not therefore surprising that Odysseus (or Ulysses) has become almost the archetype of the modern man. Tennyson's Ulysses first widely popularised the figure of the restless adventurer to whom ease is but sloth and who is determined "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield". The Poundian Odysseus of the Cantos voyages forth on the seas of the past, the present and the future, but the "swart ship" is seldom actually seen, it moves most of the time submarine-like under the water, but we are not long left in doubt regarding its reality. In his fine poem, The Sail of Ulysses, Wallace Stevens projects a "Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night/The giant sea", prospecting seas of thought, alone and unafraid:

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There is a human loneliness,

A part of space and solitude,

In which knowledge cannot be denied,

In which nothing of knowledge fails...

The right within us and about us,

Joined, the triumphant vigour, felt,

The inner direction on which we depend,

That which keeps us the little that we are,

The aid of greatness to be and the force.⁵⁶

It is the first step in wisdom to race beyond the blaze of action and debate and seek out the sanctuary of silent thought where knowledge reigns undefiled and proves the ready helper. What does is exceeded by what knows, and action on a sure and sound basis of knowledge will be true creation, and this is how man the thinker becomes "the waver/Waving purpling wands", the magician who creates out of chaos a dancing star. But what knows has in its turn to be surpassed by what is;-' the light of knowledge has to give place to the overhead illuminations, the utter Truth of Being:

Yet always there is another life,

A life beyond this present knowing...

Not to be reached but to be known,

Not an attainment of the will

But something illogically received,

A divination, a letting down

From loftiness, misgivings dazzlingly

Resolved in dazzling discovery.

There is no map of Paradise.

The great Omnium descends on us

As a free race...

      Always the cry is, in Eliot's words, not Farewell, but Fare forward! Leave the broken images behind; leave the symbols behind; leave "the rumours or speech-full domes" behind. In the realm of untainted sovereign Truth at last.

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      How then shall the mind be less than free

      Since only to know is to be free?⁵⁸

Such is Wallace Stevens' parable of the modern Ulysses' quest for freedom and felicity. The Ulysses myth has always proved a fecund source of inspiration to novelist and poet, and it seems to have (as George de F. Lord has affirmed) a peculiar relevance to the contemporary human situation. One of the latest variations of this tried old theme is Louis O. Coxe's sequence of six lyrics entitled 'The Last Hero', a series of backward glances at the life-career of Ulysses. When the hour of death approaches, Ulysses has no regrets;

      Ready? aye, always. Always at my side

      At kill or council, single eye that gathered

      The heat of heaven to fire what I said

      And did. Now let me die to what I fathered.⁵⁹

He has been ruling "this island sea-surrounded, free/Building, unbuilding", and now he is ready to go; he will become a ghost himself and haunt the places he has held dear. The prototypical picture of the heroic hero dying in ripe old age full of honour and years! But this is not how Nikos Kazantzakis, the great poet of modern Greece (and Crete), conceived the last years of Odysseus in The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, the immense epic which has lately appeared, twenty-one years after its first publication in Greek, in an English translation by Kimon Friar. It is a natural, even a logical, transition from the Cantos of Ezra Pound to the modern Odyssey of Nikos Kazantzakis.

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