Friday
A couple of my students’ Odyssey essays have me thinking of times in American military history when Americans have gone off the rails. I think of Lieutenant Calley and the May Lai massacre, those who ordered the waterboarding of 9-11 suspects, and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, credibly charged with various war crimes but recently pardoned by Donald Trump. Wikipedia sums up the charges against Gallagher as follows:
Gallagher had been charged in September 2018 with ten offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice over accusations that he had stabbed to death an injured, sedated teenage ISIS prisoner, photographing himself holding the dead teenager’s head by the hair and sending the photo to friends. He was also accused by fellow Navy SEAL snipers of randomly shooting two Iraqi civilians: a girl walking with her friends on a riverbank; and an unarmed elderly man.
Following reports of American torture following the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, I recall a military official noting that the Geneva Conventions were in place to protect us from ourselves as much as from an enemy that may or may not abide by them. We ourselves require checks if we are not to descend into darkness.
The Odyssey has many images of monstrous darkness, perhaps none so horrifying as the cyclops Polyphemus. Because our monsters are always our own shadow side, the cyclops can be understood as the savagery that we publicly disavow and secretly recognize.
The Greeks saw themselves as more advanced than cannibalistic shepherds who don’t cultivate fields or construct ships. Spurning Zeus (law and order), Polyphemus worships only Poseidon (nature). When Odysseus asks him to honor the laws of hospitality as dictated by Zeus, the cyclops replies,
You order me to fear the gods! My people
think nothing of that Zeus with his big scepter,
nor any god; our strength is more than theirs.
If I spare you or spare your friends, it will not
be out of fear of Zeus. I do the bidding of my own heart.
The bidding of his heart takes him to a horrifying place:
Leaping
up high, he reached his hands towards my men,
seized two and knocked them hard against the ground
like puppies, and the floor was wet with brains.
He ripped them limb by limb to make his meal,
then ate them like a lion on the mountains,
devouring flesh, entrails, and marrow bones,
and leaving nothing.
It is not only Polyphemus who is associated with lions, however. As Walter Coker pointed out in an essay tracking nature similes, Odysseus too gets linked with the animal. This is what nursemaid Eurycleia sees after the killing:
Among the corpses of the slaughtered men
she saw Odysseus all smeared with blood.
After a lion eats a grazing ox
its chest and jowls are thick with blood all over;
a dreadful sight. Just so, Odysseus
had blood all over him—from hands to feet.
(Trans. Emily Wilson)
We see Odysseus preparing to do more of the same when he confronts the suitors’ families at the end of the epic:
They were desperate to save
their lives, and they turned back towards the city.
Unwavering Odysseus let out
a dreadful roar, then crouched and swooped upon them,
just like an eagle flying from above.
Walter noted, however, that a Greek value system exists to check an absolute descent into animality. Homer’s predatory images, therefore, often are conjoined with heavenly messages, as a higher principle asserts itself. This is especially true of bird omens, where the violence is superseded by a message of divine order:
Then Zeus, whose voice resounds around the world,
sent down two eagles from the mountain peak.
At first they hovered on the breath of wind,
close by each other, balanced on their wings.
Reaching the noisy middle of the crowd,
they wheeled and whirred and flapped their mighty wings,
swooping at each man’s head with eyes like death,
and with their talons ripped each face and neck.
An old man gifted with prophecy interprets the omen:
Now Ithacans,
listen! I speak especially for the suitors.
Disaster rolls their way! Odysseus
will not be absent from his friends for long;
Already he is near and sows the seeds
of death for all of them.
Walter was especially struck by the final showdown with the suitors’ families, in which we see Odysseus preparing his lion/eagle attack. If Zeus forestalls him with a thunderbolt, it is because the killing must end if Ithaca is to experience peace:
But Zeus sent down a thunderbolt, which fell
in front of his own daughter, great Athena [disguised as Mentor].
She looked at him [Odysseus] with steely eyes and said,
“Odysseus, you are adaptable;
you always find solutions. Stop this war,
or Zeus will be enraged at you.”
He was
glad to obey her. Then Athena made
the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace
for future times—still in her guise as Mentor.
In other words, a powerful animal urge has been trumped by an even more powerful signal from Zeus.
This final scene was key in Rego Jaquish’s essay as well. Comparing Odysseus with Batman in some of the Joker episodes, Rego noted that Joker ultimately wants Batman to descend to his level. He’ll do anything, including goading Batman into killing him, to accomplish this.
In other words, Joker is our dark side. As I noted to Rego, Joker wants Batman to become Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Although Batman sometimes enjoys the pain and fear of his enemies–in other words, he feels the Joker temptation–he ultimately refrains from killing, thereby saving his soul. Similarly, Odysseus abandons a blood lust, whetted by the suitor massacre, that could lead to interminable blood feuds. Odysseus is a hero because he listens to a higher authority at such moments, with Zeus’s thunderbolt functioning as a metaphor for internal self-governance.
It’s not only the military that needs self-checks on its behavior. In America today we have a president who wants to abolish anything that thwarts his primal desires. Our Zeusian thunderbolt should be the Constitution, the rule of law, governing norms, and our own consciences. Pray to whatever gods there be that they hold.