In the earlier essay, my main focus was on how both the creator of THE ILIAD and his audience viewed such ideas as glory and the fortunes sent to mortals by the gods. THE ODYSSEY, though, sparks a different vein of thought.
On average I've tended to think of THE ILIAD as more grounded in reality. The Greek gods hover over the events of the Trojan War, subtly influencing the fortunes of the warriors on both sides of the conflict. However, it's easy to imagine the war proceeding roughly the same way if the gods never got involved. In contrast, much of THE ODYSSEY concerns Odysseus' adventures for a decade after the ten-year Trojan War, as he and his sailors attempt to return home but are delayed by all manner of supernatural beings. So THE ODYSSEY seems, from one standpoint, to be more in the vein of all later fantasy-romances, in that the hero's exploits are divorced from ordinary reality. Northrop Frye expressed a similar predilection in his essay "Mouldy Tales," quoted here:
...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme...-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.
I believe that Frye is basically correct about two opposed conceptions of literary experience. However, the actual structure of Homer's ODYSSEY is not nearly as invested in pure fantasy as one might think.
For one thing, the epic's structure mitigates against such investment. The first part of THE ODYSSEY focuses upon the consequences of Odysseus' long absence to his household on Ithaca. There his faithful wife Penelope continually puts off other noble suitors, while her nearly adult son Telemachus chafes at the suitors' abuse of the hospitality customs. The gods themselves are seen in Olympus, just as they are in THE ILIAD, but they're less concerned here with meting out merciless fate and more with assisting the hero in his troubles. Athena, more than any other deity, intervenes to succor both Telemachus and his father, but she doesn't produce a lot of extravagant miracles. Most of the really extraordinary myth-events seem to have happened long ago, like Menelaus relating how he wrestled the sea-god Proteus.
The second part of THE ODYSSEY contains all the metaphenomenal elements for which the epic is justly famous. The hero is condemned to be kept away from his home by the will of Poseidon after Odysseus blinds the savage Cyclops, though a lot of the beings he encounters-- a tribe of cannibals, sea monsters, the sirens, and two separate demi-goddesses-- impinge upon Odysseus and his men with no particular reference to Poseidon's will. Still, a lot of this fantastic material is played down in the Robert Fitzgerald translation, particularly the adventure of the lotus-eaters, which is completed in a few lines. Further, the reader does not experience any of these wild adventures in "real time," for all of them are related by Odysseus to his hosts the Phaecians.
Finally, the third part mirrors the structure of the first part: though Athena intervenes in very minor ways, the author focuses upon the realistic details of Odysseus' incognito return to Ithaca. Homer goes into scrupulous detail about the way ordinary life is experienced on the hero's island home, from the pecking-order of the local beggars to the way the household is run in Odysseus' absence. The final battle of Odysseus and his son against the villainous suitors is as bloody as anything in THE ILIAD, and the remainder of the novel concerns the hero proving his identity to his wife and his father through reference to their shared history.
Strangely for an epic with so much fantastic material, THE ODYSSEY seems to have even more investment in what Frye calls "life-like characterization," in part because the epic's concerns are so far from the world of warriors dying for glorious repute. I would agree with Frye that THE ILIAD is more openly "instructive" as to the ethical message it seeks to oonvey, and therefore the critic is justified in speaking of "Iliadic critics" as being more invested in "imaginative allegory." That said, THE ODYSSEY is not as deeply invested in what Frye deems the stance of the "Odyssean critic," in the "escapist" mythoi of comedy and romance. That total investment into the mode of the romance might actually be better represented by earlier epics like that of Gilgamesh, or later ones like the Argonautica and the Mahabharata.
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