American Odyssey?
MCDONOUGH, M.
American Odyssey? The return from Vietnam wasn't quite like Odysseus' return to Ithaca. BY CHRISTOPHER M. MCDONOUGH During the recent hostilities in Iraq, I suspect many of us closely followed...
...There is the poorly planned pirate raid against the Cyclops, true enough, but most bothersome to Shay is the episode of the Laestrygonian fjord, where eleven of Odysseus' ships are destroyed by giants (the two-eyed kind...
...In his clinic's treatment program, community and trust are emphasized as the paths for successful readjustment to civilian life...
...Certainly, to our way of thinking, but we are not Bronze Age warrior-kings in a work of fantasy...
...Though Shay displayed an obvious admiration for Achilles in his first book, in this new book he clearly dislikes Odysseus...
...All in all, Shay bends over backwards to exonerate the comrades...
...These men, 108 in number, have been occupying his house for many years now, and all of them would like to occupy his throne and bed...
...defeat in Vietnam...
...Eurylochus and the men choose to die by drowning rather than starvation, but Odysseus refuses this forbidden feast, opting instead to live...
...But while these literary luminaries faulted Odysseus for his guile, Shay focuses on his role as an officer failing in his duty to get his unit home safely...
...No matter what the Muse says, though, Shay contends that the comrades' disastrous end is in fact the fault of their commander...
...He cannot reclaim his home or kingdom so long as they're around...
...According to one etymology, Odysseus' name meant "the man of pain," a reference both to his own sufferings and to those he caused...
...In the epic's invocation, we read that Odysseus strove "to save his own life and bring home his comrades, [but] he could not save them from disaster, hard as he tried...
...If the Greek epics have any transcendent quality, it is because every age has its conflict to which Homer seems to speak so directly...
...If I get hurt bad it helps the nightmares go away faster...
...Ultimately, Shay's interpretation grows less out of Homer than out of observations like this: "The men I work with in the VA Clinic have vast stores of bitterness over being blamed for the U.S...
...He cites the testimony of a highly decorated sailor who, having never fully reintegrated into civilian life after seeing so much combat, seeks solace in masochism: "What happens is, I like pain...
...As well they should...
...Odysseus has shown us how not to return home from war," Shay writes, which is to say, alone and dangerous...
...The jungles of Vietnam are far away from the dusty plains of Bronze Age Troy, but in his 1994 study Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay cogently juxtaposed the one Asian war with the other...
...In this respect, the target audience for Shay's book is not students of ancient Greek literature, but the leaders of our military institutions...
...Yet it was their own recklessness which destroyed them all, the fools, who devoured the cattle of Helios the Sun-god...
...I imagine myself locking eyes with Odysseus," Shay writes, "perhaps in my office in the VA, perhaps across the table in the room where the veterans meet for their groups...
...Concerning this episode, Shay wonders why Athena couldn't "just go to his house and shake the aegis at [them...
...He is right that Odysseus occasionally exposes his men to unnecessary dangers, getting some of them killed as a result...
...No veteran should come home like this, and it is in our nation's interest that, rather than awaiting such ruinous aftermath, soldiers be instructed in the lessons of both the Iliad and the Odyssey—both how to fight when fighting's required, and how to come home when the fighting's done...
...it requires the hero's own bloody intervention...
...In this critical appraisal, Shay is bringing up the rear of a long anti-Odyssean tradition that includes Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, and Tennyson...
...So to square matters the poet got rid of the extraneous ships in one fell swoop...
...The book's real contribution is not as a description of Homer but rather as a prescription for homecoming...
...Simone Weil's profound essay "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force," for instance, read the Nazi occupation of France through a Homeric lens, while earlier the World War I poets had looked to the classics generally in framing their combat experience...
...I would have thought, before reading the book, that Odysseus might be a clear-cut case of PTSD, one who "goes off" and, in a fit of misplaced fury, kills the suitors who have overrun his home while he was gone...
...So what's the evidence for this dereliction of duty...
...But Shay condemns Homer's heartlessness here, and sticks up for "the lives of all those 'little people' [who] have been treated as just so many stage props, sometimes necessary, and sometimes clutter to be rid of because they're in the way of the Story...
...Frankly, it's disappointing to see the rich Homeric hero reduced to this tired Freudian chestnut...
...I'm asking myself, how did this level of mistrust and manipulation come to be...
...They feel that those really responsible have weaseled out of taking responsibility and the blame...
...We appreciate the epic's vast, even bewildering, cultural remove from us precisely in moments like the slaying of the suitors...
...As Shay shows, the world of those afflicted by PTSD is etched round with a hurt surprising in its scope and intensity...
...Nonetheless, Shay's desire to imagine a different ending to the story reveals the quality that makes him an expert healer to those suffering combat trauma— namely, his faith that even the most damaged veteran can return with violence avoided and dignity intact...
...Let's start at the beginning...
...But, as can be inferred, Odyss^-us in Am^irica is not a literary but a psychological study...
...Now, in constructing his epic, Homer had apparently inherited two storylines about Odysseus' return— one in which he left Troy with twelve ships, and another in which he was at sea with only one...
...Consider it from Odysseus' point of view...
...Aegis and thunderbolt—works every time...
...Based on his extensive work in this area, Shay advocates a series of measures that would foster such community and trust early in military training with the intention of heading off many of the causes of PTSD...
...The point is that Homer's world doesn't always feel like home...
...Granted, this is not Homer's most artful moment—even Homer nods, as the old saying goes—but these are fictional people, after all, and Homer has an epic story he's got to keep moving along...
...But here he maintains that the buck should stop with Odysseus, even going so far as to prepare a case for the hero's court-martial...
...Odysseus leaves over a hundred, and the message is clear: The king has returned...
...The critical moment, as specified in the invocation, concerns the sacred cattle, which Odysseus had been warned, and warned his comrades in turn, not to touch despite their desperate lack of supplies...
...In his earlier work, Shay argued that Achilles' indignant wrath against his commander Christopher M. McDonough is an assistant professor of classics at the University of the South (Sewanee...
...But no: According to Shay's diagnosis, he's just mad at his dad, who "failed to protect him from his villainous maternal grandfather...
...Shay is a psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston, where he has enjoyed great success treating veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the condition that was called "shell shock" in World War I and "nostalgia" in the Civil War...
...Machiavelli, a student of the classics, once noted that the effective ruler occasionally has to leave a corpse in the town square...
...The hero of the Odyssey is, in his estimation, "a sleazy ass-kisser," beset by "grim and despicable failures of leadership," to whom he tries to be fair, though "everywhere I turn I stub my toe on the defects of his character...
...Overkill...
...Agamemnon resembled "the first and possibly the primary trauma that converted subsequent terror, horror, grief, and guilt into lifelong disability for Vietnam veterans...
...If anything can be inferred from the introduction by Senators John McCain and Max Cleland, both combat veterans and members of the Armed Services Committee, it seems those leaders are listening...
...In his new book, Odysseus in America, Shay turns his attention to the experience of the eponymous survivor in order to discuss the ways in which warriors return to civilian life...
...What-if arguments like this make for poor literary criticism because they deny the poet the fullness of his point...
...Though the author begins to read the Odyssey "as an allegory for real problems for combat veterans returning to civilian society" (the italics are Shay's—the book is annoyingly littered with them), he soon starts to analyze the hero as though he were a real person...
...Homer's story does not call for Olympian "shock and awe...
...some of them have even plotted against the crown prince, Telemachus...
...Or she could ask her dad to land a thunderbolt in front of the door every time one of the suitors approaches...
...In Achilles in Vietnam, Shay employed the Vietnam-era slang REMFs ("rear-echelon moth-erf—ers") to describe the Iliadic gods who, at no personal risk, set the bloody events of the war into motion...
...So much wildness and so much violence, what am I missing...
...Shay doesn't discuss this passage, but this crucial decision—survival at all costs—is a part of the reason why Odysseus endures as a literary character...
...There is, sad to say, nothing new in these twin preoccupations: Literature in the West begins with Homer, whose Iliiad and Odyssey deal with the fighting of a war and the return home from it, respectively...
...When Keats first looked into Chapman's Homer, he felt "like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star'd at the Pacific...
...During Odysseus' absence, however, his kinsman Eurylochus convinces the men to kill a few of the cows and risk the gods' wrath: "I would rather die at sea, gulping down the waves, than die slowly here on this desolate island...
...BY CHRISTOPHER M. MCDONOUGH During the recent hostilities in Iraq, I suspect many of us closely followed the troops' progress on TV while simultaneously hoping that all would have a safe homecoming...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 38
