Billy Pilgrim first became unstuck in time while leaning back against a tree in Luxembourg on the wrong side of the German line following The Battle of The Bulge in December 1944. For the remainder of his life he found himself transported backward and forward across spacetime popping in and out of the linear frame into which the rest of us are locked. With the exception of some mild disorientation, which was not unexpected given his natural absent minded disposition, nobody else noticed. Sights and smells, and in at least one case, the song of a barbershop quartet at a party to celebrate his 18th wedding anniversary would send him careening off into a different time and place. Kind of a Quantum Leap vibe.
At least that’s the central conceit of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five. The reader is assured Billy bounces back and forth through a life that is both wholly remarkable and utterly pedestrian. Billy returns from his service in World War 2 and becomes an optometrist, marries the daughter of the man who owns the optometry school he attends, and his professional career is one of unrelenting profitability and expansion. His marriage is reasonably happy and stable, and his kids, while imperfect, grow up to be generally respectable adults. At the time of the novel his son is serving with the Green Berets in Vietnam. On the other hand he is the sole survivor of a plane crash which kills his father-in-law, and his wife dies tragically of carbon monoxide poisoning while rushing to be at his side while he recovers from injuries sustained in the crash. So it goes. Oh, and at one point he is abducted by aliens. Tralfamadorians, hyperdimensional beings who exist outside of spacetime as we experience it and who take him back to live on display as something like a zoo creature on their planet where he is mated with a former pornographic film star named Montana Wildhack.
The reader can be forgiven for a modicum of skepticism that these events account for what is often described as a masterpiece of modern American literature. Billy, despite being the main character, is mostly a blank. The Tralfamadorians are only given the slightest description, and their appearance and experience of time, or lack thereof, and its implication upon existence is mostly left to the reader’s contemplation. The “scientific” manipulation of this piece of science fiction is not given the slightest varnish of plausibility or verisimilitude and serves only to highlight the social, moral, and existential ground Kurt Vonnegut so desperately wanted to cover. Exactly what all great fiction does: explore the human condition without the weight and constraint of being 100% factual. The thing about Billy Pilgrim’s travels through time and space is that he is most frequently transported back to his time as a prisoner of war. He was captured shortly after he leaned back against that tree in Luxembourg. He walked for days through the freezing cold, spent weeks crammed into a boxcar so full of other prisoners that they had to sleep in shifts. He did a brief stint in a German prison camp, but was ultimately forwarded on to work in the city of Dresden where he was forced to labor until he was liberated at the end of the war.
From February 13-15, 1945 Dresden was the target of an extensive bombing campaign of allied forces that destroyed much of what was reported to be a once beautiful city. The strategic value of the campaign was a subject of debate even before the bombing started, and the number of casualties is disputed with estimates varying by an entire order of magnitude; the generally agreed upon number was at least 20,000 with some claiming numbers in the range of 200,000. Billy Pilgrim survived the bombings in a cold storage cellar beneath slaughterhouse number five where he and his fellow prisoners were housed. He spent the remaining months of the war digging through the rubble of the city retrieving the remains of those who were crushed, burned, suffocated, or otherwise perished in the bombings. He stumbled through the experience and continued on in his life rarely discussing his military service, capture, and time in Dresden. The one time he attempts to report on what he witnessed he is totally dismissed. As fate would have it, he shares a hospital room with a Harvard history professor writing a history of the U.S. Air Force during World War 2 who is trying to integrate newly declassified documents about the bombing of Dresden into his work while recuperating from a broken leg suffered while skiing on the same mountain in Vermont into which Billy’s plane had crashed. The professor flatly rejects Billy’s story of his experience and tries to convince the hospital staff Billy has gone insane. After that, Billy’s behavior becomes somewhat erratic, alarming his friends, family, and business associates. Nevertheless, he continues to tell his story, the one about the aliens and time travel, until his death. Billy Pilgrim is shot and killed by a man who was a fellow POW over a misunderstanding about the past. Billy always knew it would end thus, he was, afterall, a time traveler. So it goes.
During his most serene years, between the war and the plane crash that claimed his father-in-law and led to his wife’s death, despite being a time traveler who calmly anticipates his own death, a few unexpected things happen to him. In his final year of Optometry school, just before his marriage in 1948, Billy admits himself to the Veteran’s hospital in Lake Placid, NY where he shares a room with another veteran, Eliot Rosewater, admitted for similar reasons:
They had come here voluntarily, alarmed by the outside world… Nobody else suspected he was going crazy. Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine. Now he was in the hospital. The doctors agreed: he was going crazy. They didn’t think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
The symbolism of a father tossing his child into a pool and expecting him to sink or swim and later having the child stand overlooking an immense abyss is not what one would describe as a subtle use of symbolism in a novel about a generation of young men sent to war involving amphibious invasion, massive air raids, death camps, and atomic bombings.
Later, at his eighteenth wedding anniversary party a barbershop quartet is singing a rendition of a song called “That Old Gang of Mine”:
‘Gee’, that song went, ‘but I’d give the world to see that old gang of mine’. And so on. A little later it said, ‘So long forever, old fellows and gals, so long forever old sweethearts and pals- God bless’em – And so on. Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords- chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack. He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack, and Billy seemed to confirm this by going to a chair and sitting down haggardly. There was silence. He could find no explanation for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.
To a reader in the 21st century Slaughterhouse Five may seem quaint or a bit too obvious. Billy Pilgrim is suffering from PTSD. Over a very short time he transforms from a 19 year-old civilian attending Optometry school to a soldier destined for the front lines, while in basic training his father dies, he is shipped to the front improperly attired, he doesn’t have boots or a coat, his unit is abandoned when the majority of allied troops fall back, trapped behind enemy lines, captured by NAZIs, he endures extreme privation of a forced march and transit through German territory crumbling under the weight of a losing war effort, has bombs dropped on him by his own side, and then spends months in the land of the dead. That’s a lot for anyone to take, much less a 19 year old. Many endured the same or worse in World War 2, but that doesn’t change the fact that the sequence of events is traumatic. His voyages across space and time are almost universally triggered by sensory input that brings him back to Germany. The diagnosis and its relationship to his wartime experience is obvious to all but the most boneheaded teenagers forced to read this book in high school. It seems completely unrealistic the VA doctors, of all people, would have missed this. Except for the fact that the formal description of PTSD was not made until 1980.
“Soldier’s heart”, “melancholia”, “shell shock”, “war neurosis”, “battle exhaustion”, “old-sargeant syndrome”, and “battle fatigue” among others had all been used to describe symptoms like social withdrawal, “excessive emotionality”, tics, tremors, nightmares, and poor concentration since the civil war. My personal favorite term is “nostalgia”, something I’ll get back to in a bit. Various causes: carrying heavy packs, insufficient time to acclimate to battle, soldiers harboring unrealistic and romantic notions about the nature and conduct of war, or an inability to cope were all hypothesized causes of these syndromes. You’ll notice these causes tend to place the fault or deficiency on the person suffering, as though having bullets, artillery projectiles, and bombs coming at you at rates exceeding the speed of sound is the sort of thing for which a human SHOULD have a reasonable set of coping mechanisms. Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is considered unreasonable for not wanting to fly bombing missions because he claims the Germans are trying to kill him. He’s admonished that the bullets, flak, and anti-aircraft artillery rounds are not aimed at him personally and that they’re trying to kill everyone on the planes he is flying. This line of reasoning is somehow supposed to allay his concerns. The crucial dataset prompting the definition of PTSD came from The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey whose collection and interpretation wasn’t complete until 2013. The bottom line is that medicine and our society didn’t formally accept the connection between traumatic events and these symptoms for a very long time. The truth is while we may accept the cause and effect relationship and diagnosis in the abstract many struggle to accept it in themselves and others when we actually encounter it. We may seek and may often believe we find faults and weaknesses to explain why we ourselves or someone else can’t “just get over” a traumatic event. There’s plenty to be said for perseverance and developing grit and resilience, but it seems to me a part of the process of developing resilience is a realistic assessment of where you’re at and coping with the reality of your situation, and if your situation is that you haven’t been able to process the violence of war and your associated personal trauma, then maybe you should start there, but that’s just my amateur assessment.
It seems as though that’s what Kurt Vonnegut had to do. Slaughterhouse Five is based upon his own experience at the Battle of the Bulge, time spent as a POW, and survival of the bombing of Dresden. In the first chapter of the book he discusses how he spent 25 years telling people he was working on a story about the firebombing of Dresden. The posthumously published collection Armageddon in Retrospect attests to the many fits and starts he made over the years to tell the story from a variety of perspectives. I think it’s telling that his story found its way into print in the waning years of the Vietnam War. I suspect in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 nobody wanted a story about how terrible war really is. Everyone had already lived it, or knew someone who had. They needed and wanted no reminders. We had just defeated a great evil in NAZIism and with the looming specter of communism creeping around the globe anything that would dampen the martial spirit that we could, and for existential reasons, must prevail in wars both physical and ideological, may not have found a warm welcome. By 1969, following the stalemate in Korea, and in light of the quagmire in Vietnam, many openly questioned the wisdom of sending brave young people to foreign countries to engage in proxy wars for reasons that were primarily speculative, ideologically motivated, and devoid of direct threat to the lives and interests of American citizens. It appears we had become a nation that could discuss the financial, physical, emotional, and social costs of war. Some were ready to hear or remember what those who had been through it had to say. Kurt Vonnegut had also found his voice as a writer; by 1969 he’d published several other novels that bear his trademark blend of dark humor, whimsy, and in my opinion optimism. With classics like Cat’s Cradle and Mother Night under his belt he found a way to finally tell his own story through Slaughterhouse Five.
Even in the novel, the trauma, its effects, and the character’s coping mechanisms were masked as the science fiction and pseudo conspiratorial concepts of time travel and alien abduction. Billy Pilgrim tries telling of his experience as a POW only once and is dismissed. He is killed in Chicago by a deranged sociopath he met in the war, but he is only in that position because he had been invited to speak to a crowd at a convention about his experience of alien abduction. The message seems clear: nobody would acknowledge Billy Pilgrim’s wartime trauma, and nobody wanted to hear it, but crowds gathered to hear about his life among the Tralfamadorians. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut didn’t sell a straight memoir of his time at war, those versions went unpublished in his lifetime, but a science fiction version featuring aliens and a time traveling antihero won him enduring acclaim. This is not by way of accusation, it seems unnatural that an audience would gravitate to a story that dredges up the pain of horrible events of human slaughter and the fallout of war. If you want to make those ideas palatable for a general public you’ve got to dress them up. A journey to far away, exotic locations, lightyears away on Tralfamador, where the hero encounters strange beings possessed of inhuman powers, hyperdimensional aliens who transcend time, and no tale of exotic adventure is complete without temptation and seduction like an arranged coupling with an adult film star. Vonnegut used these timeless tropes of the hero’s journey, but they’re so thinly veiled as trauma responses we can see straight through to the darkness they are meant to conceal. The lies provide just enough cover that we willingly wade through the terror of the story, but there are little to no mental or emotional contortions required to understand the deeper meaning. It’s why the idea of letting boneheaded teenagers read it in 10th grade English class is somewhat controversial.
An interesting thing happened this spring. A friend mentioned he had just finished Slaughterhouse Five for the first time and he wanted to see if he’d missed anything. I hadn’t read it in 25 years, but remembered I’d liked it, and appreciated it anew when I’d read Armageddon in Retrospect about 15 years ago. I was in the middle of my second pass through Homer’s Odyssey at the time, and in considering both stories in parallel I had a somewhat crazy thought: what if we are meant to see through Odysseus and his fantastic tales the same way we see through Billy Pilgrim’s delusions of becoming unstuck in time and space travel? I’m told there was a genre of story in ancient Greece called a “nostos”, a tale of returning home. The Odyssey is often labeled as a story of nostalgia, literally a story about the pain of returning home. I promised I’d get back to it. What if the voyage and the pains Odysseus endured on his way home from Troy weren’t the ones we know best? What if the story is just as painful, but far less exotic? What if, for more than 2500 years we’ve been in a “The Usual Suspects” situation still enthralled by the fantastic tales Homer put into the mouth of Odysseus, meanwhile the bard embedded a simpler, darker truth in the narrative that you can only appreciate when you consider the harsh realities of the situation Odysseus navigates? I genuinely doubt Homer was some proto-Vonnegut anti-war polemicist, but I do think a slightly different perspective on the narrative breathed new life into the story, and helped me appreciate the traditional understanding of The Odyssey even more.
On what grounds could I possibly assert the idea that Odysseus and his story should be considered anything like Billy Pilgrim’s delusions? The Odyssey is perhaps one of the best known stories in history, how could I think I could see something that hasn’t been seen in all these ages? I’ll get to the first question shortly. My response to the second is that I don’t know if anyone has seen what I think I see in this story before. I haven’t heard this interpretation and I’ve listened to and read more than my fair share of lectures and interpretive essays on The Odyssey. If you perform a Google Search on “Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim, Odyssey”, you’ll find that just about every essay says something like “Slaughterhouse Five recounts Billy Pilgrim’s Odyssey from soldier, to POW, and return home…”. The Odyssey is so ubiquitous in western culture that anytime anyone endures a long/perilous journey it is the obvious allusion to make. Similar to my insight into Achilles as a model for moral injury, Jonathan Shay also published a book about The Odyssey called: Odysseus in America discussing homecoming and combat trauma in the US Veteran population, so the thought cannot be entirely original. What I haven’t been able to find is anyone making the comparison in the opposite direction: seeing Odysseus in the mold of Billy Pilgrim. Perhaps I’ve had an original insight, perhaps I haven’t. Perhaps this is so obvious to everyone else they felt no need to explicitly state these ideas. I honestly haven’t looked that hard because I want to see how well I can construct this argument without influence from others.
Returning to the first question: On what grounds do I offer the claim that one could reasonably compare Odysseus and his tale of homecoming to Billy Pilgrim’s delusions? The first hint that Odysseus is hiding something and his version of events may represent something like “alternative facts” comes from what we know about Odysseus. His most famous attribute is cunning. He’s a practiced liar. He develops the idea of the Trojan Horse, he disguises himself to deceive his son, his wife,m, and his most loyal slave Eumaeus. His lying is possibly compulsive; he presents himself in disguise to his own father for no discernible purpose after the dangers on Ithaca have already been defeated. Perhaps it’s all in jest, but the guy clearly gets a kick out of pulling the wool over the eyes of his audience.
If he is to be believed, Odysseus escapes the Cyclops Polyphemus because he lies to him about his name. When the monster is wailing in agony after having his eye skewed by a flaming spear and his fellow cyclopes ask “who has hurt you?” Polyphemus famously replies “Nobody has hurt me!”.
Despite repeated signs that the old beggar (Odysseus in disguise) is more than meets the eye: his thorough demolition of the younger challenger Irus, and unflinching resistance to hurled insults and objects, Penelope’s suitors never see through the lies Odysseus tells them when he returns to his palace on Ithaca.
His own wife knows not to trust him. After Odysseus has killed the suitors and revealed himself to Penelope, she refuses to fully acknowledge he is who he says he is and challenges him with a bit of secret knowledge about their bed. He’s done a very unique thing and built a palace around a living olive tree which he has carved to be a bedpost. Because it is rooted to the ground it cannot be moved unless it has been broken, altered, or replaced in his absence. Penelope asks that his bed be brought out of his chambers, and Odysseus loses it; he blusters about the impossibility of the act, thus confirming to her that he is in fact her husband. The default position when hearing something from Odysseus should probably not be credulity. Odysseus is famous because he is a clever liar, and only fools and monsters take him at his word. I’d like to think Homer wishes us to be neither fools, nor monsters.
The next piece of evidence comes from the context of when and where his most famous stories are told. When one thinks of the Odyssey, one thinks of Polyphemus, The Lystragonians, Aeolus king of the winds, Circe, a trip to the underworld, The Sirens and their song, the twin perils Scylla and Charybdis, the fateful decision to eat the cattle of the sun god, and sometimes an extended stay on the island paradise of Ogygia in the company of the goddess Calypso. That’s the adventure that’s been retold and recast countless times over the past two and a half millennia. The thing is that’s only a very small portion of The Odyssey. The Odyssey is composed of twenty three, perhaps twenty four “books”. Each book represents the contents of a papyrus scroll, the medium of storage at the time it was composed/recorded. My copy of Robert Fagles’ translation comes out to around 400 pages of text. What are known as “The Great Wanderings” the stories of the Cyclops, Circe, The Sirens etc. are contained in Books 9-12, about 75 pages, either way you cut it the most famous part of The Odyssey accounts for less than 20% of the story. The thing is “The Great Wanderings” are not delivered by the narrator. They’re a story within a story, something like bardic inception. At the beginning of book 6 Odysseus has washed up on the shore of the kingdom of the Phaeacians, and after a somewhat awkward introduction to the young princess of the island kingdom (book 6), Odysseus has been warmly welcomed at the palace (book 7), and without his hosts knowing exactly who he is, has been feasted multiple times, laden with gifts, and is about to be transported home to Ithaca when the local bard, Demodocus, begins singing about Odysseus and his companions of the Trojan war (book 8). Odysseus breaks down crying at hearing stories about his war buddies, and his hosts finally get around to seeking his true identity. He tells them who he is, and offers to relate all that has happened to him over the past ten years. What we most often think of when we think of “The Odyssey” is a performance for an audience who have been reveling in stories of glorious war victories, and they are subsequently treated to a tale full of exotic locations, fantastic, powerful, eternal beings, capped off by a seven year stint on an island paradise with a goddess who wanted to make HIM an immortal. Sound familiar? Perhaps, nobody celebrating the glory of victory wants to hear the painful truth?
The next reason to doubt the traditional understanding of Odysseus’ story of fantastic beasts and where they’re found is that he tells a different story just about every time he’s given a chance. Less than 72 hrs after regaling the Phaeacians with “The Great Wanderings”, Odysseus is back on Ithaca, in the hut of his most loyal slave the swineherd Eumaeus. After Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar, is brought into the hut, given fresh warm clothes and feasts with all the swineherds, he’s asked to tell his story and he replies “My Story – the whole truth – I’m glad to tell it all” (Fagles 14:220). For a variety of reasons, including the fact that we’ve made it through books 9-12 already, we’re predisposed to dismiss this version. It can’t possibly be the “whole truth” he’s in the middle of an extended deception to assess the state of affairs on Ithaca. Additionally, the story starts with his birth on Crete, so it seems reasonable to dismiss this story entirely. His tale takes him to the shores of Troy where he joins in sacking the city, and then we get to the parts that have an eerie ring of potential truth, especially as they parallel fantastic bits of the Great Wanderings we know so well. His post war voyages take him to Egypt, where his men foolishly attempt to plunder “lush Egyptian farms”, but are quickly overtaken and captured by Egyptian armies. This parallels the first encounter in book 9 when Odysseus and his men attempt to plunder The Cicones and an army sweeps in killing 72 of his men. In the version the Phaeacians got Odysseus and 500 of his men escape, but in this version he is taken captive and spends seven years, the same amount of time he spends on Ogygia, as a slave in Egypt. Eventually, no doubt through clever dealings, he earns his freedom and joins up with a Phoenician vessel that offers him passage home. The passage is delayed (maybe by unfavorable winds i.e. Aeolus) and he spends a year at the Phoenician’s home, the same amount of time he supposedly spent with Circe, and at the end of that year rather than being brought home he is taken to Libya where he is once again to be sold into slavery, but the Phoenician craft is struck by a thunderbolt and sinks, just like Odysseus’ last remaining ship is struck after leaving the island of the sun god where his men had broken the strict prohibition against eating the cattle. He is the sole survivor and washes up on the shores of Thesprotia where the island’s prince meets him, welcomes him into the palace and he’s finally sent on his way home. He gives an abbreviated version of this telling when he introduces himself at the palace as a beggar a few days later. A story of being taken prisoner following a failed military campaign, more suffering and delays at the hands of a genuine misanthrope, a voyage to yet more forced servitude, miraculous deliverance from disaster reigning down from above, and finally salvation after years of suffering and torment. It’s far less sexy, but far more realistic. Where have we heard a tale like it before?
We all know the version he tells at a celebratory feast, and we’ve just reviewed the version he tells a slave, but what does he tell his own wife? By the time we reach Book 19 Odysseus has returned to his own palace, but remains in disguise as a beggar. His son, Telemachus, who knows or at least believes this man to be his father, has invited him into his home as a guest. After a long night of enduring abuse at the hands of ill-mannered young men who have invaded the palace in hopes of marrying his wife, Odysseus is cleaning up the main hall after everyone has retired. Penelope, hoping to hear news of her husband comes to inquire about him from this visitor to the palace. Odysseus informs her that he is certain her husband is alive and will soon return to Ithaca. When asked how he could be so certain he unfurls another tale. This version contains a few elements with which we’re familiar. On his voyage home from Troy Odysseus’ ship was sunk off the coast of Thrinacia after his men had eaten the cattle of the sun god. He washed up on the shores of Scheria home of the Phaeacians who welcomed him warmly and would have sent him straight home, but deciding he couldn’t come home from a war empty handed, he got a new ship and has spent years traveling, plundering, amassing a huge volume of treasure that he has stored on Thesprotia. He’s on a quick side quest to consult with the sacred oak of Zeus at Dodona, but once he knows the will of the gods he’ll be home straight away. This one lacks much of the adventure, pain, and heartache of either of the prior two versions and there aren’t any significant parallels of time and disaster. Of course, this version is not meant to entertain or ingratiate, but to comfort a woman mourning her lost husband and may represent a coded negotiation we’ll discuss elsewhere. The point is just about every chance he gets, clever Odysseus spins a different story, so the proposition that we should believe the version he gave the Phaeacians as the truth is not necessarily one we should accept without a measure of skepticism.
You’ll note, I’ve said he tells a different version “just about” every time he gets a chance. In what amounts to the closing scene of the Odyssey, because I don’t like book 24 for stylistic and content reasons, and because many have doubted its inclusion in the original text historically I prefer to think of Book 23 as the conclusion of the Odyssey. Anyway, in the waning lines of book 23, after Odysseus and Penelope retire to the famous immovable olive tree posted bed, he tells her essentially the same version he gave the Phaeacians. See Mark! You’ve wasted our time! Maybe, but you’ll recall this is a version he gives a woman who’s just got the better of him in that business about moving the bed. You’ve got to figure a woman married to Odysseus knows what she’s gotten herself into, and enjoys letting him spin his tales. Additionally, he’s just slaughtered over a hundred men in close quarters combat in his own dining hall, then had a roughly equal number of slaves strung up in the courtyard for disloyalty, then attempted to purge and purify their home of all this bloodshed by burning sulfur. He’s had a bath, so he’s no longer soaked in blood, but all in all it’s been a pretty stressful day at the end of a pretty stressful 20 years. Perhaps he knows neither he, nor his wife is up for the painful truth, so he tells her a story of adventure that’s already pleased one crowd. Maybe that’s a stretch, but it’s the defense I’m offering.
Finally, the reason I think we should seriously consider Odysseus to be in the same mold as Billy Pilgrim, a composer of fantastic, unreliable tales as a coping mechanism for his undiagnosed and untreated PTSD, is what he has endured, what he comes home to, and the very nature of The Odyssey. I’ve just attempted to cast doubt on Odysseus’ versions of “what happened”, so how can the reader assess “what he has endured”? I think we have reason to doubt his accounting of the details of his journey home, but certain facts within the narrative are not in dispute. In the famously boring “catalog of ships” which constitutes the majority of Book 2 of The Iliad we learn that Odysseus brought 12 ships to Troy which suggests he commanded roughly 600 men. He is the warlord pirate king of Ithaca and 600 men followed him into battle and none of them returned home, he is the sole survivor. All of those 600 men were sons, most were brothers, and some were husbands, fathers, and uncles. We empathize with Penelope and Telemachus anxiously awaiting his return for 20 years, but 600 other families on Ithaca held similar vigils; the difference being their husbands, fathers, and sons are never returning. 100% mortality of the men under your command is a potentially damning indictment of your judgment and leadership, and at the very least an emotional burden. Added to this, he kills over one hundred of the sons of Ithaca and nearby islands upon his return home. How many of those men were the sons of men he failed to get home to their families? This is independent of whatever he experienced during 10 years of siege, hand to hand combat, and in the sack of Troy. Odysseus is either a first class sociopath, or he’s bound to have a few traumatic images flashing through his brain.
Near the beginning of this essay I outlined the slow formulation and acceptance of the notion of PTSD in America. What makes me think someone nearly 3,000 years ago could have had these insights about the residual stress of war on an individual? Because whoever composed The Odyssey wrote about how war caused enormous social disruption.
We all know Odysseus has returned to a house full of men seeking to marry his wife and usurp his dominion. For years these men have been living at his home, eating his food, abusing his staff, alternately grooming and threatening his son, and ultimately plotting Telemachus’ murder. How is this even a thing? It comes down to an abuse of the Greek custom of Xenia. Ten years of war and another decade awaiting the return of the warring class of adult men ripped a significant hole in the fabric of a strictly patriarchal Ithacan society. I think there’s a great case to be made for this as a strong argument against both patriarchy and protracted wars fought for ideological and economic reasons. The fact is that the composer of The Odyssey recognized the social costs and collateral damage of violent conflict not only for those directly engaged in the fighting, but for the entire society, even for the victors.
In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger makes a compelling case that some of the major sources of alienation for modern veterans are: the deep divide between those who serve, where they serve, and the relative lack of contact between the majority of the civilian population and the stresses of war. The United States engaged in two land wars in Asia for nearly 20 years, yet on American shores and cities it was largely business as usual. Once the wars were started, questions of withdrawal were far more controversial than the ongoing financial and human costs of continued prosecution of the campaigns. The American people seemed more concerned about the embarrassment of the optics of “losing”, than the hasty entry into, inconsistent executive leadership for, and poorly defined objectives of these conflicts. See the outrage over the withdrawal from Afghanistan compared to the relative silence on the failure of operations over twenty years in theater. The relationship between large standing armies, perpetual warfare, the building of empires, and their relationship to domestic politics and incompatibility with democracy (see: The Peloponnesian War and the fall of the Roman Republic) is tempting, but is a discussion for another day. The point of contrast I’m trying to make is that Iron Age Greek city states frequently engaged in battle with one another, until the 5th century BCE the men involved in these conflicts weren’t part of a standing army, they were citizen soldiers. Wars were relatively short and confined to times of the year in which agricultural and domestic life would be least disrupted. The Iliad and The Odyssey may have been about a protracted bronze age conflict fought on foreign shores, but there’s reason to believe that Homer’s audience had a very intimate relationship with war close to home. His audience knew what happened to the men involved, their families, and how the effects of battle echoed on long after the noise of shield and spear ended. The American medical establishment may have accepted the relationship between war trauma and a formal description of PTSD in 1980, but that doesn’t mean other societies didn’t figure it out for themselves long ago. I suspect it’s a lesson that has been learned, forgotten, and relearned in many different cultures and generations. Homer could spin one hell of a story, but something tells me the social disorder on Ithaca isn’t just a convenient plot point for a rollicking adventure tale, he knew the sort of upheaval violence causes in human lives and societies.
Finally, there’s Homer himself. Allow me to say that I’m aware of several of the open controversies which constitute “the Homeric Question”. I don’t claim to have any insight into these questions. What I mean when I say “Homer himself” is that whoever, and I think Homer is as good a name as any to describe this person/group, composed this poem would have had specific appreciation for the relationship between storyteller and audience that would have given him/them unique insight into Odysseus’ situation. For reasons I won’t bore you with, one of the prevailing theories about both The Iliad and The Odyssey is that they grew out of an oral performance tradition and retain vestiges of this technique in their texts. Presuming that the general structure of The Odyssey existed before it was ever written down, it would have been performed by a bard, probably a traveling bard, who would journey through the cities and towns of the Greek speaking world making a living from his ability to gain the favor of his audience. I mentioned the moment of bardic inception when Odysseus steals the show from the blind bard Demodocus among the Phaeacians. Demodocus sings of heroes and triumph, nobody is going to pay to hear extended dirges at a feast. Superhero adventure tales remain blockbusters 3000 years later. Similarly, when he wants to please and entertain because he needs a ride home Odysseus spins a tale of daring adventure. At the end of the Odyssey, following the terrible bloodbath of suitors and servants, a man named Phemius is found hiding under a table, he was the bard who sang pleasing songs for the suitors. He claims, and Telemachus backs him up, that he performed, not out of disloyalty, but because he was forced to, and never for money. His life is spared. In The Odyssey, bards occupy a special place and enjoy more latitude than the general population. It definitely makes sense for a storyteller to extoll this perspective to one’s audience.
Homer draws a sharp contrast between how bards are treated and how beggars are received. When Odysseus arrives at his own palace in disguise the suitors verbally abuse him repeatedly. Someone even throws a stool at him that hits him squarely in the back, and in a moment of foreshadowing, Odysseus doesn’t fall or even stumble, he’s unphased and simply drops a sideways glance and menacing scowl at the offender. Later, the suitors arrange a fight between Odysseus and another beggar, Irus. Basically they’re rich, spoiled upper class bro-dudes setting up a “bum fight” to determine who can beg for table scraps. This is cruel and dehumanizing stuff.
Let’s take a moment to compare these populations. Beggars and bards both travel from place to place and are dependent upon the good will of others for their maintenance. Both are asked to present their stories for audience approval. One sings of heroes winning glory and honor in combat, and the other offers a tale of misfortune and failure. One is welcomed into the feast and offered prime cuts of meat and applauded, the other begs for scraps and is subjected to abuse and derision. Homer, like Vonnegut, knew what stories sell and those that people would rather not hear. They both allow their protagonists that same latitude in how they share their own stories. In theory the audience already has one reliable narrator, the protagonists can spin whatever version of events they choose, if the truth is too much for the audience or storyteller to handle then a fantasy might do the trick.
At this point I hope to have made the idea that one viable interpretation of Odysseus’ character and the stories he tells is that his version of events is not to be taken at face value, and that it is conceivable that one contributing factor to his lies is that they could be a coping mechanism for the trauma and stresses he encounters on his painful voyage home from an extended violent conflict and absence from his family and that this is similar to Billy Pilgrim’s reports of time travel and alien abduction in Slaughterhouse Five.
So what? I have several patient friends who are subjected to my crazy ideas and stray thoughts. Most are good natured about these exercises and listen attentively while I muddle through, and they engage in conversation and ask insightful questions. There’s one friend in particular who has spent hours in these shenanigans and rarely fails to ask the question: so what? So what if Odysseus is kinda, maybe like Billy Pilgrim? Who cares? I think it helps me better understand and appreciate the remainder of the story.
Before I get too far along on this path let me say that I don’t think this perspective robs books 9-12 of any of their brilliance. They’re great stories, they were always fiction, and adding a second layer of fiction to them doesn’t change their symbolism and we can still use them to infer something about Odysseus’ character and the lessons he brings home to Ithaca. We can still profit from the insights into human behavior they contain.
In thinking about them as “creations of Odysseus” and not as realities essential to the greater narrative I had a thought about their structural brilliance and the flexibility they offered a bard. The thought occurred to me that a bard might tire of repeating the same version of a story over a span of months and years, and the ability to change up the order, alter details, or even swap in entirely new adventures depending upon whimsy, geography, or the tastes of his audience would be something a storyteller would enjoy. Why tell the same story repeatedly when you could tell a slightly different version every time? After all, that’s what Odysseus does. Could it be that Homer actually did expect his audience to accept Odysseus’ version of events as fully truthful? Maybe. Was it understood that it wasn’t necessarily the truth because every time you heard a performance of The Odyssey it was slightly different? Kind of like the conclusion to the original theatrical release of the movie Clue? Possibly. Barring the discovery of some form of documentation confirming this idea there’s no way of knowing if this occurred, but we all know how stories tend to change over time with repeated performance and I am inclined to believe professionals were more adept at these manipulations than the general public.
So What? What does it matter if we see Odysseus in the same light we see Billy Pilgrim? I think it makes Odysseus a more sympathetic character. I pity Billy Pilgrim. A guy who seems completely overwhelmed by life. His escapist fantasies are transparent, but I don’t begrudge him those escapes. He strikes me as completely absent minded and emotionally unavailable. These aspects of his personality are unfortunate for him and those who love him, but I can’t help but give him the grace to get through life in the only way in which he seems capable, especially in the absence of a helping hand which he’s never offered.
Perhaps this is uncharitable of me, but for a long time I couldn’t offer Odysseus the same latitude. Some of his decisions in The Great Wanderings have always struck me as completely foolish. He and his men attack the Cicones and then hangout on the beach partying all night entertaining themselves with wine and captured women while their victims regroup and prepare for vengeance. Sounds like Odysseus and the boys got what they deserved. He and 12 dudes trespass into a cave. A cave! You know the holes in the ground which generally feature only one exit, and are trapped. Polyphemus did the eating, but Odysseus led his men into a poor strategic position. Real clever. When he arrives at the land of the dead the first spirit he meets is one of his own men, Alpinor. At this point he’s lost hundreds of men, so this isn’t outside the realm of possibility. The thing is: he didn’t even realize Alpinor was dead. Alpinor had been with him on Circe’s island, their point of departure for the underworld. He got drunk the night before they left and decided to sleep it off on the roof and in the morning hadn’t quite sobered up and fell off the roof, snapped his neck and died. Odysseus only had one boat at this point. He didn’t even realize Alpinor wasn’t pulling at his oar the entire journey to the underworld! I found it difficult to reconcile all these examples of poor leadership and tactics from the guy who supposedly came up with the most brilliant military trap yet conceived in the form of the Trojan Horse. Perhaps his reputation is unearned. The Trojan Horse was only “brilliant” because the Trojans were stupid enough to disassemble their own walls to bring it into the city. The folks from the Monty Python troupe showed us at least one way that whole thing could have gone wrong. One may forgive these examples of failed military leadership, but he spent an entire year in Circe’s bed, and seven more in Calypso’s. Eight of his “misery filled” years away from his family were spent in the company of other women. There’s a case to be made that he didn’t have a choice with Calypso, she released him only under order of Zeus, but there’s no such evidence in the case of Circe. Some will defend him with iron age double standards of fidelity, but I don’t have to feel sorry for him.
The point is, if I take the content of The Great Wanderings seriously I personally don’t feel as much sympathy for Odysseus. However, the facts remain he’s still endured a 10 year long war and eventually loses all his men, so my judgment may be unwarranted, but it’s how I feel as a reader. If, on the other hand, I choose to doubt his version of events, and instead see his tales as fantasy, a manifestation of escapism, then I’m more disposed to appreciate the challenges he has definitely endured and currently faces and focus on his positive attributes. Maybe, dear reader, you’re more empathetic than I, but for some reason I had to take a very convoluted route to get there.
The first time I set out to read the Odyssey as an adult it felt like books 1-8 were a slog. When was I gonna get to the good stuff? After I’d finished book 12 I stopped. I wasn’t really in it for all the revenge killings, and reading another 200 pages after I’d read what I came for was not something I felt like doing. In retrospect it seems silly to read a thing just to get through a specific part. Understanding Odysseus as likely coping with PTSD while returning to a society ravaged by the effects of an extended conflict made me pay closer attention to the details of the other 80% of The Odyssey. Suddenly, Telemachus, like his father, was a far more sympathetic character, and his fact finding mission took on new significance. It was no longer filler, but vital to a better appreciation of the whole. Similarly, all the time Odysseus spends in disguise on Ithaca serves a larger purpose than to build anticipation for the final conflict. There’s a whole lot going on and when I slowed down, and considered it from a different perspective I gained new levels of appreciation for the story and its composer(s?). During a run in with his elderly nurse we learn the origin and meaning of Odysseus’ name: one who simultaneously endures and inflicts pain. He’s often called “man of pain”, and “longsuffering”. I think by bringing both skepticism and empathy to our relationship with Odysseus we are better able to see past the stories and learn more from the storyteller.
In chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse Five the narrator (presumably a thinly veiled version of Kurt Vonnegut) attends the World’s Fair with a friend and while crossing the Delaware River on a ferry he wonders, “I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, and how much was mine to keep.” All of time is present before the Trafalmadorians so the answer for them is 100%. The beings always see that all beings are alive for portions of time and all are also dead for the majority history appears to confirm the mantra that all things must pass and enbues their existence with an enviable level of serenity. We humans, as best as we can tell, pass through time and seem to come to a fairly abrupt and indefinite halt to our existence. Carrying forward our memories and insights gained in the present has some clear functional benefits. We learn. Bearing memories of cherished experiences and relationships is generally considered a good and pleasurable thing. On the other hand carrying the breadth and depth of all our pain may not be a net positive. Unburdening ourselves, knowing that this too shall pass can be a good thing. Hopefully seeing Odysseus more clearly offers some insight into the question: how much of our experience is ours to keep?
MaximumKungFu 