Odysseus’s Two Bodies: Recognition as Construction in Odyssey 19

Odysseus’s Two Bodies: Recognition as Construction in Odyssey 19

This paper argues that Odysseus and Penelope’s conversation in Odyssey 19 complicates the role of the body as a legible site of recognition. Pace Auerbach, who identifies Odysseus’s scar as a bodily mark that fully exposes a past experience (cf. Henderson 1997), I suggest that the recognition scene that takes place between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus challenges the assumption that recognition relies on a transparent correspondence between a body and its past. Building on the work of scholars who emphasize the concurrent legitimacy of Odysseus’s many selves (Dougherty 2015), and the expansive use of the senses in recognition (Mueller 2016), I propose that recognition plays a part in constructing bodies as well as identifying them. As much as Odysseus’s bodies are a result of his and Athena’s invention, they are also dependent on the projections of those attempting to read him.

When Odysseus and Penelope finally meet, Penelope is triangulated between two Odysseuses. The first is Aithon, Odysseus’s beggar persona, who claims first-person knowledge of Odysseus’s travels. The second is Odysseus himself, who is ostensibly absent, obscured by Athena’s disguise and relegated to a third-person perspective in Aithon’s speech. As the conversation unfolds, Odysseus’s two bodies function as competing models of reality. Aithon’s body represents fantasy foiled: as long as Aithon is present, Odysseus’s arrival is deferred. Odysseus’s body represents fantasy realized: Odysseus has come home at last. From the perspective of Penelope, whose knowledge of Odysseus’s body is twenty years out of date, both possibilities are equally conceivable (Murnaghan 1987).

In contrast to Eurycleia, for whom the two bodies are resolved by the accidental discovery of the scar, Penelope experiences a kind of recognition that cuts across the idea of one-to-one correspondence between Odysseus and Aithon. The high point of tension occurs when Aithon accurately describes the clothes Odysseus was wearing when he left for Troy—a reimagining of the “real” Odysseus’s experience from the perspective of Aithon, a “false” Odyssean body. Remarkably, his description triggers the recognition formula “she recognized the sure signs that Odysseus had shown her” (σήματ᾿ ἀναγνούσῃ τά οἱ ἔμπεδα πέφραδ᾿ Ὀδυσσεύς, 19.250). The sure signs (σήματ᾿ ἔμπεδα), hallmarks of Odyssean recognition (Zeitlin 1995), emerge again when Odysseus describes the construction of the marriage bed (23.206) and names Laertes’ trees (24.346). The appearance of the formula at a time when Odysseus is distributed into two bodies decenters the assumption that a singular body serves as the surety of an authoritative version of events. While the body of Odysseus-in-story is ambiguously present in Aithon, Penelope is more interested in remembered signs (the cloak, the brooch, the tunic, cf. Levaniouk 2011) that identify her husband as he was twenty years prior and are no longer physically present. Ultimately, Penelope, Odysseus, and Aithon all play parts in reimagining and constructing Penelope’s Odysseus, upon whose spectral body Penelope's recognition hinges.