Yukai Li (Carleton University)
The Odyssey presents a striking series of situations in which the protagonist is reduced to the status of a helpless spectator, watching the action unfold but unable to act. These situations include a number of episodes in the apologoi (paradigmatically, Odysseus’s escape from the sirens, but also parts of the encounters with the cyclops, Scylla, and the winds of Aeolus), as well as several times when Odysseus constrained by his disguise on Ithaca (when Odysseus watches the reunion of Telemachus and Eumaeus, and when Odysseus sees the dog Argos). I argue that our understanding of the significance of this series can be brought out using Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema (Deleuze 1986, 1989), which turns precisely on the point at which protagonists in film change from actors who can affect their situations to viewers who can only watch. Through Deleuze’s analyses of how time becomes visible when cinematic action is inhibited, we will discover parallel processes underlying the Odyssey’s helpless spectators.
I focus in particular on Deleuze’s description of “time’s forks”, which makes time visible in a divided form, split between a present-tense narration of events as they happen and a past-tense memorialization of those events. In the films of Joseph Mankiewicz, different versions of what happened compete with each other. In All About Eve (1950), for instance, Eve initially presents herself as an unfortunate widow, but later turns out to be a manipulative swindler. The present-tense action of the film is thus overlaid with a past-tense memorialization, as the audience sees Eve both as the widow she seems to be when the story is unfolding (present-tense), and as the manipulator she will have turned out to be (in the past-tense, to the eye of memory).
In similar but distinct ways, the situations of helpless spectatorship in the Odyssey also show time as divided simultaneously between the event and its memorialization. In the encounter with the sirens, what the sirens’ song promises is the story of Odysseus’s own exploits—which he lives through in the present-tense—but precisely in the form of epic kleos, the past-tense memorialization of those exploits. Similarly, when Odysseus watches the reunion of Telemachus and Eumaeus, the present-tense action is the Telemachus-Eumaeus reunion, but what Odysseus and the audience see—helped by the simile that makes the father-son reunion explicit (xvi. 17–21)—is the potential reunion of Telemachus and Odysseus. Time is again divided between an actual present event and a virtual memory. Finally, when Odysseus sees Argos, there is no actualized reunion at all. Nevertheless, the logic of the situation is so strong as to fork the present of the episode. The fork that is actualized—Odysseus’s exchange with Eumaeus, who remains oblivious—is overlaid by the fork that is desired but not realized. In this way, Odysseus’s remarks to Eumaeus about the dog (xvii. 306–10), which would in another context have been banal chatter, takes on all the affective power of what could not be said.