Frances Pickworth, University of Bristol
This paper examines the role played in the Odyssey by Cape Malea, a promontory on the southern coast of the Peloponnese. I argue that Malea functions as a narrative ‘node’ offering different possibilities for heroes’ return-tales, which the Odyssey employs to signal its own divergence from poetic tradition and to manipulate its audience’s sense of reality.
No easy journey makes a good story. As a notoriously treacherous point for seafarers in reality (Morton; Heikell and Heikell), Malea offers opportunities for plot development that make it a traditional motif in poetic storm sequences (de Jong). That the Odyssey uses Malea as a plot device has been noted (Heubeck et al. 1988, 1989; Jones; Camerotto; Purves; Minchin); the sheer complexity of this engagement, however, remains underexplored. With the help of the concept of the ‘node’, a point in narrative where multiple futures hang in the balance, I draw in this paper on the narratological work of Christoph Bode and Rainer Dietrich to conceptualise Malea as a narrative node linking the physical landscape to the poetic, and from which radiate multiple possible routes through sea and song.
Subjecting Malea’s poetic function to a closer and conceptually more rigorous examination than has yet been attempted, I examine its recursive role in four heroic journeys in the Odyssey: those of Menelaus, narrated by Nestor (Od. 3.276-312); Agamemnon, by Proteus (Od. 4.512-37); Odysseus, in the Apologoi (Od. 9.39ff.); and the ‘false Odysseus’, narrated by the disguised hero in his third ‘Cretan tale’ (Od. 19.172-202). First, based on the sea currents and winds around the promontory, I outline possible routes for a sea voyage passing by it and suggest that Malea functioned in oral tradition as a point at which a poet could choose between multiple narrative futures for a hero’s nostos (‘homeward journey’). I use the journeys of Menelaus and Agamemnon to illustrate how the Odyssey employs Malea to generate moments of anticipation and surprise for these heroes’ nostoi and to build suspense regarding the nostos of Odysseus himself. Turning to the journeys of the ‘real’ and ‘false’ Odysseus, I argue that the Odyssey returns to Malea here as a metapoetic node. Denied routes through real space, Odysseus is instead catapulted into a fantastical world; Malea not only acts as a pivot-point between a realistic landscape and the ‘looking-glass geography’ (Malkin) of Odysseus’ wanderings, but marks the Odyssey’s own departure from poetic tradition. By having its poet-hero employ Malea in his own lying tale, the Odyssey adds a further, epistemological dimension to Malea’s nodal multivalence: Malea becomes the point at which the realms of truth and falsehood switch places, as the Odyssey parades its power to invert its audience’s sense of reality. With this exploration of Malea’s potency, I hope to stimulate broader discussion around how the Odyssey uses narrative nodes to exploit the potential for a ‘poetics of divergence’ offered not only by the landscape of its narrative, but by the songscape of oral tradition.