The Therapy of Oblivion, Unforgettable Pain, and the Odyssey’s End

This chapter applies insights from cognitive science and approaches to storytelling to address issues of closure in the Odyssey's final book. The results show that the epic emphasizes the danger of its own pleasurable distractions by positioning their closed character as a kind of death. Odysseus, in order to begin his journey home, must choose to face the open tale of life. The psychological theories introduced throughout the book are brought to bear on the interpretive problem of how to end this poem. The sudden close points to the importance of life outside the poem and invites the audience to apply the frameworks explored in the poem to the worlds they inhabit without.

Odysseus’s Lies

This chapter explores the creation of narrative agency by examining Odysseus's lies in the second half of the Odyssey from a perspective informed by correspondence and coherence in memory. The lying tales offer a continuing although coded probing of the relationship between the self, internal motivation, external action, and an evaluation of consequences. Odysseus's storytelling changes from reflective of his own experiences to manipulative of his addressees and, finally, in addresses to the suitors in particular, predictive of future actions. In an important way, this pattern continues the process of Narrative Therapy, as Odysseus continues to re-author his past in order to predict and act in the future. But this process also entails a complex negotiation between the correspondence of narrative details, which may be shared by a community, and the agent's need for coherence. The chapter's reading of the lies echoes what others have said — that they are instruments by which he achieves his psychological homecoming — but also argues that they have other functions as well in helping to distinguish Odysseus's character further and in providing insights for the Homeric understanding of the interdependence between storytelling and the working of human minds.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Homer's Odyssey. It is no secret that the Odyssey relates more than a simple tale of a journey home; it is about the re-creation of a man and an investigation into what comprises an identity. Odysseus is marked out as a suffering figure from the beginning of the epic — his story is both figuratively and literally about pain experienced for the sake of pursuing and obtaining a return home. In a way, his state echoes or even anticipates the modern term nostalgia, once an official psychopathological diagnosis. Narratives about the past that convey nostalgia can similarly have positive and negative outcomes. Storytelling in the Odyssey, as many have shown, is a type of intoxication that has the potential to harm and to prevent one from achieving an actual homecoming. The book explores Homeric analogs for modern psychological theories or frameworks and their effect on the structure of the epic.