|
|
 | THE ODYSSEY Professor Fagles responds... March 13, 1997 |
|---|
Return to the Odyssey forum's
top page.
Questions asked
in this forum:
What is Odysseus' moral compass, and why are most of his lessons learnt at home ? How much of the Odyssey is history, and how much is poetic fiction? How do we know that Homer was blind? What explains the lack of colors in the Odyssey? How has James Joyce's "Ulysses" effected your reading of the "Odyssey"? ADDITIONAL COMMENTS Chris Dassios of Toronto ON Canada, asks: I'm a lawyer of Greek descent, but know no Ancient Greek and did not study classics in school. Nonetheless, I've read the Iliad and the Odyssey in several translations and have just finished listening to your Iliad on cassette. Congratulations on a marvelous piece of work and thank you for making the Iliad an oral poem in English- a wonder to which to listen.
In the Odyssey, Telemachus only seems to reach full maturity upon the return of his father. Is this view of the son being incomplete without the father common in Ancient Greek literature? Any comment on the relationship between Odysseus and his son?
Professor Robert Fagles of Princeton University responds:
I think that you're right, that Telemachus cannot come of age until he is reunited with his father—completed by his father, and challenged, and strengthened in the process. And this is a great and lasting theme in the Greek imagination.
Think of Orestes and his relationship to his father Agamemnon, or rather to the ghost of his father, which drives a large part of Aeschylus' great trilogy, The Oresteia.
Yet it's a theme that reaches forward too, into the completion of Hamlet, who becomes his father's son only after fulfilling the commands of his father's ghost. And it's a theme that's undercut with irony, but present nevertheless, in the relationship—the failed relationship—between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. It's a theme, in short, that's always with us, and I think it starts in Homer.
Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. PBS Online Privacy Policy
Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved.
