Tails Away by Andrew Seguin

Check out more of Andrew Seguin's Moby-Dick-inspired cyanotypes.

Cannabalizing Homer's Odyssey: Notes toward a close reading

"Achilles, on the point of defeating Hector in battle and caught up in the fury which has raged since the death of his friend Patroclus, raises the possibility that eating Hector could provide the ultimate satisfaction for his anger:

'I wish only that my spirit and fury would drive me to hack your meat away and eat it raw for the things that you have done to me.' (Iliad 22.346–48)."

-Mark Buchan, Eating Their Words

Cannibalizing the Odyssey

1. Tiresias to O "If you have the power to curb their wild desire.” (253  l. 119)

The prophecy is repeated by Circe (275, ~140) and O. (279, ll. 289-299).

2. The men don't want to starve to death.

“Hunger racked their bellies” (281, l. 358).

Eurlychus argues "All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals, true, but to die of hunger, starve to death -- that's the worst of all" (281, ~l. 368). c.f. Sirens

3. After O. (Moses) comes down the mountain

he sees what his men have done and cries out to Zeus, "'Left on their own, what a monstrous thing my crew concocted!'" (282, ll. 400-401). c.f. Clytemnestra

Helios “bursts out in a rage to all immortals.” “What an outrage,” he exclaims (ibid, l. 407). c.f. O to Cyclops in regards to cannibalism.

"The hides began to crawl, the meat, both RAW and roasted, bellowed out on the spits, and we heard a noise like the moan of lowing oxen" (283, ll. 420s).

4. The olive tree Homeric Simile at end of Book 5.

O. “crawled beneath two bushy olives sprung from the same root, one olive wild, the other of well-bred stock.” No wind, sunlight, or rain pierces them “so dense they grew together, tangling side-by-side.” The olive canopy as a womb???

O’s men are compared to young calves in the Homeric Simile on page 243. They are not wild at this point. We are told that they are so deeply moved at seeing O. that they felt as if they were home on “Ithaca’s rocky soil where they were bred and reared.”

---

I. GIANT, BARBARIC, MONSTROUS CANNIBALS: The Cyclops and the Laestrygonians.

Cyclops

"What are they -- violent, savage, lawless?" (217, l. 196).

Herds of "wild goats" roam the forests of the island. (215, l. 131).

The Cyclops tells O "I'd never spare you in fear of Zeus's hatred, / you or your comrades here, unless I had the urge." Nice reversal of the men's urge or wild desire to be as wild as the Cyclops and eat their shipmates.

The Cyclops washes down his first feast of "human flesh" with "RAW milk" (220, l. 334).

O. calls him a "barbarian" and adds that by eating his men "outrages all that's right" (222, l. 393, 395).

O. refers to being eaten by Polyphemus as a "monstrous death" (222, l. 473).

Polyphemus is angry enough to eat O., just as Achilles was angry enough to eat Hector. Polyphemus laments that his "dear old ram," does not have "words" and so cannot help him bind Odysseus, "that scoundrel who is cringing from my rage! I’d smash him against the ground,” he adds. “I'd spill his brains -- flooding across my cave -- and that would ease my heart" (225-226).

In taunting Polyphemus Odysseus yells "So, Cyclops, no weak coward it was whose crew you bent to devour there in your vaulted cave -- you with your brute force! Your filthy crimes came down on your own head, you shameless cannibal . . ." (226).

Note that O. is telling the Phaecians about the Cyclops episode AFTER having met with Achilles ghost. In class we have talked about how Achilles was a warrior who killed by brute force, not by cunning. He thought O. a coward, an ignoble soldier. He wanted to eat Hector, but didn’t. O. is being defensive. Brute force is for barbarians. Civilized men (and soldiers) plot their way to victory and chart a course for home.

Laestrygonians

O. wonders if they are "men like us who live on bread?" (233, l. 111). He asked the same question upon arriving at the land of the Lotus Eaters (214).

The Laestrygonians who "prepared" O. crew "a barbarous welcome" are as monstrous as Scylla: The giants “speared the crews like fish" (234, l, 135).


II. THE MONSTROUS, BARBARIC, WILD, AND CUNNING FEMALE: Clytemnestra, The Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis.

Clytemnestra

In the simile on page 262 Agammemnon says "as a man cuts dpwn some ox at the trought! So I died -- a wretched, ignominious death -- [. . .] just like white-tusked boars butchered in some rich lord of power's halls for a wedding, banquet, or GROANING public feast."

“So,” he continues, “there’s nothing more deadly, bestial than a woman set on works like these -- what a monstrous thing she plotted, slaughtered her own lawful husband!”

The Sirens

Some readers of the Odyssey have imagined as cannibals.

The first century Roman historian Pliny the Elder discounted Sirens as pure fable, "although Dinon, the father of Clearchus, a celebrated writer, asserts that they exist in India, and that they charm men by their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to pieces."

Other readers note that Circe describes the Sirens  “lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones.” That the corpses are left to rot and that skin still hangs on bones suggests that the Sirens’ victims are not cannabalized but starve to death. Entranced by the Sirens’ song they never leave the island in search of food.

Scylla and Charybdis

Scylla is a “grisly monster” (274, ~95) “wildly sweeping the reefs” for her food (274, 105). She is also "terrible, savage, wild." (275, l. 129).

The Homeric Simile on page 279 compares the men to fish. “Scylla swung them up her cliff and there at her cavern’s mouth she bolted them down RAW.”

O draws a parallel between the feminized Charybdis and  Polyphemus, who vomited  wine and chunks of human flesh after feasting on his men. Like a bat (vampiric?), O. clings to a fig tree above the whirlpool “waiting for her to vomit” his mast and keel back up again.”

---

Check out the full text of Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” on Rap Genius. Worth reading if only to appreciate Montaigne’s sarcastic closing remark.