Penelope: twisting and turning.

"...Her very words,
And despite our passion and pride, we believed her.
So by day she'd weave at her great and growing web--
by night, by the light of the torches set beside her,
she would unravel all she'd done. Three whole years,
she deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme...
Then when the wheeling seasons brought the fourth year on
and the months waned and the long days came round once more,
one of the women in on the queen's secret told the truth
and we caught her in the act-- unweaving her gorgeous web."

(Homer: The Odyssey, Book 2, translated by Robert Fagles.)

This is that one point in the Odyssey where I often wonder whether it's an epic about the travels of the man of "twists and turns" or whether it rests on the moment when Penelope becomes a force that drives the narrative. Not Neptune, not the wily Odysseus, but Penelope. In other words, can we read the Odyssey as the story of a going, not a coming? Is it the story of Odysseus coming home or is it story of Penelope whose last stronghold has collapsed and who must, therefore, venture forth in order to save herself?
Here Penelope does not speak, but is spoken about-- by the suitors who have collected in the palace and who wait impatiently for her to finish weaving Laertes' burial shroud. They have been kept at bay, circling, waiting, until this tapestry that will never end is ended, and the husband she waits for is no longer awaited, and until her faith is unfaithful. This is the information that will launch Telemachus's ship and lead, in a way, to Odysseus's successful return to Ithaca. Penelope, then, inspires both speech and action in the Odyssey--something that is almost directly opposite of Chryses in the Iliad, whose presence brings silence and destruction and of Dido in the Aeneid, whose realm is a point of departure, not of arrival.
Yet, for the suitors, Penelope is none of these things-- in fact, she's almost a kind of Circe, who also weaves for the sake of deception. She doesn't turn the suitors into pigs, but in a way, the tapestry is more human for her than these unwelcome visitors are. So what  do we make of her, this woman who weaves desperately to prolong her state of being and belonging? She is very much the wife of Odysseus, twisting and turning even as the "gorgeous web" takes form. But she is also the figure of self-preservation in the epic whose lie is for herself, her son, and her husband. Does she lie really, or does she just never bring herself to a point of speech? Or does she do something more complex than anyone else in the narrative by using an art form to speak for her? I think what Penelope does then should be read as a form of preserving being not only in the sense of her bond with Odysseus and Telemachus, but also as a form of preserving her bond with herself-- she transfers her narrative to the art form, something that can never be interpreted definitively.
The image up there is Joseph Wright of Derby's "Penelope Unravelling her Web," (1784). I've chosen it because of how perfectly it makes the case-- Odysseus in the background, Telemachus in the front-- her past and her future, and her ball of wool in her hand as a kind of weapon of preservation, as something that can both encapsulate what has happened, and prolong what is to be until it can be the way it should be. Until then, she will weave her own version of time.

Achilles' cliched rage

"But you are intractable, Achilles!
Pray god such anger never seizes me, such rage you nurse.
Cursed in your own courage! What good will a man, even one in the next generation get from you, unless you defend the Argives from disaster? You heart of iron!"

As the title indicates, Achilles' rage is one of the more obvious themes of the Iliad-- partly because of the way in which it informs the plot, and partly, because like the rest of the epic, it is grand in its proportions. If it weren't the Iliad we were talking about, I would call it supersize. Like Odysseus' twists and turns, Achilles' rage is what the muse is asked to sing about at the beginning. But this particular utterance regarding Achilles' rage comes from Patroclus, the man who bows before this unending anger, conquering it only by his own death. So there are a couple of things to think about when we look his now somewhat frustrated entreaty to his friend-- the "intractability" of anger and rage, the quality of the courage that Patroclus sees as a curse, and the general lack of goodness, I am inclined to use the word productivity here, that invades the Iliad as a result.
Untractable anger, (and I speak from experience) is a pretty awful thing. But Achilles' nurses this anger, tends to it, allows it to grow rather than allowing for its eventual demise. I am not sure why a Shakespearan character would enter into this dicussion also, but I think of Lear when I think of Achilles. "Come not between the dragon and his wrath," Lear tells Kent when he tries to intervene for Cordelia. In other words, anger, rage, wrath, are precious things that require protection from virtuous intervention.
This anger, however, is horribly picturesque (and I use the word in a somewhat non-Burkian way here). The basic thing about the word picturesque as I use it is that it suggests something can be expressed in a picture, or more generally, in an art form. I understand that there may be other words that might fit the bill, but somehow they're falling short. This idea is tightly contained in Patroclus's vehement hope that "such anger never seizes me," that he, like Achilles, is not transformed by his own paint. In King Lear, however, this idea of one's own anger seen in the form of another is better illustrated when Lear and the Fool walk in a stormy heath:
"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!"
Indeed, rage is now extant, but Lear understands it completely. What was previously a part of him now speaks to him from beyond himself. The conversation is between old acquintances.
I want to come back to the last thing I wanted to talk about, and it may not be the last, but here goes: the unproductivity of anger. Really, the question here is whether anger drives the aesthetic but subdues and possibly suffocates real human productivity. Patroclus's death is very beautiful in the epic, as are the events and poetry that it spurs-- yet, we ask, is it really worth it? Is our intractability, our inability to see beyond ourselves, our beliefs, our Chryses, our egos, our anger really worth what we lose-- and in tragic cases like this one, is it really worth what is sometimes irretrievable? So is anger just an artistic expression on our parts-- at least, this intractable, unswaying kind? Do we envision ourselves as grander, greater, more beautiful than we really are when we are enflamed and unrelenting? Are we producing a kind of living art even as we let something else die?

Athena's plea.

"Olympian Zeus have you no care for him in your lofty heart? Did he never win your favor with sacrifices burned beside the ships on the broad plain of Troy? Why, Zeus, so dead set against Odysseus?" (The Odyssey, Book 1, translation by Robert Fagles)

(I want to think about Robert Fagles for a brief second here. His translation of the Odyssey was the first book I ever read at Princeton, and it was to his work and ideas that I turned when I finally did a translation piece as thesis work at Princeton. He died a month or two before the thesis was done, but in a strange, possibly self-important way, I always feel like his legacy at Princeton was the reason I was able to do what I did.)

These particular lines in Athena's prayer to Zeus stood out to me this morning because of the sense of desperation that is so perfectly communicated in them. Unlike the rest of her carefully marked and calculated speech to Zeus, her father, these are lines that I imagine would be sobbed, screamed out by a woman tearing her hair, uttered by someone at the complete end of their wits and wisdom. Zeus' heart is care-less for this mortal, its divine height blinds and hardens it. Odysseus, the man's, constant sacrifices to this god of god's go unnoticed. But most importantly, mercy, at this point, appears to be a cheap virtue-- and it is only a god who is "dead set" against a man that does not show pity to a man in suffering.

Of course, we know that there are other powers, Poseidon among them, who plot against Odysseus (who isn't called the man of twists and turns for nothing), and in Zeus's reply to Athena we learn that he is not not into Odysseus but kind of for him... and hence the Odyssey goes. But let's come back to Athena and her cry for mercy.

Athena's is possibly one of the more desperate, least intricate, and thus, in my eye, most artistic of the mercy pleas. Hers are the words that despite existing on the page force the reader to hear them out loud-- they are horribly common, and that's why we can hear them... because we do hear them and at some point, utter them. They follow the all too common sequence of the call to a god, a higher power, the reminders to this supposedly forgetful god of the goodness of the supplicant, and finally, the rock-bottom point of why me, what is it in particular that I have done.

I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but before I even attempt to posit one, I do want to visit another, probably better-known, mercy plea: Portia's in The Merchant of Venice.

PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

...But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy...

Now mercy is placed alongside justice-- the first is an attribute of god and godliness, and the second, justice, belongs to man. Justice, according to Portia, can fail. It is a human and thus limited in its abilities to do right by humankind. It is when the human invention fails that we turn to the divine. Thus "mercy seasons justice," and when there is no "salvation" in the "course of justice," we can only "pray for mercy." This is the case of Odysseus also-- indeed, Poseidon's justice for Odysseus is his Odyssey, his endless, relentless wandering. And it is Athena, who unknowing of Zeus's predilection for Odysseus, is forced to the point where the absence of justice forces her to fall for mercy.

But mercy is not a human attribute, Portia learns. It belongs mostly to the gods, who as we see in the Odyssey can only work it in unseen ways. Instead, it is justice that must be clawed at to yield what Portia terms "salvation." In the Merchant of Venice, it is the law that savess Antonio-- a pound of flesh means not a drop of blood-- and in the Odyssey, it is the twists and turns of Odysseus that allow him to make the final journey to Ithaca.

Of course, at this point, we leave this realm of the literary for the ethical, maybe the philosophical:

Mercy: Justice :: God: Man

I'm inclined to think not. Here's my conclusion: It is Portia's and Athena's recognition of what is godly that allows them entry to this select club of humanity. Can Portia and Athena function in a lawful society where Odysseuses must be punished and Antonios be defleshed? I think mercy has ways of negotiating justice, or as Portia says, "mercy seasons justice."

That's it for O. and his troubles. Demain, c'est l'Iliad.