Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation by Justin Arft

Author:Justin Arft [Arft, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780197654934
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Tell your name, the one that your mother and father used to call you there,

and the others who live in the city and around it.

For no man among men is entirely nameless,

lowly or high-born, after they are first born,

but parents put [a name] upon all men when they give birth to them.

This famous request brings the epic’s preoccupation with identity, naming, and namelessness to a head and initiates Odysseus’ expansive treatment of his past. It is not, however, a continuation of Arete’s failed interrogation but rather a provocation with which Odysseus must contend to establish his basis for kleos.74 Just as Alkinoos has interfered with the bond of suppliancy created by Arete, so he now attempts to usurp her interrogation as well, and he does so in the most irregular way possible—he presses on the one part of the stranger’s interrogation that is not typically isolated or even to be understood literally, the “who” element, which he now invokes in an explicit request for Odysseus’ name. Further, Alkinoos forces the question of Odysseus’ identity in a way that no longer accommodates a performance of what the stranger’s interrogation elicits—a transformative invocation of shared memories that allows Odysseus’ Odyssean kleos to be expressed. Rather than allowing for such an opening, Alkinoos now closes in, explicitly asking Odysseus to connect himself to the least private, most famous, and most painful aspect of his past, the very man who can be named in reference to the display of pain he has just witnessed. This attempt at identification is in many ways the opposite of what the poetics of interrogation achieves throughout the epic.

Alkinoos’ claim that “no man among men is entirely nameless” strikes at the heart of Odysseus’ namelessness throughout the epic and deserves careful attention for its phraseological features as well. Not only will this claim be proven incorrect when Odysseus later recounts his own skillful use of anonymity to escape Polyphemus, but this exclusive claim fits the pattern of exclusionary pronominalization wherein Odysseus is the exception to the rule—no man except Odysseus is nameless. Odysseus alone wears namelessness well, and a significant component of his mythological persona is characterized by his anonymity. More significantly, Alkinoos’ statement resembles but also strongly contrasts with Penelope’s more accurate iteration of this negative claim (X is not possible; therefore tell me Y) when she likewise presses the stranger’s identity in Odyssey 19. When Penelope initially interrogates Odysseus, she uses the same couplet spoken by Arete (7.237–8), but with the Ithacan iteration in the last half of the stranger’s interrogation (19.104–5):

ξεῖνε, τὸ μέν σε πρῶτον ἐγὼν εἰρήσομαι αὐτή·

τίς πόθεν εἰς ἀνδρῶν; πόθι τοι πόλις ἠδὲ τοκῆες;

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