Conversation in the Odyssey

The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind. (Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes)When it occurs to Nausicaa that she had better do laundry in preparation for her own wedding day, which will surely come soon, she delays her fathers workday with a request for the proper equipment, explaining, with a facade of ingenuity that might have fooled anyone else that she must look out for her family's hygiene:"It is proper for you yourself to planplanswith the chiefs wearing clean clothes onyour skin.But you have five sons in your house,two married, but three red-bloodedbachelors;they always want to go to dances wearingfreshly cleaned clothes; I have to think about all these things." (Odyssey 6.60-65)1Alcinous has no trouble decoding his daughter's appeal and grants it without betraying his understanding of her true intention:Thus she spoke, for she was ashamed to name her youthful marriageto her dear father. And he understood everything and replied:"I do not begrudge you mules, child, nor anything else.Go! The slaves will prepare for you a wagonlofty and well-wheeled, fitted with a wagon cover." (Odyssey 6.66-70)We have just heard a conversation in which the communication takes place beneath the surface of the words: what is spoken by both parties is not what is truly conveyed by Nausicaa nor meant by Alcinous. This indirect interchange is a paradigm of the distinctive mode of conversation in the Odyssey.I like to think of language as a medium for the clear disclosure of what people want to get across. In conversation, words transmit information, requests, and the thoughts of my interlocutor. It is a straightforward process: say what you mean, use language to convey what you are thinking, and then I will understand. But I can see the author of the Odyssey rolling his eyes in disgust at my banal literalness and naively unimaginative attitude toward language. In this poet's hands language tends toward obfuscation rather than illumination. His characters do not as a rule say what they mean, and conversation in his epic is something of a game at which some people are better players than others. Playing the game properly requires a keen ability to use words to convey meaning indirectly and a sensitive awareness of what has been said despite what has been said. The first speaker in this Henry James dialogue does not stand a chance in the world of the Odyssey:"Why is it so necessary for you to go to the theatre tonight, if Miss Roothdoesn't want you to?""My dear child, she does. But that has nothing to do with it.""Why then did she say that she doesn't?""Oh, because she meant just the contrary.""Is she so false then-is she so vulgar?""She speaks a special language; practically it isn't false, because it renders herthought, and those who know her understand it." (James 1948, 437)Likewise, conversation in the Odyssey is a cryptic puzzle, intelligible and rewarding to those who know how to solve it, baffling to those who take it at face value.Homer's attitude toward language extends to a generally suspicious view of the way the world works.2 Dialogue in the Odyssey is founded on indirection, and the characters' success in life, even their survival, owes a great deal to both using and recognizing speech as a means of disguising thoughts and intent. This view of language as smoke and mirrors not only comments on the nature of human communication3 but also supports a worldview at the heart of the Odyssey as a whole, one characterized by distrust and uncertainty.Apart from instructions, gestures of hospitality, laments, prayers, and requests (and even some of these are not only what they appear), the bulk of dialogue that is straightforward and honest comes from the mouths of characters who prove in other ways artless: Zeus, Nestor, the servants, the suitors other than Eurymachus, Telemachus early on, and Alcinous most of the time. …