Telemachy

The first four chapters, Odysseus, the main character is not even in the book.

It's his son and it's called the Telemachy because his son Telemachus is deciding why to go find his father.

So they say to me, write six pages about why Telemachus wants to go find his father Odysseus.

Well, what do you think the answer is to that? Six pages.

And those 18 episodes are divided into three parts of 3, 12 and 3 episodes.

They're only numbered in the first edition, though they are known as the Telemachia, Odyssey and Nostos, which loosely follows the structure of Homer's Odyssey.

They're weighted differently.

There are three main characters, Stephen Dedalus, the Telemachus figure, last seen in Joyce's first novel, a portrait of the artist as a young man, now living with stately plump Buck Mulligan.

But be that as it may, what it means is you've gone through four of the 24 books.

They're called the Telemachy, after Telemachus, the son of Odysseus.

And what is established there, in the movies we have something called the establishing shot.

So the first shot of a movie or the first shot of every sequence in a movie is usually location.

Yet both wind up learning far more than they bargained for, Telemachus about his father's heroic legacy in the world beyond Ithaca, and Odysseus about the grim realities awaiting him at home and in the world beyond this one.

Despite the poem's stark contrast between Telemachus as a naive youth coming of age and Odysseus as a battle-tested warrior, Book 11's resonance with the Telemachy suggests that learning who you are is inseparable from exploring what lies beyond yourself, and that this too is a journey that never truly ends.

It's a pleasure to have as guests for this episode two of my favorite classicists and two people who have spent a great deal of time lately with Odyssey 11, unraveling some of its problems and problematizing aspects whose meaning some of us readers might have been taking for granted.

They're Cambridge professors Richard Hunter and Rebecca Laemmle, and they've just published a new green and yellow edition of Odyssey Book 11.