Odysseus and the enduring myth of the trickster-hero as not played out in the life of Pete Rose

Not a bad thing, necessarily, to start reading a new book already in an argument with the author.  The book is No Man's Lands, the author’s Scott Huler, my argument with him is this: Ted Williams was not a real-life version of the Greek hero Achilles.

That’s part of my argument, at any rate.

No Man's Lands is subtitled “One Man’s Odyssey Through the Odyssey.”  It’s a travel book, Huler’s account of his attempt to follow the course of Odysseus’s wanderings in the ten years after he helped sack Troy and set out for home on the island of Ithaca where he was king and where his wife Penelope was waiting for him, passing the time by thwarting the advances of a houseful of drunken suitors who thought she was a rich widow and thought she ought to admit she was a rich widow and thought once she admitted it she’d want to get over her grief in a hurry by marrying one of them.   I’m reading it because some minor god of vacation reading threw it off the shelf at the library just as I was passing by.

It’s called No Man's Lands because No Man (or no one) is Odysseus’ own translation of his name.

Huler’s trip around the Mediterranean is only an attempt to retrace Odysseus’ because no one really knows where Odysseus was supposed to be as he was bobbing about, surviving shipwrecks and sea monsters, fighting cyclopses, messing around with goddesses, and generally developing his opinion of himself as a man of sorrow and woe.  Homer was something of a proto-journalist and he liked to fill his stories with the kind of realistic descriptive details and historical facts that sound as though they could only have come from first-hand observation and research.  Some of the places Odysseus visits are real and identifiable.  Troy, Ithaca, the north coast of Africa.  Other places sound real.  But The Odyssey is a myth, after all, and Homer was a poet and a storyteller.  He was free to just make things up.  The islands and coasts where Odysseus washes up might as well be Narnia or Middle Earth, Discworld or Earthsea. 

These days, fantasy writers feel they have to make their magic kingdoms geographically plausible and consistent.  Homer probably didn’t worry about it.  Trying to find your way around the Mediterranean using The Odyssey as a guide book is probably a lot less helpful than trying to find your way around North America using a map of Shannara.

But over the centuries some very intelligent and temperamentally skeptical but still curious travel writers have tried to chart Odysseus’s adventures and they've made some plausible guesses as to where he did what and met up with whom have been made—the land of lotus-eaters in Tunisia, the home of the Cyclops in Sicily, Calypso’s island as Malta—and Huler took what he regarded as the best guesses and put together his itinerary based on them.

Huler has a sharp and discerning eye, a talent for thumbnail descriptions of places and people, and the good travel writer's virtue of modesty in several senses of the word---he knows that though his readers accept that in a first person narrative the writer will inevitably write about himself but that they aren't reading his book to find out what the writer thinks about himself and he has no illusions about what he's up to.  He's not trying to deliver the last word on the places he visits or on the Odyssey.  He found an original excuse to send himself on a fun trip around the Mediterranean and get his publisher to pay for it and here's his fairly straight-forward account of what he saw along the way.

Plus, he has a knack for lively summarization.  Each of his stops requires him to re-tell the passages from the Odyssey that brought him there and he does a fine job of it, which makes No Man's Lands a useful and entertaining annotated prose abridgement of Homer's epic, which is why the fifteen year old Mannion keeps stealing the book off my desk to read it himself.

Huler writes well.  But he has a bad habit, at least in the early chapters, of trying to show that the myths still have contemporary relevance, which is going about it backwards, I think.  If a myth is still relevant it doesn't need proving.  The point is to show how contemporary events, ideas, people, whatever, are relevant to the myths.  Instead of saying, "Odysseus is like so and so" or "the lotus-eaters are like such and such," you say that "So and so and such and such" are like what's going on in the Odyssey.  The reason for this is the first way diminishes the myths by bringing them down to the level of the ordinary and ignoble, the second way enlarges and ennobles the contemporary.  Plus, a comparison has to, you know, work.  The things compared have to be alike in non-trivial ways.

Huler proves my point by repeatedly reaching for sports metaphors to make his comparisons, and comparing Odysseus and his men leaving Troy to a victorious high school football team returning home on their bus not only trivializes the Greeks it forces qualifications into mind like "if victorious high school football teams raped the cheerleaders, carried off the homecoming queen to sell her into slavery, and slaughtered the opposing team and left their bloody corpses for the crows on the fifty yard line."

But my least favorite of Huler's sports analogies, the one that started the argument between me and his book, is the one he uses to try to illustrate how the archetypal characters of the Greek heroes have carried over into our times.

Baseball fans might compare Achilles, the vain, arrogant hero of The Illiad, with someone like Ted Williams: undeniably great, but not necessarily good for the team or pleasant to be around; Agamemnon might be like Ty Cobb, vicious and dangerous but hard to beat; and Meneleaus something like Mickey Mantle: great and useful but something of a blowhard.  Odysseus would be Pete Rose: the sneaky little bastard who pulls off some kind of trick that you think is beneath contempt, but carries the day.  The guy you call a liar and a cheat---unless he's on your team  Then he's just a guy who doews what it takes to win.

Oh boy, there's so much wrong in that paragraph, just starting with the idea of comparing ball players to heroes.  Heroes fight for something that matters.  Athletes play games.  Whenever you can describe a professional athlete as heroic, you are most likely doing it for what he or she does off the field or the court.  But baseball players are probably the most ordinary and workmanlike people of the whole crowd and their jobs rarely require them to do quasi-heroic things like lead or take chances that risk life and limb.  If I was forced into it, I'd look for contemporary epic heroes on the football field among quarterbacks and wide receivers.

But even taking Huler's comparisons for what they're worth, Ted Williams was not like Achilles.  For one thing, he was missing a quality that for want of a better word I'd call feminine.  Achilles was emotional, passionate, he'd have worn his heart on his sleeve if he'd worn sleeves.  He was also vain, not just arrogant, and he craved love and approval.  Williams, remember, was famous for never taking a curtain call after a home run.  He had his own approval and that was enough for him.  Williams was also something of a loner.  Achilles wasn't.  He went everywhere with his friend (and, possibly, lover) Patroclus and his Myrmidons.  They were his team.  If he wasn't necessarily good for Agamemnon's team, that was because Agamemnon didn't deserve Achilles' loyalty, not because Achilles was only out for himself.

And regardless of what you might think of Agamemnon, who sacrificed his own daughter just to get a favorable wind so he could go wage a war nobody but his stupid brother wanted to fight, he wasn't a petty villain like Ty Cobb.

I wouldn't call Mickey Mantle a blowhard either.

But it's the comparison of Pete Rose and Odysseus that really steams me, mainly because it gets Odysseus all wrong, but because it gets Rose wrong too.  Rose was an aggressive player, and he was reckless, and he could be personally and professionally obnoxious, but as far as I know he wasn't a cheater.   If he did cheat, it was after his gambling overwhelmed him and then he was cheating in order to lose.

Beyond this, though, is that Odysseus isn't a liar or a cheater either.  He does lie, sometimes, and he does resort to tricks, but always to defeat an enemy who deserves to be lied to or tricked.  It takes him ten years to come up with the idea for the Trojan Horse because it takes that long for the gods to abandon the Trojan cause.  And the cyclops is going to kill him and all his men and eat them.  I think he's pretty well justified in lying to get himself and his men out of that cave.  The point, too, of his tricks and lies is that they are signs of his intelligence.  Odysseus is the smartest of the heroes.  He's not the biggest or the strongest.  That's Ajax.  He's not the most able warrior.  That's Achilles.   But he is the one who survives not just one but two epics, because he is the one who thinks.

I don't know that anyone ever accused Pete Rose of being a great thinker.

To top it all off, Odysseus is a king.  All the heroes who go to Troy are kings and princes, a fact that is intrinsic to their characters.  They are nobles.  They are noble.  Pete Rose is hardly a prince among men.  But Odysseus is the prince among princes, a fact that is obvious at a glance to everyone who meets him.  One of his princely qualities is his honesty.  To people who deserve the truth of him, which is anyone who isn't trying to kill him or get him and his friends killed, he tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, something that distinguishes him among the heroes, apparently---his stories are never colored or edited by vanity.  It's his innate truthfulness that makes his lies effective.  And it's this combination of honesty and deviousness that makes Odysseus a relevant mythopoetical type.

The honest liar, the trickster-hero, the good guy who can outwit the bad guys by thinking like them, the rogue king---this is a type that is not just a regular character in contemporary storytelling, he or she is our favorite type of hero.

Oh, we still have plenty of versions of Achilles, the vain and petulant superhero willing, even eager, to go his own way---Batman, Dirty Harry, Grace Hanadarko, Shark.  This is the kind of hero George Lucas was warning us about with Anakin Skywalker.

And we have far too many Ajaxes, self-important blowhards who win through the exercise of brute strength and a willingness to slaughter whoever gets in their way.  Rambo, every Arnold Schwartzenegger character, Lara Croft.

But it's the trickster-hero whose exploits we most enjoy.  Ok, that I most enjoy.  But he or she is a popular type.  Han Solo and Obi-wan Kenobi are liars and con men when they need to be.  Hawkeye Pierce.  Captain Kirk.  Spider-man.  Robin Hood.  Dolly Gallagher Levi.

Indiana Jones.

Odysseus is always making it up as he goes too and like Jones he's something of a thief in the interests of a good cause.  Of course you have to know when and what and from whom it's ok to steal, and something of the cattle of the sun episode works its way into every one of Indy's adventures with someone else paying the price of going a theft too far and Indiana escaping because he knows when to shut his eyes, put the thing back, or turn his back on it and run like hell away from it.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull even echoes the Odyssey in that Indiana is reunited with his less than patient Penelope, Marion, and his son after the same amount a time as Odysseus spent away from Ithaca.

And when you get right down to it, smart and thoughtful as he is, Odysseus is a heartless killer when he needs to be and perfectly willing to do the less than noble and heroic thing and just shoot the guy with the sword and get on with the chase.

_________________________________________

The other very popular recurring mythopeotic hero isn't as popular as he used to be.  And he has no counterpart in the Greek myths that I can think of.  The hero who wins by virtue of being virtuous, the one whose strength, like Galahad's, is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure.  King Arthur.  Luke Skywalker.  Superman.

But there's a little bit of Odysseus in all of them too.  Even Superman can be pretty tricky when he needs to be.

Just ask Mr Mxyzlptlk.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

Other historical news you might find interesting:

New Date for Caesar's British Invasion.

[Brad]

Mxyzptlk, IF you puhleeeze.

[actor212]

Homer was something of a proto-journalist and he liked to fill his stories with the kind of realistic descriptive details and historical facts that sound as though they could only have come from first-hand observation and research...He was free to just make things up.

Homer now writes for FOX News.

[actor212]

"if victorious high school football teams raped the cheerleaders, carried off the homecoming queen to sell her into slavery, and slaughtered the opposing team and left their bloody corpses for the crows on the fifty yard line."

Sounds more like the Mets in 86 coming home from Houston for the Series...

I'd have to agree with your premise, Lance, that comparing ballplayers to heroes is absurdist writing.

Besides, everyone knows Odysseus was Phil Niekro...

[MikeT]

Sounds like Huler's ideas on the Illiad were influenced heavily by that Brad Pitt movie.

[Lance]

Brad: Mxyzptlk, IF you puhleeeze.

Sorry about that, Brad. Fixed it.

Btw, anybody here know how to pronounce this word: "kltpzyxm"?

[CJColucci]

Maybe Magic Johnson as Odysseus, or, if we have to stay with baseball, Joe Morgan?