The name of the tree: Recounting Odyssey xxiv 340-2

Journal of Hellenic Studies

Volumn 117, Issue , 1997, Pages 87-116

  Henderson, John ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84983415850     PISSN: 00754269     EISSN: 20414099     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/632551     Document Type: Article

References (213)

1. C.R. Milne, The path through the trees (London 1979) 243: this book—and its trilogy—develops, in Christopher Robin's quest to evade but nevertheless to rejoin Father, the most caring environ/mentality anyone could wish.
2. R. Barthes, Plaisir du texte (Paris 1973) 20
3. cf. T. de Lauretis, Alice doesn't. Feminism, semiotics, cinema (Basingstoke 1984) 107 ff. The epic figures its senescence, from Telemachus, suitors, sons of Nestor, etc., to Laertes, the fathers of the Suitors, pappy Eumaeus, Philoetius, Dolios and ‘his’ Sicilian crone
4. cf. T.M. Falkner, “$: Homeric heroism, old age and the end of the Odyssey’, in Old age in Greek and Latin literature, T.M. Falkner and J. de Luce (eds.), (SUNY 1989) 22 f.
5. ‘Inferential walk’: U. Eco, The Role of the reader (Bloomington 1979) 32.
6. C.W. Spinks, Semiosis, marginal signs and trickster (Basingstoke 1991) 83
7. comments, ‘Something in the text tells the reader not to take the text in a literal sense, but to look for other “meanings”… Eco defines semiotics as “the discipline studying all systems capable of lying’”, stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. (U. Eco, The name of the rose (London 1984): ‘Last Page’
8. quoting Bernard of Clairvaux, cf. B.K. Gold, ‘Mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum sera moretur: time and nature in Horace's Odes’, CPh 88 (1993)18 n. 8.)
9. Fruitless debate over ‘the’ end of the Odyssey must be the main reason: anything in xxiv falls into (at least) a penumbra of secondariness. Surprisingly, this Landmark in World Literature eludes J. Peradotto, Man in the middle voice. Name and narration in the Odyssey (Princeton 1990)
10. M.A. Katz, Penelope's renown. Meaning and indeterminacy in the Odyssey (Princeton 1991).
11. But see S. Goldhill, The poet's voice. Essays on poetics and Greek literature (Cambridge 1991) 18–21
12. M. Lynn George, Epos: word, narrative and the Iliad (Basingstoke 1988) 23–4.
13. On the scar, cf. esp. M. Ellmann, ‘Polytropic man: paternity, identity and naming’, in The Odyssey and A portrait of the artist as a young man’, in James Joyce: new perspectives, C. MacCabe (ed.) (Brighton 1980) 84–6
14. B.E. Goff, ‘The sign of the Fall: the scars of Orestes and Odysseus’, CA 10 (1991) 259–67.
15. Falkner (n.2) 45, ‘Throughout the poem Odysseus shows a keen eye …’ (My brackets) The farm is where nothing happens, so expect an anti-heroic adventure in anti-heroics.
16. Cf. R. Buxton, Imaginary Greece. The contexts of mythology (Cambridge 1994) 78 f.
17. Or heart: Mary Beard points out to me a certain futurity of the binary sign of ‘scar + trees’ in Hellenistic inscription of love into the growth of the tree, Callim. Ait. fr. 73 Pf., Virg. Eel. 10.53 f., etc.
18. This too should be turned around: storytelling is where storytelling has always been theorized, before and after theory, cf. R. Chambers, Story and situation. Narrative seduction and the power of fiction (Manchester 1984) 23.
19. I. Calvino, Our ancestors: Baron in the trees (London 1980) 178 f.
20. On $ here of ‘both the visual sign and the spoken message’, marking an ‘inferential’ mode of communication, and $ as a verb of recognition’ of what ‘need not be structured by a conventionalized code’, cf. D. Steiner, The tyrant's writ. Myths and images of writing in ancient Greece (Princeton 1994) 18, 26. This alone means that no Odyssean signs may be read off.
21. xxiii 205–6: here $ (205) foregrounds the image of the still-rooted tree/bed-sign, sure sign of the living sureness of his $ (‘marriage/bed/wife’), from Odysseus' description of it as $ … $ … $ (203–4, cf. F.I. Zeitlin, ‘Figuring fidelity in Homer's Odyssey’, in B. Cohen (ed.), The distaff side. Representing the female in Homer's Odyssey (Oxford 1995) 117–52).
22. Cf. J.M. Snyder, ‘The significant name in Lucretius’, CW 72 (1978) 229 on Empedo-cles.
23. xi 129, xxiii 276. Cf. Falkner (n.2) 52
24. Peradotto (n.3) 60 ff. Goldhill père puts his oar in, noting xiii 295, … $, where disguised Athene verbally strokes her wary protegé's Ithacan incorrigibility.
25. S. Bertman, ‘Structural symmetry at the end of the Odyssey’, GRBS 9 (1968) 119, diagrams how the exchange in 349–60, Laertes' fear for Odysseus' counsel (prompt-and-prohaeresis), is central and pivotal to the parallel sequences from 205–348 and 361–412, which fit farmhouse and garden together as ‘interlude’ and ‘episode’.
26. $, 205, $, 360: cf. $, 324, Rumour $, 413; $, 532. The narrative figures symmetrically its own massiveness, between the Telemachy's longueurs, where Nestorian hyper-entertainment over-delayed the story with ostensibly unfocussed storytelling before it could begin, and the summary Ithacan conclusion, cf. Redfield (n.15) 240
27. Falkner (n.2) 39.
28. All episode embedding opens the terms of interpretability to a range of options: see Chambers (n.6) 33 ff.
29. P. Pucci, Odysseus Polytropos. Intertextual readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad (Cornell 1987) 22, ‘Athene names the specific epic destination of Odysseus … Athene also stands for the polytropic style of the Odyssey, for its intriguing, baffling ironies, its playful allusiveness, its many facets and mirrors’. Pucci has written a poignant response to the present essay.
30. Cf. C.H. Whitman, Homer and the Homeric tradition (Harvard, 1958) 201–5.
31. For the eyes of death, recognition was on sight, otherwise unmediated: Antikleia, and Argus: S. Goldhill, ‘Reading differences: The Odyssey and recognition’, Ramus 17 (1988) 1–31 shows how Argus both models and anti-models with Laertes, they stalk the margins of the discourse of metis around recognition. Osmotic dog barks up the right tree undistracted by guise and disguise; hidebound dotage sweeps the scent under a carpet of leaves, blind to the quarry there under his nose, staring him in the face. So, the place of the Odyssean body is designed by visuality, inconclusively.
32. Goldhill (n.3) 11, ‘Recognition is part of the relationship (to be) recognized.’
33. 23.73–84. Cf. Ellmann (n.3) 84, ‘The scar again must tell its story. We are unlikely ever to encounter a more loquacious scar.’
34. ‘Odysseus appears well-dressed before Athena and Laertes: the narrative must explain his wealth’, T. Todorov, The poetics of prose (Oxford 1977) 62.
35. Cf. B. Fenik, Studies in the Odyssey (Hermes Einzelschriften 30, 1974) 49
36. C. Moulton, ‘The end of the Odyssey’, GRBS 15 (1974) 163.
37. Cf. Goff (n.3) 264, ‘The scar that effects the recognition of Odysseus proves him a man, both when it is acquired and again when its rediscovery confirms his status.
38. ‘Learning language is not learning—“cognition” of—some “thing”; rather, it is the development of a strategy (or rather, a context-specific tactic) for dealing with the world in particular instances of world dealing, instances always charged with need, desire, demand.’ (R. Schleifer, Rhetoric and death. The language of modernism and postmodern discourse theory (Illinois 1990) 191).
39. Cf. G. Ulmer, Teletheory. Grammatology in the age of video (London 1989) 135.
40. J.S. Duncan and N.G. Duncan, ‘Ideology and bliss. Roland Barthes and the secret histories of landscape’, in Writing worlds. Discourse, text & metaphor in the representation of landscape, T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan (eds.) (London 1992) 34 f.
41. discuss R. Barthes, Incidents (Paris 1977) 13–20, ‘La lumière du sud-ouest’, e.g. 20, ‘My body is my childhood, such as history made it. … Bayonne, the countryside of my childhood’.
42. For the model of filiation as attachment by story to a place, the story making the place, giving it a place in the culture as the site for ‘its’ narrative, cf. J.C. Nohrnberg, ‘Justifying narrative: commentary within Biblical storytelling’, in Annotation and its texts, S.A. Barney (ed.) (Oxford 1991) 15.
43. The work of Dennis Potter, from The singing detective to Cold Lazarus, obsessively visited/revisits the tree-perch of a boy's childscape for creative instauration (on the subject of primal blockage).
44. Goldhill (n.3) 19
45. cf. Falkner (n.2) 44, ‘It seems likely that not long after planting the orchard Laertes showed it to his young son and gave him various trees to call his own.’ Eurymachus planted more than he knew by picking ‘picking for dry-stone walls and planting tall trees’ as suitable labouring for beggar Odysseus (18.359).
46. Goff (n.3) 267.
47. See P. Connerton, How societies remember (Cambridge 1989).
48. Ellmann (n.3) 82
49. I.J.F. de Jong, ‘Eurykleia and Odysseus’ scar: Odyssey xix 393–466’, CQ 35 (1985) 517.
50. So Goldhill (n.3)19, ‘Each use of the scar is different, as the sign is differently manipulated, tells a different story, and constructs a different relation between the partners in recognition.’
51. D. Wender, The last scenes of the Odyssey, Mnemosyne Suppl. 52 (Leyden 1978) 61
52. Goff (n.3) 267. My italics. (This is ‘trotting’ after Rieu's Penguin translation.)
53. Katz (n.3) esp. 18 f., 170 ff., exposes ‘the Odyssey's ideology of exclusivity’ which is specially thematized in ‘Penelope's inscrutability as the logic of narrative truth’. ‘Indeterminacy is encoded into the text’, which ‘will not, in the end, vouchsafe us a sure sign of its truth’.
54. Laertes' trees must put in question Katz's view (11) that ‘the reunion between Penelope and Odysseus is unquestionably the high point of the poem, and the telos toward which its narrative development tends,… the poem's dénouement’: J.L. Beizer, Family Plots. Balzac's narrative generations (Yale 1986) esp. 4, 7 explains why text can display no unproblematic father, no proper meaning assured against slippage in narrative.
55. Pucci (n.17) 90.
56. R. Barthes, ‘Digressions’, in The grain of the voice: interviews. 1962–80 (New York 1986) 118.
57. Cf. Katz (n.3) 179, ‘… having offered the proof of the scar (xxiv 331–35), he realizes the insufficiency- or perhaps the inappropriateness—of this sema, and goes on to provide a reckoning of the trees and the orchard that compose his patrimony’
58. Goldhill (n.3) 19, ‘The addition of a further token to what was previously sufficient is itself significant and puts a strong focus on the addition’.
59. I. Turgenev, Fathers and sons (New York 1967) 24, cf. 42: the returned son's strange-r alter ego explains ‘why some of the trees … had not done well’: ‘You ought to have planted silver poplars here by preference, and spruce firs, and perhaps limes, giving them some loam. The arbour there has done well’, he added, ‘because it's acacia and lilac; they're accommodating good fellows, those trees, they don't want much care.’
60. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, On the Line (New York 1983) 5, 10 f., 33
61. cit. Ulmer (n.24) 140 f.: On the Line. 136: Ramus' ‘tree-diagrams’ re-placed the classical mnemotechniques of topology
62. Saussure's account of the ‘General principles’ of the arbitrary ‘Nature of the linguistic sign’ in his Course in general linguistics (London 1983) 65 ff.) began from the sign of the tree, using the relations between the pictorial icon of ‘(a/the/this) tree [or ’Tree’]’ and the graphic mark ‘arbor’ to model those between concept and sound pattern
63. Lévi-Strauss, The savage mind (London 1972) 159 took the tree for his own favoured model for systematizing classification.
64. For this parodic recapitulation of the poem's inception: still re -veiling the name, or beyond the name the self, cf. Goldhill (n.3) 18 f.
65. The two Odysseuses image perfect satisfaction in an emphatically balanced vision of self-accountability: ‘I gave of gold on the one hand’ (=274) ‘and I gave on the other some silver’ (= 275); ‘a dozen single cloaks ~ ditto rugs’ (= 276), (~) ‘ditto mantles ~ ditto tunics, to go with them’ (= 277); to go with these four verses of even-keeled apportionment, ‘separately, again, four women’, who themselves match their looks to their products' (278 f. On the exchange of gifts, cloth, (dis)guise, cf. E. Block, ‘Clothing makes the man: a pattern in the Odyssey’, TAPhA 115 (1985) esp. 3 n.8).
66. The naming of the father (cf. the lie to Eumaeus, naming father ‘Kastor son of Hylax’, xiv 204: ‘Beaver son of Barker’)
67. ‘Lord Apheidas Polupemonides’ (‘Unstinting Muchwoeson’, 305: Peradotto (n.3) 144 mentions the rival, ∗Polupamon, ‘Much Wealth’)
68. presumably works with ‘Arkeisiades’ as from $ (‘suffice, be plenty’, M.J. Flaumenhaft, ‘The undercover hero: Odysseus from dark to daylight’, Interpretation 10 (1982) 26
69. cf. ‘Pheidon’ in the tale to Eumaeus, xiv 316.
70. Peradotto (n.3) 144 favours ‘Unsparing—sc. of the Suitors’.); but with an evidently Oedipal/schizoid thrust of fathering the grandfather to turn the tables on father, as the ‘Laertes’ of this line is derived from the polu- sobriquets of his son, in a parody of the original christening of Odysseus as ‘Master Hate’ by the punster grandfather which is recalled to us immediately by Odysseus' self-naming for strife.
71. (On Odysseus and ∗$, see Peradotto 129 ff.: ∗$, ‘feel pain, express it’, gets missed out, though this gloss by nomination links Odysseus (from i 55, v 153, 160 on) to the rest of his family and his father Laertes (iv 110, 740 f., xv 355, xvi 145) and is acted out in the orchard-scene, where ‘Mr. Pain’ inflicts this his truth upon himself and his reflector-figure, upon himself through the pain he brings and means for his reflector.) The schizophrenic ‘becomes’ his own parent—he lives to elude, play across, ‘the ultimate linguistic dependence of one meaning (self, child) upon its opposite (other, parent)’
72. R. Harland, Superstructuralism (London 1987) 173.
73. Cf. Peradotto (n.3) 144. This impromptu self-naming (Odysseus first named his stranger self at xix 183: not ‘the beggar from Crete, an anonymous stranger in a world which regards a person's name and genealogy as his primary identity’, but ‘Aithon’
74. cf. A.J. Haft, ‘Odysseus, Idomeneus and Meriones: The Cretan lies of Odyssey’, CJ 79 (1983–1984) 302) actively intervenes in the social theatre of language in a display of mastery through teasing metis, pretending to read back the truth of the life to a primordial baptism: the life-story of one $ (‘from Wanders worth’, 304, as if $
75. or ‘from Painland’, ∗$: cf. Peradotto (n.3) 144 f.
76. On the whole set of aliases, cf. S. West, ‘Laertes revisited’, PCPhS 35 (1989) 140 n.72.).
77. $: xiv 124; viii 232 f.; viii 451–4; … $ … $, xvii 111–3. See L. Kurke, The traffic in praise. Pindar and the poetics of social economy (Cornell 1991) 41 f. n.14: ‘to preserve’ or ‘to convey safely home’.
78. ‘The epic itself… emerges finally as the ultimate structure of care’, M. Lynn-George, ‘Structures of care in the Iliad’, CQ 46 (1996) 20.
79. 245–7, cf. Falkner (n.2) 42
80. Redfield (n.15) 232 recognizes that ‘Culture is often quite literally gardening, and a master-symbol of the poem of equal standing with Odysseus’ scar and Penelope's bed—is Dolius' garden’ (sic); 229: ‘Nobody promised him a rose garden.’ The narrative enfolds this topological tropology within its detailed vision of the Sicilian servant/wife's ‘care’ for old Laertes/Dolios ($, 212, 390).
81. J. Giono's seminal tale, The man who planted trees (London 1985) 18, 20, 30, 38.
82. Here the text originarily gave Odysseus his own name and so began its destiny as Narrative to stage an act of naming. See M. Ragussis, Acts of naming. The family plot in fiction (Oxford 1986), Beizer (n.30).
83. Flaumenhaft (n.38) 26 shows how the only child syndrome of these ‘lone wolves’ chimes with their ‘cunning’ ability to feed themselves a-plenty on modest means (xiv 325 f.).
84. This could be a redolent/smelly spot of muck-spreading, if not in their text then in the horticultural reader's mind, see S. West, ‘Cicero, Laertes and manure’, CQ 39 (1989) 553–5
85. on Cic. De Sen. 54, Laertam … colentem agrum et eum stercorantem.
86. S. Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (Princeton 1987) 29.
87. Goff (n.3) 267, ‘… the scar tells of change’; ‘Homer … must have felt the lightness of these signs, the appropriateness of the olive’ (bed) ‘and fruit trees both to the continuity … of the royal family and to the renewal of Ithaca by the return of the king’
88. K.J. Reckford, ‘Some trees in Virgil and Tolkien’, in Perspectives of Roman Poetry, G.K. Galinsky (ed.) (Texas 1974) 64.
89. So H. Erbse, Beiträge zum Verständnis der Odyssee (Berlin 1972) 99, 108, ‘urn seine Freude an der Gartenarbeit zu wecken …. um die Liebe zum Gartenwesen in ihm zu wecken.’
90. S. Pugh, Garden, nature, language (Manchester 1988) 94
91. P. Womack, Improvement and romance. Constructing the myth of the highlands (Basingstoke 1989) 67
92. R. Barthes, Mythologies (St. Alban's 1973) 146
93. J.G. Strutt, Sylva Britannica (1882)
94. cit. S. Daniels, “The political iconography of woodland in later Georgian England’, in The iconography of landscape, D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds.) (Cambridge 1991) 51.
95. Remember: ‘different social segments, each with a different past, will have different memories attached to the different mental landmarks characteristic of the group in question’, Connerton (n.26) 37 (summarising Halbwachs).
96. D. Lowenthal, The Past is a foreign country (Cambridge 1985) 135, 53
97. citing Peter Tate, ‘a chronicler of the New Forest’
98. Ulmer (n.24) 149
99. W.E. van Beek and M. Banga, ‘The Dogon and their trees’, in Bush base: forest farm culture, environment and development, E. Croll and D. Parkin (eds.) (London 1992) 57–75.
100. Goldhill (n.3) 19.
101. Pucci (n.17) 173 ff.
102. See P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘Land and sacrifice in the Odyssey: a study of religious and mythical meanings’, in Myth, religion & society, R.L. Gordon (ed.) (Cambridge 1981) esp. 91 f. esp. on the olives
103. for other copses/gardens cf. v 63 f., 68 f., 238 f., vii 114 ff., ix 182 f., x 150, xi 587 ff., W. Richter, Die Landwirtschaft im homerischen Zeitalter, Archaeologia Homerica H (Göttingen 1968) 140 f.
104. R. Meiggs, Trees and timber in the ancient Mediterranean World (Oxford 1982) 108 ff.
105. S. Isager and J.E. Skydsgaard, Ancient Greek agriculture. An introduction (London 1992) 41 f., deal with this ‘orchard of considerable size’ under ‘Other fruit trees’.
106. Barthes (n. 49) 129, 132. Does Laertes' sign open dendrochronology?
107. For the Odyssey's poetic and ethic of accumulative ‘hoarding’ cf. P. Pucci, ‘The proem of the Odyssey’, Arethusa 15 (1982) 51.
108. Alcinous' Eden, cf. Falkner (n.2) 45.
109. See Pugh (n.49) 49, 96 f. on Macclary's letter about the Rousham kitchen-garden as the plethora of cornucopia turning into ever more detailed statistics and stock-taking, from effusion to steward's accountancy
110. D.E. Wayne, Penshurst. The semiotics of place and the poetics of history (London 1984) 117 on Jonson's shift of emphasis from the Penshurst garden ‘to the greater utilitarian value of the orchards’.
111. A.J. Greimas and J. Fontanille, The semiotics of passions. From states of affairs to states of feelings (Minnesota 1993) 215.
112. Cf. Connerton (n.26) 11, ‘A tradition of behaviour is unavoidably knowledge of detail.’ On the ‘mercantile mind’ and its meticulous recording of numbers that ‘serves to signify an ideology and mark an identity’
113. see R. Hodge, Literature as discourse. Textual strategies in English and history (Cambridge 1990) 93 f., anal/ysing the social stylistics in Advice to a young tradesman, by B. Franklin—‘ a printer as well as author, and his firm won the first contract to print money for the state of Philadelphia’.
114. On the articulation of the self in collecting, cf. S. Stewart, On longing. Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Duke 1993) esp. 162 f., ‘Ironically … the fetishist's impulse toward accumulation and privacy, hoarding and the secret, serves both to give integrity to the self and at the same time to overload the self with signification.’
115. For the count, cf. D. Matz, Ancient world lists and numbers. Numerical phrases and rosters in the Graeco-Roman civilizations (London 1995) esp. 199, for 108 Suitors.
116. See the remarkable work on this in Pucci (n.17) passim
117. cf. Pucci (n.58) 55 ff.
118. Peradotto (n.3) 115 ff.
119. Cf. Falkner (n.2) 53; e.g. xvi 17 ff., Eumaeus greets Telemachus ‘like a father an only son come home from abroad in the tenth year’. The story of Eumaeus' displacement, $, from home (xv 381) shows up deracination as the limit-condition of the Laertiads: cf. Menelaus' uncomprehending or challenging proposition that he ‘would have transplanted Odysseus and his family from Ithaca to some fine city in Argos’ (iv 175 f.) and the notice that those phantastical ‘Phaeacians had upped and migrated to their new land’ (vi 4 ff.).
120. H. Foley, ‘“Reverse similes” and sex roles in the Odyssey’, in Women in the ancient world. The Arethusa papers, J. Peradotto and J. Sullivan (eds.) (SUNY 1984) 63 f., 19.112 f.
121. N. Austin, Archery at the dark of the moon (Berkeley 1975) 8. The Narrative is seeded all through with this message: the years go round and the right year arrives, the year went by at Circe's, the seasons turned round, months wasted away, the days were long, the fourth year came for Penelope's ruse and the seasons came, the months wasted away and many days were passed; rich Libya is where ewes produce x 3 p.a— and milk the year round, Ithaca has every kind of timber and there is water the year round, Eurymachus's wages for the beggar would guarantee food the year round… (i 16; x 467 ff.; xix 152 f., xxiv 142 f.; iv 85 ff.; xiii 246 f.; xviii 360).
122. The fruit-trees relate to the normative attention in the poem to both the general conception of the generation as the proper structuring principle for society (C. Segal, ‘The Phaeacians and the symbolism of Odysseus’ return’, Arion 1 (1962) 47)
123. to topical instances of this, as in the correct temporal placing of couples within their generations (M. Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen. Authority, difference and the epic (Cornell 1989) 87 f.).
124. The olive, arbos… factum nepotibus umbram (Virg. Georg. ii 57 f.), is—perennially—the Greek paradigm of peasant temporality, the nostalgia of ‘the “natural wisdom” of traditional practices’, where ‘even into their old age they continued to plant olive trees … without considering costs and returns. They knew that they would die and that they should leave the earth in good order for those that came after them, perhaps simply for the earth itself …’
125. (Castoriadis in J. Tomlinson, Cultural imperialism (London 1991) 160. My emphasis.).
126. Cf. D. Davies, ‘The evocative symbolism of trees’, in Cosgrove and Daniels (n.49) 34, ‘Practical symbolism’. Consider the modelling in the Odyssey's hyperbole for Odysseus' fantasised treasures, ‘enough even to the 10th generation’ (xiv 325 f., xix 294 f).
127. For discussion of the technical gloss, a hapax and the solitary Homeric compound adjective in ‘$-’, $, cf. Richter (n.53) 145 f.
128. J. Russo, M. Fernandez-Galiano, A. Heubeck, A commentary on Homer's Odyssey. Volume III. Books XVII-XXIV (Oxford 1992) 399, n. ad loc.
129. A. Pope, The Odyssey of Homer (London 1903) 374.
130. Why the ‘30 + 22 + 8 + 1’ of Calvino's Baron in the trees, (n. 7) Cosimo, Jr.?
131. E.g. Isager and Skydsgaard (n.53) 41, ‘It is only when the hero is able to recount the number of trees given to him by his father when he was a child that Laertes acknowledges his identity. These are 13 pear trees, 10 apples, 40 figs and 50 rows of vine—in other words an orchard of considerable size laid out far from the built-up area.’ (My emphasis).
132. Todorov (n.21) 102 f.
133. Cf. Spinks (n.2) 38, ‘Numbers are the most semantically neutral of signs; their semantic carrying capacity is seen as limited to some narrow concept of amount, number or quantity. Mathematics prides itself on its precision, specificity and semantic monovalence in signs, and the history of numbering suggests such an object-centred origin since numbering records were usually inventories.’
134. To use another idiom, does knowledge by acquaintance fuse here with knowledge by description—where parallel lines meet? Cf. G. McCulloch, The game of the name (Oxford 1989) 231.
135. Handedness: Spinks (n.2) 31. Deixis: $, (Laertes), answered by: $, 331, 335, 343. Walk: $, 338 f.
136. For pioneering in the ‘anthropology of numbers’, see T. Siebers, Morals and stories (Columbia 1992) 208 f.
137. T. Crump, The anthropology of numbers (Cambridge 1992).
138. On world mapping, tool usage, etc., cf. Spinks (n.2) 31. For nameless numbers, cf. 13 in German, either 13—or from another point of view 14—in English, 17 in French or Italian, and 18 in Latin.
139. Remember the longer list of species in 246 f. This ‘13’ is an hapax in the Odyssey (A ‘13th day, so sail’, xix 202, Alcinous ‘a 13th royal’, viii 391 only
140. cf. ‘13's in Iliad v 387 (months hard labour), x 495 and 561 (baker's dozen of victims) only). There are a dozen ‘10's in the Odyssey, but this ‘40’ is another hapax (There are just the 9 ‘40's of ships in the Iliad's Catalogue.) ‘50's in the Odyssey are ‘maids’, vii 103, xxii 421
141. ‘sheep’ and ‘droves of pigs’, xii 130, xiv 15
142. ‘companies of men’, xx 49
143. or these ‘vines, rows of vines’ (And there are ‘52’ Phaeacian rowers, viii 35, 48, and ‘52’ Dulichian Suitors, xvi 247; Iliad has sixteen, or so, ‘50’s-or-so’.)
144. Cf. Richter (n.53), 131.
145. When Hardy's Tess says ‘What's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only… ?’ (see Ragussis (n.43) 179), the answer may take the form of pondering the idea of the ‘row’ in arboriculture, where even the individual identity of a tree depends, as particularly for the pear which quickly degenerates into scrub, on cultivation by a Laertian hoeing and digging, where the rows ordain them, make them, simultaneously, countable and rewardingly fruitful.
146. See J.C. Brown, Let me enjoy the earth. Thomas Hardy and nature (London 1992) esp. 160–8 on Hardy's image-repertoire around ‘the tree’.
147. Connerton (n.26) 72–104, ‘Bodily practices’
148. Oakeshott, cit. Thomas Hardy and nature, 11.
149. McCulloch (n.67) 267.
150. Cf. Ragussis, (n.43) 198 ff., Proust on childhood as ‘the age in which one believes one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name’.
151. Wender (n.29) 61 f.
152. Cf. Ragussis (n.43) 244, ‘The study of personal naming reveals the ways in which we use persons to construct our own allegories of meaning.’
153. C.E. Cummings, ‘Labeling—Help yourself, in ‘East is East and West is West (Some observations on the World's Fairs of 1939 by one whose main interest is in museums)’ Bulletin of Buffalo Society of Natural Science 20 (1940) 236 f. Mary Beard gave me this gem.
154. S. Petrey, Speech acts and literary theory (London 1990) 104
155. M. Baxandall, ‘Exhibiting intention: some preconditions of the visual display of culturally purposeful objects’, in Exhibiting cultures. The poetics and politics of museum display, I. Karp and D. Lavine (eds.) (London 1991) 35.
156. Cf. Peradotto (n.3), ‘Chapter 6: Outis: The noman-clature of the self’, and esp. 96 ff.
157. along with McCulloch (n.67)
158. Ragussis (n.43), particularly helpful accounts of philosophical and literary theorizing through the name and naming.
159. ‘Names the trees’: Whitman (n.18) 305.
160. On Homeric use of $, cf. Erbse (n.48) 214 f.
161. Wender (n.29) 49.
162. Peradotto (n.3) did not consider this (sort of) passage and so missed the all-important borderlands of ‘naming’, where its conceptualization is very likely most strikingly contested. Commentary must interpose glossatory ‘sense’ in its promise to specify ‘meaning’: ‘339. ônomasas: ‘named, identified by species’ … 340–1: … onomênas: … lacks close parallels in epic…. The related onomazo is so used with the sense of ‘specify’ … so that we are led to … understand the meaning ’promise‘.’
163. (Russo, Fernández-Galiano, Heubeck (n.63) 399, nn. ad locc.)
164. The naming of such may encapsulate and promote a particular attitude toward trees and the politics it imports onto at least the lips of those who must use the label to lead their lives, e.g. Daniels (n.49) 47 ff., ‘Planting and patriotism’: ‘New plantations were named after Nelson and other victorious British admirals’. The tree there was definitively labelled: Timber, for the Marine.
165. For the particular/general issue in the Game of the name, cf. Ragussis (n.43) 211.
166. Cf. T. Moore and C. Carling, The limitations of language (Basingstoke 1988) 93 f., on ‘the assumption that the similarities between individual apples outweigh their differences’; 21–3, for ‘the case of the Douglas fir—or was it a Scots pine?—… meant to be a simple case of language anchored in the external, physical world. … But even this was not really a simple case. … How much more room for uncertainty, for differing judgements when it is the intangible, invisible, immaterial we want to talk about. (—’As long as we are all standing looking at the tree, it is unlikely to have any consequence that we call it a Douglas fir and he calls it a Scots pine.‘—) Each of us must experience even the world around us differently, though fortunately the differences between us are often insignificant. As for the inner, private worlds, there each of us is on our own—which is not to say we do not share many of our hopes and fears and fantasies with others.’ The Odyssey—
167. E.g. J.T. Irwin, American hieroglyphics. The symbol of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Yale 1980) 32 f.
168. But cf. K. Hamsun, Pan (London 1974) 90 f., ‘You good forest, my home, God's peace, shall I tell you from my heart… I stop, turn in all directions and, weeping, call birds, trees, stones, grass and ants by name, I look about and name them each in turn.’
169. Compare Provost Bateson's surprise, Moore and Carling (n.79) 87, on ‘a graduate who had come to know a flock of Bewick swans so well she claimed she could identify around 450 of them individually. She had given them all names…. She expressed surprise … that anyone should have doubted her ability since most people can recognise a large number of human faces’.
170. A. Webber, ‘The hero tells his name. Formula and variation in the Phaeacian episode of the Odyssey’, TAPhA 119 (1989) esp. 7.
171. The regular naming of Odysseus by patronym has Laertes repeatedly ‘name’ his son for himself, part of the ‘proper name’ which makes and marks out the name as proper, cf. Goldhill (n.3) 19.
172. Murnaghan (n.46) 31 has Laertes give his ‘dependant… only a token portion of his inheritance’—a pro-portion of his portion. By this reasoning, Odysseus smuggles in notice to his father that he had understood or come to understand the attempt to tie him to the farm with a ‘some now, some later’ routine. This is to glimpse resistance through a ‘realist’ child's T with a vengeance—one who would presumably go on to mimic father's rose-tinted promises of seasons of mellow fruitfulness in silently sardonic protest: ‘How little father knew how it would all turn out, how little he knew this son’?
173. Katz (n.3) 179.
174. On pig-man Eumaeus' reception as ‘parodic foretaste’ see F. Williams, ‘Odysseus’ homecoming as a parody of Homeric formal welcomes’, CJ 79 (1986), 395
175. cf. J. Rundin, ‘A politics of eating: feasting in early Greek society’, AJPh 117 (1996) 179–215, esp. 187 f.
176. for Horace playing Eumaeus, cf. J. Henderson, ‘Horace, Odes 3.22 and the life of meaning: stumbling and stampeding out of the woods, / blinking and screaming into the light, / snorting and gorging at the trough, / slashing and gouging at the death’, Ramus 24 (1995) 103–51.
177. See Chambers (n.6) 124 on amphigory, duplicitous narrative where the display of concealing is used to conceal nothing.
178. Cf. C.R. Trahman, ‘Odysseus’ lies (Odyssey, Books xiii-xix)’ Phoenix 6 (1952) 35 n.15, ‘The lie Odysseus tells Laertes (xxiv 303–14), unlike the earlier fictions, is not prompted by necessity’
179. Moulton (n.21) 164, ‘His identity no longer needs to be concealed from his enemies.’ (My emphasis.)
180. So Goff (n.3) 267.
181. Katz (n.3) 179 mistranslates ‘I asked you about each of them’. But as we see, she is not wrong. (My emphases.)
182. So Katz (n.3) 179, ‘… quoting, in all likelihood, Laertes’ own words’. The odd sequence of tenses in 343 f. could half-suggest a sliding in and out of citation and repetition, as Monro half-suggested
183. (pace D.L. Page, The Homeric Odyssey (Oxford 1966) 107).
184. Whitman (n.18) 205. (My emphasis)
185. Cf. McCulloch (n.67)181, ‘Your vicinity is an area allotted to you for some given purpose, usually with you located somewhere near the centre.’
186. Goff (n.3) 265: the oddness of ‘matrilineal’ baptism, however, blesses in the guise of penalizing the hero destined for great things.
187. Solidarity: Goldhill (n.3) 18
188. cf. J.M. Redfield, Nature and culture in the Iliad (Chicago 1975) 111 for this idyll.
189. Threat: Ellmann (n.3) 82.
190. Autolycan naming: Levi-Strauss (n.35) 181, 185, suggests that in its most extreme form the ‘embodied name’, the one-off, ‘is a free creation on the part of the individual who gives the name and expresses a transitory and subjective state of his own by means of the person he names’.
191. Cf. Pucci (n.17) 88 f., ‘And so the scar assumes for us a figurative meaning both as the mark, left on Odysseus’ body, of his relationship with Autolycus and as the mark, left in Odysseus' name, of his Hermes-like characterization.’
192. Cf. Goff (n.3) 264, ‘The point in the narrative where this recognition is effected finds Odysseus on the brink of another great exploit, and the recounting of the story can be seen to act as a guarantee of his continued success.’
193. J.R.R. Tolkien, The hobbit, or there and back again (New York 1966) 283.
194. Murnaghan (n.46) 30–31
195. cf. 28–35, Austin (n.61) 102–5.
196. Wender (n.29) 56 f. pardons any heartlessness in Odysseus' ‘test’ of Laertes as typically esteemed Greek wiliness
197. Moulton (n.21) 163 f. names the equation of the father, the orchard and the inheritance a ‘major theme’
198. Fenik (n.21) 47 ff. concludes that Odysseus acts from ‘—let us say it openly—force of habit’
199. W.G. Thalmann, Conventions of form and thought in early Greek epic poetry (Johns Hopkins 1984) 234 n.28 finds ‘it natural that Odysseus … should—practically as a reflex—treat his father in the same way’. In the same way, that is, as Athene treated him in xiii, cf. 326 ff.; and as Penelope treated her strange visitor in xix, cf. 215 ff.; complicated in the relaying between Odysseus and Telemachus in xxiii, 113 ff., esp. 181, where wife is (to be) allowed to test her man; diffracted in Odysseus' ‘test’ to see if he can wangle a cloak from Eumaeus, xiv 459, and when he and his son mean to ‘test’ the faith of the servants, xvi 300, etc.
200. For ancient efforts to heal/purge the text of Odyssean sadism cf. N.J. Richardson, ‘Recognition scenes in the Odyssey and ancient literary criticism’, PLLS 4 (1983) 227 f.
201. Ragussis (n.43) 85 learns from Hawthorne's Pearl that ‘What the child learns from her father is how to realize her own pain through another's. Father and child meet on that common ground where each can say: I now can put myself aside for another, instead of living in terror of being put aside by another’. He warms to the idea?
202. In arguing that Odysseus' nostos as a whole is a parody of the formal welcome, Williams (n.83) 396 identifies ‘six stages … in the formal reception of a Homeric guest: 1) a stranger approaches royal host and royal attendants; 2) attendants respond to the stranger; 3) the host greets the stranger; 4) the host offers a token of hospitality, either in person or through his attendants, and reproaches attendants for any misbehavior; 5) the host or attendants feed the stranger; and 6) the host inquires about the stranger's identity’.
203. Hence $, 406: more than meets the eye if you take this Dolios to be the father of the unfaithful pair Melanthius and Melantho. On this Homeric Question, see Wender (n.29) 54 f.
204. J.H. Finley, Homer's Odyssey (Harvard 1978) 231
205. Moulton (n.21) 164 n.50.
206. There is but one ‘6th’ in Homer, of the sons of Nestor, iii 415
207. there are, I suppose, 6 other ‘6's in the Odyssey, ix 60 (crew), x 6 (6 + 6 sons and daughters, in fact), xii 90–110–246 (necks of Scylla, so crew snacks), xvi 248 (attendants on Suitors), xxii 252 (Suitors to throw first at the heroes).
208. There are, in a way, 6 ‘6's in the Iliad, v 270 (colts reared), 641 (ships), vii 247 (6/7 layers of shield), xxiii 741 (-gallon krater), xxiv 399 (other sons + yours truly), 604 (more sons and daughters).
209. On the body language of Dolios and his sons here, D. Lateiner, Sardonic smile: nonverbal behavior in Homeric epic (Michigan 1995) 140, n. 2.
210. Cf. R.B. Rutherford, ‘At home and abroad: aspects of the structure of the Odyssey’, PCPhS 31 (1985) 133–50.
211. Lynn-George (n.3) 24: ‘In one sense this world is confined in space … It is not the immense spatial realm of the wanderings. And yet a great distance opens up within this same place. … Odysseus, a traveller in time, traces his way back to a more remote world and wandering, the small steps of a far-off day as the orchard of childhood is recalled … recalling finally the names - the words which construct the worlds of Odysseus, who repeats them in the telling of the tale of the trees, the trees which … like many tales, including the Homeric epic, tell of time and transformation.’
212. Peasant in the vagrant dendrophilist E. Pound's Canto LXXXVIH (1955): recalling boyhood Pennsylvania's streets named after trees in 1957, Pound ‘remembers his father planting pear, peach and cherry, and he asks his correspondent about the oak (’purty tall in 1900‘) and the apple tree. … Late in life … he returns …, goes out … in search of an evergreen which he and a friend had planted behind the church years before. … “His father's name was Homer.”’
213. (C. Tomlinson, Poetry and metamorphosis (Cambridge 1983) 62–4, citing H.D.)