Samuel Butler—though he is mostly known now for the immortal, posthumously-published satirical bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh—spent much of his life as an author producing works of nonfiction—specifically, speculative scholarship (let us call it), on such diverse topics as evolutionary biology and the authorship of the Odyssey.
I turned to these books initially for their entertainment value; rather than in the belief that they would carry scholarly conviction. After all—Butler's hypotheses—when stated baldly—have a way of sounding ludicrous and needlessly contrarian.*
But having gone through a few of these books, now—I am beginning to notice a pattern. I start each book ready to chuckle good-humoredly over some crank hobbyhorse or intellectual hare Butler is chasing—and which even he, I think, cannot have taken too seriously.
But within a few pages, I am perfectly convinced.
It happened with Life and Habit. And, now, it has happened again with The Authoress of the Odyssey.
In short, I am now just as convinced as Butler was that the person who wrote the epic we know as the Odyssey was not some graybearded bard; or even a whole committee of them spread across countries and centuries—but a single young woman. Perhaps even a young woman who lived in Sicily, as Butler is persuaded—though I'm less committed to that point.
Maybe that idea still strikes you as contrarian. But let it sink in. As soon as it does so, a lot that always struck one as strange about the epic begins to come clear.
Anyone who reads the Odyssey (or a full translation of it), after knowing the story at second- or third-hand, will probably be struck by a few weird discrepancies between the actual text—and the mental image we all hold in our minds of what the "Odyssey" is supposed to be.
The first-time reader will probably be struck (as I was) that what we tend to think of as "the Odyssey" proper—the adventures of Odysseus as he attempts to return to Ithaca—actually make up a very small portion of the poem. Moreover, they are told in retrospect—Odysseus recounting what happened after the fact.
The first-time reader will probably be surprised by how much space in the poem is devoted to Telemachus's visit to see Menelaus and Helen; Odysseus's reception in Phaeacia and his meeting with Nausicaa and her parents—King Alcinous and Queen Arete.
The reader may also be surprised by how quickly in the poem Odysseus gets home to Ithaca—and how many pages and verses still remain before we arrive at what we all know at this point is the inevitable conclusion.
There's not actually that much for Odysseus to do, once he gets home—tell everyone he's arrived; kill the suitors; that's about it. But he takes an astonishing amount of time to do it.
Meanwhile—the parts we all think of as the Odyssey proper—the Cyclopes, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, Circe, etc.—pass by relatively quickly, and often with minimal description.
We learn infinitely more about the details of Alcinous's and Odysseus's households, that is to say, than we do about the gods and monsters that countless generations have been taught to think of as the essence of the Odyssey.
Contrast this with the Iliad—where the focus of the poem is almost never on domestic relations; and almost always on the combat of various chieftains.
All of which begins to make sense if we suppose that the Odyssey and the Iliad were in fact written by very different people (if either had a single author at all); and more to the point—that the former was written by someone much more like Nausicaa than like the composite bard who created the Iliad.
Butler goes so far as to say that the author of the Odyssey simply was Nausicaa—not a person known by that name, of course, but someone who lived in a household just like Nausicaa's—and who was writing about her own father and mother under the thin disguises of Alcinous and Arete.
We could make the same point slightly less dramatically if we merely concede—Nausicaa is plainly the character with whom the anonymous author of the work most identifies.
This—upon a rereading of the poem through the abridged translation that Butler supplies in his own text—suddenly seems irrefutable. There has to be a reason the poem dwells so much more on Nausicaa, and paints her so much more plausibly, that it does its ostensible male protagonist.
And the simplest explanation seems that the poem was written by someone of Nausicaa's age and gender.
And why not? Butler asks. What "prima facie" reason to exclude the hypothesis can anyone find? I ask the same question—and can find no answer.
At one point in his study of John Updike, U and I (well, really it's not so much a study of Updike, as it is a memoir of thinking about being obsessed with the prose of Updike)—Nicholson Baker observes that the novel as a literary form was really developed and brought to perfection by women and gay men.
As a heterosexual male author, then—Baker observes—he always felt a bit unsure of himself in the genre. In light of the "recognized preeminence of women in [...] the form [...] we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren't gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can't quite master," he suggests.
And if this is true of the modern novel—why couldn't it be true of Western literature as a whole? Perhaps all imaginative narrative fiction has been developed much more by women than by men—from the first great epic poem on down to the present.
"If the truth were known, we might very likely find that it was man rather than woman who was the interloper in the domain of literature," Butler writes—just as Baker, as a man, still felt himself an interloper in the genre of extended prose fiction at the end of the twentieth century.
Butler doesn't support this argument with technical source criticism or linguistic sleuthing (at least not when he is talking about the poet's gender; he relies more on these methods in exploring the (to me, less interesting) questions of her location, date, and familiarity with the rest of the Epic Cycle). Rather, he supports it primarily from the character and feel—the vibes, if you will—of the text (and indeed—this unapologetic subjectivity is what makes Butler's book still delightful reading for the non-specialist; it has the frank, opinionated quality of a blog post or podcast where people are arguing over the gender politics of the latest Disney or superhero movie, say—and as such, Butler's book has an astonishingly contemporary feel**).
Butler's argument for this thesis proceeds most of all from the simple and timeless truism that people write best about what they know most intimately. And so—if the author of the Odyssey seems most at home writing about the affairs of a domestic household, rather than battles or voyages at sea—the conclusion thrusts itself upon us that she spent her life among the former, rather than the latter.
She—just like writers ever since—had the most to say about the places and people she actually knew. In the person of Nausicaa, Antinous, Arete, Penelope, etc.—in the households and environs of Phaeacia and Ithaca as she sketched them—she was writing about her own "home folks" and "home town"—as Langston Hughes would put it. (The ghost of Homer approaches Patrick Kavanagh—in one of the latter's poems, to let him in on the secret that he made the Iliad out of a "local row"; a domestic quarrel—and now we can say with confidence than Nausicaa made the Odyssey of the same type of material.)
Here, then, at the dawn of Western literature—it would seem—people were already writing navel-gazing autofiction of the sort that is often condemned today as a postmodern excess. And why not, I ask again?
"Why not say what happened?" as Robert Lowell once rhetorically asked—in response to the critics who accused him of being overly autobiographical and self-disclosing in his verse. ("TMI! TMI!" they cried). And why not indeed? Why should Nausicaa not have written a book largely about herself? Isn't that the person she had the most to say about?
But is Nausicaa really the hero of the Odyssey—much more than the nominal hero Odysseus? I confess I didn't re-read the entire poem in preparation for writing this post in order to test the point. I relied instead on the abridged prose translation that Butler made, and which he includes in his text.
And it's possible, of course, that Butler's translation was tendentious in some way. But it squares with my own recollection of the poem from the last time I went through it—years ago. And it's unmistakable from the structure of the poem alone that the adventures and voyages of Odysseus are de-emphasized—and much greater importance—measured by page- and verse-count alone—is attached to the kinds of domestic turmoil that would have formed a greater part of the daily life of a young woman in the ancient Mediterranean.
Butler may seem an unlikely male writer to have this sort of flash of insight into the opposite sex. Decades of speculation about his sexuality have left certain questions unanswered; but what is undoubtable from his writings is that he was, at the very least, the patron saint of Confirmed Bachelors.
And indeed, Butler writing on this subject straddles an uneasy divide.
In some of his argument, he provides an essentially proto-feminist reading of the Odyssey—pointing out that the women in every scene become the center of interest; they get the upper hand in every disagreement; they appear almost always in the dominant role (in contrast to the portrayal of power relations in the Iliad), and they always keep their dignity, in contrast to the men—who are often made to seem ridiculous.
One of Butler's techniques for convincing us of this—and it is highly effective—is to tease his thesis in the opening chapter, but withhold most of his actual argument for it until we have first read through his own partial translation of the epic. As we do so—we start to spot the tell-tale signs of a female author's hands before Butler even directs our attention to them—so that we become partisans of his thesis before he even really needs to argue for it.
Indeed—he recounts an anecdote (which I am fully prepared to believe, since it squares with my own experience) of a young writer of his acquaintance who at first "supposed" that Butler's thesis—i.e. that the Odyssey is a female author's creation—as "some paradox of [Butler's] own," but who had only to re-read a few hundred lines of the poem for himself—with Butler's hypothesis now in mind—before he cried "why, of course it is."
We notice in reading the translation, for instance—even before Butler remarks on the point, in the later commentary—that Helen seems to be laughing up her sleeve at the horn-wearing Menelaus—whom she deems (in Butler's translation) to be at best "not deficient either in person or understanding"; we notice that the "wives and daughters" of heroes are introduced in Hades before the heroes and warriors themselves; etc.
Butler does have one giant blind spot, however—and, strangely, it prompts him to leave some of the best evidence for his own hypothesis on the table.
There is an uneasy tension in the argument, as I suggested above, between Butler the proto-feminist and Butler the misogynist. And the latter side of his character unfortunately leads him to a partial interpretation of the text. He writes of Nausicaa—his "authoress," whom he otherwise at times adores, and describes as "charming"—as a "man-hater." He notices the many times in which the author of the Odyssey places male characters in compromising and embarrassing positions, for instance—and he concludes that she must have been motivated to do so solely by a desire to score points in the sex war; and never by any genuine romantic interest in the opposite sex ("there is in fact nothing amatory in the poem," in Butler's telling—at least nothing convincingly amatory).
But what's really going on in these passages is so obvious only a confirmed bachelor wouldn't see it. The author's decision to place Odysseus in embarassing situations is really a form of flirting.
She doesn't "hate" her male protagonist, as Butler surmises—she actually has fallen in love with him. He figures in the book as the idealized male romantic lead. If Nausicaa surprises him naked while she is at her washing, and he has to cover up his unmentionables with a "bough of olive"—it is not solely for the purpose of humiliating him or making him (and, by extension, all men) appear ridiculous; it is to set up a pretext for the flirtatious scene that follows between him and the author's fictional stand-in (the author's "Mary Sue," if you will)—i.e., Nausicaa (who teases him about how people in town would make a scandal of it, if they saw them together; how he is the sort of person she might marry if she weren't already spoken for; etc.).
The device may not have been familiar to a Victorian bachelor writing at the end of the nineteenth century, whose novels feature male characters in all the lead roles. But it would be a recognizable trope now to anyone who's ever seen a romantic comedy or read a work of romantic fiction.
Indeed—one of the best ways to understand what's happening in the Odyssey is to see it as the world's first work of romantic fan fiction geared toward a female readership. (Thus, here—at the beginning of Western fiction; practically the first fiction was fan fiction.) Butler marshals persuasive evidence that the writer of the epic was familiar with the Iliad in basically the same form we now know it. Is it too much to suppose that she developed a crush on one of the relatively minor characters in the epic (as so many people often do today with works of fiction they enjoy); decided she wanted to hear and know more about him; and so wrote a work of fan fiction of her own, in which he appears as the hero—indeed, as the ideal husband and lover?
Butler would protest: "but he's so stilted and improbable in the narrative!" Well, indeed. Have you ever encountered a male love interest in a work of romantic fiction who wasn't? Just because our hypothetical Nausicaa adored Odysseus doesn't mean she understood him or could paint him plausibly.
Butler writes that—for the most part—a writer of a given sex will concentrate most in their works on members of their own sex; since they are the people they understand the best, and who are of the greatest interest to them as potential role-models or rivals. This undoubtedly accounts for the prominence given in the Odyssey to Circe, Arete, Nausicaa, Calypso, Helen, Penelope, etc.—and the fact that most of the male characters are relative ciphers and blockheads by comparison.
But Butler does allow one exception to his rule—namely, for "young and lovesick" writers—who will, he concedes, focus more on members of the opposite sex. And—by Butler's own argument—has he not already conceded that the author of the Odyssey was probably quite young? Why could she not have been "lovesick" as well, then—besotted with her own male protagonist, Odysseus?
In which case—we would then be able to account for the other primary fact about the Odyssey, which Butler's version of the argument does not explain so well: namely, why did this young woman choose to write about a male hero at all—why did she seize upon the story of Odysseus—if she was really the "man-hater" Butler imagines her to be, and wrote the entire poem just to put down men and "exalt women"? Only my version of the thesis can account for this.
The "romantic fan fiction" hypothesis also helps to explain what might otherwise strike some readers as the passages hardest to square with Butler's theory.
The violence and brutality of the final scenes of the Odyssey—after all—in which the hero takes his bloody revenge on the suitors, and Telemachus hangs the women of the household who slept with them—may strike many readers as stereotypically male. (Butler notes that "The only approach to argument which I have seen brought forward to show that the 'Odyssey' must have been written by a man, consists in maintaining that no woman could have written the scene in which the suitors are killed.")
It's unmistakeable, after all, that the author relishes this scene of revenge—and some critics—such as Adorno and Horkheimer, who discuss the passage at length in their Dialectic of Enlightenment—see in the horrific episode with the maids a tinge of male sexual sadism.
If not that—the gruesome fate that befalls the maids is at the very least surely a piece of patriarchal terrorism.
And I don't doubt that it is. But to Samuel Butler—writing at the tail-end of the Victorian age; and great satirist as he was of that age's ethics and hypocrisies—it was quite obvious that patriarchal terrorism could be inflicted by women as well as men—that is, that women could be as ruthless enforcers as men (if not more so) when it came to the rigors of the sexual double standard. Indeed, Butler adduces the hanging of the maids precisely as evidence than only a woman could have written the poem. He thinks no man would have held their "fall" so much against the maids—that only a woman would be so "jealous of the honor of her sex" as to insist that every woman in the house who had lain with a suitor must be cruelly executed.
And indeed—the passage does not make a lot of sense from a male point of view. What offense, exactly, does Odysseus imagine these women have committed? Why was it a crime for them to have sex with the suitors—what skin is it off his back? (Especially when—as Butler points out—it is implied that at least some of the women were forced into these relations against their will. Plus, how much agency could any Greek servant have in this context to genuinely consent?)
Whereas the gruesome revenge that is taken upon the maids makes much more sense if we imagine the author as female (and still more, if we imagine her—as Butler bid us—as young too, and therefore full of the unforgiving puritanism of the young; which we have seen so much of in our era). Much as she cast herself in the role of Nausicaa—perhaps she was likewise casting various rivals and contemporaries from her own life in the role of the "misbehaving" maids. (I don't mean by this to imply that women are more bloodthirsty than men; which would be absurd to allege. Just that it is human nature to indulge in what Freud called the "Narcissism of Minor Differences"—and so young women are more apt to feel competitive with each other than with young men—and the same rule applies in reverse to young men in groups; because they are competing for the same social roles.)
If we see the Odyssey as essentially a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the sort much fan fiction is (and indeed, much fiction tout court)—then a young woman is more likely than a young man would be to linger over the fantasy of punishing more sexually adventurous young women of her acquaintance—of whom she perhaps felt jealous. Just as male power fantasies in fiction tend to cast the male hero in the role of a physically dominant competitor who handily defeats all male rivals.
Butler also notices the sadistic detail that Odysseus makes the women scrub the chairs and tables of the blood of their deceased lovers, before he has them executed in turn. To Butler's point, this evinces a desire to enforce the rules of the sexual double standard to such a pathological degree of rigor and cruelty that one can only think of Mrs. Grundy (and not Mr. Grundy, if he existed). (Indeed, Butler often in the book seems to see the author of the Odyssey as the embodiment of the Grundyism he spent his authorial life warring against—a sort of "vicar's daughter" who insists upon the utmost punctilio of every hypocritical religious and customary observance.)
Moreover—he adds—the attention to detail required to even think of the fact that slaughtering a bunch of suitors in the main courtyard would stain the tables and floors would be more likely characteristic of a woman in the ancient world than a man—not, I add, because of any sexual essentialism; but merely because they are the ones more likely to have been tasked in daily life in that era with cleaning up the after-effects of these sorts of male-created messes.
But what about the violence directed against the male adversaries in the poem? Certainly, the author seems to linger just as lovingly over the gory murder of the insolent suitors, as over the sadistic hanging of the "disobedient" maids.
But this, too, should perhaps not surprise us. Have you ever read a work of "dark romantasy" in our era? Well, I haven't either—but by reputation I hear they are no strangers to violence and bloodshed. The male love interest in these books is often a slightly dangerous, violent, even gore-drenched character.
And this too—so long as we're in the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy—should perhaps not surprise us. Every male serial killer and mass shooter seems to amass a following of self-declared female "groupies" on today's internet (the Luigi Mangione phenomenon, anyone?); not—I hope—because people actually like violence in real life; but because violence in the news can seem like a kind of fiction (even when it's all too real), and therefore as a vehicle for a no-risk power fantasy.
"[W]e are accepting as axiomatic [...]" as Mark Leyner once wrote, in his collection Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, "the 'ladies love outlaws' phenomenon." In short, he observes—crime is seen as sexy (ahem, again, need I mention Mangione?)—provided, of course, it is perceived as being inflicted upon the deserving and dangerous, rather than the innocent and helpless.
"According to the experts whom I've spoken to," opines Leyner, "the crime that has the most salutary cosmetic effect on its perpetrator is intramural murder—one cartel member bombing another [etc....] There's no pity for the victim and the killer's ruthless ambition is considered the ultimate turn-on[.]"
We don't need to gender this phenomenon—there's a version of the same thing in male-oriented erotica too (buxom, boot-wearing Valkyries carrying bull-whips and striding the halls of prisons and dormitories are not a mental image we primarily owe to female creators).
Nor do we need to suppose that the fetishization of violence in fiction necessarily has anything to do with admiring real-life human crime and evil. People of both genders are, after all, often capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality (just as people of both genders are also sometimes capable of confusing them (again, for the last time, do I really have to cite Mangione to you people??))
So let's just say it's not unheard of for female writers of romantasy—geared toward a predominantly female audience—to portray the idealized male lead as one who engages in the sexy sort of "intramural violence" that Leyner describes.
And what else is the gruesome dispatching of the suitors in the final section of the Odyssey but the ultimate sex fantasy of male-on-male intramural violence—bloody revenge against people whom we are given every reason in the narrative to think deserve it?
If you had any lingering doubts as to the erotic "romantasy" interpretation—here's Butler's translation of Euryclea's description of the scene to Penelope, after Odysseus has butchered all the suitors: "I found Ulysses standing over the corpses; you would have enjoyed it, if you had seen him all bespattered with blood and filth, and looking just like a lion."
It's clear that Nausicaa—the author of the Odyssey—"enjoyed" the image too.
My purpose in this is not to demote the Odyssey in literary esteem—but rather to promote the reputation of fan fiction.
Butler's intention was the same. People at the time—he writes—accused him of being over-literal in his translation precisely in order to make the Odyssey seem more naïve. But if that's the result a literal translation yields, then maybe the book really is naïve—a young person's wish fulfillment fantasy. But Butler wasn't trying to say that was a bad thing—he was just trying to say that's what it is.
And why shouldn't it be? What are we doing in all of our fiction if not fulfilling wishes—sublimating our desires, as Freud would put it?
And if this epic poem continues to speak to us so well after all these millennia—maybe that's a sign of how well it fulfills its readers wishes—and how much of the young Nausicaa we all carry within us?
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*Was Butler himself, the incomparable ironist (who seldom wrote anything without his tongue somewhere near his cheek), entirely serious in pushing all of these improbable hypotheses? He suggests at the end The Authoress of the Odyssey—in a sly aside—in which he is ostensibly talking about the authoress in question, rather than himself—something of the state of mind in which he may have composed these books: "the writer was one half laughing and the other half serious, and would sometimes have been hard put to it to know whether she was more in the one vein than in the other." There are writers, he goes on, who "when they have done it, hardly know whether they have been more in jest or earnest, though while doing it they fully believed" in their own ostensible project. To quote Laurence Sterne: some ideas, after gaining "a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into our brains,—at length claim a kind of settlement there,—working sometimes like yeast;—but more generally after the manner of the gentle passion, beginning in jest,—but ending in downright earnest" (emphasis added).
**Butler does not hesitate to devote a whole rant to how the dog Argus deserved better in the poem—he ought at least to have been hugged by his old master before his death; and Odysseus should shed for him more than one tear. One can imagine any number of podcasts in our day arguing at length in much the same way over whether the dog in a contemporary movie got a square deal from the filmmakers.
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