Naomi ROOD The Poetics of Displacement in the Reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus

Recent scholarship on the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus agrees that it is essentially a scene of displacement. Pietro Pucci, for example, explains that because of Odysseus's inconstant identity of beggar and hero, "the son meets a constantly self-displacing figure. For us readers, however, an additional displacing element interferes: our inability to decide whether the entire scene has to be read metaphorically or literally" (P. Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos. Ithaca. 1987. p.97). While this and other current interpretations of this scene aim at the implications of displacement in the reunion of father and son, none analyze how this displacement is poetically created within the scene itself. My paper discusses the three devices which effect the displacement of the highly anticipated moment of the reunion between father and son: 1) the preliminary reunion between Eumaeus and Telemachus (16.11-22); 2) Odysseus's pseudo-epiphany (16.178-80); 3) the bird simile which describes the sound of their weeping (16.216-19).

These three devices all work by making use of the displacing effect of simile. First the swineherd, Eumaeus, greets the aristocratic Telemachus "as a father does his son." Next, Telemachus's reluctant acceptance of Odysseus as a mortal man like a god is based on simile, involving both a divine and human term (S. Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey. Princeton. 1987. p.18). Finally, there is the simile inserted into the moment of Odysseus's and Telemachus's embrace of the parent birds who return to find their young snatched away. This simile not only displaces father and son onto father and mother, but also articulates the underlying dynamic of this whole scene of father-son reunion. For it describes what ironically occurs in this time of recovery: the moment of the discovery of loss. By refusing to represent the reunion of father and son in its own terms, but rather displaced onto the relationships of master and slave, god and man, and mother and father, the meeting of father and son never fully occurs. The unsatisfactory fulfillment of Telemachus's desire for his father reveals a deeper, existential state of pothos: for a truly present father, for the likewise inaccessible divine father, and for the authorial voice of the poem -- filial "nostalgia" of its own sort.