Not for Long, Adorno & Horkheimer

In Book 22 of the Odyssey, there is a description of the way in which Odysseus’ son punishes the faithless women who had reverted to prostitution. Emotionless, and with an inhuman composure rivaled only by the impassibilité of the major nineteenth-century novelists, Homer describes the movement of the nooses and coldly compares the women’s appearance as they hang to that of birds caught in a net; the reticence and composure of the narration are the true marks of eloquence. The passage closes with the information that the feet of the row of suspended women “kicked out for a short while, but not for long” [Odyssey 22.473] The precision of the descriptive artist, which already exhibits the frigidity of anatomy and vivisection, [61] is employed to provide evidence of the dying convulsions of the subjected who, in the name of law and justice, were cast down into that realm from which Odysseus the judge had escaped. As a citizen reflecting momentarily upon the hanging, Homes assures himself and his audience (actually readers) that it did not last long--a moment and then it was all over. But after the "not for long" the inner flow of the narrative is arrested. Not for long? The device poses the question, and belies the author's composure. By cutting short the account, Homer prevents us from forgetting the victims, and reveals the unutterable eternal agony of the few seconds in which the women struggle with death. No echo of the "not for long" remains except the Quo usque tandem that the rhetors of the later period unwittingly devalued by themselves laying claim to the long-suffering attitude in question. In the narrative account of atrocity, hoever, hope attaches to the fact that it happened a long time ago. Homer offers consolation for the entanglement of prehistory, savagery, and culture by recourse to the once-upon-a-time device. Yet the epic is novel first, and fairytale after.--Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (1947) Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming, p. 80 [emphasis in original]

Much of the so-called Excursus 1 ("Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment") of Dialectic of Enlightenment -- is nearly unreadable unless one is steeped in the Gymnasium culture that marked the aspirations to Bildung of Wilhelmine Germany (and its European equivalents). The Excursus -- latin for digression -- is a lengthy re-interpretation of the Odyssee. It may seem peculiar to do so in exile in Los Angeles in the early 1940s, especially in a book with 'Enlightenment' (or Dialectic) in its title. But (with an explicit nod to Nietzsche) Homer is treated as "the basic text of European civilization." (46)

I had to memorize the opening lines of the Odyssee. I flunked the assignment initially. My latin teacher had me repeat the in the teacher's lounge (in front of her bemused colleagues) a few weeks later. I still remember the first line, but the second one required a check online:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:

That I associate the quoted passage with Gymnasium culture is not primarily due to this minor personal trauma, but due to the little puzzle Adorno & Horkheimer lodged in this text, their untranslated, Quo usque tandem. I recognized at once Cicero's opening lines of the first Catiline Oration:  Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? How long will you abuse our patience, O Catiline...* And not for the first time I reflected on the curiosity of the centrality of that nouveau riche defender of aristocratic values in a decayed republic, Cicero, in the Latin curriculum of a Gymnasium in Amsterdam in the 198s0. 

Adorno and Horkheimer are a bit quick to suggest Homer prevents us from forgetting the victims. The twelve condemned women, on the testimony of Eurykleia (Odysseus's wet-nurse), are left nameless. Their 'crime' according to Eurykleia was to show her and Penelope no honor. It is notable that Eurykleia explicitly denies that Telemachos had been mistreated by them. For, Telemachos changes his father's sentence (from death by sword to death by hanging) in virtue of their lack of honor to him and for consorting with Penelope's suitors ('prostitution').** In Telemachos' treatment of the twelve nameless women -- they are hung after being forced to clean the mayhem subsequent Odysseus' murderous revenge on his wife's suitors+ -- there are gruesome anticipations of the fate of women who served occupying forces in the world war. 

There is, I think, no consolation (or 'hope') in citizen Homer. After the gruesome deeds are done, there are rites of purification (and the cleaning up of the corpses, etc--now done by Odysseus), and life goes on without the nameless twelve women.  

I had started this impression by wanting to write about a lost culture such that whatever Adorno & Horkheimer wished to say has become opaque. But my intentions are deflected by my train of thought. In the quoted passage, they treat the devaluation of language by political rhetoric as an accident ("unwittingly").++ But this -- appropriating another's lived experience, even of death -- is always a temptation of political rhetoric, Adorno & Horkheimer's not excepted. 

 

61:

Wilamowitz is of the opinion that the sentence is "related with relish by the poet" (Die Heimkehr des Odysseus, p. 67). Even though the authoritarian philologist is delighted to find that the simile of the bird-nest is "just and modern in its appropriateness to the jerking of  the hanged women" (op. cit., p. 76), the relish seems to be mostly by his own. Wilamowitz's writings are among the most emphatic documents of the German intermingling of barbarism and culture erected on the basis of modern Philhellenism.

*See also one of Mary Beard's best columns in TLS. Her point is, in fact, partially anticipated by Adorno & Horkheimer.

**One wonders how much of Telemachos' humiliated inability to defend his mother's honor, while his returning father succeeds, is displaced onto these unfortunate women. 

+There are also gruesome anticipations of the work by the Sonderkommandos in the camps.

++It's possible Adorno & Horkheimer side with Cataline, who was advocating debt relief on behalf of the poor, and against the martial law of Cicero.

Comments

[Howard]

Auerbach's musings on the Odyssey in Mimesis are relevant. One point Auerbach makes is that in classical antiquity there is nothing to interpret. The Odyssey is externalized, without depths.
Further, he points out the separation of high and low styles, pertaining to the servant women. Such treatment is only comic in their literary world.
Auerbach is a creature of the gymnasium world of turn of the century Middle Europe

[Aaron Lercher]

The "consolation" is for us moderns, but is false. We might be relieved not to hear more than the minimum about the violence required to restore Odysseus's patriarchal order. Then we hope, or imagine without much thought, that we've made progress since then.

[Jimnasium]

But it is precisely because the women, nameless and dispassionately reported to have struggled 'not for long', are trivialized by Homer that *we* are prevented from forgetting them, under A&H's reading. Likewise, it is the attempt at consolation, by diverging the narrative time from the time of the events with the recollective 'not for long' (contra Auerbach, A&H read the Odyssey not as depthless, but as containing the emergence of complex textual layers, such as the arrested temporality discussed in this example) that makes the consolation fail.

They think Homer is being flippant, which inadvertently makes it hard for us to forget the suffering buried there. This kind of immanent critique is typical of the relationships between suffering, memory, and art in Adorno's aesthetic theory.

Also, I had very little familiarity with Homer before reading dialectic of enlightenment, and little classics knowledge overall. But I certainly did not find the chapter unreadable, if only because it's such a self-consciously modernist re-interpretation that actually eschews, to me, the trappings of old-school classicism. Still, interesting to read your post. Sorry about your Gymnasium-trauma