downfall (18:344). In the Iliad, these would have been gods speaking. Noos, while being referred to more frequently, is sometimes not changed. But more often it is also in Phase III of subjectification. At one point, Odysseus is deceiving Athene (un-thinkable in the Iliad!) and looks at her ever revolving in his noos thoughts of great cunning (13:255). Or noos can be like a person who is glad (8:78) or cruel (18:381) or not to be fooled (10:329) or learned about (1:3). Psyche again usually means life, but perhaps with more sense of a time span. Some very important exceptions to this will be referred to later.
Not only is the growth toward subjective consciousness in the Odyssey seen in the increasing use and spatial interiority and personification of its preconscious hypostases, but even more clearly in its incidents and social interrelationships. These include the emphasis on deceit and guile which I have already referred to. In the Iliad, time is referred to sloppily and inaccurately, if at all. But the Odyssey shows an increased spatialization of time in its use of time words, such as begin, hesitate, quickly, endure, etc., and the more frequent reference to the future. There is also an increased ratio of abstract terms to concrete, particularly of what in English would be nouns ending in ‘ness’. And with this, as might be expected, a marked drop in similes: there is less need for them. Both the frequency and the manner with which Odysseus refers to himself is on a different level altogether from instances of self-reference in the Iliad. All this is relevant to the growth of a new mentality.
Let me close this necessarily short entry on a toweringly important poem by calling your attention to a mystery. This is that the overall contour of the story itself is a myth of the very matter with which we are concerned. It is a story of identity, of a voyage to the self that is being created in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. I am not pretending here to be answering the profound question of why this should be so, of why the muses, those patternings of the right temporal lobe, who are singing this epic
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through the aoidoi, should be narratizing their own downfall, their own fading away into subjective thought, and celebrating the rise of a new mentality that will overwhelm the very act of their song. For this seems to be what is happening.
I am saying — and finding it work to believe myself — that all this highly patterned legend, which so clearly can be taken as a metaphor of the huge transilience toward consciousness, was not composed, planned, and put together by poets conscious of what they were doing. It is as if the god-side of the bicameral man was approaching consciousness before the man-side, the right hemisphere before the left. And if belief does stick here, and we are inclined to ask scoffingly and rhetorically, how could an epic that may itself be a kind of drive toward consciousness be composed by nonconscious men? We can also ask with the same rhetorical fervor, how could it have been composed by conscious men? And have the same silence follow. We do not know the answer to either question.
But so it is. And as this series of stories sweeps from its lost hero sobbing on an alien shore in bicameral thrall to his beautiful goddess Calypso, winding through its world of demigods, testings, and deceits, to his defiant war whoops in a rival-routed home, from trance through disguise to recognition, from sea to land, east to west, defeat to prerogative, the whole long song is an odyssey toward subjective identity and its triumphant acknowledgment out of the hallucinatory enslavements of the past. From a will-less gigolo of a divinity to the gore-spattered lion on his own hearth, Odysseus becomes 'Odysseus'.
F O O L I S H P E R S E S
Some of the chronologically next group of poems I shall merely gloss over. Among these are the so-called Homeric Hymns, most of which have turned out to be of a much later date. There are
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also the poems that originated in Boeotia northeast of Athens in the eighth century B.C., many of which were once ascribed to a cult figure named Hesiod. Unfortunately, their extant texts are often mixtures of parts of poems from obviously different sources, badly emended. Most of them contribute little to our present concern. The often tedious recital of the relationships of gods in the Theogony is usually dated shortly after the Odyssey, but its hypostatic words are fewer and without development. Its chief interest is that its concern with the intimate lives of gods is perhaps a result of their silence, another expression of the nostalgia for the Golden Age before the Dorian invasions.
But of much greater interest is the fascinating problem presented by the text ascribed to Hesiod known as the Works and Days.11 It is obviously a hodgepodge of various things, a kind of Shepherd's Calendar for a Boeotian farmer, and a very poor and scrubbing farmer at that. Its world is worlds away from the world of the great Homeric epics. Instead of a hero at the command of his gods working through a narrative of grandeur, we have instruction to the countryman, who may or may not obey his gods, on ways of work, which days are lucky, and a very interesting new sense of justice.
On the surface, this medley of scruffy detail of farm life and nostalgia for the Golden Age that is no more seems to be written by a farmer whom scholars take to be Hesiod. He is supposedly railing at his brother, Perses, over the unfairness of a judgment dividing their father's farm, curiously giving Perses advice on everything from morality to marriage, on how to treat slaves to the problems of planting and sewage disposal. It is full of such things as:
Foolish Perses! W o r k the work which the gods ordained for men, lest in bitter anguish of thumosy you with your wife and children seek your livelihood amongst your neighbors. ( 3 9 7 f f . ) 11 I have used throughout the Loeb edition of Hesiod (London: Heinemann, 1936).
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At least this is what most scholars take the poem to be. But another interpretation is at least possible. This is that the older portions of the poem may actually have been written not by Hesiod, who is never mentioned in the poem, but by none other than the hand of foolish Perses himself, and that these main parts of the poem are the admonitions of his divine bicameral voice advising him what to do. If this jolts your sense of possibility, I would remind you of the schizophrenic patients who all day may hear similarly authoritative critical voices constantly admonishing them in a similar vein.
Perhaps I should not say written. More probably the poem was dictated to a scribe, even as were the bicameral admonitions of Perses’ contemporary, Amos, the herdsman of Israel. And I should also have said a previous recension of the main poem, and that the protest lodged in the crucial lines 37-39 were added later (even as everyone since Plutarch has agreed that 654-662 were).
It is also possible that these lines originally referred to some kind of bicameral struggle for the control of Perses’ too subjective and therefore (at this time) unprofitable behavior.
The preconscious hypostases in the Works and Days occur in approximately the same frequencies as in the Odyssey. Thumos is the most common and in about half of its eighteen occurrences it is a simple Phase II internal impulse to some activity or locus of joy or sorrow. But the rest of the time, it is a Phase III space in which information (27), advice (297, 491), sights (296), or mischief (499) can be ‘put’, ‘kept’, or ‘held’. The phrenes also are like a cupboard, where the advice that is constantly given in the poem (107, 274) is to be laid up, and where foolish Perses is to