412
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred.
There is also room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated,
uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and
gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does
not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that Ulysses
takes the old woman by the throat to prevent her from speaking,
at the same time that he draws her closer to him with his left. Clearly
outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand
out in a realm where everything is visible ; and not less clear-wholly
expressed, orderly even in their ardor-are the feelings and thoughts
of the persons involved.
In
my account of the incident I have until now passed over a
whole series of verses which interrupt it in the middle. There are
more than seventy of these verses- while to the incident itself some
forty verses are devoted before the interpolation and some forty after
it. The interpolation, which comes just at the point when the house–
keeper recognizes the scar-that is, at the moment of crisis-describes
the origin of the scar, a hunting accident which occurred in Ulysses'
boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his grand–
father Autolycos. This first affords an opportunity to inform the
reader about Autolycos, his house, the precise degree of the kinship,
his character, and, no less exhaustively than touchingly, his behavior
after the birth of his grandson; then follows the visit of Ulysses, now
grown to be a youth; the exchange of greetings, the banquet which
marks his reception, sleep and waking, the early start for the hunt,
the tracking of the beast, the struggle, Ulysses' being wounded by a
tusk, his recovery, his return to Ithaca, his parents' anxious questions
-all is narrated, again with such a complete externalization of all the
elements of the story and of their interconnections, as leaves nothing
in darkness. Not until then does the narrator return to Penelope's
chamber, not until then, the interpolation having run its course, does
Eurycleia, who had recognized the scar before the interruption, let
Ulysses' foot fall back into the basin.
The first thought of a modern reader-that this is a device to
increase suspense-is, if not entirely wrong, at least not the essential
explanation of this Homeric procedure. For the element of suspense
is very slight in the Homeric poems; their entire style is such that
they do not seek to keep the reader breathless. The digressions are not
