Permanence, Endurance, Kleos: Odysseus' Bedstead and the Hauntings of War

Fog envelopes all in Hades. At Odysseus' feet lay a ram and an ewe, whose hooves twitch spasmodically as blood gurgles out of the sharp gash on their throats like an unraveling roll of burgundy satin ribbons. The blood sends twin ripples across the freshly-dug trench, fresh as the slaughter, and inks the libations a deep ruby. Elpenor, his dead comrade, stands across the trench. Swear on Ithaca and the House of Odysseus that you will bury me, he begs, that you will remember me, weep for me, tell my story, and burn me. Then, he disappears into the shade-bearing groves like the whisper of a nymph.

Odysseus recounts his journey to Penelope, laying in their bridal bed for the first time since his departure to Troy twenty years ago. He has fulfilled Elpenor's last plea for kleos. Homer's epics, Iliad and Odyssey (trans. Fagles, c. 800 BC), have codified an ideal of Homeric heroes that revolves around the pursuit of kleos, or glory. Kleos, rooted in the context of war, is the accomplishment of mighty deeds, Achilles' clogging the Xanthus river full with bodies in his wrath, and the immortal song raised to the sky by a bard about Odysseus, “the man of twists and turns” (1.1). In Homer's Odyssey, an image epitomizes the haunting effects of war on Odysseus' household – himself, his wife Penelope, and his son Telemachus – and on society at large: the “sturdy bedstead” that Odysseus “built with his own two hands” (23.198-199). Odysseus, before he left for Troy, carved the bed into a deep-rooted olive tree running straight through his palace. War has made its imprints on the bedstead through three avenues – the permanence of Odysseus' return, the endurance of a society wracked by war, and the pursuit of kleos – with the most chronologically recent at the very surface, like sedimentary layers of the Earth. The bedstead, and all it represents, runs through Odysseus' departure and return like the olive tree through his palace, a thick pulse.

Permanence

A foundational reading of Odysseus' sturdy bedstead reveals it as a metaphor for the most important narrative certainties in the Odyssey: the certainty of Odysseus' claim over his house, of his return, and of his bond with Penelope. The epic's first dusk: the suitors stagger home from Odysseus' palace as their inebriated steps fall clumsily on Ithacan streets, another night futilely asking for Penelope's hand in marriage. Last dusk: the suitors bound homeward, this time with their bloody limbs untangled and disfigured faces claimed by family. The juxtaposition between “finally, to bed. Each to his own house” and “every family buried their own … ferr[ied] back, each to his own home” illustrates how the suitors never held any legitimate claim on Odysseus' palace (1.484, 24.461-464). The echo between the first and last dusk seals a gruesome twist on the nostos narrative. As the many-turned sea ferries Odysseus back home, away from the slaughter of war and back to life, a long file of mourners carries the suitors home in death. Through this ironic parallel, enhanced by the cyclic echo of the language, the suitors' statuses as forever guests become as certain as this divine decree: “wise Odysseus shall return – home at last” (1.99).

Penelope represents another totem of certainty in the Odyssey through her unwavering fidelity. Hearing of Odysseus' reunion with Penelope in the Underworld, Agamemnon exclaims in praise, “what a fine, faithful wife… the immortal gods will lift a song for all mankind, a glorious song in praise of self-possessed Penelope” (24.212-218). Agamemnon's praise portrays Penelope's fidelity as so unwavering that it rivals the eternity of gods – a divine fidelity as certain as the turning of heaven's poles, transcending even Penelope and Odysseus' own lifetimes. Similar to the suitors' deaths, this certainty intensifies with a comparison to the divine order of things. The almost self-conscious reference to the epic genre itself further generates a parallel between Odysseus' return and Penelope's fidelity. Indeed, the Odyssey celebrates Odysseus' joy in returning home as much as it does Penelope's joy in finally getting to see her husband return.

All these permanent certainties – the suitors' deaths, Odysseus' return, Penelope's fidelity – culminate in the symbol of the sturdy bedstead. After the slaughter of the suitors, the odious smell of sulfur permeates the palace hall in a purifying fire, and Penelope stands face to face with Odysseus, still disguised as a beggar. Penelope has one last test of authenticity: she commands the maid to “move the sturdy bedstead out of [their] bridal chamber… built by [Odysseus'] own hands” (23.198-199). Of course, the bedstead's demonstrable immovability reinforces the permanence of Odysseus' claim over his house and in turn the futility of the suitors' foolish coups. More than an imposing threat, though, the bedstead symbolizes the bond between Odysseus and Penelope, for, in addition to the centerpiece of their “bridal chamber,” Odysseus calls the bedstead their “secret sign” and “life story” (23.226). The epic beautifully inverts the significance of cunning through this symbol: throughout the epic, Odysseus and Penelope have constantly tested and misdirected each other with disguises and lies; Odysseus is polytropos, “the man of twists and turns,” whereas Penelope literally weaves a shroud for Laertes which “by night… [she] would unravel” to stall the suitors and figuratively weaves a metis, “a deft way out” (1.1, 19.168-170, 177). Yet, their shared cunning and secrecy also serve as their identifier, but only to each other – the “secret sign.” They have used their cunning relentlessly, some would argue even cruelly, against each other, and yet their cunning also shines as their twin flame, their lighthouse beacon, a bond which the bedstead encapsulates in its deep-rootedness.

Endurance

Odysseus' bedstead further makes manifest the ideal of endurance, integral to the state of mind for soldiers at war and for the society left behind. Upon Odysseus' overdue landing on the shores of Ithaca, Athena commands him to “the trials you must suffer… endure them all,” to “in silence… bear a world of pain,” and to “subject [himself] to the cruel abuse of men” – commands that suit a soldier more than a displaced wanderer returning home at last. With acrid and bitter diction, Athena paints Ithaca as a different “world,” foreign and hostile from Odysseus' twenty years spent away. With this inversion, Ithaca becomes as the battlefields of Troy, the battlefield that he must conquer to earn his return home. Naturally, then, the endurance asked of Odysseus at war extends to his own shores as well like an encroaching, rising tide.

The perpetuation of endurance unto Telemachus, however, exposes it as an ideal more cyclical and far-reaching than imagined. Upon his reunion with Telemachus, Odysseus passes on Athena's warning to his son, “steel yourself, no matter what outrage [Odysseus] must suffer… just look on, endure it,” illustrating how Telemachus, though having spent his life distant from war, remains defined by its ideals. Perhaps the most pertinent question here is that, if Telemachus has spent his life distant from war, how has he nevertheless internalized the ideal of endurance? More broadly, in a society presumably filled with an aristocratic generation of young men bereft of fathers who have gone to fight on Trojan shores, how does the wartime ideal of endurance nevertheless permeate their values? Telemachus' response offers another perspective – “you'll sense the courage inside me, that I know – I'm hardly a flighty, weak-willed boy these days”; the connection between the lack of self-control and boyhood, which denotes immaturity, suggests a more endemic issue than what the violence of war requires of its soldiers only. Telemachus has hardened his will not to endure violence, but to endure his father's absence, a skill required of this whole generation of boys too young to go to war and too old to not know.

However, Telemachus' rejection of “flight,” the response of startled birds, conflicts with a Homeric simile mere moments prior, at the moment of recognition between father and son, when Odysseus and Telemachus “cried out, shrilling cries, pulsing sharper than bird of prey… when farmers plunder their nest of young too young to fly” (16.246-248). In this simile, farmers represent greater and more powerful than the absent soldiers at war (the birds of prey): perhaps the gods who have incited this disastrous war, perhaps the system of war itself. Telemachus assumes both roles, as the bird of prey having his future snatched away and as the young fledgling separated from his father, reflecting his similarly liminal status as a boy hurtling into manhood. This simile further highlights a duplicity of ways with which war affects a society. Conventionally, war compels its soldiers to endure violence and the rest of society to endure absence. In this simile, however, war “plunders” not the older generation, the birds of prey, but instead the younger generation, the nest of young, illustrating how the abandoned society too endures violence of being displaced from family and how the soldiers too endure absence and isolation. Endurance anoints itself unto every aspect of a society wracked with war. Cyclical, it passes down from father to son in violence and in absence.

In turn, Penelope's test of authenticity, in which an analysis of the bedstead must be rooted, produces a reversal that extends the bedstead, already a symbol of permanence, to reflect her own endurance. Penelope, in her unwavering fidelity, bears her own set of demons completely unique from those that plague Telemachus and Odysseus. When Odysseus stages a fake marriage-feast after slaughtering the suitors, pieces of gossip wafting around Ithaca, “strains outside” speculating that “‘someone's married the queen at last!' ‘One of her hundred suitors.' ‘That callous woman, too faithless to keep her lord and master's house to the bitter end,'” epitomize the harsh and unrelenting cynicism towards wives and women in the society of the Odyssey. These whispers speak as if, at last, Penelope has revealed herself as the calculating, faithless seductress they had always suspected. Her cunning, used to devise the plan of Laertes' shroud, to keep the suitors at bay without inciting their belligerent violence, to weave a metis, evokes distrust instead of admiration – what Odysseus' cunning evokes. The complete anonymity of these gossips further implies their ubiquity. Due to competing societal constraints – the pressure to marry from the suitors and the inevitable backlash from the wider community – Penelope remains utterly alone in her endurance, a fact reflected by the state of the sturdy bedstead during Odysseus' absence: “lying empty, blanketed now with filthy cobwebs” (16.38-39). That Penelope sleeps not in her own bed but assumedly in a guest bed in her own home illuminates how Penelope too suffers and endures a sort of displacement from home. That cobwebs entangle this symbol of endurance reflects the social double bind placed upon her when she makes the unimaginably difficult choice to remain faithful.

When Penelope tests Odysseus' identity by suggesting to move the bedstead, then, she must be doing so at great emotional cost. Her command to “take it out now, sturdy bed that it is” may be physically impossible but entirely, painfully possible in the emotional sense (23.200). If her gamble fails, and this man who has slaughtered the suitors was not, in fact, Odysseus in disguise, then her endurance will have been uprooted entirely and left desolate with false hope. The ease of her command, as evinced by the syntax that renders removing the bed a diminutive task, underlines the difficulty of choosing endurance for Penelope when she had so many easy outs. In turn, Odysseus's question to Penelope of whether “the bed… still stands planted firm? – I don't know – or has someone…hauled [its] bedstead off?” mirrors a similar fear from recognizing the difficulty of endurance (23.227-229). The “I don't know” surrounded by dashes interrupts the flow of Odysseus' furious speech and turns the speech to verbalize the darker possibility that follows. This interruption shifts the tone completely: previously, Odysseus still believed in the imagery of his bed “standing planted firm” – other possibilities have not conjured themselves in his mind yet. After the interruption, the imagery of the destruction of his bed washes away his accusations and leaves bare his fear that his displacement was in fact unendurable, much like how ebbing tides lap a little less onto the shore every time, stranding the sediments that the waves once concealed. With her test that tricks and despairs the polytropos man himself, Penelope accomplishes a reversal that reveals to Odysseus the difficulty of endurance as a choice and its psychological haunting.

Kleos

The symbolism of the sturdy bedstead takes an insidious turn in its minuscule physical details as the craft of the bed itself reveals violence's indelible stain on the pursuit of glory. As he recounts the construction of the bed to Penelope, Odysseus prides himself in his ability to tame and repress the wild, sprawling nature of the “branching olive-tree” through the bedroom's “good tight stonework” and the “added doors, hung well and snugly wedged” (23.215-218). The imagery of squeezing man-made elements “tightly” and “snugly” into a forced coexistence with nature parallels the principle of endurance with its own imagery of “steeling [oneself]” in face of the “cruel abuse of men” (16.305-309, 13.348-353). Trimming doors and chiseling stone bricks to fit the curves of a frame and smelting steel for the blows of a hammer both serve the fundamentally utilitarian objective of bending nature's will to man's will through violence. This utilitarian view comes into clearer focus as Odysseus continues to boast of how he “lopped the leafy crown of the olive”, “clean cutt[ed] the stump bare from roots up”, “shaped it plumb to the line to make [their] bedpost”, and “bored the holes it needed to make an auger”; in the language itself, Odysseus gradually reduces the olive tree to only the components of use to him (23.219-223). Throughout this action sequence, Odysseus transitions from referring to the olive in its whole, to referring to only the stump of the tree (“shaped it”), to referring only to the bedpost (“the holes it needed”). At the end, his speech even leaves ambiguous whether “it” refers to the bed or the olive. The epic echoes Odysseus' identity as a craftsman again at the moment when he comes into possession of his legendary bow; the comparison of Odysseus stringing his bow to “an expert singer skilled at lyre and song – who strains a string to a new peg with ease” exemplifies a societal norm that exalts intimacy between a soldier and his weapon, a man and violence, as much as it does artist and art (21.453-454). These three relationships – the architect and his bed, the archer and his bow, the bard and his lyre – triangulate the identification of a crafter to his craft, of Odysseus to his crafts, for the purpose of kleos. All three crafts face outward, and the crafter intended their wide renown: the epic calls Odysseus' bedstead “a great hallmark,” his bow “mighty,” and the work of the bard “songs whose fame had reached the sky” (23.212, 21.455, 8.88). Odysseus, as a Homeric hero, of course seeks kleos in battle, and he imbues that desire into his violent construction of the bed, “[lopping]... the leafy crown” of the olive and “clean cutting the stump bare.” The simile of the olive's canopy as “crown” further mirrors the excision of Odysseus the king, with Odysseus the soldier left on Trojan shores, seeking glory. Alas, Odysseus sees the ruin of war, yet he does not see the identical ruin he imposes on the olive tree in constructing his bed.

While its physical construction illuminates the violent cost of glory, the disuse of the bedstead highlights the relentless haunting of war that traps a society in grief. When Telemachus makes the offhand supposition that Odysseus' bed “[lies] empty, blanketed now with filthy cobwebs,” he brings to light the kind of squalor better described by stasis than by permanence and endurance. Yes, none can move the bed nor replace Odysseus, but doesn't its exact eternal presence compound the glaring disuse into which it has fallen? Telemachus' perspective illuminates how, through the bed's permanence, the lack of its utility becomes as vivid a reminder as its magnificent construction. This is no glorious, immortal song, no enduring marble statue under the sun, but stasis. Stasis stems from grief, from the inability to live life fully in a society shrouded in so much death, absence, and loss. Stasis masquerades as a “certainty” that has wrapped itself vine-like around Odysseus' palace in response to the complete uncertainty of Odysseus' fate. When Athena appears to Odysseus, reveals that he has finally washed up on the shores of lovely Ithaca, and assures him of his “noble wife… forever broken-hearted for your return,” her words reflect Penelope's enduring fidelity as well as the stasis that looms over Odysseus' household, and by extension, all of Ithaca (13.432-433). Time marches on, and its passage marks Odysseus' bed with layers of dust and cobwebs. Simultaneously, time stands still. Penelope's grief defies time, standing as eternal and unmovable as the bed itself. Without Odysseus, his house exists in a stasis, displaced in fragments of time.

Odysseus' bedstead is a bittersweet image. Odysseus builds it as a symbol of the pursuit of glory, unconsciously steeped in violence from its construction. In his displacement, the bedstead becomes emblematic of the different forms of endurance that a society haunted by war and trapped in the stasis of grief must take on. As Odysseus passes Penelope's test of authenticity, however, the bed transforms again into the manifestation of Odysseus' inevitable return, of Penelope's unwavering fidelity, of their immovable, immortal bond.

Their reunion culminates in a stunning Homeric simile:

… he wept as he held the wife
he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last.
Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel
When they catch sight of land – Poseidon has struck
Their well-rigged ship on the open sea with gale winds
And crushing wall of waves, and only a few escape, swimming,
Struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shore,
Their bodies crusted with salt but buoyed up with joy
As they plant their feet on solid ground again,
Spared a deadly fate. So joyous now to her
The sight of her husband…

The simile dives into Odysseus' mind and somehow comes up for air in Penelope's, as inexplicable as the gods' ways or the turning of the heavenly spheres. War has ended. Troy has fallen. Kleos is a pursuit of the past and a song of the future. Odysseus returns and finds Penelope, his land and harbor, but Penelope, too, has been shipwrecked, lost, and displaced in the waves of her grief. Through his return, Penelope comes home too. She opens the door to their chambers and finds their bed furnished with plush, woven blankets, worn by time, and nevertheless as if new.