A free public lecture by guest speaker Dr Eric Cullhed (Uppsala University).
Odysseus’ Tears and the Psychology of Weeping
Odysseus bursts into tears first at lunch and then again at dinner while listening to songs about the Trojan War among the Phaeacians. Scholars no longer take issue with the repetitive structure of these two scenes in the Odyssey (8.83–95 and 521–34), nor do they reject their psychological verisimilitude, and yet there appears to be no consensus on how to characterize the emotion that the poet implicitly attributes to the hero. I reject the most common interpretative position since antiquity, that Odysseus is suddenly struck with compassion for his Trojan victims.
I also find it hard to agree with the more recent suggestions that Odysseus is experiencing a PTSD-reaction, that he is moved to tears by the aesthetic merit of the musical performance, that his tears issue from the encounter with his own self as inscribed in text/history/cultural memory, or that he is shedding crocodile tears. A revisit to earlier artistic and scholarly engagements with this scene (Virgil, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fraenkel, Schadewaldt and Mattes) prompts me to reanalyse the relationship between weeping, loss and suffering but also affiliative attachment and values in the Odyssey. I conclude that the particular object of Odysseus’ emotion is the public celebration of his own social self, apprehended as precious and profoundly important to him.
For more information and free tickets, please visit the Scandinavian Studies website. Part of the Northern Scholars Lecture series.