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David Schur
Arethusa, Volume 47, Number 1, Winter 2014, pp. 1-17 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/are.2014.0000
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/are/summary/v047/47.1.schur.html
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THE SILENCE OF HOMER’S SIRENS
DAVID SCHUR
Nun haben aber die Sirenen eine noch schrecklichere
Waffe als den Gesang, nämlich ihr Schweigen.
Franz Kafka
G iven the seductive and menacing nature of the Sirens’ song in the Odyssey, it is thrilling, memorable, and charming that the epic presents the Sirens’
words directly. Following patterns of expectation established by the poem,
we can imagine several entirely different audiences benefitting from this
special transmission, including an internal audience of Phaeacians hearing Odysseus recount his adventures, ancient listeners to performances of
Homeric epic, and readers of today—all are granted a presumptive share
in Odysseus’s triumph in overhearing the Sirens.
Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that the Sirens do not
perform as expected; they sing, but their words appear to describe a narrative song they would like to (and never do) sing for Odysseus. Although
this obvious fact has certainly been acknowledged by scholars, its implications deserve further consideration.1 Both Pietro Pucci and Charles Segal,
noting that the episode navigates between Iliadic and Odyssean traditions,
consider the Sirens’ song as a self-conscious version of Homeric singing
1
Much of the scholarly literature has focused—with good reason—on the epic-like singing of which the Muse-like Sirens boast. Although they do no narrating, the Sirens are
portrayed in the Odyssey as singer-narrators. Ford 1992, for example, can therefore refer
to “the poem they present” (84), and Doherty 1995a devotes considerable attention to the
Sirens as narrators in order to explore parallels with other female singers in the Odyssey
(60–63; 1995b). Scodel 1998 argues for a strong distinction between bardic song and nonepic narrative in Homer, while suggesting that the Sirens are indeed singers but “represent
a sort of anti-song” (188).
1
Arethusa 47 (2014) 1–17 © 2014 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
2
David Schur
that reflects on the poetics of silence and oblivion.2 Pucci’s pathbreaking
interpretation of the passage reads the “promised song” of the Sirens as
a threat to the Odyssey: the Sirens’ “unsung” poem about Troy is incorporated by the Odyssey; its absence is filled, its promise fulfilled, and its
threat overcome by the Odyssey itself (1987.211–12). Yet the silencing of
this threat within the Odyssey is in strong contrast to the Sirens’ haunting
presence and, ironically, the subsequent renown of their singing.
My analysis builds on the interpretations of Pucci and Segal with
a shift in emphasis. While the Odyssey itself essentially replaces the song
of the Sirens, I observe that the epic—in its self-affirming role as a master narrative—does this by making over the sung promise into the promised song. Indeed, the force of this storytelling triumph is all the greater
if the replaced song (the Sirens’ song) retains as much power (persistence,
presence) as possible. I seek to explain how the Odyssey charms us into
believing that we have overheard the deadly song of the Sirens, learned its
secret, and survived to tell the tale. Our sense of triumph over the Sirens,
I suggest, often leads us to mistake their silence for their song.
In order to demonstrate how this illusion works, I will offer an
analysis of the song’s overture and connect my analysis with the notion of
survival in the broader context of ordeals triumphantly survived by Odysseus in the first half of the Odyssey. As I see it, Odysseus’s homeward mission ultimately corresponds to the epic’s poetic mission of survival through
transmission. Throughout this essay, I will refer to the Homeric text of the
Sirens’ singing (Od. 12.184–91) as the Sirens’ overture and to what Pucci
calls the “unsung” or “promised” song as their recital, thereby making a
sharp distinction between the prenarrative text and the anticipated, presumptive narrative. The Odyssey, I argue, glosses over this distinction.
Presented as part of the larger song it describes, the Sirens’ overture poses
as a charming and dangerous song in itself. In this way, the overture prefigures—and also partakes in—the prominence of the nonexistent recital.
Here is how the Sirens sing for readers today (Od. 12.184–91):
δεῦρ᾽ ἄγ᾽ ἰών, πολύαιν᾽ Ὀδυσεῦ, μέγα κῦδος Ἀχαιῶν,
νῆα κατάστησον, ἵνα νωιτέρην ὄπ ἀκούσῃς.
οὐ γάρ πώ τις τῇδε παρήλασε νηὶ μελαίνῃ,
2 Pucci 1987 and 1998, Segal 1994. For Pucci’s interpretation of the Sirens, I here draw
mainly on chap. 19 of Odysseus Polutropos (1987), which incorporates the findings of his
1979 article “The Song of the Sirens.”
The Silence of Homer’s Sirens
3
πρίν γ᾽ ἡμέων μελίγηρυν ἀπὸ στομάτων ὄπ᾽ ἀκοῦσαι,
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γε τερψάμενος νεῖται καὶ πλείονα εἰδώς.
ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ᾽ ὅσ᾽ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ εὐρείῃ
Ἀργεῖοι Τρῶές τε θεῶν ἰότητι μόγησαν,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, ὅσσα γένηται ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ.
Come here, Odysseus of many tales, great glory of the
Achaeans;
stop your ship, in order that you may hear our voice.
For never yet has anyone driven by here in a black ship
before hearing the honey-sweet voice from our mouths;
rather, he returns having taken pleasure and knowing
more.
For we know all the toils that, in wide Troy,
the Trojans and Argives suffered by the will of the gods,
and we know all that happens on the bountiful earth.3
For the purposes of analysis, we may divide this passage into two
parts. The overture begins with the Sirens addressing Odysseus by name,
praising him, and urging him to stop and hear their voice (184–85). Then
the Sirens suggest two reasons why Odysseus should stop, each of which
is introduced by the connecting particle “for” (γάρ). The effects of their
voice are, claim the Sirens, pleasure and increased knowledge, without
impeded passage (186–88); and the singers proclaim that they themselves
know everything that happens on earth, including the tale of the Trojan
War (189–91). The first of these parts functions mainly as an appeal, while
the other (consisting of reasons or explanations that make the appeal more
appealing) are descriptive.
With this breakdown in mind, I will now develop the following
points. First and foremost, the Sirens’ overture is not a narrative; instead,
it contains commands (come here and stop), an offer (you may hear our
voice), and descriptive elements concerning the effects and the content
of their singing. Second, the combination of an imperative (κατάστησον,
“stop”) with a purpose clause (ἵνα . . . ἀκούσῃς, “in order that you may
3 The Greek is from Allen’s edition of the Odyssey (Oxford Classical Text); translations are
my own.
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David Schur
hear”) functions not as a simple promise but as a conditional offer: if
Odysseus stops, he will get to hear the voice of the Sirens. A third point,
involving the peculiar temporality of the Sirens’ singing, emerges from
the conditional structure of the overture. The overture is where the muchanticipated Sirens are finally present, and vividly so, in Homer’s narrative. On the one hand, the overture points toward something in the future
that does not happen—the Sirens are merely predicting their recital; on
the other hand, by describing what they (always) sing, and by doing so in
song, the Sirens seem to sing the recital they describe and their medium
becomes difficult to distinguish from their message (cf. Segal 1994.89).
Although narrative may often serve as a rather loose and metaphorical or metonymic term, I wish to distinguish clearly between narrative
and nonnarrative text here in order to underscore a categorical difference
between the Sirens’ actual overture and their promised recital. The Sirens
may be commemorating themselves in a stretch of song, but they do not
recount a sequence of events—they do not tell a story.4 Instead, their words
are suggestive of the telling of stories. For the Sirens are universally presumed to deal with the topics of narrative when they explain that they know
about the Trojan War and about all things happening on earth. But with their
explanations they offer a prenarrative at most—a proem, if you will, in which
their own knowledge substitutes for traditional inspiration from the Muses.5
The status of the Sirens’ discourse is further complicated by its
position within the Homeric narrative of the Odyssey, embedded in Odysseus’s narration of Circe’s anticipation of the Siren encounter, which is
subsequently relayed by Odysseus to his crew. So there are two important
factors, I suggest, contributing to the illusion that the Sirens are narrators
whose recital is heard. For one thing, the accumulated weight of narrative
that surrounds the overture overshadows it with narrativity. For another,
the master narrative’s anticipations have foreshadowed the episode with
an inevitability that makes the Sirens’ sung self-description—which coincides with the foretold, narrated event of their singing—resemble the telling of that event.6
4 On nonnarrative discourse, see Chatman 1990.6–37 and Bal 2009.31–48. I follow RimmonKenan 2002 in my use of the terms story and text (1–9); cf. Genette 1980.25–32. Louden
1999 notes the suppression of internal narratives in the Aeaean sequence (66–67).
5 On the Sirens and the Muses, see Buschor 1944, Gresseth 1970, Pucci 1998.6–9, Segal
1994.102–06, Ford 1992.83–84, Doherty 1995b, and Ledbetter 2003.27–34.
6 Pucci points out that the name Siren might even be related to the word song itself (1998.8
n. 13), which would reinforce the impression (for those aware of the connection) that the
The Silence of Homer’s Sirens
5
When describing his ship’s approach to the Sirens immediately
before quoting their words, Odysseus recounts that he heard their “singing” (ἀοιδήν, 183).7 This word introduces the direct speech of the Sirens
with a strong suggestion that the Sirens themselves act as ironic (in Segal’s
terms) Homeric bards (ἀοιδοί).8 Unlike the two other words used for the
Sirens’ voice in the Odyssey (φθόγγον and ὄψ), ἀοιδή signals more than
just sound; we expect the Sirens to perform a version (or a perversion) of
Homeric singing.9 And let us not forget that the quoted words of the Sirens
(like those of all speakers included in the epic) are necessarily identical to
Homeric poetry in meter, diction, and subject matter. But the Sirens are
here using the medium of song to describe a different song, a narrative.
That the difference between these two uses of the same medium may be
of crucial significance is suggested by Segal’s discussion of the Sirens
(1994.100–06), who are seen to offer a “perversion of true heroic song”
(105). The Sirens, observes Segal, are a negative version of Homeric singers,
their power residing in the acoustic force of their physical voice rather than
in the transmission of glory (κλέος) as conceived by epic poetry. Accordingly, “the episode of the Sirens is not just another fantastical adventure of
Odysseus’s wanderings. Through his characteristic form of mythic image,
the traditional singer here finds poetic expression for the implicit values
and poetics of epic song and epic kleos” (105–06). In this observation,
Segal highlights the peculiar self-referentiality of the Sirens, whose singing (ἀοιδή) draws attention to the dangers of Homeric performance itself.
These dangers appear as poetic strains of pleasure and knowledge
that run counter to the epic drive toward immortality. In its reliance on
Sirens’ appearance in the Homeric narrative is a kind of song-event in itself. Consider
also Ahl and Roisman 1996 on the dangers of song in the Aeaean sequence: “It is, in a
sense, the song (or the sound) rather than the singer which beguiles, as Odysseus tells
the story” (147).
7 For conceptions of Homeric song (ἀοιδή), see West 1981, Ford 1992.172–97, and Scodel
1998.
8 “The close relationship between singers and the narrator allows us to take a number of
utterances concerning songs as metanarrative” (de Jong 2001.192, with biblio. listed on
191 n. 2). See, esp., Schadewaldt 1959, Marg 1971, Thalmann 1984.134–84, and Ford
1992.23–130.
9 In Book 12, Circe uses all three of these words to designate the voice of the Sirens: φθόγγον
ἀκούσῃ (“hears the sound,” 41), θέλγουσιν ἀοιδῇ (“they charm with song,” 44), ὄπ’
ἀκούσῃς (“you may hear the voice,” 52), and so does Odysseus in his own versions of the
Siren encounter: 12.159, 183, and 23.326. The Sirens themselves use only ὄψ for their voice
(12.185, 187). On the semantics of these words for voice, see Ford 1992.15, 176–77.
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David Schur
memory and vocal transmission, the developing Homeric tradition could
never have entirely overcome the constant threat of silence and loss. As critics have shown, the encounter between Odysseus and the Sirens expresses
fears, so to speak, on the part of the Odyssey: fear of the Iliad as a rival
tradition, of an Iliadic model of heroism that emphasizes militarism, of
self-knowledge, and of women.10 But as a moment of introspection in the
Odyssey, the ultimate anxiety raised by the Siren episode is about silence
itself.11 So Pucci on the Sirens’ singing: “Delight is contiguous with awe,
voice with silence, life with death” (1987.211), and Segal: “The song that
should immortalize ironically brings oblivion” (1994.104). In poetic terms,
the Muses may be immortal, but what would happen if we could no longer
hear their song? Contrasting the semantics of ἀκούειν (acoustic, physical
hearing) and κλύειν (social hearing, as in the oral propagation of κλέος),
Segal stresses the “purely acoustic” nature of the Sirens’ presence in the
Odyssey.12 And this brings me back to my point about the medium of singing, the sung overture, and the silent recital. In the Sirens’ (negative) version of singing, the medium has been stripped of narrative content while
its message focuses on the hearer’s—every hearer’s—desire for narrative.
The notion of a silent recital is entirely antithetical to the oral tradition’s
ultimate preoccupation with κλέος as epic glory to be transmitted by hearing, whereby transmission is simultaneously conceptualized as the tradition’s own self-immortalization.
The self-referential Siren episode is therefore significant and
exceptional for its thematic attention to the sound of singing in epic performance, the sound of a singer’s voice. When the Sirens sing in our text
of the Odyssey, we today are certainly denied the pleasure of hearing even
what Odysseus claims to have heard. To be sure, this would ordinarily be
a misguided complaint. After all, many sounds are described in Homeric
epic without drawing attention to the limits of what a storyteller can communicate. But this is an instance where the epic invites us to consider a
transcendent and deadly sound. The Sirens invite us, along with Odysseus,
10 Pucci 1998 observes competition between Iliadic and Odyssean poetic traditions; Segal 1994
suggests that Odyssean deceitfulness, as opposed to Iliadic military prowess, is a topic for
introspection in the Odyssey; Doherty 1995a focuses on the gendered poetics seen in the
seductiveness of narrative; Ledbetter 2003 stresses the eroticism of the Sirens’ singing.
11 On the nexus of silence and oblivion in the archaic Greek poetics of Muse-authorized memorialization, see Detienne 1996.48–52, Vernant 2006.115–38, and Svenbro 1976.144–50.
12 “The verb that repeatedly describes the ‘hearing’ of their song is akouein (purely acoustic
hearing, used eight times), never kluein, the social hearing of fame” (Segal 1994.105). On
κλέος, see Nagy 1974.244–55.
The Silence of Homer’s Sirens
7
to hear their voice. And so the function of storytelling as narrative transmission is covertly separated from the auditory dynamic of oral performance. And the meaning of an utterance is pointedly played off against
the effect of its sound. In the text of the poem, the lack displayed by the
missing narrative recital of knowledge is compounded by this emphatic
lack of sound, which is tantamount to silence. So the failure to share the
sound of the Sirens’ voice figures as a breakdown in the oral propagation
of epic glory, the poem’s self-immortalization, which we might call the epic
mission. Odysseus hears a voice without a story, and the audience hears
a story without a voice. Specifically, Odysseus hears the Sirens’ acoustic singing but not their narrative of Troy, and we hear a tale about the
Sirens’ singing but do not hear the sound of their voice. When telling his
story to the Phaeacians, could Odysseus have tried to imitate that sound?
Could the Homeric bard, speaking for Odysseus, have tried to do so? A
literal-minded response to these speculative questions may shed light on
the episode’s import: any such attempt would be doomed by the salient
inadequacy of failing to charm its hearers to death.
If there is a failure in the acoustics of Odysseus’s triumph, it is the
impossibility of sharing the ephemeral sound of death. A parallel failure
may be seen in the dearth of knowledge conveyed by the Sirens. Their claim
to know all and to convey knowledge depends not on the delivery of the
claim, of course, but on the delivery of the product. The Sirens tell Odysseus: “Stop your ship, in order that you may hear our voice,” 12.185. When
Odysseus passes by, he thereby declines the offer to hear their voice. From
a literalistic perspective, this makes no sense—Odysseus must already be
hearing the voice in order to hear the offer. And so we might assume that
the Sirens mean for Odysseus simply to continue listening. Nevertheless,
the famous seduction practiced by the Sirens is an alluring promise only
insofar as it offers Odysseus something else, something that he may get on
the condition that he stop. Again the text leads us to conflate the overture
with what its message proposes. The overture, in which the Sirens promote
their potencies, strongly implies their potential to give Odysseus much pleasure and knowledge. With Cicero (Fin. 5.18.49), many readers believe that
the special lure of the Sirens’ song resides in the promise of knowledge
and that the pleasure involved would be occasioned by that knowledge.13
Alas, although Odysseus does get to hear the beautiful voice, his presumed
13 See Germain 1962; Cicero Fin. 5.18.49. See also Bright 1977 for connections between
knowledge and danger.
8
David Schur
epistemophilia, which includes his narcissism (insofar as he would like to
hear the Sirens celebrate his own exploits at Troy), goes unsatisfied. Being
tied to the mast does not allow him to hear the narrative bait that gives the
Sirens much of their seductive power. So the encounter may be viewed as
something of a failure in this sense as well. (Compared with the mastering
of Circe, which is consummated sexually, the encounter with the Sirens is
more seductive foreplay than heroic conquest.)
Even so, Odysseus is supposed to hear the Sirens’ beautiful and
desirable song without succumbing to the song’s deadly power. But what
does Odysseus hear? For the sake of analysis, I have identified two aspects
of the overture: the physical sound of the Sirens’ voice (sound as a medium)
and the denotative content of their words (their verbal message, which is
an offer). Is there any room here for the narrative recital that the Sirens
propose? The Sirens certainly introduce the suggestion of a recital, a comprehensive narrative that would include Odysseus’s own exploits. And this
suggestion is so strong as to impose itself, in a mesmerizing fashion, in
the recital’s stead.14 The recital does not exist acoustically, but in hearing
of it, Odysseus may be said to reach mentally toward the desired recital
projected before him, never questioning the Sirens’ claims. The recital is
provoked, it is called forth, and it takes a place, however insubstantially,
in the imagination of the hearer, while its substance remains a future possibility. Quite simply, the Sirens’ overture suggests the possibility that
their recital exists. What is extraordinary, however, is not that the recital is
imagined by, or because of, the Sirens’ overture, but rather that the imaginary recital takes the place of what they actually sing.
So despite the ultimate emptiness of the Sirens’ promise for audiences of the Odyssey, their self-promotion is extraordinarily successful:
the narrative recital is overwhelmed and surpassed by a now-silent acoustic performance conveying a figment of the imagination. Odysseus does
not stop and the Sirens do not sing about Troy. As a conditional offer, the
Sirens’ promise (to the effect that he will hear their voice if he stops) is left
untested and unfulfilled. At the same time, the epic compensates for this
lack of fulfillment with Odysseus’s account of hearing them sing. Meanwhile, the overlap of nonnarrative and narrative that we have observed in
the medium of song is paralleled by a chronological overlap. The future
possibility of song described by the Sirens in the present transforms their
14 See Doherty 2002 on “the spellbinding effect of narrative,” with Pucci 1987.209–13.
The Silence of Homer’s Sirens
9
conditional promise into a kind of self-descriptive prophecy. By defining
themselves in terms of a possible recital, the Sirens project this possibility
onto themselves, reflecting the recital onto their overture. In other words,
another function of the overture is to predict its own imminent future in
a process that is, if one accepts the structure of self-description, a form of
self-fulfilling prophecy.
The knowledge on which the presumed recital (itself predicted by
Circe) depends is doubly prophetic. First, in its apparent comprehensiveness (which recalls the Muses), and, second, in its prediction of a recitalto-come (literally turning the diction of the Iliad into a prediction in the
Odyssey and thereby yet again posing the Odyssey as the successful successor). Yet I would describe this dynamic of prediction as proleptic and
more oriented toward the present than the future. The Sirens offer an omnitemporal description of what they (always) do. As a result, the listener is
bound to hear a present tense of customary action in these prophetic declarations of knowledge. The metapoetic qualities of the Siren episode have
already been noted here and elsewhere: the Odyssey reflects on itself by
presenting a variety of Homeric singers. But the Sirens are doubly, excessively, self-referential in the way that they sing about themselves singing.
It is especially in this regard that the encounter with the Sirens brings the
Odyssey toward a mise en abyme, a kind of black hole from which Odysseus and the poem itself might never return. The temporality of the overture is inclusive and capacious. When the Sirens say (12.186–87): “For
never yet has anyone driven by here in a black ship / before hearing the
honey-sweet voice from our mouths,” they use the past as a mirror, so to
speak, through which to see the future and make it present. Indeed, they
are close to reporting what is happening as it happens: Odysseus is sailing
past at the same time that he is hearing their voice.15 The words “never yet”
(οὐ γάρ πώ) look to the past in anticipation of the future, reaching back
and projecting forward—into eternity, if we assume that these Sirens are
immortal and omniscient. Their claim to omniscience seems undermined,
after the fact, by Odysseus’s survival, yet he does hear their voice. Certainly
the knowledge in which the Sirens claim to traffic goes far beyond the
here and now. “We know” (ἴδμεν, 12.189) all about the Trojan War, claim
the Sirens, and “we know” (ἴδμεν, 191) about everything on earth, they
15 This resembles and perhaps simulates what Genette calls simultaneous narration (1980.216–
19). This would be yet another way for the overture to pose (itself) as narrative.
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David Schur
insist. Conveying a sense of the present, the perfect tense of the repeated
verb ἴδμεν in direct quotation imposes an omnitemporality on the entire
overture. Surely the Sirens cannot be taken as having this knowledge only
temporarily—in their Muse-like capacity, they can guarantee their future
performance by anchoring it in their present singing. Thus the overture
encompasses the past of Troy and also all that happens (γένηται, subjunctive) on earth—all within a present-tense framework of knowing.16 I call
the overture proleptic because it is the prediction of a recital; singing “we
know” takes the place of we can and will sing and thereby poses the recital
as present and underway.
In using the term prolepsis, I refer to “the representation or
assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or
accomplished.”17 Often explained as narrative “flash forwards,” instances
of prolepsis sometimes differ from simple predictions by putting a special emphasis on the present. By making events appear “as if presently
existing or accomplished,” prolepsis is one special means—counterchronological, if not in practice counterintuitive—for Homeric poetry
to engage in a more general project of “drawing the remembered world
into the here and now of the present” (Bakker 2005.94).18 When it envisions a single event both from the past (as if the event has not yet taken
its place in the telling of the story) and from the future (as if the event
has taken place), the Odyssey as an overall narrative strengthens its claim
to being Muse-driven, timeless, and virtually omniscient (see Detienne
1996.39–52). Thus prolepsis does not simply look forward; instead, it
brings the future into an omnipresent present. When framing survival,
which hinges on passing through an imagined barrier of death that stands
between past and future, prolepsis can present threats as already encountered and already overcome.
Redundancy is a related narrative strategy of excess designed to
prevent failure. The re-telling of close calls now mastered, particularly in
embedded rehearsals that are earmarked as already transmitted and in cascading sequences of nested anticipations, is another way for the poem to
insist, metapoetically, on its own persistence. The thematic and linguistic
16 On this aorist subjunctive, see Pucci 1998.7 n. 10.
17 Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. See also Genette 1980.67–85 and de
Jong 2001.51–53.
18 Cf. Vernant 2006: “Memory transports the poet into the midst of ancient events, back into
their own time” (77). See also Ford 1992.6, 54–55.
The Silence of Homer’s Sirens
11
treatment of survival in the Odyssey reaches a crescendo in the Siren passage, where silence, which is profoundly antithetical to the fundamental
conceits of Homeric epos itself, is overcome by the recounted sound of the
Sirens’ singing. Ultimately, the notion of passage here combines the Sirens’
overture, the safe passage of Odysseus, and the ongoing transmission of the
poem. The overture serves to demonstrate the epic narrator’s power and to
confirm the epic’s survival through its own overdetermination—through a
surplus of tactics whereby the epic is determined to be heard.
Some broad remarks about challenges to Odysseus’s survival as a
hero will help to contextualize this dynamic. Throughout the first half of
the Odyssey, the protagonist must overcome many threats to his homecoming that may readily be understood as threats to his memory (see Frame
1978.34–80). In this portrayal of Odysseus’s adventures, the epic presents
his character as both the object and the subject of memory: the hero is to
be remembered and celebrated by future generations (through the medium
of epic poetry), but he must also actively remember to go home. Death is
only one of many scenarios that would spell oblivion for Odysseus, other
examples include marriage with Nausicaa, forgetfulness among the Lotus
Eaters, and eclipse in Calypso’s cave. While the plot of the epic has Odysseus facing these many threats to his homecoming, the Odyssey itself is
on a parallel but conceptually distinct mission to celebrate the protagonist’s memory as κλέος (“epic glory”).19 As Segal puts it, the Odyssey is so
self-conscious as to be self-critical or ironic and can be said to “relate the
values of heroic kleos directly to the bardic tradition that keeps it alive”
(1994.86). In reality, the persistence of memory is achieved by transmission through performance, not through the hero’s successful survival of
ordeals. The story of Odysseus, the character whose survival gives life to
the discourse of the Odyssey, is inseparable from the survival of epic itself,
in a circular dynamic that is enacted by the Siren episode in a moment of
pronounced self-consciousness.20
From the opening of the Odyssey, we know that Odysseus alone
(τὸν δ’ οἶον, 1.13) will make it to Calypso’s island after having survived
ordeals that span the first half of the epic. This example of prolepsis fits
19 In the Odyssey, characters do not speak of their own κλέος except at 9.20 and 19.128; see
Segal 1994.93.
20 “In the text of the Sirens’ song, the Odyssey demonstrates the full force of its critical and
literary awareness, for this passage tantalizingly suggests that the Odyssey’s own sublime
poetry cannot be inferior to that of the Sirens” (Pucci 1987.212).
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David Schur
into a long arc, centering on Thrinacia, of anticipated threats to Odysseus’s
survival. First mentioned in the proem (1.7–9), the disastrous eating of the
sun god’s cattle is revisited and foretold by both Tiresias (11.106–17) and
Circe (12.127–41) before it results in the death of all the remaining companions, duly recounted by Odysseus himself (12.260–425). Here I wish
to emphasize how each subsequent account of the same (future) event renders it ever more present in our thoughts, both revising our understanding
of the event and simultaneously anticipating a final telling that will view
the event from a present point that surveys, masters, and encompasses the
past. Although anticipating a threat of death, each mention of Thrinacia
simultaneously marks the threat as overcome by Odysseus—who is narrating the event as a realized occurrence—and surpassed by the narrative. In
the sweep of epic narration, devices such as foreshadowing and prophecy
tend to blur the difference between retrospective and predictive reporting. Thus the Homeric narrator exhibits proleptic foreknowledge of past
events, while prophetic characters glimpse future possibilities, and these
perspectives effectively contaminate our comprehension of Odysseus’s look
back at what led him to Phaeacia. Hence the early mention of the cattle of
the sun is a sign of the epic poet’s control over the vast story ahead and
behind. Tiresias’s prediction regarding Thrinacia intervenes to show us
future possibilities from the past; Circe’s version is a warning concerned
with imminent events and their possible permutations.
In Odysseus’s wanderings, the Sirens are encountered soon after
the lengthy Nekyia, which makes a threat of death seem somewhat redundant insofar as the ultimate and one-way barrier of death has already and
recently been crossed. As Circe puts it, once Odysseus and his companions have returned from Hades, they are “twice dying, when other men die
once” (δισθανέες, ὅτε τ’ ἄλλοι ἅπαξ θνῄσκους’ ἄνθρωποι, 12.22). This
peculiar status of proleptic survival—conferred by an extra, earlier death
and in anticipation of a later one—affords a profound glimpse of how the
narrative brings into question the temporality of survival in a dynamic that
informs epic storytelling in general and Odysseus’s retrospective telling of
his wanderings in particular. Thus prolepsis contributes a stamp of redundancy to the Odyssean narrative of wanderings. Just as threatening events
(such as the disaster at Thrinacia) can be presented as already overcome,
narrative events (recalled, retold, remembered—as when Odysseus recounts
Circe’s account of the Sirens) can assume the status of having already been
told. Nor should we underestimate the physical effects of sheer repetition
and the weight of insistent, emphatic reinforcement through which the
The Silence of Homer’s Sirens
13
accumulation of words may gain palpable powers of suggestion.21 Although
retellings inevitably exhibit important differences (both in context and in
text), and even though one telling often emerges as most complete, each
mention nevertheless provokes memory.22
Prolepsis is further strengthened when multiple tellings are
repeated and refracted through multiple voices as when, for example, Tiresias’s predictions of the future (which range from Thrinacia to Odysseus’s
death) are recalled by a first-person narrator, Odysseus at Phaeacia, for
whom Thrinacia is past, homecoming is future, and death is impossible
to narrate. Tiresias’s predictions are first recounted by Odysseus when he
is speaking in his role as a secondary narrator whose words are recounted
by the primary narrator of the Odyssey. Then, in Book 23, Homer recounts
how Odysseus recounted to Penelope how Tiresias predicted Odysseus’s
death (267–84). And while the tale told by Odysseus at Phaeacia may stand
out as a “best copy” of the wanderings, the quick version told to Penelope
(23.310–41) brings the Thrinacian arc (including the Siren encounter) back
under the manifest control of the Homeric narrator at the far end of the epic,
with Odysseus again speaking as a character in the Odyssey. Through narrative embedding and reported speech, retellings participate in a dynamic
of hearsay that stresses transmission as opposed to simple repetition. So
when Simon Goldhill draws attention to the striking brevity of Odysseus’s
tale of wanderings told to Penelope in Book 23, he observes that the epic
itself is attracting attention: “The narrative within the narrative . . . marks
the Odyssey as a composed, a constructed artifice,” a narrative possessed
of self-awareness (1991.49). Goldhill’s remarks resonate in this discussion
of proleptic presentation because the epic draws attention to itself by disembedding a previously embedded account.
If prolepsis reinforces the Homeric narrator’s atemporal, Musesanctioned omniscience, then the device of embedding—by which the
reports that lead us to the Sirens reach us through a proliferation of voices—
perhaps most clearly exhibits the mission assumed by that authority. In a
context dominated by multiple rehearsals of survival, Odysseus’s encounter
21 Redundancies in the narration of the wanderings stand out against Odysseus’s own dislike
for repeated tellings that he expresses at Od. 12.450 when he concludes his own account
of his journey with a declaration of self-silencing. In modern terms, proleptic repetition
(like its opposite) is thus marked as a rhetorical device, self-consciously and significantly
deployed to suit the circumstances.
22 On differences between tellings, see Goldhill 1991.49.
14
David Schur
with the Sirens is quite brief, but its importance is amplified by alternative
versions of what could happen (and, therefore, what might have happened):
Circe tells Odysseus what to do regarding the Sirens, and her version of
what could happen is grim (12.39–54); Odysseus tells his companions
what to do, while leaving out gory details (158–64); and then the actual
encounter rushes by in Odysseus’s Phaeacian recital (165–200). Within the
latter account, the Sirens’ overture itself offers yet another version of what
the Sirens do. They tell us what they do just as they appear to be doing it.
And as might be expected, they give the least grim version of their own
modus operandi. With the addition of each voice, our imaginary song of
the Sirens grows; the account of the Sirens, increasingly self-involved,
accrues interest and increases in discursive volume.
Embedded at the center of their own tale, the Sirens take the lead
in a monstrous tour through the poetics of hearsay, exaggeratedly following a dynamic that Gregory Nagy identifies as a primary function of epos
itself insofar as the transmission of κλέος epitomizes epic poetry’s mission of self-preservation: to survive by being heard and remembered.23 We
may tend to think of the distance opened up by indirect reportage as a
removal from an authentic, authoritative source, but here it also marks out
distance travelled. Just as Odysseus wanders homeward, so, too, does the
epic continue to move toward its audience, with this distance measuring
its ongoing survival. The episode is over-rehearsed and over-heard, with
increasingly seductive overtones mingling with the Homeric-Odyssean
narrative of what occurred. The Siren episode is thus an integral part of
a larger sequence that highlights Odysseus’s triumph against a backdrop
of survival foretold.
The quantitative volume of voices contributing to the Sirens’ performance creates an illusion of loudness. But the sound of Homeric-style
singing is here pointedly distinguished from (as well as superimposed onto)
the Homeric text. The cost of a safe passage amounts to Odysseus’s missing
of the recital, and the successful epic transmission must forgo our hearing the
very essence of the Sirens’ singing. We may also perceive this dilemma in
the word that the Sirens use, twice, for their own “voice” (ὄψ, 12.185, 187).
Related to the word epos itself, this voice (ὄψ, in the same family as ἔπος,
“word, epic poetry,” and ἐπεῖν, “to say”) serves as an epic counterpart and
imposter, a song that prevails through a bravado demonstration of acoustic
23 Nagy 1998, chap. 15, sec. 7.
The Silence of Homer’s Sirens
15
presence, a presence that emerges from the sheer momentum of a narrative
sequence that must rush through the passing moment in the effort to preserve it.24 For despite its greatest efforts to remain in the present moment,
a monumental poem such as the Odyssey necessarily marks what has been
lost.25 It seems plausible that a double movement of failure and success
would occur in this episode precisely in order to demonstrate that the poem’s
imaginative journey can survive a confrontation with its greatest imagined
fear: being lost in transmission. Nor is it implausible that the oral tradition
of the Odyssey would have expressed concern about losing its voice when
it was passing into the medium of writing. Yet such anxieties would emerge
in any tradition based on memory and the transmission of stories. Regardless of technological difficulties, the Odyssey passes by the Sirens’ real song
in silence, and their imagined song, in turn, will doubtless outlive us all.26
Brooklyn College, The City University of New York
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