'twixt the Charbidys and Scylla of Emma and Godzilla

Ah, the comic book. That chalk-on-brown paper colored podium where penny-dreadful myth-makers and philosophers zing, boom and pfft morality into little boys. That world where imagination is one step lower than supreme. That state of being that is loved by...well, I think that's enough now. I think you get the picture. In short, just in case you didn't notice, a comic book is where good and evil meet in pure exaggerated melodrama (at least, that would be ideal), and where one encounters, in almost nauseatingly pure form, other things which deeply move humans; things like loyalty and adventure and victory.

There is one problem with it, however. Comic sagas are, by necessity, unpleasantly long. One story gets the idea across, and after that, we can say, with Shakespeare "A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Just because you change the name of the monster and the hero and what they look like and what order the events happen in doesn't really make something new: it makes it look different to the superficial observer. Like a Vivaldi theme and variations, there is no point to the iconic repition of defeating yet another brightly colored monster by some trick of wit or cunning.

What does a certain half-species of sensible person occasionally do to counter this? They find refuge, by reading those sorts of things (and the more finely-crafted and rare (un comic-book like) the better) that take place in the complex world of the combinations of psyches that we call society. These things, which must by necessity be 'real' to have any sort of merit and which pleas the higher and more sophisticated parts of humanity (I am politically correct only as an undesirable by-product of the slight subtle satire that this sentence contains), bear not the mark of ever-greater same throw-ups from the fertile but unvaried and insensitive-to-the-nature-of-thingsish imagination possessed by the comic-book author. Yet, these books do not deal with exactly the most important issues of life. Survival and virtue are necessary prerequisites to the nature of and best techniques of finding a good husband or wife.

Of course, one could read or write things that are midway between these two options. Which is a perfect description of what The Oddessy does.

First of all, the Oddesey doeals with elemental, comic-book issues, particularly survival and the attaining of goals (it is the Adventures of Odesseyus, after all), in a fantastic, magical, incredibly imaginative and sensational fashion. To reach home and live, the hero has to deal with creatures (and yes, the pagan gods count as creatures) that are the equals in power of the villians of the comic-books. How does it do this without falling into the monotone and anti-realistic iconism of these same books? After all, iconism is useful for getting at the essences of things (as Chesterton demonstrates in A Piece of Chalk) but the iconic monster-after-monster, hero-after-hero time-after-time sequence tells us nothing about real monsters, heroes, or stories.

Homer's moderation, attitude toward his situations, and variety in which Odessyus acts in them help to explain this. There are not a numerical great deal of monstrous situations in the Odessy. For the increased attention span of the times, they all seem to fit nicely into one story. It must also be kept in mind that all the super-characters in the story were seen as real by the people of the times, including possibly even Homer. Hence they do not bear the mark of poorly-done imagination-objects, but of either facts or tried-and-true folk tales. Finally, Odesseyus does not act like the superhero who only thinks subtly when he must think his way out. This hero's dialogue with even the stupid Cyclops is not the simple: exchange-of-insults, "You will die" splat-boom-et cetera (obviously, the fact that it is in verse helps). Niether are the situations solved in at all simple manner. At one point, he escapes by strength, another by wit, another by magical aid, another by 'divine' compassion. It still sounds monotonus, but this sort of varied repition bears much more repeating than the modern comic kind.

Of what use is this for us on Disciples of Diotima? Well, there's a lot more to beauty than the essence of things (as if that wasn't enough!). All artists can use subtlety of technique to get points of truth and morality across to the uncooperative listener. The Odessey is an excellent example of how that can be done.