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Guest -Laiba Niaz Paracha 

Podcast Script

The Odyssey- the epic form and women

The Odyssey does give Odysseus the privilege of sharing the tales of exploits and misfortunes, but it ensures that his character fulfills its preordained role in accordance with the overarching chronology of the epic. The transition from the bardic third-person to Odysseus’ own first person accounts of events is seamless; even a story located in a distant past, such as the memory of Odysseus’s scar, occurs with little linguistic or tonal divergence to differentiate the temporal shifts from one other, and in maintaining this homogeneity, the narrative prevents Odysseus from existing outside its larger framework. In his essay “Epic and Novel”, Russian literary critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin writes of the epic as a literary form which by virtue of the definition of its genre is “walled off absolutely from all subsequent times”,-  writes of the epic as a generic form “whose constitutive feature is the transferral of the world it describes to an absolute past of national beginnings and peak times”, it’s features:

designated in the present

located in ancient time (Odyssey, Illiad, Aeneid) (an inaccessible past- “ended”/fated time- complete, congealed, fossilized)

“the world of firsts and pasts, of fathers and founders” (a world ordained by men, through the reverential eyes of a male descendant)

Within the epic, characters are absolute- the hero of the epic is incapable of change, incapable of resisting his own fate, which as I mentioned, is pre-ordained. Odysseus will indeed suffer the punishment of being lost at sea, and he will return home too. Achilles will suffer the consequences of his own wrath, his rage and his subsequent death are unavoidable. It has been argued, then, by theorists such as Bakhtin and Eric Auerbach, that the epic is static and lacks evolution. It follows therefore that it’s female characters are also locked into their roles- and that is those women who exist within the domain of humanity. Those figures that are inhuman or monstrous in some way have barely any “voice” at all, and definitely no morality. 

Within the Odyssey, a running theme of marital disloyalty and the fear of female adultery pervades the narrative, although Odysseus enjoys the company of many many, many women over the course of his journey. The focus of his preoccupations, his paranoia and resentment, are focusing specifically on the morality (or lack thereof) of the women who are unfaithful to their husbands. This occurs initially when Telemachus meets Helen and Menelaus in Book 4, where Helen embodies the repentant sinner, blameworthy for a war she never initiated. She rejects accolades and titles accruing to her beauty and grace, choosing to accept the blame for a war she never initiated and calling herself a “shameless whore”; thus securing for herself a place within Achaean society. It occurs again and most directly in Book 11, where the given passage details a conversation between Agamemnon and Odysseus regarding Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, who plotted to kill him in his absence, and carried out the plan with her lover, Aegisthus. This essay will attempt to establish and examine how Clytemnestra is systematically stripped of her femininity, and humanity as a result of her independent actions. 

Now, Jumana, I recall that you studied a great variety of mythical traditions in your previous work- how have you found the representation of women as non-human entities, I am curious about that.

Where Odysseus, for his plotting and scheming ways is referred to as “cunning”, “worldly” and a “mastermind of war”, Clytemnestra is “deadly” for her disloyalty and “monstrous” deception. She is dispossessed, even, of her existence as a human being, becoming nothing more than the action she has committed, a “bestial” entity. Any analyses regarding her possible motives and any justifications or explanations for her actions are avoided, as they would present her with the chance to reclaim her humanity once more. She is instead immortalised as both “accursed” and a curse befallen upon “the whole breed of womankind”.  The shadow of her characterisation carries over till the end of the epic, in tandem with the idea that “even the honest ones” have been “bathe(d) in shame” through the arguably justifiable actions of Clytemnestra. 

South Asian Writers of note + their writing and representation of the world:

Ismat Chugtai:

“I didn’t write what you’d call ‘literarily’. I wrote and do write as I speak, in a very simple language…I used to write grammatically incorrect sentences, because while speaking, you sometimes speak incorrect sentences…it was not my language that gained notice. It was the way I wrote that did, the frankness I wrote with.” (Chugtai, Mahfil Interview 169).  

In her essay Chugtai furthers emphasizes a disharmony in her relationship with language, as her spelling errors are noted by the calligrapher who is implicated in the trial alongside herself and Shahid Dehlavi. This disharmony is characteristic of feminine dissatisfaction with the imposition of a structure and order on the act of writing which is inherently “phallogocentric” in nature, a term coined by Jacques Derrida which combines a phallocentric and logocentric system of language and thought. Such a system privileges an exclusively masculine form of self-expression, insisting on cohesive, progressive, linear narratives as absolute. Woolf writes of this impediment; “To begin with, there is the technical difficulty—so simple, apparently; in reality, so baffling—that the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use.” (Woolf 308). She further writes of this as a reflection of a reality which similarly accommodates a masculine order through the oppressive hegemony maintained by legal and social patriarchies; women writers must confront “the order imposed upon them by convention. And as men are the arbiters of that convention, as they have established an order of values in life, so too, since fiction is largely based on life, these values prevail there also to a very great extent.” (Woolf 309). 

Feminine writing has itself been a widely contested issue even within Western feminist circles, since its inception as a literary concept and textual practice by the French feminist philosopher and theorist, Helen Cixous. There is perhaps no text more influential for its advocation of “woman’s writing” or “l’ecriture feminine”, than Cixous’ 1976 essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa”. It makes a rousing case for the exploration of women’s experiences through a reconstruction of the feminine identity, i.e., femininity, and female sexuality through “writing the body”; “By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display,” (Cixous 886). She makes a case for the necessity of literature which detracts from the “phallogocentric tradition” through the “invention of a new, insurgent writing”, as she argues “with a few rare exceptions, there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity;” (Cixous 878-880).

 Her text, radical and insurgent in its inclusive definition of l’ecriture feminine, in so far as it states in no uncertain terms; “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded-which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist…It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.” (Cixous 883). Shakir’s work, in this conception of feminine writing, both aligns with and contests the text- while Cixous states “Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity,” she excludes from this definition the “classical representations” of women in the Western literary canon i.e. as “sensitive, intuitive, dreamy, etc”, (Cixous 878, 885). Further, she details that the embodied writing she speaks of is necessarily sexual, masturbatory in nature (Cixous 883). A woman writer “‘must write herself, her body must be heard,’ she should explore and discover and exhibit her sexuality in writing and describe the pleasures or ‘jouissance’ (Lacanian term) of sexuality,”

Final comment by Audre Lorde:

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so 

necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of "it feels right to me." We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.' 

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