Improvisation as a Way of Life

Recent scholarship has shown that improvisation is not just the purview of the musician or stand-up comedian. George Lewis, jazz trombonist and music historian, brings both the practice and theory of improvisation together to show that the study of the social relations connected to the improvisational musical process leads to insights about the inventive potential of other forms of social intercourse as well.Footnote ⁵ Lewis and his colleague, the philosopher Arnold Davidson, look to philosophical and sociological traditions that have embraced improvisation not just as a mode of performance but also as a ‘way of life’ to argue that music provides the ideal platform for experiencing the condition of improvisation and for investigating its effects on a much broader scale.Footnote ⁶ Before turning to the Odyssey, then, I want to spend a little time with the work of the philosopher, David Velleman, to explore the potential of improvisation as a form of askesis, or self enactment, in the ways that Lewis and Davidson suggest for appreciating the creative potential of metis in the Odyssey.

Working in the tradition of Erving Goffman, the sociologist who called our attention to the inherently theatrical nature of social life, the philosopher, David Velleman, looks to improvisational theater as a useful framework for thinking about rational agency, by which he means how we become who we are and how we interact with those around us.Footnote ⁷ Velleman argues that we gain understanding of ourselves through improvised encounters with others. He uses the world of improvisational theater to make his point by comparing the way each of us constructs our sense of who we are in the world with the way an actor works out how to play a given character on stage—by testing and trying out different roles and attitudes until we find what works for us.Footnote ⁸ This process of ‘self-enactment’, Velleman argues, entails a kind of practical reasoning that is inherently experimental and even, to a certain extent, deceptive since we often must try on different roles to see if they help us make better sense of ourselves. As part of this effort, as Velleman says, ‘lying sometimes pays’, since the costs of deception are often outweighed by the benefits for self-understanding that emerge from that interaction.Footnote ⁹ These experimental, improvisational collaborations depend upon a common body of scripts or familiar situations through which each of us tries out, explores, and refines a sense of self.Footnote ¹⁰ The totality of this repertoire of shared scenarios might be called ‘our way of life’, and Velleman argues that we rely upon this socially developed practice to realize our own rational selves rather than depending on individual autonomy to enable social practice.Footnote ¹¹ We play ourselves, not artificially but authentically—not definitively but provisionally and repeatedly—by doing what makes sense for us to be who we are at that moment, in those circumstances.

Velleman's reading of improvisation as a kind of experimental practical reasoning in which deception and cunning play a productive role is very much like the archaic Greek concept of metis (μῆτις), the quality of cunning and cleverness that is, as Detienne and Vernant have shown, embodied in Greek mythology as the mother of Athena, and famously deployed by (πολύμητις) Odysseus.Footnote ¹² An important aspect of metis, a key component of its mode of success, is deceit and cunning; it works through trickery and disguise, and to think about these deceptive aspects of metis, qualities that are often viewed negatively through a moral lens, within the improvisational framework articulated by Velleman (and others), can change the way we think about those figures in the Greek mythological tradition who are famous for their practice of metis– chief of whom of course are Athena and Odysseus.Footnote ¹³ In addition, Velleman's notion that the authentic self is determined by social context and practice rather than individual autonomous action is very much in tune with the ways that scholars have shown that in the oral culture of archaic Greece, the authenticity of a text is conferred by its audience in performance rather than absolutely linked to any one specific author.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, the cooperative and collaborative relationships between performers and audience that George Lewis celebrates in an improvisatory jazz performance are exactly those that have long been recognized in the oral poetics of the Homeric poems. In other words, the very qualities that lie at the heart of recent investigations into ‘improvisatory studies’ are already very much a part of the archaic Greek ‘way of life’ and are absolutely fundamental to the world of the Odyssey. Read within an improvisational framework, then, Odysseus' return home to Ithaca with his frequent changes in physical appearance, his so-called lying tales, and his regular practice of testing or teasing can be productively, rather than deceptively, read.

Before exploring the ways in which Odysseus uses his metis to improvise his return home, a close reading of Odysseus' encounter with Polyphemus in Book 9 will help sketch out a template for this improvisatory practice as we find it in a Homeric context—its particular vocabulary and thematic associations. This is, after all, the episode that names Odysseus as a man of metis—both as one who expertly deploys practical reasoning and also as ‘nobody’—and we will begin to see the creative potential of that association. At the end of Book 8, after regaling Odysseus with food, drink, and song, the Phaeacian King Alcinous asks his guest to tell him who he is, adding that ‘no one among men is entirely nameless' (8.550-54).Footnote ¹⁵ After giving his name as Odysseus, son of Laertes (9.19f.), and briefly recounting his experiences with the Ciconians and the Lotus-eaters, Odysseus launches into an extended account of his adventures with Polyphemus—a story that introduces Odysseus with a different name, one that links his improvisatory skills, his metis, with the ability to be anonymous.

Odysseus: A Man of Metis

After landing nearby the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus announces that he will leave most of his men behind and take just a few to go exploring:

The verb that Odysseus uses here and on nearly every other occasion on which he finds himself in a new and unfamiliar situation is πειράομαι. At the root of the verb is the sense of a trial or attempt (πεῖρα) combined with the experience that comes from that effort. Scholars tend to translate the verb with an emphasis on the object—one tries something, one tests another person, or puts him to the test. This translation, however, fails to appreciate the force of the verb's middle voice, the distribution of the verbal activity simultaneously upon both the subject and the object, as well as the resulting experience that stems from the attempt.Footnote ¹⁶ In this respect, the Greek verb πειράομαι perfectly describes the process of active encounter with others (testing, trying out roles) that also shapes one's own character. Odysseus announces that he will ‘check these people out’, meaning that he will try out a few roles and scenarios to see what the impact will be upon himself and his situation. By ‘checking out’ the Cyclopes, Odysseus is also trying out the possibilities for who he is, and that is exactly what he proceeds to do.Footnote ¹⁷

Odysseus and his men soon discover the cave of the Cyclops on the island; they make themselves at home in the cave, build a fire, help themselves to the monster's cheese, and wait for his return. Once Polyphemus does return, he addresses Odysseus and his men as if they were guests: ‘Strangers (ξεῖνοι), who are you? From where do you come sailing over the watery ways?’ (9.252). Odysseus' reply picks up on the reference to hospitality (xenia), and he improvises a story and an identity for himself and his men as suppliants; they lost their way coming home from Troy (9.263-71). Instead of presenting himself and his men as the curious (and even greedy, gift-grubbing) explorers that they are as well, Odysseus plays up the role of suppliant, which if Polyphemus acquiesces should protect them from harm and produce the kind of hospitality that Odysseus enjoys from the Phaeacians. Polyphemus, however, rejects the suppliant scenario, he won't ‘go along’ in Velleman's terms, with Odysseus. Rather, he asks Odysseus where he left his ship, and Odysseus attributes to Polyphemus a verb of experimental reasoning (πειράζω) related to the one he used earlier of himself:

Odysseus replies, using deceptive words (δολίοις ἐπέεσσι), that their ships were destroyed, pretending that he and his men are truly dependent upon Polyphemus as suppliants. Polyphemus, however, once again refuses to ‘go along’ with the suppliant scenario, and instead of offering food and hospitality, he eats two of Odysseus' men. In this scene both Odysseus and Polyphemus draw upon coherent, if contradictory, scripts of social behavior appropriate to the situation—xenia, supplication, shipwreck—even cannibalism—and their opening engagement, each simultaneously testing the other and trying out roles for himself, portrays Odysseus engaged in a situation where his improvisatory skill, his metis, is prominently featured.

Again, Odysseus casts about for a way to out-manoeuver the Cyclops, landing, in the end, upon the idea of improvising a weapon out of Polyphemus' extra large walking stick. Once Polyphemus returns from the fields, he wants to know who his guest is, and in response, Odysseus invents a new name for himself and along with it, an identity as nobody:

In response, Polyphemus tells Odysseus that his gift will be to eat him last, but Odysseus and his men manage to blind the Cyclops in his drunken stupor first.

The full significance of Odysseus' choice of name stems from the ensuing exchange between Polyphemus and his fellow Cyclopes who have come offering aid, one that confuses the conditional form of Odysseus' fabricated name (μή τις) with his improvisatory skills (μῆτις). The Cyclopes ask:

Polyphemus answers them, identifying Odysseus by the name that he knows:

They famously reply:

And Odysseus thinks to himself:

As others have noted, the double word play that emerges here from the use of the conditional form of nobody (μή τις) and the word metis (μῆτις) designating the skills of improvisation thus intersects with and complicates the original pun introduced by the indicative form of nobody (οὔ τις) and the name Nobody (Οὖτις) that Odysseus ‘improvised’ for himself.Footnote ¹⁹

Odysseus thus emerges from his improvisatory encounter with Polyphemus as a man of metis in two different yet interconnected ways. First, he presents himself as a consummate improviser. He is Odysseus, famed for his trickery—this is what he does; this is who he is. He enacts scenes from a series of familiar scripts for encounters with strangers (supplication, xenia, etc.), and his actions offer a tour-de-force demonstration of the kind of practical reasoning that, should Polyphemus have agreed to play along, would have resulted in a successful social encounter as was the case with the Phaeacians.Footnote ²⁰ The fact that Polyphemus refuses to ‘go along’ with Odysseus in these scenes doesn't undercut the value of reading this scene within a framework of improvisation; rather it contributes to the characterization of Polyphemus' ambiguous standing both within and without the social norms of the poem. He appears to be aware of the social scripts but refuses to play along. When Odysseus' initial strategies fail, he fashions an escape from the monstrous Cyclops by improvising a weapon and a name for himself on the spot, both of which enable him to outwit the Cyclops. In addition to giving him the tools to negotiate a successful interaction (more or less) with the Cyclops, Odysseus' improvisation helps construct his sense of self in the poem. Book 9 concludes, as it began, with him stating his name—I am Odysseus—and the actions contained within these two nominative gestures construct his identity as a man of improvisational skill, or, in Greek, metis.Footnote ²¹

And yet, just as the Nobody pun works differently in its indicative and conditional registers, so this scene complicates Odysseus' identity as improviser by showing the reverse—namely, that his improvisatory skills construct his identity as nobody—μή τις. For the Cyclops episode aligns Odysseus' identity as a man of improvisation with his ability—one that is not limited to the Book 9 trick but, in fact, dominates the entire poem—to be anonymous.Footnote ²² The Cyclops episode in Book 9, then, locates this association of anonymity and improvisation (μή τις and μῆτις) within the framework of Odysseus' identity qua Odysseus. The name pun articulates the fundamental relationship between the perpetual self-enactment process of improvisation and the conditions of anonymity or non-identity upon which it depends.Footnote ²³ In order to be able to take on a new role at a moment's notice, Odysseus must be able and willing to set aside any single, fixed notion of his own identity, and the implications embodied in the μή τις / μῆτις wordplay are worked out thematically in the second half of the poem when Odysseus returns home to Ithaca as a real nobody—an unnamed beggar. His success in navigating a successful return is precisely linked to his improvisatory skill, his metis (μῆτις) at being nobody (μή τις).Footnote ²⁴

Turning now to the second half of the poem, we will see how Odysseus brings these productive improvisatory skills home to negotiate his role there anew, twenty years after he left. Shifting our focus away from the practice of recognition, reading the Odyssey within a framework of improvisation instead will call attention to the creative negotiations of identity that take place in the second half of the poem as a changed (and changing) Odysseus tries out the roles of master, father, son, and husband twenty years later.

Nobody's Home

When Odysseus arrives on the shores of Ithaca, the poet explains that he fails to recognize his homeland both because he's been away for a long time and because Athena has transformed the Ithacan landscape to give it a different appearance, a disguise of sorts (ἀλλοειδέα, 13.194).Footnote ²⁵ Odysseus' subsequent exasperated set of questions about what kind of people live here (13.200-04)—the same set of questions with which he began each of his adventures in unfamiliar territory—clearly establishes Ithaca as yet another site in which he will need to muster his improvisatory skills.

Indeed, when Athena appears to Odysseus disguised as a young herdsman, he immediately adopts the role of a Cretan exile, telling her that he is a man who has killed before in defense of his plunder (13.256-85). Athena smiles in response to his clever strategy and reveals herself to be his mentor in improvisation, and together they plot his return. Athena reassures Odysseus that she will be by his side to help inspire his efforts, and they start with a disguise. Athena transforms Odysseus' outward appearance into that of a dirty, old beggar:

Athena explains that looking like this, Odysseus will be unrecognizable—as unfamiliar to his family as the land of Ithaca was to him when he first arrived. As we saw in Book 9, Odysseus' practical reasoning is expressly aligned with his propensity for anonymity. To be Odysseus is both to be an improviser (μῆτις) and to be no one (μή τις). Odysseus has changed, just as did his native Ithaca, in the time he was gone, and Athena's partnership here signals his departure on yet another improvisatory adventure of (self) discovery—this time at home. It allows him to tell stories, to ‘try out’ what he has become—a well-traveled old beggar—to learn who that is and how to integrate that evolving identity into whatever home has become in his absence.

With wrinkled skin, graying hair, and foul clothes, this Odysseus looks nothing like the strong warrior to whom his fellow Ithacans bid farewell twenty years earlier, but probably exactly like what we would expect him to look like after twenty years of hard travel and near death experiences.Footnote ²⁶ Athena's role in transforming Odysseus' physical appearance, here and throughout the second half of the poem, represents the changes in appearance that time and travel inevitably entail. It suggests that Odysseus no longer looks like the same man he was before he left, and the ‘disguise’ that Athena, mistress of metis, has created for Odysseus here represents the opportunity for Odysseus to improvise this identity as well—to learn how to take on this new role, to embody this new appearance authentically.Footnote ²⁷ Athena's role in creating disguises for Odysseus thus represents his skill at adopting new roles or characters both as a way to negotiate encounters with those he meets at home and in order to ‘try on’ the new sense of identity that emerges for and from those encounters. Similarly, the ‘lying tales’ that Odysseus tells over the course of the second half of the poem function as opportunities for Odysseus to narrate new roles for himself as part of that process.Footnote ²⁸ Skilled as he is in the tools of improvisation—lies, disguise, role playing—Odysseus arrives on Ithaca as a nobody (μή τις) and proceeds to re-create himself as Odysseus through a series of encounters with those people he left behind.

Odysseus the Beggar

Odysseus goes first to Eumaeus' hut, to the home of the one man on Ithaca whose own personal experiences with travels and abrupt changes of fortune mostly closely resemble those of the man Odysseus has become.Footnote ²⁹ Eumaeus welcomes this stranger generously, and after feeding him and getting him settled, Eumaeus asks his guest who he is. In reply, Odysseus tells a story of a wandering adventurer—trying it out, trying it on, for Eumaeus and for himself.

Odysseus begins by saying that he is Cretan by birth, the illegitimate son of a wealthy man who was, nevertheless, treated well and given a good wife. He notes that he used to be good looking, but that time and hardship have changed him (212-15). He boasts that he was a skilled warrior and that he preferred ships and war to life at home (223f.). He went to Troy with the Cretan contingent, fought there and safely returned home to Crete. After just a month at home, however, wanderlust struck him again, and he set out on an expedition to Egypt. He goes on to tell Eumaeus that he stayed among the Egyptians for seven years before heading off to Phoenicia with a trader. A storm hits him, however, just as they are leaving Crete; he survives the storm and washes ashore on Thesprotia where he is rescued by the king's son, given fresh clothes, and taken back to the palace. Finally, he explains that although the Thesprotians agreed to transport him to Doulichion, instead they took his fine clothes, dressed him in rags, tied him up and left him aboard ship, from which he escaped and swam ashore to Ithaca.

This all sounds familiar—Odysseus has fashioned for Eumaeus and himself a story of himself that, while not line for line the same as what he told the Phaeacians, is not far off either—just without witches and cannibals.Footnote ³⁰ His account of his Egyptian expedition, for example, recalls the story Odysseus told the Phaeacians in Book 9 about his encounter with the Ciconians.Footnote ³¹ He says he stayed among the Egyptians for seven years, the same number of years Odysseus stayed with Calypso, and the storm that hits him just as they are leaving Crete is described with much the same language that Odysseus used to describe the tempest that struck him and his men after their disastrous experience with the cattle of the sun.Footnote ³² It's a story of travel and adventure, of war-mongering and trading, a tale of rapid and repeated changes of status and circumstances. Odysseus has improvised a post-Iliadic identity for himself, drawing upon previous roles and previous stories and adapting them to this context.Footnote ³³ And yet, Eumaeus won't ‘go along’—he complains that the stranger's story is out of order, a lie (14.361-65). In other words, Odysseus has not yet succeeded in constructing an authentic identity, and so, a bit later, Odysseus tries again.

After dinner, Odysseus decides he will tell another story, he wants to ‘try out’ (πειρήτιζειν, 14.459) Eumaeus—both to get a cloak and to improvise a more successful, more authentic, version of who he has become.Footnote ³⁴ This second story is set in Troy. The disguised beggar recalls a time when he was on a campaign with Odysseus and Menelaus. Having forgotten to bring a warm cloak on a cold night, he complains to Odysseus that he's freezing, and Odysseus tricks an eager Thoas into running off into the night leaving his cloak behind, which our speaker then puts on. Eumaeus likes this story; he calls it a ‘blameless fable’, and in return, he promises that when the ‘real’ Odysseus returns, he will make sure that the stranger gets his cloak.

Odysseus improvises this story both to get a cloak from Eumaeus and to begin to make sense of who he has become so many years after the war. In fact, its obsession with clothing—both within the narrative and as part of the negotiation with Eumaeus—underscores the extent to which, like clothing, the stories themselves help make the man. Through his improvised encounter with Eumaeus, Odysseus is trying out a new identity for himself, one that is the verbal equivalent of the aged appearance and worn out rags that he now wears. It is stitched together from previous experiences and previous tales precisely to fit this new occasion. Taken together, then, the two stories that Odysseus tells Eumaeus enable him to reconcile his Iliadic past on the battlefields of Troy with his more recent experiences of travel and adventure on the high seas. Both experiences combine to form the man he has become at that moment, returned to Ithaca after twenty years of battle and travels.

‘Does anyone really know who his father is?’

Next, Odysseus encounters his son, Telemachus, and their reunion underscores new aspects of Odysseus' evolving sense of identity as well as marking an important step toward a successful return home. He finds his son now grown and needs to learn to inhabit the role of father for the first time. After all, Odysseus left for Troy when Telemachus was just an infant, and Telemachus has grown up with tales, surrogates, and other people's memories of his father rather than the real thing. In the opening scenes of the poem, Telemachus responds to Mentes' observations that he looks just like his father with the plaintive claim that while my mother says so, ‘Nobody really knows his own father’ (1.216). For Telemachus, the question is not whether Odysseus is his father but who is this man they call my father? As we see from the simile that precedes their father-son reunion in Book 16, Eumaeus, the swineherd, has served as a kind of substitute father in Odysseus' absence. When Telemachus enters the swineherd's hut, Eumaeus greets him:

The simile, appearing as it does just before the real father-son reunion and with Odysseus standing nearby, emphasizes the extent to which Odysseus will have to try out or improvise the role of father. He has not been immediately recognized as such by his son. Instead, Telemachus addresses him as a stranger and learns from Eumaeus that he is a man from Crete, much traveled, down on his luck and now arrived as a suppliant to Ithaca. Once Eumaeus goes off to tell Penelope of Telemachus' safe return, Odysseus, with the help of Athena, tries to inhabit the role of father.Footnote ³⁵ First, Athena gives him the appearance of a much younger man:

This first attempt at playing the role of young handsome father is not entirely successful, though, and Telemachus fails to recognize him as his father, but assumes instead that he is a god. Odysseus has to explain as, crying, he bends down to kiss his son:

Telemachus still remains unconvinced, explaining that no mortal could have changed appearances so radically, so quickly. In other words, Odysseus' initial attempt at playing the role of father misses the mark—as if Odysseus has tried out a fantasy of the kind of father he might have been to Telemachus had he been home the past twenty years, and it is not a perfect fit.Footnote ³⁶ Instead, Odysseus has to assert his status as father once again:

Here Odysseus confronts the gap between whatever kind of father Telemachus had imagined and the one that he himself is trying to become: ‘No other Odysseus (οὐ…ἄλλος…’Οδυσσεύς) will return here’, he says, acknowledging the existence of other versions of himself as father that Telemachus may have preferred, others that he may have occupied. ‘I am as you see me’, he says, and then attempts to overcome Telemachus' hesitations by paraphrasing the opening lines of his own poem—‘after hardships and much suffering I have come, in the twentieth year, back to my own country’. In the end, he prevails—perhaps because though he may not be what Telemachus expected him to look like, he is the man he's heard about.Footnote ³⁷

Being Telemachus' father is a new role for Odysseus, and the hesitation with which he and Telemachus initially accept their respective identities as father and son suggests this is a work in progress, one that each is trying out and improvising. At the end of the book, then, Athena returns Odysseus' physical appearance back to that of the old beggar (16.455-59), a sign that he and Telemachus can now work together to ‘get along’ as father and son as they really are now rather than as they may have imagined each other to be.

In addition to learning to inhabit the role of father to Telemachus, Odysseus' return to Ithaca entails a reconfiguration of his role as son as well. The aged and widowed Laertes, we remember, has withdrawn from the palace and taken up residence in the country. In the final book of the poem, Odysseus goes to see him, dismissing his servants so that he can confront his father on his own:

The language here, Odysseus' now familiar use of the verb πειρήσομαι, locates Odysseus' actions firmly within the realm of an improvisatory encounter. Odysseus is not giving his father a loyalty test, as many have worried, but rather endeavors to ‘check him out’, to try out a new role, that of fully grown son, one who has seen the world and suffered a great deal, to see if his father will acknowledge this changed man as his son. At the same time he is checking Laertes out to see what kind of man his father has become in the past twenty years—to learn how these inevitable changes to his father will inform his role as son as well.

After all, Odysseus finds his father not at all as he was when he left, but dressed in a squalid tunic, oppressed by old age, working with his hands in his well-tended orchard. He is not sure whether he should reveal his identity directly or ‘question him first and check him out in every respect’ (ἦ πρῶτ’ ἐξερέοιτο ἕϰαστά τε πειρήσαιτο, 24.238). In the end, Odysseus decides on the latter, choosing to ‘check him out with provocative words’ (ϰερτομίοις ἐπέεσσιν πειρηθῆναι, 24.240).Footnote ³⁸

Once again, Odysseus improvises an encounter through which he and Laertes renegotiate their relationship as father and son. Playing the role of a stranger, Odysseus comments on the gap between Laertes' current appearance and actions and those one would expect from a man of his stature:

Odysseus' speech acknowledges the pathetic state in which he finds his father, challenging him to defend his decision to abdicate responsibilities as king, to explain the man he has become.Footnote ³⁹ ‘Who are you?’ he asks, ‘is this really Ithaca?’ In character as a visiting stranger, then, he says that once upon a time, in his own land, he lavishly entertained a man who said his father was Laertes, implying that the world of generous hospitality, of households that exchange silver bowls and talents of gold, is the world he expected to find Laertes inhabiting rather than a squalid hut in the country. In reply, Laertes attempts to justify the current state of affairs, referring briefly to the reckless and violent men now in control of Ithaca and explaining that he has given up all hope of his son ever returning.

Next Odysseus qua stranger explains briefly that he was hoping to find Odysseus and enjoy some hospitality in return, but Laertes' visceral demonstration of grief in response shocks him into revealing himself immediately to his father:

Whatever reservations or resentments that Odysseus had harbored over the legitimacy of his father's decision to abdicate his responsibilities at the palace and his status as king are overridden by Laertes' authentic performance of father grieving for his son, and Odysseus claims his identity as Odysseus (ϰεῖνος μέν τοι ὅδ᾽ αὐτὸς ἐγώ) and embraces Laertes as his father once again. It is Laertes, then, who wants further evidence both that this man is Odysseus and that he is still his son:

Only after Odysseus shows him the scar he got from the boar hunt and recounts the time long ago when father and son walked through their family orchard and took stock of its fruit (24.336-44) does Laertes recognize that this stranger is his son, Odysseus—a man who has traveled far but remains connected to and rooted in, like the family orchard, the Ithacan land itself.Footnote ⁴⁰

Read in this light, as an extended improvised encounter in which both father and son come to recognize each other and renegotiate their relationship as aged father and full grown son in spite of the changes brought by time and circumstances, the final scene between Odysseus and Laertes emerges as fundamental to the success of Odysseus' return rather than an unnecessary moment of parental abuse. Taken together, the scenes with Telemachus and Laertes thus reveal an Odysseus engaged in the process of reinventing his own identity as both father and son through improvisatory encounters with family members who have themselves changed during his absence as much as he did himself.

Odysseus and Penelope: ‘I know what you used to be like…’

The ultimate encounter, the one to which the whole poem has been heading, is of course Odysseus' reunion with his wife, Penelope, who, it turns out, is pretty good at improvisation herself. In the years since Odysseus left, she has drawn upon her own extensive metis to adopt a range of roles or identities as part of a protracted strategy to adapt to her circumstances in Odysseus' absence and to negotiate a working relationship with the suitors—as the sometimes grieving, sometimes flirtatious widow, the devoted daughter-in-law, the protective mother. As with Odysseus, elements of deception feature as necessary parts of her improvisatory arsenal; she is able ‘to say one thing but mean another’, the best example of which is, of course, her weaving trick.Footnote ⁴¹ When they meet each other in Books 19 and 23, Odysseus and Penelope both employ their keen improvisatory skills to revise their roles as husband and wife and to renegotiate their marriage on new terms.

When they first meet each other in Book 19, Odysseus and Penelope begin a slow process of checking each other out.Footnote ⁴² They start in familiar roles, those they have been inhabiting for years—Odysseus is the visiting traveler; Penelope is the woman at home, fending off suitors and waiting for her husband to return—and then begin to improvise new identities as husband and wife once more from there. Penelope, intent upon demonstrating her metis while her husband was away, creates an image of herself as the clever and faithful wife with the story of her weaving trick, and Odysseus invokes his now familiar Cretan persona, a man of travel and adventure.Footnote ⁴³ As such he tells Penelope that he met Odysseus in his travels. When Penelope presses him for details of his encounter with her husband, Odysseus accurately describes exactly what he was wearing when they last saw each other.Footnote ⁴⁴ The disguised Odysseus then tells Penelope that the real Odysseus will be home soon, but she denies it, observing that ‘there is no one here such as Odysseus was, if he ever existed…’ (19.315). Their conversation has thus shifted away from the identity of the stranger to questions about when Odysseus will return (if ever) and what he will be like if he does. Penelope has begun to adapt to the possibility that if and when Odysseus returns, he would look like the wretched beggar before her, and she begins to ask herself whether he might be able to act like Odysseus even if he doesn't look the same.Footnote ⁴⁵

The actions of the following books—Odysseus' successful stringing of the bow and subsequent slaughter of the suitors—securely establish the aged, bedraggled beggar as Odysseus in the eyes of nearly all.Footnote ⁴⁶ And yet Penelope still hesitates to welcome him back as her husband. In Book 23, even though both Eurycleia and Telemachus assure her that Odysseus has indeed returned and killed the suitors, Penelope remains cautious about confirming his identity as her husband; she reassures her impatient son saying:

Odysseus agrees, asking Telemachus to leave them so that Penelope can check him out (πειράζειν, 23.114), attributing to his wife the same improvisatory skills that he has deployed so often and so well. In doing so, Odysseus signals that he is willing to go along with Penelope to improvise their relationship as husband and wife anew. His first move is to change his physical appearance to try out the proper demeanor of a heroic husband.Footnote ⁴⁷ Odysseus goes to have a bath, and once again with the help of Athena takes on a new appearance:

When he reappears, Penelope, like Telemachus in Book 16, struggles to reconcile the tall, handsome, well-dressed image of a husband that Odysseus has improvised, with that of the older, bedraggled beggar he had been earlier. The scene once again emphasizes the gaps between now and then, between reality and memory. As he did with Telemachus, Odysseus rebukes his wife for failing to embrace his return:

Odysseus calls Penelope by a term (δαιμονίη) that, as others have noted, is often used by Homer to address someone who is acting out of character.Footnote ⁴⁸ By resisting or failing to recognize her husband in this new and improved condition, Penelope doesn't react to Odysseus as he anticipated she would. Just as in his encounter with Telemachus, when a frustrated Odysseus cries out ‘no other Odysseus will come home’, here he chastises Penelope with a similar formulation (οὐ μέν ϰ’ ἄλλη γ’ ὧδε γυνὴ), acknowledging the plurality of positions that she can occupy as his wife and his frustration that they are not on the same page.Footnote ⁴⁹

Penelope replies, using the same adjective (δαιμοίνι’, 23.174) to express her struggle to recognize her husband. She explains that while she does not mean to be hard hearted, she remains unsure, and her difficulty in reconciling the Odysseus who stands before her with the one who left twenty years ago, is reflected in the following remark, lines that have proved difficult to translate and retain the ambiguity inherent in the Greek:

Some have translated the lines to imply a gap between Penelope's memory of Odysseus and what he looks like now, and yet others have translated them in such a way as to suggest that Penelope is now confronted with the very same man he was twenty years ago.Footnote ⁵⁰ Either way, what Peradotto calls ‘the linguistic strain’ of the passage emphasizes the gap between who Odysseus once was and the man he has become, and Penelope struggles to reconcile her memory of the Odysseus who went to Troy (perhaps looking just like the man now standing before her) with the older, travel-weary man who slaughtered the suitors.Footnote ⁵¹ She needs a different kind of proof, something beyond physical appearance; she needs to ‘try out’ this man who has returned to see if he can be her husband once again (πειρώμενη, 23.181).Footnote ⁵² And so Penelope orders Eurycleia to move the bed Odysseus built outside the bedchamber so that he can sleep there. Odysseus' outraged response, the famous story of how he himself made their marriage bed, how he crafted it by hand from a living olive tree, rooting their marriage similarly in the Ithacan soil, thus fashions himself, equally securely, as Penelope's husband, and the two are finally reunited not just as Odysseus and Penelope but as husband and wife once more and on new terms.Footnote ⁵³

The story of the marriage bed's construction recalls the scene in Book 5 in which Odysseus similarly improvised a raft by hand suggesting that here, at the poem's end, that raft, once symbol of Odysseus' identity as a man of travel and adventure, has been refashioned and come to rest as their bed, the enduring symbol of Odysseus' marriage to Penelope and his identity as her husband.Footnote ⁵⁴ In much the same way, I would argue, the role that Odysseus initially inhabited when he met Penelope in Book 19, that of the anonymous itinerant Cretan beggar, fond of travel and adventure, has been accommodated within that of Odysseus, Penelope's husband, maker of and partner in her marriage bed, and Penelope's enthusiastic embrace and acceptance of Odysseus as her husband on these terms suggests that he has found a way to reconcile the two authentically.Footnote ⁵⁵

As with his encounters with Eumaeus, Telemachus, and Laertes, so too with Penelope, then, Odysseus succeeds in reinventing himself through an extended series of conversations and encounters with his wife as the person she has become in his absence. Indeed, the time and effort it takes for Odysseus to persuade Penelope of his identity as her husband is a sign of how much he has changed—how much they both have changed in the past twenty years that he has been at war and sea, facing unimaginable dangers and she confronting equally threatening challenges at home. Each, the poem suggests, has had to become someone new, and their renewed relationship as husband and wife had to be slowly and carefully reworked to accommodate the people they had become.