Odysseus in America

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls.

The American myth that alternately idealizes the explorer and the homeseeker too often conceals the truth of our dilemma and the ambiguity of our condition. The division within the American soul is often portrayed as a division of wholly different human types, a divide externalized as distinct characters, natures, and dispositions.

On the one hand, there are the explorers, the pioneers, the wayfarers: Daniel Boone, Huck Finn, Pa Ingalls of The Little House on the Prairie, James Gatz of The Great Gatsby, James T. Kirk of Star Trek, Elon Musk in his desire to make humanity “multi-planetary,” and dozens of other iconic American figures we might add to a long list.

On the other hand there are the less overtly adventurous but no less heroic homeseekers: George Washington, who in spite of a storied military and political career longed always to return to Mount Vernon; Ma Ingalls, who immediately begins to make a home each time Pa uproots the family yet again; the titular clan of The Waltons, who have lived for generations on a mountain named for their forbears; and the prominent author Wendell Berry, who returned to his rural home in Kentucky after several years living and teaching in New York and made a fully realized fictional world there.

It is truer to life, as the Odyssey shows, to understand these seemingly unrelated opposites as inextricably intertwined, as competing goods that are sometimes and, in some places, also competing vices.

The American imagination tends to gravitate to individuals who embody these two seemingly opposite yearnings. By externalizing these longings in the form of human “types,” though, the American social imaginary obscures the extent to which these longings are deeply embodied in every American (and in all probability, every human) soul.

Alexis de Tocqueville may share some responsibility for this tendency. Early in Democracy in America, Tocqueville depicted two radically different types of settlers. The first were the Virginians, whom he describes as “gold-seekers.” These were men who were ejected from polite society in the Old World. They were “without wealth or standards” and their “restless, turbulent temper endangered the infant colony and made its progress vacillating.” Tocqueville tells us that these were people “more apt to pillage and destroy than to consolidate the settlement.” By contrast, Tocqueville lauded the pilgrim settlers of New England, who immediately “made it their first care to organize themselves as a society.” They arrived not as “unattached adventurers” on the make, but “with their wives and children.” They were bound together as an intentional community. The New Englanders were mutually committed to the goal of making homes and collectively serving as a “city upon a hill,” in the famous words of John Winthrop. Together with their Virginian counterparts, according to Tocqueville, these were the “two great branches of the American family who have grown up together without completely mingling.”

This dichotomous understanding of American types has become a dominant mode of our self-understanding. A more recent variant was articulated by Wendell Berry in his Jefferson Lecture, delivered at the Kennedy Center in 2012. Berry began his lecture by alluding to a concept he learned from another major American novelist, Wallace Stegner.

[I have] depended on a pair of terms used by my teacher, Wallace Stegner. He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” “Boomer” names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our country. “Sticker” names a kind of person and also a desire that is, so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.
The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power. . . . Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.

Berry named James B. Duke—owner of the American Tobacco Company and founder of Duke University—as the personification of the first type, an example of those who “pillage in absentia.” He contrasted Duke with his own grandfather, who saw himself as a steward and “caretaker” of his place, his land, and his family. “I could see finally that between these two kinds there was a failure of imagination that was ruinous, that belongs indelibly to our history, and that has continued, growing worse, into our own time.”

In many of his books and essays, Berry has turned to the Odyssey to help explain these human types. He has tended to emphasize the theme of Odysseus as homeseeker over Odysseus as consummate wanderer. For Berry, the Odyssey portrays “the connections between marriage, household, and the earth.” In his first nonfiction book, The Unsettling of America, Berry devoted several pages to exploring many of the themes, episodes, and characters I have discussed in these pages. In characteristically beautiful, clear, and poetic language, Berry depicts the action of the Odyssey as moving ever to a more local and defined point—from the open, tempestuous seas to the literally rooted, domestic marriage bed of Odysseus and Penelope. In Berry’s telling, Odysseus’s homecoming represents not merely his commitment to wife, family, and home, but to the self-limiting condition of being human. The marriage of Odysseus and Penelope, writes Berry, “was part of a complex practical circumstance involving, in addition to husband and wife, their family of both descendants and forbears, their household, their community, and the sources of all these lives in memory and tradition, in the countryside, and in the earth. These things, wedded together in marriage, [Odysseus] thought of as his home, and it held his love and faith so strongly that sleeping with a goddess could not divert or console him in exile.” According to Berry’s reading of the Odyssey, Odysseus is decidedly a “sticker,” one whose yearning for homecoming, for family, and for his land overawes any alternative longing for immortality, divine knowledge, and the open seas. “In Odysseus’s return,” he writes, “we see a complete marriage and a complete fidelity.”

I think Berry’s stark division between “boomers” and “stickers” tilts his understanding of the Odyssey toward an overly straightforward conclusion, one in which Odysseus navigates his way home without misgivings, temptations, or regret—one in which he is uncomplicatedly akin to Tocqueville’s New Englanders or Berry’s grandfather. Such a reading is clarifying yet reductive. By parceling out among different people and types those longings which persist within each individual soul, we are prone to resolving the tensions of the human condition too easily. We also reduce the story of our own nation and the wider Western tradition to a conflict between two archetypes, rather than understanding their deeper interconnection, intermingling, and inextricability.

This is a temptation to which W. P. Kinsella acquiesces in his novel Shoeless Joe. The Ray Kinsella of the film is a composite of two distinct characters in the novel, Ray and Richard Kinsella, identical but estranged twin brothers. Ray is a Wendell Berry–esque sticker. He grew up elsewhere (Montana, in the novel) and departed his birthplace for college in Iowa. There he fell in love with his eventual wife Annie, and through her he also fell in love with Iowa, which he has never left. Throughout the novel, he eloquently proclaims his love for his state, farm, home, wife, and family. “I loved Iowa as much as a man could love a piece of the earth,” he declares. Speaking to his brother-in-law Mark—the embodiment of Berry’s boomer, a man who cares about the land only to the extent that it can be financialized and exploited—Ray says (in lines that were given to Doc Graham in the film version), “You have to be touched by the land. . . . Once you’ve been touched by the land, the wind never blows so cold again, because your love files the edges off it. And when the land suffers from flood or drought or endless winter, you feel for it more than for yourself, and you do what you can to ease its pain.”

Richard appears on Ray’s doorstep midway through the novel. As if looking through a mirror, he is at once Ray’s replica and opposite. Ray notes that their separation has lasted for twenty years—the same span of time, coincidentally, that Odysseus spent absent from Ithaca. Gazing at his brother, Ray wonders what it would have been like had he, like his brother, “swished like a tumbleweed across the face of America for twenty years, traveling like a long-distance mover with no home base, going from New Orleans to Amarillo, Kansas City to Chicago, Cleveland to Baltimore, and back again, over and over?” What if his wife and daughter had been Richard’s, and he a “rootless, a pulled weed?” At the same moment, Richard marvels at the life of his rooted brother. He notes that he himself has been traveling with a carnival (might we say, a collection of demigods and beasts?) for ten years. “I look around here and I see that it’s not so bad to be leadfooted. I’ve always thought it would be like having one foot nailed to the earth and turning in tight circles ever after, but now I’m not so sure. You must be happy. With a wife and child like that, you must be happy.” Author Kinsella seems to have divided the two sides of Odysseus into two separate persons.

In the film Field of Dreams, the two characters are unsatisfyingly combined. Ray is an aging hippie who left home after a bitter argument with his father. He went away to school at a place distant from his native New York City: the University of California–Berkeley, where he took part in the student protests of the late 1960s. There he met the flower-power firebrand Annie (now wholly transformed from the country girl of the novel). These two rebels inexplicably have settled in Iowa, where they have bought a farm near Annie’s folk—a deeply conservative family—and they seem neither to love nor to despise it. Kevin Costner’s charm distracts us from the incoherence of his character. Escape from his spell, and we might rightly wonder how this rebel against traditionalism, conformity, conservatism, evangelical Christianity, and retrograde views has ended up living on a farm in the American heartland. Why do two young people who have fled their oppressive homes to attend the most radical university in the most liberal state in America, and who continue to believe in the spirit of the 1960s, end up living in the most traditional setting in one of the most conservative parts of the nation? What the author W. P. Kinsella divided in his book is not put back together again in a coherent way by the makers of Field of Dreams.

In short, some of our best guides into the mysteries of the American soul—Alexis de Tocqueville, Wendell Berry, W. P. Kinsella—have tended, despite the depth of their understanding, to avoid squarely facing the inextricable complexity of the American soul. They have instead externalized our internal struggle. By their telling, the contrary longings found in Dorothy, Huck Finn, Moonlight Graham, and George Bailey are more typically found in opposing people. We are then invited to pick sides. Depending on who is asking, one represents the side of the angels, the other the demons. You can be a pillager or one who cares for places and their people. Or you can be unambitious and lazy, in contrast to the bold and adventurous. In each case, the choice of one excludes the life of the other.

This purported choice makes America easy. It eases our pain to believe that irresolvable tensions can be simplified by explaining them as two opposing sides. We are divided between liberals and conservatives, Northerners and Southerners, Coastals and Flyovers, Boomers and Stickers, those who treasure the Western tradition and those who denounce it, and so on. These binaries reduce and simplify the complexity of America—and the whole of the Western tradition itself. It is truer to life, as the Odyssey shows, to understand these seemingly unrelated opposites as inextricably intertwined, as competing goods that are sometimes and, in some places, also competing vices. One characteristic trait of the American soul is the temptation to evade the complexity of our condition, to escape our own paradoxes. But no such escape is possible, nor, ultimately, is it desirable.

As we look for guides who can help us recognize that our internal divisions are inseparable and even mutually reliant and reinforcing, we stand to gain deeper self-understanding by turning to a text at once foreign and yet our own, ancient yet contemporary, strange but familiar. By rediscovering a distinctively American Odyssey, we stand to gain renewed insight through that wayfarer whose journey outward and homeward seemed to many to symbolize the journey of those European explorers who first set foot on these shores.