Helpless Spectators in the <i>Odyssey</i> and the Cinematic Image of Time

The Odyssey presents a striking series of situations in which the protagonist is reduced to the status of a helpless spectator, watching the action unfold but unable to act. These situations include a number of episodes in the apologoi, as well as Odysseus constrained by his disguise on Ithaca. I argue that the significance of this series can be brought out through comparison with Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, which turns precisely on the point at which protagonists in film change from actors who can affect their situations to viewers who can only watch. By examining the construction of the “action-image” from its ontological foundations in Bergson’s concepts of image and movement, we see how Homeric poetics presents alternatives to subject-centered and action-oriented narrative. Further, through Deleuze’s analyses of how time becomes visible when cinematic action is inhibited, we find parallel processes underlying the Odyssey’s helpless spectators. Finally, the connection between helplessness, spectatorship, and time offers—with help from Adorno’s notion of “epic naïveté”—an explanation of the power of the formulaic phrase “for a little, not for very long” (μίνυνθά περ, οὔ τι μάλα δήν, Od. 22.473), which ends the episode in which Odysseus’s maidservants are hanged.