In English I Honors, we’ve been accompanying Odysseus as he struggles to make it back to Ithaca and his beloved Penelope. We reach Tiresias’s prophecy from the underworld and the confusion starts.

‘Great captain,
a fair wind and the honey lights of home
are all you seek. But anguish lies ahead;
the god who thunders on the land prepares it,
not to be shaken from your track, implacable,
in rancor for the son whose eye you blinded.
One narrow strait may take you through his blows:
denial of yourself, restraint of shipmates.
When you make landfall on Thrinákia first
and quit the violet sea, dark on the land
you’ll find the grazing herds of Hêlios
by whom all things are seen, all speech is known.
Avoid those kine, hold fast to your intent,
and hard seafaring brings you all to Ithaka.
But if you raid the beeves, I see destruction
for ship and crew. Though you survive alone,
bereft of all companions, lost for years,
under strange sail shall you come home, to find
your own house filled with trouble: insolent men
eating your livestock as they court your lady.
Aye, you shall make those men atone in blood!
But after you have dealt out death–in open
combat or by stealth–to all the suitors,
go overland on foot, and take an oar,
until one day you come where men have lived
with meat unsalted, never known the sea,
nor seen seagoing ships, with crimson bows
and oars that fledge light hulls for dipping flight.
The spot will soon be plain to you, and I
can tell you how: some passerby will say,
“What winnowing fan is that upon your shoulder?”
Halt, and implant your smooth oar in the turf
and make fair sacrifice to Lord Poseidon:
a ram, a bull, a great buck boar; turn back,
and carry out pure hekatombs at home
to all wide heaven’s lords, the undying gods,
to each in order. Then a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you.
And all this shall be just as I foretell.’

They see the line about being “lost for years,” and with with some guidance, realize that this is Calypso and that the blind prophet says it using future tense (“under strange sail shall you come home”).

“Wait,” they say. “That’s what the Odyssey begins with? How is it in future tense?” (We begin our exploration of the Odyssey on Calypso’s island in book five, skipping all of Telemachus’s search in books one through four.) With some more guidance they realize it’s a story within a story. A prophecy in something like a flashback. Which itself is all set within the larger story: a story within a story within a story.

Notes from the board

“And people liked to praise about Pulp Fiction‘s non-linear storyline,” I say with a smile, but no one gets it.