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I submit that this passage, in which nothing is said but all the more is thought, would not be out of place in any modern novel; it invites comparison with the following quotation from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: |
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'And how are you?' said Peter Walsh, positively trembling; taking both her hands; kissing both her hands. She's grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan't tell her anything about it, he thought, for she's grown older. She's looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands . . . Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same. 'How heavenly it is to see you again!' she exclaimed. |
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Let us take a closer look at the Homeric passage. It opens with an internal deliberation by Penelope, as she descends from her room, in the form of embedded focalization: should she remain at a distance and question 'her husband', or should she go up to him and kiss him? The words  are intriguing: is this Penelope's focalization, or is the narrator intruding upon her focalization and substituting his and the reader's knowledge that the man is Odysseus?34 I would prefer to connect the words with Penelope, without, however, taking this to mean that she recognizes Odysseus at this very moment. The two alternative actions which she considers (questioning him or kissing him) both require her to at least accept the possibility that the stranger is her husband. The second alternative (kissing) shows her as passionate and emotional as she was in her conversation with Eurycleia (cf. especially 323). When she enters the hall, however, she adopts neither alternative but, without saying or doing anything, seats herself opposite Odysseus (the name derives of course from the narrator). The focus now switches to Odysseus and we get to know his unspoken thoughts: he waits for his wife to speak first. Odysseus' feelings at this point are wavering too: the verb  indicates that he expects Penelope to speak; the dependent  clause, however, suggests that he is not sure whether she will indeed do so.35 And Penelope, to whom we now move back again, does not speak. For the benefit of the reader the narrator explains why: stupefaction has taken hold of her; one minute she looks the stranger in the face (and is inclined to believe that he might be Odysseus), and the next she looks at his poor clothing and cannot believe that this is her husband. |
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This wordless exchange between man and wife, fascinating and complex in itself, becomes even more so by the interpretations which the characters |
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34 For such intrusions, see De Jong (1987) 1089. Stanford (1958) chooses the second interpretation, Ameis-Hentze and Russo and Fernandez-Galiano and Heubeck (1992) the first. |
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35 For the analysis of this type of see Wakker (1986) 164. |
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