RADOJCIC Justine 2022-2013

Master 2 ECMA

Textes et paratextes dans le récit de soi contemporain

HLAC04B – S. Vallas
 According to the Oxford Learners Dictionaries online, education is “a process of
teaching, training and learning, especially in schools, colleges or universities, to improve
knowledge and develop skills” (OLD, 2022). That definition is an excellent one apart from the
fact that it leaves out the familial education that we receive from our parents from birth to
adulthood. Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor at Bard University and a writer, devoted one of his
books, An Odyssey, a Father, a Son and an Epic to his father, published in 2017, a few years
after his dad had passed away. As a teacher of the Classics, specialized in Homer’s Odyssey,
the theme of education is important within the book. In the following essay, I will attempt to
answer to the question of how does the notion of getting educated takes place in Mendelsohn’s
memoir? My plan will be structured and divided into two parts. The first one will explore how
education can mend bridges between a father and a son through the study of the Classics, on
one hand. And the second hand, how education will allow two relatives to reconcile with their
pasts. The second part of the analysis will demonstrate that learning can come from direct
experiences: the storytelling, the injunctions and the general reflections and the impacts each
had on the author, resulting into Mendelsohn’s memoir.

***

The world around is everything that is external. The world within us is everything
internal, like our mind and our emotions. Education is the tool that breaks down all barriers. In
An Odyssey, a Father, a Son, an Epic, Daniel Mendelsohn teaches a valuable lesson: that
education can help to mend bridges. Indeed, through his narrative, we understand that education
can both divide and unite a father and a son. The classical studies bring healing through division.
First of all, it divides as consequences of the tough education Daniel have received as a child
by his father. Jay Mendelsohn was a great believer in the power of education: “There’s nothing
you can’t do if you have the right book.” (Mendelsohn, p. 24, 2017). However, Daniel’s father
came from a poor social background and to him, everything had to be difficult or painful to
achieve– especially education– to make it worth it. As a young boy, Daniel much suffered from
it, as he tried to show his dad his ‘worthiness’: “For some perverse reason, this made me want
his approval all the more.” (Mendelsohn, p. 122, 2017). Daniel felt the pressure of his dad and
the weight of his dad’s few failures on his shoulders. As explained in Homer’s Odyssey within
the book: “Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 89, 2017). Furthermore, his dad was himself a mathematician and then later a
professor. Jay left no room for mistakes and Daniel often was afraid of going to his dad, who
could not stand failure, to help him with his math homework. The high standards in terms of
education that Jay Mendelsohn had, his certainty about everything (‘x is x’) drove Daniel
Mendelsohn to the become a teacher of the Classics much later. Within the text, we can observe
how resentful Daniel was toward his father in the beginning when he explains that his father
never finished Latin in high school and that he took pleasure in rubbing in his dad’s face that
he was able to complete his classical studies: “Virgil’s Latin, as I would sometimes take
pleasure in pointing out to my father, was denser, more complicated, and more difficult than
was Ovid’s.” (Mendelsohn, p. 26, 2017). So, at first, education is what divides Daniel
Mendelsohn and his father. But as we read the text, we understand that getting educated is also
what will reunite a father and a son. As Daniel explains us, it is also this hardness in the learning
of the Classics itself that drove him to major in it: “My resentment of my father’s hardness, of
his insistence that difficulty was a hallmark of quality […] strikes me as ironic now, since I
suspect it was those qualities that attracted me to the study of the Classics in the first place.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 35, 2017). Because studying the Classics proved itself to be a difficult
challenge, something that Jay could approve of, it is what broke the silence between Daniel
Mendelsohn and his dad. It is what mended the bridges between a father and a son.

Getting educated is also one way to reconcile with someone’s past. Just like Telemachus
is looking for an absent father in the beginning of the Odyssey, Daniel Mendelsohn embarks on
a journey to search for information on his own father throughout the book. Getting educated is,
therefore, not only a matter of getting an education at school but more about questioning our
parents’ identity and our own: “They tell the story of how an absent father’s child starts to learn
about his parents, and about the world. It is the story of a son’s education.” (Mendelsohn, p. 57,
2017). One way to understand our parents and what led them to be the way they are is to
reconcile with our past through the knowledge that we have of them, of their past. When Daniel
Mendelsohn’s father start to go to his son’s seminar on the Odyssey, Daniel begins to discover
another side of his dad, which will continue during their cruise together. It led him to rethink
his dad under a new light: “You can spend your whole life believing in something, and then
you get to a point when you realize you were wrong about the whole thing.” (Mendelsohn, p.
174, 2017). However, Daniel Mendelsohn also brings up a very essential question about what
to do with all these information that we gather: “Where does a story begin? How to put an end
to the past and turn it into the present?” (Mendelsohn, p. 55, 2017). It is within Homer’s poem
that the reader can find the answer to those questions, when Daniel discusses the moment in
which Odysseus is travelling to the Underworld with his class: “The strategic positioning of
this episode suggests an important moral: in order to move into the future, we must first
reconcile ourselves with our pasts.” (Mendelsohn, p. 168, 2017).
Furthermore, the book initiates the reader to the notion of ring composition, a literary
strategy that unfolds multiple stories withing the main narrative in order, for the reader, to
understand better what led to certain events. As Mendelsohn suggests, the point of such strategy
is to embrace both the past and the present and turn them into a powerful weapon to confront
the future. For example, as we read the book, the past of Jay Mendelsohn unfolds. In the
beginning, Daniel Mendelsohn explains that apart from his dad’s final dissertation, he never
failed anything. The more we read the text, the more we discover that, on the contrary, Jay is
also made of failures which still haunts him. First, we notice it when the author is telling us
about his dad not being able to finish Latin and failing at reading Priam and Neoptolemus when
Daniel was in his first year of graduate school: “He was still angry with himself for the way, in
which, having come this far himself in his study of the ancient language, he’d failed to travel
the final leg of his classical journey.” (Mendelsohn, p. 50, 2017). Nonetheless, it is through
education that Jay Mendelsohn will be able to reconcile with his past and failure, as he takes
his son’s seminar. At one point during a class, a student asks Daniel why his father decided to
follow the course. The answer to this question is given by Jay himself: “I figures now was my
chance to read [the classics] again before I die.” (Mendelsohn, p. 78, 2017). As a result of his
great age, Jay is also able to give valuable educational lessons to the students in the classroom:
“I can see the part about the importance of being out there and trying things even if you fail.
[…] The worst thing is to go stale.” (Mendelsohn, p. 196, 2017). Towards the end of the novel,
as Daniel Mendelsohn is searching for information to learn things about his dad by asking to
his family and Nino –just like Telemachus with Nestor, Helen and Menelaus– he ends up
understanding that the obsession his dad had for getting educated did not only come from his
poor social background nor the pressure his dad felt to succeed, but it also came from his dad’s
own failures and fear of failing. Consequently, getting educated reconciled Jay with his past but
it also pushed him to drive his son not to give up on his education. Daniel Mendelsohn, likewise,
reconcile both with his past and his dad by getting educated. When we think about it, although
he does not thank his dad in the acknowledgements, the whole book is a tribute to his dad:
“Unlike me, my father didn’t have a father who pushed him to finish, who wanted him to
achieve more than he had, who was willing to have his son beat the Homeric odds and be more
than his father had been.” (Mendelsohn, p. 268, 2017).
 ***

Getting educated usually starts at home with our own parents who shape us the way we
are today, whether we grow up in a home who give us a hard education, like it was the case for
Daniel Mendelson. But education has that magic effect on people: it can divide them or unite
them. For Daniel and Jay Mendelsohn, it was both. However, getting educated touches on a
larger spectrum than school. As explained in the author’s book, it can be the starting point to
discover our parents’ identities, their pasts, in order to reconcile ourselves with our own past
and embrace the future, armed with the knowledge we now have. As Jay Mendelsohn says it, it
is never too late to learn and make amends with ourselves and our own failures. Nonetheless,
although education can mend the bridges between people, it must come from direct experiences
that we live to learn from them.

***

In Greek literature most didactic figures depend on oral directives regardless of

biological bloodlines, with which they can be in conflict with. We can determine three precise
indicators that comes from the learning through direct experiences: Paradeigmata (exemplary
tales, storytelling), hupothēkai (injunctions) and gnōmai (injunctions). In the coming part, I will
explain how each of these markers of pedagogical moments can be found within Daniel
Mendelsohn’s book and how they are related to the notion of getting educated.
Firstly, the exemplary tales are one of the most obvious ways for someone to get
educated. As children, we are used to be read night stories by our parents before going to sleep.
This tradition, in fact, comes from a time before writing was invented when oral stories where
the only way to pass on knowledge to future generations and warn them on the dangers of the
worlds or explain moral standards of one’s community. In other words, the get educated.
Homer’s Odyssey is no exception since it probably was a series of ballads short enough to be
memorized and transmitted orally until an erudite put them in writing. Although most of us
know the story, as we learned it in school, in Mendelsohn’s book, the author goes to length to
explain to the reader the meaning of the poem. Indeed, he discusses with us what is suggested
between the lines of the text such as the notions of marriages, heroes, father-son relationships,
homecomings, death and sickness, humility or even hospitality through stories found in the
Odyssey. Especially in the proem, the author teaches us history of philology, literature and
languages: “For Wolf, many of the theories about education that were circulating at the time
were deplorably sentimental and soft […] which emphasized the practical aims of education,
its role in preparing students for “real life” […]. Could studying the ancient classics possibly
teach students in the present day?” (Mendelsohn, p. 37, 2017). But for every excerpt of the
poem that appear in the book, Mendelsohn also tell us a story: his story. As he unfolds his
family history and as we navigate through the pages, the reader understands that even a tale as
old as the Odyssey is still relevant today when it comes to questioning our lives: “As much as
it is a tale of husbands and wives, then, this story is just as much –perhaps even more– about
fathers and sons.” (Mendelsohn, p. 23, 2017). Through the different stories that we read, the
interrogation the author have o his own family, we come to question ourselves about our
relationship with all the themes exposed in Homer’s poem and Mendelsohn’s book, to
interrogate ourselves about what is the self, what is the difference between who we are and
what others perceives of us.
Moreover, the digression in the main story that we experience both in the Odyssey and
An Odyssey reminds us of the ring composition and its primal function: to get educated on
present situations through past events. Indeed, ring composition, storytelling, resembles the way
life unfolds itself. It is through direct experiences that we learn. One specific moment in
Mendelsohn’s book is a good example. Mendelsohn tells us that, as a student, he was asked
about the meaning of a scene between Helen of Sparta and King Menelaus as they both recall
stories about the Trojan War for Telemachus. No students are capable of answering correctly
except Daniel Mendelsohn: “I was able to answer Jenny’s question correctly that day because
I had grown up in a house of my mother and my father […] had learned how to read the fraught
silences […] as if some terrible storm were always threatening to break.” (Mendelsohn, p. 110,
2017). We must also remember that Mendelsohn is a writer, a storyteller, the “family historian”
(Mendelsohn, p. 233, 2017). As he himself explains it, those tales are reflections on what is
storytelling: “Because the storyteller wants his audience to think about this or that theme […]
he elaborates and embroiders the actual events with touches that would better highlight those
notions. [..] I could see the appeal of a Homer who was interested in raising profound questions
about the uneasy border between fact and fiction.” (Mendelsohn, p. 187, 2017). What do we
learn from them? What is the point of exemplary tales? Is the narrator reliable? After all, in the
author’s note before the story even begins, Mendelsohn says that “a number of details relating
to events and characters have been modified.” (Mendelsohn, 2017). So, getting educated comes
from storytelling: “We all need narrative to make sense of the world.”. (Mendelsohn, p. 290,
2017).
 Another significant exemplary tale about learning from direct experiences that we are
told within the book, is the one about Daniel Mendelsohn and his dad going on an education
cruise to retrace the Odyssey. It is during this cruise that Daniel learns more about his dad, a
side he had never seen before. He gets educated on what a person can be away from home:
“Sometimes, it was as if my father had become a different person on the ship. As we move
further and farther from home […] my father seemed to shed some hard outer surface an soften.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 141, 2017). In addition, as Daniel learns more about his father’s childhood on
the cruise, he discovers his father as a person. Not as a father or a husband but his true self:
“How many sides did my father actually have, I asked myself, and which was the “real” one?
[…] Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them. […]
Maybe Daddy, too, was polytropos. […] Maybe it’s a question of which section of the circle
the loop, you happen to be in a position to see.” (Mendelsohn, p. 149, 2017). All along the
cruise, thought the numerous exclamations “the poem feels more real!” (Mendelsohn, p. 146,
2017) his dad highlights a very interesting point about literature, about how a story can make
us travel through time and space, and how much we can be disappointed when reality doesn’t
match the story, what our minds had made up: “Obviously I’m glad I got to see the places and
be able to make a connection between the real places and what’s in Homer […] [but] it’s a little
bit empty compared to the story.” (Mendelsohn, p. 148, 2017). A little bit later in the book, as
Mendelsohn gives a lecture about Cavafy’s poem on the boat, he goes back on a popular
stereotype: that the destination is not as important as the journey. Such affirmation can be found
all over media like in Miley Cyrus’ song The Climb or in Anthony Bourdain’s book No
Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach: “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t
always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey
changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness,
on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something
good behind.” (Bourdain, p. 287, 2007). The reason why Daniel Mendelsohn is giving the
lecture in the first place is because of a technicality problem, which prevent the cruise to arrive
to its final destination: Ithaca. However, this tale, with its twisted and unexpected turn, fits right
into the theme of getting educated through the direct experiences and exemplary stories.
Last but not least, the notion of the bildungsroman in the paradeigmata emerges
throughout the book. As Mendelsohn explains it, the genre came after the Odyssey, as Homer’s
poem can be considered as a pioneer instance of the genre. The bildungsroman genre is a
formation novel, usually eponymous, “that charts the ethical and moral growth of a young
person.” (Mendelsohn, p. 112, 2017). In the Odyssey, the Telemachy part can be seen as the
maturation of Telemachus from a teenager to a man, according to the culture and rites of the
ancient Greek society. But just like Telemachus looking for his absent father, through the stories
the author shares with us, we can see the bildungsroman genre too. Daniel Mendelsohn too, is
in search of an absent father –although his dad is alive– the one he is not close to for many
reasons. It is his mother who shows him how to shave and then his aunt who tells him how to
properly shave. For most of Daniel Mendelsohn’s childhood and teenage years he felt lost, like
adrift at sea. When he arrives on his college campus, he does not feel confident just like
Telemachus whose insecurities are appeased by Athena, because both lived in the shadows of
their fathers and their father’s past: “The Telemachus of the first few books of the Odyssey can
remind you of a college freshman.” (Mendelsohn, p. 86, 2017); “The preppy boys […] exuded
a confidence I was certain I would never feel.” (Mendelsohn, p. 113, 2017).
However, just like Telemachus, Daniel Mendelsohn comes to be educated in the
searching quest for his father. This feeling we get as we read the pages is most explicitly seen
in the following passage that culminates every story together and mark the final profound
learning that result from all the tales. This passage also underlines the double entendre between
Homer’s poem and Mendelsohn’s own relationship with his father that the author is constantly
making in his book:

“My father had fallen, and it was clear there would be no more educational trips. But
we had our odyssey–had journeyed together, so to speak, through this text over the course of a
semester, a text that to me, […] seemed more and more to be about the present than about the
past. It is a story, after all, about strange and complicated families, […] about a long marriage
and short dalliances, about a husband who travels far and a wife who stays behind, […] about
a son who for a long time is unrecognized by and unrecognizable to his father, until very late,
when they join together for a great adventure; a story, in its final moments, about a man in the
middle of his life, a man who is, we must remember, a son as well as a father, and who at the
end of his story falls down and weeps because he has confronted the spectacle of his father’s
old age, the specter of his inevitable passing.” (Mendelsohn, p. 43, 2017).

Those lines also highlight the question of identity, what is it to be a father, a son, a
husband even that I will address in my last subpart.

As far as the education is concerned, the notion of hypothēkai is one of the most
important. Indeed, the injunctions that we get from our family and at school shape us in the way
we are today. In Mendelsohn’s book, the injunctions are seen specifically in the classroom as
his father is challenging the teacher figure of authority. First, it is mostly embodied with Jay’s
interventions during the seminar, refusing to acknowledge what decades of scholars have
proven on the Odyssey, refusing to understand that his son might now better than him, that x is
not necessarily x: “He dismissed any notion that Telemachus was in fact maturing.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 90, 2017). That shift in paradigm makes Daniel Mendelsohn feel
uncomfortable: “Yep, I said, a little defiantly. I felt like I was eleven years old again, and
Odysseus was a naughty schoolmate whom I’d decided I was going to stand by even if it meant
being punished along with him.” (Mendelsohn, p. 67, 2017). However, the imperative mode
that Jay sometimes uses with his son reminds us that he is, in fact, the first figure of authority
that Daniel have known: “Don’t tell me what to do, he said; another familiar refrain from our
childhood.” (Mendelsohn, p. 119, 2017); “Let me finish, he said, in a tone I recognized from
many years earlier.” (Mendelsohn, p. 134, 2017). As a consequence, Daniel Mendelsohn comes
to the conclusion that he is afraid he has failed to teach his father and that the skeptical
observations his father made in class in front of his students made them doubt of his ability to
teach.
The female figure of authority is also interesting to look at when it comes to Daniel
Mendelsohn’s education and the injunctions. We must remember that both his parents were
teachers and that Daniel mostly identifies to being his mother’s child. Later in his life, as he
becomes a graduate student, he recalls the particular influences of two of his teachers: Froma
Zeitlin and Jenny Strauss Clay. Although they both became good friends of him later, when
Daniel Mendelsohn first meet them, we can feel he associates them to divinities. There is an
aura of mystery, of something divine that revolves around the figure of the teacher and
knowledge: “The first time I entered her office, which was wreathed in so much smoke […]
was, at first, difficult to make out […] the round face with its peering nut-brown eyes emerging
from the shadows and smoke the way that a divinity might appear to a mortal in a myth, the
artisanal jewels to which she liked to refer as her “objects” […] all of it glinting amid the tendrils
of smoke like the decorations of a cult statue.” (Mendelsohn, p. 81, 2017). As for Jenny, she is
the teacher who helped him when Daniel got stuck on his final dissertation, who introduced
him on many subjects, including cooking, apart from the Classics. Daniel Mendelsohn says that
“she would wander, snipping herbs and humming to herself life a sorceress in some old legend.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 84, 2017). Here, we can assume that Mendelsohn is comparing Jenny to Circe,
one of the first enchantress that appears in myths. Let us not forget that witches were also great
female teachers. For generations they passed down they knowledge to their students.
It is Froma who urges the author to go on a cruise with his father: “Froma had been my teacher,
and I was still in the habit of obeying her.” (Mendelsohn, p. 5, 2017); it is Jenny to whom he
seeks advice on the phone when some students made an interesting point during the seminar he
had not thought of. Moreover, Jenny is the only one refers to the author as “Dan” while he is a
student, which Mendelsohn explains, has “only been used by my father” (Mendelsohn, p. 109,
2017). Here, we can see the importance of the female figure of authority in the author’s life as
one of those figures uses a nickname only his father, the traditional paternal figure of authority
exploited. Finally, Jenny is also attached to Athena, who is – let us not obliterate– the goddess
of wisdom and knowledge in Greek mythology and the mentor to both Telemachus and
Odysseus. She is the one who gives instructions to the hero and his son in the poem. The female
figure of authority is therefore well present withing both the Odyssey and Mendelsohn’s book.

The notion of gnōmai or general reflections apply to Mendelsohn’s book in different

ways. First of all, the book reflects upon patrimony and the role of legacy within education
given by a member of your family, here: his father Jay Mendelsohn. Because dad was his first
male model in life, from him he got the sense of hard-working which, as I said before, led him
to choose the Classics in the first place: “When I was fourteen, my high school English teacher
instructed us to memorize a passage from a play. Among the austere boxed of sets of books on
the bookshelves […] was one called The Completed Greek Tragedies.” (Mendelsohn, p. 36,
2017). Furthermore, during one of the seminar’s session, Jay affirms in front of Daniel’s
students that he got the tastes for the ancient language from him. But patrimony is also evoked
when Mendelsohn recalls and reflects upon what his father had brought to him and his siblings
during their childhood: “The confidence we have in our ability to enjoy what is in the world,
country music and oenophilia, species rhododendra and Shelley teacups, Jewish genealogy and
Greek syntax, vintage posters and Jacques Demy, is, I now see, a kind of ironic birthright from
our father, who showed us that it could be thus, as his own father had not done for him.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 221, 2017). His father is also the one who bought him a Merriam-Webster
dictionary as Mendelsohn is about to embark in his journey into college. The problem is that,
for a long time, Mendelsohn refused his father’s legacy, of which he was ashamed because his
dad came from a poor social background, which would be emphasized in his
diction/pronunciation and table manners: “My father’s mispronunciations, which embarrassed
me a great deal at one point in my life, were the inevitable result of him having been the bookish
child of parents who had no education to speak of; I suspect a good many of the proper names
and words he had encountered, by the time I was old enough to disdain his errors, were words
he’d never heard uttered aloud.” (Mendelsohn, p. 25, 2017). Indeed, Jay was a “Bronx child”
who lived in poverty and had to join the army in exchange for the possibility to go to college
and get an education. So, the author found alternative father figures, mostly in well-educated
men such as his teachers who got him educated: “A line of mentors to whom I felt an urgent
need to attach myself: men who, it seemed to me, were fare more appropriate candidates to
father me.” (Mendelsohn, p. 214, 2017). A relevant point is made by a student during the
seminar about Telemachus preferring Mentor or any other father figure out of fear of what his
father is really like. We cannot not notice the resemblance, once again, between Odysseus and
his son and Jay and his son.

Although patrimony is very important in the book, the inheritance that both him and his
dad got from their respective mothers needs to be highlighted. Jay Mendelsohn’s mother is said
to have no education but to be very smart and to have passed down her mathematical abilities
to Jay. Daniel’s mother, as far as she is concerned, taught her children in ludic ways when they
were children. Another sentence that supports this idea that getting educated also comes from
the mother is when Jay says to Daniel’s co-parent Lily: “You must have done something right.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 92, 2017). Patrimony also extends to the choices Daniel makes in his life, as
Lily points it out to Mendelsohn in p. 19. So, in itself, patrimony is about transmission. For
example, from Jay Mendelsohn’s interest in the classics to his son who becomes a classicist to
Daniel’s son who takes a mythology course in high school. What is interesting to notice is the
parallel that we can make with Homer’s poem when it is said that “the boy is likely to succeed
simply because he is his father’s son.” (Mendelsohn, p. 49, 2017), as if, transmission was also
genetic.

When we come to think about transmission, apart from our family, the first thing we
think of, inevitably, is teachers. We all have been marked, whether positively or negatively, by
a teacher in our life and it leaves a mark forever. Mendelsohn’s book interrogates what is it to
be a teacher, what role a teacher has as an educator: “you can never know what you effect will
be on others; can never know, if you have something to teach, who your real students will be,
the ones that will take what you have to give and make it their own– “what you have to give”
being, in small part, what you yourself learned from some other teacher […] someone whom
the teacher or the text has touched so deeply, for whatever reason, that the lesson will live
beyond the classroom, beyond you.” (Mendelsohn, p. 241, 2017). The responsibility is a huge
one. Mendelsohn intelligently guides us within his own journey as a student himself throughout
the novel which give us perspectives on how he became the teacher that he is today: “It was
from Fred that I understood that beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 214, 2017). While on the cruise, the author undertakes to deliver us the story
of an old man who decided to go on the cruise because he loved his Classics teacher.
But Mendelsohn also reflects upon the difficulties you may confront sometimes as a teacher.
For example, when you face an audience that doesn’t respond well to your leading questions or
silently stares at you. Or, even, how challenging it can be when your students disagree with
your ideas and how much you must keep on open mind: “You just sort of squash anything that
doesn’t fit your interpretation. […] I’m sorry if you think I’m imposing my interpretations on
you. […] Interpretation isn’t some mushy subjective enterprise, it has to rise from examination
of the date, and that date is what’s in the text. […] that being said, I went on, I am intrigued by
this idea.” (Mendelsohn, p. 186, 2017). An interesting fact within the book is that Mendelsohn’s
father was also a professor, but the author does not know what kind of teacher his dad was until
the seminar when Jay explains that Athena cannot be Telemachus’ educator “because a good
teacher doesn’t just tell you what to do, or what to think. A good teacher shows you how,
explains things to you. A teacher doesn’t just boss you around, he should help you come to your
own conclusions.” (Mendelsohn, p. 92, 2017). Later on in the book, as Mendelsohn is looking
for information on his dad, Nino declares how much of a good and patient teacher his father
was to him. Just like towards the end of Jay’s life, as he lays in an hospital bed, Daniel stumbles
upon a former student of his father visiting his dad.
Mendelsohn keeps nostalgic memories from his times as a student by preserving the
first books he used when he started to study the Odyssey. He gives details on how much studying
can be, like travelling, painful and yet, an excruciating pain and transformative because getting
educated means to get out of our comfort zone: “A time of pleasure and of frustration in which
I both wanted to stay and wanted to leave, to move on, a span of time that bracketed the strange
evolution that takes place between the moment you enter graduate school and the moment you
depart […] as unrecognizable to yourself as the butterfly is to the cater pillar it once was.”
(Mendelsohn, p. 82, 2017); “I happily endured these rigorous exercises because I had a clear
idea where they were leading me.” (Mendelsohn, p. 27, 2017).

Getting educated, as I said before, comes from learning through direct experiences. First
of all, the formation of the BE+ -ING present tense in the subject of this essay suggests that we
continuously keep learning all along the book. From beginning to end. Moreover, in his book,
Mendelsohn has a fundamental role for his students. But in a way, the reader also becomes a
student. Indeed, throughout the book, Mendelsohn keeps educating us by making his book
accessible to any reader or deciphering Homer and Greek with his students and us at the same
time: “We are learning too.” (Mendelsohn, p. 97, 2017). But we are also learning about
Mendelsohn’s family and the reflections that result from the analysis he does of it as literature
allows us to navigate in time through generations and in memories. The odyssey Mendelsohn
is undertaking under the form of a memoir becomes more than a text about education. Memoirs
are not only a recollection if memories or a literary genre, but also reflections upon one’s life
and what one has learned from it. Writing memoirs is usually something that is done later, as
an adult when we have experienced life and are able to extract valuable lessons from it, when
we have matured enough. A memoir is educational in itself, as the author is declaring:
“Education itself is meant to set in motion.” (Mendelsohn, p. 115, 2017). The word “motion”
comes from the Latin verb movere which means “to move”, “to take action”. But to set in
motion is not only an expression to describe a physical movement, it can also apply to the brain
as in the back and forth “movement” we make when we think or plan things. It is then only
natural that Mendelsohn questions himself on how to tell the story of someone’s life. Moreover,
he tackles the notion of identity through learning: “But which is the true self? The Odyssey
asks, and how many selves might a man have?” (Mendelsohn, p. 10, 2017). But Mendelsohn’s
reflections even go deeper as he interrogates himself on what it means to be a son and a father.
For example, he recalls a time when he was a child accompanying his dad to see his father’s ill
father at the beginning of the book. On the return from that travel, on the plane, there was a
terrible storm and the plane had to go into numerous circles before being able to land. As the
author explains, Mendelsohn meditates on how, himself years later, he would not have been
able to react as calmly –had this situation had happened to him with his children– as his father
did. Furthermore, Mendelsohn pinpoints that “children become the parents they wish they’d
had.” (Mendelsohn, p. 232, 2017) after telling us that he had never heard his father say “I love
you” to him and that it must be way, as a father himself, he goes out of his way to say it to his
children on every occasion he has. However, his reflections don’t stop here. As the author is
teaching us about the story of Odysseus scar on his leg, Mendelsohn brilliantly demonstrates
that getting educated can be as much about the father than the son. That the son, as much as he
wants to, can never know his father as a whole the way his father knows his son. Finally,
Mendelsohn comes to the conclusion of a psychological truth that we all understand once we
become adults: “that a strong sense of what our own family is like, what its weaknesses and
strengths are, the relative degrees of its conventionality and eccentricity, its normalcy or
pathology, is often impossible to establish until we are old enough to compare it intelligently
with the families of others; something we start doing only when we begin to perceive, as
happens at the end of childhood, that our family is not, in fact, the entire world.” (Mendelsohn,
p. 99, 2017).

***

In conclusion, the notion of getting educated in Mendelsohn’s memoir takes place

through numerous ways. Education is what separated his father but is also what reunited him
with his dad as the author undertook the study of the Classics. It broke the silence that lasted
for a long time as the consequences of Jay Mendelsohn’s hard education as a father and his
strict moral code. But getting educated also led to reconcile Daniel with his father as the latter
decided to take his son’s seminar at an old age and appeased Jay regarding of his own past
failures. By looking into his father’s past and searching for information on him as Telemachus
does in the Odyssey, Mendelson finally mends the bridges with his father through what he learns
from his father’s relatives. Getting educated is also achieved through the learning that comes
from direct experiences that I divided into three Greek notions: paradeigmata (exemplary tales/
storytelling), hupothēkai (injunctions) and gnōmai (general reflections). In Mendelsohn’s book,
the notion of exemplary tales or storytellings about the Odyssey in itself educates us on a lot of
topics that are essential to the poem but also to anyone and still relevant today such as: family,
marriage, humility, homecoming, father and son relationships or heroes. More than this, the
tales Mendelsohn is giving us, gives us brilliant insights on the history or literature. The notion
of paradeigmata continues as the author reveals the story about the educational cruise he went
on with his dad, a cruise on which, Mendelsohn discovers his father as his true self. As
Telemachus in Homer’s poem, Mendelsohn recalls his childhood and the steps he took to
become the man he is now. In a way, we have two bildungsroman, which is, in itself, a genre
of novels about getting educated, within one book: Telemachus’ and Daniel’s. The second term
I used to transcript the learning that comes from experience is hupothēkai, the injunctions. In
Mendelsohn’s book, the injunctions take the form of the female figures of authority to which
the author have been influenced by, like his teachers his mother, Froma and Jenny. But it is also
present in the Odyssey with the goddess Athena who guides Odysseus and his son. Amusingly
enough, Jenny is well attached to Athena as she has multiple figures of the goddess in her office.
The injunctions are also seen in the way Jay challenges his son, the teacher figure, in the
classroom, whether by disregarding the theories that Mendelsohn exposes to his students or in
the tone he employs with him. Last but not least, the notion of gnōmai is very important as it is
the culmination of Mendelsohn’s reflections which is result is this book, this memoir. The
author covers diverse subjects such as what it is to be a teacher, the importance of passing down
our knowledge and what being a student can be like. The effect a teacher can have on students,
the difficulties a teacher can face, and which teachers shaped him to become the professor he
is today. The interrogations Mendelsohn has led us to consider us, the readers, as his students
ourselves as he keeps teaching us through his reflections and make them easy to read. Finally,
Mendelson profoundly explores the question of identity, of the self, of what it is to be a son but
also a father. That education can concern as much the son as the father. In other words, about
family.
 Resources

Primary source

Mendelsohn, D. (2017). An Odyssey, a Father, a Son and an Epic. Harper Collins.

Secondary sources

Bourdain, A. (2007). No Reservation: Around the World on an Empty Stomach. Bloomsbury

USA.

Oxford Learners Dictionary. (2022). Oxford University Press.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/education?q=education