it's not so much that a cyclops is monstrous because a one-eyed giant who eats people must be a monster; it's that anyone who does not follow your laws, your customs, your culture must be a monster.
polyphemus eats his guests not because he's a cannibal — cannibalism also being a taboo that applies to humans, and he's not human — but because he doesn't follow xenia. polyphemus says to odysseus "we don't respect zeus here," but odysseus approaches polyphemus as if polyphemus is the foreigner. he expects his customs (which serve him, a conquering hero) to take precedence, even though he is the one away from home. he's been away from home for over ten years.
because to odysseus, there's not much difference between the trojans (the city he's sacked) or the cicones (a people he raided on the way home) and polyphemus, right? except that polyphemus is able to turn the tables. he is a monster, not in the sense that he is not a human being — the trojans have not been treated as human beings — but because he can insist that his law be respected in his own home.
and it's not that odysseus can't adapt. look at how differently he approaches nausicaa, or even circe. but his perspective is what we wayfind by, and all the while odysseus, at troy and during the wanderings, is himself foreign.
and then he comes to phaeacia and weeps over songs of war. and then he comes home and doesn't recognize it. and then divine intervention both hides him from and reveals him to his son and wife. and then he has to conquer his own homeland. and then the poem ends, abrupt and final journey spoken of but unresolved. and each of these things makes his perspective strange to himself, and by extension to us. it is exactly at the moment odysseus comes home that he believes himself to be lost, foreign, for good.
areudirty
yousharknotpass
amandla
gummygunk
germansingergirl
