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Abstract
This article aims to find a position to mediate the interpretation made by Horkheimer and Adorno in the text Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the chapter “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” in which a characterized view regarding the myth told by Homer is expressed and where a devastating criticism intensifies which represents the advent of a bourgeois and enlightened spirit and, therefore, prone to the fascism developed in the twentieth century in Germany. The intention is to demonstrate that this view is erroneously interpreted by a unilateral view of the myth, using only the historical-political view and leaving aside the origin of the mythical thought, which rises in a total narrative interest and whose language is literary-poetic. The myth narrated by Homer is also the author’s work, who imprints his own subjectivity and style, and that because of his coherence and poetic power has greatly influenced the culture of the times ahead.
The interest is not to ignore the position of the authors in their interpretation of Homer and the myth as historical-political fact, but to complement the point of view as far as the aesthetic look that favors language, anthropology and historically locates the myth, to understand it in the popular origin of its narrative and in the transmission made by the minstrel.
Finally, the article is concluded trying to contrast the two views and show how they can be inconsistent and if, somehow, the myth in its polysemic interpretation could be justified, that is, being consistent with the very language of art, allowing other readings of the work-myth that might be different and therefore should not have to condemn Homer and the myth to a single look that subjugates and determines them as the source of disastrous subsequent historical events.
