OK… so back to The Odyssey — book and film — one last time.
I mostly want to say I’m heartened by all the conversation around Christopher Nolan’s new film version — even with all the excess online commentary, well measured or not. Indeed, any attention we pay to The Odyssey seems of cultural value at this juncture. As Emily Wilson — the classicist and most recent translator of The Odyssey — says, for many of us in school the epic is our introduction to Western or world literature. It is the place where we begin to consider the arc of civilization, engage in deep conversations on the meaning of humanity over the course of human history. By so doing, it’s how we understand ourselves better today.
And right now, I think you’d agree, we really do need to dig a bit deeper into understanding ourselves — the whole, loud, dizzying experience of being alive in the 21st century.
I mention Emily Wilson here because her translation is worth reading, and because she was blindsided by more than a few commentators for her initial sharp criticism of Nolan’s film. To the latter point, I encourage folks to let it go. Wilson knows The Odyssey better than the vast majority of us. Classic literature is her life’s work and passion. It makes sense that any movie version of The Odyssey will fall short of her understanding of the epic and what she hopes we’ll learn from it. Instead of sitting around parsing commentary about the film, we’d be better off reading her impressive translation and reflecting on that.
In her impressive introduction, in fact, Wilson lays out the essential reasons we should read and discuss The Odyssey today.
“It is a poem that has the power to speak to people from many different social backgrounds in the contemporary Anglo-American world. Reading The Odysseywith fresh, curious, and critical eyes may help us not only rethink our assumptions about people in the past, but also break down some of our modern distinctions and assumptions. Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero. Immersing ourselves in his story, and considering how these categories can exist in the same imaginative space, may help us reconsider both the origins of Western literature and our infinitely complex contemporary world.”
I’m no Odyssey expert or even a marginally well-informed Homer nerd. But both Wilson’s translation and Christopher Nolan’s movie version of The Odyssey did get my attention. As a college sophomore, I had signed up for a course on epic literature in translation, thinking it would be an interesting challenging because… well, you know, it’s Classic Literature translated from dead languages. I welcomed the challenge because I had grown bored of the business courses I had been taking. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was one of those pivotal life moments — one I couldn’t fully comprehend but felt in the bones. I was giving up some sort of vague but safe and possibly lucrative career path for the chance to engage my mind in ways it hungered to be engaged. I also signed up to study Greek — though that turned out to be a bridge too far and I gave it up after one semester. But The Odyssey grabbed me from the opening lines of Richmond Lattimore’s translation.
Back then, I’m sure I was compelled by a kind of boyish fascination with all things epic (or my sense of “epic”). It felt like a grown-up version of the darker genre of comics I was attracted to in middle school. I met Homer’s work with the same kind of enthusiasm I brought to reading The Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet. But beneath all that enthusiasm, I realize now, lay some kind of need I didn’t know I had. It wasn’t just the story. The Odyssey, as they say, was speaking to me about struggles it would take years for me to understand.
As we know, two main themes of The Odyssey are nostos (homecoming) and xenia(welcoming/hospitality and friendship). I’m tempted here to describe the changes in my life that would lead me at a fairly young age to feel disconnected from my sense of home — and thus in greater need of welcoming. But what I’d be describing, I think, was a widely held feeling of growing up in the constant, rapid changes in America —especially its suburbs — in the mid- to late-20th century. All that really matters here is that, without fully comprehending how or why, friendships and connections that seemed so solid in my early years somehow had dissolved or shifted, and by the time I was a sophomore in college I started to feel a loneliness that both surprised me and was difficult to shake. It was nothing like facing down Scylla and Charybdis, but the effect of so much cultural change — the stuff we called “progress” —mostly made me feel isolated and confused. And experiencing all this in a nation that was wrestling deeply and poorly with its position on war and race and gender and our connection to an increasingly endangered natural world only served to magnify the loneliness. Ensuring that my accounting sheets balance didn’t help.
So one night, I went off for a long walk along the Charles River feeling a desperate mix of loneliness and panic. Something was wrong and I didn’t know what it was. All I remember feeling was the strongest sense of homesickness, but it was a longing for a home I could no longer return to — even if I wanted. I was not longing for the house my parents lived in at the time. I was not hoping to hang out with my childhood friends. In truth, I couldn’t have told you what it is I wanted. It was more a longing for a feeling I once had — the ease and comfort of being in the world. But I was also starting to wonder if it was all an illusion from the start.
So The Odyssey, excuse the expression, struck home with me when I first read it. And I felt for Odysseus the way I hadn’t for the protagonists in other works of literature. I was almost embarrassingly attentive to Odysseus’s deep craving to get home, and thus suffered with him at each obstacle. But being a young man who didn’t yet know how to be a man, I was also attentive to the ways in which Odysseus engaged with the world along the way — for all the good or bad, the right or wrong reasons. What did I make of a man of such contradictions? I could see that, for all his supposed cunning and wisdom and strength, he was not actually in control. It wasn’t just that the gods messed with him big time — Poseidon pummeling him, Athena urging him on. He and his men were making plenty of their own mistakes.
For Odysseus to get home, he needed to use all his skills. But he also needed to find people who would welcome him, feed him, guide him. Not kill him.
In the ancient world, knowing danger and death lay all about, one always hoped to find some kind of sanctuary when away from home. Thus the notion of xenia — of welcoming, of hospitality, of caring for the stranger — was central to the Archaean world. Emily Wilson points out that xenia was also a way for elites to make alliances and keep trade routes open. It was, in that sense, strategic and practical. But she also points out that the reception one received back then could range from deep generosity to treachery and death. The kind of welcome Odysseus sought wasn’t always offered. In fact, it felt like a 50-50 proposition. Pull ashore to the Phaeacians and you struck gold. Enter the cave of a Cyclops or step ashore on Calypso’s or Circe’s island and you were more likely to die or be enslaved — or, in Odysseus’ case with Calypso and Circe, be used as a kind of boy toy.
Then there are the suitors angling for Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, in their desire for power. By inviting themselves into Odysseus’s home, feasting away without regard for the wishes of Penelope or Telemachus, and demanding that Penelope choose one of them as her next husband, the suitors were seriously undermining the Archaean ideals of xenia.
Near the end of the epic, Odysseus says to one of the suitors, “Clearly doing good puts doing bad to shame” (Fagles translation). A nice truism, but then one remembers that Odysseus and his men didn’t always seek out welcoming or behave like good guests, but would arrive in a new land and engage in slaughter and pillage. Only when they worried that they were outmatched or feared the responses of the gods or were desperately hungry were they more humble and circumspect.
There was also the question of how one was greeted, depending on their perceived status. Odysseus comes home disguised as a beggar and only finds kindness among others who have suffered.
In my college course on Homer, I felt like we were being asked to come to some rough understanding of human nature in the ancient world — find some kind of through line in all that stuff about moral codes vs. individual desire and entitlement. What were the bonds of civilization — and could they hold?. But I was also thinking hard about my own life and the world around me, as I understood it (or half-understood it). The Odyssey back then steeped me in new kind of reflection. considering my own life and humanity in ways I hadn’t until that point. If we all understand our shared need for welcoming and friendship, why do we then break that understanding? And how does this duality work on the larger communal and global levels? What does this have to do with the Vietnam War? With persistent American racism? What does this say about how any of us, as individuals, navigate the larger landscape?
I think all this social and psychological complexity is why a 3,000-year-old tale can still be read with great interest today, and why Christopher Nolan can produce a movie about a 3,000-year-old tale and pack theaters in a time when we aren’t packing theaters. Pure classicists might prefer a film version of The Odyssey that more faithfully reflects the Homeric world, but I’m OK with Nolan’s choices. To get the full, faithful story, we can always read the book. Nolan’s choices, at least for me, remain faithful to some of the essential elements of The Odyssey and offer enough to encourage the kind of reflection good movies encourage.
By the end of the epic, book and film, Odysseus is an older, wiser Odysseus — tired of war, tired of pillaging, tired of male aggression, more aware of the suffering of those who serve the powerful, and more attuned to the ways generosity and selfishness combat each other. In the movie, given how the gods and men had messed with him, Odysseus becomes acutely aware that the world needs people to embrace a better, more consistent form of welcoming — both of the strategic and moral kind.
Homer, on the other hand, simply has Athena step in on behalf of the gods and say, “Enough!
If only we had some gods who could step in like this! Barring the gods, and living in a hi-tech era, it behooves us to consider how we might rethink the inner and outer workings of our still Bronze Age hearts.