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Christopher Nolan’s film Odyssey has all the expectations of a summer blockbuster set, with all the promises – as the trailers have shown – of great results, shocks and fun. You will be taken to the cave of a terrible one-eyed giant, Cyclops Polyphemus, who likes to eat human flesh. You will visit the dark and dark shores of the land of the dead, where no warm-blooded man should tread. You will escape from the trampling of cannibals. You will be struck by a sea of storms sent by the avenging gods.
And all these interesting events, of course, are part of the Odyssey, one of the first great works of literature in the world, which was written shortly after the Greeks discovered modern technology, probably in the 600s or 500sBC. The ancient Greeks said that this poem was written by a man called Homerhe is often described as the donkey of the island of Kios.
However, in recent centuries, the idea that the poem can be meaningfully attributed to a single author has been strongly contested. Especially after the 1930s, when an American scholar named Milman Parry studied the musical styles of the illiterate musicians of the Balkans, it became clear that the Odyssey, and another Homeric Greek epic, the Iliad, were written forms of poetry that inherited a long oral tradition. This means that the versions of what we call the Odyssey were – probably for hundreds of years, long before they were sent to writing – made by hoofs, using memory and revision on hoofs.
So imagine, for a moment, not the darkness of the cinema as the darkness of the hall of the king and queen, where guests gather to eat and tell stories. Against the flickering fire, the bard strikes his lyre and begins to sing, telling tales of joy and loss, of homecoming and homecoming, of war and death and the fragile, soft thread that binds man and woman and family together.
I feel that the performance of the bard in this dark hall was probably more interesting and successful than the one created by the imagination of Nolan’s movie. If we were there, in that dark hall, we might now be crying together because of the power of the bard’s stories. I think it’s because within the Odyssey – a poem that foretells and cautions about the nature of art that, at times, can feel more contemporary than ancient – there are several scenes in which the buttons in the palace courtyards tell a story, and these stories are sometimes seamlessly sewn into the epic itself. And, hearing these stories, the listeners-in the poem are crying out to hear what they have experienced – or what they fear, or hope, become music.
The question is: why do we still relate to the stories that were told in those ancient halls, their life-giving lights perhaps as old as the Greek bronze age? Why director a Introduction and Oppenheimer He is determined to change it, and why would so many people want to see his vision?
Another answer lies in the fact that the Odyssey – the story of a warrior’s homecoming, his long and difficult journey to re-enter his home – has run through the blood of many storytelling traditions. In his introduction to his latest translation, veteran scholar and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn cites Dante’s Inferno, Star Trek, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Finding Nemo, The Catcher in the Rye, Gladiator, Pride and Prejudice, and Game of Thrones as works that Odyssey revisits.
Obviously, there is James Joyce’s Ulysses, which captures the events of a high-class day in Dublin to some of the events of the Odyssey; Omeros, Derek Walcott’s long poem about colonialism and the slave trade; and many contemporary novels from Madeline Miller’s Circe to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. You can add to Mendelsohn’s list many other works: Lord of the Rings, Homeland, The Return of Martin Guerre, and classic Homer films, such as the Coen brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
I’ve read the Odyssey many times – from reading it in the storybooks as a child, to going through it, imperfectly, in the Greek as a child, and rereading it in various English translations as a teenager, then in middle age. I started with my father’s battered copy after the war translated by EV Rieu. Then there was the translation of Robert Fagles, then George Chapman, then Emily Wilson, then Mendelsohn. My latest reading continues: a long and extended journey through Wilson’s brand of footwork, in a two-day conversation with the legendary Mary Beard and with a group of amazing listeners. This is our Odyssey book club podcast (which runs along Instant Classicswhich Mary and I also work on).
The 12,000-line poem that is the Odyssey endures – like any rich and multifaceted text – not because it is perfect, but because it changes and twists into different forms as it is read again; the light that shines always looks different. My reading now is different from my earlier reading; and I know that the next one will be different. We read through our lives and our experiences: this time, because I have said a lot from Ukraine in the last four years, I cannot read the Odyssey through the stories of today’s soldiers who return from the front changed by events, and as strangers to their families. Many of the stories I hear – about relationships that never existed, that need to be carefully rebuilt, that have been completely changed by one’s disability or injury – resonate strongly with Odyssey.
This is what the poem is “about”, especially in terms of its plot. It begins on Mount Olympus, among the gods. Zeus and his daughter, the goddess Athena, discuss the fate of Odysseus, a clever and wise Greek who was one of the leaders who defeated the 10-year siege of Troy. The gods agree that Odysseus – whom we meet crying at home on the shores of a remote island, where he was imprisoned for many years by the loving but loving goddess Calypso – can be allowed to return home. But what is happening now involves his home island, Ithaca, where his wife, Penelope, despite being late, is forced to choose a new husband among the group of unruly and violent men who live in the family’s house.
Penelope and Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, a young man on the verge of adulthood, is inspired by Athena to go in search of his father’s news. On his journey he meets his father’s old friends in Troy: the old warrior Nestor, and Menelaus, who is now reunited with his magnetic wife, Helen, whose sudden departure was the cause of the Trojan War. On the way he hears many stories, including how Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, was killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, and his lover when he returned home from Troy, but to avenge his son Orestes: a warning, about the dangers of returning home, and an example of how to be a faithful son.
We return to Odysseus, who is helped by a reluctant Calypso singer to build a boat to take him home. But a storm begins, and they do not survive to be washed up on an unknown island – of a strange but very friendly people, the Phaeacians. The confident young queen Nausicaa, meeting a naked warrior, beaten on the beach, helps him to reach his parents’ house, where he explains what happened to him after the victory in Troy: how he was prevented from getting home by the angry gods, how he met the Lotus-Eaters, the cannibals, the Cyclopian Sirens, the sea giants Scylla and Charybdis, and the borders of the world of the dead. The last of his remaining men, he tells them, were killed by a storm after which, against clear instructions, they killed and ate the Sun God’s cows, leaving Odysseus alone to go to Calypso’s island. So: the main part of this, infinite poetry is told in the first person, in flashback, by the hero himself, a cunning and lying man.
The Phaeacians bring him home, landing him on Ithaca from the ship while he sleeps, so that he wakes up on the beach in sorrow and confusion, not immediately realizing where he is. Unlike Agamemnon, the leader who was killed on his way back from Troy, he arrives home not with pride and arrogance, but secretly, disguised as an old beggar, testing his family – his slaves, his son, his wife – for their loyalty. Little by little, he is recognized as the head of the family, as a father, and, finally, as a husband. He and Telemachus turn the tables on the suitors, and the story turns violent and vengeful.
You can try to demystify the Odyssey to get to know it better, to see its darker side in favor of the more colorful past of it all. It will be interesting to see what kind of story Nolan wants to present. The poem as a whole can be said to be “about” the reformation of an unsettled house into harmony – thus providing the DNA of everything from a Shakespearean comedy to a TV drama. But his long, circuitous, circuitous movement from social disorder to social order is also marked by many important questions.
Some of these are morals; others tap into the dark places of relationships that make us human. How much of our future is in our hands? What makes a good leader, a good man, a good man? What are the legal limits of retaliation? What does marriage consist of, and how can it endure the problems of separation, puberty and old age? When visitors arrive at your beach, what should you do for them? How can a soldier returning from the bloodshed of the battlefield re-enter the quiet life of peace?
None of these are dumb questions. Every day, people struggle with them. Everything about Nolan’s epic Odyssey – whether his film is a success or a disappointment – will continue to be questioned, and Odyssey will remain a poem for now.
Odyssey is in theaters from July 17.
