All summer blockbuster hopes are pinned on Christopher Nolan’s odyssey, and all promise – as the trailers have shown – of spectacular effects, shocks and thrills. You will be taken inside the cave of the terrifying one-eyed giant Cyclops Polyphemus, who loves to dine on human flesh. You will visit the dim and murky shores of the Land of the Dead, where no hot-blooded human being should ever go. You will run away from the swift movements of the cannibals. You will be thrown into a stormy sea sent by vengeful gods.
And all this fantastic adventure is, of course, part of the Odyssey, one of the first great works of world literature, written soon after the Greeks acquired the technology to do so, perhaps in 600 or 500 BC. The ancient Greeks attributed this poem to a man named Homer, often described as a blind bard from the island of Chios.
However, in recent centuries, the idea that the poem can meaningfully be called the work of a single author has been strongly questioned. Particularly after the 1930s, when the American classicist Milman Parry studied the compositional techniques of non-literary epic singers in the Balkans, it became clear that the Odyssey, and the other Homeric Greek epic, the Iliad, were written forms of poems that were based on a long oral tradition. This means that versions of what we call the Odyssey were – perhaps for centuries, long before they were committed to writing – presented by bards, using a combination of memory and on-the-hoof improvisation.
Then, for a moment, imagine not the darkness of the cinema, but the darkness of the pillared hall of the king and queen, where guests gather to feast and tell stories. In front of the flickering fire, the Bard plays his harp and begins to sing, offering tales of adventure and loss, return and homecoming, war and death, and the delicate, tender threads that bind a husband and wife and a family together.
I imagine the Bard’s performance in this dark hall would have been an even more thrilling and overwhelming experience than anything Nolan could have created in his cinematic imagination. If we had been there, in that shadowy hall, we would now be crying together over the emotional power of Chard’s stories. I think this is the case because within the Odyssey – a poem that is so aware and alert to its status as an artwork that, at times, it can feel more postmodern than ancient – there are many scenes in which the bard tells stories in the palace halls, and these stories are sometimes interwoven into the epic itself. And, by hearing these stories, listeners of poetry cry out to hear their own experiences – or experiences they fear, or long to have – turned into song.
The question is: Why are we still connecting with the stories that were told in those ancient halls, their living spark perhaps as old as the Greek Bronze Age? Why are the directors of Inception and Oppenheimer so determined to adapt them, and why would so many people want to experience their vision of them?
The answer lies partly in the fact that the Odyssey – the story of a warrior’s homecoming, his long and arduous journey to re-establish himself within his home – has been passed down into the bloodstream of many storytelling traditions. In the introduction to his recent translation, classicist and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn lists Dante’s Inferno, Star Trek, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Finding Nemo, The Catcher in the Rye, Gladiator, Pride and Prejudice, and Game of Thrones as works in which ideas and motifs from the Odyssey resurface.
More obviously still, is James Joyce’s Ulysses, which maps the events of an epic day in Dublin onto specific episodes of the Odyssey; Omeros, Derek Walcott’s long poem about colonialism and the slave trade; and a whole range of contemporary novels, from Madeline Miller’s Circe to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. You could add several other works to Mendelssohn’s list: The Lord of the Rings, Homeland, The Return of Martin Guerre, and earlier cinematic adaptations of Homer, such as the 2000 Coen brothers film O Brother, Whither Art Thou?
I’ve read the Odyssey many times – starting with the storybook adaptation as a child, in Greek as a teenager, incompletely, sinking through it, to rereading it in various English translations as a young, then middle-aged adult. I started with my father’s postwar copy, translated by Evie Rieu. Then it was Robert Fogles’s translations, then George Chapman’s, then Emily Wilson’s, then Mendelssohn’s. My most recent reading continues: a long and drawn-out journey through Wilson’s fleet-footed edition, in fortnightly discussion with the classicist Mary Beard and a band of wonderful listeners. this is our odyssey book Club Podcast (which goes along with instant classicswhich Mary and I also co-host).
The 12,000-line poem that is the Odissi endures – like any rich and multilayered text – not because it is perfect, but because it morphs into different shapes when it is reread; The light shining from it always looks different. My reading now is different from my reading before; And I know the next one will be different again. We read from our own lives and experiences: This time, because I have reported from Ukraine so often over the past four years, I couldn’t help reading the odyssey through the stories of today’s soldiers, who return from the front, transformed by the experience and strangers to their families. Many of the stories I hear – about relationships that don’t survive, that have to be carefully rebuilt, that are completely changed because of one partner’s disability or trauma – resonate strongly with the odyssey.
Here is what the poem is “about”, at least 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, the cunning and resourceful Greek who was one of the leaders who won the 10-year-long siege of Troy. The gods agree that Odysseus – whom we find crying for home on the shore of a remote island, where he has been trapped for years by the loving but possessive god Calypso – can finally be allowed to reach home. But the action has now moved to his home island, Ithaca, where his wife, Penelope, despite various clever delaying tactics, is being pressured to choose a new husband from among a group of unruly and violent men who have taken up residence on the family estate.
Penelope and Odysseus’ son Telemachus, a teenager on the verge of adulthood, sets out in search of news of his father, inspired by Athena. On his journey he encounters some of his father’s old comrades in Troy: the aged warrior Nestor, and Menelaus, now reunited with his magnetic wife Helen, whose sudden departure was the cause of the Trojan War. Along the way he hears many stories, including how Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover as he returned home from Troy, but avenged by 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 to build a boat to get him home. But a storm arrives, and he barely escapes and winds up on an unknown island – the island of a distinctly strange but largely friendly people, the Phaeacians. The narcissistic young princess Nausicaä, encountering the naked, battered warrior on the beach, helps him reach her parents’ palace, where she tells him stories of what happened to him after the victory at Troy: how he was prevented from reaching home by the angry gods, how he encountered the Lotus-Eaters, the flesh-eating Laestrygonians, the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the deadly Sirens, the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. And even the boundaries of the land of the dead. He tells them that the last of his remaining men were killed in a storm because, contrary to explicit instructions, they had killed and eaten the sun god’s cattle, leaving Odysseus alone to sail to Calypso’s island. So: A large part of this looping, nonlinear poem is told in the first person, in flashback, by the hero himself, who is a cunning man and a liar.
The Phaeacians brought him home, landing him from their ship on Ithaca while he was sleeping, so that he woke up on the foggy beach in despair and confusion, and could not immediately recognize where he was. Unlike Agamemnon, the leader who was murdered on his return from Troy, he comes home not in pomp and arrogance, but quietly, in the guise of an old beggar, testing the loyalty of his household – his slaves, his son, his wife. Gradually, he came to be recognized as the head of the household, father and finally husband. He and Telemachus turn the tables on their opponents and the story becomes a tale of violence and revenge.
You might try to make the Odyssey familiar, ignoring its darker aspects in favor of good old glorious adventure. It will be interesting to see how unstable a version of the story Nolan wants to present. The entire poem could be said to be about bringing a disordered house into balance – thus providing the underlying DNA of everything from Shakespearean comedies to TV soap operas. But its long, winding, winding path from social disintegration to social order is also marked by many fundamental questions.
Some of these are ethical; Others delve into the dark recesses of the relationships that make us human. To what extent is our destiny in our own hands? What makes a good leader, a good person, a good husband? What are the acceptable limits of revenge? What does marriage consist of, and how can it survive the shocks of separation, bifurcated experience, and aging? How should you treat strangers when they come to your shore? How can a soldier returning from the bloodshed of the battlefield rejoin peaceful civilian life?
None of these are abstract questions. Every day humans are dealing with them. Whatever Nolan’s brilliant take on The Odyssey – whether his film is a triumph or a disappointment – he will continue to be asked about it, and The Odyssey will remain a poem for now.
The Odyssey is in theaters from July 17.
