An ‘Odyssey’ for Our Time

I don’t often comment on films or – truth be told – usually care much about them. I leave that to those who do care and are much better at it. (See under: Miner, Brad.) Most movies seem, to me, to have a greater cultural impact than they deserve. I can’t deny that they’ve replaced the kinds of fiction that once shaped middlebrow culture. So my lack of interest is a fault, in a way. But in a culture like ours, from which Christianity is increasingly excluded, when a film like Christopher Nolan’s just-released Odyssey generates such mid-summer buzz – about a book almost 3000 years old – it’s worth considering what’s happening to some of our oldest cultural foundations. 

So, given my adolescent obsessions with Greek and Latin, and the current cinematic excitements, I made an early trip to the theater this weekend.

It’s easy to nitpick about film versions of the classics. Troy, with Brad Pitt as Achilles, took vast liberties (far too weak a word, in fact) with Homer, but was in my estimation worth watching and even re-watching in its own right. There’s a substantial subset of Tolkien readers who cannot abide Peter Jackson’s trilogy and what they regard as all its works and pomps. (I am not one of them and frequently revisit it.) Happily, Dante’s Commedia is utterly unfilmable, though some foolhardy directors have tried. 

Nolan has already been attacked for his mauling of several episodes, changing the arc of the story, obvious anachronisms, and non-traditional casting (a black Helen of Troy and “trans” Sinon?). Major blemishes, to be sure, but he’s admitted he wanted to create something that would speak to an audience – and was perhaps calculated to sell. And as they already said in ancient Greece, “Even Homer nods.” In the end, his Odyssey is worth a look, though it would be an abuse to call it Homer. 

Besides, even in literary terms, there’s been plenty to object to in most later versions of Homer. The 18^th-century classical scholar Richard Bentley, scanning the translation of the great Alexander Pope (an English Catholic), remarked: “It is a very pretty poem Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” That’s what almost everyone who has wrestled with Homer’s Greek feels about translations.

The recent translators – Lattimore, Fagles, Fitzgerald – are readable, but not so very pretty. Emily Wilson’s much-promoted, postmodern, feminist-inflected version (Odysseus is recast at times as a villain) doesn’t impress the present writer. It begins:

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy.

Ah yes, the Greek man, for millennia believed to be a hero, was “complicated,” and wrecked a holy city. Her distortions of key elements of the story – Nolan seems to have followed her at several points – betray Homer, about which more below.

A joke used to float around classics departments about the insoluble question of the “authorship” of the Iliad  and the Odyssey: “Homer didn’t write them; they’re by another poet, with the same name.” 

What cannot be disputed is that the “author” knew how to tell a story. (So does Nolan.) In the ancient world, it was said that the Iliad was the vigorous, martial work of Homer’s youth. In his old age, he had softened, and turned out the magical, mystical episodes of the Odyssey. Modern readers tend to like the latter over the former, which is probably a reflection of how little we appreciate the armed defenders who make peaceful living possible, and how much we prefer merely to be entertained.

Still, those old epics speak to us, even decades after our educators made the fateful, perhaps fatal, decision not to teach texts like the Bible, Homer, the Greek and Roman philosophers, the Fathers of the Church, and many other foundation stones of our civilization.    

Among their deeply human themes, the ancient epics are also notably concerned with “the gods” and the afterlife, and their interactions and importance for this world. Circe tells Odysseus that he must go to the Cimmerians’ land, at the world’s very end, perform certain rites, particularly pour out blood to attract the souls of the dead in order to learn how to return home (eerily portrayed in the film). In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas has to enter the underworld with the Cumaean Sybil to be taught – in conversation with the dead, particularly the shade of his father – about his fate: to found a new city and home, Rome.

Nolan’s Odyssey is not Homer and doesn’t entirely try to be. It’s powerful in its way. But the most radical difference between Homer and Nolan is that the Odyssey ends, definitively, with Odysseus at home with his wife, and his kingdom restored. Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen argues in his book American Odyssey (being released this week) that Homer’s conclusion points to how the private sphere (marriage and family) anchors the public. We’ve seen how separating the two is a disaster at both ends. 

By contrast, in the end, Nolan’s Penelope and Odysseus leave their son Telemachus in charge and sail away on a kind of around-the-world, romantic adventure. 

It’s a jarring shift and one imagined – and rejected – in the past. Dante’s Ulysses (his Latin name) is in Hell, precisely because, after returning home, Dante imagined that he became an “evil councilor” in that he appealed to false “virtue” to convince his men to set out again. He confesses:

neither my fondness for my son nor pity
for my old father nor the love I owed
Penelope, which would have gladdened her,

was able to defeat in me the longing
I had to gain experience of the world
and of the vices and the worth of men. . . 

‘Brothers,’ I said. . .

  . . .you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.

Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth (virtú) and knowledge.’

(Inf. XXVI)

Dante’s Ulysses seems to make a good case for idle curiosity; Nolan’s couple go off on a senior retirement cruise, with bad consequences likely to follow.

In fact, in Nolan’s telling (by way of Emily Wilson, it seems), Odysseus’ cleverness was actually a betrayal of the moral order of Zeus: The Trojan horse – his trick to win the war after ten years of fighting – was presented as a peace offering to the Trojans, but was treacherously used, contrary to ancient etiquette, to carry out mayhem and destruction. Odysseus tells Penelope that his moral violation will bring the downfall of their civilization – which will arise again, sometime. And flourish, until men forget the lessons about disobeying the divine order again.

And even more surprising, Nolan’s Calypso reverses the central thread of Homer’s story, saying that Odysseus suffered from something like a very un-archaic PTSD – and didn’t really want to get home – until he surrendered to the will of Zeus.

Nolan describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, and several obvious Christian and contemporary elements are retrofitted to an archaic, pre-Christian world in this potent film, which is not Homer, but gestures towards many things that are. It’s worth seeing, and pondering. But read the original.

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