‘More postmodern than ancient’: Why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to Westeros | culture

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has every promise of being a summer blockbuster, and every promise – as the trailers have shown – of great effects, shocks and thrills. You will be transported inside the cave of the terrifying one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, who loves to eat human flesh. You will visit the dark and misty shores of the Land of the Dead, where no warm-blooded human being should ever set foot. You will escape from the bombardment of cannibals. You will be tossed into stormy seas sent by vengeful gods.

All this incredible adventure is certainly part of the Odyssey, one of the first great works of world literature, written down shortly after the Greeks had the technology to do so, perhaps in the sixth or fifth century B.C. The ancient Greeks attributed the poem to a man named Homer, often described as a blind poet from the island of Chios.

However, in recent centuries, the idea that a poem can meaningfully be called the work of a single creator has been forcefully called into question. Especially after the 1930s, when the American classicist Melman Barry studied the compositional techniques of uneducated Balkan epic singers, 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 put into writing – performed by poets, using a combination of memory and rapid improvisation.

Imagine, then, for a moment, not so much the darkness of the cinema as the darkness of the hypostyle hall of the King and Queen, where guests gather to celebrate and tell stories. Facing the flickering fire, the poet strikes his lyre and begins to sing, performing tales of adventure and loss, of return and homecoming, of war and death and the delicate, fragile threads that bind husband, wife, and family together.

I have a feeling that performing the Bard in this dark hall might have been a more exciting and immersive experience than even the one created by Nolan’s cinematic imagination. If we had been there, in that mysterious hall, we might have wept together now over the emotional power of the poet’s stories. I think this is the case because in The Odyssey – a poem that recognizes and alerts to its status as a work of art, and which can sometimes seem more postmodern than archaic – there are many scenes in which poets in palace halls tell stories, and sometimes these stories are seamlessly integrated into the epic itself. Hearing these stories, listeners cry into the poem to hear their own experiences—or experiences they fear, or have long held—transformed into song.

The question is: Why do we still connect with the stories told in those ancient halls, whose lively sparks are perhaps as old as the Greek Bronze Age? Why were the director of Inception and Oppenheimer so determined to adapt them, and why are so many people willing to experience his vision of them?

The answer lies in part in the fact that the Odyssey—the story of a warrior’s return to his homeland, and his long and winding journey to reintegrate himself into his family—has passed into the bloodstream of many storytelling traditions. In his introduction to his latest 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 the ideas and motifs of the Odyssey reappear.

Most obviously, there is James Joyce’s Ulysses, which plots the events of an epic day in Dublin on specific episodes from the Odyssey; Omeros, Derek Walcott’s long poem about colonialism and the slave trade; And a whole host of contemporary novels, from Madeline Miller’s Circe to Margaret Atwood’s Penelope. To Mendelssohn’s list you can add many other works: The Lord of the Rings, Homeland, The Return of Martin Guerre, and previous cinematic adaptations of Homer, such as the Coen brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

I’ve read The Odyssey many times—from short story adaptations as a child, to delving into it, incompletely, in Greek as a teenager, to rereading it in various English translations as a young, then middle-aged adult. I started with my father’s tattered post-war copy translated by E.V. Rio. Then came the translation by Robert Fagles, then the translation by George Chapman, then the translation by Emily Wilson, then the translation by Mendelssohn. My latest reading continues: a long, long journey through Wilson’s fast-moving version, in fortnightly discussion with classicist Mary Beard and a group of wonderful listeners. This is the podcast of the Odyssey Book Club (which runs in conjunction with Instant Classics, which Mary and I also co-host).

The 12,000-line Odyssey endures—like any rich, layered text—not because it is perfect, but because it bends and bends into different shapes when it is reread; The light that shines always looks different. My reading now is different from my previous readings; I know what comes next will be different again. We read through our lives and experiences: This time, because I have been writing so much from Ukraine over the past four years, I cannot help but read the Odyssey through the stories of today’s soldiers who return from the front transformed by experience, as strangers to their families. Many of the stories I hear—of relationships that don’t last, those that have to be carefully rebuilt, and those that are completely transformed by one partner’s disability or trauma—resonate strongly with the Odyssey.

This 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 victorious commanders in the 10-year siege of Troy. The gods agree that Odysseus—whom we encounter as weeping for his homeland on the shore of a remote island, where he has been besieged for years by the loving but possessive god Calypso—can finally be allowed to reach his home. But the action now moves to his home island, Ithaca, where his wife, Penelope, is pressed, despite various clever delaying tactics, to choose a new husband from among a group of unruly and violent men who have taken up residence on the family estate.

Telemachus, the son of Penelope and Odysseus, a teenager on the verge of puberty, is inspired by Athens to set out in search of news of his father. On his journey, he meets some of his father’s old companions in Troy: the elderly warrior Nestor, and Menelaus, now reunited with his attractive wife, Helen, whose sudden departure was the trigger for the Trojan War. Along the way, he hears many stories, including how Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, was killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover when he returned home from Troy, but was avenged by his son Orestes: a warning, about the dangers of homecoming, and an example of how to be a loyal son.

We return to Odysseus, who is helped by a reluctant Calypso to build a boat to take him home. But a storm comes, and he barely survives until he is washed up on an uncharted island – the island of a distinctly strange but widely friendly people, the Fascists. The composed young princess Nausicaa, confronted by the naked, exhausted warrior on the beach, helps him reach her parents’ palace, where he tells the stories of what happened to him after the victory at Troy: how angry gods prevented him from reaching home, how he faced the lotus-eaters, the flesh-eating Lastragonians, the Cyclopes, the witch Circe, the deadly sirens, the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, and even the frontiers of the Land of the Dead. He told them that his last remaining men were killed in a storm after they slaughtered and ate the sun god’s cattle, against express instructions, leaving Odysseus alone to reach Calypso’s island. So: Much of this non-linear poem is told in the first person, in flashback, by the hero himself, a cunning and lying man.

The Fascists bring him home, and drop him off at Ithaca from their ship while he sleeps, so that he wakes on the foggy shore in despair and confusion, not immediately recognizing where he is. In contrast to Agamemnon, the leader who is killed on his return from Troy, he arrives home not in pomp and arrogance, but in secret, disguised as an old beggar, and tests the loyalty of his family members – slaves, his son, and his wife. Gradually, he is recognized as the head of the family, as the father, and finally as the husband. He and Telemachus turn the tables on the suitors, and the story becomes one of violence and revenge.

You can try to tame the Odyssey and make it familiar, ditching its dark sides in favor of the good old-fashioned adventure of it all. It will be interesting to see how disturbing the version of the story Nolan is willing to present. The entire poem might be said to be about taming a troubled household and bringing it back into balance – thus providing the essential DNA for everything from Shakespearean comedies to soap operas. But its long, upward and indirect movement from social disorder to social order is also characterized by several fundamental questions.

Some of these are ethical; Others penetrate the dark recesses of the relationships that make us human. To what extent does our fate lie in our hands? What makes a good leader, a good man, a good husband? What are the acceptable limits of revenge? What does marriage consist of, and how can it survive the traumas of separation, divergent experience, and aging? How should you treat strangers when they arrive on your shores? How does a soldier returning from bloodshed on the battlefield reintegrate into peaceful civilian life?

None of these questions are abstract. Every day, humans deal with them. Whatever Nolan’s astonishing take on The Odyssey — whether his film is a triumph or a disappointment — they will continue to be questioned, and The Odyssey will remain a poem for now.

Odyssey is in cinemas from July 17.