Like others who have spent years reading, re-reading, studying, teaching, and being entranced by the Homeric epics, I looked forward to Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey with an uneasy mixture of hopeful enthusiasm and nail-biting concern. Some ancient-culture aficionados were, I’m sure, fully invested in the enthusiasm, while others were preoccupied with the concern; but most, I’d wager, were experiencing them in equal measure, bouncing from one emotion to the other. The enthusiasm and concern both derive from the fact that the popular culture has once again determined that such ancient works are worthy of attention, that they can still be made to speak a language accessible to anyone, and that they belong in the pop-culture pantheon.
To some extent, that same kind of ambivalence is associated with an adaptation of any classic work for those who read it and care about it. But somehow there doesn’t seem to be as much at stake in another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice or Little Women or Wuthering Heights, or even a modern novel like Harry Potter for that matter. Maybe that’s because they are in less danger of being neglected by the culture entirely. The great works that resist popular packaging, on the other hand—works like Paradise Lost and (for very different reasons) Moby-Dick—are in danger of disappearing from the literary canon. I don’t mean to suggest a causal relationship necessarily, but it is certainly a striking correlation.
What Homer’s Odyssey resists is not the effort to package it for popular-culture consumption, but the possibility of presenting it in its own terms. (I admit that for true purists, that possibility is always out of reach; in this case, it’s a matter of relative access.) This isn’t because the work is too old or too boring. The Odyssey is, after all, an adventure story replete with exotic journeys, monsters, violence, sex, goddesses, sex with goddesses, fantasy islands, reunions with long-lost family, revenge... As the list goes on, it becomes obvious that a single movie couldn’t begin to cover it. But nor could a trilogy of movies or a lengthy TV series.
That hasn’t prevented successive generations of moviemakers—though the numbers are small compared to adaptations of other major works—from exercising their prerogative, not only to adapt the work, but to present it from their own necessarily limited perspective. In an article for the Atlantic about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, George Packer writes, “The Magic Mountain makes no clear political statement. The novel remains true to Mann’s belief that art must include everything, allowing life its complexity and ambiguity.” The Odyssey did the same thing a couple of thousand years earlier. Both the poem and its protagonist are unapologetically ambiguous. For that reason, the Homeric epic of homecoming has become whatever each successive era has needed or wanted it to be.
The Hellenistic Greeks had already put their own spin on the Homeric works by the time those works reached ancient Rome. When the Romans conquered the Greek city-states, they ended Greek dominance in literature, the arts, science, and culture overall. Good citizens that the Romans were, they felt a need to justify their victory—surely, they told themselves, the Greeks must have somehow deserved such a crushing defeat. So in Virgil’s Aeneid, Odysseus—Ulysses in Latin—became a despised character representing Greek mendacity and cowardice. At the same time, Virgil appropriated many of Odysseus’ adventures and awarded them to his own hero, Aeneas. (Some evidence in the text suggests that Virgil was less convinced of Roman uprightness than the authorities he was hired to please, but that’s a topic for another time.)
By the late medieval period, when the ancient classics were rediscovered and began attracting popular interest, the Catholic Church felt a similar need to vilify the ancient Greeks, but for its own fairly obvious reasons. So in Dante’s Inferno, Ulysses is sent to hell for giving false counsel; his death is attributed to his supposedly insatiable desire for adventure and knowledge, which compelled him to travel beyond the limits God set for humans. By the 19th century, the British belief in progress coupled with a belief in the primacy of imperialism turned that adventurer into the ideal hero. Tennyson ends his poem “Ulysses” with the hero famously proclaiming his intent “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” (That imperative was quoted favourably by M, the head of MI6, in the James Bond movie Skyfall.)
James Joyce, on the other hand, associated the adventuring hero with the entirely unheroic character of the Wandering (Irish) Jew in Leopold Bloom. And since the 2000s, Odysseus/Ulysses has become the symbol of toxic masculinity run amok, as feminist authors have retold the story from the point of view of the Odyssey’s female characters, in works like Margaret Atwood’s brilliant 2005 novel The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s recent Odyssey-based Circe. As for the two most recent film versions, Nolan’s film and Pasolini’s 2024 The Return, both have drawn upon our current culture’s fixation on the effects of trauma.
Epic Failure
Homer’s Iliad is the first and greatest epic poem to have come down to us from ancient Greece. The Odyssey is the second. Homer …
Each of the drastically different versions of Odysseus’ story mentioned above can be supported by the original work, but none manages to capture it in its entirety. It isn’t only the author’s worldview that informs the epic’s complexity and ambiguity; the protagonist also embodies that complex and ambiguous dynamic. Indeed, everything about the work and its hero introduces complications and contradictions. Is Odysseus a hero or an anti-hero? Is he the first modern civilised man or a vicious barbarian? Is he the man who unjustly suffers or the one who causes suffering for himself and others? In today’s progressive political jargon, is he the oppressed or the oppressor? Homer’s epic raises all of these questions and more, but it doesn’t answer them.
