Who are we? Epics, identity, and Nolan’s Odyssey

“Epic shows us again and again the pattern of moving from the old myth to a new, carrying everything of value with it as it goes.” — Louise Cowan

 

Christopher Nolan’s film version of the ancient Greek myth The Odyssey has been big news. Written down by “Homer” some 3-400 years after the destruction of the city of Troy, The Odyssey is a mythic account of rise of Greek civilization after the collapse of the Bronze Age Mycenaean kingdoms.

It’s an old story about ancient times. A blast of the past. And, it always has been. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks heard the myth and remembered their history. They were looking back, recalling a pivotal time of change. A time when notions of honor, order, and the right way of being and living together were redefined.

When we read or watch The Odyssey today, we’re stepping into this lineage. Many of us see myth as entertainment, and there have been centuries of cultural change. Still, I wonder if the lasting resonance of The Odyssey reveals the power this story continues to hold and explains the big response to Nolan’s movie.

We are, after all, living in a time when notions of honor, order, and the right way of being and living together are being redefined.

Transcript of Who are we? Epics, identity, and Nolan’s Odyssey

Hello and welcome to Myth Matters an exploration at the intersection of mythology, creativity and consciousness. I’m your host Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful crazy world of ours, I’m glad that you decided to join me here today.

Alright my friend, jumping into a big topic. The Odyssey. The release of Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, based on Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer, has been big news in the community of myth-lovers and beyond. Maybe you’ve seen it. His approach to the myth has stirred the collective imagination and generated some commentary and critique. I think it’s all part of the ongoing conversations, or arguments, about who has the right to tell their story and under what circumstances. 

I haven’t spent much time with the public commentary, and what I propose to share with you today are some thoughts and questions the movie raised for me, not an explanation or analysis of how I think the filmmaker got it right or wrong. I do think these arguments are important even if some opinions seem off base. The vast majority of us have been denied any meaningful participation in such debates for a very long time, and there’s bound to be pushing and shoving and a bit of chaos as the doors slowly crack open to a wider and more diverse range of viewpoints. 

And this is the effect of a powerful story, right? To inspire different interpretations and opinions? Every person who is drawn into the space of a story has their own experience of it. What matters most in my mind, is that this subjectivity be kept in mind. That we understand our response to a story as a reflection of ourselves and our concerns and not hold out some fantasy of impartial authority, although some folks will always have more expertise and experience in a given area than others, and so more credibility.

So, what I’ve been thinking about are the cultural functions performed by epic myths like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and what Nolan’s retelling of these classical Greek myths might offer us as a mythopoesis, a reworking of the epic story for our time. Be forewarned that I may spoil some surprises for you if you’ve not seen the movie. 

Now, about these cultural functions.

I find Joseph Campbell’s explication of the four functions of myth very useful. One of these four functions is the “sociological.”  According to Campbell, a useful myth first opens us to the mystery of existence and reveals the fundamental order of the cosmos, and then myth translates this cosmic scheme into a model for the proper organization of society and the place of the individual within it. 

Campbell writes, “The third function of a mythological order is to validate and maintain a certain sociological system: a shared set of rights and wrongs, proprieties or improprieties, on which your particular social unit depends for its existence.” In other words, myth provides answers to the questions: who are we, what is our covenant with the mystery, and so how shall we live?

In contemplating this sociological function, I’m reminded of the close relationship between mythology and history. Many myths are a poetic telling of events deemed to be of collective import. Stories or legends of gods and heroes and other folks who shaped a culture through their deeds, and whose character mirrors the values of the community. The folks we hold up. History is a more prosaic and presumably fact-based telling of important events but as we know, the line between fiction and non-fiction is often quite blurry.

An epic is a particular genre of historical or mythic story that expressly purports to be history or to speak about history, and handle big cultural themes and truths. If you think about events in your life that you’d describe as “epic,” they’re huge and life-changing, maybe even shocking or surprising. In collective terms, an epic is a story of an entire way of life at a moment of radical change. 

Epics describe transitional times. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are epics.

Many traditions, maybe all, of them, have an epic myth or two or twelve. The Mahabharata and Ramayana from India, for example. The Judeo-Christian myths of Noah and the Great Flood, or Moses and the exodus out of Egypt. The Chinese Journey to the West about the Monkey King. The Mayan Popol Vuh. Epics speak to periods of social change and most cultures have experienced this at least once.

So, an epic tells us about a collective movement toward destiny, and epic heroes like Odysseus stand in for the community. The hero’s personal journey is a microcosm of the process that took place on the macro, societal level and illuminates the journey of the community and its evolution. As receivers of the story, in this case as viewers of the film, we’re meant to see ourselves in the hero or in relationship to him. (It’s usually a “him.”)

 The Iliad and The Odyssey are a mythic account of the development of the Greek people, an origin story of Greek civilization after the collapse of the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization of which Troy was a part. Homer’s story was composed 3-400 years after the destruction of the city of Troy. The ancient Greeks were remembering their history. They were not living these events. They were looking back. They were recalling a pivotal time of change. A time when notions of honor, order, and the right way of being and living together were redefined.

 When we read or watch The Odyssey today, we’re stepping into this lineage of myth, history, and remembrance. Homer is part of the cultural legacy of the dominant societies. Many people are ignorant of the significance of this myth and see it as pure entertainment, and honestly, even folks who value Homer may feel the same given all of the centuries of cultural change. Still, I wonder if the lasting resonance of The Odyssey reveals the power it continues to hold and explains the big response to Nolan’s movie.

We are, after all, living in a time when notions of honor, order, and the right way of being and living together are being redefined.

The gods are usually involved in epic myths. They often champion a hero or choose a people. Their presence signals the importance of what’s at stake and connect it to destiny or fate. What do the forces that operate beyond ordinary human control and understanding require of us? What’s the message or lesson for the people?

An epic is also about language. Developing, extending, and/or preserving the language that binds a people together. A shared language is clearly important to a community, as members need to understand each other, and yet the significance of communicating in a particular language is larger than the nuts and bolts of efficient exchange. A language shapes the way that the speaker understands and views the world. A language carries values and meanings that are part of the shared reality in a culture. You belong because you understand the metaphors and other figures of speech.

This is one reason that translation from one language to another is a difficult art. The movement from text to screen is a big leap, full of exciting new meanings and insights or big mistakes, depending on the viewer, because the filmmaker offers visual images that supplant what would otherwise rise up in your personal imagination. A film claims more of the story. Naturally, there’s controversy if folks feel the story matters.

Like other myths, an epic is spacious enough to weather adaptation and make room for new meanings. Nolan’s film isn’t Homer’s story. In some respects, it comes close, and many of the essential elements, the horrible meeting with the cyclops Polyphemus, for example, are included. But Nolan streamlines and simplifies. He creates some characters (Sinon) and changes the roles played by others, Eumaeus (swineherd), for example. Some, like the god Hermes, he eliminates. He also cuts and reconfigures important pieces like the way Odysseus tells his story, and he creates new scenes, like the ambush of Telemachus at the temple of Athena in Pylos. 

There are plenty of changes and shifts in emphasis and yet, I seriously doubt that anyone who knows the Odyssey would be confused about whether or not Nolan is telling this myth. So, can this telling of an ancient epic serve us today, as it did the ancient Greeks? I think this depends on the questions we pose.

The questions that I’m considering are these:

If I’m Odysseus, who am I? Or if Odysseus represents my society, who are we?

If the gods signify fate or a lesson that must be learned, how do they play this role in Nolan’s film and what could be the message?

And if an epic is a story of a transitional time that enables us to recognize and carry what is valuable into the future, and points toward future possibilities, well, what does this version of the Odyssey suggest?

Because an epic like the Odyssey is a story about retrieving what’s valuable and necessary to the as yet unknown future, the power of memory and the act of remembrance are central themes. The story is a community recollection. A shared trip down memory lane. 

Homer’s Odyssey and Nolan‘s film begin with the song that commemorates the great deeds and memory of the missing hero Odysseus. Homer opens with an appeal to the Muse. Nolan shows us the bard standing in the great hall of the palace at Ithaca, pounding a rhythm on the floor with his staff as he tells the story of the Trojan war.

The stories that we remember and tell, and the way that we tell them– what is left out and what is included– are a key component of identity. Personal and cultural identity. You can’t have identity without a story, a context. The story includes the “when and where,” who you were with, and the what and why, of an event. These elements determine the significance and meaning of what you do, feel, and think. The ability to tell your story is an essential piece of self-definition. When someone tries to control or erase your story, they are trying to control or erase you. This is true for individuals and for communities.

In addition to establishing or reinforcing identity, our stories convey core values. A primary reason that different people attribute different meanings to the same event or symbol, is a difference in values. Values guide what feels relevant to a story. In fact, they determine whether or not you’ll remember and create a story around a given experience.

The stories that are treasured, told and retold, are memories and carriers of meaning and value. Stories are the way that humans hand down what is understood as important to survival and identity. They contain our legacy and the foundations of the present, so they are already shaping our future.

The Odyssey is about a great many things. You can find lots of interesting threads and themes in this story and yet, the power of memory and the creation of identity, meaning, and value through telling your story is at the heart of it. Odysseus discovers his story and realizes who he is, by remembering his journey and telling it. The characters in the story see him and themselves when they hear his story. 

Odysseus’s story, first the story of the wooden horse and the Trojan War, and later the story of his long, tortured journey home, remind and educate the listeners about who they are.

I think Nolan amplifies the memory theme and the pain that can attend remembering who you’ve been and what you’ve done. In Homer, Odysseus must rest and go to the effort of recollecting his adventures but there’s no evidence that he ever forgot them. He’s simply been too busy surviving. Nolan’s Odysseus has been eating the lotus flowers that foster forgetfulness on Calypso’s island. He’s even forgotten that he has a wife and son, something that Homer’s hero doesn’t always prioritize but does remember. 

Initially, the movie Odysseus is given the lotus by Calypso as part of her strategy to heal him. Body first, then mind. This Odysseus is tempted to fall back into forgetfulness once the memories begin but Calypso urges him to continue, to reclaim himself and his life through remembering and constructing the story. Nolan’s handling of the storytelling is quite different from Homer and yet the message is the same: first you must remember and tell your story and then you can go home. Then you’re ready. 

What is remembered and how does the hero feel about his story? Nolan deviates from Homer in ways I feel are significant, given the purpose of epic and the questions that I posed. Homer’s Odysseus sees the power of the gods. He understands his singular ability to survive the many trials and initiations — because he’s Odysseus, and because he’s had Athena‘s guiding presence throughout. There are many ways to interpret this, but I could summarize to say that Homer’s Odysseus sees that he is the champion of the goddess and that she is teaching him to rely less on blunt force and more on cleverness.

 In addition to guidance from the goddess, Homer’s Odysseus receives valuable help from other goddesses, nymphs, and women and tells his story in a way that recognizes and honors these gifts. The theme of initiation into feminine wisdom, as a prerequisite for healing the wounds of war and being fit to return as king in the coming new order led Joseph Campbell to suggest that The Odyssey is a series of initiations designed to bring the female and male powers into proper balance after the insanity of war. The hero’s unchecked male energy has to be modified.

Nolan diminishes the role of the gods in his version, and also the female characters. His Odysseus is a much simpler man in some respects. In this instance, he holds onto the romantic ideal of his one great, true, and perfect love, his wife Penelope. This fidelity is admirable to some modern viewers and certainly reflects cultural changes in the ideas about married love, but it takes some complexity out of the hero and his story. 

Nolan can’t cut Circe and Calypso from the myth– the roles they play are too important— and yet he drains the enchantment and beauty out of them along with any hint that Odysseus shared the sexual attraction or even offered the gratitude and honor due them. I think these shifts in the females and the gods create a sharper focus on Odysseus as a man, and features that Nolan introduces into his psychology: a propensity for self-reflection and conscience, even as he’s less amenable to initiation or learning from those he meets. 

Homer’s hero doesn’t display much regret or self-reflection although he does grieve his many losses. He does long for home. He is who he is and Athena gave him the idea of the horse, and he won the war. Yay Greeks. He gets instruction from greater powers like Athena, Hermes, and Circe and he follows them. Period. Hence the story he recollects and tells. 

Nolan’s Odysseus struggles with what we now call PTSD. When he remembers and tells his story, he meets his conscience, which is not a feature of the Homeric hero, and he has big regrets. Maybe this reflects Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind and/or maybe the weight of subsequent cultural developments over millenia, including modern psychology. Jung and others observed that we need psychology today because we’re no longer in touch with the gods, meaning they are no longer the bridge between conscious and unconscious aspects. I don’t know.

In any event, Homer’s Odysseus sees himself as a divinely guided world builder. Nolan‘s Odysseus believes he is a world destroyer. As he tells his wife Penelope when he finally makes it home, his trick with the Trojan horse was a major transgression against what Nolan calls “Zeus‘s law,” hospitality to strangers. In breaking this law by offering a deceptive gift to the Trojans and facilitating the destruction of their city, Odysseus has contributed to the collapse of all of civilization.

This makes the recognition of Odysseus by his old hunting dog Argus and his old nurse Eurycleia especially poignant. The man they remember predates Troy. Their recognition reminds him of this man. Their relatively simple love and loyalty, unencumbered by ethical questions, connects the hero to days before his terrible mistake and seems to offer the possibility of a fresh start. Odysseus is still remembered by some for moments other than the horse and the war.

An epic typically involves a journey to the underworld, a trip to this other realm, a place away from life, to retrieve a certain type of knowledge. The underworld is a place of remembrance, the ancient source of things where the spirit of the past resides. It’s a storehouse of memory and a place of revelation. What the hero learns there is crucial to his quest, to his personal transformation and so, to his community.

As I said earlier, epics are stories about transitional times, when notions of honor, order, and the right way of being and living together are being redefined. Homer’s Odysseus learns that the heroic ideal that fueled the Trojan War, the warrior’s quest for glory and the performance of great deeds that will be immortalized in song, the longing for immortality in the collective memory, is hollow. In the classic myth, Odysseus speaks with the most famous and esteemed of fallen Greek heroes, Achilles.

Odysseus praises him and the great honor he earned during the war. Looks like you’re still top dog down here too, he tells him, so you must not feel too bad about being dead. But Achilles shuts him down. That honor is worth nothing, he says, something that he understands now that he’s dead, died fighting. Life as a simple, ordinary person, enjoying simple, ordinary things, is a much better fate. Even being enslaved. Anything to be alive.

This Odysseus also makes the painful discovery that his mother has died in his absence. He grieves this loss and all of the time that he could have spent with her, rather than camped out on the beaches of Troy for a decade. His mother is joined by dozens and dozens of women, widows of the many fallen soldiers. Odysseus confronts the often-invisible costs–to him and men like him– of the war and this form of heroism.

Nolan takes mother and the women out of this powerful scene and he replaces Achilles with Sinon, the callow but loyal foot soldier character he created, loosely based on Elpinor in Homer’s version. Like Achilles, Sinon also feels betrayed by his war experience but now the betrayer is Odysseus. Sinon is upset because Odysseus didn’t tell him about the trick when he volunteered to guard the wooden horse until the Trojans claimed it. He didn’t know that his comrades were inside, that the war wasn’t really over. So, he feels poorly used by the man he admired above all others, and Odysseus’s attempts to explain the tactical logic of his keeping Sinon in the dark can’t address the young man’s anger.

The ancient Greeks hearing The Odyssey might question the warrior’s heroic quest for this type of glory and the cost of war. Questions raised by their most famous playwrights in later centuries; Euripides and “The Trojan Women, “for example. It seems that Nolan is once again questioning the trick of the horse as the means of victory. Sinon isn’t singing the praises of Odysseus like the bard who stands in the halls of kings. Is the message here about powerful decision makers who decide which lives are collateral damage? Was Sinon robbed of a choice that was rightfully his?

There is also the pivotal conversation with the blind prophet Tiresias, who has crucial information about the remaining challenges Odysseus and his men must face. In Homer’s version, all of the men can make it back to Ithaca if they leave the sun god Apollo’s cattle alone. It will require great leadership powers, maybe more than Odysseus possess, but it’s possible.

In Nolan’s version, Odysseus learns that his men will all die and he cannot protect them. The prophet tells him that the men will make bad choices and he can’t protect them from themselves. The prophet tells him this is the will of the gods, and Odysseus says that he defies the gods. But in the end, of course, he comes home to Ithaca alone. 

Here again, the more modern notions of personal choice, consequences and regret, the call to take responsibility for everyone and the limits to that concern. Our best intentions can only take us so far, especially, or at least, in a world in which we’re free to make our own mistakes. This reframe makes Odysseus and the myth more understandable to us today. The role of the gods in Nolan’s film is unclear in my opinion, but they’re not completely in charge. But what are the implications of this shift for these chaotic times of transition? 

And is Odysseus a hero? Some of us took up this question in a recent online conversation about the movie. The answers were “yes, no, and maybe.” I think this lack of consensus reflects current questions surrounding honor, order, heroism, and the right way of being and living together. 

 Is there a moral authority like the gods or the state who could– or should– rescue us from the confusion by laying out the laws, decreeing our fate? What responsibility do those who assume leadership have for our plight? What rights do we have, what do we owe each other, and what’s the role of personal choice and conscience?

I posed some questions to this myth earlier in this podcast. Have we found any answers to them? First, if I’m Odysseus, who am I? Or if Odysseus represents my community, who are we? Well, have we destroyed our world and brought about the end of civilization by breaking a fundamental law of respectful kindness toward the stranger? Have we become what we fear, as Odysseus discovered? Have we become the people from the sea?

What about the gods and the fate or lesson they signify? Does this version of the Odyssey suggest that there are forces beyond human control, the storms that we cannot prevent, for example, and at the same time, consequences for our actions? A god of inevitability perhaps, who remains after all the other figures of the divine have been rejected or faded away? Whose lesson is “don’t look beyond yourself for salvation?”

My final question is about the values we should carry into the future and the possibilities of that future. Let’s look at the end of the story.

In Nolan’s film, it’s clear that the breaking of what is called “Zeus‘s law” is the linchpin. The ancients called this xenia. Hospitality to strangers. Hospitality because a stranger might be a god in disguise. And hospitality because safe travel across any distance in those days, depended on reciprocity, mutual aid,  and the possibility of establishing trust.

Only a few characters, Penelope and Telemachus, for example, take this ancient practice seriously. Lots of people trespass against this law repeatedly, the suitors who abuse Odyssey’s household and family in his absence, being a prime example. In Homer and Nolan’s version, these spoiled rich guys, some of whom are liars and cowards, are meant to exemplify what’s gone rotten in the old order. And in both versions of the myth, Odysseus cleans house by slaughtering all of them. 

I don’t think Nolan could have changed this while remaining true to the myth. And yet, it gives one pause. The paradox it presents, of meeting the problem of violence with violence, or the questions raised about the necessity of this destruction to rebuild, to have a fresh start. 

In the Homeric version, Odysseus kills all of the suitors and has all of the enslaved women who allied themselves –allied themselves as much as a slave can!–with the suitors, hung. Very problematic today, resting as it does on the assumption that a powerful man can do what he wants with his human property. Zeus and Athena help. I’m not surprised that Nolan left the mass hanging out of his movie.

In Homer’s version, Zeus and Athena then deliver pacts and treaties that supersede earlier forms of civic order like xenia. These new protocols, in combination with fear of the gods, absolve Odysseus from any punishment for the murder of the suitors and compel their families to reconcile with Odysseus. This comes after the goddess has endowed Odysseus, his father, and his son with extraordinary power and allowed them to intimidate their enemies. 

Odysseus is king once more. There is no forced exile. In Emily Wilson’s translation, the epic poem ends with these lines:

“Odysseus, you are adaptable;
you always find solutions. Stop this war,
Or Zeus will be enraged with you.
He was glad to obey her. Then Athena made
the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace
for future times— still in her guise as mentor.”

In Homer’s version, the gods have re-shaped the world and human society, moving it one step closer to the principles and form of later Greek society. In this vision, a tricky man like Odysseus heeds the gods has an important place as hero and king. 

I’ve never found the ending of The Odyssey very satisfying. Maybe the satisfaction lies in parts of the stories that we’ve yet to piece together from surviving texts. Maybe the cultural divide is too deep or I lack sufficient knowledge of the ancient world to make sense of it. And maybe tellers of this epic struggle as many storytellers do, with the problem of ending on an open note that joins a tale of the past to the unknown future. Allowing it to be creative and provoking, rather than prescriptive.

At the end of Nolan‘s movie, Odysseus is exiled according to existing community rules and he leaves. Odysseus and Penelope sail into the west, into a beautiful sunset, leaving their son Telemachus as king of Ithaca. It felt corny to me and yet, given the problem of ending such a story, the metaphors of sunset and horizon gesture toward the endings of a troubled time and new possibilities waiting in the great beyond. It’s hopeful. And maybe the best course is admitting to the wrongs, setting right what can be addressed by the old tests and tools, and putting the future in younger, stronger, and more idealistic hands.

Nolan narrows the focus down to a family, a man, woman, and child linked by love and conscience in a world where the notion almost seems quaint. There are other myths about the end of the world in which the prospect of the future hinges on a family, couple, or small band of folks. The common values that guide and dictate their survival are humility, kinship, and respect for the larger forces in life. Appreciation of simple pleasures, friendship, community, and the wisdom in extending kindness and care to each other.

What do you make of this? The question of which values we should carry into the future to shape what’s possible isn’t one that can be left to any one person, filmmaker, or leader, to answer. 

I think it’s interesting that so many of us are watching and reading The Odyssey right now. Myth is a form of memory. Epics speak to cultures in transition. What will we take from this old story and make of this legacy?

Before we part ways, a big welcome to new email subscribers:  Angela, Robyn, Debbie, Shirley, Devon, Juan, Cindy, Elana, and Will. Welcome to Myth Matters!

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If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just, and life-centered, life-embracing world. 

And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Take good care of yourself and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.