Excitement is growing around Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film version of the Odyssey, fuelled by both his status as a storyteller and the story he is adapting. Goethe called Homer’s the Iliad, depicting key events near the end of the ten-year siege of Troy, and the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus’ ten-year journey home afterwards “the two most important books in the world”. E V Rieu, in the introduction to his translation, claimed they constitute the first expression of the Western mind in literary form. They are epic poems, yet Rieu also describes The Iliad as the first tragedy and the Odyssey, with its “well-knit plot, its psychological interest, and its interplay of character” the first novel. They are the foundational myths of the Greeks. Even if there is some doubt over who Homer was, he tells us how we became who we are. Because of who I am — a veteran and a father of boys — there are two areas of psychological interest that particularly resonate with me.
The Odyssey’s monsters, witches, gods and heroes are more than just entertaining fantasy. As Adam Nicholson states in The Mighty Dead, “Every aspect of it is grand metaphor. Odysseus is not sailing on the Mediterranean but through the fears and desires of a man’s life”. I see the same metaphor as psychologist Jonathan Shay sees: Odysseus’ journey as a metaphor for the challenges of a soldier’s psychological journey home from war. In Odysseus in America he sees the flowers on the island of the Lotus-eaters that lead you to forget of home and the cannibalistic Laestrygonians who devour many of Odyseus’ men, representing drug and alcohol addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and the moral injury he witnessed millennia later in returning Vietnam veterans.
After the camaraderie of the battlefield and the intense experience of being alive that comes from being close to death, it can be hard to want to return to civilian monotony. Many seek refuge in activities that delay that return, some delay it indefinitely. When the Sirens attempt to lure Odysseus on to their rocks they do so by claiming they “know all the pains that Archaens and Trojans once endured / on the spreading plains of Troy”. His crew, with beeswax in their ears, cannot hear the song. Odysseus who is tied to the mast on his own orders cannot get them to turn back, even though his heart was “filled with such a longing to listen”. Soldiers go to war and adventurers go on adventures so that others can tell their stories and remember their names. The Sirens provide an invitation to stay, listen to these stories, and be understood. To go home but to Troy instead of Ithaca.
The story we hear questions the ideals of glory and honour that took the Greeks to Troy. When Odysseus travels to Hades he meets heroic Achilles, the epitome of the warrior code. Achilles paid for his lust for glory with an early death. In Hades he is ashen, dull, shade of his former brilliance. He pines for more life not more glory and desperately seeks news of his son. Despite Odysseus lamenting on a number of occasions that he would have been better off with the glory of a battlefield death, his goal of surviving and getting home to his family makes him more akin to the soldiers I knew.
Odysseus’ manliness is centred around his resilience, adaptability, and as he moves restlessly through the dreamscape world his stories create, his ability to evade danger (that often manifests in the female form). But it is also about wielding the sword and spear and the application of violence. Homer does not moralise or provide us moral role models. Classical Greeks and Romans frequently saw Odysseus as an anti-hero, who used disguise, lies and deceit for questionable ends.
Odysseus is a complex and many-sided man, as many of those are, who today volunteer for military service in our largely peaceful society. He is an adventurer, a pirate, a storyteller, a competent and brave warrior whose war is over, a king far from his kingdom, a husband away from his wife, an absent father and an adulterer who is the plaything of goddesses. But we see despite time and distance it is the connections with those at home that define him. Whenever the clouds clear, they are his polaris showing him the direction to keep moving. He is offered immortality by the nymph Calypso but refuses, choosing the love of Penolope, Telemachus and home, all of which he may never see again, but give him his purpose regardless.
The abandoned Telemachus, bullied by the suitors, attempts to step into the sunlight from the shadow of his father, who he knows only through myth. As parents we influence our children as much through the example of who they think we are, as by anything we say or do when we think they are watching. Here, the parent who has remained is resented, the wanderer is worshipped. Telemachus constantly and insecurely questions his strength. He is on land, but adrift. The gods step in, with Athena taking the form of the character Mentor (from whom we get the word mentor) and advising Telemachus to seek word of Odysseus from his old comrades Menelaus and Nestor. He sets sail putting himself in danger on the “barren” or “unharvestable sea” to prove himself. You meet men like Odysseus when you leave the sanctuary of home.
Homer does not tell us what we should be like, but shows us what we can be like
When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, before returning to Penelope, he reveals himself to his son. After telling his story and asking little of Telemachus’ life, he enlists him in his scheme. This includes the famous stringing of his bow. To encourage the suitors Telemachus steps up. We are told that he might have succeeded if Odysseus had stopped him to allow his plan to proceed. Is there also a fear that while Telemachus will soon be strong enough to string the bow, Odysseus will soon not be? For one generation to bloom another must whither. Odysseus has been told by Tiresias the prophet that he must wander again, this time far inland, to finally appease the offended Poseidon who has been behind much of Odysseus’ suffering. With the suitors dispatched, this last journey could allow Telemachus to rule, with Odysseus handing him his throne, like his own father, Laertes, who is now content tending his farmland, did. Within the epic, Telemachus’ journey ends with him silencing the handmaids who slept with the bullying suitors with rope around their necks, claiming that they do not deserve the clean death Odysseus has sentenced them to.
Homer does not tell us what we should be like, but shows us what we can be like. He does not flinch from the consequences of violence, ego, loss and love, absence and presence. Homer shows us what remains deep within us from the pre-urban, nomadic, heroic world that was already in the past when he wrote his epics down, and the challenge of reconciling that with our urbane, settled, life. A challenge we for the most part we remain willfully blind to, so much so, we are still surprised when violence occurs and wars begin. Homer forces us to confront what is still within us beneath the thin veneer of civilisation.
The Odyssey asks us to consider the very nature of story-telling, as lies, exaggerations and tall tales vie with one another in a fractured timeline (the epic starts ‘in the middle of things’), something Nolan has always been interested in. As Tim O’Brien rightly claims in How to Tell a True War Story, war can have the feel of a “great ghostly fog”. There is no clarity, but much chaos. Everything swirls, time is drawn out, then compressed. Lightning can strike from a cloudless sky, a sudden storm emerges on a quiet sea. Fate and luck triumph over toil and skill. Right and wrong become indistinguishable. In disorientation the only certainty is ambiguity. In war you can lose your sense of the definite, even your sense of truth itself, and O’Brien claims, therefore, that in a true war story nothing is absolutely true. The Odyssey captures this perhaps more than any other war story there is.
The troubled world Homer describes remains strangely familiar. Nolan will find his own areas of psychological interest as he joins a millennia-long conversation with the mighty dead. Join in. We are all on a journey, following in the wake of those that came before, trying to get somewhere that seems out of reach, suffering setbacks, playing roles, trying to work out who we are, trying to connect, trying to sate our nomadic souls, and sometimes just trying to survive. Ultimately, Homer’s poem shows us that it is the stories we create on the way that are more important than where we end up.
