If you spent one to two years when you were 16-17 years old and full of wild physical and sexual energy assiduously translating Homer’s The Odyssey from the ancient Greek in little (7” x 4”) gray books where you placed your English translation interlineally, trying to get every word precisely right and the syntax flowing for the hawk-eyed inspection of a Greek obsessed Jesuit priest, you too might have felt wounded like Odysseus by a wild boar.
But the wounds we carry with the years can still impel us “to follow knowledge like a sinking star / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought,” as Tennyson has Odysseus say in his poem “Ulysses” (Latin for Odysseus). Knowledge not as simple as thinking, but like feeling your way out of a dark cave towards the light.
We boys at Regis High School in New York City in the early 1960s were supposed to be – I assume – hunting for the core meaning of it all during this academic exercise, to take some lesson to heart, while everywhere you looked outside the book nymphs and sirens beckoned you in the real world of the streets and subways to raise your eyes and take a good look. Rather than Homer’s “rosy fingered dawn,” you would see the rosy lips of a girl on the subway sitting opposite you, a lustrous living nymph in a school uniform who said nor sang nary a word to you with those rich lips but whose eyes sent a vibe that cast a spell far more exciting than Calypso’s (meaning “she who conceals things”) because what a girl on the subway concealed behind her clothes was far more enticing to a boy than even translating from ancient Greek the words “He [Odysseus] was so intense the lustrous goddess [Calypso] smiled, stroked him with her hand, savored his name . . . .” as Robert Fagles does in his 1996 translation.
Those who have read The Odyssey know that it begins in medias res—Latin for “in the middle of things,” that it’s the earliest example of nonlinear storytelling that we have, and that it was first passed down orally as sung by rhapsodists in ancient Greece. “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story” is how it begins and how Bob Dylan appropriately ends his Nobel Prize for literature lecture.
We begin where we remember or where the Muse takes us, and we are always in the middle of things even when we start near the end.
We live at a time when the nature of reality and illusion is particularly fragile, time and space jumbled like dice in a cup, and nostalgia (Greek algos “pain, grief, distress” + nostos “homecoming”) for a real or imaginary home quite intense. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined it “liquid modernity,” which is not much different from Homer’s time, so we should be wary of projecting backward our supposed wisdom, claiming those ancient Greeks were delusional in what we term their mythology, illusions, and unapologetic savagery, when we have our equivalents. Everybody knows in their hearts that it’s still the same old story, the fight for love and glory.
Of course, we are all, like Odysseus, on a journey to somewhere or nowhere, depending on how we interpret or sing the songs of our lives. There’s always someone or something to blame for our fates – the stars, the gods, biology – responsibility never being popular, like existentialism, in the United States. Lady Luck doesn’t hurt when we roll the dice, but Tyche is also a Greek goddess who hides in our hands when we cross our fingers. Try as moderns may, the gods never went away. It is one reason why The Odyssey still resonates.
In Book I of The Odyssey, Zeus says, “Ah, how shameless – the way these mortals blame the gods.” Americans have always blamed the Russians for war and Trojan Horse trickery – the Russians are claimed to be always coming and secreting themselves within our institutions – and to the Russians we now can add the Iranians, the Chinese, et al. For our wars we always have others to blame, if not gods then devils, whose foreign names are easy to recite.
And Telemachus, Odysseus’s son by Penelope, says, as if he were a modern music critic, “It’s always the latest song, the one that echoes last in the listener’s ears, that people praise the most.” I think of the blind rhapsodist Ray Charles’ 1962 song, “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” which was Number 2 on the Billboard Charts when we Regis boys graduated, having memorized the first twenty-five or so lines of The Odyssey in Greek. Yet I suspect those opening lines – “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story” – live in memory more than Ray’s soulful “I’ve made up my mind / To live in memory of the lonesome times.” Or Dylan’s warning that “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” first sung at The Gaslight in Greenwich Village also in 1962.
I wonder if lonesome means nothing at all to my old classmates, to paraphrase another Dylan song? It did to me during those four years of a classical education whose special effects were planted in our brains by shrewd Jesuits whose intentions were shrouded in rhetoric. Odysseus, after all, was a trickster, a liar, an ancient Jesuit or modern politician, trained to talk out of both sides of his mouth. Was this the lesson being imparted?
Now that the media is replete with commentary on the new filmed version of “The Odyssey” by Christopher Nolan, each of us might wish to contemplate how – until we learn to turn our stories into songs as Odysseus did when listening to the blind bard Demodocus – we will ever find ourselves on our journeys home, even if our arrivals are but temporary respites from a journey that never ends, except perhaps in death, a death Odysseus gladly chose over Calypso’s promise of immortality if he would stay with her on her island, Ogygia. Drugs only work so long before a reckoning with reality moves us to move on.
Roberto Calasso, in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, writes this:
When Calypso told him she was going to let him leave, Odysseus suspected her words might conceal some other trick to trap him there, ‘some other evil.’ They were enemies fighting it out to the last with their respective weapons, in silence and without witnesses. Feeling a stab of tenderness, Calypso called Odysseus alitrόs, ‘rascal,’ and ‘she caressed him with her hand.’ Odysseus would never hear another woman use a word at once so intimate and so accurate.
Nolan’s film, “The Odyssey,” is a trickster’s delight. It is an exciting action picture full of grotesque monsters, violent sea storms, and heart-stopping violence, staples of summer blockbusters. Teenage boys, especially those with a rudimentary knowledge of the story, will be especially entranced by Nolan’s expertise in creating scenes that explode on the screen. So will adult children. Being tricked and excited by minatory creatures is very popular.
Cinematically, it entices. Although Nolan probably didn’t intend it, I found the scenes, with Circe turning Odysseus’s men into pigs as they ate and the one-eyed giant Polyphemus eating the men, horrifyingly hilarious, a throwback to the special effects scene in “The Exorcist,” where the young girl Reagan’s head spins. The hunger for gross scenes is widespread in a society of screens that shield you from reality.
There’s a whole lot of eating going on in “The Odyssey,” and it’s not to the advantage of men, who are portrayed as glutinous pigs who deserve what they get, whether it’s the fault of nature, the gods, or Odysseus’s miscalculations. Odysseus himself, unlike the other men in the film, is never portrayed as eating ravenously. He has manners and self-control and never leaves crumbs of food on his face. As I recall, the only time we see him eat is when he delicately munches on the lotus flower that Calypso offers him, when she hopes it will induce him to want to stay with her on her island and be immortal. The drug doesn’t work after many years of lascivious living with a goddess whose cave was always open, so he lucidly renounces immortality and heads home on his raft, perhaps thinking it’s not what you eat but what eats you that is important, as his hunger for home is eating him alive.
The English writer D.H. Lawrence once wrote: “Don’t let the living-dead eat you up.” Good advice for us all.
Nolan is of course entitled to create an Odysseus that he likes, and that will serve his purposes. He is entitled to mix and match scenes, alter time sequences, and modernize language and lore. He is entitled to eliminate certain ultra-violent scenes from a film for a general audience. It’s his movie, and he has done all this, and done it brilliantly. He is a very talented creative artist.
But it’s important to see what he has done with the book, which in ways is very different from the film, no matter how it is translated. There are certain facts in this epic poetic fiction that can’t be erased. Nolan’s Odysseus is not the clearly clever rascal, the liar, the trickster, the brutally violent man that kills with glee and without remorse right to the end. He is not the Odysseus who, after slaughtering the suitors when he finally gets home, orders his son Telemachus to round up the women who had sex with the suitors, have them clean up all the blood and guts in the hall, and then, as he orders, “. . . . march the women out of the great hall—between the roundhouse and the courtyard’s strong stockade—and hack them with your swords, slash out all their lives—blot out of their minds the joys of love they relished under the suitors’ bodies, rutting on the sly.”
Telemachus carries out his father’s orders, calling them “You sluts—the suitors whores!” and hanging them by “nooses yanking their necks up, one by one so all might die a pitiful, ghastly death . . . they kicked up heels for a little—not for long.” Then they grab Melanthius, Odysseus’s goatherd who betrays him with the suitors, and with a knife chop off his nose and ears, rip his genitals out, and hack off his hands and feet. This is not a redeemed Odysseus and son confessing their sins and promising to go and sin no more. It is sheer brutality, similar to what the CIA did in Vietnam with their Phoenix Program or U.S. soldiers did at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Guantanamo and their black site torture chambers, what British MI6 does, the Israelis do to Palestinians, etc. Nothing new or original here, just the way it is around the world. It’s the terrible truth that should always be told, not concealed behind a filmic veil of false confessions and a happy ending.
How many times have you heard Trump or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or either of the Bushes or Obama or Biden or Tony Blair, et al. express remorse for their brutal wars? Jackals with smiling faces are they, killers in suits and clean hands, sitting in air-conditioned offices, not teenage Catholic boys rushing to confession for masturbating.
But there are many low-level military members who have expressed remorse for what they did while in uniform (Veterans for Peace, Ron Kovic, and many others), but they are generally ignored while the band plays on and the great heroes have statues and libraries erected in their honor.
Nolan’s ending where Odysseus and Penelope get ready to sail away into the setting sun to atone for all his warrior’s sins is pure Hollywood. It doesn’t happen at the end of the book. It’s wishful thinking on his part, a political statement that he wants to be true, but it is not. It’s a trick, a Trojan Horse, slipped to the audience as a gift when its creative deception, if grasped, leads to the death of a truth hard to bear but necessary to hear.
The killers don’t apologize. They just sail on.
But as I end, I would like to return to my opening musings about being tossed into this “wine dark sea” of such a stormy story as a teenager, for there is a connection between my beginning and end.
Fate brought me to Regis High School as a result of passing a scholarship test, as did my classmates. We were crowned as kings of the smart set, Catholic boys endowed with dazzling intelligence who would be subject to our Jesuit teachers’ tests of guile and endurance that, if passed, would result in crowns of laurel leaves.
The school was a pressure cooker, dramatized by Robert Marasco, who taught Greek at Regis but left and wrote a well-received Broadway play that won five Tony Awards, Child’s Play (originally called The Dark ) about the ominous atmosphere of the school. It is a play suffused with terror. The students are violent and suspected of being demonically possessed; some faculty are hateful and paranoid; a priest is drunk; students violently blind a fellow student and lash another to the crucifix over the altar in the chapel; and an aggrieved faculty member commits suicide by jumping out of an upper-floor window. Sexual tension suffuses the drama.
It is pressure cooker fiction where Marasco brilliantly grasps the atmosphere – not any facts that I am aware of – that I felt during my four years at the school. I don’t know if any of my former classmates felt the same, except for a childhood friend who entered the school with me. He was expelled for academic reasons after freshman year, a common occurrence back then. He told me he had been sexually abused by one of the Jesuit priests who had taken him on a weekend retreat. That priest remained at the school for all my years there. He was esteemed for his publications about movies.
The Odyssey was at the heart of this educational journey that required four years of Latin and three years of Greek, a requirement that the school has since dropped for interesting reasons. It was a hard but fruitful curriculum from which we learned much, and that led me, by chance, to major in the Classics in college, for which I am very grateful. To read Virgil and Horace and Homer and Ovid in Latin and Greek for many years was to be gifted with the beauty of language and storytelling unparalleled. What more could a writer ask for?
Such language is absent from Nolan’s film, which is understandable, since it is next to impossible to transfer the meter of epic verse with its long lines – dactylic hexameters – into a movie actor’s mouth. So while Nolan has rightfully taken the artistic liberties to use colloquial speech in his movie, his film lacks the beautiful language of Homer’s version, which is no small thing.
In writing about his “Odyssey,” critics often refer to his last film – the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer – which was a big hit. J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the smart boys, was a key developer of atomic weapons. In the film, Nolan portrays him, like his Odysseus, as contrite for what he did. This too is stretching the truth to fit a wish. It is crocodile tears, what the imprisoned and executed German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison before he was executed by Hitler for opposing Hitler’s mass atrocities, called “cheap grace.” It is grace we bestow on ourselves, forgiveness without requiring real repentance, feats of self-glorification mastered by Hollywood.
The creation of the atomic bomb and its use on the Japanese was demonic – pure evil. Robert Oppenheimer was not a tragic figure as Kai Bird, the coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the book that inspired the film Oppenheimer, claimed and Nolan portrayed. He was complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterward, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future. Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical and big tech industries, or the CIA, to regulate themselves. Or Odysseus to confess his sins. Anyone who would give the name “Trinity” to the site where the first bomb was exploded had a twisted mind. “Oppenheimer” excludes scenes from the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but includes one wherein scientists rapturously celebrate with flag waving the exploding of the bomb over Hiroshima.
There is a way of always having it both ways, yes and no, true and false – everything paradoxical and two-headed. It’s a mode of elite thinking and writing that never reaches a definitive conclusion, never pins the tail on the donkey. It’s Orwell’s Doublespeak. It’s the way the mainstream and legacy media and exclusive educational institutions “communicate” to confuse and hide their political support for the ruling elites. It’s slippery and sophisticated verbiage meant to avoid “harsh” conclusions. It’s the language of the middle of the road, the smart set’s way of suggesting with T.S. Eliot’s poetic character J. Alfred Prufrock (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem I also had to memorize at Regis) that they are ever so reasonable while devoid of Prufrock’s self-mockery:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool. [my emphasis]
But it conceals an arrogance behind its tone of moderation. It is the way of the establishment posing as reasonable – politic, cautious, and meticulous. It’s the endless debaters club where pseudo-debates conceal facts already confirmed and sly rhetoric masks intent.
The Odyssey is a wonderful story for many reasons. Odysseus is the greatest and oldest rascal, deceiver, and trickster in the Western tradition. He is unapologetically brutally violent. As Roberto Callasso says of him, “Odysseus was the first to have mediation triumph over the immediate, postponement over presence, the twisted mind over straightforwardness.”
Yes, the twisted mind. Odysseus flips what Euripides has Jocasta, the mother and wife of Oedipus, say: “Not to say what you think is the way of the servant.” Freedom of speech was not Odysseus’s thing; twisted talk was his medium. He was an early Jesuit, and that, I think, is why we boys read The Odyssey line by line so carefully. It was the true but masked meaning for why the Jesuits had us focus on it. The way to achieve success and lasting fame, even when dead, was never to talk straight or personally. Success comes by mastering the art of talking out of both sides of your mouth while convincing yourself you are honest.
But I confess to Almighty God, to Zeus, to Minerva and the entire crew, that I have sinned through my fault, and that I am heartily sorry, especially for the times I held my tongue when I should have spoken freely. I will go and sin no more.
James Joyce, also trained by Jesuits, said this about writing:
The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously.