Insights The Odyssey and the Social Order
A clunky booking website and my failure to check dates before pressing ‘buy’ meant that I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on its opening night here in Nottingham. I have since had a lot of amusement from the social media responses.
Much of the criticism seems to turn on two misunderstandings, about the nature of myth and about the society in which the original text was recorded.
Whoever wrote the Odyssey, they were not creating a work of history. There may be historical elements, memories embedded in the stories, but this is not a deliberate attempt to recapture the lived experience of the past. The Odyssey is part of the transition from a predominantly oral society to one where text dominates. As scholars like Walter Ong 1and Jack Goody 2have observed, this is a truly revolutionary moment. Writing fixes human experience. Before writing, history is just what the oldest member of a community can remember. After writing, memories can be checked against records. Predominantly oral societies develop ways of prompting memory. Stories like those in the Odyssey are built of formulaic blocks, structured by poetic metres and stock phrases that fit those beats – “wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered dawn,” “grey-eyed Athena”…
It is also of the essence of an oral society that stories evolve and change each time they are told. The teller incorporates elements of the contemporary setting and fine-tunes the narrative to fit the sensitivities of the audience. Jack Goody has an account of revisiting a Nigerian community 10 years after first audio recording its stories to discover that one of them now incorporates a reference to the man who once came with a recorder to learn it… Homeric scholars have long complained about the lack of proper closure, by their standards, in the original: Nolan adapts Peter Jackson’s final scene in Lord of the Rings. When people complain about Nolan taking liberties with the original, we should ask “what original?” There is a text, but this simply transcribes an oral tradition rather than being an authoritative statement of a creator’s intentions like a modern novel.
Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the whole was ever performed in this way. Would the historic audience have had the patience to sit through all 12,000 lines – 13 hours in a modern audiobook? More likely that each separate chapter was performed on its own, perhaps with some additional improvisation to supply context. Nolan had the challenge of compressing the work into a film of manageable length. Inevitably, some parts are omitted, condensed or reinterpreted to suit contemporary sensibilities. The director’s choices can be debated but choices are inevitable, unless working on the scale of Game of Thrones, where there are still questionable omissions.
Two choices do seem to be particularly worth discussion, perhaps reflecting my sociologist’s interest in the nature of order: the “law of Zeus” and the treatment of women.
There are frequent references through the film, which are not matched in the original, to the “law of Zeus.” At times, this is clearly the Greek notion of xenia, the proper way to treat guests, visitors or strangers through the offer of hospitality, with the expectation that others will in due course reciprocate. This is not a specific exchange so much as a generalized ideal, as the basis of a good society. In practice, the scope of the obligation is clearly limited to respectable citizens and does not extend fully to beggars, vagrants or slaves. Telemachus only enjoys the generosity of Nestor and Menelaus once he has been recognized as a princeling.
At other points, though, the “law of Zeus” seems to refer to the rule of law more generally, and to law as the basis of an international order. This ideal has been the basis of peace, culture and prosperity across the Greek world. It has, however, been destroyed by the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, whether in the form of Helen’s elopement with Paris, the official casus belli of the Trojan War, or by Menelaus’s wounded pride at the loss of his wife or by jealousy of the economic success of Troy and its control of trade routes. (These trade routes, incidentally, would inevitably have brought diversity to the Greek world, whether as merchants or slaves.) Other commentators have noted the parallels with Oppenheimer: the destruction of Hiroshima and the sack of Troy both traumatize the creative thinkers whose work has enabled these catastrophes. There are no good outcomes for a world that abandons rule-based order and glorifies unrestrained warfighting.
If this seems classic Hollywood liberalism, the treatment of women is strikingly conservative. The heroine of the piece is clearly Penelope, preserving her fidelity to a husband who she has not seen for 20 years and may well be dead. Her world is one of the film’s elements that is closest to the reality of the times when the Odyssey was written down. During most of the classical Greek period, respectable women were as sequestered as in conservative Islamic societies today. Penelope is allowed to be frustrated that she cannot act on her own behalf to take control of Ithaca but must act through her husband or her son – but she accepts this. As expected of her class, she also expresses no unrequited sexual desire despite the absence of her husband. In the original, her slaves and handmaidens are part of the provisions of the palace enjoyed by the suitors, for which they are eventually executed. Women’s sexuality is obliterated by Nolan, along with their agency.
This is underlined in the treatment of Circe and Calypso, both of whom effectively reduce Odysseus to their sex slave for periods of time. In the original, readers or listeners are invited to contrast their lustful actions with those of the virtuous Penelope, just as she is also contrasted with Helen who is led astray by her desires. In the film, Calypso becomes a celebrity therapist for Odysseus’s PTSD. Circe’s demonic powers get more expression, when his crew are turned into pigs, but are linked to an incongruous fear of rape. If she has so much power, why is she afraid? When Odysseus reassures her that she won’t be raped if he gets his men back, she more or less just goes, “Oh, all right, then” and reverses the spell. The year-long battle of wits between her and Odysseus is waved away. Nolan is fully entitled to rework his source material to create a myth for his own time – but the representation of women seems off-key.
The Odyssey is a great cinematic experience that fully deserves its enthusiastic reception. It is a measure of its status that it has received such a passionate response from many who would not otherwise consider themselves critics. There is much more to be said about the soundscape and the visual elements, which quote and reinvent many previous epic movies. Circe’s transformation of men to pigs is brutal but recognizable as a homage to Neil Jordan’s Company of Wolves, for example. This film will be on lists of all-time great movies for a generation and the subject of numerous dissertations. See it now before it is overtaken by its own mythology.
References
Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy. Methuen & Co Ltd.
Goody, Jack. 2001. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture, and the State. Cambridge Univ. Press.
