Nolan's Odyssey

Nolan and the Great Tradition

There’s a tradition in Western Civilization. About every hundred years, a great storyteller takes a crack at their version of the Odyssey for their time (see below for the timeline).

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey fits right in that tradition’s middle. He didn’t aim to tell Homer’s version, (which was the version the ancient Greeks needed). He used the story and the characters to tell the story that he thought we needed.

His new film is the more like Tennyson’s Ulysses than anything else.

Tennyson’s poem isn’t a retelling. It’s a mirror. A mirror for Victorians. I went back and reread it after seeing Nolan’s movie over the weekend, and it was absolutely as much an inspiration for Nolan as Homer.

I think it was the right choice.

Tennyson wrote Ulysses in the expanding British empire, using Odysseus as a memory of greatness in a moment when The Empire was a restless seeker, whose hunger to sail beyond the known world was filled with the expansionist energies of the rising Victorian vision. It was one generation later that Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. The descriptions of the light of empire and the reality on the ground in the Congo were too incongruous to ignore.

That’s the American empire right now. Nolan makes you feel it that way: as loss, even while still trying to hold on to hope. We feel the contradiction between the ideal of America and the reality. (The revelation of the irony of USAID being named USAID while not giving aid is the perfect example.)

That’s the achievement of the film. It doesn’t ask you to admire an ancient hero. It asks us to recognize ourself, our own moment, our own fading certainty. It’s one more entry in the echo of Homer in the identity of the West.

So, whatever issues the movie has, I am glad to have another worthwhile entry in the tradition.

HOMERIC AND EPIC RETELLINGS IN THE WESTERN TRADITION (A tradition which survives because each writer does more than retell the old story. They inherits an imaginative map of the world and redraw it with style)

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (5th C BC)
The stories of Homer told for the people of Golden Age Greece.

Virgil (1st C BC) — Aeneid
Homer rewritten as the founding epic of Rome. Books 1–6 echo the Odyssey; Books 7–12 echo the Iliad. Aeneas becomes the model of duty, pietas, and civilization founded through suffering.

Ovid (8 AD) — Metamorphoses
Troy as a part of the larger story of transformation, desire, violence, and change.

Dictys of Crete, Dares the Phrygian (4th-5th C AD) — History of the Fall of Troy
Supposed eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War that became highly influential in medieval Europe.

Benoît de Sainte-Maure (12th C AD) — Roman de Troie
The Trojan War retold in a world of knights, courtly love, and romance. I hope to read this next summer, but English translations are expensive.

John Tzetzes and Eustathius of Thessalonica (12th C AD)
Important Orthodox Homeric Exegesis that includes Homer allegorized into history, cosmos, psychology, ethics. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library just put it into print in English.

Guido delle Colonne (13th C AD) — Historia destructionis Troiae
One of the principal ways medieval Europe encountered Troy. Haven’t been able to get my hands on it yet.

Dante (14th C AD) — Divine Comedy
Classical epic transformed into Christian cosmology. Virgil becomes Dante’s guide, and Odysseus is radically reinterpreted in Inferno XXVI.

Chaucer (14th C AD) — Troilus and Cressida
The Trojan story transformed into a meditation on love, fortune, betrayal, tragedy, and Christian providence. And anytime with Chaucer is well spent.

Ludovico Ariosto (16th C AD) — Orlando Furioso
Classical epic combined with medieval chivalric romance, magic, wandering heroes, love, war, and irony. I only know Ariosto from footnotes studying Edmund Spencer. He was a super-bestseller. Hope to read him eventually.

Shakespeare (17th C AD) — Troilus and Cressida
An unsettling reworking of Troy that investigates the connection between violence and heroic glory in an England surviving the civic upheaval of the 16th century.

John Milton (17th C AD) — Paradise Lost
Biblical history transformed into Christian epic. Milton adopts Homeric forms, casting Satan as the tragic Greek hero.

Alfred Tennyson (19th C AD) — Ulysses
Odysseus as a restless Victorian seeker who cannot remain at home and desires continued striving, exploration, and experience.

Andrew Lang (1907 AD) — Tales of Troy and Greece
A fun retelling for children. Andrew Lang is always a great read.

James Joyce (1922 AD) — Ulysses
The Odyssey mapped onto a single ordinary day in Dublin. Modern urban life, marriage, memory, fatherhood, identity, and consciousness is reframed as heroic wandering. It helps you feel the dislodgment of the early modern soul.

Nikos Kazantzakis (1938 AD) — The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
I haven’t read this one, but the internet tells me it is a modern spiritual journey in a twenty-four-book continuation of Homer.

Roger Lancelyn Green (1958 AD) - The Tale of Troy
Green did so much to form my young imagination that I can’t be objective. He is the g.o.a.t. Thank you to the librarian of Mullan Road Elementary School, Mr. Zagelo for putting his books into my hands and heart.

Amiri Baraka (1965 AD) — The System of Dante’s Hell
Found this one in a used book store. It’s a fascinating read. A masterful poet, Baraka’s prose in this novel makes the language itself feel infernal: compressed, rhythmic, unstable, violent, funny, lyrical. He shows that the Black Power movement in America, right or wrong, was absolutely a part of the Western Tradition. (Contains explicit sexual material, strong profanity, violence, and a brutal beating, but all in service of the story of the breakdown of civilization after modernism described as an urban hell-scape.)

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000 AD)
Simply a great movie, great soundtrack, and evidence that universal stories are flexible.

Derek Walcott (1990) — Omeros
Beautiful poetic Caribbean epic that discovers Homeric patterns already present in Caribbean life. Homer is more an echo than a source. Or perhaps showing the way we are an echo of Homer. I’ve read large sections of this one. The poetry is beautiful. Here’s a sample:

…The sky cracked asunder   
and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain   
which can lose an entire archipelago

in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof,   
hammering the balcony. I closed the French window,   
and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof

tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed
with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar   
of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered

Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector   
trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen   
as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure

I’d never see her again…