Read or download the formatted PDF: Notes for Discussion of Nolan’s Odyssey
The story of Odysseus has been retold many times in different dress throughout the history of Western literature. Like Odysseus himself, whom Homer describes as polutropon, turning and turned, the story itself turns and is turned by authors who discover possibilities in its retelling for understanding the times in which they were living. Odysseus has been depicted as a trickster, a master of crimes, scelerum inventor, as Vergil names him, but also as every man, woman, and child who learns, in the words of Theodore Roethke, by going where they have to go.
1. The victor’s tears
In the episode of the Phaiakians, Homer describes Odysseus’s tears (his identity not yet revealed) following Demodocus’s song of the Trojan Horse, a song Odysseus himself asks for, with an extended simile that likens the victorious man’s grief to a captive woman’s suffering:
That was the song the famous harper sang
but great Odysseus melted into tears,
running down from his eyes to wet his cheeks . . .
as a woman weeps, her arms flung round
her darling husband, a man who fell in battle,
fighting for town and townsmen,
trying to beat the day of doom from home and children.
Seeing the man go down, dying, gasping for breath,
she clings for dear life, screams and shrills —
but the victors, just behind her,
digging spear-butts into her back and shoulders,
drag her off in bondage, yoked to hard labor, pain,
and the most heartbreaking torment wastes her cheeks.
So from Odysseus’ eyes ran tears of heartbreak now.
Odyssey 8.586–599, translated by Robert Fagles
Nolan’s screenplay: The film omits the entire Phaeacian scene yet retains throughout the sense of the Homeric simile.
ODYSSEUS (remembering Troy): “We violated all that’s ever sacred between people . . .”
“And turned a fight into a hunt.”
“To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire . . .”
“Including his home.”
In the screenplay’s later return to Troy, the woman pleading for mercy is identified with the figure previously seen as Athena, who in Nolan’s screenplay functions as his conscience (pp. 173–174).
2. The Sirens’ song
In Homer:
‘Come closer, famous Odysseus —Achaea’s pride and glory —
moor your ship on our coast so you can hear our song!
Never has any sailor passed our shores in his black craft
until he has heard the honeyed voices pouring from our lips,
and once he hears to his heart’s content sails on, a wiser man.
We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured
on the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so —
all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!’
Odyssey 12.200–207, translated by Robert Fagles
Nolan:
EURYLOCHUS: What was the Sirens’ song?
ODYSSEUS: All the things you’d want it to be. Then all things you wish you
never wished for . . .
(The ship glides past the rocks, passing close enough to make out
NAKED FEMALE FORMS on the misty rocks, MOUTHS OPEN in
song, sitting atop BONES and BONES . . .
. . . It told you what you most want is what you most can’t have, and
what you most can’t have is what you already had and lost . . .
It was the song of all the promises I’ve failed to keep . . .
And it told me I don’t really want to go home.
(Odysseus rubs tears of shame from his face.)
3. Remembering and refusing to know
Unlike Homer’s Odysseus, who remembers Ithaca and longs for it, Nolan’s Odysseus must recover personal memory.
Homer:
“She beguiles him that he may forget Ithaca.”
“But even so I wish and long day by day to reach my home, and to see the day of my return.”
Odyssey 1.56–57 and 5.219–220, translated by A. T. Murray
Nolan:
Calypso: “But what if remembering destroys your happiness?”
Odysseus: “Then it wasn’t real. Or earned.” (screenplay, 42–43).
Calypso: “You need to remember.” Odysseus: “No, I don’t. I don’t want to know the truth. I’m
happy here with you.” (screenplay, p. 117).
4. Violence, forgetting, and settlement
Homer:
The deaths of the suitors do not end the problem of the past. Zeus proposes a forgetting of the killing of sons and brothers and a restoration of peace; Athena’s final action establishes binding oaths.
Odysseus and his gallant son charged straight at the front lines,
slashing away with swords, with two-edged spears and now
they would have killed them all, cut them off from home
if Athena, daughter of storming Zeus, had not cried out
in a piercing voice that stopped all fighters cold,“Hold back, you men of Ithaca, back from brutal war!
Break off —shed no more blood —make peace at once!”
So Athena commanded. Terror blanched their faces,
they went limp with fear, weapons slipped from their hands
and strewed the ground at the goddess’ ringing voice.
They spun in flight to the city, wild to save their lives,
but loosing a savage cry, the long-enduring great Odysseus,
gathering all his force, swooped like a soaring eagle —
just as the son of Cronus hurled a reeking bolt
that fell at her feet, the mighty Father’s daughter,
and blazing-eyed Athena wheeled on Odysseus, crying,
hold back now! Call a halt to the great leveler, War —
don’t court the rage of Zeus who rules the world!”
So she commanded. He obeyed her, glad at heart.
And Athena handed down her pacts of peace
between both sides for all the years to come —
the daughter of Zeus whose shield is storm and thunder,
yes, but the goddess still kept Mentor’s build and voice.
Odyssey 24, translated by Robert Fagles
Nolan:
The screenplay instead has Telemachus take the kingship while Odysseus departs westward with Penelope (p. 191). Its final dialogue imagines the survival of songs and the recovery of civilization, but also the return of forgetting:
Penelope: “Why will the stories only be sung?” Odysseus: “Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.”
Penelope: “Civilization will rise again . . .” Odysseus: “A new dawn will break over the darkened world . . .” “And our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” (screenplay, pp. 191–192).
5. Selected other Homer–Nolan differences
The Cyclops. The Cyclops. Homer’s escape depends on the name “Nobody,” followed by Odysseus’s dangerous announcement of his real name. The screenplay retains the stake and sheep but replaces the wordplay with an arrow provoking pursuit (Odyssey 9; screenplay, pp. 51–58)
The oar and the final voyage. The oar and the final voyage. In Homer, Teiresias instructs Odysseus to carry an oar inland until it is mistaken for a winnowing fan; only then can he appease Poseidon. In the screenplay, Odysseus sails west
The suitors. The suitors. Homer’s Odysseus kills Antinous first; the screenplay postpones his death and leaves Odysseus wounded and some suitors alive (Odyssey 22; screenplay, pp. 188–190).
6. The first line of the Odyssey
Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον . . .
(Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polutropon . . .)
Tell me, Muse, of a man of many turns . . .
Polutropon holds together two aspects of Odysseus: turning and turned.
Comparison: Chapman’s “many a way”; Pope’s “wisdom’s various arts”; Fitzgerald’s “skilled in all ways of contending”; Fagles’s “man of twists and turns”; Lombardo’s “cunning hero”; Wilson’s “complicated man”; and Mendelsohn’s “roundabout ways.” These are fragments, not complete first lines; the original board supplies their fuller contexts.
LSJ’s senses include much-travelled, versatile or wily, and various; and, with reference to disease, complicated.
7. Hospitality and the stranger
“All strangers and beggars come from Zeus,” spoken by Eumaeus.
The sequence of hospitality: welcome, care, food, and rest before asking for identity. What does it mean to care for someone before hearing their story?
8. Odysseus in Dante and Tennyson
In Inferno 26, Ulysses and Diomedes share a flame; Virgil names the horse, the stratagem involving Achilles, and the theft of the Palladium among their offences. Ulysses then tells of departing from Circe for a further voyage instead of returning home: this is an alternative destiny, not simply a sequel to Homer’s homecoming: This is an alternative destiny, not simply a sequel to Homer’s homecoming:
né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta
del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore
lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,
vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore
ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e de li vizi umani e del valore;“Neither tenderness for my son,
nor reverence for my old father,
nor the love I owed Penelope,
which should have made her happy,
could overcome within me
the ardour I had to become
experienced in the world
and in human vices and worth.”
Dante, Inferno 26.94–99, Italian and literal rendering.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.“Consider your origin:
you were not made to live like beasts,
but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”
Inferno 26.118–120, Italian and literal rendering.
He describes the voyage as “de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo,” “we made wings of our oars for the mad flight” (26.125); his account ends “infin che ’l mar fu sovra noi richiuso,” “until the sea closed over us” (26.142).
Tennyson:
Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” excerpt
Final questions
Can a familiar story preserve our illusions? Can a new telling disturb them? What would it mean to be changed by remembering?
Auden:
“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety