What to Know Before Seeing Nolan's "The Odyssey"
Harvard’s David Elmer, PhD ’05, on homecoming, hospitality, and recognition in the ancient Greek classic
The ancient Greek epic poem, The Odyssey, tells of the hero Odysseus and his 19-year journey home after the Trojan War. A cornerstone of Western culture, the story gets its latest retelling this week with the release of director Christopher Nolan’s film of the same name. Harvard Griffin GSAS Communications sat down with David Elmer, PhD ’05, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, to talk about The Odyssey’s themes of homecoming and hospitality, and what the Homeric epic can teach us about relationships in times of uncertainty.
What are The Odyssey's origins?
I’m pretty firmly in the camp of scholars who understand the Homeric epics as the end product of a very long oral tradition that stretches back into the Bronze Age. Let’s put the origins of this story somewhere in the second millennium BCE. That doesn’t mean that Odysseus necessarily goes back that far as a character. It’s very hard to say.
I think it’s probably safe to say that the Odyssey story as we know it was circulating in the eighth century BCE. We have some early visual evidence for recognizable episodes. There’s a very early vase that has a kind of representation of the Cyclops on it, so it must have been out there. But the Odyssey story is also in some ways very widespread in world folklore, which suggests that it has really deep roots and that the story pattern goes back a very long time.
The poem's often presented as a kind of homecoming tale. So, what is home to Odysseus, both literally and symbolically? And why does it take him so long to get there?
Those are both very complicated questions. The easiest piece to answer is why it takes him so long, because there’s a very literal surface reason for that: Polyphemus the Cyclops.
There’s the famous story where Odysseus conceals his identity and calls himself “No Man,” by some kind of intuition that maybe it would be better if he didn’t tell this monstrous individual he has encountered what his real name is. It works out, amazingly, as he had hoped. That concealment of his identity secures his release and also the release of most of the companions who were with him. A couple of them get eaten by the Cyclops.
Then he goes to the ship. They’re rowing away, and he says, “Listen, Polyphemus, in case anybody asks you who blinded you, who took out your eye, you tell them it was Odysseus, son of Laertes, who makes his home on Ithaca.” That is the reason it takes him so long, because it enables Polyphemus to pray to Poseidon: “Father Poseidon, destroy Odysseus, or if you can’t destroy him, make sure that he returns home only after a very long time and after losing all of his companions.”
So that revelation of his identity not only causes the delay—some nine and a fraction years—but also causes the deaths of all his companions.
What bargain has Odysseus made? Why has he made this catastrophic misstep? He’s trying to pursue a goal that, if we switch our lens to [the prequel epic poem about the Trojan war] The Iliad, is central there. In the world of The Iliad, fame—the pursuit of fame or glory, the Greek word is kleos—is a kind of unquestionable good. Everyone acknowledges that it makes sense for a prestige-seeking male member of society to try to seek fame. That’s what Odysseus is doing. He’s programming Polyphemus as a vehicle for his own fame. He’s saying, “You, Polyphemus, are going to be the person who tells this important story about my exploit to anyone who asks.”
The name Polyphemus means something like “the one who possesses many sayings,” or “the one of many utterances.” In other words, Polyphemus embodies a voice, and that’s what Odysseus is trying to make use of. But it turns out that in The Odyssey, the pursuit of fame becomes something problematic. The Odyssey explores the notion that conventional Iliadic heroism might have a destructive side to it. It might not be an unquestionable good.
There’s another extraordinary moment in the poem where Odysseus makes his trip to the underworld and meets Achilles, the hero of The Iliad. Odysseus says to Achilles, in effect, “You’re such a fortunate person. You were the greatest hero at Troy, and when you died, we had this extraordinary funeral.” And Achilles says, “Not at all. I would rather be the slave of a poor man than the greatest of the heroes at Troy.”
The Odyssey explores the notion that conventional Iliadic heroism might have a destructive side to it. It might not be an unquestionable good.
That’s extraordinary, because you find the main figure of The Iliad completely reversing the value system of The Iliad within The Odyssey. So The Odyssey has this interesting way of critiquing the system of values of the twin Homeric epic, The Iliad.
Does that mean the Polyphemus episode is not really about hubris or arrogance, as is commonly thought? Is that the wrong way to understand that part of the story?
I’m inclined to stay away from the term “hubris,” which has so much baggage. It’s overloaded with a long tradition of interpretation that, to my mind, is more rooted in responses to Greek tragedy, among other things.
All of the Homeric heroes are excessive in some way, which is at the root of the meaning of the word “hubris.” The ancient word has to do with excess. The heroes of Greek epic all go to extremes in one way or another: extremes of grief, extremes of rage, whatever it is. So I don’t think there is exactly a reflection on hubris as such going on here.
Part of the nature of Odysseus’s character is that he is what folklorists would call a trickster figure. If you look cross-culturally at traditions that feature a trickster figure, it’s very characteristic that they [the tricksters] are morally ambivalent. They’re not always good and not always bad. You can’t just say they’re good or bad. They’re morally very ambivalent. Odysseus is no exception.
The Odyssey is very interested in exploring that ambivalence and ambiguity. In the Polyphemus episode, for example, Odysseus and his men do something very wrong. They show up in a guy’s house, steal his cheese, and take his sheep and his cheese without asking. They come to Polyphemus’s cave, and they’re basically doing exactly what the suitors are doing in Odysseus’s house back in Ithaca—coming into a guy’s house when he’s not at home, drinking his wine, killing his sheep, and expecting to get away with it.
Instead, they get stuck inside the house. Remember, part of Odysseus’s strategy at the end is that he closes off all the entrances, just as Polyphemus puts the rock in front of the cave. So there are mirror images here of the suitors in Ithaca and Odysseus and his men in Polyphemus’s cave. In both cases, you have people who are violating fundamental rules of hospitality and suffer for it. There is definitely moral ambivalence. But I think it’s a red herring to pursue hubris as the key notion there.
Another main theme of the story is hospitality. Why was that such a big deal for the Greeks?
One of the narrative patterns that The Odyssey is drawing on is sometimes called by the Greek term theoxeny, or theoxenia. The narrative pattern works like this: A god wants to test the piety of humans, so the god disguises themselves and goes to visit humans, usually disguised as a humble person in need of hospitality. If the humans do not offer hospitality, they are punished. It’s disastrous. But the humans who do offer hospitality are rewarded as pious.
This is very much like what happens with Odysseus. He’s a powerful person, but he shows up looking like a very disempowered person in need of hospitality. Of course, the suitors are not only consuming Odysseus’s wealth; they’re also very abusive toward the disguised Odysseus. Then they are punished for this.
One of the interesting things in The Odyssey is the way the violation of hospitality and the punishment of that violation seem to have effects that ripple out into the whole community.
So, the poem is definitely channeling hospitality as a principal value and hammering on the importance of upholding that value. One of the interesting things in The Odyssey is the way the violation of hospitality and the punishment of that violation seem to have effects that ripple out into the whole community. It becomes a real civic crisis, almost a civil war at the end of the poem, where you have two factions of the suitors’ families—one seeking vengeance, and one saying, in effect, that the suitors deserved it.
You also refer to The Odyssey as the first romance novel in the Western literary tradition. What do you mean?
If you look at the history of prose fiction in the Western tradition, prose fiction as a phenomenon is around in the Greco-Roman world, and the surviving texts all look to The Odyssey in one way or another—not necessarily as their model, but as a key text.
Odysseus, as the teller of fictions or lies, becomes in a funny way the progenitor of a later tradition of self-conscious fiction. And the story of separated lovers who go through trials to be reunited is also a paradigmatic narrative for early experiments in romance fiction.
Of course, it's also about homecoming. There’s a beautiful Greek word, nostos, that means “homecoming,” from which we get “nostalgia.” But “nostalgia” is a much later coinage. It’s not an ancient term. But it [the Odyssey] is also about a pair of individuals who, each on their own, play a role in reuniting and reconstituting their relationship. Penelope doesn’t go anywhere. She stays at home in Ithaca, but she does a lot. She fends off the suitors. She buys time. And the poem makes it quite clear that the success or failure of Odysseus’s return really depends upon Penelope. She’s the one who holds the key.
So why does Penelope pretend not to recognize Odysseus when he gets back and finally reveals himself to her? For that matter, why does Odysseus first disguise himself when he returns to his home island of Ithaca?
The story of recognition is not a matter of Penelope having to be certain that it’s really Odysseus and not somebody else. It’s a matter of Penelope being certain that Odysseus is still committed to their relationship after all this time has gone by. By the same token, the reason Odysseus adopts a disguise is to be certain that Penelope has remained committed to their relationship and hasn’t taken in one of the suitors as her new partner.
One thing I always like to tell students is about the famous recognition scene, where there’s this trick about the bed. Odysseus has revealed himself. He has said, “I’m Odysseus,” but Penelope isn’t really acknowledging him. Telemachus gets very frustrated. Then Penelope makes this remark to one of her servants: “Why don’t you take his bed out of the bedroom and put it for him outside here in the courtyard?” Odysseus gets really upset. He says, “Who has been inside? I built this bed with my own hands from an olive trunk fixed in the ground. Who has been moving this olive trunk?”
Most readers have the idea that what’s going on is this secret. After all, Odysseus says that no one else knows about this bed. Most readers have the sense that there is a secret known only to Odysseus, Penelope, and the one maidservant who enters the bedroom, and that what Penelope has done is trick Odysseus into revealing that he possesses this secret knowledge, which guarantees his identity.
Fine. That may be part of what’s going on. But as I read the poem, the real test is not whether he has this knowledge. The real test is, does he get worked up by the idea that somebody else might have this knowledge as well? She’s probing his emotional commitment to their relationship. It is the emotion of his response that pushes Penelope to acknowledge him as her husband.
There’s another very interesting passage, just after the bed-trick scene in Book 23, where Penelope finally says, in effect, “OK, you are Odysseus.” They embrace, and it’s a very emotional scene. The narrator says something like, “Odysseus, full of emotion, held Penelope in his arms.” Then a simile begins: “As dear as the land is to a shipwrecked sailor who has been swimming for shore and finally comes out to shore . . .” When you are reading or listening, you think that what is being said is, “As dear as the land is to the sailor, so Penelope was dear to Odysseus,” because he is the shipwrecked sailor.
But at the end, the simile gets flipped around. It says, “So dear was Odysseus to Penelope.” Penelope turns out to be the shipwrecked sailor. It’s an extraordinary way of demonstrating this parity between Penelope and Odysseus: They have both been tested. They have both been through extraordinary trials. And at last they have succeeded in reuniting.
There’s a question [in The Odyssey] about fundamental social bonds. Can they survive forces of change, displacement, and transformation? That’s a pretty vital question.
Finally, the time we’re in feels particularly challenging because of the uncertainty confronting us on many different levels. It breeds anxiety, fear, resentment, hostility, division, and polarization. What can we learn from The Odyssey about enduring in the face of uncertainty and times when we feel lost?
I do think the period that sees the formation of these stories is a period of great precariousness. I wouldn’t say simply that the poems originate in a moment of uncertainty like ours. It wasn’t just a moment. It was a world that, for centuries, was a world of precarity, food scarcity, and insecurity in many different ways.
This story is responding to a generally uncertain or precarious environment. It’s also a world of compulsory mobility for a lot of people, so the poem is thinking about displacement in that way.
The poem really acknowledges that Penelope and Odysseus are very different individuals than they were when they parted ways 20 years earlier. Then you have Telemachus, who was an infant when his father left and therefore never knew him. The recognition of Telemachus and Odysseus is really interesting. With everybody else, there’s some kind of shared knowledge and recognition token. But there’s no shared knowledge between Telemachus and Odysseus. So Odysseus just reveals himself to Telemachus, who is uncertain, and all he can say is, “I am the only Odysseus you’ve got.”
But Penelope and Odysseus are very changed persons, and what they are trying to figure out is whether the relationship, in spite of all the changes they’ve gone through individually, remains something stable.
That’s the question we’re immersed in as a nation, isn’t it? Can the relationship be stabilized?
I think that’s right. There’s a question there about fundamental social bonds. Can they survive forces of change, displacement, and transformation? That’s a pretty vital question.
I’m not sure the poem provides so much an answer as an aspiration: that the most important relationships can survive tremendous displacement and change. But maybe it’s not a guarantee.
