A summer ‘Odyssey’ through time

Since it was first composed by Homer nearly 3,000 years ago, “The Odyssey” has been reimagined countless times. From Greek drama to contemporary poetry, from Stanley Kubrick to the Coen brothers, the epic saga of Odysseus’ 10-year journey from the battle of Troy to his homeland of Ithaca has repeatedly been recontextualized and reinterpreted for changing times and new audiences. The latest version, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Matt Damon, was released earlier this month and immediately dominated the box office.

Last spring, in anticipation of the release of Nolan’s film, Yale’s Benedek Kruchió taught a course tracing the history of these various re-imaginings. Called “Odyssean Receptions: A Journey Through the History of Literature and Film,” the course considered Odysseus as “one of the defining characters of ‘Western’ culture.”

Kruchió, an assistant professor of classics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said his primary research focus is actually Greek literature between the second and sixth centuries C.E. — more than a thousand years after Homer’s time. 

“But I deal with a lot of texts that engage intensely with ‘The Odyssey,’ so I have a research interest in the ancient reception of the Homeric poem,” he said. “And I also love contemporary literature, film, and other exciting instances of Homeric reception.” 

Shortly after seeing the new Nolan film, Kruchió sat down with Yale News to talk about why “The Odyssey” has such staying power, his favorite adaptations, and how Nolan created an “Odyssey” for our times. The conversation has been condensed and edited. 

Why does this ancient fantastical tale still resonate with people after so many centuries? 

Benedek Kruchió: “The Odyssey” explores a lot of topics that are crucial to the timeless human experience. Think about the motifs of travel and exploration, and the link to human curiosity, going out and making the world our own. And the question of what it means to be civilized, human, mortal — Odysseus’ engagements with higher beings like the nymph Calypso, who offers to make him immortal if he just stays on the island with her. His engagements with Polyphemus, the Cyclops monster, raises the question: what is the difference between Odysseus, a human, and a monster? The poem cleverly questions where exactly those differences might lie and how fuzzy that boundary might be. Then, of course, the love angle — Odysseus’ commitment to returning to his wife Penelope, but also his erotic adventures with Calypso and the sorceress Circe.

Then there are the human qualities of cunning, ingenuity, and intelligence. Odysseus is the inventor of the Trojan horse that breaks the stalemate in the Trojan War after nearly a decade. And the theme of identity, which is presented as something that can be unstable and fashioned actively. Odysseus must reclaim his identity as the king of Ithaca when he returns, but we also see him manipulate his identity as a trickster who disguises himself as a beggar. 

What about the way in which the story is told? 

Kruchió: This is such a fun book to read, even after almost 3,000 years, due to Homer’s masterful control of embedded narratives, stories within stories. There is the famous beginning-in-the-middle opening of “The Odyssey.” Then flashbacks and embedded narratives fill in the narrative gaps, and there is masterful cross-cutting between different plot segments — back and forth between Ithaca, the travels of his son, Telemachus, Odysseus first on Calypso Island and telling his own stories and then on his way home. I think Nolan also does this really well in the film, although the “cross-cutting” is sped up quite a lot. 

What’s the earliest adaptation or work in dialogue with “The Odyssey” that you know of? 

Kruchió: This is a great question because it brings us to one of the core issues of what we could call Homeric reception. I would say the earliest surviving instance of Odyssean reception, or variation on the Odyssey story, is “The Odyssey” itself. In the background of the two Homeric epics that survive — “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” — is a long tradition of oral storytelling of heroic song. This is dramatized within “The Odyssey” by the bard characters who sing epic stories at the court of the Phaeacians and in Ithaca as well. These characters are fashioned as reflections on Homer’s own art of storytelling. 

We can safely assume that Homer didn’t simply come up with the story of Odysseus. He created a masterful and extensive variation on already existing material, which is something that is also reflected by the conflicting perspectives on Odysseus’ character within the poem. It’s constantly up for debate as to what kind of character Odysseus actually is. You get glimpses of him when following his adventures, but while he is absent, people in the underworld, people in Ithaca, talk about him and give us radically different takes on his character. Arguably, these cubist perspectives on his character engage with the oral tradition that is in the background of “The Odyssey.” 

Nolan’s film presents Odysseus as a complicated and conflicted man, as opposed to a more one-dimensional conquering hero. Is that true to the poem? 

Kruchió: I would say that Nolan gives us a rather different Odysseus than Homer. The presentation of Odysseus as a traumatized war veteran who is suffering from amnesia and is recovering his memories in engagement with Calypso, and the idea that Odysseus, by creating the Trojan horse, unleashed such brutality that Greek civilization as we know it from the Bronze Age couldn’t recover from the cultural shock — that is something that’s absent from Homer. The question is raised in “The Odyssey” as to what extent Odysseus’ killing of all the suitors and a number of slaves in Ithaca was defensible, or whether he shot over the top by doing this kind of categorical capital punishment. That’s quite a different variation on the question of guilt. 

In Nolan, we also get a very topical “Odyssey,” because the film draws parallels between the end of Bronze Age civilization brought about by the capturing of Troy, and our Anthropocene moment of humanity basically being on the brink of collapse and self-extinction due to our own actions. There are parallels between the Odysseus figure in the film and Nolan’s previous film protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, of course, does a comparable thing by bringing about the creation of the nuclear bomb and thereby causing a radical shift in what civilization is and might end up not being anymore.

Your course covered many films and written works that refer back to “The Odyssey.” What are your personal favorites?

Kruchió: As regards films, I really like Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Mépris,” or “Contempt,” from 1963. What we get in Godard’s French-Italian co-production is a story of a famous German director, Fritz Lang, who plays himself, making an “Odyssey” movie. An interesting thing is going on here. There’s constant discussion between the director, the producer, and the scriptwriter about what the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope was really like. Did they remain faithful to each other or not? And these discussions are mirrored by the relationships between different characters in the film. Basically, the conversations that characters have about the meaning of “The Odyssey” start bleeding into the interpersonal dynamics of the film crew.

When it comes to literature, if I must pick one favorite, it would be the Hungarian novella “Chasing Homer,” by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the current Nobel literature laureate. It’s a variation on “The Odyssey,” and specifically on the motif of Odysseus being haunted by Poseidon, the god of the sea, who is out for revenge because Odysseus blinded his son Polyphemus. This novella transforms this motif into the story of a nameless protagonist suffering from a delusion of persecution — the persecutors only exist in his head. The book is very dark on the one hand, but it’s also funny because the protagonist is giving the audience advice on how to flee from persecutors, as if the book were a comical ‘Fleeing for Dummies.’ The short chapters are usually written in one very long sentence each. And there are QR codes that you can scan to be transported to percussion music that accompanies the respective chapter. And there’s visual art, very beautiful drawings and paintings, some of which were created for this text.

“The Odyssey” is a violent tale — there is a lot of death and brutality. Does that also lend to its lasting appeal? 

Kruchió: I think it becomes part of the compelling momentum of “The Odyssey” in adaptations. When it comes to film versions, everybody wants to see what the Cyclops monster looks like and how he devours Odysseus’ comrades. And everybody looks forward to seeing how gory the killing of the suitors back in Ithaca is going to be, how that fight is going to play out. And Nolan gives us a very big showdown in the end, where Odysseus moves like Batman, another big Nolan action character. 

What is definitely appealing is the poem’s great variety. We get violence, we get adventures, we get fairy-tale-like episodic meetings with all kinds of surprising and appealing human and non-human characters. We get nuanced and richly characterized women characters. It is a very colorful poem, a poem of multitudes. 

Do you think people who don’t know anything of “The Odyssey” can still follow the tale in Nolan’s movie? 

Kruchió: I think the film does also work for those who haven’t read the book. The characters and their relationships are introduced in a way that allows people who have never heard of Odysseus or the Trojan War to follow. Which is not to say that the film won’t reveal deeper layers and more exciting material to those who are intimately familiar with the original. The transformations introduced by Nolan and his team play out against the background of “The Odyssey” as well as other variations of the story throughout the ages. And the more you know about that history of reception and the original, the more you can appreciate these creative interventions. 

Benedek Kruchió talks in more depth about Christopher Nolan’s handling of the “The Odyssey” in this YouTube discussion with Tim Whitmarsh, the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and Emma Greensmith, ancient epic expert at Oxford University.