Many words on Nolan's Odyssey
Sing to me muses of wine dark seas and rappers braiding words into the dark fall of bronze.
I just came out of The Odyssey and wanted to muse. I just sat down upon waking up and wish to write. Both are true. Both are a product of time.
A story about time. About storytelling. Perception. The ways stories are communicated. The world that was and what we create through the wars we choose to fight and battered veterans left to wander home.
The movie, like the story upon which it is based is like a braided pattern that loops back and loops back and loops back to contexualize each moment. Braided? No, woven. The way words weave.
The bard, who is not blind, but raps like a lord, who sings that story you all know.
No, we don't.
Spoilers for something that is new from something that is very old to follow…
That moment where the villager (priest of Apollo I presume) warns Odysseus' crew not to go on, because they won't like what they find, and we come to the liminal break on the map. Into the mythic.
Sack Troy. Sack a village of brown folks. Fall off the edge of the world.
In this version, there is no strong wine acquired, so no strong wine to share with a monster. Not women captured for a fate that was not written. Also, what has been long lost is the gut deep cultural understanding that watering wine is a part of being civilized. We have no ritual of symposium for all that the suitors carouse. Which is fine, things often went bad for the enslaved women pouring even watered wine at such things.
Every time Athena told Odysseus that he didn't want to go home, the more I questioned the narrative Odysseus remembered of the cheese making cyclops. Of all of it really, but especially that.
I came into the narrative very much rooted in a mythological understanding of what an ancient Hellenic culture might have understood about the Odyssey. The cyclops. The monstrous and the weapon makers.
As someone who writes in the mythological space, I want to no really emphasize there is no canonical version of Hellenic religion. Regional stories contradicted each other and rubbed against each other. Evolved over time. See also, Artemis as a goddess of wild spaces becoming a twin to Apollo, who possibly came in with Doric migration. Of Dionysius, an ancient locally attested god becoming "foreign" as time went on. As new people migrated in. Of Athena, the owl goddess protectoress of wise eyes into all that she became. Until the Romans got Byzantine with it.
I came into the narrative thinking about what an age of colonization Hellene might have thought about potentially dangerous "uncivilized folks" (i.e., not Hellenic) living out on the margins of the world when they were sailing out and setting up daughter cities. Carrying flames from the temple of Hestia for the new city's hearts. Flames are the hearth and the foundation of a polis. They bake the bread that is to be shared with beggars for they might be gods in disguise. Flames are the destroyer of cities. The towers of Ilium are forever burning.
Here there be cyclops.
There be sea people who are coming, who are us.
By the end of the movie, I questioned the memory of the cyclops or any of the mythological adventures at all.
In what we see, there isn't more than one cyclops. It has no name. It has language, but this is not used until too late. In this version of the narrative Odysseus angers the gods not by revealing his actual name in a moment of hubris (I am Nobody → I am Odysseus), but by shooting the cyclops in the eye they've already stabbed.
The more the movie progressed, the more I went back to this scene in my own memory to understand we were being told Odysseus feels he cannot go home.
He is like an arrow tied with a string that goes forward yearning for home and backward to the statue of a burning horse in Troy. With apologies (or reference) to the historian Tom Holland, to the sacral gift of a horse statue made unclean with shit and blood. The sacrifice of men's lives at the bottom of the trap. The sacrifice of a city from what should have been a sacred gift.
An cord tied to the woman in the temple of Athena who is not Athena. Who was Trojan. Who was a priestess. A victim. The towers of Illium burn. They burned. They are ever burning. Odysseus is both the man with the plan and the sword, and he bears the wound. The scar that marks him.
Tied to the woman in the temple who is Athena if Odysseus holds her in his mind to see her. If he holds his wife's brooch. A ghost. A guide. A judgement.
At it's most basic basement level (Schliemannesque in archeological approach terms), the Odyssey has always been the story of a man who reluctantly (how reluctant depends on which marginalia you apply) fought in a war, and struggled for years to make it home.
This incarnation of the tale emphasizes the affects of war and it's impact to a degree that the song of Homer does not. Well, except I suppose for those who think it does. But...
Okay, I shall digress a moment. This will not be the only time in this that I write.
Several decades ago in college, I took an Oral Literature class where we were divided into groups to give presentations on various topics. Most groups gave a straight preso. My group decided to do a free form play. I was the old storyteller telling a story I knew backwards and forwards with epithets and repetitions. The Tale of Abu Saber from "Tales of the Desert" to be specific. Before the preso, I told the story to the group twice. We turned down the lights and I told the tale -- interrupted at times by the "young ethnologist" and aided by the "old ethnologist" telling him to shut up. A second storyteller told the same story, all the same epithets and repetitions, but with a different emphasis that completely changed the spin.
Mine was poetic, his was funny. They were both the same story.
This elicited some great discussion in the class on how oral stories change. I might even have said (and did a year later in a History of the Book class) that scribal stories change. Words dropped. Changed. Understood differently as translations carried over with incomplete understandings of the context. With no actual way to get back to an original understanding, because there is no such thing. It is lost. It is the past.
How I read and understand the Odyssey cannot be as an ancient Greek would. For one thing, the concept of Greece wasn't a thing.
This shift in emphasis made me think of Sir Basil Liddel Hart's seminal "On Indirect Strategy", which after describing 2000 years of warfare culminates in a simple idea. We create the peace that follows from the wars we fight and the way we fight them. Sometimes that peace is more war.
All of which to say I'm not writing a huge essay about Nolan's the Odyssey because these changes bothered me. Never not nobody. I am a writer of that Anglo Saxon bastard of a language, and double negatives are my birthright and Latinate grammarians can take them from my cold dead throat with a curse. Cough.
Okay, that really was a digression.
In a way, that lack of "I am Nobody" in the movie is a negative space for anyone who is familiar with the tale. With that cyclops who is no Polyphemus. Whose eye is not pictured in the traditional way with the single eye shown as natural. This was a twist. This was on it's side and showing the change of perspective of the world we're now in.
The mythic. The strange. Just as dangerous, but different.
Why did Odysseus fire the arrow at the cyclops? Why did he fire the arrows in the city before the gate? Why does he fire the arrows at the suitors?
The war. Always the war.
I think about how Agamemnon's armor looked unmarked. Shiny. The most modern looking metal of all the men. It looked to me like gun metal.
But then again this is a story told by a singer of tales, who heard the story from a singer of tales, who heard the story from a singer of tales. Until one bright day, some traveler from Tyre or Byblos (certainly not Ugarit, which was lost to the sea people) or some such brought writing back into the Hellenic world. But that's out of order.
We never see Agamemnon's face. We don't see him fight. He's not crammed into the horse. He wants a war because he wants control of the trade route that Troy controls with its mighty mud brick walls, and the excuse is a woman, who left a man.
Who loved and lost. But lets let the women have the last word.
Just as the excuse is the suitors pushing Telemachus to break xenia. Sorry, Zeus' law. I suspect the reason they call it Zeus' law and not xenia is because they want to link it directly and repeatedly to the gods, who we see and we don't see. Lightning. That's Zeus. The waves. That's Poseiden. A baby's smile. The clouds. That dead girl that your men beheaded because they were angry, and Odysseus didn't stop them. That's Athena.
That's Telemachus repeatedly looking for a god to guide him in a stranger's eyes. But what he needs is his mother to ask him to string the bow, but he doesn't know the trick. What he needs is his father who knows it all too well.
But no really Agamemnon, who wanted a war so badly he murdered his daughter, came home to death. He created the peace that followed. That of pitch and gravel and the grave.
But we knew that. We knew of his wife's rage as she oiled and softened his body for slaughter. Not a sacrifice. Not sacral.
We knew her rage and her revenge and the revenge of her son, and Telemauchus, so wide eyed in the face of all this.
There's the narrative of Telemachus, rooted in the world. Carried to us by singers of tales. There's the story that Oddysseus remembers to Calypso while high on lotus root. So to I doubted that narrative.
And yet, and yet, the poetic truth is there.
Circe thought his men were pigs, and so she revealed that form. Sorceress, goddess. Daughter of Helios and Perse. Daughter of the solar deity whose cattle his men killed. After being stranded on a shore. Future. Past. Depends on the linearity of the telling.
This Circe is no queen with a grand hall. She has a hut and rage. Actually, let's put a pin in that feather. Let's let the women have the last word.
Let us return to Odysseus who designs a gift that was no gift. Who in all practicality abandons the bodies of his men. Prepares to sacrifice his men so the majority can make it home. Participated in the breaking of the world that depended on trade flowing. Copper and tin being carried across an ocean that was not a barrier, but a well travelled road. Routes that created the age that came of these metals converging. A world with writing and hospitality. The law of Zeus. Xenia. Maat. A world that a high king, Agamemnon with his bone spined helmet, wanted to control, and in so doing broke.
Over and over, we hear the sea people are coming. They are coming closer. Menaleus who admits to years traveling home with his bitter wife. How many cities did he and his men sack? Perhaps this was how Helen came to Egypt for a time after all. What balance did he and his men destroy out of hunger. Rage.
The grand palaces of the Mycenaeans will crumble. Are crumbling. The Mycenaean men are always coming home. Unless they are the Trojans seeking a new home in a new epic. Those Mycenaean palaces so grand that later Hellenes will decide they could not have been built by men, but must have been built by cyclops.
There's an end there.
But no.
Odysseus' homecoming is not by self-driving ships but a raft tossed by sea. He has to let go to arrive. And still, and still, he is who is.
Abandoning the bodies of faithful followers in a temple. Setting fire to them where there should be respect. And all those worshipers, I did wonder as they went in if they weren't praying for protection from the people of the sea, who is them. They are a mere famine away from being them. So we all.
In the very end of the movie, it's possible to take the ending several ways. Penelope and Oddysseus sail off into the sunset together. Hollywood happy.
Umm…they are predicting the fall of civilization. They are chasing the retreating sun and remaining in the light, while their son, Telemachus, who knows how to write, will fall into darkness of night. He will not pass on the gift of writing and Ithyca and the rest of the bronze age world, will collapse. Losing the power of writing.
Well, except Egypt and Babylon and, okay, Assyria is right there, and…so not the whole bronze age world, but definitely the Hellenes. Writing will be right out for them.
The story ends by sending Odysseus not home, but on a new journey. The journey his wife wanted to begin with. They are no longer young. They are scarred. Wounded.
Okay, one more digression, but at least a related one. One my favorite sections of Dante's Inferno is the when Dante encounters Ulysses encased in a tongue of flame (liars gotta burn) telling Dante a story about how he tried to sail to Purgatory/Paradise, and almost made it. His presence is such that he appears in all three books, until finally in Paradise they look down to see, "the mad leap of Ulysses". Dante did not read Greek. He did not have the Greek text available to him. He came to Odysseus/Ulysses entirely mediated through Virgil and other Roman writers. This Ulysses is sacrilegious, and I would argue much of the interpretation of Odyssesus in this movie has some foundation in Dante.
Why wouldn't I argue that.
I love Dante, and wrote a whole fanfic journey for him back in the day.
The end of the movie reconfigures Dante's vision of Odysseus' final journey, but now it is exile. Penelope and Odysseus, queen and king no longer, sail ever on. Into danger perhaps, or merely into the solar end. But they remain in the light. Or not. They must come to some final western shore and light a fire for the dead to show them respect.
To give what is owed.
But let us speak what is owed.
Now I must sing of women's rage. For that note is the string that is plucked throughout the story.
It is the story of the fall of Troy that is not told by the bard. No. Though it is stopped by the queen.
Is is the story of the fall of Troy that is not told by Odysseus until he comes back round to it and round to it and so finally can go home.
It is the women in the city murdered. Throats slit. But we know, we who have read the tale, that many were enslaved. That there are slaves in Ithythica and that was a choice by the movie, and there are the Thracian women Odysseus enslaved from the sack of Ismarus in Homer's Odyssey whose fate is unwritten. Not in the story, but like the Nobody, it is a negative space in the narrative.
Perhaps it is no tale told in the queen's chambers.
Penelope in her palace, circumscribed, and yet running the kingdom. All the years of war on that beach, she kept the looms weaving and the harvests coming in, and her son growing. Then for three years, suitors. One of whom, huh, a draft dodger.
Rage, rage, oh faithful queen, whose plan was to lock the doors to the palace with the suitors in it and kill them all with fire. Clever queen, who has lived too long in Odysseus' ruin.
Bitter is the honey that is the face of Helen, Penelope's cousin, in whose name so many died. Disfigured it's implied by her husband, the deliberately lumpish Menaleus, who she most likely fled for all the good it did her. This Helen is mortal. Not a god's daughter for all she's dressed in gold. Helen in endless regret of all those who died in her name sits bitter at her husband's side. No knife for her. No fire.
Not so her twin. The knife and axe of Clytemnestra, who took a lover and planned all the long years for what she'd do to the husband who killed her daughter, while mistreating the children yet alive. Iphigenia, in this movie, a barest glimpse of a child. No woman grown heading to a wedding with Achilles.
But let us not forget the monstrous.
The Scylla is a maiden. She is a monster on a cliff devouring sailors, men. She plucks them up and eats them.
The sirens were the handmaidens of Persephone, transformed into birdwomen by Demeter when her daughter was kidnapped, and sent to find their mistress. They figured on Hellenic funerary art for that same reason. They know all for they have seen all and their song is presented in Nolan's version of the tale as a song of the longing for what you have had, but have now lost. Their song is an itch. Their song is death, which makes sense given they serve dread Persephone.
The land of the dead lies waiting. With reproachful ghosts and stones.
Ah Circe. A sorceresses' art or that of a goddess on a snowy cliff in…Cornwall? It is a source of tin after all. In Homer's Odyssey Circe is young and beautiful. For decades, I used the image of "Circe Invidiosa" by Waterhouse as my icon on LJ and it's still my icon on Dreamwidth. The painting where she's about to transform a nymph into the monstrous Scylla based on Ovid's Metamorphosis.
Here she is a weary woman who will not wait for men to show their nature. She takes their nature in hand and crafts it.
The story changes. The story is the same.
Calypso who is alone. Who finds a lost stranger and take him in. Feeds him forgetfulness to heal him. To hold him. Tragic in her way. Not bitter, but she wears a woven net for the sea. She fishes on that shore and lives in a woven home. She sends the traveler on his way.
Athena is the girl in the temple. Not vengeful. Not angry. Knowing. She is the goddess of weaving and domestic arts. She is the figure given by a wife for recognition. The cloth will not survive the ages. Soft arts, software, the trade items created by women, don't survive ages. Only in the art that depicts them. In the stories that includes them.
The Singer of songs tells a story, a writer of tales writes a story, a film maker makes a movie.
So it goes…
Now you went through all that so I'm going to link to some of my fic, because I've written Greek (and other) myth fic for decades, and for that matter stories about stories.
The Tale of Abu Saber if told by a character in the Firefly verse,
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Buffy the Vampire Slayer commentary vis a vis a visit from Dante and Virgil,
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Sea People and some Egyptians.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
A story of Cytemnestra's rage,
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Helen not as mortal, but as goddess,
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Titanomachy + Kidnap of Kore + Birth of Dionysus,
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Um…what if aliens invaded and had to fight the Hellenic gods just before the Trojan War. Also don't kidnap Penelope and Circe and stick them in the same cell. Bad plan. Hugely bad.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Nothing to do with the Odyssey, but entirely about questionable narrators
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Oh, and why not, a mystery set on the island of Aegina based on sketchily recorded historical events, and a romance. A bit of both. Plus gods.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
That last one I turned into a novel, "Heroes Heart Like Burning"
So now I knot the last word and bite it to cut the thread.
