How Can Odysseus Go Home?

I have always preferred the Iliad to the Odyssey. The Iliad has the terrible brightness of a world ending at noon. Achilles is angry on a scale unavailable to ordinary people. Hector knows what courage requires of him. Priam walks into the tent of the man who killed his son, and for one night grief suspends a war. Even suffering there has good posture.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey made me wonder whether I had underestimated the sadder poem.

Nolan has spent years circling the same knot. Memento asks how a self survives when memory stops offering continuity. Inception asks what happens when an idea, however constructed, becomes real enough to decide what someone does next. Oppenheimer asks the uglier version of both: what happens when the act that proves your greatness is also the act you can no longer live with having done?

His Odysseus inherits all three.

Odysseus has always survived by changing the shape of reality. When a city cannot be taken, he invents a horse. When a name becomes dangerous, he becomes Nobody. When his identity cannot safely be revealed, he manufactures another one. His mētis, the cunning intelligence everyone remembers him for, is the ability to bend a problem until a route through it appears. It would be strange if that talent stopped politely at the border of his own memory.

Nolan makes the possibility explicit. His Odysseus spends the Calypso years under lotus, memory and identity fading together. Poseidon remains rumor; Zeus is mostly thunder; Athena appears in brief encounters increasingly entangled with Troy and Odysseus’ returning memories. Nolan leaves the gods in a condition of ontological indeterminacy (maybe).

The sea does not require Poseidon to drown men. Lightning manages perfectly well without Zeus. A man can arrive at a brilliant next move without Athena physically standing beside him. This disposes of nothing. Nolan simply removes the seat Homer sometimes gives us at the divine table, from which causality can be inspected with the confidence of a minor civil servant.

Once I saw that in the film, I found it difficult to unsee in Homer. I am not suggesting Homer was a secret atheist waiting twenty-eight centuries for Christopher Nolan to catch up with him. That would be an unnecessarily expensive compliment to ourselves. The gods are plainly actors inside Homer’s world. The human stories underneath them are simply remarkably sturdy. Apollo sends plague and men are sick. Athena restrains Achilles and a furious man reaches the edge of murder, then stops. Zeus may weigh armies on divine scales while armies continue to discover that plans enjoy only an advisory relationship with events.

Take away divine necessity and Achilles still loses Patroclus. Priam still loses Hector. The two men still sit together and weep. Perhaps this is why I now think of the Iliad as the last light of the mythic age. Its people inhabit a public language of kleos, timē, lineage, honor, shame and death. Achilles suffers enormously, yet even his suffering belongs to a heroic cosmology. He receives the sort of choice ordinary mortals rarely get in writing: a long obscure life or a short glorious one.

Then the Odyssey takes this magnificent dead man and makes him reconsider the deal. In Book 11, Odysseus tries to console Achilles with his eminence among the shades. Achilles replies that he would rather work for a poor living man than rule over all the dead. The supreme hero has acquired a somewhat pedestrian enthusiasm for continued breathing.

The Iliad can ask how a hero dies. The Odyssey is left with the less elegant problem of what happens when he lives.

Odysseus survived Troy, and Nolan makes survival morally troublesome. The war did not merely happen to him. The horse was his intelligence made into architecture. His mētis helped destroy a city. The thing that proves Odysseus’ genius is also the thing he cannot leave behind at Troy. Nolan’s film repeatedly drags his cleverness back through the destruction it enabled.

The poison in Oppenheimer’s remembered line, “Now I am become Death,” sits in the verb: become. Death is not merely something he witnesses. The terrible achievement and the brilliance that produced it belong to the same man. Odysseus has the same difficulty. Remove Troy from his guilt and you also remove one of the clearest demonstrations of why he is Odysseus at all.

After enough Greek nouns, the problem becomes embarrassingly simple. I did terrible things. How can I go home?

Homer makes the question stranger through narrative structure. Books 9 through 12, where most of the monsters and marvels live, are Odysseus’ own first-person account to the Phaeacians. The least plausible parts of the journey reach us through one of literature’s most accomplished manufacturers of plausible stories. More delicately, he once had witnesses.

They died.

There were men who could have said yes, I saw Polyphemus; yes, Circe happened; no, Odysseus, you are improving that part. None returned. Homer leaves an epistemological asymmetry (nobody else knows). We have many ways of confirming who the speaker is. The missing years do not enjoy the same luxury.

Kurosawa’s version of this is a noisy one. Rashomon puts several people around the same dead body and lets shame, vanity, desire and self-preservation pull each toward a different account. Nobody agrees, and the disagreement keeps the event alive. Somewhere beneath their stories, however inaccessible, there was still one afternoon in the forest. More usefully, there are still several people capable of embarrassing one another. Each unreliable witness places a limit on the others simply by existing. Even a crowded lie retains the inconvenience of company.

Odysseus gets the quiet version of the same trouble, and quiet turns out to be worse. There is no rival testimony, no second memory catching on the edge of his, no surviving companion able to interrupt with the ancient equivalent of “that is not quite how I remember it.” His witnesses disappear one man and one ship at a time until the past has lost everyone except the person telling it. What remains is an epistemic monopoly (one guy), acquired less through cunning than bereavement.

His story may be entirely true. He may believe every word. Years of fear, pride, guilt and remembering may have changed its shape without leaving him an original version against which to check the revisions. None of these possibilities cancels the others. None can be tested. Rashomon leaves us trapped among competing witnesses. Odysseus leaves us trapped inside the survival of one.

Homer, at least, gives him an audience. The Phaeacians cannot confirm the Cyclops, Circe or the Sirens, but they can confirm that Odysseus stood before them and told the story. They witness the testimony even when they cannot witness its contents. Private memory passes through a social room before it travels home.

Nolan, apparently finding even that degree of corroboration excessive, removes the Phaeacians altogether. Homer kills the witnesses to the journey and preserves witnesses to the telling. Nolan takes away even the room.

The story, meanwhile, works suspiciously well. Polyphemus gives the delay a beginning. The blinding produces the curse; the curse summons Poseidon; Poseidon gives catastrophe a causal architecture. Why did it take so long? Poseidon. Why Poseidon? The Cyclops. Why is every man who sailed with you dead? Now we are going to need another cup of wine.

Convenience does not make Polyphemus imaginary. A true event can still become load-bearing.

At this point Life of Pi stops looking like a comparison and starts looking suspiciously like an Odyssey that has misplaced the Cyclops and acquired a Bengal tiger. Pi also returns as the sole human survivor of an impossible journey carrying a story populated by extraordinary creatures. He is offered one strange mercy Odysseus never gives us: an alternative version.

Life of Pi can ask, “Which story do you prefer?” Odysseus has removed the multiple-choice section.

Rashomon gives us too many stories. Life of Pi gives us two. Odysseus gives us one.

Perhaps Pi is Odysseus. Chronology, pedantic as ever, suggests the reverse.

Once only one story survives, the question changes. We can keep asking whether the tiger existed, whether the Cyclops existed, whether Poseidon really moved the sea. We can also ask why this story took this shape. Poseidon gives suffering an agent. Polyphemus gives delay an origin. Athena gives action a voice. A story may be factually true and psychologically useful at the same time. Truth has never been required to be inefficient.

Then there is the strange arithmetic of the lost years. Popular memory makes the Odyssey feel like a decade spent continuously fighting monsters, with occasional interruptions for catering. In fact, an enormous portion belongs to one island and one woman: seven years with Calypso.

The adventures have events. Calypso has duration.

I do not think trauma psychology needs to explain the number. Homeric poetry grew from an oral, deeply formulaic tradition. Milman Parry defined the formula as a recurrent group of words used under the same metrical conditions to express a recurring idea, and showed how thoroughly Homeric diction depends on such inherited units. The oral tradition provides a mnemonic infrastructure (songs). A man can travel across thousands of lines while the poem keeps returning him to recognizable names and qualities.

Seven years may be exactly seven years. The narrower thought is enough: epic gives duration edges.

The theory can wait. Odysseus stays long enough for staying to become a life.

That makes Calypso more dangerous than a Siren. The Sirens offer a moment. Calypso offers another biography. Nolan sharpens this by turning lotus into an instrument of forgetting. Odysseus can remain there by losing the story that says he belongs somewhere else. Before he can leave, he has to recover the desire for Ithaca.

Inception has already supplied the mechanism. An idea becomes real through what it makes someone do. Home works like that. Odysseus has to arrange his past as a journey toward Ithaca before Calypso’s island can become a delay rather than a destination. If one wants a sufficiently expensive phrase, this is a teleological reconstruction of experience (home).

Ithaca creates the journey backward. Without Ithaca, the Cyclops is an incident, Circe an episode, Calypso perhaps simply a life. Once Odysseus chooses Ithaca, all of them become stations in nostos. Disasters acquire direction. The dead acquire positions in a sequence. A heap of accidents, pleasures, crimes and graves becomes the long way home.

The gods reach their limit here. Zeus can order Calypso to release Odysseus. He cannot order Odysseus to want Penelope. Athena can provide a next move. She cannot manufacture home. The story has to perform a task theology cannot quite do for him: produce a future tense.

It also acquires a public job. Troy belongs to collective memory; the following decade has one surviving narrator. A king returning after twenty years is entitled to a moving reunion, but a kingdom is entitled to some questions. Where were you? Why did it take so long? Why is everybody else dead? And, a little awkwardly, why should anyone hand you the palace?

Odysseus needs a story he can live inside and a history other people can live with.

Formulaic epic makes “becoming Odysseus again” heavier than our modern language of finding oneself. Heroic identity is social. Names, fathers, homes, deeds and epithets locate a person inside memories maintained by other people. The world already possesses an Odysseus: cunning, formidable, resourceful, the man of Troy, the king of Ithaca. Songs have kept him in excellent condition while the actual man has fared rather worse.

A person can decay faster than a formula.

Homer makes this almost cruel in Book 8. Before Odysseus gives the Phaeacians his own great narrative, Demodocus sings Troy back to him. The room hears heroic memory. Odysseus hides his face and cries. Homer compares him to a woman clinging to her dying husband as her city falls, before the victors carry her into slavery.

The man who helped destroy a city hears the song of its destruction, and Homer gives his grief the shape of someone standing on the other side of the wall. Public memory has preserved the victor. His body appears to have kept less flattering records.

Memento began with a man desperately manufacturing an external memory system because his own mind cannot maintain continuity. Odysseus already has one. Songs preserve the public Odysseus whether the private man still feels capable of living inside him.

There is another memory system in Ithaca, although Homer has the decency to give it a shorter name: Penelope.

In Book 23, Penelope proposes moving their marriage bed. Odysseus reacts because he knows it cannot simply be moved. He built the room around a living olive tree and fashioned the bed from its trunk. She has reached a memory no bard owns and no heroic formula can supply. Homer has supplied a private external identity-verification mechanism (a.k.a. wife).

The symmetry is almost too neat. Epic tradition remembers what Odysseus is. Penelope remembers who he was before anybody needed to sing about him. The songs know Troy. Penelope knows the bed. Neither can confirm the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens or the years with Calypso. Both hold memories of Odysseus that he cannot rewrite by himself.

Both can verify Odysseus. Neither can verify the Odyssey.

Nolan changes the mechanism. His Penelope and the disguised Odysseus speak through literal screens and lattices. She then sets the bow challenge. He steps forward and seems, for a terrible moment, unable to string it; Penelope turns away heartbroken. Then the bowstring sounds, and she stops.

I read that turn of her face differently from a simple case of mistaken identity. She has already found her husband. For a moment she fears that her husband has come home without Odysseus.

That distinction sounds peculiar only if identity is imagined as private property. In this heroic world, Odysseus is something other people have to agree to. The name includes husband, father, king, survivor, Trojan hero, the man capable of doing what other men cannot. Penelope can recognize the husband. The bow demands a performative verification of heroic identity (pull it).

The songs preserved the name. Now the body has to perform it.

Then the bow sings. The husband survived, and Odysseus survived too. Penelope was right. Ithaca can recognize him. The suitors are about to receive the least bureaucratic form of identity verification available.

This is the trap. If he had failed, the story would be easier. A damaged man came home after the hero inside him died. He might retire, grieve, become somebody’s difficult father and complain about the weather. Nolan gives him no such mercy. Odysseus can still be Odysseus. The machinery works.

For that reason the final reckoning hurts more. Nolan keeps husband and wife on either side of a screen while Odysseus falls into a string of what ifs about Troy, responsibility and the man Penelope remembers. Recognition has happened. Heroic capacity has been demonstrated. The remaining distance cannot be crossed by pulling harder.

It takes him ten years to become Odysseus again.

He has to turn experience into story, story into history, history into identity and identity into something a community can recognize. Homer gives him Phaeacia as a halfway house for that process. Nolan makes him do without one. Homer gives Odysseus an audience before he gives him home. Nolan gives him Penelope.

And still the old life will not take him back.

Nolan sends Odysseus into self-imposed exile, with Telemachus ruling Ithaca while Odysseus and Penelope sail west. Homer restores the household. Nolan restores the name and then watches the life attached to it fail to fit.

Perhaps this is the cruelest answer to the title. Odysseus can go home only by becoming Odysseus. By the time he succeeds, the life that once made that name home no longer fits the man wearing it.

We have, of course, only the story. We will never know what happened on that sea. The witnesses are dead. Nolan has even removed the Phaeacians. Olympus has declined comment for several millennia, inconveniently enough from an evidentiary point of view.

What remains is an Odysseus story, and we know one when we hear it.

The man who comes out of it is clever, formidable, loyal to his men, vain, dangerous, charming and, in an unfashionably old-fashioned sense, decent. He can do terrible things and know that they were terrible. He has the kind of confidence that makes one understand, with some irritation, why goddesses keep asking him to stay. He is still strong enough to draw the bow, still clever enough to survive, still haunted by the men he could not bring home. He is still someone a wife can love and a society can agree to call Odysseus.

Perhaps that is all an epic can ever prove.

The Iliad glows at the end of a mythic age where Achilles can die and let kleos preserve him at his brightest. The Odyssey gives its hero the considerably less tasteful fate of surviving. He ages. He loses people. He has to explain himself. His son becomes a man without asking permission. History continues in his absence, a habit it has shown little inclination to correct.

Even Achilles, when the Odyssey meets him again, has dropped the heroic sales brochure. Glory was splendid. He would rather breathe.

And so begins the age of mortals.

Odysseus cannot conquer time by returning unchanged. Time already won that argument. Troy burned, his men died, Telemachus grew up, Penelope waited. The young husband who built a bed around a living tree cannot be recovered. Something smaller and stranger remains possible: the husband, the strategist, Nobody, the liar, the survivor, the king and the exile can all belong to one life.

Achilles dies and becomes a story. Odysseus lives long enough to need one.

Whether the gods were watching from Olympus, we cannot know. We can only say that somewhere in the world one night, a bright flash of lightning tore through the darkness, and Odysseus said Athena had been there, beside him.