Are We Reading the Odyssey Wrong?
Two new books try to tame Homer’s hero. Neither succeeds.
American Odyssey
What an Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls
by Patrick J. Deneen
Creed & Culture, 198 pp, $26.00
Why Odysseus?
Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero
by Joel P. Christensen
Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pp, $29.99 (paperback), $19.99 (ebook)
NO MAJOR MOVIE CAN MAKE IT to theaters today without a train of tie-in and tag-along merchandise, both official and unofficial, trailing behind it. In 2023, the simultaneous release of blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer spawned a thriving market in “Barbenheimer” t-shirts; in addition to two Wicked movies, fans could buy licensed Elphaba-themed Le Creuset cookware or Glinda-pink bottles of Absolut Vodka. And this summer, the imminent release of Christopher Nolan’s latest film, The Odyssey, has inspired a Trojan horse popcorn bucket, a rather expensive speaker, and two not-very-good books about one of the greatest poems ever written.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that a pair of 200-ish-page books can’t quite nail down a character like Odysseus and his importance across thousands of years of politics and literature. Homer doesn’t entirely pin down this slippery character in 12,109 lines of poetry. Odysseus endures because he contains multitudes. It’s no surprise that his modern interlocutors, much like his fictional ones, end up revealing more about themselves than about the man they try to understand.
Notre Dame political theorist and prominent postliberal Patrick Deneen’s American Odyssey does not exactly begin with the rhetorical oomph of Stanley Lombardo’s opening translation of the poem—“Speak, Memory”—or even Emily Wilson’s plainspoken request to the Muse: “Tell me about a complicated man.” That alone doesn’t doom his project; rather, what scuppers this particular galley is Deneen’s seeming lack of interest in his purported theme: the way the Odyssey echoes in the American mind and the American idea.
It’s not as if Deneen lacks for abundant material: Even a decidedly modest trip through many of the Founding Fathers’ digitized papers reveals that the Odyssey gave them ideas about how to conduct themselves in many facets of their lives—as community-builders, as political and economic actors, as husbands and wives, and as stewards of a rising power with some unique geographic advantages.
In 1764, Benjamin Franklin judged the behavior of settlers who murdered a group of indigenous people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania against the standards of the Odyssey. “Unhappy People! to have lived in such Times, and by such Neighbours!” Franklin lamented. “They would have been safer among the ancient Heathens, with whom the Rites of Hospitality were sacred.”
John Adams argued that Odyssean cleverness outweighed Ajaxian strength in his 1763 political writings; three decades later, he mused in his diary about Odysseus’s wisdom in naming virtue the bedrock of government. In a 1777 letter he sent from Baltimore to his wife Abigail, he compared himself to the hero, who “saw the Manners of many Men and many Cities, which is like to be my Case.” Five years later, during Adams’s lengthy diplomatic deployments, Abigail told him that she would “assume the Signature of Penelope,” and expressed concern that in America, as in ancient Ithaca, “the impositions and injuries, to which she is hourly liable, and daily suffering, call for the exertions of her wisest and ablest citizens.”
A generation later, in 1809, Caesar Augustus Rodney, then serving as U.S. attorney general, compared the United States and its potential European foes to Odysseus and the cyclops Polyphemus; both Odysseus and the United States, he suggested to James Madison, would be protected by the sea. Later that year, Abigail Adams cited Penelope again, this time as an example to which American women should aspire as they attempted to increase their spinning as part of a larger campaign to become less reliant on British imports. Thomas Jefferson, in a rather more sour frame of mind in 1815, told his old enemy-turned-epistolary intimate John Adams that if Napoleon turned his eyes to America, “ours is only the boon of the Cyclops to Ulysses, of being the last devoured.”
But if Deneen found any of these examples, they seem to have captured his attention less than sequels to or riffs on the poem written by Alfred Lord Tennyson (a Brit), James Joyce (Irish), and Lucian, Nikos Kazantzakis, and C.P. Cavafy (all Greek).
That’s a strange choice for a book about the Odyssey and America. And it’s stranger still to ignore how American readers engaged with these works and translations, or to write about Cavafy’s “Ithaka” without mentioning that it was one of the poems read at Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s funeral. What does it say about one of our most iconic first ladies, famous in part as a symbol of wifely devotion, that she appears to have drawn life inspiration not from patient Penelope, as Abigail Adams did, but from her world-wandering spouse?
For that matter, Scarlet O’Hara might have made a better point of comparison with Odysseus than The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale, on whom Deneen lingers. The smartest person in almost any room she enters, Margaret Mitchell’s antiheroine is made to leave her idealized plantation home for the city of Atlanta, soon to be at the center of a brutal war. She makes it back to Tara after a series of draining misadventures, only to discover that her aged father has declined and their home is beset by interlopers eager to take her place. To save Tara, Scarlet has to leave again, surviving by her wits and her willingness to defy rigid norms. Invoking Gone With the Wind might also have opened up a fruitful—if sometimes discomfiting—discussion of the ways in which the Odyssey meshes with Americans’ love of strivers, tricksters and illusionists.
And Aeneas, the Trojan exile and founder of Rome, subject of his own Homerically inspired epic, might have been a better fit for Deneen’s focus on his belief that “American self-understanding was bound up with the practices of a pioneering people.” Hounded from the ruins of Troy by Hera, who hates the city and wants Trojan society to vanish, Aeneas and his followers find refuge in Italy, but only after they promise to become a new kind of people entirely. Deneen’s list of “the explorers, the pioneers, the wayfarers,” which includes “Daniel Boone, Huck Finn, Pa Ingalls of The Little House on the Prairie, James Gatz of The Great Gatsby, James T. Kirk of Star Trek, Elon Musk in his desire to make humanity ‘multiplanetary,’” tends to the banal, and includes many figures who have little in common with Odysseus other than that they take trips.
Of course, this is the core problem with American Odyssey: as Deneen himself acknowledges, a friend encouraged him to take advantage of the movie’s release in conjunction with America’s 250th to write a book about the Odyssey (the subject of his dissertation and first monograph), not to pursue a specific intellectual project. The result is a jumble of digressions into pop culture Deneen likes, including Field of Dreams, The Wizard of Oz, and Huckleberry Finn.
Even if this project were more thoughtfully designed or embarked upon with greater rigor, it would still be marred by interpretations that struck me most for their strangeness, or even inaccuracy. Is longing “with profound, existential urgency, to get away,” really a “consummately Odyssean” character trait linking both the wily Greek and It’s a Wonderful Life’s George Bailey? After all, Odysseus tries to feign madness to get out of leaving Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War, and spends much of the poem desperate to return home. Or was “Our forebears’ journey to these shores” really “inspired by the same sentiments expressed in Dorothy’s opening song, ‘Over the Rainbow’”? To my mind, the latter is a farcical reduction of causes that included religious liberty and the search for economic opportunity.
In the Iliad, Achilles does not brood “in his tent for most of the war, refusing to fight after the insult he has received at the hands of Agamemnon.” He leads a series of military campaigns against Troy’s allies over the course of nine years, during one of which he captures the princess Briseis; Agamemnon’s demand for her toward the end of the war is what provokes Achilles’ literally epic tantrum.
If anything, Deneen’s greatest revelations appear to be accidental, and about himself.
How interesting to know that some may think Odysseus ought to have enjoyed his time with Calypso more because he “has achieved—entirely by accident—what many successful older men attempt to arrange after decades of striving and saving: life with a young, beautiful, and sexually willing young woman on a tropical island.” Our hero also, in Deneen’s reading, apparently neglected to consider “the ravages of age on Penelope’s face, or her body bent beneath the burdens of running a home in his absence, or the likely changes of views and personality wrought by his absence of twenty years.” Matt Damon is “an actor not considered especially comely”—by whom, exactly? Deneen wishes us to know that “With some justification, it can be argued that The Wizard of Oz is for some Americans what the Odyssey was for the Greeks: a tale that provides a mythic revelation of our deepest inner selves.” Is that so? Again: For whom? And for that matter, what proof is there that the poem played that role for the Greeks?
In passages like these, Deneen is pushing passive voice and “the reader might think” as hard as Odysseus does his rowers on the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, but to lesser effect.
A FAR MORE ILLUMINATING SET of parallels between the Odyssey, the world in which it was written, and our own American moment emerges by implication—if not by direct exploration—in CUNY classics professor and provost Joel P. Christensen’s Why Odysseus? Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero.
There are few hoarier comparisons than those between America and Rome, both complimentary and pessimistic, given the threads that run between the two societies’ forms of government and quality of governance. But culturally, this description of Greek soft power sounds a lot more like the last century of American pop culture. Christensen writes:
What we refer to as Ancient Greece was a constellation of thousands of individual settlements (cities, towns, regions, colonies, trading outposts) with different dialects and local narrative traditions. Over time, and likely in response to pressure from the outside (e.g., Persian influence in Asia Minor and at sea), these disparate groups developed a composite culture that included a generally agreed upon Olympian Pantheon, shared oracular sites at Delphi and Delos, shared athletic festivals like the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games, and a shared valuing of the Homeric epics.
Christensen argues that the translations of Homer that appear in many countries and many generations represent a process of cultural assimilation and remixing that has reached its height in America. Unlike Deneen, he acknowledges the myth of Trojan Brutus as founder of Albion, the forerunner of modern Britain, a lineage that would tie early American settlers back to Homer. And in Christensen’s fascinating exploration of the idea that Odysseus marks the closing of the fictional race of heroes who were wiped out at Troy, I found myself thinking that the Founding Fathers might occupy a similar place in American mythology. They too are a lost ideal to which we must all aspire: the creators of a world that can only decline from a moment of shining, if somewhat illusory, glory.
But these are all comparisons that occurred to me while reading Why Odysseus, not ideas Christensen advances himself. And while Christensen left me feeling much more informed about the history of the Odyssey itself (and its very long life as an artistic and political inspiration) than Deneen’s tome did, both books suffer from similar flaws.
Christensen’s prose sins are slightly different in nature, if not in their narcoleptic impact on the reader. Where Deneen is turgid, Christensen is academic. And both men take a rather self-indulgent approach to their cultural criticism. Comparing Odysseus to Breaking Bad’s meth-manufacturing genius Walter White might be plausible—to a point. (Christensen ignores White’s confession that, unlike Odysseus, he embarked on his misadventures not truly for his family but “for me. I liked it. I was good at it.”) But in moments when he takes a side trip into a discussion of HBO’s The Penguin or a buddy’s Odyssey song cycle makes Christensen seem less like the highly regarded classicist he is and more like an aspiring critic, shaky-legged as he stumbles onto the shores of popular culture. He might have done better to spare us these digressions and instead gone deeper into how European intellectuals debated the Odyssey in light of the Holocaust, or Odysseus’s post-colonial reputation—is the Odyssey best read as a “proto-narrative of settler-colonialism,” as Frantz Fanon implied, or as a story of diaspora and migration?
I emerged from both American Odyssey and Why Odysseus knowing more facts about Homer’s epic and its reception across the ages. But I also came away with the strong impression that the history of the Odyssey is too big for any readable standalone volume to pin down. That alone might be a worthy lesson: The best way to prepare for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t to read someone else’s thoughts about it, but to join millennia’s-worth of other readers on a journey into Homer’s poetry and to consider the man of many turns for yourself.
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