Odyssey: A Story Being Told for 3,000 Years
Nolan's Odyssey turns our eyes once more toward this starting point of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old.
The Odysseus of Nolan's film is more a particular man — a story of war trauma, of love, of fathers and sons, of coming home.
What Homer really cared about may be a more fundamental question: what is it that makes up a human life? In the original there are no blue lotuses on the beautiful nymph's island. Odysseus chooses for himself whether to stay in a paradise and be given immortality, or to return to dangerous Ithaca and bear the struggles and troubles of mortals.
Greek has a particular word for the homecoming: nostos. It looks much like the English nostalgia, but it means something entirely different. Odysseus does not go home out of homesickness. Nostos is about returning to what one belongs to and completing the fate that was one's own: king of Ithaca, father, husband of Penelope. The ancient Greeks believed that a person holds a belonging, a place of their own, within the order of the cosmos — and that this is not changed by what happens to them.
What matters in the Odyssey is not the adventure itself; it is more like a test of whether Odysseus can complete his homecoming. Every monster, every strange encounter, even Penelope's final test, asks the same question: after everything he has been through, does this man still belong to the life that was his?
As someone who grew up inside Chinese culture and has drifted far from home, I cannot help finding a resonance in the Greek value of nostos. Even when a life lived away from one's roots turns out well, is that where a person finally belongs? And yet nostos is not only a return to a location on a map; it is about whether a person can find their own place in the cosmos and complete their own fate.
Of course, for a story told countless times across three thousand years, an unfaithful rendering of the Odyssey has never been a problem.
This epic of the Trojan War — late Bronze Age, contemporaneous with China's Western Zhou — was reworked seven hundred years after Homer by the Roman poet Virgil into the Aeneid: how a Trojan prince rebuilds a civilization after his city is destroyed. What is interesting is that Sinon, the volunteer sacrificed on the beach in the opening of Nolan's adaptation, is in fact a character from the Aeneid.
A thousand years later Virgil himself became a literary character, leading Dante through the three Christian realms of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in search of the highest purpose of life. In Hell they meet another Odysseus — one who has gone astray, lost in endless voyaging and an endless appetite for knowledge.
Five hundred years after that, Goethe — a close reader of Dante and of the Greek classics — wrote Faust, wagering with the devil that no moment of a life can serve as its completion. The pursuit of the infinite seems to have become the driving force of modern civilization itself.
A hundred years ago, Ulysses — Odysseus's Roman name — appeared once again in the title of a work of literature. This time the story is no longer grand; what remains is the endless triviality of modern life in Dublin. Logic and language themselves are no longer the carefully chosen, carefully preserved classics of Homeric epic, but what Joyce tried to render: thought as it actually is inside a head.
And when the Odysseus of the film returns to Ithaca and says to Penelope, breaking through the fourth wall, that the Trojan War severed the bonds between people, that people no longer cherish language, culture, ways of living, that the Bronze Age is going to perish. That too is Nolan speaking a contemporary historical self-awareness through Odysseus's mouth.
When we open the Iliad and the Odyssey again today, standing as they do at the beginning of Western civilization, we are struck by how modern their values are, by how closely the glory and the weakness of the human beings they describe resemble our own.
The ending of Nolan's Odyssey, with an Odysseus who chooses self-exile, is a very interesting change. The Odysseus who finally drifts onto the beach at Ithaca is like a ship that has sailed for years and had every plank replaced — when it sails back into the harbor it weighed anchor from, is it still the same ship?
If Homer were alive, he might say: whether it is the same ship does not matter. What matters is whether it can complete its nostos.