The Odyssey: A Story Told for Three Thousand Years

Nolan's Odyssey turns our eyes once again toward this starting point of Western literature, written nearly three thousand years ago.

In Nolan's film, Odysseus is more a particular man: a story of the trauma of war, of love, of fathers and sons, and of coming home.

What Homer really cares about may be a more fundamental question: what is it that makes up a human life? In the original there is no blue lotus on the beautiful nymph's island. Odysseus chooses for himself whether to stay in that paradise and be granted immortality, or to return to dangerous Ithaca and take on the struggles and sorrows of mortals.

Greek has a particular word for homecoming, nostos. It looks a great deal like the English nostalgia, yet it means something entirely different. Odysseus does not go home out of homesickness. Nostos is about returning to where one belongs and completing the fate that was one's own: king of Ithaca, father, husband of Penelope. The Greeks believed a person holds a belonging in the cosmos, a position that is theirs, and that this is not changed by what they have lived through.

What matters in the Odyssey is not the adventures themselves; they read more like a test of whether Odysseus can complete his homecoming. Every monster, every strange encounter, even Penelope's final trial, asks the same question: after all of this, does this man still belong to the life that was originally his?

As someone who grew up inside Chinese culture and then drifted far from home, it is hard not to find a resonance in the Greek value of nostos. Even when a life lived away from home comes to something, is that where a person finally belongs? But nostos is not only a return to a place on the map. It is about whether a person can find their own position in the cosmos and complete their own fate.

Of course, for a story retold countless times across three thousand years, an adaptation unfaithful to the original has never been a problem.

This epic of the Trojan War, a late Bronze Age war contemporary with China's Western Zhou, was rewritten seven hundred years after Homer by Virgil in Rome as the Aeneid: how a Trojan prince rebuilds civilization after his city is destroyed. It is striking that Sinon, the volunteer sacrificed on the beach at 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 Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, the three Christian realms of his poem, in search of the highest purpose of life. In Hell they meet another Odysseus, one who has gone astray, sunk in endless voyaging and the endless pursuit of 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 engine of modern civilization itself.

A hundred years ago, Ulysses, the Roman name of Odysseus, appeared once more in the title of a work of literature. This time the story is no longer grand; what remains is the endless trivia of modern life in Dublin. The logic and the language are no longer the carefully chosen, carefully preserved classics of Homeric epic, but Joyce's attempt to present thought as it actually is inside a head.

And when, in the film, Odysseus returns to Ithaca and breaks the fourth wall to tell Penelope that the Trojan War has broken the bonds between people, that people no longer treasure language, culture, or ways of living, and that the Bronze Age will perish, that is Nolan speaking a contemporary historical self-awareness through Odysseus' mouth.

When we open the Iliad and the Odyssey again today, standing as they do at the beginning of Western civilization, we are astonished at how modern their values are, at how closely the glory and the frailty of human nature they describe resemble our own.

The self-exile Nolan chooses for Odysseus at the end is a fascinating change as well. The Odysseus who finally drifts onto the beach at Ithaca is like a ship that has sailed so many years that every plank has been replaced: when it sails back into the harbor it weighed anchor from, is it still the same ship?

Homer, were he alive, might say: whether it is the same ship does not matter. What matters is whether it can complete its nostos.