The Great Recognition

Notes on Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

“Knowing that people and circumstances have not gotten very far in three thousand years leads to a feeling of serenity rather than hopelessness.”

~ Christa Wolf, Conditions of a Narrative

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I had things to do on Friday but The Odyssey ruined everything. We had two o’clock tickets and, after a half hour of abject previews (“How could anyone want such things?”) and nearly three hours of run time, I made my usual stumble toward the urinals well after five — but, for the first time in years, unable to blink. Unable to speak.

For the rest of that night I felt like something terrible had happened to me, on the verge of tears for hours. But I also felt exhilarated. Even exalted. I’d gone to the theater expecting something “pretty good” but, like a true Nolan film, with wooden dialogue, opaque characters, and something of groan rumbling beneath its central conceit. Instead, I got lost. Here is my best explanation.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Nolan’s Odyssey is less an adaptation of a singular epic poem attributed to Homer than it is an adaptation of the myth of Odysseus — including all the things the character of Odysseus has ever done, in any form, since Homer’s Greek first tilled its way, back and forth, in its field of papyrus. The Odysseus onscreen is not merely the Odysseus from Greek myth, but also from Athenian tragedy, Elizabethan plays, Romantic odes, all the way through modern novels and movies. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is the many-faceted Odysseus that belongs, and has belonged, to the entire world for the last three thousand years — not just “a complicated man,” but maybe the most complicated man.

Myths are why we say, I heard it like this. Each telling is the same seashell described, on different days, just below the rollers along a pebbly beach. Each version is accurate. As Roberto Calasso put it, “The repetition of a mythical event, with its play of variations, tells us that something remote is beckoning to us. There is no such thing as the isolated mythical event, just as there is no such thing as the isolated word. Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments.”

That Nolan “takes liberties” with the tale of Odysseus is truer to the Greek imagination than any disingenuously imagined fidelity to “the text” — an epic poem composed, revised, and edited orally over generations before the rare combination of literacy and taste appeared in the same person, and that person wrote it down. This is why, alongside the Iliad, the first two major works in the western canon remain among the best; few writers since have benefited from the luxury of having three or four hundred years to hand in a draft. Treating storytelling this way, as Calasso points out — avoiding the ritualistic or “priestly authority” of a single canonical version — is a peculiarly Greek practice: “In Greece, myth escapes from ritual like a genie from a bottle… The Greeks became so used to hearing the same stories told with different plots that it got to be a perfectly normal thing for them… Thus, in contrast to the harsh coercion of ritual, history was a constant overflowing, leaving, visible in its wake, those relics we call characters.”

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The word Emily Wilson renders as “complicated” is polytropos, where tropos suggests “a turn, direction, course, way; manner, fashion.” If Achilles and the other heroes of the Iliad are confined by their epithets, Odysseus of his many turns or many manners echoes Whitman’s “multitudes”: he can go anywhere, at any time, for any reason, and just as easily change his mind. In this, he is permanently contemporary, both the oldest character in the western canon and its most modern. Nolan’s genius, in The Odyssey, is to cultivate this contradiction.

The setup is simple. Ithaca is twenty years without a king. Penelope’s ruse to defer her suitors is almost up. The suitors themselves plot to kill her son Telemachus. The house’s servants are divided in their loyalty. Odysseus’s beloved and ancient hunting dog, Argos, is neglected and suffering. And there are rumors of “people from the sea” pillaging kingdoms across the Aegean. Ithaca, we understand, is weak. Odysseus, meanwhile, finds another board washed up on a beach and adds it to a pile; he has had another dream, he tells Calypso, and she asks him what he remembers. She denies him another helping of lotus flowers, and the story starts to come to him. It begins with his crew setting sail from a long beach of graves just outside Troy’s ruins. “I’ve followed Agamemnon long enough,” he tells his men, so instead they follow the wind.

From there you know the story — the Cyclops, the giant cannibals, Circe’s witchcraft, Odysseus’s journey to the underworld to speak with his fallen comrades, the maelstrom, the monster Scylla, the slaughter of the sun god’s cattle, and ultimately the death of all of Odysseus’s men — and it is precisely the point that we know the story. In Damon’s every act onscreen, there is an accumulation of acts from every Odysseus; in every Cyclops, there is the accumulated thrill of every Cyclops.

Overall, Nolan’s film hinges on this accumulation. All the times we’ve seen or read or heard this story are glimmering in this film, which invites one to look back upon literature, of course, but also upon moviemaking. There are other movies in this movie, but not in the way a Tarantino film is full of movies. Instead, by tapping mythology, Nolan goes for something deeper. In showing up to the theater not only with a rudimentary knowledge of the plot and the characters, but also with your own history of watching this same story or stories like it happen in other movies, however long you’ve been watching them, you can see the uncanniness of The Odyssey: that a major summer blockbuster, a swords-and-sandals epic with monsters, with fight scenes, with absurdly abdominaled men and bafflingly beautiful women, and with an axe of $250 million hovering over its neck, can still be an overwhelming, stunning work of art.

If a beloved film like Project Hail Mary proved that Hollywood can still make big budget sci-fi that’s nonetheless funny, moving, existential, and thought-provoking, Nolan’s Odyssey (and its opening weekend) proves that audiences everywhere are hungry for something even larger: the sublime.

The film begins, as an epigraph explains, “in a time of apparent¹ magic.” As in Homer’s epics, there’s a sense that the world is changing. The age of heroes is coming to an end, the gods are withdrawing from the earth, and humankind must begin to make its own decisions, to follow its own paths.

There are clues, too, that writing has something to do with this.

In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson explores what happens to love, to knowledge, and to human beings when words that once flew from my lungs into your ears get clipped and fastened to the page: “An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self.” To listen for stories, Carson says, is “a condition of optimum awareness and alertness… a continual fluent interchange of sensual impressions.” But when knowledge and discourse shift to the written word, the visual sense takes over:

As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him… In making the effort, he becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action. The recognition that such controlling action is possible, and perhaps necessary, marks an important stage in ontogenetic as in phylogenetic development, a stage at which the individual personality gathers itself to resist disintegration.

In a written culture, the boundaries of self come into being, and it is love and knowledge that become the two greatest threats to this new sovereignty: “The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind… Change of self is loss of self to these poets. Their metaphors for the experience are metaphors of war, disease and bodily dissolution. These metaphors assume a dynamic of assault and resistance.”

After I recovered from Nolan’s Odyssey and reached for my copy of Eros, I found an article I’d clipped from the New York Review of Books and hidden inside. Reviewing Radcliffe G. Edmonds III’s Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World in July of 2020, Marina Warner observed that, when it comes to attempts to thwart fate or fool the gods through magic,

myths often turn on the one thing that is fatally overlooked: the heel in the case of Achilles’ bath in the waters of Styx. The spread of literacy, however, rendered it possible to fix spells more securely and circulate the formulas more widely. Edmonds quotes Jonathan Smith, who noted that “the chief ritual activity within the Greek Magical Papyri appears to be the act of writing itself.”

The writer, in this imagination, achieves a version of the impossible: fixing motion in place. “Imagery of binding,” Warner goes on, “knotting, pinning down, and securing by means of constraints of every kind suffuses magical procedures in the ancient past; the word ‘fascination,’ from fasces² (bundle), also implies making fast — lashing disparate elements together into one body.”

Writing, in this sense, is polytropic magic, and reading therefore gives a false illusion of control over multiplicity. “A reader,” Carson concludes, “like a bad lover, may feel he can zoom into his text at any point and pluck the fruit of its wisdom… Like Odysseus bound to the mast of his ship, a reader may titillate himself with the siren song of knowledge and sail past intact.” But writing, like all art, is a clever magic, and continually revises itself, refines itself, with the intent of violating these defenses. It takes what we expect and subverts it; it takes what we think we know and invalidates it; and it takes what we thought we’d lost and brings it back home.

Javier Marías called this capability, unique to the narrative arts, “recognition”: “When I must stop my reading and say to myself: ‘Yes, this is true, it is just like this. I knew, but I did not know that I knew until I read it here.’”

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In the epic mode, Odysseus acts and the gods correct. He is sly, cunning, and a lover of disguises; but like all heroes he is a dangerous, impulsive man. A proper Greek protagonist, he has done a terrible thing and he will not get what he wants until he accepts his punishment with grace.

In the modern mode, the gods recede, and Odysseus is his own deity; his conscience becomes his punishment. Nolan’s film, if it has to be about anything, is about this: when the gods at last grant to man the capacity for self judgment.

While the details in Homer are scant, Nolan leans intuitively on Virgil’s Aeneid, where the “Trojan Horse” is developed into the story we know today. The horse, a “gift” for the Trojans, is Odysseus’s great idea, a breakthrough after ten years of useless siege. As we know, it’s what ultimately brings Troy — a city that controlled access to a vital waterway — to its knees.

True to an ancient king, it isn’t the slaughter or the brutality that haunts Odysseus; it’s that he deceived the Trojans by violating Zeus’s sacred law of xenia, or “guest friendship,” an ancient social contract meant to foster congenial relations between strangers — and strange peoples. If you treat everyone you meet as a god in disguise, the story goes, you will pass their potential test. Odysseus, upon leaving the shores of Troy’s ruins, believes he has destroyed that contract — and not only for Ithaca but, because the songs of his deeds are already finding their way across the Aegean, for the entire world.

Damon’s Odysseus gives truth to the cliché: Despite all his wanderings, he is not lost. Another fascinating aspect of his character is that he rarely chooses to reveal himself, or that he’s always being goaded into revealing himself. This sense of recognition is present in the poem, but Nolan makes its significance explicit. Riffing on Zeus’s law, the unpalatable suitor Antinous mocks Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar: “Are you a god, stranger?” No, he answers; Odysseus is not a god, but he is a mortal granted the gods’ ability to deceive, and in doing so to test others of their character. He has been given the divine capacity for judgment.

A few loyal to him are able to recognize him as he weighs his judgments; they catch a glimpse of old Odysseus in contemplation — “He was always fair” — shining through the disguise. But the one man who reliably never recognizes Odysseus is Odysseus. He can’t bear to go home as the man he’s become because he cannot see the man he remains. Instead of the king others recognize, he sees only a monster. In a word, he is ashamed.

“The monster,” Calasso writes, “is the most precious of enemies: therefore it is the enemy one goes and looks for.” Replete with monsters, as many old tales are, the Odyssey is a bit slant because the monsters Odysseus fights or flees are not monsters he’s sought. “When the hero confronts the monster,” Calasso adds, “he has as yet neither power nor knowledge. The monster is his secret father, who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give him.”

What makes Nolan’s Odyssey not only modern but immediately, urgently contemporary is that the monster Odysseus is looking for is Odysseus. But unlike the great tragedies, his fate is not to die or fade into obscurity, nor even only to live with his guilt, but to triumph over what he’s done through recognition. He accepts his crimes, but will not be bound by their shame. Despite his misdeeds — and despite his twenty years “lost” at sea — he is still Ithaca’s king, Penelope’s husband, and Telemachus’s father.

Slaying the monster of your shame is not without its cost. You can find yourself, you can recognize yourself, you can come home, but it takes time — another of Nolan’s novel additions to the Odyssey. I’m thinking of Lukács’ distinction between time in an epic — where “its function is solely to express the greatness of an enterprise” (similar to listing the number of ships and warriors dispatched to Troy) but in which “the heroes do not experience time within the work itself” and it “does not affect their inner changes” — and the function of time in a novel, where experiencing some sense of duration is “among its constitutive principles” as a form. Time, Lukács adds: “is the fullness of life, although the fullness of time is the self-abolition of life and, with it, of time itself.”

At no point, in Nolan’s³ film, do we get the sense that this has been easy on anyone. When Odysseus arrives home and dons his disguise, it’s not with swagger or bravado but the dewy sadness of dreaming of dead friends or sold houses; and when he places his hand on a dying, whimpering Argos, who has spent his entire life waiting for his master to return, it’s hard not to think of homecoming as a hero’s most painful act: Here is what I lost, and for what?

I didn’t know I knew this until I saw it, but afterward it seemed ordained. It is just like this, and I’m grateful to know now what I’ve known.

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Thank you for reading. I know it’s been a long time and I’m sorry. As always, please don’t hesitate to check out my books, if you feel so inclined, or support my work with a paid subscription. But really I’m just grateful to have you here. Thank you for reading and sharing.

1. Though in Circe’s case it’s rather evident.

2. It intrigues me that fasces, which refers to a bundle of rods wrapped around an axe — a symbol of power carried by a Roman magistrate and which gave Mussolini the name for his movement — also gestures toward bondage, toward the fixing of images, the pinning of butterflies to their boards, the arrest of motion, the intolerance of fluidity, and so on. Someone should write a book about this.

3. And here is the miracle of this film in particular from a director whose other works tend to betray a lack of interest, if not an avid disinterest, in human feelings and motivations. Thank god for brilliant actors, but also for growth.