Odyssey

a tale of anachronism

Somewhere around 700 years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, people—now boiled down to one vague character named Homer—transcribed what was likely a story already in circulation about a king’s journey, in which he was faced by many challenges, while his faithful but put-upon wife waited virtuously at home for a very long time.

We had to read this story when I was in high school. Everyone did, because it was part of the literary canon of Western Civilization, and having read it was believed to be one small step toward our incorporation into the Tradition. The interpretations of the story by high school teachers were generally wrong. Like a bad preacher who seeks to squeeze out a faulty exegesis of some gospel passage by telling a middle class story about his suburban fourteen-year-old’s latest “challenge,” our high school didacts lacked the erudition and imagination to step out of their own time to appreciate how utterly different people from other times and places were; and so they projected their own epistemic priors onto the story. This was not elaboration, as some comparative minded people may try to rationalize; it was outright error in which the truest value of Odýsseia was lost—a historical, metaphysical, and even phenomenological window into a lost period.

When I was attending the University of Arkansas at Monticello—a farm school in a dry county mere minutes away from both Mississippi and Louisiana—I was blessed to have a professor whose prickly iconoclasm had gotten him fired from more prestigious institutions and exiled to the Arkansas outback. His name was Frank Reuter.

Frank’s classes walked me through Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare—with the same message for all three. These people and those around them were dramatically different from ourselves or anyone we had ever known. Those differences were far more than cosmetic or material. The world around the long-dead was not only developmentally prior, it was something utterly alien to our untrained imaginations. My near instant affinity for Duden and Illich—with their strange history of perception—can be credited to Frank Reuter guiding me through the corridors of these alien worlds, where ever line in the literatures suddenly emerged as cohering evidence. There were dizzy moments when I was transported across the years by this newfound coherence. Suddenly, my own situation became strange to me—is ephemerality, its contingency, its vain and almost childish self-assurance.

Anachronism is a natural default. It has to be torn out by training, like ethnocentrism does, like the assumption that all other persons are (or should be) like me. It’s a wall where we may need a window for our best imaginations to thrive.

There have been 33 films “based on the Odyssey,” and every one of them has been—in terms of their metaphysical fealty to the original—complete bullshit. Not on purpose, and not only because literature doesn’t adapt seamlessly to film. No film for a modern audience, from 1911 to 2026, can present the truest and original world view of “Homer’s” epic—a deeply conservative story told in oral formulae from an aristocratic perspective 2,700 years ago—and still gain a popular audience. In every case, it was one of those high school teachers or bougie preachers getting it wrong.

This is why I don’t give a damn about the latest tempest in a teapot over the casting for Christopher Nolan’s movie, which I won’t be seeing, the marquee for which is already featuring characters that look like—well, Matt Damon and a bunch of the beard-balmed guys I see at the local gym, dressed up in Madison Avenue “Greek” costumes. I guess the controversy is about Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, where she sported modern black hairstyles appropriately altered for Hollywood-Troy. Too “woke,” or some shit. ← This is so far afield of my issue with “Odyssey” films in general, and in fact much of the way history and art is taught or represented in the media, that it just looks like confirmation of my grumpy antithesis. Like, this is your problem with a story that was totally retooled by Hollywood in the first place?

Yeah, I understand commerce and the ever more consolidated and just-plain-awful film industry. Spectacle displaces real creativity. Cash receipts trump originality . . . and meaning. Hollywood’s gonna Hollywood; capitalism’s gonna capitalism. Nothing to do about it but grouse . . . (that’s what I’m here for 😉).

For an alternative to all this estupidez, and a ray of hope, I refer readers to Romanticon, where Joe Cauley has just published an incredibly good film reflection on the 1992 non-blockbuster but fantastic film, Bad Lieutenant, titled “Pledging My Love.”

Peace, y’all.