There is a particular ache in every real homecoming, the kind that is never only a return to a place but also a reckoning with the person who once left it, and I think you have laid your finger on exactly the reason the Odyssey has never stopped speaking to us. It is a homecoming long before it is a lesson in how to behave. That is why I want to set one Hebrew word down beside your nostos, gently, because I have come to believe that the two traditions describe a single motion from opposite ends of the ancient world.
The word is teshuvah. Most of us have only ever met it dressed as repentance, a word that picked up a scolding tone it was never born with. Underneath, it means something far simpler and far kinder. It means to return. And in the Hebrew imagination, the turning of a soul back toward God and the long road of a person walking home are not two journeys that happen to rhyme. They are one word, spoken once, meaning both at the same time.
Your reading of the name walks the whole of that road with it. You show Odysseus gambling himself away into Outis, no one, unable to come home until the proud king's name has been laid down and he has agreed, at his own threshold, to be a nobody. The Hebrew story keeps a man who walked that exact path in the dark. Jacob had been twenty years in exile, and on the very night he turned back toward the country that was his home, he was stopped at the river crossing and wrestled to the ground by someone whose name he was not permitted to know. He asked for it and was refused. What he was handed instead was his own name, remade. He came up limping into the land at sunrise, emptied of the heel-grabber he had spent a lifetime being, carrying a wound he had not left with and a name he had not arrived with either. He too had to become nobody at the threshold before he was allowed to remember who he was.
Perhaps that is why Porphyry's cave has stayed with me since I read you. A place lovely and murky at once, whose whole gift is that it tells a man his name, is simply the truth about every one of us, small bees laboring to press a little divine honey into containers made of stone. Thank you for reading Homer with the lamp turned up this high. It has sent me back to my own scriptures with cleaner eyes.
Thank you Mark. I watched Jonathan Pageau's post-viewing report and he has also unpacked a meta-narrative of trickery in a very positive way. Apparently there are insertions of tales from the Aeneid and key figures are literally playing Trojan-horse roles. So it seems there is a great deal to contemplate for anyone wanting to get the most from this film adaptation.
This article is full of rich insights. Thank you! The film felt incredibly sterile and cold. Calypso could have been a robot. Odysseus felt flat. Shrunken to a generic, straight laced traumatic war hero who made hard decisions and committed violations that made him guilt ridden. The screaming scene with rhe Siren was ridiculous. Is Eros so hard for Nolan to grasp? As in most of his films, his female characters feel sexless. The closest he came was that opening shot of Lupita Nyongo's side profile while eating with Menelaus. He then ruined it by scarring her. The Agamemnon armor was arresting but felt out of place. Not saying it was a bad film but the source material is so rich, it felt really disappointing.
Thanks Mark. Dante places Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell for being 'a counsellor of fraud' - perhaps for his deceit in the Trojan war and counselling his men to tempt fate in search of knowledge. Is there anything of these flaws or any Dantean interpretation of him evident in the film?
Thanks and you remind me that Dante is notably fixated on Odysseus and his story and has to be held by Virgil. So my sense is this is a case of the good and human flaws being closer than is often assumed. Odysseus yearned for more, with any means justifying the end, whereas Dante who also yearns for more is realising that the means shapes the more received.
Seems like Nolans interpretation comes close to Whiteheads:
“There is Reason, asserting itself as above the world, and there is Reason as one of many factors within the world. The Greeks have bequeathed to us two figures, whose real or mythical lives conform to these two notions—Plato and Ulysses. The one shares Reason with the Gods, the other shares it with the foxes.”
“We have got to remember the two aspects of Reason, the Reason of Plato and the Reason of Ulysses, Reason as seeking a complete understanding and Reason as seeking an immediate method of action.”
“Some of the major disasters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology. Ulysses has no use for Plato, and the bones of his companions are strewn on many a reef and many an isle.”
Quotes from Whitehead, The Function of Reason.
So if I understand you correctly, you’re implicitly criticizing Whiteheads understanding of the narrative as well, arguing that there’s more contemplative reasoning happening in the original tale than meets the eye at a first glance?
Yup, good summary. Reason is resonance, vision, reaching, and in myth and rite too - which is why all those elements are in Plato’s dialogues too. Even a journey to the land of the dead.
Mark,
There is a particular ache in every real homecoming, the kind that is never only a return to a place but also a reckoning with the person who once left it, and I think you have laid your finger on exactly the reason the Odyssey has never stopped speaking to us. It is a homecoming long before it is a lesson in how to behave. That is why I want to set one Hebrew word down beside your nostos, gently, because I have come to believe that the two traditions describe a single motion from opposite ends of the ancient world.
The word is teshuvah. Most of us have only ever met it dressed as repentance, a word that picked up a scolding tone it was never born with. Underneath, it means something far simpler and far kinder. It means to return. And in the Hebrew imagination, the turning of a soul back toward God and the long road of a person walking home are not two journeys that happen to rhyme. They are one word, spoken once, meaning both at the same time.
Your reading of the name walks the whole of that road with it. You show Odysseus gambling himself away into Outis, no one, unable to come home until the proud king's name has been laid down and he has agreed, at his own threshold, to be a nobody. The Hebrew story keeps a man who walked that exact path in the dark. Jacob had been twenty years in exile, and on the very night he turned back toward the country that was his home, he was stopped at the river crossing and wrestled to the ground by someone whose name he was not permitted to know. He asked for it and was refused. What he was handed instead was his own name, remade. He came up limping into the land at sunrise, emptied of the heel-grabber he had spent a lifetime being, carrying a wound he had not left with and a name he had not arrived with either. He too had to become nobody at the threshold before he was allowed to remember who he was.
Perhaps that is why Porphyry's cave has stayed with me since I read you. A place lovely and murky at once, whose whole gift is that it tells a man his name, is simply the truth about every one of us, small bees laboring to press a little divine honey into containers made of stone. Thank you for reading Homer with the lamp turned up this high. It has sent me back to my own scriptures with cleaner eyes.
Ty
Thank you Mark. I watched Jonathan Pageau's post-viewing report and he has also unpacked a meta-narrative of trickery in a very positive way. Apparently there are insertions of tales from the Aeneid and key figures are literally playing Trojan-horse roles. So it seems there is a great deal to contemplate for anyone wanting to get the most from this film adaptation.
This article is full of rich insights. Thank you! The film felt incredibly sterile and cold. Calypso could have been a robot. Odysseus felt flat. Shrunken to a generic, straight laced traumatic war hero who made hard decisions and committed violations that made him guilt ridden. The screaming scene with rhe Siren was ridiculous. Is Eros so hard for Nolan to grasp? As in most of his films, his female characters feel sexless. The closest he came was that opening shot of Lupita Nyongo's side profile while eating with Menelaus. He then ruined it by scarring her. The Agamemnon armor was arresting but felt out of place. Not saying it was a bad film but the source material is so rich, it felt really disappointing.
Thanks Mark. Dante places Odysseus in the eighth circle of hell for being 'a counsellor of fraud' - perhaps for his deceit in the Trojan war and counselling his men to tempt fate in search of knowledge. Is there anything of these flaws or any Dantean interpretation of him evident in the film?
Thanks and you remind me that Dante is notably fixated on Odysseus and his story and has to be held by Virgil. So my sense is this is a case of the good and human flaws being closer than is often assumed. Odysseus yearned for more, with any means justifying the end, whereas Dante who also yearns for more is realising that the means shapes the more received.
Seems like Nolans interpretation comes close to Whiteheads:
“There is Reason, asserting itself as above the world, and there is Reason as one of many factors within the world. The Greeks have bequeathed to us two figures, whose real or mythical lives conform to these two notions—Plato and Ulysses. The one shares Reason with the Gods, the other shares it with the foxes.”
“We have got to remember the two aspects of Reason, the Reason of Plato and the Reason of Ulysses, Reason as seeking a complete understanding and Reason as seeking an immediate method of action.”
“Some of the major disasters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology. Ulysses has no use for Plato, and the bones of his companions are strewn on many a reef and many an isle.”
Quotes from Whitehead, The Function of Reason.
So if I understand you correctly, you’re implicitly criticizing Whiteheads understanding of the narrative as well, arguing that there’s more contemplative reasoning happening in the original tale than meets the eye at a first glance?
Yup, good summary. Reason is resonance, vision, reaching, and in myth and rite too - which is why all those elements are in Plato’s dialogues too. Even a journey to the land of the dead.