Odysseus Beyond Antiquity: Myth, Hero and Anti-Hero, a Literary Archetype for Contemporary Story-Telling

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts

For scholar and layperson alike, the dawn of story-telling in the West if not the earliest literary text, coincides with Homer and his two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dating very roughly from somewhere around 700 BCE, Homer (traditionally thought to be a blind Ionian poet – see PostScript) composed his two (very) long poems in hexameter form to be read aloud at festivals and such public events. The Homeric epics were spread throughout the Greek world and beyond by professional reciters of poetry called rhapsodes (sort of travelling bards) [Beaty Rubens & Oliver Taplin, An Odyssey Round Odysseus: The Man and His Story Traced Through Time and Place, (1989)]. 

Epic of Gilgamesh

Homer’s works are generally considered the foundation point of what is commonly referred to as the Western canon※, though the Iliad and the Odyssey are predated by other foundation texts emanating from the earlier Sumerian civilisation, particularly the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca 2,100 BCE), comprising poems and tales, the first known work of fiction [‘What is the oldest known piece of literature?’, (Evan Andrews), History, 22-Aug-2018,  www.history.com]. 

Cattle of the Sun

The second of the epic poems, the Odyssey, deals with the perilous and action-packed 10-year journey of its eponymous hero Odysseus back to his home in Ithaca after the Trojan War (the Iliad). In 2018 a poll by the BBC of over 100 international authors, academics, journalists and critics chose the Odyssey as the most influential work in Western literature. Some of the reasons given for making the Odyssey primus inter pares in such a vast array of august literary texts include: it is “one of the great foundation myths of Western culture…asking what it means to be a hero”; it is “properly epic”; it has “great female characters”; it “forces us to question the assumptions we might have about quests, war, and what it means to return home” (repatriation); it endorses a “streak of individualism”, etc [Homer’s Odyssey is Officially the World’s Most Influential Story’, (Tasso Kokkinidis), Greece. Greek Reporter,(2018), www.greece.greekreporter.com✪.

That the Odyssey has been massively influential in the arts ever since it first emerged in the rocky hillsides of Ionian Greece is indisputable. Other ancient Greek playwrights and poets who followed Homer, like Sophocles, produced their own versions of the iconic tale (and their own take on the elusive character of Odysseus). It has been suggested that the character of Jesus in the Gospel of Markspan class=”s2″ style=”font-size: 19.73px”> draws from Odysseus and his adventures, eg, the “feeding of the 500”, Jesus was a carpenter like Odysseus, who was the builder of the “Wooden Horse” [‘The Odyssey : An Overview, No Sweat Shakespeare,  www.nosweatshakespeare.com].

⍐ 2nd century AD Tunisian mosaic of the Sirens (Book 12)

The Bard’s debt to Homer

It’s widely known that Shakespeare borrowed freely from many sources – plots, devices and imagery from the Bible, Plutarch, Seneca, Chaucer, from Holinshed’s Chronicles, from Boccaccio’s Decameron, etc. [‘Shakespeare’s Source Material’, (J.M. Pressley), Shakespeare’s Resource Center, www.bardnet.net/]. Like any educated Tudor man of the day Shakespeare voraciously absorbed the classics and Homeric influences are discernible in his plays – Odyssean themes like the phenomena of homecoming (Shakespeare’s Romances); the recognition theme from Odysseus’ reappearance in disguise in Ithaca (King Lear); the renewal theme (The Winter’s Tale) (No Sweat Shakespeare)⦿.

The Odysseus-Hamlet connexion

The Odyssey’s imprint on Shakespeare is most noticeable in the Bard’s most famous tragedy Hamlet. Several patterns emerge. Both literary opuses share a preoccupation with a troubled father-son relationship (Odysseus/Telemachus, King Hamlet/Prince Hamlet). Moreover, the Odyssey and Hamlet possess striking thematic similarities. Prince Hamlet and King Odysseus both employ deception to their advantage—the former dissembling madness and the latter physical disguises—to exact retribution against those who have wronged them. Both protagonists reveal a fatal flaw (hamartia)⊞ in the course of their trials and tribulations [‘Hamlet v. Odyssey’, (William Sheng), 12-Apr-2012,  http://docs.google.com/].

⍐ Odyssey-lite Homer (Simpson)

Retelling the Odysseus myth anew

The influence of the Odyssey on various media has been recurring and pervasive, including on novels (Don Quixote: Quixote, like Odysseus, embarks on a ‘epic’ journey and inflates (or distorts) his tales of heroism and survival) or The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood’s feminist remaking of the myth as told from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’ long-suffering wife); on television animation (The Simpsons “Tales from the Public Domain” episode – a satirical travesty of the Odyssey, Homer (Simpson) as Odysseus on a decidedly unheroic journey [‘8 Novels Inspired by the Odyssey’, (Jessica Ferri), Early Bird Books,  www.earlybirdbooks.com ; Economou Green, Mary. “The Odyssey and Its Odyssey in Contemporary Texts: Re-visions in Star Trek, The Time Traveler’s Wife,and The Penelopiad.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 1.1 (2014). Web.]; in poetry (Tennyson’s Ulysses (the Latinised form of ‘Odysseus’) is a kind of pessimistic postscript to the Odyssey with the aged hero unhappily stuck in his island kingdom lamenting the loss of his life of travel and adventure). 

Odysseus by the River Liffey

Easily the most famous literary reinterpretation of the Odyssey is James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness✠ novel Ulysses, a work which tore up the handbook for writing novels in the modern age. T S Eliot summarised the revolutionary impact of Ulysses’ thus: “(Joyce) has made the novel obsolete by replacing the narrative method with the mythical method” [quoted in ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses: Remixing the Homeric Myth’, (James AW Heffernan), The Great Courses Daily, 02-Apr-2017,www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com].Joyce adapts the framework of Homer’s classic to 1904 Dublin, condensing the original’s 10-year journey into a single day, in which the protagonist, the “mock-heroic” and cod-ordinary Leopold Bloom, wanders around his various haunts in the city. In every chapter of Ulysses Joyce matches or parallels the actions of his characters with that of the Odyssey but presents them as banal and mundane. The scene in Homer where a lovely princess Nausikaa assists the shipwrecked Odysseus on the island of Scheria is reworked by Joyce to show the married cuckold Bloom as voyeur, spying on an attractive girl at Sandymount Strand while relieving his frustrations by masturbating [David Norris & Carl Flint, Joyce For Beginners, (1994)]. 

the 1967 film version of ‘Ulysses‘

Sci-Fi Odysseus: Trekking with Homer

Science-Fiction depictions on the screen, big and small, have mined an abundant seam of inspiration from the Odyssey. Kubrick’s and Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey repositions the story in the Solar System with a supercomputer named HAL-9000 filling the role of the Cyclops imperilling the life of Odysseus/Dave Bowman. Another cult classic that owes inestimably to Homer’s Odyssey is the long-running Star Trek TV series. The Odyssey parallels are more than translucent  – Star Trek is replete with alien locations and weird and unworldly characters. Captain Kirk is “an intelligent, strong and charismatic leader, struggling to keep his crew together as they sail through the depths of space” [‘Greek Myth and Science Fiction’,  www.greekmythandscifi.wordpress.com]. Kirk & Co leave the known world (Earth) to journey into the unknown (the Galaxy)❂, they “go beyond”, they problem-solve, they vanish aliens and monsters and “re-emerge into the world victorious in quest purpose and with knowledge to better the plight of humankind” (Economou Green).

Odysseus as anti-hero precursor?

Odysseus exhibits qualities that make him seem to our eyes very modern (or even post-modern). He heroically and valiantly combats the monstrous creatures which block his path, but there is another, deeply problematic side to his personality. Odysseus, the personification of guile and cunning (polumetis in the Greek), routinely acts in both the Iliad and the Odyssey without honour or noble intention – a trickster, a dissembler and “con man”, a cheat, a liar, Among his many misdeeds, he sleeps with Circe; he murders innocent maids; he displays arrogance such as in his encounter with Polyphemus (the Cyclops); he misappropriates the armour of the dead Achilles (causing Ajax to take his own life); he fails to protect his crew on the voyage home resulting in them all perishing. You can discern in the ‘complicated’ and ‘ambiguous’◪ character of Odysseus a model for the ascendency of the anti-hero in modern cinema since the 1960s (Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, etc) [Cook, E. (1999). “Active” and “Passive” Heroics in the “Odyssey”.  The Classical World, 93(2), 149-167. doi: 10.2307/4352390].

Footnote: Odyssey, the prototype road movie

Homer’s classic is of course one of if not the principal fount of all subsequent travel/road stories in Western culture. This has proved nowhere more fecund than in modern cinema in films such as Easy Rider, Mad Max and countless others. Other road movies have been even more overt in referencing their debt to Odyssey and Homer – Paris, Texas, where the Odyssean protagonist charts a hazardous course which takes him from ruin and desperation to redemption [‘Wander Forever Between The Wind: A Tribute To PARIS, TEXAS’, (Priscilla Page), Birth, Movies, Death, 23-Sep-2017, www.birthmoviesdeath.com]. The Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou is unequivocally transparent in its pilferings from the Odyssey…the movie is variously peopled by a “Ulysses/Everett”, a “Penny”, a figurative “Cyclops”, “Lotus Eaters”, “Trojans/Ku Klux Klan”, a “Cattle of the Sun God”, “Sirens/laundry ladies”, a “Poseidon/county sheriff” and assorted other Homeric entities – all transposed to a 1930s Great Depression, Deep South setting.

PostScript: Authorship issue

Some scholars over the years have sought to debunk the custom of attributing the Iliad and the Odyssey to someone called ‘Homer’, about who there is virtually zero factual information, no biography to recount. Rather than a knowable or identifiable author this view attributes authorship to the whole Hellenic culture, tracing its genesis in fragments created before the supposed dates that ‘Homer’ flourished [‘Author Says a Whole Culture—Not a Single ‘Homer’—Wrote ‘Iliad,’ ‘Odyssey’’, (Simon Worrall), National Geographic, 03-Jan-2015,  www.nationalgeographic.com].

ღ დ ღ დ ღ

＊＊ the books, films, etc referred to above are only a selection of the total works—literary, the arts, music, cinema—informed and influenced by the Odyssey

𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪

※ ‘classic’ works of literature, philosophy, music and art elevated into a band of select ‘membership’ in the firmament of high culture

✪ the claim of ‘official’ recognition should be tempered by the fact that if a different set of experts were asked, they might not necessarily agree with the choice

⊞ in Hamlet it is prevarication and indecision, failing to act when he should, in Odysseus it is hubris, by which Odysseus offends Poseidon with “god-like” arrogance  

⦿ Shakespeare’s borrowings from the Iliad are more overt in Troilus and Cressida, he is indebted to Homer’s tale of Troy for the storyline and the entire Dramatis personae

✠ a method of narration in a literary work that describes happenings in the flow of thoughts in the minds of the characters [www.literarydevices.net/]

❂ cf. Odysseus – the Underworld

◪ Emily Wilson/Erwin Cook

 ≡ ≡  ≡

An Aegean War of Words: Presaging Strife for the Old Enemies of the Eastern Mediterranean?

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, National politics, Political geography, Politics

Hostilities between the Greeks and the Turks go back to antiquity, at least to the Late Bronze Age if we accept Homer’s classic literary work The Iliad as evidence of an approximate historical actuality – although Homer referred to the mortal combatants in Asia Minor as Achaeans and Trojans. In the modern era the focus of tension between Greece and Turkey has centred on the Aegean Sea and the eastern Mediterranean…the violent division and disputed status of the island of Cyprus in 1974 has been the most dramatic consequence of the ongoing enmity between the two countries.

(Source: OU News)

Tensions rose again in July of this year – Turkish president Recep Erdoğan dispatched the research vessel Oruc Reis along with a formidable military escort into Greek territorial waters to do seismic surveys of the region in search of gas deposits. Greek protests against Ankara’s territorial incursions being in breach of international law was met with “bellicose rhetoric” and threats by Erdoğan, and the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo became a hotspot for the dispute. Other incidents followed, in August a Greek frigate collided with one of the Turkish military escorts in the vicinity of Crete, and another Turkish vessel started drilling off the coast of Northern (Turkish-controlled) Cyprus [Turkey-Greece Relations: Why are the two countries locked in a dispute over drilling rights?’, (David Walsh), Euronews, 26-Aug-2020, www.euronews.com].

What accounts for all the recent turmoil and agitation in the region is the discovery a decade ago of natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean. Both Turkey and Greece are eager to exploit this lucrative source of energy and revenue. The problem for Turkey is the myriad EEZs (exclusive economic zones) relating to the numerous Greek islands in the Aegean which blocks Turkey’s scope of activity. The problem for Greece (and other onlookers within the EU) is that Turkey does not accept the legality of Greek sovereignty over the islands and their proximity to the Turkish mainland, its perennial bugbear.

Historic grievances
Old sores have been opened for Turkey and its right wing president Erdoğan, who cite the unjust treaties (as they view it) of Sèvres and Lausanne following WWI as retarding Turkeys’s capacity to explore and access natural resources of the eastern Mediterranean. Ankara maintains that the treaties left Turkey “landlocked despite (having) 8,000km of coastline”, that the maritime rights handed the Greek islands in the Aegean by the 1923 treaty box in Turkey from accessing large areas of sea, which it maintains it has a de jure right to❋. Erdoğan, imbued with the “spirit of the Ottoman sultanate”, has threatened to “tear up the immoral maps and documents” in disregard of the International Court of Justice.  [‘How a rush for Mediterranean gas threatens to push Greece and Turkey into war’, (Patrick Wintour), The Guardian, 11-Sep-2020, www.theguardian.com; ‘Tiny island Kastellorizo at centre of growing confrontation between Greece and Turkey’, (Benjamin Brook), News, 14-Sep-2020, www.new.com.au].

Turkey’s “Blue Homeland adventurism” and ‘maximalist’ v ‘minimalist’ island continental shelves
Railing loudly against the ‘invasion’ of Greece of its ‘sacred’ islands has been a long-standing article of faith for Turkish politicians…Turkish expansionist propaganda has characterised the Greek island-dotted Aegean as its “Blue Homeland” (a doctrine known the Turks as Mavi vatan) in defiance of the Lausanne Treaty [‘Blue Homeland: The Heated Politics Behind Turkey’s New Maritime Strategy’, (Ryan Gingeras), War On The Rocks, 02-Jun-2020, www.warontherocks.com]. Turkey’s counter-argument to Greece’s is that “Greek islands far from the mainland and closer to Turkey cannot have a continental shelf” (continental shelves equate with national mainlands). It also notes that Greek islands such as Meis and Kastellorizo lie a mere two kilometres from the Turkish mainland but many hundreds of kilometres from the Greek coastline— making a nonsense, they argue, of Greece’s “maximalist continental shelf claims”◰ [‘Turkey-Greek tensions escalate over Turkish Mediterranean drilling plans’, BBC News, 25-Aug-2020, www.bbc.com; ‘Turkey ignores Greece’s dispute, moves on with Mediterranean seismic surveys’, (Onur Ant), World Oil, 22-Jul-2020, www.worldoil.com; Walsh]. The question of whether the maritime areas (the continental shelves) of islands should be equal to that of mainlands (Greece’s position) or not is a thorny international one, only resolvable by complex ICJ arbitration – something Ankara would be reluctant to undertake (Wintour).

A ”Pax Mediterranea“ excluding Turkey
Athens responded to Ankara’s aggressive steps predictably by calling it tantamount to “illegal gunboat diplomacy”. Greece has actively pursued cooperation initiatives with other eastern Mediterranean rim countries including Egypt to jointly exploit gas reserves which by-passes Turkey (eg, the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum). Athens’ efforts to exclude and isolate Turkey have secured the willing participation of France. The EU, at the urgings of France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, imposed a sanction on Turkey for its aggressive behaviour in the Aegean. Ankara’s response to the attempted snooker has been to broker an agreement with the Libyan Government of National Accord to establish its own EEZ in the Mediterranean between the two countries. The EU have condemned the arrangement as infringing the maritime rights of Greece and Cyprus, and not complying with the Law of the Sea ◰. Turkey’s initiative is “a clear signal to other coastal states in the region that the gas game will not be played without Ankara’s consent” [‘Why did Turkey sign a maritime deal with Libya?’, TRT, 10-Dec-2019, www.trtworld.com].

Kastellorizo 🔻

For the time being tensions over the Kastellorizo hotspot in the Dodecanese islands have eased, President Erdoğan has pulled back its seismic survey vessels to the Turkish mainland. But with Erdoğan defiantly vowing to assert Turkey’s rights in the sea and Greece unwilling to make concessions to its traditional foe, the chance remains that an isolated incident may escalate into something more serious in the foreseeable future◘ [Turkish President Erdogan blinks first in eastern Mediterranean standoff’, (Menekse Tekyak), Arab News, 13-Sep-2020, www.arabnews.com].

🔺 Erdoğan visiting Hagia Sophia in July

(Photo: Turkish Presidential press office via Agence France–Presse — Getty Images)

Postscript: Ankara’s intransigent view of the ‘foreign’ Greek islands within the “Blue Homeland” remains the central stumbling block to security in the region. There are other recent developments in Turkey that have added to the tense trans-Aegean climate. President Erdoğan, always keen to show his Islamist credentials, in July restored Hagia Sophia—until 1453 a symbol of Christian Orthodoxy—to its former status as a functioning mosque, drawing criticism from many quarters including Greece, the Vatican, other international ecclesiastical councils and UNESCO. A second, current source of tension with its neighbour to the west derives from Erdoğan recently deciding to allow large numbers of refugees and migrants to flood into Europe via the Evros River border and Greece (BBC News).

⥽ ⥼⥼⥽⥽⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼⥼⥽⥽⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥽ ⥼⥼⥽⥽⥼ ⥽ ⥼⥼⥽⥽⥼ ⥽ ⥼ ⥽ ⥼⥽ ⥽

❋   Erdoğan and the Turks argue that the 1923 Lausanne Treaty allowed Greece and Cyprus to steal Turkey’s continental shelf (Brook). The letter of the law supports Greece, however Turkey’s frustrations are understandable given that such a large swath of its coastline is punctuated with a multitude of Greek EEZs

◰ which Turkey continues to refuse to ratify

◘  most observers feel that despite Erdoğan’s bellicosity, Turkey is unlikely to declare war any time soon, given it is militarily overextended in Syria and Libya and the current state of the Turkish economy [‘Turkish-Greek relations tense amid fears of military showdown’, Arab News, 13-Jun-2020, www.arabnews.com]