The figure lying on the hospital bed — silent and immobile, its head swathed in bandages and arms webbed with IV lines and oxygen tubes — barely resembled my father. And yet I was sure he was in there somewhere. It was January of 2012 and my dad, a retired research scientist and computer science professor, had just had a massive stroke, from which, we were told, he was unlikely to make a significant recovery. In the days and weeks that followed, as my mother and four siblings and I visited the I.C.U., we tried to understand the relationship of the inert figure on the hospital bed to the man we had known. Was there some core essence to him — the “him” I was convinced I could still feel — that remained constant, even as so much else had changed?
As it happened, these were the same questions my father and I had spent the previous spring contemplating, when he sat in on the first-year seminar on the Odyssey that I was teaching (an experience that later became the basis of a book I wrote). Dad, a rational thinker, brought more than a little skepticism to Homer’s 12,110-line epic about a sly hero with a penchant for guile, trickery and outright lies, an adventure story full of cannibalistic giants, seven-headed man-eating monsters and love-struck nymphs. But by the end of the semester, even my father came to admit that Homer’s poem raises questions about who we are and how we can be known, questions that are at once profound and startlingly modern — or, as Homer puts it at the end of his introductory lines, “for our times, too.”
Small wonder that the Odyssey, a staple of the Western canon and the progenitor of so much from sci-fi to rom-com, has been enjoying a bump in popularity of late. Earlier this year we got a major theatrical adaptation at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., by the feminist playwright Kate Hamill. Then came not one but two significant film adaptations: “The Return,” directed by Uberto Pasolini and starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche; and, expected next summer, an adaptation written and directed by Christopher Nolan, with Matt Damon as the “man of many turns,” as Homer calls Odysseus. That epithet speaks directly to the question of his tricky hero’s multifaceted and sometimes slippery self. If every era finds its own interest in the Odyssey, it’s the slipperiness that today’s audiences and creators recognize, steeped as we are in debates about identities political, social, gendered and sexual in a world that, like that of Odysseus, often seems darkly confusing.
The poem complicates the question of identity from the start. Its opening lines, where a poet typically announces his subject and theme, conspicuously neglect to mention Odysseus’ name, referring to him only as “a man”: “Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways / To wander, driven off course .…” (Compare the opening of the other great Homeric epic, the Iliad, which tells you right up front who it’s about: “Rage — sing of the rage, Goddess, of Peleus’s son, Achilles ….”) Just who is this “man”? Hard to tell. Later, at the beginning of one of the hero’s best-known adventures, Odysseus will adopt a pseudonym, “No-one,” when first encountering the one-eyed giant Cyclops. This is a useful fiction. (After the hero blinds the Cyclops, the creature calls out to his concerned neighbors, “No one is hurting me,” so the neighbors leave him to his fate.) And yet, in another sense, the false name is eerily true: Odysseus has been gone from home and presumed dead for so long that he really is a “nobody.” His struggle to reclaim his identity, to become “somebody” again, constitutes the epic’s greatest arc.
Throughout his famous adventures, this trickster’s talent for altering his physical appearance and lying about his life story saves him. But when he returns home, that ability becomes a problem: When he is finally reunited with his wife, Penelope, she is disinclined to believe that this stranger, who only moments before had appeared to be an elderly, decrepit beggar, is really the same man she bade farewell to so long ago. Although he does eventually prove himself to her (they exchange the ancient equivalent of a secret password), the unsettling question remains: How could he be the same person after two decades of life-changing experiences and suffering?
That paradox animates some of the most profound questions that this ancient work continues to pose, and which haunt me more than ever, over a decade after my father’s death. Just what is identity? What is the difference between our inner and outer selves — between the “I” that remains constant as we make the journey from birth to death and the self we present to the world, which is so often changed by circumstances beyond our control, such as pain, trauma or even the simple process of aging? How is it that we always feel that we are ourselves even as we acknowledge that we evolve and change over time, both physically and emotionally? I’ve been teaching the Odyssey for nearly four decades, but I can’t remember a time when it has spoken as forcefully to my students as it does today, when so many are embracing fluid identities and asserting their right to self-invention.
Another resonance for contemporary readers is the feeling of — there is no other word — “post-ness” that haunts the Odyssey. In the Iliad, the gods are constantly present, and mortals are driven by an unshakable conviction that glorious feats on the battlefield will win them eternal renown after death. All that is very much in the past in the Odyssey. The great war is over, the old brand of heroism has grown obsolete and the gods have mostly retreated, no longer intimately mixed up in human affairs. The hero of the Odyssey thus becomes a familiar figure: a loner at large in a post-historical world. Odysseus travels through confusing and often hostile landscapes, navigating strange creatures and peoples about whose practices, ideologies, intentions and character it is impossible to have any certainty, in search of a destination that may no longer even exist. That dilemma is entirely foreign to the Iliad, but it anticipates conundrums faced by the modernist heroes of Kafka and Joyce.
I’m a dozen years older now than I was when I sat with my father in his hospital room. As they did for Odysseus, as they do for everyone, the years have changed me, and yet I feel myself to be the same person. That paradox of identity — my father’s, my own — has changed the way I encounter the Odyssey. Reading it now, I see that the epic poem is a work about the often perplexing challenge of embracing what is most human about us, not least our mortality, in a time of great uncertainty. Not for nothing does the poet emphasize that Odysseus rejects the nymph Calypso’s offer of eternal life, preferring instead to return to his aging wife, preferring to die with her rather than live forever without her; not for nothing does Homer confront Odysseus in the Land of the Dead with the ghost of Achilles, the Iliad’s greatest hero, who declares to his old friend that he’d rather be the slave of a serf but alive once more than king of all the dead — a shocking repudiation, it would seem, of the old heroic value of glory at any cost, even the cost of one’s life.
Who could be surprised, then, that the Odyssey is all around us right now? However strange the epic’s origins and settings, the world that it paints — with its anxieties about gender and power, exile and belonging, narrative and identity — is one we know well.
Daniel Mendelsohn, the author of “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic,” published a new translation of the Odyssey in April.
Source photograph by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
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