What Is The Odyssey?

 

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The Odyssey is not the book you think it is. Most of the action you remember happens in Books 9-12, the whole back half of The Odyssey has far less action than those four books. Those four books are the part everybody loves. Everybody thinks this is a great action-adventure story, but the major plot point of The Odyssey is not the adventures of Odysseus. The major plot point of The Odyssey is that 'these douchebags are drinking Odysseus's wine!'.

Homer is far from my favorite author. I love the adventure parts of The Odyssey as much as anybody does.. But it's really only a tiny part part of a book that isn't that long to begin with. The Illiad is quite a bit longer than The Odyssey, and it is frankly much more exciting. The last third of The Iliad is one of the greatest stories ever told: heroic, sublime, terrifying, moving.

But Homer, at its core, is not about its action. Homer is about poetry, and epic poetry is about ritual, because rituals are what give order to life. What makes poetry epic is not the excitement, it's not even the scale or scope: it's the stakes. It's the sense that these events matter, that these people matter, matter so much that part of the reason we exist is to commemorate their deeds. The Rage of Achilles is not just about Achilles's rage, it is about the rage of every person who has ever mourned a murder victim, and its nothing short of a ritual enactment of what every person who's experienced that rage wants to do. The Trojan War is not just about the Trojan War, it's about every war and every fear we have that civilization-wide death is coming for our peoples just as it came for theirs.

We may think that in our biggest movies we have that kind of grandeur, but we look for that grandeur in the wrong places. There are only a very few artistic creators in all of human history who come close to that kind of sublime solemnity: maybe Wagner or Michelangelo, or Goya or Milton. But if you really want to understand what Homer is like: don't picture a Christopher Nolan movie, you'll only find that kind of grandeur in a very few places in American culture. Picture the Baptismal Massacre in The Godfather, or Colonel Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now. Picture the ape picking up a bone in 2001. Picture the oil fire in There Will Be Blood.

That's four moments in American film, there aren't many more, in which the limitations of what entertainment can do are so transcended that it takes on the properties of a religious ritual. Those moments are not just art, those are moments so transcendent that they put us in touch with the possibility that there are forces in the universe more grand than anything of which our imaginations can conceive. When you (I) see the massacre at the end of The Godfather, it is as though evil itself has emerged from hell and subverted Christianity's holiest sacraments. Many people watch that oil fire in There Will Be Blood, and instead of an oil fire they see the destructive forces of capitalism itself. And the monkey with the bone in 2001? I don't need to describe it, everyone who's seen it can tell you it is exactly what Kubrick says it is: the dawn of man.

Now take all those tableaux's and stretch them into a thirty hour movie whose tone is basically the same as all those scenes. Now you have an idea of what a Homeric epic is. We think of Homer beginning the Greek half of Western Civilization because he managed to take the most literally awesome five minutes of The Godfather or 2001 and stretch it to the length of a book.

That's Homer. He's is not about the adventure, he's about the transcendence. Every moment of his books is that ritual where every book in his epic seems to summon a new sublime force from the ether. Not every moment in his poems is sublime, but every one of his chapters has elements that feels connected to some subtextual element of the universe so much bigger than just itself. Every other page is a grand tableux or a feast or a retelling of events every member of society was expected to know, but they're not necessarily that exciting. If they are exciting, it's not because they feel eventful, it's because they feel important.

You can't find the equivalent in too much American art, you can only find it commonly in religion: in a Passover Seder, an Easter Passion Play, a Catholic holy sacrament. And just like those rituals, it's supposed to be a little repetitive, it's supposed to try your patience a little bit. That is what Homer does, the rituals he describes are meant to summon forces that transcend material limits, and like a giant Italian cathedral, he retells it in poetry so ornate, so viscerally exciting, so gorgeous, that even as you hear it, even as you're sometimes bored, you can still hear the creation of the earth.

I have no doubt that some people will see The Odyssey and come away feeling they had a spiritual experience just that awesome: maybe they did. But a large part of the point in Homer is the renewability. If you go back to The Odyssey in a week or a month, will you have the same experience of it? If you watch it on something less than an IMAX screen, will you have the same experience of it? If you watch it on a home entertainment system, will you have the same experience of it?

The point with Homer is that millions of people over three thousand years decided that his poetry has that level of transcendence. No matter who recited it, no matter who read it, no matter who translated it, millions of people decided that the essence of Homer came through.

Now, the truth is, nobody can live with that level of transcendence all the time. Parts of Homer can be kinda dreary. In terms of the ancients, I much prefer Ovid where you get lots of jokes and ordinary people and sex and spoofs of the great figures of mythology. There are stories from Ovid it's some of the most spellbinding reading on earth in a very modern way, and nobody knew that better than Shakespeare, who practically used Ovid as a cheat sheet.

But the dreariness is part of the reason we read Homer, a dreariness that if the new movie is as good as half its spectators say it is, the movie completely lacks. Many people read Homer and all his rituals and find themselves saying 'GET BACK TO THE PLOT!' But Homer tells us 'the rituals ARE the plot. The point in Homer is not the conflict, the point is the resolution, the bringing back of disturbed cosmic forces into cosmic order. Like so much of the greatest art, Homer is moral instruction: a kind of 'how to' manual for how to heal. That is something very few movies try to do, and save certain Spielbergs, the ones that do don't make much money.

Epics, real epics, are not meant to be action-packed, they're meant to show that action is just one small phase of a much larger life cycle. Excitement is just the beginning, what brings people back to Homer is just what brings people back to Shakespeare, and Mozart and Rembrandt, and maybe even The Beatles and Spielberg. What brings people back to Homer is the capacity and the hope that he helps to heal us. The real point of the back half of The Odyessey is everything Odysseus does to restore the order of his house. Homer doesn't just excite us, he doesn't just move us, he quiets us, and makes the difficulties of little people like us easier to go about.