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

 ≡ ≡  ≡

Cursed Movies III: Making Don Quixote, a Test of Adversity and Perseverance

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Cinema, Literary & Linguistics

Cervantes‘ Don Quixote is without peer as the foremost work in Spanish literature…it is considered without question to be the most influential work in the entire Spanish language literary canon❉. The general consensus among authorities in the field is that it was the primary manifestation (first pub. Vol I 1605) of the novel as we understand the development of that emerging literary form.

DQ & Sancho Panza

The Spanish proudly extol Cervantes’ name in the same reverential tone as the English speaking world bestows on Shakespeare. When it came to adaptations of Don Quixote to the cinema screen however, Cervantes’ great novel has not experienced the same good fortune as screen productions of Shakespeare’s greatest plays have had. While the story of the ageing knight-errant’s folly-filled forays in the campo of La Mancha has been a popular source material for the theatre, opera and both the big and small screen, it has not proved a rewarding experience for some of the leading filmmakers! There have been a number of attempts to bring the book to the cinema that have ended either in disarray or as incomplete projects…the mildly suspicious among us might easily convince themselves that the subject of Don Quixote is jinxed!

Disney: the animated feature’s arrested development
One of the early US attempts to produce a film of Don Quixote was as a feature-length cartoon by Walt Disney. The Disney team laboured for six decades commencing in the 1930s to make an animated version of Don Quixote. Studio artist Ferdinand Horvath produced project sketches of the Spanish knight-errant for Disney as early as 1929. Preparatory work for a film project during WWII using concepts inspired by 17th century artistic titan Diego Velázquez was jettisoned after Disney had two commercial failures in a row with Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940. The studio tried again, several times (1946, 1951, even as recent as the late 1990s). All of the projects were eventually aborted[1]. Don Quixote thus far has evaded all attempts at being ‘Disneyfied’✫.

Orson on the DQ set

Orson’s never-ending project: Less than awesome
Orson Welles’ efforts to make a film of Don Quixote was an incredibly drawn-out saga that failed to bear fruit. Financing (habitually a millstone around Welles’ cervix) was partly to blame but procrastination by the former “boy wonder” director was taken to a new level. Starting off with test footage as early as 1955, Welles was still intermittently working on the unfinished picture (which he described as his “own personal project”) when he died (1985). By which time Welles had 300,000 feet of shot film in the can! Eventually a version completed by a Spanish director saw the light of screen in the 1990s (described as a “Spanish restoration”). However according to James Clarke, the “print (was) impoverished…the film lacked clarity… (and) Welles’ commentary and dialogue was ineffectively dubbed into Spanish”[2].

The jinx again!
Dynamic Hollywood producer of the 1950s, Mike Todd, was riding high on the back of the blockbuster success of the star-studded Around the World in 80 Days. Todd chose “Don Quixote” as the follow-up project to ’80 Days’ based on the Jules Verne novel. Having cast his new, glamour wife Elizabeth Taylor to star in a lavish production of the Cervantes classic, the hard-headed Todd’s plans for “Don Quixote” perished in the airplane crash that took the producer’s life in 1958.

The doco on DQ the disaster movie!

Terry Gilliam, nearly 20 years worth of broken mirrors!
The award for the most ill-fated attempt to bring “Don Quixote” to the screen goes to Monty Python member and film director Terry Gilliam. Gilliam first conceptualised his project in 1991…pre-production got underway seven years later and production itself got rolling in 2000 in Navarre (Spain). Gilliam brought his own, very idiosyncratic take on the Man of La Mancha (very loosely based on the original story). He cast Johnny Depp as a 21st century time-traveller hurled back to engage with the perpetually confused 16th century “windmill-tilter”.

From the start obstacles and setbacks piled on top of each other – flash floods destroyed sets and equipment in the Spanish campo, as a result the filmmakers had problems securing insurance for the production; Jean Rochefort as Quixote took ill and had to leave the set and the movie altogether; it was discovered that one of the film sites was directly below a Spanish Air Force flight path; plus the production was hit with further financial problems – the net outcome was the cessation and cancellation of the production. Gilliam made several subsequent attempts to relaunch the movie, in all there were eight unsuccessful tilts at making “Don Quixote” over a period of 18-19 years with a succession of actors coming and going. In 2002 Gilliam, no doubt with cathartic intent, released a documentary Lost in La Mancha about the trials and tribulations of trying to realise the plagued ‘Quixote’ feature film[3].

Michael Palin was one of many actors lost in transit in the course of making Gilliam’s film!

The indefatigable American Python resurrected the project once more earlier this year with longtime collaborator Jonathan Pryce in the title role. Finally in June of this year Gilliam tweeted, rather sheepishly, that the filming was finally completed…The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is slated for release in 2018[4].

PostScript: ‘Don Quixote’, a mixed track record in the cinema
Notwithstanding the long trail of misfortunes and misadventures that has bedevilled the efforts of the above film-makers to make Don Quixote, it would be misleading to conclude that the subject has been universally cursed. A survey of Don Quixote’s cinematic history on the screen confirms that it has been far from unmakeable. First point to note is that there have been a considerable number of ‘DQ’ films churned out over the decades[5], many of which went through more or less without mishap, or at least with nothing like the obstacles and hurdles in the way of Gilliam and Welles and others.

From across the world of international cinema these productions include the 1957 Russian version filmed in the Crimea (Dir: Grigori Kozintsev); the 1972 Man of La Mancha (a musical/comedy with Peter O’Toole in the lead); a 2000 feature with John Lithgow as the chivalrous but hopelessly misguided hidalgo (country gentleman); Albert Serra’s modernised Spanish version, Honour of the Knights (2006); a 2015 version directed by James Franco’s USC students, Don Quixote: The Ingenuous Gentleman of La Mancha; and believe it or not, a 2007 Spanish/Italian computer animation comedy Donkey Xote (hee-haw!), a light-hearted retelling of the classic story from the perspective of his squire Sancho Panza’s Equus Africanus steed.


___________________________________________________________________
❉ its literary influence goes far beyond the Hispanic world…extending to his English contemporary Shakespeare who is widely thought to have collaborated with John Fletcher on a play (now lost), Cardenio, believed to be based on an episode in the Cervantes novel
✫ Disney still haven’t entirely let it go…the phenomenal box office triumph of the Pirates of the Caribbean series has prompted Disney to engage ‘gun’ screenwriter Billy Ray to write something similar in tone for Don Quixote, ‘Disney Developing a Don Quixote Movie’, (J Kroll) Variety, 13-Oct-2016, www.variety.com

[1] James Clarke, ‘The troubled history of Don Quixote on film’, BFI: Film Forever, 26-Apr-2016, www.bfi.org.uk
[2] ibid. ; ”Don Quixote (unfinished film), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘My latest is a disaster movie’, The Guardian, 04-Feb-2001, www.theguardian.com
[4] “Sorry for the long silence…” (@TerryGilliam, tweeted 04-Jun-2017)
[5] in fact the tale of the muddled hidalgo with a penchant for charging at windmills has been a movie subject just about from the first dawn of the moving picture – as early as 1903 a silent film of Don Quixote was made by the French, ‘Don Quixote de La Mancha: DQ and Film’, (Barbara Robinson), USC Libraries (Research Guides), www.libguides.usc.edu

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