To my exasperated amusement, I find myself compelled to write about the Thing That Everyone Is Talking About. On this occasion I do not much mind. For all the doom-mongering about cultural decline, a sudden mass outbreak of amateur Homerists is hardly the worst fate to befall a civilisation, and any lavish adaptation that directs readers back to the Odyssey has already done the republic of letters a considerable service. The end, for once, justifies its means.
I should confess at the outset that I have not seen Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. This reflects no principled objection to presenting Homer on IMAX, but the more banal fact that a life besieged by work, passion projects, and importunate toddlers leaves little room for three-hour jaunts to the cinema. Given that babysitters in my corner of Texas demand an hourly wage that would make a surgeon consider retraining, it is also the case that this husband must husband his extravagances.
What I lack in Nolanite expertise I may partly offset with a rather humbler credential: I have taught the book at university level. Last year I had the distinct privilege of teaching a course bearing the title “Chaos and Civilization,” in which I taught our Greek epic alongside the book of Genesis. The pairing proved unexpectedly illuminating, for the two books are engaged in the same great labour—the coaxing of order out of chaos—in almost opposite ways. Homer's order is homecoming: household, fatherhood, the marriage bed, and an island kingdom restored after twenty years of anarchy. Genesis reaches for something wider: creation, command, covenant, and the slow forging of a moral worldview. Both are civilisational books, yet imagine civilisation very differently.
Pallas Athena, Gustav Klimt (1898)
