From Homer to Christopher Nolan: The many afterlives of The Odyssey

Audiences around the world won’t have long to wait before they discover what Christopher Nolan has made of The Odyssey. He’s just the latest to be inspired by Homer’s epic poem, which has been a foundational text of Western culture.

Among Nolan’s predecessors were Mario Camerini’s Ulysses (1954) starring Kirk Douglas; and a mini-series with Armand Assante in 1997. Most recently, there was The Return (2024), with a battle-weary Ralph Fiennes returning to Ithaca to find Juliette Binoche’s Penelope besieged by grasping suitors.

A more idiosyncratic adaptation came in the form of the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), whose opening credits acknowledge Homer. The film is set in Depression-era Mississippi, and follows the journeys of three escaped convicts as they encounter colourful characters and misadventures.

It’s in literature, though, that The Odyssey has seen the most inventive and memorable interpretations. To begin with, James Joyce’s Ulysses famously mapped the whole poem onto a single day in Dublin. Years later, in Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier turned the epic into the tale of a deserter during the dying days of the American Civil War.

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Of late, the women of The Odyssey have been given voice by other writers. Margaret Atwood brought us the story of Penelope in The Penelopiad. In Circe, Madeline Miller explored the character of the sorceress who bewitched the wandering hero.

The fact that ancient sagas can remain fresh won’t exactly come as a surprise to those of us in India. The Ramayana and Mahabharata, for example, have seen countless reworkings, on page, on screen, and on stage. Each time, the emphasis is different: as an updated adventure, as a feminist creed, as a national chronicle, among others.

So what explains The Odyssey’s continuing afterlife? Part of the answer lies in the story itself, but it’s also in the way Homer tells it. Together, they make this ultimate saga of homecoming unusually open to reinvention.

One reason for Odysseus’s continual reappearance is that his adventures continue to thrill, with contests against monsters, gods, the sea, Sirens, and more. The poem’s very structure also lends itself to constant adaptation.

Unlike The Iliad, which covers a focused period of time on a single battlefield, The Odyssey narrates tales from years of wandering. These are told partly in flashback by Odysseus himself, spinning stories for strangers. This is matched by a parallel plot back home in Ithaca, involving a wife fending off suitors and a son growing into manhood.

This capacious structure means that artists can use the entire poem as the blueprint for any long journey. Or, they can take one or a few of The Odyssey’s many episodes and create a full-length work to explore it.

Earlier writers, too, mined the possibilities. Dante put Odysseus in the Inferno, and Tennyson wrote a poem about an aged Odysseus getting bored of Ithaca and sailing away again. Later, in Omeros, Derek Walcott reframed it as a postcolonial poem about the lives of ordinary St. Lucian fishermen.

The hero himself is just as adaptable as the poem he inhabits. Achilles is defined by his rage, but Odysseus is defined by change. Homer describes him as “polytropos”, variously translated as “the man of twists and turns,” or “much-wandering” or even, in Emily Wilson’s version, “complicated”.

On his journey home, Odysseus becomes a beggar, a shipwrecked stranger, a Nobody, and a disguised husband. He is cunning and resourceful, making him a mortal whose inner life can be filled out in rich ways.

Some have explored the potential offered by Odysseus being a storyteller inside his own story. Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey offers several alternative myths as a counterpoint to the “real” Odyssey. Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish features a father who has spent his life embellishing his own homecoming, and a son trying to decipher which parts were real.

An unreliable narrator, a fractured timeline, and subjective realities: on the evidence of previous work such as Memento, Inception, and Tenet, one can see why Christopher Nolan was powerfully drawn to The Odyssey. His version of the epic journey home, one hopes, will be worth leaving home to watch.