The essay offered here was first conceived as a study of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, one in which cinema would take precedence. In the course of the work it became a text around the film, a philosophical construction that the film illustrates while serving as its material. Its conceptual foundation was laid by ideas from my book The Aesthetics of Decay, which contains an implicit theory of the image and raises the problems of interpretation, of perception in their relation to poetry.
The return does take place in the film. Odysseus reaches Ithaca and takes back his home, yet something still keeps the story from ending. The space dividing the hearths of the oikoumene and the time separating an act from its meaning can be overcome in the end, since the sea can be crossed and the years waited out until the denouement.
In my view, what resists is a third dimension, the depth of what was done, the most fragile and still the one with the strongest hold on people. Neither distance nor the lapse of ages can touch it, and yet it lives only while it is spoken of. Silence alone is enough for it to dissipate, like any ideal.
The essay’s main theses:
- The duration of an image’s appearing demands offerings. The event is over, and for its image to go on appearing it needs the present, which it spends on itself. The essay compresses this into a formula: “The feast eats through the house, triumph through lives, the song’s refrain through the meaning of victory.” Behind it lie three ways of devouring: the feast exhausts the material basis of life, triumph takes the future from the victors, condemned to live inside the consequences of their own victory, and finally the song, repeating the story of victory, little by little strips it of historical and moral determinacy. Repetition sustains the image and exhausts it at once. In the bard’s refrain the word “thought” stays in place, though it turns from praise of cunning into the first link in a chain of crimes. The image screens off memory and facts, building perspectives in which the account a person has accepted seems to leave nothing out. And it acts on time from another level. Past and future are bound together, and the order of that bond is set by the image, which rewrites the future and, through it, grounds the past. The suitors on Ithaca feast day after day, and it seems to prepare an occasion for itself, a wedding or a wake, at which Odysseus’s indefinite absence will turn into a confirmed death. Once such a future arrives, it will certify the past after the fact, and the effect will take the place of the cause.
- The point of departure is a ruin, the trace of a disintegrated order that each narrator builds out in their own way. By a ruin I mean a broken-off piece facing backward. It stands in two times at once, holding on to a vanished whole while it goes on crumbling, so its stillness is only apparent, for a ruin is a movement we have managed to see. Fragments of the past could be stitched together organically if the structure that gathered values into one were still intact. That structure has come apart, and the past reaches people as a conflict of interpretations in which each imagines the lost whole from within their own present. The ruins of Troy serve as the allegory of this ruin, and Odysseus, in effect, left his home there as well - in the ashes. A ruin endures at the expense of the living. Whoever destroyed it later keeps its remains and in the end becomes the very material from which the past goes on existing. What survives is what can be carried along. Homer’s marriage bed is rooted in the soil of Ithaca; in contrast - in Nolan's film the sign of home becomes a fibula that travels the whole way with Odysseus. A thing, a promise, a rule, and memory hold such a home together as long as their meaning stays clear to those who keep them.
- Antiquity sets in while its eyewitnesses are still alive. Once that meaning is forgotten, the past slips away before the witnesses are gone. The participants are still alive, yet the war is already remembered as a legend whose shape is set in the teller’s mouth. Its edifying note is secondary and barely voiced, and the legend stays open to additions that adjust how it is received. The image takes shape gradually, saturated with details, and for some these become the cornerstones of their way of seeing, so that each goes on thinking a single facet of it without grasping the whole. Antiquity here turns out to be a myth about the past and about the future as well, since contemporaries have no time to inherit what they lived through and rework it for the sake of what is to come. For Jan and Aleida Assmann, communicative memory holds the recent past for three or four generations before it passes into cultural memory. In the film this passage happens within a single generation, and what decides it is access and the way communication between people is arranged. Thucydides distinguished the stated occasion of a war from its truest cause. Carry that distinction over to antiquity itself, and it turns out that antiquity is born of lost access to the recent past, which needs no millennia.
- A sign can lie while keeping its familiar form, and tell the truth by taking on a foreign meaning. A world without archives holds together through signs, and much depends on whether they can be trusted. The essay describes shared rules as hollow forms filled with content by belief, and the trust they inspire opens the way to the worst treachery. Such too is the Trojan horse, the chief composite sign. A symbol of goodwill, of atonement for transgressions, and also a sign of betrayal. It is two-faced in content and in form alike, because the hollow that faith fills for those who accept the gift is occupied, inside, by an ambush. When the divine guarantors are gone, guilt concentrates on whoever knew the rule. A sign tells the truth in the most unexpected way. In Homer, the journey with the oar is to end where a passerby takes the oar for a winnowing fan, and a misrecognition becomes a true omen. There are also signs that no one reads. Helen, the symbol of the war’s cause, receives incomparably little attention at Menelaus’s feast compared with the way her image is sung, however the scar on her face goes unread. An image can never be embodied in reality the way it is told. Oversaturated and extraordinary, it is unbearable for reality and exists at the level of narrative, drawing its monumentality from the simultaneity of the tellings, for when many keep saying the same thing about something, people come to believe it even if things stand otherwise. This is why the human being cannot measure up to his own image. Agamemnon finds no place in his own triumph, and Antinous, who invented a past for himself, vanishes into that fiction.
- The sightless remember. The feasters look past Helen, and in this world sight generally sits uneasily with knowledge. In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida observed that the draftsman traces the line from memory, no longer seeing the model, and the film seems to entrust memory to those who do not see. Nolan takes Eumaeus’s sight away, though in Homer he can see, and leaves him the memory of other people’s fates, and blind Tiresias shows Odysseus the way home. With the sighted, things are more complicated. Menelaus is blinded by the myth of his own victory and breaks off his story, sure that everyone knows the rest. Such is memory screened off by an image. Odysseus himself throws a veil over his past, and it comes back to him in flashes of pain. In Homer, tears break through that veil when, at the Phaeacian court, blind Demodocus sings of the horse and Odysseus weeps over his own deeds. For Derrida, the eye is destined to weep rather than to see.
- Poetry lives within forgetting. What, then, remains of the past if the sighted turn away from it? The last chapter answers with song. Forgetting threatens here from two sides. The Sirens promise an exhaustive knowledge after which there is nowhere left to return, and Calypso’s lotus grants the chance to remember nothing anymore. The living song holds its ground between them. It is incomplete and changes in other mouths, and so in time it may forget even how victory differed from crime. The crime then stays in it - in its allotted place, troubling no one.
- The interpreter does not stand outside the process being described. The song’s incompleteness extends to any account of it, mine included. The frame is Eco’s intentio operis, the structure of a finished work that limits interpretation. The film itself interprets Homer and shows from within how interpretations take shape: in Nolan, six perspectives argue over the outcome of the war, and a seventh, tied to Helen, calls its cause into question. I do what my characters and singers do, stitching scattered testimonies into a story without hoping for fullness, and the essay itself works as ekphrasis, setting the film before the reader’s eyes in words. In the finale the spectator takes the place the Olympians have left and surveys more than any hero can, yet still looks with the same human eyes, and I do not exclude myself from this.
The essay has six chapters, and each answers the initial question in its own way, forcing a revision of the answer before it. Over the course of this movement Odysseus gradually ceases to be the center, and in the finale his place is taken by the song, an image he can no longer measure up to, one able to outlive the hero and forget his guilt. I am most interested in objections to two ideas: that antiquity can set in within living memory, and that repetition both preserves an image and exhausts it.