A Bookworm Bonus

I should have seen The Odyssey three times by now. English major, lover of the classics, the kind of poet and novelist who enjoys using allusions to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, I spent so much time in my youth reading Roman and Greek poets and about their times that my mildly worried father feared I preferred their world to our own.

Yet I haven’t seen Christopher Nolan’s film, and I am ambivalent about going. It is not because I am partial to the purist Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of the Odyssey. She has created a bit of a literary tempest in the otherwise adulatory Aegean of response to the movie with her blistering criticisms—taking Nolan to Herculean task for what she considers a lack of depth, overly modern dialogue (she uses the word “abysmal”), and anachronistic characterization. Nolan gives Odysseus a contemporary hero’s ambivalence about his deception and brutality, for example, where Homer’s hero suffers no such compunction. The original Odysseus delights in his warlike exploits.

I am not above a bit of anachronism myself. It’s a technique that can help us—especially poets—look at old stories in new ways. My ambivalence about enjoying what the Globe and Mail critic Barry Hertz sees as the future of filmgoing, beyond Hollywood’s current comic book fixation, is the result of a long and complicated relationship with movies and television.

As a writer who entered adulthood just as literary fiction was ceding major ground to genre fiction, and as I live and write through the seemingly complete cultural triumph of screens, I look at the dominance of film and TV (and smartphones, for that matter) the way a carriage driver might have watched the automobile taking over early twentieth-century streets.

How people are talking and writing about The Odyssey is how (I’m told) they talked about books in that mid-twentieth-century literary golden age just before I was born. So few of us talk about novels around the water cooler these days.

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My relationship with Homer’s homeland, literature, and film began long before I came to the Odyssey in adolescence. My earliest memories are of the Greek village of Molyvos, on the island of Lesvos, where my parents, both teachers, rented a cottage the summer after I had turned two.

The rocky beach, rambunctious donkeys and goats, ancient ruins and modern whitewashed buildings, local villagers and stern priest dressed all in black despite the heat, the wine dark sea and gleaming white sun—it all made an impression on me.

On the flight home, while sitting on my mother’s lap, I composed my first poem:

Stars are in the night
and snow is on top of the buildings
and between the pillars of the Parthenon.
And sometimes it comes down in big balls
and lands on the ground.

We all have to start somewhere.

Two years after composing that poem, I saw the first movie I can remember. My father, who was highly permissive when it came to literature, art, and motion pictures, let me stay up late to watch The Omega Man, about life after a pandemic zombie apocalypse.

The movie, from 1971, opens with Charlton Heston driving his red convertible through the deserted streets of Los Angeles. Most of the other humans are gone—dead or turned into zombies. Heston’s character, of course, eventually finds a few other survivors like him.

I can still see in my mind—more clearly than any poem I’ve memorized since—the exact moment in the film when Heston’s love interest takes off her sunglasses to reveal her shining eyes. She’s been turned into a zombie while out shopping for groceries. For an unusually impressionable four-year-old, the scene was terrifying. I didn’t want to go to bed alone that night, and my father had to lie with me to help me fall asleep. I still get a slight chill thinking about that movie.

As a writer, I am envious of film’s power over our imaginations, over the ancient reptilian parts of our brain. We humans could see long before we could read. Even the most carefully chosen words have a hard time conjuring up the raw visceral power that a moving image can.

My thoughts on the popularity and merits of the new Odyssey compared to the original poem would not be worth writing about on their own. But they’re not occurring in some personal vacuum. The backdrop includes, among many others, Rose Horowitch’s “The End of Reading Is Here” in The Atlantic and an upcoming book by James Marriott, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, which argues, according to publicity materials, “The age of print is giving way to the age of the screen. The world we knew is passing away and nothing will ever be the same again.”

As someone who understands, celebrates, and lives his life in large part through reading and writing, yes, I’m taking this shift in how we see, interpret, and respond to the world in art somewhat personally.

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My wife studied the classics and read both Homeric epics in her youth. Her favourite by far is the tale of Odysseus. She found it richer and more varied than the Iliad, with three-dimensional female characters showing a good measure of agency. The Iliad is the original “one battle after another.”

She is far more optimistic about literary culture than I am and tells me the movie version of the Odyssey is a good thing—because it will draw more people to Homer’s original. Maybe. I read somewhere that sales of the poem have increased, but I’m not sure most buyers will enjoy it as much or as easily as the movie. Reading an ancient poem—any poem—is harder than watching a blockbuster. Less immediately stimulating. Less immediately awesome.

My three young adult children, whose judgement I respect, have already gone to the cinema. They tell me Nolan did a great job. I don’t question that the film is visually stunning in a cinematic-action-adventure way. I will go to see it in the coming weeks. Part of me will no doubt enjoy it.

But at the same time, I will be mourning the passing of the literary world that birthed this incredible story nearly 3,000 years ago and that feels like it is coming to an end.

Daniel Goodwin won the 2016 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature in poetry. His novels include The Great Goldbergs and The Art of Being Lewis.