Gen Z’s embrace of Nolan’s Odyssey is a boon to scholarship

“Tell me about a confused academic, Muse, tell me how they wandered and were lost when Steve Jobs wrecked the holy act of reading…”

Apologies to Homer, but this is the request – the question, really – humanities professors have as a pixel-fingered dawn rises on the new academic year.

How are we in the humanities to teach reading, writing and reasoning when the Muses are no longer, turned into myth by Mythos?

Might Homer nevertheless hold an answer? Come the first day of fall semester, few of our students will not have seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The film’s worldwide gross now exceeds $1 billion (£740 million), set to break the record set by an earlier Nolan film, The Dark Knight Rises.

But these are not the only eye-popping figures; American sales of all English translations of the epic, according to Publishers Weekly, are up 76 per cent this year and it ranks as Barnes & Noble’s best-selling book. Yet the phenomenon extends across the Atlantic: bookstores in the UK are reporting sky-rocketing sales, while bookstores in France are rejoicing over the film’s “effet boomerang”.

Obviously, the statistics need to be parsed. Buying a book does not translate into reading the book; reading a book did not always translate into grasping the book; nowadays, reading a book is mostly accompanied by reading phone texts, watching TikTok videos, and plunging down rabbit-holes. Indeed, how could it be otherwise given that teenagers now spend more than 7 hours a day online, where they swap written texts and voicemails, slap voice-overs on Instagram posts, and kibitz in text and oral group chats.

How apt, given that irony abounds in the Homeric epics, that we have entered a back to the future world, leaping from the long age of literacy – one that elbowed aside the preceding age of orality – into a new age of…well, orality.

Or, more precisely, what the media sociologist Andrey Mir calls “digital orality”: the fleetingness of the spoken word with the fixedness of the written word. Tellingly, the vaulting sales of the physical editions of The Odyssey are mirrored by audiobook sales, including those narrated by our own rhapsodes – the ancient Greek performers who recited the Homeric epics – like Claire Danes or Ian McKellen.

Where does this leave the legions of professors who, like me, are caught between the Scylla of IMAX and the Charybdis of Spotify as they prepare to teach Homer this fall? While we have always had students who tune or drop out of our classes, are we now doomed to lose half or even our entire crew as was Odysseus?

While commentators foretell such an end, it is not fated. Most of us, I imagine, are not poets capable of enthralling a class of business majors the way Odysseus did a court of aristocrats. But we can nevertheless lean into what led us to our profession with even greater intensity than Odysseus’ men leaned into their oars.

To do so, we must conjure the crazy excitement we knew as undergrads, careening across the humanities and exploring what makes us human. If this is not what literature and language, philosophy and history are about, then why did we ever bother leaving home in the first place?

If any single epithet belongs uniquely to you, me, and the rest of humankind, it is the pursuit of meaning. (The sapience of Homo sapiens means the meaning we can make ours.) It is through stories – writing them to be read or voicing them to be heard by others – that we pound our raw experiences into narratives.

Recall when Alcinous, the king of Phaeacia, sees Odysseus’ tears while listening to his own past being sung by the court bard, he invites his guest to sing in turn. “The gods measured out this devastation,” the king announces, “to make a song for those in times to come.”

Of course, Odysseus desperately seeks to return to Ithaca and Penelope. But this search is not straightforward; instead, it is as complicated as is that man of many ways. Not only must he tell stories tailored for his various audiences, but he must listen carefully to their stories if he hopes to reach home.

What we learn from the bard’s story of Odysseus’ stories, as Emily Wilson points out in the introduction to her translation, is that he is the hero of his own story. What we also learn from Homer, Wilson continues, is that his hero has mastered the art of metis, the Greek word for cunning or conniving, cleverness and deviousness. These are not traits we normally associate with a mensch, but instead with a pirate or cheat, a liar or deceiver.

But these traits do not alone define this remarkable character. This is why the countless other tellers of this story, including Nolan, have yet other stories to tell about this man of mettle and metis. Even those who have not yet seen the film know that Odysseus, as played by Matt Damon, is a man haunted by the horrific consequences of his violation of xenia, or hospitality, when he conceives the idea of the Trojan Horse. (Far more convincing is the Odysseus offered by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay: a man who, like the returning Vietnam veterans treated by Shay, is traumatised by his war experiences.)

The Odysseus that I would lean into for my students, though, is the one told by Primo Levi in his account of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man. Trying to teach Italian to a fellow prisoner, Pikolo, Levi lights on to Canto XXVI in Dante’s Inferno, in which the medieval poet presents Odysseus as he sets out on his voyage with his crew.

To spur them on, this Odysseus urges his men to “Consider well the seed that gave you birth/you were not made to live your lives as brutes/but to be the followers of worth and knowledge.” As he struggles to recite the lines from memory, Levi is seized by the vital importance of making the young Pikolo grasp their import. He had to explain to him “something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps a reason for our fate, for our being here today…”

How indescribably fortunate my students and I are not to be where Levi and Pikolo were in 1944. But we are in a world that, due in large part to our own machinations, has become an inferno for so many others. What better poet than Homer, or better medium than the written word, or better hero (flawed though he is) than Odysseus to prod us to consider the seed that gave us birth and recall we were not meant to live as brutes?

Robert Zaretsky is professor in the Honors College at University of Houston.