Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey has revived a story that writer Alonso Cueto argues never really left us. Where The Iliad speaks to grand ambition and honor, The Odyssey carries a more concrete and human message: the real journey is the return.
Homer describes Odysseus from the outset as a man of many forms who has known the ways of men. Protected by Athena and tormented by Poseidon, he encounters Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa, and faces cyclopes, sirens, and monsters. Yet his destination never wavers. His home, his wife, and his son are not prizes to be won but part of who he is.
When Calypso offers him immortality, Odysseus, son of two mortals unlike the demigod heroes of other myths, chooses to remain a man of the earth. He wants to grow old with Penelope and Telemachus. When he finally reaches Ithaca disguised as a beggar, only his dog Argos recognizes him, dying on the spot.
The poem’s most intimate moment of recognition comes in Book 23. Penelope orders a servant to move the bed, and Odysseus erupts in anger. He carved that bed himself beside a living tree and built the room around it. Only the two of them know the bed cannot be moved. In that instant, she knows it is him. The home, the bedroom, the bed, Cueto writes, holds the root of who we are.
The theme stretches well beyond ancient epic. Cueto recalls a Simenon story that Gabriel Garcia Marquez often cited, in which a criminal followed through the streets of Paris by Inspector Maigret keeps walking day and night rather than go home, knowing evidence there will betray him. The story poses the question of how long a man can stay away from his own house.
Today, Cueto notes, more than 300 million people worldwide do not live in the country where they were born, with 50 million of them in the United States alone. Many will never return to their place of origin, yet they play out the idea of going back in their minds. The Greek root of the word nostalgia, he points out, joins nostos, meaning return home, with algos, meaning pain. Nolan’s film, Cueto argues, has struck that chord in the modern world.
