FEATURES
RADICAL REWORKINGS
Odysseus as Sacred Monster
Notes on a neo-Romantic adaptation of Homer's Odyssey
by Dennis Douglas
Shoestring Theatre
E-mail: 100544.31@compuserve.com
When I started work on the Odyssey I did
so in the awareness that Odysseus cannot in this day and age be held
up to public regard as an exemplary being whose attitudes and behaviour
should be copied. He behaves disgracefully. He is a liar, a cheat, a
murderer, an unfaithful husband, a pirate and a sacker of cities. He
is not lacking in charm or intelligence or shrewdness, but his two sides,
the attractive side and the unscrupulous side, are present in every
ancient text we have that mentions him. I wanted my Odysseus to be not
a hero but an anti-hero, a morally blemished being; he is not a man
who overcomes with ease every challenge he confronts, but is at times
profoundly inadequate.
I noticed, for example, that Odysseus achieves very
little without the help of his patron goddess Pallas Athene. Without
her intervention he could never have left Calypso's island. When he
is shipwrecked on Phaeacia a sea nymph provides him with a scarf that
saves him from drowning. When he lands on Ithaca Pallas Athene magically
ages him to prevent his being recognised. Odysseus survives his confrontations
with the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis and so on because of Circe's good
advice, and he wins Circe's aid because of Hermes' good advice.
The poem ends with Odysseus effectively rebuked by Zeus
himself for a very foolish act, and this further justified my focus
on Odysseus' faults. When Penelope's suitors are dead and their relatives
have gathered to take revenge, Pallas Athene intervenes to stop the
battle. The men of Ithaca recognise Pallas Athene's divine authority
and obey Zeus's edict. They retreat. Seeing them retreat Odysseus raises
his spear and shouts 'Charge!!!' So Zeus sends a flash of lightning
and a great peal of thunder to shut Odysseus up. It is as though the
last words of the poem were a reminder of its hero's fallibility.
That episode convinced me that whoever else might want
to regard Odysseus as a paragon of Mycenean virtue, Homer himself did
not portray him as cunning beyond the possibility of error, but as a
very ordinary man in many ways. And of course that choice is consistent
with the story-telling skill of the bards who contributed over two centuries
and more to the text we have. A fallible, imperfect hero adds sympathy
and suspense to any narrative. The audience is never sure that he is
going to survive the testing encounters he confronts, and they identify
more readily with his confusions than if he saw with perfect clarity
through every problem he faces.
The critical element in my interpretation came out of
something that you do not notice about the Odyssey unless
you look at the text with a certain scepticism. The poem makes a false
claim for its hero. In the first lines we are told that Odysseus visited
many cities and learnt their ways, but in the text we have of Homer's
poem we never see him doing it. Instead we see him attacking cities.
We see him being attacked in cities. We see him being hidden in a mist
by Pallas Athene as he passes through the streets of Scherie so that
the inhabitants will not insult him. He doesn't seem to get on very
well with cities and city people. And the cities of the poem are few
and far between.
The Odyssey does not celebrate the life
of cities. The people the poem was written for were profoundly suspicious
of cities and of the things that in their eyes cities stood for. This
is not a new discovery. M.I.Finley's book The World of Odysseus,
which has been in print for decades, offers a complete sociological
analysis of the 'culture' of Homer's audience, and of how different
the later culture of Greece became, when the cities were rebuilt and
trade and the arts and imperial institutions began again.
Odysseus's own society is based on communities of local
landowners who accept the rule of a chief landowner as their king because
he happens to be gifted in the arts of war. The local landowners have
aristocratic status and numerous dependents, some of whom are slaves.
There is a system of local assemblies to which grievances can be taken,
but these assemblies are not councils or parliaments in a modern sense.
They do not take decisions. They enable people to state grievances and
they enable matters of common interest to be discussed, but the King
is not under any obligation to heed the representations made in the
assemblies. This is the world we see when Telemachus summons the people
of Ithaca to hear his case against the suitors, and the assemblies of
the Greeks at Troy in the Iliad operate in precisely the
same way.
Ithaca as Homer portrays it is a group of what we might
think of as manor houses, each with its own independent lord. As well
as having a hierarchy amongst themselves based on military skill these
lords seem to glory in a national reputation for expeditions against
other regions. Military conquest is an occupation the community at one
time heartily approved of and is still, perhaps despite certain misgivings,
willing to go along with. All of these details match the picture that
was put together forty-odd years and more ago by a number of different
historians working in different countries of Europe, as well as in England
and the U.S.A., of the 'Post-Mycenean Dark Ages'.
When a high civilisation (such as that of the Mycenaeans)
collapses, communities are isolated by the disruption of trade routes
and lines of communication. Only two activities enable people to survive,
primitive agriculture and primitive violence. There is no rule of law.
Those communities that cannot defend themselves are wiped out. In the
end it is the well-defended manor houses that create the right conditions
for a culture to begin to re-establish itself, but only if there are
enough of them in a given small area to combine in self-defence against
raiding parties. And self- defence requires leadership.
The negative side of this kind of culture is that it
can only exist in a permanent state of war, and all over the Aegean
Sea people who thought of themselves as related to the men of Ithaca
developed the habit of making regular raids on neighbouring coastlines.
Because they needed warlike skills their cultural traditions were based
on them. Their poetry was about battles and sieges, about rituals of
single combat between tribal heroes, about the shrewdness of one legendary
leader, the strength of another, the great exploits of a third. That
is the poetry of the epic hero that we find in the Odyssey
and Iliad.
This world of heroes is not much fun for anybody else.
It is not even much fun for the heroes. Homer's verse returns again
and again to the human cost of the epic struggle. Again and again people
in the Odyssey weep when they hear bards recite the exploits
of the heroes. Odysseus himself breaks down at the court of Alcinous
when a bard sings of the siege of Troy.
Homer's Odysseus could not have the level of historic
awareness I wanted to give my Odysseus, not only because Homer could
not see into the future, but also because of the nature of the classical
vision of the world. It is fairly safe to say that the classical age
saw personality as something that did not change much, and that responded
to quite immediate pressures, not vast metaphysical issues or long-range
vistas. The kind of historic awareness I wanted Odysseus to have is
a modern invention.
The epic hero does not behave with any great respect
for moral considerations. He kills without compunction, and his victims
include children. He destroys cities, priding himself on dividing up
the womenfolk between the captains of his army with scrupulous fairness,
fairness towards the captains that is, not towards the women. The women's
point of view is heard only in the form of distant echoes of their grief.
I was tempted to reject the brawny maculine bloody-mindedness
of Homer's Odysseus. It would have been easy to travesty him as a Fascist,
but it would have been too easy. On the other hand it would also have
been too easy to be seduced by Odysseus's brute vitality into suggesting,
as so many writers do, that the poem's original morality represents
an adequate attitude to the problems of the world then and now. Homer's
vison of heroic action, with its emphasis on strength without compassion
belongs to a stage in the development of mankind which we desperately
need to put behind us, but which somehow or other clings like a limpet,
and is always threatening to return and take over. Odysseus is the sacred
monster who haunts our cosy twentieth-century dreams.
I wanted the Shoestring adaptation to have more of the
post-Romantic Bildungsroman about it than most readers think
Homer's poem has. I wanted Odysseus to learn more than most readers
think Homer allows him to, and I cheated a little by having him learn
from the women in his life. He lives seven years with Calypso, a year
with Circe. Why not give those relationships an overt thematic role?
At the beginning of each love affair I gave Odysseus a firm and plausible
statement about the way life is, and by the end of the relationship
I had him take that statement back.
There is a trick that nineteenth century popular dramatists
learnt from Sophocles and Euripides, the trick of surprising the audience
by turning the central situation in the play upside down at the halfway
point. This reversal of the audience's sympathies became one of the
hallmarks of the French 'well-made play'. I wanted to do something like
that with Circe. I wanted to build on hints and suggestions in Homer's
account of the situation by portraying Circe as more than Odysseus's
equal in shrewdness, in wisdom and in strength; and I wanted Odysseus
to under-estimate her, so that when he learns much later that she has
always been one step ahead of him, that new awareness will make him
more willing to learn other things too.
My overriding aim was to place Homer's text in the light
of certain scholarly findings regarding the religious life, the culture
and the texture of existence in the period in which the poem came into
being. For theatre people as for Classical scholars there is very little
that is wholly original or earth-shattering about those findings. Cacoyannis
set the siege of Troy in the Mycenean Dark Ages when he made his film
of the Iphigenia two decades ago. In the late thirties
Thompson's Aeschylus and Athens emphasized the residual
matriarchal institutions of ancient Athens. And in many other ways,
as in presenting Odysseus as an anti-hero, in treating Circe as a nature
goddess, and even in challenging the cult of violence the text is sometimes
thought of as defending, the provocative thrust of my script developed
out of elements present in the original poem that some commentators
(but by no means all) have preferred to overlook.
The end result owes more to the spirit of the age of
Beethoven than of Birtwhistle, but I suspect that an anti-militaristic
Odyssey in which Circe is a wisdom figure, from whom Odysseus learns
that a totally secular view of the world has many limitations, from
his women may seem very provocative in some of the circles we move in.
Dennis Douglas
Shoestring Theatre
E-mail: 100544.31@compuserve.com
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Didaskalia Volume 3 No. 1-Spring/Summer
1996 / University of Warwick / edited by Sallie Goetsch and C.W. Marshall/
 /ISSN
1321-4853
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