What 700 readers taught me about 'The Odyssey'

Last Friday I wrote an essay on “The Odyssey” and, in the normal course of revising, decided three paragraphs about linguistics weren’t sufficiently germane to the rest of the column. I replaced them with a short note saying, essentially, ‘Hey reader, if you want to know more about this rabbit hole, you can email me for what ended up on the cutting room floor.’ My editor and I giddily wondered whether one or maybe even two readers would take us up on this obscure offer. I came back Monday morning to 700 emails.

Lawyers wanted to know about the differences between oral and literate poetry. Neurosurgeons wanted to know. Teachers. Former classics majors, current stay-at-home dads, grad students, stepdaughters, grandpas, chefs, autoworkers, inquisitive readers from seemingly every state in the union and several foreign countries. Since I’d promised to write back to everyone directly, I wanted to write back to everyone directly, and I have just emerged from 16 hours of doing that.

But for anyone else who was thinking of emailing and just hadn’t gotten around to it — here, you splendid dorks, is what you missed:

The translator Emily Wilson writes of how there are notable differences in the values that oral and literate cultures place on poetry. Parts of “The Odyssey” that modern readers might find lazy or formulaic — the repeated mentions of a “rosy-fingered dawn,” for example — are intentional. The poem’s original speakers did not have the luxury of time to ponder their choice of words the way a modern writers would; they needed to be able to speak rapidly and have the words at easy recall.

‘In highly literate cultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse as cliché,’ Wilson writes. ‘In primarily oral cultures, repetition tends to be much more highly valued. Repeated phrases, stories or tropes can be preserved to some extent over many generations without the use of writing, allowing people in an oral culture to remember their own past.’

The anecdote that I find the most fascinating, as related to oral and literature cultures: when linguists studied a Yugoslavian culture that was primarily oral, they found that people who gained literacy lost their ability to compose oral poetry; for whatever reason, the two skills appeared mutually exclusive.

Seven hundred of you wrote to me because you were curious to know the things we know about the art of reading and storytelling, and that is, frankly, magnificent.

But! The main reason I’m back here is because of everything you all also told me about your relationships with “The Odyssey.” Your tortured, blissful, complicated relationships. Your senses of your intellectual worth. Your memories of skimming or skimping.

Some of you had read multiple translations. The adventures of Odysseus became your children’s bedtime stories, comfy as a blanket. But some of you had read it in eighth grade and forgotten everything except the teacher who assigned it to you. And some of you, either finding it too daunting or fearing it too boring, had never even opened it. I had never read it either, and this was part of the point of my column: you don’t have to read “The Odyssey” before you see “The Odyssey.”

This apparently felt like welcome permission to some readers (the majority of readers), and to others it felt like a slap in the face.

“How can you brag of your own ignorance?” one reader lamented; another wondered how I was possibly qualified for my job, which — listen, buddy, not everyone has the foresight to become an English major (cha-CHING) and then fling themself into the notoriously high-paying and stable field of newspaper journalism. The only way AI hasn’t fully captured my writing style yet is because I try to keep it guessing butterfly peanut toaster pants pants hypotenuse.

Anyway, I decided to write this second column after hearing from one older man who was enraged that I had never been assigned the work in high school or college, but mentioned in the course of our correspondence that he was in the process of starting “Pride and Prejudice.”

And you know what, I already read “Pride and Prejudice.” When I was in high school or college. In place of “The Odyssey,” maybe. Jane Austen, and Shakespeare, and Dickens and Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, and the story of Raskolnikov the impoverished student who murders a greedy pawnbroker and feels paranoia and panic rather than the triumph he expected. He is angry and naive and only 23, after all.

Thank God some of us didn’t read “The Odyssey” back in college. What would a 19-year-old have grasped about the weight carried by a weary warrior on his way home from a battle he never wanted to fight? The choices he made, the lives he sacrificed, the family receding in the distance? Give that teenager the Brontë sisters and some moody moors; give her Sophocles and the meditations on what it means to break an unjust rule; give her the Russians.

Give Odysseus to the 52-year-old manager who just had to decide whether to replace four workers with Chat GPT or risk shutting down the whole company, and then find a way to sleep at night. That’s the man who is really ready for a tale of difficult choices and tribulations.

Books are not a timed exercise, a game you are only eligible to play between the ages of 12 and 18. The literary canon is not a puzzle with a set number of pieces that perfectly interlock and must be picked up and put down in a certain sequence. You can’t read everything, and it’s never too late to read something.

And as for feeling as though you should finish it before seeing the movie? Eh. That sentiment is an insult to books. It treats them as a punishment, something to be endured or slogged through. And it treats the movie as a reward–something you earn after poring over a 5,000-year-old technology.

What if the movie is not a capstone but an invitation? What if the movie is the thing that makes you curious about the poem, and the world in which it was written? The gods they worshiped, the cities they built and destroyed, the parts of culture we took from them and then jettisoned, the parts that never changed. What if the movie is the thing that makes you want to know more, rather than an assurance that it’s okay to know less?

Seven hundred of you wrote to me because you were curious to know the things we know about the art of reading and storytelling, and because you wanted to talk about an old poem that we have been trying to understand for millennia, that we have been assigned by English teachers for centuries. You wanted to figure out a way to read it; you wanted to make sure I had, too.

Because what it makes me wonder is if we are not like the Yugoslavians, who forget what it means to have an oral tradition as soon as we have a written one. We instead still crave the formula, the repetition, the shorthand of encountering the same lines over and over. We are trying to remember our own past. To figure out where we came from and where we might go. And that is, frankly, magnificent.

See you at the theater, see you at the bookstore, see you in my inbox, I hope, again and again, as the rosy-fingered dawn rises over the wine-dark sea.