Homer is not taught in my district so last winter, thanks to a generous CANE Education Grant, I
started an Odyssey book club. The plan was to read one book a week (trans. Lombardo), and
finish in time to catch the theatrical release of Christopher Nolan’s film. I have a long and
ongoing relationship with Homer’s Odyssey, I love the poem, and I wanted to create a low-
barrier-to-entry opportunity for my students, hoping they might glimpse what I see as Homer’s
greatness. Objects of shared attention are hard to come by these days, shared appreciation
harder still. I really wanted this one.

We made it to the movie, or some of us did, but book club was not the exuberant, illuminating
adventure I’d hoped it would be. Honestly, I felt at the screening a little like Damon on Ogygia.
What happened to my crew? I want to try here and get at that feeling I had leaving the theater.
It’s a little like guilt, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. If readers will indulge me, though, I need
to go about this in a roundabout way. Fellow teachers will understand. The particulars of the
book club itself are delicate.

It’s on peoples’ minds: the children do not read much. Commentators’ preferred view of the
problem is from the sunny heights of civilizational collapse. How many times have pundits lately
dusted off Plato’s Phaedrus, or invoked the reversed Flynn effect, to situate the literacy crisis?
“The age of reading is over!”, the “darkness is gathering!”, and so on. Robert Pondiscio may be
right and it is a sign of the times that Texas’s newly baptized mandatory reading list has not
received more skeptical treatment. Even left-leaning outlets are finding things to like about a
curriculum rooted in biblia, sacra notwithstanding.
 
There are almost as many diagnoses of flagging reading habits as there are readings of Homer.
It’s phonics instruction, it’s technology. Phones and phonemic awareness are no doubt part of it.
But I remember as a paraeducator watching the lead teacher “teach” Odyssey by making
stations and shuffling students between them to retrace the hero’s journey. She hated Homer
and hated she had to teach him. In that bizarre lesson the teacher functioned as a kind of put-
upon Athena, exasperatedly coordinating a nostos nobody asked for on uncooperative and
highly distracting swivel chairs. I can think of no better portrait of reading mandates. If this is the
end of an epoch and educators are protagonists in the drama then I think I may be with Nolan.
Collapse is at least in part self-inflicted.

And Nolan is very interested in collapse. Both the film and its detractors emphasize the Bronze
Age as historical terminus but less has been said about the cataclysm in mythic time. Troy
ended the age of heroes, Odysseus is the “last hero”, and Homer’s Odyssey depends for much
of its tension on the threat of generational decline. Will son live up to father’s greatness?
Readers alert to the epochal crisis of the poem are invited to ask, or savor foreknowledge of the
poet’s triumphant answer to the question, is this how things end?
 
One way the poem builds this tension is in its contrast between Telemachus’ partial knowledge
of divine presence and Odysseus’ intimacy with Athena. At Troy gods walked among the heroes
in plain sight. That does not happen on Ithaca. Phemius emphasizes the dynamic early on. The
son’s inferior relationship to the goddess, like with his father, is the same as ours, that is, it
depends on poetry, and though Athena is very much involved, the poet tells us, Telemachus
doesn’t quite get it. The payoff comes at the end when strained faith is finally rewarded. The
stories are true: Odysseus returns and Athena asserts her presence. The heroic age may be
ending, but that is not this story.

It is most assuredly Nolan’s story though. I’m not sure what to make of this. But I felt a heartsick
kinship with Odysseus as he sailed west and the credits rolled. Much of my book club remnant
was graduated seniors, possibly in attendance out of personal loyalty. Nolan’s Odysseus left on
the throne of a weakened kingdom a son whose only real accomplishment, where heroes are
concerned, was getting his ass kicked by the goatherd. I love Homer’s Odyssey. My students
didn’t get it. I forget what this had to do with divine epiphany. Or I have repressed the memory.
In any event, Nolan didn’t know what to make of the gods either.

David Dyke
Windham High School