The Odyssey 2: How the Odyssey conquered the world

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Secret Life of Books 3 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 2 months ago

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What is the significance of Homer's Odyssey in modern storytelling?

Sophie Gee 0:03

Jonty, we're in another slob code red. Only months after Wuthering Heights smashed onto our screens and Christopher Nolan's here for the blockbuster event of the season. He's taking one of the oldest and still greatest epics of all time. It's Homer's Odyssey. You'll have seen the posters everywhere, 100% IMAX, and giving it what it always lacked, and that is, obviously, Matt Damon.

Jonty Claypole 0:29

And not just Matt Damon, but Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Travis Scott, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, and the list goes on. Basically, if you're an actor and not in this film, you might want to consider retraining and doing something else.

Sophie Gee 0:46

Yeah, that's brutal. Brutal, but true. I mean, the Odyssey itself is something of a cattle call, let's face it. So if you're feeling daunted by the scale and the import of the source material, no less than the film, don't worry. We've donned our scrubs. We've got our hazmat suits on, our surgical gloves. We've got our critical defibrillators, suction devices, and valve masks. We've got all our mixed metaphors lined up. And we're going to deliver you to the cinema, ready to take on Homer, Nolan's Odyssey, and Matt Damon's Odysseus.

Jonty Claypole 1:23

So we have republished the episode we did very early on. Golly, Sophie, it feels like centuries ago.

Sophie Gee 1:29

It's an epic journey. It's an epic journey. We were barely out of Calypso's cave in those days. We'd barely taken to the wine dark seas.

Jonty Claypole 1:36

That's right. And Mary Beard came on, the world's best loved classicist. And we did an episode with her on the Odyssey, on Homer's Odyssey. So we're republishing that alongside this episode. And then in this episode, we're going to look at what happened next, how the Odyssey shaped English literature in a what Sophie calls a portmanteau episode. which I think is just a very posh way of saying a hodgepodge that will encompass everyone from Shakespeare to Keats, Toni Morrison to Margaret Atwood.

Sophie Gee 2:09

Although I've noticed that people have taken to referring to themselves as having a portfolio career. Maybe this is a portfolio episode.

Jonty Claypole 2:16

I've got a portfolio career, Sophie.

Sophie Gee 2:18

I've got one too.

Jonty Claypole 2:19

And proud.

Sophie Gee 2:20

You know, you're nothing if you don't have a portfolio career. Dragging ourselves back to actually perhaps the ultimate portfolio narrative, the Odyssey. In the coming episodes, we're going to take deep dives into some of the most important spin-offs, rewritings and reworkings of Homer's great tale. We're going into Tennyson's Ulysses. We're going to do a watch-along with Nolan's film. Well, maybe not a watch-along, but an immediately postpartum watch download. And then as the dust settles or the waters meet, or perhaps as we thread our way through Scylla and Charybdis, Jonty, we're going to embark on what is arguably, very arguably, the greatest Odyssey rewrite of all, James Joyce's Ulysses. For that, we're actually going to take, we're taking a long run at it.

Sophie Gee 3:05

We're doing a long durée version of what is already, let's face it, a pretty long haul. We're going to do a three-part series that will take on each of the works in Joyce's trilogy of Dubliners, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then Ulysses itself.

Jonty Claypole 3:20

There's a lot of jeopardy there, isn't there, Sophie? Because you have said about 10 times on this podcast how much you hate James Joyce's Ulysses. So I'm very intrigued to see if you are going to reconsider your views in the course of that series.

Sophie Gee 3:35

Yes, and I noticed that you're doing a lot of offloading there, Jonty, because I think you're also on the record as saying that you hate James Joyce's Ulysses. So... Let's see how it all plays out, shall we?

Jonty Claypole 3:46

Well, I think I only said that to impress you. Well, maybe I do. I don't know. I'm confused. So that's why I'm glad we're doing this. This is The Secret Life of Books. I am Matt Damon. I am at the height of my career still, and I have grown a beard, especially to play a rugged seafaring adventurer. And if this doesn't get me an Oscar, boy, oh boy, am I going to throw my other Oscars out of the pram.

Sophie Gee 4:19

Nice. So I'm Sophie Gee, a.k.a.