The Odyssey by Stephen Fry
a reflection
Hero or destroyer?
This was my first ever Stephen Fry book. Every summer I pick up a Greek Mythology retelling, and this year I was lucky enough to receive this as a gift from my friends. I was expecting something along the lines of The Song of Achilles or Circe by Madeleine Miller, but this is quite different.
Fry's book is a faithful rewriting of The Odyssey by Homer, written in a modern key, making it more accessible than the original poem. Indeed, it is entertaining and humorous and feels like a much more light-hearted version of the story. Although, at times events where narrated too quickly, loosing their complexity and depth.
The writer starts by recounting everyone's return home after the Trojan War. But there is one man, who still has not made it on the shores of his beloved island: Odysseus.
His story is told directly form his point of view, after shipwrecking on the island of Phaeacia. During dinner at the court of King Alcinous and his daughter Nausicaa, he decides to tell what really happened after he left the destructed city of Troy.
The Odyssey is a story that many of us know, more or less. We studied it at school, we saw movies (there is another one coming out next year, which I am very excited about), we listened to podcasts, and we never get bored of it.
Nevertheless, after years of encountering this story in so many different ways, this time I began to reflect more on Odysseus as a hero. It is undeniable that we have always and continue to consider Ulysses as the ultimate Hero; he who allowed the Greeks to win the War, he who no one could match in wit and wisdom.
…
Yet, the famous Italian writer Dante Alighieri thought differently. In his opus magnum entitled La Divina Commedia, he places Ulysses in the eight circle of the Inferno, where he is tied up in a flame along with Diomedes. Dante invents a new story, where Odysseus wants to go beyond the pillars of the known world, in a pursuit for knowledge. Indeed, he persuades and exhorts his fellow companions to follow him into the unknown:
“Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge.”
In this scenario, his cunning and unjustified aspiration for enlightenment cause the death of his whole crew, as well as his own. In the Inferno, he is portrayed as a flawed and possibly a narcissistic man, who is willing to sacrifice others in order to fulfil his own pursuits.
Carefully reading Fry's book, there are moments in which Odysseus himself doubts he is such a hero. When fellow kings and soldiers admire what he achieved during the great Trojan War, he replies:
“'Sly', 'slippery', 'cunning', 'deceitful' - those are the usual words”.
Is this a recognition of the cruelty of his actions, disguised as heroism? Is glory a fair compromise for what his eyes have seen and what his hands have done? Can he ever be free of his past, or is it going to haunt him until his last breath?