My Ideal Odyssey

appropriate appropriations

There’s been a lot of buzz about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey lately. Well let me tell you: I haven’t seen it and I don’t particularly want to. Every generation, newly infatuated, bends the Classics to its own modernity; the texts are deep and strong, and they can take it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

It’s just. People keep taking whatever they want out of the damn things. Supergiant keeps making very fun games that are deeply upsetting to me as somebody who cares about how stories end; Campbell’s corpse should be dragged through the streets. Dan Simmons’ Illium vexed me in middle school. I wanted to like Madeline Miller’s Circe; really, I did. But it was just so bad that I returned her Song Of Achilles to the library without reading it and had to have a very awkward conversation with a book club I am thankfully no longer part of¹.

I don’t mean to be a snob, or worse, a fundamentalist. Obviously to read, and to write from reading, is to bring one’s own self and cultural context to a (hopefully grounded) approach to the work. So that’s what I’m doing. I am bringing my own self, and my experiences, and my cultural contexts to The Odyssey, to produce my ideal adaptation.

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Here is the crux of my ideal adaptation of The Odyssey: I don’t think Odysseus could make it through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Obviously he wouldn’t be able to read English. But I think the problems go deeper than that.

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But not by will nor valor could he save them,

for their own recklessness destroyed them all—

children and fools, they gorged themselves fat

on waterfall-frothed chocolate, and were taken up in tubes;

men pressed as grapes to wine for their presumptions,

unmindful others borne to deep and sunless tombs.

The last to their ends were moved

by their own devices.

Consider, of course, The Chocolate Waterfall Room — a test right out of the tales Odysseus spun for the Phaeacians, full of horror at the breach of ξενία by consumption².

Wonka seems at first to honor guest-friendship. He offers his wondrous chocolate gardens freely to the hungry; Charles and Joseph Bucket indulge, delighted. Only when Augustus Gloop falls in, contaminating the entire chocolate river, does Wonka exact his punishment — for ruining food, Augustus is rendered³ thin. If we grant, as the Greeks might, that in contaminating a great deal of valuable foodstuffs Augustus has committed a crime against his host, then Wonka is well within his rights to answer that transgression with an appropriately ironic punishment. Remember, he does send him off with a truckload of candy and the promise of a lifetime supply afterwards. In time Augustus Gloop will surely return to his former stature. No lasting harm has been done, except possibly to his psyche.

Odysseus’ men would not be so lucky. None but the man of many ways himself are so god-favored as to receive a Golden Ticket; the only way at all reasonable for the black ships to end up at Wonka’s Chocolate Factory is for them to have been blown far, far off course. The men are (as Odysseus makes a point of mentioning on multiple occasions) starving, and cannot all be reasonably expected to understand all the hygienic principles that underly modern food safety. Only Odysseus manages to obey the proper courtesies and present Wonka with a gift: a silver-studded sword won from the Sack of Troy. Wonka takes a shine to it, and wears it at his own belt, though he disparages it as a weapon; perhaps, he says, it will serve some Oompa-Loompa in cutting rare fruit. But the gaze of Willy Wonka falls harsh upon those who follow not his laws, and we can safely assume those who do fall in and get sucked up the tubes will never return to Argive shores.

Next of course is Violet Beauregard’s trial: the stick of chewing gum. Those who have not read the original text, and are familiar via the strictly inferior movie adaptations, will likely fail to appreciate the actual test here: while Violet’s gum-chewing is certainly unsanitary, her real crime against Wonka here is her pursuit of κλέος⁴ at his expense, a distinction which would not have been lost on the Greeks. For weary and long-suffering Odysseus to take part in the Phaeacian games, and for him to fire the fateful arrow through the ten axe-heads, he must first be roused to action by insult. To display virtue is fitting, but virtue, especially that demonstrated by skill in arms— as in so many Greek games— must be rendered seemly through the guest-compact. Recall: Odysseus responds to Euryalus’ taunts by issuing his own challenges to all save Laodamas, son of his host Alcinous.

Who quarrels with his host?

Only a madman—or no man at all—

would challenge his protector among strangers,

cutting the ground away under his feet.

(Odyssey VIII.217-220, trans. Fitzgerald, 1961)

Violet Beauregard has no such care. She presumes to take one of her host’s treasures and suffers the inevitable result.

Here Odysseus and his men fare better. Troy is not so far from Chios, where mastic resin (the astute reader may recognize the root from which our mastication is derived) has long been produced, and gum is not known for its nutritionally-sustaining qualities (besides which, many of the men have already sated themselves at the chocolate waterfall). The lure here is in their desire to prove themselves at cost to their host. Whichever of them take the gum are lost — but the chocolate waterfall has conclusively demonstrated that Wonka’s domain is full of dangers, and they likely heed his warnings.

As you know, Veruca Salt is hurled down the trash chute by Wonka’s army of trained squirrels. She is punished for her greed, and while the opening of Aeolus’ sack of winds handily demonstrates the greed of Odysseus’ crew, I think it likely that several of them perish here for a different reason: here, at last, they are tempted with what is to them reasonable food. One imagines no small contingent of the men wary of chocolate and confectionry unrecognizable to them, and still starving as a result; these would certainly recognize nuts and squirrels as edible and suffer the consequent downfall. Eurylochus might credibly be described as a “bad nut”. Remember: Eurylochus fears to return to Circe, a cowardice for which Odysseus considers killing him, and Charles Bucket only receives the Golden Ticket after spending a ten of the fifty-pence with which he should really buy food for his own starving family on a second Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight bar. In both Homeric and Dahlian cosmologies, ambition and indulgence are rewarded — so long as hubris is held in check. One imagines Eurylochus’ rhetoric: the crew are simple men; they presume not above their station, and will partake in food befitting of it. Surely they have now passed the tests set before them, and surely the Lord of the Factory will be merciful.

But if he flares up over his rodents lost,

wishing our lives destroyed, and if the gods

make cause with him, why, then I say: Better

whatever fate he has in store for us

than waste to skin and bones far from the sun!

Here Wonka will be identified with the Divine; perhaps in an attempt (however futile) to assuage his wrath. Odysseus, skilled in all ways of contending, must by this point have recognized Wonka’s malicious intent. Unsure of the candy-maker’s capabilities, as when he observes suitors and Phaeacians alike, the great tactician bides his time.

The fourth test is the Chocolate Television teleporter. The Nut Sorting Room tests for idiocy, and this one, its counterpart, for love of one’s own intelligence — a trap set for Mike Teevee, and perhaps for Odysseus himself. Though Mike Teevee is a tedious child, many of his criticisms are quite reasonable! But like the rest he fails.

At the fourth test, the deliberate nature of Wonka’s cruelty becomes obvious. In seeming accordance with the laws of guest-friendship, he offers the remaining men a way home. Having progressed through the Great Glass Lift, and being terrified by the godlike powers Wonka demonstrably possesses, the second that television shows their homelands (and it will! Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory holds temptations custom-tailored to any victim he pleases) the last of Odysseus’ men plunge into the screen, never to return. There are no televisions in Ithaca.

And now war-wise Odysseus readies himself. Wonka may seem to him like a god, and as with the gods, his vengeance is always justified — and yet even earth-shaking Poseidon relents, in his time. As with Penelope and the olive-trunk bed, the man of action understands that there is a time for tests and that that time is over. William Wonka has intentionally sabotaged his crew by setting forth challenges he knows they will fail. If he is a god, then there is little to be done⁵. Athena intercedes, but not when men call her; the grey-eyed goddess helps those who help themselves. But if he is a man, he can surely be killed.

How have we wronged you, wily Odysseus asks. Lord of men, skilled in craft and rich beyond compare, why have you treated us so? I gave you my very sword.

You have contaminated my chocolate, and chewed of my gum, and tried to eat my squirrels, and jumped into my television, replies Wonka. I warned you against all those things! I told all those men that they shouldn’t have done what they did! You at least gave me a sword about it. But you’re still going to have to go. You’re neither moldable nor young enough to inherit my chocolate empire.

I will go peacefully, says lying Odysseus, if you will but answer a single question. How did you earn Olympus’ favor, that the gods have blessed you so?

William Wonka recognizes his own methodology — Odysseus has given him just enough rope to hang himself with. His ego will not let him deny his own success, and the powers that back Odysseus will certainly empower him if he speaks against them.

The ways of the gods are mysterious, Wonka replies. I must have done something right.

And then many-minded Odysseus is on him.

They share a single fierce kiss, tumbling on the floor. Wonka draws blood. But it’s Odysseus who comes out on top: he has drawn the sword at Wonka’s waist and stabbed it deep into the floorboards with the crossguard at William’s neck, so that a single gulp will draw blood from his throat — and now his mouth is full of Odysseus’ saliva.

In keeping with Wonka’s own perversion of ξενία, complicated Odysseus has allowed him a way out— so long as he does not succumb to temptation.

William can only chuckle, and lightly, lest the blade part his skin; he has been bested and bound by the very guest-gift which he so appreciated.

Up through the Factory Odysseus journeys, through rooms unfathomable to him and to us. He makes up a story about his men eating the Cattle of the Sun. That will be easier to explain. Making it through the Chocolate Factory— really making it through, not just limping away with a bloodied tongue — means earning Wonka’s approval. Odysseus knows that for all the passion in their bodies, that man would kill him if he ever saw him again.

Oh, and the Oompa-Loompas should sing in dactylic hexameter.

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otakon this weekend! I will be meeting at least three of you there. if you see me cosplaying (no I won’t tell you who) tell me you like my twitter and I will probably say hi!

1. still bitter about their thoughts on The Buried Giant.

2. and it is almost always by consumption, by greedy guests or impious hosts. In many cases (Lotus-Eaters, Polyphemos, Laistrygonians, Circe’s banquet, the Cattle of the Sun) this is obvious - but consider as well the rules around the black blood and the shades! For Odysseus to deny sustenance to those journeying to him, even his mother (even temporarily) heightens the otherworldliness of the Underworld.

3. in the most literal sense?

4. remember: she’s trying to set a record.

5. only the divine can counter the divine. note that in the face of Polyphemos the Cyclops Odysseus gains his victory with soporific wine from Maron, Priest of Apollo.