Odysseus and the Passage of Time

The Odyssey is one of the oldest and most lasting works in Western literature, so it’s no surprise that Christopher Nolan is the latest in a long line of people–authors, artists, and filmmakers–who seek to “adapt” it. Whether Nolan’s work is, indeed, a good adaptation of the original is both a separate question and one open to debate.

Let me, instead, focus on another adaptation. Polish author and dramatist Roman Brandstaetter (1906-1987) grew up in a solidly Jewish home, his grandfather a distinguished rabbi. Thoroughly immersed in Judaism, he quickly made a mark for himself in the 1930s as a Polish and Jewish thinker and writer. A process began during World War II in Jerusalem that resulted in Brandstaetter’s postwar baptism. He refused to call it a “conversion” because he insisted that his entry into Catholicism was not a turning from his Jewish roots but their fulfillment. His most notable work is a four-volume work, Jezus z Nazaretu [Jesus of Nazareth], whose life he retells in Christian terms but also wholly grounded in the thought, mentality, and culture of a first-century Jew.

Brandstaetter would be included among the major writers of the 20th-century Polish literary canon. But that does not mean he was readily accepted nor had an easy time of things. Any author in post-World War II Poland would have to contend with the dictates of socialist thinking: an observant Catholic was already suspect. A Jew might also rub various people the wrong way: Catholics who doubted the authenticity of his faith; Communists who played the antisemitism card; Jews who thought Brandstaetter’s Christianity was a betrayal.

And still he persisted … and succeeded.

His literary corpus includes 20 plays, including several adaptations of classical Greek stories: Antigone, Medea, Iphigenia, and, of course, Odysseus. “Odys płaczący” [Odysseus Weeping] is one of his shorter plays, one that reconsiders the whole Odysseus legend, especially the legend of the hero, the patience of his wife, Penelope, and the fate of their son, Telemachus.

In the Homeric tradition, Odysseus is King of Ithaca, who goes to Troy to fight in the famous Trojan War. Despite a decade-long siege, Troy remained impregnable. In response, Odysseus devised the scheme of building a giant wooden horse to leave behind as a “gift.” The Trojans would bring into their city, allowing the Greeks hiding inside it to emerge and sack the place. Odysseus and his men plunder the city, intending to return to Greece with their booty.

Boastfully planning to return home, his return is impeded by the gods who punish his hubris, his men who make bad decisions, and his own tarrying. By the time he returns to Ithaca, he has been gone twenty years, his wife and home beset by suitors convinced he is dead who want to marry his wife and divide his wealth. In Homer’s version, Odysseus, together with his son, Telemachus, slays the suitors, and the home is happy ever after.

Brandstaetter presents a somewhat different reality in a four-character play: Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, and a Greek chorus.

For most of the play, Odysseus is presented as a “drifter,” a man unrecognized by his wife, who is busy spinning. (In Homer’s original, Penelope weaves a shroud. She puts off her suitors by saying she would marry once she finishes it–only to unweave it at night.) The Drifter is impressed by what he has observed of Penelope and Telemachus and relays news about Odysseus in the third person, including assuring Penelope that Odysseus loves her. She wants to believe him, but she also doubts whether he is just another enterprising soul with a story who hopes somehow to profit by it.

The course of the discussion, however, turns on a deeper question. Thomas Wolfe broached it in his great 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, when he answered negatively whether one can ever really go home again.

Penelope awaits a man who left twenty years ago. Her memory and vision of that man are, in a sense, frozen in time. A warrior king sallied forth from Ithaca to do epic battle, gain great loot, and return with riches and honor.

Would one imagine this drifter—whose “feet and clothing are covered in dust”—was that man?

Even before revealing himself, the Drifter asks Penelope, “Of which Odysseus do you speak?” Yes, he remembers the brave and handsome Odysseus who went off to Troy, spilling blood as liberally as wine. But does she want to know “how the Odysseus who wanders the world looks? … He is old and grey. The sunset is in his gaze. He is as tired as a shadow.”

He tells her bluntly that “a man living beyond the reach of our sight and our touch is but a cruel illusion,” the fossil of our memories but not necessarily the living human being. Like a pond in the palace of Ithaca that used to be surrounded by now desiccated cypresses, “they died because their souls were their own reflections in water that is not there today.”

As their conversation progresses, Penelope seems unshakably attached to the past. It moves beyond Odysseus and Penelope to their child and Penelope’s concerns that, unlike his father (or at least her memory of him), Telemachus is perhaps too sensitive to be a king. When the Drifter presses to speak to the boy and tell him about his encounters with his father, Penelope refuses … and the Drifter reveals who he is.

“I am Odysseus! I am Odysseus!” He confesses he has been “born twice.”

The first time was in Ithaca, the boy who grew up to be the hero that lay siege to Troy. The second was born the day “when I came to know the world’s hells. I experienced suffering and saw suffering so great that even the wisest among us could not … understand its magnitude.” He disavows the man who “murdered people for three days and three nights without interruption … [who] killed girls who were like young olive trees, [who] smashed the heads of infants on marble steps and killed the incapacitated elderly with a sword thrust in the back.”

“Born twice” alludes to the Christian mystery of being “born again”—something not possible by human agency but divine grace.

Penelope dismisses that man: “Leave! You are lying, drifter!” And that Drifter withdraws with but two words: “Farewell, Penelope!”

The play concludes with the Chorus asking Penelope, “Are the ladies to sit down at the looms and weave a linen wedding dress?” She answers no. “What do you intend to do?” the Chorus asks. “Wait for Odysseus!” “But that was Odyseeus, after all, Penelope.” The curtain drops as “Penelope sits down motionlessly, like a stone, full of the weight of choked back weeping.”

Brandstaetter’s adaptation perhaps reflects aspects of his own life. The author who made a name for himself as a distinguished Jewish writer in Hebrew in interwar Poland never went back to those days or those writings. That chapter of his life was like a closed book.

But the play is not primarily an autobiography. Odysseus the Returnee, the Drifter, is in some sense … Everyman. Everyman for whom life continues, even when those who have surrounded or known or think they have known him discover that the person they think they knew is gone.

How do we treat a person whose life has been changed by the passage of time? Do we accept what they have become? Or do we insist on forcing them into the Procrustean bed of our own preconceptions, as if time froze when they stepped out of our daily lives? How often do we overlay our expectations on another, and then reject the other because they continued to live?

How often are marriages and families burdened by the weight of past expectations, of ideas and persons which time has passed by? And, instead of receiving the moment as it is, how often do we try to yoke what is to expectations of what has been? And how often do those expectations accompany a refusal to forgive and forget the past to live in the present, the now?

Conversion itself also involves putting on a new man, a new man who may not meet the expectations of others accustomed to the old man.

The lessons of Odysseus remain vital some 2,700 years after the Odyssey may have been written. They remain vital because they illumine constant challenges of human life, not because they might be just fodder for action heroes. In that task, Brandstaetter’s “Odysseus Weeping” gives us grist for Christian reflection on a great, if flawed, pagan hero.

(Note: Brandstaetter’s “Odysseus Weeping” is untranslated from Polish; translations here are by the author, all rights reserved.)