Revisiting Joyce Before the Release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Fig 1 Francois-Louis Schmied, Illustration for The Odyssey by Homer. Paris, Compagnie des bibliophiles de l’Automobile-Club de France, 1928, volume 1, page 113. 1928, Vol. 1, p. 113, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

With the coming release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026), as well as Umberto Pasolini’s 2024 film The Return, Homer’s great epic poem, like its protagonist, is coming back.

Yet, in reality, The Odyssey and its many iterations have always cast a long shadow on modern storytelling. Perhaps the most famous modernist version is Joyce’s Ulysses. Set in Dublin over the course of a day, Ulysses follows a cast of characters—mainly Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom—as they live a modern sort of odyssey in the city.

So, what can The Odyssey tell us today, and why were figures such as Joyce drawn to it?

Studying The Odyssey is really rewarding in its own right. Not only is it a great story, but you begin to learn about the many questions that surround the text. And, of interest to my own research approach, you begin to learn how the different versions of Odysseus can tell you quite a lot about ethical perspectives at any given time—about debates on what it means to live well.

For starters, the famous Homeric Question asks: Did Homer really exist? The answer is “probably not.” He’s likely an invention of a school of poets (his name is itself a clue, which literally means “rhapsodist”). This recasts the story less as a single, discrete story than a collection of myths brought together around an invented figure. This is remarkable in many ways, but it also changes the context of the story, especially because today we so often conceive of texts as authored by a single individual. Thinking of The Odyssey as a cultural collage, rigidified over the years, could be a helpful frame.

Now, which version of the story to read is another point of contention. Emily Wilson’s recent translation—the first by a woman in English—reveals all sorts of problems with the history of translation. Hers begins, “Tell me about a complicated man.”

This first line in Wilson’s edition is a wallop that I absolutely love. Sometimes, translations treat the term πολύτροπος (“polytropos”) as “many-winding” or a person who has lots of features or “sides.” But Wilson captures the idea in a modern vernacular that also refuses to focus only on the positives. “Complicated” means he has depth, struggles, and deserves to have stories written about him.

She also points out that misogyny has crept into previous translations. For instance, the final episode, when Odysseus returns to Ithaca, often treats the women on the island as “whores” or “harlots.” Odysseus has them hanged for their complacency, but, as Wilson notes, “whores” is a connotation added by modern (male) translators that isn’t in source texts. So the context shifts a bit when Wilson translates this moment as Odysseus ordering the death of young women or girls when, in reality, it’s not clear how much they deserve to die (at least for a modern reader).

But I’m also interested in how Odysseus is revered in this text vs others. E.g., in Sophocles Philoctetes, Odysseus is more of a swindler than a hero. And in the Aeneid, Odysseus is recast as Aeneus, who seeks a new home rather than a return to the old. Tennyson reimagined Ulysses (the Romanized version of the Greek hero’s name) in his poem by the same name. In Derek Walcott’s Omeros, we see the story shift from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean, reflecting a postcolonial landscape. Here’s an excerpt from the opening of his poem “Sea Grapes”:

That sail which leans on light,

tired of islands,

a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,

home-bound on the Aegean;

(“Sea Grapes” 1-5)

Walcott takes a modern image of a schooner headed home and imagines that the mythic hero of The Odyssey is inside the boat. Here, imagination transplants readers into the past, yet it also takes on new meaning considering the identity of the speaker. Rather than Homer invoking the Muses, here we see a Caribbean islander (presumably on Walcott’s native Saint Lucia) who both admires the beauty and storytelling of the epic poem yet also concludes with the assertion that “Classics can console us. But not enough” (19). Walcott’s poem is a wonderful poetical reimagining of the story.

And Joyce’s Ulysses is no less revelatory.

Ulysses

Readers of Ulysses will find lots to analyze in terms of politics, literary art, psychology, and philosophy. While it’s often presented as a notoriously dense text, there are countless guides to reading the book that can point out the references that you might miss. But the book is also very unserious at times—something that people don’t mention as often. You’ll see lots of characters in compromising positions (including using the restroom or picking their nose) and read their interior thoughts (which includes lots of daydreaming about sex).

For those unfamiliar with the novel, it uses The Odyssey as a sort of template for structuring the story around Leopold Bloom. We see brief snippets from other characters’ points of view, like Stephen Dedalus, a young scholar and writer (possibly a stand-in for the young Joyce himself), and Bloom’s wife, Molly. Like The Odyssey of old, the first several episodes or chapters focus on Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, and it’s not until the fifth episode, “Calypso,” that the hero appears in the Greek epic and Joyce’s Irish adaptation.

I find it helpful to have a list of the episodes from The Odyssey and notes about what happens, as this will help you understand what’s happening in each chapter of Joyce’s book. For example, the first episode of The Odyssey, called “Telemachus,” focuses on what’s happened to Ithaca—the island Odysseus rules—since he’s been missing on a journey back home. We learn about Telemachus, his son, who tries helplessly to maintain order, and the many young men who’ve usurped the island and tried to woo the queen.

In Joyce’s first chapter, we get the irreverent Buck Mulligan—a friend and fellow lodger in Stephen’s apartment—who seems to bounce off the walls with jokes and annoying jibes early in the morning. Buck is actually a medical student, but he’s also a troublemaker. He’s invited an Englishman into their home—Haines—whom Stephen really seems to dislike. At the end of the chapter, Stephen thinks to himself that Mulligan is a usurper—he’s taken over the apartment, demanded the key, and displaced Stephen. This isn’t just physical displacement but also emotional: Mulligan has also been making light of the passing of Stephen’s mother.

There’s a lot to unpack in the first episode of Joyce’s work. If you know that The Odyssey opens with this theme of usurping Ithaca, then you know that something “bigger” is going on here. It seems especially relevant that Haines—the “intruder”—is English, a group who’ve oppressed the Irish for centuries. So Stephen’s dislike of Haines is probably political, reflecting the wider reality that Ireland (and Stephen) feels stifled and oppressed. And, what’s more, we see repeated references to drowning. The sea isn’t for journeying; it imprisons Stephen.

However, the hero of Ulysses is arguably Leopold Bloom, not Stephen. Bloom is Jewish, so a large portion of the text focuses on anti-Semitism and references to the Wandering Jew, a figure in Western culture who’s cursed to wander the earth for mocking Jesus. This also reflects the diasporic nature of the Jewish community—that it’s spread out over the world—and here Joyce seems to create a mirror between Bloom as a “wanderer” (in the city, in the world) and Odysseus wandering back home after the Trojan War. Bloom gets breakfast, visits the post office, goes to a funeral, and, eventually, runs into Stephen. You get the sense that Bloom is a bit of an oddity, though, not as a social pariah but in the sense that Bloom is both sensitive and a bit gross, silly yet full of depth. And, I think he’s curious about everything, which makes me love the guy.

Why care?

So why should we care about this novel today?

I won’t make authoritative claims about what Joyce was trying to do in Ulysses—that’s a mistake a lot of over-confident critics and readers have made in the past. But I can say that it’s relevant today because of what the novel tells us about modern life.

For starters, the book emphasizes history—personal, political, and mythical. These things often overlap. One of the most famous lines in the book comes from Stephen: “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” He might mean his recent history (the loss of his mother), Irish history and its oppression by the British, or even the playing out of the mythic past in the book itself. It is, after all, a story of stories, a repetition of the (literary) past.

We’re also embedded in history in ways that can make life seem beyond our control, at least for most people who aren’t political leaders or ultra-wealthy. Joyce’s story is about everyday people, elevating them to mythic status; it’s not about demi-gods or special figures of the past whom we’re meant to emulate. For example, I find Bloom to be incredibly sympathetic. He treats most people, and even animals, with care and concern. But he’s also deeply flawed, both in his lecherous streak and his bad memory. He’s lively and embodied, and he’s careful to notice details about the world that most people would miss.

Another key aspect of Ulysses is its emphasis on parallax, or how the same event is seen from different angles. Sometimes this seems trivial, like when Stephen hears a bell toll in an early chapter, and Leo Bloom hears it toll at the same time of day in a later chapter. (Think of Cubist painting, popular around the same time Joyce’s novel was published, which emphasizes many perspectives of the same subject.) But we can also argue that these characters view the same subjects differently. Stephen and Bloom are both faced with death, though they react differently. They both think about love (and sex), though, again, in different manners, and they both live in the world in different ways: Stephen is heady and dense, but myopic, while Bloom responds to the external world in deceivingly simple terms.

The discourse around Homer’s Odyssey has suffered from singular points of view for quite a long time. As I mentioned about Wilson’s recent translation, the epic poem has had one type of translator for such a long time that people didn’t think critically about how translation is always interpretive (and open to bias).

But beyond that, I’m also dying for someone to make a film version of Philoctetes, Sophocles play, and release it at the same time as Nolan’s movie. Philoctetes is about Odysseus and Neoptolemus, and it treats Odysseus as a bit of a scoundrel. In Homer’s Odyssey, he’s a hero, but, honestly, behaves like a jerk at times. He lies and cheats on his wife, murders innocent people, and gets a lot of help from the gods. In Philoctetes, Neoptolemus is tasked with getting the legendary archer, Philoctetes, to join the Trojan War. Odysseus is on the quest as well, and he claims that lying to the archer is worth it; let’s just trick him into fighting. By the time he gets to Troy, he’ll be forced into the fight. But Neoptolemus has a crisis of conscience and eventually refuses to lie anymore.

Sophocles’ plays challenge the way The Odyssey has been read and taught for many years; it is viewed as a marker of Greek ethics, as a story of might makes right, that ends justify means. The play Philoctetes is much more modern, I think, in this ethical view that our decisions have impact, and that we’re responsible for creating the world in which we want to live. While the gods also intervene at the end of Sophocles play, I think it’s a good contrast to the Homeric epic.

And, to bring it back to Joyce, pairing Sophocles’ and Homer’s versions of the same character—seeing two things from different angles—adds important perspective. If for nothing else, Joyce’s novel asks us to put difference in the foreground and to recognize that each individual has a rich, interior life. It makes an epic of everyday characters, treating seeming nobodies as heroes. Even the final chapter, focusing on Molly Bloom’s monologue and presented stream-of-consciousness, complicates how readers might view the unfaithful wife earlier in the novel. She’s more complicated than we may have given her credit.

So, one way of interpreting Joyce’s famous line about awakening from the nightmare of history might be to focus on how the novel awakens us from the oppressive weight of Homer’s mythic epic. In Joyce’s world, everyday people matter, and our decisions have an incredible impact. To me, that’s an idea worth celebrating.