Writing Slowly

Since we’re currently lost somewhere in the middle of wars that seemingly have no end-point, and arguably no point, I wonder just what film director Christopher Nolan will make of The Odyssey, his blockbuster movie of which comes out mid-2026.

After I watched another recent movie version of the story, The Return, I found out about the work of psychologist Jonathan Shay with Vietnem veterans. He wrote two books linking the works of Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – with the modern experience of warfare and with the travails of homecoming.

Two quotes from Jonathan Shay’s work stood out particularly. First, this one about war-induced PTSD:

“Combat veterans with unhealed PTSD have the greatest difficulty conceiving of any struggle apart from killing and dying. Passionate struggle conducted within rules of safety and fairness simply doesn’t make sense to them or seems a hollow charade. For them it is psychologically impossible to win a struggle without killing or to lose without dying, and they do not want to do either.” – Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam.

This was depicted brilliantly and chillingly in The Return, which premiered in 2024. Ralph Feinnes’ Odysseus seems both haunted by his violent past, and doomed to relive it. Classicist Joel Christensen didn’t love The Return, and I understand why he called it a shabby, Cliff’s Notes version of the Odyssey. But I felt the movie at least illuminated some of the PTSD aspects of war that Shay describes – enduring trauma less as a disorder than as an injury.

Then there was this quote, which really made me think:

“A shared narrative future – as expressed in such statements as “Yes, I’ll come to the picnic next Friday” – defines socially shared predictability of behavior. Prolonged contact with the enemy teaches that predictability is fatal. Being unpredictable is a basic survival skill in combat, where the enemy is ever observant. Many of the veterans in our program take different routes to the clinic every time they come.” – Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam.

On reading this, I thought of the epithets, the numerous descriptions applied to Odysseus. In The Odyssey he is introduced as ’the man of many ways’ (polytropos). The meaning of this name has been argued about ever since antiquity. Is it a compliment, as in ‘well-turned’, or a criticism, as in ‘shifty’?

Either way there’s a certain elusiveness to Odysseus. The point is, I’d never before encountered the idea that perhaps this unpredictability might relate directly to the trauma of the Trojan War he has survived while seeing his comrades perish (and often being the cause of their deaths too). I used to think it meant he was cunningly shape-shifting, crafting his words and actions to be ‘all things to everyone’. But if so, why exactly is he like this? When I think of the veterans taking multiple paths to the clinic, the image sheds light on Odysseus’s detour-heavy, periegetic journey home, and his frequent reluctance to admit to his hosts who he is. He’s trying to survive the war, even long after it’s over. The Return captured this well, I felt. Odysseus doesn’t so much remain in the shadows as become a shadow himself, returned to the palace but reluctant to claim his place, as though he knows his name can only ever mean trouble¹.

Well, another year, another interpretation of Homer. Apparently Christopher Nolan’s movie cost more than ten times as much as Uberto Pasolini’s film did. It will be interesting to see whether it’s ten times as incisive.

Each age makes its own version of the Odyssey. Here’s Pinturicchio’s The Return of Ulysses (1508-09).

Further reading:

Austin, Norman. “Name Magic in the ‘Odyssey.’” California Studies in Classical Antiquity, vol. 5, 1972, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/2…

Christensen, Joel. “Terrible, Wonderful Odysseus: The Meanings of his Epithets, His Name(s) and How We Read Him.” Sententiae Antiquiae, 2018.

Christensen, Joel P. Why Odysseus?: Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. Palgrave Macmillan, 2026.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson, W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Pucci, Pietro. Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad.” Cornell University Press, 1987. JSTOR.

Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Atheneum, 1994.

Shay, Jonathan. Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Scribner, 2002.

See also: No Other Odysseus - ‘a collection of links to materials on Odysseus and the Odyssey.’

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. It’s a short and accessible introduction to the concept, available now.

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