A Case Study in Culture

This is the latest in a series I am cross-posting from my new substack entitled Think Shakespeare. More details here.

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The 19th century had a dream. Well, let’s be more specific. The Romantic movement of the 19th century had a dream. The dream involved raising the status of “art” to a level that had not been seen before. In order for that to happen, the skills of interpretation needed to be lifted as well. In service to both of these goals, the scholarly discipline of hermeneutics (the study of interpretation) achieved a level of prestige hitherto unknown. Indeed, major philosophers of the era, including Nietzsche and Heidegger, made hermeneutics the gateway to the ground of being.

A key part of the broader context that drove the Romantic movement was the notion that the Christian religion was in terminal decline in the West. Although most people still professed to be Christians and went to church every Sunday, it was evident to a small group of thinkers that nobody really believed in Christianity anymore. A number of solutions were offered, one of which was to try to reinvigorate Christian faith. Another was that art could be used to fill the gap.

One of activities that religion provides is an opportunity to take time out from daily life and consider the bigger questions of existence. Stories have always formed a core part of religious practice because they provide a common language accessible to all. The Bible had provided that common language for one and a half millennia, but it was losing its relevance to the modern world. The Romantics hoped that great works of art would step in to fill the void, and it is no coincidence that they saw Shakespeare as the prime example of what that could look like because his works attain the degree of profundity and breadth of perspective that might be called biblical.

Just a few months ago, we had exactly the kind of event that the Romantics dreamed about. One of the most famous artists of our time, the film director Christopher Nolan, released an adaptation of one of the great stories in Western history, The Odyssey. It could have been an opportunity to discuss the bigger questions of life and culture. Instead, it got dragged through the “culture wars” meat grinder. Even the learned experts who opined on the movie had seemingly nothing interesting to say.

There is no shortage of things to talk about in relation to the movie. Nolan alters the original story in fundamental ways. I’m not talking about his choice of actors or his use of costumes. I’m talking about the core meanings of the work. Apparently, almost nobody saw that, even the learned experts. What the Romantics warned about two centuries ago is still true. We don’t know how to interpret art in general and stories in particular. The Romantic dream remains unfulfilled because nobody teaches the skills of interpretation, not in high school and certainly not in university. Therefore, we don’t know how to talk about art.

Think Shakespeare is about learning the skills of interpretation required to understand the deeper themes in great stories. To demonstrate what that looks like, let’s do quick run through of just a single change that Christopher Nolan made in his version of The Odyssey. On the surface, it looks like a small alteration. Nevertheless, it transforms meaning from the ancient Greek story. That’s how great works of art function. Tiny differences can change everything. (Life is like that too).

To begin, let’s recall our definition of a story as the transformation of the hero’s identity. A story is always about transformation. But that transformation doesn’t just happen out of nowhere. It happens because the hero wants something. Therefore, our first question when exploring the meaning of a story is always, What does the hero want and why do they want it?

When we ask this question of Homer’s Odyssey, we get a clear answer: Odysseus wants to go home. There is not the slightest ambiguity about this. Where things get complex is when we ask the question: why? Why does Odysseus want to go home? The answer to that reveals fundamental truths about who he is as a person.

Odysseus did not want to take part in the Trojan War in the first place, but he did his duty. The war dragged on interminably, and now, ten years later, he finally gets to go home. Consider his state of mind at this prospect. Imagine a time in your life when you really, really wanted to go home. Maybe you’d just done an extra long night shift at work. Maybe you went on a long trip, you were exhausted and you’d just had enough. However badly you felt the desire to go home on that occasion, Odysseus feels it a hundred times more at the start of The Odyssey.

Going-home Reason 1: Odysseus is tired after having fought a ten-year war. He wants to get home and relax back into his normal life.

Over and above his exhaustion, there is a much larger issue at play for Odysseus. There were no mobile phones or wifi connections back in ancient Greece. Odysseus has had no news about Ithaca, but he can guess what happens to an island nation when the king is away for ten years. The audience knows what’s happening because Homer shows us at the beginning of the story. Odysseus is more than smart enough to figure it out for himself.

Going-home Reason 2: Odysseus must know his family and kingdom are in danger. He needs to get back to help them.

Reason 3 is more trivial but still worth mentioning. Travelling in the ancient world sucked. Big time. It was inconvenient, difficult, and, most of all, dangerous. There were no credit cards back then. You couldn’t get an Uber from the airport straight to your hotel and then hit the bar for a martini and soda. Thieves were everywhere, and travellers were prime targets. The story of Odysseus’ travels can be read as an extended metaphor for the real risks that came with travelling in the ancient world.

Going-home Reason 3: even in the best-case scenario, the journey home is going to be difficult and dangerous. Odysseus would want to get it over with.

The next motivation refers again to Odysseus’ personal history. We have already noted that he did not want to go to the Trojan War in the first place. He wanted to stay at home. If every story is a transformation of the hero’s identity, then where we find Odysseus at the start of the story is having endured an identity that he did not choose. He was conscripted to the war against his will. Now he gets to go back to the identity that he always wanted.

Going-home Reason 4: Odysseus gets to return to the identity he truly wants. We might call it his “real identity”.

These first four motivations are tied to Odysseus’ immediate situation and personal history. The next one is more abstract but also key to our discussion because it connects with much deeper themes in ancient Greek society and culture.

Odysseus’ true identity is at home. That might sound like a statement of the obvious, but it is not the case in the modern world. In the modern West, we have a concept of personal identity that is tied to the individual no matter where they are. Most people would say my identity is the same whether I’m in Greece, New Zealand, or the North Pole. It was a different thing for the ancient Greeks. Back then, a person’s identity was tied to their home in ways that we struggle to imagine.

For an ancient Greek, home was the land of you and your ancestors. It was a historical bond that linked to the past and extended to the future. Since Greece was an agrarian society, almost all wealth was tied to the land. Therefore, family inheritance was tied to land. Political identity was tied to land because full participation in the polis was reserved for land owners. It is not an exaggeration to say that a Greek’s entire identity was fixed to “home”. That is why exile was considered a fate worse than death. It destroyed your identity and turned you into a non-person.

When we say that Odysseus wants to return home to get back the identity that he left behind, that is not just a personal preference on his part. It’s not like he is choosing between Ithaca and some other place to live and he decides on the island because he likes the weather there. Ithaca is the land of his ancestors. He must return to ensure that his son can continue the tradition. The identity of his entire family line is at stake.

But it’s even more fundamental than that. There is a divine duty to return home. In the very first story of the book, we see Zeus himself declaring that Odysseus must return home. In every Greek myth, the hero finds themselves either pleasing or displeasing the gods. Odysseus wants the same thing as Zeus. That’s good. His test during the story is to continue to want what is right despite the incredible challenges he faces.

Going-home Reason 5: by choosing to return home, Odysseus is aligning himself with the will of the gods.

To quote the modern meme: that escalated quickly, didn’t it? We went from Odysseus being tired and weary after the war to needing to go home so that the cosmos may be returned to order. That is what we are dealing with when we deal with great works of art. The circumstances of the hero are both personal and universal at the same time. Nevertheless, the way to get to the deeper meanings is still through the simple question, What does the hero want and why?

Now that we have a basic idea of how the core desire of Odysseus relates to larger themes in ancient Greek society and culture, we can start to appreciate how radically Christopher Nolan altered the story. Nolan calls into doubt whether Odysseus really wants to go home. Then, after he reclaims his kingdom at the end, Nolan has him leave Ithaca in search of some kind of redemption over war guilt. By changing Odysseus’ core desire, Nolan changes the meaning of the whole story.

Why Nolan wanted to do that and why he felt the need to use The Odyssey as a vehicle for a different story is a question for another day. What I would like to do for the rest of the post is to contrast the meaning of going-home that we have just outlined in ancient Greek culture against our own time. The reason why Nolan was able to radically change The Odyssey is because we simply don’t share the cultural assumptions of the ancient Greeks and therefore we don’t mind if the going-home theme gets changed. To demonstrate the difference, we may contrast the stories of Homer against those of Shakespeare. Let’s consider a few examples.

Romeo and Juliet cannot consummate their marriage at home because of the longstanding enmity between their families. They decide to elope, but eloping amounts to the rejection of their entire identity. Renaissance Italy was very similar to ancient Greece in that wealth was tied up in land and land was passed down through the family. Home was the location of your family, political, and economic identity. To leave home was the nullification of that identity. Romeo and Juliet are prepared to give up their identity in order to be together.

The exact same dynamic appears in Othello. Desdemona is the most beautiful bachelorette in Venice. She could have her pick of any local man. Who does she choose to marry? A travelling mercenary who is not a citizen. Desdemona marries Othello in secret. Her father finds out and disinherits her. She elopes. Desdemona, Romeo and Juliet choose to leave home in order to consummate their love. This is the opposite of Odysseus, who must return home to reunite with his love.

Next, we have two examples in Shakespeare where the hero is away from home. However, when they get called back, it signals their doom.

Hamlet is enjoying himself at university when he receives news that his father has died. His homecoming should be the beginning of his adult identity as king, but his uncle usurps the crown. Meanwhile, his mother supports the whole thing by marrying his uncle. Penelope holds out for twenty years against the suitors. Gertrude barely lasts a month before remarrying not just any man but her late husband’s murderer. Hamlet’s return home leads him to tragedy.

Marc Antony is away from Rome enjoying the delights of Egypt with Cleopatra. Octavius calls him back to fight in a war. While there, Antony agrees to marry Octavius’ sister for political reasons. Rome wants Antony back, but he’s in love with Cleopatra. He returns to Egypt, a move guaranteed to anger Octavius. With Antony away, Octavius solidifies power and eventually launches war on Egypt. Antony tries to escape his home (Rome), but home comes to get him.

There are numerous other examples we could cite, but the point should be clear. In Shakespeare, home is not an unadulterated good because it places restrictions on the identity that the hero is trying to create. Odysseus wants to return home because his identity is already there. Shakespeare’s heroes want an identity they cannot get at home.

These changes are not arbitrary. They link to deeper themes in broader society. Just as the going-home theme in The Odyssey ties in with the core beliefs of Greek culture, Shakespeare’s leaving-home theme ties in with modern Western culture. Our identity is something we create for ourselves. It is not tied to any place. Wherever we go, our identity goes with us. That is why we think nothing of working, studying, or travelling overseas.

This larger cultural orientation is manifested in real-world practicalities. Our wealth travels with us wherever we go. The US stock market and bond market are both worth significantly more than the combined value of land in that country. Meanwhile, people earn their living through wages that are highly liquid. This kind of wealth can be redeemed anywhere in the world via the international financial system. A modern billionaire can have a doomsday bunker in New Zealand and a beach house in the Bahamas. But are either of them “home”?

These are the bigger issues that are raised when we learn how to interpret the great stories. Interpretation is both methodology and skill. We must learn to ask the right questions. The hermeneutic movement of the 19th century understood that, and that is why so much thought was put into the correct method for interpretation. We have demonstrated just one part of that method above. To understand a story, we must first understand what the hero wants and why. The major reason why Shakespeare is still not understood is because we have not understood what his heroes want. Learning how to do so is just the beginning of the interpretive journey.

Clearly, The Odyssey is also not understood or there would have been a much more interesting discussion about Nolan’s adaptation. Instead, we got the usual “culture war” debate which completely missed the point. The Romantics’ warning from two centuries ago still rings true. If art is not raised to a level that deals with the bigger issues of life, then all we get is endless bickering over trivialities. Meaningful debate over “culture” can only begin with the true skills of interpretation. That is what we will be covering at Think Shakespeare when courses begin on November 2.

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Think Shakespeare will be an ongoing series of courses that teach practical skills in how to interpret the works of The Bard. More details on how the courses will run can be found here. Subscription options can be found here.

Our first course will a ten-week deep-dive into Henry IV Part 1. For the rest of the first year, we will read Henry IV Part 2, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra.