My son is taking a class on Mythologies of the Ancient World, which means he's been reading things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and other ancient works (in translation). And since we've been talking about what he's studying in class, that means I've been re-reading them and thinking about them, as well.
In particular, I'm struck by the portrayal of Odysseus in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Most of the other heroes in the Iliad are very mythological people. Achilles is half-god, and Hector is put up against him with divine aid because the gods want Achilles to look good. But Odysseus is very obviously a man, possibly even a real person. He doesn't want to go off to Troy in the first place, and once there he wants to finish the job and go home. He's clever and brave, but he's notoriously devious and lies as easily as breathing.
My personal comparison for Odysseus is Han Solo, in Star Wars. In the original Star Wars, most of the characters are quite fantastic. Luke is a fairy-tale hero, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a mythic space wizard mentor. But Han Solo is a recognizably contemporary working stiff. He's got a beat-up old freighter, he owes money to a loan shark, and he doesn't believe any of that nonsense about a mystical force field which pervades the Galaxy. He grounds the story in reality.
Odysseus has a similar role, at least in the Iliad. The Greek audience for Homer's epic could identify with Odysseus. He does the things most of us would do in that situation — assuming most of us were much more clever, attractive, strong, brave, and silver-tongued than most of us really are. He grounds the story in reality.
Which makes it kind of ironic that Odysseus is the one who winds up going on a fantastic sea voyage in the western Mediterranean in the course of his journey home. The most grounded character in the Trojan war winds up having the wildest adventures.
Ironic, that is, if you think of the Odyssey as a myth, bubbling up by some cthonic process out of the collective Greek unconscious. But if you consider the Odyssey as a work of fiction by an author, it's inevitable. Who else should be thrown into the middle of weirdness, with one-eyed giants, cannibals, wind gods, lusty nymphs, sorceresses, lotus-eaters, and sea monsters? A more mythic character like Achilles would be part of that weird world — he's probably related to Circe or Calypso.
No, it's a better story to put the skeptical realist Odysseus in the realm of monsters and fantastic islands. Three thousand years later, Jonathan Swift wrote a tale of a voyage to bizarre islands in a distant sea. And what manner of man did he send on that voyage? Lemuel Gulliver! A . . . recognizably Queen Anne era working stiff. And three centuries after that when I wrote about weird creatures at the bottom of a dark ocean on another planet, who was my viewpoint character? Rob Freeman, a recognizably near-future working stiff.
The whole point of showing fantastic things is to show how an ordinary person reacts to them. Fantastic people experiencing fantastic events makes one fantastic too many. The author of the Odyssey understood that, and so chose the hero Odysseus over all the other homeward-bound Greek heroes of the Trojan War as the viewpoint character. It could have been called the Menelaiad, but it wasn't. That was an artistic choice by a creator of literature.
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