The Man, The Myth, The Trickster

 The regular readers of my blog entries (both of you) will not be surprised that my wife and I went to see Christopher Nolan's new film The Odyssey the first day it was available. We are achraeology and mythology buffs.

Short review: Not a masterpiece but not an embarrassment. To paraphrase Lincoln's book review, people who enjoy this type of film will definitely enjoy this one.

But what I want to discuss here is how, inevitably, Nolan had to make this 3,000-year-old character more palatable for a modern audience. Because Homer's Odysseus is a long way from what we would call a hero.

The very first sentence of the poem describes him with a word translators have been struggling with ever since. "A man of twists and turns." "A man skilled in all ways of contending." "That ingenious hero." "The crafty man." "The Shifty."

Emily Wilson translates it as "a complicated man," and she is worth noting because her 2012 version is the most popular these days (Nolan mentioned it in interviews) and has sold more than a walloping million copies this year alone.  I imagine Christopher Nolan is on her Christmas (or Saturnalia) card list.

So Odysseus is not just smart but tricky.  He lies, he cons, he gloats about it, and Homer expects us to admire him for it. This doesn't fit our idea of a hero these  days, so Nolan burdened the big O. with a guilty, post-traumatic conscience.  Sure, the guy dreamed up ther Trojan horse, leading to the destruction of the city and the slaughter of men, women, and children, but doggone, he feels awful about it.  In fact, you could argue that except for the phony horsey his wife Penelope does more tricking in the movie than her husband.

But tricksters were held in high regard in those cultures. I think one of the more interesting examples is Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish general during the Jewish War against the Romans.  He was part of a group of seventy soldiers who, trapped by the enemy, decided to commit mass suicide, killing each other,  rather than surrender.  When only two were left Josephus and the other survivor promptly surrendered.  

How do we know about this dastardly deed?  Because he bragged about it in his book The Jewish War, written while he was a guest of Vespasian who he had correctly predicted would become emperor.  He knew his Roman readers would appreciate his cleverness, rather condemn his treachery.

Folk tales are full of tricksters, especially admiring those who outsmart stronger enemies: Aesops's fox, Anansi, Brer Rabbit, Loki, Puss and Boots, Jacob.

Actual armor from Odysseus's age

I've been trying to think of good examples from mystery fiction.  Sherlock Holmes, multiple disguises and all, seems too straight-forward to qualify.  Nero Wolfe? Perry Mason?  Possibly.  

Jackson Lamb?  Absotively.

I want to leave you with one anecdote from the Odyssey which didn't make it into the movie, not quite having that heroic vibe.

In Book Nine (where Wilson has Homer describing our guy as "the lord of liars") he talks about his ships arriving in the land of a people called the Cicones. Odysseus and his men sack the city, killing most of the men and taking the women as slaves.

But then, wouldn't you know it? The Cicones called on their allies and attack, killing many of Odysseus's men.  "Poor us!" Wilson's O. laments.

Imagine the unfairness of it.  You declare an enemy's ability to conduct war has been obliterated and they keep fighting back.

Thank the gods that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.

"Crossing Genres: The Literary Mystery"

By Art Taylor

As you might be able to tell from this post and my previous ones here, my teaching at George Mason University is dominating my mind these days—and lately it's not only the semester I'm enmeshed in but next semester as well that's occupying a lot of my mental energy.

In the spring 2016 semester, I'll be teaching a graduate-level course for the first time: "Crossing Genres: The Literary Mystery." That's not my title, I should stress, and I have some issues with the idea of what's meant by the "the literary mystery"—a phrase that could go in a number of directions: mysteries that have books or bookish folks at the core of them maybe? But as intended primarily for aspiring writers in the MFA program here at Mason, I think the goals of the course are potentially a good one: an exploration of genre fiction, a look at the places where these persistent classifications of genre fiction and literary fiction blur, and a study of what so-called "literary writers" can learn from genre writers. To put all this in context, back when I was in the MFA program at Mason myself, I had a fellow writer tell me he'd finally read a Stephen King book and was surprised that it was actually good!

Stephen King

More context: I remember at panel on genre fiction at an AWP conference several years ago, where a writer/professor in another MFA program talked about the difference between his students interested in writing genre fiction and his students interested in writing literary fiction: If a he told students writing fantasy that they might want to read Gilgamesh or The Aeneid or any of a number of "high literary" works, they'd have it read by the next week, whereas if he suggested to literary-minded students that they should read a thriller or a sci-fi novel, they'd drag their heels.

There's lots of room to learn, clearly, from lots of different writers and lots of different kinds of writing—and I've often been fascinated, often written myself about, these delineations between kinds of books, the prejudices and biases at the core of such attitudes, and the continuing evolution of writers attitudes toward genre, how those writers might be informed by formal traditions on the one hand and how they might challenge them on another.

Much more to say on all this, but I mostly wanted to share some of the books I'm considering teaching—and invite others to chime in with books I might add to the reading list, whether one for the syllabus itself or a supplemental list for students to explore on their own.

The course will start out with a selection of short stories surveying both the foundational history of the genre (Poe and Conan Doyle there, among others) and also various subgenres within the larger world of crime fiction: the traditional mystery, the hard-boiled tale, the noir story, domestic suspense, the police procedural, true crime writing, etc. etc. But once that foundation is laid in the first few weeks, here's the list of full novels—and one feature film!—that have risen to the top so far (in no particular order yet but all, purposefully, pointedly, from 2000 onward):

• A Rule Against Murder, Louise Penny
• Little Scarlet, Walter Mosley
• In the Woods, Tana French
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
• The End of Everything, Megan Abbott
• Country Hardball, Steve Weddle
• Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan 
• The City & the City, China Miéville
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

Thoughts? Additions?

I have a second list of strong contenders too that will be on a growing supplemental list, so.... Thanks in advance for suggestions and additions!