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Alex Lo

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has hit theatres across North America. Suddenly, everyone has Homer on their mind.
If China has Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, the West has The Iliad and The Odyssey. These are civilisation-defining monuments, about which children know the stories and scholars spend a lifetime probing every detail.
The identity of Homer has always intrigued scholars over the ages. Samuel Butler, who translated both The Iliad and The Odyssey, was convinced a woman wrote the latter.
T.E. Shaw, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, thought The Odyssey was a modern potboiler unworthy of the heroic epic of The Iliad. He said he spent four years working on his translation. You would assume it was a labour of love, but he seems to have more contempt than respect for this Homer, whom he rejected as the same author of The Iliad.
“Crafty, exquisite, homogeneous – whatever great art may be, these are not its attributes,” he wrote in a note to his translation. “In this tale every big situation is burked and the writing is soft … Epic belongs to early man, and this Homer lived too long after the heroic age to feel assured and large … It is sorrowful to believe that [Nausicaa, Eumaeus, Odysseus, Menelaus, etc] were really Homer’s heroes and exemplars.”

Emily Wilson, whose recent translation is the version Nolan uses for his movie, agrees Odysseus is a different kind of Homeric hero, almost a modern anti-hero. Why? Because he lies, tricks, deceives and tells tall tales.
In a Financial Times interview, she said the way “he is constantly reinventing himself” helps explain why Odysseus is a character for our times. “There are so many stories about cons, deception, manipulation and persuasion on TV right now,” she said. “The Odyssey jives with those somehow. He’s a different kind of con man.”
What these translators – and many others – share is an intuition that Homer was not a single person, however much they may disagree over who the author actually was. The heroes in The Iliad had a completely different archaic mentality from Odysseus. To some, this offers clues to the age-old question of Homer’s identity or identities.
The psychologist Julian Jaynes made this startling claim in his cult classic, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. “Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips?” he asked.
In describing the gods as “what we now call hallucinations”, Jaynes wrote that, “They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.”
We could not invent “mind-spaces” behind the “fierce eyes” of Homeric heroes, as we do for each other. “Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as do we,” Jaynes observed. “He had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon. In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Mycenaeans a bicameral mind.”

“Volition, planning, initiative” are not acts of self-consciousness but commands or instructions “‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ‘god’, or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual,” according to Jaynes, “obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself.”
Odysseus is an entirely different creature altogether. Deceiving and making up stories – his specialities – require a self-awareness of the truth to misdirect and fool others. Jaynes called The Odyssey “a journey of deviousness”. “It is the very discovery of guile, its invention and celebration.”
Where once it described external events objectively, Jaynes wrote, poetry became “subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.”
“There are no secrets in The Iliad. But The Odyssey has many of them …,” he continued. “The whole long song is an odyssey towards subjective identity and its triumphant acknowledgement out of the hallucinatory enslavement of the past.”
Homer was not a single person. Rather, he was a stand-in for a long oral tradition that bifurcated from the bicameral to the modern mind.
“[T]here were many intermediaries who verbally transmitted whatever happened in the 13th century to succeeding ages,” Jaynes argued. “It is thus more plausible to think of the creation of the poem as part of this verbal transmission than as the work of a single man named Homer in the ninth century BC.”


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Scheming Odysseus may have been the first modern man with a self-directing mental life while other archaic heroes blindly obeyed the gods


Scheming Odysseus may have been the first modern man with a self-directing mental life while other archaic heroes blindly obeyed the gods.


Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


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As I see it

How an obscure psychologist reshaped the Homeric hero

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Scheming Odysseus may have been the first modern man with a self-directing mental life while other archaic heroes blindly obeyed the gods

Scheming Odysseus may have been the first modern man with a self-directing mental life while other archaic heroes blindly obeyed the gods