A reflection on almost 400 Odyssey shows across all 50 U.S. States and More
In book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus famously recounts the story of how he came across Polyphemus the cyclops, who trapped the trespassing Odysseus in his cave. The titular hero tells the cyclops that his name is οὔτις, or “Nobody.” When Odysseus stabs Polyphemus in the eye with an olive tree trunk, the other cyclopes hear Polyphemus’ distress and run to help him. Polyphemus proclaims that “οὔτις (Nobody) blinded him,” the cyclopes think Polyphemus is a delusional lunatic, and Odysseus is eventually able to escape the cave and be back on his way.
This isn’t the only time in the poem that Odysseus takes on an alternate identity: He routinely uses other names and backgrounds as he tries to find his way back to the island of Ithaka and reestablish himself as the ruler of his household, a journey that spans twenty years from the time he left to fight the war at Troy to when he becomes the final Greek warrior to make it home.
But of these alternate identities, it’s the Nobody trick that feels the most telling and significant. There’s a piece of being a traveling storyteller (as Odysseus is) that makes you aware of both who you are and who you aren’t, something in you that is devoid of identity, which comes untethered when you are away from home. It’s both a freedom and a burden.
I know this feeling. For over twenty years I’ve traveled the world performing an original 24 song one man folk opera of the Odyssey. And I think I’m the only person since, well, Homer’s time, who can say that.
I’ve played in all 50 US states. I’ve played in Athens and Rome. I’ve played in lecture halls at formal educational institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge, and I’ve played in a muddy field in Jackson, Mississippi. I’ve played for audiences of elite academic specialists and I’ve played for high school freshman English classes. I’ll let you decide which of those is scarier.
In total I’ve played my Odyssey almost 400 times. I’m a guy who goes around telling stories about a guy who goes around telling stories.
In this essay, I’d like to share my journey to create my bardic folk opera and what I’ve learned in sharing my work with audiences around the world.
Like Odysseus’ nostos, it’s been anything but a straight line.
παλίντροπος άρμονίη: “ a harmony of opposites”
I remember staring at those words my senior year of high school in the book “Myth of the State” by Ernst Cassirer, drawn to them, frustrated I couldn’t sound them out, break them down, understand them. They were magical. My life had no antecedent for interest in Ancient Greek and I had no idea why, but the words called to me.
So I chased that feeling and took Ancient Greek my first semester at University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by classes in Classical Mythology and Greek Archaeology my second semester. Quite suddenly (and altogether accidentally) I was a Classics major, a major I previously had no idea existed.
I read Homeric Greek in my fourth semester language class. Like those Greek words my senior year of high school, I vividly remember my initial engagement with the Iliad though I still struggle to describe to my audiences what I felt as this text washed over me and I saw and experienced the poetry for both how it was organized and what it meant.
Sometimes I call it being surrounded by a living breathing organism. Sometimes as being inside the words and feeling a landscape around them. Sometimes as having my head and heart explode at the same time (in a good way I mean…). Sometimes as having my brain rewired.
All these are good approximations of my first encounter with Homer in Greek but maybe the best way to describe what I felt was connection. Connection to humanity. Connection to the tens of thousands of voices that sang these stories as songs three thousand and more years ago before they were texts, voices which left their residue in and around the words that finally got written and passed down for two and half millennia, improbably landing in front of me, a twenty year old undergrad in an upper Midwest public university who took Ancient Greek because of two words he saw in a book in a public high school in west suburban Chicagoland.
It was a connection unfacilitated by intellectual calculation. Academic analysis came later and fleshed out my understanding of perhaps exactly what I was connecting to and how but that initial flash was a pure emotional reaction to a force embedded in the text that was above or below or beside cognition. The text was acting on me and the result was emotional and visceral connection.
For the rest of college, I chased that feeling. I read Homer in translation. I read more Homer in Greek both for class and on my own. I took as many Greek classes as my schedule allowed and loved them all, but none lit me up in quite the same way Homer did. I took the equivalent of two years of Latin in 8 weeks the summer between my sophomore and junior years and survived it (screw you, Wheelock!) but found it didn’t do the same thing for me that Greek did.
More significantly, I took a Comparative Literature class in which we read the Odyssey and a number of what I would learn were called “receptions,” works inspired by or in response to the original, as well as works that shared some of the themes of the epic.
The primary theme we considered in that class was the relationship between home and identity. We read (in translation) the Aeneid and the Argonautica. We read Ulysses the novel by James Joyce and Ulysses the poem by Lord Tenneson. We read Omeros by Derek Walcott. We watched movies about journeys to or the search for home: Planet of the Apes (Spoiler alert: they were home all along!), the Wizard of Oz (Spoiler alert: there’s no place like home!), and Waterworld (Spoiler alert: uh… jetski biker gangs are even worse than Scylla and Charybdis?).
It was, in retrospect, ahead of its time: in the year 2024 there are many classes that engage ancient sources alongside modern receptions, receptions in literature, film, music, and other media, but in 1997 this type of framing and syllabus was rare.
What the class did was open my mind and heart to the idea that epic was a tradition not a fixed artifact. And that tradition is open for all to participate in. The stories of the Odyssey and Iliad originated as ephemeral oral performances and for a very long time there were no definitive versions. The truth of the stories was (and is) the sum of all the performances and in particular how tellings inspire retellings.
And the connection that I felt, the connection in which I wanted to participate, was a connection to this chorus of voices that told and retold this story and the audiences that collaborated on the meanings of the tellings.
So after I graduated college in 1999 with a BA in Classics, I went wading in the wine dark sea of epic tradition and wrote my own original 24 song bardic retelling of the Odyssey. I performed it for the first time in my parents’ living room on March 17, 2002, to a score of family and friends. The journey from performance number one in March of 2002 to performance number 366 (yes, exactly a leap year’s worth of shows) on November 8, 2023, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the 50th and final US state, could fill 24 books and then some with stories and adventures that rival Odysseus’ in nature and variety but one of the questions I’ve been asked after almost every one of those performances is:
Why the Odyssey?
My initial experience with Homer was through the language in the Iliad. But I chose the Odyssey as the source for my first folk opera (and waited until 2018 to create my Iliad song retelling, The Blues of Achilles). Why?
That same shock of human connection I got from feeling the dactylic hexameter of the Iliad wash over me, I got from thinking about the experiences of the characters in the Odyssey. Thinking about what they were going through and why. Thinking about why a culture found these characters and experiences important enough to preserve in songs and then texts that preserved songs.
Did I identify with Telemachus? Sure. In some ways. But even when I was Telemachus’ age, I felt a pull towards Odysseus.
A lot of attention is paid to the word πολύτροπον, that untranslatable epithet that modifies ἄνδρα (“man”) in the first line of the poem. But what struck me as more intriguing than πολύτροπον was the whole third line of the epic:
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω
“He (Odysseus) saw the cities and knew the mind of many men”
From the very beginning, Odysseus is presented as a seeker, a collector of experience. Why? How does he use it and what does he get out of it? Why does he want to hear the Sirens’ song? The tension between his desire for experience and his wish to get home moved me even before I was a traveling bard and got to feel it firsthand as the itinerant bards who told Odysseus’ story surely did as well.
Current cultural norms are not kind to Odysseus. And I should say that any scorn heaped on his behavior and performance as a leader is fair and apt. But I think that the power of the story and its timelessness lie not in the morality of the characters (certain aspects of morality presented in the poem are clearly culturally determined) but in the power of the text’s portrayal of human behavior with respect to identity, which is complicated (or one might say πολύτροπον) for all of us.
I suspect that some of our discomfort with Odysseus is that we understand there is a little bit of him in all of us. Hopefully not the killing or getting people killed but the tension between our stated beliefs and our behaviors, how that resonates or doesn’t resonate with our identities, how we fit or don’t fit into the homes and societies that formed and produced us.
And nothing will make one feel this tension like becoming Nobody out on the wine dark sea.
A final thought:
My odyssey is a story of chasing things that moved me even when I wasn’t sure why. It’s one of reintegrating text into its vestigial form of experience to explore how musical elements impact storytelling. It’s one of trying to create the very feeling of connection that inspired me: connection to my own identity and myriad connections between humans who attend my performances, listen to my songs about Nobody, and take the feelings from these performances forward in their own lives to create more connection.
To participate in this far-reaching chain of human connection, to be even the tiniest part of it, is humbling and beautiful. Becoming Nobody allowed me to become Somebody.
Joe Goodkin is a modern bard who performs original music based on epic poetry and other subjects. He can be seen and heard at http://www.joesodyssey.com http://www.thebluesofachilles.com or http://www.joegoodkin.com and emailed at joegoodkin@gmail.com about bookings or anything else. He has written about his work on SA before.
