FROM ‘Odysseus, Trauma and Identity in Homer and Pasolini’s The Return’ by Jan Parker
2nd most read article of 2025
FULL TEXT: https://antigonejournal.com/2025/05/odysseus-trauma-identity-pasolini-return/
The return of the hero from an identity-defining and potentially identity-denuding great war is a timeless literary topic: there was a lost poem in the Trojan War epic cycle called ‘the Returns’ of the Heroes (Nostoi); Pat Barker’s The Voyage Home has been shortlisted for the 2025 Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award. Uberto Pasolini’s film, a version of Homer’s Odyssey books 13-24, is ‘the story of the mythical Greek hero, Odysseus (Fiennes) who, after 20 years away, washes up on the shores of Ithaca, haggard and unrecognisable’.
The film uses many of the dramatic scenes of Odyssey books 13-24, smoothing them into a developing narrative of a withdrawn veteran who has seen too much blood. But in so doing, it is difficult not to think that it evades or glides beautifully past the very problematics of ‘The Return’ – of the hero – that make the Odyssey both psychologically realistic and profoundly thought-provoking.
Fiennes/Odysseus as ‘unrecognizable’: the second half of the Odyssey is centrally concerned with recognition: what of the Odysseus who went away is recognizable to those he left behind? And for what, as what, can he be recognized? A question for all in – and indeed outside – the story: a problem for soldiers and soldiers’ families though the ages faced with the returning veteran. Indeed, the psychiatrist first diagnosing PTSD in returning Vietnam veterans, Professor Jonathan Shay, in his Odysseus in America:[] The Trials of Homecoming drew on Homer’s account to compare the experiences of veterans and their families.