Daniel Larson:
Hello and welcome to today's Virtual Faculty in the Field with Professor Joel Christensen, Brandeis Class of 2001 and Master of Arts Class of 2001 as well. Thank you for joining us all.
Daniel Larson:
If you have any questions for Joel and we hope you will, please enter them in the Zoom Q&A box and we'll try to answer as many as we can after the presentation. And now, let's pass it off to Barbara Sherman, Brandeis Class of 1954, co-chair of the Boston Alumni Club's Downtown Lunch Series to introduce Professor Christensen. Barbara?
Barbara Sherman:
Thank you. Welcome to all of you. And I understand that we have many people from all over the country, or the world really. So, I am going to say good morning, good afternoon, or good evening and take your pick. Look out the window and see what the sun is doing.
Barbara Sherman:
My name is Barbara Cantor Sherman, and I was a member of the Brandeis Class of 1954. Now, fortunately, I had my 65th reunion in reality last year and it was really very nice. And if any of you are having reunions this year, I'm sorry, you're going to miss them in reality and have to do them virtually. My daughter was also an alum at Brandeis in the Class of '83.
Barbara Sherman:
I'm co-chair as we just heard of the Alumni Club of Greater Boston's Lunch Series and Professor Christensen was originally going to give this talk to our group at an event in March, a real live event. But while we're not able to do this, we are able to hold this event and we are thrilled that he has agreed to lead this virtual event and to share it with the alumni, parents, friends, national committee members, and friends literally from all around the world.
Barbara Sherman:
And now to introduce our speaker, Joel is an associate professor and chair in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis. He's also a Brandeis alum and received both his BA and MA from the university in 2001. He is chair of the Brandeis Faculty Senate and serves as the faculty representative, the Alumni Association Board of Directors.
Barbara Sherman:
Professor Christensen has been a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies and has received the Society for Classical Studies Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Collegiate Level. Later this year, his new book, The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic have published by Cornell University Press.
Barbara Sherman:
We're fortunate to get him to give us a preview today with his talk. Welcome, Joel, Professor Christensen.
Joel Christensen:
Thank you. Thank you, Barbara. Thank you, Sharon, James and Dan for making this possible. And thanks to all the alumni who are carving time out of their day to talk about Homer and to think about how the Odyssey is still important to our lives today.
Joel Christensen:
Just as a warning, if suddenly there's a burst of noise and children come into the room, it's because I'm at home with my kids. And they are now sort of self-controlling. So, we'll see if that works out.
Joel Christensen:
And if you have any questions that come up that don't get answered during the talk, feel free at any time to email me. My email is pretty easy. It's on one of the slides, It's joel@brandeis.edu. I'm going to switch to a slideshow presentation now so you can follow along with some of the Greek and see some of the texts that I'll be talking about. So, here we go. And I will make this live.
Joel Christensen:
So, I apologize the reduplication of a picture of me. My wife walked in this morning and saw this picture and said, "You look so young in it." And I said, "Well, that was just last year." So, we'll move that as soon as we can.
Joel Christensen:
I really am excited to talk about this work because it's important to me, but I'm also a little sad to talk about it because the past year has shown in many ways how much the work I'm about to talk about resonates and how many of the lessons the ancient world still have for us. And it's not always a positive lesson and it doesn't always encourage us.
Joel Christensen:
But what I hope to show you today is one important thing. And that's that ancient people and ancient audiences of Homer had a sophisticated idea of the way the human mind works and the way that human emotions can affect the way we act and live in the world.
Joel Christensen:
As Barbara said in her very kind introduction, this work does in fact come from a book that I have coming out in December from Cornell. I'm plugging the book again not for sheer megalomania. But because this book is actually fairly reasonably priced, and I won't get a penny from it. It goes to support open access publishing. So, the deal I made for this book is one that I think is really important for scholars to think about and that's that I am foregoing any type of loyalty, so that the book can go free online in one year. And any proceeds in the year in which it is for sale will go to support the work of the press and other scholars who are working towards publication on their own.
Joel Christensen:
So, I want to tell a little bit of the story about where this book came from. And the first thing I'd like to ask you is how many of you have read the Odyssey? So, there'll be a quiz on. There's a bit of an interactive portion to this and I'll let you know the results in a little bit.
Joel Christensen:
So, the Iliad and the Odyssey are two epics that I've lived with for many years. When I was an undergraduate at Brandeis, I started working on Homer with my Greek teacher at the time, Lenny Muellner. And what I really got interested in then was the Iliad. And the Iliad is a home that's very complicated. It's about war. It's about death. It's about how to live in war, what's worth fighting for, and it's really also about immortal fame and politics. So, about 74% of you have read the Odyssey and that allowed me, I think, to summarize some things quickly.
Joel Christensen:
But I spent about a decade or more of my life working on the Iliad, almost exclusively. And I think one of the reasons I really worked on it is that it responded to me at the time. When I graduated from Brandeis, it was 2001, I moved to New York City, and in my third week of graduate school, it was 9/11. I almost left graduate school at the time because it didn't make much sense to me to be studying something very esoteric, like Ancient Greek literature at a time when the world was rapidly changing around me.
Joel Christensen:
And so, I did something that I tell my students not to do. And I stopped working on my classwork. And I started just reading poem. I read the Iliad in Greek straight through and it really started to respond. So, I really started to respond again to its reflections on politics, war, human condition, and especially as we move from a state of being attacked to one into engaging in what is now a 20-year war, the Iliad really made sense to me.
Joel Christensen:
So, I went on sort of a journey there. I wrote my dissertation on the Iliad, many articles on the language in the Iliad and about the politics that's being represented. And I was already convinced that the Homeric epics are really sophisticated view of the world and reflected their audience's interests.
Joel Christensen:
But what happened during the same time is that I found that students didn't respond to the Iliad. It was, let's say, maybe too much about war. There are too many different characters in it. It can be really overwhelming. But in my classes, they did respond to the Odyssey.
Joel Christensen:
Now, in Homeric studies, you're either an Iliad person or an Odyssey person. There are very few people who go both ways. It's not exactly taboo, but not everybody does it. But what happened for me is that I ended up teaching the Odyssey at the same time that I was going through significant life experiences myself. In 2010, I had a daughter. Her name is Aalia. She's now almost 10 years old. And the following year, we had a son, Iskander.
Joel Christensen:
But in between those two births, my father died. Now, my father was a complicated man himself and he died suddenly. And some of the reasons that his death was so sudden were self-inflicted. Drugs were involved, long term types of physical abuse to himself. And when I looked back to the Odyssey at that time when I was reading it, what I saw more and more was a complex reflection on who the people in your life are, who confirm who you are.
Joel Christensen:
The Odyssey is intimately engaged with questions of what it means to be a person and where you get your identity from. And I really think there's a way in which you need to be slightly older to love the Odyssey or understand it fully, because it's about a man or a person separated from the people who make his life worth living. And I think becoming a father and losing one made me see the Odyssey in a way that I hadn't before.
Joel Christensen:
So, around the same time, I was engaged in the way that I always have been with reading rather widely and thinking about things like psychology and cognitive science. And so, I just serendipitously happened to start reading books about the way the human mind functions and where consciousness comes from at a time when I was watching my children develop consciousness. And it made me realize that there was something going on in Homer that I thought people hadn't seen and that had to do with the Homeric idea of the way that the minds work.
Joel Christensen:
So, before we get to that topic, I just want to make it clear that part of what I want to accomplish in talking about this topic and in writing this book was to address some big questions that sometimes we discourage from addressing and one is the simple question, why does Homer matter. What does epic tell us about being human? And what does storytelling do for us?
Joel Christensen:
So, this investigation is not just about Homer. This is about the value of literature. It's about the value of humanities to help heal us, to help teach us about what it means to be human. And I hope to convince you that reading literature can help you recover part of who you are.
Joel Christensen:
So, some big topics that I talked about in the book, and that I'll cover in some today are on this slide I've given you. I know it's a little overwhelming, but I just want to give you a preview of some of the things that I'll mention. So, one argument that I have is that the Odyssey projects an assumed theory of mind, what I'll also call folk psychology, and this is the idea that the epic reflects a basic understanding of the way the human mind works and doesn't work in the world.
Joel Christensen:
Part of this has to do with sort of classic concerns about determinism and free will. And then from these, we can move to some more modern concepts. So, I want to talk a little bit about the psychological concept of learned helplessness. And it's important in the structure and thematics of the Odyssey as well as issues of marginalization and isolation, how you can treat these things with something called narrative therapy. And if there's time, maybe in the questions, we can talk about the Odyssey's reflection on the interdependence of memory and trauma and the importance of the communalization of loss.
Joel Christensen:
Now, before we get there, and I'll really try not to spend too much time on this, but I do kind of geek out on this kind of thing. I want to talk a little bit about what Homer is and what the Odyssey is. Now, since 74% of you have read the Odyssey and the rest of you are here, you probably think you have an idea of what Homer is, and you're probably uncomfortable with the fact that I'm saying what is Homer instead of who is Homer?
Joel Christensen:
But the important thing to understand is that Homer is an idea. Homer is a metaphor for a poetic tradition and not actually an author in the modern sense. And the reason that this is an important thing to emphasize is that ancient epic arose out of an oral poetic performance context. And this means that the poems were performed and reperformed, and they have a language of the type that they can actually be composed in performance.
Joel Christensen:
So, when we talk about Homer, we're talking about a particular type of ancient poetic performance from a particular perspective. And that perspective is one that's centralized in Greece and probably comes before the 6th century BCE, but it goes much later in both directions.
Joel Christensen:
So, what I really want to emphasize about this is that the Homeric epics developed out of a context where audience, performer and composer were all wrapped up in a cyclical cycle of reflection. And so, the Homeric epics are almost like a language themselves. They develop among and through many different participants. And this helps to sort of supercharge the power of the epics to reflect cultural values but also enforced them. For those of you who are a little more interested in, say, sociology or psychology, Homeric epics have the cultural force of discourse or ideology. They are both products and producers of the cultures that they are embedded in.
Joel Christensen:
So, Homeric epics can be seen as educational, but they're much more pervasive than that. The Roman rhetorician quintillion had a nice little saying about Homer. He said that Homer is like his own conception of the ocean. All rivers issue into it and back from it again. So, this whole notion that Homer is constantly not just recycling, but creating culture around it.
Joel Christensen:
And that might be hard to wrap your head around, but something to really think about from oral poetic theory is this, from the level of the word all the way up to major structures, there's an organic relationship in the Homeric language between words, formulas, themes and larger structures. So, think of this language the way you would a massive tree. If you cut it in the middle and you look at the center, you can see the rings and structure that made it happen. And there's a sort of symbiotic relationship between the parts.
Joel Christensen:
Now, I understand that this description was probably pretty abstract and I went through it quickly. I could do the annoying sort of advertisement thing and say check the book for it. But there's a lot online about Homeric poetry and to be honest, there are some pretty broadly, divergent opinions about them. So, you read some books about Homer saying there was a dude named Homer in the 8th century. And then you read some things like, I would like to be, saying that there was no Homer and we're just talking about a cultural product.
Joel Christensen:
Either way, I think that we can get some of the same values and outcomes from reading the poems. And that's when we try to when we realized that most creative arts are responding to their time, to their people, who are expected to read them and to the art that came before anticipating art that came after as well. So, you can take a more broad sort of reader response approach to the poetry regardless of what we think about the origin of the poems.
Joel Christensen:
Now, one insignificant question, I think, that people often ask is, why do we have just the Iliad and the Odyssey? To let you know, there were many other poems in the ancient world, that we have records of only fragments of them. I think part of the reason this is, is that the epics are complementary. They work together. And what they really do I think as a whole is they help us to understand the totality of human life. Now, when I say they're complementary, it doesn't mean that they repeat each other or that they even agree in everything. But they are like hand in glove, yin and yang, so working together to help us reflect on the major issues of human life.
Joel Christensen:
And they do represent sort of the major, two major arcs in sort of narrative tradition. The Iliad is in a way a tragedy because it ends with a funeral and people start in a pretty bad position, but end up in an even worse one. The Odyssey adheres to the basic traditional plot of a comedy. Things start out pretty badly, but it ends with a kind of wedding and at least for Odysseus, things are better at the end. The Odyssey teaches us about what is worth dying for and the Odyssey when it works well, I think teaches us how to live and what it means to be a person.
Joel Christensen:
Now, you can really see some of what's important from the Odyssey from its proem. The proem is a fancy Greek word for prooimion for the pre part of the song or the intro to the song. Now, epic poetry always has the sort of advertise what will be in it. And to read to you from Stanley Lombardo's translation, the Odyssey in Greek starts, andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polutropon, hos mala polla.
Joel Christensen:
In English, so speak, memory of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered Troy's sacred heights. Speak Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped, the suffering deep in his heart at sea as he struggled to survive and bring his men home but could not save them, hard as he tried, the fools, destroyed by their own recklessness when they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun, and that god snuffed out their day of return. Of these things, speak, immortal one, and tell the tale once more in our time.
Joel Christensen:
Now, when I teach this, I like to play a Socratic grant game where I ask people what the Odyssey could be about based on the beginning. And I try to get them to think about what's not in the program. And what's not in the program is anything about Odysseus's son, his father, his wife, or really, most of the events that occupy the epic. We do get signals that he is intelligent, cunning hero, the Greek is polytropos and Emily Wilson's recent translation, she uses the word "complicated" for it. He's a wanderer who suffers and who failed.
Joel Christensen:
So, one of the really powerful things about the beginning of the Odyssey is that it focuses on his failure. And that's one thing I want you to try to keep in your mind. Another thing that's important and the reason I said that whole first line in Greek is the Odyssey starts with the word andra. This is a Greek word for man. That means human being, but it also means a gendered human being. And it's distinct because it's saying that this epic is not about a demigod like Achilles. This epic is not about a divinity, like Hercules. This epic is about a person. And I think that that's one of the keys to sort of thinking about the whole thing.
Joel Christensen:
Now, one of the reasons that I started to talk about the nature of epic as a production or collaborative production between audience and composer over time is that this endows it with many different social functions. I often teach Homer in myth courses. And when I teach myth I focus on myth as a type of cultural discourse. Myth tells us what's possible out of the world and it shapes our expectations.
Joel Christensen:
And one of the things that I've really learned from thinking about cognitive science and modern studies in narrative is that the stories we hear, the stories we tell constrain the way we interpret reality. And I'll talk about this more. But the basic fact of myth making and myth telling is that it shapes what we expect from the world and how we think we can behave in it. So, it functions to establish and explore what I call metaphysical and ethical boundaries of behavior, tells us what's physically possible in the world and then how we should act in it through complicated series of stories.
Joel Christensen:
And myth is different than pure education. Because it's dialogic. It doesn't give you a simple do this, don't do that. Instead, it gives us some of what you might think of as series of problems sets of what happened in different situations. There's a great description of narrative that I'm for forgetting who said it right now who says that storytelling is the flight simulator of the soul.
Joel Christensen:
So, much of this comes from reading in a broader set of categories than classics and Homer alone. And I've given you some examples here about how cognitive scientists, cognitive psychologists, literary theorists and computer programmers, that's in the last category there, Clark and Chalmers, talk about how important storytelling is to the brain.
Joel Christensen:
So, Mark Turner, in his Literary Mind, basically expresses the idea that storytelling is at the foundation of human consciousness and the way we interpret the world. And what I would like to do is to take this from a single level of an individual person and move this aggregated to entire communities.
Joel Christensen:
So, in recent years, people have talked about things like intersubjectivity and distributed cognition to talk about the ways in which human minds function collectively, the way we depend on the other human minds, the way we learn from them. An easy analog for this is to think about the way that language exists in all of us together aggregate, but no one of us at any singular place. And I think the collective storytelling traditions we have and the narratives we have do a similar thing.
Joel Christensen:
So, my basic assumption and argument when talking about what I call folk psychology is that ancient narrative and myth functions as a collective representation of the way that you think the world works. And within this is a basic idea about a theory of mind.
Joel Christensen:
And so, you can get other perspectives on this besides just literary theoretical and three that I've also read up on a lot come from neurobiology, cognitive science and psychology, which really emphasize the way that storytelling shapes consciousness and shapes the way we engage in the world.
Joel Christensen:
So, our brains are basically constantly telling stories to themselves. And story and ideas of causality may actually be prior to language comprehension and sort of early childhood. So, I'll leave some of these names for you to think about later and I can follow up on this. But these are some of the frameworks that I brought to the Odyssey to really think about how in collective, we can represent the function of a single human mind.
Joel Christensen:
Now, the big questions that I brought to the Odyssey with these frameworks in mind was how the Odyssey represents the way brains and minds function in the world. How does it represent metaphysical assumptions, what we think is real in the world, and assumptions about what we can know and how we know things in the world.
Joel Christensen:
And so, one of the things that's really interesting if we go back to the problem of the Odyssey is this basic assertion that the fools or Odysseus' men were destroyed by their own recklessness. Now, one of the things I mentioned earlier was how early epic poetry functions in a deep relationship between language, formula, theme and structure. And that line destroyed by their own recklessness is repeated only 30 lines later in the Odyssey.
Joel Christensen:
When this happens, when there's formulaic repetition like this, in early Greek poetry, we have to remember that all of this was sung. So, if you're listening to a complicated piece of music and there's a melody that repeats, it makes you recall the last one. And when this happens again and again in epic poetry, it connects things together. It invites the audience to wonder what's going on.
Joel Christensen:
Now, soon after the program, we don't get to see Odysseus at all. We see Zeus looking at some other story complaining about human beings. He says, "Mortals! They're always blaming the gods and saying that evils come from us when they have pain beyond their lot thanks to their own recklessness." Now, this obviously recapitulates what just happened in the proem.
Joel Christensen:
But for ancient audiences, this also challenges some of the basic assumptions of Greek epic. And we know this if you read the Iliad. In the Iliad, we get this long ... We get the proem as well and the end of the proem talking about Achilles rage sending myriad of Achaeans to their dooms, the narrator says, "Dios d'eteleieto boule," which means the will or plan of Zeus was being completed.
Joel Christensen:
So, in the framework of the Iliad, everything that's happened is according to divine will and plan. But at the beginning of the Odyssey, the story about a human being, Odysseus, we get a very different message and the message is short. There's fate. But human beings make their own fate worse. Right now, I think we can all say we can look around to current events and see that this is the case or even our own lives and see where we've done this.
Joel Christensen:
But this message functions programmatically in the epic. It invites us to judge everything that happens in the epic from the perspective of figuring out how its characters engage with the world, whether or not there's fatalism, what agency they have, and how causality works. These are essentially metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological questions about how we engage in work in the world. And it's important because this process of asking the audience to think about how Odysseus caused his own fate to be worse, encourages them to apply the same concept to themselves. And this to me is sort of the basic function, the first therapeutic function of epic.
Joel Christensen:
Now, but the Odyssey concedes that human beings actually do have some agency and points to those in action. It's interesting that many of its main characters actually have no agency at all. When we first find Penelope, Odysseus and Telemachus, they're incapable of acting. And so, there should be a question and that's why. So, there's an organic relationship between words, formulas, poet, poetic themes and larger structures. We get these cells with repeating actions. And there is a relationship between those first lines and what's not happening with these other characters.
Joel Christensen:
So, that we also have a repeated pattern of identity formation in the plot and people who are trapped in destructive cycles of non-action or loss of agency. So, when I looked at the Odyssey, one of the first things I saw was that we have this triple action going on, figures who don't make their own fate worse or better at all, who just sit there doing nothing.
Joel Christensen:
And this is what we see when we first see Telemachus. Athena comes in in disguise. And we see Telemachus from her perspective. And he's having a daydream. He's grown up with his mom and all these suitors are there. He's 20 years old and he's done nothing to change the situation. And he's just dreaming that maybe his dad will return and scatter the suitors from his home, and then maybe things will be all right.
Joel Christensen:
One of the things that I started thinking about serendipitously with the Odyssey is what's called learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a pretty old concept in psychology that's been shown in animals and humans to do a bunch of things. But it's basically a term used to characterize what you could call a steady decrease in performance when people are exposed to uncontrollable outcomes. The simple definition of this is that if we fail repeatedly, not only do we stop trying, but we're also less successful when we do try. We can be conditioned to not try to change our outcomes in life at all.
Joel Christensen:
Now, this basic concept has been applied to many different social phenomenon. It's part depression, anxiety, loneliness. It's hard to tell where it's causal. But what's important is that it's cyclical, and you get caught in it, and it's very difficult to get away from it.
Joel Christensen:
So, when I bring the idea of learned helplessness, to the Odyssey, part of what I see is a pattern of facing up to it. I think learned helplessness is connected to the Odyssey's focus on agency. And there's a basic pattern that you find in the first book of the Odyssey if you read it, which is repeated throughout the epic and that's that a character in this case, Telemachus, disavows agency. He says, "The gods are in control. I can't do anything about it." And this, of course, vitiates the first comment of the Odyssey by the god, Zeus, which is that the gods aren't completely in control of everything.
Joel Christensen:
Then what happens is we get an experienced figure correctively saying, "You know what, it's not all about the gods. Humans have some control." And then you get a process of negotiation as the characters try to figure out what's controllable and uncontrollable, and you reach eventually this ideal cooperative aesthetic between man and god that shows that there are some events that are unclear, some things you can't control, some causes you can't trace. But there is a hope that there's divine justice somewhere and that human beings can affect their fate.
Joel Christensen:
So, all of this goes back to this comment from Zeus, I think. And that's that there has to be a positive corollary to the fact that human beings suffer beyond their pain because of their own recklessness. If you're not reckless, if you're careful, does that mean that you could suffer a fate better than the one that was given to you. So, there are two sides of the same coin most of the time when we're talking about epic poetry.
Joel Christensen:
Now, all of this is engineered into the structure of the Odyssey. The structure of the Odyssey is I really think like a tree with many rings in it, moving out from the small stage of the Ithaca, back to the broader one of Odysseus until we get to the slaughter at the end. And what happens in this type of structure is that it repeats certain elements as Odysseus tries to achieve his homecoming.
Joel Christensen:
So, when we meet Odysseus in book 5, he is in a position very similar to Telemachus. He has been on the island of Ogygia for seven years. Hermes finds him sitting on the shore crying every day. At night, of course, he goes and have sex with the goddess, Calypso, but every day he cries and he does nothing to change his reality. Now, this may seem like an overstatement based on the plot of the Odyssey, but Odysseus sits there and cries every day for seven years.
Joel Christensen:
Now, in addition, what I think is going on is something to do with isolation. All right. So, the epic is showing a character who has been reduced by his lack of connection to other people. So, I think we can start with another quiz right now. I have a quiz on how this isolation has made all of you feel. I think James can help you with that one.
Joel Christensen:
So, some studies have been done, mainly studies of prisoners about what happens when people are isolated for too long. And there are some interesting things that are pretty sad. I mean, there's self-mutilation. There's decreased socialization. There's suicide and suicidal ideation. What cognitive scientists have just started to show is that being separated from other people, not engaging in communion in conversation actively over time alters neural pathways. People who are isolated for too long show a decrease in memory, a distorted perception of reality, and in fact, diminished language function.
Joel Christensen:
Now, if you lose all of these things, you lose your capacity to tell your story, to hear stories, and in a way, you lose your full capacity to engage in what it means to be human. So, for me, at the beginning of the Odyssey, we find Odysseus has been isolated and he's helpless. He doesn't act at all. And he's actually showing diminished cognitive abilities because of his suffering and his isolation.
Joel Christensen:
And so, the question is, what happens next? How do things change? And so, this is where I think we go from talking to, if I'm talking about mere observation of psychopathology to the epic actually thinking about how you treat a human brain that's been harmed by the vicissitudes of life. And as not too surprising many of you have answered that you have been anxious because of our isolation, lethargic, which makes sense. Because what can we do? One of the things going on now that I think really makes this work sort of pop for me is how we all have a decreased sense of agency and how it exhibits differently for different people.
Joel Christensen:
Now, the epic gives us various ways for dealing with that. And it gives us two basic models. One is that in order to act in the world, sorry, to feel agency in the world, you need to have the capacity to act in the world. And so, one way that sort of reflects modern CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy or occupational practice, is actually going out and doing things. And a second thing that it does is emphasize on the telling of stories.
Joel Christensen:
So, in I guess the next 10 minutes I'll take before I get to some time for questions, I want to talk about how the Odyssey depicts both of these treatments for Odysseus' original malaise.
Joel Christensen:
So, Odysseus has been sitting on an island for seven years. Hermes comes and says, "Make a raft and go home," and then suddenly he makes a raft. What I think is critical about this is that the gods don't whisk him away and plop him down in Ithaca. That could be the story. If the epic were just about a deceased going home, they could just take him to Ithaca, have him kill all the suitors, reunite with Penelope. And the story would be over.
Joel Christensen:
But instead it makes it hard. And I think it makes it hard because it is a series of metaphors about regaining agency and regaining personhood in order to return home. So, Odysseus makes his own raft and he builds it and the epic spends time describing how he does it. And I really think that this is an elaborate metaphor or an anticipated metaphor for how Odysseus remakes himself. And he doesn't just build a ship.
Joel Christensen:
What I find more interesting is that he builds and then sails the raft, but he fails multiple times. So, part of what happens when we read the Odyssey and talk about it is there are all these sections and books people skip over because they just don't seem as important as others.
Joel Christensen:
The second half of book 5 in the Odyssey has Odysseus get into his raft, fall off of it, get back on it, has the raft get destroyed, has him think about swimming or drowning, and then eventually surviving. But there's a series of repeated words and formulas that show Odysseus talking to himself in the session, trying to figure out how he's going to survive. And I think it's a similar pattern to what we have before.
Joel Christensen:
Odysseus is forced into action. He has to decide to save himself. And I think that it's important that he does. Part of recuperating a sense of agency in the world relies on exerting control. And this is called achieving an expectancy change. If you think what you're going to do in the world doesn't matter chances are, you're not going to act. But if you have an experience and even more than one that makes it seem like what you do matters, you're more likely to act and you're more likely to act with the type of competence that makes it possible to succeed.
Joel Christensen:
So, so far, what I've talked about is that Odysseus and his son Telemachus both need to be taken out of their position of helplessness of isolation by a sort of cognitive behavioral therapy of action. But there's a second component to this. And that's that they also need to tell their stories and revise their sense of self. And so, I think this is the last section I'll talk about in detail today.
Joel Christensen:
Before then, one more poll. And I do a lecture sometimes for a new student weekend call so you think you know Odysseus. So, my whole question now is, do you guys think Odysseus is a good guy? And so, we'll get that poll up in a minute. Is he a good guy? Agree, disagree, no opinion, or hey, it's complicated.
Joel Christensen:
I think part of the challenge of the Odyssey is that the Odyssey has to take a character whom everyone may not love. And that's Odysseus. And one of the interesting things about the Odyssey that people often forget is that Odysseus spends four books of the Odyssey, books 9 through 12, the core of the epic talking about himself.
Joel Christensen:
Another thing I do when I'm able to work live with people on this is I ask them to write down what they remember from the Odyssey, fold it up and give it to me. And 90% of the information people tend to remember are things about the Cyclops and Scylla and Charybdis and all the elements of the Odyssey that come from Odysseus's own narrative.
Joel Christensen:
So, what I think happens in the second part of the Odyssey, so the end of the first half, is that Odysseus recreates himself in a couple of ways. First, he engages with action and changes his expectancy for the world by building a raft, losing it and deciding to swim to safety. He has to use his intelligence. He hears stories about himself among the Phaeacians, the people who rescue him and then he tells his own tale.
Joel Christensen:
Now, this is all part of a larger part of the Odyssey, which is that Odysseus has to return to himself by telling stories or having people tell stories that reflect who he is. And so, he goes through a series of reunions that confirm his identity, reunion with his servant, Eumaeus, with his son, Telemachus, with his nurse, his wife, and eventually his father, and it's not complete to book 24 when he's reunited in a pretty violent way with his people.
Joel Christensen:
But one of my central questions and really a central question about the Odyssey is why do we spend so much of the Odyssey listening to Odysseus talk? So, an idea I had that's not completely original, but I built on from others, is that there's an essential therapeutic function to him telling his own story. And part of my inspiration from this is from the therapeutic practice of narrative therapy, which basically proposes that many of the psychological problems we have are problems of narratives, are problems of cultural discourse of things we say and think about ourselves. And much of what we need to do to get back to health and agency is to change the stories we tell about our lives.
Joel Christensen:
So, this isn't just Michael White, who talks about this, but a lot of this goes back to the cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruner, and you can even take it back to sort of psychotherapy in Freud and among the Freudians. And the basic idea is that when we have understandings of ourselves, so we cannot change and we think we are a certain way, we're limited from action and change in the world. And the only way to really change ourselves in the world is to change the story we tell about ourselves.
Joel Christensen:
So, Odysseus is invited and this should be book 8 not 9, to tell his own story, why he's upset. And he's invited about by Alkinoos, his host among the Phaeacians to tell the story the gods fashioned for you. So, Odysseus starts as did Telemachus in telling his own story where the gods are in control perspective.
Joel Christensen:
And he starts out by saying, well, the gods gave me a lot of pains. But I'll tell you my name and this is the first time Odysseus names himself in the epic so that you'll know it. I want to come home. I'm Odysseus, the son of Laertes, who's known among all men for my tricks, my fame reaches up to heaven.
Joel Christensen:
So, he's talking about a story people have already about him, a story that constrains him, that typifies him the way many of us are locked into social roles or goals of behavior by the stories we tell them about ourselves and others.
Joel Christensen:
Now, this is a complicated chart. But it draws on Michael White's work. And in therapy, he says part of the goal is to get people to look back at the past, going through what he calls a landscape of action and identity, and revising how we think or what we think the connection is, the causal connection between who we are and what we do.
Joel Christensen:
And what I think is going on here, and this is a series of scenes that Odysseus goes through, is I think that he uses his narrative books 9 to 12 to demonstrate what it's like to trace back the causal steps in your life and figure out what went wrong and tell a new story about yourself.
Joel Christensen:
Another game I play with students is I have a worksheet called the blame chart. And we go through all of the events and the apology, which is what his story is typically called, and try to figure out who's to blame for what and what's going on with sort of the assumptions about agency and causality in this narrative.
Joel Christensen:
And what's really important is that Odysseus traces back the story to hit that critical moment, the most famous part of the epic. And that's when he blinds the Cyclops. And he tells the story in such a way that his men discouraged him first from going on the island, and second, from taunting the Cyclops, and third, from telling him his name. So, Odysseus had multiple opportunities not to end up in the cave of the Cyclops, not to blind the Cyclops, and not to tell him that it was Odysseus who did it.
Joel Christensen:
Now again, this may seem like I'm just toying with what's a good tale, but I think if we look back at this specific moment, we can see that Odysseus is looking forward. We're seeing in dramatization a process of therapy of going through your past and figuring out how you came to be who you are and where this all comes to a head if you will, is in the prophecy of Teiresias. Some of you might remember, Odysseus goes to the underworld. He goes to the edge of the world. There's a sacrifice. The dead come up to see him and Teiresias tells him his future.
Joel Christensen:
Now, according to Teiresias, he says, "Look, if you stop in the island of Helios," and remember, this was at the beginning of the proem, Odysseus' men ate the Cattle of the Sun. That's why everything went so bad. He says, "If you harm them, that will be a sign of ruin for your ship and your companions. Even if you survive yourself, you will come home late and badly after losing all of your companions, and you will find pain in your house."
Joel Christensen:
Now, this is important because it doesn't have to be the truth. What it is though is Odysseus telling the story about what happened in his past. And what happened in his past is that he blinded the Cyclops, the Cyclops cursed him. Because the Cyclops cursed him, his men ended up on the island of Helios. Because they were on the island of Helios, they all died. They ate the Cattle of the Sun. And if they hadn't done that, if they had gone home right away, if Odysseus had not blinded the Cyclops in his own arrogance, the suitors never would have come to Ithaca.
Joel Christensen:
So, the Odyssey does this amazing thing, where it invites you to think about causality and agency and then gives you a character who has none and then lets us watch this character regain agency over six books in a really complicated dance of action and story, and it's really the story about himself that signals to the audience and to Odysseus what he's in control of, and what he's in control of is concealing who he is and constraining who he is. And this is the central trait he uses when he goes home and he returns to his family and reveals himself at the right time.
Joel Christensen:
So, the final word before I sort of take off the slideshow and go to some questions is that I think that all of this process is for the audience as well. As Odysseus, this hero, this human, goes through a process of questioning his most famous deeds and figuring out if he's to blame for his own suffering just as he's predicted so to the audience is supposed to go away with the ability to question themselves, to question their lives, and the bravery and courage to admit where they were wrong in order to be able to plot a new course forward. And what the Odyssey teaches us is that it's the people who don't do this, who fail to tell these stories who most frequently never change.
Joel Christensen:
So, I'll stop the screen share there and take some questions. And I think maybe ... Is Sharon going to give me some?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes. I will.
Joel Christensen:
Okay.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you very much. We do have a few questions in here.
Joel Christensen:
Awesome.
Sharon Rosenberg:
I'll start off with how do you think the story of helplessness and isolation would be different if Odysseus were female?
Joel Christensen:
Oh, that's a great question. And if I had like four hours, I would have done the entire book for you. So, I have a chapter all about Penelope. And I think that the story that's worse for women in the ancient world is that helplessness is a constant condition for Penelope and that her avenue for action is restrained.
Joel Christensen:
So, the story that's told about Penelope is that she can regain a type of agency, but women in the Odyssey who takes let's say, manly agency or too much are murdered. And this is part of the story of what happens when Odysseus kills all the handmaidens is they take too much agency over their lives.
Joel Christensen:
So, the ability to control life and agency in Greek epic, in Greek myth is gendered. So, women can have a type of agency and Penelope gets some. But women in the Odyssey who take too much are seen as threats. And some of them are murdered. So, I think the difference is that if your watch Penelope, she has to be more clever, she has to be more careful, and her range of motion is even more limited.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Next question is in the tradition of the Jewish Torah, an oral tradition prior to being written down and canonized, what is the evidence that the Odyssey was an oral play prior to being written down?
Joel Christensen:
So, there are two types of evidence for the Odyssey being oral. One is anecdotal, just evidence we have from the ancient world. But the primary best one is the language itself. So, Ancient Greek ... Sorry for that noise. Ancient Greek epic language is formulaic and it's highly repetitive. And what's really neat about it is every line is a self-contained unit of meaning. And complex linguistic analysis over time has shown that it can be broken up not into ductility examiner, the six feet that we traditionally analyze it in, but like two or three segments per line.
Joel Christensen:
So, the words aren't the compositional units. The compositional units are phrases. So, the complex analysis has shown that the language developed as a language that could be composed in performance. It takes a while to get there. A lot of people don't believe it because you have to hit a certain level of comprehension first of the language, but there's some good books about it to really show how it works.
Joel Christensen:
John Miles Foley has several books about or poetry. And Walter Ong has a famous book called Orality and Literacy. And there's a book classic by Ruth Finnegan about oral poetry that also helps explaining some of the features.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Another question, I see that Darth Vader is behind you on the wall. Is it Luke Skywalker story parallel with this story?
Joel Christensen:
Yeah. So, Darth Vader's head is something my children have added. And in fact, everything you can see behind me has been added by my kids over time. They say my wall is too boring. And they're right.
Joel Christensen:
So, the story of Luke Skywalker is part of what we call the heroic pattern. And there are many different names. Probably Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces is the most famous rendition of it. And George Lucas very consciously adopted the pattern for his narrative and so successfully that there are companies in Hollywood now that will take a script and try to make it adhere to the Campbellian heroic pattern.
Joel Christensen:
And so, this is a classic thing. But as psychoanalysts, like Freud, and his successors showed, it's keyed into human experience. The basic story of the hero leaving his family or not being set up in society is a story of a human being coming into place in the world and trying to make their way in it. So, Harry Potter is the same thing.
Joel Christensen:
When I teach myth, I talk a lot about this. And what's really I think not to get dark again with it, but what I think is really pernicious about heroic narrative is that it structures certain roles for certain people. So, one, there's no room in heroic narrative for women, other as aides to men or prizes or objects. And there's also a little room for life after the heroic deed. And so, I think the heroic narrative can be pretty damaging when used the wrong way.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. This sounds similar to the Buddhist belief of karma. Can you comment?
Joel Christensen:
Maybe. So, I mean. So, when it comes to similarities and cross-culturally, there are two basic, let's say, extremes people go to. One is that, oh, item B is similar to item A in that one culture so much come from there. Another one is, well, it's just universalism.
Joel Christensen:
I think when it comes to karma, we may be dealing with just sort of a human universalism. But I wouldn't necessarily say that that's the only thing. As human beings, we have similar cognitive apparatus over time in different cultures. And it's very possible that similar answers in the world, similar narrative functions will develop in different environments.
Joel Christensen:
And I often think of parallel developments in evolution. We can have the same thing in different species and they're not connected, but they're based on similar environments and sort of core like features of, let's say, living DNA. But there may be a connection in that Buddhism comes out of North India. Its first language is Sanskrit in a way. I mean, Prakrit is developed from that.
Joel Christensen:
And in the back of this maybe some essential Indo-European linguistic and political beliefs, but I wouldn't go too far there. So, if you're really interested in this topic, I'd look at similarities in early Hindu beliefs and Buddhism and then compare the Hindu beliefs to early Greek ones.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Another question is, I appreciate the parallels for what we're possibly going through during this time of quarantine and isolation. What do you hope is our biggest takeaway from the Odyssey during this time?
Joel Christensen:
So, I have many hopes, but I'm going to go to the worst one. And I hope that we realize that we can't put all our trust in leaders and that we need to work as a community.
Joel Christensen:
The Odyssey ends with Odysseus coming back and killing 108 people. The suitors were in his home. And then in the middle of book 24, all the people that could get together and they say, "Look, he killed everyone he took the war, didn't come home, 600 people, and then he came home and slaughtered a hundred people for no reason. We need to get rid of him."
Joel Christensen:
But then they're split, half of them want to follow the monarchy, half don't. And the epic ends with them almost killing Odysseus, but the gods coming down and saying, "No, this is not good."
Joel Christensen:
And so, part of the message is about ending cycles of vengeance. But I think a deeper message in Homeric epic is that leaders get you killed and that when their people die, they stay around and their sons stay around and the relatives stay around. And the nameless masses of dead never get it. And that might be a little too dark, but when I see 80,000 people dead and no names, and nothing changing in our country that's what I think of.
Joel Christensen:
A second thing, maybe a little more positive, is I think we can get from the Odyssey the importance of the criminalization of grief and the telling of our stories. One of the things I talked to my colleagues at Brandeis already about is that we all know that we are people in the process of being traumatized. And I think it's important to understand what effects trauma can have so we can identify them and talk about them in order to make their impact slightly less dysfunctional.
Joel Christensen:
I mean, this is the biggest event in any of our lifetimes. Our children are being shaped by it. We are being shaped by it. I think that the Odyssey can help us understand that there are treatments, reading things together, talking together, understanding what's happened to us can really help us find a way out of this when it's over.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Another question is why did Joyce switch the name to Ulysses?
Joel Christensen:
We'd have to ask him. He didn't switch the name. Ulysses is the Roman name and I'll give you a little fun etymology. The Roman name Ulysses comes from the Etruscans. The Etruscans are people who moved into North Italy, they moved through North Greece first. And they brought this name with them.
Joel Christensen:
What's really cool about Ulysses is it is a version of a Greek name for Odysseus. His name Odysseus may mean something like the hated or hateful man. But another name, an ancient name for him is [inaudible 00:57:27], which means the scarred man. And it's for the fact that he has that famous scar that marks who he is on his leg.
Joel Christensen:
In the book, I riff on this a bit. And this is something that people talk a lot about Odysseus, but the scar is a physical marker of a story of identity and initiation. I think part of what's going on in the Odyssey is the communication that our stories that other people tell about us are like physical scars on our bodies. It's not that they're like harm, but there are ways that people identify who we are and help to shape our identity.
Joel Christensen:
So, Ulysses is the Roman name. It's the Latin version. And more people learn Latin than Greeks so it may be there. But Joyce is a pretty smart guy. He may have had that idea of scarring identity and storytelling in the choice of Ulysses versus Odysseus.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. And I see we're just about coming up on 9:00 here on the east coast. And I know you said you can stick around for a few more minutes. And so, we got several more questions in here. We'll get to as many as we can. So, thank you.
Joel Christensen:
Yeah.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Next question, someone says, I like both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Why is it that some but only few like both?
Joel Christensen:
Well, a rhetorical trick is antithesis and saying that making things much worse than they actually are. So, I do think a lot of people like both.
Joel Christensen:
But when you get into studying them and writing on them, I think the tendency to go to one than the other has to do with the fact that these are some of the most written on works in the history of academic literary studies.
Joel Christensen:
So, when I was in grad school, my advisor said, "Don't work on Homer because the bibliography is too big." And it's true. The biography is huge. You can't possibly read everything about Homer. So, I think the reason people tend to go to one to the other is in part specialization. But they're very different fields.
Joel Christensen:
The Iliad is pretty chaotic, plot wise and it's very operatic. And the Odyssey seems kind of simpler, but I think the simpleness is deceptive. So, maybe 10 years ago, I would have given you a different answer. Longinus, who was a great literary critic in the ancient world, thinks that the Odyssey is the work of an old man and the Iliad is one of a younger man. So, some of it might be about perspective.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Have you seen modern performances of the Odyssey? And if so, what did you think of them?
Joel Christensen:
So, I'm going to make a guilty confession that may make everyone dislike me. I can't really watch anything based on the ancient world. I don't like Disney's Hercules. I'm not a fan of Gladiator. I think it's too close.
Joel Christensen:
So, I haven't seen any. What I like are works that are kind of inspired by it. I actually think that Breaking Bad, the television show, it's closer to the Odyssey than any film of the Odyssey has ever been. And I think if you were to do the Iliad or the Odyssey correctly, if you want to do sort of filmic version of it, it'd be like an HBO show of 24 episodes. You'd have to do each book. The problem with something like Troy is that epic works over time. The narrative engagement of a film is too short. So, to believe are engaged with the things that you need to get epic, you need a lot more time and engagement.
Joel Christensen:
So, that's why I think that its long form narrative like that of a modern television show is closer to the experience of ancient epic than a movie. So, sorry, if that's a disappointing answer. Hopefully, I'll be proved wrong and there'll be a great Odyssey sometime soon.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. I'm actually going to combine two questions into this next one because we got one request to please expand on what is agency.
Joel Christensen:
Okay.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Another question that said is Penelope weaving a metaphor for deviated agency? So, you can answer both of those. I feel like they go together.
Joel Christensen:
So, I talked about agency rather than free will because agency is the idea that you're able to act in the world and do something. So, a sense of agency means that you believe you can be an agent or an actor in the world. And so, I think that Penelope's weaving is definitely an act of agency deferred, but it's a type of act itself. So, it is an exploration of what kind of agency she has.
Joel Christensen:
And another thing about it, it's also a metapoetic act. So, she's creating something and we hear that she puts on the tapestry some type of image, but it's never described. And this is going to get a little too literary. But I actually think it's also a metaphor for the telling of the story of the Odyssey itself in how many times it has to begin before it can end. So, I think in that, it's a special type of agency. And it's one that's really important because Penelope has storytelling power, the way that Odysseus does.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Thank you. Is there archeological proof for anything in the Odyssey?
Joel Christensen:
Nope. Just it. Nope. It depends on what you mean proof. There's a really complicated relationship between the Homeric epics and the Odyssey. The Odyssey and the Iliad are fantasies about the past. There's a famous book by HL Lorimer called Homer and the Monuments that basically shows that every object in Homer pretty much comes from different archeological periods. So, you can get something from the 7th century BCE, something from the 12th century BCE.
Joel Christensen:
The basic world depicted is set in the Mycenaean period. So, digs in Greece proper and in Asia Minor show that there was in fact shared or at least communicating culture between where we would see sort of Odysseus' world and the Trojans. But I don't really know anybody who believes that there's some historicity to the Trojan War.
Joel Christensen:
So, there aren't really facts, but there's a general cultural representation that Greeks in the 5th century would have believed it. And so, I think that's the important thing to observe.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Okay. Thank you. And we got a few questions in here about how do you feel about the novel, Circle by Madeline Miller?
Joel Christensen:
Oh, Circe. So, Circe, so there's a whole series of works now that have come out that is sort of retailing Homeric material. In addition to Madeline Miller's book, there is the Penelopiad from 2003 by Margaret Atwood.
Joel Christensen:
And I think that these are brilliant rewritings and rethinkings of the narrative. And I think what it really shows is how successful Homeric poetry has been over time in projecting certain structured, gendered views. And for me, these works really expose in ways the kinds of voices and experiences that are marginalized from Homer. So, I think that Miller's work and Atwood's work are really brilliant engagements with the poems that help us to see what audiences aren't finding in them and explore what different types of stories could have been told.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Question, do you think you're going to write a book about the Iliad?
Joel Christensen:
Yeah, probably, maybe. That's the plan for the next one. I want to talk more about how the Iliad has a concept of storytelling and how Homeric poetry works. And my dissertation was on politics and language in the Iliad and I never really got around to publishing that. So, the idea is the next book will be the Iliad. But I don't like to say I'm going to do something until it's done because you never know what's going to happen in between the beginning of something and the end, like a pandemic or Darth Vader showing up in your house.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. I think we got time for maybe two more questions in here. So, this one is autocrats in former Yugoslavia retold myths of victory over Muslim invaders from centuries earlier. They replayed the story in real life militaristic policy, something there forces in the US replaying the outcome of the Civil War. So, how to "modern myths" express themselves in current politics?
Joel Christensen:
That's a huge question. I'm not going to talk about modern myths, I'm just going to start by saying about the way we report and tell stories about the world. I mean, we have people in this country who tell very different stories about the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2000 to 2003. And the stories we tell about current events shape policy in the future.
Joel Christensen:
When I talk to students now, they don't understand that there was not a necessity to invade Afghanistan or Iraq. However you feel about the outcomes, there was no necessity. We chose to do it based on certain interpretations of the dead.
Joel Christensen:
So, I think that we're constantly in a process of reinterpreting our history, mythologizing our present and past and it shapes the way we act in the future. Right now, we can see this with various narratives that have been told about the coronavirus since December. We don't need to dwell on those. But every day, there's a press conference by the President. There's an attempt to shape the information in order to justify what we're doing now. And this will be retold in the future.
Joel Christensen:
So, I think that we always do this in how we talk about victories and losses in war. But we also do this in things that affect policy from climate change to coronavirus to how we legislate for education.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. I know we got several more questions in here. We're going to take one more, which goes back to Odysseus as being good, bad or it's complicated. And just asking your thoughts on that. And the questioner notes, "He does some brutal things." But what are your thoughts on good, bad, it's complicated.
Joel Christensen:
I think Odysseus is a terrible human being. But the epic goes at great lengths to make him likable. So, I think it's complicated. And I think the danger is that we don't realize that we are each potentially an Odysseus. And what happens by the end of the epic and the real test is, if you think back to the epic and you don't remember that he mutilates his slave and allows his son to hang the slave women and kills all his people, then you've been bamboozled by a clever character.
Joel Christensen:
So, I think that as an anything, Odysseus tells us more about ourselves than him. So, I think the answer is it's complicated, trending to him being a bad guy.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Hey, well, thank you very, very much for giving us a lot to think about and also for doing this East Coast time early in the morning. Thanks to all of you for joining us. There were a few questions about accessing a recording of this and the answer to that is yes, we will be sending out an email with a recording. Because it usually takes a little over a week. We just need to make sure we get all the captions and transcripts in full accessibility for an online version, but we will absolutely be sending out that link to you with this presentation on there.
Sharon Rosenberg:
So, thank you again for joining us. And we hope to see you at other virtual events. We have a whole bunch of programs coming up over the next several weeks and in the coming month. And thank you again, Joel, for doing this for us, very much appreciated.
Joel Christensen:
Take care everybody. Bye.