ἠχώ, ἠχώ, ἠχώ…
“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.”
– The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
As a veteran of this still-thriving organization (despite whatever our Stranded slander would have you believe) who has read article after article denouncing the many live-actions and remakes of mainstream media today, I dreaded yet another piece on the same subject. Nevertheless, disregarding the irony of me growing tired of contributors rewriting articles about being weary with movie remakes, we’re kicking the same dead horse because we’re still facing the same problem: pallid imitations of the past—did anyone really want a How to Train Your Dragon live-action?—that leave audiences numb, bored, and wishing for something more. Perhaps, we’ve exchanged an age colored by the anxiety of influence, the artist’s fear of mimicking your muse without developing your own style, for the affliction of imitation. Echoes of someone else’s music rather than any worthwhile production of our own.
A classic example of reviving the same old tales for modern times is the (now, perhaps, waning) sub-genre of Greek myths told with a feminist twist—Clytemnestra, Circe, Elektra, Ariadne, to name a few. The Song of Achilles and the Percy Jackson (and its many spinoffs) series have remained all the rage on Booktok and for YA readers for years now, Epic the Musical, Hadestown, Hades 2, and Lore Olympus still sparkling in the public eye. One could argue it’s nice to see these stories alive and well two thousand years later, that perhaps Orpheus and Eurydice or Homer’s The Odyssey contain some universal appeal akin to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, if readers knew a thing or two about their origins. Yet, aside from the obvious critique that feminist retellings of these stories are something of an anachronistic misreading, oftentimes it feels as if our audiences (or perhaps our authors?) are more so fascinated by the idea and the safety of Greek mythology—the aesthetic of familiar characters like thunder-bearing Zeus or wine-drunk Dionysus with an overabundance of online resources detailing their backstories. Of course, these radical retellings of old myths mean little if people haven’t been exposed to the original material—a point on which, perhaps, one could form a larger critique of film adaptations (or rather, the ignorant filmgoer) in general. It’s one thing if this oversaturation of Greek mythology inspires a deep-seeded curiosity about ancient civilizations and the many silly tragedies and comedies they have to offer: Euripides’s The Bacchae, Aristophane’s Lysistratas, Sophocles’s Antigone. Rather, these modern “retellings” may be more aptly named “rewritings” of the past, commodified nostalgia for the classical age, disingenuous derivatives taking the names of Greek heroines and stuffing them into Y2K clothes.
In Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, he writes, “Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” While it may be a little overzealous to track and trace every single reference to the work of past authors (good luck taking that strategy to Joyce’s Ulysses), you should be able to trace echoes back to their source, to construct your work in such a way that it enters into conversation with the older texts. Emily Wilson, author of the new (notably, contentious) translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad, argues that “said novelizations of Greek myths appeal to readers in part because they have the patina of high culture, but may feel less intimidating than translations of the originals.” Certainly, it’s far less daunting to read novels using colloquial language or flip on films on Disney+ than to dig through dusty dissertations buried in scholarly archives. But again, can we fully appreciate the novelty of Wilson’s work if we haven’t read Lattimore’s, Fagles’s, or any one of the other dozens of well-regarded Odyssey translations that came before? Should we be writing dumbed down versions of ancient myths to make them less intimidating, more familiar, and more relatable, or should we be making these lofty translations more accessible?
The principles of pedagogy and the perils of sifting through popular and pretentious audiences go beyond the scope of this editorial, but I’ll extend a humble plea for those of you who’ve made it this far: next time you find yourself consuming classically-“inspired” (not much more authentic than the made-in-Wisconsin “Greek-inspired” feta my mother once bought by mistake) media, trace the echoes back to their source. The ancient world has plenty to offer, if only you deign to follow her hidden paths back to Ὅμηρος.