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On Magical, Impossible Identities in Story
Permission (from Vajra Chandrasekera) to tell fiction that names gods, recognizes supernatural beings, and personifies nature and emotion
Novelist Vajra Chandrasekera wrote yesterday about Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey.
He feels that something is missing. Divinity, perhaps. In the film,
the gods (as characters who have their own motivations and dialogues) are excised from the story entirely and all fantastical elements are contained within a frame of mimetic psychologism. Athena is a hallucination derived from guilt, and in case that was not clear, all her brief dialogue is about putting divinity in its place as allegory for nature, human and otherwise. It is evident that gods are fictions, as they are under modernity.
In this film, all the gods and monsters were reinterpreted as merely literary, as Chandrasekera sees it. The thing is, he says, they were already literary, and there was nothing mere about it; the film’s way of doing it…
