“American Mythology in the Coen Brothers' Odyssey”

The Odyssey is the most obvious source text for the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with its invocation of the Muse and its opening-credits announcement that it is “Based on The Odyssey by Homer” (the Coens’ claims that they have never read Homer notwithstanding). But the film draws on a number of other source texts as well. The scene in which the chain gang visits the movie theater alludes to a pivotal moment in the 1941 Preston Sturges film Sullivan’s Travels, which includes a fictional film-within-the-film called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Pappy O’Daniel is loosely based on the historical “Singing Governor” Jimmie Davis of Louisiana, who is mostly known today as the composer of “You Are My Sunshine,” which he used to sing on the campaign trail (just as Pappy requests it on stage with the Soggy Bottom Boys, to seal the sudden change of fortune his campaign has just experienced).

The Coens cast a distinctively “mythical” air over the familiar setting of the Depression-era American South throughout the film, on a visual and audible level. The otherworldly folk and spiritual music that permeates the film draws on American folk and gospel traditions to depict the South as a place where sweet tunes emerge from the mist, and Roger Deakins’s Oscar-nominated cinematography creates a look that evokes sepia-toned photographs but also includes startling and magical flashes of color. The atmosphere evokes a land of mystery that our heroes must navigate, a land populated by beguiling Sirens, Lotus Eaters, and Cyclops.

But one conspicuously mythical element of the film has no clear origin in Homer. When the Soggy Bottom Boys encounter a black man with a guitar case standing alone at a crossroads, we enter a distinctively American mythology. Tommy Johnson tells the boys a story about meeting the devil at the crossroads, and selling his soul in exchange for supernatural talent on the guitar. Many viewers will recognize here the legend of the hugely influential Delta blues guitarist Robert Johnson, whose haunting and haunted songs have been covered by the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, and pretty much everyone else. Very little is known for certain about Robert Johnson—he only recorded twenty-nine songs in his short life (he was killed in ambiguous circumstances at age twenty-seven), and there are only three known photographs of him (see one of them below). His polyrhythmic finger-picking technique was so radical and so widely influential that stories began to circulate that he had met the devil at the crossroads one night, and the devil retuned his guitar and demonstrated new techniques, in return for which Johnson sold his soul in a Faustian bargain—as if the only way to account for his otherworldly talent were to invoke supernatural intervention. This story of the devil at the crossroads has enhanced the Robert Johnson mystique to the point that it’s difficult to separate straight biography from legend. With scant hard facts to go on, the sensational story fills the gaps.

The crossroads legend has been bolstered in part by some of Johnson’s spooky recordings, which evoke the crossroads as a setting, and refer to a tormented soul with a “hellhound on his trail.” Johnson’s early death, shrouded in mystery, only further supports the idea of a moment of reckoning, when the devil comes and collects his due. Take a listen to “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Cross Roads Blues”:

There was actually a blues musician named Tommy Johnson, who was also reputed to have made a deal with the devil. (The devil took quite an active interest in the development of American secular roots music, apparently, which certainly helped enhance the reputation of the blues and its descendant, rock-n-roll, as “devil’s music.” An instance of an almost Greek degree of gods intervening in human affairs?) The Coens have acknowledged that their Tommy Johnson represents a mashup of these two mythical figures in American music. (Robert Johnson’s legend is more prominent, probably due to his early death—it better fits the hellhound-on-my-trail narrative.)

By drawing on this American folk mythology as part of their riff on Homer’s Odyssey, the Coens portray the South as a place where supernatural forces hold sway in human life. And this animates the metaphysical debate that pervades the film, with Everett insisting (verbosely) on a rational, scientific, non-superstitious view of the world—the “only one who remains unaffiliated” in a car with his two companions, who’ve recently been “saved” among the Lotus Eaters and their river baptism, and Tommy, who’s sold his soul to the devil. Like in The Odyssey, we have the sense that our heroes’ story is being shaped and guided by supernatural forces, and that their “affiliations,” like Odysseus’s affiliation with Athena and his lack of affiliation with Poseidon, have grave consequences. Tommy Johnson’s story has no specific analog in Homer, although his is the most overtly “mythical” story in the film. The Coens draw on the American myth of the crossroads and the blues, and the idea of great talent in the “devil’s music” as a kind of magical, transformative power, as Tommy’s guitar playing propels “Man of Constant Sorrow” and the Soggy Bottom Boys’ burgeoning music career (the parallel to legendary fame among the bards’ repertoire in Homer is a popular single on the radio that everyone wants to hear). Their story is profoundly redirected by this supernatural intervention, despite Everett’s doubts, and the devil-inspired recording of Everett’s Odyssean theme song ends up saving them in the end.

The Coens also draw on a more historically grounded element of American mythology in the Tommy Johnson thread, by depicting the Ku Klux Klan as both a form of American “monster” and agents of the devil (with ties to electoral politics, too). Tommy believes that “nothing can save him now”—this is the moment of reckoning for selling his soul—but the heroes save him and evade the devil, killing the Cyclops with a burning cross (another “mythical” artifact of American history). The “sheriff” who trails the boys (and Tommy), complete with his “hellhound,” is a supernatural figure who doesn’t answer to man-made laws. In the Robert Johnson legend, the devil is a black man and a guitarist, and according to Everett he is “red and scaly with a bifurcated tail,” but in Tommy’s version he’s “white, white as you folks, with empty eyes and a big, hollow voice.” This sure fits the profile of the sheriff, with his mirror-empty sunglasses reflecting flames and his terrifying, gruff voice of condemnation.

Poseidon doesn’t hold sway in the landlocked Delta where this film is set, and the Greek gods are mostly alien to American shores (outside of the work of Rick Riordan and Neil Gaiman, that is). The Coens animate their story with more familiar elements of American mythology: the Klan is scarier to us than a Cyclops would be, in large part because these are monsters with a real historical basis, and the hollow-eyed white devil/sheriff is a more terrifying hellhound to contend with, even if he does leave Tommy with some wicked chops. 

“Qualms about Odysseus and Revenge”

Many first-time readers remark that Book 22 of The Odyssey has a strikingly modern or contemporary feel. Maybe this has to do with the relentless graphic violence, and the way that Homer’s speaker at times seems to revel in the gory or sadistic details. The killing of Antinous—although surprising that it comes first, and so quickly—has an especially cinematic quality to it. Homer’s “camera” moves in slow motion, cutting from Odysseus aiming his bow to Antinous raising his goblet to drink, tilting it back, just about to taste it . . . when an arrow pierces his throat and he falls dead, spilling the wine (and plenty of blood) and kicking over the table. We can imagine this book as a sequence near the conclusion of a Quentin Tarantino film. It’s not just that it’s violent; it’s the way that the violence is fetishized as a kind of art, an aesthetic display that serves a cathartic function for the reader, a release of pent-up tension and a sense of culmination. We are meant to enjoy this scene—if you get into this kind of thing, that is.

And of course many perfectly decent, well-behaved, nonviolent people enjoy scenes of righteous slaughter on movie screens. The climax of The Odyssey feels so modern in part because contemporary cinema has acclimated us to representations of rough justice. There’s a bit of the vigilante in Odysseus—he doesn’t invoke the law of the land to evict the suitors from the palace and to exact some kind of fine or community service for their crimes, and after the slaughter he fears persecution and exile. The man whose honor, home, and family have been violated is the one who gets to administer justice himself (ably assisted by his recently come-of-age son, a loyal swineherd and cowherd, and the more-or-less righteous goddess Athena). And he shows no mercy. There’s an aesthetic symmetry to the arrangement. However horrified we’d be to learn of such an event in real life, within the confines of fiction, our aesthetic pleasure in reading of the suitors’ violent comeuppance blurs with a kind of moral or ethical satisfaction. It feels like justice. Poetic justice.

Odysseus is a paradigm of the epic hero, but he emerges here as a more specific subset of the hero category: a revenger hero. The revenge structure has been recycled many times over the years; audiences clearly respond to it. The narrative arc virtually writes itself, and only the details change: the protagonist is wronged in some way at the start of the story (convicted of a crime he didn’t commit; his wife and children harmed; his career ruined; his palace overrun by swaggering suitors), and he spends the bulk of the narrative tracking down the perpetrators and plotting his revenge. (And there are a few woman-centered iterations of a revenger plot: see Tarantino’s Kill Bill vols. 1 and 2 for a good example.) The final act depicts the culmination of the revenger-hero’s plot—part of the appeal, I think, has to do with the pleasure of watching a plot being formed, and then seeing it come to fruition. We see the author’s and the hero’s plots come together—as in The Odyssey, where Homer’s plot, Athena’s plot, and Odysseus’s plot all converge with the slaughter in the hall. It’s not chaotic and random; it’s a well-planned tactical maneuver. The revenger is a kind of author of his own story, and we take pleasure in seeing a plan come together.

Odysseus is one of the earliest revenger heroes in Western literature, but we also hear (repeatedly, and pointedly) of another revenger story within The Odyssey—the story of Agamemnon’s murder being avenged by his son, Orestes, which Zeus cites in book 1 as a paradigm of justice served (1.34-44). When Agamemnon hears about Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors from Amphimedon, down in the Kingdom of the Dead, he gives his enthusiastic approval (24.193-224). The Homeric vision of justice entails the wronged (or someone working on behalf of the wronged) returning and taking vengeance, repaying a grave wrong and punishing those who have wronged him. Athena’s eyes flash with approval throughout the slaughter in book 22. She likes what she sees.

But stories of revenge always leave me a little cold. The sense of catharsis, and of poetic justice, is fleeting, and a sense of pointlessness and futility often overshadows any sense of justice restored. Hamlet is another classic example of a revenge story—with the young prince feeling pressure to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the man who has just married his mother (a version of the Agamemnon story)—but my favorite parts of that play are when Hamlet is unsure how to proceed, doubting the point of revenge even as he’s aware that it’s expected of him, his duty as the prince. Hamlet is miscast in the role of avenger, and that’s what makes the play so good. We see a guy trying to talk himself into the role, to work himself up to the task, even as his doubts persist. The play ends in a bloodbath, with Hamlet dying along with pretty much everyone else (it is a tragedy, after all), and there’s little sense of comfort or resolution in the prodigious body count. The king’s death has been avenged. And now everyone is dead.

The Odyssey seems not entirely sure about its own revenge structure. Odysseus’s “berserker” mode renders our sense of him as a righteous judge rather ambiguous. He kills everyone involved, with no distinction and no mercy, and by the end of book 22, we’re seeing gratuitous dismemberment and torture in addition to mass slaughter. It all seems a bit much—especially in light of the suitors’ crimes. Hamlet dithers and delays, even when he’s pretty sure his stepfather has killed his father and stolen the throne. He has a much more valid motive for revenge than Odysseus, and he still has to talk himself into it. In the final book of The Odyssey, some dissenting voices emerge to question the hero’s triumph: we hear reference to the families of the suitors mourning outside the gates; we see Odysseus’s indiscriminate slaughter denounced by the ghost of Amphimedon and by the grieving father of Antinous, Eupeithes (who is then promptly killed by Laertes, Odysseus’s father—in what seems like a gift, or generous gesture, on his son’s part. Talk about poetic justice!). Eupeithes’s grievances are legitimate enough to resonate with the populace of Ithaca, stirring up a civil war, which Athena is only able to thwart by erasing all memories of those killed, essentially voiding the whole meaning of the revenge plot (if no one knows there’s been revenge, has there really been revenge?). All of this suggests that the poet feels a little uneasy about the outcome of the plot.

The grief of the suitors’ families—and their outrage at Odysseus’s extremely violent form of justice—draws our attention to the moral bankruptcy of revenge as an ethos. It feels good, even in vicarious fictional form. We want to see these swaggering punks get what’s coming to them. But slaughter only goes so far, and once the catharsis takes place, we still just have a bunch of dead bodies. Nothing has been restored; the revenger has still been wronged. It’s not quite as satisfying as it should be.

My favorite example of a deconstruction of the revenge plot is Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento. It’s one of the most inventive narrative structures ever attempted in cinema, and a fascinating, mind-bending experience to watch, with a story that mostly moves backward chronologically. It features a classic revenge plot—a man whose wife has (ostensibly) been raped and murdered, and he’s singlemindedly tracking down the perpetrator to kill him. But Leonard, the protagonist, also is afflicted with a post-traumatic neurological condition that means he can’t form permanent new memories, or hold on to memories for more than ten minutes. He comes up with some creative ways to try to combat this condition, to turn his experience into some kind of coherent narrative even though his own mind keeps slipping the details of the story. He writes himself cryptic notes, and tattoos certain “facts” about the case onto his body, so he’ll never forget. And he struggles to pursue a kind of detective story, identifying and tracking down his wife’s killer, in the absence of short-term memory. It is all that he does. He’s a single-minded revenger with literally nothing and no one else in his life.

The film opens with the ostensible moment of revenge: the protagonist shoots and kills a man. But we have no idea who these two people are, or what their relation to one another is, so the moment is drained of significance. The film’s plot then moves backward in time, reconstructing the story (as Leonard has had to reconstruct it himself), filling in how he’s determined that the guy he shoots is the guy he’s after. And we’re pretty sure it’s the right guy. But we have our doubts, and the possibility that Leonard has been projecting rather than uncovering a plot is present throughout. He is extremely vulnerable to others’ manipulation, of his actions and his understanding of the facts. The more we see, the less we seem to know for certain. At one point, it is suggested to Leonard that his quest for revenge is pointless because he won’t really know he’s gotten revenge—he’ll forget about it right away, it won’t fit into a larger narrative framework that gives revenge its meaning.

The director, Christopher Nolan (known to many of you from the Dark Knight films), unravels the idea of revenge at a fundamental level by compelling us to see how it depends upon a surrounding narrative to give it meaning—and if we can’t be sure about that narrative, we can’t take the proper aesthetic and moral pleasure in the act of revenge. Leonard is a sympathetic character, but his status as a righteous hero is in question. His extreme single-mindedness is as much tragic evidence of his victimhood and trauma as his neurological condition. He becomes oriented entirely around his revenge plot—his life literally has no other storyline. His whole meaning is entangled in his role as revenger, but that role is premised on uncertain facts and incomplete knowledge. The revenger is a little crazy (like Hamlet), thoroughly obsessed to the point of mania, but also very sad. He can kill the guy he thinks probably killed his wife, and nothing will be restored to him, he will gain no “closure”—in fact, the tenuous meaning that shapes his life will then, ironically, disappear. He’ll be a revenger without a cause.

I’ve never been in a position where I’ve felt I’ve had to take revenge on anyone, and I’ve been fortunate never to have had a loved one taken from me by someone else’s violence, so perhaps I’d feel differently if I were in Hamlet’s or Leonard’s position. Maybe the revenge would bring some satisfaction or closure. But my sense is that the desire for revenge would create the illusion or expectation of closure that could never be satisfied by a stack of bodies.

“Bards within Bards”

For a poem that was first put into writing almost three thousand years ago—and performed orally for a couple hundred years prior to that—The Odyssey features a number of surprisingly modern aspects. The domestic drama at the heart of the story is one example: Telemachus’s heavily fraught coming of age, the question of Penelope’s devoted or foolhardy faithfulness to her departed husband, and a hero who spends so much time weeping because he just wants to go home and be with his family (even giving up eternal youth in the company of Calypso to do so). Although the family dynamics, gender roles, and many details of life in Ancient Greece are foreign to us, the fundamental story of simply trying to make it back home amid a host of obstacles is universal, and this “domestic” framework at the core of the story has a lot to do with its enduring appeal.

The tightly structured and rather complex plotting of the story is another seemingly “modern” feature of the poem: the “gods’ eye view” with which it opens, allowing us to place both Odysseus and Telemachus in context as the story begins, and the dramatic structure of the Telemachiad, ending with a classic cliffhanger, as the suitors head out to ambush an unsuspecting Telemachus. The narrative structure itself is also rather complex, for a poem that was originally delivered orally—the Greek audience was clearly sophisticated when it came to following a multilayered narrative. We open with Telemachus in Ithaca and on his travels, in the “present tense” of the story, and then cut back to Odysseus being freed from Calypso’s island at around the same time (both in response to the plans established in the opening council of the gods), from which point the action moves forward until the two strands come together in the last twelve books of the poem. Within this forward-moving present-tense narrative, we have both flashbacks and prophecies, or literal foreshadowing of the story to come, and a number of references to other stories of other heroes. And we have a whole bunch of embedded narratives within this main story. Homer’s story is full of other people telling stories, their own or stories of myth and legend. Reading The Odyssey is like reading a bunch of different books all at once.

How many times has Agamemnon’s story come up so far? Zeus mentions it early in book 1, during the council of the gods (1.34-44), and then Athena mentions it to Telemachus later in the same book (1.298-300), trying to get him to see himself as a potential Orestes, avenger of his wronged father. And then Nestor brings it up again in book 3 (302-12), just in case Telemachus still doesn’t get it. Menelaus tells it yet again, this time in greater detail, within his own frame narrative in which he is ostensibly answering Telemachus’s question about his father—he takes his sweet time answering the question, going into the whole story of being stranded down in Egypt, getting the tip about how to pin down Proteus and make him tell the truth, which is how he first learns what happened to his brother (Agamemnon), and which also yields some limited information on Odysseus, which he finally shares when he gets to the point at long last. This isn’t even an exhaustive list, as Agamemnon tells his own story to Odysseus in book 11, when his “ghost” warns Odysseus to be careful when homecoming after a long journey.

So partly this is to drive home the potential parallels between Odysseus’s story of being taken advantage of during an absence from home and that of Agamemnon and Orestes—the story is designed to be an inspiration for Telemachus, to rouse him to heroic action on the model of Orestes. But it also nicely illustrates just how many little stories are buried throughout this big story.

Remember that the whole thing is ostensibly narrated by “Homer,” a blind bard, as a written rendition of an oral narrative. Within this wide frame, we also get a number of other bards telling stories—at the court of Menelaus, for example, or Demodocus the famous blind bard (a figure for Homer himself in his own poem?) repeatedly telling stories in Alcinous’s palace. This self-reflexive quality also strikes me as rather postmodern—we not only have frame narratives, but our attention is drawn to the very medium we’re currently consuming, when we have the blind bard Homer portraying another blind bard doing the things bards did: entertaining guests of honor with epic stories.

This story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure reaches its most extreme and dizzying point when Odysseus himself takes over the bardic duties (after another pretty “meta” moment, when Odysseus requests that Demodocus tell the story of the Trojan Horse, in which he himself features prominently—and then breaks down crying under the strong emotions it, rather predictably, evokes in him). Alcinous invites him to self-narrate—“But come now, tell me / about your wanderings” (8.571-72)—but this is more than simply saying, “Identify yourself, introduce yourself.” He wants the story, and Odysseus delivers, narrating the next four books of the poem and keeping the Phaeacian court up all night listening to him. This structure was clear throughout the “Wanderings of Odysseus” presentations: the present-tense story of Odysseus trying to make it back from Calypso’s island is interrupted for a long interlude in which first Demodocus tells a few epic stories from the Trojan campaigns (already becoming legendary, we can see), and then Odysseus narrates everything that happened to him since the end of the war, for our benefit as well as that of Alcinous and his court.

In part, this gives the “Wanderings” a personal, lyrical quality—Odysseus laments his own bad fortune and establishes his identity as the “long-suffering man of sorrows.” He begins by praising the skills of the bard who preceded him, but Homer gives Odysseus himself the previously unheard epithet “the lord of lies” (9.1), which is translated by Fagles as “the great teller of tales.” It is clear from the context that this guy can tell a good story, and his audience seems spellbound as he delves into these fantastical stories of mythic monsters and a visit to the Underworld. He tells of the Cyclops, and of the adventure on Circe’s island, before launching into what must have been a pretty intense first-person tale, his extremely rare experiences in the Kingdom of the Dead (which isn’t typically visited by living mortals, for obvious reasons). Here’s where the stories-within-stories dynamic starts to induce vertigo, or to evoke the image of infinitely receding mirrors: Odysseus’s story entails him recounting in detail the stories told to him by various of the ghosts that emerge from the Underworld, and at times he tells his story to them. Remember that all of this is being told by Odysseus himself to Alcinous. And Homer is telling us about Odysseus telling Alcinous about Agamemnon telling him about what happened with Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Are you losing track of all the internal quotation marks this would require? And these narratives in the Kingdom of the Dead don’t only reflect past events—we also get a forward-looking prophetic narrative from Tiresias (as reported by Odysseus to Alcinous via Homer), which basically telegraphs the end of the story, and Agamemnon’s story is not yet complete, as Orestes has not yet had his revenge at the time of this telling (although he has by the time of the present action of the poem).

It’s easy to forget that Odysseus is narrating these sections—the frame begins to recede, and we get lost in the story itself. But Homer reminds us of the frame, doesn’t let us lose sight of the story he’s telling—that of Odysseus telling his story to Alcinous. At one point in his exhaustive (and somewhat exhausting) litany of encounters with ghosts, Odysseus seems to sense that his audience might be getting bored. He pauses, and we’re snapped back to the present tense. “There is a time for many tales, but also / a time for sleep,” Odysseus avers (11.380-81). He stops the story, and the audience is “silent, spellbound, / listening in the shadowy hall” (11.334-35). Alcinous breaks the silence with a spirited praise of Odysseus, as a man and a storyteller, promising to transport him safely to Ithaca. But he’s not off the hook just yet. Although our hero has given a pretty strong hint that he’s tired and wants to go to bed, the king insists that he keep talking—“The night is long; / it is not time to sleep yet. Tell me more / Amazing deeds! I would keep listening / until bright daybreak, if you kept on telling / the dangers you have passed" (11.422-25). So after snapping us briefly back into the frame, Odysseus dutifully resumes his story, narrating the rest of book 11 and all of book 12. At the end of book 12, he sounds exhausted and even a little irritable, having brought them (and us) up to the point where he arrives on Calypso’s island: “Why should I tell / the story that I told you and your wife / yesterday in your house? It is annoying, / repeating tales that have been told before” (450-54). Just as in The Odyssey as a whole, Odysseus’s narrative to the Phaeacians is fragmented in structure.

While The Odyssey does feature a good deal of action and, by the end, its share of bloodletting, much of it simply depicts people sitting around telling stories. We get a picture of Ancient Greek culture where such stories were valued—there’s a strong sense of formality to the storytelling, whether it’s a bard performing a narrative to music or an honored guest being asked to tell “the whole story.” And in addition to his noted exploits in battle and his great tactical wits, it’s worth noting that our hero is something of a bard himself, a “great teller of stories” (which, as Wilson’s translation reminds us, is a skill that is very close to telling lies). Maybe this is why Homer likes him so much.

“Holden Out for a Hero?”

I don’t tend to reach for heroic narratives in my own personal reading. My favorite movies don’t typically involve costumed avengers or caped crusaders. I’ve read all three Lord of the Rings volumes and The Hobbit to my son as our bedtime reading a few years ago, and parts of them were really cool, but I admit to zoning out for large portions of the story. As a kid, I had only gotten about halfway through the second book before I gave it up, but that may reflect my general laziness as a young reader more than my interest in heroic quests. I never did get around to seeing the third movie, although I mostly enjoyed the first two. They do make it back from that big mountain where he chucks the ring, and the world is saved—I remember that much from volume 3. It’s just that some of the twists and turns along the way—the close brushes with death, the cliffhangers—might have lost me.

For your inaugural writing assignment, I am asking you to contemplate the significance of heroism as a part of your general consumption of literature, television, and film. I’m approaching this course, based in part on what I’ve gleaned from my students in the past, with the assumption that many of you are more actively conversant in the heroic genre, in your day-to-day recreational reading and viewing, than I am. And I look forward to reading your writing this semester, as you unpack those interests and bring to light something fundamental about why and how heroic narratives continue to appeal to and inspire you. I feel like I get the hero thing, even if I don’t fully feel it myself. But I also have a lot to learn.

I understand that the concept of the hero is still alive and well, at the movies and in the news, but my own ambivalence reflects what’s maybe an unfortunate tendency in our contemporary culture—toward irony and cynicism over idealism and sincerity. Does the concept of a “hero” seem outdated or quaint, a relic of a simpler and more credulous time? We’re hesitant to speak seriously about some public or historical figure as our hero because we expect some killjoy to interject and remind us of their flaws and shortcomings (“Oh, you admire President Obama? What about all those drone strikes against innocent civilians? Some hero!”). To admit to having a hero is, in a way, to make yourself vulnerable to disappointment or disillusionment. We don’t want to seem too credulous, easily duped. We want to seem like we’re already over it, unimpressed, devoid of wonder. It’s somehow safer not to have heroes. Some airline attendant is caught on video resigning from his job in a dramatic and made-for-YouTube kind of way, and we all repost the clip, with a knowing smirk, captioned with stuff like, “This guy is totally my hero LOL.” But we don’t really mean “hero” in the wholly unironic way Joseph Campbell uses the term.

I did a lot of thinking, in my initial preparation for teaching this course, about the role of heroes throughout my life. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually had a hero. I was heavy into Star Wars, but it was the whole imagined-world aspect that compelled me, more than Skywalker’s quest. I always preferred Han Solo, the reluctant, mercenary hero who gradually does develop a sense of social and moral responsibility but never loses his trademark sneer, over Luke Skywalker. I was a sucker for the sarcastic riposte over sincere idealism. I went through some phases where I was into superhero narratives as a kid—a faithful viewer of the Superfriends every Saturday morning, and I did see the original Christopher Reeve Superman in the theater—but it didn’t really stick. By the time the first Batman movie (dir. Burton; 1988) came out, I was in high school, I went to see it mainly because Prince did the soundtrack, and I was (and am) a huge Prince fan. I've listened to the album way more than I've watched the movie.

There are people I admire—in history, in culture, even in sports—and it’s hard to unpack how much they may or may not have shaped my development as a person. I can name names of people whose actions and experiences impress me deeply, and whose life stories and the values they represent have made a strong impression on me. At various times in my life, I have thought about them a lot, and maybe in some distant capacity modeled my behavior on their example. But it doesn’t sit right with me to call them my “heroes”—it feels like I’m fronting, like I’m expected to cite heroes, so I have a few I could name.  But really, there are no shrines in my bedroom or office. On my desk here at school I do have a religious-style candle depicting Virginia Woolf as a secular/literary saint, and I admit that I do think of her lifelong struggle to produce profoundly beautiful and insightful art in the face of sometimes debilitating mental illness as genuinely  heroic and inspirational--but the candle is a bit of an ironic joke, the kind of thing English teachers are given as gifts by friends.

I do follow some professional sports on occasion, but the concept of “hero” as applied to elite athletes has always seemed a little shaky to me. Professional athletes often do admirable things, on and off the field, in a heavily scrutinized public forum. I’m inspired by Muhammad Ali’s refusal to submit to the draft, or Tommie Jones and John Carlos protesting American racism at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, or Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem. I admire the courage it took for Michael Sam to come out as gay on the eve of the NFL draft. And as a Yankee fan by birth, of course I believed for a long time that Derek Jeter might well be immortal. But still . . . it seems false to claim any of these guys as my own personal heroes. I’m not denying that they play this role for others. It’s just that I don’t necessarily relate.

There have been literary protagonists who have made a profound impression on me, and who have indeed shaped my development as a person. Among the most significant of these—and this is such a cliché, it’s a little embarrassing to admit—I would have to count Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). I came to Catcher later than many readers, who had the book thrust upon them by a parent or older sibling, usually with the insistence that they “have to” read it, that it will “change your life.” Happily, no one told me the book was going to change my life. I was under the impression, based solely on the title, that it was about baseball.

It was assigned in my senior-year AP English class in high school. I had just started to enjoy reading and analyzing literature in a scholarly context—a development that would have obvious consequences for the course of my life, although I never would have anticipated it at the time. We had read a few books already in that class that had made a strong impact on me; I had never really gotten into English before this year. I wasn’t aware of Catcher’s reputation as a landmark representation of American adolescent disenchantment, but I was a rather disenchanted American adolescent, and when I first encountered Holden Caulfield’s distinctive narrative voice—sarcastic, irreverent, occasionally profane, funny as hell—it blew my mind. I couldn’t believe the book was being assigned in school. I felt like I was encountering a kindred spirit: Holden’s academic record was a lot worse than mine, but his impatience with all the things a high-school kid is “supposed to” be impressed by and interested in really struck a chord with me. It was my first experience of a narrator in a novel who seemed to be speaking to and for me alone, against what I perceived to be the madness and stupidity that was all around me. In an utterly unprecedented event, I ended up staying in on a Friday night and reading the entire novel in one sitting. I’d never even done homework of any kind on a Friday night before.

Holden Caulfield isn’t a classical example of a hero—although he does take a journey through the streets of Manhattan, slowly wandering his way back home on the Upper East Side. His general attitude toward adulthood and mainstream American society is disaffected and cynical—and this negativity was indeed a big part of what appealed to me about the novel, the way it seemed to articulate my own unspoken feelings about the world into which I was coming of age. But there is a kind of “heroic” aspect to Holden, in the way he stubbornly affirms youth and innocence in the face of the seemingly inevitable corruption of adulthood. And he gets beaten up a couple of times over the course of a few days—something else I could, unfortunately, relate to all too well. In one memorable scene, Holden is beaten up by his roommate at his boarding school, a guy named Stradlater, for no good reason at all. Holden refuses to take it back when he calls Stradlater a “moron” (“all morons hate it when you call them a moron”), and he takes a beating. The crazy logic of Holden’s behavior—which sort of “proves” Stradlater is a “moron” by making him get all violent and worked up over Holden calling him one—made sense to me. I could recount way too many such stories, but one time I was skateboarding at the beachfront in the early spring (so it was pretty desolate) with a large crew of associates when a carload of wrestlers from a nearby town drove up and started harassing us. My so-called crew scattered, but I, stupidly, refused to run away. I was skating here, and I’m going to keep skating here, whatever these morons have to say about it. The episode ended badly, with a giant kid named Artie getting out of the car and beating me down, at one point slamming my skateboard against my head. Like Holden, I didn't even try to fight back. My humble protest accomplished very little. And I couldn’t quite explain why I had refused to flee with the rest of them. There was a doomed, futile, stupid pride and protest in my refusal, and I took a serious beating for it. So while some readers are perplexed by some of Holden’s seemingly incoherent, self-destructive behavior, I could kind of see myself in him and his pointless efforts at heroism.

Holden Caulfield is probably closer to an antihero than a traditional hero, and it’s not clear how much the novel ultimately affirms his doomed rebellion. There’s a lot of irony in Salinger’s depiction that I entirely failed to see at the time—which is one reason it’s been so interesting for me to keep teaching this novel in my fiction classes at the University of Illinois when I first started teaching, and in my Coming-of-Age Novel course at Uni. Every time I reread Catcher in the Rye, I view Holden (and my younger self) with a little more distance and critical detachment. But I still also see, and affirm, the aspects of his character that resonated with me as a young man, and I still hold many of those same values today. As a reader of fiction and a filmgoer, I continue to be drawn to antiheroes—lonely, often morally confused outsider figures, or those who operate outside the law or the bounds of conventional society. I admit that I grow bored as a larger-than-life action hero cheats death in scene after scene. There’s no drama, no recognizably human fear of death or personal insecurity, for me to latch onto. And yet, sitting in a theater crowded with people who clearly love this stuff, I realize I am likely in the minority.