re: adaptation and the supposed âpurityâ of the original work itâs complicated right. and ultimately I think that whether classicists like it or not, itâs just the nature of the beast that (a) the texts we study have been and continue to be radically readapted and reinterpreted and we can have strong opinions about which adaptations we like or donât but itâs just the nature of a 2000+ year reception tradition to produce variance, and (b) the texts we study are much more a scholarly construction, and authorial intent far more difficult (and ideologically suspect) to try to recover, than is true of, say, a 19th or 20th century novel. which is to say that itâs one thing to say that Fennellâs Wuthering Heights misunderstands Charlotte Bronteâs novel and something quite different to say that Nolanâs Odyssey misunderstands âHomerâsâ epic, because the latter is responding to another 2500 years of a reception tradition that in some sense is not entirely or even primarily about the Odyssey as a poem in Ancient Greek. this is not to take a stand on either one as an ideological project or whether either is a good film (I am reserving judgment but strongly suspect that neither is) but to say that I think that whatever the Odyssey is on a conceptual level is much less singular and well-defined than what Wuthering Heights is, if that makes sense
basically what Iâm getting at here is that âHomerâ or âthe classicalâ is not a real, tangible, solid thing out there in the world that can only ever be correctly or incorrectly interpreted. itâs an ongoing process of cultural conversation and production and assignment of value judgments that operates across thousands of years of accreted meaning, and the impulse to see an adaptation or interpretation you donât like for ideological or aesthetic reasons and immediately claim that itâs a misinterpretation of the Original Text is a kind of rhetorical dodge
