Patrick J. Deneen’s ‘American Odyssey‘ reviewed in Commonweal
What’s the point of Great Books? There’s never been a straight answer. Leo Strauss argues that they offer an opportunity for “listening to the conversation among the greatest minds” of history, transmitting timeless wisdom to future generations. Others—including Socrates in Plato’s Republic as well as today’s critics of Eurocentric canons—might strip texts like Homer’s Iliad of the very title of “great book.” In their view, such works glorify violent misdeeds and propagate pernicious values. Some of today’s leading champions of liberal education, such as Purdue’s Melinda Zook, prefer the term “transformative texts” for the books that have changed the world and can still change their readers.
Patrick Deneen’s American Odyssey takes a somewhat different approach to one of the indisputable monuments of the Greco-Roman tradition, Homer’s Odyssey. Here, Odysseus’s epic journey isn’t an opportunity for readers’ self-transformation or even a vehicle for universal insights. Instead, Deneen takes the Odyssey as a sort of mirror for twenty-first-century readers in the United States. They—like Odysseus—are driven by two competing drives: a need for novel adventure and a persistent longing for home. “No ancient story,” Deneen writes, “is as well-matched to our American souls as the Odyssey.”
In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie adaptation of the Odyssey, this is a good time to reconsider what we’re supposed to get out of great books like Homer’s epic. Do we see our modern American selves reflected in the duplicitous king of Ithaca? Should we even want to? Deneen thinks we should, and he urges us to “gain deeper self-understanding” by studying the “honorary Americans” who populate Homer’s story. Invitations to return to the richness of Homeric poetry are always welcome, but the thesis of Deneen’s book—that there is something particularly American about a three-thousand-year-old poem—risks reducing Homer’s boundless, wine-dark sea to a can of Coke.
Deneen’s argument begins not with Homer but with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. For today’s readers, this nineteenth-century sociological study is best known for its praise of American “associations” and its anxiety about the “tyranny of the majority,” the psychological pressure to conform to prevailing opinion. From among the many topics Tocqueville’s great survey covers, American Odyssey focuses on his assessment of our “national inability to rest satisfied in one’s achievements.” Even though Democracy in America was published nearly two hundred years ago, Deneen argues that its diagnosis of our agitated “restlessness” remains a “central feature of the American character.”
