The Classics Aren’t Dead, or Irrelevant

The classics are often perceived as monolithic — all white, all male, all dead. Nothing could be more wrong. Especially when taught in the classroom, accompanied by new material that makes them part of the contemporary scene, many classic tales showcase ethnic and gender diversity, not to say a diversity of languages and of media beyond print.

The argument could be made using any number of examples. I’ll stick to the two most obvious and frequently re-imagined classics: "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and the "Odyssey."

"Gilgamesh," the oldest literary work on record, began as a cycle of poems written in Sumerian, which were then translated into the Babylonian cuneiform script around 1200 BCE, and rediscovered in that language in the 19th century. It tells the story of two friends, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, going off to do battle with the monster Humbaba, and the mortal terror that befalls both, the one who survives as well as the one who dies.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the story can also be read through the eyes of the monster. Yusef Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, in his adaptation, zeroes in on this non-human creature as a “slave” to the gods, serving those eternally indifferent to his welfare. Humbaba doesn’t quite become African-American in Komunyakaa’s hands, but he does become a competing and compelling center of interest, pulling the story away from Gilgamesh, and adding a new layer of narrative.

Komunyakaa’s play is a great teaching companion for the “original” Gilgamesh (if such a thing ever existed), an integral part of the collective and sometimes contradictory genesis of this classic. Circulating in translation since 2750 BCE, and coming down to us in fragments of clay tablets, Gilgamesh has always depended on the input of scribes and collators and translators, accommodating diverse opinion from the very first. A parody of Tablet VIII — called the “Gilgamesh Letter” — was popular among schoolchildren in the first millennium BCE. The evolution of this story is ongoing, perhaps even picking up steam in the 21st-century classroom.

The "Odyssey" — historically performed by rhapsodes, itinerants who selected and arranged the material traveling from town to town — shows much the same tendency towards competing centers of interests. The ancient Greek epic is by no means the sole property of its eponymous hero, who wanders the seas for 10 years after the Trojan War before coming home to the island of Ithaca.

Margaret Atwood’s "The Penelopiad" shifts the focus away from Odysseus, to put his long-suffering wife, Penelope, and others of less consequence into the foreground. The novella is divided between Penelope’s monologues and the song and dance of her twelve maids, as they tell the story in alternating chapters.

The plight of the maids — who, in Book 22, are forced to clean up the carnage of the slain suitors (who courted Penelope in Odysseus's absence), and are then killed for having slept with the now-dead men — becomes its own visually stunning and unforgettable story in Atwood's hands. This story of scapegoated women was adapted for the stage, as well, in venues ranging from the Royal Shakespeare Company in London to La Mama in Melbourne, Australia.

Other stagings and rewritings will no doubt follow. Classics are classics because we aren’t done with them yet. Crowd-sourcing their meanings is what keeps them interesting and energized. Controversy and diversity have been their lifeblood: College curriculum should take full advantage of that fact.

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