Sensing weakness, apex poster Joyce Carol Oates enters The Odyssey discourse

Mere days after Emily Wilson, the Odyssey expert whose 2017 translation served as inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s film version, tore the blockbuster a new one in the London Review Of Books, another literary giant smelled blood in the water. Joyce Carol Oates—author, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and apex social media poster—sniffed out weakness and struck without mercy. Oates, who has remained one of the most prolific and high-profile users of X, using the platform in part to rail against its owner Elon Musk, entered the Odyssey discourse (perhaps surprisingly) on the side of The Odyssey.

Wilson wasn’t at all a fan of Nolan’s take, explaining that “the writing is abysmal,” it “lacks many of the elements that make the poem great,” and—if all that wasn’t bad enough—”there are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.” Her take could be summed up with this: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” There’s some backhanded charity at the end of her review, but it’s almost entirely a takedown, penned by someone extremely close to the source material. Yet closeness to the source material does not inherently mean your critique is sound, especially for a literary figure as pugnacious as Oates. Describing Wilson’s review as speaking “in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers,” Oates torched the LRB piece like it was the home of a Trojan non-combatant. “Her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates writes of Wilson’s piece, while referring mainly to the translator as “this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film.”