The wink at the end of the episode
I imagine all the settings in Homer’s The Odyssey to look like an episode of the Saturday morning TV show The Secrets of Isis, which I watched when I was around six. The show was set in California and Egypt, nowhere near the Odyssey. Still, it works for me. I crack open my book, pause for the trumpets, and hear the voiceover below. I start to read, but now and then, I stop to say, “Oh, mighty Isis!” I imagine Asia Minor across the islands of the Mediterranean Sea. I imagine Ithica. I imagine the Bronze Age. It all looks like the set of Isis, steeped in the colors of 1970s TV.
I am not Andrea Thomas, the science teacher at Larkspur High School who found an ancient mystical gold amulet, the “Tutmose amulet,” on an archeological dig in Egypt, but I am a sociology professor—who prefers modernist fiction—reading Homer’s The Odyssey with some college students. And like Andrea/Isis, as the assigned leader of this reading group, my job is to break the fourth wall of this book to wink at my class and acknowledge them at pertinent moments in a story. Scroll to the 20’09 mark.
Just as a little modernist note, in many signature 1970s American kid’s programming, like The Secrets of Isis, each episode featured an epilogue in which the main character—in this case, Isis—directly addressed the camera and imparted a moral lesson derived from the episode's events. However, these moral message segments were later deleted from the show's syndication prints. Kind of like how there will be little record of this weekly Odyssey course I am leading. Maybe just these Substack notes.
