What if the fallen statue in Percy Shelley’s killer sonnet “Ozymandias” is a vampire? And if so, what is it a vampire of?
This is the question that sprang fresh into my mind as I listened, rapt, to Piya Pal Lapinski lecture on “The Vampire Isles of Greece: Byron, Revenants, and Archaeology in the Ottoman Mediterranean” at the International Association of Byron Societies Conference here at Keele University in the UK. (It’s been a great week!) It’s from Piya that I first learned to distinguish revenants from vampires (crucial to my next novel!), and her lecture wove a brilliant web of connections among Byron, the atmosphere and fact of the Mediterranean ruin, and the figure of the revenant or vampire – a network of hauntings that is still haunting me (in a good way.) There is nothing like a great conference for sparking conversations and friendships and just straight-up teaching you things and excavating something unexpected from your thoughts.
As I listened and scribbled notes, “Ozymandias” started up again in my head. Of course. He is undead. With that Elvis sneer (“wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”) and entitlement that both is and is not ineffectual (he’s fallen, silent, half-buried in the sand, but his words rise up into the speaker’s living mind and mouth, and thus into ours, overtaking us, me and you, right now, dead and alive because we are alive), he’s a radioactive presence glowing right through the bars of his 14-line cage in a way only the vampire, or revenant, can be. I thought about my first literary home (ha!), the great haunted house of American and specifically Southern literature, from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Stephen King’s The Shining (which IS a great American novel, much better than Kubrick’s film) and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” And then I thought about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.
Of the many pieces on this film I’ve read (of which I recommend Matthew d’Ancona‘s and Daniel Mendelsohn’s), none of them has quite tackled the question that I’ve been pondering since I sat, openmouthed, in Curzon Bloomsbury last Saturday, at the sheer might of the images and sounds coming at me: what’s the deal with the American accents? And what if there is more to them than just the inevitable result of getting big stars to get your movie made? Because the more I think about it, as my country continues to pursue the Fibonacci-spiraling folly of an illegal war and as I write and think about poets and prophets (especially women prophets), I keep thinking about a line repeated just often enough by the film’s characters and hero to make it significant: “the people from over the sea.”
[If you haven’t seen “The Odyssey,” stop reading here and come back later. Otherwise, carry on.]
Babylon, Mammon, Caesar, Inferno, the Athenians matter-of-factly informing the Melians that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” Odysseus (in Nolan’s rendering) ordering his men to leave the fallen behind – these are all faces of the same war of all against all into which human society is always threatening to collapse. Homo homini lupus. Yet in the words of a female prophet I know, “Babylon is not our home.” Fear, greed, the love of money which is the root of all evil – these are the forces, inside and outside our hearts, that send us into exile from the state of curiosity about and connection to other beings in which we can dwell as natives, if we intend to – and as I believe we were meant to. Those are the forces that transform us into Ozymandian vampires of the past (and present) upon the future. That transform us into raiders dropping, stealthily, from the belly of a wooden horse (which is, in Nolan’s rendering, “in the sand / Half sunk,” as Ozymandias is.) That transform us into the people from over the sea, that we all claim to fear and never want to be, but that – in classical dramatic fashion – we recognize, if we are lucky, as being that which we already are. And to recognize our real selves, we have art. O art, make haste to help us.
This is what fills the sails of Nolan’s film for me: in 2026, when Odysseus, polytropos, man of many twists and turnings, recognizes the worst turnings of his own heart and reviews every bloody deed of the last twenty years, slowly coming unhidden from himself and from the wife he is both eager and ashamed to face, he blurts, in the tone of a confession, “We are the people from over the sea.” This powerful self-recognition of a warrior that war has made him an exile from himself, a stranger to himself and his wife and son and home — these words are delivered in an American voice. It is a prophecy. It is a challenge. And one that we need to hear, right now. Having been so immersed in the brutality of war on bodies and minds for the last three hours (the scenes of the Trojan Horse interior parallel Nolan’s “Dunkirk” to brilliant, harrowing effect), we are already perhaps being inhabited by that idea, already ready for it. Lay down the sword and shield. Study war no more. Consider what is an actually appropriate use of knowledge and power. When Odysseus and Penelope leave the kingdom to Telemachus and sail away into self-exiled freedom, this is not only every GenZ real estate fantasy come true but an appropriate response to that recognition. They heard the voice. They listened. We are the people from over the sea. And that is not the people we want to be.
In 1812, a 68-year-old writer and teacher and devout Protestant Dissenter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, already experienced in critique of the English state, published an epic poem called Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Prophecy. It warns, essentially, that if England continues its overseas wars (especially with the support of the Church of England, the state religion), it will set the country on a path that will leave London (for example), a literal ruin, wandered through by curious tourists. Especially Americans, to whom, in the poem, the spirit of innovation and freedom may pass: “Ardent, the Genius fans the noble strife,” the poem ends, “And pours through feeble souls a higher life, / Shouts to the mingled tribes from sea to sea, / And swears–Thy world, Columbus, shall be free.” Barbauld got trolled (most infamously by a male journalist half her age) for being a 68-yo woman, a little old lady schoolteacher and children’s writer, warning the country she loved that war was taking them down the path of literal ruin, just as they are visiting ruin on other places (she would have known Marlowe’s description in Doctor Faustus of Helen of Troy as “the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”) But this is what the prophet does: says what people do not want to hear. Sometimes directly, sometimes less so.
Prophecy, cue, thought-provocation, direction: they come in many forms inside and outside ourselves, including through art, which retells stories to help humans deal with all the things about ourselves and our world we can’t understand. In the Gospel of Matthew, a famously riddling teacher, scratching his only written words in the sand with a stick to be blown away unseen – the same sand of time and ruin that will bury all our Ozymandian works of empire — reminds us, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Maybe we can still hear the prophecy of a very old story in American voices as we need to hear it, right now.