When Joe Fox refers to that line in You've Got Mail the film is not just wittily referring to another film. The Godfather is more than a movie (or two) -- it's a touchstone. Actually, a bit of the reason Godfather is iconic has to do with that reference. We quote it with a laugh, and it bounces around the echo chamber of our public conversation (this very blog is one of its distant reverbs), and becomes part of our larger cultural vocabulary.
Likewise, those who still remember The Odyssey get a complicated pleasure from that moment when a character in Cheever's novel cries out, "Tie me to the mast, Perimedes," as his boat steams past a particularly appealing scene. Though Cheever was hardly a distinguished student, he grew up in a time and place that still gave the Illiad and Odyssey, along with the Bible, full shrift. He expected that his readers would pick up the reference without any fuss.
Alas, these days kids who suffer through Lattimore's dutiful versions of Homer come out unfazed with eyes glazed. They remember a few salient plot points for the test, and then shake the remnants out of mind like a dog shaking water off his hide. So, who, pray, is going to enjoy Margaret Atwood's little Penelopiad?
Penelope looks at the whole shebang -- the war at Troy and the leisurely wend home -- through the wrong end of the telescope, summarizing the panoply of great deeds in a few offhand phrases. At the time she was stuck in rustic Ithaca without friend or kin, her virtue continually under siege. But the time of her reminiscence is now: she's a long dead spirit still wandering the dreary Elysian fields. She has her memories and reports an occasional (parodic) glimpse, via spiritualist or magician, of our modern world.
Upon reflection, she doesn't mind so much the empty years and the great indescriminate slaughter of the good, the bad, and the ugly suitors. But those twelve maids, her pretty, cheerful little serving girls, strung up on the one rope? For what?
Homer's heroes were warlords and pirates: barbarians. Of course, the fact that one needed in latter days to be a Greek scholar to read him has made the tales the province of an educated, effete elite who don't notice the barbarity, just the heroism.
Perhaps it's better that Homer has dropped out of our cultural consciousness (though it leaves few to appreciate delightful riffs like Atwood's): those piratical virtues do not have much of a place today. Even Michael Corleone is not as cold as Odysseus: he would have got the maids "escort" work at his casino in Vegas.
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