Give Us More-dyssey
Sondheim and Homer's Odyssey: bards and balladeers
Someone tell the story… Someone sing the song…
Throughout Assassins, the Balladeer takes the lives of presidential killers and fixes them in song. John Wilkes Booth gets a ballad. So do Leon Czolgosz and Charles Guiteau. Events that might sprawl messily across history are given verses and refrains, beginnings and ends.
The Balladeer’s job is an old one.
As Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens, the bard Phemius (Travis Scott) stands atop a table at Ithaca’s royal palace, surrounded by the heaving mass of Penelope’s suitors. He pounds his staff on the table and cries out:
A face... A fleet... A war... A man... A thought... A trick... A trick to break the walls of Troy... and burn it screaming to the ground!
For thousands of years, we’ve turned to these kinds of figures to make the world around us legible — to mold recent, chaotic, even violent history into a shape we can make sense of. And, with one eye (cyclops-like) toward Sondheim’s work, it’s a tradition worth looking at more closely…
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Because legibility is not the same thing as neutrality.
Phemius does not offer a sober accounting of the Trojan War. His is a language of montage: face, fleet, war, man, trick. He compresses vast armies and ten grinding years into a handful of images, chosen for their force. Before we meet Odysseus the man, we encounter Odysseus the myth, the legend.
The Balladeer in Assassins performs a similar act of compression. His title suggests impartiality, but he is anything but neutral. Booth wants Lincoln’s murder understood as a consequential political act; the Balladeer strips away the grand justification and supplies a rather less flattering verdict.
But traitors just get jeers and boos,
Not visits to their graves.
While Lincoln, who got mixed reviews,
Because of you, John,
Now gets only raves.
Assassins understands that any act, any event, is not enough. Immortality requires form: a story that can be repeated, a song that can pass from voice to voice. And throughout history, balladeers and bards have held the power to provide it.
Homer’s Odyssey is constructed around such acts.