Nolan’s Odyssey: You’re Participating in the Wrong Color Controversy

A whole post in which I talk about color, the Odyssey, and Nolan’s film without talking about color, the Odyssey, and Nolan’s film.

Full disclosure: the likelihood that I’ll see Nolan’s Odyssey is rather low. To this day I also haven’t seen “Troy” (I had to Google it—) by Petersen. I could cite some fairly snobbish reasons as to why, but at the end of the day the fact will remain that my taste is rather idiosyncratic: my favorite adaptation, after all, is the adaptation for a “radio program” (for the young ones: that’s what we used to call high-production podcasts) by the BBC, done by Armitage in 2004. Either way, I’ve noticed that the online debate around Nolan’s Odyssey focuses mainly on the skin color of the actress playing Helen. If I understand correctly, the sides competing for attention in this story are “conservative” icons who discovered the Odyssey yesterday but realized they could generate online traffic with their half-baked opinions on the subject, on one hand, and the film’s progressive PR machine, who realized they could get two birds with one actress, on the other: preaching to the general public and generating buzz around the film. If so, I apologize in advance. It seems to me that you are an unwilling participants in the wrong color controversy.

The right color controversy, for your information, began with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s opinion that the Greeks didn’t see colors particularly well. That said, the controversy really gained momentum with the publication of a book by one William Gladstone in 1858, Studies on Homer, volume three. The man was in the middle of one of the most eventful political careers in the history of British politics, served the most terms as Prime Minister, and yet still found time for philological research that in many respects has not lost its freshness to this day. I don’t want to compare to today’s politicians, but where we are, if they publish a book on international relations or something of that sort they’re regarded as great scholars. Fine. Either way, the Gladstone–Goethe thesis was fairly basic, and it started a debate that continues to this day.

According to Gladstone, the Greeks lacked the ability to perceive colors like green, orange, and blue. From the meticulous analysis Gladstone performed on the appearances of colors in all the Homeric literature available to us, he discovered that, in general, the colors he called prismatic—Gladstone mentions that British children learned colors by observing the colors produced by the prism —do not receive from Homer the same level of distinction and precision they receive, for example, in the English of his own time. Careful analysis of the evidence led him to the claim that the Greeks in general, and Homer in particular, classified colors differently from how his British contemporary classified them. According to him, Homer classified colors especially around the dark–light axis, with the prismatic colors receiving a sparser vocabulary than the one we possess. Furthermore, Homer—and this is perhaps slightly less surprising—classified his colors mainly around things like copper and honey, in contrast to the somewhat more abstract manner we have at our disposal for classifying colors.

(Odysseus in the Underworld, the National Library in Paris)

Either way, it turns out, for instance, that when Gladstone considers whether Homer attributes color to human beings (excluding, roughly, hair color), his answer, surprisingly, is negative. No, Gladstone claims. With a slight qualification, Gladstone advances the following argument: whereas in the northern countries (like Britain) it is customary to mark beauty by emphasizing a particular color (rosy cheeks, blue blood, etc.) that stands out against the piglet-pink background (I added that epithet myself, sorry) of northern European skin, in the Mediterranean belt people tend to have olive-colored skin, against which the prismatic colors stand out less. This statement is also true for those with the mud-brown skin color of Africa, but what’s interesting is that the skin color of the Mediterranean belt allows for something that, in his opinion, is less possible further north or further south: it allows the use of dark and light as a contrast to the olive that marks beauty more frequently. Thus, for example, when Athena restores Odysseus’s beauty to him, Homer uses the expression ἂψ δὲ μελαγχροιὴς γένετο (roughly: and his skin returned to its darkness). The meaning, Gladstone claims, is not that his skin became mud-brown or black, but simply that his skin color returned to its healthy tan. Of course, one might add: the statement that a certain lady is “white-armed” (λευκώλενος) does not necessarily indicate that her skin color is that of someone from a place that has never seen sunlight, but only that in some way her skin gleams relative to the skin color common in the region.

Trivial matters like human beauty aside, Gladstone’s radical argument—that people in different times and perhaps in different cultures see different colors—received a stormy discussion in the 19th century. Gladstone’s claim is radical because its grounding in successful Homeric philology in effect served, until the mid-20th century, as an example for the popular but mistaken claim that our language or our conceptual system exclusively conditions even our perception down to its foundations. This claim, in its strong variation, was in fact refuted in the excellent 1969 study by Berlin and Kay, Basic Color Terms. Berlin and Kay showed not only that there is good basis for thinking there are universal psychological colors, but that a structural study of the development of human languages suggests there are quasi-evolutionary reasons why natural languages in fact develop a vocabulary for the ‘precision’ of colors, even basic colors, along a rather long timeline.

That said, Berlin and Kay’s erudition was not limited to linguistic and psychological studies. In a fascinating appendix they give a historical survey—beginning, broadly, with Gladstone—of the people who surveyed this field. The one who systematized and generalized Gladstone’s argument that language may condition the capacity of our perception, and that it may develop as language develops, was Lazarus Geiger (nephew of—). As for the serious critique of Lazarus [Geiger] and Gladstone, Berlin and Kay point specifically in the direction of one Grant Allen, and they note one argument of his in particular:

According to Allen, it may very well be that the language of the ancients was somewhat limited in its color-designating capacities precisely because the things in their world on which they focused their attention—natural things—had hues too varied for an abstract designation of color to capture how they looked without seriously distorting what they saw. In other words, it may very well be that precisely because their perception was occupied with fine distinctions about things that concern us less (the color of a stream on a cloudy day beside a grove, for instance), while we spend most of our time dealing with objects somewhat simpler in respect of their colors, that we think more abstract designations of color are a kind of achievement of language—when they may in fact be a kind of testimony to the sort of things we deal with in our world, which are not so complex in respect of the hues they contain.

Whatever the relation between language and perception may be, it seems it is not as simple as the early participants in the color controversy assumed. It seems that language, too, in the case of colors as well, may influence our perception. The view that language alone dictates color has indeed been refuted, but reflection on what color is, on how history nonetheless plays a role in the understanding of color, on what the political and social dimensions of color are, and many other questions continue to occupy philosophers and scholars. One question I’m fairly sure will die out in a few months is the skin color of the actress who’s supposed to play Helen in some Hollywood film—even if, theoretically, one could enlist to her cause a 19th-century British politician who already understood that the Greeks’ conception of beauty-and-color doesn’t exactly match our own.