Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey opens with an uncomfortable scene on the corporeal reality of the most famous military ruse in the History of war: the Trojan Horse. The story goes that the Achaeans hid in a hollow wooden horse for a surprise attack on the Trojans, thus winning the war. The real experience of being trapped for hours, however, was gruesome. The brilliance of this stratagem is destabilised when attention shifts to the bodily experience and the grim physical implications for those enclosed within the horse.
Shimmering narratives of superhuman heroism or incomparable beauty often distract readers from the fact that the actions described are, in fact, destructive. This article discusses how literary speech can instead question the pleasure of such narratives and provide tools to help people come to grips with difficult realisations. This is because narratives of heroism can be connected to violence, since “[t]he violence of an action can be veiled as a heroic deed” (https://www.compendium-heroicum.de/lemma/violence-and-heroism/).
In particular, this article compares modern rewrites of Classical texts, such as the Iliad, to the cognitive process of complying with health-related text warnings, that is, medically informed discourse aimed at raising awareness to protect public health. Namely, it suggests co-examining such rewrites with the World Health Organisation’s campaign to impose mandatory labelling on tobacco products. This comparison aims to explore how literary speech can interrupt harmful automatic behaviours by drawing on injury-prevention tactics in public health.
The risks for readers to adhere to the heroization process are compared to smoking in the sense that people derive pleasure from it and often do not question its impact on them, even though they are informed of its connection to possible detrimental effects. Similarly, to the risks of the heroization process in narratives, a large portion of the population adheres to smoking, and the “prevalence of smoking is […] not getting reduced to a desirable extent”, despite the public being aware “that this dangerous addiction is a life-threatening deal” (10.7759/cureus.46532).
Against this background, more than aiming to visualise the effect of deriving pleasure from identifying with a desired image of either a smoker or a glorious fighter, this comparison discusses how this process can be disrupted. The premise for this co-examination is that although these practices are, of course, vastly different, the discourse that attempts to tackle them shares some key similarities.
To begin with, by looking at the World Health Organisation’s campaign, it seems that this is achieved in two ways: by bringing closer the long-term consequences and by attempting to connect the information with the painful effects on the mind and the body. On the one hand, the long-term effects are stated by the simple phrase “smoking kills” on the cigarette boxes. On the other hand, according to a directive by WHO, the text is complemented by graphic corporeal images, since: “[p]ictorial health warnings that include graphic, fear-arousing information […] detract from the overall attractiveness of tobacco packaging.” (https://www.who.int/europe/activities/encouraging-health-warnings-on-tobacco-packaging)
Norma Jean Baker of Troy (2019), a play by Anne Carson in which the main character merges Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy, employs similar stratagems to explore how language can conceal or expose violence. Carson in this play comments on the Iliad by focusing on Helen, the legendary casus belli of the Trojan War. She compares her to Marilyn Monroe to showcase the hidden violence within great narratives, comparing the glory of the Iliad to the allure of old Hollywood. These stories not only share the audience’s fascination with their glossy narratives, but also the fact that they are completely false:
“like a cloud in the shape of a woman, or a golden Hollywood idol in place of a mousy-haired pin-up girl from Los Angeles” (NJBT 5).
In light of this, Carson points to the harsh reality lurking behind the glossy image. Turning to the toolset for destabilising dominant narratives, Carson, firstly, employs Euripides’s version of Helen’s myth. According to this ancient retelling she, surprisingly, never went to Troy. The gods created a cloud woman who followed Paris to Troy, but more importantly, the real woman was sent to Egypt, desperately fighting off the king who wanted to marry her. Carson then compares this version of reality to the shocking difference between Marilyn’s shiny persona and the bleak reality of a woman facing such psychological pressure that led her to addiction. By conflating these stories, Carson challenges the epic narrative of the ideal of beauty, which in Helen’s case justified a ten-year war. More specifically, she does so by showing the aftermath of the two stories. Helen was defamed and brutalised by war, while Marilyn died from a fatal overdose.
Secondly, Carson further destabilises the epic discourse by focusing on the effects on minds and bodies. For example, in a similarly disarming tone to the phrasing “smoking kills”, the result of the Trojan War is described as “[a] thousand bloody T-shirts left on the sand.” (NJBT 3). More specifically, she points to the physical presence of wounds and blood, as powerful indicators of harm that cannot be overlooked:
[…] ancient Greek ἀρπάζειν […] comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum, and gives us English rapture and rape – words stained with the early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities […] (NJBT 13).
Carson’s strategy thus resembles the cognitive mechanism employed by strong textual health warnings. Tobacco warnings interrupt habitual consumption by forcing the smoker to imagine future bodily consequences, while the pictures aim to visualise these harmful effects on the body. Likewise, the conflation of time within literary narratives as well as the metaphorical connection of abstract notions such as “war” with the visually accessible “wounds” can interrupt culturally inherited narratives and can force readers to imagine bodily consequences that dominant narratives suppress.
Therefore, rewrites that question stories about war and violence can be comparable to the labelling’s attempt to disrupt reaching for a cigarette box, in that they both seek to interrupt automatic behaviour. Furthermore, looking at the mechanisms through which these discourses implement their objective to disrupt automatic behaviour can help elucidate the ways in which literary speech can have real effects on human behaviour. That is, this comparison plausibly suggests that literary rewrites might succeed in interrupting the predicted behavioural patterns, on the premise that they employ cognitive stratagems that have proven to be effective in the context of medically informed speech. In doing so, it then provides a new way in which co-examining literary and medical discourse can shed light in the intricacies of both.
Works Cited
Brink, Cornelia & Olmo Gölz. Violence and Heroism. https://www.compendium-heroicum.de/lemma/violence-and-heroism/. Accessed 1 Aug. 2026.
Carson, Anne. Norma Jean Baker of Troy. Oberon Books Ltd, 2019.
“Encouraging Health Warnings on Tobacco Packaging.” World Health Organisation, World Health Organisation, https://www.who.int/europe/activities/encouraging-health-warnings-on-tobacco-packaging. Accessed 31st July 2026.
Varghese, Jerin, and Pramita Muntode Gharde. “A Comprehensive Review on the Impacts of Smoking on the Health of an Individual.” Cureus vol. 15,10 e46532. 5 Oct. 2023. PubMed Central, doi:10.7759/cureus.46532. Accessed 1st August 2026.
Image by: Riccardo Farinazzo, Source: Unsplash
