“Bards within Bards”

For a poem that was first put into writing almost three thousand years ago—and performed orally for a couple hundred years prior to that—The Odyssey features a number of surprisingly modern aspects. The domestic drama at the heart of the story is one example: Telemachus’s heavily fraught coming of age, the question of Penelope’s devoted or foolhardy faithfulness to her departed husband, and a hero who spends so much time weeping because he just wants to go home and be with his family (even giving up eternal youth in the company of Calypso to do so). Although the family dynamics, gender roles, and many details of life in Ancient Greece are foreign to us, the fundamental story of simply trying to make it back home amid a host of obstacles is universal, and this “domestic” framework at the core of the story has a lot to do with its enduring appeal.

The tightly structured and rather complex plotting of the story is another seemingly “modern” feature of the poem: the “gods’ eye view” with which it opens, allowing us to place both Odysseus and Telemachus in context as the story begins, and the dramatic structure of the Telemachiad, ending with a classic cliffhanger, as the suitors head out to ambush an unsuspecting Telemachus. The narrative structure itself is also rather complex, for a poem that was originally delivered orally—the Greek audience was clearly sophisticated when it came to following a multilayered narrative. We open with Telemachus in Ithaca and on his travels, in the “present tense” of the story, and then cut back to Odysseus being freed from Calypso’s island at around the same time (both in response to the plans established in the opening council of the gods), from which point the action moves forward until the two strands come together in the last twelve books of the poem. Within this forward-moving present-tense narrative, we have both flashbacks and prophecies, or literal foreshadowing of the story to come, and a number of references to other stories of other heroes. And we have a whole bunch of embedded narratives within this main story. Homer’s story is full of other people telling stories, their own or stories of myth and legend. Reading The Odyssey is like reading a bunch of different books all at once.

How many times has Agamemnon’s story come up so far? Zeus mentions it early in book 1, during the council of the gods (1.34-44), and then Athena mentions it to Telemachus later in the same book (1.298-300), trying to get him to see himself as a potential Orestes, avenger of his wronged father. And then Nestor brings it up again in book 3 (302-12), just in case Telemachus still doesn’t get it. Menelaus tells it yet again, this time in greater detail, within his own frame narrative in which he is ostensibly answering Telemachus’s question about his father—he takes his sweet time answering the question, going into the whole story of being stranded down in Egypt, getting the tip about how to pin down Proteus and make him tell the truth, which is how he first learns what happened to his brother (Agamemnon), and which also yields some limited information on Odysseus, which he finally shares when he gets to the point at long last. This isn’t even an exhaustive list, as Agamemnon tells his own story to Odysseus in book 11, when his “ghost” warns Odysseus to be careful when homecoming after a long journey.

So partly this is to drive home the potential parallels between Odysseus’s story of being taken advantage of during an absence from home and that of Agamemnon and Orestes—the story is designed to be an inspiration for Telemachus, to rouse him to heroic action on the model of Orestes. But it also nicely illustrates just how many little stories are buried throughout this big story.

Remember that the whole thing is ostensibly narrated by “Homer,” a blind bard, as a written rendition of an oral narrative. Within this wide frame, we also get a number of other bards telling stories—at the court of Menelaus, for example, or Demodocus the famous blind bard (a figure for Homer himself in his own poem?) repeatedly telling stories in Alcinous’s palace. This self-reflexive quality also strikes me as rather postmodern—we not only have frame narratives, but our attention is drawn to the very medium we’re currently consuming, when we have the blind bard Homer portraying another blind bard doing the things bards did: entertaining guests of honor with epic stories.

This story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure reaches its most extreme and dizzying point when Odysseus himself takes over the bardic duties (after another pretty “meta” moment, when Odysseus requests that Demodocus tell the story of the Trojan Horse, in which he himself features prominently—and then breaks down crying under the strong emotions it, rather predictably, evokes in him). Alcinous invites him to self-narrate—“But come now, tell me / about your wanderings” (8.571-72)—but this is more than simply saying, “Identify yourself, introduce yourself.” He wants the story, and Odysseus delivers, narrating the next four books of the poem and keeping the Phaeacian court up all night listening to him. This structure was clear throughout the “Wanderings of Odysseus” presentations: the present-tense story of Odysseus trying to make it back from Calypso’s island is interrupted for a long interlude in which first Demodocus tells a few epic stories from the Trojan campaigns (already becoming legendary, we can see), and then Odysseus narrates everything that happened to him since the end of the war, for our benefit as well as that of Alcinous and his court.

In part, this gives the “Wanderings” a personal, lyrical quality—Odysseus laments his own bad fortune and establishes his identity as the “long-suffering man of sorrows.” He begins by praising the skills of the bard who preceded him, but Homer gives Odysseus himself the previously unheard epithet “the lord of lies” (9.1), which is translated by Fagles as “the great teller of tales.” It is clear from the context that this guy can tell a good story, and his audience seems spellbound as he delves into these fantastical stories of mythic monsters and a visit to the Underworld. He tells of the Cyclops, and of the adventure on Circe’s island, before launching into what must have been a pretty intense first-person tale, his extremely rare experiences in the Kingdom of the Dead (which isn’t typically visited by living mortals, for obvious reasons). Here’s where the stories-within-stories dynamic starts to induce vertigo, or to evoke the image of infinitely receding mirrors: Odysseus’s story entails him recounting in detail the stories told to him by various of the ghosts that emerge from the Underworld, and at times he tells his story to them. Remember that all of this is being told by Odysseus himself to Alcinous. And Homer is telling us about Odysseus telling Alcinous about Agamemnon telling him about what happened with Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Are you losing track of all the internal quotation marks this would require? And these narratives in the Kingdom of the Dead don’t only reflect past events—we also get a forward-looking prophetic narrative from Tiresias (as reported by Odysseus to Alcinous via Homer), which basically telegraphs the end of the story, and Agamemnon’s story is not yet complete, as Orestes has not yet had his revenge at the time of this telling (although he has by the time of the present action of the poem).

It’s easy to forget that Odysseus is narrating these sections—the frame begins to recede, and we get lost in the story itself. But Homer reminds us of the frame, doesn’t let us lose sight of the story he’s telling—that of Odysseus telling his story to Alcinous. At one point in his exhaustive (and somewhat exhausting) litany of encounters with ghosts, Odysseus seems to sense that his audience might be getting bored. He pauses, and we’re snapped back to the present tense. “There is a time for many tales, but also / a time for sleep,” Odysseus avers (11.380-81). He stops the story, and the audience is “silent, spellbound, / listening in the shadowy hall” (11.334-35). Alcinous breaks the silence with a spirited praise of Odysseus, as a man and a storyteller, promising to transport him safely to Ithaca. But he’s not off the hook just yet. Although our hero has given a pretty strong hint that he’s tired and wants to go to bed, the king insists that he keep talking—“The night is long; / it is not time to sleep yet. Tell me more / Amazing deeds! I would keep listening / until bright daybreak, if you kept on telling / the dangers you have passed" (11.422-25). So after snapping us briefly back into the frame, Odysseus dutifully resumes his story, narrating the rest of book 11 and all of book 12. At the end of book 12, he sounds exhausted and even a little irritable, having brought them (and us) up to the point where he arrives on Calypso’s island: “Why should I tell / the story that I told you and your wife / yesterday in your house? It is annoying, / repeating tales that have been told before” (450-54). Just as in The Odyssey as a whole, Odysseus’s narrative to the Phaeacians is fragmented in structure.

While The Odyssey does feature a good deal of action and, by the end, its share of bloodletting, much of it simply depicts people sitting around telling stories. We get a picture of Ancient Greek culture where such stories were valued—there’s a strong sense of formality to the storytelling, whether it’s a bard performing a narrative to music or an honored guest being asked to tell “the whole story.” And in addition to his noted exploits in battle and his great tactical wits, it’s worth noting that our hero is something of a bard himself, a “great teller of stories” (which, as Wilson’s translation reminds us, is a skill that is very close to telling lies). Maybe this is why Homer likes him so much.