Voice and Voices: Homer and the Stewardship of Memory

Abstract

The primary narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which we associate with the voice of the poet, are elaborated and enhanced by a number of other tales, secondary narratives that are in almost every case spoken by one or another of the storyteller's characters. There has been abundant discussion of the content of secondary tales of this thematic kind, especially those of the Iliad, and their relationship to the story proper. I shall use this wealth of secondary narrative as a resource as I probe the mechanisms of memory that underpin a successful oral poet's stewardship - his management - of his repertoire of stories. In the first long section of this paper I shall explore the form in which an oral poet such as Homer stores story material in memory, how he locates it when he needs it, and how, when necessary, he adapts it to render it thematically relevant. The second part of the paper builds on the first. It concerns the Odyssey exclusively. My concern at this point will be to observe how the poet controls the release of information.