Stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end have a temporal framework. The story of the Odyssey is built on a timeline of forty days, but the framework expands to include the ten years of Odysseus’ wanderings, the twenty years of the Trojan war, and also contracts into a hundred smaller stories - tales of the war, Odysseus’ travels and other characters lives, and also lies - products of Odysseus’ imagination and strategy. As Professor Struck noted, a story may begin with an object such as the scar or a bow, digress into another narrative and then cycle back through time to the main narrative thread. Time contracts and expands in Homer just as it contracts and expands within our consciousness.
Professor Struck comments that the Odyssey is a story that doesn’t want to end. In many ways it expands endlessly, circling back on itself. The arc of the story is always toward home and peace. Birth, suffering, struggle, and cessation of struggle - the cycle of human life. Odysseus’ peaceful life, a successful ruler, loving husband and father is interrupted by war, by conflicts among the gods and men, yet from the beginning the reader knows that Odysseus -”the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course” will return home, will live to a peaceful old age - will complete the human cycle successfully. Odysseus is the most human of heroes. We need Odysseus to be okay in the end, because his struggle is so much like our own.
Within the forty days of the Odyssey’s timeline Homer retells the cycle repeatedly. Sometimes in years as in Eumaeus’s tale. Sometimes within the arc of a single day in Book 22, the slaughter of the suitors, or within the span of an hour in Book 23 in Penelope’s final recognition. Or in just a few brief lines, when all of the epic story is compressed into the details of the life of Odysseus’ dog Argos. In Homer time often shrinks into the details and then explodes into the eternal.
Does Homer’s temporal framework have significance for the making of myth? Yes, in that it affirms the universals of human experience. But there is more to consider. The Odyssey is - by common agreement, over a vast period history - one of the greatest works of the human imagination. It is impossible to fit it into Burkert and Struck’s definition of myth as a traditional tale told with secondary partial reference to something of collective importance and “told by someone for some reason.” Homer burst through those boundaries. The Odyssey is simply so much more than just a myth. So much more than a “secondary partial reference to something of collective importance.”
In the six lines below, as Odysseus and Eumaeus settle in for the night, Homer tells us everything I believe we will ever actually know about why people tell each other stories:
We two will keep to shelter here, eat and drink
and take some joy in each other’s heartbreaking sorrows,
sharing each other’s memories. Over the years, you know,
a man finds solace even in old sorrows, true, a man
who’s weathered many blows and wandered many miles.
My own story? This will answer all your questions …
Book 17 Eumaeus Lines 447 - 452
