Para-Narratives in the Odyssey: Stories in the Frame by Maureen Alden (review)

This book is a companion to Alden's Homer Beside Himself: Para-Narratives in the Iliad (Oxford 2000). Like the earlier study, it aims to show how "subsidiary narratives … explore and interpret the concerns of the primary narrative" (Preface). The term "para-narrative" comprises mythological exempla narrated by characters, "parallel situations" narrated by the poet, and narratives of "events prior to, or independent of, the main plot" narrated by either the poet or the characters (6). Following the introduction, the first and last chapters are devoted to para-narratives related to specific themes (2, "Para-Narratives of Return"; 9, "The First Person: Para-Narratives of Trial and Pity"), and the other chapters focus on specific characters or stories, including the Oresteia (3), the members of the Odysseus family (4–6), Demodocus (7), and the Cyclops (8). After the chapters, which range in length from 22 to 60 pages, there are seven tables, a bibliography of more than forty pages, a subject index, and an index locorum.

The book makes many stimulating points about how various inset stories shape the narrative of the Odyssey for both the internal and external audiences, and it discusses a truly impressive quantity of both primary and secondary sources in support of these claims. However, the scope of the supporting evidence is both a strength and a weakness: interpretive points often get buried by the sheer quantity of evidence being presented. A reader who is familiar with the Odyssey will find much of use in this volume. Anyone who needs more guidance or who is new to the field of Homeric studies may become lost or overwhelmed, and those expecting a sustained argument as the main organizational principle of the book will not really find one.

Both the introduction and the organization of the book cast it more as a presentation of a body of data than as an interpretation or synthesis of that data, and readers who take the book on those terms will learn a great deal from it. The introduction describes the main thrust of the book in terms that are sufficiently general that it is hard to see how anyone would dispute them: the book "seeks to examine their [para-narratives'] relationship to the main narrative and to their immediate context. They take a variety of forms and serve a variety of purposes, but all relate to their context in some way … They may be understood differently by different audiences" (1). The headers and sub-heads organize the introduction as a taxonomy, by different kinds of para-narratives (analogy, paradigm) and para-narrators (poet, characters). Moreover, the introduction does not explain why Alden chose the particular chapter topics and sequence of ideas that she did, and the book has no conclusion.

Throughout the book, story patterns that create parallels between para-narratives and the main story of the Odyssey are systematically and thoroughly mapped out, often without tying together the analyses into some kind of unified understanding of the particular story or issue at hand. For instance, "2.2. Story Shapes," a one-page subsection of section 2 of the introduction (devoted to "paradigmatic speeches by the poet's characters"), explores the different versions of Odysseus' return to Ithaca that appear throughout the Odyssey as para-narratives (5). Among these, Alden includes not only the well-known parallels provided by the returns of Nestor, Menelaus, and Agamemnon, but also the stimulating idea that Odysseus' own tale about the Cyclops finding intruders in his cave (9.231–555) and Helen's story of Odysseus' infiltration of Troy(4.242–264) resemble key aspects of Odysseus' experiences when he returns to Ithaca. This helpful list ends without offering the reader an overarching interpretation of how these different stories of return might affect our understanding of paradigmatic speeches by characters as a category of para-narrative, or of the Odyssey narrative more generally. Similarly, the incisive critique of...