Stories in Disguise: On Odysseus' Ithacan Lies and Their Relevance ...

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The storyteller, the aoidos, opens by presenting in his own words a motif: a character, Ktesippos, "versed in villainy." Then he tells the psychological motives that push this man to dare courting Odysseus' wife in her husband's absence. This is done in rather a summarizing style and could be understood as directions as to the kind of situation he is going to represent. After that he leaves the scene to the man himself, dramatizing his words, and then ends by mentioning an action. These two represented actions are rendered in a scenic mode. Let us suppose that the diegesis (or part of a more complex one), communicated here by a mixture of diegetic and mimetic techniques, should be understood as an "act of villainy," then it is evident that the storyteller has adopted three means to convey this: direct outlining of the situation or characterization, speech, and action, the two latter contributing indirectly to the same portrayal. So, the storyteller's choosing to communicate the representation of such an act directly by "telling" or his indirectly doing so by using a dramatic mode seem to be equivalent actions from his side, separated only in style. The significance of the represented will come to the same end. If the aoidos prefers to render the whole episode directly in his own words, then the diegetic content, i.e. the representation of the "villainous act," will have to be implied from his speech. If, on the other hand, he chooses to dramatize the whole episode, then the directions as to what kind of scene is represented (an "act of villainy") will have to be implied. For the receiver is in need of both direction and drama. Sometimes the storyteller presents as a motif a person telling of events in a world where he himself is an actor, a so-called homodiegetic narrator. It is not easy to say what significance this device has for the story presented. Sometimes at least it strikes one as being of little consequence. Compare this episode from the homodiegetic story of Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclops in song IX.272-291: So I spoke, but he answered me in pitiless spirit: "Stranger, you are a simple fool, or come from far off, when you tell me to avoid the wrath of the gods or fear them. The Cyclops do not concern themselves over Zeus of the aegis, nor any of the rest of the blessed gods, since we are far better than they, and for fear of the hate of Zeus I would not spare you or your companions either, if the fancy took me otherwise [---]." [---] So I spoke, but the pitiless spirit answered nothing, but sprang up and reached for my companions, caught up two together and slapped them, like killing puppies, against the ground, and the brains ran all over the floor, soaking the ground. Suppose that we are ready to regard even this gift from the aoidos as a representation of an "act of villainy," very much resembling the example above. What is new is the pronoun "I" which mixes with third person pronouns. This indicates the device of the "homodiegetic narrator." But as to the rest, the episode seems to be rendered by the same three means used in the Ktesippos scene: direct outlining of the situation or characterization, dramatized speech in accord with the characterization, and action illustrating both. So there is evidently no considerable difference in narrative effect whether a diegesis (or part thereof) is assumed to be presented by a homodiegetic narrator or by the storyteller in person. The idea of the narrator device here is that the character 4
Odysseus lets the Phaiakians know that he and his men have been the victims of an act of villainy on the part of the Cyclops, but this is not really our concern, because this is not what is represented by the aoidos at this very moment. What is represented is simply an "act of villainy", presented to us for the sake of its narrative qualities, its narrativity. Homodiegetic narratives often seem to function in this way. If the difference between the diegetic and mimetic mode as regards the significance of what is represented seems to be non-existent, the same may be the case for the difference between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narratives. When no functional difference between the primary storyteller and the inserted narrator is manifested, narrative theory has referred to the latter as a "reliable narrator" and his assumed act as "reliable narration." * So how should we analyze the opposite of this phenomenon, an "unreliable narrator" and "unreliable narration?" An "unreliable narrator" will be a kind of dramatized narrator. In that sense he is akin to a dramatized speaker such as Ktesippos or the Cyclops, or even our uninformed informer, characters who in speaking about things in their world simultaneously indirectly and unwittingly characterizes themselves. What he has in common with the "reliable" homodiegetic narrator is that he is the pretended source of a discourse which we take to be a real narrative, not just dramatized speech. What makes him the "opposite" of such a narrator is that his narrative seems to harbour a lack of fit between the direct diegetic outlining or characterizing of situation on the one hand, and the mimetic rendering of the characterized on the other. He goes on telling what is on his mind in very much the same way as Odysseus in the Cyclops episode, but somehow a "false tone" clings to the relation. A typical feature of the homodiegetic "reliable" narration is the quick fading away of the original enunciation situation with the narrator as an erzählendes Ich only for it to appear as erlebendes Ich in the story. With a term borrowed from film theory I will term this phenomenon "dissolving." This complete dissolving of the narrating character does not appear to the same degree in "unreliable narrating," since the moral, intellectual or emotional qualities of the narrator are usually an important, or even the main, theme of the storyteller's narrative. These qualities give rise to the "false tone" which adheres to the continuing telling. Wayne Booth stipulated as a criterion of "unreliable narration" a clash between a normative and a mimetic level. The source of meaning of the consistent text, so his argument goes, is not the narrator but the "implied author." The tacit presence of an authority beyond the narrator has also seemed a necessary assumption to most of the critics who have discussed the subject after Booth. 8 The inner tension of such a narrative has been described as a lack of congruence between story and discourse, what is said by the narrator as contrasted with the "facts" of the fictional world, or as a lack of fit between what is reported and the narrator's validation of it. 9 In Story and Discourse Chatman offers a scheme of the narrative communication that reads like this: implied author narrator narratee implied reader The solid line is said to indicate direct and the broken lines, indirect or inferential communication. If the narrator is reliable the narrative act is achieved through the main axis, if he 5
Page 1 and 2: Stories in Disguise: On Odysseus' I
Page 3: Such a sense of irony can also be b
Page 7 and 8: as instrumental in the communicatio
Page 9 and 10: to his interlocutors, but the "unre
Page 11 and 12: typically again, the means employed
Page 13 and 14: straining to kill me, for they were
Page 15 and 16: even in your own country give over
Page 17 and 18: these three episodes do not resembl
Page 19 and 20: was king for nine-year periods, and
Page 21 and 22: Perspective: Transmission and Recep

Stories in Disguise: On Odysseus' Ithacan Lies and Their Relevance ...

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