Homer’s Odyssey Once More: Magical Stories and Spellbound Audiences

Abstract

In this essay, I discuss specific ways in which the Odyssey ensures its reception by broader and future audiences by employing both professional and amateur storytellers and internal listeners as guarantors of the story's viability. My focus here is on the differences between Demodocus’s professional storytelling and Odysseus's nominally nonprofessional storytelling. While the former serves to please groups of an audience who expect “safe” pleasures by listening to traditional epic tales, the latter opens an affective space between listeners and the storyteller, where the listeners’ affects are mobilized by Odysseus’s unpredictable and perhaps less skillful ways of narrating stories. Odysseus’s amateurism (as I would call it) instigates the audience’s desire to listen more and becomes a successful strategy to captivate the audience’s minds. In this age and culture often defined by the “narrative turn,” many of us are interested in telling good stories that can impact broad audiences. This much-loved, ancient work of fiction can teach us various techniques of good storytelling that can move the hearts of generations of audiences.