Homeric catalogue: Tradition, paradigm and the limits of narrativity

This dissertation examines passages in the Homeric poems that can be formally identified as lists or catalogues. It is generally recognized that Homer uses catalogues to evoke a credible image of the larger heroic world in which his stories take place. This study aims to demonstrate that as inset pieces, catalogues and the information they contain bear a more complicated relationship to the poet's own story: Catalogues do, indeed, help the poet to construct an epic world. Yet examination of particular examples reveals that the world evoked in a catalogue is not, as we might expect, a larger context in which the poet's narrative is situated, but rather another world to which the world of the narrative is juxtaposed. These other worlds have their own rules and their own narratives that stand in an oblique and refractory relation to those of the poet's story. In this regard, the Homeric catalogue can be compared in some ways to the rhetorical application of paradigmatic exempla, inset narratives which are applied by Homer's speakers with a straightforward rhetorical aim but which also show crucial and revealing contrasts to the poet's own narrative. In order to better explore the possibility of rhetorical function along these lines, this study focuses first and foremost on the catalogue form as a manner of speech and rhetorical strategy for both the poet and his speakers. For Homer's characters, the catalogue form proves to be an especially effective mode in that it seems to present "pure information" within a rigid framework allowing a minimum of manipulation, while in fact these very features can be exploited to serve the speaker's rhetorical aims. The poet uses catalogues in much the same way, although here the results of analysis are poet contrasts his tale with other possible narratives, evoked through catalogue in an allusive and fragmentary form. Indeed, the poet seems at times to exploit catalogue's relatively simple and rigid structure not only to veil or complicate his own activity but to comment upon the poetic limitations of description and narrative.