A poem with bards in it
The Odyssey contains its own account of what poetry is for, and it does it by putting singers on the page.
Phemius performs on Ithaca, under duress, for men who are eating the house he lives in. Demodocus among the Phaeacians is blind, honoured, led to his chair, given the best cut of meat, and asked for songs on request. Both are professionals with a defined social position: they are not inspired amateurs, they are paid, and they perform what the occasion requires.
When Odysseus finally names himself at the start of Book 9, he begins by saying that there is no better fulfilment than a feast with a singer present. He says this immediately before telling the longest story in the poem himself.
The hero as narrator
Books 9 to 12 — the Cyclops, Circe, the dead, the Sirens, Scylla — are narrated in the first person by Odysseus, to an audience that is deciding whether to give him a ship home.
The poem knows exactly what it is doing. This is the man it has just spent eight books establishing as the most persuasive liar alive, with a strong motive to make himself sympathetic, describing events for which there are no surviving witnesses because his entire crew is dead.
Alcinous even raises the point, remarking that his guest does not seem to be one of the many liars and cheats the earth breeds. He means it as a compliment. The audience is in a position to weigh it.
Nothing in the poem instructs a reader to doubt the wanderings. Nothing insulates them either. The frame is the poem's own comment on the reliability of first-person heroic narration.
Contested memory
The clearest statement is in Book 4, where Helen and Menelaus tell incompatible stories about the same events, minutes apart, in front of a guest. Hers makes her Odysseus's secret ally inside Troy; his makes her the voice that nearly killed the Greeks in the horse.
Helen drugs the wine before telling hers — a remedy from Egypt that suspends grief and anger for a day. A poem about memory shows a character chemically managing it, and then narrating.
The two accounts are never reconciled. The poem simply sets them side by side, and this is among the earliest depictions in European literature of the past as something people argue about rather than retrieve.
What song does to the person it is about
The poem's hardest scene on this theme is Book 8. Demodocus sings about Troy, and Odysseus weeps under his cloak; and the poem finds its comparison for his grief in a woman clinging to her husband's body on a battlefield as she is beaten with spear-shafts and led away into slavery.
The sacker of cities, hearing his own fame sung, is compared to the person his fame was built on. Kleos — glory, literally what is heard — arrives at its subject and is unbearable.
The Greek terms
Kleos, fame as something heard; the whole economy of heroic reputation depends on there being someone to sing it. Mnēmosynē, memory, the mother of the Muses in Hesiod — poetry is memory's child. Aoidos, the singer.
Later interpretation
The framed retrospective narration of Books 9 to 12 is the ancestor of a very large part of subsequent European fiction, and the specific problem it raises — an unreliable narrator inside a reliable poem — was not treated systematically again until the modern novel.