The Birth of Cinema: Winged Words and Moving Pictures in Homer’s Iliad

In his Poetics, the cornerstone of narratology, Aristotle establishes plot as the most, and spectacle as the least, important of the six elements of tragedy. This initiates a bias for time and against space that continues to shape the narratological agenda to the present day. In the only book-length treatment of narrative space in Homer to date, Brigitte Hellwig reduces the wealth of spatial detail in the Iliad and Odyssey to a finite number of places and charts their trajectory throughout each respective epic. As such, she applies to space the structuralist methodology typically devoted to time, extracting from it as hypothetical temporality that subordinates experience to exegesis and disregards all but those spatial phenomena that survive the process of paraphrase. There exists, however, an aesthetic dimension of narrative as well, within which actions are conveyed to the audience in real time before they are abstracted into story-events. In this book, I offer a narratological reading of Homer’s Iliad from the standpoint of space rather than, the usual emphasis, time. I adapt Meyer Schapiro’s conception of the picture frame as a finding and focusing device placed between the observer and the image to the dynamic medium of epic narrative, and establish the manipulation of frames as the basis for a poetics of narrative engagement. I demonstrate how Homer employs four cinematic devices in the Iliad-decomposition, intercutting, meta-audience, and vignette-to achieve montage-like control over his audience’s attention and to reveal a semantic component of the epic that manifests itself exclusively within narrative space.