Stories within stories

I've just been re-reading the Odyssey and I'm struck, given how ancient the text is, with the complexity of the structure of the story- telling.
How do we start, with this story of Odysseus's journey home from Troy? With him leaving Troy? No.
We start twenty years later. In Olympus, with Athena and Zeus talking not about Odysseus but about all the recent problems with the murder of Agamemnon and the how his son Orestes had to kill his wife Clytemnestra and her lover who did it (big scandal).

And Athena uses this discussion to change the subject in this conversation amongst the gods to talk about Odysseus, who's been stuck on an island for the last nine years and to sort of summarize what's been happening there and at home with his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus.
We then spend the next four chapters of the book with Odysseus off stage, just dealing with Telemachus and Penelope and the suitors, with Telemachus ultimately going off on a voyage to Pylos and Sparta where he talks to various people and hears second hand accounts of what happened to various participants of the Trojan War more about Orestes and what a great job he did compared to what Telemachus has been doing back home which is nothing
and it's only when we hit Chapter five that we're finally introduced to Odysseus just as he's leaving Calypso's Island he gets washed ashore on another Island where he proceeds to finally tell about all of his adventures since leaving Troy.

And it's only then, around three quarters of the way through the story that all of the various threads join up, when Odysseus is finally returned to Ithaca, that all of the various "stories within stories" are done and the Odyssey moves toward its final conclusion the slaughter of the suitors.
I find it interesting because, of course, we are all in the habit of warning beginning screenwriters to stay away from flashbacks they're generally considered to be such a dangerous area (and I've certainly done my share of warning people away from them).

And yet here we have one of the most ancient and enduring works of literature and it's virtually all flashbacks it's stories within stories within stories.
It's obvious from reading the Odyssey (well, the Illiad too) that this is no primitive work. It is clearly the end result of a long developmental process of a particular very sophisticated literary form.
So it is equally clear that the form the decision to tell the story in this particular way, is not happenstance.
What purpose, then, does it serve? What lesson can we learn and apply to this Russian doll structure this story within story structure that Homer has used?
I think that we can find a number of reasons for this.

First, of course this was a classic story. Virtually everyone in the ancient world who sits down to listen to this thing knows it knows how it comes out. So it's not a question of "real" suspense any more than somebody who sits down to watch Apollo 13 is in suspense as to how it's going to come out.
Suspense and involvement emerges from the structure and the way the telling draws us into the events of the story.
And so we start not at the beginning of his journey home, where things are presumably okay but at the end, where things are terrible and not with him, who doesn't know how bad things are back at home - but back at home so that we know how bad his absence, his failure to be back at home have caused things to be.
And they are, in the way the ancient mind viewed things, about as bad as things could be the hospitality of his house has been violated by a hundred suitors who are disrespecting his home, disrecting his wife his young son is unable to achieve his manhood.

All because nobody knows where he is or whether he's alive or dead.

Because, of course, Odysseus' absence Odysseus who is a king and a husband and a father, isn't simply his problem it is his people's problem, his wife's problem, his son's problem his nation's problem and none of it can be made right until he gets home.

And, of course one of the biggest problems is that no one back home knows whether he's alive or dead if Penelope or Telemachus decide that he's dead, she's going to get married and that will be a disaster. And that's what the suitors are pressing her to do.

And time is running out.
So we have, in a story sense, an interesting situation. On the one hand, Odysseus, wherever he may be, is eager to get home, but he's been at it for years if it takes another year, another couple years, oh well, so what?
But back at Ithaca, things are coming to a head. Ultimately, Telemachus declares that he's going to sail off to find out news about his father. If he finds out that he's dead, he'll tell his Mom to get married. If not, he'll wait a year. But even as he goes off, the suitors have decided to ambush him either way and kill him when he comes back and force Penelope to pick between them.

So even before Odysseus has even shown up, the story has now created this sense of urgency there is a ticking clepsydra.

So that by the time we finally get to Odysseus, his problems have been placed in the context of the larger problems back home, and also have been placed in the context of an urgent situation an immediate threat to his wife and his son, that he knows nothing about but which we do know about.
In addition, there are the larger thematic concerns of the Odyssey, dealing with guests and hosts and how guests are supposed to be treated and part of the structure of this story involves this constant re-working with variation of this theme of Telemachus as guest who goes seeking information who is treated as a guest should be treated, by Nestor and then by Menelaus, who wine him and dine him and give him gifts and tell him all about Troy and Odysseus and in turn all of various places that Odysseus goes, where he is alternately treated well by his various hosts and, of course, not so well.

And thus, the hearing of stories and the telling of stories in the context of being a guest and and being a host is a central part of the overall theme of the Odyssey.
The structure, then, not only serves the story in the sense of plotting and for building suspense, but also in the larger arena of reinforcing the theme.
So you see, you actually can learn things from reading some of this old stuff.
NMS