The complex use of time in The Odyssey

Odysseus' visit to Hades to summon the dead and hear the prophecy of Tiresias is one of the stranger moment - among the many - in the Odyssey; it feels like a pause in the voyage, and it is, as O's shipmates are angry that he makes this stop after their freed from Circe's enchantments - they want head straight back to Ithaca - but O has sworn (to Circe?) that he will make this stop and besides he wants the intelligence from Tiresias. Home gives relatively little description of Hades, unfortunately, just that it's out beyond the farthest reaches of the Ocean (an all-purpose word, it seems, sometimes denoting the sea and sometimes a great river) and in a land so overgrown that it's constantly dark as night; the men pour some libations and make some offerings to the dead - yes, to the dead - which brings back a bit of spite memory as I recall my daughter's idiot h.s. English teacher knocking her down a grade on a fine essay on the Odyssey because she said that they sacrificed to the dead and the idiot teacher said no they sacrificed only to the gods - and the spirits arise from a pit in the ground. Tiresias gives O some valuable but disturbing information - that he will wander at sea for many years and if he does return home it will be in another's ship and he will find trouble at home - all because Poseidon was angry at the blinding of his son the Cyclops (got a better solution, Po?). O also sees the spirit of his mother who gives him some updates on the family back in Ithaca; he tries to embrace her but it's like embracing a cloud of smoke. This is a section of the Odyssey that you'd think maybe doesn't have to exist, maybe could be cut in the interest of pace and economy - but I think it adds to the complexity of time and space in the Odyssey: We begin the epic toward the end of the journey, with Telemachus waiting for the return of his father, uncertain of O's fate; then we hear rumors that O is still alive - and only then do we enter O's story, near the end of his voyage. We don't learn the "back story" until 1/3 through the poem, as he relates his journeys to the Phaecians; and now we get a moment in the back story when, through the prophecy, he looks - we look - even farther ahead, to the time of O's eventual arrival in Ithaca. These interlocked and layered strands of chronology give us a dislocated sense of time and in that sense make the poem feel timeless: from any point in the narrative we can look forward to the conclusion or backward to the source (also many references to the battles of Troy and to the Trojan horse - more on that than in the Iliad I think): Homer uses time to make his narrative stand outside of time.