Odyssey: Lecture by Samuel Eliot Bassett

SOURCE: "The Epic Illusion (Continued)" in The Poetry of Homer, University of California Press, 1938, pp. 57-80.

Bassett was an influential Greek scholar and one of the foremost Homeric specialists of his time. In this excerpt from a posthumously published collection of lectures, he analyzes Homer's use of dialogue to create the "illusion of personality" in the characters of the Odyssey and the Iliad.

No poetic picture of past human life can produce the illusion of reality if it does no more than convince us with its general likeness to life. The real world that we know is peopled with other human beings no two of whom are identical. The more intimately we enter into the lives of others, the more we feel the uniqueness of their individualities. The universal human interest is never in typical "man"; it is in persons—because individuals, not types, belong to life. The most universally human presentation of life must therefore create above all the illusion of personality. This is the life principle of every great mythos. The biology of literature may abstract the elements of personality and describe them, but the secret of its synthesis has never been discovered. It differs from moral character as the story from its plot. It is not physical appearance or peculiarities of action. Shylock is a real personality, but who knows how he looked or moved? Much less is it revealed by an analysis of the contents of the mind. Personality is a complex intangible. It has been called a "fourth dimension," a term which in the theory of relativity describes ultimate physical reality. Literary art produces the illusion of the ultimate human reality chiefly by means of the form of self-expression which is most characteristic of our race. Man has been articulate ever since he became human. He makes known the uniqueness of his individuality best by his psissima verba.

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