Date of birth: 1903-02-21
Date of death: 1976-10-25
Quotes number: 19
Nationality: French
Profession: Poet
A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.
After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.
All confessions are Odysseys.
All societies are historical.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.
It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.
It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.
Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.
One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.