The Cognition of Deception: Falsehoods in Homer's Odyssey and their Audiences

This chapter is about how audiences engage with stories: how the work they undertake as they follow a complex narrative shapes their experience of the tale. As a Homerist, I want to observe what happens when a storyteller throws some serious challenges at an audience and how these listeners might respond. An ideal locus for such a study is Homer’s Odyssey, a story in which disguise is central to the action. This study of the complications within the Odyssey focuses on a repeated scenario, when the hero, from the moment he arrives on Ithaca, attempts to disguise himself through false identities and a series of false tales.

The work of psychologist Jeffrey Walczyk and his colleagues, who have developed a framework for understanding what they call ‘serious lies’, underpins the discussion. I draw on this framework to identify the responses of the internal audience, as depicted by the poet, to the hero’s false tales and the responses of the external audience, as they compare what they know of the ‘real’ story with the false tale, and as they make room for a ‘fake’ Odysseus within that tale. I argue that listeners or readers become more engaged with a narrative when they are required to invest cognitive effort in order to follow its intricacies, that they gain confidence and pleasure from the problem-solving exercises that the narrative poses, and that we can observe this phenomenon in one of the earliest tales that has survived to us.