I launched this blog in 2007 and began posting seriously in
2009. In 2010, in a fury of activity
lasting several months, I wrote and posted a Memoir that eventually turned into a 261,000 word Autobiography. When I had exhausted the literary
possibilities of my own life, I turned to more promising subjects, creating
"tutorials" as a vehicle for on-line professorial pontificating. The tutorials, which ranged in length from
20,000 to 30,000 words, gave place to Mini-Tutorials. These in turn were followed by what I called
"Appreciations" -- brief commentaries on books I had particularly
liked, intended to encourage my readers to take a look at them for
themselves.
One of the Appreciations with which I was particularly
pleased concerned a great work of humanist scholarship, Mimesis by Erich Auerbach. I
have decided to re-post it now, in the hope that there are more recent visitors
to this blog who may find it of interest.
Erich Auerbach
(1892-1957) was a German Jew trained in the German philological tradition. Forced
to flee Germany, he spent the war years in Istanbul, where he wrote his
greatest work, Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature. After the war, Auerbach
came to the United States, where, from 1950 to his death, he was a professor at
Yale.
Mimesis is a series of twenty chapters, organised chronologically, each of which
is a separate essay, capable of standing alone. Each essay begins with an
extended passage (in the original followed by a translation) from a work of the
Judeo-Christian Greco-Roman literary tradition, which Auerbach then subjects to
an intense linguistic, literary, and philosophical analysis. The only exception
to this pattern is in the earliest chapters, in which neither the Greek of the
Odyssey, nor the Hebrew of the Old Testament nor the Aramaic of the New
Testament is reproduced. In many, but not all, of the chapters, the initial
passage is paired with a contrasting passage from the same period drawn from a
very different literary/philological style.
The greatness of Mimesis is in the extraordinary detail
of the several analyses, but there are certain overarching themes that it is
good to be aware of as one reads through the book. The first, and most
important, theme is the connection between the purely syntactic linguistic
resources of the language being used by the author of the passage under
examination and the nature of social reality that the author seeks to capture
and communicate. Thus, for example, the extreme limitation of the syntactic
resources on which the author of the 12th century Chanson de Roland is able to draw results in (or perhaps, is
paralleled by) the very blunt, un-nuanced representation of the motivation of
Roland and the other characters of the Chanson.
(Although the text is 12th century, and reflects the Chivalric ideals of the
time, it refers, of course, to events that took place much earlier.) Two
centuries later, when Boccaccio wrote the Decameron,
he had available to him in early Italian extraordinarily rich syntactic devices
that permitted him to capture the motivations and perceptions of a number of
characters from different and even incompatible perspectives, all within the
same sentences.
This general idea of
the relation between linguistic structures and conceptions of social reality is
central to the first chapter of my little book, Moneybags
Must Be So Lucky, and I
think it is fair to say that I was drawing heavily on what I learned from
Auerbach when I wrote it, for all that I do not explicitly credit him.
A second theme that
plays an important role, in the early chapters especially, is the distinction
between high and low literary styles, paralleling the social distinctions of
the milieu being represented. All of us are familiar with this distinction from
Shakespeare’s plays in which a scene of the most intense seriousness, involving
well-born characters, will be followed by a scene of comic buffoonery involving
peasants or servants. Auerbach demonstrates quite dramatically that one of the
most powerful and revolutionary features of the texts of the New Testament is a
mixture of high and low styles that would have been impossible either in the
classical Greek literature or in the Roman literature of the first several
centuries of this era.
It goes without saying
that I shall not attempt to summarise, or even make reference to, all or most
of the twenty essays. Rather, I shall focus on several, drawn principally from
the earliest portion of the book, to convey something of the complexity and
penetration of Auerbach’s discussion.
I shall begin with the
first chapter of the book, in which we encounter many of the themes and
insights that characterise Auerbach’s work. For the opening chapter, Auerbach
chooses two very ancient texts, the first from the 8th century BC, the other
from the 6th century BC. The first text is the famous “recognition” scene from
the Odyssey. As you will recall (at
least, I hope you will recall), at the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus sets out
with his followers to return to Ithaca and his wife and son, but for one reason
and another, it takes him ten years to complete the journey. He is presumed
dead, and a number of suitors are vying for the hand of his widow, Penelope,
and for Odysseus’ wealth and position. Odysseus shows up at his home disguised
as a wanderer, and is put in charge of a servant who was, when he was young,
his nurse. She washes his feet (I think I am recalling this correctly) and in a
dramatic moment recognises a scar on his leg as that of her old master,
Odysseus. Odysseus warns her to remain silent about her discovery for the
moment so that he can study the interactions between his wife and the band of
importunate suitors.
This passage is
contrasted by Auerbach with an equally famous passage from Genesis 22:1 in which God speaks to Abraham and commands him to
make a sacrifice of his only begotten son, Isaac.[i]
Abraham obeys, and sets out to the place of sacrifice with Isaac, but at the
last moment, as Abraham is about to slay Isaac, he sees a ram caught in the
bushes, and substitutes it for his son.
These are equally
dramatic passages, but they are treated linguistically by their authors,
Auerbach argues, in utterly different ways that reveal to us the completely
different conceptions of reality of the Homeric Greeks and the Old Testament
Hebrews. It is very, very difficult to capture the subtlety and richness of
Auerbach’s discussion without resorting to endless lengthy quotes. The central
points of his analysis of the Homeric passage, as I understand him, are these:
The scene “is
scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion… Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly
illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible.” One
of the key notions here is expressed by the word “externalized.” We are these
days (after the literary evolution that Mimesis
is designed to explicate) accustomed to distinctions between the inner and
outer, the visible and the hidden. The motivations of a character – her hopes,
desires, fears, beliefs, anticipations, understandings and misunderstandings – may
all be communicated by hints and nods, with revealing turns of phrase, as much
by what is not said on the page as
what is. But all of this is foreign to Homer. As Auerbach notes, even as Achilles
and Hector fight to the death, they utter speeches that express their inner
feelings. The key to the Recognition scene, the “McGuffin” as stage buffs would
call it, is the old scar on Odysseus’ leg. Once the maid, Euryclea, spots it,
she knows that the stranger is her old master. A modern author would not want
to slow down the action, or release the tension, by devoting line after line to
an explanation of the origin of the scar. Either the modern author would
prepare the way for the Recognition by inserting an account of the scar earlier
in the text, so that the reader understands its significance instantaneously,
or else such an author would leave the scar unexplained, relying on the reader
to fill in the blanks. But Homer, Auerbach notes, enters into a complete and
unhurried account of the hunting expedition on which Odysseus acquired the
scar. The effect, deliberate, Auerbach is sure, is to drain the moment of its
tension. In a Homeric text, all is on the surface, all is fully realised, all
is externalised.
Auerbach invites us to
contrast this with the terrifying story of God’s commandment to sacrifice
Isaac. The previous Chapter, Genesis
21, tells the story of the miracle by which the seventy-year old Sarah
conceives, and bears Abraham a son, Isaac. This is not simply some story of
domestic happiness. It is through Isaac that God will fulfil his promise to
Abraham to make him to be fruitful and to multiply. Isaac is to be the son who
founds a nation.
Genesis 22 begins abruptly and ominously.
And it came to pass after these things, that
God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, [here]
I [am].
And he said, Take now thy son, thine only [son]
Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
Even this opening startles us when we come
to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader,
however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on
earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from
somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from unknown heights or depths. Whence
does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not
come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethopians, where he has been enjoying a
sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham
so terribly.
Note, the temptation
is that Abraham, out of love for his only son, through whom the divine promise
of multitudes will be fulfilled, might fail to obey God’s command. As Auerbach
says at the conclusion of the paragraph from which I have been quoting, “The
concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner
of comprehending and representing things.”
Like God, Abraham’s
position, his location, is unspecified. Is he indoors, out of doors, alone,
surrounded by his tribe? It seems not to matter. Nor are we given any details
at all of the three day journey that brings him and his son to the place of
sacrifice. Both God and Abraham are multi-dimensional. There is a foreground,
what is presented in the story, and there are depths and complexities that
cannot possibly be contained within any single account. God, of course, is a
transcendent figure only a part of which can ever be presented to man. But
Abraham too is more than merely a man with a son whom he loves. Abraham is a
prophet, the father of nations. He plays a role in a metaphysical story that
stretches from Creation to the End of Times.
As Auerbach says:
the relation of the Elohist to the truth of
his story remains a far more passionate and definite one than is Homer’s
relation… The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s,
it is tyrannical – it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture
stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historical true reality – it
insists that it is the only true world, is destined for autocracy… The
Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us
that they may please us and enchant us – they seek to subject us, and if we
refuse to be subjected we are rebels.
There is much, much
more in Auerbach’s analysis of these two passages in his opening chapter, but
this is enough, I hope, to convey some sense of the richness and power of his
treatment of them. Consider just the last point I quoted him as making. Any
fair minded reader, I think, must agree that Homer’s work is far better
crafted, as a literary work of art, than the rather abrupt, jumbled together,
barely sketched in narratives of Genesis.
There are, to be sure, later Books of the Old Testament that achieve a higher
level of literary art – one thinks of Psalms,
or The Book of Job, among others. But
the account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, of Abraham’s sacrifice of
Isaac, of Noah and his three sons, of the Tower of Babel, of Jacob and Esau (or
of Cain and Abel) have the power to terrify us, to seize us by the scruff of
the neck and shake us until we tremble, that nothing in Homer can match.
[i] By the way,
Kierkegaard has written a wonderful entire book about this story, but that is
another matter.
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