Yesterday I wrote about a book I read as a college freshman, a novel that, as I now remember it, has more than passing relevance to this cultural moment. There were other books that made a serious impact on me—of course, every curriculum demands many books. In my sophomore year Eric Auerbach’s “Mimesis” caught my attention. It was an unlikely book to do so. It required the reader to know a thing or two about literature. I had yet to read much of anything. And there I was, reading a deep critique of the western imagination. I had no idea what I was looking at.
From Claude:
Broadly, Auerbach traces the slow expansion of who and what literature considers worthy of serious representation: from gods and aristocrats, to Christian humility, to Dante’s synthesis of the sublime and the everyday, to the rise of the realist novel in 19th-century France (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert) which finally represents ordinary contemporary life in full social and historical context, and ends with modernist stream-of-consciousness (Woolf, Proust) as a new fragmentation of represented reality.
I like the way Claude summarizes but my experience of the book was different. Rather than feeling the sweep of tradition I was struck by the asperity and nuance of Auerbach’s prose. He was truthful:
Examining the Homeric epics from the perspective of when and by whom they were composed, Vico refutes generations of interpreters who had assumed that because Homer was revered for his great epics he must also have been a wise sage like Plato, Socrates, or Bacon. Instead Vico demonstrates that in its wildness and willfulness Homer’s mind was poetic, and his poetry barbaric, not wise or philosophic, that is, full of illogical fantasy, gods who were anything but godlike, and men like Achilles and Patrocles, who were most uncourtly and extremely petulant.
When you’re a kid reading criticism, clarity and truth matter. This passage was undeniably true. Homer was not a sage, he was the purveyor of big feelings. He was a fantasist. And man, could he spin a story. I was in mind of this as I watched Nolan’s film version of The Odyssey, which notably hacked out the poetry in favor of a numbingly tedious plat. This happened. This happened. We ran from the island. We ran and ran. See Odysseus run!
Nolan deleted the barbaric poetry. I digress.
The way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present.
Auerbach believed the active imagination is fully alive and a significant part of us but is also part of nature. I remember thinking, “If I wake the fuck up I might get some of this.”
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
