Interlibrary loan finally came through with the real version of the Barth book, so I can resume commenting on that tomorrow, but in the meantime I felt like reading something associated with my historiography class and took up my Prof on the throw-away suggestion Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Eric Auerbach. What exactly is the genre of this book? Something like philosophical-comparative-philology? At any rate, while I suspend judgment on its value as a commentary on the texts it deals with, I already admire it as an extremely thought-provoking and entertaining experiment in its own right.
Here’s my favorite moment from the first chapter. Auerbach makes his point with a lot of flair:
So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them — Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles — appear to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast! — between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord’s jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen to be examples.
Isn’t the little detail about Abishag the Shunnamite classic?
