Great episode. Was wondering how much you would engage with Auerbach. Admittedly I’m conflicted about his conclusions in “Odysseus’ Scar” (I actually think some of his insights in subsequent chapters re: early Christianity are arguably more profound) but even if he’s biased in projecting a muscular proto-proto-Nazism onto Homer, we’re left with the uncomfortable fact of phenomena like Bronze Age Pervert, lol. Chicken/egg question maybe.
Thanks! I wonder if there's a way to quantify violence inspired by the Bible vs. Homer. I suspect the former would win, but that might be "presentism" (if thinking about the last 2000 years more than the previous 1000 is an undue focus on the present). I wrote an essay-review on Auerbach's selected essays when the book came out in 2014 if you're interested:
I need to read that essay collection. Maybe someday if there’s a rationale you could slot in Auerbach’s final chapter in Mimesis about Woolf. This line has haunted me in a strange way since I read it in undergrad. Is it utopian? Resigned? Maybe ultimately derailed by postmodernism or some of the more contemporary pernicious political emergent movements?
“In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent-below the surface conflicts-the differences between men's ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples. A century ago (in Merimee for example), Corsicans or Spaniards were still exotic; today the term would be quite unsuitable for Pearl Buck's Chinese peasants. Beneath the conflicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural leveling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible.”
Resignation to utopia, maybe? The end of history = the last man. On the one hand, there's a progressive quality in Mimesis that leads to Woolf—serious representation is extended to more and more of reality—but on the other hand modernism seems to the invert the process at its conclusion so that we're back in the Homeric world of blinding clarity and stasis, this time under the sign of equality rather than hierarchy and inwardness rather than exteriors. An academic I once knew said that "The Brown Stocking" of the last chapter is for Odysseus's scarred leg in the first. He didn't elaborate, it was sort of a poeticism, but the idea might be that the circle of western civilization closes at the conclusion.
Great episode. Was wondering how much you would engage with Auerbach. Admittedly I’m conflicted about his conclusions in “Odysseus’ Scar” (I actually think some of his insights in subsequent chapters re: early Christianity are arguably more profound) but even if he’s biased in projecting a muscular proto-proto-Nazism onto Homer, we’re left with the uncomfortable fact of phenomena like Bronze Age Pervert, lol. Chicken/egg question maybe.
Thanks! I wonder if there's a way to quantify violence inspired by the Bible vs. Homer. I suspect the former would win, but that might be "presentism" (if thinking about the last 2000 years more than the previous 1000 is an undue focus on the present). I wrote an essay-review on Auerbach's selected essays when the book came out in 2014 if you're interested:
https://johnpistelli.com/2019/05/22/erich-auerbach-time-history-and-literature-selected-essays/
I need to read that essay collection. Maybe someday if there’s a rationale you could slot in Auerbach’s final chapter in Mimesis about Woolf. This line has haunted me in a strange way since I read it in undergrad. Is it utopian? Resigned? Maybe ultimately derailed by postmodernism or some of the more contemporary pernicious political emergent movements?
“In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent-below the surface conflicts-the differences between men's ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples. A century ago (in Merimee for example), Corsicans or Spaniards were still exotic; today the term would be quite unsuitable for Pearl Buck's Chinese peasants. Beneath the conflicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural leveling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible.”
Resignation to utopia, maybe? The end of history = the last man. On the one hand, there's a progressive quality in Mimesis that leads to Woolf—serious representation is extended to more and more of reality—but on the other hand modernism seems to the invert the process at its conclusion so that we're back in the Homeric world of blinding clarity and stasis, this time under the sign of equality rather than hierarchy and inwardness rather than exteriors. An academic I once knew said that "The Brown Stocking" of the last chapter is for Odysseus's scarred leg in the first. He didn't elaborate, it was sort of a poeticism, but the idea might be that the circle of western civilization closes at the conclusion.