ODYSSEUS’ SCAR
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Reprentation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, 1953, repr. 1974, chapter one.
Readers of the Odysy will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when Odysus has at last come home, the scene in which the old houkeeper Euryclea, who had been his nur, recognizes him by a scar on his thigh. The stranger has won Penelope’s good will; at his request she tells the houkeeper to wash his feet, which, in all old stories, is the first duty of hospitality toward a tired traveler. Euryclea busies herlf fetching water and mixing cold with hot, meanwhile speaking sadly of her abnt master, who is probably of the same age as the guest, and who perhaps, like the guest, is even now wandering somewhere, a stranger; and she remarks how astonishingly like him the guest looks. Meanwhile Odysus, remembering his scar, moves back out of the light; he knows that, despite his efforts to hide his identity, Euryclea will now recognize him, but he wants at least to keep Penelope in ignorance. No sooner has the old woman touched the sc
耻成语ar than, in her joyous surpri, she lets Odysus’ foot drop into the basin; the water spills over, she is about to cry out her joy; Odysus restrains her with whispered threats and endearments; she recovers herlf and conceals her emotion. Penelope, who attention Athena’s foresight had diverted from the incident, has obrved nothing.
All this is scrupulously extemalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct discour. Feelings though they are, with only a slight admixture of the most general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connection between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred. There is also room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that Odysus takes the old woman by the throat to keep her from speaking, at the same time that he draws her clor to him with his left. Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear-wholly expresd, orderly even in their ardor--are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involv
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ed.
In my account of the incident I have so far pasd over a whole ries of vers which interrupt it in the middle. There are more than venty of the vers—while to the incident itlf some forty are devoted before the interruption and some forty after it. The interruption, which comes just at the point when the houkeeper recognizes the scar—that is, at the moment of crisis—describes the origin of the scar, a hunting accident which occurred in Odysus’ boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his grandfather Autolycus. This first affords an opportunity to inform the reader about Autolycus, his hou, the preci degree of the kinship, his character, and, 中班保护眼睛教案no less exhaustively than touchingly, his behavior after the birth of his grandson; then follows the visit of Odysus, now grown to be a youth; the exchange of greetings, the banquet with which he is welcomed, sleep and waking, the early start for the hunt, the tracking of the beast, the struggle, Odysus’ being wounded by the boar’s tusk, his recovery, his return to Ithaca, his parents’ anxious questions—all is narrated, again with such a complete externalization of all the elements of the story and of their interconnections as to leave no
歌曲小酒窝thing in obscurity. Not until then does the narrator return to Penelope’s chamber, not until then, the digression having run its cour, does Euryclea, who had recognized the scar before the digression began, let Odysus’ foot fall back into the basin.
The first thought of a modern reader—that this is a device to increa suspen—is, if not wholly wrong, at least not the esntial explanation of this Homeric procedure. For the element of suspen is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless. The digressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspen, but rather to relax the tension. And this frequently occurs, as in the passage before us. The broadly narrated, charming, and subtly fashioned story of the hunt, with all its elegance and lf-sufficiency, its wealth of idyllic pictures, eks to win the reader over wholly to itlf as long as he is hearing it, to make him forget what had just taken place during the foot-washing. But an episode that will increa suspen by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the prent entirely, will not put the crisis, who resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspen; 钻石品牌排行榜the crisis and the suspen must continue, must r
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emain vibrant in the background. But Homer—and to this we shall have to return later—knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only prent, and fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely. 提升工程So it is with the passage before us. When the young Euryclea (vv. 4oiff.) ts the infant Odysus on his grandfather Autolycus’ lap after the banquet, the aged Euryclea, who a few lines earlier had touched the wanderer’s foot, has entirely vanished from the stage and from the reader’s mind.
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Goethe and Schiller, who, though not referring to this particular episode, exchanged letters in April 1797 on the subject of “the retarding element” in the Homeric poems in general, put it in direct opposition to the element of suspen—the latter word is not ud, but is clearly implied when the “retarding” procedure is oppod, as something proper to epic, to tragic procedure (letters of April 19, 21, and 22). The “retarding element,” the “going back and forth” by means of episodes, ems to me, too, in the Homeric poems, to be oppod to any tensional and suspensive striving toward a goal, and doubtless Schiller is right in regard to Homer when he says that what he gives us is “simply the quiet existence and operation of things in accordance with their natures”; Ho
mer’s goal is “already prent in every point of his progress” But both Schiller and Goethe rai Homer’s procedure to the level of a law for epic poetry in general, and Schiller’s words quoted above are meant to be universally binding upon the epic poet, in contradistinction from the tragic. Yet in both modern arid ancient times, there are important epic works which are compod throughout with no “retarding element” in this n but, on the contrary, with suspen throughout, and which perpetually “rob us of our emotional freedom”—which power Schiller will grant only to the tragic poet. And besides it ems to me undemonstrable and improbable that this procedure of Homeric poetry was directed by aesthetic considerations or even by an aesthetic feeling of the sort postulated by Goethe and Schiller. The effect, to be sure, is precily that which they describe, and is, furthermore, the actual source of the conception of epic which they themlves hold, and with them all writers decisively influenced by classical antiquity. But the true cau of the impression of “retardation” appears to me to lie elwhere—namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized.
