I’ve long been a fan of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (see this 2011 post), and I like Corey Robin’s take on it:
In that famous first chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach does something that usually drives me insane. Introducing the story of Odysseus’ scar from Homer’s Odyssey, Auerbach writes, “Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when….” Six pages later, when he introduces the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis, Auerbach writes, “the story itself begins: everyone knows it….”
When contemporary academics do this kind of thing, make this gesture of knowingness, it drives me crazy, as I said. I want to cry out, no, everyone does not know it, readers will not remember! But in Auerbach’s case, I don’t mind it. Why not?
Because, despite his saying we all know the story, Auerbach always proceeds to narrate the story. He gives you, the reader, the details of the story, its plot, the relevant background. When he then undertakes his analysis, which follows his summary of the plot, we’re all working on the same page. He doesn’t make knowing references, without any support or concreteness. He doesn’t invoke authority to justify his claims. He doesn’t pile up concept upon concept, or context upon context, to get himself out of the work of argument, of demonstrating that what he is saying is indeed true, or at least has a justifiable claim upon our attention and engagement.
So despite his use of the “we,” which a generation of academics has taught us is exclusionary or creates a false idea of readerly consensus and audience, Auerbach actually works, hard, to create that “we.” By setting out his evidence, he invites us to disagree with him, to remove ourselves from that “we” if we have reasons to object to it. Despite our assumptions of the democratic progress we’ve made from the midcentury intellectual/critic to today’s intellectual/critic, the actual style and substance of that midcentury intellectual/critic’s engagement is far more democratic in some ways than that of much of our contemporary world.
I feel that’s exactly right; when I started on the book, I felt intimidated because I’d read hardly any of the works he references, but I found that his account of them gave me enough of a handle that I could immerse myself further if I so desired, and I could easily follow his argument. It wasn’t at all like reading a scholar of these degenerate latter days who constantly drops references to Žižek, Sloterdijk, & Co. for generalized shock and awe. I did not, however, appreciate the commenter on his post who felt compelled to write:
“In that famous first chapter…” Really? I mean, I’ve read a lot of books but I never heard of that one. Pot, kettle, etc.
Smug parading of one’s own ignorance is another blight on our times. Pull down thy vanity!
There’s a certain lack of parallelism in the two examples, because the Odyssey one is explicitly limited to those who have specifically read the book (even if it might be embarrassing in some circles to fess up to having not done so) whereas the Genesis ch. 22 one is sort of “you grew up in this civilization so you must know the highlights reel of its foundational narrative, right”?
As recently as the year of my own birth (more recent than the publication of Auerbach’s work*), some hip young folkie experimenting with going electric could start a song “God said to Abraham ‘Kill me a son'” and assume that his increasingly long-haired and dope-addled audience would nonetheless know what he was talking about, right?
*I’m pretty sure there’s a copy in our living room, but it’s on one of the shelves of books my wife contributed to the household.
Right.
So… what does it add to state that everybody knows what’s about to be explained? How does it help? Why not just skip that part and go ahead with the explanations – just for fear that the readers with the most profound classical education might scoff?
There should be a name for this rhetorical device. It’s a cousin of Hypophora and Apophasis.
I am struck by the first-person-plural in “Despite our assumptions …” Is that an instance of the very same “‘we,’ which a generation of academics has taught us is exclusionary or creates a false idea of readerly consensus and audience”?
This is surely much the same thing as Hattic irony. It would be rude to imply that a fellow-Hatter did not know (for example) that the most widely spoken African language in Ghana is Twi, even if (realistically) there may actually be one or two otherwise perfectly estimable Hatters who have somehow missed this fact (probably because they had been too engrossed in developing new fields in homology theory, or had been too busy exploring new approaches to macroeconomics, or in writing sonnet cycles. Such things are notorious time sinks.) Accordingly, the correct form is something like “as one would expect, much of this conversation took place in Twi …”
It is, similarly, impolite to translate anything one happens to cite in languages like French, Latin or Hausa that any reasonably well-educated person will have acquired in their schooldays.
To be honest, if I took the review’s first line seriously, I would sympathize with the commenter you’re calling ignorant and proud of it. Odysseus is famous, at least at some level, but the first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis is decidedly not. So much so that I enjoy Robin’s irony, in a short essay about how Auerbach handles chapters and passages that are indeed famous.
the first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis is decidedly not.
The first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis is in fact famous among the set of people who know and/or care about Auerbach. That’s exactly the point. No matter how famous someone or something is in a certain set, there is always another set of people who’ve never heard of them or it; if you’re going to use that strict a standard, you might as well retire the word “famous.” The proper way to interpret a phrase like “In that famous first chapter of Mimesis” is to prick up one’s ears and say to oneself “this is something I should pay attention to and learn about.” If one’s response is to say “Well, I’ve never heard of it, so that’s bullshit,” one is fatuous and unlikely ever to learn anything.
I don’t agree about fame. You can say Britney Spears is famous, but you can’t say Los Blue Ventures (similar floruit) are, though most people where I live have heard of the latter (and I can sing something by them, more or less, but nothing by her). Even if you had a stricter standard for fame, you could still use the word by specifying the circle where someone or something is famous, which is not a bad idea.
And I don’t agree about the way to interpret “In that famous first chapter of Mimesis“. I think two valid possibilities are “This looks like an article for people like me” and “This doesn’t look like an article for people like me. I’ll find something aimed at a wider readership.”
@JWB: I’m not sure whether the story of Isaac is one that one could assume the average reader even in today’s Western Civilization (not talking about people without a non-Western educational background) to be familiar with. It’s certainly not on a level of familiarity with Adam & Eve and the apple or the deluge or David and Goliath, which even people not having had a religious education or read a children’s bible will be likely to know by cultural osmosis.
As for Odysseus, while the number of people having read the Odyssey itself is not so large, more will have read popular retellings or watched cartoon versions, but again the story of the scar is probably less well-known to a wider public than the Sirens or the blinding of Polyphem.
I’m also not too convinced by the “set of people” framing. That’s fair if you’re talking about someone like Auerbach, but I expect very nearly every anglophone will at least know something called “The Odyssey” exists, even if they don’t have any impression of it. We’re talking a totally different order of magnitude than Auerbach. One pretty much demands a(n implicit or explicit) qualifier, the other does not.
Warren Cowgill apparently viewed the use of “I” as a matter of intellectual honesty. I’m very glad I read a summary of his views on the matter (in the introduction to his collected writings volume) during my masters — it was some of the most useful (and frankly only) writing advice I got during that time. I’ll try to dig up the exact reference when I’m next in the office.
I do still use “we” sometimes, but generally only when I really want to represent a general scholarly consensus (i.e. “we academics [of X subject]”), or if I’m being particularly didactic. If I’m presenting a new argument, I’ll use “I”. And whatever “a generation of academics” supposedly says about that, I’ve repeatedly gotten pushback for doing so.
… the Genesis ch. 22 one is sort of “you grew up in this civilization so you must know the highlights reel of its foundational narrative, right”?7
Right? Mostly. But… about once or twice a year Public Radio and the NY Times or The Economist cite the Pew Foundation research on religion in the U.S. For the past few tears, allowing for some statistical drift in my aged memory, some 30% of American persons are unaffiliated with any religion, though some chunk of those are spiritually inclined.
There seems to be a growing number of people for whom “the foundational narrative” is unfamiliar. Add to that number, whatever it may be, those whose holy book is not the one you assume.
My impression is that many actual Christians are unfamiliar with this particular story. The kind of detailed knowledge of the Bible that a preacher might take for granted in a congregation a few decades ago is much less common now; including among “Bible-believing” Christians, whose commitment to the text is often more a matter of ideology than of actually reading it.
(Many of them will tell you that “God helps those who help themselves” is from the Bible.)
@cuchuflete et al.: obviously the “this civilization” that Auerbach was presupposing for his intended readership did not have precisely the demographics of the U.S. eight decades in the future. Nor in fact did it have the demographics of actually-existing 1940’s Istanbul, where he was living and working while writing the book. I suppose he would have accepted if asked that the U.S. was part of the “Western” civilization he was writing about, but I don’t know if he was at the time even anticipating his own subsequent post-war relocation to the U.S.
And Auerbach was himself as a practical matter apparently “unaffiliated” at least as to institutional practice, although the internet seems undecided as to whether he was a “cultural Christian of Jewish origins” or a “secular Jewish intellectual.” But he would have assumed that e.g. the aggressively laique Third Republic schoolteacher in some little town in rural France who played the role of stereotypical village atheist (or his equivalents in Germany, Italy, etc.) would have been generally familiar with the plotline of Genesis, because it was part of “Western literature.”
Let me note separately that those so-called “Bible-believing” Protestants whom David E. deprecates usually go to churches where the pastor chooses Bible readings by personal whim rather than accepting the Church’s authority to prescribe what is read to the congregation when. So they cannot be presumed to have attended year-after-year Easter Eve services featuring a long string of OT readings largely chosen for their typological relevance to the Passion and Resurrection. The so-called “Binding of Isaac” passage unsurprisingly is always included in that context.
As Auerbach’s work goes on, the works discussed get a bit less comparatively famous than the Odyssey and Genesis. I daresay that even in our own decadent times many well-educated people will at least claim a general familiarity with e.g. the Decamaron or Gargantua & Pantagruel, even if they don’t claim to have actually read them. But can the same be said about Schiller’s _Luise Miller_ or the Goncourt brothers’ _Germinie Lacerteux_? Even in Auerbach’s own youth, were those books that the proverbial every schoolboy was familiar with?
ETA: the wiki article about _Mimesis_ lists by title 31 works discussed therein, with links to separate articles about 30 of the 31. The one outlier with so little “notability” as not to have its own wikipedia page is _Le Reconfort de Madame du Fresne_ by Antoine de la Sale, which I will freely admit to lacking familiarity with.
My impression is that many actual Christians are unfamiliar with this particular story.
Especially in places where the majority religion is Roman Catholicism. In Italy I’ve learned to never, ever take for granted that anyone is going to be familiar with stories from the Old Testament. Art history may help a little, but not necessarily.