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. According, 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.