Tag: Odyssey

“It Is Easy to Separate the Historical from the Legendary” — A Passage from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis

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Erich Auerbach parses the structure of history and legend and points out why writing history is such a messy, challenging job. From “Odysseus’ Scar,” the first chapter of his epic work of literary criticism Mimesis—

Homer remains within the legendary with all his material, whereas the material of the Old Testament comes closer and closer to history as the narrative proceeds; in the stories of David the historical report predominates. Here too, much that is legendary still remains, as for example the story of David and Goliath; but much—and the most essential—consists in things which the narrators knew from their own experience or from firsthand testimony. Now the difference between legend and history is in most cases easily perceived by a reasonably experienced reader. It is a difficult matter, requiring careful historical and philological training, to distinguish the true from the synthetic or the biased in a historical presentation; but it is easy to separate the historical from the legendary in general. Their structure is different. Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of the miraculous, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it is generally quickly recognizable by its composition. It runs far too smoothly. All cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the actors, has disappeared. The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, how often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too simple classification of the original events! Legend arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it; it knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remains uninterrupted. In the legends of martyrs, for example, a stiff-necked and fanatical persecutor stands over against an equally stiff-necked and fanatical victim; and a situation so complicated—that is to say, so real and historical—as that in which the “persecutor” Pliny finds himself in his celebrated letter to Trajan on the subject of the Christians, is unfit for legend. And that is still a comparatively simple case. Let the reader think of the history which we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples and states before and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent historical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the historical comprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; only seldom (as in the last war) does a more or less plain situation, comparatively simple to describe, arise, and even such a situation is subject to division below the surface, is indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification—with the result that friend and foe alike can often employ the same ones. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.

Reminder: The Lost Books of the Odyssey Giveaway Ends This Friday

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The kind folks at Picador are offering you, dear reader, a chance to win one of two copies of Zachary Mason’sThe Lost Books of the Odyssey, a dazzling re-imagining of Homer’s epic tale. And you’ll want to read this book, folks. Here’s a snippet from our review–

In his preface to The Lost Books of the Odyssey, author Zachary Mason tells us that before the story we now know as the Odyssey was organized by the poet Homer, the “material was formless, fluid, its elements shuffled into new narratives like cards in a deck.” Mason’s goal in The Lost Books is to echo these older versions of the story of Odysseus, omitting “stock epic formulae in favor of honing a single trope or image down to extreme clarity.” He succeeds admirably — Lost Books is an engaging and perplexing work that challenges our assumptions about one of the most foundational stories of Western literature. Mason’s “novel” (it is not really a novel, of course) strikes a wonderfully resonant and deeply upsetting chord, disrupting our sense of narrative satisfaction, breaking us away from the outcomes we thought we knew.

So, how do you get your grubby little hands on a copy? First, you need to have a U.S. mailing address. Second, you need to email us at biblioklept.ed@gmail.com, responding to this simple prompt: Who is your favorite character in The Odyssey, and why? Our esteemed judges will choose the winners from the best responses and post them as an announcement this Friday Saturday. Good luck!

The Lost Books of the Odyssey — Zachary Mason

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In his preface to The Lost Books of the Odyssey, author Zachary Mason tells us that before the story we now know as the Odyssey was organized by the poet Homer, the “material was formless, fluid, its elements shuffled into new narratives like cards in a deck.” Mason’s goal in The Lost Books is to echo these older versions of the story of Odysseus, omitting “stock epic formulae in favor of honing a single trope or image down to extreme clarity.” He succeeds admirably — Lost Books is an engaging and perplexing work that challenges our assumptions about one of the most foundational stories of Western literature. Mason’s “novel” (it is not really a novel, of course) strikes a wonderfully resonant and deeply upsetting chord, disrupting our sense of narrative satisfaction, breaking us away from the outcomes we thought we knew. I’ll share an example. Here’s chapter 14, “Fragment,” in its entirety–

A single fragment is all that survives of the forty-fifth book of the Odyssey:

Odysseus, finding that his reputation for trickery preceded, started inventing histories for himself and disseminating them wherever he went. This had the intended effect of clouding perception and distorting expectation, making it easier for him to work as he was wont, and the unexpected effect that one of his lies became, with minor variations, the Odyssey of Homer.

Lies with minor variations is a pretty good definition for storytelling. As the fragment above may skew a bit too academic for some readers, a bit too meta-textual, I’ll hasten to point out that Mason’s primary concern is storytelling. We get all the old characters: Penelope and Telemachus, Agamemnon and Achilles, Circe and Cassandra, and so on. Mason’s take is programmatic from the example above though — he works by “clouding perception and distorting expectation.” The opening chapter, “Sad Revelation,” begins with Odysseus returning home to find that Penelope is an old woman, and remarried at that. This revelation turns false, a “vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god. The real Ithaca is elsewhere, somewhere on the sea-roads, hidden. Giddy, Odysseus turns and flees the tormenting shadows.” Hence, the real joy here is in movement and adventure. The journey is the telos, not Ithaca itself. Homecoming is always a deferral.

The opening chapter’s theme of an illusory home and wife repeats throughout the text, as Mason suggests again and again that notions of a stable, fixed identity will always prove untrue. Odysseus, through a clerical error, is ordered to carry out his own assassination. Later, he seems to swap souls with a Trojan enemy, living out another person’s life entirely. In another episode, we see that Odysseus never really escapes Hades, that he is simply always travelling through it, catching glimpses of another, older life.

While many of Mason’s pieces are short — one to three pages — there is a richness here that taps into the history of Western literature. What’s striking is how alienating it can all be: how dark, how cold, how scary. We are reminded that Odysseus can trace his lineage to lycanthropes, an odd call to Scandinavian myth, one reinforced later on a beach with three witches, a tale that echoes (or prefigures) the horror of Macbeth. Mason shows us (or, perhaps more accurately reminds us) that the Odyssey uncannily permeates more of our literature than we might readily recall.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is post-modern through and through, fragmentary and elliptical, meta-textual and highly ironized. There’s of course a rich tradition of reinterpreting the Odyssey, from Tennyson’s poem to Joyce’s classic, from the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and Mason’s book will not disappoint those who are interested int the subject (although admittedly, some readers may find too much academic commentary in his work — not me though). In his brevity and frank humor, but most of all in the seemingly unclassifiableness of his work, Mason’s writing reminds me of Lydia Davis or Amy Hempel, but also Borges and Calvino. These are stories that might not be stories in a novel that might not be a novel. Highly recommended.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is new in trade paperback from Picador.