1
THE LYCÉE FRANÇAIS
Il valente uomo, che parimente tutti gli amava, né sapeva esso medesimo eleggere a qual più tosto lasciar lo dovesse, pensò, avendolo a ciascun promesso, di volergli tutti e tre sodisfare; e segretamente ad uno buono maestro ne fece fare due altri, li quali sì furono simiglianti al primiero, che esso medesimo che fatti gli avea fare appena conosceva qual si fosse il vero.
The worthy man, who loved them all alike and knew not himself how to choose which one he ought to leave the ring to, considered that, having promised it to each one of them, he should like to satisfy all three; and in secret he had a master craftsman make two other rings which were so similar to the first that he himself, who had ordered them made, scarcely knew which was the true.
—BOCCACCIO, The Decameron, Day 1, Third Novella
A STRANGER ARRIVES in an unknown city after a long voyage. He has been separated from his family for some time; somewhere there is a wife, perhaps a child. The journey has been a troubled one, and the stranger is tired. He stops before the building that is to be his home and then begins walking toward it: the final short leg of the improbably meandering way that has led him here. Slowly, he makes his progress through the arch that yawns before him, soon growing indistinguishable from its darkness, like a character in a myth disappearing into the jaws of some fabulous monster, or into the barren sea. He moves with difficulty, his shoulders hunched by the weight of the bags he is carrying. Their contents are everything he owns, now. He has had to pack quickly. What do they contain? Why has he come?
FOR A PERIOD of several years early in the new century I was working on a book the research for which required me to travel extensively throughout the United States, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Israel, and Australia. I went to those places in order to interview a number of survivors of, and witnesses to, certain events that took place during the Second World War in a small eastern Polish town where some relatives of mine had lived. These relatives were ordinary people, of little interest to history but nonetheless the focus, the center so to speak, of the story I wanted to tell, about who they had been and how they had died; just as the town itself, a place of little historical importance, had yet been the focus of my relatives’ lives, the fixed point from which they had never wanted to stray. And so they died there, some hidden quite close to the house where they had lived, only to be betrayed; some rounded up and shot in the town square or in the old cemetery nearby; some transported to remote locales and then gassed. From this small place the few survivors would later radiate outward, after the war was over, to distant parts of the world—places that, only fifteen years earlier, would have struck these townspeople as improbable, absurd even, as destinations, let alone as places to live: Copenhagen, Tashkent, Stockholm, Brooklyn, Minsk, Beer Shevah, Bondi Beach. Those were the places I had to go, sixty years later, in order to talk to the survivors and hear the tales they had to tell about my relatives. The only way to get to the center of my story was by means of elaborate detours to distant peripheries.
When I was finished writing the story I found myself unable to move. At the time, I told myself that I was merely tired; but now the distance of a decade and a half permits me to see that I had experienced a crisis of some kind, even a kind of breakdown. For some months I found it hard to leave my apartment, let alone to do any traveling. I had been to Australia and Denmark and Ukraine, Israel and Poland and Sweden, been to the mass graves and to the museums, including one in Tel Aviv where, to my surprise, the thing that moved me most was a room full of meticulous models of synagogues that had, over the millennia, been built throughout the territory of the Jewish diaspora: in Kaifeng, China, and in Cochin, India, the sixth-century Beth Alpha Synagogue in Lower Galilee and the twelfth-century Santa Maria la Blanca Synagogue in Toledo (which owes its strange name to the fact that, shortly after it was built by a special dispensation from King Alphonso X to create “the largest and most beautiful synagogue in Spain,” it was attacked by mobs, partly destroyed, and subsequently reconstituted as a church dedicated to the Virgin); the nineteenth-century Tempio Israelitico in Florence and its contemporary the Oranienburger Straße Synagogue in Berlin, both largely destroyed by fire in 1938 and now painstakingly re-created in miniature in Israel, a country that did not exist when those buildings were gutted. I was so moved, I think, because at one point from late childhood to early adolescence I myself had been an obsessive model-builder, carefully constructing precise scale replicas of ancient buildings, the mortuary temple of Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahri, the Parthenon in Athens, Rome’s Circus Maximus, each of those structures characterized, as I can now see although I doubt I was conscious of it at the time, by the insistent reduplication of a given structural or decorative element: ramps, columns, arches. I suppose I found the repetition reassuring. At any event, this is why, as I stood there in the model room of the museum in Tel Aviv, halfway through the worldwide journey I undertook in the early 2000s, I had such a strong emotional reaction. I was familiar with the impulse to make such replicas, which is haunted by a poignant paradox: the belief in our ability to re-create and the acknowledgment that the original has been lost . . . “Lost,” I should say, can be a misleading word, implying as it does destruction beyond the point where reconstruction is possible. But there are other kinds of loss, alterations or repurposings of structures so extensive or dramatic that, although the original still stands, is still present, we might nonetheless feel the need for reconstruction of the sort to be found in the Model Room at Beth Hatefusoth in Tel Aviv. There is, for example, a decaying but still handsome structure that dominates the market square of a small sub-Carpathian town called Bolekhiv, currently located within the borders of Ukraine although it was part of Poland when my relatives, who called it Bolechów, lived there, as their relatives before them had done for many centuries until 1943, when the last of them perished. This large rectangular building, its pale pink stucco walls pierced at regular intervals by a series of elegant tall windows with rounded tops, was once known as the “Great” Synagogue of the town—a slight pretension that can be forgiven when you consider, first, that there were at one time more than a dozen synagogues of various sizes in this small market town, and, second, that most of the other buildings in Bolechów were in fact quite small in comparison. The epithet “Great” can, if anything, strike you as poignant now, given that there is not a single synagogue left in that place and that every single person who ever attended those houses of worship, every person who ever familiarly referred to this structure as the Great Synagogue, is long since dead; and that almost none of the people who live there now are aware that it was once a place of worship. This is not surprising. In the 1950s, long before the vast majority of the current residents lived there, the building had been converted into a meeting house for leather-workers, its walls painted with murals celebrating the landscapes of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and a decade before that the ark of the Torah, once the focal point of its architecture, had been ripped out, its scrolls defiled and lost, its decorations stripped off. Hence although you could say that the Great Synagogue of Bolechów still stands, it seems nonetheless to have been “lost,” seems to be in need of a model that could show you what it looked like when it was first constructed, the product of a living civilization. The historical reality which a model of an old building is meant to suggest is, therefore, more than merely material; such a model is surely meant to capture the (as it were) soul as well as the appearance of a building . . . But all this is a dream. There is no model of the Bolechów synagogue in the Beth Hatefusoth Museum, partly because no one who could help reconstruct its lost reality is alive today, and partly because if the museum were to re-create in miniature every synagogue in every town in Eastern Europe that suffered the same fate as the synagogue in Bolechów, it would take up acres, rather than a single room, in Tel Aviv.
The trip to the Model Room was the only occasion when I cried during my travels. Later, during the period of immobility that followed my return home, I would sometimes find myself in the middle of a room, looking around, unable to remember why I had entered it; standing perplexed in this way, motionless, I would burst into tears. A psychiatrist friend of mine suggested at the time that I was experiencing a kind of post-traumatic event. Having listened to tales of violence and destruction for five years without being able to assimilate them emotionally (because at the time I was listening to them my only thought was to “get the story down”), I was now, my friend surmised, having a delayed reaction. It was here, back in the familiar space of my home, that (she said) I was “doing my grieving.” Whatever the reason, I felt emptied, emotionally and creatively. Every time I tried to begin a new project it was as if I had become one of the elderly witnesses or survivors I’d written about: a vacant wanderer arrived at last at a blank new place, unable to go on.
This strange state persisted for some time after I returned from my final research trip, which I took in July of 2005 and which brought me at one point to eastern Poland, where I saw the newly opened memorial of the Belzec death camp. It is a striking monument which is, so to speak, all periphery and no center. The memorial itself consists of a vast field where a large part of the camp had been situated. (The word “camp” can have misleading connotations. Belzec was a death camp, not a labor camp, which means it had no barracks, no sleeping quarters, nothing to suggest a habitation: you got off the train, as a great-aunt of mine did in September 1942, walked through the narrow passage known as der Schlauch, the hose, and went to the gas chamber.) This field has now been filled with stones of varying sizes, some of them as big as boulders, others as small as pebbles, that appear to have been burned. This impressively enormous space, with its suggestive barrenness—we understand that it is a place where nothing will ever live or grow—is in fact off-limits to the visitor; the commemorative act consists of walking around it. A paved path goes all the way round the field of burnt stones. Attached to this pavement are bronze letters and numbers, which also appear to have been burned, or perhaps badly rusted, and which spell out the names of every city and town in Europe from which a transport of human cargo went to Belzec, and the date or dates on which these transports took place. To walk along this path is, then, to retrace the history of Belzec as a killing field. Because many municipalities, even small towns such as the one I was writing about, had more than one transport to this death camp, and because the creators of this monument had decided that the names of the towns and cities should appear as many times as there were transports from those places, in the correct chronological order, there are certain place-names that appear and then reappear as you progress from MARCH 1942, the month of the first transport, to JUNE 1943, the month of the last—a scant fifteen months in which, nonetheless, six hundred thousand people were gassed—the foreign syllables becoming increasingly familiar, so that you almost find yourself looking for them, much in the way that certain characters or motifs in a play or a novel will make their mysterious entrances only to lose, as you keep watching or reading, their strangeness and become, finally, recognizable. The walk around the perimeter of the field is tiring.
That was, as I have said, in 2005. In 2008, on the advice of a friend who suggested that I return to what she called my “intellectual roots,” I began to entertain the idea of writing something about the Greek classics. Although at first I was still incapable of beginning a new book, the idea of writing on a purely literary subject, on something whose charm and inventiveness, whose fantastical characters and settings and intricate construction would beguile and distract my still-bruised mind, appealed to me more and more as the months and then years passed. Wherever else it might lead, I thought, this Greek, this literary subject would at least allow me to leave behind the anguishing stories that had haunted me for so long and, in time, immobilized me: the tales of political collapse and religious intolerance, of escapes both successful and failed, of displacement and refugees, Germans and Jews. Soon after my friend shared her thought with me, the long period of morbid inaction I had been experiencing began to yield to one of reading and animated contemplation until, toward the end of that first decade of the century, for reasons I ended up describing in the book that I eventually wrote, it became clear what my subject would be. I decided to write a book about the Odyssey.
AS IT TURNED OUT, the book was difficult to write: so difficult that there were many occasions when I thought of abandoning it. I was baffled, balked: like some enchanted character in an old tale, the story I wanted to tell kept changing shape, shifting away from me, slipping from my grasp. The problems I was having with the Greek book were not at all like those I had experienced while writing the Holocaust book. The emotional despair that had characterized my relation to that book had yielded, in the new project, to what I can only call narrative despair.
Although there was a period when I studied Classics at the highest level, the book I was trying to write was not a scholarly work. It is, rather, about the last year of my father’s life, which turned out, strangely enough, to be refracted through the Odyssey. In January of 2011, at the age of eighty-one, my father had decided to sit in on a first-year seminar on the epic that I was teaching, an experience that, despite the comic potential of the situation, had a profound impact on him, the students, and myself. In June of that year, just after the course ended, we heard about a Mediterranean cruise that purported to re-create Odysseus’s voyages. We decided to take it, and the voyage turned out to be an experience during which a transformation of sorts took place in my father, a metamorphosis into a version of himself I had never glimpsed during our lives together. Then, in the autumn of the same year, he fell in a parking lot and suffered an injury that, in time, led to a massive stroke and, in still more time, to his death.
These experiences were profound, both intellectually and emotionally. But it was neither their depth and complexity, nor the awkwardness of some of the feelings that would rise to the surface in the classroom or the stateroom or the intensive-care unit, that baffled me, made the writing so difficult. The problem, as would become clearer as a year of writing became two and then three, was that I had no idea how to organize the story.
I had begun writing in the fall of 2012, six months after my father died, and by the end of August 2016, I had six hundred manuscript pages. Each of the three sections had been written, the classroom and the ship and the hospital, and yet the narrative as a whole wasn’t working; reading through it was strangely tiring. As the summer came to an end and I despaired increasingly of finding a way to make the narrative work, I decided to seek out a friend of mine, an editor who has been a mentor to me since I began writing, nearly thirty years ago. I gave him the manuscript, and within a day he called me. The problem, this mentor of mine said, was that I had all the pieces but they hadn’t yet come together. There was something wrong about the way I was telling the story, he went on; it was one thing after another, the seminar, the cruise, the illness and death. There was a lot of incident but it wasn’t yet a story. The first part, the account of the seminar, was interesting (he observed, after a small silence during which I absorbed his criticism), but in his opinion the problem was that once you reach the end of that part—once you come to the end of the Odyssey course—you didn’t want to keep reading. You don’t want to get through the whole semester and then have to go on a cruise, he said, at which I weakly protested, But that’s how it happened. I don’t care how it happened, he returned, this isn’t about fact, this is about a story. You need to find a way to plant the cruise and the hospital within the narrative of the seminar. Use flashbacks, use flash-forwards, don’t worry about chronology. Make it up, if you have to! You just have to find a way.
When he said the word way I couldn’t repress an embarrassed start of recognition. The phrase “find a way” allowed me, first of all, to understand retroactively the nature of the creative and spiritual crisis I had undergone after finishing my previous book. I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem. The literal meaning of aporia is “a lack of a path,” or “no-way.” I hadn’t been able to leave my apartment; I couldn’t think of a new project. I was, in the Greek way of thinking, pathless—the adjective, as it happens, that, in the Odyssey, is used to describe the sea, the terrifying blank nothingness from which Odysseus must extricate himself, literally and figuratively, in order to reclaim his identity and find his way home.
The second thing that occurred to me after my conversation with my mentor was that the technique he was recommending—the insertion within one story of other stories, the flash backward or forward in time in order to give depth and complexity to the primary narrative—is one I have known about since at least my junior year in college, when I attended a seminar on the Odyssey, since this device is most famously used to great effect by Homer himself.
The technique is known as ring composition. In ring composition, the narrative appears to meander away into a digression (the point of departure from the main narrative being marked by a formulaic line or stock scene), although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end to be a circle, since the narration will return to the precise point in the action from which it had strayed, that return marked by the repetition of the very formulaic line or scene that had indicated the point of departure. The material encompassed by such rings could be a single self-contained digression or a more elaborate series of interlocked narratives, each nested within another in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. This, at least, was the argument of a Dutch scholar named W. A. A. Van Otterlo, who in the middle of the last century published a number of studies of this widely wandering literary technique, culminating in a book called De Ringcompositie als Opbouwprincipe in de epische Gedichten van Homerus, “Ring Composition as Structuring Principle in the Epic Poems of Homer,” which would become the definitive scholarly statement on the subject. My editor friend had recommended the latter, more complex approach, although as a non-specialist he could hardly have been familiar with Van Otterlo’s works, most of which were published during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, in 1944 and 1945, the years in which my relatives were trapped in their hiding places, or in places much worse.
I had known about ring composition during my university years. And yet, thirty years later, I had somehow managed to produce a book about Homer’s epic, about teaching Homer’s epic, a book that actually talks about this convoluted manner of composing, without internalizing its lessons. Now I knew at once what to do. I began rejiggering my manuscript in just the way my friend had recommended, folding episodes into one another, involuting certain narratives into larger story lines. The story of our marvelous cruise ended up curled inside an account of our seminar’s reading of Books 9 through 12, the books of the Odyssey in which Odysseus relates his voyages and adventures; the story of my father’s illness and death now spiraled outward from our class discussion about the climactic section of the epic, in which the hero is reunited with his family, his son and then his wife and finally his father; a section saturated with themes of identity, of startling physical transformations and long-delayed and emotional recognitions, themes I was reminded of more than once as I sat by my father’s bed in the ICU, wondering, as people do who attend this kind of sickbed, whether the person by whose side I sat was in fact the person I had once known.
A STRANGER ARRIVES in an unknown city after a long voyage. He is middle-aged, and has been separated from his family; somewhere there is a wife, somewhere a child. The journey has been winding and the stranger is tired. He glances up at the building that is to be his home and, perhaps with a little sigh, begins walking toward it: the final short leg of the improbably meandering way that has led him here. There are stairs leading up to the building, which he mounts effortfully. Or maybe there is an arch at the entry to the building through which he now makes a sluggish progress, a small smudge disappearing into the gaping darkness. His shoulders are likely hunched by the weight of the bags he is carrying, the two bags which now are everything he has, apart from the wife and the child. When are they coming? The bags were packed in haste. What to take, what is most precious? One of them may well contain books.
Who is he? He could be anyone in the past half century: a Syrian, a Bosnian, a Kurd, an Angolan, a Ugandan. A few decades before that he would likely have been a Jew, a mild middle-European, say, who suddenly finds himself in some faraway city that would have been unimaginable in the life that was, until recently, his: Shanghai, Tashkent, Chicago, Istanbul . . . Istanbul. By the late 1930s the influx of German scholars to the Republic of Turkey is so heavy that the Minister of Education there allows himself a little joke: This immigration of Europeans to Istanbul, the Minister says, is a belated recompense for all the Greek scribes and poets and philologists who, hundreds of years earlier, had fled Constantinople for Europe as the Byzantine Empire collapsed under pressure from the Ottomans. So the Turk had joked in 1935. Two and a half centuries earlier this wanderer could have been a Huguenot. It is, let us say, 1685, the year in which the Edict of Nantes, the 1598 decree that had established toleration for French Protestants, was revoked, and this Frenchman, having fled his home and made an arduous journey by sea or land, now finds himself in one of the several nations that have welcomed the sudden great exodus of their Protestant brethren: England, the Netherlands, the German states. By 1689 there are so many French refugees in Prussia that the school built for their children in Berlin by the generous Friedrich Wilhelm, elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, is known as the Lycée Français, the French school, a name that it will retain long after anyone remembers its origin. Two centuries earlier still, in 1492, this stranger could be one of the tens of thousands of Jews and Muslims who, following the promulgation of the Alhambra Edict by the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella in July of that year, were forced out of Spain and eventually made their way eastward, to Istanbul. In the early 1490s the spate of non-Catholics, so many of them prosperous and productive citizens, rushing from west to east was so great that in Istanbul the Sultan, Bayazid II, allowed himself a little joke at the expense of his Iberian rival. “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler,” Bayazid laughed before his courtiers, “he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”
Or it could be half a century still earlier. It could be 1453, and our weary refugee is now one of the many scholars about whom, five centuries later, the Minister of Education would make his jest: those scholars who, after Byzantium finally fell to the Ottoman Muslims in 1453 and the great capital was taken, were forced to flee westward, most of them to Italy, where the torrent of Greek-speaking scholars is so swollen that the nature of knowledge itself eventually shifted, as Greek became part of the mind of Europe for the first time in a millennium. He could be Janus Lascaris, for instance, the scion of an aristocratic Athenian family who was a boy of eight when Constantinople fell and who eventually ended up in Venice as a great scholar of Greek literature, a man who had a hand in many crucial intellectual undertakings of the time, from publishing the editio princeps, the first printed edition, of Aristotle’s Poetics to annotating the text of the ten-volume Histories of Laonikos Chalkokondyles—this Chalkokondyles being another Greek who was displaced by the fall of the Byzantine capital, and who in those Histories described the last rotting century and a half of Byzantium up to and including the city’s fateful fall; the description of which would, of course, have been all too familiar to his countryman Jan Lascaris as he read Chalkokondyles’s Histories and, with what emotion we can only guess, made his meticulous scholarly notes in its margins. Or it could have been Chalkokondyles’s brother Demetrios, who was born in Athens in 1423 but who ended up in Florence, another refugee from the Turks, where he became a great teacher, and where, in 1488, he published Ἡ τοῦ Ὁμήρου ποἰησις άπασα, Hê tou Homêrou poiêsis hapasa, “the complete poetry of Homer”: the editio princeps of the Iliad and Odyssey.
These were just three among the many dozens who fled the collapse of Byzantium, bringing with them their families and their precious baggage of manuscripts and the many-syllabled names with their hard Greek consonants, which, when you read through them in the indices of certain books or in the online lists of “Greek Refugee Scholars in the Italian Renaissance”—the movement of these exiles being significant enough to warrant being memorialized in such indices and lists and Wikis—explode in the mouth with the crunch of candied violets, the Chalkokondyles brothers, of course, but also Manuel Chrysolaras, invited to emigrate to Florence by that city’s wise Chancellor in a letter politely quoting Cicero on the superiority of Greek to Italian culture, who wrote the first Greek grammar to be used in western Europe; or Zacharias Kalliergi, who published the first Greek book to be printed in Rome, an edition of Pindar’s Odes; or Andronikos Kallistos, who, after his escape from the fallen city, taught Aristotle to the French. The list is a long one.
But the effects of the Fall of the City (as the Byzantines called their capital, since it needed no other identifier than that, I Polis, much as, half a millennium later, I, a child growing up in the suburbs of Manhattan, would ask my father to drive me into “the City” so I could stare at the huge scale model of the Parthenon that sat in a Plexiglas case outside the coat room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue)—the effects of the Fall of the City rippled outward from the actual refugees. We need look only at the case of Demetrios Chalkokondyles to get a sense of the immensity of the impact that this upheaval, this Westward flow, had. To be sure, there was the publication of The Complete Poetry of Homer, a signal event in the history of the literature of the West. But there were also less material results of his flight from the East. For instance, there was the influence that this single displaced Greek, Demetrios Chalkokondyles, had on his students, one of whom was the German humanist Johann Reuchlin, among whose many accomplishments was the rather enlightened promotion of the study of Hebrew along with Greek and Latin in German schools; a pairing of the twin pillars of our civilization, the Greek and the Hebrew, Athens and Jerusalem, that to us now seems inevitable but that might have taken longer to seem inevitable had the Greeks not fled the victorious Ottoman Turks in 1453.
So our weary refugee could be any one of those Greeks. But he need not be a historical figure. Indeed, he could be the hero of the book that Demetrios Chalkokondyles published in Florence in 1488: he could be Odysseus. As Chalkokondyles supervised the setting of the Greek type for his momentous publication, how could he not have indulged in a wry smile? For the first line of the first book of the Odyssey could well be a description of Demetrios himself.
In this line we learn two crucial facts about Homer’s hero. First, that he is polytropos: that is, “of many turns,” an adjective that suggests not just the man himself, those twisty and convoluted habits of mind with which the stories that follow will make us so deliciously familiar, the seductions and tall tales and outright lies he is so good at fabricating, but also the painfully circuitous journey he must endure in order to reach his destination, a journey that more than once forces him to return to a place he has already been and start over: to travel in circles, in rings. And second, this line tells us that its hero was, like Demetrios, like those other Constantinopolitan scholars, “forced to wander very greatly,” mála pollá plánghthê: in Odysseus’s case, forced to wander greatly after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, and in their case, forced to wander greatly after their city had been sacked. Some wanderers are less innocent than others . . . The Greek word plangthê, “wandered” or “roved,” is a form of the verb plazô, whose range of meanings suggests the difficulties endured by the poem’s hero. It can mean “to turn aside or away from,” a sense that eventually evolved into another meaning, “to ward off,” or to “baffle or balk,” which evolved into yet another, figurative meaning, applicable to mental states: “to embarrass or trip up.” The etymological intimation that there is something personally mortifying about all these detours and switchbacks and missteps is interesting—as if it were somehow the wanderer’s fault that he wandered so widely.
But this exhausted wanderer could be someone else, too, someone who belongs neither to history nor to fiction. In his anxiousness, his irresolution and helplessness before this blank new façade, this figure becomes available as a type, as a very modern character. He could, for example, be a writer embarking on a new book.
THE BEST-KNOWN EXAMPLE of ring composition in Western literature is the carefully prepared and touching passage in Book 19 of the Odyssey in which the hero is recognized by his old nurse Eurycleia. By this point in the story, Odysseus has at long last returned to Ithaca. Aided by his son, with whom he has finally been reunited, as well as by some loyal servants, he has managed to sneak into the palace disguised as a beggar, the better to be able to assess the situation and contrive a way to kill the Suitors and reclaim his wife. Not long after his arrival in the palace, the “beggar” is given a bath as a matter of traditional courtesy; during this ritual the slave who has been given the task of bathing him, an old woman long attached to the royal household, notices a distinctive scar on this stranger’s thigh—a scar that, she well knows, marks him as none other than Odysseus.
At this suspenseful moment the poet chooses not to proceed to an emotional scene of reunion between the old woman and her long-lost master. Instead, Homer brings the narrative of that encounter to a halt as he begins to circle back into the past, spinning the story of how Odysseus got his scar in the first place: of how, when he was a youth newly grown to manhood, he was wounded in the leg during a boar hunt that he participated in while visiting his mother’s father, a notorious trickster and troublemaker called Autolycus. But this ring turns out to require another, since (the author of the Odyssey assumes) we must understand why Odysseus happened to be visiting his grandfather in the first place. And so the poet traces a second circle, spiraling even further back in time to a moment long before the boar hunt: the moment of Odysseus’s birth. Autolycus, we learn, had paid a visit to his daughter and her husband just after their son was born, and it was during that visit that the baby’s young nurse—the very woman who, in the “now” of the Odyssey’s primary narrative, recognizes the grown man as he sits in the bath—insisted that Autolycus be the one to name the newborn baby. In a fit of narcissistic preening, the grandfather who had caused so much pain to others gives his infant grandson a name best suited to himself: Odysseus, which is ultimately derived from the word odynê, pain. The hero of the complicated story has a complicated identity. He is the man of pain, one who suffers pain but causes others to suffer it, too.
From this crucial moment in the remote past the story winds its way gradually back to the surface again, stopping briefly to revisit the boar hunt before returning at last to the very moment when the now-elderly nurse recognizes the scar on the thigh of the beggar who has appeared in the palace at Ithaca: a moment that takes on added luster because we now have the history of the scar and its owner and his name. There, at the center of these concentric narrative circles, lies a key to the whole epic, the history of how the hero came to be himself, polytropos.
But polytropos was also a way to describe a certain literary style; was an attribute of texts as well as of persons.
In the twenty-third chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics, the book that was helped into print by one of the many Byzantine Greeks who fled westward after the Fall of Constantinople, the Greek philosopher warns about some potential pitfalls in constructing the plots of epic poems. As examples of what can go wrong he uses two works, now lost, from the so-called Epic Cycle, the series of eight lengthy verse narratives which together related all the events having to do with the Trojan War, from its remotest prehistory—the wedding of Achilles’s parents—to the final bizarre ramification of its most attenuated plotline: the accidental killing of Odysseus, in his old age, by his son Telegonus, his child by the witch Circe. Of that cycle, only the Iliad and the Odyssey remain, all of the others having fallen victim to the destructive force of time, neglect, fire, rats, and violence; manuscripts, after all, being only as safe as the libraries in which they reside, which is to say as safe as the cities in which the libraries reside, and as we know the cities of men are remarkably prone to destruction. Aristotle in the Poetics is particularly interested in what is wrong with two parts of the Epic Cycle: the Cypria, a rather haphazard affair that covered all the action from the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis to the Judgment of Paris to the abduction of the Greek queen Helen by the Trojan prince Paris, on through the first nine years of the war to the moment when Homer’s Iliad begins; and the so-called Little Iliad, also something of a laundry list of a poem, narrating as it did much of the action after the death of Achilles up to and including the construction of the Trojan Horse and the Achaeans’ terrible entry into Troy.
For Aristotle, both epics made the same fatal structural error. The structure of an epic, he writes, “should not be similar to that of histories, which require the exposition not of one action, but rather of all the events that happened during one period.” An “action,” for him, is what we think of as “plot”: a sequence of events whose elements are organically, coherently interconnected. A “period,” by contrast, is merely a span of time during which a number of incidents take place one after another. Homer, Aristotle goes on to say, wisely avoided the historical method—that is, narrating sequentially every episode belonging to a given event (the Trojan War, in this case)—since this kind of serial structure “would be too extensive and impossible to grasp all at once.” Instead, Homer wisely focused on “just one section” (as Aristotle puts it) of a larger event—that “one section,” in the case of the Iliad, being the wrath of Achilles in the final year of the Trojan War, into which the poet artfully weaves a number of other episodes in order to give his composition what Aristotle calls “diversity.” As examples of those other, less talented poets who failed to see the wisdom of Homer’s method, Aristotle cites the poets of the Cypria and Little Iliad, who made the mistake of constructing their works out of many sequential actions in the order they occurred.
A mistake that I, too, once made, in the original version of my Odyssey book.
For all of its elaborations and narrative circling, the Odyssey is about what Aristotle calls “one complete action”: the homecoming of Odysseus and everything that ramifies from it. Not the least of these ramifications is speculation about the nature of the hero himself, such speculation being the object of the poem’s ring-like digressions and episodes: for instance, “The Scar of Odysseus” in Book 19. For this reason, digression is never the same as distraction. Its twists and turns are unified in their aim, which is to help us understand the one complete action that is the subject of the work to which they belong.
THE GREEK TASTE for the paradoxical way in which digression and what Aristotle calls “diversity” can enhance rather than detract from a given theme is evident in some ancient commentary on a crucial part of the Odyssey. In the third and fourth books of the epic, Odysseus’s young son, Telemachus, is spurred by Athena, his father’s divine protectress (who has assumed the appearance of an old family friend called Mentor) to leave Ithaca and seek information on his lost father’s whereabouts, traveling first to Pylos (Book 3) and then to Sparta (Book 4) to interview his father’s aging comrades, Nestor and Menelaus. Although these interviews turn up no hard evidence about his father’s fate, most modern readers never question that the youth’s voyages are, in and of themselves, somehow “educational”—that (like going away to college, say, or taking a gap year or a junior year abroad) the mere fact of leaving home and being on his own will play a crucial part in his maturation. Travel, we like to think—even getting lost now and then—is a good thing. Certainly there were scholars in ancient times who understood the boy’s adventures in this way. One commentator on the Odyssey who was annotating line 284 of Book 1 (the line in which Athena, as she sets her ward’s itinerary, advises him to “go first to Pylos and question godlike Nestor”) argues that Telemachus’s ensuing travels are “educational,” and will moreover give him “glory on account of the search for his father.”
But some ancient readers of Homer questioned the pedagogical value of Athena’s advice. “Preposterous,” one sage harrumphed in his marginal note to line 284, noting that by going abroad, Telemachus leaves his home unprotected and his mother open to danger. Baffled by what they saw as the foolishness of the goddess’s plan, this scholar and others who followed his lead advanced another explanation for Telemachus’s trips abroad: a literary, stylistic explanation. This portion of the Odyssey, the critics theorized, was designed to provide entertaining “variety” in a story that, they argued, otherwise had very little. Added on to the story of Odysseus’s homecoming, the adventures of his son, the youth’s conversations with two great figures of the Trojan War, would prevent the epic from being too (as one commentator put it) “uniform.”
The Greek word for “uniform” that this commentator used is monotropos, “having only one turn.” His choice of words suggests that, for the ancient readers of Homer, the aim of the Odyssey’s narrative was to be as polytropos, “many-turned,” as its hero. Which is to say, the way to avoid boring uniformity is to add more and more turns. “Since the Odyssey does not offer sufficient variety by itself,” another scholar concluded, “he [Homer] has Telemachus travel to Sparta and Pylos, so that much of what happened at Troy can be narrated by Nestor and Menelaus, by means of digressions.”
Now there are two ancient Greek words for “digression.” The one used in this passage is parekbasis, which literally means “a going off to the side”; the other, which is almost identical, is parekbolê, literally “a casting something off to the side.” Curiously, this second word for “digression,” parekbolê, eventually became one of the technical terms in Ancient Greek for “scholarly commentary.” Digression, commentary: it’s actually not hard to see how this happened. Part of the work of ancient scholars was to compile and extract the observations of other, earlier scholars. After a while, these ever-expanding compendia of marginal references—accompanied, to be sure, by the observations of the scholar who was doing the compiling—became freestanding critical works in their own right: which is to say, commentaries.
The word parekbolê, for example, appears (in its plural form, parekbolai) in the titles of two important works by a twelfth-century Greek Orthodox cleric and scholar named Eustathius. The works in question were his Commentaries on Homer’s Iliad and the Commentaries on Homer’s Odyssey, Parekbolai eis tên tou Homêrou Iliada and Parekbolai eis tên tou Homêrou Odyssea, which, in the standard modern print edition, together comprise six volumes of densely printed Greek text. Even by the august standards of his own era, Eustathius was an impressive scholar. Acknowledged already by his peers to be the most learned man of his age, he had a prodigious knowledge of Greek epic and lyric poetry, among other genres. But it was his work on Homer’s epics that won him lasting renown. It does him no injustice to say that his immense and meticulous commentaries are valued today less for the author’s original insights into the epics than for his many quotations of other, much earlier scholars—including the greatest scholars of antiquity, the heads of the Library of Alexandria, the first professional scholars to devote themselves to studying Homer’s poems—whose works have since been lost and which survive only in Eustathius’s citations of them . . . “Lost,” it should be said, is often a euphemism. Many ancient texts that had been preserved through centuries of careful copying and recopying by Byzantine monks later fell victim to wanton destruction. Some of the most devastating acts of such destruction, it is worth noting, were inflicted on Byzantium, a Christian empire, not by the Muslims (as many people assume) but by the Christian armies of western Europe which, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, ravaged the cities of the Byzantine Empire, they being closer to Europe and easier targets than were the cities of the Levant, the nominal targets of these Crusaders’ violent energies. Most scholars agree that some major classical works that are now lost to posterity were still extant before 1204, the year in which soldiers of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and destroyed much of the city, a blow from which the Empire never recovered politically and which prepared the way for the coup de grâce administered two centuries later by the Ottomans when they finally took Constantinople in 1453.
But that was not the only instance of this shocking Christian-on-Christian violence. A generation before 1204 there had been the Sack of Thessalonica by the Normans. This was in 1185. Luckily for history, that dreadful event was memorialized in a work called The Sack of Thessalonica, written soon afterward by that city’s septuagenarian archbishop. This text is notable both for its precise descriptions of the horrific atrocities visited upon the city and its people and for its admirable literary polish—particularly the echoes of Homer’s style and diction. The description of terrified citizens seeking sanctuary in a church as trembling “like sheaves of corn,” for instance, borrows an image from the Book 23 of the Iliad, while an evocation of the sun rising over the fields on the day after the city’s sack (“which however had no power to put an end to the night of death”) echoes the first lines of Book 3 of the Odyssey, which describes the sunrise that greets Telemachus when he visits Nestor in Pylos during his educational trip abroad. But these verbal parallels should not surprise us, since the author of the Sack of Thessalonica was Eustathius, that city’s archbishop and the scholar whose commentaries on Homer, those famous and important parekbolai, are so invaluable.
For the Greeks, then, the “commentary,” a genre that we turn to for illumination, derived quite naturally from the “digression,” something many of us think of as an irritation, an impediment to knowledge.
A MAN HAS ARRIVED in an unknown city after a long voyage. He is tired, middle-aged; wracked with anxieties about the wife and child from whom he has been separated. He stands now before a building whose architecture is slightly fantastical to his eye and whose as-yet unknown interior will be his home for years to come. Wearily, he begins to climb the stairs.
Who is he? He could be so many people, the Spaniard or the Jew, the Muslim or the Greek. He could be a refugee from the Christians’ destruction of Thessalonica, returned home at last to start rebuilding; he could be a Byzantine scholar fleeing westward from the fall of Constantinople, of whom as we know there were so many. It could be someone more recent; it could be a Jew in the 1930s. Indeed it is. For it is neither 1204 nor 1453, now: it is, rather, the late summer of 1936, and the stranger pausing before his new life is a middle-aged German Jew who has been separated from his family. There is in fact a wife, there is in fact a child; we know that, a few months after this exhausted refugee arrives in his exotic new home, they will safely follow him. On this summer day he is in his mid-forties, but seems older. A number of photographs of him survive. He has a fine, intelligent face with heavy cheeks that never quite become jowls, balanced by a high forehead which seems to be racing back to meet the vanishing hairline; the dour effect of the strong nose, which ends sharply, and the wide, slightly frowning mouth is alleviated somewhat by the dark eyes which, with their heavily hooded lids, look kindly and a little bit tired: the eyes of a person who understands a great deal and says somewhat less. His journey has been winding, wearying. We know that he has passed through many cities: Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest. He has settled into his new home here in Istanbul and today arrives for the first time at the building that will house the office where he can do his precious work. He begins walking toward the strangely ornate edifice, a “magnificent palace,” as another refugee scholar, a friend of our wanderer, would later recall, “with views of the blue Sea of Marmara, with beadles at every door, but almost no books.” There is a short flight of stairs leading up to the doorway, which he mounts effortfully. His shoulders, it is not hard to imagine, are hunched by the weight of the bag he is carrying. We can guess what is inside. His friend, that other refugee scholar, whose name was Spitzer, and who had preceded this tired traveler to Turkey long before the trickle of scholars became a desperate eastward rush, had warned him about the libraries, which could not compare to those of the rich German universities the two had known so well, and from which they have recently been expelled. Unfortunately, there were almost no books. But they were safe. Our wanderer hoists the bag up the stairs to his new place of work.
He is Erich Auerbach, a German literary scholar. One day in the future, largely because of a vastly learned book that he will soon write, he will be referred to as “the father of Comparative Literature,” but now he is known, by those who know him, as a scholar of the Romance literatures and of medieval literature particularly—above all the poetry of Dante, another exile, about whom he has written a book that earned him the chair in Romance Philology at the University of Marburg, the position that he has recently been forced to give up. And so, along with all those other lucky Germans, he now finds himself in Turkey, having been invited to join the faculty at the University of Istanbul as part of that country’s ambitious plan to remake itself as a European nation: an invitation which he and many others would have scorned a scant five years earlier but which now they have eagerly accepted, given what is happening throughout Europe. We remember the education minister’s sour joke.
It is in this magnificent and empty building with its turquoise views of the Sea of Marmara, that crucial body of water which divides Europe from Asia, that this great authority on European literature will write his greatest work, a paean to the civilization of the continent that he has just fled. The name of this work is Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. This massive tome, on which he labors in peace, in Istanbul, all through the mid-1940s—the very years, as it happens, during which, in the occupied Netherlands, W. A. A. Van Otterlo is publishing his definitive papers on ring composition—ranges easily over the entire landscape of Western writing, poetry and history and fiction, from its first chapter, which contrasts the Greek with the biblical style of narration (that seemingly inevitable pairing) to chapters on the Roman historians Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus; from Gregory of Tours in the Dark Ages to The Song of Roland in the early Middle Ages, from Dante and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century to Voltaire in the eighteenth and Stendhal in the nineteenth, ending with Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, his contemporaries, in the twentieth. Each of its twenty chapters begins with a long and, it is to be assumed, representative citation from the work in question, sometimes a few paragraphs and sometimes an entire page or two, first in the original language—Latin, Occitan, Provençal, Italian, French, German, English—and then in Auerbach’s translation, each citation being followed by a minutely close reading of the text, all leading to an insight into how that text achieves its mimicry (which is what the Greek word “mimesis” means) of reality—and of course what it understands the reality of life to be.
The meticulous analytical technique that Auerbach would use to re-create the meanings of past writers in his book is representative of the branch of literary studies known as philology: literally, the “love of words” or “love of learning.” Philology is, simply put, the study of written literature in its historical context. When it began its existence as a formal academic discipline in the late eighteenth century, founded by a German called Friedrich August Wolf—a groundbreaking scholar of Homer’s poems, as it happens—philology was intended to be as rigorous as any branch of the natural and physical sciences, which at that time were coming into great esteem. Literature, the interpretation of which many people casually think of as subjective, impressionistic, a matter of opinion, was, for the early philologists, an object like any other object of scientific enquiry: gravity, plants, stars. To understand the meaning of a literary text, one had to master its various elements, just as one had to master addition or trigonometry or the calculus in order to engage in higher mathematics; those elements being, in the case of literature, not only the language in which the text was written, its grammars and syntaxes and vocabularies, but also the history, religion, sociology, and politics of the civilization that produced the text.
As painstaking as its methods are, the overall project of this discipline is, if anything, almost touchingly grandiose: to construct a kind of model of the mind of the past, using the fragments and scraps and quotations of texts that have been left behind to recuperate the wholeness that was once there; to reproduce (as Auerbach put it) the entire “inner history” of a given culture, which seems in retrospect to have “proceeded as if according to a plan”—a plan that is perceptible only in retrospect because its contours are often obscured during the “twisted course” of history, the medium in which literature arises. Just so do the overarching themes and meaning of an epic or novel we are reading often elude our full comprehension until we finish it, when at last incidents or characters or motifs that may have struck us as casual or incidental when we first encountered them are revealed as having a significant, even a crucial place in the overall structure.
The philological method that is everywhere on display in Auerbach’s Mimesis was something he had learned in his native Germany, a country renowned for the thoroughness of its scholarly tradition. Auerbach, who was born in Berlin in the late autumn of 1892 and was, therefore, forty-three at the time he arrived in Istanbul in the summer of 1936, had first been exposed to that tradition as a boy during the first decade of the last century, when, sitting in the safety of his schoolroom, he could hardly have been expected to imagine the religious and political persecutions that would come. His future had, no doubt, seemed cloudless back in the first years of the 1900s, when he was a prize-winning student at the Französisches Gymnasium in Berlin, the Lycée Français, where he was drilled in Greek and Latin and French—the germ, no doubt, of his scholarly inclination. And yet he realized his dreams only after a series of distractions and digressions: the First World War, in which he received a serious wound in the foot that left him with a scar for life; then an abortive career in the law, followed by a stint as a librarian. It was only in his mid-thirties that he found his calling, wrote his Dante book, and got his chair in Romance Languages.
From that early life, the rigorous training at the Lycée Français and the varied and cosmopolitan exposure to the world that followed, would spring Auerbach’s later and somewhat quixotic belief that philology, that painstaking excavation of a given literature’s relationship to the historical moment that produced it, nonetheless held the key to the grandest plan of all: die gemeinsame Verbindung der Kulturen, “the common connectedness of all cultures.” A number of scholars today, in fact, see Mimesis as a desperate if noble attempt to reconcile two incompatible impulses: the passion for philology, with its maniacal insistence on method and specificity, and the intuitive, vaguely Romantic human “feeling” (as the author once referred to it) that transcends the specifics of cultures and histories.
This concept of a universal literature of the human spirit was not new, as Auerbach himself acknowledged. He owed the idea to his countryman Goethe, who a century earlier had coined the term Weltliteratur, a literature of the world: a notion with an interesting genealogy that is linked, as it happens, to Istanbul.
Goethe came to his expansive humanistic vision of literature during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, a period in which his poetry was drawing inspiration from the East—particularly from the great verse collection, or diwan, of the fourteenth-century Persian writer Shams al-Din Hafiz, who is still considered the greatest of all Persian lyric poets and whose work, when Goethe encountered it, had been recently translated into German. The translator, an Austrian named Joseph von Hammer, was a diplomat who had stumbled into a literary career. After being posted to Istanbul, in 1799, he had fallen in love with the East, a consuming passion that eventually led him to write extensively about the Levant and its cultures after his return to Europe. His writings included a number of translations: of verse, including of course the diwan of Hafiz, which would so impress Goethe, but also of prose—not least, the fascinating memoirs of the Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi, whose record of a trip to Athens in 1667 affords us a precious contemporary description of that city and its buildings, among others the Parthenon, which suffered devastating damage barely twenty years after he visited. There were also a number of learned treatises, with subjects as varied as the history of Constantinople (which is to say, Istanbul) and a study of assassins; his ten-volume History of the Ottoman Empire, for many years the standard work on that subject, was often compared to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But it was von Hammer’s translation of Hafiz, embedded in a study of Persian poetry, that would have the greatest impact, because of Hafiz’s influence on Goethe, who in turn so strongly influenced the literature of the centuries to come. Hafiz’s poetry made Goethe feel (as he wrote to a friend at the time) as though he were oscillating between West and East. This unifying movement between seemingly unbridgeable poles was reflected in the title of what many scholars agree was Goethe’s last great collection of love poems, West-Östlicher Diwan, “The West-Eastern Diwan,” written in the second half of the 1810s and published in 1819.
It was this dream of a fusion between East and West, born of his exposure to von Hammer’s translation, that would lead Goethe, a few years later, to the concept of Weltliteratur.
The same vision underpins Mimesis. However disparate the national cultures that the individual chapters analyze in such exhaustive detail, however specific the contexts in which those cultures’ literatures must be understood and analyzed, Auerbach assumes that certain realities are, in the end, shared by all humans. There is a “common fate” that arises from a “diverse background,” as he wrote in an article published a few years before he died, in a nursing home outside of New Haven, Connecticut: the last of his many destinations. It was a concept that he clung to with a tenacity you can only call poignant, given the specific history of his own times.
mimesis IS A WORK that is of interest to readers of the Odyssey for a number of reasons, one of them being the book’s first chapter, which is called “Odysseus’s Scar.” In this introductory section, which establishes the methodological and intellectual bases for the critical endeavor to follow and thus serves as the “starting point,” as Auerbach put it, for the entire project, the author explicates the scene from Book 19 that I have mentioned. Because his study seeks to understand how literature makes reality feel real, what this chapter is really about is ring composition: a technique about which, as it turns out, Auerbach has some doubts.
In his account of the scene, Auerbach comments with something bordering on bemusement on the fact that the “digression,” as he calls it, into Odysseus’s past that is triggered by Eurycleia’s recognition of the scar—the “ring” that gives us the history of the scar and of the man who bears it—is nearly as long as the narrative of the scene taking place in the present. “There are more than seventy lines of these verses” that make up the digression about the scar, he observes, going on to note that the “incident itself”—the recognition of the scar by the old nurse as Odysseus sits in his palace once more after twenty years abroad—is barely any longer: eighty lines long. “All is narrated,” Auerbach writes, “with such a complete externalization of all the elements of the story and of their interconnections as to leave nothing in obscurity.” As Auerbach surely knew, the Greeks themselves applauded what he calls externalization. In an ancient literary treatise called On Style, for instance, by an author known as Demetrius, another passage from Homer is singled out for praise in terms that uncannily anticipate Auerbach’s words. This passage, from the twenty-first book of the Iliad, is an extended simile in which the movement of an enraged river-god who flows and surges in hot pursuit of that epic’s hero, Achilles, is compared to a stream of water that surges powerfully through an irrigation ditch once a laborer has painstakingly cleared the ditch of debris. (The choice of this particular passage will have seemed natural to the Greeks, whose myths are full of highly symbolic bodies of water, not least streams and rivers—for instance the dreadful River Styx, in which Achilles, the limits of whose prowess are demonstrated in this very passage, was dipped by his mother in an attempt to make him invincible.) For Demetrius, the success of the simile derives from the exhaustiveness with which the poet evokes the homely scene to which the god’s movement is compared: the peasant with his hoe, the pebbles that are washed away once the blockage is cleared, and so on. “Its vividness,” the ancient Greek critic writes, “depends on the fact that all of the attendant circumstances are mentioned; nothing is left out.”
Nothing left in obscurity, Auerbach had noted; nothing is left out, Demetrius had observed. But whereas the Greek critic admires Homer’s manner, the exhaustiveness of epic’s descriptive technique—the way in which objects and persons, scars and brooches and bows, slaves and masters, all have histories that (with sufficient narrative space) can be illuminated, explained, accounted for—can, as far as Auerbach is concerned, present an obstacle to a persuasive representation of reality. For Auerbach, obscurity is, paradoxically, an advantage in literary mimicry, mimesis.
He demonstrates his idea a little later on, when he compares the Greek technique to the manner of narration that we find in the Hebrew Bible—a manner exemplified, for him, by the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22:1–19:
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! And he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off . . .
The passage, Auerbach points out, is full of opacities, blanks. Where are the speakers? he wonders. Whence does God come, whence does he call Abraham? Why, the modern critic asks, are we not given the reasons for God’s dreadful temptation of Abraham, his faithful servant? “We are not told,” comes Auerbach’s reply to his own question.
One detail on which he focuses his critical attention is the three days’ journey that takes Abraham to the place where he is to sacrifice his son, a journey that, amazingly to Auerbach, and no doubt to many others who, willingly or not, have undertaken arduous voyages, receives no further description in the Hebrew text. We do not know where it is set, we have no description of the terrains traversed, the animals or attendants who accompanied the father and son—nothing except what Auerbach characterizes as “what is necessary to the purpose of the narrative.” And yet the very lack of detailed illumination is, the author implies, productive, since it forces the reader to probe further, to think harder about the characters, their motivations, their interior lives. This (as it were) efficient opacity of the narrative, Auerbach goes on to observe, reflects the elusiveness of the Hebrew deity Himself. “Even their earlier God of the desert was not fixed in form and content. . . . The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things.” (It is difficult not to be struck by the author’s use of the possessive pronoun “their” in this passage, as if he were not a Jew himself; this diction makes me, at least, wonder whether his interest in opacity is purely scholarly.) Both the opaque style of narration and the elusive deity, that is to say, are recognizable products of the Hebrews’ distinctive mentality, their Geist: precisely what philological analysis is meant to reveal.
And so Auerbach finds the narrative inscrutability in the text of Genesis persuasively realistic. Just as we do not in fact know everything about the events and people encountered in our lives—certainly not the way in which the ring composition in Book 19 of the Odyssey allows us to know them—so too with the biblical narrative, which grants us only partial vision and imperfect information and, because of its fragmentary nature, its imperfection, feels real.
THERE ARE VARIOUS WAYS to describe the two styles of narration that Auerbach contraposes as he begins his epic journey through the literature of the West—those two styles representing, not incidentally, the two cultural pillars of European civilization. The Homeric or Greek technique with which the great critic begins is what you might call the “optimistic” style. Like a brilliant light, flattening out shadows and contours, putting everything on the same level, past and present, history and legend, it implies that everything can be known, explained, accounted for. And then there is the densely shadowed Hebrew style, the pessimistic “way,” with its acknowledgment that, like God himself, creation is never knowable, but can (as Auerbach went on to argue) only be subject to interpretation.
Interpretation. However glum its premise, Auerbach’s argument invites him and every other critic and writer in history, including me, to do what we do, which is to fill in the blanks, model what is no longer there, or what is not apparent. And so the very unknowability of creation necessarily, paradoxically generates further creation—more text, which in turn will require more interpretation. This makes me wonder whether the pessimistic and optimistic styles are not, after all, opposites so much as complements, two aspects of the same complex phenomenon, each necessary to describing that phenomenon and each inextricable from the other—the way our understanding of the word “cave,” say, is constituted by our being able to imagine both its characteristic hollows, its defining emptiness, and its smooth stone walls, the structure that contains the emptiness. The Hebrew way, in this reading, is what makes possible the Greek way, the two being not so much points at opposite ends of a line as arcs of a continuous circle.
All this, I should say, was quite different from what I remembered it being when, ten years ago now, in my moment of aporia, of narrative despair, I consulted Mimesis for the first time in many years in the hope of finding there some insight that could be useful in rescuing my book about the Odyssey. I had recalled Auerbach’s first chapter as a glowing endorsement of the ring composition that I was determined to adopt on my mentor’s recommendation, only to find there the German Jew’s grave doubts about Homer’s technique and its ability to represent reality in the textured way I was hoping to achieve. Still, it is hard for me to give up my confidence in the Greek way—in the perhaps superstitious belief that behind the apparent fragmentation and chaos of the world (and what better example of that than the history of classical scholarship?) it is possible to perceive a shape; perhaps even a plan.
Indeed, in an epilogue he appended to Mimesis some time after completing it, Auerbach admitted that it was, in fact, his exile, his eastward wandering across borders and nationalities and continents, that made possible his great study of Weltliteratur (or at least of the European world and its culture)—much of which, legend has it, he had to write from memory of the various texts, given the relatively meager collections of the libraries that he found on arriving at his strange destination, which as we know could not compare to those he had left behind. However difficult for him and his scholar friends, this dearth was the object of a witticism on the part of the dean of the University of Istanbul. “We don’t bother with books,” the dean had replied after Auerbach’s friend Spitzer asked about the library’s resources. “They burn.” For some people interested in the twentieth century and its dark histories, this comment will bring to mind the words of yet another German, the Jewish-born nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, who famously remarked that wherever books are burned, people will end up burning, too—although it is unlikely that he could have predicted the scale of the burning his countrymen would one day be able to achieve, incinerations that would, as we know, extend far beyond the borders of Germany, to places like Belzec.
“The book,” Auerbach wrote in his epilogue to Mimesis,
was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies. . . . I had to dispense with almost all periodicals . . . and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts. . . . It is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might have never reached the point of writing.
That is where we will leave Auerbach for now: at the once unimaginably distant point to which he fled and where he began to write, there just beyond the edge of Europe, the weary stranger arrived at the remote periphery where he will compose his masterpiece about the center, about the canonical texts of the West. Liberated, as Dante had been, by his exile, he is now able to surrender himself to memories of his intellectual and cultural home, memories which, because of what is happening there, are the only materials from which he will be able to build his model: a museum of a civilization that has lost its identity.