“And as when the land appears welcome to men who are swimming, / after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open / water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy / sea,…/…gladly they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil; / so welcome was her husband to her as she looked upon him, / and she could not let him go from the embrace of her white arms.”1 If we gauged the Odyssey by these lines, this simile for the happiness of reunited spouses, taking it not simply as a simile inserted into the narrative but as the substance appearing in naked form as the story nears its end, then the Odyssey would be none other than an attempt to attend to the endlessly renewed beating of the sea on the rocky coast, and to patiently reproduce the way the water floods over the rocks and then streams back from them with a roar, leaving the solid ground glowing with deeper color. This roaring is the sound of epic discourse, in which what is solid and unequivocal comes together with what is ambiguous and flowing, only to immediately part from it again. The amorphous flood of myth is the eternally invariant, but the telos of narrative is the differentiated, and the unrelentingly strict identity in which the epic subject matter is held serves to achieve its nonidentity with what is simply identical, with unarticulated sameness: serves to create its differentness. The epic poem wants to report on something worth reporting on, something that is not the same as everything else, not exchangeable, something that deserves to be handed down for the sake of its name.
Because, however, the narrator turns to the world of myth for his material, his enterprise, now impossible, has always been contradictory. For myth—and the narrator’s rational, communicative discourse, with its subsumptive logic that equalizes everything it reports, is preoccupied with myth as the concrete, as something distinct from the leveling ordering of the conceptual system—this kind of myth itself partakes of the eternal sameness that awoke to self-consciousness in ratio. The storyteller has always been the one who resisted interchangeability, but historically and even today what he has to report has been the interchangeable. Hence there is an anachronistic element in all epic poetry: in Homer’s archaistic practice of invoking the muse to help proclaim events of vast scope as well as in the desperate efforts of Stifter and the late Goethe to pass bourgeois conditions off as primordial reality, a reality as open to noninterchangeable language as to a name. But as long as great epic poetry has existed, this contradiction has informed the narrator’s modus operandi; it is the element in epic poetry commonly referred to as objectivity or material concreteness [Gegenständlichkeit]. In comparison with the enlightened state of consciousness to which narrative discourse belongs, a state characterized by general concepts, this concrete or objective element always seems to be one of stupidity, lack of comprehension, ignorance, a stubborn clinging to the particular when it has already been dissolved into the universal. The epic poem imitates the spell of myth in order to soften it. Karl Theodor Preuss called this attitude “Urdummheit,” or “primal stupidity,” and Gilbert Murray has characterized the first phase of Greek religion, the one preceding the Homeric-Olympian phase, in precisely these terms.2 In the epic account’s rigid fixation on its object, which is designed to break the intimidating power of the object of the identifying word’s stare, the narrator gains control, as it were, of the gesture of fear. Naiveté is the price he pays for that, and the traditional view considers it something positive. The customary eulogizing of narrative stupidity, which emerges only with the dialectic of form, has made of that stupidity a restorationist ideology hostile to consciousness, an ideology whose last dregs are currently being sold off in the philosophical anthropologies of our day with their false concreteness.
But epic naiveté is not only a lie intended to keep general reflection at a distance from blind contemplation of the particular. As an anti-mythological enterprise, epic naiveté emerges from the enlightenment-oriented and positivist effort to adhere faithfully and without distortion to what once was as it was, and thereby break the spell cast by what has been, by myth in its true sense; hence in restricting itself to what occurred once and only once it retains an aspect that transcends limitation. For what occurred once and only once is not merely a defiant residue opposing the encompassing universality of thought; it is also thought’s innermost yearning, the logical form of something real that would no longer be enclosed by social domination and the classificatory thought modeled upon it: the concept reconciled with its object. A critique of bourgeois reason dwells within epic naiveté. It holds fast to a possibility of experience that is destroyed by the bourgeois reason that ostensibly grounds it. Its restrictedness in the representation of its one subject is the corrective to the restrictedness that befalls all thought when it forgets its unique subject in its conceptual operations and covers the subject up instead of coming to know it. It is easy to either ridicule Homeric simplicity, which was the opposite of simplicity, or deploy it spitefully in opposition to the analytic spirit. Similarly, it would be easy to demonstrate the narrowmindedness of Gottfried Keller’s last novel, Martin Salander, and to accuse that novel of ignoring what is essential and instead displaying a petit-bourgeois “things are terrible these days” ignorance of the economic bases of the crises and the social presuppositions of the Gründerjahre, the period of economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. But again, only this kind of naiveté permits one to tell the story of the fateful origins of the late capitalist era and appropriate them for anamnesis instead of merely reporting them and—through a protocol for which time is merely an index—casting them down in their deceptive actuality into a void where memory can find no purchase. Through this kind of remembrance of what cannot really be remembered any more, Keller expresses a truth in his description of the two shyster lawyers who are twin brothers, duplicates of one another: the truth about an interchangeability that is hostile to memory. Only a theory that went on to provide a transparent definition of the loss of experience in terms of the experience of society would be able to match his achievement. Through epic naiveté, narrative language, whose attitude toward the past always contains an apologetic element, justifying what has occurred as being worthy of attention, acts as its own corrective. The precision of descriptive language seeks to compensate for the falseness of all discourse. The impulse that drives Homer to describe a shield as though it were a landscape and to elaborate a metaphor until it becomes action, until it becomes autonomous and ultimately destroys the fabric of the narrative—that is the same impulse that repeatedly drove Goethe, Stifter, and Keller, the greatest storytellers of the nineteenth century, at least in Germany, to draw and paint instead of writing, and it may have inspired Flaubert’s archaeological studies as well. The attempt to emancipate representation from reflective reason is language’s attempt, futile from the outset, to recover from the negativity of its intentionality, the conceptual manipulation of objects, by carrying its defining intention to the extreme and allowing what is real to emerge in pure form, undistorted by the violence of classificatory ordering. The narrator’s stupidity and blindness—it is no accident that tradition has it that Homer was blind—expresses the impossibility and hopelessness of this enterprise. It is precisely the material element in the epic poem, the element that is the extreme opposite of all speculation and fantasy, that drives the narrative to the edge of madness through its a priori impossibility. Stifter’s last novellas provide the clearest evidence of the transition from faithfulness to the object to manic obsession, and no narrative can partake of truth if it has not looked into the abyss into which language plunges when it tries to become name and image. Homeric prudence is no exception to this. In the last book of the Odyssey, in the second nekyia, or descent to the underworld, when the shade of the suitor Amphimedon tells that of Agamemnon in Hades about the revenge of Odysseus and his son, we read: “These two, / after compacting their plot of a foul death for the suitors, / made their way to the glorious town. In fact Odysseus / came afterwards; Telemachos led the way….”3 The German word “nämlich” [in Lattimore’s translation, “in fact”]4 maintains the logical form, whether of explanation or of affirmation, for the sake of cohesion, while the content of the sentence, a purely descriptive statement, does not stand in any such connection to what precedes it. In the minimal meaninglessness of this coordinating particle the spirit of logical-intentional narrative language collides with the spirit of the wordless representation that the former is preoccupied with, and the logical form of coordination itself threatens to banish the idea, which is not coordinated with anything and is really not an idea any more, to the place where the relationship of syntax and material dissolves and the material affirms its superiority by belying the syntactic form that attempts to encompass it. This is the epic element, the element of genuine classical antiquity, in Hölderlin’s madness. In his poem “An die Hoffnung” [“To Hope”] the following lines appear:
Im grünen Tale, dort, wo der frische Quell
Vom Berge täglich rauscht und die liebliche
Zeitlose mir am Herbsttag aufblüht,
Dort, in der Stille, du holde, will ich
Dich suchen, oder wenn in der Mitternacht
Das unsichtbare Leben im Haine wallt,
Und über mir die immerfrohen
Blumen, die blühenden Sterne glänzen.
[Below where daily down from the mountain purls
The limpid spring and where on an autumn day
The late and lovely saffron opens,
There in the stillness, beloved, will I
Look out for you, or when in the rustling copse
At midnight strange invisible creatures teem
And up above, the ever-joyful
Flowers, the blossoming stars, are glistening.]5
Hölderlin’s “oder” [or], and often particles in Georg Trakl’s poetry as well, resembles the Homeric “nämlich.” While in these expressions language, in order to remain language at all, still claims to be a propositional synthesis of relations between things, it renounces judgment in the words whose use dissolves those relations. In the epic form of linkage, in which the train of thought finally goes slack, language shows a lenience toward judgment while at the same time unquestionably remaining judgment. The flight of ideas, discourse in its sacrificial form, is language’s flight from its prison. If it is true, as J. A. K. Thomson has pointed out, that in Homer the similes acquire an autonomy vis-à-vis the content, the plot,6 then the same antagonism to the way language is constrained by the complex of intentions is expressed in them. Engrossed in its own meaning, the image developed in language becomes forgetful and pulls language itself into the image rather than making the image transparent and revealing the logical sense of the relationship. In great narrative the relationship between image and plot tends to reverse itself. Goethe’s technique in the Elective Affinities and Wilhelm Meister’s Wander Years, where interspersed miniature-like novellas reflect the nature of what is presented, testifies to this, and allegorical interpretations of Homer like Schelling’s famous “odyssey of the spirit”7 are responses to the same thing. Not that the epic poems were dictated by an allegorical intention. But in those poems the force of the historical tendency at work in the language and the subject matter is so strong that in the course of the proceedings taking place between subjectivity and mythology human beings and things are transformed into mere arenas through the blindness with which the epic delivers itself over to their representation, arenas in which that historical tendency becomes visible precisely where the pragmatic linguistic context reveals its inadequacy. It is not individuals but ideas that are in combat, says Nietzsche in a fragment on “Homer’s Contest.”8 It is the objective transformation of pure representation, detached from meaning, into the allegory of history that becomes visible in the logical disintegration of epic language, as in the detachment of metaphor from the course of the literal action. It is only by abandoning meaning that epic discourse comes to resemble the image, a figure of objective meaning emerging from the negation of subjectively rational meaning.