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diff --git a/mimesis.md b/mimesis.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e895647 --- /dev/null +++ b/mimesis.md @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +# Mimesis +## Erich Auerbach +### 2024 + +# Literature + +# Places + +# Art & Architecture + +# Words + +# Theses +1. Genesis & Odyssey +- Parataxis (clauses combined with *and*) and hypotaxis (subordinating/dependent clauses) +- Both Genesis and Odyssey use parataxis but to different effects? +- Homeric actions are all external - characters speaking, setting and time completely defined, rather than internal thoughts +- Everything is described in foreground with 100% light, even during flashbacks like Odysseus' scar + - Flashback presented in present tense and divorced from narrative, rather than as Odysseus recollecting the memory +- In Genesis 22:1 Abraham & Isaac, God introduces himself but is unspecified where he comes from, what he looks like, what time it is, etc + - In contrast to Odyssey +- Bible - externalization of only that which is necessar for narrative, all else left in obscurity, only decisive points emphasized + - (in Woolf - only nondecisive points emphasized) +- Bible's humans are much more psychologically deep +- "Homer can be analyzed but not interpreted", because everything is spelled out for us +- But Bible can be interpreted into our own world due to its ambiguity +- Goal in Odyssey is to transport us into another world by offering such detail about it +- Goal in Bible is to overwhelm our own sense of reality and replace it with the Bible's, written like this because of the inherent claim to objective truth + - Although, advancements in technology have made Bible seem more foreign to us than it would a thousand years ago +- General ambiguity in the Bible allowed later interpretation to unify even disparate parts written by different authors with different histories/theologies/regions +- Boring chronicles and genealogies give Bible a historical character, though it be legendary +- Homeric poems for the most part only animate the ruling class, but Bible is moreso just regular people +- Homeric world has stable social order, but Old Testament has a lot of political maneuvering +- Homer occassionally allows the routines of daily life to enter the sublime (like foot washing scene) +- But Bible is replete with the commonplace becoming sublime, revealing the influence of God into everything - the everyday and sublime are inseparable +- It is not important to understand the history of the texts because their influence on world was primarily in their completed form + +20. To the Lighthouse +- Focus on mundane events (like measuring stocking) leading to a deep movement of consciousness and psychology within +- Fluidly moves perspective between individuals and locations and times +- Sometimes paragraphs with no clear speaker, so it must be author. But paragraph is as unknowing as characters/reader; author is not omniscient. + - Makes subjective statements like "Never did anybody look so sad" +- There is no single external viewpoint from which characters are shown, but viewpoint shifts between each characters inner world in turn +- Stream of consciousness apt for this purpose, but Woolf's non-omniscient narrator, and multiplicity of perspectives is novel +- We see Mrs Ramsay from perspective of multiple consciousnesses, all of them subjective, and try to construct an objective truth from them +- Fog in "Time Passes" that explores entire house kind of similar to perspective? Relationship w/ Eliot's yellow fog? +- Proust in contrast only uses memory as a device for exploring the past, but not different people at same time +- Woolf picks very short, mundane moments (like measuring of stocking) to go on lengthy inner-world explorations + - Implication that the inner world is richer and fuller, and every second of our lives is full of humanity + - Other authors would have picked a more significant moment instead +- Times of recalled scenes is ambiguous in Woolf, so more fluid than stark flashback in Odyssey scar +- The main thread of narrative happens in background consciousness +- "As though an apparently simple text revealed its proper content only in the commentary on it" (pale fire?) +- Proust development of narrative via memory + - Neo-Platonic idea of true prototype of subject to be found in soul of artist; in this case, artist and subject are same +- Film, unlike novels, can reveal a completely different time and place in great detail in a few seconds before returning back to original scene + - Causing modern authors to be acutely aware of the limitations of the novel due to language +- Important events (like deaths) in To the Lighthouse only mentioned in passing, similar to Proust/Mann +- Idea that the totality of life is contained in any random fragment, and this is better suited than a summary recital of all of the events like in a history that emph. important points of history +- Similarly, philological idea that one can analyze a single passage from a book and glean more than analyzing entire book (like Mimesis!) + - entire history of european realism would have swamped Auerbach +- Why did this narrative style evolve after WWI? Widening of man's horizon of knowledge, ideas, culture, existence (started in 15c and grew rapidly w/ globalization) +- Caused crises of adjustment with conflicts of reliigions, economic systems, philosophical debates, etc. +- Led to tendency of fascism which proclaims one ideology to exclusion of all others, to resolve conflict +- But project of modern writers/Woolf: show that multiple perspectives and consciousnesses can exist in harmony and can give rise to an objective truth together +- Finally - idea that all of humanity is contained within mundane moments that are shared by all humans, unifies us and focuses on our commonality regardless of origin or strata |