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A Refuge of Lies
REFLECTIONS ON FAITH AND FICTION
By Cesáreo Bandera Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-088-7
CHAPTER 1
Auerbach's Mimesis Revisited
Let us begin with Auerbach's description of what he called "the basic impulse of the Homeric style":
To represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed ... a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.
And this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground—that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute. (6–7)
The view, therefore, is that of a very detailed picture laid out on a flat and perfectly smooth surface, which can be stretched horizontally in every direction, but offers no inkling of anything that may lie underneath or beyond. In other words, complete superficiality—even though the superficiality of Homer's style is not a formal defect, but, on the contrary, the very perfection of its form, what it is meant to be. Because everything is visible, everything is surface.
The episode chosen by Auerbach as typical of this style, the recognition by the old nurse Eurykleia of Odysseus's scar, is both striking and, fittingly, quite long. But there are many other shorter examples just as telling. For instance, it takes almost ten lines to describe Penelope's opening of the door to the chamber where Odysseus's bow is kept:
When she, shining among women, had come to the chamber, and had come up to the oaken threshold, which the carpenter once had expertly planed and drawn it true to a chalkline, and fitted the door posts to it and joined on the shining door leaves, first she quickly set the fastening free of the hook, then she inserted the key and knocked the bolt upward, pushing the key straight in, and the door bellowed aloud, as a bull does, when he feeds in his pasture; such was the noise the splendid doors made, struck with the key, and now they quickly spread open.
(21:42–50)
Clearly, the Homeric poet must feel that he would not be doing his job properly if he simply said that Penelope opened the door and went in. The contrast with the biblical style could not be more striking. The biblical narrative is full of gaps and conspicuous silences. The story chosen by Auerbach, that of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, is perhaps the best possible example:
The King James version translates the opening as follows (Genesis 22:1): "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." Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told.... Whence does [God] come? Whence does he call Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast.... [If] we now turn to the other person in the dialogue, to Abraham. Where is he? We do not know ... whether in Beersheba or elsewhere, whether indoors or in the open air, is not stated; it does not interest the narrator ...; and what Abraham was doing when God called him is left in the same obscurity....
After this opening ... the story itself begins ... it unrolls with no episodes in a few independent sentences whose syntactical connection is of the most rudimentary sort. In this atmosphere it is unthinkable that an implement, a landscape through which the travelers passed, the serving-men, or the ass, should be described.... They are serving-men, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet; they are there to serve the end which God has commanded; what in other respects they were, are, or will be, remains in darkness....
They began "early in the morning." But at what time on the third day did Abraham lift his eyes and see his goal? The text says nothing on the subject.... So "early in the morning" is given, not as an indication of time, but for the sake of its ethical significance; it is intended to express the resolution, the promptness, the punctual obedience of the sorely tried Abraham. Bitter to him is the early morning in which he saddles his ass, calls his serving-men and his son Isaac, and sets out; but he obeys. (8–10)
Not only individual episodes, but the composition of the Old Testament as a whole is also full of gaps or discontinuities. "[It] is incomparably less unified than the Homeric poems." However, "the greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection ... the stronger is their general vertical connection ... which is entirely lacking in Homer" (17).
It is precisely through these discontinuities, or these episodic gaps, that the invisible dimension of historical reality filters in, that a sense of depth and background is conveyed, and a profound concern for essential truth beyond the empirical details is communicated at all levels. Even at the psychological level, "the great figures of the Old Testament are so much more fully developed, so much more fraught with their own biographical past, so much more distinct as individuals, than are the Homeric heroes" (17). In other words, these characters have a history; the old man of today is no longer the person he was in his youth. In contrast, the "life-histories" of Homeric heroes "are clearly set forth once and for all"; even Odysseus, who goes through so many events for such a long time, "on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast" (17). Circumstances, and above all, the will of God, change and mold the biblical characters. "Indeed generally, this element of development gives the Old Testament stories a historical character, even when the subject is purely legendary and traditional." This is also why, as opposed to Homer, who "remains within the legendary with all his material ... the Old Testament comes closer and closer to history as the narrative proceeds" (18–19). It is as if anything that the Homeric style touches becomes legend, regardless of its historical or ontological status, and the opposite happens with the biblical style: even if the material is legendary, it acquires the flavor of history. It is there because it is felt to be true. Therefore, in reference to the truth in general, the perfectly illuminated, the smooth and detailed surface of the Homeric text acts as a barrier, a blind. The homogeneous and unbroken surface is precisely what prevents us from seeing through or beyond it, or, to put it differently, what prevents a sense of the importance of the real as such, as that which is true, from filtering through and giving density to the representation of the facts of reality. The multiplication of visible surface details stretching in every horizontal direction turns everything into what Dante would have called parlare fabuloso. In fact, the glaring surface of the facts is so consistent, so evenly extended, and its contrast with the Bible, a text of similar antiquity, so striking that not only must we suspect that the Homeric text has no interest in revealing anything behind the facts, but it appears rather likely on this evidence alone that it actually wants to hide that which it does not reveal. But why? Th at is what we want to reflect on.
Everybody, I assume, would agree that Homer is much closer to modern fiction than the Bible. And one might think that even from a fictional perspective, Homer's mythical text could have fabricated its own poetic sense of depth, could have striven for a transcendent truth beyond the surface of the myth. According to Auerbach, there is none of that in Homer, and I agree. He clings to the surface and holds our attention there, ignoring anything beyond the literal text itself. Never a reflective pause to divert our attention to wider or deeper considerations. Its brief meditations can hardly be called such:
The general considerations which occasionally occur (... for example, v. 360: that in misfortune men age quickly) reveal a calm acceptance of the basic facts of human existence, but with no compulsion to brood over them, still less any passionate impulse to rebel against them or embrace them in an ecstasy of submission. (14)
But while one can understand a "calm acceptance" of the facts of life in the case of "aging quickly in misfortune," or something similar, such calm becomes surprising, even startling, when we find it in the midst of incredible violence. I am referring to Homer's famous narrative equilibrium in the midst of battle. War is war, and death is death, and sufferings are evenly distributed. He does not incline toward the Greeks or the Trojans, for example. He does not judge. He narrates the "wars of men," he does not take part in them. He laments them, just like the tragic chorus of a later time would lament the inexorable development of the tragic action, but with even more equanimity, just the facts. Does that mean that he is indifferent or unconcerned about such facts? Of course not, but it seems to be essential to the Homeric poem not to look behind the facts, not to generalize—just the facts, horrific as they may be sometimes. And, of course, this absence of a deeper or a more general level, this presentation of the facts as nothing but facts, leaves unanswered the question about the truth of those facts. Did they really happen or not? Homer does not say.
The gaps and discontinuities in the biblical text "startle" us, says Auerbach, when we come to it from Homer. And we should be so "startled." They are so unexpected. There is nothing in Homer to prepare us for what we find in the Bible. From a Homeric perspective, the Bible is indeed a strange text. But should we not wonder equally about the conspicuously homogeneous, gapless surface in Homer, about its blinding visibility? Looking at it with biblical eyes, it should appear no less strange, perhaps even scandalous. The reason why it does not look so strange to us is simply that we look at it through the prism of modern literary fiction. But that in itself can be seriously misleading. For even though modern literary fiction is a direct descendant of Homer, the distance between the two is quite great. When we read modern fiction, we do something that a Homeric Greek could not do, or at least not as casually and without thinking as we do it today: to bracket historical reality, historical truth, the reality of the world out there, and put it aside for the time being while we immerse ourselves in a world of make-believe. We do not deny that reality, the truth out there. We do not try to hide it. We simply suspend it for convenience's sake, push it out of sight temporarily. Fiction, we say, creates its own ad hoc reality with its own poetic truth. In fact, we may even think that such a poetic truth can reveal things, truthful things, about true reality.
To a Homeric Greek, this convenient, unproblematic separation between make-believe and true reality, this reassuring distance, was either not available, or not fully comprehensible. His relationship with the truth, with the real world out there, was far more problematic and infinitely more ambiguous. He could not just ignore it. He could imitate it, and he could fictionalize it. But in either case it was something he did to it or because of it, not something independent of it. He did not create a separate reality having nothing to do with the true one. He manipulated or disguised true reality, and this manipulation or disguising, which drew a veil over the real thing, was quite openly called lying—because a lie was still a lie, poetic or otherwise. Nobody had any problem with calling Homer a liar. What happened is that lying and divine inspiration were by no means antagonistic concepts. This is why, to a Homeric Greek, "[knowing] how to say many false things that were like true sayings" was still an awe-inspiring, sacred art, which could not be approached lightly. Of course, that also meant that even though a lie was a lie, not all lies were equally admissible. Only divinely inspired lies were to be revered, lies conceived within a religious, quasi-ritual context. Strange as it may sound to modern ears, it was precisely the sacred character or association of the lie that turned it from something bad into something revered and required. Homer's poetic lying was likewise a heroic art, Odysseus's art—"long-enduring" Odysseus, "resourceful," "crafty," "devious." This is how Athene describes her protégé:
It would be a sharp one, and a stealthy one, who would ever get past you in any contriving; even if it were a god against you. You wretch, so devious, never weary of tricks, then you would not even in your own country give over your ways of deceiving and your thievish tales. They are near to you in your very nature. ... [You] are [also] far the best of all mortal men for counsel and stories.
That is the soul of the Homeric style. In essence, Homer's tale is Odysseus's tale. Of the two great Homeric heroes, Achilles and Odysseus, only the latter is made to perform like a poet, a narrator of tales. To celebrate Odysseus is to celebrate his narrative style and skill, which is not precisely that of telling the truth, but quite the opposite. Odysseus was renowned for his cunning in disguising, masking, the truth. He is, par excellence, the great disguiser. We must remember, the Trojan horse was his idea. What is important in his style, therefore, is how one positions oneself before the truth at any given moment. It is ultimately a matter of strategy. The obvious question is, should we not take Odysseus's cunning, his skill in masking the truth, as a clue to our approach to the Odyssey and, by extension, to Homer's style in general?
But Odysseus's tale is not just any tale in Western culture. It has an archetypal value. It is one of the pillars of a millenarian tradition, as Auerbach so brilliantly saw. In other words, it touches the foundation of such a tradition. Therefore, when we speak about Odysseus's hiding of the truth, we are not speaking about something accidental, or a reaction to a particular historical manifestation of the truth, but about his fundamental approach to truth as such, at its most basic ontological and existential level: the truth embodied in the reality of the world out there in the very act of being there, appearing to human eyes; truth as a metaphysical quality or dimension of the human world—that is to say, of the reality, both physical and cultural, inhabited by human beings. Because, as we anticipated in the Introduction, to human beings, physical reality is never just physical as it manifests itself as such, as reality, as that which is truly out there. Truth changes the character of the physical world. Or perhaps I should say that truth changes the way in which the world out there is out there for human beings. This must also be why the "artistic" representation of reality is such a uniquely human characteristic. "Artistic" representation is probably the clearest testimony to the transcendental visibility of the truth in the empirical reality of the human habitat. "Man dwells as a poet on this earth," said Heidegger in his commentary on a poem by Hölderlin. It is the truth of what is truly out there that man wants to capture, to represent either in visible signs or in words. Animals, on the other hand, although they communicate with one another, do not speak, because they have absolutely nothing to say. Their world is not sayable. Of course, as soon as the truth of what is truly there is captured, re-presented (in its most primitive version—in cave paintings, for example—this existential "capture" would probably have to be understood rather literally, magically), it will no longer be that which is truly out there. A gap, a symbolic gap, a cultural space, will open up. This is the space of the sacred, the original human space—which, if we are to judge by Homer's inspired representation of it, is, or has become at some point, a very ambiguous space, the breeding ground of the revered sacred lie, which so upset Plato against the poets, for example.
One notices that animals living in the wild are always vigilant, very much on guard against dangers lurking in their physical environment. In the case of human beings it was not the physical environment as such, in its materiality, that threatened them in a fundamental sense, but its sacred character, its metaphysical link to the truth, its transcendence. And such a fundamental threat, lurking everywhere but nowhere in particular, hovering over everything like an evil spirit, only makes sense anthropologically as a result of the sacrificial violence that took over, that usurped, the place of the true spirit. And is that not precisely the origin of the existential anxiety, or dread, or uneasiness, or malaise, of which Western philosophy has been speaking for almost two hundred years—Kierkegaard's "anxiety," for example, or that of Heidegger's in Being and Time?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Refuge of Lies by Cesáreo Bandera. Copyright © 2013 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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