The first chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis is “Odysseus’ Scar,” in which he defines “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.” Nothing psychological, he says, goes on in Homer. He has no interest in suspense, and will pause the description of a battle to describe armor, or the genealogies of the combatants—as he does at the tense moment when Euryclea feels the scar and recognizes the disguised Odysseus. What does Homer do? He abandons the tense moment and flashes back to a lengthy account of how the scar got there, before Odysseus grabs her to stop her crying out and giving him away. This is a world of surfaces, without depth, without “perspective,” to use Auerbach’s word.
He contrasts this with the “equally ancient and equally epic
style” with which the Elohist treats Abraham. God “appears” to Abraham, but is
not described; nor is Abraham; nor is his son; nor is their three-day journey
to the sacrifice. Everything is inner. God speaks to Abraham “out of depth.”
And his own depth, the agony of conscience in which he knows he must choose God
over the life of his son, is all that matters. Details are irrelevant.
This is the style that Auerbach prefers, and which launches
his study of “The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” through
twenty chapters to Virginia Woolf, and the historical development (where would
our sense of history be without the bible? where would Marx be?) of that representation.
Auerbach is one of the four giants of literary criticism in
the twentieth century:
1) T.S. Eliot, who, though he preferred the more civilized
world of Virgil, considered Homer the superior poet, and admired Joyce’s use of
the Odyssey to structure, order and shape his novel Ulysses.
These are the values of the classicist.
2) Auerbach, a German Jew in Istanbul taking refuge from the
Nazis, writing Mimesis over 1942-45 and, fortunately for us, without the use
of his library, which could only have slowed him down. My own 600-page copy is
so heavy with underlining I can hardly see the print these days.
3) My teacher, if I may namedrop, Northrop Frye, who told us there are only two books that go from The Beginning to The End, the bible and the Communist Manifesto. You won't find that sense of an unfolding history in the classics.
4) And Harold Bloom, for whom Odysseus is the most “incessant” and infinitely adaptable character in all of Western literature, though he notes that Penelope also enjoys her own cleverness, and is his intellectual equal.
These four divide the century among them. That
there are no such men in our own should, I suppose, tell us something about the
“revolution” we’re going through.
What do I think? Who cares! I find it impossible to maintain an opinion for very long. But
confronted by the unfortunate boob who made the film in question, let us note that surfaces,
the externalized, the spatial and the temporal, are the terms of classicism
itself.
The Greeks, for example, invented geometry, “a mad
undertaking,” says Paul Valéry (certainly it took a while, 200 years from
Pythagoras to Euclid, and still not finished), which formalized language,
music, philosophy, politics, space, and the mind (because Euclid's are the rules, not of space, but of the mind). Surfaces. Exteriors. Details.
If I may be boobish myself I shall quote the cliché: The
Greeks gave us a mind; the Jews gave us a heart. Tricky organs, both. What
Odysseus may have been “feeling,” Christopher, is his business, supposing it
interested him at all, not ours.
Here in Athens I am lucky enough frequently to pass the
Parthenon, glowing like a jewel against the background of the mere world,
because it’s made of marble hauled in from Mount Pantelicus. To quote Gemini:
Pentelic marble is a fine-grained calcitic stone. Its compact, uniform crystal structure acts like thousands of microscopic mirrors, tightly packing and reflecting light rather than absorbing it. The marble possesses a rare translucent quality. Sunlight does not simply hit the surface and bounce off; instead, light actually penetrates a few millimeters into the stone before reflecting outward. This creates a deep, luminous into the stone before reflecting outward. [Gemini doesn't speak in perfect grammar.] This creates a deep, luminous effect that makes the temple look as if it is glowing from within.
Perfectly symmetrical? No. Straight pillars don't look straight from far away, so the architects used tricks of carving, tilting and spacing, maddeningly
miniscule, to make it look perfectly symmetrical. A lucid masterpiece of
the mind.
After a thousand years of groping in dumpsters, that radiant world was reborn. Why do we romanticize, to use an obscene word, Shakespeare
and the Italian painters? Why don’t we see the classical structure? Because
they’re gorgeous.
Rebels and individualists though they be (“Michelangelo spoke to the pope,”
said Vasari, “as the king of France would not have dared to speak to the pope”),
the rules mean everything to them. When the Laocoön was found in
someone’s vineyard Michelangelo was there that day, before they got it out of the ground.
In the almost aridly classical eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon
treats the history of Christianity, which occupies much of the Decline and
Fall, with a detachment that can amount to a smirk. On the Arian heresy he
quotes “an intelligent observer” in Constantinople:
“This city,” says he, “is full of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians; and preach in the shops, and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you, wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire, whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing.”
We will find few classicists with any tolerance for
Romanticism, or its Judeo-Christian roots. Indeed, let us tiptoe with all
possible tact through the polluted swamp of the nineteenth century to the fresher
air of the moderns:
“Romanticism,” says Paul Valéry, “introduced the practice of imitating the unusual, instead of, as in earlier times, the masterly.” “Only what is on the surface can have meaning; what is deep can have neither sense nor consequence.” “The difference between the romantic and the classical writer is a very simple one; it is the difference between the man who does not know his trade and the man who does.”
As for the inner self, Robert Frost assures us that we
can see “neither out far nor in deep.”
Ernest Hemingway, who did no traffic with depth
psychology, treated his fiction as he did his reportage: “When writing a novel
a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a
caricature.” Surfaces. Space. Details. A battlefield littered with dead
soldiers, their pockets pulled inside out.
His acolyte (he had so many) Albert Camus dispensed
with the heart entirely, as in the first line of L'Étranger, “Aujourd'hui,
maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” (“Mom died today. Or
maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.”) Not entirely involved. The sun, the
sea, Mediterranean stone, these are the seductions that hold him.
Speaking of which, that devout classicist Robert
Graves wrote a novel demonstrating to his satisfaction that the Odyssey
was written by a woman. The theory, originally Samuel Butler’s, is based on the
scene, botched and mangled by the film under discussion, if I ever get to it,
in which Odysseus has lost his men, his ship, his raft, his armor, is swimming
naked and without direction, and prays for rescue before, in Fitzgerald’s
translation, a shark hunts him. (I’ve felt like that myself in the Greek sea.) Then
comes the charming account of his rescue by Nausicaa, a Princess of Sicily, which was then Greek, who,
according to the theory, enlarged her own story into her hero’s. Whereas in the
military Iliad there are only gods and goddesses, who function as
commanders, the Odyssey shows no knowledge of fighting or sailing,
but there are cyclopes (Nolan’s Polyphemus is a sort of giant Pillsbury
Doughboy), Scylla, Charybdis, ghosts, giants, a witch who turns your men into
pigs (we and several in the audience gagged on Nolan’s version), another who keeps you prisoner
for years—girl stuff. Which does not however compromise the classic discipline,
whoever wrote it.
Now let us lead Christopher to the slaughter. Sorry,
Christopher, but if you shit on the sidewalk you will not escape comment. “Guy
shit on the sidewalk! Right there!”
I saw the film in a packed 400-seat open-air Athens cinema. Most of the audience was between twenty and thirty, Greeks who know at least something of the
story, and seemed not much more impressed than I was. And judging by the cheerless faces when the
lights came up, the revision of the ending, king and queen going off together
on a new odyssey of their own, fell dead.
Nolan’s movie is an exercise in “feeling,” a soap opera in which the lonely wife’s husband is off, not doing brain surgery, but fighting a war he doesn’t believe in, because war is bad, people die and stuff, with scenes stitched together by tears, by innerness—and music. It is in fact a melodrama, from the Greek melos, melody, presumably made for the kids. Those giants in clanking armor look suspiciously like robots. But I didn’t see any happy kids on the way out. Oh well, at least Anne Hathaway gets that paralytic smile off her face. I hadn’t thought that was possible.
The climactic let-down is the slaughter of the suitors, in which Odysseus, played by that-dumb-kid-next-door Mat Damon, makes agonizing choices to pacify his conscience.
I mean, fuck! Odysseus? A conscience? If you want to know how that scene should be done, get
ten minutes into The
Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and see how John Huston and John
Milius do it. I recommend the whole movie, it’s one of the best, and is also about a
man who claims a kingdom, and runs it, and keeps it, and how he does it. Roy Bean’s heart is
his own business—very Homeric, and very funny.
In former reviews I have admired Nolan’s Dunkirk,
over which I disagreed with those who found the side stories ungermane. I
thought they fit nicely. And I enjoyed his Oppenheimer.
This has to do, I now suspect, with his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema,
whose shots of the sea gave me one of the few pleasures I had in The Odyssey.
One has to look for something! I don’t remember much of him in Oppenheimer,
but I can’t forget what he did with that so-central beach in Dunkirk,
which, talk about glowing, I see even now.
So farewell, Christopher! I loved you for two films but, as
Astrid sang, “What can one do when a love affair is over?”
“Red wine for conversation.”—Henry Miller
The Destruction of West Los Angeles
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