Jun 27, 2022·edited Jun 27, 2022Liked by Jacob Siegel
Horkheimer and Adorno were wrong. The aristocratic warrior epic is The Iliad, not The Odyssey. The latter is much more a tale of a wily survivor, not a celebration of gory mortal combat and the cult of honor and shame. In fact, most historians classify the modern novel as precisely, in part, a descendant of The Odyssey, stripped of its mysterious gods and fates, which are replaced by a more recognizably human psychology. For example, the main characters of The Iliad would be utterly out of place in a modern novel; one of the earliest, Don Quixote, satirizes precisely such figures in a medieval context. This is not to say that The Iliad is not worth reading; quite the contrary, its value is precisely is that it takes us into a world and mentality very different from later antiquity and even more so our own day. Even later Greco-Roman culture viewed such epics as reflecting a bygone time that had vanished, replaced by a more prosaic humanity without semi-divine heroes. Later literary figures, contemplating past heroic ages, often projected strong ambivalence about heroic virtues and deeds; e.g., the end of Virgil's Aeniad, a violent ending full of negative foreboding.
Overall, the modern Western novel is best thought of as a hybrid of the decidedly non-heroic Odysseus and his personal journey and the chiaroscuro of the Hebrew Bible, which never fully lets on origins and motives and whose personalities are more clearly and recognizably human.
It's like the difference between classical tragedy, say Oedipus the King, and the modern, say Hamlet. Oedipus is subject to an impersonal fate that actually reflects the search of the community for the scapegoat to blame for the plague of Thebes. OTOH Hamlet is tortured by his inward conscience, something rarely registered in classical tragedy (although you do see it to an extent in Euripides, late in classical culture, and alluded to in Sophocles' Antigone). The action in Oedipus is human on the surface, but really driven by the "gods"; that is, by the community's need for a scapegoat. The action in Hamlet is human through and through, albeit a flawed humanity with limited knowledge and foresight and often fooled by its own wishful thinking. It's completely biblical in its feel, in spite of (maybe because of?) the absence of anything overtly divine.
Auerbach's very valid contrast is between a mystifyingly clear surface of characters who are always and ever the same, finite and unchanging in nature -- like the Greek gods, where the mystery is transferred to the gods' incomprehensible interaction with humans, the mortal and the immortal touching each other -- and the approach not only of Genesis but of Samuel and Kings in depicting complex human characters with a depth of never-fully-revealed nature. The characters of all three books (but not necessarily other biblical books) could be easily lifted and dropped into a modern novel, with the explicit divine involvement left out.
One should never confuse, compare and say in the same breath the magnificent mystery of the Book of Genesis as expounded and commented on by traditional rabbinical commentaries with Marxist philosophy and its popularizers
Horkheimer and Adorno were wrong. The aristocratic warrior epic is The Iliad, not The Odyssey. The latter is much more a tale of a wily survivor, not a celebration of gory mortal combat and the cult of honor and shame. In fact, most historians classify the modern novel as precisely, in part, a descendant of The Odyssey, stripped of its mysterious gods and fates, which are replaced by a more recognizably human psychology. For example, the main characters of The Iliad would be utterly out of place in a modern novel; one of the earliest, Don Quixote, satirizes precisely such figures in a medieval context. This is not to say that The Iliad is not worth reading; quite the contrary, its value is precisely is that it takes us into a world and mentality very different from later antiquity and even more so our own day. Even later Greco-Roman culture viewed such epics as reflecting a bygone time that had vanished, replaced by a more prosaic humanity without semi-divine heroes. Later literary figures, contemplating past heroic ages, often projected strong ambivalence about heroic virtues and deeds; e.g., the end of Virgil's Aeniad, a violent ending full of negative foreboding.
Overall, the modern Western novel is best thought of as a hybrid of the decidedly non-heroic Odysseus and his personal journey and the chiaroscuro of the Hebrew Bible, which never fully lets on origins and motives and whose personalities are more clearly and recognizably human.
It's like the difference between classical tragedy, say Oedipus the King, and the modern, say Hamlet. Oedipus is subject to an impersonal fate that actually reflects the search of the community for the scapegoat to blame for the plague of Thebes. OTOH Hamlet is tortured by his inward conscience, something rarely registered in classical tragedy (although you do see it to an extent in Euripides, late in classical culture, and alluded to in Sophocles' Antigone). The action in Oedipus is human on the surface, but really driven by the "gods"; that is, by the community's need for a scapegoat. The action in Hamlet is human through and through, albeit a flawed humanity with limited knowledge and foresight and often fooled by its own wishful thinking. It's completely biblical in its feel, in spite of (maybe because of?) the absence of anything overtly divine.
Auerbach's very valid contrast is between a mystifyingly clear surface of characters who are always and ever the same, finite and unchanging in nature -- like the Greek gods, where the mystery is transferred to the gods' incomprehensible interaction with humans, the mortal and the immortal touching each other -- and the approach not only of Genesis but of Samuel and Kings in depicting complex human characters with a depth of never-fully-revealed nature. The characters of all three books (but not necessarily other biblical books) could be easily lifted and dropped into a modern novel, with the explicit divine involvement left out.
One should never confuse, compare and say in the same breath the magnificent mystery of the Book of Genesis as expounded and commented on by traditional rabbinical commentaries with Marxist philosophy and its popularizers