Antony George Photo: R R

ചന്തേര റെയില്‍വേ സ്റ്റേഷനിലെ നീലക്കോഴികള്‍

ചന്തേര റെയില്‍വേ സ്റ്റേഷനിലെ നീലക്കോഴികള്‍

ആരെയും കൂസാക്കാതെ വെയിലില്‍ കൊത്തിപ്പെറുക്കുന്നു.

എന്തെന്നറിയില്ല അവ ഉദ്ധരണികളും ഗ്രന്ഥസൂചിയും ഇല്ലാതെ

തെളിവ് സമഗ്രികളില്ലാതെ പട്ടയവും കരയോഗവും ഇല്ലാതെ

പാട്ടുകുര്‍ബാന കൂടാതെ നോമ്പും മീറ്റിംഗും ഇല്ലാതെ

പാളത്തിലെ ഓടുന്ന തീവണ്ടികളെ നോക്കാതെ

സമയം തെറ്റിയ കോളേജ് പിള്ളേരെ നോക്കാതെ

കൈക്കൂലിയും കൊലച്ചതിയും കൂവിപ്പോകുന്ന

നീണ്ട നാവുകളിലെ വാക്കുകള്‍ കേള്‍ക്കാതെ

പല്‍ച്ചക്രങ്ങളുടെ താളത്തില്‍ ഉലയാതെ

പീലിയഴകില്‍ മയിലിനെ വെല്ലാതെ

പക്ഷി നിരീക്ഷകരുടെ ക്യാമറകള്‍ക്ക് പിടികൊടുക്കാതെ

തത്ത്വജ്ഞാനികളെ പറ്റി ഒട്ടുമേ അറിയാതെ

ഓര്‍ണിത്തോളജി എന്തെന്നറിയാതെ

ദേണ്ട് ...പറന്ന് പോയ്‌....!   

ANNIHILATION OF CASTE

Arundathi Roy’s longer introduction to Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste tries to critique the nationalism, especially Gandhian, and tries to evoke the participation of the Dalits in creating a public sphere within the Indian context. Roy throughout this introduction tries to point out the undermining politics which Gandhi has taken in the case of the Dalits. The primary question she addresses is how he became Mahatma? It is within the context where Maharashtra Government has the whole copyrights for Ambedkar’s works and they are not willing to publish his works anymore, that Arundathi Roy tries to revoke his counter critique.

Roy begins by tracing the history and shows how Gandhi misrepresented the Dalits by calling them Harijans. The mask of Mahatma protected him and it is with the use of this that Gandhi protected the whole caste and varna system in India. While on the other side, Ambedkar was trying for a modernity and emancipation of the Dalits. To an extent Ambedkar was trying to maintain the colonial system as it will maintain the submissiveness and won’t lead to much oppression of the Dalits.

Gandhi argued for the equality between castes, and made steps for the inclusion of Harijans to the oppressive chain of Varna system. He wanted to make Harijans to be Hindus, as the Article 25 itself suggests “those who are not Muslims and Christians shall be counted as Hindus”. But Ambedkar believed that with caste based division, the equality and equal rights will never happen. He believed that nothing other than the destruction of caste system can help the Dalits. So, he rejected the caste based Hindu religion.

Gandhi, on the other,  represented for the Upper caste. During his South African life, he fought for the rights of merchants. His early movements in Africa were for the Indian merchants and their rights to be treated fairly than the “Kaffirs”. Gandhi was always talking about inclusion, not about emancipation, she says. It is this politics of Gandhi which made the much population of the Hindus Dalits.

            While Gandhi became the “saint” and “father” of the country, Ambedkar faded away from mainstream politics of the time. Even now he is only regarded as the builder of our constitution. The efforts he made slowly faded away and the upper caste Hindu nationalism strong in its content, it can be seen in the death of Gandhi too. This building of nationalism is evident in the current situation of Dalits within India.

 The introduction revoked the Ambedkarian politics but it was not able to counter critique the Nationalism which is formed on a firm Hindu right ideology. The space and way in which the text was delivered itself is also problematic. The print capitalism behind the publication of this text was problematic for the most Dalits in India.

IDEOLOGY AND IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUS

The relation between the base and superstructure in Marx’s understanding is reformulated in a complex way by Louis Althusser in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus. The superstructure in includes the politico-legal institutions of the society and the ideological relations prevalent. The superstructure is dominant over the base in all its aspects. Althusser rethinks in way that how the ideological positions are more powerful than the material aspects of dominance without neglecting the Marxian thoughts. It is in this way he distinguishes between Ideological State Apparatus and Repressive State Apparatus. The State Apparatus includes the government, police, state etc and these are institutions which run by the enforcement of law through threat and punishment.

                As the ISA appear to be quite different but they are unified by the common ideological positions of the ruling class. To Althusser, the dominant class has made education as it primary instrument of Repressive mechanics. The first thing he puts down is that, ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real condition of existence. Here ideology needs to be interpreted to discover the world behind their imaginary representation of the illusion. On interpreting the imaginary transpositions of ideology men arrive at the conclusion that men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form.

                What is reflected in these imaginary representations of the world found in an ideology is the conditions of existence of men. These representations of the real conditions of existence of the individuals in different positions as agents of production does arise from the relations of production and relations deriving from the relations of production. All ideology doesn’t represent in the necessary imaginary distortion the real existing relations of production and the other relations that derive from it. But above all the (imaginary) relation between the individuals to the relation of production and the relations that derive from it are represented. What is represented in ideology is not the real existing conditions of production which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation to the real existing world.

                Ideology has a material existence; this is the next point Althusser stresses on. An ideology always exists in an apparatus and its practises, which is material. By means of the absolutely ideological device the material attitude of the subject is also determined. The individual in question behaves and participates in such and such way as those of these ideological apparatuses which has in all consciousness freely chosen as subjects. The ideology of the ideology is thus recognized in the ideas of the human subject existing in actions, or ought to exist in his actions or it lends him other ideas he does not perform. In this case ideology talks about actions and actions inserted into practises. These practises are governed by rituals in which the practises are inscribed with the material existence of the ideological apparatus. The subject’s ideas are his material actions inserted into material practises governed by material rituals which are defined by the material ideological apparatus from which the ideas of the subject derives.  

                Idea disappears to the extent that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practises governed by rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. The subject also acts as far as he is acted by the following system where, ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus resulting in the material practises governed by a material ritual which exist in the action of the subject acting in all conditions according to his belief. Althusser formulated two theses from this position:

1.       There is no practise except by and in ideology.

2.       There is no ideology except by subject and for subjects.

There is no ideology, for Althusser, except for concrete subjects and the destination of the subject is made possible by the subject by his categorisation and functioning. The category of the subject also constitutive of all ideology as the ideology has the function of constituting individuals as concrete subjects. Man is an ideological animal by nature, Athusser says and all ideology interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. In this context ideology acts or functions in such a way that it recruits among individuals and transforms them into subjects by the operation called interpellation.

The existence of ideology and the interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing and one of its effects is the practical denial of the ideological character of ideology by ideology. Ideology never says I’m ideological, and it has no outside but at the same time it is nothing but outside (science and reality). On the other side individuals are always subjects as they are always interpellated by ideology. The duplicate mirror structure of ideology ensures simultaneously the interpellation of the subjects and their subjection along with the mutual recognition of subjects and subject. These are done on the condition that everything really is so and subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly in way that everything will be alright.

The subjects are thus inserted into the practises governed by the ideological state apparatus. They identify the existing state of affairs that what is happening is really true and it won’t happen otherwise. Subject, in this sense means, a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives and responsible for its actions and a subjected being who submits to a higher authority denied all the freedom except that of freely admitting his submission. The subject is interpellated as a free subject in order that he shall accept his submission. On the other hand there are no subjects except by and for subjection and Althusser says, that is the reason why they work all themselves. The reality in question is this mechanism, the reality which is misrecognized in the very forms of recognition, the relations of reproduction and the relations deriving from them.

Assignment- The question of Feminism in Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"

            Donna Haraway is considered as a feminist, neo Marxist and postmodernist. Her works have always bought together the ideas of science and feminism though she is known as a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology. She is known for her alternative theories and viewpoints towards the mainstream accepted ideologies which also presents her call for the unity of ‘women’ for a rationale unity which can create an end to the problems created by the  hegemonic bracketing and categorizations within the category of women. In her essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, Donna Haraway points out that there is no such thing as ‘woman’s experience’ and the same proposed by International Women’s Movements are constructed.

             Oxford English dictionary defines cyborg as a “fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond human limitations by mechanical elements built into body.” In the essay, Haraway uses this ‘cyborg’ as a metaphor to expose how things which are considered natural are mechanical constructs, shaped by certain ideas. This is particularly connected to feminism as women live within the experiences constructed by certain ‘groups’. Haraway cites on cyborg as a “creature in a post-gender world” which “skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the western sense”. Cyborgs are conceived as socially constructed hybrids of machines and organisms, a coupling of social reality and fiction. Three central pairs which are examined through the metaphor of cyborg are human and animal, man and machine, and the physical and non physical. The image of borderland is used to denote as the productive space intended for knowledge building. ‘Cyborg’ is the symbol used in the essay to argue for the construction of one’s consciousness or responsibility in the age of technology. Harraway attempts to interpret social structures through the construct of cyborg. Cyborg is an attempt to create a sense of community without insisting on an absolute identity. It can be seen as one’s ontology which argues for situated, localized knowledge rather than providing a universal claim. Technology and civilization are argued to be the ways of subduing nature and bending it to human will. Nature-culture is also a repeated dichotomy uses in theories to explain world events and ideologies, from colonialism to Freudianism. These are mentioned in the essay as well.

The essay was able to counter the standard feminist lines on the use of technology. Zeo Sofoulis notes on it so, “Whereas a standard feminist line on technology had been to equate it with abstract masculinist rationality, militarism and the rape of the Earth, Haraway insisted on the intimate physicality of our relations to nonhumans,and on ‘the pleasures of interface’(qtd. in Schneider295). The exclusionary politics and simplification of the women’s experience is challenged here. Sisterhood is often raised as a tool of women empowerment which can be seen as a striking chord of black feminism. Here joint kinship is proposed as a solution. Haraway views so, “theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism and other unlamented-isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint”. Haraway observes that this stand is timely as there was no other time in “history when there was a greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of race, gender, sexuality and class”. A unity is most possible at this moment as the ‘non innocence’ of the category ‘women’ are understood by white women and social feminists now. Cyborgian feminism should stress the argument to rule out a natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. The naturalization and denaturing of the category ‘woman’ was always pointed by Marxist and socialist feminisms. She draws out a caricature of bracketing in feminisms which reveal the hypocrisy of not including the structural room for race which goes like this:

Socialist feminism-structure of class//wage labour//alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race.

Radical feminism- structure of gender//sexual appropriation//objectification sex, by analogy labour, by extension reproduction, by addition race

            Haraway sketches a picture of possible unity listing certain dichotomies which include Representation-simulation; heat-noise; bourgeois novel-science fiction; realism-postmodernism; biology as a clinical practice and that as an inscription; sex-genetic engineering etc. In the set of pairs listed by Haraway, the first category appears as ‘naturalistic categories’ but not so, the second category subverts the supposed natural categories. Both categories are constructed in the world. For instance, ideologies which support sexual reproduction are also not considered reasonable. Here, the ambiguity of natural-cultural binaries are revealed and the definition of ‘naturalness’ is also bought into question.

            Haraway wants the feminists to code a cyborgian self which is a kind of “dissembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self”. She exposes that there are inadequacies existing in the analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge since the Second World War. The dichotomies between body and mind, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all ideological questions. Women are integrated into such dichotomies of production/ reproduction/ communication which are termed as informatics of domination. The way to reconstruct these dominant practices is through theory and practice addressed to the social aspects involved in science and technology. The transformations the world of biology and communication sciences propose to the world into a problem is through the illustration of cybernetic systems or interpreting through molecular genetics, ecology etc. These interpretations are considered as only those in a fundamental level. New groups doing science should have a kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination and practice. Haraway also enquires the possibility of these groups be allied with progressive social and political movements.  

The essay was criticized for its opaque language and the author’s understanding of the scientific method was questioned often.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Lemoine, Sunny “Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto”. N.p.n.d. Web. 20 Nov 2015.

Schneider, Joseph. “Haraway’s Viral Cyborg”. Women’s Studies Quarterly. 40.1(2012): 294-300. JSTOR. Web. 20 Nov 2015. 

Assignment - Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter

Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter

                        Jane Bennett describes her Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things as a philosophical and political project with an objective to think slowly over the idea of ‘matter’ that modern individual considers as passive stuff, as raw, brute or inert. Bennett explains that the division of the world as ‘living’ and ‘nonliving’ is the result of the sensual perception of the sensible. It is not in the traditional sense that she brings into question the division as ‘living’ and ‘nonliving’ but she observes that even the so called passive stuffs are capable of  altering human moods and are capable to incorporate ‘vitality’ as well as lively powers of material formations. The division is not churned over as merely between life and matter but the discussion leads to the evolution of the notion of ‘vital materiality’. It may seem like witnessing vitality in inanimate objects in the childhood stage when the passive objects appear like animate. Bennett propounds that she would re-invoke this sense which is describes as “a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature” in her book. The work is about finding a commonality with the out-side which may induce “vital materialists to treat nonhumans - animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and commodities - more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically." (Bennett, VM18) She does an expert extraction from literatures as diverse as political theory and philosophy, ethics, physics, complexity theory, ecology, and geography and calls for a reconnection with all that animates our world.

            Bennett wants to describe the philosophical history of the idea of vibrant matter in the West. For this, she has drawn ideas and claims from Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nitzsche, Henry David Thoreau, Darwin, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, bergson and Hans Driesch. Bennett provides a perspective in which the matter should be conceived. She argues that the matter is able to draw human beings near to them and provoke deep attachment to them which she calls as the ‘calling capacity’ of things. She focuses on the productive and creative power of things.

            Bennett’s most important concern seems to be the fact that the modern mind sets out its action in society as human centric but, as she observes, human-beings are not the only components who have the decisive power over matter or all their activities but the non-living things too.  It is the serious eco-critical concern that is found in her text.

            The chapter “Force of Things” contains descriptions of her philosophical approach towards the conception of world. Bennett’s conception of ‘force of things’ encompasses neither previous vitalism nor naturalistic mechanism (Bennett, “Interview”). She here describes various approaches towards and perspectives of viewing world. The post-Cartesian description of nature in modernity as mechanistic and lifeless gets questioned by Bennett. She discusses the ‘ecological' character of a vital materialism. She acknowledges that the studies made by Deleuze and Guattari on the idea of a ‘vital materialism’ are inspiration for her project.

The project, she says that, simultaneously calls for the pursuit of several tasks:

1.     To paint a positive ontology of vibrant matter, which stretches received concepts of agency, action, and freedom sometimes to the breaking point.

2.     To dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic using arguments and other rhetorical means to induce in human bodies an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality.

3.     To sketch a style of political analysis that can better account for the contributions of nonhuman actants. (Bennett, VM x)

            After this objective Bennett tries to show the vital materiality that flow through and around us. All the ‘its’ reveal themselves to be potentially forceful agents.

She states that she has taken Spinoza’s stand as a touchstone in this book. The use of terms such as ‘conative bodies’, that is, which strive to enhance their power of activity by forming alliance with other bodies, are used by her. His faith that everything is made up of the same substance is being followed in this text. He rejected the idea that man “disturbs rather than follows Nature’s order” and promises instead to consider human actions and appetites just as if it were an investigation into lines, planes or bodies. Therefore,  Bennett does not go with the view that man controls the nature. She further describes the views of Lucretius which said “Everything is made of the same quirky stuff, the same building blocks” and he used the term ‘primordia’ which can be compared to today’s atoms, quarks, particle streams or matter energy. Bennett views this observation resonating with ecological sensibility.

            Bennett states that her aim is to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such, and to detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance. She needs a proper word for speaking for vibrant matter and she claims that for that purpose certain sort of foolishness or the ‘willingness to appear naïve or foolish’ is needed. This necessitates a willingness to theorize events as encounters between ontologically diverse actants, some human and some not. Bennett uses Latour’s word ‘actant’ which is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman, it is that which has efficacy. Actant and operator, she claims, are substitute words for what in a more subject-centered vocabulary are called agent (9).

            In the first chapter named as “Force of Things” features the negative power or recalcitrance of things and Bennett also seeks to highlight a positive, productive power of their own. She highlights the active role of nonhuman materials in public life and thereby entering into the description of ‘thing-power.’ She states that there is family resemblance to Spinoza’s conatus as well as to Thoreau’s idea of ‘wild’. She finds the nature of ‘wild’ as an irreducibly strange dimension of matter. She also compares thing-power to de Vries’s ‘the absolute’ which he used in the context of political theology.

            Is she attributing the material vitality to all the ‘living beings’, that is, in a traditional sense of ‘living’ beings? No, but she calls for a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body, that is, not only human exert power but implying her denotation to ‘thing-power.’ She narrates a ‘story’ of a day when she came across the assemblages of objects which in themselves formed a tableau emanating within her various levels of status that surrounded them. She states: “the items on the ground that day were vibratory- at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence…” (5) Along with the description of thing-power, Bennett provides Manuel De Landa’s view of the “self-organizing” power of inorganic matter which results in the attainment of various stages of material organization, for example, the formation of different water types like tsunami. In a following section, she describes the ‘vitality’ of Odradek, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s short story “Cares of a Family Man”, a spool of thread who/that can run and laugh. He/this exercises an impersonal form of vitality. She talks of it since it exposes the continuity of living and nonliving states of existence (7).

            She calls for a counter-cultural perception without which world will appear as if it consists of only active human subjects who confront passive objects and their law-governed mechanisms. The perception of the world as consisting of only active human subjects who confront passive objects or stuffs and their law-governed mechanisms is necessary to an action-oriented perception on which our survival depends. So, the perception of the world in this manner is thus dangerous and counterproductive. She claims that this is a kind of fiction and it is dangerous and counterproductive to live this ‘fiction’ all the time and neither does it conduce to the formation of a ‘greener’ sensibility. She applies the practice of demystification for the task but also with a caution because demystification, she says, presumes that at the heart of any event or process lies a ‘human’ agency that has illicitly been projected into things.

            Bennett also cautions against the fact that there is a possibility for the treatment of human beings as mere objects as a result of the perception of them as the combination of vital matters such as minerals and chemicals. Thus, expresses her fear in a failure to affirm human uniqueness. She suggests that the vital materialists must be truly aware of this possibility and they must respond to this concern. At first, then by noting that its success by acknowledging that, the framework of subject versus object operated “to prevent or ameliorate human sufferings and to promote human happiness or well-being”. Secondly, by noting that its successes come at the price of an instrumentalization of nonhuman nature that can itself be unethical and can itself undermine long-term human interests. Thirdly by pointing out that the Kantian imperative to treat humanity always as an end-in-itself and never merely as a means does not have a stellar record of success in preventing human suffering or promoting human well-being (12).

            Bennett, then explores some of the affinities between adorno’s nonidentity and her thing-power, that is, in a more general manner, between Adorno’s ‘specific materialism’ and her ‘vital materialism’. For Adorno, ‘nonidentity’ is a “presence that acts upon us: we knowers are haunted, by a painful, nagging feeling that something’s being forgotten or left out”. He makes use of the method of ‘nagative dialectics’ which would teach how to “accentuate this discomforting experience and how to give it a meaning”. The ethical project of it to keep remembering the negative dialects and to learn how to accept it and so that we can stop raging against a world that refuses to offer the ‘reconcilement’ that we ‘crave’ for according to Adorno. But for the vital materialists the ethics begins with less the acceptance of the impossibility of “reconcilement” and more the recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materiality (14).

Conclusion

            Bennett wants to advocate the ‘vitality’ of matter because she intuitively feels that it is the image of the dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter which feeds human hubris and the earth destroying desires of conquest and consumption. She purposes “to give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality in the process absoluting matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mechanism” (3).  Thus, it is assured that ‘vitality’ of matter will change the human perception and their attitude towards it will change by which Bennett wants to promote ‘greener’ forms of human culture and more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing materialities. Thomas Princen, one of the reviewers of Bennett’s work, states that the politics that emerges within the work is animate and ecological, not about ecology, not for the environment but a politics that, as Bennett says, takes seriously vibrancy in all matter, human and otherwise (118). Through the work emerges an ethic inspired by a sense of all bodies being "enmeshed in a dense network of relations" (13) where harm to one element may very well be harm to oneself. And from this ethic Bennett develops a politics that which is "natural" as that premised on subject/object, life/matter dualisms, on "man apart from nature," on hierarchy and domination that is of others and nature. It is a politics that is ecological, not because theorists should pay more attention to "the environment" but because these networks of relations permeate all bodies, human and nonhuman, animate and, seemingly, inanimate. She has drawn from Epicurean, Spinozist, Nietzschean, and vitalist traditions as well as from the assortment of contemporary writers in science and literature which makes it a perfect blend of science, social science, philosophy and literature studies; an approach that is always encouraged and adopted in contemporary study circles of comparative literature.

           

Bibliography

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.

---. Interview. “Vibrant Matters: An Interview with Jane Bennett.” by Peter Gratton. Philosophy      in a Time of Error. n.d. web. 18 Oct. 2015.

---. “Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter.” The New School. New York. 27 Sept     2011,   Lecture.

Gratton, Peter. Rev. of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, by Jane Bennett. XXX.3,            n.p.: n.p. 2010.

Princen, Thomas. Rev. of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, by Jane Bennett.                   Perspectives on Politics 9.1(2011): 118-120. JSTOR. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. .

Trout, James Michael. Rev. of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,      by Jane             Bennett. Journal of Ecocriticism 4.1(2012): 62-63. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

ODYSSEUS’ SCAR

           

            Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Eric Auerbach traces the realistic portrayals in western literature from Bible to James Joyce. The portrayal of reality is given in a contrasting way from the whole epics. The imagining styles of these texts are given throughout this text. The first chapter of this text, Odysseus Scar, tries to find out the representation of reality in the epic texts of Homer and Bible.

            The Odysseus’ Scar begins with the detailed description of the return of the Odysseus. Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when Odysseus has at last come home, the scene in which the old housekeeper Euryclea, who had been his nurse, recognizes him by a scar on his thigh. The stranger has won Penelope’s good will; at his request she tells the housekeeper to wash his feet, which, in all old stories, is the first duty of hospitality toward a tired traveler. Euryclea busies herself fetching water and mixing cold with hot, meanwhile speaking sadly of her absent master, who is probably of the same age as the guest, and who perhaps, like the guest, is even now wandering somewhere, a stranger; and she remarks how astonishingly like him the guest looks. Meanwhile Odysseus, remembering his scar, moves back out of the light; he knows that, despite his efforts to hide his identity, Euryclea will now recognize him, but he wants at least to keep Penelope in ignorance. No sooner has the old woman touched the scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Odysseus’ foot drop into the basin; the water spills over, she is about to cry out her joy; Odysseus restrains her with whispered threats and endearments; she recovers herself and conceals her emotion. Penelope, whose attention Athena’s foresight had diverted from the incident, has observed nothing.

            This is given in externalized leisurely fashion. The women express their feeling in a direct manner and the feelings they have are given with a mixture of most general consideration of human nature. There is also room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that Odysseus takes the old woman by the throat to keep her from speaking, at the same time that he draws her closer to him with his left. There are more than seventy of these verses—while to the incident itself some forty are devoted before the interruption and some forty after it. The interruption, which comes just at the point when the housekeeper recognizes the scar—that is, at the moment of crisis—describes the origin of the scar, a hunting accident which occurred in Odysseus’ boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his grandfather Autolycus.

The first thought of a modern reader—that this is a device to increase suspense—is, if not wholly wrong, at least not the essential explanation of this Homeric procedure. For the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless. The broadly narrated, charming, and subtly fashioned story of the hunt, with all its elegance and self-sufficiency, its wealth of idyllic pictures, seeks to win the reader over wholly to itself as long as he is hearing it, to make him forget what had just taken place during the foot-washing. the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic im-pulse 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.

            The separate elements of narration are most clearly placed in relation to one another and a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles are also used. The way in which any impression of perspective is avoided can be clearly observed in the procedure for introducing episodes, a syntactical construction with which every reader of Homer is familiar with. The genius of the Homeric style becomes even more apparent when it is compared with an equally ancient and equally epic style from a different world of forms.

            The account of the sacrifice of Isaac, a homogeneous narrative produced by the so-called Elohist, is taken by Auerbach for the analysis. 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. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told.

            After this opening, God gives his command, and the story itself begins: everyone knows it; it unrolls with no episodes in a few independent sentences whose syntactical connection is of the most rudimentary sort. A journey is made, because God has designated the place where the sacrifice is to be performed; but we are told nothing about the journey except that it took three days, and even that we are told in a mysterious way: Abraham and his followers rose “early in the morning” and “went unto” the place of which God had told him; on the third day he lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. That gesture is the only gesture, is indeed the only occurrence during the whole journey, of which we are told; and though its motivation lies in the fact that the place is elevated, its uniqueness still heightens the impression that the journey took place through a vacuum; it is as if, while he traveled on, Abraham had looked neither to the right nor to the left, had suppressed any sign of life in his followers and himself save only their footfalls.

            The text says nothing on the subject. In the narrative itself, a third chief character appears: Isaac. While God and Abraham, the serving-men, the ass, and the implements are simply named, without mention of any qualities or any other sort of definition, Isaac once receives an appositive; God says, “Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest.” But this is not a characterization of Isaac as a person, apart from his relation to his father and apart from the story; he may be handsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, pleasant or unpleasant—we are not told. 

            The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts—on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. God gives his command in direct discourse, but he leaves his motives and his purpose unexpressed; Abraham, receiving the command, says nothing and does what he has been told to do. The conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way to the place of sacrifice is only an interruption of the heavy silence and makes it all the more burdensome.

            the Homeric style was “of the foreground” because, despite much going back and forth, it yet causes what is momentarily being narrated to give the impression that it is the only present, pure and without perspective. A consideration of the Elohistic text teaches us that our term is capable of a broader and deeper application. It shows that even the separate personages can be represented as possessing “background”; God is always so represented in the Bible, for he is not comprehensible in his presence, as is Zeus; it is always only “something” of him that appears, he always extends into depths. But even the human beings in the Biblical stories have greater depths of time, fate, and consciousness than do the human beings in Homer; although they are nearly always caught up in an event engaging all their faculties, they are not so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain continually conscious of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their thoughts and feelings have more layers, are more entangled. Abraham’s actions are explained not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by his character (as Achilles’ actions by his courage and his pride, and Odysseus’ by his versatility and foresightedness), but by his previous history; he remembers, he is constantly conscious of, what God has promised him and what God has already accomplished for him—his soul is torn between desperate rebellion and hopeful expectation; his silent obedience is multilayered, has background. Such a problematic psychological situation as this is impossible for any of the Homeric heroes, whose destiny is clearly defined and who wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are simple and find expression instantly.