Odysseus scar by Auerbach (seminar week 3)

Septelici Gheorghe (seminar group 5)

S3461912

Essay 1: In his essay Auerbach is exploring two narrative styles which, as he states, shaped the way in
which the reality of the European culture is perceived. As examples he used Homers Odyssey, more
precisely the sequence with Odysseus return to his homeland, and the story of Abraham from the
Hebrew Bible.

The distinctive trait of the Homeric style is the complete externalization of facts and emotions. In
Auerbachs vision there is nothing in Homers oeuvre to keep the reader breathless. The storyline is very
descriptive, the timeline and space is well defined, as well as characters thoughts and emotions. In other
words Homers Odyssey is creating a world of its own, where everything is set from the beginning, with
little character development, and therefore little suspense. To cite the author, the purpose of Homers
poem is to make us forget our own reality for a few hours.

On the other hand, the story of Abraham from the Hebrew Bible makes us fit our own life into its
world. Its use of little detail about the chronotope, the thoughts and the feelings of the characters, et
cetera, contributes to the creation of suspense in the dramatic work and ends up robbing us of our
mental freedom, as Schiller points out in one of his letters to Goethe. The story of Abraham was meant
to be taken as a universal truth, while Homer may have not had that on his mind when he was writing
The Illiad and The Odyssey. These features make the reality of the Old Testament narrative more
acceptable. The Old Testament text ends up proving more historically compatible with our reality than
Homers epic, which alludes more to a legend.

Essay 2:

Auerbach noticed the clearness in the Homeric poem, and he believes that was exactly Homers
purpose for this epic. The retarding element, term thought up by Goethe and Schiller, is often present
in Homers poem. In Auerbachs vision this elements purpose was to externalize any phenomena which
took place in the poem, and as much as possible eliminate any tension the reader shall encounter when
reading the epic. In this aspect he agrees with Schiller, who claimed that Homers intention was to
portray existence as it is in its nature, without leaving anything out.

However there is something which was mentioned in the discussions between Schiller and Goethe,
that produced a reaction in Auerbach, and that is the fact that both Schiller and Goethe attributed the
retarding element as a law for the epic, and the suspense as a law for the dramatic text. He argues that
there are important works in ancient as well as in modern times which do not obey that rule. Moreover
he believes that the use of the retarding element in Homers narrative was used merely from his desire
to leave nothing in obscurity, which means to make the events in the epic poem as clear as possible for
the reader.