Performativity and Visualisation: A Critique of Mimesis in Odysseus’ Scar
Rezumat
Abstract: The representation of reality in the Homeric Odyssey has spurred many conflicting interpretations due to the question of its orality. The awareness of the oral tradition can be traced in the history of Homer criticism and it starts with the Analysts (19th century higher criticism) that sought to determine how fragments of earlier poems had been layered together and culminated with Milman Parry’s (1928) discovery that the Homeric epic exhibits oral methods of composition (Ong). The oral quality of the text and the oral culture that produced it demanded a new type of criticism that shifted the focus from text as product to text as a transcript of a process, at the end of the last century (Rabel, Bakker). This type of criticism addressed issues of representation not in terms of sign—referent (a structuralist mode of reading), but in terms of action—model, as we will see. It also distances itself from the oral-formulaic theory that views the epic poetry of Homer as a set of formulae coupled with performance as improvisation; instead, it understands oral culture as a fundamentally different way to perceive the world in regards to heroic events of the past (kleos) in the memory of their previous performances. Such an oral-oriented reading also draws from the archaeology of mimesis as it appears in the pre-literate Greece, and subsequently problematises both ancient “narratological” approaches (Plato and Aristotle) and modern narratology (De Jong). The present paper will address two aspects of mimesis: 1) performativity, not only representation, imitation, but enactment, presentification (Spăriosu); and 2) visualisation, starting from Auerbach’s stance that the Homeric world is “brightly and uniformly illuminated” and that “everything is visible” and placing this stance near or against oral-oriented criticism (Ong, Bakker).
Keywords: mimesis, performativity, visualisation, presentification, oral-orientied criticis
Bibliografie
Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by W.H. Fyfe. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Aristot.%20Poet.
Auerbach, Erich. “Odysseus’ Scar.” In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton University Press, 1953.
Bakker, Egbert J. “Mimesis as Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter.” Poetics Today 20, no. 1 (1999).
De Jong, Irene J. F. “Beetween Word and Deed: Hidden Thoughts in the Odyssey.” Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature, edited by Irene J. F. De Jong and J. John Patrick Sullivam. Brill, 1993.
Homer. Iliad. Translated by A. T. Murray. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0134:book=1:card=1.
Homer. Odyssey. Translated by A. T. Murray. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hom.+Od.+1.1&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext% 3A1999.01.0136.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980.
Katz, Marylin A. Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the Odyssey. Princeton UP, 2014.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 2002.
Plato. Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0168.
Rabel, Robert. “Impersonation and Representation in Odyssey.” The Classical World no. 2 (1999).
Spăriosu, Mihai I. Resurecția lui Dionysos [Dionysus’s Resurrection]. Univers, 1997.
