[lit-ideas] Re: Auerbach on Mimesis
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 20:55:07 +0900
Just to follow up a bit on my interest in Auerbach. Yes, Mimesis spoke to me
from my bookshelves as I was thinking about how to compose a review of a
book about people reflecting on the experience of working in a liminal zone
defined by competing world views. Taking the book in hand and rereading the
famous first chapter recalled the sense of wonder with which I still
encounter authors with big ideas that seem to make sense of at least some
aspects of long stretches of history, coupled with a certain awe toward
scholars like Auerbach, who could not only read several languages but
apparently knew them well enough to make stylistic assessments of texts
written in them. It is hard to imagine anyone being able to publish a book
these days in which long stretches of Latin, translations of the Latin, and
comments on style referring to the Latin instead of the English translation
appear.
Then, pausing to savor that moment, I sense other connections coming alive
in my brain. One string of associations leads from Auerbach to Ruth
Benedict, who borrowed from Nietzsche the distinction between Appollonian
and Dyonysian strands in ancient Greek culture, another famous contrast in
which the opposition of order and clarity to chaos and ambiguity looms
large. That reminds me of Andrew Abbott's Chaos of Disciplines, in which,
according to the University of Chicago Press website, Abbott
"... presents a fresh and daring analysis of the evolution and development
of the social sciences. *Chaos of Disciplines* reconsiders how knowledge
actually changes and advances. Challenging the accepted belief that social
sciences are in a perpetual state of progress, Abbott contends that
disciplines instead cycle around an inevitable pattern of core principles.
New schools of thought, then, are less a reaction to an established order
than they are a reinvention of fundamental concepts.
*"Chaos of Disciplines uses fractals to explain the patterns of disciplines,
and then applies them to key debates that surround the social sciences.
Abbott argues that knowledge in different disciplines is organized by common
oppositions that function at any level of theoretical or methodological
scale. Opposing perspectives of thought and method, then, in fields ranging
from history, sociology, and literature, are to the contrary, radically
similar; much like fractals, they are each mutual reflections of their own
distinctions."*
Then, another book on my shelves speaks to me, N.J. Girardot's Myth and
Meaning in Early Taoism, where Girardot talks about "the overwhelming
cultural compulsion to distinguish cosmos and chaos respectively in terms of
absolute order and disorder, meaning and nonsense" and then goes on to
elaborate,
"In many archaic traditions this kind of dichotomy is apparently sanctioned
by the mythical imagery of a primordial battle between the forces of chaotic
disorder and the triumphant powers of the sacred order of the cosmos. The
mythic chaos, however, is never just equivalent to nothingness, profanity,
neutrality, unreality, nonbeing, death, or absolute disorder. Despite the
fact that chaos constantly threatens the cosmic order, frequently becoming
synonymous with the demonic, a comparative assessment of creation mythology
generally affirms that the cosmos originally came from, and continually
depends on, the chaos of the creation time."
Now there unfolds in my imagination a string of fractal oppositions: cosmos
and chaos, Greek and Hebrew literature as Auerbach describes them,
Appollonian versus Dyonysian, first in Nietschze's discussion of the birth
of the tragedy, then in Benedict's Patterns of Culture.
This may, of course, be nothing more than a bit of intellectual bricolage,
the Savage Mind in operation as Levi-Strauss describes it. Still, there is
that sense of wonder aroused by things appearing to click together. What
fun.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
Other related posts:
