Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Month: January 2008

Bruno Snell on the Epic

The style of writing characteristic of the epic, the exposition of life as a chain-like series of events, is not a mechanism artfully designed; Homer did not, from among several methods of portraying the existence of man, purposely choose this particular one because it seemed most appropriate to the epic. Lessing is mistaken when he credits Homer with aesthetic discrimination for avoiding the description of static scenes and translating everything into the language of dynamic events. Actually this feature of Homer’s style is a necessary function of the perspective in which he discerns man, his life and his world. According to this view–and there could be no other for him–a man’s action or perception is determined by the divine forces operative in the world; it is a reaction of his physical organs to a stimulus, and this stimulus is itself grasped as a personal act. Any situation is likely to be the result of stimuli, and the source of new stimuli in turn.

Bruno Snell, “The Rise of the Individual in Early Greek Lyric”

I like this because it suggests that the mechanistic worldview is not some post-Englightenment Leibnizian creation portraying the world as a clockwork device, but something that goes back before the conception of the individual. So as science isolates all the various factors in making us who we are and removes more and more from the vagaries of freedom and individuality, we aren’t stepping into the inhuman unknown, but just reincorporating a mindset from the past.

I also like that this argues for a transcendence of psychologism and psychologically-inflected description, which has long been one of the tyrannies of the novel.

Ernst Cassirer on Art Public and Private

The artist possesses the strongest will and the strongest capacity for communication. He cannot rest or repose until he has discovered the way to bring to life in others everything that lives in himself. And nevertheless it is just in this continual self-renewing flow of communication that the artist feels himself isolated and thrown back to the limits of his own I. For no individual work that he creates can capture the fullness of this vision that he bears within himself. Always a distressingly felt opposition remains: “outer” and “inner” never completely correspond. But this boundary, which the artist must acknowledge, does not become a limit for him. He continues to create, for he knows that it is only in his creations that he can discover and take possession of his self. He has his world and his true self only in the gestalt that he gives them.

In religious feeling, too, we find the same duplexity. The deeper and more inward it is the more it appears to turn away from the world and break all ties that bind man to man, to his social reality. The believer knows only himself and God; and he does not want to know anything else. “God and the soul I desire to know,” says Augustine, “Nothing else? Nothing at all.” And yet, with Augustine, as with every other religious genius, the power of faith proves itself only in the profession of faith. He must communicate his faith to others, he must fill them with his own religious passion and fervor, in order to become truly certain of this faith. This profession is possible only through religious images–in images that begin as symbols and end as dogmas. Thus, even here, every initial enunciation is already the beginning of a renunciation. It is the destiny and, in a certain sense, the immanent tragedy of every spiritual form that it can never overcome this inner tension. With the resolution of the tension the life of spirit would also be extinguished; for the life of spirit consists in this very act of severing what is, so that it can, in turn, even more securely unite what has been severed.

Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences,” “Perception of Things, Perception of Expression”

Some thoughts:

  • This picture of the artist in society is a nice variation on Hegel without all his Whiggish baggage and rationalism.
  • The lack of correspondence of “inner” and “outer” is something not just confronted in art, but in all aspects of our lives.
  • Cassirer’s claim puts so-called folk art in an interesting position. When it is taken up by cosmopolitans, their appreciation for it is not for a pure or untainted version of artistic expression, but for someone who has tapped into a vein of public communication seemingly beyond their reach, and has done so without trying to or realizing it.
  • And so it pays to be suspicious of those who claim to be creating art “just for themselves.” I think Gore Vidal puts it best, below.

From the beginning of the United States, writers of a certain kind, and not all bad, have been bursting with some terrible truth that they can never quite articulate. Most often it has to do with the virtue of feeling as opposed to the vice of thinking. Those who try to think out matters are arid, sterile, anti-life, while those who float about in a daffy daze enjoy copious orgasms and the happy knowledge that they are the salt of the earth. This may well be true but Miller is hard put to prove it, if only because to make a case of any kind, cerebration is necessary, thereby betraying the essential position. On the one hand, he preaches the freedom of the bird, without attachments or the need to justify anything in words, while on the other hand, he feels obligated to write long books in order to explain the cosmos to us. The paradox is that if he really meant what he writes, he would not write at all. But then he is not the first messiah to be crucified upon a contradiction.

Gore Vidal, “The Sexus of Henry Miller”

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