Flache Wirklichkeitsdarstellung als Mythos oder narrative Kunst der Performance in Homers Odyssee? Zu Auerbachs erstem Kapitel in Mimesis über Odysseus’ Narbengeschichte

Abstract

Based on the most innovative recent Homeric scholarship, the episode of the scar is subjected to a close reading and contrasted with Auerbach’s one-sided interpretation in Mimesis. Only Homer’s traditional discourse based on orality, mimesis, and performance can do justice to this passage. The scar is interpreted symbolically as a sema (sign) of central importance for both Odysseus and Auerbach in their identity of crevices, fissures, and rifts. At this important point in the Odyssey, the central life incisions of birth, naming, and initiation into manhood that constitute Odysseus’ identity, are narrated in retrospect. At the same time, Auerbach’s Jewish approach is unmasked as a cultural-ideological construct with which he aims to topple Homer and thus the entire Prussian philhellenic humanism of Winkelmann’s style from its pedestal. Paradoxically, Auerbach does not follow Vico as his central model here, but his argument is deeply rooted in specifically German discourses of the national Sonderweg. Contrary to his attitude as a philologist not to obstruct his access to literature with a predetermined theoretical template, in this case Auerbach does so himself, although the core of the Homeric sense does emerge to a certain extent.