Odysseus’
Scar
S. Sreekumar
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis : [Auerbach was one of those towering European intellectuals,
with encyclopedic knowledge of almost everything, who gave real meaning to the
word scholarship. A German Jew (b. 1892), Auerbach had a distinguished academic
career—studying and teaching law, art history, comparative literature, Romance
languages, and Latin philology—until the mid-30s, when the Nazis came to power.
He spent the war years in Turkey, where—without benefit of his library or research
materials—he wrote Mimesis, a study of Western culture and imagination
that includes detailed discussions of Homer, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Goethe, Woolf, among others. He explained the difficulties this way:
Mimesis "was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well
equipped for European studies. International communications were impeded; I had
to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent
investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts.
. . . The lack of technical literature and periodicals may also serve to
explain that my book has no notes." Evidently, Auerbach relied on his
prodigious memory quite as much as the Istanbul
libraries.
