FREE, WHITE, AND TWENTY-ONE

Newt Gingrich's upset victory in South Carolina appears to have been made possible by his success in tapping into a deep, bitter, implacable sense of grievance and victimhood that afflicts a large segment of the Republican electorate in that state.  This permanent ressentiment was manifested in the eruptions of applause with which the debate audience greeted Gingrich's attack on moderator Juan Williams.  It found expression in their delight when Gingrich called Obama a "food stamp president."  And of course its steadiest manifestation is their hysterical hatred of and contempt for President Obama.  The principal appeal of Gingrich to this electorate seems to be rooted in their erotic fantasy that Gingrich would, in a debate with Obama, whip the President and put him in his place.

The sense of being insulted and injured is not new, of course.  It has long, deep roots.  The purpose of this blog post is to explore those roots and identify what I believe to be the real origin of the grievance that motivates so large a segment of the Republican electorate today.  As will become obvious, my explanation is little more than a suggestion, grounded in some historical realities.  But readers of this blog may find it to be of some interest.

Our story begins, as do so many of the stories of America, in the pre-Civil War institution of slavery.  Slavery was a fact of American society and economy north and south for several centuries -- one tends to forget that at one point New York City was home to more slaves than any other city in America.  But although slavery was widespread in the North, the northern economy was not a slave economy.  That is to say, slave labor was not the foundation of northern wealth.  The South, however, was a slave economy.  The tobacco, rice, and then cotton that made the ante-bellum South the wealthiest region of the United States rested firmly on slave labor.

It was far from the case that all white southerners owned slaves.  Healthy, adult Black men and women were an extremely valuable commodity in the southern slave markets, each one bringing more money than a northern white free worker could earn in a year.  Indeed, in his very valuable study of the economics of southern slavery, Branches Without Roots, Gerald Jaynes tells us that fully one half of the entire wealth of the South at the outbreak of the Civil War was in the form of slaves.

There were a great many poor whites trying to wrest some sort of living from the soil in the hollows and backwoods and upcountry reaches of the Southern states.  Jacqueline Jones, in her splendid book American Work, reports that in the period before the Civil War, the popular view among affluent Southern whites was that the slaves were good workers -- skilled, obedient, hard-working -- but that the poor whites were lazy, shiftless, and no account.  Within a generation after the end of the War, this attitude had flipped.  It was now the newly freed Blacks who were condemned as lazy and shiftless and the white workers who were lauded as reliable and industrious.

Poor as the rural whites were in the Old South, they had one cardinal fact that they could clutch to their bosoms, one balm for their troubled souls, and it was not the old time religion.  It was that THEY WERE NOT BLACK.  However they might be scorned and condescended to by the gentry in the big plantations, there was an entire large segment of the population that was permanently, unalterably below them in the caste system of the South.

There is an old American saying that was still current when I was a boy:  "I can do what I like.  I am free, White, and twenty-One!"  I am free -- I am not an indentured servant or a slave.  I am White -- I can never be a slave;  I am a citizen.  And I am twenty-one, I am an adult."  This was the proud boast of the poorest, most despised whites in an America with Black slaves.

At the end of the Civil War, everything changed.  Suddenly, that oppressed, enslaved, and despised caste of Black men and women was Free.  This created a situation that Whites found intolerable.  An entire system of socially, legally, and extra-legally enforced caste separations and oppressions had to be introduced to replace the easily recognizable status of Slave.  Thus were born the Black Codes and the system of Jim Crow.  If a legally free Black man walking on a sidewalk did not step into the gutter to make way for a White man or women, he risked a blow, a beating, or even death.  Before the war, white slave owners traveled by train with their slaves in the train car with them to attend to their needs and desires.  Now, legally free Black travelers were forced to ride in separate cars so as not to offend the tender sensibilities of well-born Whites.  Under slavery, Blacks drove carriages and they built and repaired them;  Blacks cooked the food of Whites, fed it to them, cleaned up their messes, wet-nursed their babies, bathed them, and did their hair.  After liberation, the sensibilities of White women were so easily offended by the mere presence of Black women that Black women were barred from serving as salesladies in department stores.

The hideous practice of lynching was entirely a post-bellum phenomenon.  In slavery times, a slave was worth a great deal of money, and a sensible owner would no more kill a slave than kill a horse or a mule.  The law records are full of cases in which one white man rented another white man's slave and, by beating him too harshly, returned him as damaged goods, giving rise to a lawsuit for the recovery of damages [to the white owner, of course, not to the slave!]

The strictly enforced caste system persisted through the end of the nineteenth century into the new twentieth century, through the First World, War and the Great Depression, and through the Second World War as well.  During all that long century, poor whites could console themselves with the thought, spoken or unspoken, that they were not at the bottom of the social and economic ladder because THEY WERE NOT BLACK.  In the great northern cities, housing discrimination, enforced by the Federal Government's policies as well as those of the states and localities, created large inner city ghettoes, in which Black Americans were forced to live by the covenants and housing discrimination in the rapidly expanding suburbs.

It was more or less at this time that a new and curious linguistic practice entered the public speech of America.  Ordinary White working class families began to be referred to, and increasingly referred to themselves, as "middle class."  Now "middle class" is itself a rather suspicious bastard sociological category.  It does not have the historical roots and deeper meaning of "petty bourgeoisie," which conveys the notion of shopkeepers and small business owners who, although owners of their means of production, are yet not the great geldbesitzeren or haute bourgeois who command the economic heights.  But it also does not merely mean "between rich and poor."  It does, in the American context, somewhat correspond to the old distinction between "suits" and "shirts" or "white collar" and "blue collar."  However, in the racially segregated America of the '50s and '60s, "middle class" clearly meant suburban, respectable, not living in an inner city ghetto.  It meant NOT BLACK. 

The Civil Rights Movement challenged the Black Codes, it challenged Jim Crow, it challenged the deeply embedded caste system of American society.  And it was successful!  I will yield to no one in my outrage at the discriminations that still afflict Black Americans, but I am old enough to recall what this country was like in the '40s and '50s, and that change has been dramatic, transformative, and irreversible.

We may celebrate this change as the greatest progressive victory of the twentieth century, but to a large number of Americans, the change has been devastating, incomprehensible, and hateful.  No longer can Whites at the bottom of the economic ladder console themselves, in the dark night of their souls, with the secret thought, AT LEAST I AM NOT BLACK. 

Now add to these thoughts the fact that even now, half a century after the GI Bill, only 30% of adult Americans 25 and older have college degrees.  For seventy percent of Americans, even such mediocre jobs as Elementary School teacher or WalMart store supervisor are closed to them because they do not have the college degree that the mass media comfortably assume is possessed by everyone who matters.

Into this world, stripped by the changes of the past half century of the comforting reassurance that at least I AM NOT BLACK, comes Barack Obama, who gets himself elected president in an election that not even a compliant Supreme Court can throw.  Obama is the ultimate uppity Nigger, made infinitely more unbearable by his easy manner and insufferable good humor.  By popular consensus, the President is the highest status person in America, regardless of politics.  It is, to a great many Americans, deeply, unacceptably, offensively cognitively dissonant to see a Black man in the White House.  It contradicts everything on which they have built whatever remains of their self-esteem.

Which brings me, at long last, to the question why so many right wing Republicans are prepared to throw their support to Gingrich, despite the polling evidence that he would stand no chance at all against Obama even in these terrible economic times.  The answer, I suggest, is that this is their last desperate effort to see Obama -- and by extension, all the other uppity Blacks -- get what is coming to him -- to see him humiliated on the public stage, before all America, by a smart White man who takes no crap and is not afraid to say what they all think.

Now, it goes without saying that this is a mad, hopeless, pathetic fantasy.  In the first place, Obama is smarter than Gingrich, and a good deal more knowledgeable.  Secondly, so long as you retain your cool, which Obama is a master at doing, you never are destroyed, wiped out, put in your place, in a debate.  That is simply not how Presidential debates work.  Gingrich's pseudo-historical call for "Lincoln Douglas Debates" between himself and Obama is even dumber.  Those debates consisted of a ninety-minute speech by one man followed by a thirty-minute rebuttal by the other.  Before the first statement was a third done all America would be watching re-runs of "Two and a Half Men."

But despised for their lack of education, mocked for their religion, deprived of the last-ditch self-defense that AT LEAST I AM NOT BLACK, large numbers of White Americans have a deep, ineradicable need to see the iconic Black man put in his place by a White hero.  And that need swamps all practical calculation, all tactical or strategic thinking, even mere self-preservation.  If Obama wins in November, especially against Gingrich, a cry of despair will rise up from certain corners of White America that only the Rapture can allay.  One almost wishes it for them, especially if they leave America to the rest of us, along with their dentures and prosthetic devices.

THANK YOU

Thank you all for your kind wishes and thoughts.  I shall try to return later today with some thoughts I have been [rather feverishly] turning over in my mind about the historical roots and meaning of the powerful sense of resentment and grievance on the right, and the reasons for their obsessive hatred of Obama.

AN APOLOGY

I have been absent from this blog for a while, and I have also been very dilatory in responging to emails.  This post is a general apology.  I have just been through the worst five days of my life, and although life looks a good deal brighter now, I am still not able to function normally.

Last Wednesday, troubled by my inability to throw off what I thought was a bad flu, I went to the Same Day clinic at UNC Health Services, and was seen by a young Doctor Vance.  After listening to my heart and lungs, he ordered some blood work, an ekg, and a chest x-ray.  The blood work showed a slight anemia.  The ekg was normal.  But the chest x-ray revealed what is called a pleural effusion -- fluid in the bottom of my left lung.   The next morning, Thursday, I went to the Pulomonary Clinic of UNC Memorial Hospital, where a young specialist named Dr. Bice hooked me up to a variety of monitors and inserted a catheter into my lung, withdrawing 360 ml of fluid.  When he saw that the fluid was bloody, he said there was a 50% chance that I had lung cancer.  He said he would order a CT scan, while the lab examined the fluid.  My primary care physician, by phone, told me there was a 70% chance that I had stage 4 lung cancer, which is incurable.  He started talking to me about making my remaining time as qualitatively valuable as possible.

I was devastated.  I have spent my entire life protecting myself against stroke or heart attack by diet, exercise, and medication.  I had before me always the image of my father, who died at 79 of emphysema, obese, alcoholic, and a chain smoker.  I swore that I would not lead my final years as he had led his, and now it seemed I probably would not live even to be as old as he was when he died.

My entire world contracted sharply, so that it included only Susie, my two sons, my sister, and Susie's two sons, all of whom, especially Susie, were imm ediately supportive and helpful.  Nothing else -- politics, philosophy, my blog -- mattered at all.  I was numb -- not really with fear, but with a dead feeling.  I even lost four pounds rather rapidly, apparently because I was not eating very much.

I waited all day Thursday for a call setting up the CT scan.  On Friday, I called the pulmonary unit and was told that Dr. Bice had scheduled the scan for the following Friday!  I was outraged.  I desperately needed some definitive word on the cancer, even if it was, as I fully expected, bad news, so that I could start making plans to make sure that Susie would be taken care of.  I told the secretary who informed me abou the appoitment that that date was unacceptable.  She fussed a bit and said she had rescheduled it for Wednesday.  Not good enough, I said,  What about this afternoon [it was then about 3:45 p.m.]  Well, she allowed, she would have to transfer me to the Radiology lab.  Fine, I replied, do so.  The Radiology lab said they could take me right then.  By 4:00 p.m., Susie and I were sitting in Women's Hospital, where the Radiology lab is, waiting to be admitted.  By 4:15 p.m., we were in the basement, waiting to be called.  I had to wait for more than an  hour, but then I went in and had a CT scan "with contrast" [they inject a fluid through an IV, which makes it easier to see things on the scan.]  The med tech, who was very, very nice, told me that as an outpatient, I would be at the end of the line for reading the results, but that if my doctor called and asked, they would read the scan and give him the results.  I had already called Dr DeWalt's secretary, while I was waiting for the scan, asking her to send him an email requesting that he get the results.

The next morning, at 6 a.m., I sent DeWalt an email, repeating the request.  Later that monring, he called back.  It seems that he had not only the CT scan results but also the results of the tests on the fluids.  The results?  NO SIGN OF ANY TUMORS ON THE CT SCAN, AND NO SIGN OF ANY CANCER CELLS IN THE FLUID.  Dr. DeWalt said that they still did not know what was making me sick, and therefore cancer of some sort was still a possibility, but he agreed that stage 4 lung cancer seemed ruled out.  There was also no sign in the CT scan of a pulmonary embolism [blood clot], a secondary possibility they were considering.

If I had not insisted on having the CT scan immediately, I would still right now, and until next Friday, be living with a diagnosis of incurable terminal cancer.

I am sure all of you will understand that everything else -- emails, inquiries about the Paris apartment, politics -- has simply not been on my mind.

I don't know what is wrong with me.  I awoke this morning at 4:30 a.m. drenched in sweat.  My body is fighting something, but it will be a while before the doctors figure out what, if indeed they ever figure it out.

ERICH AUERBACH MIMESIS: AN APPRECIATION CONCLUSION

Well, several days have gone by during which I mostly huddled under the covers and tried to stop the shivering brought on by this implacable flu.  I think I am now sufficiently recovered to attempt the conclusion of my Appreciation of Mimesis.

The first passage of Chapter Two is an extended monologue placed by the author, Petronius, in the mouth of one of the guests at a feast being hosted by a parvenu businessman named Trimalchio.  The passage is gossipy, circumstantial, full of detail about the backgrounds, pretensions, successes and failures of the other guests seated around the table.  Very much in the manner to which we have become accustomed in modern novels, the speaker unconsciously reveals himself, and unintentionally places himself perfectly in the social and economic milieu of which the host, Trimalchio, is a prominent and successful example.  [Compare the way in which Becky Sharp reveals herself through her narration in Thackeray's Vanity Fair.]  The discourse is vulgar, chatty, and entirely interior to the scene the speaker is describing.  The following passage by Auerbach gives some sense of the thrust of his analysis:

"Petronius does not say:  This is so.  Instead he lets an 'I,' who is identical neither with himself nor yet with the feigned narrator Encolpius, turn the spotlight of his perception on the company at table -- a highly artful procedure in perspective, a sort of twofold mirroring, which I dare not say is unique in antique literature as it has come down to us, but which is most unusual there.  In outward form this procedure is certainly nothing new, for of course throughout antique literature characters speak of their experiences and impressions.  But nowhere, except in this passage by Petronius, do we have, on the one hand, the most intense subjectivity, which is even heightened by individuality of language, and, on the other hand, an objective intent -- for the aim is an objective description of the company at table, including the speaker, through a subjective procedure."

But, Auerbach argues, the convention of the separation of styles makes it impossible for an author like Petronius to discuss anything serious, let alone tragic, concerning the sorts of characters who are attending Trimalchio's feast.  They can only be the subject of comic portrayals, regardless of how accurate and penetrating Petronius' anatomization of their character flaws, aspirations, and social origins.  What is even more interesting, to my way of thinking, Auerbach notes that although the world portrayed by Petronius is in constant turmoil, with some getting rich quickly, others just as quickly losing their fortunes and falling to the status of slaves, it is, from the point of view of modern social and economic theory, a static world.  Individuals rise and fall, but Petronius has no sense of the deeper and longer acting social forces that might be transforming the entire social world, not merely the fortunes of this or that actor in that world. 

The same is true of the next passage Auerbach considers, a speech by a rebellious member of the Roman legions by the Roman historian Tacitus.  Because Tacitus is a great literary artist, the speech is powerful and effective as a set piece.   But although the occasion for the speech is a moment of the greatest uncertainty in the young Roman empire -- namely, the death of the first Emperor, Augustus [the speaker, Percennius, is protesting the low wages, long service, and harsh treatment meted out to the common soldiers in the legions] -- Tacitus has no sense of or interest in moving historical forces that may bring about changes in the Empire. 

After quoting two modern historians of ancient Rome, one of whom, Rostovtzeff, is one of my very favorite historiographers, Auerbach says:  "what (both statements) express goes back to the same peculiarity of the ancients' way of viewing things;  it does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes. ... an aristocratic reluctance to become involved with growth processes in the depths, for these processes are felt to be both vulgar and orgiastically lawless." 

What Petronius and Tacitus lack, in common with the other Greek and Roman writers of antiquity, Auerbach suggests, is the idea of historical forces moving beneath the surface, forces of which Trimalchio's dinner party or Percennius' rebellious speech are merely symptoms or expressions.  This is an idea with which we are now quite familiar, and in the novels of Stendhal or Tolstoi or indeed Austen, it finds expression either explicitly or by implication.  We might imagine that it would be necessary to jump across many centuries to find a passage that shows us far-reaching forces beginning to stir beneath the surface.  But Auerbach locates a passage contemporaneous with Petronius and Tacitus in which something very like this finds expression -- the passage in the Gospels in which the Apostle Peter thrice denies Jesus.  Jesus, you will recall, has been arrested, and his disciples have been allowed to slip away undetained.  But Peter follows Jesus and the officers to the high court, showing uncommon courage.  Once there, he is challenged several times to admit that he is one of Jesus' group, and three times he denies that he is.

As Auerbach makes clear, this is a situation that simply could not be satisfactorily rendered by Greek or Latin authors.  First of all, the participants -- Peter, a young woman who confronts him, the soldiers, indeed Jesus Himself -- are common people of the lowest social order, and the strict separation of styles forbids that anything tragic or momentous or of world-historical importance should be portrayed as involving them in any essential way.  As Auerbach rather nicely puts it, "viewed superficially the thing is a police action and its consequences;  it takes place entirely among everyday men and women of the common people;  anything of the sort would be thought in antique terms only as farce or comedy."  And yet, Peter's situation is of the most profound  significance possible.  What is more, this is the man on whom Jesus has chosen to found His church.  This is St. Peter, the first Pope, the man from whom flowed an institution that transformed first the Roman Empire and then all of the Western world.

There is much, much more in Auerbach's analysis of the passage that I simply do not have the space or the energy to capture.  But the central idea I want to leave you with is this:  The thoroughly modern sociological/historical idea of deep-moving long-running social, economic, and political movements that transform a society -- the idea on which Marx's theories are built, and that finds expression as well in the writings of every great modern social theorist -- find their first primitive powerful expression in these New Testament passages.  Originally, the transformations are metaphysical or theological, and are imposed from outside the social order by God -- the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection.  But the violation of the principle of the Separation of Styles, the presentation of subterranean movements among the common people that will eventually burst forth into world-historical significance, the literary and conceptual possibility of a thoroughly secular deployment of these same ideas in the works of Marx and others -- all of this is prefigured in the New Testament two thousand years ago.

Well, that, I think, is enough to pique your interest in Auerbach.  And that, after all, is the task of an Appreciation.

ERICH AUERBACH MIMESIS: AN APPRECIATION PART THREE

Auerbach invites us to contrast this with the terrifying story of God's commandment to sacrifice Isaac.  The previous Chapter, Genesis 21, tells the story of the miracle by which the seventy-year old Sarah conceives, and bears Abraham a son, Isaac.  This is not simply some story of domestic happiness.  It is through Isaac that God will fulfill his promise to Abraham to make him to be fruitful and to multiply.  Isaac is to be the son who founds a nation.

Genesis 22 begins abruptly and ominously. 

"And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, [here] I [am].

²And he said, Take now thy son, thine only [son] Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of."

What on earth are we to make of this passage?  Absolutely nothing in the preceding has prepared us for it.  Auerbach's gloss is worth quoting at length [as is everything else in the book, alas.]  "Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer.  Where are the two speakers?  We are not told.  The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from unknown heights or depths.  Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham?  We are not told.  He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast.  Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly."  Note, the temptation is that Abraham, out of love for his only son, through whom the divine promise of multitudes will be fulfilled, might fail to obey God's command.  As Auerbach says at the conclusion of the paragraph from which I have been quoting, "The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things."

Like God, Abraham's position, his location, is unspecified.  Is he indoors, out of doors, alone, surrounded by his tribe?  It seems not to matter.  Nor are we given any details at all of the three day journey that brings him and his son to the place of sacrifice.  Both God and Abraham are multi-dimensional.  There is a foreground, what is presented in the story, and there are depths and complexities that cannot possibly be contained within any single account.  God, of course, is a transcendent figure only a part of which can ever be presented to man.  But Abraham too is more than merely a man with a son whom he loves.  Abraham is a prophet, the father of nations.  He plays a role in a metaphysical story that stretches from Creation to the End of Times. 

As Auerbach says, "the relation of the Elohist to the truth of his story remains a far more passionate and definite one than is Homer's relation.... The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical -- it excludes all other claims.  The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historical true reality -- it insists that it is the only true world, is destined for autocracy.... The Scripture stories do not, like Homer's, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us -- they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels."

There is much, much more in Auerbach's analysis of these two passages in his opening chapter, but this is enough, I hope, to convey some sense of the richness and power of his treatment of them.  Consider just the last point I quoted him as making.  Any fair minded reader, I think, must agree that Homer's work is far better crafted, as a literary work of art, than the rather abrupt, jumbled together, barely sketched in narratives of Genesis.  There are, to be sure, later Books of the Old Testament that achieve a higher level of literary art -- one thinks of Psalms, or The Book of Job, among others.  But the account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, of Noah and his three sons, of the Tower of Babel, of Jacob and Esau [or of Cain and Abel] have the power to terrify us, to seize us by the scruff of the neck and shake us until we tremble, that nothing in Homer can match.

The key to Auerbach's analysis, he tells us in many different ways, is the relationship between the totally different conceptions of the structure of reality that underlie the two passages, and the language with which Homer and the Elohist tell their stories.  What is not said in the Genesis story is as significant as what is said in the Odyssey. 

As Auerbach proceeds, slowly and with enormous patience, through the entire sweep of the development of Western literature, we see the literary resources crafted by the writers of one era being carried forward and deployed in ever more complex fashion until, by the time he has reached the familiar terrain of the Nineteenth Century novel, we have some appreciation of how much lies beneath the surface in the novels of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust [the last chapter.]

Tomorrow I shall turn to Chapter Two of Mimesis, in which Auerbach contrasts two passages from First Century A.D. Rome -- one by the comic author Petronius, the other by the great Roman historian Tacitus -- with a passage from the Gospels written at roughly the same time.  Once I have completed my account of what unfolds in that chapter, I shall leave off this hopeless task of trying to convey the many dimensions of Auerbach's great work, and leave it to you to explore the rest of it on your own.

ERICH AUERBACH MIMESIS: AN APPRECIATION PART TWO

I shall begin with the first chapter of the book, in which we encounter many of the themes and insights that characterize Auerbach's work.  For the opening chapter, Auerbach chooses two very ancient texts, the first from the 8th century B.C., the other from the 6th century B.C.  The first text is the famous "recognition" scene from the Odyssey.  As you will recall [at least, I hope you will recall],  at the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus sets out with his followers to return to Ithaca and his wife and son, but for one reason and another, it takes him ten years to complete the journey.  He is presumed dead, and a number of suitors are vying for the hand of his widow, Penelope, and for Odysseus' wealth and position.  Odysseus shows up at his home disguised as a wanderer, and is put in charge of a servant who was, when he was young, his nurse.  She washes his feet and in a dramatic moment recognizes a scar on his leg as that of her old master, Odysseus.  Odysseus warns her to remain silent about her discovery for the moment so that he can study the interactions between his wife and the band of importunate suitors.

This passage is paired by Auerbach with an equally famous passage from Genesis 22:1 in which God speaks to Abraham and commands him to make a sacrifice of his only begotten son, Isaac.  [By the way, Kierkegaard has written an wonderful entire book about this story, but that is another matter.]  Abraham obeys, and sets out to the place of sacrifice with Isaac, but at the last moment, as Abraham is about to slay Isaac, he sees a ram caught in the bushes, and substitutes it for his son.

These are equally dramatic passages, but they are treated linguistically by their authors, Auerbach argues, in utterly different ways that reveal to us the completely different conceptions of reality of the Homeric Greeks and the Old Testament Hebrews.  It is very, very difficult to capture the subtlety and richness of Auerbach's discussion without resorting to endless lengthy quotes.  The central points of his analysis of the Homeric passage, as I understand him, are these:

The scene "is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion... Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible."  One of the key notions here is expressed by the word "externalized."  We are these days [after the literary evolution that Mimesis is designed to explicate] accustomed to distinctions between the inner and outer, the visible and the hidden.  The motivations of a character -- her hopes, desires, fears, beliefs, anticipations, understandings and misunderstandings -- may all be communicated by hints and nods, with revealing turns of phrase, as much by what is not  said on the page as what is.  But all of this is foreign to Homer.  As Auerbach notes, even as Achilles and Hector fight to the death, they utter speeches that express their inner feelings.  The key to the Recognition scene, the "McGuffin" as stage buffs would call it, is the old scar on Odysseus' leg.  Once the maid, Euryclea, spots it, she knows that the stranger is her old master.  A modern author would not want to slow down the action, or release the tension, by devoting line after line to an explanation of the origin of the scar.  Either the modern author would prepare the way for the Recognition by inserting an account of the scar earlier in the text, so that the reader understands its significance instantaneously, or else such an author would leave the scar unexplained, relying on the reader to fill in the blanks.  But Homer, Auerbach notes, enters into a complete and unhurried account of the hunting expedition on which Odysseus acquired the scar.  The effect, deliberate, Auerbach is sure, is to drain the moment of its tension.  In a Homeric text, all is on the surface, all is fully realized, all is externalized.

A LION IN THE CAPITOL [SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR ACT I SCENE 3]

One of the standard literary tropes for conveying a breach in the social order is a violation of the natural order -- a lion walking in the Capitol, in Julius Caesar, for example.  We are now witnessing a breach of the social order so violent, so unexpected, so incomprehensible that I fully expect to encounter lions lying down with lambs and peaches dropping from fig trees.  Deeply conservative Republicans have started attacking venture capitalism as Vulture Capitalism, taking large ad buys to tell piteous stories of ordinary men and women who lost their jobs as a consequence of the wealth-amassing actions of predatory investors.  I feel that to capitalize on this development, I must rush back into print my books on the thought of Karl Marx.  Surely, Lady Gaga will soon record The Internationale and The Wall Street Journal will launch a serialization of The Communist Manifesto.  If I had not tarnished my brand by announcing myself an anarchist as well as a Marxist, I could expect momentarily to be tapped for guest appearances on Fox News.

It is all very well to reply calmly that just as soon as the Republicans anoint Romney as their standard-bearer, they will cease this madness and return to celebrating "the free enterprise system," but as Dan Ackroyd can testify, it is not so easy to stuff the Pillsbury Doughboy back in his can once you have released him. 

I am going to resist the temptation to pontificate about these developments.  Maybe this is an unanticipated consequence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement;  perhaps the zeitgeist has finally aligned itself with the stars.  However that may be, the only thing to do in the short run is to relax and enjoy it.  You may not see its like again in your lifetime.