Mimesis

NaokoSmith said:

Well ... I was having oysters and champagne once with an otherwise lovely guy who suddenly asked for a tissue. He had been sipping his champagne through his 'chewie'!

- at least he didn't take it out and stick it under his chrome bar stool.

Click to expand...

I have nothing informative to add here, but this made me snort while drinking my coffee. Painful.

Handley_Page said:

It strikes me that the 'knightly ideal' died off during the 100 years War; certainly after Agincourt (following Crecy & Poitiers). Realism reared it's head.

Click to expand...

The death of knightly ideals is actually coming up! It's discussed in Chapter 10. Auerbach blames the The Black Prince, son of Edward II and father of Richard II. (He died a year before his father so was never crowned king himself.) Watch this space!

MLClifton said:

I have nothing informative to add here, but this made me snort while drinking my coffee. Painful.

Click to expand...

Apologies! I'm so sorry.

Apologies! I'm so sorry.

[/QUOTE]

No worries. A laugh is a laugh, even with coffee up the nose.

MLClifton said:

No worries. A laugh is a laugh, even with coffee up the nose.

Click to expand...

It wasn't quite the reaction I was aiming for with this thread, however as long as you enjoyed it

Ch. 7 – 1/3 merging of the sublime and the low

Chapt 7 – Adam and Eve

Auerbach begins this chapter with a brief discussion of the gender politics in the mediaeval religious drama he is exploring. He points to the way that the serpent in the drama persuades Eve to overturn the order of things established by God, making her man’s master and leading both to ruin. (149). But she can only do this because she is ‘sa per’, they have a deep special relationship.

Here we can see the merging of the sublime and the low styles which begins to happen in the world of Christianity, especially figured in Christ’s Incarnation and Passion. The passage from the religious drama presents an ancient and sublime moment – the Fall; Adam and Eve talk both like sublime representatives of humanity and like a farmer and his wife.

As Christianity spread, highly educated pagans criticised its writings for the uncivilised style in which it seemed to them it was expressed. Church Fathers became concerned with drawing on a higher standard of classical style. However they also became more aware of the distinctive greatness of scriptural writing. On the one hand Scripture speaks very simply, on the other hand it has occult meaning written in secrets and riddles. (154.)

Ch 7 – 2/3 The simultaneous present

(158) Auerbach points to the way that everything for God happens in a simultaneous present, thus religious texts of this kind are in the moment of their happening and can both look back and look forward to past and present, not with foreknowledge but with knowledge. There is no basis for a separation of the sublime from the low and everyday either, since they too are indissolubly connected.

“The everyday and real is thus an essential element of medieval Christian art and especially of the Christian drama. In contrast to the feudal literature of the courtly romance, which leads away from the reality of the life of its class into a world of heroic fable and adventure, here there is a movement in the opposite direction, from distant legend and its figural interpretation into everyday contemporary reality.” (158-9.)

Ch. 7 – 3/3 popular mundane obscenity creeps in

Obscene passages demonstrating popular realism:
- Detailed representation of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute;
- Farcical jokes and dirty stories;
- Balaam talking to his ass in ‘decidedly spicy colloquial language’ (161).

Auerbach goes on to quote and explore two letters from St. Francis and St. Bernard, demonstrating the mixture ‘of ecstatically sublime immersion in God and humbly concrete everydayness’. [This bit reminds me of a letter I once read about which signed itself off: Yours in the bowels of Christ. I mean, how fantastic is that! The abject humility of the signatory: he is but a shit in the lowest of Christ's bodily organs.]

In both a good and bad sense, St. Francis’s commitment to the humble and low gave rise to a popular style. As the Middle Ages progressed, Franciscan friars are linked with dramatic, witty and even obscene anecdotes. Auerbach speculates whether a certain freedom of expression in Italian literature is due to the influence of St. Francis, or implicit in the character of the Italian people.

An aside from the above, interesting passage from St. Bernard:
Ipsi sunt qui non te diligent, sed gaudium suum ex te.
Those who love not you, but their own joy in you.
(163-4)
Maybe a more literal translation would be: there are those who do not love you, but their joy out of you.

NaokoSmith said:

Auerbach goes on to quote and explore two letters from St. Francis and St. Bernard, demonstrating the mixture ‘of ecstatically sublime immersion in God and humbly concrete everydayness’. [This bit reminds me of a letter I once read about which signed itself off: Yours in the bowels of Christ. I mean, how fantastic is that! The abject humility of the signatory: he is but a shit in the lowest of Christ's bodily organs.]

Click to expand...

Didn't Cromwell say something like that to the English Parliament.
"By the bowels of Christ. . . ."

NaokoSmith said:

It wasn't quite the reaction I was aiming for with this thread, however as long as you enjoyed it

Click to expand...

Oh come on, now that you can look back on it, you have to admit that a guy sipping champagne through his "chewie" is hilarious. No? Just me? Okay.

NaokoSmith said:

Auerbach points out how the knightly ideal survives even the poignant critique offered by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, where the real world which Quixote encounters causes complete confusion for him. He cannot emancipate himself from the class he belongs to, which no longer has any function.

Click to expand...

Something that intrigues me about chivalry is how very different the historical knightly ideal was to the way we remember it now.

Don Quixote is driven to adventure by reading chivalric romances. Among his influences, he praises the nobel Tirant lo Blanc as the best of its kind. That's a real book; it was hard to access in English for a long time but these days there are a couple of translations available. (Gutenberg here.)

Tirant is presented as a paragon of knights, and his author (Joanot Martorell) was a knight himself, so we're probably safe in accepting that Tirant's behaviour represented the chivalric ideal of the time.

That ideal is pretty brutal. Tirant repeatedly fights other knights to the death, sometimes over matters such as a woman's favour and sometimes for no offence at all, simply to show his own strength at arms. His courtship of the Princess Carmesina culminates in outright rape, approved by the queen who urges him on. And this is the good guy!

Bramblethorn said:

Something that intrigues me about chivalry is how very different the historical knightly ideal was to the way we remember it now.

Don Quixote is driven to adventure by reading chivalric romances. Among his influences, he praises the nobel Tirant lo Blanc as the best of its kind. That's a real book; it was hard to access in English for a long time but these days there are a couple of translations available. (Gutenberg here.)

Tirant is presented as a paragon of knights, and his author (Joanot Martorell) was a knight himself, so we're probably safe in accepting that Tirant's behaviour represented the chivalric ideal of the time.

That ideal is pretty brutal. Tirant repeatedly fights other knights to the death, sometimes over matters such as a woman's favour and sometimes for no offence at all, simply to show his own strength at arms. His courtship of the Princess Carmesina culminates in outright rape, approved by the queen who urges him on. And this is the good guy!

Click to expand...

Historically Accurate Disney Princess Song - Rachel Bloom

Tio_Narratore said:

Historically Accurate Disney Princess Song - Rachel Bloom

Click to expand...

love it.

Tio_Narratore said:

Historically Accurate Disney Princess Song - Rachel Bloom

Click to expand...

I love Rachel's work.

Bramblethorn said:

I love Rachel's work.

Click to expand...

And she encourages reading!

MLClifton said:

Oh come on, now that you can look back on it, you have to admit that a guy sipping champagne through his "chewie" is hilarious. No? Just me? Okay.

Click to expand...

OMG, yes! I laughed very heartily at the time too - although I was also grateful to him for asking for a tissue to put his 'chewie' in instead of sticking it underneath the chrome bar stool at the Oyster Bar in Selfridges.

Bramblethorn said:

Something that intrigues me about chivalry is how very different the historical knightly ideal was to the way we remember it now.

Click to expand...

The Victorians have a lot to answer for.

You can see that shift starting to happen in Auerbach's account of the Chanson de Roland. The parataxis where it moves between high courtesy and extremely low cursing.

(Will come back to check out the Disney Princess thing when Piglet has gone off to drama club!)

So Mimesis is Exhibitionism?

Diegesis then is Voyeurism?

Ah hah... but I digress.

Actually, in a planned future Chapter, I'm going to present some background through the dialogue. Paragraphs of just the character talking.

My brain 'urts

NaokoSmith said:

(Will come back to check out the Disney Princess thing when Piglet has gone off to drama club!)

Click to expand...

Piglets and drama club? is that an oxymoron or maybe redundant?