DANIEL FRIED

OF BOARS, RHAPSODES, AND THE USES OF CULTURALIST ERROR

CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEMS WORK A WEIRD MAGIC upon the world. Their enforcement of arbitrary division and homogenization is the constant work of language: these forces have a power to trap the swarming anarchy of detail that attention confronts everywhere. Culturally-defined schemata are as guilty of this as any other variety, and the attempt to characterize national or ethnic cultures as unities susceptible to summary has had a particularly troubling history. Culturalist logic has retained a peculiar aesthetic force since the earliest days of colonialism, and even the most monstrous sadnesses of the drive to empire have been obscured by the radiance of imagined structures.

Although it is not difficult for academics to move beyond over-hasty categories—we do so at the urgings of something almost instinctual—the various critiques performed by recent postcolonial criticism have been revelatory. Old habits of mind have been deployed in new ways, movements of cultural force and subversion traced and delineated, and “world literature” (if not Weltliteratur) given a reality and a bittersweet history that one could never have suspected from the well-meant abstractions of core classes everywhere.

The European canon is no enemy to the mainstream of such criticism, just a foil against which the complex literary engagements of the colonial periphery are analyzed. The civilizational frameworks that separated the cultural globe into Manichean spheres of light and dark have been unwoven, not to vitiate Europe, but to understand the processes by which imperial ideologies hide complexity. But how does one read these insights back into an analysis of the traditional canon? Even if many of the insights of postcolonial practice are too specific to the histories of the decolonizing world to be of much use in the analysis of the main line of the classical tradition, these insights need not leave the frameworks of the European past as mere ghostly hulks, suited only for abandonment to the recesses of deep storage. An understanding of literary tradition in the wake of transcended schemata can be superior to an understanding that had never been subjected to the bland authority of culturalist essentialisms.

Objects fracture along lines of weakness, both in the physical world and in the ideational. Understanding the nature of a literary-theoretical system’s failure allows us better to measure the weights of culture beneath which it groaned. Systems sparkle in their alluring completeness: joint to joint, beam to beam, spidery crystalline networks in which word links up to theme, and theme to idea. But the real world enters easily, and as a destroying beast. If one cares more about the beast than the system, the resulting patterns of wrack offer welcome data.

I offer a case study in such data, drawn from the shortcomings of one particularly well-known reading of Homer: the opening chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.