Erich Auerbach'
THE SCAR OF ULYSSES *
Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared
and touching scene in the Nineteenth Book, when Ulysses has at last
come home, the scene in which the old housekeeper Eurydeia, who
had been his nurse, recognizes
him
by a scar on
his
thigh. The
stranger has won Penelope's good will; at
his
request she tells the
housekeeper to wash his feet, which, in all old stories, is the first
duty of h<?spitality toward a tired wanderer; Eurydeia busies herself
fetching water .and mixing cold with hot, meanwhile speaking sadly
of her absent master, who is probably of the same age as the guest,
and who perhaps, like the guest, is even now wandering somewhere,
a stranger; and she remarks how astonishingly like him the guest
looks. Meanwhile, Ulysses remembers his scar and moves back out
of the light; he knows that, despite his efforts to hide his identity,
Eurycleia will now recognize him, but he wants at least to keep
Penelope in ignorance. No sooner has the old woman touched the
scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Ulysses' foot drop into the
basin; the water overflows, she is about to cry out her joy; U lysses
restrains her with whispered threats and endearments; she recovers
herself and conceals her emotion. Penelope, whose attention Athena's
foresight had diverted from the incident, has observed nothing.
All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely
fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct dis–
course; although these feelings are only slightly mixed with the most
general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connec-
*
This is a chapter from
Mimesis: dargestellte Wirklichkeit
in
der Abend–
liindischen Literatur,
a study of the representation of reality in Western
literature from Homer and the Bible to the modern age.
Mimesis
is one of the
most important works of literary scholarship and criticism that has appeared
in the German language in recent years. Two more parts of the book-the
chapter on Rabelais and the chapter on Stendhal-will be published in PR in
subsequent issues.-Ed.
