THE
SCAR OF ULYSSES
4 13
planned to keep the reader in suspense but rather to relax the ten–
sion. This very thing frequently occurs, as in the passage before us.
The broadly narrated, charming, and subtly fashioned story of the
hunt, with all its elegance and self-sufficiency, its wealth of idyllic
pictures, seeks to win the reader over wholly to itself as long as he
is hearing it, to make him forget what had just taken place during
the foot-washing. But an interpolation that increases suspense by
retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the
present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being
awaited, entirely out of the reader's mind, and thereby destroy the
mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must
remain vibrant in the background. But Homer-and to this we shall
have to return later- knows no background. What he narrates is for
the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the
reader's mind completely. So it is with the passage before us. When
the young Eurycleia (vv. 401 ff . ) sets the infant Ulysses on
his
grand–
father Autolycos' lap after the banquet, the aged Eurycleia, who a
few lines earlier had touched the wanderer's foot, has entirely van–
ished from the stage and the reader's mind.
Goethe and Schiller, who, though not referring to this par–
ticular episode, exchanged letters in April, 1797, on the subject of
"the retarding element" in the Homeric poems in general, placed
it in direct opposition to the element of suspense-the latter word is
not used, but is clearly implied when the "retarding" procedure is
opposed, as something proper to epic, to tragic procedure (letters of
April 19, 21, and 22). The "retarding element," the "going back
and forth" by means of interpolations, seems to me, too, in the
Homeric poems, to be opposed to any tense and suspense-arousing
striving toward a goal, and doubtless Schiller is right in regard to
Homer when he says that what he gives us is "simply the quiet
existence and operation of things in accordance with their natures";
his goal is "already present in every point of his progress." But both
Schiller and Goethe raise Homer's procedure to the level of a law
for epic poetry in general, and Schiller's words quoted above are
meant to be universally valid for the epic, in contradistinction to the
tragic, poet. Yet, both in modern and in ancient times, there are
important epic works which are written throughout with no "re–
tarding element" in this sense but, on the contrary, with suspense
