~2
PARTISAN REVIEW
days-in order that we may see the heroes in their ordinary life, and
seeing them so, may take pleasure in their manner of enjoying their
savorsome present, a present which sends its strong roots down into
social usages, landscape, and daily life. And thus they bewitch and
ingratiate us until we live with them in the reality of their lives; so
long as we are reading or hearing the poems, it does not matter
whether we know that all this is only legend, "make-believe." The
oft-renewed reproach that Homer is a liar takes nothing from his
ef–
fectiveness, he does not need to base his story on historical reality,
his reality is powerful enough in itself; it ensnares us, weaving its
web around us, and that suffices him. And this "real" world into
which we are lured, exists for itself, contains nothing but itself; the
Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no
secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed, as we have tried to
do here, but he cannot be interpreted. Later allegorizing trends have
tried their arts of interpretation upon him, but to no avail. He
resists any such treatment; the interpretations are forced and
strange, they do not crystallize into a single teaching. The general
considerations which occasionally occur (in our episode, for ex–
ample, verse 360: that in misfortune men age quickly) reveal a
calm acceptance of the basic facts of human existence, but with no
compulsion to brood over them, still less any passionate impulse either
to rebel or to embrace them in an ecstasy of submission.
It is all very different in the biblical stories. Their aim is not
to bewitch the senses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory
effects, it is only because the moral, religious, and psychological
phenomena which are their sole concern are made concrete in the
sensible matter of life. But their concern with religion involves an
absolute claim to historical truth. The story of Abraham and Isaac
is not better established than the story of Ulysses, Penelope, and
Eurycleia; both are legendary. But the biblical narrator, the Elohist,
had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham's sac–
rifice-the existence of the sacred categories of life rested upon the
truth of this and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately
-or else (as many rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps
still believe,) he had to be a conscious liar-no harmless liar like
Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but a political liar with a definite
end in view, lying in the interests of a claim to power.
