Passion of Henry James Book Review by Daniel Mendelsohn

A stranger arrives in an unknown city after a long voyage. He has been separated from his family unit for some time; somewhere there is a married woman, perhaps a kid. The journeying has been a troubled ane, and the stranger is tired. . . He moves with difficulty, his shoulders hunched by the weight of the numberless he is carrying. Their contents are everything he owns, at present. He has had to pack apace. What practise they comprise? Why has he come?

So begins Daniel Mendelsohn's new book Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (University of Virginia Press, 2020). Mendelsohn, a classics scholar and humanities professor, is a natural story-teller and he has managed to turn a multi-century saga of literary criticism and history into an immensely entertaining, readable, and curt(!) book. 3 Rings originated every bit the Page-Barbour Lectures, which Mendelsohn delivered at the University of Virginia in 2019, and if but more literary criticism (and scholarship, in general) were delivered this way, it would have a much greater audience and impact.

There are actually 3 "strangers" or "rings" in Mendelsohn's book, as we shall encounter, but his story begins with Odysseus.

In Book 19 of Homer's Odyssey , the hero Odysseus has finally returned to Ithaca. Disguised, he has entered his own abode, determined to murder his wife'south suitors and announce himself to her after many years of wandering. An old adult female from the household offers him the traditional welcome of washing his feet and she recognizes a scar on his thigh. Information technology should be a moment of keen suspense and excitement—the great Odysseus is abode at terminal! But instead, Homer begins a long digression into the past. Equally Mendelsohn puts it, Homer does the unexpected. He delays. Then he delays some more.

At this suspenseful moment the poet chooses not to proceed to an emotional scene of reunion betwixt the old woman and her long-lost principal. Instead, Homer brings the narrative of that come across to a halt as he begins to circle dorsum into the past: of how Odysseus got his scar in the get-go place. . . Merely this ring turns out to require another, since (the author of the Odyssey assumes) we must sympathise why Odysseus happened to be visiting his grandfather [at whose firm he received the wound] in the commencement place. So the poet traces a 2nd circle, spiraling even further back into fourth dimension.

Eventually, Homer works his fashion back to the moment when the old woman recognizes Odysseus's scar and the narrative proceeds again. These digressions into the past are band compositions, a technique in which the narrative appears to devious abroad from its obvious management only to eventually return to the point where it originally left off. "The material encompassed by such rings could be a unmarried self-independent digression or a more than elaborate series of interlocked narratives, each nested within another in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls."

Mendelsohn says that he got the idea for this book during the writing of his previous book An Odyssey: A Begetter, A Son, and An Epic , when he was thinking about Eric Auerbach (1892-1957), a German Jewish scholar who left Federal republic of germany in 1935 to live in Istanbul for more a decade. It was there that Auerbach wrote his masterpiece Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature , which was first published in 1946 and remains in print today. (I nonetheless take the copy I studied in college l years ago.) Mendelsohn started to wonder about "the connections betwixt political exile and narrative digression" in connection with Auerbach, and so Auerbach becomes the start of the three "rings" in his book.

In Auerbach's "epic journey through the literature of the W" there are "two cultural pillars" or styles into which all of literature could be divided: the Homeric or Greek technique, in which everything tin can be known and there exists, through the gods, a supernatural connection between all things; or the Hebrew style, which acknowledges that information technology is impossible to know everything and that the world is subject to interpretation. Mimesis , in function, tracks the ??? of these two styles throughout literary history.

Mendelsohn's second "ring" is the story of François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénélon (1651-1715), a Cosmic archbishop and writer, whose 1699 book The Adventures of Telemachus he calls "a fan-fiction sequel to the Odyssey ." Fénélon's Adventures were originally constructed as "ethically instructive tales based on Homer's Odyssey " that he used to teach the son of the Duke of Burgundy (and eventual heir to France's Louis XIV), but which evolved into a fantastically convoluted series of digressions loosely based on Homer'southward exploits.  Unfortunately for Fénélon, his "fantasia on Homeric themes" contained a number of lectures on good kingship, which Louis Fourteen took as an insulting critique of his own rule, and he banished the archbishop to an obscure post in far northern French republic.

Even so, the Adventures became hugely popular and Mendelsohn speculates that information technology might have been the well-nigh widely read book in Europe throughout the eighteenth century until Goethe'due south The Sorrows of Young Werther came along in 1774. Not simply that, but the Adventures was and so widely received in the nineteenth century that it was translated into "Turkish, Tatar, Bulgarian, Romanian, Armenian, Albanian, Georgian, Kurdish, and Arabic, amongst many other languages." In the twentieth century, Fénélon deeply influenced Marcel Proust'south In Search of Lost Time , a novel which suggests to Mendelsohn "that a vast series of digressions could themselves form the largest imaginable ring, one that embraces all of human being experience."

Mendelsohn's third "ring" is Due west.G. Sebald. "The circles in Sebald's restless narration lead us to a serial of locked doors to which there is no fundamental." For Mendelsohn, Sebald is the apotheosis of Auerbach's preference for the Hebrew approach over the Greek, for the style that "refuses to reveal" over the 1 that is "all-illuminating."

Auerbach'south distrust of the Greek technique raises a larger question well-nigh the problems of representation in literature, well-nigh the means by which writers make their subjects seem "realistic." Naturally this question has plagued all kinds of artists equally they have struggled with difficult subjects, ane of the greatest and almost difficult of these being, in our own time, the issue that landed Auerbach in Istanbul: the High german plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe during World War 2. The difficulty of representation posed by this unimaginably subversive vent was almost famously, if controversially, expressed in the often-quoted dictum of Auerbach's boyfriend German refugee Theodore Adorno: "nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht ze schreiben, ist barbarisch," "to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric."

In this section, Mendelsohn traces his personal attachment to each of Sebald'due south 4 cardinal books of prose fiction, but focuses on The Rings of Saturn as "the almost emblematic of this author'southward foreign style." "The narrative rings, circles, digressions, and wanderings. . . we find in Sebald seem designed to confuse, entangling his characters in meanderings from which they cannot extricate themselves and which have no articulate destinations." While Homer'southward rings somewhen lead dorsum to where they left off and to a new beginning, for Sebald "the twisting history of the world is written by the hiders."

Three Rings is a volume you must read for yourself, to witness Mendelsohn as he unravels and lays bare the connections between Homer, Auerbach, Fénélon, Sebald, and others. In a style, it's ironic that Mendelsohn relates and so intimately with those who believe in the "irretrievability of the past," because for him the stories of the by are vital to understanding the present. What he transmits so magically in Iii Rings is his infectious passion for learning and sharing with others.

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Source: https://sebald.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/three-rings/

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