Erich Auerbach

Only real scene building takes the reader back to that specific afternoon 22 years ago.

So as you engineer the timelines of your own stories, I want to leave you with Eric Auerbach's provocative theory to consider.

Does your flashback interrupt the present exactly when the reader's attention is most intensely captive? Because a perfectly engineered entry and exit door means you can halt the absolute most suspenseful moment of your story, pull the reader decades into the past, and they will follow you every single step of the way.

In the language of the Sfat Emet, Abraham is a mehalech, a person whose life is not merely a journey through the world, but a continual journey of becoming.

It was a great literary critic, Eric Auerbach, who in his celebrated comparison of Homer and the Hebrew Bible, cast a spotlight on the fundamental distinction between Greek and biblical storytelling.

Agamemnon, Achilles, for all their travels and tragedies and triumphs, remain essentially the people they were, Even Odysseus returning home to Ithaca after 20 years of wandering is arguably the same man as the one who set out two decades earlier.

Not so Abraham.

or their lack of speech, right? There are these...

Erich Auerbach made a lot of hay out of the lack of speech in biblical narrative.

And I have a sort of different take on it, but one of the more... interesting or playful moments of silence in biblical speech is in the story of Jonah, where God speaks to the fish, and we don't know what God said to the fish.

But it feels like a really important point there, right? Because immediately after, first of all, God only has a direct relationship, speaking relationship with two characters in that story, Jonah and the fish, right? Right? So, hierarchically, I would say, like, well, actually, like, Jonah and the fish are kind of on equal footing here.

And of course, he failed.

I think it was Eric Auerbach who said that this moment as described in the confessions was a seminal moment.

It was like the death of stoicism, I guess, the death of the Greek conception of self-mastery.

That required a different view, the Augustinian view of self-mastery.

I'm not trying to put down that person in the conference at all, because I had done the same thing for decades.

And when I looked at what he said, he said, if you don't believe me, read Auerbach, meaning Eric Auerbach's famous book Mimesis on the representation of the real.

And I had known Auerbach, I had read a little bit of Auerbach, but I actually read Auerbach in conversation with Lewis's argument here and determined that Auerbach actually said the opposite of what Lewis said.

That vivid, realistic details don't have any bearing at all on the historical truth.

And then, of course...

These are semi-nomadic herders moving with their flocks between the edges of settled towns, digging wells, negotiating with local rulers, and burying their dead in caves.

Now to the critical questions, because they're live, and you deserve the honest state of play.

For much of the 20th century, scholars like William F. Albright argued that the customs in these stories fitted the second millennium remarkably well.

Tablets dug up at places like Nuzi and Mari in modern Iraq and Syria seem to show the same practices a barren wife giving her servant to her husband to bear an heir, adoption arrangements, household gods carried as title deeds.

Eurycleia regains her composure, conceals what she knows, and the final drama of Odysseus' return begins to unfold.

Unto itself, the scene is a small one, made famous by Erich Auerbach in his book Mimesis, where he uses it as a point of departure for comparing Homeric and Biblical narrative, a subject to which we will return.

On a larger scale, the scene encapsulates one of the most fundamental themes of Homer's epic poem, homecoming, in Greek, nostos, meaning return, the moment when after a long voyage or even an exile, a person returns to the place from which they s- set sail.

Homecoming is one of the most enduring and engaging storylines we know.