An Anatomy of Interpretation

ion by which they are constituted. The emergence of the work of art as a commodity, and the appearance of a distinct category of producers of symbolic goods specifically destined for the market, to some extent prepared the ground for a pure theory of art, that is, of art as art” (Bourdieu 1985: 16). 83. Regarding the role of the artist, William Blake, in his annotations of 1808 to the first volume of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses, writes: “The Foundation of Empire is Art & Science. Remove them or Degrade them, & the Empire is No More. Empire follows Art & Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose” (Blake 1972: 445). Reynolds writes in his dedication “To the King”: “To give advice to those who are contending for royal liberality, has been for some years the duty of my station in the Academy.” Blake comments: “Liberality! we want not Liberality. We want a Fair Price & Proportionate Value & a General Demand for Art” (446). 84. “Disciplinary power has as its correlative an individuality that is not only analytical and ‘cellular,’ but also natural and ‘organic’” (Foucault 1979: 156). 85. The study “Epic and Novel” (1981) by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) could also be fruitfully compared to the studies by Auerbach and Lukács. In regard to the terms in the title, Bakhtin makes two changes: he generalizes their content, making them mean not just the respective genres to which they normally refer but fundamental modes of writing; and he, like Auerbach, makes them potentially co-exist and compete for influence and power. For him, the epic stands for all canonical literature. It depicts a monochronic, idealized past—a closed, finished, complete, final, self-contained world. It is addressed to the future memory of a nation, trying to control its past through selective recollection. As for the novel, it stands for what is always fluid in the history of genres—for the cyclical project of renewal and modernity, the constant becoming of literature which anticipates and opens the future. It is the defamiliarization of the commonplace, the transgression of the normative, the violation of the rules, the parody of the canon. It enunciates the perennial novelistic spirit of all literature by expressing the present, the real, the raw, the lower, the transitory, the free. The modernity of the novel, which counters orthodoxy, is always relevant because it is irreverent. In this reading, Lukács’ conception of the novel as the epic of the sinful age is revised. But while in Mimesis the novel prefigures a final synthesis, that of the assimilation of Christianity back into its biblical roots, in Bakhtin it is privileged because it disturbs every synthesis and opposes solidification. For him, the novel has nothing to do with the Fall (Lukács) or Redemption (Auerbach). It is the spontaneous, explosive violation of systems and transgression of codes. In this respect, Bakhtin’s generalization seems the more generous and promising: it insists on the importance of the festival after the decline of the religious ritual. But even for him, the demonological dimension of the argument (namely, the construction of a Hellenic negative) is unavoidable and dominates the essay: even in a world where people can apparently celebrate without gods and rules, the face and the name of evil, in order to be effectively exorcized, had to be classical. (There is no need to emphasize the remarkable point of agreement NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 353 among the three theorists: their faith and trust in “reality.” They all believe in a world out there which is true, natural, present, accessible, and reflected in verbal art. Their common assumption is that representation is a basic way of human understanding, and literature its best medium.) 86. “The opening volumes of George Grote’s History of Greece (1846) set the Homeric question and its implicit relationship to the Bible before the British reading public and permanently associated the issues with rationalist, radical, and utilitarian thought” (Turner 1981: 142). 87. This last parallel should also be made chronologically: it was roughly at the time when the first “real” Greeks were seeking ways to escape the millet system that the first “real” Jews looked for means of freeing themselves from the bondage of the