| Reader of the scar, Euryclea recognises its bearer through its uniqueness: not because of Odysseus’s nobility or essential selfhood, but because of the trace of something which happened to him a long time ago (and needn’t have). Readers of the Odyssey too will recognise the well-prepared and touching scene—of recognition—in book 19. We are not reading for general theories of mimesis or representation or reality, about which there has not yet been a word after that title. Like Euryclea, we are reading something quite specific, unique. This has nothing to do with mystifying ideas about the specialness of literature, everything to do with the traces of a history, the Odyssey’s peregrinations across "Western literature" rather than Odysseus’s across the Aegean: those marks of a history which render the text both so immediately recognisable and unreadable. Reading from Istanbul. |
