Only halfway through Mimesis (and well over the 80% of the way between Homer and Woolf), do we get something like the modern subject of introspection emerging: Montaigne's "ceaseless listening to the changing voices that sound within him" (291).
| Auerbach has previously given examples of what we could take as intimate, introspective, personal writing, but none of them look quite like this. Look at the passage he takes from Augustine's Confessions, for example, on Alypius's bloodlust at the gladiatorial shows (66 ff). Just as various secular ethics of the time suggest, Alypius is convinced he can resist the spell of the crowd through his own temperance and selfcontrol, but he finds himself swept away despite himself. | Alypius might close his eyes, but he cannot close his ears to the coil of noise which arises from the arena. Opening his eyes, he "was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to see, was in his body; and he fell more miserably than he on whose fall that mighty clamour was raised, which entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of his soul ..." (68). There is only one person in the entire amphitheatre, a defeated gladiator multiplied a thousandfold. |
All of this, of course, will be a prelude to Alypius's conversion, but this conversion will neither prevent him from being swept away, nor help him preserve that core of selfcontrol and moderation. On the contrary, conversion itself sweeps away, empties the self: "And from all this didst Thou ... pluck him, and taught him not to repose confidence in himself, but in Thee" (68). If confession seems an intimately personal mode, for Augustine it is not an assertion or exploration of subjectivity, but a voiding of it, a sort of spiritual vomiting. And conversely, the singular focus of Montaigne's writing is on precisely what Augustine insists needs to be put to one side, purged from the soul.
ce sont icy ... des excremens d'un vieil esprit, dur tantost, tantoste lasche, et toujours indigeste (291) |
