something old, something new

Lying in bed last night I picked up Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) and flipped it open to the chapter on Rabelais. Erich Auerbach wrote in Mimesis that the revolutionary thing about Rabelais' way of thinking "is not his opposition to Christianity, but the freedom of vision, feeling and thought which his perpetual playing with things produces, and which invites the reader to deal directly with the world and its wealth of phenomena. On one point, to be sure, Rabelais takes a stand, and it is a stand which is basically anti-Christian; for him, the man who follows his nature is good, and natural life, be it of men or things, is good."

“Wow.” I thought, “Rabelais is the first post modern thinker.” On that thought, J. came in and turned off the light and we settled into slumber, but not before I decided that I had once again discovered an instance where past and future have overlapped, knowledge that was once common, had been lost, and I had rediscovered it (Or at least Auerbach had). Postmodernism did not start in the 1950’s. It started in the 1500’s.

I have a secret penchant for discovering knowledge that was forgotten and then rediscovered. The Archimedes Palimpsest showed how Archimedes was able to solve problems that would now be treated by integral calculus, which was formally invented in the seventeenth century by Newton and Leibniz, working independently, and solved a problem in his “Method” that is the calculation of the volume of a cylindrical wedge, that reappears in the 1600’s as theorem XVII (schema XIX) of Kepler's Stereometria. One of my favorites is this website dedicated to unraveling the secret of Egyptian pyramid construction and demonstrates how Archimedes' lever is employed to move 20 ton blocks with ease.

Alas, when I woke this morning it occurred to me that while Rabelais may be the great grand father of Postmodernism in the same way that Hieronymus Bosch is the Great Grand daddy of surrealism, by the time Auerbach was writing in the 1950’s there was already a dominance of formalist trends in western culture. Signs of what we call Postmodernism were already floating about in the ether that fills the halls of academia. Auerbach sees in Rabelais, (and Abraham and three thousand years of literature) a kind of realism, in part, because that is what he was trained to see. Which isn’t to say that his Masterpiece Mimesis isn’t an amazing contribution to critical thought, rather it is one that reshapes our vision of the past, and brings it up to date and launches it into the future…

There is definitely a part two to this post, I just can think what it is right now. Perhaps a cup of coffee and a shower are all I need and I can look at this renewed and refreshed. Perhaps then I can look at how, Duchamp revisits Alchemy and Picasso revisits African masks and how so much of what we think of as new knowledge is really just old knowledge recast in a new light. Or maybe i just said it? Who knows. Now, off to that coffee maker.