The Scars and the Tale, the Wounds, and the Drama

Abstract

Starting from the famous chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis on the scar of Ulysses, this chapter analyses the forms in which, in the ancient Greek, wounds and scars play the role of structures of meaning, beyond literary topoi. The hero is injured, the wound becomes a scar, and the aoidos can go back to the story that generated the wound itself. In this sense, the scar is analeptic, while the wound is proleptic. Instead, the open wound screams, cries out for individual pain, and symbolises dramatic political and moral conflicts. Some important questions will be explored: how are memory and remembering articulated with each other in epic narrative? How does Homeric poetry thematise the gap between experience and the memory (or rather the memories) of experience? What is the relationship between anonymity, recognition and recollection in the Odyssey’s narrative structure and in Odysseus’ own storytelling?