Mimesis (Oral)

In Havelock’s reading of Plato’s attack on the poets, mimesis names not imitation in the pictorial sense but the psychological condition of the oral performance: the listener identifies with the performed character, is absorbed into the story, and re-inhabits the tribal material as his own. “The task of education could be described as putting the whole community into a formulaic state of mind” (Havelock 1963, Ch. 7).

This state is the educational mechanism of the oral culture. The youth memorizes by performance, repeats what he has heard at mess table and banquet, and matches his memory against his elders. The self is not standing apart from the material; the self is the material. “The whole community from minstrel and prince down to the peasant was attuned to the psychology of remembrance” (Havelock 1963).

Plato’s objection in Republic III and X is that such a mind cannot know itself. The psyche that is coextensive with its content cannot examine its content. The banishment of the poets clears the ground for a different psyche — one in which “thinking” is “a function (arete) of the psyche supreme above all others” (Havelock 1963, Ch. 11, on Republic VII).

For the Lineage, oral mimesis names the pre-condition out of which philosophical and, much later, Jungian consciousness emerges. It is the classical parallel to what erich-neumann calls the uroboric containment and what carl-jung calls participation mystique.

Relationships

• oral-literate-transition
• homeric-plural-self
• porous-self
• tribal-encyclopedia

Primary sources

• havelock-preface-plato (Havelock 1963)