Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature

Book excerpt: Anagnorisis has been called ‘one of the great works of comparative literary criticism of our time’. It is a book that spans the millennia, the adventures of Ulysses in Homer and God’s mysterious appearance to Abraham in Genesis, down not only to Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, but also to Dumas’ Count of Montecristo, Borges’s ‘The Immortal’, and Walcott's Omeros. ‘Anagnorisis’ means ‘recognition’. Aristotle defined it simply as ‘the passage from ignorance to knowledge’. But the knowledge one gains in anagnorisis is neither scientific nor abstract – it is living knowledge in the flesh, as Euripides’ Helen understood when, seeing her husband again after many years, she exclaimed: ‘to recognize those we love is a god.