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University of Oregon
Auerbach in ExileAuthor(s): David DamroschReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring, 1995), pp. 97-117Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
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SPRING 1995
Volume
47,
Number
2
DAVID
DAMROSCH
uerbach
n
x i l e
FEW WORKS
of
modern
literary
criticism
have
been
so
widely
admired
as Erich
Auerbach's
masterwork
Mimesis,
and
yet
Auerbach has found
surprisingly
few followers.
Though
Mimesis
is
one of a handful of
works
that
defined
comparative
literature
in
the
postwar
era,
the scholars
who
continue to cite and to
study
the
book
show
little interest
in
doing
anything
of the
kind
themselves.
The book lives on, in effect, only in fragments; while people will
dispute
or refine
an
argument
in one or
another
of Auerbach's
chapters,
the book as a
whole
has not
inspired
further
work
of
comparable
range
or
synoptic
ambition.
The
case of Mimesis
is
part
of a more
general
question:
why
have
the students
of such
generalists
as
Auerbach,
Ernst Robert
Curtius,
and Leo
Spitzer
confined
themselves
to far
narrower
fields of
study?
Auerbach's
exile in
Istanbul
seems,
in
retrospect,
to
have
been
neither so
pro-
longed
nor so
complete
as
his
book's
later exile here
in
America.
Why is this so?
We
may
observe
that,
as
early
as the
publication
of
Frye's
Anatomy of
Criticism
n
1957,
theory began
to
eclipse literary history
as
the
ground
of
broad,
generalizing
work.
Yet
the
question
re-
mains
why
this shift occurred to
begin
with.
One
might go
further
and
say
that
even
at
the
time Auerbach
was
writing
Mimesis,
the era
of the
philological
method
had
ended,
and no
new
generation
was
being
trained
to do his
kind
of
work even
if
they
wanted
to. This
is
Edward Said's
view,
for
example,
in a recent
article
on
the
state of
literary studies. Even as he argues that "the tiresome wheel-spin-
ning
and elaboration"
of much
literary
theory
have
gotten
out of
hand
by
now,
he
adds
a
caveat:
This is
not to
say
that
we
should
return
to
traditional
philological
and
scholarly
approaches
to
literature.
No one is
really
educated to do
that
honestly
anymore,
for
if
you
use Erich
Auerbach and Leo
Spitzer
as
your
models
you
had
better be
familiar
with
eight
or
nine
languages
and most of the
literatures
written
in
them,
as
well
as
archival, editorial, semantic,
and
stylistic
skills that
disappeared
in
Eu-
rope
at
least two
generations ago.
("News
of
the World"
14)
97
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
Auerbach
and
Spitzer
themselves
felt uncertain as to
whether
their
methods could be
transplanted
to this
country,
a
concern
Spitzer directly expressed
as
early
as
1951
in
his
uncomfortable
article
"The
Formation of an American
Humanist." Yet
there
are
still
many
fields,
from
Classics
to Indic
studies,
where no one
thinks
it remarkable
for scholars to be
expected
to
master half a
dozen or more
languages,
and
in
which
philological
method re-
tains
a
broad
prestige.
The real
question
is
why
students
of
Euro-
pean literature no longer feel it important to retain these skills.
Equally, many
scholars do
still
practice
"traditional
scholarly
ap-
proaches
to literature"
-
but almost
always
in
relatively narrowly
defined
fields and
periods,
without
the
grand
historical
sweep
of
an
Auerbach,
a
Curtius,
or indeed a
Northrop
Frye. Why
do
people
no
longer
feel that
a clear
view
of the
whole
is a
necessary
basis
for
the
study
of
individual
moments
in
the
history
of Euro-
pean
literature?
Of
course,
in
order
to
consider a view
of the
whole as
necessary,
we would first of all need to feel that it is possible. Can one ad-
equately
survey
the
long
history
of
Western
European
literature
(not
to
range
more
widely
still)
without
one's
own
parochial
con-
cerns
and
competencies
distorting
the
picture
to
an
unacceptable
degree?
From
the
first,
even
Auerbach's admirers had
an
uneasy
sense
that
what
he
was
attempting,
however
brilliantly
and
movingly presented,
was
inherently impossible. My
argument
here
will
be that Auerbach
shared
his
readers'
uncertainty
to a
surpris-
ing
degree;
Mimesis itself
is
deeply
divided
as to the
nature
and
even the viability of its own project. The tensions within
Auerbach's work
may
have
strengthened
his
early
readers' inclina-
tion to focus
on more circumscribed
bodies of
material,
yet
his
students did not
resolve
those
tensions but
merely displaced
them
when
they
turned to
specialized
work
and
to
literary
theory.
Auerbach's
problems
are
very
much
with
us to
this
day,
and
exam-
ining
them
can
have
more than
historical interest.
Like much
current
work,
Mimesis is
caught
in
a double bind be-
tween
scholarly
objectivity
and
personal
commitment,
fidelity
to
history versus the shaping force of the scholar's own moment.
Auerbach both
reveals
and
represses
his
own
present reality
as
he
investigates
"the
representation
of
reality
in
Western
literature."
He set
himself,
in
fact,
an
impossible
task: to become an
objective
relativist,
faithful to
his
texts
on their
own
terms
while
also ac-
knowledging
his
own
role as observer
and
interpreter,
a role
placed
under
particular
stress
by
the
exigencies
of
the Second
98
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AUERBACH
World War.
Watching
Auerbach's
efforts
to
negotiate
these treach-
erous
waters
can
give
us a
vantage point
to assess our
own
efforts,
rarely
more
successful than
Auerbach's,
to do
justice
both to the
traditions
we
have received
and to the needs of
our
contemporary
cultural moment.
Begun
in
exile
in
1942
and
completed
in
April
1945
(the
very
month of Hitler's
death),
Mimesis
stands as an affirmation
of
the
scholar's
ability
to rise
above
every
obstacle that
adverse
historical
circumstances can present. Or, to put it differently: Auerbach re-
sponds
to the loss of his
homeland and the
collapse
of his
scholarly
world
through
the
recreation of
European
culture,
both
in
the
evocation
of texts
from across the tradition and
by
the
display
of
humanistic
scholarship
at its
best,
with
analyses
at once
judicious
and
loving, objective
and
deeply personal.
As
Said's
long,
ambiva-
lent interest
in
Auerbach
attests,
the
book's
power
was
by
no
means limited to the
early
postwar
years.
Over
the
years,
Mimesis
has seemed to
many
to be the essence
and
the culmination
of
liter-
ary analysis, literary history, and comparative literature, all rolled
into one.
More than that:
Mimesis
is
an entire
world.
Auerbach's readers
were drawn into this
world first and foremost
by
his
voice,
so often
labelled
"magisterial,"
yet
curiously
intimate
as
well,
with
its
strangely intoxicating
blend of ironic
detachment
and
moral ur-
gency.
Then
too,
to
read
Mimesis
is to
live
in
its
world
for
a
long
while,
and this
world,
like
Proust's,
is
a
true modernist heter-
ocosm:
not an alien
world,
but our
own
world
made
new.
Our
world, in fact, both lost and found at once: the loss symbolized by
the
cataclysm
of the
Second
World War
and
Auerbach's own
exile
during
it,
often
hinted at
in
the
body
of the book and
movingly
brought
forward
in
the
epilogue,
almost
as an aside
-
"I
may
men-
tion that the book
was written
during
the
war
and
at
Istanbul";
and
at
the
same time
a
recovery
of that lost
world,
a
recovery
staged
precisely through
reading.
Auerbach indicates as much in
his
clos-
ing
lines:
"Nothing
now remains but to find
him
-
to
find the
reader,
that is.
I
hope
that
my study
will reach its readers
-
both
my friends of former years, if they are still alive, as well as all others
for
whom
it
was intended. And
may
it contribute to
bringing
to-
gether
again
those
whose
love
for
our
western
history
has
serenely
persevered"
(557).
Like
Joyce,
Auerbach
filters this recreation of a
library,
a
com-
munity,
and
a
history
through
an
interpretation
of
the
figure
of
Odysseus.
In a
reversal
suggesting
an inverse relation
of scholar-
99
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
ship
to
literature,
he
presents
this return not
at the end
but
in
the
very
first words of his book: "Readers of the
Odyssey
will
remember
the
well-prepared
and
touching
scene
in
book
19,
when
Odysseus
has at last come
home,
the
scene
in
which
the
old
housekeeper
Euryclea,
who had
been his
nurse,
recognizes
him
by
a scar on his
thigh"
(3).
The
great
modernist themes are
here,
in
these
opening
words:
reading,
memory,
the intimate
linkage
of
form to
emotion
(well-prepared
and
touching),
the cautious
homecoming
from a
long exile (a nostos without nostalgia), the crucial value of recogni-
tion,
and the
crystallization
of all
these themes
in
the
reading
of
history
in
the
message
of
the
body,
as
figured
in the
scar on the
hero's
thigh.
Auerbach's
focus,
however,
immediately
shifts
away
from
Odysseus
to his
wife
Penelope
and
his
nurse
Euryclea,
and
in
this
we
may
sense
as
much
of
Woolf
as of Proust and
Joyce.
Auerbach
subtly
invites
us to see
ourselves
reflected more in
the
women
than
in
Odysseus:
it
is
they
who
observe, react,
respond,
they
who
tend
Odysseus, they who have nurtured him, and the memory of him,
all
along.
Odysseus
may
be the author
of the
scene of his
home-
coming,
but the
women
are its
interpreters,
an
audience
who also
must take
part
in
the action.
They
must
do so
with
understanding,
sympathy,
and
tact,
if
the hero
is to be restored
to his home.
Like
memory
itself
-
her
self,
in
Greek
thought
-
Euryclea
and
Penelope
are the muses
of
Odysseus's
story.
On
Auerbach's first
page
(to
adopt
an
appropriately
stylistic
analysis), Odysseus
is the
subject
of
five active
verbs;
Euryclea
and
Penelope
are
the
subjects
of fourteen. Woolf, who privileges the feminine eye and mind in
this
way,
is the
subject
of
Auerbach's
final
chapter,
in
which
Joyce
and Proust make brief
appearances
as
well.
As Bruce
Robbins has
noted,
Auerbach
often focuses
on
servants;
his
emphasis
here on
Euryclea
as
she
tends
Odysseus
inaugurates
a
frame that
will
close
with
his
long
quotation
from To
the
Lighthouse,
in
which
Mrs.
Ramsay
talks
with
her
son,
measuring
her
knitting against
his
leg
even
as
the maternal
figure
of
Odysseus's
nurse
takes
the measure
of the
scar on his
thigh
as
she
bathes him.
Long
before we can
begin
to perceive the beauties of
Auerbach's narrative
structures,
we
are
already
seduced
by
his
style,
itself
both
his central
subject
and the
ground
of
being
of his
own
presentation.
Auerbach's
characterization of
Homeric
style
could
apply
to
his
own
writing
as
well:
The
separate
elements of a
phenomenon
are most
clearly
placed
in
relation
to
one
another;
a
large
number of
conjunctions,
adverbs,
particles,
and other
syntac-
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
bilitate
Western
culture,
and
particularly
Judeo-Christian
culture,
from the nationalistic
Aryanism
of the
Nazis. Thus
the
apparently
neutral
juxtaposition
of Genesis
and
the
Odyssey
serves
as a
power-
ful,
and
polemical,
counter
to
anti-Semitic
dismissals
ofJewish
cul-
ture,
with
Jewish
psychological complexity
and
historical con-
sciousness
complementing-or
even
trumping-Winckelmannian
Greek
clarity
and
harmony.
There
is
evidence
in
Mimesis
to
support
Green's
thesis,
but
there
is little in the book that supports it openly. Any direct cultural po-
lemic
in
the book
occurred
not
by
Auerbach's
wish
but
despite
his
own
intentions.
The
contrast
both
with
Spitzer
and
with
Curtius
is
notable.
The
prefaces
and
opening
chapters
to
their
major
works
of the 1930s
and
1940s locate their
work within
their
own
careers
and
their
own
times,
emphasizing
their anti-Nazi
intent.
Curtius
first attacked
the Nazi cultural
program
in
a
remarkable
polemic,
Deutscher Geist
in
Gefahr,
which
he
published
in
1932,
on
the
eve
of
Hitler's accession to
power.
His
preface
to
European
Literature
and
the Latin Middle Ages (1948) also stresses that his book "is not the
product
of
purely
scholarly
interests,
that it
grew
out of a concern
for
the
preservation
of
Western
culture"
(viii).
It is also
notable
that he
made a
point
of
publishing
a
version
of
this
preface
in
1945,
as a sort of call
to
postwar
cultural
reconstruction,
three
years
before
the
actual
publication
of
the book.
Spitzer
prefers
to rise
above
political
disputes
as
such,
but
he
does so in
such a
way
as to
emphasize
both
individual freedom and
cultural
commonality.
Thus,
his
Essays
in
Historical
Semantics,
pub-
lished in the United States in 1948, consists of six essays, three
written
in
English
and three
written
in German.
He
leaves
the Ger-
man
essays
untranslated
-
in
order,
he tells
us in
his
preface,
"to
attract scholars
in
German
and
English
toward
that common stock
of
European
semantics that informs our
vocabulary;
in
this
volume
all
nations will
appear
as
equal
citizens
of
'quella
Roma
onde
Cristo
&
Romano"'
(13-14).
As
important
as
commonality
for
Spitzer
is
personal
liberty, typified by
his
remarkable
suggestion
in
"Linguistics
and
Literary History"
that his
autobiographical essay
is his "MeinKampf as it were - without dictatorial connotations,
of
course"
(1).
This
is
a
bold
gesture
indeed:
Spitzer's
sovereign
scholarly
liberty
will
be such that Hitler
will
be
unable to
deny
him
even the
use of his
own
autobiography
-
stripped
of its "dictato-
rial
connotations,"
no
less.
Auerbach's
approach
is
very
different. He takes us
without
any
preface directly
into
his discussion of Homer.
Contemporary
his-
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AUERBACH
tory
figures
only
in
passing,
as
providing
illuminating
contrasts to
issues
in
the
works
under
discussion rather than as the
overriding
context and
shaping
force that
Green
believes
them to be.
In his
Epilogue,
Auerbach
speaks
of
the
evolution
of his
subject
almost
entirely
as
an
intellectual
problem
of
shaping
and
of
presentation;
even
his
mentioning
of
the
war serves
only
(or
"only")
to
explain
why
he lacked
adequate
library
facilities.
Just
how, then,
does the
war
enter into his book?
I
would
like to
draw
attention to three basic
ways
in
which Auerbach reflects his
times:
through
explicit
analogies;
through implicit guiding
of se-
lections;
and
through
an
often unconscious
shaping
-
and
even
distortion
-
of his
interpretations.
This third sort of
case
is
the
really problematic
one,
but Auerbach's direct
analogies,
and his
ambiguous
comments on his
principles
of
selection,
already
show
the
delicacy
of
the
problems
involved.
On the
level
of
direct refer-
ence,
Auerbach
allows
his moral
passion
and
his
contemporary
concern to
appear
in the
form of
analogies,
particularly analogies
that clarify the difference between past ages and the present. To
give
one
example:
Whenever
a
specific
form
of life or a
social
group
has run
its
course,
or has
only
lost
favor
and
support,
every
injustice
which
the
propagandists perpetrate
against
it
is half
consciously
felt to be
what
it
actually
is,
yet people
welcome
it
with
sadistic
delight.
Gottfried Keller describes this
psychological
situation
very finely
in
one of
the
novellas
of his
Seldwyla
cycle,
the
story
of lost
laughter,
in
which
a
campaign
of
defamation is
discussed.
It is
true,
the
things
he
describes
compare
with what we
have
seen in our time as
a
slight
turbidity
in
the clear
water
of
a brook
would
compare
with
an ocean of filth and blood
...
Keller
was
fortunate
in
that he could
not
imagine
an
important change
of
government
which would
not entail
an
ex-
pansion
of freedom.
We have
been
shown
otherwise.
(404)
As
explicit
as Auerbach is
prepared
to be
in
such
contrasts,
he
usually
refrains from
any
direct comment when the
analogy
would
strike
closer to home.
In
his
chapter
on
Shakespeare,
for
example,
he
opens
with
a
passage
from
Henry
IV,
Part
1,
discussing
the
every-
day
realism
that
shows
through despite Shakespeare's persisting
attachment to noble
figures
as
his
protagonists.
He then
abruptly
devotes
a
page
and
a half
to
Shylock,
whom
he
describes as
"a bor-
derline
case": "To be
sure,
in
terms
of his
class,
he is not
a
com-
mon or
everyday
figure;
he is a
pariah;
but
his
class
is
low.
The
slight
action of the Merchant
of
Venice,
with
its
fairy-tale
motifs,
is
almost
too
heavily
burdened
by
the
weight
and
problematic
impli-
cations
of his
character"
(314).
Far
from
drawing
any
direct
com-
parison
to
contemporary
treatments of
Jews,
Auerbach doesn't
even
mention that
Shylock
is
aJew
until the tail end of
the
discus-
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
sion,
and
then
only
to contrast
Shylock
to
Marlowe's
Jew
of Malta.
In
his
discussion,
"race"
(as
the Nazis would
have
described
Jewish
identity)
is recoded
in
terms of class and
personal
character.
This
treatment
of
Shylock
can
be
seen either
as a
retreat
from
the
problem
-
a
virtual
denial that
Shylock
is
a
Jew
at
all
-
or
as
an
implicit
defense
of
Shylock
(his
weaknesses
stem
not from his
ethnicity
but
from his
character,
or from
Shakespeare's
inability
to
give
lower-class
figures
true
tragic depth).
In
either
event,
it
is
clear that Auerbach prefers to draw a direct analogy to contempo-
rary society
when
the
situation
differs
sufficiently
from
the
present
that he can maintain a clear distance
between
his
time
and the
events
in
the text.
In the
end,
Auerbach
treats
Shylock's
Judaism
with
something
of the "heedless
Olympian
serenity"
which
he
sees
as
characterizing Shakespeare's
own
treatment
of
Shylock's
tragic
situation
(314).
As
Carl Landauer has
put
it,
Auerbach's discus-
sion
of
Shylock displays
"a strained
objectivity
.
.
.
a sort of
self-
conscious lack
of
self-consciousness"
(95n.).
Auerbach is consistently reluctant to allow his personal con-
cerns to intrude
whenever
they
might
distort
his
view
of the
past
-
even
to
the
point
that
this
distancing may
itself constrain
his dis-
cussion,
as
in
the case
of
his
treatment of
Shylock.
Yet he
was well
aware
that a scholar's
perspective
cannot
simply
be turned on and
off at
will.
His drive
toward
synoptic
completeness
was
fueled
by
his
hope
that
the
totality
of
literary history
could
ultimately
resist,
and
guide,
his
own
relativism.
This
hope
can be seen
in
one
of his
major methodological
statements
of
the
1950s,
"Vico's
Contribu-
tion to Literary Criticism":
Our
historistic
way
of
feeling
and
judging
is
so
deeply
rooted
in
us that
we
have
ceased
to
be
aware
of
it.
We
enjoy
the
art,
the
poetry
and the music of
many
differ-
ent
periods
and
peoples
with
equal preparedness
for
understanding
.
.
.
The
variety
of
periods
and
civilizations
no
longer frightens
us: neither the critics
and
historians
nor an
important,
continually
increasing part
of the
general public
...
Historical
relativism
has a
twofold
aspect:
it
concerns
the
understanding
historian
as
well
as the
phenomena
to be understood.
This is an extreme
relativism;
but
we
should
not fear
it
...
Only
in
the
entirety
of
history
is there
truth,
and
only by
the
understanding
of
its
whole
course
may
one obtain
it.
(33-37)
It is somewhat ironic that later scholars have focused on period-
based
studies
as more "honest"
(to
recall
Said's
phrase)
than
broad
literary history,
which
they
presumably
feel
is
too
likely
to
be
shaped by ungrounded projections
of
the
generalizer's precon-
ceptions.
Auerbach
believed
just
the
reverse:
that
only
the
totality
of the tradition
could
provide
a check
against
the
interpreter's
rage
to
(re)order
the material at hand.
104
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AUERBACH
In
the
Epilogue
to
Mimesis,
Auerbach
both
stresses and
limits
the role of his
personal
concerns
in
the
shaping
of
his
book:
The method of textual
interpretation
gives
the
interpreter
a
certain
leeway.
He
can
choose and
emphasize
as
he
pleases.
It must
naturally
be
possible
to
find
what
he
claims
in
the text.
My
interpretations
are no
doubt
guided
by
a
specific pur-
pose.
Yet
this
purpose
assumed form
only
as I
went
along,
playing
as it
were with
my
texts,
and for
long
stretches
of
my way
I
have been
guided
only by
the
texts
themselves.
Furthermore,
the
great
majority
of the
texts
were
chosen
at
random,
onil
the
basis
of
accidental
acquaintance
and
preference
rather than in
view
of a
definite
purpose. (556)
In
principle,
Auerbach
is
perfectly willing
to
acknowledge
the
shaping
force of his
interests
and
of
his
own
historical
moment,
but
in
practice
he
displays
a
deep
ambivalence
whenever that
shaping
goes beyond
an almost
random selection
of
themes
and
texts and
begins
to affect
the
actual
interpretation
of
the
material.
The
ambiguity
of
Auerbach's
relation to
what we
might
call the
otherness
of
his material
was
not lost
on
his
early
reviewers.
Helmut
Hatzfeld,
for
example,
criticized
Auerbach for
reading
the Chanson de Roland "with the eyes of an enlightened pacifist"
(335).
More
generally,
Rene
Wellek,
in
a
review
filled
with
faint
praise,
wrote
that Mimesis
"must be
judged
as
something
of
a
work
of
art,
as
a
personal
commonplace
or
rather
uncommonplace
book,"
adding
that "his results are
peculiarly
shifting
and
discon-
certingly
vague"
(300, 305).
Charles
Muscatine
spoke
glowingly
of
Mimesis as "one
of
those
rare books that
speak
to
everyone
in
the
literate
world,"
and
yet
he found the
book
"strikingly
ambivalent...
The book
contains a
wealth
of historical
data,
and
repeated
rec-
ommendations of historicism, yet it is itself only semi-history. At its
center is
something
intuitive
and
creative,
aesthetic,
even
moral,
though
for himself
Auerbach treats 'ethical' literature
tangen-
tially
and even
slightingly.
This is the
book's
encompassing
am-
bivalence"
(448,
456).
Auerbach's
ambivalence was
still
apparent
when
he
responded
to his
first
reviewers,
in
an article called
"Epilegomena
zu
Mime-
sis,"
published
in
1954.
In
this
article,
he
was
especially
concerned
to counter
charges
that his
representation
of the
history
of
realism
had been skewed by personal biases. To critics who claimed that
he
had
understated
the
extent
of
realism
in
classical
antiquity,
he
replied
that
those readers had
failed to understand the
kind
of
re-
alism
he
was
discussing. "Perhaps
I
should
rather
have
spoken
of
'existential
realism,'"
he
continues,
"but
I
was
reluctant to
employ
this
all-too-contemporary
term for
phenomena
of the distant
past"
(4).
"Existential
realism,"
a term
openly
expressive
of
a modern
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
perspective,
is thus
a term he both
suggests
and
withholds.
Auerbach returns
to the
problem
of his
perspective
later
in
the
article,
but
modulates the issue
to
one of
generalization:
"abstract,
comprehensive
concepts
falsify
and
destroy
the
phenomena.
The
order
must
develop
in
such a
way
that
it
allows
the
individual
phe-
nomena to
live
freely.
If
it had
been
possible,
I
would
not
have
employed any general
terms
whatsoever"
(15-16).
He
continues
by
praising
the
nineteenth
century's
renunciation of
"any
absolute,
externally-imposed judgment of phenomena as unhistorical and
dilletantish"
(17).
The
slippage
in
Auerbach's
usage
of
key
terms
like
Wirklichkeit
tems in
part
from
his
ambivalence
concerning
his
role in
shaping
his
narrative,
an
ambivalence
that also
yields
an
overall
narrative
progression variously
described either as
sym-
phonic
(Holdheim)
or
as
chaotic
(Landauer).
Neither
character-
ization alone
suffices;
to an
unusual
extent,
Mimesis must be read
along
both
registers
at once.
This
doubleness is
at
once
Auerbach's
achievement
and his fail-
ure. Paul Bove may be right in seeing Mimesisas "an engaged his-
tory
of
the
present
meant to
intervene
authoritatively
in moder-
nity"
(Intellectuals
in
Power,
89).
Yet
it
appears
that such
an
engage-
ment
proceeded
largely
in
spite
of
Auerbach's
own
conscious
wishes.
The
"strange
failure,"
as
Bov6
calls it
(99),
of
Auerbach's
early
commentators to
appreciate
the
political
force of the book
is
less
strange,
on the
whole,
than Auerbach's own blindness
to the
shaping power
of his
cultural-political
concerns.
We
have
seen
Auerbach's assertion that his texts
shaped
his
topic
more
than
he
did himself: his texts were chosen "at random," his themes devel-
oped through
"play,"
under the
guidance
of the books
themselves.
On closer
examination, however,
his choices
of texts
rarely
look so
very
random,
even when
less
charged
figures
than
Shylock
are
in-
volved.
Consider "The
World
in
Pantagruel's
Mouth,"
one
of
the
most
famous
of his
chapters.
Auerbach centers his discussion of
Rabelais
on
a
long
passage describing
Monsieur
Alcofrybas's
jour-
ney
into
Pantagruel's
mouth,
where
he encounters
whole
cities
and landscapes. A splendid passage for a discussion of Rabelais's
techniques,
to be
sure;
but
hardly
randomly
chosen. Auerbach
be-
gins
a
few
paragraphs
into the
chapter
from
which
he
is
quoting,
just
in
time to
give
Alcofrybas's
reaction to the
strange sights
he
saw:
"But,
oh
gods
and
goddesses,
what
did
I
see there
Jupiter
confound me
with
his
trisulk
lightning
if I lie I
walked
there as
they
do
in
Sophie,
at
Constantinople"
(264).
106
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
earthly historicity
into his
beyond;
his dead are cut off from the
earthly
present
and its
vicissitudes,
but
memory
and
the most intense
interest
in
it stirs them so
profoundly
that the
atmosphere
of the
beyond
is
charged
with
it.
(192-93)
This
seems
to
me
a
perfect
description
of the
presence
of
Auerbach's
own
European past
(or
his vanished
present)
within
his Istanbul
masterwork.
In
contrast to the
cosmopolitan Spitzer,
Auerbach
never
lost his sense that the
center of his
world
was
Eu-
rope,
and
not
merely Europe
in
general
but
Germany
in
particu-
lar. As
he
later said of
Mimesis,
"it is not a German book
in
its
lan-
guage
alone ... It
arose
from the themes and
methods
of
German
intellectual
history
and
philology;
it
would
not
have
been think-
able in
any
other tradition than
in
that
of
Hegel
and the
Ger-
man
Romantics;
it
would
never have
been
written
without
the
influences
which
I
experienced
in
my
youth
in
Germany"
("Epilegomena"
15).
In
Auerbach
we
see
both the stern
serenity
of
Farinata and the
melancholy passion
of Cavalcante:
wholly
disregarding
his
situa-
tion,
at the same time he is
inseparably
attached
to the
world
he
has
lost.
Even
the
structure
of Mimesis is
comparable
to
that
of
the
Inferno: guided
by
Auerbach,
as Dante
is
by
Virgil,
we
travel from
one area to the
next,
and at each
stop
a text
arises
and
announces
itself,
in
a
single passage
from
which
Auerbach then
draws
its
whole
being.
Mimesis as
a
whole
radiates
out from the
chapter
on
Dante,
that
greatest
of
writers-in-exile.
Auerbach's discussion of Dante
stands
on the borderline
of
the
problem
of
the
shaping
consciousness.
Who,
finally,
has
shaped
whom the most? To the extent that Dante has inspired Auerbach's
method
and
themes,
the
chapter
illustrates Auerbach's
own
theory
of his
method.
To the
extent,
though,
that
the
shaping
has
gone
in
the
opposite
direction,
modernity may
invade
the
repre-
sentation of the
past
in
a
way
that would violate
Auerbach's histori-
cist creed.
I
do not find
that
a consideration
of
Auerbach's
per-
sonal stake
in
the discussion detracts
in
any way
from
the
lucidity,
the
brilliance,
or
the
persuasiveness
of
his
analysis
of
Farinata and
Cavalcante.
It
does,
on
the
other
hand,
help
to
explain
the
chapter's one real weakness, Auerbach's inability to do justice to
the least visible
yet
most
pervasive
character
in the Commedia:God.
As
striking
as Auerbach's
sensitivity
to
the
humanity
of
Dante's
characters is
his
lack
of
sympathy
for the
poem's theology.
From
his
exposition,
we
see
Farinata
as a noble
exile,
but
we would
scarcely imagine
he
had
done
anything
wrong
on earth. Auerbach
closes his
chapter,
in
fact,
by
deconstructing
the entire
theological
108
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AUERBACH
framework
in
which
Dante
places
his characters:
Their eternal
position
in
the
divine
order is
something
of
which we
are
only
con-
scious as a
setting
whose
irrevocability
can but
serve
to
heighten
the
effect of their
humanity,
preserved
for
us in all
its force.
The
result is a direct
experience
of life
which overwhelms
everything
else
.
. an illumination
of man's
impulses
and
pas-
sions
which
leads us to share
in
them
without
restraint and indeed
to
admire
their
variety
and their
greatness.
And
by
virtue
of this immediate
and
admiring
sympathy
with
man,
the
principle,
rooted
in the
divine
order,
of the
indestructibility
of the
whole
historical
and indi-
vidual
man turns
against
that
order,
makes
it
subservient
to
its
own
purposes,
and
obscures it. The
image
of man
eclipses
the
image
of God. Dante's work made
man's
Christian-figural
being
a
reality,
and
destroyed
it
in
the
very
process
of real-
izing
it. The tremendous
pattern
was
broken
by
the
overwhelming
power
of the
images
it
had
to contain.
(201-2)
These
are
astonishing
claims.
The
Romantic admiration of
a
few
free-thinking
figures
like
Francesca
da Rimini
and Brunetto
Latini
is
here
extended to all of the sinners
in
hell,
whom we
are
sup-
posed
to admire
"without
restraint"
Needless
to
say,
alternative
readings
of
the Commedia
were
possible
at the time
Auerbach
was
writing; compare Curtius's treatment of Dante in his EuropeanLit-
erature,
where
the
stress
is
very largely
on the
theological
elements
Auerbach believes have
been
obscured
by
the
power
of Dante's
art.
What
are
we
to make of
Auerbach's
selectivity,
an
emphasis
amounting
to
outright
distortion?
In
part,
Auerbach's
analysis
is
more an
expression
of
his
per-
sonal
preferences
(in
this
instance,
his
secular
humanism)
than
an
inherent and
inevitable
response
to the
text-in-itself.
More
par-
ticularly,
it
seems as
though
God
is
a source
of
discomfort
for
Auerbach less as an ethical force than as an orderingforce. What
Auerbach
stresses
is
not so much the
obscuring
of
the
divine
mo-
rality
as
the
individual's
power
to
overturn the
divine
order.
We
can see
played
out
here a
version
of
Auerbach's
ambivalence
to-
ward
his
own
shaping activity: withholding,
as he
believes,
any
prior
or external
conceptual ordering,
he
allows
himself to be
guided by
his
texts;
the
phenomena,
"allowed
to
live
freely,"
create
such order as
they
choose for
themselves
and do not
allow
it to
dominate
them.
In Auerbach's eyes, Dante tried to do just the opposite, to im-
pose
God's
order
on his
characters,
only
to have the characters'
ineluctable
individuality
triumph
over
the
divine
aggression
that
would
put
them forever
in their
places.
Against
the
fascist insis-
tence on
the
purified
collective
will,
Auerbach finds
in
Dante the
origin
of modern
individualism:
"he
opened
the
way
for that
aspi-
ration
toward
autonomy
which
possesses
all
earthly
existence.
In
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AUERBACH
tions it
has
generated.
As for
the historian's
duty
"to attain
a
clear
understanding"
and
to
interpret
as
little
as
possible,
it
is
striking
that
Hamete's difficulties
in
this
regard
form
the
subject
of
the
opening
paragraph
of the
very
chapter
from
which
Auerbach has
taken
his
representative
Cervantes
passage.
The
chapter begins:
When
the
author
of
this
great history
[i.e.,
Benengeli]
comes to relate the
events
of
this
chapter,
he
says
that he
would have
liked to
pass
them
over
in
silence,
through
fear of not
being
believed,
for
the delusions of
Don
Quixote
here
reach
the
greatest heights
and
limits
imaginable,
and
even
exceed
those,
great
as
they
are, by two bow shots. However, he wrote them down finally, although not without
fear and
misgiving,
just
as
they
occurred,
without
adding
or
subtracting
one
atom
of
the truth from
the
history,
or
heeding
any objection
that
might
be
brought
against
him as a liar.
And he
was
right,
for
truth,
though
it
may
run
thin,
never
breaks,
and
it
always
flows
over
the lie as oil
over
water.
(558)
Auerbach,
then,
echoes
Benengeli
even
as he
suppresses
him,
and
this
double treatment
of the
historian
is
paralleled by
his
treat-
ment
of Don
Quixote.
Auerbach discusses
Quixote
twice
in
Mime-
sis,
in
opposite
terms.
In his
chapter
on Chr6tien de
Troyes,
he
gives a sociological interpretation of Quixote's motives:
Cervantes
makes
it
perfectly
clear,
at the
very beginning
of his
book,
where
the
root
of
Don
Quixote's
confusion
lies:
he
is
the
victim
of a social order
in
which
he
belongs
to a
class
that has
no
function. He
belongs
to this
class;
he
cannot emanci-
pate
himself from
it;
but
as
a
mere
member of
it,
without
wealth
and
without
high
connections,
he has
no role and no
mission. He feels his life
running meaning-
lessly
out,
as
though
he
were
paralyzed. Only
upon
such
a
man,
whose
life
is
hardly
better than
a
peasant's
but
who
is
educated
and
who
is
neither
able nor
permitted
to
labor as
a
peasant
does,
could romances
of
chivalry
have
such
an
unbalancing
effect.
His
setting
forth
is a
flight
from a
situation
which
is
unbearable
and
which
he has
borne far
too
long.
He
wants
to enforce his claim
to the function
proper
to
the class to which he
belongs.
(137)
Another
self-portrait-all
the more
clearly
so
if,
as
in the
discus-
sion of
Shylock,
we
consider
that
a class can be
constituted
on eth-
nic as
well
as economic
grounds.
Yet
in
the
actual
chapter
on Don
Quixote,
he
argues against
this
viewpoint, seeing
Quixote
instead
only
as the focus of Cervantes's
"merry
play
on
many
levels."
Auerbach
himself notes
the
contradiction,
without
resolving
it:
discussing
Quixote's
decision
to
set out
as
a
knight-errant,
he
says
that
one
might suppose
that
his
mad
decision
represents
a
flight
from
a
situation
which
has
become
unbearable,
a
violent
attempt
to
emancipate
himself
from
it.
This
sociological
and
psychological
interpretation
has
been advocated
by
various
writers
on
the
subject.
I
myself
advanced
it in
an earlier
passage
of this
book,
and
I
leave
it there
because
in the context of that
passage
it
is
justified
.
.
.
That
this
should
happen
to
a man in his fifties
can be
explained
-
from
within
the
work
-
only
in
aesthetic
terms,
that
is,
through
the comic
vision
which
came to
Cervantes
111
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
when
he
conceived
the
novel
...
(348-49)
Why
the
shift
away
from
the
sociological
and
psychological
view
to
the
very
different
view
of
Quixote
as
pure play?
Alone
among
the
chapters
of
the
book,
the
Cervantes
chapter
was written
after the
war,
added
only
in the second
edition,
apparently
in a desire
to
close
a
perceived
lacuna
in
the
history
of realism.
It
may
be
that
the
wartime
composition
of the
"Chr6tien"
chapter
had
provided
a
special
impetus
toward
the stress on
Quixote
in
flight
from the
unsupportable situation in which he is denied work, and is not
even
permitted
to
work
as a manual laborer.
What
is
most remark-
able, however,
is the fact that Auerbach lets
both
representations
of
Quixote
stand
-
each
one,
moreover,
presented
as the
whole
truth
and
nothing
but the truth.
The
two
Quixotes
illustrate a fundamental
duality throughout
Mimesis.
Everywhere
in
the book there
is
a tension
between
Olym-
pian
classicism
and
exilic
modernism,
and Auerbach
continually
oscillates
between
these
perspectives.
This
duality
is
first
staged
in
the contrast of Homer to the Bible. Homer's style is analyzed in
great
and
loving
detail,
and
I still
think it fair
to see
Homer as a
model for
Auerbach's
own
style.
As the
chapter develops,
however,
Auerbach contrasts Homeric
psychology
most
unfavorably
with
that
found
in
Genesis.
Discussing
Abraham's reaction
to the
command
to sacrifice
Isaac,
Auerbach
says,
Such a
problematic
psychological
situation as
this is
impossible
for
any
of the
Homeric
heroes,
whose
destiny
is
clearly
defined and
who wake
every
morning
as
if
it
were
the first
day
of their
lives:
their
emotions,
though strong,
are
simple
and
find
expression instantly.
How
fraught
with
background,
in
comparison,
are
characters like Saul and
David
. . .
the
Jewish
writers
are able
to
express
the simultaneous
existence of
various
layers
of consciousness and the conflict
between
them.
(12-13)
The
Hebrew
writers
(whom
Auerbach calls
"Jewish,"
as
though
he
were
speaking
of a much later
period)
excel at the
very psycho-
logical
analysis
of
conflicting
layers
of consciousness that
Auerbach
will
identify
in
his final
chapter
as
the
great
skill of mod-
ernists
like
Woolf
and
Joyce. They
might,
then,
seem to be the he-
roes of the piece (as Green and others have taken them to be),
except
that it is the Bible that strives
for
a totalitarian
effect:
The
world
of the
Scripture
stories is not
satisfied
with
claiming
to be a
historically
true
reality
-
it insists that it
is
the
only
real
world,
is destined for
autocracy...
Scripture
stories do
not,
like
Homer's,
court our
favor,
they
do not flatter us that
they may
please
and
enchant us
-
they
seek to
subject
us,
and
if
we
refuse to be
subjected
we
are rebels... Far
from
seeking,
like
Homer,
merely
to make us
forget
our
own
reality
for a
few
hours, [the Bible]
seeks to
overcome
our
reality:
we
are to
112
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AUERBACH
fit our
own
life into its
world,
feel
ourselves
to be
elements
in
its structure of uni-
versal
history.
(14-15)
Throughout
Mimesis,
in
many guises,
there
appears
a
conflict
between
two
sets of
values that
Auerbach
sets
sharply against
one
another,
but
both
of
which
he himself
holds: classical
(Greek)
har-
mony,
order, balance,
free
play,
and
presence ("foregrounding,"
in
his
discussion
of
Homer);
all
in
opposition
to modernist
(Jew-
ish)
fragmentation,
psychological complexity,
and exile
or
ab-
sence. These
latter traits
may
militate
against
the
repressions
that
Aryan
theorists
were
associating
with
a return to classical
order;
but
they may
also
only
reinforce those
same
tendencies.
In his
fi-
nal
chapter,
Auerbach associates himself
with Woolf's
stream-of-
consciousness
technique,
and
her focus
on
small
fragments
of
time
and
place:
"It is
possible
to
compare
this
technique
of
mod-
ern
writers with
that
of
certain
modern
philologists
who
hold that
the
interpretation
of a
few
passages
from
Hamlet, Phedre,
or
Faust
can be made
to
yield
more
... than
would
a
systematic
and
chrono-
logical treatment" (548). He goes on, though, to suggest that the
modernist
retreat
from
system
and
chronology
itself
paved
the
way
for
the
rise
of
fascism: "These forces threatened to
split
up
and
disintegrate. They
lost
their
unity
and clear
definition
.
.
.
The
temptation
to entrust
oneself
to a
single
sect
which
solved
all
prob-
lems
with
a
single
formula ...
was
so
great
that,
with
many
people,
fascism
hardly
had to
employ
force
when
the
time
came
for
it to
spread through
the
countries of old
European
culture,
absorbing
the smaller sects"
(550).
The dualism of Auerbach's thought finds a structural expres-
sion
in
the doubled frame-tale
within
which
he encloses
his book.
I
have
already
alluded to one
of
these
frame-tales,
in
which
Euryclea
and
Mrs.
Ramsay
become
the foci for the discussions
of Homer
and
Woolf.
There is a second
frame as
well,
corresponding
to
the
other term
of
the first
chapter,
for the Bible
is
recalled
in
a
second
long
quotation
that
Auerbach
gives
in his final
chapter.
The
pas-
sage
comes from
Proust,
whom
Auerbach introduces
not to stress
modernist
subjectivity
but
on
the
contrary
in order to
give
an
ex-
ample of the objectivityattainable by self-conscious recollection of
a vanished
past:
A
consciousness
in
which
remembrance causes
past
realities to
arise,
which
has
long
since left behind the states
in
which
it
found itself
when
those
realities oc-
curred as a
present,
sees and
arranges
that content
in
a
way very
different from the
purely
individual
and
subjective.
Freed from its
various
earlier
involvements,
con-
sciousness
views
its
own
past
layers
and their content in
perspective;
it
keeps
confronting
them
with
one
another,
emancipating
them from their exterior tem-
113
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COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
poral
continuity
as
well
as from the
narrow
meanings
they
seemed
to
have when
they
were
bound to a
particular present.
(542)
Another
self-portrait,
it
appears:
the
observer,
seeing
and
"arrang-
ing"
(but
not
distorting)
events
of the
vanished
past,
"emanci-
pates"
them from
time
by
viewing
them
"in
perspective";
we
may
recall
that Auerbach's
favorite
term
for his
own
method
is
"perspectivism."
The
passage
Auerbach
gives
to illustrate this
per-
spectival objectivity
is
an
interesting
one indeed: he chooses a
long
paragraph
from the
opening
section of the
Recherche,
n
which
the
young
narrator,
desperately longing
for his mother's
company,
has
been
banished
to his room for the
night; unexpectedly,
through
his
father's
arbitrary
whim,
he is
allowed
to
spend
the
night
with
his mother rather
than
alone.
Auerbach
arranges
to
begin
this
quotation
with
a
highly
appro-
priate image:
"It
was
impossible
for me to
thank
my
father;
what
he
called
my sentimentality
would have
exasperated
him.
I
stood
there not
daring
to
move;
he
was
still
confronting
us,
an
immense
figure in his white nightshirt .
. .
standing like Abraham in the
engraving
after
Benozzo Gozzoli
which
M.
Swann
had
given
me,
telling
Sarah that
she
must tear
herself
away
from
Isaac"
(543-44).
Now,
this
metaphor
recalls
the
very
scene from
Genesis
with
which
Auerbach has
begun
his book: the
Akhedah,
"the
Binding
of
Isaac."
If
Euryclea
and Mrs.
Ramsay
form
a
feminine frame
for his
book,
this frame
is in
turn
paired
with
the
patriarchal binding
of
Isaac,
first
in
its
biblical form and then
in its
metaphorical
recre-
ation
in
Proust.
As Shalom Spiegel has eloquently shown in The Last Trial,Jews
since
antiquity
have
turned to the Akhedah
in
times
of
persecu-
tion,
finding
in
ever
renewed
interpretations
of that
enigmatic
story ways
to come to terms
with
God's
willingness
to countenance
his
people's
destruction.
Auerbach has
a
private
hope,
the
hope
of
many
Jews
in
many
times of
persecution:
that
like
Isaac
he
and
his
beloved
lost
world
may yet
be
snatched
from
destruction,
freed
from
the
bondage
of
death.
So
far,
this
private
hope
need
not im-
pinge
in
a
problematic
way
on his
reading
of
Proust,
since the nec-
essary elements are all there in the passage he cites, in which
Proust
describes
how
the
vanished
past
lives
on
in
memory
and
in
memory
alone.
But Auerbach has
misquoted
the
passage.
I
have
given
the lines
in
their
correct form
above,
but this
is
how
Auerbach
himself has
transcribed,
or
remembered,
the
metaphor:
"standing
like
Abraham
in the
engraving
after Benozzo Gozzoli
which
M.
Swann
114
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AUERBACH
had
given
me,
telling
Hagar
that
she must tear herself
away
from
Isaac"
(544;
French
text on
543).
Auerbach
gives
us the
wrong
wife.
In order
to harmonize the
passage
and
its
translation,
Willard
Trask
quietly
altered the Moncrieff translation of Proust that
he
used
in
his
English
version;
the
error
has
stood uncorrected
in
subsequent
German editions as
well,
and
I do
not
know
of
any
published
discussion
of
it.
This
is,
however,
a resonant
slippage
of
transcription
or of
memory.
Auerbach has not
only
a secret
hope
but also a secret fear: that he may most resemble Abraham's other
"first-born"
son,
Ishmael,
reprieved
from
death
only
to
be sent
with
Hagar
into a
permanent
exile
in
the
wilderness
(Genesis
21:20).
Writing
his
great
book in
Istanbul,
Auerbach both
responded
to
his
exile
and refused to
submit to it. But
he
was
wrong
as to the
nature of this exile: his
problem
was
not that
he
was
cut off from
earthly
life like
Alcofrybas,
Farinata,
Quixote,
the Proustian narra-
tor,
all
of
whom
in
varying
ways
recover this
loss
through
memory,
stories, interpretation. Auerbach's exile is the reverse: far more
irrevocably
wedded
to
his
present
age
than
he
would wish
to
be,
he
lives
in exile from
the
past,
from
the
worlds
of his
beloved
texts,
which
cannot
finally
provide
an
Olympian
refuge
from the
dual
tyrannies
of
time
and
of
political
pressures.
Amid
the
ringing
affirmations of the
power
of
perspective
in his
article
on
Vico,
Auerbach includes a
disquieting
aside:
after
tell-
ing
us that "the
variety
of
periods
and civilizations
no
longer
frightens
us,"
he
adds: "It
is
true that
perspectivistic
understand-
ing fails as soon as political interests are at stake; but otherwise,
especially
in
esthetic
matters,
our historistic
capacity
of
adaptation
to the
most various forms of
beauty
is
almost
boundless"
(34).
The
absolutes
in
this
sentence
are
striking:
perspectivism
does not
merely
falter,
it
fails,
and it
does
so not
gradually
but
just
as
soon
as
political
interests
are
at stake.
For
a
generation,
Auerbach's
readers
shared
his
deep
wish
for
an
objectivity
unswayed
by political
interests,
for
an historicism all
the
more
profound
as
it could transcend
its
own
time-
boundedness. Little wonder that they admired but did not imitate
his
synthetic project,
and turned to
far more circumscribed fields
of
study,
in
the
hope
that more
knowledge
of a more
manageable
body
of
material could enable them
truly
to
escape
themselves
and
do
justice
to the material on its
own
terms.
Little
wonder,
too,
that
they
did
not
succeed.
The
specialized
projects
characteristic
of
scholarly
work
in recent
decades have
not
resolved
but
only
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COMPARATIVE
ITERATURE
masked
the contradictions
we
can
now
see
in
Auerbach's
work,
while
the
global
generalizations
in
which
local
readings
are now
often framed
give
these contradictions
a
new
urgency.
To return
to
Mimesis
now
is to be
warned
that our
own
perspective
can all
too
easily
harm
the books
we wish
to
bring
to
life,
even
as
Auerbach
illustrates
(in
part deliberately)
the reasons
why
an
outright
era-
sure of
our
perspective
is
unattainable and undesirable.
The chal-
lenge
for us
is
to find
ways, by facing
the
problem squarely,
to
see
the benefits of our own perspective while resisting our often unre-
flective will
to
power
over
our
material.
Auerbach's
problem
was
not that
he
knew
too
little,
about
Dante
or
even
about
the
Bible;
he
knew
too
much
about
his
own
times,
and
that
knowledge,
so
often
repressed, continually
returned
to
shift
the course
of his
argument away
from the free
play
of the
material
in
itself.
Though
Auerbach
takes
up
Homer and
the Bible
without
any
prefatory
remarks,
he
does
begin
with
an
epigraph,
from
Marvell:
"Had
we
but
world
enough
and time . .
." His
wish
was granted only too well: there is, in Auerbach's terms, all too
much
world
within
his
book,
all
too much
of his
own
time. Thanks
to the
work
of Said and
others,
we
are now
willing
to
advance
an
openly
worldly
criticism,
and
we
can
see more
directly
than
could
Auerbach
and
his
early
readers the extent
of the
shaping
force
of
our
own
moment,
our
own
needs. This
shaping
force can enrich
our
work,
as
it has enriched Mimesis
more
than
Auerbach
himself
desired,
but
it can also
impoverish
it,
if
we
simply
recreate
past
works
in
our
own
image,
or
reject
out of hand
any
that
we
cannot
readily bend to our will. The best corrective to such a narrowing of
our
outlook
may
well
be to recover
Auerbach's breadth and
gener-
osity
of
perspective,
too often
foreshortened
through
a focus
on a
single period
or a
few
favorite
theorists. Mimesis
may
now,
finally,
begin
to
find its true readers.
Columbia
University
Works Cited
Auerbach,
Erich.
Dante:
Poet
of
the Secular World.
Trans.
Ralph
Mannheim.
Chicago:
University
of
Chicago
Press,
1961.
--- . "Epilegomena
zu
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