Erich Auerbach (1892–1957): Sampling and Synthesizing Western Literature

University of Southern Denmark

Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) Sampling and synthesizing western literature Engberg-Pedersen, Anders

Published in: History of Humanities

DOI: 10.1086/704848

Publication date: 2019

Document version: Final published version

Citation for pulished version (APA): Engberg-Pedersen, A. (2019). Erich Auerbach (1892–1957): Sampling and synthesizing western literature. History of Humanities, 4(2), 319-324. https://doi.org/10.1086/704848

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Download date: 29. Sep. 2021 Erich Auerbach (1892–1957): Sampling and Synthesizing Western Literature

Anders Engberg-Pedersen, University of Southern Denmark

safield, comparative literature is usually confronted with a problem of method. From its intellectual origins in the Romantic period to its gradual institution- A – alization in the 1870s, its post World War II blossoming, and up until today, scholars of comparative literature have not been content with the well-established traditions and intellectual frames and divisions operative within and between the national philologies. Comparatists are constantly forced to devise new ways of establish- ing and engaging their research objects. The raison d’être of the field lies in the belief that other, more interesting, more relevant, or more powerful questions and explana- tions may be had if the study of literature is not first partitioned and restricted by na- tionality or language. For comparatists, the problem of method is also a promise. It is therefore not surprising that Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is widely regarded as one of the seminal texts in the field.1 In 1935 Auerbach (1892–1957), a Jew, had been forced to give up his professorship in Romance philology at the University of Marburg due to the increasingly hostile climate of national socialism. Like many other persecuted Jews he fled to Istanbul, where he would succeed another of the leading figures in the comparative study of literature, Leo Spitzer, at Istanbul University. Like Spitzer, Auerbach would eventually emigrate to the United States, where he held positions at Pennsylvania State University and at Princeton University before he became Sterling Professor of Romance Philology at Yale University. Yet it was in exile in Turkey that Auerbach wrote the book that would set an exam- ple for the next several decades of scholarship. Written at the edge of Europe and against the background of a continent ravaged by belligerent nationalism, Mimesis is very much a book about Europe. Bringing together the literatures of Western Europe from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Auerbach’s great endeavor is to trace the ways in which reality has

1. The English translation by Willard R. Trask appeared seven years later and remains the standard reference: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1953). A ﬁftieth-anniversary edition with an introduction by Edward Said was published in 2003.

been represented in literature over a span of some three thousand years—a daunting task, and an insurmountable one, as Auerbach himself notes at the end of Mimesis, if it were not for his development of a new methodological approach. In each of the twenty chapters, Auerbach first immerses himself and his readers in a scene from an exemplary text. Through a magisterial explication de texte, or close reading, of the few carefully selected pages, he then develops an interpretation that marries stylistic analysis to the larger social and intellectual context where Auerbach could draw on his vast knowledge of European history and culture. The question that propels his inquiry is this: When has European literature represented everyday reality in a serious manner? In antiquity, Auerbach notes, literary representation was governed by the doctrine of distinct levels of style and topics. A high style was reserved for the serious, the tragic, and the sublime, whereas the comic and the pleasant were rendered in the low or intermediate styles. In the ancient doctrine, a stylistic hierarchy corresponds to a hierarchy of topics. The realistic depic- tion of everyday life was incompatible with the serious or the sublime. With the Old Testament, however, this “stylistic differentiation” gives way to “stylistic mixing.”2 In the Old Testament stories, we encounter for the first time what Auer- bach variously labels “serious realism,”“domestic realism,” or “existential realism,” where everyday phenomena are treated in a seriousmannerandminglewiththetragicandthe sublime.3 In Homer’s Odyssey, the characters capable of generating tragedy or sublimity belong primarily to the ruling class—when they are not gods—and their conflicts work themselves out in open battles. By contrast, the Old Testament stories depict domestic conflicts such as the hereditary dispute between Cain and Abel or the marital discord between Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. Yet these commonplace scenes and events of daily life are permeated by conflict and suffused by the influenceofthedivinetosuchadegreethat theseriousandthesublimeareinseparablefromtheeveryday.InAuerbach’slargerhis- torical frame, Dante’s Commedia, completed in 1320, forms the next triumph of the serious representation of reality followed by the French realists of the nineteenth century. While the immense argumentative arc of the book impresses, Mimesis is a profoundly untheoretical book. Auerbach was brought up in the German philological tradition of Wilhelm Dilthey that cast the methods and practices of the Geisteswissenschaften in clear opposition to the laws and abstractions of the natural sciences, and Auerbach was skep- tical of anything that smacked of abstract system building. In “Epilegomena,” abriefcom- mentary on Mimesis published in 1953, seven years after the original German version of

2. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 563. 3. Ibid., 555, 22, 561.

This content downloaded from 130.226.087.005 on November 29, 2019 01:15:13 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). ERICHAUERBACH(1892– 1957) |321 the book had appeared, he stressed the necessary particularism of literary scholarship. General concepts that designate literary epochs or groups such as Renaissance, Baroque,

Romanticism, symbolism, and so on, have value only insofar as they “elicit in readers or THEME hearers a series of ideas that facilitate for them an understanding of what is meant in the particular context. They are not exact.”4 Even the key concepts of his own study are de- liberately and often frustratingly undefined and at times seemingly inconsistent. As Ed- ward Said noted in his foreword to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of the English translation of Mimesis, “there is something impossibly naïve, if not outrageous that hotly contested terms like ‘Western,’‘reality,’ and ‘representation’ ...are left to stand on their own, unadorned and unqualified.”5 At the same time Mimesis is, on the face of it, a profoundly unscholarly book. The book lacks almost entirely the apparatus of footnotes and references, as well as academic debates and positioning, that are so central to scholarship. In a famous passage in the epilogue, Auerbach exonerates himself with a description of the conditions of his exile. In Istanbul, in the midst of the war he had no access to the well-stocked German libraries that had previously supported his research. As he put it, “international communications were impeded; I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts. Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have consid- ered and that I occasionally assert something which modern research has disproved or modified. I trust that the probable errors include none which affect the core of my argument.”6 Writing with knowing ignorance of recent specialized criticism did result in minor errors, but it also liberated Auerbach from the onerous task of reading up on scholarship on so many subjects. Thus, he concluded, “it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to the lack of a rich and specialized library.”7 Auerbach’s remarks about the book’s genesis may not have been entirely correct. In the 1930s and 1940s, Istanbul was hardly an intellectual backwater, but a cosmopolitan city in which Auerbach could converse with colleagues, use their private book collections, and visit local monasteries, whose holdings were anything but insignificant.8 Nevertheless, Mimesis remains an un- usual book, particularly for a scholar brought up in the German academic tradition.

4. Ibid., 573. 5. Edward W. Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,” in Erich Auerbach, Mime- sis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), xxiv. 6. Auerbach, Mimesis, 557. 7. Ibid., 557. 8. Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Moreover, Auerbach never once mentions the term comparative literature. Like many of his fellow German-speaking academics who were forced to flee Nazi Ger- many, such as Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, and René Wellek, Auerbach had been trained in Romance languages and literatures, and he never taught in a department of comparative literature.9 Instead, Auerbach refers to his own work as “synthetic historical philology,” offering “a synthesized cosmic view” of Western literature.10 Why, then, is Mimesis a classic of comparative literature? For one, the intellectual climate in the 1940s was favorable to a central aspect of the methodology—the detailed attention lavished on the texts themselves. While Auerbach is ever attentive to historical context, every chapter of Mimesis displays his sheer brilliance as a close reader. Ignoring Auerbach’s historical interest, the so-called New Critics, with their attentiveness to literary form, could claim him as one of their own. Indeed, before the English translation was completed, a chapter of the book was published in the Kenyon Review, a journal closely associated with the New Criticism. The immediate appeal of Auerbach’s explicitly untheoretical approach is its ability to conjure the silent voices of the literary works, to first let them speak and then engage them in an intimate dialogue. While his stylistic interest sets the tone, his readings remain radically open. They trace a path of alert dis- covery and a process of thinking aloud with the particular text in front of him. The un- scripted nature of his readings suggest that—in the right hands—a work of imaginative literature can potentially reveal seismic shifts in the historical development of percep- tions of self and world in Western culture. And that such global shifts can be detected in the shades and nuances of a small fragment from a fictional text. Perhaps unsurpris- ingly, the respect for Auerbach’s virtuosity as a close reader endures. In his attention to all the subtle details of the passage he has chosen, Auerbach demonstrates in exemplary fashion the skill that in spite of recent trends of distant reading still forms the backbone of the curriculum in most departments of comparative literature. At the same time Mimesis demonstrates one way of transforming the problem of method into a promise. Though simple, Auerbach’s theoretical construct enables a comparative analysis of the European literatures over three thousand years, while his method makes it practicable. Juxtaposing twenty text samples that represent different genres, nations, and languages, Mimesis makes a case for a truly comparative literature in which the chosen texts reflect light and insights back and forth on each other across borders,

9. See Ben Hutchinson, “Late Reading: Erich Auerbach and the Spätboot of Comparative Litera- ture,” Comparative Critical Studies 14, no. 1 (2017): 61–85. 10. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 17, and Mimesis, 549.

This content downloaded from 130.226.087.005 on November 29, 2019 01:15:13 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). ERICHAUERBACH(1892– 1957) |323 over immense time spans, and between cultures. In this endeavor, the long arc of the stylistic argument about the development of the serious representation of reality from

the Bible via Dante to the nineteenth-century realists is perhaps less important. Indeed, THEME like the modernist novels by Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, which Auerbach dis- cusses in the twentieth and concluding chapter, Mimesis abandons a well-ordered, cohe- sive, and exhaustive narrative. Just as the mundane task of measuring a stocking in To the Lighthouse allows Virginia Woolf to probe the depths of her protagonist Mrs Ram- say’s mind, the insights of Mimesis emerge from the extrapolation and juxtaposition of the seemingly insignificant but carefully selected samples. Reading these samples closely allows Auerbach to identify a unit of style and content—the serious representation (style) of everyday experience (content)—that pertains to literature as such regard- less of its division into different genres, different periods, and different languages. In other words, Mimesis establishes a ground of comparison that makes it not only possible but important to compare Homer with Boccacio and Boccacio with Balzac. With this methodological innovation, Mimesis exemplifies what comparative literature has to offer over and above the established approaches in the study of national literatures. And, thus, somewhat paradoxically, Auerbach is often referred to as one of the foundational figures of a field he doesn’t mention and in which he never formally held an appointment. It may well be that Auerbach’s choice of samples and their arrangement in his larger historical narrative could be carried out only by someone possessed of such deep knowledge of European culture as Auerbach himself, a learning rarely found among scholars today. It may also be that Auerbach’sinfluence cemented a Eurocentrism that has dom- inated comparative literature for decades. Yet, the combination of close reading and methodological experimentation remains a key legacy and makes of Mimesis a model of comparative literary scholarship more than seventy years after its publication.

FIRST PUBLICATION Auerbach, Erich. 1946. Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur.Bern: A. Francke.

RECOMMENDED ENGLISH TRANSLATION Auerbach, Erich. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.Translatedby Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

RECOMMENDED SELECTION FOR STUDENTS Auerbach, Erich. 2003. “The Brown Stocking.” In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask, 525–53. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

RECOMMENDED READINGS Apter, Emily. 2006. “The Translation Zone: Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Lit- erature, Istanbul, 1933.” In The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature,41–65. Prince- ton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Auerbach, Erich. 1965. Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bremmer, Jan N. 1999. “Erich Auerbach and His Mimesis.” Poetics Today 20 (1): 3–10. Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich. 1996. “‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress’: Erich Auerbach’s Everydays.” In Lit- erary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, edited by Seth Lerer, 13–35. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Holquist, Michael. 1999. “ErichAuerbachandtheFateofPhilologyToday.” Poetics Today 20 (1): 77–91. Hutchinson, Ben. 2017. “Late Reading: Erich Auerbach and the Spätboot of Comparative Literature.” Comparative Critical Studies 14 (1): 61–85. Konuk, Kader. 2010. East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Landauer, Carl. 1988. “‘Mimesis’ and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing.” German Studies Review 11 (1): 83–96. Lindenberger, Herbert. 1996. “On the Reception of Mimesis.” In Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, edited by Seth Lerer, 195–211. Stanford, CA: Stan- ford University Press. Madsen, Peter. 2004. “World Literature and World Thoughts: Brandes/Auerbach.” In Debating World Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast, 54–75. London: Verso. Said, Edward W. 2003. “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition.” In Erich Auerbach, Mi- mesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,ix–xxxii. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

This content downloaded from 130.226.087.005 on November 29, 2019 01:15:13 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).