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The Gospel According to Auerbach

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The Gospel According to Auerbach 135.3 ] The Gospel according to Auerbach jane o. newman N 1948, NOT LONG AFTER HE ARRIVED IN THE UNITED STATES FROM HIS Turkish exile during World War II, the German Jewish Roman- I ist and comparatist Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) gave a lecture on Dante on the campus of Penn State University. Delivered in some- what halting En glish—a tape of the lecture has survived (Vialon, “Die Stimme Dantes” [“Dante’s Voice”])—the talk, “The Three Traits of Dante’s Poetry,” is marked by the venue as an academic one. This made sense; Auerbach had already written both a book and any number of essays and chapters on Dante by this time.1 Yet, as part of the annual Simmons Series, the lecture may have also been designed, at least in part, for a more general audience. In any case, both publics might have been somewhat perturbed by Auerbach’s opening claim that very few readers actually know the text of Dante’s Divine Com- edy; Dante is in fact, he maintains, “one of the great authors who sur- JANE O. NEWMAN is professor of compar- vive rather by . the evocative power of their name.” But, Auerbach ative literature at the University of Cali- continues, readers who do engage with the poem directly discover fornia, Irvine. Her teaching and research that, beyond the name, “[t] here are in this great work many passages interests include comparative European Renaissance and early modern literature of such emotional and poetical power that they enter the soul of the and political theory and dialogues be- reader immediately and spontaneously” (“Three Traits” 188). These tween pre- and early modernity and the two different kinds of “power,” one associated with the author’s name modern and postmodern worlds, and she and person, the other with his text, both guarantee Dante’s fame. has been a fellow at the National Human- Auerbach’s observations in 1948 about the blended powers of ities Center and the American Academy Dante’s name and his text are surprisingly relevant for another im- in Berlin. Her translations of a selection portant case—his own. Here, however, the name of the author and of Erich Auerbach’s essays appeared as the substance of his most well- known book, the 1946 Mimesis: Dar- Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton UP, ge stellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Mimesis: The 2014), and she is completing a book Representation of Reality in Western Literature), are often yoked so entitled “Auerbach’s Worlds: Existential firmly together that they “enter the soul” of both lay and professional Realism in the Work of Erich Auerbach.” readers simultaneously. Auerbach’s personal history seems to lie © 2020 jane o. newman PMLA 135.3 (2020), published by the Modern Language Association of America 455 Newman_135-3_pp2.indd 455 6/22/20 7:43 PM 456 The Gospel according to Auerbach [ PMLA enfolded within Mimesis, for example, when Jewish ways of reading Auerbach in the con- it is described in the pages of The New Yorker text of Germany in the 1930s.6 Theorists of as a “soulful narrative” whose story parallels world literature have both endorsed and cri- its author’s (Krystal 84). Elsewhere, the book tiqued Auerbach and his work in their debates is invested with almost human characteristics along similar lines.7 In these receptions, Auer- when it is described as “enthralling” (Haco- bach’s philology is read as part and parcel of hen 615). Seth Lerer even claims that “Auer- his biography and times.8 bach comes alive in it” (24). This tendency to There is much that is compelling in this read the man and his book as “consubstan- approach. Literary criticism and theory do tial” (Montaigne 504) was of course initiated not develop in a vacuum. This essay neverthe- by Auerbach himself. After all, it was he who less argues for reading Auerbach and Mimesis first suggested—somewhat misleadingly—that together in a different context—namely, the Mimesis had been written in his lonely exile Christian existentialist milieu he belonged “in Istanbul between May, 1942 and April, to during his years as a professor at the Uni- 1945.”2 Indeed, the very grammar of Mime- versity of Marburg, from 1929 to 1935–36— sis’s last lines lends the book pathos when it and in conversation with the thought of his locates it alongside its author on the shores of friend and colleague there, the famous Prot- the Bosporus by cunningly having the “Unter- estant existential theologian Rudolf Bult- suchung” (“study”) itself seek to “erreichen” mann (1884–1976). Bultmann’s work on the (“reach”) its “Leser” (“readers”), if they “Pro ble ma tik des Diesseits,” or “problematic “überleben” (“survive”) the war (518; 557).3 of immanence” (Presence 189), can be seen Embedded in these years and contexts and an- to inform both Auerbach’s work in Mimesis thropomorphic tropes, Mimesis has thus come overall and chapter 2 of that book in particu- to function, prosopopoeia- like (Kadir 26), as a lar, when he discusses Peter’s denial of Christ “document” of its author’s “complex personal as it is depicted in the Gospel of Mark. In and literary history” (Lerer 23), nowhere more Sigmund Freud’s famous description of the pointedly so than in the context of Auerbach’s multilayered archaeologies of civilizations perilous life as a German Jew after 1933, when and psyches, multiple pasts jostle against the Nazis came to power, and then, after both one another and the present and come 1935–36, during his prolonged exilic life.4 It is “to light” (16–18) at various times and usu- these chronological, geographic, and political ally in complicated ways. Auerbach’s reading coordinates, then, and the narratives associ- of the Gospel of Mark provides an excellent ated with them, that lie at the foundation of example of such complex residues. Their pres- the “affective . attachment” (Wurgaft 363) ence ought not to surprise us. After all, Auer- to both Auerbach and his book that has in bach was already forty- three years old when large part determined how both have been he was forced to leave Germany’s National read over the past twenty- some years of their Socialist academy and state. By that time, he En glish- language reception. Critics conflate had published numerous articles on many of Auerbach’s person and Mimesis both when the texts he discusses in Mimesis. While his they align them with a Eurocentric and man- positions on some issues did evolve over time, darin advocacy of the Western great books in it is unlikely that he would have left the al- the United States (Lan dauer) and when they ready mature scholarly commitments he had associate them with an exilic postcoloniality developed in conversation with his Marburg and cosmopolitanist consciousness and proj- colleagues behind when he fled. Looking to ect (because of Auer bach’s time in Turkey).5 the ideas and language of Christian existen- Such conflations also occur in the specifically tialism during Auerbach’s preexile years and Newman_135-3_pp2.indd 456 6/22/20 7:43 PM 135.3 Jane O. Newman 457 ] understanding their impact on his work helps Protestant existentialism that informs this explain the “emotional . power” of Mimesis particular New Testament gloss. Again, Au- and the hold it has had on so many readers. erbach would have encountered this version of existential theology during his time as a professor of Romance languages at the Uni- Auerbach’s Christianity versity of Marburg, most directly through his This section heading may seem counter- contact there with the German Lutheran New intuitive. In spite of both how assimilated Testament scholar Bultmann.12 he and his family may have been and his Understanding Auerbach’s approach to stated indebtedness to Christian thought, Peter’s story and its indebtedness to Bultmann the German- Jewish Auerbach was of course as representative of the Marburg context is not a Christian.9 The possessive genitive thus crucial to helping us to see Auerbach and his points not to questions of personal religiosity work in new ways—that is, to see Mimesis as or alignment with a particular faith. Rather, a project with a longer collaborative history it underlines the centrality of a fine- grained (rather than the melancholic reflections of a understanding of the Christian tradition to solitary exile on the shores of the Bosporus Auerbach’s work, as is obvious in his lifelong looking back at a Europe in flames) that con- interest in figures such as Augustine, Dante, cerns, as Auerbach himself writes in his “Epi- and Pascal. This interest is particularly clear legomena to Mimesis” (1954), not only literary in his reading in Mimesis, chapter 2, of a key “realism” but also the “dargestellte Wirklich- text from this tradition—namely, Peter’s de- keit” (“represented reality”) of the finitude nial of Christ in the Gospel according to of the human condition (“Epilegomena zu Mark (14.66–72),10 where the apostle refuses, Mimesis” 468–69; “Epilegomena to Mimesis” after Jesus has been arrested, to admit that 561). Acknowledging the importance of early- he is part of His movement (he has been rec- twentieth- century Christian existentialism in ognized as a follower on the basis of his Gal- Germany for Auerbach’s work also helps us lilean accent). To date, Auerbach’s reading address the question with which I began— of the Markan text has been noted by only namely, why so many chapters of this famous a very few scholars (Cho; Rancière, “Body” book move professional academic and lay and “Corps”; Von Koppenfels), who, in line readers alike.
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