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 Go to publication entry in University of Southern Denmark's Research Portal Terms of use This work is brought to you by the University of Southern Denmark. Unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving. If no other license is stated, these terms apply: • You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to [email protected] 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 na- tional 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 be- fore 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. History of Humanities, Volume 4, Number 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/704848 © 2019 by Society for the History of the Humanities. All rights reserved. 2379-3163/2019/0402-0016$10.00 319 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). THEME 320 | HISTORY OF HUMANITIES FALL 2019 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 rep- resented 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 doc- trine, 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 “stylis- tic 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 be- tween 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 se- rious 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 trans- lation 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 ar- gument.”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.