Mimesis (4 page)

Auerbach then goes on unhurriedly to detail the “pendulation” or swings in Peter’s soul between sublimity and fear, faith and doubt, courage and defeat in order to show that those experiences are radically incompatible with “the sublime style of classical antique literature.” This still leaves the question of why such a passage moves us, given that
in classical literature it would appear only as farce or comedy. “Because it portrays something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life, which thus assumes an importance it could never have assumed in antique literature. What we witness is the awakening of ‘a new heart and a new spirit.’ All this applies not only to Peter’s denial but also to every other occurrence which is related in the New Testament” (42-43). What Auerbach enables us to see here is “a world which on the one hand is entirely real, average, identifiable as to place, time, and circumstances, but which on the other hand is shaken in its very foundations, is transforming and renewing itself before our eyes” (43).

Christianity shatters the classical balance between high and low styles, just as Jesus’ life destroys the separation between the sublime and the everyday. What is set in motion, as a result, is the search for a new literary pact between writer and reader, a new synthesis or mingling between style and interpretation that will be adequate to the disturbing volatility of worldly events in the much grander setting opened up by Christ’s historical presence. To this end, St. Augustine’s enormous accomplishment, linked as he was to the classical world by education, was to have been the first to realize that classical antiquity had been superseded by a different world requiring a new
sermo humilis
, or as Auerbach puts it, “a low style, such as would properly only be applicable to comedy, but which now reaches out far beyond its original domain, and encroaches upon the deepest and the highest, the sublime and the eternal” (72). The problem then becomes how to relate the discursive, sequential events of human history to each other within the new figural dispensation that has triumphed conclusively over its predecessor, and then to find a language adequate to such a task, once, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin was no longer the
lingua franca
of Europe.

Auerbach’s choice of Dante to represent the second seminal moment in Western literary history is made to seem breathtakingly appropriate. Read slowly and reflectively,
chapter 8
of
Mimesis
, “Farinata and Cavalcante,” is one of the great moments in modern critical literature, a masterly, almost vertiginous embodiment of Auerbach’s own ideas about Dante: that the
Divine Comedy
synthesized the timeless and the historical because of Dante’s genius, and that Dante’s use of the demotic (or vulgar) Italian language in a sense enabled the creation of what we have come to call literature. I will not try to summarize Auerbach’s analysis of a passage from the tenth canto of the
Inferno
in which Dante the
pilgrim and his guide Virgil are accosted by two Florentines who knew Dante from Florence but who are now committed to the Inferno, and whose internecine squabbles between the city’s Guelph and Ghibelline factions carry on into the afterworld: readers should experience this dazzling analysis for themselves. Auerbach notes that the seventy lines he focuses on are incredibly packed, containing no less than four separate scenes, as well as more varied material than any other so far discussed in
Mimesis
. What particularly compels the reader is that Dante’s Italian in the poem is, as Auerbach puts it assertively, “a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle,” used by the poet “to discover the world anew” (182-183).

There is, first of all, its combination of “sublimity and triviality which, measured by the standards of antiquity, is monstrous.” Then there is its immense forcefulness, its “repulsive and often disgusting greatness,” according to Goethe, whereby the poet uses the vernacular to represent “the antagonism of the two traditions … that of antiquity … and that of the Christian era. … Dante’s powerful temperament, which is conscious of both because its aspiration toward the tradition of antiquity does not imply for it the possibility of abandoning the other; nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style” (184-185). Then there is its abundance of material and styles, all of it treated in what Dante claimed was “the common everyday language of the people,” (186) which allowed a realism that brought forth descriptions of the classical, the biblical, and everyday worlds “not displayed within a single action, but instead an abundance of actions in the most diverse tonalities [which] follow one another in quick succession” (189). And finally, Dante manages to achieve through his style a combination of past, present, and future, since the two Florentine men who rise out of their flaming tombs to accost Dante so peremptorily are in fact dead but seem to live on somehow in what Hegel called a “changeless existence” remarkably devoid neither of history nor of memory and facticity. Having been judged for their sins and placed inside their burning encasement inside the kingdom of the damned, Farinata and Cavalcante are seen by us at a moment when we have “left the earthly sphere behind; we are in an eternal place, and yet we encounter concrete appearance and concrete occurrence there. This differs from what appears and occurs on earth, yet it is evidently connected with it in a necessary and strictly determined relation” (191).

The result is “a tremendous concentration [in Dante’s style and vision]. We behold an intensified image of the essence of their being,
fixed for all eternity in gigantic dimensions, behold it in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives on earth” (192). What fascinates Auerbach is the mounting tension within Dante’s poem, as eternally condemned sinners press their cases and aspire to the realization of their ambitions even as they remain fixed in the place assigned to them by Divine Judgment. Hence, the sense of futility and sublimity exuded simultaneously by the Inferno’s “earthly historicity,” which is always pointed in the end toward the white rose of the “Paradiso.” So then “the beyond is eternal and yet phenomenal. … [I]t is changeless and of all time and yet full of history” (197). For Auerbach, therefore, Dante’s great poem exemplifies the figural approach, the past realized in the present, the present prefiguring as well as acting like a sort of eternal redemption, the whole thing witnessed by Dante the pilgrim, whose artistic genius compresses human drama into an aspect of the divine.

The refinement of Auerbach’s own writing about Dante is truly exhilarating to read, not just because of his complex, paradox-filled insights, but as he nears the end of the chapter, because of their Nietzschean audacity, often venturing toward the unsayable and the inexpressible, beyond normal or for that matter even divinely set limits. Having established the systematic nature of Dante’s universe (framed by Aquinas’ theocratic cosmology), Auerbach offers the thought that for all of its investment in the eternal and immutable, the
Divine Comedy
is even more successful in representing reality as basically human. In that vast work of art “the image of man eclipses the image of God,” and despite Dante’s Christian conviction that the world is made coherent by a systematic universal order, “the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns
against
that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it” (202). Auerbach’s great predecessor Vico had flirted with the idea that the human mind creates the divine, not the other way around, but living under the Church’s umbrella in eighteenth-century Naples, Vico wrapped his defiant proposition in all sorts of formulae that seemed to preserve history for Divine Providence, and not for human creativity and ingenuity. Auerbach’s choice of Dante for advancing the radically humanistic thesis carefully works through the great poet’s Catholic ontology as a phase transcended by the Christian epic’s realism, which is shown to be “ontogenetic,” that is, “we are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding” (202).

Yet Dante’s Christian and post-Christian achievement could not have
been realized had it not been for his immersion in what he inherited from classical culture — the capacity to draw human figures clearly, dramatically, and forcefully. In Auerbach’s view, Western literature after Dante draws on his example but is rarely as intensely convincing in its variety, its dramatic realism, and stark universality as he was. Successive chapters of
Mimesis
treat medieval and early Renaissance texts as departures from the Dantean norm, some of them like Montaigne in his
Essais
stressing personal experience at the expense of the symphonic whole, others such as the works of Shakespeare and Rabelais brimming over with a linguistic verve and resourcefulness that overwhelms realistic representation in the interests of language itself. Characters like Falstaff or Pantagruel are realistically drawn to a certain degree, but what is as interesting to the reader as their vividness are the unprecedented riotous effects of the author’s style. It is not a contradiction to say that this could not have happened without the emergence of humanism, as well as the great geographical discoveries of the period: both have the effect of expanding the potential range of human action while also continuing to ground it in earthly situations. Auerbach says that Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, adumbrate “a basic fabric of the world, perpetually weaving itself, renewing itself, and connected in all its parts, from which all this arises and which makes it impossible to isolate any one event or level of style. Dante’s general, clearly delimited figurality, in which everything is resolved in the beyond, in God’s ultimate kingdom, and in which all characters attain their full realization only in the beyond, is no more” (327).

From this point on, reality is completely historical, and it, rather than the Beyond, has to be read and understood according to laws that evolve slowly. Figural interpretation took for its point of origin the sacred word, or Logos, whose incarnation in the earthly world was made possible by the Christ-figure, a central point, as it were, for organizing experience and understanding history. With the eclipse of the divine that is presaged in Dante’s poem, a new order slowly begins to assert itself, and so the second half of
Mimesis
painstakingly traces the growth of historicism, a multiperspectival, dynamic, and holistic way of representing history and reality. Let me quote him at length on the subject:

Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions. When people realize
that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the direction taken by their development (443-444).

Auerbach never loses sight of his original ideas about the separation and mingling of styles — how, for instance, classicism in France returned to the vogue for antique models and the high style, and late-eighteenth-century German romanticism overturned those norms by way of a hostile reaction to them in works of sentiment and passion. And yet in a rare moment of severe judgment, Auerbach shows that, far from using the advantages of historicism to represent the complexity and social change that were overtaking contemporary reality, early-nineteenth-century German culture (with the exception of Marx) turned away from it out of a fear of the future, which to Germany seemed always to be barging in at the culture from the outside in forms such as revolution, civil unrest, and the overturning of tradition.

Goethe comes in for the harshest treatment, even though we know that Auerbach loved his poetry and read him with the greatest pleasure. I do not think it is reading too much into the somewhat judgmental tone of
chapter 17
of
Mimesis
(“Miller the Musician”) to recognize that
in its stern condemnation of Goethe’s dislike of upheaval and even of change itself, his interest in aristocratic culture, his deep-seated wish to be rid of the “revolutionary occurrences” taking place all over Europe, and his inability to understand the flow of popular history, Auerbach was discussing no mere failure of perception but a profound wrong turn in German culture as a whole that led to the horrors of the present. Perhaps Goethe is made to represent too much. But were it not for his withdrawal from the present and for what he otherwise might have done for bringing German culture into the dynamic present, Auerbach speculates that Germany might have been integrated “into the emerging new reality of Europe and the world might have been prepared more calmly, have been accomplished with fewer uncertainties and less violence” (451-452).