Mimesis (5 page)

At the time these regretful and actually understated lines were being written in the early 1940s, Germany had unleashed a storm on Europe that swept all before it. Before that, the major German writers after Goethe were mired in regionalism and a marvelously traditional conception of life as a vocation. Realism, as an overall style, never emerged in Germany, and except for Fontane, there was very little in the language that had the gravity, universality, and synthetic power to represent modern reality until Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks
in 1901. There is a brief acknowledgment that Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt were more in touch with their own time, but neither of course was “concerned with the realistic portrayal of contemporary reality” (519). As against the chaotic irrationality ultimately represented by the anachronistic ethos of National Socialism, Auerbach therefore locates an alternative in the realism of mainly French prose fiction in which writers such as Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust sought to unify the fragmented modern world — with its unfolding class struggle, its industrialization, and its economic expansion combined with moral discomfort — in the eccentric structures of the modernist novel. And these replace the correspondence between Eternity and History that had enabled Dante’s vision, and which was now completely overtaken by the disruptive and dislocating currents of historical modernity.

The last few chapters of
Mimesis
thus seem to have a different tone than what goes before them. Auerbach is now discussing the history of his own time, not that of the medieval and Renaissance past, nor that of relatively distant cultures. Evolving slowly from acute observation of events and characters in the mid-nineteenth century, realism in France (and, though he talks about it much less, England) takes on the character
of an aesthetic style capable of rendering sordidness and beauty with unadorned directness, although in the process master-technicians like Flaubert, unwilling to intervene in the rapidly changing world of social upheaval and revolutionary change, also formulated an ethic of disinterested observation. It is enough to be able to see and represent what is going on, although the practice of realism usually concerns figures from low or, at most, bourgeois life. How this then turns into the magnificent richness of Proust’s work based on memory, or into the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, is a topic that makes for some of Auerbach’s most impressive later pages, though once again we should remind ourselves that what Auerbach is also describing is how his own work as a philologist emerges from modernity and is indeed an integral part of the representation of reality. Thus the modern Romance philology exemplified by Auerbach acquires its special intellectual identity by a kind of conscious affiliation with the realistic literature of its own time: the uniquely French achievement of dealing with reality from more than a local standpoint, universally, and with a specifically European mission.
Mimesis
bears within its pages its own rich history of the analysis of evolving styles and perspectives.

To help one understand the cultural and personal significance of Auerbach’s quest, I’d like to recall the laboriously complicated narrative structure of Mann’s postwar novel
Dr. Faustus
(published after Auerbach’s work), which, far more explicitly than
Mimesis
, is a story both of modern German catastrophe as well as the attempt to understand it. The terrible story of Adrien Leverkuhn, a prodigiously endowed composer who makes a pact with the devil to explore the furthest reaches of art and mind, is narrated by his much less gifted childhood friend and companion, Serenus Zeitblom. Whereas Adrien’s wordless musical domain allows him to enter the irrational and the purely symbolic on his way down into terminal madness, Zeitblom, who is a humanist and scholar, tries to keep up with him, translating Adrien’s musical journey into sequential prose, struggling to make sense of what defies ordinary comprehension. Mann suggests that both men represent the two aspects of modern German culture: one as embodied in Adrien’s defiant life and his pathbreaking music, which takes him beyond ordinary sense into the irrational demonic; the other as delivered in Zeitblom’s sometimes bumbling and awkward narrative, that of a closely connected friend witnessing that which he is powerless to stop or prevent.

The novel’s fabric is actually made up of three strands. In addition to Adrien’s story and Zeitblom’s attempts to grapple with it (which include
the story of Zeitblom’s own life and career as scholarly humanist and teacher), there are frequent allusions to the course of the war, concluding with Germany’s final defeat in 1945. That history is not referred to in
Mimesis
, nor of course is there anything in it like the drama and the cast of characters that animate Mann’s great novel. But in its allusions to the failure of German literature to confront modern reality, and Auerbach’s own effort in his book to represent an alternative history for Europe (Europe perceived through the means of stylistic analysis),
Mimesis
is also an attempt to rescue sense and meanings from the fragments of modernity with which, from his Turkish exile, Auerbach saw the downfall of Europe, and Germany in particular. Like Zeitblom, he affirms the recuperative and redemptive human project for which, in its patient philological unfolding, his book is the emblem, and again resembling Zeitblom, he understands that like a novelist, the scholar must reconstruct the history of his own time as part of a personal commitment to his field. Yet Auerbach specifically forswears the linear narrative style, which, despite its numerous interruptions and parentheses, works so powerfully for Zeitblom and his readers.

Thus in comparing himself to modern novelists such as Joyce and Woolf, who re-create a whole world out of random, usually unimportant moments, Auerbach explicitly rejects a rigid scheme, a relentless sequential movement, or fixed concepts as instruments of study. “As opposed to this,” he says near the end, “I see the possibility of success and profit in a method which consists in letting myself be guided by a few motifs which I have worked out gradually and without a specific purpose … which have become familiar and vital to me in the course of my philological activity” (548). What gives him the confidence to surrender to those motifs without a specific purpose is the realization that no one person can possibly synthesize the whole of modern life, and second, that there is an abiding “order and … interpretation of life which arise from life itself: that is, those which grow up in the individuals themselves, which are to be discerned in their thoughts, their consciousness, and in a more concealed form in their words and actions. For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self” (549).

This testimonial to self-understanding is a deeply affecting one, I think. Several recognitions and affirmations are at play and even at odds within it, so to speak. One of course is staking something as ambitious as the history of Western representations of reality neither on a preexisting method nor a schematic time-frame, but on personal interest,
learning, and practice alone. Second, this then suggests that interpreting literature is “a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self.” Third, rather than producing a totally coherent, neatly inclusive view of the subject, there is “not one order and one interpretation, but many, which may either be those of different persons or of the same person at different times; so that overlapping, complementing, and contradiction yield something that we might call a synthesized cosmic view or at least a challenge to the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis” (549).

Thus it all unmistakably comes down to a personal effort. Auerbach offers no system, no shortcut to what he puts before us as a history of the representation of reality in Western literature. From a contemporary standpoint there is something impossibly naive, if not outrageous, that hotly contested terms like “Western,” “reality,” and “representation” — each of which has recently brought forth literally acres of disputatious prose among critics and philosophers — are left to stand on their own, unadorned and unqualified. It is as if Auerbach was intent on exposing his personal explorations and, perforce, his fallibility to the perhaps scornful eye of critics who might deride his subjectivity. But the triumph of
Mimesis
, as well as its inevitable tragic flaw, is that the human mind studying literary representations of the historical world can only do so as all authors do — from the limited perspective of their own time and their own work. No more scientific a method or less subjective a gaze is possible, except that the great scholar can always buttress his vision with learning, dedication, and moral purpose. It is this combination, this mingling of styles out of which
Mimesis
emerges. And to my way of thinking, its humanistic example remains an unforgettable one, fifty years after its first appearance in English.

MIMESIS

1

ODYSSEUS’ SCAR

R
EADERS
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. The stranger has won Penelope’s good will; at his request she tells the housekeeper to wash his feet, which, in all old stories, is the first duty of hospitality toward a tired traveler. Euryclea busies herself fetching water and mixing cold with hot, meanwhile speaking sadly of her absent master, who is probably of the same age as the guest, and who perhaps, like the guest, is even now wandering somewhere, a stranger; and she remarks how astonishingly like him the guest looks. Meanwhile Odysseus, remembering his scar, moves back out of the light; he knows that, despite his efforts to hide his identity, Euryclea will now recognize him, but he wants at least to keep Penelope in ignorance. No sooner has the old woman touched the scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Odysseus’ foot drop into the basin; the water spills over, she is about to cry out her joy; Odysseus restrains her with whispered threats and endearments; she recovers herself and conceals her emotion. Penelope, whose attention Athena’s foresight had diverted from the incident, has observed nothing.

All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct discourse. Feelings though they are, with only a slight admixture of the most general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connection between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred. There is also room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that Odysseus takes the old woman by the throat to keep her from speaking, at the same time that he draws her closer to him with his left. Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear—wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor—are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.

In my account of the incident I have so far passed over a whole series of verses which interrupt it in the middle. There are more than seventy of these verses—while to the incident itself some forty are devoted before the interruption and some forty after it. The interruption, which comes just at the point when the housekeeper recognizes the scar—that is, at the moment of crisis—describes the origin of the scar, a hunting accident which occurred in Odysseus’ boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his grandfather Autolycus. This first affords an opportunity to inform the reader about Autolycus, his house, the precise degree of the kinship, his character, and, no less exhaustively than touchingly, his behavior after the birth of his grandson; then follows the visit of Odysseus, now grown to be a youth; the exchange of greetings, the banquet with which he is welcomed, sleep and waking, the early start for the hunt, the tracking of the beast, the struggle, Odysseus’ being wounded by the boar’s tusk, his recovery, his return to Ithaca, his parents’ anxious questions—all is narrated, again with such a complete externalization of all the elements of the story and of their interconnections as to leave nothing in obscurity. Not until then does the narrator return to Penelope’s chamber, not until then, the digression having run its course, does Euryclea, who had recognized the scar before the digression began, let Odysseus’ foot fall back into the basin.

The first thought of a modern reader—that this is a device to increase suspense—is, if not wholly wrong, at least not the essential explanation of this Homeric procedure. For the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless. The digressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspense, but rather to relax the tension. And this frequently occurs, as in the passage before us. The broadly narrated, charming, and subtly fashioned story of the hunt, with all its elegance and self-sufficiency, its wealth of idyllic pictures, seeks to win the reader over wholly to itself as long as he is hearing it, to make him forget what had just taken place during the foot-washing. But an episode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background. But Homer—and to this we shall have to return later—knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both
the stage and the reader’s mind completely. So it is with the passage before us. When the young Euryclea (vv. 401ff.) sets the infant Odysseus on his grandfather Autolycus’ lap after the banquet, the aged Euryclea, who a few lines earlier had touched the wanderer’s foot, has entirely vanished from the stage and from the reader’s mind.