436 Sarah Pourciau

SARAH POURCIAU

Istanbul, 1945

Erich Auerbach’s Philology of Extremity

Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has a profoundly pessimistic conclusion. The present paper takes seriouslythe consequences of the apocalyptic rhetoric therein introduced for Auerbach’s humanist historicist project,arguing that Auerbach holds responsible his own brand of secular humanism – whose story his book tellsand whose method it implements – for the “Nivellierungseffekt” he so clearly deplores. As an exile onthe outskirts of European space and time (Istanbul, 1945), Auerbach possesses a privileged philologicalperspective from which to synthesize a history nearing its end; the techniques he employs in order to do so,however, are for him complicit in the destruction. The final chapter of Mimesis, so often considered aweak point of the work, provides a condensed and lyrical account of this predicament.

The final pages of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) tell a story about endings.The end of the historicist era, the end of historical differentiation, the end of ir-reducible otherness, the end of European unity, the end of meaningful time, andthe end of human history all make a subtle but readable appearance in the lastchapter of his epoch-making study of western literary realism, under the aspectof a devastating and irreversible process of cultural leveling:

Unterhalb der Kämpfe und auch durch sie vollzieht sich ein wirtschaftlicher und kulturellerAusgleichsprozeß; es ist noch ein langer Weg bis zu einem gemeinsamen Leben der Men-schen auf der Erde, doch das Ziel beginnt schon sichtbar zu werden; am sichtbarsten,konkretesten erscheint es schon jetzt in der absichtslosen, genauen, inneren und äußerenDarstellung des beliebigen Lebensaugenblicks der verschiedenen Menschen. So scheint derkomplizierte Auflösungsprozeß, der zur Zerfaserung der äußeren Handlung, zu Bewußt-seinsspiegelung und Zeitenschichtung führte, nach einer sehr einfachen Lösung zu streben.Vielleicht wird sie allzu einfach sein für diejenigen, die unsere Epoche, trotz aller Gefahrenund Katastrophen, wegen ihres Lebensreichtums und des unvergleichlichen geschicht-lichen Standorts, den sie bietet, bewundern und lieben. Aber das sind nur wenige, und siewerden voraussichtlich von jener Vereinheitlichung und Vereinfachung, die sich ankündigt,kaum mehr als die ersten Anzeichen erleben (514).1

On this note – the elegiac, pathos-ridden note of a leave-taking lover turned her-ald of doom – Auerbach brings his book to its official conclusion, to the begin-ning of its end. The history of realism draws to a close and in its place we are left

1 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, Tübingen: FranckeVerlag, 1946. All future pages numbers refer to this edition.

arcadia Band 41 (2006) Heft 2 DOI 10.1515/ARCA.2006.027

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to anticipate: the “gemeinsames Leben der Menschen auf der Erde.” The teleo-logical endpoint of 8000 years of difference and struggle. The timeless essenceof the human. Speaking here in the name of the few for whom the end of the his-torical drama spells the end of the world, for whom a temporality without con-flict and plot necessarily degenerates into a meaningless, stagnant stream ofempty, unrelated moments, Auerbach quietly subjects the trope of the apocalyp-tic remnant to a cynical reversal, in which a backward-looking elite who will not

survive self-consciously steps aside to make way for the undifferentiated, post-apocalyptic masses who will.

This single act of reversal undermines nearly five hundred pages of explicitprivileging, for Mimesis elsewhere devotes much of its polemical power to cel-ebrating the poetic potential and philosophical complexity of ordinary, everydayreality and ordinary, everyday human beings – the very realms here associatedwith the approaching annihilation of historical difference. In doing so, it alsonullifies Auerbach’s (brief) attempt to salvage an affirmative element fromthe modernist texts whose “verschleierte, ausweglose Trauer” and “Abwendungvom praktischen Lebenswillen” he analyzes in his final chapter as evidence of apervasive “Weltuntergangsstimmung.” The modernist mode, he informs us, “istdoch nicht nur ein Symptom der Verworrenheit und Ratlosigkeit, nicht nur einSpiegel des Untergangs unserer Welt” (512)2, for in its emphasis on the “belie-bigen Lebensaugenblick,” it provides access to the previously unrepresentableabundance of everyday existence: “Welch eine Wirklichkeitstiefe gewinnt überallder einzelne Vorgang […]! Es erscheinen Bezirke des Vorgangs und Verbin-dungen zu anderen Vorgängen, die vordem kaum geahnt, nie gesehen undbeachtet wurden – und die doch bestimmend sind für unser wirkliches Leben”(513). How peculiar, then, that the very element which ostensibly allows themodern novel to transcend its role as an apocalyptic mirror turns out to providethe essential link between the enormous complexity of modernist literarytechniques and the cultural levelling process (“die einfache Lösung”) thosetechniques make visible. How peculiar, too, that Auerbach should choose to em-phasize this element as the point of convergence between modernist literarytechniques and his own methodology – “Man kann dies Vorgehen moder-ner Schriftsteller mit dem einiger moderner Philologen vergleichen […] ja mankann die vorliegende Untersuchung selbst als Beispiel anführen” (509) – whenthis decision so obviously implicates him in the very levelling process he de-plores.

Different readers have dealt with the bizarre implications of these final linesin markedly different ways. Those who choose to emphasize Auerbach’s demo-cratic, anti-hierarchical interest in the common man generally ignore them en-

2 Emphasis mine, S.P.

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tirely, as do those committed to a conception of Auerbach as enemy of despairand proponent of future-oriented action.3 Readers who make a serious attemptto confront the book’s unambiguously pessimistic conclusion tend to focus onthe pathos of its tone, as a rare instance in which Auerbach’s personal sense of“moral urgency” takes clear precedence over the rigorous philologist’s committ-ment to scholarly objectivity and “ironic detachment.”4 According to this posi-tion, Auerbach’s struggle against the growing hegemony of an absolute relativ-ism, his insistence that philological values must take their validity from the objectof investigation rather than the arbitrary personal experience of the interpreter,clashes here with his equally profound awareness of his own, rooted perspectiveand the necessarily fragmentary character of his synthesizing vision – an aware-ness certainly intensified, as his readers seldom hesitate to point out, by the par-ticularities of his position as a Jew in exile.

Auerbach himself acknowledges the all-encompassing significance of hisconcrete historical situation by performatively re-inscribing his finished bookwithin the dates of its production: a near empty page between the title and theopening lines contains the deceptively neutral phrase, “Geschrieben zwischenMai 1942 und April 1945,” which looks forward to an equally laconic reminder inthe epilogue: “Dazu kommt noch, daß die Untersuchung während des Krieges inIstanbul geschrieben wurde” (518). Such a framing device unmistakably anchorsAuerbach’s completed interpretive project in a moment of crisis experienced at

3 Claus Uhlig goes so far as to suggest that the analyses of Auerbach’s final and most openly pessi-mistic chapter “could fade with time” – in opposition to the far more affirmative chapter on Mi-chel de Montaigne, which Uhlig believes “will never lose its luster” – since modern reality, heclaims, remains largely inaccessible to Auerbach’s particular hermeneutic methods. Devaluingthe final chapter as a piece of inferior interpretive work allows Uhlig to portray Auerbach as anunambiguous proponent of the democratic cause, a champion of the common man (Claus Uhlig,“Auerbach’s ‘Hidden’ (?) Theory of History,” in: Seth Lerer (ed.), Literary History and the Challenge

of Philology: the Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 36–49, esp.pp. 46 and 48). Jesse Gellrich ends his study, “Figura, Allegory, and the Question of History,”by comparing Walter Benjamin’s pessimistic understanding of allegory – as a profoundly non-redemptive form of signification – with Auerbach’s ostensibly life-affirming commitment to theirreducible “strangeness” of true historicity (a strangeness the study aligns with Auerbach’s ownexperience of estrangement as a German Jew writing in Istanbul). He makes no attempt to ac-count for the unmistakable pessimism of Auerbach’s eschatological conclusion (in Lerer,pp. 107–123).

4 The terms are taken from David Damrosch, whose study “Auerbach in Exile” investigatesAuerbach’s ambivalent attitude toward his own interpretive role as shaping agent (in Comparative

Literature 47:2, 1995, pp. 97–117). See also Geoffrey Green, “Erich Auerbach and the ‘InnerDream’ of Transcendence,” in Lerer, Literary History (see note 3), pp. 214–226. Green celebratesAuerbach’s pathos of estrangement as the poignant life force of Mimesis, and credits his “simul-taneous engagement and detachment of self within the text” with anticipating “an inherent post-modernist strategy,” p. 220.

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the furthest boundary of European time and space, in the liminal predicament ofthe philologist writing from Istanbul in the year 1945. Auerbach’s own under-standing of the spatio-temporal extremity of his historical situation, however,would appear to take a rather different and significantly more disturbing formthan most readers of his concluding burst of pathos are willing to admit. For re-gardless of how one chooses to interpret his final lines, there is no escaping theparadoxical fact that the epoch for which he professes such nobly understatedloyalty, the epoch he loves “trotz aller Gefahren und Katastrophen, wegen ihresLebensreichtums und des unvergleichlichen geschichtlichen Standorts, den siebietet,” is none other than the era of fascism, genocide, and a Europe torn apartby two world wars. The unambiguously positive notion of Lebensreichtum lendsAuerbach’s depiction of historical crisis a distinctly vitalist spin. It is an emptyand, under the circumstances, rather tasteless prioritization of experiential abun-dance that would be utterly unthinkable without the aestheticizing distance builtinto his spectatorial viewpoint. His position as exile in neutral Istanbul provideshim with precisely the kind of “unvergleichlichen geschichtlichen Standort” heelsewhere affirms as the proper perspective of all true philology, from which thephilologist can witness the drama of history unfold, as it draws to a close for alleternity.5 The language he employs in the final lines of Mimesis can not there-fore be dismissed as an anomalous outburst born of exilic despair, a catharticmoment in which the interpreting self overwhelms the interpreted object andthe dispassionate philologist gives way to the experiencing man. The Auerbachwho here so movingly mourns an era of unspeakable carnage for the sake of thedialectical spectacle it affords is the same Auerbach who will later refer to theprogression of human history as a “Schauspiel” and the two world wars as a“praktische[s] Seminar in Weltgeschichte.”6 Crisis appears in all of these cases asthe precondition of true philology, the apocalyptic interpretive standpoint as theessentially philological mode of experiencing the world. Far from leaving philol-ogy behind to make room for an unusual moment of subjective expression,Auerbach’s final lines thus give voice, radicalized and empowered almost beyondrecognition, to the philological perspective as such.

There remains the question of how to reconcile this radicalization of thephilological project with the unmistakable humanist thrust of the work itself.Paul Bové, in his insightful study Intellectuals in Power : A Geneology of Critical

Humanism, suggests that the “modern eschaton” called into play by Auerbach’sconclusion should be read as a subtle acknowledgement of what will turn out to

5 The “elsewhere” in question is the essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” which first appearedsome seven years after the war in a collection of essays edited by cultural purists Walter Muschgand Emil Staiger: Weltliteratur. Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag, Bern: Francke Verlag,1952, pp. 39–50.

6 Muschg/Staiger, Weltliteratur (see note 5), pp. 41 and 45.

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be Bové’s own thesis: “History’s trick has been to turn humanism against itself.”7

There can be little question that Bové’s formulation is apt. Secular humanists,after all, devote themselves almost by definition to the study of a hidden, humanessence they hope to render visible, yet in Auerbach’s account it is precisely thenewly visible nature of this once-hidden essence that spells the end of humanisthistoricism. Bové, however, never tells us why.8 Why, in the final lines of Mimesis,does the realization of the humanist dream end up looking so much like a night-mare? How does Auerbach’s mournful preference for his own age – “trotz allerGefahren und Katastrophen” – over the approaching humanist utopia of equal-ity and harmony affect the conceptual framework of Mimesis? What exactly doesthis peculiar passage, with its apocalyptic undertones and suffocating atmos-phere of closure, have to do with the gargantuan preservationist effort it con-cludes and – to all appearances – undermines? The pathos that bursts onto thescene in the final lines does not emerge from a conceptual vacuum, even if itdoes arrive unannounced. In order to trace the arc of its progress, we must re-turn to the beginning of the book and watch, once again, as Auerbach draws hiswell-known distinction between Homer and the Hebrew scriptures, for it is herethat he establishes the conceptual categories that shape his project.

A close, critical look at these two stylistic modes requires a careful analysis ofAuerbach’s own words on the subject, and these words must therefore be repro-duced at some length. He begins with Homer. After introducing the famous foot-washing episode – taken from the description of Odysseus’ homecoming – as an il-lustration of the Homeric style, he makes the following preliminary observations:

Dies alles wird genau ausgeformt und mit Muße erzählt […] Klar umschrieben, hell undgleichmäßig belichtet, stehen oder bewegen sich Menschen und Dinge innerhalb einesüberschaubaren Raumes; und nicht minder klar, restlos ausgedrückt, auch im Affektwohlgeordnet, sind die Gefühle und Gedanken (5).

7 Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power. A Geneology of Critical Humanism, New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1986, p. 96. Bové’s study focuses primarily on the various ways in which intellectual en-deavors like Mimesis can serve to reenforce the authority of the intellectuals who author them:“Not incidentally, this response to what is, for Auerbach, little less than a modern eschatonuniquely positions a certain elite group of academic humanistic intellectuals as the last reservoirof value, knowledge, mastery, and method in this moment of terrible crisis,” p. 91.

8 Bové breaks the flow of Auerbach’s concluding lines into two distinct moments: “das elementarGemeinsame unseres Lebens” rendered visible by modern literature receives a positive valu-ation, while the “wirtschaftlicher und kultureller Ausgleichsprozeß” is clearly negative. Auer-bach’s dilemma, he concludes, springs from the realization that “the truth of the present momentis that this ontological commonality of men is being collectivized,” p. 94. Ontological common-ality good, collectivization bad. Yet by introducing a distinction where Auerbach himself makesnone, Bové has overlooked the true enigma of the passage. For Auerbach, the negatively markedleveling process occurs as a direct result of the commonality of man, and his refusal to performthe clear separation Bové tries nevertheless to draw makes clear that the ontological commonal-ity of man is always already, by its very nature, collectivized and commodifiable.

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A few pages later, he characterizes the “Grundimpuls des homerischen Stils” asthe need to make all phenomena present both visually and palpably, in the full-ness of their plastic form (“die Erscheinungen ausgeformt, in allen Teilen tastbarund sichtbar zu vergegenwärtigen”). He continues:

[W]ie die einzelnen Erscheinungen selbst, so treten auch ihre Verhältnisse, die zeitlichen,örtlichen, kausalen, finalen, konsekutiven, vergleichenden, konzessiven, antithetischen undbedingenden Verschränkungen in vollendeter Bildung ans Licht; so daß ein ununterbro-chenes, rhythmisch bewegtes Vorüberziehn der Erscheinungen stattfindet, und sich nirg-ends eine Fragment gebliebene oder nur halb beleuchtete Form, nirgends eine Lücke, einAuseinanderklaffen, ein Blick in unerforschte Tiefen zeigt. Und dies Vorüberziehen der Er-scheinungen geschieht im Vordergrund, das heißt stets in voller örtlicher und zeitlicher Ge-genwart. Man sollte denken, daß die vielen Einschübe, das viele Vor- und Zurückgehen,eine Art Zeit- und Ortperspektive schaffen müßten […] Aber solch subjektivistisch-perspektivisches Verfahren, welches Vordergrund und Hintergrund schafft, so daß dieGegenwart sich nach der Vergangenheitstiefe öffnet, ist dem homerischen Stil völligfremd; er kennt nur Vordergrund, nur gleichmäßig beleuchtete, gleichmäßig objektive Ge-genwart […] (8–9).

Understood simply as a description of Homeric style, these passages could easilycause confusion, for the categories employed here seem in many ways more ap-propriate to a Winckelmann-inspired treatise on classical art than a literary analy-sis of an epic poem.9 Under Auerbach’s shaping gaze, Homer’s narrative emergesas a clearly circumscribed, uniformly illuminated, visually bounded, and phy-sically continuous space, within which the uninterrupted parade of sensory phe-nomena takes place. Forms and relations are well-defined and harmoniouslycombined; there are no rough edges or ruptures to disturb the planar surface, notemporal delays or postponements to endanger the illusion of absolute presence.It is almost as though he has forgotten that he is dealing with text.

But this is, indeed, precisely the point. Text, in the modern sense of a riddledemanding a reader, presupposes for Auerbach a notion of directional time,a past and future beyond and behind the immediate present of a rooted sub-ject. The “subjektivistisch-perspektivisches Verfahren,” to which the Homericpoems in their perpetual, static presence do not have access, opens into absenttemporal depths. In his characterization of biblical narrative, for which hechooses, significantly, the Genesis account of the binding of Isaac, Auerbach in-itially does little more than stand his extensive elaboration of Homeric attributeson its head, so that the analysis can take the form of a series of “on the otherhand”s: where the Homeric characters remain psychologically uncomplicated,their biblical counterparts are “vielschichtig” (14); where Homer’s syntax is hyp-totactic, the biblical structure is paratactic; where the Homeric poems express

9 Damrosch notes that the language employed here also recalls the “rounded totality” of Greekculture as conceived by Georg Lukács in Theorie des Romans (1920) (Damrosch, “Auerbach inExile”, see note 4, p. 101).

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everything on the surface, in the biblical narratives “[bleibt] alles unausgespro-chen” (13); and so on. The series peaks in the following paragraph:

Auf der anderen Seite [i.e. in the case of the biblical narrative] wird nur dasjenige an denErscheinungen herausgearbeitet, was für das Ziel der Handlung wichtig ist, der Rest bleibtim Dunkel; […] Ort und Zeit sind unbestimmt und deutungsbedürftig […] das Ganze, inhöchster und ununterbrocher Spannung auf ein Ziel gerichtet, und insofern viel einheit-licher, bleibt rätselvoll und hintergründig (14).

Like the Winckelmann-flavored language of the Homer passage, these lines sug-gest that the terms of Auerbach’s distinction may owe nearly as much to 18thcentury German texts – specifically, in this case, to Goethe and Schiller’s collab-orative theorizing of epic and dramatic forms – as they do to the ancient epicones. For though he disregards the generic component of Goethe and Schiller’sreflections, choosing to refer to the biblical narratives as “epic,” Auerbach none-theless adopts their conceptual opposition between a static portrayal of timelessessence and a directional representation of temporal, goal-oriented develop-ment, even pausing to cite Schiller directly on the subject of Homer’s “ruhigesDasein” (7).

With regard to the now-famous Hintergründigkeit, however, Auerbach feelscompelled to make clear that the concept he has in mind bears “broader anddeeper” implications than its obvious oppositional relation to the Homeric Vor-

dergrund would otherwise suggest. The reason lies in its intimate connection tothe one element of the biblical text that transcends the process of definition byopposition: the Jewish God. The appearance of the divine in the biblical textcontains, for Auerbach, a paradox that can not be thoroughly grasped through asimple negation of the Homeric style. On the one hand, it opens up the possi-bility of a perspective extending beyond the planar space of physical existence,for God always arrives from somewhere outside the plane: “er ist nicht in sei-ner Gegenwart umgreifbar, wie Zeus; es erscheint immer nur ‘etwas’ von ihm, erreicht immer in die Tiefe” (14). On the other hand, his very appearance suggeststhat the distance can somehow be negotiated, that the divine “elsewhere” caninteract meaningfully with the human “here.” Indeed, “die erhabene WirkungGottes greift hier so tief in das Alltägliche ein, daß die beiden Bezirke des Erha-benen und des Alltäglichen nicht nur tatsächlich ungetrennt, sondern grund-sätzlich untrennbar sind” (26). It is this “everyday” experience of qualitative dif-ference, occasioned by a confrontation with the divine rupture, that definitivelydifferentiates the biblical topology of perspectival depth from the evenly illumi-nated surface of the Homeric poems.

It is this experience, too, that provides Auerbach with his paradigmatic figurefor the uneasy union of meaning and materiality that underlies a conception oftext and history as “deutungsbedürftig.” Homer’s bounded, tautological surfacerefers to nothing outside itself; it contains no concealed meaning in its nonexist-ent depths. “Man kann Homer analysieren,” Auerbach explains, “[…] aber man

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kann ihn nicht deuten” (16). The biblical narratives, in contrast, demand the veryinterpretation the Homeric poems supposedly resist:

In ihnen inkarniert sich Lehre und Verheißung, unscheidbar sind diese letzteren in sie hin-eingeschmolzen; eben darum sind sie hintergründig und dunkel, sie enthalten zweiten, ver-borgenen Sinn […] Die Lehre und das Streben nach Erleuchtung sind unlösbar mit derSinnlichkeit der Erzählung verbunden (17).

Just as God can never wholly manifest himself in the realm of human existence,so the sensory material of the biblical narrative simultaneously reveals and con-ceals its epistemological truths. The insistence that such truths can be contained,however partially, within the textual frame – like the emphasis on the concrete,phenomenal appearance of a supersensible God – makes possible an entirelynew approach to text. No longer defined solely by the Homeric attempt to re-produce the vivid sensuality of the plastic arts, narrative acquires its unique ca-pacity to mean. This capacity, however, relies on precisely the kind of referentialgesture the self-contained world of the Homeric poems tries successfully toavoid, for the narrative can only derive its epistemological resonance fromclaims that implicitly exceed the textual scope. From the biblical perspective, thepurpose of literary production consists in bearing witness to a single, interpre-tive worldview that anchors and gives meaning to the whole, and only the suc-cess of this testimony, irrespective of aesthetic criteria like those that shape theHomeric poems, can legitimate the Hebraic version of narrative. “Das Deuten,”Auerbach notes, “wird in einem bestimmten Sinne zu einer allgemeinenMethode der Wirklichkeitsauffassung” (18). Within his spatially differentiateduniverse of surfaces and depths, foregrounds and backgrounds, this approachbespeaks a vertical orientation:

Der weltgeschichtliche Anspruch und das ständig bohrende, ständig in Konflikten sichauseinandersetzende Verhältnis zu einem einzigen, verborgenen und doch erscheinendenGott, welcher verheißend und fordernd die Weltgeschichte lenkt, verleiht den Erzählungendes Alten Testaments eine ganz andere Perspektive als sie Homer besitzen kann […] So vielvereinzelter, horizontal unverbundener die Erzählung und Erzählungsgruppen neben-einander stehen als die der Ilias und Odyssee, so viel stärker ist ihre gemeinsame vertikaleBindung, die sie alle unter einem Zeichen zusammenhält, und die Homer gänzlich fehlt(19).

It is the Hebrew scriptures, in the doubled verticality of their “Auffassungs- und

Darstellungsweise,” that introduce into the western literary tradition the twintasks of textual and historical interpretation (10).

Auerbach clearly intends these conclusions regarding the Homeric and He-braic modes of representation to develop organically out of his textual analyses.The two opposing styles introduced in the first chapter delineate the perpendi-cular axes that structure his entire book, thus providing him with what he willlater term an Ansatzpunkt, a notion characterized by the following methodologi-cal observations:

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Der Ansatz soll nichts Allgemeines sein, was von außen an den Gegenstand herangetragenwird – er soll aus ihm herausgewachsen sein, ein Stück von ihm selbst. Die Dinge selbst sol-len zur Sprache kommen […].10

All the more surprising, then, that here the texts do not speak. They do not speakbecause, unlike the other passages analyzed within the framework of Mimesis,they are not cited. Instead, Auerbach speaks for them, first paraphrasing, thenbriefly analyzing, and finally synthesizing and concluding. This textual vacuumdoes not occur for ideological reasons, as should be clear from the methodologi-cal statement cited above, but rather because Auerbach does not read Greek andHebrew, and therefore can not subject these particular texts to the same rigor-ous, philological analysis he performs at other points in his text. The pragmaticorigin of the problem does not, however, abolish the theoretical difficulty, sincethe absence of citation makes it nearly impossible to determine where the textends and Auerbach begins. By the time he reaches his conclusions, and occasion-ally even before, it is no longer clear whether he is speaking for the texts or over

them, taking them apart in order to reveal the paradigm or reconstituting them inits image. This is true particularly with regard to the Homer passages, whichabound with concrete instances of interpretive distortion.11

10 Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (see note 5), pp. 39–50, p. 49. In “Epilogomena zuMimesis,” a brief essay composed around the same time as “Philologie der Weltliteratur” and in-tended as a response to various critics, Auerbach describes the method of Mimesis in very similarterms: “Meine Bemühung um Genauigkeit bezieht sich auf das Einzelne und Konkrete. Das All-gemeine hingegen […] sollte sich nach äußerster Möglichkeit dem jeweils Einzelnen fügen, undist jeweils nur aus dem Zusammenhang zu verstehen. Das Ordnen muß so geschehen, daß es dasindividuelle Phänomen frei entfaltet leben läßt” (in Romanische Forschungen. Vierteljahresschrift für

romanische Sprachen und Literaturen 65, 1/2, 1953, p. 15).11 The most obvious of these concerns his use of the example of Patroclus, sent off in Book 16 of

the Iliad to fight in Achilles’ place, in order to demonstrate that Achilles “[verliert] fast jede Ge-genwart, solange er nicht körperlich gegenwärtig ist” (15). A glance at the original text makesclear the almost incomprehensible inappropriateness of this illustrative choice, for the details ofthe episode make rather the opposite point. What Auerbach neglects to mention in his passingreference is that Patroclus enters the battle wearing Achilles’ armor, in order to fool the enemy war-riors into thinking that Achilles’ himself has swallowed his fury and joined the fight; the ruseworks, and the borrowed garments therefore serve to keep Achilles constantly before thereader’s eyes. (Consider, for instance, the following verses, which describe Patroclus entering thefray: “The Trojans, soon as they saw Menoetius’ gallant son, / himself and his loyal driver flare inbrazen gear – / all their courage quaked, their columns buckled, / thinking swift Achilles hadtossed to the winds / his hard rage that held him back by the ships,” p. 421. The Iliad. Trans. Ro-bert Fagles, New York: Penguin Books, 1990.) Another such example is the pointed irony of thedialogue between Penelope and a disguised Odysseus in Book 19, just after the foot washingscene. It is possible, of course, to read this scene, in which Penelope narrates a prophetic dreamand announces the archery context, as simply an exchange between a polite and sympatheticvagabond and his gracious lady host. The veiled double meaning of Penelope’s speech – her in-genuous plea for help with the interpretation of her dream, her unnecessary lingering over thedetails of the sleeping arrangements – must in this case be ascribed to the superior knowledge of

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Auerbach’s characterization of the horizontal form is problematic at a moregeneral level as well, since it seems unlikely that the description he offers in thisfirst chapter could realistically apply to any textual narrative, despite the fact thatit supposedly originated with one, depending as it does on textually unattainablecriteria like “vollkommene Klarheit,” “ununterbrochenes Vorüberziehen,” and“gleichmäßige Beleuchtung.” Ultimately, of course, every text requires a decisionas to what should be left out and what should stay, how much the reader can inferand how much must be made explicit, and the rules by which these decisions aremade – rules that remain external to the text and that have little or nothing to dowith the relationship between contiguous events – form an ordering principlethat can only be described as vertical. In the realm of textual narrative, the dif-ference is always a quantitative one of degree, rather than a qualitative one of di-rection. In other words, to extend Auerbach’s analogy into the absurd, all textshave slope.

What, in that case, does Auerbach hope to accomplish with his description ofsuch a form?12 Why force his texts to assume a perpendicular relation that hemust know is a distortion? We will have a better sense of the issues at stake if werecall from our brief analysis that the perpendicular axes of the chapter and workare defined by an opposition between dynamic and static forms of represen-tation, for this distinction invests his account of the two texts with an emotionaland moral urgency that would be incomprehensible in a commentary devotedsolely to the question of literary style. The reasons behind this urgency emergemost clearly in the passages devoted to the distinction between the legendaryand the historical:

the narrator. It is, however, impossible to discount a different reading, which suggests that Pene-lope has guessed at the identity of the stranger and that she is subtly providing him with a planfor the suitors’ prompt and tidy disposal. Auerbach’s analysis can not account for the presence ofsuch a passage in Homer’s text, a passage as enigmatic and hintergründig in its ultimate indeter-minacy as any scriptural narrative. Where, here, is the “vollkommene Klarheit” of the Homericstyle? What of the dictum that “nichts verborgen und unausgesprochen bleiben [darf]”? (8)There are, of course, many more such instances, in which the foundational distinctions of theepic-scripture comparison can be made to appear ridiculous when confronted with the actualtexts.

12 Auerbach himself has something to say on this subject: “Hier habe ich zunächst einzuräumen,daß die Motive der Spannungslosigkeit und ‘Vordergründigkeit’ Homers im ersten Kapitel allzustark betont sind, und daß ich überhaupt mit meinem ersten Kapitel nicht ganz zufrieden bin[…] Einen Augenblick erwog ich, das Homerkapitel ganz fallen zu lassen – für meine Zweckehätte es genügt mit der Zeit um Christi Geburt zu beginnen. Aber eine Einleitung zu finden, diean Deutlichkeit und Wirksamkeit für die Problemstellung sich mit dem Homerkapitel hättemessen können, erwies sich als undurchführbar […] es schien mir berechtigt, Motive stark her-vorzuheben, auf die es im Zusammenhang des Buches ankommt, und die richtig gesehen, wennauch einseitig herausgearbeitet sind” (“Epilegomena zu Mimesis”, see note 10, p. 2).

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[Die Sage] verläuft übermäßig glatt. Alles Querlaufende, aller Reibungswiderstand, allesSonstige, Sekundäre, welches in die Hauptereignisse und Hauptmotive hineinspielt, allesUnentschiedene, Gebrochene und Schwankende, welches den klaren Gang der Handlungund die einfache Richtung der handelnden Personen verwirrt, ist ausgewaschen. Die Ge-schichte, welche wir miterleben oder aus Zeugnissen Miterlebender erfahren, verläuft sehrviel uneinheitlicher, widerspruchsvoller und wirrer […] Die Sage ordnet den Stoff in ein-deutiger und entschiedener Weise, sie schneidet ihn aus dem sonstigen Weltzusammenhangheraus, so daß dieser nicht verwirrend eingreifen kann […] Man denke an die Geschichte,welcher wir selbst beiwohnen; wer etwa das Verhalten der einzelnen Menschen und Men-schengruppen beim Aufkommen des Nationalsozialismus in Deutschland, oder das Ver-halten der einzelnen Völker und Staaten vor und während des gegenwärtigen (1942) Krie-ges erwägt, der wird fühlen, wie unbrauchbar sie für die Sage sind […] und bei allenBeteiligten sind die Motive so vielschichtig, daß die Schlagworte der Propaganda nur durchroheste Vereinfachung zustande kommen – was zur Folge hat, daß Freund und Feind viel-fach die gleichen verwenden können (22).

Homer and the Hebrew Bible have disappeared for the moment, as though theywere all along only a means to this particular end, and they have left behind twohighly charged, conceptually unwieldy abstractions to finish off a battle that wasnever more than partly textual to begin with. The discussion enters the narrativepresent abruptly, without transition, but the marked increase in rhetorical inten-sity makes it possible to read this passage as a kind of surreptitious climax dis-guised as a digression. Auerbach jumps back and forth repeatedly between the de-ceptive surface of the legendary and the profoundly historical present – a presentdefinitively anchored by the jarringly precise parenthetical inscription “(1942)”and defined above all by its resistance to legendary simplification – until, in one ofthe most telling movements of the entire work, he suddenly brings the two to-gether by ascribing to the “literary” productions of propaganda the status of themodern legend. The undeniable relation between the Homeric horizontal and thefascist legendary expresses itself through a disturbing inversion of value. “Ausge-formt” reappears metamorphosed into “ausgewaschen,” “gleichmäßig belichtet”into “übermäßig glatt.” In place of the exhaustive expressivity, the rounded total-ity, the leisurely, all-encompassing inclusiveness of the Homeric style, there standsa frightening catalogue of exclusions which reads too much like a list of politicallyundesirable elements (“alles Querlaufende, aller Reibungswiderstand, alles Son-stige […] Gebrochene und Schwankende”) to function innocently as the “objec-tive” characterization of a representational form. In the realm of the modern leg-endary, real historical complication (1942) tips over into a false and falselytimeless simplicity, prefiguring the structure of the book’s concluding lines.

Auerbach, it turns out, is entirely aware of the counter-textual nature of hishorizontal paradigm, aware that in the realm of text its two-dimensional simplic-ity can be achieved only by means of a conjuring trick, and aware, too, of themutilations a text must undergo in order to achieve this illusion. His descriptionof the legendary chronicles this procedure, making clear in the process that, farfrom devaluing the paradigm as an explanatory figure, the impossible demands

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of the horizontal may actually engender the true terms of the discussion – a dis-cussion that now appears to concern itself primarily, albeit surreptitiously, withthe ethical implications of literary-historical forms. The inaccessibility of thehorizontal ideal necessitates, in the case of a horizontally-oriented text, an el-ement of deception at the origin of literary production; the apparently artlesssimplicity of the legendary always dissimulates a highly artificial process of(over)simplification. For Auerbach, this dissimulation is never entirely innocent,and his extremely ambivalent relation to the power of the Homeric style belieshis tolerant dismissal of its creator as a “harmloser Lügner” (16). The Homericnarratives “bezaubern uns und schmeicheln sich bei uns ein”; reading them, weare magically transported into their world (“hineingezaubert”) and become tem-porarily lost to our own, complex historical reality, an effect at which Homerclearly aims (“er umgarnt uns, er spinnt uns in sie ein”) (15). In these ostensiblydescriptive observations, we hear the anxiety called forth by the confrontationwith a magic that “snares” and “charms” its victim into loss of conscious con-trol, a magic, indeed, recognized as dangerous even within the realm of the leg-endary – think, for instance, of the sirens, the lotus eaters, or the terrible, trans-formative beauty of Circe. It is, however, the reference to propaganda, in its roleas the modern legendary, which clinches the case against the horizontal illusion,for here we see the source of the ethical urgency that, for Auerbach, legitimateshis distortion of the Homeric poems. Homer, after all, may qualify as a harmlessliar, but his modern day counterparts can not be so easily exonerated.

Homer, however, is not the only casualty of Auerbach’s war on modernity;the biblical narrative, too, appears here primarily as a sign of things to come. Tosee this, we need only recall the language he uses to describe the crucially un-Homeric relationship between biblical narrative and biblical meaning: “[D]ieGeschichten sind eben nicht, wie die Homers, bloß erzählte ‘Wirklichkeit’. Inihnen inkarniert sich Lehre und Verheißung.” And again, a few lines later: “DieLehre und das Streben nach Erleuchtung sind unlösbar mit der Sinnlichkeit derErzählung verbunden” (17).13 Biblical meaning, for Auerbach, occurs as a di-vinely inspired rupture in the smooth surface of epic self-containment, blastingopen the boundaries of the static, Homeric universe to animate the dead letter ofthe physical world, forcing it to gesture toward a transcendent beyond that re-veals itself – miraculously, provisionally – only by assuming bodily form. The no-tion of embodied meaning fascinates Auerbach for its ability to transcend boththe referential relationship of substitution, in which the sign disappears into thesignified once meaning has been achieved, and the tautological non-relationshipof self-identity, in which things merely are but never mean. In Auerbach’s biblicalparadigm, world and text become the meeting ground for irreconcilable oppo-sites, the precarious site of a transformative encounter between Word and Flesh.

13 Emphasis mine, S.P.

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The difficulty, of course, is that Auerbach here imposes his interpretation,and with it an entire theory of textual and historical meaning, onto a text farolder than the paradigm of incarnation he so clearly has in mind, and in doing so,effectively Christianizes the perspective he anachronistically refers to as Jewish –transforming the Akedah into a prefiguration of the Christian sacrifice.14 It is theChristian method of figural interpretation, with its emphasis on embodiedmeaning, which shapes Auerbach’s understanding of the Hebrew narrative andprovides him with a redemptive counterpart to the exclusions and dissimulationsof the horizontal legendary. The figural mode of comprehending history rests ona technique of reading developed by early Christian thinkers in order to assimi-late for a Christian teleology the “historical” material of the Hebrew scriptures.In his early essay, “Figura,” Auerbach describes it as follows: “Die Figuraldeu-tung stellt einen Zusammenhang zwischen zwei Geschehnissen oder Personenher, in dem eines von ihnen nicht nur sich selbst, sondern auch das andere be-deutet, das andere hingegen das eine einschließt oder erfüllt.”15 Both moments,though often separated by vast amounts of time, remain immersed “in dem flie-ßenden Strom, […] welcher das geschichtliche Leben ist,” and only the interpre-tive understanding that connects them, in accordance with a vertical organizingprinciple neither chronological nor causal, qualifies as a “geistiger Akt”.16

The authority of this interpretive understanding and, consequently, the au-thority of the figural connection, remains always provisional, for it depends on arevelation as yet only partially complete. The incarnation of the Word throughChrist’s embodied existence, which fulfills the already embodied history of theHebrew scriptures, gestures in turn toward a final sublimation, a final fulfillmentof history that will occur only at the end of time, a “Zukünftiges, […] welcheserst das Eigentliche, voll und wirklich und endgültig Geschehende sein wird.”17

At this point, however, the temporality becomes rather complicated. For thesame “ausbleibende verheißene Dritte” that will eventually transcend and pre-serve the original, historical duality of figure and fulfillment “ist, obgleich nochals Geschehen unvollendet, bereits in Gott vollständig erfüllt und war es in

14 This hermeneutic approach is perhaps not quite as bizarre as it might at first appear. Auerbach,after all, devoted much of his scholarly life to the works of the early church fathers. His apparentwillingness to christianize the Hebrew scriptures might, however, raise some doubt about one ofGeoffrey Green’s theses in his book Literary Criticism and the Structures of History. Erich Auerbach

and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Green reads Auerbach’s decisionto begin his investigation of the western literary tradition with the Hebrew scriptures as a gestureof political resistance, but it would be hard to argue, here, in light of the interpretation being of-fered, that Auerbach is really attempting to “re-judify” either the bible or the European traditionhe credits the bible with grounding.

15 Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Romanischen Philologie, Bern und München:Francke Verlag, 1967, pp. 55–92; citation taken from p. 77.

16 Auerbach, “Figura” (see note 15), p. 77.17 Auerbach, “Figura” (see note 15), p. 80.

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seiner Vorsehung von Ewigkeit her.”18 History as a succession of meaningful fig-ures, as “Gleichnis,” must therefore be considered “sowohl vorläufig als auchverhüllte jederzeitliche Wirklichkeit”; its true reality, unknowable from a tem-poral vantage point, is guaranteed by the extra-temporality of the third and finalinterpretive term and thus, ultimately, by the atemporality of a transcendentGod. Only God, himself outside history, can invest concrete historical materialwith the capacity to mean.19

Whether conceived as a rhetorical figure that maintains its literal, bodily char-acter – the conceptual foundation of the Incarnation20 – or as a literal reality that

18 Auerbach, “Figura” (see note 15), p. 81. The Hegelian resonances are not, of course, accidental.Auerbach’s reading of Dante – a reading which both inspires and directs his investigation of theterm “figura,” and with which the essay concludes – is deeply and explicitly (see “Figura,” p. 89)influenced by Hegel’s interpretation of the world of the Comedia as the realm of the figure fulfilled:“Statt einer besonderen Begebenheit hat [Dantes Gedicht] das ewige Handeln, den absolutenEndzweck, die göttliche Liebe in ihrem unvergänglichen Geschehen und ihren unabänderlichenKreisen zum Gegenstande, die Hölle, das Fegefeuer, den Himmel zu seinem Lokal und senkt nundie lebendige Welt menschlichen Handelns und Leidens und näher der individuellen Taten undSchicksale in dies wechsellose Dasein hinein […] zugleich aber steht das sonst Vergänglichste undFlüchtigste der lebendigen Welt objektiv in seinem Innersten ergründet, in seinem Wert und Un-wert durch den höchsten Begriff, durch Gott gerichtet, vollständig episch da” (G.W. Hegel, Vor-

lesungen über die Ästhetik III. Werke. Bd. 15, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986, pp. 406–7). Thenotion of the figural also contains, however, an implicit critique of Hegel’s prioritization of ab-straction, a prioritization that allows Hegel to subject the concept of concreteness to its famousdialectical inversion. Thus, shortly after acknowledging the significance of the Hegelian perspec-tive, Auerbach speaks of a figural perspective in which “die historische Wirklichkeit durch die tier-fere Bedeutung nicht aufgehoben, sondern bestätigt und erfüllt [wird]” (p. 90, emphasis mine, S.P.).

19 One of the most interesting consequences of this “middle road” between meaning and matter isthat the figural perspective implicitly collapses any meaningful distinction between historical real-ity and its textual representation. History, even in its extra-literary form, unfolds for the figuralworldview as a narrative in which God has inscribed hidden meanings to be parsed by the faith-ful. Auerbach does not explicitly note this peculiarity – perhaps because he, too, rejects such a dis-tinction. Consider, for instance, the passage in which he pronounces figural interpretation to bedifferent from symbolic or mythological interpretation “dadurch, daß sich die Realprophetie aufGeschichtsdeutung bezieht, ja von Haus aus Textinterpretation ist”: textual interpretation andhistorical understanding appear here as synonyms (“Figura,” see note 15, p. 80). The refusal to dif-ferentiate clearly between history and text shapes Auerbach’s entire conception of the philologi-cal project. Philology, in his eyes, is first and foremost a “historische Disziplin,” its literary subjectmatter “die innere Geschichte der letzten Jahrtausende” (Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltlitera-tur,” see note 5, p. 41). The figure, for Auerbach as well as for the Christian theologians, is alwaysreadable as both rhetorical moment and historical event. For an interesting attempt to confrontthe strangeness of this conflation, see Timothy Bahti’s study, “Auerbach’s Mimesis: Figural Struc-ture and Historical Narrative” (in: After Strange Texts. The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature. Ed.Gregory Jay and David Miller, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985, pp. 124–145).

20 This idea was also available to antiquity, though in substantially weaker form, as a category inQuintilian’s rhetorical handbook. See the passages in “Figura” devoted to Quintilian’s distinctionbetween “trope” and “figure”: the former names a category in which the figurative meaning actsas a substitute for the literal one, the latter a category in which the figurative usage appears along-side the literal meaning (Auerbach, “Figura”, see note 15, pp. 62–4).

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receives the provisional imprint of referential, figurative meaning, figural historymust continuously enact a kind of “Kampf zwischen sinnlicher Erscheinung undBedeutung” if it is to retain its redemptive function as a meeting ground of differ-ence (52). Defined against both meaningless contiguity and atemporal substitu-tion – the purely literal view of history, on the one hand, which perceives onlya “niemals abreißende horizontale Linie des weiteren Geschehens”21, and thepurely figurative or allegorical view on the other, which replaces the historical na-ture of the figural relationship with an abstract, theological concept – the figuralparadigm turns out to encode, among other things, a 20th century philologist’s re-sponse to the so-called crisis of values. Grounded in the rigorously provisionalreality of a truly time-bound form, the figural stands alone in the European tradi-tion as a viable source of real, historical meaning; it alone directs the trajectory ofMimesis, determines all interpretive value judgments, and justifies the oppositionbetween Homer and the Hebrew Bible, for it alone transcends the binaries ofmodern experience in the struggle to join meaning and matter. The anachronisminvolved in reading a medieval form against the backdrop of a modern dilemma isthe product of the perspectival method Auerbach unapologetically defends in“Epilegomena zu Mimesis,” as the only intellectually honest way of writing history:

[A]m Ende habe ich gefragt: wie sehen die Dinge im europäischen Zusammenhang aus?Einen solchen Zusammenhang kann heute niemand von anderswoher sehen als eben vonheute, und zwar von dem Heute, welches durch seine, des Sehenden, persönliche Herkunft,Geschichte und Bildung bestimmt ist […] Mimesis ist ganz bewußt ein Buch, das ein be-stimmter Mensch, in einer bestimmten Lage, zu Anfang der 1940er Jahre geschrieben hat.22

We will return presently to the question of Auerbach’s perspective; for the mo-ment, it suffices to note that the figural paradigm, understood as a theory ofmeaning in the context of a modern crisis, provides a roundabout answer to theproblem of secular humanism.

The answer goes something like this: The figural paradigm can generate nomeaning without God. It is God who introduces and anchors the possibility of atimeless, transcendent truth to be revealed at the end of time, and this truth, inturn, that gives history the directional energy of a drama. And it is God himself,a transcendent cipher entangled in a relation with the worldly immanence heoccasionally sees fit to rupture, who provides the model for the inherently para-doxical relationship between the provisional particulars of history and the time-less universal of truth – the relationship figural interpreters call meaning.Without God, then, the notion of meaning requires an alternative model, andMimesis prepares its readers to expect just such an alternative; according to thelogic of teleological overcoming that governs the first half of Auerbach’s history,the disappearance of God should produce a sea change on the level of the shift

21 Auerbach, “Figura”, see note 15, p. 81.22 Auerbach, “Epilogomena zu Mimesis” (see note 10), p. 18.

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from Homer to the Hebrew Bible, from Abraham to Christ. But this is not whathappens. Neither the European tradition as it appears in Mimesis, nor Mimesis

itself as the chronicle of that tradition manages to overcome the figural model inthe direction of a new paradigm. Instead, secular humanism simply adopts thefigural structures it inherits – and subtracts transcendence.

Let us take a closer look at how this works. Dante, famously, sounds the deathknell for the figural method of the pre-humanist age, and prepares the way forthe great tradition of human-centered meaning to come, by allowing the extra-ordinary intensity and concreteness of his human characters to overpower thevertical, meaning-bestowing frame of the timeless afterlife:

Es kommt zu einer alles andere überwältigenden, unmittelbaren Erfahrung des Lebens […]das Bild des Menschen tritt vor das Bild Gottes. Dantes Werk verwirklichte das christlich-figurale Wesen des Menschen und zerstörte es in der Verwirklichung selbst; der gewaltigeRahmen zerbrach durch die Übermacht der Bilder, die er umspannte […] in dieser Erfül-lung wird die Figur selbstständig (193).

There follows a period of two centuries during which the sublime and the every-day remain separated by the chasm Dante creates when he transcends the verti-cally-oriented interpretive space where otherworldly meaning and worldly matteronce met. The notion of the real as a potentially problematic sphere, infused withthe capacity to point beyond its own concrete thingness, first regains prominencein sixteenth century France with the innovations of Rabelais and, even more cru-cially, Montaigne. For if Auerbach’s Rabelais celebrates the amorphous but appar-ently unlimited potential for meaning beyond the tyranny of the Christian vertical,if for him reality appears for the first time as an open ocean of opportunities onwhich a post-figural humanity can float freely without succumbing to the rigor ofdirection, then it is Auerbach’s Montaigne who attempts to actualize this potentialby directing it toward a new interpretive goal, who replaces one teleology with an-other and in doing so, blazes a trail across the open sea for humanity to follow. Thesearch for a humanist model of meaning must therefore begin with Montaigne.

Montaigne himself begins with himself, turning inward to explore the subjecthe knows best in the dynamic fullness of its temporal unfolding, pragmaticallyand unapologetically positioning Michel de Montaigne, sixteenth century resi-dent and one-time mayor of Bordeaux, at the center of his interpretive universe.The principles behind his investigation are simple but revolutionary. Rather thaninterpreting history as a way of gaining access to a transcendent God, he will siftthrough the concrete material of his inner experience as a way of gaining accessto the human as such. Such a project presupposes the existence of the human es-sence it seeks to explore, defining it from the outset as the totality of possibilitiesin which the self, as human being, necessarily participates; it is the stipulated“fact” of participation, the presupposition of a meaningful, non-arbitrary rela-tionship between the human essence as realm of possibility and the concretehuman as sphere of actualization, that enables the self to assume the represent-

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ative function Montaigne assigns it in the passage Auerbach cites: “chaquehomme porte la forme entière de l’humaine condition” (271). An investigationof the self can stand in for an investigation of all human beings everywhere be-cause every self has at least potential access to every aspect of the human condi-tion, and thus to the totality of the human essence. This access remains merelypotential, however, so long as the various possibilities of humanness fail to takeconcrete shape within the world of experience, for only those aspects of thehuman condition that the self actually actualizes can be considered by Mon-taigne as material for his interpretive investigation. The human essence itselfdoes not exist for him, apart from its embodied revelation in the material worldof concrete experience, and even the relatively certain truths of self-knowledgeare never more than provisional. In Auerbach’s words:

[E]in solcher Versuch einer Wesensgewinnung durch Isolierung von den jeweiligen zufäl-ligen Kontingenzen würde ihm sinnlos erscheinen, da seiner Überzeugung nach das Wesensogleich verlorengeht, sobald man es aus der jeweiligen Zufälligkeit loslöst […] [E]r istüberzeugt, daß das Ganze der Erkenntnis sich dem Ausdruck entzieht (284).

Auerbach, of course, interprets Montaigne’s emphatic refusal to separate truthfrom world – together with his more prosaic but no less significant refusal toseparate mind and body – in terms of the Christian tradition of embodied mean-ing that Montaigne, as a nominal Catholic, would certainly have inherited. Butthis profound, structural affinity can neither disguise nor diminish for Auerbachthe radically new and distinctly non-Christian character of the immanent, humantruth the Essais seek. “Montaigne,” he assures us, “ist etwas Neues” (281).

Readers determined to pinpoint a paradigm shift will discover one in Auer-bach’s account of Montaigne, and they will not be wrong. Certainly Auerbachhimself understands his account this way, for Montaigne’s unorthodox interpre-tive approach emerges here quite clearly as the forerunner, not only of his ownphilological project, but of the secular humanist project per se:

[D]enn Montaigne zielt bei seiner Untersuchung des beliebigen eigenen Lebens im ganzenauf die Erforschung der humaine condition überhaupt, und er offenbart damit das heu-ristische Prinzip, dessen wir uns, bewußt oder unbewußt, in verständiger oder unverstän-diger Weise dauernd bedienen, wenn wir die Handlungen anderer Menschen zu verstehenund zu beurteilen bemüht sind, seien es die Handlungen unserer nächsten Umgebung oderferner liegende, politische und geschichtliche: wir legen an sie die Maßstäbe, die uns unsereigenes Leben und unsere eigene innere Erfahrung bieten; so daß unsere Menschen- undGeschichtserkenntnis abhängig ist von der Tiefe unserer Selbsterkenntnis und der Weiteunseres moralischen Horizonts (287).

This passage contains as good a description of the interpretive method Auer-bach considers his own as any of the more explicit reflections to be found inother texts.23 Indeed, in an earlier essay entitled “Giambattista Vico und die Idee

23 See, for instance, the methodological introduction to Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in

der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958, esp. pp. 11–15.

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der Philologie,” Auerbach celebrates the 18th century historian for developing astructure nearly identical to the one mentioned here in an effort to anchor hisgroundbreaking philological studies of primitive peoples. Vico’s notion of a sen-sus communis potentially available to every human being, grounded not in ab-stract concepts and definitions but on bodily “Instinkt und Gewohnheit,” allowshim, according to Auerbach, to close the as yet non-existent hermeneutic circle,anticipate German historicism, and write “das erste Werk der verstehenden Phi-lologie” – the very work Auerbach repeatedly credits with exerting such extra-ordinary influence on his own methods.24 Writing on Montaigne, however,Auerbach seems more intent on making the much broader claim that this par-ticular, anachronistically Diltheyian brand of secular humanism (or Vicoian his-toricism) introduces into the tradition a new and universally applicable way ofconfronting the world without a transcendentally anchored, vertical frame.

Yet for all the radical novelty of Montaigne’s orientation, the actual structureof the project outlined in these passages should look strikingly familiar. Indeed,if one conceives of interpreting self and interpretive object as two distinct his-torical events, separated by time but connected by a common ground of poten-tial humanity, Auerbach’s characterization of the figural method can function asan accurate description of their relation: “Die Figuraldeutung stellt einen Zu-sammenhang zwischen zwei Geschehnissen oder Personen her, in dem einesvon ihnen nicht nur sich selbst, sondern auch das andere bedeutet, das anderehingegen das eine einschließt oder erfüllt.” But where is God, who anchors thesystem and gives direction to the whole? Where is the atemporal third term thatcould guide the interpreting subject in establishing a non-arbitrary relation be-tween the event of its own being and the past event of an other? We have severalcandidates competing for this particular honor, since each version of the hu-manist interpretive project seems to include its own transcendent, atemporalterm, from Montaigne’s human essence, to Vico’s divine providence – otherwiseknown as the verum, in opposition to the concretely appearing and therefore pro-visional certum – to Auerbach’s own conception of history as drama, proceedingaccording to a plan that transcends the horizontal march of time.25 But whereasthe divine anchor of the figural paradigm occasionally ruptures the immanent

24 “Giambattista Vico und die Idee der Philologie,” in Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Romani-

schen Philologie (see note 15), pp. 233–241, esp. pp. 239–241.25 For an extremely lucid formulation of Auerbach’s conception of history and its foundation in the

ethical necessity of a hypothetical “plan,” accessible only to intuition and speculation, see theopening paragraph of the lecture entitled “Vico und Herder,” delivered in 1931 at the Deutsch-Italienischen Forschunginstitut Köln and printed in Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romani-

schen Philologie (see note 15), pp. 222–231. The purely heuristic character of the conceptuallynecessary third term, common to all post-Christian attempts to make meaning out of history, isexposed here with unusual clarity: “Mit der Auflösung der geschlossenen christlichen Welt inEuropa zerfällt die transzendente Sinngebung des menschlichen Lebens […],” p. 223.

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fabric of history through revelation, thereby securing the interpretive relationbetween temporal world and atemporal truth, its secular imitation remains con-scientiously beyond the reach of the realm whose concrete multiplicity it unifiesand fulfills. Since the content of the secular third term remains radically unknow-able, accessible only through the additive accumulation of concrete evidenceout of which organizing principles are supposed to somehow, spontaneouslyemerge, its terms have no power to guide interpretation. They are, in the end,little more than empty, totalizing abstractions, each one a different name for thepurely theoretical sum of all possible historical events.

Auerbach admits as much when he names Montaigne as the first to acknowl-edge what Auerbach himself understands to be the specifically modern phenom-enon of dislocation and rootlessness:

[E]r hat von allen Zeitgenossen am reinsten das Problem der Selbstorientierung des Men-schen gesehen; die Aufgabe, sich ohne feste Stützpunkte in der Existenz Wohnlichkeit zuschaffen. Bei ihm zum ersten Male wird das Leben des Menschen, das beliebige eigeneLeben als Ganzes, im modernen Sinne problematisch (296).26

This, then, is the real sense in which Montaigne is “etwas Neues.” Unlike hispredecessors, he undertakes the interpretive project of reading the world withoutany guarantee that truth and matter can actually be joined, “ohne feste Stütz-punkte” for the Christian structure he inherits but also without a reasonable al-ternative to the embodied meaning it generates. Under the influence of secular-ization, the figural paradigm comes unmoored and begins to float aimlesslyaround on Rabelais’ sea of possibilities. No longer able to point forward toward afuture fulfillment that could give provisional direction to the act of interpre-tation, it turns around to take its cue from the past in the hope that the events,given proper encouragement, will begin to speak for themselves. The only verti-cal element that remains – a pale shadow of God’s meaning-bestowing ruptures –is the vertical imposed by the interpreting self as a result of that peculiarly intu-itive and criterion-less negotiation between identity and difference, Verstehen andBeurteilen, which constitutes for Auerbach the “Kunst” of philology.27

26 In the final chapter Auerbach will rather conventionally assign culpability for this seasickness tothe historical situation surrounding the two world wars, to a breakdown in values that culminatesin a dangerously rootless relativism; here it becomes interestingly clear that his understanding ofthe dilemma is rather more complex.

27 “So bleibt die Erforschung geschichtlicher Vorgänge im weitesten Sinne […] eine Sache des ur-teilenden Verstehens oder des ‘Wiederauffindens’ im Geiste des Erforschenden […] Es ist einemit gelehrtem Material arbeitende Kunst” (Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum, see note 23,p. 11). See also “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (see note 5), p. 45: “Die historische Synthese, an diewir denken, obwohl sie nur auf der Grundlage wissenschaftlicher Durchdringung des Materialsihren Sinn finden kann, ist ein Erzeugnis persönlicher Intuition, und also nur vom Einzelnen zuerwarten.”

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Auerbach himself, of course, never discusses the secular “fulfillment” of thefigural paradigm in such terms.28 His responsibility, as he understands it, is to de-fend and preserve the dying tradition of a unified Europe, and he has no inten-tion of exposing an inheritance so vulnerable and precious to explicit accu-sations of such a damning kind. And yet, he can not avoid critique altogether; hisreverence for the figural paradigm and its theory of embodied meaning driveshim to acknowledge, however, subtly, the parodic degradation it endures in all itssecular transformations. It is therefore entirely possible to read the post-Danteportion of Mimesis as the thinly disguised story of a steady decline, in which thevarious permutations of the figural lose more and more of their substance andpower, the further they get from the anchoring mechanism on which their struc-ture depends.

Standing at the very origin of secular humanism, Rabelais and Montaigneboth fare rather well in this regard, for Auerbach makes clear in both cases thattheir admirable refusal to separate mind from body, along with their tendency toassign a non-arbitrary spiritual weight to the concrete, worldly material of theirnarratives, derives directly from the Christian tradition of incarnate truth out ofwhich they both spring (see 258, 295). These first two humanists participate forAuerbach in something like a liminal moment of grace, during which the Chris-tian frame manages to exert considerable influence even at the instant of beingtranscended. Even so, there are a few dire signs of things to come. When Auer-bach observes, for instance, that the Rabelaisian man tends to forfeit the fixedboundaries of the Christian individual in favor of a protean participation in thecommon, bodily experience of man as natural animal – “die gemeinsamen, über-individuellen Züge, zumal die animalischen, instinktiven, werden sehr stark her-vorgehoben” (264) – or when he exempts Montaigne from a future levelling pro-cess for which the secular (“laienhafte”) reflections of the Essais, with their acutesensitivity to the “modern” dilemma of interpretive disorientation, nonethelessset the scene, he is gesturing toward the threat to which this revolutionary shiftfrom God to man will eventually, inevitably succumb (294). Other such momentsserve a similar function. The emphasis on Restoration-era France, birthplace ofmodern secular realism, as a claustrophic realm of suffocating boredom andparalyzing hopelessness, the peculiarily precise perversion of the figural relation-

28 For a rather different way of understanding modern realism as the fulfillment of the medievalfigural worldview, see Hayden White’s study “Auerbach’s Literary History: Figural Causation andModernist Historicism,” in which he claims that “Mimesis presents western literary history asa story of the ‘fulfillment’ of the ‘figure’ of figurality” (in: Lerer, Literary History, see note 3,pp. 124–139, here p. 125). White, like so many other readers of Mimesis, ignores the pessimisticthrust of the book in order to focus on the figural – both medieval and modern – as a mode ofhistorical interpretation that transcends mere mechanical causality: “The figure-fulfillmentmodel is, therefore, a model for comprehending the syntagmatic dimensions of historical hap-pening and for constructing the narrative line for the presentation of that history,” p. 129.

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ship accomplished by Flaubert’s “fulfillment” of Dante29, Stendhal’s sense of hisown age as a post-historical wasteland, beyond all possibility of change and thusalso beyond redemption30: all these instances combine to prefigure the apocalyp-tic abolition of difference that must one day issue from the absence of a mean-ing-bestowing, boundary-drawing, difference-preserving vertical.

From the tonality of the final chapter, it is clear that Auerbach believes he haslived to see the day of abolition dawn. Understood in this eschatological context,the “wenige” who fear the reductive simplicity of a world without differenceclearly anticipate the elitist “wir” of his 1952 essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur,”a “wir” whose urgent but impossible task is to synthesize and record the dramaof human history, in all its infinite variety, before it disappears forever. Both the“few” and the “we” refer here to the philologists of the modern age, and theincomparable historical vantage point they treasure is the “Endstadium” of his-tory – a standpoint that corresponds to the figural Judgement Day, to the finalmoments before time ends for all eternity, when total synthesis becomes pos-sible and an omnipotent vertical subsumes into its meaningful structure the en-tire horizon of experience:

[D]enn mir erschienen schon sehr früh, und immer dringender, die europäischen Möglich-keiten der romanischen Philologie nicht nur als Möglichkeiten, sondern als Aufgabe, derenErfüllung erst jetzt und gerade noch jetzt versucht werden könne. Die europäische Gesit-tung ist nahe der Grenze ihres Daseins […] Es schien und scheint mir die Zeit gekommen,wo der Versuch, jene geschichtliche Einheit […] zu erfassen, unternommen werden muß.31

29 Timothy Bahti was the first to point out and explore this relationship of perverted fulfillment in“Auerbach’s Mimesis” (see note 19), a study devoted to Auerbach’s Flaubert chapter. Bahti readsthe modern secularization of the figural structure as a literalization of the (figural) allegory ofhistory; he thus understands literature as a potentially redemptive force within the context ofAuerbach’s thought, since literature could be considered capable of re-animating, or – more lit-erally – de-literalizing the dead letter of history.

30 Lazlo Géfin, in “Auerbach’s Stendhal: Realism, Figurality and Refiguration” (in: Poetics Today

20:1, 1999, pp. 27–40) expands on Auerbach’s notion of Stendhalian belatedness by arguing thatStendhal’s ironic use of intertextual models produces a structure of “disfigured figurality,” inwhich the novelistic universe takes on the status of a belated and hence inherently shadowy, life-less figure in relation to an already accomplished (literary) fulfillment.

31 Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum (see note 23), pp. 9–10. Compare the following linesfrom Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (see note 5): “Wenn die Zukunftsgedanken, mitdenen ich begann, einige Berechtigung besitzen, so ist die Aufgabe, das Material zu sammeln undzu einheitlicher Wirkung zu bringen, dringend. Denn gerade wir sind noch, wenigstens grund-sätzlich, in der Lage, die Aufgabe zu erfüllen: nicht nur, weil wir über so viel Material verfügen,sondern vor allem, weil wir den historisch-perspektivischen Sinn ererbt haben, der dazu erfor-derlich ist. Wir besitzen ihn noch, da wir noch mitten in der Erfahrung von geschichtlicherMannigfaltigkeit leben, ohne die, wie ich fürchte, jener Sinn schnell an lebendiger Konkretheitverlieren könnte. Wir also, so scheint mir, leben in einem Kairos der verstehenden Geschichts-schreibung; ob viele Generationen ihm noch angehören werden, ist fraglich,” p. 41.

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The flattening that follows on the heels of this necessarily liminal clarity levelsthe dissonant cognitive power inscribed in the spatio-temporal extremity ofIstanbul, 1945 – this “Ort des Abschlusses und der Wendung, der zugleich Über-schau gestattet wie nie zuvor”32 – in a process which is structurally analogous tothe apocalyptic shift from history to eternity. Small wonder, then, that Auer-bach’s rhetoric at times recalls the revelatory visions and moral urgency of thebiblical prophets. Thus the distortions inflicted by propaganda on a world stilltoo differentiated to accommodate it appear as a “Meer von Schmutz und Blut,”echoing the moment in Revelations when “the second angel poured out his bowlupon the sea, and it became like the blood of a dead man” (379).33 The impend-ing collapse of linguistic differentiation – described in a 1937 letter to WalterBenjamin, and again in “Philologie der Weltliteratur” – presents the pentecostalinversion of the confusion of Babel, a phenomenon described in the Book of Acts

as a sign of the “last days.”34 Only against this eschatological background can thecarefully chosen epigraph to Mimesis – Andrew Marvell’s famous opening lines,“Had we but world enough and time” – truly begin to resonate with the book itprecedes, a book about the end of both world and time: “But at my back I alwayshear / Times winged Chariot hurrying near: / And yonder all before us lie / De-serts of vast Eternity.”35

And yet: always there is Auerbach’s gentle, pessimisstic irony, underminingthe pathos. For he is fully aware that it is not actually the world which is ending,but rather the humanist ideal of a unified Europe. Die europäische Gesittung ist nahe

der Grenze ihres Daseins. Partial endings have no place in an authentic eschatology,and Auerbach’s partial apocalypse would therefore bring no longed-for revel-ation, no redemptive fulfillment even if it were not already compromised by itsdebased, parodic fulfillment of the Christian figural tradition. A figural fulfill-ment of the figural method, but an empty one, unlikely to reveal anything to thephilologist’s watchful, interpretive eye beyond the utter hollowness of its ownimpotent structures. Here again, Auerbach demonstrates his awareness of thefarce by turning his rhetoric inside out, just as he did in the passage where mod-

32 Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (see note 5), p. 42.33 Rev. 16:3. King James Bible, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.34 “It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the present international situation is nothing but

a ruse of providence, designed to lead us along a bloody and tortuous path to an Internationalof triviality and a culture of Esperanto,” included, in a translation by Anthony Reynolds, in anarticle by Karlheinz Barck, “Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach: Fragments of a Correspond-ance” (in: Diacritics 22:3/4, 1992, pp. 81–3, p. 82). And from “Philologie der Weltliteratur”:“Sollte es der Menschheit gelingen, sich durch die Erschütterungen hindurchzuretten […] sowird man sich an den Gedanken gewöhnen müssen, daß auf einer einheitlich organisierten Erdenur eine einzige literarische Kultur, ja selbst in vergleichweise kurzer Zeit nur wenige literarischeSprachen, bald vielleicht nur eine, als lebend übrigbleiben,” p. 39. Compare Acts 2: 8–17.

35 The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell. Ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1971, p. 28.

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ern propaganda appeared as the terrifying “fulfillment” of the ancient legendary.The modern fascination with the depths of everyday existence – vertically-oriented, democratic, fraught with background, requiring interpretation – elicitsfrom him only a stream of descriptive vocabulary (“etwas der WirklichkeitFeindliches,” “Abwendung vom praktischen Lebenswillen,” “verbissener undradikaler Zerstörungsdrang,” “das Verschleierte, Unabgrenzbare ihres Sinnes,”“ausweglose Trauer” [513]) intended to emphasize the exhaustion of the para-digm and the futility of the modernist search for meaning.

Even more illuminating are the things he manages to say with the texts them-selves, for the final chapter completely reverses the structure of the first in be-stowing great power on its cited passages, taken from Woolf and Proust. Auer-bach comments on each of them only briefly, preferring to paraphrase at greatlength and allow his laborious, painstaking re-writings to force the reader to re-read. A close look at the Woolf passage, in particular, reveals the extraordinarycomplexity of a discursive contribution that remains largely unacknowledgedby Auerbach’s explicit analysis. The chapter opens with a long citation from theopening pages of To the Lighthouse, Woolf ’s passionately ambivalent paeon to herdead mother. A novelist who once considered renaming her genre after the elegyform36, Woolf depicts Mrs. Ramsey’s valiant battle – hopeless despite the un-deniably life-affirming power of her maternal attitudes and instincts – againstthe inexorable forces of death and decay. The passage exudes precisely the kindof twilight-flavored nostalgia that Auerbach’s analysis will first critique and ulti-mately perform.

Scolding and demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands thatshut and spread like a Frenchwoman’s) all had folded itself quietly about her, when the girlspoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the wings of a bird fold themselves quietly andthe blue of its plumage changes from bright steel to soft purple. She had stood there silentfor there was nothing to be said. He had cancer of the throat […] and there was no hope, nohope whatever […] (489).

Hope, after all, is a particular prerogative of the Christian figural perspective37,offshoot and origin of its generative dynamism and future-turned face. It has noplace amidst the airless immanence of Woolf ’s profoundly secular reconfigu-ration – a reconfiguration, moreover, that figures both the vertical, interpretivemovement of the figural and the timeless horizontal into which it disappears38:

36 “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ A new – by Vir-ginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 1925–30. Ed. Anne OlivierBell and Andrew McNeillie, New York/London, 1980, p. 34).

37 “[D]ie Stellung des lebenden Menschen zu [dem jeweiligen Weltgeschehen] ist die des Ge-prüften, Hoffenden, Gläubigen und Wartenden” (Auerbach, “Figura”, see note 15, p. 81).

38 The novel, “der Teile von zwei zeitlich weitauseinanderliegenden Tagen schildert,” juxtaposestwo trips to the same destination – one merely planned, one actually accomplished. Divorced bythe text from their horizontal context, the two events enter into a by now familiar relation of fig-

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Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in theshaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; thewaters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad(489).

Mrs. Ramsey’s beautiful face, floating above dark, unfathomable waters, unmis-takably recalls the first line of Genesis and the spirit of the biblical God, hover-ing over the watery depths of a world not yet made. This revelation of a sublime,biblical dimension beneath the beautiful, Hellenic harmony of form – “Greek,blue-eyed, straight-nosed […] the Graces assembling seemed to have joinedhands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face” – produces a play of sur-faces and depths that structures Auerbach’s reading of the relation between thevarious excurses and the framing event of the stocking (490). Whereas in theHomeric text, to which he explicitly compares it, the footwashing scene disap-pears during the narrative devoted to the scar, in the Woolf passage “das Bildvon Mrs. Ramsay’s Gesicht bleibt während des Einschubs ständig gegenwärtig”(502). Whereas in Homer the originating incident and the excursus remain al-ways side-by-side in a single, narrative plane, defined by their relation of conti-guity, here the excurses function to rupture the beautiful surface by exerting avertical, interpretive pressure, to produce “ein Sich-Öffnen des Bildes in die Be-wußtseinstiefe,” and thus to transform the face into a potentially meaningful fig-ure – though always, it must be remembered, under the sign of radical undecid-ability, a face framed by the interpretive disorientation repeatedly expressed inthe pervasive “perhaps” (502). From Auerbach’s perspective, then, the most tell-ing moment of all is clearly the one the passage itself most explicitly depicts: thesingle, individually differentiated tear falling vertically toward dissolution. In theprimordial, ahistorical waters that open to receive and assimilate it, at a level fardeeper and more powerful than that of the ruptured Hellenic surface, atemporalessence announces itself as the teleological endpoint and apocalyptic annull-ment-as-Aufhebung of radical, historical particularity.39 It is therefore highly ap-

ure and fulfillment, in which the third and final term, “jene abschließende Vision, die [Lily] inStand setzt, ihr Bild mit einem einzigen Pinselstrich zu beenden,” turns out to possess no spec-ifiable content (513).

39 The Proust passage, cited by Auerbach to supplement his discussion of Woolf ’s figural tem-porality, reproduces this transition – from enigmatic, time-bound moment to atemporal “fulfill-ment” – at the level of sound, without ever leaving the domain of tears: “La possibilité de tellesheures ne renaîtra jamais pour moi. Mais depuis peu de temps, je recommence à très bien perce-voir si je prête l’oreille, les sanglots que j’eus la force de contenir devant mon père et qui n’écla-tèrent que quand je me retrouvai seul avec maman. En réalité ils n’ont jamais cessé; et c’est seule-ment parce que la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau,comme ces cloches de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu’onles croirait arrêtées mais que se remettent à sonner dans le silence du soir” (505). A constantsound underlying the mutliplicity of daily noises is revealed to the ear only in the twilight hushthat announces the silence of death. Auerbach follows the passage with the observation: “Hier

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propriate that the tiny passage should be framed by the repetition of the elegiacphrase, “Never did anybody look so sad” (489).

schimmert durch die Zeitenperspektive schon etwas von symbolischer Jederzeitlichkeit des imerinnerden Bewußtsein fixierten Ereignisses” (506). That this very same image appears also in To

the Lighthouse, only a few pages prior to the passage included in Mimesis, underscores its intensethough subterranean significance for a man who believes himself to be witnessing the twilight ofhistory: “The gruff murmur […] which had kept on assuring her […] that the men were happilytalking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in thescale of sounds pressing on top of her […] had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waveson the beach […] this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other soundssuddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.” NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, pp. 17–18.