ERICH AUERBACH MIMESIS: AN APPRECIATION PART ONE

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was a German Jew trained in the German philological tradition.  Forced to flee Germany, he spent the war years in Istanbul, where he wrote his greatest work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.  After the war, Auerbach came to the United States, where, from 1950 to his death, he was a professor at Yale.

Mimesis is a series of twenty chapters, organized chronologically, each of which is a separate essay, capable of standing alone.  Each essay begins with an extended passage [in the original followed by a translation] from a work of the Judeo-Christian Graeco-Roman literary tradition, which Auerbach then subjects to an intense linguistic, literary, and philosophical analysis.  The only exception to this pattern is in the earliest chapters, in which neither the Greek of the Odyssey, nor the Hebrew of the Old Testament nor the Aramaic of the New Testament is reproduced. In many, but not all, of the chapters, the initial passage is paired with a contrasting passage from the same period drawn from a very different literary/philological style.

The greatness of Mimesis is in the extraordinary detail of the several analyses, but there are certain overarching themes that it is good to be aware of as one reads through the book.  The first, and most important, theme is the connection between the purely syntactic linguistic resources of the language being used by the author of the passage under examination and the nature of social reality that the author seeks to capture and communicate.  Thus, for example, the extremely limited syntactic resources on which the author of the 12th century Chanson de Roland is able to draw results in [or perhaps, is paralleled by] the very blunt, un-nuanced representation of the motivation of Roland and the other characters of the Chanson.  [Although the text is 12th century, and reflects the Chivalric ideals of the time, it refers, of course, to events that took place much earlier.]  Two centuries later, when Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, he had available to him in early Italian extraordinarily rich syntactic devices that permitted him to capture the motivations and perceptions of a number of characters from different and even incompatible perspectives, all within the same sentences.  When I speak of "syntactic devices," I mean such things as subordinate clauses, if-then constructions, manipulations of tense to capture complex temporal relations, and so forth.

This general idea of the relation between linguistic structures and conceptions of social reality is central to the first chapter of my little book, Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, and I think it is fair to say that I was drawing heavily on what I learned from Auerbach when I wrote it, for all that I do not explicitly credit him.  Drawing on the English Metaphysical Poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for inspiration, I argued that the rich use of irony and metaphor that distinguishes the early chapters of Capital were Marx's way of capturing the mystifications of social reality embodied in commodity production.  The idea was that since Marx believed that social reality is genuinely mystified, even for theorists like himself who have intellectually penetrated that mystification, he needed a language that could at one and the same time convey the persuasiveness of the social surfaces -- of equal exchange in a free market, of workers as legally free partners in a wage bargain with capitalists -- and yet also capture the underlying reality of exploitation and the crippling distortion of the humanity of the workers.  His highly inflected metaphors and endless literary references were not extraneous aesthetic embellishments of a story equally well capable of being told in plain English or German, but in fact the necessary literary devices for capturing the complex social reality.

A second theme that plays an important role, in the early chapters especially, is the distinction between high and low literary styles, paralleling the social distinctions of the milieu being represented.  All of us are familiar with this distinction from Shakespeare's plays, in which a scene of the most intense seriousness, involving well-born characters, is followed by a scene of comic buffoonery involving peasants or servants or common soldiers.  Auerbach demonstrates quite dramatically that one of the most powerful and revolutionary features of the texts of the New Testament is a mixture of high and low styles that would have been impossible either in the classical Greek literature or in the Roman literature of the first several centuries of this era.

In this Appreciation, it goes without saying that I shall not attempt to summarize, or even make reference to, all or most of the twenty essays.  Rather, I shall focus on several, drawn principally from earliest portion of the book, to convey something of the complexity and penetration of Auerbach's discussion.  As always, my goal is to entice you to seek out the book for yourselves.

BRIEF REPLIES TO COMMENTS

First things first.  Thank you all for your good wishes for my speedy recovery.  I think I have turned the corner, and later today I am going to try to launch the Mimesis Appreciation.

GT, I will certainly have a go at explaining my anarchism.  To be perfectly honest, that has not been at the center of my thoughts for half a century, but if Google is to be believed, it is, more than anything else, what I am known for, insofar as I am known at all.  Perhaps after I finish the Auerbach, I will tackle your questions.

I just bought, through Amazon.com, a comfortable plush backrest, so I have been sitting propped up in bed watching the chaos of the Republican primary contest.  Needless to say, life does not offer many idle pleasures quite like listening to Rick Perry condemning Mitt Romney for Vulture Capitalism.  One needs the talents of a Jonathan Swift married to the ideological sensibility of a Karl Marx to strike the right tone.

MAJOR SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY, FIRST ANNOUNCED HERE

When you are seventy-eight, it takes you longer to get over being sick.  Who knew?

When my natural animal spirits return, I think I shall start an Appreciation of Erich Auerbach;s great work, Mimesis. 

FLATTENED

Forgive the lack of blog posts.  I have been battling a debilitating flu since returning from Paris two weeks ago.  It seems that when you are seventy-eight, you do not throw these things off as easily as when you are twenty-eight.  Who knew?

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I have combined all the chapters of the three volumes of my Autobiography in a single file, which I am now slowly proof-reading and correcting.  This will take a while -- the bloody thing is eight hundred pages long -- but when I am finally finished, I shall post the entire file on box.net, so that anyone interested in it need not download a chapter at a time.

Meanwhile, I must get ready for a conference in Seattle at which I shall be speaking next week.  The conference is the third A. A. Berle Center conference, located in the law school of Seattle University, a Catholic university in Seattle.  Most of the twenty speakers are professors of law, and the theme of the conference -- hardly surprising considering the Berle connection -- is The Theory of the Firm.  Professor Charles O'Kelley, the Director of the Center, invited me to present my paper, "The Future of Socialism."  I shall be very interested to see what sort of reception it gets.  It will be a nice opportunity for Susie to see her son, Jon, his wife, and their two sons.  Jon helps to run an organization called The Children's Alliance that has for some years now been doing very effective advocacy work on behalf of children's needs and interests.  He also sits on the board of the local newspaper of Seattle's homeless.

NEW YEAR'S DAY MUSINGS

I am not a great fan of New Year's Eves.  It is many years since I actually stayed awake long enough to welcome a new year in.  And the rare resolutions I do make, principally having to do with my weight, never coincide with a turnover in the calendar.  Indeed, as I explained in the first Chapter of Volume One of my Autobiography, a lifetime in the Academy has so shaped my perception of time that I understand the year to run from September to September, rather than from December to December.  Nevertheless, now that the maintenance of a blog is my principal occupation, I consider myself to have some responsibility to look back from January 1st and see whether I can identify anything in the past twelve months that is cause for hope,

For some time now, I have been taking a dour view of the prospects for social justice.  My paper, "The Future of Socialism," despite its cheery title, is in fact a rather bleak assessment of my lifelong hopes for a socialist world.  Like Herbert Marcuse in the Preface to One-Dimensional Man, I believe that useful social critique must arise out of actual progressive developments on the ground, and their absence in the past thirty or forty years has condemned me, Like Marcuse, to abstract intellectual analyses.

And yet, and yet -- there are developments in the past twelve months that suggest the possibility [I emphasize the possibility] of a rebirth of genuine progressive energies.  I have in mind first the eruption of massive progressive protests in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere to the truly appalling efforts by newly elected Republican governors to kill what little remains of collective bargaining rights and basic democratic voting protections.  There have been several dramatic victories -- the recall of two Republican state senators, the repeal of a newly enacted law.  More important than the content of these victories has been the discovery by hundreds of thousands of progressive Americans that they are not alone, and that by joining forces, they can alter the nation, however marginally.

But far more important still is the sudden, unexpected eruption of the Occupy movement.  This has the potential of being the most important political event in America of the past half century.  What makes the Occupy movement so powerful is precisely its lack of specific, identifiable legislative or administrative goals.  Unlike the protests in Wisconsin and Ohio,  unlike the anti-war movement of the late 60's and early 70's, unlike the movements for Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation, indeed even unlike the great Civil Rights Movement itself, the Occupy movement takes as its target a deep structural evil in American economy and society so fundamental that there is no plausible Congressional legislation that could address it successfully.  This is, I repeat, its strength, not its weakness.  The Occupy movement cannot be co-opted because to change the distribution of wealth and income in America would require nothing less than a socio-economic revolution.

It is easy for me to imagine a positive outcome of the Wisconsin and Ohio protests -- the recall of Governor Walker, the recapture of the State Legislatures.  But I cannot even imagine a believable positive outcome of the Occupy movement, short of a gut-wrenching change in the way the American economy is organized.  I have no idea at all whether the Occupy protestors understand this, and it is certainly way too soon to imagine the protests morphing into a political movement with identifiable goals.  But with a brilliant intuitive grasp of the underlying reality, the Occupiers resist either laying down a list of demands or allowing themselves to be recruited into a political campaign.

When one conjoins to these promising harbingers the extraordinary eruption of the Arab Spring across Northern Africa and into the Near and Middle East, it does seem that the calendar year 2011 gave us the first hope in a very long time of fundamental changes in world politics.  I think that ought to be enough to justify a sliver of optimism

A SAD END

In the end, there was nothing to be done.  It turned out that little Christmas Eve had a large, cancerous, inoperable tumor in her abdomen that had already spread to her lymph nodes.  On Friday, Susie and I spent some time with her, stroking her and talking to her, and then we took her to the vet, where very quickly and painlessly, as we stood there, she was put to sleep.

These past two days, when we return to our apartment, it seems barren and lonely.  It is not a large apartment -- 1500 square feet, more or less -- but she was, at her best, only ten pounds, and she took up very little space.  Indeed, truth to tell, we sometimes had to go searching for her to find where she had settled down -- under the bed, under a chest, in a closet, on a chair.

It is much too soon to think about getting another cat.  She was found up a tree in Amherst, Massachusetts, on Christmas Eve, seventeen years ago [hence the name].  We offered to look after her for the weekend, and she never left.

I understand that it is odd for two mature, sophisticated adults to lavish so much emotion on a little black and brown long-haired cat, but there it is.  We shall miss her greatly.