Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern

Readers of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis will remember the first of these epigraphs as a moment in which history and legend fuse to mark the making of his book.¹ The famous story of Odysseus’s scar has just been recollected, with its close attention to the detail of its characters and setting; and the story of the sacrifice of Isaac has been retold as a foil for the Homeric style, where the narratives of the Old Testament give us but little of the setting and the motivations of its actors. Auerbach, in his opening chapter, has been distinguishing between the legendary flavor of Homer and the historical feel of the Elohist, when he announces that such a distinction “can be easily perceived by a reasonably experienced reader” (p. 19). But what may not be so apparent, and what stands in the ellipses of my epigraph, is the history behind the making of Mimesis itself, and the ways in which that history has been transformed—by Auerbach, by later readers, and by the institutions of professional literary study—into a legend of the writer in exile, remembering the texts and contexts of a past. What interrupts the reading of Odysseus’s scar, and what interrupts Auerbach’s own career, is “the history which we ourselves are witnessing” (p. 19). “[A]nyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual people and states before and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent historical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend” (pp. 19–20).² With the complexity of motives, the bluntness of propaganda, and the ambiguities of political discourse, a simple understanding of these public events becomes nearly unimaginable. No “careful historical and philological training” can distinguish true from false, das Wahre vom Gefälschten, in these matters. “To write history,” he concludes, “is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend” (p. 20).

Such moments in Mimesis contribute to our understanding of the place of exile in philology and, more pointedly, the place of Erich Auerbach in the constructions of the postwar émigré philologist. They share with the writings of his contemporaries Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, and Werner Jaeger—among many others—a recognition that the disciplines of historical philology and literary criticism are inseparably linked to national identity and personal displacement. As Maria-Rosa Menocal has argued in her Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, the study of philology is born in exile. The political, institutional, and aesthetic criteria by which we select the objects and the methods of our inquiry are deeply implicated in the estrangement the philologist feels from the world of experience and the home of learning. And “no story is more famous,” she avows, than that of Auerbach in Turkey, writing his Mimesis, putting his great book together without libraries or colleagues, the German-Jewish scholar of the Romance languages sitting “helpless at the edge of the desert.”³ This story separates him poignantly from his contemporaries. Though often grouped together as the great exponents of a German philological tradition, they had very different lives. Spitzer is today largely remembered for his impassioned, idiosyncratic teaching at Johns Hopkins (whose faculty he joined in 1936) and his acute application of techniques of explication de texte to medieval and Renaissance works. Curtius sat out the war in Switzerland and remains, except to specialists in Romanistik, the distant compilator of the topoi that fill European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Werner Jaeger went to Harvard in the mid-1930s and produced, in his enduring study of Greek educational identity, Paideia, as much a historical survey of a culture as a nostalgic blueprint for a university ideal. It is the personal, the self-reflective, in Auerbach that late-twentieth-century readers treasure, as if what marked the magisterium of his work was the very suffering that brought him from Marburg, to Istanbul, to Pennsylvania State, and, finally, to Yale, where he died as Sterling Professor of Romance Languages in 1957.⁴

The second epigraph is probably less well known to us.⁵ The opening sentences to an introductory handbook of Romance philology, a handbook written originally for Auerbach’s Turkish students, they seem, at first glance, to articulate the verities of a tradition rather than the idioms of an individual. Their definition of philology, the importance that they place on textual criticism, and their loose associations between method and cultural understanding would have been familiar to almost any European student at midcentury. With over a hundred years of institutional history behind them, Auerbach’s opening lines affirm the centrality of philological investigation to recovering the character of high civilization and its origins.⁶ They call to mind such affirmations of the social value of philology as those of Friedrich Diez in 1821 (that the serious study of literature “reveals utterly characteristic directions and tendencies in the mind of man”);⁷ of Charles Aubertin in 1874 (“L’histoire des origines de la langue est l’histoire même des origines de la nation”);⁸ and of the many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French and German attempts to locate the search for national identity in the curricula of language study.⁹

These two quotations, written most likely in the space of the same year, stand at the poles of Auerbach’s career. They introduce my reassessment of his place in academic literary study, and they recall, too, the major themes of my own book. Both quotations center on the techniques of recovery; both juxtapose a potentially destructive time against the endurances of culture; and both valorize the power of the philological-historical to distinguish true from false, the originary from the secondary, the authentic from the ersatz. They stimulate our efforts to separate the historical from the legendary in the scholar’s work and may become, for such a purpose, subjects of textual inquiry themselves.

Much recent work has focused on the national origins and ideological consequences of the development of European philology: on the tensions between French and German Romanists from the 1820s to World War I, on the agendas of post–World War II American New Criticism and of the German revival of the Grundriβ project, and on the changing status of medieval studies in the canons of professional training.¹⁰ The past ten years have witnessed something of an Auerbach revival and a renewed set of attempts to place him along the axes of these intellectual developments. The centennial of his birth in 1992 saw at least two major conferences and essay collections, while, more generally, the breakup of the theoretical hegemonies of the previous decades led many to look back—to rhetoric, philology, archival textual criticism—for direction.¹¹ Moreover, as the temperature of literature departments rose and fell throughout the 1990s, many searched for a moral center to the critical profession: a figure of unassailable impact and integrity.¹² Auerbach in Istanbul and, later, in America presents the figure of the writer in political withdrawal: a Dantesque figure for our time, an Ovid of mid-century, whose Mimesis was as triste as anything that could be found in the Tristia. But Istanbul has, in more recent years, conjured up the aura of orientalism, the European attempt to efface the other or, at the very least, to domesticate it.¹³ And Auerbach’s exile may not even be what he, or we, would like to believe. In the words of David Damrosch, “far more irrevocably wedded to his present age than he would wish to be, he lives in exile from the past, from the worlds of his beloved texts, which cannot finally provide an Olympian refuge from the dual tyrannies of time and of political pressures.”¹⁴

Auerbach and his émigré contemporaries remain touchstones for the literary academic, and one could well imagine rewriting the history of recent literary criticism as a series of reactions to his work.¹⁵ This task, at least in part, is my concluding purpose in this book: to trace the readings and misreadings that Mimesis both encodes and generates. But my goal, too, is to expose its politics of errancy, whether it be found in the techniques of editing a text or in the Feingefühl of selecting a passage for review and commentary. Mimesis remains a book of errors in all senses of the word. Yet it is, too, a study in synecdoche, of parts for wholes, and, as such, it illuminates the methods and the motives of the history of literary scholarship I have selectively traced here.

From its start, Mimesis is a book of exiles, an account of separations and errores, of parents and children, and of hoped-for returns home. The famous Odyssey chapter that opens the book has been read, taught, and criticized so often that it has attained a canonical status in the classroom almost comparable to the texts it studies.¹⁶ But just what are the stories told here? There is the return of Odysseus and the sacrifice of Isaac. Behind them both, however, lies a similarity of theme and narrative that informs the whole volume.

Chapter 1 is unique in Mimesis in that it begins without a quoted text. Instead of a sample passage—selected, it always seems, almost at random, offered in the original language, occasionally noteworthy for its editorial cruces—Auerbach begins with paraphrase. He retells the account of Odysseus’s return in book 19 of the Odyssey briefly, out of sequence, and wholly in German (there is not a single Greek word in the chapter, even in transliteration). In Auerbach’s handling, this is a story totally in the vernacular. It replays all the “touching” (ergreifenden) domesticity of Euryclea’s discovery of the scar. It focuses on everyday experiences: the activities, rituals, and moments that Homer and, by extension, Auerbach himself “scrupulously” narrate “in leisurely fashion” (genau ausgeformt und mit Muβe erzählt). One could, in fact, go so far as to say that these opening pages are an essay in vernacularity itself—in the root meaning of the word, from the Latin “verna,” a slave born in the master’s household, hence “vernaculus,” belonging to the household, domestic (p. 3; p. 7).¹⁷

At the most obvious level, this is an episode of homecoming. It introduces Mimesis explicitly as a book of exiles and returns, and the thematic resonances of the passage have long been noted by the book’s readers. But what has not been noticed, perhaps because Auerbach himself subordinates it to the central narrative, is the backstory of Odysseus’s scar. Auerbach defers his account of what Homer has done in this scene. In the Odyssey, the mention of the scar recalls the tale of young Odysseus’s boar hunting during a visit to his grandfather, Autolycus. And there is, within this digression, another remembrance nested inside. For Autolycus had first seen Odysseus as a newborn, when he visited his daughter and was asked to name the child. “Lo, inasmuch as I am come hither as one that has been angered (οδυσσαμενοσ) with many, both men and women, over the fruitful earth, therefore let the name by which the child is named be Odysseus (Οδυσευσ, i.e., ‘child of wrath’).”¹⁸ Only then does Homer tell the story of Odysseus’s boar hunt (now, significantly, another return, this time to see his grandfather). The boy is hunting with Autolycus’s sons when they see the animal.

But even this biblical text is abbreviated in Mimesis. Auerbach relies on its familiarity (“everybody knows it” [p. 9]; “ein jeder kennt sie” [p. 13]); he tells us only the part of the story up to Abraham and Isaac’s setting forth. “So they went both of them together,” he quotes and leaves it at that. “Everything,” he avows, “remains unexpressed” (p. 11; “Alles bleibt unausgesprochen” [p. 16]). And so it does for Auerbach himself. These elisions are central to the method of Mimesis. By relying on a common literate experience (“Readers will remember” the Odyssey; “Abraham gives the well-known answer” in Genesis), he can argue through implication. He counts on readers knowing what is really there, making the connections through only the most allusive, fragmentary hints.

For in his juxtaposing of these two texts, Auerbach now makes it possible to understand them both as tales of filial harm and salvation. The episodes both center on snatching a child from certain death. They encode stories of sacrifice, templates of ritual, against which all subsequent subjects in Mimesis will take their measure. If this book remains a collection of exiles and returnees, it is, too, a book of parents and their children, holding (if only barely) to the rituals of everyday, vernacular existence in a threatening world.

Take, for example, scenes of what we might call (giving it an anthropological flavor) ritual ingestion. How many fill the Odyssey and Genesis, and how many, too, fill Mimesis? There is Trimalchio’s great feast (from Petronius and at the heart of chapter 2); the world in Pantagruel’s mouth (from Rabelais, in chapter 11); the interrupted supper from Manon Lescaut (chapter 16); the coffee chatter of Luise Millerin (chapter 17); the abbé’s thrill at dining with the marquis from Stendahl’s Le rouge et le noir (chapter 18). And, of course, there is that unforgettable repast, the apple eating of Adam and Eve (in the Jeu d’Adam, in chapter 7). Domestic servants abound, from Euryclea to Germinie Lacerteux. And so do families and their quarrels: the willfulness of young Odysseus, the obedience of Isaac, the errancy of Prince Hal, the “middle class tragedy” of Luise Millerin, the Ramsays of Virginia Woolf, the Prousts.

“And even if it isn’t fine to-morrow, … it will be another day.” How many times must such a sentence have been uttered? How many exiles, émigrés, or housebound readers far away from home (like Mrs. Ramsay herself) have marked out the passage of their days? This line opens the closing chapter of Mimesis, and it presages a poignant future for the writer looking for a reader. “Nothing now remains but to find him—to find the reader, that is,” wrote Auerbach in the penultimate sentence of Mimesis (p. 577). Why the qualification, though? For whom else could we be looking? Chapter 20 asks these questions in a different way. It takes us back to Homer and the Bible, to the rituals of everyday domestic life, and to the threats and wonders that may shatter childhood and its ease.

As in his opening chapter, Auerbach here uses an analysis of narrative style to reflect on his own method. The central features of high modernism—its selection of the fragmentary portion, its assembly of ruins, its attention to “any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time” (p. 547; “dem beliebig Herausgegriffenen des Lebensverlaufs” [p. 488])—may all be thought of as both literary and critical devices. “It is possible to compare this technique of modern writers with that of certain modern philologists who hold that the interpretation of a few passages from Hamlet, Phèdre, or Faust can be made to yield more, and more decisive, information about Shakespeare, Racine, or Goethe and their times than would a systematic and chronological treatment of their lives and works. Indeed, the present book may be cited as an illustration” (p. 548). Much as Mrs. Ramsay had consoled her son—“Let’s find another picture to cut out,” she says at the end of Auerbach’s selected passage—so Auerbach may console himself. But there is something very different about this passage and about its author. For what Auerbach has done is, in the end, locate the authority for his method not in a male but in a female voice. Virginia Woolf becomes the mother of philology—a brilliant recalibration of what Auerbach had elsewhere called the patrimoine spirituel—and the paternal relationships so central to Mimesis’s opening reframe themselves, at its close, as maternal ones. Rituals of family life hinge now not on hunting or on sacrifice but on artistic play. The journey to the lighthouse, deferred at this moment in Woolf’s novel, finds itself replaced by cutting and by knitting. The explorations of great outside spaces will be halted; explorations of interior dimensions may begin.

There is a sense throughout this chapter that the paradigms of European literature that Auerbach has framed throughout his book—the sacrifice, the quest, the revel, the great sin, the social pressures of reform—close down. Fatherhood takes on a complex and muted cast. Mr. Ramsay himself is but a distant and dismissive figure, and, in the passage from Proust that Auerbach apposes to his Woolf, the father appears downright bizarre: “He was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Hagar that she must tear herself away from Isaac” (pp. 543–44). I should not say “bizarre” but “bazaar.” Proust’s father here is something out of a bazaar: an orientalized apparition, a figure not really from life but art, a living presentation of a fantasy about the Bible. For this is the scene, of course, when Abraham reenters Mimesis: when the first father of the Jews comes back, from chapter 1, to save his son. But, now, it is a story not of testing faith but of dismissing otherness. Hagar, the emblem of the “oriental,” of the Arab, must leave.

And yet Auerbach is wrong. As David Damrosch has perceptively observed, the correct text from Proust’s novel has the final phrase as, “telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac.”¹⁹ Willard Trask simply alters the Moncrieff translation to conform to Auerbach’s misquotation, and, as Damrosch notes, the error has never been corrected. He characterizes the mistake as follows: “This is, however, a resonant slippage of transcription or of memory. Auerbach has not only a secret hope but also a secret fear: that he may most resemble Abraham’s other ‘first born’ son, Ishmael, reprieved from death only to be sent with Hagar into a permanent exile in the wilderness” (p. 115). I agree with Damrosch that this is a resonant mistake, but I locate it elsewhere. The father-son relationship of chapter 1 is now transformed, in chapter 20, into a mother-son one. And European literature becomes refracted through the lens of orientalism. It is as if Auerbach himself, finding himself in the land of Hagar, must affirm his Europeanness—his own identity as Jew, as father, as master of the vernacular (with Hagar now standing, unlike old Euryclea, as the verna who must be thrown out). Proust’s passage, in this mistranscription (or misremembrance) stands as emblem of the oriental. With the father done up like some potentate—with the Indian cashmere, itself a word coming from Kashmir—Auerbach can confront again the ways in which the oriental may intrude itself even into the most apparently straightforward “European” literary texts. Or, perhaps, a more pointed way of putting it is to say that to read Proust in Istanbul is to find Hagar in it. As Edward Said (who, as far as I can tell, does not discuss this passage) puts it, Mimesis “owed its existence to the very fact of Oriental, non-Occidental exile.”²⁰ And as Aamir Mufti summarizes, working from Said’s reading of Auerbach, “A major impulse behind the critique of Orientalism is therefore the possibility, the danger, that Orientalist descriptions take hold and repeat themselves in the very societies that they take as their objects.”²¹ What I would argue is that Hagar, as the emblem of that orientalism, takes hold of this European text; that she becomes, too, an emblem of Auerbach’s Oriental exile. Her erroneous, yet powerfully meaningful, presence in this quotation participates in the larger set of challenges, inversions, and paradoxes that close Mimesis (and to which I will return at my chapter’s close).

Mimesis is a book, then, of familiarities upended; of misquotations; of parts ripped from wholes and made to stand for great traditions; of small boys who, whether they be snatched from death or deprived of a day trip or a kiss, will go on to be writers and readers. “Now nothing remains but to find him.” But that “him” is not the reader but the author. Nothing remains but to find myself, to recall the child that must be somewhere hiding in the man, to linger on the memory of a mother. And maybe, too, the answer to that question is not him at all, but her. The mothers are more powerful in chapter 20 than the fathers, far more central to the rites and rituals of everyday experience. “The ends the narrator has in mind,” writes Auerbach of Proust, but I think no less of himself, “are not to be seen in them” (that is, the narrative’s surfaces). “The way in which the father’s death is brought up in the passage cited above—incidentally, allusively, and in anticipation—offers a good example” (p. 547). As Auerbach had put it in his first chapter, “Everything remains unexpressed.”

The unexpressed narrative of Mimesis is the threat to family security. The paradox of philological inquiry, then, lies in its claim to rescue a patrimoine spirituel while at the same time exposing the underminings of that patrimony. What is the legacy that it bequeaths? What happens when the structures of paternity become the models of an intellectual inheritance? If Mimesis is framed, then, by tales of parents and children, of removal and return (if only, as in Proust’s case, a return by means of memory), it has at its center a tale of our first parents and the original exile. Chapter 7, “Adam and Eve,” has many purposes: an education in the arts of scholarly edition, an allegory of collaboration, a plea for the constructive ends of national philology. But much of this is “unexpressed,” riding below the surface narrative in Auerbach’s critical rhetoric. And much of this, too—the political subtext of this and other chapters of the book—had been effaced by Auerbach’s first critics. In what follows, I use Auerbach’s own devices of figural interpretation on his own text, seeking to expose a political allegory of philology—to speak what had remained, as he would put it, unausgesprochen.

“Adam and Eve” begins by trying to establish a text.²² The opening quotation for this chapter—the dialogue in which Adam and Eve first quarrel, then debate, and then fall—comes from a play “extant in a single manuscript” (pp. 145–46). Of the little that survives of the vernacular, liturgically oriented drama, the play that Auerbach calls the Mystère d’Adam is “one of the oldest specimens” (p. 146).²³ Unique and originary, marking both the starting point of a distinctive genre and of a vernacular literary history, the play’s text stands here at the opening of “Adam and Eve” in ways far different from the quotations that begin Mimesis’s other chapters. It appears not as some randomly selected, exemplary section of a larger work; nor is it one of those “few passages” that, in the phrasing of the book’s close, “can be made to yield more, and more decisive, information about [authors] and their times than would a systematic and chronological treatment of their lives and works” (p. 548). This is a passage carefully selected for its individualities and not its commonplaces. It tells a story of a set of firsts: the first human communication, first sin, first desire, and first text of a tradition that articulates the sublime in colloquial form. It is a story of a loss; yet, in the larger context of Mimesis, it provides the occasion for recovery. This passage from the Mystère d’Adam enables Auerbach to deploy those few resources of Zeitschriften and Untersuchungen in his Turkish exile. It enables him to use the techniques of philology to re-create “reliable critical editions” of his texts and, in the process, to restore methodological control over the study of the European Middle Ages.

Because the Mystère d’Adam and its manuscript encompass the discussion of first things, Auerbach seems anxious from the start to find its correct and originary form. Textual and literary criticism intertwine themselves here as in no other chapter of Mimesis, for the crux of Auerbach’s interpretation turns on the correct edition of the manuscript. Adam and Eve speak in what Auerbach defines as the familiar idioms of French life. The first man “calls his wife to account as a French farmer or burgher might have done when, upon returning home, he saw something he did not like,” while the first woman responds with “the sort of question which has been asked a thousand times in similar situations by naive, impetuous people who are governed by their instincts: ‘How do you know?’” (p. 147). The correct assignment of the dialogue is central to Auerbach’s reading, not so much because it governs the play’s action but because it helps articulate its characters. The opening paragraphs of the chapter have, in fact, already sketched out the broad contours of those characters: Adam, good, noble, a representative of the French citizenry; Eve, intuitive, childish, even clumsy in her wiles. The text of the Mystère—garbled by medieval scribe and confused by modern editor—must be brought into line with the essentials of these characters, their idiom, their motivations, and their sensibilities.

In his Introduction aux études de philologie romane, Auerbach sets out the methods of the editor, delineating the procedures for establishing a text beset by problems in transmission.

This moment in the Mystère d’Adam offers a test case for this advice. The manuscript is, as Auerbach states, “somewhat confused” (p. 148; “ein wenig in Unordnung” [p. 145]). His goal will be to restore “the original form of the passage in question,” a task seemingly “easy” when faced with this “unique manuscript.” But there is little that is “easy” about the editing of this text. The distributions of these lines has been confused by one S. Etienne who, in a note published in Romania in 1922, proposed a new reading of the lines.²⁵

This is, to Auerbach, clearly no “reconstruction of the text” but a complete misunderstanding; from a manuscript only “somewhat confused,” Etienne constructs a reading now “completely confused” (völlig durcheinandergemischt). The problem with the manuscript lay in the assignation of the parts, signaled by the scribe with a capital A and E for the respective speakers. Now, in Etienne’s note, this particular passage “ont embarrassé la critique.” It is “très curieux,” presenting a problem in what Etienne calls the psychological continuity of the speakers.²⁶ What seems clear to him is that the scribe has mangled the assignment of the lines, shifting radically the tone of Adam and Eve. Etienne’s goal, therefore, is to rescue the text from its copyist’s mistakes; in Auerbach’s terms, defined in the first page of the Introduction aux études de philologie romane, “to preserve them not only from oblivion, but also from the changes, mutilations, and additions that necessarily result from popular consumption or the negligence of copyists.”²⁷

For Auerbach, however, there is no “negligence of copyists” in the text of the Mystère d’Adam. Rather, it is Etienne who misconstrues both the characters and the themes of the drama. Eve, in Etienne’s edition, is far too knowing for Auerbach, far too skillful and self-assured. The emendation presents a dynamic of seduction and control, where the serpent’s intercession simply augments Eve’s advance. To Auerbach, though, it is the serpent who masterminds the Fall. Eve is clumsy (ungeschikt), “for without the Devil’s special help she is but a weak—though curious and hence sinful—creature, far inferior to her husband and clearly guided by him” (p. 149). Adam, the good French citizen (“ein braver Mann, ein französischer Bürger oder Bauer” [p. 147]) must be approached “where he is weak,” must be confused into compliance. After the devil’s intercession, Eve can take control; only after taking counsel from the serpent can she master the situation. “The Devil has taught her how to get the better of her man; he has showed her where her strength is greater than his: in unconsidered action, in her lack of any innate moral sense, so that she transgresses the restriction with the foolhardiness of a child as soon as the man loses his hold (sa discipline) upon her” (pp. 150–51). Eve’s character, for Auerbach, remains stable, even though her actions shift in form and direction. Before and after her encounter with the serpent, she is childish, impetuous. Her earlier question was akin to that of “kindlichen, sprunghaften, instinktgebundenen Menschen”; here she has the “Tollkühnheit des Unmündigen,” the rashness of the underaged. By contrast, Adam is always adult, always the head of the household. His fall, in these terms, is the fall of the grown-up trapped by games of the child. The pathos of his situation lies in this vision of a “poor confused, uprooted Adam” with whom Eve plays (spielt). She eats, as if to goad him into playing—“und dann ist es geschehen,” and then all is over and the game is won (p. 151; p. 148).

Auerbach offers this analysis as a case study of the way in which the Christian drama of redemption gives voice to sublime ideas in simple form. The juxtaposings of the learned and the popular, the Latin and the Old French, illustrate how vernacular literary experience becomes the vehicle for moral truth. The profundity of the Fall resounds in a scene of “everyday reality,” a dialogue “in simple, low style.” Its pathos and its power look back to those moments in the sermo humilis of Augustine while they anticipate the Tuscan idioms of Dante. The possibilities for figural interpretation—here, as in nearly all the medieval texts Auerbach handles—lie precisely in this nexus of the high and low. God, the figura of the Mystère d’Adam, is both judge and savior, legal officer and spiritual father. He embodies the capacity of medieval literature to use historical or biblical personae to prefigure spiritual forms while holding both distinct as historical realities. The simple surfaces of medieval Christian drama simultaneously shadow and reveal the underlying patterns of Creation, Incarnation, Passion, and Last Judgment that define what Auerbach identifies as “the very truth of the figural structure of universal history” (p. 158).

But what precisely is this everyday contemporary reality for Auerbach? As he reminds us at the close of Mimesis, it is a scholar’s life without the tools of scholarship: the journals, studies, and editions of the philological profession. As he announces at the opening, it is an exile’s life without a nation, a moment when political and military action so challenges relations between truth and falsehood that “most historians are forced to make concessions to the techniques of legend” (Konzessionen an die Sagentechnik zu machen).

These similarities of phrasing blur the line between the philological and the political. Read in tandem, they point toward the construction of a scholarly figura of their own, a recognition that debates on the establishment of texts may adumbrate the arguments of nations. The high and low are not just styles of literature but styles of scholarship as well. The place of the sublime in the colloquial becomes an issue not just for the story of the Fall but for the narrative of its edition. To paraphrase the reading of the drama, we might say that “Adam and Eve” moves from distant readings and their scholarly interpretations into the language of everyday contemporary reality.

Throughout the chapter, technical analyses are couched in the colloquial expressions of feeling. Arrestingly informal, the conversational gambit that opens the discussion of the play disarms the reader: “Now let us examine” (p. 147). But we are really asked, in Auerbach’s “Betrachten wir nun” (p. 144), to reflect and meditate, to move in that realm of impression and response that early German reviewers of Mimesis found characteristic of its Feingefühl, its almost belletristic sensitivity. Auerbach asks us to share his imagination of the everyday. The ordinariness of his French Adam is translated into language full of idiom and commonplace. Eve’s question, we are told, is asked a thousand times. We are, in his translations and his paraphrases, on familiar turf here, much as we are in Auerbach’s own analysis. “I find this impossible” (p. 148; “Mir scheint das unmöglich” [p. 145]), he rejoinds to Etienne’s emendation. Exclamations, rhetorical questions, appeals to common sense—these are the argumentative devices of this scholar. “I know from experience”: this might as well be Auerbach’s as well as Adam’s line. Indeed, it might as well be that of the reader of Mimesis, for what the scholar is relying on here is not so much a refined ability with ancient languages but simple clear-headed observation. Experience is what is at the heart of “Adam and Eve,” an experience of how people react, of how men speak to women, and of how the stories from the past can resonate with present lives. Eve is, after the serpent’s tuition, “Herrin der Lage” (p. 147), idiomatically master of the situation. She is “to use the language of sport … in great form” (p. 150; “wie man in der Sportsprache sagt, in großer Form,” [p. 148]), and, as she plays (spielt) with her confused husband, we can see the transformation not only of the Fall into a game but of the discipline of textual edition into sportsmanship.

For it is Auerbach himself who is in groβer Form here, Auerbach who deploys all the clichés of his everyday reality to offer up a sermo humilis of philological control whose simple, low style may conceal the subtleties of criticism. The quarrel with Etienne replays the quarrel of his Eve and Adam: a quarrel about what we know, about the control of sa discipline, about what might be thought of as the spiritual patrimony of high civilization. There is an allegory to the philological. Textual recovery becomes a kind of restitution, and these pages in Mimesis work out, in practical form, the directives of the Introduction aux études de philologie romane. Philology saves texts not only from oblivion but from the changes, mutilations, and additions that popular usage or the carelessness of copyists necessarily brings to them. The emendation of Etienne, and its acceptance and reprinting in the published text of Chamard, presents a fallen text to Auerbach. Its misassignments of the dialogue place Eve over her husband, rewrite, in effect, the challenge of serpentine guile in the subversions of the first couple. Eve may play here, may be in the fine form of the competitor, may be the master of the situation, yet it must remain for Auerbach to show his form, to reaffirm the competitive edge of textual criticism, to become the master of the interpretive situation. Auerbach, in short, replays a competition between French and German critics and philologists charged with the politics of the academy.

The story of Romance philology is a distinctively German story, as the discipline arose “in a period in which German intellectuals were accustomed to taking the French to task as effete (Welsche).”²⁸ The origins of Romanistik worked in tandem with the origins of European nation states, and a good deal of the institutional support for literary studies hinged on the recovery of a cultural patrimony to the emerging political entities. The character of literature and the character of a people came to stand as elements in an equation whose solution was a national identity conceived through educational structures. Philology, to paraphrase von Clausewitz, became a form of politics by other means; indeed, it could become a form of war by other means. The French responses to the so-called German science often couched themselves in military terms. Leon Gautier could write of his defeated countrymen in 1870: “We find before us a nation which makes war scientifically…. For the Prussian fights in the same way he criticizes a text, with the same precision and method.”²⁹ And in 1913 Henry Massis could complain: “[T]here is a clear, logical link between our system of classical studies and the capitulation of Metz, as, of course, between the methodology of German universities and the invasion of Paris.”³⁰ The rise of chairs of literature in France, the establishment of journals dedicated to medieval culture (Romania being among the first), all contributed to what Gaston Paris could think of as a medieval literature emanating from French soil: plantes indigènes.³¹

What was Auerbach to make of all this? He had been compelled, as a Jew, to leave his appointment at Marburg, the very university town where, Gautier had complained nearly seventy years before, “there were more Germans working on the chanson de geste than were French scholars in all of France.”³² For Auerbach, the anxieties of exile go beyond the mere lament for journals, up-to-date investigations, and reliable editions. They embrace something of the taint of having been a part of the ongoing war with France and French philology. Thus the quarrel with Etienne, on the surface, seems to recapitulate these national philology wars, seems to revile the scholar in Romania for constructing an interpretation of the Mystère d’Adam that is Welsche, even feminized, in its imaginations of a controlled and controlling Eve. But only on the surface. Rather than reinvest in the rhetoric of military conquest, Auerbach recasts his quarrel with philology and, in turn, his reading of the play as a story of collaboration. In reading his analysis of Eve, we find not the “invasion of Paris” but the infiltration of the French countryside. We find her assault on her husband—called, almost pathetically now, “ein braver Mann, ein französischer Bürger oder Bauer”—worked not by the machinery of all-out war but in the machinations of betrayal.

Eve’s claims, in her discussion with her husband, always rely on appeals to the here and now. She wishes for their betterment, speaks of experience in its most commonplace terms, and queries Adam on his understanding of the hard facts of life. Hers is the language of betrayal, and much of Auerbach’s discussion hinges on Eve’s failure to appreciate the line between her realistic questioning and her real betrayal. “Verrat,” “Verräter,” and “verraten”: these are the words that predominate in Auerbach’s German. For Adam himself, the idiom is always that of being led astray: “verführen” is the operational verb, as Satan becomes the Verführer of the cause. The heart of Auerbach’s objection to Etienne’s reading is that Eve cannot be the “extremely skillful and diplomatic person” generated by his emendation. Diplomacy is far from Auerbach’s concerns here. Eve’s discussions with the serpent, and her temptation of Adam, do not go on in the realm of skill or political savvy. They transpire in the worlds of instinct, of impression, and of a blithe unawareness of the historical (if not the spiritual) consequences of her acts.

The picture of the Fall drawn here fits neatly in the terms of another, exiled essayist of collaboration. In his “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” published first in New York in August 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre defines the logic of collaboration as the logic of realism.³³ Sartre’s paradigmatic collaborator succumbs to the “tentations de la defait,” the temptations not just of defeat but of defeatism. What he identifies as the “réalisme” of collaborationist thought devolves to a sense of the fait accompli, a sense that what is about to happen has already happened. “Réalisme,” he writes, is the “refus de l’universel et de la loi” (p. 60). It signals a confusion between judgment and experience. Instead of judging facts in the light of the law, the realist collaborator judges the law in the light of facts. He evidences an odd sort of passivity; indeed, he is not necessarily a he at all. There is a certain “féminité” about collaboration, not simply a docility in the face of facts but a participation in the subversion of natural laws and hierarchies. Femininity might be thought of here as a figure for the fait accompli itself, and this precisely is how Auerbach defines the serpent’s swaying of Eve in her Edenic collaboration. His counsel to the woman “upsets the order of things established by God, … makes the woman the man’s master, and so leads both to ruin.” He continues: “The serpent accomplishes this by advising Eve to break off the theoretical discussion [of sin and treason] and to confront Adam with a wholly unexpected fait accompli.” Adam’s knowledge of the law, his sense of right now inextricably a part of his condition as a good Frenchman, finds its subversions in the claims of Eve. “Manjue, Adam,” eat Adam, she implores, until she eats the fruit herself “and it is all over” (p. 149).³⁴

Auerbach tells the story of the Fall as the figural narrative of collaboration for specific pedagogical as well as political goals. It is not so much that he wishes to condemn Eve as much as he wants to save Adam. Again and again, the character of Adam is affirmed as good, as noble, and as French. This sense of character is what bridges the political and the philological. Etienne’s misunderstanding of the characters of the Mystère now may be seen as standing for that larger misinterpretation of the French themselves and of the national characters of all the European peoples. What is “völlig durcheinandergemischt,” completely confused, is the notion of responsibility in the face of political challenge. How do we evaluate, as Auerbach had put it in “Odysseus’s Scar,” “the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany” (p. 19)? To whom do we assign blame? What is the relationship between the national character and the individuals who live and act within, and sometimes for, those nations?

Such questions find their answers in the course of Auerbach’s whole chapter, a sequence of brief assessments and long quotations designed to illustrate the humble and sublime in the religious literatures of the thirteenth century. From the Mystère d’Adam, we traverse the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Francis of Assisi, and a range of early French and Italian dramas. Unlike the other chapters of Mimesis, in which ancillary texts appear as foils for the declared subject—the Old Testament to Homer, Proust to Virginia Woolf—here, we seem to lose sight of the focus. The reader moves through a variety of European Latin and vernacular texts, from anonymous plays in unique manuscripts to named, canonical authors writing at their most authoritative. What remains a constant in this panoply is the editor. Each text, no matter how exemplary or marginal, receives its full citation. Editors are acknowledged: Förster-Koschwitz, Ferdinand Brunot, H. Boehmer, P. Eduardus Alenconiensis, E. Monaci. The volumes build, each with their comprehensive titles of the past half-century of learning: Übungsbuch, Histoire, Analekten, Crestomazia. German, French, Latin, and Italian stand side by side, as Auerbach re-creates on these pages the European resources he had abandoned. Now, in this chapter and only in this chapter, we get the range of Zeitschriften, Untersuchungen, and zuverlässige-kritische Ausgabe whose loss he had lamented at Mimesis’s end.

“Adam and Eve” recites a literary history not in the narratives of the textbook but in the selections of the anthology. It compiles a chrestomathy in miniature, a selection whose illustrative texts may complement the story told in the Introduction aux études de philologie romane. As in that work, the telos of “Adam and Eve” is the restoration of a patrimoine spirituel for high civilization, or, as Auerbach puts it in the final paragraph of the chapter, “the character of the people” (p. 173; “das Charakter des Volkes” [p. 168]). “Adam and Eve” thus answers questions about national character and individual motivation not by meditating on politics but by doing philology. By offering a miniature anthology of European texts, it recovers and sets out in clear order a moral conscience for a medieval and a modern Europe. By locating “das Charakter des Volkes” in the idioms of the vernacular, it illustrates the power of philology to find the ethic that inheres in nations. And, finally, by couching this discussion in the old debates between the national philologies, it realigns relations between literary origins and political types. Auerbach does more than seek to reclaim Romance philology from the French; he seeks to reclaim it from the Germans. He seeks a politically pacifist philology, one that restores the possibilities of language study and literary criticism to a humanist agenda. He is not depoliticizing scholarship, as later critics hoped to do. Rather, he repoliticizes it. The allegory of collaboration behind the Mystère d’Adam and its interpretation, by the chapter’s end, takes as its moral the belief in the inherent goodness of the European peoples. We need not blame the good French like Adam, only the childish, instinct-governed, impetuous French like Eve, who would succumb to the temptations of a satanic Verführer.

“Sed inimici hominis domestici eius,” but a man’s enemies are the men of his own house. These are Bernard of Clairvaux’s words, quoted in this chapter, as a guide against “the prickings of temptation” (p. 163).³⁵ And when St. Francis of Assisi speaks, he gives voice to the very theme and method of the whole of Auerbach’s enterprise. Developing the observation that the bulk of the saint’s sentences, in one of his letters to Brother Leo, all begin with et, Auerbach notes (speaking as much, perhaps, for himself as for Francis): “But the person who writes these hurried lines is obviously so inspired by his theme, it fills him so completely, and the desire to communicate himself and to be understood is so overwhelming, that parataxis becomes a weapon of eloquence [zu einer Waffe der Beredsamkeit wird]” (p. 166; p. 162). “Adam and Eve” may well be seen as something of an armory of those weapons of eloquence, an education in the powers of philology both to read and write figurally. It teaches us that the political occasions of linguistic study can, in themselves, come to be the subject of scholarly erudition. It teaches, too, that allegory may become a mode of writing far more historical than history itself, for to find the historical resonance of “Adam and Eve”—to discern its political subtext—we need to read the chapter allegorically, as if it were itself a text in need of figural interpretation.

This allegorico-political Mimesis I have outlined seems far from the version of the book imagined by its early readers. The vision painted of Auerbach in the legends of the European and American academy is of a scholar almost willfully detached from social activism. The various interpretations advocated for the origins of Auerbach’s projects—their Hegelianism, their Viconianism, their commitments to a humanist philology—are, in their own way, curiously removed from the history of German university life between the world wars.³⁶ And, to a certain extent, the criticisms of Mimesis’s reception in America after the war, and of its embrace by the formalist New Critics, hinge on the criticism of the work itself: its lack of a self-conscious methodology, its apparent garbling of the theoretical and the historical.³⁷ This apprehension of the book is due largely to its first reviews by German and American readers. As Paul Bové has argued, the original reviews in American journals were by German émigrés who, apparently unfamiliar with Auerbach’s work on Dante and figuralism, considered Mimesis an idiosyncratic collection of essays without guiding principles of method or style (pp. 96–113).³⁸ The historical moment of its making, and its thematic and ideological consequences for the book, were lost on (or ignored by) early readers, who saw Auerbach’s exile more as impediment than challenge to his project.³⁹ To Helmut Hatzfeld, who wrote the first American review in 1949, “The book was doomed to remain eclectic because of the working conditions of the author in Istanbul.”⁴⁰ And, to the audiences who heard him in the first Princeton Seminar in Literary Criticism (later to be called the Gauss Seminars), in the fall of 1949, Auerbach’s personal experience was almost crassly heroic. “A Jew, an émigré from Germany, for years homeless, putting his big book together in Istanbul without benefit of the great libraries he longed for, Auerbach had faced with his flesh and blood the reality of evil force; the extremity of Pascal’s thought [the subject of the first seminar] answered, for him, an extremity of experience.”⁴¹

These two sides to the book’s early reception—the one flat, the other romantic—share nonetheless a predilection for effacing the political subtext to Auerbach’s reflections. The Turkish exile is externalized, made either a problem in research or a badge of honor, yet nowhere relocated in the critic’s narratives.⁴² This depoliticizing of Mimesis is in the interest of the institutions of postwar academic criticism. To find its origins, we need to turn not to the critic’s early reception in America but to the responses of Auerbach’s German contemporaries in the first years after the war. The second number of the 1948 volume of Romanische Forschungen—perhaps the premier organ of German Romanistik—opens with a long review essay by Gerhard Hess of Heidelberg, “Mimesis: Zu Erich Auerbachs Geschichte des abendländischen Realismus” (pp. 173–211); the volume’s third number closes with a brief notice of the Introduction aux études de philologie romane by Peter M. Schon of Mainz. Sandwiched between them is a full review by Auerbach himself of Leo Spitzer’s Essays in Historical Semantics and his Linguistics and Literary History. This volume of the journal represents Auerbach’s postwar debut in the media of German scholarship: Mimesis had appeared, in Bern, in 1946, and, with the exception of a piece in Speculum of that year, all Auerbach’s other publications from the end of the war until the Spitzer review appeared in Turkish volumes.⁴³ To call it a debut, though, or even a reemergence would be a misnomer, for the overall impression of these contributions to Romanische Forschungen is that, quite simply, there was nothing from which to emerge.

Hess’s is certainly the most positive of the early reviews (it is certainly the longest), and it appears from Auerbach’s “Epilegomena zu Mimesis” of 1953 that he did not consider it one of the negative assessments full of “Mißverständnisse” and in need of rebuttal.⁴⁴ What makes this review distinctive, however, is less its outright praise for the book—it is a little muted—than its desire to ground it in a tradition of a certain kind of scholarship. Hess begins by placing Mimesis not in the locus of the author’s exile but in the genealogies of academic scholarship. There are, he begins, few “Außergewöhnliche Bücher … in den geisteswissenschaftlichen Disciplinen” (p. 173), few truly unusual examples of scholarly work, such as Eduard Norden’s Antike Kunstprosa and, before that, Erwin Rohde’s Griechischer Roman. Norden and Rohde stand as exemplars of a nineteenth-century scholarly control, a blend of an “unermüdichen philologischen Fleißes und literarischen Feingefühls” (an untiring philological industry and a literary sensitivity). They also appear as teachers, and Norden himself, as Auerbach’s old teacher, stands as a fitting opening to this forthcoming account of the student’s book. The legacies of scholarship present themselves as legacies of student and master, as the paternity of learning.

Now, Auerbach’s Mimesis is, to Hess’s mind, not quite up to the model of these masters: it seems a little spotty in its coverage, familiar in its choice of major texts, and relatively unimaginative in its focus on the old question of the representation of reality and its choice of a primarily soziologische mode of inquiry. Yet Hess’s impression (Eindruck) is of a singular mind at work in Mimesis, an impression of “einer überlegenen, kunstverständigen, geschmackssicheren, im guten Sinne gebildeten Personlichkeit” (a personality judicious, connoisseurial, sure of its tastes, and brought up with good sense [p. 173]). Auerbach has a literary talent, one discernible from the book’s opening pages, but not one that imposes itself through polemic or dogmatic judgments. “Der Leser lebt in einer wohltuend humanen Atmosphäre”—The reader lives in a comforting, humane atmosphere (p. 174).

This attention to the humane atmosphere, to the more belletristic rather than the primarily scholarly features of Mimesis, leads off Hess’s chapter-by-chapter summary of the book. Though he begins with an allusive reference to “die Geschichte des Buchs” and to the writings of Auerbach’s “Istanbuler Zeit” (p. 174), there is no mention of the difficulties of his exile, no attention to the details of that Geschichte or to the contours of that Zeit. Hess’s review preoccupies itself with placing Mimesis in its traditions—scholarly, institutional, and literary—rather than in its time. Its goal is to bring Auerbach back into the official organs of Geistesgeschichte by emphasizing the continuities, genealogies, and detachments that enable der Leser to read Mimesis in the study. Instead of the fissures of exile, the limitations of a Turkish library, or the personal reflection on political conditions, Hess proffers the unbroken flow of learning.

The emphases on sensitivity and belletrism here—and, I would argue, in many of the early reviews—is not simply a misunderstanding on the part of Auerbach’s contemporaries. It represents a conscious strategy to efface the disturbing political and personal themes of Mimesis: to make it safe for the reader in the study, the student in the library, the connoisseur in that literary gallery where we may all breathe the “humane atmosphere” of intellectual comfort. More informed than the American reviewers of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hess relates Mimesis to Auerbach’s other work on Dante and on figura (p. 189). He recognizes that certain chapters, especially the Flaubert section, bring together work that Auerbach had written earlier. And he compares the work on Old French texts to scholarship by Curtius and Voretzsch (pp. 181–186, 187). These citations do not necessarily imply that Hess’s is a more objective account of the book than those by Hatzfeld, Ludwig Edelstein, or others. It is a more informed account, but one whose display of information presents an ideal of the worker in the institutions of the academy, where each book, each essay, has a place in the trajectory of apprenticeship, journeyman work, and mastery. The review, as a whole, papers over the hiatus of exile and the political subtexts of Mimesis’s readings. It brings the book back into the ambience of scholarship as if nothing had arrived to interrupt it or as if even such an interruption (“die Istanbuler Zeit”) could be safely tucked away in the vagaries of euphemism. Discontinuities exist: discontinuities of style, of method, and of technical approach. But, in spite of this apparent eclecticism of Mimesis, Hess writes, “hat der Leser nie das Gefühl der Uneinheitlichkeit. Ein klarer Geist durchdringt und verbindet scheinbar Disparates” (pp. 175–76). A clear and guiding spirit binds together all that seems disparate. For this, too, is Hess’s purpose, to unite together the disparate periods and products of Auerbach’s career as part of a genealogy of Geisteswissenschaft at whose heart may lie that Geist that has no history or politics.

The pages of Romanische Forschungen that follow Hess’s opening review article similarly leave us with a sense of academic business as usual. Studies of etymology, dialects, phonology, and literary topoi fill the volume in a manner hardly different from anything that had appeared before or during the Second World War. The tone of scholarly detachment similarly permeates Auerbach’s review of Spitzer’s books, the first entry in the Besprechungen section of the volume. For the most part, Auerbach concerns himself with narrating the contents of Spitzer’s volumes and with defining his particular method and its strengths and limitations. Only occasionally is there a reference to the personal in this review: to what, for example, Auerbach identifies as the “teilweise autobiographischen” (occasionally autobiographical) introduction to Linguistics and Literary History (p. 398) or to the letter from an American student, quoted in the book, criticizing Spitzer’s approach as personal and intuitive. The differences between the German review of this book and the one in English Auerbach published in the first volume of Comparative Literature (1949) are subtly instructive in this regard. Though the American review is somewhat shorter than the one in Romanische Forschungen, it closes with a substantial reflection on the personal in academic study and teaching. Commenting on the idiosyncratic possibilities of Spitzer’s method in his hands, Auerbach notes that we should not condemn the approach because of the excesses of the user.

For Auerbach writing in the pages of Romanische Forschungen, however, the practice has to be simpler and less personal. There are no comparable reflections in the German review, nothing of the “teilweise autobiographischen” that he attributes to Spitzer himself. Only in America, and only in English, could he give voice to the personal and political concerns behind the practice of scholarship. For the readers of Romanische Forschungen, such concerns can only be slipped in, allusively, in other forms and other languages. Witness the curious, unique English quotation in the discussion of Spitzer on Racine: “Racine’s main purpose was to show us the collapse of the world order as revealed to Thesée” (RF, p. 400). Or witness the moment, in the otherwise purely descriptive, brief review by Peter Schon of Auerbach’s Introduction aux études de philologie romane, where the circumstances of the book’s production can only be quoted in the French (“Ce petit livre fut écrit à Istanbul … pendant la guerre … loin des bibliothèques européennes et américaines” [RF, p. 490]).

The Auerbachiana of these volumes of Romanische Forschungen take us far from the political allusions or the personal reflections of Mimesis—so far that when Auerbach eventually came to publish his “Epilegomena zu Mimesis” in the 1953 volume of that journal, he set out to rehistoricize the book. This essay, which opens the volume, offers an occasion to respond to queries about individual interpretations by catching up on current scholarship. Yet, in the course of his responses to reviewers published, Auerbach grows more personal. He reminds the readers of the period in Istanbul (p. 5), recalls his youthful training in Germany (p. 15), and, at the close, explicitly addresses the historical and biographical moment in which the book took shape: “Mimesis ist ganz bewußt ein Buch, das ein bestimmter Mensch, in einer bestimmten Lage, zu Anfang der 1940er Jahre geschrieben hat” (p. 18). A certain man, at a certain time, in a certain “situation” (Lage)—this is the closing key to understanding Mimesis, to reading its figurae of the person and the present. Auerbach’s phrasing takes us back to the chapter on Adam and Eve, where Eve herself, “Herrin der Lage,” overthrows the order of her God and man; and it reminds us, too, of Auerbach’s quarrel with Etienne over who will be the master of the editorial situation.

It would be rewarding to name Auerbach the winner in that quarrel and to show that, in spite of all the manglings of Mimesis in the early reviews and the later appropriation of Auerbach himself into the canons of literary studies, his editorial decisions on the Mystère d’Adam stood up to professional approval. But, apparently, they do not. He is, perhaps, as much in error here as he was in his Proust quotation. The critical edition of the play by Paul Aebischer, published in the Textes Littéraires Français series in 1963, accepts without question Etienne’s distribution of the lines between Adam and Eve.⁴⁶ And, while the diplomatic edition of Leif Sletsjöe, published with a facing-page facsimile of the manuscript in 1968, does not print the text of the speeches as Etienne edits them, it does state in a note to line 283 that Adam probably should speak this line and that the A used by the scribe to signal the speaker has probably been lost from the margin of the manuscript.⁴⁷ Sletsjöe and Aebischer both cite Etienne approvingly, and, while their spellings of the individual words of the text may differ from the earlier scholar’s, they both confirm an ordering of speeches first suggested on the pages of Romania in 1922. So powerful has been this editorial tradition that, in the definitive American anthology of medieval drama edited by David Bevington, Etienne’s version appears without question. And yet so powerful is Auerbach’s example for the institutions of American medieval studies that Bevington can quote his interpretation of the play as received wisdom.⁴⁸

This fissure in a classroom anthology, perhaps more precisely than the record of the histories of scholarship, shows the paradox of the place of Auerbach’s Mimesis in the academy. On the one hand, it accepts the critical interpretation, treasures its appreciation of the humble and the everyday in the articulations of the sublime in order to breathe in fully that atmosphere of humanistic scholarship. On the other hand, it rejects—or, better yet, ignores—the textual interpretation, bypasses the very heart of Auerbach’s display of philological erudition that enables him to recover the character of European peoples and to write their literary history. One can only speculate on why Auerbach never went back to this passage, never revised his reading in the light of further textual scholarship (especially once he reached America).⁴⁹ Such speculation, too, might take us back to the very style of Auerbach’s chapter and to the paradoxes of Mimesis itself. The colloquialism of the presentation in “Adam and Eve” shifts scholarly attention away from the details of his editorial technique and toward the sensitivities of belletrism. Ironically, it may be Auerbach himself who seems to lack the precision of method he demanded in the Introduction aux études de philologie romane. The paradoxes of Mimesis lie in the tensions between the scholarly and the colloquial, between the learned techniques of Geisteswissenschaft and the felt experience of Feingefühl, between what Auerbach defined as the historical and the legendary. “Again and again, I have the purpose of writing history.”⁵⁰ This widely quoted passage has been used throughout much recent scholarship on Auerbach to emphasize the theory of historical understanding that grounds even his most affective of readings. But, as I have suggested here, we might do well to find his purpose in writing not Geschichte but Sage and to recall, as he asks us, that in times such as those in which he wrote Mimesis, “most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.”

If most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend, then so, too, are most literary critics. Erich Auerbach himself has become something of a legend, and the critical reception of his work in the past decade, as I have already noted, skirts the fine line between Sage and Geschichte: between exemplary valorization and historical framing. Certainly, by the time he had ensconced himself at Yale (whose faculty he joined in 1950), he was already legendary. Curtius himself complained, during a visit to America in the late 1940s, “one hardly hears anything but Mimesis.”⁵¹ Early American reviews waxed orphic over its great range and scope. No one, it would appear, had read as much, or with such insight, as Auerbach had. And, at Yale, whose New Critical formalism had, by the early 1950s, come to dominate the teaching of, at least, English literature, the apparently formalist close reading of Mimesis seemed a welcome confirmation of the local pedagogy. Carl Landauer has wittily reviewed “how New Haven stole the idea of Mimesis.” What he has called “the virtuoso performer” of that book—the rhetorically constructed narrator we see throughout its chapters—“played perfectly to American audiences of the 1950s.” Landauer goes on: “For the mid-century attempt to apotheosize culture, in a sense to create an Americanized Kultur, Mimesis was an exemplary text” (p. 180).⁵²

Landauer and others have done much to trace the impact of the book, and of Auerbach himself, on American readers, and the blend of formalist close reading and high literary cultural appreciation still, for some, embodies the ideal of literary study.⁵³ But even the history of Auerbach’s seven years at Yale has been transformed into a legend. Who can really say just what went on; who can draw lines between Sage and Geschichte among memories now half a century old? Almost everyone, it seems, wants something of his legacy, his imprimatur. Stephen G. Nichols reminisces about taking tea with Auerbach’s widow in the late 1950s, while he was a graduate student at Yale, going through old notes and papers, “each one seeming to recall a special occasion whose background and significance Mrs. Auerbach would gloss with reminiscences of university politics and intellectual quarrels from Weimar Germany (she did not much care to discuss their years in Istanbul).”⁵⁴ More recently, Alvin Kernan has also sought his place, quite literally, at Auerbach’s table, as he recalls his years in the mid-1950s at Branford College, Yale, when the dining room would be “graced sometimes by Erich Auerbach.” Mimesis, Kernan reminds us, was written “with only his small personal library available to him.”

I have no idea just what “dreary book on rhetoric” is on Kernan’s mind. Perhaps he is thinking of Literary Language and Its Public, the collection of essays assembled in the 1950s and published posthumously in German in 1958, though soon translated into English and, in fact, regarded as one of the most important critical assessments of the literary culture of late antiquity.⁵⁶ Of course, it is in Kernan’s interest to imagine a contrast between the brilliant Mimesis (the product of exile and almost intuitive literary skill) and the scholarly “book on rhetoric” (the product of a research library and a book, apparently, for specialists). Of course, too, it is in Kernan’s interest to associate himself with such an author, who should find himself not just in Auerbach’s dying presence but be instrumental in the scene. There is, in fact, a curiously Auerbachian quality to both the reminiscences of Nichols and Kernan. Both focus on scenes of repast—the domestic tea, the faculty lunch—and both lovingly linger over the everyday details that grant larger meaning to the scene. One could well imagine Kernan’s memoir of the moment, “The Red Leather Couch,” as something of his own “Brown Stocking” chapter. Or perhaps, too, “The Interrupted Supper” of Mimesis now becomes the interrupted lunch.

So, other than the techniques of close reading or the patina of humanistic scholarship or a collection of self-serving anecdotes, just what did New Haven steal from Mimesis? I would suggest that there remains another strand of influence, one not explicitly (or perhaps one might better say ingenuously) acknowledged by its practitioners, and one that has had an impact on more recent modes of inquiry in the academy. What the Yale critics of the 1970s (not just the 1950s) learned from Auerbach was the technique of synecdochic reading, of selecting apparently random quotations from literary works in order both to illustrate the larger stylistic and aesthetic qualities of those works and to illuminate the broader social environments and literary periods in which those works were written and read. There lies, behind this technique, a project in cultural etymology, and Auerbach’s other heirs have their tie to the modern ardent etymologists who closed my previous chapter.

Perhaps the best example of these later Auerbachian engagements is that succinct manifesto of American deconstruction, J. Hills Miller’s “The Critic as Host,” published in 1979 when Miller was professor of English at Yale.⁵⁷ This essay works through a series of etymological feints. It writes a cultural philology of Romanticism, yet it performs its Auerbachian maneuvers not only on literary texts but on critical ones as well. Its opening selection of quotations—the apparent guise of randomness, the performance of a kind of sortes of the critics—functions much like the Mimesis technique of selection. The whole point of this process, in Miller as well as in Auerbach, is to create the rhetorical impression not that random samplings necessarily exemplify larger textual structures but that there is something in the gift or talent of this particular selector, this particular reader, that enables him to select, quite simply, better than you or I can. Look at the way Miller begins.

Miller brilliantly stands Auerbach on his head. Central, as we remember, to Mimesis is that there are no citations: that the work was written without access to a major library, without access to “almost all the more recent investigations.” We know this now to be a pose.⁵⁸ And so, too, Miller’s is a pose, for here the subject matter is the set of “recent investigations” themselves. Miller effectively inverts the hierarchical relationship of text and critic by performing the Auerbachian move on critical rather than authorial works. And he proceeds, in what immediately follows, to perform a similar bit of critical magic on the philological tradition itself. His etymological play with the word “parasite” (here, though redolent as much of Freud on the uncanny as it is of any professional philologist) leads him to argue (in terms that might resonate with Auerbach or, for that matter, with William Dwight Whitney) that “[a] curious system of thought, or of language, or of social organization (in fact all three at once) is implicit in the word parasite” (p. 453). Cultural history through philology.

But there is more. Midway through Miller’s essay, as he turns from etymology and criticism to the reading of Romantic poetry, he introduces texts in ways distinctively reminiscent of the rhetoric of Mimesis. Look at the way Shelley enters: “One of the most striking ‘episodes’ of The Triumph of Life is the scene of self-destructive erotic love” (p. 459). This could be the opening sentence of any chapter of Mimesis—except for the way in which Miller ironizes it by placing the word “episodes” in scare quotes. The very notion of the critical selection here, the very gesture of exemplary reading, is called into question, exposed as the feint of the critic rather than the genius of the writer. After the passage from Shelley, when Miller returns to the rhetoric of awe, we cannot, I think, read it wholly straight: “This magnificent passage is the culmination of a series of passages writing and rewriting the same materials in a chain of repetitions beginning with Queen Mab. In the earlier versions the word ‘parasite’ characteristically appears, like a discreet identifying mark woven into the texture of the verbal fabric” (p. 460; emphases mine). If we did not know what the “Brown Stocking” meant in Auerbach, we know it now. And if, in some sense, Mimesis really is a modernist novel—a verbal version of Mrs. Ramsay’s injunction to “find another picture to cut out,” where individual fragments are selected and reconfigured into a compelling yet self-consciously artificial whole—then Miller’s version of things is a postmodernist fiction. As such, it is a fiction that leads not to success but to failure. Shelly’s poetry concerns itself with “narcissism and incest, the conflict of generations, struggles for political power, the motifs of the sun and the moon, the fountain, the brook, the caverned enclosure, ruined tower, or woodland dell, the dilapidation of man’s constructions by nature, and the failure of the poetic quest” (p. 459).

Miller’s “Critic as Host” represents a possible response to the philological tradition as exemplified by Auerbach. It exposes as rhetoric the devices of selection, close reading, aesthetic evaluation, and etymological reading that motivate that tradition. In this project, it works out what Frederic Jameson (who was Miller’s Yale contemporary, teaching French there from 1976 to 1983) recognized as the fiction of etymology: “For etymology … is to be considered not so much a scientific fact as a rhetorical form, the illicit use of historical causality to support the drawing of logical consequences.” And then, quoting an authoritative source—Jean Paulhan “in an ingenious little book”—Jameson continues: “the word itself tells us so: etymology etumos logos, authentic meaning. Thus etymology advertises itself, and sends us back to itself as its own first principle.”⁵⁹ Jameson here, in the opening pages of The Prison-House of Language, is reviewing the Saussurian inheritance in critical theory, and he argues (in the passage just before the one I quote) that “Saussure’s is in a sense an existential perception”—that is, that behind Saussure’s notion of the sign lies an awareness that, for all the history behind individual words, such history is irrelevant to the speaker of a language. This observation was, as I noted in my previous chapter, central to Whitney’s notion of the arbitrary and conventional nature of communication (and, in turn, his claim that appeals to etymology could have a rhetorical effect but really were not useful in language of the everyday). But it is here, in Jameson, pressed into the service of a kind of existential criticism itself. “Only for the speaker, at any moment in the history of the language, one meaning alone exists, the current one: words have no memory.”⁶⁰

If words have no memory, people do. The memory of texts and readings is of primary concern to Auerbach and those who write in his wake (“Readers will remember,” begins Mimesis). And this concern, too, lies just beneath the surface of The Prison-House of Language. A little later in the book, when he is reviewing the idea of defamiliarization and the Russian critical term “ostranenie,” Jameson illustrates the idea with a passage from the seventeenth-century French writer La Bruyère. He quotes from La Bruyère’s description of the peasantry, with its depiction of those people as “ferocious animals,” who only have “a sort of articulate voice,” and who, upon standing up, the viewer recognizes as people. It is a long and terrifying passage, and Jameson reflects: “This horrifying text, one of the first explicit descriptions of the peasantry in modern French literature, no longer directs our attention to the natural and metaphysical conditions of human life, but rather to its unjustifiable social structure, which we have come to take for granted as something natural and eternal, and which therefore cries out for defamiliarization” (pp. 56–57). But the attention of the reader of The Prison-House of Language is, in fact, directed someplace else. Go to the bottom of the page, and find La Bruyère’s text cited as follows: “Quoted in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (trans. Willard Trask [Princeton, New Jersey, 1968], p. 366” (p. 57 n. 10). Certainly, Jameson could have found the passage on his own. But he did not. Like Miller’s “Critic as Host,” Jameson’s book here questions the very problem of quotation and citation. The point is not just Jameson’s laziness but rather that the passage stands as part of the critical consciousness because Auerbach had quoted it. And he had quoted it with an attention-getting commentary of his own. “I should also like to quote the well-known and strangely arresting passage on the peasantry,” is how Auerbach introduces it, and then he writes: “Although this important passage is clearly of its century through its moralizing emphasis, it yet would seem to stand alone in the belles-lettres of the time…. I prefer to assume that he was also thinking of himself and the general political and aesthetic situation…. [P]olitical reasons and aesthetic reasons are interrelated” (pp. 366–67).

The interrelatedness of the political and the aesthetic is a key theme throughout Jameson’s work. It is the very argument of Prison-House (as it would be for the much later Political Unconscious). And so, here, it is the authority of Auerbach, the commentary behind the quotation, that grants Jameson the entry into his discussion of the “unjustifiable social structure.” The text, and its politico-aesthetic reading, has been sanctioned by Mimesis, and yet Jameson can take that reading one step further by enfolding it into the legacy of Russian formalism. What is being defamiliarized here, in other words, is not just the “phenomena of social life” presented in La Bruyère but the phenomena of critical life as represented in Auerbach.

The old philology, then, lurks always in the background not just of New Criticism but high theory. And, most recently, it has come out of the shadows to be acknowledged in the New Historicism. At the beginning of their Practicing New Historicism, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt offer Auerbach as nothing less than the inspiration for their project. Mimesis is a book of “textual fragments,” informed by “a profoundly melancholy sense that the centuries-long project [Auerbach] chronicles is close to exhaustion, disintegration, or irrelevance” (pp. 32–33). There is, in Mimesis, too, a “buried Hegelian plot,” not, perhaps “finally realized” but certainly informing Auerbach’s fascination with “the secularized representations of human destiny.” But what does this enterprise have to do with the claims of the New Historicism?

Unlike the critics of Kernan’s generation, there is no appeal here to the direct influence of the master. Auerbach was dead two decades before Gallagher and Greenblatt and their peers were “writing literary history in the 1970s.” This is a kind of metareminiscence: a remembrance not of the author but of the text, a nostalgia for a time not when the literary works were read but when the literary critics were—a time, by implication, when literary criticism mattered. The New Historicist anecdote now has a genealogy of its own, one that goes back to the method of selection and discussion raised, almost to an art, by Auerbach. What was, then, “so appealing about Auerbach’s strategy” was that it “enabled critics to illuminate extremely complex and … long works without exhausting themselves or their readers” (p. 36).

But there remains, it seems to me, something profoundly disingenuous about this critical appeal. “Auerbach can say convincing and fresh things about texts like the Bible, the Odyssey, the Inferno, … because he has liberated himself from the task of writing a full ‘history,’ because his analyses have the kind of intensity and detail more typically associated with readings of Shakespeare sonnets or Donne lyrics” (pp. 36–37). In other words, Auerbach could say fresh things because his techniques looked like classical New Criticism: intense, detailed readings of rich Renaissance texts. But the point remains: Auerbach can say convincing and fresh things because he is Auerbach. His insights come not from some “conjuring trick,” as Gallagher and Greenblatt insouciantly imply (p. 38), but from a blend of immense learning and intense reflection. The New Historicists, as Gallagher and Greenblatt do acknowledge, were, in fact, “for the most part vastly less learned than Auerbach” (p. 45). Moreover, they were reading texts he would not care to read: texts not framed in the canon of great Western literature. Had canonical literature exhausted itself? Had the times so changed that rereadings of the classics simply would not do? Had the question of reality revealed in style become unanswerable? “The turn to the historical anecdote,” Gallagher and Greenblatt write, “in literary study promised both an escape from conventional canonicity and a revival of the canon, both a transgression against the domestic and a safe return to it” (p. 47).

In these, and the many other passages in Practicing New Historicism that reflect on Auerbach’s influence, there remains a curious defensiveness, a need to justify a project through an appeal to the method and example of the master. But more than adherence to a method, the pressure of this claim is to participate in the moral fiction of Mimesis: in the story of exile and dismissal, the fantasy of homecoming and its parent-child relationships. Practicing New Historicism seeks a parent for its project, one safely dead who cannot query the methods or motives of his heirs. “We suspect that Auerbach would have disliked this characterization of his work,” an aside that makes sense only in the larger rhetoric of approval that these writers play (p. 37). What Mimesis itself inscribes within it is the fundamentally paternalistic quality of the philological tradition and, in turn, of that very need for authoritative approval. Auerbach rhetorically constructs himself as an exiled prodigal son, whose return is metaphorically adumbrated in its chapters. Odysseus comes home, and Isaac is spared; Mrs. Ramsay smoothes her young boy’s hair; and so on.

Mimesis may be a paternalistic text, and Gallagher and Greenblatt are but the most recent appellants to its approval. And, as such appellants, they are complicit in the reading, or the reconstruction, of Mimesis as a book of fathers. Their account of Auerbach’s engagement with Virginia Woolf—“virtually the only female author accorded sustained attention …, and then as an emblem of dissolution and decadence” (p. 45)—misses the point. She is, in many ways, the telos of Mimesis. As I have suggested, she emerges as the maternal figure of philology, the voice through which the method of the book itself is posited (“let’s find another picture to cut out”), the entrée for a final chapter that takes all the paradigms of literary canonicity (male, European, Christian) and inverts them. Gallagher and Greenblatt fail to notice the women who populate the volume. Indeed, one could make the claim that Mimesis stands as book of female figures at the center of the literary tradition.

Let us imagine such a project. Let us think of the book’s first reader not as that “him” that Auerbach would seek but as a her. Euryclea becomes the motivating reader of the Odyssey, the true interpreter of signs and marks. Odysseus’s scar is an inscription; like so many marks on skin and bone throughout the epic, it is written on the body (the word used to describe such scars is often επιγραψε). As Haun Saussy has shown in great detail, Euryclea’s reading of the scar is really that: the recognition of a written sign, its meaning, and its bearer. Her recognition recalls many other moments in the epic when the incised mark or scratch provokes an understanding. For an oral poem, such scenes of epigraphy break in, revealing not just the fissures in our own, historical conception of the poem and its circulation (are there really literate figures in its narrative?) but in Homer’s, too. Euryclea becomes the reader who remembers, even though her expression of that memory is stifled as Odysseus goes for her throat and silences her.⁶¹

Let us imagine all the women of Mimesis longing for a voice. Amid the bustle of Petronius, there is Fortunata, who has risen from nothing to a position of such power that “[i]f she tells [Trimalchio] at high noon it’s dark, he’ll agree.” “Sed haec lupatria providet omnia,” a phrase translated in the English as “But that bitch looks out for everything.” Perhaps she is a forerunner of Adam’s Eve in chapter 7, who would similarly aspire to control, to be “Herrin der Lage.” And there are Madame du Chastel, Lady Macbeth (who comes in only briefly and already dead [p. 326]), the Dulcinea of Don Quixote’s desire, Esther in Racine’s play of that name (treated in the context of “The Faux Dévot,” chapter 15), Manon Lescaut, Luise Millerin, Madame Vauquer, Germinie Lacerteux. Throughout, the book is moving, almost aching, for a fully fledged female authority, one that may speak or write without fear of censure, dismissal, or death. And that is where Virginia Woolf comes in.

“Had we but world enough and time….” This phrase from Andrew Marvell stands as the epigraph to Mimesis (right on the title page of the German but deferred to a later page of its own in the English). It has long been valued for its melancholy: its enduring sense that, if we only had enough time, all things would resolve, the great projects would emerge, and readers and scholars would reunite in a world literature. And yet this epigraph comes from a poem about not melancholy but desire. It is a plea “To His Coy Mistress,” and perhaps, so is Mimesis itself. For now, philology is that coy mistress—that Lady Philology of the medieval allegories—as are, perhaps, the many women (some coy, some not) who populate its chapters. Read this phrase not as an epigraph but as a dedication to another kind of reader, and restore it to its context.

Marvell’s lines telescope all earth and all time into narrow space. And so does Auerbach. Can we imagine him, if not by the Indian Ganges, then some place similarly (at least for the European reader) at the end of the earth—or should we say that instead of the Indian Ganges there lies that touch of the “oriental” in the Indian cashmere of Proust’s remembered father? And how could anyone who, in Auerbach’s words, “evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany” (p. 19) read Marvell’s line on the “Conversion of the Jews” and not shudder? Had we but world enough and time, certain behaviors would be no crime; but in these times and this place, just being who you were was criminal.

I leave Mimesis as a paradox: a book of sons and fathers that inscribes a female reading in it; a work of a European written in the “orient”; a book that aspires to correct editions and right readings and yet is shot through with error. Let me say, more to the point, that it lies in this book, and not in the work of later critics, that we find “both a transgression against the domestic and a safe return to it.” No better phrase, it seems to me, could be deployed to describe many of the literary narratives Mimesis brings together. And no better phrase could stand as epigraph to those traditions of philology and rhetoric I trace throughout my book. For if Mimesis is a story of synecdoche, then so is almost everything I study here. Errata sheets take bits and pieces out of books, call them to our attention, and then alter them—in the process, not simply correcting a local error but forever altering our way of reading an entire book. The history of Anglo-Saxon literature is a history of fragments, whether they be the surviving leaves of a near-lost vernacular tradition or the exemplary passages selected by historians and critics from George Hickes to Tolkien and beyond. Casaubon’s barely legible notes, the explicitly named “errant fragments,” seek to construct a history of thought but, in the end, lead only to despair. And the ardent etymologies of American rhetoricians and philologists aspire, from the eighteenth century to the present, to explain a history of reading, nationhood, or scholarly identity in a single word.

The Oxford English Dictionary had built its history of the language out of well-selected bits and pieces. Book reviewing, literary criticism, even reading itself uses parts for wholes. The great reader is one who can recall a quote, make aphorisms, epigraphs, or anecdotes out of a text (perhaps “Auerbach can say convincing and fresh things,” in large part, because he can select fresher passages than anybody else). And “text” itself, from “textus,” something woven (hence, our modern word “textile”) finds itself etymologically brought to life, not only in Virginia Woolf’s brown stocking but in the anonymous review of a mid-nineteenth-century forgotten dictionary: “The authorship or compilership of a dictionary which has gone through numerous editions is, indeed, a question like that of the identity of the darned and redarned stockings with the original pair.” I made much of this quotation in chapter 3, showing both how the OED had truncated it and how it may be read, both in the Dictionary and in its original context, as something of a statement about authorship itself. Is any work of criticism little more than a redarned stocking, a patchwork of the fabric of others? What happens when we wrap the old in fabrics fresh or strange? Like Proust’s father, turbaned in his Indian cashmere, philology has always come so sheathed: wrapped in the trappings of the orientalist, embedded in the memories of childhood, fearful of fathers. And, in what may be the most dazzling compilation of fragments, the concatenation of Shakespearean quotations drawn, as Auerbach himself says, “at random” and full of mothers, fathers, kings, and servants, there appears this comment.

At moments such as this one, Auerbach anticipates the ending of his book. The fabric of the world, the fabric of this vision, look ahead to the knitting of the stocking. And the “little life” that Prospero finds “rounded with a sleep” looks forward, too, to all our bedtime stories, not the least those of one who “used to go to bed early” and whose remembrance of bedtime comes complete with structures “long ago demolished.” Mimesis closes, as we all know, with an appeal to the future. “Nothing now remains but to find him—to find the reader, that is.” I return to this line now to reread it not as a problem in gender (as I had suggested earlier) but in referent. Perhaps the claim is not to find the reader but to find the author. Nothing now remains but to find him. I’ve searched throughout my book to find them—scholars, that is—and I think I have. Their errancies and errors, like my own, help us to find them and to find ourselves. Nothing now remains but to find him. “Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.” I found myself, as Auerbach’s beloved Dante put it. If that search goes on by recalling our pasts, it also transpires in the search for our futures, and my final foray into this inquiry lies with one imagination of such a future. For, if Auerbach imagines Prospero, at least implicitly, as his philologist in exile, then so did his contemporaries. My epilogue looks at a popular account of such an exile, the movie Forbidden Planet, released just a year before Auerbach’s death. It scripts out an errand into a wilderness both domestic and weird, familiar and familial, grounded in The Tempest and yet driven by an image of the émigré philologist and his uncomprehending, all-too-American students.