Reality in literature

Eurycleia washes odysseus feet

Not long ago I was looking through a recently published volume of English translations of essays by Erich Auerbach. The volume contains a range of essays, but my interest concerned the new translation by Jane Newman in this volume of Auerbach's essay on world literature. Previously, the "standard" translation was that of Edward Said. Auerbach's intention in that essay is hard to grasp, even if one has read it, as I have, in German –– several times, indeed. It is probably necessary to go back and read many of Auerbach's earlier writings to speak more definitively about what he meant by "philology of world literature," which is Newman's translation of the title. In contrast, Said rendered it as "philology and world literature." Both are somewhat odd, as is even the German title, "Philologie der Weltliteratur." After all, Auerbach is asserting that, in our globalized world, all nations and cultures are becoming homogenized, whereas (what he does not say) philology was a study of texts, particularly of the historical evolution of texts and the relationship of texts through history. Now that we have reached "the end of history" (a phrase Auerbach doesn't use, but it seems to be suggested),  the discipline of philology would appear to be irrelevant.

In this connection was another essay, "Vico and Aesthetic Historicism" (1948). We moderns, writes Auerbach, have a historically unprecedented access to all arts of the world and of all times, and our aesthetic preferences are "indiscriminate." It is not a contradiction to enjoy both Shakespeare and Sophocles, no matter the different dramatic choices of the two writers, or even such non-Western dramas as Noh and Javanese puppet plays. We enjoy for each, as he writes, “the same preparedness for understanding.” Unlike the Ancients, we do not judge art according to “certain aesthetic rules or judgments" that are shared by our contemporaries. The Greeks, when it came to art, had rules that pertained to each genre, but the same can be said of every other historical culture and to the greater civilizations, e.g., the Islamic empires, the Mayans and Aztecs, or China. Moreover, a civilization can be identified by its shared artistic ideals. Thus, philology, which exumes those ideals through texts.

The Sacrifice of Isaac (Rembrandt workshop), 1636

This week I read a review of this volume of translations. It was by Michael Wood and appeared in the London Review of Books. Wood's focus was on Mimesis, published in 1946 in German, which is the work by which Auerbach is principally known outside of Germany. It is subtitled "The Representation of Reality in Western Literature." That study begin with a chapter contrasting two stories. One is Odysseus's homecoming as described in Homer's Iliad; the other is the Old Testament account of the sacrifice of Isaac (which of course does not take place). Auerbach finds that what Wood in his review calls "the erratic, immediate reality of the inhabitants" of the earth is captured in the Biblical account, but not in Homer. On his homecoming, after all, and after a decade of amazing adventures, Odysseus is the same man he was when he left Ithaca to join the Greek fleet for Troy. As Auerbach writes of the Homeric style, it knows "only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present." In a memorable coinage, Auerbach writes that the Homeric heroes "wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives."

How different the fate of the Old Testament characters:

"[W]hat a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast!––between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealously, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues. [...] It is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality."

In connection with the representation of reality in Western literature, Wood connected this realism with a transcendent structure that does not ignore the earthly existence of humans. Real lives play out in real time, but it is time subsumed under a transcendental authority. Thus, one's character and one's fate are intertwined. One cannot escape who or what one is, quite literally in the afterlife of Dante's Inferno, in which one is condemned to repeat for eternity one's besetting character flaw.

This term irdisch (of the earth) in Auerbach is sometimes translated as "secular," which, to today's ears, lacks any suggestion of transcendence. Just the opposite. But as Wood points out, Auerbach also often uses the word "concrete" to suggest the situatedness of characters in Western literature in their milieu. But, again, human fate is carried out within that milieu. As Wood writes, however, we moderns, true secularists, are left to figure out the meaning of our lives ourselves. Some might disagree, but "individual destiny" sounds meaningless in a secular world.