"An Inner About-Face": Auerbach and de Man Reading Montaigne

It has become common among scholars to illustrate the significance of Erich Auerbach's critical project by both situating it within the context of his life and defining it against deconstruction.² In an early essay, Emily Apter argues that, despite his apparent conservatism, Auerbach's "privileging of exile" (87; he wrote Mimesis as a refugee in Turkey) suggests a parallel with postcolonial theory and might thus offer a corrective to "several generations of Europhilic, deconstructively trained, predominantly white comparative literature critics" (86).³ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht likewise contrasts his own methodological emphasis on Auerbach's biography—a staple of Auerbach criticism whether the focus is (in Gumbrecht's case) on his academic career in Germany, on his exile in Turkey, or on his emigration to the United States⁴—to deconstruction, which offers only "the bleak insight into the impossibility of any stable meaning and, with it, into the illusory character of any existential orientation" (32, emphasis in original). The implication here seems to be that an analysis that approaches Auerbach's texts deconstructively is bound to ignore the necessary link between Auerbach's own "existential decisions" and his writing (32). While neither Apter nor Gumbrecht mentions him, their criticism of reading practices indebted to deconstruction on ethical and political grounds would seem to identify Auerbach as an antidote to the likes of Paul de Man, whose wartime journalism and otherwise checkered life are summoned up indirectly to explain why the critical orientation he spearheaded would deny the link between existence and writing that Auerbach supposedly privileged.

Auerbach himself certainly encouraged this connection between life and work, famously noting in the 1953 "Epilegomena to Mimesis" that "Mimesis is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s" (Mimesis 574). Nevertheless, elsewhere in his work—and in Mimesis itself—he calls into question writing's ability to transmit meaning stably and thus reflect life, a position that suggests similarities between his criticism and de Man's. In particular, Auerbach's work on Michel de Montaigne's Essais, both in the 1932 article "Montaigne the Writer" and in the chapter titled "L'Humaine Condition" in the 1946 Mimesis, registers an uncertainty about textuality that conflicts with Auerbach's claim that Montaigne offers a model of authentic existence whose point of departure is the acknowledgment of mortality and the freedom that accompanies it. Paul de Man takes up similar issues in his 1953 "Montaigne et la transcendence" ("Montaigne and Transcendence"), a text that precedes but in many ways anticipates his exercises in rhetorical reading. In that article, de Man identifies an inherent tension between language and subjectivity in Montaigne, one that would imperil efforts to read the Essais as autobiography. De Man therefore makes explicit the problems with textuality toward which Auerbach only gestures, though the language of his own account suggests a much more ambivalent attitude toward questions of writing and existence than might be expected, one that does not simply deny the relation between the two. In this essay, I argue that both Auerbach and de Man consider the possibility that reading and writing amount to a form of death, understood not in an existential or thematic sense, but as a consequence of Montaigne's practice of linguistic self-reflection, which paradoxically severs him from the concrete existence that he seeks to transmit through his text. Rather than claiming, then, that Auerbach's Montaigne represents an instance of humanism while de Man's Montaigne anticipates what we might call "post-structuralism," attention to the reading practices of both demonstrates the impossibility of such tidy historical schemes, suggesting rather that the two critics' concerns cross in unanticipated and previously unnoticed ways.

I. Auerbach's Montaigne

At first glance, Auerbach's 1932 "Montaigne the Writer" seems to describe Montaigne as an existentialist avant la lettre, a man who, in a world where religious and political traditions could no longer ground the human subject, turned inward, his "main concern" being "to protect his inner core, where he kept his mind and his thoughts concealed...