Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History and the Human

3. Erich Auerbach and Invention of Man

3 Erich Auerbach and Invention of Man Thmare atlmtM 幽rent ways t 切 O 叫uce 叫 A叫吋 h 削削 11 川 l what we have s 阻 ai 迅 d about Vico. On the one hand, we might speak of him as a scholar who embraces philology as a method for thinking about literature and culture because it recognizes that human being is a self-making historical species 一 and so we might begin with a look at philology. On the other hand, we might approach Auerbach as a reader and student of Vico, about whose work he thought long and seriously, writing essays that give us perhaps the best literary critical understanding we have of the Italian's work and historicism's value to criticism and culture. These approaches converge, of course, linking great literary scholars across national boundaries and historical epochs; they converge at a point of great discovery of what 1call the invention of the human. Much of what 1say today focuses on one chapter in Auerbach's greatest and most influential book, Mimes佑: The Representation ofReality in Western Literature.1 Mimesis is so well-known and so much written about that 1 introduce it only by saying that its author was a romance philologist by training, a fact that 1 interpret as politica11y significant - that is, as importantly different from either Germanic or classical philologies that might well have become more easily part of the official culture of Nazism. Auerbach was also a Jew who fled for his life to Turkey where, as he says in "The Epilogue," he wrote this book without the resources of a major research library, but with the support of a Papal Nuncio who a110wed him access to the Vatican library in Istanbul. Mimesis comes into the world marked with a11 the richness that study, exile, and experiential complexity might produce. It exists in part because of cultures' mutual interpenetration: writing at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, this specialist in romance languages and literature makes use of a Catholic institution in a then insistently secularized Turkey to write a book that μCαh 甘 ri 臼 ist 討 tian Europe,' by his torture a 缸 n 吋 dk 恆 illing， would have made impossible. Mimesis sits before 40 Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human its readers as a cry of conscience against those intellectuals, specialists, and politicians who repudiate the interactions of cultures and institutions and treat them violently, reductivel步 in terms of simple national, bordered, or linguistic identities. The grandeur ofAuerbach's achievement is the preemptive indictment specifically of all those who entice or enable power with monologic stories about nations, languages, and cultures and who forget what Vico and Auerbach certainly knew: the intellectuals' task is to reinforce the pollinating, fertile, and interesting richness of common human life lived and thought differently but compassionately, empatheticall步 with love. 1intend to discuss Auerbach's reading of Dante, especially his discussion of ηle In戶rno， the first part of Dante's great Italian poe吼 LaCo仰的d肌 which tells the story of the poet's descent into hell with the Roman poet, Virgil, as his guide. 1will comment mostly on the chapter entitled,“Farinata and Cavalcante," about which 1 will say more as we go along.2 1 want to draw your attention to one specific but crucial moment in this essay and from i七 follow the lines of interest that appear. 1commend this as one of the most daring moments in critical history, a moment when a great critic, reading an even greater poet, finds the truth that humanity is a poetic creation - that poetry created modern humanit多 and this because of the historical development of the species' cultural capacities. Inthetenthcanto ofThe In戶rno， asVirgil and Dantediscuss the condemnation of heretics and atheists, a Tuscan voice arises from the tombs, hailing Dante the Pilgrim, stopping him in his passage. At the very start of his readings, Auerbach insists that we acknowledge the difficult greatness and grand originality of this poetry. His comments are always comparative and in this case, he raises Dante against a background of great writings he has already studied - the Homeric epics, the Hebraic Bible, the Song of Roland, and other m句or classical and medieval texts. Comparative critical technique permits both evaluative and historical placement of Dante's work.“More is packed together in this passage," writes Auerbach,“than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book; but there is not only more, the material is not only weightier and more dramatic within...