ERICH AUERBACH'S REALITY

1 5 3 R E R I C H A U E R B A C H ’ S R E A L I T Y P A U L H . F R Y A new selection of essays by Erich Auerbach o√ers a welcome chance to revisit the author of Mimesis (1945), the vast meditation on the history of realism known to modern Anglophones through the 1968 translation of Willard Trask. Auerbach is also known for the great essay ‘‘Figura’’ (1938), reprinted in this selection and central to everything he ever wrote, and for the 1929 Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Despite the range and variety of his learning, owing to which we mention his name in the same breath with those of E. R. Curtius, Leo Spitzer, and René Wellek, Auerbach was no fox but a hedgehog whose whole oeuvre is the elaboration of a single idea. This idea is simple enough to be contained in the title of the first book on Dante: ‘‘Dante’’ is the name above all others that evokes our destiny in other worlds, yet his genius embeds his characters in this world, in all its earthly (irdisch) immanence. Yet this idea of Auerbach’s is at the same time so multi-faceted that it must be pursued in many directions. T i m e , H i s t o r y , a n d L i t e r a t u r e : S e l e c t e d E s s a y s o f E r i c h A u e r b a c h , edited and with an introduction by James I. Porter, translated by Jane O. Newman (Princeton University Press, 336 pp., $39.50) 1 5 4 F R Y Y Not that he browbeats the reader. One can read along here and there in Mimesis, sensing the richness of the tapestry without being conscious of a guiding thread. It is there nonetheless. It arises very much from Auerbach’s biographical and historical circumstances . A secular Jew at home with the culture of Herder, Goethe, and Hegel until the rise of the Nazis, he was fascinated by the central mysteries of Christianity, especially by the Incarnation, with its tragic outcome, that volatile admixture of transcendent promise and physical torment that can only be described in a mixture of styles, combining without fully fusing the high style of prophetic witness and the low style that admits visceral detail. For Auerbach, even though he never seems wholly indi√erent to the redemptive promise of this event, the Crucifixion and its irreducibly Jewish prototype, the sacrifice of Isaac, are primarily the supreme aesthetic moments of what in the subtitle of Mimesis he calls ‘‘the representation of reality in Western literature.’’ Thus he shares with Walter Benjamin – with whom he corresponded – an ever so slightly mystical preoccupation with the messianic as perhaps the sole recourse for cultural fulfillment. In 1921 he wrote, recalling Dante: ‘‘Only once the cultural community in which we live takes on a closed form again, one from which it can draw su≈cient strength and courage to acknowledge that its destiny is its final arbiter, only then will a commemoration of Dante be more than a celebration by scholars and enthusiasts.’’ But Auerbach also lived and wrote during a time when the nationalist horrors of the 1930s had the e√ect among others of burying ‘‘reality’’ under the inflexible rhetoric, narrowly aristocratic in earlier times, from which Auerbach nearly always winced away whenever it appeared in history. During this time, when much of the work on Mimesis was under way, international Marxism had a strong appeal to many who would now identify themselves as liberal or cosmopolitan. Like Peter Gay, Auerbach in the long run had what one might call a willingly bourgeois outlook, not least because historically the middle class has often embodied the mixture of outlooks and styles he admired. Yet the appeal of Jesus was politically more radical, more ‘‘Marxist’’: a carpenter doing his conversion work among marginalized peoples under the baleful gaze of the Roman elite was a natural focus for the ‘‘tragically serious...