For Nick Heron and Jernej Habjan, who stimulated it.
Erich Auerbach’s essay on world literature, written in the early post-war period and later promoted by Edward Said, has become central to our understanding of the field. Today I want to contextualize that essay mainly by approaching it through Auerbach’s larger project, which I will think about in relation to scholars rarely considered in this regard. These scholars are the French literary historians and critics, Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) and Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915), and the German historical sociologist, Alexander Rüstow (1885-1963). Considering that Taine and Gourmont had very different interests than Rüstow’s, this conjecture may seem surprising. But to place Auerbach at an intersection between them turns out to be illuminating. It both enlarges our sense of him and helps us better understand why he turned to world literature in the early fifties. In particular, I wish to show that world literature is, for Auerbach, as much a political as a literary category, with roots in both post-Nietzschean “end of history” thought and the Cold War emergence of a stand-off between capitalism and communism of global reach. [1]
Taine
Hyppolite Taine may well have been the mid-nineteenth century’s most influential French literary historian: Antoine Compagnon has called him the era’s “literary dictator,” and in an introduction to his project Marshall Brown called his History of English Criticism one of “the greatest works of literary history of its century.”[2] In Mimesis, Auerbach himself notes that Taine was “the first to employ the sociological method” which he himself drew upon and whose emergence Auerbach considered to have crucially altered the quality of European realism.[3]
Taine’s three volume History of English Literature (1866—) established a new ‘scientific’ model for analysing literature, one that broke with the various methods and interests then in place across the disciplines of philology, literary history and rhetoric.[4] But Taine was not primarily a literary scholar. Like Rüstow, he was a polymath: a philosopher, a psychologist, a political historian and theorist as well as a famous travel writer.
In effect Taine harnessed a Lockean/Humean understanding of the human mind (as spelled out in his masterwork De’ l’Intelligence (1870)) to a sweeping naturalist account of humanity’s development in general. His work relies on the Enlightenment assumption that human history and thought is based in, and develops from, a universal human nature. For him all cultural and intellectual analysis contributes to the study of ‘Man.’ More particularly, human ‘selves’ are constructs developed through a universal psychological process in which primary mental events—concrete sensations and perceptions—when repeated and associated with one another become ideas, memories, identities, and names. These secondary mental forms are more abstract than sensations and perceptions, and for that reason cruder too. Nonetheless, in selves, they gradually form a sensibility, that is to say, a web of ideas, affects, and habits through which we experience the world, and in which our individuality comes to consist.
In this philosophical psychology, the world itself becomes a “true hallucination” shaped in, and emanating from, individual sensibilities by and in the words and ideas we share and repeat, which are, as I say, themselves abstractions and conventionalizations of sensations.[5] This leads Taine to an aesthetic which urges possibilities for breaking out of these generalized ideas and habitual associations in which selves and lives are formed so as to establish whatever contact with the actual is possible. As far as literary criticism is concerned, Taine’s epistemology heads in two different directions. First it supports art and literature which finds its basis in primary concrete sensations and perceptions (especially visual ones as in Flaubert’s prose).[6] That way it anticipates literary modernism’s will to deploy images and tropes which, in their sheer presence and concreteness, break the web of habit and cliché. At the same time, Taine is also especially sensitive to how literature can present sensibilities organized into ‘characters,’ that is to say, as forceful and integral beings in the world.[7] This is important because Taine thinks of human groups or collectivities as always tending to barbarism: for him literature is positively connected to individualism.
Second, and differently, Taine’s epistemology supports naturalism a la Zola as the literary genre closest to describing ‘scientifically’ how material conditions in the world actually shape lives and sensibilities. For Taine, individual psychologies thought this way are not merely individual. They are formed by the biological, ecological and social conditions in which individuals associate with one another. Individuals adapt to “dispositions innées et héréditaires” transmitted by ‘race’ (which can mean something like community spirit for Taine) or by ‘milieu,’ where ‘milieu’ denotes a particular social or ecological setting. [8] Lastly, individuals are formed by their ‘moment,’ by their precise place in history where history is conceived of as a passage of cultural transmission, in genealogies in something like the Foucauldian sense. For Taine, the passage of cultural transmission reaches as far back into the past as science and scholarship can go, that is, back to the origins of the species.[9]
To think about literature like this is to see it as fundamentally historical and expressive of the social and physical settings in which it is written. This is “world literature” in its most expansive form, that is to say, as understood less as a geographical category and more as a anthropological and philosophical one.
Gourmont
Gourmont, Taine’s junior by thirty years, developed Taine’s analysis on terms that would shape much thought about literature in the first decades of the twentieth century, and, in particular, would form a basis for Pound and Eliot’s restructuring of literary criticism in the English-speaking world.[10] Let me at once admit that I have found no evidence for Auerbach ever having read Gourmont. [11] Nonetheless, given that Auerbach was a widely-read expert in French literary history and Gourmont was one the most important French critics in the period immediately before his own, we can be fairly confident Auerbach knew his work. If he did not, my argument still stands I believe, because it is an argument about contexts not about influences.
Gourmont has entered literary history mainly as a ‘symbolist,’ indeed as French symbolism’s key theorist. But that is a simplification. He changed direction later in his career, and as Richard Sieburth has shown was then recognized by Pound, Eliot and others as the most significant critic of his time because of what we might call his Lockeanism, which was also his Taineanism.[12]
In La Problem du Style (1907), the work of Gourmont’s that came to matter most to (especially Anglophone) literary history, he accepts Taine’s sensationalist psychologism which he uses to critique the discipline of rhetoric, based in the Aristotlean category of ‘imitation,’ as taught in the French education system and in particular as popularized by the textbook writer, Antoine Albalat (1856-1935). [13] For Gourmont, rhetorical norms and rules are not what is important to modern literature: style is. Further, style is physiological. It is the direct, not necessarily intentional, expression of an author’s individuality thought of as a sensibility à la Taine.
Gourmont was writing in the interests of a programme: for him, once more reaching back to Taine, successful literature needs to be as true as possible to sensations and perceptions, and, in particular, to sight. A successful literary style sees concrete things in the world and permits its readers to see them too. Which means that good literature remains close to the lived-in world, to what Auerbach, deploying a not utterly dissimilar idea, calls ‘creatureliness’ (Kreatürlichkeit), that is, everyday life as lived beneath the thresholds of class, gender and cultural difference. For Gourmont, as for Taine but now with a narrower literary focus, to write concretely, sensorily, from out of one’s individual sensibility is to position oneself against clichés and dominant ideology. It is, to use what became a term of art for him, to ‘dissociate.’ Dissociation has a Tainean political resonance too: it is to assert oneself as an individual rather than as a citizen to use Gourmont’s own language.[14] In that way, such literary writing can thus become a tool both of liberal individualism (if not indeed of anarchism) and of the alienated (modernist) intellectual.
At the same time, Gourmont distances himself from Taine’s race concept: for him successful styles are most likely to emerge in societies that are mixed both culturally and ethnically. He opts for difference not homogeneity, a preference that will also organize Auerbach’s criticism and especially his idea of world literature. Not that Gourmont was a historicist: he was famous for declaring that “all ages are contemporaries.”[15] In his Le Latin mystique: Les Poètes de l’antiphonaire et la symbolique au moyen âge (1892) (a topic which Auerbach would also turn to in his Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity (1965)), he introduced the French literary world to medieval Latin poetry in order to show how that moment, so distant from his own, could supply standards and forms of beauty that were still applicable, even still imitable. Gourmont was also one of the earliest modern European critics to return to Dante (here too Auerbach would follow him). He did so in order to argue that Dante was a visually and experientially concrete and direct poet, a realist poet we might say, presumably because of his love of the world, an argument that, consciously or not, Auerbach would develop further, and historicize, in his first book, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929).
But Gourmont is most relevant to Auerbach just because he demanded that literary critics concentrate less on the categories of ‘rhetoric’ and more on those of ‘style.’ From one point of view, Mimesis may be a history of rhetoric and its internal divisions across European literary history but, if so, this is not rhetoric a la Aristotle and Alabab. In particular, the Aristotelian principle of imitatio is marginalized. We can put it this way: for Auerbach style and rhetoric are overlapping categories, and relations between them change from one historical setting to another. Were we, however, to think of style and rhetoric as opposing categories as Gourmont does, then Mimesis can be read as charting style’s incursion into, and final triumph over, rhetoric in European literature, as that literature becomes realist on new terms. For Auerbach, the world literature to come will only intensify this trajectory.
Rüstow
Rüstow was a very different kind of intellectual than either Taine or Gourmont. As was usual among German academics of his time, he was transdisciplinary, but in his case especially so. His dissertation and first book, Der Lügner (1910) was an analysis of the ancient Greek liar’s paradox, which had become philosophically important again in Bertrand Russell’s use of a version of it for his pathbreaking theory of types. On leaving university, Rüstow used his ancient Greek and Latin philological skills to work for a Munich academic publisher in those fields, at the same time becoming friends with people like Kathe Köllwitz and the gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, as well as participating in the period’s vibrant youth movement. After the war, in which he served and which pushed him to the political left, Rüstow became an economic advisor to various public agencies as well as repositioning himself, in the wake of Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918-22), as a historical sociologist. His major work, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart. Eine universalgeschichtliche Kulturkritik [henceforth OdG], which appeared in three long volumes between 1950 and 1957 is, as its title suggests, a work of historical sociology deployed as sweeping cultural critique.
Like so many of his generation, Rüstow could not accept the political situation that prevailed under the Weimar Republic. Albeit drawing on Carl Schmitt’s critique of Weimar parliamentarianism as a nineteenth-century institution ill-suited for contemporary mass democracy, he tried to find a liberal solution on other terms, that is to say, in proposing reconfigurations of Germany’s economy. He thus became a polemicist for a particular form of economic liberalism.[16] On the Nazis coming to power in 1933, he emigrated from Germany to Istanbul where he was to remain until the war’s end, remaining active internationally as a supporter of economic liberalism.
He is said to have coined the term, ‘neo-liberalism’ in 1938 at the first meeting of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, if in a rather different sense than we use it today. Indeed, with his one-time Istanbul colleague Walter Röpke and others, he developed the ordo-liberal program against Frederick Hayek and Ludwig von Mises’ ‘paleo-liberalism.’ In that spirit, a form of ordo-liberalism would be implemented in West Germany after 1945.[17] To put it succinctly, ordo-liberalism assumed that, for markets to work properly, that is, not to collapse into monopoly, oligarchy and inefficiency, they required a restraining legal and ideological framework enforced by the state. Rüstow’s version of ordo-liberalism, influential on those who established the German Federal Republic, also drew on the ‘principle of subsidiarity’ associated with Catholicism and postwar Christian Democracy and which is indeed enshrined in European Union Law to this day. That principle resisted the centrality and empowerment of the state on the one side and market laissez-faire on the other by insisting that decisions, including economic decisions, that affect communities are to be made as close to those communities as possible and then by attempting to find constitutional and economic policy settings which might enable this.
Auerbach became close to Rüstow in Istanbul. Rüstow had been on the committee that hired Auerbach to the university there, and had encouraged the appointment. On the back of Rüstow’s deep interest in philology as well as Auerbach’s sociological approach to literary scholarship, they soon became interlocuters and friends.[18] Auerbach often acknowledged the scholarly help he received from Rüstow, and vice versa.[19]
During Auerbach’s time in Istanbul, Rüstow was mainly working on OdG, the first volume of which appeared three years before Mimesis. As I say, OdG is an ambitious, thesis-driven universal history in the grand style pioneered by Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Alfred Weber, but which mounts a critique of modernity on different terms than its predecessors. It absorbs the turn to deep history encouraged by Taine and others to develop a quite simple theory, a universal rule indeed. For Rüstow, state formation always happens in a violent dispossession of one people’s territory by another, a process he called Überlagerung, and whose conceptualization he dates back to the great fourteenth-century Islamic polymath, Ibn Khaldun, who believed that Uberlagerung had begun with the conquest of pastoral societies by armed nomads.[20]
In this way Rüstow’s history consists of continual territorial expropriations. When one group comes to control the territory of another, a state may be formed.[21] It follows that all state societies are stratified as conquerors’ cultures impose themselves on those of indigenous peoples. So-called ‘cultural pyramids’ are established: ‘aristocratic’ cultural forms become divided from more vernacular ones. Überlagerungen last a long time because they are sustained not just in direct governmental form (as for instance in feudalism or totalitarianism) but also ideologically (as in racism, absolutism, exclusivist religious confessionalism. . .) Some periods know less Überlagerung than others however, and harder forms of Überlagerung, especially those which produce an aristocratic/feudal high culture detached from the everyday life around them, contain the seeds of their own undoing.[22]
This account of state formation means that states routinely face a political difficulty: the need to find a balance between freedom and oppression. In Rüstow’s analysis of this difficulty, culture again plays a significant role. For him social stratification may produce a cultural ranking between “high” and “low,” but, somewhat paradoxically, high or aristocratic cultures retain and disseminate possibilities for freedom just because they are produced in leisure and relative autonomy.[23] Nonetheless societies that become too stratified and too self-enclosed lose dynamism: Rüstow cites ancient Athens and Renaissance Florence as periods in which cultural stratification lost rigidity, releasing intellectual and creative energies. Today, the long-term movement towards state centralization, democratization and equalization, as globalized across the twentieth century, has only intensified Uberlagerung in part because it has weakened aristocratic culture.
Two issues that follow from this broad thesis especially concern Rüstow.
First, like Taine, he remains committed to the European enlightenment. Hume and Kant’s critiques mean that philosophy in its traditional, pre-Humean, forms can offer no solution to sociological or political problems. What does offer some benefit, however, is history, memory. For Rüstow, one riposte to modern de-individuation and statism is the historical information and understanding provided in his own big book, a historicism which Auerbach’s Mimesis also presents to us. Indeed, Mimesis in particular can be read as an attempt to remember old high culture in an era when global uniformity threatens, and then, in a Rüstowian sense, as showing how entangled European high and low cultures have been from the very beginning, an entanglement which was also an energization.
Second, although state stratification begins in one group’s violent expropriation of another’s territory, internal Überlagerungen can gain their own momentum, as when, for instance, the capitalist bourgeoisie dominate and expropriate from the working class in one direction and from the state itself in another. In the modern period, powerful modes of internal dispossession have led not just to a diminution of high culture’s reach and power but to a society committed to individualism, or at least to the primacy of subjectivity, albeit a society which is also massified, democratic and homogeneous. The upshot is that individuals feel an “integration-deficit” and Rüstow reads totalitarianism, whether communist or capitalist, as an over-compensation for this deficit.[24] Ethical as well as governmental solutions need to be found to overcome this loss of community or Gemeinschaft and its replacement by the state.
This deficient form of political modernity is now global even if the world has become divided into two massified, industrialized, stratified enemy camps, one communist, the other capitalist. For Rüstow, the future depends on capitalism defeating communist totalitarianism and then deploying an ascetic Vitalpolitik which does not aim to expand economic activity and exploit resources, human or otherwise, but simply to increase the quality of life and sense of community. That requires the application of the principle of subsidiarity to all governmental and economic settings as well as limiting the domain of competition and individualism to the market alone.[25] It also requires an ethical and ideological effort to scale back what, after the ancient Greeks, Rüstow calls “pleonexia”—greed, excessive desire for more power and stuff than your fellows—because pleonexia underpins and sustains Überlagerung.
***
My thesis here is uncomplicated. Auerbach’s idea of literature draws upon Taine and Gourmont’s revisionary analyses, but its historical and sociological position extends (and perhaps draws upon) Rüstow’s version of universal history as well as on Rüstow’s cultural critique and ethical recommendations. I say that Auerbach draws on Taine and Gourmont, but a qualification to that claim must be made immediately. Taine and Gourmont were, philosophically, committed to naturalism: as we have seen, for them all human activity could be read off an underlying human nature. That was not the case for Auerbach: Vico was a model for him because Vico broke with Enlightenment naturalism in various respects. For Vico, history did not belong in any simple way to nature: it was artificial in that it was humanly created. As an artificial creation, history and its cultural products belonged to the domain of poetry rather than that of nature. For that reason, understanding the institutions and the literature and art that had accumulated in history required tools that were not scientific but philological and hermeneutic.[26]
Nonetheless, Auerbach historicizes Taine and historical sociology itself. In Mimesis he argues that the turn to historical sociology starts with novelists not theorists, and, specifically, with Stendhal. That’s an insight he borrowed from Taine.[27] Auerbach’s argument is that the sociological turn can itself be understood sociologically as a product of the upheavals of the immediately post-Napoleonic moment when the alienation of modern intellectuals begins. That is, of course, an epoch which has not finished, and Auerbach is shaped by it and his reflections on world literature are bound to it. Which is to say that, for him, modern philology is a form of historical sociology, and historical sociology is a form of what Rüstow called Kulturkritik emerging out of alienation and exile.
Auerbach shared with Rüstow the sense that what matters to the deep history of modernity is stratification, and in particular, relationships between, and admixtures of, high and low as mediated by Christianity (although Auerbach joins Rüstow in a suspicion of Protestantism).[28] Mimesis is a history of how high and low styles have been connected to one another in the Western tradition. A high style (such as the sublime or tragedy) deals both with high topics and people of high social status while a low style (such as in comedy) deals with everyday matters and people of low social status. For Auerbach both traditions, not least the aristocratic, carry glories and lessons but what is important is that, in Europe, they can be combined and dynamized.[29] We owe this to Christianity. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation joins the high to the low, and because Christianity was able both to dispossess Judaism and to absorb Latin and Greek heritages, inside it this interlacing of high and low became hegemonic. Auerbach also shared Rüstow’s critique of modernity—a diagnosis of increasing massification, de-individuation and homogeneity, and he leans towards a similar ethical solution—the resistance to pleonexia or, as Auerbach in his world literature essay phrases it, an embrace of Paupertas. That embrace too, although by no means unique to Christianity, also has Christian grounds here.
This is to say that Auerbach’s work, and Mimesis and the world literature essay in particular, can be understood as a rather paradoxical form of literary historical sociology in which, over the centuries, low forms of style/rhetoric have given vitality to high forms and in which today (i.e. after 1945) new combinations of high and low are coming into existence. To show how this works and to connect Auerbach’s world literature essay to his oeuvre as a whole, let me offer some very brief sketches of authors who mattered most to Auerbach. (My approach here has been influenced by Matthias Bormuth who has shown, I think, that the swiftest way into Auerbach is to attend to what he has to say about particular authors).[30] It is a long history, reaching back to Virgil, and the writers I will gesture to here are Virgil himself, Dante, Montaigne, Stendhal and Virginia Woolf. This is a limited list but it is enough to present the big picture.
Virgil
Virgil matters to Auerbach because he stands at the head of what we might call European literature’s great tradition. As the centuries roll on, Virgil will come to be regarded as a prophet and indeed he was consciously projecting his image of the pax Romana into the future on the terms through which it can form an ideal basis for the idea of Europe and then of the West more generally. Virgil’s projective force, an extension of what Auerbach was famously to analyse as figura—that trope by which a past event is interpreted as prefiguring a future one—reaches a climax when Virgil is chosen to guide Dante through the Inferno in what is, for Auerbach, the Western tradition’s other central literary text.
Virgil was brought up in a rural way of life which stood outside the self-enclosed elitism of Rome’s senatorial class, and for that reason, could provide an inspiration for Dante, say, in his turn to reject the stilted, high-cultural mode of the dolce stil nuova of his own day. What enabled Virgil to have a shaping force on Western culture is that he brings a rural, simple, non-elite formation and sensibility to a sublime style in the interest of a political vision—that of universal peace and universal empire—which can indeed ground future European (and not just European) political hope and intent, and which, by the time of the early-modern humanists, had become doxa.[31] Furthermore, Virgil’s political vision allowed him to restructure what a character could be, as he does in presenting his epic hero Aeneas. Now a character, a person we might say, becomes defined in terms of their intent, their project rather than by more or less superficial and accidental traits and accoutrements. In effect, as the poet of the pax Romana, as inventor of the Western future-directed person, Virgil is the prophet of a world in which a world literature becomes possible. Virgil’s combination of a universal political project, a will to sublimity and a common touch will allow him, as Auerbach puts it in his early Dante monograph, to provide a vision which belongs to our reason.[32]
Dante
As James Porter has emphasized, Dante is the pivot around whom Auerbach’s literary history turns across his career.[33] His first book, Dante as Poet of the Earthly World (1929) offered a fresh account of Dante, and his last, Literary Language and its Public in Latin Antiquity in the Middle Ages (1965) can be understood as examining certain intellectual and literary preconditions for Dante’s achievements. In the same way, Auerbach’s Dante course was key to his classroom teaching in his American period when he came to identify with Dante as a fellow-exile. He shared this interest with Rüstow who, however, had a more pessimistic view of Dante’s place in history than did Auerbach. Rüstow regarded Dante’s embrace of the vernacular in The Divine Comedy more conservatively still—as an end point for the glory days of European high culture.[34]
Auerbach approached Dante differently on different occasions, but he never wavered in his sense of the importance of Dante’s Virgilian political project, most thoroughly articulated in Monarchia, namely his championing of the concept of universal empire as the secular condition for peace.[35] This political project, with which Auerbach, as a good humanist, had strong sympathies, underpinned not just his literary critical analysis and judgment of Dante but of world literature more generally.
In literary terms, Auerbach argued that Dante was able to join a realism in the Tainean/Gourmontian sense (what he calls “the innermost sensory ground of [our] view of the world”) with a grandeur of scope, style and intent to such a degree that he was able to abandon writing in Latin for a vernacular fully capable of Latin’s tonal reach and power.[36] In The Divine Comedy, Dante became the poet of a “concrete reality” which was a “configural truth” because of the poem’s unified structure and assurance of intent and judgment.[37] Drawing from Thomism, it was a text in which representation of an imagined world acquired apodictic force.[38]
For Auerbach, Dante was able to combine and balance various literary forms which he had inherited so as to create a model for European mimesis in general. Such forms included, most importantly, the sermo humilis, the Christian/medieval low style which had been most firmly advanced by the Franciscans who, along with the sermo humilis itself, were important to Auerbach’s understanding of European literature. And Dante also drew on the gloria passio, the Christian doctrine of the passion (that it to say, identification with Christ’s human suffering on the cross) which, Auerbach believed, underpinned Europe’s understanding and glorification of emotions, not least the emotions of sympathy and love.
In sum: for Auerbach (as for T.S. Eliot) Dante articulated a unique moment of European coherence and was driven to do so in a style which effectively met both modernist and realist criteria of judgment. And he did so because he was a certain kind of conservative: one who valued security and order above liberty in such a way as to make him a champion of universal empire as prefigured in the Pax Romana.
Montaigne
Matthias Bormuth has suggested that Auerbach changed his mind about Montaigne over his career, becoming more critical of him.[39] That may well be right: certainly the account in the1932 essay that Auerbach dedicated to Montaigne differs from the account in Mimesis written several years later. But still: if Dante is the summit of European literature for Auerbach across his career, Montaigne represents the emergence of what we (but not he) might call the modern.
For Auerbach, what marks Montaigne out as the first modern “man of letters” is that he writes from a position which is socially and professionally indefinable.[40] He writes just as an individual. And Montaigne isolates himself in two senses: he lives, so he himself claims, in solitude (a radicalization of Petrarch’s otium litteratum) and his topic is always, in the end, himself. Montaigne examines himself, and what he finds is a being without any human essence, a person continually changing and exposed to contingencies. As such, what he writes about himself is true for human beings in general. In effect here we are encroaching upon the Enlightenment study of man, which is, rhetorically, as much a ‘low’ as a ‘high’ mode. Montaigne sees himself as a kind of scientist: he is experimenting as he writes. [41] That is what the essay form means to him. Montaigne does not make arguments, teaches no moral lessons, has no (obvious) political project although he has an ethical one: the insistence on his own freedom and autonomy. Given that, he reaches for the truth about himself and thence human beings in general.
In Mimesis, Auerbach provides a more sociological account. Here he sees Montaigne’s capacity to position himself as a universal man of letters is actually a function of his high social status. As a quasi-aristocrat he needed no profession and had the leisure to embark on his essayistic self-examination. Auerbach also now places Montaigne more securely into a particular cultural lineage: he belongs to what Auerbach calls a “Christian-creatural anthropology” based, ultimately in the doctrine of Incarnation. This allows Auerbach to situate Montaigne within his history of style/rhetoric but it is clear that Auerbach does not wholeheartedly endorse Montaigne’s universalizing of the low style in the name of human nature, interiority and freedom. Between Dante and he something has been lost both for society and literature: confidence in a universal collective order.
Stendhal
Stendhal, like Montaigne, is a founder of the modern sensibility. As Auerbach sees it, both possess an ‘aristocratic’ remoteness from the society around them, a precursor of that detachment that will come to command large swathes of later intellectual life. While Montaigne takes this aristocratic detachment towards solitariness, interiority, and essayism, Stendhal takes it towards realism and alienation/critique. As Auerbach presents him, he is, thus, the first alienated critical intellectual in the modern sense. He is also, alongside Balzac, the first modern literary realist.
The reason for this turn to a new form of realism is that Stendhal lives in a post-revolutionary society where social conditions have become radically unstable and change is constant. Thus context has become crucial for understanding and action. At the same time, social forces, reality itself, have, unexpectedly, blocked and soured the Rousseauvian/enlightened hopes and beliefs that powered the Revolution. In this blockage, reality’s and society’s sheer obduracy stands revealed. Sociology appears from out of this blockage. Thus Stendhal’s fictions cannot be read “without the most accurate and detailed knowledge of the political situation, the social stratification and the economic circumstances of a perfectly definite historical moment.”[42] All the more so because experience’s scale has been transformed: transportation, democraticization, global commerce have not just stengthened reality’s obduracy and instability, but allow us “to prophesise a unification of human life around the world” on new terms, a unification, based on trade and infrastructure rather than empire and faith, which is the pre-condition of Auerbach’s concept of world literature. There is, in this, a sense that Stendhal can be regarded as the Virgil of global modernity.
Woolf
Auerbach’s analyses Virginia Woolf at the beginning of Mimesis’s last chapter, although his analysis there extends beyond Woolf to become a general statement about literature’s place in the world today. That general statement will be repeated in Auerbach’s essay on world literature.
Auerbach begins his reading of Woolf by paying close attention to the beginning of To the Lighthouse. Here, once again, he recognizes in Woolf a distinct style— by this stage of European literary history very much not a rhetoric—which he comes to read as a marker of a general social, and now for the first time, global, condition. What counts for him in the passage he selects to begin his reading is that it focuses on an insignificant, seemingly random, moment which does not present things in the objective world but rather presents the consciousnesses (or better, the sensibilities) of various characters. Woolf moves from one character’s subjectivity to another associationally, again as if by chance. As Auerbach puts it, what Woolf represents is “the continual rumination of consciousness in its actual purposeless freedom”, the freedom that we first found in Montaigne.[43]
Auerbach mimics this fragmentation and contingency in his own critical method. He starts by reading a concrete moment in a text and from that develops a reading of the work as a whole from which he takes in the work’s wider social setting. As he will argue in his World Literature essay this is an appropriate method for a critic of his time just because the world has been globalized (as we would say). It has become both so unified and so diverse as well as so factionalized that no critic can claim to master the whole, no critic can draw on all possible approaches. No critic is completely at home in it. Global unification and uniformity mean, somewhat paradoxically, that the exilic condition has become general. Because systemic, holistic literary knowledge has become impossible in the age of world literature, a philology grounded in the detail and the arbitrary is what remains just as what remained to Woolf in her fictions is a concentration on fleeting experience. Auerbach ends his account of Woolf by linking this general condition to a general—it would seem global—mood. It is a mood of despondency, a “turning away from a practical will to live” as he puts it, just because the global social order has become so fragmented, individualized, factional and mobile.[44] This diagnosis echoes Rüstow’s.
But a saving grace remains. Our moment of pessimism and fragmentation may lead us to what is in effect a revived and secular Franciscanism—a humble connection to what is low, to the little things of everyday life, an abandonment of Rüstow’s Aristotelian pleonexia. In his world literature essay, which, as I say, repeats Auerbach’s account of Woolf, this Franciscan turn is explicitly called an embrace of Paupertas, the condition of humility and voluntary poverty that belongs not to a nation or to culture but to the earth as recommended by Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury, Jean de Meun, Hugh of St Victor and, he might have added, St Francis or, indeed, Boccaccio.[45]
It is notable that Auerbach himself made no effort to reflect on the relation between his final pessimism and the European literary history he had spent his career elucidating. Let me end this essay by a somewhat speculative attempt to fill that gap, because it may allow us to see the logic of Auerbach’s project a little more clearly.
For Auerbach, as we know, the high points of European literature were achieved by Virgil and Dante. That is because they had access to a grounded, full conspectus of the world, one that was hierarichal but covered all positions in that hierarchy. They had such access because they believed in the promise of ‘universal empire’ and universal peace embodied in the pax Romana. This universal empire is the frame for Auerbach’s ideal for world literature. But (outside Dante’s great poem) it was never fulfilled. The pax Romana and its successor the Holy Roman Empire, built from an accommodation of Rome’s political/legal order to Christianity were both undone. Latin was replaced by vernacular languages; the empire by republics and nation-states. Progressivist will for freedom and autonomy came to battle with conservatism and capitalism. Two opposing writers usher in this modern order: Montaigne as the patron of modern subjectivism and retreat from the social in the interest of personal freedom and exploration. Stendhal as the recorder of society’s obdurate force in relation to such individual will and desire, and prophet of the despondency to come. In this scheme, Woolf represents a final—in effect an ‘end of history’—phase of this lineage, i.e. world literature’s moment, which she catches via her neo-Franciscan love of the fragment, the intimate, the contingent, the everyday.
What Auerbach rescues from the dissolution of the positive idea of empire is, following Vico and Gourmont, the promise of diversity itself. For Auerbach, the fact that languages and genealogies differ matters. For Vico human diversity mattered for natural theological reasons: it allowed God to demonstrate his perfection to us. For Auerbach, it matters because it is a last testimony to the human creativity which might survive the general embrace of Lady Poverty which is our best hope.
World Literature
However, as I’ve noted both Auerbach and Rüstow believed that massification, de-individuation and homogeneity are being globalized, so that the possibility of social orders firmly based in hierarchy is disappearing. That is what Auerbach’s world literature essay is about. And for both, exits will come from below—in Rüstow’s case a return to independent rural entrepreneurialism, a kind of frugal peasant society antagonistic to “plexonia” by which is meant the desire for more and more (and which had been denounced by Aristotle), and, in Auerbach’s case, a return to “Paupertas”, that is to humbleness and the humble.[46]
Auerbach’s world literature essay ends by citing the 12thc mystic, Hugh of St Victor, to argue that only from a “Liebe zur Welt” whose “philologische Heimat ist die Erde”—the earth not the nation— and which is only possible in a condition of poverty and humbleness, can a proper sense of world literature emerge in the end of history era of global unity, homogeneity and massification. Because that condition of humbleness sees the world’s political and cultural divisions as alien to itself, it involves a renunciation of hopes for community and integration, an acceptance of irreparable “integration deficiency.” It is, I believe, a bleaker view than Rüstow’s, who, writing in the early days of the cold war, hopes, in a utopian spirit, that, were capitalism to triumph over communism, and a single peaceful, united global order come into being, then human beings will be able to renounce greed, competition, the desire for more and more, and this “beautiful earth” become “a garden for all.”[47] Rüstow seems to believe that a practical politico-economic order is possible that rescues us from the history’s bad end. Auerbach does not.
[1] I wish to note that I have been inspired by reading Nicholas Heron’s as yet unpublished essay, ‘Auerbach’s cultural-historical thermodynamics.’
[2] Antoine Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres de Flaubert à Proust, Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1983, 181, and Marshall Brown, “Why Style Matters: the lessons of Taine’s History of English Literature,” in Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997, p. 33. For Taine more widely see Compagnon, 181-186 and William Marx, Naissance de la critique moderne: la literature selon Eliot et Valéry Arras Cedex: Artois Presses Université 2002, p. 34-36, Stéphane Michaud and Michèle Le Pavec, Taine au carrefour des cultures du XIXe siècle, Paris BNF 1996.
[3] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, intro. Edward Said. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003, p.391.
[4] See, for instance, Nathalie Richard, Hippolyte Taine: histoire, psychologie, littérature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, and Zakir Paul, Disarming Intelligence: Proust, Valéry and Modern French Criticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2024.
[5] Hyppolite Taine, De l’Intelligence, 2 vols. Paris: Hachette 1870, 2: 13.
[6] I have found Christos Hadfiyiannis’s remarks on Taine’s follower, Armand Ribot especially useful here. See Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britaine, 1900-1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018, pps. 43-45.
[7] Taine’s, The Origins of Contemporary France contains his classic exposition of this line of thought.
[8] H. Taine, Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise: tome premier, Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette 1863, p. xxiii.
[9] See, for instance, Jacqueline Carroy, “Philosophie et psychologie au XIXe siècle en France: Taine, Ribot et la Revue philosophique,” in Marie-Louise Pelu-Kaplan ed, Unité et globalité de l’homme: des humanités aux sciences humaines, Paris: Syllepse 2006, 79-91.
[10] See Richard Sieburth, Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont, Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press 1990. For Taine’s impact on Gourmont see Thierry Gillyboeuf, Remy de Gourmont: une vie fin-de-siècle, 2 vols. Rennes: Éditions La Part Commune 2024, 2:93. For Gourmont’s impact on Pound and Eliot see F.W. Bateson, “Dissociation of Sensibility,” Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951): 301-312.
[11] For Taine in particular, see Leo Spitzer’s philological analysis of Taine’s concept of ‘milieu,’ first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1948, which Auerbach comments on in some detail in his essay in honour of Spitzer’s sixtieth birthday.
[12] Siebarth, Instigations, p. 64.
[13] For background see the Marshall Brown essay footnoted above.
[14] See his Paradoxe sur le Citoyen (1897).
[15] Cited in Sieburth, Instigations, p. 45.
[16] Kathrin Meier-Rust, Alexander Rüstow: Geschichtsdeutung und liberals Engagement, Stuttgart: Verlag Klett-Cotta 1993, pps. 46-54.
[17] Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier, The Walter Lippmann Colloquium; the Birth of Neo-Liberalism, London: Palgrave 2018, pps. 28-30.
[18] Kadar Konuk’s East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey Stanford: Stanford University Press 2010 offers an account of their friendship.
[19] Auerbach notes Rüstow’s help in his essays “Figura” (1938) and “Über Pascals politische Theorie” (1941). See Erich Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Romanishchen Philologie, Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag 2021, p. 69 and p. 212). Rüstow cites Auerbach repeatedly in Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart (including in the last volume, Mimesis itself). See, for instance, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart: eine universalgeschightilich Kulturkritik in drei Bänden, Zürich und Stuttgart: Eugen Rentsch Verlag 1950: vol. 1, p. 357; vol. 2, pps, 247 and 259; vol. 3, 569 and 581.
[20] OdG, 1: 75-76. Historical analysis which depends on the Uberlagerung concept to describe political formations was already well established by Rüstow’s time but particularly important to him was Franz Oppenheimer’s use of it in Der Staat (1907). We might note that the English liberal idealist, T.H. Green, who helped pave the way to state socialism also accepted it.
[21] In broad terms, Rüstow leant on the so-called Austrian Kulturkreislehre who argued that cultures spead via trade, conquest and migration and he sourced his Nietzschean sense of how important violence was to state formation and history to Jacob Burkhardt. See OdG, 1: 47.
[22] Meier-Rust, Alexander Rüstow , pps. 120-124.
[23] Jan Hegner, Alexander Rüstow: Ordnungspoltische Konzeption and Einfluß auf das wirtschaftspolitische Leitbild der Nachkridgzeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius 2000, p.35.
[24] OdG, 3: 626-630.
[25] OdG, vol.3, p. 520.
[26] Auerbach often wrote about Vico over his career but in this particular context, I’d refer to his essay ‘Giambattista Vico and the Idea of Philology’ (1936).
[27] See Compagnon, La Troisième République, p. 308.
[28] This is perhaps most obvious in Auerbach’s dispute with Karl Vossler in regard to Racine. Vossler read Racine as a proto-Protestant but for Auerbach that limits his power: he thinks of Racine as the poet of passio, who, in a particular and new social structure, helps convert the Christian Passion into a basically secular component of the aristocratic/courtly “soul.” See Aufsätze, p. 240
[29] On Auerbach’s aristocraticism, see Carl Landauer, ‘Auerbach’s Performance and the American Academy, or How New Haven Stole the Idea of Mimesis,’ in Seth Lehrer (ed.) Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: the Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Stanford: Standford University Press 1996: 179-194.
[30] See Matthias Bormuth, Erich Auerbach: Kulturphilosoph im Exil, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2020.
[31] Take, for examples, Coluccio Salutati’s influential theorization of the importance of universal peace to a good society and his defence of Dante’s condemnation of Brutus and the conspirators against Julius Caesar.
[32] Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: New York Review Books 2001, 9-11.
[33] Newman, Jane O.. “Auerbach’s Dante: Poetical Theology as a Point of Departure for a Philology of World Literature”. Approaches to World Literature, edited by Joachim Küpper, München: Akademie Verlag, 2013, pp. 39-58. https://doi.org/10.1524/9783050064956.39
[34] OdG, 1: 193.
[35] In this regard Auerbach’s view seems to be that Dante’s political project had little to do with his actual connection to the pro-Imperial White Guelph fraction in Florence.
[36] Auerbach, Dante, 13.
[37] Auerbach, Dante, 169.
[38] Auerbach, Dante, 159ff.
[40] “Montaigne the Writer” in Time, History, and Literature, 205.
[41] Mimesis, 297.
[42] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Thought, intro. Edward Said. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003, p. 481.
[43] Auerbach, Mimesis, 525.
[44] Auerbach, Mimesis, 653.
[45] Time, History, and Literature, 264.
[46] For Rüstow, see OdG 1, 137, for Auerbach, see ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur,’ in Die Narbe des Odysseus: Horizonte der Weltliteratur, ed. Matthias Bormuth. Berlin: Berenberg 2018, p.121.
[47] OdG 3, 525.
