Vampiric Mimesis: Farinata and the living blood of history

If Auerbach's Mimesis tells a story, it's not one that is obvious or simply summarized. His close reading of passages from widely disparate times requires some tenacity to weave into a narrative. The reader at times feels he's been left to do the work of making connections among ganglia that hover on all sides.

At moments, though, Auerbach will yoke expanses of history. Time, instead of flowing uniformly, has long inert periods that undergo sudden seizures that leave imprints on all that comes after. It can be like visiting an archaeological dig, and finding, beneath the structure of one age, that of another. Here's James I. Porter connecting two passages from Mimesis:

Christianity could not, however, have succeeded without the lessons it learned from Judaism’s capacity first to conceive and interpret the world historically (based on its notion of universal, “world-historical” events) and then to organize this history into a single coherent transcendental order (Mimesis 17). In doing so, Christianity inherited not merely a religious sensibility, but an ineluctable antagonism: “the antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning, an antagonism which permeates the early, and indeed the whole, Christian view of reality” (Mimesis 49).

Introduction to Time, History, and Literature:  Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, xxvii. Page references work for the edition of Mimesis we've been using.

Christianity, which Auerbach sees as the primary organizing principle of history even to our day, has a substratum that is unlike it -- an order that is manifest in Judaism. Judaism is profoundly different, radically other than Christianity, yet the latter, learning its "lessons," was shaped fundamentally by this previous order, which it immediately set about re-interpreting. That reinterpretation was so complete as to devalue, even to deface, the legacy that Christians inherited. 

Whatever else is involved in that "antagonism" Auerbach speaks of, it's fairly clear that between Jerusalem and Rome there was never a harmonious synthesis, or syncretism. Auerbach sees rupture:

History for Auerbach is marked by two major ruptures, each constituting moments when vertical, transcendental meaning is shattered in the course of the horizontal, forward propulsion of history, while history is etched in turn with the scars of these traumatic unfoldings, and so acquires a depth of its own. First there is the devaluation (Entwertung) of Judaism through Christianity . . . Porter ibid xxvii.

Nearly at the last page of Dante: Poet of the Secular World, Auerbach will see in Christianity the seeds of its own supercession:

With the discovery of individual destiny, modern mimesis discovered the person. It lifted him out of the two-dimensional irreality of a remoteness that was only constructed or imagined and placed him in the realm of history, which is his true home. . . . The immanent realism and historicism that are found in the eschatology of the Comedy flowed back into actual history and filled it with the lifeblood of authentic truth. . . . Radiating out from here, history as such— the life of the human being as this is given and in its earthly character— underwent a vitalization and acquired a new value. (178)

It is this "lifeblood of authentic truth" that Auerbach sees in Farinata's commanding presence, even in his tomb; in Cavalcante's grieving; in the power of Dante's poetics to move the reader in ways that draw away from, rather than toward, the remote godhead:

Even the Comedy barely manages to subdue the wild spirits of life within the framework of its eschatology, and one senses how quickly and forcefully these spirits will soon prise themselves loose from their constraints.

Somehow it seems that this sanguinaceous theme -- one that runs throughout Auerbach's work -- is always within earshot of Farinata -- as if this wild spirit who rises with the apostrophaic "O Tosco" is always about to break out of the eternal walls of hell itself.

If time permits, I hope to briefly return to Inferno 10 with this in mind.

Four pieces on Auerbach

Time, History and Literature gathers a substantial number of previously uncollected essays by the German critical philologist Erich Auerbach. Published by Princeton in 2013, the essays were translated by Jane O. Newman, with an introduction by James I. Porter.


For those interested in becoming better acquainted with Auerbach, below are links to four essays that explore his work. 




Earthly Happenings - James Ley, Sydney Review

By carefully tracing the meaning of the Latin term figura from its earliest usage, Auerbach demonstrates that initially it signified only a material object, but over time acquired additional abstracted connotations. For Auerbach, the duality of the term — the way it comes to embrace both materiality and abstraction — is related to the conflict he identifies in the Judaeo-Christian tradition between the ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ perspectives. The idea that an event might have a figural as well as a literal meaning allows history to be conceived as something more than a chronicle of happenings. It raises the possibility that history may not be (as Arnold Toynbee is supposed to have quipped) just one damn thing after another, but something with a shape and meaning, something with an underlying coherence and purpose, something that invites comprehension on a large scale. 

The figural interpretation of reality, writes Auerbach,

creates a connection between two events or persons in which one signifies not only itself but also the other — and that one is also encompassed or fulfilled by the other. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but they both also lie within time as real events or figures. As I have repeatedly emphasised, both figures are part of the ongoing flow of historical life.

Arthur Krystal, "The Book of Books: Erich Auerbach and the Making of Mimesis"

“Mimesis,” too, may have taken its bearings from German cultural politics. The book’s compelling first chapter, “Odysseus’ Scar,” which contrasts Book 19 of the Odyssey with Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, lays out the differences in attitude and articulation between the Homeric epic and Hebrew Scripture. But because the discussion pivots on the binding of Isaac and Abraham’s reflexive anxiety—one of several Biblical scenes forbidden in German schools—the chapter can also be viewed as Auerbach’s nod to Jewish martyrdom. At least one Auerbach scholar wants to take this even further, claiming that Auerbach was “pressing philology in the direction of something utterly unheard: a new resistant, if implicit, Jewish philology.”

Edward Said, Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Mimesis

Auerbach's choice of Dante to represent the second seminal moment in Western literary history is made to seem breathtakingly appropriate. Read slowly and reflectively, chapter 8 of Mimesis, "Farinata and Cavalcante," is one of the great moments in modern critical literature, a masterly, almost vertiginous embodiment of Auerbach's own ideas about Dante: that the Divine Comedy synthesized the timeless and the historical because of Dante's genius, and that Dante's use of the demotic (or vulgar) Italian language in a sense enabled the creation of what we have come to call literature.

James I. Porter, Introduction to Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach

A superb, in-depth look at Auerbach's far-reaching insights into literary language and its relation to culture, history, and our sense of ourselves.