Archives of Authority by Rubin Andrew N

Author:Rubin, Andrew N.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

TERRAINS OF PHILOLOGY

Of all the figures whom Said employs to articulate the basis for the praxis of a new or alternative humanism, no one has been of more importance to his work than Erich Auerbach (1892–1957). A scholar of classical and philological training and part of a defined group of German Romance scholars, including Ernest Robert Curtius (1886–1956), Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), and Karl Vossler (1872–1949),28 Auerbach has held a lasting importance for Said as the one figure to whom he returns again and again to articulate a vision of an alternative, secular humanism.29 Not only does Said translate his essay “Philology and Weltliteratur,” he refers to Auerbach in multiple works: in Orientalism (where Auerbach's secular philology is juxtaposed to the theological philology of Orientalists); in The World, the Text, and the Critic (where Auerbach stands for an exemplary, situated, yet displaced critical consciousness); in Culture and Imperialism (where Auerbach is shown to dramatize a particular idea of history, while concealing the geographical basis of that view of history); in “History, Literature and Geography” (where he stands for a temporal, as opposed to a spatial, dialectics); and in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (where Auerbach enacts a secular humanism).30

A great deal of important work has been written about the significance of Said's affiliation with and great admiration for Auerbach, and most of the scholarship has tended to emphasize Auerbach's particular experience in writing Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) while in exile in Istanbul, where he had sought refuge from Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1946.31 The book, which Said has described “as one of the most admired and influential books of literary criticism ever written,”32 was nothing less than an unassuming, yet monumental account of the representation of reality in Western literature in the context of the unfolding of human history over the course of three thousand years, beginning with Homer's Odyssey and ending with Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Writing in exile in wartime Istanbul in the early 1940s, Auerbach had few resources at his disposal. There were no Western libraries to consult, and he had few critical editions in his possession from which to draw. As he writes in his epilogue, the lack of access to contemporary scholarship freed him from the constraints and obligations of specialization. Writing on such an ambitious subject would have otherwise been overwhelming, if not impossible; the sheer amount of secondary sources required to study three thousand years of literary history would have made the whole project infeasible. Auerbach wrote that he had to “dispense with all periodicals, almost all recent investigations, and in some cases reliable editions of my texts…[but] it is quite possible,” he goes on to say, “that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library.”33

The book was a product of exile in a conscious and intentional way. Auerbach was writing in the early 1940s in the midst of a European catastrophe, and though he had only a dim awareness of

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