On Auerbach, Rabelais, and Montaigne

I wish that someone had told me earlier about the importance of Mimesis. This book contains an education. Auerbach may be too quick in his traversal of territory which is, to modern eyes, so fraught with dangers and ambiguities, but the enormous erudition and extraordinary capacity for penetrating judgments (even if such a thing is riveted to a particular mode of thinking which every fashionable PhD dissertation seeks modestly and hypocritically to overturn), that to read Auerbach is to get a feeling (perhaps too strong) that one now understands the crucial conceptual foundations of European literature - that one has almost glimpsed the basic terms of the project of European literature.

Along the way, there are exceptionally lucid readings, not just of Dante, Rabelais, and Montaigne, but of medieval texts which, being unknown to me, serve all the better as markers both of evolving problems and of consistent or enduring ways of seeing the world.

Auerbach is not so fond of innovative concepts and terms as Bakhtin, but it would seem that he covers in two dozen pages, and with much more attention to the concreteness of the text, some of the essential features of the latter's analysis of Rabelais: "The revolutionary thing about his [Rabelais's] way of thinking is not his opposition to Christianity, but the freedom of vision, feeling, and thought which his perpetual playing with things produces, and which invites the reader to deal directly with the world and its wealth of phenomena" (p. 276). Meanwhile, the reader, exposed to 'the world in Pantagruel's mouth,' finds himself "perpetually flung back and forth between provincially piquant and homely forms of existence, gigantic and grotesquely extra-normal events, and Utopian-humanitarian ideas; he is never permitted to come to rest on a familiar level of events" (p. 272).

All this without the unnecessary condemnations of degraded Romantic concepts of the grotesque or laments about the repressive machinery of an all-too essentialized Christianity transparently standing in for authoritarians everywhere (hence his popularity with people of modest imagination and virulent anger). What is more, Auerbach's method, relying on an extremely close analysis of the language which constitutes the text in question, is infinitely more concrete than Bakhtin's generalizations, which do more to suggest that for him every text is simply raw material for his polemic than to indicate a sincere engagement with, to invite the vengeful visitations of Heidegger's ghost, what is there. Suffice it to say that I wish people would take their examples from Auerbach and not Bakhtin. But the disingenuousness of the latter makes him infinitely convenient, for one can readily do with him what he does with the texts he mutilates.

Enough of Bakhtin. Let me include another bit of Auerbach's brilliance, this time with regard to Montaigne who, it is safe to say following the analysis in Mimesis, must qualify as the first prominent homme de lettres. Montaigne valorizes the general development of a human being in the round, so to speak, against any kind of specialization - a very popular bit of rhetoric today. But what is the historical basis of the concept of the well-rounded person? Tracing the confluence of classical ideals - unearthed by the emergence of humanism - the demands of courtly social interactions, and the emergence, more than ever, of learning as a source of distinction (someday I must read Bordieau),

[T]here arose a non-professional, strongly social, and even fashionable form of general knowledge. It was, of course, not encyclopedic in range although it represents as it were an extract from all branches of knowledge, with a pronounced preference for the literary and for the aesthetic generally; humanism, indeed, was itself in a position to furnish most of the material. Thus arose the class of those who were later to be called 'the educated.' Since it was recruited from the socially and economically most influential circles, to whom good breeding and conduct in the fashionable sense, amiability in social intercourse, aptitude for human contact, and presence of mind meant more than any specialized competence; since in such circles, even when their origin was middle class, feudal and knightly value concepts were still dominant; since these were supported by the classicizing ideals of humanism insofar as the ruling classes of antiquity had also regarded preoccupation with art and science not as a professional matter but as otium, as an ornament indispensable for the man destined to the most general life and to political leadership: there soon resulted a sort of contempt for professional specialization (p. 307).

Despite the inevitability of specialization in the present age, something of the old ideal still lingers in certain domains of upper-class life, as, for instance, in the contradictory and atavistic concept of college education - that strange throwback to which I owe my economic superfluity and social discontent. But the ideal of non-specialized and purposeless knowledge has other interesting consequences. "For the more general a man's culture and the less it recognizes a specialized knowledge and a specialized activity, at least as a point of departure for a more general survey of things, the further removed from the sphere of the concrete, the lifelike, and the practical will be the type of all-around perfection striven after" (p. 308). One might want to supplement Lukacs's analysis of the etiology of reification with this idea. If the scientific mode of thought encourages a contemplative approach to life, then this entirely formal sort of knowledge encourages the reification of thinking generally.