To introduce Auerbach’s Renaissance, I will start at the end of an essay preoccupied with figuring out how to start anew, “The Philology of World Literature,” published in 1952. In the final paragraph, Auerbach quotes a passage from Hugh of Saint Victor’s twelfth-century Didascalicon: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.”

Human beings, argues Hugh, should be travelers. A tender beginner finds his homeland comfortable, and the cosmopolitan person is at home everywhere. But the perfect traveler finds the entire world foreign. Auerbach ends the essay with two sentences of commentary: “Hugh’s intended audience consisted of those individuals whose goal it was to free themselves from their love of this world,” he writes. “But also for anyone who desires to earn a proper love for the world, it is a good path.”¹ Following Hugh’s good path, Auerbach rejects Hugh’s main point. For Hugh, foreignness means that you are not where you are supposed to be. For Auerbach, foreignness indicates that you are – paradoxically – right at home. Our “philological home is the earth” (AE 264)² he insists at the start of the paragraph. Our earth is not a heaven, a home that is always the same, a destination to arrive at, a concept to realize. Our philological home changes, and a “proper love” of it will expect, as Auerbach writes at the start of the essay, that “what we share and the great diversity of what we do not share can be mutually enriching” (AE 253).³ Human beings are enriched by sharing a common home – simply as human beings we all equally benefit from our similarity. But we are also enriched by the fact that our common home is never the same. The “great diversity [‘Mannigfaltigkeit’] of what we do not share” for Auerbach means the different understandings of life that human beings have in different times and places – in the past, present, and future. Diversity means historical difference. Hugh’s traveler must leave the mutable world to go home. For Auerbach, in contrast, earning a proper love of the world means becoming a continual foreigner in your philological home: a sentimental tourist following the path of a changing history.

Becoming a tourist might seem a surprising ambition for Erich Auerbach. When he wrote “The Philology of World Literature,” he and his wife Marie were living in their third country. Having been forced by Nazi racial laws to leave Germany in 1936, they had spent eleven years in Turkey. Then in 1947 they decided to move to the United States, even though Auerbach had no job and only enough money to last about a year. Over the next few years, they moved from Cambridge, to State College, to Princeton, to New Haven, and they were clearly never entirely at home in any of these places. Wouldn’t a home without foreignness be a more likely goal for these perpetual travelers? Wouldn’t a little familiarity be nice? Yet what bothered Auerbach was not so much that he found the places he traveled to different and strange. What bothered him was they all looked increasingly alike. The earth, he complains at the start of “The Philology of World Literature,” “is growing smaller and becoming less diverse” (AE 253). The essay describes, as a series of paradoxes, a homogeneity settling over the planet: the realization of Goethean Weltliteratur eliminates the diversity of human experience that was its basis; the United States and the Soviet Union, sworn enemies, both try to enforce standardized forms of life; former European colonies celebrate their linguistic and cultural autonomy by pursuing the modernity that subordinated them; the “myth” of science “crowds in on and controls” (AE 255) the multiplicity of human lives it would describe. A shrinking world means that cultures all become more alike.⁴ And as the world becomes more homogeneous, Auerbach argues, what is really lost is the historical diversity of human beings.

Global standardization imposed itself upon Auerbach’s life as he moved from country to country. Inevitably, it shaped his work. In such an unchanging world, he seriously wondered whether his academic discipline was still worth bothering with. The point of philology, as far as Auerbach was concerned, was to describe the historical diversity of human experience. But on an increasingly homogeneous planet, was philology still possible, or even desirable? We “can already now observe the dawn of a world,” he writes, “in which there will no longer be any practical significance in possessing this kind of sensibility” (AE 254), the sensibility that studies, and values, historical diversity. Nevertheless, uncomfortably situated in the bland uniformity of New Haven, Auerbach offers a sentimental possibility for philology: cultivating diversity by challenging standardizations of all sorts. The “task at hand,” he decides, “is an urgent one.” Without the “experience of diversity” that philology has inherited, “our sense of historical perspective might rapidly lose its vitality and concreteness” (AE 256). How many more generations will there be with this sensibility, he wonders, in a world in which the centripetal force of standardization speeds up every day?

And so in the second half of the essay, he lays out how he proposes to do “the philology of world literature” in a homogeneous world. To write literary criticism, you need an “Ansatzpunkt,” “a starting point, a tangible hook” (AE 262), a scholarly point of departure. Points of departure “can be very heterogeneous” (AE 263), as long as they are concrete and concise, as long as they have a “potentiellen Strahlkraft” (PW 47), a potential radiance, an illuminating force of possibility. An Ansatzpunkt will reveal the many different ways a past or a present can be constructed, and it will radiate out and into a diverse future. And that is exactly what Auerbach tries to do: “The Philology of World Literature” is not just a diagnosis. It is a starting point. Auerbach has elaborately set up the closing quotation of Hugh and his commentary on it to become the essay’s main example of an Ansatzpunkt. Putting his readers on Hugh’s path, Auerbach redirects them into the diverse historical world that is our philological home, a home that, he implies, can still have a diverse future.

It is hardly an accident that “The Philology of World Literature” is so carefully constructed. Scholarship, the essay stresses, must “be at once a scholarly achievement and a work of art” (AE 260). Philology, once “the model for all subsequent disciplines in the university,”⁵ certainly has a scientific side to it – there are techniques to learn, facts to know, theories to master, languages to absorb. An Ansatzpunkt, though, can never be, strictly speaking, scientific because it can’t be reproduced or repeated. Each starting point is a singular act, the result of the experience of a particular individual. Auerbach’s scholarship, then, is an individual art that values historical diversity, a sentimental disposition that follows a path without a destination. What sort of art is that? There has been, after all, no shortage of definitions of art, and many of them insist that art must maintain a certain homogeneity: A plot needs a beginning, a middle, and an end, insisted Aristotle; worldly representation only finds its realization in God, proclaimed Augustine. Auerbach’s answer, though, is very clear. In the story that he tells over his entire career, modern art and modern history come into the world as two twins cleaving together in Renaissance art. In the wake of Dante, a “mixed style” of writing emerges that depicts human life without any fixed points. In Mimesis, Auerbach sets up Shakespeare as the synthesis of this turn: Mixing the separation of styles demanded by classical poetics with the figuralism of medieval Christian writing, Shakespeare’s writing apprehends human life as historically diverse by unraveling the unchanging visions of life he inherits and offering limitless possibilities. Shakespeare’s mixed style subsequently becomes the model for more systematic accounts of art and history in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Vico and Hegel to Flaubert and Woolf. Auerbach himself is an heir to these traditions, and his own mixed style reactivates Renaissance writing. In other words, when Auerbach ends “The Philology of World Literature” by putting readers on a historical path, he is himself offering a scholarly art that is a Renaissance.

In a 1948 essay, Auerbach, typically uninterested in theoretical pronouncements, offered the phrase “aesthetic historism” to name the scholarship he sought to practice.⁶ I will retain his peculiar spelling (“historism,” not “historicism”; the spelling displays Auerbach’s struggles with English when he arrived in the United States), in order to distinguish his account from the many “historicisms” that have proliferated over the years.⁷ Aesthetic historism, though, should not be taken as a method or theory. It is a sentiment. As Fredric Jameson remarks, Auerbach’s work is linked to a tradition of what Jameson calls “existential historicism,” where the writer’s “rapt attention” to past cultures generates “historicity” itself, the “immense aesthetic excitement and gratification” that comes from the “diversity of cultures and historical moments.”⁸ The aesthetic sentiment must be “honored,” Jameson emphasizes,

Jameson’s primary example is Michelet, who inaugurates a tradition running from Nietzsche to Warburg, Croce, Ortega, Castro, Boas, Panofsky, Spitzer, and Auerbach himself – then on to Deleuze and Guattari. Within this eclectic group, Auerbach is, I think, distinguished by his repeated stress that aesthetic historism is “a precious (and also a very dangerous) acquisition of the human mind” (AE 36). “Precious” because aesthetic historism celebrates historical human diversity; “dangerous” because it actively questions all aspirations to declare a correct way of life, an appropriate style, an unchanging identity, a theoretical model, a moral order, a social hierarchy, an inevitable narrative.

This precious danger has proven irresistible to Jacques Rancière, another heir to the tradition of existential historicism, who has for many years relied on Mimesis as the “distant model” (RA xi) for the “sensible fabric and intelligible form” (RA ix) he calls aisthesis. It is not difficult to see what Rancière admires about Mimesis. Auerbach’s aesthetic historism has given Rancière a point of departure for the many forms of democratic “dissensus” he shows unraveling the standardized accounts of human existence that are the great villains in his work: political consensus, hierarchies of representation, appropriate distributions of sensibility of all sorts. These are all homogenizations that impose and reinforce hierarchies of forms of life. Rancière is at his most Auerbachian in his account of art. Modern art has meant, for Rancière, neither a timeless perfection floating beyond human life nor bourgeois cultural capital obscuring and mystifying the operation of its power. Instead, aisthesis is democratic, Rancière insists; like aesthetic historism, the “aesthetic regime of art” pulls apart any declaration of an appropriate organization of human life.

This unraveling of homogeneities that aesthetic historism performs is especially needed today. For a new sort of homogeneity, connected to but not identical with that global standardization Auerbach saw in the 1950s, characterizes contemporary life.¹⁰ There now seems to reign in our philological home a broad resignation in which life does not seem to change, a resignation that has been intensified, perhaps to the point of intolerability, by COVID-19: the sense that we live at the end of time itself, that a global pandemic, climate change, teetering democracy, unfettered commodification, endemic racism, and so on are all somehow part of one unrepresentable disaster. The heart of such resignation, insists Rancière, is a particular conception of time, “the idea of modernity as a time destined to carry out an internal necessity, once glorious, now disastrous” (RD 201). The French historian François Hartog calls this “regime of historicity” “presentism”: “the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now” (H xv).¹¹ It is a conception of time he dates loosely to the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and he cites a compelling diagnosis by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1998. “Our societies,” wrote Lévi-Strauss,

The great histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were stories about a future: the triumph of nations; the victory of technological efficiency; the emancipation of workers, women, colonies. But now those stories seem to have all ended not in progress or emancipation but in “ghastly tragedies,” as Lévi-Strauss puts it. Those histories seemed to require sacrificing present happiness to a future promise that constantly receded, a promise equally appealing to ideologues stressing the glorious revolution to come and financial planners stressing the need to cut retirement benefits to ensure future prosperity (see RM 3). In response, our present seems to have “bid farewell,” writes Rancière, “to the great hopes and bitter disappointments of the time of History inflected by a promise of justice” (RM 4). A just future, a better life, emancipation – such aspirations sound naive, impossible, or “paranoid.”¹³ On the political left and on the right, “we are always looking both backwards and forwards,” writes Hartog, “but without ever leaving this present that we have made into the limits of our world” (H 203). Hence our peculiar regime of historicity – presentism – that tries to suspend time by embracing heritages, roots, and identities.

Art and criticism have participated in this regime of historicity by rejecting narratives of emancipation in favor of defining human experience in terms of abjection and trauma. Contemporary art of the 1990s, Hal Foster remarks, found a special truth residing in “abject states, in damaged bodies.” Surveying artists from Cindy Sherman to Andrew Serrano and Mike Kelley, Foster invokes psychoanalytic terms to grasp this artistic turn: Trauma discourse continues poststructuralism’s rejection of the mastery of any subject, for strictly speaking “there is no subject of trauma” since a subject is rather an effect of what Lacan termed the gaze. On the other hand, the traumatic subject has “absolute authority,” because it is never possible to call into question the trauma of someone else.¹⁴ Rancière similarly stresses that the primary task of art and criticism since the 1980s has been a traumatic repetition of past disaster by “interminably” bearing “witness to catastrophe” (RD 193) and offering a “tale of suffering and disillusionment” that “does not stem from any system of domination that might be understood and abolished” (RD 185).¹⁵ He links this artistic and critical task with the “ethical turn” in philosophy, whose primary spokesman, Giorgio Agamben, Rancière accuses of generalizing the “state of exception” to the point that Agamben appeals to “a sense of messianic waiting for salvation to emerge from the depths of catastrophe” (RD 192).

It seems to me useful to rethink Renaissance criticism of the last forty years within this broad, and obviously general, frame of presentism. Despite many methodological and political disputes (idealism or materialism? Subjects or objects? Presentist politics or historicist precision?), Renaissance scholarship since the 1980s is also writing of its own particular moment, and it consistently invokes Renaissance as the name of one of those cuts in time that inaugurated the modern catastrophe to which we must bear witness. “Renaissance” has come to mean, in other words, presentism. Surprisingly enough, a reading of Mimesis has been central to the construction of this traumatic break. “Those of us who began writing literary history in the 1970s,” declared Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt in Practicing New Historicism (2000), “had a strong affinity both with Auerbach’s existential pessimism and with his method.” Auerbach’s “existential pessimism,” they thought, turned to anecdotes to reject “Hegel’s confidence in a grand design”¹⁶ – historical narratives written with the conviction that a future goal would be realized. Out of this perceived affinity, I suggest, emerged Renaissance scholarship’s particular iteration of presentism. One well-known anecdote can illustrate how. In the Epilogue to his 1980 Renaissance Self-fashioning, Greenblatt tells a story about meeting a man on a flight who was en route to see his son. A disease had impaired the son’s ability to speak and drained his will to live. Would Greenblatt mouth “I want to die” so that the man could practice reading his lips? Fearing the man is a lunatic, Greenblatt can’t do it. “I have related this brief story,” he writes in the final sentence of the book, “to bear witness at the close to my overwhelming need to sustain the illusion that I am the principal maker of my own identity.”¹⁷ It is an illusion, he decides, that he shares with his Renaissance subjects. Greenblatt agrees with Jacob Burckhardt, who, in his classic The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, argued that a “radical change in consciousness” occurred in the period. When princes, condottiere, poets, and courtiers were cut off from “established forms of identity,” they fashioned “a new sense of themselves and their world.” But, adds Greenblatt, Burckhardt’s assertion that “these men emerged at last as free individuals must be sharply qualified.”¹⁸ Instead of free individuals, in Greenblatt’s telling, “identity” since the Renaissance has been an illusion to which you “bear witness” and about which you can do nothing except attest to its existence. The Renaissance marks the inauguration of “an identity aware of its own insecurity, teetering on the brink,” as Hartog puts it, an identity to be pieced together as “memory,” as a “heritage” that “one was, without being aware of it or without having been in a position to know it” (H 151). The self-fashioned Renaissance subject is an illusion but it also bears authentic witness to a trauma – the illusion of modern self-possession itself.

Needless to say, not everyone has agreed with Greenblatt’s Renaissance. Since 1980 certain scholars, and much of the public, still tentatively tell a story of Renaissance and the modern times it begins as the start of free individuality and its progressive enlargement; others have emphasized a narrative in which the Renaissance names the beginning of those ghastly tragedies Lévi-Strauss invokes: capitalism, imperialism, slavery, fascism. More recently, the Renaissance has been recast as part of “premodern” “alternatives”¹⁹ to the “relentless inevitability of modernity,”²⁰ an alignment of post- and pre-modernity that has fostered an explosion of archival work which, however, presupposes and reiterates the catastrophic modernity it would challenge: What else does “premodern” mean but the calm before the cataclysmic storm? Nevertheless, Greenblatt’s book is rightly perceived, by those who like it and those who don’t, as demarcating a fundamental shift, the start of a critical era in which we still reside. Renaissance Self-fashioning has remained a point of reference for forty years because it captures better than any other work the sense that the word “Renaissance” has become shorthand for past aspirations that have turned into modern catastrophes of many sorts,²¹ a historiographic concept that seems irredeemable or, perhaps, can only be invoked with a certain cautious irony.²² For what remains consistent in the very varied scholarship since the 1980s, I think it is fair to say, is Renaissance as the moment that inaugurates a grand future we have now – sometimes with sadness and sometimes with enthusiasm – rejected: the Renaissance, in short, as presentism.²³

All of which is also to say that since about 1980 “Renaissance” has not meant what it meant for Auerbach. Writing for his Turkish students in the 1940s, Auerbach stressed (as I suggested in the Preface) that Renaissance means a “quality of potential fecundity,” a “seed of the future” (IR 151) – a sense of possibility, an awareness that the world is diverse and changes, that what we share and what we do not share enriches everyone. With the rejection of Grand Narrative, with the transformation of history into memory and heritage, with the paradoxical assertion of a subject claiming authority by abjectly bearing witness to its trauma, the future has appeared since the 1980s not as a possibility but “as a threat” (H 191). Who knows what that man on the plane will do?! Twenty years before 9/11 and the war on terror, justice had already become unthinkable in Renaissance Self-fashioning, and (to paraphrase Rancière) the preservation of the communal body at all costs had become imperative.

This sense of impending catastrophe linked to the presentist Renaissance might help account for an otherwise curious fact: Despite Gallagher’s and Greenblatt’s invocation of Mimesis as the model of a vast historiographic shift, Renaissance scholarship, with barely a handful of exceptions, has ignored Auerbach. How could that be? How could such a foundational book simply vanish? It is hard to say, but I will suggest a reason why for the last forty years Renaissance criticism has been uninterested in Mimesis: There is no “existential pessimism,” as Gallagher and Greenblatt put it, in the author utterly dedicated to aesthetic historism. Auerbach does not tell a story of modern trauma at all. The increasingly homogeneous present that is the basis of this existential pessimism is, rather, the target of Auerbach’s scholarship: A sentimental tourist, he sets out to unravel the sameness of his traumatic moment in order to set in motion historical diversity.

This unraveling has political implications in our presentist moment. What “emerges with the utmost clarity when people purport to revoke History’s promises of unveiling and justice,” observes Rancière, is a “hierarchical distribution of forms of life” (RM 5). Our regime of historicity is also a hierarchical regime of political and social orders, and imagining that life doesn’t change also accepts a prevailing order as inevitable or natural. Auerbach himself had a term to describe such a hierarchy, a name for a conception of time defined by immutable categories in which structural change seems impossible: He called it classicism. Classicism in Mimesis does not mean admiration for Homer or Tacitus. Nor does classicism mean a shared tradition of acknowledged masterpieces. Classicism for Auerbach means a vision of life as unchanging, as just the way things are and must be, a conceptual hierarchy to which all life must correspond. What Homer offers, Auerbach quotes Schiller observing, is “simply the quiet existence and operation of things in accordance with their natures” (M 5), an affordance linked to the ancient world’s “ethically oriented historiography” (M 38). Bearing witness to a world and rejecting a Renaissance is, at the same time, an affirmation and acceptance of a world whose unequal order, whose hierarchical distribution of capital, does not and cannot change.

But a Renaissance, Auerbach insists, has been the antidote to classicism for 500 years. “At a much later period, more than a century and a half after his death,” he writes at the start of chapter 13, “Shakespeare’s work became the ideal and the example for all movements of revolt against the strict separation of styles in French classicism” (M 313). I return to Auerbach’s Renaissance – and in particular to the many ways Shakespeare, and the writing he stands in for, became an ideal and example of dissensual revolt – to challenge the new classicism of presentism, that pervasive “tyranny of the instant” (H xv), that reiterates a hierarchical vision of human life that seems never to change. Auerbach’s invocation of Hugh at the end of “The Philology of World Literature” does not try to recover an alternative past to avoid the catastrophe of the present. He returns “under different conditions” (AE 264) to what the Middle Ages knew (a home not organized by nation) to challenge a homogeneous world and to set off on a path to a future that he doesn’t know. That path does not require a grand design or a fantasy of free individuals. Mimesis’ story of 3,000 years of represented reality is evidence that one can write a history that is neither teleological nor random, that stresses the vitality of individual subjects without fetishizing them, and that takes the present seriously without losing the human diversity that is the core of aesthetic historism. That said, Auerbach is no cheery Pangloss. The author of Mimesis and “The Philology of World Literature,” the resident of Berlin and New Haven, the wounded veteran of World War I and the exiled Jew of World War II, knows all about disasters. Mimesis viscerally grapples with catastrophe. “The temptation to entrust oneself to a sect which solved all problems with a single formula,” he tersely complains in chapter 20, “whose power of suggestion imposed solidarity, and which ostracized everything which would not fit in and submit – this temptation was so great that, with many people, fascism hardly had to employ force” (M 550). The author of that sentence looks squarely at disaster. But he cultivates no existential pessimism and bears no witness. He does not cling to identity, heritage, or roots. And he is not resigned to a traumatic life. Those are single formulas to be rejected, classical ethical quandaries to pull apart, absolute points of view that Renaissance art unravels. The moral of Mimesis is that human life changes, that human life is historically diverse – and that conviction still has profound, democratic, political implications.

The result, I will try to show, is the radiating thrill that reading Mimesis still offers. Seventy-five years after it first appeared, it has lost none of its punch. Mimesis is full of possibilities, points of departure, because the book never entrusts itself to a single formula. Possibility, to be sure, has been a primary defense of literature for at least 2,500 years. Poetry, insisted Aristotle against Plato, does not represent the world as it is. It represents the world as it could be or should be, and that possibility makes poetry philosophically serious. But Aristotle’s “should” always referred to a perfection, an ideal person or state – a home without foreignness, in Hugh’s terms. Aristotle was, in this respect, entirely in agreement with his teacher Plato. With a Renaissance, declares Auerbach, possibility becomes embedded in historical life itself, a life available to anyone because it is lived aesthetically.

2 What is it like to read Mimesis? To read it cover to cover, analysis after analysis? There is little doubt that Auerbach wanted the book “to be read as a whole” (LL 23), as he later remarked of Literary Language and Its Public. My honest answer is that you come to expect the unexpected, even though, with interesting exceptions, each chapter is rigorously uniform:

1. (1) An opening quotation with translation, often long, rarely introduced.

2. (2) A meticulous reading of the style of the quotation, usually focused on grammar and syntax.

3. (3) An unfolding of the style of the quotation into a historical situation.

4. (4) A comparison of the quotation with a contemporaneous text in a different style that leads to a different portrait of the period.

5. (5) The entire procedure, all over again, sort of in chronological order.

So chapter 1 contrasts The Odyssey (all foreground) and Genesis (all background), and chapter 2 contrasts Petronius and Tacitus (refined and elevated) with Saint Mark (simple and low). Chapter 5 mostly deals with the parataxis of the Chanson de Roland; chapter 6 mostly deals with the hypotaxis of Yvain. The procedure is nearly unwavering, and all the more surprising when it does waver. And yet despite his meticulous organization, Auerbach always manages to be surprising, even occasionally shocking. Each moment of Mimesis, remarks Alex Woloch, “is only a moment, intensified … by its own contingency, and set in relief against the ‘magisterial’ structure it helps to constitute.”²⁴ A great pleasure of reading Mimesis lies in never quite anticipating all the twists a chapter takes, or the bridge from one chapter to another,²⁵ even when you know perfectly well what, in some sense, they say. I have read Mimesis dozens of times, and I still find myself a little startled to discover (did I just forget, or is this a new connection?) that Saint Francis (“everything he did was a scene” M 162) reworks the disposition of Gregory of Tours (“Any story that he can, he thus makes into a scene,” M 87); that Goethe and Schiller’s analysis of “epic retardation,” introduced in chapter one (M 5), reappears in chapter five (M 105), and is invoked (though not named) in the reading of To the Lighthouse (M 538–39); that Flaubert, who seems the book’s hero in much of chapter 18, becomes a tiresome, neurotic aesthete in chapter 19; that Boileau, who seems the book’s villain in much of chapter 15, turns out to be the source for Auerbach’s discussion of the sublimity of the syntax in Genesis (M 110, after Boileau momentarily appears in chapter 5 to clarify the clumsy parataxis of the Chanson de Roland).

To read Mimesis, for me, is much like reading Hamlet. Both inaugurate an unending sense of an expanding coherence, of a “conception, so difficult to formulate in clear terms although everywhere to be observed in its effects, of a basic fabric of the world, perpetually weaving itself, renewing itself, and connected in all its parts” (M 327) – as Auerbach says of Shakespearean tragedy. Yet what Auerbach later called “the loose but always perceptible unity of Mimesis” (LL 24) also challenges, rather than declares, unity. One reason for the looseness is apparent in a complaint Auerbach makes of Cervantes. Though Don Quixote presents Spanish life “in its color and fullness,” in the “resulting clashes between Don Quijote and reality no situation ever results which puts in question that reality’s right to be what it is” (M 345) (“in den mannigfaltigen Zusammenstößen Don Quijotes mit der Wirklichkeit ergibt sich niemals eine Lage, die diese Wirklichkeit in ihrem Lebensrecht in Frage stellt” M 329). It is an odd, but entirely Auerbachian, sentence. What can it mean for a reality to have, or not to have, a “Lebensrecht,” a right to live, to be what it is? The answer is, I think, simple enough: Reality is never one thing in Mimesis. The assumption driving the entire investigation of 3,000 years of the “representation of reality” is that human life and human reality changes. And so Auerbach constructs Mimesis to do what he claims Don Quixote does not (in the Afterword I offer a guess about why he picks on Cervantes, whom he also clearly adores): offer “mannigfaltigen Zusammenstöße,” multiple, diverse clashes that constantly challenge the Lebensrecht of any style and the reality attached to it. The chapters of Mimesis are so many paratactic units in which (this is Auerbach’s description of the Chanson de Roland) “[t]ime and again there is a new start; every resumption is complete in itself and independent; the next is simply juxtaposed to it, and the relation between the two is often left hanging” (M 105). But Auerbach also sticks mostly to chronology, so that the book sometimes feels hypotactic, the unfolding of a definite argument, organization, and plan. Yet despite the narrative hypotaxis, each chapter demands that it be treated, so to speak, with dignity and respect, and not merely as a weigh station or syllogism en route to a higher purpose. Each “single event,” to again appropriate Auerbach’s description of the Chanson de Roland, “is filled with life” (M 120). But on the other hand, neither is any chapter, or any particular style, or any conception of reality, ever simply granted its right to be what it is: the world of Roland, for instance, is also “very small and narrow” (M 112). The result is that each quotation, and each chapter, rings familiar yet new, a repetition but not a repetition compulsion, a continual and surprising development whose outcome you can never quite predict. A Renaissance.

Auerbach’s subtitle calls this Renaissance “dargestellte Wirklichkeit,” represented reality, or “the representation of reality” (the official English translation) or (brutally but precisely) “imagined worldly actualization.”²⁶ “Dargestellte Wirklichkeit” means the creation and manifestation of ways of living in and organizing the world, the formalization of experience; it does not mean imitation of a pre-existing, unchanging reality. In 1946, Mimesis had a second subtitle, not reproduced in new editions, that makes the point more clearly: “Eine Geschichte des abendländischen Realismus als Ausdruck der Wandlungen in der Selbstanschauung des Menschen,” “A History of Occidental Realism as an Expression of the Changes in the Self-portrayal of Human Beings.”²⁷ How human beings portray themselves has not always been the same. Those differences capture diverse conceptualizations of the reality of the world – that is, diverse conceptions of what “reality” amounts to at all.²⁸ In the opening chapter, Homer and Genesis “represent basic types” (M 23) and provide an “Ausgangspunkt” (M 26), a “starting point for an investigation into the literary representation of reality in European culture” (M 23). Auerbach doesn’t mean that these two “basic types” are unchanging archetypes floating timelessly beyond historical life, static laws of style that inform all subsequent writing. His ambition is to begin to understand the different realities that human beings create by paying attention to their mimetic practices. A close contemporary theoretical term would be Foucault’s “regime,” the word that both Rancière and Hartog redeploy. Like Foucault, Auerbach begins with a loosely Kantian principle that rejects a truth that is unchanging and everywhere the same. He instead tries to describe the circumstances of what could or could not count as true or real at any given moment. When Auerbach declares, for instance, that the “concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things” (M 8) – that “God” is more a result of how the Jews write than the informing spirit of their utterance – you can see his similarity to Foucault very clearly.

Yet there is an obvious difference between Auerbach and Foucault. For Foucault, in “any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge.”²⁹ Auerbach, in contrast, constantly finds one regime (for present purposes a synonym of episteme)³⁰ supplementing another, and he juxtaposes them, mixes them together in his own prose. The result is that neither regime can be a closed system: What is unformulatable in one finds an articulation in the other, and what seemed absolute and unchanging in one is spun into motion in the other. The task of Mimesis is, in this sense, to make representation not self-evident by constantly offering Ausgangspunkten, challenges to the Lebensrecht of any specific conception of life. Mimesis offers, stresses Woloch, an “almost perverse attention to the counterexample,”³¹ and the result is, in Hartog’s terms, an “experience of self-estrangement” that is also “an encounter with historicity” (H 52). The styles of Homer and Genesis are a starting point not as immutable guides but only “in their opposition” (M 23) – crossed together, mixed in a single chapter, they reveal each other as particular styles and are not merely granted their right to exist. As Rancière writes, Auerbach’s first chapter

“Reality” in Mimesis is consequently not a given; it is “a trip amongst various and contradictory senses of reality in which there is always something gained in compensation for what is lost and something lost in compensation for what is gained” (RC 230).³² The intersection of two coordinates, the mixing of horizontal and vertical axes, exposes the lack that constitutes the totality of each coordinate. They become supplements of each other. The result is an unfolding, developmental narrative that paradoxically has no telos. The terrible Latin of Gregory of Tours, testament to the ruins of the entire Roman world, is also a seed of Western vernacular writing and modern realism. The doctrine of the separation of styles, by which Roman writers enforce and obey an unchanging, hierarchical conception of life, gets turned inside out by Flaubert’s mot juste, which insists that a word must correspond to reality in continual motion.

Rancière has a name for this coming into conflict of senses of reality, the awareness that truth and reality are themselves specific formalizations of experience. He calls it “aisthesis,” the paradoxical “aesthetic regime” that reveals the historicity of mimetic practices themselves and calls into question the inevitability or naturalness of any distribution of sensibility. “Art as such began to exist in the West,” he declares in Aisthesis, only when the “hierarchy of forms of life,” the sense that certain forms of life are natural, immutable, correct, and eternal, “began to vacillate” (RA ix). “Vacillate” here means two things: It names the unraveling that modern art performs; and it names the historical moment when it happens. The moment when this vacillation occurs, Rancière argues, is the eighteenth century (he invokes Winckelmann and Kant). Auerbach in many respects agrees (he invokes Vico and Herder). But for Auerbach, aisthesis itself has a supplement. Before there was an explicit theory of aesthetic historism, before Vico, Winckelmann, Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel revolutionized the critical and philosophical terms of art and history, there was an event that made the historicity of mimesis itself thinkable: the Renaissance.³³ Auerbach’s Renaissance begins with Dante, who is the first voice of European poetry (D 76) because his mix of Thomist theology and Vergilian poetics challenges, so to speak, the Lebensrecht of the senses of reality linked to those two great writers and the worlds they manifest. European poetry after Dante, for Auerbach, is not a stable edifice or immobile cultural achievement: It is an aesthetic that continually disputes the inevitability of any sense of reality. The writing that emerges over the 300 years after Dante is summed up, in Mimesis, by Shakespeare’s plays: the “world of realities in which men live is changed; it grows broader, richer in possibilities, limitless” (M 321) – limitless because though there is a single “world,” a home we all live in, that world also expresses limitless, plural “realities.” We are all players, but also tourists, in this aesthetic home.

Auerbach’s own style, his careful construction of his examples, conveys this historical diversity. Shakespeare’s mixed style is not only the ideal and the example for Goethe and Schiller, Stendhal and Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, and Woolf. The Renaissance writing that Shakespeare synthesizes informs the greatest mixer of styles in Mimesis – Auerbach himself. The vacillating opposition of The Odyssey and Genesis in the opening chapter is also a Renaissance, a rebirth of the mixed style. And even before he juxtaposes Homer and the Elohist, Tacitus and St Mark, Auerbach sets off from a Renaissance poem – Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” whose first line is quoted on his title page: “Had we but world enough and time.” That said, I want to stress that the Renaissance is obviously not the only influence on Auerbach’s understanding of art. Nor is Renaissance the correct standard by which life is measured. How could it be? Historical diversity means that Auerbach can – and does – take nearly every author he considers as a sort of model. He praises Tacitus as a “great artist” (M 36), and he is awed by Augustine’s capacity to “express the impulsive and dramatic” (M 71). He emphasizes that contemporary scholarship depends on “the historicist humanism of Goethe’s age” (AE 254), and he makes very explicit his imitation of Woolf’s narrative technique (M 548). Likewise, linking historical diversity with art is not surprising for a German philologist. Auerbach no doubt subscribed to Dilthey’s dictum that the “art of interpretation” originates “in the personal and inspired virtuosity of the philologist,”³⁴ and surely he agreed with Nietzsche’s praise of philology as a “venerable art.”³⁵ “Ancient historiography was a literary genre,” Auerbach likewise points out, and “the philosophically and historically oriented criticism established by German Classicism and Romanticism strove to develop its own version of artistic expression as well” (AE 260). Still, Auerbach’s point of departure in Mimesis for combining all these influences, the ideal and the example of the ability to imagine human beings in the world as diverse, is the mixed style of Renaissance writing. As with any deconstructive term, it would be easy enough to reify “Renaissance” and turn it into an ideal period and theoretical model. That is not what happens in Mimesis, though, and it is not at all what I intend either. I have tried throughout to keep the term “Renaissance” in historical motion and not to offer it as the key to all mythologies.

Attention to Auerbach’s Renaissance ought to put to rest, I hope, some lingering objections to his understanding of art and the style in which he conveys his argument. Victoria Kahn’s charge that Auerbach “is too readily associated with arguments that assume the self-evident virtues of literature”;³⁶ or Terence Cave’s declaration that “Mimesis, representation of reality, however it is defined, is reassuring” and “for Auerbach, the Greek mimesis is supremely reassuring”;³⁷ or David Wallace’s vision of Auerbach “huddling with select masterworks of European literature”³⁸ – these all repeat a common, influential assessment: that Auerbach is a great defender of aesthetic idealism, artistic masterpieces, and a coherent European edifice that he tragically wished to hold together after the catastrophe of World War II. But the link Auerbach makes between art and historical diversity makes clear that he is no defender of a durable, timeless essence of art. The autonomous aesthetic artifact and everything associated with it – rules of composition, unchanging natures, idealist concepts of perfection, timeless cultural achievements – are all consistent targets of Auerbach’s sometimes explicit ire (“The principle of l’art pour l’art has outlived its usefulness” M 512). Chrétien’s courtly romance is “an absolute aesthetic configuration” that escapes into fairy land by depicting the life of the new ruling class “in extrahistorical terms” (M 138). A similar sentiment appears in his essay on Baudelaire, who remains “contaminated by the idolatry of art that is still with us. What a strange phenomenon: a prophet of doom who expects nothing of his readers but admiration for his artistic achievement.”³⁹

Auerbach’s critical style has also been equated with political hesitation, conservatism, or naiveté. When Kahn excludes Auerbach from The Future of Illusion because she finds the treatment of politics in Mimesis “fairly oblique”⁴⁰ and consequently not very compelling, she echoes a critique first made by René Wellek in 1954. Mimesis “must be judged as something of a work of art,”⁴¹ stressed Wellek, but he did not mean it as a compliment. He thought his new colleague at Yale “averse, on principle, to discussing and analysing his terms and methods”:

Wellek is, in a sense, right: Auerbach flatly refuses to recognize a clear distinction between the realms of fiction and criticism. He is averse, on principle, to declaring a theoretical principle. When asked by Martin Buber in 1957 to write a short, new preface for the Hebrew translation of Mimesis, Auerbach responded with a succinct “no”: “Mimesis is a book without introduction; the Homer-Genesis chapter is meant as an introduction; theoretical arguments at the beginning would contradict the intention of the book.”⁴³ In the “Epilegomena,” Auerbach made the startling announcement that he never really liked his opening chapter and contemplated cutting it – too introductory, too theoretical, too simplified, especially the unanimity of the classical world. “I emphasize the one-sidedness of the presentation,” he adds, “expressly because, time and again, there are readers who especially praise the first chapter in particular” (M 560). Auerbach reiterates that the key to understanding a historical moment is not its explicit theoretical declarations (never to be ignored, of course) but its style, and that conviction applies to his own prose as well. His reason is simple: A theoretical principle aspires to be a governing concept, and it is not historical in a modern sense. There can be no introduction to, no point of view exterior to, historical diversity. Scholarship has to be an art.

Auerbach’s aversion to theoretical principles, then, has deep political stakes. Geoffrey Hartman thought it obvious that Auerbach’s work practiced an “urbane, undogmatic Marxism.”⁴⁴ Despite much overlap with his friend Walter Benjamin, though, Auerbach never imagines mimesis as “aestheticization,” as a fascist or capitalist aura that needs to be punctured to reveal a progressive politics. Instead, Auerbach’s rejection of any overarching theory also pursues a basic democratic conviction. The “common life of mankind on earth” (M 552) he summons at the close of Mimesis should be thought of less as a bureaucratic goal or a philosophic concept or unified human spirit than a basic commitment to the dignity of anyone and everyone, a sense that the equality of human beings is the point of departure for any analysis. In this sense, Auerbach is a touchstone for that equality celebrated by Rancière. For both of them, modern art is democratic not because of its ideological postures but because its dissensus reveals the equality that underlies any consensus, any distribution of sensibility, and any ethical principle.⁴⁵ Mimesis is not a book that takes political sides, in this sense, because its aesthetic rejects out of hand any point of view claiming to be absolute, and does so with the conviction that any moment, any text, and any person is equally worth paying attention to.⁴⁶

In contrast, scholarship on Auerbach of the past thirty years has sometimes tried to show his political relevance by insisting that he is, in fact, taking sides, that the opening chapter of Mimesis in particular tries to demystify the aesthetics of fascism. Some very astute readers, pursuing different theses, have agreed with the premise that Mimesis declares, in Walter Cohen’s words, “the superiority of the Hebrew Bible to Homeric epic.”⁴⁷ The results of this turn have been important because they have made clear what was obvious to his contemporaries but has sometimes been forgotten since as Auerbach has been absorbed into the Cold War on the side of American hegemony: Mimesis is not just a stunning piece of traditional humanist scholarship but an impassioned response to its historical moment. It takes Jewish traditions with the utmost seriousness and sets them against the racism and antisemitism which had long been part of the German idealist tradition.⁴⁸ I am deeply indebted to this scholarship, and I draw on it to try to show the intensity with which Auerbach is thinking about the world he lives in. But the stress on Auerbach’s political engagement has tended to come at the expense of attention to what is always the center of his attention: style. Imagining that Auerbach’s work is more “an act of civil disobedience than an act of literary criticism”⁴⁹ imposes a very narrow understanding of literary criticism, particularly Auerbach’s. Auerbach thought very carefully about his style and its implications for the world he lived in. In a letter to Traugott Fuchs in 1938, he wrote that it is not “too difficult” to grasp “all the evil that’s happening.” The problem, rather, was finding a “point of departure [Ausgangspunkt] for those historical forces that can be set against it.”⁵⁰ What style can be a point of departure to combat fascism? How to convince people that they live in a historical and variable, not a theological or fated, world? In 1938, Auerbach writes, he does not quite know. But he found his point of departure as he wrote his essays in the 1930s and, eventually, constructed the distinctive style of Mimesis, published in 1946. Auerbach’s work is an intense, often manic response to the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s. Any careful reading will hear in his writing not only the agony of a scholar watching a world at war but also a driving compulsion, bitterness, and anger. He wrote a 500-page book in about six years, a new chapter more or less every two months, while running the Western languages department at Istanbul University, writing a general introduction to European philology for his Turkish students, and completing several other articles. It is not difficult to grasp where he got the energy. “Can you imagine,” he wrote to Fuchs, “that someone can be so intensely and exclusively busy for years with a particular problem, a particular difficulty or challenge, that it absorbs him so much with all its force that only with effort can he find strength for anything else? That’s how it is with me.”⁵¹ But Auerbach’s obsession was not channeled into absolute judgments or a political treatise, however disguised. Auerbach’s response to the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s is a carefully structured piece of scholarly art – the subtle balancing and mixing, the patient explication and unfolding, that his literary criticism performs.

It is possible, maybe even likely, that in the face of the terror of fascism, in the face of the catastrophe of the Holocaust, in the face of the atomic bomb dropped just after he finished his book, that Auerbach’s devotion to his scholarly art is hopelessly, stupidly, embarrassingly, and even dangerously simple-minded. Wellek seems to have thought so, and he is one of the best readers of Mimesis because he grasps so viscerally, if negatively, the political and social stakes of its artistry. Unlike Auerbach, Wellek championed theoretical statements and nonnationalistic period concepts (“The Baroque”) because, he hoped, they were the sort of theory that could preserve democracy.⁵² Auerbach also wants to move beyond national historiography to preserve and promote democracy: A nonnational historiography is one of the things he admires in Hugh of Saint Victor, an admiration that deeply resonated with Edward Said.⁵³ But Auerbach trusts his scholarly art completely. He sees no other way of imagining a historical future. “It is an enormous task,” he declares toward the end of “The Philology of World Literature,” “to make people conscious of themselves within their own history” (AE 264). The way you make people aware of historical diversity, he decided, is through the mixed style inherited from Renaissance art.

An art that makes people aware of their diverse history was on Auerbach’s mind when, in the fall of 1949, he gave the first of what would come to be known as the Gauss seminars at Princeton. The seminars were organized by R. P. Blackmur of Princeton and Francis Fergusson of Rutgers. Fergusson invited Auerbach.⁵⁴ Blackmur, for reasons known only to himself, took meticulous notes every week, running to over ninety typed pages. Blackmur had also asked Robert Fitzgerald to attend. Fitzgerald did not go to every session, but with the help of Blackmur’s notes, he wrote up a longer report for the Guggenheim foundation on the history of the Gauss seminars, eventually published as a book in 1985. Though they should hardly be taken as objective, Fitzgerald and Blackmur offer a detailed portrait of the presentations and the reflections of two thoughtful observers on Auerbach the person.⁵⁵ Blackmur was impressed by Auerbach but not won over; he thought Ernst Curtius, who attended a few of Auerbach’s seminars, was more intellectually imposing.⁵⁶ Fitzgerald, though, gazed at Auerbach with awe. “Here was the superlatively good European,” he writes, “practiced in the old languages, steeped in the old universities cosmopolitan as seaports, his dark eyes glowing with cultivated energy, amused, alive, disenchanted, ardent.”⁵⁷ Auerbach sounds like a character out of a Henry James novel, and he seems to have performed the role of cultivated European intellectual with great mastery. One night when Christian Gauss suggested that Stendhal’s Oedipal complex made him history’s first really pathological figure, Auerbach wryly responded: “It is hard to confer the crown for pathology”⁵⁸; at another moment he remarks of Emma Bovary: “Please realize what kind of woman it is who succumbs to a plate – not a woman of vigorous character.”⁵⁹

But Fitzgerald also noticed something slightly off in this superlative European, something registered in Fitzgerald’s odd absence of punctuation: “steeped in the old universities cosmopolitan as seaports.” Should there be a comma there? Is Auerbach cosmopolitan, or are the universities? Are universities cosmopolitan in quite the same way as seaports? Lecturing in the clubby atmosphere of Princeton, the author of Mimesis, disenchanted and ardent, was a citizen of the world. But there was something strange about this seaport scholar. He was not quite the bearer of cultural capital, of acknowledged masterpieces and intellectual aristocracy, that Fitzgerald wished him to be. Fitzgerald didn’t know it, but despite his one-year fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, the esteemed author of Mimesis was unemployed. And one reason – it had to be a bitter pill – was Princeton. Two years before the seminar, just after he’d arrived in the United States, Auerbach wrote to Werner Krauss that a hoped-for appointment to Princeton had been pushed off by the president to the following year, nominally for budgetary purposes but probably for other reasons: “Princeton is considered hostile to ‘strangers,’ and I would, if the thing happens, be more or less the only one of my kind …”⁶⁰ The ellipsis here is by Auerbach. Auerbach thought he was a stranger at Princeton because he was a Jew – that is surely part of what he implies. Bitter, if unsurprising, as antisemitism in the United States had to be, it was hardly a new experience for Auerbach. But Jewishness was only one expression of the disenchanted, cosmopolitan foreignness of this stranger. Victor Klemperer caught something fremd in the very architecture of Mimesis, and his admiring 1948 review gave Auerbach the epithet attached to him and his scholarly art ever since: “Philologie im Exil.”⁶¹ Mimesis “is an exile’s book” (M xvii), Edward Said constantly stressed. In the wake of Said’s emphasis on exile, scholarship has focused a great deal of attention on Auerbach’s life in Istanbul in order to explain what is (or is not) strange about him, viewing his experience there as a key to Mimesis and as part of the founding ethos of the discipline of comparative literature in particular.⁶² But Auerbach’s act of imagination and the strangeness attached to it does not begin when the fired professor in Marburg took up Leo Spitzer’s position in Istanbul.⁶³ Foreignness for the author of Mimesis and “The Philology of World Literature” does not begin with physical relocation. It begins where Goethe’s Weltliteratur begins: with the development of vernacular literatures and the historical world they express. The continual temporal displacement that is Auerbach’s exile begins, in other words, with the Renaissance: not a theory but a historical event.

The Renaissance, Auerbach stresses in “The Philology of World Literature,” was not very long ago. Its lessons are still unfolding. It “has only been some five hundred years since the European national literatures overtook Latin culture and acquired a sense of themselves,” he writes, “and scarcely two hundred years since the sense of historical perspective awoke which allowed a concept like world literature to take shape” (AE 254). The cosmopolitan Henry James character Robert Fitzgerald saw in front of him at the Princeton seminar was, in a very specific sense, still a Renaissance Man. When the word “cosmopolite” appeared around 1577 for the first time since perhaps Diogenes, the universality of this new citizen of the world depended paradoxically on pushing aside the much broader universality of Latin that accompanied the explosion of vernacular literatures in Europe.⁶⁴ Renaissance cosmopolitanism meant, and still means, moving among languages and cultures with no single universal guide – no universal church, no universal language, and no absolute point of view of any sort. Auerbach’s “act of reading begins with an acknowledgment of the limits of his own position,” writes Timothy Hampton – that is, with an acknowledgment that he writes in a definite world and time. Hampton makes clear that Auerbach takes this lesson from Rabelais’ running joke that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives” (TH 53). When Rabelais breaks the universal moral frame of medieval writing by walking his text into an endless proliferation of new worlds, he sets the stage for Montaigne and Shakespeare, who in Auerbach’s narrative will “confront the question of cultural multiplicity head on” (TH 53). Alternately lauded or damned as a defender of a unified Europe, Auerbach’s scholarly art rather begins with the demands of cultural multiplicity and historical diversity. Recent efforts to recast cosmopolitanism less as a universal worldly sophistication, or even a nationalism set squarely against the claims of race and patria, but rather as a strangeness “slightly subversive of one’s sense of self” that undermines your “relation to a ‘home’ culture”⁶⁵ – these efforts repeat and renew the cosmopolitanism that for Auerbach begins with the Renaissance. When Homi Bhabha stresses that the “universals” accompanying cosmopolitanism are not “truths for all time” or “ends” but continually “send us back to the beginning to relocate, re-pose our starting questions, and to retool our originating assumptions,”⁶⁶ he is, in Auerbach’s sense, redeclaring a Renaissance.

Auerbach’s life in Turkey, with all its unique antagonisms and traumas, bitternesses and desires, is a continuation, not an inauguration, of this scholarly and artistic expression of historical diversity. The Western cultural tradition, shows Kader Konuk, was “at home in Istanbul, even while the humanist tradition was being banished from Europe,” and Auerbach’s very job at the university existed as part of Turkey’s project of modernization and Europeanization.⁶⁷ Traugott Fuchs described his own “arrival in Istanbul as ‘a Renaissance-like joy of a return to the conditions that existed in certain highly intellectual circles in pre-Nazi Germany.’”⁶⁸ And the Turkish minister of education liked to declare that just as the departure of Byzantine scholars in 1453 helped inaugurate Renaissance culture, so the return of scholars such as Auerbach would help to create a new Turkish “national culture in the image of Renaissance Europe.”⁶⁹ What bothered Auerbach about his life in Turkey was not a confrontation with diversity or a fear of others. It was that the very government that hired him as part of a Renaissance and saved his life was also simultaneously doing its best to eradicate historical diversity in its pursuit of a homogeneous modernity reminiscent of the dreams of purity driving European fascism.⁷⁰ Auerbach was horrified that the creation of a new Turkish culture was proceeding “spookily fast,” particularly linguistically. Already “there is hardly anyone who knows Arabic or Persian,” he wrote to Benjamin, “and even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly become incomprehensible since the language is being modernized and at the same time oriented on ‘Ur-Turkish,’ and it is being written with Latin characters.”⁷¹ This modernization was not an extension of the Renaissance but its destruction.

The stress on historical and linguistic diversity recasts as a Renaissance question one of the fables that continues to surround Auerbach – his command of languages. Auerbach appears at his most Renaissance-cosmopolitan in his celebrated linguistic prowess, because in a diverse world, you need to deal with a lot of languages. Often enough, though, Auerbach’s languages have been used to make him seem “like one of the philological giants who lived before the Flood,”⁷² someone whose knowledge of languages is so absolute that they all might as well be Latin (one recent description: Auerbach “commands Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, English, and French,” a sign of his magisterial “scale”⁷³). Fitzgerald’s superlative European “practiced in the old languages” indulges in this fantasy of pre-Babel, total linguistic control. But Fitzgerald’s own interactions with Auerbach at the Princeton seminar made clear that Auerbach was hardly linguistically at home or always majestically commanding. During the questions after the second lecture, Fitzgerald remarked that an artist “always had formed material on his hands, was stuck with it.” “Stuck with it?” asked Auerbach, “all polite attention but puzzled by the idiom.”⁷⁴ After two years in the United States, English could still be a stretch. In March 1948, Auerbach had written from Penn State to his friend from Istanbul, the social liberal economist Alexander Rüstow, that while he didn’t find teaching very taxing, preparing academic talks in English took a lot of time.⁷⁵ Languages, for Auerbach, were work. After learning that Auerbach (graduate of the Französisches Gymnasium Berlin, where classes were conducted in French) had landed Spitzer’s coveted position in Istanbul, Klemperer complained: “Now Auerbach is brushing up his French in Geneva. And Spitzer had been saying in Italy that only someone who could really speak French would get the appointment! If I go off to Geneva for a couple of months then I too could ‘really speak French’ again.”⁷⁶ Still, Auerbach was much more comfortable in French than any other language besides German. When he wrote to inquire about publishing his essay “Figura” to Giulio Bertoni, editor of the journal Archivum romanicum in Rome, he wrote in French to ask the Italian Bertoni to publish the essay in German, because translating it (presumably into Italian) would be difficult.⁷⁷ Auerbach had translated Vico and Croce into German, and he wrote to Croce in Italian. But the letters to il Senatore make clear that Auerbach’s Italian is sometimes shaky, and when he felt he had to defend the thesis of his first book to an unpersuadable Croce, Auerbach began the letter by declaring in Italian, “Please permit me today to write in German” – which he proceeded to do.⁷⁸ In a charming note sent from Penn State to Croce in April 1948 along with a copy of Mimesis, Auerbach offers a portrait of himself not as a biblical philological giant but someone exhausted by the effort of moving in and out of languages:

Auerbach did not think languages were something that anyone ever really mastered. Though he knew many languages very well in certain situations, the struggles languages entail are the paid tickets of a Renaissance tourist traveling in the world. You only know your mother tongue well. But even that knowledge only emerges through the foreignness of poliglotnia, as he remarked in “The Philology of World Literature”: “Gewiß ist noch immer das Kostbarste und Unentbehrlichste, was der Philologe ererbt, Sprache und Bildung seiner Nation; doch erst in der Trennung, in der Überwindung wird es wirksam” (PW 49) – “Surely the most precious and indispensable thing that the philologist inherits is the language and culture of his nation; but it is only in separation, in overcoming, that it becomes effective” (AE 264, translation altered). A mother tongue separated and overcome is a home that appears when the entire world is a foreign place, un cativo stile expressing history. Every philologist, in this sense, is a tourist.

Auerbach’s poliglotnia comes from his Renaissance, and Auerbach’s Renaissance opens an opportunity for rethinking the story to be told about the moment when vernaculars overtook Latin culture. Reading a review in 1933 in Nuova Antologia by Arminio Janner of Ernst Walser’s Gesammelte Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der Renaissance, Antonio Gramsci noted that “it is worth taking into account” Janner’s sense that “there is an interpretation of the Renaissance of modern life that is attributed to Italy – as if it had originated in Italy and were based on its history – but it is only the interpretation of a German book on Italy.”⁸⁰ One way of reading this remark is that Renaissance names a nationalism imposing itself as a hegemony proclaiming its universality; Burckhardt’s infamous celebration of individuality means Renaissance marks the start of imperialism and capitalism, what Germans call Italiensehnsucht as the start of mass tourism, not a celebration of diversity.⁸¹ Here is one start of that modernity-turned nightmare that organizes so much contemporary Renaissance scholarship: The Renaissance inaugurates much or most of what is wrong in the world in the last 500 years, and tourists are only a symptom of it. Gramsci records that Janner thinks that the great Italian critic Francesco de Sanctis, in contrast, thought in Italy the Renaissance was “the start of a regression,” that it “undid Italy and conveyed it in servitude into foreign hands.”⁸² Even Renaissance Italy, the cradle of individual achievement and the launching point for Eurocentric capitalism, might be a conquered land.

Another way of putting Gramsci’s description, though, brings out a contradiction at work when a vernacular tries to proclaim its universality: Renaissance appears when one language imagines itself via another language, when a nation coalesces via another nation, when a cultural value appears via an exchange, when styles, and the realities they manifest, mix.⁸³ For some Italians, Renaissance means less national assertion than the moment when you become a foreigner in your own home. This experience is not entirely different – not the same, but not entirely different – from what occurs in a “German” book on Italy that Gramsci especially has in mind. When Jacob Burckhardt put a French word into his German title, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: ein Versuch, the Swiss historian located the expression of an ideal of German Geistesgeschichte in Italy by deploying untranslated (he does not write “Wiedergeburt”) a word popular among early nineteenth-century French Catholics who used it to designate everything they hated about the modern world, a word that had been reappropriated by Jules Michelet as a celebration of human emancipation: “Renaissance.” The word Renaissance, concretized in the nineteenth century, was never a simple expression of national homogeneity or individual mastery or intellectual abstractions. From its onset, Renaissance was mixed, including the open question of when its onset happened (Carolingian Aachen? trecento or quattrocento Florence? 1590s London? 1830s Paris? 1850s Switzerland? 1970s Berkeley?). The result is that, even when Renaissance is invoked as an unmixed concept of universal perfection, foreignness mixes into the language. “We in England, the devoted children of Protestantism,” writes Matthew Arnold in chapter 4 of Culture and Anarchy, “chiefly know the Renascence by its subordinate and secondary side of the Reformation.” Why the funny spelling? In a footnote, Arnold explains. “I have ventured to give to the foreign word Renaissance, destined to become of more common use amongst us as the movement which it denotes comes, as it will come, increasingly to interest us, an English form.”⁸⁴ The author of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” who castigates Wordsworth for not reading Goethe, maintains no fear of foreign ideas, and it is to his cosmopolitan credit that Arnold carries a French word across the channel. But Arnold’s Renascence also aims to unify Hellenism and Hebraism in order to form a perfected English Culture, a destination that closely resembles the goal of Hugh of Saint Victor: “man’s perfection or salvation,” writes Arnold, so “that we might be partakers of the divine nature.”⁸⁵ You are most perfect, writes Hugh, when the entire world is foreign, because then you are closest to God. You are most perfect, writes Arnold, when the foreignness of Renaissance is domesticated into the home of English Culture. Arnold’s effort at nationalism has, though, been paradoxical. While the word Renaissance has found a home in Arnold’s English Culture, his nativist spelling never really caught on. The result: In English, there is always something foreign about a Renaissance, but something really, really strange about a Renascence.

Auerbach’s Renaissance cannot be limited to the cinquecento. Renaissance is the birth and rebirth of aesthetic historism. Renaissance is a period to study, but it is also an aesthetic that dissolves absolute standards of judgment by insisting on historical singularity. While Renaissance means writing whose meaning is always linked to a time and a place, that injunction also means that Renaissance can be any time and any place. The proliferation of worlds that leaps into existence with More’s Utopia or Rabelais’ Pantagruel “has a revolutionary force which shakes the established order, sets it in a broader context, and thus makes it a relative thing” (M 270). Europe is conceptually relativized at the exact moment of its global expansion, a point Benedict Anderson, explicitly following Auerbach, stressed was at the basis of national “imagined communities.”⁸⁶ A Renaissance can happen anywhere, and it can happen anytime.

Since the 1980s, in contrast, it has become an unconsidered habit of scholarship mostly to dismiss nineteenth-century accounts of the Renaissance as little more than aesthetic idealism, Eurocentric propaganda, and teleological historiography; the name “Jacob Burckhardt” has become, as it is in Renaissance Self-fashioning, a virtual shorthand for everything that should be dismissed about the term Renaissance. This dismissal, I will try to show (especially in Chapter 5), is a mistake; it misreads not simply of Burckhardt but of the nineteenth-century inheritance of Renaissance. By way of introduction, consider another sentimental tourist, a nineteenth-century writer Auerbach himself never mentions but whose characters seem to shape the imagination of Fitzgerald as he looks at a cultured European delivering a lecture on French literature at a rich American university that would not hire him. In the piece Henry James wrote for The Century Magazine in 1882 – later the first chapter of Italian Hours – he deploys prose glowing with cultivated energy: amused, alive, disenchanted, ardent. “It is a great pleasure to write the word [Venice],” begins James, “but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it.”⁸⁷ James’ task is not to add to the word but to make it live in prose, and that job begins with the Venetians – about whose social condition he is under no illusions. The “misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see,” stresses James; “it is part of the spectacle.”⁸⁸ The life of the lagoon is the abject subject of contemporary political, social, and economic forces. Conquered by Napoleon, absorbed by Austria, folded into the Risorgimento,

There is plenty of condescension dripping from this preeminent chronicler of the foibles of the privileged class. But James’ elitism is not exactly patronizing, because it never pretends to be a separation of styles putting the Venetians in their appropriate place. These poor who “dabble in the sea” are not the children of Rousseau or Wordsworth’s beggars, idealized pre-industrial peasants in touch with an authenticity that culture corrupts. They are sophisticated experts at living who are at home in their foreign city. The beauty of Venice is their attitude, the art and architecture extensions of their life. When you go into Venetian churches and galleries, writes James, you do not enter a realm of autonomous art, a culture of perfection free of history. Instead, the masterpieces they contain “offer you an exquisite reproduction of the things that surround you.”⁹⁰ A Tintoretto, for James, is “an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual.”⁹¹ Spreading: it doesn’t stand still, this actual, because it is historical.

To be sure, everyone hates a tourist, and James is no exception. Though “there are some disagreeable things in Venice,” he remarks, “there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.” The tourist wants “to be alone; to be original; to have … the air of making discoveries,” but that urge ends up making you feel foreign, and not in a good way. After a week in Venice, you are “tired of your gondola” and irritated by the “attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke.⁹² Wanting to make discoveries turns out to be another way of saying you miss your real home. The savvy traveler, though, gives up on the idea of a permanent home by ceasing to imagine Venice as a secret to be found.⁹³ “When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to Venice. It is by living there from day to day that you feel the fulness of her charm; that you invite her exquisite influence to sink into your spirit.”⁹⁴ To grow attached to Venice is not to find it comfortable or perfect: “sink” is a dangerous word in la Serenissima. Instead, James takes a lesson from the locals and learns how to be at home in this foreign world: Follow their conception of art, the life he sees when he looks at a Tintoretto and gets “the impression that he felt, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically – with a heart that never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of his brush.”⁹⁵ The life of Venice becomes part of James’ essay when the American, or the Englishman – whatever James is – writes with a heart-beating passionate accompaniment, even to the serenading he often finds insufferable. James is a tourist. He can never be a smooth participant in the eternal conversazione because he doesn’t know veneziano. The spreading actual, nevertheless, lives in the accent of his essay. Its art is not an escape from history but its expression. The sentimental tourist – my title for this chapter – is not nostalgic for the lost home of Schiller’s naive poetry. “We are citizens of our own Age no less than of our own State,” declared Schiller himself in his second letter in Aesthetic Education.⁹⁶ Sentimentality expresses the beauty that makes everyone both a foreigner and right at home in their historical moment. In this respect, every sentimental tourist earns, in Auerbach’s philological terms, “a proper love for the world” (AE 265), which is to say: Every sentimental tourist lives a Renaissance.

Auerbach’s work, I suggest, is the offering of a sentimental tourist, the aesthetic effort to live a Renaissance and, necessarily, to make a Renaissance too. His effort did not end in Istanbul. Auerbach and his wife Marie arrived in the United States in September 1947. After eleven years, they had, with mixed feelings, left Turkey with no secure employment for him and not enough savings to last a year. They’d sold many of their books first to send their son Clemens to Harvard and then to pay for their own relocation. Their ship arrived in Baltimore, and after three days with Leo Spitzer and ten days in New York (with side trips to Princeton and Yale), they traveled to Cambridge and took rooms in a boarding house to save money. It seemed half of Europe had also arrived. They found, Auerbach told Werner Krauss, “a lot of appointments, invitations, correspondence, small trips – many fantastic people, including Spitzer, Castro, Ernst Bloch, Panofsky, Werner Jaeger, Llorens, Claveria, (next time Amado Alonso) – Viëtor, Arno Schirokauer, the old Viennese Hans P. Kraus (here really big), Löwith and Erich Frank hopefully soon.” Despite his money worries, Auerbach wasn’t concerned. “Here however there is so much money and possibilities, that no one is afraid, including me. Maybe I’ll get a scholarship.” University job prospects for the year were mostly over – too late in the semester – but Auerbach thought maybe he’d teach elementary French or German, or help an antiquarian. “All is possible.” “Something striking,” he added – “the people are all naturally friendly, helpful.” And whether he won a fellowship or found a teaching position for the winter or not, Auerbach declared, “I will sit here in the library and work.”⁹⁷

Unsurprisingly, the thrill subsided. Auerbach noticed right away that his son, despite being financially self-sufficient and at Harvard for two years, was “still not like the American students.”⁹⁸ The job market proved difficult: The emerging fame of Mimesis made him strangely overqualified for some positions, while French or Italian positions went to French and Italians, not Germans. The Princeton job would never come through. He went to the Modern Language Association meeting in Detroit (an “unpleasant city”⁹⁹) and found it exhausting. He feared, with much supporting evidence, that at age fifty five he was too old to hire. Coming to the United States was a risk, he admitted. But still, it was worth it. Eventually, he found a temporary job at Penn State, where he was excited to start in February 1948 because they needed the money. That summer Auerbach taught practical advanced French (for $550) and was happy to do it – he and Marie wanted to buy some furniture for their rented apartment.¹⁰⁰ After a semester, Auerbach declared that he was resigned to staying at Penn State. “All the great plans which were pending in the first months of my stay have been shattered,” he wrote to Rüstow back in Istanbul, “the teaching chairs have been given at 5 or 6 major universities, and I am compensated with expressions of purely theoretical reverence and admiration.” But Auerbach was not unhappy at Penn State. The landscape reminded him of central Germany, he found the students naive but humane, and everyone behaved charmingly to him. There “are even a few people here who, as Kant once said, you can talk to for your satisfaction.” The conditions weren’t brilliant, but “a state university is crisis-proof.” They rented a pretty house and hoped soon to buy a car.¹⁰¹

Penn State was not crisis-proof. Marie never got over the fact that Penn State fired her husband after a required physical revealed hypertension, making him an insurance risk.¹⁰² Though Auerbach’s friend Richard Krautheimer (then at Vassar) had been communicating with Panofsky for nearly two years to try to get Auerbach a position at the Institute of Advanced Study, nothing had happened.¹⁰³ Finally, some luck: In April 1949 Panofsky wrote to Krautheimer that by an “unexpected windfall” there was a fellowship at the institute, but only for one year: “please try to prevent wrong conclusions that he is being taken care of for good,” Panofksy stressed, “and do not relax in your efforts to find something for him.”¹⁰⁴ In July 1949 Auerbach wrote to Rüstow that though the fellowship could be career-making, the old problems persisted: French departments still wanted no part of Germans; administrators still wanted no one over age of fifty. He was willing to return to Germany, but he thought that Germans thought he’d rejected them.¹⁰⁵ In fall 1949, after two years in the United States, the acclaimed author of Mimesis had employment only till the following April.

Eventually, Yale hired Auerbach in 1950. It was an unexpected job, if not entirely surprising. But the author of “The Philology of World Literature” did not stop being a foreigner in his new home. In a letter to Panofsky in 1955, Henri Peyre, chair of the Yale French Department, wrote that Auerbach “seems to be going through occasional crises of doubt about himself and loses any hope of ever completing his immense projects.” “He is such a remarkable man,” added Peyre, “with a gentle sense of humor and a zest for life, that I feel remorseful at times for having lured him away from your genial humor, which he loved, to our inhuman and over-busy Yale atmosphere.”¹⁰⁶ Yale made Auerbach Sterling Professor in 1956 and gave him a $4,000 raise,¹⁰⁷ but he occupied the position for barely a year and a half. After suffering a stroke, he died and was buried in New Haven in October 1957.

Yet the Auerbachs had lived an aesthetic life, a life in history, for many years. They were sentimental tourists on a good path. Three months after they’d arrived in the United States, Marie Auerbach added a personal note to her husband’s letter to Werner Krauss:

Pragmatic, self-aware, humble, gracious, and delicately optimistic, it is the very best summary of Mimesis I know, and the definitive statement of Auerbach’s Renaissance.