Auerbach and the Contradictions of Realism

Auerbach and the Contradictions of Realism Jacques Rancière

To address the issue of realism in Mimesis I will use the same method that Erich Auerbach used when he addressed the issue of “the representation of reality in Western literature.”1 Auerbach gave no preliminary definition of either reality or representation. He started from the “thing itself ”: two narratives borrowed from two books that had long been given a founding role in the western literary tradition: the Odyssey and the Bible (M, p. 153). In the same way, I will give no preliminary account of what realism means to me. I will start by focussing on a narrative: the interpretive narrative of the first chapter of Mimesis, wherein Auerbach tells us what the two narratives that he has selected reveal. I hope that, in my case as in Auerbach’s case, the very development of the analysis will show that starting from “the thing itself,” and constructing the interpretive categories from this “thing,” is itself a method with some philosophical and political implications. The argument of the first chapter is well known. At a highly dramatic moment in the Odyssey, when Euryclea has just recognized the scar that identifies her master Ulysses, Homer takes the time to make a long digression about the history of the wound. With a luxury of adjectives, he describes to us the visit of the young Odysseus to his uncle Autolycus, Autolycus’s house, the banquet, the sleep and the awakening, the hunt, the struggle with the boar, and the wound. He does not describe them, however, as memories in Ulysses’ mind. He describes them in the same temporal mode as the present washing of his feet by Euryclea. All those events are on the same level, in the same light; all the feelings of the characters are made explicit; all the elements of the story are fully externalized so as to 1. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946; Princeton, N.J., 2003); hereafter abbreviated M. Critical Inquiry 44 (Winter 2018) © 2018 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/18/4402-0002$10.00. All rights reserved.

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make them palpable and visible without any obscure background; all of them are perfectly articulated as regards both the narrative connection of the events and the syntactic order of the sentences. It is a fully opposite scenario that can be observed in another narrative of travel: the travel that God demands that Abraham make to the place where he must sacrifice his son Isaac. We don’t know where the protagonists of the scene stand, why God imposes this ordeal on Abraham, or what Abraham feels about God’s order; we have no description of the travel, of the servants who go with Abraham and Isaac, of the place of the sacrifice. There are no descriptive adjectives. There is only an abstract succession of events expressed in a rudimentary syntax. Almost everything remains in the background, untold, unexpressed, unexplained. This lack of light and presence, however, is precisely that which gives to the characters and situations a depth that the entirely individualized characters and the objective situations of the Odyssey could not attain. It refers them to a vertical dimension, a historical dimension, exactly opposed to the overall horizontal connection, in Homer’s epic. Schematic as this summary may be, it allows us to make two comments that help us outline the specificity of Auerbach’s method. The first one deals with the very construction of the diptych Odyssey/Bible. That construction might seem to follow a tradition initiated in the age of enlightenment and developed in the context of Romanticism and German idealism. That tradition created a symmetry between the epic, thought of as the book of a people’s life, and the Bible, thought of as the poetry of the ancient Jews. But Auerbach breaks the happy concordance that made the religious text and the epic poem equivalent expressions of a people’s life. He shows a radical gap between the two texts. The point is not about religion or about the people, it is about narration itself. Homer and the Bible present us with seemingly incompatible narratives. And it is from that very incompatibility that we have to rethink the possible link between literature and people. The second point deals with this incompatibility itself. At first sight the opposition between the leisurely description of Ulysses’s wound and the dramatic narration of the sacrifice of Isaac may remind us of an opposition made, some years before, by another literary theorist dealing with realism and its political significance. In 1936 Georg Lukács wrote his polemical text “Narrate or Describe?”2 He too started in medias res by comparing two parallel episodes in two novels: a horse race in Émile Zola’s Nana and another 2. See Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” Writer and Critic, trans. and ed. Arthur Kahn (London, 1970), pp. 111–48.

Ja cqu e s Ra n ciè re is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII, St. Denis.

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horse race in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Zola objectively described the scene with vivid detail; it was a picture from the point of view of a spectator but also a picture that could have been omitted without damage to the story. On the contrary, Tolstoy’s horse race was dramatized by the fall of a protagonist, Vronsky, under the eyes of his lover Anna, who was observed herself by her husband Karénine. Such was the realistic method that included any detail in the whole of an action determined by the interconnection of active beings in quest of their destiny, an interconnection that, by the same token, made the reader aware of the broader interconnections of the social totality. Zola’s descriptive method, on the other hand, was naturalistic. He presented things, characters, and situations as a collection of details, separated from the whole that would give them life and meaning. In such a way the so-called objectivity of naturalism paved the way for the formalistic and subjectivist dissolution of reality in twentieth-century novels. Auerbach’s opposition of the leisurely description of Ulysses’s wound to the intense historical drama of Abraham may seem to echo Lukacs, but it soon turns out that it completely dismantles its logic. It is no more possible to tell the right method of the interconnected totality from the wrong method of the detail. There are two kinds of totality. There is Homer’s way of adding detail to detail to build a well-articulated totality: a reality that is defined as such by the very fact that there is no question as to whether this “reality” is real; in fact it is self-sufficient. On the other side, the dramatic narration of the sacrifice is entirely paratactic, deprived of connections. It is this very lack of horizontal connections that makes it part of a historical totality, a totality that the text is unable to construct, that it has to presuppose as a truth. The opposition is thus an opposition between two totalities, which also entails several suboppositions and contradictions. On the one hand, the vivid descriptions of the Homeric method, which puts things and events under the eyes of the reader, have a lesser sensible power than the elusive biblical narration that leaves almost everything in the dark; on the other hand, the very gap between the visible of the narrative and the invisible of the historical drama that gives the latter its sensory power opens a wide space. But the very emptiness of this space needs to be filled by interpretation whose abstractions and allegories compromise this concrete power and so on and so forth. The opposition between the two modes of narration is an opposition between two totalities. But each presents a lack. The first one lacks depth, and the second one lacks clarity. Lukacs’s interpretive model, then, is dismantled. But the same is true for the model that stands at the background of both Lukacs’s and Auerbach’s interpretations; I mean the Hegelian opposition between classical art and symbolic art that was also an opposition between two


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kinds of community. In Auerbach’s interpretation, there is no classicism, no form of art expressing, through its self-sufficiency, the substantial life of a community. It is in their insufficiency—Homer’s lack of depth or the Bible’s lack of clarity—that each mode of narration is related to the life of a people. From the very beginning, Auerbach makes reality a problem and locates realism at the crossroads of a multiplicity of diverging or opposite criteria: vividness of the description; magnitude of the world that it covers; mundanity of the situations that it describes; capacity for conjuring up the invisible behind the visible; rationality of the connection of events; power of the emotions that are conveyed; concordance between a mode of presentation and its object, between the vision of the writer and the society that gives the writer a position as a writer; and so on. One commentator, for example, found twenty-one different meanings of the word realism in the book. But what is at stake is not so much realism, and how often it is mentioned and used in the book, as it is the sense of reality and the ways in which it perpetually comes into conflict with other senses of reality. Take, for instance, the ways in which the magical relationship that Ammien Marcellin establishes between the events that he narrates allows him to introduce for the first time the sensory element into high style. And even the incapacity of Grégoire de Tours to make any sense of the tortuous history of the relationships between Sichaire and Chramnesinde still manages to reveal de Tours’s capacity to express the chaos of the society in which he writes, a society that has lost at the same time the interpretive patterns of human actions and its rhetorical forms. In such a way, the history of the representation of reality, far from any politically oriented teleology, 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. This chaotic trip, however, is read through a clear grid of oppositions that is carefully constructed in the first two chapters. The first chapter sets up the issue of the representation of reality as the tension between two axes: a horizontal axis on which all situations, events, characters, thoughts, and feelings are brought to light so as to construct an autonomous, self-sufficient reality; and a vertical axis that the very gaps, shadows, and disconnections of the narration conjure up as the background that gives the events their meaning and the characters their consistency. The way in which the opposition is set up makes the history of the representation of reality oscillate between two scenarios: a scenario of irreducible divergence and a scenario of convergence that adjusts the two axes so as to define a homogeneous system of coordinates. This indecision is increased further when the second chapter puts into play a new pair of opposites that had not been taken



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into account by Lukács: the opposition between low and high. The point is not only to know whether the events are articulated on a horizontal or a vertical axis. It is to know who can be represented and in what way on this or that axis. Lukács left this issue aside when he opposed good realism to bad naturalism. This oblivion was by no means incidental; when he opposed narration to description, Lukács was still in line with a hierarchy that dates back to Aristotle. In the ninth book of the Poetics, Aristotle opposed poetry, which is an arrangement of actions according to necessity or verisimilitude, to the chronicle, which merely tells things as they happen, one after another. This hierarchy between two forms of connection clearly rests on a hierarchy between two kinds of human beings: those who live in the noble sphere of action and those who stay in the sphere of prosaic everyday life. Auerbach did not comment on Aristotle’s distinction, but from the very beginning he linked the issue of realism with the issue of the connection between a kind of subject and a specific modality of narration. For him the perfect horizontal connection, the profusion of epithets and the self-sufficient reality displayed by the Homeric epic, is the expression of an immobile social hierarchy. The realistic conquest entails the disruption of this self-sufficient reality and that the well-articulated connections be disrupted by the force of an obscure movement called history. Moreover it entails that the travel into the depths include those who live in the depths of society, in the obscure world where things happen in the unpoetic way pinpointed by Aristotle, one after another, day after day. It entails the disruption of the hierarchical regime of the fiction in which elevated people deserve the high genres of tragedy and epic and the dignity of the sermo sublimis, while ordinary people are doomed to the prosaic genres of comedy and satire and to the simplicity of the sermo humilis. In such a way the grid must be complicated: the horizontal connection ties up with the vertical dimension of a traditional social hierarchy; the egalitarian subversion of this vertical hierarchy ties up with another verticality, the one that plunges the everyday into the hidden forces whose connection builds the movement of history. This is what appears when we move from the Old to the New Testament. The indeterminate character of the man called by God’s order becomes the determinate social character of the humble Galilean fisherman wrested from his nets by the living predication of the word made flesh. While Petronius could only represent the new historical character of the emancipated slave in the prosaic genre of the satire, and Tacitus used the forms of elevated rhetoric to tell the reasons a soldiers’ rebellion that he himself considered devoid of any good reason, the sacred writer locates in the prosaic decor of the everyday an event that explodes the very distinction between the chronicle of the everyday and the


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poetic arrangement of noble actions: the birth of an intense spiritual movement in the depths of the low people, a birth witnessed by the very tempest that takes place in the brain of one of those men who were not supposed to have a mind made to experience such tempests. What comes forth with Peter is the character that will be at the center of the literary revolution, the random individual belonging to the low classes of society who accedes to the problematic and tragic experience of history. Let us call him the tragic popular character (see M, p. 491). The literary conquest of realism then appears to be the conjunction of two movements connecting surface and depth: the movement that includes the visible surface of the events within the development of a historical process and the movement that brings all people, regardless of their social elevation, to an equal surface of visibility. From the very beginning the conjunction of these two movements proves problematic. In The Flesh of Words I emphasized the paradox implied by Auerbach’s reading of Peter’s denial: to make of Peter’s tempest in a skull the starting point of a literary revolution, Auerbach must deny any “literary” intention in Mark’s narration.3 He must make it the plain record of what a witness has seen, which means that he has to leave aside that which gives to the event and to the writing their historical dimension: the fact that Peter’s denial had been announced by Christ and that it had been announced as the confirmation of the words of Zechariah’s prophecy: “I will hit the shepherd and the cattle will be dispersed” (Zech. 13:7). The process that gives to the fisherman an interiority that makes him equal to the noble heroes of epic or tragedy presupposes his belonging to the truth of a historical movement of revelation. The two dimensions—the unfolding of a whole historical process and the revelation of the aptitude of any humble worker to the inner wrenches of tragic heroes—are strictly interconnected, which also means that the “plain record” of what happened to Peter in a popular inn is also the demonstration of the truth of the Old Testament’s prophecy, which means the demonstration of the truth of the New Testament that accomplishes its prophecies. This part of the demonstration however is left aside by Auerbach in order to emphasize the plain physical evidence of the apparition on the stage of universal history of the random individual becoming a tragic or problematic popular character. In such a way, the depth of the historical process of the accomplishment of truth and the depth of the problematic popular character whose connection is strictly required start parting with each other from the very beginning. It is no coincidence that the story that must epitomize the very 3. See Jacques Ranciere, The Flesh of Words, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif., 2004), pp. 71–93.



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conjunction of the historical revelation and the popular elevation is a story of denial. In his early text on Dante Alighieri, Auerbach had interpreted Peter’s denial as evidence of the “contradictory character that dominates the story of Jesus,” which in fact was the story of a “lamentable failure” for which the vision of the future spiritual kingdom of God was a compensation.4 Mimesis shifts the focus and emphasizes the positivity of the spiritual revelation whose strength is efficient in the very strength of the denial. But it does so at the cost of brushing aside the history of the scripture within which it takes place. It might be said that the historical process at issue in the case of Peter’s denial is only a matter of religious belief and that a change occurs when the movement of history is wrested from the grip of religious teleology and becomes the scientific interconnection of economic and social forces. At this point it seems that the rationality of the global historical process, which is the rationality of class struggle, and the rise of the tragic popular character coincide in the advent of the great realistic novel, locating this character at the center of the interconnections of global history. But this is not what happens. Instead the last chapters of Mimesis make the conjunction highly problematic. I wish to show this by looking at two chapters, one of which focuses on the emergence of the modern realistic novel, while the other focuses on its last accomplishment. The chapter “In the Hôtel de la Mole” emphasizes the radical turn operated by Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. In his previous chapter, devoted to Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Auerbach had formulated one among the many contradictions that get in the way of the development of modern realism: eighteenth-century Germany had laid the “aesthetic foundation of modern realism” (M, p. 443). Those foundations had been set up by the new historicist interpretation of the world that shows each epoch as a totality of life, recognizable “in the familiar setting of popular everyday life” as well as in the elevated social spheres (M, p. 161). In such a way every present can appear as a fragment of a global historical process animated by the play of deep social forces. But this intellectual lead was cancelled by the belatedness of the immobile social structure that was at the background of Schiller’s dramas and Goethe’s novels. I don’t know whether Auerbach was familiar with Karl Marx’s work. But this relationship between German intellectual advancement and German social belatedness irresistibly evokes the dilemma spelled out by the young Marx in his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. And 4. Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 2007), pp. 13, 12.


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it comes as no surprise that, just as it happened in Marx’s text, the solution to the quandaries of the German head is provided by the activity of the French heart. Nineteenth-century France played, Auerbach says, the most important part in the rise and “development of modern realism,” characterized by two main features: first, “the serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation,” then “the embedding of random [beliebiger] persons and events in the general course of contemporary history” (M, pp. 472, 491). The story of Julien Sorel, the son of a carpenter, who, in the wake of the French Revolution that has upset the whole edifice of social hierarchy, sets out to climb to the top of the social ladder, seems perfectly fit for initiating the task of the French literary century by exactly linking the rise of the plebeian to the dignity of “problematic” “subject matter” of fiction with the description of the transformations that produce a new society: “Insofar as the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving . . . Stendhal is its founder” (M, p. 463). Convinced as we are in advance by the logic of the demonstration, we can’t help feeling some perplexity when we look at the example that Auerbach chose in order to demonstrate that perfect fit. It is a rather insignificant discussion in which Sorel expresses the boredom that he feels at attending the diners at the Marquis de la Môle’s table. Still more disconcerting is the reason that he gives for the choice of this passage. It would be, he says, “almost incomprehensible without a most accurate and detailed knowledge of the political situation, the social stratification, and the economic circumstances of a perfectly definite historical moment,” the moment of the monarchic restoration in France between 1815 and 1830 (M, p. 455). It is a strange argument. We would expect Auerbach to make the opposite argument: that fiction makes us understand history. But he doesn’t. What makes the case still stranger is that the historical fact that has to be understood is simply “boredom” (M, p. 455). The boredom that Julien feels, Auerbach tells us, is a specific historically determined one, the boredom of aristocratic salons in the time of the Restoration where no interesting subject—either political or ideological—can be discussed because any such subject would conjure up the ghost of the recent revolution and the threat of the next one. In such a way the global, political, economic, and social reality in perpetual evolution that realistic fiction should allow us to feel in everyday reality is present only in absentia. The global historical evolution is the absent cause that explains why no aspect of this evolution can take flesh in the salon of the Marquis de la Môle. And the young plebeian whose career should reveal the play of the



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forces that compose a society reveals only one thing about this society: it’s boring. Auerbach assumes that this boredom is the feeling that Stendhal himself, a “son of the ancien régime grande bourgeoisie,” fond of the aristocratic manners and enlightened spirit of the eighteenth-century elites, experienced before the meanness of the postrevolutionary society and of its “material” interests (M, pp. 464, 461). He makes it, in short, another case of the Franco-German paradox, another case of discrepancy between the movement of society and the movement of thought. I think there is a more interesting way of thinking about boredom by focussing on Stendhal’s character and fiction rather than on the psychology of their creator. It is not incidental that this issue of boredom looms over the whole chapter devoted to the French invention of modern realism. It is also through a scene of everyday boredom that Auerbach addresses Gustave Flaubert’s realism. The description of the boring lunchtime in the Bovary house does not seem however to be very appropriate to “the embedding of random [quelconques] persons and events in the general course of contemporary history” characteristic of the nineteenth-century realistic French novel. Or rather there would be a way of making boredom a core issue in this “embedding” and to make it socially significant. This would only require a slight shift in focus; what is socially significant is not so much the fact that social life is boring either in the salons of the declining aristocracy or in the petty-bourgeois provincial small towns as it is the fact that a carpenter’s son or a farmer’s daughter can experience boredom. Boredom is a luxury that workers’ sons and farmers’ daughters normally cannot afford. In passing, there is at least one author who felt that there was something wrong in this access of workers’ children to the experience of boredom, an author who started his career at the very moment when Auerbach was writing Mimesis, namely Clement Greenberg. In his view, it is this experience that led them to ask for a culture of their own, the culture of kitsch. Such might be the core of the “tragic” or “problematic” experience of the sons and daughters of the inferior classes that the new novel raises to the foreground. Their elevation “to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation” entails a conflation between two temporalities: the poetic temporality of the arrangement of actions according to necessity or verisimilitude and the temporality of the chronicle, the temporality of the events that arrive one after another. The tragic popular character is a character who experiences the conflict between two temporalities, which has been from the most antique times a conflict between two forms of life: on the one hand, the form of life of the active men and women who can conceive great projects and try to achieve them or experience the free time of leisure as an end in itself; on the other hand, the form of life of the passive beings whose activity is entrapped in the time of the


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everyday and whose inactivity can only take the form of the rest between two efforts. Emma Bovary feels herself entrapped in the ordinary boredom of the everyday. Sorel, who has set out to get into the world of action, finds a new kind of boredom in the place where he wishes to deploy his capacity for action. He will find the solution to the conflict of temporalities in the last part of the novel. After having devoted his energy gaining knowledge of the social relationships in order to reach a high position, Julien discovers in his prison the secret of happiness, which is to give up the will to act, to dedicate oneself to the enjoyment of reverie, the enjoyment of a doing nothing that is the privilege of leisure. In the realm of leisure lies the real success, the real equality that the workers’ children vainly try to attain in the calculations of social action. The encounter between the rise of the random individual and the knowledge of the global society results in a divorce. And this divorce also breaks the logic of the fiction. The normal time of fictional action is the time of a coincidence between the succession of the events and the unfolding of a causal logic through which the characters experience the outcomes and the setbacks of their decisions and of their actions. But between the time of boredom in the salons of the Marquis de la Môle and the time of leisure, reverie, and passionate love enjoyed by Sorel in the prison, there is a break. Sorel’s gunshot at Madame de Renal is the most absurd solution to the situation provoked by her denunciation, and the revival of the passion between the “murderer” and his victim is the most absurd outcome of this absurd gesture. But this double nonsense is necessary to open a radical breach between two senses of reality and two temporalities: the temporality determined by the conflicts between the ends pursued by characters involved in a social situation and the temporality of leisure, the temporality determined by the pure enjoyment of a sensible affect disconnected from any social plot of ends and means. The normal adjustment between time and causality that defines the logic of fictional action is broken by another matter of time that is the social core of the affair: the rupture of the hierarchy between the time of the active men and the time of the passive men. The social content of the narrative explodes the very logic of the narration. Stendhal must then sacrifice the logic of narrative action to allow his plebeian character to enjoy the time of exception, the aristocratic time of leisure. Flaubert takes the opposite stance; he forbids his character to shift from the time of boredom to the time of leisure. He keeps her entrapped in the universe of the social intrigues in order to weave the new temporality of the novel: a temporality in which action and reverie, normal time and time of exception, are no longer separated. Out of the boring moments of everyday routine and the exceptional moments when two souls experience the great equality of the impersonal dance of the atoms,



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he makes one equal time, the time of writing, the poetic time of what he calls the great boredom, the great equality of the sentences that the writer and the reader can enjoy while the character is doomed to live in the time of prosaic boredom and of the prosaic recipes to escape it—adultery and debts. Auerbach is obviously not willing to push the play of compensations through which he interprets the history of realism to that extremity. The promised land of modern realism that raises the humblest people to the level of the global historical process is too close to allow the reopening of such gaps. But the very proximity of the end apparently makes him perceive something that had not been so far explicit in the development of the book and the clash of the various senses of reality. The key issue in the whole story might be time or, more precisely, the possibility given to anybody of an experience of time cancelling the hierarchical distribution of the forms of life. This is what explains the strange end of Mimesis. As a matter of fact the book seems to reach its end at the furthest distance from this global political, economic, and social reality that was for Auerbach the final conquest of modern realism. After having hailed the “great historical tragedy” of Zola’s novels, which encompass a whole society while definitely abolishing the hierarchy of styles, Auerbach ends his book—and the whole historical movement of the literary conquest of reality—with a microscopic scene that takes place in a social and familial décor apparently disconnected from any global social reality: the salon of the vacation home of the Ramsay family in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (M, p. 515). This scene displays a random tissue of reverie around the very prosaic occupation of the housewife, who is trying to measure against the legs of her youngest son the size of a pair of stockings that she is making for the son of the lighthouse keeper. The myriad of insignificant material events and impalpable spiritual events that makes the stuff of Woolf ’s novels might seem to illustrate to the utmost the formalistic and subjectivist regression that Lukács stigmatized in 1936. Against this regression, epitomized by James Joyce’s Ulysses, Lukács extolled the humanist virtue of the great classical novels of Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and Thomas Mann. It seems inconceivable, then, that soon after the Second World War and the Nazi genocide, the exiled Jewish scholar Auerbach would locate in the narrow circle of an intellectual petty-bourgeois family the last step of the Western conquest of literary realism. It appears however that this narrow circle is the perfect place for bringing to the fore the last conquest of modern literature—a conquest that is both aesthetic and political: the possibility of widening any narrow family circle so as to make it infinite. In Woolf ’s prose, literature has conquered what Auerbach calls the “random moment” (see M). I would personally rather


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translate it as the “any moment whatever.” Any moment in the everyday life of any character from any class of society appears to have an infinite power of expansion. The last step in the conquest of literary realism is the abolition of the hierarchy that had its deepest roots in the literary as well as in the political tradition: the hierarchy of times and temporalities. It is an egalitarian experience of time. The infinite expansion of the circles of time and thought that move around the knitting of a pair of stockings bears a political promise that may prove more radical than the promise based on the knowledge of the social connection; the experience of the any moment whatever is an experience in which the most intimate in an individual life meets the most common that belongs to everybody. It is likely that Auerbach chose a story of knitting because this prosaic activity also provides an appropriate metaphor for the common fabric of an egalitarian community. But we can find a still better illustration of this community between the most individual and the most common in an episode of another novel by Woolf. I am thinking of Mrs. Dalloway and of Clarissa’s morning walk in London, when the sensations felt by an upperclass woman hearing the noise of an explosion or looking up at the words written in smoke by a plane move away from her and draw an undulating line through which all kinds of people, from all social origins, passing in the streets, receive an interiority that makes them the participants in a common life. In the same novel, another walk in the street, that of Clarissa’s former wooer Peter Walsh, gives to the novelist the opportunity to emphasize the new experience of time, the new capacity to enjoy the time of inaction that weaves a new community, freed from the old hierarchy of times that underpinned the pyramidal order of the old society. For Lukács the fragmentation of the outer experience and its absorption in the life of the mind meant the regression of literature far away from the scene of political understanding and political action. For Auerbach they mean a widening of the field of experience wherein the individual and the common penetrate each other. The time of the shower of atoms that falls on any mind at any moment is a time of coexistence that abolishes the separation between those who live in the time of causal action and those who live in the time of the chronicle. That’s why, better than the knowledge of the historical linkage of causes and effects, it bears the promise of a new common world: “It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the [any moment whatever] in the lives of different people” (M, p. 552). Today, readers may smile at the statement of this humanist faith characteristic of the postwar period, the period of the “family of man” and of



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the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). What interests me however is different; the faith in the path that leads from the discovery of the any moment whatever to a future common life may conceal a division located in the very simplicity of that moment. This division can be located very precisely. It lies in the relationship between the whatever that qualifies the moment and the anyone who can experience that quality. This division is quite precisely what is staged by the second part of To the Lighthouse. Auerbach selected a chapter of the first part wherein Mrs. Ramsay is the heart of the house and the center around which all the circles of the expanded moment of a multipersonal life gravitate. But in the second part, this multipersonal life is split in two. On the one hand, there are the impersonal events that are provoked by little airs in the deserted house or by reflections of light in the pools on the beach; on the other hand, there are the personal events that happen to the distant family and are given, here and there, two or three lines, isolated by square brackets. This is how Mrs. Ramsay, who was the center of the multipersonal life of the house, is killed inside square brackets. But there is something still more radical than the separation between the personal and the impersonal; there is their insane fusion when the anyone feels so much his or her unity with the impersonal that he or she gets astray from the multipersonal life. Such is the case in The Waves with the schizophrenia of Rhoda, who fancies that we might “blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”5 Such is the case in Mrs. Dalloway with the madness of Septimus, who has found in the multiple epiphanies of sensory events the revelation of a new religion of universal love of which he is the prophet. Rhoda and Septimus are doomed to death—just as Mrs. Ramsay, just as Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary—as if the conquest of the whatever of sensory equality was forbidden to the anyone or the whoever. They are expelled from the promised land of the egalitarian experience of the random moment and of its infinite richness. Moreover they are to blame for their expulsion; they proved unable to enjoy the impersonality of the random moment. Instead they turned it into a personal story. Out of a whirlwind of breaths in the air, reflections of light on rippling water, or little rays of gold around pupils, Bovary wove a personal story of love that led her to death. In the quivering leaves, the dazzling sun, or the rise and fall of sparrows, Septimus read a personal message sent to him by God, which ultimately led him to suicide as well. At the origin of their mistake, there is the same cause: they have got out of their condition. Woolf makes the point about Septimus’s personal history so as 5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York, 1978), p. 224.


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to emphasize his kinship with the heroes of nineteenth-century “realistic” novels. He was, she says, “one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from the public libraries, read in the evening after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter.”6 Why add this detail to Septimus’s clinical picture? The traumatism of the war was enough to account for his madness. This useless addition points however to the core of the problem: the random individuals are alienated from the treasure of the random moment whose knowledge only belongs to the writers who tell their story. We might say that the story opened by Peter’s denial ends with another denial. But the random individual is no more the one who betrays; he or she is the one who is betrayed. Literature has stolen their power for itself. Auerbach is not willing to consider this reversal. But, at the same time, one of his compatriots, another exiled Jew, Herman Broch, raised from a different angle the issue of literature’s betrayal or miserliness. The verdict that he pronounced in The Death of Virgil is that literature is unable to help human beings. The history of Western literature should have led to the connection of the two kinds of depth: the depth of the historical process of forces within which all singular events are connected and the depth of the problematic experience of anybody at all. Instead it seems to lead to a twofold divorce. On the one hand, Auerbach, in the last chapter, leaves the great stage of the interconnection of the political, economic, and social forces to focus on the power of expansion encapsulated in the microscopic events that anyone can experience at any moment whatever in everyday reality. But he can only hail the promised land where anybody can share the infinite richness of the whatever at the price of forgetting the new divorce between the anybody and the whatever that lies in the core of the modern democratic novel. Of course this oblivion is not a matter of absentmindedness. Rather it witnesses the connection between the method of the interpreter and his object. In the Woolf chapter Auerbach explains how he applied in his reading of literature the method that was the last conquest of literature itself: the method that shows the whole in the microcosm of the fragment. This method only raises one problem; it is the principle of an infinite expansion. The old fiction was based on a solid principle that antique poetics lent to modern social science: a fiction must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Instead the new fiction starts from the middle and its progression consists in widening it indefinitely. Multipersonal life has no end. But a book, be it a novel or a theory of the novel, must have an end. This is why Septimus must die; his deadly madness opposes to the indefinite expansion of life a counter6. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York, 1981), p. 84.



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movement leading the novel to his end. This is also why Auerbach must ignore this countermovement. He must ignore Septimus’s death to lead his own book to its end and postpone to an indefinite future the promise enclosed in the random moment, that of a “common life of mankind on earth” (M, p. 552). For my part, I just tried to reopen the door that he had closed in order to follow the play of contradictions through which literary realism both promises and postpones this future.


Auerbach and the Contradictions of Realism

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