Auerbach's Scars: Judaism and the Question of Literature.

T H E J E W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 101, No. 4 (Fall 2011) 604–630

Auerbach’s Scars:Judaism and the Question of Literature

G A L I L I S H A H A R

PROLOGUE

ERICH AUERBACH’S BOOK MIMESIS, written in Istanbul between1942 and 1945, is a fascinating example of literary criticism that does notdeny its dual origins—its ‘‘scars.’’1 My essay discusses Auerbach’s book inits historical context and explores its theophilological pretext: Auerbach’sreading of the biblical story of the Akeda (the binding of Isaac) that fol-lows the account of Odysseus’s scar. Auerbach’s interpretation of thesilent and unrepresentable scene of Abraham’s story constitutes in Mime-sis the condition for the possibility to discuss literary representation. Thetext on the hidden and formless Jewish God who has no image is theorigin of Auerbach’s critical discourse of representation.

Auerbach’s view and experience of Judaism and its relationship to hisliterary enterprise has been discussed in recent years in various contexts.2

My essay deals with this question, but charged with a different urgency.

1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendlandischenLiteratur (Bern, 2001). All references in the body of the article are to the Englishtranslation: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. D.Trask (Princeton, N.J., 2003).

2. For a recent discussion, see James I. Porter, ‘‘Erich Auerbach and theJudaizing of Philology,’’ Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 115–47; Martin Treml, ‘‘Auer-bachs imaginare judische Orte,’’ in Erich Auerbach: Geschichte und Aktualitat eineseuropaischen Philologen, ed. M. Treml, K. Barck (Berlin, 2007), 230–51; and EarlJeffery Richards, ‘‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as Meditation on the Shoah,’’German Politics and Society 59.2 (2001): 62–90. Another significant view onAuerbach’s ‘‘Jewish background’’ and his devotion to Christian doctrine ofrepresentation is found in Edward W. Said’s ‘‘Introduction to the Fiftieth Anni-versary Edition’’ of Mimesis (Eng. trans.), Mimesis, xvii–xviii; xx–xxvii. See alsoHans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress: Erich Auerbach’sLegacy,’’ in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auer-bach, ed. S. Lerer (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 13–35.

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The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2011)Copyright � 2011 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.All rights reserved.

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In my view, Auerbach’s Mimesis, his concept of literature, and his under-standing of realistic representation should not be separated from hisviews on Jewish monotheism and from his modernist negotiation with itsheritage. I do not suggest, therefore, reading Mimesis as a ‘‘Jewish’’ proj-ect of literature or denying other contexts of reading this book, such asthe ‘‘Romanist’’ one.3 The reception of Auerbach’s book as a project ofEuropean humanism, reading Mimesis as an exilic perspective on Westerncivilization,4 exploring its Turkish context,5 revealing its non-Europeanroots, are all significant for understanding Auerbach and the differentfaces and legacies of his book.6 My own contribution, however, is basedon the argument that Mimesis attests to the ambiguous structure of iden-tity; Mimesis shows the differences and similarities, the gaps and thebelonging-together of the Jewish, the Christian, and the Greek. It is thestructure of a cut and a stitch, the structure of a scar, that reflects thedialectics of representation in Auerbach’s project. The scar is the signa-ture of Mimesis. It is the sign of German Jewish writing that was chargedwith an experience of pain, crisis, and exile—Europe 1942.7 In otherwords, my essay returns to discuss the ambiguous representation ofJudaism in Mimesis, not in order to ground Auerbach’s project in its‘‘Jewish background’’ or to attest to his attraction to Christian doctrines.Rather, I wish to show how Auerbach’s work involves resistance anddenial, and deconstructive treatment of origins and traditions, which,however, lead to a productive and progressive understanding of litera-ture. This is why I suggest discussing the foundational contexts of Auer-

3. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Vom Leben und Sterben der großen Romanisten:Carl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Werner Krauss(Munich, 2002); William Calin, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics: FromSpitzer to Frye (Toronto, 2007).

4. I refer here to Edward Said’s significant readings of Mimesis and the explor-ing of its exilic perspective and humanistic depth. Said writes on Auerbach’s bookin his seminal works, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, 1983) andCulture and Imperialism (New York, 1993). See also Said’s ‘‘Introduction to theFiftieth Anniversary Edition’’ of Mimesis, ix–xxxii.

5. Kader Konuk, ‘‘Deutsche-judische Philologen im turkischen Exil: LeoSpitzer und Erich Auerbach,’’ in Erich Auerbach, 215–29.

6. On Auerbach’s legacies and the different receptions of his book, see Her-bert Lindenberger, ‘‘On the Reception of Mimesis,’’ in Literary History and the Chal-lenge of Philology, 195–211.

7. In the first chapter of Mimesis (‘‘Odysseus’ Scar’’) Auerbach refers to‘‘1942’’ as the date of the ‘‘current war’’ (gegenwartiger Krieg). ‘‘1942’’ thus marksthe time of Mimesis’s first chapter, its historical date, its jetzt, ‘‘now’’. The Englishtranslation omits the date ‘‘1942’’ and replaces the ‘‘current war’’ with the ‘‘lastwar.’’ The reading of Mimesis should, however, recall its original date.

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bach’s work, yet without arguing for their preference in terms of originsor identities.

In the first part of the essay, following a short biographical introduc-tion, I discuss three examples that demonstrate the complexities of hisproject: first, Auerbach’s interpretation of figura as a literary mode ofrepresentation that has a theological dimension and which embodies mes-sianic potential; second, Auerbach’s remarks on Shakespeare’s Shylock,the Jewish pariah, which are interwoven in his readings of Shakespeare’sroyal dramas; and third, his modernist approach to literature that is basedon the philology of the fragment (the scene, the broken piece, the quota-tion, the foreign word). In the second part of the essay I discuss Auer-bach’s interpretation of the Akeda and argue about how the theologicaldimension of the biblical story—the secret, the silence, the hidden, andthe unrepresentable dimension—is transformed into the realm of litera-ture. Finally, I offer a short comparative reading of Auerbach, Kierke-gaard, Derrida, and Levinas on the question of Abraham’s silence. Throughthese correspondences, the radical potential of Aurebach’s interpretationwill be illuminated and ‘‘fulfilled.’’

PHILOLOGY, THE SCAR

Erich Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1892 to a family of Jewish origin.He received his education at the Franzosische Gymnasium in Berlin(1900–10) and later studied law at Berlin University from 1910 to 1913.His dissertation was devoted to program of reform in German penal law.8

However, already during his law studies, as Auerbach reports in an auto-biographical note,9 he became interested in philosophy, art history, andRomantic literature. Clear evidence of this can be found in his 1913 legaldissertation. In one of the footnotes, Auerbach mentions Don Quixoteand Sancho Panza as ‘‘examples’’ of the exclusion of free will ‘‘for theperson who finds himself under somebody else’s influence.’’10 Cervantes’protagonists, the fools who appear in the margins of Auerbach’s legalproject, can be understood to prefigure his literary project.11

During the First World War Auerbach served in the German army.He was sent to the Western Front, where he fought in northern France.

8. Karlheinz Barck, ‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin: Spurensicherung und ein Por-trat,’’ Erich Auerbach, 204–5.

9. Auerbach, ‘‘Der Marburger CV,’’ in Erich Auerbach, 199.10. Quoted in Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’’ 28.11. The double background and the dialectic of law and literature were nota-

bly characteristic of German biographies of life and letters ranging from Goethe,the brothers Grimm, and E. T. A Hoffmann to Franz Kafka.

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In April 1918 he was seriously wounded and spent eight months in amilitary hospital.12 After his recovery he returned to the University ofBerlin and continued his studies in philosophy and Romance philology.In 1921 he completed a second dissertation, The Technique of the EarlyRenaissance Novella in Italy and France. One of Auerbach’s first publica-tions, however, was his translation into German of Giambattista Vico’sThe New Science. His studies of Vico’s work determined his views on ‘‘aes-thetic historism.’’13 Between 1923 and 1929 Auerbach worked as a librar-ian at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, where he first met WalterBenjamin. In 1929, after the publication of his habilitation, Dante: A Poetof the Profane World, he was appointed as a professor in the philologicaldepartment of the University of Marburg. After the rise of the Nazis andanti-Jewish legislation, his position was rescinded and he left in 1936.14

He found shelter at the State University of Istanbul in Turkey where hebecame involved in academic reforms in the field of foreign language andliterature. In 1947 Auerbach left Istanbul and emigrated to the UnitedStates. His initial appointment was at Penn State University and later atYale, where he remained until his death in 1957. Auerbach’s studies ofRomance philology and European literature were bound up with theexperience of the Great War, with reflections on loss and crisis, and laterwith the consciousness of exile. Auerbach entered the field of philologyas a ‘‘wounded body.’’ Mimesis recalls the scar.15

FIGURA : LITERATURE AND MESSIANISM

Mimesis contains twenty chapters on different works of Western litera-ture. The book begins with a discussion on the Homeric poems and thebiblical story and continues with a survey of Romantic literature, theRoland poem, and the Christian theater. It includes readings of Dante’s

12. Barck, ‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin,’’ 204.13. On Auerbach’s reception of Vico and his ‘‘historicist’’ view, see his essay

‘‘Vico and Aesthetic Historism,’’ in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature(New York, 1959), 183–98.

14. On Auerbach’s dismissal and his departure from the University of Mar-burg, see Gumbrecht, ‘‘Pathos of the Earthly Progress,’’ 14–19. Auerbachreturned to Germany for a short visit in summer 1937. A report on this trip wasmade in the 1990s by his son. See Clemens Auerbach, ‘‘Summer 1937,’’ in ErichAuerbach, 495–500.

15. In a letter to Werner Krauss in December 1946, Auerbach recalls the trau-matic experience of the First World War and mourns the loss of his close friendsand colleagues in the war. For him, he writes to Krauss, ‘‘the First World War,although it cannot be compared with the Second, was likewise terrible.’’ Quotedin Barck, ‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin,’’ 204–5.

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Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and works by Rabelais, Montaigne,Shakespeare, Racine, and Cervantes, and it also considers Schiller andGoethe, Voltaire, Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert. Mimesis ends with achapter on modernism that deals mainly with Virginia Woolf, MarcelProust, and James Joyce. This is Auerbach’s canon: a gallery of worksand readings that demonstrate the history of representation in Europeanliterature. By discussing these ‘‘examples,’’ Auerbach shows how eachperiod reframed the realistic narrative according to its social and culturalconditions. In addition, Auerbach explores the historical development ofthe concept of representation and its affinity to the process of seculariza-tion in Western civilization. Each chapter of Mimesis includes a criticalreview and close reading of several scenes, literary fragments, and quota-tions that demonstrate different narratological strategies, poetic struc-tures, and styles. According to Auerbach, realism is the representation ofthe historical, concrete aspects of the human being. However, realism isnot simply the mirror of reality but rather a complex, sophisticated,ironic, and inverted perspective of representation. In realism, the sublimeis revealed from the ordinary, the sacred from the profane. The tragic isbound up with the comic, the magnificent with the grotesque and themetaphysical with the sensual. Realism is the art of mixed styles.

Auerbach demonstrates his model of representation with the conceptfigura to which he dedicates his 1938 essay.16 In this essay he discussesthe Hellenistic and Christian genealogies of figura and analyzes its philo-logical and theological implications. Figura is the way in which a historicfigure, an event or a character in the present, a figure of concrete timeand space, not only signifies reality but also embodies and prefigures‘‘something still to come’’—the future, the other.17 Figura is thus a dis-course of an opening: the present remains here ‘‘open and points to some-thing still concealed.’’ In the Christian view, however, the future, the‘‘coming,’’ which is hidden in the present, is essentially holy and redemp-tive.18 In the Christian scheme figura is also the anticipation of the messi-anic order. Auerbach mainly identifies the origin of the Christian figuralinterpretation with the enterprise of St. Paul. In Paul’s readings of theBible, Auerbach writes, the Old Testament became ‘‘from beginning toend a promise and prefiguration of Christ.’’ As a whole, only here, inChrist’s appearance and in the Gospel, is the Old Testament ‘‘fulfilled’’

16. Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans.R. Manheim (New York, 1959),11–76.

17. Ibid., 58.18. Ibid., 71–76.

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and achieves its complete, sacred meaning.19 Figura is thus a discourse ofan open text, in which, however, a messianic element is hidden: theother—the different, the nonidentical, the yet-to-come, the future itself—carries redemptive power. The other is not a ‘‘who,’’ it does not possess aspecific identity. The other is not to be identified but rather should beunderstood as the possibility of not-being-the-same. In other words, theother is the principle of becoming, the idea of permanent change that isembedded in history. In Mimesis Auerbach gives a positive, progressiveinterpretation to this movement (otherness, becoming other, new, differ-ent) in history, which is linked to, yet not exhausted by, the doctrine ofredemption. The messianic horizon of the Scriptures, as is represented inPaul’s reading, demanded the denial of the original sacredness of the OldTestament. According to Paul, Auerbach, writes, ‘‘the most important andsacred events, sacraments and laws’’ of the Old Testament, are only ‘‘pro-visional forms and figurations of Christ and the Gospel.’’20 The Jewishfigures of sacredness are thus transformed into a ‘‘system of figuralprophecy.’’ A similar argument on the Christian interpretation of the OldTestament is found also in Mimesis. In the second chapter of his book,Auerbach discusses the enterprise of Paul, the apostle, whom he nowcalls ‘‘a member of the Jewish Diaspora,’’21 a title which hints, perhapsironically, at Auerbach’s own situation as a German Jewish ‘‘apostle’’ ofliterary criticism in Istanbul.22 Paul’s role in Auerbach’s view of literatureshould not be ignored. Paul embodies the gaps-between and the belonging-together of the Jewish, the Christian, and the Greek. His name hints atthe nexus of traditions from which the condition of literary representationin the Western world was born. In Auerbach’s view, Paul is someone ofJewish origin, yet, at the same time, he is not only (or no longer) a Jewbut also a Greek who becomes the Christian messenger to the gentiles.Paul embodies the denial of Judaism (the revolt against rabbinic Juda-ism, and the revolt against Jewish law). The denial (or rejection) of theJewish tradition, however, led also to the opening of the monotheistictradition and its ‘‘fulfillment’’ in terms of literary representation. This isthe paradox of Paul’s role in Auerbach’s figural theory: it is a method of

19. Ibid., 51.20. Ibid.21. Auerbach, Mimesis, 48.22. Compare with Said’s remark on the parallel between the apostle Paul, ‘‘a

diasporic Jew converted to Christ,’’ and Auerbach’s ‘‘own situation as a non-Christian explaining Christianity’s achievement.’’ The Christian achievementimplied here by Said is the doctrine of figural representation that led to the cre-ation of European literature (Said, ‘‘Introduction’’, xvii–xviii).

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denial through which the literary potential of the Jewish tradition wasbrought about and gained its universal implications. Let us again recon-struct the path of this argument in Mimesis. Paul’s missionary workamong the gentiles and his need for ‘‘detachment from the special precon-ceptions of the Jewish world’’ led, Auerbach writes, to a radicalization ofthe Jewish tradition by playing down the Old Testament as ‘‘popularhistory.’’ The Hebrew Bible was now assumed to embody ‘‘a series offigures’’ that mainly anticipate the coming of Christ. This figural interpre-tation entailed, however, paying a grave price, namely, ‘‘the danger,’’Auerbach writes, that the ‘‘visual element’’ and the ‘‘sensory substance’’of the biblical stories ‘‘might succumb under the dense texture of [figural]meaning.’’23 Auerbach demonstrates his arguments with the figural repre-sentations of the wound: Adam’s side-wound, out of which Eve, ‘‘the firstwoman, mankind’s primordial mother,’’ was created; and Christ’s side-wound, out of which the Church, ‘‘the mother of all men after the spirit,’’was born.24 It is the wound that demonstrates the possibilities of figura—the possibilities of the literary form itself. The Christian figurations ofthe wound, which deny the concrete, sensual elements of the originaloccurrence, became abstract. This is the danger of figura becoming purely‘‘allegorical’’ or merely ‘‘symbolic’’ when rejecting the historical reality ofthe biblical events.25 Here, if one likes, Auerbach defends the Old Testa-ment from the distortions of the Christian interpretation, yet without ofcourse rejecting figura itself. Auerbach possibly attempts to save the fig-ural reading of the Old Testament from the dogmatic views of incarnationand from the Paulian hostility toward Judaism, the reason being thatfigura is the way to open the monotheistic text as a subject-matter ofliterature. Figura constitutes the opening of monotheism and the transfor-mation of the Hebrew Bible into progressive discourses of literary repre-sentation. Here, with figura, literature begins. And figura, we recall, isoriginally the ‘‘shape’’ of a wound, a side-cut, a ‘‘scar.’’

In Auerbach’s view, figural interpretation represents a foundationalmovement in world literature. The figural movement is bidirectional: first,horizontal—the text is reinterpreted time and again in new historical con-texts and moves endlessly forward; and second, vertical—the text is rein-terpreted in theological contexts and moves upward, toward redemptivefulfillment. The figural interpretation thus endows literature with a ‘‘mes-sianic’’ horizon, the hope for salvation. This theological dimension, the

23. Auerbach, Mimesis, 48.24. Ibid., 48–49.25. Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ 68.

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messianic potential of the figural interpretation, is now transformed intoand imprinted on the history of Western literature. The openness of theliterary text, the fact that its figures can always represent something dif-ferent, yet to come, nonidentical, is ‘‘redemptive.’’ According to this inter-pretation, the messianic horizon that literature inherits from the JudaicChristian tradition is not merely apocalyptic and does not demand theend of history; it is not the last day (the Day of Judgment) but rather theother day that carries the hope for fulfillment in the realm of time.

Figura that was reborn in the nexus of Judaism and Christianity (inthe framework of the Greek culture and language) embodies in Auer-bach’s view one of the conditions of the literary project in the West. It isthus difficult, in my view, to attempt to separate the ‘‘Jewish’’ from the‘‘Christian’’ in Auerbach’s reading. If there is a ‘‘Jewish’’ point of viewin Auerbach’s project, it involves also its denial, its doubling, its radicaltransformation. Auerbach’s ‘‘Jewish’’ point of view depends also onmaintaining distance from the origin, and from knowledge and experienceof tradition. And yet Auerbach never seems to accept the thesis that Jew-ish sources are doomed to disappear in the Christian framework. Thereis a sense of resistance in Auerbach’s reading of the Bible that movesbeyond the figural reading back to history. When Auerbach returns inthe epilogue of his work to discuss briefly the role of figural reading inMimesis,26 he remains faithful to this pattern, namely, recognizing thepower of figura as a foundational structure of literary representation, yetmarking the historical movement that shaped modern realism. Auerbach’sown project, I argue, does not escape this tension between the historicaland the allegorical. Rather, it gives it a new, urgent interpretation, datedas ‘‘1942.’’

My argument on the messianic horizon that literature inherits from theJudaic Christian world thus does not imply the identification of literaturewith Judaism (or with Christianity) but rather hints at the opening oftradition, and its fulfillment through otherness (becoming other, noniden-tical, different).27 I will return to discuss this dialectic of Judaism andChristianity and the paradox of tradition in Auerbach’s work below.

In Mimesis Auerbach identifies the climax of the figural discourse in

26. Auerbach, Mimesis, 554–55.27. I am following Said’s insight on the unsolved tension between Judaism

and Christianity in Auerbach’s writing. My understanding of Auerbach’s project,however, is different from Said’s view, which stresses the Christian essence ofAuerbach’s figural method, which governs also Mimesis (‘‘Introduction’’, xxii). Ifind Auerbach’s reading of the Akeda to be figural, but not identical with theChristian view. For further discussion see below.

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Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s poetry is filled with grotesque figures,secular themes, historical allusions, popular phrases, and short and natu-ral structures of expression. Dante’s profane figures are interwoven, how-ever, in a metanarrative that maintains the Christian belief in the unity ofthe divine order and the existence of God’s plan.28 The thesis of the Com-edy is that ‘‘earthly phenomena are on the whole merely figural, andrequiring fulfillment.’’29 The protagonists of the Comedy, who appear inthe world of beyond, thus express the ‘‘sum and the result’’ of all theiractions and can tell the ‘‘decisive aspects’’ of their life and character onearth. The heroes of the Jenseitsrealistik, ‘‘realism in the beyond,’’30 theresidents of hell, are thus the authentic poets of the profane order.‘‘Here,’’ Auerbach writes, ‘‘we face the astounding paradox of what iscalled Dante’s realism.’’31 The realistic representation of the profaneworld, the sensual, open, changeable perspective of reality, is the work offigures that live in a changeless, timeless, sacred realm. This is the para-dox, the secret of figura. It is important to recall that in Auerbach’s viewDante’s work is essentially ‘‘Christian’’ but in itself is also a new creationthat brings about the mixed style and other poetic textures that shouldnot merely be identified with the Christian doctrine of incarnation.Dante’s Comedy, Auerbach writes, is a challenge and even a danger to theclassical figural interpretation of Christianity: it makes the Christian fig-ural interpretation ‘‘a reality and destroyed it in the very process of realiz-ing it.’’32 The Comedy moves against and beyond the divine order byrealizing the figural image of the human. In this sense Dante’s workalready marks the secular movement in European literature.

Dante’s legacy—the rich and colorful style, the dialogue between thetragic and the comic, the divine and the profane, the range of voices andaccents—is imprinted also in the geistigen Wirbel, the ‘‘intellectual whirl-pool,’’ of Rabelais.33 Rabelais’s world, Auerbach writes, is a realistic uni-verse, a real present, a world of here and now, bound up with eroticlaugher, jokes, ironic views of utopia and parodies of science and medi-cine, law, and religion. Rabelais’s stories lack any Christian moral ortheological lesson. Their wisdom is revealed in the play of fools. A similartendency governs Boccaccio’s Decameron. His stories are scenes of every-day life. They describe erotic experiences that are released from the bur-

28. Auerbach, Mimesis, 194–95.29. Ibid., 196.30. Ibid., 197.31. Ibid., 191.32. Ibid., 202.33. Ibid., 272.

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den of belief and morality. Boccaccio is the herald of secular literature.His work is an enterprise of desires and senses, his message is the ‘‘ethicsof love.’’34 From this world figura already seems to disappear. UnlikeDante’s Comedy, Boccaccio’s realism avoids the figural: ‘‘Boccaccio’s char-acters live on earth and only on earth.’’35

Realism thus reflects the experience of secularization. It represents aworld governed by rapid transformations of standpoints and gives voiceto sensual perceptions, discourses of desire, and dialogues of everydaylife. The subject matter of realism is the coming-into-being. Its perspec-tive is irony, its heroes are the fools. However, the fundamental shape,the ur-form, the origin of realism, is theological. Figura is the originalstructure of representation that was ‘‘secularized,’’ that is, emptied, andturned on its head in modernity. Mimesis still recalls the traces and thescars of its origins.

READING HAMLET WITH SHYLOCK (THE ‘‘GERMAN,’ ’ THE ‘ ‘JEW’’)

The profane discourse, the irony, and the performance of the fool areimprinted also in the theater of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, Auer-bach writes, is a master of the mixed style who incorporated comic ele-ments in his tragedies and intertwined the sublime and the low, thebeautiful and the creaturely body.36 The tragic hero in Shakespeare’splays is still of aristocratic origin, but in every Lear or Hamlet a foolis hidden.37 The tragic play is interrupted by grotesque scenes, ironicalspeeches, discourses of cynical reason, reflections of doubt and weariness.No Christian order governs Shakespeare’s world but rather the secularperspectives and movements of early modern time that was still free fromthe burdens of rationalism.38 Auerbach thus reads Hamlet as a symptomof the secular age. In Shakespeare’s drama one experiences the leap fromChristianity to humanism, from myth to physiological drama, from ‘‘fate’’to ‘‘character.’’ In his chapter on Shakespeare’s drama, Auerbachincludes also a few remarks about The Merchant of Venice and its protago-nist, Shylock, the ‘‘pariah.’’39 Shylock, he writes, is an outsider whostands on the edge of his genre: ‘‘His character is a temptation to tragicoveremphasis,’’ for Shylock does not lack ‘‘problematic depth,’’ ‘‘power

34. Ibid., 228.35. Ibid., 224.36. Ibid., 313–15.37. Ibid., 316.38. Ibid., 323–24.39. Ibid., 314.

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and passion, and strength of expression.’’40 However, Shylock is not atypical tragic protagonist. He is rather characterized in the play as a ‘‘lowfigure, unworthy of tragic treatment.’’41 His appearance is replete withirony and mockery. By the end of the play he is ‘‘forgotten and aban-doned.’’ Shylock, this tragic-comic protagonist, a figure of mixed styles,a hybrid, a person who embodies foreignness, is also an echo of ‘‘greathumanitarian ideas, especially those which most deeply moved and influ-enced later centuries.’’42 Shylock is the foreign portrait of Europeanhumanism. His drama, Auerbach argues, is not of social class and doesnot give voice to an abstract, metaphysical tragedy but is rather ‘‘actual’’or ‘‘immediate.’’ For ‘‘the pariah Shylock does not appeal to natural right(Recht) but to customary wrong (Unrecht),’’ Auerbach writes, and ‘‘whata dynamic immediacy there is in such a bitter, tragic irony.’’43 The refer-ence to the dynamische Aktualitat, ‘‘the dynamic immediacy’’ of Shylock’stragedy, should be read here twice: first, as a reference to the fact towhich Shylock gives his voice in Shakespeare’s play—the appeal againstan actual injustice; and second, as a hint at the urgent ‘‘actuality’’ of thepariah, namely, Shylock’s ‘‘actuality’’ reflected in the 1940s—his urgencyas a figuration of the banished Jewish body.44

Auerbach’s reading of Shylock’s role is interwoven with his readingsof Hamlet. In Germany, Hamlet, was the theatrical character subject tothe most philosophical, philological, and dramaturgical interpretation.The translations of Hamlet, its performances, and its receptions were con-sidered from the time of Wieland and Schlegel also as cultural decisions.Hamlet was received as a paradigm of cultural identity: ‘‘Hamlet is Ger-many.’’45 Auerbach recalls in his discussion the significant reception inGermany of Goethe’s Hamlet. In his novel Wilhelm Meister—Die Lehrjahre,Johann Wolfgang Goethe introduced Hamlet as a model for the GermanBildung. Hamlet is discussed by Goethe as a dramaturgical model of sub-jectivity, a paradigm of identity, and a principle of representation. InGoethe’s novel, Hamlet is a subject of mimetic desire, which, however,

40. Ibid.41. Ibid., 315.42. Ibid., 314.43. Ibid., 325.44. Compare with Richards, ‘‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as Meditation on the

Shoah,’’ 78–80.45. For a short discussion of Hamlet’s reception as a dramaturgical model and

as a paradigm of cultural identity in Germany, see Walter Muschg, ‘‘Deutschlandist Hamlet,’’ in Der deutsche Shakespeare, ed. R. Grimm, W. Jaggi, H. Oesch (Basel,1965), 10–29.

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has to be transformed and corrected in order to become suitable for theGerman case.46 One of Hamlet’s disadvantages, in Goethe’s view, lies inhis inability to decide. Hamlet, Goethe argues, is weak and lacks charac-ter and morality.47 Auerbach refers to Goethe’s interpretations of Shake-speare’s play by arguing that Hamlet is a drama of a ‘‘strong character’’;its protagonist possesses will, energy, and psychological depth.48 ThusHamlet’s doubts and weariness, Auerbach writes, cannot be explained bya ‘‘lack of vitality.’’ In his view, as opposed to Goethe’s interpretation,Hamlet should be understood as a demonic portrait of human strength, arepresentation of the power not-to-decide.49

The discussion of Hamlet is one of the contexts in which Shylock isintroduced in Mimesis. Shylock, compared with Hamlet and other royalprotagonists in Shakespeare’s theater, is ‘‘an exception.’’50 He is a gro-tesque figure, an untragic protagonist elevated to a tragic conception ofbeing. If Hamlet embodies the fall of the tragic personage in Shake-speare’s drama into the ‘‘corporeal-creatural, the grotesque, and theambiguous’’ condition of the human existence,51 Shylock embodies theopposite—the rise from the grotesque to the sublime. Shylock, ‘‘theexception,’’ is thus an inverted Hamlet. This is how Mimesis attests to thedialectic of representation, the uncanny reflection of the ‘‘German’’ andthe ‘‘Jew.’’ There is indeed an irony in reading Shylock as a ‘‘Jew,’’ asmuch as understanding Hamlet as a ‘‘German.’’ We are dealing of coursewith dramaturgical constructions, with literary reflections and culturalimages (partly negative, anti-Semitic ones). In Auerbach’s chapter theseimages are real. For Auerbach the reading of Hamlet cannot be separatedfrom a reading of The Merchant of Venice; the image of Germanness cannotbe separated from its inverted, exceptional image—the image of the Jew.

In his remarks on Shylock Auerbach thus challenges the Germanmodel of culture and undermines its harmony and its ‘‘beauty.’’ Shylockis this ambivalent, tragicomic figure of a Jew, a body of oddness andbanishment that nevertheless incarnates dignity and the voice of humani-tarian ideas. Should he not be seen as another portrait of Auerbach’s ownbook? Mimesis, similar to Shylock, is an enterprise of exile, a book that

46. On Goethe’s interpretations of Hamlet as a paradigm of identity, see R.Ellis Dye, ‘‘Wilhelm Meister and Hamlet, Identity and Difference,’’ Goethe Year-book 6 (1992): 67–79.

47. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Werke, vol. 7) (Munich, 1981), 217–18.48. Auerbach, Mimesis, 329.49. Ibid., 327–30.50. Ibid., 328.51. Ibid.

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was written ‘‘outside.’’ Mimesis is the work of a pariah,52 an enterprise ofmixed styles, an integration of the tragic and the grotesque that drawstogether the lost, foreign portraits of European humanism.

MODERNISM/MONOTHEISM: LITERATURE AND FRAGMENTS

The final chapter of Mimesis deals with modernist versions of realism anddiscusses the novels of Woolf, Proust, and Joyce. Auerbach defines herewhat he considers the tendency of early twentieth-century literature,namely, the rejection of metanarratives and ideological frameworks ofrepresentation in favor of the fragmentation of being.53 The modernistnovel is a prose of small universes, a field of fragments and pessimisticanecdotes. The new novel draws nets of subjective, private, and minormemories. Not wisdom, but doubt; not knowledge, but riddles; not order,but crisis—these are the forms of modernism. Modernist literature is a‘‘symptom of . . . confusion and helplessness.’’54 However, ‘‘somethingentirely different takes place here too.’’ In this literary field that carriesthe scars of the period of the First World War, Auerbach seeks also per-spectives of beauty and gestures of love, of the ‘‘wealth of reality and thedepth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves withoutprejudice.’’55 It is conditio humana, the ‘‘elementary things which our liveshave in common,’’ that is illuminated here, in this field of fragments andnarratological ruins. Modernism embodies the inversion of figura—a ‘‘ful-fillment’’ that does not lie in the unity of a divine order but rather in thebroken forms of being on earth.

Other than his final chapter’s discussion of a few examples of modern-ist literature, Auerbach does not deal with the radical avant-garde move-ments of his time. However, the way in which Auerbach reads theEuropean canon of literature hints at his modernist consciousness.56 Thetechnique of the fragment, the concept of the broken form, and the aes-thetics of ‘‘ruins’’are imprinted also in his book. Auerbach acknowledgeshis own modernist technique in a short passage in the final chapter of

52. On the pariah and its implications in the Jewish discourse of literature,compare Hanna Arendt’s essay ‘‘The Jew as Pariah,’’ in The Jew as Pariah: JewishIdentity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York, 1978), 67–90.

53. Auerbach, Mimesis, 549–51.54. Ibid., 551.55. Ibid., 552.56. On Auerbach’s modernist consciousness, see Hayden White, ‘‘Auerbach’s

Literary History: The Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism,’’ in LiteraryHistory and the Challenge of Philology, 124–39; Barck, ‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin,’’212–14.

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Mimesis. His book is now presented as an illustration of the modernistapproach to literature: the abandonment of the great syntheses, rejectionof the chronological treatment of literature, and the turn to ‘‘basic motifs,’’‘‘few passages,’’ and short scenes.57 The philological methods that madeMimesis possible are thus similar to those of the modernist writers. Themodernist consciousness of ‘‘miniatures’’ is internalized.

The fragment is a signature of crisis and loss. And the fragment is‘‘real.’’ The way Auerbach perceives short cuts, selective pieces, ‘‘anec-dotes,’’ and foreign words from the history of the novel embodies a ‘‘touchof the real.’’58 The fragment is to reflect the essence of the historical expe-rience. Auerbach’s method of representation does not deny the variety,the randomness, the broken forms, and the imperfections of the real.Rather, Mimesis recognizes the faults and the decadence of the humanenterprise. And yet, its insights remain faithful to the ‘‘wealth of realityand the depth of life.’’

Auerbach’s method should not be separated from the modernist con-texts of the German Jewish projects of literature that included the writ-ings of authors and critics such as Karl Kraus, Alfred Kerr, Ernst Toller,Walter Mehring, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Walter Benjamin. Similar toBenjamin’s discourse of literature, Auerbach’s modernism is also basedon broken forms and ‘‘ruins’’ of historical consciousness and includesfigures of irony.59 However, modernist discourses of literature, fromExpressionism to Dada and the Epic theater, served the German Jewishwriters also as a medium of critical negotiations with tradition. Through

57. Auerbach, Mimesis, 548.58. On Auerbach’s Mimesis and the historical consciousness of the ‘‘real’’ that

reveals itself in anecdotes and fragments, compare Catherine Gallagher and Ste-phen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), 31–48.

59. In this context Mimesis can perhaps be read parallel to Benjamin’s Ursp-rung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in which figura reads equivalently to Benjamin’sconcept of allegory. See Jesse M. Gellrich, ‘‘Figura, Allegory, and the Questionof History,’’ in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, 107–23. For furtherreading on Auerbach and Benjamin, see Robert Kahn, ‘‘Eine ‘List der Vorse-hung’: Erich Auerbach und Walter Benjamin,’’ in Erich Auerbach, 153–66; Barck,‘‘Erich Auerbach in Berlin,’’ 208–12. It was Benjamin himself who hints at Auer-bach’s modernism, when he refers, in his essay on Surrealism, to Auerbach’s1929 book on Dante and his interpretations of medieval poetry that show how‘‘surprisingly close’’ this poetry stands in its relation to the surrealist concept oflove (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2.1 [Frankfurt am Main, 1980], 299).In his book on Dante, Auerbach admits that his modernist approach to medievalpoetry is based on an ‘‘analogy’’ to contemporary discourses of crises in languageand literature.

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a modernist perspective, the question of monotheistic tradition, its dialec-tics of representation, its discourses of law and justice, its messianic fig-ures and horizons of redemption were explored and transformed intopoetics of memory and justice. This is how the figures of the ‘‘brokenform’’—the fragment, the cut, the rupture—should be understood. Thefragment embodies a modernist consciousness of historical destruction. Itexpresses the cognition of crisis and loss. However, in a few cases themodernist fragment was also loaded with reflections on the monotheistictradition. The montage and the broken forms of Expressionism andDada, the modernist declarations against the image, the denial of beauty,and the critical reflections of representation were presented also as anecho of the monotheistic prohibition against the image and the idea ofan unrepresentable God.60 In this context the montage itself could beunderstood as an ironic reflection of Shevirat ha-tsurot (the breaking ofthe forms).61 Auerbach does not mention here the Mosaic Law and theprohibition against the making of an image. It is also clear that Auerbachwas unfamiliar with the tradition that discusses the breaking of idols byAbraham. However, the traces of the monotheistic tradition, the prohibi-tion of images, and the poetics of fragments are revealed somewhere elsein his book. This brings us back to the beginning of Mimesis and to itsdiscussion of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac.

THE AKEDA : THE HEBREW SILENCE,

THE SECRET OF LITERATURE

In its opening chapter, Mimesis offers a comparative reading of two scenesfrom the Homeric epic and the Old Testament. Auerbach first reads the

60. Among the examples of modernist reflections of the Jewish prohibitionagainst the image, one recalls Walter Benjamin’s and Gershom Scholem’s discus-sions on the theological implications of Franz Kafka’s literature; the poetry ofElse Lasker-Schuler and her Expressionistic reflections of the biblical figures;and Ernst Toller’s drama Die Wandlung (Transformations). Other examples arerooted in the world of modern Hebrew literature—the poems and essays of HaimNacham Bialik and the stories of Shmuel Yosef Agnon.

61. Shevirat ha-tsurot, ‘‘the breaking of the forms,’’ tradition informs, is theorigin and essence of Abraham’s enterprise. The tradition attributes to Abrahamthe revolt against the rites of the idols and the stars in his homeland as the consti-tutive gesture of monotheism. Abraham’s gesture thus seems already to imply (orto prefigurate) the monotheistic prohibition against the making of an image:(‘‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thingthat is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waterunder the earth,’’ Exodus 20.4). On Abraham, his revolt against the rite of idols,and the theological significance of his gesture of breaking the forms, see Moshe

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‘‘well-prepared and touching scene’’ on the return of the Greek heroOdysseus in book 19 of the Odyssey, ‘‘the scene in which the old house-keeper Euryclea, who had been his nurse, recognizes him by the scar onhis thigh.’’62 In this scene, Auerbach writes, ‘‘everything is visible.’’63 Hediscusses the ‘‘direct discourse’’ of Penelope and Euryclea, the ‘‘orderly,perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions,’’ in whichfeelings, thoughts, and gestures are ‘‘wholly expressed.’’64 The exposureof the scar on Odysseus’s thigh by the old housemaid, leads, however, toUnterbrechung, ‘‘an interruption,’’ that is, the interpolation of a long pas-sage on the visit of the young Odysseus to his grandfather Autolycus.The digression tells of Odysseus’s welcome at the grandfather’s house,the hunt in the morning, the struggle with the beast, the wound, and therecovery. All this is ‘‘narrated again with such a complete externalizationof all the elements of the story and their interconnections as to leavenothing in obscurity.’’65

The digression on Odysseus’s scar keeps the same element of represen-tation that is imprinted in the main plot, ‘‘an externalization of phenom-ena in terms perceptible to the senses’’: Hier ist die Narbe, ‘‘here is thescar.’’66 Indeed, Auerbach writes, ‘‘the excursus upon the origin of Odys-seus’s scar is not basically different’’ from other passages in the poem.67

The use of episodes and digressions is rather widespread in the Odysseyand serves as the ‘‘retarding element’’ that dissolves dramatic tensionsand avoids suspense and anxiety. And yet it is a story in which a woundedbody serves as the opening scene in Auerbach’s book. The scar is the firstsymbol of Mimesis. With this sign the question of representation isopened. Furthermore, the scar is the signature of the subject. This is howthe Greek hero is recognized at home: ‘‘here is the scar.’’ Similar toChrist, who on his return is recognized by the wounds of his crucifixion,Odysseus’s identity is also hidden in his wound/scar. To represent or tobe represented means to explore the wound. Is it therefore accidental thatAuerbach’s 1938 essay ‘‘Figura’’ begins also with a reference to a wound?The essay begins with a quotation of a fragment (the texture of a ‘‘cut,’’a signature of crisis) by Marcus Pacuvius, a Roman tragic poet, in which

Ben Maimon, Sefer ha-mada‘ (The Book of Knowledge) (Jerusalem, 1992),126–29.

62. Auerbach, Mimesis, 3.63. Ibid.64. Ibid.65. Ibid., 4.66. Ibid., 6.67. Ibid., 5.

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Auerbach finds the early and original meaning of figura as a ‘‘plasticform.’’68 The Latin fragment tells about barbarica pestis, ‘‘an outlandishplague’’ fashioned in nova figura, ‘‘unaccustomed shape.’’ This ‘‘outlandishplague,’’ Auerbach writes in a footnote, ‘‘is probably the sting of a ray, bywhich Odysseus was mortally wounded.’’69 The discussion on figura, the‘‘shape,’’ the original form of literary representation, begins with a cut.

The second part of Auerbach’s opening discussion in Mimesis is dedi-cated to the biblical ‘‘account of the sacrifice of Isaac’’ from Genesis 22.The scene, Auerbach notices, is silent, abstract, dark, and enigmatic.Mount Moriah, the site of the Akeda, lacks clear descriptions of time andplace. Similarly, the Jewish God appears here from no-place. UnlikeZeus or Poseidon, ‘‘he enters the scene from some unknown height ordepth and calls: Abraham!’’ (8). This is the first characteristic of the mono-theistic being: its Ortlosigkeit, ‘‘the lack of habitation.’’ The second is theGestaltlosigkeit, ‘‘the lack of form.’’ The Jewish God ‘‘appears withoutbodily form (yet he appears).’’70 Even in its early biblical appearances,Auerbach argues, the Jewish God ‘‘was not fixed in form and content.’’71

The Jewish God has no form or image. The third characteristic of themonotheistic being is its solitude: the Jewish God lives in Einsamkeit,‘‘singleness.’’ Jewish monotheism is thus based on the figure of a form-less, placeless, lonely being. The ‘‘lack of habitation, the lack of form andthe singleness’’ are also the merits of Abraham and Isaac. Like the JewishGod, the biblical figures are also Gestaltlos. The biblical scene does notreveal but rather covers the plot, concealing its figures and hiding theiractions. The biblical figures are not subjects of beauty but of ethical judg-ments. The Old Testament, according to Auerbach, does not deal with theaesthetic representation of the world but rather with theological truths.72

The Homeric poem and the biblical story are introduced in the firstchapter of Mimesis in opposition. The former is sensual, simple, clear,and well expressed. It exposes the body and reveals the scar but lackspsychological depth and avoids conflicts. The latter is silent, fragmented,and obscure, hiding the body and creating riddles of representation. Itsnarration is allegorical and its implications are ethical. Biblical style issublime, and its complexities are tragic. Both biblical and epic styles,

68. Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ 11.69. Ibid., 229, n. 1.70. Auerbach, Mimesis, 9.71. Ibid., 8.72. Ibid., 11–14.

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however, had a complementary constitutive influence on the history ofEuropean literature.73

The riddles of the Jewish book, Auerbach argues, are bound up withthe Gestaltlosigkeit, ‘‘the formlessness’’ of the biblical figures. The fact thatAuerbach differentiates and discusses the Jewish origin as Gestaltlos issignificant. The discourses of Gestaltung, ‘‘figuration’’ or ‘‘forming,’’ havebeen imprinted in German culture since the eighteenth century. Theform, which was discussed often as an aesthetic ideal, following Greekmodels, had also political implications, forming German identity. In the1930s and 1940s the discourse of the form gained radical interpretationsthat were based on racial theories. In this context the Jewish origin wasrepresented as a source of deformations. The Jew was essentially consid-ered as ‘‘formless.’’ Auerbach’s writing about the Jewish Gestaltlosigkeitand his discussion of its theological implications and ethical merits canthus be understood as a gesture of resistance in the field of German cul-ture: Mimesis discusses the formlessness of the biblical protagonist againstthe clear, well-expressed figures of the Homeric poems, responding hereto the German ideology and its worship of the Greek form.

Besides the formless appearance of the biblical figure, the story of theAkeda is characterized by its silence. Auerbach writes:

The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does notserve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts—on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unex-pressed. God gives his command in direct discourse, but he leaves hismotives and his purpose unexpressed; Abraham, receiving the com-mand, says nothing and does what he has been told to do. The conver-sation between Abraham and Isaac on the way to the place of sacrificeis only an interruption of the heavy silence and makes it all the moreburdensome.74

The story of the Akeda is governed by ‘‘heavy silence.’’ Its protagonistsspeak, however, even though their speech is not an expression or exter-nalization of thoughts but rather only an indication of unspeakablethoughts. The language in the biblical scene does not represent but ratherhints at the unrepresentable. This is the paradox of language in the storyof Abraham: in the Akeda even the spoken is silent. Auerbach does not

73. Ibid., 23.74. Ibid., 11.

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discuss the ‘‘meaning’’ of this biblical silence. He does not attempt tosolve the mystery of Abraham’s thoughts and does not pretend to concealthe hidden layers of the story. The unexpressed, the formless, and theunspoken embody in his view the theological dimension of Judaism.Judaism is a secret; its speech is silence; its expression is the unexpressed.

The Akeda embodies a secret. Its obscure and empty landscape, itssilent figures, its unexpressed background and hidden plot, its ‘‘mysteri-ous,’’ ‘‘concealed meaning’’ require, Auerbach writes, ‘‘subtle investiga-tion and interpretation.’’75 The biblical story of the one unrepresentableGod embodies not only Herrschaftsanspruch, ‘‘the claim to absolute author-ity,’’ but also Deutungsbedurfnis, ‘‘the need for interpretation.’’76 The mono-theistic story that represents nothing, and avoids words and images, butstill claims theological authority is also a condition for the possibility ofinterpretation. The Jewish origin, Auerbach writes, is forced to adopt‘‘constant interpretative change’’77 in order to preserve its legitimizationand relevance. Here lies the foundation of the Jewish tradition itself—theorigin of study and exegesis (Talmud, midrash). However, Auerbach doesnot refer here to the Jewish tradition and its frames of exegesis. Heignores the role of aggadah and rather discusses its Christian counter-parts, for the need for new interpretations of the Bible, Auerbach writes,reaches beyond the ‘‘original Jewish-Israelitish realm’’ into the gentileworld. The interpretation of the Hebrew Bible became ‘‘a general methodof comprehending reality.’’78 This is how the secret of the Akeda and otherbiblical scenes created ‘‘universal’’ institutions of interpretation, amongthem European literature itself. The ‘‘interpretative transformation’’ ofthe biblical narrative brings about the concept of an open text that willbecome the essence of literature.

From a historical, theological, and poetical point of view, the ‘‘moststriking piece of interpretation’’ of the Old Testament, Auerbach writes,was bound up with the emergence of Christianity and particularly withPaul’s enterprise: ‘‘Paul and the church fathers’’ were seeking a new inter-pretation of the Jewish tradition as a ‘‘succession of figurers prognosticat-ing the appearance of Christ, and assigning the Roman empire its properplace in the divine plan of salvation.’’79 Here, with the Christian interpre-tation of the Hebrew Bible, we recall, figura—the foundational ‘‘shape’’of literary discourse—was reborn.

75. Ibid., 15.76. Ibid., 16.77. Ibid.78. Ibid.79. Ibid.

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Auerbach seems initially to follow the Christian path of interpretation.He recalls the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament in Luther’s Germantranslation) but ignores rabbinic tradition and the archaic forms of Jew-ish literature. It is rather Paul who embodies in his view the most signifi-cant interpretation of the biblical sources. Paul is the first to transformthe Bible into ‘‘literature’’ (a popular story, a legend, an allegory). How-ever, in his reading of the Akeda, Auerbach, who accepts figura as thecondition for the possibility of the literary interpretation, also turns fromthe Christian preoccupation to discuss the original characteristics of theOld Testament and its own literary implications. In his reading, the Jew-ish origin is not simply reduced to an anticipation or redemptive promisebut rather constitutes a different possibility of historical representation.80

The Bible, Auerbach argues, compared with the Homeric poems, ‘‘is lessunified,’’ but rather ‘‘pieced together.’’81 The Old Testament is made upof fragments and pieces that lack unity. It shows ‘‘separateness and hori-zontal disconnection of stories and groups of stories in relation to oneanother.’’ And yet all these pieces are held together strongly by a ‘‘verticalconnection’’ to God’s oneness. The story that embodies the monotheisticthesis on the unity of God embodies disunity at the surface level. Thistension between vertical unity and horizontal disconnectedness endowsthe Bible with the potential for reinterpretations. The literary potential ofthe Bible is now discussed by Auerbach not only as a result of the Chris-tian enterprise but rather as an initial, internal textual structure. HereAuerbach reveals perhaps the other source of his philology of fragments.In Auerbach’s view the structure of the biblical story is like the modernistform: a fragment, a piece, a cut. Auerbach reads the Hebrew Bible as ifit were an ancient montage. Furthermore, the biblical story that concealsbodies and plots and in itself is implicit in secrets and silence carriesalso the foundations for a model of historical representation that suits thecomplexities, contradictions, and conflicts of Europe/1942. ‘‘The rise of

80. Said, who stresses the Christian path in Auerbach’s reading of the OldTestament, which is based on the possibilities of figural interpretation that is bornfrom the Christian doctrine of incarnation, also recognizes the fact that in Auer-bach’s view the Jewish origin does not disappear despite the transformation itsuffers: ‘‘Auerbach is a firm believer in the dynamic transformations as well asthe deep sedimentations of history: yes, Judaism made Christianity possiblethrough Paul, but Judaism remains, and it remains different from Christianity’’(Said, ‘‘Introduction,’’ xviiii). Said thus acknowledges the ‘‘sets of antinomies’’ inAuerbach’s contexts of writing (the Jewish/the Christian, the German/the Turk-ish) that ‘‘never lose their oppositions to each other’’ (xviii).

81. Auerbach, Mimesis, 17.

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National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual people andstates before and during the [current (1942)] war,’’ he writes, are histori-cal events that consist of a ‘‘great number of contradictory motives.’’82

The modernist writing of history thus demands a complex attitude, whichis essentially different from that of a legend.83 The Old Testament ‘‘comescloser and closer to history’’ against the Homeric style that remains in therealm of legend. The Bible implies a complex narrative and contains the‘‘confused, contradictory multiplicity of events’’ which, according toAuerbach, ‘‘true history reveals.’’84 The biblical story offers a structure ofhistorical representation that suits the stage of war and political catastro-phe in Europe. The story of the sacrifice of Isaac and other biblical storiesare indeed prefigurations. However they are not anticipations of theredemptive narrative of Christianity but rather embody the fragmentarystructure of historical representation, one that hints at the tragedies of the1940s.

The Jewish source thus does not disappear in Auerbach’s reading. Hisview on the essence of biblical story remains figural but was not reducedto a dogmatic Christian perspective. It would thus be wrong to try to‘‘identify’’ Auerbach’s reading with Judaism (Jewish tradition, the ‘‘Jew-ish background’’), or to associate it exclusively with certain Christiantraditions.85 One should rather think of Auerbach’s project in terms ofmodernist interpretation in which identities are revealed as mixed, unsta-ble textures, and traditions are experienced from a distance, through aprocess of radical transformation, denial, and openness. And yet the sig-nificance of the Jewish origin in Auerbach’s project is hinted at in thefirst chapter of Mimesis with another minor yet essential sign: the firstforeign word quoted in Mimesis is from ancient Hebrew: the word Hineni,

82. Ibid., 19–20.83. Ibid., 20.84. Ibid.85. Auerbach’s ability to borrow certain elements from Jewish tradition or

from Christianity and to mix them into a new, original view of literature andculture attests, in my view, to the modernist sensibility of the German Jewishauthor and hints at a certain historical urgency in which he was caught. I cannotthus fully follow Martin Elsky’s intriguing suggestion of understanding Auer-bach’s ‘‘universalism’’ as ‘‘Catholic,’’ but I would rather insist on the modernistcontext in which Auerbach attempted to reinterpret the open text of literaturefrom the origins of monotheism. Auerbach’s attraction to Catholicism, as repre-sented in his interpretations of strong emotions, is significant but secondary anddoes not, in my view, exhaust the complexity of the Jewish-Christian dialectic inhis work nor his criticism of Bildung. Compare Martin Elsky, ‘‘Introduction toErich Auerbach, ‘Passio as Passion,’ ’’ Criticism 43.3 (2001): 285–88.

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‘‘behold me here,’’ cited from the story of the Akeda. It is the expressionof ‘‘obedience and readiness,’’ Auerbach writes, that indicates Abraham’s‘‘moral position in respect to God.’’86 The poetics of foreign words inMimesis thus begins with the gesture of an ethical response, a silent move-ment that flows from Hebrew into the world of literature. The fact thatAuerbach introduces the question of representation through the complex-ities of the biblical story is significant. However, it is not that the decisionmade by Auerbach to write about the Old Testament, and particularlythe scene of the binding of Isaac, should now be understood as a gestureof ‘‘Jewish philology.’’87 It is also difficult, in my view, to understandAuerbach’s project as ‘‘meditation on the Shoah’’ or to identify his writingin Mimesis as allegories of the concrete events of the 1940s.88 I thus sug-gest a different conclusion: Auerbach’s reading of the Akeda, the way inwhich he places the biblical scene in conjunction with but also in opposi-tion to the Greek and the Christian wounded figures, his ambiguousinterpretations of figura after (and also with and against) Paul, his readingof Shylock with Hamlet, and finally his way of discussing the monotheis-tic text as a condition for the possibility of dealing with the question ofliterature in the 1940s, attest to the rips and the hyphens—the ‘‘scars’’ ofmodernist consciousness of a German Jewish writer

ABRAHAM’S SILENCE? READING AUERBACH IN DIALOGUE

(KIERKEGAARD, DERRIDA, LEVINAS)

By way of conclusion, I will suggest here three short correspondences toAuerbach’s discussion of the Akeda, three short ‘‘dialogues’’ on the biblicalscene and the question of literature. These dialogues are based on Kierke-gaard’s, Levinas’s, and Derrida’s interpretations of the Abraham story.The way in which Auerbach defines and differentiates the Jewish from

86. Auerbach, Mimesis, 8–9.87. Compare with Porter’s provocative and brilliant analysis of Auerbach’s

reading of the Akeda as a gesture of ‘‘Jewish philology’’ which should be under-stood as an answer to ‘‘the decanonization of the Old Testament under the Ger-man National Socialists,’’ and therefore as an attempt to protect the Hebrew textin the field of philological research against the predominance of the Greek in theGermanic literary and cultural imagination (‘‘Erich Auerbach and the Judaizingof Philology,’’ 124–25, 126, 134–36).

88. Richards’s reading of the Mimesis chapter of Adam and Eve as a criticalallegory of the French collaboration is brilliant, yet somewhat exaggerated in myview. The same can be argued about the analogy Richards draws between Isaac’sjourney to Mount Moriah and the transportations of Jews to Treblinka andAuschwitz. See Earl Jeffery Richards, ‘‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as Meditationon the Shoah,’’ 71–78.

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the Greek in order to introduce the question of literature reminds us firstof Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard writes about Abraham’s‘‘movement of faith’’ in his silent journey to Mount Moriah. Abraham’sexperience, however, is wholly singular and escapes the universal catego-ries of representation. His deeds cannot be shared or expressed. Abra-ham’s experience is not discursive; it does not seek general validity andthus carries no moral meaning. The Akeda has no logical and therefore noethical meaning. It rather demands the ‘‘teleological suspension of theethical.’’89

Similar to Auerbach, who reads the Akeda beside the Homeric, Kierke-gaard feels compelled to ‘‘compare’’ the biblical scene with a Greek exam-ple, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis.90 In the Greek tragedy, he argues, thesacrifice has purpose and meaning. Agamemnon sacrifices his beloveddaughter, Iphigenia, in order to lead the Greek fleet to the war on Troyand thus to serve the destiny of his nation. The tragic deed has a meaningthat can be shared and represented within the Greek community. Thesacrifice of Iphigenia belongs to the public sphere (the common, the uni-versal, the polis) and therefore embodies a moral meaning: ‘‘The tragichero is still within the ethical.’’91 Unlike Iphigenia, the sacrifice of Isaachas no telos, no meaning or purpose. Its depth is concealed in ancientHebrew.92 However, the secrets, the paradoxes, and the silence of thebiblical scene become a challenge for discourses of literature. It is Kierke-gaard himself who offers in the beginning of his book four literary ver-sions of the Akeda. His response to Abraham’s secret begins with thegesture of narration—retelling the story. Moreover, the history of West-ern literature, from Greek tragedy to modern European drama, is readin Kierkegaard’s book as a response to the biblical story. Literature isintroduced as a counterexample to the unspoken, concealed experience ofAbraham. Aesthetics (literature, poetry, and drama), Kierkegaard writes,demands also hiddenness and silence. Aesthetics is understood as a ‘‘playwith the hidden,’’ a mode of recognition, an experience of revealing theveiled.93 The poetical silence is a strategy of representation. The secret inliterature can be explained and finally can be put into words. Here lies

89. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong(Princeton, N.J., 1983), 54–57.

90. Ibid., 57–60.91. Ibid., 59.92. Kierkegaard writes ironically on the paradox of Hebrew: ‘‘That man was

not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew,he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham’’ (ibid., 9).

93. Ibid., 82–85.

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the gap between aesthetics (literature) and faith (the Akeda) which,Kierkegaard writes, avoids a real analogy between the poetical silenceand the silence of Abraham.94 In its words and silence, literature marksoff the boundary of the other sphere—the sphere of faith in which silencecannot be explained. In contrast with protagonists of literature, Abrahamtruly cannot speak.95

In Kierkegaard’s book the question of literature appears not simplyafter the biblical scene but also because of it and against it. A similar dialec-tic is found in Auerbach’s Mimesis. For Auerbach too, the need and thepossibility to discuss the question of literature is bound up with thesecrets of the Akeda, with the paradoxes of silence and the theologicaldemands for new interpretations of the biblical story. The possibilities ofdiscussing beauty and irony, exploring the tragic and the grotesque, thedemonic and the sublime, are related in both projects to the silent dis-course of the Hebrew Bible.

Auerbach’s reading of the biblical scene follows central aspects ofKierkegaard’s interpretation. Like Fear and Trembling, Mimesis is alsoimprinted by Paul’s conception (figura).96 However, Auerbach is nottrapped in the discourse of faith and does not demand the suspension ofthe ethical dimension. For Auerbach, we recall, Abraham’s experience,his response to God’s call, is purely ethical. Auerbach also hints at theprice of the figural discussion and does not force a Christian reading onthe Akeda.

The correspondences between Kierkegaard and Auerbach on the ques-tion of Abraham’s silence and the birth of Western literature lead us alsoto acknowledge Derrida’s reading that attributes the secrecy of the bibli-cal scene, the riddle of the Akeda, the unspoken experience of Abraham, tothe world of literature. Following Kierkegaard’s reading, Derrida arguesabout Abraham’s experience—the encounter with God, the silentresponses to his requests of sacrifice—that is wholly singular, intimate,

94. Ibid., 112.95. Ibid., 113.96. Kierkegaard’s interpretation, as Derrida points out, is essentially ‘‘evan-

gelical’’: the concept of ‘‘fear and trembling’’ follows St. Paul’s idea of the worktoward salvation as it is introduced in the Letter to the Philippians (2.12). Kierke-gaard’s text is based on the idea of faith that demands the suspension of the law(‘‘the universal’’). And yet, Derrida writes, Kierkegaard’s Christian interpretation‘‘does not necessarily exclude a Judaic or Islamic reading.’’ Rather, it marks thesecret, the paradox of all monotheistic traditions—the paradox of sharing/repre-senting Abraham’s secret that cannot be shared/represented. See Jacques Der-rida, ‘‘Whom to Give To,’’ in his The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. D.Wills (Chicago, 2008), 56–59; 79–81.

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and thus carries no meaning that can be shared or represented.97 Abra-ham’s real test, he writes, is this test of secrecy—Abraham must keep hisencounter with God’s secret.98 The literary project, Derrida says, inheritsthis experience, the silence of Abraham—the inability to tell, the necessityto keep a secret.99 The literary project is defined by the ability not to telland thus to maintain an internal, autonomous, silent dimension thatescapes the readers. ‘‘Every text’’, Derrida writes, ‘‘that is consigned topublic space, that is relatively legible or intelligible, but whose content,sense, referent, signatory, and addressee are not fully determinable reali-ties [ . . . ] can become a literary project.’’100 Literature keeps a degree offreedom, the right not to be defined or determined. This right of literatureto keep a secret, Derrida argues, is the heritage of Abraham—the heritageof the Akeda.

Kierkegaard’s and Derrida’s readings offer different yet parallel per-spectives to Auerbach’s own interpretation of the Akeda. All three read-ings stress the structure of secrecy and the principle of silence and referto the unexposed, unrepresentable, hidden dimension of the biblical textas a condition of/for literary discourse.

My discussion on the Akeda and literature requires a fourth criticalremark that highlights also the limits of Auerbach’s reading. Auerbach’sethical interpretation of Abraham’s experience, as opposed to the Greekvoyage, recalls Emmanuel Levinas’s comparison of Odysseus with Abra-ham and his discussion of the differences between their ‘‘movements.’’The Greek, according to Levinas, embodies the ‘‘movement of return.’’Odysseus finally returns home from his long journey; he comes back tohimself. His movement embodies the metaphysical structure of returnthat reflects the Western consciousness of being-the-same.101 Odysseusdoes not experience a real break with the self but rather brings subjectiv-ity to its fulfillment, its self-realization. Abraham, however, ‘‘who leaveshis fatherland forever for a yet unknown land,’’ embodies a ‘‘movementwithout return.’’ He travels toward the unknown, the nonidentical, theother. Abraham’s movement thus hints at the ethical dimension of mono-

97. Derrida, ‘‘Literature in Secret,’’ The Gift of Death, 154–55.98. Ibid., 122.99. Ibid., 131–32.100. Ibid., 131.101. Philosophy is based on the ‘‘autonomy of consciousness, which finds itself

again in all its adventures, returning home to itself like Ulysses, who through allhis peregrinations is only on the way to his native island.’’ Emmanuel Levinas,‘‘The Trace of the Other,’’ in Deconstruction in Context, ed. M. C. Taylor (Chicago,1986), 346.

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theism—the movement from the self to the other. This movement is indi-cated by God’s call to Abraham in Genesis, Lech-Lecha, ‘‘Go forth’’—thesame call that brings him to Moriah.

Levinas’s commitment to the ethical dimension of the biblical storyleads him to oppose Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Akeda as stressingsilence and as denying the possibilities of ethical discourse in the biblicalscene.102 Kierkegaard, he argues, does not discuss the real meaning of theHebrew drama: God’s second call that forbids Abraham to perform ahuman sacrifice—the call that leads him back to the ethical order. OfAbraham’s obedience to the second call, Levinas writes, ‘‘that is theessential.’’103 For Abraham’s real experience, he argues, is not of silencebut rather of language. Abraham’s encounter with God is interwovenwith networks of calls, dialogues, and negotiations. Levinas recalls theconversation in which Abraham interceded on behalf of Sodom andGomorrah. In his view Abraham embodies the discourse of justice andthe language of the ethical order that is imprinted in Jewish tradition.Levians thus rejects the secrecy and the paradox of silence and rathertraces the ethical implications of the biblical language.104 Abraham thusspeaks.105

Levinas, like Auerbach, offers a reading that acknowledges the callof hineni, the Hebrew expression of ethical commitment. However, forAuerbach the Hebrew word remains a foreign and therefore a silentword. For one who stood far from the world of Jewish tradition and wasunfamiliar with sources other than the translations of the Bible, Abra-ham’s experience seems unspoken. For Levinas, who entered the worldof Jewish tradition through a different path and engaged Talmud andmidrash as the only way through which the Bible can be read andrevealed, the Hebrew word seems to speak aloud the essence of languageitself.106 Here perhaps lies a difference between two experiences of tradi-

102. Levinas, ‘‘A Propos of Kierkegaard vivant,’’ in Proper Names, trans. M. B.Smith (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 76–77. On Levinas’s criticism of Kierkegaard andthe possibilities of a ‘‘dialogue’’ between them on questions of ethics and theologysee: J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood, eds., Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics,Politics and Religion (Bloomington, Ind., 2008).

103. Levinas, ‘‘A Propos of Kierkegaard vivant,’’ 77.104. Compare with Levinas’s remarks on Hebrew and its poetical implications

in his essay on Agnon: ‘‘Poetry and Resurrection: Notes on Agnon,’’ in ProperNames, 7–16.

105. In midrash literature Abraham truly speaks and cries out his experienceof the Akeda. See, for example, Midrash tanhuma (parashat Va-yera, 18–23).

106. Levinas’s understanding of tradition is represented first and foremost inhis talmudic readings. See also his essay ‘‘Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,’’ inBeyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. G. D. Mole (Bloomington,

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tion: the one cannot experience Judaism and its traditions except from adistance, in translation, through Christian and German lenses; the otherattempts to return to the original discourses of Jewish tradition throughits own exegetical praxis. Both experiences of tradition are, however,modernist in their nature and dialogical in their essence. The Jewish tra-dition is marked in both cases by an open text that carries ethical implica-tions. These readings of the Akeda lead to productive approaches to thequestion of representation, which also challenge and approve the idea ofliterature.

Ind., 1994), 127–47. For further reading see Hilary Putnam, ‘‘Levinas and Juda-ism,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi(Cambridge, 2002), 33–62.

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Auerbach's Scars: Judaism and the Question of Literature.

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