Abstract
“To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.” With this sentence Erich Auerbach concludes a paragraph in the first chapter of Mimesis in which, unusually, he considers his own contemporary moment beyond literature, “the history which we ourselves are witnessing.” Auerbach sees the currents of twentieth-century German history through to Hitler (whom he does not mention) as complex and contradictory, even at the level of the individual, so that “the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification.”2 This has struck some of Auerbach’s readers as an unexpectedly guarded response to the Nazism that had deprived him, at the least, of academic tenure. It is certainly neither a statement of partisanship nor a request for sympathy; but it is also introspective and self-reflexive, underlining the ambiguities and contradictions of Auerbach’s own project, a study of “the representation of reality in Western literature.” The traj ectory Auerbach traces is still influential— in, for example, Benedict Anderson’s move from the cohesive transcendence of the Middle Ages to modern nationalism. Auerbach traces the overturning of classical rhetoric and its modes, consummately in the work of Dante, by a system of signs and totalizing codes bonded by a doctrine of incarnation that makes possible the radical stylistic movement between high and low, grotesque and sublime.
Con vauc torban!
Soi serrazis o crestians?
Qals es ma leis?
Non sai.
(How perturbed I am!
Am I Saracen or Christian?
What is my law?
I do not know.)
Raimbaut d’Orange1
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Notes
Raimbaut d’Orange, “Pos trobars plan,” ed. Alan Press, Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 120, from
The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange, ed. W. T. Pattison (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952), n. 16.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 19–20. Written in German in Istanbul between 1942 and 1945, the book was first published in Berne, Switzerland, in 1946.
Michael Holquist, “The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly, 54 (1993): 371–91.
Seth Lerer, “Introduction,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–10, at 6.
Kathleen Biddick, “Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 35–52;
Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (Yeni Hayat), trans. Guneli Gun (NewYork: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998).
Elizabeth Grosz, “Judaism and Exile: The Ethics of Otherness,” in Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, ed. Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), 57–71, at 60, citing and paraphrasing
Emanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978) and Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979).
Quoted from Auerbach’s letters by Stephen Greenblatt, “The Touch of the Real,” in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 20–48, at 43.
The Croxton Play is edited in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). For the mummers’ plays, see
E. K. Chambers, The English Folk-Play (London, 1933);
R. J. E. Tiddy, The Mummers’ Play (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923);
Alan Brody, The English Mummers and Their Plays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970);
C. R. Baskervill, “Mummers’ Wooing Plays in England,” Modern Philology 21, (1924): 225–72, and “Dramatic Aspects of Medieval Folk Festivals in England,” Studies in Philology, 17 (1920): 19–87.
John E. Matzke, “Contributions to the History of the Legend of St George, with special reference to the Sources of the French, German and Anglo-Saxon Metrical Versions,” PMLA, 17 (1902): 464–535, and 18 (1903): 99–169, and “The Legend of St George: Its Development into a roman d’aventure,” PMLA, 19 (1904): 449–78.
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1999), 167, 77.
For this and most other texts cited here, see Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1995). For Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see J. R. R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, eds., rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
See Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and “‘Good Lords’ and ‘King Makers’: The Stanleys of Lathom in English Politics, 1385–1485,” History Today, 31 (1981): 12–17;
David Lawton, “Scottish Field: Alliterative Verse and Stanley Encomium in the Percy Folio,” Leeds Studies in English, 10 (1978): 42–57.
Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk 1453–1517 (NewYork: St Martin’s Press, 1967), 9–12. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. S. R. Cattley, 8 volumes (London: n.p., 1837–41), 4:122, 19–20;
Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 346–8.
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© 2003 Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren
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Lawton, D. (2003). History and Legend: The Exile and the Turk. In: Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (eds) Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_9
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