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Jacques Rancière - Auerbach - Contradictions of Realism
Jacques Rancière - Auerbach - 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 represen-
tation of reality in Western literature.”1 Auerbach gave no preliminary def-
inition of either reality or representation. He started from the “thing itself ”:
two narratives borrowed from two books that had long been given a found-
ing 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 nar-
ratives 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 digres-
sion about the history of the wound. With a luxury of adjectives, he de-
scribes to us the visit of the young Odysseus to his uncle Autolycus, Auto-
lycus’s house, the banquet, the sleep and the awakening, the hunt, the
struggle with the boar, and the wound. He does not describe them, how-
ever, as memories in Ulysses’ mind. He describes them in the same tempo-
ral 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.
227
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228 Jacques Rancière / The Contradictions of Realism
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 sce-
nario 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 re-
fers them to a vertical dimension, a historical dimension, exactly opposed
to the overall horizontal connection, in Homer’s epic. Schematic as this sum-
mary 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 con-
struction 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 equiv-
alent 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 nar-
ration 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 par-
allel 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.
3. See Jacques Ranciere, The Flesh of Words, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.,
2004), pp. 71–93.
4. Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 2007),
pp. 13, 12.