Review: [Untitled]

Reviewed Work(s):
Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Eric Auerbach and Leo Spitzer by Geoffrey
Green
Interrelations of Literature by Jean-Pierre Barricelli; Joseph Gibaldi
Terry Eagleton

The Modern Language Review, Vol. 79, No. 2. (Apr., 1984), pp. 385-386.

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 Reviews 385
the country's resources, and in the end, the inhabitants, suspecting that their leader
has tricked them, ascend the tower in a body, bringing it crashing down to their own
destruction. Is this a parable of the United States of America and the logical
conclusion of the American dream? O r is it a satire on the Soviet Union and its
collectivist pursuit of a Marxist millennium? It cannot surely be Britain, whose
leader at the last election persuaded the people to contribute to the construction, not
of towers to Heaven, but of launching pads to Hell.
W. A. SPECK

Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Eric Auerbach and Leo Spitzer. By
GEOFFREY G REEN.Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 1982.
x + 186pp. £13.50.
Interrelations of Literature. Edited by JEAN-PIERRE BARRICELLI and JOSEPH GIBALDI.
New York: The Modern Language Association of America. 1982.
+
vi 329 p p $18.50 (paperbound $9.50).
It is not easy to know how to relate nowadays to the awesome figures - Auerbach,
Curtius, Spitzer, Wellek -who dominated the philological heights of the first halfof
the century. Undiminished in scholarly stature yet oddly remote, they loom up as
denizens of some luminous region of high European culture from which Auschwitz
and its aftermath have decisively severed us. T o lay claim today to that lineage, in
the manner of a George Steiner, is to court the pathos ofinhabiting a country of the
mind whose historical conditions have effectively evaporated. Geoffrey Green's neat
little study of Auerbach and Spitzer offers a more modest but also more original
approach: these men are now sufficiently distant from us, hovering somewhere
between history and mythology, for their work to be provisionally placed in its
political moment.
The political moment in question is that of the Third Reich, the Jewish intellec-
tual emigration, and the dignified protest of classical humanism against a contem-
porary barbarism. Auerbach's grand Viconian syntheses, his ceaseless efforts to
combine 'universal' human truths with historicist relativism, are silently, ten-
aciously at odds with fascistic nationalism. Figura, with its insistence on the proleptic
character of the Old Testament in relation to the New, is an implicit rebuff to anti-
Semitism: Mimesis pits the fluid, capacious, plebeian humanism of literary realism
against a static, hierarchical, inhumanly 'sublime' mythologizing whose unspoken
political correlative is Nazism. Auerbach yearns for Lukacsian totality but is deeply
fearful of theoretical totalitarianism; in this way, one might claim, he has affinities
with the Yale deconstructors, whose political imagination has been similarly
paralysed and arrested by a Central European catastrophe in which, as Jews or
European e'nigris or both, they feel themselves implicated.
Exiled in the United States, Auerbach saw European civilization as approaching
the term of its existence and died. relatively disillusioned, in 1957. The story of Leo
Spitzer is rather different, sketching as it does a possible alternative trajectory for the
high Germanic tradition in an epoch of savagery. Auerbach's championship of
realism, as Green ably demonstrates, is a coded kind of political militancy; indeed
there is an intriguing parallel here, unexamined by this book, with the work of
Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom the dynamic, heterogeneous character of the novel
figured as a cryptic critique of Hitler's totalitarian twin, Stalin. Spitzer. however,
was altogether more Olympian. Convinced that classical humanism could survive
only by a certain operative aloofness from history, he pursued his compulsive
holisms to the end, touchingly trustful of that intuitive 'click' by which a literary
work, squeezed in the right philological spot, would yield up its integral harmonious
 Reviews
being to the superiorly perceptive enquirer. Mr Green is much too polite to confess
outright just how intensely he dislikes Spitzer, with his bland authoritarianism,
vacuous talk of 'faith', and self-congratulatory flourishes but the Spitzerian term
'click' gathers a slightly thicker sardonic coating each time it recurs in his text.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for such a learned scholar, Spitzer's imigri years in the
United States were marked by an astonishing political complacency: he died in 1960
superbly confident that he had rediscovered, in Sunkist advertisements no less, the
Geist of his fathers.
'Leaving aside the relations of literature and politics . . . during the long and
complex history of Christianity . . .', writes one of the desperately hard-pressed
contributors to Interrelations o f Literature. This, indeed, is the keynote ofa book which
seems modelled more on the Monty Python 'Summarise Proust' contest than on any
received notions ofcritical commentary. In a faded publishing formula, literature is
linked in turn to linguistics, philosophy, religion, myth, sociology, science,
psychology, and so on, and the luckless expert granted about twenty pages to skid
from Plato to Hillis Miller. A handful of them heroically transcend these unpropi-
tious conditions: Jonathan Culler is characteristically cogent on literature and
politics, and there are useful essays on literature and religion and literature and
science. But most of the pieces are predictably threadbare and perfunctory; and it is
ominous to see the MLA peddling these flashily commodified wares.

Humanities in Review: Volume I. Edited by RONALD DWORKIN, KARLMILLER,and

RICHARDSENNETT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982.
+
xi 234 p p £19.50 (paperbound £5.95).
The interest ofthis volume as a whole is considerably less than the sum ofits parts. It
collects together the papers given at the New York Institute for the Humanities, in
which a number of very eminent figures in the humanities and social sciences offer
(in most cases) a summary of their general theoretical position. We therefore find
Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett on sexuality and solitude, Jean Starobinski on
the history of body consciousness (a useful placing of Freud's theory of dreams in its
intellectual context, relating it to nineteenth-century views on the body and its
relation both to mind and to society), Victor Turner on the idea of acting as seen by
an anthropologist, Harold Bloom claiming that all the best poems work by breaking
form and combating earlier poetic language, Frances Yates summarizing her views
on Elizabethan occult philosophy, Alain Touraine expounding the philosophy of
what may vaguely be called the New Left in terms of a threefold dialectic: between
permanent change, imposed by large organizations on a passive majority, the
strengthening of the state, that suppresses genuine social conflict, and the new,
radical social movements that find it so hard to discover their constituency and (as
Touraine's fascinating exposition, alas, confirms) to define their aims. Plus three or
four others, which include one piece of original historical research, Natalie Zemon
Davies's account of sixteenth-century Lyons, which contrasts Catholics and Pro-
testants both in demographic and in more or less structuralist terms.
To read the book through is therefore to give oneself an up-to-date liberal
education of what is nowadays called a modular type - accumulating a number of
course credits in fashionable areas of study, all fascinating but with very little to do
with one another. Even the grouping of essays into four sections is a gesture towards
coherence of the flimsiest kind: to put together Frances Yates and Alain Touraine
under the heading 'Studies in Cultural History' is to say precisely nothing. For most
of us, the purpose of the volume can only be to indicate which of the authors we