Mimesis (96 page)

What Curtius understands by typological allegoresis, about which I am supposed to have refrained from informing myself, is unfathomable; typological allegoresis is, after all, the subject of my investigations. Whether one calls it so or calls it figural explication is irrelevant. My original terminology came into being naturally through the fact that I proceeded from a semantic history of the word
figura
. I spoke there extensively about the fluctuation of the terminology in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The terminology that I first preferred is so practical, and was alive so long in the tradition, that a separate
Index figurarum
and
Index de allegoriis
are still found in the second volume of indices in Migne’s
Patrologia
.
¹⁸
But the terminology does not matter, so
long as one distinguishes clearly between abstract/allegorical and real/prophetic methods of explication.

I have often heard the reproach that I generalize the meaning of the figural or typological principle more than is appropriate, but even so, I had never heard it yet from a medievalist or a historical theologian, apart from Curtius. Unfortunately Curtius has occupied himself little with the subject; earlier researchers of the Middle Ages of the same level possessed great experience in it — not only liturgists and hymnologists, but also figures such as [Konrad] Burdach [1859-1936] or [Karl] Strecker [1861-1945], whose notes on the poems of Walter of Châtillon are a trove of typological information. Among contemporaries, apart from some art historians, it would be fitting to name as an example Ernst H. Kantorowicz [1895-1963].
¹⁹
The effect of typology is most certainly just as important and permanent a phenomenon for the medieval structure of expression as is the survival of ancient rhetorical
topoi
of form and content; it has strengthened in me ever more the conviction, and that conviction has been confirmed through discussions with experts in the material, that typology is the real vital element of Bible poetry and hymns, or, even more, of almost the whole Christian literature of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, as also of Christian art, from the sarcophagi down to the end of the Middle Ages — and sometimes beyond. Politically, too, to establish or deny claims to power, it played a significant role over many centuries. Curtius certainly has the right, in his synthetic researches into the Middle Ages, in so monumental a subject, to limit himself to the points of view that interest him particularly; but the neglect and inadequate treatment of the problem of allegory (in the broadest sense) must be emphasized. In this context I have stated that Curtius’ claim is misleading and substantially incorrect that “in his study of the sacred text [Augustine] persisted in the antiquarianizing and allegorizing method which Macrobius had applied to Cicero and Virgil” (
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
, p. 74).
²⁰
In opposition to that, Curtius refers me to the fifth chapter of the third part of [Henri Irénée] Marrou’s book on Augustine. This chapter bears the heading “La Bible et les lettrés de la décadence.” But a person can get better instruction about Augustine’s exegesis from Augustine than from
Marrou. His posing of the problem motivated him to an overly sharp development of the influence on Augustine of late-antique erudition, an influence that is incontestable in itself. Yet even in his significant, but one-sided and not always insightful book, Marrou did not and would not ever have used a formulation such as that of Curtius. Later he published an addition to the book, entitled
Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique: Retractatio
(Paris: E. De Boccard, 1949). There one can read on page 646: “If there is a chapter the inadequacy of which I deplore today, it is in fact the one I dared to entitle ‘La Bible et les lettrés de la décadence.’”

Many reviewers have ascribed to the book, in praise or blame, tendencies that were far removed from me: that the method of the book is sociological, even that the tendency was socialist; that it is focused all too much on the Middle Ages, but also the opposite: it is antimedieval and anti-Christian; that it is wholly pro-Romance, especially pro-French, neglects German, [and] is unjust toward German literature. But there have also been patriotic readers who have congratulated me on the observation that the tragic in the
Hildebrandslied
and in the
Nibelungenlied
is deeper than that of Roland. One reviewer concluded on the basis of the first paragraph of the Roland chapter that I am an enlightened pacifist.

Here I will go into only one of these questions, namely, the relation of the book to German literature and culture, and in fact chiefly because in that context one misunderstanding can be dispelled. World history has made it so that one in my situation can scarcely speak on this topic without hurting someone’s feelings. I will take the risk anyway.

The preponderance of Romance material in
Mimesis
is to be explained not only because of the fact that I am a Romanist, but rather above all because in most periods the Romance literatures are more representative of Europe than are, for example, the German. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France took unquestionably the leading role; in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Italy took it over; it fell again to France in the seventeenth, remained there also during the greater part of the eighteenth, partly still in the nineteenth, and precisely for the origin and development of modern realism (just as for painting). It would be erroneous to read between the lines of my selection [any] preferences or aversions of a fundamental kind — and equally wrong to see estrangement or aversion in the regret or criticism that
occasionally comes to be expressed about certain limitations of outlook in German literature of the nineteenth century. The opposite would be more accurate. The criticism comes out of sorrow over missed possibilities to give a different direction to European history. The great French novelists are, for the posing of the problem in
Mimesis
, of crucial significance; my admiration for them is great. But for pleasure and relaxation I prefer to read Goethe, Stifter, and Keller.

It has been said that I acquired my category of stylistic mingling from modern French realism, and indeed one could deduce that from the epilogue of
Mimesis
. However, the arrangement of this is chronologically misleading The motif of a stylistic break became apparent to me first in the story of Christ, during my Dante studies in the 1920s; one finds it in
Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt
(which appeared at the end of 1928), pages 18-23.
²¹
Shortly after the appearance of this book I began to teach in Marburg, and the teaching activity led me back to French, which I had rather neglected during my years as a librarian, in which I worked on Vico and Dante.
²²
While preparing a course of lectures in Marburg, the thought came to me that one could present the principle of modern realism in corresponding fashion; it was then published in two essays that appeared in 1933 and 1937.
²³

There is yet another side to the matter:
Mimesis
attempts to comprehend Europe, but it is a German book not only on account of its language. Anyone who is a little familiar with the structure of the humanities in various countries sees that at once. It arose from the themes and methods of German intellectual history and philology; it would be conceivable in no other tradition than in that of German romanticism and Hegel. It would have never been written without the influences that I experienced in my youth in Germany.
²⁴

It has often been said that my conceptualization is not unambiguous and that the expressions that I use for organizational categories required a sharper definition. It is true that I do not define these terms, in fact even that I am not consistent throughout in using them. That happened intentionally and methodically. My effort for exactitude relates to the individual and the concrete. In contrast, the general, which compares, compiles, or differentiates phenomena, ought to be elastic and flexible; to the utmost that is possible, it ought to fall into line with what is feasible from case to case, and it is to be understood from case to case only from the context. There is not in intellectual history identity and strict conformity to laws, and abstract, reductive concepts falsity or destroy the phenomena. The arranging must happen in such a way that it allows the individual phenomenon to live and unfold freely. Were it possible, I would not have used any generalizing expressions at all, but instead I would have suggested the thought to the reader purely by presenting a sequence of particulars. That is not possible; accordingly I used some much-used terms, like realism and moralism, and, compelled by my subject, I even introduced two little-used ones: stylistic differentiation and stylistic mingling. That they all, but especially the much-used words, signify all and nothing was perfectly clear to me; they should acquire their meaning only from the context, and in fact from the particular context. That has obviously not always worked out. Almost all misunderstandings have arisen because, all the same, the reader has precisely the possibility to release the schema of a concept from the context and to hold fast pedantically to it; and thus, to give an example that has not been mentioned yet, he can hold against me that he finds
Phèdre
more realistic than
Madame Bovary
. A good writer must write in such a way that one infers from the text what he intended to express. That is not easy. Earlier I believed that one could devise words and collocations that comprehend the general in the historically intellectual more exactly than do the usual ones, and I tried it with “popular spiritualism,” “dialectic of feeling” ([Karl] Vossler [1872-1949]), and “serious imitation of the everyday.” But that only leads to new misunderstandings and, what is more, sounds pretentious and pedantic. It is in
the nature of our subject that our general concepts are poorly differentiable and are undefinable. Their worth — the worth of concepts such as classic, Renaissance, mannerism, baroque, enlightenment, Romanticism, realism, symbolism, and so forth, most of which originally designate literary epochs or groups, but which are also applicable far beyond those — accordingly, their worth consists in that they elicit in readers or hearers a series of ideas that facilitate for them an understanding of what is meant in the particular context. They are not exact. The attempts to define them, or even only to collect completely and without contradiction those characteristics that compose them, can never lead to the desired result — even though they are often interesting, for the reason that someone produces in the discussion a new point of view and thereby assists in the enrichment of our ideas. One must beware, it seems to me, of regarding the exact sciences as our model; our precision relates to the particular. The progress of the historical arts in the last two centuries consists above all, apart from the opening up of new material and in a great refinement of methods in individual research, in a perspectival formation of judgment, which makes it possible to accord the various epochs and cultures their own presuppositions and views, to strive to the utmost toward the discovery of those, and to dismiss as unhistorical and dilettantish every absolute assessment of the phenomena that is brought in from outside. This historical perspectivism was founded by the pre-Romantic and Romantic critics; since then it has turned out to be very refined and ever more complicated, through insight into a great number of previously unknown or unheeded developments, influences, and relationships. A person with a classificatory taxonomy that works with exact and set conceptions of order cannot succeed in drawing together the aspects that intersect multiply into a synthesis that does justice to the subjects.

Another objection that people have made is this: that my presentation is all too time-bound and all too much determined by the present. That is also intentional. I tried to make myself thoroughly conversant with the many subjects and periods that are treated in
Mimesis
. With a deliberate extravagance of time I studied not only the phenomena that had direct significance for the aim of the book, but I read around widely in the various periods. But in the end I asked: How do matters look in the European context? No one today can see such a context from anywhere else today than precisely from the present, and specifically from the present that is determined by the personal origin, history, and education of the viewer. It is better to be consciously than unconsciously time-bound.
In many learned writings one finds a kind of objectivity in which, entirely unbeknownst to the composer, modern judgments and prejudices (often not even today’s but instead yesterday’s or those of the day before yesterday) cry out from every word, every rhetorical flourish, every phrase.
Mimesis
is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.

*
First published in
Romanische Forschungen
65 (1953) 1-18.

¹
Mimesis. Eine Rezension
. Den Mitgliedern von Svenska Klassikerförbundet … überreicht. Uppsala: Privately Printed, 1949, 23 pp. Rept. in Otto Regenbogen,
Kleine Schriften
, ed. Franz Dirlmeier (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1961), pp. 600-617.

²
Modern Language Notes
55 (1950) 426-431.

³
I will not here delve into the questions relating to Augustine; they have been dealt with in the meantime in this journal [
Romanische Forschungen
], 64 (1952) 309ff.

⁴
[The phrases
vita comes
and
vita comitante
are frequent in Carolingian poetry: see Otto Schumann,
Lateinisches Hexameter-Lexikon. Dichterisches Formelgut von Ennius bis zum Archipoeta
, vol. 5 (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1982), p. 680.]

⁵
[Auerbach compared the self-expression and thinking of the ancient authors with that of [Michael Ivanovitch] Rostovtzeff [1870-1952] (
Mimesis
, p. 39).]