Re: Mimesis

["stolz" <stolz@xxxxxxx>]

Eagleton wrires:

The avant-garde Leftists also found something sinisterly consoling in
representational realism, which reassures us with images of a world we feel at
home with. Bernard Shaw's plays may be radical in their content, but their
stage directions portray a world so solid, familiar and well-upholstered, all
the way down to the level of the whisky in the decanter on the sideboard, that
it is hard to imagine ever being able to change it. In this sense, the realist
form usurps the radical content. Besides, representational art is from one
viewpoint the least realist of all, since it is strictly speaking impossible.
Nobody can tell it like it is without editing and angling as they go along.
Otherwise the book or painting would simply merge into the world. No sooner
had the English novel embarked on its celebrated rise in the 18th century than
Laurence Sterne reminded his literary colleagues of the crazed hubris of the
realist project. Determined not to cheat the reader by leaving anything out,
Tristram Shandy represents so much material so painstakingly that its
narrative collapses. Indeed, the novel form itself is an impossible
contradiction, since it is committed at once to representation and formal
design, two ends which, in our society at least, are ultimately incompatible.
You cannot marry everyone happily off in the last ten pages and claim that
this is how life is.
------------------------------

What a rubbish!  It's OK for  Eagleton to hate the guts of "Stalinist" Lukacs
but why to make a clown of himself.  I wonder if he ever read Anna Karenina,
Gorky's Mother, or Sholokhov's epic let alone got interested in the history of
their reception and the impact these and so many other realist works made on
moral and political education of millions of people.  There is nothing
"sinister" about a British "Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands
Fellow at the University of Manchester" writing in the legislator of bourgeois
taste like London Review of Books about what revolutionary art is and is not
and attacking the 20th century realism.  There is something slightly
despicable about this.

But when it comes to explaining to us WHY exactly Auerbach's study is "great"
Professor Eagleton turns strangely apolitical and repeats apologetic
banalities to the book that became one of the cornerstones of the post-war
bourgeois scholarship.

>>Auerbach ranges through some of the mighty monuments of Western literature,
from Homer, medieval romance, Dante and Rabelais to Montaigne, Cervantes,
Goethe, Stendhal and a good many authors besides, scanning their work for
symptoms of realism. >>
--------------

"The mighty monuments of Western literature, from Homer" on?   Could anyone on
this list confirm that this is indeed what "Trotskyist lecturers" say nowadays
in British universities?  Shit, if so their students better opt for some good
liberal professordom of Edward Said type.  At least, they won't draw the
straight line of mighty Western thought from Aristotle to Eagleton.
----------------

>>His criterion for selection, however, is more political than formal or
epistemological. The question is whether we can find secreted in the language
of a particular text the bustling, workaday life of the common people. For
Auerbach as for Mikhail Bakhtin, who was writing his classic work on Rabelais
and realism at much the same time that Auerbach was holed up almost bereft of
books in Istanbul, realism is in the broadest sense a matter of the
vernacular. It is the artistic word for a warm-hearted populist humanism. It
is thus an anti-Fascist poetics, rather as for Bakhtin it was an
anti-Stalinist one. Mimesis is among other things its author's response to
those who drove him into exile, even if they were unlikely to have heard of
Farinata and Cavalcante or Frate Alberto.

For all its formidable erudition, then, there is a fairly simple opposition at
work in Mimesis, one more class-based and militant than the universal respect
paid to Auerbach by conservative scholars would intimate. Realism is the
artistic form that takes the life of the common people with supreme
seriousness, in contrast to an ancient or neoclassical art which is static,
hierarchical, dehistoricised, elevated, idealist and socially exclusive. In
Walter Benjamin's terms, it is an art which destroys the aura. There is an
implied continuity in this respect between Homeric epic and the Third Reich,
with its heroic myths, tragic posturing and spurious sublimity. If all this
had been argued by a Trotskyist English lecturer at a redbrick English
university, rather than by one of the 20th century's most eminent Romance
philologists, it would almost certainly have provoked a clutch of dyspeptic
reviews in the learned journals. If you can make such claims in a dozen or so
different languages, however, as Auerbach doubtless could, and if like him you
know your French heroic epic from your Middle High German one, you are likely
to win a more sympathetic hearing.>>
------------------------

The fact is that Auerbach himself became a "mighty monument" precisely because
he procured Western Imperialism with the sublime literary pedigree right in
time for its Cold War crusade.   Characteristically, Auerbach's "criterion for
selection" excludes  from this glorious tradition 19-century Russian novel,
which Lukacs saw as the culmination and the unsurpassed model of realist art.
  No wonder this "Trotskyist English lecturer" gets invited to review books
for LRB.  He makes Auerbach a champion of a class-based approach, and Lukacs a
defender of bourgeois hegemony! In the real world, however, Bakhtin was a
neo-Kantian with the taste for literary theology and his idealist philosophy
of "dialogism" between the opaque, proudly unique "subjectivities" was
anything but popular democratic, which explains its popularity among
anti-communist intelligentsia as well as in the Cold War US academy where
Bakhtin became an industry.  As for  his "anti-Stalinist" theory of "carnival
culture", this is little more than another scholarly utopia of the
pre-bourgeois world and its ideological relation  to the culture of Stalin's
SU  might be more complex than Eaglton imagines.

Vadim Stolz

Pork Chops and Pineapples
Terry Eagleton

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n20/eagl01_.html



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