Tragic Realism
点击上方“外国文学研究”可以订阅哦
内容摘要
“悲剧现实主义”由埃里希·奥尔巴赫提出，总结了他对“模仿”以及语文学的理解。奥尔巴赫主要使用悲剧现实主义来描述 19 世纪小说的智识要求，但这一概念所反映的正是 19 世纪现代性在法国大革命后对维系及探查世界的激进历史性的迫切需求。因此，奥尔巴赫在《模仿论》（1946）中强调了对日常生活的重点关注。奥尔巴赫于 1941 至 1942 年间在伊斯坦布尔的演说中对现实主义的阐释体现了悲剧现实主义早已主导他的思维：“悲剧”意味着现代现实主义包含希腊悲剧的睿智。同希腊悲剧一样，现代现实主义介入了世界的激进历史性，而民主的概念体系正是通过这一历史性得到商榷。鉴于此，本文聚焦奥尔巴赫在伊斯坦布尔的演说，探讨悲剧现实主义的三个层面。此三个层面奥尔巴赫皆有谈及，但未曾得到深层解释：第一，悲剧现实主义是一种用作解释历史的灾难结构，第二次世界大战即为证明；第二，19世纪英语小说乃一种迂回的现实主义；第三，影视在 20 世纪成为现实主义的载体。这三个层面勾勒出悲剧现实主义的隐性理论。这一理论不仅对《模仿论》进行了补充，而且指向具有普遍意义的现代性理论。
关键词
悲剧现实主义；埃里希·奥尔巴赫；战争；悲剧；小说；中国；原子论；世界文学
作者简介
塔蒂亚娜·尤基奇，克罗地亚萨格勒布大学英语系教授、主任。她讲授维多利亚文学与艺术、电影研究以及多门比较文学与克罗地亚语言文学的博士课程，出版两本专著。她在《亨利·詹姆斯评论》《维多利亚研究》《世界文学》《欧洲英语研究》等期刊上发表文章多篇。
Title
Tragic Realism
Abstract
Tragic realism is a concept outlined by Erich Auerbach; in many ways, it summarizes his understanding of mimesis and, by extension, his understanding of philology. While Auerbach employs it mainly to describe the intellectual stakes of the novel in the nineteenth century, what it captures is no less than the imperative of nineteenth-century modernity, in the wake of the French Revolution, to sustain and investigate the radical historicity of the world; hence Auerbach’s emphatic concern with the everyday in Mimesis (1946). By then, however, tragic realism has already dominated Auerbach’s thinking, most pointedly perhaps in his Istanbul lecture on realism in 1941-1942: “tragic” suggesting that modern realism entails the intelligence of Greek tragedy, invested as Greek tragedy was in engaging the world’s radical historicity, against which the conceptual apparatus of democracy was negotiated. With a focus on the Istanbul lecture, I propose to discuss tragic realism against three points that Auerbach makes, but does not pursue: first, that tragic realism serves to explain history as a structure of catastrophe, as evidenced by the Second World War; second, that the nineteenth-century English novel sidesteps realism; and third, that cinema takes over as a foothold of realism in the twentieth century. Taken together, these three claims seem to chart a tacit theory of tragic realism that supplements Mimesis and invites a general theory of modernity.
Key words
tragic realism; Erich Auerbach; war; tragedy; the novel; China; atomism; world literature
Author
Tatjana Jukić is Professor and Head of English Literature of the Department of English, University of Zagreb, Croatia, where she teaches Victorian literature and arts, film studies, and various courses in the doctoral programs of Comparative Literature and of Croatian Language and Literature. She is the author of two monographs, as well as of essays in a variety of journals and collections, including The Henry James Review, Victorian Studies, Orbis Litterarum, and the European Journal of English Studies.
Email: tjukic@m.ffzg.hr
Introduction: War
In perhaps the single most important book of Western philology in the twentieth century – Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, written in Turkey during the Second World War and first published in 1946 – tragic realism surfaces in Chapter Eighteen (458) as a concept that describes not merely the intellectual stakes of the novel in the nineteenth century but the rationale of nineteenth-century modernity. In the wake of the French Revolution, Auerbach suggests, the novel is tasked with sustaining the terms of the radical investigation of the world against a sense of historical complacency, and realism references the fact that the world remains targeted for investigation; hence Auerbach’s concern with concepts like the everyday, the common and the ordinary when he speaks about realism. The French Revolution was when the “process of temporal concentration” began in Europe, he writes, “both of historical events themselves and of everyone’s knowledge of them,” resulting in “modern tragic realism based on the contemporary” to which forceful “modern consciousness of reality” was key (Mimesis 458, 459). It is an argument voiced emphatically in his lecture “Realism in Europe in the Nineteenth Century,” delivered in Istanbul in 1941-1942, in which tragic realism is pervasive: “tragic” implying that realism should be explained against the intelligence of tragedy, and that nineteenth-century modernity may well depend for its self-definition on acknowledging this fact.
That tragic realism entails a general theory of modernity, not only in the nineteenth century, can be inferred from a point that Auerbach makes at the end of the Istanbul lecture, but does not pursue: in his view, realism is a position from which to “understand … the tragic events occurring today” – in the Second World War – that contribute to a history “manifested through catastrophic events and ruptures” (“Realism in Europe” 193). Clearly, tragic realism in Auerbach’s view proceeds from the French Revolution but accommodates the idea of world war, so much so that realism receives its rationale from a world which is wholly engaged in war; it is in this sense that world war is as much about war as it is about the modern world, whose totality coincides with warfare. In another Istanbul lecture, on literature and war, delivered at about the same time, in 1940-1941, Auerbach states that “[w]orld war puts forth the world problem” (“Literature and War” 204); or rather, he says that “[w]orld war is how the world problem is clarified” (Kultur als Politik 48). ① This means that the underlying condition of the modern world is revealed to be one of fundamentally interrupted identification and substitution. If that is the case, then tragic realism begins as a language of interrupted identification and substitution – say, a language in which metaphor is suspended – but one whose world persists, even prevails, as a sustained, relentless demand to think transformation, so much so that a failure to think transformation manifests as catastrophe and rupture.
These early lectures constitute in many ways a preamble or supplement to Mimesis. Like Mimesis, they were written in Turkey during the war, a document to Auerbach’s sojourn there as an exile from Nazi Germany.② Unlike Mimesis, they point emphatically to world war as an intellectual stake of realism, and suggest that realism is instrumental to understanding the Second World War, specifically as a structure of repetition. Repetition turns out to be a trajectory of rupture and catastrophe in modernity and an index of failed attempts to think transformation; for the same reason, repetition is an index of failed attempts at realism. Without realism, Auerbach implies, the Second World War is likely to remain underanalyzed and misunderstood, and contribute a less than tragic flaw to modern humanity – it is not for nothing that Auerbach, a preeminent philologist, should call the Second World War a plural tragic event. Indeed, in the conclusion of his lecture on realism in Europe in the nineteenth century, Auerbach says, “That which is being prepared today, that which has been in preparation for a century, is the tragic realism I have discussed, modern realism, the life shared in common which grants the possibility of life to all people on earth” (“Realism in Europe” 193).
01
Tragedy
That last sentence is particularly revealing, and it entails another argument which is formative to realism: apparently, realism relates to the reason of tragedy, because its task, like the task of tragedy in fifth-century Athens, is to negotiate a political rationality – an understanding of life which is shared in common, one comparable to the invention of democracy in ancient Greece.
There is a theory of realism in that one sentence, and it relies on aligning tragic realism with modern realism into a single thought. It is not only that modern rationality, as Auerbach understands it, is informed by the intelligence of Greek tragedy and, by extension, of democracy; it is also that the true extent of this contact – indeed, of this in-formation – cannot be known except in terms of realism, or as realism. It is in this sense that realism constitutes the truth of modernity. After all, Auerbach’s understanding of war, too, is a fit for the role which was assigned to war in the imaginary of Greek antiquity. According to Nicole Loraux, war and politics were “the experiences basic to the Greek city” and “the starting point for deciphering the fantasies of the Athenian imaginary,” and “understanding citizenship in its origins also implies an appreciation of the armed warrior in Athena, ‘the goddess-woman armed with every weapon’” (The Children of Athena 17-18).
That realism thus imagined is implicitly political can be inferred from Auerbach’s claim that realism professes no less than “the life shared in common,” whose promise is one of “life to all people on earth.” As noted, the life shared in common spells out the concept of democracy, whose invention in fifth-century Athens coincides with the language of tragedy. Tragedy, as Jean-Pierre Vernant points out, was invented in the fifth century BC so as to address and engage the transformation, of language too, that ultimately brought about the conceptual apparatus of democracy in ancient Greece. Once the process of shaping the democratic polis is finished, not even Aristotle can know, says Vernant, “the tragic consciousness or tragic man”: because tragedy “is born, flourishes, and disappears in Athens within the space of a hundred years” (89).
What realism captures as tragic, that is, seems to be a radical, overwhelming historicity of the world, one that, while feeding into the concept of democracy, remains excessive to it. Hence Auerbach’s interest in the everyday: when he speaks about the life shared in common, which is implicit to tragic realism, Auerbach insists on defining realism as a sustained investment of language in the everyday, so much so that the relentlessness of the everyday is synonymous with realism in his work. For Auerbach, the everyday points to the acute historical conditions of participation in the affairs of world – to the life shared in common – and, as such, paves the way to the idea of democracy. Without taking the everyday into account, democracy is void of radical historicity, which is given up for bland historicism. For Auerbach, it is only when the common is translated into the everyday, and the ordinary into the contemporary, that tragic realism is truly in operation: “the topic could be ordinary only when it was contemporary” (“Realism in Europe” 182), says Auerbach in his discussion of tragic realism in the nineteenth century. Also, this is why tragic realism, while proceeding from the French Revolution, is still in preparation: Auerbach argues that the world keeps pressing on the conceptual apparatus of modern European democracy, which is why the language of modern democracy keeps revisiting the very terms of its formation, as or into literature. For Vernant, tragedy is about a language being forged without which the conceptual apparatus of early democracy would have been impossible; for Auerbach, modern realism is about feeding that conceptual apparatus back to the conditions of tragedy.
That is also how Auerbach revisits his own philological formation. For him, the invocation of tragic realism is always also a reference to Dante Alighieri, with whom modernity begins as figural realism: figural pointing to “the maintenance of the basic historical reality of figures, against all attempts at spiritually allegorical interpretation” that prevail in the European Middle Ages (Mimesis 196). This, in Auerbach’s view, explains Dante’s decision to call his Commedia just that, a comedy, because figural realism allows for bringing together historical reality and allegory into “a mixed style” (Mimesis 198) by which the concept of comedy is decided in the first place. It follows that Dante’s Commedia, precisely because a comedy, “had compassed… tragic realism” too, destroying in the process Christian-figural realism – yet Auerbach is quick to add that “that tragic realism had immediately been lost again” (Mimesis 231). Tellingly, this constitutes an astute hint at ancient Greek comedy, which in many ways began as a comment on tragedy, or as paratragedy, so that Athenian “comedy is always, and by definition, ready to criticize democracy” (Loraux, The Divided City 229, emphasis added). Or, in the words of Froma Zeitlin, “[a]long with the parody of other serious forms of discourse within the city (judicial, ritual, political, poetic), paratragōdia, or the parody of tragedy, is a consistent feature of Aristophanic comedy” (378). Pierre Vidal-Naquet goes so far as to say that “Aristophanes was a better reader of Aeschylus than many of our twentieth-century critics” (253).
To sum up: what Auerbach’s Dante captures is the loss of tragedy to modernity except as genre, whose best chance at truth is in the mixed style of comedy. It therefore comes as no surprise that, in his discussion of Jean Racine and the seventeenth-century French classicist tragedy, Auerbach should hold that “[t]he classic tragedy of the French represents the ultimate extreme in the separation of styles, in the severance of the tragic from the everyday and real” (Mimesis 387) – a comment the historian Roger Chartier identifies as being germane to the intellectual groundwork of the French Revolution (10). Tragic realism is retrieved when tragedy as literary archive is unpacked into a language of radical historicity – of the everyday – in which substitution (allegory, metaphor) is sidestepped for contiguity and proximity (metonymy), just as identification is sidestepped for relations of intimacy. This also means that democracy is functional only when its conceptual apparatus is unpacked into metonymy.
02
The Novel
This unpacking, according to Auerbach, happens in the novel, and realism is how the nineteenth-century novel is betrayed to entail the function and conditions of Greek tragedy. The novel cultivates the language of radical historicity in which the French Revolution is inflected, now as tragic excess in the nineteenth century, and realism names precisely the excess of historicity that tragedy, or the revolution for that matter, forgot on its way to being archived. In fact, the intellectual constitution of nineteenth-century modernity seems decided in this excess, insofar as the nineteenth century is the century of the novel. It follows that the novel is as historical as the Greek tragedy (which, in Vernant’s words, is born, flourishes, and disappears in Athens within the space of a hundred years); hence Auerbach’s claim that “the realist novel would have a brighter future in times to come if it were not for the art of cinema, which rivals it in the field of realism” (“Realism in Europe” 185). Hence, also, Auerbach’s claim that “[r]ealism as we understand it today, whether in the novel, the cinema, or something else, could not have emerged prior to the nineteenth century, for there was no readership that could understand it” (“Realism in Europe” 185).
Auerbach voices these concerns as early as “Romanticism and Realism” (1933), when he writes that only realism impacted by “the French Revolution and its aftermath” embedded, consistently, “the tragic within the everyday” and “discovered the sphere of the tragic within a realm that had until then been home only to the base and the comic” (Time, History, and Literature 145-146). In nineteenth-century realism, he adds, “everydayness does not merely interrupt tragedy” but “is the very home of the tragic itself” (Time, History, and Literature 147). That, as well, seems to spell out the distinction between figural and tragic realisms: figural realism appears to be pre-revolutionary, whereas tragic realism surfaces as revolutionary language, whereby revolution is revealed as an essentially realist function. If film is how this tragic excess is rehearsed in the twentieth century, then film does to the twentieth century what the novel did to the nineteenth; put otherwise, film may be how the twentieth century comes closest to the radical conditions of tragedy. Once again, this is a claim put forward as early as 1933, Auerbach observing that, “[w]hile not undermining all prior aesthetic traditions in their entirety, the cinema does, in my opinion, shake them to their foundations and forces upon them a complete transformation” (Time, History, and Literature 155). This in many ways anticipates Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of film, for instance, Cavell’s claim that the creation of film “was as if meant for philosophy – meant to reorient everything philosophy has said about reality and its representation, about art and imitation, about greatness and conventionality, about judgement and pleasure, about skepticism and transcendence, about language and expression” (vii, xii) – not least because it is only in film, or as film, that Cavell can fully think a coming together of tragedy and the ordinary, his two philosophical lynchpins. ③
Auerbach repeatedly cites Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir, 1830) as an exemplifying instance of tragic realism (Time, History, and Literature 146, 152; “Realism in Europe” 189-190; Mimesis 466). Repeatedly, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel is advertised as the first self to exact the modern outline of the tragic consciousness or tragic man, as Vernant would put it: like Stendhal, Sorel is above all a relation of susceptibility to the world (he is ombrageux, Mimesis 466) against which a self is asserted. “[T]his,” says Auerbach, “explains the fact that the stylistic level of his [Stendhal’s] great realistic novels is much closer to the old great and heroic concept of tragedy than is that of most later realists – Julien Sorel is much more a ‘hero’ than the characters of Balzac, to say nothing of Flaubert” (Mimesis 466). This, then, is why Stendhal’s novel is revolutionary in the final analysis and Balzac’s is not, or not quite – realism itself being a tragic hero in the history of the novel.
To Auerbach, the French Revolution is instrumental to tragic realism in the Stendhal novel, and in the novel as such, because the revolution engages a self essentially as a relation of susceptibility. Compared to Stendhal, Balzac fails at tragic realism because he “was sixteen years younger than Stendhal and had not seen the old society or the revolution” (“Realism in Europe” 189). The same may be the reason why Auerbach dismisses the English novel, even though “many would have me give place to Thackeray and Dickens beside Balzac and Stendhal” (“Realism in Europe” 191). “I do not find in them the best understanding of the political and economic entities which characterize the new forms of tragic realism,” says Auerbach, and adds: “Although everyday life in England is very modern, the vantage point on life is very backward” (“Realism in Europe” 191). ④
Yet the new form of tragic realism, in which a self is claimed for radical susceptibility to historical transformation, seems to have been invented precisely in the nineteenth-century English novel, by Jane Austen – so much so that a self falls prey to the novel as an instance of relentless education. It is for this reason that Austen’s narrative selves, her focalizing consciousnesses, cannot coincide with the narrator even though they are engaged for radical narrative intimacy; in each of her six finished novels, they are consistently metonymic to the narrator but never identical to it. For the same reason, Austen does not subscribe to the idea of the Bildungsroman. While it is true that Thackeray and Dickens do not come across as Austenites, or not easily, Elizabeth Gaskell does, as does Henry James. Moreover, to Gaskell the focalizing consciousness is a trajectory to the industrial novel, whereby the Industrial Revolution becomes a format of understanding and Manchester a Victorian Athens, especially in North and South (1854-1855).
Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), is already a summary of this process. Elinor Dashwood, Austen’s first focalizing consciousness, begins by becoming fatherless and dispossessed, stripped down to being the poor relation: to being merely a relation and the poorer for it. While her widowed mother and orphaned sister Marianne overplay being ombrageuses into selfishness (Austen mockingly calls it “romantic delicacy” 63), Elinor is strict in acknowledging a sense of self only as it is subject to dire historical contingency of the everyday. If that in itself constitutes her realism as tragic, it is also how the constitution of the focalizing consciousness in the nineteenth-century novel is shown to proceed from tragic realism. Elinor is prey to language in the same way: by strenuously keeping her word to those who do not keep theirs (Lucy Steele), she educates her narrative self into a bare, vulnerable linguistic relation – into a tragic speech act. That is why sense and sensibility in Austen’s novel are not opposite but relate exactly as they sound: they make for an alliteration and a sustained metonymy, their intimacy ultimately a syntactic one of the narrator and the focalizing consciousness. When Fredric Jameson identifies Auerbach’s realism, repeatedly, as “a syntactic conquest” (3, 163-164), what this brings to mind is precisely Austen’s radical narrative syntax. ⑤
That Austen’s novel was also a shorthand for an economic understanding that went into the making of tragic realism is suggested by the economist Thomas Piketty. Piketty takes Austen and Balzac to be no less than the specimen stories of capital in nineteenth-century Europe; additionally, Piketty suggests that realism was instrumental to this understanding when he notes that Austen “[i]n particular… minutely describes daily life in the early nineteenth century” (415). To Piketty, Elinor Dashwood’s destitution may be exemplary insofar as Norland, the parental estate in Sussex from which Elinor is banished, is “the pinnacle of wealth in Jane Austen’s novels” (413). This makes Elinor a revolutionary figure, because the focalizing consciousness in the Austen novel is shown to begin as the conceptual purity of wealth is being dismantled into relations of impoverishment. By Mansfield Park (1814), “being honest and rich has become impossible” (85) in an Austen novel, as Terry Eagleton astutely remarks.
If that is how the focalizing consciousness begins in the Austen novel, it is certainly symptomatic that it ends once the novel takes for its subject the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, in Persuasion (1818), Austen’s last finished work. It is thus the Austen novel that the historian Peter Fritzsche references when he writes that, between 1806 and 1815, “the revolutionary wars killed as many soldiers and civilians, proportionately, as did World War I,” and also that “the revolutionary wars mobilized and garrisoned and ultimately killed more men than had any other previous war” (34). Taken together, Austen’s novels seem to imply that the French Revolution is indeed the trajectory of tragic realism in the nineteenth century, as Auerbach argues, but one whose rationale derives from an understanding of modern revolutions as they go back to the English Revolution, and anticipates world war, which is why the French Revolution fails to contain it. That Auerbach, too, is open to this line of thought can be evinced from his remark, in “Literature and War,” that in nineteenth-century “Britain the democratic state was bound to an unshakable tradition,” Britain being “the most democratic of all” nations at the time (“Literature and War” 202). Auerbach seems to associate nineteenth-century Britain with democratic excess here, precisely the excess in which tragic realism is decided – which is why his decision to dismiss the (pre-)Victorian novel from tragic realism, on the evidence of Dickens and Thackeray, could be explained as a failure to take into account the radical format of the focalizing consciousness in the English novel at the time, just as Dickens and Thackeray themselves were reluctant to engage it.
The fact that Auerbach concludes Mimesis with a chapter on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and a close reading of Woolf’s “middle voicedness” (Figural Realism 40), as Hayden White calls it, seems to compensate precisely for this failure – it is only that Woolf already coincides with cinema taking over as a domain of tragic realism. In the words of Laura Marcus, Woolf, while critical of cinema, “undoubtedly saw or found in film a relationship to reality that gave visible form to her own world-view, and her fascination with ‘the thing that exists when we aren’t there’, the phrase linked, at one point in her diaries, to the concept of images and ideas ‘shoulder[ing] each other out across the screen of my brain’” (115).
03
China
It is a line of thought whose historical climax is a reference to China, China constituting for Auerbach the present tense – the tense present? – of tragic realism and the democratic project in 1946. In the last paragraph of Mimesis, Auerbach indexes “Pearl Buck’s Chinese peasants” for “a common life of mankind on earth” (Mimesis 552): a claim that echoes Auerbach’s earlier remark, in the Istanbul lecture on realism, that “[w]e rightly consider the wonderful Chinese novels of Madame Pearl Buck to be realist novels” (“Realism in Europe” 182). Historically, this coincides with Chinese culture itself negotiating the concept of realism into an operable relation. Wang Shouren notes that “etymologically, the term ‘realism’ ( 现实主义 ) … originated from other languages, and literary realism is an imported idea” (75-76); likewise, “the word ‘reality’ ( 现实 ) … did not appear in the Chinese vocabulary until the late 19th century when it was first coined in the Japanese language and then travelled to China” (76). Lydia H. Liu speaks emphatically about transformation when she observes that “[t]he huge influx of translated European literature into China in the first few decades of the twentieth century so radically transformed the nature of written vernacular Chinese that subsequent translations between modern Chinese and English assume a whole different character” (106).
What appeals to Auerbach about Pearl Buck’s Chinese novels in the 1940s, that is, is not their presumption to authenticity, but their ambition to investigate the life “shared in common” outside of modern Europe, one whose formative intelligence, while not identical to modern Europe’s, allows for metonymic closeness. Also, in this brief comment, the constitution of Auerbach’s own language, and of his philology, is again revealed as one staunchly based in metonymy – and, by extension, in realism – insofar as metonymy serves to explore relations of proximity and contiguity, of intimacy past identification. For this reason, Auerbach could well be a sinologist in the making, Chinese being a culture in which the metonymic limit of Europe’s modern intelligence is decided. And this is why I would argue that tragic realism, as Auerbach understands it, takes Chinese culture to be its intellectual perimeter. For the same reason, I take tragic to indicate the condition of realism in which relations of intimacy and susceptibility take over from the concepts of identification and substitution, language itself becoming ombrageux. ⑥
Auerbach’s understanding of historicity, too, finds an important inflection in his concluding reference to China in Mimesis, because China at the time was how revolution peaked in the present tense and, with it, the conditions of tragic realism. When Auerbach speaks of “Pearl Buck’s Chinese peasants,” he in fact speaks of humanity being claimed for revolutionary urgency, revolution essentially a realist function in the American novel which is thus being confronted with its own revolutionary buildup. It is an argument I propose to understand against a point made by the historian Jürgen Osterhammel (265-267), that revolution was a concept modern Europe forged while also describing historical shifts of authority in Asian cultures, notably in China. This means that a decision to write about the English, American or French Revolutions – or about the novel, or, finally, about realism – has been prearranged as it were by the language Europe had forged in order to relate to Asia. ⑦
04
Atomism
There is nothing imprecise about Auerbach’s philology here; in fact, tragic realism is how Auerbach negotiates a point of contact between the languages of philology, political theory, and philosophy.
Once again, one turns to the Istanbul lectures for confirmation. In a telling example, almost a parable, Auerbach argues that an ordinary baker engaged for a heroic act would not constitute a realist figure, because heroism is not of the order of the everyday and therefore fails to count as realism. A baker who does what he does every day, however, and is, say, “mixed up in an important court case,” does constitute realism, because it is as the everyday and in the everyday that that baker partakes of the world together with and alongside exceptional figures like “Atatürk, Roosevelt, or Einstein” (“Realism in Europe” 183).
In political terms, this is the language of democracy, whose modern theory harks back to the philosophy of David Hume and an empiricist appreciation of proximity, in a world in which Atatürk, Roosevelt, Einstein, and an ordinary baker are decided by a network of relationships that brings them together. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, it is a language decided not by the verb is, but by and, a conjunction: “Thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret” (57). The focus may well be on Hume in this particular context, because, while “every history of philosophy has its chapter on empiricism: Locke and Berkeley have their place there,” it is in Hume that “there is something very strange which completely displaces empiricism, giving it a new power, a theory and practice of relations, of the AND” (Deleuze and Parnet 15). In philological terms, this is metonymic language, insofar as metonymy, unlike metaphor, is exhausted by negotiating the relations of proximity and contiguity (to which the conjunctions and and with are instrumental), over and above the relations of substitution and identification (the verb is). In terms of modern science, this is a language which points to atomic physics, the physics of subatomic particles, whose emphasis is on understanding the extreme relations of proximity; it is certainly telling that Auerbach should reference specifically Albert Einstein in his discussion of realism.
That Auerbach should engage physics for realism is in character with his philology, and one could argue that Auerbach’s own grasp of the everyday – of the radical historicity of the world that goes into the making of tragic realism – is consistently atomistic. In “Figura,” his 1938 essay on figural language, he remarks that hardly anyone understood figural language better than ancient atomist poets/philosophers, notably Lucretius, which is to say Epicurean physics; one should add that Epicurean physics is in many ways a precursor to modern atomic physics. Lucretius, says Auerbach, “espoused a cosmogony indebted to Democritus and Epicurus, in which the world consists of atoms … bodies whose clashings, motions, order, positions, [and] shapes] create all things,” which is why Lucretius often refers to atoms “as ‘shapes’ (figurae), and …, conversely, one can often translate figurae with ‘atoms’” (Time, History, and Literature 70). When Auerbach describes this to constitute a contribution to philology that is “without a doubt the most individually brilliant, if not the historically most important one” (Time, History, and Literature 70), he actually claims Epicurean atomism for a bedrock of mimesis, mimesis naming the world precisely in terms of relentless transformation, whose physics is available to philology as a relation of radical historicity. That radical historicity is how physics absorbs this relation can be evinced from the fact that Einstein, in June 1924, contributed a foreword to the very Hermann Diels edition of Lucretius that Auerbach emphatically references in “Figura”; Einstein praised Lucretius for a “geometric-mechanical” presentation of atoms that nonetheless adumbrates the conceptual outline of quantum mechanics, which “must make a profound impression” (255). Einstein’s biography supplies further, narrative clues: he attended Diels’s funeral in 1922 (398) and, during his Berlin years, was a colleague of Hans Reichenbach, a physicist/philosopher who later “served on the search committee for Auerbach’s position and chaired the department of philosophy at Istanbul University” (Konuk 50). This, then, is how to read Auerbach’s claim, in 1952, that “our philological home is the earth” (Time, History, and Literature 264); Geoffrey Hartman rightly observes that Auerbach’s chosen authors are “irdisch” and that, to Auerbach, “‘Wirklichkeit’ is a favorite word, better translated as ‘actuality’ or ‘world actualization’ than as ‘reality’” (171). Insofar as tragic realism best captures this particular condition of mimesis, Auerbach seems to suggest that Epicurean atomism, not Aristotle’s philosophy, is a truly apt summary of Attic tragedy, and an equally true anticipation of the novel and film. ⑧
What is also interesting about the Epicurean take on atomism, as it departs from Democritus, is that the movement of atoms is explained as a metonymic trajectory, atoms moving in response to the relations of proximity whose closest philological equivalent is metonymy. Lucretius calls this movement clinamen or “the swerve”, the relation Stephen Greenblatt finds instrumental to the impact of Lucretius on the formation of modernity, not least on the rein-vention of democracy, when he remarks that Thomas Jefferson “owned at least five Latin editions of On the Nature of Things, along with translations of the poem into English, Italian, and French,” and that “[t]he atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence” (262-263). There is a historical swerve here in its own right, leading from Jefferson’s impassioned reception and rejection of Hume’s The History of England to the fact that Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation, in 1841, was on the difference between the Democritean and Epicurean atomism: a case could be made that realism as Auerbach understands it had left its traces on Marx’s earliest philosophical formation. ⑨
When a few years after “Figura” Auerbach engages Einstein for the everyday from which realism receives its (tragic, metonymic) formation, his reference is therefore also to the Epicurean swerve of Einstein’s physics. And there is further philological evidence for this in the Istanbul lectures: as Einstein is claimed for a figure of realism, Stendhal, Auerbach’s epitome of tragic realism, is described, explicitly, as “Epicurean” (“Realism in Europe” 189). After that, the equation, if an equation it is, is fairly simple: if Stendhal, whose constitution is Epicurean, comes closest to tragic realism, and Epicurean atomism comes closest to the truth of philology, then Auerbach’s philology is, in its entirety, inflected in tragic realism, just as tragic realism, by this equation, entails a theory of modernity.
05
World Literature
The everyday, while accommodated in metonymy, clearly falls short of a concept and, by extension, of philosophy, insofar as concepts are the building blocks of philosophy. Yet, for Auerbach, it is exactly the everyday that indexes a radical proximity to the world of the modern man, so much so that this proximity – this metonymy – constitutes the modern human condition. Put otherwise, what realism spells out for modernity is metonymic humanity, which may well be philological rather than philosophical, just as Auerbach’s understanding of realism is philological rather than philosophical. In short, modernity for Auerbach seems to be just short of philosophy, just short of concepts, and realism addresses and explains this philosophical shortcoming of the modern man. For the same reason, modern humanity seems decided in a literary excess, realism being the true name of this excess, one that philosophy cannot but register as a shortcoming.
Auerbach’s view of world literature in “The Philology of World Literature” may be his conclusive response to this problem. In this essay, first published in 1952, some years after the Second World War, Auerbach, now in America, argues that world literature is not about the man’s being at home everywhere in the world, but about the man’s being at home nowhere in the world. Quoting Hugh of Saint Victor, he concludes by saying that “he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land” (Time, History, and Literature 264-265). It follows that world literature, or Weltliteratur, is not about the world which is domesticated by literature, and perhaps only by literature, into a concept upon which philosophy then proceeds to think thinking itself. Instead, world literature, like realism, seems to be about the world in which home as concept is given up for thinking the everyday: not because the everyday is a substitute for home or domicile, but precisely because, once confronted with the everyday, home is undone into a radical historicity of the world in which no domicile can be sustained, and no concept.
That would be my conclusion, too, for now: if realism charts metonymic humanity whose philosophical condition is one of shortcoming, but whose notation is one of literary excess, then world literature, in Auerbach’s view, follows the same reasoning, insofar as the world from which world literature receives its rationale is the world of tragic realism. This may be why Auerbach’s philology is radical, also perhaps in the sense in which radicalism is captured by Hayden White in Metahistory, a book precisely about the intersections of the French Revolution and the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. According to White, radical histories of the French Revolution tend to favor metonymic thinking, and their “historical realism” (Mimesis 191) is one of tragedy.
责任编辑：谢 超
此文原载于《外国文学研究》2024年第1期
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