Return to Mimesis: Georg Lukács and Erich Auerbach

in the Wake of Postmodernity 1

Christophe Den Tandt

Université Libre de Bruxelles (U L B) 2005

In his recent scholarship, Ihab Hassan pleads for a re-evaluation of

the discredited project of realism (“Beyond”; “Realism”).2 He argues

that the objections levelled against mimesis—not only in 20th-century

aesthetics, but also in philosophy and in contemporary science—lose

some of their strictures if we endorse an attitude of pragmatically

based “cognitive trust.”3 Hassan means thereby that a shared “will to

truth”4 can still express itself in a cultural context that invalidates

such previous anchoring points of realism as “the truth of corre-

spondence or of coherence, of authority or of revelation, of ideologi-

cal conformity or of factual precision”.5 In his view, there is room in

contemporary culture, if not for a naïve, snapshot-like reproduction

of reality, at least for discourses that oppose “falsity and pretence”.6

This broadened concept of realism, Hassan contends, still fits

within the perimeter of postmodernism: Important aspects of post-

modernist art—Allen Ginsberg’s acceptance of world immanence or

even Samuel Beckett’s harrowing search for truth—contribute to the

project. Still, it seems obvious that the call for a new mimesis breaks

with the scepticism of poststructuralist authors whose writings have

shaped postmodernist theory (Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard,

Jacques Derrida). For the latter philosophers, the subject’s capacity

1 This paper was first published in Return to Postmodernism: Theory—Travel

Writing—Autobiography; A Festschrift in Honour of Ihab Hassan. Eds. Klaus

Stierstorfer.Heidelberg: Universitästverlag Winter, 2005: 61-78. 2 Ihab Hassan, “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust” in Klaus

Stierstorfer (ed.), Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessments in Literature, Theory,

and Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 199-212; Ihab Hassan, “Realism,

Truth, Trust in Postmodern Perspective”, Third Text 17:1 (2003), 1-13. 3 Ihab Hassan, “Beyond”, 206. 4 Ihab Hassan, “Beyond”, 206; Ihab Hassan, “Realism”, 20. 5 Ihab Hassan, “Realism”, 12. 6 Ihab Hassan, “Beyond”, 208.

2

to grasp the real through discourse is burdened by a feeling of aliena-

tion—“the sense of strangeness of the world”, as Richard Rorty

evocatively puts it.7 Hassan’s endorsement of pragmatic truth stand-

ards implies, on the contrary, that there is no reason to believe that a

gulf separates discourse, consciousness, and the world. Poststructur-

alist scepticism is, in this view, an unfalsifiable metaphysical claim.

In the present essay, I wish to contribute to this re-evaluation of

realism by revisiting two mid-twentieth-century theoreticians—

Georg Lukács and Eric Auerbach—whose legacy is still discernible

today. Hassan praises Auerbach’s Mimesis, while neo-Marxist and

neo-historicist theorists regard Lukács as an inescapable interlocu-

tor.8 In general terms, Auerbach and Lukács demonstrate, against the

pressure of twentieth-century formalism and modernism, that mime-

sis remains a serious concern of philosophical aesthetics. It is no

outdated aesthetic whose epistemological claims may be ignored.

Discussions of mimesis, Lukács and Auerbach argue, must investi-

gate the function of literary texts with regard to the social world and

its historical development. The two critics’ approach is admittedly

tied to a quasi-metaphysical confidence in historical progress that

can hardly be emulated in a post-deconstructionist era. Yet they

wrestle with key issues that formalist readings cannot address. At the

end of the present essay, I will indicate how turn-of-the-twenty-first-

century works still have to devise new solutions to problems

broached in their writings.

1. Georg Lukács: Realism and totality

Realism has been an awkward topic for twentieth-century criticism

because it postulates an affinity between literary texts and truth.

There are admittedly many legitimate objections against a truth-

based literature. Plato, in The Republic, already pointed out the

paradoxical status of literary fictions claiming to imitate the world.9

7 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 129. 8 Hassan, “Beyond”, 207. For neo-Marxist appraisals of Lukács, see June Howard,

Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill and London:

University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 22-26; Fredric Jameson, Marxism and

Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1971), 194; John Frow, Marxism and Literary History

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 9-17. 9 Plato, The Republic, ed. and trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1987), 92-

93.

3

In the wake of Russian formalism and the New Criticism, many

scholars have attempted to bypass these difficulties by divorcing

literature from truth claims. Twentieth-century readers have often

been content to endorse I. A. Richards’s contention that literature

does not rely on referential statements.10

Formalist approaches have

reduced mimesis to rules of representation and technical protocols—

the principles of “verisimilitude” or “referential illusion”.11

Tzvetan

Todorov, in his structuralist poetics, contends that realist verisi-

militude amount to a text’s adequacy to the rules of a genre: It is

merely one aspect of the text’s literariness, affording no privileged

anchorage in a non-semiotic world.12

Admittedly, the concept of verisimilitude has allowed critics ap-

propriately to point out that realism is a historically situated dis-

course with ascertainable structural features. Admirable essays—Ian

Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, for instance—have been written on the

hypothesis that studying mimesis requires identifying the features of

a “formal realism”.13

Yet Watt makes exorbitant concessions to

formalist aesthetics when he argues that “formal realism is […] only

a convention” and that there is therefore “no reason why the report

on human life presented by it should be […] any truer than those

presented through the very different conventions of other literary

genres”.14

Such epistemological agnosticism will, I think, not suffice

in this matter. If verisimilitude endows fictions with the capacity to

simulate the real, one still needs to clarify how this simulacrum can

be effective enough to trick readers into mistaking the word for the

world. Similarly, discussions of realism, unless they seek to dismiss

the genre altogether, need to trace a dividing line between texts

aiming to do justice to specific perceptual or social contexts and, on

the other hand, those that pursue other goals. Hassan remarks that the

scientific records elaborated by travellers to the South Seas, though

undeniably determined by ideology and pre-existing artistic conven-

10 Ivor Armstrong Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge,

2002), 249-53. 11 Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique (Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme 2), Seuil Points 45

(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), 36-37; Jean Ricardou, Le nouveau roman, Col-

lection Microcosmes: Ecrivains de toujours 52 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978),

30. 12 Todorov, Poétique, 37-38. 13 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Har-

mondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 35. 14 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 35.

4

tions, enjoy a separate status from such deliberately anti-mimetic

modernist works as Vassily Kandinsky’s or Piet Mondriaan’s paint-

ings.15

Likewise, late-nineteenth-century readers legitimately as-

sumed that William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes

(1890), a social novel of urban life, and Lewis Wallace’s Ben Hur

(1880), a historical romance, rely on incompatible epistemological

assumptions. Such distinctions can hardly be made without acknowl-

edging that texts may fulfil some sort of truth function, even if the

latter is understood differently from the capacity to offer full-fledged

epiphanies of the real.

Surprisingly, the term truth seldom appears in Lukács’s writings

on realism. Instead, when Lukács seeks to designate what makes

both literature and human experience worthwhile, he mentions the

concrete totality of meaning and experience. Totality is central to

Lukács’s thought. Yet the Hungarian theorist’s attitude towards it

famously shifted from his early writings to his 1930s and 40s essays

on realism. His first texts—Soul and Form (originally published in

1911) and The Theory of the Novel (1920)—are proto-modernist and

existentialist in tenor. On their logic, the “totality of life” is ardently

desired, yet can no longer be perceived as an immediate given.16

This

philosophical pessimism, Lukács contends, informs the very struc-

ture of novels. Unlike ancient epics, which managed to express the

plenitude of a “rounded world”, (TN 33) novels make “the immanent

meaning of the […] world” (TN 84) the object of a “demonic” quest

(TN 88). They depict “problematic individual[s]” (TN 78)—

Cervantes’ Quixote or Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s L’éducation

sentimentale—embarking on an irrepressible yet unfulfilled pursuit

of authenticity. Realism is not discussed in these early essays. For

the proto-modernist Lukács, the depiction of the phenomenal world

would indeed only yield snapshots of a degraded realm—the map of

a “‘bad’ infinity” (TN 81). In this, the early Lukács anticipates the

high-modernist disparagement of phenomenal experience: His Jere-

miad of the lost totality is comparable to the stance of authors who

locate the wellsprings of meaning beyond the phenomenal realm—in

the inner self (Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce); in an

15 Hassan, “Realism”, 7. 16 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the

Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press,

2003), 49. All subsequent quotations from this edition will be given in the text,

abbreviated as ‘TN’.

5

afterworld of aesthetic perfection (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound) –, or who

argue that being eludes any movement toward presence (Martin

Heidegger).

Lukács’s conversion to Marxism and his participation in the post-

WWI proletarian insurrection in Hungary brought about his break

with modernist / existentialist scepticism.17

His political commitment

expressed itself in a new-found devotion to realism, set forth in such

essays as The Historical Novel (originally published in 1937), Stud-

ies in European Realism (1948), or The Meaning of Contemporary

Realism (1957). These works, based on Hegelian Marxist principles,

no longer present authenticity as a hidden god. Lukács now argues

that the essence of the totality of life expresses itself rationally in

human experience in the form of the dialectic development of histo-

ry. Realist art must make plain the presence of this historical logic

within specific human situations. Concern for totality is the pivot of

this vision of “[t]rue, great realism”.18

Authors should strive to depict

“man as a whole in the whole of society”,19

thus rejecting the mod-

ernist drift toward “exclusive introspection”.20

In Lukács’s view, the

modernists’ focus on a specialized segment of human experience

condemns their works to abstraction in the Hegelian sense of the

term—to incompleteness, fragmentation, and impoverishment. Only

fiction that portrays the totality of “the world in its contradictory

dynamics” is concrete, namely able to reveal the immanence of

historical meaning through social phenomena.21

Instead of exploring

subjectivities, novels must point out how “personal destinies […]

interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis”.22

One might infer from this that the Marxist Lukács rushed to real-

ism with the fervour of the convert, smothering his previous scepti-

17 See Lucien Goldmann, “Postface: Introduction aux premiers écrits de Georg

Lukács” in Georg Lukács, La théorie du roman, trans. Jean Clairevoye (Paris:

Denoël, 1968), 183; Arpad Kadarkay (ed.), The Lukács Reader (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1995), 213. 18 Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York:

Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 6. 19 Lukács, Studies, 5. 20 Lukács, Studies, 6. 21 Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe” in Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and

Other Essays (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1970), 143. All subsequent quota-

tions from this edition will be given in the text, abbreviated as ‘ND’. 22 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Har-

mondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 42. All subsequent quotations from this edition will

be given in the text, abbreviated as ‘HN’.

6

cism. Yet the value of the Hungarian critic’s discussion of realism

consists precisely in the fact that it still wrestles with his earlier

proto-modernist sensibility. Beyond his brazen metaphysical confi-

dence, Lukács implicitly portrays realism as a problematic praxis.

His relentless emphasis on the totality imperative betrays his aware-

ness that realism remains vulnerable to the modernist suspicion that,

in the contemporary field, essences, being, or concrete meaning

seldom shine through the surface of phenomena. On this light, what

Lukács found in Marxism is the ability to depict the modernist com-

plaint over the “emptiness of life” as an offshoot of historically

determined socio-economic processes (ND 147). In The Theory of

the Novel the loss of authentic values was rather unsatisfactorily

attributed to “the gradual working of a spell” (TN 42). In the Marxist

Lukács, it stems from changes in modes of production.

The reification of human experience induced by the increasing

complexities of capitalism is, for Lukács, the factor that makes

realism both a necessary and a problematic pursuit. In History and

Class Consciousness, Lukács bases his discussion of reification on

the theory of alienation and commodity fetishism articulated in

Marx’s early writings. Marx describes the alienation of labour as the

process by which members of capitalist societies lose the capacity to

view themselves as human subjects, in control of their historical

development. This evolution is triggered by the increasing division

of labour. As capitalism grows increasingly complex, observers are

no longer able to view their social environment as a totality of mean-

ingful human relations. Instead, they perceive a fragmented social

field where subjects are reduced to the status of a “human commodi-

ty,”23

and are tossed about by economic constraints seemingly en-

dowed with the implacability—the thingness—of natural laws.24

Human history is thus disguised as natural history, acting as an “alien

force.”25

In both Marx and Lukács, alienation and reification are of

course not irreversible. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács

claims that it can be counteracted by direct proletarian action, of the

23 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin

Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 121. 24 See Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Clemens Dutt

, in Clemens Dutt (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart,

1975), 46-48; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marx-

ist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 83-110. 25 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 48.

7

kind developed in post-WWI Germany by Rosa Luxemburg.26

Lu-

kács’s advocacy of insurrectional socialism was, however, con-

demned by communist party authorities. In his later essays, Lukács

therefore entrusts the struggle against reification to realism itself.

The chief aim of realism is, on this logic, to retrieve the human, lived

meaning of social phenomena.

The gesture by which Lukács makes realism the antithesis of rei-

fication implies that mimesis is neither an effortless mirroring of the

real nor an aesthetic resource equally available to all authors at all

times. Firstly, realism is not achieved merely by representing social

life in its “extensively complete totality” (HN 43). Realist authors

must see through the social process that turns their life-world into a

mystified environment. They must therefore connect the observation

of possibly misleading or inert social superficialities to a totalizing

grasp of “the real driving forces of their epoch” (HN 212). On this

logic, local-colour realism—Gustave Flaubert’s and Emile Zola’s

obsessive accumulation of factual details, for instance—remains cut

off from concrete meaning. By sticking to such an abstract factuality,

writers turn their texts into a lifeless, “kaleidoscopic chaos,” thus

unconsciously abetting the reification process (ND 133).

Secondly, the possibilities open to realism at given historical

moments are conditioned by the development of capitalist modes of

production. In particular, Lukács argues that socio-political changes

from the first to the second half of the nineteenth century restricted

the window of opportunity for realist praxis. Walter Scott, Honoré de

Balzac, or Leon Tolstoy were able to draw up literary maps of a

world in which the bourgeoisie was the engine of revolutionary

change, and were therefore able to grasp history’s “essential driving

forces” (HN 245). However, the bourgeoisie turned against the

working classes during the 1848 revolutions. Late-nineteenth-century

realists lived in societies where bourgeois and workers were two

separate “‘nations” (HN 205). From then on, bourgeois authors

remained alien to “popular life” (HN 376). Late-nineteenth- and

twentieth-century novels display dysfunctional traits—lifelessness,

dehumanization, abstract symbolism, irrationality, a predilection for

senseless violence—testifying to their creators’ inability to overcome

reification and grasp concrete meaning. Zola’s naturalism is, on this

logic, as complicit with reifying forces as modernism. It exhausts

26 See Goldmann, “Introduction”, 184.

8

itself in producing dehumanized panoramas of an ill-understood

social scene (ND 132). Occasionally, Lukács nuances his critique of

twentieth-century literature. He praises democratically inclined

authors for producing political fiction fostering “anti-Fascist human-

ism” (HN 345). His later essays attempt to co-opt Thomas Mann as a

genuine realist.27

Yet, his standard for evaluating literary representa-

tion never wavered: Realism must seek a totalizing grasp of the

essence of the historical moment if it hopes to escape dehumaniza-

tion.

2. Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Tragic-Problematic Dignity of

Everyday Life

Though Lukács mentions dozens of authors in his essays, he cannot

lavish praise on a wide gamut of objects. His readings constantly

revert to the small set of authors (Balzac, Scott, Tolstoy, Mann) he

regards as truly great (M 6). The Hungarian critics’ ambitious defini-

tion of realism, as well as his obsession with the obstacles facing

realist praxis, account for his narrow sympathies. Only exceptional

writers in the proper historical context can, in his logic, retrieve the

essence of the real. On the contrary, Auerbach’s monumental essay

on “the [r]epresentation of [r]eality in Western [l]iterature” strikes its

readers by its inclusiveness.28

Not only does Mimesis stretch over

more than twenty centuries, from Homer to Virginia Woolf, but it

tackles texts—the Old and the New Testament, notably—whose

realist affiliation is not self-evident. Auerbach’s critical openness and

Lukács’s censoriousness are noticeable in their contrastive responses

to Zola. For Lukács, the author of the Rougon-Macquart cycle is an

unwitting precursor of avant-garde “anti-realism.” (M 17)29

Auer-

bach, on the contrary, praises Zola’s “determination and courage,”

(Mim 515) as well as his Balzacian ability to do justice to “the whole

life of the period.” (Mim 515) Similarly, the Marxist Lukács profess-

es a doctrinal, though well-informed, hostility toward modernism.

27 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin Press, 1963),

78-79. All subsequent quotations from this edition will be given in the text, ab-

breviated as ‘M’. 28 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,

trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), iii. All

subsequent quotations from this edition will be given in the text, abbreviated as

‘Mim’. 29 See also Lukács, “Narrate,” 140.

9

His defence of Thomas Mann assumes that the German novelist

defers only superficially to twentieth-century currents (M 78-79). By

comparison, Auerbach’s attitude towards experimental twentieth-

century fiction is best described as circumspect. He is troubled by the

new aesthetic, yet manages better than Lukács to locate realist fea-

tures in modernist writers—in his case, Virginia Woolf—without

negating the specificity of their practice.

Still, Auerbach concurs with Lukács on key issues. In his chapter

on Stendhal, Auerbach states in quasi-Lukácsian fashion that modern

realism must portray “the embedding of […] events in the general

course of contemporary history.” (Mim 491) Realism must include in

its scope “the lower strata of the people” (Mim 497) without relegat-

ing them to the status of “background figures” (Mim 497). Like

Lukács, Auerbach voices the Hegelian belief that the spirit of history

is embodied in social phenomena. Realism must trace the “deep

subsurface movement” of “unfolding historical forces” (Mim 44) as

they manifest themselves in “the depths of the workaday world and

its men and women” (Mim 444). Specifically, Auerbach’s concept of

realism resembles Lukács’s Hegelianism in that it links the realist

portrayal of historical development to a totality imperative. Auerbach

tests the value of realism at each historical period by its capacity to

overcome social and aesthetic fragmentation. The greatest impedi-

ment to realist practice, he contends, is the prejudice, expressed in

Aristotle’s Poetics and in all ancient and neo-classical literature, that

only “the upper strata of society” and “major political events” (Mim

444) deserve a “tragic-problematic” literary representation, formulat-

ed in the “elevated style” (Mim 40). Realism, on the contrary, re-

quires “the serious treatment of everyday reality” (Mim 491). It

cannot fully develop in the works of authors who regard “the de-

scription of random everyday life” as worthy only of a “comic (or at

best idyllic)” treatment (Mim 44). The most arresting expression of

this credo appears in Auerbach’s reading of the New Testament. The

Gospels, he contends, differ from all ancient texts in that they stage

the most solemn narrative—the sacrifice of the son of God—among

“the random fisherman or publican or rich youth, the random Sa-

maritan or adulteress” (Mim 44). Peter, in the Gospel according to

Mark, is a protagonist of singular “weakness”, (Mim 42) who nev-

ertheless rises from the mundane to the sublime. Thus, the New

Testament serves as a paradigm for all texts that provide “a serious

10

representation of contemporary everyday social reality against the

background of a constant historical movement” (Mim 518).

Auerbach’s call for a realism that includes the less privileged is

rooted in his concern for the proper understanding of history. He

makes this point in remarkable readings of Latin historians—Tacitus

and Ammianus Marcellinus. The two authors’ chronicles include

narratives of “revolutionary movement[s] from the depths”, respec-

tively among first-century legions and in fourth-century Rome (Mim

33). Yet in each case, “aristocratic conservatism” and the adhesion to

the elevated style impedes any consideration of whether the soldiers’

and the plebeians’ demands might hold social legitimacy or historical

significance (Mim 37). From Tacitus’ perspective, Percennius, the

insurgent legionary, is not spurred on by “world-moving ideas”

(Mim 50). His motives are the “orgiastically lawless” instincts of the

mob (Mim 50). Symptomatically, any concrete representation of the

revolt is screened out by Tacitus’ oratorical style: Percennius “does

not speak his own language, he speaks Tacitean” (Mim 39). Like-

wise, Ammianus’ superficially realistic narrative of “the [a]rrest of

Peter Valvomeres” carries little historical enlightenment (Mim 50).

Ammianus reports how Leontius, the prefect of Rome, tames a riot

by wading into the mob in person and by having its leader strung up

and flogged. In this, the author only offers a stark spectacle of chaos

and repression, formulated in a language that, through its parasitical

emphasis on the “gruesomely sensory”, makes the incident uncanny

and distant (Mim 60): Ammianus’ idiom is paradoxically vivid and

“overrefined”—a baroque version of the elevated style (Mim 59). It

highlights the author’s virtuosity and obscures the object of his

narrative. Intriguingly, Auerbach’s critique of Ammianus’ “distorted

realism” castigates the very flaws Lukács discovers in Zola (Mim

60). Thus, Lukács and Auerbach do not disagree on the possible

failings of realist practice, only on the authors affected by them.

3. Tentative Mimesis

The genuine difference separating Auerbach from Lukács consists in

the fact that the latter never envisages the concrete possibility of a

perfected, absolute realism: No text will grasp a totality of meaning

immanent in phenomena. This is the import of the often-cited first

chapter of Mimesis (“Odysseus’ Scar”), in which Auerbach contrasts

Homer’s representation of the world with the depiction of Abraham’s

sacrifice of Isaac in the Old Testament. These pages are inspiring to

11

postmodern readers because they stir echoes of Jacques Derrida’s

semiotically informed phenomenology. Auerbach argues indeed that

realism revolves around the issue of presentification—how to make

world and meaning present within a text. As he handles this task,

Homer quixotically writes as if all phenomena could be “brought to

light in perfect fullness”, leaving no “lacuna, […] gap” or “glimpse

of unplumbed depths” (Mim 6-7). In his text, “men and things stand

out in a realm where everything is visible” (Mim 3). The narrative of

a scar incurred in Odysseus’ boyhood morphs seamlessly into the

account of the hero’s incognito return to Ithaca at the end of his

journey back from Troy, as if these moments were not inscribed in

differentiated time frames. In the Old Testament, on the contrary,

everything is “fraught with background” (Mim 15). The protago-

nists’ main interlocutor is a “hidden God” (Mim 15) whose “motives

and purposes” remain “unexpressed” (Mim 11). Dialogue is made up

of “fragmentary speeches” interspersed with “silences” (Mim 11).

Time and place are sketchy and therefore “call for interpretation”

(Mim 11). In this, Auerbach contends, the Old Testament is faithful

to the structure of human experience. Unlike Homer’s epics, it does

not ignore such key phenomenological constraints as the apprehen-

sion of the real through a limiting perspective and the correlative

need to interpret a partly enigmatic empirical given. Above all, it

acknowledges the existence of historical time. For, as Heidegger’s

and Derrida’s phenomenological reflections suggest, the inscription

of experience in time is the most irrevocable obstacle to the percep-

tion of stable meaning. Time spells the death of Homer’s pure,

“uniformly illuminated” present (Mim 3). Caught in the transit from

the fading past to an undefined future, the present is always framed

by shadows. Its meaning (or signified, in Derrida’s terminology) is

always liable to be reconfigured by new perceptions arising in the

temporal flow (by new signifiers). Accordingly, Homer’s “style […]

of the foreground”, (Mim 12) as it portrays a world frozen in pure

presence, may at best aspire to depict “the quiet existence and opera-

tions of things”;30

it may even capture the lives of ancient heroes and

gods. Yet it cannot render the time-bound human perception of

reality.

Readers of Auerbach usually note that the author of Mimesis fails

to elaborate on his initial reflections. If he had, his essay would rank

30 Friedrich von Schiller, qtd. in Auerbach, Mimesis, 5.

12

in between Lukács’s existentialist/modernist Theory of the Novel and

the founding texts of deconstruction. As it is, Mimesis quickly

switches to the less aporetic analysis of stylistic and social fragmen-

tation discussed above. Yet the insights expressed in the first pages

affect the whole volume in so far as they make Auerbach sym-

pathetic to imperfect, unfulfilled forms of realism. The “Odysseus

Scar” chapter acts as an epistemological warning sign, denying the

possibility of absolute mimesis. This leads Auerbach to devote most

of his discussions to non-classical varieties of mimesis. His succes-

sive readings focus on what we might call defective mechanics of

immanence: They reveal how authors, as they trace meaning in

phenomena, succeed only partially, depending on the discursive tools

available to them and the social configuration of their time. The

“figural” realism of popular medieval drama illustrates this tentative

mimesis (Mim 157). The twelfth-century Mystère d’Adam is realistic

in so far as it makes the everyday experience of medieval townsmen

the “figure”—the concrete allegorical token—of the sublime themes

of Christian teleology, which constitute the bedrock of the medieval

audience’s world view (Mim 156). This allegorical realism is, of

course, compelling only to communities where the Christian view of

salvation history goes unchallenged. Likewise, in his reading of

Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, Auerbach shows how the

historian’s crude early-medieval Latin prevents him from expressing

links of cause and effect adequately, making his chronicle barely

comprehensible. Yet, Gregory, who writes after the break-up of the

ossified elevated style of the late Roman empire, is in a better posi-

tion than his Latin predecessors to depict “practical activity in the

practical world” (Mim 92) and to offer his readers the “sensory

apprehension of things and events” (Mim 95).

I do not mean to argue, by way of contrast, that Lukács takes for

granted the possibility of a realism of immanent presence. Only in

his pre-WWI writings does the Hungarian critic describe literary

forms approaching this goal. His main exemplum is Homer’s epics,

which The Theory of the Novel analyzes in terms similar to Auer-

bach’s. Yet the Theory also assumes that the plenitude of

“[i]ntegrated [c]ivilizations” such as ancient Greece is irrevocably

past, eclipsed by the problematic life-world of modernity (TN 29).

Admittedly, one would expect Lukács’s post-WWI endorsement of

totalizing realism to make utopian fulfilment available again to

human societies: Realism, in this Marxist-Hegelian light, should help

13

humans reclaim the rounded cosmos, in the form of a society freed

from reification. Yet, as I pointed out above, there is a gap between

Lukács’s dogmatic statements and the literary method his texts

actually advocate. The aesthetic miracle of totalizing realism is more

a ceaselessly receding goal—“a potentiality”—than a concrete option

(M 115). Specifically, it takes Lukács painstaking critical and politi-

cal circumnavigations to avoid making socialist realism the perfect

embodiment of mimesis. In arguments that play hide-and-seek with

communist orthodoxy, the Hungarian critic still suggests that the

worthiest literary idiom is “critical realism” (M 93). The latter liter-

ary method—Balzac’s in the Comédie humaine, for instance—does

not depict phenomena as if they were self-evidently meaningful. It

constructs instead an “intensive totality”—portraying fragments of

the world and making them significant by anchoring then in a global

understanding of social conditions (M 100). This praxis therefore

calls for a sense of distance and perspective (M 55). As they connect

facets of the real to totalizing meaning, critical realists must practice

“poetic selection” (ND 128), screening out “the essential elements”

from the “ballast” (ND 128).31

Their literary idiom differs in this

respect not only from Homer’s “style of the foreground” but also

from naturalism, both of which attempt to map the “extensive totali-

ty” of extant phenomena (M 100). It is also distinct from the propa-

gandistic allegories of “socialist naturalism” that travesty as reality

itself what are only abstract communist dogmas (M 124). Though the

intensive / extensive dichotomy allows Lukács to rephrase his cri-

tique of naturalism (and of modernism) in elegant terms, it is, I

believe, not entirely consistent: Why would writers who manage to

display the intensive totality of their world be unable to evoke a self-

immanent cosmos? The intensive totality is therefore best interpreted

as a necessary paradox allowing Lukács to project his ideal of an

accomplished realism that still maintains its critical edge.

In spite of Lukács’s tendency to defer the advent of utopian real-

ism, his vision of literary history remains tied to a teleological narra-

tive with well-defined articulations: As a Hegelian Marxist, Lukács

knows exactly when the bourgeoisie was a vital force and when it

became decadent. His readings are predicated on the belief that the

future belongs to socialism. It is, I think, on this plane that the speci-

ficity of Lukács’s and Auerbach’s visions should ultimately be

31 See also Lukács, Meaning, 123.

14

located: The two critics differ slightly yet crucially in their concept

of historical time. In an eloquent passage of The Meaning of Con-

temporary Realism, Lukács argues that realist praxis must start out

from a hypothesis about the time sequence in which historical socie-

ties fit. The very meaning of social phenomena depends on the shape

of history: It requires a temporal “perspective” making it possible to

gauge the present with regard not only to the past but also to the

future (M 55). Auerbach does not disagree with this principle. His

discussion of Christian figuration shows indeed how certain forms of

realist praxis make the mundane, everyday world meaningful by

connecting it to a world historical narrative (Mim 158). Yet it is not

clear whether this figural realism determines the whole history of

mimesis. Overall, Auerbach’s handling of time is far vaguer, less

thematized than Lukács’s. Mimesis assumes the existence of a gradu-

al process—a “constant historical movement” (Mim 518)—leading

to the withering away of the “unnatural class structure of society”

(Mim 440). In this, Auerbach’s argument resembles a non-theoretical

Marxism that acknowledges the existence of Hegelian sequences of

historical periods without committing itself about the mechanics of

the dialectic. At bottom, the central point of Mimesis—the celebra-

tion of everydayness—is determined by Auerbach’s unwillingness to

shape his literary-historical narrative in hard-edged terms. Lukács, by

comparison, distrusts the literary representation of a contingent life-

world peopled with what Auerbach approvingly calls “random”

characters. The Hungarian critic contends that this literary choice,

illustrated in Franz Kafka or Albert Camus, is typical of writers who

abdicate the critical duty to reveal the core logic of history (M 58).

On the contrary, Auerbach’s intimation that mimesis remains a

tentative practice, inscribed in a sketchily defined historical logic,

leads to his positive appraisal of works where the contingency of

everydayness is allowed to reveal itself.

4. Mimesis Today

Auerbach’s concept of a tentative mimesis of contingent everyday-

ness seems to meet the demands of postmodern realism better than

Lukács’s Marxist-Hegelian literary historical metaphysics. Still, I

believe that Lukács’s and Auerbach’s approaches remain comple-

mentary. Lukács’s essays are inspiring by their urge to ask over-

whelming questions about meaning and historical development. I

indicate above that these grand issues—the status of truth, notably—

15

cannot be silenced if realism is to remain useful as a literary term.

Regardless whether one shares Lukács’ historical faith, these over-

whelming questions retain a heuristic value, provided their aporetic

nature is properly acknowledged. Specifically, I think it important to

maintain a space of discussion—in criticism or within meta-realist

texts—where the ultimate ends of mimesis are investigated. Lukács

compellingly shows that realism is simultaneously an aesthetic and a

political concern. Its object is not only how the real is perceived, but

also what it means, and how we wish it to evolve by human action.

In other words, realism is in need of regulatory utopias. The arena for

such discussions should not be monopolized, as is the case today, by

spokespersons either of endless commodification or of a return to a

polity of faith-based charisma.

Lukács’s greatest contribution to contemporary debates is argua-

bly his emphasis on historically determined obstacles to realist

praxis: In his view, the windows open to literary representation vary

according to political configurations and time-bound class systems.

Admittedly, Lukács’s Hegelian-Marxist view of literary-historical

opportunities needs to be recast in more flexible terms for it to have

present-day relevance. One might start from the recognition that

realism has never been a literary gaze indifferently open to all as-

pects of the world. Different cultural periods have been dominated

by what we may call realist problematics—specific issues, topics,

and strategies of representation texts had to handle in order to test

their clear-sightedness. Late-nineteenth-century realists could not

afford to ignore the pathologies of urban poverty. Sexual candour in

literature was likewise regarded as a benchmark of realist integrity.

Lukács’s notion of a historically constrained realist gaze therefore

helps us realize that the centre of gravity of mimesis has moved

toward new issues. Among present-day concerns, two topics domi-

nate, I think, the twenty-first-century realist problematic. The former

is the reconfiguration of phenomenal experience induced by the

information society—the genesis of a world where the perception of

space and time is interwoven with virtual images and codes. The

latter is the deepening of multicultural experience, encouraging

contemporary observers to believe that several realities now coexist

in the social field.

The information society has been a major concern of postmodern-

ist theorists and artists (one thinks of cyberpunk, the science fiction

of the virtual experience). For Fredric Jameson, the new technostruc-

16

ture is the embodiment of the economic structure of postmodernity.32

In this logic, the virtual polity is the ultimate fulfilment of the reifica-

tion process denounced by Marx and Lukács. It is so vast and elu-

sive—or, as its theoreticians like to label it, “sublime”33

—that it

seems to outgrow its status as a human creation. Instead of enhancing

human experience, it creates seemingly autonomous pseudo-living

creatures—the fetishized commodities of advertising, the media

biospheres of reality TV, cyborgs, or artificial intelligences.

Postmodern technology thwarts realist praxis because it blurs the

definition of what counts as phenomena. In his typology of postmod-

ernist fiction, Brian McHale argues that postmodernist culture is

dominated by ontological anxieties, distinct from the epistemological

uncertainties of modernism.34

Modernist protagonists approach the

world they live in from plural perspectives. Postmodernist subjects,

by comparison, live at the crossroads of several worlds—in spaces

McHale, after Foucault, calls “heterotopia[s]”.35

Postmodern tech-

nology makes the resulting ontological dizziness quite concrete.

With computerization and digitalization, the concept of a world

intuited through phenomenal perception becomes problematic.

Subjects interact with virtual entities enjoying little definition in

space and time. Information is exchanged through barely traceable

electronic connections. Digital recordings capture the accents of

famous performers singing alongside anonymous musicians whose

sampled voices are triggered at the touch of a keyboard, regardless of

when and where these musical gestures were initially carried out.

Heterotopia evokes subjects living in-between worlds, always

within the territory of the other. The term is therefore a proper meta-

phor for contemporary multicultural experience. Due to migratory

flows and the speeding up of travel, new modes of co-existence of

ethnically diverse populations have reconfigured postmodern social

spaces. On the face of it, multicultural societies offer a new territory

for realist praxis. Cross-ethnic exchanges often occur in contexts of

inequalities and racism. As such, like nineteenth-century proletarian

32 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 38. 33 Jameson, Postmodernism, 49; Joseph Tabbi, The Postmodern Sublime: Technol-

ogy and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1995), 1. 34 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), 9. 35 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 18.

17

life, they constitute a prime object for writers aiming to provide an

uncensored account of social conditions. On the other hand, tradi-

tional mimesis seems ill-fitted to a heterotopian perception of social

space. Realism is expected to develop a voice of cognitive authority,

privileging a dominant—supposedly Western, rationalistic—world

view. Lukács’s Marxist realism, which seeks to capture the essence

of social phenomena within an organically consistent literary idiom,

embodies this monovocalism. Even Auerbach’s flexible concept of

mimesis is partly grounded in it. In his discussion of modernism,

Auerbach voices concerns about a situation where “a violent clash of

the most heterogeneous ways of life and kinds of endeavor” removes

the grounds for the “recognized community of thought” on which

nineteenth-century realists built their representation of the world

(Mim 550). Fragmentation, in Auerbach, is no vector of liberation: It

is the mark of the social and aesthetic inequality of aristocratic

cultures. Mimesis, in this view, is threatened by the suggestion that

the social scene—and, especially, the disempowered constituencies

on which realism focuses—might be rifted by irreconcilable differ-

ences, separate world views, and incompatible idioms.

Logically, then, postmodern strategies addressing technological

and social change forsake mimesis, or, at best, secure its precarious

survival in modified form. Jean Baudrillard argues that the familiar

frameworks shaping human experience—indeed the very concept of

a social world—are immaterial to postmodernity.36

Only large-scale

technosemiotic forces are worthy of scrutiny, and they no longer

obey the reflectionist logic of reference.37

Similarly, cyberpunk

theorist Scott Bukatman advocates a culture liberated from its an-

choring in human nature, and dedicated to producing posthuman

hybrids of organic bodies and computer systems.38

In less radical

terms, multiculturalist critics suggest that realism might survive if it

becomes plurivocal. In this view, multicultural constellations can

only be represented adequately in hybrid genres (magic realism,

historiographic metafiction) mingling reference-oriented discourses

36 Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 5. 37 Baudrillard, America, 3-4. 38 Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science

Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 8-9.

18

with the mythology of pre-industrial societies.39

This solution does

mark out a place for realism in the cultural spectrum, and it has

arguably spurred more interest among general readers and academics

than the flight into a cyberpunk future. Yet it begs the question of

how mimesis may remain epistemologically valid when it is put on

the same plane as discourses that previous realists regarded as fables.

Mimesis itself suggests a different reclaiming of realism. Auer-

bach’s aesthetic of contingent everydayness may serve as model for a

gesture of phenomenological refocusing: There should be room for a

cultural praxis that cautiously appraises the newly reconfigured

contemporary life world. Wayne Wang’s and Paul Auster’s film

Smoke illustrates this realist attitude. One of the film's protagonists,

Augie Wren (Harvey Keitel) is an amateur photographer whose

hobby consists in taking snapshots of the crossroads in front of his

Brooklyn cigar store. With his old Leica, he has accumulated more

than four thousand pictures of the intersection of 3d Street and

7thAvenue “in all kinds of weather”, with any combination of traffic

and pedestrians.40

One senses a double impulse in the cigar-store

owner’s obsession. On the one hand, it betokens the need to be

reassured about the solidity of everyday experience, which, if one

trusts postmodern theorist, has been emptied out of meaning. On the

other, his watchfulness is rooted in a hankering after epiphanies that

might revitalize his life world.

By calling Augie’s attitude phenomenological, I use this philo-

sophical term loosely, with no wish to enter the technicalities of

Edmund Husserl’s thought. I only mean to point out that Husserl

fosters trust in “the world […] ‘on hand’”—a stance that might prove

beneficial even to the supposedly shattered early-twenty-first-century

culture.41

Husserl assumes that the world given to our perception “is

there for [us] not only as a world of mere things, but also with the

same immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods,

39 See Jose David Saldivar, “Postmodern Realism” in Emory Elliott, Cathy Da-

vison, et al. (eds.), The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1991), 524; Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmod-

ernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 60-73. 40 Smoke, script by Paul Auster, dir. Wayne Wang, perf. Harvey Keitel, William

Hurt, and Forest Whitaker (Miramax-Nippon, 1995). 41 Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology as Transcendental Philosophy: 5. The Basic

Approach of Phenomenology” in Donn Welton (ed.), The Essential Husserl:

Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology (Bloomington and Indianapo-

lis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 61.

19

a practical world”.42

In this view, radical change and instability

cannot be taken for granted in human perception. Stable elements of

meaning (mathematical principles, for instance) are given to human

consciousness without mediation.

Husserl’s credo resonates evocatively with Auerbach’s appraisal

of everydayness and with Hassan’s concept of a realism stance based

on pragmatic trust and “attentive empathy”.43

At bottom, there is no

reason to believe (and no way to establish) that the world is out to

trick us. This does not entail, however, that we should return to the

metaphysical certainties that Husserl himself aimed for, and that

Jacques Derrida so perceptively deconstructed.44

Simply, faced with

prophecies of dislocation and infinite change, one feels a need for a

counter-perspective. The twenty-first-century context may still be

mapped to good effect by realist approaches focused on the complex

interaction of continuity and change, rather than on evidence of

endless cataclysms. This call for a circumspect phenomenological

realism is motivated in part by the evolutions of postmodernity itself.

Though this might sound odd at a time of seemingly hopeless politi-

cal violence, I believe that the great sociological metamorphoses of

postmodernity already belong to the recent past. It makes therefore

sense to draw up charts of the resulting landscape. The evolution of

cyberpunk novelist William Gibson’s fiction registers this diminish-

ing pace of change. Gibson’s mid-1980s stories (Burning Chrome

and Neuromancer) depict a mid-21st-century world revolutionized

by computer technology and new population patterns.45

Instead, his

recent novels (from Virtual Light to Pattern Recognition) are located

in a barely futurized present.46

They offer a form of practical tech-

nosociology, making visible shifts in human experience that are

currently running their course.

The phenomenologically refocused realism I discern in Smoke

and Gibson seems to dispense with the hankering after total

knowledge that characterizes Lukác’s writings. It starts out from the

42 Husserl, “Phenomenology”, 61. 43 Hassan, “Realism”, 13. 44 See Jacques Derrida, “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s

Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University

Press, 1973). 45 William Gibson, Burning Chrome (London: Grafton Books, 1988); William

Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984). 46 William Gibson, Virtual Light (London: Penguin, 1993); William Gibson,

Pattern Recognition (London: Penguin, 2003).

20

quasi-certainties of a limited perimeter—the field of available phe-

nomena and the socially-bound conceptual framework that makes

them meaningful. Symptomatically, Fredric Jameson, in his major

article on postmodernism, surrenders to the Lukácsian instinct of

calling for a realist idiom endowed with a superlatively inclusive

gaze, and thus presumably tailored to the challenges of technological

alienation and social heteroglossia. Yet Jameson is led to concede

that this perspective is presently unavailable.47

At the risk of break-

ing all ties with the Lukácsian tradition, I believe that this re-

totalizing impulse, though legitimate in a utopian perspective, never

fitted the praxis of realism. Auerbach’s approach follows, in this

respect, the only workable path: it implicitly focuses on what Amy

Kaplan, in a seminal reading of U.S. realist novelist William Dean

Howells, calls a “knowable community”.48

Reading Lukács’s essays against the grain, it is equally possible

to show that the Hungarian critic’s discussion of realism, though it

pays lip service to the totality imperative, is covertly centred on the

proximate world. The narrative method that, according to Lukács,

“brings [its] objects to life” (ND 138) resembles what Gérard Ge-

nette calls internal “focalization”.49

Scenes, Lukács claims, must be

portrayed not from an impersonal documentary vantage point, but

from the perceptual horizon of specific characters—provided, of

course, these protagonists “participat[e] variously and actively in the

great social struggles of their times” (ND 118). More fundamentally,

Lukács’s constant use of the term “life”—or, conversely, “lifeless”—

as a gauge of realist integrity designates in many cases a limited

perimeter of perception (ND 133). I cannot within the scope of the

present essay discuss the momentous role “life” plays throughout the

Hungarian critic’s works. I will limit myself to mentioning Guy

Haarscher’s remark50

that Lukács uses “life” in two apparently

opposite meanings. In early works such as Soul and Form, the term

means, on the one hand, authenticity (the lived embodiment of the

essence), and, on the other, contingent, empirical existence. Lukács’s

47 Jameson, Postmodernism, 65-66. 48 Amy Beth Kaplan, The Social Construction of Realism (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1988), 47. 49 Gérard Genette, Figures III, Collection Poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972),

206 50 Guy Haarscher, “Postface: Approche des écrits de jeunesse de Lukács” in

Georges Lukács, L’âme et les formes [Die Seele und die Formen], ed. and trans.

Guy Haarscher (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 281.

21

later allusions to “life” implicitly interweave these two ideas, gener-

ally to the advantage of the empirical connotation, which is more

easily grasped in human terms than the pure living out of the abso-

lute. Thus, Lukácsian “life”—regardless of the authors’ emphasis on

totality—often resembles what is, I think, the object of Auerbachian

phenomenological realism. It designates a field of human praxis—

the locus of the characters’ “interaction […] with world events”—

where meaning may emerge or be constructed by dint of pragmatic

commitment (ND 124).

The specific objects of this non-totalizing contemporary mimesis

are, I think, the concrete complexities of the proximate life world.

The postmodernist mapping of the social world has notoriously been

addicted to large-scale vistas and hyperbole. The “contemporary

world system” is routinely depicted as “enormous”, “threatening”,

and “dimly perceivable”.51

It is proverbially subjected to the “feroci-

ty of the transformations lived in daily life”.52

Though such formulas

are in some respect useful markers of change, they also replicate the

ideology of information capitalism, which reaps profits out of the

fantasy of continual novelty. Likewise, in the field of ethnicity, the

celebration of diversity has yielded discourses that fail to address the

intricacies of concrete human relations. Multiculturalist critic Paula

Moya criticizes the abstract handling of otherness in postmodernist

authors.53

She recommends instead a “postpositivist realist” approach

that does not gloss over the specific social obstacles based on ethnic

difference, or, conversely, that disregards the empowering potential

of the concept of identity.54

Several types of realist works embody

these precepts. Film-makers such as Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing,

Clockers) 55

and John Sayles (City of Hope; Passion Fish, Lone

51 Jameson, Postmodernism, 38. 52 Donna Haraway, Modest _Witness@ Second _Millenium. FemaleMan©

_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge,

1997), 4. 53 Paula Moya, Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural

Struggles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 9-11. 54 Moya, Learning, 12. 55 Do the Right Thing, dir. Spike Lee, perf. Dany Aiello, Spike Lee, Ruby Dee, and

Ossie Davis (40 Acres and a Mule - Universal, 1989); Clockers, dir. Spike Lee,

perf. Harvey Keitel, Mekhi Phifer, John Turturro, and Isaihah Washington (40

Acres and a Mule - Universal, 1995).

22

Star)56

excel at giving visible shape to configurations that are neither

clichéd, nor too defamiliarizing to be perceived as alien to the film

audience’s own environment. Their works favour differentiated

representations of social situations and the intelligent use of counter-

stereotypes. They have the capacity to indicate that, due to the

changing configurations of everydayness, the complexity of actual

conditions is not self-evident enough to be a mere object of reflec-

tionist representation: It should also be actively imagined. A contem-

porary cultural praxis that performs this task fulfils one of the most

intriguing goals Lukács attributes to critical realism: asking of the

real the “reasonable” question (M 69). Under this term, borrowed

from Anton Chekhov, Lukács designates the gesture that seeks to

determine the status of reason in a problematic environment.

56 City of Hope, dir. John Sayles, perf. Vincent Spano, Joe Morton, and Tony Lo

Bianco (Samuel Goldwyn, 1991); Passion Fish, dir. John Sayles, perf. Mary

McDonnell, Alfre Woodard, and David Straithairn (Samuel Goldwyn, 1992);

Lone Star, dir. John Sayles, perf. Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena, Joe Morton, Clif-

ton James, and Kris Kristofferson (Columbia Pictures, 1996).