Memos from the Besieged City

Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability

Djelal Kadir

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804775779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Memos from the Besieged City argues for the institutional and cultural relevance of literary study through foundational figures, from the 1200s to today, who defied precarious circumstances to make significant contributions to literacy and civilization in the face of infelicitous human acts. Focusing on historically vital crossroads—Baghdad, Florence, Byzantium, Istanbul, Rome, Paris, New York, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Beijing, Stockholm, Warsaw—Kadir looks at how unconventional and nonconformist writings define literacy, culture, and intellectual commitment. Inspired by political refugee and literary scholar Erich Auerbach's path-breaking Mimesis, and informed by late twentieth-century ideological and methodological upheavals, the book reflects on literacy and dissidence at a moment when literary disciplines, canons, and theories are being reassessed under the pressure of globalization and transculturation. At the forefront of an ethical turn in the comparative analysis of cultures and their literary legacies, it reminds us of the best humanity can produce.

1

Auerbach's Scar

Nothing now remains but to find him—to find the reader, that is. I hope that my study will reach its readers.

—Erich Auerbach, coda to Mimesis

I have not opened someone else's mail. The message in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means I have become its secret addressee.

—Osip Mandelstam, “On the Addressee”

I. Ancestral Antiphony: Autolycus/Abraham

A crossroads, as we shall see throughout this study, has been the perennial site of our literacies. This has certainly been the case of antiquity's trivium, as we shall see once again, in the Epilogue most overtly A crossroads is also the intersection where comparative literature finds its ancestral legacy and future vocation. This is the junction where Erich Auerbach has often encountered and engaged his interlocutors from the past, and it is the site of a continuing conversation joined by successive generations. The coda of Auerbach's most significant contribution to this conversation, which serves as the chapter epigraph, enjoins us, his posterity, to partake of the colloquy through him. His contemporary Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), quoted in the second epigraph, demonstrates a particular alertness to such an encounter. At this junction, the subject of their encounter, and ours, is Dante, a poet whose life and afterlife have been in transit from one world to another by way of many intersections. We begin here, then, wakeful to the summons, or citation, a term that in some Romance languages signifies encounter or assignation as well as reference or quotation. Alert to such crossroad encounters, coincidental or inevitable, Auerbach and Mandelstam prompt us to explore the significance of the occasion—in anxious anticipation of the reader, in the case of the Auerbach, or in celebration, in the “Eureka!” proclaimed by Mandelstam upon finding the message in a bottle. Whether anticipatory or recuperative, then, beginnings are an intricate juncture, an intersection whose complexity an heir of Auerbach and Mandelstam, Edward Said explored in one of his first books, aptly entitled Beginnings¹

The question for us at this particular juncture still remains: is a beginning anything other than a citation? And isn't an opening of quotation marks the opening of the bottle,² the release of the message? Each chapter of Auerbach's Mimesis—except, suggestively enough, the opening chapter, “Odysseus' Scar”—takes such citational beginnings quite literally. And, for his part, Osip Mandelstam instructs us, “A quotation is not an excerpt. A quotation is a cicada. It is part of its nature never to quiet down. Once having got hold of the air, it does not release it.” It is this persistence, Mandelstam insists, that “is the main essence of an education. I mean to say that a composition is formed not from heaping up of particulars but in consequence of the fact that one detail after another is torn away from the object, leaves it, flutters out, is hacked away from the system, and goes off into its own functional space.”³ This “functional space” is the site of our conversation. It is a conversative locus, a point of conjunction, a crossroads, a middle of the road, though the road be crooked and long, where, to cite Dante's Mandelstam once more, “the word turns out to be far longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road.”⁴

It is here, where words intersect and paths crisscross, albeit asynchronously, that we are enjoined to persist, patiently, so that we might meet Erich Auerbach meeting Dante. Ours is a long-distance trajectory, a long tradition, and this “forever” of Mandelstam's “forever on the road” is as long a yesterday as it is a long tomorrow whose serial way stations constitute our cultural history and our literary practice as comparatists. This enduring trajectory aimed toward the future, by Mandelstam's reckoning, could be the key to Dante's vocation as “antimodernist,” modernism being programmatically committed to self-obsolescence, even through self-succession, while Dante's futurum, as enacted by Auerbach, is inexhaustibly contemporaneous, an endlessly dialectical present. In Mandelstam's terms: “It is unthinkable to read the cantos of Dante without aiming them in the direction of the present day…They demand commentary in the futurum. Time, for Dante, is the content of history, understood as a single, synchronic act. And conversely: the content is the joint containing of time with one's associates, competitors, codiscoverers. Dante is an antimodernist. His contemporaneity is inexhaustible, measureless, and unending.”⁵

Mandelstam finds this momentum most demonstrably in canto 26 of the Inferno, devoted to Odysseus's (Ulysses', for Dante) westward sally, an intrepid excursus not only into the geographical unknown but also a bursting into the future; Ulysses' speech (at Inferno, 26.112–20) “bulging like the lens of a magnifying glass, may be applied to the war of the Greeks and the Persians as well as to the discovery of America by Columbus, the bold experiments of Paracelsus, and the world empire of Charles V…the revelation of the structure of the future.”⁶ We, immediate inheritors of this legacy through Auerbach, are the “structure” and detail of that revealed future, as he makes clear in chapter 1 of Mimesis, which refers to book 19 of Homer's Odyssey, a book in which Odysseus is finally back home, albeit disguised as a homeless beggar. Hence, the notable absence of any epigraphic citation for this chapter in Mimesis, unlike all the other chapters of that book. This absence could well be read as Auerbach's own disguise, his cloak of invisibility. And this strategic gambit, as the conjunction of our “functional space,” an overture that hides something at an incipient point of convergence, functions more as a problem than as a nostos, or homing.

This suggestive complex of problems at the juncture identified by Mandelstam and occupied by Auerbach as a “functional space” goes by any number of names—comparative literature as discipline, university as institutional formation, ethical sensibility as intellectual obligation, critical discourse as intervention in a “functional space.” As a threshold to “modes of representation of reality,” as the descriptive subtitle of Mimesis avers, this spatial threshold serves as a performative opening onto the representational culture of a long tradition.

Itinerants in this “functional space” prove roadworthy to the degree that they extend the conversation at junctures where paths converge. Like Dante, Mandelstam, Auerbach, and their academic progeny, the new arrivals enter the conversation with vigilant circumspection. They become conversant, foremost, knowing their place. Few, if any, know their place more than those out of place, as we learn from the emphatic lessons of Dante, the forerunner of exile for our modern times. This is the Dante invoked by Auerbach, in his own exile, in a March 1948 lecture at Pennsylvania State University, which was then Pennsylvania State College.⁷ By then the administration of the college had made the decision, still unknown to him, that the newly arrived migrant had to move on, having been found physically unfit for the college's faculty:

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:

this is the arrow that the bow of exile

shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others' bread, how salt it is, and know

how hard a path it is for one who goes

descending and ascending others' stairs.⁸

The particular functionality of this “functional space,” the site of Auerbach's first American refuge, continues unchanged for those whom fate has destined to taste the same salt bread and go up and down these same stairs in what is still called, ironically, Pennsylvania's “Happy Valley.” At what is now Pennsylvania State University, Auerbach, with characteristic circumspection, halts at the top of the stairs, as if staring silently at the valley mentioned in the next tercet from Dante's Paradiso:

And what will be most hard for you to bear

will be the scheming, senseless company

that is to share your fall into this valley. (11. 61–63)

Location, or finding the place of things, Mandelstam reminds us, is not only a function of topical or spatial self-orientation, it is also decisively epistemic: “Things themselves we do not know; on the other hand, we are highly sensitive to their location.”⁹ And there seems to be an uncanny relationship between the degree of our sensitivity to where things do belong and the knowledge that we do not belong. Dante, Mandelstam, Auerbach, and those who, like them, have been dislocated by the caprices of history are keenly attuned to this inverse ratio of knowing and belonging, of pertinence and epistemology As we shall see shortly, Auerbachs positioning calculus for reckoning our place could well be his most significant legacy to us, in our time of displacements, and to the dark wood of that searching vocation called literacy, ethical discernment, and comparative literature. Perhaps this explains his enduring significance to the field.¹⁰

By Auerbach's and by Mandelstam's reckoning, conversation and composition are complementary. For, if conversation is extensive and augmentative, composition, as Mandelstam has defined it, not unlike the “functional space” of the arts of music, poetry, and sculpture, is subtractive in its acts of distillation. Thus composed, a work finds its composure in the economy of rendering, in the optimal possibilities of understatement, in the silenced and indirect elisions of the comprehended. If conversation resides in the sensitivity to location and the knowledge of placement, composition, its etymons to the contrary notwithstanding, emanates from disposition, or subtraction, as Mandelstam would have it, and the combinatorial possibilities of display and displacement. Mimesis, Auerbach's most enduring bequest, has proved more compositional than conversational, although for the attentive student his rehearsals of our cultural legacy lack in neither. Together in their representations, conversation and composition perform the process captured by the lexical etymology of a Greek verb that we, following Auerbach, have often called mimeīsthai, a verb “in the middle voice, which means that its grammatical subject is necessarily affected by the action denoted. Mimeīsthai is what people do, not what things are. Thus mimesis originally does not denote a relation between a text (as in a finished product…) and its referent, but between an action (i.e., a process) and its model.”¹¹ The first-person middle voice of the infinitive mimeomai (“to imitate”) points to the agency of the subject and the implicated role of his or her mediation, as the Greek grammarian Bakker notes in the citation here, “between an action (i.e., a process) and its model.” As an attentive philologist, Auerbach knows the implication of his own role in the declension of this verb and he is obviously alert to the original denotation of the nominative now synonymous with his own persona. In their philological discussion of the performative etymology of mimesis, classicists parse the term for us in ways that point directly to Osip Mandelstam's apothegm regarding our knowledge of things and our locative relation to them: “Things themselves we do not know, we are highly sensitive to their location.” Since the time of Auerbach's exemplary demonstration and symptomatic embodiment of this project, our task remains constant in the shifting pursuit of determining how the “grammatical subject [you, we, I] is necessarily affected by the action denoted" by mimeīsthai, a verb “in the middle voice,” as classicists put it.

Caught in the ironies of outspoken transit, always mindful to “remember that to speak means to be forever on the road,” Mandelstam would be overtaken by his tragic death in a Stalinist transit camp. Auerbach's own transition in the commons of Bradford College, Yale University would be no less abrupt. In his exilic passage, Auerbach made landfall on this same university spot in central Pennsylvania from where I am now writing. From here, he was dislocated, in turn, in institutional hedging against his own mortality, almost as if everyone else at the university were immortal at the time. The university doctor, who had to certify all professors as physically fit to serve on the faculty then, weighed Auerbach's condition against the actuarial tables of the university health insurance program and found Auerbach wanting. Human societies historically cope with war's aftermath by shunting whatever could be perceived as disability that is, by becoming “ablist,” in the parlance of what now, in the midst of our new century's “perpetual war,” is called disability studies.¹² Auerbach beached on the scene of American history in 1947 not only with other war refugees like himself but also with one of the largest contingents of disabled war veterans. Postwar “ablism” has invariably proved an expedient coping mechanism for societies that, in postbellum relief, would rather forget war and its “detritus,” human or otherwise. Those who now retrace Auerbach's steps in the paths and stairways of this same institution, where the peripeties of their own exilic translocations find them, with names and provenance that, like Auerbach's at the time, correspond to the sanctioned xenophobia du jour, might often wonder what he thought as a marked man whose mortality was foregrounded with unalloyed actuarial punctiliousness and officially adduced as sufficient reason for his termination, or dis-appointment, from the faculty:

It is my opinion that an individual of 55 years of age with a hypertension as indicated in this examination should not be employed on the full time staff. Individuals suffering from this type of disease will sooner or later have a serious cerebral accident which will incapacitate them for work. There is no way, of course, for us to predict how soon or how far distant such accidents might occur, but such possibility will be part and parcel of this man's life. Sincerely yours, Herbert R. Glenn, M.D., Director, College Health Service, January 29, 1948.¹³

In his personnel file, now before me as I write this memorandum, except for a hand-written note Auerbach addressed to the college dean, he remains unremittingly silent. In the last document in his file, penned more than a year after the good doctor's irrevocable sentence on his permanent appointment and dated February 23, 1949, Auerbach writes: “We had a very cordial talk with Dr. Glenn, but, as I expected, he can do nothing in my case. I am extremely grateful to you that you are willing to write to your friends about a possible position for me. I want to mention, in this connection, that there might be possibilities not only in the field of Romance philology and literature, but also in Comparative Literature, or even German. Thank you! Very sincerely yours, Auerbach.”

The case file is amply articulate, intentionally and otherwise, on a bureaucratic process worthy of Kafka. And the circumspect conversion, in Auerbach's final sentence, of his undeniable qualifications into hypothetical “possibilities” is not an insignificant index to his own self-effacement and dislocation within a precarious locus. As his syntax enjoins adverbial conjunction (“but also in Comparative Literature”) to adversative option (“or even in German”), the shading from a sense of resignation into anxious urgency becomes unmistakable. The dean would indeed write to over a dozen institutions announcing Auerbach's availability and inquiring after “possibilities,” principally in the Ivy League and in the Big Ten universities, though his efforts at solicitation would seem to contradict the somewhat parlous circumstances of his original appointment a year earlier as described to the dean by the head of the department:

“If this figure [four thousand dollars] is hardly consonant with the experience and publications of Dr. Auerbach, I believe that it would nevertheless suffice to bring him here for the twelvemonth mentioned [February 1948 to February 1949] principally because Dr. Auerbach is new to America and his availability is not generally known to the profession [department head's request to the dean for authorization of temporary appointment, December 8, 1947].”

As revealing as this might be of Auerbach's predicament, perhaps best captured in an apt phrase by Seth Lerer in a variant context as a “story of exile and dismissal,”¹⁴ it is no less articulate on the incorrigible constancy of university governance as institutional culture of parsimony and self-impoverishing opportunism. Farinata's characterization of the damned consigned to the circle of heretics could well apply to the endemic penchant for myopic expediencies in our institutional culture—

We see, even as men who are farsighted,

those things, he said, that are remote from us;

the Highest Lord allots us that much light; (Inferno, 10.100-103)

—notwithstanding the motto of Yale University, “Lux et Veritas.” Yale was Auerbach's final exilic destination, where he arrived in 1950 after a year's stint at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. His only other option in 1949, ironically, was the Chair of Romance Philology at Humboldt University, in what had then recently become East Berlin, an offer that came through the good graces and bad conscience of Ernst Bloch and of Werner Krauss, the latter having succeeded Auerbach at the University of Marburg from which he had been dismissed in 1935 “on racist grounds.”¹⁵

Inevitably, one must countenance these historical details, and others even less felicitous and unworthy of dissemination, since Auerbach's predicament and intellectual vocation have so often been rendered as synonymous with the history of the discipline of comparative literature and its place in the modern universi...