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PARTISAN REVIEW
quainted, Auerbach begins his discussion of any work by explicating
very thoroughly one or two short passages, often selected almost at
random. This is not the explication of the New Critics, however, bearing
down hard on verbal ambiguities, thematic images, and symbols. Auer–
bach is primarily interested in syntax, style, and reference. From the
references and their paratactic or hypotactic ordering, from the logic
and rhythm of the development, Auerbach infers the author's sense of
external reality, partly personal, partly determined by his class and
period. This world-view Auerbach reconstructs or recovers from the
passages he quotes, aided by his vast, particular and precisely qualified
knowledge of literature and history.
Such analysis of style, called
Stilforschung,
has been prominent in
German criticism since before the First WorId War, and strangely ne–
glected in English and American criticism, especially of fiction. We
possess separate studies of the styles of major American novelists, but
no serious comparative or historical works which attempt to place the
styles culturally in their American context. Joseph Warren Beach's ten–
tative beginning in
The Outlook for American Prose
(1926) has not
been followed up.
Auerbach began his study in reaction to Plato's view of art. The
tenth book of the
Republic
argues that imitative art is completely
divorced from the truth, is an imperfect reflection of an imperfect re–
flection, and hence at two removes from reality. Auerbach opposed to
this Dante's assertion that the
Commedia
represented true reality, and
he opposed it also with his own strong admiration for Stendhal and
Balzac. These novelists "took random individuals from daily life in
their dependence upon current historical circumstances and made them
the subjects of serious, problematic, and even tragic representation."
Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert broke completely with the classic and
neo-classic theories of separation of styles, which assigned to different
kinds of social reality their appropriate styles. Since the styles, according
to these theories, could not be mixed, kinds of reality were kept separate
in art, or excluded from it. Everyday reality could be dealt with only
in a low, comic style, or a sentimental or unserious one.
Auerbach was aware, of course, that these doctrines were accepted
only in certain periods, and that literary realism did not begin in the
French nineteenth century. He set out, using texts already well known
to him, and without preconceptions so far as this theme was concerned,
to discover to what degree and in what manner realistic subjects were
treated seriously, problematically, or tragically, in the historic develop–
ment of Western literature.
