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Dante: Poet of the Secular World (New York Review Books)

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Auerbach's Dante book was published first in 1929 before the period of his Turkish teaching as Michael Dirda's helpful preface relates. In this book one can see Auerbach working out his thoughts both on mimesis, which would bear fruit in his most celebrated work, and on typology or <figura> that would become the focus of a stellar essay. What is most dazzling about this work here is its simultaneous attention to historical sweep and poetic detail. One works one's way from Homer, Greek tragedy and comedy, Aristotle and Virgil through Augustine, Guizinelli and Cavalcanti. By the time Dante's early works appear for discussion, the reader has amassed a tremendous background. Auerbach's writing on the Comedy is as impressive where he shows the ability to ponder the value of white petals on a rose or the necessity of the Veltro, or greyhound as the foe to the She-wolf that menaces Dante. Also, I was struck by Auerbach's attention to Dante's word order and period construction. After all that, it is remarkable to discover how sparsely emulated and admired Dante's poetry was for centuries after its completion. This little book fits scintillating learning within its 180 pages. I do recommend it.

This neglected and almost unknown work, to which we have access only thanks to the New York Review of Books' quixotic and impeccably chosen list of forgotten classics, is the most fundamental metaphysical defense of literature ever written.

And the great thing is that it is totally practical, an inspiration for the working writer. Since Plato, imaginative literature has had a bad conscience, and in English words like "fiction" don't even bother to disguise the association of imaginative literature with lies, deception, and mere tales.

Of course this is frustrating for those of us who believe that literature tells human truths that cannot be revealed by any other method. But there it is.

Actually, however, Erich Auerbach cracked the conundrum many years ago, right in the middle of the robust, high-coloured good health of the Scientific Age (ie before all our supposedly neutral and quasi-divine scientific knowledge had produced nuclear weapons) and he set forth in this book, which he wrote out of a unique understanding and an intimate love of Dante's work, the ultimate defense of literature and the truth of literature.

Auerbach starts out with the pre-Socratic Heraclitus (thereby neutralising the later Plato's critique in THE REPUBLIC) and his dictum "A man's character is his fate." Auerbach elaborates this insight to show how each of us, each actual human being, attracts characteristic sorrows, challenges, and other experiences the way a magnet attracts iron filings. And out of our decisions and actions in confrontation with these characteristic experiences, which are unique to each of us in the historical drama of our individual life, our inner being is revealed. Nietzsche had a very similar insight when he observed "If one has character one has one's characteristic experience which recurs again and again."

But Auerbach then generalises this insight to account for the selection process required by practicing writers to create literature. A novel can only have so many characters, so many incidents, and so many details, and these must be rigourously selected from the vast richness of life and incorporated into the limited space of a work of art. And to do so an artist must possess some principal for making this selection, an understanding of the inner working of reality which is embedded in the underlying plot and which reveals itself in a fully satisfying work of art. Auerbach shows how the basis for literature, from its very beginning, is an evolutionary interaction between a sentient being and its environment, an interaction which is unique and which changes both the creature and its environment (ie the bee adapts towards the flower and the flower adapts towards the bee). The premise for this is a deep cultural belief in a living order of reality which adapts and changes, not in some deterministic and mechanistic way, but uniquely and unpredictably, simultaneously following the laws of nature while reserving the mystery of an inviolate virgin contingency in every pristine new moment of the constantly arriving present, and this change occurs as a result of the passage through life of each living being and the interaction of that being with its surrounding historical reality.

Of course, modernism was committed to chaos and randomness and therefore it literally lost the plot . . . but Auerbach shows us how to return to the plot, by rebuilding its philosophical base from the ground of the unconscious back up into the light of a fully realised artistic work.

This is only one of the many treasures contained in this brief work. In the same chapter Auerbach shows how the example of Jesus--told in a new kind of story with a surprising plot in short books we now call The Gospels--detonated the foundations of the classical ideal of the Gentleman. By destroying the gentleman as an ideal of a civilised life this new kind of story jumped the rails of historical development and set the world in motion towards an entirely new destiny. These 400 words--and that is about all they amount to--should be required reading in the high schools of the civilised world.

And then, and only then, does Auerbach begin his brilliant discussion of Dante.

Honestly, reading this book left me breathless. Turning the pages was like watching a new galaxy come into view. It is one of the most important books I have ever read. Literature will begin a new, not necessarily golden, but certainly less dross-like age, if more writers read this book, and it is not too much to suggest that the world would be a better place, if poets and other artists truly are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, and if they read this book and then went forth and did likewise, as Auerbach suggests that Dante did.

He has certainly shown us what to do . . . the rest is up to us.