Auerbach and the para-modern

One of the offshoots of the study of the postmodern has been a new life for pre or early modernity as a kindred spirit of our own time. The most obvious example to my eyes is the place of "science" which was mythologized as part of modernity and which has since become somewhat more horizontal to other knowledges, as it was in the emergent period of the early modern. Conversely, the kind of claims religion can make, or the ways in which "the religious" informs judgment, have shifted around the demarcations of modernity. Without over-emphasizing the borders of "modernity," there is some usefulness to it as a periodizing device.

I recap this as an intro to two ways in which narrative today can be compared to early modern mimetics in Auerbach's Mimesis. First, Auerbach characterizes the Medieval period in terms of a strong displacement of high tragedy because of the figural power of Christianity. By "figural" he means a certain relationship between the earthly and the heavenly, the present and eternity, in which all phenomena on each side ultimately correspond; and while the heavenly side is absolutely the more significant, this device gives every earthly happening, no matter how mean or human, connection to the divine. The limit case is Dante's Comedy in which the endowment of the earthly overwhelms and excludes the heavenly; but this is a limit case, and the drama of the Middle Ages generally did not suffer from this potential crisis--in general it enjoyed its license to earthiness with the knowledge that all filth was a sign in the cycle of redemption. Retrospectively, Dante is seen as a bridge into humanism and the general replacement of the figura as an aesthetic device. Examples of an anti-figural writing are Montaigne's essays or Shakespeare--anything in which we can recognize an existential dimension.

I would argue, however, that the postmodern has rediscovered the figura in the Holocaust. The "other side" of the figural is not unrepresentable; rather, it is an inescapable part of any economy of representation. Thus Ranciere, in The Future of the Image, rebuts Adorno (et al.) on the unrepresentability or barbarism of representation of the Holocaust. It is instead a matter of focal distance, of making decisions and staking positions in the economy of "the visible and the sayable" (Ranciere's definition of "the image"). Just as the Medieval Christian aesthetic endorsed all kinds of "creatural" or "kreaturlich" abjection in the name of the figural regime, so today art has taken on a mission in relation to dehumanization under the unannounced but understood sign of the Holocaust as a kind of "beyond."

Second point: Auerbach moves on to discuss the differences between Elizabethan and Greek tragedy. I'll boil the distinction down as it is fairly basic to Western history: Greek tragedy presumes the audience knows the story because it is part of national myth or history; Elizabethan tragedy involves fate as a personal and existential value. The experience of Greek tragedy is thus something that is fundamentally withheld from us except insomuch as we have taken the time to familiarize ourselves with an equivalent knowledge of Greek myth--and in fact, the same is now true for viewing Shakespearean productions. In general, though, our tragedies fall on the model of Shakespeare's--except in rigidified low genres, like horror. While one can point to examples of "good horror movies" with well developed characters, the weight of the output is on a mythic tragic format in which character's are basically ossified and predestined.

Differences: the post-modern viewer has retained an expectation of surprise, a distilled form of irony, which prevents the solemnity of tragedy, the condition for speech, from developing. So let us imagine stripping a horror movie of all the tricks and turns designed to trigger our startle reflexes. What will fill the time? The Greek solution is rhetoric, the well-formed speeches that take their turns but which cannot hold back the falling blades of fate. The current solution is the eloquence of viscerality, which the Greeks banned from the stage and which I doubt could have been rendered in prior ages as hyper-graphically as today, even when a butcher's harvest could have represented, with hardly any mimetic gap, the interior of the human body. I see shreds or sparkles of this neo or post mythic tragedy in certain zombie films, and it is here too that we find the structural conditions most ripe to exclude the surprise.