Mimesis (95 page)

In regard to the “stylistic differentiation” in later (thus, for example, “post-Socratic”) ancient literature, I was sure of my facts from the beginning; but I still read with satisfaction which counterexamples were adduced by my reviewers who were classical philologists. Edelstein cites Aristophanes’ assertion that he pursues serious intentions, as well as Plato’s, Cratinus’, and Cicero’s remarks that tend in the same direction. He brings up Middle Comedy and Menander (is it justified to exclude the latter from an analysis of realism?); he speaks of Milesian fable, of Theocritus and Herondas (I never claimed that these were to be excluded from the category considered by me because they wrote in verse!), of mime and of epigrams; and he mentions later also Xenophon’s
Oeconomicus
. People can adduce such counterexamples only if they have lost sight of the concept of realism as I meant it, and consequently assume that I intended to characterize the whole of ancient realism as “a vaudeville show” or as “poking fun.” That, however, I neither intended nor did. I call the realism that is alien to antiquity serious, problematic, or tragic; I set it in express opposition to the “moralistic.” Perhaps I would have done better to call it “existential realism,” but I hesitated to use this all too contemporary term for phenomena of the distant past. And what I meant, it seemed to me, was to be inferred with unmistakable, even overpowering clarity from the passage about Peter and my analysis of it [
Mimesis
, pp. 40-49]. But Regenbogen, too, mentions Xenophon (
Oeconomicus
and
Socratic Memoirs
), where “the
description of everyday life turns up in a sense not at all comic or idyllic.” Does Regenbogen believe that these examples of “serious” realism have something to do with what the temptation of Peter contains, that they anticipate or even just announce the world-historical change in stylistic feeling that is proclaimed there? Edelstein writes toward the end of his review: “Yet, in my opinion, it is not only the contrast, it is also the similarities (between ancient and modern concepts) that need to be emphasized.” Of course. It is quite clear to me with what great justification, for example, early Christianity can be regarded as the product of late antiquity. I have read many significant investigations that have been written from this point of view, and I have learned from them. In
Mimesis
I also took account, partly expressly, partly implicitly, of this approach. But the task that my theme imposed on me was a different one: I had to show not the transition but rather the complete change.

Only much later, six years after the book had appeared, did E[rnst] R[obert] Curtius [1886-1956] publish his objections to it. He sees in the book a theoretical construct, from which he seeks to extract theses in order to refute them. But the book is no theoretical construct; it aims to offer a view, and the very elastic thoughts or ideas that hold it together cannot be grasped and proven wrong in single, isolated phrases. I will return to this later. First it is necessary here to enter into the details of Curtius’ refutations. He considers as the theses of the book the doctrine of stylistic differentiation and mingling (which for its part rests on the concept of the three ancient types of style) and the doctrine of the figural view of reality of Christian late antiquity and the Middle Ages.

[Curtius] deals with the doctrine of the three styles in this periodical (
Romanische Forschungen
64 [1952] 57ff.).
⁶
He begins with an enumeration of the expert opinions on the types of style that have been preserved to our day, from the
Rhetoric to Herennius
down to Meinhard of Bamberg (eleventh century), so as to reach the conclusion “that the ancient rule of stylistic differentiation is neither so unified nor so absolute as it might seem according to Auerbach.” The compilation of expert opinions is useful, but it contributes nothing to the criticism of
Mimesis
.
Mimesis
is an attempt at the history of the matter itself, not of the expert opinions on it; to write the latter with the resources that were at my disposal in Istanbul would have been altogether impossible. The conceptual pair “stylistic differentiation/stylistic mixing” is one of the themes of my book and always has the same significance throughout the twenty chapters, from Genesis all the way to Virginia Woolf. Thus it does not conform to changes in expert opinions. It has to do with a version of the thought, which was formed by me around 1940. In particular, the idea of realism, which is present in
Mimesis
, was dealt with previously only rarely—and even then in another context. It has nothing to do with “Jest and Earnest in the Middle Ages” or “Kitchen Humor.”
⁸
Incidentally, in the extant ancient opinions on the three styles (most of which relate to oratory) very little is said about realism.

It is an entirely different question, whether my pair of concepts covers the tradition adequately, whether it is applicable, whether, therefore, stylistic differentiation was really a characteristic element of ancient stylistic feeling. On the last two pages of his essay (and already in note 3 on page 60) Curtius tries to contest this also, and specifically he thinks:

1. I advocated the thesis that ancient comedy had been classed in the humble style.
⁹
Presumably I let myself be misled to this end by Dante’s
statements in
De vulgari eloquentia
2.4 and
Epistola
10.10. But [according to Curtius] this theory surfaces for the first time, as Paget Toynbee [1855-1932] has demonstrated (
Dante Studies and Researches
[London: Methuen and Co., 1902] p. 103), in Uguccione of Pisa [often known by his Latin name, Hugutio] (ca. 1200).

2. I seemed generally to accept that for ancient theory a conscious correspondence existed between the types of style and the genres of poetry. This is [according to Curtius] false. At the beginning of
De optimo genere oratorum
Cicero denies the equation of the types of style with the genres of poetry. While there should be no transition between the genres of poetry, there must be between the types of style. Curtius cites verbatim: “oratorem genere non divido, optimum enim quaero” (“I do not divide up the orator by class, for I seek the best”). This would be an express denial of stylistic differentiation. In
Institutio oratoria
10.2.22 Quintilian reproduces Cicero’s train of thought in a way true to its meaning.

I advocated absolutely no “thesis” on the ascription of genres of poetry to set levels of stylistic elevation. But to be sure, tragedy is always assigned to the high style,
¹⁰
comedy—ever in accord with its character—to the middle or humbler style,
¹¹
as Boileau still does (and, by the way, Dante, too, in
De vulgari eloquentia
, loc. cit.). Paget Toynbee takes care not to claim that Dante’s characterization of comedy surfaces first in Uguccione. He contents himself with the reference to Uguccione as Dante’s direct source. A. Philip McMahon, whom Curtius, for reasons beyond my comprehension, likewise cites, references even older sources of Uguccione: Papias and Isidore (“Seven Questions on Aristotelian Definitions of Tragedy and Comedy,”
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
40 [1929] 97-198, here: 140). It is hard to understand how the author of the book
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
can believe that Uguccione, or another medieval author whom Uguccione could have used, created a new definition of comedy. Uguccione’s and Dante’s definition derives, in the final analysis, from one of the oldest
definitions we know, and the one that became far and away the most influential: that of Theophrastus. It developed as follows in the glosses of Placidus (fifth-sixth century:
Placidus liber glossarum. Glossaria reliqua
, ed. Georg Goetz, Corpus
glossariorum Latinorum
5 [Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1894], p. 56): “Comoedia est quae res privatarum et humilium personarum comprehendit, non tam alto ut tragoedia stilo, sed mediocri et dulci” (“Comedy is that which comprehends the affairs of ordinary and humble individuals, not in so high a style as tragedy but in a humble and engaging one”). Although the words
privatarum et humilium
point rather to the lower style, this gloss rates comedy as belonging to the middle style, to which Menander and Terence particularly gave impetus. The contrast to the level of tragedy is essential and permanent. A scholium on Terence (
Scholia Terentiana
, ed. Friedrich H. Schlee [Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1893], p. 163, l. 12) counts comedy as belonging to the lower style: “comoedia villanus cantus, ut qui sit affinis cotidianae locutioni” (“Comedy is lower-class song, the kind related to everyday speech”). Note the agreement with Uguccione and Dante: it is a late-antique topos!
¹²
And why does Curtius reject the Horace passage,
Ars poetica
93-98, Dante’s true source — and one cited by him? Because it has to do with the connection of
lexis
[“language”] to the
prepon
[“the apt (the virtue of parts that fit harmoniously into a whole: decorum)”]. But the doctrine of the types of style is nothing other than the expression of that will to style that connects
lexis
to the
prepon
. From its earliest beginnings, ever since Aristotle, the
prepon
has been the basis for the doctrine of the types of style.

That is the heart of the argument. I never claimed a precise connection of the genres of poetry to the types of style; except for tragedy, the epic in Virgil’s or Lucan’s style, and on the other hand for the various forms of humbler realism, the classification is uncertain. But I claim the differentiation of style, which is based on the
prepon
; a hierarchy of forms of expression corresponds to a hierarchy of topics. Every offense against it is
cacozelia
[“affectation of style”] (“aut magnarum rerum humilis dictio aut minimarum oratio tumens” [“either humble diction for great topics or bombastic speech for the least important”]: Marius Plotius Sacerdos,
Artes grammaticae
, in Heinrich Keil, ed.
Grammatici
latini
, vol. 6 [Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1874], p. 455, ll. 12-13). Curtius’ polemic against this truism of classical philology rests upon a misunderstanding of the texts. He mistakes the mingling of the types of styles or the levels of stylistic elevation with Cicero’s challenge that the ideal orator must command them all. The latter appears in the passages of Cicero and Quintilian that he adduces, but there is nothing about a rejection of stylistic differentiation. That Cicero demands the command of all levels of stylistic elevation only from the orator and not from the poet has only a very remote connection with the subject treated in
Mimesis
(of the differentiation between the high style and everyday realism), but I would like nonetheless to present here briefly the thinking of Cicero. He thinks—and this corresponded to the actual situation—[that] there are genres of poetry in which, under all circumstances, a loftiness prevails, namely, tragedy or grand epic on the one hand, comedy on the other.
¹³
In each of them, individual poets (Cicero names Homer and Menander) distinguished themselves as specialists, as it were. In contrast, there is, for the most part, in one and the same judicial or political speech a motivation for the application of many levels; yet that does not mean such application must happen all at once, but rather in alternation according to an intention (
docere
“to show,”
delectare
“to delight,”
commovere
“to move”). Cicero and Quintilian never taught that one ought to present (
docere
) the facts in the high style or excite and rouse the audience in the matter-of-fact, lower one. That would amount to a rejection of stylistic differentiation for oratory; but it would appear to them as
cacozelia
[“affectation of style”] or
tapeinosis
[“lowness of style”]. A greater authority than Cicero and Quintilian demanded, by the way, or so it seems, the same from the poet as they did from the orator. At the end of Plato’s
Symposium
it is related how at daybreak, among the many people sleeping, Socrates explained to Agathon and Aristophanes, who were still drinking with him but who were also already half asleep, that one and the same person must know how to compose tragedies and comedies.

I believe that one can have confidence in my idea of ancient stylistic differentiation without fear of being misled. The idea is not incautious.

The second of my “theses,” that of the figuralism of the Christian view of reality, Curtius briefly “repudiated,” as he puts it, in another place.
The repudiation, which is directed against my essay on
figura
(first in
Archivum Romanicum
22 [1938], reprinted in
Neue Dantestudien
, Istanbuler Schriften, no. 5 [Istanbul, 1944]),
¹⁴
is found somewhat irrelevantly in a footnote of his work on [Gustav] Gröber [1844-1911] (
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie
67 (1951) 276-277) and consists substantially of an enumeration of book and essay titles. [He charges] that I had not taken into consideration the research results contained in these writings [and that] if I had done so, my thesis would have become worth discussing. Among the works enumerated are found only two (by [Jean] Daniélou [1905-1974] and [Rudolf Karl] Bultmann [1884-1976]) of the specialized theological investigations of typology, which have recently become very numerous. All of these works appeared long after
figura
; the two specialized works did not appear until four years after
Mimesis
. What is more, they would not have been accessible to me in Istanbul.
¹⁵
It is also astounding that Curtius mentions among the witnesses against me the work of Bultmann, which makes reference to my work.
¹⁶
More important, however, is that the theological writings on typology—both those named by Curtius and other more recent ones—give me no cause to change anything substantive in my views.
¹⁷
This is because, among
other things, far and away most of them concern themselves with individual questions of sources and with restricted segments of time, whereas my efforts rest upon collections of motifs that I began seventeen years ago and that extend from Paul up into the seventeenth century.