One day, I hope to write like Erich Auerbach. The founding father of my discipline, comparative literature, knew how to set up an argument in an essay, illustrating his carefully made points through close and distant reading. As a student in Istanbul in the 1990s, when having one’s nose to a book was seen as an anomaly, I admired the German philologist’s lucidity, depth of knowledge, and erudition so much that I decided to become a scholar.

A typical Auerbach essay begins with a concept – ‘Figura’ say – and follows its meaning through the ages. A word, an image, an idea unfurls before our eyes with great skill. Watching the trajectory of a notion from classical antiquity to Dante allows one to think deeply and at great length about history, politics, and representation. It inspires a similar posture of critical engagement with artworks, texts, and the world.

Seven decades after his passing, Auerbach’s deep, close reading is a dying art in this precarious moment of constant distraction and diminished attention. Today, an endless succession of social media clips, designed to stoke up anger and conflict, is overtaking the role reading has played for centuries in everyday lives. Civility reached through lengthy reflection slowly vanishes in favor of performative wisdom that people live-stream on their social media channels. Auerbach’s passionate engagement with text and history has never been needed more.

What would an Auerbach essay on the demise of deep reading at a time of rising nationalisms look like? ChatGPT might come up with an answer if appropriately prompted (I’ll resist the temptation), yet the honest answer is that we will never know. Not only is Auerbach long dead, but his slow, thoughtful method of thinking is evaporating.

Still, as a 45-year-old comparatist living in Istanbul, I do my best to think like Auerbach. I take long walks by the Bosphorus Strait, which help me concentrate and fantasize about a metempsychosis between our souls. I have some rational, historical reasons for this fantasy of soul migration. The great Jewish comparatist lived in my hometown in the 1930s. He wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) near my apartment. When working on long-form commissions that require months of research and close reading, I ask myself: ‘How would Auerbach approach this subject?’ This provides an impossibly high bar for my essay’s construction, which elevates the scope and depth of my writing.

It is not only as a critic and scholar that Auerbach’s work informs me. I’m also a novelist. While working on my second book, Şehir (The City), an auto-fiction based on my time in Amsterdam as a graduate student in 2004-2005, I repeatedly returned to Auerbach’s ideas and concepts. How to represent reality is the key question of Auerbach’s thinking. How can I bring this-worldliness to text? How can I make my experience a piece of history itself?

For Auerbach, realism was the gateway to history, philosophy, and beauty. If a text relied on empirical reality instead of metaphysics and theological notions, it attained a secular, realist quality. By embracing this type of secular realism when their subjects were concerned with religious events and characters, several texts in the Jewish-Christian literature tradition transformed the concept of mimesis.

In those key works which Auerbach discussed in his essays and books, flashes of reality interrupt and disrupt accepted norms in rhetoric and narrative, shocking and rattling their contemporaneous readers. Reality would make its way into epics, poems, and novels this way. As a novelist, I ensured my text soaked up as much earthly reality as possible. Auerbach showed me this endeavor’s history and techniques better than any writing workshop or MFA program could.

Born into an affluent Jewish family in 1892 in Berlin, Auerbach lived through violent times. After studying law and earning his doctoral degree from Heidelberg University in 1913, he was wounded while fighting for Austria-Hungary in the First World War. Back home, he was decorated with an Iron Cross. Witnessing the destruction of the world he grew up in led Auerbach to shift his academic field to Romance philology. Leo Spitzer (1887-1960) became Auerbach’s adviser in Marburg as he researched his postdoctoral thesis on Dante.

Landing a teaching post in Germany at the time was no easy feat. Auerbach was Jewish and, despite the support he received from Spitzer, cut a lonely figure. In the 1920s, he found work as a field librarian at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Reading his output at the time, I was struck by how prolific Auerbach was. ‘The Discovery of Dante by Romanticism’ (1929) explores how the Divine Comedy marks a breaking point in the Western tradition where God’s judgment manifests itself in ‘earthliness’ and ‘this-worldliness’. In his attempt to capture objective life, or reality, Dante eternalizes and freezes existence: the characters Dante encounters in Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell have ended up there by choice. Although it concerns the ‘other world’, Dante’s representation of these spheres was objective and realistic.

By 1930, Auerbach was a professor of Romance philology at the University of Marburg. He published his thesis, ‘On the Technique of the Early Renaissance Novella in Italy and France’, before putting out several more essays and books that tackle ethics and responsibility, the aesthetics of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and Vico and Hegel’s concepts of time, among others.

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