• 1 J. Huizinga, “Over studie en waardeering van het Buddhisme”, in Verzamelde Werken I, Haarlem, Tjeen (...)

1For someone so home-loving, someone with such a well-defined feeling for place, someone whose work consisted to a large extent of the history of his own environment, Johan Huizinga had a mental existence that was quite nomadic. “In the world of Buddhism there are entire countries still open to research”, he said at the end of the public lecture which inaugurated his position as private lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. “Personally, I would prefer to wander along its long frontiers, where [the study of Buddhism] touches on the general study of civilisation, the art of China and Japan, the history of Hellenism in the East, and Early Christian culture.”1

• 2 The priceless collection of Jolles’ letters and documents edited by Walter Thys was aptly subtitled (...)

2In fact his wanderings took him to less exotic places. But as a reader he remained, especially in view of the current myopic perspective of specialized historians, a wanderer. So was André Jolles, in an even more emphatic way. A wandering scholar, there is no better way to characterise Jolles, a vagrant between cultures, between climates of opinion, but also literally, between positions and homes.2 Where Huizinga turned out to be stability itself, Jolles had, in the end, lost his bearings.

• 3 On Huizinga, see A. van der Lem, Johan Huizinga. Leven en werk in beelden & documenten, Amsterdam, (...)
• 4 On mai 1, 1933, Jolles became a member of the NSDAP. His membership number was 2989023. See A. Boda (...)
• 5 On the end of this friendship, see W. Thys, “Waarom gingen Johan Huizinga en André Jolles in 1933 u (...)

3Where Huizinga succeeded in almost anything he did—he found happiness in marriage twice, his career brought him recognition in the Netherlands as well as abroad—Jolles was unhappy in almost everything he did.3 His greater brilliance—Huizinga would be the first to admit it—was only recognised after his death. Both men were conservative by nature. But where happiness seasoned Huizinga’s conservatism with a fine flavour of nostalgia, Jolles’ conservatism became revolutionary: he became a national socialist.4 It was the end of a wonderful friendship, of a bios parallellos, as Jolles rightly called it.5

• 6 See H. U. Gumbrecht, Vom Leben und Sterben der grossen Romanisten. Carl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curti (...)
• 7 C. Magris, Microcosmi, Milano, Garzanti, 1997. (English translation: Microcosms, London, Harvill, 1 (...)

6One of the most important branches of this family of readers was Romanic philology in Germany, with Friedrich Christian Diez and Leopold von Ranke as its founding fathers. It blossomed in the beginning of the Twentieth century with scholars such as Vossler, Curtius, Spitzer and Auerbach.6 There is of course a brilliant counterpart to this tradition in French and Italian Germanistik. In his breath–taking book Microcosmi Claudio Magris in wonderful vignettes sketches the great Italian masters of this trade, Arturo Graf, Paolo Raffaele Troiano, Farinelli, Vincenti, describing not so much a course of study as a life’s fulfilment.7

• 8 I took the inspiration for my essay from J. Kamerbeek Jr., “Johan Huizinga und Ernst Robert Curtius (...)

7Here, as a background for the creative erudition of both Huizinga and Jolles, the presentation of a triumvirate suffices: Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach. I will focus on four similarities between them: an assumption, an experience, an analysis and a tool. Their common assumption was that culture was defined by harmony, by the unity and inseparability of the hearts and minds of its participants. This unity gave a culture its metaphysical aura, it was a musical harmony of the individual soul with the cosmos. They believed that this harmony once existed, and that it, quite recently, had been radically disturbed.8

• 9 E. R. Curtius, Französischer Geist im neuen Europa, Berlin, Leipzig, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1925, (...)

9The feeling of unity that they cherished with respect to culture, whether that of Europe, of Christianity or of even greater entities, provided them with a rather wayward methodological assumption, which can best be described as a form of homeopathy. Where everything was linked, a secret affinity arose, and those who could sense it were able to find it again in every given thing, down to the smallest detail. The insight into this connectedness often came in the form of an epiphany, a shock, or a flash. All three of them adhered to what they called “a sense of quality”, the theory of essential details or privileged aspects, the insight into a mysterious economy of part and whole that cannot be otherwise defined. “Sie müssen einen aufleuchten”, in the words of Curtius. It was all about “the inner click”, according to Spitzer.9

• 10 E. Auerbach, Die Narbe des Odysseus, in Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen L (...)

10It was, above all, the ability to see the abstract in the concrete. They used, in the happy phrase of Spitzer, “warm abstractions”, abstractions that are visible and, rather than being used to sever our bonds with life, are organic and remain close to the body. It is this ability that forms the basis for Auerbach’s masterwork, Mimesis. In the scar of Odysseus and the sacrifice of Isaac, Auerbach is able to point to two basic stylistic types that were given to European literature by Homer and the Elohist.10

• 11 On Curtius: M. Kowal, Introduction, in E. R. Curtius, Essays on European Literature, Princeton, Pri (...)

11The connection between part and whole, between detail and totality, intrigued them it the utmost way. And all of them assumed a fairly similar description of that relationship in their definition of “form”. Curtius used the notion of “intellectual constitution”, Spitzer that of “inner form” and “inner life centre”. “The lifeblood of poetic imagination is everywhere the same,” says Spitzer, “whether we are tapping the organism for ‘language’ or ‘ideas’, ‘plot’ or ‘composition’.”11

• 12 E. Auerbach, Mimesis, op. cit., p. 23. On the notion of “table of antinomies”, see J. Kamerbeek Jr. (...)

12This allowed them to create the visionary typology of which Auerbach’s Mimesis is a textbook example. “The two styles, in their opposition”, Auerbach writes about the differences between Homer and the Elohist, “represent basic types”. Complete description contrasts with selection, clarity with suggestion, surface with depth, simplicity with complexity. And this focus on contrast, this creation of a “table of antinomies” is a fundamental component of the method of these literary theorists.12

• 13 E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Bern, München, Francke, 1973, p. (...)
• 14 L. Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the (...)

13Curtius for instance traces, in his Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, the two Kulturkörpern of European culture, contrasting the old Mediterranean and the modern Western (“abendländische”) characters only to ultimately reunite them into a single frame and reveal their deep underlying continuity.13 In his Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, Spitzer opposes changeability and permanence, atmosphere and environment, subjectivity and objectivity, to ultimately find harmony as a “dialectics of integrated contrasts”.14

• 15 L. Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, op. cit., p. 9.
• 16 E. R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, op. cit., pp. 8–9.
• 17 See J. M. Ziolkowski, Foreword, in E. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Anti (...)

14Nothing is stable in the world of human creation and what the philologist is essentially doing is, to use once again Spitzer’s words, “surrendering to a propensity to see things as shifting and melting into each other”.15 Curtius used the metaphor of rivers flowing into each other, “wie wenn der Rhein die Wasser des Tibers aufgenommen hätte”. “Wortwandel ist Kulturwandel und Seelenwandel.”16 Auerbach said it in his Philology and Weltliteratur [Philologie der Weltliteratur]: “The inner history of the last thousand years is the history of mankind achieving self-expression: this is what philology, a historical discipline, treats.”17

• 18 E. Auerbach, “Figura”, in J. I. Porter (ed.), Time, History, and Literature. Selected Essays of Eri (...)

15It is undoubtedly also Auerbach who formulates most transparently this intensely Pythagorean way of thinking with his notion of figura. Figura is the concept in which everything on earth finds its completion and fulfilment in the hereafter. This form of philology, which looks exactly like the typological interpretation of the Old Testament—every person and every story finds its fulfilment in the New Testament—immediately makes it clear how easy it was to translate Pythagorean mysticism into Christian ideas, and it explains the magnificent continuity of thought.18

• 19 See also the Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition, by E. Said, in E. Auerbach, Mimesis, (...)
• 20 See M. Kowal, Introduction, op. cit., pp. xvi–xvii.

17This also makes their books individual testaments. Mimesis was a book, “written in the early 1940s by a certain person, in a certain situation”. Auerbach wrote it, dismissed from Marburg and driven out of Germany, in Istanbul.19 Curtius was not a Jew and he was allowed to remain in Germany, but he was nevertheless writing against the background of “the crisis of European culture” revealed by the First World War. In his book on Balzac, he talks about the aesthetics of art for art’s sake as the reaction of the artistic and humanistic instinct against the rupture in style that characterised art in the Nineteenth century.20

• 21 L. Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, op. cit., pp. 75–6.

18And Spitzer? Another victim of the diaspora, he wrote his book on World Harmony at Yale. The field of meaning that he describes had disappeared, and its disappearance was simply “the history of modern civilisation”, the history of a disenchantment or unchristening. He pleaded for a new periodization of Western history. For him, the breech did not come with the Renaissance. It was only after the Baroque that the field defining the concepts of mood and harmony was “radically uprooted”. At the end of the Eighteenth century, Harmony had become frozen and robbed of its flowers.21

• 22 To go into real detail here is impossible but for a good idea of my working method I can refer to W (...)

19A dual biography of Huizinga and Jolles is thus necessary. Not a proper biography, actually, but rather the recreation of an “intellectual constitution”, the growth of a “spiritual person”, split in two halves, contrasting identities that for a few decades found a middle ground of exhilarating creativity.22 For the remainder of this essay, I will concentrate on only one small aspect of this creativity, the ideas of both Huizinga and Jolles about transformation, about metamorphosis, as the inner mechanism of cultural change.

• 23 J. Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en v (...)

21At several points in his oeuvre Huizinga for instance refers to standard psychological figures that incorporate both elementary ways of seeing and social roles that readily transform into each other. One of those series was about the creative persona. “Our intellect is still capable”, he wrote in The Autumn of the Middle Ages about the capacity of seeing colours as symbolic essences, “of seeing things in this way at any time, if we can momentarily capture the wisdom of primitive man, the child, the poet, or the mystic. For all these, the natural essence of things is locked up in their general quality”.23

• 24 J. Huizinga, “Twee worstelaars met den engel (bespreking van Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Ab (...)

22In his major essay on Spengler and Wells, “Two Wrestlers with the Angel”, he describes two ways of understanding the world: “that of the immediate awareness of things in their totality and in their interrelatedness, the apprehension of their intrinsic nature and shape, of seeing things in [the context of] time, in their supernatural fullness of significance, in their eternal motion and their tragic fatality. It is the way in which primitive man, the child and the poet understand the world”. The second way developed only at a later stage of culture: “seeing things in their isolation, in [the context of] space, analyzing, measuring, calculating, systematizing, solving all mysteries with the category of causality”.24

• 26 “Het is een mystische identiteit. De een is het ander geworden. De wilde, in zijn tooverdans, is ka (...)

24The whole text of Homo ludens is geared towards dissolving the distinction between child and primitive man. The child is one with his play, just as the primitive man, in his magic dance, becomes the kangaroo. “It is a mystic unity. The one has become the other.” This metamorphosis too is based on the dynamics of the fairy-tale. “In this sphere of sacred play the child and the poet are at home with the savage.” And it is “aesthetic sensibility” that has “brought the modern man closer to this sphere”.26

• 29 “The literary travesty. Knight–Shepherd–Knave.” A. Jolles, “Die literarischen Travestien, Ritter–Hi (...)

27In October 1931 Jolles held a lecture for three Dutch universities, that was published in German under the title “Die literarische Travestien. Ritter–Hirt–Schelm”.29 Like the series of Huizinga, these identities were both elementary attitudes and social roles. They could spill over into one another and they were both literature—genres such as the heroic, the bucolic and the picaresque—and realities—our confrontation with culture.

• 30 “A world with its own requirements and its own patterns.” (A. Jolles, “Die literarische Travestien” (...)
• 31 “Een eigen, uitzonderlijke, omheinde wereld binnen de gewone.” (J. Huizinga, “Over de grenzen van s (...)

29Jolles here also reflects on his theory of culture. Whether literary genres or social attitudes, the three travesties are a form of play. The travesty of the shepherd is a play with nature, the travesty of the knight is a play with the heroic, the travesty of the knave is a play with crime. Play, according to Jolles, is a world with its own demands and its own laws: “Eine Welt mit eigenen Erfordernissen und eigener Gesetzlichkeit.”30 Two years later Huizinga, in his rectoral address on the dies natalis of Leiden university (February 8, 1933), would define play as the creation of “a completely fenced off, enclosed world in which the players move according to its own constraining law”.31

• 32 A. Jolles, Einfache Formen. Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz, (...)

30So, here we have the announcements of two seminal books, Einfache Formen on the one hand, and Homo ludens on the other, and we see the bioi parallelloi of both writers characterised by a common creativity and clarity, an essential preconception and postulate.32 But the richness of the bioi parallelloi not only lies in the detection of similarities, they also show the differences. And there is a fundamental one here at work.

• 33 “Irgendwie beschwert und bedrückt uns unsere Kulturwelt, ihre sogenannten Wohltaten quälen und verl (...)

31Huizinga recognised the heart of culture in play. All culture was preceded by play, born as play and in play. But for Jolles play was at the same time essence and avoidance, “Quintessence und Abfall”. The three forms he described were forms of escape from culture, the only three available to mankind. Upward, downward or outside, these were the three possibilities of the flight from culture, of “Kulturflucht”. “Somehow or other culture weighs on us, depresses us,” he writes, “its so called blessings harass and torment us.” “The knight, the knave and the shepherd, they are the three safety valves of our culture.”33