Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach, traces the realistic portrayal of human life through the whole of western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf. Instead of an exhaustive historical or philological survey, Auerbach provides a series of close readings of substantial, representative passages from the wide sweep of writing under his masterful purview. They are given in the original languages and then followed (in most cases) by English renderings in Trask's excellent translation, so the amateur Romance language-learner is richly challenged and rewarded by the author's patient explications and illuminating arguments, solidly grounded in the texts, which are allowed to stand on their own as well as being contextualized and brought into conversation with one another across the centuries.
Auerbach asks a seemingly simple question, as he explains in the Epilogue. What would it mean to pursue 'the category of "realistic works of serious style and character"'? His aim is not to define realism--perhaps this is why he leaves the abstract until the end--but through literature to grasp reality, and to reflect at some length on the greatest expressions of human experience.
The subject of this book, the interpretation of reality through literary representation or 'imitation,' has occupied me for a long time. My original starting point was Plato's discussion in book 10 of the Republic--mimesis ranking third after truth--in conjunction with Dante's assertion that in the Commedia he presented true reality...I came to realize that the revolution early in the nineteenth century against the classical doctrine of levels of style could not possibly have been the first of its kid. The barriers which the romanticists and the contemporary realists tore down had been erected only toward the end of the sixteenth century and during the seventeenth by the advocates of a rigorous imitation of antique literature. Before that time, both during the Middle Ages and on through the Renaissance, a serious realism had existed. It had been possible in literature as well as in the visual arts to represent the most everyday phenomena of reality in a serious and significant context...And it had long been clear to me how this medieval conception of art had evolved, and when and how the first break with the classical theory had come about. It was the story of Christ, with its ruthless mixture of everyday reality and the highest and most sublime tragedy... (554)Once he's sharpened up his interpretative focus, however, Auerbach begins his study not with Plato but with Homer's Odyssey, contrasting it not with Dante or the Gospels but with Genesis. His opening chapter--surely one of the most brilliant essays on literature ever written, justifying by itself all the years of dogged teaching and grading of writing by all the teachers and magisters ludi down through the ages, sufficient to warm the cockles of their heart ad infinitum and make up for every piece of evasion, procrastination, and brazen bullshit perpetrated by their pupils come essay-writing time--poses the question of the serious realistic representation of ordinary life with reference to two great moments: Euryclea's discovery of Odysseus by his scar, and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. Analyzing the very different styles of the two works, and their effects and ramifications for the reader's view of the world, Auerbach proceeds to trace the development of the influence of each of these dominant threads, the Classical and the Judeo-Christian, through an array of famous authors and texts, as well as in more obscure ones. Along with their consummation in Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, we read of the developments of these themes in Roman satire and history, in the church fathers, in medieval romances and mystery plays; the ribald Rabelais appears alongside the didactic Antoine de la Sale; the droll Voltaire is juxtaposed with the frank Saint-Simon; romantics, historists, and realists brandish their words, and finally we come full circle with a comparison of the stream of consciousness and kaleidoscopic perspectives of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, which recall the narrative clarity of the Odyssey leaping over breaks in time, or the voice of eternity speaking through the everyday in the Bible. Proust's petite madeleine in Swann's Way and Woolf's enigmatic Mrs Ramsay, measuring out a stocking against her son's leg in To the Lighthouse, become the counterparts to Odysseus' wounding by the boar and Abraham's proving his faith on Mount Moriah.
Auerbach leaves American authors out of consideration, suggesting that he considers the West to be bounded by the Old World, and whatever cross-fertilization has taken place in the New, as well as across the rest of the globe, to be outside the limits of his study. He highlights the works of the Spanish Golden Age and the Russian giants Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as ones he would have liked to touch upon, along with early German realism, the lights of antiquity, the scraps of the early Middle Ages. In the closing envoy, he bids his book, as complete as he could make it, farewell:
May it contribute to bringing together again those whose love for our western history has serenely persevered.It is a fitting echo to the epigraph from Marvell:
Had we but world enough and time...The tantalizing suggestion of these pages, first to last, is that figures of immortal significance still walk among us, but that we have all but unlearned the words with which to understand them. First and last, the themes of fleeting time for love and of fragmentation of even the deepest love, is opposed by patient study of the fruits of that love. Ultimately, then, I take the tone to be one of hope and generosity. In itself, Mimesis exemplifies the serious treatment of representations, which may well be the first step out of the cave and into the light, the yearning for which shines through even the clumsiest of them.
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