Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

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Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (

Nazis in 1935,[1] it was first published in Switzerland in 1946 by A. Francke Verlag, with an English translation by Princeton University Press
following in 1953, since when it has remained in print.

Mimesis is arranged in twenty sections, in chronological order. Each section analyses one to three works from the particular period, often beginning with a lengthy extract from the work, given in the original language and English translation. Nearly all the passages selected are narratives of some sort (# 12, covering an essay by Michel de Montaigne is one exception). The literary forms covered include epic poetry, novels, plays, memoirs and letters.

The book opens with a comparison between the way the world is represented in

Modernist
novelists writing at the time Auerbach began his study.

Overview

Mimesis gives an account of the way in which

Proust and Woolf. Despite his treatment of the many major works, Auerbach apparently did not think he was comprehensive enough, and apologized in the original publication in 1946 explaining that he had access only to the 'insufficient' resources available in the library at Istanbul University where he worked;[2] Auerbach did not know Turkish and so could not use locally available sources, and did not have access to non-Turkish secondary sources.[3]

The mode of literary criticism in which Mimesis operates is often referred to among contemporary critics as

Hegel in this respect), and interpreted specific features of style, grammar, syntax, and diction
to make much broader claims about cultural and historical questions. Of Mimesis, Auerbach wrote that his "purpose is always to write history."

He is in the same German tradition of

Romance language
specialist, which explains his admitted bias towards treating texts from French compared to other languages.

Chapters

# Chapter title Main works discussed
1 Odysseus' Scar Odyssey by Homer and Genesis 22
2 Fortunata Satyricon by Petronius, Annals Book 1 by Tacitus and Mark ch. 14
3 The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres Res Gestae by Ammianus Marcellinus
4 Sicharius and Chramnesindus
History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours
5 Roland Against Ganelon
Chanson de Roland
6 The Knight Sets Forth
Yvain by Chrétien de Troyes
7 Adam and Eve The medieval mystery play
St. Francis of Assisi
8 Farinata and Cavalcante
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
9 Frate Alberto The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
10 Madame Du Chastel Le Réconfort de Madame du Fresne by Antoine de la Sale
11 The World in Pantagruel's Mouth Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
12 L'Humaine Condition
Essays by Michel de Montaigne
13 The Weary Prince Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 by William Shakespeare
14 The Enchanted Dulcinea Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
15 The Faux Dévot Tartuffe by Molière
16 The Interrupted Supper Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost; Candide by Voltaire; Mémoires by Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon
17 Miller the Musician
Luise Miller by Friedrich Schiller
18 In the Hôtel de la Mole The Red and the Black by Stendhal and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
19 Germinie Lacerteux Germinie Lacerteux by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt and Germinal by Émile Zola
20 The Brown Stocking To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Position and evaluation of rhetoric

To the consternation of his colleague Ernst Curtius,[citation needed] Auerbach's work is marked by an openly anti-rhetorical position. Auerbach criticizes classical writers such as Homer, Tacitus and Petronius, as well as medieval theologians (except St. Augustine) and writers of the seventeenth century, like Racine, for their adherence to the rhetorical doctrine of "styles" with their corresponding subject matters: the low style's association with the comedic and the popular classes, and the elevated style's association with the tragic, the historic and the heroic. Auerbach sees the Bible as opposing this rhetorical doctrine in its serious and poignant portrayals of common folk and their encounter with the divine. As Auerbach notes in Chapter 2 when discussing the New Testament:

But the spirit of rhetoric — a spirit which classified subjects in genera and invested every subject with a specific form of style as one garment becoming it in virtue of its nature [i.e. lower classes with the farcical low-style, upper classes with the tragic, the historic and the sublime elevated-style] — could not extend its dominion to them [the Bible writers] for the simple reason that their subject would not fit into any of the known genres. A scene like Peter's denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history — and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist in the literature of antiquity.[5]: 45 

The Bible will ultimately be responsible for the "

Flaubert
).

Auerbach champions[

Proust (an admirer of Saint-Simon) and Zola
.

Critical reception

Mimesis is a sprawling, wide-ranging work. It has been praised for its insights on the particular works it addresses, and for the way the author revels in the complexities of each work and epoch without resorting to reductive generalities. At the same time, it has been criticized for its lack of a single overarching theme or claim. For this reason, individual chapters of the book are often read independently.

Auerbach summarizes his comparison of the texts as follows:

The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand [The Odyssey's] fully externalized description, uniform illustration, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand [in the Old Testament], certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, "background" quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.

Auerbach concludes by arguing that the "full development" of these two styles, the rhetorical tradition with its constraints on representing reality and the Biblical or "realist" tradition with its engagement of everyday experience, exercised a "determining influence upon the representation of reality in European literature."

By far the most frequently reprinted chapter is Chapter 1, "Odysseus' Scar," in which Auerbach compares the scene in book 19 of Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus finally returns home from his two decades of warring and journeying, to Genesis 22, the story of The Binding of Isaac. Highlighting the rhetorically determined simplicity of characters in the Odyssey (what he calls the "external") against what he regards as the psychological depth of the figures in the Old Testament, Auerbach suggests that the Old Testament gives a more powerful and historical impression than the Odyssey, which he classifies as closer to "legend" in which all details are fleshed out in a leisurely manner and all actions occur in a simple present – indeed even flashbacks are narrated in the present tense. It is in the context of this comparison between the Biblical and the Homeric that Auerbach draws his famous conclusion that the Bible's claim to truth is "tyrannical," since

What he [the writer of the Old Testament] produced then, was not primarily oriented towards "realism" (if he succeeded in being realistic, it was merely a means, not an end): it was oriented to truth.

By the time Auerbach treats the work of

Flaubert, he has come full circle. Like the Biblical writers whose faith in the so-called "tyrannical" truth of God produces an authentic expression of reality, Flaubert's "faith in the truth of language" (ch. 18) represents "an entire human experience."[6]

References

  1. S2CID 233317165
    .
  2. ISBN 0-691-01269-5
    . 557.
  3. Aeon
    . Retrieved February 2, 2018.
  4. ^ Edward W. Said (2013). Introduction to Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. First Princeton Classic edition. Trans. Willard Trask. ISBN 978-0-691-16022-1. Princeton: Princeton University Press. xii.
  5. ISBN 0-691-01269-5
    .
  6. ISBN 978-1-4008-4795-2
    .

Bibliography

Further reading

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