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Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, send e-mail to permissions pupress. Since World War Two the sheer volume of books appearing in English has risen to huge numbers, thus further ensuring if not ephemerality, then a relatively short life and hardly any influence at all. Books of criticism have usually come in waves associ- ated with academic trends, most of which are quickly replaced by suc- cessive shifts in taste, fashion, or genuine intellectual discovery.
Thus only a small number of books seem perennially present and, by compar- ison with the vast majority of their counterparts, to have an amazing staying power. Its range covers literary master- pieces from Homer and the Old Testament right through to Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, although as Auerbach says apologetically at the end of the book, for reasons of space he had to leave out a great deal of medieval literature as well as some crucial modern writers like Pascal and Baudelaire.
He was to treat the former in his last, posthumously published book, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiq- uity and in the Middle Ages, the latter in various journals and a collec- tion of his essays, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature.
He explains in the concluding chapter of Mime- sis that, even had he wanted to, he could not have made use of the available scholarly resources, first of all because he was in wartime Istanbul when the book was written and no Western research libraries were accessible for him to consult, second because had he been able to use references from the extremely voluminous secondary literature, the material would have swamped him and he would never have written the book.
Thus along with the primary texts that he had with him, Auerbach relied mainly on memory and what seems like an infallible interpretive skill for elucidating relationships between books and the world they belonged to. But who was he, and what sort of background and training did he have that enabled him to produce such work of truly outstanding influence and longevity? By the time Mimesis appeared in English he was already sixty-one, the son of a German Jewish family residing in Berlin, the city of his birth in He received a doctorate in law from the University of Heidelberg in , and then served in the German army during World War One, after which he abandoned law and earned a doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Greifswald.
Far from being the dry- as-dust academic study of word origins, philology for Auerbach and emi- nent contemporaries of his, like Karl Vossler, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius, was in effect immersion in all the available written documents in one or several Romance languages, from numismatics to epigraphy, from stylistics to archival research, from rhetoric and law to an all-embracing working idea of literature that included chronicles, epics, sermons, drama, stories, and essays. His ideas about knowledge rest on an initial distinction between the world of nature and of natural sciences and the world of spiritual objects, the basis of whose knowl- edge he classified as a mixture of objective and subjective elements Geisteswissenschaft , or knowledge of the products of mind or spirit.
In the posthumously published third edition of his magnum opus The New Science, Vico formulated a revolutionary discovery of astonishing power and bril- liance. Knowledge of the past that comes to us in textual form, Vico says, can only be properly understood from the point of view of the maker of that past, which, in the case of ancient writers such as Homer, is primitive, barbaric, poetic.
Examin- ing the Homeric epics from the perspective of when and by whom they were composed, Vico refutes generations of interpreters who had as- sumed that because Homer was revered for his great epics he must also have been a wise sage like Plato, Socrates, or Bacon.
The poetic age of giants and barbarians is succeeded by the age of heroes, and that slowly evolves into the age of men. Thus human history and society are created through a laborious process of unfolding, development, contradiction, and, most interestingly, repre- sentation.
Each age has its own method, or optic, for seeing and then articulating reality: thus Plato develops his thought after and not dur- ing the period of violently concrete poetic images through which Homer spoke. The age of poetry gives way to a time when a greater degree of abstraction and rational discursivity become dominant. All these developments occur as a cycle that goes from primitive to advanced and degenerate epochs, then back to primitive, Vico says, ac- cording to the modifications of the human mind, which makes and then can re-examine its own history from the point of view of the maker.
That is the main methodological point for Vico as well as for Auerbach. Now it is quite obvious that such an approach requires a great deal of erudition, although it is also clear that for the German Romance phi- lologists of the early twentieth century with their formidable training in languages, history, literature, law, theology, and general culture, mere erudition was not enough.
Nor could you if you did not know the traditions, main canonical authors, politics, institutions, and cultures of the time, as well as, of course, all of their interconnected arts. He landed his first academic teaching job with a chair at the University of Marburg in ; this was the result of his Dante book, which in some ways, I think, is his most exciting and intense work. But in addition to learning and study, the heart of the hermeneutical enterprise was, for the scholar, to develop over the years a very particular kind of sympathy toward texts from different periods and different cultures.
For a German whose specialty was Romance lit- erature this sympathy took on an almost ideological cast, given that there had been a long period of historical enmity between Prussia and France, the most powerful and competitive of its neighbors and antago- nists.
I think Auerbach scants the substantial English contribution in all this, perhaps a blind spot in his vision. For English readers today who associate Germany principally with horrendous crimes against humanity and with National Socialism which Auerbach circumspectly alludes to several times in Mimesis , the tradition of hermeneutical philology embodied by Auerbach as a Romance specialist identifies two just as authentic aspects of classical German culture: its methodological generosity and, what might seem like a contradiction, its extraordinary attention to the minute, local de- tail of other cultures and languages.
The great progenitor and clarifier of this extremely catholic, indeed almost altruistic, attitude is Goethe, who in the decade after became fascinated with Islam generally and with Persian poetry in particular. This was the period when he composed his finest and most intimate love poetry, the West-Ostlicher Diwan , finding in the work of the great Persian poet Hafiz and in the verses of the Koran not only a new lyric inspiration allowing him to express a reawakened sense of physical love but, as he said in a letter to his good friend Zelter, a discovery of how, in the absolute submission to God, he felt himself to be oscillating between two worlds, his own and that of the Muslim believer who was miles, even worlds away from European Weimar.
Such noble intentions were insufficient, however, to save his career after In , he was forced to quit his position in Marburg, a victim of Nazi racial laws and of an atmosphere of increasingly jingois- tic mass culture presided over by intolerance and hatred.
A few months later he was offered a position teaching Romance literatures at the Istanbul State University, where some years before Leo Spitzer had also taught. And even though the book is in many ways a calm affirmation of the unity and dignity of European literature in all its multiplicity and dynamism, it is also a book of countercurrents, ironies, and even contradictions that need to be taken into account for it to be read and understood properly.
Thus for all its redoubtable learning and authority Mimesis is also a personal book, disciplined yes, but not autocratic, and not pedantic. Auerbach seems not to have wavered, however, in his loyalty to his Prussian upbringing or to his feeling that he always expected to return to Germany. American friends and colleagues report that until his final illness and death in , he was looking for some way to return to Germany. Nevertheless, after all those years in Istanbul he undertook a new postwar career in the United States, spending time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and as a professor at Pennsylvania State University, before he went to Yale as Sterling Professor of Romance Philology in It is not hard to detect a combination of pride and distance as he describes the emergence of Christianity in the ancient world as the product of prodigious missionary work undertaken by the apostle Paul, a diasporic Jew converted to Christ.
Auerbach is a firm believer in the dynamic transformations as well as the deep sedimentations of history: yes, Judaism made Christianity pos- sible through Paul, but Judaism remains, and it remains different from Christianity.
So too, he says in a melancholy passage in Mimesis, will collective passions remain the same whether in Roman times or under National Socialism. What makes these meditations so poignant is an autumnal but unmistakably authentic sense of humanistic mission that is both tragic and hopeful.
I shall return to these matters later. I think it is quite proper to highlight some of the more personal aspects of Mimesis because in many ways it is, and should be read as, an unconventional book. Of course it has the manifest gravity of the Im- portant Book, but as I noted above, it is by no means a formulaic one, despite the relative simplicity of its main theses about literary style in Western literature.
In classical literature, Auerbach says, high style was used for nobles and gods who could be treated tragically; low style was principally for comic and mundane subjects, perhaps even for idyllic ones, but the idea of everyday human or worldly life as something to be represented through a style proper to it is not generally available before Christianity.
Tacitus, for example, was simply not interested in talking about or representing the everyday, excellent historian though he was. The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts—on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed.
Nelson Lowry Jr. The point is how you arrive, by what dangers, mistakes, fortuitous encounters, sleeps or slips of mind, by what insights achieved through great expense of time and passion and to what hard-won formulations in the face of history. It is not an exaggeration to say that, like Vico, Auerbach was at heart an autodidact, guided in his diverse explorations by a handful of deeply conceived and complex themes with which he wove his ample fabric, which was not seamless or effortlessly spun out.
One major theme turns up already in the first chapter—the notion of incarnation—a centrally Christian idea, of course, whose prehistory in Western literature Auerbach ingeniously locates in the contrast between Homer and the Old Testament.
Furthermore, Auerbach observes that the use of comedy generates an alternate form of sublimity and realism, as it allows multiple actions of various genres and tones succeed each other, creating a mingling of interactions and impressions In Dante, Auerbach identifies different kinds of reality. Dante represents, for Auerbach, a more real reality.
Two clowns enter the scene, which takes place in a graveyard. In the beginning of the scene, the gravediggers are the only characters present. Two commoners are given space and voice. Later, they will interact with Hamlet himself, mixing the sublime with the low, the high status of a prince with the low status of simple gravediggers.
Furthermore, the gravediggers are discussing matters such as equality, corruption and society, subjects usually not assigned characters of lower classes. Through their interaction, their clever wit is juxtaposed to their low social status. What also becomes evident, is the connection to the portrayal to the physical-creatural, which Auerbach connects to the representation of reality Later in the scene, 5. Perhaps most important to note though, is the alternation of the tragic and the comic which permeates the scene.
The scene takes place in a graveyard, a place of graveness and death, yet the gravediggers are making jokes, singing songs and throwing up skulls from the ground. We can thus see, that the humour of the gravediggers is mostly at the expense of the sublime, making fun of both coroners, social laws, and the prince. It is also interesting to note how this scene, with its tragedy undercut by comedy, contributes to make Hamlet more human, more real.
Hamlet is interacting with simple gravediggers, and they are dealing with similar thoughts. Likewise, Hamlet becomes more humble when met with the skull of Yorick, as he is put literally face to face with the inevitability of death.
The mixing of styles, the mixture of the tragic and the comic, the sublime and the low, as well as notions of the physical-creatural are thus the key tools of realism in the gravedigger scene. He focuses on literary moments where the common and the real is treated with seriousness and examines what allowed that realism to be written. Thus, he finds that realism has been written and presented in Western literature solely when the historical environment of an author has allowed him to reject the separation of styles.
Reality becomes deeper with time, and as reality changes, and literature develops, new modes of representation are given space. Instead of approaching realism as a style of writing and dissecting it, Auerbach questions what made realism possible in the first place, he examines the dynamics of history and society, and the interplay between them, to identify the milieu that births the possibility of a style of literature that turns inward and presents ourselves and our minds in ways previously impossible.
Auerbach and the Representation of Reality. Auerbach, Erich. Willard R. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Said, Edward. Shakespeare, William. Ann Thompson, Neil Taylor. London: Arden Shakespeare,
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