Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

“The digressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspense, but rather to relax the tension.”

Auerbach opens Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature with consideration of tension in the Odyssey. This quote is important for its explanation of Homer’s style of using flashbacks in narrative. Some critics have argued that interruptions of tense scenes cause a build-up of tension, but Auerbach argues instead that the flashbacks are foregrounded in a way that makes the listener (or reader) forget the action of the scene they just left.

“[T]he Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed, as we have essayed to do here, but he cannot be interpreted.”

This quote is related to Auerbach’s assertion that Homer foregrounds and makes explicit every aspect of the narrative. Here, however, Auerbach explains the importance of this: If everything is foregrounded, then interpretation is not necessarily (nor is it possible).

“[A] calm acceptance of the basic facts of human existence, but with no compulsion to brood over them, still less any passionate impulse either to rebel against them or to embrace them in an ecstasy of submission.”

This passage illustrates an essential element of Homer’s style. The realism of the time, with no sense of historicity and no concern for lower classes, contains no desire to rebel. In such a narrative, written about upper-class citizens, everything exists as it was meant to exist.

“[D]omestic realism, the representation of daily life, remains in Homer in the peaceful realm of the idyllic, whereas, from the very first, in the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace.”

This quote provides a breakdown of the essential differences between Homeric and Biblical narratives, which will provide the backbone of Auerbach’s study in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Homer comes to represent the separation of styles, while the Bible represents the mingling of styles.

“The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, 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, 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.”

This passage provides a more in-depth summary of the differences between Homeric and Biblical narratives. This is important because the two texts provide illustrations of the early traditions that Auerbach traces throughout Western literary history. These two texts will serve as archetypes for the analysis Auerbach conducts in the rest of the book.

“Petronius’ literary ambition, like that of the realists of modern times, is to imitate a random, everyday, contemporary milieu with its sociological background, and to have his characters speak their jargon without recourse to any form of stylization.”

This quote is important for its representation of an early version of “objective” realism. Petronius represents his characters by having them speak in language that makes sense for them, illustrating an awareness of class differences.

“Of course this mingling of styles is not dictated by an artistic purpose. On the contrary, it was rooted from the beginning in the character of Jewish-Christian literature; it was graphically and harshly dramatized through God’s incarnation in a human being of the humblest social station, through his existence on earth amid humble everyday people and conditions, and through his Passion which, judged by earthly standards, was ignominious; and it naturally came to have—in view of the wide diffusion and strong effect of that literature in later ages—a most decisive bearing upon man’s conception of the tragic and the sublime.”

Here Auerbach returns to the concept of a mingling of styles. He explains it further, asserting that the very nature of Christ’s story dictates that Christian literature must mingle the everyday (or the humble) and the sublime, since the sublime Son of God came to live on earth among the most humble of people.

“The true heart of the Christian doctrine—Incarnation and Passion—was, as we have previously noted, totally incompatible with the principle of the separation of styles.”

This quotation is important for its assertion of an important element of Christian literature, which influenced all Western literature. The very nature of the separation of styles would not work for Christian doctrine, since Christ himself, as both God and man, mingled the sublime and the humble.

“It was vernacular poetry—our comparison of these two texts seems to show—which first imparted relief to the individual pictures, so that their characters took on life and human fullness. […] It was the vernacular poets who first saw man as a living being and found the form in which parataxis possesses poetic power.”

This passage is important because it illustrates the power Auerbach explores in early vernacular literature. Parataxis is the rhetorical practice of stringing together sentences or thoughts without clear conjunctions or transitions, and Auerbach argues that the use of parataxis in early vernacular literature give life and vibrancy to the texts.

“And indeed, the heroic epic is history, at least insofar as it recalls actual historical conditions—however much it may distort and simplify them—and insofar as its characters always perform a historico-political function. This historico-political element is abandoned by the courtly novel, which consequently has a completely new relationship to the objective world of reality.”

This passage is important for its introduction of the concept of historicity. Auerbach explains that although ancient scenarios are exaggerated and distorted in epic stories, they still retain a sense of their history. This sense, however, was abandoned in the courtly novel, which focuses on fantastical stories of courtly knighthood.

“In the courtly romance the functional, the historically real aspects of class are passed over. Though it offers a great many culturally significant details concerning the customs of social intercourse and external social forms and conventions in general, we can get no penetrating view of contemporary reality from it, even in respect to the knightly class. Where it depicts reality, it depicts merely the colorful surface, and where it is not superficial, it has other subjects and other ends than contemporary reality. Yet it does contain a class ethics which as such claimed and indeed attained acceptance and validity in this real and earthly world.”

In this passage, Auerbach explains the surface-level nature of courtly realism. This is important because of its relation to the theme of a separation or mingling of styles—the courtly romances return to a separation of styles, especially through their focus on the superficial values of only the upper class.

“The widespread and long-enduring flowering of the courtly-chivalric romance exerted a significant and, more precisely, a restrictive influence upon literary realism, even before the antique doctrine of different levels of style began to be influential in the same restrictive direction.”

This passage is important for its notation of an important moment in literary history. The courtly romances did not stand alone; instead, they influenced all that came after them. For a period of time after the courtly romances, realism was more restricted, limiting literary representation to the upper classes and to particular types of societal values.

“The scenes which render everyday contemporary life […] are, then, fitted into a Biblical and world-historical frame by whose spirit they are pervaded. And the spirit of the frame which encompasses them is the spirit of the figural interpretation of history. This implies that every occurrence, in all its everyday reality, is simultaneously a part in a world-historical context through which each part is related to every other, and thus is likewise to be regarded as being of all times or above all time.”

This passage references the figural style of realism. In this style, historical events are made to fit into a Biblical framework, creating a sense of history as connected through events that prefigure and echo one another.

“[Dante’s] elevated style consists precisely in integrating what is characteristically individual and at times horrible, ugly, grotesque, and vulgar with the dignity of God’s judgment—a dignity which transcends the ultimate limits of our earthly conception of the sublime.”

This moment explains an important literary development. Dante’s work, according to Auerbach, provided the most intense mingling of styles since Biblical narrative, bringing the vulgar into a narrative about the sublimity of God.

“Before Dante, vernacular literature—especially that of Christian inspiration—is on the whole rather naïve so far as questions of style are concerned, and that despite the influence of scholastic rhetoric—an influence which of late has been rather heavily emphasized.”

This passage is important because Auerbach here observes the historical trajectory of vernacular literature. He has already studied several instances of early vernacular literature, but he asserts that vernacular literature before Dante is naïve and not as smooth and skilled as the writings of classic Latin literature.

“It is in him [Boccaccio] that the world of sensory phenomena is first mastered, is organized in accordance with a conscious artistic plan, caught and held in words. For the first time since antiquity, his Decameron fixes a specific level of style, on which the relation of actual occurrences in contemporary life can become polite entertainment; narrative no longer serves as a moral exemplum, no longer caters to the common people’s simple desire to laugh; it serves as a pleasant diversion for a circle of well-bred young people of the upper classes, of ladies and gentlemen who delight in the sensual play of life and who possess sensitivity, taste, and judgment.”

This passage is important for its observation of Boccaccio’s place in literary history. Auerbach notes that Boccaccio moved away from the religious purposes for the use of the mingling of styles, using it instead for secular and entertainment purposes.

“But the spontaneous vigor of the sensory was stronger, and thus the creatural realism of the Middle Ages came to be passed on to the sixteenth century. It supplied the Renaissance with a strongly counterbalancing factor against the forces working toward a separation of styles which grew out of the humanists’ emulation of antiquity.”

Auerbach here explains the role of creatural realism as literature moved out of the darkness of the Middle Ages. Creatural realism did not remain as a way to bemoan the ugliness of life on earth, but rather transitioned into a force that counterbalanced the separation of styles, providing a means of utilizing a mingled style.

“[W]hat we have here [in Montaigne] is a keen and original intellectual effort to probe the problem of self-analysis, the vitality of the will to expression is so strong that the style breaks through the limits of a purely theoretical disquisition.”

This passage is important for its exploration of a particular moment in literary history. Auerbach explains that Montaigne is the first to explore a more personal, introspective realism.

“Here we must point out that the sixteenth century had attained a comparatively high level of historical consciousness and historical perspective.”

This is an important point Auerbach makes before exploring works of the 16th-century and after. He previously noted that prior works of Western literature mostly did not have a sense of historicity, but now, he argues, the 16th century attains more historical consciousness as humanism gains ground.

“Insofar as the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving—as is the case today in any novel or film—Stendhal is its founder.”

This is another important moment marking a change in Western literary history. Literary works gained a deeper sense of historicity after the 16th century, but Auerbach illustrates why Stendhal’s work, which can only be understood by understanding his historical circumstances, provides a foundation for later works, which hold that to understand a man it is essential to represent his full reality.

“[H]ere too [in Woolf] we are not dealing with objective utterances on the part of the author in respect to one of the characters. No one is certain of anything here: it is all mere supposition, glances cast by one person upon another whose enigma he cannot solve.”

This is an important part of Auerbach’s explanation of Woolf’s method. In To The Lighthouse, Woolf uses a multi-perspectival method of representation, giving insight into characters through the perspectives of other characters (a method that leaves some aspects of characters still in the dark).

“But the method is not only a symptom of the confusion and helplessness, not only a mirror of the decline of our world. There is, to be sure, a good deal to be said for such a view. There is in all these works a certain atmosphere of universal doom […]. And most of the other novels which employ multiple reflection of consciousness also leave the reader with an impression of hopelessness. There is often something confusing, something hazy about them, something hostile to the reality which they represent […]. Common to almost all of these novels is haziness, vague indefinability of meaning: precisely the kind of uninterpretable symbolism which is also to be encountered in other forms of art of the same period.”

Auerbach explores the hopelessness that readers often associate with works of Modernist literature. He calls this an indefinability of meaning, something common to an era when artists were experimenting with new forms of representation to illustrate the new ways they saw reality in an increasingly complex world.

“[P]ut the emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself. And in the process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice.”

This method of using “random occurrences” is an important element of Modernist literature. Auerbach illustrates how both Woolf and Proust use it, and it is a method that appears in other works of the time. Auerbach explains how this method allows for a deeper exploration of life through the inner experience.