Mimesis (3 page)

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 Important 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. If we go back to Homer, as Auerbach does in the celebrated and much-anthologized first chapter of
Mimesis
, the style is paratactic, that is, it deals with reality as a line of “externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground [which technically speaking is parataxis, words and phrases added on rather than subordinated to each other]; thoughts and feelings completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense” (11). So as he analyzes the return to Ithaca by Odysseus, Auerbach notes how the author simply narrates his greeting and recognition by the old nurse Euryclea,
who knows him by the childhood scar he bears the moment she washes his feet: past and present are on an equal footing, there is no suspense, and one has the impression that nothing is held back, despite the inherent precariousness of the episode, what with Penelope’s interloping suitors hanging about, waiting to kill her returning husband.

On the other hand, Auerbach’s consideration of the Abraham and Isaac story in the Old Testament beautifully demonstrates how it “is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath … the overwhelming suspense is present. … 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. … [There is an] externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies beneath is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole is permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background’” (11-12). Moreover these contrasts can be seen in representations of human beings, in Homer of heroes “who wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives,” whereas the Old Testament figures, including God, are heavy with the implication of extending into the depths of time, space, and consciousness, hence of character, and therefore require a much more concentrated, intense act of attention from the reader.

A great part of Auerbach’s charm as a critic is that, far from seeming heavy-handed and pedantic, he exudes a sense of searching and discovery, the joys and uncertainties of which he shares unassumingly with his reader. Lowry Nelson Jr., a younger colleague of his at Yale, wrote aptly in a memorial note of the self-instructing quality of Auerbach’s work: “He was his own best teacher and learner. That process goes on in one’s head, and one can become publicly aware of it to the extent of reproducing some of its primeval dramatic unfolding. 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. … Auerbach had the ability to start with a single text without being coy, to expound it with a freshness that might pass for naiveté, to avoid making
mere thematic or arbitrary connections, and yet to begin to weave ample fabrics from a single loom” (“Erich Auerbach: Memoir of a Scholar,”
Yale Review
, Vol. 69, No. 2, Winter 1980, p. 318). As the 1953 “Epilegomena” demonstrates, however, Auerbach was adamant (if not also fierce) in rebutting criticisms of his claims; there is an especially tart exchange with his polymathic Romance colleague Curtius that shows the two formidable scholars slugging it out rather belligerently.

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. In
Mimesis
, he resolutely sticks to his practice of working from disconnected fragments: each of the book’s chapters is marked not only by a new author who bears little overt relationship to earlier ones, but also by a new beginning, in terms of the author’s perspective and stylistic outlook, so to speak. The “representation” of reality is taken by Auerbach to mean an active dramatic presentation of how each author actually realizes, brings characters to life, and clarifies his or her own world; this of course explains why in reading the book we are compelled by the sense of disclosure that Auerbach affords us as he in turn re-realizes and interprets and, in his unassuming way, even seems to be staging the transmutation of a coarse reality into language and new life.

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. The difference between Homer’s Odysseus and Abraham is that the former is immediately present and requires no interpretation, no recourse either to allegory or to complicated explanations. Diametrically opposed is the figure of Abraham, who incarnates “doctrine and promise” and is steeped in them. These are “inseparable from” him and “for that very reason they are fraught with ‘background’ and [are] mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning” (15). And this second meaning can only be recovered by a very particular act of interpretation, which, in the main piece of work Auerbach produced in Istanbul before he published
Mimesis
in 1946, he described as figural interpretation. (I refer here to Auerbach’s long and rather technical essay “Figura,” published in 1944 and now available in
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays
[Meridian Books, Inc., 1959; rept. Peter Smith, 1973]).

Here is another instance where Auerbach seems to be negotiating
between the Jewish and European (hence Christian) components of his identity. Basically, figural interpretation develops as early Christian thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine felt impelled to reconcile the Old with the New Testament. Both parts of the Bible were the word of God, but how were they related, how could they be read, as it were, together, given the quite considerable difference between the old Judaic dispensation and the new message emanating from the Christian Incarnation?

The solution arrived at, according to Auerbach, is the notion that the Old Testament prophetically prefigures the New Testament, which in turn can be read as a figural and, he adds, carnal (hence incarnate, real, worldly) realization or interpretation of the Old Testament. The first event or figure is “real and historical announcing something else that is also real and historical” (
Drama of European Literature
, 29). At last we begin to see, like interpretation itself, how history does not only move forward but also backward, in each oscillation between eras managing to accomplish a greater realism, a more substantial “thickness” (to use a term from current anthropological description), a higher degree of truth.

In Christianity, the core doctrine is that of the mysterious Logos, the Word made flesh, God made into a man, and therefore, literally, incarnation; but how much more fulfilling is the new idea that pre-Christian times can be read as a shadowy figure (
figura
) of what actually was to come? Auerbach quotes a sixth-century cleric as saying, “‘that figure [a character or episode in the Old Testament that prophesies something comparable in the New Testament], without which not a letter of the Old Testament exists, now at length endures to better purpose in the New’; and from just about the same time [Auerbach continues] a passage in the writings of Bishop Avitus of Vienne … in which he speaks of the Last Judgment; just as God in killing the first-born in Egypt spared the houses daubed with blood, so may He recognize and spare the faithful by the sign of the Eucharist:
tu cognosce tuam salvanda in plebe figuram
(‘recognize thine own figure in the people that are to be saved’)” (
Drama of European Literature
, 46-47).

One last and quite difficult aspect of
figura
needs pointing out here. Auerbach contends that the very concept of
figura
also functions as a middle term between the literal-historical dimension and, for the Christian author, the world of truth,
veritas
. So rather than only convey an inert meaning for an episode or character in the past, in its second and more interesting sense
figura
is the intellectual and spiritual energy that
does the actual connecting between past and present, history and Christian truth, which is so essential to interpretation. “In this connection,” Auerbach claims,
“figura
is roughly equivalent to
spiritus
or
intellectus spiritalis
, sometimes replaced by
figuralitas”
(
Drama of European Literature
, 47). Thus for all the complexity of his argument and the minuteness of the often arcane evidence he presents, Auerbach, I believe, is bringing us back to what is an essentially Christian doctrine for believers but also a crucial element of
human
intellectual power and will. In this he follows Vico, who looks at the whole of human history and says, “mind made all this,” an affirmation that audaciously reaffirms but also to some degree undercuts the religious dimension that gives credit to the Divine.

Auerbach’s own vacillation between, on the one hand, his extraordinarily erudite and sensitive care for the intricacies of Christian symbolism and doctrine, his resolute secularism, and perhaps also his own Jewish background and, on the other, his unwavering focus on the earthly, the historical, the worldly gives
Mimesis
a fruitful inner tension. Certainly it is the finest description we have of the millennial effects of Christianity on literary representation. But
Mimesis
also glorifies as much as it animates with singular force and individualistic genius, most overtly in the chapters on verbal virtuosity in Dante, Rabelais, and Shakespeare. As we shall see in a moment, their creativity vies with God’s in setting the human in a timeless as well as temporal setting. Typically, however, Auerbach chooses to express such ideas as an integral part of his unfolding interpretive quest in the book: he therefore does not take time out to explain his ideas methodologically but lets them emerge from the very history of the representation of reality as
it
begins to gather density and scope. Remember that, as his point of departure for analysis (which in a later essay he referred to and discussed as the
Ansatzpunkt
), Auerbach always comes back to the text and to the stylistic means used by the author to represent reality. This excavation of semantic meaning is most virtuosically evident in the essay “Figura” and in such brilliant shorter studies as his fertile examination of single phrases like
la cour et la ville
, which contain a whole library of meanings that illuminate seventeenth-century French society and culture.

Three seminal moments in the trajectory of
Mimesis
should now be identified in some detail. One is to be found in the book’s second chapter, “Fortunata,” whose starting point is a passage by the Roman author Petronius, followed by another by Tacitus. Both men treat their subjects from a one-sided point of view, that of writers concerned with maintaining
the rigid social order of high and low classes. The wealthy and the important personages get all the attention, whereas the commoners or vulgar people are relegated to the fate of the unimportant and the vulgar. After having illustrated the insufficiencies of this classical separation of styles into high and low, Auerbach develops a wonderful contrast with that agonizing nocturnal moment in the Gospel of St. Mark when, standing in the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace peopled with servant girls and soldiers, Simon Peter denies his relationship to the imprisoned Jesus. One particularly eloquent passage from
Mimesis
deserves quotation:

It is apparent at first glance that the rule of differentiated styles cannot possibly apply in this case. The incident, entirely realistic both in regard to locale and
dramatis personae
— note particularly their low social station — is replete with problem and tragedy. Peter is no mere accessory figure serving as
illustratio
, like the soldiers Vibulenus and Percennius [in Tacitus], who are represented as mere scoundrels and swindlers. He is the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense. 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 … a most decisive bearing upon man’s conception of the tragic and the sublime. Peter, whose personal account may be assumed to have been the basis of the story, was a fisherman from Galilee, of humblest background and humblest education. … From the humdrum existence of his daily life, Peter is called to the most tremendous role. Here, like everything else to do with Jesus’ arrest, his appearance on the stage — viewed in the world-historical continuity of the Roman Empire — is nothing but a provincial incident, an insignificant local occurrence, noted by none but those directly involved. Yet how tremendous it is, viewed in relation to the life a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee normally lives … (41-42).