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Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

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In the 30 odd years since I read this book it has never been far from my thoughts. It has changed my understanding of how people think and how they look at their world. I cannot do true justice its impact.

We are apt to think that people are the same wherever and whenever they lived. This is probably a legacy of our democratic, universalistic heritage. It is also what gets us in trouble when we get involved abroad in changing other nations and their societies. Auerbach shows us that humankind is not and has not been alike in its thoughts, aspirations and character but has distinctly changed and varied over time and place.

By closely reading, analyzing and comparing texts of different periods through time, the author demonstrates how the structure of language interacts with the structure of thought, how the way one writes delimits ones vision. This is a more radical thought than its converse that the way we think affects how we write. To Auerbach, an early medieval religious writer, because of the way that Late Latin worked, could not think the way a classical author could. This seems intuitively wrong to a person who has knowledge of one language, but if you have ever tried to translate anything beyond the simplest sentence, you can appreciate what Auerbach means. This is one of those books that stay with you for a lifetime.

To paraphrase JOhn Lennon: evereybody's talking about Marxism and Modernism, Structuralism and sociologism, this-ism and that-ism; all I am saying, is give the narrative a chance. That is really what this greatest critic of all time - a man who is to literary criticism what Beethoven is to music, or Tocqueville to history, or Shakespeare to English poetry - ever did. Only he armed himselv with such a broad and wide-ranging array of different interpretative approaches, that he was always able to extract more, and more diverse, meanings, from any significant passage; and that not by illegitimately stretching the content to cover areas the writer had never conceived of, but simply by bringing out what already was there. His account of a passage in Ammianus Marcellinus, for instance, ought to be read by every historian of the late Roman Empire to understand what really was happening to that ancient civilization in the fourth century; as should his reading of a short story by Boccaccio (together, I would say, with Chesterton's magnificent essay on Chaucer) to understand the spirit that was awakening at the height of the Middle Ages. And this book is just as broad as it is sharp; just as it manages to pierce to the very heart of a single well-chosen subject, so too it covers the most extraordinary range of subjects, from the beginning of our culture (Homer and the book of Genesis) to high modernity (Proust), from the obscure (a stunning review of a bloody sixth-century anecdote by Gregory bishop of Tours) to the famous (Shakespeare). It is the finest book of literary criticism and history ever written, not only on account of its keen penetration and insight, but also of its enormous and wide-ranging learning, that allows the reader access to almost every century and every area of our Western heritage.

Beginning with episodes in Homer and the Bible, this amazing study concludes by analyzing passages in Woolf and Proust. To echo Rene Wellek's assessment: it is a book of such scope and depth....it combines so many methods so skillfully, it raises so many questions of theory, history and criticism, it displays so much erudition, insight and wisdom.... I returned to this book after being out of graduate school for twenty years (where it was already out of fashion in most English departments but read with care by all students of Comparative literature), and it is so much better this time around. The essay on Fortuna continues to resonate with timely warnings, and what I once admired about "Odysseus' Scar" is even more luminous after my recent rereading of the book.

Altho published in the 50's, the chapters on genesis, and his (refreshing) "construction" of how Western literature changed with uderlying philosophical assumtions is a classic. The best is his technique of using examples, from the bible to Shakespear, which perfectly demonstrates his theory. The book is deep but not difficult to read. His style is conversive and the theoretical concept is nailed down with passages from literary works. I highly reccomend it, especially the first 4 chapters, for anyone who wants to connect and see a synthesis of western classics they've read.

'Mimesis' is arguably the most important piece of Literary Criticism written in the twentieth century. Auerbach's opening chapter 'Odysseus Scar' in which he compares Chapter 19 of the 'Odyssey' with the Akeda , Chapter 22.1 of Genesis is the foundation from which he goes on to read the whole history of Representation in Western Literature. In that first chapter he contrasts the clearness and descriptive richness, the surface brilliance of the 'Odyssey' with the enigmatic, fragmented, deep- backgrounded mysterious narrative of 'Genesis'. These two basic 'Western' texts are used to provide a reading of the theory of representation in Western literature that spans its whole historical span.
"Revealing the system of conventions that produce "a lifelike illusion of some 'real' world outside the text by processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader," Auerbach sets up conclusions about how literature, the world, and literature's place in the world were understood in each work and historical period." ( Wikipedia)
Auerbach reads from the Bible and Odysseus through the great works of Western Literature down to the masterworks of his own day.
He wrote this book in Istanbul when in exile from Nazi Germany. He lacked many of the sources he might have used, and thus concentrated more on providing a close reading of the great works he discusses.

From the look of it, one would expect this to be a dull, dry, academic book, but it's really a lot of fun. Auerbach quotes extensively from the books you probably always meant to read and uses them in a meaningful and entertaining way. His point is that over the last three thousand years or so, the West has changed the ways in which it views reality--and that the "modern" viewpoint is not necessarily the only way in which the world can be presented. Good book!

When one starts to study western literature, and puts all of his effort to an neverending task of unravelling mysteries of European literature, one has sooner or later stumble upon this book. Sooner the better. Auerbachs work is on of the most influential works in comparative sciences of literature, it spans for Homer to Virginia Woolf, covering large variety of authors and styles. Main point in the books is recurrence of "realism" troughout the entire history of literature. "Realism" here stands for platonic and aristotelian term of "mimesis" which is, roughly said, (and as the title indicates) manner of representation of reality.

This was one of the greatest, and on the other hand, most disputed theory. Question of style related to function and age where it emerged are unanswered up till these days and will remain so in quite a few years to come.

But I am not here to debate about the contents of this book. I am here simply to note that, no matter if you agree or not with Auerbach, Mimesis is fundamental piece of work that has to be read if you are even thinking of spending your life buried inside books and start to think in a manner of literary criticism. Together with Ernest R. Curtiuses "European literature and middle ages" it stand highly above the average piece of work that you can stumble upon.

You don't have to be particularly educated for this one. It can be read on many levels and with many kinds of understanding, considering of your education, but never diminishing its value, allways offering you some more to look upon, and some new perspective to think about.

And if you are aware that this book was written in Istambul, almost without any secondary literature avaliable, admiration for this work may only go higher.

Written in non-self-imposed exile in Istanbul, *Mimesis* is not only a fantastically influential piece of literary scholarship, but also an interesting response to the political calamities of the 20th century. Erich Auerbach, a student of Romance literatures, covers the entire history of Western literature from Homer to Proust: his goal is uncovering the literary devices that made the achievement of literary realism possible. His analytic techniques are manifold and his technical mastery of philological detail is breathtaking, but the book requires no specialist knowledge to appreciate -- this is a truly worthwhile contribution to the discourse of the educated public, not a larder of academic in-references.

Auerbach's signature move, undoubtedly influenced by his Jewish faith but also a wise assessment of the material realities of the history of literature, is to reverse the traditional critical valuations of "Hebraism" and "Hellenism" -- for him, the realistic spirit in literature begins with the Bible and not with the ancient "novels". He analyzes the progress in realism along two axes: a rhetorical one concerning the end of the "separation of styles", found in medieval realists like Dante who began to depict "low" occurrences with the same seriousness and dignity aristocratic tragic heroes had traditionally merited, and a syntactic one in which the revival of connective precision in language overcomes the poverty and ambiguity of the literary Dark and Middle Ages.

Auerbach is almost as famous for what he neglects as for what he favors: he thinks poorly of French classicism and German literature in general, and knows hardly anything at all about historical English literature beyond Shakespeare. But the scope of the book is nevertheless so encylopedic that it could not but help the reader to achieve a clearer view of European literature in its entirety; the political asides from a serious scholar with decidedly socialist sympathies, looking on at genocidal execution he narrowly escaped, are of great documentary value. Any educated person will want to read this book.

this book is excellent and one of its kind, erich auerbach commanded a veritably deep understanding of philology and languages which he used to cunning effect in analysing various works, e.g. gregory of tours' "history of the franks." there he informed us that bishop gregory's latin was something midway between roman latin and early vernacular french, somewhat crude and grammatically obfuscated. auerbach was a lot more alert to the dynamics of cultural and language change than was his contemporary ernst robert curtius, the latter was held back (i suspect by his aristocratic background) from appreciating the fact that many tectonic shifts of culture start from the bottom-up -- this auerbach took great pains to demonstrate, e.g. in the very first chapter when he compared the odyssey to the hebrew bible. curtius' view was a static, fossilized one, consisting of a select circle of literary greats convening together "in the mind" and influencing world-history. auerbach's view was more egalitarian and generous toward those works which might not be "rightfully" called literary (e.g. works that fail to satisfy the classical rules of rhetoric, as stipulated in curtius' ELLMA) -- to this category belong the nibelungenlied and other germanic epics. one walks away from "Mimesis" feeling considerably enriched by Auerbach's insights into languages and different Weltanschauungen and not least of all by his pervasive spirit of humanism.

Do you read to be entertained or enlightened? While most of us would answer "both", we each exhibit a preference. From the celebrated first chapter, "Odysseus' Scar", of what is widely regarded as one of the definitive critical studies of comparative literature, Auerbach attempts to trace the evolution of the representation of reality in narrative in the West. The two streams, with their sources emanating from Athens and Jerusalem, converge finally in post-Napoleonic France during the first half of the 19th century, in the realism of Stendahl, Balzac, and Flaubert. The trend continues with increasing refinement in the work of their heirs in France, England, Russia and the Americas. The thread of the evolving democratization of the criteria for understanding is traced in the most fascinating manner through this study of the influence on the emphasis on the universality of meaning first emerging in the impulse of Biblical texts and later in subjectivist trends in the early 20th century.