Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Citation

Auerbach, E. (2013). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (W. R. Trask, Trans.; new and expanded ed.). Princeton University Press.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Auerbach wrote Mimesis in German between 1942 and 1945 while teaching in Istanbul, after losing his professorship at Marburg in 1935. It appeared in Switzerland in 1946, and Willard R. Trask's English translation followed in 1953. The book contains no footnotes. Instead of surveying periods, each chapter opens with a passage, often quoted in the original language and in English, and reads it closely for the way it represents everyday reality. The twenty chapters run in chronological order from Homer and the Bible to Virginia Woolf. The Princeton Classics edition adds an introduction by Edward Said and an essay in which Auerbach answers his critics.

Chapter 1: Odysseus' Scar

The best-known chapter sets the homecoming scene in Odyssey 19, the scene of the scar, against Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac. Homer's narration is fully externalized, evenly lit and kept in the foreground, while the biblical text leaves much unspoken, highlights some elements and obscures others, and demands interpretation. Auerbach also argues that the biblical writer aimed at truth rather than realism, which gives the Bible a claim to truth he calls tyrannical. The contrast between these two modes frames the rest of the book.

Chapter 2: Fortunata

The chapter reads Petronius' Satyricon, a passage of Tacitus' Annals and Mark 14. It shows how ancient rhetoric kept serious treatment of everyday life out of the high styles and why the gospel narrative did not fit that scheme.

Chapters 3–4: The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres; Sicharius and Chramnesindus

Two late-antique and early medieval chapters turn to Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae and Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks. Gregory is one of the writers Auerbach admires for vivid expression despite poor Latin and little rhetorical training.

Chapters 5–7: Roland Against Ganelon; The Knight Sets Forth; Adam and Eve

These chapters move to medieval vernacular works: the Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain and the medieval mystery play of Adam, together with Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi. Chapter 7 is where Auerbach develops the Christian mixing of high and low styles.

Chapters 8–10: Farinata and Cavalcante; Frate Alberto; Madame du Chastel

The chapters read Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's Decameron and Antoine de la Sale's Le Réconfort de Madame du Fresne. Chapter 9, on Boccaccio, is one of the places where Auerbach follows the development of a style between the high and the low.

Chapters 11–12: The World in Pantagruel's Mouth; L'Humaine Condition

The Renaissance chapters treat Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Montaigne's Essays, and chapter 12 is the one chapter not built around a narrative.

Chapters 13–14: The Weary Prince; The Enchanted Dulcinea

Auerbach reads Shakespeare's Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Cervantes' Don Quixote.

Chapters 15–17: The Faux Dévot; The Interrupted Supper; Miller the Musician

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chapters cover Molière's Tartuffe and Racine, then Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Voltaire's Candide and Saint-Simon's Mémoires, and finally Schiller's Luise Miller. Auerbach treats Saint-Simon's court portraits as free of both Racine's strict constraints of style and the superficial use of reality he finds in Prévost and Voltaire.

Chapters 18–19: In the Hôtel de la Mole; Germinie Lacerteux

The nineteenth-century realists are the focus: Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert in chapter 18, and the Goncourt brothers and Zola in chapter 19. Chapter 18 is where Auerbach's "modern realism" comes into view.

Chapter 20: The Brown Stocking

The last chapter reads Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, with Proust, as the book's endpoint in the twentieth-century novel.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2

• Mimesis: the representation of reality in literature, the topic of the whole book.
• Externalized versus background narration: Chapter 1 sets Homer's fully described foreground against the biblical text's silences and need for interpretation.
• Separation of styles: ancient rhetoric matched elevated styles to tragic and heroic matter and low styles to comic matter, a scheme the gospel scene challenges.
• Truth versus realism: Chapter 1 argues that the Old Testament writer aimed at truth rather than at realism.

Chapters 3–12

• Mixed style: chapter 7 describes the Christian merging of high and low in the figure of the Incarnation.
• Middle style: chapters 9 and 15 follow a style between the high and the low that develops in the medieval and later periods.

Chapters 13–20

• Modern realism: nineteenth-century writers' serious treatment of ordinary social life, taken up in chapters 18 and 19.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A method readers can copy. Each chapter begins from a short passage and reasons outward, so the book teaches a way of reading as well as a history. Terry Eagleton, quoted by the publisher from the London Review of Books, describes Auerbach's method as fastening on some stray phrase or passage and unpacking a wealth of historical insight from it.
• Chapters that stand alone. Because the book has no single running claim, readers can take individual chapters, and chapter 1 is by far the most often reprinted.
• Range. From Homer to Woolf, across Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German and English works, the book offers a long view of European literature in a single argument about representation.
• Context in this edition. The expanded edition adds Said's introduction, which Guy Davenport in the Los Angeles Times Book Review describes as both an analysis of Auerbach and a framework placing him in his scholarly and historical context, and Auerbach's reply to critics.

Limitations

• No overarching thesis. Critics have noted the book's lack of a single claim, so readers who want a compact argument will need to build one themselves from the chapter discussions and the closing essay.
• Western and largely French-weighted. The title promises Western literature, and Auerbach, a specialist in Romance languages, admitted a bias toward French texts. Nothing in the contents addresses non-European literatures.
• Written in exile. Auerbach wrote in Istanbul without access to non-Turkish secondary sources, and the book has no footnotes, so a reader has little to follow up for further reading.
• Length and language. At about 600 pages, with passages quoted in many languages, the book needs time and some tolerance for texts the reader may not know.

Where It Fits in the Course

Mimesis is a work of criticism to read with the primary texts it discusses, not an introduction to the field. For a first look at what comparative literature is as a discipline, Ben Hutchinson's short Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction or the concise guide Introducing Comparative Literature by Domínguez, Saussy and Villanueva are gentler starting points. Auerbach is widely regarded as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature, and his book shows that philological tradition at work: one scholar reading across languages.

Other books in the course ask what Auerbach's frame leaves out. David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? treats world literature as a mode of circulation and reading, and Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters treats it as an international field of competition. The Norton Anthology of World Literature supplies texts from many traditions in translation. Read Mimesis before or alongside these to see what a European-centred history of representation looks like, and then test it against the wider canon.

How to Use This Book

The book suits advanced undergraduates and graduate students in literature, who can read passages in several languages with the English translation alongside. It does not require a theory background, but it rewards knowing some of the works discussed: the Odyssey and Genesis, Dante, Don Quixote, Madame Bovary.

Start with chapter 1, and then choose between chronological reading and picking chapters that match your own period. For each chapter, read the primary text first, then Auerbach's discussion, and note what he takes from the passage and what he leaves out. Read chapters 7, 18 and 20 together to follow the development from mixed style to modern realism and the modern novel. Save Said's introduction and Auerbach's closing essay for after you have read several chapters, as they are most useful once you have a sense of the method.