(2nd reading) ‘Auerbach’s genius is his ability to both engage his texts in close, illuminating and rigorous analysis and to make these text speak for entire epochs, showing how people define themselves and their concerns.’
I wrote that after completing Mimesis seven years ago. While I agree with it, after this rereading, I would say that it fails to get at the heart of his project which I didn’t comprehend then. Maybe the idea was too big since it was in the subtitle; ‘the representation of reality.’ The reason we look to art to represent reality is because in our lives our conception of reality is extremely limited and is in fact no more than a representation. What art can do and literature in particular is present to an audience tools and techniques that create mimesis, the simulation of a reality. We can then use those tools and techniques in our own lives to better test and poke at our own mimesis. Knowing that reality is a construct and that art is a methodology to make sense of these constructs is for me, what make art worthwhile to my life.
Below is what I wrote after my first reading:
This is a life changing book because Auerbach brings to life the embedded conversation that is the core of our Western Civilization. Literature contains the most intimate sense of what it is to be human at a particular moment. Mimesis strings together and highlights those critical moments.
Starting with the Bible and Homer, Auerbach contrasts two poles of Western Civilization, the externalized classicism of the Greeks with the internal pain and struggle of the Biblical tradition. These two poles come together and then twist apart in different ways but act as tent poles holding up the edifice of Western Civilization.
Auerbach’s genius is his ability to both engage his texts in close, illuminating and rigorous analysis and to make these text speak for entire epochs, showing how people define themselves and their concerns. His love of Dante informs his reading of this text which he identifies as creating an exterior unity in this vital world of the dead but telling far more of the living than we have any right to expect.
Modernism doesn’t get ignored.
Auerbach recognizes that the fusing of externalize action with searing interiority goes beyond synthesis into stream of consciousness that only passingly appears consistent with the age-old debates at the heart of our civilization. Concerns of high drama and low comedy are collapsed and disintegrated. Auerbach shows how Virginia Woolf created a completely subjective world every bit as rich and seductive as what had been created by reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition and the classical concerns. There is nothing in Auerbach’s classicism that suggests he is ready to surrender the flag of culture to philistines who make sure that big questions never get addressed.
