My title for this post is a joke. I’m not sure there is anyone alive today qualified to write a sequel to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, an astonishing survey of the literature of Western civilization and its spiritual-moral-humanistic underpinnings.
Just for starters, Auerbach apologizes that he can’t read the Russian novelists in the original language, which he considers an embarrassing flaw in no way compensated for the fact that he did read the original Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English of the other books he considers—and not only the modern iterations thereof but in all their chronological variety.
He also apologizes that, because he had to write this book in exile in Istanbul, he didn’t have his library to hand, so he had to work from memory.
So, let me admit that I am not worthy even to untie the straps of this scholar’s sandals.
That said, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. This was such an amazing book that I want to record my thoughts about it, and also offer some speculations about what it implies for where literature has gone since he left off his story in the early twentieth century.
Figural Interpretation
First, why I read it at all. Though I have enjoyed the odd work of literary criticism here and there (my other favorite is Edward Mendelson’s The Things That Matter), it is not a genre I spend a lot of time in. I discovered, and then decided to tackle, this massive work because it is considered the Ur-source of “figural interpretation” of the Bible coming back to light in recent years (see for instance Ephraim Radner’s Time and the Word). Intrigued but not entirely clear as to what figural interpretation was, I figured (ha, ha) I should go to the source.
Well, biblical scholars beware: there is actually very little about figural interpretation here. It’s mentioned, but is in no way the main focus. If you happened upon this essay hoping for a fast and dirty primer on figural interpretation, though, here goes.
First, Old Testament literature distinguishes itself from Homeric literature because the former admits of multiple levels of interpretation, the unexpressed, and a divided human self, whereas the latter functions entirely on the surface.
Then, the early Christian authors have to interpret their life-altering experience with Jesus in the light of the received Old Testament literature, which takes the invitation to look at multiple levels and pushes it into new places.
Additionally, the content of both Old and New Testament is such that it makes a claim on all of reality, thus, theoretically, all of reality can and must be interpreted through the Scriptures. Given that, it makes sense of both the text and the world to see the “figures” of the Bible as templates for God’s ways in the world and to interpret later events accordingly.
This can be done very well or very badly. At its best, it is creative, sophisticated, nuanced, thoughtful, and breaks new ground in understanding. At its worst, it is narrow, constricting, controlling, pedantic, and suppresses new thoughts and understanding. I’m sure you’ve encountered both ways of doing Bible interpretation!
I will admit to some hesitation in making all of the world’s story fit into the procrustean bed of what is contained in the Scripture, if only because I have far more often seen it done pedantically or self-servingly. But I think it is possibly the best way of understanding the Bible canonically, as a library of mutual comment and exploration. I tried to do this in a Theology & a Recipe essay on King Saul of the Old Testament and Apostle Saul/Paul of the New Testament.
Expanding the Scope of the Human
The bulk of the book is tracing out both content and style in representative examples of Western literature, from Homer to Virginia Woolf, and more of the late antique and medieval period than I’m guessing the average reader to be familiar with (which certainly qualifies me as an average reader).
I’ve already mentioned the starting contrast between Homer and the Old Testament. In the Iliad, “never is there a form left fragmentary of half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.” “…the 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.”
By contrast, in the Bible, not only is there much unseen, unexplained, and unexpressed, but most important there is a profound individuation of biblical personages. “For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation—and in the midst of misfortune and in their humiliation their acts and words reveal the transcendent majesty of God. There is hardly one of them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and hardly one who is not deemed worthy of God’s personal intervention and personal inspiration.”
This, Auerbach argues, sets in motion the two basic trajectories of Western literature ever after: “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.”
Or as I would simplify it: the first is the Hero and functions as wish fulfillment; the second is the Everyman that exposes what we actually are.
This double trajectory has further implications for both content and style. Over the course of the book, Auerbach lays out a case for an ancient Greek tendency, replicated in its successor cultures, to treat only the aristocratic and royal classes as fully human, admirable, worthy of attention, and most of all worthy of placing in situations of tragic grandeur. Lower classes and ordinary people are there for comic relief, but neither emotional-psychological realism or tragic anguish. He believes the reason the New Testament is such a startling and powerful work is because it takes its ordinary protagonists seriously—they are not comic relief. And even Jesus is not a Homeric hero, not by any means.
I won’t review all the many chapters here, but Auerbach persuasively (to my mind) traces out the implications and developments of these conflicting tendencies down through the centuries. Ammanius vs. Augustine was particularly instructive; so was the impact of the comingling of sublime and humble in the story of Christ that Bernard of Clairvaux, the Victorines, and the Franciscans put to use in heightening the emotional and personal resonance of their preaching and passion plays.
Rather fascinatingly, and surprisingly, Auerbach sees the turning point in Dante! This came as a surprise to me, since Dante is often held up by the kind of people who are nostalgic for a Middle Ages they never knew as the apex of a fully Christianized culture. Auerbach agrees—and basically says it’s a classic case of becoming a victim of your own success.
In short, Dante invests so much humanity, personality, and individuation in his souls populating hell, purgatory, and paradise that they are finally able to leap out of the very frame of thought that made them possible—the person before God. He draws his figures so lifelike that it becomes possible to imagine them living without reference to God at all.
“Figure surpasses fulfillment, or more properly: the fulfillment serves to bring out the figure in still more impressive relief.” “Dante’s work made man’s Christian-figural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it. The tremendous pattern was broken by the overwhelming power of the images it had to contain.” “In this fulfillment, the figure becomes independent…”
Without a Dante, then, there couldn’t have been a Bocaccio, who crafted vivid characters without reference to God or heaven at all. Same for François de Villon and Rabelais. Same even for Montaigne, who takes his single, random, individual life as the starting point for philosophical investigations.
Shakespeare traced out the very Christian intermixing of high and low, tragic and comic, more than any other writer to date, while still having characters that existed of themselves. Don Quixote was pure play, to a degree that one suspects of being nearly nihilistic. Molière uses Greek techniques of despising the lower classes and bowing before social convention in order to achieve the Christian end of preaching morality. “Voltaire arranges reality so that he can use it for his purposes,” which I suspect may as much as anything define the break from medieval to modern!
Once we hit the nineteenth century, the back pressure of several centuries of deep investigation of the human qua human results in a new quest for realism, to a degree never seen before. Auerbach takes Schiller as representative of German and other European literature of the time turning to investigate home life and work: “sentimental, narrowly middle-class, realistic, and revolutionary.” Although Schiller wrote fiction, he and his French counterparts like Balzac and Zola as well as Russian authors did so in order to map reality closely and, ideally, to change it. A social-transformative urgency invests the depiction of even ordinary domestic life.
But this too falls apart, analogous to how impressionism broke up the smooth and unified picture of reality in previous painting. Everything is of interest, everything can be depicted, no detail is ruled out of court by taste or style, such as in the brothers Goncourts’ writing. At the end of Auerbach’s history, we get the fracturing of consciousness itself and the attempt to depict it in authors like Woolf, Proust, and Joyce.
In effect, we have all fully absorbed the biblical lesson of being multiple, divided, fractured selves, with much in the background that we cannot gain access to, much less express and control—but we no longer do so in dialogue with God, who could (one hopes) grant a unity to our fractured selves.
The Sequel Is a Series of Inquisitive Footnotes
I’m in no position to judge Auerbach’s overall thesis, but I will say that it’s persuasive, detailed, and compelling. It has a lot of explanatory power, not least of all in showing what wasn’t and couldn’t be said at previous points in literary history, and how that changed.
I was desolated that it ended when it did, though! I would desperately love a study of equal breadth and merit to trace where we’ve come since then.
So, as a modest offering of my own, here are some questions and working hypotheses that I’d like to see explored; let’s call them inquisitive footnotes to Mimesis.
1. The title of the book might throw off people better acquainted with René Girard’s concept. What Auerbach means is representation of reality—“mimicking” what you see in written form. The trajectory is an ever wider scope of what might be “mimicked.”
What strikes me here is the rise of nonfiction, which Auerbach doesn’t give much attention to (Montaigne obviously qualifies, but I mean it in the modern sense). Nonfiction sells better than fiction overall nowadays. My guess is that it was only in the anonymized modesty of fiction that previous generations could tackle areas previously cordoned off from consideration.
But as all strictures on topic areas have been swept away, what need is there to cloak it in fiction? In fact, aren’t we better persuaded by nonfiction studies than literary depictions of the same thing? There is probably a certain pressure from the sciences on literature here: you want to “prove” that your depiction is accurate, not motivated by politics or ideology. So you choose nonfiction to make your case over a good story. This is naïve about nonfiction, but I think it may account for its near-dominance of the reading market anymore.
2. Photography created a crisis for painting. What need of a painter if you could get a faster, better image from a few clicks and chemicals? Painting by and large pursues anything but realism anymore, unless it’s ironically trying to imitate photographs. (If this line of inquiry intrigues you, I highly recommend the documentary “The Shock of the New.”)
Suppose nonfiction did the same to fiction? If you can tell truth more truthfully by recording actual facts, what purpose does story serve? I think that accounts at least in part for the stream-of-consciousness fiction authors, since that is all but impossible to replicate in nonfiction.
But my guess is that it also accounts for the astonishing rise of what is dismissively called “genre fiction.” For instance, romance novels: always the industry leader! And while it’s always nice to hear of a real-life romance, probably a real and profound love is going to remain discreet, choosing not to expose itself to the public eye. (And if it is foolhardy as to go public, you can expect a bust-up… hence, celebrity tabloids.) Essentially the love story has to remain fictional to do what it intends to do.
Then there’s science fiction. To some extent it maps out what’s actually happening in technological development. But it is very far from a user’s manual. Sci fi explores what could happen, given this or that line of development—and so, by definition, it is safe from nonfiction as well.
Then fantasy. Its origins lie in The Lord of the Rings, but it’s hard to imagine this genre without sci fi coming first. The one imagines an inaccessible future; the other, an inaccessible past. It readmits mythology, magic, and wonder to the realm of human experience. Also safe from nonfiction.
Last example: horror. This is in some ways the most surprising to persist in the face of nonfiction, because actual human life and history furnish so many horrors. It seems it was facing up to these horrors that motivated so much realist fiction in the first place. I’m no reader of this genre at all, but from what I know secondhand, it offers emotional tools for dealing with the horrors of reality, as well as readmitting magic—usually dark magic—to explore what all the science, technology, and nonfiction journalism in the world can’t account for.
Note, however, that none of these genres necessarily bar realism. Certainly, they all contain works of pure heroism, or flat foreground with no background, or wish fulfillment. But they all can accommodate all the richness and depth of personality that characterizes realism. The difference is that they place this textured humanity in settings and situations that nonfiction by definition cannot reach.
3. Why does contemporary literary fiction suck so bad?
This has been a sore point with me for years. As a brand new adult with writing aspirations of my own, and no affinity for any particular mass market genre (with the one exception of Golden Age detective fiction, which by chronological defect I cannot contribute to), literary fiction seemed the place to go. But almost to a title, every one I’ve read has been lousy. Same for short stories in literary magazine. There is no plot to speak of, or when the author tries at the last minute to bring in plot, it feels like a cheat ripped off of genre fiction they despise but don’t understand. The characters are off-putting at best, and mostly unrealistic, despite the ideological realism of the books. They often have beautiful sentences, but I’m not going to slog through a novel just for a sequence of beautiful, meaningless sentences.
My guess is that this contemporary suckiness can be attributed to two factors. One: nonfiction has colonized the territory of the literary novel. It just does it better, and more compellingly. I would include in this not only journalistic nonfiction reporting on social conditions, but also psychological nonfiction, everything from well-researched scientific findings to self-help books. At some point, I suspect, readers today would rather know how to understand and solve their social and psychological problems rather than wallow in them. Or, if they really need to wallow, social media is waiting for them.
Two: returning to Auerbach’s deeper point, contemporary literary fiction is all fractured selves, not discovering that fact but assuming it, flailing around, with no tethering to God to grant a unity that cannot be forced out of this-worldly conditions. It cannot help being nihilistic, in the end.
Strangely enough, even genre fiction that has no explicit, implicit, or remote connection to biblical faith still operates out of its assumptions. There is causality. Actions have consequences. Character matters. There is right and wrong, good and bad, pure and impure, just and unjust. An action story assumes that things really matter; there is meaning; there is a good end worth pursuing, and an agent of that action who will be judged.