Mimesis Read Online Free Page B

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 maintainingthe 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