What we can — and cannot — learn from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: A personal reflection

Abstract

Since it was first published Auerbach’s Mimesis has often been dismissed as old-fashioned and naïve. In recent years, however, prominent literary scholars in the USA (E. Said, F. Jameson, S. Greenblatt) have praised this book on “The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” as a new way of writing the history of the literature of the West. Auerbach himself saw his book’s strength not in its conceptual theses, but in its presentation of vivid perceptions derived from comparative “close readings” of short extracts of texts from more than two millennia. However, this programmatic disavowal of theory is misleading. Auerbach contrives to put philosophical ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant to literary critical use with a minimum of specialist vocabulary. This is especially true of his tacit debt to the hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher: his programme of “grammatical interpretation”, his “comparative method” and indeed his foundation of the exegesis of written works on the exegesis of “significant dialogue”. Auerbach’s parting comparison between the approaches of modern writers and those of some modern philologists, of which his own research is an exemplar, shows how clearly he understood his own modus operandi. Auerbach can only occasionally refer to the works of specific research due to his precarious situation as an emigrant in Istanbul, and thus, for example, exhibits in his analysis of the sacrifice of Isaac (Chapter 1) his deficiencies in contemporary Old Testament scholarship (e. g. of G. von Rad). Yet his general thesis is so robust and adaptable that the scholarship he omitted from particular disciplines may still be fully integrated into the overall structure of his analysis of the representation of reality in Western literature.