Erich Auerbach's Mimesis—'Tis Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment - Critical Essay

Style, Fall, 1999 by William Calin

Assuming that we are allowed to count Gregory of Tours as medieval, seven of the original nineteen chapters of Mimesis (it later became seven of twenty; the Cervantes chapter was written for and first published in the Spanish edition [1950]) are devoted to the Middle Ages. The medieval centuries, their varying styles, publics, and mental attitudes, as variety and multiplicity, not a single, simple medievalness, are offered maximum scrutiny that treats Western culture as a whole, one in which the Middle Ages occupies a place of honor. In addition, like Spitzer, Auerbach was committed to a single methodology--his own--which he applied to the medieval and the modern equally, and which produced similar results across the centuries.

Perhaps still more significant is the fact that, instead of the usual approach, that is, applying modern insights to medieval texts (what most of us, who think of ourselves as theoretically progressive, do all the time), Auerbach does the opposite. He defines our human conscious and unconscious apprehension of reality, our attitude toward the world, and our artistic expression of that attitude as shaped by two cultural phenomena that date from the Middle Ages and from classical antiquity. Auerbach concentrates on figura and on the hierarchy of styles--these are examples of his Ansatzph[ddot{a}]nomen [point of departure]. The classical triad of high, middle, arid low styles in Antiquity, when it breaks down due to the impact of Christianity, gives rise to a mixed style; and the figural Christian vision of history (today, under the influence of D. W. Robertson, we call it allegorical or typological [5]) allows for random events in the present or the past to prefigure or postfigure momentous events in history. Thus emerged the possibility of writing in the vernacular where the low can be treated with high seriousness. In Dante human existence is fulfilled in its ultimate destiny; the individual in his earthly existence and the individual in eternity both are concretely real. In Dante we find a mixture of styles in which the seeming sermo humilis (low register--for Dante, vernacular Italian) is transformed into a new sublime style embracing historical existence and the cosmos, just what the authors of the New Testament did with and for demotic Greek. [6]

This powerful, concrete representation of reality in Dante was then, because of figura and because of a second collapse of the hierarchy of styles re-established by French classicism, to fuel a tradition of realism in the modern centuries culminating in Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola. Modern realism allows for the lower classes and their social concerns to be depicted as and in historical reality, in the dynamic concreteness of history, their unique historical peculiarity, and also allows that they be treated not as comedy but with depth and the problematic seriousness of tragedy, the tragic seriousness heretofore reserved to Virgil's Aeneas and Racine's Nero. Now, the French novelists' achievement in endowing the humble and the quotidian with the dynamic concreteness of history, that is, with historical significance and with high tragic seriousness, occurs as a modern secular replication of Dante and as a cultural phenomenon that could occur only in the West because of Christian figura and because of the (now broken) hierarchy of styles. Thus, the medieval is not depicted simply as a precursor of or introduction to the modern. Instead, with two summits-Dante and the nineteenth-century French novel--the two periods exist in a structure of dynamic tension wherein the modern is shaped by the medieval and is a direct outgrowth of it. Hayden White has even proposed that this structure is figural, a secular, aesthetic figural pattern of the history of literature according to which the medieval foreshadows the modern, which then fulfills the medieval.