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sam_bizar_wilcox's review against another edition
4.0
Auerbach writes with such delicate strength about world literature, it's hard not to be swayed by his gorgeous prose. I think about this book not so much for the strengths of his individual arguments, which build up through each chapter, but for the humanist ethic that sits at the core of such a monumental feat. Here is the exiled writer, without his library, forced to reflect on what remains from his own memory. Here he is at the dawn of WWII, thinking about how literature can (and should) be a unifying force, not one that divides, at a time that was all about division. This is the tragedy of representation: when what is represented is fraught with the politics of its creation. This is also, I think, a form of salvation--salvation through representation in spite of the context that surrounds it.
rc90041's review
4.0
Auerbach's overall project in this outrageously ambitious book—mapping the development of the “representation of reality” over the course of Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf—is a little perplexing, and at times incoherent. It’s never exactly clear what Auerbach means by “reality”; the definition seems to shift through the book; and it’s also not clear why he chose to focus on realism as the sine qua non of literary merit or success, as opposed to any number of other aspects of literature.
In the Epilogue, Auerbach acknowledges that “[n]ot even the term ‘realistic’ is unambiguous,” as he uses it throughout the book. And he even hints that though mapping the career of realism in Western literature was his project, the “specific purpose” that “guided” his “interpretations” of the various texts he took up “assumed form only as [he] went along, playing as it were with [his] texts, and for long stretches of [the] way, [he was] guided only by the texts themselves,” which he acknowledges were largely “chosen at random, on the basis of accidental acquaintance and personal preference rather than in view of a definite purpose.” (Epilogue.)
It does sound like Auerbach is quietly backing away from making any sweeping judgments or conclusions about the career of realism in literature, and is instead noting that he took a random path, guided by an aleatory assortment of texts, and wandered where the texts took him; and that’s what a lot of this book feels like. There’s certainly great pleasure in watching Auerbach carry out his meticulous close readings of various texts and provide a historical context of the development of literature he maps. But one shouldn’t expect, as Auerbach acknowledges, some grand overarching theory or conclusion to emerge.
* * * * *
To take one example, the chapter on Montaigne's Essays felt out of place, coming after many chapters on fictional forms of literary representation. What did Montaigne's writing have to do with fictional forms of representation? I get that Auerbach likely selected Montaigne because of his uninhibited range of topics—from literature to farting. But this valorization of the mixture of styles, of the ability to deftly incorporate high and low, the sublime and the grotesque (or “creatural”), and to provide concrete, realistic representations of reality, seems a little overemphasized by Auerbach. Or, perhaps, it just feels like that emphasis doesn't bear the weight that's put on it by him, and also feels like not all that overwhelming a point. Montaigne helps him show a successful mixture of styles, but so what?
Auerbach comes back, again and again through the book, to the significance of the Christ story shattering old barriers between high and low styles: The Christ story placed a focus on the poor, the non-aristocratic for the first time, in a way that was not comic or boorish, but serious and tragic; and Western literature bobbed in the wake of that seminal event for a while. But, again, this argument feels a little tendentious to me. Is Auerbach trying to map a progression or development in Western Lit—as one might try to map the development and steady improvement of, say, techniques of perspective in painting, or lifelike qualities and structural freedom in sculpture? Because that project seems fundamentally wrong-headed (though that's probably too strong a word for it).
But there’s something odd about Auerbach’s insistent focus on reality (and therefore successful literary representation) being the presentation of the “human beings in the midst of their everyday environment, with their background, multifarious relations, their possessions, every particle of their bodies, their gestures, every nuance of their speech, their hopes, and their fears,” expressing both “physical [creatural?] and . . . spiritual factors,” with “absolute precision, scorning nothing.” (Ch. 16.)
What Auerbach describes here sounds a lot like how an art historian might describe Dutch or Flemish realism, the work of Vermeer, Van Eyck, Bruegel, et al. (Indeed, he makes a direct comparison between the coarse literary realism of Zola and Dutch and Flemish painterly realism in Chapter 19.) Thought of in terms of varying historical styles, Auerbach’s project seems all the stranger. Why fixate and elevate this type of precise, concrete, everyday realism above other styles? Above impressionism, abstraction, the fantastic, etc.? And does it make any sense to focus on the representation of “reality” when analyzing, say, The Inferno?
Auerbach seems to set up a running contrast between the brittle, stiff, pleonastic, turgid, pompous, conventional—the lifeless, or “unrealistic”—texts of and medieval writers versus the vernacular, demotic, multiplex, whole, broad, human, vivid, robust—the alive, or “realistic”—texts of more successful writers, those who more successfully represented “reality.” The adjectives I’ve listed here seem to get deployed again and again through the book by Auerbach in creating the faint outlines of his division between the “realistic” and the “unrealistic.”
But it’s not quite enough in his view that the representation be alive and concrete and depicting everyday life. As he says about Dante and Montaigne, the author must also be in command of both high and low styles, must depict the everyday from a perspective of learning and wisdom. As he says about Zola,
(Ch. 19.)
Perhaps this is a form of complexity—a kind of deeply granular photorealism in representation—that he values, and that he calls “realism.” To capture reality, in his view, an author must faithfully and seriously capture high and low. To me, these evaluations of whether a text was succesfully “realistic” simply began to sound like an appraisal of whether a text was successful, with “realistic” becoming a stand in for “successful.”
Because whether a text is successful, whether it has power and a hold over us—that’s very difficult to articulate or explain with any kind of precision. I wonder if Auerbach was trying here to figure out a way to talk about the frustrating ideas of appreciation—why we like some writing more than others—in a more concrete and systematic way, and settled on “realism,” a project that was never going to work, as it was a stand-in for whether a work was successful, a hopelessly complex question?
Sidenote: A 2012 article in The New Yorker on Mimesis made the following observation re Auerbach's holding up of the common man's experience as the ultimate goal of representation:
It’s a fair point, and there are times, especially near the end, where Auerbach’s meandering takes on “realism” begin to feel like a gesture toward a Marxism-lite, without actually pushing on toward an actual Marxist critique.
* * * * *
As to the teleology of literary development Auerbach attempts to map, modernism in Virginia Woolf and Proust and Co., his final destination, is surely not some apotheosis of literary evolution. That’s not how the history of art (or literature) works? Always higher and better? Literary evolution is probably more like actual evolution: Sometimes things devolve into simpler forms. Sometimes they evolve into "higher" forms. But there's not necessarily a teleology of upwards and better toward the angels and pure light, etc.?
Auerbach seems to recognize this to some degree, as he notes that even after the crisis of the Christ story, Western Lit struggled with the conflict between stiff, turgid medieval forms, and more "lifelike," concrete, vivid forms of representation of reality.
* * * * *
All of that said, the book somehow manages to remain interesting and weirdly compelling despite the patent flaws with the project and the overall thesis. It's the industriousness with which Auerbach dives into each text he's selected that's compelling. His precision and acute attention to minutiae are kind of thrilling, in the weird mania of it all. I've found that, after spending time with this book, I come away a bit more hyper-attuned to the syntax and form of the things I'm reading, and the things I might be writing.
That is to say, the book isn’t all that compelling in presenting an overarching argument about the history of Western literature, but it is compelling in how Auerbach goes about offering a close reading (I think I'm using that term correctly here) of each text he chooses, and a historical context for the text, analyzing how each text works, etc. My interest was maintained by the variety of each new chapter: I was curious to see what he had to say about Shakespeare or Cervantes or Montaigne, and how he would apply his techniques of dissection to them. Watching him at work is the pleasure, not so much the grand theory that one comes away with.
As a further aside, going backward in the history of literary criticism to Mimesis could itself be seen as a recognition that literary criticism, like literature itself, does not necessarily constantly evolve to higher and better forms. There are swings, trends, and corrections. It's interesting to note that the technique of close reading, which was much emphasized by the school of New Criticism, and which went out of style for its generally detached, clinical, ahistorical, and apolitical approach, appears to be making tentative steps back towards relevance. (Auerbach's approach doesn't seem to fit into the box of New Criticism, as its purpose is to provide a historical context for texts, and suggest a historical trend, based on insights gleaned from close readings of texts seemingly chosen at random--like an analysis of broken pottery at archaeological sites or fossilized femurs.)
That the techniques of close reading may be having a new moment makes sense. What is it English majors actually do? Yes, they can deconstruct or apply psychoanalysis to texts, often, in the process, reducing, ignoring, and simplifying in the way structuralists did before them, to successfully achieve the ends of their deconstructive or psychoanalytic projects. But after the project is completed, the text remains, mocking the successful deconstruction or psychoanalysis: It's still a thing of pleasure, beauty, power. What is that? How does that work? What school of analysis or method do we have for understanding that? And here, maybe, is where close reading still has a role to play. Trying to actually figure out how language works in literature, how it achieves the effects that it does, etc. Is this going backwards? Maybe? Maybe it's a synthesis of techniques and approaches over time? I don’t know, but there’s much to be gained in an engagement with Auerbach and his somewhat Quixotic project. It’s worth taking a look back at the brand of serious, meticulous close reading, attention to context and the history of literature, and broad erudition that Auerbach offers here.
In the Epilogue, Auerbach acknowledges that “[n]ot even the term ‘realistic’ is unambiguous,” as he uses it throughout the book. And he even hints that though mapping the career of realism in Western literature was his project, the “specific purpose” that “guided” his “interpretations” of the various texts he took up “assumed form only as [he] went along, playing as it were with [his] texts, and for long stretches of [the] way, [he was] guided only by the texts themselves,” which he acknowledges were largely “chosen at random, on the basis of accidental acquaintance and personal preference rather than in view of a definite purpose.” (Epilogue.)
It does sound like Auerbach is quietly backing away from making any sweeping judgments or conclusions about the career of realism in literature, and is instead noting that he took a random path, guided by an aleatory assortment of texts, and wandered where the texts took him; and that’s what a lot of this book feels like. There’s certainly great pleasure in watching Auerbach carry out his meticulous close readings of various texts and provide a historical context of the development of literature he maps. But one shouldn’t expect, as Auerbach acknowledges, some grand overarching theory or conclusion to emerge.
* * * * *
To take one example, the chapter on Montaigne's Essays felt out of place, coming after many chapters on fictional forms of literary representation. What did Montaigne's writing have to do with fictional forms of representation? I get that Auerbach likely selected Montaigne because of his uninhibited range of topics—from literature to farting. But this valorization of the mixture of styles, of the ability to deftly incorporate high and low, the sublime and the grotesque (or “creatural”), and to provide concrete, realistic representations of reality, seems a little overemphasized by Auerbach. Or, perhaps, it just feels like that emphasis doesn't bear the weight that's put on it by him, and also feels like not all that overwhelming a point. Montaigne helps him show a successful mixture of styles, but so what?
Auerbach comes back, again and again through the book, to the significance of the Christ story shattering old barriers between high and low styles: The Christ story placed a focus on the poor, the non-aristocratic for the first time, in a way that was not comic or boorish, but serious and tragic; and Western literature bobbed in the wake of that seminal event for a while. But, again, this argument feels a little tendentious to me. Is Auerbach trying to map a progression or development in Western Lit—as one might try to map the development and steady improvement of, say, techniques of perspective in painting, or lifelike qualities and structural freedom in sculpture? Because that project seems fundamentally wrong-headed (though that's probably too strong a word for it).
But there’s something odd about Auerbach’s insistent focus on reality (and therefore successful literary representation) being the presentation of the “human beings in the midst of their everyday environment, with their background, multifarious relations, their possessions, every particle of their bodies, their gestures, every nuance of their speech, their hopes, and their fears,” expressing both “physical [creatural?] and . . . spiritual factors,” with “absolute precision, scorning nothing.” (Ch. 16.)
What Auerbach describes here sounds a lot like how an art historian might describe Dutch or Flemish realism, the work of Vermeer, Van Eyck, Bruegel, et al. (Indeed, he makes a direct comparison between the coarse literary realism of Zola and Dutch and Flemish painterly realism in Chapter 19.) Thought of in terms of varying historical styles, Auerbach’s project seems all the stranger. Why fixate and elevate this type of precise, concrete, everyday realism above other styles? Above impressionism, abstraction, the fantastic, etc.? And does it make any sense to focus on the representation of “reality” when analyzing, say, The Inferno?
Auerbach seems to set up a running contrast between the brittle, stiff, pleonastic, turgid, pompous, conventional—the lifeless, or “unrealistic”—texts of and medieval writers versus the vernacular, demotic, multiplex, whole, broad, human, vivid, robust—the alive, or “realistic”—texts of more successful writers, those who more successfully represented “reality.” The adjectives I’ve listed here seem to get deployed again and again through the book by Auerbach in creating the faint outlines of his division between the “realistic” and the “unrealistic.”
But it’s not quite enough in his view that the representation be alive and concrete and depicting everyday life. As he says about Dante and Montaigne, the author must also be in command of both high and low styles, must depict the everyday from a perspective of learning and wisdom. As he says about Zola,
[He] knows how these [industrial workers] thought and talked. He also knows every detail of the technical side of mining; he knows the psychology of the various classes of workers and of the administration, the functioning of the central management, the competition between the capitalist groups, the cooperation of the interests in capital, with the government, the army. But he did not confine himself to writing about industrial workers. His purpose was to comprise . . . the whole life of the period . . . : the people of Paris, the rural population, the theater, the department stores, the stock exchange, and very much more besides. He made himself an expert in all fields; everywhere he penetrated into social structure and technology.
(Ch. 19.)
Perhaps this is a form of complexity—a kind of deeply granular photorealism in representation—that he values, and that he calls “realism.” To capture reality, in his view, an author must faithfully and seriously capture high and low. To me, these evaluations of whether a text was succesfully “realistic” simply began to sound like an appraisal of whether a text was successful, with “realistic” becoming a stand in for “successful.”
Because whether a text is successful, whether it has power and a hold over us—that’s very difficult to articulate or explain with any kind of precision. I wonder if Auerbach was trying here to figure out a way to talk about the frustrating ideas of appreciation—why we like some writing more than others—in a more concrete and systematic way, and settled on “realism,” a project that was never going to work, as it was a stand-in for whether a work was successful, a hopelessly complex question?
Sidenote: A 2012 article in The New Yorker on Mimesis made the following observation re Auerbach's holding up of the common man's experience as the ultimate goal of representation:
[Auerbach’s] characterization of realism as the unvarnished reënactment of the common man’s sojourn on earth is oddly restrictive. As [Terry] Eagleton pointed out [in critiquing Mimesis], ordinary life is no more real than "courts and country houses," and "cucumber sandwiches are no less ontologically solid than pie and beans."
It’s a fair point, and there are times, especially near the end, where Auerbach’s meandering takes on “realism” begin to feel like a gesture toward a Marxism-lite, without actually pushing on toward an actual Marxist critique.
* * * * *
As to the teleology of literary development Auerbach attempts to map, modernism in Virginia Woolf and Proust and Co., his final destination, is surely not some apotheosis of literary evolution. That’s not how the history of art (or literature) works? Always higher and better? Literary evolution is probably more like actual evolution: Sometimes things devolve into simpler forms. Sometimes they evolve into "higher" forms. But there's not necessarily a teleology of upwards and better toward the angels and pure light, etc.?
Auerbach seems to recognize this to some degree, as he notes that even after the crisis of the Christ story, Western Lit struggled with the conflict between stiff, turgid medieval forms, and more "lifelike," concrete, vivid forms of representation of reality.
* * * * *
All of that said, the book somehow manages to remain interesting and weirdly compelling despite the patent flaws with the project and the overall thesis. It's the industriousness with which Auerbach dives into each text he's selected that's compelling. His precision and acute attention to minutiae are kind of thrilling, in the weird mania of it all. I've found that, after spending time with this book, I come away a bit more hyper-attuned to the syntax and form of the things I'm reading, and the things I might be writing.
That is to say, the book isn’t all that compelling in presenting an overarching argument about the history of Western literature, but it is compelling in how Auerbach goes about offering a close reading (I think I'm using that term correctly here) of each text he chooses, and a historical context for the text, analyzing how each text works, etc. My interest was maintained by the variety of each new chapter: I was curious to see what he had to say about Shakespeare or Cervantes or Montaigne, and how he would apply his techniques of dissection to them. Watching him at work is the pleasure, not so much the grand theory that one comes away with.
As a further aside, going backward in the history of literary criticism to Mimesis could itself be seen as a recognition that literary criticism, like literature itself, does not necessarily constantly evolve to higher and better forms. There are swings, trends, and corrections. It's interesting to note that the technique of close reading, which was much emphasized by the school of New Criticism, and which went out of style for its generally detached, clinical, ahistorical, and apolitical approach, appears to be making tentative steps back towards relevance. (Auerbach's approach doesn't seem to fit into the box of New Criticism, as its purpose is to provide a historical context for texts, and suggest a historical trend, based on insights gleaned from close readings of texts seemingly chosen at random--like an analysis of broken pottery at archaeological sites or fossilized femurs.)
That the techniques of close reading may be having a new moment makes sense. What is it English majors actually do? Yes, they can deconstruct or apply psychoanalysis to texts, often, in the process, reducing, ignoring, and simplifying in the way structuralists did before them, to successfully achieve the ends of their deconstructive or psychoanalytic projects. But after the project is completed, the text remains, mocking the successful deconstruction or psychoanalysis: It's still a thing of pleasure, beauty, power. What is that? How does that work? What school of analysis or method do we have for understanding that? And here, maybe, is where close reading still has a role to play. Trying to actually figure out how language works in literature, how it achieves the effects that it does, etc. Is this going backwards? Maybe? Maybe it's a synthesis of techniques and approaches over time? I don’t know, but there’s much to be gained in an engagement with Auerbach and his somewhat Quixotic project. It’s worth taking a look back at the brand of serious, meticulous close reading, attention to context and the history of literature, and broad erudition that Auerbach offers here.
evan_streeby's review against another edition
4.0
4.5 I have a lot of thoughts. But most of all, wow was that dense (but brilliant).
motifenjoyer's review against another edition
informative
4.0
"A book like Don Quijote dissociates itself from its author’s intention and leads a life of its own. Don Quijote shows a new face to every age which enjoys him. Yet the historian—whose task it is to define the place of a given work in a historical continuity—must endeavor insofar as that is still possible, to attain a clear understanding of what the work meant to its author and his contemporaries."
teodomo's review against another edition
Me gustó mucho cómo describe las diferencias estilísticas de los textos homéricos y los bíblicos. La Biblia la leí 3 veces (bah, 2, la primera fue una versión abreviada), pero hace mucho, cuando estaba decidiendo mis creencias. Siempre quise releerla como a un relato épico-religioso.
Capítulo 1 - La cicatriz de Ulises.
Intertextualidad
Menciones directas:
* "To His Coy Mistress" de Andrew Marvell (Inglaterra, ca. 1650) (cita, epígrafe).
* La Odisea de Homero (Grecia, s. VIII a.C.).
* La Ilíada de Homero (Grecia, s. VIII a.C.).
* Tanaj/Antiguo Testamento, anónimo (ca. s. II).
* Mención a los escritores Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico, s. XVIII-XIX), Friedrich Schiller (Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico, s. XVIII-XIX), Cipriano de Valera (España, s. XVI) y Hermann Gunkel (Alemania, s. XIX-XX).
Indirecta:
?
Capítulo 1 - La cicatriz de Ulises.
Intertextualidad
Menciones directas:
* "To His Coy Mistress" de Andrew Marvell (Inglaterra, ca. 1650) (cita, epígrafe).
* La Odisea de Homero (Grecia, s. VIII a.C.).
* La Ilíada de Homero (Grecia, s. VIII a.C.).
* Tanaj/Antiguo Testamento, anónimo (ca. s. II).
* Mención a los escritores Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico, s. XVIII-XIX), Friedrich Schiller (Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico, s. XVIII-XIX), Cipriano de Valera (España, s. XVI) y Hermann Gunkel (Alemania, s. XIX-XX).
Indirecta:
?