Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

In Chapter 18, Auerbach studies Le Rouge et le Noir, the 1830 novel by Stendhal and the 1857 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Auerbach is particularly concerned with Stendhal’s quality of work:

[His work would] be almost incomprehensible without a most accurate and detailed knowledge of the political situation, the social stratification, and the economic circumstances of a perfectly definite historical moment, namely, that in which France found itself just before the July Revolution (455).

Even the boredom of the characters and the scenes, he says, are due to the society of “pure convention” and constraint among the ruling classes after the Bourbon regime tried to “restore conditions long since made obsolete by events” (456). This carries literature of the time quite far from the “intellectual daring of the famous eighteenth-century salons” (456). Contemporary situations are intimately tied up with the characters and events of Stendhal’s work, and they are portrayed in a far more detailed fashion than in earlier works, creating a new kind of realism. Stendhal has far more temporal awareness than in previous literatures, and he sees man as “an atom within” his historical situation (456). Stendhal also avoids emotional Romanticism when representing those of classes closest to his own, treating all classes critically, although lower classes do not often appear. Despite these great changes, his heroes retain something of the older concepts of tragedy.

Stendhal and others of his generation, Auerbach argues, came under the influence of writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, during the Revolution, Empire, and Restoration in France, tried to flee their own reality. This younger generation of writers carried on the tendency to flee, but they lost the revolutionary element from Rousseau. Auerbach argues that this Rousseauist movement and its disillusionment “was a prerequisite for the rise of the modern conception of reality” (467). A mixture of styles, he explains, began with Romantic authors like Victor Hugo, who mingled the sublime and the grotesque.

A new kind of “serious” style developed, not completely aligning with antique, Christian, or Shakespearean levels of style. There are no longer high and low subjects:

[E]very subject in its essence contains […] both the serious and the comic, both dignity and vulgarity; if it is rightly and surely reproduced, the level of style which is proper to it will be rightly and surely found; there is no need either for a general theory of levels (487).

Gustave Flaubert, Auerbach explains, leaned toward impartial and objective representations of reality. Like other authors of the time, he represents everyday events in a low social class and in the bourgeoisie class, and those events are treated seriously. His works are also clearly products of their time and set within his contemporary reality. But Flaubert does not comment on his characters, opting instead to simply present events.

Chapter 19 focuses on Germinie Lacerteux (1864) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt and on Germinal (1885) by Émile Zola. Auerbach argues that the development of the realistic mixture of styles that authors like Stendhal brought about had to continue through the social and political changes of the time. As the masses, or the lower classes, became more conscious of their own power, so too did realism have to represent them if it was to represent a full reality of contemporary existence. On top of that, they had to be treated seriously. In the Goncourts, representation of lower classes accompanied a “need for sensory representation of the ugly, repulsive, and pathological” (499), disdaining the older idealizing, elevated style.

Auerbach explains that some of these changes may have been due to the fact that the reading public had been expanding since the beginning of the century, bringing with it a “coarsening of taste. Intelligence, choiceness of feeling, concern for the forms of life and expression deteriorated” (501). Publishers also began accelerating commercial publication, seeking easy profits. In addition, the institution of religion had been shaken in France, and governments provided little support, leading to a situation where individuals fought amongst themselves.

Turning to Zola, Auerbach explains that Zola purposefully represented the lives of the lower classes seriously and morally, rather than comically or in a low style. He sought to represent contemporary society as it was. Art and style no longer strive to please; instead they represent the unpleasant and depressing elements of reality and provide a call to action to improve this dire reality. In this way, Auerbach argues, French literature was far ahead of other European literatures in the 19th century. In Germany in particular, literature was far more old-fashioned and provincial.

Chapter 20 focuses on a scene from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927) and also discusses Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. One of Auerbach’s first points about Woolf’s work is that narration takes up far more time than the scene itself would have taken; in other words, Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts seem to take more time than they actually exist within, as she measures a stocking against her son. Woolf and many of her contemporaries move toward representing inner processes, focusing on the reality of individual consciousness. The representation of reality is less objective and more focused on representing the subjective, but nonetheless “real,” experience of people. A unique element of this kind of representation is that the reader is given the perspectives and thoughts of not only one primary character but multiple characters. Many of the characters in To The Lighthouse are preoccupied with knowing Mrs. Ramsay, and the reader comes to know her through a multi-perspectival approach. Auerbach asserts that Woolf represents an attempt to approach “objective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions” (536), and that this is an important technique of Modernism.

He reflects on similar processes of realism and representations of thought in Marcel Proust’s work. The author reflects the process of memory and thought, illustrating reality through a character’s experience. One historical element influencing these developments was the World War I, when many people felt that their reality was destroyed and sought a richer, more suitable way to represent reality than their predecessors had used. Artists, like the rest of the world, sought ways to give meaning to life, and Modern artists tried to do so through what Auerbach calls a “synthesized cosmic view,” or an attempt to represent reality through a variety of individual, private perspectives and an emphasis on random events (549). In the end, however, nearly all of them struggled to define meaning. In Modern literature, Auerbach argues, classes and their representations have become mingled, and the separation of styles no longer holds power.

Auerbach explains his reasons for writing the book, providing a broad overview of some of the literary movements and “styles” he explored in the bulk of the novel. He explains that at some point in his work, he realized that he was concerned specifically with “to what degree and in what manner realistic subjects were treated seriously, problematically, or tragically” (556). He explains his method, providing direct quotes of texts at length and moving into textual interpretation. He discusses the difficulties he encountered, clarifying that he wrote the book during World War II, while he was in exile in Istanbul, and that the libraries were not well-equipped for European literary studies. Auerbach had limited access to things like periodicals, recent literary studies, and reliable critical editions of his chosen texts, so he admits that there may be things he overlooked or things that may have been disproven since he last accessed research on the texts.