Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Chapter 10 focuses on the work of Antoine de la Sale, a Provençal knight, and his 15th-century work, le Réconfort de Madame du Fresne. It was written to console a woman who lost her first child and tells the story of two brave mothers, the first of which discusses the Hundred Years’ War. Auerbach explains that La Sale differs from humanistic realism in his pompous use of specific language for specific classes, providing every character with a “correct” form of address. He uses “formations of the late antique period of decadence” that were “absorbed and developed by class-determined cultures” (242). Even historic elements like battles and their outcomes are approached with a concern for knights’ courtly honor, rather than for social, political, or economic issues caused by such outcomes. La Sale combines what Auerbach calls a “starkly creatural realism” with a style reminiscent of knightly ceremony, and in this way his writing reflects the somberness of Middle Ages taste (247). Following the tradition of Christian figural realism, representation of real life in the Middle Ages turned to the “intimate, domestic, and everyday detail of family life” (248). This realism developed further through the rise of an upper-bourgeois culture (or what would later be understood and called a middle class), whose combination of growing wealth and power and lingering “lower bourgeois” styles and attitudes provided impetus for representing the everyday aspects of life.

Another important aspect of realism in the Middle Ages is the Christian tendency, inspired by the Passion of Christ, to emphasize “man’s subjection to suffering and transitoriness” (249). Auerbach explains that this element of style, which he calls “creatural,” has developed into a “devaluation and denigration of earthly existence” due to the trials experienced in the Middle Ages, which came into literature as a “barrenness” (249). Comparing La Sale’s work to a slightly earlier text representing married life, derived from the tradition of moralizing clergy, Auerbach argues that the two texts alongside one another reveal a “level of style” that considers the everyday life (current everyday life, to be specific) worthy of “detailed and serious portrayal” (257). This style has only developed as a result of the Christian mixture of styles, but Auerbach explains that by the time of La Sale’s work, this mixed style no longer only serves Christian goals, but rather has become independent.

Chapter 11 focuses on Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, a 16th-century French novel. Auerbach focuses on a scene describing a campaign by Pantagruel’s army. Rabelais, he argues, constantly moves between not only settings and themes but also levels of style, as well. The novel also develops a new theme that is nonetheless “extremely current,” that of discovering a new world (269). Given the exploration that was happening at the time in the real world, a common theme of the Renaissance was the theme of exploration and a widening of horizons. Rabelais, however, buries the theme under “grotesque jokes” (270). The predominant style, Auerbach explains, is a “grotesque-comic and popular style” (271), but the narrative alternates between that style, matter-of-fact narrative, philosophical ideas, and creatural realism. He argues that Rabelais got this mixture of styles from late medieval preaching, which would exaggerate style mixture, but Rabelais adapted this strategy for his own purposes. Other elements taken from the late Middle Ages include coarse jokes, creatural representation of the body, a lack of sexual reserve, a mixing of realism and satiric content, and the use of allegorical figures.

Auerbach argues that Rabelais’s method of exaggerating all of these elements creates something entirely new. Instead of the work focusing on specific social, religious, or other frames for the narratives, it focuses on one thing at a time, permitting Rabelais to play with the “multiplicity of [the] possible aspects” of styles, events, people, and more. Auerbach disagrees with many critics’ assertion that the most important consideration when interpreting Rabelais is his “divorce from Christian dogma”; Auerbach points out that Rabelais’s “blasphemous joking” isn’t necessarily different from Middle Age works. What makes Rabelais different, he argues, is Rabelais’s “freedom of vision, feeling, and thought which his perpetual playing with things produces, and which invites the reader to deal directly with the world and its wealth of phenomena” (276). Even though Rabelais makes use of the creatural realism used by previous writers, instead of using it to illustrate the “wretchedness and perishableness of the body and of earthly things,” he uses it to represent the “vitalistic-dynamic triumph of the physical body and its functions” (276).

The subject of Chapter 12 is a passage from Chapter 2 of Book 3 of Essais by 16th-century French essay writer Michel de Montaigne. Auerbach describes Montaigne as disinclined to consider humans in a tragic light, somewhat contemptuous of the writer’s craft, and inclined to “belittle his own particular approach,” noting its “artless, personal, [and] natural” quality (291). Montaigne’s method, Auerbach says, is an experimental one, following his impulses and surroundings. He calls it an almost scientific method, since it allows Montaigne to observe and adapt to his surroundings as he represents them, factually and according to each situation’s conditions. Another important element of his “method” is his indifference to “things” in the outer world and his interest in exploring himself and his inner mental workings. The “unity” that Auerbach finds in Montaigne’s work is a unity of person, representing Montaigne’s true being and inner rhythms. Montaigne uses false modesty, Auerbach explains, about his own life to explore the larger idea that any human being can provide material enough for analysis and for scientific study of “man as a moral being” (297). In other words, Montaigne is solely interested in study of the human condition. In his preoccupation with the unity of mind and body (or that both mind and body must be considered to study the human condition), Montaigne reveals his indebtedness to Christian creatural realism, exploring things like death, burdens, animal existence, and more with “gruesome suggestiveness” and “frightening palpability” (309).

Auerbach explains that during this time, the growth of wealth and a wider field of educated persons led to a “non-professional, strongly social, and even fashionable form of general knowledge”; humanism began to grow alongside a “contempt for professional specialization” (307). This attitude contributed to the separation of styles that became an ideal in French classicism. Montaigne can only be said to specialize in his own self rather than in any particular field. He studies himself to explore “general conditions of human experience,” and he does so with hardly any change in his tone, whether he discusses daily occupations, antiquity’s moral precepts, or his own death (309). This tone is like a “lively but unexcited and very richly nuanced conversation” (309). He writes with dignity, but that does not preclude his use of popular expressions. He avoids an elevated tone, but he also does not use a comic tone or content. Like Rabelais, Montaigne utilizes Christian styles he has inherited, but he no longer uses them for Christian ends, rooting his work in the concrete world of human life. Auerbach ties this to the “disconcerting abundance of phenomena which now claimed the attention of men” during the time (310), creating a need for ways to orient oneself in the world. Montaigne provides the first consideration of man’s “random” personal life as something “problematic in the modern sense,” or as illustrating the ways that a man’s life can be personally tragic (311).