Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Although Chapter 1 is named for a scene in the Odyssey, Auerbach explores both the Odyssey and elements of Biblical narrative in contrast to one another throughout the chapter. Explication of their different approaches to the representation of reality lays the groundwork for exploring the representation of reality in European literary traditions.

To explore the Odyssey, Auerbach describes the scene where Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, welcomes Odysseus, who is disguised, as a guest and arranges for one of the servants, Euryclea, to wash his feet, a common practice of hospitality. Odysseus realizes that Euryclea, who was his nursemaid, will recognize him because of a particular scar from a childhood injury. Auerbach describes how when Euryclea does recognize the scar, the narrative moves immediately from the “present” moment to the past, telling the story of how Odysseus got the scar. Analyzing the scene as emblematic of Homer’s style, Auerbach explains that in Homer, everything about the story is fully described and placed in the foreground, even when describing events of the past. Characters’ meanings and feelings are made clear, although they experience little to no psychological development and exemplify “legendary” style through the lack of contradictions and overlapping motives that complicate historical narrative.

In Biblical narrative, by contrast, much is left unsaid. Thoughts and feelings are suggested rather than stated outright, and only the main actions necessary for the story are described. In this way, much is left in the “background,” requiring the reader to interpret the story. Biblical stories are more historical, even when not actually historical, through their allowance of many meanings and contradicting (perhaps even problematic) elements. The characters are more psychologically developed, illustrating how one can become a more fully realized individual through age and experience.

Auerbach also introduces the concept of the separation of styles. Although Homer’s work does not fully adhere to the separation of styles, it adheres more closely than the Old Testament, argues Auerbach. This separation of styles, which, Auerbach claims, manifests in later Western literary traditions, dictates that the realism of daily life should be comic and should be separated from any narratives addressing the sublime or the tragic. The Odyssey’s characters do indeed live and work within domestic reality, but Auerbach explains that domestic realism “remains in Homer in the peaceful realm of the idyllic, whereas, from the very first, in the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace” (22). The characters are also primarily those of the ruling class, and the very few servants who are described are fully loyal to their masters and have no lives or feelings of their own in the narrative.

Chapter 2 takes as its subject a passage from Gaius Petronius’s Satyricon, a Latin-language work of fiction believed to have been composed in the first century AD. Auerbach begins by quoting the original Latin passage and follows it with his own English translation. The chapter is called “Fortunata” after the name of the woman whom a character describes in the chosen passage.

Auerbach compares Petronius’s work and representation of reality to that of Homer. He notes that although Petronius’s style is similar to that of Homer in that he makes everything explicit, the narration is subjective rather than objective, having one character describe members of the inner circle of which he is one. Another major difference lies in Petronius’s manner of illustrating characters’ personal histories. Rather than simply providing familial lineages that anchor characters but do not portray changes in the social order, Petronius discusses just how individual fortunes can move up or down, something that was, for the most part, only shown as something extraordinary and unusual in other texts of antiquity.

One of the most important differences, Auerbach notes, is that Petronius’s work actually conveys the language and views of his characters’ particular social milieu with little to no literary stylization. Auerbach notes that this is very similar to our modern interpretation of “realism” and that Petronius provides the only version of this style that Auerbach has seen in texts of antiquity. A limit of the Satyricon, Auerbach claims, is that it only touches on the comic, using only low styles and avoiding any psychological or tragic issues. Avoiding reference to everyday tragedy and trials leads to the text having no sense of historicity, and Auerbach explores the historical work of Tacitus to demonstrate how antiquity in general had no sense yet of historiography, or “methodical research into the historical growth of social as well as intellectual movements” (38).

To address the separation of styles, Auerbach again turns to Jewish-Christian literature, exploring Mark’s version of Peter’s denial of Christ. He uses this example to contrast with the literature and histories of antiquity, illustrating how Jewish-Christian literature illustrates the mingling of styles rather than a separation. The mingling is, he argues, dictated by the fact that God, in Jewish-Christian tradition, was incarnated as a human being of a humble social station, and he lived among and engaged with people of other humble lives.

Chapter 3 begins with an excerpt from the report of Ammianus Mercellinus, a historian and officer in the fourth century AD, who described a mob riot in Rome. Like Tacitus in the passage Auerbach discusses in Chapter 2, Ammianus does not care about the motivations and conditions of the people or about the causes of the riot as he describes it. How Ammianus differs from Tacitus is his privileging of “the magical and the sensory” over “the objectively rational” (53). Auerbach explains that the Imperial Age began to develop an oppressive and darkening atmosphere, and that Ammianus’s work represents that atmosphere through its vivid, magical, and dehumanizing descriptions and style. Ammianus follows the tradition of antique historians in using an elevated style rather than allowing his “characters” to act or speak as they would naturally, instead elevating their portrayals. Auerbach traces the development of this elevated style and how it became increasingly gruesome and vivid (or what Auerbach calls “exaggeratedly sensory” [59]).

Auerbach connects the gruesome descriptions of Ammianus’s work to the oppressive quality of his era, which Auerbach blames on a lack of “counterbalance,” or a lack of equally heroic or “good” acts to balance the horrible. Auerbach explains how the “glaringly pictorial realism” of Ammianus (and of the Metamorphoses, which Auerbach quotes at length to compare to Ammianus) illustrates a progressive undermining of the separation of styles by invading the elevated style of antiquity. He explains that classical rhetoric only truly began to exert influence on Church Fathers once the elevated style of antiquity was already being undermined by the “glaringly pictorial realism,” bringing it closer to the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which there was no separation of styles (63). To explore this connection, Auerbach quotes and explores the satirical work of Jerome, whose work is “strongly pictorial” (63).

Saint Augustine, however, as Auerbach explains, approached the realities of his time with a “much more dramatically militant attitude” (66). By the time of Augustine, Auerbach argues, “[t]he age of separate realms of style is over,” and he reiterates how Christian doctrine itself is incompatible with a separation of styles (72). A “new elevated style” emerges from the moving story of the Passion of the Christ, allowing depiction of everyday life even when exploring tragedy, awe, or other “higher” emotions, events, or styles (72). Auerbach calls this a new “sermo humilis,” or a low style that once only applied to comedy but could now address the sublime and the eternal (72). He argues that Church Fathers increasingly begin to interpret their own realities and history in general with a view to harmonizing their modern reality and the Judeo-Christian version of history. They use what Auerbach calls “figura,” meaning that they find/create connections between two events or people to illustrate how the first both signifies and prefigures/predicts the second (73).

Chapter 4 opens with a long passage from History of the Franks, a sixth-century text written by Gallo-Roman historian and bishop Gregory of Tours. Auerbach notes the first primary difference between antique authors and Gregory: Antique authors either would not have discussed the subjects of Gregory’s history at all, or they would have referenced them in just a few short lines. These subjects are not mighty leaders, and the content of the story is not of political interest. Gregory, nevertheless, provides dramatic psychological renderings of these mundane subjects.

Auerbach explains that in the era before Gregory’s, the Church was focused on establishing Christian dogma; by Gregory’s time, their activities in the West focused more on organizational issues or practical matters. He argues that Gregory’s style reflects this shift, as he does not utilize rhetorical training or engage in issues of dogma. Instead, confident in the established Church, he addresses issues that make impressions on the people, including legends of saints, moral lessons, and other things that lean into the mysteries of the faith and the imagination of a people frightened by supernatural forces. He uses both spiritual and secular means to capture men’s hearts for the Church. Realism, for the Church at this time, included practical matters, veering into the everyday activities of its people and taking considerations of the sublime with it, since Christianity is concerned with the spirituality of each individual in their daily lives.

Gregory’s style, Auerbach argues, has moved away from that of antiquity by virtue of its “sensible” nature, losing the rigid quality of late antiquity’s “elevated” style. He still writes in Latin rather than the vernacular, but Auerbach argues that the vernacular “can be sensed through Gregory’s [awkward] Latin” (94).