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01/05/2016 Terry Eagleton reviews ‘Mimesis’ by Erich Auerbach · LRB 23 October 2003
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Pork Chops and Pineapples
Terry Eagleton
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach
Princeton, 579 pp, £13.95, May 2003, ISBN 0 691 11336 X
Realism is one of the most elusive of artistic terms. ‘Unrealistic’, for example, is not necessarily
the same as ‘nonrealist’. You can have a work of art which is nonrealist in the sense of being
nonrepresentational, yet which paints a convincing picture of the world. Conversely, Jeffrey
Archer’s novels are representational but unconvincing. Jane Austen’s novels are realist, but
you could claim that the spooky Gothic fiction she disliked so much reflects more of the
anxiety and agitation of an Age of Revolution than Mansfield Park does. Life can be a good
deal more surreal than André Breton. Walter Benjamin considered that Baudelaire’s poetry
reflected the urban masses of Paris, even though those masses are nowhere actually present
in his work.
Bertolt Brecht thought that realism was a matter of a work’s effects, not of whether it recalled
something familiar. According to this theory, realism is a relationship between the artwork
and its audience, in which case your play can be realistic on Monday but not on Thursday.
One person’s realism is another’s fantasy. Realism is as realism does. Verisimilitude – showing
a dockyard on stage, say – is not necessarily realistic in a politically and artistically evaluative
sense of the word. Realism, in this view, is a matter of what the audience or readers get out of
the thing, not what you put into it. ‘If one wanted an aesthetic,’ Brecht writes, ‘one could find
one here.’
If realism is taken to mean ‘represents the world as it actually is’, then there is plenty of room
for wrangling over what counts in this respect. You cannot decide whether a work is realist
simply by inspecting it. Suppose we discovered a piece of writing from some longvanished
civilisation which we knew was in some sense fictional, and which paid inordinate attention
to the length of men’s noses. We might categorise the work as nonrealist, until further
archaeological research revealed that the civilisation in question regarded nosesize as an
important index of male fertility. In which case the text might shift into the category of
realism. Literary critics in the distant future would not be able to tell that Endgame was non
realist unless, for example, they had historical evidence that putting old people in dustbins
was not standard geriatric practice in the mid20th century.
Artistic realism, then, cannot mean ‘represents the world as it is’, but rather ‘represents it in
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accordance with conventional reallife modes of representing it’. But there are a variety of
such modes in any culture, and ‘in accordance with’ conceals a multitude of problems. We
cannot compare an artistic representation with how the world is, since how the world is is
itself a matter of representation. We can only compare artistic representations with non
artistic ones, a distinction which can itself be a little shaky.
Besides, representationalism has its limits. If the source of representing is the self, it is
doubtful whether the self can be captured within its own view of the world, any more than
the eye can be an object in its own field of vision. In picturing the world, the self risks falling
outside the frame of its own representations. It is the dynamic power behind the whole
process, but one which it is hard to figure there. The human subject becomes the blindspot at
the centre of the picture, the absent cause of the world’s coming to presence. For the
Modernists, this is a problem which is resolvable only by irony – by representing and pointing
to the limits of your representation in the same gesture.
What, in any case, is so precious about an art which portrays life as it is? Why do we take
delight in an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop? No doubt we admire
the skill which is needed for such acts of mimesis, but it is hard to feel that this is the whole
story. Nor is it easy to see why Zola and the Naturalists thought that telling it like it was,
taking the lid off the social underworld and exposing its squalor, was somehow inherently
subversive. Behind this may lie the assumption that people in the overworld are as
conservative as they are only because they don’t know about the sordid lives which others are
forced to lead, which is far too charitable a view of them.
Isn’t it bad enough that everyday existence is bounded by laws and conventions, without art
feeling that it has to follow suit? Isn’t part of the point of art to give those tiresome restrictions
the slip, creating things such as the Gorgon, or a grin without a cat, which do not exist in
nature? Realism is meant to be a riposte to magic and mystery, but it may well be a prime
example of them. Perhaps the roots of our admiration for resemblance, mirroring and
doubling lie in some very early ceremony of correspondence between human beings and their
recalcitrant surroundings. In that case, what Erich Auerbach takes in his great study Mimesis
to be the most mature form of art may actually be the most regressive.
To describe something as realist is to acknowledge that it is not the real thing. We call false
teeth realistic, but not the Foreign Office. If a representation were to be wholly at one with
what it depicts, it would cease to be a representation. A poet who managed to make his or her
words ‘become’ the fruit they describe would be a greengrocer. No representation, one might
say, without separation. Words are certainly as real as pineapples, but this is precisely the
reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called
the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that
is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the
precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us say) simply to signal: ‘This is realism.’ In such
art, no waistcoat is colourless, no way of walking is without its idiosyncrasy, no visage without
its memorable features. Realism is calculated contingency.
‘Reality changes,’ Brecht remarked, and ‘in order to represent it, modes of representation
must also change.’ In this sense, a lot of Postmodern art is as realist in its own way as
Stendhal or Tolstoy. It is faithful to a world of surfaces, random sensations and schizoid
human subjects. Postmodernism takes off when we come to realise that reality itself is now a
kind of fiction, a matter of image, virtual wealth, fabricated personalities, mediadriven
events, political spectaculars and the spindoctor as artist. Instead of art reflecting life, life
has aligned itself with art. In portraying itself, then, art ends up miming reality.
Like ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘realism’ is a term which hovers between fact and value, the
descriptive and the normative. It can be either a neutral comment or a glowing
commendation. Georg Lukács believed that it was both at once: for him, a work of art which
was realist in a descriptive sense was also aesthetically superior. Realism in this Lukácsian or
Hegelian sense means more than simple representation, as well as more than ‘actually
effective’. It means an art which penetrates through the appearances of social life to grasp
their inner dynamics and dialectical interrelations. It is thus the equivalent in the artistic
realm of philosophical realism, for which true knowledge is knowledge of the underlying
mechanism of things.
Lukács’s sense of realism, then, is cognitive and evaluative together. The more a work of art
succeeds in laying bare the hidden forces of history, the finer it will be. In fact, there is a sense
in which this kind of art is more real than reality itself, since by bringing out its inner
structure it reveals what is most essential about it. Reality, being a messy, imperfect sort of
affair, quite often fails to live up to our expectations of it, as when it allowed Robert Maxwell
to slip quietly into the ocean rather than ending up in the dock. Austen or Dickens would
never have tolerated such a botched finale. For the Lukácsian case about realism, technique is
an optional extra, like having a stereo or a sunroof in your car. It is his or her position in
history which allows a writer to see into the heart of things, not talent or a way with words.
This fails to account for the fact that Balzac is a realist, but not every realist is Balzac. It also
fails to account for the writer who has an excellent grasp of historical dynamics, no sense of
verbal rhythm and a vocabulary of only two hundred words.
Lukács never doubts that realism in this ‘deep’ sense goes hand in hand with realism as
representation. But there is no reason to assume a logical link between the two, as Brecht, the
Futurists and the Surrealists recognised. Why cannot montage or automatic writing or the
alienation effect achieve the same cognitive end? Anyway, is art really just secondhand
cognition? Marxism is philosophically speaking a realism, but it does not follow from this that
its aesthetics have to be realist too, either in the Lukácsian or the representational sense of the
word. For the various Modernist and avantgarde Marxist artists of the early 20th century,
the whole point was to overthrow existing representations, complicit as they were with the
dominant political power. Indeed, they wanted to overthrow the act of representation itself,
partly because it was not clear how you could ‘represent’ a reality which was changing and
contradictory without striking it dead in the process. How do you take a snapshot of a
contradiction?
The avantgarde Leftists also found something sinisterly consoling in representational
realism, which reassures us with images of a world we feel at home with. Bernard Shaw’s
plays may be radical in their content, but their stage directions portray a world so solid,
familiar and wellupholstered, all the way down to the level of the whisky in the decanter on
the sideboard, that it is hard to imagine ever being able to change it. In this sense, the realist
form usurps the radical content. Besides, representational art is from one viewpoint the least
realist of all, since it is strictly speaking impossible. Nobody can tell it like it is without editing
and angling as they go along. Otherwise the book or painting would simply merge into the
world. No sooner had the English novel embarked on its celebrated rise in the 18th century
than Laurence Sterne reminded his literary colleagues of the crazed hubris of the realist
project. Determined not to cheat the reader by leaving anything out, Tristram Shandy
represents so much material so painstakingly that its narrative collapses. Indeed, the novel
form itself is an impossible contradiction, since it is committed at once to representation and
formal design, two ends which, in our society at least, are ultimately incompatible. You
cannot marry everyone happily off in the last ten pages and claim that this is how life is.
Realism, then, can be a technical, formal, epistemological or ontological affair. It can also be
a historical term, describing the most enduring artistic mode of the modern age. It is the kind
of art most congenial to the ascendant bourgeoisie, with its relish for the sensuously material,
its impatience with the formal and ceremonial, its insatiable curiosity about the self and
robust faith in historical progress. Perhaps it is impossible for us now to recreate the
alarming or exhilarating effect of a few pages of Daniel Defoe on an 18thcentury reader
reared on a literary diet of epic, pastoral and elegy. The idea that everyday life is dramatically
enthralling, that it is fascinating simply in its boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great
revolutionary conceptions in human history, which Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self
claims as Christian in inspiration. The modern equivalent of Moll Flanders in this respect is
EastEnders.
Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942
and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a Berlin Jew, had taken refuge from the Nazis. The
book was published in 1946, and this new edition, with an introduction by Edward Said,
marks the 50th anniversary of its first appearance in the United States. Auerbach ranges
through some of the mighty monuments of Western literature, from Homer, medieval
romance, Dante and Rabelais to Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Stendhal and a good many
authors besides, scanning their work for symptoms of realism. His criterion for selection,
however, is more political than formal or epistemological. The question is whether we can
find secreted in the language of a particular text the bustling, workaday life of the common
people. For Auerbach as for Mikhail Bakhtin, who was writing his classic work on Rabelais
and realism at much the same time that Auerbach was holed up almost bereft of books in
Istanbul, realism is in the broadest sense a matter of the vernacular. It is the artistic word for
a warmhearted populist humanism. It is thus an antiFascist poetics, rather as for Bakhtin it
was an antiStalinist one. Mimesis is among other things its author’s response to those who
drove him into exile, even if they were unlikely to have heard of Farinata and Cavalcante or
Frate Alberto.
For all its formidable erudition, then, there is a fairly simple opposition at work in Mimesis,
one more classbased and militant than the universal respect paid to Auerbach by
conservative scholars would intimate. Realism is the artistic form that takes the life of the
common people with supreme seriousness, in contrast to an ancient or neoclassical art which
is static, hierarchical, dehistoricised, elevated, idealist and socially exclusive. In Walter
Benjamin’s terms, it is an art which destroys the aura. There is an implied continuity in this
respect between Homeric epic and the Third Reich, with its heroic myths, tragic posturing
and spurious sublimity. If all this had been argued by a Trotskyist English lecturer at a
redbrick English university, rather than by one of the 20th century’s most eminent Romance
philologists, it would almost certainly have provoked a clutch of dyspeptic reviews in the
learned journals. If you can make such claims in a dozen or so different languages, however,
as Auerbach doubtless could, and if like him you know your French heroic epic from your
Middle High German one, you are likely to win a more sympathetic hearing.
Like Lukács, then, Auerbach uses ‘realism’ as a value term. Like Lukács, too, he is a Hegelian
historicist for whom the art that matters is one flushed with the dynamic forces of its age.
Neither critic can find much value in Modernism: Mimesis ends by rapping Virginia Woolf
sternly over the knuckles, while Lukács can see little but decadence in Musil and Joyce. The
upbeat humanism of both men is affronted by the downbeat outlook of the Modernists. Both
are doctrinal lifeaffirmers, high European humanists dismayed by the flaccid melancholia of
the late bourgeois world. Unlike the austerely disembodied Hungarian, however, Auerbach is
a radical populist who celebrates the fleshly and mundane, a man for whom authentic art
has its roots ‘in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women’. If realism is
bourgeois for Lukács, it is plebeian for Auerbach. In this respect, Auerbach is a curious cross
between Lukács and Bakhtin, blending the historicism of the former with the iconoclasm of
the latter.
Authors score high marks in Mimesis for being vulgar, vigorous, dynamic, grotesque, demotic
and historical, and are ticked off for portraying characters as stylised, idealised, nonevolving,
psychologically stereotyped and free of context. The book’s celebrated opening chapter,
‘Odysseus’ Scar’, one of the great setpieces of literary criticism, contrasts what Auerbach sees
as Homer’s externalised presentation of things, which fixes them in space and time and
knows only foreground, with the Old Testament’s more concrete, commonplace, historical,
socially mixed view of the world. There can be no serious treatment of the common people in
the culture of antiquity, whereas the New Testament grants a fisherman like Peter
psychologically complex, potentially tragic status. Antiquity, unlike modern realism, has no
conception of historical forces.
Similar contrasts can be found in the literature of the Middle Ages. The French heroic epic is
rigid, narrow and simplified, whereas medieval religious drama is redolent of the ‘everyday
and the real’. The acme of world realism arrives with the Divine Comedy, whose elevated style
can integrate the vulgar, humdrum, grotesque and repulsive in a language which Auerbach,
a Dante scholar of great distinction, regards as ‘a wellnigh incomprehensible miracle’. Dante
transports an earthly historicity into his heaven and hell, in an idiom which is both sublime
and sublunary. Shakespeare interweaves high and low with equal adroitness, though marks
are deducted from his work for failing to take the common people seriously enough. (English
literature in general takes a back seat in Auerbach’s work – strangely, given the demotic
flavour of much of its major realism.) As for Cervantes, his ‘gaiety in the portrayal of everyday
reality’ has never been equalled. Goethe’s work, by contrast, fails to represent the inner
dynamics of a revolutionary age, retreating instead into an aristocracy of the spirit.
Behind this realist mingling of styles lies the influence of Christianity. It is in the Christian
gospel, for which God incarnates himself in the humble and destitute, that the affinity
between what St Bernard calls ‘sublimitas’ and ‘humilitas’ is first established. Christianity,
with its parody of a Messiah and carnivalesque reversals of rich and poor, shatters the
classical equipoise between high and low. What lies behind realism is Revelation. Auerbach
might have quoted Matthew 25 here, which has the Son of Man coming again to judge the
living and the dead, depicted in some offthepeg Old Testament imagery of angels and
clouds of glory. But the effect is calculatedly bathetic, since it turns out that what saves or
condemns you is such embarrassingly quotidian matters as whether you fed the hungry and
visited the sick. Salvation, for the JudaeoChristian tradition, is an ethical and political affair,
not a cultic one.
Mimesis turns on one of the most momentous cultural events of human history: the morally
and artistically serious representation of unvarnished everyday life, as the common people
enter the literary arena long before they make their collective appearance on the political
stage. Rather as Roland Barthes once speculated that one could write a history of textuality,
showing how the selfconscious play of the signifier threads its way through the history of
writing, so Auerbach charts the surfacing and submerging of popular realism from Homer to
Woolf. Precisely because of this coming and going, there is no unbroken teleology at work
here, but there is certainly a presumption that an art which smacks of the common people is
ethically and aesthetically superior to one which does not.
Rigidly interpreted, this would elevate A Taste of Honey over Phèdre. There is no reason to
assume that an art attuned to the common life will be politically radical, any more than the
common people themselves are spontaneously radical. William Empson revealed the
‘progressive’ possibilities of as wellbred a genre as pastoral. Neither is it true, as romantic
populists like Auerbach and Bakhtin tend to believe, that everyday life is somehow more ‘real’
than courts and country houses. Cucumber sandwiches are no less ontologically solid than
pie and beans. Nor is there anything inherently valuable about dynamism and mutability, as
Auerbach seems to assume. Capitalism is the most dynamic social system history has ever
witnessed, and a touch of stasis would do it no harm at all. Mingling styles is sometimes
subversive and sometimes not. There is no more enthusiastic mingler than the market.
Auerbach’s championing of realism over antiquity also involves backing it against Modernism.
Those for whom all valid literary characters are wellrounded, psychologically complex
creatures are unlikely to be impressed by the wasted protagonists of Samuel Beckett. Indeed,
the prejudice against ‘stereotypes’ and in favour of subtle, plausible, fullblooded characters is
one of the most entrenched in our current literary orthodoxy, which is no doubt one reason
the most favoured form of literary narrative in Britain is biography. It is a remarkably narrow
view of literature, excluding an enormous number of intriguing fictional figures, from
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the witches in Macbeth and Milton’s God to Swift’s Gulliver and
Dickens’s Fagin. Some literary characters are meant to be freaks, caricatures, emblems or plot
functions, whatever the dogmatic humanists may consider.
Whereas a literary scholar today might take, say, 1830 to 1900 as his or her specialist period,
Auerbach’s period stretches for almost three thousand years. AngloSaxon scholars
sometimes like to console themselves for their poor showing in this respect by claiming that
high European humanists like Auerbach deal in oracular generalities, whereas they
themselves grapple with the material detail of a text. Mimesis is a discomforting work for
such selfapologists. For Auerbach’s method, like that of his great philological colleague Leo
Spitzer, is to fasten with fastidious sensitivity on some stray phrase or passage in order to
unpack from it a wealth of historical insight. It is his combination of scholarly erudition and
critical astuteness which is most remarkable, not least in an age when those who know all
about books are rarely the sharpest analysts of them, and vice versa.
Vol. 25 No. 20 · 23 October 2003 » Terry Eagleton » Pork Chops and Pineapples
pages 1719 | 3690 words
ISSN 02609592 Copyright © LRB Limited 2016 ^ Top

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