An important discussion of literary realism.

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Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Auerbach was one of those towering European intellectuals,with encyclopedic knowledge of almost everything, who gave real meaning to theword scholarship. A German Jew (b. 1892), Auerbach had a distinguished academiccareer—studying and teaching law, art history, comparative literature, Romancelanguages, and Latin philology—until the mid-30s, when the Nazis came to power.He spent the war years in Turkey, where—without benefit of his library or researchmaterials—he wrote Mimesis, a study of Western culture and imaginationthat includes detailed discussions of Homer, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare,Cervantes, Goethe, Woolf, among others. He explained the difficulties this way:Mimesis 'was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not wellequipped for European studies. International communications were impeded; I hadto dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recentinvestigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts. The lack of technical literature and periodicals may also serve toexplain that my book has no notes.'

Evidently, Auerbach relied on hisprodigious memory quite as much as the Istanbullibraries. Readers of the Odysseywill remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, whenOdysseus has at last come home, the scene in which the old housekeeperEuryclea, who had been his nurse, recognizes him by a scar on his thigh.The stranger has won Penelope’s good will; at his request she tells thehousekeeper to wash his feet, which, in all old stories, is the first dutyof hospitality toward a tired traveler. Euryclea busies herself fetchingwater and mixing cold with hot, meanwhile speaking sadly of her absentmaster, who is probably of the same age as the guest, and who, perhaps,like the guest, is even now wandering somewhere, a stranger; and sheremarks how astonishingly like him the guest looks. Meanwhile, Odysseus,remembering his scar, moves back out of the light; he knows that, despitehis efforts to hide his identity, Euryclea will now recognize him, but hewants at least to keep Penelope in ignorance.

No sooner has the old womantouched the scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Odysseus’ foot dropinto the basin; the water spills over, she is about to cry out her joy;Odysseus restrains her with whispered threats and endearments; sherecovers herself and conceals her emotion. Penelope, whose attentionAthena’s foresight had diverted from the incident, has observed nothing. All this is scrupulouslyexternalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women expresstheir feelings in copious direct discourse. There is also room andtime for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminateddescriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures; even in thedramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit to tell the readerthat it is with his right hand that Odysseus takes the old woman by thethroat to keep her from speaking, at the same time that he draws hercloser to him with his left. Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformlyilluminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything isvisible; and not less clear-—wholly expressed, orderly even in theirardor—are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved. The first thought of a modernreader—that this is a device to increase suspense—is, if not wholly wrong,at least not the essential explanation of this Homeric procedure.

For theelement of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in theirentire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless. Thedigressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspense, but rather torelax the tension. Homer—and to this weshall have to return later—knows no background. What he narrates is forthe time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader’smind completely. The genius of the Homeric stylebecomes even more apparent when it is compared with an equally ancient andequally epic style from a different world of forms. I shall attempt thiscomparison with the account of the sacrifice of Isaac, a homogenousnarrative produced by the so-called Elohist.

The King James versiontranslates the opening as follows (Genesis 22:1): 'And it came topass after these things that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him,Abraham! And he said, Behold, here I am.' Even this opening startlesus when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are nottold. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be foundtogether in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speakto Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm fromsome unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he callto Abraham?

We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, fromthe Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Free download cakewalk z3ta vst programs for mac windows 7. Nor arewe told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He hasnot, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered incouncil; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us;unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height ordepth and calls: Abraham!. The concept of God held by the Jews isless a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending andrepresenting things. Auerbach analyses this versefurther, referring to the original Hebrew to buttress his commentary.After this opening God gives his command and the story itself begins:everyone knows it; it unrolls with no episodes in a few independentsentences whose syntactical connection is of the most rudimentary sort.

Auerbach describes Abraham’s journey as a silent progress through theindeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process whichhas no present, which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what haspassed God’s call and what lies ahead the sacrifice. In the narrative itself, athird chief character appears: Isaac. While God and Abraham, theserving-men, the ass, and the implements are simply named, without mentionof any qualities or any other sort of definition, Isaac once receives anappositive; God says, 'Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thoulovest.' But this is not a characterization of Isaac as a person,apart from his relation to his father and apart from the story; he may behandsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, pleasant or unpleasant—weare not told. Only what we need to know about him as a personage in theaction, here and now, is illuminated, so that it may become apparent howterrible Abraham’s temptation is, and that God is fully aware of it.

Bythis example of the contrary, we see the significance of the descriptiveadjectives and digressions of the Homeric poems. Which even whenthe most terrible things are occurring, they prevent the establishment ofan overwhelming suspense. But here, in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice,the overwhelming suspense is present. It would be difficult, then, toimagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient andequally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminatedphenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected togetherwithout lacunae gaps in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feelingcompletely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and withvery little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only somuch of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative,all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone areemphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefinedand call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, areonly suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole,permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a singlegoal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and'fraught with background.' .

Auerbach ties this‘backgrounding’ to Biblical representations of God, of whom only‘something’ appears or is heard, leaving appearance and often purposemysterious. He compares this with Homeric representations of gods andheroes, claiming that the Homeric poems conceal nothing; they contain noteaching and no secret second meaning.

Homer can be analyzed, as we haveessayed to do here, but he cannot be interpreted. Whateverphilosophical ideas the poems contain reveal a calm acceptance of thebasic facts of human existence, but with no compulsion to brood over them,still less any passionate impulse either to rebel against them or toembrace them in an ecstasy of submission. Itis all very different in the Biblical stories. Their aim is not to bewitch thesenses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory effects, it is onlybecause the moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their soleconcern are made concrete in the sensible matter of life. But their religiousintent involves an absolute claim to historical truth. The story of Abraham andIsaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, andEuryclea; both are legendary.

But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had tobelieve in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice—theexistence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this andsimilar stories. He had to believe in it passionately. The claim of the Old Testamentstories to represent universal history, their insistent relation—arelation constantly redefined by conflicts—to a single and hidden God, whoyet shows himself and who guides universal history by promise andexaction, gives these stories an entirely different perspective from anythe Homeric poems can possess. As a composition, the Old Testament isincomparably less unified than the Homeric poems; it is more obviouslypieced together—but the various components all belong to one concept ofuniversal history and its interpretation. With the more profoundhistoricity and the more profound social activity of the Old Testamenttext, there is connected yet another important distinction of Homer:namely, that a different conception of the elevated style and of the sublimeis to be found here. Homer, of course, is not afraid to let the realism ofdaily life enter into the sublime and tragic; the episode of the scar isan example, we see how the quietly depicted, domestic scene of thefoot-washing is incorporated into the pathetic and sublime action ofOdysseus’ home-coming.

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From the rule of the separation of styles which waslater almost universally accepted and which specified that the realisticdepiction of daily life was incompatible with the sublime and had a placeonly in comedy or, carefully stylized, in idyll—from any such rule Home isstill far removed.