Mimesis Read Online Free

the other hand, Auerbach’s consideration of the Abraham and Isaac story in the Old Testament beautifully demonstrates how it “is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath … the overwhelming suspense is present. … The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts — on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. … [There is an] externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies beneath is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole is permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background’” (11-12). Moreover these contrasts can be seen in representations of human beings, in Homer of heroes “who wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives,” whereas the Old Testament figures, including God, are heavy with the implication of extending into the depths of time, space, and consciousness, hence of character, and therefore require a much more concentrated, intense act of attention from the reader.
    A great part of Auerbach’s charm as a critic is that, far from seeming heavy-handed and pedantic, he exudes a sense of searching and discovery, the joys and uncertainties of which he shares unassumingly with his reader. Lowry Nelson Jr., a younger colleague of his at Yale, wrote aptly in a memorial note of the self-instructing quality of Auerbach’s work: “He was his own best teacher and learner. That process goes on in one’s head, and one can become publicly aware of it to the extent of reproducing some of its primeval dramatic unfolding. The point is how you arrive, by what dangers, mistakes, fortuitous encounters, sleeps or slips of mind, by what insights achieved through great expense of time and passion and to what hard-won formulations in the face of history. … Auerbach had the ability to start with a single text without being coy, to expound it with a freshness that might pass for naiveté, to avoid makingmere thematic or arbitrary connections, and yet to begin to weave ample fabrics from a single loom” (“Erich Auerbach: Memoir of a Scholar,” Yale Review , Vol. 69, No. 2, Winter 1980, p. 318). As the 1953 “Epilegomena” demonstrates, however, Auerbach was adamant (if not also fierce) in rebutting criticisms of his claims; there is an especially tart exchange with his polymathic Romance colleague Curtius that shows the two formidable scholars slugging it out rather belligerently.
    It is not an exaggeration to say that, like Vico, Auerbach was at heart an autodidact, guided in his diverse explorations by a handful of deeply conceived and complex themes with which he wove his ample fabric, which was not seamless or effortlessly spun out. In Mimesis , he resolutely sticks to his practice of working from disconnected fragments: each of the book’s chapters is marked not only by a new author who bears little overt relationship to earlier ones, but also by a new beginning, in terms of the author’s perspective and stylistic outlook, so to speak. The “representation” of reality is taken by Auerbach to mean an active dramatic presentation of how each author actually realizes, brings characters to life, and clarifies his or her own world; this of course explains why in reading the book we are compelled by the sense of disclosure that Auerbach affords us as he in turn re-realizes and interprets and, in his unassuming way, even seems to be staging the transmutation of a coarse reality into language and new life.
    One major theme