Mimesis Read Online Free Page A
Book: Mimesis Read Online Free
Author: Willard R. Trask Edward W. Said Erich Auerbach
turns up already in the first chapter — the notion of incarnation — a centrally Christian idea, of course, whose prehistory in Western literature Auerbach ingeniously locates in the contrast between Homer and the Old Testament. The difference between Homer’s Odysseus and Abraham is that the former is immediately present and requires no interpretation, no recourse either to allegory or to complicated explanations. Diametrically opposed is the figure of Abraham, who incarnates “doctrine and promise” and is steeped in them. These are “inseparable from” him and “for that very reason they are fraught with ‘background’ and [are] mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning” (15). And this second meaning can only be recovered by a very particular act of interpretation, which, in the main piece of work Auerbach produced in Istanbul before he published Mimesis in 1946, he described as figural interpretation. (I refer here to Auerbach’s long and rather technical essay “Figura,” published in 1944 and now available in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays [Meridian Books, Inc., 1959; rept. Peter Smith, 1973]).
Here is another instance where Auerbach seems to be negotiatingbetween the Jewish and European (hence Christian) components of his identity. Basically, figural interpretation develops as early Christian thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine felt impelled to reconcile the Old with the New Testament. Both parts of the Bible were the word of God, but how were they related, how could they be read, as it were, together, given the quite considerable difference between the old Judaic dispensation and the new message emanating from the Christian Incarnation?
The solution arrived at, according to Auerbach, is the notion that the Old Testament prophetically prefigures the New Testament, which in turn can be read as a figural and, he adds, carnal (hence incarnate, real, worldly) realization or interpretation of the Old Testament. The first event or figure is “real and historical announcing something else that is also real and historical” ( Drama of European Literature , 29). At last we begin to see, like interpretation itself, how history does not only move forward but also backward, in each oscillation between eras managing to accomplish a greater realism, a more substantial “thickness” (to use a term from current anthropological description), a higher degree of truth.
In Christianity, the core doctrine is that of the mysterious Logos, the Word made flesh, God made into a man, and therefore, literally, incarnation; but how much more fulfilling is the new idea that pre-Christian times can be read as a shadowy figure ( figura ) of what actually was to come? Auerbach quotes a sixth-century cleric as saying, “‘that figure [a character or episode in the Old Testament that prophesies something comparable in the New Testament], without which not a letter of the Old Testament exists, now at length endures to better purpose in the New’; and from just about the same time [Auerbach continues] a passage in the writings of Bishop Avitus of Vienne … in which he speaks of the Last Judgment; just as God in killing the first-born in Egypt spared the houses daubed with blood, so may He recognize and spare the faithful by the sign of the Eucharist: tu cognosce tuam salvanda in plebe figuram (‘recognize thine own figure in the people that are to be saved’)” ( Drama of European Literature , 46-47).
One last and quite difficult aspect of figura needs pointing out here. Auerbach contends that the very concept of figura also functions as a middle term between the literal-historical dimension and, for the Christian author, the world of truth, veritas . So rather than only convey an inert meaning for an episode or character in the past, in its second and more interesting sense figura is the intellectual and spiritual energy thatdoes the actual connecting between past and present,
Here is another instance where Auerbach seems to be negotiatingbetween the Jewish and European (hence Christian) components of his identity. Basically, figural interpretation develops as early Christian thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine felt impelled to reconcile the Old with the New Testament. Both parts of the Bible were the word of God, but how were they related, how could they be read, as it were, together, given the quite considerable difference between the old Judaic dispensation and the new message emanating from the Christian Incarnation?
The solution arrived at, according to Auerbach, is the notion that the Old Testament prophetically prefigures the New Testament, which in turn can be read as a figural and, he adds, carnal (hence incarnate, real, worldly) realization or interpretation of the Old Testament. The first event or figure is “real and historical announcing something else that is also real and historical” ( Drama of European Literature , 29). At last we begin to see, like interpretation itself, how history does not only move forward but also backward, in each oscillation between eras managing to accomplish a greater realism, a more substantial “thickness” (to use a term from current anthropological description), a higher degree of truth.
In Christianity, the core doctrine is that of the mysterious Logos, the Word made flesh, God made into a man, and therefore, literally, incarnation; but how much more fulfilling is the new idea that pre-Christian times can be read as a shadowy figure ( figura ) of what actually was to come? Auerbach quotes a sixth-century cleric as saying, “‘that figure [a character or episode in the Old Testament that prophesies something comparable in the New Testament], without which not a letter of the Old Testament exists, now at length endures to better purpose in the New’; and from just about the same time [Auerbach continues] a passage in the writings of Bishop Avitus of Vienne … in which he speaks of the Last Judgment; just as God in killing the first-born in Egypt spared the houses daubed with blood, so may He recognize and spare the faithful by the sign of the Eucharist: tu cognosce tuam salvanda in plebe figuram (‘recognize thine own figure in the people that are to be saved’)” ( Drama of European Literature , 46-47).
One last and quite difficult aspect of figura needs pointing out here. Auerbach contends that the very concept of figura also functions as a middle term between the literal-historical dimension and, for the Christian author, the world of truth, veritas . So rather than only convey an inert meaning for an episode or character in the past, in its second and more interesting sense figura is the intellectual and spiritual energy thatdoes the actual connecting between past and present,