On Erich Auerbach

In the preface to The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), Hans W. Frei notes that the impact of Auerbach’s Mimesis is ‘evident through this essay’ (vii, and see esp. 1-16, 28-37). (Note also that Frei has the audacity to call his 350 pages of dense prose an ‘essay’…)

As we might explore in subsequent posts, Frei saw the identification of parts of the Bible as ‘realistic narrative’ (as described by Auerbach) as significant for understanding the history of biblical interpretation, the nature of biblical narrative, and the theological relationship between the two testaments.

In fact, however, Auerbach’s importance extends beyond his influence on Frei.

Like his peers, Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Karl Vossler, and Helmut Hatzfield, Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was grounded in the tradition of Romance philology and literary history.

[Jan N. Bremmer, ‘Erich Auerbach and His Mimesis’, Poetics Today 20:1 (1999), 3-10, provides biographical background.]

He gained recognition with his 1929 work on Dante and an essay published in 1938 on figural interpretation, but especially for his subsequent volume, Mimesis, first published in German in 1946 and translated into English seven years later.

[Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11-79; Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), reissued in 2003 with a significant introductory essay by Edward W. Said (‘Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition’, ix-xxxiii).]

Auerbach moved to Yale in 1950, and was Sterling Professor of French when he died in 1957, the year after Frei completed his doctoral thesis. Recent appraisals have explored the implications of his work for the place of philology in the curriculum, the institutional history of university departments of literature, the nature of realism, the status of the western canon, the relation between exile and reading, and the concept of periodisation in literary history.

[E.g., Seth Lerer (ed.), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Figurae: Reading Mediaeval Culture Series (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), and the essays in Poetics Today 20:1 (1999).]

Mimesis remains the most well-known of his works, and the one which to date has received the most critical attention.

[See William Calin, ‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis – ’Tis Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment’, Style 33, 3 (1999), 463-74, and A.D. Nuttall, ‘Auerbach’s Mimesis’, Essays in Criticism 54, 1 (2004), 60-74.]

As the subtitle suggests, ‘mimesis’, for Auerbach, has to do with the ‘representation of reality’, the changing conceptions of which he examines in western literature from Homer to Woolf (making his work even more a tour de force of intellectual history than Frei’s Eclipse). His method was to take a brief excerpt from a representative text and submit it to close reading, before discussing broader matters related to culture and society. As such the work has appealed to philologists, literary historians, formalists, and Marxists, and has even been studied as an historical phenomenon in its own right.

Michael Holquist (‘The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism’, Modern Language Quarterly 54:3 [1993], 371-91) sees it as a foundational document of cultural criticism. Earl Jeffrey Richards (‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as a Meditation on the Shoah’, German Politics and Society 19, 2 [2001], 62-91) contends that Auerbach uses examples from western literature figurally to address contemporary issues of Jewish history.

[More generally, see further Herbert Lindenberger, ‘On the Reception of Mimesis’, in Lerer (ed.), Literary History, 195-213.]

As might be expected, reservations have been expressed about Auerbach’s reading of select texts as well as his use of the concept of mimesis which has been accused of suffering from lack of clear definition. Frank R. Ankersmit, ‘Why Realism? Auerbach on the Representation of Reality’, Poetics Today 20:1 (1999), 53-75, detects at least five conceptions of realism in Mimesis.

In all this, however, he remains important, and his readings of Dante (and the Bible) are regularly cited. Even those who demur from him begin with deep admiration for his work. As A.D. Nutall notes:

‘Auerbach’s book survives… Again and again he emerges from the dust and confusion in somewhat better shape than his attackers… I have suggested that Auerbach on occasion flattens, overstates, simplifies, and I hold to the charge; but if he overstates he is usually overstating an important truth’ (Nuttall, ‘Auerbach’s Mimesis’, 72). Said also comments on the book’s ‘amazing staying power’ (‘Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition’, ix).