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Erich AuerbachMimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-16 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Weary Prince”
Chapter 13 focuses on a conversation between Prince Henry and a companion in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2. In the scene, Henry expresses weariness and a desire for beer and notices the existence of a lowly person; Auerbach explains that to those valuing a separation of styles, such actions would not be appropriate for characters of such high rank. Shakespeare’s inclusion of these traits and actions, then, is a satire on the contemporary trend toward strict separation of styles that kept the sublime and the everyday apart in literary representation. Although Shakespeare, like advocates of a separation of styles, was inspired by antiquity, his work was the “ideal and example for all movements of revolt against the strict separation of styles in French classicism” (313). His mixture of high and low is not only relegated to the actions and characters of his plays; he also uses a “marked mixture of high and low expressions in the diction,” even using the term “humble,” which often marked works of low style (313). The plays mix tragic and comic elements, although Shakespeare does only treat high-ranking characters with a sublime and tragic manner, unlike the consideration of the “Everyman” as tragic in the Middle Ages. He is, Auerbach notes, more aristocratic in terms of his ideas of the sublime and the tragic than Montaigne, reflecting the human condition differently depending on characters’ classes. Despite this, Auerbach asserts that Shakespeare’s mixing of styles is pronounced, interweaving the tragic and the comic (and the sublime and the low) quite closely, with styles and tones alternating between or interrupting scenes. In this way, he counters the distinction that the separation of styles had gained again in the 16th century.
Auerbach observes that another element of Shakespearean and Elizabethan tragedy more broadly is the greater role of a hero’s individual character in shaping his destiny, rather than the changes of fortune from destiny or the gods that affected heroes in antiquity. Elizabethan drama also brought with it a “multiplicity of subject matter,” or a variety of conversations, scenes, and characters that provide more information about characters and their lives but that are not necessarily required for the primary action (319). Sixteenth-century theater had a higher awareness of historical perspective than did previous literatures, and their perspectives were further widened by discoveries that expanded their conceptions of human life. Furthermore, national identities and realities were beginning to be constructed as people became more conscious of differences between peoples and schisms in the Church. All of this contributed to a “more complex picture of human society” during Shakespeare’s time (321). Auerbach asserts that the varied stylistic levels in Shakespeare’s tragedy go “beyond actual realism” and that it is freer in its “nonpartisan objectivity than the realism of his admirers about 1800,” and he notes that Shakespeare’s realism was created through the possibilities of the Christian Middle Age mixture of styles (330).
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Enchanted Dulcinea”
Chapter 14 focuses on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, written in the 17th century. (Note: Auerbach uses the spelling “Don Quijote,” so this guide will use that spelling for this chapter summary and analysis.) Auerbach notes Cervantes’s use of contrast for effect; for strong emotions or sublime events, he uses elevated style, but in this scene, Don Quijote’s “elevated rhetoric” in contrast to the peasant girl’s crude speech “only serves to make the comedy of the stylistic anti-climax fully effective” (342). Despite Don Quijote’s madness and illusions, everyone in the novel is portrayed realistically; Don Quijote’s “real” experience is that of the illusions he experiences. Auerbach explains that “the persons and events of everyday life are constantly colliding with his madness and come out in stronger relief through the contrast” (343). And although Don Quijote is not truly a knight accomplishing great deeds, his feelings are “genuine and profound,” ready to sacrifice and fight (343). He himself is still heroic in his personality despite the fact that his story is absurd. Even his presentation retains dignity, since Cervantes does not present him in the vulgar way that comic figures are often portrayed. He does not exist purely for comic effect; he grows throughout his story. Style clashes with life through Don Quijote’s madness.
What Cervantes’s realism does not do, however, is explore causes of events or society’s problems. Don Quijote’s story simply “present[s] Spanish life in its color and fullness” while ridiculing Don Quijote’s madness (345). Cervantes had a talent for representing different types of people and events with equal vividness. Auerbach argues that Cervantes saw a novel as only serving the purpose of entertainment, rather than “reveal[ing] the order of the universe” (358). Questions about reality and life had begun to grow in Europe, but Cervantes occupied his work simply with the task of entertainment, which Auerbach argues was in accordance with the spirit of himself and his country.
Cervantes, Auerbach argues, used the novel to attack “the romances of chivalry,” but in doing so he maintained use of the elevated style used in those stories, illustrating mastery of the style rather than a wooden and dry use of it as in the chivalric romances (350).
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Faux Devot”
Chapter 15 studies the 17th-century French comic play Tartuffe by Molière. Molière, Auerbach argues, focused on representing individual reality rather than relying on the character types that were used by moralist writers in his time. Despite this difference, Auerbach points out that Molière still aligns with his “moralizing and typifying country” because his fleshed-out versions of “types” of characters serve to increase their ridiculousness, or their “deviation from the normal and customary” (362). These exaggerated types were more suited for the stage. Molière also did not limit himself to creating exaggerations of only lower-class, typically comic character types; he exaggerated all classes equally. Auerbach calls this an “intermediate style of comedy and satire,” and he contrasts it with the extreme that the separation of styles had achieved in the classic tragedies of French drama and literature (370).
Comparing Molière’s version of realism to his contemporary culture, Auerbach notes that Molière did not conform to the era’s trend toward “psychological types,” but like authors using those types, Molière leaned toward portraying anything peculiar ridiculously. And as with authors of his time, Moliere did not represent (in any “real” way) anyone from the popular or lower classes; all lower-class characters are comic and functional. Molière also rarely alluded to political issues, and when he did, they were done discretely. His use of farce reflected the attitudes of the day, representing a society that avoided specialization and valued “elegant dilettantism” that would allow them to engage in “easy and pleasant social discourse” (368).
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Interrupted Supper”
Chapter 16 opens with a passage from the 1731 Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost. Auerbach describes the text as representing the intimacy of domestic situations, like late-medieval texts, but he notes that this text lacks the creatural realism of those texts. It avoids exploring the “depths of existence,” presenting readers with neat pictures of intimate domestic life (399). The separation of styles does not play a role, as characters from all classes move their way through the text. The text is, however, meant to be taken seriously, using a moral and tragic tone.
Auerbach explains that this era experienced more stability than before in terms of politics and economics, and the bourgeois class was on the rise. With a lack of worry over the lives of the next generation, moral and aesthetic forms of art arose, brimming with “bourgeois sentimentality” (401). In the same vein, Prévost’s text illustrates the intermediate style, mixing realistic and serious events and treatment without much depth. Even when portraying vices, the language is elegant. Auerbach notes that this differs greatly from the Enlightenment’s propaganda-serving realistic texts, and he provides a passage from Voltaire to exemplify this. These kinds of texts paired religion and business and placed business on a higher level, making religion seem ridiculous by simplifying problems. These texts manipulated reality, Auerbach argues, to use it for their own purposes, and this involves a mixture of styles, avoiding tragic portrayals despite the nearness to the sublime when representing religion.
Auerbach also addresses the rise of memoirs and diaries in the French 17th century and their relationship to the separation of styles, claiming that they “cannot separate realism and a serious approach” and thus do “not submit unconditionally to the aesthetic principle of the separation of styles” (413). They engage in a “ruthless representation of everyday events, of things that are ugly and, in terms of classical aesthetics, undignified” (431). They explore problematic issues and explore our inner natures rather than maintaining a superficially moralistic style and content. They provide early forms that echo modern-day realism, illustrating people within their own everyday environments and representing their natural speech, gestures, and actions.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
Auerbach engages in further sociocultural and historical analysis in this section, exploring The Relationship Between Literature and Society through consideration of each work’s contemporary society and historical events. As with authors in the previous section, Auerbach notes during the chapter on Shakespeare, “The Weary Prince,” that people’s horizons of experience and knowledge were being broadened as exploration continued. Shakespeare himself reflected this “multiplicity of subject matter” and greater sense of historicity developing during his time (319). Another important element of consideration, however, is that of national identity. Nations became more aware of their cultural and social differences from others, and this alteration in how others viewed identity was deepened as schisms developed in the Church. Shakespeare plays with the variety of perspectives possible, moving between high and low styles and experimenting with the kind of subject matter he could include within each style. Moliére, on the other hand, moved slightly away from trends of his time, although he was inspired by them. Works of his era tended to rely on what Auerbach calls psychological types, or exaggerated and simplified character archetypes. He instead gave those types more depth and texture and chose to exaggerate anything peculiar, rather than limiting himself to specific types of people that society deemed odd. Like others of his time, he either avoids referencing contemporary political issues or references them discretely. Finally, during Prevost’s time, Auerbach explains that there was more stability, which allowed for the development of increasingly sentimental and moralizing works of literature.
The Evolution of Western Literary Realism begins to move ever closer to a mingling of styles during this time. Shakespeare begins a more extreme mixture of styles; Auerbach explains that the playwright “mixes the sublime and the low, the tragic and the comic in an inexhaustible abundance of proportions” (317). Although Shakespeare does not treat “low” (or lower-class) characters seriously, his work reveals an increasing openness to the possibilities of mingled style. His high, noble characters do things like expressing fatigue and hunger, and they engage in humor alongside lower characters. His plays also reveal these high characters engaging in their everyday lives, rather than only heroic or sublime endeavors. During Prevost’s time, Auerbach notes the continuation of a growing bourgeois sentimentality, as explored in the previous section, which contributes to a growing number of works of mingled styles. Sometimes, however, as with Prevost, texts achieve more of what Auerbach calls an intermediate style, mixing daily life and more serious event but not exploring them in depth. The growth of diaries as a genre of published work also impacts the trend of a mingling of styles, and Auerbach calls this genre early echoes of Modern literature’s realism, rooted in the everyday. These works, he argues, cannot submit to a separation of styles, representing everyday events with brutal accuracy, even if they are humble or ugly. During the same time, Prevost increases the mingling of styles by bringing characters of varied classes in and out of the text, with all treated seriously.
The character of Don Quijote provides a slight difference from the other works of this section in his focus purely on entertainment; this aligns with the other works, however, by its connection with Cervantes’s society. Auerbach argues that his focus on entertainment and avoidance of society’s problems aligned with the attitudes of Spain at the time. Cervantes also goes beyond simply representing all subjects, high or low, seriously. In fact, he nearly completely flips representation of each class of character. Don Quijote is of a type of character that would normally be portrayed comically: somewhat mad and not in touch with his own current reality. Cervantes treats him heroically, however, revealing just how noble Don Quijote really is, even if he does not understand that his fantasies are just that. Cervantes illustrates an early example of exploring the tragic and the sublime through what would normally be considered a low character.
