Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Chapter 6 opens with a passage from the 12th-century French courtly romance epic poem Yvain by Chrétien de Troyes. Auerbach notes that although only about 70 years separate Yvain from Chanson de Roland, and although both are epic feudal works, the style has changed completely. Yvain flows more easily, and there are clearer connections between each of its parts. Courtly romances, Auerbach argues, are the first places where vernacular literature is so subtle and smooth. The romance also carries the reader into the world of fairy tales, representing time and place in the typical manner of fairy tales, often using allegory and secondary meanings for words and events and illustrating that time outside of the fairy landscape has not passed. The element of mystery, Auerbach argues, originates in Breton folklore.

The fundamental purpose of courtly romance, Auerbach explains, is “[a] self-portrayal of feudal knighthood with its mores and ideals” (131). The courtly romance reveals the reality of the time’s customs, including the highly developed rituals of courtly society and the “mannerly ease and comfort of the social life of a cultured class” (131). The courtly style is subtle, graceful, and attractive, but it can also become “silly coquetry,” seem trifling, or come across as cold (132). The style is “a creation of the French Middle Ages” (132).

Compared to the chanson de geste, of which the Chanson de Roland was one, the courtly romance represents a much richer and more varied world, but it is still only the world of the upper class. Chrétien occasionally represents other classes, but those representations are always suiting the purpose of creating “a colorful setting for the life of the knight” (132). Auerbach explains:

Courtly realism offers a very rich and pungent picture of the life of a single class, a social stratum which remains aloof from the other strata of contemporary society, allowing them to appear as accessories, sometimes colorful but more usually comic or grotesque; so that the distinction in terms of class between the important, the meaningful, and the sublime on the one hand and the low-grotesque-comic on the other, remains strictly intact in regard to subject matter (132).

Auerbach therefore claims that courtly realism maintains the separation of styles, but he argues that it is not a true separation of styles because the courtly romance doesn’t use an “elevated style,” which Auerbach defines as a “distinction between levels of expression” (133). The courtly romance style adapts to any subject and any emotion.

The “fairy-tale” element of the courtly romance is important, because it helps create a sense that the stories are not grounded in the social, economic, or political realities of the time; they exist separately from their social conditions and focus primarily on expressing the ideals of upper-class courtly society. The courtly romance tradition creates the practice of using legendary traditions to create a magical and chivalrous world. The adventures are not chaotic, but rather stable trials that are essential pieces of the knight’s ideal life and purpose. They help knights move through tests that work toward “personal perfection” as set forth by fate (136). Auerbach compares this tradition with Don Quixote, which parodies the courtly romance by using the trope of a knight proving himself but places that knight within the randomness of the real world. The courtly romance does not represent that true reality but rather creates an escape through its fairy tale elements and its focus on the themes of love and feats of arms. Through courtly romances, love develops more importance as a theme, and love eventually becomes a characteristic theme for the elevated style.

The focus of Chapter 7 is a piece of mostly dialogue from Mystère d’Adam, which is a Christmas play from the 12th century, written in French vernacular. After a close reading of the events of the passage, Auerbach explores the style, explaining that despite the “utmost importance and the utmost sublimity” of the drama’s topic to a Christian audience, it presents itself as “popular” (151). It is as if that ancient and sublime story could happen in the present moment, making it familiar and more immediate for viewers and thus having more emotional and mental impact for contemporary French viewers. Adam and Eve come across like any other French person of the time, making the scene seem like it fits within everyday reality. The play, composed in a simple, low style, nonetheless represents the sublime. This follows the Judeo-Christian tradition of mingling the two styles, sermo gravis (or sublimis, elevated style) and sermo humilis (or remissus, low style), rather than the antique tradition of keeping the two completely separate.

Auerbach explains that the theological and mystic literatures of the 12th century brought about a return of this mixture of styles. He illustrates a more theological example of this through passages by Bernard of Clairvaux. Theological works such as these were not concerned with questions of style, Auerbach explains, but Christianity began to consider style as Holy Scripture and Christian literature encountered the “aesthetic criticism of highly educated pagans,” who were horrified by writings that told the highest truths through uncivilized and stylistically ignorant language (154). Christian Fathers became more concerned with traditional standards of classical style, but they also recognized the new kind of everyday, accessible sublimity created through Scripture. Even the uneducated, simple masses could now find their way to the hidden truths of the sublime through the everyday. The everyday and the real become essential to medieval Christian art and drama, although later on a courser realism develops, juxtaposing Passions and crude farce. Auerbach follows the trend of mixture of styles to the beginning of the 13th century, quoting from Saint Francis of Assisi’s Epistle 322 to illustrate his combination of “ecstatically sublime immersion in God and humbly concrete everydayness” (162). He also explores the development of “a freedom from self-conscious restraint, a sweetly passionate abandonment to feeling, a release from all timidity in public expression” that developed through works like mystic poet Jacopone da Todi’s Passion poem.

Chapter 8 opens with a passage from Dante’s Inferno, from the Divine Comedy, written in the early 14th century. Auerbach’s analysis in this chapter is one of the most famous from the text. The passage is from the 10th canto, when Dante and Virgil encounter the tombs of Farinata and Cavalcante, historical Italian figures. Both men, like Dante, are from Florence, so they appear above their coffins to speak to him when they hear his accent, asking after political affairs of the city and their families.

Auerbach studies the sharp breaks in action, such as when one of the spirits interrupts Dante or one another. This, Auerbach explains, differentiates Dante’s work with “pre-Dantean narrative” (180). These sharp breaks, he argues, don’t come from the classical Latin version of elevated style but rather from Biblical elevated style. Unlike European vernacular writers before this time, Dante has many stylistic devices he can use within his own (now more developed) vernacular. His style, in fact, is so natural and has such movement that it “exhibit[s] to perfection the natural vitality of spoken discourse” (182). Dante exhibits so much more subtlety, directness, and use of a variety of forms that Auerbach determines the author was “discover[ing] the world anew” (183). Despite his “natural” imitation of everyday speech, Auerbach points out that Dante is always working toward the sublime, and the “ordinary” conversations exist alongside stylistically sublime elements. Dante illustrates a mixture of styles by combining the sublime and the trivial in his work, and he even finds ways to present the more trivial elements of his story so as to illustrate their connection to the sublime. Dante, Auerbach argues, is the ultimate representative of the mingling of styles.

Dante represents reality by imitating all spheres of reality, including past, present, the sublime, the vile, history, legend, tragedy, comedy, man, and nature (189). In Dante, reality becomes full and well-rounded as he aims to teach his readers.

Dante’s representation of reality is notable partly because of his representation of the historicity of people and life on earth. Auerbach notes that a vital part of reality (and representation of it) is that humans and the earth all contain a history, one that is constantly growing and changing. In the Inferno, however, the inhabitants of Hell live a “changeless existence” (191). But when they recognize Dante as one of the living, they exert great effort to express themselves to him; these moments and the inhabitants’ vivid memories of their lives reveal a sense of “historicity.” Dante’s realism is also related to the concept of “figural realism” that Auerbach has already introduced (196). Auerbach explains that the world beyond (the setting of Dante’s story) is “God’s design in active fulfillment” (196). From that perspective, earthly events and people are simply figural, or in other words, they represent something that will be fulfilled in the future. Only “in the beyond…[do] they attain fulfillment and the true reality of their being” (196). As a result of this sense of realism and Dante’s mixture of styles, his work is Christian both in its content and in its style. Dante’s realism is, Auerbach argues, the farthest realism had been taken up to that point, because he used such expressive art to produce “an almost painfully immediate impression of the earthly reality of human beings” (199). His realism represents the fullness of life and heightens the emotional effect. Auerbach ends by describing Dante’s realism as more accurately presenting “the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding” than antique literature ever achieved (202).