Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007
Dante: The Supreme Realist
By Michael Dirda
Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) is best known for his magisterial, and majestic, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a book written in Turkey, where the German Jewish scholar had taken refuge from the Nazis, and published in German in 1946. This volume of connected essays opens by contrasting the ancient Greek and Hebrew worldviews, as revealed in the Odyssey and the Old Testament, and ends with a close reading of a passage from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. In the five hundred or so pages in between Auerbach offers searching analyses of short, illustrative extracts from Petronius, Gregory of Tours, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rabelais, Saint-Simon, Schiller, Stendhal, and others. Building on the stylistic quirks, lacunae, and emphases in his carefully chosen authors, Auerbach gradually discloses their underlying suppositions about what art should do and how people and events can be represented in language at a specific moment in history. For example, by analyzing a dinner scene from Stendhal's The Red and the Black, then comparing it with similar short passages in Balzac and Flaubert, Auerbach reveals the foundations of nineteenth-century realism.
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