texts chosen at random - Fench novels, Virginia Woolf, and a lot more - Auerbach says "write your own book!"

Wrapping up Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.  He ends with three chapters on the modern novel, mostly French, but covering a lot of territory.

19. “Germinie Lacerteux,” Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Zola.

This chapter is by itself a history of the 19th century French novel, repeating some of the ideas of the previous Stendhal / Balzac / Flaubert chapter.   It is too bad that Auerbach begins with the novel that is not read much, but it is too useful for his purposes, since it is about a servant, a maid, which links back to the passage from the Odyssey in Chapter 1.  And the background of Germinie Lacerteux (1865) is useful, hilarious – the longtime servant of the brothers dies and they discover that she had her own life, that she was human, thus inspiring the novel.  How do you represent such a person?  Can a novel be built from “the sensory fascination of the ugly, the repulsive, and the morbid” (499)?  I know, now this sounds ridiculous.  It might have sounded slightly ridiculous at the time to a reader who – but now I am repeating my doubts about Zola’s “ideas.”

Auerbach has great fun with Zola.  “Even today, after half a century the last decades of which have brought us experiences such as Zola never dreamed of, Germinal is still a terrifying book” (512).  So-called Naturalism died off because “there was no one left to vie with him in working capacity, in mastery of the life of the time, in determination and courage” (515).

This chapter is so expansive that it includes significant sections on 19th century German and Russian literature, plus Ibsen.

20. “The Brown Stocking,” Woolf and Proust.

The passage with which Auerbach begins is the longest in Mimesis, three and a half pages of To the Lighthouse (1927) in which Mrs. Ramsay knits a sock and thinks, or maybe just exists.  Auerbach then summarizes the passage, which takes him six pages, or perhaps eight.  Woolf’s text is so compressed that merely describing it expands it.

That is pretty much all Auerbach does with Woolf’s text.  He just looks at it.  Looking at it carefully is a lot of work and source of insight.

When I noted a few posts ago that Mimesis was half French, I was understating, since I was counting this chapter as English, when it is actually half French.  Auerbach moves to Woolf to some passages from Proust, and then wanders freely – Joyce, Hamsun, Mann, Gide.  He writes that he “could never have written anything in the nature of a history of European realism; the material would have swamped me” (548).  Well, the book he did write is quite the substitute.

Epilogue

Auerbach describes his method.  Take some texts – passage, really – from each period and use them as “test cases for my ideas.”  Which texts?  “[T]he great majority of the texts were chosen at random, on the basis of accidental acquaintance and personal preference rather than in view of a definite purpose” (556), which is random in a sense but maybe not in some other senses.  He wishes he had been able to cover more “English, Spanish, and German texts” (557).  He wrote Mimesis in Istanbul, in exile, away from a research library.

As useful as always, the commenters at Languagehat pointed me to Edward Said’s introduction to the 2014 edition of Mimesis.  Said argues that some features of the book are personal responses to the war.  France is a conquered country; Germany is the conqueror.  Auerbach is righting the balance.  Maybe so.

In the end, the reader is left to fill in the gaps, pick his own passages from various languages, and write his own book, possibly in some other form.

Which book should we all read together next?  European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages or what?  What will possibly be as good as Mimesis?