Review of Mimesis

Mimesis by Erich Auerbach

The members of this forum have been putting up beautiful book reviews and they really help many readers about the choice of books and also enlighten the essence of those texts. The range of books is quite expansive covering wide variety of genre. 

Many of the texts include literary mostly fiction, some self help books and others on sundry topics. But as on date I haven't seen any text on literary criticism put up for discussion or review on this forum. Literary criticism gives us an insight into the production and idea of fiction and knowledge about the source and the basis of which fictions come into existence. With this motive behind I wish to introduce this seminal text of literary criticism on Western literature by Erich Auerbach from Germany. Originally written in German language and published in 1946. English translation was published in 1953. The book appended here is Princeton University Press edition brought out on the occasion of 50 years of its publication. This comes with an introduction by Edward  W. Said.

This book runs into little over 600 pages including index. But the length of the book would be found rewarding by the extent of its coverage and engaging texts.

This book is very ambitious as it covers Western literature of three thousand years. Beginning with Homer it ends with Virginia Woolf.

It is claimed that this is best book of criticism of 20th century. Some even maintain that Erich Auerbach is the greatest critic. Edward Said writes " Auerbach's book is by far the largest in scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works of the past half century." This book was written while he was in Istanbul. He had no books for ready reference and had to rely only on his encyclopaedic memories for this.

The first two chapters are on Homer and Bible. Erich theorises that all fictional writings draw their  inspiration either from Homer or from Bible. Any text which gives details of biographical sketches of protagonists are in the tradition of Homer. The text where the these details remain undefined is of the tradition of Bible.

Although all the twenty essays are equally great but to me the essays on Shakespeare  and Dante after Homer(Odysseus) Bible just stand out. The better the text the more exquisite  is his writing. I have read that the scene described in Divine Comedy of meeting Dante with Beatrice is the most beautiful writing ever written by a man. Erich takes out an episode from Divine Comedy and what he produces out of this  the piece  is sheer magical.

Each text has an extract from the original and translated into english if the original wasn't in english. This takes a reader into rendezvous of those ancient, mediaeval and modern texts which is a feast for all enthusiasts or connoisseur of literary art.

This text is not a history of western literature but it gives a panoramic view about the development of forms and Western reality as depicted in literary writings.