"Stylistic".

McLuhan, H. Marshall

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. By Erich Auerbach. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harvard University Press. 1953. $7.50.

Erich Auerbach belongs with that group of scholars whose approach to literature and culture has been described as "stylistic." Many Americans are already familiar with this approach; they have met in the work of Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Helmut Hatzfeld, and Ulrich Leo. It is an approach which is not unrelated to the methods worked out for art and culture by Burckhart and his student, Wolflin. As for myself, I met it first in Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture. Giedion is a disciple of Wolflin much greater than his master.

As for the approach itself, it may be said to accept any work of art or any portion of human expression (a road, a town, a building, a poem, a painting, an ash-tray, or a motor-car) as a preferential ordering of materials. Since all art expresses some preference, any portion of anything made by man can be spelled out. Every art object and every art situation represents a preferential response to reality, so that the precise techniques chosen for the manipulation and presentation of reality are a key to the mental states and assumptions of the makers. Thus, the art object or situation (a city or a factory) may be a non-verbal affair, but its "meaning" can easily be verbalized to the person skilled in the language of vision or stylistics.

This is an approach to literature and art which, superficially, dispenses with history. In practice it provides a technique, both massive and minute, of historical documentation and awareness. What we have in the past four centuries come to accept as historical explanation has typically been linear. Linear perspective comes into painting and writing (via format of the printed page) at the same time. And it consists in the discovery that a single, fixed point of view is possible to the spectator both in time and space. This extremely artificial and arty discovery was very exciting and useful at first. It seemed to be great improvement on medieval non-lineality in time and space.

But lineal perspective was supplanted in the visual arts by the techniques of lo spettatore nel centro del quadro or the spectator in the center of the picture, which, in poetry, gives the novelty of Wordsworth's Solitary Reaper. The very fact of poetry appearing almost entirely in the printed form, however, long disguised this shift from lineality, and helps, for example, to explain Hopkins' insistence on his poetry being heard.

The purpose of these remarks is to reveal that Auerbach's Mimesis is very much in line with those developments in English poetry and criticism which we link with the names of Pound, Eliot, Richards, Empson, Leavis, and Brooks: "A work of art has the power of imposing its own assumptions." The business of the reader or spectator is to discover the stylistic assumptions of a work of art, not to extract meanings and ideas from it. For some people biographical and historical data, as well as meanings and ideas, appear to help in the art experience. For most they tend to be a substitute for such experience. But for all types of reader the stylistic analyses in Mimesis will come as a series of new insights and sympathies with many authors from Homer to Virginia Woolf (from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, as it were).

Auerbach is able to get startling results from such unexpected works as Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks, in which the sentences and points of view have shifted from the autocratic position of earlier imperial writers to an interest in "everything that can impress the people."

It is impossible to illustrate Auerbach's procedure in a review. But it should be said that it is a way of seeing and doing that he offers and not a set of conclusions or ideas. Even agreement or disagreement with his particular perceptions and discussions is unimportant, because it is the enterprise of making the whole of world literature available on its own terms that is here valuable. Moreover, this method not only promotes exact attention to the modalities of experience incorporated in particular works and makes those modalities luminously available, but it incidentally reveals the mode of existence of any type of art and its natural function within a culture.

Today, with 30,000 new titles a year in English alone, it is nothing less than a necessity to make of the book a tool of perception. The book has a new role in our new technological culture--just the role that Auerbach and his associates have discovered. The book having lost its monopoly as a channel of information or as an avenue of recreation, now assumes a higher role as tool and trainer of perception in all the arts. And it is just because the Auerbachs have perfected the techniques of literary stylistics that these techniques can be extended to music, painting, architecture, and town planning.

"STYLISTIC" (4)

(4) Renascence 9.2 (1956): 99-100.