BOO KS
325
To twentieth-century realism, Auerbach devotes only one brief
chapter, principally on Virginia Woolf, Proust, and Joyce. The per–
spectival play, the mixtures of styles and kinds of reality, are Rabelais–
ian, but the grasp of history has relaxed. In this extremely individual–
istic and subjective fiction, the stress is on the random contingency of
real phenomena, on what occasions unexpectedly reveal, on the muIti–
personal representation of consciousness, on the disintegration of the
continuity of exterior events. Auerbach hints darkly that with the ac–
celeration of the world-leveling and unifying process now going on, his–
tory will take care of this confusion with a simplification hardly pleasing
to those few who still love the richness and complexity of Western
culture.
Auerbach writes with a humane objectivity and clarity refreshingly
contrasted to the arrogance, defensiveness, snobbery, esotericism and
self-conscious elaborations of most serious contemporary criticism. He
restores works to their own times in a way that brings them closer to
ours. He so defines relations within the work and relations between
the work and outer reality that they give added meaning to each other.
There has been a marked revival of appreciation of social realism in
this country in the last year or two, of fiction which has both social
and moral, both formal and referential meaning.
Mimesis,
which every–
one responsibly interested in literature will have to read, will give this
revival depth and strength.
The book is not without its own limitations, of course. Insofar as
these are a matter of necessary selections and omissions, one cannot
quarrel with them. Auerbach does almost nothing with English fiction
before 1900, and except for a few references to Fielding, omits entirely
the great realists of the English eighteenth century, Defoe, Swift, Field–
ing, Richardson, SmoIIett, and Sterne. They had not grasped
C<histor–
ismus,"
but they certainly carried realism forward at a time when it
was very weak on the Continent. Nor does Auerbach mention American
literature.
Auerbach's chief limitations, however, are temperamental. He is
rather unimaginative, rather literal, much interested in history, but not
much interested in psychology or philosophy. The worlds of Freud and
Jung, Bergson and Cassirer, hardly touch his. Not only does he not
play with ambiguities and metaphors, with the symbolic and mythic,
in the manner of the New Critics; he rarely acknowledges that such
elements exist in serious work, in work that accords with reality. And
though he often describes other events in a drama or novel besides the
one referred to in the passages he explicates, he cannot deal with the
dramatic or narrative structure as a whole with anything approaching
