Erich Auerbach on Mimesis

Mimesis was big. Enormous. I've been reading it for far too long. It's about realism, whatever the fuck that is, and Auerbach wants to get at it in two ways—by talking about Jesus, and by talking about class. The religion and the Marxism are actually tied up together because Jesus permits realism by introducing poor people as important people. Unlike Euryclea in The Odyssey (well, really more like the maids), poor people in the New Testament of the Bible are a very real and necessary part of the action. And talking about poor people practically guarantees realism because poor people do stuff—their lives interact with objects and teem with events that are real and boring and very ordinary. (Rich people just fantasize about courtly romance; poor people poop. In Auerbach's reckoning, rich people never poop and poor people never have ridiculous fantasies.)

He's also a goddamned structuralist, and wants to talk about how sentences and verses and things are constructed, so that he can show you that the realism is there in the very grammar and meter of the things he's quoting. Eh—sort of, but why is it so important to demonstrate that even the conjunctions care about realism? That god-is-in-the-details kind of reading is starting to feel untrustworthily glib.