Weeks after the book report Erik Auerbach recently posted by Acantilado: Ulises’ scar. The enthusiasm I generated made me return, many years later, to the pages of Unbearable mimesis. Representation of reality in Western literature (1942).
Auerbach’s masterpiece was written, as is well known, during the Second World War, a refugee in Constantinople, without a decent library in her home, so you have to learn the hand of her amazing knowledge and all her memory to take the dark path that leads de la Biblia to Virginia Woolf.
One of the recurring ideas in it mimesisand what is coming to the fore most these days is the disappearance of tragedy and the tragic spirit during the Middle Ages in the context of Greco-Latin culture and its new beginnings since Renaissance humanism. Auerbach links this disappearance to the subversive effects of Christianity in the image of the dominant male in Antigues and in the various stylistic registers that were used to discuss his fate.
“Christ did not appear as a hero or a king, but as a man – writes Auerbach – placed on the lowest social ladder; His first disciples, fishermen and artisans, lived in the world of the lower communities of Palestinehe talked with publicans and coppersmiths, with poor and sick people and children, and by this one of his words and actions he did not lose his high and deep dignity; they were more transcendental than anything that had ever happened, and the style to which we were related did not even represent a rhetorical culture in the ancient sentiment. […] That King Reyes was now emaciated, stripped, nailed and nailed to the cross as a vulgar criminal: this narrative was completely elaborated, penetrated deep into the consciousness of the people, into the aesthetics of the department of style…”.
Among the consequences of this “revolution” is the disappearance of tragedy. “If it were repeated that the Christian media does not know tragedy, it would be more accurate to say that in the media all tragedy has been included in the tragedy of Christ. […] Above all the achievements, for the graves that were in the earthly course, there stood the stupendous and all-embracing dignity of a single achievement: the coming of Christ, and the whole tragedy was the only figure or reflection of the only transformation of success in which he had to forcibly reveal himself: the original sinful work, the birth and suffering of Christ, the Juicio Final. Subsequently, it was shifting the center of the grave that has passed from one human life to the nextof course the tragedy did not happen”.
Auerbach links the disappearance of tragedy to the subversive effects of Christianity in the image of the dominant male in Antigues
Only very slowly, starting with humanism, will the corresponding process of “desacralization” of the world lead to a renewed awareness of the diversity of the human lot and thus to a renewed stylistic spectrum that placed it in harmony with the polar categories of tragic and comic. In this process, Isabella of Tragedy, led by Shakespeare, assumes that everything will be successful.
As Auerbach says:The drama of Christ is not a universal drama, it is not a sea in which all human destinies unfold; the dramatized argument has its focal point in decisive human action, emerging from the specific circumstances of the unit, and the path is muddled by an independent human tragedy”.
For the same reason, Christianity and its introspective tendencies became clear. The tragedy of Isabella serves to demonstrate the deeper and richer relationship between man and his destiny that is recognized in Antiquity. In it, “the hero’s special nature imposes with much greater force his importance as the source of his destiny.”
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