mimēsis praxeōs

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (1) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

To conclude, I would like to return to the question of mimesis, the second focus of my interest in reading the Poetics. It does not seem to me to be governed by the equating of the two expressions “the imitation (or representation) of action” and “the organization of the events.” It is not that something has to be taken back from this equation. There is no doubt that the prevalent sense of mimesis is the one instituted by its being joined to muthos. If we continue to translate mimesis by “imitation,” we have to understand something completely contrary to a copy of some preexisting reality and speak instead of a creative imitation. And if we translate mimesis by “representation” (as do Dupont-Roc and Lallot), we must not understand by this word some redoubling of presence, as we could still do for Platonic mimesis, but rather the break that opens the space for fiction. Artisans who work with words produce not things but quasi-things; they invent the as-if. And in this sense, the Aristotelian mimesis is the emblem of the shift [décrochage] that, to use our vocabulary today, produces the “literariness” of the work of literature.

Still the equation of mimesis and muthos does not completely fill up the [End of Page 45] meaning of the expression mimēsis praxeōs. We may of course—as we did above—construe the objective genitive as the noematic correlate of imitation of representation and equate this correlate to the whole expression “the organization of the events,” which Aristotle makes the “what”—the object—of mimesis. But that the praxis belongs at the same time to the real domain, covered by ethics, and the imaginary one, covered by poetics, suggests that mimesis functions not just as a break but also as a connection, one which establishes precisely the status of the “metaphorical” transposition of the practical field by the muthos. If such is the case, we have to preserve in the meaning of the term mimesis a reference to the first side of poetic composition. I call this reference mimesis1 to distinguish it from mimesis2—the mimesis of creation—which remains the pivot point. I hope to show that even in Aristotle’s text there are scattered references to this prior side of poetic composition. This is not all. Mimesis, we recall, as an activity, the mimetic activity, does not reach its intended term through the dynamism of the poetic text alone. It also requires a spectator or reader. So there is another side of poetic composition as well, which I call mimesis3, whose indications I shall also look for in the text of the Poetics. By so framing the leap of imagination with the two operations that constitute the two sides of the mimesis of invention, I believe we enrich rather than weaken the meaning of the mimetic activity invested in the muthos. I hope to show that this activity draws its intelligibility from its mediating function, which leads us from one side of the text to the other through the power of refiguration.

Darwin and Scarlet Cloth/ 达尔文与一块红布

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Take Darwin’s account of the following joyous exchanges, with each party delighted at the other’s delight, the other’s silliness:

Both parties laughing, wondering, gaping at each other; we pitying them, for giving us good fish and crabs for rags, etc.,; they grasping at the chance of finding people so foolish as to exchange such splendid ornaments for a good supper. It was most amusing to see the undisguised smile of satisfaction with which one young woman with her face painted black, tied several bits of scarlet cloth round her head with rushes. (227) [End Page 94]

That was 1832, by which time the European bourgeoisies, male versions, unlike the aristocracy and Middle Ages of time past, were deeply invested in grey to a degree that brilliant colors such as red took on a wild, primitive, not to mention even a revolutionary hue—obviously the perfect gift for the Fuegians (whom, we are later told, had the practice of daubing their naked bodies with black, white, and red). But from the beginning of European discovery and conquest, redness itself, first from a species of tree in India, called Brasilium on account of its fieriness, and later from Bahia (in what came to be called Brasil), and from Central and South America, fetched enormous prices in Europe into the eighteenth century. Indeed, after gold and silver and perhaps slaves, the commodity that seems to have most interested the buccaneers of Spanish Main, those same sailor-buccaneers with whom the Cuna Indians allied themselves in the famous Darien peninsula in the seventeenth century, was red dyewood.

文学是如何“再现”“现实”的？

文学是如何“再 现”“现实”的？

五十多年前，古典学者奥尔巴赫从纳粹德国逃命到了土耳其，以“历史”为纲写了本大书，回顾和分析自古希腊以来人们如何用文学 来再现现实，把这个事儿在西方的情形说了个透。从此以后，西方再没有人觉得有能力（一开始是这样）或者“屑于”（后来是这样）干这种吃力的事儿了。

五十多年过去了，在两代人的时间里，西方的文科平添了不少精致的淘气。“文化大革命”在西方的遗毒尚未清除，物欲横流的“后现代”社会已经把学问一门一门地给玩儿了。现在是姿态越激进，就越显得有学问，应聘的钱就越多。拿那么多钱，再不骂骂资本主义，就会有资本主义的走狗之嫌。

如同高尔泰回忆文革里的批斗，说是“知识分子打人，胳膊细，道理多”。西方的文科忽悠到了那么超前的地步，“胳膊”又那么“细”，真不愧是发达资本主义超“酷”的上层建筑。

文学是如何“再现”“现实”的？文学就是这样“再现”“现实”的。

Terry Eagleton/ Pork Chops and Pineapples

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach · Princeton, 579 pp, £13.95

…

Isn't it bad enough that everyday existence is bounded by laws and conventions, without art feeling that it has to follow suit? Isn't part of the point of art to give those tiresome restrictions the slip, creating things such as the Gorgon, or a grin without a cat, which do not exist in nature? Realism is meant to be a riposte to magic and mystery, but it may well be a prime example of them. Perhaps the roots of our admiration for resemblance, mirroring and doubling lie in some very early ceremony of correspondence between human beings and their recalcitrant surroundings. In that case, what Erich Auerbach takes in his great study Mimesis to be the most mature form of art may actually be the most regressive.

To describe something as realist is to acknowledge that it is not the real thing. We call false teeth realistic, but not the Foreign Office. If a representation were to be wholly at one with what it depicts, it would cease to be a representation. A poet who managed to make his or her words 'become' the fruit they describe would be a greengrocer. No representation, one might say, without separation. Words are certainly as real as pineapples, but this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the 'air of reality' of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick - a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us say) simply to signal: 'This is realism.' In such art, no waistcoat is colourless, no way of walking is without its idiosyncrasy, no visage without its memorable features. Realism is calculated contingency.

…

Auerbach's Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a Berlin Jew, had taken refuge from the Nazis. The book was published in 1946, and this new edition, with an introduction by Edward Said, marks the 50th anniversary of its first appearance in the United States. Auerbach ranges through some of the mighty monuments of Western literature, from Homer, medieval romance, Dante and Rabelais to Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Stendhal and a good many authors besides, scanning their work for symptoms of realism. His criterion for selection, however, is more political than formal or epistemological. The question is whether we can find secreted in the language of a particular text the bustling, workaday life of the common people. For Auerbach as for Mikhail Bakhtin, who was writing his classic work on Rabelais and realism at much the same time that Auerbach was holed up almost bereft of books in Istanbul, realism is in the broadest sense a matter of the vernacular. It is the artistic word for a warm-hearted populist humanism. It is thus an anti-Fascist poetics, rather as for Bakhtin it was an anti-Stalinist one. Mimesis is among other things its author's response to those who drove him into exile, even if they were unlikely to have heard of Farinata and Cavalcante or Frate Alberto.

For all its formidable erudition, then, there is a fairly simple opposition at work in Mimesis, one more class-based and militant than the universal respect paid to Auerbach by conservative scholars would intimate. Realism is the artistic form that takes the life of the common people with supreme seriousness, in contrast to an ancient or neoclassical art which is static, hierarchical, dehistoricised, elevated, idealist and socially exclusive. In Walter Benjamin's terms, it is an art which destroys the aura. There is an implied continuity in this respect between Homeric epic and the Third Reich, with its heroic myths, tragic posturing and spurious sublimity. If all this had been argued by a Trotskyist English lecturer at a redbrick English university, rather than by one of the 20th century's most eminent Romance philologists, it would almost certainly have provoked a clutch of dyspeptic reviews in the learned journals. If you can make such claims in a dozen or so different languages, however, as Auerbach doubtless could, and if like him you know your French heroic epic from your Middle High German one, you are likely to win a more sympathetic hearing.

Like Lukács, then, Auerbach uses 'realism' as a value term. Like Lukács, too, he is a Hegelian historicist for whom the art that matters is one flushed with the dynamic forces of its age. Neither critic can find much value in Modernism: Mimesis ends by rapping Virginia Woolf sternly over the knuckles, while Lukács can see little but decadence in Musil and Joyce. The upbeat humanism of both men is affronted by the downbeat outlook of the Modernists. Both are doctrinal life-affirmers, high European humanists dismayed by the flaccid melancholia of the late bourgeois world. Unlike the austerely disembodied Hungarian, however, Auerbach is a radical populist who celebrates the fleshly and mundane, a man for whom authentic art has its roots 'in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women'. If realism is bourgeois for Lukács, it is plebeian for Auerbach. In this respect, Auerbach is a curious cross between Lukács and Bakhtin, blending the historicism of the former with the iconoclasm of the latter.

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。

God, Abraham, and Mimesis/ 上帝、亚伯拉罕和艺术再现

While God and Abraham, the serving-men, the ass, and the implements are simply named, without mention of any qualities or any other sort of definition, Isaac once receives an appositive; God says, “Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest.” But this is not a characterization of Isaac as a person, apart from his relation to his father and apart from the story; he may be handsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, pleasant or unpleasant—we are not told. Only what we need to know about him as a personage in the action, here and now, is illuminated, so that it may become apparent how terrible Abraham’s temptation is, and that God is fully aware of it. By this example of the contrary, we see the significance of the descriptive adjectives and digressions of the Homeric poems; with their indications of the earlier and as it were absolute existence of the persons described, they prevent the reader from concentrating exclusively on a present crisis; even when the most terrible things are occurring, they prevent the establishment of an overwhelming suspense. But here, in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, the overwhelming suspense is present; what Schiller makes the goal of the tragic poet—to rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual and spiritual powers (Schiller say “our activity”) in one direction, to concentrate them there—is effected in this Biblical narrative, which certainly deserves the epithet epic.

--Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 11.

The Homeric poems present of definite complex of events whose boundaries in space and time are clearly delimited; before it, beside it, and after it, other complexes of events, which do not depend upon it, can be conceived without conflict and without difficulty. The Old Testament, on the other hand, presents universal history: it begins with the beginning of time, with the creation of the world, and will end with the Last Days, the fulfilling of the Covenant, with which the world will come to an end. Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in this sequence; into it everything that is known about the world, or at least everything that touches upon the history of the Jews, must be fitted as an ingredient of the divine plan; and as this too became possible only by interpreting the new material as it poured in, the need for interpretation reaches out beyond the original Jewish-Israelitish realm of reality—for example to Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history; interpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending reality; the new and strange world which now comes into view and which, in the form in which it presents itself, proves to be wholly unutilizable within the Jewish religious frame, must be so interpreted that it can find a place there.

--Ibid, 17.

© Copyright by Dun Wang (王敦). All rights reserved. 著作权拥有者：Dun Wang (王敦)。