Mimesis

[NaokoSmith]

I think that is a most fascinating and typically Byronic reflection, that if real life could be properly represented in literature, vice and virtue / the good and the malign, would appear very differently. Perhaps that's the core problematic of mimesis, the representation of reality.

 

[NaokoSmith]

5/6 Chapt 3 – St. Augustine, the triumph of the Divine

Finally Auerbach considers a passage from Augustine’s writing in which a young man is taken to the Roman circus and, having been morally opposed to blood sports, is overcome by the sensual pleasures of spectating violence. He relied only on his own willpower when he should have depended on faith in God.

Against the increasing dominance of the mob, against irrational and immoderate lust, against the spell of magical powers, enlightened classical culture possessed the weapon of individualistic, aristocratic, moderate, and rational self-discipline. The various systems of ethics all agreed that a well-bred, self-aware, and self-reliant individual could through his own resources keep from intemperance[.] (Auerbach 1968 p.69.)

Christianity, Auerbach argues, draws on both classical rational ideals and immediate emotion, “it can fight the enemy with his own weapons” (ibid).

Its magic is no less a magic than is bloodlust and it is stronger because it is a more ordered, a more human magic, filled with more hope.
(Auerbach 1968 pp.69-70.)

The New Testament stories, full of fishermen and carpenters, low people fit only for comedy in the Classics, usher in a new ethos and a “new elevated style”. This style “does not scorn everyday life and ... is ready to absorb the sensorily realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base.” (Auerbach 1968 p.72.)

 

[NaokoSmith]

6/6 Chapt 3 – Temporal Figures

Auerbach argues that realism in Christian writings is characterised by a particular figural device. He shows how events get linked across vast reaches of time, for example the sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the sacrifice of Christ. When we read about Abraham being told to sacrifice Isaac, we are thinking ahead to how the people will sacrifice Christ, past and future get bonded in a way which suggests the eternal eye of God watching and determining all things past, present and future at once.

Finally it’s this sensual yet rational, temporally elastic ethos which wins out over classical antiquity “with all its ingenious and nicely shaded conjunctions, its wealth of devices for syntactic arrangement, its carefully elaborated system of tenses” (Auerbach 1968 p.74.). (I put a little marker down against that concept of a system of tenses as it happens that I am currently very conscious of how writers are using past vs. present tense to convey certain tones or moods in their stories.)

Auerbach has a little grumble at the end of the chapter about the loss of classical rational realism, “the lost comprehension of rational, continuous, earthly connections between things,” (Auerbach 1968 p.75) for he says the figural (temporally elastic) interpretation of history can’t be applied to random occurrences, although of course attempts are made to include these in some divine overarching purpose.

 

[NaokoSmith]

Chapt 4 Sicharius and Chramnesindus

Auerbach now takes a passage from Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks. It is confused and chaotic, barely recognisable as history in the tradition of Tacitus and Ammianus. Many of the Latin words are strained beyond their classical syntactical usage, but beyond this, Auerbach asserts that the whole story is one classical historians wouldn’t even have bothered to tell.

The empire in which all roads led to a small densely populated epicentre no longer exists. Even when they were far from Rome; Caesar, Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus directed their reports, their thoughts to a strategic nerve-centre which collected and collated all news and views in line with how they affected that place. Gregory lives in one of many fragmented localities, between “the strange atmosphere of the Merovingian period: the sudden and undisguised brutality which blots out every memory of the past and every thought of the future, and, on the other hand, the slight effect of Christian morality which, even though presented in its most primitive form, cannot penetrate these brutish souls” (86).

However, Auerbach points out that everything Gregory tells, he learnt at first or second hand – not from reports coming from a long distance away. Gregory tells the events in direct fashion, without commentary and sometimes providing discourse as if he had overheard it. He gives us detail which the classical historians would have utterly disdained.

Dixitque unus, dum equi urinam proicerint
One of them said, while the horses were pissing

It’s like something out of a Breughel painting:

even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
(from WH Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts)

While the classical historians organise and regulate the facts, Gregory makes them concrete. “He has many horrible things to relate; treason, violence, manslaughter are everyday occurrences; but the simple and practical vivacity with which he reports them prevents the formation of that oppressive atmosphere which we find in the late Roman writers” (94).

 

[oggbashan]

...

While the classical historians organise and regulate the facts, Gregory makes them concrete. “He has many horrible things to relate; treason, violence, manslaughter are everyday occurrences; but the simple and practical vivacity with which he reports them prevents the formation of that oppressive atmosphere which we find in the late Roman writers” (94).

For realism and concrete unvarnished details of the Roman period in Britain, I like the Vindolanda tablets.

They could be from a 1920s outpost of the British Empire:

"Can you join us for tea and biscuits tomorrow afternoon? RSVP"

 

[Tio_Narratore]

...and modern historians interpret the facts in order to produce narratives that make sense to themselves. They also tend to think their narratives are "truth." I was at a week-long workshop in a Midwestern university where, in a session with the history department, I was assured that "historical truth is established when the body of established historians accept an interpretation."

I found it more hysterical than historical, but did have to accept the "truthiness" of it. So much for non-fiction. Oh, wait a minute... Then there's the DSM, the work that defines the reality of mental illnesses by committee.

Not all agree, and Eco takes the view to task in "Baudolino," where the title character realizes that if "only one person says it, it isn't true, but that if many do, it is true" and then discovers what happens when reality imposes itself.

I have a little exercise I give my students that illustrates the conflict between reality and making sense. It consists of 12 questions about a brief reading. The reading itself is a chronicle, much like Gregory wrote, but readers tend to make their own narrative from the facts. The way they answer the questions displays the idiosyncracies of "truth," and few students (or colleagues) manage to pass this "truth test."

 

[NaokoSmith]

For realism and concrete unvarnished details of the Roman period in Britain, I like the Vindolanda tablets.

They could be from a 1920s outpost of the British Empire:

"Can you join us for tea and biscuits tomorrow afternoon? RSVP"

I hope to take Piglet to Vindolanda one of these days. We sometimes work out of a Latin book based on the tablets, which tells the story of a family in Vindolanda through the eyes of a mouse in their house called Minimus, LOL.

Isn't there a tablet which is asking for some socks? Ah, those poor Romans stuck out there on the Scottish border.

Tio, the topic of 'truth' is going to be a whole new thread! I thought I'd merely sketch a few details about 'realism' in here .

And for truth and realism in history, get the anxiety about the current English History curriculum. They want it to be proper English history ... but of course they will never get rid of the Romans, who seem to have become more English than Italian simply by virtue of being empire builders.

 

[oggbashan]

As part of an evening class I attended on popular culture, the students were asked to watch the television evening news, buy several daily newspapers the following morning, and list how many stories were in each of them, and how few stories were common to all.

The television news had the fewest stories covered in the least detail. Even the popular newspapers that had tits and bums prominently displayed covered the main news stories with much more information.

But what surprised us was the amount of variation between the accounts of the same news item in the different outlets.

We had to conclude that, although we considered the 'quality' papers to be offering the more comprehensive accounts, the differences between the reports meant that we did not actually know what had happened.

If that is true of yesterday's events, what chance have we of really knowing what actually happened 200 years ago, even if we have several eye-witness accounts?

All we can do is suggest a conclusion based on the evidence we have, and accept that we could be wrong...

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Of course, the day after Statistics Canada announced their study of the relationship between father and son's monetary worth, the Globe and Mail, our national liberal newspaper, announced, "Son's Wealth Closely Tied to Father," while the conservative sheet, the National Post, declared, "Culture of Poverty Disproved: Son's Income not Related to Father's."

The study had shown no correlation between father and son in salary, not unexpectedly, but a very high correlation in total wealth.

 

[NaokoSmith]

As part of an evening class I attended on popular culture, the students were asked to watch the television evening news, buy several daily newspapers the following morning, and list how many stories were in each of them, and how few stories were common to all.

The television news had the fewest stories covered in the least detail. Even the popular newspapers that had tits and bums prominently displayed covered the main news stories with much more information.

But what surprised us was the amount of variation between the accounts of the same news item in the different outlets.

We had to conclude that, although we considered the 'quality' papers to be offering the more comprehensive accounts, the differences between the reports meant that we did not actually know what had happened.

If that is true of yesterday's events, what chance have we of really knowing what actually happened 200 years ago, even if we have several eye-witness accounts?

All we can do is suggest a conclusion based on the evidence we have, and accept that we could be wrong...

Of course, the day after Statistics Canada announced their study of the relationship between father and son's monetary worth, the Globe and Mail, our national liberal newspaper, announced, "Son's Wealth Closely Tied to Father," while the conservative sheet, the National Post, declared, "Culture of Poverty Disproved: Son's Income not Related to Father's."

The study had shown no correlation between father and son in salary, not unexpectedly, but a very high correlation in total wealth.

I guess what Auerbach argues, in relation to the development of representations of realism, is that both style and (political) context have more to do with what is understood to be 'truth' than the bare facts.

He understands political context in the broadest sense - as above, when he argues that Gregory of Tours necessarily has a very different take on what is and what isn't important to report, because he lives in such a different era to that of the Roman Empire.

All the news outlets have roughly the same priorities as to what they might report on. (As Hypoxia commented above, there is a difference between cold and hot media - high-resolution cold medium (print) can offer deep detail / low-res hot medium (TV) provides less detail.)

Where Roman historians provided overarching analyses of disturbances which might have an effect at the centre of Empire, and Gregory of Tours gives more disparate accounts of chaotic local struggles with a focus on a more direct human experience, newspapers today offer accounts of conflict at what often seems to be a great geographic and emotional distance. Afghanistan is represented as far removed from us in space and because culturally it is so different - although having been in the region, there are lots of ways in which of course Afghan society is similar to any human society.

I wonder if what we are being provided with is a plethora of 'news' which works to anchor us in a particular identity. We are not like those warring Muslims we constantly hear about. The social theorist Nikolas Rose would have it that a search for identity is at the core of our contemporary social being, while more classical Foucaultians will say that it's sexuality rather than identity.

 

[NaokoSmith]

The chronic chtonic condition

Y'know, I am just going to take a little excursion out of Mimesis here, and say I am awfully sorry Auerbach did not write something about Middle English romance like Gawaine and the Grene Knight.

The way in which this poetry is written, with realism carried by alliteration as well as by symbolism and expressive male emotion, is quite different to the other pieces Auerbach writes about. It would have made a nice addition to his check-list of types of European literature.

I think this was what I was considering when I said the other day that Welsh poetry seemed to have missed out on the Cartesian mind/body split. I was thinking about the use of language in a manner which echos in the body, rather than in the mind.

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
(From Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood.)

DesEsseintes pointed to Ted Hughes as an English poet who writes in this way, but then Hughes comes from Yorkshire. He doesn't belong to the verbal traditions of Betjeman, or even Auden. Auden can be poignant, but always somehow cerebral:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm
(from Lullaby)

I mean, this is just delightful - you can hear the music, you can feel your feet moving in the courtly dances (that p thing is pronounced 'th'):
With alle þe mete and þe mirþe þat men couþe avyse;
Such glaum ande gle glorious to here,
Dere dyn vpon day, daunsyng on nyȝtes,
With all the meat and the mirth that men could manage
Such glamour and glee, glorious to hear,
Dear din in the days, dancing at night,

 

[oggbashan]

...

Where Roman historians provided overarching analyses of disturbances which might have an effect at the centre of Empire, and Gregory of Tours gives more disparate accounts of chaotic local struggles with a focus on a more direct human experience, newspapers today offer accounts of conflict at what often seems to be a great geographic and emotional distance. Afghanistan is represented as far removed from us in space and because culturally it is so different - although having been in the region, there are lots of ways in which of course Afghan society is similar to any human society.

I wonder if what we are being provided with is a plethora of 'news' which works to anchor us in a particular identity. We are not like those warring Muslims we constantly hear about. The social theorist Nikolas Rose would have it that a search for identity is at the core of our contemporary social being, while more classical Foucaultians will say that it's sexuality rather than identity.

During my lifetime the amount of 'news' that is reported has increased massively, and the geographical spread of it has widened.

During the Second World War people in the UK became aware of detail about countries they might have seen only in an atlas. The censored reports of the campaign in North Africa mentioned tiny locations that previously would have been known to a few nomads. Depressions, ridges, wadis, oases - all became important.

After the war, the UK media continued to carry much more of what previously had been 'foreign' news by diplomatic correspondents. It would become impossible for a UK newspaper to seriously state "Fog in Channel - Continent cut off" because people wanted to know what was happening in France, in Germany and even in the mystical Far East.

There was also far much more of it. I can remember in the late 1940s that gang fights between local youths did not get reported in our local newspaper even if a dozen or so young men had needed hospital treatment after being slashed by cut-throat razors. It wasn't news because it was a common, recurring event. If someone died, eventually there might be a coroner's report.

Now? It would be a 'riot' splashed across the TV news with video from multiple phones even if it happened hundreds of miles from where you live.

What our local newspaper carried was council news, court reports, and club events 'Mrs Jones gave an interesting talk to our WI Branch about her recent holiday in Bognor Regis'...

Yet recorded hospital admissions for knife wounds were many times the number that are reported now. The streets of London were far more violent then than they are now - but if you believe the media, the opposite is true.

The world, if you believe the media, is a far more violent place than it was in the late 1940s. There are wars and massacres in Africa, in the Middle East, terrorism in parts of China...

But there were similar events then. They just weren't newsworthy. No one in Europe or the US was interested in tribal disputes in 'deepest Africa' or post war 'readjustments' in Communist Yugoslavia.

I have personal experience. As a child I was trapped in No Man's Land between government forces and rebels in North Africa. Tanks and artillery were involved and dozens of people were killed. But it never made the news outside the local newspaper in the local language. Why should it? It wasn't a 'war'. It was a dispute between smugglers and the local government about the level of bribes that the government officials should get for allowing the smuggling. Both sides had ex-WW2 artillery and armour recovered from the North African battlefields. A ceasefire was agreed, mainly to get the children out of the way of the fighting, and before the fighting resumed a slight increase in the level of bribes had been agreed. Next year the tanks and artillery might be in action again unless the negotiations were concluded peacefully.

But according to the world's media - it never happened. If it was mentioned, it might have been reported as 'a minor disturbance'.

What is news? Who decides what news you should get?

 

[NaokoSmith]

I can remember in the late 1940s that gang fights between local youths did not get reported in our local newspaper even if a dozen or so young men had needed hospital treatment after being slashed by cut-throat razors. It wasn't news because it was a common, recurring event. If someone died, eventually there might be a coroner's report.

Now? It would be a 'riot' splashed across the TV news with video from multiple phones even if it happened hundreds of miles from where you live.
...
What is news? Who decides what news you should get?

Acksherly, you choose an interesting example. A famous study by Stanley Cohen (who sadly passed away last year) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, explores the way the media chose to depict fights between mods and rockers, and to represent certain young men in a way which defines them as dangerous antisocial elements, fueling calls for increased political and law and order interventions.

(Sorry you were caught up in such a scary spot when you were young. )

 

[NaokoSmith]

1/4 Mimesis Chapt 5: Roland Against Ganelon.

In this next chapter, Auerbach moves to discuss two of the earliest examples of vernacular French poetry. He analyses two heroic poems: the Chanson de Roland – which is an account of the Battle of Roncevaux, and the Chanson d’Alexis, telling the story of St. Alexis. Both were written and re-written, mainly in the Eleventh century, different versions exist of both.

The verses Auerbach quotes from the Chanson de Roland recount what happened when Roland’s stepfather, Ganelon, puts him up for the dangerous vanguard duty as the French army move through Spanish territory. This is an act of treachery which he has agreed with the King of Spain, and it mirrors Roland’s vengeful act in proposing him as an ambassador to go and negotiate with the Spanish King. (Envoys to the Spanish King rarely survived.)

(Unrelated aside: I do really love the first line of this segment:
Tresvait la noit e apert la clere albe ...
Travels the night and clear dawn appears

 

[NaokoSmith]

2/4 Intense emotional action in paratactic form

The action in the verses is emotional, not physical, and it is extraordinarily heavily laden in comparison to the Latin accounts we have been reading, much more like the Bible in intensity. What Auerbach chiefly points to is the paratactic structure of the verses. (Hypotaxis: juxtaposition of functionally similar but unequal constructs, Parataxis: juxtaposition of starkly dissimilar images or fragments, without clear connection.)

Verse 1 – the King asks who should go in the vanguard. Ganelon proposes Roland. The King is furious.

Verse 2 – Roland says something like, “Sire stepfather, whom I must hold dear, you have judged the vanguard is for me. The King will not lose a single ...” and then he lists kinds of horses, in a manner which reminds us how important the horse was then, and that this is a battle poem; he mentions several kinds of war charger.

Verse 3 – Roland says something like, “You c**t, stupid b*****d, do you think I’ll just suck this one up like you did?”

This is a powerful example of parataxis. We know that Roland and Ganelon have a longstanding mutual hatred and that Roland fitted Ganelon up for the mission to the Spanish King, so we will be reading Verse 2 as an ironic pleasantry. Nevertheless, the disparity is extraordinarily vivid; that huge leap from the ironic boasting pleasantry: “Yeah, thanks a lot. Don’t worry, I’ll show you how defending the vanguard is done,” to the vicious rage of the insults Roland hurls immediately afterwards.

Even Verse 1 has this paratactic structure, which brings into sharp relief an emotive realism already being conveyed by the short sharp sentences. The King goes, “Blah blah, who shall we put in the vanguard, then, guys,” then when Ganelon answers, he suddenly snarls: “vos estes vifs diables” "You’re a living devil".

 

[NaokoSmith]

3/4 Chanson d’Alexis

Well, we are a long way from the measured and considered clauses of classical Latin; their many conjunctive words linking up and creating those smooth-flowing sentences with such rational charm: Dum, quibus, quondam.

This becomes more apparent in Auerbach’s comparison of the Chanson d’Alexis with the Latin text which originally told the story, and which is not much older than the vernacular French version. Cool, calm and rational, the Latin version gives good reasons for what the Saint does – which is to leave his young virginal bride on their wedding bed, tootle off to foreign climes, then come back and pretend to be a beggar in his parents’ house, listening to her and them lamenting him. (Yah, dahlinks, there was a good reason he left his virgin bride, honest – read the Latin text and I’m sure you will be totally convinced about it .)

In the vernacular French version, by contrast, there is a terrible emotional struggle. (Hard to believe, isn’t it.)
“e! Deus,” dist il, “si forz pechiez m’appresset!”
“Oh! God,” he said, “how strongly sin presses on me!”

That word ‘appresset’ is just right – the sin presses on him as he would press on his virgin bride, if he gave way. But he calls God to his aid and makes a run for it. (Remember the young friend of Augustine’s in Chapt 3 who relied on his "individualistic, aristocratic, moderate, and rational self-discipline" (69) instead of appealing to the forgiving love of God, and who succumbed to the love of blood sports?)

“[T]he human movement is weak,” Auerbach says of the Latin version. It fails to exploit its paratactic constructions (117). “It was vernacular poetry ... which first imparted relief to the individual pictures, so that their characters took on life and human fullness.” (118)

 

[NaokoSmith]

4/4 Life, art and meaning

Using the term in its proper, original, sense, Auerbach describes the Chanson de Roland as ‘spastic’. Varied repetition is a rhetorical technique used by medieval poets, but here it is fully exploited. There are repeated returns to the same starting point, from which utterly different directions are taken. This is a “halting, spasmodic, juxtapositive, and pro- and retrogressive method in which causal, modal and even temporal relations are obscured.” (105).

In other words, the Chanson de Roland is written in a time-loop, replaying events as if they were the present moment repetitively, and their realism is greatly enhanced. We get a moment which is one layer of emotion, then the same moment with another layer of emotion superimposed, until we have an exceptionally rich vivid mobile account. (E-motion.)

Auerbach comments on the narrow confines of life for the medieval French. This is conveyed in a poetry with “abundant and delicate emotions ... but ... properly problematic situations, let alone tragedy, can hardly arise.”

Chanson de Roland, and Chanson d’Alexis string individual pictures like beads on a thread. The little pictures are so concrete, that they are almost symbols or figures. The paratactic verse structure allows them no horizontal flow of rational meaning from one image to the next, so they stand out like icons, or linked clues, which together have a powerful emotional significance.

 

[Gorza]

Thank you for this old thread.

After René Girard died last week, I was prompted to pull a couple of his books from my shelves to revisit his ideas of mimesis. He has a different take on it from Auerbach, moving from literature to more myth and religion. What I find useful is his anthropological understanding of mimetic desire. I'm bad at plotting stories and character development, but Girard's idea of how we psychologicallly and socialogically struggle both to imitate (mimesis) and overcome a model or mediator is powerful. This model/mediator can be another person, a deceased parent or childhood influence, a crush, a lover, a nemesis, an icon, a hero, a societal expectation, a god, a saviour, a past self, or a future self.

I searched for 'mimesis' and found this wonderful thread, and didn't want to copy ().

 

[NotWise]

Well ... I was having oysters and champagne once with an otherwise lovely guy who suddenly asked for a tissue. He had been sipping his champagne through his 'chewie'!

Mushroom ravioli in a rich white sauce would probably do quite well with a nice prosecco -- and with champagne as well.

Not sure about the chewing gum. Imagine double mint and champagne. Bleh.

 

[ishtat]

1946

Just re-read this thread - lot of good stuff. 1946 was an auspicious year, I believe that apart from Auerbach, Robert Graves 'The White Goddess' was published in the same year. Graves was dealing with his/the poetic muse, whilst very significantly flawed, in parts it is amazingly insightful.

 

[NaokoSmith]

Aww, I came back to this old thread as I have started reading Mimesis again after a long break, and found these comments here.

I hope Gorza is well!

I agree, NotWise. I am quite sure that champagne does not go with chewing gum!

ishtat, it seems that The White Goddess was published in book form in 1948, however it was based on articles Graves wrote for Wales magazine. First Graves wrote it as The Roebuck in the Thicket - in only three weeks! in 1944. He sent it to his publishers in 1946, and it was brought out in 1948.

I wonder if it would be possible to get old copies of Wales magazine and read it that way? I must look on Abe Books. It would be such fun to do that - in Wales!

I have actually got notes on a few more chapters written up, and I shall put them in here for fun. I was thinking about realism recently in regard to Poldark (second series has just kicked off in the UK and Australia). Taking Auerbach's reflections on the representation of realism to Poldark may seem like taking a sledgehammer to Aidan Turner's nuts but I will enjoy it

(Writing about realism and Poldark, I mean )

 

[NaokoSmith]

Ch. 6 – 1/3 – A Touch of Class

In Chapter 6 (The Knight Sets Forth), Auerbach moves to talk about the twelfth century poem, Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain. The writing in this courtly romance uses a more rigid rhyming form, but is nevertheless much lighter and freer than in the chanson de gestes such as Chanson de Roland. There is a graceful fresh charm to a poetry which seems sprung from Breton folklore.

Auerbach focuses on the way that these kinds of poem delineate a certain (upper) class identity.

They are characterised by colourful details: a Knight riding towards a castle is greeted by the lord standing on the bridge with a falcon on his wrist, servants are summoned by striking a copper plate.

Women play an important part, coming to tend to guests in a refined, delicate and attentive fashion.

In these poems, classes other than the knightly upper class appear only as accessories, colourful detail like the copper plate, and often comic or grotesque.

 

[NaokoSmith]

Ch. 6 – 2/3 From the Realpolitik of vassalage to vain ideals of cortesie.

These stories are exclusively about fairy tale adventures, there isn’t a sniff of political reality. When real economic and social conditions are demonstrated, for example there is a vivid depiction of a weavers’ workshop in Yvain, this is as an accidental detail in a fairy tale adventure.

In the Chanson de Roland, the knights have missions with political and/or military purpose. They exist in vassalage, a term often used in the Chanson de Roland, which Auerbach suggests may be taken as representing the feudal ethos. Here in Yvain, the term is replaced by cortesie – courtly culture.

Concepts associated with [courtly culture] – courage, honor, loyalty, mutual respect, refined manners, service to women – continued to cast their spell on the contemporaries of completely changed cultural periods. Social strata of later urban and bourgeois provenance adopted this ideal, although it is not only class-conditioned and exclusive but also completely devoid of reality. As soon as it transcends the sphere of mere conventions of intercourse and has to do with the practical business of the world, it proves inadequate and needs to be supplemented, often in a manner most unpleasantly in contrast to it. But precisely because it is so removed from reality, it could – as an ideal – adapt itself to any and every situation, at least as long as there were ruling classes at all. (137)

We can think of the Victorians with their obsession with the Knights of the Round Table, while under that decorated cover of a mores, an ethos which they spun for their women, they made money in oppressive and exploitative ways out of other nation-states and lower classes.

 

[NaokoSmith]

Ch. 6 - 3/3 Burghers begin to rise (BurgHers, not burgers!)

Auerbach points out how the knightly ideal survives even the poignant critique offered by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, where the real world which Quixote encounters causes complete confusion for him. He cannot emancipate himself from the class he belongs to, which no longer has any function.

Auerbach suggests that the flowery graceful poetry of de Troyes may be the result of his consciousness that the feudal class was no longer the only player in town. De Troyes lived in Champagne , where great commercial fairs were held, and then in Flanders where the burghers were attaining an early economic and political importance.

“efore very long there were tendencies at work which sought to base the solidarity of the group not on descent but on personal factors, on noble behaviour and refined manners.... Courtly culture gives rise to the idea ... that nobility, greatness, and intrinsic values have nothing in common with everyday reality.” (139).

For Auerbach’s purpose, what is significant is the way the literary art of courtly culture did not continue to support the development of realism in writing, so he moves on to other writing which does. I notice the effect of this turning from realism. The emphasis on personal qualities as the indicators of belonging to the courtly feudal upper class seem to echo on, as we insist we live in a meritocracy. We do not acknowledge openly the force of descent, the power of being Somebody’s son or granddaughter, the influential position in which your family can place you, the way in which that can lead to the qualities of greatness which you might personally have, being recognised.

 

[Handley_Page]

Gosh! Even more things that I didn't even know there were names for.
I need a cup of tea and a lie down in a dark room.

I feel the need for a few weeks of therapy.

That's better. Although only HP is allowed to call me Dr. Miss. You may call me Dr. Honey.

As you wish, Dr Miss. [ ]

It strikes me that the 'knightly ideal' died off during the 100 years War; certainly after Agincourt (following Crecy & Poitiers). Realism reared it's head.