Mimesis Read Online Free PDF

own ideas about Dante: that the Divine Comedy synthesized the timeless and the historical because of Dante’s genius, and that Dante’s use of the demotic (or vulgar) Italian language in a sense enabled the creation of what we have come to call literature. I will not try to summarize Auerbach’s analysis of a passage from the tenth canto of the Inferno in which Dante thepilgrim and his guide Virgil are accosted by two Florentines who knew Dante from Florence but who are now committed to the Inferno, and whose internecine squabbles between the city’s Guelph and Ghibelline factions carry on into the afterworld: readers should experience this dazzling analysis for themselves. Auerbach notes that the seventy lines he focuses on are incredibly packed, containing no less than four separate scenes, as well as more varied material than any other so far discussed in Mimesis . What particularly compels the reader is that Dante’s Italian in the poem is, as Auerbach puts it assertively, “a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle,” used by the poet “to discover the world anew” (182-183).
    There is, first of all, its combination of “sublimity and triviality which, measured by the standards of antiquity, is monstrous.” Then there is its immense forcefulness, its “repulsive and often disgusting greatness,” according to Goethe, whereby the poet uses the vernacular to represent “the antagonism of the two traditions … that of antiquity … and that of the Christian era. … Dante’s powerful temperament, which is conscious of both because its aspiration toward the tradition of antiquity does not imply for it the possibility of abandoning the other; nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style” (184-185). Then there is its abundance of material and styles, all of it treated in what Dante claimed was “the common everyday language of the people,” (186) which allowed a realism that brought forth descriptions of the classical, the biblical, and everyday worlds “not displayed within a single action, but instead an abundance of actions in the most diverse tonalities [which] follow one another in quick succession” (189). And finally, Dante manages to achieve through his style a combination of past, present, and future, since the two Florentine men who rise out of their flaming tombs to accost Dante so peremptorily are in fact dead but seem to live on somehow in what Hegel called a “changeless existence” remarkably devoid neither of history nor of memory and facticity. Having been judged for their sins and placed inside their burning encasement inside the kingdom of the damned, Farinata and Cavalcante are seen by us at a moment when we have “left the earthly sphere behind; we are in an eternal place, and yet we encounter concrete appearance and concrete occurrence there. This differs from what appears and occurs on earth, yet it is evidently connected with it in a necessary and strictly determined relation” (191).
    The result is “a tremendous concentration [in Dante’s style and vision]. We behold an intensified image of the essence of their being,fixed for all eternity in gigantic dimensions, behold it in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives on earth” (192). What fascinates Auerbach is the mounting tension within Dante’s poem, as eternally condemned sinners press their cases and aspire to the realization of their ambitions even as they remain fixed in the place assigned to them by Divine Judgment. Hence, the sense of futility and sublimity exuded simultaneously by the Inferno’s “earthly historicity,” which is always pointed in the end toward the white rose of the “Paradiso.” So then “the beyond is eternal and yet phenomenal. … [I]t is changeless and of all time and yet full of history” (197). For Auerbach, therefore, Dante’s great poem exemplifies the figural approach, the past realized in the present,