Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. In the book he explores how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality and by doing so has taught generations how to read Western literature. I was moved by his searching and yet empathetic discussion of very diverse texts, his daring comparisons, which generated new questions and insights.
Tell me about your first choice, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach.
For many of us Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. In the book he explores how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality and by doing so he has taught generations how to read Western literature.
I mention the book here because it has had a broad impact on my work in general. In 1946, when I was discharged from the US army, and after three years returned as an undergraduate to the University of California at Berkeley, a copy of Auerbach’s just published German text came into my hands. I was moved by his searching and yet empathetic discussion of very diverse texts, his daring comparisons, which generated new questions and insights – for example, his confrontation of Petronius and Tacitus with the account of Peter’s denial in the Gospel according to Mark – and also by the unobtrusive but powerful manner in which the work was shaped by Auerbach’s personal situation, writing as a refugee in Turkey during the Second World War.
Together with others at the time, I welcomed his book as a confirmation of high culture emerging from years of barbarism. I disregarded signs of subjectivity in Auerbach’s discussion, and if I noticed the inconsistencies and even contradictions in his approach that have since been pointed out, they did not bother me. Above all, I was impressed by his ability to understand the varieties of realism in works of the imagination, while distinguishing the intent and execution of depictions of reality from their conventional or ideological accompaniment or context.
From there it was only a further step for me to learn to pay attention to the documentary potential – its strengths and limitations – of fictional works of all kinds, as I do in The Cognitive Challenge of War, in which I use works of literature as well as works of art to trace changes in attitude that directly effected change in military institutions and doctrine.
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Peter Paret is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study, with a special interest in the intellectual and political challenges of war, and the relationship of art and literature to ideology and politics. His latest book, The Cognitive Challenge of War, examines the problem of how societies respond to innovation in the military practices of an opponent or potential opponent.
