Representing Reality: Erich Auerbach’s Concept of Memory

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of Erich Auerbach’s concept of memory as a method of representing reality – as “recovery of lost realities in remembrance” – through Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse and Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Times (1913–1927). In the last chapter of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Auerbach demonstrates that use of a first-person narrator, an important characteristic of the modern novel, means at the same time a preoccupation with the literary depiction of memory. As a form of consciousness depiction, memory is “the memorizing consciousness,” comparable to the metaphor of a flash (Benjamin, 1977, p. 253) that enlightens the sub-conscious. Defining Proust’s literary depiction, called by Auerbach a “recovery of lost realities,” and by his friend Walter Benjamin “visualization” of memory, one recognizes an interesting analogy between Benjamin and Auerbach’s concepts of memory.