Homer’s Vividness: An Enactive Approach

Abstract

The vividness of Homeric poetry has been admired since antiquity, but has been difficult to pin down with precision. It is usually thought to come about because readers are prompted to visualize the storyworld in the form of mental images seen with the mind's eye. But this cannot be right, both because there are serious scientific problems with the concept of ‘pictures in the head’ and because Homer does not offer many detailed descriptions, which are a prerequisite for eliciting detailed mental images. This article presents a different, and cognitively more realistic, take on the imageability of Homeric epic, which is based on recent reader-response studies inspired by the enactivist theory of cognition. These studies make a compelling case for readerly visualization as an embodied response, which does not depend on bright or detailed mental images. An analysis of the chariot race in Iliad 23 identifies specific features of what may be called an ‘enactive style’, notably the description of simple bodily actions. The final part of the article demonstrates that an enactivist take on Homer's vividness is not incompatible with the ancient concept of enargeia, the chief rhetorical term with which Homer's vividness is characterized in ancient criticism.

Nec Cogitare Sed Facere: The Paradox of Fiction at the Tribunal of Ancient Poetics

“…In general, enargeia and its cognates and related expressions were used to characterize the powerful effect that narratives had on audiences, that is, the phenomenon which I have so far referred to in terms of “immersion”. While traditional classical scholarship offers a pictorialist account of enargeia and describes the effect of narratives on audiences in visual terms, based on the idea that a detailed description ( ekphrasis ) would allow audiences to inspect clear and accurate images with “the mind's eye” (e.g., Zanker, 1981; Webb, 2009), new trends in cognitive literary theory and cognitive classics provide us with a different account by drawing on the enactivist theory of cognition and imagination (e.g., Grethlein and Huitink, 2017; Huitink, 2019). 13 Pictorialism, whose main exponent is Stephen Kosslyn, is one of the main representationalist theories of perception and imagination:14 based on the idea that vision is paradigmatic of sense perception and that it involves quasi‐photographic mechanisms, it talks of mental representations as iconic analogues that “convey meaning via resemblance to an object” (Kosslyn, 1994, p. 5) 15.…”

“…For a discussion of the narrative aspects and linguistic cues that elicit vivid experiences of the narrative, cf. Troscianko (2010Troscianko ( , 2013Troscianko ( , 2014aTroscianko ( , 2014b, Bolens (2012), Kuzmi cová (2012a, 2012b, Caracciolo (2013Caracciolo ( , 2014 and Grethlein and Huitink (2017). perception and imagination.…”

Historical fiction and archaeological interpretation

“…Of course, none of these concepts could be understood solely in terms of any individual's life, but fictive techniques encourage engagement with the human-scale actions that aggregate across time and space into large-scale processes (Hodder 1999: 143). Using anthropocentric narrative, relating specific objects or outcomes to human actions, also provides structure and meaning to descriptive detail (Grethlein & Huitink 2017).…”

AN EMBODIED READING OF EPIPHANIES IN AELIUS ARISTIDES’SACRED TALES

“… 6. My article fits into the recent trend of using cognitive studies to analyse literature. See Herman (2012) and Kukkonen and Caracciolo (2014) concerning modern literature; Butler and Purves (2013) concerning ancient Greek and Latin literature; Grethlein and Huitink (forthcoming) for an enactive study of Homer's Iliad ; Harkins (2012a) and (2012b) for studies of Jewish and early Christian texts through the lenses of embodiment. …”

“… 53. See Kuzmičová (2012), 25, for presence as the impression ‘of having physically entered a tangible environment’. See also Grethlein and Huitink (forthcoming) for further discussion of enactive accounts, with additional bibliographical references. …”