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Abstract In this paper, the first chapter of Auerbach's Mimesis is reassessed in light of new developments in the study of Homer. Auerbach's emphasis on foregrounded detail is shown to be an apt formulation of the aesthetics of oral traditions which need concrete visualization to facilitate memorization and recall. The Homerically visual quality of Auerbach's account is taken in the dynamic sense of act of perceiving, as a moment in the transmission of the poetic tradition, the reality perceived and reenacted being the previous perception, that is, the previous performance of the poem. In this way, a different understanding of mimesis is reached, one more in line with the archaeology of the term in its original language: the relation between an action and its model, rather than between a sign and its referent.
The reputation of the first chapter of Auerbach's Mimesis among classicists has risen and fallen with the tides of fashion in Homeric studies. The notion of Homeric privileging of the part over the whole, argued for in the essay on Odysseus's scar, gained wide currency at a time when scholars were concerned with parataxis and paratactic composition as the hallmark of Homer's oral style. But the influence of Auerbach's essay has diminished in recent years with the renewed interest in "literary" interpretations: We are now prepared to see more silence, more elliptic moments, and more "unplumbed depth" in Homeric poetry than Auerbach granted with his insistence on Homeric style as a "uniformly illuminated foreground." '
Without questioning these developments, I propose to consider Auerbach's chapter from the perspective of Homeric studies and in light of recent advances in the study of oral poetry. Fifty years after the first publication of Mimesis, Auerbach's interpretative shortcomings are clear; but his account of Homeric style still contains a powerful core that, if reformulated, may continue to say something important about the flow and quality of Homeric poetry.
The central element in Auerbach's discussion is his insistence on perception and illumination. Homeric poetry, according to Auerbach (1953: 6), is driven by a constant need for an "externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses." Moreover, Homeric narrative style "knows no background"; it fills the reader's present entirely: "Like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships...