Finkelpearl, 'Search for the Ancient Novel', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9410-finkelpearl-search
James Tatum (ed.), The Search for the Ancient Novel.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. 463.
$24.95. ISBN 0-8018-4619-8 (pb).
Reviewed by Ellen Finkelpearl -- Scripps College
It is now almost five years since the memorable International
Conference on the Ancient Novel (otherwise known as ICAN 2) was
held for most of a week in a very hot July in the wilds of New
Hampshire, under the auspices of the hostly James Tatum. This
conference was one of the most exciting that many of us had
attended, not only because it gave us a chance to talk to our
footnotes while crossing deep gorges on rotting logs, but because
it more or less formally marked the emergence of the study of the
Ancient Novel as a legitimate field. This volume represents a
sampling of the papers delivered there, twenty-four essays (now
expanded and with copious footnotes) of the original ninety
papers. The Search for the Ancient Novel is a welcome
memento of that wonderful occasion and many of the essays in it
will be of interest to a wide variety of readers.
It is the nature of the collection and the audience for which
it is designed that, in the long run, may be the most
problematic. The original aim of the conference was to cover
"every aspect of the novelists of ancient Greece and Rome: the
recovery of their texts; their reception, ancient and modern;
their place in literary history and theory" (Tatum, p. xii). This
volume certainly reflects that wide range, but not
comprehensively; one should not consult the book hoping to find a
survey of all the major approaches or introductory essays on the
major novelists. There were obviously constraints from the
outset: the editor had to select from the papers that had been
presented and was limited by the fact that, as he points out in
the preface, many of those papers were already promised
elsewhere, about to be published, parts of larger projects, or
prolegomena. It is nonetheless striking that nine of the essays
(more than a third) are about Nachleben of one sort or
another, and that four out of the five major Greek novelists have
no single essay devoted to them (Longus gets three). Nor is
there any essay on narratology, for example, although there were
a significant number of papers at the conference on this topic.
In other words, in terms of selection, this is truly a
satura, perhaps fittingly. For whom is it designed?
Specialists will find that there is frequently much more plot
summary or even sheer sensuous quotation designed to expose
innocents to the joys of the ancient novel (Winkler) than would
be ideal. Those teaching the novel may find that there are not
enough basic essays on the novels to give them a foothold in the
field, and that most of the essays are not of a sort to hand on
to students either because they are theoretically too complex or
simply not central enough to the discipline. Scholars in other
fields may enjoy some of the essays on the connections between
the ancient novels and later works, but may experience some of
the same problems just mentioned.
On the other hand, one could argue that there is something
here for everyone. You should go to this collection prepared to
be randomly amused, edified, and provoked, to learn fascinating
bits of information--the illiterate General Makriyannis who, at
the age of thirty-two learned to read and write in order to
"record the truth" and went on to compose in 1829 "one of the
glories of Modern Greek prose," the Apomnimonevmata (in
Peter Bien's "The Reemergence of Greek Prose Fiction"); or the
name of Alexander the Great in Arabic: Al-Iskandar (Faustina C.W.
Doufikar-Aerts on the "Legacy of the Alexander Romance in Arab
Writings"); or that Columbus, in his youth was thought to have
sailed a hundred leagues beyond Thule, a land at the ends of the
earth (James Romm, "Novels Beyond Thule"). There is much here,
too, that makes one reflect on the nature of the novel as a
genre, the conditions under which it has flourished throughout
history and in different cultures, as well as the validity of
those very comparisons and classifications.
Since the collection contains twenty-four essays and since
Tatum himself gives admirable summaries of each in his
Introduction, I will concentrate on a few issues and individual
essays, beginning with the last segment: "How Antiquity Read Its
Novels." This section contains three careful, well-documented
pieces which examine the readership of the novels from tangible
evidence rather than via an extrapolation of the readership from
our modern perception of the novels' literary character, or from
the model of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. In
other words, assumptions held by Perry and later reaffirmed by
H_gg and others that the novels were read by women, the newly
literate bourgeoisie, and other less serious and educated readers
is challenged in favor of the view that the novels were read by
the same group of educated elite that read Homer or Thucydides.
Susan Stephens ("Who Read the Ancient Novels?"), pointing out,
first of all, the high cost of papyrus (several days' wages for a
common laborer) and the low level of literacy, goes on to
calculate the comparative number of papyrus fragments of novels
vs. the number of fragments of canonical literature found in
Greco-Roman Egypt. She concludes that the number of fragments of
novels is actually quite scant and that this literature, far from
being popular, may actually have been difficult to procure. Ewen
Bowie ("The Readership of the Greek Novels in the Ancient
World"), addressing the same issues, combats the assertion that
there were no mentions of novels in antiquity, one of the
central props of the view that novels were a genre that nobody
wanted to admit to reading. Where, he asks, would we expect to
find references to reading novels? They are too late to be
mentioned in the ancient works of literary theory. Moreover,
there are several references; Philostratus mentions Chariton, the
Emperor Julian warns upright citizens to avoid reading a type of
literature that must be the novel, and there are others. Bowie
also discusses the sophistication of the literary texture and
allusions in the Greek novel as an indication of a readership
that is not composed of "women, juveniles, and the poor in
spirit" (as Perry had claimed).
Ken Dowden's article in this section, "The Roman Audience of
The Golden Ass," aims to mainstream Apuleius' novel by
suggesting that it was written in Rome and with a Roman audience
in mind, rather than being "marginalized to North Africa."
Dowden begins by stressing the oddity of the work, with its
extravagant style and its status as the only Latin romance and
continues by discussing its physical marginality and the way that
Apuleius has traditionally been associated with Carthage. He
then argues for its Roman quality on the basis of references
within the text (Christians, the Dea Syria, Sextus), its survival
through manuscripts in Rome, and the probable dates of Apuleius'
"Roman Period." He feels that it would be absurd to imagine that
Apuleius was writing merely for an educated provincial audience
without an eye to the people who mattered in this world, the
educated Roman elite. Dowden's arguments are convincing and come
at the problem from many different angles. They situate the
novel much more at the center of Latin literary history than has
been traditional (which is something I do in my own work in a
different way). Composition at Rome does not, however, explain
away the oddities with which Dowden begins the article; the
Golden Ass is still just as strange stylistically and just
as much of an anomaly. Is it not possible that some of the
strangeness comes from the outsider status of Apuleius as North
African trying to assimilate himself--or not--to Roman society?
His marginality as Greco-Roman-African is now appealing and I,
for one, would like to see it supported (though only in
responsible ways) rather than minimalized, as there are days when
I think the only reason I still have a job is that I can claim
that I work on an author from North Africa who concludes his work
with an epiphany by an African female divinity. The values of
the center and the margins have been realigned in the last five
years, and now that we have put Apuleius sufficiently at the
center, we may want him back at the edge.
These three essays are meticulous in their methodology and
scrupulous in their efforts to correct the misconceptions of the
past and also form the most cohesive section of the collection.
Nonetheless, they, too, have their ideology. In 1989, it seemed
expedient to prove that the novels were not "merely" a popular
form of literature akin to Harlequin Romances, that they were
serious works read by MEN not women; Romans, not North Africans;
the elite, not middle class tradespeople. In the spirit of ICAN
2, the establishment of a readership no different from that of
Homer or Thucydides brings the novels into the canonical fold
(see Helen Elsom's cynical comments in Pornography and
Representation, in an essay that was part of ICAN 2 in an
earlier form). In 1989, Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek
Novels was just coming out, before which time it was very
difficult even to locate a decent translation of some of these
novels. In the last five years, however, interest in and respect
for the novel has grown dramatically, while a not unrelated
interest in women's studies and social history has also, rather
slowly, entered our field. While I find these three articles
impressive and persuasive, I also wonder how certain one can
possibly be when dealing with questions of literacy and
readership at this remove. How many people own copies of
Shakespeare and the Bible, but read their borrowed copy of
Stephen King? How many people who couldn't read were read to, if
even the Elder Pliny had slaves read to him? While we may reject
the claim of female readership that has been made on the basis of
the novels' allegedly poor quality, we may still wonder at the
fact that the romances have women--virtuous and triumphant ones,
unlike Greek tragedy--so much at their centers. Elsom (above)
and Egger ("Women and Marriage in the Greek Novels" in this
volume) both, in different ways, read the treatment of females by
the novelists as admonitory, affirming of male power and the
institution of marriage as a way of limiting women's legal
possibilities. Their analyses require a female readership. This
all seems to me very much still an open question. (I should
mention that this same stance, the assumption of high quality in
the novel, yields excellent results for Stefan Merkle's article
on Dictys, "Telling the True Story of the Trojan War."
Essentially, by believing in Dictys, Merkle shows that the
account is sophisticated literarily and interestingly anti-epic.)
Another major theme of the collection is the nature or
definition of the novel, the question of whether we can call
these "novels" at all or include them under the same generic
heading. The large percentage of essays on Nachleben
seems designed partly to pursue this question of whether we can
legitimately claim the novel for antiquity. If the earliest
"modern" novelists looked back at Heliodorus, Chariton, Apuleius,
and the like, does this not support an unbroken generic line
connecting these works? In addition, some of these essays
enlighten our investigation of the nature of the novel by useful
comparison. Peter Bien, for example, in an essay that does not
really address the ancient novel at all, shows that the
conditions Ian Watt proposes as favorable to the rise of the
novel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries (increased
literacy, a growing capitalist middle class, etc.) just do not
work in the case of Greece--hence perhaps further cause to doubt
that the model of Europe in the Eighteenth century is an
appropriate one for antiquity, either. Margaret Doody, in
"Heliodorus Rewritten: Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and
Frances Burney's Wanderer," does not dwell on the question
of whether there was any direct influence by the ancient novel,
but discusses them side-by-side in ways that illuminate
Heliodorus. One of the high points of the essay is the discussion
of the oracle about Chariclea and why "sable brows"? Doody
examines the ending in terms of a "becoming-black", a vindication
of her Ethiopian heritage. At the same time, the comparison with
the ending of Frances Burney's novel, which defies conventions of
closure, reveals the artificiality of novel/romance endings. The
other piece in this group that I found particularly memorable was
David Rollo's "From Apuleius' Psyche to Chretien's Erec et
Enide," in which parallel representations of gender are
explored. While it is frequently noted that Apuleius is
interested in gender roles, Rollo takes the symbolic reading of
Cupid and Psyche to new extremes. Not only are the arrows
phallic, but "the appropriation of metaphorized masculine power
reaches its apogee at the moment at which Psyche's lamp, the
illuminating impulse for her liberating gestures, achieves its
ejaculatory overflowing." It is interesting to observe the
different ways that Classicists and non-Classicists read a text
within the essays in this volume.
While some of these essays on other sorts of novels indirectly
address the issue of "What is a novel?", Daniel Selden challenges
the whole notion of a genre for the novel (in "Genre of Genre").
As he says, "The question is not simply whether there is a
coherent corpus of prose fiction from antiquity, but why and
under what historical conditions it becomes both possible and
desirable to conceive of it as such." He sees the main
ingredient of what we think of as a "novel" as convincing
characterization, the portrayal of the individual. He rejects
this for the ancient novel, and offers instead a model whereby
ideology is indeterminate in the face of two mutually resistant
models of behavior, a double logic where two systems of morality
are simultaneously upheld. These texts, by maintaining their
double logic, defy the very possibility of genre. The essay is a
healthy ingredient in a volume that assumes (as do most of us) a
genre for this set of texts that may have none. On the other
hand, he comes up with his own way of defining these works, one
that may fit better with the reason that many of us approached
them in the first place: their irreverence and refusal to conform
to classical norms. On the whole, though, while the question of
the nature of the novel and whether it is legitimately ancient
was one of the central issues raised in Tatum's Introduction, we
are left more with a set of interesting pieces to the puzzle than
with any solution--necessarily, of course, since this is a series
of essays by different authors.
Finally, which essays will I read again? "Trimalchio's
Underworld" in which John Bodel examines the sepulchral nature of
the visual imagery in the Cena strikes me as a classic.
Winkler's essay, "The Invention of Romance," a characteristically
iconoclastic unfootnoted critique of the romantic basis of the
institution of marriage (today and in the ancient romances) in
contrast to the archaic and classical perception of eros
as impermanent, is a welcome inclusion although it is reprinted
from Laetaberis 1982. It was imperative to include
something by Winkler in this volume as his absence was a major
presence at the conference, and this essay provides a fitting
beginning to the book by asking whether this dreamlike unreality
of the two ideal lovers that we so often criticize in the ancient
novels isn't actually the basis of modern society. Froma
Zeitlin's "Gardens of Desire in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe:
Nature, Art, and Imitation" does real justice to the complex
interaction of the natural and the artificial, word and image,
and the erotics of physical and literary desire in ways that some
other essays in the volume that dwell on the issue of realism in
the novel fail to achieve. (That this is an abbreviated and
revised version of her essay in Before Sexuality may
actually seem an advantage to those who admire Froma Zeitlin but
don't have much time.) The essays by Romm and Konstan give some
sense of the books that both of them subsequently published, and
for someone who hasn't read them are a major incentive to do so.
This book, in short, is in some ways--but for obvious
reasons--a curious melange, but also has some real high points,
and I am sure that we can all be glad that some of the essays
that we heard or failed to hear five years ago July are finally
available.