1 The Success and Critique of Narratology in Classics

Classics is a demanding discipline. Before being able to read ancient texts, students have to learn Greek and Latin.Footnote ¹ They have to memorize various declensions and conjugations, drill into their heads numerous irregular verb forms, acquaint themselves with a third voice in addition to the active and passive voices, master the uses of tense and mode in conditional clauses and so on. Once they have achieved this, Classicists face a long history of scholarship; when trying to come up with something new about Homer, Tacitus and Augustine, they have to plough through shelves of books and articles discussing these authors. Little surprise, then, that not all scholars in Classics delve enthusiastically into theory – the days when traditional philologists were in irreconcilable opposition to the disciples of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida are over, and yet there is still a considerable faction that avowedly uses their time for reading ancient texts rather than books on postcolonialism, new materialism and cognitivism.

There is, however, one approach that even conservative Classicists have gratefully embraced, and this is narratology, more specifically structuralist narratology.Footnote ² Key to the dissemination of narratological analysis in Classics was Irene de Jong’s dissertation on Narrators and Focalizers in the Iliad (1987), but other pioneering works ought not to be forgotten. While de Jong utilized Mieke Bal’s system, John Winkler’s Auctor & Actor. A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Reference Bal1985) was inspired chiefly by Barthes, and Massimo Fusillo marshalled Gérard Genette’s taxonomy for his examinations of Apollonius’ Argonautica (Reference Bal1985) and the ancient novel (1989).Footnote ³ In the introductory chapter to a volume geared to bringing together theory and philology in Classics, Stephen Harrison parades narratology as an approach that illustrates the potential of this endeavour: ‘The application of narratology to classical texts has been a success story.’Footnote ⁴

One of the reasons for the popularity of narratology is ‘its technical and descriptive nature’, which ‘is non-threatening to conventional models of interpretation’.Footnote ⁵ The classification of a narrator as extradiegetic or intradiegetic, heterodiegetic or homodiegetic is, after all, not that different from identifying the forms ᾗ or missum iri. However, what is appraised in Oxford is not necessarily le dernier cri at Cambridge. The formalism that renders Bal’s and Genette’s taxonomies so attractive to Harrison and many other scholars is a major weakness in the eyes of others. In his review of de Jong’s Narratology & Classics. A Guide to Narratology, Simon Goldhill contends that the kind of analysis presented in this book ‘is bound to seem like no more than a rather trivial formal observation’.Footnote ⁶ If narratology wants to cut some ice, it needs to confront semantic issues in the manner of Barthes’ S/Z. From a slightly different angle, but also taking issue with narratology’s formalism, Tim Whitmarsh notes: ‘Like many readers, I suspect, I have long found the antiseptic formulae of narratologists incompatible with my experience of reading.’Footnote ⁷ The criticism of narratology is not confined to Cambridge – the US scholar William Thalmann exacerbates a feeling of discomfort shared by others when he chastises ‘an often rebarbative jargon … that at best helps systematize features common to a great many narratives and at worst mystifies simple concepts’.Footnote ⁸

And, in fact, narratology is best seen as a tool, not an end in itself. Narratological analysis becomes fruitful when it is used for interpretation.Footnote ⁹ De Jong’s analysis of focalization in the Iliad, for example, has significantly improved our understanding of Homer’s way of presenting his story.Footnote ¹⁰ Generations of scholars had called Homer’s style ‘objective’. However, de Jong showed that in Homer’s narrator text, adjectives can be focalized by characters. When, for example, Homer reports that Priam ‘kissed the hands/ that were dangerous and man-slaughtering and had killed so many of his sons’ (24.478−9), the hands, de Jong suggests, are described through the lens of Priam. Far from objective, the account is emotionally charged through the perspective of the character. Now, de Jong was not the first to observe the emotional quality of such passages – Jasper Griffin had followed up comments on pathos in ancient scholiaFootnote ¹¹ – and yet her narratological examination put such interpretations on a new footing. De Jong’s argument was corroborated not least by the observation that many of the adjectives deployed in embedded focalization were elsewhere confined to character speech.Footnote ¹²

Another example illustrates that, whereas most narratological models were developed for fiction, our understanding of factual texts can also benefit from their deployment. In a pioneering chapter, Simon Hornblower considered anachronies in Thucydides.Footnote ¹³ The History of the Peloponnesian War is chronological and follows the course of the war from season to season, but some events are displaced in the narrative. As Hornblower shows, some of these displacements help downplay Athens’ aggressiveness before the outbreak of the war. The narratological analysis thus backs up Ernst Badian’s thesis about Thucydides’ minimization of Athens’ share in the escalation leading to the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ¹⁴ In itself, the examination of anachronies is worth little, but as part of an interpretation it can become powerful – in our example it sheds light on the bias of a putatively objective historian.Footnote ¹⁵

It would be easy but also boring to fill pages with references to further studies that have deepened our understanding of a long list of Greek and Roman authors with the help of narratology. At the same time, it needs to be admitted that narratological analysis is less exciting when it is done for its own sake; the purposeless parsing of narrators and mere tracing of anachronies quickly become tedious. A case in point is the volumes of the Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, a large-scale project spearheaded by de Jong.Footnote ¹⁶ The first volume examines narrators and narratees, the second time, the third space, the fourth characterization, each pursuing Greek literature chronologically from Homer to the Imperial era. By no means are the volumes without value – each of them contains chapters with intriguing observations, and yet, on the whole, the enterprise falls flat. None of the narratological categories yields an interesting trajectory for the history of Greek literature. We do not gain a better understanding of it by analysing the narratorial position or temporal orchestration diachronically. Interesting points often emerge when the different narratological categories are viewed in conjunction. Most importantly, the chapters that are rewarding to read illustrate that narratology ought to have an ancillary status – they illuminate Greek texts by using the narratological analysis for interpretation and combining it with other approaches.

2 The Priz/ce of the Modern Lens of Narratology

There is another issue with narratology in Classics that has not received much attention but is, I think, equally serious as the formalism decried by Goldhill and Whitmarsh and ultimately more challenging. Narratologists present their taxonomies as transhistorical tools, and, indeed, any narrative can be dissected with regard to voice, time and perspective (just as any flower can be classified as a daisy or a non-daisy). However, the categories of narratology were coined in readings chiefly of modern realist novels.Footnote ¹⁷ Genette, to name arguably the most influential proponent in the field, developed his taxonomy in a reading of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. More recent approaches in narrative theory, including cognitive narratology, also tend to privilege modern texts as their basis. This does not undermine their applicability to premodern texts – such a claim would be hermeneutically naive – and yet it raises the question of how far it gets us.

At first sight, there seems to be no doubt about the fruitfulness of the endeavour, as ‘classical texts themselves display the kind of narrative complexities which narratology can help to unravel and categorize’.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, as de Jong’s investigation has shown, there are complex instances of focalization in Homer, just as the condensation of the action in both Iliad and Odyssey is premised on a complex temporal orchestration that can be captured through Genette’s categories of order, duration and frequency. One of the reasons for the fruitfulness of analysing ancient texts with the help of narratological categories forged for modern novels is the genealogical links between ancient and modern literature. It is not always acknowledged in literary histories, but the ancient tradition had a significant impact on the rise of the modern novel. To mention just one strand, the ancient Greek novels were translated into the vernacular languages in the sixteenth century, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe and Heliodorus’ Ethiopica especially served as models for Baroque novels, which influenced the novels emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁹ In an important monograph, Nick Lowe traced the emergence of ‘the classical plot and the invention of Western narrative’ in ancient literature.Footnote ²⁰

There are also strategic reasons for the infatuation of Classicists with narratology – the application of categories forged for the analysis of modern texts allows Classicists to prove the complexity and, closely linked to it, quality of their material.Footnote ²¹ The inclination of classical narratologists to demonstrate through their investigations that their authors compare to the likes of Henry James is tangible in the rhetoric of ‘Homer first’ pervading the works of de Jong. In Narrators and Focalizers in the Iliad, she triumphantly declares: ‘Despite the uniformity bestowed upon the Iliadic text by the unity of metre … the formulas and the typical scenes, the narrative has more variety of presentation than many a modern novel.’Footnote ²² Besides the notorious NF1, the primary narrator-focalizer, the Iliad also features tertiary focalizers and hypothetical speakers! The same argumentative strategy can be found in all volumes of Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative. In the first volume, Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, de Jong proudly announces: ‘The first texts we have, the Homeric epics, display much of the narratorial repertoire and handle it in a virtuoso manner.’Footnote ²³ In the second volume, which focuses upon time in narrative, we read: ‘This chapter has shown that just about the whole arsenal of time-related narrative devices which modern narratology has identified is to be found in Homer.’Footnote ²⁴

The appeal of this rhetoric of ‘Homer first’ to Classicists is admittedly hard to resist. It shows that the texts we work on are far from primitive – they even rival the experiments of William Faulkner and other modern authors. In proving the sophistication of ancient authors, we can also showcase our own cleverness. Our colleagues in the English and Comparative Literature departments may ignore our texts and consider us brutish philologists, but with the help of their tools we can finally get the better of them. To a certain extent, this strategy works, because many of the features of modern novels can be found in ancient genres. At the same time, it comes at a considerable price. While permitting us to identify putatively modern features in ancient narratives, narratology has been less helpful for elucidating what renders them specific and different from modern literature. The taxonomies derived from the study of modern realist novels have let us see in ancient narratives primarily elements that these narratives share with modern texts. The victory march of narratology in Classics has thus had the unfortunate side effect of detracting from what distinguishes ancient from modern literature. The focus on continuity at the expense of alterity has seriously impaired our understanding of ancient narrative.

The problem we encounter here is not limited to structuralist narratology and has deep hermeneutic roots. Structuralist narratology is not alone in having been developed with an eye to modern novels; many other approaches in the broader field of narrative studies and literary theories in general were forged or at least tested in readings of novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our reading expectations in general are shaped not exclusively but chiefly by modern texts. More profoundly, we always understand texts from other periods and cultures in the horizon of our present. Hans-Georg Gadamer envisaged this understanding as the melting of the horizons of author and reader, but this view has been criticized as overly optimistic.Footnote ²⁵ Even if we do not subscribe to a radical scepticism that challenges the possibility of understanding what others mean in general, the gaps separating cultures ought not to be underestimated. The coining of narratological categories in readings of modern novels epitomizes our general tendency to view texts through the lens of our own time.

3 Alternative Approaches

If we wish to highlight the gap between ancient and modern texts and the understanding of narrative in antiquity and today, we can take different routes. First, Classicists have drawn on narratology mostly to show the complexity of ancient texts and to emphasize their similarity to modern literature, but narratological analysis can also be harnessed to spotlight differences. This is the goal of the diachronic narrative called for by Monika Fludernik in an influential article from 2003.Footnote ²⁶ The examination of the history of narrative forms and functions, she argues, opens up a huge new field for narratological investigations. The Studies of Ancient Greek Narrative, however, reveal that a diachronic survey of major narratological categories can be unrewarding. Even if done differently, an examination of anachronies or pacing from Homer to Handke is unlikely to enhance our understanding of where ancient narratives deviate from modern ones.

Fludernik’s case study illustrates that diachronic narratology has to proceed more subtly and circumspectly. She explores scene shifts from Middle English literature to modern texts in relation to larger narrative patterns and to their functions. In the oral delivery of episodic narrative, scene shifts had an important structuring function. They lost this function with the introduction of chapters in texts written to be read, notably the novel, and were refunctionalized as meta-narrative comments. The case of scene shifts reveals that it may be heuristically fruitful to focus on more specific narrative elements instead of the major narratological categories. Perhaps even more importantly, it shows that it will not do to survey the transformation of narrative forms – the forms need to be examined in conjunction with their functions. Such an examination may also lead to extratextual aspects, such as medium in Fludernik’s discussion, which help to explain differences.

An article by de Jong throws into relief how important the consideration of the function of narrative forms is for diachronic narratology in delivering interesting results. In her contribution to Douglas Cairns and Ruth Scodel’s Defining Greek Narrative, de Jong investigates the motif of the anonymous traveller in European literature.Footnote ²⁷ After introducing the motif, she starts from an example in Proust, gives further instances from Flaubert and Stendhal, makes a huge jump to Procopius and works her way back through ancient literature until she arrives at Homer. She then raises the question of whether the anonymous traveller is a universal or a distinctly Greek device with an impressive reception history. Instead of doing the work necessary to prove or disprove the existence of a literary tradition, however, she hijacks a concept of Richard Dawkins and declares the anonymous traveller ‘an originally Greek meme that has proved to be an extremely fit survivalist’.Footnote ²⁸ But even more disappointing than this conclusion is the diachronic survey itself. Where Fludernik considers the form in light of the functions it plays in different genres and cultures, de Jong merely lists examples and perfunctorily surveys the narrative contexts – all that we can note after her inquiry is that the anonymous traveller can be traced back to antiquity. Done in this way, diachronic narratology will certainly not help elucidate the distinctiveness of ancient narrative.

By no means do I wish to belittle the value of de Jong’s article. The identification of the motif of the anonymous traveller in ancient literature is full of merit, and the juxtaposition of its occurrences in ancient and modern texts is interesting even without further analysis. This said, the article shows what is required if diachronic narratology is to shed light on the specific character of ancient literature. If we only trace forms back to antiquity without carefully scrutinizing their use and exploring the contexts of production, circulation and reception, all we learn is that ancient authors already deployed them. Another major challenge consists in identifying narrative forms that are specific enough to be analysed across a wide range of texts and nonetheless sufficiently significant to grant insights into different conceptions of narrative. Diachronic narratology can grasp only such differences as are related to narrative forms surfacing across epochs and cultures.

Pertinent to my discussion is a distinction that has recently been proposed. While many scholars use ‘diachronic narratology’ and ‘historical narratology’ indistinctly, some differentiate between them: in a programmatic article that advances the term ‘chrononarratology’ as an umbrella term for approaches that pay attention to the historical dimension of narrative, Dorothee Birke, Eva von Contzen and Karin Kukkonen envisage the diachronic approach as including ‘texts from different periods’ and aiming to ‘trace developments across these periods, while the historical approach foregrounds a corpus of texts from a single historical period’.Footnote ²⁹ In a survey of recent contributions, they note that diachronic studies tend to emphasize continuity, whereas the investigations of historical narratology rather come down on the side of alterity.Footnote ³⁰ There are, however, also exceptions, as the authors duly note – the article of Fludernik just mentioned (n. 26), for example, is sensitive to the differences between historical epochs. De Jong’s influential work, on the other hand, illustrates the inclination of diachronic analysis to stress continuity.

The distinction made by Birke, von Contzen and Kukkonen leads us to another way of approaching the distinct quality of ancient narrative, namely, turning directly to ancient texts. The careful scrutiny of ancient narrative is, of course, essential to all the approaches outlined here, but whereas diachronic narratology is premised on identifying narrative forms and tracing them across epochs, other scholars prefer simply to take a close look at ancient texts themselves. Ancient criticism in particular gives us glimpses of how ancient readers viewed their texts. While Aristotle’s Poetics, Pseudo-Longinus’ de sublimitate and Horace’s Ars poetica have occupied scholars for a long time, recent work has done much to chart the scholia, using them to give us an idea of what questions were asked and which answers were given in the numerous critical treatises that have not been preserved.Footnote ³¹ For attempts to identify the ancient logic of narrative, the scholia are a priceless treasure.

Here too, however, we can see the tendency to view the ancient material either explicitly as prefiguring modern standards or at least through the lens of modern categories. Even René Nünlist, who considers a vast amount of ancient material and takes care not to present it as narratology avant la lettre, draws partly on major narratological categories such as plot, time and focalization to structure his foray into the field of Greek scholia.Footnote ³² The alternative of taking Greek terms as organizing principles would only conceal this tendency and is also rendered impractical by the lack of a coherent critical terminology in antiquity.

Stefan Feddern’s Elemente der antiken Erzähltheorie illustrates how easy it is to slide from the inevitable process of translation to a view of ancient criticism as a prefiguration of modern narratology: ‘In my investigation of ancient narrative theory, modern narrative theory serves chiefly to systematize the discursive field, in which – this is a second step – individual ancient positions can be distinguished from one another.’Footnote ³³ Modern narratology seems to be the innocent grid through which ancient narrative theory is assessed; that this, however, implies reducing ancient views to anticipating modern categories is evident in the preceding sentence: ‘In fact, the ancient narrative theory presented here consists of the most important reflections on narration, many of which, mutatis mutandis, correspond to those categories that modern narratologists such as Genette have coined and/or compiled (the adherence to them in this monograph will not be slavish).’Footnote ³⁴ Genette’s use of Greek terms makes it easy to use them for charting ancient theoretical reflections but should not detract from the fact that these are categories forged in the analysis of Proust. Looking only at reflections that correspond to modern categories risks losing sight of aspects that are different from what we encounter in modern literature.

I also wonder what justifies Feddern’s notion of ‘the ancient narrative theory’. One of the strengths of his study is its breadth – Feddern takes into account far more texts than other studies of ancient criticism, drawing attention to some that are relevant but rarely discussed. But ‘the ancient narrative theory’ suggests a unitary entity and veils the very different contexts from which the references stem. I do not take issue with the theory of narrative. There are several terms in Greek and Latin that we translate as ‘narrative’, and ancient authors often focus on specific forms of narrative – for example, song, tragedy or speeches – but if we take into account their focus, it is legitimate to explore their discussions as reflections on what we call narrative. It is the theory of narrative that is problematic, as it downplays the disagreements and the variety of genres in which narrative is addressed.

Another recent book, Genevieve Liveley’s Narratology, circumvents this danger of claiming a single ancient theory by discussing author by author (at the price of a much smaller breadth than Feddern’s study) but also reveals the pull to view ancient critics as the predecessors of modern narratologists.Footnote ³⁵ Liveley advances an account of the history of narrative theory from Plato to Post-classicism. Her study is illuminating in many regards, not least because it lets us see the presence and transformation of ancient ideas in modern theory. At the same time, the teleological structure makes Liveley’s history less apt at spotlighting the peculiarities of ancient views on narrative. Teleologies inevitably direct us to points that will turn out to be significant for the outcome, while neglecting others that were significant in their own time without, however, leaving noteworthy traces.

The danger of falling back onto modern categories is equally present in studies that concentrate on ancient narrative instead of criticism. Scodel’s own contribution to Defining Greek Narrative is a case in point.Footnote ³⁶ The chapter examines shifts of focus, the management of gaps and the characters’ mind reading in Homer. Scodel contends that Homer takes pains to engage us with his heroes’ consciousness processes, whether they are described explicitly or need to be conjectured. His ways of making recipients mind read are fundamental for later ancient literature: ‘The Homeric narrative thereby provides a basis for drama, in which the audience must make sense of the action without a narrator’s help … it shows narrative possibilities that were to be developed by tragedy, Virgil and the realist novel.’Footnote ³⁷ Scodel explicitly rejects the narratological category of focalization as a frame for her analysis, and yet, as I will argue in one of this book’s chapters, her argument fails to capture the logic of Homeric narrative because it is premised on reading expectations generated by modern realist novels.Footnote ³⁸ As readers of Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford and Jonathan Franzen, we are trained to concentrate on the characters’ mind – there are of course fictional minds also in ancient narratives, but other aspects are more important for enticing the recipients.

As this survey reveals, in Classics not only diachronic investigations, but also studies that through their focus on ancient texts rather fall under the category of historical narratology, tend to stress the continuities with modern literature. In this regard, scholarship in Classics is different from the strong tradition of historical narratology in Medievalist Studies, which elaborates on the alterity of medieval texts.Footnote ³⁹ One reason for this may be the claims still inherent in a discipline called ‘Classics’, another is certainly the greater conspicuousness of the clash of medieval narrative conventions with modern expectations. This said, as I hope to show in this book, there are also flagrant discrepancies in what is still seen as the continuum linking modern to ancient literature.

The paper by Scodel just mentioned also touches on a third way of identifying what is Greek about Greek narrative, namely the comparison with other ancient literatures. While Scodel refers only in passing to Erich Auerbach’s juxtaposition of Homer with the Hebrew Bible, the comparative approach forms the core of two other contributions to the volume. Johannes Haubold also starts from the first chapter of Mimesis but goes on to replace the Hebrew Bible with the Gilgamesh epic.Footnote ⁴⁰ His comparison yields a similar result though: ‘Auerbach was right: the Homer who emerges from my discussion is still a master of immediacy.’ However, Haubold finds the differences ‘aesthetically meaningful rather than merely betraying different mentalities’.Footnote ⁴¹ What renders Haubold’s chapter particularly thought-provoking is its reflection on the politics of comparisons. It is not incidental that the Jewish exile Auerbach compared the Hebrew Bible with ‘the Homer of Schiller and Goethe’, just as Haubold’s own probing into the differences between Homer and Gilgamesh is firmly situated in the current urge to delimit the Western canon. Haubold’s reflections underline that comparisons are never innocent operations – they are always imbued with political agendas.

Adrien Kelly compares the battle scenes in Homer with those in texts of the Ancient Near East, notably the Hebrew Bible and Akkadian as well as Egyptian epics.Footnote ⁴² His conclusion is that Homeric epic is distinct in its narrativization and aestheticization of the happenings on the battlefield. Kelly’s inquiry is simultaneously impressive on account of the wide range of Near Eastern texts it discusses and precise by virtue of the focus on battle scenes. This focus, however, also limits insights into the narrative techniques, as only a very special type of scene is examined, which may determine some of the findings. Here, we touch on a general problem of the comparative approach. The more specific the comparison is, the more precise the results can be, but the narrowing of the focus, just like the exclusion of other potential material, may reduce the significance of the comparison.

4 Approaching the Fault Lines

All three approaches mentioned have their merits: a close engagement with ancient texts is indispensable, and comparisons can be immensely illuminating, whether synchronically in a juxtaposition of ancient cultures or as a part of a diachronic narratology that traces the development of narrative forms through epochs. In this book, though, I will try another route: each of the following chapters takes a central concept of modern narrative theory and investigates how ancient texts relate to it. However, instead of striving to prove the existence or prefiguration of these concepts in antiquity and thereby to prove ancient literature to be modern avant la lettre, I will zero in on the fault lines, where the ancient sense of narrative does not map onto our categories. This inquiry will alert us not only to the limits of modern narrative theory with regard to antiquity. It also prepares the ground for probing into what renders the ancient understanding of narrative unique.

A possible objection to my approach is that, not unlike narrative theory, the target of its criticism, it uses the filter of modern narrative, as it starts from concepts and categories derived from its examination. However, to take modern concepts as a starting point is part of a hermeneutic exercise. We inevitably view antiquity through the lens of our time. Even where we do not explicitly invoke theory, our viewpoint is, more or less strongly, shaped by assumptions premised either on theory or on our reading experiences (where, in most cases, modern novels will dominate). The strategy of simply looking closely enough at the ancient material without the use of theory bypasses this to its own detriment – the modernizing interpretations that its advocates set out to avoid frequently return in the unreflected premises of their readings. By taking my cue from modern concepts that guide our approaches to literature, I try to make explicit our hermeneutic horizon; this, I hope, will make it easier to tease out where the ancient understanding of narrative deviates from it.

My approach not only opposes the tendency of classical narratologists to pinpoint the modern features of ancient narrative, but it also differs from the diachronic narratology envisaged by Fludernik. Instead of tracing the transformation of narrative forms, I look at major narrative concepts. My inquiry is concerned not only with ancient narrative, but more broadly with the ancient sense of narrative. In order to elucidate this sense, I will discuss ancient criticism alongside ancient narratives. What I consider the distinctly ancient understanding of narrative manifests itself both in narrative texts and in critical reflections on these texts.Footnote ⁴³ By no means do narrative practice and the concepts of critics always coincide. Nor is there a single view to which all authors unanimously subscribe – on the contrary, ancient writers not only contemplated various narrative forms that only partly map onto each other, such as logos, mythos, aoidē, poiēsis; they also indulged in disagreements and advanced a significant number of rival concepts. At the same time, ancient narratives and the various comments of critics belong to a gravitational field. When I refer to the ancient sense or understanding of narrative, it is not a unified theory but a question of certain premises shared by a wide range of positions expressed in different contexts and forms.

This book thus triangulates modern narrative theory, ancient narrative and ancient criticism.Footnote ⁴⁴ Its title has only two parts, because ‘ancient texts’ encompass criticism as well as narrative. Only studied in conjunction with and thrown into relief by modern approaches do narrative practice and criticism permit us to capture the distinct sense of narrative in antiquity. ‘Practice’, here, is not a mere façon de parler; in some cases, it will not suffice to consider textual features, but it will be necessary also to take into account the production, circulation and reception of texts. This context, so different from ours, can help explain some of what strikes us as the peculiarities of ancient literature. For the reasons already stated, the third part of the triangulation is modern narrative theory, which, however, in some ways reflects the practice of modern narrative, as many of its categories derive from the examination of modern literature. At the same time, modern narrative theory, besides itself encompassing various approaches, is far from fully mapping onto ancient criticism. Greek and Roman critics not only had their own objectives, but a significant part of their work is only accessible in the truncated form of scholia. This said, it is the asymmetries between the corpora involved – the tensions between narrative practice and narrative theory as well as the gap between ancient and modern views – that renders the triangulation, on which this inquiry is premised, productive.

Let me add a comment on the use of theory in literary studies in order to avoid misunderstanding. By no means am I opposed to the deployment of modern concepts in the interpretation of ancient texts. On the contrary, I am convinced that the application of modern theories to Greek and Roman literature can be extremely useful and that it is also, in some ways, inevitable. As I have pointed out, we cannot but understand texts against the horizon of our own time. It is preferable to reflect on the parameters of one’s readings than to mistake them for an objective frame. Theories are neither legitimate nor illegitimate per se; they serve heuristic functions – their value depends on the questions raised and the texts to which they are applied.

There is a considerable pay-off in the application of structuralist narratology and other more recent approaches in narrative theory to all sorts of texts, including ancient ones. But they are less than helpful for the purposes of this study – in fact, they have generated a one-sided view of ancient literature that I wish to complement. Shaped by readings mostly of modern realist novels, narratological approaches have drawn our attention to features that ancient texts share with modern ones, making us neglect aspects that jar with the conventions of the works of Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens and other modern authors. In this book, I am not distancing myself from structuralist narratology and other approaches of narrative theory because it is anachronistic to apply their taxonomies and concepts to Greek and Latin texts, but because they are not the right tool for the purpose of appreciating what renders ancient literature distinct.

Needless to say, given the vastness of the material, my readings will be highly selective. Neither in the material covered nor in the topics tackled is exhaustiveness possible, nor would it be desirable. However, even if my samples are only halfway representative, as I hope they are, they will give us insights into the ancient sense of narrative. While the texts that I discuss range from the Archaic to the Imperial eras, most of them are Greek – this is due to my expertise and does not mean that my argument works only for Greek literature. Occasional references to Latin material will at least suggest its applicability to Latin literature as well.

The goals of this book are far more modest than the ‘defining Greek narrative’ advertised by the volume that emerged from the 7th Leventis Conference at Edinburgh.Footnote ⁴⁵ Not only does Greek narrative seem, at least to me, too protean to become the object of a definition, but it is also beyond the scope of this book to capture fully the ancient logic of narrative. As the subtitle Towards a Critical Dialogue indicates, Ancient Greek Texts and Modern Narrative Theory aims to stimulate scholars, inviting them to view ancient narrative and criticism along new lines. Not only, but especially, narratology has let Classicists detect modern features in ancient literature. As instructive as this has been, it is, I think, equally important to account for other aspects. After having learned to analyse the complexities reminiscent of modern novels, it would be beneficial at this stage also to explore what renders ancient narrative and its understanding in antiquity distinctive. It bears repeating that I am far from arguing against the narratological analysis of ancient literature – it has been immensely fruitful and will, I have no doubt, continue to be an important tool for Classicists. What I wish to do is to direct the attention of Classicists also to aspects of ancient narrative that the application of Bal’s and Genette’s taxonomies and of other concepts of narrative theory has occluded in the past decades. My goal is not to replace narratology but to complement the view of ancient narrative that we have gained with its help.

By no means is this book the first and only attempt at teasing out peculiarities of ancient literature. In the course of this introduction, I have had the chance to refer to several illuminating inquiries, and there are others that could be mentioned.Footnote ⁴⁶ The oralist tradition in Homeric scholarship deserves singling out as a major endeavour to approach early Greek epic on its own terms. And yet, on the whole our perspective on ancient narrative is dominated by the logic encapsulated in de Jong’s claim that ‘Classical scholars can now lay bare the literary DNA of the most popular literary form of our times, the novel, in ancient narrative texts’.Footnote ⁴⁷ If my attempt at teasing out ancient views of narrative prompts Classicists to view Greek and Latin literature not chiefly as the DNA of the modern novel or even induces them to take the exploration of its peculiarities further, this book will have succeeded.

While Ancient Greek Texts and Modern Narrative Theory primarily addresses Classicists, it also reaches out to scholars of narrative theory. In a famous sentence of his first Critique, Kant states that ‘thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Literary theory needs literature to have substance, just as readings without reflection risk falling flat. Most theoreticians continue to focus on modern literature, understandably, as it is more accessible to us. But premodern texts not only pose a special challenge to modern readers, they also have the potential to redirect theory. In another book, I exploited ancient reflections to reconsider our ideas of aesthetic experience:Footnote ⁴⁹ ancient authors, I contended, draw our attention to the affective dimension and long-lasting effects of aesthetic experiences that have been sidelined by many theoreticians and at the same time contemplate the ambiguity between immersion and reflection with great nuance.

The chapters of this book invite scholars of narrative to reconsider some of their concepts in the light of ancient material. For example, as I hope to show, Greek literature makes it difficult to maintain claims about the Theory of Mind being the essential mode of engaging with narrative. Ancient views of narration will also turn out to be cognitively more realist than the structuralist model of narration. In this respect, Ancient Texts and Modern Narrative Theory goes beyond the goals of a historical narratology that tries to chart the specific gestalt of narrative in an epoch – it also aims to unlock the potential of ancient narrative to shape theoretical concepts.

5 Synopsis

As starting points for the chapters, I have chosen concepts and categories that stem from different fields of narrative studies and allow us to tackle core aspects of narrative. Fiction(ality) is a key concept in literary theory and has come to attract considerable attention from narratologists in the past two decades. No surprise, then, that it also looms large in Classics. However, a brief look at the discussion indicates that there must be something wrong. Classicists have made numerous cases for the birth of fiction – the texts credited with it range from the Homeric epics to the Imperial novel. Most of these cases flagrantly contradict each other – if Hesiod invented fictionality, how can it have been discovered by Menander or Theocritus? It has also been argued that fictionality is a core concern of Greek literature from its beginnings to the Imperial era. In Chapter 2, I agree with the idea that fictionality did not have to be discovered at some point but then proceed to argue that it never played an important role either. After presenting evidence for the familiarity of fictionality in antiquity, I reconsider two authors who often appear as cornerstones in histories of fictionality, Gorgias and Aristotle. A closer look at their reflections draws our attention to two dimensions of ancient narrative that were deemed far more important than its referentiality, namely its immersive quality and its moral thrust.

Chapter 3 turns to a key category of structuralist narratology that is not unrelated to the issue of fictionality, voice. The narrator as an entity independent of the author owes its prominence in modern criticism, it has been suggested, ultimately to the concept of fictionality – the narrator helps suspend referentiality in fictional texts. In ancient criticism, however, the idea of a narrator independent of the author is absent. What is more, ancient critics tended to ascribe utterances of characters in general to authors. This, I argue, is not a deficiency, but the expression of a distinctly ancient view of voice, which I reconstruct on the basis of a wide array of texts. Where we see several narrative levels nested into each other, ancient authors and readers envisaged narration as an act of impersonation. One of the upshots of my analysis is that, while it may be intriguing to explore metalepseis in ancient literature, the very idea of metalepsis conflicts with the premises of narrative as it was understood in antiquity. The ancient view of narration can be linked at least partly to the prominence of performance and therefore reveals the impact of socio-cultural factors; at the same time, it resonates with recent cognitive theory, notably embodied and enactive models of cognition.

That it would be wrong to consider all strands of cognitivism an apt framework for the investigation of ancient narrative emerges from Chapter 4. Perhaps the most prominent cognitivist concept in recent narratology is the Theory of Mind. Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine and others have been highly influential with their claim that mind reading is at the core of our engagement with narrative in general. However, not only have these scholars ignored how controversial the idea of the Theory of Mind is in psychology, but ancient literature, I believe, also belies their argument about narrative at large. Mind reading is certainly central to our responses to modern realist novels, but ancient narratives – as my test case, Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, illustrates – were more invested in the reconfiguration of time than in individualized minds. Plot was crucial for the experiential quality of narrative hailed by critics, as shown in Chapter 2. This prominence of plot is reflected in Aristotle’s Poetics and other critical works. In order not to play off plot against character, I propose experience as a category that integrates cognitive processes as well as matters of plot.

Chapter 5 touches on some of the points brought up in Chapter 3, notably ancient views of character, but has a different focus – narrative motivation, a category prominent particularly in story-oriented narratology. The Odyssey is the origin of the classical Western plot, and yet, the motivation of the Penelope scenes in books 18 and 19 does not follow the logic that modern realist novels have made our default model. Instead, I suggest, Odyssey 18 and 19 have a design premised on features that we encounter in medieval narratives, notably retroactive motivation, thematic isolation and suspense about how. The reason why Penelope has provoked innumerable psychologizing interpretations in modern scholarship is that her comportment is not psychologically motivated by Homer. Similar cases of motivation that are bound to strike the reader of modern novels as peculiar can be found in Homer and also in later literature. At first sight, these cases may seem to conflict with the emphasis on motivation in Aristotle and the scholia, but in viewing motivation rather in terms of plot than psychology, the critics share common ground with the texts discussed.

To round up and sharpen the critical dialogue of ancient Greek texts with modern narrative theory, the final chapter compares the ancient sense of narrative as explored in the course of this study with what we find in postmodern literature. At first sight, the similarities are striking: postmodern narratives challenge the distinction between fact and fiction, ignore the boundaries between narrative levels, play with character presentation and forgo motivation in psychological terms. However, whereas postmodern authors consciously undercut the conventions of modern realist novels, ancient authors follow their own, independent logic. The parallels between pre- and postmodern narratives belong to utterly different frameworks, which endow them with different significances. Cast as a challenge, postmodern texts remain fixated on modernism. Ancient texts, on the other hand, while having influenced the rise of the modern novel, are premised on their own distinct view of narrative. Teasing out some features of this view is the objective of the following chapters.