A Companion to Greek Literature (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781118886069
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

8. The Elasticity of the Greek Novel

After this brief survey we are in a better position to ask whether the love novel as represented by the “big five” should be seen as the origin and the center of the Greek novel tout court. I have already discussed how each of groups 2–4 may not hinge on the love novel. It could be added that it is even possible to turn the tables and argue that the love novel is itself a reaction to earlier, perhaps lowlife, kinds of novel writing (cf. e.g. Tilg 2010, 32–6 and 146–55). If the love novel moves out of the center, however, this will affect our whole idea of the Greek novel as a genre. We would certainly include groups 2 and 3 as full-fledged novels, but we might also reconsider our view of the “fringe” texts which mimic other genres. Somewhat confusingly, modern scholarship often addresses them as “romances” anyway (cf. conventional titles like Alexander Romance, Troy Romance, and Clementine Romance).

Should our “novel” tag be elastic enough to accommodate these variegated strains of prose fiction too? From a modern perspective little can be objected to this. Who, for example, would dispute that Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian is a novel, although it consistently poses as the autobiography of the Emperor Hadrian? We may ask whether the Greeks of the Imperial period were able to adopt a certain “willing suspension of disbelief” or a “contract of fictionality” in the same way as we do, but in the absence of an elaborate ancient theory of fiction and fictionality no conclusive answer to this question can be given. Gorgias’s (c. 480–380 BCE) remarks on the aesthetic “deception” (apáte) of drama, in which “the deceived is cleverer than the non-deceived” (DK 82 B 23) is at least reminiscent of Coleridge’s dictum about the “willing suspension of disbelief.” What is more, the theory of late Hellenistic rhetoric about literary narrative (cf. Cic. Inv. 1.27; Rhet. Her. 1.12–13) clearly shows some awareness of fiction in our sense, especially in the category of argumentum, defined as “fictional, yet possible events” (ficta res, quae tamen fieri potuit). Ultimately, we also have to acknowledge that the complex ways fiction interacts with reality eludes critics, let alone a larger reading audience, even today, and I doubt if even the most learned reader of the Memoirs of Hadrian will be able to completely separate his or her picture of the historical Hadrian from Yourcenar’s compelling invention.

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