Dreams and Suicides

The Greek Novel from Antiquity to the Byzantine Empire

Suzanne Macalister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415642972
• eBook ISBN: 9781135086435
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This study discusses the Greek novel through the ages, from the genre's flowering in late Antiquity to its learned revival in twelfth-century Byzantium. Its unique feature is its full coverage of the Byzantine novels, demonstrating that they both depend upon and react against the ancient novel, and can only be understood against the cultural backdrop of ancient Greek literature. Dreams and Suicides analyses the cultural symptoms and attitudes portrayed or implied in the novels, thus rooting them in a social rather than merely a literary context. For all students of ancient culture, this book provides important and original insights into the genre of ancient literature.

1

A RESPONSE TO UNCERTAINTY

The ordered and predictable lives of a well-born, chaste and beautiful young woman and a well-born, beautiful young man are disrupted by their meeting and falling instantly in love. The event represents an irreconcilable life crisis: their love cannot follow a desired course leading to marriage for reasons beyond their control (for example, arranged betrothal to another) so that the principal feature of their love (and their lives) becomes uncertainty. The lovers submit themselves to exile from their normal environments and thereafter, within a nebulous time-frame, their existence becomes one of ordeals and sufferings involving confrontations with danger and death. Removed from their homes and their families, they are tossed about in alien lands, mostly separated from each other, lost and as victims of the unpredictable force of controlling chance or tyche. The foreign places into which they are cast, of familiar but far-away names like Babylon or Ethiopia and scattered across the entire Hellenistic world and beyond, are totally alien to the displaced Greek lovers in terms of culture and customs. They become totally subject to the uncertain regulation of chance which they attempt to comprehend through dreams but, once their ordeal has begun, they can only passively await an outcome. Frequently they perceive their longed-for goal of union with each other as so beyond hope that their only desire or attempted action is suicide. But, finally, through chance again, hero and heroine are reunited with each other and their families and, returned to their normal environments, their love attains its ultimate fulfilment in the longed-for marriage.

Such is the subject-matter of the typical novel and such are its oftrepeated themes: love, risk, exile, ordeals, deaths, dreams, attempted suicides and reunion. As Bakhtin was to see it, the plot conforms to a basic narrative framework which can be divided into three principal narrative units or ‘chronotopes’ – his term coined to express a unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented – the meeting and falling in love of the young couple, their ordeals and sufferings in an alien world, and their ultimate union (Bakhtin 1981: 86ff.). Within the central (or major) chronotope of the ordeals may also be contained any number of minor chronotopes with their own temporal and spatial boundaries and meanings (p. 252). I shall look at one of these minor chronotopes presently.

What is significant about the three principal chronotopes, Bakhtin says, is that they are by no means equally balanced in terms of the novels’ use of time: the first and the last serve as mere starting and ending points of plot movement and all action takes place between them: ‘it is not around these that the novel is structured; rather it is around that which lies (that which takes place) between them’ (p. 89). Bakhtin was also to observe that in the major chronotope neither the protagonists’ personalities nor their love for each other is subjected to any change, growth or development as a result of time and their ordeals and suffering in the space of the alien world:¹ their meetings and their unions take place, as it were, in adjacent biographical moments (pp. 89–90).² Or – to see all this in another way – the world of the first and last chronotopes is not that of the major one; in the world of the major chronotope, where there exists no organising and constructing principles like defined time and rationality and where fate, chance moments and chaos rule supreme, no resolution can be reached. It is not until a return to the ordering system of the alternative chronotope occurs that any conversion of form can take place.

Let us look a little more closely at Bakhtin's notion of the protagonists’ unchanging love. At the point the protagonists’ ordeals in the major chronotope cease and the narrative reverts to the alternative system, the protagonists love or eros – to use the term applied almost universally to the phenomenon in the novels, whether experienced by the primary or secondary characters, friend or foe, reciprocated or not – is of the same meaning and nature as it was at the point of its onset. There is nothing in the texts to suggest that, when the chance moment intrudes to bring about the plot's resolution, any change or development has taken place either in the love or in the protagonists’ responses to it: should resolution be aborted at that specific chance moment, the major chronotope and all that it represents would simply and necessarily be prolonged. Eros has remained, despite every despair and hope that might have acted to influence it, an enduring all-possessing force, offering commitment, desiring permancy and for which all whom it overpowers are prepared to die.³

Thus, rather than the in-between-time of the ordeals in the alien world (to adopt Bakhtin's terms again) serving to bring about change or development, it is the nature and meaning of the love as it was initially conceived, and as it constantly remains, which serves to act upon and influence the development of ordeals in the major chronotope. How this happens will be considered in the next section. But first I would like to pause for a while with Chariton's Chaireas and Kallirhoe and examine the meaning of eros to Dionysios after marriage to Kallirhoe. I shall summarise the context.

Dionysios had fallen in love with the captive Kallirhoe at their first meeting in Miletos, he had experienced an eros of the same nature and meaning as all instances of eros in the novels, his responses too conformed to those demonstrated by someone overpowered by eros – on perceiving no hope of gaining the object of his love, he had attempted to kill himself (3.1.1). But, as chance had it, he married Kallirhoe. She bore a child he believed was his own and their life together in Miletos remained uneventful – so the reader can surmise in the absence of evidence to the contrary – until the appearance of Chaireas on the scene, the interference of Mithridates and their removal to Babylon for the trial to decide Kallirhoe's lawful husband. Now, facing the threat of losing Kallirhoe, Dionysios bears the misfortune nobly, in the spirit of his natural stability of character and disciplined good breeding – the omniscient narrator tells us – although his feelings for her are deeper than they had been at the beginning (5.9.8–9):

When he first felt his desire (epithymia), it was her beauty alone that he had loved but, by this time, a lot else had contributed to⁴ his love (eros): familiarity, the blessing of children, her lack of gratitude, his jealousy and especially the unexpectedness of its happening.

(5.9)

Under such circumstances a more dramatic reaction from Dionysios might have been expected, consistent with his earlier behaviour and conforming to the responses of a character overpowered by eros who is faced by loss. The omniscient narrator stresses that the present extraordinary disaster would have been enough to drive even the bravest man out of his senses (5.9.8). It certainly drives Chaireas to make an attempt on his life (5.10.6–10).⁵ Why, then, does Dionysios too not attempt to kill himself, or indeed succeed? After all, his role in the narrative as rival to Chaireas has now been usurped by the King. So why now is his behaviour inconsistent with his previous behaviour, and why now does he not conform to the picture of the novel's lover in the face of loss? And why, particularly, has the quality of his love changed?

I suspect that the change in Dionysios and the quality of his eros is due to the specific nature of the plot segment comprising the episode of Dionysios' and Kallirhoe's marriage, that is, what Bakhtin would have called a minor chronotope contained with within the major. Unlike the major chronotope of the protagonists' ordeals which is organised around an undifferentiated time of sudden and undefined periods of separation in an abstract expanse of space consisting of interchangeable and indefinite places distant from what is familiar to them, the minor chronotope of Dionysios' and Kallirhoe's time together is distinguished by its biological and maturative duration (as stressed by the narrator in the statement about the meaning of Dionysios' love), by proximity and by the specific, stable, self-contained and familiar space of Miletos (to Dionysios at any rate). In the sort of ordered time and space which the couple had shared in this minor chronotope, Kallirhoe's feelings towards Dionysios had also changed and developed: she had grown to respect him (5.8.6), and demonstrated affection, gratitude and kindness towards him even after she had regained Chaireas (8.4.4–6). (Here we might also compare Longus' Daphnis and Chloe where the plot's focus is the maturation of the couple's love which is, in turn, bound to the ordered time of the year's seasons and the defined space of pastoral Lesbos.)

In the in-between-time in the alien world chronotope of the typical novel there is no such ordering to override the prevailing blind determinism of tyche: the only other force which operates is eros which is itself also an agent of chaos. It is not until eros is subjected to the binding and ordering forces that prevail in an alternative chronotope that its disruptive force can be harnessed. In terms of underlying meaning, then, I suggest that the novels' major chronotope symbolically communicates – whether consciously or otherwise – contemporary pessimistic perceptions of the world, and that love's resolution in the system of an alternative chronotope communicates an idealised expression of the fulfilment of a social and cultural quest for self-validation and social identity.⁶

In terms of the protagonists’ story, the ordeals to which the lovers so passively submit themselves serve both to convey the intensity of their quest, and to provide (for the protagonists and the reader) a frustration of desire, similar in modern Freudian theory to the sexual build-up where discharge is the aim so that the psyche may return to its initial state of non-stimulation.⁷ Eros, as an agent of chaos for the novel's major chronotope, proves little different in the novel from eros as the disruptive force in earlier Greek belief: its story can only be a story of frustrated desire and lack; once its object is achieved, there is no story to be told. As Anne Carson puts it in her essay on Eros, ‘the bittersweet:

The Greek word eros denotes ‘want’, ‘lack’, ‘desire for that which is missing’. The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.

(Carson 1986: 10)

Let me draw attention here to Chariton's omniscient remark in Chaireas and Kallirhoe when he announces, at the conclusion to the couple's ordeals, the different subject-matter of the final chronotope:

And I think that this last book will be more pleasant for my readers since it is a cleansing of the grim subject-matter of the earlier books. There will be no more pirates and servitude and lawsuits and fighting and self-killing and war and capture; instead, its contents will be lawful love and sanctioned marriage.

(8.1.4)

The obstacles and ordeals to which the protagonists are subjected in the major chronotope – or the grim subject-matter, as Chariton calls it – are frequently described as ‘trials’ or, more specifically, ‘trials’ or ‘tests’ to love or fidelity (e.g. Bakhtin 1981: 106, Stark 1989: 83, Konstan 1994: 11).⁸ Although I agree that the ordeals serve, in the final analysis, as tests to the protagonists and their love, I would like to develop an aspect to the notion of test not considered in these interpretations. In the following section I shall consider how the specific nature of eros, and the ways in which the protagonists respond to it, act in the novel to develop the very ordeals which serve to test it.

RUSSIAN ROULETTE

The protagonists’ departure to the alien world is, in essence, a provocation of chance. In terms of their story, it is represented as a dangerous life-threatening expedition willingly undertaken either as a necessity or as an escape from an intolerable situation or stalemate which has developed in their normal environment. The common denominator in all situations leading to departure is the element of uncertainty, an uncertainty which is brought about by the outside force of chance or tyche, and which, in some way or another, poses a threat to the continuation and desired outcome of their love. So intense is this love and their desire for marriage that the protagonists readily submit themselves to risking their lives to resolve the uncertainty.

In Leukippe and Kleitophon, a chance event had set in motion a train of unresolved circumstances which was to lead to the couple's decision to elope. No sooner had Kleitophon laid down beside the willing Leukippe in an attempt at sexual union than her mother, disturbed by a dream of her daughter being ravished, burst into the bedchamber. Although Kleitophon had escaped unidentified, and Leukippe had denied that she was entertaining a lover, the resulting circumstances were to prove intolerably uncertain for all the characters concerned: for the mother, uncertainty and despair concerning her daughter's future; for Leukippe and Kleitophon, uncertain consequences at potential discovery (2.23–30). In Chaireas and Kallirhoe, Chaireas had been provoked by Kallirhoe's rejected suitors into uncertainty concerning Kallirhoe's fidelity which had, in turn, led to the action which ultimately caused her abduction (1.4–10) and Chaireas’ determination to discover her uncertain fate (3.5). In the Ephesiaka, it was in obedience to an enigmatic oracle that the couple was despatched abroad: although the journey promised to be perilous and its outcome uncertain, the parents recognised that the god had allowed their children's marriage on condition that the oracle was obeyed (1.6–10). In the Aithiopika, the desired resolution of the couple's mutual love was threatened by the uncertainty arising from Charikleia's arranged marriage to another (4.6–15).⁹

But once the protagonists have exposed themselves to the alien world, it is not only the outcome of their love which is subjected to uncertainty, it is survival as well. Survival, however, is not simply continuation of life, since life can only have purpose and meaning through love of, and identity in, the other. When one is believed dead, the other prepares to follow.¹⁰ Survival, then, has the special meaning of continuation of life as an entity: without the other, there can be no life or identity. So Kleitophon, when he learns t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A RESPONSE TO UNCERTAINTY
• 2 CULTURAL MEANINGS SUBJECTED TO REFLECTION
• 3 THE NOVEL, THE DREAM AND ‘SUICIDE’ IN THE INTERIM PERIOD
• 4 THE BYZANTINE REVIVAL
• 5 THE REVIVALIN CONTEXT
• Appendix: Synopses of novels highlighting dreams and suicides
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of passages from early and Byzantine novels
• General index