In his book on Longus, Bruce MacQueen argues that the structure of Daphnis and Chloe is dominated by a series of cycles or "rings" that are created by repetitions that take the form of a chiasmus. As is often the case in such analyses of "ring composition"--now a century old enterprise--such patterns are thought to focus attention on a central event or theme that is surrounded by the two series of elements (ABC D C'B'A'). MacQueen identifies rhetoric and myth as the themes "centralized" by the structure of Daphnis and Chloe , since there are mythical and "rhetorical" passages situated in the middle of the ring patterns he identifies.
A study like MacQueen's inevitably raises the general question of the value and appropriateness of such accounts of narrative structure: should a work such as Daphnis and Chloe be conceived of spatially as a unity able to be grasped as a whole, or should it be conceived of as a linear series whose purpose and meaning only becomes clarified in the actual articulation of the narrative itself. That is, is the work to be comprehended as a static object or as a process? This question is particularly acute for Longus, since his story combines two genres, one essentially static (pastoral) and one primarily dynamic (novel). Moreover, some studies of ring-like narrative patterns have accounted for them in a more linear way, as part of the dynamics of performance (Lang, Peabody, Minchin).
I would like to propose a different reading of the patterns identified by MacQueen, one that emphasizes the story's forward propulsion. Rather than patterns that preexist the articulation of the work, I argue that the centralized "pivots" identified by MacQueen should be thought of as what Mabel Lang calls "directional arrows," preliminary attempts to identify a long term goal which will only be completely clarified when the narrative is actually articulated. In foregrounding Daphnis and Chloe's linear movement, I argue that it requires a reading theory that focuses on the flow of the story--how one thing leads to another--rather than a reading theory that takes for granted a unity of purpose from beginning to end. As Winkler writes, "[Longus] may have no single intention but rather experiments with a variety of possibilities and perspectives, shifting from scene to scene. Though Longus is clearly thinking in terms of a social geometry of desire, it is not clear (and may not be true) that he is committed to a single Euclidean system."
It is not the case, therefore, that myth or rhetoric as such is thematized by Longus, but these are the resources which he musters at various points in the story to initiate or redirect his evolving sense of purpose. In this way Daphnis and Chloe takes its rightful place among the other novels as heuristic and experimental, as part of what Bakhtin calls the "centrifugal forces of language."
Bakhtin, M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin. 1981.
Lang, Mabel. Herodotean Discourse. Cambridge, 1984.
Minchin, E. "Ring-Patterns and Ring-Composition." Helios 22.1 (1995) 23-35.
Peabody, B. The Winged Word. Albany, 1974.
MacQueen, B. D. Myth, Rhetoric and Fiction. Lincoln, 1990.
Winkler, J. J. "The Education of Chloe: Hidden Injuries of Sex," in Before Sexuality ed. David M. Halperin, et al. (Princeton, 1990), 101-126.