Memory and Description in the Ancient Novel

Literary description (ekphrasis) in ancient narrative is generally seen either as ornamental or symbolic: In the first case, ekphrasis produces enargeia, vivid visual realization, that contributes to some specific rhetorical impact; in the second, ekphrasis serves to foreshadow events, delineate character, or otherwise reflect or figure the key interpretive issues raised by the text. The latter case often involves complex "figuring" of readers that specifically raises issues of interpretation. Such accounts of ekphrasis, however, take for granted an instrumental view of the switch from narrative to description: description is selected at some point in a narrative from a set of available options because it suits the author's purpose best. While not denying that possibility in general, I would like to entertain a different idea of the function of ekphrasis that has to do with its generative relationship to the narrative in which it is embedded. Such an approach may be relevant to any text, but is especially suitable to the ancient novels, whose non-traditional character (namely, they are "novel" plots in prose) means more energy will be allocated to constructing the story as it goes along, and not just to ornamenting an already well-plotted narrative. I will use the example of Achilles Tatius's novel, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, which has several ekphrases recently examined in detail as elements of a complex narrative strategy of foreshadowing by S. Bartsch, in Decoding the Ancient Novel.

I will argue that the three descriptions of paintings in Leucippe and Clitophon are not "foreshadowings" of events already composed in the author's head, but places where semantic resources are gathered for the process of composition itself, places where "the narrative halts while the discourse continues to organize itself" (P. Hamon). This view is supported by analogy to ancient rhetorical memory techniques that use imagines agentes arranged in suitable loci in order to create mental images of speeches (Ad Herr. 3, 22, 37). The point of the comparison is not that ekphrasis in Leucippe and Clitophon is really a complex code for memorizing text, but rather that vivid images were traditionally used to create "imaginative vectors." This leads to a consideration of the notion of authorial intention, whether it should be understood as a conscious design that pre-exists the text and is instantiated at each moment of composition, or whether it should be considered as something that assumes concrete form only in the very process of the novel's articulation, and thus guided partly by unconscious intentions incompletely understood by the author even at the end of the story. Crucial to this latter perspective is Leucippe and Clitophon's central ekphrasis of the violation of Philomela. Significantly, this gruesome story is preceded by an elaborate adynaton that imagines the city of Alexandria as a series of loci incomprehensibly large and filled by a teeming population too numerous to be held by any place. Traversing this space fills the hero with the "uncanny" feeling of being abroad while still at home (endemos apodemia), the feeling Freud specifically identifies as characteristic of an encounter with the repressed. That such a pregnant evocation of the workings of the unconscious should precede the story of Philomela, itself a story about the return of the repressed, heightens the sense that a different level of imaginative activity is at work here. After the ekphrasis the hero gives a second description of the story of Philomela, notoriously adding details absent from the first one. This revision of the first ekphrasis is reminiscent of the way successive accounts of dreams result in revisions activated by the censorship of consciousness.

Ekphrasis can certainly be a point in the text where interpretive issues are explicitly raised in a self-conscious manner. But they are also places where, as D. Fowler has argued, there is a simultaneous desire for integration and resistance to it. Thus it is the perfect place to look for the contradictions--conscious and unconscious--that both generate the novel of Achilles Tatius and that the novel seeks imaginatively to overcome. For example, if D. Konstan (Sexual Symmetry) is correct that the Greek novels project an ideal of eros founded on mutual fidelity between equals, the reality of male domination and violence and its construction of desire haunts Achilles Tatius's version of that project and disfigures the narrative presentation of that ideal. Attention to the way devices like ekphrasis contribute to the process of the composition of this and other novels makes it possible to see these texts as more than trashy entertainment or a sophisticated, but frivolous, jeu d'esprit.