This paper seeks to lay the groundwork for a new approach--a prosaics--to the so-called ancient novels by viewing them in the context of the emerging signifying practice of prose. I begin with a literature review. Many critics tend to view the ancient novels as degenerate or decadent forms of other verse genres. This denigration of the novels with respect to their verse predecessors is repeated in discussions of the opposition between verse and prose themselves. Actually reversing their historical relationship, critics generally speak of prose as the unelaborated stuff out of which verse is created by the addition of form. Prose is typically defined as "not-verse," and considered to be "formless" unless elements of verse are added to it. This definition, however, is just as inadequate as the definition of the novel as degenerate epic or prosified drama. Recent work on the rise of prose in partially analogous contexts (Godzich and Kittay) allows us to rethink prose in a more positive way, as a new technology of the word that no longer presupposes the presence and activity of a performer. This is linked to Bakhtin's conception of "novelistic discourse" as the redeployment of elements from monologic genres by a "dialogic" juxtaposition of such elements. Prose thus presumes new protocols and conventions between author and audience analogous to the new demands made on users of the technology of writing, to which prose is historically related. These new relationships, intimately intertwined with the emerging forms of social relationships in a more complex and heterogeneous society, seem chaotic from the perspective of traditional verse genres, with their highly specified decorum and spatial-temporal contexts; but from the perspective of the novel, the protocols of verse genres can be seen to have exhausted their possibilites in late antiquity, and thus seem quaint and outmoded. Traditional insights of critics of the novel can be rethought in a more positive light once the novel is placed in its proper relationship to the verse genres. As prose progressively edges out verse as the appropriate form for the expression of society's most important ideas and information, verse genres will have to be satisfied with becoming a sign of an older and simpler discursive age that has passed forever. The ancient novel is one of many creative responses to the new discursive context of the late Hellensitic and imperial periods.
References: Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay, The Emergence of Prose.
1987. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. 1981.