Handbook of Diachronic Narratology 9783110617481, 9783110616439

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Towards a Diachronic Narratology
Two Handbooks – Two Concepts? On “Diachronic” and “Historical” Narratology
First-Person Narration in Ancient Greek and Modern English Literature
Narrator as Dissociated from the Author in Russian Literature
Narrator’s Commentary in Czech Literature (1300–1900)
Characters and Persons in Russian Literature
Unreliable Narration in Antiquity
Point of View in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature
Perspective in Narrative Texts of the European Middle Ages
Point of View in Russian Literature
Representing Mental States in Ancient Greek Narrative
Free Indirect Discourse in German and Russian Literature
Free Indirect Discourse in English (1200–1700)
Free Indirect Discourse in English (1700–Present)
Free Indirect Discourse in Medieval and Modern French Literature
Interior Monologue in Ancient and Modern Literature
The Rhetoric of Narration in the Early Modern Period
Trajectories of Plot in Icelandic Literature
Motivation in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature
Temporality in Ancient and Medieval Literatures
Cohesion and Coherence in Russian Narrative Literature
Sequence in French, Italian, and Spanish Literature (1500–1800)
Suspense in Greek, Latin, and Spanish Literature
Suspense in Spanish Narratives from the Golden Age to the Nineteenth Century
Ekphrasis in Ancient Greek and Latin Epics
Mise en Abyme in the Baroque Era and in Modernist and Postmodernist Narrative Fiction
Mise en Abyme in Russian Literature
Eventfulness in Classical Greek and Latin Literature
Eventfulness in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature
Eventfulness in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature
Eventfulness in Late Antique Jewish Literature
Poetic Narratives: The Sonnet Sequence (1400–1900)
Poetical Narration in Russian Literature from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Oral Storytelling in Ancient Greek and German Medieval Literature
Metanarration and Self-Reflexivity in Classical Greek, Latin, and Byzantine Narrative
A Diachronic Perspective on Metalepsis
Metalepsis in English Literature: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernism
Metalepsis in Czech Literature
Narrative Metalepsis in German and Italian Literature of Medieval and Early Modern Age
Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature
Fictionality in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature
Aesthetic Illusion: A History of ‘Immersion’ and Western Illusionist Literature since Antiquity
List of Authors
Index

Citation preview

Handbook of Diachronic Narratology

Narratologia

Contributions to Narrative Theory Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier, Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik, José Ángel García Landa, Inke Gunia, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn, Markus Kuhn, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers

Volume 86

Handbook of Diachronic Narratology Edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid

ISBN 978-3-11-061643-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-061748-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-061664-4 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933695 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Peter Hühn, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid Introduction: Towards a Diachronic Narratology 

 1

Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg Two Handbooks – Two Concepts? On “Diachronic” and “Historical” Narratology   5 Yonina Hoffman and Alice Gaber First-Person Narration in Ancient Greek and Modern English Literature  Valerij Tjupa Narrator as Dissociated from the Author in Russian Literature  Bohumil Fořt and Jiří Koten Narrator’s Commentary in Czech Literature (1300–1900)  Andrej Agratin and Valerij Tjupa Characters and Persons in Russian Literature  Robert Kirstein Unreliable Narration in Antiquity 

 41

 55

 71

 84

Harald Haferland Point of View in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature  Brigitte Burrichter Perspective in Narrative Texts of the European Middle Ages  Andrej Agratin Point of View in Russian Literature 

 105

 127

 140

Ruth Scodel Representing Mental States in Ancient Greek Narrative  Wolf Schmid Free Indirect Discourse in German and Russian Literature 

 162

 177

 16

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 Contents

Monika Fludernik Free Indirect Discourse in English (1200–1700) 

 204

Monika Fludernik Free Indirect Discourse in English (1700–Present) 

 230

Sophie Marnette Free Indirect Discourse in Medieval and Modern French Literature  Michal Beth Dinkler Interior Monologue in Ancient and Modern Literature  Christine Noille The Rhetoric of Narration in the Early Modern Period  Craig R. Davis Trajectories of Plot in Icelandic Literature 

 257

 282

 302

 324

Harald Haferland Motivation in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature  Sonja Zeman Temporality in Ancient and Medieval Literatures 

 371

Galina Žiličeva Cohesion and Coherence in Russian Narrative Literature 

 396

Anne Duprat Sequence in French, Italian, and Spanish Literature (1500–1800)  Inke Gunia Suspense in Greek, Latin, and Spanish Literature 

 347

 420

 443

Inke Gunia Suspense in Spanish Narratives from the Golden Age to the Nineteenth Century   459 Stefan Feddern Ekphrasis in Ancient Greek and Latin Epics 

 482

Contents 

 VII

John Pier Mise en Abyme in the Baroque Era and in Modernist and Postmodernist Narrative Fiction   502 Larisa Murav’eva Mise en Abyme in Russian Literature 

 528

Simon Grund Eventfulness in Classical Greek and Latin Literature 

 550

Peter Hühn Eventfulness in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature  Florian Remele Eventfulness in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature  Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky Eventfulness in Late Antique Jewish Literature 

 574

 597

 620

Peter Hühn Poetic Narratives: The Sonnet Sequence (1400–1900) 

 644

Veronika Zuseva-Özkan Poetical Narration in Russian Literature from the Eighteenth Century to the Present   666 Sonja Zeman Oral Storytelling in Ancient Greek and German Medieval Literature 

 684

Veronika Zuseva-Özkan Metanarration and Self-Reflexivity in Classical Greek, Latin, and Byzantine Narrative   710 Françoise Lavocat A Diachronic Perspective on Metalepsis 

 725

Jan Alber Metalepsis in English Literature: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernism   751

VIII 

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Ondřej Sládek Metalepsis in Czech Literature 

 770

Martin Sebastian Hammer and Ursula Kocher Narrative Metalepsis in German and Italian Literature of Medieval and Early Modern Age   790 Christine Putzo Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature 

 810

Christine Putzo Fictionality in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature 

 833

Werner Wolf Aesthetic Illusion: A History of ‘Immersion’ and Western Illusionist Literature since Antiquity   854 List of Authors  Index 

 881

 879

Peter Hühn, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid

Introduction: Towards a Diachronic Narratology 1 Why Diachronic Narratology? Classical narratology from the 1950s up to the 1980s was focused on identifying the formal properties, categorial distinctions, and taxonomies peculiar to narrative. While this approach brought welcome theoretical rigor to the analysis of narrative structures in their specificity, it increasingly came to be seen as decontextualizing narratives from their cultural setting and eluding questions crucial to their historical evolution. In the late 1980s, there thus began to emerge a transformation of the structural paradigm into the pluralistic “new narratologies” that coalesced around “postclassical narratology” (Herman 1999), later apostrophized as “hyphenated narratologies” and ordered into an eight-part typology (Nünning and Nünning 2002). Among the new narratologies, postcolonial narratology and feminist or gendered narratology gained particular prominence, for they pointed the way to a more culturally and historically aware form of narratological practice. The experience of the past twenty years, however, shows that the new approaches have not lived up to the demands of more precise text analysis due to their concentration on thematic and ideological concerns. In the new narratologies, even in their less ideological cognitive and reception-oriented forms, the historical development and cultural diversity of narrative have yet to be adequately explored. The aim of this Handbook of Diachronic Narratology is to take steps toward remedying this deficiency by examining the evolution of specific narrative devices within the framework of various cultures, periods, and genres. Each of the contributions to this handbook examine two or more narrative traditions within the context of two or more epochs of a given culture. Underlying this approach is the idea that narratology adopts a supracultural frame of reference. In contrast to intercultural approaches that situate narratological study “between” cultures, attending to “exchanges” between cultures, a supracultural narratology occupies a position “above” national cultures, literatures, and periods. In this way, narratology is better positioned to observe transhistorical regularities and developmental tendencies peculiar to narratives in their culture-specific manifestations and evolutions. Such a narratology, being both diachronic and supracultural, may well produce findings that will draw the attention of specialists in cultural studies (Kulturwissenschaften). However, this narratology will maintain a disciplinary autonomy, spechttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-001

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ificity, and attention to detail that are lacking in the expansive concept of culture embraced by cultural studies. Motivation is one example of a narratological concept that is of potential interest for specialists in cultural studies. An eminently culture-sensitive phenomenon such as this enables us to take stock of the mindset that prevails during a particular period and how it develops in various national and historical contexts. Thus, in periods such as the Christian Middle Ages, where expectations of divine salvation and teleological thinking are prominent, structuring techniques such as “motivation from behind” or “final motivation” tend to stand out. In modernism, which is critical of realism, the motivations of realist fiction become intertwined with elements of mythical motivation. The avant-garde after modernism, by contrast, celebrates unconventional rules of motivation that question and destabilize the norms of realist fiction.

2 The Heuristic Starting Point Little is known as yet about the historical development of the categories and principles that modern narratology, in its synchronic bias, uncritically takes to be universal and valid for narratives throughout the ages. To be sure, narratological studies of works prior to the modern period have been undertaken, but the time now seems ripe to address questions that can be most profitably approached through a properly diachronic narratology in response to Monika Fludernik’s call (2003) for the “diachronization of narratology.” Starting from which period was the narrator perceived as an entity separate from the author, and how did this distinction evolve in the various national literatures? When did techniques for the representation of consciousness through the mixing of narrator voice and character voice, such as free indirect discourse, emerge, and how are these techniques conditioned over time by the grammatical and stylistic markers of one language or another? How is the gradual movement from sacred to secular worldview from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century reflected in the form and function of narrative sequence in the Romance literatures? These are but some of the questions addressed by the contributions to this handbook, and a mere taste of the many dimensions of a more comprehensive diachronic narratology that remain to be explored by future scholarship. In contrast to historical narratology, which examines narratives and narrative devices synchronically within their specific historical and social contexts (von Contzen and Tilg 2019), diachronic narratology is interested in the historical emergence and evolution of devices and techniques in selected corpuses. While historical narratology draws attention to the unstable dividing line between author

Introduction: Towards a Diachronic Narratology 

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and narrator in a tale by Chaucer or between external and internal focalization in a Homeric epic (as shown by von Contzen und Tilg in their contribution to this volume), diachronic narratology will view such cases as individual instances within a series of narratives in their historical development. The handbook contains no entries that are devoted entirely to genres such as the Greek novel or the Renaissance novella. The emphasis remains on narrative techniques and devices in their historical evolution, referring to genre only when textual phenomena can be adequately examined in the light of generic considerations.

3 The Design of the Handbook When in early 2018 the editors of this handbook sent invitations to narratologists to participate in the undertaking, not everyone accepted. One reason for this was that some had never before worked on diachronic aspects of narrative. The difficulty of the task, which was new to many, was also evident in the fact that about one third of the contributions originally proposed were never submitted. To complicate things further, a number of withdrawals were brought about by the public health crisis that swept across the globe while the book was under preparation, leaving little time for finding suitable replacements. These circumstances lie behind a number of the gaps that readers are sure to find in this handbook. On the other hand, it was never the aim of the editors to achieve a comprehensive coverage of a subject so vast as diachronic narratology. Nevertheless, the handbook offers a wide spectrum of exploratory studies bearing on specific and clearly defined narrative techniques and devices as they have developed in various national traditions across different periods. This, it is hoped, will provide an attractive framework for further research in the burgeoning field of diachronic narratology.

4 The Structure of the Entries In exploring the diachronic dimension of narrative techniques, the individual entries proceed in the following manner. Each entry focuses on one particular narratological category, offers a succinct working definition, and applies this definition to the practical analysis of concrete examples from one particular culture and language and from two different periods. In accordance with the explorative design of the handbook, the individual entries refrain from entering into extensive discussions of the conceptual history of the narratological terms in question,

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and they also refrain from presenting an overview of previous research on the literary examples drawn on. The particular definition of the respective category is always the author’s own and may differ partly from other approaches. For reasons of space, primary sources are generally cited by author and/or title only. Quotations from literary works in languages other than English are translated into English. The original is quoted in addition to the English translation only if the wording itself is relevant for the argumentation. Own translations are marked by an asterisk.

References Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “The Diachronization of Narratology.” Narrative 11, no. 3, 331–348. Herman, David. 1999. “Introduction: Narratologies.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, 1–30. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. 2002. “Von der strukturalistischen Narratologie zur ‘postklassischen’ Erzähltheorie: Ein Überblick über neue Ansätze und Entwicklungstendenzen.” In Neue Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie, edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, 1–33. Trier: WVT. von Contzen, Eva, and Stefan Tilg. 2019. “Einleitung.” In Handbuch Historische Narratologie, edited by Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg, vii–x. Stuttgart: Metzler.

Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg

Two Handbooks – Two Concepts? On “Diachronic” and “Historical” Narratology In this short addition to the introduction, we take the opportunity, kindly provided to us by the editors, to reflect on the relation of the Handbook of Diachronic Narratology (HDN) to our own recent Handbuch Historische Narratologie (HHN). The titles of the two handbooks bear a clear resemblance. Nonetheless, the respective adjectives‚ “diachronic” vs. “historical,” also suggest a difference. Although the two words may be used synonymously in some cases, “diachronic” puts emphasis on the idea of a development in time, while “historical” foregrounds the idea of a setting in the past. Starting from this observation and from a review of the research field, we distinguished in our introduction to HHN two major strands of narrative theory with an interest in older texts: “diachronic” and “historical” narratology. Diachronic narratologists would typically examine the development of narratological categories such as “narrator” or “focalization” through time, from antiquity to postmodernism, for example. Moreover, the diachronic approach would usually see these categories as universals: their cultural framing and their historical manifestation may differ, but as elementary principles of narrative they work in all historical contexts. Monika Fludernik’s well-known manifesto (2003a) about the “Diachronization of Narratology” is a good example of this approach. Historical narratologists, by contrast, would typically be interested in how the historical and cultural setting of a given narrative relates to its principles of construction. The historical approach would not a priori posit that modern narratological categories are applicable to premodern texts and would be more inclined to look at alternative frames of reference such as ancient rhetoric or poetics. In the general sense of explaining narrative with reference to its historical context, this approach has, of course, long been practiced before and beside narratology. The approach became more specifically narratological, however, in the early years of the twenty-first century, when scholars from the older philologies, after an initial enthusiasm for modern narratology, started to question its validity for their disciplines. Pride of place here belongs to the field of Medieval German Studies, which remains at the center of debate about historical narratology. The volume edited by Harald Haferland and Matthias Meyer, Historische Narratologie: Mediävistische Perspektiven (2010), was the first widely heard rallying call and is still a fine point of reference. Returning to the two handbooks, their titles are not coincidental. HHN, leaning toward historical narratology, was a project by scholars from the premodern phihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-002

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lologies promoting a reassessment of narratology with a view to their historical material. HDN, leaning toward diachronic narratology, is a project by scholars with a background mainly in modern literature and theory and promoting an expansion of narratology back in time. That being said, the difference should not be exaggerated. Ultimately, convergence and complementarity prevail. Historical narratologists, even if they end up rejecting concepts from modern narratology, cannot but take their cue from these concepts at the outset. Conversely, classical narratologists will be more ready to rethink narratological categories when they start to consider their historical situatedness. On a practical level, it should also be noted that there is no such thing as a “purely historical” and a “purely diachronic” approach. The core section of HHN, after all, relies on the established narratological categories (e.g., perspective, time, plot) in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period. A chapter on perspective in antiquity, for instance, is followed by chapters on perspective in the Middle Ages and perspective in the early modern period. While we do not focus on developments across these periods, this chapter structure invites comparison and diachronic observations. In addition, we could not, and did not wish to, avoid the inclusion in HHN of contributions that, rather than fundamentally challenging modern narratological categories, happily worked with them to tease out particular historical configurations. Some categories also offer themselves more readily for historical re-evaluation than others. The presence or absence of a narrator in antiquity, for instance, is much more contested than the functions of temporal categories. HDN, by (mostly) dealing with at least two periods in the same chapter, follows a different rationale, but nonetheless arrives at a host of results relating to the situatedness of texts in a given historical context. Apart from these inherent relations between “historical” and “diachronical” viewpoints, the terms themselves are also often mixed in scholarship. Monika Fludernik, in “The Diachronization of Narratology,” for instance, speaks of “the historical approach to narrative” (2003a, 332), by which she means tracing the development of genres and narrative forms, such as the development from the verse epic to the novel or the history of the genre of romance in its different manifestations over time. In another much-quoted early call to historicizing narratology, Ansgar Nünning uses the term “historical narratology” when he outlines an approach that is diachronic (2000). Recently, Lukas Werner has suggested differentiating between three foci within what he calls “historical narratology”: a focus on context and contextualization, a focus on the history of form, and a focus on the history of theory. Nünning’s agenda, with its emphasis on the cultural embedding of any historicizing narratological approach, would be an example of the first kind. Werner adduces Fludernik’s approach as an example of the second kind, since she is interested in tracing individual narrative features such

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as metanarrative commentary. Approaches that describe the history of narrative theory, that is, metatheoretical approaches, exemplify the third focus. Werner further opens up a distinction between “revisionist,” “affirmative,” and “complementary” approaches, depending on their relationship to narratology and its established categories. While these categories are helpful in discerning someone’s stance toward narratology, they complicate the terms “historical” and “diachronic” narratology by opening up yet another framework for describing what narratological approaches to premodern texts do. Once again, it is within Medieval German Studies that we find the greatest consistency. Here, historical narratology has become established as the term of choice for describing approaches that highlight period-specific parameters of narrative. With its distinctive research interests, both HDN and HHN will hopefully contribute to establishing a general sensitivity toward the respective research interests that distinguish historical narratological from diachronic narratological ones. This would certainly help to avoid misconceptions and lead to greater clarity in mapping out the aims of narratological research – especially since the two foci are closely linked and can undoubtedly profit from each other. Even more importantly, we hope that both diachronic and historical narratology will acquire greater importance and visibility in mainstream narratology, which to date remains predominantly modern or postmodern in its choice of material (see von Contzen 2018a). What is of paramount importance to us in this context is our firm understanding to retain the core terminology of narratology. Of course, a nuanced historical approach to narrative in premodern contexts may result in adapting the terminology. Yet it seems to counter the very idea of narratology to replace its established terminology with something else entirely (see Bleumer 2015 for an attempt in this direction). The shared set of concepts, including narrator, perspective, plot, character, and so forth, are the heart of narratology and have contributed immensely to the fact that narrative theorists can communicate their ideas on very different texts and contexts. The terminology of narratology is its lingua franca: even if historical narratologists may adjust or discard certain terms for certain contexts, the benchmark for our ongoing debate remains the terminology that classical and postclassical narratology have established. Just as all roads lead to Rome, we think that all approaches to diachronic and historical narratology can contribute to a deeper understanding of narrative. In our view, this is of greater import than disputes over terminology and methodology, not only but especially when we are addressing a larger interdisciplinary audience. To illustrate this point, we would like to conclude with two examples, one from antiquity and one from the medieval period. In each case, we take a well-known narrative text, present both diachronically and historically oriented analyses, and consider their respective values.

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1 Penelope in the Odyssey The Odyssey is a classic text not only of world literature but also for narratologists, who frequently test their concepts on it. Rather than such a deductive approach, however, we here follow an inductive one: we take a particular passage/problem from the second half of the epic and ask how various narratological analyses help us better understand the narrative. The problem is almost as classic as the text itself: why does Penelope in book 18, although signs of Odysseus’s return are increasing, suddenly announce to the suitors that she will remarry? In her address to the suitors (18.250–280), Penelope first fondly remembers Odysseus and quotes the instructions that he allegedly gave her before departing for Troy: if he does not return before their son, Telemachus, grows his first beard, she will give up on him and remarry. The time has now come and Penelope makes this known, though vaguely and unwillingly: “So he [Odysseus] spoke, and now all this is being brought to pass. The night shall come when a hateful marriage shall fall to the lot of me accursed” (18.271–273; trans. from the Loeb edition by Murray and Dimock). In the final part of her speech, Penelope goes on to express her disappointment in the suitors who have failed to bring her presents and have even lived on her fortune: Those who wish to woo a lady of worth and the daughter of a rich man and vie with one another, these themselves bring cattle and fat sheep, a banquet for the friends of the bride, and give to her glorious gifts; they do not devour the livelihood of another without atonement. (18.276–280)

The suitors understand the implication perfectly well and will shower Penelope with offerings soon. Before that, however, and immediately after Penelope’s speech, we hear the reaction from Odysseus, who witnessed the scene incognito: “So she spoke, and much-enduring noble Odysseus was glad, because she drew from them gifts, and beguiled their souls with winning words, but her mind was set on other things” (18.281–283). Nothing in the text prepares us for Penelope’s seeming change of mind, nor do we get any further information about Odysseus’s interpretation. The latter implies some ruse on Penelope’s part, but we know neither whether Odysseus is right nor what the exact nature of the ruse might be: does it refer to the very decision to remarry, or just to the fact that Penelope wants to sell herself to the highest bidder? The problem runs deep and will not be definitively resolved by narratology. A number of narratological approaches by classicists, however, have shed light on the passage and expanded our ideas about Homer’s narrative principles. Irene de Jong made herself a reputation for adopting structuralist narratology (mainly in the form developed by her teacher, Mieke Bal) early on and successfully

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applying it to classical texts. She represents diachronic narratology in an almost pure form that easily moves back and forth in history, presenting Homer in the same way as the authors of modern novels. Her best-known area of specialization is focalization (roughly in Bal’s definition). Unsurprisingly, then, she discusses our passage in related terms (1994; 2001, 449–451). De Jong analyses Odysseus’s reaction to Penelope’s speech as an instance of “embedded focalization”: the perception of a character (Odysseus) is embedded in narrator speech (“So she spoke, and much-enduring noble Odysseus was glad, because [.  .  .]”). The larger assumption is that Homer, far from being a primitive narrator, is just as capable of zooming in and out of characters’ minds as the authors of modern novels. Focalization is an essential part of his (modern, novel-like, masterful) narrative art; hence, he never focalizes without a reason. In our case, the fact that the phrase “her mind was set on other things” forms part of Odysseus’s focalization would not only signal that Penelope really has something up her sleeve (otherwise, Homer would confuse his audience, which, as a consistent and purposeful narrator, he never does), but also that her deceit has to do with Odysseus, or more precisely with his advice that Penelope has just quoted to the suitors. De Jong’s conclusion is that Penelope invented Odysseus’s advice, and that this is precisely her ruse, appreciated by the ever-cunning Odysseus. Penelope, for other reasons, is still serious about remarriage, but she wants to sell herself to the highest bidder. De Jong’s specific interpretation of Odysseus’s focalization may be disputed, but what matters here is simply that narratological assumptions shape a larger reading. We get a modern Homer who employs focalization in a sophisticated manner. Wolfgang Kullmann’s study of “hidden thoughts” in ancient literature (2002) includes a direct response to de Jong in a historical-narratological spirit. Kullmann argues that modern structuralist narratology, developed on the basis of the modern novel, is not always suitable for the analysis of ancient narrative because it neglects historical and cognitive anthropological dimensions. All in all, Kullmann paints a more “primitive” Homer who did not regularly make psychological and narratological distinctions dear to later periods. Regarding de Jong’s focalization, for instance, Kullmann is skeptical as to whether Homer clearly distinguishes “embedded” perspectives of a character from the perspective of the author/narrator. Taking the example of the recognition of Odysseus by his wet nurse Eurykleia in 19.399–466, he shows that what has been termed Eurykleia’s “mental flashback” by de Jong is rather an entangled composite of narrator and character perspective in the sense that the narrator partly focuses on facts with particular relevance to the character. Focalization, Kullmann concludes, does not always seem to work in modern ways, and perhaps the term should be avoided entirely. As far as our Penelope passage is concerned, Kullmann accounts for the curious lack of motivation by the – from a modern viewpoint “limited,” but we could also say “different” – narrative means at

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Homer’s disposal: the only extensive way he had of representing “hidden thoughts” was silent monologues (e.g., speaking “to one’s heart”). Two other options, indirect speech and “embedded focalization,” are typically short and simple, with the latter usually comprising a single word or a sentence. The only way of showing more of Penelope’s (or Odysseus’s) thoughts, then, would have been Homer’s variant of the interior monologue, which, according to Kullmann, would have been too cumbersome at this moment of suspense. And it is precisely suspense that Homer gains by the lack of motivation. The audience is referred to the continuation of the plot, from which it may gather Penelope’s real intentions (which, in Kullmann’s reading, never were to remarry). In a way, Kullmann’s reading could be paraphrased as “plot beats psychology.” Jonas Grethlein’s paper (2018) on the Penelope problem works with the same idea but gives it a different twist and a more programmatic frame. If Kullmann argues at least in part that Homer could not represent Penelope’s thoughts, Grethlein emphasizes that he would not. While he would have been perfectly able to do so, he chose not to because he followed a narrative protocol very different from that of the modern novel. Not only does Homer privilege plot over characters and their minds, but plot itself is constructed radically differently. Spelling out his argument, Grethlein embraces the basic ideas of Clemens Lugowski’s monograph Die Form der Individualität im Roman (1932) and adapts them for Homer and antiquity. Lugowski explores the narrative logic of medieval and early modern storytelling and details a number of stark contrasts with modern ideals about the motivation of plot. Most important is the concept of “retroactive motivation” (Motivation von hinten), according to which the plot is motivated by its known or desired ending rather than by a coherent series of causes and effects. Mapped onto Homer, this means that Homer simply does not care about a consistent motivation of our scene. He needs it to drive the plot, leading up to the contest of the bow in which a suitor should be picked, and ultimately to the recognition of Odysseus. Homer’s audience would have regarded this not as a problem or a narrative weakness (in fact, we do not know of any such complaint in antiquity) but as a valid device for bringing plots to an end. In fact, the apparent lack of motivation would even have generated suspense in an otherwise well-known mythological story (again, this accords with Kullmann’s reading). People knew how the story of Odysseus and Penelope ends, but they could have been surprised with retardations and unexpected turns such as Penelope’s change of mind: how is she going to be reunited with Odysseus if she now wants to marry one of the suitors? Thus, Homer may be seen as part of a larger tradition of premodern narrative, the plots of which are either known from mythology or stereotypical enough to anticipate the eventual outcome. On these conditions, how a story is told matters more than what is told. Penelope’s mysterious move would be a striking instance of that how.

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2 Chaucer and the Author/Narrator Debate Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, is clearly the most famous poet of the later medieval period writing in Middle English. A contested issue in Chaucer criticism has been the question of how to distinguish between Chaucer the poet and the characters he creates, who in turn tell their stories – including, possibly, the fiction of Chaucer’s own participation in the pilgrimage. All medieval and early modern readers of Chaucer unequivocally talk about Chaucer as the (only) instance responsible for the works. This does not mean that they did not discuss the various characters and tellers he created, yet for centuries, Chaucer criticism could do without the concept of a narrator. Only in the mid-twentieth century, spurred by trends in literary studies, was the narrator introduced. The Chaucer scholar E. Talbot Donaldson marked the turning point: he made a distinction between the historical Chaucer, who, as the surviving records tell us, was a civil servant and political figure; Chaucer the poet, who emerges as a poet only through his works; and Chaucer the pilgrim, the fictional character of the Canterbury Tales. According to Donaldson, Chaucer is all of these: using the device of the persona or mask, “the several Chaucers must have inhabited one body, and in that sense the fictional first person is no fiction at all. In an oral tradition of literature, the first person probably always shared the personality of his creator” (1954, 935). Donaldson maintains that in a setting of oral delivery by Chaucer himself, the audience would obviously have attributed everything that was being read to Chaucer himself, who impersonated the different roles. Later scholars, however, changed Donaldson’s terminology silently so that the author putting on a mask became an entity in its own right: the narrator. Thus, R. M. Lumiansky distinguished sharply between the author Chaucer and his pilgrimpersona, the narrator, who is “a separate person from Chaucer the author of the Tales” (1955, 53). From the mid-twentieth century on, then, Chaucer criticism has been governed by the principle of keeping author and narrator(s) separate. Historical narratology, by focusing on the realities of the production and reception of medieval literature, not only draws attention to this issue but also provides further evidence against the narrator-thesis and, in doing so, offers a fresh perspective on metalepsis. Looking more closely at Chaucer’s works, we can see that for him, as for his audience, the distinction between the different levels of the narrative we, as a modern audience, are accustomed to does not hold. “Levels” refers to the distinction commonly made in narratological models of narrative communication: the “realworld” audience on the outside which is addressed through the narrator(s), who in turn communicate the characters’ discourse. In medieval literature, this elaborate model of communication does not apply. “Chaucer says X” is frequently used in con-

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texts where we would expect a character to be the speaker, or rather the ascription of a passage to a character. For instance, several marginalia in manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales mark what is clearly a character’s direct speech as the author’s, using the Latin term auctor. In her discussion of these marginalia, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton notes that “the auctor is often conflated with the narrator wherever a vocative (or an apostrophe, rhetorically speaking) appears” (2012, 212). However, it is questionable whether these cases are indeed “conflations.” Rather, they point to a literary practice that is predicated on a different idea of authorship and textual authority. Across medieval literature, we oftentimes find passages where narrative levels are transgressed, forming metalepses. There are at least two prominent kinds of such conflations of narrative levels: sometimes the author may interfere in the narrative, even though he is not part of the narrated world; and sometimes a character may break out of his or her narrative situation and address the audience. The “conflation” of levels in the first sense is especially strong in those parts of narrative texts that do not contribute significantly to the development of the plot, such as in ekphrastic passages. In the extended description of images and engravings, the author enters the intradiegetic world by means of the first person. A striking example can be found in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” (see von Contzen 2018b). The “Knight’s Tale” (KnT) opens the Canterbury Tales: befitting the nobility of its teller, it is a story of epic and tragic scope centered on the two knights Arcite and Palamon, who have both desperately fallen in love with Emely, Theseus’s beautiful sister-in-law. In order to determine who is worthy of marrying Emely, Theseus has a grand amphitheater built in which the two knights and their men assemble for the decisive fight. This theater features three temples, devoted to Mars, Diana, and Venus, respectively (KnT 1902–1913). Each of them is described in great detail. The descriptions are characterized by an increasing sense of immersion on the teller’s part. The teller – the Knight, one would assume – is quite overt throughout the tale, frequently coming to the fore in brief interjections and comments that punctuate his telling. Yet in the extended ekphrasis of the temples, the teller’s involvement in the narrative intensifies to the extent that he imagines himself being present in the temples. For instance, in the temple of Mars: “There saugh I first the derke ymaginyng / Of Felony” (There I saw first the malicious plotting / of Felony; KnT 995–1996); “The sleere of hymself yet saugh I ther” (✶The slayer of himself yet saw I there; KnT 2005); “Yet saugh I Woodnesse, laughynge in his rage” (✶Yet I saw Madness, laughing in his rage; KnT 2011). The frequency of these authorial intrusions becomes even greater in the description of the third and last temple, that of Diana. In the end, it has become almost impossible to keep track of who is talking now on what narrative level. Are we hearing the Knight’s voice, and do we imagine him standing in the temple? Or is it Chaucer the pilgrim who is responsible for recounting the frame in which the “Knight’s Tale” is embedded?

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While modern narrative theory prompts us to posit a narrator and assume the existence of different narrative layers and levels, it is possible from a historical narratological perspective to challenge this approach and argue that it is both unnecessarily complex and an imposition on the actual narrative practice medieval authors and their audiences were engaged in. To claim that in the example of Chaucer, the Knight-as-narrator, who tells the story, steps into his (heterodiegetic) narrative, while the Knight is part of Chaucer-the-pilgrim’s narrative, who in turn is a narrator figure deliberately set up by Chaucer the real man, runs counter to Ockham’s razor. Following the lead of the marginalia, for a medieval audience, we can argue that it was Chaucer’s voice all the way through: he impersonates the Knight and imagines the images he describes as if he were standing right in front of them. What counts is that the immersive effect is heightened, not that a presumed idea of neatly separate narrative levels applies. The historical narratological approach thus highlights a distinctive feature of medieval narrative and thereby challenges our understanding of both metalepsis and the author/narrator distinction. Evidence from the Middle Ages suggests that narratives do not require the stance of a narrator that “communicates” between text and audience. Also, switches between different levels of the narration, since they can be ascribed to the author, do not break the illusion of the narrative, but heighten it. From a diachronic narratological perspective, the non-transgressive, non-illusion-breaking function of metalepsis and its links to the author are relevant primarily because they shed new light on the development of metalepsis. For a long time, metaleptic transgressions were seen as a feature of modern and especially postmodern literature. Narratologists have challenged this view. Monika Fludernik, for instance, has demonstrated that metalepses occurred in earlier periods of literary history (in her corpus, mainly in connection with scene shifts) and that they are not necessarily anti-illusionistic (2003b). Cases such as the ones we have found in the “Knight’s Tale” (which also occur elsewhere, not only in Chaucer but also in other medieval narratives) may thus provide further evidence of a change in the uses and functions of metalepsis: from an unmarked feature that creates illusion to a marked feature of breaking it. The fact that a very similar argument has also been made with respect to ancient literature (see de Jong 2009) further demonstrates the validity of the argument and stresses once again the need for a historically sensitive narratological approach. The readings presented above would merit further discussion, especially if we were to enter into a debate about whether they are “right” or “wrong.” But this is not our concern here. Our aim is to show on a more general level that both diachronic and historical approaches have their value. It is fair to apply modern concepts of focalization and mind-reading to Homer because they add interpretative options

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and establish a basic level of comparability. At the same time, historical contextualization helps us understand that this cannot be the full story and that narratological principles outside our established system may be at work. Chaucer may speak directly to his audience and not require the concept of a narrator. But it is only the idea of a narrator which, combined with a historical-narratological analysis, throws Chaucer’s characteristic authorial metalepsis into relief and leads to a better understanding of metalepsis as a feature of narrative texts. Having both perspectives enables us to ponder individual passages and the general narrative make-up in novel ways. One could object that we must take a stance at some point, and we certainly will in more specific contexts. In general, however, we think that tensions between the approaches (of which the diachronic and the historical as described above are just extremes in a broad gamut) are not only inevitable but also welcome and productive. They stimulate reflection on narratological concepts and eventually lead to a richer understanding of narrative. We hope that the present Handbook will be the next step in carving out a shared research field, and we look forward to further narratological work on both modern and historical Homers and Chaucers.

References Bleumer, Hartmut. 2015. “Historische Narratologie.” In Literatur- und Kulturtheorien in der Germanistischen Mediävistik: Ein Handbuch, edited by Christiane Ackermann and Michael Egerding, 213–274. Berlin: De Gruyter. de Jong, Irene. 1994. “Between Word and Deed: Hidden Thoughts in the Odyssey.” In Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature, edited by Irene de Jong and John P. Sullivan, 27–50. Leiden: Brill. de Jong, Irene. 2001. A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Jong, Irene. 2009. “Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature.” In Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, edited by Jonas Grethlein and Antonios Rengakos, 87–115. Berlin: De Gruyter. Donaldson, E. Talbot. 1954. “Chaucer the Pilgrim.” PMLA 69:928–936. Fludernik, Monika. 2003a. “The Diachronization of Narratology.” Narrative 11, no. 3, 331–348. Fludernik, Monika. 2003b. “Scene Shifts, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode.” Style 37, no. 4, 382–400. Grethlein, Jonas. 2018. “Homeric Motivation and Modern Narratology.” Cambridge Classical Journal 64:70–90. Haferland, Harald, and Matthias Meyer, eds. 2010. Historische Narratologie: Mediävistische Perspektiven. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. 2012. “Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors and Correctors in Middle English Literary Texts.” In Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual

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Approaches, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, 207–244. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kullmann, Wolfgang. 2002. “Die Darstellung verborgener Gedanken in der antiken Literatur.” In Realität, Imagination und Theorie: Kleine Schriften zu Epos und Tragödie in der Antike, edited by Antonios Rengakos, 177–205. Stuttgart: Steiner. Lumiansky, Robert M. 1955. Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lugowski, Clemens. 1932. Die Form der Individualität im Roman. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt. Nünning, Ansgar. 2000. “Towards a Cultural and Historical Narratology: A Survey of Diachronic Approaches, Concepts, and Research Projects.” In Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings, edited by Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts, 345–373. Trier: WVT. von Contzen, Eva. 2018a. “Diachrone Narratologie und historische Erzählforschung: Eine Bestandsaufnahme und ein Plädoyer.” Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung 1:18–38. von Contzen, Eva. 2018b. “Narrative and Experience in Medieval Literature: Author, Narrator, and Character Revisited.” In Narratologie und mittelalterliches Erzählen: Autor, Erzähler, Perspektive, Zeit und Raum, edited by Eva von Contzen and Florian Kragl, 61–80. Berlin: De Gruyter. von Contzen, Eva, and Stefan Tilg, eds. 2019. Handbuch Historische Narratologie. Stuttgart: Metzler. Werner, Lukas. 2018. Erzählte Zeiten im Roman der Frühen Neuzeit: Eine historische Narratologie der Zeit. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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First-Person Narration in Ancient Greek and Modern English Literature 1 Definition The term first-person singular designates a grammatically marked subject position, the “I” of discourse. This grammatical expression of “I” is typically assumed to index an individual person in the narrated world. The deictic “I” is then, by convention, linked to a mimetically natural individual, with human limitations of knowledge and perspective. Nevertheless, I-narration often violates mimetic norms because there is no necessary connection between the “I” and a normative human figure. Violations by paraleptic, metaleptic, collective, and supernatural narrators have varying effects on audiences; to emphasize the significance of shifting conventions of I-narration, the chapter focuses its analysis on types of I-narration that appear antimimetic. First-person narration includes texts narrated entirely by an I-narrator as well as those in which an I-narrator is a dominant extradiegetic speaker (e.g., in multiple-narrator novels). Cases of embedded (intradiegetic) I-narration are excluded, except when they are especially extended (e.g., Odysseus’s narration in Odyssey). Certain ancient Greek poetic texts are included because of their narrative significance in their original contexts. In order to highlight the broad historical shifts of conventions regarding I-narration, ancient Greek and modern English texts are counterpointed with I-narration in the early English novel, when the mimetic norms of the first person became firmly established. Listed below are a set of variables involved in I-narration. Any of these variables may shift within a single text, with effects depending on the norms and expectations of a particular audience in its historical and geographical situatedness: – World: is the narrator physically part of the storyworld? This corresponds to Genette’s distinction between homodiegesis and heterodiegesis ([1972] 1980). – Framing: Is the narrator’s telling framed by the telling of another? This corresponds to Genette’s distinction between intradiegetic, extradiegetic, and metadiegetic ([1972] 1980). – Centrality: how central is the narrator to the story – is it his/her own story or someone else’s? Centrality is related to Genette’s “autodiegetic” ([1972] 1980), but places it on a continuum. – Number: how many narrators are there?

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Presence: how “present” or intrusive is the narrating-I in the telling? High presence increases personalization and creates an “authorial” effect in the narrative voice (Stanzel [1955] 1971, [1979] 1984). Narratee: does the narrator address a concrete narratee? Both “presence” and “narratee” can relate to the “self-consciousness” of a narrator (Sternberg 2005). Reliability: does the narrator manifest unreliability in reporting, evaluating, and/or judging? Tense: what is the primary tense in which the story is told? Present tense increases “homodiegeticization” (Genette [1983] 1988, 83), while retrospective past tense allows greater distinction between the narrating-I and narrated-I. Emphasis: is the emphasis on the narrating-I (the telling) or the narrated-I (the told)? Fictionality: is the narrative expressly fictional, nonfictional, mixed? (Some narratives may predate this distinction.) Relation to author: are author and narrator identical, detached, or “equivocal” (Lanser 2005)? Mimesis: is the narrator mimetically human? Consider the following: – Singularity: is the narrator an individual or a plural collective? – Knowledge: is the narrator’s knowledge limited by mimetic human factors? – Humanness: is the narrator human, animal, object? – Life: is the narrator alive, not yet born, beyond the grave?

This framework recognizes that the “narrator” is always a textual construction. No technique has a single necessary effect, and techniques intersect in various ways.

2 Ancient Greek Narrative Literature: From Homer to the Second Sophistic Ancient Greek Narrative Literature is a diverse category, covering a variety of genres over a period of roughly a thousand years. Distinctions, e.g., between fiction and nonfiction or between verse and prose, were still emerging or even antithetical to our own (Whitmarsh 2013). Further, some texts considered here are the artifacts of multimedial, sensory events, born of specific ritual, social, and aesthetic contexts; they remain only as fragmentary selections, transcribed centuries after their initial performance. Two interrelated issues, narrative authority and performativity, complicate mimetic models of first-person narration. Ancient Greek narrative norms predate the modern distinction between narrator and author, using the authority of a speaking author to ground the text. Greek audiences assumed that the “I” refers

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to the biographical author, not a narrator, even when this would seem absurd from a modern perspective (e.g., in fiction or drama). The sense of a real author’s accessibility comes from the fact that even written texts followed the performative conventions that were dominant at the time (Whitmarsh 2013, 63–74). Such texts also often appeal to a divine source of authority and authorship: the Muses. Despite the divinity of the Muses, other narrators could compete for authority over narrative texts (Liapis 2017), as when a character-narrator claims a superior vantage point. These considerations destabilize the “I” as the stable, singular origin of the discourse because the pronoun and the voice can variously capture different entities (Calame 2005, 2017). Tensions regarding narrative authority are most evident in the authorial “bardic narrator,” which complicates the narration in ways that involve several variables listed above: world, framing, centrality, number, presence, reliability, fictionality, relation to author, and mimesis. The performative dimension of many ancient Greek texts further multiplies the referentiality of the “I”: it can point both to a speaker in the storyworld and to a performing speaker (strict divisions between oral and written media are discouraged; Bakker 2017, 2). “Performance” for ancient Greek literature means that a narrative may literally involve a face-to-face interaction with a real speaker and a real audience in real time in the real world or that it may represent or draw on such a context – a kind of performative conceit. The seemingly straightforward indexical “I” simultaneously belongs to the authorial voice and to a performing voice (Bakker 2009) as well as to a character (Calame 2017, 342). Further,  reperformance(s) – literal and textualized, diachronic and transmedial – further multiply the indexical attachments of the “I” (e.g., Uhlig 2017). Performative narratives, especially those with a choral narrator, involve unusual configurations of world, number, presence, reliability, tense, fictionality (Horstmann 2018), relation to author, and mimesis. There are five main types of I-narration in ancient Greek narrative literature.

2.1 The Bard The earliest examples of Greek I-narration come from the genre of Homeric epic with its bardic narrator. The Bard is a heterodiegetic, extradiegetic I-narrator who frames the story and evokes the oral and performative quality of ancient Greek narrative literature. The bardic I-narrator speaks at the opening of an epic poem, but he is almost entirely without characterization and reports the actions and words of the characters from an omniscient position as an observer at an extreme but privileged distance. His attachment is to the author and to the performing speaker, and his direct interactions on the level of story are marked as intrusive.

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Even though this narrator acts omniscient, his narrative authority and access to knowledge are problematized. The bardic narrators of the Iliad and the Odyssey offer an intrusive subjectivity that is aligned with both poet and rhapsodic performer, but that defers to the authority (and even narration) of the divine. That is, authorial as this voice is, in the proemial frame (Il.1.1–8; Od.1.1–10) the I-narrator overtly positions himself as merely the intermediary for narration of the divine. There is ambiguity about authorship (i.e., who controls the content, construction, and composition): the narrator both defers to divine authority, supplementing his own self-evaluated insufficiency with supernatural omniscience, and claims “I say” or “I will tell” and then proceeds to do so. The I-narrator’s presence is further heightened by intrusive moments, such as Muse-invocations, apostrophes, gnomic utterances, evaluative comments, and “if-not” situations (de Jong 2004b, 13–18). The Homeric narrator becomes increasingly personalized through these comments, which he interjects into the story in two ways. As teller, the narrator addresses in the second person a heterodiegetic narratee, whom he invites to agree with his judgments using hypotheticals such as “if you were there, you would have seen.” And speaking to characters on an intradiegetic level, he uses second-person apostrophe to comment on their actions, especially in moments of extreme pathos. These techniques reflect the oral-performative origins of the bardic narrator, but they also deliberately create a metanarrative and metaperformative effect (Klooster 2013, 158). Bardic narratives also contain significant embedded character-narration, none more extreme than that of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. The bardic framing I-narrator periodically cedes “control” to Odysseus, who himself as intradiegetic I-narrator appropriates the distinctly literary identity of the Homeric bard, commenting on his own composition and performance. He notes constraints on his narratorial capacities like limited time or cognitive capacity, with his eyewitness character-narration counterbalancing the divinely granted authority of the omniscient bardic narrator. Further, there is a metaleptic slippage between the two narrators’ interests, techniques, privileged knowledge, and identities. As the bardic narrator intrudes downward into the level of story at moments of extreme pathos (as in the Iliad), Odysseus’s narration (and unreliability) bleeds upward into the narration of the frame narrator (Bakker 2009). For example, in the proem of the epic poem, the narrator calls Odysseus’s companions νήπιοι (fools!) and attributes their deaths to their own hubris, greed, and gluttony (Od. 1.6–9). Then, nine books later, Odysseus begins his own narration, describing the same companions as νήπιοι (fools!; Od. 9.39–46). The use of the same word and sentiment merges the two narrators’ voices and judgments.

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A similar metalepsis between levels of authority takes place in the structure of the Odyssey. In the proem, the bardic narrator asks the goddess to tell the tale of “a man” who wandered on the sea, encountered many monsters, and suffered as he lost his companions. But instead, the bardic narrator’s story (the Odyssey) focuses on “a man” who went to war and came home to dispatch his wife’s suitors and restore his kingdom. The story that the bardic narrator requested from the Muse is restricted to Odysseus’s self-narration in books 9 through 12. In this way the bardic narrator’s request is fulfilled, but only as embedded backstory. In that backstory, Odysseus’s authority is further amplified by the power of his own voice, which transforms the omniscient narrator’s diegesis from within. The performative power of Odysseus’s telling, even as an embedded narrator, means that both narrators tell the Odyssey. The Homeric examples above, with their emphasis on orality and performance, occur early in the irregular historical shift from purely orally performed narratives to purely textual literary artifacts. Later Greek poets decentralize the bardic “I,” foregrounding their writtenness in the process. For example, the narrator of Callimachus’s  Aetia (third century BCE) is particularly complex and self-consciously literary but still defers to the Muses, who themselves appear as character-narrators for individual episodes (anticipating the multiplicity of the epistolary novel and the multi-narrator novel). The Muses thus remain mythically omniscient but are more humanized than the generic divinities of Homeric epic. As they engage in dialogue with the framing “I” of Callimachus, they also evoke the philosophical “I” of Plato as well as choral and dramatic performance (Harder 2004, 67–71; Morrison 2007, 178–199; Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2012, 173–176, 264–267). Reliability, singularity, number, knowledge, and authorial attachment are all called into question throughout the extant fragments of the Aetia.

2.2 The Teacher Among the earliest extant Greek texts are the didactic hexameter poems of Hesiod, a rough contemporary of Homer (mid- to late eighth century BCE). The fully realized intradiegetic autodiegetic narrator is yet to come, but Hesiod’s Theogony is the first of all surviving Greek texts to give its I-narrator a name – “Hesiod.” He begins speaking as “Hesiod the Poet” but recedes as he tells a broader history. Hesiod’s second poem, Works and Days, offers an “I” (again, “Hesiod”) who is characterized extensively and plays an active, internal role in the elaborated frame that occasions his recounting of didactic myths for his brother. The intrusive framing narrator of epic is reduced almost to the point of elimination (Nünlist 2004, 32; cf. Genette [1972] 1980, 240 on “pseudo-diegetic”). With its emphasis on Hesiod’s active telling, Works and Days offers rare examples of simultaneous narration in the present tense and

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an internal, characterized, and mimetically human narrator, marked by frequent interjections and apostrophe to an internal, mimetically human narratee. He nevertheless lapses into apparent omniscience and authorial, subsequent narration with transgeneric analepses (an etiological myth, an anthropological succession myth, and a fable) and a hymnic introductory frame that is left open at the end of the poem (Calame 2005 addresses the relationships between these narrative levels). In addition, the poem indicates an internal narratee (“Perses,” the brother of “Hesiod”) but, true to its didactic nature, consistently addresses a “you” more closely aligned with a reader or audience. Thus the indexical “I” is uniquely multiplied, manipulating many variables: world, centrality, narratee, presence, and tense.

2.3 The Philosopher In the fifth century BCE another didactic genre developed: the philosophical dialogue. While drama as such is beyond the scope of this chapter, the “I” of, most notably, Plato’s Socrates showcases the development from the more authorial persona of the didactic “I” to the fully realized experiential character-narrator of Greek prose fiction. In these dialogues, the “I” is not identified with the author Plato, but with his character Socrates in conversation with various interlocutors. This first-person “Socrates” is often removed from the author (or a hidden extradiegetic narrator) by several levels of narrative embedding (as in the Republic) and is sometimes himself a reporting narrator (as in the Symposium), yet he still presents as the central narrative figure when the Platonic corpus is taken as a whole. The philosophical narrator’s decreasing authorial attachment prefigures a true character-narrator – one who is at least superficially responsible for his own speech – by borrowing the performative conceit of drama and its multiple antagonistic “I”s. The five dialogues that employ this Socratic “I” create the illusion of “unmediated interaction with Socrates, whose narratorial presence is overt” (K. A. Morgan 2004, 361).

2.4 The Experiential Character-Narrator The experiential, intradiegetic character-narrator is a relatively late development emerging with the Greek novel in the first or second century CE. Even in Greek prose fiction, first-person narration is not conventional (at least as far as our extant evidence demonstrates), but by the late third century CE, a few examples prefigure the rise of first-person narration in the early English novel. Among the Greek novels, only one employs a first-person narrator throughout: Achilles Tatius’s Leukippe and Kleitophon. The work is roughly contemporary with

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other experimental I-narratives, including Lucian’s True Story, Petronius’s Satyricon, and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (the latter two in Latin). Leukippe and Kleitophon actually employs two I-narrators: the experiencing narrator is Kleitophon, who reports his first-hand account to an unnamed framing “I” whom he meets in an art gallery. This framing “I” is closely related to the bardic narrator (Romberg 1962, 34); he is absent from the central narrative and does not return, while Kleitophon’s I-narration takes over. In the opening frame Kleitophon comments on truth, lies, and storytelling. He guides the reader’s interpretation and signals his own limited ability as a teller of mythoi (stories), but at the same time, he is a self-created manipulator of character, action, and genre (J. Morgan 2007). Kleitophon superficially affords a psychological realism, an un-idealized and irreverently parodic distortion of the Greek romance’s genre conventions; yet the realism of Kleitophon’s I-narration is in part undercut by his self-characterization in the opening frame scene (Morales 2004, 48–60). Thus, we understand Kleitophon might be producing a fiction within the represented world of the novel, even though his I-narration seems to move toward that of a more novelistic homodiegetic/autodiegetic teller. Yet, as soon as the mimetic character-narrator is formed, the problem of the mimetic motivation of information emerges. As narrating-I, he paraliptically withholds information to create suspense or humor, foregrounding the “documentary provenance” of the account (J. Morgan 2007, 106–107). There are also moments of paralepsis – some later explained and some impossible (Heinze 2008) – as well as deliberately signaled fictionality, parody, and metatextual interpretation that expand the resources of first-person narration. These foreshadow its possibilities in twentieth-century novels, especially for unreliable narrators discussed in section 4.3 below (J. Morgan 2004, 493–502; 2007; Reardon 1994). There are tantalizing hints that such expansion of narrative possibilities is not unique to Achilles Tatius’s novel. In Greek, Lucian’s True Story is even more explicitly framed as a metanarrative that is as much about fictionality as it is a fiction. In Latin, Petronius’s Satyricon is narrated in the first person by Encolpius, who, like the later Kleitophon, uses the resources of storytelling and signaled fictionality to communicate as “hidden author” with the reader (J. Morgan 2007). The pseudo-historical letters of “Chion,” with their experiential “I,” might be categorized as the world’s first epistolary novel, exploiting “the persuasive and deceptive capabilities inherent in epistolary discourse” (Christy 2016, 263).

2.5 The Chorus The chorus as narrator is unique to the Greek context and draws on the expectations of performed narrative. Like the Bard, the Chorus is intensely self-referential

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and focused on the performativity of telling, but distinctively, it does not maintain its ontological position in an external frame. The choral “I” does not refer to a single, stable, human speaker. The “I” regularly vacillates between the historical composer, a singular chorus-leader, and the collective voice of the chorus, which in turn is often made up of non-exceptional and non-differentiated individuals, or even allegorical figures. The first-person choral narrator is often misunderstood because critics fail to distinguish the medium and function of choral performance from other types of narrative communication. A choral performance, like contemporary theater, involves immediacy between teller and audience. The narrator who says “I” is physically present before the narratee “you” on the level of external presentation. When that performance is rendered in text, the illusion of that immediacy remains, without its physical correlate. Further unique to Greek choral narration, the narrator who says “I” is not an anthropomorphic individual but a collective. This phenomenon is difficult to grasp for a modern reader. Today, a “voice” implies an embodied, anthropomorphic, singular individual. Who is speaking when a chorus says “I”? The choral use of the singular “I” diverges from the norms of pronominal deictics: the Chorus who says “I” cannot be squared with an individual speaker, and the choral “I” exists somewhere in the intersection between the choral collective, the community audience, and the poet’s persona. This enigma is at the heart of a long-running debate among classicists regarding whether the songs of, most notably, Pindar were composed for an initial monodic or choral performance. The debate “was not resolved but rather abandoned” (Rawles 2011, 147n20). Consider the following techniques of choral I-narration, which configure narrator variables in unique combinations: 1. Lyric subjectivity: the collective performer-narrator expresses or represents a subjectivity that, mimetically, could only be experienced by an embodied, human individual, e.g., erotic desire, sensory experience, or vision. In a fragment of a partheneion – a song for a chorus of young unmarried women – the choral narrator wails: “If only somehow I might know if she could love me! If only she would come near and take my soft hand!” (Alcman 3 PMGF, 79–80). This speaking voice evokes the individual, embodied experience of desire, yet it issues from a performance context that is public and plural, spoken by a group of choral performers whose subjectivity is both singular and plural. 2. Metanarration: the I-narrator comments on the act of composition or otherwise announces the text, metaleptically erupting upward from the level of story to the level of narration. This technique creates a similar effect to the narratorial intrusions of the Bard. It is common for the choral narrator to comment on the restraints on his own narration, such as limited time or cognitive capacity, or to

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refuse a line of narration based on a fear of impiety, inappropriateness, or other ethical concerns. In Pindar’s first Olympian, for example, the narrator begins a myth wherein the gods are tricked into eating human flesh, but then refuses to continue, claiming aporia on ethical grounds (“There is no way for me to call one of the blessed gods a glutton – I stand aside”; 52). Such metanarration lends a semblance of spontaneity to the text and therefore activates the memory of oral performance, yet this self-referentiality is especially jarring (for a modern reader) as it highlights the disjunction between choral narrator-performer and mimetic human voice. In this it manipulates tense and presence. It also suggests a lack of cognitive unity within that collective “I,” undermining mimetic norms. Meta-performance: the first-person narrator counterintuitively engages in simultaneous or retrospective self-narration. In the opening of Alcman 3 discussed above, the first-person narrator claims to be awoken by “the voice of girls singing a lovely song” (Alcman 3 PMGF, 4–5); yet she (one or many?) figures herself as representative of those very singing girls, who somehow already awakened her. At the same time, her self-narration is retrospective: she is actively engaged in the choreography that she describes in the future tense; “I will shake my shining locks” she says (9), as she (presumably) does just that in this very moment. It would be easy to dismiss this temporal distortion by reducing it to a feature of performed song recorded in text, but this would flatten the effect of the poem and its chorality. She – the choral “I” – is not a single, embodied individual with mimetic human limitations. Rather, she is the Chorus: timeless, iterative, multiple. She is always, already awakened; always, already dancing; always, already saying “I.” Indexical multiplication: usually in combination with meta-performative self-reference (see above), the collective narrator “I” displaces its own choral activity, moving in time and space, self-consciously associating a single, earthly iteration of the chorus with mythic, divine, and paradigmatic choruses. This is described as “choral projection” by Henrichs (1996) or simply “collapsing” by others; de Jong recognizes a subset that often occurs at the end of choral narratives, which she calls “fade-out” (2009, 106–113). Bacchylides’s fragment 17 and Pindar’s Fifth Nemean are two examples. Bacchylides’s fragment 17 contains a layering of ritual performance contexts; superficially, it was composed for a chorus of Keans to perform on Delos, but on the level of the story, it embeds two mythic choruses: a chorus of Nereids (seanymphs) and a chorus of Athenian youths who sing a paian to Apollo. The performing chorus of Keans, the textual narrator, and the mythic Athenian youths simultaneously cry out this prayer, layering at least three narrative levels, locations, and voices one over the other. In Pindar’s Fifth Nemean there are at least four narrative positions evoked, adding another mythic chorus to the already dense layering of referents for the “I.”

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Choral narration allows for temporal-referential iteration wherein the present chorus is figured as projecting choruses of the past and the future, as well as ventriloquizing choral paradigms, both mythic and mundane. It is a recurring feature of choral song that the Chorus’ voice overlaps the mythic and the real, the internal and the external, the animate and the manufactured, or the human and the divine. This resource of the choral “I” explodes the possibilities for choral time and choral space; there is not just a mythic chorus and a real one, but a (possibly infinite) regress of choruses layered one on the other, ventriloquizing, interpreting, and performing each other’s roles – and all saying “I” simultaneously. Despite the seeming strangeness of these texts, they were conventional in their period. The ritual, embodied, and situated pragmatic action of the performance defines the texts’ logic, and the choral I-narrator, while recognizably distinct from other I-narrators in ancient Greek narrative, only appears troubling when approached from anachronistic norms. This form of narration ultimately declined in prominence, superseded by the increasing prominence of a mimetic autobiographical speaker, whose allegorical capacity further declined in favor of the personalized, psychologically interior individual who dominates the early novel.

3 The Early English Novel A “hinge” moment can be located in the early English novel, which generally established a naturalized one-to-one relationship between an “I” and an individual, mimetic human teller (a relationship most firmly established in the epistolary novel). Early English novels heavily relied on the first person, and a majority of them even begin with the word “I,” suggesting that the English novel in formation desired to foreground the presence of a first-person speaker. The perspectival limits of first-person narrators, however, restricted the kinds of stories that authors were able to tell, and first-person narrators (along with the epistolary novel form) “faded away once the third-person novel began to realise its potential in the hands of novelists such as Austen” (Bray 2003, 1). There are six main types of I-narration in the early English novel: 1. Epistolary: a homodiegetic I-narrator who addresses a homodiegetic narratee, as in epistolary novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1749). This “I” emphasizes the told, and there is little distance between the narrating-I and experiencing-I. Aphra Behn’s Love Letters (1684–1687), John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748), and other epistolary novels fit this type.

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The Traveler: a homodiegetic autodiegetic I-narrator who tells his own tale (often of a trip), sometimes addressing an epistolary narratee (as in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 1726). The I-narrator of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) lacks an epistolary frame but similarly focuses on the told rather than the telling, only later referring to a reader and to his own narration. Travelers’ tales are often diaristic, emphasizing the written rather than spoken. The Continuous Intruder: a homodiegetic I-narrator who speaks intrusively and self-consciously in an authorial voice and refers to a heterodiegetic reader, as in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). This narrator, in dramatizing the distance between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I, foregrounds the act of telling, emphasizing the written rather than spoken. The Editor: a similarly authorial homodiegetic “I” who, rather than telling his own story, appears as a frame narrator whose editorial efforts link the collected documents of the novel, e.g., letters, diaries, and news reports, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). This figure naturalizes the “juxtaposition[al]” quality of the epistolary novel (Fludernik 2002, 209) and resembles the Bard’s oral framing (Romberg 1962, 34). The Author: a heterodiegetic I-narrator who foregrounds his authorial quality, as in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), which begins with how “An author ought to consider himself” and begins sentences with “I have told my reader.” The narrator of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) even comments on various genres he might have chosen, emphasizing fictionality. An early instance of apparent omniscience, this narrator still says “I.” The Occasional Intruder: a heterodiegetic I-narrator with low presence: e.g., a limited “I” intrudes in the majority of Jane Austen’s novels. Austen uses a more prominent authorial-I (and self-reference as “author”) only in her first novel Northanger Abbey (1817; Mullan 2013, 296), thereby leading the shift away from I-narration. Emma (1816) notably does not contain an I-intrusion but contains an important intrusive moment (Perlstein 2012).

At stake in these examples are issues of reliability, temporality and emphasis, and centrality: what private ends do epistolary speakers pursue, when does the narrating-I speak relative to the narrated-I, and what is the narrator’s relation to the story (reporter, evaluator, organizer)? Despite its potential, authors began to see character I-narration as limiting (Watt [1957] 2001, 295–296) and authorial I-narration overly intrusive (Gunn 2004, 48).

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4 Twentieth-Century Literature in English Statistically, authorial third-person fiction narration eclipsed I-narration beginning in 1750, such that “about half of eighteenth-century fiction is first-person, and in the nineteenth century [. . .] about a quarter” (Underwood 2013). Twentieth-century preoccupation with authorial “impersonality” (Eliot 1920) minimized narrator presence: James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus imagines the “artist” (and the narrator) “invisible, refined out of existence” (1916). Instead, the novel was valued for its omniscient capacity to depict private states (Cohn 1977, 7) using free indirect discourse to provide a “dramatized rendering” of “thought processes” (Dawson 2019, 161–162). Such interest in dramatic interiority, though, found expression once more in first-person modernist novels by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner, among others. The first-person novel “was somewhat in vogue in the twenties” (Romberg 1962, 317), due to authors’ interest in interiority, perspectivism, epistemology, and reliability. Even as character-narration saw a resurgence, twentieth-century authors also sought ways to communicate beyond its natural, mimetic limits, leading to experiments with paralepsis, multi-person narration, narrative embedding, and fundamentally “unnatural” or antimimetic narrators. Samuel Beckett’s first-person speakers often move between hetero- and homodiegetic positions (Iser 2006), emphasizing postmodernism’s ontological play (McHale 1987). While techniques like Beckett’s have continued to be estranging for readers, an increasing conventionalization of the “enhanced I” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Pennacchio 2020) shows that readers’ responses to the fictional I-narrator continue to evolve in response to authors’ changing techniques. Further, as fiction explored nonmimetic possibilities, nonfiction innovated with a very different use of the “I” in autofiction, blending memoir and fiction. Nonfiction conventions may continue to evolve regarding uses of the “I.” There are nine main types of first-person narration in modern English literature.

4.1 The Autobiographer Autobiography flourished in the twentieth century as authors engaged more intimate topics. In 1934, H. G. Wells remarked that with increasing “frank[ness] in the scrutiny of the self, [. . .] autobiography will take the place of fiction for the investigation and discussion of character” (quoted in Yagoda 2009). Satisfying readers’ “reality hunger” (Shields 2010), autobiography and memoir offer both voyeuristic intimacy and witnessing of real-world events.

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Autobiography has traditionally been defined in terms of the equation between author, narrator, and protagonist (Lejeune 1989). In nonfiction, author and narrator are “attached” (Lanser 2005, 208). The narrator must be honest or readers feel betrayed; notable violations of the “autobiographical pact” (Lejeune 1989) include Beatrice Sparks’s Go Ask Alice (1971), Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of A Wartime Childhood (1996), and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003). Further, autobiography’s motivations are varied: it can offer “investigation, remembrance, and contemplation” of the self, but also witness broader human rights abuses (Smith and Watson 2001, 1; 2005), with an individual speaking for a community and appealing to an audience for action. In this, autobiographical I-narration can take on a didactic function. The Autobiographer is also subject to shifting conventions regarding fictionality: the “aura of authenticity” created by an “I-witness” (Smith and Watson 2012, 591) can sometimes authorize local moments of paraleptic or even dishonest narration (Phelan 2017, Roiland 2013). Twentieth-century readers of autobiography also accept nonmimetic elements like “mnemonic overkill,” e.g., the reporting of long-past conversations as if remembered verbatim (Cohn 1977).

4.2 The Autofictionist Autofiction responds to the desire for first-person authentication and immediacy, but refuses to follow the autobiographical contract. The protagonist usually shares the author’s name but can have distinct characteristics, as the “I” both points and does not point to the actual author; thus, attachment is destabilized by the possibility of fictionality. Autofiction allows authors to fictionalize at will in the interests of narrative impact rather than veracity, “suggesting an unresolved tension between [. . .] truth understood in a factual sense, and the revelation of symbolic truths” (Lecarme, quoted in Dix 2018, 6). Autofiction arises concurrently in English and in French (Nicol 2018); in English, it includes work by Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Bret Easton Ellis, Chris Kraus, Will Self, Ben Lerner, and others (Worthington 2018). In self-consciously playing with ideas about truth, lies, and fiction, autofiction resembles the experimental I-narratives of Greek and Latin prose discussed above.

4.3 The Unreliable Narrator Unreliable character-narrators are central to the twentieth-century novel; mid-century examples include J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Vladimir

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Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), which both rely on powerful voices to create a sense of intimacy and performativity in the text. Such performativity can involve either immediate orality (Salinger) or reflective writerliness (Nabokov). The intimacy of the first person is central to the effects of unreliable narrators, whose communication to narratees or to readers must have rhetorical force but also, through its construction, reveal to the reader the unreliability of the narrator’s telling in some way, creating a “double communication” (Phelan 2005, 50) as both character and implied author communicate with different purposes in the same discourse. Unreliability is much more complex than untrustworthiness. Phelan (2005) builds on Booth (1961) to create a typology of unreliability. It can operate along the axis of reporting, interpreting, or evaluating; can involve different modes of error (misreporting vs. underreporting); and can have different effects on readers (bonding or estranging). Narrators can lie (Graham Green, The Quiet American, 1955), suppress memories (Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, 1989), underreport (Toni Morrison, “Recitatif,” 1983), misperceive (Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow, 1991), and so on. Attributions of unreliability rely on difference from the author’s implied values (Booth 1961, 158); interpretations of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) are contested for this reason. Unreliability focuses readers on the narrator’s character, and Riggan (1981) categorized unreliable narrators into various character types, including the picaro, the madman, the clown, the naïf, and the liar. The author’s management of knowledge in revealing the narrator’s character shapes the reader’sincreasing awareness of the nature and nuances of the narrator’s unreliability. Readers must carefully evaluate the specific type and degree of unreliability and its impact on the story; they must judge whether it is bonding or estranging (or a variable mix); and they must evaluate the implied author’s purposes in making these choices. Unreliable narrators can present with nearly any configuration of the variables of I-narration, and they constitute an enormous proportion of twentieth-century narrators.

4.4 The Limited Narrator “Restrictive narration” limits the narrator to only one axis of communication (Phelan 2005, 80); when this axis is reporting, the narration moves toward the “figural” mode (Stanzel [1979] 1984). In the figural mode, the self-consciousness of the telling is much diminished and the story begins to feel almost like a camera’s neutral reporting. Detective fiction often uses this restricted first person to align the reader’s and detective’s knowledge, creating a cinematic, “hardboiled” telling: see Dashiell Hammett’s “Op” character (first introduced in “Arson Plus,” 1923) or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (first introduced in The Big Sleep, 1939).

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This technique is also common for naive or child narrators in both fiction and nonfiction, for instance Frankie in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), Benjy in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Jack in Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010) (Phelan 2005, 2017). Restrictive narration requires readers to make careful inferences about what is happening and how to feel about it, emphasizing the estranging nature of the telling while maintaining a focus on the exterior rather than interior world. Such narrators have very low presence and use the present tense more often to enhance the dynamic sense of progression and the uncertainty of the reader about what is happening. Unsurprisingly, two examples here are also observer-narrators – both Frankie and Benjy relate a story to which they are not central.

4.5 The Observer-Narrator The observer-narrator, who is not central to the story he tells, plays a significant role in experimental twentieth-century fiction. Examples include Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), John Barth’s The End of the Road (1958), Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1991), Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), and many others. William Faulkner explored the form abundantly, sometimes also with multiple narrators, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Go Down, Moses (1942). Observer-narrators often adopt an authorial stance as watchers, with self-conscious construction of a pieced-together story of the lives and minds of others. For instance, Gatsby follows Nick Carraway’s gradual acquaintance with his mysterious neighbor Gatsby, with narration emphasizing the narrated-I rather than the narrating-I. His position as narrating-I becomes foregrounded when he mentions having been busy with work, distant from Gatsby’s doings and thus missing crucial access. Gaps and limits in Carraway’s knowledge can create dramatic effect, but they can also limit Fitzgerald, who must use paralepsis to relate what took place at Wilson’s garage after the crash. Although Nick cannot know these events, Fitzgerald has him narrate them anyway (rather figurally). Nevertheless, readers are unlikely to notice (Phelan 1996), and the violation can be naturalized by considering Nick as an editorial reporter, cobbling together information vividly for narrative effect. In this, Nick’s status as observer-narrator is similar to the editorial “I” of the epistolary novel or document novel, and he even provides readers with a childhood document of Gatsby. The observer-narrator novel becomes prominent in moments of historical transition as a way to explore a “clash of sensibilities” between a “skeptical modern”

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narrator and a “mysterious and romantic” protagonist (Kelly 2013, ix). These skeptical observer-narrators tend to insert themselves into the story, problematizing story ownership and emphasizing the socially linked but perspectivally divided nature of storytelling, as in Heart of Darkness and As I Lay Dying. Observer-narrators also explore history, “understand[ing] the self in terms of its relationship to its contemporaries and to its own past” (Byram 2015, 2). Fittingly, Thomas Pynchon’s historical novel Mason & Dixon (1997) contains the intradiegetic observer-narrator Reverend Cherrycoke who tells of his travels with Mason and Dixon, and adopts heterodiegetic, authorial tendencies as he shifts focalization, describes people he never met, and reconstructs events he did not experience (and that maybe did not happen). Cherrycoke exemplifies a postmodern, antimimetic observer-narrator who verges on the authorial Working Author figure described below. Even in more conventional instances, the observer-narrator consistently undermines certainty about what actually happened, because readers must attempt to reconstruct events and to critically evaluate the narrator’s perceptions, which are often limited or unreliable.

4.6 The Supernatural Narrator Twentieth-century fiction (especially post-1945) contains many omniscient I-narrators, many of them supernatural. Darl in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying manifests a telepathic ability that makes him seem supernatural, but this capacity is never explained or naturalized in the story of the novel. By contrast, in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) a young girl, recently deceased, observes her family struggling with her loss from some otherworldly viewpoint; her supernatural omniscience is naturalized by placing her in the afterlife. Similarly, the narrator of David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” (2004) has just killed himself and can narrate the thoughts and experiences of others. Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), is telepathic. These narrators are like character-narrators, given that they are (or have been) part of the storyworld, but they are also able to focalize and communicate like heterodiegetic narrators, not limited to mimetic human knowledge. Dawson, calling this phenomenon “first person omniscience,” suggests that these narrators rely not on a paradigm of speech, but of writing (2013, 201); they should not be held to a mimetic model because they do not pretend to be mimetic human speakers in the storyworld and are instead operating as writers, free to imagine and invent rather than simply report. Further, these omniscient I-narrators recall ancient Greek efforts to motivate excess knowledge by invoking the Muses as the “actual” source of narration. The otherworldly, nonhuman, or dead narrator becomes, in the twentieth century as in the ancient period, a way to combine omniscient capacity with the personalized I-narrator.

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4.7 The Working Author The “narrator as writer” proposed by Dawson (2013) is literalized by experimental fiction writers of the twentieth century. Such narrators not only highlight their authorial presence with self-reference and evaluation of the story; they often comment metafictionally on writing as well. For instance, the narrator of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) comments, “One beginning and one ending was a thing I did not agree with” (9), and in Donald Barthelme’s “The Dolt” (1968), the narrator tells about a man struggling to write, further commenting, “I sympathize. I myself have these problems.” Reflecting on the writing process, the intrusive “I” of William Gass’s “Cartesian Sonata” (1998) comments, “I’d given her a long nose, I remember – no good reason why. Now her nose is middling.” Here, the heterodiegetic “author,” from a stable ontological position, speaks to us about storytelling, dramatizing his power in the storyworld and sometimes using that power through denarration to destabilize the text’s creation of a coherent and continuous world. A more common type of Working Author shifts back and forth between homoand heterodiegesis, creating a “critical metalepsis” (Fludernik 2003) which can cause dissonance for readers. Consider the omnipotent character-narrator in Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure (1975): “My elbows on the dressing table began to ache. And someone opens the door. It’s Dale [. . .] I erase him” (quoted in McHale 1987, 99). Similarly in Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” (1981), the narrator alternately responds to an unnaturally large balloon, documents the reactions of others, and authorially controls the balloon-as-textual-construction before ending the story with the acknowledgment that “the balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure” (58). Here the “I” is metafictional, both creator and observer of the balloon, emphasizing the performative dimension of writing that actively creates a world. The most sustained metafictional I-narrator who mixes homo- and heterodiegetic positioning “I” appears in Samuel Beckett’s fiction. The I-narrator of The Unnamable (1958) is like a writer in the troubled act of creation, both of world and of self, saying, “I shall not be alone [. . .] I am of course alone [. . .] I shall have company [. . .]. A few puppets. Then I’ll scatter them” (1–2). In this crepuscular nonworld the speaker is omnipotent but also powerless and knowledgeless, commenting on the “truly unpredictable” surroundings and shifting unstably between character and narrator and author, words and voices “coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them” (104). His frequent denarration (even of self) undermines the “I” as a stable entity who “precedes” the telling, instead emphasizing the self and the story as a process; in this, Beckett’s “I” recalls the ancient Greek choral narrator, who emphasizes performance in both language and action. He dramatizes the act of writing, blurring distinctions between the experi-

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encing-I and narrating-I, homodiegetic and heterodiegetic, singular and plural: he not only breaks the mimetic code but acts as if it does not exist.

4.8 The Framer The Framer resembles the Working Author, but his high presence, self-referentiality, and emphasis on the telling quickly give way to an emphasis on the told. This narrator uses the intimate orality of the individualized “I” as a framing device, transitioning into heterodiegetic and impersonal narration with little to no return to I-narration. Such are Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988) or Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994), which opens with a speaker promising to “dish you this story about a family I knew when I was growing up.” Rather than preside over the narrative as a whole, the “I” is merely an author’s strategy for introducing the story, reinforcing Nielsen’s claim that there need not “be an existential indexical continuity between the character referred to in the first person and the referring voice” (2004, 139). The Framer troubles the reader’s sense of who is telling, and from where: is a continuous characterized intradiegetic entity the source of the telling, even if that entity ceases to say “I”? This assumption would lead to conflicts with mimetic norms of knowledge and access. The Framer’s disruption of world, framing, centrality, presence, and narratee variables evokes similar disruptions in the bardic narrator and in the document novel; unlike the Bard, however, the Framer is not clearly established as heterodiegetic.

4.9 The One among Many Framing “I”s can also lead into a multi-narrator situation, either all I-narrators or combining first, third, and second person (Richardson 2006). Janssens (1997, 335) identifies early “multiple-I”s in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), but argues that William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) was the “originator of the multiple-I fashion.” Faulkner’s multiple-narrator novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), narrated by three brothers before ending with a third-person limited narrator; Absalom, Absalom! (1936), narrated by four speakers; The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), narrated by three who alternate; and As I Lay Dying (1930), narrated by fifteen speakers, including a dead person, a strange child, an omniscient character (Darl), and more marginal others. As Janssens quotes, for Faulkner the technique “was like looking thirteen times at a sparrow” and “inviting the reader to invent a fourteenth one,” “the only right one” (1997, 340). The technique thus bears a resemblance to cubism, exploring

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new ways to depict multiple perspectives. By the 1990s the multiple-I technique had even proliferated into children’s novels, like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman (1974) and Aiden Chambers’s Dance on My Grave (1982); other multiple-I novels include Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves (2008), Ana Castillo’s The Guardians (2007), and Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (2008) (Bancroft 2018). Multiple-narrator novels often have observer-narrators; further, multiple perspectives alleviate the epistemological limitations of the observer-narrator noted above. The multiple-I situation most often sets narrators alongside each other paratactically, not embedding them in an external narrative frame. Tellers share the story variously: by telling sequential parts, by telling versions of the same events, or by “narrational crossfire” when there is “no central core of events to link the different partial narratives between them, or the core is a pretext that is progressively diluted” (Coste 1989, 174). The reader must navigate perspectival multiplicity, as well as conflicts or gaps between versions and events. No one I-narrator can offer an impartial and authoritative perspective (though in As I Lay Dying, Darl’s perspective is nearly authorial). Multiple-narrator novels are a clear analogue to the epistolary novel (Hartner 2012); some also have an analogue in the “document novel” of the early period (Paige 2018) if they have a framing “I.” A mixed mode combines both first- and third- (and/or second-) person narration, with varied embedding patterns. Vertical embedding of I-narrator(s) in a third-person frame is most common, but horizontal embedding (as in the multiple-I novel) is increasingly used, in both literary and genre fiction. Shifts between person can be either blended or clearly separated (by sectioning). The former is more unusual, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), where third-person reflector narration so closely depicts characters’ interiority that it momentarily uses the “I” pronoun. Similarly, J. P. Donleavy’s novels The Ginger Man (1955) and The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968) contain “lapses from standard third-person narration into first-person stream of consciousness” (Jahn 2017). Cohn (1981) and Stanzel (1990) have debated whether these moments of “liminal deixis” (Grishakova 2018, 208) are really shifts to I-narration or instead brief unmarked psychonarration. Sectioned texts demarcate shifts between first- and third-person explicitly, as in Molly’s speech in Ulysses (1922). Burn calls this mixing the “legacy” of the encyclopedic novel (2008, 20), used in Richard Powers’s Gold Bug Variations (1991), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s The Tropic of Orange (1997). While Wallace echoes Joyce with irregular sectioning patterns, other authors increasingly use a “systematic alteration of first and third person narration,” which Richardson (2006, 64, 74) suggests begins with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Sea Change (1959) and later Falling (1999). Similarly, Fay Weldon in The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) structures chapters in a repeating 1–3–3–3 pattern. Howard’s

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Falling, a thriller, adapts multi-person narration to genre novels: its first-person sections follow a “predatory male” and its third-person sections follow an “unsuspecting female protagonist” (Richardson 2006, 74–75). Stephen King’s Christine (1983), James Patterson’s Cat and Mouse (1997), Nelson DeMille’s The Lion’s Game (2000), and Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are You Now? (2008) all invert Howard’s structure, using I-narration for protagonists and suspenseful limited third person for villains. Braided multiple-I novels multiply the rhetorical and ethical questions a reader must ask, complicating both analysis and interpretation (Bancroft 2018). Mixed-mode novels also complicate framing relations, with different structural and rhetorical effects to shifting from initial first to third or from third to first person. Texts which seem to have multiple third-person narrators in addition to I-narrators raise the question of whether these are genuinely different “narrators”; if not, how should such changes in voice be understood? Thus the multiple-narrator novel highlights the rhetorical constructedness of narration, with narrators appearing as both entities and as textual strategies for organizing the discourse.

5 Conclusion I-narration cannot be reduced to a single function or structural position: the character-narrator (autodiegetic and mimetic) and the authorial narrator (extradiegetic, heterodiegetic, and sometimes unnatural) can both say “I.” So too can narrators of other structural positions. The set of variables listed above – world, framing, centrality, number, presence, narratee, reliability, tense, emphasis, fictionality, relation to author, and mimesis – interact in complex ways, and configurations can vary even in a single text. There is no one central element around which to tell the story of historical variation, but three central tensions across history become clear: authority vs. limitation, speech vs. writing, and fictionality vs. nonfiction. Across its diverse uses, I-narration can create intimate immediacy and offer a sense of privileged, authoritative positioning. Authorial telling found early voice in ancient Greek epic, with the Bard as heterodiegetic I-narrator who seems to relate his story orally to a similarly heterodiegetic narratee. The Bard highlights the authority of a framing “I” and begins a long history of the heterodiegetic “I,” which reappears variously in the early English novel (the Editor and the Author) and in the modern English novel (the Supernatural Narrator and the Working Author). The formation of strong mimetic conventions reduced authorial omniscient I-narration, but experimental authors in the twentieth century broke the mimetic “rules” that limited I-narration to homodiegetic character-narration, exploring broader narrative possibilities and the ontology of fiction. Modern experimental fictions in

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English resembled some elements of ancient Greek narrative (and may have been influenced by them), but their motivation – rejecting convention and exploring the ontological possibilities of fiction as writing – was quite different. Nevertheless, the shifts capture broad historical changes regarding acceptable norms for storytelling, based on changing beliefs about mimetic naturalness, that is, how much fiction should follow real-world parameters. Twentieth-century character-narration captures tensions between immediacy of witnessing and unreliability, authentic authority and perspectival limitation. It allows authors to create a mimetic interest in teller-characters, offering an appealingly stable experience of another person’s perspective while exploring epistemology, psychology, and ethics. But such stories are a challenge to create, because they require authors to manage two tracks of communication and to motivate all information through the character’s limited perspective, avoiding paralepsis or redundancy. The relatively late development of experiential or psychologically realistic I-narrators in ancient Greek narratives gave increasing (often playful) attention to matters of truth and falsehood; similarly, the early English character-narrator is tied to the rise of fictionality in that era. A higher pressure on what counts as “realistic” is linked to the perceived limits of the form. Ancient Greek choral narration appears the most unnatural in light of mimetic conventions, but its immediacy between teller and audience foregrounds the speaker in ways similar to “oral” and performative narrators like Tristram Shandy or Beckett’s Unnamable (though Unnamable is both speaker and writer). Such narrators link the action of the telling to the active unfolding of the told, and this performativity disrupts our modern idea of an opposition between fictionality and nonfiction, and between authority and limitation. When the choral speaker says “I will shake my shining locks” (Alcman 3 PMGF, 9) and then shakes her/their locks, or when Beckett’s Unnamable makes something true by saying it, (non)fictionality is hard to ascribe. Such speakers have enormous power – not perceptual, but performative – but are simultaneously limited: the choral narrator by the metaleptic layering that overdetermines their actions, and the Unnamable by an enormous sense of his impotence as a character and purposelessness as author. Perhaps the choral narrator will always remain strange to readers, but the role of convention must not be understated in evaluating I-narration. The ancient Greek texts demonstrate the dominance of the performative medium in shaping conventions, and the modern mimetic I-narrator reflects a reliance on nonfiction rather than fiction in shaping conventions. The early English novel offers a glimpse of modern norms in development, with the epistolary novel’s firm relationship between “I” and a human individual; and many twentieth century authors chafed against mimetic norms and even pursued performativity. As contemporary authors increasingly use I-narrators with authorial discourse, or create highly personal-

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ized heterodiegetic narrators who say “I,” the conventional connections between first-person and homodiegesis and between third-person and heterodiegesis are weakened. With this weakening, the category of person becomes increasingly important to examine, and I-narration can be best understood in terms of the historically evolving authorial practices and reader expectations.

References Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin, and Susan A. Stephens. 2012. Callimachus in Context: From Plato to the Augustan Poets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakker, Egbert J. 2009. “Homer, Odysseus, and the Narratology of Performance.” In Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, edited by Jonas Grethlein and Antonios Rengakos, 117–136. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bakker, Egbert J. 2017. “Introduction.” In Authorship and Greek Song, edited by Egbert J. Bakker, 1–7. Boston: Brill. Bancroft, Corinne. 2018. “The Braided Narrative.” Narrative 26, no. 3, 262–281. Booth, Wayne. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bray, Joe. 2003. The Epistolary Novel. New York: Routledge. Burn, Stephen. 2008. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. New York: Continuum. Byram, Katra A. 2015. Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Calame, Claude. 2005. Masks of Authority: Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Poetics. Translated by Peter M. Burk. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Calame, Claude. 2017. “From Structural Narratology to Enunciative Pragmatics: Greek Poetic Forms between Mythical Narrative and Ritual Act.” In Emerging Vectors of Narratology, edited by Per Krogh Hansen, John Pier, Philippe Roussin and Wolf Schmid, 335–359. Berlin: De Gruyter. Christy, John Paul. 2016. “Chion of Heraclea. Letters and the Life of a Tyrannicide.” In Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization, edited by Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen, 259–277. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1977. Transparent Minds. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1981. “The Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel’s Theorie des Erzählens.” Poetics Today 2, no. 2, 157–182. Coste, Didier. 1989. Narrative as Communication. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dawson, Paul. 2013. The Return of the Omniscient Narrator. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Dawson, Paul. 2019. “Fictional Minds and Female Sexuality: The Consciousness Scene from Pamela to Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” ELH 86 no. 1, 161–188. de Jong, I. J. F. 2004a. “Homer.” In Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by Irene de Jong, René Nünlist, and Angus Bowie, 11–24. Boston: Brill. de Jong, I. J. F. (1987) 2004b. Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the “Iliad.” 2nd ed. New Caledonia: Bloomsbury. de Jong, I. J. F. 2009. “Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature.” In Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, edited by Jonas Grethlein and Antonios Rengakos, 87–115. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Morgan, J. 2007. “Kleitophon and Encolpius: Achilleus Tatius as Hidden Author.” In The Greek and the Roman Novel: Parallel Readings, edited by Michael Paschalis, Stavros Frangoulidis, Stephen Harrison, and Maaike Zimmerman, 105–120. Groningen: Barkhuis. Morgan, K. A. 2004. “Plato.” In Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by Irene de Jong, René Nünlist, and Angus M. Bowie, 357–376. Leiden: Brill. Morrison, Andrew D. 2007. The Narrator in Archaic Greek and Hellenistic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mullan, John. 2013. What Matters in Jane Austen? New York: Bloomsbury. Nicol, Bran. 2018. “Eye to I: American Autofiction and Its Contexts.” In Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix, 255–274. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Nielsen, Henrik Skov. 2004. “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction.” Narrative 12, no. 2, 133–150. Nünlist, René. 2004. “Hesiod.” In Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by Irene de Jong, René Nünlist, and Angus M. Bowie, 25–42. Leiden: Brill. Paige, Nicholas. 2018. “The Artifactuality of Narrative Form: First-Person Novels in France, 1601–1830.” Poetics Today 39, no. 1, 41–65. Pennacchio, Filippo. 2020. “Enhanced ‘I’s: Omniscience and Third-Person Features in Contemporary First-Person Narrative Fiction.” Narrative 28, no. 1, 21–42. Perlstein, Arnie. 2012. “Jane Austen’s Rare Authorial Intrusions.” Sharp Elves Society: Jane Austen’s Shadow Stories (blog). 18 October 2012. http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/ 2012/10/ jane-austens-rare-authorial-intrusions.html (accessed October 15, 2019). Phelan, James. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell about It. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James. 2017. Somebody Telling Somebody Else. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Rawles, R. 2011. “Eros and Praise in Early Greek Lyric.” In Archaic and Classical Choral Song, edited by Lucia Athanassaki und Ewen Lyall Bowie, 139–160. Berlin: De Gruyter. Reardon, B. P. 1994. “Achilles Tatius and Ego-Narrative.” In Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context, edited by J. R. Morgan and Richard Stoneman, 80–96. London: Routledge. Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Riggan, William. 1981. Pícaros, Madmen, Naīfs, and Clowns. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Roiland, Josh. 2013. “The Fine Print: Uncovering the True Story of David Foster Wallace and the ‘Reality Boundary.’” Literary Journalism Studies 5, no. 2, 148–161. Romberg, Bertil. 1962. Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel. Translated by Michael Taylor and Harold Borland. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Shields, David. 2010. Reality Hunger. New York: Knopf. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2005. “The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by J. Phelan and P. Rabinowitz, 356–371. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2012. “Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony.” Biography 35, no. 4, 590–626. Stanzel, Franz. (1955) 1971. Narrative Situations in the Novel. Translated by James P. Pusack. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stanzel, Franz. (1979) 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stanzel, Franz. 1990. “A Low-Structuralist at Bay? Further Thoughts on A Theory of Narrative.” Poetics Today 11, no. 4, 805–816.

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Valerij Tjupa

Narrator as Dissociated from the Author in Russian Literature 1 Definition The term narrator designates the figure of subject of narrating who tells the story and has some outlook (wide, super-wide, or narrow), a viewpoint (spatiotemporal and axiological) and a voice (speech features, manifesting the particularities of mentality). In verbal aesthetic activity, it is always a fictitious figure, an author’s creation fundamentally different from the author. At the same time, the category of author has a twofold meaning: (1) a specific (biographical) personality of the writer; (2) an abstract author (also called “implied” or “supra-personal”), the latter defined as the “embodiment of the text’s intentionality” (Schmid 2008, 57), that is, a virtual instance of the meaning subject of a certain narrative statement as a creative whole. While the narrator guarantees the story’s eventfulness, the abstract author guarantees its sense. The abstract authorship’s necessity is most obvious when the writer introduces an unreliable narrator (Booth [1983] 1961), whose testimony must to some extent be accommodated by the reader in order to comprehend the story’s actual meaning. The theoretical opposition narrator–author has been examined in detail by Wolf Schmid (2008, 2010), but this opposition is variable and ambiguous in the diachronic aspect.

2 Preclassical Period (Eighteenth Century) Medieval Russian narratives are mostly anonymous. Despite their cultural significance, the works by the best-known authors (Nestor Iskander’s historical novel, Afanasij Nikiti’s travelogue, Ivan Peresvetov’s journalistic novel, Protopope Avvakum’s autobiography) do not belong to the field of literary and aesthetic activity. In the writings of the initiator of Russian literary prose, Nikolai Karamzin, there is the original syncretism of the instances of the author and the narrator. In his remarkable essay “What Does the Author Need?” (1802), Karamzin argued that “the creator is always portrayed in his creation”; therefore, they must have “a kind, tender heart,” “desire for the common good,” and “passionate benevolence”; the rules and techniques of composing a text are optional for them. Contemporaries Note: Translated from the Russian by Andrej Agratin and Vitalij Ul’janov. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-004

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did not distinguish between Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (1816–1824) and the writer’s fictional heritage. Narrating fictional stories— “Poor Lisa” (1792), “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter” (1792), “Bornholm Island” (1794)  – the narrator denies their fictitious character and emphasizes his biographical specificity as a writing author. For example, to the inscription on the knight’s armor, in which Natal’ja was “dressed up,” the writer gives a literal note: “In the Kremlin Armory, I have seen many an armor with this inscription.” In Karamzin’s narratives, the isolation of the diegetic world is greatly weakened, making the abstract author practically indistinguishable from the concrete author and from the narrator.

3 Early Classical Period (1830–1840s) At first glance, the most prominent successors of the Russian narrative tradition formed by Karamzin follow the same syncretic principle of “inconsistency and indivisibility” of narrative discourse subjects. For instance, the full title of The Tales of Belkin – The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, Published by A. P. (1830) – obviously refers to Puškin himself as the author of the “Editorial Introduction” and of the text’s composition; the Puškin editorial afterword to The Captain’s Daughter (1836) performs a similar function. A “frame” narrator, uniting the chapters of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1838–1840), demonstratively identifies himself with the famous poet Lermontov (e.g., in the following footnote: “I beg my readers’ pardon for having versified Kazbič’s song, which, of course, as I heard it, was in prose; but habit is second nature”). However, in all these cases the opposition of the author and narrator is much more complicated than that of Karamzin. Their separation occurs at least because in the above-mentioned prose texts, narration of the stories is entrusted to other persons: to Belkin, Grinëv, Maksim Maksimyč, Pečorin himself. At the same time, a conventional figure of the “publisher” is placed between the biographical author and the narrating character. In Puškin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1825–1833), the narrator attributes the author’s competence to himself, “pretending” to be the author, the creator of the text, and indicates the presence of a hierarchically higher narrative instance in the structure of the work. Considering this work in the completeness of its composition, which ends with “Excerpts from Onegin’s Journey,” it is the first time in Russian literature that the emergence of a full-fledged instance of abstract author becomes evident: “Puškin got one level higher by creating a fiction model of universal ironic consciousness” (Čumakov 1999, 22). Of course, irony is optional for this instance, but starting with Puškin’s texts, a certain model of consciousness as an abstract author becomes an integral attribute of classical narrativity.

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In The Tales of Belkin, a similar instance appears due to the repeatedly emphasized effect of the “double authorship” of Belkin and Puškin. In this initial phenomenon of Russian classical prose, Belkin personifies the first appearance of unreliable narrator. Understanding the meaning of this work implies looking beyond the horizon of Belkin’s texts, overcoming his naivety and imitative manner of writing. The composition of the five works should be perceived as a single aesthetic whole, permeated throughout with motives and allusions that are not realized by Belkin (the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the carnival couple Harlequin and Pierrot, the antithesis of the Mozartian and Salerian attitude to life; Tjupa 2001). Similarly, in A Hero of Our Time it is not the narrator who calls himself the “author” and takes possession of Pečorin’s notes and rejoices in his death who is the bearer of deep meaning, but an abstract subject of the aesthetic intention according to whose creative will the novel’s text ends. The story ends not with the death of the lone hero but with his close interest in another person (in Maksim Maksimyč). Comparing Lermontov’s masterpiece with his early unfinished text about Pečorin (Princess Ligovskaja, 1836–1837) clearly demonstrates the decomposition of the original syncretism of the autobiographical hero, narrator, and abstract author (Markovič 1996). In Dead Souls (1842) by Gogol’, the narrator also repeatedly speaks of himself as the “author” of the unfolding text. Such an arrangement of the narrator is undoubtedly oriented toward the Puškin precedent. There are links with parody as well. For example, while Puškin’s “author,” in introducing the reader of Eugene Onegin to Tat’jana Larina, seriously motivated the choice of his heroine’s name, Gogol’s “author” “is extremely perplexed how to name these ladies in such a way as to avoid exciting an outburst of anger.” It is often that both “authors” enter into conversations with readers. But Gogol’s “author” speaks of himself in the third person, not in the first (as was the case in Eugene Onegin), and unlike Puškin’s “author,” he refuses his creative role in the novel, resorting to the figure of metalepsis: “If this thought had never entered Čičikov’s head, this story would never have seen the light [. . .] he is the master, and where he leads we must follow.” The demonstrative conventionality of such an “author” is even more obvious than that of Puškin, for it manifests the presence in the novel of the instance of an abstract author. In particular, it shows in its relation to the Christian notion of “inward man” (see Bočarov 1985). This conventional “author” cannot believe that an “inward man” is able to awaken in Čičikov, whereas for the abstract super-author this possibility is the focus of his creative and didactic intention. In all the cases mentioned, the narrating subject is found in the foreground. The transformation of the “author’s” metanarrative figure into one of the work’s characters makes abstract authorship – the concentration of the highest semantic unity of a given narrative as an aesthetic whole – fundamentally necessary.

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4 Mature Classical Period (1860s–1880s) Russian realist prose was originally based on the authority of an abstract author who embodies a kind of true knowledge of real life. This intention was inherited not from romanticism but from the Natural School of Vissarion Belinskij and later was significantly developed and extended. At the time of classical realism, it was considered that even a brilliant author, being a mere human, is not able to possess the fullness of living (not theoretical) knowledge. Nevertheless, the artistic text manifests the truth of life and makes it available, leaving it to be interpreted by literary criticism. In this case, the need to specifically focus on the author’s personality or on the narrator, replacing the author, disappears. Generally, in realist novels and novellas the narrator is quite active, yet he does not claim to be the subjective maker or creator of the diegetic world; the narrator only testifies to this world. Among the great works of mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature, such a subjective maker is only found in War and Peace (1863– 1869) by Lev Tolstoj, known for its extensive historical, journalistic, and moralistic digressions. Here, the narrator tends to coincide with the virtual figure of an abstract author, but it is the journalistic judgment of his digressions that reveals a subjectivity and disputability of generalizations that go beyond the novel’s diegetic world and point to its biographical author. Tolstoj himself realized that rather than writing a novel he was writing a “book” about humans, nature, and history, that his multivolume statement was not reduced to narrative. In fact, in this literary work there was an involuntary return to Karamzin’s syncretism, whereas in subsequent novels and novellas Tolstoj usually followed the generally accepted realistic setting of the narrator when “the narrator’s generalizations sound like the voice of truth itself” (Markovič 2008, 301). Narrator positioning in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862) can be considered classical. The narrator here freely chooses the viewpoint for himself: in some situations he shows the characters only externally, in others – internally, revealing their thoughts and feelings. Here, the distance between a narrator and an author tends to be minimal. This distance is determined by the verbal embodiment of the narrator. Like Tolstoj’s narrator, he is fully aware not only of the image, but also of the internal situation of each character. Yet he usually refrains from authorial intervention in the hero’s existence, although he allows himself a priori judgments, as in the following example from Fathers and Sons: “Anna Sergeevna was a rather strange creature [. . .] Like all women who have not succeeded in loving, she wanted something, without herself knowing what.” The subsequent interest of novel narrative consists in how a well-defined character will act in given circumstances. At the same time, an authorial narrator often considers it his duty to finish showing all the life trajectories of main characters, as

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Puškin did at the ending of “The Queen of Spades” (1833). So, in the final chapter of Fathers and Sons the narrator says: The end, would it seem? But perhaps some one of our readers would care to know what each of the characters we have introduced is doing in the present, the actual present. We are ready to satisfy him.

Further on we learn how the lives of almost all the characters of the novel go. In general, there is a non-diegetic narrator in Turgenev’s novels, whereas in novellas the narrator’s role was often assigned to a character (Asja, 1858; First Love, 1860). Mixail Baxtin expressed and developed the idea of “equality” between Fëdor Dostoevskij’s heroes and the author himself, who does not impose on them his own understanding of their life (Baxtin [1929] 1993). But in this case Bakhtin must have meant the narrator (the term was not used then), and not the aesthetic subject about which he wrote in his early philosophical work (Baxtin 1923–1924) and which is identical to the narratological category of abstract author. The classic narrator of the realistic type can be seen in Dostoevskij’s novels Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Idiot (1868), but this function is more often performed by a central hero, as in The Gambler (1866) and in A Raw Youth (1875), or by a “chronicler,” very interested in the unfolding events but trying to be neutral in recording them. Such forms significantly increase the importance of an abstract author’s semantic instance. The most striking example is The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), where this instance manifests itself in the ambivalent ideological “split of the author” (Schmid 1996, 1998). Earlier, the ambiguity of the abstract author’s position hidden from the reader first appeared in Ivan Gončarov’s novel Oblomov (1859). In criticism and literary studies, Oblomov’s history has repeatedly been interpreted in opposing ways: some considered it a caricature of Russian laziness, others as praise for a “natural” person. The first version is confirmed by Štol’c’s (a German surname meaning “pride”) criticism of Oblomov; the second version is confirmed by the fact that, in numerous repetitions, the novel’s central figure is inextricably linked with the sun in the text, whose diegetic time is organized in accordance with the annual solar turn (Tjupa 2010a). The final sentence of the text (“And Stol’z told him [the writer] that it was written here”) indicates that the novel states the version of Štol’c (who believes Oblomov ruined himself through his inertness and drowsy apathy). However, this version is expressed by a “literary gentleman” so similar to Oblomov (“a stout individual with an apathetic face and sleepy, meditative eyes”) that it can explain the sympathy for the hero as arising out of the text. It is no accident that the story we learn cannot be definitively interpreted, which in this case constitutes the abstract author’s fundamental intention. When the narrating subject is divided into a witness of the hero’s life (Štol’c) and someone who narrates it (“literary gentleman”), the instance of the abstract author becomes a constructive necessity.

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5 Anton Čexov and Post-Realism (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries) In Čexov’s mature works, the questioning intonation heuristically created in Oblomov comes to the fore. The writer believed that his task was to correctly put the relevant questions to the reader. Unlike the classical novel of the nineteenth century, Čexov’s narrator for the most part does not become a work’s hero: narrators “are close not to the reader, but to the heroes, are not outside, but inside the literary world” (Cilevič 2011, 280). Usually, Čexov’s narrator, as, for instance, in “The Lady with the Little Dog” (1899), knows the content of the inner life of only one participant in the narrated story who is observed from the outside and from the inside; about the other heroes the reader learns only what is revealed to this hero. However, based on the belief that the basis of human existence lies in the “personal secret” (Tjupa 1989, 32–58), Čexov does not allow his narrator to know everything about a certain hero. The narration develops not in the modality of ready knowledge about a person, as in Turgenev’s works, but in the modality of deepening understanding of their individuality. Such is the source of the well-known open endings of Čexov’s short stories, later becoming widespread in world literature, as well as of Čexov’s problematizing of eventfulness (Schmid 1991, 104–117; 1998, 263–294). Čexov’s mature prose is characterized by the demonstrative incompleteness of the plot. The category of intrigue (or plot) was reformulated by Paul Ricœur (1984) so as to consider the receptive aspect of narrative practices. Intrigue is an affective dimension of reading (Baroni 2010, 2017), a configuration of episodes that forms an interested expectation of the end of the story. By refusing to make the story complete, Čexov’s narrator does not present the reader with a clear, well-established understanding of life, but purposefully leaves the reader searching for it, involving him not only in a joint search but also holding him responsible for the way he sees the intrigue’s possible resolution (Tjupa 2010b). Put simply, a pessimist reads Čexov pessimistically, an optimist reads him optimistically. Here lies Čexov’s exceptional novelty, praised by Tolstoj, Somerset Maugham, and many others. A significant role in Čexov’s innovation was played by the “poetization” of prose, that is, by numerous uses of motifs and formal equivalences in the “presentation the narration” (Schmid 1998, 297–344). It is not only the narrating character, as one of the story’s participants, but also the non-diegetic narrator presented by Čexov as an individual who does not possess absolute knowledge but delves into a hero’s life and strives to comprehend someone else’s “personal secret.” It is for this reason that Čexov’s short stories written from a third- or first-person perspective differ only slightly in their poetics. A typical example is the trilogy “The Man in the Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love” (1898), in which the basic event of each short story is an embedded story

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of a character. At the same time, there is no stylistic contrast between the texts of the primary and the secondary narrators. And yet they differ significantly in their narrative strategies: Burkin tells Belikov’s story as an anecdote; Ivan Ivanovič tells his brother’s story as a parable; and only Alëxin’s narration conforms well to the hybrid strategy of Čexov’s short story as a genre, which is fundamentally different from other short stories or novellas (Tjupa 2006, 2018b). While the first two embedded narratives of the trilogy disjoin the communicants, the last brings them together. The primary narrator of the three independent but closely linked texts uses his framing remarks and descriptions to let the reader himself approach the abstract author’s intention. It consists in revealing dialogical tension between individual approaches to life. In its degree of “poetization,” Ivan Bunin’s prose is similar to Čexov’s, but their narrative modalities are diametrically opposed. In contrast to the personalized position of Čexov’s abstract author, in Bunin’s works this instance takes up a pantheistic position of impersonal absolute knowledge about the precedence of existence. As stated in Bunin’s essay “Waters Aplenty” (1925–1926): “a common life commits its mysterious journey through our bodies.” Bunin’s narrator captures in the word an eventful interaction of “bodies” while the author contemplates the profound eventlessness of the “common life” whose events are precedential (like a “sunstroke” in the short story under the same title). In his autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev (1930), Bunin, using his personal memories, not only hides behind a pseudonym, not telling about himself but rather about this “common life” for which a person’s individual personality has little value. A prominent place among Russian post-realist narratives belongs to The Petty Demon (1902) by the symbolist Fëdor Sologub. The story of the protagonist’s madness develops a literary tradition created by Gogol’ in “Diary of a Madman” (1835) and by Dostoevskij in The Double (1846), except that here the narrative of insanity seizes the whole diegetic world of the text. Peredonov’s pathology does not immediately become apparent, and on the first pages everyone around him produces a similar impression of some kind of insanity. Citywide madness reaches its climax during the masquerade. The narrator, who often uses the formula “in our city,” resembles Dostoevskij’s chroniclers, but he is well aware of the inner life of every character; moreover, he often acts as a moralist who accompanies the narration with biting generalizing commentary. In the case of Sologub, the abstract author’s positioning, as the poet Aleksandr Blok astutely pointed out in his article “Irony” (1908), consists in the total irony of human self-rejection. Čexov’s narrative poetics served as the basis for the culture of literary writing known as “ornamental prose,” which emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, represented by Andrej Belyj, Isaak Babel’, Evgenij Zamjatin, Vsevolod Ivanov, Boris Pilnjak, Aleksej Remizov, and others. The heightened rhythmic and

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euphonic organization of the text, the ornamental coherence created by the relations of equivalence (contrast and similarity) of the textual units, the actualization of mythical structures of archaic thinking  – all this gives the prose narrative an air of lyric poetry (Schmid 2008, 229–254; 1998, 297–344; 2014, 720–725). Thus, a growing division between narration and its verbalization noticeably deepens the dissociation of the narrator and the author. While the narrator’s figure is used to preserve eventfulness (significantly weakened in ornamental prose, but also in Čexov’s and Bunin’s works), the poetic organization of the narrative text refers to the abstract author who provides semantic depth and unity to the text’s multilevel structure. As the significance of the abstract author as an instance grows, the role of the reader in narrative communication increases. According to Zamjatin, the reader’s impression, “which is achieved by the reader himself, will be stamped in his memory immeasurably stronger” ([1929] 1988, 470). In this intention, a radical narrative “turn toward the reader,” realized in Čexov’s mature writings, continues. In emigrant Russian literature, it is Vladimir Nabokov who stands out as a prominent representative of ornamental prose. For instance, in the short story “Christmas” (1924), the narrator is focused on the behavior of a father blinded by grief while the abstract author organizes the communicative storytelling event as an influence on the reader’s consciousness. Strictly speaking, nothing happens in the diegetic world, since the transformation of a chrysalis into a butterfly is a natural change of state – a process, not an event (Schmid 2008). Likewise, we do not find out whether the mental event of the internal transformation of a hero, contemplating suicide, has taken place. The author’s intention of mental transformation is aimed at the reader and manifested in various ways: in a mythopoetics of the butterfly as a soul; in the compositional division into four stanza-like parts, providing the initial and (especially) the final words and phrases with a marked position; in the symbolic significance of detailed elaboration of mental vision frames; in a special stylistic selectivity of the text’s speech units; in penetrating the text’s motif structure with numerous equivalences. As a result, the absence of an eventful intrigue of the plot moves the intrigue of the word into the foreground (Tjupa 2018a): a story of immense mental suffering ends with the word “happiness.”

6 Socialist Realism and Its Aftermath (1930s–1960s) Socialist realism, which originated in Maksim Gor’kij’s works long before the Revolution and was proclaimed in 1934 “the principal method of Soviet fiction,” was a politically committed literary practice used to implement Stalin’s cultural policy.

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Abandoning skaz and ornamental forms of text organization, the writers of socialist realism took the path of “style regress” and came to an “authoritarian style” (Belaja 2000) based on the authoritarian mentality. Despite its a priori ideological content, the “occupational” novel – the leading genre of socialist realism – resembled non-fictional narrative forms. This led to the line between the narrator and the biographical author becoming almost indiscernible. At the same time, the authoritarian figure of the abstract author merged with the intertextual canonical “image of the leader” – the inspirer of all the achievements of the Soviet people. The narrative modality of socialist realist texts, archaic in their form, is the modality of persuasion. But in marginal literature of the Stalin period, the ironic dissociation of author and narrator (e.g., in Konstantin Vaginov’s metanarrative prose), originating in symbolism, is preserved (Žiličeva 2013, 185). Being a sign of the crisis of the Soviet mentality (Tjupa and Fedunina 2008), the literature of the “Xruščëv” or “Thaw” period (1956–1968) turned toward the classical narrative tradition. For instance, Life and Fate (1959) by Vasily Grossman is obviously oriented toward the narrative strategy of War and Peace by Tolstoj, while One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) by Aleksandr Solženicyn is oriented toward the strategy of essay (očerk) – a narrative genre formed in the Russian “Natural School.” However, against the background of canonical socialist realism, “Thaw” prose is perceived as an innovative wave. By using the plot schemes of the occupational novel and their non-fictional (journalistic) experience, Georgij Vladimov in The Great Ore (1961), and Vasilij Aksënov in Oranges from Morocco (1962), refuse the labor-deed-intrigue, the guiding role of the Party leaders, and the modality of persuasion. In the prose of the 1960s, the authors resort to both diegetic and non-diegetic figures of the narrator, but in both cases the storytelling is carried out in the modality of private opinion. As in Čexov’s works, the abstract author’s intention is not affirmative, but rather the intention of a problematic issue, implicitly addressed to the reader. A further departure from socialist realism was marked, on the one hand, by the restoration of classical literary practice (Fёdor Abramov, Valentin Rasputin, Jurij Trifonov, Vasilij Šukšin, and others) and, on the other hand, by postmodernist trends in literary writing. The most notable phenomenon of this kind is Puškin House (1971) by Andrej Bitov. But here as well the focus was on literary continuity. First, the narrator, “pretending” to be the author, moves into the foreground, as in the novels of Puškin and Lermontov. Second, the poetics of Puškin House goes back to “ornamental prose”: weakened eventfulness “is compensated for by cross-cutting themes, polysemantic poetic leitmotifs, forming a symbolic subtext”; overall, the novel “has a rather rigid and harmonious architectonics that reminds us of the structure of a lyrical poem” (Andrianova 2011, 77–79). In this case, we cannot speak of “the death of the author,” since textual fragmentation, attributed to the

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postmodernist narrator, is compensated for by the abstract author’s powerful unifying intention. Here, it is an intention of responsibility that contrasts with betrayal in the heroes’ diegetic world. In another famous work of those years, Moscow to the End of the Line (1970) by Venedikt Erofeev,  the author’s intention should be considered similar. This first-person narrative of a demonstratively autobiographical narrator, thanks to its mastery of composition, numerous intertextual allusions, and the ending in which the diegetic narrator dies, renders the instance of the abstract author undeniably present. In general, in writings resorting to the figure of an unreliable narrator such as Lolita (1955; Russian in 1967) by Nabokov, Moscow to the End of the Line, or A School for Fools (1973) by Sokolov, the presence of the abstract author in the narrative discourse stands out especially clearly. The highest achievements of non-socialist-realist narrative literature of the Soviet era are The Master and Margarita (1940) by Mikhail Bulgakov and Doctor Živago (1955) by Boris Pasternak – highly innovative works and at the same time faithful to the classical laws of verbal aesthetic activity. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov adopts Puškin’s practice of the metanarrative “image of the author” who repeatedly enters into conversation with the readers during narration. Here, the abstract author’s instance is manifested through a mise en abyme: the novel’s protagonist is his own novel’s author and takes a heuristic position of insightfully guessing the truth. Having received confirmation of his version of the evangelical events, the Master exclaims: “Oh, how I guessed!” A similar strategy is hidden behind a somewhat buffoonish speech of the primary narrator, enthusiastically telling about the tricks of Woland’s retinue, yet seriously concerned about the fate of the Master and his lover. The self-performance of Puškin’s narrator in Eugene Onegin – “one unhappy buffoon” – is quite applicable to Bulgakov’s “image of the author,” referring to the over-authoritative meaning, existing in the “fifth dimension” (free from time). In Pasternak’s novel, the position of the abstract author is also the position of eternity, and the main character seeks to unravel the eternal mystery of the overcoming of death. The narrative modality of storytelling here is similar to Čexov’s: the narrator’s mental outlook is broader than that of the hero, but at the same time the narrator is connected with the hero by the attitude of human solidarity in times of catastrophic loss of humanity. Doctor Živago is very rich in historical and biographical events, but at the same time is heir to the poetics of ornamental prose. The verbalization of narration here uses composition, a system of various equivalences, and a deep mythopoetics to imbue the prose text with lyricism (Tjupa 2014); the novel ends organically with the protagonist’s verses. This construction including the enigmatic figure of Evgraf in the text’s compositional center, full of striking coincidences, equivalences, and palimpsest layers, makes the abstract author’s supreme instance clearly tangible. In keeping with the figure of mise en abyme, the novel’s protagonist himself appears as the author and realizes that his

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poems belong to “what was higher than him, by what was above him and guided him”; these poems are “the next step it [world poetry] was to take in its historical development.” Doctor Živago allows us to speak of the “supra-personal nature of the author: the creative act is conceived as a solution to one of the objective tasks of world culture” (Markovič 1996, 175).

7 Post-Soviet Literature The most prominent figures of Russian postmodernist prose – Saša Sokolov, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin  – recreate the authorial intention of total irony, formed in The Petty Demon (1905) by Sologub. For example, Pelevin’s famous novel, The Clay Machine-Gun (1996), whose diegetic space is an absolute void, is written in the “strategy of anecdote” (Bogdanova, Kibal’nik, and Safronova 2008). As one of the characters claims, “this whole world is a joke God told himself.” In Generation “P” (1999) “the storytelling event itself” forms the “ironic meta-plot,” making the hero a “figure of plot irony” (Silant’ev 2006, 174). At the turn of the millennium, the destructive tendency of ironic narration is continued by Mixail Šiškin, who injects into the novel The Taking of Izmail (1999) an effect of “narratological emptiness,” destroying the two-centuries-old dissociation between narrator and author (Šatin 2015). What also leads to the indistinguishability of these figures is the blurring of boundaries between fictional and factual narration, which is quite common in contemporary literature and at the origin of which is an authoritative figure of Sergej Dovlatov. In Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2006) Ljudmila Ulickaja can be said to return to the original Karamzin syncretism of narrator and author (Grimova 2018). This tendency contrasts with restoring the aesthetic completeness of a narrative work, as achieved by the leading Russian contemporary prose writer Еvgenij Vodolazkin. In his novel Laurus (2012), this writer implements a paradoxical hybridization of the medieval genre of hagiography and classical novelistic integrity. A “mythogenic” narrative, an appeal to the “viewpoint of eternity” (similar to the “reverse perspective” in icon painting studied by Pavel Florenskij), together with the typical intrigues of novelistic biography and a dense network of motif equivalences (Grimova 2018), organically connects the archaic worldview with the historically relevant experience of personal presence in the world. The work is organized around an extremely stingy, “simple-minded” narrative that does not distinguish between the text of the narrator and the texts of the characters. Against this background, the complex construction of the novel as a whole clearly refers to the instance of an abstract author-creator. This kind of dissociation is even more

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obvious in Aviator (2016), where Vodolazkin skillfully utilizes the figure of an unreliable narrator  – a character who regains his self-identity  – while continuing to follow the goal of narrative overcoming time, the goal that successively connects his novels with The Master and Margarita and Doctor Živago.

8 Conclusion The relation between the instances of author and narrator goes through several stages of development. The syncretism of the subject of telling, the biographical personality of the writer, and the abstract author (Karamzin) can be observed in Early Russian literature and in the literature of the eighteenth century. The abstract author as an autonomous authority emerged only in the early nineteenth century. The narrator of Puškin’s, Lermontov’s, and Gogol’’s works puts on the “mask” of the creator of the text, thus demonstrating his conventionality and his distinction from the biographical or implicit author and indicating the presence of a hierarchically higher subject in the narrative structure of the work. This subject generates a fictional world in which not only the character but also the narrator is among the fictional “inhabitants.” The artistic discoveries of the early classics served as a guide for writers in the 1860s–1880s. Novels by Turgenev, Tolstoj, and Dostoevskij were originally based on the instance of an abstract author. However, the conventionality of the narrator’s image here is no longer so obvious, as the narrator does not play the role of creator but appears before the reader as an omniscient observer. Subsequently, the abstract author was established as the fundamental (i.e., default) condition of literary narration; it was at this point that writers switched to the figure of the narrator. Čexov’s non-diegetic narrator, contrary to the “rules,” is a private individual trying to understand the meaning of human existence. Bunin, on the contrary, gives the narrator absolute knowledge of life. In the works of the twentieth century, the model of the relationship between author and narrator formed by classical literature is restored (Bulgakov, Pasternak) and at the same time complicated. In ornamental prose, the role of the narrator is significantly reduced as a result of attenuated eventfulness. The novels of socialist realism mimic non-fictional narration, largely effacing the boundary between narrator and biographical author. Postmodernist writers rethink the tradition established by Puškin (narrator-creator) along the lines of deconstructionism. Post-Soviet prose also distinguishes between narrative instances and at the same time demonstrates the opposite trend, referring us back to the classics (Vodolazkin).

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Perhaps the periodic convergence and divergence of author and narrator is one of the basic properties of literary narrative that can be identified from a diachronic perspective.

References Andrianova, Marija. 2011. Avtorskie strategii v romannoj proze Andreja Bitova. Sankt-Peterburg: Biblioteka rossijskoj akademii nauk. Baroni, Raphaël. 2010. “Réticence de l’intrigue.” In Narratologies contemporaines: Approches nouvelles pour la théorie et l’analyse du récit, edited by John Pier and Francis Berthelot, 199–213 Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines. Baroni, Raphaël. 2017. Les rouages de l’intrigue: Les outils de la narratologie postclassique pour l’analyse des textes littéraires. Geneva: Slatkine. Baxtin, Mixail (1923–1924). “Avtor i geroj v estetičeskoj dejatel’nosti.” In Sobranie sočinenij. V 7 t. Moskva: Russkie slovari. Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury, 2003. T. 1. 69–263. Bakhtin [Baxtin], Mikhail [Mixail]. (1929) 1993. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Belaja, Galina. 2000. “Stilevoj regress: O stilevoj situacii v literature socrealizma.” In Socrealističeskij kanon, 556–568. Sankt-Peterburg: Akademičeskij proekt. Bočarov, Sergej. 1985. “Zagadka «Nosa» i tajna lica.” In Gogol’: Istorija i sovremennost’, 180–212. Moskva: Sovetskaja Rossija. Bogdanova, Ol’ga, Sergej Kibal’nik, and Ljudmila Safronova. 2008. Literaturnye strategii Viktora Pelevina. Sankt-Peterburg: Petropolis. Booth, Wayne. (1983) 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cilevič, Leonid. 2011. “Povestvovatel’ v čexovskom rasskaze.” In A. P. Čexov: Enciklopedija, edited by V.B. Kataev. Moskva: Prosveščenie. Čumakov, Jurij. 1999. Stixotvornaja poetika Puškina. Sankt-Peterburg: Gosudarstvennyj Puškinskij Teatral’nyj centr. Grimova, Ol’ga. 2018. Poetika sovremennogo russkogo romana: Žanrovye transformacii i povestvovatel’nye strategii. Ekaterinburg: Intmedia. Markovič, Vladimir. 1996. “Avtor i geroj v romanax Lermontova i Pasternaka: ‘Geroj našego vremeni’ – ‘Doktor Živago.’” In Avtor i tekst, edited by V. M. Markovič and Wolf Schmid. Sankt-Peterburg: Peterburgskij universitet. Markovič, Vladimir. 2008. “Paradoks kak princip postroenija xaraktera v russkom romane XIX veka.” In Izbrannye raboty, 290–304. Sankt-Peterburg: Lomonosov. Ricœur, Paul. 1984. Temps et récit II: La configuration dans le récit de fiction. Paris: Seuil. Šatin, Jurij. 2015. “Narratoliogičeskaja pustota v sovremennom xudožestvennom tekste («Vzjatie Izmaila» M. Šyškina).” In Russkaja literatura v zerkale semiotiki, 328–335. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury. Schmid, Wolf. 1991. “Čechovs problematische Ereignisse.” In Ornamentales Erzählen in der russischen Moderne: Čechov – Babel’ – Zamjatin, 104–117. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Schmid, Wolf. 1996. “Die «Brüder Karamazov» als religiöser «nadryv» ihres Autors.” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 41, 27–50. Schmid, Wolf. 1998. Proza kak poezija. Sankt-Peterburg: INAPRESS.

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Schmid, Wolf. 2008. Narratologija. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2014. “Poetic or Ornamental Prose.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1, 720–725. 2nd ed. Berlin: 2014. Silant’ev, Igor’. 2006. Gazeta i roman: ritorika diskursnyx smešenij. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury. Tjupa, Valerij. (1989) 2018. Xudožestvennost’ čexovskogo rasskaza. 2nd ed. Moskva: Flinta-Nauka. Tjupa, Valerij. 2001. “Povesti pokojnogo Ivana Petroviča Belkina, izdannye A.P.” In Mixail Darvin and Valerij Tjupa Ciklizacija v tvorčestve Puškina, 151–224. Novosibirsk: Nauka. Tjupa, Valerij. 2006. “The Communicative Strategy of Čexov’s Poetics.” In Anton Pavlovich Chekov: Poetics – Hermeneutics – Thematics, edited by J. Douglas Clayton, 1–20. Ottawa: Slavic Research Group. Tjupa, Valerij and Fedunina, Ol’ga, ed. 2008. Sociokul’turnyj fenomen šestidesjatyx. Moskva: RGGU. Tjupa, Valerij. 2010a. “Funkcija čitatelja v čexovskom narrative.” Russkaja literatura, no. 3, 45–50. Tjupa, Valerij. 2010b. “Soljarnye povtory v romane Gončarova Oblomov.” In: Kritika i semiotika. Issue 14. Novosibirsk: NGU, 113–117. Tjupa, Valerij. 2014. Poetika «Doktora Živago» v narratologičeskom pročtenii, edited by Valerij Tjupa. Moskva: Intrada. Tjupa, Valerij. 2018a. “Intriga slova v rasskaze V. Nabokova ‘Roždestvo.’” In Wyklady z nieklasycznej narratologii, 169–173. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikolaja Kopernika. Tjupa, Valerij. 2018b. “Žanrovaja priroda narrativnyx strategij.“ In: Filologičeskij klass, no. 2, 19–24. Zamjatin, Evgenij. (1929) 1988. “Zakulisy.” In Sočinenija, vol. 4, 299–309. Munich: A. Neimanis, Buchvertrieb und Verlag. Žiličeva, Galina. 2013. Narrativnye strategii v žanrovoj structure romana (na materiale russkoj prozy 1920–1950-x gg.). Novosibirsk: NGPU.

Bohumil Fořt and Jiří Koten

Narrator’s Commentary in Czech Literature (1300–1900) 1 Definition Narrator’s commentary is an utterance that forms part of a fictional text that does not serve primarily to construct a fictional world but rather to explain or evaluate it. As such, narrator’s commentary can be considered part of exegesis, i.e., a part of the text making it possible to achieve a better understanding of its meaning and context. Commentary is sometimes viewed as a “philosophical digression” (Ėjchenbaum [1922] 2012, 200) or as a “plot digression,” usually in the form of thoughts that constrain the development of the sjužet (Šklovskij [1928] 1991, 147). From the point of view of the discursive plurality of a narrative text, narrator’s commentary appears to be a somewhat overlooked category caught in the blind spot between Plato’s mimesis (character’s discourse) and diegesis (narrator’s discourse) to which the commentary form belongs. Narration and commentary form a complementary pair whose functioning was well illustrated by Tzvetan Todorov (1971, 131–132) in his analysis of La Quête du Saint-Graal, in which almost every single episode is accompanied by a commentary interpreting the spiritual meaning of chivalric deeds (cf. Doležel 1998, 26).

2 Narrator’s Commentary and Its Types Aristotle in his Poetics incorporated the thought-related aspects of a work (διάνοια) that the poet, like a successful orator, achieves through words. The meaning of the work is often manipulated by incorporating rhetoric into the narrative text: commentaries assess, edify, exhort, and generalize. In modern theory, commentary is sometimes equated with narrative modes. Helmut Bonheim (1982), in his classification, claims commentary to be one of four basic modes together with description, narration, and speech. In the generative model suggested by Wolf Schmid (2010), commentary is an act of narrative presentation. The final form of a narrative text is thus co-created by the commentary which is a part of the narrator’s presentation. Presented narrative, which also includes the story, is complemented by the presentation: “the story of the narrative act, in the process of which the presentation of the narrative is produced” (Schmid 2010, 211). In narratives with a low level of mediation, narrative commentary is played down or suppressed. On the other https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-005

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hand, literary works dominated by omniscient narration are usually characterized by a wealth of interpretative rhetoric. Representatives of classical narrative poetics (Gérard Genette, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Seymour Chatman) developed a general typology of narrator’s commentary according to which commentaries are integrated into either story or narration. In terms of story, writes Chatman, it can be said that ‘interpretation’ (in this special sense) is the open explanation of the gist, relevance, or significance of a story element. ‘Judgment’ expresses moral or other evaluative opinions. ‘Generalization’ makes reference outward from the fictional to the real world, either to ‘universal truths’ or actual historical facts. ‘Self-conscious’ narration is a term recently coined to describe comments on the discourse rather than the story, whether serious or facetious. (1978, 228)

2.1 Five Perspectives on Narrator’s Commentary Chatman’s definitions contained in the chapter “Discourse: Covert versus Overt Narrators” (1978) can be used to establish a general framework for further inquiry into the topic. It must be pointed out, however, that close examination of narrator’s commentary will reveal that the boundaries between the various types are sometimes uncertain and blurry. To untangle these difficulties, narrator’s commentary can be approached from several angles. (1) Commentary can be investigated as a specific means of plot retardation. This view was employed by the Russian Formalists in particular, who pointed out its role in the construction of aesthetically appealing sjužets. (2) Commentary can be examined as one of the basic narrative modes (e.g., Doležel 1973; Bonheim 1982). Early on, Robert Petsch (1934) differentiated reflection (Betrachtung) from other modes such as introduction, narration, description, scene, and dialogue. In unpublished lectures on the epic, Jan Mukařovský (n.d. a, n.d. b) suggests style formations that form the epic work. Alongside narration, which represents the basis of epic structure, description, and dialogue, he also mentions reflection. In the postclassical phase of narrative theory, it seems useful to revise the approach so as to include narrative modes within broad text-types that function as types of cognitive activity and influence communicative practice (e.g., Bruner 1986). In the Czech tradition, the theory of modes is closely connected with functional linguistics. Text-types, by contrast, encompass multiple approaches with different concerns. Commentary forms can thus be equated to the explanatory type (Herman 2009). (3) Commentary can be investigated in connection with narrative mediation. In a six-degree model between the poles of “covert” narrator and “overt” narrator, Rim-

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mon-Kenan considers commentary as showing the highest possible “perceptibility of the narrator” ([1983] 2002, 97–101; similarly already Chatman 1978, ch. 5). In its stronger forms, narratorʼs commentary, which impedes the flow of plot, epitomizes the authorial narrative situation (Stanzel [1979] 1984). Narrative discourse may reveal the individuality of the narrator and even lead to comparisons with the flesh-and-blood author. (4) Narrator’s commentary can be analyzed as a specific component of narrative discourse, marked by zero fictional reference. Consider John Searle’s assertion that “a work of fiction need not consist entirely of, and in general will not consist entirely of, fictional discourse” (1979, 74). (5) Narrator’s commentary can be explored from the point of view of its relationship with the object of the commentary. During the height of the postmodernist novel, much attention was devoted to metafictional commentary (Alter 1975; Hutcheon 1980; Waugh 1984), which, by means of self-reflexive techniques, underscores narration as fiction and thus undermines aesthetic illusion (see Werner Wolf’s contribution to this volume). Nevertheless, as has been shown by theoreticians of postmodernist metafiction, narrator’s commentary is firmly bound to the genre of the novel, particularly its polyphony. During the nineteenth century, the period of the boom of the realist novel, which became the most influential genre, overshadowing the others, “the conflict of languages and voices is apparently resolved” (Waugh 1984, 6). In reaction to theoretical positions taken up with regard to the metafictional and anti-illusive novel, often mistaken for the whole field of self-reflexivity, important studies devoted to metanarrative commentary have appeared. Metanarrative commentary, it is argued, can function in totally contradictory ways and thus not necessarily detract from aesthetic illusion. The variety and wealth of commentary has been set out in a detailed typology by Ansgar Nünning (2004). Nünning draws attention to the various functions associated with commentary including, inter alia, authentication, didactic, humoristic, and parodic functions (40). In contrast to these functions is narrative commentary as intratextual reference such as reference to previous or subsequent parts of the plot or to accessory plot lines. Another detailed and exhaustive summary of the issue of metafiction and metanarration can be found in Monika Fludernik (2003, her own model 27–30). Three principal types of narrator’s commentary found in Czech prose fiction from the fourteenth to the twentieth century and their main developmental tendencies will be examined here: interpretative, evaluative, and metanarrative/metafictional. When relevant, other types of commentary will also to be taken into account (e.g., didactic, appellative, supplicatory). It must be borne in mind that commentary can serve a variety of purposes. The emphasis here will be on the functional characteristics of narrator’s commentary rather than on its form and content.

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Interpretative commentary comprises all exegetic narrative passages that explain, analyze, and/or interpret narrative information. As already mentioned, for the purposes of this study the pragmatic criterion is preferred over formal criteria. Therefore, no special attention will be paid to the originator (narrator) of interpretative passages or to other formal features. The same goes with regard to the particular topic of the commentary. As for evaluative narrator’s commentary, it is generally connected to moral judgments, attitudes, and resolutions. Finally, metanarrative narrator’s commentary refers to narration as such. In this type of commentary, the circumstances surrounding the process of narration are mediated. Again, such commentary can adopt different forms and serve various functions in narrative. In the following analyses and descriptions of narrator’s commentary, formal features will be combined with pragmatic considerations (who speaks to whom and about what). Special attention will be paid here to the functions of narrator’s commentary in its diachronic evolution.

3 Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (1300–ca. 1600) Generally speaking, Czech narrative literature of this period was influenced by the coexistence of Old Church Slavonic and Latin alongside literature written in German. Old Czech literature appeared around 1300, its development being connected with the prosperity of the Czech kingdom under the Luxembourg dynasty. It is also notable that Prague was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire from 1346 to 1400. Regarding narrator’s commentary during this period, attention will be focused primarily on Old Czech prose texts, which at the time were secondary to faster-developing verse narrative. Epic poetry was mainly inspired by popular European topics (Alexandreis, Tristan and Iseult), but it also cultivated domestic themes (Chronicle of Dalimil, 1314). Commentary at the time was a common part of verse narratives. In the incipits of particular works of chivalric romance, appellative commentary was often used in order to emphasize the exceptionality of the narrative so as not to disappoint audience expectations. An example can be found in the Czech version of Tristan and Iseult (Tristram a Izalda, second half of the fourtneenth century): ✶ Listen all what I want to tell you about joy and about sorrow

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one story of a couple about unheard things about deeds and speeches and about love. Who can listen, listen!

Turning now to prose fiction in the Czech lands during the second half of the fourteenth century, three types of medieval narrative texts can be differentiated according to the proportion of exegesis and diegesis they contain.

3.1 Equal Distribution of Narration and Commentary in Tales with Interpretation and Moralization As already indicated, narratives include a rhetorical element that bears on the thought dimension of the work. This element generally takes the form of a commentary whose function and power in medieval narratives vary in accordance with the delivery of a story in conjunction with interpretation, evaluation, and/or appeal to the public. Narrative forms that employed narrative and commentary in equal proportions were common during the Middle Ages. It should be emphasized, however, that narratives constituted in this way are older and that the origin of paradigmatic genres can be traced back to ancient times. The balanced composition of narration and commentary entered the Czech literary tradition through the translation of the European bestseller Gesta Romanorum at the end of the fourteenth century (ca. 1380). This balance is exemplified as follows: ✶ The King, known as Octavianus, loved his wife very much for three reasons: first, she was faithful, second, she was very beautiful, third, she was obedient and stable.

Spiritually: Dearest! This king can mean our beloved Lord Jesus who loves his wife, every soul, when she is faithful and does not follow other gods, when she is beautiful without a blemish of sin and she is stable in obeying God’s commandments forever. (42)

Narration (imitatio) and interpretative commentary (moralizatio) create an indivisible whole in this passage. Although the two types are strictly separated in the text, together they constitute the genre of the exemplum. A story without an interpretative commentary would be a riddle, while interpretation without a story would not be a narrative. An exemplum is achieved only when both types are present: the meaning of the narrative can be fully grasped only with the help of explicit interpretation. The interpretative component of the text also proves that a commentary can simultaneously perform several functions: in the example, it displays not only

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the interpretative function but also the generalization function (once interpreted, the singular example of the queen is pluralized and generalized) and the appellative function (an exemplary narrative shows that a woman receives an honorarium in exchange for marital virtues). The balanced composition of narration and commentary is a good starting point for investigating other Czech medieval narrative genres. Incorporation of interpretative commentaries into narrative genres transformed these genres into didactic and moralizing forms that were common in Czech literature from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Conversely, the weakening of commentary resulted in the enhancement of the literariness of narratives. In the Middle Ages narrative commentary usually formed necessary parts of the ending. For example, in the well-known Griselda (Czech version 1459), the narrative ends with the following commentary: “This was written to give an example not only to other women but also to men in order to stay faithful in marriage.” It will be noticed that this commentary (which is also self-reflexive) is much less extensive than the one from the spiritual genre of the Gesta Romanorum. Nevertheless, the presence of commentary in Griselda suggests that even newer narratives sought to achieve moralizing aims. It can be surmised that the decline of commentary was probably connected to the growth of literariness. This can be seen in the Prostějov Collection (1557), consisting of various European fables and short stories translated into Czech and collected by the humanist Jan Albín Vrchbělský. Narrator’s commentary seems to be an attribute of older medieval genres (in Aesopian fables the commentary at the end of the story always interprets the meaning). On the other hand, in more modern genres, borrowed from Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) and Sebastian Brant (1457–1521), interpretation plays only an optional role or is completely missing. Simply put, in genres dominated by the poetic/aesthetic function, didactic or moral commentaries tended to fade from view.

3.2 Plot Stories That Eliminate Commentary Simultaneously with narratives that sought to enlist the power of commentary, another group of narratives displays the tendency to eliminate narrator’s commentary. A telling example of such a tendency can be seen in stories of chivalry that originated under the rule of the Luxembourg dynasty: the Chronicle of Štilfríd and Chronicle of Bruncvík (both second half of the fourteenth century). In this diptych the heroes undertake various adventures in order to further embellish the coats of arms of Czech dukes. Štilfríd vanquishes twelve famous heroes and wins an eagle for the coat of arms; Bruncvík adds to his coat of arms a lion he befriended during his chivalric adventures in fantastic countries. Both books were highly popular prose romances from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. There are several

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reasons why stories of chivalry did away with commentary, one of the most important being how the story is built up: commentaries with interpretative or generalizing functions tended to slow down the flow of actions and events that are significant for genres based on overcoming obstacles. A simple plot that concentrates entirely on the actions of the protagonist does not need the help of commentary to assist the reader in following the storyline. Moreover, the stories in question possessed an allegorical dimension that was not intended to be interpreted for a clear meaning. For example, during his chivalric adventures, Bruncvík conquered two strange female creatures, Maid Europa and Maid Africa, and lived with them, only to rid himself of them later. It is highly probable, in the Middle Ages, that a narrative about an affair with creatures carrying topographical names burnished the status of the hero, allegorically describing power over Europe and Africa in terms of sexual domination of man over woman. The author did not wish to explicitly divulge the meaning of the symbolic creatures, at the same time disguising the power of the knight in the cloak of allegory. Were the personifications to be explicitly interpreted by a commentary, the effectiveness of the story would be lost. In some cases, however, commentary was eliminated for purely practical reasons. For example, in a prose romance called Alexander (the Czech version of which dates from the rule of the Luxembourg dynasty), no commentaries can be found. The possible reason for this is that the author (or adapter) wanted to avoid evaluating the ambiguous nature of a pre-Christian conqueror. The thematic level of the work is thus not represented in the narrator’s commentary but rather in commentaries by heroic characters who either idolize Alexander or pass judgment on him. An authoritative statement of the narrator’s judgment is entirely missing from the text.

3.3 Narrative Genres with a Distinctive Exegesis While the genres discussed above either combine narration and commentary in a balanced way or eliminate commentary, other genres common in Czech medieval literature are heavily weighted in favor of exegesis. As already seen, exempla used commentary for the interpretation and generalization of spiritual truths. In more complex forms and genres, a highly diversified scale of commentary form was used. For example, a medieval romance, History of the Destruction of Troy (Kronika trojánská), translated from Latin into Czech at the end of the fourteenth century, complete with commentaries by the Czech adapter, has a sprawling plot. In this text, commentaries function as signposts referring to particular spots of the text or as reminders of already narrated segments. Moreover, interpretative commentary, often used in this lengthy text, partly routes the novel toward a didactic genre. For example, the origin of idolatry is explained and various natural and astral phe-

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nomena are interpreted. Generalizing commentaries are relatively frequent as well, with the murder of Agamemnon, for example, leading the reader to reflect on opprobrious actions. Commentaries can also express attitudes and allow the narrator to judge characters and their motivations. At the same time, the narrator appeals to the public to learn from the text. The authority of the narrator in these moments is reinforced by quotations from ancient thinkers and references to contemporary sources, and so on. In sum, the History delivers an interesting story, but it also provides extensive commentaries in which the narrator functions as a wise man who not only narrates the deeds of old times but also explains phenomena of the contemporary world, reveals bad things, warns, and admonishes. The commentaries thus serve to bring out the didactic and moral undercurrent of the romance concretized and actualized by the reader who becomes emotionally involved in the plot as a mediator or interpreter of the work and is thus an important factor in building up the semantics of the work. In the History of the Destruction of Troy, commentary does not outweigh narration. It is more appropriate to view their interaction as a variety of forms without which narration would be unable to fulfill its functions. Nevertheless, Czech medieval literature does encompass works in which interpretation overbalances narration, particularly in didactic narratives. A telling example is the allegory The Game of Chesse (Knížky o šašiech, end of the fourteenth century) by Tomáš Štítný. In the cases of Štilfríd and Bruncvík, allegory remains open, thus obviating any interpretative commentary. In contrast, Štítný builds interpretative commentary into the text itself, a story about a wise man who invents a game of chess in order to advise a cruel king who could not be criticized directly without punishment. In Czech literature at the end of the Middle Ages, and during the early Renaissance, narratives that used commentary for parodic effect can be found. For example, Hynek of Poděbrady complemented his own translation of ten stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron with a short story about Lady Salomena (1490). The story portrays a noblewoman who is neglected by her ignorant husband. Instead of finishing the story with a climax, Hynek introduces a parody of supplicatory rhetoric in which the narrator asks God to free neglected women from their commitment to fidelity. The effect does not grow from the plot but rather from a grotesque parody of generalizing and supplicatory commentaries.

Summary The effect of medieval narratives is firmly connected with that of the commentaries that accompany them. Genres based on or using the form of the exemplum, prototypically embodied in the Gesta Romanorum, build upon both narration and com-

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mentary. Commentary thus undergirds a genre-establishing function: it amplifies the meaning of extraordinary deeds in verse epics and lies at the heart of didactic and moralizing genres. Whereas domination by interpretation signals didactic and moralizing genres, elimination of commentary signals an adventure sjužet typical of stories of chivalry.

4 Baroque, Enlightenment, Pre-Romanticism (1600–1800) Due to translations of works written in other languages, Czech literature of the sixteenth century was deeply influenced by older foreign themes. In 1611 a Czech translation of The History of Life of Doctor Faustus (Historia o životu doktora Jana Fausta), which originally appeared in German in 1587, was published. The story about a mage who committed his soul to hell was popular all around Europe. Doctor Faustus is another example of the importance of narrator’s commentary. Both the German author and the Czech adapter of Doctor Faustus use the narrator as an active commentator who issues a warning: judgment (the narrator criticizes Faustus as arrogant and proud) is complemented by generalization (he who hurries to hell is not easily scared) and exhortation (every Christian can take a negative example from the story of Faustus and start praying to the Lord). Interestingly, when the narrative touches upon theologically sensitive topics (e.g., the Lutheran doctrine of justification), authoritative commentary is missing. The fight over Faustus’s soul is not fully based on interpretation but emerges from the story, in which characters urge Faustus to repent his sins. In other cases, however, didactic and moralizing genres often rely on the illocutionary force of narrative commentary: the more extensive the interpratation, the more didactic the effect. This can be seen in the works of Simon Lomnicius of Budeč (1552–1623), who wrote moralistic prose about the deadly sins: Cupid’s Arrow (Kupidova střela, 1590), Tract about Dance (Traktát o tanci, 1597), and several other works. Borrowed mainly from medieval exempla, these narratives are rather amazing and sometimes even slightly kinky or perverse (especially Cupid’s Arrow). Nevertheless, Lomnicius literally “wrapped” these themes in evaluative, generalizing, and precautionary commentaries. As a result, the narratives are not felt as a collection of stories portraying sinful practices, but as a vehement warning to shun infidelity and disorderliness. The narrator seems to be very engaged in his supplicatory appeals: “You, unwise men, you, senseless madmen, what are you doing? Yet you don’t know that your wives are crowns on your heads?” Systematic (e)valua-

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tion and interpretation, appeal and urgency, turned the original stories into moralizing didactic prose. Overall, baroque texts (and this is obvious already in the work of Lomnicius) are full of commentaries expressed from an emotional position. This can be seen in one of the most popular books of that period, a baroque legend known as the History of Genoveva from Brabant (Velmi pěkná historie o Jenovefě). The Czech version of the text comes from 1784, translated by an unknown translator from the German Volksbuch. Compositionally speaking, Genoveva follows the design of the most famous “Czech” baroque novel, the Life of Christ (Veliký život Pána a Spasitele našeho Krista Ježíše, 1779) by Martin of  Kochem, translated into Czech by Edelbertus von Nymburk at the end of the seventeenth century. Similarly to the Gesta Romanorum, the Life of Christ and Genoveva are comprised of both narrative and commentary. However, whereas medieval Gesta commentaries primarily employ the interpretative function or, indirectly, the generalization function, in baroque stories commentary expresses feelings, contemplation, and worship. In other words, the narrator’s attitudes are born out of religious faith and spiritual sentiments. The story of Genoveva, a noblewoman who was forced to survive the terror of her protector while living in hiding after her husband left for war, is complemented by passages that are typographically distinguished from narration: ✶ You, who love pureness, saint Genoveva! How mighty is your love for innocence and how great an example of marital faith do you provide for others! You know very well that the slimy steward with high malice follows for you and is ready to harass you. Nevertheless, you are ready to suffer a hundred times in order not to betray our omnipotent God with the deed of marital unfaithfulness. I thank our mighty God for obtaining you with such a virtue and beg through your credit the heavenly solemnity to let the perfect love of saintly purity and virtue be rooted in my heart.

The commentary, which turns into a prayer here, does not interrupt narration in order to interpret it. There is no need to explain who is good and who is bad, for the characters are presented schematically and continuously evaluated. The narrator interrupts the narration in order to express his feelings and celebrate his heroine. Such commentary also gives evidence of pre-Romantic sentimentality. Czech literature at the end of eighteenth century, less dependent on translations and beginning to reflect the imperatives of the national movement, was enriched under the influence of German literature with strong self-reflexive commentary. Self-reflexivity was present mainly in statements explaining the purpose or the origin of a story. It should be noted that prose fiction during this period was dominated by didactic and moralizing stories. On the other hand, in adventure stories of the period, commentary was eliminated in order not to slow down the flow of the action. Adventure stories borrowed not only from chivalric patterns such as those

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of Štilfríd and Bruncvík but also from pre-Romantic horror literature and gothic novels, for example, the popular works of Christian Heinrich Spiess (1755–1799), a German author living in the Czech lands.

Summary The coexistence of narration and commentary was long lasting in Czech literature. In the later phase of the early modern period, there were both plot-based stories that eliminated commentary (still-popular stories of chivalry in chapbooks, adaptations of Spiess and others) and stories with a balanced proportion of narration and commentary (History of Faustus). Baroque literature brought in displays of feelings, religious sentiments and devotion (Lomnicius, Genoveva). Configurations in which dominant interpretative, evaluative, and appellative commentaries contributed to didactic and moralizing genres continued to be influential (as it can be most clearly seen in Lomnicius).

5 Realist Fiction One of the most significant tendencies in realist prose fiction is the attenuation of rhetorical forms of address, narrator’s commentary included. However, commentary can still be detected in some realist novels and continues to perform the functions discussed with regard to medieval and early modern Czech literature. In Czech realist prose, interpretative narrator’s commentary can be divided into various clusters according to its relation with the interpreted. Historical realist fiction, representing a large share of Czech literary realism, also plays an important role in the national revival project. Historical realist fiction often served as a tool of national education by portraying key moments and circumstances in Czech national history; often, it was focused on the everyday lives of the Czech (village) people, who were considered the bearers of Czech national values. Actually, a great deal of Czech realist historical fiction serves as a relevant source of (missing) historical information and knowledge. Nevertheless, even when the whole work (both story and narration) serves the purpose of mediating historical information, passages that are fundamentally exegetic can influence this mediation in specific ways, and to particular effect. Passages of this nature are commonly placed in the main body of the text, or they can take the form of specific paratexts such as a foreword or an introductory chapter, notes or footnotes. A telling example of this tool can be found in the works of Karolina Světlá, who, through her ethnographic approach,

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stuck as closely as possible to factual detail so as to achieve authenticity, also adopting authentic folk language by using dialect; the meanings of some expressions are given in footnotes which effectively become part of the work. In Světlá’s works, as in other works of Czech realist prose, explanatory or interpretative passages commenting on local customs and speech, based on ethnological research, are relatively frequent. This is the case not only with historical novels devoted to Czech national history, but also with realist prose portraying the everyday lives of Czech village people, considered to be the bearers of Czech national values: What is our pride, hope and solace, what power and strength in us is jealously recognized even by our deadly enemies, what has never failed under any circumstances, what carries us in our fight for our national being, what is the warranty of our cheerful future, what saved the treasure of our language and thus confirmed us Slavs, than an unprecedented diligence and endurance of our folk, its ideal aspiration and dedication?

Explanatory narrator’s commentary can also be found in non-historical realist fiction. The famous Czech pre-realist and realist writer Jan Neruda, for example, compares particular occupations and their assignments so as to describe the contemporary phenomenon of a special type of working-class people: Workers for digging, shipping and storing soil, workers for ripping the rocks – “ajznbans,” “rippers,” but never address any of them as a “ripper,” their hands are hard as stone when they hit you properly – better hit by a stone than by this hand. Rippers are a completely new phenomenon in Czech lands. It is not a former Prague “flamendr,” as they were prior to 1848, it is not a German “Läufer,” or Norvegian “stavkarle” or Hungarian gypsy, it is a hard-working man – look at him, at his diversity. ✶

Last but not least are passages in Czech realist prose that evoke religious, philosophical, political, or economic themes or that ponder human nature at the exegetic level. Here, for example, is how the life of a village widower is commented on: “He lives in his chamber on his own, now, in winter, he sits at the stove and cooks. Village men can usually cook as well as women. What does old Střihavka cook?”; or how the general weekly practice of a town house is described by Jan Neruda: “Today is Monday, the whole house washes laundry and due to the smell of soap and peas – every household cooks peas whilst doing their laundry – the only comfortable place in the house is on the roof.” Also to be found are general statements of an objective nature regarding unfortunate human conditions. Thus described are the psychological circumstances of illness: ✶ Ill people like to commemorate the most and in the most adorable way. All the material world dies with their dying bodies, what is left is just the soul with its dreams, ecstasies and memoirs in which their ill mind bathes. Commemorating their only wealth with which they play as children, lying in their death beds.

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Moreover, general political or ethical statements regarding poverty can be implemented in the main body of narrative text: “With poverty – especially with poverty in a low, decadent stage – it is difficult to deal.” Evaluative commentary in Czech realist fictional prose is a tool which, in the exegetic mode, can either set out general ethical rules or express the speaker’s attitudes. Evaluative narrator’s commentary may pass judgment on historical events and circumstances as they appear in the realist historical novel, even contributing to the formation of Czech national identity. A telling example of a general evaluative description of morality which is firmly bound to the specific situation of the Czech national revival can be found in the works of one of the founders of modern Czech literature, Josef Kajetán Tyl in his The Last of the Czechs: ✶ This is a curse of our time – of the time when a fellow does not know a fellow, when blood hates blood, when a daughter negates her mother – that everything tears out of its roots, dirt is thrown to the cradle, and everything leaves for adventure to foreign regions.

Other forms of evaluative narrator’s commentary that express general views of human nature, historical periods, or political movements can also be found in Czech realist prose. Jakub Arbes, for example, provides his audience with commentaries that combine and evaluate contemporary political, economic, and ethical issues: ✶ Cultural historians who will one day want to truthfully and earnestly depict the period we live in will face an uneasy and also interesting task. We contemporaries who have become familiar with the outstanding state of affairs view the results of general corruption, daily described in various journals, with apathy. We know that today almost every salesman, regardless of dealing with goods or talents, very often causes a blatant injustice. And in spite of this fact, only some few reproach them for excusing their brutality with a modern phrase, that “financial pressure” or “business interests” are the real cause.

As is the case with other types of commentary in Czech realist prose, metanarrative commentary can come in different forms and strategies with a variety of effects. Most metanarrative commentary employs “classical” forms and can be found in various periods and literary movements. However, such commentary is generally not substantial or frequent in realist literature, due to the fact that a not-insignificant part of realist production seeks to minimize the “presence” of the narrator in the text. Even so, techniques for laying bare the narrative or fictional dimensions do appear. One technique is related to narrative omniscience by which the constructedness of the narrative is underscored: “At the very exact moment when the previous chapter finishes a new chapter starts as soon as Mr. Ebr, the landlord, comes back from his office.” Another example of the connection between narrative omniscience and metafictional commentary can be found in cases in which the (authorial) narrator

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addresses possible, real, or apparent reservations that the audience might have, thus revealing the role of these reservations in the process of literary narratives. Such is the case of Karolina Světlá’s ethnographic approach: And therefore it sounds to me like a denial of the state of affairs when I am accused of idealizing the village folks in my humble pictures. On the contrary, I deserve the completely opposite accusation of my pen being so weak that it cannot see and describe this ideal individuality. ✶

Still another example of metafictional commentary in Czech realist prose, resulting in a form in which the narrator who addresses the reader is actually addressing the readers, can be found in the work of Jan Neruda: “I do not intend here to describe the nervous excitement of the doctor in detail, my readers are clever enough that they, based on the character and the events performed, form their own opinions.”

Summary Although Czech realist prose seeks, as a general rule, to minimize narrator’s commentary, instances of commentary fulfilling specific functions do exist and can be broken down into several types: didactic, explanatory, metanarrative. All three can play an important role as an auxiliary means employed by the narrator to stay on the scene in realist literature, where narrators commonly remain fairly invisible or silent.

6 Conclusion From the beginning in the fourteenth century, narrative commentary in Czech written narrative literature was used to various degrees, taking a variety of forms according to the respective period and genre. Suppressed commentary is particularly symptomatic for genres foregrounding the sjužet. This applies in particular to medieval chivalric stories, popular short stories, and facetiae from the Renaissance period and to adventure stories during the Romantic period. Similar tendencies can be detected in allegories whose openness does not strive for authoritative interpretations, so that narrative commentaries are rarely employed. Nevertheless, from the very beginning various forms of commentary also became a fruitful tool for narrators’ activities, resulting in the establishment and confirmation of their authority. Narrators explained and interpreted Christian mysteries, and they warned and educated their readers by displaying their knowledge of worldly affairs. Genres based on the power of exegesis were thus a staple

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of Czech written literature from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the nineteenth century, some of these genres to the extent that the stories in which they were couched served mainly as an illustration of their central thesis. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Czech realist literary narratives brought in specific forms and distributions of commentaries serving specific purposes. The most common explanatory commentaries provided readers with detailed information delivered by “invisible” narrators, resulting in greater objectivity of the narration. Evaluative, however, and specifically metafictional commentaries, which became common in Czech realist literature, made narrators more “visible,” thereby contributing substantially to the subjectivity of the process of narration.

References Alter, Robert. 1975. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bonheim, Helmut. 1982. The Narrative Modes. Cambridge: Brewer. Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Doležel, Lubomír. 1973. Narrative Modes in Czech Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Doležel, Lubomír. 1998. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ėjchenbaum, Boris. (1922) 2012. “Lev Tolstoj.” In Jak je udělán Gogolův plášť, 194–238. Prague: Triáda. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and Metafiction.” Poetica 35, no. 1/2, 1–39. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Hutcheon, Linda. 1980. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Mukařovský, Jan. n.d. a. “Epika: Její podstata a druhy.” LA PNP, fond Jana Mukařovského, 66/86, inv. č. 3210. Mukařovský, Jan. n.d. b. “Epika II.” LA PNP, fond Jana Mukařovského, 66/86, inv. č. 3454–3455. Nünning, Ansgar. 2004. “On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology, and an Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary.” In The Dynamics of Narrative Form, edited by John Pier, 11–58. Berlin: De Gruyter. Petsch, Robert. 1934. Wesen und Formen der Erzählkunst. Halle: Niemeyer. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. (1983) 2002. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter. Searle, John. 1979. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Šklovskij [Shklovsky], Viktor. (1928) 1991. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive.

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Stanzel, Franz Karl. (1979) 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1971. “La quête du récit.” In Poétique de la Prose, 59–80. Paris: Seuil. Waugh, Patricia. 1984. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Routledge.

Andrej Agratin and Valerij Tjupa

Characters and Persons in Russian Literature 1 Definition The term character (C) is used to refer to a participant in a storyworld. Narratology postulates two minimal features by which C differs from other storyworld entities: “an invisible ‘inside’ which is the source of all intentions, wishes, etc., and a visible ‘outside’ which can be perceived” (Jannidis 2014, 34). These features mark the basic boundaries of the category, testifying to its universality and contextual mobility (“fairy-tale characters,” “dramatic characters,” “novel characters,” etc.). Thus, the term character itself is “indifferent” to the historical aspect of narration: the term is used to describe any fictional narrative. For this reason, related notions focused on the diachronic analysis of narrative must be adopted. The Russian academic tradition offers a more specific understanding of character (xarakter, C✶). С✶ is a set of properties (psychological, moral, behavioral, social, etc.) attributed to а participant in a story. It is important to note that C✶ is not formed with the emergence of narration. The fairy-tale hero is a functional figure, whose essence comes down to his place in the plot, as pointed out by Vladimir Propp ([1928] 1968). C✶ took form in literature. Initially, it was not central to narration but was rather a consequence of sequences of events. The development of literary narration was accompanied by changes in the constitution of C✶ which resulted in external eventfulness gradually being pushed into the background. C✶ is a “social role” performed by the hero, the “public” mode of his fictional existence. Here, it would be appropriate to mention Mixail Baxtin’s reflections on the human “self.” From within his or her own consciousness, the subject is unable to see himself or herself as a whole. This is the prerogative of the “other”; only “he” or “she” has access to the external, final view of “me.” Applying the described model to the study of an artistic text, we can say that C✶ is the result of such an external observation: “Character is the name we give to that form of the author– hero interrelationship [Baxtin makes no distinction between author and narrator] which actualizes the task of producing the whole of a hero” ([1979] 1990, 174). By and large, C✶ is the complete set of features used to identify the hero. C✶ “integrates the various manifestations of a character [C] in a fictional text, allowing them to be attributed to the same person in a motivated manner” (Markovič 2008, 290), and helps “to identify the sameness of a certain number of intratext subjects” (Faustov and Savinkov 2013, 4). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-006

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At the same time, the “other” is not able to take “my” place in being, to become “me” (Baxtin [1979]. 1990, 23). This is why C✶ in fiction (“I-for-the-other”) inevitably implies the hero’s inward, hidden “I-for-myself” (“private” mode of existence), which is the product of his inner self-actualization corresponding to person/personality (ličnost’, P). The correlation of C✶ and P echoes the ideas of Paul Ricoeur. Based on the opposition of idem (sameness)–ipse (selfhood) in Latin, Ricoeur considers character (Fr. сaractère) “as the overlapping of ipse by idem [. . .] exactly as second nature, my character is me, myself, ipse; but this ipse announces itself as idem.” According to Ricoeur, “a character trait” is “a distinctive sign by which a person is recognized, reidentified as the same” ([1990] 1994, 121). The above definition may well be used to explain the essence of C✶ (a set of permanent “distinctive signs,” distinctive features of the subject). Selfhood is a pure ipse and refers to “identity without the aid and support of the idem” (124). This is nothing other than P: a self-awareness, Baxtin‘s “I-for-myself,” existing regardless of the constancy of “my” properties addressed to the “other.” The contradiction between character (Fr. caractère)/C✶ and selfhood/P is resolved through the realization of narrative identity that provides the dialectic of idem and ipse: “Narrative identity makes the two ends of the chain link up with one another: the permanence in time of character and that of self-constancy.” On the one hand, “in narrativizing character, the narrative returns to it the movement abolished in acquired dispositions, in the sediment of identification-with” (Ricoeur [1990] 1994, 166). On the other hand, it is the narrative that is “a form of permanence in time which can be connected to the question ‘who?’ inasmuch as it is irreducible to any question of ‘what?’” (118); that is, it implies an irreplaceable attribution of the story to P. Ricoeur does not refer to the phenomenon of narrative as such. However, in connection with the problem of identity, it is necessary to consider not only a narrative in the traditional sense of the word (verbal or non-verbal discourse that refers to a certain story), but also mental structures that are narrative in nature. Taking into account their specifics significantly modifies Ricoeur’s dialectical “formula” in which character (Fr. caractère)/C✶ is given equal place along side selfhood/P. Self-narration – the unspoken perception of a person about his or her life path – does not imply any listener/reader except for the perceiver, and thus causes only P of the subject (ipse) and not his or her C✶ (idem). Artistic representation of self-narration is discussed in more detail in the section on Čexov’s prose. It should be added that the phenomenon described has long occupied specialists in the field of cognitive psychology (Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001; Bruner 1991). It is also important to understand exactly how C✶ and P are recognized and distinguished in narrative. C✶ can be manifested in three ways: (1) as an “objective”

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narratorial description; (2) in the text of the narrator, but with the use of a figural point of view (Schmid [2003] 2010, 105) that reflects the perception and speech traits of the hero as well as his spatial, temporal, and/or ideological position (Uspenskij [1970] 1973); (3) in the character’s text. (2) and (3) require increased attention from the reader because there may be an erroneous version of C✶ (false representation of the hero of himself or of someone from his environment). The same caution should be exercised if the work involves a diegetic narrator whose words cannot be fully “trusted.” P implies the presence of a figural point of view expressed in the character’s text (when this text is purely self-reflexive, as when the thoughts of the character are quoted by the narrator), or in the narrator’s text (often in the form of free indirect discourse). “Self,” unlike C✶, is not evaluated on the criterion of truth/ falsehood. Therefore, the techniques of storytelling that are “unreliable” in the case of reconstruction of C✶ turn out to be not only maximally adequate but also the only acceptable option for the narrative embodiment of P (“subjective” dimension of C). This is also true for self-narration, which is a detailed configuration of P: when a narratorial point of view (Schmid [2003] 2010, 105) is adopted, self-narration inevitably transforms into a narrative self-representation (“story-for-the-other”). C✶ and P are treated in this article as different aspects of С presentation. Over time, the relations between C✶ and P have changed. These changes will be illustrated with examples drawn from Russian literature.

2 Pre-Classical Period (Eleventh to Eighteenth Century) Before the seventeenth century, Old Russian literature focused only on mental states, describing turning points while leaving out С✶ description (Liхačёv 1970). As Sergej Averincev explained: “A medieval Christian writer wanted to instill in his Christian reader the most direct feeling of personal involvement in universal good and personal guilt for universal evil [. . .]. Objectively contemplative ‘psychology of character’ obviously does not meet the requirements of such a ‘supertask’” (1971, 257). Yet the adventure stories of the seventeenth century such as the anonymous Tale of Frol Skobeev, and even of the eighteenth century such as The Comely Cook by Georgij Čulkov, are, like folktales, devoid of developed С✶s. This is not about C✶s; it is about types. Nikolaj Karamzin was the first Russian prose writer to develop C✶s. The plot of Poor Lisa (1792) is formed not around the depicted circumstances but around the C✶s; a mysterious story told in Bornholm Island (1794) has no motivation either, for its beginning or for its end: the accent is transferred from the plot situation, which

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receives no explanation, to how differently it is perceived and experienced by its three participants due to their uniqueness as C✶s.

3 Early Classical Period (First Half of the Nineteenth Century) Romanticism radically updated the narrative practice of literary writing by implementing an internal (personal) dimension in the actor’s structure: the identity of the human “self.” The pinnacle of Russian romanticism, the poem Demon by Mixail Lermontov (1839), tells a story of a hero who is a sort of absolute “self,” a pure ipseity, lacking a C✶. His sudden desire to love, as well as his former unbearable negativism, is not motivated by anything; rather, it is an arbitrary eruption of a unique personality core. The Romantics’ individualizing approach to narrative identity played a significant role in the subsequent development of literary narrative. The full development of C✶s in the course of the story’s peripeteia (as previously formed in drama) is reflected in The Tales of Belkin (1831) by Aleksander Puškin, a literary cycle representative of a rethinking of the unsophisticated narrative structures of the ending literary era. The separation of selfhood from C✶, artistically motivated by the clash of two national components in the “Russified German” (Mann [2000] 2008c), occurs in Puškin’s The Queen of Spades (1833) and leads the C to madness. Eugene Onegin (1825–1833), a novel in verse by Puškin, was the first in Russian literature to fundamentally demarcate C✶ and P as the actor’s external and internal sides. In the final chapter, the C✶s of Onegin and Tat’jana (especially that of Tat’jana) change radically, beyond recognition. However, it turns out that the heroine’s personal uniqueness (the integrity of her selfhood), not recognized by Onegin at their first meeting, is well preserved by her under the cover of a new, exemplary secular C✶. Such intimacy of a person hidden behind a C✶ mask was to become a commonplace of Russian classical literature. Pečorin, the protagonist of Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time (1838–1840), is demonstratively mysterious, and his interaction with others is mostly masked, not revealing his inward “self.” Appearing in the mise en abyme of this text is the figure of a blind boy whose blindness “does not make him unseeing, it makes the inner content of his soul unseeable” (Savinkov 2004, 237). Pečorin’s character is contradictory: “There are two personalities within me,” he admits, that are inconsistent and extremely egocentric: he sees other people as material for his experiments on his own life. But unlike trivial egocentrics such as Grušnickij, Pečorin is endowed with a powerful ipseity, incomprehensible to him and paradoxically

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attractive to those around him. This is a kind of “demon” of Lermontov’s poem (Savinkov 2004, 254) in a “frame” (in a metaphorical sense) of C✶. Yet there is no organic unity between selfhood and its “frame” here. Another mysterious actor is Čičikov, the protagonist of Dead Souls (1842) by Nikolaj Gogol’, who mastered the mask behavior of a rogue: “The character [С✶] here is formed by merging a person with a role” (Gurvič 2002, 98) such that C✶ is downgraded to a type. The image of the crafty purchaser is well manifested in how ingeniously Čičikov concludes his “deals.” However, at the ball where Čičikov was supposed to finally consolidate his entrepreneurial success, he suddenly betrays his C✶-mask, sincerely admiring a young girl and insultingly neglecting the attention of the women of fashion. The narrator is perplexed, thinking that in such people there is not the slightest personal component, even though this personal component is involuntarily revealed, destroying a fraud that had been carried out so successfully. The mise en abyme that exposes Gogol’s С is achieved by the prosecutor’s death, described as follows: Clasping their hands, they cried out, as is customary: “Oh, my God!” and sent for the doctor to let his blood, but saw that the prosecutor was already a mere soulless body. Only then did they learn with commiseration that the deceased indeed had had a soul, though in his modesty he had never shown it.

While Lermontov embedded a self-contained Romantic personality into a C✶ that “belongs to historical time” (Savinkov 2004, 212), Gogol’ parodies Romantic selfhood in the scene of Čičikov’s narcissistic self-contemplation in a mirror. Yet the C’s inward side, discovered by romanticists, becomes practically unavoidable for literature. Within the “natural school,” with its close attention to the everyday life of the average person, there arises the problem of the personality of ordinary people with “ordinary” characters (see Faustov and Savinkov 2015), as in Ivan Gončarov’s first novel, A Common Story (1847). The problem is accentuated to the utmost in Mr. Proxarčin (1846), an early short story by Fëdor Dostoevskij in which officials, denying one of their “fellows” a right to his selfhood, ask him: Why, are you the only person in the world? Was the world made for you, do you suppose? Are you a Napoleon? What are you? Who are you? Are you a Napoleon, eh? Tell me, are you a Napoleon?

At the same time, Proxarčin’s story demonstrates that he indeed had his own secluded secret world, incompatible with his well-known C✶ as a meek and destitute official. “It was already in his first, ‘Gogol’ period’, when Dostoevskij portrayed not a ‘poor official’ but the self-consciousness of a poor official” (Baxtin 1972, 80), revealing to the reader not individual thoughts and feelings but the actor’s internal side as a sort of wholeness.

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4 Late Classical Period (Second Half of the Nineteenth Century) The classical Russian novels of Gončarov and Turgenev, Tolstoj, and Dostoevskij fulfilled the aim of making “the reader perceive a literary text as an equivalent to reality” (Markovič 2008, 303). The significance of “the epilogue in Dostoevskij’s novels, as well as in Turgenev’s and Lev Tolstoj’s novels, lies in verifying what is written, in emphasizing its irreversibility, genuineness, and involuntariness” (Mann [1994] 2008b, 401). At the same time, the significance of the inward, personal side that renders a С’s literary presentation complete increases. “The depicted world appears as ‘self-revealing’ thanks to the completeness of a character’s [C’s] self-consciousness” (Tamarčenko 1997, 198). By telling the lifestory of the C, realism reaches a deep organic unity of the external and the internal – of C✶ and P. These are two sides of the narrative identity of a hero as a whole. For instance, Oblomov’s laziness constitutes the dominant negative trait of his C✶ (“Oblomovism”); yet this trait is inseparable from his inner naturalness and “sunniness” (his selfhood; see Tjupa 2010). Such duality of heroes forms the specific charm of classical realism. Due to the effect of a “temporary and relative balance of power” (Tamarčenko, N. 1997, 196), realist novels show us typical characters, animated from the inside by each hero’s personal distinctiveness. They feature not “positive” or “negative” actors but “living people” who enter the reader’s horizons along with the reader’s real contemporaries. This can be seen in War and Peace (1863–1869): Rostov went on ahead to carry out his errand, and, to his great surprise, discovered that Dolokhov, this rowdy duellist, lived in Moscow with his old mother and hunchbacked sister, and was a most affectionate son and brother.

The depth to which fictional Cs are revealed in classical realism makes them even “more real” for the reader than real people whose inner lives are hidden from the outside observer. As E. M. Forster noted, people in a novel can be understood completely [. . .]. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends [. . .]. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly. (1927, 46–47, 61)

This equilibrium of C✶ and P begins to oscillate in prose starting in the 1860s. Significant in this respect is the figure of Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Bazarov’s distinctiveness is not only in the discovery of a new social type, manifested by Bazarov’s С✶, but also in the conceptually important “vagueness” of the hero who has entered a “period of crisis” and carries within himself

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a “disturbing secret” (Mann [1968] 2008a, 59, 53). This secret lies in the dramatic inconsistency of the hero’s selfhood with his C✶. In his relations with those around him, he remains for the most part a consistent “nihilist,” ignoring social conventions and speaking frankly, bluntly, and sharply. However, in dealing with Odincova, the crisis-provoking tension between the “me-for-myself” and the “me-for-the-others” poles grows in Bazarov’s soul. He ceases to recognize himself in himself. His personal “self” is gripped by a painful feeling that he would immediately repudiate with scornful laughter and cynical swearing were anyone to even remotely hint to him what was happening in him. Jurij Mann called this hero “one of the most amazing manifestations of Russian realism” ([1968] 2008a, 46). Similar crises of discord between C✶ and P are experienced by many of Dostoevskij’s (e.g., Raskol’nikov) and Tolstoj’s heroes (e.g., Andrej Bolkonskij). In Tolstoj’s novel Resurrection (1899), the С’s identity crisis (“his inner life was, as it were, wavering in the balance”) lies in the discrepancy between “believing oneself” (selfhood) and “believing others” by maintaining one’s С✶ identity in their eyes. The positive result of the crisis is the awakening of his P: “But the free spiritual being, which alone is true, alone powerful, alone eternal, had already awakened in Nekhludoff.”

5 Anton Čexov (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century) In Čexov’s late short stories, the mismatch between С✶ and P becomes the norm, and the hero’s narrative identity crisis grows into principal genre-forming factor. It is especially pronounced in The Lady with the Little Dog (1899), in which the С’s story consists of how, under the layer of “character identity” (Ricoeur) of a rather trivial wealthy Muscovite, tightly corseted in the philistine way of life, the С’s selfhood is awakened, now perceived by the hero and the narrator as a “personal secret” that forms the basis of all human existence (Tjupa [1989] 2018, 32–58). At one extreme of the mature Čexov’s many heroes is the C✶ of Belikov from the short story The Man in the Case (1898). Not only does Belikov not know his own “personal secret,” but he also refuses to tolerate it in others. At the other extreme is the madness of Kovrin in The Black Monk (1894), whose solitary consciousness goes so deep into the “personal secret” that it breaks with real life. The tension between the external and internal sides of human existence determines the personal competence of Chekhov’s character. In the life of Nikitin from the short story The Teacher of Literature (1894), such a tension arises and escalates because his selfhood grows stronger. In the life of Ionyč from the short story of the same name (1898), by con-

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trast, the initial tension between C✶ and P weakens and disappears, marking the C’s spiritual death. Čexov’s innovation was to recast the phenomenon of implicit self-narration as the basis of identity of the human “self.” This phenomenon (and those adjacent to it) has been considered in narratology (Ryan 1986a, 1986b; Palmer 2004; Agratin 2017; Tjupa 2019), and not only with reference to Čexov’s prose. Self-narration is one of the “pre-speech contents of consciousness” (Schmid 2017). It is the mental life of the subject’s personal past, narratively ordered by his memory through an inner voice as though from a second person. Once this self-narration is turned into the usual first-person narrative, it loses authenticity, since it is radically transformed by the discursiveness of speech forms and by narration itself, reflexively oriented toward a dialogically significant addressee. Self-narration takes place in our consciousness “automatically”  – without reflexive self-control  – in the various forms of “internal discourse” (Vygotskij 1982; Žinkin 1998). In self-narration the self is seen from the outside exactly as it is seen from the inside. At the same time, self-narration is not reduced to the sum of memories. This is a narratively (albeit unconsciously) ordered trajectory of one’s personal life, a whole story of presence in being. In this regard, psychological studies of “autobiographical memory” as a historically very late and structurally complex mental formation are of considerable value. In the short story The Darling (1899) the heroine, who “could not keep a secret” (tr. Constance Garnett), is completely lacking in self-narrational “heart memory” and thus appears to be devoid of ipseity. By contrast, in the short story The Bishop (1902), the hero’s presence is marked thanks to self-narration. In pre-Čexov literature, the narrator usually recounted the hero’s biography to motivate and explain his С✶. The Right Reverend Peter’s self-narration does not explain anything: it only indicates the hero’s selfhood, his own, internal, unique story, the continuity of which is daily existence. In Čexov’s late prose, the hero’s ipseity becomes his self-narrative dimension, a dimension that stretches beyond the narrator’s reach. In particular, this explains the problematic nature of mental events in Čexov’s works (Schmid 1991, 104–117; 1998, 263–294).

6 Literature of the Twentieth Century and Post-Soviet Prose The profound influence of the 1917 revolutionary catastrophe and subsequent years on literature was perceptively caught by the poet Osip Mandel’štam in his essay The End of the Novel (1925). He predicted that the genre would disappear because novelistic narrative is based on biographical narrative but the historic

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turbulence that involved many millions of people deprived them of their personal biographies: “the personality’s shares in history go down” (Mandel’štam 1925, 73). For example, the non-novelistic figures of Mixail Zoščenko’s tales are truly people without a biography, since they are devoid of the self-narrational dimension characteristic of Čexov’s heroes. Historically, the genre survived. Yet the revolutionary change profoundly altered the structure of the narrative identity of the novel and, in general, the literary hero. С✶ began to be determined not so much by the correlation of the actor with his personal biographical circumstances as by his position in the context of the national catastrophe (emigrant, winner, “fellow traveler,” etc. trying to fit into Soviet reality). As for personal selfhood, if it appeared at all, it was now determined by an “irreparable distortion of personality” (Kolobaeva 2015, 203), by personal trauma, usually in a historical context – the unique experience of social collapse or its aftermath. For instance, in Red Cavalry (1926) by Isaak Babel’, the Čexov-style demarcation of P and С✶ develops as follows: after a sharp and decisive gesture (killing a goose and demanding to fry it), conforming to the norm of a “commissar” C✶ and inspiring respect among the Red Army soldiers, only Commissar Ljutov’s heart, “crimson with murder, screeched and bled.” The post-revolutionary personality is traumatized. The measure of its ipseity is its inner degree of trauma. It is most obvious in emigrant literature (Nabokov, Gazdanov, and others), but it is also widespread in the works of Soviet authors far beyond the boundaries of socialist realism: The Master and Margarita (1940) by Mixail Bulgakov, Doctor Zhivago (1955) by Boris Pasternak, Life and Fate (1959) by Vasily Grossman, as well as And Quiet Flows the Don (1928–1940) by Mixail Šoloxov (the assignment of the early Šoloxov novels to socialist realism had opportunistic reasons and is not confirmed by his poetics). On the other hand, the weakening of the factor of personal trauma (not fully clarified in the text) leads the Сs of The Luzhin Defence (1930) by Vladimir Nabokov or those of Moscow to the End of the Line (1970) by Venedikt Erofeev to the weakening of selfhood, compensated for by the vividly portrayed С✶ of the hero. For example, Lužin’s childhood ipseity, with his elaborate С✶, is gradually “eaten” from the inside, forced out and replaced by chess, which leads to the figure of the hero disappearing (the novel’s final words are “there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich”). The literature of socialist realism, starting from its “embryo,” the novel Mother by Maksim Gor’kij (1906), was focused on searching for positive Сs as true heroes of their time. It was in conflict with such positive Cs that negative Cs formed. Personal selfhood lost its significance and almost disappeared from Soviet literature of the period of Stalinism. The archaic structure of a hero (С✶ without P) is clearly manifested not only in works marked by a high degree of pathos but also in comic novels by Il’ja Il’f and Evgenij Petrov such as The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf

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(1931) – works that did not conform to the canon of socialist realism, yet adhered to the dominant narrative practice of their time. By recreating the phenomenon of the adventure hero (analogous to the Сs of picaresque novels), the co-authors demonstrate the masked essence not only of the Сs that surround Ostap Bender but also that of Bender himself. The personal component, nourishing the hero with roguish energy, remains unrevealed (as is the case with the medieval Frol Skobeev; see section 2 above) in unofficial Soviet literature. Historically adjacent to these processes, however, exemplified by texts by the OBERIU collective, by Konstantin Vaginov, by Jurij Mamleev’s Rogue Bears (1966), and by Saša Sokolov’s A School for Fools (1973) and others, the certainty of C✶s deprived of ipseity is subjected to caricature. For instance, Vaginov’s Cs “reveal inner emptiness instead of freedom” (Žiličeva 2013, 188). In the works of Viktor Pelevin, developing along this line, the hero of the novel Generation “П” (1999) returns to the pre-character and pre-personal status of an actor whose fate “is predetermined from the very beginning of the whole history” (Silant’ev 2006, 174). A special place in this series belongs to the novel The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1969) by Vladimir Vojnovič, whose hero, leaving the world of caricatural C✶s, is born as an individual “self” (Žiličeva 2004). The recovery of implicit self-narrational traits and, as a result, of the hero’s ipseity, is achieved during the Thaw (Xruščëv) era of Soviet literature, as can be seen in “youth” prose (Vasilij Aksënov, Georgij Vladimov, Anatolij Gladilin and others) and military “trench-truth” prose (Jurij Bondarev, Grigorij Baklanov, and others). In the early writings of Aleksandr Solženicyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962; Matryona’s Place, 1963) and in the works of Jurij Trifonov, Vasilij Šukšin, and the representatives of “village prose” (Viktor Astaf’ev, Vasilij Belov, Valentin Rasputin, and others), there is a tendency to reconstruct the unity of C✶ and P found in classical realism. However, the newest Russian literature (chiefly the postmodern novel), with its propensity for denarrativization, seems to have completely turned its back on the unity of C✶ and P. In Mixail Šiškin’s novels, “there is no character [C✶] in the traditional sense [. . .]. Nor is there a fully and versatilely recreated human personality (as in the classics) [. . .]. This hero has a ‘one-plane’ implementation, mainly in speech” (Grimova 2018, 17). In Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2006) by Ljudmila Ulickaja, “the free self-development of the character [С✶] and free interaction between the personality and the environment, which define [the classic] novelistic discourse, are excluded” (Grimova 2018, 81–82). The catastrophes of political terror and of World War II turned out to be such powerful impulses in perpetuating the post-revolutionary model of the C✶–P correlation in Russian literature that, for almost a century, the trauma of personal experience and the conditioning of C✶s by this or that historical calamity have been the

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dominant features of narrative identity. They are preserved even in the best examples of modern literary practice. Especially interesting in this respect is Aviator (2016) by Evgenij Vodolazkin, a novel that relates the restoration of self-identity by a person burdened down with a “frozen” memory. The basis of the text are the records that “translate” the protagonist’s self-narration into a memoir-type first-person narrative during “a search by a protagonist, a kind of ‘lost man,’ for his personal, social, existential identity” (Grimova 2018, 269).

7 Conclusion The tension between C✶ and P is extremely important for the diachronic study of narrative. In Russian literature, the gradual shift from one pole of this opposition to the other (the dominance of P), which includes a a period of equilibrium (classical realism), can be considered a fundamental development on the one hand, and a manifestation of one of the historical (perhaps universal) “laws” of narration on the other. In this regard, a comparative approach to the problems raised in this article can be seen as very useful. A closer analysis of individual narrative works with the purpose of revealing linguistic, stylistic, and compositional forms of C✶ and P actualization would be equally valuable. It should be stressed that the path from C✶ to P is not one of necessity. Reverse processes are possible, and can be observed particularly in the literature of socialist realism. There is also a rethinking of this categorial pair in various sociocultural contexts (post-revolutionary era, postmodernism). The theoretical considerations set forth in this article are in need of further refinement. Here, only a number of philosophical preconditions for enriching the narratological toolkit have been outlined. This toolkit has already found application in literary studies, but as current research shows, it is organically included in the system of narratological categories. Thanks to the developing diachronic approach to narratology, fundamental aspects of these categories are beginning to come more clearly into focus. The problem of self-narration requires more detailed study. The most successful attempt to represent self-awareness in Russian narrative literature can be attributed to Čexov. A fuller understanding of this phenomenon will require further analysis of texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which the techniques of narration developed in classical Russian literature become a subject for aesthetic reflection and undergo important changes in the works of writers belonging to various periods of literary history.

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Silant’ev, Igor’. 2006. Gazeta i roman: Ritorika diskursnyx smešenij. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury. Tamarčenko, Natan. 1997. Russkij klassičeskij roman XIX veka: Problemy poetiki i tipologii žanra. Moskva: RGGU. Tjupa, Valerij. 2010. “Soljarnye povtory v romane Gončarova «Oblomov».” Kritika i semiotika 14:113–117. Tjupa, Valerij. (1989) 2018. Xudožestvennost’ čexovskogo rasskaza. Moskva: Vysšaja škola; Flinta-Nauka. Tjupa, Valerij. 2019. “Pograničnye sostojanija v literaturnom narrative.” Vestnik RGGU: Serija «Literaturovedenie, Jazykoznanie, Kul’turologija» 2:10–18. Uspensky [Uspenskij], Boris. (1970) 1973. A Poetics of Composition: The Strucutre of the Artistic Text and a Typology of Compositional Form. Translated by Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vygotskij, Lev. 1982. “Myšlenie i reč’.” In Sobranie sočinenij, vol. 2, 295–360. Moskva: Pedagogika. Žiličeva, Galina. 2004. Russkij komičeskij roman XX veka. Novosibirsk: NGPU. Žiličeva, Galina. 2013. Narrativnye strategii v žanrovoj structure romana (na materiale russkoj prozy 1920–1950-x gg.). Novosibirsk: NGPU. Žinkin, Nikolaj. 1998. Jazyk – reč’ – tvorčestvo. Moskva: Labirint.

Robert Kirstein

Unreliable Narration in Antiquity 1 Definition Modern theories of unreliable narration (UNn) were initiated by Wayne C. Booth’s monograph The Rhetoric of Fiction, first published in 1961 (for the following s. Kirstein, 2019). Booth takes his starting point from the difference between “self-conscious narrators, [.  .  .] aware of themselves as writers” (e.g., Tristram Shandy or Dr. Faustus) and “narrators [. . .] who rarely if ever discuss their writing chores” (e.g., Huckleberry Finn; Booth [1961] 1983, 155). Apart from whether the narrator is part of the story (homodiegetic) or not (heterodiegetic), there is always a “degree and kind of distance that separates them from the author, the reader, and the other characters of the story” (155). Booth explores this aspect of distance further and argues that a narrator is reliable when and insofar as he/she narrates in compliance with the norms of the work as a whole. If he/she deviates from this norm, modes of unreliability evolve. The effect of such deviation is a kind of dramatic irony, “and a secret communion occurs between the latter [i.e., the implied author] and the reader behind the narrator’s back” (Shen 2013). Since Booth relates the unreliable narrator (UNr) to the implied author of the text, his line of argumentation builds upon an inner-textual understanding. His theory has initiated a wide-ranging and ongoing discussion on the mechanisms of literary unreliability. Today, especially in postmodern discourses, unreliability is recognized as a fundamental category of narrative. The concept has undergone manifold modifications since Booth, especially by Kindt (2008, 28–67), Margolin (2015), A. Nünning (1997, 1998), V. Nünning (2015a), Shen (2013), and Sternberg and Yacobi (2015). Schmid ([1973] 1986; 2010, 36–51, esp. 40–42) has introduced the term “abstract reader” to avoid the moral undertones implicit in Booth’s notion of “implied reader” (cf. Berendsen 1980). A criticism of the concepts of both implied author and abstract author has been formulated by Bal (1981, 208–209; cf. de Jong 2014b, 19). One of the changes since Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction has been a shift away from the implied author as point of reference to the real reader of the text, thus replacing the original inner-textual model with an extra-textual one (A. Nünning 1997). In complex texts with embedded narratives (like Ovid’s Metamorphoses; see section 3 below), the norm giving reference can then be located both outside the text in the reader’s world or within the text among the inner-textual recipients of the embedded narrative. A further modification has been proposed by Phelan and Martin, who have established three axes: an axis of facts, an axis of value, and an axis of knowledge (1999, 94). This taxonomy results in a distinction between six types https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-007

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of unreliability falling into two major groups. Dan Shen uses this approach for a basic definition of unreliability: a narrator is unreliable or untrustworthy if she/ he “misreports, -interprets or -evaluates, or if she/he underreports, -interprets or -evaluates” (2013, nos. 5–6, with reference to Phelan and Martin 1999; Phelan 2005). In ancient texts, intertextuality seems to be of central importance for an understanding of the narrative mechanisms of UNn. Per Krogh Hansen has introduced a model which lends itself well for this purpose. His model contains a taxonomy of four categories (Hansen 2007, 241–243): (1) Intranarrational “designates the ‘classical’ definition  – that is unreliability established and supported by a large stock of discursive markers.” (2) Internarrational “designates the situation in which a narrator’s version of incidents is contrasted by another or several other narrators’ versions. [. . .] In opposition to the intranarrational version, internarrational unreliability is not necessarily marked discursively in the unreliable narrator’s discourse, but comes into being by the framing of other voices and a non-correspondence with what is taking form as the factual story on their behalf.” (3) Intertextual is “based on manifest character types that, on behalf of their former existence, in their configuration or paratextual mentioning [. . .] already direct the reader’s attention towards their reliability.” (Examples provided by Hansen are typical figures such as Naifs and Clowns.) (4) Extratextual: “designates unreliability depending on the reader’s direct implementation of own values or knowledge in the textual world. [. . .] this category is the most ambiguous.” The value of this model is that it does not center on the typical textual markers of UNn as such (1: intranarrational). Instead, it lays emphasis on the communication between different voices, be they part of one and the same text (2: internarrational) or generated in part by the reader’s knowledge which is positioned outside the text itself (4: extratextual). The third category (intertextual unreliability) is suitable, for example, for typical figures in comedy and in the novel. Hansen also discusses an approach developed by Dorrit Cohn (2000) that offers a distinction between unreliable and discordant narration. Discordance is used here to determine unreliability when it occurs not on an axis of facts but rather on an axis of ideology, creating a distance between the author and the narrator of a text (Hansen 2007, 243; cf. Fludernik 2005). Hansen also points to the historical dimension of interpretation. As an example, he refers to the interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1900) and the ideological problem of colonialism, of which it may or may not be critical. Furthermore, narratological model building after Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction has also emphasized possible bonding effects of UNn in contrast to its distanc-

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ing and estranging effects. Phelan (2007, 226–232) proposes six subtypes of such bonding unreliability: “literally unreliable but metaphorically reliable,” “playful comparison between implied author and narrator,” “naïve defamiliarization,” “sincere but misguided self-deprecation,” “partial progress toward the norm,” and “bonding through optimistic comparison” (cf. Phelan and Rabinowitz 2012, 33–37; V. Nünning 2015a, 10; 2015b, 102).

2 Exploring UNn in Ancient Texts 2.1 Preliminary Remarks The project of a diachronic and comparative narratology that addresses UNn and other central aspects of narrative is still in its early stages (Fludernik 2003; de Jong 2014a; von Contzen and Tilg 2019; on unreliability as future topic, von Contzen 2018, 29). There are already individual studies on individual authors, genres, and epochs within antiquity in which one has identified characteristics of UNn. What is missing, however, is a comprehensive and systematic survey of the phenomenon as we find it in modern and contemporary European literature (a brief survey is provided by Kimmerle 2015, 130–132). It is therefore not surprising that Stefan Tilg (2019, 78; similarly Feddern 2021, 2) only briefly touches on the subject of the UNr in his chapter on the narrator, and that Dan Shen includes a historical treatment of the subject among the open research desiderata (2013).

2.2 The Ancient Novel 2.2.1 Introduction UNn is among the aspects of narrative that are often associated with modernity. It shares this feature with other linguistic and literary phenomena such as, for example, ambiguity (for a discussion of ambiguity as a “modern” phenomenon, see Vöhler 2021; Kirstein 2021, 159–160). Diachronic studies thus tend to place the starting point of modernity at the end of the eighteenth century with a glance back to the literature of the Middle Ages (Zerweck 2001; A. Nünning 2000; Plotke 2019, 268; see, however, Martínez and Scheffel 2019, 106, on Apuleius and Lucian). Only recently have there been approaches that examine UNn in ancient texts within a larger diachronic framework. An obvious candidate is the ancient novel (its general narrativity is discussed by Whitmarsh 2008, 242–245 and, for the Greek novel, by

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Morgan 2004), although this genre was established relatively late in ancient literature – far later than epic, tragedy, or historiography.

2.2.2 Petronius, Satyrica Early attempts include Conte’s study The Hidden Author (1996) providing a narratologically inspired analysis of Petronius’s Satyrica (sometimes referred to as Satyricōn), a Roman novel dating from the first century CE that was rediscovered in the early fifteenth century. The work has survived only in fragments, its best-known part being the largely complete Cena Trimalchionis (made into a film by Federico Fellini in 1969), the story of a banquet given by the freedman and nouveau riche Trimalchio. The novel is told in the first person by its main character, Encolpius. Conte identifies two properties of this homodiegetic narrator – the “agent ‘I’” and the “narrating ‘I’” – while the author Petronius himself remains “covert” (absconditus), communicating with the reader behind the backs of the acting and narrating characters: Behind the protagonist’s narrative we meet the “hidden author”, who is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narration – and, along with the reader is smiling at it. [. . .] the protagonist is also the narrator, so that the problem of parody becomes the problem of “first person narrative”. The “I” in the Satyricon is not the author but an unreliable narrator, and the hidden author (Petronius) takes advantage of this ambiguity to create a many-sided discourse, a discourse into which are woven many other discourses. (Conte 1996, 21–22, 117; see also Whitmarsh 2008, 242; Bartsch 2008, 245–250).

Conte’s approach has been taken up by other interpreters (Schmeling 1994/1995, 207; avoiding the term “unreliability,” however, Schmeling 2011, xxvi–xxvii).

2.2.3 Apuleius, Lucian, Achilles Tatius There are similar approaches to the Golden Ass, a Roman novel of the second century CE (Martínez and Scheffel 2019, 106). The Golden Ass tells us in the first person the story of the protagonist Lucius, who travels to Thessaly (a land of witchcraft and magic), experiences numerous adventures, and is accidentally transformed into an ass without losing his human consciousness. The novel has a highly complex and much-discussed narrative structure resulting, among other things, from the main character’s metamorphosis (hence the probable original title Metamorphoses in 11 Books) into an animal and the resulting shift of perspective (for narrative structure, see Winkler 1985; Harrison 2000, 226–235; Benson 2019, 3, 28–29). Similar to Petronius’s Satyrica, Apuleius’s novel contains numerous individual narratives, the

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most famous of which and often alluded to since the Renaissance is the story of Cupid and Psyche. The “duplicities of auctor/actor” (Winkler 1985, 135–179) – in the person of the homodiegetic narrator Lucius, and the unclear identity of the speaker of the prologue – have prompted numerous analyses in which the aspect of UNn plays an important role (Lytle 2003, 352; cf. Wright 1973, 218; Bartsch 2008, 250– 251). On this basis, Apuleius’s novel has been seen as a fundamental (metapoetic) discussion of the extent to which a fictional work can negotiate and communicate matters of reality (May 2013, 28). A question that is also being discussed in connection with Lucian’s Vera Historia (A True Story), a Greek novel also written during the second century CE (Martínez and Scheffel 2019, 14–15, 106). Whitmarsh (2008, 243–244) observes aspects of UNn in another Greek novel, Leucippe and Clitophon, by Achilles Tatius, from the end of the second century CE (cf. also Whitmarsh 2011; more cautiously, Morgan 2004, 497).

2.2.4 General Observations Not insignificant for a historical discipline, in Classics unreliability is also linked to the question of the credibility of the text as a historical source in itself. This can be found for example with regard to religious issues, which play an important role in ancient novels. As Bowie and Harrison put it: “if for example the text of Apuleius is narratologically ‘unreliable’, what price its historical reliability as a source for contemporary mentalité [. . .]?”; 1993, 173; cf. Nicolini 2009). All in all, then, UNn has entered into the interpretation of ancient novels. However, this is often done in a conceptually heterogeneous way in conjunction with aspects of multiperspectivity, polyphony, invisibility, notions of (ironic) distance between narrator and author/reader, and other qualities that render the first-person narrators of the individual novels and their surrounding world as destabilized, agency-less, and crisis-ridden in some way (for the interplay of multiperspectivity and unreliability, see Menhard 2009). The destabilization of the protagonists is also placed in relation to the reconstructed social context of the time in which the novels came to life (cf. Bartsch 2008, 256, for the “transgressive play with voice, gender and class”).

2.3 Historical Epic Among the representatives of historical epic are the Pharsalia by the Roman poet Lucan, who wrote in the first century CE. It is a remarkable work because, among other things, the sphere of the intervening Olympian gods (Götterapparat) is left

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out, thus departing from the literary practices of the Homeric tradition. New and unusual are also the quantity and detail with which military violence is described in this poem (Nill 2018). The subject of the Pharsalia is a critical phase of the Roman Civil War at the end of the Roman Republic, the confrontation between Caesar and Pompey and the forces of the Senate. This explains the alternative title On the Civil War (De Bello Civili). A recent narratological analysis has brought to light the relevance of UNn for this work, which wavers between ideologies of the late Republic and the early imperial age (Kimmerle 2015, 117–146; cf. Hardie 2013, 225). Extra-textual references such as the overshadowing Alexander-figure (356–323 BCE) play a role, as do text-internal inconsistencies between the actions and speech of the main characters (especially Caesar and Pompey) on the one hand and the auctorial narrative voice on the other. This results in a “fractured voice” within the narrative itself (see also Nill 2018, 68). On this basis, Kimmerle concludes that, from a historical perspective, no political tendency can be detected in the Pharsalia. The work is then “republican” only on its surface. What it does instead is to describe the “failure to offer an unambiguous view of past and present” (2015, 308, also 266–267; cf. also Pausch 2017, who offers a brief interpretation of UNn in Virgil’s more mythological epic The Aeneid).

2.4 Historiography and Biography 2.4.1 Introduction Not only the historical epic but also historiography has drawn on research dedicated to UNn. It may sound surprising that in Classics, of all things, a rather factual genre such as historiography raises questions of literary theory whose discussion within modern literature revolves around fictional texts. However, this observation can be explained by the high degree of literary stylization and the historically evolved affinity with fictional genres such as the epic. For this reason, Irene de Jong (2014b, 172) argues that ancient historiographical texts can be analyzed with the same narratological toolbox used for literary genres (for a general discussion of the credibility of narrators in non-fictional texts, cf. A. Nünning 1998, 36; Martens 2015).

2.4.2 Herodotus, Histories Of particular interest to narratologists are the Histories of Herodotus, the famous fifth-century-BCE author who is considered the “father of historiography” (Cicero, De legibus 1.5). The question of the credibility of Herodotus’s Histories as a his-

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torical source has been discussed by scholars all along and continues to this day (Baragwanath and Bakker 2012, 2–10). More recently, studies have increasingly been carried out that are more concerned with Herodotus’s narrative technique than with the verification of the historical accuracy and the realia mentioned in the text (e.g., Fehling [1971] 1989; Grethlein and Krebs 2012; de Jong 2004; 2012; 2014b, 192–195; 2019; Bakker 2019). Drawing on a reader-response approach and the implied-author model, Baragwanath (2008) has described elements of UNn in some parts of Herodotus’s work. According to Baragwanath, this device aims to sharpen the general attentiveness of readers and to heighten the authority of the text. Discussing a chapter of the Histories in which Herodotus expresses doubts about the Athenian rumor that the Alkmeonids, as supporters of the Tyrannis, had collaborated with the Persians at Marathon (6.121–131), Baragwanath concludes that Herodotus’s remarks here work against the information he offers in the surrounding text (2008, 33; for a critical discussion of this approach, see Flower 2009).

2.4.3 The Historia Augusta No less debated than Herodotus’s credibility as a historical source is another work of ancient historiography, the Augustan History (Historia Augusta). The work comprises thirty biographies of rulers and usurpers of the second and third centuries CE, ranging from Hadrian to Carinus. Almost everything about this collection is highly controversial, from the question of dating and authorship to the problem of historical credibility. Dennis Pausch (2010) proposed to consider the text’s sometimes contradictory statements and judgments about individual events and imperial figures as a deliberate strategic use of the device of UNn. It is observed, with Syme, that there are close links between the literary techniques employed in the Historia Augusta and those found in the ancient novel (Pausch 2010, 115–116; Syme 1968, 205). In an analysis of the Vita Aureliani, for example, Pausch comes to a conclusion similar to Baragwanath’s on Herodotus by drawing on multiperspectivity and reader-response theory, comparing it especially with Heliodorus’s Aithiopika, a novel dating from the late third or fourth century CE (Pausch 2010, 131, see also 121, and Pausch 2007).

2.4.4 General Observations Overall, the treatment of the model of UNn in history-related texts turns out to be similar to that in the field of the novel. The concept is already present and contributes to a more precise understanding of the narrative structure of a variety of

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texts, but it is not yet firmly established. The research conducted so far can offer initial building blocks for the project of a diachronic narratology from a vertical perspective; at the same time, like other studies on related narratological topics, it also uncovers references horizontally between different types of texts within the epoch of ancient literature, such as those between the historiographical genre and the novelist and epic traditions.

3 UNn in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 3.1 Introduction Ovid’s Metamorphoses seem a particularly suitable subject for an analysis of UNn. On the one hand, ancient epic poetry as a major narrative genre can be regarded as a precursor of the modern novel, through which concepts of unreliability are primarily developed. In addition, the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses – totaling nearly 12,000 lines  – are characterized by a highly complex narrative structure, with a multitude of internal narrative voices and audiences making it a highly attractive text for interdisciplinary and diachronic research. Hardly any other author of antiquity has been so closely related to the positions and aesthetics of postmodernism as the late Augustan poet Ovid, who is author not only of the Metamorphoses, but also of the Tristia (Sorrows) and the Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), both works that are regarded as foundations of European exile poetry (Fowler 2000; Harrison 2001; Roynon and Orrells 2019; Kirstein 2019, 2021). Ovid’s Metamorphoses – in many ways a predecessor of Lucan’s Pharsalia (see 2.3 above) – consist of about 250 individual narratives, which generally offer etiological explanations for existing natural phenomena, names, customs, cults, and so on. It has already been observed that etiological narratives are often connected to the notion of UNn (cf., e.g., Solodow 1988, 64). Since legitimation is one of the traditional key functions of etiology, UNn is of particular importance here due to its destabilizing effect (Waldner 2014, 28). This is true not only for the Metamorphoses, but also for another of Ovid’s grand poems. In his Fasti – a calendrical poem on the origins of Roman cults and festivals, of which only the first six books survive – Ovid exploits UNn by various narrative strategies. For example, holidays important to Roman national identity, such as the Parilia in Fast. 4.783–806, are obscured by techniques of “multiple explanations” typical of antiquarian ritual exegesis (Beard 1987), resulting in a high degree of what Feeney (1998, 133) refers to as “defamiliarisation” of the conventional. The narrating voice of the Fasti himself is “noticeably unreliable” (Newlands 1992, 47;

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cf. Newlands 1995, 51–86; Williams 1991), and reveals his lack of knowledge to an increasing extent in the course of the six books. Correspondingly, the number of his human and divine informants becomes more and more extensive, especially in the last two books (cf. Newlands 1995, 79–86). However, these secondary informants also contribute to a further confusion of the origin stories, since they themselves sometimes act as unreliable narrators (Newlands 1995, 65–77; cf. Harries 1989). This is perhaps most evident in the Muses appearing in Fasti 5.7–110. The Muses are traditionally attested as reliable sources of poetic inspiration. In the Fasti, however, even the Muses “disagree” (dissensere deae; 5.9) and come into dispute over the etiology of the name of the month of May (cf. Barchiesi 1992). The technique of UNn applied at various levels thus results in an “epistemological crisis” (Newlands 1995, 52). This is particularly problematic in the Fasti because a calendrical commentary is actually a medium that seeks to provide reliable information by explaining individual myths and cults. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, the first love story (“primus amor”; 1.452) introduces the reader to the god Apollo not only as a god who fails in the business of love, but also as a god who, despite his position as an Olympian oracular god of prophecy, proves to be unable to control his own future: Phoebus amat visaeque cupit conubia Daphnes, quodque cupit sperat suaque illum oracula fallunt. (Phoebus caught sight of her, fell in love and longed to possess her. Wishes were hopes, for even his powers of prophecy failed him; Met. 1.490–491, trans. Raeburn)

Apollo does not appear here as the narrator of an etiological story. Nevertheless, his failure is noteworthy and has an indirect, yet momentous effect on etiological storytelling in the Metamorphoses. Since Apollo is not only the god of oracle but also, in a very Callimachean sense (cf. Aitia frg. 1.22 Harder), the inspiring divinity of poetry, the story of Apollo and Daphne may very well be read as a marker which gives the reader an idea about the possibly unreliable nature of the primary narrator himself, thereby providing directions on how to read the Metamorphoses as a whole.

3.2 Ways of Introducing UNn 3.2.1 Embedded/Framed Speech The technique of framing subordinate narratives within a larger context is a fashionable practice among Hellenistic poets (Myers 1994, 20; cf. Wheeler 1999, 185–193; Barchiesi 2006; Goldhill 1991, 240). The reader is confronted with two (or

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more) narrative voices which offer different or even opposing views and evaluations of a given context. An example can be found in the eighth book of the Metamorphoses. The book concludes with three embedded (or framed) narratives, as part of the story of Theseus visiting the river god Achelous (Met 8.547–884). All three narratives recount a metamorphosis; two of them are told by the host Achelous himself and one by a figure called Lelex, an aged and distinguished man and an old friend of Theseus. In terms of the disposition of the passage as a whole, it is highly complex and noticeably “Callimachean,” carrying a wealth of intertextual references, especially to Callimachus’s Hymn to Apollo and to the Hecale (Hollis 1970 ad loc.; Hutchinson 1988, 345–352; Myers 1994, 90). An Ovidian invention of some irony seems to be the choice of the river god Achelous as internal narrator, because he is introduced at the beginning using rather non-Callimachean metapoetic words such as “swollen” river (imbre tumens; Met 8.550). According to Hinds, Ovid is here “de-Callimachizing Callimachus” (2006, 36; cf. Barchiesi 2006, 277). Perhaps it is no coincidence that this Callimachean passage stands almost exactly in the middle of the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses, which can easily be interpreted as a structural marker in line with the Callimachean passages at the beginning and the end of the work (Holzberg [2007] 2015, 79). Of special interest here is the middle of the entire passage in which Lelex recounts the story of Philemon and Baucis in an embedded narrative (Met. 8.547– 884). At first sight, Lelex’s story appears to be of decent origin and solid reliability. His speech is the direct reply to a brief statement by the son of Ixion, Pirithous. Pirithous, as a spretor deorum (a despiser of the gods), had discredited Achelous’s previous story of the origin of two Greek Islands (Echinades and Perimele; Met 8.577–610) by calling into question the power of the Olympian gods: Amnis ab his tacuit, factum mirabile cunctos moverat; inridet credentes, utque deorum spretor erat mentisque ferox, Ixione natus: “ficta refers nimiumque putas, Acheloe, potentes esse deos” dixit, “si dant adimuntque figuras.” obstipuere omnes nec talia dicta probarunt, ante omnesque Lelex animo maturus et aevo sic ait: “inmensa est finemque potentia caeli non habet et quicquid superi voluere peractum est.” (The river-god held his peace. His amazing story had moved the whole of the company. One poured scorn on their credulous wonder, Pirithoüs, a young tearaway, who had no use for the gods. “Pure fiction!” he said. “Acheloüs, you credit the gods with too much power, if you think they create and then alter the shapes in Nature.” All were aghast at these blasphemous words and voiced disapproval, especially Lelex, whose mind reflected his riper years. “The power of heaven cannot be measured,” he answered firmly. “lt knows no bounds. Whatever the gods decree is accomplished”; Met. 8.611–619, trans. Raeburn)

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This seems to be the beginning of a reliable story, and Lelex does everything to back up his claims regarding the veracity of his tale: he believes in the power of the gods, the story has been told to him by old men who have no reason to lie, and he has been in Phrygia and actually seen the trees into which Philemon and Baucis were transformed with his own eyes: quoque minus dubites, tiliae contermina quercus collibus est Phrygiis, medio circumdata muro ipse locum vidi. (To ease your impious doubts, you should visit the Phrygian hills to look at an oak tree and linden nearby, both ringed by a low wall. I’ve been to the place myself; Met. 8.620–622, trans. Raeburn) haec mihi non vani (neque erat, cur fallere vellent) narravere senes. (The story was told me by trustworthy elders who had no reason to lie or deceive; Met 8.721– 722, trans. Raeburn)

Through this affirmation, the Lelex figure connects the reality outside the story with the story itself in a manner typical for etiological storytelling (Waldner 2007, 219). The conventional phrasing of the transition between the here and now of the etiological object and the explanatory story of the past is depicted in the adverb adhuc, “until now”: ostendit adhuc Thyneius illic incola de gemino vicinos corpore truncos (Still to this day the peasants of Phrygia point to the oak and the linden nearby; Met. 8.719–720)

For aetiological formulas such as adhuc and nunc quoque, see Solodow (1988, 176n30) and Loehr (1996, 35, 134–136 with n215); for the formula quia, quod, and so on, cf. Loehr (1996, 82). In addition, the local flavor and the rich detail of the story support the story’s overall trustworthiness. However, if one looks at this embedded narrative more closely, doubts arise as to whether this story and the other two stories might be told by a UNr. The very fact that Pirithous classifies Achelous’s earlier story about the origin of the two islands as ficta (Met. 8.614) leaves one with an uneasy feeling and a general sense that there might be UNn at work in the story of Philemon and Baucis (and in the two related stories). The reader is encountered with two possible but opposing views and evaluations of a given context: “Readers tend,” as Feeney has put it, “to be either Lelex or Pirithous” (1991, 230). The Lelex passage has been interpreted in this metapoetic manner as disillusioning along these lines many times (e.g., Feeney 1991, 230; Myers 1994, 91–93; Waldner 2007, 219). As Feeney and Myers point out, however, it is not

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Ovid’s agenda to destabilize and deconstruct what remains, even in an embedded story, but rather to make visible the (poetic) mechanisms in which etiological storytelling works. Here, and in many other passages, Ovid gives us a glimpse into the poetic “workshop of fiction” (Feeney 1991, 230–231; Myers 1994, 93). Two further aspects also need to be taken into consideration. First, although ficta belongs primarily to the voice of Pirithous in the Lelex and Pirithous episode (Met 8.614), it can also be read as an “atmospheric marker” for the entire passage in the sense of Genette ([1972–1976] 1980, 75: “advance mentions”; cf. also Barthes 1966, 7, who uses the term “germe”). Second, what Feeney (1991, 230–231) convincingly explains as “double vision [. . .] as a necessary condition for reading our fictions” can also be described as “strategic ambiguity,” which seems to be a key feature of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (cf. Bauer et al. 2010; Knape and Winkler 2015; on Ovid, Kirstein 2021).

3.2.2 Multiple Explanations The technique of embedded or framed narratives is not the only way texts can enhance the use of UNn. Unreliability can also occur when a text offers a multiplicity of views, explanations, and evaluations. This narrative device, often called multiple explanations (Mehrfacherklärungen), seems to have been highly popular among authors of the Hellenistic and the Augustan ages (for Callimachus’s use of direct speech to generate multiple perspectives, see Harder 2012, vol. 1, 55). Multiple explanations can, but need not, be narrated by multiple narrative voices, as when, for example, embedded or internal narratives are applied. Multiple explanations can also be presented using one and the same narrative voice. As an example, one might take a look at the three etiological stories in the first book of the Metamorphoses that tell the story of the creation of human beings (Met. 1.76–88, 158–162, 367–415). Schmidt reads these key passages in the light of an anthropological interpretation (1991, 35). All three stories belong to one and the same narrative voice, the primary narrator of the Metamorphoses being interrupted only by Jupiter telling the story of Lycaon (Met 1.211–239; Loehr 1996, 168–170). There is some evidence that this technique of multiple explanations also dates back to Callimachus: the Milan Diegesis reports a triple explanation of the cult of the Diana Lucina, and there was also a multiple explanation of the origins of the Charites (Loehr 1996, 194–198).

3.2.3 Direct Characterization of Narrative Voices In addition to the techniques of embedded narrative and multiple explanations, there is yet another possible way of introducing UNn into etiological contexts. Often,

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the narrative voices are characterized as unreliable not because of the content of their narration and aspects which might not be in accordance with other voices and views, but rather through their direct characterization. The literary tradition of etiological storytelling has one particular kind of figure that invites the question of UNn: etiologies are often narrated in a dialogue configuration of question and answer (Harder 2012, vol. 1, 1–56). Responsibility for the answer is given to a voice which is regarded as especially reliable. In the first two books of Callimachus’s Aitia, the Muses take over this role of answering. In the story of Philemon and Baucis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it is the character’s old age that makes the figure of Lelex a trustworthy senior informant. When we look at religious aitia (Kult-Aitien) explaining the origins and institutions of cults, rituals, and other practices, statues of gods and goddesses are often used as narrators. Such speaking statues or objects were popular among Hellenistic poets in general. One need only think of their extensive use in the literary epigram, and it is likely that Callimachus deliberately played with elements deriving from different genres, as Annette Harder has argued (1998; 2012, 2:894–895, with further parallels). In etiological texts such as Callimachus’s Aitia, the authoritative nature of the divinity speaking to him- or herself was mostly exploited for narrative purposes. Unreliability (or the possibility of UNn) comes into play when a statue speaks not only from a limited, “personal” perspective about its own (local) cult, but also when it extends the general and etiological information it offers beyond its proper area of influence and control (Waldner 2007, 223; Barchiesi 1997). Here, one could possibly apply Genette’s term paralepsis ([1972–1976] 1980, 195), a category that forms part of the theory of focalization to describe situations in which a figure offers more information than it ought properly to have. This happens, for example, when external focalization slides into internal focalization and the figure continues to speak like an external voice. When this happens, one might suspect that the authoritative voice is being undermined by an untrustworthy expansion of possible knowledge. In a surviving fragment of the Aitia, Callimachus applied this technique of speaking statues in an interplay of questions and answers. In this story, which may have been part of the third book, a statue of the Delian Apollo answers the question of an unidentified interlocutor (frag. 114 Harder; the statue carries a bow and the Charites (Graces) in its hands; see Harder 2012, vol. 2, 892–906). A contemporary of Ovid, Propertius, transforms this motif by passing the voice to the statue of Vertumnus (Elegy 4.2). In Rome, the statue of Vertumnus, the god of seasons, gardens, and fruit, had a prominent location in the city, thus fitting perfectly into the Propertian program of creating a “nationalized” Roman etiological world history (for literary and epigraphical evidence on the Roman cult of Vertumnus, see Myers 1994, 117–118; Hutchinson 2006, 86–87; Waldner 2007, 22n78). Clearly, this is a reference to the Callimachean model of Apollo speaking (Myers 1994, 113–132, esp.

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120; Loehr 1996, 82–84, 198–206; Barchiesi 1997, 186–187). In Ovid, examples of speaking statues are more prevalent in the Fasti than in the Metamorphoses (Myers 1994, 120). Still, in the Metamorphoses the god Vertumnus appears again, notably in the last love story of the work in the fourteenth book (Met 14.622–771). Here, the reader sees Vertumnus in the role of a lover, which reminds us of the first love story in the Metamorphoses, in which Apollo unsuccessfully woos Daphne. The last love story of the Metamorphoses ends on a somewhat more positive note than the first one (Myers 1994, 125, 114; Holzberg [2007] 2015, 108): Vertumnus has fallen in love with Pomona, but he cannot win her over. He disguises himself as an old (Italian) woman and gives her a warning by telling the story of Iphis and Anaxarete: Anaxarete does not respond to Iphis’s love, Iphis hangs himself, and Anaxarete is turned into a stone (Met. 14.698–764). In this story Anaxarete is described as dura (hard, unyielding) in the well-known terminology of the Roman love elegy (Myers 1994, 123; for a gendered reading, see Wheeler 1999, 57–58). Vertumnus affirms that his story is not fictive and that even in his time a statue of Anaxarete could be visited in Salamis in a temple of Venus: neve ea ficta putes, dominae sub imagine signum servat adhuc Salamis, Veneris quoque nomine templum Prospicientis habet. (To prove this isn’t an idle fiction, Sálamis still preserves Anaxarete’s statue. It also possesses a shrine dedicated to Venus the watcher; Met 14.759–761, trans. Raeburn)

In the Ovidian version of Vertumnus, the god does not speak as a statue, but narrates an etiological story revolving around another statue, the statue of Anaxarete. Although Vertumnus does not speak through a statue, the intertextual link to Propertius’s Elegy 4.2 and through Propertius also to Callimachus’s Aitia makes one think of the Ovidian Vertumnus “as both a statue and an aetiological internal narrator” (Myers 1994, 120, 119, on the intertextual links to Propertius in Ovid’s version; on the etymological wordplay in the elegy of Propertius with its multiple explanations, see Loehr 1996, 206; Barchiesi 1997, 187). As a result, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Vertumnus appears as an etiological storyteller of reduced and questionable reliability. Again, Ovid metapoetically offers a glimpse into the making of etiologies and into his workshop of fiction.

3.3 Modern Theoretical Approaches and Models of UNn Relevant to the Analysis of Ovid So far, it has been argued that UNn is one aspect of etiological storytelling which enables the poet to cause the reader to reflect upon the fictional status of the text

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by breaking the illusion of a concordant or unified world view. The popularity of embedded narratives with their potential for generating unreliability is in line with the Hellenistic preference for intertextuality. Both techniques  – distinct theoretically, though often intertwining – are similar in their effect of creating a highly complex and dense textual universe through a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints (for intertextual voices in Callimachus, see, e.g., Cusset 2011). At this point, the model of UNn as proposed by Phelan and Martin (1999) seems suitable for further analysis of the structure of the Ovidian text. One could argue that Vertumnus uses or rather abuses the etiological story of Iphis and Anaxarete for the purpose of courtship. Thus, on the axis of value one might assume that he misevaluates the story because the emphasis is put on his personal moral of the metamorphosis: “don’t be a dura puella!” As noted by Myers, “Vertumnus underlines the moral lesson of this metamorphosis, a maneuver unusual in the rest of the Metamorphoses” (1994, 123). On the other hand, given the practices of Hellenistic intertextuality, he fully complies with Ovid’s advice to lovers in his Amores and Ars Amatoria. On the axis of knowledge, one could argue that the Ovidian Vertumnus does not under-report but rather over-report. In the story of Anaxarete and her image at the temple of Venus Prospiciens at Salamis, he displays a kind of far-reaching knowledge which seems to be beyond his natural sphere. In the Lelex episode in the eighth book of the Metamorphoses, it is again the axis of evaluation that is of importance. Much like the god Vertumnus (who uses his story in an attempt to win love), the aged Lelex introduces his story of Philemon and Baucis for the purpose of refuting Pirithous’s criticism of the gods. The possibility that Lelex misevaluates his story arises less from the story itself than from the story’s context and its intratextual references to the two other stories within the same passage, which are told by the swollen river god Achelous (Met 8.550). The characterization of Achelous as “swollen” has been interpreted as an intertextual reference to the metaphorical categories of Callimachean poetics, holding a prominent position in the middle of the Metamorphoses. Since the entire passage transports a plethora of intra- and intertextual references which are decoded and supplemented in reader-response activity, the Lelex episode displays a mode of over-reporting rather than of underreporting. In the passages of Vertumnus and Lelex, one could apply Hansen’s category of internarrational unreliability (2007) because in both instances unreliability is, at least partly, the outcome of framing (embedding) voices or the confrontation of accumulated framed voices. In addition, one could argue that Ovid, through an intertextual reworking of Propertius, evokes the possibility of a discordant unreliability in the referred text as discussed by Cohn (2000) and Hansen (2007, 243): having read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a reader may be able to detect and decode silent signals of discordance in Propertius’s Elegy 4.2. At the same time, Ovid reveals

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a metapoetic view of his own poetry as well as of poetic production in general. This interpretation falls into line with the observation that Ovid uses the Vertumnus episode explicitly to “override” Propertius’s decisively Roman approach to enact a decentering by widening the view to the Greco-Roman world and its literary tradition as a whole. A mode of decentering and overwriting (Überschreibung; Walde 2000) is very Ovidian and can be found in different parts of his oeuvre, notably in the Heroides and his exile poetry where he gives a voice to those who are unheard otherwise. Does Ovid, in the end, fall victim to his own playfulness with the borders of fiction? Does his voice as the implied author of the Metamorphoses become unreliable itself? In the first instance, unreliability bears a negative weight that calls for some kind of counterbalance. However, critics have also taken a more positive approach to this phenomenon. Solodow understands UNn in Ovid as part of poetic self-doubt and self-criticism (1988, 64). This observation fits in well with the observation that unreliability has a certain affinity with self-analysis (Bal [1985] 2009, 131) with regard in particular to autobiographical genres. This invites a connection with Phelan’s considerations on the potential for the bonding effects of UNn. Features such as playful comparison or bonding through optimistic comparison in particular seem to be promising for research on the intertextual poetry of Ovid or other ancient authors.

4 Summary The research situation does not yet allow for a systematically complete and diachronic overview of the different types of UNn in ancient literature. Already existing but still sporadic analyses show that UNn is a narrative technique that can be traced in the ancient novel, but also in genres such as historiography and biography. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, due to the multitude and complexity of the narratives presented, offer an inherently high potential for the use of UNn. A tentative analysis of selected stories of the Metamorphoses reveals that Booth’s theory of UNn and the ongoing development of this approach can be fruitfully applied to ancient texts and contribute to their more accurate understanding. The reason for the discussed tendency of over-reporting in Ovid can be found in the high degree of intertextuality and the preference for embedded narratives which is typical of the literary production of the Hellenistic and Augustan ages. Since modern theories of UNn build upon texts starting from the eighteenth century, this makes an interesting statement about the special features of this earlier period. It might also be seen as an affirmation that ancient texts can contribute to the expansion of theory building in diachronic narratology.

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Harald Haferland

Point of View in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature 1 Definition In literary studies, the term “point of view” (or “narrative perspective”; see Niederhoff [2011] 2013) has two different meanings. First, it describes a mode of narration in which the subjective thoughts, feelings, and experiences of characters convey what is happening (third-person limited point of view). Second, it describes a mode of narration which focuses only on the external and objective circumstances of what is happening and does not give any access to the inner, subjective thoughts of characters (third-person objective point of view). Each of the two modes of narration gives the reader a different impression, the first being an impression of subjectivity, the second of objectivity. Both concepts (“subjectivity” and “objectivity”) place these modes of narration in a wider intellectual and sociohistorical context. In a diachronic view, there is a third mode of narration that has, strictly speaking, no perspective: omniscient narration. This mode of narration is older than third-person limited point of view and third-person objective point of view. In fact, both types of point of view are achieved by an artificial restriction of omniscience. Omniscient narration was dominant in the premodern period, but it has not disappeared in storytelling since point of view/narrative perspective emerged. Literary scholars have postulated a further kind of perspective, which is the perspective of the author or narrator (Whitcomb 1905, 66–67; esp. Uspenskij [1970] 1975; also Schmid 2010, 100–105). The author/narrator intervenes throughout the narrative: he may make appeals for sympathy, express his empathy, or describe a character negatively. Such intrusions play an important role in medieval and early modern literature (pilot studies based on medieval literature include Barthel 2008; Dimpel 2011, 2012; Huber 2014). The history of the author/narrator perspective needs further investigation. Here, however, the emphasis will be on the pre-history of point of view, understood as third-person limited or objective point of view. The discussion in this chapter is based on the following assumptions. (1) Omniscience is understood as an overarching stance adopted by the author/narrator with regard to the story’s characters and to the narrated world. (2) A terminological differentiation between the author and the narrator is not pertinent to early modern or older literatures (on medieval storytelling, see Glauch 2009, 77–136; Haferland 2019, 17–42). This is indicated by the term “author-narrator.” (3) The definition of point of view by Gérard Genette needs revision from a historical perspective. Genette defines https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-008

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third-person limited and objective point of view as narrative mode and distinguishes narrative mode from narrator or voice ([1972] 1980, chaps. 4–5). This systematic differentiation, however, does not hold with regard to premodern storytelling, where point of view had not yet been emancipated as a mode of narration from the control of the omniscient author-narrator. It can be found only in elementary forms and in restricted passages. Point of view comes into being when omniscient author-narrators relinquish parts or all of their “knowledge.” The term “knowledge” describes an effect that emerges when listeners or readers ascribe everything that is presented through statements in a narrative to the mental faculty of a narrator. In omniscient narration, the recipient gains the impression that the author-narrator is the only center of knowledge and knows all about the characters and the narrated world. But author-narrators can pretend not to know everything. They can temporarily restrict their “knowledge” to what a character would know about the narrated world, or they can pretend not to “know” anything about the inner life of the characters and restrict their statements to the objective “facts” of the narrated world. In the course of literary history, this restriction of “knowledge” is explored further, so that characters with their thoughts, feelings, and experiences as well as objective circumstances and events in the narrated world seem to become independent sources of “knowledge” in narration. In this way, limited and objective point of view (and along with them, the separation of author and narrator) emerge. The narrative techniques that form the premodern forerunners of the two modern modes of narration can be differentiated as the “characters’ visual foci” and the “action/plot focus.” A character’s visual focus is restricted to that which a character literally can see with his eyes. The action/plot focus is closely tied to actions and events in the narrated world. These two narrative techniques are explained in the following section. Section 3 returns to the omniscient author-narrator and shows that first-person narratives should be attributed to author-narrators in medieval literature. The omniscience of the author-narrator is also present in extended monologues of characters in third-person narratives. Section  4 addresses another terminological misunderstanding regarding third-person limited point of view, which is often confused with introspection. Introspection as a form of omniscient viewing into a character is frequent in premodern storytelling and should be distinguished from limited point of view. Section 5 turns to a special case of a narrative that makes use of the limited knowledge of a character: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Section 6 deals with proto-forms of third-person objective point of view.

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2 Action/Plot Focus and Character’s Visual Focus In premodern narratives, an imbalance in favor of a third-person limited or objective point of view occurs only rarely. Medieval authors writing in vernacular languages do not use perspective or point of view as explained in the previous section. Generally, a character’s circumstances and affective and mental states and processes come together in such a way that the external circumstances will trigger the character’s inner processes and push them both forward. They are in a relation in which one causes the other, something that is not made clear in modern narratives. Rather, premodern texts narrate how these inner states are triggered and then play out. How they play out is subject to a typical progression or causal chain. There is no systematically uneven distribution of narrative information in order to achieve an impression of subjectivity or objectivity. The principles of point of view and perspective are thus applied in the study of medieval literature, but without comparison to passages in modern literature, where point of view and perspective have been more frequently employed (for a critique, see Hübner 2003, chap. 3). This does not mean that characters’ inner states or processes cannot become the focus of the narrative. It is rather the opposite that is the case: medieval author-narrators discovered characters’ inner states and processes as a novel narrative resource. “How a character’s inner world is portrayed is one of the most important achievements for the art of courtly storytelling” (Hübner 2003, 86; on the distinction between introspection and point of view, see section 4 below). Here, however, one looks less with the characters into the world; rather, there is a glimpse or a view into the characters over which the omniscient narrator always has control. This proves to be an expanded function of omniscience. In particular, German adaptations of French originals, the adaptation courtoise, often expand upon passages, providing insight into characters’ minds (Bauschke 2005, 73–76). However, this has nothing to do with third-person limited point of view. On the other hand, it can be claimed that, to some extent, medieval authors were already familiar with third-person limited point of view. The term “point of view” is then used in the narrow sense of a character’s visual focus. Sometimes, medieval narratives give information about the space, the situational surroundings, and the actions of characters in an indirect way by telling what one of the characters sees. In this case, a vidit-formula or a variation of it is often used. The usual expectation of listeners and readers of oral or folk-tale narration would be that the narrator will give this information directly. If the narrator assigns what is perceived to a character, he shifts part of his knowledge to the character’s perception. This narrative technique of viewing from a character’s perception conveys a more immediate introduction to a narrated situation. It can be understood as a proto-form of third-person limited point of view.

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In early Germanic alliterative poetry from the eighth and ninth centuries (Beowulf, Heliand), examples of viewing from a character’s perception are found in some noticeable passages (in Beowulf, lines 217–230, and in Heliand, lines 649–668, 3671–3687; see Battles 2019, 18–19, 24–31). At the beginning of the twelfth century, this practice became widespread in secular German epic poetry. Passages starting with “There he/she/they saw” or similarly structured sentences can illustrate this point. One episode of the Kaiserchronik (ca. 1150) focuses on the period in which Tiberius ruled, but also details the last days of Jesus. Before Jesus enters Jerusalem, he gazes upon the city that lies before him (“He looked at the city”; line 873) and prophesizes the imminent destruction and downfall of all who live in the city. As Alexander conquers Tyre in the Straßburger Alexander (ca. 1170), he sees the duke of Tyre appear on the city wall (lines 1256–1257) and kills him. In the Eneasroman by Heinrich von Veldeke (ca. 1170), Eneas sees, after a storm on the Mediterranean Sea subsides, that Libya lies before him (lines 228–229); here he will land and enter into a relationship with Dido. One can understand from these few examples that they allow the listener/reader to be immersed in the narrated situation through the character’s visual focus. Such strategies are greatly expanded upon in the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200). When Siegfried goes to war against the Saxons on behalf of the kings of Worms, the text reads as follows upon his arrival at the battlefield: “Then he saw the great army, now lying in the field” (181.1). There are a number of comparable narrated passages that are worthy of note, including when Siegfried sees Kriemhild for the first time (281.4) or when fighters in the key battles between the Burgundians and the Huns witness murder firsthand (1929.1, 1963.1, 2016.1, 2135.3, 2170.4, etc.). It is through these passages, which contain long and detailed descriptions of what is seen, that the reader – as in the examples with Jesus, Alexander, and Eneas – is immersed in the narrated situation. Before his courtship, Gunther lands in Isenstein and sees numerous young women in the windows of a castle (strophe 389). With Siegfried accompanying him, they discuss who, among the women of the castle, Gunther would take in marriage (strophe 390). The snow-white-clad Brünhild, rapturously beautiful, stands out among the other women (strophe 391). At the same time, Brünhild requests that the women in the castle step away from the large window openings and stand in the small windows so that they can see for themselves but not be seen (strophe 394). They watch Siegfried perform the services expected from a vassal (Siegfried holds Gunther’s stirrup irons to help him mount his horse, the Stratordienst), which Gunther and Siegfried had previously agreed upon so that Brünhild would regard Gunther as the suitor and Siegfried as a vassal or – as Brünhild would later say – a simple servant from his own house (eigenholt). The passages in question (395.4, 396.3, 398.4, 401.4, 408.4) emphasize the women’s perspectives many times over, and the fatal event that causes the

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Burgundians’ downfall ultimately results entirely from insufficient information – information that can be inferred only through Brünhild’s sense of sight (Müller 1998, 267–289). Complex scenarios in which multiple characters’ visual foci are narrated in a short stretch of time are present in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1205). As Parzival’s father, Gahmuret, rides into Patelamunt, which was under siege, women pressed themselves against windows, watching him mightily parade with his squires into the city and assessing Gahmuret (17.30–18.4). Queen Belakane’s marshal marvels at the escutcheon on Gahmuret’s shield: “He didn’t mind looking there. Looking [at the coat of arms] reminded him that he had seen this knight or his magnificent appearance before” (18.10–13). From Gahmuret’s perspective, however, it is overwhelming to be so highly honored upon arrival. He quickly recognizes that if the siege is to be broken, the town needs his help: shattered and battered shields hang on house walls, countless soldiers lie injured, bed-ridden and without a leader, and seriously injured horses must be moved out of the way so that he can continue further through the city: “he saw many black women standing on both sides; raven black was their skin color” (20.4–6). These ladies would have been less aware of their skin color than Gahmuret, who comes from abroad. One could see this narration as a by-the-rules example of a third-person limited point of view: Gahmuret’s point of view sticks out from the other characters’ views. In a predominantly omniscient narration, narrative focus is integrated in such a way that it follows the order of events or the plot. Such narrations can turn in whatever direction they please or jump to a new point of departure in the story when the effects of actions or causal chains are left out. This type of narration incorporates the possible inclusion of perceiving narrative circumstances and situations through a character. The previous examples, which described what the characters see, belong (in this sense) to the plot itself and are not to be considered separate narrative passages. There are related levels of dependence that can be understood as such: omniscient narration > action/plot focus of the narrative > characters’ visual foci. Only rarely in medieval narratives does one have the opportunity to assess how well thought-out the focus of the action/plot is and how much it restrains and dominates the usage of concentrating on a character’s visual focus. With that in mind, we come to the beginning of Hartmann von Aue’s Erec (ca. 1180). Erec rides out with the queen (Ginover) and other court ladies to follow the young King Arthur’s hunting party. The queen’s group meets a foreign knight with a lady and a small dwarf-like companion. The queen wishes to know who it could be and, instead of Erec, she sends one of her ladies-in-waiting to the knight to find out. The girl has no luck and the dwarf chases her away with a whip after a short exchange of words. Ginover and

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Erec must watch the ordeal from a distance: “The queen and Erec saw that the dwarf beat her with a whip” (lines 53–54). The focus of the action/plot is on what the girl does and experiences. Since the queen and Erec see this from a distance, Ginover’s and Erec’s visual foci are separated from the action/plot focus for a short narrative stretch. Usually both occur together: thus, in the previously mentioned examples – what Jesus, Alexander, and Eneas are focusing on – the perceiving combines with the action/plot focus and therefore remains integrated with the focus of the action/ plot itself. Since the girl in the passage from Erec is spatially separated from Ginover and Erec, there is a split between action/plot focus and characters’ visual foci. Consequently, Hartmann could have chosen a different means of narration: he could have told how the queen and Erec observe the whole process from a distance. Then, the characters’ visual foci would have been equated with the action/plot focus, but Hartmann only dares to equalize the foci with regard to the whip stroke, as its perception by Ginover and Erec also determines the further course of the plot in this scene. The alternative option is clearly out of the question for Hartmann because the action/ plot focus is most prevalent: it wanders with the girl. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec (ca. 1160), the observation of the incident from afar is not even told, although Chrétien tells Erec’s visual focus in the sparrow-hawk fight a few lines later; however, this is again the focus of the action/plot and of no character’s point of view (see Burrichter 2019, 151). The characters’ visual foci remain integrated in the focus of the action/plot even when it is the protagonist’s viewpoint and, in some exceptional cases, is told over longer passages. For example, in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein (ca. 1200), where Iwein looks from a hiding place at what is happening before his eyes, Laudine laments her husband, whom Iwein had just killed (lines 1452–1482). But the omniscient author-narrator soon takes the lead again. In Herzog Ernst (B) (ca. 1200), there is a remarkably long batch of over five hundred lines: Duke Ernst and his people curiously visit the castle of Grippia (lines 2311–2816) and its many wonders (diu manicfalden wunder; line 2460) which captivate them again and again. In the course of the almost twenty times that seeing and perceiving are mentioned, however, the focus of any character’s vision remains integrated with the course of the action/plot in the scenes, controlled by the omniscient author-narrator. Choosing to have the character’s visual focus superordinate to the action/plot focus is not experimented with in the Middle Ages, for it is always the case that the action/plot focus is superordinate to the character’s visual focus.

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3 Medieval Narratives in the First Person and the Transfer of the Narrator’s Knowledge into Characters’ Speech in Third-Person Narratives Since narratives in the third person and in the first person are grammatically distinguishable at the first reading, there is no reason to unify them under the same terms, as some modern scholars do (e.g., Brooks and Warren [1938] 1979, 171–176; Friedman 1955, 1168–1179; Stanzel 1979). Here, narrative perspective is neither a point of distinction nor a common feature. Rather, two different concepts of perspective should be distinguished: one denotes narrative perspective (third-person limited and objective), and the other denotes the narrator’s perspective, i.e., in medieval narratives the perspective of the author-narrator. Narrative perspective is constituted through certain narrative techniques, whereas the narrator’s perspective is given in any narrative. If the narrative is a first-person narrative, the narrator’s perspective can be that of a fictional narrator. In medieval literature, this is only the case when characters narrate within a (third-person) narrative. First-person narratives with a fictional narrator throughout come into being only in modern times. A prominent case of a first-person narrative in the German literature of the Middle Ages is Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst (1255). Ulrich tells of his adventures as a minstrel (Minnesänger) and servant (Minnediener) and thus gives only a representative excerpt of his life, oriented toward a culturally shaped ideal. With regard to the distinction above, Frauendienst brings the first-person perspective of the author-narrator to the fore. It should not be understood as a first-person narrative with a fictional narrator (as proposed by Müller [1995] 2010; Chinca 2010). This also applies to comparable French and Italian narratives such as Dante’s Vita nova (for a plausible analysis, see Glauch 2017). Stories that feign being told by a different (real-world) author while the actual author hides himself do not utilize narrative techniques that convey subjectivity. An example is Lohengrin (possibly before 1300, but presumably later), whose author pretends to be Wolfram von Eschenbach, from strophe 30 onward. The real Wolfram’s Parzival ends with an episode featuring Lohe(ra)ngrin as the protagonist, which makes the pretense more plausible. When a character is the narrator for almost the entire narrative, there is no attempt to form an individual perspective. In Konrad Fleck’s Flore und Blanscheflur (ca. 1235), a Carthaginian princess is introduced as a character; she narrates the story from line 273 to the end. In such cases, the real historical authors are supposedly telling the story and fictional narrators simply

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function as heterodiegetic narrators whose naming and introduction are in danger of being forgotten in the course of the narrative’s plot. In the case of Lohengrin, the listener/reader is constantly reminded that “Wolfram” is narrating the story. These different cases do not represent early “test runs” for perspective-based narration. On the contrary, in longer narratives by characters in the third person, the voice of the omniscient narrator can often be heard quite irritatingly. The poets themselves threaten to forget who is actually speaking. In Parzival, Wolfram makes a kind of blunder that shows the dominance of the omniscient narrator: The squire Tampanis reports about Gahmuret’s tomb, which is decorated with the knight’s diamond helmet, which bears an inscription. The explanation of the monument includes a reference to the speaker (“I mean [. . .]”; 108.17), which seems not to refer to Tampanis but to come from Wolfram’s own narrative discourse (Bein 1996). This is typical, since it seems difficult for medieval author-narrators to keep the basic sense or logic of a character’s direct speech – or, in this case, an inscription quoted by a character – consistent. Consistently preventing the author-narrator’s diction from coming into the narrative is also a challenge. When Tristan in Gottfried’s Tristan praises Isolde’s extraordinary beauty before Marke’s court (lines 8257–8304), he refers to the daughter of Aurora and Tyndareos. However, despite a misleading genealogical construction by Gottfried, it is Helen who is meant in this case. After Tristan sees Isolde, he no longer believes that the greatest beauty of all time (Helen) shines as the “Sun of Mycenae” (sunne von Myzene; line 8278) in Greece. Tristan believes that she is to be found in Ireland: Isolde thus surpasses Helen. This outdoing that shifts into direct speech (Figurenrede) is too stylized to be coming from Tristan. One gets the impression that the author-narrator is vicariously speaking through Tristan in an ostentatious manner with his mythographic knowledge and usage of literary constructions based on world history. In a different way than with Wolfram, Gottfried has hardly adapted himself adequately to the limited knowledge of his character. However, in relation to a section (the story of Ginover’s abduction; Iwein, lines 4520–4739) narrated by a character from Hartmann’s Iwein, one wonders how the narrating lord of the castle can even know the many details he presents. Here, too, the narrator transfers his omniscience into the character in the form of a metanarration that is only thematically linked to the story, instead of taking the limit of the character’s knowledge into account. Often, medieval author-narrators do not carefully sort the knowledge they assign to their characters; instead, they succumb to achieving higher-level narrative goals (Schulz 2012, 383–395). In doing so, they ascribe knowledge to characters that could never possess such knowledge. In Der gute Gerhard (ca. 1220), the author, Rudolf von Ems, inserts a lengthy first-person narration of over six thousand lines by Gerhard into the frame narrative. This includes the main story, which is remarkably consistent and concentrated on what Gerhard experiences and can truly know. However, Rudolf does not succeed

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in doing this throughout the entirety of the story. For example, Gerhard knows/narrates another character’s long speech as if he were an omniscient narrator (lines 3845–4116). The omniscient narration becomes even more apparent when Gerhard knows/narrates the thoughts of his fellow-characters (lines 4635–4668) or when he tries to personify abstract concepts (vrou Minne; line 4993), which courtly author-narrators do exclusively (Glauch 2010). All in all, medieval first-person narratives do not allow for narrative perspective. However, in Lazarillo de Tormes (1552/1554), the foundational text for the picaresque novel, one can observe some early glimmerings of perspective. How Lazarillo sees the world reveals a distinct point of view, a perspective bearing signs of subjectivity. A similar development of narrating subjectivity in a third-person narrative occurs only from the eighteenth century and onward.

4 Omniscient Viewing into the Character (Introspection) without Sharing a Point of View: The Example of Gottfried’s Tristan Medieval narration prefers omniscient narration in the third person due to a prevalent focus on action/plot, the characters’ visual foci, and spatial overview. Specific details relating to how the plot is to proceed are revealed only when they are required by the action. De Jong (2012, 25) already formulated this elementary principle for the Iliad, and this applies similarly to biblical narratives: As observed by Naumann, “all emphasis is placed on the external action, which is understood to be highly functional” (2016, 242). This does not exclude the possibility of integrating a character’s visual focus in each case, though usually only for a very short time and limited to a “he/she saw [the seen object(s)].” Here one could cite a whole series of passages from Greek epics as well as from biblical stories. This principle is maintained in medieval literature: the action/plot focus remains dominant, and the narrative technique of a character’s visual focus is made subordinate. In the Middle Ages, descriptions are set to stand alone for themselves due to their rhetorical interest. In contrast, spatial representation remains just as directly bound to the action/plot as narrating from a character’s visual focus. In principle, this also applies to the representation of time, which appears to stretch or condense time or to leap within it, depending on the focus of the action/plot (Störmer-Caysa 2007 gives an overview with references to special features and anomalies). So far, emphasis has been laid on the distinction between narrating from a character’s visual focus and from the action/plot focus (what the omniscient author-

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narrator explains and where he directs the progress of the narrative). Since the focus on a character’s vision in the Middle Ages is not made independent of the focus of the action/plot, it does not develop into a third-person limited point of view. To do so, it would have to fulfill conditions that are only given with the subjectivity of a character’s point of view. The numerous passages in medieval narratives in which one looks “inside” the characters do not leave one with the impression that omniscience is restricted, because the action/plot focus depends on omniscient narration and thus enters “inside” a character and out again at will. Introspection gives a temporary view into a character’s “inner world.” The author-narrator is thus able to demonstrate the extent of his knowledge and lead into details of the character’s “inner world” in a remarkable way. Since this particular characteristic of medieval narrative is usually confused with perspective/point of view and Genette’s internal focalization, this common misanalysis will be discussed by means of a single example following a number of preliminary remarks. By looking through characters into the world, the subordinate relationship of “omniscient narration > action/plot focus > characters’ visual foci” (see above) is undermined. The technique of looking through a character’s mind (and not only through his visual focus) then appears alongside the action/plot focus as an alternative and distinguishable narrative option. This extension, however, allows a character’s mind to become a point of view in the terminological sense of the word. In modern narration, the position of a character’s point of view leads to narrative passages being taken out of an omniscient narration and handed over to the perspective of one or more different character(s) with or through whose view(s) the action/plot is told (and not only seen). Thus, looking through characters into the world is not identical to penetrating the “inner world” of characters (see, however, Hübner 2003, who disregards the distinction). Narrative perspective/point of view is not introspection (Schmid 2010, 104–105, and passim; Meister 2018, 104). Although both bring out a character’s interior and consciousness, they do so in very different ways. With point of view, one looks from the character’s perspective into his surroundings; but with introspection, one looks at what the surroundings have caused and are causing to the character. Furthermore, point of view produces reader participation and can be adopted or taken over from him. Introspection elicits sympathy for the character, or the reader/listener identifies with said character. In modern narratives, both forms usually converge, but not in premodern narratives because the corresponding narrative techniques have not yet been developed. This includes free indirect speech, where a character’s thoughts overlay or interfere with the narrator’s words, a device conceptualized by current narratology in different ways (Schmid 2010, chap. 4.3).

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Premodern narration utilizes only one means of thought representation that is not directly comparable to free indirect speech. This is the soliloquy, which shows a character in “conversation” with himself without a listener (Whitcomb 1905, 17–18). Soliloquies are special cases of direct speech, as they represent externalized thought processes. Instead of “he said to himself,” “he thought [.  .  .]” being expressly stated – as is very often the case in medieval literature – it seems certain that what is being narrated takes place “from within.” One then looks through the “window” of the inquit- (or cogitavit-)formula into the character instead of looking into the world with him. However, one of the self-evident effects of free indirect speech is being able to look into the world with the character. This goes hand in hand with a time structure that both chronologically fixes the moment of experiencing while also making the process of experiencing present to the reader because free indirect speech conveys the subjectivity of experience while the experience is occurring. In contrast, an example of a character’s depicted “inner world” from the Middle Ages that is ahead of its time, Gottfried of Straßburg’s Tristan, shows that a different time structure prevails here (on the epochal significance of this text from the perspective of historical narratology, see Schmid 2017, 107–129). The accidentally ingested love potion (Minnetrank), originally intended for King Marke and his wifeto-be Isolde, causes the two protagonists to fall in love. It symbolizes a beginning based upon chance, which leads the two lovers from an objectionable (widerwertic; line 11723) and separate relationship to a rather unified one. Tristan and Isolde’s love begins against their will and against the plans and interests of Marke, who is supposed to take Isolde as his bride. The protagonists must resist their emerging feelings, which they do not initially understand, and once they recognize their true feelings, they do not want to admit them. It also clearly reveals the power of love, in which those affected by it are defenselessly exposed. Such complex psychology in this story is an immense challenge for an author-narrator. It is one of the most complex of its time, since Gottfried deals with a short phase of unconsciously processed feelings. Gottfried only briefly mentions this, saying that love creeps into their hearts “before they even noticed” (line 11717). When the lovers then realize their true feelings (Gottfried hints at this gradually throughout the story), they do not confess to each other immediately, but hide their feelings from each other out of “doubt and shame” (cf. lines 11734–11744). Tristan wants to rid himself of his feelings immediately: “‘No,’ he thought to himself. ‘Refrain yourself from it, Tristan! Reflect. Do not pay any attention to [these feelings]’” (lines 11749–11750). Thus, his heart, which is intent on loyalty and honor (triuwe und êre), fights against his emotional desires. Gottfried elevates the forces working in Tristan to living agents: “heart,” “mind,” “eye,” “desire,” “love,” and so on come into conflict with one another, so much so that Tristan repeatedly talks to himself in an attempt

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to suppress his true feelings: “Point yourself elsewhere! Just distance yourself from this desire. Direct your love elsewhere.” (lines 11785–11786). But Isolde’s presence and love overcome his attempted inner resistance (lines 11788–11792). The same is true for Isolde, as her love for Tristan triumphs. However, forces such as femininity and female shame fight against her true feelings (lines 11793–11844). The lovers’ furtive mutual glances force their true feelings to surface, resolving their emotional struggles (lines 11845–11878). Their love then blossoms, and it brings them closer to one another. A closer look at the temporal structure of this blossoming love reveals that the lovers’ inner monologues are told in a procedural way, without being emphasized at any particular moment: When Tristan becomes aware of his love, he immediately (“sâ zehant”; line 11746) tries to convince himself otherwise on account of his loyalty (triuwe) to Marke and his endangered honor: “Refrain yourself from it [. . .].” Choosing to bring Tristan’s true feelings to the fore means that this must be an important moment, but Gottfried then tells Tristan’s inner struggle in such a way that Tristan repeats the aforementioned objection to his own thoughts (“distance yourself [.  .  .]”) more often (“dicke,” line 11781; “ofte,” line 11784). The narrative form of the two soliloquies, therefore, does not indicate that they belong to a particular moment. Generally, one does not assign soliloquies to a specific moment, even if they function analogously to declarative expressions, and such expressions are always instantiated spatiotemporally. Therefore, Gottfried can easily combine them with frequent repetition: someone who finds himself in an inner conflict, for example, always brings forth the same phraseology again and again (line 979 and others). In medieval narration, specific moments of experiencing only occur in cases where the author-narrator strictly guides a causal sequence of experiencing, so long as it leads to a specific critical moment. However, these moments then quickly dissolve in the course of experiences narrated by the author-narrator. Medieval narratives lack information about the surrounding world that would function as a mirror for what is experienced. This mirror would have the power of pinpointing important moments. Mentioning contingent elements of a narrated situation adds a temporal anchoring of the character’s inner thoughts and feelings, an imperative for modern narration. The Middle Ages do not use this anchoring (on its origin, see Haferland 2018, §6 and 146–147). The beginnings of love inside of Tristan and Isolde are thus in no way mediated by what is taking place in the surrounding situation: Gottfried does not narrate/write anything as though it were incidental. Even if Tristan and Isolde drank the love potion by pure chance and would thus offer the opportunity to bring further contingent parts or aspects of the environment into play, Gottfried narrates/writes nothing incidentally. It is thus a coincidental result of the action/plot, and not that of an experience. On the contrary, what is temporarily

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incidental is an essential component of narratives with a point of view. Gottfried, on the contrary, does not narrate what else Tristan perceives, as Tristan is merely looking for a drink to quench his thirst and the love potion happens to come into his hands. Gottfried could use this additional anchoring point here, but he chooses to expound upon Tristan’s deep uncertainty by directly narrating Tristan’s thoughts. Since Gottfried neither narrates the immediate progression of any characters’ inner thoughts nor establishes a contingent situational reference, no experience of the world through the lens of a character is made accessible. A point of view cannot be evoked. Gottfried’s narrative has a differentiation that is fragile, difficult to achieve, and is hardly ever encountered in the Middle Ages, as is the case in the early modern period (see further examples in Hübner 2003, chap. 7, where, however, the examples are terminologically recorded and analyzed without reference to the key points that are critical for my analysis). Although the naming of inner, partly personified instances is already widespread in medieval debate poetry (for the Streitgedicht, see Freese 2009) and in the courtly romance (e.g., in Chrétien), Gottfried makes use of these instances as carriers of feelings and thoughts. The narration of such processes leads through “windows” into the “inner world” of the characters and to short or sometimes long soliloquies again and again (on soliloquies, using Chrétien as an example, see Burrichter 2019, 154–155). Such “windows” allow a far-reaching view into the character. When the sequence of events causes the initial moment to appear, upon which the focus of action/plot hinges, at the same time Gottfried often attaches repeated expressions of emotion to it. He then analytically dissects and describes them as a whole. In both cases, the focus of the action/plot moves into the character, where thoughts expressed in soliloquies form the foundation for the narrative without these soliloquies being or having to be temporally specified. Gottfried’s choice to immerse the reader in the problematic content of the material and his detailed psychological analyses of characters lead to the reader becoming sympathetic toward the analyzed characters, since the analysis allows the reader to better understand a character and his issues. The reader thinks of the characters positively (see the prologue, lines 1772–1785, and others), although the narrated immorality may lead the reader to adopt a critical narrative stance toward the story. However, the reader’s positive attitude toward the characters is the critical part of Gottfried’s poetic work and characterizes a very finely developed narrator’s perspective without letting a narrative perspective come into play at the same time.

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5 Utilization of Characters as External Viewers and Unequal Distribution of Knowledge in Wolfram’s Parzival In Tristan, Gottfried uses many elaborate forms of introspection into a character, including the subtleties of the character’s psychology, without forming a perspective. In Parzival, however, Wolfram achieves a completely different narration, in which one can identify steps toward perspective as one understands it in the modern era, even if it is not yet a distinct character’s perspective. Wolfram starts from an outside view through the characters, from an unequal distribution of knowledge between the characters, and from a different evaluation (the characters’ perceived worth) of the characters in the story by other characters. This character-based outside view and unequal distribution of knowledge extend to the listeners/readers, whom the author-narrator deliberately deprives of information. The author-narrator uses the subject matter of his work to develop narrative techniques. Gottfried’s subject matter is love, whereas Wolfram’s is kinship. Kinship was a core area of social organization in the Middle Ages, and, as with love, its meaning in Parzival must first be developed by the characters in their world. At the castle (schastel) of Marveile, where he now reigns, Gawan wants to free his imprisoned relatives, i.e., his own grandmother, his mother, and his two sisters, in order to introduce them to his uncle, Arthur. This is supposed to be a surprise for them, and consequently Gawan proceeds discreetly (644.7–8). Gawan needs time to discover which of the prisoners are his family members because he was educated and raised away from his father’s court. They do not recognize him either, as they have been in captivity for a long time. His early separation from home reflects the way of life of high-ranking aristocratic youths in the Middle Ages, who were often sent to foreign courts for the purpose of education. At first, the listeners/readers are kept in the dark about the fact that the prisoners are Gawan’s closest relatives. Gawan discovers their true identities bit by bit, and readers who do not pay attention will only fully realize that the prisoners are part of Gawan’s family when Arthur recognizes his mother, sister, and two nieces and vice versa (672.1–21). At the moment of surprise, the relatives’ great anagnorisis thus occurs at the same time as the listener/reader’s realization of who they truly are. Assuming he pays attention, the listener/reader could possibly come to this conclusion before this moment (from 636.15–30 onward). Until the anagnorisis comes about, the story is told with a technique that is similar to a third-person objective point of view. Wolfram works with the technique of the unequal distribution of knowledge between characters and between the characters and the listeners/readers in Parzival’s case, as well. Wolfram’s way of narrating does not fit in with the concept of

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knowledge in narratology. Genette’s inclusion of the possessed level of knowledge ([1972] 1980, chaps. 4 and 5) does not capture all relevant differences in knowledge for the currently presented case. It may be trivial that the characters are subject to an unequal distribution of knowledge among themselves, but the author-narrator can also, like Wolfram, let it play out in a particularly intricate way and leave his listeners/readers in the dark until he decides to equalize the distribution of knowledge. In the Gawan-centric part of Parzival, Gawan at first seems to be narrated as though he is “seen from the outside,” because Wolfram does not reveal anything about his knowledge and thus seems to know less than Gawan. But the listener/ reader cannot recognize this at all, since the author-narrator uses ignorance on the listener/reader’s level and said author-narrator arranges everything so as to keep the listener/reader in the dark for as long as possible. One is thus put in the position of being a fellow-character alongside Gawan. In the end, the author-narrator asserts his omniscience by pronouncing it more evidently through means of the narrative. A similar way of initially restricting and eventually revealing knowledge can be found in modern detective novels. This means that there are genres in which the aspects of information and knowledge distribution are approached and analyzed differently from Genette’s theory of different types of focalization (see above). The central message of Parzival connects with a further and more complex unequal distribution of knowledge. Here, a character-based external perspective is also brought in. It is about Parzival’s slowly developing identity as the future ruler of the Grail. Just as in Arthurian poetry – as for example, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet (ca. 1200; lines 312–315, 2045, 2269–2270, and others), but above all already in Chrétien’s Perceval – the hero often does not know his own name. So, too, does Parzival not know his name in the beginning, and, like Gawan, he is unable to find his way into his relatives’ “universe” at first. When Chrétien and Wolfram include not revealing a character’s name as a part of the missing knowledge, this signals that they want to include Parzival’s narrow scope of knowledge in the narrative by omitting information that Parzival himself does not yet have. Members of his family run into him, and Parzival does not understand exactly who they are. With their information he can form a picture of his family piece by piece. At first, he also does not know proper manners and what constitutes chivalry, so that when he appears for the first time at the Grail castle, Munsalvaesche, he does not understand what is going on around him and what has happened to the suffering Anfortas. Here, listeners and readers become involved in his situation by being kept ignorant of what is actually happening before his eyes during such a strange ceremony. The listeners do not learn his name either. Only after Sigune calls to him and Parzival hears his own name for the first time (140.16) does the listener learn the protagonist’s name. The slowly expanding scope of knowledge occurs on the listener/reader’s level. When Parzival sees his great-grandfather, Titurel, at Munsal-

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vaesche through a crack in the door, Wolfram explains in his famous parable of the bow (241.1–30) why he does not yet want to mention Titurel’s name and delve further into this character: the slow disclosure of such information is supposed to correspond to a poetic process. Since secrets are associated with the Grail, Wolfram also knows how to make a religiously coded body of knowledge mysterious in his work, Parzival. A complex reconstruction is required to decode it (Haferland 2020, §4). Apart from this decoding, however, Wolfram reveals all knowledge needed to understand the complete story toward the end of the narrative, thus eliminating the unequal distribution of knowledge held by the characters and the listeners/readers. In Parzival the listeners’/readers’ knowledge is conditionally restricted. Wolfram avoids introspection into characters. This makes it seem as though one is looking outward into an unclear world with Parzival’s eyes. The narrative is told as it appears to Parzival, seen from Parzival’s limited scope of knowledge. This means that there is a combination of both a third-person objective point of view that is bound to a character and an externally oriented third-person limited point of view. This combination of two perspectives is highly unusual.

6 Characters with an External View as a Restriction of the Narrator’s Knowledge in the Middle Ages Old Germanic heroic poetry (seventh and eighth centuries) is largely concerned with affects and feelings. They are expressed through character dialogues and characters’ actions only, and are never described or made explicit by the singers. This gives the impression of singers deliberately avoiding the narrative thematization of affects and feelings. One could speak here of a third-person objective point of view. However, this is a side-effect of the narrative style that focuses exclusively on action. Even speaking appears to be a kind of physical action in this way of narrating. In the Old High German Hildebrandslied, one learns nothing about the thoughts and feelings of Hildebrand and Hadubrand, despite their dialogue being quite extensive. When Hildebrand decides to fight his own son to the death, his condition can only be deduced from his heartfelt lament. Even in Atlakviða, no word is uttered about what happens in Gunnar’s mind when he decides to ride to Atli, dooming himself to death. It is not part of the style of these poems to narrate the characters’ inner experiences separately from their feelings: they tell of a world of exorbitant actions. In the smaller genres of Middle High German literature, one repeatedly encounters a large number of conversations between characters where the narrator does

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not communicate anything additional about their experiences. Stricker’s short narratives (first half of the thirteenth century) progress exactly in this manner. In the Ehescheidungsgespräch, for example, the narrator’s speech represents only one tenth of the text and is thus reduced to a minimum. This, too, gives the impression of an external view. However, this is an effect of the subject matter, since Stricker’s short narratives often involve speech and its dynamics: arguing, giving advice, eloquent lying, and so on (Nowakowski 2018). If one takes the distribution of knowledge as a basis, then indications can be found in medieval narration that an outside perspective or a third-person objective point of view could be realized to some extent. Such indications appear, for instance, in the narrative handling of names. This often concerns only a small detail about the beginnings of narratives, but it is meaningful for situations where the author wants to take a particular narrative stance that could possibly extend throughout the narrative. Of course, an omniscient narrator always knows the names of his protagonists, but names can also be used to cause a variety of possible desired effects, as for example, when they are deliberately withheld (see also Parzival, above). Unlike in heroic poetry, in which fame and glory are attached to the name of a historical person (Hildebrand, Gunnar, etc.), characters in folk tales hardly ever bear a name. It is sufficient if the character is called “the king,” “the princess,” “the shoemaker,” and so on. This changes in literary folk tales. Names bring a latent compulsion to further identify characters with themselves: where do named characters come from, where do they live, and where are they going? When Boccaccio takes up folklore plots in his Decameron (ca. 1350), he adds names and locates the protagonists spatiotemporally: in Florence and the surrounding area. The plots are thus re-referenced, and it is not uncommon for the resulting novella to become a case story that claims to tell something that happened remarkably in a certain place at a certain time (Neuschäfer 1969). In this way – due to the implicit preoccupation with naming – one is finally dealing with an individualized event determined by space and time. For this reason, names, or the absence thereof, can virtually cause a drift toward a desired narrative perspective. A characteristic way of restricting omniscience can be observed where names are withheld by the narrator. This gives the impression that a narrator does not (yet) know them and obtains them only from the narrative world that is being built up step by step. Hemingway experiments in a number of his stories with the central knowledge component of the characters’ names. He puts the narrator in the role of a reporter who only slowly and indirectly acquires knowledge about what he is reporting on. However, the information remains inaccessible to him even then. Some stories and novels (“Hills Like White Elephants,” The Old Man and the Sea) go so far that the names of the characters remain unknown throughout. In “The Killers,” the narrator enjoys the advantage of his knowledge about Henry’s restau-

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rant and its guests. There, George serves behind the bar. The narrator “knows” the incoming killers just as little as George knows them, and can only call them by name – Al and Max – after they have spoken with each other at the bar. This narrative detail indicates that the narrator has demonstratively shed his omniscience. To be more specific, the narrator does not know anything in relation to the characters. In this way, he then reflects on much of what happens later on from a consistent observing outside perspective or a third-person objective point of view that does not allow him to possess the knowledge that omniscient narrators would naturally possess. When knowledge and not just a view appears to be limited, one can speak of a perspective in the full sense of the word. Many novels of the nineteenth century use the name-limiting technique at the beginning, but use of this technique can be traced back much further. The author of the late antique Aithiopika, Heliodorus (late fourth century), uses it very consciously and purposefully. He begins his novel with an in medias res view of the aftermath of an attack on a ship at the mouth of an anabranch of the Nile at sunrise. The perspective of some robbers from Egypt is added, who are presented with the following mysterious sight on the beach: the dead and dying suggest a terrible fight must have taken place just a moment before, but the victors have not claimed the spoils of their victory. The robbers’ perspective replaces the narrator for a longer duration of the novel and is thus recognizably used here to introduce an outside view/perspective because the robbers cannot make sense of what they see. It would hardly make sense to analyze this as if their “point of view” were being played out, even if their perspective is narrated; rather, they serve as a proxy for establishing an outside view of what they see without understanding it. Restricted perspective is already widespread in ancient literature (examples in Pausch 2019, 140–146), so the technique in Aithiopika is no accident. External viewing is not a separate matter but is played out through characters’ externally oriented visual foci (see also Wolfram). This kind of external view is now further strengthened in Aithiopika, even though the narrator does not want to grant himself more knowledge than the characters possess. This is initially limited to the naming of characters. The narrator “knows” the names of the protagonists, Theagenes and Charikleia, only after they have addressed each other (Aithiopika 1.8), which is quite analogous to the two killers, Al and Max, in Hemingway. This, in turn, allows the narrator to give the impression that his knowledge is limited. In this way, Heliodor continues to build up the narrative with long speeches from the characters. These speeches allow the narrator to provide more information about the plot. One must go far back to the novels of the early modern period to encounter efforts to use a remotely comparable method of character representation. After Late Antiquity, Heliodor’s Aithiopika was not widely read again until the sixteenth and

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seventeenth centuries (see Rivoletti and Seeber 2018, esp. Keller 2018, 156–174), so it cannot be held responsible for influencing or causing the efforts of the medieval and early modern periods to achieve an external view until the second half of the sixteenth century. Therefore, it stands out all the more when the author consciously sets both the narrator’s and reader’s already achieved level of knowledge about the story, characters, and so on at zero. Usually, once introduced, names serve to identify characters throughout a whole narrative text. Exceptions arise when, for instance, a character’s loss of identity is narrated and his/her name is given up for a certain length of the narrative. Chrétien and Hartmann do this in Yvain/Iwein (ca. 1180/ before 1200) when they mark the protagonist in the second half of the story with the designation “the knight with the lion” (Yvain, lines 4291, 4750, and others; Iwein, lines 4741, 5496–5506, and others). In doing this, Chrétien and Hartmann symbolically put his shame about his identity onto the level of narration. In Early New High German prose novels, a special condition seems to lead to characters that were already introduced by name being made anonymous. Their names are suppressed, and instead, indefinite pronouns are used. Wickram’s Nachbarnroman (1556) begins with the bitter fate of the merchant Robertus from Antwerp who, quarrelling with a wicked neighbor, also loses ten of his children, leaving him only one daughter. When he gets the opportunity to move to Lisbon, he takes it and begins a new life there with his wife, daughter, and servants. The title of the chapter that follows is “How two rich merchants, traveling with the same merchandise, come together on a ship, seeking friendship and companionship, [how] one became very ill, the other looked after him faithfully, and, when they came to Lisbon, took him into his house” (29). This is narrated over the course of a few pages as if it were a new narrative, but without the names of the merchants, one of them already old, the other still young. The old merchant takes such excellent care of the young one that he quickly recovers well enough to be able to take a seat at the family dining table, where he eventually takes interest in the old merchant’s daughter. Only now in this chapter and the next does the reader learn the names of the two merchants: Robertus and Richard. This confirms something that one can only suspect up to this point: it is the same Robertus who, out of grief at his fate, had taken up residence in Lisbon. But why does the author set the readers’ level of knowledge at zero, and what does this new technique achieve? Since the two merchants do not yet know each other, Wickram tells the story of the two strangers in such a way that they both remain strangers to the reader, even though the reader already knows who Robertus is. Wickram thus finds a narrative form that represents the typical experience of long-distance traveling merchants. They have to build up a rapport and establish trust between them without knowing each other very well due to the fact that they travel on trade routes that change frequently so as to minimize the business risk. In the Nachbarnroman, one gets the impression that the author is projecting the lack

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of familiarity between the two merchants onto the narrator’s level. Here, the author brings the merchants’ restricted knowledge over from the narrated world onto the level upon which the narration occurs. This appears as a method for depicting experience in narrative form. The merchants experience each other as strangers, and Wickram emphasizes this meeting of strangers by not revealing their names. In a certain sense, these characters’ points of view unfold and transform into an external view for the reader. On the one hand, in Parzival, not being able to recognize one’s relatives is already conveyed by means of an experimental narrative technique that can be better understood when it is considered that youths were sent to, raised, and educated at foreign courts. On the other hand, in Wickram’s case, a new opportunity arising out of newly emerging modern capitalism becomes the starting point of a newly invented narrative technique. In this sense, it can be assumed that new types of life and world experiences are often responsible for the discovery and formation of new narrative techniques.

7 Conclusion The term “point of view” as it has been developed by scholars of modern literature cannot be adequately applied to medieval narratives. Premodern storytelling is characterized by the omniscient author-narrator with a dominant focus on the plot along with unconstrained access to the inner life of the characters. Nevertheless, proto-forms of limited and objective point of view can be found. They appear when omniscience makes way for characters’ perceptions and their restricted knowledge. Such a restriction becomes especially noticeable when an author-narrator hands over his “knowledge” to a character or when he retains information and discloses it only bit by bit.

References Barthel, Verena. 2008. Empathie, Mitleid, Sympathie: Rezeptionslenkende Strukturen mittelalterlicher Texte in Bearbeitungen des Willehalm-Stoffs. Berlin: De Gruyter. Battles, Paul. 2019. “Old Saxon-Old English Intertextuality and the ‘Traveler Recognizes his Goal’ Theme in the Heliand.” In Old English and Continental Germanic Literature in Comparative Perspectives, edited by Larry J. Swain, 5–37. New York: Lang. Bauschke, Ricarda. 2005. “Adaptation courtoise als ‘Schreibweise’: Rekonstruktion einer Bearbeitungstechnik am Beispiel von Hartmanns Iwein.” In Texttyp und Textproduktion in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, edited by Elizabeth Andersen, Manfred Eikelmann, and Anne Simon, 65–84. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Bein, Thomas. 1996. “Autor, Erzähler, Rhapsode, Figur: Zum ‘Ich’ in Wolframs Parzival 108,17.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 115:433–436. Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. (1938) 1979. Understanding Fiction. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Burrichter, Brigitte. 2019. “Perspektive – Mittelalter.” In Handbuch Historische Narratologie, edited by Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg, 149–156. Stuttgart: Springer. Chinca, Mark. 2010. “Der Frauendienst zwischen Fiktivität und Fiktionalität: Perspektiven der Forschung.” In Ulrich von Liechtenstein: Leben – Zeit – Werk – Forschung, edited by Sandra Linden and Christopher Young, 305–323. Berlin: De Gruyter. de Jong, Irene. 2012. “Homer.” In Space in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, edited by Irene de Jong, 21–38. Leiden: Brill. Dimpel, Friedrich Michael. 2011. Die Zofe im Fokus: Perspektivierung und Sympathiesteuerung durch Nebenfiguren vom Typus der Confidente in der höfischen Epik des hohen Mittelalters. Berlin: Schmidt. Dimpel, Friedrich Michael. 2012. “Perspektivierung, Fokalisierung, Fokussierung und Sympathiesteuerung zur Einführung: Mit Beispielanalysen zum Erec Hartmanns von Aue.” IASL online (http://www.iaslonline.de; view date: 20.09.2022) Freese, Eike. 2009. “Streitgedicht.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, vol. 9, 172–178. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Friedman, Norman. 1955. “Point of View in Fiction.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 70:1160–1184. Genette, Gérard. (1972) 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Glauch, Sonja. 2009. An der Schwelle zur Literatur: Elemente einer Poetik des höfischen Erzählens. Heidelberg: Winter. Glauch, Sonja. 2010. “Ich-Erzähler ohne Stimme.” In Historische Narratologie: Mediävistische Perspektiven, edited by Harald Haferland and Matthias Meyer, 149–185. Berlin: De Gruyter. Glauch, Sonja. 2017. “Versuch über einen minnelyrischen Ursprung des Autobiographischen (Guillaume de Machaut, Dante, Ulrich von Liechtenstein).” In Von sich selbst erzählen: Historische Dimensionen des Ich-Erzählens, edited by Sonja Glauch and Katharina Philipowski, 317–342. Heidelberg: Winter. Haferland, Harald. 2018. “Konzeptuell überschriebene Module im volkssprachlichen Erzählen des Mittelalters und ihre Auflösung.” Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung 1:108–193 (online: https://doi.org/10.25619/BmE_H201811; view date: 20.09.2022). Haferland, Harald. 2019. “Erzähler – Fiktion – Fokalisierung: Drei Reizbegriffe der Historischen Narratologie.” Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung 2:11–147 (online: https://doi. org/10.25619/BmE_H201921; view date: 20.09.2022). Haferland, Harald. 2020. “Christliche Weltherrschaft im Parzival.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 142:548–615. Huber, Christoph. 2014. “Empathisches Erzählen und Katharsis in Gottfrieds Tristan.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 88:273–296. Hübner, Gert. 2003. Erzählform im höfischen Roman: Studien zur Fokalisierung im “Eneas”, im “Iwein” und im “Tristan.” Tübingen: Francke. Keller, Andreas. 2018. “Transformation statt Translation. Plurale Heliodor-Imitatio am Beispiel von Exordialtopik im deutschsprachigen Roman des 17. Jahrhunderts.“ In Heliodoros redivivus: Vernetzung und interkultureller Kontext in der europäischen “Aithiopika”-Rezeption der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Christian Rivoletti and Stefan Seeber, 147–181. Stuttgart: Steiner.

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Meister, Jan Christoph. 2018. “Erzählen: Eine anthropologische Universalie?” In Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft: Erzählen, edited by Martin Huber and Wolf Schmid, 88–112. Berlin: De Gruyter. Müller, Jan-Dirk. (1995) 2010. “Ulrich von Liechtenstein.” In Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, vol. 9, 1274–1282. Berlin: De Gruyter. Müller, Jan-Dirk. 1998. Spielregeln für den Untergang: Die Welt des Nibelungenliedes. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Naumann, Thomas. 2016. “Biblisches Erzählen.” In Handbuch Literatur und Religion, edited by Daniel Weidner, 241–245. Stuttgart: Springer. Neuschäfer, Hans-Jörg. 1969. Boccaccio und der Beginn der Novelle: Strukturen der Kurzerzählung auf der Schwelle zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Munich: Fink. Niederhoff, Burkhard. (2011) 2013. “Perspective – Point of View.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter (http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/perspective-–-point-view; view date: 20.09.2022). Nowakowski, Nina. 2018. Sprechen und Erzählen beim Stricker: Kommunikative Formate in mittelhochdeutschen Kurzerzählungen. Berlin: De Gruyter. Pausch, Dennis. 2019. “Perspektive – Antike.” In Handbuch Historische Narratologie, edited by Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg, 138–148. Stuttgart: Springer. Rivoletti, Christian, and Stefan Seeber, eds. 2018. Heliodoros redivivus: Vernetzung und interkultureller Kontext in der europäischen Aithiopika-Rezeption der Frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Steiner. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2017. Mentale Ereignisse: Bewusstseinsveränderungen in europäischen Erzählungen vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schulz, Armin. 2012. Erzähltheorie in mediävistischer Perspektive. Berlin: De Gruyter. Stanzel, Franz K. 1979. Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: UTB Vandenhoeck. Störmer-Caysa, Uta. 2007. Grundstrukturen mittelalterlicher Erzählungen: Raum und Zeit im höfischen Roman. Berlin: De Gruyter. Uspenskij, Boris A. (1970) 1975. Poetik der Komposition: Struktur des künstlerischen Textes und Typologie der Kompositionsform, edited by Karl Eimermacher. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Whitcomb, Selden L. 1905. A Study of a Novel. Boston: Heath.

Brigitte Burrichter

Perspective in Narrative Texts of the European Middle Ages 1 Definition Gert Hübner (2003) and Sophie Marnette (1998) analyze the narrative strategies in medieval texts. They proceed from the French tradition, particularly from the narratology of Gérard Genette ([1972] 1980, [1983] 1988). These authors advocate a strict distinction between narrator and perspective, opposing “Who speaks?” to “Who perceives?” The underlying principles are (1) the relation of the narrator to the narrated world (in Genette’s terminology, heterodiegetic vs. homo- or autodiegetic narrator), and (2) the mode of focalization (zero, external, internal), which, according to Jesch and Stein (2009, 62), regulates information. In Genette, this distinction is not always clear and changes from one narrative to another. I will follow Jesch and Stein’s proposal as one “way to achieve focalization” (65). In the medieval texts studied here, the authors employ only one of the four combinations of perspective and focalization identified by Jesch and Stein: “focalization through perspectivization” (69–71). In his study on focalization, Hübner (2003) carries out a detailed and well-substantiated analysis of courtly romances. In particular, he explains why the “analytical, abstract, and formalized” (10) apparatus of narratological categories based on Genette lends itself better to describing older texts than the categories derived from the English-language and Slavic traditions, which are more strongly bound to the narrative conventions of the nineteenth century. The present chapter endorses Hübner’s approach. On the basis of a large text corpus, Marnette (1998) provides a broad overview of virtually all narrative genres from the twelfth to the fifteenth century in France. Based on Genette, and taking English-language narratology into account, she provides a systematic framework for narrative perspective that covers a wide variety of medieval narratives. Her analysis shows that narrative perspective depends on genre and is not linked to any chronological pattern.

1.1 Narrative Voice Narrative voice and perspective, though distinct, are so closely interconnected that a short preliminary remark is necessary. A narrative voice necessarily speaks https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-009

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from a certain perspective and encapsulates a number of very different narrative possibilities. On the one hand, there are narratives in heterodiegetic narratorial perspective in which, in the case of medieval narratives, either the author tells a story of his own, as in romances where narratorial perspective corresponds to the authorial position relative to the text or the narrator tells a story that is not his or her own in a non-authorial position – a situation typical for the heroic epic poem. There are also texts in which narrative voice cannot be correlated with any “person” whomsoever  – texts in which the story seems to “narrate itself,” as in French prose narratives where the narrator evokes “the story” as referent (“Now, the story goes [. . .]”). On the other hand, there are homo- or autodiegetic narrators, characters who speak about themselves and who report events in which they take part. With each change of narrative voice, perspective changes as well. Moreover, a narrative voice can adopt different perspectives or even a succession of perspectives and also different focalizations. As it turns out, the continual changing of narrative perspective and/or focalization within a text is a rule rather than an exception.

1.2 Perspective The position of the narrative voice (or, more generally, the narrator) corresponds to perspective: “Who perceives?” Drawing on Marnette (1998, 139–144, examples on 161–200), but with a slightly modified systematization, two fundamental narrative positions can be distinguished with regard to perspective. (1) The heterodiegetic position of a narrator who (a) determines the story and is also the author of the story (authorial position) or (b) tells a story but is neither the author of the story nor adopts the role of the author (non-authorial position). The narratorial perspective is not limited, although in medieval texts it is often reduced to external focalization enriched with background information. In the French verse romances of the twelfth century, this external focalization is combined with various other techniques to regulate information (see the examples below) in order to achieve special effects such as suspense. (2) The homodiegetic position, where (a) an observer or witness reports an event as an homodiegetic narrator; or (b) a character in the fictional world of the story narrates events using direct or free indirect speech, or (c) an autodiegetic narrator tells his or her own story either throughout the text in metadiegetic narration or in a character’s voice. The figural perspective of these narrators is restricted (Jesch and Stein 2009, 62; see also Genette ([1972] 1980, 185–189).

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1.3 Focalization Focalization serves as an instrument to disseminate information within a narration (for in-depth remarks, see Hübner 2003, 56–63 and passim; Jesch and Stein 2009). When it comes to detailed analyses, Genette’s controversial zero focalization can generally be disregarded (Fludernik 1996, 345–346; Hübner 2003, 41–45), since combining perspective as mode of reception and external or internal focalization as modes of regulation of information usually suffices to describe a narration. However, the narrator’s entry into the characters’ inner perceptions (ranging from simple remarks about mental states to psycho-narration) is an exception, since, according to Genette, external focalization does not have access to such perceptions and also since perceptions of this kind cannot be conveyed by means of internal focalization. Genette assigns it to zero focalization; it might be also taken as a general property of non-limited narratorial perspective.

2 Analyses To illustrate the arguments, examples will be taken primarily from Erec et Enide (ca. 1170) by Chrétien de Troyes, Erec und Enite (ca. 1180/1190) by Hartmann von Aue, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fourteenth century). Side-glances at narratives from other literatures will complement the survey. These texts feature a broad variety of narratorial possibilities.

2.1 Narratorial Perspective and Focalization It is integral to narratorial perspective that the narrator can adopt any perspective and lend his voice to any character: focalization ranges from the broadly focalizing narrative voice of a heterodiegetic narrator (as in the description of a setting) to internal focalization by the narrator or a character. In conjunction with a particular kind of focalization, it controls the dissemination of information in the course of the narration and guides the reader. According to the focalization employed, various effects can be achieved that emphasize different aspects of one and the same plot. A case in point is the comparison of corresponding scenes from Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide and Hartmann von Aue’s Erec und Enite. After a foreign knight insults the queen at the beginning of the story, Erec follows the stranger to a town unknown to him where a battle for the sparrow hawk is to take

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place. In Chrétien de Troyes’s case, the narrator focalizes externally, transferring the perspective adopted to the protagonist in the foreign town. Narration is limited to his view (lines 342–372 and with short interruptions up to line 410; see Burrichter 2018). As a result, the dissemination of information is restricted: the recipients learn neither of Erec’s whereabouts nor what kind of feast is being prepared in town. Moreover, Erec’s impressions are not explicitly communicated, nor is anything conveyed as to his character. Basically, what we are dealing with is external focalization through the character Erec. However, this change of perspective and restriction of focalization is not marked as such, and it is only at the end of the scene (line 372) that it is mentioned for the first time that Erec sees the foreign knight entering the house (and thus leaving his field of view). The scene is narrated throughout in the narrator’s voice. In Hartmann von Aue’s version (lines 223–252), Erec’s entry into the town is described similarly to Chrétien de Troyes’s version. Yet focalization is used differently here. The entire scene is told from the perspective of the authorial narrator, and the narration itself is driven by Erec’s motivation to find shelter, described from the inside, a psycho-narration in Dorrit Cohn’s sense of the term (1978, 11–12), as in the following example: die burc meit er durch den sin daz er sîn iht würde gewar dem er hete gevolget dar. (lines 225–228) (He avoided the castle, thinking that he whom he had pursued there should not be aware of him at all; trans. Edwards)

The narrator’s broad perspective provides for introductory information on the town and on the custom of the battle for the sparrow hawk. His access to the character’s thoughts informs the reader about the motivation of the protagonist. When comparing the two versions of this scene, the effects and narrative possibilities of the change of focalization become clear. Chrétien de Troyes plays with the dissemination of information and grants both the protagonist and the recipient a common level of knowledge, thus guaranteeing constant tension and an openended plot. The temporal restriction to the perspective of the protagonist makes the reader experience his difficult situation indirectly. Hartmann von Aue, by contrast, informs the recipient in detail about the protagonist’s circumstances and his efforts to find shelter. The reader’s attention is focused on the successful quest for shelter. The experience of being a stranger is reported from the perspective of the narrator (lines 245–247): Erec does not know anyone in town, which is why no one speaks to him. Through the use of focalization and the way information is disseminated, the two narrators produce different effects for the same scene. In medieval texts, narratorial perspective is often combined with a type of focalization that might best be described as the external focalization of a heterodiegetic

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narrator who occasionally weaves information into the narrative derived from his background knowledge and the entire plot. To illustrate this, a short sequence from the French Chanson de Roland, a description of Charlemagne, can be cited: Li Emperere en tint sun chef enclin, De sa parole ne fut mie hastifs, Sa custume est qu’il parolet a leisir. (lines 139–141) (✶The Emperor inclined his head full low; Hasty in speech he never was, His custom was to speak leisurely.)

The first two lines describe the emperor and the circumstances as perceived by an external observer; the third line adds information from the narrator. The combination of heterodiegetic narrative position, predominantly in external focalization, plays an important role for medieval texts. Narratives written in metrical language (such as heroic epic poems, romances, and hagiographies) reckon with oral speech in the sense of a performative rendering of the text, introducing the speaker’s voice into the text. The narrative perspective hinted at in the texts and updated with every performance corresponds to the situation of a witness who describes the action through external focalization while at the same time commenting on it in internal focalization. In particularly dramatic scenes, the narrator orchestrates a simultaneity of the reported event and the respective present of both narrator and audience told in “parallel” to the course of action. With reference to the use of tense, Blanc (1964, 111–115) likens this kind of narrator to a sportscaster who narrates an athletic competition and comments on it in real time (see also Marnette 1998, 156). In so doing, the narrator switches between external and internal focalization. With respect to grammar, these situations are characterized in both French and English by changing to forms of the present tense. This narrative perspective is most common in chansons de geste, but it is also found in other types of narratives. In French novels, change of tense is widespread during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Chrétien de Troyes, for example, writes: Erec s’an va tote la trace, A esperon les jaianz chace. Tant les a chaciez et seüz Que il les a aparceüz. (lines 4381–4384; emphasis added) (✶Erec follows the lane, He hounds the giants putting spurs to his horse. He hounded and followed them, Until he found them.)

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In German, by contrast, tense changes are not used, perhaps because (as Hübner notes with respect to free indirect speech; 2003, 150–151) the use of tenses in Middle High German was much more regulated. Thus, in Hartmann’s version the entire scene is told using the past tense: Nû was er komen û fir slâ Und îlte in vil sêre nâ Unz er sị begunde sehen an. (lines 5378–5380; emphasis added) (By now he had come upon their tracks And made great haste after them, Until he caught sight of them; trans. Edwards)

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the text switches to the present tense when a new event is introduced: An oþer noyse ful newe neȝed biliue, Þat þe lude myȝt haf leue liflode to cach. For vneþe watȝ þe noyce not a whyle sesed, And þe fyrst cource in þe court kyndely serued, Þer hales in at þe halle dor an aghlich mayster. (lines 132–136; emphasis added) (Another noise and a new was well-nigh at hand, That the lord might have leave his life to nourish; For scarce were the sweet strains still in the hall, And the first course come to that company fair, There hurtles in at the hall-door an unknown rider; trans. Borroff)

With these examples, it becomes apparent how the narrator uses the present tense to accentuate certain aspects of the scene. In passages that use the present tense, it can be difficult to determine what the pertinent focalization is. Because of staged simultaneity, Marnette (1998, 156 and passim) speaks of external focalization of a quasi-homodiegetic narrative voice, an immediate witness. Yet, in all cases of medieval texts, the alleged simultaneity is not real (as opposed to the real-time narration of the modern sportscaster); it is rather in view of the intended performance of the speech that simultaneity is staged. This being the case, it appears to be more accurate to speak of the external focalization of a heterodiegetic narrator. From this perspective, the narrator can occasionally turn the audience into immediate witnesses if, through the use of phrases such as “behold” or “look,” the perspective is transferred to the audience: “Ez vos le palefroi venu” (Behold, now, the palfrey comes into view; line 1404); “Estes vos que venir le voient./Lez lui son nain et sa pucele” (Behold, now, they see him coming/with his dwarf and his damsel; lines 778–779). Here, the audience follows the view of the narrator in staged simultaneity. As is the case with the change of tenses, integrating the audience in this way

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creates an impression of orality. It follows, then, that a heterodiegetic narrator can adopt any narrative perspective and change the narrative perspective within a text, taking on the perspective of intradiegetic characters as it so pleases. Because of the change of tense, and by directing the recipient’s view by narrowing down focalization and commenting on the narration, the personal narrator prevails, thereby controlling the recipients’ attention and vouching for the accuracy of the narrated. As regards focalization, Marnette (1998, 198–200) has shown that heterodiegetic narrators behave differently depending on genre. Verse novels of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where the author presents himself and is mentioned by name, use focalizing strategies considerably more than narratives with anonymous narrators who only claim to recount faithfully. Both of these heterodiegetic narrative positions can be paired with any narrative perspective whatsoever, as they have access to all events and can also enter the inner life of the characters. This can be accomplished by rendering speech and thought in direct or indirect speech or by switching to an omniscient position from which a character’s mental life can be presented in psycho-narration.

2.1.1 Authorial Position If the narrator is the author of the text or takes liberties with the source text, then the authorial position applies to the text as a whole. As the voice of a personal narrator, the narrator and the author of the narrative are the same. The narrative voice not only comments on the course of the action, but it can also weave in poetological comments, thus highlighting the role of the author. In medieval literature, this narrative position applies especially to longer and shorter narratives of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries whose authors reveal their identity. This is the case with Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes in France and with Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Straßburg in Germany. Another feature of this narrative position in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is a profound change in focalization in the text. The heterodiegetic narrator passes his voice on to different intradiegetic figures, and not only in passages containing direct speech. He describes the scene from the perspective of a character (“Queen Guinevere sees [. . .]”) or conveys the thoughts of different characters. Accordingly, the narrator not only demonstrates that he commands all perspectives, but particularly that he, following Chrétien de Troyes’s conjointure, is capable of bringing together a plethora of voices and perspectives and of forming a coherent whole (Marnette 1998, 177–184). On the other hand, this multitude of languages leaves space for different interpretations by the audience. Subsequently, authors

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such as Montalvo in Amadís de Gaula (1505) do without the variety of focalizers in favor of an authorial narrator who leaves no room for doubting the correct interpretation of the narrated (Weich 1989, 218–222).

2.1.2 Non-Authorial Position In some genres, the narrator does not claim authorship. Rather, a traditional story is told, as shown in the first line of the Nibelungenlied: “Uns ist in alten mæren wunders vil geseit” (Full many a wonder is told us in stories old; line 1). Jehan Bodel invokes the “livre d’estoire,” history books from which he learned about the Saxon Wars (Mölk 1969, 6). Any interventions by the narrator that do not directly comment on the course of the narration seek to vouch for an accurate recounting of the story. This applies particularly to heroic epic poems, hagiographies, and prose novels – genres that lay claim to historical truth. From time to time, narrators appear in the prologues. This is the case with Jehan Bodel and Adenet le Roi in French, for example, and in German particularly with Wolfram von Eschenbach in Willehalm (4.19). For the most part, the narrators remain anonymous. Among the twenty-one prologues of French heroic epic poems (from the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries) published by Mölk (1969), only two names are given, those already mentioned above. When it comes to hagiographies, the findings are comparable: it is only seldom that the people who adopt them and pass them on reveal their identity, one exception being Wace in his Anglo-Norman adaptation of the legend of St. Margaret from the mid-twelfth century. In heroic epic poems and in hagiographies, narrators are to be understood mainly as personal narrators. In other contexts, such as French prose romances, the status of the narrator remains indeterminate or is openly impersonal, the story (“li contes”) being left to narrate itself. Except for direct speech of characters and (especially in hagiographies) entering the thoughts of the protagonist, perspective and focalization are the narrator’s, and the narrator thus remains in control of the narrative voice. With this it is ensured that the single correct view of events is not disturbed by the characters’ potentially competing views. In genres that insist on the verisimilitude of the reported material, directing focalization in this way supports the narrative’s intention.

2.2 Figural Perspective In passing his or her voice over to an intradiegetic character, the narrator creates different figural perspectives taken over by the characters. As this occurs frequently

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in verse romances, it deserves discussion. In these texts, three variants of figural perspective can be found. (1) The internal perspective of a character who, in the position of the homodiegetic observer or witness, reports the events as an intradiegetic narrator in external focalization is that of an embedded narrator. The heterodiegetic narrator transfers information meant for the intradiegetic characters (and audience) to one of the characters. An example is Guivret’s description of the Brandigan castle for Erec: diz hûs heizet Brandigân und ist vil mannig ritter guot durch sînen genendigen muot ûf aventiure her komen, die alle dar an hânt genome schaden zuo den schanden die besten von allen landen. (lines 7959–7965) (This castle is called Brandigan and many good knights in their boldness, the best in all the lands have come here in pursuit of adventure, all of whom have incurred by loss and disgrace; trans. Cramer)

In the passages quoted above, the position of the narrator can be described as homodiegetic, since Guivret reports events of the intradiegetic world or knows more about the castle without being actively involved in the adventures. This position corresponds to the homodiegetic position prominent in modern storytelling. In medieval literature, however, it is only present in brief episodes when characters report about events, but never as the dominant narrator’s position. An exception in which the change of perspective is constitutive can be found in collections of novellas. Boccaccio’s Decamerone (1348–1353) and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (before 1549) are characterized by an extradiegetic narrator in the outer frame story (accounts of the Plague in Florence and of the storm in the Pyrenees, respectively) as well as by the frame story of the individual days. Concerning the novellas themselves, this extradiegetic narrator transfers his voice to the intradiegetic narrators, who, in relation to the stories they narrate, are heterodiegetic and non-authorial, but nonetheless omniscient narrators. (2) In verse romances in particular, the intradiegetic perspective of a figure who, as a character in the narrative, perceives events or speaks (in either direct or free indirect speech) is the most common case of change of perspective. Events are described from the perspective of characters who see or hear something. Because

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the knowledge of characters is limited in most cases, any change of perspective results in increasing the tension of the situation. At the beginning of the adventure of the Joie de la Cort, Erec and his companions ride into the orchard. Adopting the heterodiegetic narrative perspective, Hartmann von Aue describes what can be found in the orchard; then, from the intradiegetic perspective of the small group that enters the garden, horrible stakes with impaled skulls are seen (lines 8724– 8725, 8765–8774). As for Chrétien de Troyes, he transfers the perspective to the internal perspective of the protagonist: it is thus Erec who hears the birds singing and rejoices over it when suddenly he sees a miracle that would frighten the bravest hero, namely, the stakes with impaled skulls (lines 5764–5782). Because of that, the contrast between the wonderful, peaceful garden and the horrible stakes is made even more striking due to the focus being entirely that of the protagonist, Erec. (3) Internal perspective associated with the autodiegetic narrative voice can be found in all types of figural narration, particularly when the character speaks about himself. This is often the case in dialogues but also in longer narrative passages expressed in (pseudo-)autobiographical narration. In this case, a good example is the narration by Calogrenant/Kalogrenant in Yvain/Iwein (lines 173–578 in Chrétien de Troyes/lines 260–802 in Hartmann von Aue). This occurs in direct or indirect speech where the change of focalization is unambiguous. However, the situation is more complicated in the case of discours indirect libre (free indirect discourse), which occurs in all genres of the French Middle Ages for the representation of character consciousness. (For examples in German literature, see Hübner 2003, 50–52, 150–151.) Since mental discourse goes unmarked, both the perceiver and the speaker are ambiguous, the character’s thoughts being conveyed without comment. A well-known example is Yvain’s deliberations on the daring adventure of the well before the Arthurian court officially departs (Marnette 1998, 178–179; Burrichter 2018). Chrétien uses the same technique when Yvain witnesses the burial of his dead opponent after the battle at the well, describing Yvain’s reaction as follows: del cors qu’il voit quan enfuet Li poise, quant avoir n’en puet Aucune chose qui l’an port Tesmoing qu’il l’a ocis et mort; S’il n’en a tesmoing a parlemant Que mostrer puisse en aparant, Donc iert il honiz en travers Tant est Kex fel et pervers, Plains de ranpones et d’enui, Qu’il ne garra ja mes a lui, Einz l’ira forment afitant

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Et gas et ranpones gitant, Ausi con il fist l’autre jor. (lines 1343–1355) (✶The body that is buried here disturbs him, because he cannot take any evidence that he killed him. If he cannot present a piece of evidence in court, he will be rightfully vilified. Cei is so mean, so perverse, so sarcastic, and so full of hatred that he will not leave him in peace. On the contrary, he will shower him with malice. He will heap mockery and insults on him like he did the other day.)

Who is speaking here? In the first sentence, it is most likely the heterodiegetic narrator. But then the passage continues in free indirect discourse. The protagonist’s thoughts are expressed without the mediation of a heterodiegetic narrator, the stress thus falling on the internal focalization of the protagonist. In some cases, an authorial personal narrator uses the first person in ways that extend beyond comments by the narrator and addresses to the reader. The frame narrator of the Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century), reporting that he meets other pilgrims at the inn, describes them from a heterodiegetic perspective and gives them a voice to narrate the individual stories. Similarly, Rabelais relates his stories of Pantagruel as a heterodiegetic authorial narrator and then occasionally changes to the intra- and homodiegetic perspective when he presents himself as an eyewitness, eventually becoming part of the story: “Ce pendant ie qui vous fays ces tant veritables contes, m’estoys caché dessoubz une feuille de Bardane” (✶While I am telling you these very true stories, I was hiding underneath the leaf of a burr). Up to this point, the authorial heterodiegetic narrator frequently addresses the reader, comments on his text, and anticipates objections by the reader. To be sure, in the prologue he announces that he is the servant of his protagonist and that he will report everything from his own perspective. But it is at this point that he becomes part of the story, first describing from an external focalization what is going on, and then narrating his own adventure using internal focalization. Rabelais then adopts once again the position of the heterodiegetic narrator as a result of the narrative perspective adopted. It is seldom in medieval narration that autodiegetic narrative adopts a consistent narrative perspective. It is common in allegorical dream narratives, however. A case in point is Raoul de Houdenc’s Songe d’Enfer (1200), in which the narrator continuously relates his dream from an internal perspective. He himself is the protagonist and tells the dream and the dream’s frame story (Burrichter 2014). Another example is the Roman de la Rose (thirteenth century) by Guillaume de Lorris. In Italian literature, Dante’s Divina Commedia (early fourteenth century) is a prominent example. Here, the narrator Dante Alighieri relates the adventures of the wanderer Dante, and the author Dante Alighieri comments on them. Starting in the fourteenth century, first-person narration became more frequent.

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In Boccaccio’s Elegia di madonna Fiammetta (1343), it is the female protagonist who is the narrator. The fourteenth century in Spain saw the emergence of novels in the form of fictional autobiographies (e.g., Cárcel de Amor [1480] by Diego de San Pedro). In 1554, an anonymous author founded the genre of the picaresque novel with the publication of the fictional autobiography La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes. In narratives told in the first person, external and internal focalization alternate. Yet the information is limited because of the internal narrative perspective.

3 Conclusion In her study, Marnette (1998, 198–200) argues that when it comes to focalization, the genres of medieval French literature show a wide variety of solutions. In chansons de geste, heterodiegetic perspective and external focalization of the narrator prevail, while hagiographies switch from the heterodiegetic perspective of a narrator to the intradiegetic perspective of a character. Romances are characterized by the ongoing change of perspective, with a considerable proportion of intradiegetic perspective and internal focalization by the characters. Genres that claim historical truth (chansons de geste) or role-model status for their protagonists (hagiographies) maintain control over the position of recipients by means of perspective and focalization. The novel, largely unaffected by these two qualities, affords great openness and gives multiple voices an opportunity to speak (see Marnette 1998, 180–181). Because of its focalizing strategies, the novel is thus already in the Middle Ages the dialogic genre identified by Baxtin. Thanks to the interplay of its components – narrator, perspective, and focalization – narrative perspective has achieved crucial importance in narrative meaning. As for the strategies of perspective and focalization – particularity in medieval narrative – they result from the oral design built into narrative texts that employ narrative perspective in ways rarely used in modern narration. Analyzing perspective in all its aspects makes clear that the use of narratorial and figural perspective, focalization, and control of information in the texts does not follow a chronological pattern. French verse romances of the 1170s – and to a slightly lesser degree the first French romances of the 1150s, and German romances around 1200  – show a broad and calculated use of perspective and focalization which is found again in Renaissance novels. Prose romances of the thirteenth century are much more restricted, as they are intended to be read as historiographical texts, written in prose rather than in verse, while at the same time control over the interpretation of their texts is increased.

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With regard to one feature, however, a chronological development can be observed. “Oral design” fades away during the thirteenth century while autodiegetic narratives gain in importance. A number of discussions of perspective can be found in introductions to editions of individual works of the Middle Ages, but only on rare occasions are there comprehensive studies of narrative perspective with a focus on stylistic and interpretative potential. Marnette (1998) has shown that this endeavor can open the way to fruitful discussion of perspective in the genres of medieval literature.

References Blanc, Michel H. A. 1964. “Time and Tense in Old French Narrative.” Archivum Linguisticum 16:96–124. Burrichter, Brigitte. 2014. “Raoul de Houdenc La Vengeance Raguidel – Komik und Parodie.” In Ironie, Polemik und Provokation, edited by Cora Dietl, Christoph Schanze, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, 287–302. Berlin: De Gruyter. Burrichter, Brigitte. 2018. “Perspektive bei Chrétien de Troyes.” In Narratologie und mittelalterliches Erzählen: Autor, Erzähler, Perspektive, Zeit und Raum, edited by Eva von Contzen and Florian Kragl, 43–60. Berlin: De Gruyter. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. (1972) 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. (1983) 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Hübner, Gert. 2003. Erzählform im höfischen Roman: Studien zur Fokalisierung im “Eneas”, im “Iwein” und im “Tristan.” Tübingen: Francke. Jesch, Tatjana, and Malte Stein. 2009. “Perspectivization and Focalization: Two Concepts – One Meaning? An Attempt at Conceptual Differentiation.” In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, edited by Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 59–78. Berlin: De Gruyter. Marnette, Sophie. 1998. Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale. Berne: Lang. Mölk, Ulrich. 1969. Französische Literarästhetik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts: Prologe, Exkurse, Epiloge. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Weich, Horst. 1989. Don Quijote im Dialog. Passau: Rothe.

Andrej Agratin

Point of View in Russian Literature 1 Definition Point of view (PoV) is the position taken by a narrator toward the storyworld. It was the writer Henry James who first spoke extensively about narrative point of view, although similar reasoning can be found in theoretical works by Otto Ludwig, Friedrich Spielhagen, and Lev Tolstoj (Tamarčenko 2008, 266). The concept of point of view entered Anglo-American scholarly use through the English literary critic Percy Lubbock ([1921] 1972). The concept of PoV is transdisciplinary in nature and applies to all representational art forms as well as to non-artistic communicative practices (see Uspenskij [1970] 1973).

2 Exploring Point of View The term “point of view” is similar to the terms “perspective” (P) and “focalization” (F). Often, the three concepts are used synonymously. Nevertheless, some differences between them can be traced. P is usually understood as the subjective worldview of a character or narrator (if the latter is personified). In the framework of constructivist approaches to narrative, the term indicates the specifics of reader activity: the recipient inevitably transfers his ideas about the person and the human mind to the hero (builds his “perspective”), so that his existence is conceived as pseudo-real (Surkamp 2005, 424). However, classical narratology does not imply a strict distinction between P and PoV. In the vast majority of contexts, they are interchangeable (Niederhoff 2014b). This principle is also accepted in this article. The concept of focalization introduced by Gérard Genette ([1972] 1980, 185–198; [1983] 1988, 72–78) is a bit more complicated. The new term was intended to replace the overly metaphorical notion of PoV. Describing the structure of the narrative text, Genette proposes to distinguish two questions: “Who says?” and “Who sees?” He emphasizes that the subject of the story and the PoV are independent parameters of the narrative. In fact, Genette’s opinion looks quite novel compared to the findings of his predecessors. For example, Franz Stanzel formulated a theory of narrative situations ([1955] 1971). There are three such situations: the authorial narrative situation (dominance of the narrator’s viewpoint), the figural narrative situation (a story told https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-010

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from the hero’s viewpoint), and the first-person narrative situation (a story told by a personalized narrator). Apparently, in the third situation, as in the second, the narrator is able to convey the character’s P, but Stanzel ignores this possibility because he believes that the type of narrator and the “optics” of the narrative are related parameters. The same attitude is characteristic of the earlier typologies of Lubbock ([1921] 1972) and Norman Friedman ([1955] 1967). It should be added that the above remarks on Stanzel’s theory are consistent with Dorrit Cohn’s (1981) observation according to which a narrator of any type can tell a story from his or her own point of view (dissonant I-narration/authorial he-narration) or from the perspective of a hero (consonant I-narration/figural he-narration). Genette, based on his original thesis, identifies three main types of F: (1) zero F, (2) internal F, and (3) external F. In the first case, the narrator’s perspective is unlimited: he sees (knows) everything. In the second case, the narrator’s horizon is determined by the character’s field of view such that the narrative reality is available only from within his perception. Finally, in the third type, the narrator is significantly inferior to the hero in terms of information competence (“behavioral” manner of storytelling). The Genette Typology (GT) has caused mixed reactions among scholars and is still a subject of discussion. The fact is that it is based on at least two criteria (C1 and C2): (C1) all three types of F are differentiated by the narrator’s knowledge of the storyworld (he knows more/less than the hero, or knows as much as the hero); (C2) (1) and (3), on the one hand, and (2), on the other hand, have one more distinguishing feature, namely character’s/narrator’s P. This is probably why Gerald Prince’s dictionary contains two definitions of the term “focalization”: “the perspective in terms of which the narrated situations and events are presented; the perceptual or conceptual position in terms of which they are rendered” ([1987] 2003, 31). The same “bilateral” definition is formulated by Uri Margolin: “textual representation of specific (pre)existing sensory elements of the text’s story world as perceived and registered (recorded, represented, encoded, modeled and stored) by some mind or recording device which is a member of this world” (2009, 42). Narratologists, developing Genette’s ideas, put forward either the first or the second criterion as the only one. If C2 is preferred, GT is usually reduced to two components. For example, Shlomith Rimmon (1976) thinks that it makes sense to speak only about the narrative from within/from outside the depicted events; Mieke Bal ([1985] 1997) speaks about internal/external (combined with zero) F; Marjet Berendsen (1984) insists on rejection of the concept of zero F. Selecting С1 entails a distinction between F and so-called perspectivization. Tatjana Jesch and Malte Stein interpret F as follows: “author’s temporary or definitive withholding of information from the reader.” Perspectivization, in their view, is

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“the representation of something from the subjective view of a fictive entity (narrator or character)” (2009, 65). The authors argue that perspectivization and F are autonomous narrative techniques that can be used separately. Burkhard Niederhoff has a similar opinion. He notes that many narratologists studying the problem of F are engaged in the substitution of concepts, that is, “renaming” the phenomenon of PoV (P), while Genette has discovered a fundamentally new phenomenon which refers to the information (cognitive) aspect of narration. At the same time, Niederhoff believes that F cannot be identified with the acts of perception represented in the text: in the strict sense, F (“selection” of the narrated) is carried out by the narrator, regardless of whether the hero is a perceiving figure or not. That is why the term “focalizer” – the act of focalizing attributed to the hero and the narrator (Bal [1985] 1997, 144–149; Phelan 2001) or only to the hero (Chatman 1990; Prince 2001) – is superfluous. To talk about characters as focalizers is to confuse focalization and perception. Characters can see and hear, but they can hardly focalize a narrative of whose existence they are not aware. This leaves us with the narrator (or the author?) as the only focalizer, an inference whose interest is primarily scholastic. If all types of focalization can be attributed to one agent, this attribution does not provide us with any conceptual tools that we can use in distinguishing and analyzing texts. (Niederhoff 2014a)

In fact, Manfred Jahn expresses the same opinion. He distinguishes between (1) strict F (views originating from a determinate spatio-temporal position), (2) ambient F (story events and existents seen from more than one angle), (3) weak F (an object seen from an unspecific spatio-temporal position), and (4) zero F (an aperspectival view). Jahn understands F as a “window” onto the storyworld (it is intended for the reader-viewer) rather than a “focus” assigned to this or that subject (1999). At the same time, Niederhoff stresses that the terms “focalization” and “point of view” are complementary. The use of one or the other is motivated by specific research tasks: Point of view seems to be the more powerful metaphor when it comes to narratives that attempt to render the subjective experience of a character [. . .] Focalization is a more fitting term when one analyses selections of narrative information that are not designed to render the subjective experience of a character but to create other effects such as suspense, mystery, puzzlement, etc. (Niederhoff 2014a)

Jahn adopts a position that is even more of a compromise: “it would be more natural to differentiate between perspectival and filtering factors of focalization” (2005, 176). Narratologists who concentrate on F interpret the concept of PoV (P) somewhat indefinably, using it rather as an auxiliary tool (“background”) to explain the

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essence of F. However, the concept of PoV (P) is not located on the periphery of the categorical apparatus of narratology and has a very serious generalizing and heuristic potential. Niederhoff (2014b), following Susan Lanser (1981, 13), rightly notes that PoV is “a relation between a viewing subject and a viewed object. Narratologists have occasionally succumbed to the temptation of simplifying things by reducing the relation to one of the elements connected by it.” By shifting the emphasis toward the object, scholars are more likely to use the term “focalization,” but they prefer the term “point of view” (“perspective”) to draw attention to the subject. In our opinion, PoV (P) is a generic concept in relation to F and PoV (P) in a narrower sense (the point from which the storyworld is viewed). To paraphrase Jahn, we can say that it would be logical to distinguish between perspectival and filtering factors of PoV. Depending on the specifics of the material being studied, either one factor or another comes to the fore. This is also the thesis of Wolf Schmid. Schmid qualifies PoV as a mandatory (basic) component of the narrative which determines its “optics” (the ratio of “focuses”) and the selection of translated information about the storyworld. Choosing PoV is the initial phase of generating a narrative: a given object becomes a part of the story when it is in the field of vision of a subject. In other words, a narrative without PoV simply does not exist (Schmid [2003] 2010, 195). It should be added that narratologists who interpret the concept of PoV more narrowly do not agree with this statement. “If we think of the concept in spatio-visual terms,” lack of PoV is acceptable: “One can tell a story without a fixed viewpoint in the literal sense, just as one can paint a landscape without perspective.” In the same way, if we were talking about focalization “in terms of restriction of information, then Genette’s zero focalization, the equivalent of non-perspectival narrative, would appear to be a possibility” (Niederhoff 2014b). Schmid is guided by Boris Uspenskij’s theory outlined in A Poetics of Composition ([1970] 1973). Uspenskij distinguishes several planes of PoV: ideology, phraseology, space-time characteristics, psychology. The concept under consideration is regarded as a decomposable narrative “unit”: different planes are not necessarily synchronized within a single P (for example, a space-time plane may belong to the “horizon” of the hero, and a phraseology plane may belong to a narrator). The above theory contradicts (or “absorbs”) other narratological approaches in some respects. Thus, the time plane of PoV covers phenomena which, according to the tradition set by Genette, are considered in another dimension (beyond the category described): analepsis (a retrospective account of the events that occurred), prolepsis (a preliminary account of future events), summary (“récit sommaire”). As Diana Korobova notes, “Genette’s classification is about the relationship between story and narrative, and Uspenskij’s classification is about the interaction between the time of the narrator and the time of the character” (2007, 27). For example, the

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phrase “John didn’t know that Mary wouldn’t get his letter” refers to the temporal P of the narrator, who, unlike the hero, knows not only what has already happened, but also what has not happened yet from John’s P. In the light of the ideas put forward by Uspenskij, the notion of “hypothetical focalization” proposed by David Herman (1994) seems redundant. In Herman’s opinion, it is necessary to specifically study such cases where narrative reality is not described as one already seen by a narrator or a character, but as one which could be presented from one point of view or another. However, it follows from Uspenskij’s theory (in Schmid’s interpretation) that identification of a narrator (hero) as a direct/possible recipient is insignificant, because PoV is an initially abstract (i.e., in a sense already hypothetical) position, a certain set of acceptances (language “signals”) referring to some “observer” not necessarily present here and now. This is why Schmid says PoV is not the view of an existent “spectator” but “the complex [. . .] of conditions for the comprehension and representation of the happenings” ([2003] 2010, 99). For the same reason, he defines the phenomenon of figurally colored narration (FCN, the English equivalent of the Russian-language term nesobstvenno-avtorskoe povestvovanie; Koževnikova 1977; 1994, 206–248) – “the authentic narration of the narrator, which takes on unmarked evaluation and terms from the characters’ text in varying density.” It is significant that “figurally colored elements of the narrator’s discourse do not reflect the current internal situation of the figure in a given moment [. . .] before the explicit appearance of a reflector character, the narration is already colored, in his or her evaluations and terms” ([2003] 2010, 166–167). In Schmid’s opinion, PoV is directly related to the model of narrative constitution describing the process of generation of a narrative. This process involves four stages: happenings, story, narrative, and presentation of narrative. He says that “happenings correspond to the formalist fabula in Shklovsky’ sense, but not seen here as esthetically indifferent material, rather as the already esthetically relevant result of invention, the act that classical rhetoric called inventio or εὕρεσις” (Schmid [2003] 2010, 190–191). The second stage “corresponds to Tomaševskij’s fabula and Todorov’s histoire. In the terminology of classical rhetoric, the story is the result of disposition (dispositio, τάξις). It contains the selected elements in their ordo naturalis.” The narrative “is the result of composition, which places the elements in an ordo artificialis”; “the linearization of things occurring simultaneously in the story, forming a sequence of presentation [. . .] the reorganization of the segments of the story” (191). Finally, “the presentation of the narrative is formed by the phenotypic tier [. . .] In the terminology of rhetoric, it is the result of the elocutio or the λέξις. Its constitutive device in the case of literary narration is verbalization” (192). PoV is actualized at all stages of narrative generation. Schmid argues that the initial selection of events already suggests taking a position. This article will show the

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importance of P at the stage of organizing the fabula, using Čexov’s work as an the example. Even though the “parametric” concept of PoV has been widely used (Lintvelt 1981; Fowler 1982; Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002; Schmid [2003] 2010), it has been criticized. For example, the incompleteness and variability of the list of PoV planes as well as the vagueness of their delineation are qualified as its weaknesses (Niederhoff 2014b). This critique concerns, first of all, the plane of phraseology (language), which can be extremely difficult to separate from the other planes because it often does not have a precise meaning (it serves as a means of expressing ideology); according to some narrative theoreticians, it performs an indexical function by signaling only the actualization of a particular PoV. This article is focused on Uspenskij’s theory (as interpreted by Schmid) primarily because it covers a number of local phenomena that enable us to consider the problem of PoV from a distance. This is necessary in order to solve the task at hand: to identify major phases in the transformation of the category under study. It should be noted, however, that the planes of PoV will be set out not systematically but case by case, depending on the nature of the analyzed fragments. This article adopts Schmid’s typology of PoV. According to this typology, a narrator can tell a story in either of two ways: from his own P (narratorial PoV, NPoV) or from the P of one or more characters (figural PoV, FPoV; [2003] 2010, 105). It is here that the diachronic dimension of the category under consideration enters the picture as a result of the unstable and dynamic relations between NPoV and FPoV. No systematic study of PoV in the diachronic perspective has yet been undertaken. The works in which PoV is studied in historical (Weimann 1962) and socio-ideological (Lanser 1981) dimensions are of some interest. However, the authors of these works consistently refer the reader to one worldview system or another (Marxist or feminist) without analyzing the phenomenon of PoV as such. It seems important to consider PoV as a structure varying over time, the nature of which is not strictly conditioned by the cultural-historical context, evolution of public consciousness, and so on. Of course, these aspects cannot be completely ignored and will thus be regularly taken into account to explain certain particular facts. Selected works of Russian literature written over a period of more than two hundred years (from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present) will be analyzed. Over this period of time, Russian literature has undergone a number of fundamental shifts, and PoV as one of the organizing “links” of artistic narrative is their epicenter.

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3 Early Classical Period (First Half of the Nineteenth Century) The difference between NPoV and FPoV is imperceptible in narrative works of Russian literature of the pre-classical period: the narrator tells the story without identifying with a character: “all subject–object relations expressed in the text” converge “in one fixed focus” (Lotman 1988, 57). The distinction between NPoV and FPoV becomes relevant in the works of Aleksandr Puškin. In Eugene Onegin (1825–1833), the narrator openly expresses his opinion, makes value judgments concerning the heroes and their actions, and has knowledge of all the events and the most intimate thoughts and feelings of the characters. However, in a number of episodes the poet limits the story to the character’s horizons. For example, when Tat’jana scrutinizes Onegin’s study, the reader can follow her gaze: She looked: in the reception room forgotten, a cue reposed upon the billiard table; upon a rumpled sofa lay a riding crop. (trans. Vladimir Nabokov)

Commenting on Lenskij’s creative experiences, the narrator employs poetic language that was undoubtedly used by a young lyricist immersed in a romantic worldview: He sang parting and sadness, and a vague something, and the dim remoteness, and romantic roses. He sang those distant lands where long into the bosom of the stillness flowed his live tears. (trans. Vladimir Nabokov)

In “The Snow Storm” from The Tales of Belkin (1831), the alternation between NPoV and FPoV is determined by plot development. The tale opens with the words of a narrator who, “from afar,” describes the relations between the characters. At first, the lovers’ escape is perceived from Maša’s PoV. The girl leaves her parents’ home, and this event is depicted using grammatical devices referring to the moment of her direct experience (indication of directly experienced time; short, fragmentary syntactic constructions that convey the emotional state of the girl, the haste of her actions): Everything was ready. should leave forever her parents’ house, her room, and her peaceful girlish life [. . .] Her maid followed her with two bundles. They descended into the garden [. . .] With difficulty they reached the end of the garden. (here and hereafter, trans. T. Keane, slightly adapted)

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Then the narrator enters into his rights and takes us to another place. This is how the plot is created: if the narrator had stayed with Maša, we would have learned too much. It will be noted that PoV changes with the introduction of a metalepsis: “Having entrusted the young lady to the care of fate, and to the skill of Tereshka the coachman, we will return to our young lover.” Vladimir’s path is reproduced with words expressing uncertainty, indicating that what is happening is closed within the perception of the character: He had now been on the road for more than an hour. Jadrino could not be far off. [. . .] At last something dark appeared in the distance. Vladimir directed his course toward it. [. . .] It must now have been midnight. [. . .] He saw, not far off, a little village, consisting of four or five houses. (emphasis added)

As is the case generally, FPoV here is obviously not omnipresent. Even so, up to the very end of the exhausting road, the narrator does not come out from behind the character’s back, and in order for the plot to be maintained, FPoV remains constant: in the morning, when Vladimir goes to the church, Maša is not there, and it is not known why. Then the author switches to “a distant view,” making a temporary “leap forward” – a move possible only for an omniscient narrator: Maša meets with the Hussar colonel several years after the marriage failed. Here for the last time, Puškin’s narrative is “colored” by the perception of the character, as Burmin becomes a new reflector. The clue to the story is presented in Burmin’s speech, Burmin being Maša’s former admirer who tells the story of the past and acts as a secondary narrator. It is difficult to establish any stable relation between the two poles of PoV in Puškin’s works. In The Captain’s Daughter (1836), Puškin rarely marks the character’s PoV, compensating for the absence of FPoV with a first-person narrative that creates an effect of the identity of the narrator and the character while at the same time emphasizing that the story is told by an experienced man who has said goodbye to youthful illusions. However, The Shot (1831), which tells the story in an identical way, has a double perspective (Schmid [2003] 2010, 107–109). The possibility of alternating PoV found in Puškin points to an alternative in A Hero of Our Time (1838–1840) by Mixail Lermontov. Here, different NPoVs alternate with each other. Grigorij Pečorin is the central figure of the novel, and the transition from one narrative instance to another results in a closer look at the character. Maksim Maksimyč offers a first, somewhat naive look at Pečorin. Next, an anonymous narrator sees a mysterious young man and makes Pečorin’s portrait. Finally, “Pečorin’s Journal” reveals the smallest details of the spiritual life of the “superfluous man.” Gogol’s prose is dominated by NPoV. The narrator constantly passes from one point of observation to another, freely changing the scale of vision. The description of the hall in the governor’s house from the poem Dead Souls (1842) is indicative

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in this respect. The transition from one space-time zone to another is carried out within the limits of a short passage. Everything seemed suffused with light, and everywhere, flitting and flashing, were to be seen black coats – even as on a hot summer’s day flies revolve around a sugar loaf while the old housekeeper is cutting it into cubes before the open window [.  .  .] airy squadrons of flies, borne on the breeze, enter boldly, as though free of the house, and, taking advantage of the fact that the glare of the sunshine is troubling the old lady’s sight, disperse themselves over broken and unbroken fragments alike, even though the lethargy induced by the opulence of summer and the rich shower of dainties to be encountered at every step has induced them to enter less for the purpose of eating than for that of showing themselves in public, of parading up and down the sugar loaf, of rubbing both their hindquarters and their fore against one another, of cleaning their bodies under the wings, of extending their forelegs over their heads and grooming themselves, and of flying out of the window again to return with other predatory squadrons. (here and hereafter, trans. Charles Hogarth)

FPoV practically does not appear in the narrator’s discourse and at best becomes a guiding idea for him, helping to move between the elements of the storyworld. Following Čičikov, walking around the city, the narrator captures an extremely wide range of details, clearly exceeding the visual competence of the character, and provides them with his own assessments: edifices, “which, consisting, for the most part, of one or two storeys (added to the range of attics which provincial architects love so well”); “tables heaped with nuts, soap, and gingerbread (the latter but little distinguishable from the soap).” The writer plays with the conditionality of the FPoV in a very witty way, bringing to absurdity the need to “reckon” with it (in terms of time): The two friends exchanged hearty embraces, and Manilov then conducted his guest to the drawing-room. During the brief time that they are traversing the hall, the anteroom, and the dining-room, let me try to say something concerning the master of the house.

The rather unpredictable (varying from text to text) “competition” between NPoV and FPoV (with a clear advantage of the former) during the early classical period ends with their complementary combination in the Russian literature of the next period.

4 Late Classical Period (Second Half of the Nineteenth Century) The realist novel of the second half of the nineteenth century is organized by the figure of an omniscient narrator. Such a structure, it would seem, implies the domination of NPoV.

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Indeed, in Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev, landscapes are not usually marked by the character’s spatial position. The narrator does not imitate the characters’ speech, and his discourse is not tainted by their ideology. Moreover, he underscores his independence from the hero’s temporal experience, arbitrarily squeezing long periods of time into short summary explanations: “Half an hour later Bazarov and Arkady made their way together into the drawing room” (here and hereafter, trans. Richard Hare; emphasis added). At other points in Fathers and Sons, Turgenev highlights portrait details that are beyond the characters’ perception: Arkady took up the last number of a journal and began to read. The princess, as usual, first tried to express angry amazement by her facial expression, as though he were doing something indecent, then glared angrily at him, but he paid no attention to her. (emphasis added)

However, FPoV occasionally appears in the narrative and helps to show better the visual, tactile, olfactory, and auditory sensations of the characters: he felt that soft hair under the palms of his hands, and saw those innocent, slightly parted lips, through which pearly teeth gleamed with moist brilliance in the sunshine. (emphasis added) The lamp went on burning for a long time in her room while she still sat there motionless, only from time to time rubbing her hands which were bitten by the cold night air. (emphasis added) Pavel Petrovich was left alone and this time he looked round with special attention. The small, low room in which he found himself was very clean and cosy. It smelt of the freshly painted floor and of camomile flowers. (emphasis added) The light wheels rolled nearer and nearer; the snorting of the horses was already audible. . . (emphasis added)

The combination of two perspectives is a regular phenomenon in the Russian classical literature of the late period. Tolstoj’s narrator in War and Peace (1865–1869) has a maximum degree of omniscience. He covers the whole of the narrated world, from the battlefield to the facial expressions and gestures of the characters, and easily crosses the border of the inner being of the heroes, penetrating the feelings of Prince Andrej, Nataša Rostova, and Pierre. At the same time, some parts of the novel are not without FPoV. For example, the famous scene of the Council at Fili, a textbook case of “defamiliarization” in the novel, is associated with the perception of a little girl, turning the historical meeting into a fairytale story about the struggle between positive and negative heroes. The reader of Tolstoj’s novel is called upon to use this story as an interpretive pattern

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(that Kutuzov is right is obvious, because it is understandable even to a child who has no idea of the content of the dialogue between adults): In the middle of the conversation, she noticed a sly glance that Grandpa cast at Bennigsen, and after that, to her joy, noticed that Grandpa [i.e., Kutuzov] had said something to Long-skirts [i.e., Bennigsen] that took him aback [.  .  .]. (here and hereafter, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

The Battle of Borodino falls into the “focus” of Pierre Bezuxov and is presented as something completely new, seen for the first time: Pierre turned back to the first puff of smoke, which he had left as a round, compact ball, and in its place there were already balloons of smoke drawing to one side, and poof . . . (with a pause) poof-poof – another three, another four were born, [. . .] It seemed that these puffs of smoke now raced along, now stood still, and past them raced woods, fields, and gleaming bayonets.

The war “approaches” the reader, draws him into the chaos of forms, sounds, movements, imperceptible from afar. It begins to be evaluated from a different side. In Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fëdor Dostoevskij, the narrator expresses himself many times in such a way as to point to his external position in relation to the thing shown. It is from this perspective that the portrait of Raskolnikov is drawn: “He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair” (here and hereafter, trans. Constance Garnett). Often, the state of mind of the protagonist is recreated, even with extremely accuracy, but not from his internal perception: He had never experienced such a strange and awful sensation. And what was most agonizing – it was more a sensation than a conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most agonizing of all the sensations he had known in his life.

Sometimes the narrator is limited to listing the external manifestations of the character’s psyche: “Raskolnikov’s set and earnest face was suddenly transformed, and he suddenly went off into the same nervous laugh as before, as though utterly unable to restrain himself.” At the same time, the use of FPoV turns out to be an integral attribute of Crime and Punishment: the author is interested in the character as the subject of the act (crime). It is no coincidence that the character’s preparation for murder is depicted in free indirect discourse (FID): he glanced cautiously in to see whether, in Nastasya’s absence, the landlady herself was there, or if not, whether the door to her own room was closed, so that she might not peep out when he went in for the axe. [. . .] He turned away his eyes, and walked past as though he noticed nothing. But it was the end of everything; he had not the axe! He was overwhelmed.

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The murder scene creates the illusion of what is happening (FPoV): All at once he noticed a string on her neck; he tugged at it, but the string was strong and did not snap and besides, it was soaked with blood. He tried to pull it out from the front of the dress, but something held it and prevented its coming. He left the chest of drawers, and at once felt under the bedstead, knowing that old women usually keep boxes under their beds. And so it was; there was a good-sized box under the bed, at least a yard in length, with an arched lid covered with red leather and studded with steel nails.

It is noteworthy that the author also employs monologue (to represent thoughts and reflections by Raskol’nikov, Marmeladov, Svidrigajlov, etc). The voice of the hero becomes “audible,” making his PoV sound out in the narrator’s discourse. It is for this reason that Baxtin introduced the concept of polyphony. However, this term also covers all modes of representation of character consciousness (another, according to Baxtin), not just narration from FPoV. In the late classical period, PoV is employed as an aesthetically deliberate and systematically actualized component of discourse: NPoV orders and centralizes the storyworld, while FPoV gives a deeper perception of the hero and portrays the narrated events in a particular light.

5 Anton Čexov and Post-Realism (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century) Anton Čexov’s prose occupies a borderline position in the history of Russian literature, completing the era of classical realism and opening the way to modernist poetics. Čexov’s legacy can be explained in part by the fact that the writer rethought the possibilities of perspectivization in the literary text. Aleksandr Čudakov (1971) was the first to undertake a systematic study of this phenomenon, presenting the creative evolution of Čexov as a change and subsequent updating of three narrative paradigms: (1) subjective narration of 1880–1887 (dominance of NPoV), (2) the so-called objective manner of 1888–1894 (dominance of FPoV with the story “in the tone” and “spirit” of the characters), and (3) Čexov’s narratives of 1895–1904 (development and restructuring of the two previous types of narrative). Čudakov identifies a wide variety of techniques, extending from the distribution of FPoV among several heroes to new ways of expression of FPoV in narrative discourse. It should be noted that neither the objective manner of 1888–1894 nor the entire set of narrative techniques adopted by Čexov in the late period of his work explain

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the fundamental innovation of this writer in comparison with his predecessors. The essence of Čexov’s “revolution” is not a quantitative complication of the “bifocal” narrative system (high frequency and unprecedented prevalence of all possible variants of perspectivization) which had already developed in Russian literature during the second half of the century, but a qualitative change in the subordination of NPoV and FPoV in relation to the narrated events. The analysis of Čexov’s works presented below illustrates this thesis. In the framework of this article, it is not possible to consider in detail the interpretations of the debatable concept of an event. Therefore we use the most general definition: an event is a significant change in the storyworld, a “deviation from the normative regularity applying in a given narrative world and preserving the order of that world” (Schmid [2003] 2010, 8). In pre-Čexovian literature, NPoV, unlike FPoV, is the main tool for identifying narrated events. Of course, a diegetic narrator’s PoV (“The diegetic narrator appears on two levels:  in both the exegesis, the narration, and the diegesis, the narrated story”; Schmid [2003] 2010, 68) should also be considered unreliable in this regard. But, first of all, this quality is usually marked at a higher level of artistic communication between the author and the reader capable of evaluating the narrator’s words. This can be seen with the narrative in Gogol’s Diary of a Madman (1835), which is initially positioned as not quite reliable. Nevertheless, this is how the situation is viewed by the author (and subsequently by the reader), but not by the narrator and not by his ideal addressee. Second, even if the narrator is aware of the limits of his cognitive potential, the uncertainty of his PoV does not affect the events as such, but involves the referential connection of the story with the part of the storyworld which is thought to be real. In other words, “traditional” narrative does not surpass the elementary dichotomy of “did/did not” as to whether Bašmačkin’s ghost in The Overcoat (1842) really walks around St. Petersburg or this is just a rumor. In Čexov’s prose, the narrator does not completely trust his own eyes. This underscores the ambiguity of the events described. In “Terror” (1892), the popular story of treason becomes an existential puzzle because the narrator does not know how to interpret the events that occurred, or even whether they should be taken into consideration at all. At one point he enters into an illicit relationship with a friend’s wife, but he does not understand why: “Why have I done this?” I kept asking myself in bewilderment and despair. “Why has it turned out like this and not differently? To whom and for what was it necessary that she should love me in earnest?” (here and hereafter, trans. Constance Garnett)

Discrediting of the causal links that ensure the coherence of the story occurs at the level of fabula construction (selection and systematization of events). The end of the story brings into question the very possibility of fabula construction, since the

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situation of conflict has not resulted in anything: “I set off for Petersburg that day, and I have not seen Dmitri Petrovitch nor his wife since. I am told that they are still living together.” The narrator becomes like a character who is alarmed by his inability to comprehend what has happened to him. Marija Sergejevna’s husband confesses: “To-day I do something and to-morrow I do not understand why I did it.” Sometimes the event is uniquely recognizable only from FPoV. A student in “A Nervous Breakdown” (1889), when visiting a brothel with friends, suddenly realizes “that everything that is called human dignity, personal rights, the Divine image and semblance, were defiled to their very foundations.” Vasil’iev believes that prostitutes are oppressed because “they, like sheep, are stupid, indifferent, and they don’t understand,” and that those who use the services of women of easy virtue are sinners unaware of their sin. The student acts as a preacher: “And he began to dream how he would the next evening stand at the corner of the street and say to every passer-by: ‘Where are you going and what for? Have some fear of God!’” The character’s thoughts, transmitted by means of direct speech and FID, create something like a narrative “superstructure” over the narrator’s discourse: the hero does not interpret events as though they were happening in addition to the act of his perception, but creates his own story – the parable of moral transformation, implicitly expressed in “A Nervous Breakdown.” In other words, character provides the surrounding reality with eventful meaning. Such stories can contain almost any narrative: the hero dreams of something, makes predictions, and so on. In the end, his motives, which form some kind of “proto-story” or version of future events, should, at the very least, be hinted at by the narrator; otherwise the logic of the plot will be broken (Ryan 1986, 329; Palmer 2004, 183–193). However, it is very rare that characters’ “mental narratives” have the same degree of autonomy as can be found in Čexov’s prose. Except for Vasil’iev, no one finds anything wrong with prostitution. Moreover, it turns out that he is mentally ill and it is not the first time he has experienced a nervous breakdown. However, the narrator does not share the opinion of the carefree friends of the hero or the doctor, who considers the young man’s “discovery” a symptom. The narrator’s position is subtler: he does not know whether the student might be right. The outlook of the narrator and that of the hero diverge, and not merely in the interpretation (ethical assessment) of the event, but in its very statement: the event is perceptible only through the parable “lens” of FPoV, but not independently of NPoV. Moreover, it is not known which “optics” gives a more truthful “picture”: both the “blindness”/objectivity of the narrator and the excessive (pathological) impressions/enhanced “sight” of the character are at work here. In “The Student” (1894) the narrator does not have enough context to unambiguously testify to the narrated event. Ivan Velikopol’skij, under the influence of cold weather and without the most comfortable conditions of home life, succumbs to

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pessimism. After telling two widows the parable of Peter’s denial and seeing Vasilisa cry and how Luker’ja’s “expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain,” the student suddenly realizes “that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day.” The whole story is a narrative from Ivan’s PoV. Both the emotional decline and spiritual elevation of the character occur within his horizons. To comprehend Ivan’s discovery and see whether it is simply the impulsive, meaningless reaction of the young man, it is necessary to hear the narrator’s voice and find out what will happen to the hero afterward. For this, the context of his future is required. However, NPoV does not give us access to this information. It is only at the end that the narrator, who looks out from the shadow of the hero’s perception for a brief instant, hints at the uncertainty of the hero’s future life: and the feeling of youth, health, vigor – he was only twenty-two – and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning. (emphasis added)

And again, the narrator, unlike the hero, remains unsure about the significance of the changes in his world: any fact may or may not turn out to be an event once the character has chosen one of the possible continuations of his life. However, we are informed about none of these paths. Čexov does not omit the events but narrows down the NPoV. (Puškin’s narrator in “The Snow Storm,” by contrast, knows what happened in the church, but he does not specifically report it.) The interaction between NPoV and FPoV in the prose of Čexov is not only realized in almost all acknowledged forms, thus becoming a distinctive feature of his prose, but also serves to problematize the eventfulness of the literary text: “Čexov’s narrative [.  .  .] demonstrates the impossibility of objectively qualifying an event outside the refractive lens of narrative” (Tjupa [2010] 2018, 135). It should be added that there are two such “lenses”: a narrator and a character are equivalent participants in the storytelling. Čexov’s rethinking of eventfulness in the light of the phenomenon of point of view can rightfully be considered as unique in the history of Russian literature and has no equivalent analogues either in the late classical period or in the artistic experiments of the following century. Nevertheless, at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Čexov’s interweaving of NPoV and FPoV with a pronounced predominance of the latter was confirmed. More and more attention was paid to the “subjectivity of the character” (Koževnikova 1994, 10). Ivan Bunin’s prose, which is one of the quintessential examples of the use of impressionist techniques in Russian literature (Usenko 1988; Zaxarova 2012), illus-

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trates this thesis well. This writer is interested not only in the psychology of his characters in general (the external details of the characters’ lives are not detailed and therefore do not frame the image of his inner world), but also in its specific implementations here and now (moments of experience), observed not from a distance, but reproduced from the perception inside of the hero. It should be noted that this technique is typical of modernist prose. In “Exodus” (1918) the hero is “reincarnated” into Bestuzhev, who is watching the deceased prince with bewilderment: ✶ He kept trying to understand something, to collect thoughts, to be horrified. But there was no horror. He was only surprised, unable to comprehend, unable to grasp what had happened . . . Has everything been resolved, and can we now speak as freely in this bedroom as Natasha says? However, Bestuzhev thought that she had been talking about the prince with the same freedom for the last month.

The FPoV, although it provides the reader with superficial information about some dramatic story with the participation of the hero, is not directly related to anything about his biography, character, or personal qualities that might be known to the reader from the very beginning. (Dostoevskij, by contrast, reports on the social status of Raskolnikov, his family, and the peculiarities of his worldview, and the character’s perspective is actualized against this backdrop.) At the same time, writers at the turn from the nineteenth to twentieth century did not forget the traditional model of narration with the dominance of NPoV, adapting it rather to new aesthetic tasks. Such is the novel The Little Demon (1905) by the symbolist Fëdor Sologub. The narrator penetrates effortlessly into the consciousness of the characters, periodically comments on their behavior, and makes sharp moral assessments. However, the recognizable ways of narration are not used so much for the exhaustive reflection of reality as they are for emphasizing new, unrealistic imagery.

6 Literature of the Twentieth Century and Post-Soviet Prose In the twentieth century, the opposition between NPoV and FPoV did not undergo any fundamental transformations. At the same time, its functional properties changed due to both internal (literary) and external (sociocultural) factors, and the very immutability of the demarcation of the narrative “lens” was reassessed. In fact, ornamental prose (Andrej Belyj, Evgenij Zamjatin, Boris Pil’njak, Aleksej Remizov, etc.), which became one of the most important artistic discoveries

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of Russian modernism, did away with the problem of contrasting two narrative “lenses,” and the role of perspective was reduced. The ornamental text is characterized by “aperspectivism” (Schmid [2003] 2010, 124) and a poetic goal in itself with the focus on word and speech as such. The narrative experiments of the post-revolutionary era paradoxically coincide with the formation of an “authoritarian style” (Belaja 2000) that became the basis of socialist realism. Works written in this style are characterized by third-person narration with the prevalence of NPoV as well as by “using the technique of combining the narrator’s and character’s aspects to the extent necessary to reveal the psychology of characters” (Galimova 2002, 67). If FPoV is marked by the author, ideologically it turns out to be the same as NPoV. Sufficiently strict adherence to these requirements is observed in Iron Steam (1924) by Aleksandr Serafimovič, Čapaev (1923) by Dmitrij Furmanov, and The Rout (1926) by Aleksandr Fadeev. With the proclamation of socialist realism as the only acceptable artistic method, narrative was enshrined in the name of an omniscient narrator whose immutable view excludes any manifestation of the hero’s subjectivity, denounced as vulgar pseudo-imitation typical of traditional Tolstojan narration. Against the backdrop of “exemplary” works such as Cement (1925) by Fёdor Gladkov, How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) by Nikolaj Ostrovskij, and many others, the creative achievements of writers belonging to the various literary currents from the 1930s to the 1950s stand out vividly (literature authorized to be published in the USSR, underground literature, works of emigrants published abroad). Thus, the novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1928–1940) by Mixail Šoloxov involves personally colored forms of representation of events, but FPoV is vague. It is not assigned to a specific hero or group of characters, presenting the storyworld to the reader from a particular perspective, and for this reason FPoV tends to be assimilated into NPoV. The voice of Šoloxov’s narrator is “the voice of a man living the same life as his heroes, reflecting on their difficult destinies, sympathizing with them” (Jakimenko 1982, 504). The italicized sentence below lies at the intersection of narrative perspectives: And for some reason in this short moment, when Aksin’ja looked through her tears at the flower and inhaled its sad smell, she remembered her youth and all her long and joyful life. Well, it seems that Aksin’ja has become old . . . Will a woman cry because of the accidental memories of her heart? (emphasis added) ✶

“Inseparability” (Baxtin 1975, 34) of NPoV and FPoV is traced in Čevengur (written 1926–1928, published 1972) and The Foundation Pit (written 1930, published 1968) by Andrej Platonov. Socialist realist texts, as noted above, are characterized either by a one-dimensional (ideological) identification of the narrator’s and hero’s perspectives or by an inseparable hegemony of NPoV. Platonov, distinguishing between two

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narrative focuses, assimilates them to each other as much as possible. The voices of the narrator and of the character have “an undoubted tendency to merge, to sound in unison. In Platonov’s works, the simultaneity of their sound became a distinctive feature of the writer’s style” (Belaja 1977, 211). The “unsanctioned” storytelling tactics of Russian literature during the Soviet era also include combinations of different types of focalization within a single text and the strengthening of FPoV in the structure of the narrative. Examples of this practice can be found in The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936) by Maksim Gor’kij, The Luzhin Defence (1930) by Vladimir Nabokov, The Master and Margarita (written 1928–1940, published 1966–1968) by Mixail Bulgakov, and Doctor Zhivago (written 1945–1955, published 1957) by Boris Pasternak. The cultural “Thaw” had a significant impact on public awareness, which was naturally expressed in a critical rethinking of the rules of literary creativity. The non-diegetic “impersonal” narrative is freed from socialist realist tropes, regaining its true form. This is the case with Life and Fate (written 1950–1959, published 1980) by Vasilij Grossman. First-person narration (works by Vladimir Vojnovič, Jurij Dombrovskij, Dmitrij Sergeev, and many others) spread in an unprecedented way. The narrator no longer pretends to have absolute control over all aspects of the storyworld and thus to be in possession of indisputable truth. At the same time, the confessional tonality of narrative dissimulates the traditional way of depicting events in NPoV. In the 1970s and 1980s, such practices were preserved and reflected in the texts of Viktor Astaf’jev, Sergej Dovlatov, and Ėduard Limonov. In the literature of the years described, FCN (Schmid [2003] 2010, 166–168), in which FPoV is presented everywhere, is no less important. Works by Vasilij Šukšin, Fёdor Abramov, and Vera Panova (cf. Holthusen 1968; Koževnikova 1977; Schmid 1968, 79–84) can be characterized in this way, a form inherited from the prose of Šoloxov, Platonov, and Bulgakov (and through them from Čexov’s late prose). In Aleksandr Solženicyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (written 1959, published 1962), the character seems to “take over the narrative” (Čudakova 1988, 243), and the narrator’s voice “approaches as closely as possible the evaluative and linguistic horizons of the protagonist” (Schmid [2003] 2010, 168): Shukhov was smart enough to hide from The Tartar around a corner of the barracks – the guard would stick to him if he caught him again. Anyway, you should never be conspicuous. The main thing was never to be seen by a campguard on your own, only in a group. Who knows whether the guy wasn’t looking for someone to saddle with a job, or wouldn’t jump on a man just for spite? Hadn’t they been around the barracks and read them that new regulation? You had to take off your hat to a guard five paces before passing him, and replace it two paces after. There were guards who slopped past as if blind, not caring a damn, but for others the new rule was a godsend. How many prisoners had been thrown in the guardhouse because of that hat business? (trans. Ralph Parker)

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In general, FPoV is a significant constructive feature of many texts of the last third of the twentieth century such as The Exchange (1969) by Jurij Trifonov, The Picture (1980) by Daniil Granin, and Farewell to Matyora (1976) by Valentin Rasputin. Postmodernist writers problematize the relationship between NPoV and FPoV. In Puškin House (1978), Andrej Bitov explicates the conventionality of storytelling tools, both rejected and accepted (the latter are still thought of as a result of artificial choice, as a technique). In the author’s opinion, an omniscient narrator is a highly questionable figure. However, he has alternatives: The first-person narrative is least reproachable in this regard – we have no doubt that the “I” could have seen what it describes. Nor is any particular suspicion aroused by a scene that is worked out through one of the heroes  – in the third person, but solely by the process of his seeing, feeling, comprehending. (here and hereinafter trans. Susan Brownsberger; emphasis in original)

At the end of the novel, when the hero comes to life after his fictional death, the distance between the “author” (narrator) and the character disappears. As a result, no story is possible except through “endless waiting while the hero lives long enough for this span of time to turn into the past, so that it can be reported with the speed of coherent narration.” The mixing of points of view of the diegetic narrator and the character with whom he is identified in the final episode of Moscow to the End of the Line (1970) by Venedikt Erofeev is no less controversial. The relativity and instability of the distinction between NPoV and FPoV are postulated in A School for Fools (1976) by Saša Sokolov. The chapter “NOW: Stories Written on the Veranda” consists of twelve independent miniatures which represent both first- and third-person narratives of all possible varieties (FID, FCN, narrative with predominance of NPoV). In Russian prose fiction of the post-Soviet period, the variability and entangled interaction between NPoV and FPoV has become the subject of a complex aesthetic game with the reader which is intended not so much to see the world depicted and created through a new narrative language as it is to decode this language itself. In The Capture of Ishmael (2000) by Mixail Šiškin, the hero’s speech and the narrator’s speech line up in a chain of loosely connected syntactic and lexical units, producing a kaleidoscopic effect. Multiple switching of PoV is also presented in the works of Ljudmila Petruševskaja, Tat’jana Tolstaja, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Makanin, and many others. However, modern literature is not alien to more traditional narrative strategies. For example, Sanka (2006) by Zaxar Prilepin and The Aviator (2016) by Evgenij Vodolazkin are characterized by the complementarity of NPoV and FPoV, a practice that harks back to the traditional principles of the narrative art.

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7 Conclusion As the analysis of the works of Russian literature shows, the diachronic measurement of the PoV category includes several phases characterized by a certain ratio of NPoV and FPoV: (1) NPoV prevails in the text; FPoV is encountered irregularly and serves to solve specific artistic problems (Gogol, Puškin). (2) NPoV and FPoV are present in relatively equal proportions (they switch back and forth), but the former remains the unconditional identifier of the event, framing the storyworld (Turgenev, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij). (3) FPoV dominates, and the role of NPoV in the selection and distribution of events and the construction of the story is significantly reduced (Čexov, Bunin). (4) NPoV and FPoV are synchronized fully, partially, or according to most parameters, i.e., they cover the narrated events simultaneously in some or all planes (Platonov, Šoloxov). Each of the listed “formations,” once emerged, is reproduced later, as a result of which different ratios of NPoV and FPoV are adjacent to one another at the same historical stage. For example, phases 1 and 2 were actualized in the works of writers of the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and in the literature of socialist realism; phase 3 was realized in the literature of the “Thaw” era (Grossman, Vojnovič, Dombrovskij), in modern novels (Prilepin, Volodolazkin); and phase 4 found itself in the prose of the twenty-first century (Tolstaja, Ulickaja). A special role is played by the literature of postmodernism (Erofeev, Bitov, Šiškin), in which the very distinction between NPoV and FPoV is problematized and becomes the object of artistic reflection. Finally, a few topics for further research can be envisaged. It would be interesting to see how the planes of PoV (spatial, ideological, temporal, etc.) are realized at different stages of formation of the literary narrative. New results can be obtained within the framework of another methodological paradigm that involves a distinction between F and PoV. The most important question here would be to see how these narrative tools historically relate to the various possibilities of storytelling. Finally, a comparative study (for example, on the material of several European literatures) would confirm or deny the universality of the regularities identified.

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References Bal, Mieke. (1985) 1997. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Baxtin, Mixail. 1975. Voprosy literatury i ėstetiki. Moskva: Xudožestvennaja literatura. Belaja, Galina. 1977. Zakonomernosti stilevogo razvitija sovetskoj literatury dvadcatyx godov. Moskva: Nauka. Belaja, Galina. 2000. “Stilevoj regress: O stilevoj situacii v literature socrealizma.” In Socrealističeskij kanon, 556–568. Sankt-Peterburg: Akademičeskij proekt. Berendsen, Marjet. 1984. “The Teller and the Observer: Narration and Focalization in Narrative Text.” Style 1:140–158. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. “A New Point of View on ‘Point of View.’” In Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, 139–160. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1981. “The Encirclement of Narrative.” Poetics Today 2, no. 2, 157–182. Čudakov, Aleksandr. 1971. Poėtika Čexova. Moskva: Nauka. Čudakova, Mariėtta. 1988. “Bez gneva i pristrastija: Smena literaturnyx ciklov.” Novyj mir 9:240–260. Fowler, Roger. 1982. “How to See through Language: Perspective in Fiction.” Poetics 11:213–35. Friedman, Norman. (1955) 1967. “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept.” In The Theory of the Novel, edited by Philip Stevick, 108–137. New York: Free Press. Galimova, Elena. 2002. Poėtika povestvovanija russkoj prozy XX veka (1917–1985): Učeb. posobie. Arxangel’sk: Pomorskij gosudarstvennyj universitet im. M. V. Lomonosova. Genette, Gérard. (1972) 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell. Genette, Gérard. (1983) 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Herman, David. 1994. “Hypothetical Focalization.” Narrative 2:230–253. Holthusen, Johannes. 1968. “Stilistik des ‘uneigentlichen’ Erzählens in der sowjetischen Gegenwartsliteratur.” Die Welt der Slaven 13:225–245. Jahn, Manfred. 1999. “The Mechanics of Focalization: Extending the Narratological Toolbox.” GRAAT 21:85–110. Jahn, Manfred. 2005. “Focalization.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 173–177. London: Routledge. Jakimenko, Lev. 1982. Izbrannye raboty. V 2 tomax. T. 2. Tvorčestvo Šoloxova. Moskva: Xudožestvennaja literatura. Jesch, Tatjana, and Malte Stein. 2009. “Perspectivization and Focalization: Two Concepts – One Meaning? An Attempt at Conceptual Differentiation.” In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, edited by Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 59–78. Berlin: De Gruyter. Korobova, Diana. 2007. “Točka zrenija.” Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta: Serija 9; Filologija 4-2, 24–31. Koževnikova, Natal’ja. 1977. “O sootnošenii reči avtora i personaža.” In Jazykovye processy sovremennoj russkoj xudožestvennoj literatury: Proza, 7–98. Moskva: Nauka. Koževnikova, Natal’ja. 1994. Tipy povestvovanija v russkoj literature XIX–XX vv. Moskva: Institut russkogo jazyka. Lanser, Susan S. S. 1981. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lintvelt, Jaap. 1981. Essai de typologie narrative: Le “point de vue”; Théorie et analyse. Paris: Corti.

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Lotman, Jurij. 1988. V škole poėtičeskogo slova: Puškin, Lermontov, Gogol’; Kiga dlja Učitelja. Moskva: Prosveščenie. Lubbock, Percy. (1921) 1972. The Craft of Fiction. London: Cape. Margolin, Uri. 2009. “Focalization: Where Do We Go from Here?” In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, edited by Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 41–58. Berlin: De Gruyter. Niederhoff, Burkhard. 2014a. “Focalization.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1, 197–205. 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter. https:// www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/18.html (accessed 20 August 2019). Niederhoff, Burkhard. 2014b. “Perspective – Point of View.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 2, 692–705. 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/26.html (accessed 20 August 2019). Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Phelan, James. 2001. “Why Narrators Can Be Focalizers – and Why It Matters.” In New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, edited by Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman, 51–64. Albany: State University of New York Press. Prince, Gerald. 2001. “A Point of View on Point of View; or, Refocusing Focalization.” In New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, edited by Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman, 43–50. Albany: State University of New York Press. Prince, Gerald. (1987) 2003. “Focalization.” In Dictionary of Narratology, 31–32. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rimmon [Rimmon-Kenan], Shlomith. 1976. “A Comprehensive Theory of Narrative: Genette’s Figures IIΙ and the Structuralist Study of Fiction.” Poetics and Theory of Literature 1:33–62. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. [1983] 2002. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed. London: Routedge. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1986. “Embedded Narratives and Tellability.” Style 20, 319–340. Schmid, Wolf. 1968. “Zur Erzähltechnik und Bewußtseinsdarstellung in Dostoevskijs ‘Večnyj muž.’” Die Welt der Slaven 13:294–306. Schmid, Wolf. (2003) 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin: De Gruyter. Stanzel, Franz K. (1955) 1971. Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby-Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses. Translated by James P. Pusack. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Surkamp, Carola. 2005. “Perspective.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 423–425. London: Routledge. Tamarčenko, Natan. 2008. “Točka zrenija.” In Poėtika: Slovar’ aktual’nyx terminov i ponjatij, edited by Natan Tamarčenko, 266–267. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Kulaginoj; Intrada. Tjupa, Valerij. (2010) 2018. Diskursnye formacii: Očerki po komparativnoj ritorike. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Jurajt. Usenko, Leonid. 1988. Impressionizm v russkoj proze načala XX veka. Rostov-na-Donu: Izdatel’stvo Rostovskogo universiteta. Uspensky [Uspenskij], B. A. (1970) 1973. A Poetics of Composition: The Strucutre of the Artistic Text and a Typology of Compositional Form. Translated by Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weimann, Robert. 1962. “Erzählerstandpunkt und Point of View: Zu Geschichte und Ästhetik der Perspektive im englischen Roman.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 10:369–416. Zaxarova, Viktorija. 2012. Impressionizm v russkoj proze Serebrianogo veka: Monografija. Nižnij Novgorod: NGPU, 2012.

Ruth Scodel

Representing Mental States in Ancient Greek Narrative 1 Definitions In comparison with the modern novel, ancient Greek narrative appears limited in its techniques for representing consciousness and exploring both the minds of individuals and how individuals understand the minds of others. “Mental states” encompass beliefs, feelings, and intentions. They also include an individual’s orientation to the external world, such as whether individuals see or hear what is happening around them. Ancient Greek narrative, from the Homeric epics, the oldest surviving texts, to the prose narrative of the third century CE, is constantly concerned with the minds of characters and with their inferences about other minds, although some critics have argued that there is little interest in interiority in Greek literature (Grethlein 2015; see in response Fludernik 2015; Palmer 2015; Ryan 2015). At all periods, however, it concerns itself mostly with a relatively basic folk psychology and a few tools of representation. Most of its techniques do not develop diachronically, although they differ across genres; the Homeric epics, composed around 700 BCE, remained a template for many features of Greek narrative throughout antiquity. This discussion will address four aspects of the Greek narrative representation of mental states: (1) narrative indicators, (2) Theory of Mind (i.e., representations of the beliefs individuals have about the mental states of others), (3) entanglement of external narrator and character, and (4) interior monologue. (1) Narrative indicators are explicit comments about a character’s mental state, such as “he was angry” or “she believed.” Such statements, whether made by an omniscient heterodiegetic narrator, a heterodiegetic narrator who has inferred the relevant mental state, an omniscient homodiegetic narrator (a divine character), or a limited homodiegetic narrator, are the simplest way Greek narratives provide information about mental states; they are usually brief and are frequent in all periods and genres. (2) Theory of Mind sequences depict characters as they make inferences about the mental states of other characters. These may appear within interior monologue, but are most common in dialogue. They often appear as narrative indicators, where an external narrator reports what one character believes about the mental state of another as a motive for the first character’s actions. Theory of Mind sequences offer information about both the speaker and the character whose mental state is inferred, and they appear in all periods and genres of Greek narrahttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-011

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tive. (3) Entanglement of external character and narrator is the transfer of information or affect from narrator to character or from character to narrator, so that it is impossible entirely to distinguish them. Homeric narrative sometimes presents a blurred focalization that enables the narrator to convey a character’s mental state vividly without being confined to it. (4) Interior monologues are reports in direct speech of a character’s thoughts. These are available only to omniscient narrators, and although in theory a divinity within a narrative could offer an extended quotation from a character’s mind, in practice this is never found. The interior monologue is one of the few aspects of Greek narrative to develop diachronically. Ancient Greek narratives are often very much about the mental states of characters. Whether it is ever appropriate for a modern reader to attribute unconscious motives or desires to a character in a Greek text is debatable (in support of the unconscious in early Greek, Currie 2016, 136–137). Greek narratives, however, at least sometimes imply complex mental states in literary characters. As early as the Iliad (ca. 720 BCE), Zeus says that he “gave” Hera the destruction of Troy “willingly, but with an unwilling heart” (4.43). Ancient Greek authors of all periods and genres use free indirect style or engage in psychonarration (Cohn 1978, 14) only rarely and briefly. Greek authors do not typically represent thoughts that characters try to push from their consciousness, although some modern readers have wondered whether in the Odyssey Penelope recognizes Odysseus without being fully conscious of it (Amory 1963). In most Greek narrative of all periods, speech is the most important technique for representing mental states, and all others are supplements.

2 The Techniques 2.1 Narrative Indicators Early Greek narrative relies frequently on giving an indicator of a speaker’s emotional state or hidden intention before direct speech. In Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BCE), Prometheus addresses Zeus “with a sweet smile, but he did not forget his crafty skill” (547), so that the audience is alerted not to believe what he says. Deceptive speech is consistently marked as such, and heterodiegetic narrators, though they often leave much about a character’s motivations or feelings in doubt, typically provide guidelines for the audience’s inferences. Narrators may supply a quick summary of a character’s emotion even when it is obvious, as when Demeter refuses a demand from Zeus because she is angry (Homeric Hymn to Demeter 330, perhaps late seventh century BCE), or Hera is said to be angry in a speech that pours out her resentment over how her husband has treated her (Homeric Hymn to Apollo

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331, sixth century BCE ). Such abbreviated indicators moments also appear without speech. Evadne in Pindar’s Olympian 4.4 (460 or 456 BCE), having given birth, abandons the baby, “distressed.” Also frequent throughout the history of Greek narrative are descriptions of physical manifestations of intense emotion, whether the gestures of Homer’s Andromache after her husband’s death (Il. 22.462–476), which are followed by a lament, or the near-collapse of the protagonists when they see each other in the second-century CE erotic novel Daphnis and Chloe (3.7.3). Greek historians and orators, although they claim that their narratives are true, use some of the techniques that we often see as markers of fiction (cf. Cohn 2000). Because they assume a limited set of posible human motives – primarily self-interest and desire for power or glory modified by a few emotions (such as fear, anger, and pity), they can attribute motives. Herodotus in the fifth century BCE provides the reasoning of characters from remote legend: Alexander the son of Priam, having heard this [earlier abductions], wanted to get a wife from Greece by abducting her, knowing absolutely that he would pay no penalty for the abduction, for those earlier men did not. (1.3.1)

He is, of course, wrong, causing the Trojan War; Herodotus creates a distance between the “knowledge” of Alexander and that of later Greeks. His younger contemporary Thucydides (writing between 431 and not long after 405 BCE), in contrast, who emphatically stresses his meticulous efforts to verify what. he has learned from his sources, nonetheless does not hesitate to attribute concealed motives to historical individuals: Harmodius was splendid in the perfection of youth, and Aristogeiton, a citizen, a man. of middle rank, was his lover and possessed him. Harmodius, having been sexually approached by Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, and not persuaded, reported it to Aristogeiton. He, extremely distressed in his erotic passion, and in fear that the power of Hipparchus might take Harmodius by force, immediately began a conspiracy, to the extent of his influence, to overthrow the tyranny. (6.54)

As the narrative proceeds, Hipparchus does not attempt force, but after a second attempt is again rejected, he invites the sister of Harmodius to serve as basket-carrier in a procession (a significant honor), and then rejects her and says that she was not asked because she was unworthy: this is a public attack on her chastity and could render her unmarriageable. “Harmodius found this unendurable, and because of him Aristogeiton was even more spurred to action” (6.56.2). The motive for the conspiracy apparently shifts from fear to revenge. This assassination took place a century before Thucydides, and the historian cannot have had evidence for the emotions and motives of the conspirators. The narrative rests on a chain of invisible inferences. Thucydides surely assumes, for example, that because tradition

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makes Aristogeiton the lover and Harmodius the beloved, Harmodius would have been young, not yet an adult citizen, and therefore Aristogeiton must have taken the lead in the plan. Hipparchus was the younger brother of the actual tyrant, Hippias, and the conspiracy plans the overthrow of the tyranny because Hipparchus had too much for any ordinary social pressure to control him, and it would be impossible to kill him and escape death unless the tyranny was overthrown. The insult to the sister of Harmodius must have been a version Thucydides found most probable among various accounts offered in Athenian tradition, and it almost required that he change the motive from fear to revenge. The stereotypes about how lovers feel and behave are implicit in Thucydides, but stereotypes may be explicit. Polybius in the second century BCE tells how a man named Abilyx, “observing the situation and thinking that the hopes of the Romans were more splendid,” successfully schemed to deliver a group of Carthaginian hostages to the Romans, “an Iberian and barbarian calculation” (3.98). Andocides, in his forensic speech On the Mysteries 37–42 (400 BCE), tells a story about how Diocleides claimed that he had gotten up too early to go to Laurium, outside Athens, and witnessed men gathering at the theater. When he came back to the city, he heard that the statues of Hermes had been vandalized and a generous reward offered for information. He then made an agreement with some of the conspirators to receive twice the amount of the reward the following month, but when they did not pay as promised, he informed on them, giving forty-two names. Within the narrative of Diocleides, the narrator shows himself a blackmailer and willing to support a coup d’état, and we must infer that he would do this in order to provide a motive for waiting to inform instead of doing so immediately. Andocides, however, offers no alternative reason why Diocleides delayed, and offers no reasons why Diocleides chose to name the particular men he denounced. His audience must infer that Diocleides chose to inform only when it seemed clear that the government was so panicked that he would not be subjected to rigorous examination. The narrative is typically Greek in its assumption that motives often require little explanation once a character’s circumstances are known, because their actions allow motives to be inferred.

2.2 Theory of Mind While Greek is not remotely so sophisticated in its representations of characters who infer the mental acts of other characters as the novel, it certainly represents both skill and failure at mind reading. Alcinous realizes that his daughter is too embarrassed to talk about her marriage (Od. 6.67). Hector makes completely false inferences from the fighting of Patroclus (Il. 16.830–843). In the Iliad, Agamemnon sends

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ambassadors, accompanied by two heralds, with the mission of persuading Achilles to end the expression of his anger at Agamemnon, his withdrawal from the battlefield, by offering him gifts. The three ambassadors are Ajax, Odysseus, and Phoenix, an elderly member of Achilles’s own contingent. Phoenix has not appeared at all before Nestor suddenly proposes him to “lead” the ambassadors (9.168), and it is not clarified in what this leadership consists. Nestor, who has suggested the embassy, gives the most instructions to Odysseus (9.180), which seems to imply that Odysseus is the real leader. Diplomacy is central to his characterization both in the Iliad itself and in Greek literature generally; Phoenix is probably included as “leader” to ensure that Achilles will not react with so much hostility that the embassy will fail before anyone can speak (if so, the employment of Phoenix allows the audience to infer that Nestor believes that Achilles is likely to behave impulsively and aggressively). Indeed, although sending a delegation in such a situation may be a conventional move, we are not told anything about Nestor’s thinking and why he does not suggest that Agamemnon visit Achilles himself. Achilles, however, greets the ambassadors cordially, calling them his best friends, despite his anger (9.197–198), and serves a meal. Then “Ajax nodded to Phoenix, and Odysseus noticed, and he filled a cup of wine and toasted Achilles.” The narrator does not tell the audience what Odysseus is thinking, or how he interprets the nod. It is not hard to infer that Ajax is signalling to Phoenix to speak first, or that Odysseus believes that he should be the first speaker. Yet there is much here that is obscure. We do not learn whether Phoenix saw the signal and was about to respond, and we are given no information about the reasoning of Odysseus. His speech antagonizes Achlles, whose furious anger – he announces that he will leave Troy and sail home in the morning – is gradually moderated first by a speech from Phoenix, followed by one from Ajax. We may speculate that Odysseus has misinterpreted the courteous reception that the ambassadors have received as an indication that Achilles is ready to receive an offer favorably (the presence of the heralds makes it obvious that this is not a social call), but we can only speculate. It is also possible that Achilles would have received favorably an offer that was more truly apologetic, and that it is the nature of the speech of Odysseus that offends him. Yet we can also not easily imagine how he would have responded had Agamemnon come himself. After the furious response of Achilles, the ambassadors are silent, and then Phoenix speaks, “bursting into tears, for he was very fearful for the ships of the Achaeans” (9.433). Again, when old Priam appears suddenly in the shelter of Achilles, Achilles is astonished, but the two men who have been serving him are also astonished, “and they looked at one another” (24.483–484): the narrator does not explain what this look signifies (we know, as they do not, that Achilles has accepted a divine command to ransom Hector’s body, though the gods have not prepared him for the king of

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Troy to appear before him out of nowhere). The audience must try to guess what they are thinking, and the likeliest guess is that they are unsure how Achilles will react. This gesture, throughout Greek literature, marks moments at which individuals either constitute a social mind or the unified group breaks at a moment of panic (e.g., Isocrates 3.18.4; Apollonius of Rhodes 3.503–504; and in the first century BCE, Dionysius of Halicarnassus Rom. Ant. 2.291; in the first–second century CE, Plutarch, Comparison of Dio and Caesar 5.30). Similarly, in the Odyssey, Penelope, prompted by the goddess Athena, leaves her rooms to address the suitors. She says that Odysseus told her when he left for Troy that if he did not return she should remarry when Telemachus had a beard, and she rebukes them for not bringing her gifts. The disguised Odysseus, watching, is pleased, because she “was enchanting their minds with sweet words, but her intelligence had other plans” (Od. 18.282–283). Odysseus knows that Penelope is tricking the suitors, but the narrator does not explain how he knows. Other examples are easier. When the heralds first arrive at the shelter of Achilles to remove Briseis, the narrator says: he did not rejoice when he saw them. They, fearing and respecting the chief, stood and did not address him or ask a question. But he recognized in his mind and said “Greetings, heralds, messengers of Zeus and men.” (Il. 1.330–333)

Because the narrator has already said that Achilles “did not rejoice,” which implies that he immediately knew why they had come, we can easily supplement the object of his recognition as the emotions of the heralds. Because powerful characters often display anger even toward mere agents (at Il. 1.106–108, Agamemnon exploded in anger at the prophet Calchas, although his prophecy was true), this recognition and the speech it provokes invite the audience to infer more self-control and broader sympathies in Achilles than he has so far demonstrated; he has made a public oath that he will let Greeks (whom he blames for not intervening to support him) die in order to show Agamemnon that he should not have insulted the best of the Greeks. Both rightly and wrongly evaluating the intentions of others is central to Greek historical narrative  – not surprisingly, since military success often depends on foiling an enemy’s plans, while political success often requires being able to predict how crowds will react. The passage from Thucydides (4.27.2–4) cited above shows how Cleon must adapt his strategies by evaluating the mood of the Athenians in the assembly. Xenophon shows how the perjuring satrap Tissaphernes misjudges the intentions of the Spartan king Agesilaus (Hellenica 3.4.12, 21), apparently because he cannot comprehend how Agesilaus can be both pious and rationally self-controlled. Demosthenes (fourth century BCE) argues with an imaginary debater about what the motives of Philip must have been (Philippics 2.13).

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Greek literature is often concerned with interpreting exterior signs. A third-century BCE epigram of Asclepiades (Anthologia Palatina 12.135) narrates how Nicagorus, who denied being in love, was betrayed when he drank wine. In Callimachus (AG 12.134), who plays with the same theme, the speaker observes a stranger at a symposium: We didn’t notice that the stranger has a wound. What a painful breath – did you see? – he took through his chest! When he drank the third glass, the petals from his garlands of roses all ended up on the floor. The man, by the gods, is seriously burned up. I am not guessing without reason – I have learned, being a thief, the tracks of thieves.

In one epigram, the method for reading another’s hidden passion seems to be common knowledge, while in the other, skill is based on similar experience. These signs are not subtle, but they need to be noticed and read.

2.3 Narrator–Character Entanglement A special narrative technique of Homeric epic in the eighth–seventh centuries BCE is the sequence that moves close to a character’s perception but is not strictly focalized by the character: the narrator may organize a description around the character’s viewpoint but not restrict the description to what the character perceives or knows. Characters are sometimes allowed to know information that they should not have (Homerists call this “transference”; cf. de Jong 1987, 379). There is a certain blurring between the characters and the narrator; Eumaeus tells the story of how he was kidnapped as a child in detail, including direct speech, that he could not have known (Od. 15.403–484; see Kakridis 1982). Most members of an audience would hardly notice, however, because the motives he attributes are so stereotypical: his enslaved Phoenician nurse has a sexual relationship with a Phoenician sea-captain and hopes he will take her home. At the same time, Homeric characters sometimes do not know information that they should have, as when Achilles has not heard whether his father is alive, although his home could be reached “on the third day” (Il. 9.363). Neither phenomenon has a significant effect on the representation of consciousness. Similarly, tragic messenger-speeches from the fifth century BCE, although the characters speak as eyewitnesses and as individuals, albeit very minor characters, show some drift toward omniscience, taking on some of the authority of an epic narrator, but there is nothing special about such a speaker’s consciousness (see Barrett passim). When Odysseus as narrator in the Odyssey introduces the places he visits, sometimes, as in the introduction of the Cyclopes (9.105–115) there are miniature ethnographies that his brief and disastrous visit could not supply. Such “excessive” information, however, adds to the wonder of the

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tale and to the authority of Odysseus and does not affect how an audience understands his mind. In other situations, the blurring of character and narrator is less straightforward. When Odysseus first sees the palace of Alcinous, “Odysseus pondered a great deal as he stood, before he reached the bronze threshold. For there was a radiance like the sun or moon through the high-roofed house” (Od. 7.82–84). The description that follows combines what Odysseus actually sees with details he could not at that moment know, such as that the gold and silver dogs beside the doors had been made by the god Hephaestus as watchdogs for the palace, and were immortal, and that there were fifty slave women to grind grain and make textiles. At the end of the description, we are told that Odysseus gazed in wonder at everything, so that there is no question that we are primarily seeing what he sees, but we know more than he does. At the same time, he is thinking: the splendor of the palace is both worth admiring for itself, and requires that he adapt his strategy for obtaining what he wants. The external audience can share in his wonder, and indeed more fully enjoy it than he does because we learn more and because the narrator has told us that Athena herself, in disguise, has given Odysseus directions to the palace and concealed him in a mist (7.14–42). The narrator does not say what Odysseus thinks, only that he is thinking. Indeed, the extended description serves largely as a delay before the interaction between Odysseus and the Phaeacians, and it is striking that neither the present mental state of Odysseus nor any personal traits seem to have any effect on the description. In other examples, entanglement moves the opposite way: the perceiving character knows what the narrator reports, but is not consciously aware of it. So, for example, when King Priam sees Achilles approaching his son Hector, the shining armor of Achilles is compared to Sirius: The old man Priam saw him first with his eyes, rushing over the plain, gleaming like the star that comes in autumn, and his beams are conspicuous among many stars in the dark of night, the one that men nickname the Dog of Orion. It is the brightest, but it is a bad sign, and brings much fever on miserable mortals. So the bronze shone upon his chest as he ran. And the old man groaned. (Il. 22.25–33)

The simile conveys Priam’s sense of Achilles as an immensely powerful and destructive force, and the comparison may be in his consciousness, but it is not Priam who reflects that the star is called the Dog of Orion. Priam is not mentally articulating shared beliefs about the Dog Star, and indeed the passage is confusing, since the Dog Star was thought to cause fever during late summer, when it rises just before dawn and is not visible most of the night. These beliefs lie behind the fear that the gleam of the armor of Achilles inspires in him. The external audience may need to be reminded of this information in order to understand the cognitive background

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of the old man’s fear and to feel the sympathy for him that the narrator seeks, but Priam is not thinking about the characteristics of Orion, but feeling increased terror because of the associations that the gleam carries with it. In the recognition of Odysseus by Eurycleia (Od. 19.386–466), the narrator does not quite move into the memory of either Eurycleia or Odysseus, but nonetheless moves very close to the characters’ minds. In introducing the subordinate narrative, he explains first that Odysseus moved away from the light of the hearth to keep her from seeing the scar, and then that as she began washing the feet of “her lord” she immediately recognized it. He then tells, with zero focalization, how Odysseus as a baby, received his name from his grandfather while seated on the knees of Eurycleia, and how as an adolescent he was wounded in a boar-hunt while visiting that grandfather. The narrator emphasizes the moments that the characters would remember with special intensity. The focalization is not that of the narrator, nor that of either Eurycleia or Odysseus, but some mixture of them all. The narrative conveys the deep attachment that Eurycleia feels for Odysseus, whom she cared for when he was an infant; the voice, however, is always the narrator’s. He does not provide access to the consciousness of the characters, but gives the audience the information that they need to imagine what the characters feel. This melding or entanglement is not a frequent practice in the history of Greek narrative, however. Its use in Homer seems to be largely a dead end. The opening of the novel Aethiopica, a Greek novel by Heliodorus of Emesa, probably from the third century CE, shows an entirely different approach. Here the reader is introduced to a group of bandits in Egypt. They see a moored ship, obviously filled with goods because it is low in the water, and the scene of a massacre. As they come nearer, they see a very beautiful young woman, armed with a bow, who is observing a wounded man. Initially, they think she is a goddess, but when she kisses the wounded man, they decide that she is mortal and approach, beginning to pillage the ship. When a larger band of armed men approaches, however, they flee. Throughout, the reader sees only what the bandits see, initially from a distance, and then in close-up as they approach. We know their motivation, since the narrator mentions their greed, and he is careful to inform us that they cannot understand what the man and woman have said, although we do. We have no interest whatever in the minds of the bandits. We are drawn into sympathy with the lovers (as we realize they must be), curiosity about what will happen to them next, and a desire to understand what lies behind this strange tableau, but the bandits share none of these concerns (Grethlein 2015). Narrator and focalizer are clearly differentiated.

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2.4 Interior Monologue Greek narrative, throughout its history and in most genres, relies primarily on dialogue to reveal the minds of its characters. It does, however, also employ interior monologue, and such monologue shows diachronic development. Early Greek narrative does not present extended passages of unvocalized thought. Homeric characters talk to their own minds in moments of crisis (usually they address the mental organ called thymos), and while it is not clear whether they speak their monologues aloud or not, this is not a significant distinction. Short “decision” monologues present the alternatives before a character and state which seemed more “profitable.” These are remarkable for their extreme rationality. For example, when Odysseus, after he lands in Scheria, must decide whether to sleep by the riverbank or go into the woodland, he begins with a pathetic exclamation (“Alas, what am I to suffer?”; Od. 5.465) but continues with the disadvantages of each, and the narrator simply announces which seemed preferable. Although the speech is internal, after its initial emotional marker it could be persuasive speech. These monologues can reveal character, when the speaker rejects a less heroic alternative, but they rarely surprise the audience or reveal a complex state of mind. When Odysseus ponders whether to reveal himself to his father or to test him “with mocking words,” it is very hard to see why the second alternative seems “more advantageous” when the sight of his father’s suffering has made him weep (24.234–240). Often, however the interior monologue serves to increase sympathy for a character and create pathos. Zeus himself delivers pathetic monologues when he expresses his pity for the immortal horses he gave to Achilles’s father Peleus, who are now grieving for Patroclus (Il. 17.443–455) and for Hector as Hector puts on the armor he has taken from Patroclus (17.201–208, although it is addressed to Hector). The audience must feel something like pity for the supreme god whose position requires that he not exercise his power to prevent human suffering, and through him must pity those he pities. Elsewhere Zeus briefly considers rescuing from death first his son Sarpedon, then Hector, and is dissuaded by Hera and then by Athena (16.431–457 and 22.176–85). The similarity of effect shows the limits of the interior monologue – Zeus does not say to himself anything he might not say to the other gods. Hector speaks a variant of the decision monologue when he chooses to fight Achilles rather than take refuge in Troy (22.99–130), in which he first anticipates how he will be blamed for the Trojan defeat, then imagines trying to negotiate a settlement with Achilles, and then, in two lines, says that it is better that they fight as soon as possible and learn to whom Zeus will give glory. Hector here avoids confronting how unlikely it is that he will defeat Achilles, and this monologue is answered by his much shorter speech during combat, when he realizes that the gods have determined his death (22.297–305). In Iliad 18.3–14, as the messenger approaches

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to tell Achilles that Patroclus is dead, Achilles himself, seeing that the Greeks are in flight, remembers a prophecy that he had heard from his mother that the best of the Myrmidons would die before him, and guesses that Patroclus has ignored the instructions that Achilles gave him and has been killed. This interior moment serves no purpose in advancing the action or motivating a choice, since Achilles is about to be told the truth. The most complex representation of a character’s consciousness in early Greek literature is probably Odyssey 20.5–55. Odysseus has gone to bed beneath the portico of his house, and sees the slave women leaving to meet with suitors. His heart “barks” like a dog protecting her puppies; he exhorts his heart to self-control, reminding himself that he endured worse in the cave of the Cyclops; then, as he thinks about how to defeat the suitors, he rolls in bed like a sausage that a man turns as he cooks it; Athena appears, and he asks how he can kill the suitors, and escape vengeance if he does; Athena promises that she will protect him, and sends him to sleep. The narrator seems to be concerned that his audience will take the courage, endurance, and cleverness of Odysseus for granted, especially since Odysseus himself has rebuked Telemachus for doubting their ability to defeat the suitors, since Zeus and Athena will help them (16.258–265). Sometimes other forms of speech take on the function of monologue. Menelaus delivers a battlefield boast after killing an enemy at Iliad 13.620–639, but the boast becomes a complaint to Zeus that he allows the Trojans to succeed. He then claims that the Trojans are insatiable about war, although even pleasures lead to satiety. Formally, this speech is boast and prayer, but it serves as interior monologue. Danae, in a fragment of Simonides (later sixth or first half of fifth century BCE; fr. 543 in Campbell 1982–1993), sings to the baby Perseus a lullaby that is also a lament, stressing his obliviousness to their plight and thereby her awareness of it. Solo song in the late fifth century developed an impressionistic and highly emotional style, often including narrative material filtered through a profoundly agitated consciousness. Tragedy employed this pathetic mode: in Euripides’s Orestes (408 BCE), Electra sings a monody about her family history (982–1012) and a terrified Phrygian slave narrates in song the attempt to murder Helen (1368–1502). These are not technically either interior or monologue (the Phrygian’s replaces a messenger-speech to the chorus), but they function as if they were. Timotheus’s fourth-century BCE Persians narrates the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, including a series of character-songs. A drowning soldier curses the sea (64–85), a group who have reached land call on their homeland (98–139), a representative individual begs for his life in broken Greek (150–161), Xerxes himself laments (78–95). Only the drowning man’s song is formally monologue, but they are all direct representations of the characters’ mental states. Even the man begging for his life mostly expresses

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his terror. The main narrative is almost stream-of-consciousness, but this narrative style did not move into other genres. Although historians are not reluctant to attribute motives to their characters, they do not pass the boundaries of what they consider reasonable inference, and they summarize their characters’ reasons instead of dramatizing them. Xenophon (early fourth century BCE) is an exception in his Anabasis, where he is both the narrator (he writes as an external narrator, using the third person throughout) and, from the third book onward, the most important character (see Grethlein 2012). After the Battle of Cynaxa leaves a group of Greek mercenaries, of whom Xenophon is one, stranded in Asia Minor and their leaders have been treacherously murdered, Xenophon first describes at length the fear and perplexity of the Greeks. He then formally introduces himself in the third person (“there was a certain Xenophon in the army”). He gives an analeptic anecdote about how “Xenophon” was advised by Socrates to consult the Delphic oracle before joining the expedition, and how he asked the oracle not whether he should go but what sacrifices he should make to be successful (such questions were not unusual in Greek oracular consultations). Returning to the main narrative, he recounts a dream that seems auspicious but also leaves him fearful, and provides an interior monologue of his thoughts: Why do I lie down? The night is going by. At daybreak it is likely that the enemy will come. If we are in the king’s power, is there anything to keep us from first seeing the most horrible sights and suffering the most terrible sufferings and then dying in humiliation? Yet no one is preparing for us to defend ourselves or caring about it, as if we had the option of remaining peaceful. From what other city do I expect a general to come and organize things? Why am I waiting? How old do I have to be? I will not become older, if I betray myself to our enemies (3.1.13–14).

The monologue is striking because interior monologue is so unusual in this genre, and because of its shift from the singular “I” to “we” and back to “I.” Still, it is traditional in content, echoing the battlefield speeches and decision monologues of epic, along with the apologies common in tragedy when a character speaks outside social expectations (women, slaves, young people). It is persuasive speech that happens to be addressed to the self, and what it reveals about Xenophon as an individual is directed at the reader, defining “Xenophon” as a leader, someone who does not yield to despair but shows leadership in an emergency. Hellenistic literature represents much more fluid thought; this is one aspect of Greek narrative in which there is visible diachronic development. Euripidean tragedy introduced a new kind of monologue that vividly represents repeated changes of mind, while emotional outbursts and rational deliberation are not kept entirely distinct. The great speech in which Medea resolves to murder her children (Medea 1021–1080, 431 BCE) was the great influence. Although the chorus is present, Medea addresses first her (absent) children, then her thymos, as her mind wavers.

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The most vivid and extensive representation of psychic turmoil in Greek literature is the Medea of book 3 of the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes (third century BCE), after divine intervention has made her fall in love with Jason and she is torn between loyalty to her family and desire to save him from the impossible tasks her father has imposed. Narratorial summaries of her thoughts and feelings, and the exterior signs of her distress (3.451–463, 616–632, 751–769, 802–824, 948–955) alternate with interior monologues (3.451–463, 636–644, 771–801). It is a bravura display of the narrator’s ability to represent interiority. Remarkably, once Medea has taken the decisive stop of helping Jason, the narrative goes back to the traditionally epic method of combining brief comments on a character’s emotional state with persuasive dialogue; thus, he briefly summarizes Medea’s distress at the possibility that the Argonauts will not protect her (4.351–352), then has her address Jason at length (4.355–390), then adds that she is angry and wants to burn the ship and publicly throw herself into the flames (4.291–293). Like Achilles, she seems to intensify her own emotions by speaking. Apollonius, however, is not unique in the development of interior monologue and of the fuller representation of interiority. Hellenistic epigrams often in a few lines imply a narrative and a particular state of mind. Callimachus (third century BCE) has a mask of Dionysus that hangs in a schoolroom, dedicated by a boy for academic success, complain that the boys read the Bacchae of Euripides, “telling me my own dream” (Anthologia Palatina 6.310). When Meleager (Anthologia Palatina 12.23) in four lines says that he used to laugh at unrequited love, but Eros has attached him as a dedication on the porch of Myiscus, with the inscription “spoils of self-control,” his narrative implies a variety of emotions, not just his desire for Myiscus and frustration that it is not reciprocated, but his humiliation that his situation is public knowledge. Idyll 2 of Theocritus (third century BCE) is dramatic in form, spoken entirely by a woman, Simaetha, who addresses the bird that she is using is a magical ritual to recover her beloved Delphis, who has not come for eleven days, and the slave who assists her, along with the Moon and Hecate, goddess of magic. The slave goes to perform a ritual at his door, and the poem at once becomes true monologue and turns from magic actions to narrative. The Moon seems to be drawn into a narrative function, for the refrain of the second half of is “Tell me, Lady Moon, where Desire came from.” Both narration and focalization, however, continue to be Simaetha’s, and she tells the story, although she knows it already, as she might tell an intimate friend; it is not marked, for example, as a series of her memories. The narrative uses and varies the clichés of Greek erotic literature (Sappho, tragedy, New Comedy): she saw him at a religious procession and was instantly overcome with desire, she has the physical symptoms of love-sickness, she sent her slave to invite him. She quotes an extended speech in which Delphis claims that he would have pursued

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her had she not summoned him first (114–138), and the narrating “I” comments on her own gullibility. She has recently heard a rumour that he is in love, but does not know even whether his beloved is male or female (the limits of first-person narrative are strictly observed). Nothing in the poem hints that Simaetha is in any way unreliable, and she is unlike most first-person narrators in Greek in having no obvious rhetorical purpose. She is not trying to persuade anyone to do anything, and the events as she presents them show her own behaviour as wildly outside social norms. Simaetha judges only in the single reference to how easily persuaded she was; the response of readers could be some mixture of sympathy, dismay, disapproval, or revulsion.

3 Summary Greek narrative is constantly concerned with the motives and emotions of fictional characters and historical people. Its techniques for representing mental states are relatively simple and most do not develop significantly over time, though they differ according to genre. Throughout the history of Greek literature, the direct speech of characters is most revelatory of their mental states, along with brief narratorial comments or summaries that provide guidance of how characters’ speech should be understood. The Greeks seemed generally to have believed that the mental states of others, unless they were deliberately concealing them, were easy to infer, so even non-fictional narrative reports as fact beliefs and feelings for which the authors did not have evidence. Genre is usually more significant than diachronic development in determining how narrators treat mental states. Interior monologue, however, becomes richer and more sophisticated in the third century BCE, while the entanglement of narrators and characters is limited in narratives from the fifth century BCE onward and very uncommon thereafter.

References Amory, A. 1963 “The Reunion of Odysseus and Penelope.” In Essays on the Odyssey, edited by C. H. Taylor, 100–121. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barrett, J. 2002. Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Campbell, D., trans. 1991. Greek Lyric with an English translation. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Cohn, D. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohn, D. 2000. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Currie, B. 2016. Homer’s Allusive Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Jong, I. F. 1987. Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad. Amsterdam: de Grüner. Fludernik, M. 2015. “Plotting Experience: A Comment on Jonas Grethlein’s ‘Heliodorus Against Palmer, Zunshine & Co.’” Style 49, no. 3, 288–293. Grethlein, J. 2012. “Xenophon’s Anabasis from Character to Narrator.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 132:23–40. Grethlein, J. 2015. “Is Narrative ‘the description of fictional mental functioning’? Heliodorus against Palmer, Zunshine & Co.” Style 49, no. 3, 257–284. Kakridis, T. 1982. “ΜΕΤΑΚΕΝΩΣΙΣ.” Wiener Studien 9:5–12. Palmer, A. 2015. “Response to Jonas Grethlein’s Essay ‘Is Narrative “the description of fictional mental functioning”? Heliodorus against Palmer, Zunshine & Co.’” Style 49, no. 3, 285–288. Ryan, M.-L. 2015. “Response to Jonas Grethlein’s ‘Is Narrative “the description of fictional mental functioning”? Heliodorus against Palmer, Zunshine & Co.’” Style 49, no. 3, 293–298.

Wolf Schmid

Free Indirect Discourse in German and Russian Literature 1 Definition of FID The term free indirect discourse (FID; French: style indirect libre, German: erlebte Rede, Russian: nesobstvenno-prjamaja reč’) designates “a character’s mental discourse in the guise of the narrator’s discourse” (Cohn 1978, 14) or, more precisely, a segment of a narrative that in the form of the narrator’s text actually represents the inner speech, thoughts, feelings, perceptions and/оr the evaluative position of a character whereby the reproduction is not marked, either graphically or by any kind of explicit indicator. (Schmid 2010, 157)

FID is a hybrid phenomenon in which mimesis and diegesis (in the Platonic sense) are mixed, a structure that unites two functions: the reproduction of the characters’ text (mimesis) and the actual narration (diegesis). FID rarely serves the reproduction of outer speech. Most cases of seemingly representing outer speech are examples not of the reproduction of spoken discourse itself, but rather of the perception of outer speech by someone other than the speaker (cf. Kovtunova 1955, 138). FID is not specific to artistic or fictional literature, as postulated by some of its theorists (e.g., Banfield 1982). It is also widely used in children’s literature (Sokolova 1968, 212–215), in parliamentary reporting (Pascal 1977, 18–19, 34, 57), and in journalistic interviews and narratives (McHale 1978, 282). And it is not characteristic of the fictional (as Bronzwaer 1970, 49 states). Furthermore, FID is most importantly characteristic of everyday oral narratives. As soon as a narrator in everyday life reports the experiences of a third person, his narration tends to take over the perspective of this person at some or even at all levels of narrative point of view, starting with (1) the perceptual point of view (the selection of situations, characters, actions, and their properties), through (2) the ideological or evaluative point of view, to (3) the linguistic point of view (on the distinguishable levels of point of view, cf. Uspenskij [1970] 1973; Schmid 2010, 99–117). Such everyday narratives “infected” by the point of view of third, experiencing and telling persons may presumably be regarded as the real origin of FID.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-012

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2 Exploring FID The description of FID begins in the nineteenth century. As early as 1876, the German writer Heinrich Keiter described a form of depicting character consciousness which he considered for the novelist “at ease” (ungezwungen) and which fits “effortlessly” (zwanglos) into the flow of the narrative: “indirect monologue,” by which he meant FID (cf. Grüne 2018, 168–171). The first scholars to explore the linguistic structure of FID were the Swiss professor of Romance studies Adolf Tobler (1887, who analyzed the device by French examples) and in Russia, P. Kozlovskij (1890). Among the various ways in which the structure of FID has been modeled (cf. McHale 2014), two should be mentioned. The more traditional one, called by its critic Alan Palmer (2002, 30) the “speech category approach” (A), is based on the application of the three modes of speech representation (direct, indirect, and free indirect discourse) to the representation of characters’ minds. The most prominent representatives of approach A are Brian McHale (1978), with his seven-level scale based on Norman Page’s (1973, 31–35) degrees of indirectness; Dorrit Cohn (1978), with her tripartite model (psycho-narration, narrated monologue, quoted monologue); and – in contradiction to his polemics against the speech category approach – Palmer himself (2004, 2005), whose ternary model (thought report, free indirect thought, direct thought) shows a remarkable resemblance to Cohn’s triad. The text interference model (B) is an alternative to the tripartite approach and the seven-level scale. It goes back to Mixail Baxtin’s description of FID as a “hybrid construction” that “contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages’, two semantic and axiological belief systems” ([1934/1935] 1981, 304). Baxtin’s concept, already published under the name of Vološinov (Baxtin [1929] 1986), was taken up by the Czech structuralist Lubomír Doležel (1958, 1960, 1965) and integrated into a model of distinctive features of narrator’s and characters’ texts. Wolf Schmid (1973; 2003 [English trans. 2010, German trans. 2014a]) further developed model B by redefining the characteristics, status, and possible neutralization of its oppositions and introducing the category of “interference of narrator’s and character’s text” or, more simply, “text interference” (TI). TI is based on the fact that in one and the same segment of narrative, some features refer to the narrator’s text (NT) and others to the character’s text (CT) as their origin. As a result of the distribution of features to both texts and the “expression function” (in the sense of Kundgabe and Ausdruck in Bühler 1918/1920 and [1934] 1990 respectively) pointing in two directions, NT and CT are simultaneously realized in one and the same segment. Using a catalog of features in which NT and CT can differ, one gets to finer-grained typologies of FID. These features include (1) thematic and (2) ideological (or evaluative) markers, (3) grammatical person, (4) tense and (5) deixis,

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(6) semantic functions (representation, expression, and appeal), and features of (7) lexical and (8) syntactical style. Approaches A and B differ in three main respects. (1) Approach A tends to regard FID as a “purely grammatical device of objective and obvious speech and mind representation” (Bally 1912, 1914), without any evaluative accents. In this approach, FID is – first – a simply grammatical transformation of direct discourse (one type of “direct discourse fallacy,” according to Fludernik 1993, 276–277, 401) and – second – less authentic than direct discourse (another type of “direct discourse fallacy,” according to Sternberg 1982a, 1982b). Approach B on the one hand emphasizes the ambiguity of the assignment of segments to narrator and character, and on the other takes into account the possibility that the narrator’s voice and context overlay the depicted content of consciousness with evaluative accents and thus are able to produce humorous, ironic, satirical, and other effects. (2) Approach A tends to ascribe to FID univocality, while B basically assumes bivocality. Since the first scholarly description of FID, there has been a dispute between univocalists (E. Lerch 1914; 1928, 469–471; G. Lerch 1922; Banfield 1982; Padučeva 1996) and bivocalists (Günther 1928; Baxtin [1929] 1993; Vološinov [1929] 1986; Schmid 1973; Pascal 1977) as to whether FID serves more for empathy or more for ironic distancing. Decisive for this question is the overall axiological relationship between narrator’s and character’s stance, as had been demonstrated already by Leo Spitzer (1928). (3) Approach A tends to see the narrator “leaving the stage” in FID, thus yielding his narrative function to the character (Bally 1914; E. Lerch 1928; Banfield 1982; Padučeva 1996), while approach B recognizes traces of the narrator even in the most figural FID, if only in the use of the personal pronouns of the third person instead of the first and second.

3 FID in Various Languages Each language uses its own grammatical means to express FID (for comparison of grammatical realization in German, French, and English literature: Steinberg 1971; Fludernik 1993; including Russian: Schmid 2010, 158–163). The main difference is the choice of tense. In German and English, the tense corresponds to the narrator’s text, i.e., there is a temporal shift in FID: the character’s present (or future) is expressed by the past tense; his or her past is expressed by the pluperfect: Aber am Vormittag hatte sie den Baum zu putzen. Morgen war Weihnachten. (✶But in the morning she had to decorate the tree. Tomorrow was Christmas; Alice Berend, Die Bräutigame der Babette Bomberling)

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Das Manöver gestern hatte acht Stunden gedauert. (✶Yesterday’s maneuver had lasted for eight hours; Bruno Frank, Tage des Königs) But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse)

By contrast, in Russian, FID is in the tense of the character’s text, i.e., direct discourse. За что она его любит так? (✶Why does she love him so?; Anton Čexov, “Dama s sobačkoj”)

In the published English translation of this quotation, the temporal shift is used, i.e., FID appears in the tense of NT: Why did she love him so? (Anton Čexov, “The Lady with the Little Dog”)

The picture is complicated by the fact that variants are used in the languages in addition to the basic types. In German, we encounter a variant without the temporal shift. The tenses in FID are the same as in CT, i.e., as they would be in direct discourse. Er hat viel über Rom gelesen, aber es nützt ihm wenig. Der Brand vor drei Monaten hat die Stadt sehr verändert. [. . .] Es ist ein Wunder, wie viel diese Römer in der kurzen Zeit schon neu gebaut haben. Er mag sie nicht, die Römer, er hasst sie geradezu, aber das muss er ihnen lassen: Organisationstalent haben sie, sie haben ihre Technik. Technik, er denkt das fremde Wort, denkt es mehrmals, in der fremden Sprache. Er ist nicht dumm, er wird diesen Römern von ihrer Technik etwas abluchsen. (Lion Feuchtwanger, Der jüdische Krieg)

By contrast, the English translation of this passage uses the narrator’s preterit: He had read a great deal about Rome, but that did not help him much. [.  .  .] It was astonishing how much these Romans had already rebuilt in the short time since. He could not endure them, these Romans; indeed he hated them, but he was forced to admit that they had a talent for organization; they had their technique. Technique, he mused over the strange word, repeating it several times to himself in the foreign Latin tongue. He was not a dunce; he would watch these Romans and learn something of their technique. (Feuchtwanger, Josephus)

In English, when the entire story is narrated in the present, there is no alternative to the present-tense FID. This is the case, for instance, in John M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg. Here, FID in the present lacks any kind of temporal marking. The entire novel reads like the narrative unfolding of the hero’s, Fëdor Dostoevskij’s, inner world: He [Dostoevskij] emerges into a crowded ante-room. How long has he been closeted with Maksimov? An hour? Longer? The bench is full, there are people lounging against the walls, people in the corridors too, where the smell of fresh paint is stifling. All talk ceases; eyes turn

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on him without sympathy. So many seeking justice, each with a story to tell! (Coetzee, Master of Petersburg)

In Russian, one widespread variant contains not the tense of CT, but the narrative preterit. In it, FID moves closer to NT: Всё было так натурално! И было отчего сокрушиться, бить такую тревогу! (F. M. Dostoevskij, “Dvojnik”) (It was all so natural! And what a thing to break his heart over, what a thing to be so distressed about!; “The Double”)

The preterit in this case does not describe the character’s past but is rather the narrative preterit which describes the character’s present. The varying use of tenses leads to different degrees of markedness of FID according to the language in question. The basic type of German FID is relatively weakly marked by the tense of NT. That makes it difficult to identify. The situation is very similar in English. In French, FID by the use of the imparfait in place of the passé simple is more strongly marked than in German and English (cf. Kullmann 1995b, 320; 1995a, 134–135). In Russian, the basic type of FID with the tense of CT is also more strongly marked than in German or English. The degree of markedness is an important factor in the reception process. Low markedness reinforces the effect of hybridity and bitextuality that led early explorers of the device to such terms as concealed discourse (verschleierte Rede; Kalepky 1899, 1913) or veiled discourse (verkleidete Rede; Kalepky 1928). The ambiguity of FID activates the reader and forces him to refer back to the context, making use of his “deductive abilities” (Låftman 1929, 165).

4 Mind Representation in the Middle High German Courtly Romance In the Old French epic, especially the Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes, FID seems to be documented (on possible cases of FID in Old French and the problems of their identification: Stempel 1972; Lebsanft 1981; Marnette 2005). In the Middle High German courtly romance, although it adheres closely to the French models, FID that can be clearly identified does not occur (Hübner 2003). However, the absence of FID does not mean that there was no representation of consciousness in German medieval narrative. Gottfried von Straßburg makes ample use of direct interior monologue in a form that can be described as dialogized inner

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monologue, i.e., a monologue the addressee of which is either the absent beloved person or the alter ego (cf. Schmid 2017a, 116–126; 2021, 104–115). Gottfried was by no means the first to introduce direct inner monologue into European courtly prose. Already in his source, the Anglo-Norman French Tristan (second half of the twelfth century) by Thomas d’Angleterre, extensive soliloquies can be found. And they definitely had a dialogized character similar to the soliloquies in Gottfried. (Direct interior monologue can be traced back much further. As early as in the Greek New Testament, especially in Luke’s Gospel, we find extensive interior monologues depicting the thinker’s inner turmoil in a crisis moment: cf. Sellew 1992 and Dinkler 2015, where Lucan’s interior monologues are discussed in the context of ancient literature: Homer, Platon, Virgil, Ovid, Apollonius, Longus, and Xenophon of Ephesos.) To emulate FID in Chrétien de Troyes’s romances, the Middle High German poets used various techniques. With respect to Hartmann von Aue, Gert Hübner (2003) mentions the following equivalents: (1) Chrétien’s style indirect libre is usually represented by direct or indirect discourse (Hübner 2003, 52). (2) Hartmann creates transition phenomena that are close to FID: continuation of indirect speech or of psycho-narration (in the sense of Cohn 1978). (3) Functionally, the use of certain techniques of perceptual point of view, which Hübner (2003, 54) assigns to “focalization” and “filtering,” broadly understanding them in a Genettean sense, is close to FID. (4) Another replacement for FID is “nestling” the narrator’s voice in the characters’ evaluative point of view. According to Hübner (2003, 394–397; cf. the enlightening but not uncritical review by Schulz 2004), the narrator of Gottfried’s Tristan tends to support the characters’ evaluative point of view authoritatively in his generalizations and in the representation of the characters’ inner worlds, also in their soliloquies. This method brings about a figuralization that is otherwise only known from FID. A problem that arises when dealing with premodern texts is the seemingly inconsistent use of point of view. In the medieval German Arthurian romance, the narrator’s point of view often follows a reflector figure, which creates the conditions for the occurrence of FID; but the perspective is not as strict as we would expect from a modern novel. The figural structure is interrupted, for example, by paralipsis (saying too little) or paralepsis (saying too much) with respect to the character’s knowledge. Armin Schulz ([2012] 2015, 383–384) explains such violations of perspective with reference to oral presentation. The voice of the reciter can mark the transition from NT to CT and back. Thus, the perspectival irregularities were less serious for the medieval listener than they are for the modern reader.

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5 FID in Modern German Literature 5.1 Emergence in the Eighteenth Century: Schnabel, Wieland, and Others FID appeared in German literature only around the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1774 in his Versuch über den Roman the critic Friedrich Blanckenburg demanded that the reader of a novel should see the whole “inner being” of the characters “with all the causes that set them in motion.” The emergence of FID corresponds to the tendency to explore inner life, which had already led to the development of the sentimental epistolary novel. However, the depiction of the unconscious and the auto-introspection designed to be communicated to an external addressee overtaxed the diegetic (first-person) narrative. Restricted to what the character was aware of and to what he could say in words, the letter was not capable of expressing the unclear and the unconscious. A different narrative mode was required for the expression of hunches and the wavering and indeterminate in the life of the soul. This means was developed with the non-diegetic (third-person) narrator, who in hybrid modes of mixing CT and NT presented a more or less concrete image of the deeper, not clearly fixable processes of his figures’ consciousness. It is significant for this development that the early master of FID, Jane Austen, wrote her first works as epistolary novels and after a few years changed them to third-person novels with an increasing proportion of FID (Schmid 2017a, 153–188). Supported by Werner Neuse’s (1990) detailed historical investigations of the German FID, we can state the following tendencies in the form and function of FID in the eighteenth century. (1) FID is still used relatively rarely, but when it occurs it serves to depict inner doubts and uncertainty in questions regarding life. Self-questions or self-arguments which show the character in mental turmoil are the most reliable signs of FID in novels of the epoch: Sollte man wohl glauben, dass eine Frau, die da wusste, dass ihr Mann ihr Bruder war, noch auf einen solchen Verdacht fallen könnte? Allein was ist in der Liebe und in dem Traume wohl unmöglich?” (Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Das Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G✶✶✶)

(✶Should one believe that a woman who knew that her husband was her brother could still fall for such a suspicion? But what is impossible in love and in dreams?)

Gellert’s Life of the Swedish Countess of G✶✶✶ (1747–1748) is one of the first German novels to use FID. Influenced by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, this sentimental family novel in the first-person form, conventional in theme and plot structure,

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shows an interest in representation of the inner world new for the times and thus paves the way for the development of the psychological novel in Germany. (2) FID is, as a rule, more or less distinctly marked by its figural context, such as indirect discourse, or by contiguous thought report. The second question of the above quote implies a certain ambiguity. Its universality, underlined by the gnomic present, suggests both the narrator and the character as thinker. But for the reader at that time, who was not yet familiar with the device, the authors of the eighteenth century usually did not shy away from making clear through verba dicendi and credendi or explicit statements who is responsible for the content in a given narrative segment. Uncertainty about the thinking authority was not a goal that the authors of the time were striving for. (3) FID occasionally depicts struggles of the soul in correspondingly disconnected syntax with a strong expressive function. The novel Woldemar (1779) by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi contains examples of this presentation which seem very modern (here and in the following, FID is marked by my italics): Henriette wusste nicht, wie ihr geschah. Bisher hatte sie ihrer Freundschaft für Woldemar weder Maß noch Ende gewusst: nicht der entfernteste Gedanke an dergleichen war ihr je in die Seele gekommen: und nun auf einmal – Was? – Schranken! Grenzen! – Einer solchen Freundschaft  – Woldemars und Henriettens Freundschaft!  – Grenzen?  – Schranken?  – Wie? Warum? Welche? Sie glaubte von Sinnen zu kommen. (✶Henriette did not know what was happening to her. Until then she had known neither measure nor end to her friendship for Woldemar: not the remotest thought of such things had ever entered her soul: and now all of a sudden – What? – Barriers! Borders! – Of such a friendship – Woldemar’s and Henriette’s friendship! – Borders? – Barriers? – How? Why? Which one? She thought she was losing her senses.)

(4) An early example of FID is the pietistic-idyllic Robinsonade Wonderful mirage of some sailors [. . .] (Wunderliche Fata einiger See-Fahrer [. . .], 1731–1743) by Johann Gottfried Schnabel, which Ludwig Tieck 1828 re-edited in an abridged version under the title The Island of Felsenburg (Die Insel Felsenburg). It is a traditional novel with a diegetic narrator (first-person novel): Allein, was konnten mir nunmehro alle diese sonst gar wohl klingenden Reden helfen, der Kaufmann Julius war fort, und ich konnte weiter nichts von seinem ganzen Wesen zu meinem Vorteil erfahren. (✶But what could all these otherwise very well sounding speeches help me, the merchant Julius was gone, and I could not learn anything else of his whole being to my advantage.)

This quotation shows the fundamental ambiguity of FID in diegetic narration: the self-questions can be related to the narrating “I” and his distanced temporal-evalu-

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ative point of view as well as to the narrated “I” involved in the event. In this quote there is sufficient reason to opt for FID. But the example shows a characteristic trait of FID. Unless numerous striking features or markers are present, the assignment of a segment to NT or CT is largely dependent on interpretation, i.e., presupposes the realization of the entire previous context. (5) As far as grammatical forms (tense, mode) are concerned, FID is amazingly well canonized in the eighteenth century. The majority of texts contain a shift of tenses. However, there are cases of FID in the present tense, as in Jean Paul’s Titan (1800– 1803): Agusti und die Ministerin sahen, man müsste in der Abwesenheit des Ministers doch etwas für Liane tun; und beide trafen wunderbar im Projekte zusammen. – Liane muss auf Land in dieser schönen Zeit – man muss ihre Gesundheit rüsten für die Kriege der Zukunft – sie muss den Besuchen des Ritters entzogen sein  – die nun der Geburtstag vervielfältigen wird  – der Minister muss sogar gegen den Ort nichts einzuwenden haben – Und wo kann dieser liegen? (✶Agusti and the minister saw that something had to be done for Liane in the minister’s absence; and both met wonderfully in the project. – Liane must go to the countryside in this beautiful time – she has to be removed from the visits of the knight – which the birthday will now multiply – the minister even has nothing to object to against the place – And where can the place be?)

(6) On the other hand, we can already observe the use of the preterit to express future or planned events. Such is the case in the following quotation from Johann Martin Miller’s sentimental novel Siegwart: A Monastery Story (Siegwart: Eine Klostergeschichte, 1776): Oft wünschte er sie in Lebensgefahr, rettete sie, und nun gab sie ihm zur Dankbarkeit ihre Hand. Aufs lebhafteste fühlte er die Wonne, mit der er sie ans Herz drückte; den Blick der Dankbarkeit und Liebe, den sie auf ihn warf; dann eilte er zu ihrem Vater, zeigte ihm die befreite Tochter, und ward ihr Bräutigam. (✶Often he wished her in danger of life, saved her, and now she gave her hand to him in gratitude. He felt in the most lively way the joy with which he pressed her to his heart; the look of gratitude and love she threw at him; then he hurried to her father, showed him the liberated daughter, and became her bridegroom.)

In the passage, all preterita refer not to what has happened but to the future, to the fulfilment of his wishes. (7) In this epoch we already encounter the ironic use of FID. In the following quotation from the Life Story of Tobias Knaut the Wise (Lebensgeschichte Tobias Knauts des Weisen, 1773–1776) by Johann Carl Wezel, an elderly lady observes the condition of her niece, and the ironic narrator, in FID, joins her in drawing conclusions from the observations:

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Der Tiefsinn nahm zu, die Zufälle wurden immer bedenklicher: genug, es fand sich aus sicheren Anzeichen, dass das gute Kind – schwanger war. (✶The profundity increased, the coincidences became more and more worrying: enough, it was found out by certain signs that the good child – was pregnant.)

It then turns out that the “good child” is not pregnant at all. Double-voiced FID becomes characteristic of the humoristic novel. (8) Already in this epoch, the device called free indirect perception plays an important role. This form presents images of immediate perception of given phenomena from the position of an experiencing character whereby the character’s reactivity is not necessarily always precipitated in a speech act, or even in an interior speech act. Free indirect perception is in evidence even when only the thematic and evaluative markers refer to CT and all other features refer to NT or are neutralized. (9) The first systematic use of FID in German literature can be seen in Christoph Martin Wieland’s novels The Adventures of Don Sylvio of Rosalva (Die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva, 1764) and The History of Agathon (Geschichte des Agathon, 1766–1767). Significant for the development and dissemination of FID is that Wieland, in the third version of Agathon (1794), adds text segments in FID and now even presents a thought report of the first version of 1767 in this device (Neuse 1990, 78). Those changes testify to authors’ assumption that their audience is familiar with the device.

5.2 Goethe An early highlight in the emergence of FID is Goethe’s novel The Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809) after only occasional occurrences of the device in The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774, 1787) and in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1779/1796; cf. Pascal 1977, 37–45; Neuse 1990, 105–154). In FID in The Elective Affinities, two peculiarities can be observed which at first glance seem to exclude each other. (1) FID is difficult to identify because the characters are scarcely differentiated by their linguistic behavior. Their language remains in lexis and syntax in the narratorial sphere, and the narrator interferes again and again with subjective statements. In the following example, where Eduard is rereading his letter in which he is announcing his renunciation of his love for Ottilie, only the expressive language function with its exclamations points to CT:

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Diese letzte Wendung floss ihm aus der Feder, nicht aus dem Herzen. Ja, wie er sie auf dem Papier sah, fing er bitterlich an zu weinen. Er sollte auf irgendeine Weise dem Glück, ja dem Unglück, Ottilien zu lieben, entsagen! Jetzt fühlte er, was er tat. (This last expression flowed out of his pen, not his heart. Yes, as he saw it on paper he began bitterly to weep. In one way or another he was to renounce the happiness, yes the unhappiness, of loving Ottilie! Only now did he feel what he was doing.)

(2) In FID the ironic voice of the narrator can be felt throughout (on narratorial irony in The Elective Affinities: Kahn 1974; Pascal 1977, 41–43). Although consciousness is essentially conveyed in the novel through narratorial report, indirect representation, direct discourse, and various forms of direct figural statements such as letters and diary recordings, FID bears the main burden in the representation of the unclear, often illusionary thoughts, hopes, and musings of the heroes. Goethe prefers his initially unobtrusive and then double-voiced FID to marked and reliable representation, since ambiguity in the use of FID corresponds to the indeterminate movements of the soul. FID gives “a glimpse of those pre-articulate mental processes that precede literate consciousness.” So FID becomes an “instrument for the recording of a level of awareness that cannot properly be put into words in the form of direct speech or narratorial explanation” (Pascal 1977, 45). Goethe’s novel of relationships is characterized by a multiple perspective: the thoughts and feelings of not only one main character but all four main figures (and some minor characters) are represented in FID. This multiperspectivism has served as an example for the representation of complex configurations of people up to the present day.

5.3 German Realism: Otto Ludwig Around the middle of the nineteenth century, FID was a widely used method in German literature that also played a major role in popular literature. The artistic novel with the undoubtedly densest and structurally most relevant use of FID is Otto Ludwig’s Between Sky and Earth (Zwischen Himmel und Erde, 1856), which many consider to be the first German novel of consciousness. But this is not a “figural” novel (in the sense of Stanzel [1955] 1971, 1978), as one might assume. Notwithstanding the dominant figural point of view and the great role of FID, there is a strong narratorial element here. The omniscient narrator interferes in the narrative text again and again with emphatic exclamations, rhetorical questions, subjective judgments, and generalizations. So Stuart Atkins (1939, 352) comes to the

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conclusion: “it is sometimes difficult to decide whether one is reading narrative or the thoughts of a character.” The novel is a roofers’ tragedy. On the roof of the church tower, Apollonius, a pure and rather hypochondriac soul, must realize that his envious brother Fritz, after taking his beloved Christiane away from him and marrying her himself, now strives for his life. After dodging the brother’s deadly attack on the roof, whereupon Fritz himself fell into the depths, Apollonius is torn between love for Christiane, who is now free, and the false feeling of guilt. His absurd argument is first presented in FID, after which the narrator describes his aporetic situation in thought report: Nimmt er des Bruders Weib, die frei wurde durch den Sturz, so hat er ihn hinabgestürzt. Hat er den Lohn der Tat, so hat er auch die Tat. Nimmt er sie, wird das Gefühl ihn nicht lassen: er wird unglücklich sein, und sie mit unglücklich machen. Um ihret- und seinetwillen muss er sie lassen. Und will er das, dann erkennt er, wie haltlos diese Schlüsse sind vor den klaren Augen des Geistes, und will er wiederum das Glück ergreifen, so schwebt das dunkle Schuldgefühl von neuem wie ein eisiger Reif über seine Blume, und der Geist vermag nichts gegen seine vernichtende Gewalt. (✶If he takes his brother’s wife, who was set free by the fall, he has brought him down. If he has the reward of the deed, he also has the deed. If he takes her, the feeling will not leave him: he will be unhappy and make her unhappy too. For her sake and his sake, he must leave her. And if he wants that, then he realizes how unstable these conclusions are before the clear eyes of reason, and if he again wants to seize happiness, then the dark feeling of guilt floats anew like a hoar frost over his flower, and the mind cannot do anything about his destructive power.)

In the interplay of NT and CT, the novel leads us into complex states of consciousness, into the depths of resentment and the narrowness of obsessions. The author stages fierce struggles in the heroes’ souls to reach decisions, the reflection directed toward self-knowledge showing the development and rejection of mental events.

5.4 Post-War Literature: Dieter Wellershoff In German postrealism and modernism, there are many masters of FID using the device for the representation of characters’ unconscious or half-conscious movements, among them Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Robert Musil, Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka, and Alfred Döblin. Forms and functions have changed little since the beginning of the nineteenth century (cf. Neuse 1990, 553–568). Depending on the stylistic and ideological difference between NT and CT, FID is more or less close to the poles of narratoriality and figurality respectively, and the ambiguity of FID is more or less strong. Against the background of the politically committed and ideology-critical novel of the post-war period, a purely psychological novel attracts attention: Dieter

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Wellershoff’s The Love Desire (Der Liebeswunsch, 2000). In a sense this is a variation of Goethe’s Elective Affinities: there are two couples changing partners with a catastrophic outcome, the suicide of the younger woman. What makes this novel special is its multiperspectivity. The story of the relationships between the four people is told in some sections by a non-diegetic narrator, and in other passages the four protagonists act as primary narrators. In each of their four narratives, in which direct interior monologue and FID play a large part, the respective narrator focuses on himself and the partners. Self-analysis takes the form of first-person narrative in FID. In the following quotation, Anja, the young victim, who changes from Leonhard, an older man, to Paul, Marlene’s husband, analyses herself: Mit mir stimmte etwas nicht. Ich, die dieses beneidenswerte Leben führte, war unsicher, konfus, unausgeglichen, undankbar – das machte mich mir selbst fremd. Wer war ich eigentlich, dass ich so wenig aus meinem Leben zu machen verstand? Was war los mit mir. Ich wusste es nicht, sah nur, dass ich mein Glückssoll nicht erfüllte, und gab mir Mühe es zu erreichen. (✶There was something wrong with me. I, who led this enviable life, was insecure, confused, unbalanced, ungrateful – that made me a stranger to myself. Who was I to make so little of my life? What was wrong with me. I didn’t know, just saw that I wasn’t meeting my happiness target and tried to achieve it.)

The protagonists’ inner speech is often dialogized. Marlene, who leaves Anja and Paul alone because she has to go on night duty as a doctor, rejects her suspicions: Aber warum sollten sich Anja und Paul nicht noch eine Weile unterhalten, wenn ich in die Klinik fuhr? Wir waren schließlich miteinander befreundet. (✶But why shouldn’t Anja and Paul talk for a while when I went to the clinic? We were friends after all.)

After Anja’s mother congratulates her on her acquaintance with Leonhard, Anja is plagued by doubts and self-reproaches: Jetzt hatte sie schon Erwartungen geweckt, ohne zu wissen, was sie wirklich wollte. War das für sie nicht voraussehbar gewesen, oder hatte sie auf diese Weise über ihre eigenen Zweifel hinwegkommen wollen? Sie konnte sich das Leben mit diesem Mann nicht vorstellen. Es war, als nehme sie eine Schuld auf sich, die sie nicht kannte. (✶Now she had already raised expectations without knowing what she really wanted. Had this not been foreseeable for her, or had she wanted to get over her own doubts in this way? She couldn’t imagine life with that man. It was as if she was taking on a debt she didn’t know.)

In summary, it can be said that FID has not changed grammatically and structurally in German literature since its emergence in the eighteenth century. The changes essentially concern narrative motivation and thematic embedding. The lexical-syn-

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tactic profiling of NT and CT is further advanced. And under the sign of an increasingly complicated perspectivism, FID expanded its role in narrative. Representing the consciousness of the characters up to their most secret movements, FID increasingly fulfilled a narrative function by carrying the story forward.

6 FID in Russian Literature 6.1 Aleksandr Puškin In Russian literature, the first traces of FID can be found in the Nestor Chronicle (Povest’ vremennyx let, compiled around 1113, oldest manuscript from 1377). But these are only isolated abridgments of direct discourse. Aleksandr Puškin makes the first conscious use of FID in Russian literature (on TI in Russian prose from Puškin to Dostoevskij: Schmid 1973, 171–186; on FID from Puškin to the 1920s: Hodel 2001, 107–265). In his “novel in verse” Eugene Onegin (Evgenij Onegin, 1825–1833), at the end of chapter 5, the narrator depicts the dialogue between Ol’ga and Lenskij (as it is perceived by Lenskij!) and Lenskij’s thoughts in FID: Но ей нельзя. Нельзя? Но что же? Да Ольга слово уж дала Онегину. О боже, боже! Что слышит он? Она могла. . . Возможно ль? Чуть лишь из пеленок, Кокетка, ветреный ребенок! Уж хитрость ведает она, Уж изменять научена! Не в силах Ленской снесть удара; Проказы женские кляня, Выходит, требует коня И скачет. Пистолетов пара, Две пули – больше ничего – Вдруг разрешат судьбу его.

(But no, she cannot. Cannot? But what is it? Why, Olga has given her word already to Onegin. Ah, good God, good God! What does he hear? She could. . . How is it possible? Scarce out of swaddling clothes And a coquette, a giddy child! Already she is versed in Guile, already to be faithless has been taught! Lenski has not the strength to bear the blow; cursing the pranks of women, he leaves, demands a horse, and gallops off. A brace of pistols, two bullets – nothing else – Shall in a trice decide his fate; trans. Vladimir Nabokov)

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The quote shows how Puškin can already deal with the device in a complex implementation. Puškin must have known the device from Western literatures, especially from French, which he knew excellently. His predecessor, the Sentimentalist Nikolaj Karamzin, who was the first in Russian literature to immerse himself in the souls of his heroes, was far from FID. In “Poor Lisa” (“Bednaja Liza,” 1792), Karamzin’s most famous narrative, the sentimental narrator revolves around the inner world of his heroine, but he does so in an extremely narratorial voice by bursting into the story with emotional exclamations and rhetorical apostrophes. There is no trace of FID. Representation of the heroine’s thoughts and emotions, for which FID would have been natural, actually uses distinctly marked direct discourse: Ах! – думала она. – Для чего я останусь в этой пустыне? (✶Oh! – She thought. – Why do I stay in this wilderness?)

Puškin also uses FID in his narrative prose. In his first completed prose work, The Tales of Belkin (Povesti Belkina, 1831), he developed sovereign mastery of this perspective technique. In “The Station Supervisor” (“Stancionnyj smotritel’”) he even uses a special form of FID which can be called free indirect narration (on this device: Herdin 1905: Bericht, with examples from Jean Paul and Ludwig Ganghofer; Steinberg 1971 berichtete Rede; Spitzer 1928: berichtete erlebte Rede): the Sentimental narrator reproduces the station supervisor’s account of the alleged kidnapping of his daughter Dunja by the hussar Minskij. The narrator’s reproduction varies between a narratorially sober report of the facts and the figural representation of the inner world of the deceived father. The figural segments include FID and free indirect perception. At one point, however, at the culmination of the plot, the free indirect narration goes beyond the limitation of perspective. Vyrin, the father, who has gained cunning access to his daughter’s apartment in St. Petersburg, has to witness the tender tête-à-tête of his “lost sheep” with the ravenous “wolf”: Минский сидел в задумчивости. Дуня, одетая со всею роскошью моды, сидела на ручке его кресел, как наездница на своем английском седле. Она с нежностью смотрела на Минского, наматывая черные его кудри на свои сверкающие пальцы. Бедный смотритель! Никогда дочь его не казалась ему столь прекрасною; он по неволе ею любовался. (In the room, which was elegantly furnished, Minskij was seated, deep in thought. Dunja, dressed in all the finery of the latest fashion, sat on the arm of his easy chair like a lady rider on an English saddle. She was looking at Minskij with tenderness, winding his dark locks around her fingers, which glittered with rings. Poor supervisor! Never had his daughter appeared so beautiful to him; he could not help admiring her.)

The last two phrases are no longer a report of Vyrin’s account. Would the unhappy father have so frankly confessed to himself his most secret feelings and even

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revealed them before the narrator? Was he even capable of this? The depiction of Vyrin’s mixed feelings goes beyond the horizon of the character and is set out from the point of view of the Sentimentalist narrator. The exclamation “Poor supervisor!” expresses sympathy for the hero, but at the same time it ironically echoes Vyrin’s two-fold exclamation “Poor Dunja!” that leads back to Karamzin’s “Poor Lisa.”

6.2 Mixail Lermontov, Ivan Gončarov, Nikolaj Gogol’ Lermontov’s first attempt at prose, the novel Vadim (1832–1834), could not yet break away from the lyrical-pathetic style the poet had used in his Romantic verse narratives (Ėjxenbaum 1924, 127–134). NT and CT are largely in the same style and contain the same expressiveness (Vinogradov 1941, 519–521). The two discourses are also not noticeably differentiated in their evaluative positions. The narrator expresses his solidarity with both the angelic Ol’ga and the demonic Vadim. The following interior monologue of Vadim, held in the mode of FID and in the tense of NT, corresponds in its language completely to the rhetorically elaborate style of Lermontov’s early, still verse-oriented prose. Но третья женщина приблизилась к святой иконе,  – и  – он знал эту женщину! .  .  . Ее кровь – была его кровь, ее жизнь – была ему в тысяча раз дороже собственной жизни, но ее счастье  – не было его счастьем; потому что она любила другого, прекрасного юношу; а он, безобразный, хромой, горбатый, не умел заслужить даже братской нежности; он, который любил ее одну в целом божьем мире, ее одну,  – который за первое непритворное, искреннее: люблю с восторгом бросил бы к ее ногам все, что имел, свое сокровище, свой кумир – свою ненависть! – Теперь было поздно. (✶But a third woman approached the holy icon, and – he knew this woman! . . . Her blood was his blood, her life – was a thousand times more valuable to him than his own, but her happiness  – was not his happiness; for she loved another, a beautiful young man; but he, ugly, limping, hunchbacked, could not even gain fraternal tenderness; he, who alone loved her in God’s wide world, only her, he, who for the first unfeigned, sincere “I love you” would have enthusiastically placed at her feet everything he possessed, his treasure, his idol – his hatred! – Now it was too late.)

In Vadim, FID serves the Romantic fusion of narrator and hero. It was only in the novel A Hero of our Time (Geroj našego vremeni, 1838–1840) that Lermontov succeeded in stylistically and ideologically individualizing the talking and thinking heroes. The perspectivism here, however, is not based on FID but on the change of narrator figures. Ivan Gončarov’s prose is the battlefield of two styles. The Romantic expression, hitherto the predominant element of narration, moves into the characters’ sphere clearly delimited by the narrator. In FID, the narrator no longer expresses

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his solidarity with his figures, but ironically represents their inappropriate way of speaking. The techniques of double-voiced FID, which are already encountered in Gončarov’s early stories, unfold fully only in the novel A Common Story (Obyknovennaja istorija, 1847; see Brodskaja 1955). The dominant element in Nikolaj Gogol’s narrative is skaz, which mostly appears in its ornamental version (Schmid 2014b). Skaz is a clear narratorial device. In the famous novella “The Overcoat” (“Šinel’”; 1842), the heterogeneity of the narrative text can mainly be explained by the skaz narrator with his variable narrative gesture, who is constantly pushing himself into the foreground. Although we encounter pronounced FID in this narrative, which in some places even becomes an interior monologue, the narrative report is essentially structured narratorially. This is also the case with the following example: Как же, в самом деле, на что, на какие деньги ее [шинель] сделать? Конечно, можно бы отчасти положиться на будущее награждение к празднику, но эти деньги давно уж размещены и распределены вперед. Требовалось завести новые панталоны, заплатить сапожнику старый долг за приставку новых головок к старым голенищам, да следовало заказать швее три рубахи да штуки две того белья, которое неприлично называть в печатном слоге, – словом, все деньги совершенно должны были разойтися; и если бы даже директор был так милостив, что место сорока рублей наградных определил бы сорок пять или пятьдесят, то все-таки останется какой-нибудь самый вздор, который в шинельном капитале будет капля в море. (But how, whereof, of what money is he supposed to have it [the overcoat] made? Of course, one could partly rely on the expected bonus for the holiday, but this money is planned and distributed long in advance. He had to buy new trousers, pay the cobbler an old debt for sewing a new upper on the old boot shafts, and order three shirts and two pieces of lingerie, which is clumsy to name in written language, in short, he would run out of money completely; and even if the director were gracious enough to make forty-five or fifty rubles of gratification instead of forty rubles, all that which would remain would be ridiculous rubbish, which in the sum for the overcoat would be like a drop in the ocean.)

6.3 Fëdor Dostoevskij and Lev Tolstoj An unmistakable sign of the novelty of FID is the lack of understanding by the audience of the figural perspective. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) caused the public’s moral indignation against the author and triggered a lawsuit on accusations of immorality. The author was thought to be speaking in his own name by presenting the adulterous thoughts of the heroine in a figural presentation, which was still unusual at the time. Fëdor Dostoevskij’s short novel “The Double” (“Dvojnik,” 1846) was a great failure after the lavish success of the epistolary novel Poor Folk (Bednye ljudi, 1846). From the judgment of the literary critic Vissarion Belinskij

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(1846, 565), we can conclude that the audience was irritated by the radically applied figural perspectivation in which FID (in both variants possible in Russian) has the main share: “The author puts himself, so to speak, in the skin of another, completely foreign being.” In FID, the narrator offers what the hero perceives as objective events. That the doppelgänger is not a Romantic figure of fantastic literature, but merely the product of the subjective delusion of a sick brain, can only be guessed from individual signs. So it remains unclear what actually happens in the story, what is reality and what is chimera. In “The Double,” FID often widens into extended interior monologues, not seldom interior dialogues between Goljadkin’s two voices (cf. Schmid 1973, 85–148). In the following free indirect monologue alternating between basic type and variant (italics), Goljadkin tries to calm himself in the face of the disturbing appearance of the doppelganger: Всё было так натурально! И было от чего сокрушаться, бить такую тревогу! Ну, есть, действительно есть одно щекотливое обстоятельство, – да ведь она не беда: оно не может замарать человека; амбицию его запятнать и карьеру его загубить, когда не виноват человек, когда сама природа сюда замешалась. К тому же гость просил покровительства, гость плакал, гость судьбу обвинял, казался таким незатейливым, без злобы и хитростей, жалким, ничтожным и, кажется, сам теперь совестился, хотя, может быть, и в другом отношении, странным сходством лица своего с хозяйским лицом. (It was all so natural! And what a thing to break his heart over, what a thing to be so distressed about! To be sure there was, there really was, one ticklish circumstance – but, after all, it was not a misfortune; it could be no disgrace to a man, it could not cast a slur on his honour or ruin his career, if he were innocent, since nature herself was mixed up in it. Moreover, the visitor begged for protection, wept, railed at destiny, seemed such an artless, pitiful, insignificant person, with no craft or malice about him, and he seemed now to be ashamed himself, though perhaps on different grounds, of the strange resemblance of his countenance with that of Mr. Goljadkin’s.)

The impression that in “The Double” the narrator reacts dialogically to the hero’s speech, on which Baxtin’s well-known hypothesis of polyphony is based, arises from the fact that the hero’s interior dialogue is distributed between different patterns of thought representation. Often a speech in FID invalidates doubts, fears, or hopes that have previously been formulated in direct or indirect discourse. In the following example, direct interior speech is followed by a counter-replica in FID. «Что же это, сон или нет [. . .]?» Нет, не сон, да и только. (“What does it mean? Is it a dream?” [. . .] No, it was not a dream and that was all about it.)

In FID, the narrator prefers to portray Goljadkin’s downplaying voice (italics), whereupon in direct interior discourse the counter-replica of the concerned voice follows.

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Вот он, господа, и выжидает теперь тихомолочки, и выжидает ее ровно два часа с половиною. Отчего ж и не выждать? И сам Виллель выжидал. «Да что тут Виллель! – думал господин Голядкин, – какой тут Виллель?» (So here he was, waiting now for a chance to slip in, and he had been waiting for it two hours and a half. “Why not wait? Villesle himself had waited. But what had Villesle to do with it?” thought Mr. Golyadkin: “How does Villesle come in?”; in the translation, the quotation marks are shifted. In the Russian text the direct discourse begins at “But what had Villesle [. . .].”)

In Dostoevskij’s great novels, FID and related forms do not appear in the density and with the semantic complication of “The Double”; but especially in Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) and in the first-person novel The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1875), they are also of great importance. In contrast to Dostoevskij, whose worlds are presented figurally despite the narrator’s constant presence, Lev Tolstoj is an author with a predominantly narratorial and even authorial perspective. The minds of his heroes are presented either in thought report, in indirect discourse, or in extensive direct interior monologues. And these direct monologues, in which the heroes account for themselves at turning points in their lives, are organized narratorially at the thematic and linguistic levels. FID is rarely encountered in Tolstoj’s novels, but when it does occur, it carries unmistakably narratorial accents. However, these accents are seldom ironic.

6.4 Figurally Colored Narration in Russian Postrealism (Anton Čexov) In Anton Čexov’s narratives, three phases have been distinguished (Čudakov 1971). Until 1888, humorous anecdotes were dominated by the subjective style of an ironic narrator. From 1883, a consistently figural technique began to prevail: CT is axiologically and stylistically maximally subjectified, while NT is largely neutralized. FID is widespread. In the third phase from 1895 onward, Čudakov observes a new increase in the presence and subjectivity of the narrator and a reduction of the classical FID. Čudakov’s observation must, however, be relativized: the origin of the new subjectivity is not NT, but CT. The result of this development is described by Čudakov (1971, 98) using 1899) as an example quite correctly: “The description is presented entirely in the narrator’s language; nowhere does it change to FID. But on the objective reconstruction of the events lies, as it were, the shadow of the emotional state of the character.” The text interference here changes from the classical FID to a form that is called in Russian nesobstvenno-avtorskaja reč’ (improperly authorial narration), in German uneigentliches Erzählen (improper narration; Holthusen 1968), and which

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I propose to call figurally colored narration in English (FCN; see Schmid 2022). This term denotes the punctual and extremely fluctuating figuralization of the narrative report, for which the narrator remains essentially responsible. How does FCN differ from FID? FID reproduces CT in the form of NT, with greater or lesser narratorial transformation. FCN is, by contrast, the narration of the narrator, which takes on unmarked evaluations and terms from CT, in varying density being “infected” by them (Spitzer 1922) or reproducing them ironically. In FID, the feature choice of the theme refers to CT; in FCN, by contrast, to NT. An example is provided by the beginning of Čexov’s tale “The Student” (“Student,” 1894). The first sentences, in which the narrator “sees” and speaks, are nonetheless interspersed with what are clearly figural evaluations (emphasized here with italics): Погода вначале была хорошая, тихая. Кричали дрозды, и по соседству в болотах что-то живое жалобно гудело, точно дуло в пустую бутылку. Протянул один вальдшнеп, и выстрел по нем прозвучал в весеннем воздухе раскатисто и весело. Но когда стемнело в лесу, некстати подул с востока холодный пронизывающий ветер, всё смолкло. По лужам протянулись ледяные иглы, и стало в лесу неуютно, глухо и нелюдимо. Запахло зимой. (At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.)

Before introducing the protagonist, the narrator already describes the world from the hero’s evaluative point of view, without, however, employing lexical or syntactic features that would indicate CT. FCN is characteristic of the late Čexov. It is as if the entire world depicted is immersed in the character’s horizon. FCN is associated with a considerable difficulty of reception. The figural part of the narrative report is less easy to identify than in the classical FID, in which exclamations, self-questions, and adjoining direct or indirect representation suggest the presence of CT. The figural moments of FCN, which does not distinguish itself from the purely narratorial context by syntactic means, consist mainly in the use of certain evaluations. Their identification presupposes recourse to the mental and ethical profile of the character. The device of FCN is by no means limited to Russian literature. It has been widespread in European and American narrative art since the end of the nineteenth century, but probably in no other literature is the device more constitutive of modern narrative prose than in Russian literature.

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6.5 “Socialist Realism” and Its Overcoming Even under the so-called Socialist realism, a socio-pedagogical doctrine proclaimed in 1934 as the “main method of Soviet artistic literature,” Russian prose writers used FID. But this was a meagre dwindling of the wealth of forms that had been developed in post-realism, symbolism (Andrej Belyj), and the artistic avant-garde of the 1910s–1920s (including Evgenij Zamjatin, Boris Pil’njak, Aleksej Remizov). The narrator degenerated into the author’s humorless and irony-free mouthpiece. The characters’ language, purged of characterological, local, and social idiosyncrasies, was committed to a neutral bookish style. If FID, which was suspected of bourgeois formalism, was used at all under the auspices of the official doctrine, it degenerated into a stylistically monotonous and colorless device of CT reproduction with clear narratorial-authorial intentionality (cf. Koževnikova 1971; Hodel 2001, 236–258). Since the end of the 1950s a rebirth of text interference can be observed. All innovative directions – from the “village prose” of Fedor Abramov, Viktor Astaf’ev, Vasilij Belov, and Vasilij Šukšin, through the Moscow novels and historical narratives of Jurij Trifonov, to the reflective journeys and novels of Andrej Bitov – give FID a central place in narrative structure (Schmid 1979). In the new prose, FID is characterized not only by high frequency and strong characterological stylization, but above all by expansion of the functional range. While FID has so far only reproduced inner speech, the reflections, perceptions, and standpoint of the character, it now spreads to all constructive elements of the work. It takes on tasks that have so far fallen to the narrator’s narration and description. As a narrative FID, it reproduces the prehistory of the hero and of the current events. As a descriptive FID it creates portraits, personal characteristics, scenes, and landscapes (Koževnikova 1971). Of course, one cannot speak of an “expansion” of the contents of FID in the strict sense. For FID, in all the variants mentioned above, basically restricts itself to the reproduction of facts of consciousness. In the new prose, the story is no longer formed by the external events themselves, but by the reflector’s mental acts. In the 1960s, FCN was truly cultivated (Koževnikova 1971, 154) by authors such as Jurij Trifonov, Vasilij Šukšin, Sergej Zalygin, Fëdor Abramov, Vladimir Tendrjakov, and Vera Panova. A key work in the renaissance of FCN, which became a leading device in narrative prose before Perestrojka, was Aleksandr Solženicyn’s short novel of life in a prison camp: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovič (Odin den’ Ivana Denisoviča, written 1959, published 1962). Although FCN and FID exhibit differing structures, it is not always possible to separate them from one another in Solženicyn’s text. As a result, the closing sentences of the novel can be considered either as the reproduction of a current process in the character’s consciousness, summing up the day’s events as he falls asleep (i.e., as FID) or as the words of the

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narrator who, independently of the current situation in the character’s consciousness, draws a balance of this day’s “successes” (i.e., as FCN): Засыпал Шухов, вполное удоволенный. На дню у него выдалось сегодня много удач: в карцер не посaдили, на Соцгородок бригаду не выгнали, в обед он закосил кашу, бигадир хорошо закрыл процентовку, стену Шухов клал весело, с ножовкой нa шмоне не попался, поработал вечером у Цесаря и табачку купил. И не заболел, перемогся. Прошел день, ничем не омраченный, почти счастливый. (Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him in the cells; they hadn’t sent the team to the settlement; he’d pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw-blade through; he’d earned something from Cezar in the evening; he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it. A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.)

The ambiguity visible here is not the least of the reasons that have made FCN a fundamental narrative device for Russian literature between the Thaw and Perestrojka.

7 Conclusions (1) Language employs specific grammatical means in the formation of FID. The varying use of tenses results in different degrees of markedness of FID, an important factor in the reception process. Low markedness reinforces the effect of hybridity and bitextuality. The ambiguous nature of FID causes the reader to refer back to the context. (2) The long-disputed question among researchers as to whether FID tends more toward empathy or irony can only be answered in consideration of the position which the narrator whose text reproduces and overlays the character text generally takes with respect to the character’s valuations. (3) In the medieval phase of German literature, contrary to French literature of the same period (Chrétien de Troyes), FID cannot be found. To compensate for this, the poets of the German Arthurian romances adopted various means to emulate the use of FID by their French models. (4) FID appeared in German literature only around the middle of the eighteenth century. It serves to depict inner doubts and uncertainties reflecting the struggles of the soul, in conjunction with a disjointed syntax marking a strong expressive function. As far as grammatical forms (tense, mode) are concerned, FID became amazingly well canonized during the eighteenth century. Already in this time, the

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device known as free indirect perception plays an important role. This device is in evidence even when only the thematic and evaluative markers point toward the character’s text while all other features concern the narrator’s text or are neutralized. (5) The first systematic use of FID in German literature dates back to Wieland’s novels. An early highlight in the emergence of FID is Goethe’s novel The Elective Affinities, where two seemingly contradictory peculiarities can be observed: (1) FID is difficult to identify because the characters are scarcely differentiated by their linguistic behavior, and (2) in FID the ironic voice of the narrator can be felt throughout. (6) Goethe’s novel of relationships is characterized by multiple perspectives: the thoughts and feelings not only of one main character but of all four main figures (and some minor ones) are represented in FID. This multiperspectivism has served as an example for the representation of complex configurations of people up to the present day (Wellershoff). (7) By around the middle of the nineteenth century, FID became a widely used device in German literature. The novel with the undoubtedly densest and structurally most relevant use of FID is Otto Ludwig’s Between Sky and Earth, which many consider to be the first German novel of consciousness. (8) In German postrealism and modernism, there are many masters of FID using the device for the representation of characters’ unconscious or half-conscious movements. (9) Against the background of the politically committed and ideology-critical novel of the post-war period, one purely psychological novel in particular attracts attention: Dieter Wellershoff’s Der Liebeswunsch  – in a sense a variation on Goethe’s Elective Affinities. (10) FID has not changed grammatically and structurally in German literature since its emergence in the eighteenth century. The changes essentially concern narrative motivation and thematic embedding. Under the sign of an increasingly complicated use of perspectivism, FID expanded its role in narrative. By opening the way deep into character consciousness, FID increasingly took on a narrative function as it contributed to carrying the story forward. (11) In Russia, the history of FID begins with Puškin’s verse and prose narratives with a use characterized by the author’s orientation toward French models. In his work can be found a special form: free indirect narration, a form that extends beyond the limits of perspective.

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(12) A climax in the application of FID is found in the young Dostoevskij, whose tale “The Double,” with its excessive use of this device, was rejected by the public due to a poor understanding of the unfamiliar technique. For Baxtin however, it was this very tale that was the starting point for his well-known polyphony thesis. (13) Another flowering of FID is the middle phase of Anton Čexov’s stories, where figuralization penetrates so deeply into the text that figural opinions sound like the author’s statement and are taken as such by many readers. (14) In Čexov’s third creative phase, text interference changes from FID to the form of figurally colored narration: the narration of the narrator which takes over unmarked evaluations and expressions from the character’s text in varying density, either “infected” by them or reproducing them ironically. (15) In the new Russian prose since the 1960s, FID is characterized not only by high frequency and strong characterological stylization, but above all by the expansion of the functional range, encompassing all constructive elements of the work.

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Monika Fludernik

Free Indirect Discourse in English (1200–1700) 1 Definition In English, Free Indirect Discourse (FID) is used both for the representation of utterances and of consciousness from the Middle Ages onwards. The main characteristics of FID in English can be related to three key parameters: (1) syntax, (2) referential aspects (pronominal reference, tense), and (3) expressivity markers. In English, FID’s (pronominal) referential system and deployment of tense operate in alignment with indirect discourse, whereas syntax and indexicality espouse the deictic center of the subject of the utterances or consciousness that are being depicted. (See Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 113–114; McHale 1978; Fludernik 1993.) Syntactically, FID is characterized by its free form, i.e., it does not integrate what was thought or said by the original subject into a subordinate clause as does indirect speech; the syntax of FID therefore corresponds with that of direct speech. FID clauses can include questions and imperatives (compare, in reported discourse, He asked whether she was happy or She ordered him to leave; in FID: Was she happy? and She should leave) as well as exclamations and incomplete sentences, even asyntactic verbal material. Like direct discourse, FID can make use of intermediate or final parentheticals (Banfield 1982). In contradistinction to syntactic freedom, reference to the persona whose utterances or subjectivity are being reported remains aligned with the referential standpoint of the reporting discourse. Hence a speaker or a subject referred to as she or you in the framing third-person or second-person frame text will continue to be referred to by she or you, whereas that subject would have referred to herself as I in direct discourse. (Examples: [a] Tim shouted at Harry: “I will kill you”— appears in FID as: Tim shouted at Harry. He would kill him; [b] You were saying to Margery again and again “I love you” – in FID: You were declaring your love to Margery. You loved her, you reiterated.) In parallel with pronominal reference, temporal morphology also aligns with the reporting frame as it does in indirect discourse (rule of consecutio temporum/sequence of tenses): past tense for simultaneity, past perfect for anteriority, and conditional tense for posteriority. There are, however, instances

Note: Research for this article has been funded in the context of the Reinhart-Koselleck-Projekt (2019–24) 404215440. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-013

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in English of FID where consecutio temporum is not used (Steinberg 1971, 255–70) as likewise in Russian or Medieval French (see the articles by Schmid and Marnette in this handbook). In these cases, it is possible to recognize FID only because of the referential shift. On gnomic sentences not employing sequence of tense, see Steinberg (225–35). Due to its third constitutive feature, expressivity, FID tends to foreground the indexicality of the original mind or speaker, whose deictic center (K. Bühler [1934] 1990; Duchan et al. 1995; Banfield 1982) supplants that of the reporting discourse. Indexicality is responsible for the impression of “voice” in FID, evoking the viewpoint, attitudes, and emotions of the discourse being recounted (Fludernik 2001). In parallel to Boris Uspenskij ([1970] 1973), one can distinguish between (a) a spatiotemporal positioning, (b) an expressive (linguistic), (c) a psychological, and (d) an ideological plane of point of view. (a) The spatiotemporal orientation relates to the hic et nunc of the reported speaker or mind. Whereas in indirect discourse one has to shift now into then and here into there (if the framing report is in the past tense), FID generally tends to adopt the here and now of the reported subject. This may also involve relational terms, for instance terms of endearment and forms of address attributable to the subjective point of view of the reported subject. Such signals of viewpoint belong to (b), i.e., expressive markers of a linguistic type; they moreover include adjuncts, intensifiers, evaluative adjectives, epithets, malapropisms, and exclamations. They serve to provide contours of a subjective and especially emotional involvement. The psychological point of view (c) concerns subjective perceptions, insights, and attitudes attributable to the represented subject’s speech or consciousness. (d) Owing to their correlation with attitude, opinion, and ideological stance, the noted expressive markers additionally serve to project an ideological position for the reported subject. FID can therefore be defined as a textual (linguistic) phenomenon, namely a strategy of speech and thought representation characterized by both formal (syntactic, referential) and deictic (indexicality, expressive vocabulary) features. However, owing to syntactic ambiguity and a lack of colloquialisms or idiosyncratic stylistic features, there are sometimes insufficient signals available to unequivocally establish FID; often the classification of a passage as FID is due to an interpretative choice, since a stretch of discourse may be attributable to alternative voices and modes (thought and/or speech). Where a particular passage displays many expressive markers, ambiguity will focus on determining whether the “voice” projected by these markers is that of the narratorial or the reported speaker.

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2 Exploring FID Criticism of free indirect discourse has focused on three major issues (voice, literariness, function), to be discussed in what follows. Schmid (in this handbook) outlines a number of models: one is his own text interference model (FID consists of a mixture of narratorial text and characters’ text; see also Schmid 2017); the second, more traditional approach is the linguistic paradigm featuring categories of speech representation, which is adopted in this article. The intermediary position of FID on a scale of forms of speech representation (free direct–direct–free indirect–indirect speech–speech report–narrative report of speech acts) is not only mirrored formally in the evocation of consciousness (soliloquy/interior monologue–free indirect thought–(indirect thought)–psychonarration–thought report–narrative report of thought acts); it also illustrates the in-between-ness of FID, in which features pertaining to the narrator’s language are intermingled with features of what is assumed to be the characters’ discourse. Unlike the popular dual voice hypothesis (Pascal 1977), which argues for the existence of two overlapping “voices” in FID, Fludernik (1993) has argued that this impression of voices is an effect generated by the markers of expressivity, projecting a fiction of voice rather than providing a realistic echo of a character’s discourse (which is in any case fictive). “Voice” does not exist in and of itself; it emerges on the basis of linguistic expressives that are interpretationally related to the deictic center of a person to be distinguished from the source of the narrative discourse (speaker, narrator). When the passage in question is ironic, one does indeed have the impression that the narrator reporting a character’s discourse is emphasizing a double code and alerting us to the clash of styles, attitudes, or arguments between the reporter and the reported utterance or thoughts. Yet, when the reporting is done in a consonant or neutral rather than a dissonant fashion, the reader will tend to forget about the narrative voice (since it is often covert rather than overt, to use the terminology of Chatman 1978, 197–211) and will gain the impression of that character’s discourse reaching him or her in a seemingly unmediated fashion. (On the terms “consonance” and “dissonance,” see Cohn 1978, 26–33.) The evocation of voice can be foregrounded by a number of signals of FID – the more the better – but there are also passages in which there are no lexical or syntactic markers of subjectivity and where it will depend on the reader’s interpretation of the context whether or not to assume that a particular passage is to be attributed to a character. In the controversy between the proponents of univocality and those of dual voice (the former relying on the no-narrator theory of FID or optional narrator theory; Banfield 1982, 2019; Patron 2009, 2021), the resolution of the conflict depends on the context in terms of narrative situation and on the question of whether there is or is not a narratorial persona in all narratives. In alignment with

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Stanzel’s theory of narrative, figural narratives, i.e., narratives with prominent and continuous internal focalization, can be argued to evoke an illusion of immediacy. Stanzel’s authorial–figural continuum ([1979] 1984, 76–77, 186–200), a feature of much mid- or late Victorian fiction, serves to lead from narratorial into figural passages that make us forget about the presence of a narrator and likewise takes us back again. On the other hand, radical modernist texts (when there is no first-person pronoun singular or plural in evidence, nor a particular viewpoint or set of opinions conveyed) may have such a covert narrative voice that the assumption of the existence of a narratorial persona becomes a matter of ideology or theoretical assumption. So far, this article has implied a literary context of narrative. However, it needs to be emphasized that FID occurs in oral communication and in journalism, history writing, and letters, diaries, and other more informal discourses, i.e., in non-literary and non-narrative texts. Although reports of other people’s speech are almost invariably part of a narrative (since these utterances occur within situations that are being recounted), there are contexts in which discourse can be reported outside a narrative frame. For instance, a reporter can put down in writing an interview with a minister where the form given to the questions and answers may employ a few instances of FID. In philosophical studies especially, the views of a philosopher with whose tenets the writer is engaging may at times slide into FID. Hence, though the overwhelming contexts of FID are narrative, this is not invariably so. Secondly, even though they are narrative, a considerable number of texts containing FID and oral narratives employing the device are factual; hence, the reported consciousness and utterances are to be attributed to real (historical or currently existing) persons and not merely to fictional characters. Yet the veracity of such reports tends to be variable even so, ranging from near-equivalence to schematized exaggeration and free imaginative invention (Fludernik 1993, ch. 9; Mäkelä 2018). Even direct speech is verbatim only in some key social contexts (the law, politics) where misrepresentation carries heavy penalties (perjury, loss of position), but the bulk of reported speech tends to be produced at random, elaborating on faulty memory. (But see Michael H. Short in Short et al. 2002 for an emphatic upholding of the intended verbatim nature of DD.) This is even truer of the rendering of other people’s consciousness, based on speculation and assumption and where we only very rarely (in historical accounts) have sources underwriting FID passages. In oral discourse, FID and direct thought renderings of others’ minds are invariably invented for the sake of entertainment and vivacity, and this holds true especially for collective FID (Chafe 1980; Fludernik 1993, ch. 9). Much discussion has been devoted to the functions of FID. For literary texts, online advice for writers emphasizes the usefulness of FID as a means of looking into characters’ minds without needing to switch to the first person, assuming a

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normative third-person past-tense narrative context. Both for speech and thought representation, FID has served as an interesting alternative to direct discourse and the traditional indirect modes of reporting (indirect discourse and narratorial description of speech or mind content, i.e., speech report or psychonarration). There are well-known patterns in dialogues in which one party’s speech is reproduced in direct speech and the interlocutor’s responses are rendered in FID (e.g., Little Dorrit, Bk. 2, ch. 1), or in which one persona monologizes and the listener’s internal comments are interspersed in the FID form (e.g., Jeremy’s thoughts commenting on Dr. Obispo’s harangue in Huxley’s After Many a Summer). FID passages can betoken shyness (as in Fanny’s exchange with Edmund in Mansfield Park, ch. 2) or critical distance, or signal other character-related implications (as in the exchanges between “the insinuating traveller,” i.e., Rigaud, and Miss Dorrit and between Mr. Gowan and the “Host” in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Bk. 2, ch. 1). Alternations occur also in the combination of indirect speech or speech report with FID, or psychonarration and FID, where the FID passage foregrounds linguistic peculiarities of the person and the indirect and reportial rendering levels the style or summarizes the gist of the matter. In what follows, the following abbreviations are used: DD/DS/DT iM/SOL ID/IS FIS/FIT psN spR NRSA/NRTA FIP NARR ME EME/EM

direct discourse (direct speech, direct thought) interior monologue/soliloquy indirect discourse/speech free indirect speech/thought (subcategories of FID) psychonarration speech report narrative report of speech/thought acts free indirect perception narrative report Middle English Early Modern English/early modern

Passages of FID are printed in italics. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. In alignment with Fludernik (1993) and Palmer (2004), there is no indirect thought (IT) category, since that-clauses following a verb of thinking describe (rather than report) mental content and are therefore psychonarration. “Psychonarration” and “speech report” are employed as terms for more extended presentations of consciousness and speech (compare Fludernik 1993, 291). Short’s labels NRTA and NRSA are here applied to what Semino and Short (2004, 30–31) have called NI and NV (Internal Narration and Narrator’s Representation of Voice); they

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refer to minimal references to an act of speech or thought (He discoursed on his youth; She was worried). I often employ the term “soliloquy” for direct internal thought in the medieval and early modern periods, on account of its rhetorically fashioned quality. Free indirect perception (Chatman 1978, 204), also called narrated perception (Cohn 1978; Fludernik 1993, 304–9) and represented perception (Brinton 1980), refers to a passage rendering a character’s perception in a syntactic form and/or by means of deictic and lexical features that suggest that the passage reflects that character’s experience and point of view. FIP often cohabits with FIT (see the “erlebte Wahrnehmung” of Steinberg 1971, 27–37).

3 The Middle Ages The following summary focuses on English narrative texts composed after, roughly, 1250, from the South English Legendary onward, to the turn of the sixteenth century. It reflects knowledge about FID in Middle English at the time of writing (spring 2021), updating information in Fludernik (1993). So far, eighteen passages of FID have been traced in Middle English, with four other passages discussed in the criticism under the heading of FID (though they do not meet the formal requirements). Of the eighteen passages, twelve are FIS and six FIT (one of them also interpretable as FIS). FID in English before the late eighteenth century is thus not limited to the representation of speech, nor does FID exclusively concentrate on the representation of consciousness. The representation of thought predominates in the medieval romances, whereas the Chaucer and Gower examples are exclusively devoted to the reporting of utterances. The example passages come from the romances (five in verse, one in prose), from the saint’s lives (three), and from Gower (one), with Chaucer’s work covering the rest (eight). This scarcity of FID requires explanation. Whereas French extensively uses FIS and FIT in the chansons de geste and the romans d’aventures (Marnette 1998, 2005), in translations or rewritings of these texts in Middle High German, as Hübner (2003) has shown, these passages are rarely rendered by means of FID, mostly replacing Chrétien’s FIT by psychonarration or iM/SOL. Similarly, an analysis of Hübner’s examples from Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain ou Le Chevalier au lion (ca. 1180) in the equivalent English romance, the anonymous Ywain and Gawain (early 1300s), demonstrates the same practice: very few of Chrétien’s FIT passages are rendered as FIT in English; the rest are psN or DD. To illustrate ME use of FID, an example of a very brief passage of FIS is the following passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 2471: [1] “And he nikked hym ‘Naye!’ – he nolde bi no ways” (And he told him, “No,” he would not at all; see Pons-Sanz 2019, 215). Here the change from the first to the third person and the

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expressive “no way” plus the interjection “nay” show that this is FIS rather than ID. A much longer passage is the following: [2] Daun John hym maketh feeste and murye cheere, And he hym tolde agayn, ful specially, How he hadde wel yboght and graciously, Thanked be God, al hool his merchandise, Save that he moste, in alle maner wise, Maken a chevyssaunce, as for his beste, And thanne he sholde been in joye and reste. (Chaucer, “The Shipman’s Tale”, B2 342–348; Riverside edition) (Father John rejoices [lit. makes himself a festival] and [makes] merry cheer, and told him again in detail how he had well and successfully bought his whole merchandise, thank God; only he still must, without fail, take up a loan [to repay his debts] for his best interest, and then he would be happy and relax.) Here we move from speech report (“he told him how”), which already includes an interjection (“thank God”) to a FID clause after the semicolon. The FIS passage is not particularly expressive, except for the must, one of those verbs that frequently relate to a reported person’s mentality in its epistemic (rather than deontic) meaning. Likewise, the “sholde” hints at the speaker’s perspective (should rather than would). FID is particularly hard to pin down in Middle English because “written direct quotation,” as Moore says, “does not seem to function as strictly in pre-modern texts. [. . .] The pre-modern expectation for quotation of direct speech in written language may have been more like present-day expectation for practices of oral reporting” (2011, 184). In terms of thought representation, the following two short passages can be cited: [3] The king alighte off his stede, [. . .] And his gode knightes two. All too fewe he hadde tho! (King Horn, lines 51, 53–54) (The king descended from his horse, [. . .] and [so did] his two knights. All too few they were [literally: had he then].) [4] “Now hath Porfir me forsake, That was wardain of al mi liif!” Oft he seyd allas allas That euer was he born of wiif! (“Seynt Katerine,” Ms.Auchil.fol.21; Horstmann edition, lines 597–600)

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(“Now has Porfir forsaken me, who was the guardian of all my life.” He often said: Alas, alas, that he had ever been born by a woman; Fludernik 2011, 87–88) In [3], the italicized passage seems to be an internal exclamation on the part of the king, though it could also be read as a narrator’s empathetic expression of sorrow. In [4], it is the tyrant who laments the treachery of his main councilor (who has converted to Christianity). Note that the verb say is used even for internal discourse, a feature that recurs with DD throughout Middle English and is common also in French (see Marnette in this handbook). In the romances, a lengthier passage of FIT is the following: [5] He [Gamelyn] thoughte on his londes that layen vnsawe, And his faire okes that down were i-drawe. His parkes were i-broken and his deer byreued; Of alle his goode steedes noon was him byleued; His howses were vnhiled and ful yuel dight; Tho thoughte Gamelyn it wente nought aright. (Gamelyn, lines 83–89) (Gamelyn thought of his landes . that were lying untended [unsown] / and of his beautiful oaks . that had been cut down. / His woods were destroyed . his deer taken away / of all his good horses . none was left [to him] / his houses were laid bare . and very badly cared for [de-stroyed]. / Thus thought Gamelyn . it all went badly [it had all gone awry].) The passage marks the fact that there is thought representation both before and after the FIT passage as highlighted in bold above. However, there are no expressive markers and no syntactic indications (like the question form) in this example. In the few examples of FID in Middle English found so far, one encounters only four cases with syntactic patterns typical of FID (interrogative and exclamative constructions); interjections occur in four passages; phrases and stylistic choices alignable with the character in nine passages; and the tell-tale marker for introducing a FID passage in three examples, one of which is the following: [6] For unto swich a worthy man as he [the Friar] Accorded nat, as by his facultee, To have with sike lazars aqueyntaunce. It is nat honest, it may nat avaunce, For to deelen with so swich poraille [. . .] [DD or FID] (Canterbury Tales, A 243– 247; quoted in Burnley 1983, 50) (For to such a worthy man as he was / it was not seemly in his position / to have anything to do with sick lepers / or to deal with such poor riff-raff.)

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Here the friar expresses his hypocritical rejection of lepers as “such poor riffraff”: his attitude reveals that he does not follow Christian precepts of charity. The passage from the General Prologue is part of a narratorial delineation of the Friar’s character; it here echoes his point of view, coming very close to the kind of ironic FID we know from Jane Austen. There is also one passage of collective FID in Capgrave’s epic verse legend of St Katharine of Alexandria (see Fludernik 2011, 91–92). Though pronominal alignment with the narrative is de rigeur in Middle English (if it were not, we would not be able to recognize FID), sequence of tenses is not necessary, though it does occur more often than not (see examples [1]–[5], with a change from the preterite to the present tense in [5]). There are no collocations of proximal deictics with the preterite, supposedly definatory of FID according to Banfield (1982), and Adamson (1995a, 1995b). The sources of FID in Middle English, given its sparse occurrence and the forms of the device, can be argued to derive from the oral language and also from syntactically less strict continuations of ID or psN. It is to be assumed from the material that authors were not ingeniously developing a new device but stepped into FID by echoing oral FID or by continuing indirect constructions, avoiding verba dicendi and cogitandi. As for the functions of FID in Middle English, they predominantly relate to evoking the “voice” of the reported speaker, presumably to enhance the effect of vivacity and entertainment. After all, legends and romances were performed by bards, and even Chaucer must have been read aloud or recited.

4 Early Modern FID In the early modern period, FID becomes a more extensively used device, but both in terms of the number of FID passages and in terms of their length, it still cannot compete with the use of DD (dialogue and soliloquy) and psychonarration. In fact, the most important innovation in EME relates to the burgeoning of psychonarration as a form of representation of consciousness. The soliloquies in EM romances, too, are much more refined than those in ME romances and draw attention to their rhetorical sophistication. At this point, I have found seventy-one passages of FID in EME, of which fifty-eight are FIS and thirteen FIT. Two passages of FIS are actually FID renderings of a written text (what Semino and Short would call “free indirect writing”). Although FID occurs across the board of early modern genres, examples of FIS occur mostly in the tradition of the picaresque novel, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and the criminal biography, whereas FIT passages are found in the romances, in Bunyan, and in Aphra Behn. In the romances, FIS also tends to be of more extensive length (more words per passage) than in the other genres and in ME.

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4.1 Romances The following summary is based on Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) and New Arcadia (1590), and on the selection in Paul Salzman’s anthology, which contains George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F. J. (1573), John Lyly’s Euphues (1578), and Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588). Of these, Lyly’s romance contains soliloquies both for speech and thought representation throughout, with minor passages of speech report, NRSA, psychonarration, and NRTA, but no FID. However, all the other texts do have FID passages, albeit few in number; the bulk of FID occurs in Master F. J., Pandosto, and the two Arcadias. Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde has only one very brief passage of FIS, namely when the usurper Torismond banishes his daughter and her friend: [7] “[. . .] yet his resolution might not be reversed, but both of them must away from the court without either more company or delay.” Similarly, Master F. J. deploys FID for the representation of utterances (see bolding in the quotation): [8] [. . .] they two walked apart [. . .] and fell into sad talk [NRSA], wherein Mistress Frances did very courteously declare unto him that indeed one cause of her sorrow [. . .] was that he had said so openly overnight that he could not love [. . .] [IS], for she perceived very well the affection between him and Madame Elinor, and she was also advertised that Dame Elinor stood in the portal of her chamber hearkening to the talk that they had at supper that night [spR?, FIS?] [. . .], wherefore she seemed to be sorry that such a word, rashly escaped, might become great hindrance unto his desire [spR]. But a greater cause of her grief was, as she declared, that his hap was to bestow his liking so unworthily [FIS], for she seemed to accuse Dame Elinor for the most unconstant woman living [FIS? FIT?]; in full proof whereof she bewrayed unto F.J. [. . .] [spR]. In this extract, there are two passages that could arguably be taken for FIS, marked by the connector for in the first and DD word order in the second instance; but the narratorial presentation is distancing, obviously critical of Frances’s deceitful exposure of Elinor’s supposed love affairs. This distancing shows in the use of the verb seemed (underlined above), a narratorial hint that she is trying to manipulate F. J., and a clear marker of the return to speech report, whereas syntactically – except for the seemed – one could have continued to read this as FIS. The subsequent sentence is unequivocally FIS if one takes “as she declared” to be a FID parenthetical in Banfield’s terms. However, at least in present-day English, the as would tend to prevent a FIS reading, and the subsequent for clause is narratorial, as is the rest of the sentence after the semicolon, which uses the verbum dicendi bewray and therefore is spR.

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As for the representation of consciousness, the novella employs psN and soliloquies (DD) throughout, with the possible exception of one passage, where psN perhaps dissolves into FIT (74). Robert Greene’s Pandosto contains six passages of FID, one of which could at least partially also be read as FIT. There is a long dialogue between Pandosto’s councilor Franion with the guest king Egistus, warning him of Pandosto’s contemplated treachery. Egistus at first refuses to believe the charge: [9] “He knew not, therefore, any cause that should move Pandosto to seek his death, but suspected it to be a compacted knavery of the Bohemians to bring the King and him at odds.” This is the third sentence following an introductory ID, and the FIS reading is corroborated by the phrase “compacted knavery,” definitely attributable to Egistus. In Franion’s answer, one also finds expressions that relate to his perspective: [10] “Therefore his Majesty did ill to misconstrue of his good meaning, sith his intent was to hinder treason, not to become a traitor; and to confirm his premises, if it please his Majesty to flee into Sicilia for the safeguard of his life, he would go with him”: “his Majesty” and “if it please his Majesty” directly echo Franion’s address to King Egistus. The romance also has a very modern-looking example of indirect speech that includes expressivity markers. When Pandosto hears his wife is with child, he [11] “swear[s] that she and the bastard brat she was withal should die if the gods themselves said no.” These epithets recur in a passage that could be read as FIS or FIT – it comes after a long FIS passage, detailing the arguments of the nobility trying to sway Egistus to mercy (IS → FIS): [12] These such like reasons could not appease his rage, but he rested resolute in this: that Bellaria, being an adulteress, the child was a bastard, and he would not suffer that such an infamous brat should call him father. Yet at last, seeing his noblemen were importunate upon him, he was content to spare the child’s life, and yet to put it to a worser death. For he found out this device: that seeing (as he thought) it came by fortune, so he would commit it to the charge of fortune, and therefore he caused a little cock-boat to be provided [. . .]. The passage can be read as a depiction of Pandosto’s mental deliberations, but at some point his decisions must also have been communicated, since “From this his peers in no wise could persuade him.” While “rested resolute” is either NRSA or NRTA, the passage after the colon has a number of expressive markers (“bastard,” “infamous brat”). Though the that seems to be a relative linked to “resolute in this,” it is not directly dependent on a verb of saying, which is merely implied. The construction is repeated in “he found out this device: that seeing [. . .].” Again, the initial that argues for a narratorial syntactic reading, but the inversion “so he would commit it” might reflect Pandoro’s perspective. Both that-clauses therefore tend toward an FID reading.

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In Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580), there are not only extensive passages of both consonant and dissonant psychonarration (Penguin edition, 80, 85–86, 95, 162–164, 199–200, 236, 251–252 – this is only a selection), but also eleven instances of FID. Among these, there are several reports of utterances that continue IS ([13] “She [Gynecia] told him [Philanax] how [. . .]. If he now forgot his prince [Basilius] he should show he had never loved but his fortune, like those vermin which suck of the living blood and leave the body as soon as it is dead”; 249). Another more interesting passage is the plea Kerxenus makes to his Mantineans to help the princes Pyrocles and Musidorus: [14] He willed them to consider that, when all was done, Basilius’s [sic] children must enjoy the state, who since they had chosen, and chosen so as all the world could not mend their choice, why should they resist God’s doing and their princesses’ pleasure? This was the only way to purchase quietness without blood, where otherwise they should at one instant crown Pamela with a crown of gold and a dishonoured title, which whether ever she would forget, he thought it fit for them to weigh. (282) Here the syntax (question form) identifies the passage as FIS, and later the content of what follows, which is clearly a continuation of Kerxenus’s oration. FIS also occurs in the continuation of Euarchus’s IS reply to the princes that they have not been unequivocally proved to be of noble blood and will have to submit to Arcadia’s laws as private men (333; see also 324, 332), in Philoclea’s response to Philanax (264), and in Timautus’s harangue (280). A more modern, “expressive” example of FIS is found in the scene where Dametas, having discovered Cleophila and Philoclea in her chamber, runs to the duke to tell him the tale: [15] “[. . .] he went first into the duke’s chamber, and not finding him there, he ran down crying with open mouth, the duke was betrayed, and that Cleophila did abuse his daughter” (237). Here “the duke was betrayed” is FIS, while the following that-clause is IS (crying [. . .] that). This is followed by IS with loans from Dametas’s phraseology when he declares that Cleophila (Pyrocles in disguise) [16] “was as arrant a man as himself was [. . .]; and that he was as close as a butterfly with the lady Philoclea” (237). FIS also occurs in the first and second riot scenes. In the first, the discourse of the rioters, initially conveyed in speech report, slides into FIS, marked syntactically by a number of questions: [17] Whereupon it were tedious to write their far-fetched constructions; but the sum was he [the duke] disdained them, and what were the shows of his estate if their arms maintained him not? Who would call him duke if he had not a people? [. . .] What need from henceforward to fear foreign enemies [. . .]. If

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Arcadia grew loathsome in the duke’s sight, why did he not rid himself of the trouble? [. . .] why should they that needed not be partakers of the danger, be partakers with the cause of the danger? (111–112) This passage continues for a whole page, almost entirely in FIS. (For another lengthy FIS passage see 101–102.) Both riots scenes represent collective discourse, and in the second riot, the representation is arguably of opinion rather than utterances, therefore FIT: [18] “But now, if the prince’s choice by so many mouths should be confirmed, what could they object to so rightly esteemed an excellency?” (278). A few lines later, one sentence can possibly be taken as Philanax’s self-justification to himself: [19] “went forward stoutly in the action of his master’s revenge, which he thought himself particularly bound to. [psN] For the rest, as the ordering of the government, he accounted himself but as one, wherein notwithstanding he would employ all his loyal endeavour” (278). It is mainly on account of the adjunct “for the rest” that this sentence allows for a FIT reading (rather than psN). There are thus only two passages of FIT in the Old Arcadia; all the other instances of FID represent utterances. The New Arcadia (1593) significantly expands the representation of consciousness in general. The book contains long passages of psychonarration besides numerous soliloquies. Yet there is only one extended indisputable passage of FIT, plus two short passages where one might perhaps construe the text to be FIT. All the other eleven instances of FID are speech representation. And there is one quite long example of the representation of written discourse in FID (Penguin ed., 452–454), which Semino and Short (2004, 31) would call free direct writing (on FDWr see also Bray 2018). The New Arcadia (in its traditional form of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 1593  – the Old Arcadia not having been rediscovered and published until 1926) allows the reader in-depth insights into the minds of all the major characters, both heroic (the two princes and princesses) and villainous (Cecropia, Amphialus). The passage of unquestionable FIT falls into two sections. In the first, we get a glimpse of Dorus writing a letter to Pamela, which conveys his problems with composition (I quote from the Penguin edition): [20] [. . .] mistrusting each word, condemning each sentence. This word was not significant; that word was too plain; this would not be conceived; the other would be ill-conceived; here sorrow was not enough expressed, there he seemed too much for his own sake to be sorry; this sentence rather showed art than passion, that sentence rather foolishly passionate than forcibly moving. (437)

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When Pamela receives the poem, she at first does not want to read it: [21] “Shall I,” said she, “second his boldness so far as to read his presumptuous letters? And yet,” said she, “he sees me not now, to grow the bolder thereby: and how can I tell whether they be presumptuous?” The paper came from him, and therefore not worthy to be received; and yet the paper, she thought, was not guilty. At last, she concluded it were not much amiss to look it over [. . .]. (438) While Pamela’s FIT is not very expressive, but contains a typical FIT parenthetical, the syntax in the earlier clauses delineating Dorus’s writing problems exemplifies the expressivity of FIT, especially by means of the deictics this and that, here and there. Among the many passages of FIS, the use of for-clauses to introduce the FIS passages is notable (W. Bühler 1937, 99, already commented on the prevalence of such connectives introducing FID). The most extended passage of FIS mixed with IS is the account that Clinias gives to Basilius of the riot in book 2 (389–392) and in which he details what the rioters were saying about “your sacred person” (390): [22] “But the sum was, you disdained them: and what were the pomps of your estate, if their arms maintained you not? Who would call you a prince, if you had not a people?” (391). The passage otherwise echoes that in the old Arcadia. Note that this passage is a representation of an oral instance of FIS, and that the referential shift is foregrounded by the address pronoun (the rioters say “he” or “the duke,” but Clinias, addressing Basilius employs “you,” since Your Majesty would have suggested the rioters had employed that honorific). As for the passage of written discourse reported in FID, this is a type of FID that occurs very rarely, and has previously been noted only for the eighteenth- and twentieth-century novel. The extract concerns Amphialus, who produces a communiqué justifying his imprisonment of Pamela and Philoclea with specious arguments for their security. The passage opens with: [23] “Then sent he to his mother’s brother, the king or Argos; but he was then so over-laid with war himself as from thence he could attend small succour” (452). It is to be assumed that the clause starting with but renders what the uncle has returned by way of answer, presumably in writing, though it could, just conceivably, be Amphialus’s recognition of what he has read, i.e., FIT. In what follows, we then get a detailed account of the content of the communiqué (452–454), introduced by [24] “he caused a justification to be written” in order to “hide indeed the foulness of his treason” (452). This is followed by a long sentence of narratorial report of what the communiqué says ([25] “For beginning how much the duty which is owed to the country goes beyond all other duties [. . .]; he fell by degrees to show that [. . .] the weal-public was more to be regarded than

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any person or magistrate that thereunto was ordained”; 452–453), a sentence that ends in a colon, after which the FIS rendering of Amphialus’s arguments starts: [26] [. . .] ordained: the feeling consideration whereof had moved him (though as near of kin to Basilius as could be) yet to set principally before his eyes the good estate of so many thousands over whom Basilius reigned, rather than so to hood-wink himself with affection as to suffer the realm to run to manifest ruin. (453) Although, syntactically, the relative clause can be argued to continue the speech (or rather writing) report, the colon and the delineation of Amphialus’s diction suggest that this is already FID. The passage ends: [27] But if in the meantime [. . .] he should be assailed, he would then [. . .] take arms [. . .]. And if the prince should command them otherwise, yet to know that therein he was no more to be obeyed [. . .]; since all that was done was done for his service howsoever he [the duke] might (seduced by Philanax) interpret of it: he [Amphialus] protesting that whatsoever he should do for his own defence should be against Philanax, and no way against Basilius. (453–454) The FID passage moves into spR with the verb “protesting,” though conceivably one could also read this as FID if Amphialus writes “I protest that.” One can therefore summarize that in the genre of the romance, FID occurs in increasing quantity but is nevertheless marginal in relation to the overwhelming use of DD in speech and soliloquies. It is also to be noted that FID is employed primarily for the reporting of utterances, but that here and there consciousness can also come to be rendered in FIT. The most noticeable development in the romance, however, concerns the quantitative and qualitative expansion of the representation of consciousness by means of psychonarration and soliloquies.

4.2 Early Modern Popular Narrative The following summary is based on the analysis of the texts included in Salzman’s anthology, i.e., Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1597) and Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (1594); the first book of Deloney’s The Gentle Craft (1598); Arthur F. Kinney’s collection of cony-catching tales; as well as Francis Kirkman’s The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled (1673), Richard Head’s Jackson’s Recantation (1674), and the anonymous Don Tomazo (1680), all from Peterson’s 1961 anthology.

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In these genres of popular literature (cony-catching tales, low-style prose, criminal biography), FID passages occur only rarely and almost exclusively for the representation of speech. A typical example from Nashe is the sentence [28] “No remedy there was but I must help to furnish him with money” (221) – rendering the captain’s plea to Jack Wilton before fleeing to the French camp. A longer passage follows the devilish plan of Cutwolf, who makes Esdras forswear himself: [29] The groundwork of it was this. That whereas he had promised for my sake to swear and foreswear, and commit Julian-like violence on the highest scales of religion, if he would but thus far satisfy me he should be dismissed from my fury. First and foremost he should renounce God and his laws, and utterly disclaim the whole title or interest he had in any covenant of salvation. Next he should curse Him to His face, as Job was willed by his wife, and write an absolute firm obligation of his soul to the devil, without condition or exception. Thirdly and lastly, having done this, he should pray to God fervently never to have mercy upon him or pardon him. (306–307) Although the that-clause opening the second sentence seems to be subordinate to “this,” the phrase “if he would but” could be argued to project a “voice,” and thus might already be read as FIS. The subsequent sentences stipulating the conditions of Cutwolf, meant to damn Esdras completely before he kills him, are unequivocally FIS. The passage at first seems to delineate Cutwolf’s plan, i.e., his reflections (→ FIT), but in the next paragraph retrospectively emerges as speech ([30] “Scarce had I propounded these articles [. . .]”; 307). There are six passages of FIS in the book. In Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, we have one sentence of FIT when Jack decides to wed one of his women servants: [31] “He [. . .] thought it better to have her with nothing than some other with much treasure. And besides, as far her qualities were good, so was she of very comely personage, of a sweet favour and fair complexion” (334). A second example of FID can be found in the scene where the merchants are rebuffed at the doors of the Cardinal’s house and are told by the servants [32] “my lord was busy [. . .]; or else he was asleep, and they durst not wake him; or at his study, and they would not disturb him; or at his prayers, and they durst not displease him; and still one thing or other stood in the way to hinder them” (364). By contrast, the first part of The Gentle Craft deploys DD throughout and has no FID. In Kinney’s anthology, there are four very brief instances of FIS, all in Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566), and only one of them is unequivocally FID. In the section on the “wild rogue” (123–124), the rogue threatens the poor man to give him more money: [33] “For it was not a penny would now quench his thirst” (124) – a clause one could read as narratorial comment but also as reporting

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the utterance or thought of the thief. The narrator then goes on to tell of his experiences with another beggar, who [34] “shewed me that he was a beggar by inheritance: his fond father was a beggar, his father was one, and he must needs be one by good reason” (124). In the subsequent section, the townspeople are interviewed by the gentleman who has had his horse stolen: [35] And una voce, all said that no such man dwelt in their street, neither in the parish that they knew of, but some did well remember that such a one they saw there lurking and huggering two hours before the Gentleman came thither, and a stranger to them. (125) Again, this can be read as a narratorial speech report, but if one takes remember as reflecting part of the discourse uttered, the stretch after “some of them” could be interpreted as FIS, particularly on account of “well” and “huggering.” In a passage from the chapter on the walking mort, the man rescuing the woman is trying to take advantage of her: [36] “And to be plain with you [she tells the narrator], he liked me so well, as he said, that I should there lie still, and [“if”] I would not grant him that he might lie with me” (139). Interpreted as FIS, the man might have said something like “I like you so well that I’d like you to sleep with me but if you won’t I’ll leave you stuck here.” By contrast, the criminal biographies have much clearer instances of FIS: [37] At length he calls for the people of the house and asks them if they knew not the men that were with him. They replied, “No.” What not know my lady’s men Thomas and Ralph that were there with him? “We know none of them,” Replied they, “Nor know not what lady you mean.” (Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, 69) This passage is notable because of the strategy of contrasting DS and FIS. The colloquial origins of the passage are patent. In the following example, it is the interjection which signals the presence of FIS: [38] “When Father Worsley came to discourse [with] Don Tomazo in English, heavens, what a refreshing it was to him! For he had not spoken to any person whatever in ten weeks before” (Don Tomazo, 282). And in Jackson’s Recantation, the FIS clause follows a colon: [39] “[. . .] he [. . .] claps to my breast a little ugly, brass-barreled pistol, and swore as bloodily as if he had been one of the trade above twenty years: if I would not instantly dismount, he would send a bullet to my heart” (16). In the popular literature, in which there must be many more examples, FID therefore echoes oral patterns of FID and serves to underline the vividness of the dialogue.

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4.3 Other Genres In the category of other genres, I treat passages from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563 edition) in the selection of G. A. Williamson from 1965 (four passages), a cursory glance at Holinshed (one passage), Roper’s life of Sir Thomas More (one passage), Bacon’s English New Atlantis (one passage), and John Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding, which has the most extensive use of FID. The passages in Foxe are all continuations of preceding speech reports or narrative clauses that suggest that what follows after the colon or semicolon represents an utterance: [40] “Barnes was commanded at the end of the sermon to declare that he was more charitably handled than he deserved; his heresies were so horrible” (147). Or: [41] “the answer of whom [the bishop to Tindall] was this: his house was full; he had moe than he could well find” (122). The passage from Holinshed (the edition used is Wallace and Hansen) is particularly interesting since it is part of an accusatory narrative in the second person. (The context is the treason trial after the coronation of Henry IV in 1399.) [42] “Well then (said the duke of Excester) this that I doo and shall say is true, that the late king [Richard II], the duke of Norfolke [Thomas Mowbray], and thou [Sir William Bagot or the Duke of Aumerle; reference unclear] being at Woodstoke, made me to go with you into the chappell, and there the doore being shut, ye made me to sweare upon the altar, to keepe counsell in that ye had to say to me, and then ye rehearsed that we should never have our purpose, so long as the duke of Lancaster [the later Henry IV] lived, and therefore ye purposed to have councell at Lichfield, and there you would arrest the duke of Lancaster, in such sort as by colour of his disobeieng the arrest, he should be dispatched out of life. [. . .].” (“Henry the Fourth,” 9) Besides the italicized passage, the clause before that (“and therefore ye purposed”) can also be argued to be FIS. This must be the first instance of second-person FIS, Holinshed having been published earlier than the New Arcadia (see [22] above). Two authors are particularly important for the later seventeenth century in terms of their use of FID: John Bunyan (1628–1688) and Aphra Behn (1640–1689). As Sylvia Adamson has demonstrated in a series of articles on “empathetic narrative” (most importantly in 1995a, 1995b), Bunyan’s Grace Abounding (1666) – like some other spiritual autobiographies – may be the first instance(s) of first-person FID. The importance of Bunyan for the history of FID was recognized in 1980 by Gérard Strauch. Based on the key aspect of the collocation of preterite tense and proximal deictics (i.e., PAST and NOW [Banfield’s notation]  – as in Käte Hamburger’s famous example sentence Morgen war Weihnachten, i.e., “Tomorrow was Christ-

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mas Eve”; see Hamburger [1957] 1993, 72; Fludernik 2009, 78), Adamson mapped all the occurrences of past-tense verbs with now, here, this, and so on in Sidney’s Old Arcadia, book 1; Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller; and Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and Pilgrim’s Progress. She found that Grace Abounding had the highest percentage of such collocations, and then found that other spiritual autobiographies (with one exception) also had elevated frequencies of the collocation. Adamson (1995b) discusses only two passages from Bunyan. One is the following: [43] And now was I both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die. Oh! how gladly now would I have been anybody but myself! anything but a man, and in any condition but my own! For there was nothing did pass more frequently over my mind, than that it was impossible for me to be forgiven my transgression, and to be saved from the wrath to come. (section 149) The second passage also includes an exclamation: [44] “I was [. . .] unfit to dwell among them, or be partaker of their benefits, because I had sinned against the Saviour. O how happy now was every creature over I was! For they stood fast, and kept their station, but I was gone and lost” (section 187). In both cases, the FIT passage is integrated into psN, which (in the first passage) also includes a now. All in all, I have found eight passages of FID in my edition of Grace Abounding: there are two other instances of FIT in sections 85 and 182; and “The Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan,” following Grace in the Penguin edition, has several examples of FIS: a longish passage of what Bunyan says to his community (88–89), starting with a for-clause; a witness report about Bunyan’s utterances (91–92); and three more renderings of speech (93, 94, 103). It is therefore likely that Adamson’s thesis that first-person FIT first emerged in the context of the spiritual autobiography is correct. However, the identification of NOW and PAST with FIT is misleading. It is true that in the debate between Hamburger and Stanzel (Hamburger 1953; Stanzel 1959), the latter was able to show that Hamburger’s examples of the epic preterite (such as Morgen war Weihnachten) were actually instances of FID. (According to the theory of the epic preterite, the past tense uses its quality of pastness in fiction, and this is proved by the possibility of combining proximal deictics with the past tense.) Stanzel demonstrated that at other times, the preterite does not lose its temporal force, only when it occurs in FID passages. However, what was not observed at the time is the fact that proximal deictics, and indeed quite a few other expressive markers typical of FID, can show up outside passages of FID in the narrator’s language, in the narrative report; and they can also be found in passages of ID, psN, or spR as part of what has variously been called Ansteckung (“infection,” “contamination”; Cohn 1978, 33; Stanzel

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[1979] 1984, 192–193) or “coloured speech” (Hough 1970). More recently, Kiki Nikiforidou (2010, 2012) has presented statistical evidence on the correlation between PAST (and past progressives) and NOW and the representation of consciousness in present-day English, but notes that the configuration can also occur in narratorial sentences. The conjunction of PAST and proximal deictics in a past-tense narrative therefore need not necessarily identify the passage as FID. In addition, now is often used as a narratorial discourse marker structuring the presentation of various stages in the plot development; in these cases, the now cannot even be claimed to have an “empathetic” function at all. Let me document this counter-claim to Adamson’s thesis (all instances of now are in bold). For instance, in book 1 of the Old Arcadia, a new paragraph starts with [45] “Now, newly after that the duke had begun his solitary life, there came [. . .] into this country two young princes [. . .]” (World’s Classics ed., 9). The use of now in this sentence relates entirely to the structuring of the discourse on the part of the narratorial voice, moving from the installation of Basilius in his exile to the onset of complications through the arrival of Pyrocles and Musidorus. After a digression about the identity of the two princes, the narrative returns to their arrival in Arcadia and to the impending initiating event of all further plot complications, Pyrocles’s falling in love with Philoclea, with [46] “So now it fell unto them” (10). Again, this now is a discursive discourse marker linked to narratorial presentation. Most instances of now in book 1 occur in direct speech. But in the following passage, which includes an account of Musidorus’s psychology, now occurs in a FIS clause and functions exactly as Adamson describes: [47] “[.  .  .] he besought him [Pyrocles] not to make account of his speech [. . .]; that he had never thought fancy could have received so deep a wound [ID], but now finding in him the force of it, he would no longer contrary it [. . .]” (12). Here, now may well be read as an empathy marker and a proximal deictic supporting the FIS interpretation. Other examples of now with a conjoined preterite are part of passages of psychonarration. For instance: [48] Cleophila (Pyrocles in disguise) “gave herself to feed those sweet thoughts which now had full possession of her heart” (36). Another case of empathetic narrative without a clear case of FID occurs later when Cleophila wonders about Pamela, [49] “But now, with a kind of rising in her heart, lest some evil should be fallen to her chosen friend [Philoclea’s sister Pamela] she hastily asked [. . .]” (45). Dito at the end of book 1, Pamela [50] would needs make open war upon herself [. . .]; for, indeed, even now find she did a certain working of a new-come inclination to Dorus. [. . .] But how therein Dorus sought to satisfy her you shall after hear; for now the day being closed up in darkness the duke would fain have had Cleophila gone to rest [. . .]. (49)

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There is, therefore, in the entire first book of the Old Arcadia only a single instance of FIT with now, but now repeatedly occurs in conjunction with the representation of thought in psychonarration (including two passages in the narrative of Pyrocles’s feats of heroism in the embedded tale of the first eclogues); and one equally often encounters now as a narrative discourse marker unaligned with characters’ consciousness. This demonstration was necessary to place the important insights of Adamson (1995b) in perspective. She is correct to argue that proximal deictics often collocate with an empathetic point of view, linking with the consonant representation of consciousness; however, the actual cases of FIT (in which the syntax is free) are comparatively rare. It is for this reason that a definition of FID as coterminous with the PAST and NOW (i.e., proximal deictics) formula does not work. Instead, one will have to connect that formula with the beginnings of consonant representation of consciousness. Adamson’s impression of extensive first-person FIT in Bunyan rests on her equation of the NOW and PAST formula with FIT; it should, however be aligned with internal focalization and not with FIT. In fact, in her second article, Adamson (1995a) also concedes that the conjunction of NOW and PAST is part of a wider phenomenon of deictic doubling and bi-perspectivity. What is extremely significant for the history of FID is the fact that the use of proximal deictics in the context of thought representation in third-person texts can be traced back to the sixteenth century; it will now be necessary to check in prose texts before Sidney to see where this occurs first and perhaps even look at late medieval prose romances. So far, outside Sidney and Bunyan, in none of the passages of FID that I am aware of was there any indication of a collocation of NOW and PAST; nor have I seen any passages of psychonarration that utilize this collocation. In the examples quoted above, [4] does employ now, but FIT is in the present tense; and in a passage cited by Dahlberg (2003, 27) from The Master F. J., the passage with now and past tense is neither FID nor internally focalized. The gradual development of internal focalization in Sidney and Bunyan could therefore be seen as another key development of the early modern period, linking with the more expansive use of psychonarration. However, it is only in the modernist novel that the collocation of NOW and PAST becomes an outstanding feature of both FIT and psychonarration; before that period, its occurrence enhances a development in progress but without becoming a necessary constituent of either FIT or internal focalization. The proliferation of passages of psychonarration, with some instances of FIT, is particularly notable in the second key author of the period, Aphra Behn. Fludernik (1993, 242; 1996b, 155–158; 1996a) already pointed out that there are examples of FID in Aphra Behn in Love Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister (1684–1687), Oroonoko, and some of her stories. Beside two longer passages of FIS from Love Letters, that novel also has two instances of FIT, notable because they employ the present tense:

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[51] [. . .] she reconciles him with every touch, and sighs on his bosom a thousand grateful vows and excuses for her fault, while he weeps his love, and almost expires in her arms; she is not able to see his passion and his grief, and tells him she will do all things for his repose. (part 3) [52] [. . .] he [Brilliard] advanced near the door, but finding it shut walked yet with greater impatience, every half minute going to the door; at last he found it yield to his hand that pushed it: but oh, what mortal can express his joy! His heart beats double [. . .]. (part 2) In [51], the italicized FID passage can be read as either FIS or FIT, depending on whether one interprets Sylvia’s inability to endure Octavio’s passion as a thought or an utterance. One could also see the clause as psN. In [52], the FIT reading is less problematic on account of the interjection and the exclamative. In a FIS passage from Oroonoko, we move from IS which contains many expressive markers, to a brief clause in FIS and back to IS: the governor of Surinam, in discourse with his council, [53] concluded, that (damn ’em) it might be their own cases; and that Caesar ought to be made an example to all the Negroes, to fright ’em from daring to threaten their betters, their Lords and masters: and at this rate no man was safe from his own slaves; and concluded, nemine contradicente, that Caesar should be hanged. On Behn’s FID, see also Skinner (2001, 257) and Bradburn (2011). What is more remarkable is the fact that Behn’s stories focus quite extensively on thought representation, displaying long passages of psychonarration, and this gives rise to examples of FIT as well. In the collection by Maureen Duffy that I was using, there are three instances. In the first, the sentence “What shall she do?” is wedged into the move from action report to psN and continues with speech report and IS (“The Fair Jilt”). In the second passage, the defendant, accused by the eponymous Miranda, replies to the Father Provincial: [54] May heaven forgive that bad woman, and bring her to repentance! For his part, he was not so much in love with life, as to use many arguments to justify his innocence; unless it were to free that order from a scandal, of which he had the honour to be profess’d. But as for himself, life or death were things indifferent to him, who heartily despis’d the world. (“The Fair Jilt”)

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The final instance is again FIT: [55] She was eternally thinking on him, how handsome his face, how delicate every feature, how charming his air, how graceful his mien, how soft and good his disposition, and how witty and entertaining his conversation, she now fancy’d, she was at the Grate, talking to him as she us’d to be, and blest those happy hours she past then, and bewail’d her misfortune, that she is no more destin’d to be so happy, then gives a loose to grief; [. . .], all frighted with horror; but, alas! whither would she fly, but to a life more full of horror? (“The Story of the Nun”) In the beginning, syntactically, we have psN (“thinking on”), but the subsequent text already evokes an impression of FIT with the repeated how-clauses, no longer felt to be subordinating but exclamatory. The continuation of the passage after the quoted extract can also be interpreted as FIT, though the clauses are ambiguous between FIT and psN. As can be seen from the examples, not one of these passages has a NOW and PAST construction. In summary, as we have seen, the early modern period offers quite a large number of FID passages. However, only a few of these, mostly in the popular genres, already employ the speaker’s or the consciousness’s deictic center to invoke the feel of a voice. In fact, it is only with Aphra Behn that the FID passages start to sound “modern” – another indication that Behn may have a claim to being the first novelist, with her texts first fully resembling the tradition of novelistic prose (see Fludernik 1996b, 158). Throughout the early modern period, FID occurs predominantly for the reporting of utterances and FIT passages are rare; this may be explained as due to the popularity of soliloquies flanked by psychonarration for the depiction of consciousness. It can therefore be argued that psychonarration is the most important category of thought representation (compare Palmer 2004) and that criticism has largely overlooked it so far (but see Cohn 1978).

5 Conclusion Comparing the material laid out in this article, one can see that more information is now available on FID for the period before the eighteenth century. FID can now be demonstrated to occur both for the presentation of speech and consciousness, more frequently for the former. There are still only a few instances in Middle English and more, but still not many, in early modern texts. FID occurs both in more colloquial and in more literary texts. In EME, FIT is predominantly found in higher-style writ-

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ings. The seventeenth century constitutes a turning point, at which the increase of passages of psychonarration combines with the rise of internal focalization and starts to provide a catalyst for more extensive FIT usage. For subsequent developments, see my other article in this handbook.

References Adamson, Sylvia. 1995a. “Empathetic Narrative – a Literary and Linguistic Problem.” In Syntax and the Literary System: New Approaches to the Interface between Literature and Linguistics, edited by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Patrick O’Donovan, 17–42. Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia. Adamson, Sylvia. 1995b. “From Empathetic Deixis to Empathetic Narrative: Stylisation and (De) Subjectivisation as Process of Language-Change.” In Subjectivity and Subjection: Linguistic Perspectives, edited by Dieter Stein and Susan Wright, 195–224. New York: Cambridge University Press. Banfield, Ann. 1982. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston: Routledge. Banfield, Ann, ed. 2019. Describing the Unobserved and Other Essays: Unspeakable Sentences after Unspeakable Sentences. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Bradburn, Elizabeth. 2011. “1620–1700: Mind on the Move.” In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, edited by David Herman, 132–158. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bray, Joe. 2018. The Language of Jane Austen. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brinton, Laurel. 1980. “‘Represented Perception’: A Study in Narrative Style.” Poetics 9:363–381. Bühler, Karl. (1934) 1990. Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Translated by Donald Fraser Goodwin. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Bühler, Willi. 1937. Die “erlebte Rede” im englischen Roman: Ihre Vorstufen und ihre Ausbildung im Werke Jane Austens. Zurich: Niehans. Burnley, David. 1983. A Guide to Chaucer’s Language. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Chafe, Wallace L., ed. 1980. The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dahlberg, Mary Margaret. 2003. “‘Now She Understood’: Free Indirect Discourse and Its Effects.” PhD diss., University of North Dakota. UMI. Duchan, Judith F., Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt, eds. 1995. Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Fludernik, Monika. 1993. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika. 1996a. “Linguistic Signals and Interpretative Strategies: Linguistic Models in Performance, with Special Reference to Free Indirect Discourse.” Language and Literature 5, no. 2, 93–113. Fludernik, Monika. 1996b. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge.

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Fludernik, Monika. 2001. “New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization and New Writing.” New Literary History 32, no. 3, 619–638. Fludernik, Monika. 2009. An Introduction to Narratology. Translated by Patricia Häusler-Greenfield and Monika Fludernik. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika. 2011. “1050–1500: Through a Glass Darkly; or, The Emergence of Mind in Medieval Narrative.” In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, edited by David Herman, 69–100. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hamburger, Käte. 1953. “Das epische Präteritum.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 27:329–357. Hamburger, Käte. (1957) 1993. The Logic of Literature. Translated by Marilynn J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hough, Graham. 1970. “Narrative and Dialogue in Jane Austen.” Critical Quarterly 12:201–229. Reprinted in Selected Essays, 46–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Hübner, Gert. 2003. Erzählform im höfischen Roman: Studien zur Fokalisierung im “Eneas”, im “Iwein” und im “Tristan.” Tübingen: Francke. McHale, Brian. 1978. “Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts.” Poetics and Theory of Literature 3:249–287. Mäkelä, Maria. 2018. “Exceptionality or Exemplarity? The Emergence of the Schematized Mind in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Novel.” Poetics Today 39, no. 1, 17–39. Marnette, Sophie. 1998. Narrateur et Point de Vue dans la Littérature Française Médiévale. Une Approche Linguistique. Berne: Lang. Marnette, Sophie. 2005. Speech and Thought Presentation in French. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Moore, Colette. 2011. Quoting Speech in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nikiforidou, Kiki. 2010. “Viewpoint and Construction Grammar: The Case of Past + Now.” Language and Literature 19, no. 3, 265–284. Nikiforidou, Kiki. 2012. “The Constructional Underpinnings of Viewpoint Blends: The Past + Now in Language and Literature.” In Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective, edited by Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser, 177–197. New York: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pascal, Roy. 1977. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the Nineteenth Century European Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Patron, Sylvie. 2009. Le Narrateur: Introduction à la Théorie Narrative. Paris: Armand Colin. Patron, Sylvie, ed. 2021. Optional Narrator Theory: Principles, Perspectives, Proposals. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pons-Sanz, Sara. 2019. “Speech Representation as a Narrative Technique in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Review of English Studies, n.s., 70, no. 294, 209–230. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Schmid, Wolf. 2017. Mentale Ereignisse: Bewusstseinsveränderungen in europäischen Erzählwerken vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne. Berlin: De Gruyter. Semino, Elena, and Mick Short. 2004. Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge. Short, Mick, Elena Semino, and Martin Wynne. 2002. “Revisiting the Notion of Faithfulness in Discourse Report/(Re)presentation Using a Corpus Approach.” Language and Literature 11, no. 4, 325–355. Skinner, John. 2001. An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Raising the Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Stanzel, Franz Karl. 1959. “Episches Praeteritum, erlebte Rede, historisches Praesens.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 33:1–12. Reprinted in Zur Poetik des Romans, edited by Volker Klotz, 319–338. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965. Stanzel, Franz Karl. (1979) 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Preface by Paul Hernadi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinberg, Günter. 1971. Erlebte Rede: Ihre Eigenart und ihre Formen in neuerer deutscher, französischer und englischer Erzählliteratur. Göppingen: Kümmerle. Strauch, Gérard. 1980. “Dialogue Intérieur et Style Indirect Libre dans Grace Abounding.” Bulletin de la Société de Stylistique Anglaise 2:33–48. Uspensky, Boris A. (1970) 1973. A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Translated by Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Monika Fludernik

Free Indirect Discourse in English (1700–Present) This article is a sequel to the previous one, “Free Indirect Discourse in English (1200–1700).” The “Definition” and “Exploring FID” sections should be consulted there, as should the explanations of the speech and thought categories that are abbreviated as follows: DD/DS/DT iM ID/IS FIS/FIT psN spR NRSA/NRTA FIP NARR

direct discourse (direct speech, direct thought) interior monologue indirect discourse/speech free indirect speech/thought, subcategories of FID psychonarration speech report narrative report of speech/thought acts free indirect perception narrative report

Passages of FID are printed in italics.

1 The Eighteenth Century Received opinion locates the rise of FID in the late eighteenth century and assumes that Jane Austen initiated the sophisticated use of the device and perfected the strategy of internal focalization. However, in the last two decades research has demonstrated that several earlier and some roughly contemporaneous authors also used both FIS and FIT, though mostly the former. Nevertheless, no systematic and exhaustive study of FID in the eighteenth century exists to date. Bender (1994) noted the occurrence of FIT in Caleb Williams (1794), and the use of FID in the first-person novel has also been recognized in novels by Brockden Brown and in Godwin’s Fleetwood (Kittel 1990a, 1990b, 1992; Manganaro 2018). Strauch (1993) extensively documented the pervasive use of FID in Richardson’s work. Joe Bray’s (2003) study of the epistolary novel likewise illustrates the use of FIS in a great number of passages from Richardson’s work (see also Neumann 1992), but he also mentions other texts, namely Anna Maria Bennett’s Agnes (1789) and Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824). Another important book providing information on FID https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-014

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in the eighteenth century is the survey of the eighteenth-century novel by John Skinner (2001). Skinner analyzes brief passages in Defoe (on Defoe, see also Shigematsu 2018, 2019) and Fielding. More particularly, he finds that FIT is linked to a female tradition of writing which includes the work of Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, and Frances Burney (on Burney’s FID, see also Bray 2007 and Frank 2015). Anna Uddén’s book (2000) on less well-known women authors before Austen likewise locates the rise of FID among female novelists. Among women authors, Radcliffe and the gothic novel in general are also credited with widely using passages of FIT. (See also Uddén 2000 and perhaps Shimazaki 2015, not yet accessible in print.) Austen’s use of FID is often argued to derive from the model of Richardson, but Fergus (2016) also claims a direct influence from Maria Edgeworth. Taking all this newer work into consideration, the history of FIT and FID in the eighteenth century already needs to be rewritten: rather than initiating the use of FID, Jane Austen’s oeuvre has to be seen as an endpoint and perfectioning of a strategy for rendering characters’ utterances and consciousness (Vermeule 2010, 177). The following survey of FID is sketchy to the extent that some texts have not been included (for instance, the sentimental novel and the Jacobite novel).

1.1 Early Instances of FID There do not seem to be any passages of FID in Swift. The first eighteenth-century author to employ FID, though only rarely, is Daniel Defoe. Passages of FID are often foregrounded by the question form: [1] “but where was such a one [a friend] to be found by a poor Boy, bred up among Thieves?” (FIT – Colonel Jack; World’s Classics, ed. Monk, 58; see Shigematsu 2018, 75) and [2] “He came to me, and [. . .] said, Why wou’d I be so unkind, not to tell him that before?” (FIS – Roxana; World’s Classics, ed. Jack, 155; quoted in Shigematsu 2018, 76; see also Karpf 1933, 261; there are several other passages on the same page; see also Robinson Crusoe (FIT; Penguin, ed. Richetti, 91) and Colonel Jack (FIS; 51, 71, 98, 114, 196, 200, and possibly 190, 257)). Exclamatory syntax is another indicator of FIT passages, e.g., in Moll Flanders: [3] Then it occurr’d to me what an abominable Creature am I! and how is this innocent Gentleman going to be abus’d by me! How little does he think, that having Divorc’d a whore, he is throwing himself into the Arms of another! [. . .] What is he going to do? (Penguin edition, ed. Blewett, 243–244) (the [. . .] is a continuing passage of FID) The passage is doubly refracted in that Moll reflects on what she is doing to the man but also speculatively assumes his perspective. Likewise, in Roxana, Amy’s coition

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with Roxana’s landlord results in her despair; she [4] “cry’d, and took-on most vehemently; that she was ruin’d and undone, [IS] and there was no pacifying her; she was a Whore, a Slut, and she was undone! undone! and cry’d almost all Day” (47). Bunyan in Grace Abounding had employed the collocation of NOW plus PAST in order to foreground the experiencing self (see the previous article). Shigematsu (2018) discusses a dozen passages from Defoe’s first-person fiction doing exactly the same thing. As Shigematsu herself notes, the many passages of now combined with past-tense verbs are part of a strategy of “contamination,” “contagion,” or Graham Hough’s “coloured narrative.” (The terms belong to McHale 1978, 260–261; Stanzel [1979] 1984, 192–193; Hough 1970, 50–51; Schmid 2017, 30–31, calls the phenomenon direkte figurale Benennung, “direct character-related reference.”) They therefore continue Bunyan’s and Behn’s practice of deploying internal focalization, enhanced by the adoption of characters’ expressivity and deictic positioning.

1.2 FID in the First Person and the Epistolary Novel Defoe is an important model in that the first-person use of FID in his work echoes in later eighteenth-century texts, especially in the epistolary fiction of Richardson and Burney. As Skinner notes, Richardson in Sir Charles Grandison uses FIS in lively dialogues, and often the FIS passages occur in the form of echo (questions) (93). Richardson also regularly integrates expressive vocabulary and colloquialisms into his rendering of speech in FID: [5] “He had had, he told my cousins, a most uneasy time of it, ever since he saw me. The devil fetch him, if he had had one hour’s rest. He never saw a woman before whom he could love as he loved me” (vol. 1, letter 17; Skinner’s italics – 2001, 94; for me, the first sentence is also FIS). Richardson’s FIS in fact displays the full gamut of expressive features that link to oral discourse, from hedges to exaggerations, exclamations, apostrophes, interruptions of syntactic phrases, intonational emphases, and so on (Strauch 1993, 96). Strauch (see also Karpf 1933; Schmid 2017) provides numerous examples for the whole of Richardson’s oeuvre, underlining that Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison are teeming with FIS passages (he counts 1016 in Clarissa and 505 in Grandison – Strauch 1993, 92–93), some of them formally striking: [6] “So handsome a man! – O her beloved Clary!” (Clarissa Letter 2); [7] “[. . .] and Comeliness, let her tell me, having not so much to lose as Beauty had, would hold [. . .]” (ibid., quoted in Strauch 1993, 95). This contradicts Skinner’s dictum that the device is “rare in Clarissa” (2001, 259). Strauch also demonstrates that the overwhelming number of occurrences are FIS, with FIT only at 5 and 6 percent in the two novels respectively. In addition, he points out that Richardson may be the first author to transcribe an entire dialogue in FIS, i.e., where the utterances of both interlocutors are rendered in FIS (Strauch 1993, 97).

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In the Burney canon, it seems that Camilla (Bray 2007; Dawson 2019, 178) and Cecilia (Frank 2015), rather than the better-known Evelina, use FIS extensively (Skinner 2001, 259). Both Skinner and Bray foreground the increasing relevance of FIS in the genre of the epistolary novel. FID is therefore overwhelmingly represented in homodiegetic narrative. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, too, utilizes FID, though not frequently. Yorick’s evaluations are rendered in FIS ([8] “but if it was a dirty action, – without more ado, – The man was a dirty fellow, – and so on”; Bk. I, ch. 11); so is the father’s anger at having been persuaded to go to London just when [9] “his wall fruit [. . .] were just ready for pulling: – ‘Had he been whistled up to London, upon a Tom Fool’s errand, in any other month of the whole year, he should not have said three words about it’” (Bk. I, ch. 16); and there is also the longer FIS passage in which he expatiates on the importance of naming that includes the remarkable [10] “[. . .] He knew as well as you, that the legislature assumed a power over surnames [. . .]” (Bk. I, ch. 19); the FIS passage here incorporates the address pronoun from direct speech. Other first-person narratives have also been mentioned in FID criticism, e.g., the work of Mary Hays (see Bray 2016 on the Memoirs of Emma Courtenay). Two first-person narratives which are not epistolary stand out for their use of FID. The first is Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), in which there are several examples of FIT as well as a few instances of FIS. It is to be noted that in Caleb Williams the initial third-person section (the story of Falkland in Italy) also employs FIS (World’s Classics, ed. McCracken, 13), though no FIT. All in all, there are fifteen passages of sometimes very extended FIS in the novel (see, e.g., Tyrell’s tirade against Falkland, 20; Mr. Underwood’s caution against Tyrell, 68; or the old man’s exclamation, [11] “He was sorry that fortune had been so unpropitious to him, as for him ever to have set eyes upon me! I was a monster with whom the earth groaned!,” 249). FIT is equally represented in Caleb Williams (again fifteen cases). These instances become more frequent in books 2 and 3 of the novel, and (as has been remarked, e.g., Vermeule 2010, 116–119) involve not merely delineations of Caleb’s own reflections and emotions (e.g., [12] “What was I to do? Was I to wait [. . .],” 229; see also 239–240, 279) but also those of Mr. Tyrrel (80), Mrs. Marney (265), and Falkland (e.g., 121, 143). For this reason, the FIT passages do not all include first-person pronouns in reference to the experiencing self of Caleb, thereby making FID in its first-person context less conspicuous than it might otherwise have been. Godwin’s 1805 novel Fleetwood, discussed in detail by Manganaro (2018), is a particularly interesting case of ironic FIT. Another first-person novel by Godwin, St. Leon (1799), also includes FIT, for instance [13] “And now, was I to be directed by the very refuse of the species? Was I to learn the prudence of not replying to their insults? Was I to purchase [. . .] their patience and forbearance?” (World’s Classics, ed. Pamela Clemit, 216). The second key text, which has received no notice in reference to its use of FID as far as I know, is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman

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(1798). This novel includes much first-person narrative and quite a few instances of FIS and FIT. FIT moreover can be found in the third-person sections of the novel (see, e.g., [14] “[. . .] Maria was grieved at the thought – but who would watch her with a mother’s tenderness, a mother’s self-denial?”; Norton, 7). Of special interest is a long passage (64–67) in which Maria hears Peggy’s story from her sister Mary, who has told her of her troubles. Much of the account can be read as FIS of either Peggy’s or Mary’s utterances. Part of this passage describes Peggy’s feelings about her children, adopting Peggy’s diction and that of her children (in her account that has been uttered to Mary and then repeated to Maria): [15] “Molly and Jacky were grown such little darlings, she was almost angry that daddy did not see their tricks” (65; here the tense shift signals that the entire passage is to be read as FIS). Maria’s first-person narrative of these events also contains FIT, as in [16] “I had two mattresses on my bed; what did I want with two, when such a worthy creature must lie on the ground? My mother would be angry, but I could conceal it till my uncle came down; and then I would tell him all the whole truth, and if he absolved me, heaven would” (67; see also 69). Later in the novel, FIS predominates, but there is the same predilection for colloquialisms: [17] “For his part, he was devilish sick of it; but this was the plague of marrying women who pretended to know something” (99).

1.3 Heterodiegetic Novels and FID Fielding’s novels are best known for their omniscient narrators and their superior deployment of psychonarration (Birke 2016; see also Dawson 2013); yet both Jonathan Wild and Amelia incorporate very long first-person narratives (by Mrs. Heartfree and by Booth, Miss Matthews, and Mrs. Atkinson; Skinner 2001, 103–104, 123). Fielding’s use of FID is quantitatively minimal compared to Behn and Defoe. In Tom Jones (1749), I have only found two passages: [18] “Jones answered with a sigh, ‘He feared it was already too late for caution’ [. . .]” (Bk. V, ch. 6), and [19] On the contrary, he [Tom] liked her [Arabella] as well as he did any woman except Sophia. But to abandon Sophia, and marry another, that was impossible; he could not think of it upon any account [psN or FIT]. Yet why should he not, since it was plain she could not be his? Would it not be kinder to her, than to continue her longer engaged in a hopeless passion for him? Ought he not to do so in friendship to her? (Bk. XIV, ch. 11) In Amelia, 6.4, there is one passage of FIT in which the “girl” relates her thoughts to Amelia and Booth: [20] “Then I thinks, thinks I to myself, to be sure he’s a highwayman, whereof I did not dare speak to him: for I knew Madam Ellison and her maid

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was gone out, and what could such a poor girl as I do against a great strong man?” (Penguin, ed. David Blewett, 244). This is a syntactic construction of unconventional colloquial indirect speech, highlighted by de Mattia-Viviès (2006, 55, 90–91). Besides Henry Fielding, his sister Sarah should be mentioned. In The Adventures of David Simple (1 The Adventures of David Simple 744), one can find some ten passages of FID (more than in any novel by her brother), and these occur both in the homodiegetic and heterodiegetic sections of the novel. Thus, early in the text, the beliefs of Daniel Simple’s wife reflect the exaggerations of anti-crime literature: [21] [. . .] she had been taught never to keep company with any Man [. . .] nor to get drunk, or steal: for if she gave way to those things, (besides that they were great Sins), she would certainly come to be hanged; which, as she had an utter Aversion to, she went on in an honest way [. . .].” (Bk I, ch. 2) In the next chapter, we are treated to an instance of collective FIS, in which [22] “People said, it was no wonder, for it was impossible any body could live in the House with him [.  .  .]; and sure, when People are kept upon Charity, they need not be so proud, but be glad to be contented, without setting a Gentleman against his Servants” (Bk. 1, ch. 3; the italics here are in the original, since the edition often employs italics to mark both direct and indirect or free indirect discourse, as is here the case; hence, the non-italicized phrases are to be taken as “direct quotes” from the gossips’ discourses). More expressive language is employed when Daniel’s wife persuades her husband not to give himself up after the forgery of the will: [23] [. . .] for altho’ the Action they had done was not right, yet, thank God, they had not been guilty of Murder. Indeed if that had been the case, there would have been a reason for confessing it; because it could not have been concealed, for Murder will out; the very Birds of the Air will tell of that; but as they were in no danger of being found out, it would be madness to run their Necks into a Halter” (Bk. I, ch. 3); italics for FIS mine, italics in the original for citations from proverbs here quoted in roman). In the harangue by one of the ladies complaining about their servants, the FIS passage includes the ironic epithet “Madam” for the lady’s companion (Cynthia): [24] “and Madam [Cynthia] grew out of humour at it, [spR] altho’ she [the lady] never put the Creature at all on the footing of a Servant, nor paid her any Wages as such, but look’d on her as her Companion” (Bk. II, ch. 5; italics in original, the whole quotation is FIS). When we get Cynthia’s version in the first person, there are additional FIS passages: she is deprived of her reading materials by well-meaning persons, [25] “For Miss must not enquire too far into things, it would turn her Brain

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[. . .]; reading and poring on Books, would never get me a Husband” (Bk. II, ch. 6; italics in original). The other authors of the heterodiegetic novel using FID include Smollett. His FID passages employ FID for convenience (continuation of IS in the form of FIS) and ironic effect (dissonant FID). A case of collective FIS occurs in chapter 54 of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), where the gossip about Fathom is related: [26] At every tea-table, his name was occasionally put to the torture, with that of the vile creature whom he had seduced; though it was generally taken for granted, by all those female casuists, that she must have made the first advances; for it could not be supposed, that any man would take much trouble in laying schemes for the ruin of a person whose attractions were so slender [. . .]; besides, she was always a pert minx, that affected singularity [. . .]. The novel also has an example of FIT. Fathom, in love with Monimia, ponders the difficulty of getting her since she is in love with a man who is superior to himself: [27] “because, with what face could he commence rival to the person whose family had raised him from want and servility, and whose own generosity had rescued him from the miseries of a dreary jail?” (ch. 43). There are also a few passages of FID in Smollett’s other novels, usually tagged onto longer passages of IS and speech report. In the 1790s, FIS and particularly FIT expand quite dramatically in connection with the sentimental novel and the gothic romance. Strauch (1993, 93), for instance, mentions Thomas Holcroft alongside Godwin and Burney. Although the gothic novel is frequently considered a cornerstone in the development of FID, close analysis of the texts demonstrates that it is psychonarration rather than FID that predominates in Radcliffe’s novels. While in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) one finds one lengthy passage of FIT and at least three short ones (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, ed. Wright, 25, 86, 99; see also Bender 2012, 106), Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) on a cursory examination has only one passage of FIT (World’s Classics, ed. Dobrée, 392), whereas the extended representations of consciousness come in the form of psychonarration. In fact, the most noticeable device in Mysteries is the recurrent use of free indirect perception, i.e., the extended presentation of what characters see from their perspective, often adopting vocabulary likely to derive from those characters’ minds. For instance, already on the second page of the novel, St. Aubert’s memories of the family domain with its “impressions of delight” (2) are described, listing the [28] “green pastures along which he had so often bounded in the exultation of health, and youthful freedom – the woods, under whose refreshing shade he had first indulged that pensive melancholy [. . .] – the wild walks of the mountains [. . .]” (2). As for the representation of characters’ psyche, where a

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Victorian and modernist author would have employed FIT, Radcliffe chooses the narratorial syntax of psychonarration: [29] A new view of nature seemed to burst, at once, upon his mind, and he could not have experienced greater astonishment [. . .]. But, when he thought of Ellena, considered that she was in the power of this tribunal, and that it was probable she was at this moment within the same dreadful walls, grief, indignation, and despair irritated him almost to frenzy. (The Italian, Bk. II, ch. 6) At times, the extensive representation of characters’ consciousness is also supported by means of DT: [30] “The state of her mind can only be imagined, by considering that upon the present time turned the crisis of her fate. ‘They have now,’ thought she, ‘discovered my flight; even now they are seeking me [. . .].’ The power of imagination almost overcame her” (Romance of the Forest, Bk. 2, ch. 11). One rare passage of FIT in the Romance occurs, perhaps tellingly, in Adeline’s first-person account before she escapes from the convent: [31] What days of blissful expectation were those that preceded my departure! The world, from which I had been hitherto secluded – the world, in which my fancy had been so often delighted to roam – whose paths were strewn with fadeless roses – whose every scene smiled in beauty and invited to delight – where all the people were good, and all the good happy – Ah! then [emphasis in original] that world was bursting upon my view. Let me catch the rapturous remembrance before it vanish! [. . .] It was in the convent only that people were deceitful and cruel: it was there only that misery dwelt. I was quitting it all! How I pitied the poor nuns that were to be left behind. I would have given half that world I prized so much, had it been mine, to have taken them out with me. (Bk. I, ch. 3) The passage modulates into the thoughts of Adelina. Starting out with an exclamation of the narratorial self, Adelina’s reflections depict her idealistic vision of “the world” – soon to be proved faulty – and her rapture at being able to join it at last. (The phrase “rapturous remembrance” is a hypallage, since it is the rapturous expectation of getting out of the convent that she remembers now.) The two parenthetical phrases, detailing her unrealistic views of life outside the convent, could be read as FIT, but also as her comment on that previous state of mind. Certainly, “that world was bursting,” due to the use of the continuous form (a correlate of FIT in modernist prose) can be interpreted as FIT. The passage thus arrives at the more extended FIT passage by means of a long sentence of psychonarration that is already steeped in Adelina’s fancies about the past, though syntactically (and due

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to the implied hindsight), this initially seems to be a narratorial presentation of her emotions. The final sentence of the extract, too, appears to me a retrospective comment rather than a rendering of her earlier thoughts, but it could perhaps also be interpreted as FIT if one sees her wishing to take her fellow nuns away with her at the time. On the basis of the above analysis, we will therefore do well not to consider Radcliffe as the crucial pre-Austen juncture in the history of FID, but rather as the most important stage in the rise of internal focalization (Genette) or reflector narrative (Stanzel) before the generalization of that technique in George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, or Thomas Hardy. Sir Walter Scott’s novels seem to resemble Radcliffe, with their rather backgrounded use of FID, rather than Wollstonecraft or Austen and their more extensive deployment of FID.

2 The Nineteenth Century: Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy 2.1 Jane Austen Starting with Jane Austen, the prevalence of FID in the nineteenth century is no longer in doubt. Austen employs the device extensively for speech and thought representation, and she does so both ironically and as part of consonant depictions of consciousness. Irony is foregrounded in many contexts of implicit criticism of characters who expose their stupidity, hypocrisy, meanness, or bias in what they say or are thinking in FID passages. The opening of Pride and Prejudice, initially perceived as an authorial gnomic dictum on unmarried men of fortune being in need of a wife, turns out, after we read on, to be a case of FID attributable to Mrs. Bennet (and other mothers), exposing her (their) naive and selfish perspective. Similarly, Mrs. Norris’s attempts in the first chapter of Mansfield Park to have Sir Thomas Bertram accept Fanny Price into his house to spare her the expense are cast in a passage of FIS in which she betrays her meanness. Austen’s Emma is particularly rich in irony and, unusually so, in irony directed at the main protagonist, whose perspective dominates the novel in conjunction with the authorial presentation of the village of Highbury. Irony is rife in Austen’s sketches of rural life and the collective voice or thought of villagers (see Vermeule 2010, ch. 8). Although there are a few instances of collective voice in narrative before Jane Austen, Austen initiates a satirical tradition of the representation of common opinion that will reach its peak in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–1853). From Scott’s

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Heart of the Midlothian (1818) onward, we will moreover have scenes and riots and mass disturbances depicted in fiction, though not necessarily all in FIS or FIT, a template first utilized in Sidney’s Arcadia (Fludernik 2014) and extended by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge (1840–1841) and Eliot in Felix Holt (1866). Austen’s use of FID has been the focus of a great number of essays and books. Five interventions on Emma have taken FID as their starting point. The first is an essay by Finch and Bowen (1990) on the collective voice of Highbury, which they see as “policing” the village. Mezei (1996b, 71) already noted that “it seems that FID, along with irony, becomes an effective space in which questions of gender, authority, and propriety can be subtly interrogated,” choosing Emma as her example text (as did Roulston in the same volume). Ferguson (2000), D. A. Miller (2003), and Vermeule (2010) are responses to Finch and Bowen. Like Roulston, they also foreground the subject of gossip. In her much-noticed essay, Ferguson starts out from Finch and Bowen’s characterization of gossip as a “serious and privileged form of knowledge” (1990, 5) of the “social collective” (Ferguson 2000, 162) of the village: “the ‘very force of free indirect style is the force of gossip,’ because both ‘function as forms par excellence of surveillance, and [. . .] locate the subject [. . .] within a seemingly benign but ultimately coercive narrative or social matrix’” (Finch and Bowen 1990, 3–4; Ferguson 2000, 161; my omissions). Ferguson proposes that the collective is a constitutive element of individual character formation (“The brilliance of [Austen’s] development of free indirect style is that it recognizes what we might want to think of as a communal contribution to individuality”; 2000, 164) and that FID is the form that demonstrates this connection of external and internal discourse in form and content. According to Ferguson, “the trick of the novel is both to suggest why any and all observers would think what they did and to insist that they all would be wrong” (178). FID thus enables a delineation both of individuality as embraced by communal will and of the vox communis as fractured into a variety of views that conceal individual motives and aspirations. Ferguson’s analysis, unfortunately bereft of a single illustrative quotation, is countered by D. A. Miller (2003, 31) in a move that foregrounds Austen’s narrator as more omniscient than those of Fielding or Thackeray because of the impersonality of her narratorial voice (anticipating the narrator as paring her fingernails in the Joycean phrase): “In the paradoxical form of an impersonal intimacy, it [FID] grants us at one and the same time the experience of a character’s inner life as she herself lives it, and an experience of the same inner life as she never could” (60). Irony and consonance (to use my terms) are thus balanced out. Vermeule, by contrast, focuses on Miss Bates and returns to the power of communal voice and its function of surveillance. (But see Bray 2018, 165–171, who sees Miss Bates as an implicit conveyor of secrets.) While Emma, due to her social position, can allow herself to dissent from

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general opinion, Miss Bates has to obsequiously echo it and must avoid any dissent or friction owing to her dependence on people’s goodwill (Bray, 180–183). For Vermeule, the paradox of FID lies in its illusory quality. She takes Ferguson one step further by marrying form not only with communal discourse and power but also with emotion and active social positioning. She is also quite alert to the impurity of FID – the effect Austen achieves is not due to FID alone: “Just as Knightley is and is not correct about Frank Churchill, this passage is and is not free indirect discourse – it shifts rapidly between narrated monologue and ordinary third-person narration, at once entering into Knightley’s perspective and standing outside of it” (2010, 189). Austen criticism can therefore be argued to have highlighted the sophistication displayed in Austen’s use of FID and the wider social and cultural relevance of the device. Although Austen’s irony is extremely decorous, she stands at the start of a tradition of social satire that will be deployed extensively in Dickens and Trollope, all the way to George Meredith and Samuel Butler, especially in connection with characters’ verbal exchanges. The implicit ridiculing of characters’ self-serving and self-deceptive minds in Austen can also be argued to have inspired more sardonic and savage sarcasm in Trollope as well as Virginia Woolf, where Mrs. Ramsay’s comments are juxtaposed with and undermine the display of self-assured authority on the part of her husband; though, again, not all of these passages necessarily employ FID (see below). Most importantly for the development of the English novel toward modernism, Austen’s extensive representation of characters’ motives, feelings, thoughts, and reflections, handled in a combination of psychonarration and FIT (see the discussion in Schmid 2017), set a model for the Victorian novel with its focus on protagonists’ development in the bildungsroman and the analysis of motivation and psychology in all novels. These representations of consciousness were to find a temporary culmination in Hardy, Conrad, and Henry James.

2.2 Victorian FID First-person narrative is not as prominently present in Victorian fiction. Many of the texts in this category deploy the representation of mind to allow characters to engage in self-analysis from a retrospective stance or to highlight the experiencing self in memories of vivid presentification. FIT tends to occur at key points when characters are questioning themselves or experience crises, deciding what to do or how to react to events. Thus, Jane Eyre’s decision to leave Thornfield (ch. 27) and Pip’s analysis of his life after Magwitch turns up (ch. 39 of Great Expectations) give rise to extensive internal debate, using psychonarration as well as FIT. Dickens’s two first-person novels are notable for their use of FID:

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Here is our pew in the church. [.  .  .] But I can’t always look at him [the clergyman] – [.  .  .] and I am afraid of his wondering why I stare so, and perhaps stopping the service to enquire – and what am I to do? It’s a dreadful thing to gape, but I must do something. (David Copperfield, ch. 2)

FID, but also FIP, are deployed with dexterity by Dickens to represent the naive perspective of the child. Soliloquies, now closer to interior monologues, are still possible in Victorian writing (e.g., in Persuasion, Anne tries to calm herself by an argument marked as DD: [33] “Surely, if there be constant attachment on each side, our hearts must understand each other ere long”; ch. 22). However, the important moments of mental life in the third-person novel tend to be in FIT and embedded in consonant psychonarration and narratorial comment. As Alan Palmer (2004) has pointed out, for the Victorian novel it is psychonarration that is the major technique for depicting characters’ consciousness. The sophistication of fictional minds in Victorian fiction comes from the adept manner in which the narrative slides from comment to psychonarration and FIT and back again – a movement that Stanzel has labeled the “authorial-figural continuum” ([1979] 1984, 186–200). To illustrate with passages from Austen, Scott, and Trollope in turn: [34]

Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. [psN] She had fully proposed being engaged by Wickham for those very dances: [psN or FIT?] – and to have Mr Collins instead! her liveliness had been never worse timed. There was no help for it however. (Pride and Prejudice, ch. 17; 1985, 130)

[35]

His [Alan Fairford’s] first thought was, to attempt [.  .  .] his instant escape [. . .]. [psN] There would, he thought, be little difficulty in effecting his liberty, and in concealing his course after he had gained it. [. . .] [H]e relinquished this design as soon as formed. [psN] He had no doubt, that any light which he could throw on the state of the country, would come too late to be serviceable [. . .]. (Redgauntlet, ch. 23)

[36]

Mary had learnt that Frank was already at Greshamsbury. [.  .  .] Would he come and see her in spite of his mother? Would he send her any tidings of his return, or notice her in any way? If he did not, what would she do? and if he did, what then would she do? It was so hard to resolve; so hard to be deserted [. . .]. (Doctor Thorne, ch. 36)

All of these passages present the characters’ minds consonantly, non-ironically. The FIT form is not foregrounded by many expressive markers, apart from the syntax

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of questioning and exclamation and lexical choices best attributed to the character (so hard, repeated twice in [36]; no help in [34]). The examples illustrate the staple of nineteenth-century representation of consciousness both formally and in its quiet authoritativeness. As for speech representation, the Victorian novel extended several techniques already employed in the eighteenth century, and also invented new ones. The main difference to Austen and eighteenth-century fiction lies in two aspects. Nineteenth-century novels are often family chronicles and extremely lengthy narratives with a huge cast of characters, which for Victorian narrative brings in its wake livelier and frequent verbal exchange, entailing the necessity to distinguish between speakers, for instance by means of DS–FIS alternation. Outside Richardson, this was much less generally the case in eighteenth-century fiction. Secondly, Victorian fiction moves toward increasing levels of realism by attempting to mimic real speech, including settings from many walks of life, depicting situations not often found in the texts from the previous century. While often presented in derogatory, comic, or condescending manner, rural and lower-class speech also comes to symbolize authenticity, rootedness in traditional life, and genuine moral standing (Goetsch 1987, 2003). Rural dialect and idiolectal expressions are used for satirical effect in Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray, but mostly sympathetically in Hardy. Literary renderings of dialect display schematization (overemphasizing some typical features and ignoring others) and non-standard spellings to signal non-standard pronunciation. However, while such nonstandard language occurs frequently in dialogue, i.e., DS, dialectal or rural FID is much less common. Dickens employs the technique the most: [37] “Mr. Towlinson returns thanks in a speech [. . .] turns on foreigners [. . .], but all he hopes, is, he may never hear of no foreigner never boning nothing out of no travelling chariot” (Dombey and Son, ch. 31; see also Mrs. Murdockson’s witness statement in Scott’s Heart of the Midlothian, ch. 18). Nonstandard FID becomes more extensively used in the twentieth century in the African American novel and the postcolonial novel, where the narrative itself often employs nonstandard English diction. Irony or dissonance is a key element in Victorian FID passages. This can take the form of satire directed against individual characters or the expression of a common viewpoint. For instance, Casaubon’s thoughts expose his inacceptable views of what a wife’s functions should be: [38] And this cruel outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife – nay, of a young bride, who, instead of observing his abundant pen scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference. (Middlemarch, Bk. I, ch. 20)

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In Adam Bede, Arthur’s self-accusatory reflections outline the weakness of his character and his lack of responsibility: [39] Arthur had felt a twinge of conscience during Mr Poyser’s speech, but it was too feeble to nullify the pleasure he felt in being praised. [pdN] Did he not deserve what was said of him, on the whole? If there was something in his conduct that Poyser wouldn’t have like if he had known it, why, no man’s conduct will bear too close an inspection; and Poyser was not likely to know it; and, after all, what had he done? (ch. 24) Sometimes the discourse, voiced aloud or not, mirrors a collective viewpoint, as in Mrs. Plymdale’s opinions: [40] “But Mrs Plymdale thought that Rosamond had been educated to a ridiculous pitch, for what was the use of accomplishments which would be all laid aside as soon as she was married?” (Middlemarch, Bk. I, ch.16); see also the clearly biased views about Lydgate on the part of his competitors ([41] the “long-established practitioners, Mr Wrench and Mr Toller”; Bk. I, ch. 18). Another aspect of nineteenth-century FID passages in particular is their use of simile and metaphor, where it remains unclear whether the comparison is part of the character’s mental purview or part of the narrator’s figurative conception. It is convincing to attribute the “canary-bird” in [38] to Casaubon’s apprehension of women, though the phrase itself smacks of the narrator’s ironic choice of lexeme. In Adam Bede’s thoughts about Hetty, one cannot be sure either – is Adam visualizing her as an apple of temptation for all his male competitors? Or is that the ironic phrase of the narrator (or Eliot) hinting at Adam’s naivety? [42] Adam had confidence in his ability to achieve something in the future [. . .]; but he had too cool a head not to estimate to the full the obstacles that were to be overcome. And there was Hetty, like a bright-cheeked apple hanging over the orchard wall, within sight of everybody, and everybody must long for her! To be sure, if she loved him very much, she would be content to wait for him; but did she love him? (Adam Bede, ch. 19) Certainly, Victorian metaphors in FIT are ambiguous, but they do not yet self-reflexively ask the reader to criticize their use as modernist texts do: [43] Giles nicked his chair into position with a jerk. Thus only could he show his irritation, his rage with old fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole of Europe – over there – was bristling like . . .. He had no command of metaphor. Only the ineffective word ‘hedgehog’ illustrated

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his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes. (Woolf, Between the Acts, Faber & Faber, 42) (It is debatable whether the FIT segment already starts with “Thus” and continues on until “metaphor.”) This passage is also a good example of refusing a particular verbal expression to a character. (For another example from Trollope, see Dames 2011, 228.) As for the function of characterization, one could list typical situations of satire – the man who talks too much, the inquisitor, the naive or unwilling informant, the speaker who rambles on and on, the hypocrite, the fanatic, and so on. While FID gained notoriety in France thanks to Flaubert and the Madame Bovary trial, the British public and academia remained unaware of the peculiarity of FID as a strategy or grammatical phenomenon: it was presumably deployed as one of the handy stylistic techniques available to authors, but not analyzed, labeled, or evaluated. It is only with the post-World War II Foucauldian perspective on the nineteenth-century novel that FID, recently discovered in the anglophone world, began to elicit debates and controversies regarding its use. Another blind spot in connection with FID has come about through modernism’s suspicion of the overt narratorial voice and the preference for figural narrative in modernist prose with its illusion of unmediated access to the minds of protagonists.

3 From Modernism to Postmodernism 3.1 Literary Modernism The increasing focus in fiction on the psyche gives rise to the novel of internal focalization (reflector narrative in Stanzel’s typology) and the invention of interior monologue (DT, often in incomplete sentences and single words or phrases) plus the stream-of-consciousness technique (mirroring the associative functioning of thoughts; see Steinberg [1958] 1973; Schmid 2017, 26). As a result, FIT, though still in operation, has until recently been sidelined in criticism (as was psychonarration). The integration of FIT with stream of consciousness and interior monologue has tended to either obscure the use of FID in modernist prose or to exaggerate it (equating FIT with psychonarration or stream of consciousness). As for speech representation, the satiric use of FIS predominates, but modernism’s emphasis on the mind generally leads to a notable plunge in the use of FIS as early as the end of the nineteenth century. In a plea for a diachronic analysis of FID, Violeta Sotirova (2007, 2013) proposes the thesis that there is a great stylistic change between instances of FID in the nine-

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teenth century and those in modernist fiction. She juxtaposes a passage from Eliot’s Middlemarch ([44] “Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could illuminate principle with the widest knowledge: a man whose learning almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!” – Bk. I, ch. 2; quoted in Sotirova 2007, 131; Sotirova’s underlining) with an extract from Sons and Lovers (1913): [45] “But here was a new specimen, quick, light, graceful, who could be gentle and who could be sad, and who was clever, and who knew a lot, and who had a death in the family” (ch. 7; Sotirova 2007, 131; Sotirova’s underlining). In Sotirova’s reading, Eliot’s language is more hypotactic and narratorial, while Lawrence gives us “a stronger sense of following somebody’s train of thought” (132). Put differently, modernist FIT participates in the impression of a stream of consciousness in progress, it is more colloquial on the scale of orality features suggested by Douglas Biber (1988), and it can be said to reflect typically modernist stylistic patterns of parataxis, the use of non-standard varieties of language, the simplification of syntax, and the more extended use of the progressive and perfective aspects (Sotirova 132–133, citing Adamson 1999). Sotirova’s clinching argument is that there is a difference in the handling of perspectival shifts between Victorians and modernists. She finds that Eliot explicitly marks the shift from one perspective to the other when juxtaposing Rosamond’s and Lydgate’s viewpoints, deploying psychonarration and the explicit use of verba cogitandi (“thought”). By contrast, in the passages from Woolf and Lawrence, Sotirova documents a flow of interactions between perspectives, which is aided by the use of paratactic syntax and the repetitive deployment of connectives like and, but, or for (Bühler 1937, 99, had already commented on the prevalence of such connectives introducing FID). One further striking characteristic of modernist texts concerns the often missing clear demarcations between the speech of different interlocutors (no quotation marks, no inquit tags) and between DS and DT/iM, enhanced by the deployment of clauses without finite verbs, syntactically incomplete sentences, and chunks of discourse. Indeterminacy, a feature associated with FID throughout its history, becomes extended to speech and thought representation in general. Among the linguistic features that have been repeatedly noted for modernist FIT, the most important are the use of the progressive tense, FIT parentheticals, the non-anaphoric reflexive (Brinton 1995), and the collocation of NOW and PAST. In characterizing FID in modernist prose, one needs to distinguish between passages of FIT that are consonant and those that are ironic; and between speech and thought representation. The use of FID in speech representation declines in the modernist period, in part because so much emphasis is placed on a focus on consciousness, but also because DS is used extensively in dialogues. There are three patterns that recur in fiction of the 1900s to 1930s. On the one hand, there is the

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ironic representation of utterances by means of FID, as in the following passage from Forster’s Maurice: [46]

The dark gentlemanly fellow couldn’t be Wimbleby if he said he wasn’t. [FIS? FIT?] He [Mr. Ducie] said, “I’m extremely sorry, sir, it’s so seldom I make a mistake,” and then, determined to show he was not an old fool [psN], he addressed the silent pair [Alex and Maurice] on the subject of the British Museum – not merely a collection of relics but a place round which one could take – er – the less fortunate, quite so – a stimulating place – it raised questions even in the minds of boys – which one answered – no doubt inadequately [FIS]; until a patient voice said, “Ben, we are waiting,” and Mr Ducie rejoined his wife. (ch. 43)

[46] illustrates the typical juxtaposition of external and internal perspectives and the dissolution of syntactic patterns, a radicalization of a technique already used by Dickens in the utterances of Mr. Dorrit after his release from the Marshalsea. Especially in more popular prose, FID is employed to summarize, ironically or not, social exchange or imparted information, often also emphasizing typical patterns of diction, thought or opinion: [47]

More greetings ensued. M. le Chef had heard of M. French from his colleagues at Dieppe and was ravished to meet him. And this was M. Knowles? He was ravished to meet M. Knowles. He, M. le Chef, had some news for M. French. (Crofts, Mystery in the Channel)

Popular literature and much realistic and neomodernist narrative of the latter part of the twentieth century in British fiction continues such strategies of typification, ironizing, and social denigration already current in the Victorian novel. By contrast, free indirect thought cannot be discussed without paying attention to psychonarration and interior monologue. The use of FIT is different in each major modernist author and also varies between individual works, especially in Joyce. For instance, the Dubliners stories and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are frequently discussed for their use of FIT, while in Ulysses the technique occurs less prominently and mostly for ironic effect. In the later chapters, like “Nausicaa,” FIT is part of stylistic persiflage, of romantic love fiction in the case of “Nausicaa.” In the early Bloom chapters, FIT is juxtaposed with equally brief snatches of interior monologue, as in this extract from the opening of “Calypso”: [48]

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. [. . .] Made him feel a bit peckish. [. . .]

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Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. (Penguin, ed. Ellmann) In “Wandering Rocks,” FIT and FIS ironically expose the mind of Father Conmee (see already Stanzel [1979] 1984, 175): [49]

Was that not Mrs M’Guinness? Mrs M’Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the father footpath along which she smiled. And Father Conmee smiled and saluted. How did she do? A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to think that she was a pawnbroker. Well, now! Such a . . . what should he say? . . . such a queenly mien. [. . .]

In the recent criticism on Joyce and FID, several different aspects have been foregrounded. Thus, Gibbons (2013) emphasizes the colloquial element of FIT in Joyce’s texts, and proposes that Joyce is modeling his style on FIT in George Moore’s oeuvre. Rundquist (2016) argues that the wordplay in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode is a tour de force of Stephen Dedalus’s creative remodeling of his surroundings in FIT format. Sotirova (2010) concentrates on the “Eumaeus” episode, citing passages of what she considers to be FIT (but which I would classify to be mostly psychonarration); her focus is the lack of antecedents for anaphorical he and she in Joyce and in oral language. By contrast, in the fiction of Virginia Woolf or D. H. Lawrence, FIT is embedded in long passages of psychonarration, with very few snatches of iM if at all (Ikeo 2016, 367, provides statistical evidence for this in Woolf). A typical example is the following passage: [50]

Her [Gudrun’s] fingers went over the mould of his [Gerald’s] face, over his features. [NARR] How perfect and foreign he was – ah, how dangerous! [FIT] Her soul thrilled with complete knowledge. [psN] This was the glistening forbidden apple, this face of a man. [FIT, or psN?] She kissed him [. . .]. He was so firm and shapely, with such satisfying, inconceivable shapeliness, strange yet unutterably clear. [FIP] He was such an unutterable enemy, yet glistening with uncanny white fire. [FIT] She wanted to touch him and touch him and touch him, till she had him all in her hands, till she had strained him into her knowledge. [psN, possibly FIT] Ah, if she could have the precious knowledge of him, she would be filled, and nothing could deprive her of this. For he was so unsure, so risky in the common world of day. [FIT] (Women in Love, ch. 24)

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While Woolf tends to have more psN than FID, Lawrence here combines FIT with FIP that characterizes Gudrun’s impressions of Gerald using intensifiers as markers of emotivity (“so,” “such,” perhaps even “shapely”; underlined above), though the rest of the sentence is less likely to mirror her vocabulary. Internal focalization is to be found also in the triple repetition of “and touched.” Lawrence is therefore closer to Eliot and Hardy in the avoidance of interior monologue, but deploys FIT and psychonarration extensively and avoids external narratorial interference with the characters’ point of view. Many of the passages from Woolf and Lawrence are highly poetic, and it is often difficult to decide whether a sentence is psychonarration with expressive features attributable to the character or a rather philosophical reflection on the part of the character. There are, however, also examples of more colloquial FIT, which are not so bound up with psychonarration, for instance this from The Rainbow: [51] “Afterwards he [Tom Brangwen] glowed with pleasure. By Jove, but that was something like!” (ch. 1). I now turn to irony or dissonance versus consonance. In the depiction of consciousness, irony and consonance are balanced out across authors, with Woolf at the ironic end of the scale and the early Joyce, Lawrence, Huxley, and Forster at the consonant pole. There is, however, much variance even within the oeuvre of individual authors. In To the Lighthouse and Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s representation of consciousness tends to be extremely ironic, but it is much less so in Mrs. Dalloway or in the short fiction. What is particularly foregrounded in Woolf’s novels – and this constitutes an advance over Victorian fiction – is the double and triple reflection on what characters believe the other is thinking, and what he or she is thinking about themselves. In other words, modernist fiction often highlights the process of mediating between the different levels of mental embedding which Lisa Zunshine has highlighted in her seminal Why We Read Fiction (2006). Although speculations about other characters’ thoughts on the part of protagonists in their own minds occur here and there in the nineteenth-century novel, the guessing game that couples often perform in modernist fiction constitutes another turn of the screw, fitting well with the epistemological orientation of modernism in McHale’s account ([1987] 1993). Though modernist FID has seen extensive stylistic analysis in recent years, which has underlined several key features, these contributions are difficult to relate to a diachronic perspective because equivalent database-related analyses do not yet exist for the late Victorian novel or for fiction after modernism. Another problem for comparisons is the very broad definition of FID in many of these studies, which treat as FID passages that should syntactically be classified as psychonarration and also neglect analysis of FID in its combination with psN and iM.

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3.2 Second Half of the Twentieth Century Post-World War II fiction in the UK does not primarily adopt postmodernist formats, often continuing in a neomodernist style of writing or integrating a few postmodernist and self-reflexive strategies with a basically realist and modernist presentation of characters and settings. On the one hand, there are authors like Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, or Graham Swift, whose texts do not differ much from those of Arnold Bennett or Ford Madox Ford; this is true of much postcolonial anglophone fiction from South Asia or Africa as well. This literature tends to deploy FIT extensively (for Africa, see Arua 2014). On the other hand, there are authors like John Fowler, Alasdair Gray, or Angela Carter, whose prose utilizes modernist and self-reflexive techniques in a more consistent manner, but at the same time nevertheless displays a fairly traditional style of writing including the use of FID. Hard-core experimentalists like Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, Gabriel Josipovici, or Salman Rushdie are a minority in the UK, but this type of writing has occupied a much larger segment of the US-American market since the 1960s. Despite this, even in the US, fairly traditional novels continued to be produced in the work of John Updike, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. In particular, the fiction of women authors, ethnic minorities, or immigrants has on the whole followed fairly realistic modes of narration, including the use of FID. Moreover, much of the postmodernist trend in twentieth-century fiction petered out toward the late 1990s; novels that avoid a realistic depiction of characters and their speech are no longer all that numerous. Of course, there are already radical experiments in writing in the early twentieth century in the work of Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Ernest Hemingway, just as there are postmodernist texts with a high profile of self-reflexive prose and an undermining of traditional narrative style (e.g., work by Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Federman, the Barthelmes, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, Richard Brautigan, or William Gass). Yet even in texts by E. L. Doctorow, Vladimir Nabokov, or John Barth one can find fairly traditional narrative passages which report characters’ discourse and consciousness by means of dialogue, speech report, psychonarration, and FID, even if this is not quantitatively comparable to modernist or nineteenth-century fiction. In practice, the rendering of characters’ utterances and thoughts is only disrupted when the author decides to dispense with realism in toto (as do the dialogue novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett or Gabriel Josipovici); when the narratorial voice becomes so prominent and all-powerful that no other discourse can easily be filtered out to be attributed to characters’ language (e.g., Pynchon); or when characters and their actions and emotions take a back seat and the story of writing itself obtrudes, as it does in surfiction.

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Another way of putting this is to say that nothing much changes in the representation of speech – dialogue continues to be the preferred option, and (unlike modernist prose) it is rarely reflected in passages of characters’ psyche. The depiction of characters’ consciousness is where the most important changes occur. Some authors avoid it almost entirely, except for brief snatches of NRTA, employing a behavorist model. What disappears almost entirely in fiction after World War II is the conjunction of extended interior monologue and stream of consciousness (with some exceptions, e.g., Eva Figes), and this eclipse applies to all types of texts, to the experimental, semi-experimental, and more traditional novels. Given the less pronounced emphasis on characters’ psyche in many texts from the 1960s onward, there is from the outset less occasion to employ psychonarration or FIT. However, to the extent that the more traditional writing styles have survived, especially in British fiction, or have been integrated with more adventurous strategies of composition, FIT and psychonarration can still be found extensively in the literature of the second half of the twentieth century and up to the present day. Moreover, modernist techniques of internal focalization have taken over genre fiction, from detective novels to Mills and Boon love stories. Much feminist and postcolonial writing, too, is teeming with chapters presented from the point of view of the main protagonist or of several of them in succession. Hence, there is no dearth of material for an analysis of FIT and psychonarration (see the statistics in Semino and Short 2004). At the same time, few new developments can be noted. Narrative experiments with the category of person (second-person narratives, we narratives) often display a parallel preference for traditional modes of speech and thought representation, adapting them to their purposes. Present-tense narration, in vogue since the early twentieth century, likewise displays much FIT and FIS, but their use has not been examined in depth, since the recognition of FID in a present-tense narrative, and especially in first-person present-tense texts, is quite difficult (see Fludernik 1996, 249–256). A good example of a radically postmodernist text undermining realistic reader expectations is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Pynchon’s novel is of course an extremely complex text, and the complexity extends to the way that snippets of thought are interbraided with narrative, which can be both shifted and unshifted, since the narrative is mostly in the present tense. For instance, in the second section of chapter 2, Dr. Porkyevitch’s FIT is part of a passage that starts in the present tense ([52] “stands on deck”), though after several fragmentary sentences without a finite verb, it turns to his past, which might already be treated as FIT (“He gave up questioning orders long ago [. . .]”) and reverts to the present tense: “there are forms of innocence, he knows, that cannot conceive of what that means, much less accept it as he has.” We continue with FIT: “At least he had physiology, something outside the party, a thought that makes him think of other victims

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of Stalinism, [psN] and never to know anything for certain, never to have the precision of the laboratory . . . it’s been his own sanity, God knows, for twenty years. At least they can never –” (Picador edition, 189). When we turn to Slothrop, [53] “Katje is ignoring him, talking with some [. . .] bird colonel about his prewar profession, managing a golf course in Cornwall. Holes and hazards. Gave one a feel for terrain” (190). Here we have a reflection of what Slothrop overhears of the conversation, i.e., a FIT rendering of the colonel’s discourse, which could, however, also be seen as a FIS representation of what he is saying. There are many passages in the novel in which we share characters’ perspective and thoughts, and there are even interspersed clauses of interior monologue. Gravity’s Rainbow is full of passages of FIT (and sometimes FIS) of between one clause and some two or three sentences, with an instance occurring on average almost on every page of the book. However, not every case of what looks like FIT is necessarily a representation of consciousness. In his incisive analysis of the novel, Samuli Hägg (2005) devotes a whole chapter (ch. 6) to the “voices” in Gravity’s Rainbow and also notes passages where authorial and figural expressivity and “stylistic difference” cannot be disentangled: “[. . .] it is often impossible to arrive at a justifiable voice attribution. [. . .] sometimes the contextual grounds for discrimination are denied as well” (149). Moving on from postmodernism to more recent fiction, Paul Dawson’s The Return of the Omniscient Narrator (2013) tackles the difficult subject of speech and thought representation in this literature, devoting a whole chapter to free indirect discourse. Dawson criticizes Roy Pascal and other scholars who have worked on FID for assuming that FID needs to be realistic, i.e., to convey a character’s voice in a recognizable fashion. He questions the idea of a neutral and therefore non-subjective narrative voice which is contrasted with the highly subjective and foregrounded idiosyncrasies of the character’s language (in terms of colloquialisms, typical phrases, expressivity, bias, etc.). The novels he analyzes have a foregrounded narratorial voice and leave little basis for character-based “alterity” (Dawson 2013, 177–179). Where the distinction between two sets of style disappears, the attribution of a “voice” to a character no longer imposes itself as a reading effect. In the Victorian novel, though there was an omniscient narrator, the alterity of characters’ discourse was assured through social status (Cockney dialect) and through key phrases which certain individuals had used in their direct speech; in modernism, the narrator (at least in the theory of impersonal narration) was “drowned out” by the subjective language of the characters. What Dawson shows is that in the novels of Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, or Don DeLillo, “characters have been buried by the style” of the narrative (178). Yet this is true already of Pynchon, as illustrated above, whose work might therefore be an antecedent of these more recent developments in novels otherwise less radically disruptive of realism than Pynchon.

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Dawson concentrates on authors’ self-reflexive mocking of the rules of representation of consciousness (2013, 182–185) and illustrates examples of “carrying the stylistic presence [of the narrator] into the performance of FID” (185). Thus, quoting from Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (2007), he notes that the narrator often comments on the use of metaphor and that the extract he cites transfers that strategy to the FID passage supposedly rendering Gaffar’s thoughts and arguments (185). In Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons (2004), the narrative juxtaposes the colloquial “oh God” and “Now” with the medical term “pectoral sheath,” very unlikely to be part of the character’s discourse (discussed by Dawson 2013, 185). Dawson proposes that FID is here constituted not so much by the character’s “voice” (i.e., register) but by the fact that the passages is “expressive of the rhythm of Charlotte’s hyper-conscious mental activity”: “This, along with the third-person pronoun and back-shifted tense, is why the passage as a whole can be defined as free indirect thought” (186). Rather than interpreting FID as an evocation of “voice,” Dawson considers the device as a “narratorial performance”; it is mimetic, but in a different manner from that of modernist aesthetics and poetics. The narrator “adopts” an “anthropological distance from the characters [. . .] throughout the book.” Dawson goes on to note that in Wolfe’s novel there are many different “manifestations of a shared linguistic habitus: between narrator and character, from stylistic contagion to narratorial usurpation; and between characters and their social milieu” (187). What all of this amounts to is the absence of a realistic reflection of style or register in FID and a reduction of the signals of FIT to foregrounded grammatical features (syntax, interjections) rather than lexical choices. There is a suspension of the commitment to invoke a reproduction of what a character might have said to herself in a specific situation. Dawson’s insights are extremely pertinent, especially for the diachronic analysis of FID. What a comparison of these newest forms of FID teaches us in comparison with earlier, for instance Renaissance modes of style, is that the invasion of FID by the narratorial register is not an phenomenon of the twenty-first century but was the norm before modernism. Readers’ and critics’ expectation that FID should be a verisimilar echo of characters’ discourse can be linked to precisely those authors who have been praised as coming closest to a latter-day modernist poetics of narrative, namely Jane Austen and – to a certain extent – George Eliot. These novelists anticipated – and this despite their omniscient narrators – the predominance of internal focalization in modernism and its performance of the representation of consciousness as a sophisticated play with the echoing of characters’ language and of their registers. Both Austen and Eliot in fact employed a fairly neutral non-intrusive narratorial voice (compare Miller 2003 above on Emma) whose omniscience resided in cognitive and moral superiority but not in the figure of an obtrusive storyteller on the model of Fielding and Thackeray. When we go back to FID in

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Sir Philip Sidney and Aphra Behn, we can observe that its register is necessarily shaped by the register of the narration. New insights into the history of FID since the eighteenth century do not consist in a major revision of what has been received opinion; the grand outline of an increase in FIT (and internal focalization) toward the end of the nineteenth century and on into modernism is corroborated. However, we now have much more information on FID in the eighteenth century. In addition, modernist FIT has come under more extensive scrutiny, and the status of FID from the 1960s to the present is starting to be considered. In contrast to earlier treatments of FID, which tended to be narrowly linguistic, recent FID criticism has gone beyond pragmatic functions of FID to consider FID from a variety of different cultural perspectives and as a symbol of social and ideological contexts and ambiance. No consistent story of the history of FID is possible, but many interesting vantage points have been scouted. Topics for future research are exhaustive treatments of nineteenth-century FID; in-depth comparisons between the Victorian and modernist handling of FID on the basis of databases; and more extensive surveys of the spread, quantity, and functions of FID after modernism and into the twenty-first century.

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Kittel, Harald. 1992. “Discovering, Naming and Translating the Impossible: (Self-) Narrated Discourse in Caleb Williams (English and French).” Geschichte, System, literarische Übersetzung/Histories, Systems, Literary Translations, edited by Harald Kittel, 301–323. Berlin: Schmidt. McHale, Brian. 1978. “Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts.” Poetics and Theory of Literature 3:249–287. McHale, Brian. (1987) 1993. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge. Manganaro, Thomas Salem. 2018. “Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of the Will in Two Novels by William Godwin.” Studies in Romanticism 57, no. 2, 301–323. Mezei, Kathy, ed. 1996a. Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mezei, Kathy. 1996b. “Who is Speaking Here? Free Indirect Discourse, Gender, and Authority in Emma, Howards End and Mrs. Dalloway.” In Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, edited by Kathy Mezei, 66–92. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Miller, D. A. 2003. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Neumann, Anne Waldron. 1992. “Free Indirect Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel: Speakable or Unspeakable?” In Language, Text and Context, edited by Michael Toolan, 113–135. London: Routledge. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Roulston, Christine. 1996. “Discourse, Gender, and Gossip: Some Reflections on Bakhtin and Emma.” In Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, edited by Kathy Mezei, 40–65. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rundquist, Eric. 2016. “Consciousness. Representations of Consciousness in Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce: Modernist Experimentations with the Free Indirect Style.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, edited by Violeta Sotirova, 380–399. London: Bloomsbury. Schmid, Wolf. 2017. Mentale Ereignisse: Bewusstseinsveränderungen in europäischen Erzählwerken vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne. Berlin: De Gruyter. Semino, Elena, and Mick Short. 2004. Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge. Shigematsu, Eri. 2018. “Defoe’s Psychological Realism: The Effect of Directness in Indirect Consciousness Representation Categories.” Language and Literature 27, no. 2, 71–85. Shigematsu, Eri. 2019. “Authenticity and Creation of Selves in Defoe’s Fictional Autobiographies: Representation of Consciousness in Retrospective Narratives.” https://api.semanticscholar.org/ CorpusID:213151403. Accessed on 2 June 2022. Shimazaki, Hatsuyo. 2015. “Free Indirect Speech in the Work of Jane Austen: The Previously Unappreciated Extent and Complexity of Austen’s Free Indirect Speech and Its Development from Eighteenth Century Fiction.” PhD thesis, University of Southampton. Skinner, John. 2001. An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Raising the Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Sotirova, Violeta. 2007. “Historical Transformations of Free Indirect Style.” In Stylistics: Prospect & Retrospect, edited by David L. Hoover and Sharon Lattig, 129–141. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Sotirova, Violeta. 2010. “The Roots of a Literary Style: Joyce’s Presentation of Consciousness in Ulysses.” Language and Literature: Journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association 19, no. 2, 131–149. Sotirova, Violeta. 2013. Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stanzel, Franz Karl. (1979) 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Preface by Paul Hernadi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Steinberg, Erwin R. 1958 (1973). The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in “Ulysses.” Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Strauch, Gérard. 1993. “Richardson et le Style Indirect Libre.” RANAM 26:87–101. Uddén, Anna. 2000. Veils of Irony: The Development of Narrative Technique in Women’s Novels of the 1790s. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. Vermeule, Blakey. 2010. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Sophie Marnette

Free Indirect Discourse in Medieval and Modern French Literature 1 Definition Based on Oswald Ducrot’s theory of enunciation (1984, 1989), Free Indirect Discourse (FID) can be defined as a unique enunciative act in which the locutor (responsible for the enunciative act and denoted where necessary by je) reports the perspective of another speaker (the enunciator) in his discourse without it being explicitly indicated in the utterance that said perspective is being reported. In other words, the speaker neither subordinates the enunciator’s discourse to a declarative verb nor coordinates it with another subordinate reported discourse, even though subordinated reported discourse (expressed in Indirect Discourse, ID) can be found in the co-text immediately preceding the FID. Contrary to what occurs in ID, the locutor and the enunciator whose perspectives are reported are not confined to any specific part of the utterance. In narrative terms, FID is thus a device by which the narrator/locutor integrates a character’s/enunciator’s discourse into his own speech without interrupting the flow of the story – that is, without having to open quotation marks or employ an introductory formula for Direct Discourse (DD). In modern French, FID is characterized by the presence of features of DD (direct questions, exclamations, deictics, and colloquialisms attributed to the quoted locutor, etc.) reported in the fashion of ID entailing the shifting of pronouns and tenses to refer to the quoting locutor, but without syntactic dependency on a reporting clause and thus without direct subordination to a verbum dicendi or sentiendi or coordination with a previous reported clause. Certain shifters such as ici (here), maintenant (now), and aujourd’hui (today) may refer to the reported clause’s context of utterance. Contrary to Jean Rychner (1989, 74) and many others, specialists studying FID in English recognize the presence of parentheses, or what Ehrlich (1990, 11) and Fludernik (1993, 164, 285) call “sentences containing parentheticals.” The grammatical subject of the FID parenthesis must correspond to the person whose speech is quoted. As for the reported clause’s pronouns and verbal persons, the frame of reference depends on the parenthesis, the agreement of tenses between reported clause and parenthesis being obligatory in most cases, but, as in any FID, these occurrences usually contain DD structures (exclamations, deictics such as maintenant, etc.). This kind of FID nevertheless approximates ID insofar as the parenthesis denotes the enunciator and makes explicit reference to this being a reported discourse. That

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said, there is no subordinating conjunction linking this discourse to the parenthesis, which can appear relatively far from the beginning of the utterance. For standard references with historical accounts of FID, see Cohn (1978), Fludernik (1993, 1996), McHale (1978, 2014), Pascal (1977), Rosier (1999), and Strauch (1974, 1975). The three essential points underlying the present approach to FID in French literature are as follows: (1) FID existed before the nineteenth century both as a form and as a Speech and Thought Presentation (S&TP) strategy. (2) FID can take various forms depending on its context. (3) FID has different functions depending on its context and its type (speech or thought/attitude). Context can be understood, for the present purposes, as knowledge of former and future events in the text, knowledge of what the characters are or are not aware of, and knowledge of their ways of reacting and thinking. Context may also refer to the means by which narrators present themselves and, more generally, to the requirements of the literary genre in question. The discursive context, i.e., the “co-text” that comes immediately before and after an FID segment in a text, is also essential to identify FID, for it cannot be considered solely within the limits of the sentence. This is because the formal characteristics generally attributed to FID (imperfect tense, third person, etc.) are not specific to it and therefore do not always allow for differentiation between an utterance in FID and a narrative utterance (Ehrlich 1990). In cases where ambiguity may arise, examination of the text surrounding the utterance may thus reveal the presence of FID. For example, interpreting an utterance as FID is made easier if this utterance is related to a character’s previous thought or speech reports by coreferential expressions or connectives. Likewise, the presence of an imperfective verbal form (progressive -ing form in English, imperfect tense in modern French) can only express FID if superimposed onto a previous predicate denoting a character’s speech or thought. The specificity of FID is that it constitutes reported discourse (speech or thoughts) but without necessarily being signposted as such, at least within the utterance under consideration. Consequently, the signs of reported discourse must frequently be sought outside FID itself. In the co-text directly preceding a stretch of FID, an instance of ID or the “narrative report of a speech act” (Leech and Short 1981, 184) can often be found, a category that includes reports of thoughts or attitudes. Thus in many cases, the co-text explicitly indicates the presence of discourse, whether it is reported or not and whether this is discourse involving two characters or just one (self-reflection). FID has a relationship with this co-text of both continuity and dis-

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continuity. For example, in some cases of ID, FID can continue the reported discourse but is no longer connected to the introductory declarative verb by subordination or coordination. The co-text directly following the FID usually indicates strong discontinuity such as changes of tense, of grammatical subject, and topic. FID cannot be associated with one unique function or specific meaning. It is polyvalent, partly because it occupies a medial position between DD and ID, and also because it constitutes a marked method of representing discourse, be it speech or thought. The differentiation between FID reporting speech (FID/speech) and FID reporting thought (FID/thought) is not a problem of taxonomy, for these two types of FID relate to two discrete issues, or rather two discrete questions: “Who is speaking in the text?” and “Who is seeing?” In narration, it is always the narrator who speaks, even if on occasion s/he reports characters’ speech through DD, ID, or FID. However, the narrator is not the only one to “see,” and the perspective of other characters can be included in the narration (Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002, 72). FID/ thought is most intimately tied to perspective and focalization, while FID/speech pertains more to narrative control by the narrator. FID reporting thought (FID/thought) is probably the most difficult kind of FID to spot, since it is less frequently marked and thus occasionally confused with narration. In most cases, context can be as helpful as co-text when sorting these matters out. For instance, if the text’s narrator is perceived as impersonal or neutral, an utterance containing a value judgment is more likely to be in FID. This involves a vicious circle, since the use of FID contributes to how the narrator is perceived. On the other hand, the presence of FID/thought is closely related to what types of focalization are at work within a text. For present purposes, the model of focalization proposed by Rimmon-Kenan ([1983] 2002, 72–86) will be adopted. In essence, the story is presented through a certain perspective or viewpoint, yielding the text’s focalization. In external focalization, the narrator is the focalizing agent, the view over events is panoramic and panchronic, and knowledge of the events is in principle complete. In internal narration, the locus of focalization is situated within the diegetic world, the focalizing agent generally being a character. The view over events is synchronic, and knowledge of events is reduced to however much the focalizing agent knows. Just as the focalizing agent can be external or internal to the events being represented, so the focalized “object” can be seen either from without or from within. This gives us the following matrix: External focalization - from without - from within Internal focalization - from without - from within

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Since FID/thought reproduces what is happening in the mind of the character whose perspective is being reported, the device necessarily entails focalization from within. It is more difficult to say whether FID/thought belongs uniquely to internal focalization, which some believe can include the narrator’s perspective alongside that of the character/enunciator (Ducrot 1989, 188; Rychner 1980, 97; Bruña-Cuevas 1988, 436). Rimmon-Kenan ([1983] 2002, 81) points out that formulae such as “he thought,” “it seemed to him,” and “he felt” can be found in external focalization from within, with examples of this type of focalization generally containing ID. Should it thus be concluded that the difference between ID and FID is that they belong to two different types of focalization? This is difficult to imagine, especially in cases where FID follows ID or contains a parenthesis like “in his view” or “it seemed to her.” FID reporting speech (FID/speech) is less clearly linked to focalization, despite Schmid’s view that “FID rarely serves the reproduction of outer speech” and that “cases in which it is used for the representation of spoken discourse [. . .] are almost always examples not of the reproduction of spoken discourse itself, but rather of the perception of the outer speech by one of the characters” (2010, 148). In fact, as will be shown below, the narrator of a text may simply use FID/speech to add color to the narration with his characters’ idioms rather than using it as a vehicle for their thoughts and inner perceptions. In using FID/speech instead of, or after, DD/ speech, the narrator might seem to tighten his grip on his characters’ discourse while retaining the vivacity and realism peculiar to the direct mode. Furthermore, in some cases, the characters themselves use FID/speech within their own discourse quoted in DD, for example when intimating what another character will say in the future (see below). The views on FID adopted here, and in particular the importance given to co-text and context in order to identify FID, are in line with Monika Fludernik’s approach (1993, 1996, and in this volume). They are also in agreement with Laurence Rosier’s seminal book Le Discours rapporté: Histoire, théories, pratiques (1999), except for one important point: wherever necessary, FID is signaled by the transposition of grammatical person (verb ending, pronouns, possessives, etc.) and only optionally by the transposition of tenses. By contrast, Rosier (1999, 280–281) considers that the use of the present tense (even with a transposition of grammatical person) signals Free Direct Discourse (i.e., direct discourse without verbum dicendi; FDD) rather than FID. Finally, the views adopted here are also in broad agreement with Schmid (2010 and in this volume) in acknowledging that identifying FID is not always easy in practice because of its intrinsically “mixed” nature resulting from the combination of techniques (DD and ID) and voices (speaker and enunciator[s]), which can give rise to the interference of narrator’s text and characters’ text, or, more concisely, “text interference” (to use the words of Schmid 2010, 137).

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2 FID in Medieval French Literature 2.1 Previous Work on Medieval FID FID has traditionally been considered as a deliberate stylistic device from the nineteenth century onward (with the exception of La Fontaine in the seventeenth century). The main reason for this assumption is that FID was long perceived as a development in how the narrator manipulates fiction and presents the perspectives of the characters. According to this view, FID is supposedly too elaborate a structure for medieval literature; several studies on FID openly exhibit a contempt for the narrators of medieval texts, deemed incapable of differentiating between their perspective and that of their characters. Lips (1926, 125–126) states that in Old French what sometimes appeared to be FID were in fact cases of unbridled ID where the medieval storyteller subjectively mixed his characters’ preoccupations into his own thoughts, thereby creating ambiguity. In her view therefore, this was not real FID, which she saw as a fixed, “objective” grammatical form that would not allow for any hesitation regarding the identity and objectivity of the writer. In a similar vein, Florian Coulmas (1986, 10) is keen to cite Baxtin ([1929] 1986, 150) on the subject of Old French: “Therefore no clearly marked boundaries between direct and indirect discourse existed then. The Old French storyteller was as yet unable to separate the figures of his fantasy from his own ‘I.’” These views call for two observations, one regarding the confusion of perspectives, the other regarding subjectivity. It is not correct to speak of perspectives being reduced into one in medieval literature. This is evident in early examples of elaborate psychology and subtle dialogue, as in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, thus countering any suggestion of the confusion of perspectives. Sung epic poems such as the medieval French chansons de geste are no more deserving of this characterization. At issue is the playfulness of perspectives rather than their indistinguishable mixture. Suzanne Fleischman (1990) demonstrated as much by analyzing the use of the present tense in epics. It was found that a blend of pasts and presents, previously regarded as a confusion of tense usage, was in fact a consequence of the originally oral nature of the chansons de geste. Also calling for re-examination is the problem of subjectivity. What is meant by “objective narrator”? The term “impersonal narrator” is more appropriate, but actually FID can occur even when a narrator is “personal,” such as in medieval epics where the storyteller openly addresses his audience and sides with his characters. The second reason for FID supposedly being limited to “modern” written discourse is the restrictive definition of its form. In modern French, FID is generally identified by the use of the imperfect and related tenses (past future, pluperfect). The situation in Old French, however, is quite different.

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Lips (1926) sought to prove the nonexistence of FID in medieval French. To do so, she examined three epics (La Chanson de Roland, Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, and La Conquête de Jerusalem), also drawing from the chrestomathies of medieval writers such as Clédat, Paris, Jeanroy, and Langlois. This corpus is insufficient for qualifying the entirety of medieval French, and it is unreliable, given that some of the editions she used were heavily edited versions of the texts found in the actual manuscripts. Later, Verschoor (1959) examined some twenty texts including chansons de geste, lais, courtly romances, chronicles, and so on. He did not deny the existence of medieval FID – quite the contrary, even though his analysis of the corpus was not entirely convincing. He occasionally called FID what is merely a subordinate clause dependent on an ID subordinate clause, as in the following example: (1) La Mort Le Roi Artu (13th century) Lors revindrent au roi, si li distrent que a Lancelot avoient failli, car il s’en estoit alez pie ça et en a avec lui menez toz ses chevaliers. Quant li rois l’entent, si dist [. . .]. (Then they came back to the king; they told him that they had missed Lancelot because he had gone away some time ago and has taken with him all his knights. When the king hears this, he said [. . .]; Verschoor 1959, 95, emphasis added) Cerquiglini (1984) devoted an article to the study of medieval FID, yet for all the examples he gave, he did not seek to provide a systematic study of an entire corpus of medieval French texts. In La Parole médiévale (1981), he identified instances of FID in Robert de Boron’s Estoire del Graal, noting their disappearance in the work’s prose versions. Bruña-Cuevas (1988) examined FID in works attributed to Marie de France, notably her collections of lais and of fables, and L’espurgatoire saint Patrice, but he failed to adopt a diachronic perspective. Ultimately, it was Rychner (1987, 1989) who paid the most attention to medieval FID (which he termed “subjective discourse”) through his studies of Marie de France’s lais and subsequently in his posthumous book, La narration des sentiments, des pensées et des discours dans quelques œuvres des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (1990). The analysis that follows has benefited greatly from Rychner’s insights, although it is based on a more comprehensive formal description of FID, particularly with regard to the surrounding co-text. Buridant (2000, 677–680) offers a simple but comprehensive overview of FID in medieval French, focusing on various literary genres and giving a broad range of examples. The recently published Grande grammaire historique du français (GGHF) devotes a section to “discours représenté” (Marchello-Nizia et al. 2020, 1702–1728) which includes a discussion of Cerquiglini’s (1984) and Marnette’s (1998) work

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on FID in medieval French. The GGHF highlights the difficulty of distinguishing between Free Indirect Discourse (“discours indirect libre”) and Freed Indirect Discourse (“discours indirect émancipé”), noting that the latter might be accidental – not a deliberate strategy but the “petering out” of a stretch of ID. Similarly, FID with inserted parentheticals is not seen as FID by the GGHF but as a separate category called “discours indirect régi sans subordination,” bizarrely deemed to have existed “as early as” the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., in La Fontaine’s fables), whereas similar examples already existed in medieval French, such as in the following example (FID is italicized): (2) Chanson de Roland (late eleventh century) “Voet par hostages, ço dist li Sarrazins, Dunt vos avrez u dis u quinze u vint. Pa num d’ocire i métrai un mien filz E sin avrez, ço quid, de plus gentilz. Quant vus serez el palais seignurill, A la grant feste seint Michel del Peril, Mis avoez la vos sivrat, ço dit. Enz en vos bainz que Deus pur vos i fist, La vuldrat il chrestïens devenir.” (lines 150–155) (“He wants to [guarantee the peace] through hostages, of which you will have ten or fifteen or twenty. Despite the fact that he might be killed, I will add one of my own sons, and you won’t in my view have a nobler one. When you will be in the noble palace at the feast of St. Michel del Peril, there my lord will follow you, so he says. In the bath that God made for you, there will he want to become Christian.”) Note that the GGHF also identifies examples of FID in premodern France (Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Scarron) without linking them to any narrative strategy.

2.2 Medieval Forms of FID In Old French, there is no particular verb tense for FID, which in some instances can be expressed in an assortment of tenses. Moreover, the punctuation of medieval texts operates at the discretion of the editors, and is sometimes less than ideal (Rychner 1989, 1; 1990, 200–202). Unlike the FID that we find in contemporary spoken language, the original intonation of the narrator in medieval times is inaccessible. It thus becomes essential to examine the co-text in order to determine

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whether the utterance in question is in FID. Bruña-Cuevas (1988) showed the importance of the co-text in identifying FID in the Lais attributed to Marie de France. This was confirmed by my own analysis, based on a larger corpus of twenty-two medieval texts from different literary genres (Marnette 1996), which attempted to tease out the constants at work throughout the corpus and not just in the Lais. The importance of these constants cannot be stressed enough: medieval FID is not a lawless phenomenon, but rather one that requires a minimum number of characteristics in order to be appropriately interpreted. However, aside from the necessity for verb endings and pronouns to be switched to the reporting situation of enunciation, none of these characteristics are obligatory, even though the more numerous they are, the more confident one can be that this is an instance of FID. Even so, some utterances are likely to remain ambiguous. It is this very ambiguity that Flaubert and Zola made such masterful use of in their works. After all (and despite what Lips might say), what reader can clearly distinguish between the speech of characters and that of the narrator in each sentence of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) or of Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–1893)? As described in section 1 above, FID can continue a reported discourse but without being connected to the introductory declarative verb by subordination or coordination. In the medieval corpus, as shown in (3) below, the verb that introduces ID (underlined) is sometimes unlikely to introduce FID. (3) Eliduc (from Lais de Marie de France, late twelfth century) Ele li demandot suvent, s’il ot oï de nule gent qu’ele eüst mesfet u mespris, tant cum il fu hors del païs; volentiers s’en esdrescera devant sa gent, quant il plaira. “Dame fet il, [. . .].” (lines 725–756) (She often would ask him whether he had heard from anybody that she had misbehaved or strayed while he was away from the land; she will defend herself publicly in front of the people, whenever it pleases him. “Lady, he says, [. . .].”) In the medieval corpus, it is rare to see FID where the first main verb is in the same tense and has the same grammatical subject as the final main verb of the ID that it follows (see [4] below). Nevertheless, the first main verb of FID tends to possess at least one formal link with ID: (a) it is in the same tense as the last verb of the ID (see [4] below); (b) it has the same grammatical subject as this verb (see [4], [7] below); (c) its grammatical subject is the same as the verb introducing the ID (see [3] ,[4],

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[11] below). In the absence of these links, the coreference between ID and FID is provided by object pronouns, possessive adjectives, or the grammatical subjects of other verbs in the FID (see [12] below). In sum, medieval FID often follows a co-text which establishes a context of reported discourse. It can have links to this co-text other than subordination and coordination (same grammatical subject, same verb tense, coreferentiality, etc.), but since FID seldom adopts all of these links, it occupies a position that is in both continuity and conflict with the co-text. When the co-text preceding the FID does not explicitly establish a discourse context, this can be a case of FID with a parenthesis: reported discourse is thus signposted within FID (see [2] above and [7] below). The co-text following FID generally indicates separation from the reported discourse and a return to narration. In the medieval corpus, this separation can be characterized by a change in verb tense between the last main verb of the FID and the first verb of the co-text and/or by a change of grammatical subject as well as by the beginning of a new stanza in epic poetry and by closure of the DD if the FID is a message included within a character’s DD (see [7] below). The most efficient means of breaking from the discourse is the use of a formula such as “Quant il l’entent, si li respunt” (When he hears it, so he answers). Separation can also be conveyed through a transition to action: the character who has just expressed himself then acts following this discourse. Another category involves changes of topic. Change of grammatical subject is thus but the formal indication of a more profound change: something else – another character and/or situation – is being spoken about, as is the case in the following example: (4) Beroul, Le Roman de Tristan (twelfth century) Il lor dit que il a toz boit: Si grant arson a en son cors A poine l’en puet geter fors. Tuit cil qui l’oient si parler De pitié prenent a plorer. (lines 3656–3660) (He tells them that he drinks to the health of them all: there is so much burning in his body that he can barely throw it out. All those who hear him speak so start crying out of pity. [Tristan who speaks here is lying to the crowd as he is pretending to be a leper.]) While the importance of the co-text in interpreting FID is obvious, this criterion must be viewed with caution. None of the aforementioned characteristics are by themselves sufficient or even necessary (cf. Vetters 1994). They allow for, but do not guarantee, the presence of FID. The more characteristics deemed conducive to FID can be found, the more likely it is that this is a case of FID. Occasionally, however,

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context (what is known about the characters, what they do or do not know, etc.) must be taken into consideration in order to be sure, especially in the absence of any other reported discourse in the co-text. In the following example from the Chanson de Roland, FID occurs because the action expressed in the future simple does not take place, as the character (Turpin) dies before he able to fulfil it: (5) Chanson de Roland (late eleventh century) Li arcevesques, quant vit pasmer Rollant Dunc out tel doel unkes mais n’out si grant. Tendit sa main, si ad pris l’olifan. En Roncesvals ad un’ewe curant; Aler i volt, sin durrat a Rollant. Sun petit pas s’en turnet cancelant. Il est si fieble qu’il ne poet en avant; N’en ad vertut, trop ad perdut del sanc. Einz que om alast un sul arpent de camp, Faut li le coer, si est chaeit avant. La sue mort l’i vait mult angoissant. (line 2222–32) (The archbishop, when he sees Roland faint, then he had such sorrow, never did he feel more. He rose his hand, he has taken the horn. In Rencesvals, there is a stream of water; he wants to go there; he will give some to Roland. With very small steps, he turns around, staggering. He is so weak that he cannot go further. He does not have the strength to, he has lost too much blood. Before he can go any further, his heart fails him, he has fallen forward. His death is causing him great anguish.) It has been observed above that changes of verb tense help to identify FID in relation to its immediate co-text, signaling its beginning and/or its end. The use of verb tenses inside FID is also extremely relevant. A majority of verbs contained in medieval forms of FID are in the future indicative or in the present indicative (see [2], [3], [4], [5] above and [8], [9], [11] below). Verbs in the imperfect indicative or related tenses (past future indicative, imperfect subjunctive) are less frequent: (6) Erec et Enide (ca. 1170) Ceste novele estoit alee A Guivret le Petit contee, C’uns chevaliers d’armes navrez Iert morz en la forest trovez,

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O lui une dame tant bele, Qu’Iseut semblast estre s’ancele; Si fesoit duel mout merveillous. Trovez les avoit anbedous li cuens Oringles de Limors, s’an avoit fait porter le cors, et la dame esposer voloit, Mais ele li contredisoit. Quant Guivrez la parole oï, [. . .]. (lines 4935–4947) (This news had gone to Guivret the Short that a knight wounded in a battle had been found dead in the forest, with him a lady so beautiful that Iseut would have looked like her servant; she was showing such great sorrow. The count Oringles of Limors had found both of them, he had taken the body away and wanted to marry the lady, but she was refusing him. When Guivret heard these words, [. . .].) Furthermore, some FID mixes imperfect and simple past verbs with simple future or present verbs, as in the following example (see also [12] below): (7) Lanval (from Lais de Marie de France, late twelfth century) Mult fu dolente e curuciee de ceo qu’il l’out si aviliee. En sun lit malade culcha; ja mes, ceo dit, n’en lèvera, se li reis ne li faiseit dreit de ceo dunt ele se pleindreit. Li reis fu de bois repairiez, [. . .]. (lines 307–313 (She was very upset and angry that he had reproached her so. She went to her bed, ill. Never, she says, will she get up, unless the king would right what she would complain about. The king had come back from the forest, [. . .].) The situation is very different in modern French, however, where it is the imperfect and related tenses that signal FID. The use of the present and simple future indicative tenses to mark FID in medieval texts can be easily explained. First of all, the use of the imperfect indicative is rare in the earliest Old French texts. Fleischman (1990, 124) counts only eight examples in the Oxford version of the Chanson de Roland (late eleventh century). Fleischman (56) also points out that the unmarked verb tense in epic poetry (eleventh to thirteenth century) is the

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present indicative, not the simple past, as is generally the case in modern fictional narratives. It is by this means that the narrator (performer) of chansons de geste links the narrative to its context of utterance in a move to make it appear more vivid. By transitioning from present to past verb tenses and vice versa, medieval storytellers transported their audience directly to the action, presenting themselves and their audiences as eyewitnesses. Consequently, if the present indicative is the unmarked tense of a text, it is no surprise that future indicatives will be found in reported discourse such as ID and FID. It is only with the advent of lais and verse romances (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) that verbs in the imperfect indicative and the conditional become more numerous within FID, sometimes in the majority of cases. It should also be acknowledged that during this period (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), significant mutations in the use of verb tenses in narration were underway. This explains the variations that occur in medieval lais and romances. The other reason why the present and simple future indicative tenses are characteristic of FID in medieval texts is that FID is found not only in the narrator’s discourse, but also in characters’ speech quoted in DD. This is the case particularly in chansons de geste, for example, when a character wants to convey a message from or to a third party (Marnette 1999). The original speaker indicated what the messenger should say to the addressee of the message, as in (8) below. The GGHF calls this “FID in the second person” (Marchello-Nizia et al. 2020, 1722–1723). Alternatively, the messenger can report the discourse entrusted to him in the present or in the simple future indicative (see also [2] above). (8) La Prise d’Orange (late twelfth century) “[. . .] Il le te mande nel te devon celer, Que tu t’en fuies en Aufrique outre mer. Ja ne verras le mois de moi passer Qu’il te sivra a.xx.m. ferarmez; Ne te garront les tors ne li piler, Les amples sales ne li parfont fossé; A mous de fer te seront estroé. S’il te puet prendre, a martire es livré, Penduz as forches et au vent encroé.” (lines 581–589) (“[. . .] He tells/orders you this, we must not hide it from you, that you shall flee to Africa, overseas. You will not see the month of May pass by without him following you with twenty thousand of his armed men; your towers and pillars will not save you, nor the ample halls nor the deep ditches; with iron club they will be destroyed for you; if he can capture you, you will be doomed to martyrdom, hung from the gallows, fleeting in the wind.”)

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2.3 Functions and Strategies of FID in Medieval Narrative Examples of FID in modern narratives are generally taken from impersonal (also called third-person) works of fiction, that is, texts where the narrator is not referenced in the first person. However, contrary to the opinion of some, this does not mean that the narrator is absent (Banfield 1973, 34–35) or even objective (Lips 1926, 125–126). The narrator is nevertheless reduced to a minimal role in the text and to a voice which is distinct from the characters’ voices, but more or less willingly identified with their perspective (Ehrlich 1990, 10). It is difficult to qualify medieval texts as “impersonal narratives.” From hagiographies to verse romances, and from epic poems to lais, first-person references to the narrator as well as second-person references to the narratee are frequent (Marnette 1998). Even in prose narratives, which appeared later than verse ones (i.e., from the thirteenth century onward) and where expressions such as “Or dit li contes que [. . .]” (Now the tale says that [. . .]) instead of “Or conterai que [. . .]” (Now I will recount that [. . .]) are more frequently found, there are references to the narrator and the narratee in the first and second persons. What, then, is the role of FID in medieval French, a device which is so commonly considered as the ultimate tool of impersonal narratives? Given the multiplicity of literary genres and their evolution over time, there is no single answer to this question. Two groups of texts, epic poetry and prose romances, appear to resist the use of FID as a result of the strategies of S&TP they adopt (Marnette 1996, 1998, 2005). Chansons de geste (mainly composed between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries) make considerable use of DD, which is usually unequivocally signposted, and very little use of ID. Character speech thus receives as much space as, if not more than, storyteller speech. The aim is to deliver speech in the most “faithful” and “direct” manner possible. Moreover, character speech rarely appears alone and generally forms part of a dialogue. The absence of narrator mediation may explain why FID, like ID, is not a favored device in epic poetry. The absence of FID is thus explained by functional factors and not by medieval narrators’ ignorance or inability to differentiate between their perspective and that of the characters. The lack of FID and of ID in epic poetry is also explained by the fact that focalization in epic poetry is mainly external: the narrator plays the role of a witness, reporting the actions and direct speech of the characters from an external perspective without access to the characters’ mental discourse. Although prose romances (from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century) are the closest to what one might call “impersonal narratives,” they usually contain very little FID. Cerquiglini (1981), based on thirteen examples, finds that with the rendering of Robert de Boron’s verse Estoire du Graal into prose, FID either disappears or becomes DD or ID. The reason for this is in Cerquiglini’s view that prose texts

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deliberately make explicit what the verse kept more implicit. In particular, the use of DD clarifies who the locutor is instead of keeping him/her vague. This is due to the fact that prose romances are keen to emphasize the identity of the person speaking (Cerquiglini 1981, 84). Below is an example of FID in the original text and its transformation into DD (in bold), as identified by Cerquiglini: (9)  Robert de Boron, Estoire du Graal (ca. 1200) E cil qui l’avoient gardé Disoient bien par vérité Qu’il n’estoit pas la u on le mist. Encor unt il plus grant despist, Car il l’unt par Joseph perdu. De ce sunt il tout esperdu; Et se damages y a nus, Ç’a il fait, et Nychodemus. (lines 631–638; quoted by Cerquiglini 1984, 99) (And those who had guarded him were saying by truth that he was not where he had been placed. And they are even more annoyed because they have lost him due to Joseph. Because of this, they are quite distraught. And if there is any damage coming from this, that is his fault, and Nichodemus’s.) (10) Prose version of the Estoire du Graal (early thirteenth century) Et cil parolent qui le gardoient et dient que il sevent bien que il n’est mie la u Joseph l’avoit mis, et dient que “par lui l’avons nous perdu et se maus nous en vient, ce nous ara il fait entre lui et Nichodemus” (quoted by Cerquiglini 1984, 99) (And those who were guarding him speak and say that they know well that he is not where Joseph had placed him, and they say that “because of him [Joseph] we have lost him and if any harm comes to us from this, this will be his and Nichodemus’s doing.”) A study of larger corpora of medieval prose romances confirms Cerquiglini’s observations as to the speaker’s identity (Marnette 1998, 2005). Here, unlike in epic poetry and verse romances, DD rarely appears without being introduced by a verbum dicendi. Moreover, each prose romance privileges one type of introduction over the rest, whereas verse romances exhibit no real preferences in this regard. A pattern is thus established in the prose text: every speaker of DD must be identified as consistently as possible. The narration itself is predicated on this need for

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identification, with formulae such as “Le conte dit que [. . .]” recurring many times over. The reason for why FID – where real effort is required to determine who is speaking or thinking – is underused in prose romances is now clear. As with modern FID, the medieval use of FID cannot be associated with one unique function or specific meaning. Though it may be useful to group texts by genre, the risk of simplifying the issue cannot be ignored. The Oxford version of the Chanson de Roland, for instance, contains more examples of FID than other epics, and it reveals various types, if one includes examples of FID inserted in the characters’ discourse (see [2] above and [11] below). Likewise, there is a real variation in the proportion and type (speech/thought) of FID present in the various lais, including both those attributed to Marie de France and others (Marnette 2013). In my own research, I have tried to elucidate some of the functions played by FID while relating them to specific types (i.e., speech or thought). Chansons de geste are generally described as having an external focalization from without. The narrator plays the role of a witness, reporting the actions and direct speech of the characters from an external perspective and without granting access to their reflections. Characters’ feelings must thus be ascertained by their reactions or by their utterances. This practice explains why FID is so rare in these texts, albeit not completely unknown in narrator discourse (see [5] above). The situation changes in lais and romances, where the narrator more readily communicates the reflections of the characters and tends to focus on the psychological evolution of their amorous feelings. Here, focalization is predominantly external from within: it is rare for events to be recounted solely through the characters’ eyes, and the narrator always provides more information than the characters have at their disposal. However, contrary to what one might expect, characters’ thoughts are not often the subject of reported discourse, be it in ID or in FID. The narrator describes feelings and reflections but does not impart characters’ mental discourse as easily as he does their spoken discourse. In fact, in romances, mental discourse is often presented as spoken discourse. For example, in Chrétien de Troyes’s romances Erec et Enide (ca. 1170) and Yvain (ca. 1180), Enide and Laudine engage in debates with themselves out loud. The verb dire is used instead of penser, and we only occasionally find dire en soi même (to say within oneself). Lais employ a higher proportion of FID to express thought than romances, especially the Lais attributed to Marie de France (Marnette 2013). In general, however, medieval narrators rarely use FID to report thoughts: they prefer either ID or description, giving them more control over discourse (in the broad sense), or, at the other extreme, they dress up thought as speech. In this way, medieval FID differs greatly from FID in modern narratives, where it is very commonly used to express characters’ thoughts. FID reporting speech (FID/speech) is more frequent than FID reporting thoughts in medieval French literature, although the proportions of speech and thought are

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distributed differently depending on the text. This type of FID is the most clearly marked, since few instances are not preceded by a co-text which establishes a discourse context or is followed by a formula indicating the end of the FID. Taken as a whole, lais, which tend to be courtly love verse narratives (twelfth to thirteenth century) make more use of FID than fabliaux, which are short comic verse tales of relatively equal length (thirteenth to fourteenth century; Marnette 2013). Overall, lais also contain less DD in comparison to narration. It would seem, then, that the narrators of lais tend to prefer narration, which includes character speech in FID and ID. In thus placing character speech under their control, the narrators of lais tend to play a very different role to that of the narrator/witness in chansons de geste. They filter and “transcribe” the characters’ discourses with their own words, just as they purport to transcribe the original Breton lais into their own language with their own structure. As noted above, some FID/speech is included in a character’s DD and forms part of a message that has either been reported or remains to be delivered. Of these examples, a majority follow ID or the narration of a speech act. Here, FID (like ID) is used for reasons of intelligibility: one direct discourse contained in another would risk confusion between two possible jes, that of the reported clause and that of the reporting clause. This is possible only in monologues that constitute a secondary narrative within the main text, such as the character Calogrenant’s account with which Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, le chevalier au lion begins (around 500 lines). FID thus alternates with ID for reasons of intelligibility and fluidity in messages. FID avoids the ponderousness of a repeated verbum dicendi, but ID is sometimes necessary in order to clearly restate who is speaking. In one particular instance taken from the Chanson de Roland, FID is used where ID would provide excessive clarity: (11) Chanson de Roland (late eleventh century) Si li ad dit: “A tort vos curuciez, Quar ço vos mandet Caries, ki France tient, Que recevez la lei de chrestïens; Demi Espaigne vus durat ill en fiez. L’altre meitet avrat Rollant, sis niés Mult orguillos parçuner i avrez! Si ceste acorde ne volez otrier, En Sarraguce vus vendrat aseger; Par poëstet serez pris e liez, Menet serez dreit a Ais le siet. Vus n’i avrez palefreid ne destrer, Ne mul ne mule que puissez chevalcher;

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Getet serez sur un malvais sumer. Par jugement iloec perdrez le chef. Nostre emperere vus enveiet cest bref.” (lines 469–483) (He [Ganelon] said to him  [Marsile]: “You are wrong to get angry, because Charles who holds France sends for you to receive the Christian law; he will give you half of Spain in fief. As for the other half, his nephew Roland will have it. You will have quite a proud partner! If you don’t agree to this, he will come to besiege you in Sarragosse; you will be made captured and bound by force. You will be led to the city of Aachen. You won’t have a palfrey or a war horse, nor a mule to ride; you’ll be thrown on a bad pack horse. By trial, there, you will lose your head. This is the message our emperor has sent you.”) Rychner (1990, 213) considers this not as an example of FID but as Ganelon’s discourse. However, the contents of Ganelon’s traitorous and threatening message would have no weight if he did not present his speech as a reproduction of Charlemagne’s (which in fact it is not). Nevertheless, and in refraining from repeating the “ço vos mandet Carles” introduction, Ganelon appears to have misgivings, as when he later speaks ill of Roland while refusing to do so about Charlemagne. In truth, the only line that Charlemagne probably did say forms part of the ID (“Que recevez la lei de chrestïens”). FID can also report a written discourse. In Béroul’s Tristan, the couple’s message to King Mark is first orally composed by Tristan, with the hermit then summarizing King Mark’s written response aloud. These varied interventions are reported by FID in characters’ DD. FID/written also involves the well-known issue of the stick on which Tristan engraves a message for Iseult in Chèvrefeuille, one of the lais attributed to Marie de France. Here, there is no human intermediary to deliver the message: FID is used, preceded by ID and followed, in this instance, by DD: (12) Chèvrefeuille (from Lais de Marie de France, late twelfth century) Ceo fu la sume de l’escrit qu’il li aveit mandé e dit, que lunges ot ilec esté e atendu e surjurné pur espiër e pur saveir coment il la peüst veeir kar ne poeit vivre senz li. Dels dous fu il tut altresi cume del chievrefueil esteit ki a la coldre se prenoit:

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quant il s’i est laciez e pris e tut entur le fust s’est mis, ensemble poeent bien durer; mes ki puis les vuelt desevrer, la coldre muert hastivement e li chievrefueilz ensement. “Bele amie, si est de nus ne vus senz mei ne jeo senz vus!” La reïne vint chevalchant. (lines 61–79) (This was the sum of the written word that he had sent for her and said, that for a long time he had stayed there and waited and sojourned in order to spy and to learn how he could see her because he could not live without her. With the two of them, it was like it was for the honeysuckle which attached itself to the hazel tree: once it has laced and clasped itself to it and it has gone all around the trunk, together they can last long; but whoever then tries to separate them, the hazel tree dies straight away and so does the honeysuckle soon thereafter. “Fair friend, so it is for us: neither you without me nor I without you.”) In example (12), DD is more of a motto characterizing Tristan and Iseut’s love than a true description of it, as in the FID that precedes. In this type of situation, FID fulfills the role of intermediary, which would usually belong to a human character. It retains the fluidity of DD but also demonstrates the “non-direct” nature of written messages generally, given that the recipient must decipher the sender’s speech through a written medium. It is not the intention of the above analysis to argue that FID appears with high frequency in medieval texts, or that all instances of FID that have been identified cannot be contested. It simply reveals that FID, in the same way as DD and ID, is a tool at the medieval narrator’s disposal for representing the speech and thoughts of his characters. Although ambiguity and polyvalence are among its essential features, it most assuredly presents a series of formal regularities that grant it a “welloiled” system of identification. It exists because of and in relation to its surrounding co-texts and context. The narrator can employ this tool to various ends depending on the type of FID (speech/thought) and on the type of text in question. The presence or absence of FID in a text tells us about the degree of control the narrator holds over the characters’ speech and thoughts and about the different perspectives (focalization) to which the reader has access. Refusing to take notice of FID in medieval narratives due to a few specious arguments or to an overly restrictive formal definition is to deprive oneself of a major variable in the study of the diverse narrative strategies at work in medieval texts.

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3 FID in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French Literature It is fair to say that FID flourished in nineteenth-century literature because it was intimately linked to a specific genre: the modern novel told in the past tense and in the third person with an impersonal narrative voice, as exemplified in Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, and so on and their British counterparts, Austen and James (and later Lawrence, Woolf, etc.). However, the eclecticism of this list vindicates my point that FID has many different functions and is employed for very different strategies (Marnette 2005, 226–240). Flaubert, does not use FID for the same reasons as Zola. What makes their strategies very different is Flaubert’s use of FID/thought as opposed to Zola’s predilection for FID/speech, as shown in the two examples below: (13) Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale (1869) Frédéric était resté seul. Il pensait à ses amis, et sentait entre eux et lui comme un grand fossé plein d’ombre qui les séparait. Il leur avait tendu la main cependant, et ils n’avaient pas répondu à la franchise de son cœur. Il se rappela les mots de Pellerin et de Dussardier sur Arnoux. C’était une invention, une calomnie sans doute? Mais pourquoi? Et il aperçut Mme Arnoux ruinée, pleurant, vendant ses meubles. Cette idée le tourmenta toute la nuit. (2.2) (Frédéric was left on his own. Thinking about his friends, he felt as if there were a great dark gulf separating them from him. Yet he had held out his hand to them; it was they who had failed to respond to his generous gesture. He remembered what Pellerin and Dussardier had said about Arnoux. It was probably a slanderous fabrication. Or was it? He imagined Madame Arnoux ruined, in tears, selling her furniture. This idea tormented him all night; trans. Robert Baldick) (14) Zola, Son excellence Eugène Rougon (1876) Nulle part, ni en Angleterre, ni en Allemagne, ni en Espagne, ni en Italie, elle n’avait vu des bals plus étourdissants, des galas plus prodigieux. Aussi, disaitelle avec sa face tout allumée d’admiration, son choix était fait, maintenant: elle voulait être française. (Nowhere, not in England, not in Germany, not in Spain, not in Italy, had she seen such breathtaking balls, more prodigious galas. Therefore, she was saying, with her face all illuminated with admiration, her choice was made, now: she wanted to become French; emphasis added)

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In his prolific series Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second empire, Zola aims at coloring the narration with his characters’ vocabulary and cheek rather than using it as a vehicle for their thoughts and inner perceptions. By using FID/speech instead of DD/speech, he appears to tighten his grip on his characters’ discourse while retaining the vivacity and realism peculiar to the direct mode. The “truth” or verisimilitude of his technique resides in the coloring of the narrative through free indirect speech and thus in rendering how realistically characters speak (especially working-class characters). It does not lie in the rendition of how characters actually think. This is probably why Zola prefers FID/speech to FID/thought. Moreover, this trend toward a parler vrai (true speech) pervades the narration itself so that the vocabulary used in the reported discourses is often found in the very discourse of the narrator, a technique often described as “contamination” by scholars. Flaubert, by contrast, tends to relinquish some of his control by “freeing” the thoughts of his characters – more so for Frédéric Moreau in L’Education sentimentale than for Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary. Emma’s thoughts are often rendered in FID/thought, but as noted by many scholars, it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between her romantic thoughts and Flaubert’s ironic rendition of her musings, and this double-voicedness can create ambiguity. In some cases, the sophisticated words and ideas used by Flaubert’s narrator seem impossible for Emma Bovary to conceive as such. In other cases, it is not clear whether the narrator is describing her state of mind or reporting what she thinks her feelings are. Consequently, one is left with the impression that the narrator/enunciator is somewhat overtaking the character/enunciator. Both in Madame Bovary and in L’Education sentimentale, Flaubert focuses on specific individuals (Frédéric Moreau, Emma Bovary) such that only rarely is the reader not in the presence of the main character or seeing things from another character’s perspective. This means that most events (actions and utterances) are seen through either the narrator’s perspective or that of the main character. Either the narrator describes these thoughts (narrated thoughts and more generally psycho-narration, direct and indirect thoughts, both marking external focalization from within) or he allows access to their thoughts freely, without these utterances being dependent on a verbum sentiendi (FID/thought and very rarely free direct thought, marked by internal focalization). Experimentation with S&TP strategies (especially those employing Free Direct Discourse [FDD] and FID) as well as with tenses was key to the evolution of the twentieth-century novel. Many writers sought, implicitly or explicitly, to break with the traditional unity of narrative voice and thus with the homogeneity of specific markers such as tenses and reported discourses. Also defied were neat classifications into third-person and first-person narratives and the dominance of the narrator-focalizer over the character-focalizer. Twentieth-century writers combined

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changes in tenses and S&TP to create innovative narratives where the concept of “narrator” (or “narrative voice”) took on a very different meaning. With regard to tenses, these changes resulted in relinquishing the canonical use of the past tenses (simple past and imperfect) to refer to story events. Some authors chose to use the present tense only or to alternate between the present tense and the past tenses from paragraph to paragraph, thereby maintaining a certain level of overall homogeneity. Others went further and mixed present tenses (present and present perfect) and past tenses (simple past and imperfect) within the same chunks of text in a way that is reminiscent of oral language and medieval texts, as André Gide did, for example, in Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925). As a consequence, there occurs a certain blurring between the time of the narration and the time of the story events that results in ambiguous forms of point of view, particularly in first-person narration but also in third-person narration, as can be seen in the following example, where the difficulty of differentiating between the narrator’s comments and the characters’ discourse does not exist only at the level of focalization (who perceives what, e.g., the bell ringing) but also at the level of discourse (who says/thinks what). (15) Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs Monsieur Profitendieu prend le cahier, mais il souffre trop. Il repousse doucement l’enfant: “Plus tard. On va dîner. Charles est-il rentré? – Il est descendu à son cabinet. (C’est au rez-de-chaussée que l’avocat reçoit sa clientèle). – Va lui dire qu’il vienne me trouver. Va vite.” Un coup de sonnette! Madame Profitendieu rentre enfin, elle s’excuse d’être en retard; elle a dû faire beaucoup de visites. Elle s’attriste de trouver son mari souffrant. Que peut-on faire pour lui? C’est vrai qu’il a très mauvaise mine. – il ne pourra manger. Qu’on se mette à table sans lui. Mais qu’après le repas elle vienne le retrouver avec les enfants. – Bernard? – Ah! C’est vrai; son ami .  .  . tu sais bien, celui avec qui il prenait des répétitions de mathématiques, est venu l’enmener dîner. Profitendieu se sentait mieux. Il avait d’abord eu peur d’être trop souffrant pour pouvoir parler. (29) (Monsieur Profitendieu takes the copy-book, but he is in too much pain. He gently pushes the child away.  – Later on. It’s just dinner time. Has Charles come in?  – He went down to his consulting room. (The barristers receives his clients in a room on the ground floor.)

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 – Go and tell him I want to speak to him. Quick! A ring at the door bell! Madame Profitendieu at last! She apologizes for being late. She had a great many visits to pay. She is sorry to see her husband so poorly. What can be done for him? He certainly looks very unwell.—He won’t be able to eat anything. They must sit down without him, but after dinner will she come to his study with the children? – Bernard? – Oh, yes; his friend . . . you know, the one he is reading mathematics with, came and took him out to dinner. Profitendieu felt better. He had at first been afraid he would be too ill to speak.) Such alternations of tense also enabled authors to play on the continuum and ambiguities allowed by FDD and FID in the present, thereby challenging any neat pigeon-holing into categories (DD, ID, FID) or types (speech vs. thought/attitude). Also called into question is the clear embedding of characters’ voices in the narrator’s discourse. As shown in Marnette (2005, 240–282), twentieth-century authors such as Gide, Céline, Aragon, Queneau, Sarraute, and many others spearheaded innovative narrative strategies involving alternations of tense and creative uses of reported discourse. Their strategies for S&TP, stemming in particular from the play on continuum and the ambiguities made possible by the use of FID in the present and of FDD, brought about some or all of the following consequences. (1) Character discourse is put on the same level as narrator discourse with no salient distinction between levels (use of the same tense, lack of typographical signaling, absence of verbum dicendi/sentiendi, same colloquial style), thus calling into question the independence and consistency of the narrative voice as well as the distinction between external and internal focalization. (2) The absence of verbum dicendi/sentiendi blurs the distinction between speech and thought, thus opening the way to a subtler continuum going from external speech to interior monologue or even to pre-reflexive perceptions. In some novels (Céline, Sarraute), what characters say is infinitely less important than what they think and feel. (3) It is also more difficult to know which character is speaking/thinking, so that some narratives become continuous texts full of voices lacking in individuality. (4) These ambiguities elicit more interpretative work (and thus more freedom) on the part of the reader, who is to some degree left to his own devices by the author/narrator. Clearly, in many twentieth-century texts, discourse (speech, thought) takes on a greater importance than action. This is linked to complex attitudes held by writers

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toward reality and toward prose fiction. On the one hand, the oralization and theatralization of language at work in some texts (consider, for instance, the massive use of DD and the presence of colloquialisms in Queneau and Céline) would seem to take us closer to Zola’s parler vrai (authentic speech). At the same time, one is left with the feeling that reality is only the sum of what registers on different consciences, that it is not linear and unique, reigned over by an omniscient narrator, but rather must be reconstructed by the reader from the intricate interplay of characters’ and the narrator’s discourses. There is the additional caveat that what appears on the surface  – speech  – is inherently empty and useless because it is tainted by ideological structures and because, as Baxtin ([1979] 1986, 92) notes, “each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances,” i.e., with what has been said or thought before by someone else. The paradox is that discourse, be it that of the characters or that of the narrator, cannot be trusted even though it is the only way to reach reality.

4 Conclusion Whether in the Middle Ages or in the twentieth century, narrators have exploited different attributes of FID, and more freely so, than in the nineteenth century’s FID “golden age.” At all times however, it is clear that FID, like DD and ID, has been a crucial tool for narrators to modulate their hold on their characters’ discourse and to alternate the various perspectives which their readers could access (focalization). Because FID results from the combination of techniques (DD and ID) and voices (speaker and enunciator[s]), it is inherently “mixed,” which can allow for some ambiguity. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that even medieval FID, despite its relative formal freedom, presented linguistic regularities and can be identified through both its context and its co-text. As seen above, it would appear that medieval texts, while using FID relatively little compared to modern ones, also favored FID/speech over FID/thought, which can possibly be linked to their general preference for external focalization. Overall therefore, medieval FID, while formally freer, might be said to be used for relatively fewer functions (even though none of them were excluded). Modern FID, on the other hand, while formally more restricted, was deployed in relatively more functions, depending on the authors’ choices to focus more on their characters’ speech or thought (e.g., Zola vs. Flaubert) or to sometimes jettison the distinction of speech and thought altogether while experimenting with innovative narrative strategies, as we have seen for some twentieth-century authors.

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References Bakhtin [Baxtin], M. M. (1979) 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin , M. M. [V. N. Vološinov, pseud.]. (1929) 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Banfield, Ann. 1973. “Narrative Style and the Grammar of Direct and Indirect Speech.” Foundations of Language 10:1–39. Bruña-Cuevas, Manuel. 1988. “Le Style indirect libre chez Marie de France.” Revue de Linguistique Romane 52:421–446. Buridant, Claude. 2000. Grammaire nouvelle de l’ancien français. Paris: Sedes. Cerquiglini, Bernard. 1981. La Parole médiévale. Paris: Minuit. Cerquiglini, Bernard. 1984. “Le Style indirect libre et la modernité.” Langages 73:7–16. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coulmas, Florian. 1986. “Reported Speech: Some General Issues.” In Direct and Indirect Speech, edited by Florian Coulmas, 1–28. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ducrot, Oswald. 1984. Le dire et le dit. Paris: Minuit. Ducrot, Oswald. 1989. Logique: Structure et énonciation. Paris: Minuit. Ehrlich, Susan. 1990. Point of View: A Linguistic Analysis of Literary Style. London: Routledge. Fleischman, Suzanne. 1990. Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press. Fludernik, Monika. 1993. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. “Linguistic Signals and Interpretative Strategies: Linguistic Models in Performance, with Special Reference to Free Indirect Discourse.” Language and Literature 5, no. 2, 93–113. Leech, Geoffrey, and Michael Short. 1981. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London: Longman. Lips, Marguerite. 1926. Le style indirect libre. Paris: Payot. Marchello-Nizia, Christiane, Bernard Combettes, Sophie Prévost, and Tobias Scheer, eds. 2020. Grande grammaire historique du français. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Marnette, Sophie. 1996. “Réflexions sur le discours indirect libre en français medieval.” Romania 114:1–49. Marnette, Sophie. 1998. Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale: Une approche linguistique. Berne: Lang. Marnette, Sophie. 1999. “Il le vos mande, ge sui qui le vos di: Les stratégies du dire dans les chansons de geste.” Revue de linguistique romane 63, 387–417. Marnette, Sophie. 2005. Speech and Thought Presentation in French. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Marnette, Sophie. 2013. “Oralité et locuteurs dans les lais médiévaux”. Diachroniques 3:21–48. McHale, Brian. 1978. “Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts.” PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3:249–287. McHale, Brian. 2014. “Speech Representation.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 2, 812–824. 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/speech-representation (accessed 1 August 2018).

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Pascal, Roy. 1977. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel. Manchester: Manchester Unity Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. (1983) 2002. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge. Rosier, Laurence. 1999. Le Discours rapporté: Histoire, théories, pratiques. Paris: De Boeck-Duculot. Rychner, Jean. 1980. “La Présence et le point de vue du narrateur dans deux récits courts: Le Lai de Lanval et la Châtelaine de Vergi.” Vox Romanica 39:86–103. Rychner, Jean. 1987. “Messages et discours doubles.” In Studies in Medieval French and Literature Presented to Brian Woledge in Honour of His 80th Birthday, edited by Sally Burch-North, 145–161. Geneva: Droz. Rychner, Jean. 1989. “Le Discours subjectif dans les Lais de Marie de France: A propos d’une étude récente.” Revue de Linguistique Romane 53:57–83. Rychner, Jean. 1990. La Narration des sentiments, des pensées et des discours dans quelques oeuvres des XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Geneva: Droz. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology. An Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter. Strauch, Gérard. 1974. “De quelques interprétations récentes du style indirect libre.” Recherches Anglaises et Américaines 7:40–73. Strauch, Gérard. 1975. “Problèmes et méthodes de l’étude linguistique du Style Indirect Libre.” In Tradition et innovation: Littérature et paralittérature. Actes du congrès de Nancy (1972), 409–428. Paris: Didier. Verschoor, Jan Adriaan. 1959. Etudes de grammaire historique et de style sur le style direct et les styles indirects en français. Groningen: V. R. B. Vetters, Co. 1994. “Free Indirect Speech in French.” In Tense and Aspect in Discourse, edited by Co Vet and Carl Vetters, 180–225. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Michal Beth Dinkler

Interior Monologue in Ancient and Modern Literature 1 Definition A number of terms refer to the narrational techniques by which writers present the thoughts of their characters, including internal/interior/inner monologue, self-talk, (unspoken) soliloquy, and inner discourse. While some critics treat these descriptors as synonyms, others jettison terms such as stream of consciousness and interior monologue because “they are beyond precise definition” (Palmer 2004 23). Standard literary handbooks regularly trace the origins of “interior monologue” to Édouard Dujardin’s novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888; e.g., Cohn 1978, 12), and Dujardin (1931) himself claimed to have invented the method; nevertheless, interior monologue appears across multiple genres, languages, and chronological and geographical locations long before the twentieth century. Definitions of interior monologue depend to a large degree on one’s assumptions regarding such complex and culturally specific concepts as selfhood, language, identity, and consciousness. It is important not to conflate ancient and modern notions of interiority or personhood (for useful overviews of distinctions between ancient and modern conceptions of individuality/personhood, see Stendahl 1963; Gill 1996, 11–12; and the contributions in Sedley and Nightingale 2010). Moreover, unprecedented modern movements such as romanticism, the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, and the Protestant Reformation inevitably gave rise to narratological innovations vis-à-vis portrayals of characters’ inner lives and self-talk. At the same time, the innovations of an era are always grounded in and inseparable from the epochs that precede them; this is no less the case with narratological conventions related to the inner life. Modern scholars have taken several approaches to defining interior monologue. Critics such as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg define interior monologue as “the direct, immediate presentation of the unspoken thoughts of a character without any intervening narrator” (1966, 177). Underlying this definition is the Platonic view that thought is “a talk which the soul has with itself about the objects under its consideration” (Theaet. 189e). This conception of thought dominated during the Enlightenment; as the nineteenth-century French psychologist Victor Egger wrote: “At every instant the soul speaks its thoughts internally [. . .], the series of internal words forms a quasi-continuous sequence of other psychic facts” (1881, 1). Narrowly defined, interior monologue quotes unvocalized speech and therefore https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-016

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reflects the same conscious logic, rational linearity, and discursive comprehensibility as speech that is verbalized externally; narratologists refer to this pattern of speech, whether spoken or unspoken, as direct discourse (DD). Interior monologue used in the narrow sense is distinguished grammatically from other modes of representing inner consciousness by the use of the present tense; a narrator’s quoting frame, such as ‟She said to herself, ‛[. . .],’” ‟He thought, ‛[. . .],’” or ‟They wondered, ‛[. . .]’”; and/or a reference to the thinking self in the first person (Cohn 1978, 13). In modern languages such as English, the quoted thoughts are set apart using verbs of thinking, commas, and quotation marks (as in the previous sentence), a qualification that indicates explicitly that the speech is unspoken. Ancient Greek and Hebrew do not use punctuation in the same way. Because interior monologue is not set apart typographically in these languages, it can be more difficult to discern. Some scholars distinguish between interior monologue and other kinds of thought-representation based on the statement’s intended audience and/or intended form of delivery. In interior monologue, a character addresses herself or himself (Bal [1985] 2009, 161). This is also true of dramatic monologue, often dubbed soliloquy, but the latter is written for the stage and meant to be vocalized. In traditional Greek drama, the soliloquy depicts a character’s individual musings, which are portrayed as though they are addressed to the self, but these are meant to be delivered verbally to viewers in a theater (Edel 1961, 58). James Hirsh, tracing the history of soliloquies, declares, “I have not encountered any interior monologues in any dramatic work written before the middle of the seventeenth century” (2003, 44). This conclusion is dependent on Hirsh’s definition of interior monologue as “the direct representation of the character’s thought,” which cannot possibly be overheard, as opposed to what he labels “self-addressed speeches,” which are verbalized and therefore at least hypothetically could be overheard by others (44). First-person narration, employed in written literary texts, which are not meant to be performed, addresses an outside readerly audience, even if indirectly (on the first-person novel, see Romberg 1962). Stream-of-consciousness (SOC) and free indirect discourse (FID) differ from interior monologue because they blur the conventional lines between narrator’s and character’s respective voices, or texts. Wolf Schmid refers to this blurring as Textinterferenz; with FID, although the quotation is presented “in the form of the narrator’s text,” it “actually represents the inner speech, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and/ оr the evaluative position of a character whereby the reproduction is not marked, either graphically or by any kind of explicit indicator” (Schmid 2010, 157). In other words, distinctions between mimesis and diegesis are maintained in interior monologue, but collapse into one another in FID. In contrast to the views just described, many critics define interior monologue broadly, as a superordinate category that encompasses all forms of mind rep-

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resentation. The focus in this case is on content: interior monologue depicts any and all expressions of interiority, no matter the form or intended audience (e.g., Stone 1959 31). Some scholars include under the capacious umbrella of interior monologue the genre of an entire novel told from the unmediated inner perspective of its protagonist, also called, “the stream of consciousness novel,” “the psychological novel,” or “psycho-narration” (Cohn 1978, 11). Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupés was an early instance of such a genre; Joyce lauded the latter as a predecessor for his novel Ulysses (cf. Genette [1972] 1980, 173–174). Of course, some novels, such as Dorothy Richardson’s pioneering thirteen-volume series Pilgrimage (1915–1935), alternate between interior monologue and the observations of a detached third-person observer. Acknowledging that interior monologue is difficult to define, and that ancient “self-knowledge” (σωφροσύνη) differs from modern notions, this chapter adopts the narrower definition of interior monologue as quoted inner speech. As Schmid notes, this quoted inner speech is a form of character text that “can be represented both in the pattern of DD and in FID” (2010, 149). In other words, interior monologue can appear in the first or third person. The following discussion compares different modes of portraying characters’ minds in ancient and modern narratives and identifies patterns within the literatures of particular epochs and cultures.

2 Interior Monologue in Ancient Hebrew Literature In Ancient Hebrew, speech markers are more fluid than in Classical and Koine Greek (Miller 1996). In the Hebrew Bible, we have one example of Cohn’s description of a genre “constituted in its entirety by the silent self-communion of a fictional mind” (1978, 16), namely, the book of Qoheleth (also called Ecclesiastes). Maren Niehoff describes Qoheleth as “one long soliloquy in which one individual attempts to make sense of his life” (1992, 579). More commonly, however, interior monologues appear as a form of character speech within a larger narrative. At times, they are indicated by an introductory phrase that explicitly refers to thought (e.g., ‫חשׁב‬, “to think”). Yet not all uses of ‫ חשׁב‬refer to interior monologue; in Genesis 38:15, 31:15, and 50:20, ‫ חשׁב‬refers instead to a person’s incorrect perceptions of the world (Niehoff 1992, 579). Sometimes, context is the sole factor indicating the existence of interior monologue (e.g., Gen. 3:22, 18:17; Judg. 15:2). For instance, Hirsh considers the beginning of the book of Genesis to be a soliloquy because “God speaks even though there is apparently no one else in existence yet” (2003: 46): “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth [. . .] Then God said [‫אמר‬ ֶ ֹ ‫]וַ ֥יּ‬, ‘Let there be light’;

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and there was light” (Gen. 1:1–3). In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, abbreviated LXX), the Greek formulation used most often to introduce interior monologue is the phrase “in his heart” (ἐν καρδίᾳ αὐτοῦ). Throughout biblical literature, interior monologue is used predominantly to caution against the folly of wicked self-address. In Genesis, Esau plans “in his heart” (‫ )ובלב‬to kill his brother (27:41), and Abraham questions “in his heart” (‫ ;ובלב‬Gen. 17:17) whether he and his elderly wife Sarah will conceive a baby as his angelic visitors have foretold. In Esther 6:6, the king’s vizier Haman asks self-servingly “in his heart, ‘Whom would the king wish to honor more than me?’” (‫ ;ובלב‬LXX: ἐν ἑαυτῷ, “in himself”). In 1 Samuel, when King Saul begins to distrust David, the narrator uses a combination of extradiegetic explanation and interior monologue to reveal Saul’s deceitful intentions: Saul had his spear in his hand; and Saul threw the spear, for he thought [‫אמר‬ ֶ ֹ ‫]וַ ֕יּ‬, “I will pin David to the wall.” But David eluded him twice. Saul was afraid of David, because the Lord was with him but had departed from Saul. (1 Sam. 18:10–12)

For a time, Saul keeps up an outward appearance of goodwill, and he and David begin to discuss which of Saul’s daughters – Merab or Michal – David will marry: Then Saul said to David, “Here is my elder daughter Merab; I will give her to you as a wife; only be valiant for me and fight the  Lord’s battles.” For Saul said, “I will not raise a hand against him; let the Philistines deal with him.” David said to Saul, “Who am I and who are my kinsfolk, my father’s family in Israel, that I should be son-in-law to the king?” But at the time when Saul’s daughter Merab should have been given to David, she was given to Adriel the Meholathite as a wife. Now Saul’s daughter Michal loved David. Saul was told, and the thing pleased him. Saul thought, “Let me give her to him that she may be a snare for him and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him.” (1 Sam. 18:17–21)

In Saul’s first interior monologue above, English translations regularly add that Saul is thinking, but the Hebrew merely says, “For Saul said [1) [‫”]אָמר‬ ַ֗ Sam. 18:10). The only indication that Saul speaks inwardly to himself in this case is narrative logic; the content of Saul’s thoughts would lead to different consequences if he were to speak them out loud. The second example from chapter 18, in which Saul decides Michal will be a “snare” for David, explicitly stipulates that Saul “thought” (‫אמר‬ ֶ ֹ ‫;וַ ֨יּ‬ 1 Sam. 18:21). These Hebrew narratives use interior monologue as a window into the minds of disingenuous characters whose machinations remain concealed from other characters in the story. Most of the thinking characters’ inner ruminations expose them as fools, those who turn their backs on God. As such, they represent narrative embodiments of the explicit condemnations of foolish self-talk that appear elsewhere

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in biblical literature. The writer of Psalms warns that the fool says “in his heart” (‫ )ובלב‬that there is no God (Ps. 14:1; LXX has ἐν καρδίᾳ αὐτοῦ), while the author of Deuteronomy describes one who turns away from God as blessing himself “in his heart” (‫ובבלב‬, Deut. 29:18; in LXX: ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτοῦ). There are a few exceptions in which a positive character employs interior monologue. In Genesis 8:21, for example, God speaks inwardly, although interestingly, the content of this interior speech focuses on the evil that grows in humans’ hearts: “The Lord said in his heart [‫לא‬-‫ ;ובל‬LXX: διανοηθείς], ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth.’” Thus, even this interior monologue illustrates the importance – and even dangerous potential – of what one says in/to one’s own heart. Later noncanonical Jewish writings employ interior monologue somewhat differently. Joseph and Asenath, for example, is a popular pseudepigraphic Jewish novel most likely from the Second Temple Period. Widely disseminated in the Hellenistic period, Joseph and Asenath is preserved in over ninety manuscripts in seven different languages (including Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Slavonic). Building on the brief biblical reference to Joseph’s wife Asenath in Genesis 41:45, the story resembles other novels from the time period, such as Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe and Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale. Reardon notes that the common plotline of the ancient Greek novels centers upon the vagaries of both love and adventure: typically, a hero and heroine fall in love and intend to be married, but their plans are thwarted by “a series of misfortunes, usually spectacular,” before ultimately reaching a happy ending (1989, 2). Frequently, the upheavals of dramatic external circumstance are mirrored in the interior monologues of the upset, lovestruck heroes and heroines. Repeatedly in Joseph and Asenath, the narrator offers glimpses of Asenath’s tumultuous inner experience using the reflexive pronoun and the by-then familiar Greek formulation “in her heart” (ἐν  τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτῆς). When Asenath first sees her future husband Joseph, for example, the narrator states that “she was strongly pricked in the soul, and her inwards were broken” because she had previously denounced him (JosAs 6.1). In addition to the strategy of “telling” about Asenath’s response, the narrator also “shows” her apprehension through an interior monologue: becoming “much afraid,” she asks “in her heart [ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτῆς], ‘What will I do now, as miserable as I am?’” (6.2). Two entire chapters (12 and 13) consist of Asenath’s first-person speech. Strictly speaking, this is a different speech category from interior monologue due to its referent – the Lord. This long passage is prefaced by the description “her eyes looked up to heaven, and she said [. . .]” (12.1), which establishes that Asenath addresses not herself, but her God: “Oh Lord, God of the ages, who gave to all the breath of life [. . .]” (12.2). Confession and supplication to God are not self-address, but prayer overlaps with interior monologue in a number of ways.

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On the level of the story, prayer, like interior monologue, is often spoken within an individual character and/or is rarely (over)heard by other characters. On the level of the discourse, prayer fulfills similar narratological functions to interior monologue: both can advance the plot, introduce and underscore particular themes or moral lessons for readers, and/or characterize the speaker in particular ways by portraying her hopes, emotions, and/or self-perceptions, which relate in turn to particular extratextual social expectations. Asenath’s prayer demonstrates that she perceives herself as a sinner (12.4, 5, 6, 7). Yet the prayer also portrays her as that time period’s definition of a faithful Jewish woman, placing her beloved Joseph above herself as she asks God to protect him (e.g., “But to thee, my Lord, do I entrust him; for I love him more than my own soul”; 13.11). Moshe Lavee, reading Asenath’s prayer as “an expression of the inner self,” argues convincingly that Asenath’s declarations of “detachment from family and property” are “internalizations of a social model corresponding to the renunciation of property and kinship upon conversion that was frequent in the late Second Temple period, as well as in the narrative materials of early rabbinic literature” (2015, 259). Other noncanonical Jewish literature also highlights the dangers of negative self-talk. In one first- or second-century CE work of biblical interpretation preserved in Latin, the Liber antiquitatum biblicarum, ascribed to Pseudo-Philo, King Saul’s interior monologue recounts his disappointment at no longer being recognizable, a detail that is missing from the biblical version: “And Saul said within himself [intra se], ‘When I was king in Israel . . . they knew that I was Saul’” (64.4). Pseudo-Philo casts Saul as a villain, using interior monologue to expose his moral failures, including self-centeredness, which ultimately results in his fall from grace. The Jewish historian Philo of Alexandria uses inner speech to depict both positive and negative ways of thinking. A godly ruler is one who thinks to himself about the laws he writes “in order that . . . I might at once proceed to impress them on my heart, and that I might stamp upon my intellect their divine and indelible characters” (Spec. 4.163). Philo’s In Flaccum portrays the exiled Roman senator Flaccus’s despairing soliloquys, directed “to heaven and to the stars” (169), in which Flaccus laments his unjust previous oppression of the Jewish people: living by himself, and bewailing and weeping over his fate [. . .] he would cry out, “O King of gods and men! you are not, then, indifferent to the Jewish nation, nor are the assertions which they relate with respect to your providence false; but those men who say that that people has not you for their champion and defender, are far from a correct opinion. And I am an evident proof of this; for all the frantic designs which I conceived against the Jews, I  now suffer myself.  [.  .  .]  In times past I  reproached them with ignominy as being foreigners, though they were in truth sojourners in the land entitled to full privileges [. . .].” (169–172)

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Though Flaccus speaks aloud, the context makes clear that he is alone. Philo continues, indicating that Flaccus’s thoughts are indicative of a devolving emotional state: “And he was continually giving way to dread and to apprehension, and shaking with fear in every limb and every portion of his body, and his whole soul was trembling with terror and quivering with palpitation and agitation” (176). Rhetorically, placing a self-condemnatory confession in the mouth of a Roman senator provides an effective way for Philo simultaneously to condemn the Romans’ mistreatment of the Jews and to legitimate the Jewish claim to be the people of God. There is a significant difference between the standard use of interior monologue in the Hebrew Bible and its function in later Greek and Hellenistic Jewish narratives. In the Hebrew Bible, the characters’ thoughts tend to have a negative but singular focus, whereas in ancient Greek narratives, the interior monologues often depict an embattled, unsettled mind. As Niehoff observes regarding the story of Esau’s fratricide in the biblical book of Genesis: It is immediately obvious that Esau’s “saying in his heart” [. . .] does not represent an intense debate he has with himself. This expression rather introduces a momentous awareness of an unforeseen opportunity and indicates [. . .] an uncontrolled flush of the evil inclination. (1992, 580)

Esau knows his plan and intends to carry it out. He is not afraid or remorseful, like Asenath, nor are there any hints of indecision or paranoia, as with Flaccus. Consequently, the interior monologues in the Hebrew Bible reveal a disjuncture between the character’s true inner disposition (e.g., King Saul is untrustworthy and malicious) and that same character’s outward actions and/or accompanying plot developments (e.g., Saul offers his daughter to David in marriage, despite really wishing for David’s death). The inner conflicts of ancient Greek characters, on the other hand, typically mirror their volatile external circumstances and thus reflect a continuity or symmetry between inner and outer realities.

3 Interior Monologue in Ancient Greek Literature Scholars commonly claim that modern novels are characterized by a special preoccupation with their characters’ inner lives; however, ancient Greek literature demonstrates a concern with interiority as well (on ancient interiority as the result of rapidly expanding Roman imperialism, see Reardon 1989, 7). A number of contemporary narratologists have recognized interior monologue’s ancient roots. Scholes and Kellogg, for instance, assert that the third-century BCE Greek poet Apollonius Rhodius “invented” interior monologue (though they also discuss

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Homer modeling the device before Apollonius in Scholes and Kellogg 1966, 178–188 and appendix, 283–299). The narrative to which Scholes and Kellogg refer as the birthplace of interior monologue is Apollonius’s The Argonautika (also called Jason and the Golden Fleece), the only extant Hellenistic epic. In The Argonautika, the love-struck Medea grieves as she contemplates the danger awaiting her beloved Jason. Her angst leads her first to lament to herself, but then, her interior monologue morphs into prayer. Just as Asenath prays to her God for Joseph’s protection, Medea pleads with the goddess Hecate for Jason’s protection: she mourned for him as though he were already slain outright, and the tears ran softly down her cheeks in her affliction from her exceeding pity; and, softly weeping, she uttered her voice aloud: “Why does this sorrow come o’er me to my grief? Whether he be the best or worst of heroes that is now to perish, let him die. Ah! Would that he might escape unhurt. Yea, let that even come to pass, O dread goddess, daughter of Perses; let him escape death and return home. But if ’tis fated that he be slain by the oxen, let him learn ere his doom, that I at least exult not in his cruel fate.” (Argon. 3.463–471)

Although the Greek says that Medea speaks her desperate thoughts “out loud,” the section just prior to this passage suggests that Medea is not speaking to other (human) characters: she is “brood[ing] in her heart” (Argon. 3.460). Like Asenath’s prayer to the Jewish God, discussed above, Medea’s prayer to the goddess is located in the same place that interior monologue occurs – namely, “in her heart.” Not long after, Medea again becomes overcome by emotion, torn between her love for Jason, fear of the god Aetes’s wrath, and the potential shame of dishonoring her father: But once more did shame and a horrible dread seize her when she was alone, to think that she was devising such things for a man, without her father’s knowledge [. . .] her heart was wildly stirred within her breast [. . .] hither and thither it darts and dances on the quick eddy; even so the maiden’s heart was fluttering in her treats [. . .] So she sat halting between two opinions, then spoke, “Ah, woe is me! Am I now to toss hither and thither in woe? My mind is wholly at a loss; there is no help for my suffering, but it burns ever thus. Oh! Would that I had died by the swift arrows of Artemis, or ever I had seen him [. . .] Far better will it be this very night to leave life behind in my chamber by an unseen fate, avoiding all ill reproaches, or ever I complete this infamous disgrace!” (Argon. 3.772–801)

Here again, Apollonius depicts Medea’s emotional excitation through interior monologue. She is “alone” and “thinking,” “halting between two opinions,” and her heart is “wildly stirred” as she weighs her terrible options. Significantly, Medea’s impossible choice – to disobey her father or to refuse to help the one she loves – leads her to conclude that death would be preferable to the inner torment she is experiencing. A century later, Medea appears again, this time as the heroine in the Greek tragedian Euripides’s drama Medea. Again, Medea speaks candidly to herself as she

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bemoans her wretched circumstances. In the Euripidean play, after Medea’s love affair with Jason has taken a tragic turn and she learns that she has been banished, she plans murder by poison as retribution. Euripides has her address herself by name and refer to herself in the first-person plural, “we”: So come, Medea, call on all those things you know so well, as you plan this and set it up. Let the work, this deadly business, start. It’s a test of wills. You know what you now have to deal with. [. . .] So get to work. Besides, we possess a woman’s nature – powerless to perform fine noble deeds, but very skilled in every form of evil. (Med. 401–413)

When the time comes for Medea to enact her resolution to commit infanticide to punish Jason, Euripides once again depicts her interior state. In this lengthy monologue (Med. 1021–1080), Medea’s grief as a mother contemplating the death of her children pulls her one way, while her desire for revenge pulls her another. Here is an excerpt that illustrates her vacillations: Alas, what shall I do? You women here, my heart gives way when I see those eyes, my children’s smiling eyes. I cannot do it. Good bye to those earlier plans of mine. I’ll take my children from this country. Why harm them as a way to hurt their father and have to suffer twice his pain myself? No, I won’t do that. And so farewell to what I planned before. But what’s going on? What’s wrong with me? Do I really want my enemies escaping punishment, while I become someone they ridicule? I will go through with this.  (Med. 1040–1052)

Euripides often shocked contemporaries by portraying the inner thoughts of non-traditional (i.e., non-male, non-elite) characters like Medea (see, similarly, Phaedra’s speech in Hippolytus 373–430; on soliloquy in Greek tragedy, Schadewaldt 1926). Unlike the examples provided from the Hebrew Bible in the previous section, but similar to the Second-Temple Jewish novel, Joseph and Asenath, ancient Greek epics such as The Argonauts and Medea conventionally use interior monologue to depict high-stakes moments of internal crisis, wherein the hero or heroine must negotiate an inner conflict. Two famous monologues from the Odyssey typify

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this tendency. Twice, Odysseus wrestles internally (ὁρμαίνω) over how he should respond to the god Poseidon’s fury. Both instances occur in intensely dramatic moments, with Odysseus nearly drowning in Poseidon’s thunderous waves: Odysseus’ knees gave way, his spirit fell, and in great distress he cried out, addressing his great heart: “I’m facing a disaster! How is all this going to end up for me? [. . .] My sheer destruction is now beyond all doubt. [. . .] How I wish I’d died as well and met my Fate that day. [. . .] Then I’d have received my funeral rites, and Achaeans would have made me famous. But now I’m fated to be overwhelmed and die a pitiful death.” As he said these words, that massive wave charged at him with tremendous force, swirled round the raft, and then, from high above, crashed down. (Od. 5.365–389; see also 5.424–425).

Like Apollonius’s Medea, Homer’s Odysseus expresses his anguish about his external circumstances through internal monologue. Like Medea, Odysseus feels unmoored, powerless, and doomed to destruction by the gods. We can discern, too, affinities between Medea’s guilt and indecision, which toss her “hither and thither,” and the fact that Odysseus’s inner turmoil is reflected in his actual bodily experience: he is literally tossed about in the sea, as “the huge wave carrie[s] him along its course this way and that” (5.403–404). Finally, like Medea, Odysseus closes his monologue by concluding that death would be preferable to his current suffering. The Homeric narrator repeatedly describes Odysseus speaking to himself in the midst of dramatic events: At that point, Odysseus felt both his knees and spirit give way, and in despair he spoke to his great heart [lit.: “to his great-hearted soul,” πρὸς ὃν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν]. (Od. 5.353–354) Resourceful Odysseus, who had endured so much, considered what to do, speaking, in great distress, to his courageous heart [lit.: “to his great-hearted soul,” πρὸς ὃν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν]. (Od. 5.405–407)

Much later in the narrative when he is safely home, Odysseus “debates a great deal in mind and heart” (πολλὰ δὲ μερμήριζε κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν) over how to handle his wife Penelope’s many suitors, and, chiding himself, addresses his heart in the vocative: “Endure, my heart” (τέτλαθι δή, καρδίη; Od. 20.18–21). We find a similar use of interior monologue in ancient Greek comedies. Drawing on the works of comic writers such as Plautus and Menander, Bernhard Heininger (1991, 34) identifies the following tripartite formula: (1) the speech introduction (Redeeinleitung), (2) the identification of the problem (Bestandsaufnahme), and (3) the chosen solution (Problemlösung). Often, the inner speech includes the telltale question for such moments of crisis: “What should I do?” (τί ποιήσω); Heininger’s

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progression thus sets the character’s dilemma right at the heart of interior monologue, simultaneously highlighting the thinker’s plight and amplifying the scene’s emotional intensity. As Heininger also delineates, the interior monologues reveal the thinker’s nature as a particular stock character type, such as an honorable hero, a dishonorable villain, or a comic fool. In the biblical literature that belongs to the Second-Temple era – that is, the texts of the New Testament – interior monologue is sparse. The New Testament is divided into two major generic categories: epistolary and narrative literature. In the former, there is one famous passage (mentioned previously) in the apostle Paul’s epistle to the church in Rome that has traditionally been read as Paul’s description of his own internal crisis of conscience: So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin. (Rom. 7:21–25)

Modern biblical scholars tend to take this not as a straightforward expression of Paul’s own inner thoughts, but rather as his use of a standard device from classical rhetoric called “speech-in-character,” or prosōpopoiia (from the Greek prosōpon, “face,” and poiein, “to make”; other common translations include “personification” and “impersonation”). A common technique taught in the ancient rhetorical handbooks, prosōpopoiia refers to speaking in the voice of another in order to make one’s case. Amongst the New Testament narratives, the Gospel according to Luke exhibits the most interest in its characters’ inner lives. Throughout Luke, characters think, consider, ponder, wonder (συμβάλλω, δοκέω, κατανοέω, διαλογίζομαι), or marvel (θαυμάζω, ἐκπλήσσω, γίνομαι, θάμβος; e.g., Luke 1:21, 29, 63; 2:19, 33; 3:15; 5:21–22; 6:8; 9:47; 11:17; 12:17; 20:14, 23; 24:12, 38). Still, only a few of these instances actually use interior monologue. The Lukan narrator typically states that a character is thinking without citing the actual thoughts, as when Jesus’s mother Mary ponders “in her heart” (ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτῆς; 2:19) but the audience does not hear what she is thinking. When interior monologue does appear in Luke’s Gospel, we find an intriguing combination of the Hebrew Bible and Greek/Hellenistic uses of the technique (Dinkler 2015). The author of Luke, like his Hellenistic predecessors, tends to incorporate interior monologue into crisis situations in which the thinking character must make an important decision. Of the seven times inner speech is explicitly quoted in Luke’s Gospel, six are found in Jesus’s parables: the foolish farmer (12:16–20), the unfaithful servant (12:42–46), the prodigal son (15:11–32),

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the crafty steward (16:1–8), the unjust judge (18:2–5), and the owner of the vineyard (20:9–16). Each parable employs Heininger’s formula – a dilemma is introduced, the thinker takes stock of the problem, and he chooses a solution (12:17, 45; 15:17–19; 16:4–7; 18:4–5; 20:13). In three of the parables, the thinking character explicitly asks, “What should I do?” (τί ποιήσω; 12:17, 16:3, 20:13). Structurally, Luke’s interior monologues in these scenes resemble those we find in ancient Greek literature: faced with a dilemma, a character’s self-talk increases the dramatic tension in pivotal moments of decision-making. There is an important difference, however, between the thinkers in Jesus’s parables and those in most ancient Greek narratives: in stories like the Homeric epics, the thinkers are positive archetypal heroes. Lukan thinkers, on the other hand, tend to be foolish and un-heroic, requiring correction. Put differently: structurally, the Lukan interior monologues resemble Hellenistic inner speech because they heighten the dramatic tension of a character’s inner conflict, but thematically, they are more similar to Jewish literature insofar as the thinking characters exhibit foolish self-talk. The Gospel of Luke thus reflects a prominent theme in ancient Jewish literature: what one says in/to one’s self both conditions and reflects one’s relationship with God. Several features stand out as characteristic of interior monologue in these many and varied ancient narratives. First, as the examples above illustrate, the use of interior monologue in ancient literature is not dictated by genre. We find characters speaking “inside” or “to” themselves in ancient epics, novels, comedies, and even histories. Today, interior monologue is often considered a literary characteristic exclusive to fictional writing. One rarely finds interior monologue in modern historiographical literature, for example, because historians are ostensibly writing from an objective external perspective and do not have access to the inner workings of their subjects. However, generic lines between fact and fiction often differ within and across cultures, including those of antiquity (on “fact” and “fiction” in the ancient world, see e.g., Depew and Obbink 2000; Bowersock 1994; Gill and Wiseman 1993). Ancient historiographers allowed for a wider range of creative compositional strategies than historians do today, including imputing unspoken motives to their subjects and allowing unobstructed glimpses into their minds (Kraus 2010, 415). The ancient historian Thucydides speaks freely about his own process of composing speeches and setting them into the mouths of his historical characters, while another, Herodotus, says that he models his history-writing on the epics of Homer. While ancient historians did not always agree with one another on proper procedures of history-writing, many appear to have cared more about dramatic verisimilitude than factual veracity (Fornara 1983). Second, interior monologue functions in a number of ways on the level of the discourse, or storytelling. At times, it serves to advance the plot. In ancient narratives, this often occurs not only when human characters think to themselves and

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plan their course of action (as with Esau and Medea), but also with divine and other non-human characters. In the Odyssey, the god Poseidon, “mighty Shaker of the Earth,” observing Odysseus leap into the sea, speaks “to his own heart”: “So now, after suffering so much anguish, keep roaming on the sea until you meet a people raised by Zeus. Still, I don’t think you’ll be laughing at the troubles still in store.” With these words Poseidon lashed his fine-maned horses and left for Aegae where he has his splendid home. (5.373–381)

Here is a case in which interior monologue is not actually self-talk, insofar as it is addressed to someone else but not vocalized to that person. Homer stipulates that Poseidon speaks to “to his own heart,” but the use of the second-person address “you” in the final sentence is clearly directed at Odysseus, whom Poseidon leaves to face “the troubles in store” alone. Elsewhere, interior monologue serves as a plot device to indicate divine or otherworldly intervention, but not through external acts (as when Poseidon whips up the winds and waves). In these instances, inner speech does not depict the words of the character, but of another entity who speaks inside the person’s mind or heart. In the Odyssey, gods and goddesses enter the minds of humans and implant thoughts that determine what happens next in the narrative: As [Odysseus] debated in his mind and heart like this [. . .] the goddess with the gleaming eyes, Athena, put a thought inside his mind. On he rushed and seized the rock with both hands, and clung to it, groaning, until the great wave went by. (5.423, 426–429)

Odysseus only escapes the deadly wave because Athena gives him the idea of clinging to the rock. Sometimes, gods and goddesses personify certain qualities or virtues in the minds of human characters. In what is likely the earliest extant work of Greek novelistic prose, Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, we read: Love entered the King’s thoughts, whispering to him, “How wonderful it would be to see Callirhoe here, her tunic tucked up to her knees, her arms bared, face flushed, breast heaving, a very ‘Artemis the archer as she moves on the mountain, high Taygetus or Erymanthus, delighting in boars and swift deer’ [Od. 6.102–104].” Painting this scene in his imagination, the King burned with passion. (Char. 6.4)

Later, Love again enters the King’s thoughts: But when night came, the King was once more inflamed with passion; Love kept on reminding him what eyes Callirhoe had, how lovely her face was. He recommended her hair, her walk, her voice; the way she entered the courtroom, the way she stood. (Char. 6.7)

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Though Love’s words are not quoted directly, the first passage cited above suggests that the remembrances described in the later nighttime visitation to the King ought to be understood as interior monologue. Interior monologue also functions as a telling form of characterization – viz., an indication of the thinker’s true nature. As we have already seen, in ancient Jewish narratives, interior monologue often serves as a reliable indicator of the character’s posture toward the Jewish people and/or the Jewish God. Usually, in the contexts of these writings, the thinker is not wise but foolish. Some interior monologues implicitly warn against the dangers of indecision itself; for example, Montiglio has shown how the only two characters to experience inner conflict in Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale are “morally weak” (2010, 35). As such, the characterization accomplished through interior monologues works didactically, condemning vices such as Saul’s duplicity or Jesus’s characters’ failure to rely on God.

4 Interior Monologue in Modern English Literature Discussions of interior monologue in the English literature of modernity typically highlight free indirect discourse (FID) as an innovative narrational technique for presenting characters’ inner speech. David Lodge identifies Jane Austen as “the first English novelist” to use FID “extensively” (1990, 126). Lodge’s claim that Austen was the “first” to employ FID has been contested and prior examples adduced, but most recognize that FID is a stylistic hallmark of Austen’s wildly popular nineteenth-century novels. In actuality, FID is only one salient feature of Austen’s narrational style. She makes creative use of punctuation and voice in order to blend various methods of speech and thought representation. In the following example from Catharine, Austen writes in third-person narration, but enlists italics (not quotation marks) and present tense to indicate that the protagonist is thinking an exact thought at that particular moment (as opposed to the narrator summarizing a character’s prior ruminations): “She must write well thought Kitty, to make a long Letter upon a Bonnet & Pelisse” (263). Often, as in Northanger Abbey, we find a dash and inverted commas to suggest thought: An hour passed away before the General came in, spent, on the part of his young guest, in no very favourable consideration of his character.  – “This lengthened absence, these solitary rambles, did not speak a mind at ease, or a conscience void of reproach.” (Austen 2006, 187)

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In this passage, the protagonist, Catherine, speculates about the guilt of her friends’ father, General Tilney, and while there are no speech tags to indicate explicitly whether her suspicions remain unspoken, the punctuation and context suggest that she does not voice them aloud. This fits Monika Fludernik’s description of FID, which at times, “cannot be determined on purely linguistic grounds,” but rather, “only [on the basis of] the content and the context” (1993, 198). In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the respective communicative styles of the sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood reflect a larger thematic lesson: juxtaposing Marianne’s indiscriminate loquacity with Elinor’s calculated uses of measured speech and silent thought, Austen teaches her readers the benefits of linguistic moderation. The narrator links command over one’s tongue with power, deeming the talkative Marianne “without any power, because she [is] without any desire of command over herself” ([1923] 1986, 82). Marianne speaks “inconsiderately what she really” feels, and consequently, “her own vexation at her want of thought [can] not be surpassed by” the surprise of her hearers (98). Whereas Elinor decries Marianne’s tendency to express her “torrent of unresisted grief” through unrestrained speech (185), she deals with her own sorrow over Edward’s engagement to Lucy by insisting, “Marianne, I have nothing to tell” (170). Elinor’s assessment of her sister’s and mother’s melodramatic personalities is portrayed through FID: Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her sister’s sensibility; but by Mrs Dashwood it was valued and cherished. They encouraged each other now in the violence of their affliction. The agony of grief which empowered them at first, was voluntarily renewed, was sought for, was created again and again. They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in future. Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but still she could struggle, she could exert herself. (5)

Much has been made of the literary foil between the two sisters in Sense and Sensibility, as well as the narrative symmetry that the title clearly foretells. However, Austen’s strategic use of FID demonstrates that more is going on here than a contrived literary parallelism.  By comparing Elinor to Marianne, Austen implicitly comments on particular uses of speech: she praises Elinor’s restraint and warns readers of the prospective pitfalls of speaking aloud everything one thinks. Twentieth-century authors further developed techniques for portraying the inner lives of their characters. Not surprisingly, many of these writers were women who, like Austen, were grappling with masculine narrational norms that proved insufficient for expressing their authentic experiences. As Virginia Woolf puts it in A Room of One’s Own, a female writer in the early nineteenth century had “no common sentence ready for her use” and thus had to “devise” her own communicative mode (1929, 114). In Mrs Dalloway (1925), which takes place over the course

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of twenty-four hours in the routine life of one woman in London, Woolf devises a form of narration that adopts a microscopic focus on the minutiae of everyday life. Clarissa Dalloway’s thoughts are not the only glimpses of interiority afforded readers. In the following excerpt, the inner focus shifts between Clarissa and her old suitor, Peter: “But what are you going to do?” she asked him. Oh the lawyers and solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn, they were going to do it, he said. And he actually pared his nails with his pocket-knife. For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his age, how silly! I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I’m up against, he thought, running his finger along the blade of his knife, Clarissa and Dalloway and all the rest of them; but I’ll show Clarissa (Woolf 2003, 234–235).

Woolf’s easy flow between her various characters’ inner expression has an impressionistic, effervescent quality, reflecting her celebrated advice to writers to “examine” the “incessant shower” of “myriad impressions” that run through “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (1972, 106). In just the brief passage above, Woolf utilizes FID (the intensifying “actually” used to modify Peter’s pocket-knife nail-paring indicates this is Clarissa’s disapproving perspective, not that of an objective third-person narrator), unvocalized address to another (Clarissa’s second-person “your” in “leave your knife alone!” paired with “she cried to herself”), and quoted first-person inner speech (Peter’s “I know” twice paired with the explanatory verb “thought”). Notably, each of these strategies for representing “an ordinary mind” is marked by cogent, grammatically correct language; any of these interior thoughts, if spoken aloud to another, would communicate clearly. For Woolf, then, “ordinary” means comprehensible. In contrast, stream-of-consciousness (SOC) narration (discussed below), is characterized by its deviation from “ordinary” – i.e., coherent – language. The poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle (known by her initials, H. D.) devised her own form of self-expression by experimenting with grammatical and narrational techniques in her autobiographical novel HERmione (1927). The protagonist’s name is Hermione Gart, but her father gives her the nickname “Her.” As a result, Her’s interior monologues use the third-person pronoun “Her” to refer to herself. The novel begins: Her Gart went round in circles. “I am Her,” she said to herself; she repeated, “Her, Her, Her.” Her Gart tried to hold on to something; drowning she gasped, she caught at a smooth surface, her fingers slipped, she cried in her dementia, “I am Her, Her, Her.” (H. D. 1981, 3)

Much like the formal consonance between inner and outer realities found in the Greek narratives discussed above, H. D.’s often confusing slippage between first- and third-person narration mirrors the central character’s conflicting impulses inside her

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own mind. The difference is one of foregrounding: for H. D., the interior drama is the main focus of the narrative, whereas for ancient epic authors like Homer, self-address enhances the drama that takes place externally. Odysseus “addresses his own heart” as his body grasps at a rock to keep him from literally drowning (Od. 5.365–389), but Her Gart grasps at Selfhood as an anchor while “drowning” in her dementia. Another major innovation in the literature of modernity is the technique of stream-of-consciousness narration (SOC). The term stream of consciousness entered literary criticism through the field of psychology, where it was coined by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890). James observed: “Consciousness [. . .] does not appear to itself chopped up in bits [. . .] a ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described” (1952, 155). The quintessential example of SOC to which critics point is the final “Penelope section” (18) of Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, which does, indeed, flow like a running river: Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly [. . .].

This remarkable hypotactic sentence continues for many more lines, as Molly Bloom’s innermost thoughts are relayed rapidly, rhythmically, and without punctuation or standard syntactical markers. The fact that literary critics cannot seem to resist the metaphor of water when describing this Joycean passage bespeaks its stream-of-consciousness style (Attridge 1989). Although the focus in this section is on English literature, it is worth mentioning that the Viennese author and playwright Arthur Schnitzler is often credited for “developing the stream of consciousness as a narrative technique” in his 1900 novel Lieutnant Gustl (Lorenz 2003, 195). Schnitzler’s 1924 novella Fräulein Else also depicts the interior monologue of its eponymous protagonist, including literal self-address, as she addresses herself by name: Well now, Fräulein Else, can’t you make up your mind to read that letter? It needn’t have anything to do with Father. Mightn’t it be something about my brother? Perhaps he’s got engaged to one of his flames. A chorus girl or a girl in a glove shop. [. . .] He told me a great deal about someone called Lotte [. . .]. And since then he’s never told me anything more. . .Why, the letter’s open, and I never noticed that I was opening it. (Schnitzer 2012, 15)

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Throughout Fräulein Else, Schnitzler makes liberal use of ellipses in order to evoke both the speaker’s untoward insinuations and Else’s complex inner responses to them: “Yes, Else, I’m only a man after all, and it isn’t my fault that you are so beautiful, Else . . .” What does he want? What does he want? . . . “. . . I want nothing more, Else, than – to see you.” Is he mad? He does see me. Oh, that’s what he means! . . .Why don’t I simply go? . . . I’d like to call him a brute but I can’t. “. . . You must understand, Else, that my request implies no insult . . . I’m only a man who . . . has learnt . . . that everything in this world has a price . . . And the sale of what I want to buy this time, Else, much as it is, will not make you poorer.” . . . He is mad. Why do I let him go on talking? I’m paralysed . . . He speaks as he would speak to a female slave. I’d like to spit in his face. (45–48)

Though ellipses are but three small marks of punctuation, they do heavy communicative labor for Schnitzler, connoting in one case an unspoken but pointed message, and in another case an inarticulate jumble of inchoate impressions. Meant to evoke the immediacy of the present moment before thoughts become conscious, organized, and linguistically processed, SOC paradoxically attempts to express an inner state that is ultimately inexpressible.

5 Conclusion To sum up, the various methods of narrating interior speech serve similar narratological functions across ancient and modern narratives. Formal techniques such as interior monologue, free indirect discourse, and stream of consciousness, operating on different levels of the narration, can establish causation and/or heighten the drama of an unfolding plot, characterize the thinker as a certain kind of person (often, with negative evaluative implications from a moralizing narrator), and/or introduce and offer commentary on important narrative themes or lessons. The fact that interior monologue appears in ancient narratives belies the stereotype that ancient people were entirely allocentric or “anti-introspective,” as well as the common trope that modern narratives alone are concerned with interiority. The most striking difference between uses of interior monologue in ancient and modern narratives is related to genre: in ancient literature, interior monologue appears across generic lines (including historiographical narratives), whereas in modern literature, depictions of a character’s inner life tend to be restricted to

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fiction and autobiographical nonfiction. Additionally, the kinds of characters who “think to themselves” reflect the worldviews of a narrative’s author(s). Accordingly, in ancient narratives, we see more interventions in and engagement with human thought by otherworldly characters, such as gods and goddesses, as well as (sometimes implicit) judgments about the relative alignment of humans’ thoughts with the divine. In modern narratives, the focus of interior monologue and related techniques tends to lie more on the human characters themselves, who might struggle to articulate their particular conscious and subconscious experiences, but nevertheless tend to maintain their agency as autonomous individuals.

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Kraus, Christina S. 2010. “Historiography and Biography.” In The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, edited by Alessandro Barchiesi and Walter Scheidel, 403–419. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lavee, Moshe. “From Emotions to Legislation: Asenath’s Prayer and Rabbinic Literature.” In Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions: Emotions Associated with Jewish Prayer in and around the Second Temple Period, edited by Stefan C. Reif and Renate Egger-Wenzel, 259–272. Berlin: De Gruyter. Lodge, David. 1990. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge. Lorenz, Dagmar. 2003. A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler. Rochester: Camden House. Martin, Luther H. 1994. “The Anti-Individualistic Ideology of Hellenistic Culture.” Numen 41, 117–40. Miller, Cynthia L. 1996. The Representation of Speech in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: A Linguistic Analysis. Harvard Semitic Monographs 55. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Montiglio, Silvia. 2010. “‘My Soul, Consider What You Should Do’: Psychological Conflicts and Moral Goodness in the Greek Novels.” Ancient Narrative 8:25–58. Niehoff, Maren. 1992. “Do Biblical Characters Talk to Themselves? Narrative Modes of Representing Inner Speech in Early Biblical Fiction.” Journal of Biblical Literature 111:577–95. Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Reardon, B. P. 1989. “General Introduction.” In Collected Ancient Greek Novels, edited by B. P. Reardon, 1–16. Berkeley: University of California Press. Romberg, Bertil. 1962. Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Schadewaldt, Wolfgang. 1926. Monolog und Selbstgespräch: Untersuchungen zur Formgeschichte der Griechischen Tragödie. Neue philologische Untersuchungen. Berlin: Weidmann. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter. Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg. 1966. The Nature of Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press. Sedley, David, and Andrea Nightingale, eds. 2010. Ancient Models of Mind: Studies in Human and Divine Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stendahl, Krister. 1963. “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” Harvard Theological Review 56:199–215. Stone, Harry. 1959. “Dickens and Interior Monologue.” Philological Quarterly 38:52–65. Woolf, Virginia. 1972. Collected Essays. Vol. 2, edited by Leonard Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus.

Christine Noille

The Rhetoric of Narration in the Early Modern Period 1 Definition The empire of rhetoric was not blind to narration, a term that transposed into modern French (from sixteenth to the nineteenth century) the Latin narratio, -onis, f., itself a translation of the Greek diègema (διήγημα, ατος, τὸ). Narration here is thus not understood in the sense proposed by Gérard Genette: “the producing narrative act” (1972, 72).

2 The Places of Narration in Rhetoric From the time of ancient Greece up to the age of literature (end of the nineteenth century), two stable and consequential bodies of writings were devoted to narration at two levels of the rhetorical system. On the one hand, narration, in the third subtechnique forming the ars oratoria, known as dispositio, constitutes one of the five specific parts of persuasive discourse alongside exordium, proof (or confirmation), refutation, and peroration. The standard definitions are found in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (1.8–9) and in Cicero’s Treatise on Rhetorical Invention (1.19–21.27–30), and they are repeated in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (4.2) as well as by all subsequent rhetoricians. On the other hand, narration is included among the fourteen “preliminary exercises” (progymnasmata) collected in the fourth century CE by Aphthonios (2008) and others. Starting in 1599 and for the next three centuries, it was transmitted throughout Europe thanks to the Jesuits’ ratio studiorum: the student worked on these exercises during the year prior to the study of rhetoric properly speaking, which was devoted to the Humanities. Thus, on the one hand, narration is a sophisticated syntagmatic device integrated into a larger discursive whole; on the other hand, it is an autonomous piece of writing open to variations that are more or less academic, more or less ingenious. Nowhere, however, is it a composition of facts in a system (as in Aristotle’s famous definition of poetic mimesis). In rhetoric, narration is not an art of the plot; more precisely, it is not an art of linking facts into the intricate whole of a unified plot. Note: Translated from the French by John Pier. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-017

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So what is narration? The answers to this question offered by traditional rhetoric for fifteen hundred years have remained remarkably stable: (1) syntagmatically, narration is a part of discourse that can be broken down into autonomous units; paradigmatically, it is an arrangement of facts; (2) it consists mainly in the circumstances of the fact; (3) it is characterized by brevity, clarity, and verisimilitude; (4) it can be amplified through the use of ornaments. Summed up in this way, the doctrine of narration does not appear to have much to offer us, either from the angle of the production of narratives or from that of their reception. Yet this doctrine remains absolutely fundamental for understanding the art of narration during the ancien régime: contrary to the tightly wrought plot in Aristotelian poetics, discussed only among scholars and literati, the rhetoric of narration is a cognitive tool that infuses all forms of narrative production and commentary, an elementary grammar of narrative that structures the most immediate intuition as well as the most fine-grained analysis. How is it that the rhetoric of narration came to have such a degree of preponderance? By benefiting from a solid institutional anchoring in education, beginning with elementary education, since the rhetorical grammar of narrative was included in the preparatory program for the class in rhetoric. It was the subject of the first three chapters of preliminary exercises, devoted respectively to the Aesopic fable, or tale with a moral intent; to “narration,” or the short verisimilar story; and to the chreia, or laudatory narrative of a memorable event or saying. These exercises were spread over the first two months of the class in Humanities before going on to a more in-depth treatment during the class in rhetoric properly speaking, which was devoted to learning each part of speech. In both classes, the rhetoric of narration was based on three additional resources: (1) teaching of rules (with the use of treatises), (2) analysis of ancient models (narration in the plays of Terence and in the fables of Phaedra, for instance; for the preliminary exercises, the narrative parts of the major orations of Cicero and of the Latin historians in the rhetoric class), and (3) written composition imitating the ancients. All in all, then, it is no surprise that the morphology and syntax of narrative have been linked together in the language of rhetoric for generations of readers, public speakers (lawyers, politicians, preachers, etc.), and authors (historians, memorialists, letter writers, novelists, playwrights). The model serves to structure learning, writing, and grids of reading; it nurtures political speech, sermons, and pleas before the court as well as historiography, memoirs (factual or fictive), and news of the day (letters, gazettes, etc.). And there is no end to its coursing through, shaping, and haunting the modern imagination of the novel, as illustrated in the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (trans. A. Wainhouse and R. Seaver):

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Duclos, the President interrupted at this point, we have, I believe, advised you that your narrations must [have] the most numerous and searching details; the precise way and extent to which we may judge how the passion you describe relates to human manners and man’s character is determined by your willingness to disguise no circumstance; and, what is more, the least circumstance is apt to have an immense influence upon the procuring of that kind of sensory irritation we expect from your stories. – Yes, my Lord, Duclos replied, I have been advised to omit no detail and to enter into the most minute particulars whenever they serve to shed light upon the human personality, or upon the species of passion; have I neglected something in connection with this one? – You have, said the President; I have not the faintest notion of your second monk’s prick, nor any idea of its discharge. In addition, did he frig your cunt, pray tell, and did he have you dandle his device? You see what I mean by neglected details.

3 Narration: An Expository Script In rhetoric, narratio cannot be defined as the representation of an action such as the story of events taking place in the past, as recounted before the court, for example. Rhetoric sees narratio independently of fabula, unrelated to the devices of emplotment or to those of narrative tension. Rather, narratio is linked to devices for making a fact explicit, for discussing it (Noille 2018). What about the etymology of these terms? Narro/narrare means to relate, to set out a piece of information. Its etymology goes back to the Latin gnarus, coming from (g)nosco, to know: gnarus refers to he who knows, who is informed. Narration is thus linked to sharing a piece of knowledge. The narrator is he who both informs and puts into form. In traditional rhetoric, narrative discourses strive for knowledge and elucidation of a fact. Rhetoric works out a conception of narration that frees it from poetics and integrates it into a pragmatics of explanation (in Latin: expositio). That narrative discourse is not assigned to simulating an action, but to paraphrasing and understanding it, is the minimum displacement, and possibly the most capital, that ancient rhetoric authorizes us to express. Narration is a “statement of fact” (Crevier [1765] 1767), the “part of discourse that explains the affair” (Pajot [1646] 1708). But what then is the difference between merely mentioning a fact and explaining it? At what point does narration begin? A legitimate question arises once “one calls narration merely Fact in pleas and statements of fact by our lawyers” (Crevier [1765] 1767), so much so that “it would seem to persons having little education or with little experience in these matters that fact, being something positive, is as simple as saying it like it is” (Delamalle 1816). A brief but well-known counter-example (from the burlesque trial staged by Racine in The Litigants, 1668) shows that this is hardly the case and that the judge, waiting for the narration, does not expect a mere mention of the fact. To Judge Dandin, who vigorously demands that the defense finish the exordium and get on

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with the facts (“Facts, I say. . . Facts, facts, facts!”), the appellee speedily replies with the following statement of fact: The facts are these. A dog invades a kitchen, And finds a capon there of good proportions. Now he for whom I speak is very hungry, He against whom I speak lies ready pluck’d, Then he whose cause I plead, with stealthy step Draws near, and grabs him against whom I’ve spoken. A warrant’s issued, he’s arrested, counsel Are call’d, a day is fix’d, I am to speak, I speak, and I have spoken, There, – I’ve done!

To which the judge retorts: Tut, tut! A pretty way to state a case! His pace is slow and stately while he utters Irrelevant remarks; but, when he comes To facts, he gallops. (trans. R. B. Boswell)

A summary is not a lower degree of narrative discourse (a “minimal narrative”), but rather its exterior. Narration, on the contrary, is an extended and detailed development that can be broken down into minimal units. Or as one rhetoric textbook puts it with regard to the “active  chreia,” the laudatory narrative of a memorable action: “What is an active chreia? – It is a chreia in which one sets out, develops, an action or a fact. [. . .] How many parts does a chreia contain? – Eight [. . .]” (Jouvancy [1710] 1892). The narrative syntagm is a composite, extended syntagm, in other words a script in Quintilian’s sense of the term (for a discussion of this concept, see Baroni 2002).

4 Morphology of the Narrative Script Rhetoric looks at narration from a strictly syntagmatic point of view as a set of juxtaposed, ordered, and linked sequences. Returning now to the textbook referred to above, we discover the items that make up narration in the chreia, the school exercise that combines narrative and commendation: “How many parts does a chreia contain?  – Eight, namely Commendation, Paraphrase, Cause, Contrast, Resemblance, Examples, Testimony of the ancients, Conclusion” (Jouvancy [1710] 1892). Out of these items, the last five come under the rhetoric of commendation, two under the rhetoric of narration properly speaking (paraphrase, cause), and one (the first) under both commendation and narration.

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Consider now the last three entries in detail. Commendation covers, first of all, a (laudatory) portrait “of he who [. . .] carried out the action.” Paraphrase is “the amplification [. . .] of a fact” or “explanation of the action forming the subject of the chreia” through antecedents, circumstances, and consequents. Cause is “the obligation to motivate the argument that one wishes to develop,” that is to say, the reasons and emotional or moral grounds at the origin of an action. The textbook then goes on to propose the following subject as an exercise: “St. Francis goes through the town with his companion in order to preach by example and not in words” (Jouvancy [1710] 1892). The habits instilled by everyday teaching of the chreia enable students to fill in the successive boxes of the narrative program as so many juxtaposed sequences: [Praise of Francis]: “Listen to this new apostle, this Francis, illustrious defender of religious poverty, this generous denigrator of wealth and rich partisan of indigence, this learned littérateur, this eloquent orator.” [The antecedents]: “Francis leaves his cell and goes out to preach.” “The circumstances are silence, and the modesty of Francis going through the city.” “The consequents are the support of citizens eager to see him, because of their admiration, excited by his virtue.” “As a motive for this very useful sermon, superior to all others, you can add that examples are more effective than words.” (Jouvancy [1710] 1892)

These five recommendations are not trivial, for they turn up identically in all chapters where rhetoric meets narration, be it in other preliminary exercises (fable, story) or in the narrative accounts included in lofty speeches. The grammar of the narrative syntagm that they familiarize pupils with is thus based on three major categories of rhetorical resources for amplification: (1) two resources constitutive of the exercise (an expository resource, namely a portrait of the person and the circumstances), (2) an explanatory resource (causes or motives), and (3) two optional resources (antecedents and consequents). (1) Regarding the portrait of the person and the development of the circumstances, these form a single rhetorical category. Insofar as they are resources for argumentation (commonplaces), circumstances in rhetoric correspond to a wellknown litany in the form of a Latin verse: Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando? (Who, what, where, with whom, why, how, when?; medieval hexameter said to come from Quintilian). Circumstances thus go well beyond the circumstances of place and time retained by the twentieth century. They also include the very dense circumstances of person (who?) which, in turn, sweep across a new formalized grid extending from passions to character, from elders to education and fortune (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 5.10). Alongside this broad category forming the circumstances of person, the other circumstances extend to considerations

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regarding time, places, means, and manner. Causes (why?) are set aside, forming a rhetorical category in their own right. It is this topical grid that constitutes the fundamental armature of the narrative script. (2) Motives or reasons for the fact make it possible to break down point by point everything that comes under explanatory cause, a rhetorical category which is also subdivided (efficient cause, formal cause, material cause, final cause), but in particular is operative for formal causes (design, motive) and final causes (goal). Here again, motivations cover a number of subcategories (passions, characters, intentions, inclinations and preferences, duties, will, etc.). (3) Optional, and usually treated in the form of summary, sequences drawn from antecedents and consequents are to be understood particularly in a temporal sense, although the logical sense is not excluded: in his expository narration, the orator will summarize the web of known precedents as well as the muddle of actual consequences. Rhetoric, then, makes it possible to both fashion and describe narration in terms of a sequenced script according to a grid of items to be gone through. Thus, stating a fact does not leave the choice of details to the orator’s judgment. On the contrary, he must put his inquiry into form in a pre-established questionnaire which he is free to fill in point by point. Describing a “fact” (a narrative sequence) comes down to acknowledging the succession of expected items. It is thus that the following sequence by Terence is analyzed by a rhetorician. For what shall I say of my father? Alas! Could he settle so important an affair so negligently? Passing by just now, he said to me in the forum, “you must take a wife, Pamphilus, today: get ready: go home.” I was astounded. Do you think I could utter any word, or any excuse, even a foolish one, a false one, a lame one? I was struck dumb. (Terence, Andria 1.5; trans. anonym, 1859) Argument drawn from the cruelty and flippancy of the father [. . .] And he proves it with a short narration in which we find a character who commands, Simon, a character who obeys, Pamphile, a place, outdoors, an action, taking a wife, manner, namely going home quickly, result, astonishment that seized him to such an extent that he was unable to say a word or provide a justification. (Willich, In omnes Terentii fabulas compendiosa commentaria, 1550)

Thus, ancient rhetoric models narration in accordance with a paratactic script that lists in full or in part the various points expected of the narrative program. In rhetoric, narration is not the emplotment of a chronological chain, nor is it the constitution of a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rather, it is the organized development of the syntagm in a succession of points (circumstances, motives, antecedents, consequences), all converging in a same expository intentio operis.

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5 Uses of Narrative Script The institutionalized uses of rhetorical narratio appear to extend into two families: oratorical narration (integrated into a long speech or into a letter of persuasive intent) and academic narration (as taught in the progymnasmata). On closer scrutiny, however, things prove not to be so clear. Two academic exercises linked to narration – the Aesopic fable and the chreia – employ narrative elements with a discursive aim deployed in complementary sequences: a moral lesson in one case, commendation of the memorable in the other. All academic exercises fed into autonomous writing of high standards (fables, tales, anecdotes, history, etc.) that we would characterize today as literature as well as narrations inserted into speeches or letters that could be extracted and included in anthologies as so many bravura pieces. There also exists another distinction, perpetuated by the progymnasmata and established by Aphtonios (fourth century CE), that breaks down the various uses of narration according to genre: poetic narration, historical narration, oratorical narration. The distinctive criteria here are pragmatic aim (pleasing, commemorating, persuading) and the status of veracity attributed to that aim (fictive, truthful, verisimilar). But here again, the borders are porous, for they do not restrict the poetic to the fabulous, but readily extend it to the verisimilar, just as the true is not excluded from the field of the persuasive or the verisimilar from the field of history; nor is pleasure an attribute ignored by historians and orators. So much so that this distinction especially appears to be sociological, relating to differentiated forms of writing in Antiquity (poets, historians, lawyers, politicians). It can be concluded, in particular, that rhetorical narration appears in all genres of discourse and fiction and in all forms of discursive integration, from minimal expository frameworks up to lengthy argumentative frameworks. In all genres of discourse, narration is motivated, as pointed out early on by Aristotle in his Rhetoric (3.16). It is thus that the normalized expository script of rhetorical narration has remained one of the major resources of commendation from Antiquity to the present day (referring to the feats of the person being praised), broken down into several short successive narrations. Examples of this version of commendation abound, particularly in the early modern period with the funeral oration (e.g., narration in Bossuet’s funeral oration for the Grand Condé, 1687). Narrative script continues to be one of the bravura pieces of courtroom advocacy, so much so that it has been possible to liken oratorical narration to courtroom narration, which became a paradigm of the exercise. The emblematic example, from Antiquity up to the nineteenth century, remains Cicero in his Pro Milone, the last sequence of which is usually quoted in rhetoric handbooks, the one devoted to the very day of the ambush in which Milo’s men killed Clodius:

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[Antecedents:] Milo, on the other hand, as he had been in the Senate on that day, until the Senate was dismissed, came home, changed his shoes and his clothes, waited for a little, as usually happens, while his wife got herself ready, then set off at that time when Clodius could already have returned, if indeed he had been intending to come to Rome on that day. [Circumstances of manner and accompaniment:] Clodius happens to meet him, unencumbered, on horseback, with no carriage, with no baggage, with no Greek companions, as he was accustomed, without his wife, something which was almost never the case, while Milo, this so-called waylayer, who is said to have arranged that journey for the purpose of murder being done, was being driven in a carriage with his wife, wearing a heavy travelling cloak, with a great amount of baggage, and with a feminine and feeble company of maidservants and pages. [Circumstances of place and time:] He meets Clodius in front of his farm at about the eleventh hour, or not far off it [. . .] (Cicero, Pro Milone 10.28; trans. Colson)

Rhetorical narration also appears in the deliberative genre, but as exemplum or accessory proof more than as a constitutive part of the framework of oratory, thus as mere ornament (e.g., Mercuriales by d’Aguesseau, 1668–1751). From the perspective of poetic fiction, however, examples of narrations with a deliberative intent abound, be it in the fable (a genre characterized by moral warning or exhortation, as in La Fontaine’s Fables, 1693) or in the narrative tissue of certain novels where an episode is narrated only by way of illustration: exemplary or pedagogical narration; allegorical narration. In this way, the exemplary calling of novelistic narrations may be signaled starting with the title, as in Honoré d’Urfé’s The Twelve Books of Astrée [. . .] Where by Several Stories, and under the Persons of Shepherds, and Others, Are Deduced the Various Effects of Honest Friendship (1607). This can also be seen in the conclusion of an episode from Fenelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses (trans. W. H. Melmoth, London, A. Hogg, 1770): Thus Minerva, under the figure of Mentor, established the best laws, and the wisest principles of government, at Salentum; not so much that the kingdom of Idomeneus might flourish, as to show Telemachus, at his return, by a striking example, what may be expected by a wise government, with respect to the happiness of people, and the honour of the prince. (end of book 14)

As these examples show, narration – in the rhetorical sense of expository script – is also present in novelistic composition, since, more generally, it is present in all fictional genres, whatever their mode of expression (epics: Achaemenides’s account of his stay with the Cyclops in the Aeneid, L. III; tragedies: the story of Theramene in Racine’s Phaedra; etc.). In essence, this allows for the possibility of rhetorical narration being a device which is not integrated into an argument, an expository script which is not subordinated to probatory finalities. In effect, implementation of an expository script can take place either through recourse to a framing device that is persuasive (introducing narration into an argument that is long, be it epidictic, judicial, or deliberative)

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or brief (Aesopic fable, epidictic chreia), or through the absence of any argumentative framework (the school exercise of narratio, as in stories and tales). The latter case can give rise to a positive variant, the presence of an expository minimal framework, namely an utterance motivating the desire for explanation or information: ŒNONE. Madam, in the name of tears I have shed for you, By your feeble knees that I embracing clasp, Deliver my spirit from this mournful doubt. PHAEDRA. Thou wishest it: rise. ŒNONE. Speak: I listen to thee. PHAEDRA. Heaven: what am I about to say to her, and how commence? ŒNONE. By these vain tears cease to offend me. [. . .] PHAEDRA. My evil comes from a greater distance [. . .] (Racine, Phaedra, 1.3, trans. R. B. Boswell)

As is the case here, the reason for desiring an explanation (expecting information) can be stated briefly (this is the most frequent case in novelistic and dramatic contexts), or it may be implicit due to generic convention, as in historiography, memoirs, and anecdotes. It is nonetheless true that this breaks fundamentally with the poetic approach, namely that a novel, play, chronicle, or anthology of anecdotes can insert narrations in the rhetorical sense, including one or more narrative syntagms that can be broken down into autonomous units, one or more scripts that narrate less a story than state a fact or a situation, making the circumstances and motivations explicit. To this can be added a brief mention of the antecedents and consequences. It must be added that with an essentially paratactic syntax, narrative script is characterized by an easily recognizable rhythm, for it is enumerative and set out as a list in the succession of items of which it is made up. However, three aesthetic qualities or stylistic effects complete the rhetoric of narration: brevity, clarity, and verisimilitude. These features are required everywhere, starting with the oldest treatise in our possession (Rhetoric to King Alexander, 1686; original: fourth century BCE), for oratorical narrations as well as for poetic and historical narrations, but also for narrations for argumentative use and narrations with a merely expository intent. It turns out that these three qualities have major impacts on the syntax of script (its structuring and ordering) as well as on its semantics (the choices made to give a content to each of the items).

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6 Brevity: A Technique for Argumentative Tension It is here that we arrive at a rather intricate distinction, established by Quintilian, between two types of narration: (1) the emblematic example of successful narration – the script of Milo’s departure given by Cicero, characterized, as seen above, by an enumeration of antecedents and especially of circumstances as well as by a juxtaposition of propositions – and (2) a stigmatized counter-example which is also marked by parataxis and the enumeration of circumstances of manner (cf. Formarier 2018). Whereas Cicero skillfully writes “Milo [. . .] came home, changed his shoes and his clothes, waited for a little, as usually happens, while his wife got herself ready, then set off [. . .]” (Pro Milone 10.28; trans. Colson), one cannot but pale (dixit Quintilian) on reading the following passage: “I  came to the harbour, I saw a ship, I asked the cost of a passage, the price was agreed, I went on board, the anchor was weighed, we loosened our cable and set out [. . .]” (Institutio oratoria 4.2.41; trans. Butler). Where is the difference? Neither in the morphology nor in the syntax, but in interpretation by the context, by the surrounding argumentative framework: the persuasive intent or, failing that, the explanatory intent, operates as a hermeneutic constraint. In the expository script are kept only the elements that are likely to provide a clarification or lend support to a proof. In the case in point, each circumstance adopted by Cicero contributes to establishing an absence of premeditation. This constitutes the first element of a plea in two stages: (1) Milo did not intend to kill Clodius; (2) Milo killed Clodius for reasons of legitimate defense. On the other hand, the multitude of circumstances surrounding the other departure (going to sea) contributes neither to making the statement explicit nor to any proof whatsoever. Or, as Quintilian explains: Nothing could be terser than these assertions, but it would have been quite sufficient to say I sailed from the harbour. And whenever the conclusion gives a sufficiently clear idea of the premisses, we must be content with having given a hint which will enable our audience to understand what we have left unsaid. (Institutio oratoria 4.2.41; trans. Butler)

This, then, is the very principle of utility that defines what rhetoric calls brevity. The brevity in question is not opposed to the absence of length (a long narration can appear to be brief), but to the absence of tension (explanatory or persuasive). Or, as summarized by an eighteenth-century treatise: The precept of brevity must be explained. It does not consist precisely in shutting oneself up in a paucity of words. One is short whenever one only says what is necessary or even useful. [. . .] I will even go further: whatever lengthens only by an ornament aptly placed and distributed with taste and discretion cannot be treated as superfluous. (Crevier [1765] 1767)

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On the other hand, Quintilian claims the following: “Frequently conciseness of detail is not inconsistent with length in the whole” (Institutio oratoria 4.2.41; trans. Butler). Brevity, then, is not a formal trait but rather a discourse effect. Clearly, it is here that the distance from the narratological approach to narrative (as from the ancient poetics of the plot) is at its greatest. For it is not narrative (or dramatic) tension that serves as a vehicle of narration and provides it with its finality, infusing it with both its interest and its coherence. In rhetoric, narration engages circumstances that are guided and oriented solely by expository and/or argumentative intent. At the level of composition, this results in a true strategy of selection: the speaker chooses just what details he wishes to draw attention to, what reasons, what motives to catch one’s eye, what moments, earlier or later, to focus on. As a consequence, there are no neutral (or gratuitous) notations in an expository script: each and every element serves an intentio operis; each and every circumstance stands out and, according to the case, either aggravates or mitigates, lauds or belittles. Narrative script knows no “useless detail” dear to Roland Barthes. It is conveyed not horizontally along its denouement, but vertically in its intelligibility in a redundant process of elucidation through the juxtaposition and accumulation of elements all going in the same direction. Its other side is thus digressive: narration achieves its goal, according to the most famous rhetorical formulation, if the beginning of it is derived from the quarter from which it ought to be; [. . .] if the speaker does not in his narration go on at a greater length than there is any occasion for, as far as the mere imparting of knowledge is concerned; and if he does not make a digression to any other topic; and if he states his case in such a way, that sometimes that which has not been said may be understood from that which has been said; and if he passes over not only such topics as may be injurious, but those too which are neither injurious nor profitable; and if he repeats nothing more than once; and if he does not at once begin with that topic which was last mentioned. (Cicero, Treatise on Rhetorical Invention 1.20.28; trans. Yonge)

Or, as Mme de Sévigné ironically put it when commenting on one of her patently digressive narrations (in the famous letter on haymaking of 22 July 1671): This is the story in a few words. For my part, I like narratives in which one is only told what is necessary without any straying either to the right or to the left, or going back to the beginning of things. In short, to speak without any vanity, I think you have here a model of a pleasant narrative. (trans. A. I. Ritchie)

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7 Clarity: The Technique of Ordo Naturalis Clarity has remained one of the three fundamental qualities of expository script from the time of the first texts on the rhetoric of narration in our possession. The Rhetoric to King Alexander includes an analysis of it which has been taken up and repeated everywhere. The author begins by distinguishing between two types of clarity: clarity in words and clarity in things. Clarity in words involves the development of grammatical observance that rhetoric manuals devote to correctness of the elocutio: direct and ordinary expressions, rejection of improprieties and ambiguities. Clarity in things introduces the idea of ordering the narrative topic according to a strictly chorological classification: We shall perspicuously make appear either from words, or from the business itself. From the business itself, if we do not relate the Matters confusedly and out of order, but such as were first done or to be done, in the first Place: and the rest afterwards in their Order. (Rhetoric to King Alexander 31; trans. Taylor)

The same advice goes fifteen hundred years later: To put facts in order and allow the judge a little rest, it is necessary to separate them into different periods [. . .] This can be conceived quite easily. The order of facts [. . .] will itself announce [the] periods to be distinguished. (Crevier [1765] 1767)

One must not be misled by the simplicity of this device. Initially, there appears to be a continuity between rhetorical narration, which sets out the circumstances (and motivations), and poetic narration, sometimes described as an emplotment of chronology, from the simplest (progressive) to the most complex (beginning in medias res followed by an analepsis, suspensive prolepses, antepositioning of the denouement, etc.). In rhetoric, however, establishing chronology is not consubstantial with narrativity: its effect is comparable to that of figures of thought, for it introduces delimitation, a linear tension, into the enumeration of items (horizontally, from past to future) together with a scansion of the syntagm, thus improving readability significantly. The grammatical marks of chronology (verbal tenses of narrative, circumstantials of time) are reliable indices of narration, delimiting with their appearance and flow the opening and closing of the narrative part of the discourse. By their recurrence within the narrative sequence, they also represent a mechanism for progression and scansion that choreographs the succession of items while separating them clearly. As seen in the passage from Pro Milone, the mentioning of dates and hours (“on that day,” “at the eleventh hour,” etc.) is enough to sequence narration into an ordered succession of parts. A narration is thus a syntagm that begins with an adverb or an adverbial phrase of time and divides its matter into conjoined temporal units, as in the following letter by Mme de Sévigné (19 December 1670):

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On Monday the thing [the marriage between Lauzun and Mademoiselle de Montpensier] was declared, as I told you. All Tuesday went by in talk, in Avonder, in compliments. On Wednesday Mademoiselle made a formal donation to M. de Lauzun, in order that he should have the necessary titles, names, and adornments with which to figure in the marriage-contract, which was drawn up that same day [. . .] Thursday morning that is to say, yesterday Mademoiselle hoped that the king would have signed the contract, as he had promised to do; but about seven o’clock in the evening, the queen, Monsieur, and several old dotards persuaded his Majesty that this affair was doing harm to his reputation; so that, having sent for Mademoiselle and M. de Lauzun, the king declared to them, in the presence of Monsieur le Prince, that he positively forbade their thinking any more of this marriage. (trans. A. I. Ritchie)

Lastly, it is to be noted that the progressive chronological order is no more “natural” than any other, even though it comes under the name ordo naturalis (as opposed to the ordo artificialis of the poets, which consists in setting out the fact before suspending its drift and returning to the antecedents and motivations). Order becomes “natural” by convention in that in modern times it is considered to convey clarity, thus making it a factor of attention. It is well known that in the twenty-first century, for the same reasons of attention and clarification, journalistic news dispatches are structured backward, putting the present at the beginning and then piling on successive layers of previous information in an anti-chronological order.

8 Verisimilitude: The Technique of Decorum Verisimilitude is of course at the heart of the mechanisms for the construction of plot in Aristotle’s Poetics. Whether it is the linking together of facts, passions, or ethos, all are subject to a rule of linking together persuasively: an act with its motivations and circumstances, a character with his words, a situation with an affect. But what is often forgotten is that this conception of the verisimilar is imported directly from rhetoric. Indeed, Aristotle defines the main feature of rhetoric as reasoning according to the verisimilar, and he thus distinguishes it from logical reasoning and dialectical reasoning. Settling on neither the true nor the probable but on the verisimilar, rhetorical reasoning draws its force from the credibility of doxa: For a probability is what happens for the most part, not in a simple sense, as some define it, but whatever, among things that can be other than they are, is so related to that in regard to which it is probable as a universal is related to a particular. (Aristotle, On Rhetoric 1.2, 1357a15)

As pointed out by one French commentator (P.  Chiron) on this passage: “For example, the universal corresponding to the verisimilar is that children love their parents, and the particular situation which, moreover, can also be qualified as verisimilar: ‘Paul loves his mother’” (in Aristotle, Rhétorique, 2007, 133).

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Doxa is a general affirmation that can be declined ad libitum into all particular cases, real or fictive: an ethical verisimilar (children, as catalogued characters, love their parents and speak without thinking), a pathetic verisimilar (great misfortune awakens pity, an undeserved fate, indignation), verisimilarity in the motivation of an act (anger begets vengeance) or in its circumstance (the night brings good counsel). All of these teachings, developed at several levels of the rhetorical system, re-emerge in the poetics of the plot. Upstream, they are also mobilized in the normativity of the narrative script. That the rhetoric of narration subordinates narrative script to a requirement of verisimilitude is thus not to be interpreted as a sign of narrative script opening up to requirements of a poetic order, but rather as a profoundly rhetorical process. The expository script must aim for its credibility, its acceptability, aptly described in one eighteenth-century treatise as “the inclination to believe” (Crevier [1765] 1767). The rhetorical pact is not a commitment to truth or probability; nor is it an admission of falseness or a call to the suspension of judgment. For narration, as for the other parts of discourse, the rhetorical pact, in keeping with doxa, is persuasive, in line with consensus. What techniques, then, are summoned up to implement the resources of verisimilitude in narrative composition? A narration will be probable, if in it those characteristics are visible which are usually apparent in truth; if the dignity of the persons mentioned is preserved; if the causes of the actions performed are made plain; if it shall appear that there were facilities for performing them; if the time was suitable; if there was plenty of room; if the place is shown to have been suitable for the transaction which is the subject of the narration; if the whole business, in short, be adapted to the nature of those who plead, and to the reports bruited about among the common people, and to the preconceived opinions of those who hear. (Cicero, Treatise on Rhetorical Invention 1.21.29–30; trans. Yonge)

Four points are spelled out here: (1) conformity (in Latin, decorum: what is suitable) of words and gestures (acts) with the acting persons (having a person say and do what this type of character is expected to say and do); (2) conformity of actions with their motivations (whether they involve inclinations, passions, reasoned decisions, etc.); (3) conformity of acts and times, of acts and places; and (4) acceptability of the act itself. One treatise of the eighteenth century puts it this way: To make your narrative verisimilar, you must assign your characters motives and traits proportioned to the nature of the actions you attribute to them. In this way, says Quintilian, if you accuse a man of theft, you must portray him as greedy; deranged in his morals if adultery is concerned; reckless and violent if you pursue him as guilty of homicide. (Crevier [1765] 1767)

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In the logic of exposition and/or probative persuasion lying at the heart of the narrative script, decorum thus governs the choice of circumstances (of person, time, place, manner) and that of motivations (causes). A political murder entertains doxal affinity with a portrait of the murderer as a despot, a time (at night), and a place (at a remove) together with a well-adapted modus operandi (being accompanied by henchmen) and the expected motivation (premeditation)  – in a word, everything that characterizes Clodius’s attack against Milo. There remains a final resource that Cicero puts in a negative light: that the affair, the act itself (in relation to which the circumstances and motivations have been evoked), does not affront doxa, that it remains credible. What does this mean? It does not involve drastically restricting expository narration strictly to the possible, but integrating the incredible into the possible by thematizing it: “We shall be thought faithful, and to be credited, if we bring Reasons, by which the incredible things that are said to be done may seem to be probable” (Rhetoric to King Alexander 31; trans. Taylor). In rhetoric, the extraordinary is not the flip side of verisimilar narration, but a complication of verisimilar narration.

9 Suavitas: The Technique of Figural Amplification That brevity is interpreted in the sense of argumentative tension, clarity in the sense of chronological ordering, and verisimilitude in the sense of doxal affinity – this is what allows us to complete the morphology and syntax of narration in rhetoric. But there remains a last “virtue,” a last narrative quality, to add to the rhetorical program as instituted from the time of Aristotle: suavitas, or agreeableness. And with agreeableness, of course, the entire field of placere opens up to the narrative script. The question of suavitas puts expository narration at the junction between rhetoric and poetics. The requirement of agreeableness appears rather late in the history of rhetoric with a pedagogical work by Cicero. Here we can read the following: “A narration is agreeable which contains subjects calculated to excite surprise and admiration, expectation, unlooked-for results, pieces of feelings, conversations between people, grief, anger, fear, joy, desires” (Cicero, Dialogue Concerning Oratorical Partitions; trans. Yonge). Without lingering for the moment over the details of this list, the essential element must be stressed: agreeableness usually comes down to introducing specialized sequences into the narrative script dedicated to pathos, dialogues, motivations, and so on. The search for agreeableness goes through the insertion of

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ornamental syntagms, intended above all to please through an operation of amplification. Agreeableness does not undo the script, giving it a different plot: rather, it lengthens the script. Here there is no incompatibility with the dogma of brevity, however, since, absorbed into expository or probatory tension, brevity itself is compatible with length: By “just what is necessary” I mean not the bare minimum necessary to convey our meaning; for our brevity must not be devoid of elegance, without which it would be merely uncouth: pleasure beguiles the attention, and that which delights us ever seems less long, just as a picturesque and easy journey tires us less for all its length than a difficult short cut through an arid waste. (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 4.2.46; trans. Butler)

Or, as paraphrased by the eighteenth-century treatise we have followed all along: It is not without reason that some rhetoricians added to the three virtues of narration – clarity, verisimilitude, brevity – a fourth: interest and agreeableness. [. . .] If the cause is great by its subject and by the name of the persons it concerns; if it is varied by a multitude of diverse events, if it is susceptible to sentiments of grief, commiseration, indignation, surprise, then a cold and dry narration would be totally vicious. (Crevier [1765] 1767)

A portrait of the lawyer as novelist seems to peep through when the lawyer transforms his narration into a tragic poem, orchestrating the grandeur of the characters and the multitude of events around the emotions of pity and indignation. But it does not go exactly like that: highlighting does not give way to emplotment. In other words, the ornamentation in question remains fundamentally rhetorical, an art of figural agreeableness, so that all treatises conclude their discussion of narrative script with a list of “figures of narration.” Suavitas calls on four types of resources: (1) surprise, (2) pathos, (3) dialogues, and (4) a few figures of thought. (1) Treating expectations sparingly, then surprising, clearly draws the art of the narrator close to that of the storyteller. However, by encouraging the narrator to play on the extraordinary, on suspended expectations, and on unexpected denouements, rhetoric does not go in the sense of a systematic arrangement. It remains with local adjustments, with incipital and terminal accommodations, concerning mainly the item of causes and motivations. The narrator is urged toward an art of restraint (fragmentary, allusive motivations gauged toward the effects of expectation) and toward an art of misleading tracks (motivations in paradoxical contradiction with the action of which they are supposedly the origin, thus producing surprise effects). This can be seen in the following plea before the court over a contested inheritance:

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It is easy to feel that these features of the narrative, which is only beginning, suddenly cast a cloud and doubt over the reality of the marriage, discrediting its verisimilitude. The Count of Hautefort’s age, the long years he spent without marrying, his sudden ardor, his slowness to contract marriage – all this announces a novel that the opposing party imagined without even thinking to make it credible. (Crevier [1765] 1767)

(2) Pathetic passages also contribute to narrative ornamentation through the addition of dedicated monological sequences. Whether they be in direct or indirect speech or narrativized, these sequences all produce variations on topical grids listed for each passion (e.g., the fifteen commonplaces or topoi for indignation or the sixteen commonplaces for pity listed by Cicero in his Treatise on Rhetorical Invention 1.52, 1.55). (3) Dialogues in the modern period are one of the most frequently used resources of the art of making narration agreeable. In fact, this involves additional sequences, amplifying the presentation of the motivations or circumstances behind an event. Or, as one of the ancient manuals puts it: “Sometimes fables need to be expanded, sometimes to be compressed. How would this be done? If we sometimes recount the fable in a bare narrative, at other times invent speeches for the given characters” (Hermogenes [attributed to], Preliminary Exercise 1.2; trans. Kennedy). The quasi-systematic intermingling of expository sequences and sequences containing dialogues in the ornamented narrative script results in the array of speeds characteristic of novelistic prose described by Genette as summary and scene: “The true rhythm of the novelistic canon [. . .] is thus alternation between non-dramatic summaries with a function of waiting and liaison and dramatic scenes whose role in the action is decisive” (1972, 142). (4) Figures of thought are additional syntagms that give form to the utterance and make it more lively (through the use of apostrophe, exclamation, interrogation, suspension, enumerations, hypotyposes, etc.). They contribute greatly to transforming an explanatory presentation into a bravura, as can be seen in a letter by Mme de Sévigné, an eminent woman of wit and learning (letter of 22 July 1671): You know that Madame de Chaulnes is at Vitre: she is there awaiting her husband, the Duke, who arrives in ten or twelve days for the opening of the Brittany Chambers. You think that I am Avander: she is there awaiting her husband and all the Chambers, and, meanwhile, she is at Vitre all alone, dying of dulness. You cannot understand how this will ever lead to Picard [a dismissed footman]. She is there dying of dulness. I am her only consolation, and you can well believe with what a high hand I carry it over Mademoiselle de Kerbone and De Kerqueoison. All this is very roundabout, but nevertheless we shall soon reach the point. As I am her only consolation, after having paid her a visit, she must come to me, and I want her to find my lawns neat and my alleys neat, those great alleys which you love. But still you don’t understand where this is leading. Here is another little circumstance relating to it. You know this is haymaking time: I had no labourers, so I am obliged to send to that meadow which the

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poets have praised, to fetch all those working there to come and clean up here (you still see no point), and in their place I send all my people to make hay. Do you know what to make hay means? I must explain: to make hay is the prettiest thing in the world. It is to turn hay over and over whilst gambolling in a meadow; if one can do this much, one can make hay. All my people went off gaily: Picard alone came to tell me he wouldn’t go [. . .] (trans. A. I. Ritchie)

In the final analysis, the morphology of the narrative script that is both effective and agreeable is in some way unfolded and contrasted between focal sequences (expository sequences concerning motivations and the succession of circumstances, antecedents, and consequences) and ornamental sequences (descriptions, scenes, monologues, figures of speech, etc.). Overall, the composite script – made up of compartments – is linked together in a weakly conjunctive syntax, drifting along with the changes of tense and the changes of person or place. But at this point, a new set of considerations enters the picture.

10 Complex Narration Complex narration results from either of two different operations: division and serial montage. First of all, the divided script is a script that involves all complex and thus muddled affairs: There are causes loaded with such a multitude of different facts that it is not possible to embrace them all in the same body of narrative. [. . .] In this case, to put order into the facts and allow the judge’s attention a bit of rest, it is necessary to divide them up into different epochs and even into the different nature of objects. (Crevier [1765] 1767)

When the actors, places, and acts abound in the genesis of the fact to be explained, ordo naturalis does not suffice to guarantee a minimum of intelligibility. There appears here just under the surface the possibility of a narration containing several threads: The order of times is the natural order of facts: but it may happen that this order is complicated by several series that meet up and intersect, each with their particular origin and point of departure. [. . .] There must thus be other principles of order that produce clarity and ensure it despite complication. (Delamalle 1816; emphasis added)

Chains of motivations and facts thus compel an additional division, upstream of chronological division, that occurs according to the persons and occasionally the places: “Division can be achieved through several principal points: [.  .  .] circumstances relating to time – past, present or future [. . .]; circumstances relating to persons, to place” (Jouvancy [1710] 1892).

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The rhetorical tool of division thus makes it possible to think of the complex story as a script whose various threads are arranged in parallel, their turning point, in modern French, being an archetypical grammatical marker: the adverb cependant (meanwhile). This word is taken not in the adversative sense of “nevertheless,” but in the etymological sense of pendant ce temps (during this time) along with the concurrent use of locational variants such as en même temps (at the same time), for example. Divided narration thus offers an elementary grammar of great simplicity, often taken advantage of by novelists. One might think here of how Mme de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) is composed, where episodes focused on the gallant fiction alternate with parallel episodes devoted to the historical chronicle. This leads us toward another type of management of complexity: not by division, but by serial composition. Up to this point, we have examined rhetoric such as it is attached to the narration of a fact – one single fact. But what happens when there are several conjoined or disjunctive facts? The rhetoric of narration adopts only one principle: one narration per fact. It does, however, allow for an arch-mechanism: the serial montage script, a script consisting in a collection of distinct narrations, all of them simple expository scripts. This comes in such a way that the model for thinking about the novelistic story in its totality or the historical chronicle is not a coherent system (suspended between complication and denouement, organized hierarchically between the main action and secondary actions), but rather a collection of “facts”: the multitude and gathering together of expository scripts that can be broken down into autonomous units. If script can be thought of as a model for the listing of items, then serial montage script can be thought of as a model for the listing of related facts, of scripts, and thus the work as a whole as a model for the accumulation of episodes: A narrative (diêgêma) differs from a narration (diêgêsis) as a piece of poetry (poiêma) differs from a poetical work (poiêsis). A poiêma and a diêgêma are concerned with one thing, a poiêsis and a diêgêsis with another; for example, [. . .] the History of Herodotus is a diêgêsis, as is that of Thucydides, but the story of Arion or of Alcmeon is a diêgêma. (Hermogenes [attributed to], Preliminary Exercices 2.4; trans. Kennedy)

Serial montage thus takes place in three ways: (1) By juxtaposition pure and simple (collections of short stories, tales, anecdotes, etc.). (2) By thematized coordination: motifs of spatial succession (voyages, etc.), of chronological succession (historical chronicles, letters published in gazettes, memoirs, fictional life narratives, etc.), or even of a succession of places, as in the following example from Furetière’s Le Roman bourgeois (1666): “These are small stories and adventures that took place in various quarters of the city that have nothing in common and that I try to bring together as best I can. As for establishing the links between them, I leave that to whoever binds the book.”

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(3) By subordination and embedding (intradiegetic narrative) with the motifs of conversation or encounters so as to “naturalize” the device (according to the term proposed by Tomaševskij [1925] 1965). A collection of narrations sewn together into the “thread of the novel” (Furetière, Le Roman bourgeois, 1666) constitutes the most fruitful basic plan in the history of the novel in the modern era, be it in comic stories (heirs to Cervantes’s Don Quixote [1605/1615], Scarron’s Le Roman comique [1651/1657], Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1778], etc.), adventure stories (from the medieval romances of chivalry to Telemachus and the picaresque novels), and memoir novels (L’Hermite’s Le Page disgrâcié [1643], Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne [1731–1742], Diderot’s La Religieuse [1796], the Marquis de Sade’s Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu [1791], etc.). The collection of embedded narrations serves as a protocol of composition for narrativized novelistic collections as varied as Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1558) or the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Journées de Sodome (1785). Lastly, many novels borrow from one plan in major mode and from the other plan in minor mode (embedded stories emphasizing episodes in Le Roman comique scatter adventures throughout retrospective narratives by Telemachus). Moreover, the architectures of the long novels of the first half of the seventeenth century (d’Urfé’s L’Astrée [1607], Mme de Scudéry’s Clélie, histoire romaine [1654–1660], etc.) mix the two resources with virtuosity, unfolding by both coordination (in the course of a voyage) and subordination (during encounters) the numerous narrative scripts that make up the diegesis in the form of either episodes or reported stories. But long novels have yet another lesson in store for us: they do not overlook the features of tension and narrative cohesion in the narratological sense. In these novels, the work of cohesion and suspense is in some way delegated to certain places in the text – the occurrence of the dramatic obstacle (e.g., Céladon’s suicide early on in L’Astrée) and its denouement – as well as to the articulation of the major parts by a system of reminders and relaunchings. The features of tension and narrative cohesion fulfill two functions in the general organization of these works: the functions of framing and transition. It is left to the other places in the novel to adjust according to the two organizing principles coming from rhetoric: coordination or subordination in the serial montage of narrative scripts.

11 Conclusion Putting seriality at the heart of the serial narrative mechanisms in this way ultimately induces us to imagine other serial figures, other ways of organizing narrative series. Alongside the figures of framing and transition can be found, through

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the interpretation of resemblances and differences, a variety of montages: parallel, inverted mirror, alternance, gradation, concentric figures, and so on. Future theoreticians will draw up inventories of these montages. To be mentioned for now are Christian Metz (1966) and his proposals for the analysis of film in a “grand syntagmatics of the narrative film” (by which the present author was inspired in an article devoted to montage in the novel; Noille 2017); in the early twentieth century, the Russian formalists (on the morphology of the short story in particular; Ėjchenbaum [1919] 1974; Šklovskij [1921] 1991, Reformatski [1922]); earlier still, a number of German philologists (e.g., Dibelius 1910; Schissel von Fleschenberg 1912) who place their work on the composition of the novel under the aegis of rhetoric. For 1500 years, the technique of narration fell within the province of rhetoric, for authors as for readers, for attested facts as for invented facts. Up to the dawn of the narratological revolution, the elementary rhetoric of expository script inscribed in modern Europe an atomist, extensive, and anthological conception of narration, globally foreign to the holistic, intensive, and integrative conception of our own modernity.

References Aphthonius the Sophist. (fourth century CE) 2008. The Preliminary Exercises. In Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, translated by George A. Kennedy. Leiden: Brill. 89–128. Aristotle. (fourth century BCE) 2007. Rhétorique. Translated with notes by P. Chiron. Paris: Flammarion. Aristotle. (fourth century BCE) 1992. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baroni, Raphaël. 2002. “Le rôle des scripts dans le récit.” Poétique 129:93–114. Cicero. (first century BCE) 1852. Treatise on Rhetorical Invention. Translated by Charles D. Yonge. In Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, vol. 4. 241–380. London: Bohn. Cicero. (first century BCE) 1953. Pro Milone. Translated by Francis H. Colson. London: Macmillan. Cicero. (first century BCE) 1852. Dialogue Concerning Oratorical Partitions. Translated by Charles D. Yonge. In Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, vol. 4. 486–526. London: Bohn. Crevier, Jean-Baptiste. (1765) 1767. Rhétorique française. 2 vols. Paris: Saillant. Delamalle, Gaspard-Gilbert. 1816. Essai d’institutions oratoires à l’usage de ceux qui se destinent au barreau. 2vols. Paris: Delaunay. Dibelius, Wilhelm. 1910. Englische Romankunst: Die Technik des englischen Romans im achtzehnten und zu Anfang des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Berlin: Mayer & Müller. Ėjchenbaum [Eikhenbaum], Boris. (1919) 1974. “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made.” In Gogol’ from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, edited by Robert A. Maguire, 269–291. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dionne, Ugo. 2008. La Voie aux chapitres. Poétique de la disposition romanesque. Paris: Seuil. Formarier, Marie. 2018. “La narratio chez Cicéron doit-elle être brève pour persuader?” Interférences, no. 10. http://journals.openedition.org/interferences/6007 (accessed 10 January 2021).

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Genette, Gérard. 1972. “Discours du récit: Essai de méthode.” In Figures III, 65–282. Paris: Seuil. Hermogenes [attributed to]. (ca. 3rd century CE) 2003. Preliminary Exercices. In Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, translated by George A. Kennedy. 73–88. Leiden: Brill. Jouvancy, Joseph de. (1710) 1892. L’élève de rhétorique. Translated by H. Ferté. Paris: Hachette. Metz, Christian. 1966. “La grande syntagmatique du film narratif.” Communications 8:120–124. Noille, Christine. 2017. “Le montage d’un roman.” Poétique 182:177–194. Noille, Christine. 2018. “Narratio/narration? La rhetoric et la langue française.” Littératures classiques 96:85–97. Pajot, Charles, SJ. (1646) 1708. Tyrocinium Eloquentiae; sive, Rhetorica nova, et facilior. Venice, Bassano: Antonio Remondini. Quintilian. (first century CE) 1842/1920. Institutio oratoria. Translated by Harold E. Butler. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reformatskij, Aleksandr A. 1922. [On the analysis of novel’s composition], Moskva, OPOÏAZ. Rhetorica ad Herennium. (first century BCE) 1954. Translated by Harry Caplan. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann. Rhetoric to King Alexander. (fourth century BCE) 1686. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric; or, The True Grounds and Principles of Oratory Shewing the Right Art of Pleading and Speaking in Full assemblies and Courts of Judicature/Made English by the Translators of The Art of Thinking: In Four Books. London: Printed by T. B. for Randal Taylor. Schissel von Fleschenberg, Otmar. 1912. Novellenkränze Lukians. Halle: Niemeyer. Shklovsky [Šklovskij], Viktor. (1921) 1965. “La construction de la nouvelle et du roman.” In Théorie de la littérature, edited by T. Todorov, 170–196. Paris: Seuil. Tomashevsky [Tomaševskij], Boris. (1925) 1965. “Thematics.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 61–95. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Craig R. Davis

Trajectories of Plot in Icelandic Literature  1 Definitions  Narratives of the past derived from oral tradition often replicate in the deep structure of their plots patterns of events found in narratives of superior cultural prestige. These trajectories of plot are inscribed in the Heilsgeschichte or sacred history of a culture, whether scriptural or promulgated in various oral accounts of the beginning and end of the world. Indeed, Aristotle used the multivalent term mythos (what is told, an authoritative tale) to refer more specifically to the “plot” of such venerable stories, that is, the particular sequence of events narrated within them: “So the plot [mythos] is the source and (as it were) the soul of tragedy; character is second and discloses the nature of a choice” (1996, 12). Here, following Karin Kukkonen, “plot” is defined as “the ways in which the events and characters’ actions in a story are arranged and how this arrangement in turn facilitates identification of their motivations and consequences” (2014, 706). Traditional plots are manipulated by authors to reveal, perhaps even to discover, characters’ motivations or other factors governing the outcome of the events narrated. The moral and emotional resonance of these events, their thematic significance, is thus intimated in the process of retelling them, especially when these qualities are unstated or unclear in a traditional narrative, or otherwise felt to be overdetermined by cognitive uncertainties, complex motivations, or conflicting impulses on the part of the protagonists and other characters in a story. Peter Hühn defines these more fully qualified events in a retold tale as “type II events,” in that they are “accredited – in an interpretive, context-dependent decision – with certain features such as relevance, unexpectedness, and unusualness” (2014, 159). The new telling of an old tale can also reconfigure the consequences of the characters’ choices in the events that result from their words and deeds. These outcomes will still most often be made to conform to familiar plot-structures or the way events are characteristically understood to transpire through time in a particular storytelling tradition. The truth or plausibility of these retold tales – their “historicity” as understood by contemporary audiences – is strengthened by the closeness with which they are made to approximate recognized patterns of universal history in the authoritative narratives important to the culture. As Marshall Sahlins has observed in his studies of several Polynesian oral traditions, what constitutes a significant account of the past is very differently formulated in the narrative systems of distinct island groups: “different cultures, different historicities,” he concludes (1985, x). Actual historical events are soon assimilated to the “underlying recurrent https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-018

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structures” in the tradition of their narration (72); the recognition of these structures is a large part of what makes the stories “true” to participants in that tradition, at least “true-to-life.” However, storytellers also inevitably reimagine traditional tales through the lens of their own cultural moment. They adapt inherited narratives to changing political circumstances, religious values, or views of historical process in order to create a freshly relevant and compelling account of the past. In the case of the thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas, literate Christian clerics and secular chieftains rewrote the oral-traditional tales of their pagan ancestors, settlers of the island in the late ninth and tenth centuries CE. Authors found surprising and memorable ways to elaborate these inherited narratives that were highly influential upon subsequent writers as well, creating a new literary tradition that was preserved on vellum manuscripts in ecclesiastical scriptoria. The “eventfulness” of these innovative literary sagas – their relevance, distinctiveness, and authority for their contemporary and subsequent readership – is a measure of their difference from what can be reconstructed of the ephemeral versions of saga plots told by successive oral storytellers in earlier times (cf. Hühn 2014, 173; Schmid 2005). The written sagas both conform to and diverge from what can be postulated about pre-Christian, preliterate norms of narrative expectation, oral-traditional tales which can survive in fossilized or adapted form in the extant sagas. In fact, the most successful literary sagas dramatize the tension between opposing pagan and Christian plots of history, producing vividly eventful narratives that simultaneously satisfy and overturn traditional expectations of historical process.

2 Historical Background  The surviving Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders) or “Icelandic family sagas” are multigenerational prose narratives about the founding settlers of the island and their descendants. Most of these settlers had been Germanic polytheists worshipping a pantheon of deities called the Æsir (Powers) in later sources composed after the conversion of the country to Roman Christianity around the year 999. Cathedral schools were established at Skálholt in 1056 and Hólar in 1106. Written prose narratives in the vernacular began to appear with Íslendingabók (Book of Icelanders) by Ari Thorgilsson (1067–1148), who adapted native oral traditions to the format of the Latin chronicle. Ari may also have had a hand in the compilation of Landnámabók (Book of Settlements). These two texts list more than three thousand settlers of the island, tracing their family histories from the late ninth through the early twelfth centuries, sometimes including brief character-revealing anecdotes punctuated by

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a memorable utterance usually at or near the point of death. These “famous last words” became a key organizing principle of Icelandic saga narratives in the thirteenth century, the anticipated “punchline” of a character’s life-story, which was often further memorialized by the description of an extraordinary, impressive, or catastrophic demise.  Other vernacular compositions include the Prose Edda, a handbook of Norse mythology and poetics by the chieftain Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) and poems collected in the mid-thirteenth-century Poetic Edda, mainly dramatic scenes and dialogues from the myths associated with the pre-Christian divinities, including their final destruction at Ragnarök (Doom of the Gods). This ultimate cataclysm seems to have loomed large in the early Norse imagination, an apocalyptic conclusion to the trajectory of time implicit in many of the oral narratives cultivated on the island before the introduction of Christian literacy in the eleventh century. In the late pagan myths preserved in medieval Icelandic sources, the world is created from the corpse of a primeval titan slain by his great-grandsons on their maternal side. This aboriginal act of violence between close kinsmen  – gods and giants  – provokes an ongoing feud in which both parties will one day destroy each other in a final confrontation. The sequence of kin-slaying, creation, and apocalypse is the precise inverse of the biblical plot of history introduced to Icelandic culture at the turn of the eleventh century in which a benevolent God creates an utterly good world ex nihilo, humankind falls from grace through sin, but is eventually redeemed – at least potentially – through Christ’s vicarious atonement. This biblical pattern is neatly formulated by St. Paul: “Scimus autem quoniam diligentibus Deum omnia cooperantur in bonum (And we know that to them that love God, all things work together for good; Rom. 8:28, Vulgate). The reverse trajectories of the Norse pagan and biblical plots of history exerted a penetrating influence upon stories shaped under their narrative hegemony, traditional sagas in which the protagonists, as Aristotle suggested, are shown to make choices when the choice is not clear. These choices may not change the ultimate outcome of the plot’s trajectory, one more or less “fixed” by tradition, but can reveal more clearly the characters’ motives, that is, the moral quality or complexity of their response to their circumstances. The competing pagan and Christian plots of sacred history in medieval Icelandic culture thus inspired the inventiveness of saga-writers as they strove to compose stories that conformed simultaneously to opposing expectations of significant eventuality. This effort inspired a high degree of creativity in their characterization of protagonists, as revealed through their manipulation of saga plots. Each saga conforms to, but also deviates from its inherited narrative expectations, poised between older and newer ideas of historical process, a balance that shifted through time (we may imagine) in successive retellings in oral tradition, but even more so in the deliberate, literary elaboration of saga plots during the course of the

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thirteenth century. The plots of the Icelandic sagas were progressively reconstrued in a creative tension between oral and literary modes of composition, as well as competing models of diachronic plausibility derived from opposing mythic plots (Lönnroth 1991, 10).

3 Conventions or Plot Devices of the Íslendingasögur 3.1 Narrative Beginnings and Endings By the turn of the thirteenth century, prose texts like Grænlendinga saga (Saga of the Greenlanders) offered a more elaborate account of the colonization of both Iceland and Greenland, as well as the attempted settlement of the North American littoral around the Gulf of St Lawrence, during several expeditions after ca. 985. Grænlendinga is perhaps the first of the literary family sagas, a genre that was to flourish throughout the thirteenth century in narratives of increasing length and complexity, but typically focused on the course of individual careers from a laconic, matter-of-fact introduction – “There was a man named . . . who lived at . . .” – to a memorable finale. The saga-writer first offers a succinct but carefully formulated summary of the character’s appearance, personality, and social identity, including his or her family background with a few remarks or truncated anecdotes about ancestors in Norway or Iceland, often merely implied by nicknames like Thorkel Tidal-Rock, Unn the Deep-Minded, Hallbjörn Half-Troll, or Óláf the Woodcutter. These “preparatory ancestors” and introductory generalizations serve as a focalizing device, a lens through which to train the reader’s attention on key traits under observation in the development of the character, as well as a technique of foreshadowing events that will manifest these traits by the end of the saga (Hume 1973). They anticipate and, to some extent, clarify the motives or impulses that will actuate a character’s choices later in the saga. 

3.2 Parallelism and Foiling  Another feature of Grænlendinga saga that became characteristic of Icelandic family sagas as a whole is the introduction of related parallel characters who dominate the narrative in sequential, though often intertwined, episodes. Grænlendinga opens with an account of Bjarni Herjólfsson, the first accidental discoverer of

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Vínland in North America, followed by five further expeditions led by different figures to explore and settle the new land. These include Leif Eiríksson, his two brothers Thorstein and Thorvald, an Icelander named Thorfinn Karlsefni, and finally Leif’s sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir, who engineers the murder of her Norwegian companions. In each of these episodes the temporarily dominant characters are successively foiled against each other, revealing something of their different moral characters and leadership qualities by contrast, all of which are pertinent to the relative success or failure of their particular expeditions, though in the end all attempts to settle Vínland fail. Once again, characters’ motivations are clarified both by their initial description and then by comparison with the behavior of other characters in parallel circumstances. 

3.3 Stealth Protagonists  A third narrative device to appear in Grænlendinga saga might be called “misdirection” in that its introductory protagonist is rarely the real focus of the story. Bjarni Herjólfsson quickly disappears from the narrative with some criticism over his lack of curiosity about the new land he has discovered but failed to explore. Even the subsequent shift of attention to the family of Eirík the Red is deceptive, since in the middle of this family’s prominent leadership of expeditions to Vínland, a “stealth protagonist” is slipped into the narrative with the figure of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir. She is a poor girl of humble background who is rescued with others from a shipwreck by Leif Eiríksson, whereby he earns the epithet Leif the Lucky. She marries Leif’s younger brother Thorstein, who leads a completely fruitless expedition to the new shores, never finding them even after months at sea. Thorstein dies before the couple has children back in Greenland. Gudrid then remarries a more competent newcomer, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and subsequently emerges as the true protagonist of the saga – its ultimate heroine – mother of the first European born in the New World and a figure with whom the saga ends, but only after her superior character has been revealed through several trying episodes, especially by contrast with the story of the treacherous Freydís Eiríksdóttir. Gudrid returns to Iceland with Karlsefni, becoming the grandmother and great-grandmother of the Icelandic bishops mentioned in the closing lines of the saga, the learned clerics who were presumably responsible for this account of their ancestress’s career. The main protagonist of an Icelandic saga is thus not always the figure with whom it begins nor even necessarily the one after whom it is named, but rather the character with whom it concludes. Often this protagonist is introduced somewhere rather far into the development of the narrative, but again memorialized by the end of his or her career by some piquing utterance or distinctive behavior. In Gudrid’s case, she

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patiently endures the scorn of her husband’s mother because of her low parentage, but eventually wins the woman over by demonstrating the same quiet fortitude and discretion she had already exhibited in much more challenging circumstances in frontier Greenland and Vínland.

3.4 Gendered Heroism  Gudrid’s superior character is not only confirmed by her concluding behavior, it provides an early example of another common theme in Icelandic narratives, that courage and fortitude in extremis are not virtues restricted to male characters or even to active combatants. Although women are rarely depicted as physical fighters in the sagas, they quite often evince a remarkable degree of independence, agency, and resolve, either for better or worse. The deplorable Freydís and admirable Gudrid are shown to have comparable intelligence and force of character. And though women in the sagas usually only marry with the approval of their fathers or other male kinsmen, a woman’s willing consent to a marriage is shown to be crucial to its success. Strength of character is the most important resource of a woman’s “dowry” in Icelandic sagas, expressed by many such figures like Gudrún Ósvífsdóttir in Laxdæla saga (Saga of the People of Laxriverdale) or the outlaw Gísli’s wife Aud in Gísla saga Súrssonar (Saga of Gísli Súrsson), to be discussed below. 

3.5 Famous Last Words  The serial and interlaced biographies of the Icelandic family sagas, even those of minor characters in shorter episodes included primarily for the purpose of foiling more important figures, usually end with a striking but in-character conclusion, one marked by an ironic, wry, or suggestive comment on the part of the protagonist or other characters present in the closing scenes. These remarks often evince a calm fortitude or cavalier insouciance in the face of death. In Grænlendinga, for instance, Thorvald Eiríksson asks his men if they have been wounded after an attack by Skrælings (Native Americans). They say they are unharmed, at which report Thorvald pulls an arrow from his armpit, remarking: “Carry me out onto that headland where I thought it most desirable to settle. The truth may have escaped me when I said I’d be staying there for a while.” A century later, Thorvald’s story is retold as part of Eiríks saga Rauða (Saga of Eirík the Red). This time he is not shot by a Native American, but by a fantastic hopping uniped, introduced as a learned borrowing from Isidore of Seville’s description of a one-legged race in Africa. The Norse explorer pulls the arrow from his groin rather than his armpit,

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observing: “There’s fat around my entrails! This is a good land of great plenty we have found here – though I doubt we’ll get to enjoy it much.” Thorvald is shown to have many imperfections as an expedition leader, but his errors of judgment and other inadequacies are redeemed in the end for the two saga-writers by his brave death and clever wisecrack, differently imagined in the successive versions of his biography. This “sense of an ending” would have a long life in Icelandic literature, the conclusion to a narrative that is at once unexpected  – eventful  – but deeply satisfying nonetheless. 

4 Competing Plots of History  4.1 Mythic Norse Plots  As noted above, the Íslendingasögur developed in a creative tension between two competing patterns of historical process that were encrypted to varying degrees within the deep structure of saga plots. The first is characteristic of traditional narratives inherited from the late pagan past, encapsulated at a mythic level in eddic poetry, especially Völuspá (The Witch’s Prophecy) and Hávamál (Sayings of the High One). Völuspá offers a vision of cosmic history from the creation of the world to the end of time when the gods will fall against the resurgent monsters of chaos. In this unusually dark theory of history, even the divinities to whom we look for help in this world have much bigger problems of their own, including dire mutilations and other handicaps: Odin is missing an eye, Tyr his right hand; nothing the wise and benevolent Baldr decides ever comes to pass; and even the mighty Thor is not the sharpest tool in the shed  – physically strong but cognitively challenged. In addition, these damaged gods of dubious powers are the only deities in world religion (known to this author) who are also terminally mortal. They will one day die and stay dead. We humans can emulate their courage and resolve, but not rely upon their help. They are not our benefactors. We win their favor by the way we face failure on the field of battle, some of us earning a place by their side for the final apocalypse. Ordinary people – those who die of illness or old age or foul play like Baldr – simply go down to Hel, not a place but a person, a corpse-queen of the underworld who welcomes her guests to an empty banquet. The honor that the Norse gods enjoy from their worshippers is thus only tentative and provisional: they are esteemed not for protecting us from the dangers and difficulties that beset us in our lives, but for showing us the way to confront them, that is, by persevering as long as we can to postpone the inevitable. Indeed, even the protection the gods offer their human followers on that last day will be problematic: it will be the

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fearsome shock of Thor’s hammer-blow against the Midgard serpent that blasts all human life from earth, not the monster itself. And the god will step only nine paces away from his foe before succumbing to its venom, pyrrhic “victor” of the final defeat. 

4.2 The Fornaldarsögur This conclusion to the plot of history would continue into the fourteenth-century fornaldarsögur (sagas of ancient times) where Icelandic writers were inspired to reconstruct in prose the implied backstory of many of the eddic poems, including legendary narratives like Völsunga saga (Saga of the Völsungs) and Hrólfs saga Kraka (Saga of Hrólf Kraki), each set before the Viking age in continental Germanic or Danish prehistory. These recovered tales show the same incessant pattern of heroic demise against overwhelming odds or insidious treachery, retelling the story of Sigurd the Völsung, Gunnar in the snake-pit, or the last stand of Hrólf Kraki, king of Denmark, against his witch-sister Skuld and an army of undead. Virtually all native genres of Icelandic narrative evince this traditional plot of history, a process of beleaguered and ultimately disastrous eventuality, which is repeated on both larger and smaller scales throughout the sagas. It is the way the world works through time in early Icelandic tradition, the outcome of all earthly events which may be delayed by preemptive vigilance but must also finally be faced with the stoic courage and grim dignity that will at least secure the respect of posterity. This archaic Norse narrative sequence and its concomitant value system is perhaps most neatly epitomized in a verse from Hávamál: Cattle die; loved ones die;  oneself dies the same; I know one thing that never dies:  men’s judgment of the dead. (stanza 77) 

In this tradition the cup of life is not half-full nor even half-empty: it will soon be empty for everyone – except in the memory of others.

4.3 Narrative Syncretism  Carol Clover has described more precisely the new “syncretic form” produced by the interaction between competing plots of history (1985, 294). The Icelandic family sagas were woven from shorter oral tales or þættir (strands) in the process of being written down into the constituent episodes of longer narratives that themselves

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had been only “immanent” or potential in native oral tradition, that is, generally understood in the main trajectories of their plots by experts in that tradition, but rarely (if ever) performed in their entirety (Foley 1991). The amplification of these episodic oral narratives in writing produced a new “long prose” form and consequently a new literary tradition, where competition between the two systems of narrative organization could be played out in a more deliberate and disciplined form. Such competition, we may imagine, had already occurred to a large extent in the multifarious oral performances of vernacular verse and prose. After all, oral storytellers had been Christians for over two centuries, and some very successful performers were themselves priests of the Church, like Ingimund in Sturlunga saga (Saga of the Sturlungs; Bauman 1986, 135). These performers of oral narratives, whether cleric or layman, cultivated the distinctive ethos of terminal valor already illustrated, one that may also have accommodated some sharp and not perhaps always entirely consistent penetrations of Christian ethics and ideals (Andersson 1970). But the process of assimilation between secular and clerical values – the not unfriendly competition between two contrary models of narrative development – was accelerated and finally resolved as clerical writers became more closely involved in the literal production of saga texts.  In fact, it is in the writing of the Íslendingasögur that medieval Icelandic culture achieved its most fully integrated, comprehensive, and definitive self-awareness. Saga plots became an ideological workshop, the primary site in the imaginative life of the country where native writers could reflect on human experience in general and their own national history in particular. In doing so, they found a way both to celebrate and critique the culture of their ancestors, as well as the effectiveness of the quasi-representative system of government those founders had put in place at the Althing in the early tenth century. The Icelandic Commonwealth functioned with varying degrees of success for over three centuries before finally succumbing in 1262–1264 to the Norwegian Crown under King Hákon the Old (1204–1263). After this pivotal event, the subsequent Icelandic family sagas of the later thirteenth century became as much about “pre-monarchical” as “pre-Christian” times. These later sagas project the more recent political dysfunctions of the Commonwealth upon the preor early Christian period of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. By the end of the thirteenth century, the saga form had effectively transformed into a technique of political and religious analysis. It had grown in depth, intensity, and ambition to become a most searching form of historical revisionism, a fictional arena in which saga-writers could freshly assess the quality of their ancient form of government, as well as their traditional patterns of social interaction and philosophy of life. The sagas thus emerge as ground zero in the struggle between rival plots of history, the very place where medieval Icelandic authors could negotiate what constituted a significant and edifying account of their past. Republican Iceland had finally been

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absorbed into a European community ruled by kings and their ministers, as well as by the spiritual authority of a Catholic Church governed from Rome. Iceland’s native plots had become increasingly acculturated to the dominant paradigms of Latin Christian culture (Clunies Ross 2010, 125–126). It was in the deep structure of these plots where that integration was most intimately and profoundly secured. 

4.4 New Christian genres  Many genres of medieval European literature were introduced to Icelandic culture during this period, most of which had developed under the dominance of the most prestigious texts of clerical education and religion – the Bible and its dependent vitae sanctorum (Wolf 2013). These popular imported genres included translations of the riddarasögur (knights’ sagas) or Arthurian romances; others were composed in imitation of or adaptation to foreign genres, like the konungasögur (sagas of the [Norwegian] kings) or biskupasögur (bishops’ sagas) on the early Christian leaders of the island. A new native genre featured virginal “shield-maidens” or “maiden-kings” who sail ships like Vikings, lead men into battle, and keep court as a European monarch would. In some cases, this young woman warrior actually takes on a male name and masculine persona, but most maiden-kings retain their unsullied sexual purity and feminine identity, even while defending their realms by feats of martial prowess  – at least until they marry and submit to husbands in a domestic “happy ending” to their careers. Most of these imported or newly developed genres have some sort of happy ending after severe trials, so that they are clearly influenced by the narrative trajectory of the Bible with its providential arc of history – its repeated pattern of fall and redemption, preparation and fulfillment, the progressive dispensation of grace in human affairs, all leading ultimately toward beatitude for those who persevere faithfully, for whom all things work together for good. The protagonists of this narrative register are the patriarchs, prophets, martyrs, and other saints whose lives anticipate or recall that of Christ in the Gospels, who are understood to approximate an imitatio Christi in their own narrative careers.

5 Progressive Reconfigurations of Heroic Demise in Three Selected Sagas  The most potent, but subtle and ramifying issue at the heart of the greatest of the Icelandic family sagas, Brennu-Njáls saga (Saga of Burning Njál), is that between

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these two opposed formulations of what constitutes a compelling account of the past. For all the accommodation between these rival plots of history prior to the composition of Njáls saga  – whether oral or literary, in verse or prose  – there remained in this work one last obstacle to full assimilation: the recalcitrant deep structure of traditional Icelandic plots, especially their anticipation not of a “happy ending,” but of a heroic demise recalling Ragnarök.  As we have seen, archaic Norse narratives were marked by a pattern of temporary success but ultimate failure. Many saga characters act out this traditional plot of history. These figures exemplify unflinching fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds. The saga-writers often go so far as to invest their heroes’ deaths with an aura of preternatural force or heroic apotheosis. Gísli, for instance, is said to have “given up his life with so many serious wounds that there seemed to be something strange about it. They have said that he never gave up, and they could not see that his last blow was weaker than his first.” After his solitary last stand against forty opponents, Gunnar is seen by moonlight inside his grave mound, exultantly chanting a verse in his own honor: his death has made him, once again, “the most outstanding man in the land.” Such mystifications are the secular reflex of a sacred tradition of heroic demise.

5.1 Laxdæla saga As suggested above, we may assume that the oral feud stories of founding families had come to reflect in some cases the considerable influence of Christian patterning before they were construed during the process of literary elaboration into the longer sagas they had only implied or adumbrated. The impressive, if rather peremptory, conversion narrative of Gudrún Ósvífsdóttir with which Laxdæla saga concludes anticipates a deeper and more complex integration of Christian paradigms in the plotting of the later Njáls saga, discussed in the next section. Nonetheless, the author of Njála seems to have learned some of his narrative strategy from this earlier saga’s depiction of Gudrún’s four marriages, each different, but all ending in the divorce or death of her husband in ugly or regrettable circumstances. The technique of sequenced structural redundancy in these marriages, anticipated by Gudrún’s four dreams as a young woman and Gest Oddleifsson’s foreboding interpretations of them, prepares us for the final overturning of the established pattern in her concluding “marriage” to God as Iceland’s first nun and anchoress, founder of the most distinguished monastery on the island. God, one might say, turns out to be the only “man” good enough for Gudrún, the only one to whom her marriage can be termed an unmitigated success. From a repeated pattern of marital difficulties emerges the redemptive plot of history implicit in the conclud-

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ing episode of Laxdæla, where a penitent Gudrún cryptically admits to her son that she had been worst to the man she loved the most. Famous last words again, as in the old days, but her saga’s new pattern of sequenced, but finally overturned, redundancy was adopted by the author of Njáls saga in the incremental sequencing and final overturning of his own plots.  The author of Laxdæla saga introduced one other important narrative technique to the developing saga tradition. This is how to stage a martyr’s death for a secular hero, one not actively fierce and belligerent, like that of Thor at Ragnarök, but passive and principled, like that of Christ or one of the martyrs who imitate him. Kjartan Óláfsson, after manfully defending himself against the Ósvífssons, finally provokes his first cousin and foster-brother Bolli to draw his sword. Kjartan then throws down his own weapon, saying: “You are now ready to do something disgraceful, kinsman, but I would much rather take my death at your hands, kinsman, than give it to you at mine.” The saga-writer suggests some very uncharitable motives on the part of Kjartan here, despite his recent conversion to Christianity and demonstrative “dry-fasting” for months on end. It seems his only way of besting Bolli and regaining the superiority he had once enjoyed in Iceland before their going abroad is to entice his cousin into shaming himself irrevocably by killing such a close relative. Kjartan also knows that he will never have Bolli’s wife Gudrún now, the most desirable woman in Iceland, and that without this “treasure” he will always be considered the lesser man. But whatever jealous, passive-aggressive, or even self-destructive motives we may see on the part of Kjartan in this scene, he does in fact impress by his willingness to sacrifice his own life rather than kill his former friend, as he surely could.

5.2 Njáls saga This staging of a passive “martyrdom,” if such it can be called, is intensified in Njáls saga with the death of Höskuld Hvítanessgodi, who echoes Kjartan in saying that he would much rather suffer death at the hands of the Njálssons, his foster-brothers, than do them any harm himself, even though he has actually done very little to assuage their growing resentment so far. Yet Höskuld dies like a good Christian, praying that God will forgive his enemies, foreshadowing the self-sacrifice of his beloved foster-father Njál later in the saga. The sequential, passive deaths of Kjartan, Höskuld, and Njál all demonstrate in a compact event the expression of ultimate heroism in the two competing systems of narrative, each character evincing in turn a stronger preponderance of Christian charity over pagan defiance in accepting his death. The component of conspicuous good will toward enemies rises sharply from Kjartan to Njál.

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The Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5–7, rejects, of course, the lex talionis of the ancient Germanic blood-feud, an institution that clearly comes in Njáls saga to be associated with the negative fatalism of the old world order, a system of reciprocal violence between closely related kin-groups that is shown persistently to overwhelm the best efforts of good people to find an honorable settlement that will satisfy both parties in a conflict (Byock 1982, 1995; Miller 1990). The saga-writer would seem to agree with the anthropologist C. R. Hallpike, who concludes with regard to the feuding hill clans of Papua New Guinea that “the organization of some societies makes a high level of conflict both permanent and inescapable” (1977, vii). Families in societies of such insecure honor exercise minimal constraints upon the external violence of their members, while retaliation for such killings can fall upon any appropriately ranked member of the offending kindred. Hence, a minimum of social control is linked to a maximum potential for renewing and extending hostilities. The patient and kindly Njál is trapped in a system where he can exercise only hortatory constraints upon the sensitivities of his adult sons, but one in which he is nonetheless fully accountable for their actions. Njál’s social identity, whatever his personal feelings, includes the deeds of his sons.  The inexorable propensity toward violence in Njáls saga replicates on a human level the pending catastrophe on a cosmic scale in native Icelandic myth. Like Gudrun’s four troubled marriages in Laxdæla saga, the three episodes of Njáls saga that focus on the characters of Hrút, Gunnar, and Njál each evince, but then further intensify, the traditional plot of history. This sequential intensification of the same pattern of events clarifies a basic principle for the saga reader in that the efforts of better and better men to avoid conflict ironically produce the opposite effect from their intentions. Each case proceeds more slowly than the last, but with greater devastation once the techniques of legal control snap. Like opposing continental plates that yield more violent earthquakes the longer pressure between them builds, the longer friction between families is suppressed under the old system of suit and arbitration at the Althing, the more devastating the violence once those restraints finally fail, as they always will. As Gunnar says to Skarphedin at a horse-fight: “with me things will go more slowly, even if they turn out just the same in the end.” 

5.2.1 “Hrúts saga” (chapters 1–24) Let us consider the career of the first of the three parallel protagonists, Hrút Höskuldsson, “a handsome man, big and strong, a first-class fighter, but mild in manner and extremely intelligent, tough toward his enemies, but totally reliable in matters of importance.” However, Hrút puts his wife Unn in an impossible position

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when he challenges her publicly to declare the reason for her unhappiness in their marriage, even though the dysfunction is his own fault. Stung in his sexual vanity, the normally fair Hrút leaves his wife no remedy short of clandestine divorce before refusing to return her dowry when sued by Unn’s father Mörd for the whole marriage settlement. He challenges the much older man to single combat. Even among well-matched combatants, dueling is considered a deplorable, extra-legal expedient in the sagas – a bullying tactic. The honor Hrút gains in one system of value – his manly honor – must thus be paid for by loss of face in another. Yet in all other situations, especially in the various conjugal disasters of his niece Hallgerd, the author troubles to show Hrút to be a man of superior judgment, restraint, and responsibility. Further violence in “Hrúts saga” is averted when Mörd backs down, but the hero’s bad behavior in this one instance leaves an imbalance in the relationship between the two families that has an ill effect upon the otherwise sympathetic Unn. She neurotically tries to recover her self-esteem by a prodigal lifestyle, forcing the issue of her uncollected dowry upon her other kinsmen. The social imbalance left by Hrút’s uncharacteristic belligerence is then resolved, but with only poetic justice, when the former champion is himself forced to back down from a challenge to single combat. Hrút must now endure his own public humiliation by Unn’s kinsman Gunnar, while the larger saga moves on to more dire conflicts dominated by this new protagonist.

5.2.2 “Gunnars saga” (chapters 19–81) Gunnar’s saga is interwoven with that of Hrút, and his character supplants that of his opponent as the protagonist of the larger saga for its duration. Compared with Hrút, Gunnar of Hlídarendi is not only a superlative warrior and athlete – “it is said that there has never been his equal” – but he is described as “the most courteous of men, staunch in every way, generous with his wealth, soft-spoken, loyal to his friends, but careful in his choice of them.” Yet, like Hrút, Gunnar finally snaps when his masculine vanity comes into conflict with his competing self-image as a jafnaðarmaðr (man of justice). After remarking that “we must not be orðsjúkir [wordsick],” that is, over-sensitive, when he learns of Skamkel’s slander, the normally restrained Gunnar goes on a killing spree after which he is made to reflect bitterly: “What I’d like to know [. . .] is whether I am any the less manly than other men because killing people bothers me more than it does them.” This with the blood of six neighbors dripping from his halberd.  Gunnar has now irreparably damaged his own rather self-righteous self-image. He was, in fact, more reluctant to kill than other men and proud of his

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scruples. But Gunnar restrains himself only so long as he is sure his patience is properly appreciated. He needed the constant reassurance of Njál’s continued compliments during the killing match between their two wives in the earlier part of his saga. Now, when the hero has to endure some disrespect from a different, less honorable family, his deeper vanity bursts forth with the inappropriate violence of prolonged suppression. Even his friend Njál is forced to equivocate about the justifiability of Gunnar’s actions and correctly predicts more trouble to come. In the end, Gunnar’s life-story will conclude the old-fashioned way. The compromised hero will face overwhelming odds with a dry comment on his lips after his estranged wife Hallgerd refuses to give him strands of her long hair to restring his bow. She has chosen her “own way of becoming famous,” he says, “and will not be asked again.” But long before this eventful end to his career, Gunnar had asked his friend Njál, with some apparent reproach, whether he knew what would be the cause of his own death. Njal replies that he does indeed know: “something that everyone would least expect.” 

5.2.3 “Njáls saga” (chapters 20–132)  [Njál] was such an able lawyer that no one was considered his equal; he was wise and prescient, giving sound and friendly advice, and everything he counseled worked out well for those who followed it. He was a kindly and upright man, far-sighted and long-remembering: he solved the problems of anyone who came to him for help. 

If Hrút was normally a fair and restrained man, and Gunnar a courteous and generous one – a real gentleman – then Njál is a truly gentle man and one in whom the saga-writer invests a supreme degree of perspicacity, benevolence, and positive influence upon the affairs of his fellow men. He is endowed with a rare intelligence and subtle initiative in anticipating and diverting the course of events for good. His only “flaw” is the remarkable fact that he could not grow a beard. Yet this wise character’s control of his own affairs falters in the end, just as had Hrút’s and Gunnar’s, and with far more devastating consequences for himself, his family, and the community at large than those endured by the two prior protagonists. Njál is burned alive with his wife and sons and baby grandson for the killing of his beloved foster-son Höskuld, a crime in which Njál had no part, for which he had arranged an unheard-of compensation, and which he had deplored in the most extreme terms possible: I want you all to know that I loved Höskuld more than my own sons, and when I found out that he had been killed, it seemed to me as if the sweetest light of my eyes had been put out, and I would rather have lost all my sons, if he still were still alive.

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The burning of Njál for the slaying of Höskuld is indeed the very last thing anyone would have expected for this gentle hero. How does it happen? What does Njál do wrong? The saga-writer had so convinced us of Njal’s command of events that he forces us to contemplate the cause of his failure. What concealed weakness of character, hidden infirmity of judgment, or fatal confluence of circumstance drags this truly excellent man to an even more tragic downfall than those of his predecessors? To take these questions in reverse order, we might simply remind ourselves that Njál has a family. Despite his good will to all, Njál cannot escape responsibility for the sins of his sons. Their behavior is part of his own social identity. Next, after contriving with great difficulty triple compensation for Höskuld, Njál places a silk gown on the huge pile of silver as a final gesture of good will. Yet this gift has the unexpected effect of irritating the otherwise genial Flosi, who very much wants to settle his claim peacefully. Flosi stupidly and uncharacteristically insults the very man among his opponents who has always shown him the most sympathy and respect. He calls him karl inn skegglausi (Old Beardless), which incites Skarphedin’s outrageous reply that Njál has at least fathered sons upon his wife and that Flosi will indeed need this woman’s garment since he himself is used as a mistress by the Svínafell troll every ninth night. The chieftain’s attitude then hardens into an unrelieved determination not to rest until all these men are dead. This surprising effect of Njal’s silk gown thus seems at first mere perverse misfortune and certainly no moral failing, even a venial one, on the part of the old sage. But it is still an error of judgment, if an absurd and finally inexplicable one. The tension between the two parties has now become so great, the rupture into violence so long delayed by increasingly desperate expedients, that the most trivial act, even one intended to smooth over any remaining hard feelings, precipitates the collapse of relations.  The apparent pointlessness of this disruption over the silk cloak reveals that, whatever Njál intended to achieve by this gift, it illustrates yet again the perversity of old Norse fate, the pattern of negative eventuality that has already characterized the earlier careers of Hrút and Gunnar. Something will always go wrong in an Icelandic saga. Even the most benign and foresightful of characters, like even the wisest of gods and men, cannot bend the traditional arc of history. Nothing Baldr decides ever comes to pass. Yet even so, the question remains for the Christian audience of Njála or that dimension of its narrative sensibility that had reason to expect some moral explanation for the way things work out in the world: has Njál himself done anything wrong, anything culpable, to contribute to this outcome of his story? Is he guilty of any act or attitude that might explain his failure, that we might recognize as equivalent to Hrút’s insecurity or Gunnar’s vanity? We might begin by noting that even the scrupulous Njál, who may as counselor-at-law have plotted deceptions to help his clients but never before told a

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lie himself, does finally prevaricate when he is driven to a choice between his family honor and his Christian pacifism. He prevails upon his sons to leave their position outside Bergthórshvál in which all, including their enemies, agree they cannot be overcome. This is one piece of advice from Njál that does not turn out at all well for those who follow it, prompting what we uncomfortably come to realize must be a fully intended result. Why does he do this? In the end, Njál seems most concerned not for his sons’ lives or even for their honor, but for their souls. Not only will they heap more mortal sins upon themselves if they remain outside to fight; if they survive, they will pursue the vendetta, as Skarphedin promises, until their attackers are all dead. And these are Christian men like themselves, an unhappy irony that even their leader Flosi acknowledges. So Njál’s bad advice, his one fib about the good sense of going inside, is designed to instigate a surreptitiously benign result, that is, his sons’ salvation in a kind of “baptism by fire” before they can do any further damage to their enemies – or to themselves. When the house begins to burn, he reassures its occupants: “Take it all well and don’t cry out, for this is just a passing storm and it will be long before another like it comes. Have faith in the mercy of God: He will not let us burn both in this world and the next.”

5.2.4 “Flosa saga ok Kára” (chapters 95–159)  In the saga of Flosi and Kári that follows the Burning, characters of lesser moral stature than their predecessors manage to overturn the trajectory of events we have come so clearly to expect from the three earlier episodes (Harris 1986, 212). Under the terms of his settlement, Flosi undergoes a pilgrimage to Rome and receives absolution from the hands of the Pope, as later does his opponent Kári. This dispensation of grace into human affairs through God’s vicar on earth reverses the train of events that had overwhelmed even the saintly Njál. On his return from Rome, Kári is shipwrecked in a snowstorm off Svínafell, Flosi’s farm on the south coast of Iceland. Kári seeks shelter with the penitent chieftain, who jumps up to embrace him, invites Kári to stay for the winter, and offers him his niece Hildigunn in marriage, widow of Höskuld Hvítanessgodi, whom Kári himself had helped to kill. The two pilgrimages to Rome result in a mutual forgiveness that has the effect of overturning the traditional plot of history and internalizing  – one might even say, “institutionalizing”  – the redemptive paradigm of Christian sacred history in secular saga narrative. Flosi and Kári are now reconciled in more than merely political terms, and the principle of Christian forgiveness is illustrated in a way that makes possible the saga’s happy ending in the utter end of the feud.

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5.2.5 End of the Íslendingasögur  The political confrontation between proponents of the native and newer views of history is dramatized in chapters 100–105 of Njáls saga, but the more profound struggle between Iceland’s pagan heritage and its adopted Christianity takes place in the deep structure of the larger saga’s plots. The real crisis of Njála occurs not at the Althing of 999, but in the Burning itself, where Njál becomes both a martyr to the new faith he loves and a hero of the old world order whose inevitable violence he abhors, but whose ethos of family loyalty and brave death against odds he is incapable of rejecting. The Burning recapitulates in Christianized, social form the final conflagration of the gods at Ragnarök. The victory of Christianity in the saga occurs at the very moment Njál’s active submission to his enemies transforms defeat, the inevitable conclusion to the old plot of history, into redemption, the defining promise of the new. Christian beatitude transcends, but does not erase, pagan posthumous honor; salvation supplants, but does not undo, “men’s judgment of the dead”; our sympathy for Kári’s loyal vendetta against the Burners is subsumed into our relief at his final reconciliation with their leader. Vengeance for Höskuld has been exacted from the family of his slayers, but Njál’s personal innocence and quiet willingness to lead his sons in death patently renders him a kind of Christological victim, a beardless lamb of God whose example serves to cleanse the sins of his kin, a martyr whose death inspires the admiration of his enemies and, ultimately, in the case of Flosi, their salvation.

5.3 Grettis Saga Njála thus completes the triumph of a biblical plot of history in native narrative culture. The family saga had achieved its “manifest destiny” or logical fulfillment in a more thoroughly integrated Christian Iceland. After Njál’s saga’s success the saga form evolved into different kinds of narrative, becoming less publicly historical and more explicitly psychological or even fantastic, offering quasi-allegorical case studies, where creatures like the phantom Glám in Grettis saga (Saga of Grettir) suggest interior states of the protagonist (Hume 1974, 470; Mitchell 1991, 30). The fires of human hatred that once publicly burned Njál and his family now burn in the eyes of an undead revenant, which reflect the angry eyes of the outlaw Grettir himself glaring back at him when he finds himself alone in the night. Grettir is his own worst enemy. Even his last stand atop the basalt sea-pillar of Drang Island is more pathetic than heroic, his soul’s congenital illness manifested physically through the gangrene eating into his bowels. Yet no man is an island in an Icelandic saga. The supine hero is defended to the death by his younger brother

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Illugi and avenged by another brother out in Constantinople – a double conclusion to Grettir’s life-story, one reflecting the heroic last stand of traditional narrative, the other a spiritual redemption where Thorstein the Galleon marries a Christian woman Spes (Hope) with whom he ends his life in prayer and penitence. A good death defines the good life in Icelandic sagas, a narrative reflex that would never quite die in the national literature of the island. 

6 Halldór Laxness and Modern Icelandic Literature and Film Iceland’s conversion to Christianity on the cusp of the second millennium CE was a political event reimagined in the middle of Njáls saga. There were a few duels, but no persecutions, martyrdoms, or apostasies. In contrast, the Protestant Reformation concluded its violent course in 1550 with the execution of the recusant bishop Jón Helgason and his sons by King Christian III of Denmark who had assumed rule of the country along with that of Norway in 1537. A complete translation of the Bible into Icelandic was soon available, along with much Lutheran literature translated from German and Danish. In the late eighteenth century Jón Thorláksson translated John Milton’s Paradise Lost (2nd ed., 1674), the most comprehensive retelling of Christian sacred history in Icelandic verse. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century that the country began to find its own literary voice again in prose narratives, responding to wider European movements in Romanticism and nationalism. Short stories by Jónas Hallgrímsson were followed by the country’s first novel in 1850 by Jón Thóroddsson, Piltur og Stúlka (Lad and Lass), an evocation of Icelandic rural life. Other Icelandic authors into the twentieth century wrote in either Danish or Icelandic, emulating continental trends in realism, naturalism, surrealism, and other forms of modernism and postmodernism. Indeed, the contemporary writing of this highly literate nation has continued to be responsive to foreign genres and narrative experiments, though most popular fiction takes the form of detective mysteries and romantic dramas and other imitative forms that have multiplied since the country’s final independence from Denmark during the Second World War, along with increasing urbanization and integration into the global community.  At the same time, a fierce sense of national identity and genuine love of the archaic Icelandic language – perhaps the most conservative in Europe – has reasserted itself in the official construction of neologisms from native roots to express new ideas and technologies from abroad. This movement comports with the revival of traditional forms of narrative art as well, including novels by Halldór Laxness (1902–1998), the 1955 Nobel laureate who published his Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent

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People) in two volumes in 1934–1935. The novel is a response to the larger movement of social realism so admired by the Nobel Prize Committee of the day, but also draws its inspiration from medieval prose sagas and oral rímur (ballads), the latter cultivated by country folk well into the twentieth century. The novel recounts the life of a poor shepherd, Guðbjartur Jónsson, beginning with his ancestors who first established a subsistence economy that barely changed for over a thousand years. Its setting is an isolated steading named Winterhouses for the lambing sheds once built there. It is believed to be haunted and has been abandoned and reoccupied endless times over the centuries:  How often has the bigging Albogastathir on the Moor been destroyed by spectres? And rebuilt, in spite of spectres? Century after century the lone worker leaves the settlements to tempt fortune on this knoll between the lake and the cleft in the mountain, determined to challenge the evil powers that hold his land in thrall and thirst for his blood and the marrow in his bones. Generation after generation the crofter raises his chant, contemptuous of the powers that lay claim to his limbs and seek to rule his fate to his dying day. The history of the centuries in this valley is the history of an independent man who grapples barehanded with a spectre which bears a new and ever a newer name. Sometimes the spectre is some half-divine fiend who lays a curse on his land. Sometimes it breaks his bones in the guise of a norn. Sometimes it destroys his croft in the form of a monster. And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same spectre assailing the same man century after century.

Bjartur is only the last crofter to confront this elemental force and step into this repeated plot of history, changing his farm’s name to Summerhouses after marrying a servant of his old master already pregnant by the bailiff’s son. She dies in childbirth while Bjartur is out hunting sheep in a storm, but his dog keeps the baby girl alive. The shepherd names the child Ásta Sóllilja (Beloved Sun Lily) and raises her as his own daughter. She grows into an ill-favored young woman who both loves and fears her hard-bitten step-father and eventually runs away from him. Bjartur subsequently loses three natural sons in a second marriage, but the dying Ásta and her step-father are finally reunited in the closing scene of the novel. He lifts the ill, exhausted woman in his arms as she seeks with her lips the old soft spot beneath his beard. He says:  Keep a good hold round my neck, my flower. “Yes,” she whispered. “Always – as long as I live. Your one flower. The flower of your life. And I shan’t die yet awhile; no, not for a long while yet.”

This is the way Icelandic stories end  – must end, it seems: their very imperfect characters reaffirming life and love and loyalty in the face of death. The nature of their relationships is each time reimagined to reflect the particular preoccupations of succeeding generations, but the stories always seem to end, in some eventful way or another, the same. 

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This same sense of an ending is apparent in the first feature-length film version of an Icelandic saga, Útlaginn (The Outlaw), released in 1981 by Ágúst Guðmundsson, a retelling of Gísla saga, mentioned above. It follows the original plot fairly closely through the hero’s last stand against fourteen attackers atop a steep rock cliff, Einhamarr (Lone Hammerhead), which transpires in an isolated fjord where he is hiding out with his wife and foster-daughter. The women fight bravely, too, until they are overcome and bound, whereupon Gísli leaps to his death against his attackers, showing no fear or even diminution of his powers despite grievous wounds. Hrafn Gunnlaugsson quickly challenged the insular success of Útlaginn with an original script composed for Hrafninn Flygur (The Raven Flies, 1984), billed as the “most authentic Viking film ever,” though one actually modeled more closely on Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti Westerns,” especially the first two, Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). The hero Gestur (Stranger) manages single-handedly to avenge his pious Christian father who was murdered twenty years earlier in Ireland by renegade Norwegian Vikings, worshippers of Odin, who then took refuge on the south coast of Iceland. Gestur also rescues his sister who had been abducted by their leader as a teenage girl, killing her captor-husband, father of her young son. The hero survives the bloody “shoot-out” at the end, but his sister’s love for him dies as well. She refuses to return with Gestur to Ireland, while his nephew, played by the same boy actor as the hero himself at the same age, discovers his assassin’s weapons in the final scene, intimating a revival of the raven-god’s revenge. Hrafninn Flygur enjoyed great success at home and abroad, followed by the sequels Í skugga hrafnsins (In the Shadow of the Raven, 1988) and Hvíti víkingurinn (The White Viking), serialized as a mini-series in 1991, then edited in a “director’s cut” as Embla (2007). This film saga, too, culminates in a violent climax, here the burning of a Norwegian stave-church from which the devoted pagan heroine Embla, named after the first human woman of Norse mythology, plans to escape with her lover to an independent Iceland, not realizing that the country has already succumbed to the new faith under pressure from her enemy King Olaf Tryggvason, the first Christian king of Norway.

7 Conclusion  The most successful Icelandic narratives all end with a memorable, poignant, or eventful demise, whether eddic myths, heroic legends, family sagas, or other more heavily Christianized genres of the Middle Ages, or novels and films of the modern period. Some popular imitative genres like crime novels and situational romances are less nationally distinctive in the organization of their plots, but even so, for

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over a millennium, Icelandic writers have used the trajectory of their plots as a lens through which to contemplate the course of their lives on a remote glacial island in the North Atlantic. They have used these plots to help shape and dignify their collective experience of life, to air and contest competing visions of their national history during the centuries since the original settlement of the country. In each generation, plots and the characters who inhabit them serve their authors to reassess and often to reaffirm their sense of the way the world works through time, their diachronic destiny. They both valorize and deplore their traditional lifestyle and its travails, an endlessly evolving reassessment of their country’s challenges, its character and distant place in the world. This tiny population of readers and writers – and now film-makers – has produced one of the most distinctive contributions to world literature of any nation its size.

References Andersson, Theodore M. 1970. “The Displacement of the Heroic Ideal in the Family Sagas.” Speculum 45:575–593. Aristotle. 1996. Poetics. Translated by M. Heath. London: Penguin. Bauman, Richard. 1986. “Performance and Honor in Thirteenth-Century Iceland.” Journal of American Folklore 99:131–150. Byock, Jesse L. 1982. Feud in the Icelandic Saga. Berkeley: University of California Press. Byock, Jesse L. 1995. “Choices of Honor: Telling Saga Feud, Thattr, and the Fundamental Oral Progression.” Oral Tradition 10:166–180. Clover, Carol J. 1985. “Icelandic Family Sagas (Íslendingasögur).” In Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide, edited by Carol J. Clover and John Lindow, 239–315. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga. Cambridge University Press. Foley, John Miles. 1991. Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Halldór Laxness. (1934–1935) 1991. Sjálfstætt Fólk. Reykjavik: Vaka Helgafell. Translated into English by J. A. Thompson. New York: Random House, 1946. Hallpike, C. R. 1977. Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harris, Joseph. 1986. “Saga as Historical Novel.” In Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature: New Approaches to Textual Analysis and Literary Criticism, edited by John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, and Gerd Wolfgang Weber, 187–219. Odense: Odense University Press. Hühn, Peter. 2014. “Event and Eventfulness.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. 2nd ed. Vol. 1, 159–178. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Hume, Kathryn. 1973. “Beginnings and Endings in the Icelandic Family Sagas.” Modern Language Review 68:593–606. Hume, Kathryn. 1974. “The Thematic Design of Grettis saga.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73:469–486.

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Kukkonen, Karin. 2014. “Plot.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. 2nd ed. Vol. 1, 706–719. Berlin: De Gruyter. 706–719. Lönnroth, Lars. 1991. “Sponsors, Writers, and Readers of Early Norse Literature.” In Social Approaches to Viking Studies, edited by Ross Samson, 3–10. Glasgow: Cruithne Press. Miller, William Ian. 1990. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, Stephen A. 1991. Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sahlins, Marshal. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmid, Wolf. 2005. Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolf, Kirsten. 2013. The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Harald Haferland

Motivation in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature 1 Definition Motivation is based on a connection between two elements (a, b) in a story, where b follows a (a → b). If the relationship (→) seems purposefully made, one can speak of motivation, but if it is only temporal, it has nothing to do with motivation. Motivation comes into play when the relation is causal (a causes b), final (a serves to reach b), schema- or plot-bound (in a schema, b must come after a; in a plot, b is fixed to follow a), or when it is a relation of coherence and/or composition (b fits a or is arranged as correlate of a). Compositional (or artistic) motivation means the arrangement of parts of a story and usually includes causal and final motivations. Typically, stories contain whole chains or networks of such kinds of connections. A connection is possible on the level of content (histoire) as well as on that of narration (discours). On the content level, “ad[esignated]” and “bd[esignated]” refer to designated actions, events, perceptions, emotions, etc. (indexed as ad, bd, etc.); on the level of narration, “an[arrated]” and “bn[arrated]” stand for narrative steps constituted by phrases, several sentences, or entire narrative parts (indexed as an, bn, etc.) that narrate the designated elements. In a narration, therefore, an stands for the narration of ad, bn for the narration of bd, and so on.

2 Oral Storytelling and Retelling of Pre-Existing Stories: Motivation Bound to the Plot or to Schemata Medieval narrative texts differ from modern texts on one crucial point: sole poets/ narrators do not invent entire plots (“plot” referring to the construction of a story). Rather, poets or narrators retell pre-existing stories. In oral traditions, the content of the story may change considerably in the process of retelling it, but this can also occur if the pre-existing story is written down, typically in a tongue foreign to the new poet. In other words, the resulting product of the retelling can vary significantly from the original (i.e., written stories are not translated but reworked; see Worstbrock 2004a). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-019

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When poets of the medieval period use the classical rhetorical device of inventio, they do not create a plot in the modern sense. Inventio refers foremostly to parts of a speech that pertain to already understood/known facts (Kienpointner 1998). However, medieval storytelling is free and inventive in finding and executing probable narrative steps (for inventio from a rhetoric-based perspective, see Johannes von Garlandius, Parisiana Poetria, chap. 1). The poet either creates or finds what will make his narration believable (verisimilis; cf. Hübner 2014, 432–440, 452–454. In the history of narration, the original creation of entire plots in a poetic style gained importance in the eighteenth century, as imagination and inventive genius came to be understood as prerequisites for authorship (Schulte-Sasse 2001; Ortland 2001). This lack of entirely invented plots in the medieval period has considerable consequences for motivation: an immanent motivation is always already present in the plot, and a poet is given only limited leeway to take the motivation into his own hands again. A poet who retells a given story cannot, consequently, create all of the characters’ actions. For modern readers, this typically creates the impression that the depiction of characters is relatively static, as these depictions are dependent upon the plot (plot > characters’ actions). This relationship is reversed in modern narration: one gets the impression that the characters carry the plot or the plot stems from them (characters’ actions > plot). A plot can be defined as the “structure of events in a narrated or dramatic text” (Martínez 2003, 92). One can differentiate two types of plots under this definition: episodic and integrated plots, both of which came into being early on. Epic stories – beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad, among many others  – most often contain episodic plots; narratives derived from dramatic texts, including the ancient Greek novel, which shares some similarities with ancient Greek comedy, most often contain integrated plots. The differentiation of these two types of plots already existed in Antiquity, as evidenced in Aristotle’s Poetics, where the episodic plot is seen as inferior (Poetics, chapters 9, 17 and 23). It should be noted, however, that Aristotle wrote predominantly in regard to theatrical drama and not other types of texts. There are other sources for the origination of the integrated plot aside from the drama; narrative folklore has also influenced literature throughout time. Integrated plots build a single sequence of actions/events (from ad to zd) in the form of motivated narrative steps (from an to zn; cf. Propp’s [1928] 1972 functions). Episodic narrations need a superordinate nexus: in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the search for the magical plant that grants eternal life; in the Iliad, Achilles’s resentment that leads him to shirking from taking part in the Battle of Troy until it is nearly over. A nexus connects an open number of sequences whose motivation is all-encompassing (the search in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story slowing down in the Iliad) or limited to only certain episodes.

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For the two medieval texts which, in the following chapters, serve the purpose of demonstrating the particularities of motivation, integrated and episodic parts cannot be distinguished neatly: the “epically” narrated Nibelungenlied (which came about in three main versions before and around 1200) possesses strongly integrated parts; the highly literary Tristan (ca. 1210) by Gottfried von Straßburg, which was derived from narrative folklore that spread across Europe and then became literary poetry, possesses many episodically arranged parts. In both cases, one can consider the plots as mixed, and this is true for many examples from the entire history of stories and storytelling.

3 The Case of the Nibelungenlied In medieval heroic poetry, poets use narrative schemata that provide plot structures and ensure a strong dominance of the plot (even when it is expanded episodically). These schemata had already developed in old German song poetry and survived for centuries by means of their continued usage. Examples include treacherous invitation, in which the inviting party overpowers or will overpower the invited party; expulsion, in which one party contests another party’s claim to the throne in order get rid of them; revenge for injuring a person’s sovereignty or for doing some unjust deed; political intrigue which is to rob a ruler of his rights or of his life; courtship in which a ruler attempts to attract an adequate bride from a far-off kingdom but cannot acquire her without complications. These schemata, among others, always define roles (hosts and guests, expellers and expelled, etc.) that partake in the plot, and these roles are further differentiated through the addition of more parties. Some of the schemata contain basic acts with which the plot can begin. They are initial and not motivated. In this sense, an attempted courtship does not require a pre-existing initiator, rather only a clear desire for a bride. Schemata in heroic poetry always focus on battle, e.g., in an attempted courtship where the bride’s father rejects the potential suitor. Battles and fights are always designed schematically: as one-on-one fights, a series of fights between two individuals, group fights, mass slaughters, and so on. The motivation for the characters’ actions is bound to its respective schema. In the course of the retelling of the stories of heroic tradition, plot motivation can remain even if the content changes. A comparison of Atlakviða (first recorded in Old Norse in 1230, but certainly existing much earlier in other versions on the Continent from the sixth/seventh centuries, which told the [partial] downfall of the Burgundians) and the Nibelungenlied can demonstrate this. A historical substrate remains preserved, even if names and (to an extent) outlines of the historical event

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are changed. But the roles which are bound to the schemata are assigned to different characters. In Atlakviða, the king of the Huns, Atli (= Attila, d. 453), invites the king of the Burgundians, Gunnar (= Gundahar, d. 436) to visit him. Atli is married to Gunnar’s sister, Gudrun. The schema of the treacherous invitation is implemented here without any historical evidence. Although Gunnar recognizes that Atli only desires to possess the hoard of Niflungen (Nilflungenhort), he decides to ride only with his brother, Högni, to Atli with no other protection. Gudrun laments Gunnar’s imminent death upon arrival; however, he is not fazed by this, and demonstrates his contempt for Atli through his ostentatious indifference toward his own death. As Atli arrests both Gunnar and Högni in order to find out the hoard’s hiding place, Gunnar provokes the killing of his brother, Högni, and, as the sole person who knows the location of the hoard, refuses to give up the information; therefore, Atli puts Gunnar to death in a snake pit, which he faces while playing the harp. Following the schema of the treacherous invitation, the revenge schema brings Atlakviða to an end in which Gunnar’s sister, Gudrun, decides that she will avenge her brothers: she gives the drunken Atli the two hearts of his sons as a meal, bribes his bodyguards, stabs him to death, and sets fire to his hall. The Burgundians’ downfall seems to be extremely reduced – reduced to the deaths of Gunnar and Högni – and the story connects Atli’s death with the downfall of the Burgundians, although this is contrary to what historically occurred to Attila. In the second part of the Nibelungenlied, one recognizes the contours of the plot determined by the treacherous invitation and the act of revenge. However, these contours are reassigned when one considers the characters: Kriemhild (= Gudrun from Atlakviða), who is married to Etzel (= Atli), invites the Burgundians  – i.e., the Burgundian kings Gunther (= Gunnar), Gernot, and Giselher, Hagen the vassal (=  Högni, but he is not Gunther’s brother in this story), and their warriors  – in order to take revenge on Hagen for having murdered her first husband, Siegfried. Since the Burgundians manage to hold out, they all die at the end of the story, which means that Kriemhild does not avenge her brothers and kill Etzel; rather, she avenges her husband, who was killed by the Burgundians, by luring them in via an invitation. Etzel survives. The constellation of revenge is turned completely on its head (Heusler [1922] 1965, 24–29). Note also that it is not Etzel who invites the Burgundians, but Kriemhild. This reassignment of the character’s motivations brings about another problem: where the hidden hoard lies is a central question in Atlakviða. This question also remains in the Nibelungenlied but appears to be dysfunctional. At the end of the story, Kriemhild turns to Hagen, who, just like Gunnar in Atlakviða, refuses to reveal the hoard’s location (the roles are exchanged here). Therefore, Kriemhild kills Hagen (and Etzel/Atli does not kill Gunther/Gunnar). Consequently, it is not clear whether Kriemhild kills Hagen to avenge her murdered husband – which she would have to

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do, as that is what the construction of the plot heads toward – or because he does not reveal the hoard’s secret location. This would be Atli’s motivation from Atlakviða that is passed on to Kriemhild (see the disagreement between Heinzle 2014, 130–132, and Müller 1998, 15–25, 147–151, and passim). In view of the thorough changing of roles and the changing of motivations, the Nibelungenlied tells a similar – in that the roles themselves do not change – yet entirely different sequence of events. One could speak of a true recasting of the same schemata, which, when taking into account that heroic poetry suggests that it tells of historical events, appears worthy of note. The recasting proves the independence and power of songs, which could freely stand on their own against spreading legends – if such a thing existed at all – that could only be told by word of mouth.

4 The Case of Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan Whereas motivations in schemata exist as already determined (but not bound to specific characters), motivations in plots that do not have a schema can appear variable in comparison. Therefore, in written medieval literature that contains folk narrative, the retelling of stories involves changes in motivation. A poet is free to diverge from the motivations inherent in the plot, as Schultz (1987a) has shown using different versions of the story Tristan as an example. Schultz differentiates “narrator motivation” from “story motivation” (see also 1987b, 588–594). The story of Tristan contains an already integrated plot. It deals with adulterous love between Tristan and Isolde, the wife of his uncle Marke. Adultery is a firm theme in narrative folklore and literature of the world (Roth 1981). An initial problem with adultery narratives is eliciting sympathy or empathy from the listener/reader: should he laugh at the husband for becoming a cuckold, show solidarity and condemn the adulterous act, or show sympathy for the two lovers? One can recognize that the love potion (Minnetrank) that Tristan and Isolde mistakenly drink is a central motif that exonerates the lovers and directs the reader’s sympathy toward them. Marke has sent Tristan to Ireland in his place as a suitor, and Tristan manages to successfully acquire Isolde’s hand in marriage for Marke. Isolde’s mother gives Isolde a magical potion which is to guarantee the love between Marke and Isolde and secure the marriage. Yet, by mistake, the potion lands in Tristan’s hands, and, having no idea of the ramifications, he drinks it with Isolde. There are early Old French and medieval German versions of this material, but Gottfried’s Tristan is particularly prominent. In Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant (ca. 1170), the drink has the causal psychological effect of a magic potion (on magic potions, see Abraham and Thinnes 2014),

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and it loses its strength after four years (lines 2264–2291, 4724–4733). Within this period of time, it is impossible to avoid the potion’s effects. Although in the last verses, Eilhart emphasizes that Tristrant and Isalde fell in love without intending to do so (“âne iren dang”; lines 9472, 9490), Eilhart does not completely avoid moralizing the involuntary love: the drink causes one to become stupid (line 3909), brings misfortune (line 9489), and has evil effects (line 2349). Thomas of Britanje’s Tristan (ca. 1160, existing only in fragments) also keeps the love potion, taking it from literary retellings of narrative folklore, like Eilhart. Gottfried follows suit, taking the motif of the love potion from Thomas himself: a maidservant discovers wine by chance as Tristan and Isolde travel back to Marke in Cornwall; the two realize they are parched for a drink. Both drink the supposed wine, while Gottfried writes: nein, ez’n was niht mit wîne, doch ez im ime gelîch wære: ez was diu wernde swære, diu endelôse herzenôt, von der si beide lâgen tôt. (But no, it had nothing to do with wine, though it did appear as such: it was but a constant hardship, an endless affliction of the heart, through which they would suffer death; lines 11676–11680)

One strong interpretation would be that this concoction has nothing to do with only the magical effects of a love potion. Instead, a fatal love blossoms between two unwilling individuals. That Gottfried abandons the materiality of the drink and, instead of working with the physiological effect, switches to the mental reality of the blossoming love, allows one to argue that the drink has a more symbolic role. Gottfried, unlike Eilhart, does not mention the drink ever again after it both takes effect (lines 11665–11878) and Isolde’s maidservant Brangäne explains the drink’s true nature. Love’s causal motivation becomes exhausted, and one cannot attribute moralization to the drink. Corresponding to this, Gottfried narrates ambivalently. Gottfried imbues the content with a plot structure through a narrative concept which newly motivates the entire plot, along with the characters’ actions, in the course of adapting the already courtly version of the story. This motivation lies on a superordinate level/plane and makes the narrated events subject to a characteristic system of progression: unpredictable coincidences control the narrated world of Tristan, and these coincidences recur again and again in the course of the action (Haug 1989; Worstbrock 2004b) and also as the drink is imbibed. These coincidences, however, bring a returning pattern of contrasts into the narrated lifeworld and to the characters’ experiences and actions; Gottfried calls them “widerwarte” (lines 9888, 9914, 10262f.) or “conterfeit” (lines 5079, 10263; this word stems from contrafacta, and Gottfried coins it with a new meaning). This pattern exists even

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in the characters’ finest emotions (e.g., lines 10253–10284) and, most certainly, in the grand scheme of the romance and the characters’ destinies. Gottfried combines corresponding contrasts in the prologue with oxymora of sweet bitterness, loving sorrow, yearning distress mixed with love from the heart, and joie de vivre mixed with memento mori (lines 60–63). The recurring coincidences in the course of the plot always reproduce this pattern, which Gottfried understands as a general principle of the order of the world. On the level of narration, this pattern is used as a motivational basis for the entire plot. On the content level, it builds a nexus that stretches over the entire plot: Tristan thus demonstrates a case of two both happy and unhappy lovers. No other text of courtly literature has succeeded in becoming such a comparable intellectually complex adaptation of its source material, which is held together by the structure of motivation explained in this section, despite Tristan also containing many simple motifs from narrative folklore.

5 Causal, Final, and Compositional (or Artistic) Motivation; Motivation in Schema and Plot The Nibelungenlied and Gottfried’s Tristan address different kinds of audiences and represent different traditions of narration. The Literaturexkurs (literary digression) of Tristan outlines what is considered literature (lines 4587–4905). Heroic poetry is decidedly left out. Irrespective of the differences in the narration of schemata and the narration of content, the texts share a few noticeable common points with regard to motivation and narrative types (see section 9). These points are shared across almost all of medieval literature. In order to differentiate types of motivation, a threefold division has been developed: (1) causal, (2) final, and (3) compositional (Martínez 1996a, 20f. and passim; 2000; Martínez and Scheffel 2012, 114–122; Schneider 2021, 250–258 and passim). This division started with Clemens Lugowski ([1932] 1976): as a preparatory psychological motivation (66–71 and passim); as a motivation through a resulting moment, e.g., the end of a narration (71–81 and passim); and as a motivation defined conditionally by the composition of the narration (113–115 and passim). These types of motivation are ever-present in narrated texts and can overlap with one another. However, they also make other differentiations possible. One can categorize causal motivations according to different degrees of causality, from weakly to strongly defined sequences or from necessary to sufficient conditions which are implemented to reach a desired result (Haferland 2016, 17–23; discussion in Dimpel 2018). Mere additive stringing together of sequences can still be understood as compositional motivation, which, in turn, requires further differentiation.

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6 Causal Motivation Causal motivation is defined broadly: causal effects in narrated texts are not relationships of cause and effect in the sense of physical mechanics, although a character can, of course, be killed by a falling object. Rather, they consist of the fact that the characters’ actions and experiences have a comprehensible reason in the sense of folk psychology and can, in turn, produce corresponding effects. This is primarily psychological causality, which affects action and experience equally. It can be more or less explicitly told so that the listener/reader may have to make strong inferences in order to relate an effect to a cause. In the modern novel, both can be in a highly complex relationship, be it that everything that might suggest a causal relationship is suppressed and that the reader must make the story accessible for himself by filling in the gaps, or that it would take innumerable pages to account for an effect fully. This is not the case for medieval narration. Cause and effect are noticeably much more clearly and closely connected to one another. That Gudrun in Atlakviða chooses to take revenge is due to the fact that Atli had killed her brothers; that Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied takes revenge on Hagen and her brothers is due to the fact that Hagen killed Siegfried and that her brothers did not prevent her husband’s killing. It takes many years before Kriemhild is able to enact her revenge and before she is able to invite the Burgundians to her; during these years, she suffers from their misdeeds inflicted on her at her home in Worms (“si gedâht ouch maniger leide, der ir dâ heime geschach”; 1391.4). Not only does the murder of her husband motivate her to action, but also her woe (i.e., her experience). The intrinsic causal motivation within the framework of a heroic epic’s schema is, in this sense, always explicit, even if the process of retelling the story often leads to contradictions or irregularities in the characters’ motivations when old content is not properly brought over into the retold story. These schemata barely allow compositional coincidences when they are connected. In the Nibelungenlied, courtship (Siegfried courts Kriemhild, and later Etzel), rivalry/dispute (Kriemhild and Brünhild have a dispute about whose husband is of superior rank), murderous plots (Hagen initiates the killing of Siegfried and carries it out himself), the treacherous invitation, and (Kriemhild’s) revenge are connected to one another in such a way that no room is left for coincidences. The plot thus appears to be closed off from any additional motivations. Overlapping causal motivations (more specifically, multiple motivations) can result from the connected schemata, and these motivations are not always resolved or clarified – for example, when Kriemhild attempts to find out the location of the hoard at the end of Nibelungelied (see above). So long as the schemata provide lines of motivation, one can speak of motivation by means of the respective schema (schema motivation).

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Since motivations are inherent in plots as well as in schemata, one can also speak of plot motivation. Such motivations are usually obvious. Even in Greek tragedy, plots are constructed as a whole from the beginning to the end. The interlocking of all actions and parts of actions does not have to be achieved by narrative schemata, as in heroic poetry, but can also be achieved by a largely causal structure of interlocking actions and successive states. A motivationally closed plot is also created by the fact that everything foreseeably points toward the end of the plot and that the end appears to be particularly emphasized. Of course, coincidences create causal effects: were a protagonist killed by a falling brick, then a causal cause and effect relationship would exist for his death, as the lethal blow from the brick also has a cause in that it came loose. A similar case of causal effects resulting from coincidences are characters coincidentally encountering one another as a result of independent, yet overlapping plans of the characters. This can have further psychological consequences. Yet, taking the role that coincidences have in the narrated world as well as their role for the construction of plots into account, one should analytically keep narrated coincidences separate from causal motivation (for a contrasting opinion, see Martínez and Scheffel 2012, 114). Honoré de Balzac wrote a memorable one-liner regarding the construction of plots in modern literature: “Chance is the world’s greatest novelist; if one wishes to be productive, one need only study it” (Le hasard est le plus grand romancier du monde; pour être fécond, il n’y a qu’à l’étudier; Balzac [1842] 1976, 12) Chance occurs in unmotivated non-causal events in the narrated world (Köhler 1973, 58–62 and passim), even when the series of events leading to and away from chance events are causal in and of themselves, and even when an author introduces chance events in a calculated manner. Principally, coincidences can be analyzed as cases of non-motivation, but one can better understand them as component parts of the plot’s construction. An author can deploy these coincidences in such a way that they serve either a final or compositional motivation. They do not disappear, even if an écriture automatique or aléatoire were to be used as a compositional principle. In Tristan, chance serves as means for plot construction: Tristan arrives at his uncle Marke’s court in Cornwall by way of being robbed by seafaring merchants in his homeland. This is only the beginning of a series of coincidences so striking and meaningful that they indicate the protagonists’ fate (see section 10).

7 Final Motivation Final motivation must be distinguished from finality. Finality, as a term used for the construction of narrations, is the case when a story’s end appears to be empha-

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sized, foreseeable, and pre-programmed. Narrative conventions make it possible for the reader to foresee the conclusion of the story before he has actually reached it. Perhaps the most widespread of these is the “happy ending.” Schema-bound narration leans toward finality, as in premodern and many modern genres. Medieval stories are narrated in such a way that it is possible for the reader to predict the end. Conversely, modern narratives play with giving the reader the impression that the story has an open future. Modern authors undermine the possibility of predicting the end of a text by distraction and the use of red herrings. They abruptly insert unforeseen circumstances or use a plot-twist in order to surprise the reader. Attempts to abandon or avoid finality grew as storytelling developed as an art throughout history. With schemata and plots that stem from older material, the “pre-history” (i.e., the material’s repeated telling and spreading) prepares the reader for the end: all the Burgundians will die in the Nibelungenlied. A medieval reader would know this, for heroic poetry is also a historical tradition. But at the same time, plot events of chance can lead to a foreseeable end, as in Tristan. Both texts make it no secret that they will end this way. The Nibelungenlied foreshadows the end countless times. The first example of foreshadowing is in the second (in version B, the first) strophe, and in Tristan the prologue closes with a biblical metaphor about the recording of a story – in this case, of the two lovers’ deaths, likened to a meal (the story is likened to bread or a type of spiritual food for the listener/reader; lines 233–238). The end is given away by a metaphor telling the reader how to interpret the story. Finality and final motivation should be differentiated. Finality is a characteristic of plots, while final motivation describes the connection of narrative steps. One can recognize this differentiation in that finality can exist in completely causally motivated plots. The schemata in the Nibelungenlied establish causally motivated sequences that are thoroughly final with regard to the entire plot. If many causal sequences of events or (as in Tristan) coincidences in a story lead toward an end that is determined by a schema or plot, then one can say that the narrator/poet has established the sequences by final motivation. Thus, the narrative sequences have a double, i.e., causal and final, motivation. Final motivation is realized when a narrator/poet allows ad (e.g., the murder of Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied) to occur with the narrative step an in order to reach bd (Kriemhild’s revenge). The motivations overlap here: the causally motivated sequence from ad to bd and so on to zd also contains an overarching final motivation (the downfall of the Burgundians, zd) and is consequently – the more it is played out and especially when ad and bd occur far apart in the story – also compositionally (artistically) motivated because the narrator/poet can insert a targeted final motivation (see Ajouri 2007, 38–42, in regard to overlapping). This causes causally motivated plots and, if applicable, chance events to build chains through which

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finality comes about. In Tristan, causality is often suspended, and often chance is partially infused with finality. The levels overlap, and chance events create a means for combining causal and final motivation. In the same way that coincidence/chance should be separated from causal motivation, the motivations that are controlled by a higher power on the content level should be analytically separated from final motivation (for a contrasting opinion, see Martínez 1996a; Martínez and Scheffel 2012, 115). A motivation controlled by godly Providence or other higher power(s) that operate(s) in the narrated world allows one to recognize a final style, but this style does not necessarily create a final plot nor a final nexus; that always remains the task of the creator or poet. However, the effects of a higher power and a final plot construction can complement/complete each other (see section 10). Fundamentally, one must assume that there is an overlapping of levels. The listener/reader can foresee what occurs on the content level, provided that he is accustomed to narrative conventions whose regularities he would be able to recognize. Even if the narration contains only causal motivations, one can know how the story is to end. Whereas causal motivation only exists in the characters’ world (= content level), compositional (artistic) motivation can only exist on the level of narration. Final motivation involves both, if a narrative step has a double (causal + final) or a triple (causal + final + compositional/artistic) motivation. As a rule, a story’s order of events, and perhaps also the impression one gets from listening to the story or reading the book, is subject to the author/narrator’s omniscience or plan, which is not subject to time. This is especially true for medieval stories. Stories possess either a clear or a hidden purpose implemented by their creator (Herrnstein Smith 1968, 2, 126, and passim, discusses this as a poetic universal constant). Exactly this condition makes finality a vague literary term, as every narration would be final according to this vague definition. One can, however, still differentiate an explicitly foreshadowed ending (cf. the Nibelungenlied) from an ending that is only indirectly implied – by means of narrative traditions, schemata, or narrative tropes (cf. Tristan) – and also from a modern narration that is made in such a way that we see the end as open, which the author achieves by means of narrative steps that cause the illusory impression of an open future. We tend to judge literary cultures that have not yet reached this literary technique from our more advanced perspective. Therefore, premodern narrations appear to be final relative to great or high literature of the modern period, which attempts to avoid finality where possible. One must take into consideration that the listeners/readers of premodern times had different literary experiences and different expectations from ours. They could have interpreted a schematic story as, more or less, having an open end. In this way, finality seems relative from the historical standpoint of such listeners/readers.

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8 Compositional (or Artistic) Motivation Compositional (or artistic; see Schmid 2020, 6–8) motivation refers strictly to the level of narration and exists when the narration’s composition has consequences for the motivations of parts of the plot: one can correlate an and bn all the way to zn compositionally. However, much as with finality, composition does not always define motivation; rather, compositional structure may have effects on the motivation. The most artistic compositions of medieval literature are those in which the story proceeds naturally with the changing circumstances and which, instead of narrating in an ordo naturalis, narrate in an ordo artificialis (Klopsch 1980, 56, 130, and passim; Ernst 2003), where composition implies artistic disposition (cf. Schmid’s 2020, 6–8, 206–207, reformulation of compositional motivation as artistic motivation). Odysseus’s first-person narration of his travels (Odyssey 9–12) and Aeneas’s first-person narration of his escape from Troy (Aeneid 2) would be early examples of such narration. In the medieval period, Hagen’s telling of Siegfried’s youthful escapades in the Nibelungenlied (strophes 84–101) can serve as an example in that, within a character’s own story, a flashback or analepsis is present. This way of constructing the narrative (Lämmert [1955] 2017, 100–139) makes a motivation – the journey in the Odyssey, the escape in the Aeneid, as well as the protagonist’s traits in the Nibelungenlied – noticeable in retrospect. At the same time, a story from a character within the story that flashes back is motivated in and of itself: Odysseus, Aeneas, and Hagen each have a reason for telling their respective stories. This way of constructing a narration would fall under the definition of composition. Composition, then, is the key term that comprises many narrative techniques, but not all of them pertain to motivation. Some of these techniques are relevant for motivation, as in the case when necessary conditions are set up for events yet to come. Then, the compositional problem of where they should be set up or placed emerges. Čexov’s recommendation, which Boris Tomaševskij promulgated, was especially influential for compositional motivation: “If one speaks of a nail in the wall at the beginning of a story, then the hero must hang himself from it at the end” (Tomaševskij [1925] 1985, 227f.; cf. Schmid 2020, 22–23). This recommendation pertains to motivation in a very specific way in that two narrative elements correlate with one another (the author inserts, along with an, that which bd makes possible). This also works when reversed: if the hero is to hang on the nail by the end, then the author should establish the nail’s existence in the narrated world ahead of time and not incidentally add it at the point where the nail is used (an must be introduced with logical arguments; see section 9). This is the case in the Nibelungenlied, for example, where the superhumanly strong Brünhild wins a fight against Gunther for her virginity. Tied up with a belt and hanging by a nail on the wall, Gunther manages to survive the encounter (strophe 637). The nail was not spoken of beforehand; in a

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modern narration one would expect an explanation. An author could have inserted the nail as a contingent situational factor while describing the surroundings of the wedding night before it begins. But descriptions in premodern literature have a very different function and are never based on the special features of any one situation. Not only do heroic epics allow gaps in a story’s motivation to become more easily noticeable; literary poetry also does this. Modern literature, by contrast, will typically not allow such gaps. To avoid them is not only the most basic rule for fiction but also for the creation of pieces of theater and screenplays. An exception to this rule are action scenarios: here, one finds compositional motivations which allow something to happen, seemingly without any motivation. In movies like Mission Impossible, action is established compositionally by captivating the reader/ viewer with suspense. A medieval forerunner of this technique is Wolfdietrich D (Haferland 2020, 152–161). Compositional/artistic motivation is especially important for the use of setups and payoffs as it is taught in screenwriting. An example from medieval heroic poetry would be an episode in Wolfdietrich D: Wolfdietrich finds himself entangled in a knife-throwing competition and, surprisingly, excels in it (lines 1060–1280). In light of the fact that such a fight is not chivalrous, there is the need to explain how the hero learned the art of knife-throwing. His education in knife-throwing is explained in line 334. A poet must determine what to insert into the story so that a later occurrence will remain logical and grounded. Considering the entire story from a compositional perspective is an intrinsic part of the art of probable (i.e., plausible and believably motivated) narration, for it correctly places all of the necessary conditions for everything that happens at transfer points in the narration. In medieval narration, entities like the aforementioned nail (but also actions, events, etc.) can be introduced when needed; setups and payoffs do not have to be moved apart. This already applies to folklore narratives in general, where an entity needed for a story simply turns up without any explanation or motivation. Gottfried (with Thomas of Britanje) motivates the great lengths Tristan goes to at the Irish court after being wounded by Morolt, Isolde’s uncle, so that Isolde’s mother, the Irish queen, heals his wound (lines 7283–7842). When he arrives he must do everything in his power not to be seen as Morolt’s murderer and to remain anonymous. Here, chance comes to Tristan in the form of a court chaplain who brings Tristan to the court (lines 7700–7771). Tristan’s forethought jumps to the narrative level as he calls himself Tantris (line 7791 = setup). In Thomas of Britanje’s version, Tristan renaming himself is a symbolic setup for Isolde’s game with the syllables “Tris” and “Tan” through which she recognizes Tantris’s true identity (lines 10104–10146 = payoff). At that moment, Tristan’s anonymity is compromised, and the plot now has a new direction. The author incorporates the setup with a strong motivation, and as a result the payoff is well prepared.

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9 Motivation from Behind Clemens Lugowski coined the term “motivation from behind” (Motivation von hinten) – in contrast to a preparing psychological (i.e., causal) motivation from the front – after he observed and analyzed significant violations of the modern convention of setting up everything that has a payoff ([1932] 1976, 66–80, 135–138; see also Haferland 2014). Motivational gaps are common in early modern literature, but Lugowski did not suspect that he had come upon a central attribute of premodern narrations, and he did not see the entirety of it as it applies to medieval literature, the literature of antiquity, and folklore narratives. Without knowing Lugowski’s preliminary work, Morton Bloomfield explored the spreading use of motivation from behind/backward motivation in the medieval period (1970, esp. 109f.). The Dragon Killer is one of the oldest and most widely spread fairy tales, often inserted into other tales (Uther 2011, vol. 1, 174–176; Bolte and Polívka 1963, vol. 1, 547–556; Röhrich 1981 798–801). It is a prime example of motivation from behind, and it is also an example of the occasionally precarious relationship of setup and payoff. In this story, after the hero has killed the dragon and won the heart of the king’s daughter, he cuts the dragon’s tongue out as proof of his heroic deed so that he will be sure to marry the princess after a year’s journey back home. But in the meantime, a rival steps forth with the dragon’s head and courts the princess for himself. After a year, the dragon killer appears abruptly during the wedding. He displays the tongue and invalidates the rival’s “proof,” for the dragon’s head is missing that part. The cutting out of the tongue is the setup, and its showing to the princess and king as proof, invalidating the rival’s claim, is the payoff. Each is correlated with the other: cutting out the tongue triggers a sequence of events that leads to it being used as a means of proof; conversely, this proof contains the necessary condition that the dragon killer has cut the tongue out. Only a modern reader would have the following question: why should the dragon killer only cut out the tongue and not simply take the entire head with him as the rival does? That is because it allows motivation: the tongue is much easier to carry in one’s pocket than an entire head. Some versions tell it in a similar fashion. For example, in Tristan, Gottfried has Tristan hide the tongue under his shirt (lines 9064–9067) in his inserted version of the fairy tale of the dragon killer. Other versions overlook this, perhaps because its meaning in the setup’s motivation is not understood. This, however, points to a significant difference in motivational techniques: that the tongue will later be used as proof necessitates that it is cut out; consequently, the cutting out is a form of final motivation. The narrative step, since the author added it ahead of time (= setup), is also compositionally motivated, because it is needed later in the plot for the resulting payoff. It is also motivated causally, if

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one can recognize a reason for the dragon killer’s choice to cut only the tongue out. However, without an initial motivator, cutting out the tongue is a motivation from behind (because the tongue will be used in the payoff). If cutting out the tongue does not appear to be motivated causally  – for example, because the tongue is easier to carry – it then appears to be motivated merely backwards. Once it comes to the pay-off, the modern reader will tend to see the cutting out of the tongue as a surprising coincidence and perhaps as a gap in the plot. Even if the cutting out is causally motivated, modern readers may still notice its final motivation. Resolute motivation from the front is the norm in modern literature. Friedrich von Blanckenburg states, with reference to the novel, that there should be a consistently harmonious relationship between cause and effect ([1774] 1965, 10, 39, 110, 264, 279, 289f., 296, 343, and passim). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing states that the characters’ actions in stage plays should contain carefully chosen motivations ([1767/1769] 1973, 238, 562, and passim). Medieval literature seems to be as indifferent to the problem of motivation from behind as fairy tales are, and offers a wealth of examples. As the feud between Kriemhild and Brünhild comes to the boil, Kriemhild has the option to display Brünhild’s ring and belt, which (according to Kriemhild) Siegfried took from Brünhild as he took Brünhild as his mistress and deflowered her (strophes 847–850). In order for Kriemhild to make this rather cruel and inappropriate assertion, the ring and belt must, of course, be inserted into the story, and they must, by some means, end up in Kriemhild’s possession (especially since the supposed “deflowering,” which Kriemhild thinks has occurred, is described in detail; strophes 663–683): with a cap of invisibility, Siegfried fights with Brünhild, but he leaves the deflowering to Gunther. Only after a great struggle does he manage to remove Brünhild’s belt, with which she wants to tie Gunther up; in addition, he takes her ring (strophes 677–680). The poet pretends not to know why (680.2). Later, Siegfried gives the ring and belt to Kriemhild (680.3). For the sake of the plot, Siegfried must do this, so that Kriemhild can later trump Brünhild with these objects (see the payoff in strophes 847–850). Irrespective of this, Siegfried’s giving of the belt and ring has no motivation and is problematic, since it is compromising and shameful for both Siegfried and Kriemhild: Siegfried, it seems, slept with another woman the night after his wedding. In reality, however, he did not. The existence of the belt is motivated, but Kriemhild receiving it with the ring creates inconsistencies in the characters’ depictions. It is clearly a motivation from behind. A less central passage from Tristan is also insightful, as contemporaries of the time took notice of the motivation. The entire sequence of events in which merchants kidnap Tristan as a child and Tristan manages to get to his uncle Marke’s court in a most improbable manner, is motivated from behind. Otherwise, the entire plot could not exist. Also, the fact that Tristan had already visited the Irish

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court before Marke’s attempted courting of Isolde must be due to the attempted courtship. This is not the decision of Gottfried; the story was structured as such in previous versions. In the Norse prose adaptation (1226; this is the only document through which one has nearly full access to Thomas of Britanje’s complete version) one can read a tiny, insightful note from the adapter, Brother Robert, about Thomas of Britanje’s Tristan, which states that the kidnapping is motivated backwards: If Tristram had never been kidnapped, he would never have become acquainted with the king, nor so highly esteemed nor so blessed with friends in that country, where he was beloved by all and known in that city and throughout the entire kingdom. (Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, chap. 22, p. 63)

But Tristan must get to know the king in order for the plot to exist at all. Such coincidences that bring about the end of a plot in narrative folklore (Lüthi [1951] 2005, 50–52; Boden 2014, 1406f.), in the ancient Greek novel (Sedelmeier [1959] 1984, 353, talks about a comparable case of fortune- or luck-based motivation, Tyche-Motivierung), as well as in all types of medieval literature have a clear propensity for motivation from behind, serving the purpose of making a narrative move – often the climax – possible. The strong final orientation and “stubbornness” of the plot, which pulls to the end or brings intermediate events to a fixed end, explains why motivations are so often (only) backward in premodern literature.

10 Motivation by Means of Fate (Tyche), Fortune (Fortuna), and Providence: Finality-Oriented Scenarios and Arrangements It is known that archaic cultures did not make use of coincidence – not, at least, in the sense of a significant coincidence (Hallpike 1979, chap. 10.3). Rather, these cultures understood coincidence as a numinous causality or intentionality. This form of causality or intentionality is recognizable in folklore narrative which, according to Max Lüthi, develops its own narrative style, making coincidences appear as though they were guided by an unknown providence ([1951] 2005, 51). This means that, to both narrators and listeners, it is not clear (in the modern sense) whether or not a sequence of events is coincidental. Listeners and narrators assume that the causes are fate-based or (divinely) predicted causes (Boden 2014, 1406). In the fifth book of his Consolatio philosophiae (ca. 525), Boethius describes a significant coincidence (casus) as an unforeseeable meeting of two series of events,

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each effected by independent but confluent causes (ex confluentibus causis; 5.1.37– 60). Boethius discusses the question as to whether significant coincidences follow a secret plan or are foreseen by a greater intelligence that knows how all series of actions and events will come together. He uses the terms praescientia and providentia (5.4–6), which he summarizes very abstractly as possession of superordinate/ superior knowledge not subject to time in which knowledge of the future is always integrated. In regard to stories, Boethius’s philosophical ideas apply in every way: stories follow a plan; only in exceptional cases do they follow a plan that was not created at the outset. In premodern times, people tended to have numinous beliefs of all types regarding destiny and the future. Poets could draw on these shared beliefs to motivate events in their stories. In Homeric epics and also in Virgil’s Aeneid, the use of the mythological apparatus of gods serves as an artistic means to motivate the plot. It is clear that the gods’ actions are also subject to destiny in that they use fatum and fortuna in their conversations as independent powers. In the ancient Greek and Roman novel, Fortuna and Tyche (fortune and fate) determine the course of the story before it occurs (Hägg 1987; on fortune/fortuna, Vogt 2011, chap. 7), while in Christian stories it is divine Providence that prevails. The Pseudo-Clementine Writings (with two versions from a lost collection, the Clementine Homilies [after 300], and the Clementine Recognitions [ca. 350]) adapt the well-known plot of many novels of the antiquity in which two lovers are torn apart and then search to find each other again. In the Pseudo-Clementines, the protagonist’s, Clement’s, mother, leaves the family, abandoning her two first-born twins with them and following the direction of a dream. The father searches for her, and, eventually, having grown up without a proper family, Clement ventures off in search of his parents and older brothers. Under the spiritual guidance of the Apostle Peter and running into a host of characters, Clement discusses, in light of his situation, many aspects of the divine Trinity along with godly Providence. He and his family view life as predetermined. In a discussion in the Clementine Homilies, the unpredictable way things go (ἀπρονόητος φορά), which is what separates the family, is chastised as the worst philosophical position (Pseudo-Clementine Writings 4.13.1, p. 110). Another philosophical position appears to state that the gods are controlled by their passions and that they determine everything based on the whims of their passions (as with Homer). This position contains the idea that unchangeable fate determines everything (as is the case with novels in antiquity) and is also chastised (4.12.2 and 4.12.4, p. 110). However, God’s justice is opposed to these positions: one receives this justice when one trusts in Him (4.20.2. p. 112). The narrated plot uses the meaning these positions possess as a result of God’s justice in order to continue the narrative. As the family members slowly find each other, it becomes clear that God has brought about an improbable reunion, which

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convinces the father of the role and power of divine Providence in their lives and thus causes him to believe in God. Peter says to the father at the end of the Clementine Recognitions, “As God has given you, the father, your sons back, so do your sons give you, the father, to God” (10.72.4, p. 371). The story of Faustinian from the medieval German Kaiserchronik (ca. 1150) is a retelling of the Clementine Recognitions (lines 1219–4066), since it contains a long conversation with the aforementioned father and his sons (whom he does not recognize), used to convince the father of God and his divine Providence (lines 3029– 3966). An unchangeable fate (wîlsaelde) does not determine what happens in the narrated world; rather, the “Creator of All Things” (lines 3355–3339), who is also a divine judge (lines 3429), does. Only after Peter confronts the father with his entire family is the father finally ready to believe in God and God’s divine Providence (on finality in this story, see Martínez 1996b). The authors of the Pseudo-Clementine Writings use a formal tradition of the ancient Greek novel which developed characteristic coincidental scenarios: shipwrecks, sea storms, marauding pirates with kidnappings, even unpredicted meetings, among others (Söder 1932, 48–51; Stark 1989, 140f.). These scenarios motivate the separation of characters, which leads to an unlikely sequence of events containing backwards motivated meetings and coincidences that bring the separated characters together again. Godly Providence in the Pseudo-Clementine Writings and the Kaiserchronik’s story of Faustinian takes responsibility for what modern reason would understand as coincidence in the narrated world; the authors accommodate finality-based motivations into their narratives, adding godly Providence to them. The characters themselves identify the coincidence as godly Providence: their conversation with Peter appears as a metanarration with a mise en abyme, commenting on what is happening within the storyworld itself by means of spoken dialogue. Most modern readers would understand the coincidences not only as guided by godly Providence (on the content level), but as a kind of constructive element on the level of narration. In order to bring a plot to an intermediate state or to an end, many scenarios of coincidence from the ancient novel spread into medieval literature (see the contributions in Fichte 1996). As the merchants rob and kidnap Tristan, God causes a storm to appear that lasts for such a long time that the merchants think it to be divine punishment for their current misdeed. Regretting their actions, they bring Tristan back to land (lines 2399–2479). Gottfried uses terms (âventiure and geschiht; lines 2420f.) that he considers as relating to coincidence, even though he states that God is responsible for the storm (lines 2404–2417). This establishes two perspectives: one is based on coincidental happenings that cross with the intentions of key actors, and the other is based on a higher power in the background. Medieval

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German romances of courtly love (Minne) and adventure (âventiure; Minne- and Aventiureromane) almost always make use of these traditional coincidental scenarios without necessarily relating them to any form of divine Providence. Causal, final, and compositional (artistic) motivation are superimposed on one another in the above examples: the characters’ actions have causal motivation, the narrated world and the sequence of events are final by means of godly Providence, and this final sequence of events by means of godly Providence is effective for constructing a plot oriented toward finality (thus making it also compositionally relevant). Only in the eighteenth century does a breakthrough occur in the construction of new narrated worlds in the novel, which makes use of contingency in place of providence (Frick 1988).

11 Finality in Arthurian Romances In Arthurian romance, a very popular genre in medieval literature, one can recognize the aforementioned types of motivation (causal, final, and compositional/artistic) together with motivation through coincidence. The plot construction in these romances is always final (see Cormeau 1977, 15f., on observations by Lugowski [1932] 1976): The episodes are final and are added to the plot with the end in mind. Being directed toward a goal motivates the continuation of the story; it is not a causal motivation from station to station that creates a goal along the way. (Cormeau and Störmer [1985] 2007, 177)

The Arthurian court calls all knights after their initial stay and acceptance into the court – as made part of the tradition by Chrétien de Troyes for both classical and postclassical Arthurian romances – to reach the ultimate life goal: proving worthiness to rule, successfully inheriting a throne, or winning one’s own land by means of war or marriage. The path to such glory, in the spatial, factual, and figurative sense, contains roadblocks and personal failures. The hero gains full proof of his chivalric competence as knight and ruler (Bewährung) when he has successfully completed all the challenges. This path is rife with âventiuren (adventures), which unfold in episodes; one can understand these âventiuren as features that are used for a systematic construction of the story. In the narrated world, âventiuren can be acts of liberation in which the protagonist frees a territory from an external threat or tyrant, or he may be needed to fill a vacancy. In a social-historical perspective, one can trace this motif back to the knightly and noble way of living of the iuvenes (youths) who rode out in order to gain experience and establish the practice of fairness (Duby 1964). From this way of life stems a form of narration that authors

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put into words in Arthurian romances, showing the cultural significance of this experience in chivalry. This form of narration is based on the staging of exemplary and experienced leaders. Coincidences do not simply come about in the narrated world of Arthurian romances. Rather, the authors integrate them into the protagonist’s plan(s) of action because the protagonist does not know what lies ahead of him in his coming âventiure. Âventiure signals a coincidental approaching to a moment when the protagonist will prove his chivalric competence. Kalogrenant in Chrétien’s Yvain (ca. 1180) rides out, searching for avantures (line 177), and does so in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein (ca. 1200; line 261) as well. It is astounding that he reaches a place, within a day’s ride, where he barely knows the residents; another day’s ride brings him to a kingdom that Arthur’s court never knew existed. Riding out into unknown territory marks a new narrative form that creates experience. It is the paradox of âventiure that the hero finds his destination by chance. In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1205), this is made evident: Parzival, chosen to become Grail king, manages to find Munsalvaesche (the castle of the Grail) unknowingly. Munsalvaesche can only be found unwizzende (unknowingly; 250.28f.); in other words, a knight searching for the castle would never find it. Parzival lets his horse run in whatever direction it pleases (224.19–21; he rides equally aimlessly in Chrétien’s Perceval, ca. 1190, lines 2976–2979). However, he does not fulfill what is desired of him at the Grail. This brings him into crisis until he is given a second chance. The entire plot structure of Arthurian romances leads to an emphatic ending. Iwein, like Parzival, has a two-part plot structure in which coincidences direct the path to lordship. At the end of the first part, Iwein fails to return to his wife (Laudine) and country at the time he promised. In the second part, Iwein finds reconciliation for his broken promise in that, this time, he sticks to his promised return despite unforeseen âventiuren he experiences in the interval. At the end, he reconciles with his wife and is reinstated as king. Motivation is thus processed in a form with an open beginning (initial âventiure as basic act/action not motiviated by previous actions) and an emphatic ending. Because Arthurian heroes ride out with no specific goal in mind, coincidences are integrated. One could speak of a kind of final causality. This form is taken from narrative folklore where the travelling hero is determined to reach a fortunate end after going through a number of unforeseen incidents (trials and tribulations) in a search that he always undertakes (Horn 2010) and in the appearance of impeding circumstances that are to be overcome (Kahlo 1930/1933; Klíma 1977). The plot of Arthurian romances is characterized by finality in that it always leads to the hero proving his chivalric competence. Within this final plot structure, the actions of the hero are causally motivated (Willms 1997 proves this using

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Hartmann von Aue’s Erec as an example). The connection between episodes can be attributed to coincidence. Thus, coincidences contribute to final motivation. Many episodes are also compositionally motivated. This is proven by the fact that the episodes cannot be moved from their given place, since they are ordered in a meaningful sequence within the two-part structure. Cormeau (1977, 17f.) points out that connecting episodes not through causal motivation but primarily through chance and/or coincidence relieves the preparing motivation of the force of probability and thus makes the structure of the hero’s personal process fungible. This is how the hero’s progress from one âventiure to another is imbued with final motivation. Finality in Arthurian romances possesses a certain double meaning. There is no higher power that (pre)determines it in the narrated world, but through strong emphasis on the story’s structure of progression, the protagonist’s path seems to be designed to be foreseen (compare a comparable double meaning in Martínez 1996a, 204, using Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice as an example).

12 Conclusion Premodern and medieval narration was not created by any singular individual. Pre-existing stories spread by means of being retold in other languages, heroic poetry was passed on through oral tradition, and epics and narratives were continually rewritten. All these narratives are bound to schemata and plots where motivation consistently seems to have already been determined. In comparison, modern (high literature) narratives do not have a set structure; they give the impression that they follow an open series of events. In contrast, premodern narratives seem to head toward a foreseeable end. This difference in motivation can be analyzed more closely with the help of the aforementioned threefold typology: causal, final, and compositional. These types of motivation are present in any type of narration. Premodern narratives, however, have specific characteristics. Final motivation sees wide-spread use and the narrative steps that the story takes are frequently motivated from behind. Chance and coincidences are imbued with finality and, therefore, constitute essential elements when constructing (a) plot(s) for a given narrative.

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Sonja Zeman

Temporality in Ancient and Medieval Literatures 1 Dimensions of “Narrative Temporality” It is a rather uncontroversial claim that narration and temporality are intricately intertwined. According to the standard definition of narration as the “representation of a sequence of events” (cf. among many Genette 1982, 127), it is the temporal succession of events (in the sense of a general “change of state” as a minimal condition of narration; Schmid [2005] 2014, 3, but see 12–19, and Hühn in this volume, on the discussion of which properties of changes of state define narrative eventfulness) that constitutes the fabric of narrative texts. In many accounts, temporality has therefore been regarded as the basic form and foundational source of all narration (see Lessing’s famous dictum that “the sequence of time is the field of the poet”; [1766] 2006, 129; see also Müller [1947] 2011, 72; Ricoeur 1980, 169). Furthermore, narration and temporality have been seen as linked together under the common assumption that the represented stories are prototypically past, since telling a story presupposes that the events already happened (see Cohn 2000, 96, for an overview and critical discussion). In addition, time is also an important ordering force in the storyworld. Temporality is thus not a clearly defined category, but a semantic domain that both constitutes and affects the structure of narration as well as the content of the story. In order to compare the dimensions of “narrative temporality” in different stages of language and different cultures, it is necessary to distinguish between two different dimensions of narrative temporality: (1) the temporal relations between events, which roughly comprises Genette’s (1972) subcategories of “order,” “frequency,” and “duration” of events (section 3); and (2) the temporal relationship between the telling frame, constituted by the communicative situation between narrator and the (fictive, implied, or real) recipients, and the represented storyworld (section 4). Apart from these structural aspects of narrative temporality, diachronic narratology is furthermore concerned with (3) the role of time within the content of the story (section 5).

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2 Concepts of Time Within the controversial discussion on the phenomenology of time, there are in particular two temporal conceptualizations which are discussed since antiquity: an absolute concept and a relative concept of time. The absolute concept of time is based on the assumption that time is a cosmological force that determines the succession of events in an absolute order of “before  – simultaneous  – after” relations. According to this view, time exists independently from its potential observer and time relations between events are permanent: within the common conceptualization of linear time, the discovery of America, for example, is always localized “before” the French Revolution. While the absolute conceptualization of time allows for the description of one event with respect to its intrinsic relation to another event, it does not allow for a description of an event as “past,” “present,” or “future.” Terms like “past” always imply the question “‘past’ in reference to what?” and, as such, an observer’s viewpoint from which the temporal interval can be evaluated: the French Revolution is “past” as seen from our present standpoint, but it was “future” for Columbus. According to this conceptualization, time is dependent on an observer’s mind (see Störmer-Caysa 2007 and Kragl 2013 on similar conceptions of time by Aristotle and Augustine). Narratives comprise both observer-dependent and observer-independent aspects. They prototypically invoke a succession of events in terms of “before  – after,” but they are, at the same time, observer-dependent since the events are also located with respect to the actual speech act and the viewpoints represented within the story. While in everyday discourse, the primary reference point for temporal localization is constituted by the actual speaker of the utterance, narrative events can (in addition to their localization with respect to the narrating act involving the speaker and the recipients) be seen as “past,” “present,” or “future” from both the narrator’s and the protagonists’ viewpoints (see Meister 2011, 198) and thus integrate a forward and backward view on the story. The question “‘past’ in reference to what?” is thus particularly relevant for narratives.

3 The Succession of Events The order of events has been subject of investigation in many studies on narrative temporality (but see Werner 2018, 45, for a critique of the dominance of chronological accounts of “time” in narratology). Traditionally, the order of events has been investigated with respect to deviances between the “natural” succession of events of the story and their “artificial” representation in the discourse, but this view has

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been challenged. On the one hand, the sequence of events has been seen as the result of general narrative processes like ordering and the selection of information (see Schmid [2005] 2014; Meister 2011, 190–191) and thus not as a temporal phenomenon in the first instance. On the other hand, it has also been criticized that there is no “natural” sequence of events given a priori, which is then transformed into a story. This is seen in the fact that not every narration makes it possible to reconstruct the temporal timeline of the narrative events (see also Werner 2018, 77), and not all narrative information can be brought unambiguously into a temporal plotline. Furthermore, sequentiality (in terms of “earlier – later”) and temporal localization (in terms of “past,” “present,” and “future”) are closely linked together. Achronological representations of narrative events should thus not be seen as “deviations” but rather investigated with respect to their narrative function.

3.1 Ancient Greek Epics Narratives in Ancient Greek (AG) have been said to follow, in general, a rather chronological order of events. According to de Jong and Nünlist (2007, 505), this is even true for narratives that are structured according to the principle of ring-composition (i.e., the ordering of thematic units according to the pattern A-B-C-B-A). However, there is also wide variation both within AG and Latin narrations (Grethlein 2019, 171). The Homeric epics, in particular, are examples of narratives that do not represent a story in a chronological way. Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey start from the beginning, but in medias res, and focus on a short period of several days, whereas the Trojan War and the journey of Ulysses stretch over a time span of multiple years. In order to present the events outside the main plot, the epics make frequent use of analepses, prolepses, and the technique of foreshadowing. In the Odyssey, Ulysses’s adventures prior to the main plot are narrated by the protagonist himself in an extensive flashback which stretches over four books (9–12). Within the Iliad, the actual end of the story is not told but only anticipated by analepses and foreshadowing. Both analepses and prolepses are important narrative strategies which are used in different functions. Analepses can refer both to events that have been described earlier within the story (internal analepsis) and to the “epic plupast”, i.e., the past that preceded the main story (Grethlein 2012, 15). While internal analepses in Homer are usually infrequent and brief (de Jong 2007, 20), external analepses are frequently used to provide information about the background of characters and objects that are relevant for the actual story now. A famous example is the background story about Ulysses’s bow (Odyssey 21.11–41) when it is presented to the suitors who are competing for Penelope. Background stories about the protagonists

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prototypically occur in obituaries that praise the hero’s life after his death in the storyworld. In some cases, the serialization of analepses can form a complete story, like the story about the returns of Agamemnon and Menelaus in the Odyssey. While this use is not frequent in the Homeric epics, the technique is extensively used in the late antique novel Aethiopica by Heliodorus, where analepses are essential in order to reconstruct the action that precedes the massacre at the beginning of the novel. Analepses in the Homeric epics can be made both by the narrator and by the protagonists (as in the case of Ulysses). The same can be said about prolepses that anticipate the posterior events in the story line. Narratorial prolepses often evoke dramatic irony, since they offer information about the events to come that cannot be foreseen by the protagonists within the storyworld. Within the Homeric epics, the prolepsis is often indicated by the verb μέλλω (intend to) + inf., which within the prolepsis denotes an ineluctable fate that is contrasted with the intention of the protagonist (de Jong 2007, 25; Bakker 2005). As Dolon leaves the Trojan camp in order to spy on the Greeks (Iliad 10.336–337), the narrator adds that “in fact he was never to return” (ἄρ᾽ ἔμελλεν ἐλθὼν) from the ships and to bring his report back to Hector’s (trans. de Jong 2007, 25). The dramatic irony can further be emphasized by narratorial comments on the protagonists’ unawareness of their destiny (see e.g., Grethlein 2010, 320–-322, on the foreshadowing of Patroclus’s death). In contrast to the narrator’s anticipations, prolepses made within the storyworld are less reliable but contribute to the foreshadowing of future events in a similar way. A famous example is the conversation in which Andromache bids Hector not to enter the battlefield (Iliad 6.407–465). Both Andromache’s worries that her husband could die and Hector’s worries about the future of his wife after the fall of Troy foreshadow the upcoming events, but Hector’s speech still does not exclude the possibility of a bright future for his son. After Hector’s death, however, Andromache’s lament pictures the fall of Troy and foresees quite accurately the future that is destined to her son, although represented as a guess (“as I think”): he [. . .] who is still a child, he, as I think, will never reach his youth [οὐδέ μιν οἴω ἥβην ἵξεσθαι]. Because beforehand, this city will be destroyed [πέρσεται] completely, as you have perished, the guardian, who has kept the wives and children safe, who will quickly be held in the hollow ships, I as well among them. You my child will follow me and be put to do shameful tasks, working for some relentless master, or some Achaian will grasp you by the arm and throw you from the tower to mournful death [ῥίψει χειρὸς ἑλὼν ἀπὸ πύργου λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον]. (Iliad 24.725–745)

The figural prolepsis serves more than one goal. Next to an emphatic representation of the grief of Hector’s wife, it pictures the events that follow the end of the war as is common practice in antiquity: the slavery of women and killing of small children. Furthermore, it refers to the individual fate of her son Astyanax who is, according to traditional knowledge, thrown from the walls after the fall of Troy. Since the

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end of the Trojan War was commonly known to the audience, the reference to Astyanax’s death will have been received as more than just a vague guess by Andromache. As such, the prolepsis contributes to a dense network of the foreshadowing of the fall of Troy (see also Grethlein 2019, 171). Furthermore, the passage emphasizes Hector’s glory as the most important guardian of Troy, since it is due to his death that the ruin of Troy becomes inevitable. The example thus makes obvious that prolepses are more than temporal deviations from iconic representation of events, but constitute a narrative strategy that serves multiple goals.

3.2 Middle High German Epics Analepses and prolepses are also common in the Middle High German (MHG) epics in different forms and functions. Next to smaller analepses which provide missing information about anterior events that are of relevance for the current story now, there are also more extensive ones which repeat prior parts of the story from a different perspective. The narrative effect of these “repetitive analepses” is apparent when comparing Virgil’s Aeneid with the medieval representations of the story, the Old French Roman d’Eneas and the MHG Eneasroman by Heinrich von Veldeke. In the Virgilian version, the background of the main story – i.e., the events after the fall of Troy and Aeneas’s flight – is narrated when Aeneas has arrived in Carthage and tells his story to Dido. Within the medieval versions, the story is narrated twice, i.e., chronologically at the beginning of the story by the narrator and a second time by Aeneas in Carthage. Yet the second analepsis is not just a repetition but elaborates subtle contrasts between narratorial and figural perspective (Fromm 1996; Zimmermann 2017, 93). Within the medieval epics, analepses can thus also be used as a narrative strategy of multiperspectivization. Prolepses are also used frequently in the MHG epics. The Nibelungenlied, for example, contains about a hundred prolepses. They often do not anticipate a specific event, but predict a complication or the bad outcome of an event in rather stereotyped forms: “dâ von im sît vil liebe und ouch vil leide geschach” (Later on, as a result, much love and also much harm was happening to him; Nibelungenlied, 138.4). Linguistically, the prolepses are indicated by the preterit, i.e., by the same tense form that also denotes the sequence of the events in the main plotline, often combined with adverbials like sint/sider (later on). These adverbials are not explicit markers of the future, but can also be used to indicate the next step in the successive progression of events. This linguistic pattern of prolepses is also frequent in the later epics. In the courtly epics, there is further the possibility to mark the prolepsis by the construction sollte + inf. (literally “should,” proleptic meaning “was to do”; Zeman 2018).

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Next to explicit prolepses, the technique of foreshadowing also is frequently used in the heroic epics. The most famous example in the Nibelungenlied is Kriemhild’s dream about a falcon which is torn to death. The dream interpretation is given by her mother, who supposes that the falcon represents Kriemhild’s later husband and thus foreshadows his early death. Dreams and prophesies are also frequently used in later narrations in order to foreshadow future events. In the Prosalancelot, dreams and prophesies constitute important parts of the narrative since they not only anticipate further events but also motivate the actions of the heroes (Klinger 2012). However, whereas the truthfulness of dreams and prophesies is taken as a given in heroic epics like the Nibelungenlied, the validity of dreams and dream interpretation is put into question in narratives like the Prosalancelot (Fuchs-Jolie 2012). When Galahot dreams about two hearts, of which one turns into a leopard and springs away while the other dries up and dies (Prosalancelot II, 2,10), he consults a number of prophets. Their interpretation  – Lancelot represents the leopard who will leave Galahot, who himself will die afterwards – is proven true within the further line of the story and can thus be seen as a reliable prophecy. Lancelot, however, questions the validity of dreams and criticizes dream interpretation as an unmanly practice: “‘Dreams are often wrong’, said Lancelot [to Galahot], ‘and a man with such a brave heart like you should not worry about dreams. Women should believe in them and people with weak hearts” (Prosalancelot II, 2,11). While the proleptic narrative pattern in general is thus comparable to the use of prolepses in the heroic epics, the uncertainty about the future becomes a topic within the content of the story. Proleptic narrative strategies are thus not pure temporal phenomena but are also dependent on the epistemological precondition concerning the hero’s capacity to influence his fate.

3.3 The Order of Multiple Plotlines 3.3.1 Ancient Greek Epics Next to the sequence of events within a story, the temporal order between episodes and subplots has also been discussed for narratives in the ancient and medieval epics. For AG, the investigation of the order of multiple plotlines is closely connected to the debate on “Zielinski’s Law,” also known as the “continuity of time principle” and “law of succession” (Zielinski 1899–1901). It states that within a narrative, two simultaneous plotlines have to be represented in a sequential order since they cannot be perceived at one time. While this could be said about all verbal narratives in general (see also Seeck 1998 for discussion), Zielinski’s argument refers to the specific way the Homeric epics deal with it: according to him, the Homeric epics

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are characterized by a forward movement that prevents the narrator from going backward in order to retrace a parallel plot of events. In consequence, simultaneous events are represented successively, often without any indication that they should be thought of occurring simultaneously. Zielinski’s law has been subject to controversial discussions and continues to be debated (see e.g., Rengakos 1995; Scodel 2008; Pozdnev 2016). While earlier research focused particularly on the reconstruction of the temporal relationships between different events in the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as on the question of whether Homer’s representations might be a reflection of an “undeveloped” concept of time in general (Fränkel 1931; for detailed critiques, see Krischer 1971; Rengakos 1995), Zielinski’s observations are nowadays seen not primarily as a temporal, but rather as a narrative problem linked to scene shift and story progression. The main characteristic is seen in the fact that Homer is obliged to a poetic convention that foregrounds the flow of the narration as a single strand, whereas in later novels, changes of episodes are frequently indicated by formulas like “in the meantime [. . .]” (see Fludernik 2003), which invoke a step back in narrative time (i.e., Zielinski’s “zurückgreifende Methode”) and thus interrupt the sequence of narrated time (Rengakos 1995, 9). Several interpretations have been suggested for this specific treatment of episode change. Zielinski himself has argued that the representation of the narrated events corresponds to the way the poet perceived them before his virtual eyes. As such, the Homeric epics seem more inclined to a representation of a homogeneous, continuous flow of narration than explicit indications of the temporal relationship between the events. The argument of “the seeing poet” is also found in studies that consider the Homeric convention as a result of the oral predisposition in ancient Greece. According to Bakker (1997, 2011), the primary temporal reference point for the Homeric epics is not the actual story now but the “time in which a live narrative unfolds as a flow of live spoken language” (Bakker 2011, 877). Similarly, Kawashima has argued that the Homeric epics establish a storyworld that subsists wholly in memory and exists only when actualized within the singer’s performance (Kawashima 2008, 115). Since time does not progress in a backgrounded subworld, it is possible to simply return to a character when the narrative requires it. Subplots in parallel narrative worlds to the main plot thus do not exist independently, but are only actualized when they come into the “vision” of the poet. A famous example is book 14 of the Iliad, where the narrator refocuses on Nestor, who is still drinking from his cup like he was in 11.624–643 (Scodel 2008, 111). This and similar examples have been seen as evidence that the Homeric narrator is “less concerned with temporal realism than with narrative effect and thematic continuity” (112). Furthermore, it has been argued that Zielinski’s “Law” can be reduced to a general lack of explicit marking of temporal relations (Pozdnev 2016). In contrast

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to other ancient epics like Virgil’s Aeneid, where explicit markers like conjunctions and adverbials are used even when the temporal order is clear from context, both parallel and successive events in the Homeric epics can be connected by the same particle, δέ (Pozdnev 2016, 6). Whether the represented strands follow each other or have to be thought as occurring at the same time has thus to be conjectured.

3.3.2 Medieval Epics Similar observations have also been made for the heroic epic in MHG. In the tradition of Zielinski (1899–1901), the Nibelungenlied has been described as an example of a “single-stranded” story representation. Like the Homeric epics, it has been characterized by its forward movement which desists from the representation of parallel subplots, and it is rarely the case that the simultaneity of events is relevant for the main action. Instead, parallel plots are oriented to the “story now” of the main plot (Steinhoff 1964, 91–92). Within the medieval courtly epics, metanarrative comments by the narrator (“How do I now begin my speaking that I prepare the dignified protagonist Tristan [. . .] in such a way that one would like to hear it gladly?”; Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, 4591–4595), narrator’s dialogues with allegoric instances (“Oh, it is you, Lady Aventiure, how is the dear hero doing?”; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 9.7), and so on indicate a general reflection on the representation of the story and on its temporal order in particular (see Reichlin 2019, 182). In general, however, the courtly epics have also been classified as single-stranded. Arguments have been seen in the fact that supporting actors and side stages disappear as soon as the hero on their journey has moved away (Störmer-Caysa 2007, 79–83.; Reichlin 2019, 188). In contrast, the Prosalancelot, the first romance in prose in MHG, displays a more complex network of multiple strands (Ruberg 1965, 129). Changes in characters and places are often indicated by formulaic expressions, which lead to the illusion of the coexistence of parallel narrated subworlds: “Now we have to leave this talk about my lord Gawain and his companions and speak further a while about King Arthur” (Prosalancelot, II, 25a,10). In the courtly epics, the order of narrative information can also be oriented towards the protagonist’s knowledge about the storyworld. An example is Parzival’s adventure in the Castle of the Holy Grail, where the hero does not know that he has to ask a question in order to free the city from a heavy curse (Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 5.239.11–240.9). The narrator only inserts an unspecific regret about the fact that Parzival did not ask. Apart from that, the reader remains uninformed about the background story until Parzival learns it from a conversation with Sigune.

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The chronological order of events can also remain underspecified. This is particularly true for narrative medieval genres like the adventure and the picaresque novel that are characterized by an episodic structure. Though picaresque novels like Till Eulenspiegel depict phases of a biographical life of one main character, the temporal macrostructure remains weak as the single units could be arranged in a different order without leading to chronological or causal disruptions, or even stand for themselves (Kipf 2014, 77). The transition between the different episodes is often marked by temporal clauses that indicate a temporal progression (“After he had accomplished x, he continued his journey and came to place y”). Such expressions can be seen as rather formulaic markers of scene shift whose temporal meaning has lost its importance.

3.4 The Sequence of Events in Diachrony In sum, both ancient and medieval narratives display a whole arsenal of narrative techniques that deviate from pure chronological storytelling. Achronological representations are not restricted to the epic texts but are also found in, for example, tragedy like Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and historiography (see de Jong and Nünlist 2007). Analepsis and prolepsis as strategies of information selection thus seem to be a common feature of narratives per se. Their functions, however, depend on various factors like the content of the story and the precondition with respect to the eschatological precondition of human life in time. Within the Iliad, prolepses and foreshadowing emphasize the discrepancy between the heroes’ intentions and the outcome of fate, and as such, highlight “human fragility” (Grethlein 2012, 32). The Odyssey, in contrast, though it shares the same template for viewing human life in time, i.e. “notably a general feeling of insecurity and the belief that crimes provoke divine punishment” (Grethlein 2012, 32), focuses on the successful return of Ulysses and does not display the same tragic irony as the Iliad. Furthermore, the representation of events is dependent on narrative conventions within different genre traditions. Within the medieval tradition, there are significant differences between heroic and courtly epics. Whereas the protagonists of the heroic epic are powerless in face of Fatum and part of a story that implements itself, the events within the courtly epic are intricately determined by the hero whose action, though in a way predestined, is the prerequisite for the succession of events (Philipowski 2007, 55–56). The representation of the order of events is thus dependent on several factors, without adding up to a clear line of development. What has been seen as a more general diachronic tendency is a change with respect to the representation of multiple plotlines. Both AG and medieval heroic

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epics have been characterized as single-stranded narrations with a continuous focus on the respective “now” of the narrating act. The story is presented as one main plotline, and parallel subworlds do not coexist independently but only come into existence if the story “needs” them. In later narratives, the focus shifts from the “discourse now” to the “story now.” Linked with that, the selection of narrative information can also be oriented toward the knowledge of the protagonist, a change of focus that might correlate with the increase of internal focalization in MHG (Hübner 2003). Furthermore, the later narratives tend to integrate multiple strands that correlate with a more complex architecture of the storyworld, as reflected within the formulaic expressions for scene shifts.

3.5 Duration and Frequency: Ekphrasis and “Slow” Narration Two other aspects which are frequently discussed as subcategories of narrative temporality are the “duration” and “frequency” of the represented events. “Duration” refers to the velocity of the narration, measured by the density of details in order to describe an event in the story (Schmid [2005] 2014, 233–234). In this respect, both AG and medieval narrations have been described as “slow” narrations (e.g., Kragl 2013, 121), since the plotline is frequently interrupted by extensive descriptions of battles, tournaments, ceremonials, as well as depictions of objects like special clothes and weapons. Although the moments of ekphrasis seem to “pause” the succession of events, the “visual,” “pictorial” style is, however, not primarily a temporal phenomenon. This is in particular obvious for the German courtly epics, where the digressions made by the narrator – such as metanarrative comments, as well as metaphorical and allegorical descriptions – add further levels of meaning that reach beyond temporal aspects (see e.g., Kragl 2013, 148, for an interpretation of the Blutstropfenszene in Chretien’s Perceval and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival). Frequency as well is a not a primarily temporal category either but linked to different semantic effects. As seen above, repetitions can be used to present different perspectives on the same event and to increase the emotional intensity (Lock 1985), e.g., in fighting scenes. In the Prosalancelot, Lancelot has to fight successively against twenty individual knights in order to be able to enter the castle of “Dolorose Garde.” Twenty-one fights are described in detail (five duels on the first day, which are won in vain as a rule dictates that all fights have to be fought in one single day, and sixteen fights the day that follows – after that the remaining knights take flight) over fourteen pages. The effect of the detailed representation might not only be a “visual” impact on behalf of the reader but also an enactment of experience of Lancelot’s exhaustion and strength.

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4 The Grammar of Temporality 4.1 The Grammar of the Past According to a common view, narrative always requires a retrospective view since the narration of events presupposes a knowledge about events that have happened before. Although this view has been called into question by studies on multiple future narratives (Bode 2013) and present-tense novels (Fludernik 2010, 63–64; Martínez and Scheffel 2016, 73–75), it seems in particular natural for ancient and medieval narrations. First, they refer to a heroic past with no specific localization in historical time and distinct from the temporal viewpoint of the narrator. Second, the narrator’s voice is omnipresent and constitutes an important temporal reference point (on the problematic distinction between “author”/“teller” and “narrator,” see Tilg 2019 for antiquity and Kragl 2019 for medieval narratives). Linguistically, the distinction between the narrator’s discourse world and the narrated storyworld parallels with two discourse modes, an immediate and distanced mode (Chafe 1994), which imply a different usage of temporal deictics and tense markers. Past tenses and deictics like then and there indicate that the denoted event is seen at a distance from the moment of speech, whereas present tenses establish a reference frame including both the moment of speech and the denoted event. One example for this distinction is the contrast between the prologues of the narrator and the main plot of the story in the MHG courtly epics. The present tense and first-/second-person pronouns indicate a reference frame including the “now” of the narrating act, shared by the narrator and his audience, whereas the preterit “leit” (suffered) marks a shift into the past reference frame of the storyworld. I tell all this for the reason that you pay attention all the better to this poem that I want to tell, because I do not want to conceal the distress and the great effort that Duke Ernst was suffering, when he was expelled from Bavaria. (Herzog Ernst, 31–37)

The shift into the storyworld is enabled by two grammatical properties of the preterit, i.e., the denotation of specific events within narrative succession and the establishment of a reference frame that does not include the narrating act. In MHG, the preterit is often accompanied by using the concatenative particle do (then), which indicates the next step of the story (“[and] then/after that”) and, at the same time, localizes the events in a world that is distant from the reference system of the speaker (“then, at that time”). In contrast, the present perfect is a non-narrative form which is excluded

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from passages with time-specific adverbials and the particle do (then) and cannot denote a temporal sequence of events (Zeman 2018). The semantics of the preterit thus combines both temporal properties that are characteristic for epic narration: the forward movement of the temporal succession of specific events within the narrated world and the temporal localization of the events in a time interval that excludes the speaker and presupposes the narrator’s external viewpoint.

4.2 The Grammar of Immediacy While it is the prototypical case that the narrator is situated outside the narrated world, ancient and medieval storytelling has also been characterized by the fact that the story is “relived” and represented as if it was happening simultaneously to the actual “now” of the narrating act. A property which is commonly seen as characteristic for narrative epics from antiquity to the Middle Ages is thus the notion of “literary presentness” and “immediacy” (for overviews, see Philipowski 2013; Zeman 2016; Philipowski  & Zeman 2022), where the narrator “adopts the stance of an eye-witness” (Bakker 2005, 63) and the past events are represented as they were present for the eyes of the audience. Such “narrative immediacy” refers to two different temporal relations (Zeman 2018): first, a (real or fictive) simultaneity relation between the production and the reception of the story (“simultaneity I”); second, the simulated simultaneity between the time of the actual performance (including both the time of the producing and perceiving act) and the time of the events within the storyworld (“simultaneity II”).

4.2.1 Ancient Greek Epics Temporal adverbials are the most explicit expressions of the language of immediacy. Within narrations, adverbials like “now” can refer to different temporal anchors, notably the “now” of the (actual or fictive) narrating act, the “now” of the actualized stage in the sequence of events, or the “now” of a character’s point of view. For the Homeric epics, it has been claimed that the primary “now” is the moment of performance. A famous example is the invocation of the muses in Homer, where linguistic means of the immediate mode (i.e., the particle νῦν, “now”; the personal pronouns in first person, ἡμεῖς, “we”; and the imperative) refer to the “now” of the act of narration as shared by the poet and his audience. Sing now to me [ἒσπετε νῦν μοι], Muses, who dwell in Olympian houses – For you are goddesses and you are present, and have seen everything;

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But we [ἡμεῖς] are hearing only the rumor of it and know nothing – Who the leaders and lords were of the Danaans. (Iliad 2.484–487; trans. Bakker 2005, 81)

While the passage is a straight example for the immediate mode in referring to the frame of reference that includes the communicative situation (“simultaneity I”) and is in this respect comparable to the MHG prologue (see section 4.1), the characteristics of the Homeric epics are seen in the fact that the “now” of performance stays actualized for the whole time of the story. It is not a displaced “now” in the past but the moment of the poet’s recollection in the present that constitutes the primary reference point for the epic’s deictic orientation (Bakker 2005, 175; Kawashima 2004, 146). This is supported by the fact that linguistic means of the immediate mode also “intrude” into the representation of the epic past. Linguistic means that draw attention to the actual moment of narrating speech are, for instance, demonstratives like the hearer-oriented oὕτως (this; Bakker 2005, 75–84). Unlike anaphors which refer to an antecedent within the linguistic discourse, oὕτως “points” at existing objects within the “here and now” (Bühler’s [1934] 1978 “deixis ad oculos et aures”). As a linguistic feature of proximity, it is usually used in the dialogic parts of character speech. Used in displaced mode, it creates the impression that the narrator can point at the narrated situation as if it were before his eyes (“simultaneity II”). Other linguistic means that have been listed as markers of proximate deixis and of the narrator’s voice within the representation of the sequence of events are the augment (Bakker 2005, 127), the aorist (169), particles referring to the “here and now” like ἄρα, and several discourse markers (Bonifazi 2008). In the Homeric epics, the “language of immediacy” is thus a mode that combines linguistic markers of proximate and distant deixis, leading to a “conflation of far and near” (Bakker 2005, 80).

4.2.2 MHG Epics As in the Homeric epics, the “now” of the narrating act is the first temporal reference point in the MHG epics, and there are similar linguistic strategies that invoke a shared communication space between the narrator and the audience. The time of narration is indicated by linguistic means of the immediate mode, i.e., first-person pronouns, deictic particles of proximate deixis (nu, “now”), and the present tense. It is told to us in old stories a lot about the glorious adventures Of famous heroes [. . .], [about which] you can now hear glorious adventures. (Nibelungenlied, 1.1–4)

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There are, however, several differences with respect to the use of the language of immediacy when compared to the Homeric epics. Regarding the relation between the poet and the audience, it is characteristic for the courtly epic that the succession of events is occasionally interrupted by metanarrative comments which turn the narrating process itself into a subject of discussion. In the example given below, the progression of events is suspended and the narrator expresses his concerns about how to represent the following pivotal moment, namely the protagonist’s knightly accolade. How do I now begin my speaking that I prepare the dignified protagonist Tristan in such a way for his knightly accolade that one would like to hear it willingly? (Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, 4591–4595)

Such comments reinforce the impression that narrating and perceiving process are taking place simultaneously. Whether this is the actual case in oral performance or not (for the oral preconditions of narratives, see my contribution on oral storytelling in this volume), the narrating act is conceptualized as a dynamic online production process in which the story evolves within the speech act. The example thus refers to a simultaneity between production and performance of oral storytelling (“simultaneity I”). At the same time, it also creates a moment of distance, since the discussion about the form of the representation emphasizes that the story is one version out of many possible versions, and that it is the representation, not the events themselves, which is happening before the recipients’ ears and eyes. In the following example, the linguistic means refer to the simultaneity between the represented events and the “perceptional” act of the audience (“simultaneity II”). now let Terramer ride – listen how the first ones are fighting! his help comes for them yet to early. (Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, 360.29–361.1) Now look, there [dô] approaches distress to them. (Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 407.10)

The deictic “nû” (now) and the imperatives of verbs of perception (“seht” [look!], “hoeret” [listen!]) imply that the narrator and his recipients are situated in a shared communicative situation and are looking at the narrated events happening simultaneously with the narrating act (“simultaneity II”). The second example shows that this feature of immediacy can also be combined with the particle “dô,” which establishes a temporal reference frame of a storyworld that is distinct from the narrator’s discourse. Despite effects of immediacy, the distance of the past events is thus not repealed. Another linguistic feature of the immediate mode that evokes the impression of “simultaneity II” is often seen in the “historical present,” i.e., the use of the present

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tense in alternation with the preterit in order to denote past events in the storyworld (see Zeman 2013). This usage, however, occurs neither within the Homeric nor in the MHG epics, but in later narratives of early modern High German: and as he lay in this way, there comes a small animal which is called a weasel, running down the mountain. (Das Volksbuch vom Hl. Karl, 94.14; fifteenth centuy, quoted in Herchenbach 1911, 125)

There are many accounts in order to explain the use of the historical present and its effect of “immediacy” (for a recent overview, see van Gils and Kroon 2020). The comparative view on the historical present suggests that there is no single explanation that could account for all its functions within the different languages and narrative traditions. It is, however, rather clear that “an explanation of the historical present on the basis of time alone is quite impossible” (Schlichter 1931, 47), since not all its functions can be reduced to the temporal meaning of the present tense. Furthermore, it has been argued that it is not so much the temporal meaning of the present tense but the whole alternation pattern (Wolfson 1982; Fludernik 1992) and the markedness of the present tense within the narrative discourse mode (Fleischman 1990) that causes the effect of “vividness.” In a similar way, the “vivid” impression caused by tense alternation in general  – the seemingly unmotivated alternation of different tenses, also dubbed “tense confusion” (Fleischman 1990) – cannot be deduced directly from tense semantics either.

4.2.3 The Grammar of Temporality in Diachrony The representation of past events as present is a paradox inherent in all kinds of narratives (Müller [1947] 2011, 69) and linguistically reflected by the fact that narratives combine linguistic features of both the immediate and the displaced mode. In both traditions, the moment of the (actual of fictive) performance constitutes the primary temporal reference point and aims at the representation of simultaneity in two aspects: the cotemporality between the poet’s performance and the reception in a shared communicative setting (“simultaneity I”) and the cotemporality between the narrating act and the events of the storyworld (“simultaneity II”). In both the Homeric and MHG epics, the language of immediacy “intrudes” into the distanced mode and leads to a “conflation” of proximity and distance. The specific constellation between distance and immediacy is, however, dependent on narrative conventions and subject to change. In MHG courtly epics, metanarrative comments explicate that the narrative events are the result of an artificial representation and thus create a moment of distance. Also, the continuous use of dô (then) as a marker of distance indicates that the frame of the sto-

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ryworld is maintained throughout the poem in distance from the teller (and the audience). In later romances, the focus on the “discourse now” is increasingly weakened, and the dynamic “story now” within the progression of events becomes the more important reference point for temporal anchoring. This focus shift has been seen in connection with the oral predisposition of ancient and medieval epics, as it is supposed that the focus on the “now” of the narrating act becomes less relevant as soon as the literary tradition and the composition of the poem are no longer based on the moment of active memory and verbal reactualization but on the written word. Although strategies of visualization are characteristic for narratives in general, the peculiar narrative conventions are thus subject for change. This becomes obvious in comparison to the modern development of the present-tense novel in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Fleischman 1990), which is characterized by a use of tenses of immediate discourse mode (present, present perfect, future tenses) throughout the entire novel. The use of the present tense does, however, not lead to the same effects of immediacy as in AG and MHG epics. Whereas modern present-tense narration evokes the impression that the distance between the storyworld and the reader’s perception is erased and implies that the reference frame of narrator and implied reader includes the storyworld, the storyworld in epics is reperformed within the actual moment of memory but stays at the same time in a distant reference frame.

5 Time in the Storyworld 5.1 Conceptualization of Time in Premodern Narratives Next to the structural aspects of temporality in narratives, historical narratology has also focused on the conceptualization of time within the content of the stories. In this respect, one of the most striking characteristics of premodern narrations has been seen in the polycentric conceptualization of time: there is no invisible clock ticking which would constitute an orientation time for all protagonists within the story (Cross 2008, 163; Störmer-Caysa 2007, 88). Rather, a single narration can include different dimensions of time, and some events of the story can also defy a localization in time altogether. In this respect, the following dimensions of time have been expounded as characteristic for premodern narratives.

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5.1.1 Biographical vs. “Adventure Time” In AG and MHG stories, time can pass without affecting the protagonist, a fact that has been described in the tradition of Baxtin (1981) as “episodic” or “adventure time.” “Adventure time” is an “extratemporal hiatus” where the whole action takes place, whereas the passing of biographical time “leaves no trace in the life of the heroes or in their personalities” (90; emphasis in original). Consequently, the physical age and health as well as the personal development of the character and the fictional world remain resistant to temporal change. In the AG novel Aithiopika by Heliodorus, the protagonists meet in their youth and marry after several adventures, being as young and beautiful as at the beginning of the story (Baxtin 1981). The concept of “adventure time” is seen as a chronotopos valid not only for AG narratives but for premodern narrations in general. Baxtin (1981) himself has elaborated parallel characteristics for both the Hellenic adventure and the medieval chivalric romance (but see Störmer-Caysa 2007, 83, for differences in the conceptualization of adventure time in MHG and AG epics).

5.1.2 Historical vs. Indefinite Past “Adventure” time is not only unaffected by biographical time, but also by the historical context. The epic past as a whole remains an indefinite past “once upon a time” without any indication of absolute localization in time. This is the case both for the mythological world of the Homeric epics as well as for the context of Germanic and Celtic legends in the MHG epics. Even if the narration alludes to historical events, it does not aim at a faithful description of the historical background. In the book about the adventures of Herzog Ernst, for example, the story starts in the historical context of the German Empire, but names and events of different times are mixed. After his banishment from Germany, the hero travels to exotic countries and gets involved in fabulous adventures that are taken from traditional medieval and oriental fairy tales. The dividing lines between historical and epic time thus become blurred (see also Ruberg 1965, 146, on the Prosalancelot). This has led to the hypothesis that epics are based on a different concept of historical time and fictionality.

5.1.3 Spaces In and Outside Time Though epics are set in an indefinite past frame and the heroes remain unaffected by time in several respects, time is an important factor in many stories. Protago-

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nists make appointments to meet each other, and there are timelines that have to be met. One famous example in MHG epics is the story of Iwein, who has to return to his wife within one year but fails to do so, with crucial consequences for the storyline. Furthermore, MHG courtly epics refer to different dimensions of measuring time such as juridical timelines, the liturgical year, the natural cycle of day and night, and the seasons of the year. There are also narrative spaces where the computation of time seems to stop. After Iwein has lost his wife and honor, he goes mad and lives secluded in a forest. Outside of courtly society, no temporal frame is established within the text, and it remains unknown to the reader how much time Iwein spends in the timeless wilderness of the forest (see Nitsche 2006). Next to such “wild places” like the forest, magical places like the Minnegrotte where Tristan and Isolde meet are also not represented as subjected to time.

5.1.4 Heterochronias Both Homeric and MHG epics are characterized by the fact that there is not a timeline that is valid for the whole story. Episodes can have their own temporalities without leading to logical contradictions, and there is no temporal continuity that comprises the whole storyworld. The absence of a homogeneous computation of time should, however, not be equated with a “subjective” concept of individual time perception as it has been described for modern novels (see also Reichlin 2019, 187, for MHG; Will 1976, 53, for Homer). Unlike the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg who forgets how old he is while being in the timeless world of a sanatorium, the protagonists within the medieval stories do not perceive time in an individual way but stay committed to social conventions (Weixler and Werner 2015, 3). In MHG epics, the representation of temporal relations seems rather to follow text-internal patterns and is, as such, not primarily dependent on external conceptualizations of time (Störmer-Caysa 2007, 120).

5.2 Hypotheses on Diachronic Changes of the Conceptualization of Time To account for the characteristics of ancient and medieval epics, several hypotheses have been proposed with respect to the question of whether and how the aspects of “narrative temporality” interact with the conceptualization of time in different stages of language.

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5.2.1 Hypothesis 1: Development of an “Abstract”/“Objective” Notion of Time In a still famous article on the conceptualization of time in ancient Greece, Fränkel (1931) argued based on semantic and grammatical arguments that the Homeric epics reflect an “undeveloped” sense of time. In its strong sense, this hypothesis has been rejected (see Krischer 1971; Rengakos 1995; Zanker 2019; Reitz and Finkmann 2019, 178) by showing that the Homeric heroes have a clear conception of “the passing of time, the weight of the past, and their historical situation” and that the narrator reveals “a sophisticated sense of time in structuring his story” (Zanker 2019, 66). However, the question about whether and how ancient epics reflect a different time concept is still discussed. Influenced by Cassirer’s concept of “mythological time” as opposed to both cosmic and historical “objective” time, Baxtin (1981) has argued that AG narratives were characterized by the development from an ahistorical epic past to a notion of historical time (251–252; for a critique, see Bemong and Borghart 2010, 9, with further references). Kawashima (2004) sees a crucial difference between “deictic” and “non-deictic”/“objective” time conceptualization. His hypothesis is based on the observation that the Homeric epics take the present moment of oral performance as the primary reference point, whereas the Bible as a literary tradition based on the written word tends to focus on the temporal relations between the narrated events in terms of “earlier/later than” (146). This chronological pattern is also dominant in the later historiographical literature, which has been interpreted in favor of the hypothesis that the “idea of historical time” is a fifth-century BC “invention” (Williams 1993, 69). The notion of “objective” time has also been given as an explanation for the fact that time becomes an increasing concern as a topic of the stories, whereas narrations like the Homeric epics focus on the events that occur in time, but not on the existence of time itself (Lock 1985, 46; Zanker 2019, 65).

5.2.2 Hypothesis 2: Development of a “Subjective” Notion of Time Another general development is seen in a focus shift from the chronological sequence of events toward the representation of consciousness, also subsumed under the term “inward turn.” Whereas premodern narratives such as courtly epics and chivalric romances are generally based on a pattern of “and then [. . .]” and depict the “visible” events in the storyworld, the plot within modern novel has been seen as “a matter of relations between states of consciousness” (Keunen 2010, 51). While this is a development characteristic in particular for the nineteenth century, an increase of thought and speech representation and focalization patterns has been stated already for MHG courtly epics (Hübner 2003). This shift in focus might

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have been favored by the fact that the protagonists become more and more the temporal orientation points within the story in MHG epics (Störmer-Caysa 2009, 83).

5.2.3 Hypothesis 3: Oral Predisposition The characteristics of premodern narratives like polycentric timelines and the focus on the sequence of events have also been seen in connection to their oral predisposition. In this respect, it has been argued for the following causalities, which refer to different aspects of narrative temporality (see my contribution on oral storytelling in this volume). (1) Since the Homeric epics were performed orally, the now of the storyteller constitutes the primary temporal orientation point for narration. Consequently, the narrator’s voice is omnipresent, reflected within the combination of grammatical means of immediate and distanced mode. As soon as the epics are composed in written form, the focus on the present moment of the narrating act decreases and the events within the story become more and more the primary temporal anchors of narration (Bakker 2005; Kawashima 2008). (2) In oral performance, the flow of narration is the most important timeline, which causes the pursuit of a single-stranded plot. The connection between different subplots can be left underspecified. In contrast, stories that are composed in writing are characterized by complex constellations of different subplots. (3) Epics composed in oral performance simulate simultaneity between the narrated events and the perception of the story and evoke the impression that the events are happening virtually before the poet’s and the audience’s eyes. This “language of immediacy” decreases with the increase of literacy (see Zeman 2013 for discussion). It is, however, maintained in later epics and romances as a strategy of visualization. (4) Since the epics’ stories belong to traditions shared by everyone and are familiar to the audience, less emphasis is placed on expectation and surprise and more on their elaboration as a retold story (Lock 1985, i; Grethlein 2010, 322–323). This has been seen as a predisposition for a more repetitive, paratactic, and discontinuous narrative structure. It has also been seen as the cause for the fact that narrative strategies like the frequent use of prolepses and foreshadowing in the epics “widen the gap between the recipients and heroes” (Grethlein 2010, 324), whereas the modern novel aims at an alignment of the experience between recipients and protagonists.

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(5) It has been argued that oral cultures tend toward cyclic conceptions of time. The concept of time as a recurring cycle has, for example, been seen as reflected in the Homeric epics, which defy a clear distinction between past and present (Lock 1985). (6) Since the epic past can be reactivated in each performance of the poem, it has also been described as an “eternal past” that transcends the present. Within the Homeric epics, the past does not exist outside discourse but is eternally present (Bakker 2005). In a similar way, the future in the epics is not “some kind of fixed future, a future locked up in the past,” but persists within the hero’s kleos (fame), a future moment of recognition that will become present every time the story is performed (Bakker 2005, 109; see, however, Garcia 2013, 8, for a critique of the hypothesis of “poetic immortality”).

5.2.4 Hypothesis 4: Eschatological Predisposition The conceptualization of temporality in narrative texts has also been seen in connection to eschatological preconditions. Within the Homeric epics, the heroes are represented as subjected to the course of inevitable fate. In the Iliad, in particular, the Homeric heroes act within a world where human life is represented as fragile, which is reflected within the frequent prolepses that emphasize dramatic irony. In the courtly romance, the fate of the protagonists is also in a way predestined. However, their adventures do not occur by chance but as moral trials assigned by God, and their fate is seen as dependent on their actions (Störmer-Caysa 2007, 83). For medieval narratives, a distinction has been made between “human” and “divine time” (Cross 2008, 165) which is ever-present and transcends temporal change. According to Cross, it is this difference that allows for the idea of alternative temporalities and can provide the context for the heterochronias in premodern narratives.

6 Historical and Universal Aspects of Narrative Temporality In sum, the relationship between “narrative temporality” and the conceptualization of time is not straightforward. Not all phenomena debated under the term “temporality” are temporal in the first instance. Furthermore, “narrative temporality” is closely linked to the communicative setting, the status of the narrator, the selection of information, and viewpoint organization.

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With respect to the universal and historical aspects of narrative temporality, the perception and conceptualization of time seem not to be radically different in premodern narratives (see also Reichlin 2019, 181), as is also reflected in the metaphorical conceptualizations of time. In medieval epics, time is measured by the natural cycles of day and night and the seasons, as well as by social conventions. Time can “come” and “pass.” It can be pressing due to time limits, and it can be spent in a useful way or left unused (see, e.g., Nitsche 2006, 47, on the example of Erec and Enite, who – against the social code of practice – stay in bed during daytime and verligen (lie too long inactively, causing possible bad consequences). For the Homeric epics, Zanker (2019) has shown that the concept of time is conceptualized in the metaphor “[time/ego] moving along a path,” which is also common both in present-day Western languages and in Sanskrit and Hittite (Zanker 2019, 102). From the perspective of cognitive grammar, this suggests that there is a general Indo-European tendency for time conceptualization, if not a universal one. The specific characteristics of narrative temporality in its different aspects in ancient and medieval epics are thus not direct reflections of the conceptualization of time. Rather, the differences with respect to the ordering of events, episodes, and subplots, the “grammar of immediacy” as well as the polycentric organization of temporal timelines within a narrative, can be seen as text-internal patterns and narrative strategies (Störmer-Caysa 2007, 120), still to be explored by diachronic narratology in their details.

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Kawashima, Robert S. 2008. “What Is Narrative Perspective? A Non-Historicist Answer.” In Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature Presented to Ann Banfield, edited by Robert S. Kawashima, Gilles Philippe, and Thelma Sowley, 105–126. Berne: Lang. Keunen, Bart. 2010. “The Chronotopic Imagination in Literature and Film: Bakhtin, Bergson and Deleuze on Forms of Time.” In Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, edited by Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen De Temmerman, and Bart Keunen, 35–55. Ghent: Academia Press. Kipf, Klaus. 2014. “Episodizität und narrative Makrostruktur: Überlegungen zur Struktur der ältesten deutschen Schelmenromane und einiger Schwankromane.” In Das Syntagma des Pikaresken, edited by Jan Mohr and Michael Waltenberger, 71–102. Winter: Heidelberg. Klinger, Judith. 2012. “Die Poetik der Träume: Zum Erzählen von und mit Traum-Bildern im ‘Prosa-Lancelot.’” In Lancelot: Der mittelhochdeutsche Roman im europäischen Kontext, edited by Klaus Ridder and Christoph Huber, 211–234. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kragl, Florian. 2013. “Bilder-Geschichten: Zur Interaktion von Erzähllogiken und Bildlogiken im mittelalterlichen Roman. Mit Beispielen aus ‘Flore und Blanscheflur’ und ‘Parzival.’” In Erzähllogiken in der Literatur des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Florian Kragl and Christian Schneider, 119–151. Heidelberg: Winter. Kragl, Florian. 2019. “Autor und Erzähler – Mittelalter.” In Handbuch Historische Narratologie, edited by Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg, 82–93. Stuttgart: Metzler. Krischer, Tilman. 1971. Formale Konventionen der homerischen Epik. Munich: Beck. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. (1766) 2006. Laokoon; oder, Über die Grenzen der Malerei und der Poesie. Stuttgart: Reclam. Lock, Richard. 1985. Aspects of Time in Medieval Literature. New York: Garland. Martínez, Matías, and Michael Scheffel. 2016. Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. 10th ed. Munich: Beck. Meister, Jan Christoph. 2011. “The Temporality Effect: Towards a Process Model of Narrative Time Construction.” In Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct; A Reader, edited by Jan Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus, 171–216. Berlin: De Gruyter. Müller, Günther. (1947) 2011. “The Significance of Time in Narrative Art.” In Time: From Concept to Narrative Construct; A Reader, edited by Jan Christoph Meister and Wilhelm Schernus, 67–83. Berlin: De Gruyter. Nitsche, Barbara. 2006. Die Signifikanz der Zeit im höfischen Roman: Kulturanthropologische Zugängen zur mittelalterlichen Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Philipowski, Katharina. 2007. “Strophisches und stichisches Sprechen: Medientheoretische Überlegungen zur Figurenrede in höfischer- und Heldenepik.” In Formen und Funktionen der Figurenrede in der mittelhochdeutschen Großepik, edited by Nine Miedema and Franz Hundsnurscher, 43–71. Beiträge zur Dialogforschung 36. Berlin: De Gruyter. Philipowski, Katharina. 2013. “Vergangene Gegenwart, vergegenwärtigte Vergangenheit: Zeit und Präsenz in der mediävistischen Alteritätsdebatte.” In Wie anders war das Mittelalter? Fragen an das Konzept der Alterität, edited by Manuel Braun 127–159. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. Philipowski, Katharina, and Sonja Zeman. 2022. “Wann und wo ist nû? Literarische Strategien des Präsens-Gebrauchs (am Beispiel des ›Wilhalm von Wenden‹ Ulrichs von Etzenbach).” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 144, no. 1, 92–120. Pozdnev, Michael. 2016. “Das ‘Incompatibilitätsgesetz’ Th. Zielinskis: Eine kolumbische Entdeckung.” Philologia Classica 11, no. 1, 6–19. Reichlin, Susanne. 2019. “Zeit – Mittelalter.” In Handbuch Historische Narratologie, edited by Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg, 181–193. Stuttgart: Metzler.

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Reitz, Christiane, and Simone Finkmann. 2019. “Time in Ancient Epic – a Short Introduction.” In Structures of Epic Poetry, edited by Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann, 171–181. Berlin: De Gruyter. Rengakos, Antonius. 1995. “Zeit und Gleichzeitigkeit in den homerischen Epen.” Antike und Abendland 41, no. 1, 1–33. Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “Narrative Time.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1, 169–190. Ruberg, Uwe. 1965. Raum und Zeit im Prosa-Lancelot. Munich: Fink. Schlichter, John J. 1931. “The Historical Tenses and Their functions in Latin.” Classical Philology 26, no. 1, 46–59. Schmid, Wolf. [2005] 2014. Elemente der Narratologie. 3rd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter. Scodel, Ruth. 2008. “Zielinski’s Law Reconsidered.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 138, no. 1, 107–125. Seeck, Gustav Adolf. 1998, “Homerisches Erzählen und das Problem der Gleichzeitigkeit.” Hermes 126, no. 2, 131–144. Steinhoff, Hans-Hugo. 1964. Die Darstellung gleichzeitiger Geschehnisse im mittelhochdeutschen Epos. Studien zur Entfaltung der poetischen Technik vom Rolandslied bis zum “Willehalm.” Munich: Eidos. Störmer-Caysa, Uta. 2007. Grundstrukturen mittelalterlicher Erzählungen: Raum und Zeit im höfischen Roman. Berlin: De Gruyter. Tilg, Stefan. 2019. “Autor und Erzähler – Antike.” In Handbuch Historische Narratologie, edited by Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg, 69–81. Stuttgart: Metzler. van Gils, Lidewij, and Caroline Kroon. 2020. “Engaging the Audience: An Intersubjectivity Approach to the Historic Present Tense in Latin.” In Lemmata Linguistica Latina, vol. 2, Clause and Discourse, edited by Lidewij van Gils, Caroline Kroon, and Rodie Risselada, 351–373. Berlin: De Gruyter. Weixler, Antonius, and Lukas Werner. 2015. “Zeit und Erzählen – eine Skizze.” In Zeiten erzählen: Ansätze – Aspekte – Analysen, edited by Antonius Weixler and Lukas Werner, 1–24. Narratologia 48. Berlin: De Gruyter. Werner, Lukas. 2018. Erzählte Zeiten im Roman der Frühen Neuzeit: Eine historische Narratologie der Zeit. Narratologia 62. Berlin: De Gruyter. Will, Frederic. 1976. The Generic Demands of Greek Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolfson, Nessa. 1982. CHP: The Conversational Historical Present in American English Narrative. Dordrecht: Foris. Zanker, Andreas. 2019. Metaphor in Homer: Time, Speech, and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zeman, Sonja. 2013. “Vergangenheit als Gegenwart? Zur Diachronie des Historischen Präsens.” In Sprachwandel und seine Reflexe im Neuhochdeutschen, edited by Petra M. Vogel, 236–256. Berlin: De Gruyter. Zeman, Sonja. 2016. “Orality, Visualization, and the Historical Mind: The ‘Visual Present’ in (Semi-)Oral Epic Poems and Its Implications for a Theory of Cognitive Oral Poetics.” In Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science, edited by Mihailo Antović and Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, 168–196. Berlin: De Gruyter. Zeman, Sonja. 2018. “Dimensions of Tense and Temporality in Middle High German Narratives.” In Narratologie und mittelalterliches Erzählen: Autor, Erzähler, Perspektive, Zeit und Raum, edited by Eva von Contzen and Florian Kragl, 267–283. Berlin: De Gruyter. Zielinski, Thaddæus. 1899–1901. “Die Behandlung gleichzeitiger Ereignisse im antiken Epos.” Philologus Supplement 8:405–449. Zimmermann, Julia. 2017. “Vervielfältigungen des Erzählens in der ‘Heidelberger Virginal.’” In Brüchige Helden – brüchiges Erzählen: Mittelhochdeutsche Heldenepik aus narratologischer Sicht, edited by Anne-Katrin Federow, Kay Malcher, and Marina Münkler, 93–113. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Cohesion and Coherence in Russian Narrative Literature 1 Definition The terms cohesion and coherence are used in linguistics and discourse analysis to describe the external (formal) and internal (substantive) connectedness of an utterance. Cohesion and coherence are usually understood as lexical and grammatical connectedness between the units of the text in the surface text and conceptual and semantic wholeness of the text beneath the surface text, respectively. Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler state that cohesion designates “the ways in which the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual words we hear or see (language expressions), are mutually connected within a sequence,” while coherence “concerns the ways in which the components of the textual world, i.e., the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text, are mutually accessible and relevant” (1981, 3–4). As for the relations between the two, “the cohesion of the surface text rests on the presupposed coherence of the textual world” (71). Coherence is typically viewed as a pragmatically determined quality of the text. As shown by Gillian Brown and George Yule, interpretations of any text are based on the “assumption of coherence”: readers “fill in any connections which are required” and make an effort to reconstruct the author’s “intended meaning” (1983, 224). Michael Toolan ([2009] 2014, 66) describes the usage of the terms in narratology. He specifies “norms” that influence the degree of narrative cohesion and coherence: the “presence of story or plot, of an inter-related event sequence, of focus on [. . .] characters undergoing change, and of a situation of stability developing a disequilibrium following which a renewed but altered equilibrium emerges (closure)” (71). Judging by these criteria, the perceiver of a narrative is influenced not only by cohesion and coherence manifested at the level of presentation of narration but also by the coherence of plot elements and the story itself. Investigating the levels of narrative sequentiality, Herbert Grabes specifies “presented events in their individual shape” and “underlying bare scheme of successive narrative events” (2014, 765). This means that the plot itself makes narration coherent. In addition to its grammatical properties (studied by text linguistics), coherence is represented in narrative as a set of connections between events (studied by narratology). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-021

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There are two interconnected theoretical approaches to event-type coherence. One centers around the structure of plot (the arrangement of events). Karin Kukkonen suggests that plot, when conceived as “a fixed structure,” “becomes a pattern which yields coherence to the narrative” ([2009] 2014, 707). Overviews of coherence often begin with discussions of Aristotle’s Poetics (335 BC). For instance, Genevieve Liveley (2019, 36) investigates Aristotle’s qualities of the “well-constructed plot,” which include “wholeness,” “appropriate size,” “coherence,” “unity,” and “a probable [. . .] or necessary [. . .] sequence of events” (see also Toolan [2009] 2014, 67). The second approach deals specifically with the addressee’s perception of the narrative. For instance, Meir Sternberg ([1983] 2013) shows how the reader’s “affects” (suspense, curiosity, and surprise) determine aesthetic closure of the depicted sequence of events. Usually, the addressee is considered to infuse a series of events with coherence in accordance with his or her cultural background, cognitive patterns, and schemata (Toolan [2009] 2014). Márta Horváth (2015, 46–47) points out that fictional narratives make readers automatically switch to the fictional reading mode, taking the intentional stance regarding the whole text [.  .  .] their reading process is directed toward the recovery of an authorial intention [. . .] they seek to establish [. . .] coherence that organizes [. . .] the events in narrative.

Text linguistics and discourse analysis have established that coherence may be represented in the text’s cohesion. Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (1976), while never distinguishing cohesion and coherence, view text as a unified whole organized by cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Catherine Emmott (1997, 216–235) develops a narratological approach to such markers as deixes and anaphoric chains (in particular, names and pronouns). However, markers of coherence in fiction cannot be summarized in one table of devices. Fictional texts require coherence on a higher level. Super-coherence (de Beaugrande 1987) is formed by underlying ideas that are not explicitly represented in the text. Unlike cohesion and coherence in the linguistic sense, it may not have formal markers, being defined by context and patterns instead. One of the main factors of narrative coherence in fiction is the composition of story, plot, and intrigue. In the English-speaking world, narratologists view plot in either of two ways: as a global paradigmatic macrostructure or as syntagmatic “progressive structuration” (see Kukkonen [2009] 2014, 708–712). In contrast, Russian literary scholarship traditionally distinguishes fabula from sjužet. Formalism viewed fabula as the raw material of story and sjužet as the way the fabula is composed by the author (Tomaševskij [1925] 1965, 66–67). They may be seen either as equivalents to plot and story or as two sides of plot, respectively. Wolf Schmid (2010, 187–188) establishes a correspondence between the fabula/sjužet dichotomy

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and the various models of narrative levels developed in classical narratology, including Tzvetan Todorov’s histoire and discours and Gérard Genette’s histoire and récit. Taken as a macrostructure, plot (or fabula) is a factor of coherence, since it is a typical, culturally established configuration of events. The sequential aspect of plot (or sjužet) is also a factor of coherence, since it serves to organize the addressee’s cognitive activity in the process of perceiving the narrated events. On this basis, plot can be defined as a configuration of events arranged as they are perceived by the recipient. Dealing with the receptive aspect of plot, Paul Ricoeur coined the term mise en intrigue (emplotment) to emphasize the role of the addressee in narrative communication. He views narrative intrigue as tension in anticipation of events linking the beginning of the story with its end. The intrigue “must be typical” (Ricoeur [1983–1985] 1984–1988, 1:41) in order for the reader to properly comprehend it. Cognitively speaking, the reader gains aesthetic information through a particular set of frames and scripts (see Emmott and Alexander [2009] 2014). Contemporary French and Russian narratologists understand narrative intrigue as plot in the receptive mode which engages the reader to impart coherence to the narrative (Villeneuve 2004; Baroni 2011, 5; Tjupa 2014, 569). The formal side of intrigue incorporates sequences of episodes  – discrete segments of an event line. The configuration of episodes, being unique to each narrative, reflects cultural patterns that help readers to understand narratives. Basic forms of configuration include drawing together similar events and building a sequence of complication – peripeteia – climax – denouement. They have their origins in two ancient models of plot (intrigue): cumulation and cycle (Tamarčenko 1986, 36–51). According to Vladimir Propp ([1984] 2012, 276–278), the cumulative model involves building up a series of similar episodes which lead to a “catastrophe.” The cyclical model has two varieties. The first is based on the mytheme of a dying-and-rising god (Frejdenberg [1978] 1997). It includes three stages: lack  – search – getting. The second variety of cycle originates from rites of passage and consists of an unfolding chain of events that culminates with the hero’s symbolic death and ends with either his renewal and change of status or defeat (Tjupa 2013a, 70). In the course of the evolution of narrative literature, other types of intrigue also appear. For instance, peripeteian intrigue consists of the alternation of segments of narration, bringing the reader closer to and further away from the clue to the meaning of events. Intrigue of the word (intrigue of discourse), replacing the traditional intrigue of action, shifts the focus away from events to presentation of the narration (see Tjupa 2015).

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Overall, it can be said that narratology usually follows linguistic approaches to cohesion, understanding it as a grammatical connection between elements of the surface text. Typically, cohesion depends more on language norms than it does on narrative structure. A clash between cohesion and non-cohesiveness becomes a narrative device only during periods when authors start experimenting with forms of speech. Coherence, by contrast, is studied by narratology more intently, since it corresponds to relations that underlie the surface text. This article views coherence as a configuration of narrative sequences determined by the semantics of storyworld in conjunction with narrative pragmatics. Narrative coherence is manifested in (1) methods of communication with the recipient, (2) the type of intrigue, (3) the way the episodes are linked together, and (4) methods of achieving textual fragmentation or unity (devices such as anaphoric indexes or various kinds of repetitions). The following sections describe how these features of coherence are used in Russian literature.

2 Literature of the Eighteenth Century Coherence in Russian eighteenth-century narratives is based on reproducing previously established schemes of plot (fabula). Russian authors strived to master traditional European plots, and, in the words of the eighteenth-century playwright Vladimir Lukin, to “adapt to Russian customs” the plots of particular works (quoted by Toporov 1989, 107–108). The first eighteenth-century narratives were formulaic: the stories consisted of a number of typical occurrences. For instance, anonymous tales from the Petrine era contaminate invariants originating in both folklore and literature. History of the Russian Sailor Vasilij Koriockij and of the Beautiful Princess Heraclius of the Florentine Land (ca. 1700–1730) is modeled partly after Russian folk poems and fairy tales and partly after Western heroic romances (see Mamurkina 2012, 284–285). Coherence is achieved when the reader recognizes familiar frames and connects a particular plot with literary tradition, which makes him or her neglect contradictions and inconsistences of events and their causes (Vasilij the Sailor’s victories are often quite unreasonable: he fascinates aristocrats, merchants, and pirates; he instantly wins the heart of a princess; he speaks many languages and has polite manners; etc.) In narratives of Russian classicism (1740s–1770s), there are two main factors of coherence: reproduction of an external example (invariant) and its transformation by the author. Coherence is determined by the aesthetic purposes of “eidetic poetics,” having as its main principle the conscious reproduction of ideal classical forms (Brojtman [2001] 2004, 190–191).

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Narratives of that period have three distinct features: a rhetorical and rationalizing nature, typicality and repetitiveness, and commitment to literary canons. The narrator and the reader take the roles of a “master” and an “expert”: the former reproduces a canon fabula while the latter checks it by comparing with the external standard. Two traditional forms of coherence between episodes are employed: liminal coherence (a journey of initiation aimed at changing a hero’s status through challenges, which has a complication, a climax, and a denouement) and cumulative coherence (multiplication of similar episodes, as in a picaresque hero’s adventures). In both cases, narratives clearly manifest the primacy of the norms over the author’s individuality. For example, Vasilij Trediakovskij adapts François Fénelon’s bildungsroman Les aventures de Télémaque (1699) by converting Fénelon’s prose narrative into an epic poem entitled Telemachiad; or, The Wandering of Telemachus, the Son of Odysseus Described in the Form of a Heroic Poem (1766). On the basis of Fénelon’s fabula, he attempted to reconstruct the epic of Homer. In the introduction to Telemachiad, Trediakovskij proclaims that all epic narratives derive from Homeric fabulas. For him, Fénelon’s novel deviates too much from the perfect ancient example of storytelling, and its story should be retold in actual hexameters and thus come closer to its eidos. Trediakovskij was one of the first Russian authors to make theoretical observations regarding the principles of plot coherence. He praises the continuity between the “episodia” (a term borrowed from Aristotle’s Poetics) of Fénelon’s novel: they are “so skillfully woven into one another that right from the previous one comes the following one.” Here, Trediakovskij adapts the European metaphor of the thread of a plot (see Kukkonen [2009] 2014, 709) that has remained in the inventory of Russian literary tropes ever since. Trediakovskij believed that in “high” genres (ode, tragedy, epic poem), all events of the story should be connected causally and told in chronological order. Thus, to Trediakovskij, coherence is established with the help of rational thinking and rhetorical rules. “Low” prose and mock-epic poems, popular in the same period, by contrast, employ cumulative coherence. Their intrigues lack causality, consisting of loosely connected adventures or episodes that keep accumulating until the denouement comes. For example, in Mixail Čulkov’s picaresque novel The Comely Cook; or, The Adventures of a Depraved Woman (1770), every love affair is presented as a separate episode. Martona, the protagonist, narrates the events of her life but never reflects on them. Instead, transitions between the episodes include various proverbs and maxims. As the logic of the picaresque narrative dictates, Martona follows the rises and falls of the wheel of fortune and keeps changing roles and masks, but her character does not

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develop. There are, however, signs of another narrative intention. While describing the separation from her lover Svidal’, Martona mentions her genuine feelings about him. Liminal episodes (such as Martona’s illness, visiting the dying Axal’) contradict cumulative coherence: by their nature, they should leave some trace of a person. There could have been two possible outcomes: either Martona starts developing and changes her status (e.g., to be a wife or a mother) or she keeps going through yet another similar adventure. Neither option was chosen, however, since The Comely Cook was never completed. Paradoxically, the incomplete state of Čulkov’s work helps it to maintain coherence and fulfill the reader’s expectations. After the final stage of Russian classicism and the rise of sentimentalism (1760s–1810s), attention shifted toward the author’s individuality and emotional appeals to the reader. The addressee is supposed to become the author’s “sympathizer” (see the beginning of Alexandr Radiščev’s A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, 1790). The more complex motivation for changes in a character’s destiny leads to extensive use of liminal narrative devices. Presentation of the story to come seeks to address the reader’s sentiments. This can be seen with narration in Ippolit Bogdanovič’s Dušen’ka (1775–1783), a burlesque poem whose aim is less to recreate ideal works such as Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (ca. 170) and Jean de La Fontaine’s The Loves of Cupid and Psyche (1669) than it is to present an original interpretation of them, often parodic. Coherence is meant to be imparted by encouraging the reader to figure out the author’s attitude toward the classical tradition, the narrative itself, however, remaining formulaic. Parodic effect appears when two formulas collide: first is the myth of Cupid (Eros) and Psyche, one of the most archetypical liminal plots; second is the Russian folktale, familiar to the Russian audience. The purpose of introducing these clashing forms is to help the reader “interiorize” the foreign story and interact with tradition. The poem abandons didactic discourse, replacing it with the discourse of compassion. Cohesion of the poem also corresponds with sentimentalist intentions. The heroine is named Dušen’ka (Russian for “a sweet soul”) instead of Psyche. In the poem, she is called by this name 236 times, while the expected pronoun “she” is barely used. Anaphoric index creates an effect of care and intimacy that emphasizes the lyrical nature of the narrative. There are also synonyms praising the heroine such as carevna (princess) or “Venus in a sarafan,” which highlight the double Greek–Russian mythological patterning. Those partiqular aspects of cohesion help establish interiorizing coherence. The poem often directly addresses the reader (“as the reader knows,” “the reader would imagine that”), which also helps to create a feeling of sentimentalist dialogue. The text constructs the image of a perfect reader who easily recognizes themes and emblems and, when doing so, can

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read the poem as a coherent whole. Metalepses and appeals to this image serve as hints for the actual recipient’s emotional perception. Nikolaj Karamzin was an important innovator in the history of Russian literary prose. His works abandoned the formulas found in folktales and do not force a normative interpretation on the reader. The plot of Poor Lisa (1792) includes many standard devices and motifs (ruins of a monastery, love of theg outdoors, a seduced and abandoned female protagonist), but at the same time it often subverts the reader’s expectations. Toporov (1995, 82–83, 135) suggests that Liza’s suicide departs from the motifs of pastoral literature and that established associations with Liza’s name (in French comedies, Lizette was a typical name for a maid) deliberately contradict her actions in the story. Karamzin employs a liminal intrigue based on character development: Erast, Liza, and even nature and the narrator all undergo their own “rites of passage.” The reader is meant to impart coherence by sharing the narrator’s sentiments. Compassion is based on the “affects” of the plot that set the mood of each episode. The events of the story are outlined with only a few details that help to shape the reader’s perception of an episode. In addition to typical plot patterns, coherence is built around the psychological motivation of the characters. This does not make the literary conventions disappear, though. Liza, the peasant girl, still talks like the educated heroine of a romance novel; she is never depicted doing hard peasant work outside of occasionally selling beautiful flowers. To sum it up, in eighteenth-century literature, coherence in narrative is laid out by authors and received by readers in accordance with previously established patterns (fabulas), usually drawn from European examples. An event is not narrated as a part of life experience but is presented as a finished product, a literary convention for the reader to recognize. During the period of sentimentalism, authors actively developed new methods of building up cohesion and coherence. Devices of cohesion, aside from their role in connecting words and sentences together, acquire artistic purposes. The leading factors of cohesion are various textual repetitions. As for the plot, external focalization plays a major role: key details help to link together characters’ inner feelings, descriptions of landscape, and readers’ sentiments. Coherence is manifested not only in the fabula itself but also in engaging the readers’ narrative interest. The readers’ “affects” are organized through the extensive use of “authorial intrusions,” appeals to the addresse of a narrative.

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3 Early Classical Literature In the years from 1801 to 1840, romanticism became a prominent tendency in Russian literature. Romantic literature finds a new basis for constructing the narrative event as narratives focus more and more on the problems of human personality. Characters become “the center of value” (Baxtin [1919/1921] 1986, 59–63) of the depicted world. For example, many readers of Romantic poems sought to explore the persona’s mind and perceived such a character as the author’s double. Coherence thus began to depend on biographical context, literary fashions, the author’s public image, and popularity. Emphasis on characters’ personalities leads to a more complex depiction of their speech. Non-cohesive speech patterns may showcase a character’s physical or mental illness or eccentric forms of speech. For example, the narrator of Nikolaj Gogol’s Memoirs of a Madman (1835) writes entries in his diary under nonsensical dates like “Marchember 86th”; Akakij Akakievič in “The Overcoat” (1841) “mostly spoke in prepositions, adverbs, and, lastly, such parts of speech as have no meaning whatsoever.” Coherence in narrative can be achieved through the reader’s empathy toward a character. Readers become interested in a fictional narrative not because they crave for variants of a traditional fabula, but rather because they can witness new “heroes of their time” becoming the driving force of a new type of plot. This type of plot, known in Russian criticism as “sjužet-situation” (Pinskij 1989, 326), primarily correlates with the main character’s personality and worldview: events start to be connected following the inner logic of the narrative instead of outer factors. Distancing itself from canonical models, the intrigue is now based on original configurations of episodes. The reader of a story focuses less on typical sequences of events (motivated by the fabula) and more on features (added by its author and that are unique to a particular story). One of the dominant forms of the Romantic era was the literary cycle, as in Puškin or Gogol. Grouping individual stories into a cycle foregrounds the receptive potential of “double” coherence: in relation to the overall plot of a cycle, the plots of individual stories serve as “macro-episodes.” For example, each short story in Aleksandr Puškin’s The Belkin Tales (1831) is both a separate work and part of a larger whole. What unites those short stories is above all the relations between the voice of the implicit narrator of each story and the voice of the explicit narrator – the “deceased” Belkin: the former acts as an ironic or humorous part of the narrative while the latter fills the role of a serious, melodramatic narrative instance. As stated by Tjupa, the plot of each short story and the whole cycle can be read both as a “parable” and an “anecdote.” Paradigmatic integrity (same motifs, details, and

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metatropes) also becomes essential, helping the reader to establish connections between different stories and view them as a whole (Tjupa 1989, 13–32). Narratives of early classic novels have their episodes form narrative sequences that suggest an even stronger unity. Puškin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (1825– 1833), is described by the narrator as a “collection of pied chapters,” but the events actually have inner narrative motivation and do not simply follow the fabula of a “rite of passage.” Jurij Čumakov calls Eugene Onegin “the novel of open possibilities” (1999, 18). For example, аfter Lenskij’s death, the narrator presents several alternative versions of his fate (fame as a poet or an “ordinary lot”). The reader of Eugene Onegin is expected to impart coherence in response to significant contradictions in story progression and continuity, ellipses, and unspoken words (some verses and stanzas are literally cut short and replaced with dots), mentions of various possibilities of plot development, and the open ending. Mixail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time (1838–1840), a collection of short stories, takes a new look at the adventurous intrigue. Lermontov intentionally loosens the coherence of his narrative. The parts are structured in a non-chronological way: we learn about Pečorin’s death and follow Maksim Maksimyč’s point of view long before having a chance to read Pečorin’s own journal. Such a narrative structure provokes the reader to uncover Pečorin’s true personality. The search for coherence is intensified due to the gaps left in the continuity of events. To fill those gaps, readers can no longer utilize their familiarity with a given universal narrative model and its exploits; rather, they use their imagination in order to complement the inner motifs of the storyworld. Lack of formal global coherence (timeline disruptions, missing backstories, and explanations of characters’ actions) is compensated for with some episodes having more than one semantic layer. The symbolic context of adventure is represented in the metaphors and in situations of acting, directing, and performing tricks (see the episode of Apfelbaum’s magic show). The novel’s key episodes, however, have an adventurous intrigue followed by the liminal one, as the previously listed metaphors are progressively accompanied by metaphors of death. In both novels, coherence is achieved through disruption of the narrative. Coming across an informational gap, the reader uses his/her imagination to fill them so as to bring the disrupted pieces into correlation. Nikolaj Gogol’s prose poem Dead Souls (1842) also features an adventurous plot with a second semantic layer. Čičikov’s journey is based on a cumulative model of the picaresque plot, but this model is made more complicated by adding another principle of coherence. Beneath the poem’s “mirage intrigue of adventure” (Mann [1993] 1996, 161–162) told by the narrator, another intrigue is hiding – an intrigue of necessity (or a parable-like plot) based on recreating the motifs of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1320). Gogol intended his narrative to be perceived in the light of

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a well-known European cultural model: readers are expected to see through Čičikov’s adventures and recognize them as the journey through Hell to (as planned for unfinished later volumes) Purgatory and Paradise. Thus, this intertextual connection is meant to shape the coherence of the narrative by means of expanding the referential field of its signs. To sum up, narrative coherence in the early classical period is based not on external factors but on the author’s own designs that develop and complicate traditional models. The sjužet-situation and the author’s own arrangement of episodes replace typical fabulas. The importance of single episodes grows, providing the intrigue with new layers of meaning. Outer coherence of the narrative can be deliberately disrupted, but in such cases, it is compensated for by semantic coherence which exists at the level of the episodes’ configuration. In spite of formal inconsistences, readers view classical narratives as highly coherent by perceiving the authorial instance as a “core value” of narrative.

4 Late Classical Literature The primary trend of late classical Russian literature (1840s–1890s) is to develop the biographical structure of the plot. To describe that form, Natan Tamarčenko (1997, 198) coined the term “inner measure,” the development of the world inside the character and through the character. That is why Russian realist novels employ a type of plot that links the character’s experience of the events to the reader’s existential experience. Ricoeur claims that without “the life-world of the reader [. . .] the signification of the literary work is incomplete” ([1983–1985] 1984–1988, 2:160). The end of the story becomes less important than the way events follow one another. As before, non-cohesive elements can be used to depict a character’s unique speech patterns. These elements start to appear in works bearing various aesthetic orientations. Mixail Saltykov-Ščedrin’s satirical novel The History of a Town (1870) features a governor who has a music box for a brain and answers all questions with either “I’ll not have it!” or “I’ll break you!” Such pieces of non-cohesive speech reflect the novel’s grotesque aesthetic modality. A different principle can be found in Lev Tolstoj’s Anna Karenina (1877). In one well-known episode, Levin reveals his love to Kitty by writing the initial letters of various words with a piece of chalk. To Kitty, however, it is a perfectly coherent and understandable confession. What appears to disrupt cohesion actually turns out to be part of the idyllic aesthetic modality.

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Classical narratives are dominated by coherence based on the biographical plot in which the author highlights critical, transitional states in the character’s life. As Baxtin ([1929] 1999, 149) observed, crucial events in Dostoevskij’s Crime and Punishment (1866) usually take place “on the threshold” (doorways, staircases, etc.) where crises occur, at which point the character’s life takes unexpected turns. In late classical narratives, coherence is formed not through utilizing already established literary conventions and clichés but through proclaiming the “verisimilitude” (Markovič 1975, 70) of situations and characters depicted in the narrative. Realistic situations tend to call out to the reader’s own life experience. During this period, character development and evolution become a major factor of text coherence. The narrator often has knowledge of a character’s background and the outcome of his or her story. Therefore, endings and epilogues tend to play a vital role, as they focus on how the initial situation is resolved. An emphasis on verisimilitude leads to the events of the diegetic world being highly detailed and to portrayal of the characters’ interior life. The first sentence of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) describes the clothes and appearance of one of the main characters, Nikolaj Kirsanov. However, the narrator then claims that this is not enough for an objective picture of Nikolaj. “While he is sitting there with his knees drawn under him [. . .] the reader may care to become better acquainted with his personality.” The intrigue is crafted in such a way that the recipient enters the story following the narrator’s perspective. The narrator adopts the position of witness, and the authorial instance is excluded from the depicted world. The sheer quantity of detail in the episodes causes them to grow in length (an episode may take a whole chapter) and to be more independent, becoming a unit of coherence not only at the structural (formal) level but also as a unit of meaning. Since late classical narratives strive to achieve the effect of “truthlikeness,” the structure and coherence of each episode is isomorphic to the structure and coherence of the entire narrative. The focus shifts from formal markers of narrative coherence (beginnings, complications, culminations, denouements, etc.) to the representation of uncertainties and possibilities that are inherent to each key episode. The leading role of an episode can be explained if we take into account that in classical Russian narratives, a depicted event always contains an array of potential possibilities for future plot development (as in real life, we do not know the outcome of every event). For example, in the first episode of Dostoevskij’s Crime and Punishment, the narrator gives Raskol’nikov a chance to renounce his plans by saying that he walked “slowly, as though in hesitation.” The plot becomes multifaceted, containing several climaxes at once. The role of turning points is taken by differently structured episodes, including supposedly non-essential ones.

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Coherence between episodes in classical Russian narratives influences the reader at the aesthetic level. This is due to the fact that the processes of reception and interpretation imbue some episodes with a “semantic aura.” This occurs as the recipient’s mind connects episodes containing various semantic repetitions and collects them into personal “ensembles” (e.g., Raskolnikov’s dreams or watching the sky in Tolstoj’s War and Peace, 1865–1869). The prominence of episodic coherence leads many readers to perceive classical Russian literature as a never-ending sequence of dueling, dancing, hunting, going to the theater, and so on. The coherence of artistic impression is so important for classical literature that it is often made explicit at the metanarrative level. Metaphors of coherence do not appear only in introductions or in commentaries (as in Trediakovskij during the eighteenth century): they are interwoven into the main plot. For example, in War and Peace there are certain episodes whose connectedness is borne out through metaphors of the “thread of life.” In the early episodes of Tolstoj’s novel, Anna Šerer is compared to “the foreman of a spinning-mill.” In the final episode of the first part of the epilogue (which ends the narrated part of the novel), Nikolen’ka sees in his dream that the threads holding him and Pierre together “became droopy and tangled.” This series of metaphors not only references the European mythological code of the Fates and the thread of the plot, but also highlights the main theme of Tolstoj’s narrative: the unity between the individual and the universal. Overall, the problem of chance, crucial for the adventure plot, is minimized in classical novels. In the biographical plot, choice depends on a character’s personality, but realization of a given possibility is by no means inevitable. The dominant form of coherence also changes slowly as readers turn from set thinking to thinking about the possibilities of the story and the potential development of events. Plot becomes probabilistic, since an event, according to Ricoeur, “is what could have been done differently” ([1983–1985] 1984–1988, 1:97). In early classical works, the symbolism of events is deepened by the intention of both the narrator and the abstract author. In late classical works, the dissociation between the layers of the intrigue is less evident (not counting unreliable narration), which allows the narrative to create an illusion of verisimilitude.

5 Anton Čexov and Postrealism Anton Čexov’s prose holds a special place in the history of Russian literary fiction. His works transform the classical principles of coherence while at the same time they foreshadow many future developments of the twentieth century.

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Čexov’s narratives focus on lack of communication, for his characters frequently misunderstand each other (see Stepanov 2005). At the level of presentation of narration, this problem is depicted via non-cohesive character speech, related, for example, to grammatical and semantic inconsistencies (see, e.g., “At Christmas Time,” 1900, where a drunken clerk writes an incomprehensible letter). Čexov’s short story “The Book of Complaints” (1884) contains what are perhaps the best-known examples of playing with grammatical cohesion in Russian literature. This story resembles a list of miscellaneous entries written down by railroad passengers in the complaints book at the station. Many entries contain jokes or mistakes, one of them becoming an iconic depiction of a dangling participle in the Russian language: Подъезжая к сией станции и глядя на природу в окно, у меня слетела шляпа (Approaching the station and admiring the scenery, my hat blew off; trans. Vasilina Orlova); Čexov “constructed this phrase in order to mock [. . .] a rude stylistic mistake” (Orlova 2016, 95). But violations of cohesion do not make the text incoherent. Coherence is restored in the very process of reacting to the humor: readers who are familiar with the standard grammatical rules will be quick to spot the absurdity of the misconstructed sentence, finding it comical. Čexov’s prose also explores semantically ambiguous events, as evidenced by the presence of open endings and the lack of authorial judgment with regard to the characters’ actions. In Čexov studies, events (both external and internal) are seen as problematic (Schmid 1992; 1998, 263–294). Čexov’s narrators do not possess the qualities of being the supreme instance for imparting coherence to the story; this role is reserved for the reader. Narrators and characters always perceive events differently, leaving readers to form their own opinions. The so-called uneventfulness in Čexov’s prose is actually an eventfulness of a new kind in which the event takes place inside the recipient’s consciousness, and it is here that semantic ambiguity is resolved (Tjupa 1989, 13–32). It can be concluded that narrative coherence is dependent on reader perception and on the contexts that shape his or her views of the narrative. The intrigue’s scope of reference broadens out in several directions as the narrative becomes more paradigmatic. Schmid (1998, 242–262) describes the system of poetic “equivalences” in Čexov’s prose such as phonetic and alliterative devices, anagrams, and rhythmicity. The intrigue appears to be more concentrated as the full-fledged episodes typical of classical novels are reduced to micro-fragments. A highlighted detail becomes the essential device of artistic meaning (Tjupa 1989, 32–58). Contrary to “truthlike” narratives, the reader feels the rhythm of the whole story and its construction. He is influenced by the configuration of the intrigue as a whole instead of by the long individual episodes typical of the classical period. Čexov’s artistic discoveries inspired Russian authors to search for ways of making plots more paradigmatic. This can be seen in the way the plot and the story

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of Ivan Bunin’s “Light Breathing” (1916) deliberately contradict each other (see Vygotskij [1965] 1971, 145–165). The words “lightness” and “breathing” (and their derivatives) are repeated in each episode, adding a poetic dimension to the story (see Žolkovskij 1994, 75–77). Symbolist narratives (in works by Valerij Brjusov, Fёdor Sologub, Andrej Belyj) radically complicated the configuration of intrigue. Following the concept of two-worldness (earthly existence vs. transcendent reality), the symbolists connect events and their mystical interpretation through the use of alliteration, allusions, and the rhythms of prose. Symbolists viewed the act of reading as a sacred ritual that can change both the reader and the world around him or her. Formal coherence is typically violated by symbolist narratives by means of disjointed storylines, character “doubles,” information gaps, and achronological narration. The true meaning of a symbol is never explained directly. All of this is meant to make esoteric readers seek deeper semantic coherence by employing their knowledge of symbolist aesthetics.

6 Ornamental Prose, Experimental Narrative The ornamental prose of twentieth-century authors (1910s–1930s) such as Andrej Belyj, Isaak Babel’, Evgenij Zamjatin, Boris Pilnjak, Alexej Remizov, and others develops new methods of narrative coherence. As stated by Schmid (2014), the main features of ornamental prose originate in poetry and poetic devices. Narrativity appears to be downplayed, and “it can go so far that no eventful story is formed at all [. . .] interrelations are no longer narrative-syntagmatic but only poetic-paradigmatic, produced in line with the principles of association, similarity, and contrast” (723). Coherence created by equivalency relations (opposition or similarity) between elements increases the importance of particular words and thematic complexes. Ornamental narratives demand active involvement by the reader. The reader is called on to focus less on the events of the story and more on the way they are being told. This kind of intrigue can be called intrigue of discourse, or intrigue of the word. For example, the linear plot of Andrej Belyj’s The Masks (1932; second volume of the novel Moscow) is undermined through the introduction of lyrical meditations and fragments of stream of consciousness. The weakened state of the formal coherence of events is accompanied by metaphors of actual dissociation, collapse, falling-off, explosions, and so on. The shattered state of the narration is also represented graphically:

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Isn’t Moscow a mirage? There is a pit underneath it; the province clings to the shell; the weight of the buildings would break that shell; Nikanor Ivanovič, and Eleonora Leonovna, and Titelev [. . .]  – would fall –  – into the pit!

In the case of Vsevolod Ivanov’s U (1934), even the title of the novel – the seemingly meaningless Russian letter У – requires additional semanticizing, prompting the reader to search for meaning in the narration and its representation rather than in the story itself. In addition, the novel begins with an apparatus of parodic annotations establishing the acratic nature of communication and undermining the novel’s coherence. The intrigue of U is cumulative, as it follows the model of a picaresque novel. However, knowledge of that model cannot help the reader to understand the story due to disruption of the coherence of the events (adventures). In the novel’s key episodes, the sound [u] (in Russian: [y]) plays a major role, shifting the reader’s focus from a referent (the events of the story) to connections between phonetic and thematic perception. For example, when describing the actions of Dr. Andrejšin (who is stuck at house number 42 due to certain circumstances) and Uncle Savelij (leader of the crooks living at that house), the narrator uses words with [u] in them more than seventeen times. The sound [u] even highlights a metaphorical loss of humanity – in one episode, singing characters look and sound like howling werewolves: если прислушаться, то это походило на волчий вой [. . .] выпадали все звуки и оставался один: «у. . . у» (If you listened closely, it would really sound like a wolf howl [. . .] every sound was dropped except one: “awooooo”; italics added). Experimental narratives of post-symbolism (1920–1950) tend to focus less on plot and more on metatextuality. Coherence is achieved not by the given arrangement of events, but by making the reader follow the creative process. In Konstantin Vaginov’s novel The Works and Days of Svistonov (1929), the titles of the chapters mirror the stages of the protagonist’s writing: “Silence,” “Search for Minor Figures,” “Tidying Up the Manuscript.” The author is considered the main instance of the text, while the narrator, who gets bogged down in his characters’ affairs, appears to be a false demiurge. This leads to a “trap of self-reference”: Svistonov keeps putting every bit of his reality (the city, its gardens, its people) into the pages of his novel until, in the final episode, he cannot escape this fate himself: “Svistonov entirely transferred to his creation” (see Žiličeva 2013). Vladimir Nabokov’s prose develops the most original ways of weaving plot and narration (intrigues of events and the intrigue of discourse) together. The continuity of events becomes multilayered, creating a sort of metapoetics (see Davydov 2004) as well as allusions and intersemiotic relations: the intrigues of Nabokov’s works incorporate various codes such as those of theater, cinema, chess, and entomology (see

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Dolinin 2004). The reader is thus forced into deciphering the elements of each episode. For example, a short story called “Torpid Smoke” (1935) simultaneously transforms Bunin’s term “light breathing” and Nabokov’s own metatexts: when describing a street in Berlin, the narrator mentions the Unknown Woman of the Seine, which is an allusion to Nabokov’s poem “L’Inconnue de la Seine” (1934). Nabokov’s own novel The Defense (1930) can be seen on the protagonist’s bookshelf. The finale of “Torpid Smoke” changes the protagonist (who is a poet) into a lyrical persona when poetic lines start intercepting the prosaic narration (a similar device will be used later in The Gift, 1938). Coherence may come about in a variety of ways: through knowledge about life in Berlin during the 1920s, through familiarity with Nabokov’s life and works, or through the ability to follow intertextual and mythological allusions. In sum, modernist experimental narratives explore polyvalent coherence, which means that the reader is at liberty to recreate the fictional world by various methods using different frames and patterns. Abandoning “truthlikeness,” narratives become text-centric, as life itself is perceived as text. Coherence is meant to be imparted through supporting the reader’s interest in the intrigue of discourse. The reader is called on to focus less on the events of the story and more on the way they are being told. A new way to arrange episodes is developed where, similarly to montage in cinema, a narrative sequence could be interrupted with practically anything. As opposed to the literature of realism, which employed non-cohesiveness as an attribute of a character’s speech behavior, in modernism non-cohesiveness often becomes a dominant feature of a narrator’s speech. Cohesion is often deliberately loosened. Texts typically violate language norms as well as the norms of visual design (intentional alterations in the text’s graphics and page layout, playing with letters and sounds). To reconstruct the coherence of the text, the reader becomes involved in the process of proactive reading.

7 Socialist Realism and the Years Since In Russian post-revolutionary literature, avant-garde works coexisted with other kinds of narratives. Social realist works, in particular, are characterized by simplification and an attempt to follow the ideal model reminiscent of the aesthetics of eighteenth-century classicism. Many scholars have noted that works of socialist realism follow the basic formula of the Russian folktale (e.g., Clark 2000, 256). In many cases, however, it is even more archaic. The narratives of socialist realism never really sought to intrigue their readers but instead addressed themselves to some superior instance. As opposed to creating any form of narrative interest, they always follow the

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typical model all the way back to the simple cyclical plot: lack – search – getting. For example, the plot of Alexandr Serafimovič’s The Iron Flood (1924) resembles the traditional myth of returning from the land of the dead. However, the model remains hidden, and coherence is imparted by episodes of political agitation. In the last episode of the novel, the army finally manages to make it to the homeland, but instead of resting, the collective body gets an hours-long political rally, “until the evening deepened.” The ritual of agitation after the return to the “Promised Land” feels like a report to some unknown supreme force. The act of creation is reproduced, sacrificing a person’s identity in the process. To achieve coherence, the narratives of socialist realism require the recipient to be in line with extratextual contexts: ideological values, propaganda clichés, current Party line, and so on. It should be noted that narrative intrigues of agitation were parodied throughout the whole Soviet period of Russian literature. In Ilja Ilf and Jevgenij Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs (1928), for example, Bender laughs while listening to a political speech at the opening of the tram line. In the final episode of Vladimir Vojnovič’s Pretender to the Throne: The Further Adventures of Private Ivan Čonkin (1979), the protagonist leaves the rally, escaping the world created by the discourse of power. However, both authors still turn to archaic forms such as cumulative intrigue and picaresque plot. Bender, like a baroque picaro, listens to “the squeaky Wheel of Fortune” (The Golden Calf, 1931). The character Čonkin is based on the folklore figure of a “wise simpleton”; his failure to comprehend the ideological norms undermines those norms in the eyes of the reader. He views propaganda as “devil talk.” In one episode, after hearing a list of words such as communism, fascism, the worker’s movement, and the peace movement, he adds another term: “‘Bowel movement!’ сried Čonkin, delighted that he, too, had remembered a devil word.” Mixail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (written 1928–1940, first published 1966–1967) and Pasternak’s Doctor Živago (1957) continue the experiments initiated by Russian symbolism and ornamental prose. Those novels were not available to the wider Soviet audience until the end of the period of socialist realism. As shown by Boris Gasparov (1993, 267), both works can be regarded as “palimpsests,” meaning that their coherence is multilayered and multileveled. The Master and Margarita includes three main storylines which contain episodes of different nature and, therefore, correspond with different intrigues. The Moscow chapters have two storylines: one focuses on comical events (Woland’s farcical “tests” for the Soviet people’s souls), while the other develops a romantic plot (Margarita and the Master’s love story). Fragments of the Master’s novel serve as an embedded narrative (the Jerusalem chapters), adding another storyline – the trial and crucixion of Jesus. Reflecting on global ethical (and religious) problems, the Jerusalem chapters form the “ontological” intrigue of revelation. The novel’s design

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encourages the reader to draw parallels between the two “sets” of chapters (as well as between Soviet reality and the time of Jesus) and eventually to perceive them as one coherent whole. In Doctor Živago, peripeteian intrigue plays a pivotal role. According to Tjupa, that intrigue, while not having any unremovable canonical stages, includes “peripeteian alternations of narrative parts that get the reader closer to or farther away from revealing a secret or understanding the purpose” (2013b, 88). Every episode contains a potential “spiritual secret” that could be “revealed,” and the revelation would depend on the reader’s views. There are approximately thirty-six episodes in which Živago steps out of the stream of life, acting as a mediating figure between historical and transcendent realities. He becomes delirious, observes nature, feels inspired, and writes his works; he prays, meditates, and symbolically takes on the roles of Hamlet and Jesus. Živago himself crafts his alternative biography in the form of journals and poems. Pasternak’s narrative has two levels of inner coherence: the structure of its peripeteian intrigue and the poetic overtones of its narration. Coherence is achieved through various poetic devices: anagrams, rhythmic sections, alliterations and assonances, short chapters similar to verse, anaphora, parallel syntax. Placing Živago’s poems in a separate chapter at the end makes it possible to read the novel recursively. In order to establish a true coherence between prose and poetry, the actor of the intrigue becomes a poetic persona, and the narrator’s speech is replaced by the poet’s prophetic voice (Žiličeva 2012, 2013). It is significant that Vasilij Grossman (Life and Fate, 1980) and Varlam Šalamov, while disapproving of Pasternak’s novel, explore the same aspect of plot coherence: episodes of the characters’ unmotivated transfiguration. The last short story of Šalamov’s literary cycle The Left Bank, “A Sententia” (1965), deals with the protagonist’s “spiritual recuperation” (Toker 2000, 160–161). A sudden thought about the word sententia – a word so distant from the crude speech of the Kolyma labor camp – causes the protagonist to experience a metaphorical rebirth. Overall, such plots depict the process of making the character’s own life narratives coherent. Finishing this process, the character starts (with the narrator’s support) to see a certain meaning in his life story: which stages of life were important, what the reasons behind the events are, what goals were reached, and what should be set. The reader is meant to share this revelation. The archaicist tendencies cultivated by socialist realism were subverted by creating peripeteian intrigues that enjoin the reader to partake of the revelation that resonates with their worldview and cultural background. Coherence comes as a result of an experience of “intense reading,” a journey through the vicissitudes of the narration itself (Baroni 2010, 211).

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8 Contemporary Fiction During the last third of the twentieth century, Russian fiction continued to follow the trends set by ornamental prose and post-social-realism prose. Narratives tend to shift focus from outer action (fabula) to narration and its representation: narrators’ speech often includes non-cohesive depictions of internal speech and stream of consciousness such as lack of proper paragraphing, violations of lexical and phrasal compatibility, and over-analyzing and reinventing mundane words and significant terms belonging to dominant discourses of past and present. In contemporary fiction, plot structure undergoes massive changes. Linear coherence of events is superseded by strategies of montage and collage where different kinds of episodes and embedded elements can be spliced to together freely. All of that makes it more difficult for the reader to impart coherence to the text: restoring semantic coherence clashes with formal incohesiveness and incoherence. The reader takes the position of a text’s co-creator. Devices such as suspense, cognitive dissonance, and shock are used to trigger that shift. Saša Sokolov’s novel A School for Fools (1976) is a striking example of a plot overtaken by the presentation of narration. Both initial and final situations of the plot refer to the beginning of the writing process. Right, but how to begin, what words do you use? Student so-and-so, allow me, the author, to interrupt your narrative again. The thing is that is time to end the book: I’m out of paper.

Individual episodes that can be distinguished in the unfolding of the discourse do not come together to form a plot in the usual sense of the word. Instead, the episodes are connected through “metamorphoses”: characters can be born out of assonances, alliterations, and onomatopoeia. For example, the name and the character of Veta Akatova (the schoolteacher) derives from the sounds of the words vetka akacii (acacia branch) and železnodorožnaja vetka (branch railway line). The same events keep repeating themselves again and again (talking with the deceased teacher Norvegov, meeting “a girl with an ordinary dog”) but each time are shown in a different light. The receptive aspect of the plot is constructed as a meditation on the events. However, personal remembrances are depicted as a part of cultural memory, and they become overshadowed by associative narration, intertextuality, and mythology. For example, the assonance between the Russian verb issjaknut’ (to run out) and the Japanese unit of measurement sjaku (shaku) foreshadows the episode of railway workers reading aloud Snow Country (1935–1937) by Yasunari Kawabata, a novel which begins at a railway station.

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The method of shifting the reader’s paradigm involves radically changing an interpretant. The reader is led to surpass the formal lack of cohesiveness and coherence and to find new ways to perceive the narrative while dismissing conventional ones. Contemporary fiction actively develops the intrigue of identity. On the one hand, the contents of the plot start to invoke the problems of nationality, gender, and age. On the other hand, the search for identity belongs to the field of characters: sequences of episodes are structured to represent the character obtaining his/her selfhood. The main character of Viktor Pelevin’s Čapaev and Void (1996) has to find out which one of his two identities (a decadent poet from 1918 or a mental institution patient from the 1990s) is actually real. When inconsistencies in the coherence of the events (obvious errors in continuity and contradictions in the timeline, conflicting descriptions of the same characters, changes between multiple points of view or even multiple languages) are encountered by readers, they become engaged in constructing their own interpretations of the events and may end up disagreeing with the author. It is a trademark of contemporary fiction that contemporary authors often act as readers, “challenging” famous works by creating “secondary texts” such as poetic and prosaic pastiches, centos (texts composed of parts of other texts; e.g., Tatjana Tolstaja’s “Sjužet”, 1991), remakes, and parodies (e.g., Vladimir Sorokin’s works). Contemporary authors retain and expand the modernist practice of exploiting the contraposition between cohesiveness and non-cohesiveness. Many narratives continue to be fragmented and discontinuous, to break the norms of speech, storytelling, and text’s visual design. Unlike those of modernism, however, narratives of the twenty-first century often treat the process of imparting coherence through characters reading and interpreting fictional narratives as an essential part of the plot. Professional readers including scholars, critics, or publishers often become main characters (novels by Andrej Ljovkin, Pelevin, Evgenij Vodolazkin, and others). Narratives often involve discussions of theoretical concepts important to Russian literary studies, such as Propp’s theory, semiotics, structuralism and poststructuralism, discourse theory, and so on. All these features are attested in the intrigue of interpretation. When episodes of interpretation (in particular, scholarly and critical) become interwoven into the intrigue, readers are invoked to compare their own methods of imparting coherence with the characters’ methods. Overall, while modernist narratives focus on the process of creating a text by the character, contemporary narratives urge their readers to read and understand them as a necessary part of establishing coherence.

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9 Conclusion Throughout the history of Russian literary narrative, the principles of coherence of events and strategies of linguistic cohesion have undergone significant development. In literary narratives of Petrine and early post-Petrine eras (1700s–1740s), as well as in Russian classicism (1740s–1770s), coherence in plot episodes is determined by external factors, since fictional texts followed the established models of fabula and plot. During the period of sentimentalism (1760s–1810s), another major factor of coherence is introduced in the form of programming the recipient’s reaction through a range of specific devices. Episodes are linked together by appeals to the image of the reader, thus serving as reference points for guiding the implied reader through the narrative. In Romantic and early classical narratives (1800s–1840s), сoherence is based on an author’s unique configuration of episodes and is built up as the reader gains insight into the character’s personality. An author’s overall design may include deliberate breaching of cohesion (such as depicting mental illnesses or abnormal speech behavior) and formal coherence (such as leaving out stages of the plot or breaking the timeline). The reader, driven away from reliance on the pre-made morals and sentiments, needs to actively participate in the process of imparting coherence. Later classical narratives (1840s–1890s) tend to focus specifically on verisimilitude. Coherence emerges as a set of events that could occur in a character’s life narrative in light of readers’ expectations formed by biographical, social, and cultural contexts. Narrated events now take on an air of probability. Breaks in cohesion serve as a way of depicting both the external and internal discourse activity of a character. Čexov’s prose transforms the classical principles of coherence. Long expanded episodes that recreate pieces of a narrated world in a “truthlikely” manner are replaced with more compressed and dynamic ones. Non-cohesive fragments are used to illustrate the failure of communication between characters. Incomplete fabulas (stories) or the indeterminate destiny of the characters point toward an “open work” where conceptual completion and the establishment of coherence between events is left for the reader to achieve. In twentieth-century narratives, artistic experiments take place in the act of communication with the reader. This is especially intense in avant-garde literature. The practice of loosening narrative cohesion is represented in various narrative tools (intentional alterations in the text’s graphics and page layout; inserting elements such as charts, pictures, etc; playing with rhythm, letters, and sounds). As a result, modernist narratives strive to attract the reader’s attention to the intrigue of

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discourse. Narration itself may become incoherent as timelines are broken, events are presented out of order, and actions lack motivation. The purpose is to force the recipient to react to disruptions of cohesion and coherence and thus to intrigue him by “how” the text is made and restoring coherence during the process of reading. Contemporary fictional narratives tend to violate linguistic cohesion so as to deconstruct dominant discourses (languages of power, classical and modernist literary styles). The coherence of postmodern narratives can be imagined as a structure with a dynamic (variable) center. Their plots are constructed in such ways that they deliberately allow for a seemingly endless multitude of interpretations. Emphasis is given to the intrigue of regaining identity and to the depiction of reading processes: the position of the reader is considered to be a function of the plot, so that professional readers (interpreters) often turn out to be the main characters.

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Tjupa, Valerij. 2015. “Ėtos narrativnoj intrigi.” Vestnik RGGU: Serija «Istorija, Filosofija, Kul’turologija, Vostokovedenie» 144:9–19. Toker, Leona. 2000. Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tomashevsky [Tomaševskij], Boris. (1925) 1965. “Thematics.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 61–95. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Toolan, Michael. [2009] 2014. “Coherence.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, 65–84. 2nd ed., Berlin: De Gruyter. https://www. lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/119.html (accessed 12 February 2019). Toporov, Vladimir. 1989. “Sklonenie na russkie nravy s semiotičestoj točki zrenija (Ob odnom iz istočnikov fonvizinskogo «Nedoroslja»).” Sign Systems Studies 855:106–127. Toporov, Vladimir. 1995. «Bednaja Liza» Karamzina: Opyt pročtenija. Moskva: Izdatel’skij centr RGGU. Villeneuve, Johanne. 2004. Le sens de l’intrigue; ou, La narrativité, le jeu et l’invention du diable. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Vygotsky [Vygotskij], Lev. (1965) 1971. The Psychology of Art. Translated by Scripta Technica Inc. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Žiličeva, Galina. 2012. “Metafory otkrovenija v narrative Doktora Živago.” Novyj filologičeskij vestnik 25:79–103. Žiličeva, Galina. 2013. Narrativnye strategii v žanrovoj strukture romana (na materiale russkoj prozy 1920–1950-x gg.). Novosibirsk: NGPU. Žolkovskij Alexandr. 1994. “Lёgkoe Dyxanie Bunina – Vygotskogo sem’desjat let spustja.” In Bluždajučšie sny i drugie raboty, 103–120. Moskva: Nauka, Vostočnaja literatura.

Anne Duprat

Sequence in French, Italian, and Spanish Literature (1500–1800) 1 Definition Sequence and sequentiality are central to all theories of narrative, generally understood to be the sequential representation of a sequence of events (Grabes 2014). The definition of sequence varies significantly depending on the nature of its constituents and on the minimum number of units necessary to form a sequence (for an overview, see Prince 2016; also Sternberg 2010). Most narratologists postulate three steps for a sequence: beginning → middle → end, or equilibrium → disequilibrium → equilibrium, or initial situation → transformation → final situation (Bremond 1973; Phelan 2005, 18; Todorov 1973, 82). Genette considered one event to be sufficient to create a sequence: “as soon as there is an action or event, even a single one, there is a story because there is a transformation, a transition from an earlier state to a later and resultant state” ([1983] 1988, 19). As to the relation of consecution between units, this can be understood as a concrete linear succession of elements present in written, spoken, or visual narratives, or as the abstract series of elements essential to the existence of a plot – that is, as the set of elements needed to transition from an initial state of equilibrium to a final state of equilibrium while going through a transformation (Todorov [1971). In the final analysis, “conceptualizations of narrative sequence can be linked either to the chronology of the events, to its reorganization by the narrative representation, or to the interplay between these two sequential dimensions” (Baroni 2016, 1–2). It is when moving from the order of the narration to the order of the narrated that the passage from sequence to consequence takes place. Following Sternberg, Kafalenos describes this operation, indispensable to the proper working of narrative, as a passage between two sequentialities and two temporalities: the temporality of the telling and the temporality of the told (Sternberg 2001, 117; Kafalenos 2006, 2–3). Starting from the order of events as they are enunciated, the reader/listener reconstitutes the succession of events as they are linked together at the level of the told. It is in the course of this reconstitution that causation is attributed to succession. Consecution, as it occurs in the abstract construction of the fabula, is thus not only temporal but also causal, with each element in the series being linked as antecedent to its consequent(s). Such a construction can proceed correctly or fallaciously: a post hoc ergo propter hoc reading consists in intuitively inferring a causal relation from the mere consecution of events as they unfold in the narrative sequence (see Pier 2008). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-022

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The shift from sequence as the linear ordering of events to consequence determines how one makes sense of a narrative. It is for this reason that sequence is sensitive to the evolution of the forms and cultural uses of narrative. The explanatory value assigned to narrative in a given historical period is dependent on how the attribution of consequence to sequence is understood and theorized, for it is in the course of this operation that the system of values underlying narrative as an instrument of knowledge is determined. In Western European vernacular literature, between the early modern period and the eighteenth century, the evolution of the explanatory value of narrative constructions is greatly affected by the rise of writing, reading, and interpretative practices that are specific to secular or profane narratives and that enter increasingly into competition with the older rhetorical and exegetical frameworks initially designed for sacred narratives. In the following pages, these developments will be examined on the basis of three fundamental constituents of narrative discourse. Representation (section 2.1). The promotion during the sixteenth century in Italy of new poetic and rhetorical categories of narrative that differ from those of biblical exegesis enhanced the capacity of secular forms of narration (especially literary fiction) to represent the world in a realistic and evidence-based way in contrast to the hitherto predominant model of sacred narrative. Author/narrator (section 2.2). The rediscovery of classical fictions (epic, tragedy, Lucianic stories, satire, Hellenistic romances), strongly marked by the intervention of the author in the ordering of the narrated facts, competes with the model of Holy Scripture, bound to the interpretation of narrative sequences as immutable and significant in themselves, since they are part of a revealed text. As the forms and strategies of narrative became more secularized, the succession of narrative utterances was increasingly conceived as the contingent result of the choices made by an author – whence the growing importance of the interplay between two sequentialities that marks the construction of the meaning of narratives in the modern period. Reader/listener (section 2.3). The reader’s participation in the reconstitution of the relationship between narrative sequence and consequence (of events) through the interplay of suspense-driven prospection and curiosity-driven retrospection is increasingly theorized and commented upon. The emergence, from the sixteenth century on, of new conceptions of fictional immersion and of the exemplarity of fictions (novels, short stories, theater), characterized by narrative tension, contributes to the staging of a world that has become uncertain and whose working logic is left to the reader to fathom. Together with the evolution of these constituents, the causal setting that underlies how readers and listeners understand and interpret narratives changes for the

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same reasons. This evolution is linked to the secularization of the frame of reference and to changes in the types of causality attributed to narratives (section 3). Thus, the differences between naturalistic and supernatural causality, which were compatible with each other in the narratives of the Renaissance and during the classical period, gradually solidified into an opposition that was not to become predominant in the treatment of narrative causality until the Enlightenment (section 3.1). The emergence at the beginning of the eighteenth century of narratives employing unconventional metafictional or random forms of causality, characteristic of a non-providential understanding of the world, appears as one of the results of this transformation (sections 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4).

2 Evolution of the Three Constituents of Narrative Discourse (1550–1650) In the early modern period, narrative theories that accompanied the literary works of the Renaissance took form progressively as a result of combining the rhetorical teachings of the medieval scholastic trivium with the principles of narrative poetics taken from Horace, the Latin grammarians and rhetoricians, and a number of Neoplatonic texts. In addition to these sources, Aristotle’s Poetics was rediscovered in the mid-sixteenth century and was widely interpreted and adapted to Christian literary works, first in Italy, then in France and Spain. Early modern narrative poetics allowed for the passage from the sequence of actions as stated in the uttered sequence (verba) and the logical construction of the story told (res), thanks to the theorization of an intermediate structure between the two: the fable (fabula/favola), adapted from the μῦθος of Aristotle’s Poetics. The principle of muthos, already assigned by the Latin grammarians to the treatment of narrative texts or texts containing narrationes (stories, tales, poems, plays, romanzi, epics), made it possible to identify the plot and analyze the differences between the artificial order of the events as they are related in narrative and the natural order in which the events purportedly occurred. At the same time, it opened up the possibility of commentary on the disparities between the two orders and their explanatory value. This development, which was to become central to the poetics developed in Italy, France, and to a somewhat lesser extent Spain, paved the way toward a narrative logic that was peculiar to profane narrative, a logic that, in its quest to elucidate the Book of the World, was to compete progressively with the logic of Sacred Scripture.

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2.1 Representation The narrative poetics formed during the second half of the sixteenth century was initially dependent on a formal and synthetic conception of the plot. The text was viewed spatially, in a way comparable to classic semiotic narratology: sequences were seen as a minimal group of motifs taken from the corpus of classical texts that can be combined with others to form the overall design of the action. Needless to say, such a sequence, especially when there is only one, will follow the trinary schema set out in section 1 above. The sequence can be understood as such, even when it does not unfold temporally, whether through telling or reading. It must be pointed out that this poetics initially served to model representation and explanation of the world as portrayed in secular narratives (tales, romances, epics, theatrical representations) along the lines of Holy Scripture in an essentially synthetic and semiotic manner, not as a temporal process. This can be observed in the images frequently used to describe narratives: imitations, mirrors, reflections or shadows, to mention only those framed in a Platonic vocabulary. Initially, Aristotle’s Poetics, which defines plot and spells out a theory of literature used as a programmatic system of genres (most notably for tragedies and epic poems), was interpreted the same way. Commentaries in Italian and in Latin (Robortello [1548] 1968; Maggi and Lombardi [1550] 1969; Castelvetro [1570] 1978–1979; Heinsius [1611] 2001) consider the definition of plot in the Poetics as a finished and organic whole, not as the product of an utterance situated in time or an interpretation by the reader/listener that comes about gradually. Plot, which gives life to narrative and is its organizing principle, must be a globally logical structure in order to seem like a credible imitation of the world. Between 1550 and 1610, theoreticians translated and commented on the important passages of the Poetics that define the bonds of probability (τὸ ἐικός) and necessity (τὸ ἀναγκαῖον) that organize the presentation of events in the muthos (ὁ μῦθος; Aristotle [1895] 1951, 1450b–1451b). From these principles they derived the idea that the purpose of narrative was to reveal the existence of a natural causality which is already at work in the world as described by the story but hidden under the tumult of phenomena presented chronologically. In the traditional rhetorical exercise in which the tasks of the chronicler and the poet are compared, the assertion by the Poetics that poetic narratives are somewhat more philosophical (φιλοσοφώτερον) than chronicles because they do not report on what has been, but on what is possible, was particularly useful (1451b5). The poet was to create perfectly structured plots that would reveal the true nature of human acts by showing the consequential (significant) order at work beneath the phenomena. Paul Ricoeur ([1985]) would later return to this essentially early modern way of configuring the narrative text by introducing the principle of mise en intrigue (emplotment), which

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he examines in detail. In contrast, history simply lists events in sequential, chronological order in successions that are not significant. Because of this difference, new epistemological theories of secular fiction were formed (Duprat 2009, 20–25; 2011). Narrative logic during the Renaissance was based on the idea that secular narrative justifies its own existence from the moment it contributes to the revelation of meaningfulness in the world, whether the meaning has providential overtones or not. Technically speaking, this is why narrators of this period emphasize in their prefaces the second of the three phases of literary composition: inventio, dispositio, elocutio. The creation of perfect plots involves the reorganization of chosen events so that their narrative succession, even if it is not chronological, indicates their natural causal link in the world. This logic can be observed in Torquato Tasso’s epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata (1581), in which the battle between Christian knights, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, and the Saracens to end the siege of Jerusalem in 1099 is recounted. The events that take place in this narrative are combined with two other narrative threads (the love of Tancredi and Clorinda and the love of Rinaldo and Armida) in such a way that they do not simply alternate from one to the other, but form part of the main plot. The essential point is the construction of an overall plot that expounds the triumph of unifying volition over dissident forces. The underlying causal structure can be read in several different ways: the actions of the characters can be interpreted on a human, microcosmic scale (human deeds contribute to the accomplishment of just acts), on a historical scale (the Christian armies overcome their internal disagreements to liberate Jerusalem), or on a macroscopic scale (humanity conquers the heavenly Jerusalem). Such polysemic structures made it possible for some of the great idealistic and allegorical novels from 1600 to 1630 to elude censorship by setting out a variety of competing levels of interpretation of a story, none of which are explicitly forced on the reader as the right one. Thus, in the Heliodoran novel Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1616) by Cervantes, the story can be understood as referring to a number of possible scenarios. Two heroes, disguised under false names (Periander and Auristela) during the first half of the book, travel dressed as pilgrims from the realm of Thule to Rome. The sentimental adventures around which the journey is constructed constitute the first level of meaning in the story, which can thus be read as an idealistic love novel: separated lovers seek to find one another again; once reunited, they continue their voyage together, culminating in marriage and royalty. The steps along the way can also be understood as those of an initiatory pilgrimage in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation: from North to South, from darkness to light, from the world of paganism to the world of Roman Catholicism. For the cultivated reader of the early seventeenth century, however, the novel can also be read as a plea for an enlightened Christianity insofar as it represents a political alliance

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between Spain and France as something desirable. Finally, it can be understood as a scientific allegory exalting the perfection of the heliocentric system emanating from a numerical symbolism based on the constellations and decipherable in the numbering of the parts and the chapters (Nehrlich 2005). Whether intentionally or not, early modern narratives were conceived of as unveiling the inner workings of causal relations already present in the world, since it was considered that human languages could not create something that did not exist already (Tasso 1585). This is why fictional narratives could represent a legitimate form of reasoning in which sequence turns into consequence. Many early modern poets inferred from this a concept of narrative in which the plot sets itself up as an organizing principle, standing between the order of discourse (verba) and the order of the world (res) so as to reveal its underlying structure. Classification of the degrees of necessity that bind the actions of the perfect plot together (the tighter, the better) derives directly from this idea of plot. Plot should be mimetic in the metaphysical, not in the realistic sense: the story should not simply imitate the succession of events as they occur in the world, for this succession is understood as fundamentally absurd. Rather, it is the logical concatenation that establishes their truth that must be emphasized. This revelation leads to surprise, admiration, lamentation, and the overall aesthetic effect of the narrative. This is how the paradox taken over from Aristotle’s Poetics by authors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be explained: not only is it possible but interesting to introduce an unexpected event into an otherwise verisimilar narrative (1452a1). The purpose of the narrative art was thus to invest such events with a cause of their own, hidden in the order of succession of phenomena in the real world. Narrative dynamics, until at least the eighteenth century, sought to emphasize a causality that pre-existed in the world. Though subjective chance is to be found everywhere in baroque and neoclassical fictions, objective chance in literature comes into its own starting in the eighteenth century (Richardson 2005, 51). The way theoreticians of the sixteenth century interpreted tragic error, of which the plot of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex was, according to Aristotle, the perfect example, is typical of this reappropriation. In the context of Counter-Reformist Catholic theater, tragic error became a moral or religious error, knowingly committed by the character; divine punishment was understood as the just retribution for this transgression.

2.2 Author/Narrator As already mentioned, the secularization of narrative forms that accompanied the development of vernacular literatures, first in Italy, then in France and Spain, during the sixteenth century was accompanied by a questioning of the exemplarity

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of Sacred Scripture based on what was considered to be the self-evident interpretation of narrative sequences. For instance, in the example given by Forster ([1927] 1962, 93), “the king died and then the queen died” would constitute a plot in a sacred text rather than a mere story, even without any mention of a causal relationship between the events: “the queen died of grief.” Exegesis is employed to spell out the causal relationship that is implicitly built into the fixed narrative sequence of the revealed text. By contrast, in the classical grammatical and rhetorical tradition taken up by the artes poeticae during the 1550s in Italy, profane literary works are understood as the product of an orator’s eloquence, and consequently their causal organization is dependent on authorial intervention from beginning to end. This conception has its rhetorical origins in narratio as a part of discourse, borrowed by Renaissance theorists from the grammarians of Antiquity (Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, 1473; originally from the first century CE) and from Horace (Ars Poetica). As an element of the rhetorical arts, narratio is part of the argumentative structure of discourse, serving as an instrument of persuasion even when it is used for entertaining an audience. Its truthfulness is upheld by the good faith of the orator who, whether speaking fictively or in seriousness, seeks to enhance his argument. Narrator and author are not distinguished, and the discourse of the orator who tells the story ensures smooth passage from sequence to consequence as the storyteller rolls out a series of facts. In this way, a narrative serves as both testimony and demonstration. This is the dominant model in the genre of the collection of stories consisting of a narrative frame and multiple narrators, widely developed in Renaissance Europe. The genre began with Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348) and Chaucer’s Canterbury’s Tales (ca. 1390), and continued into the sixteenth century with Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (1559), Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554, 1574), and Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio’s Ecatommithi (1565). This genre can be characterized as an entertaining exchange of tales among the persons present. Conversation among the storytellers as they present and comment on their and others’ narratives can take up more or less space within the tales or between them, but their presence remains a key factor even when the frame narrative or cornice remains rudimentary. Here, the choice of stories is attributed to the storytellers themselves, who can either announce from the beginning what meaning is to be drawn from the stories or comment on it at the end. Significantly, these discussions were to become a salient feature of the genre during the sixteenth century, as is the case in Navarre’s Heptameron. The discussions are not commentaries on the technical operations carried out by the narrator on the arrangement of the material, but rather seek to identify the logic and meaning at work in the series of narrated actions, and this even though the characters themselves might not be aware of the significance of these actions.

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The strategies of auctorial narration are also prominent in the development of first-person narratives in France and England in the form of personal and epistolary literature as well as in the proliferation of life stories ranging from picaresque novels to romans-mémoires (1580–1750) and in the arrangement of episodic subnarratives embedded in a primary narration and told by secondary narrators (as in Mlle de Scudéry’s and Mme de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century galant novels). In all of these forms, the narrator is openly seen to be directing the passage from the apparently surprising chronological succession of events to the hidden logical structures that underlie and explain this succession. Narrative sequence in these works stands out as the product of the author’s intentions; pre-construction of the consequences – particularly when they are supported by commentary or prolepses – can be seen as essentially prospective. This is especially true of Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, originally included in Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité qui s’est retiré du monde (7 vols., 1728–1733). The entire story takes place after an initial prolepsis that reveals right from the beginning the unfortunate end of the adventure that is about to be told. The narrator meets the Chevalier des Grieux in Pacy and helps him out just as he is about to follow a convoy of prisoners, amongst whom is his lover, Manon, all the way to the Americas. Two years later in Calais, the narrator recognizes the same young man, back from his travels, who then proceeds to tell him the adventures that are subsequently recounted in the novel. Generally speaking, the different types of memoirs that develop at the end of the period favor a narrative logic that is weighted toward the end. This makes it more likely for the meaning of a destiny to stand out clearly. Even when the adventures themselves give great importance to chance happenings, their chronological succession is oriented toward the narrator’s present situation of utterance: the repentant picaro, now an adult female narrator in the memoir novel, or the minor character saved by the heroes in a classical novel.

2.3 Reader/Listener One of the most significant developments throughout the period, since it concerns practically all European literary genres from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century, is the growing prominence of the reader/listener/interpreter in the logical construction of narratives. At the outset of the period, literary interpretation was guided by biblical exegesis inherited from medieval theology and transposed to secular fiction, a hermeneutic strategy initially conceived during the early Italian Renaissance, notably in Dante’s Convivio (ca. 1305) and in Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium

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(ca. 1365). The aim was to apprehend a system of transcendent causality existent prior to its utterance, a system already at work in narrative. To read is to identify the deeper meaning to which narrative refers, a meaning brought to light thanks to the skills acquired from the practice of glossing Holy Scripture. However, the procedures employed for glossing religious texts encounter difficulties in the interpretation of works such as the Gargantua and Pantagruel cycle of novels by attempting to read them allegorically: the innovation of Rabelais’s strategy (especially in The Third Book, 1546) was precisely to openly mock and undermine the inherited hermeneutic framework. From the perspective of the arrangement of narrative sequences, this global hermeneutic model corresponds to the chivalric romance cycles of the thirteenth century along the lines of the French Lancelot-Graal type. Here, the elements of the plot are organized not chronologically but causally through a procedure of reciprocal implication. Plot does not advance temporally, one transformation following the other, but from antecedent to consequent, with each implication gradually completing the novelistic universe (Micha 1976, 78). In contrast to this atemporal narrative logic, and to the practice of reading as deciphering that goes along with it, the appearance in the mid-sixteenth century of romances structured around the reader’s linear progression through the text durably transformed this conception of narrative inherited from the chivalric cycles. Starting in the 1550s in Italy (Giraldi Cinzio’s Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, 1554; Giambattista Pigna’s I romanzi, 1554), and developed in France and Spain after the translation by Jacques Amyot of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica (1547), a narrative poetics emerged that sought to “instruct and delight.” This constituted an early sign of the premodern novel, a genre that stands in sharp contrast with the canonically Aristotelian genre of the epic. The pleasures of the narrative art arose out of the practice of continuous reading. Significantly, the narrative poetics that derived from reading marks a turn from the logical organization of plot toward narrative tension. In Spain, Alonso López Pinciano’s treatise Philosophía antigua poética ([1596] 1998) adapted the Aristotelian principles of plot (muthos), complication (desis), and denouement (lusis) to the novel. However, López Pinciano does not regard these principles as causal in nature, forming a just and logical disposition of actions, but rather as temporal and progressive: the fable is like a rope, it has a knot [complication] and a denouement; it has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so we tighten it, tighten it as much as we can, just like when someone is being tortured on the rack until he confesses – or doesn’t confess. But then we release the garotte. ([1596] 1998, 296)

This tension is likened to the experience of the reader, no longer an exegete but someone who interacts with the plot, reconfiguring the causal links as the sequence

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progresses. Whence the double imperative of narration in long novels: on the one hand, the plot must be easy to follow and not overwhelm the imagination or memory by containing too many actions or actions that are too complex; on the other hand, the reader’s interest must be maintained through the introduction of varied and original adventures. The two models of the sequential montage of narration that were to become dominant in novel-writing during the sixteenth century are as follows. (1) Episodic form, in which complication and denouement follow each other linearly in a succession that could potentially go on infinitely, both temporally and spatially. This is the form used by most adventure novels based on the model of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516). Ariosto popularized the technique known as intreccio, or braiding of narrative lines, in an entertaining sequel to Boiardo’s unfinished episodic novel Orlando Innamorato (1483). By alternating between the amorous adventures of Orlando, Angelica, and Rinaldo, the story of Bradamante and Ruggiero, and the fight between Charlemagne and the Saracens, the poet seeks to avoid wearying his readers by captivating their imagination. The first part of Don Quixote (1605) follows a similar model, as does the picaresque novel, starting with Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). (2) Implexa/involved form, which begins in medias res. The entire action of the novel is wound around that beginning, and the narrative will explain this initial situation by unwinding it all the way to its logical end. The different actions are all causally linked, but these links can only be revealed over time, so that the tension keeps building until the final denouement, where one or more recognitions occur. Contrary to the episodic narrative, where time is the carrier of events, with basically no spatial limitations, the itinerant or wandering novel creates a teleonomic time whose tension is never allowed to be released and that seems to lead toward a spatially represented, restrictive finality. (Molho 1999, 15)

This is the pattern established by the Hellenistic novel that emerged in all Western European vernacular languages following the French translation by Jacques Amyot of Heliodorus’s Hellenistic novel Aethiopica in 1547. This translation included a preface in defense of the new hedonistic use of secular reading by claiming it would help the reader acquire narrative skills that are explicitly described as a pleasant, recreational form of learning (see Plazenet’s 2008 commentary on Aethiopica). The Greek novel typically begins in medias res with an enigma. In Aethiopica, on a beach, a witness looks over the debris of a shipwreck and wonders how the passengers managed to survive. The first part of the novel follows a generally chronological order, with events leading up to the revelation of the identities of

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the characters midway through the story. This revelation occurs through a series of retrospective subnarratives and minor episodes embedded within the greater frame that ends with the separated lovers reunited. In the second part of the novel, a pilgrimage or quest, the couple resume their journey until they arrive at their destination, a temple or holy site and thus a symbolic place where they can finally perform the action (sacrifice, discovery, ordeal) that restores a final balance to the story. While a narrative dynamics of curiosity drives the first part, a dynamics of tension accompanies the reader to the end of the novel. Sequential construction can thus reach extreme levels of complexity. For example, in Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1615), the Heliodoran novel that Cervantes considered his masterpiece, the hero, Periander, prince of Thule (concealed under the name Persiles), tells the tale over the course of many chapters (as in The Odyssey) of his adventures at the court of the king Policarpus. His retrospective narrative moves toward the present while a separate, embedded, alternate narrative moves instead toward the past, that is, toward the initial situation of the novel, following the pattern of the “crab canon” (canon cancrizans; Molho 1999, 16). This complex composition did not weaken the passage from sequence to consequence. Quite the contrary, for it was designed to show the capacity of a highly crafted narrative to reveal the causal structure hidden away in the apparent chronological succession of phenomena. Formally speaking, the three types of sequence montage in narratives identified by Todorov (1968, 138) – linear succession of sequences (one event presented after another, as in the chronicle); alternative succession, in which the narrative follows in turn the parallel chronological evolution of several stories; and embedding, where a new sequence or a series of sequences uttered by one of the characters is inserted within the frame narrative – can all appear both in novels with episodic structures and in novels with complex structures. The lengthiness of these forms allows them to resort to a rhetoric of augmentation and ornamentation. The simpler episodic form is most often used by novels that strive to entertain the reader as their main objective (picaresque or burlesque novels). Technically more elaborate, the complex form is adopted mostly by learned allegorical novels (Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 1616), by French baroque adventure novels (Marin de Gomberville’s Polexandre, 1637; Mme de Lafayette’s Zaïde, 1671), and by the great pastoral novels with their elaborate digressions and embedded episodes (Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, 1607–1627; Madeleine and Georges Scudéry’s Artamène; ou, Le Grand Cyrus, 1649–1653). These works are considered to have a greater value because they require of their readers a more artistic sensibility and greater knowledge. The French précieux novels were able to maintain the epistemological dignity of the epic while at the same time employing a form that was compatible with the new curial and aristocratic customs of novelistic imagination.

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The development of narrative tension in lengthy novels between 1570 and 1650 was to engage the cognitive and emotional involvement of the contemporary reader, increasingly exposed to secular narratives. At the same time, in the theatrical arts, the creation of the rules of dramatic poetry during the last third of the sixteenth century in Italy (Robortello – [1548] 1968; Guarini [1611] 1914) and the implementation of these rules by poets and critics like Chapelain ([1624–1673] 2009, François Hédelin d’Aubignac ([1657] 2001), and Corneille ([1660] 2007) in French neoclassicism between 1630 and 1660 is predicated on the involvement of the listener/spectator in the represented fiction. For the action of a play to be believable, moving, and thus aesthetically pleasing, the spectators must feel immersed in the scenes acted out before them. In this way, they will be prompted to infer causal links in the series of actions – that render them at once necessary, logical, and surprising. From these links there emerge the unities of action, time, and place around which the plot of neoclassical theater is organized. By observing these unities, it was argued, the represented world is brought closer to the spectators’ experience, making it possible to better apprehend the laws that govern the world and the spectators’ experience of it (Duprat 2009, 310–325). As a general rule, the ideological value of narrative is dependent on reader/ spectator involvement in the represented world. French neoclassical poetics, when touching on the subject of fiction (histoires feintes), debated this quality, which its defenders sought to attribute to fiction and which was consistently attacked. Most of the arguments put forth in France between 1630 and 1670 in favor of fictions emphasized their cognitive value by praising their ability to teach narrative skills which the reader/listener/spectator can then apply to their social and moral behavior. Learning through literature, and particularly through the emotions elicited by fictional immersion, whose civilizing power was already promoted by Boccaccio during the first Italian Renaissance, acquires, in the sixteenth and particularly the seventeenth century, a political as well as a social and moral dimension. This cognitive value associated with narrative strategies depends on how the causality underlying reader response to narratives is conceived from the end of the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Whereas for readers of Boccaccio and of Italian and French novellas during the 1570s the interpretation of narratives was largely left to the individual reader, free to apply the lessons they conveyed to his personal experience of the world (Zanin 2022), the end of the sixteenth century saw a hardening of attitudes toward profane writings, their authors and their readers, held increasingly to strict religious and political orthodoxy. It is in the context of the wars of religion and of the birth of nation states in Europe, together with the growing number of accusations and trials, that the success of Aristotle’s Poetics, of the Italian academies from the 1570s to the 1630s, and of the French Academy up to the end of the seventeenth century

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is to be understood. On the one hand, the Poetics served as a means of defending actors in the literary field, protecting them from the direct violence of censorship by placing their writings under a competent authority that was exclusively technical and secular, responsible for the regulation and evaluation of narrative works. On the other hand, it also provided an instrument for collective and rational control over the meaning of these works. By postulating the necessity, for each wellmade narrative work, of a structure for linking events together logically – μῦθος (fabula) – the Poetics offered the means necessary for evaluating and judging works as well as for establishing the correct “lessons” they might contain for the lives of the readers and their understanding of the world. This explains the changes during this period in the types of causality that organize how of the events in a narrative are linked together in a logical way, thus shedding light on the workings of the world. The balance in these forms of causality changes noticeably during the seventeenth century due in particular to the progressive emergence of an increasingly sharp opposition between natural and supernatural forms of causality, as well as to the introduction of aleatory causality into the telling of stories.

3 Changes in Types of Causality (1550–1775) The “causal setting” of the narrative work, described by Brian Richardson as “the canon of probability that orders its fictional world,” involves four types of cause: naturalistic, supernatural, metafictional, and chance (2005, 48). Metafictional causality involves a causal link between narration and story. While this causal setting is particularly effective in narratives that come after the mid-eighteenth century, it must be adapted for narratives dating from earlier periods, notably early modernism.

3.1 The Emergence of Naturalistic vs. Supernatural Causality (1550–1775) In early modern French, Italian, and Spanish fictional narratives (novellas, tragedies, epic poems, romances, novels), naturalistic and supernatural causality are understood as intrinsically compatible, given that any conceivable natural causality is at the same time divine (Deus sive natura). The order of reality, characterized by the predictability with which material phenomena succeed one another in everyday experience, is not considered to be the exclusive frame of reference for

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naturalistic causality in a cultural environment in which a variety of universes of reference – magic and superstition, incompatible religious orthodoxies, divergent scientific models, and so on – share a bond with truth. The fact that miracles occur in violation of the normal material order of things is in itself naturalistic, for it was seen as a direct manifestation of the Divine Will as revealed in Holy Scripture. During the early Renaissance, the world of the transcendent held sway over the sublunary world, where the material order of things is illusory and deceptive. Within this framework, all frames of reference in narrative flow from the transcendent. This worldview stands out in Spanish, French, and Italian baroque theater from 1580 to 1630, as well as in the theater of Elizabethan England. It is also present in critical writings of the period. Increasingly, theater became a way to show the unreality of the material world and to highlight a transcendent world where the true meaning of the actions performed on stage plays out. Plots were thus designed in such a way as to show the different strata of represented worlds bound together through the progression of dramatic action. The error committed by many characters in the stories is to underestimate the influence of divine causality on human affairs. This explains the success of the motif of the self-fulfilling prophecy in dramatic literature during this period, as in Calderón’s La Vida es Sueño (1635). Conversely, the characters who succeed best are those who choose to ignore observable human causality and focus instead on divine causality. The genre of the comedia dos santos in Spain follows this schema closely. For early modern narratives, the distinction is therefore not between naturalistic and supernatural causality, but rather between ordinary and extraordinary causality. Moreover, these categories concern not only the logical organization of a given universe of reference, but also the sequential presentation of the narrative and the link between the telling and the told. It is these distinctions that are focused on by all theoretical debates as to the respective merits, epistemological legitimacy, and aesthetic interest of the merveilleux (either an extraordinary succession of ordinary events or a succession of extraordinary events) as opposed to the plausible (either probable and necessary successions of events or successions of probable and necessary events). This explains the singular status, during this period, of random causality, the existence of which is theoretically impossible in the Christian frame of reference governed by Providence. Within this framework, chance necessarily operates through the logical succession of the events of a story as a causality that remains unknowable to mortals but whose ultimate explanation exists at the transcendent level of the Divine Will. Fortune is blind, but only in appearance, for in truth, it is the instrument of Providence even though this may not be made explicit in the plot. When causality is not explicit, narratives may well contain random elements in the form of chance, meaning that actions are performed and events occur without any

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efficient cause. This practice was quite important, for example, in the genre of the tragic tale between 1530 and 1600 (Bandello, Boaistuau, Cinzio, etc.). Again, the narrative value given to random events, particularly in works dating from 1570 to 1630, even though it might be incompatible with the structure of the purported universe of reference, is relevant to the fundamental opposition between ordinary and extraordinary causality, the latter being a category that refers both to a choice of sequential organization made by the narrator and to the type of causality that organizes the fictional world itself. During the seventeenth century, this opposition had to compete with a new naturalistic form of causality that was limited to the nature of phenomena in the observable physical universe. Supernatural causality was seen as a counterpoint of natural phenomena and was defined by such phenomena – quite the opposite of the position entertained at the beginning of the period. This change emerged as the worldview of Western societies turned gradually from the Christian outlook on reality toward a view supported by, among other things, the empirical sciences. In his presentation of a mechanistic model of causality, Descartes, significantly, relied on the capacity of fictional narratives to persuade, which could compete with the scholastic models (see Cavaillé 1991). Historical accounts, scientific reports, travel narratives, memoirs, and other reality-based narrative forms increased in number throughout the seventeenth century, but so did fictional narratives. Many narrative genres typical of the last third of the seventeenth century (historical fiction, but also fairy tales) contributed to the gradual shift from the opposition between ordinary and extraordinary causality to the opposition between naturalistic and supernatural causality. This is so even though the latter opposition was not to come into its own as an effective category in narrative logic until the beginning of the eighteenth century, in particular with the emergence of the English novel, starting with Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and, later on, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749; Watts 1957). Much the same is true of metafictional causality, which results from the gap between the telling and the told. Its emergence, most obviously in Diderot’s and Sterne’s works, is possible only if a certain degree of stability of the border between the fictional and the metafictional is maintained: in order for the border to be transgressed, it must give the impression that it really exists. During the seventeenth century, such borders were still in the process of formation. In dramatic fiction, it was favored by French neoclassical playwrights who force the creation of fictional universes that are impenetrable to direct intervention by the playwright and his audience in the succession of actions. In narrative genres, it can be seen in the development of forms that exclude any direct communication between narrator and reader and favor instead an immersion that functions exclusively by proxy in the represented story. Throughout this period, however, these forms continued

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to compete with one another. Various conversational genres (scripted dialogues, précieux novels, narrative games, portrait galleries), interactive (street theater), and semi-fictional critical practices such as critical theater, as in the case of the many critical plays that followed the performance in 1663 of Molière’s L’Ecole des Femmes (including Molière’s own La Critique de l’Ecole des femmes and L’Impromptu de Versailles, Boursault’s Le Portrait du peintre ou la Contre-Critique de l’Ecole des femmes, and Robinet’s Panégyrique de l’Ecole des femmes ou Conversation comique sur les œuvres de M. De Molière), in which the interplay between the telling and the told is not considered particularly transgressive or metaleptic, show how porous the border still remains. The various types of causality employed in narratives from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century changed considerably. This evolution involved not only a profound transformation of worldview as the growth of the sciences gradually supplanted the Christian worldview, but also the organization of narrative sequences and the relations between them and the causal construction of the storyworld.

3.2 Polyfunctional Narratives with Multiple Forms of Causality Kafalenos (2006, 18–19) points out that, as a rule, the picaresque novel is opposed to the bildungsroman in its sequential montage. The principle of the bildungsroman is that experience accumulates as each episode represents another step in the hero’s growth to maturity. Such narratives can thus be understood as a single, long sequence. By contrast, picaresque narratives are made up of a series of sequences or episodes that follow one another in linear fashion. For example, La Vida de Guzman de Alfarache (1599–1604) by Mateo Aleman begins with a retrospective narrative by the picaro Guzman, a convict who was sent to the galleys; he tells the story of his life, interrupted by many long digressions and tales inserted for the edification of the reader. His journeys take him from Seville to Madrid, then to Barcelona, and finally to Rome after a trip around the Mediterranean. Each of these stops is structurally identical to the others: he is successively a servant to seven different masters. A sequence is thus repeated with few or no variations and with no overarching macrostructure. Whereas the picaro learns nothing from his adventures other than how to get out of tough situations, the sequential, linear structure of the story aims to provide the reader with theological and spiritual teachings in addition to practical and moral lessons. Since neither the hero nor the material world with which he interacts is perfectible, only God can redeem him. The picaro sets out on a journey with multiple episodes from which he derives no spiritual or moral edification in a sort of reverse idealistic narrative: the destiny of the hero in

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both cases exemplifies the lowly state of the material world and the inadequacy of human action, doomed to pointlessly repeat the same mistakes over and over again without the help of divine grace. From the point of view of narrative causality, the Spanish picaresque novel cannot be said to be innovative, for its realism is compatible with the theological, cultural, and rhetorical frameworks of representation. Significantly, the model Cervantes experimented with in Don Quixote steps outside this framework in many ways. Determining the dominant sequential and causal structure of a narrative depends partly on the reader’s interpretation as well as on the point of view of the characters in the narrative itself (Kafalenos 2006, 19). In the case of Don Quixote, readers see the hero’s series of forays into the world as a repetition of sequences juxtaposed along a temporal line with no causal progression, as in a picaro’s journey. However, from the perspective of the logic of the story, the hero sees in these adventures the stages of an atemporal quest as constant progress because they follow the fictional model of chivalric romances. It is in the comic coexistence of these two incongruous interpretations of the sequence/consequence structure that Cervantes’s modernity lies. Regarding the types of causality involved, one is based on what is called today naturalistic causality, the other on supernatural causality. Furthermore, the appearance in the second part of Don Quixote (published in 1615, ten years after the first part) of metafictional causality, already present at the beginning of the novel, confirms the disruptive nature of the narrative logic in Cervantes’s work. The innovative nature of this model does not lie in the hesitation between different possible narrative sequencings, between different possible frameworks of reference, or even between different types of causality (naturalistic, supernatural, metafictional, chance). Rather, it lies in the fact that these systems are explicitly made to compete with one another in the logical structure of narrative. The polyfunctionality of narrative actions is emphasized and thematized as the subject of the novel, rather than as coexisting invisibly. The development and generalization of this process in ironic fictions, the antinovels of Scarron, Sterne, Fielding, Diderot, Voltaire, and Swift, will result in the progressive displacement of the structure of the link between sequence and consequence to a level where metafictional causality prevails.

3.3 Nonsense and Non-Sequitur (1650–1760) It is noteworthy that changes in the various types of causality employed in literary narratives (factual and non-factual) between 1550 and 1730 also concern the

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particular kind of veracity found in early modern secular narratives and thus the prescriptive and heuristic value of narration as well. When relating his narrative, the author/narrator is held responsible for what is understandable, true, and good, in other words, for the consequences his narrative might have in the world through the process of reception. Logically speaking, the fictional causality at work in the story is understood to be identical to the causality in the real world from which the events proceed: a narrative explains in figurative terms (supernatural or not) the way in which the possible, the probable, and the necessary truly function. The implied link between the logic of the narrated world and the logic of the world properly speaking can be made explicit. Such is the case with the morals of La Fontaine’s fables. This link can be thematized and discussed, as in the commentaries on the relevance of narratives made by characters in collections of tales (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Marguerite de Navarre). It can also appear in a direct though implicit manner through represented causal succession, as in collections of the tragic tales of Bandello, Boaistuau, and Belleforest, and in Cervantes in his Novelas Exemplares (1613). The implicit heuristic and moral structure lying beneath the logic of premodern and classical narratives was regularly challenged through irony, heterodoxies, parodies, and games in specific works or in entire genres of early modern and neoclassical literature: the Rabelaisian novel of the sixteenth century, the comic novel of the seventeenth century, the libertine novel of the eighteenth century. These challenges became more frequent during the eighteenth century with the development of persiflage and of paradoxical and ironic moral fictions in French philosophical tales (Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, 1721; Voltaire’s Contes 1775; Crébillon’s Contes, 1730–1754) as well as in the English ironic novel (Fielding, Swift). Out of this there arises a gap between fictional and real causality at the end of the period considered here: the logical succession of events, as can be inferred from uttered narrative sequences, is perceived as scandalous, pathetic, laughable, or improbable. This phenomenon can produce contrasting effects that reflect the two directions taken by the evolution of the link between sequence and consequence in narrative logic at the beginning of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the disjunction between fictional causality and real causality had the effect of producing social, political, and moral criticism through the logical process of narratives based on the principle of reductio ad absurdum. The signifying, ideological, and prescriptive nature of narratives was thus maintained or even strengthened. In this way, the unreliable narrator of an absurd tale becomes trustworthy, albeit in an ironic or paradoxical way insofar as the story exposes the absurdities of the real world (engagé fiction, philosophical and moral tales). On the other hand, a logical but improbable narrative emphasizes the discretionary power of the narra-

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tor over the sequential succession of the narration. Here, however, it is the aesthetic and creative nature of the narrative that is strengthened (oneiric, symbolic, ludic fictions). Just as with the appearance of metafictional causality mentioned earlier (Sterne, Diderot), the phenomenon marks the emergence of an aesthetic regime of art based on the principle of the autonomy of fictions. The gap between the logical concatenation of events in fiction and in reality takes a third meaningful form at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the emergence of fictions emphasizing chance or random causality.

3.4 Chance Causality in Narrative (1700–1730) The establishment and rapid development of the oriental tale in France, and then in the rest of Europe, starting with the French translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1700–1710), illustrates the development of chance causality. For the European public, the originality of this work was not the presence of supernatural causality or of supernaturally induced effects of small or realistic causes found in the collections of tales of Persian, Arab, and Indian origin adapted into French by Antoine Galland around 1700. In themselves, these characteristics were merely to constitute a cultural variant of a logical structure that was already familiar in European fairy tales and Greco-Roman mythology. The specificity of the “new” model lay in the importance given to the disproportion between cause and effect in the logical succession of actions. To a large extent, this novelty explains the popularity of The Thousand and One Nights in Europe. In contrast to the high value placed on the predictable (plausible fictions and non-fictions), the necessary (history, neoclassical tragedies), and the significant (implausible fictions, moral tales, fairy tales) – all characteristic of the European Christian tradition  – oriental tales emphasize randomness and, more generally, the disturbance of the normal succession from sequence to consequence. In the progressive implementation of events, they favor exponential development, either linear (long story) or non-linear (multiple stories) with many effects following a single cause. In the retrospective reconstruction of causes, these stories favor the discovery of an imperceptible, secret, or seemingly insignificant cause at the beginning of the sequence of events that subsequently turns out to be disproportionately elaborate and/or consequential. The technique of the frame tale employed in The Thousand and One Nights bears witness to a striking difference between Arab and European storytelling. The story of Scheherazade is a redemptive narrative, much as the frame tales of the Italian novellieri, the French conteurs, and the English tellers of tales. The storytellers of the Decameron, having sought refuge on a hilltop, bide away their time

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by telling tales while a plague ravages Florence; those of the Heptameron wait in a mountain inn for the waters to recede after torrential rains; in the Ecatommithi (1565) by Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, the storytellers have just fled the sack of Rome and found refuge on a boat. In The Thousand and One Nights, by contrast, the danger that the narrative wards off is immeasurably out of proportion to its original cause: King Schariar kills all the women of his kingdom because one of them was unfaithful. All of Scheherazade’s stories are initially motivated by the fear of death. This is similar to many European collections of tales, except that in this case it is the very survival of the principal narrator that act as the raison d’être of the stories. This structure appears with Scheherazade’s first tale and is then repeated in many of the tales included in the four manuscripts translated by Galland. A traveling merchant stops one night near a tree. He eats dates, performs his ablutions, and prays but is interrupted by a djinn who says he will kill him, not in retribution for some sort of moral or religious offence (since the merchant was praying when the spirit appeared and surprised him) but because he put the djinn’s son’s eye out when he threw away the pit of a date. His son having died, the djinn concluded by answering the horrified protests of the merchant: “That is why I must kill you,” for “is it not just to kill the one who has killed?” The merchant was to live, however, but thanks only to a possibility that takes the place of retaliatory moral and religious justice: he offers a tale in exchange for his life. The suspense generated by this situation in The Thousand and One Nights also results in Scheherazade’s first victory over the sultan, for he puts the storyteller’s execution off until the next day in order to hear the end of the story. In effect, the suspension of the moral, cultural, and religious laws that pertain in the real world through a logic peculiar to the narrative universe is underscored by the aesthetic, comic, tragic, pathetic, and poetic treatment of the incident. Just as the hero of the story of Cogia Hassan Alhabbal, who repeatedly laments his unjust fate (his life is threatened because he “did not put any salt in a cream pie”), the characters of The Thousand and One Nights constantly marvel at their good or bad luck. The immediate success of the oriental tale, a model that spread throughout Europe in the space of thirty years, contributed at the beginning of the eighteenth century to a new way of looking at narrative causality in the West. While the oriental tale was greatly prized for its cultural originality, its characteristic random causality further weakened the providential logic on which narrative in the Christian tradition had been based since the sixteenth century. Changes in the philosophy of causality, highlighted at the time by David Hume’s questioning of the foundations of the law of universal causality (nothing allows us to affirm that the effect follows the cause of necessity and proportionally), form the backdrop of this change.

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4 Conclusion This evolution, revealed rather than triggered by the introduction of random causality in the narrative logic of Western narratives, leads at the end of the period considered here (1760) to an ever-clearer division between two possible artistic treatments of narrative causality: realist as opposed to fantastic. On the one hand, the capacity of narratives to organize reality in accordance with the factual basis of history and to bring to light the logic of the succession of natural phenomena becomes stronger. On the other hand, the gradual implementation of an aesthetic regime of the arts favors the promotion of narratives in which the sequential presentation of events prevails over the consequential logic of their progress. Inaugurated by Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), a novel dominated by metafictional causality in which the logic of the story told is produced entirely by the succession of narrative utterances, this way of treating causality favors oneiric logic and the expressiveness of narrative. In such works, the artistic order of presentation and the montage of narrative sequences determine the construction of consequence in the world, which, as a result, was understood to be expressed by the narrative and projected by it, rather than preexisting it. As the narrative material (world, characters, values) is affected by the evolution of the cultural, axiological, and ideological contexts expressed in the narrative, so too is the logical structure of narration itself. This stands out in how the linking between sequence and consequence changes from the end of the Renaissance up to the mid-eighteenth century. How the reader reconstitutes the causal links in a story starting with the succession of propositions in a narrative is affected by modifications in the conception of the profane narrative and by changes in the functions attributed to it. With the de-Christianization of literary tastes, greater importance was granted to the narrator and to the reader/listener in how the meaning of a story was constituted. From a referential perspective, while the types of causality favored by fiction changed, the ability of narrative logic to shed light on causality in the real world was transformed. If narrative, from that point on understood as the product of auctorial strategies and secular interpretative practices, lost its ability to reveal divine causality at work in the world, it gained in its power to construct the meaning of human events.

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References Aristotle (1895) 1951. Peri Poetikés/Poetics. In Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, edited and translated by Samuel H. Butcher, 1–111. New York: Dover. Baroni, Raphaël. 2016. “Introduction: The Many Ways of Dealing with Sequence in Contemporary Narratology.” In Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology, edited by Raphaël Baroni and Françoise Revaz, 1–7. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Bremond, Claude. 1973. Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil. Castelvetro, Lodovico. (1570) 1978–1979. Poetica d’aristotile volgarizzata, Et sposta. Edited by Werther Romani. Bari: Laterza. Cavaillé, Jean-Pierre. 1994. Descartes: La fable du monde. Paris: Vrin. Chapelain, Jean. (1624–1673).2009. Opuscules critiques. Edited by A. Duprat. Geneva: Droz. Corneille, Pierre. (1660) 2007. Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique. Edited by Bénédicte LouvatMolozay and Marc Escola. Paris: Gallimard. d’Aubignac, François Hédelin. (1657) 2001. La pratique du théâtre. Edited by Hélène Baby. Paris: Champion. Duprat, Anne. 2009. Vraisemblances: Poétique et théorie de la fiction en France et en Italie (XVIe–XVIIe siècles), Paris: Champion. Duprat, Anne. 2011. “Corde nouée et corde à nœuds: Images du roman de la Renaissance au classicism.” In La Partie et le tout: La composition du roman, de l’âge baroque au tournant des Lumières, edited by Marc Escola, Jan Herman, Lucia Omacini, Paul Pelckmans, and Jean-Paul Sermain, 261–270. Brussels: Peeters. Forster, E. M. (1927) 1962. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Genette, Gérard. (1983) 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grabes, Herbert. 2014. “Sequentiality.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. http://www.lhn. uni-hamburg.de/article/sequentiality (accessed 12 February 2020). Guarini, Giambattista. (1611) 1914. Compendio della poesia Tragicomica, Tratto dai due Verati. In Il Pastor Fido e il Compendio della poesia Tragicomica, edited by Gioachino Brognoligo, 217–291 Bari: Laterza. Heinsius, Daniel. (1611) 2001. De Constitutione Tragoediae: La Constitution de la Tragédie. Edited by Anne Duprat. Geneva: Droz, 2001. Kafalenos, Emma. 2006. Narrative Causalities. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. López Pinciano, Alonso. (1596) 1998. Philosophia antigua Poetica. In Obra completa, vol. 2, 83–84. Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro. Maggi, Vincenzo, and Bartolomeo Lombardi. (1550) 1969. V.Madii. Et B. Lombardi In Aristotelis Librum de Poetica Communes Explanationes: Madii Vero In Eudem Librum Propriae Annotationes. Poetiken des Cinquecento 4. Munich: Fink [facsimile]. Micha, Alexandre. 1976. “Sur la composition du Lancelot en Prose.” In De la chanson de geste au roman, 293–318. Geneva: Droz. Molho, Maurice. 1999. Preface to Les travaux de Persiles et Sigismonde, by Cervantès, translated by Maurice Molho, 7–68. Paris: Corti. Nehrlich, Michael. 2005. Le Persiles décodé; ou, La divine comédie de Cervantes. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Pier, John. 2008. “After This, Therefore Because of This.” In Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 109–140. Berlin: De Gruyter. Prince, Gerald. 2016. ”On Narrative Sequence, Classical and Postclassical.” In Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology, edited by Raphaël Baroni and Françoise Revaz, 11–19. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Quintilian. 1514. Marci Fabii Quintiliani De Institutione Oratoria. Edited by Andrea Navagero. Venice: Aldus. Richardson, Brian. 2005. “Causality.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 48–52. London: Taylor and Francis. Ricoeur, Paul. [1984] 1985. Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robortello, Francesco. 1548. Paraphrasis in Librum Horatii [. . .] Eiusdem Explicationes de Satyra, de Epigrammate, de Comœdia, de Elegia. Florence:Torrentini. Robortello, Francesco. (1548) 1968. In librum Aristotelis De Arte Poetica Explicationes. Munich: Fink [facsimile]. Sternberg, Meir. 2001. “How Narrativity Makes a Difference.” Narrative 9, no. 1, 115–122. Sternberg, Meir. 2010. “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm.” Poetics Today 31(3), 507–659. Tasso, Torquato. 1585. Scritti sull’arte poetica. Edited by Ettore Mazzali. Milan: Ricciardi, 1959. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1968. “Poétique.” In Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?, edited by Oswald Ducrot, 97–168. Paris: Seuil. Todorov, Tzvetan. (1967) 1971. “Les transformations narratives.” In Poétique de la prose, 225–253. Paris: Seuil. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. Poétique. Vol. 2 of Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Seuil. Watts, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: Chatto & Windus. Zanin, Enrica. Le Miel et l’Absinthe: Poétiques du sens dans l’Europe de la première modernité. (forthcoming).

Inke Gunia

Suspense in Greek, Latin, and Spanish Literature 1 Preliminaries To understand the role of suspense in narrative, it is helpful to look at the history of its exploration since Antiquity. The difficulties encountered in theorizing about suspense are due, among other things, to two outlooks on the question. On the one hand, suspense designates a phenomenon that has not been investigated exclusively in literary studies, but also in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and in the media sciences and media reception research (mainly in film studies). On the other hand, there are German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish studies in which the loan word suspense is used in an assimilated form (le suspense, la suspense, o suspense, el suspense/o, la suspensión) as a synonym for Spannung, Nervenkitzel, tensione, tensão, tensión, while others consider suspense techniques as a subset of tension/tensión/Spannung techniques. In German-language literary scholarship, for example, suspense is sometimes explained as a special form of Spannung, a term that can be translated as tension (e.g., Bomhoff 1972; Borringo 1980; DolleWeinkauff 1994; Bonheim 2001; Junkerjürgen 2002). The first step in tackling these two orientations – approaching suspense in literary texts from different interdisciplinary perspectives as opposed to analyzing the relationship between tension and suspense – can be undertaken by reviewing the crucial historical stages of research on suspense. In a second step, the diachronic view on this topic is narrowed down to one country, Spain, a task that has not been undertaken to date.

2 Greek and Latin Antiquity Two lines of development underlie the systematic literary study of a plot-related phenomenon called suspense in my other contribution to this volume. These two lines are rooted in Antiquity: one goes back to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in the Poetics, in particular his comments on mythos and on the generation of pity (éleos) and fear (phóbos; Lawson 1934, 19; Borringo 1980, 12). The other line of development, going back to Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, is anchored in the rhetorical methods for generating and maintaining interested attention (attentum parare) and the avoidance of weariness and boredom (taedium; Deupmann 2008). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-023

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In Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, it is the components of the mythos that have the strongest emotional impact on the audience. With reference to the edition of the Poetics prepared by Heath, who translates it as “organization of events” (Arist. Po. 1450a; also Heath 1996, xviii), mythos must be interpreted here as plot in Forster’s sense (as a causally motivated arrangement of events; [1927] 2016, 85). Later, Aristotle presents plot as the causal connectedness of events, meaning that each event must follow from the preceding, “so that it comes about as a result” (Arist. Po. 1452a). From Fuhrmann we learn that mythos should be interpreted as the “skeleton of a story” (Gerippe der Fabel) forming part of the collective memory of the presumed addressee, passed down through generations of authors but open to poetic treatment (1971, 127). Such prior knowledge would have an effect on the creation of suspense in the recipient (as explained in my other contribution to this volume) because through the title of the work the reader would already know the outcome of the plot (Fuchs 2000, 141). As we will see later, in Antiquity there existed an awareness of suspense in the sense described, meaning that the recipients of these particular plots would have to be motivated by the textual design to suppress their knowledge about the outcome. It will be shown that ancient rhetoric provides yet more insights into this mechanism. The description of the special organization of plot required for the generation of pity and fear takes up most of Aristotle’s Poetics (Arist. Po. 1449b-1454a). It begins with the observation that tragedy imitates an “action” (praxis) that must be “performed by actors, not through narration”; in other words, Aristotle pleads for immediacy in the representation of “action” (Arist. Po. 1450a). Moreover, the selected “action” must be “admirable” (spoudaios), i.e., morally good; it must be “complete,” have “a beginning, a middle and an end,” and “possess magnitude” (megethos) or a certain scope so that it can be remembered more easily (Arist. Po. 1449b, 1450b-1451a; Heath 1996, xliv). The “most important devices” to trigger emotional effects are “reversals” (peripeteia, “change to the opposite,” “things” coming “about contrary to expectation”), and “recognitions” (anagnôrisis, “change from ignorance to knowledge”), both characteristics of complex plots (Arist. Po. 1450a, 1452a). Reversal and recognition, too, “must come about as a result of what has happened before” (Arist. Po. 1452a). With respect to the outcome, Aristotle specifies that “a well-formed plot [. . .] must involve a change [. . .] from good fortune to bad fortune – and this must be due [. . .] to a serious error” (Arist. Po. 1453a). With regard to the controversially discussed hamartia, Heath (xxxii) views this as the equivalent for “error.” Contrary to those researchers who hold on to hamartia in the meaning of an intellectual error, he argues that the term “includes errors made in ignorance or through misjudgment” as well as “moral errors of a kind which do imply wickedness” (xxxiii). In chapter 14, Aristotle argues precisely for an outcome that is contrary to that described in chapter 13, as this is the most effective way

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to arouse emotions such as fear and terror: “the last case is the best; I mean, for example, in the Cresphontes Merope is on the verge of killing her son, but does not do it, but instead recognizes him” (Arist. Po. 1454a). A plausible explanation may be that this development facilitates last-minute rescues, thus increasing suspense (Moles 1979, 86–87). This example also contains an ingredient that contributes to creating an impressive emotional effect on the audience based on the selection of characters involved in events that “appear terrible and pitiable” (Arist. Po. 1453b). In the words of the Stagirite: What one should look for are situations in which sufferings arise within close relationships, e.g. brother kills brother, son father, mother son, or son mother – or is on the verge of killing them, or does something else of the same kind. (Arist. Po. 1453b)

By reducing these cases to lay bare the mechanisms responsible for the generation of emotional effects on the audience (pity or fear or both), we arrive at the following observation: a causal connectedness of events that includes a change of fortune combined with reversals or recognitions on the basis of a certain ratio between knowledge and ignorance on the part of the character (character’s insights and character’s errors), and close relationships between the characters. With regard to the prehistory of suspense research, three further terms in Aristotelian poetics are significant: lýsis (for resolution), désis (for complication), and ploké (the knot/tying). According to Laferl (2007, 127–128), it is through these terms that Spannung is explained by Aristotle. Laferl uses the translation of Fuhrmann, i.e., the German Knoten – knot or tying – as the equivalent of ploké. The passage in the translation by Heath reads as follows: By complication I mean everything from the beginning up to and including the section which immediately precedes the change to good fortune or bad fortune; by resolution I mean everything from the beginning of the change of fortune to the end. (Arist. Po. 1455b)

Since the resolution is not predictable (it can change to good or to bad fortune), the central criterion, i.e., uncertainty, is given. Furthermore, “only a tight knot can leave us uncertain as to how exactly the individual strands within it are wound” (Laferl 2007, 128). Borringo (1980, 42), sees a connection between Aristotle’s description of catharsis (katharsis, Arist. Po. 1449b) and the suspense effect literary texts have on the reader. Catharsis shows the effect that texts with suspense have on us; suspense, too, should lead to relief (for a discussion of the meaning of catharsis, see Heath 1996, xxxvii–xliii). Apart from this poetological strand that feeds the later exploration of suspense, there is yet another one coming from ancient rhetoric which has led to the coining of the term suspensum, as derived from the Latin perfect participle passive neuter (meaning “[of persons] In a state of anxious uncertainty or suspense, on tenterhooks

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[.  .  .] [of things] marked or accompanied by anxious uncertainty”; Oxford Latin Dictionary 1994, s.v.; also Fuchs 2000, 19). Suspensum and its earlier synonym sustentatio (meaning “deferment, delay”; Oxford Latin Dictionary 1994, s.v.) designate techniques whose purpose is to produce “stirring imagination” or “vividness” in the audience (an ideal of the effect variously referred to as enargeia, evidentia, illustratio, or hypotyposis). The aim is to hold the audience’s attention (attentum parare or attentum facere) and avoid boredom (taedium; Janka 2009, 263, 264, Lausberg 1998, §§257, 271, with reference to Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria; in the German original of the Institutio: “aufrüttelnde Vergegenwärtigung”; §271δ). In the international debate a line of research has emerged that subsumes under the term tension/tensión/Spannung techniques that serve to maintain the interest of the recipient. This inquiry can be traced back to Antiquity, where one encounters a wide range of means for creating and maintaining attentum parare, first within the prooemium and then in other parts of the speech: avoid trivial topics (humile genus), highlight the importance of the topic and its innovative power, explicitly request the attention of the audience, promise to be brief, arouse emotions through visualization (enargeia, evidentia), and generate voluptas (“agreeable experience or sensation (to the mind or senses), pleasure, delight”; Oxford Latin Dictionary 1994, s.v.) in the audience (Lausberg 1998, §§269–271; Wessel 1992). With regard to sustentatio/suspensum as a precursor of suspense, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria is an important reference (in the following, the 2002 edition by Donald A. Russell is used). It appears among other devices to generate cognitive and emotional involvement through enargeia or evidentia, devices that, according to Lausberg (1998, §810), place “the speaker [. . .] himself and his audience in the position of the eyewitness.” Quintilian explains its effect, elaborating on how the orator, first, through his own imagination (phantasiai/visiones) feigns an eyewitness for himself (e.g., Inst.  – Russell 6.2.26, 29; Singer 2016, 162n19, reads this as part of the actio, that is, with reference to the body language of the orator) and, second, through speech can bring “absent things” before the senses of the audience being thus drawn into the world created with words. For Quintilian, the arousal of emotions is dependent on empathy; rendering an “impression of reality” presupposes that both the orator and his audience “assimilate [themselves] to the emotions of those who really suffer” (Inst. – Russell 6.2.27): Suppose I am complaining that someone has been murdered. Am I not to have before my eyes all the circumstances which one can believe to have happened during the event? Will not the assassin burst out on a sudden, and the victim tremble, cry for help, and either plead for mercy or try to escape? Shall I not see one man striking the blow and the other man falling? Will not the blood, the pallor, the groans, the last gasp of the dying be imprinted on my mind? The result will be enargeia, what Cicero calls illustratio and evidentia, a quality which makes us seem not so much to be talking about something as exhibiting it. (Inst. – Russell 6.2.31–32)

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As for the linguistic devices employed by enargeia/evidentia with an emotive effect on the audience in Quintilian’s Institutio, Lausberg distinguishes the following (1998, §812): (1) “specification of the whole object”. An example for this can be found here: “The floor was filthy, swimming with wine, littered with wilting garlands and fishbones.” What more could anyone have seen who had entered the room? This too is how the pathos of a captured city can be enhanced. No doubt, simply to say “the city was stormed” is to embrace everything implicit in such a disaster, but this brief communiqué, as it were, does not touch the emotions. (Quint. Inst. – Russell 8.3.66–68)

However, this also refers to events that are “broken up into a number of individual events” (Lausberg 1998, §810), resulting in what modern narratology calls the approaching of story time to discourse time. In Quintilian’s Institutio we read the following: “As for what Cicero calls ‘putting something before our eyes,’ this happens when, instead of stating that an event took place, we show how it took place, and that not as a whole, but in detail” (Quint. Inst. – Russell 9.2.40). Further devices are: (2) the “use of present tense [. . .] even for objects that do not belong to the present time”; (3) the addressing “of a person who figure in the narration,” a special kind of apostrophe that stimulates the identification of the audience with the characters presented in speech (see Lausberg 1998, §763, §810); and (4) “direct speech of persons figuring in the narration.” If beyond Quintilian’s Institutio we take into account further ancient sources for enargeia/evidentia, we also find the use of “adverbs of place (and pronominal stems) that express presence” (Lausberg 1998, §815). All these techniques serve to reduce the distance between presentation and what is presented, shifting toward the perspective of the figures presented in the narration. Suspense, as a device to achieve such an emotional involvement through enargeia/evidentia, is described in book 9, chapter 2, with reference to the communicatio figure of thought. In a feigned dialogue, the orator addresses a counterpart directly with a question relating to the expected progression of the story, thereby inviting the empirical audience to identify with this addressee. However, he does not wait for the answer, instead making his own suggestions and stopping at a certain point, thus leaving the audience in suspense until he proceeds with the unexpected: Sometimes, on the other hand, when we are sharing a thought with the audience, we add an unexpected item – this is a Figure in itself – as Cicero did in In Verrem: “What then? What do you think? Some theft, maybe, or plunder?” And then, having kept the judges’ minds in suspense for a long time, he put in something much worse. Celsus calls this sustentatio. (Quint. Inst. 9.2.22–23)

This example makes clear what devices are designed to produce sustentatio/suspensum: the generation of expectations, suggesting to the audience a hypothesis in

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relation to what is being told through insinuations, by ellipsis or pauses (delays), syntactic polarities within the protasis–apodosis schema, and surprising turns to the negative or the positive (Janka 2009, 264). The overriding purpose of these techniques, as stated, is to hold the audience’s attention through “stirring imagination” and “vividness.” Since Antiquity, the generation of suspense has thus been closely linked to enargeia, an ideal of effect that, in contemporary research, corresponds to what Wolf calls “aesthetic illusion” (2014; see Wolf’s contribution to this volume).

3 Spain A closer look at the Spanish equivalents of the Latin sustentatio/suspensum in historical dictionaries of the Spanish language reveals that suspensión as a rhetorical device does not appear until the second half of the eighteenth century: “Rhetorical figure aimed at pleasantly suspending the listeners as if they were ‘hung up,’ in order to express something that agitates them. Fr. Suspension. Lat. Suspensio, dilation” (Terreros y Pando 1767, s.v. “SUSPENSION”). By the end of the nineteenth century, the definition of the Royal Academy’s dictionary includes the notion of “arousing interest”: “Rhet. A figure that delays the revelation of the idea the speech is aimed at, in order to arouse the interest of the listener or reader” (Diccionario de la lengua castellana 1884, s.v. “suspensión”). It is interesting to note that the term suspense in English spelling does not appear in the Royal Academy’s dictionaries until the year 1985: “(English word.) m. equivalent to suspensión, emotional state.” A little further down in this volume, a reference to the technique for generating suspensión in film and other performance genres also appears: “In film and other performances, an emotional, generally anxious situation, produced by a dramatic scene with a deferred or uncertain outcome” (Diccionario manual e ilustrado de la lengua Española 1985, s.vv. “suspense,” “suspenso”). As for the meaning of tensión as a synonym of suspensión as a rhetorical or poetological device, there is no entry in the Royal Academy’s dictionaries until 1984: “7. State of mind [anímico] of excitement, impatience, effort or exaltation produced by certain circumstances or activities, such as attention, expectation, intellectual, poetic, or artistic creation, etc.” (Diccionario de la lengua Española 1984, s.v. “tensión”).

3.1 Golden Age The reference works for poetics and rhetoric of the Spanish Golden Age follow the paths prepared in Antiquity concerning the description of plot-related techniques

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aimed, on the one hand, at generating pity and fear, complication and resolution, and, on the other hand, at the special form of holding the audience’s attention (attentum parare) by sustentatio/suspensum. In the following, I will concentrate on a few examples. The Philosophía Antigua Poética (1596) by Alonso López Pinciano was a frequently cited poetics in the Spanish Siglo de Oro. As the personal physician of Mary of Austria, the Holy Roman Empress, Pinciano was held in high esteem by the court. In his poetics, Pinciano transforms his theories into conversations between three protagonists: Fadrique, Ugo, and Pinciano. These theories, in turn, are transcribed into thirteen letters addressed by Pinciano to Don Gabriel. Each letter deals with a specific poetological topic that is summarized by Don Gabriel in his reply. Pinciano is the naive narrator and protagonist who does not understand the true value of poetry and is led by prejudice. Fadrique, the nobleman, is the expert on all poetic texts, and Ugo is a poet and a physician in the service of the empress. The letters reference the rhetoric and poetics of Aristotle and Horace. In chapter 6, Ugo metaphorically explains the plot (“fábula”): the fable is considered a rope and has a knot and a release, and has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and begins to tighten and tighten and tighten [. . .], and is like one on the torture rack, who, thus tied, either confesses or not depending on the loosening of the garrote. (López Pinciano 1894 [1596], 215)

As López Grigera (1983, 28) points out, the Spanish rhetorics of the sixteenth century granted increasing importance to evidentia: before 1569, the term refers only to dynamic processes (actions), thereafter also to things or static landscape descriptions. The first rhetoric written in Castilian is by Miguel de Salinas (Rhetórica en lengua castellana, 1541). There, in the chapter on affect (“de los affectos”; ch. XXIX), he explains that what is visually perceived leaves a stronger emotional impression than what is heard. With regard to the evidentia techniques, he explains that all that is needed is a mode of expression that incites the audience to make assumptions about persons, times, and places, which leads to a matter (“cosa”) becoming more acute (“agravar”) or being mitigated (“disminuir”).

3.2 Eighteenth Century During most of the eighteenth century, scholars oriented their research toward ancient rhetorics and poetics, as is evident in works such as La poética o reglas de la poesía en general y de sus principales especies ([1737] 1789) by Ignacio de Luzán and Retórica (1752) by Gregorio Mayans y Siscar. In the third book of the Retórica, “On Elocution,” which deals with figures of thought (“figuras de sentencia”) and in

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this group with “figures of amplification” (“figuras de amplificación”), he devotes the sixth paragraph to suspensión, “which the Romans call sustentatio, [. . .] a way of speaking by which the listener’s mind is left guessing until the end as to what is being said.” The examples given, however, do not refer to plot construction, but to the syntax of speeches. Antonio de Capmany y Montpalau in his Filosofía de la elocuencia (1777), in the paragraph devoted to suspensión (also classified under “figures of thought”), is more detailed in his comments: suspensión or sustentación is performed when we keep the minds of the listeners suspended for some time, without declaring to them our last thought, which must always be unexpected, not delivered until they have reached a state of attentive expectation and a desire to satisfy or quieten their judgments. For by thus bringing them closer to the object that excites their curiosity, one draws them away in some way, only to move them more vividly when, by suddenly dropping the veil, the character emerges very different from the one imagined.

3.3 Nineteenth Century The definition of the term suspensión takes a decisive turn with Francisco Sánchez Barbero in 1805. Following Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) in the Spanish translation by Munárriz (1789–1801), he divides his Principios de Retórica y Poética (1805) into two parts: “Principles of Rhetoric” and “Principles of Poetics.” In the first part, we find two references that are relevant here. As an elocutio element, “suspension” appears as a rhetorical figure that is meant to attract attention with a startling description that turns into something unexpected (Sánchez Barbero [1805] 1840, 39). The illustrating example comes from a sonnet by Lope de Vega; there is even an explicit reference to suspense in the penultimate chapter 16, following the chapter on examples from historiography. In “From Romances and Novels” (146), the students learn that suspense is a plot-related phenomenon that is produced by what Sánchez Barbero calls “obstacles”: If you undertake to write a romance, do not lose sight of my advice: let it be a new, interesting, and plausible plot; let the heat of your imagination give soul to the whole thing, and let it communicate itself to the reader without being dampened, keeping him in suspense until the end; this must be conducted naturally and without a machine, and be the result of obstacles. Let the episodic incidents be plausible and varied, and be born of action; the characters sustained and contrasted, the style pure and always proportionate to the character, situation, and state of the speaker. ([1805] 1840, 148–149; “intriga” here is translated by “plot,” based on the definition in Diccionario de la lengua castellana 1817).

It can thus be concluded that the description of suspense with the meaning of a storytelling technique producing a special type of emotional affect begins in the

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early nineteenth century in Spain. However, the literary use of suspense is only slowly established. This is due to the fact that the novel in particular, and fictional narrative prose literature in general, do not find their way into poetic treatises until around the middle of the nineteenth century in Spain. Because of their proximity to everyday language and their fictionality within the limits of verisimilitude, these genres were ascribed a greater power of persuasion (Gunia 2008, ch. 2.4). A treatise that shows uncertainty in the classification of texts of this sort is, for example, the Manual de Literatura (1844) by Antonio Gil y Zárate, who was the Director General of Public Instruction at that time. His manual became a compulsory textbook in institutions of higher learning throughout Spain. In section 4, “Particular Rules for Prose Compositions,” it is the third chapter that deals with novels; however, thoughts on plot structure and the generation of suspense are given in section 5, “Particular Rules for Verse Composition,” chapter 1 “On the Epic Poem or Epic,” article 4, “About the Plan of the Poem.” The Director General prescribes a three-part plot structure with an introduction, a main part, and a conclusion. The opening of the epic poem includes a “critical point” (222) in the development of the plot and must provide information about the main events that have led to this critical situation. The main part is the “complication” (nudo), as it is there that the different strings of action are twisted together. It is the place where those events are located that accelerate or slow down the development of the plot, propelling it toward its outcome. This part is the most extended and requires the greatest talent and skill: All that can be prescribed is that the events that form the knot or entanglement of the poem should be such that the reader fears that the enterprise will fail in view of the obstacles presented, that he trembles for the hero as danger is threatening him. Furthermore, the difficulties to be overcome should gradually increase, generating suspense and agitation within us for some time, until the way is cleared again and the knot untangled in a natural and probable way, and the machine does not have to intervene. (223)

As a professor at the High School of the Novitiate in Madrid, Narciso Campillo y Correa published a Retórica y poética ó literatura preceptiva (1872). Lesson 38 is about the novel, defined as “the ordered and complete narration of fictitious, but verisimilar events, constructed to delight through beauty.” He goes on to emphasize, among other elements, the importance of what he calls the “argumento” (argument) or synonymously “accion [sic], fábula ó [sic] asunto” (action, fable, or issue). This is required to be of great, sustained, and progressive interest, to keep the reader in suspense and his spirit agitated, so that he eagerly wants to be led from scene to scene and from chapter to chapter through the variety and uniqueness of the events, the truth and warmth of the passions, and the vivacity and mastery of the paintings. (210)

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Sixteen years later, we find that these explanations have not yet been extended. José Callejón y Asme, professor of rhetoric and poetics at the High School of Huelva, in his Elementos de literatura preceptiva ó de retórica y poética (1888) in the chapter “Minor Species of Epic Compositions,” also treats the short story (“cuento”) and the novel (232–239). Of relevance to our concerns are his comments on the novel, which, as he points out, had reached a level of popularity previously unrivalled by any other literary genre (233). In view of the current literary representations of realism of the era, he defines the novel as “the manifestation of an action that possesses verisimilitude, is interesting and generally fictitious, in which scenes of life and society are presented in a poetic way” (232). Since the novelist narrates and does not represent things directly, as in theater, it is necessary to take into account these characteristics. What follows with respect to the plot is an almost verbatim repetition of the words of Campillo y Correa. The interest aroused by the plot must be so strong that it creates “suspense and an agitated spirit in the reader from one event to another, progressively augmenting and increasing his curiosity and anxiety with the introduction of new and appropriate incidents, and all that is opposed to this must be removed” (233). He uses “acción,” a term that I here translate by “plot” because he speaks of a “plan” on which the “acción” is based.

3.4 Twentieth Century In the overview of the origins of the crime novel in Spain by Valles Calatrava (2002, 142), the short stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán are presented as the first examples of the detective story in Spain. This line of inquiry leads us seamlessly to the journalistic chronicles published by Pardo Bazán under the heading “Contemporary Life” in the illustrated weekly La Ilustración Artística: Periódico semanal de literatura, artes y ciencias published in Barcelona (1882–1917). Countess Pardo Bazán is indisputably one of the few women of the time who worked hard to gain access to the literary field in Spain (Gunia 1998) and, like many of her male fellow-writers recognized in the literary field, denies the detective novel any literariness. Thus it is not surprising that in issue 1416 of 15 February 1909, she observes with some displeasure that the popular trend of crime novels has also arrived in Spain, albeit with some delay. After reading the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, she comments that she rejects this type of commercially oriented literature. Unlike the novels of Jules Verne or the psychological portrait of the protagonist in Bourget’s André Cornélis (1887), who investigates the death of his father, the stories surrounding the protagonist Sherlock Holmes are boring because they are based on a repetitive schematic structure. Two aspects are surprising to her: on the one hand, “the radical inability of the author to move beyond the always identical formula,” and the willingness

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of the audience to read a series of stories with Conan Doyle’s protagonist and be surprised again and again. She speaks dismissively of “a clumsy, gripping, nervous interest” in suspense (we can assume that this is what she means here) generated by the “scientific-detective tinware of Conan Doyle.” In her contribution in issue 1581 (15 April 1912), she pursues the question as to why the Spanish reading public has such a lively interest in detective, crime, and outlaw novels (“novelas policíacas, de crímenes y apachismo”): “After the bland accuracy that prevailed in the age of scientific naturalism, there had to come this inventive unbridledness, this new form of the old spooky stories of the English novelist Anne Radcliffe.” Since the detective in his struggle against evil resembles the knight in the chivalric romances of the sixteenth century, it is hardly surprising that the genre of the detective story should enjoy such popularity. The “account of extraordinary and improbable events,” “the suspenseful and ceaselessly stimulated interest,” and the good that wins in the end appeal to basic drives of human nature. For once, far from being in alignment with progressive contemporary views on this subject, Pardo Bazán certainly argues from an aristocratic Catholic conservative position in pointing out that this type of novel can be said to have contributed in a not insubstantial way to rising crime rates in the big cities. On the other hand, and this may not have pleased the reactionary-conservative members of her class, she deals with these new literary subjects, aims, and ways of writing in public. Pedro Laín Entralgo earned a medical degree at university, but also earned considerable merits in the field of humanities. As a Falangista, it is surprising that in the 1940s he declared his support for a genre that was dismissed as trivial in scholarly circles. In his 1948 essay on the crime novel, he notes that the danger that threatens the victim in the event of the crime novel is always carried out (murder, robbery; Laín Entralgo 1948, 76). In crime fiction, the world remains uncontrollable regardless of the institutions in charge of public safety and order. Every individual is threatened by crime. Moreover, in crime novels, the “emotional tension” begins with a sudden increase, only to gradually decrease again in the course of the investigation. Apart from this emotional aspect, the crime novel appeals to the intellect, since events reveal a logical coherence (77, 79–80; see also Laín Entralgo 1956, 93–101). In the same year, Mariano Baquero Goyanes published some ideas on suspense – without referring to this effect explicitly – in his article on time and “tempo” in narrative fiction. He observes that the success of the serial novel and feuilleton novel was “not so much due to the terrifying interest in the action,” but to the fact that this type of novel had to stick to a certain narrative tempo – “to the novelist’s ability to present it [the action] in doses. The serial writer has time to spend, and he uses it as the most powerful emotional springboard by submitting the reader’s attention to impatient waiting.” (Baquero Goyanes 1948, 88). In his study on the Spanish short story in the nineteenth century (1949), which was awarded

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a prize by the CSIC, Baquero Goyanes deals with suspense only very briefly at a point where he compares the short story with the novel. Unlike the novel, where the novelist can play with the interest of the reader by delaying, hiding the outcome, suspending an action and intercrossing it with another, describing unexpected reactions, in the short story the traditional three parts – exposition, knot, and ending – of the old preceptive treatises are so tightly bound together that they are almost one. (1949, 125)

It should be noted that the entries in Ensayo de un diccionario de la literatura: Términos y conceptos literarios by Sainz de Robles (1949; s.vv. “suspension,” “sustentación”) as well as in Lázaro Carreter’s Diccionario de términos filológicos (1953, 1962, 1968, s.v. “SUSPENSION”) do not go beyond the classical rhetorical definitions of the homonymous logical or thought figure. The Spanish translation of the Diccionario de retórica, crítica y terminología literaria, prepared by Joaquín Forradellas (Marchese and Forradellas 1986), lists the German term Spannung with a reference to the Spanish tensión in the following brief entry: “The term tension (which we translate from the German Spannung, introduced by Tomaševskij marks the climax of the narrative situation, after which the narration moves toward its solution.” In other words, in the second half of the 1980s criticism has still not moved beyond a rough summary of those statements on plot structure in the epic poem already made by the preceptists in the late nineteenth century. There are two further entries. However, they both show that in those years there was no in-depth study of the topic. The first, on suspense, relates the effect on the plot (“trama”), but in a manner that is all but incomprehensible: It is a mechanism of the plot that makes dramatic elements that in themselves are not, creating a strong tension in the reader. The paradigm is Hitchcock’s cinema, but there is no lack of examples in narrative and even in poetry. (Marchese and Forradellas 1986, s.v.)

Just how tensión is created remains unanswered, as does the question of what is meant by “dramatic.” The second entry is on suspensión, that is, the term in the rhetorical tradition which limits the mechanisms of generating the phenomenon to the sentence level. As an explanation for the two entries, Marchese and Forradellas add: “Some critics translate with this word [suspensión] the English – and universal – term suspense. However, this does not refer to the syntax, but to the construction of the discourse; we prefer, therefore, to distinguish them” (1986, s.v.). It is not until 1989 that Baquero Goyanes, in his monograph Estructuras de la novela actual gives the topic more space than he had previously. He raises the issue at various points in his study, including in the subchapter on the detective novel (“4. The Detective Novel as a ‘Structure’”), which is part of chapter 11 on “Disorder and Digressions.” A suspension effect is created by the interruption of action at the

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end of each chapter and the insertion of further chapters, or – with reference to the much-cited book by the French author duo with the pseudonym Boileau-Narcejac on the detective novel (1964; Span. trans. 1968) – by the insertion of flashbacks at decisive points in the plot, thus delaying its continuation (Baquero Goyanes 1989, 110, 121). Compared with the plot structure of the nouveau roman, detective novels also show time leaps and are thus complicated, but never obscure or ambiguous, because this would be at the expense of tensión: “It would have been difficult to sustain and feed the reading tension of the particular reading public of these serial novels with ambiguities” (138, emphasis in the original). In the subchapter on the detective novel (1989, 138–156), Baquero Goyanes compares the nouveau roman with the detective novel as riddle, and as a type of mystery, on the basis of similiarities in plot structure. Though he says nothing more on the subject of suspense here, in the end he feels the need to justify the space he has dedicated to the genre of the detective novel: “The attention paid to a literary species considered to be of very modest importance (if not infraliterary) may seem to be excessive” (156). In 1992, Francisca Suárez Cualla presented suspense as it had developed in film studies, starting in the 1950s. Based on the definition given by Chatman (1978) and referring to stories of the Arabian Nights and to fantastic literature in general, Suárez Cualla describes suspense as a plot-related phenomenon, looking to John Searle for the concept of a performative speech act such as a promise. Among the conditions formulated for this speech act is the possible future action of the speaker. The sender (speaker) promises something to the recipient, whose expectations are raised correspondingly. According to Suárez Cualla, in suspense stories there is a state of tension between what the recipient knows and what he does not know, and this situation generates an expectation that results in suspense. Tension can be represented in the characters. There are three “mechanisms” by which this state of expectation is produced: (1) the interruption of something that is anticipated, (2) mutually interrupted interwoven stories, and (3) “the representation of parallel stories sometimes related to each other that complicate the plot by shifting interest to different focal points” (Suárez Cualla 1992, 806). In connection with the novelist and screenwriter Eugene Vale (1944), she lists further techniques for producing suspense common to detective stories and fantastic literature: anticipation and the choice of certain themes (crime, mystery, the extraordinary). With reference to the famous Hitchcock interview and the bomb example, she concludes that there are two “possibilities” (what she actually refers to is plot types) for the appearance of suspense that are based on the tension between knowledge and ignorance (807): first, plots that avoid revealing the outcome of a sequence of events and stimulate the reader’s desire to know what comes next (“qué sucede”) and second, plots that avoid revealing how it will happen (“cómo”). The function of suspense is to immerse the reader in the story.

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4 Conclusion It appears that little research on the subject of suspense was conducted in Spain until the 1980s. This can be explained by the fact that as a characteristic of the crime narrative in general, and of the suspense novel in particular, from the point of view of the representatives of an elitist concept of literature, suspense was marked early on as a characteristic of popular fiction and thus not worthy of scientific study. Another reason for the belated and hesitant academic interest in the functional mechanisms of these genres is, for some critics, that they are not of Spanish origin (Buschmann 2002, 93).

References Aristotle. 1982. Poetik. Edited and translated by Manfred Fuhrmann. Stuttgart: Reclam. Aristotle. 1996. Poetics. Translated with commentary by Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin. Baquero Goyanes, Mariano. 1948. “Tiempo y ‘tempo’ en la novela.” Arbor: Revista general del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas 11, no. 33, 85–94. Baquero Goyanes, Mariano. 1949. El cuento español en el siglo XIX. Madrid: CSIC. Baquero Goyanes, Mariano. 1989. Estructuras de la novela actual. Madrid: Castalia. Blair, Hugh (1798–1801). Lecciones sobre la Retórica y las Bellas Letras. Translated by Don Joseph Luis Munarriz. 4 vols. Madrid: En la Oficina de D. Antonio Cruzado. Boileau-Narcejac [Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac]. 1964. Le roman policier. Paris: Payot. Translated into Spanish as La novela policial (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1968). Bomhoff, Jürgen G. 1972. “Über Spannung in der Literatur.” In Dichter und Leser: Studien zur Literatur, edited by Ferdinand van Ingen, Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Hans de Leeuwe, and Frank C. Maatje, 300–314. Groningen: Wolters Noordhoff. Bonheim, Helmut. 2001. “Spannung, Suspense, Tension – a Survey of Parameters and a Thesis.” In Spannung: Studien zur englischsprachigen Literatur für Ulrich Suerbaum zum 75. Geburtstag, edited by Raimund Borgmeier and Peter Wenzel, 1–9. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Borringo, Heinz-Lothar. 1980. Spannung in Text und Film: Spannung und Suspense als Textverarbeitungskategorien. Düsseldorf: Schwann. Buschmann, Albrecht. 2002. “La novela negra: Presentación.” Iberoamericana 2, no. 7, 92–96. Callejón y Asme, José. 1888. Elementos de literatura preceptiva ó de retórica y poética. Seville: Imprenta y Litografía de José Ma Ariza. Campillo y Correa, Narciso. 1872. Retórica y poética ó literatura preceptiva. Madrid: Imprenta de Segundo Martínez. Capmany y Montpalau, Antonio de. 1777. Filosofía de la Eloquencia. Madrid: Antonio de Sancha. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Deupmann, Christoph. 2008. “Langeweile: Das Andere der Spannung.” In Zwischen Text und Leser: Studien zu Begriff, Geschichte und Funktion literarischer Spannung, edited by Ingo Irsigler, Christoph Jürgensen, and Daniela Langer, 103–122. Munich: edition text + kritik.

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Diccionario de la lengua castellana por la Real Academia Española. 1817. Madrid: Imprenta Real. Diccionario de la lengua castellana por la Real Academia Española. 1884. Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando. Diccionario de la lengua española. 1984. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Diccionario manual e ilustrado de la lengua Española. 1985. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Dolle-Weinkauf, Bernd. 1994. “Inszenierung – Intensivierung – Suspense: Strukturen des ‘Spannenden’ in Literatur und Comic.” In Unterhaltung: Sozial- und literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu ihren Formen und Funktionen, edited by Dieter Petzold and Eberhard Späth, 115–138. Erlangen: Universitätsbund. Forster, E. M. (1927) 2016. Aspects of the Novel. London: Arnold. Fuchs, Andreas. 2000. Dramatische Spannung: Moderner Begriff – antikes Konzept. Stuttgart: Metzler. Fuhrmann, Manfred. 1971. “Mythos als Wiederholung in der griechischen Tragödie und im Drama des 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Terror und Spiel: Probleme der Mytherezeption, edited by Manfred Fuhrmann, 121–143. Munich: Fink. Gil y Zárate, Antonio. 1844. Manual de literatura: Principios de poética y retórica. Madrid: Ignacio Boix. Gunia, Inke. 1998. “‘Bewundert viel und viel gescholten’: Das Romanschaffen der Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921).” In Ein Raum zum Schreiben: Schreibende Frauen in Spanien vom 16. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Ute Frackowiak, 174–197. Berlin: edition tranvía. Gunia, Inke. 2008. De la poesía a la literatura: El cambio de los conceptos en la formación del campo literario español del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Heath, Malcolm. 1996. Introduction to Poetics, by Aristotle, edited by Malcolm Heath, vii–lxxiv. London: Penguin. Janka, Markus. 2009. “Suspensio.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, vol. 9, 263–269. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Junkerjürgen, Ralf. 2002. Spannung – narrative Verfahrensweisen der Leseraktivierung: Eine Studie am Beispiel der Reiseromane von Jules Verne. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Laferl, Christopher F. 2007. “Der Knoten: Zum Problem der Spannung in der Filosofía Antigua Poética des Alonso López Pinciano.” In Gespannte Erwartungen: Beiträge zur Geschichte der literarischen Spannung, edited by Kathrin Ackermann and Judith Moser-Kroiss, 125–135. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Laín Entralgo, Pedro. 1948. “Ensayo sobre la novela policíaca.” In Vestigios: Ensayos de crítica y amistad, 75–97. Madrid: Espesa. Laín Entralgo, Pedro. 1956. “La novela policíaca.” In La aventura de leer, 91–119. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Lausberg, Heinrich. 1998. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. Leiden: Brill. Lawson, Marjorie F. 1934. Spannung in der Erzählung. Bonn: Röhrscheid. Lázaro Carreter, Fernando. 1953. Diccionario de términos filológicos. Madrid: Gredos. Lázaro Carreter, Fernando. 1962. Diccionario de términos filológicos. Madrid: Gredos. Lázaro Carreter, Fernando. 1968. Dicci Diccionario de términos filológicos onario de términos filológicos. Madrid: Gredos. López Grigera, Luisa. 1983. “Sobre el realismo literario del Siglo de Oro.” AIH: Actas 8:201–209. López Pinciano, Alonso. (1596) 1894. Filosofía Antigua poética. Valladolid: Imprenta y Librería Nacional y Extranjera de Hijos de Rodríguez 1894. Luzán, Ignacio de. (1737) 1789. La poética o reglas de la poesía en general y de sus principales especies: Con Las memorias de la vida de don Ignacio de Luzán escritas por su hijo. Madrid: Cátedra 1974. Marchese, Angelo, and Joaquín Forradellas. 1986. Diccionario de retórica, crítica terminología literaria. Barcelona: Ariel. Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio. (1752) 1984. “Rhetorica.” In Obras completas, edited by Antonio Mestre Sanchís, vol. 3, 1–652. Oliva: Ayuntamiento de Oliva.

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Moles, John. 1979. “Notes on Aristotle, Poetics 13 and 14.” Classical Quarterly 29, no. 1, 77–94. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1994. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1909. “La vida contemporánea.” La Ilustración Artística: Periódico semanal de literatura, artes y ciencias, 15 February 1909, no. 1416. https://prensahistorica.mcu.es/ publicaciones/numeros_por_mes.do?idPublicacion=9062&anyo=1909 (accessed 26 February 2020). Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1912. “La vida contemporánea.” La Ilustración Artística: Periódico semanal de literatura, artes y ciencias, 15 April 1912, no. 1581. https://prensahistorica.mcu.es/publicaciones/ numeros_por_mes.do?idPublicacion=9062&anyo=1912 (accessed 26 February 2020). Quintilian. 2002. The Orator’s Education. Edited and translated by Donald A. Russell. Vols 3–4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sainz de Robles, Federico Carlos. 1949. Ensayo de un diccionario de la literatura, vol. 1, Términos y conceptos literarios. Madrid: Aguilar. Salinas, Miguel de. 1541. Rhetorica en lengua castellana, en la qual se pone muy en breue lo necessario para saber bien hablar y escreuir: y conoscer quien habla y escriue bien. Alcalá de Henares: Ioā de Brocar. Sánchez Barbero, Francisco. (1805) 1840. Principios de retórica y poética. Barcelona: Librería de A. Pons y Compañía. Singer, Rüdiger. 2016. “Intermediale Anschaulichkeit: Enargeia als rhetorisches Wirkungsideal von Text, Bild und actio.” In Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit: Visualisierung im Wahrnehmen, Lesen und Denken, edited by Hans Adler and Sabine Gross, 157–177. Paderborn: Fink. Suárez Coalla, Francisca. 1992. “El suspense en la ficción literaria.” In Investigaciones semióticas IV (describir, inventar, transcribir el mundo), vol. 2, 803–808. Seville: Visor. Terreros y Pando, Esteban de. 1767. Diccionario castellano con las voces de ciencias y artes y sus correspondientes en as tres lenguas francesa, latina, e italiana. Vol. 3. Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra. Vale, Eugene. 1944. The Technique of Screen and Television Writing: A Book about the Framatic Structure of Motion Pictures. New York: DeVorss & Co., distributed by Crown Publishers. Translated into Spanish as Técnicas del guión para cine y televisión (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1985). Valles Calatrava, José R.,. 2002. “Los primeros pasos de la novela criminal española (1900–1975).” In: Iberoamericana II, 7, 141–149. Wessel, Burkhard. 1992. “Attentum parare, facere.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, vol. 1, 1161–1163. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Wolf, Werner. 2014. “Illusion (Aesthetic).” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1, 270–287. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Suspense in Spanish Narratives from the Golden Age to the Nineteenth Century 1 Definition In the present study, where the object is narrative fictional prose literature, suspense is understood as a type of textually intended reader activation. There is widespread agreement in research across different traditions and disciplines that the term suspense designates a special type of human emotional experience generated in the process of reading that is attributable to cognitive uncertainty (e.g., Lawson 1934; Barnet, Berman, and Burto 1964; Sternberg 1978; Chatman 1978; Borringo 1980; Brewer and Lichtenstein 1981; Brewer 1984; Brewer and Jose 1984; DolleWeinkauff 1994; Carroll 1990; 1996; 2001; Brewer 1996; Anz 1998; Wenzel 2001; Junkerjürgen 2002; Valles Calatrava and Álamo Felices 2002; Baroni 2007; Beecher 2007; Mellmann 2011). Specifically, suspense is a hovering between a “hope emotion” and a “fear emotion” (Ortony, Clore, and Collins 1988, 131) and creates, as by-products, pleasure and desire (as equivalents to the German Lust; see, e.g., Nell 1988, 60; Anz 1998, 2007; Laferl 2007, 125). Given the abundance of research positions on suspense in literature (and in film) describing it as an emotional experience, it is surprising that few authors concern themselves with a definition of emotion (e.g., Mellmann 2011; Mikos 1996; Wuss 1996). The conception of suspense adopted here draws from research on emotion by the sociologist Christian von Scheve and philosopher Jan Slaby (2019, 42–43). They describe emotion as an integral part of an affective dynamic. Whereas affect in this context is not understood as an inner state (feeling, emotion), but as a pre-categorical relationship between “bodies that involve a change,” emotion refers to a world-relatedness that is culturally categorized and linguistically labelled (fear, anger, happiness, grief, envy, pride, shame, etc.). Emotions are explained as reactions to “felt or anticipated loss or reclamation of control” (Wuss 1996, 53 interpreting Dörner et al. 1983, 66). With regard to the relationship between emotion and cognitive uncertainty in the generation of suspense, it was observed that humans, in order to adapt to their environment, feel the need to permanently look for well-defined situations that allow them to influence the course of events (Wuss 1996, 53 based on Dörner et al. 1983; Anz 1998, 151; a similar approach, based on the psychological field theory of Lewin [1936] 1969, had been pursued earlier by Borringo 1980).

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It can be concluded that suspense goes hand in hand with the recipient’s attentiveness with respect to the control of the narrated situation. The need for control is regulated by the way in which information is provided (Wuss 1996, 54, with Simonov 1975, 83; Pfister [1982] 1984, 143, based on Pütz 1970; Wienold 1972, Fónagy and Fónagy 1971). Consequently, inherent in the text that is intended to generate suspense are certain emotional control mechanisms (Anz 2007, 464, uses the term Wirkungsdisposition, “disposition of effects”), regardless of the fact that individual empirical recipients may or may not have the prerequisites for their recognition. This aspect is relevant insofar as it entails an approach in which the concept of the implied reader, functioning as a “presumed addressee” with the concomitant “linguistic codes, ideological norms, and aesthetic ideas” inscribed in the text (Schmid 2014, 302), serves as an important reference point that should not be disregarded. The uncertainty resulting from a suspense-generating textual disposition refers to the outcome of a course of events that the narrative discourse draws the addressee’s attention to (e.g., Rabkin 1973, 58–64; Boulton 1975, 49; Sternberg 1978, 65; Ortony, Clore, and Collins 1988, 131; Carroll 1996, 75). Suspense is first seen as a phenomenon of event combination through narrative discourse that pursues a specific strategy for the distribution of information (plot), a position that has its roots in the ancient poetics of drama (see my other contribution in this volume). As for the way in which information is imparted, Hitchcock’s famous example of the bomb is often reproduced, serving as a jumping-off point for theoretical considerations that differentiate suspense from the emotional reactions of curiosity and surprise (Truffaut [1966] 2014). Although Todorov’s thoughts on the “roman policier” as early as 1971 (1977, 45, 47) included the description of interest-led event-linking to differentiate “suspense” (moving “from cause to effect”) from “curiosity” (“it proceeds from effect to cause”) with the help of the Russian formalists’ categorization into fable (“the story of the crime [. . .] what has happened in life”) and sujet (“the story of the investigation [. . .] the plot”), Sternberg’s reasoning (1978) provided the basis for the interdisciplinary psychological and literary “Structural-Affect Theory” developed by Brewer and Lichtenstein (1981, 1982; Brewer 1984, 1996). Brewer and Lichtenstein further substantiate the above-mentioned remarks on the distribution of information in the plot. The suspense-generating event sequence in the narrative discourse corresponds to the temporal arrangement of this sequence on the level of the histoire, with the peculiarity that there is an “initiating event [. . .] that has the potential to lead to a significant outcome (good or bad),” but that the event that reveals that very future outcome is omitted in the narrative discourse (Brewer 1984, 6–7; 1996, 112–113). This gap in information is marked in the narrative discourse in such a way as to suggest the formation of hypotheses about the outcome of the event sequence, one of which is judged to be threatening. To produce suspense, not

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only must danger be introduced; it must also become imminent. Relevant here is the duration of anticipation on the level of the narrative discourse, in other words, the “time” that elapses until the outcome of the suspense-generating event sequence is reached (Junkerjürgen 2002, 49–51, based on de Wied 1991). The imminence of danger linked to approximation of story time and discourse time results in the emergence of suspense coupled with a mixture of hope, fear, and pleasure. Curiosity and surprise discourse structures also behave differently from suspense discourse structure with respect to omitted event information. The curiosity discourse structure consciously omits information regarding relevant antecedents to an event critical to a sequence of events, but lets it be known that information is missing, thus eliciting the recipient’s curiosity (Brewer 1984, 7–8, “classical mystery story”; 1996, 112). In a surprise discourse structure, too, initial event information is omitted (Brewer 1984, 5–6; 1996, 111–112). However, unlike suspense and curiosity, omissions of information about relevant antecedents related to a significant event remain unmarked in the narrative of surprise-generating event sequences. In contrast to suspense discourse structure, curiosity and surprise discourse structures deviate from the chronological event structure at the histoire level. This is the reason why curiosity and surprise tend to appear in tandem, with one effect, namely surprise together with its preliminary information practice designed to lead the reader down a wrong path, preceding the other, namely curiosity together with its missing preliminary information as a kind of abridged surprise discourse structure (Junkerjürgen 2002, 46–47). A suspense-generating sequence of events may be contained in a curiosity discourse structure, and  – as Chatman shows (1978, 60–62)  – a suspense discourse structure may follow a surprise discourse structure, while the outcome of a suspense discourse structure may also be to produce surprise. Cataphoric elements may fulfill an essential instructive function in the recipient’s modelling of possible event outcomes (in research, they have been given different names and definitions; see e.g., Chatman 1978, 60: “anticipatory satellites”; Borringo 1980, 53: “Vorinformation durch konnotativ angeladene Indices,” “preliminary information through connotatively loaded indices”; Pfister [1982] 1984, 145: “zukunftsorientierte Informationsvergabe,” “future-oriented allocation of information”; Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 1991, 128–129: “hermeneutic [. . .] temporary [. . .] prospective [gaps]”; Wulff 1996, 2: “cataphora as constructions of attention”). However, as a mechanism of steering expectations with respect to possible developments of a chain of events (i.e., the anticipated developments may or may not occur), cataphora are not to be confused with prolepsis, which provides more or less precise clues about the development of a chain of events. Thus, cataphora can coincide with the event that triggers the suspense-generating discourse structure.

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The nature of how the reader relates to characters (through empathy, sympathy, antipathy) in the course of the generation of suspense has been controversially discussed (Pfister [1982] 1984, 144; Ackermann 2005, 119; Baroni 2007, 271–274; see also the debate around the paradox of suspense: Gerrig 1989a, 1989b, 1996, 1997; Carroll 1990, 1996, 2001; Brewer 1996; Smuts 2008, 2009; Arguello Manresa 2016). As in the case of the suspense phenomenon, empathy, sympathy, and antipathy should also be treated above all as intended effects through a strategy laid out in the text for the presumed addressee. As such, they are determined by certain poetological, social, political, and other conventions existing at the time of producing the text. The intention to create these effects can be inferred, for example, from the presentation of the characters, the nature of the initial suspense-triggering events, or from perspective, and so on. When it comes to drawing readers imaginatively and emotionally into the narrated world, as in the case of suspense-generating discourse structures, all dimensions of the narrative textual constitution and their components, as well as paratextual references (the design of the book cover and book trailers, etc.) and extrafictional context, come into play. Consequently, suspense-generating discourse structures are to be seen as devices for the reception effect that Wolf calls “aesthetic illusion” (2014; see Wolf’s contribution to this volume), a phenomenon that lies in the tradition that goes back to sustentatio/suspensum as a technique of ancient rhetoric to produce the effect known as enargeia/ evidentia (see my other contribution in this volume). The pragmatic framing of the analysis of suspense-generating textual strategies follows the view of various scholars who mention the cultural, historical, and individual conditioning of suspense (Pfister [1982] 1984, 142, for dramatic texts; Borringo 1980, 38, for literature and film; Schmitz 1994, 4, for literature; Mikos 1996, 47, for film; see also Ackermann 2005, 118, and Mellmann 2011, 68). Indeed, since suspense is defined as a special emotional type of human experience that implies culturally categorized world-relatedness, the tracking of its generation and the strategies for intensifying it must take into account aspects of production and reception on the part of the empirical author or recipient. Thus, suspense is also dependent on the knowledge of poetological conventions and norms valid at the time of producing, reading, or hearing the text in question. The effects of suspense may be intensified by the experiences and value concepts of the individual empirical recipient, although these are difficult or impossible to determine in retrospect. However, what is comparatively easier to describe are collective value systems and emotional memories that are consciously activated by the literary text through its connotations. The term collective or public mood may be helpful in this regard (based on the concept of “mood” described by Wulff 2006, 3). Public mood refers to the communicative situation between the empirical recipient and the literary text that may influence the effects of suspense. Similarly to the concept of public

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opinion, in other words a consensus on public issues (res publicae) formed through communicators in the public sphere (opinion-leading social actors), one may look for a consensus of sentiment in corresponding communicators in order to determine public mood. Rahn, Kroeger, and Kite focus on public mood within the context of political psychology and define it as “a diffuse affective state, having distinct positive and negative components that people experience” (1996, 29). This perspective enables inquiry into how the issues related to suspense-generating textual mechanisms are debated among potential recipients in empirical reality. The question of whether suspense is a measurable phenomenon in terms of scale at the level of textual strategies and their intended effects will not be considered here (for further information: Fónagy and Fónagy 1971 for drama; Borringo 1980 for prose fiction and film; Pfister [1982] 1984 for drama; de Wied 1991 for film; Mattenklott 1996 for prose fiction). Finally, it should be noted that the textual mechanisms for creating suspense defined above can apply to both the micro-level (suspense focused on one section of a plot) and to the macro-level (suspense that increases from the beginning to the end of a plot) of a narrative.

2 Suspense in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age: The Chivalric Romance Amadís de Gaula (1508) The chivalric romance (libro de caballerías), due to its plot structure and to the nature of the events it portrays, suggests the existence of practices aimed at generating suspense. Amadís de Gaula is a work that, in its day and beyond, enjoyed enormous circulation, primarily among the Spanish nobility (Aguilar Perdomo 2005, 46–47). One of the most famous reception testimonies regarding this genre is found almost a hundred years later in chapter 6 of the first volume of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, where the barber Maese Nicolás and the priest Licenciado Pedro Pérez enter the library of Don Quixote to burn the books that are said to have twisted his mind. The first work that comes into the hands of the barber are the four books of the “virtuous knight Amadis of Gaul.” In Don Quixote, the barber prevents the priest from burning Amadís, because apart from being the first of this genre in Spain, it is said to be “the best of all the books of this kind that have been written, and so, as something singular in its line.” The only complete published version of Amadís known so far is an amended one comprising four books by Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo (Zaragoza, 1508). This edition is entitled The Four Books on the Virtuous Knight Amadís of Gaule (Los cuatro libros del virtuoso caballero Amadís de Gaula).

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The work is constructed as a narrative in which the plot starts ab ovo with Amadís’s grandfather and the meeting of his parents and does not follow a development based on an initial event that leads ineluctably to an outcome at the end of the text. Instead, its plot is episodic, with the episodes being syntactically linked to the whole through the protagonist Amadís and other characters who are functionally oriented toward him. More precisely, the recipient is presented with a variety of individual sequences of chronologically and causally connected events by an extradiegetic or primary narrative instance presenting the extraordinarily virtuous life and heroic deeds of the knight Amadís de Gaula, which correspond to the office of chivalry as described by the Catalan Raymond Lully in his widely circulated Libre del orde d’cavayleria (1274–1276), namely as an institution created and ordained by God. The sequences of events mostly begin and end with the chapter boundaries. The story does not come to an end upon the death of the protagonist. Instead, the narrative continues and then focuses on the consequences of Amadís’s actions for posterity. There is no suspense-favoring structure that spans the entire plot of Amadís with a suspense-triggering event at the beginning and an event that resolves the uncertainty at the end. Instead, there are episodic individual event sequences designed to create suspense. The romance is anchored in ancient poetics and rhetoric when examined for techniques intended to create suspense (see my other contribution to this volume). As for the selection and combination of events relevant to the generation of this special type of human emotional experience in the process of reading, influences from Aristotelian poetics can be discerned, namely regarding those components of the mythos that are said to have the strongest emotional impact on the audience. When it comes to the strategic distribution of information resulting in uncertainty and the formation of hypotheses about the outcome of a course of events (where one of these hypotheses is estimated to be threatening), the author of the romance also seems to have been directed by the guidelines of ancient rhetoric, more precisely by sustentatio/suspensum techniques for maintaining attention (attentum parare) as formulated in connection with the ideal of the enargeia/evidentia effect. After two general observations related to the unpredictability of event developments in suspense-generating discourse structures, the following four examples will make clear how the techniques from poetics and rhetoric are combined so as to create suspense. The story is presented on the extradiegetic or primary level by a heterodiegetic overt narrative voice that explicitly addresses an audience. The narrative discourse resembles a speech to an audience whose sustained attention must be captured and kept. One can assume that this form is due to the practice of the time of reading such texts aloud to a community of listeners (Frenk 1982). According to the poetological scheme of the chivalric romance, the protagonist is noble, grand, and important,

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representing the type of the invincible hero, which makes the plot predictable. On the other hand, some chapter titles in the Spanish original contain the term “aventura” (in the English translation by Munday, 1590, “aduenture”), which counteracts predictability and is conducive to the creation of suspense because, according to Cacho Blecua (2018, 110), “aduenture” at the time connoted three characteristics: a unique event, a problematic course of events, and an unknown outcome. In Amadís, magical elements are also used. Pauses between the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one delay the outcome of an event sequence and are intended to cause sustentatio/suspensum as part of the devices to produce enargeia/evidentia. This occurs, for example, between chapters 8 and 9 during Amadís’s stay at King Perión’s castle. He has slept badly because of his longing for his distant love, Oriana. His grief is so great that he wants to die. Suddenly, Perión is caught off-guard by King Abiés’s army, injecting a potentially significant outcome into the initial event. Despite his emotional instability and contrary to the warnings of Perión and Agrajes not to take up arms before dawn, which can be read as a cataphoric element, Amadís is determined to defend his king. In the course of the chapter, Perión, supported by Amadís, engages in a grueling battle that shows him to be at a disadvantage. However, Amadís, despite his exhaustion, pushes for a duel with Abiés. In vain, Perión tries to stop Amadís when, suddenly, the chapter ends. In connection with suspense-favoring plot sequences like this one, another characteristic of the protagonist should not go unmentioned. Amadís is introduced as “virtuoso” in the prologue. The term conveys the meaning of the Latin noun virtus – “the essence of ‘man’ (vir), expressed in particular as courage” (Wardle 2006). Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española (1611) defines virtuoso as one “to whom virtue is given” (“el dado a la virtud”), where virtud is the opposite of vicio (vice). Considering the value system of the time the romance was written, the reading audience was supposed to feel sympathy for Amadís and be concerned about his survival in event sequences in which his life is threatened by evil. Further examples of a delay through sustentatio/suspensum by yet other techniques can be found at the end of chapter 9 and in the next one (end of chapter 10 and chapter 11 in the 1590 English translation by Munday). Before the end of the chapter, the narrative voice announces a “straunge occasion” (trans. Munday, the Spanish original reads: “un caso maravilloso”) proceeding in the same way as the orators of Antiquity in the prooemium/exordium part of a speech when announcing something important and unprecedented. The “straunge occasion” is elaborated in the following chapter 10, where the narrative voice makes use of another delay, this time, however, by breaking up the whole event into its parts approximating story time and discourse time. The event in question is one of those that meet the

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criterion stipulated by Aristotle as a must for a plot (mythos) designed to generate emotions such as pity (éleos) and fear (phóbos): anagnôrisis  – the “change from ignorance to knowledge” (Arist. Po. 1452a, according to the English edition of Heath 1996). It is a highly emotional scene in which King Perión and Queen Elisena recognize their son in Amadís. This is exactly the kind of peripety that results logically from the events narrated previously, so we are not faced here with surprise. Born premaritally, Amadís is abandoned as an infant by his mother Elisena, who puts him out to sea in a box. He is given a sword and a ring, which Elisena had previously received as proof of love from Perión. Perión himself has a very similar ring. Later, when Elisena, now King Perión’s wife, is asked by her husband about the ring, she tells him that she has lost it. At King Perión’s court, Amadís meets Milicia, the daughter of Perión and Elisena, who is desperately looking for a ring her father had lent her. Amadís gives her his own. When King Perión wants to put it on, he sees his own ring on the floor in the corner of the chamber and finds that the two rings look very similar. Asked about the origin of Milicia’s ring, she mentions Amadís. This constitutes an event with the potential to lead to a significant outcome, considering the contemporary recipient’s knowledge of the conventions of proof of love and marriage. The latter also refer to the meaning of a ring as a pignus amoris attesting to the existence of a clandestine marital bond between Perión and Elisena before their official marriage (Cacho Blecua 2018, 122). The king suspects that his wife is in love with the young knight, which brings the situation to a climax. Perión takes his sword, enters the queen’s chamber, closes the door and thus the queen’s way out, and then forces her to explain herself. A release from the distress in which the queen finds herself is delayed. The queen tells her secret and they decide to awaken Amadís so that he can contribute his knowledge about his origins to complete the story. In the end, the threatened act of violence can be avoided by the knowledge that Amadís is her biological son and the brother of Milicia. In contrast to present-day fiction which, based on creative freedom, presents a variety of suspense-generating discourse structures and other means of aesthetic illusion to draw its recipients emotionally into the narrated world, the works of Golden Age authors exhibit a close adherence to ancient rhetoric with its prescriptive character. This is particularly evident in the last example from Amadís. A humiliating gesture of the knight Dardán toward Amadís in chapter 13 serves as suspense triggering an initial event, because it results in a duel that is announced for the next morning. The narrative voice delays the beginning and the end of the important event by particular means of ancient rhetoric that are meant to bind the audience’s attention through the effect of enargeia/evidentia. The narrative voice explains Dardán’s humiliating action in a complicated and time-consuming manner which should stimulate the audience to hypothe-

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size about the further course of events (how will a possible fight end?). First, it makes use of a feigned dialogue with the “soberbios” (arrogant men) in general, announcing that this type of person will be made to pay for his/her attitude. Next, the audience is addressed (apostrophe) through a question related to the consequences of arrogance in the specific case of Dardán in order to finally note that the answer will be revealed in the following: “what benefit is there in those vile words spoken by Dardán [. . .] History will show you the outcome [. . .].” The fight between Dardán and Amadís later in this chapter is broken up into numerous individual events approaching discourse time to story time. Details are not spared, especially those that refer to the damage caused to the knights’ armor and the physical blows the opponents have to suffer. Lances penetrate armor, then break, the violent blows cause sparks to fly from the helmets, chips come off the armor, splinters off the shields. What is more, the narrative voice does not refrain from capturing the emotional reactions of the spectators, shifting the view from the lowest position in the audience to the highest, an early form of perspectivism. There is mention of great horror and terror. At the very last, after the people of the city standing on towers and ramparts, after the ladies and damsels watching from the windows of the castle, the narrative voice directs attention to the king, who, similarly to today’s sportscasters, also comments on the event using linguistic hyperbole: “Whē King Lisuart saw them endure so long, he said aloud: that he neuer beheld a more singuler combat, pursued with greater courage & manhood” (trans. Munday). Despite the long duration of the fight and the exhaustion of the knights, both refuse to give up, which delays the resolution of the tense scene. Since the horses have exhausted their strength, the fight is continued on foot at Dardán’s request. This means that the situation is becoming more acute as the opponents – according to the narrative voice – now are coming closer to each other. Once again the reactions of the audience are added: “it was folly of Dardan to want to get off the horse.” Amadís shows himself superior to Dardán in the course of the fight, and the presumed addressee, for whom Amadís is the radiant hero, can breathe a sigh of relief at this point, upon hearing the voices of the audience in the diegesis: “whē she [the queen] & all ye Ladies said. Without question, Dardan is but dead” (trans. Munday). But the fortunes seem to turn when Amadís, distracted by his lady Oriana at the window, loses control over his opponent, a development intended to have the presumed addressee worry about the hero again. Subsequently, the narrative voice lets a spectator, in this case Lady Oriana, confirm what has happened: “the Damosell of Denmarke [. . .], spake out aloud. In an vnhappy hower did the Knight behold any Lady in this company, whereby he hath lost what he wun of Dardan: it is no time now for his heart to faint” (trans. Munday). Amadís hears this comment, is ashamed of his own behavior, and strikes out for the last victorious blow. By inserting the

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comments of the spectators of the fight, the narrative voice seeks to dynamically present the different perspectives on the spectacle. The use of two different names for the protagonist underlines the change of perspectives. When he talks of “the foreign knight” (cavallero estraño), he switches to the perceptual horizon of the spectators, who do not know the true identity of Dardán’s opponent, whereas when saying “Amadís,” it is the narratorial perspective. Bartholome Ximenez Patón, in his Eloquencia, española en arte (1604, 80), emphasizes that books of chivalry are full of examples of evidentia. Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua (2008), for his part, explains Amadís’s particular position regarding the relationship between fictionality and factuality as a third way: he chooses to classify his text as a “feigned story” although in its presentation he uses mechanisms of factual storytelling. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo ([1905] 1943, I, 371) found a special reception testimony to Amadís passed on through Francisco de Portugal. In his Arte de galantería ([1670] 2012, 149–150), Portugal tells an anecdote that shows how much the empirical reader succumbed to the immersion effect emanating from this novel, decades after Cervantes had aimed to put an end to books of chivalry with his Quixote because they gave too much room to the imagination. The scenic presentation, the approximation of discourse time and story time, the emphasis on the emotionality of scenes on the part of the narrative voice and the characters – all these techniques contributed to the fact that the recipients were emotionally gripped by the supposed death that Amadís experiences after the duel with the magician Arcalaus in chapter 18. It is only in the following chapter that it becomes clear that Amadís, the invincible knightly hero, has only been hit by a spell from which he can free himself: A mysterious incident concerns Amadis de Gaula, a book that introduced the imitation of what is not like history [sic] (A very important gentleman came to his house and found his wife, daughters, and maids crying. With consternation he asked her in great distress if any of his sons or his masters had died. They replied, drowning in tears, that they had not. He replied, more confused: Well, why are you crying? They said: Sir, Amadis is dead. [. . .])

3 Suspense at the End of the Spanish Eighteenth Century: El Valdemaro (1792) With his novel El Valdemaro, the Franciscan friar Vicente Martínez Colomer (1762–1820) produced a publishing success in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Spain. By 1822 it had been reprinted five times (Brown 1953). Almost three hundred years after the appearance of Amadís, El Valdemaro exhib-

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its a far more complex narrative structure – a development that has implications for the treatment of suspense. In poetological terms, the novel is classified as an early example of romanticism. In addition, structural similarities to the Byzantine romance have been demonstrated (Carnero 1984, 21), such as the narrating of journeys with obstacles (kidnappings, shipwrecks, imprisonments, robberies, disguises), anagnôrisis, and parallel plot threads that culminate in a happy ending (Álvarez Barrientos 1991, 258; González Rovira 1996, 130–154). The fact that the author of Valdemaro selected so many events for his plot that entail emotional reactions in the characters and equipped a number of them with mechanisms for generating suspense, is closely related to artistic motivation (“künstlerische Motivierung”; Schmid 2020, 7). Martínez Colomer explicitly pursues a didactic goal in the highly charged political atmosphere of the early 1790s in Spain, shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution. In the prologue, whose authorship is attributed to Martínez Colomer, he reveals that he knows about the effectiveness of emotions and shows himself concerned with creating an appropriate counterweight. The friar begins with Horace’s call for usefulness and pleasure and then dwells on the latter: “Pleasure can inebriate the reader’s spirit and drive it into delicious ecstasy.” Martínez Colomer is concerned with the control of passions by reason and with the reader’s recognition of the necessity of being governed by divine Providence (1985, 52). This call for the containment of emotions corresponds to an attitude which the Church and above all the government under Charles IV in Spain propagated at that time and pursued with vehemence, as seen in the various measures of censorship (Gunia 2008, 163). This situation may have directed the author to a protagonist who challenges the principle of Providentia as a foundation for world order. Valdemaro does not want to ascribe evil to the unknown divine plan of Providence, instead believing life to be the product of whimsical fortune and chance. With this attitude he articulates the doubts that the presumed addressee of the text must also face. Thus, Valdemaro is constantly put to the test. However, since the author has also created characters such as Andrónico, who, as the aged tutor of Valdemaro, appeals over and over again to the conscience of his protégé, responding to his doubts with moral lectures, the emotional peripeties in the plot are continually given a counterbalance. Andrónico, at the same time, is the mouthpiece of the implicit author and provider of the moral guidelines for the presumed addressee, which means that in the course of the plot the latter, like the protagonist, learns that each person has his or her special task in the plan of Providence and that “God never fails to protect those who love justice and hate iniquity.” Against the background of the portrayal of Valdemaro as the innocent and essentially virtuous victim, the addressee, through the progress of the plot, is supposed to recognize that Providence works in such a

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way that in the end it rewards characters like the protagonist, so that there always will be a change for the better, a happy ending. The plot of El Valdemaro shows similarities with that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There is a Danish king who, different from Shakespeare’s tragedy, is not murdered by his brother, but by his power-obsessed son. The latter, Cristerno, then has his brother, Valdemaro, the heir to the throne, imprisoned and all the faithful of the murdered king banished and persecuted, among them his brother’s educator, Andrónico. Ulrica-Leonor, the sister of the two, discovers the evil machinations of Cristerno and frees Valdemaro, who flees the sphere of influence of Cristerno, now on the throne. Valdemaro begins anachronically with an event that has the potential to bring about a situation of imminent danger for the protagonist, who, full of despair, is about to commit suicide. This event is chained to another one that offers the possibility of anticipatory hypothesis formation with respect to the outcome of the first event. Standing at the precipice, Valdemaro hears a voice that wants to dissuade him from his plan. The ensuing dialogue between the rationally arguing old man, who teaches the emotionalized protagonist that man must face the adversities of life and trust in divine Providence, delays the outcome of this suspense sequence. Finally, Valdemaro shows understanding and accompanies the old man to his home, where he is made to tell his story up to that point. This intradiegetic narration provides the causal motivation of the presented fictive reality (“kausale Motivierung”; Schmid 2020, 7) and a suspense-generating discourse structure that spans the entire plot: a suspense-triggering initial event (the brother of the heir to the throne kills their father) that entails imminent danger for the protagonist and whose significant outcome (good or bad for Valdemaro) is revealed at the end of the plot. At the micro-level, individual shorter event sequences can be identified that are aligned with the overarching topic of the chase and are designed to generate suspense through moments of imminent danger. The particularity of these shorter suspense sequences resides in the fact that they are on different narrative levels. The plot opens with an emotionally highly charged scene intended to challenge the Catholic addressee from the time the novel was written. The prologue and the novel’s intention speak against a person deliberately disregarding the will of God, who alone determines life and death (for further information on this topic, see Parra Sandoval 2017). The novel’s addressee is intentionally confronted with a social world based on a clear order that is functionalized toward the positively conceived protagonist. And this order supports both the didactic intention and the suspense-generating discourse structure: on the one hand, there are those actors who observe virtuous fealty to the murdered king, thereby generating sympathy. On the other hand, there are the murderer and his followers who threaten Valdemaro and the entire social

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order. The latter do everything to destroy the former, so Valdemaro is on the run from his murderous brother and his henchmen. The addressees, thus directed to an antipathetic attitude toward the enemies of Valdemaro, are supposed to ask themselves whether the protagonist can save his life and restore an order that existed under his father. Given the explicit message the Franciscan friar Martínez Colomer conveys in his prologue, the topic of the chase for the macro-level of the plot, the binary-organized social world it entails, as well as the suspense-generating discourse structure are complemented by a series of textual strategies used to support the suspense-generating sequences in such a way that the addressees are expected to temporarily forget the predictability of a happy outcome. This can be explained by means of the following examples. The author of Valdemaro also resorts to the poetological principles of Antiquity when dealing with the suspense-relevant question of providing information, as for example when he resolves a plot sequence in which suspense is generated by anagnôrisis in order to increase its emotional impact. When the captain of the ship that is to take Valdemaro to his Swedish exile wants to throw him into the sea, which is tantamount to his certain death, one of the vassals who have been placed at Valdemaro’s side on his perilous journey reveals the protagonist’s true identity, which earns him imprisonment, saving him from death for the time being. At other times in the plot, the peripeties are embedded in emotionally charged descriptions construed according to the rhetorical figure of evidentia. Like the antique orators, Valdemaro-narrator seems to mentally recall the images of the past to himself in order to make the depicted situation relivable with all the senses. So Valdemaro-narrator reproduces the exclamations of terror of the narrated I (“Woe is me, said I”) and allows the addressee to follow each and every one of his physical and psychological reactions to the threatening situation: I no longer felt any vigor in my spirit, my limbs languid and torpid could not move, a cold humor ran through my veins [. . .] fatigued body [. . .] my eyes were open and I could not see anything, my clear ears could not perceive any sound [.  .  .] I could not carry out any vital action [. . .] my hair stood on end and my knees went weak, a cold trembling.

In the following examples, figural perspective is used in suspense-sequences, discourse time is approximated to story time, and Valdemaro-narrator occasionally switches to the present tense. During his captivity below deck, Valdemaro-protagonist hears shouting and roaring. The ship is caught in a storm, and he, tied to chains, is unable to escape. In this situation Valdemaro-narrator imitates the whistling of the wind onomatopoetically (“el estruendo de las irritadas ondas, los horribles silbidos de los vientos, el estrépito de los rayos”; bolding added). At other points in the text when danger is imminent, the narrative is made dynamic by the

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accumulation of action verbs (“fight,” “counteract,” “raise,” “submerge,” “grab,” “crash,” etc.) or the use of prosopopeia and hyperbole, turning wind and waves into terrible creatures of gigantic proportions that can split trees and break rocks. In the tumult, a Swedish knight who believes in Valdemaro’s innocence manages to free him from the life-threatening prison below deck. Disguised as a sailor, he waits for the opportunity to jump off the ship. To underline the perilous situation, Valdemaro-narrator reproduces the premonitions of Valdemaro-protagonist, a procedure that he repeatedly makes use of in his narration (e.g., “once the storm had calmed down, I would surely be recognized in spite of the disguise”). When a storm-damaged mast is thrown overboard near land, he jumps after it and manages to save himself ashore. In other passages preparing similar imminent danger, the contrasting representations of space explicitly play a cataphoric role, turning the locus amoenus into a locus terribilis, where turbulent nature reflects man’s troubled soul: “the ship calmly ploughed the blue waters, the gentle zephyrs softly stroked the sides” and “the winds, which until then had been moving the boat with a gentle impulse, began to fight it with such violence that the whole art of the sailors could not counteract their force.”

4 Suspense at the End of the Nineteenth Century: Los pazos de Ulloa (The House of Ulloa, 1886) Los pazos de Ulloa, the first of a two-part novel project that concluded with La madre naturaleza one year later, is inspired by the poetics of realism. Throughout her life, the author, Emilia Pardo Bazán, was looking for an intellectual exchange with the most progressive literary figures of her time. Her discussion of Zola’s naturalism shortly after the publication of Le roman expérimental (1881/1882) provoked some harsh criticism in the conservative Spanish literary debates of the time (José Manuel González Herrán 1989, 64–74). While Pardo Bazán cautiously embraced French naturalism, she showed greater enthusiasm for the Russian novelists, in particular for Dostoevskij and Tolstoj (see her lectures at the Ateneo of Madrid; Pardo Bazán 1887). Two readings of the novel, which are not mutually exclusive, are widely discussed in research: one understands Los pazos de Ulloa as the depiction of the decline of a Galician noble family, while for the other the focus is on the psychological portrait of the protagonist, the priest Julián, who is sent from Santiago de Compostela to the country estate, the House of Ulloa, to provide spiritual and worldly assistance to the nephew of Señor de la Lage.

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The plot is presented by a heterodiegetic narrative voice, which very frequently and in the sense of the attitude of impassibilité or impersonalité discussed in the context of realism and naturalism at that time recedes and shifts to figural perspective (also through free indirect discourse). In La cuestión palpitante (The Burning Question, 1882), Pardo Bazán explains the impersonality of the narrative voice in the works of realists and naturalists, who choose to “refrain from expressing their feelings by not intervening in the narrative and by avoiding interrupting it with digressions or reasoning.” The discourse structure of Los pazos de Ulloa is not characterized by a suspense-triggering event at the beginning and its resolution at the end, but by sequences of events intended to generate suspense at certain points of the plot. There is no recognizable borrowing of the events included in these sequences from ancient poetics. The design of suspense structures in this novel of the late nineteenth century exhibits two further characteristics. First, Pardo Bazán deliberately uses cataphoric elements to guide the addressee with regard to possible outcomes of threatening events. Second, the figural perspective governing the distribution of information in the suspense-generating event sequences is obvious. One example is the birth of the first child of the marquis of the house of Ulloa and his wife from the perspective of the clergyman. The sequence of events leading up to the birth is designed in the form of a suspense-generating sequence. Appropriate measures are put in place for this to happen at the level of the chain of events narrated as preceding this sequence. Under the influence of the priest, Nucha, the cousin of the marquis, who grew up in the city, is chosen as the ideal wife for him. The marriage of the two – according to the chaplain’s plan – is to make the social situation on the estate morally and economically stable by suppressing the sexual relationship of the marquis with his maid Sabel, his steward’s daughter. The steward, in turn, is the real master of the manor house due to a cleverly woven network in the rural society that lives off the estate. The socially neglected Perucho is the illegitimate fruit of the relationship between Sabel and the lord of the manor, and brings the latter into additional dependence on his steward. For this purpose, a male heir is expected on the part of the marquis. The portrayal of the characters plays an important role. The priest Julián, who is not suited to the social reality of the countryside, sees in Nucha the earthly equivalent of the Virgin Mary and in this way allows himself to be attracted to her. Furthermore, the relevance of the birth is underlined by the fact that, first, the marquis, contrary to his usual behavior, is particularly caring toward his wife and, second, the piety of the clergyman is rekindled by Nucha’s resemblance to corresponding images of the pregnant Virgin Mary. In this situation, Nucha’s pregnancy is the suspense-triggering event; the outcome of the birth (the child is healthy and it is a boy or the child is not healthy

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or it is a girl, both of which amount to the same result in the depicted world) is given great weight in terms of the social structure on the manor, since it determines the possibility of restoring order and the future fate of Nucha (as the Marquis’s wife, respected by all). Moreover, there are cataphoric elements which indicate that these plans will not necessarily lead to their desired end: (1) for his prayers, Julián has only two illustrations at his disposal: Raymond the Unborn, cut from the womb of the dying mother, and Our Lady of Anguish, who holds the dead son in her lap; (2) several times the weak physical constitution of urban women is pointed out, as for example when Nucha becomes weaker and weaker and the doctor speaks of her heart failure; (3) while even the clergyman expects a male heir, the increasingly restless father of the unborn child presents himself with a martial gesture (“whip in hand, spurs rattling”); (4) shortly before the climax, the doctor has his instruments fetched for an operation, indicating that a natural birth is no longer to be expected; (5) the spatial arrangements also show signs of impending tragedy: “the only sounds to be heard were the night wind as it groaned through the chestnut-trees, and the low sobbing of water in the sluice of the nearby mill,” “he noticed an ill-omened calm.” The care of the patient in labor is complicated by the fact that the doctor does not hear the steward’s alleged knock at his door (leaving the addressee to wonder whether the scheming steward might have intended this), and that the doctor is an alcoholic. Discourse time is approximated to story time, and special indications emphasize the passing time of the prolonged birth process (at dusk of an October evening, 10 p.m., a new dawn, nightfall, dinner, midnight, daybreak). When danger becomes imminent at the approach of childbirth, events are depicted from the figural perspective of the priest, who fears for Nucha’s life. Some of his thoughts are expressed through free indirect discourse. Shortly before Nucha’s child is born and it thus becomes clear whether it is of the desired sex or not, the day dawns. Since Julián had spent the night kneeling in prayer for a good outcome, he is now on the verge of fainting: But Julián did not see the dawn, nor anything else apart from the spots in his mind’s eye caused by the movement of blood – those little violet, green, scarlet or sulphur-coloured stars that quiver without shedding light, which we confuse with the ringing of our ears or the sound of the giant pendulum of the arteries, near to bursting. He felt as if he were about to lose consciousness and die. His lips no longer spoke in sentences, but only produced a mutter that still had the singsong of prayer. In the midst of his painful giddiness he heard a voice that seemed to him as resonant as a bugle call. The voice was saying something. Julián only understood two words: “A girl.”

Another example of a passage with a dominant figural perspective shows the priest realizing that his efforts to restore moral order have not been successful. The marquis returns to the sexual relationship with his maid, and Julián must even

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fear for the life of his adored mistress and her little daughter (“the chaplain could now see the development of a mute and terrible tragedy”). Again, there is the use of cataphoric references in the suspense-generating sequence, and the imminent threat is presented from the figural perspective of the clergyman. When Julián goes down to the kitchen to fetch oil for his lamp, he becomes a secret witness of a fortune-telling, which is depicted mostly from the priest’s perception in an ambience reminiscent of the witchcraft images in Goya’s Caprichos. Since Julián can overlook the scene from his position, but cannot hear all the words of the cartomancer, the reader learns of Nucha’s imminent danger through the narratorial perspective. As we learn thereafter from the priest’s perception, the situation, also leads him expect the worst: And what would have happened, if then, [. . .] he [the priest] had been able to hear distinctly all the words that came out of her appalling, cavernous mouth! [. . .] The Knave of Spades, coming with the Knave of Goblets upside-down, was a sombre omen of widowerhood [. . .] But as he leant on the banister to try to catch the words that he could hear only indistinctly, it creaked slightly, and the witch raised her horrible mask. [. . .] Julián returned to his room in a terrible state of mind. [.  .  .] He had always been aware that Nucha and her daughter were exposed to certain dangers by living in the manor house. But now . . . now he saw these dangers as imminent, and with utmost clarity. What a dreadful situation! The chaplain turned it over and over in his agitated mind: the baby girl would be stolen and starved to death; Nucha would probably be poisoned.

Julián seeks to calm himself by reading, but does not succeed. The room perceived from his perspective also points to an unhappy outcome: the sad sounds coming from outdoors, the constant groan of the sluice, the moan of the wind in the trees [.  .  .] and in the distance the howling of a dog could be heard, that mournful howling of an animal supposedly on the scent of death.

After a first sound that resembles a human scream in his perception, he hears with certainty another scream of terror. He rushes toward it and sees Nucha in a danger-averting gesture. To convey what is going on in the clergyman shortly before the end of the sequence, Pardo Bazán chooses free indirect discourse: He was about to round the corner of the passage that divided the record-room from Don Pedro’s, when he saw – Holy God! Yes, the very scene, exactly as he had imagined it – Nucha against the wall, her face distorted with fear, her eyes no longer vague but filled with a lost look of death. Before her stood her husband, brandishing a huge weapon.

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5 Conclusion Against the background of the definition of suspense in literary fictional narrative prose, the examination of the three textual examples clearly reveals a development in the practical implementation of suspense-generating techniques. For the author of Amadís, in the Golden Age, when creating suspense, the relevant insights from ancient poetics and rhetoric and their examples are still binding: the description of the special organization of plot needed for the generation of emotions like pity and fear in the Aristotelian poetics of tragedy as well as the rhetorical methods for generating and maintaining interested attention (attentum parare) and the avoidance of weariness and boredom (taedium) through sustentatio/suspensum techniques that seek to produce “stirring imagination” or “vividness” in the audience (enargeia/evidentia). For the two novels that follow (Valdemaro and Los pazos de Ulloa), it can be seen that the normative character of ancient poetics and rhetoric in relation to suspense generation becomes decreasingly clear. This is understandable, given that in the Golden Age rhetoric, and with it poetics, still dominated in social life, school and university, the arts, the court system, the Church, and theology. The differences between Valdemaro and Amadís in the handling of suspense discourse structures become apparent with regard to artistic motivation. The chivalric romance Amadís is about the formation of a hero in the tradition of Christian chivalry who is legitimized to serve society, to restore its order again and again, a scheme that allows the plot to continue. Magic occasionally influences the development of the plot, and consequently Amadís does not always confront predictable opponents. In Amadís, there is no suspense discourse structure at the macro-level, but episodically occurring individual peripeties do flourish at the micro-level. The selection and combination of suspense-relevant events in Amadís is based on the guidelines of ancient poetics (those components of the mythos are chosen that are said to have the strongest emotional impact; anagnôrisis related to characters in close relationships). The strategic and marked omission of information about the outcome of the suspense-generating chain of events in narrative discourse intended to stimulate the formation of hypotheses, one of which is presented as threatening, follows the sustentatio/suspensum techniques to achieve the enargeia/evidentia effect: the announcement of an important topic at the end of a chapter, apostrophe, the breaking up of a suspense-generating sequence of events into numerous individual events when danger becomes imminent to approximate story time to discourse time, the presentation of a protagonist in danger aiming to engender sympathy. In addition, the novel shows early forms of narrative perspectivization in the suspense-generating plot sequences.

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In contrast, the novel El Valdemaro, from the late eighteenth century, shows an overarching suspense discourse structure whose uncertainty regarding the outcome is diminished under the effect of its moral didacticism in times of strict censorship shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution. The event that triggers suspense is the patricide by the brother of the heir to the throne. The latter is chased away without mercy. To counteract the moralistic view, the suspense-favoring plot of the chase shows numerous micro-level suspense-generating event sequences that are located on different narrative levels. The author opted for an anachronic beginning of the plot with a suspense-generating sequence of events (imminent suicide). The selection of suspense-relevant events is also based on the model of ancient poetics (anagnôrisis related to characters in close relationships), but not exclusively (suicide). The peripeties with intended suspense effect are embedded in emotionally charged descriptions according to the principles of enargeia/evidentia. In contrast to Amadís, cataphoric elements are deliberately used to orient the addressee of Valdemaro with respect to hypothesis formation about the outcome of a suspense-generating event sequence. In the personnel of the novel, organized in a binary fashion, the protagonist Valdemaro belongs to the characters who inspire sympathy. The shaping of suspense discourse structures in The House of Ulloa, at the end of the nineteenth century, takes place in the context of the poetics of realism and strives to reduce narratorial interventions. With the help of free indirect discourse, the illusion of scenic representation is created. In this way, the presumed addressee is consciously offered the opportunity to become more receptive to psychological, even visceral engagement. Emilia Pardo Bazán, like Martínez Colomer, makes deliberate use of cataphoric elements as he builds up the climax of a suspense-generating event sequence.

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Truffaut, François. (1966) 2014. Mr. Hitchcock, wie haben Sie das gemacht? Edited by Robert Fischer. Translated by Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas. Munich: Heyne 2014. Valles Calatrava, José R., and F. Álamo Felices. 2002. Diccionario de Teoría de la Narrativa. Granada: Alhulia. Wardle, David. 2006. “Virtus.” Brill’s New Pauly. http://dx-1doi-1org-10070abt205ec.emedien3.sub. uni-hamburg.de/10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_e12205670 (accessed 3 April 2020). Wenzel, Peter. 2001. “Spannung in der Literatur: Grundformen, Ebenen, Phasen.” In Spannung: Studien zur englischsprachigen Literatur für Ulrich Suerbaum zum 75. Geburtstag, edited by Raimund Borgmeier and Peter Wenzel, 22–35. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Wienhold, Götz.1972. Semiotik der Literatur. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum. Wolf, Werner. 2014. “Illusion (Aesthetic).” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1, 270–287. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wulff, Hans Jürgen. 1996. “Suspense and the Influence of Cataphora on Viewers’ Expectations.” In Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, edited by Peter Vorderer, Hans J. Wulff, and Mike Friedrichsen, 1–16. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Wulff, Hans Jürgen. 2006. “Emotionen, Affekte, Stimmungen: Affektivität als Element der Filmrezeption; oder, Im Kino gewesen, geweint (gelacht, gegruselt . . .) – wie es sich gehört!” http://www.derwulff.de/2-134 (accessed 27 April 2020). Wuss, Peter. 1996. “Narrative Tension in Antonioni.” In Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, edited by Peter Vorderer, Hans J. Wulff, and Mike Friedrichsen, 51–70. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Ximenez Patón, Bartholome. 1604. Eloquencia, Española en arte. Toledo: Tomás de Guzmán.

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Ekphrasis in Ancient Greek and Latin Epics 1 Definitions According to a widespread modern view, narration differs from description in that an action is represented: events take place and narrated time is not suspended (Martínez and Scheffel [1999] 2016, 47; Schmid [2005] 2010, 5–6; Herman 2005; Pflugmacher 2005, 101). The modern term ekphrasis denotes a subclass of description and is defined as a literary description of real or imagined pieces of visual art (Klarer 2005, 133; in German: Kunstbeschreibung; for a classification of descriptions according to this criterion, see Elsner 2002b). In this article, ekphrasis will be examined through an analysis of Homer’s and Virgil’s descriptions of shields containing images that represent Greek and (proto-) Roman history. Since (these) ekphrases are verbal descriptions of works of visual art – a representation of a representation in a different medium with a different semiotic character – the concept of intermediality allows for a precise analysis of the complex phenomenon under scrutiny. (For intermediality in the field of Classics, see Dinter and Reitz-Joosse 2019; for ancient epic ekphrases, see Harrison 2019. For an explicit application of the concept of intermediality to ancient ekphrases, see Koopman 2018, 3–4. For a similar approach, see de Jong 2015, 891; 2011, 2–3; Fowler 2000, 64–85; and the distinction between opus ipsum and res ipsae introduced by Becker 1995, 42–43. For comprehensive studies on ekphrasis, see Bartsch and Elsner 2007; Ratkowitsch 2006; Elsner 2002a.) Werner Wolf’s (2005, 254) definition of intermedial reference can be taken as a starting point, but it must be completed with further observations and distinctions (for intermedial reference as one kind of intermediality, see also Rajewsky 2002, 16–17). Unlike plurimediality, intermedial reference suggests neither medial hybridity nor semiotic heterogeneity, since it does not involve the incorporation of signifiers from other media. Rather, works and performances in which intermediality is present as a reference seem to be medially and semiotically homogeneous, for the involvement of another medium here takes place only covertly or indirectly – through signifiers and sometimes also through signifieds pointing to it. In contrast to plurimediality, the other medium enters as a conceptual rather than a concrete presence, and the base medium retains the character of a homomedial semiotic complex. Intermedial reference can indicate another medium in general, address an entire heteromedial genre, or gesture toward an individual heteromedial work. Wolf (2005, 255) mentions ekphrasis as an example of a subform of intermedial reference: evocation, which is distinct from explicit reference/intermedial https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-025

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thematization; implicit intermedial reference; and formal intermedial imitation. This variant imitates the effects of another medium or heteromedial artifact by monomedial means. It appeals to the recipient’s imagination and therefore goes beyond explicit reference, pointing to another medium in a non-imaginative, denotative, or “technical” way. Thus, novels can evoke a painting in the reader’s mind through ekphrastic description (e.g., of a landscape), just as they can call up a specific musical composition in one’s inner ear by describing its effect on certain characters. However, it must be stressed that ekphrastic description in this sense means a vivid style of writing that can be compared with the ancient definitions of ἔκφρασις/descriptio. In its ancient sense, a description is not necessarily limited to a representation during which nothing happens in the main plot and narrated time stands still. Rather, these representations were viewed as descriptions and separated from (simple) narratives that clearly visualize the people, objects, events, and so on depicted for the recipient: vividness (ἐνάργεια/evidentia) is the criterion for differentiating between description and narration (Feddern 2021, 12–13, 134–141). Consequently, ekphrasis in the broad sense of traditional intermediality theory – a vivid style of writing – must be distinguished from ekphrasis in the strict sense of a verbal description of a work of visual art (or other combinations of media differing in their semiotic features). Homer’s and Virgil’s descriptions of shields belong to the second class of ekphrasis. Further, ekphrasis can also be conceived of as having other functions than evocation. Ekphrasis can serve as an explicit (or implicit) intermedial reference, as would be the case in a partial quotation or reproduction (Wolf 2005, 255, chooses as an example the possibility that music or literature is explicitly referred to in a painting by depicting a musician playing an instrument or a person reading a book). Finally, ekphrasis is not restricted to the category of intermedial reference, but can be classified as another main variant of intermediality, especially as intermedial transposition. This kind of intermediality is characterized by cases in which discernibly similar contents or formal aspects appear in heteromedial entities, but where it is clear that one medium (the “source” medium) acts as an origin in a process of medial transfer (to the “target” medium), an example being the adaptation of a novel into film (Wolf 2005, 253–254). In the case of Homer’s and Virgil’s ekphrases, an intermedial transposition can be observed insofar as the shields and their depictions are (at least logically) at the origin of their verbal descriptions. Unlike adaptations of novels into film (that is, into a composite medium combining verbal language, pictorial signs, and music), the target medium (verbal representation) of our descriptions is monomedial. The source medium requires further consideration in the case of the Homeric description of Achilles’s shield because it probably includes the depiction of a musician playing an instrument. However, even in this case the source medium seems to be

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monomedial (visual representation), so that an ekphrasis on a second level comes into play as well. Moreover, Homer’s and Virgil’s ekphrases are descriptions of a specific object inside the frame narrative. Last but not least, a systematic distinction between facts (or real things) and fictions must be taken into account. An ekphrasis (in the strict sense) can be a verbal description of a real or – as in the case of Homer’s and Virgil’s descriptions – an invented work of art. The differentiation between real and fictive objects would allow for further subdivisions, but in this context it is crucial to stress at least the fact that the (shields with the) depictions that Homer and Virgil describe did not exist in reality. Therefore, these descriptions are intermedial references insofar as the other medium (the fictive visual representation) figures as a conceptual rather than a physical presence. Moreover, they are intermedial transpositions of a fictive source medium insofar as (1) there are correspondences (references) between the verbal narration and the visual depictions, and (2) one medium is at the origin of the other medium. In this case, however, the source and the target medium are inverted: while images would be at the origin of the verbal representation of a real source medium, verbal narration is at the origin of the invented depictions of a fictive source medium such as Achilles’s and Aeneas’s shields.

2 Functions of Ekphrasis Regarding the function of descriptive elements contained in narration, a traditional view holds that in factual and especially in historiographic discourse, these elements contribute to the understanding of the narration: they are meaning-explicative and therefore integrative components of the narrative context (Stempel 1973). In the case of fictional narrations, however, descriptive elements function differently, particularly in modern and postmodern narrations. Here, there is a tendency for detailed description to serve not as aesthetic embellishment, but to give the illusion that the fictive story takes place against the backdrop of a world that can be described in so many (principally infinite) details as the real world can be described. This illusion is even put before our eyes as such in many postmodern narrations (Kablitz 1982). The function of ekphrasis is more specific. It is immediately clear that the Homeric and Virgilian descriptions of shields are not meaning-explicative because these ekphrases do not bear on the subsequent struggles that Achilles and Aeneas will be forced to endure. They do of course embellish the narration, but they also serve a metanarrative function. Homer and Virgil resort to intermedial descriptions of shields in order to reflect on the process of vivid and detailed representation, not only of the

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shield but of the entire plot. While this is a feature common to Homer and Virgil, the content of the respective ekphrases is symptomatic of the development of this narrative form from archaic Greece to Augustan Rome to the extent that the depictions on Aeneas’s shield as well as the entire plot of the Aeneid reflect the idea of a linear historical development.

3 Homer’s Description of Achilles’s Shield 3.1 The Context of the Shield’s Production and the Five Scenes Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield (Il. 18.478–608) “can easily be qualified as ‘the mother’ of all ekphrases, and scholarly interest in this passage has been massive” (de Jong 2011, 1, with bibliographical references; see especially Arpaia’s 2010 bibliography). The production of Achilles’s shield is motivated by the fact that Achilles’s friend Patroclus fought against the Trojans in Achilles’s armor and lost his life. Hephaestus then began to manufacture new armor at the request of Achilles’s divine mother, Thetis. The Homeric narrator does not describe a given shield with its depictions, but narrates how Hephaestus manufactures it and explains the meaning of the images as though they were finished (Koopman 2018, 76; de Jong 2015, 895). Lessing reflects in chapter 18 of his Laocoön ([1766] 1990, 130–137) on the relationship between description and narration, and praises Homer for his ability to produce a vivid representation of this action (in Virgil, by contrast, the main plot stops while the poet describes what can be seen on Aeneas’s shield as a finished object). In an ekphrasis, Homer not only describes the shield as a material object, but he focusses in particular on its visual adornments: First he made a shield, great and sturdy, adorning it cunningly in every part, and round about it set a bright rim, threefold and glittering, and from it he fastened a silver baldric. Five were the layers of the shield itself; and on it he made many adornments with cunning skill. On it he fashioned the earth, on it the heavens, on it the sea, and the unwearied sun, and the moon at the full, and on it all the constellations with which heaven is crowned – the Pleiades and the Hyades and mighty Orion and the Bear, that men call also the Wain, that circles ever in its place, and watches Orion, and alone has no part in the baths of Ocean. (Il. 18.478–489; here and subsequently, trans. Murray and Wyatt)

Whereas the first lines are devoted to the material qualities of the shield (478– 481a), the rest of the quoted text as well as almost the whole end of book 18 of the Iliad is a verbal description of the images seen on the shield (481b–608, with lines

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481–482 serving as an introduction; in lines 609–613 Homer describes the rest of Achilles’s armor, while in lines 614–617 he narrates how Hephaestus handed it over to Thetis). The scenes depicted on Achilles’s shield are narrated as stories, with characters speaking and thinking and events following one after the other. Just who is responsible for these narrativized scenes has been a subject of scholarly debate. De Jong (2011) lists four different positions that can be attributed to some degree to the two possible authors, Hephaestus and the Homeric narrator (see also Koopman 2018, 69–72). Among the two more plausible positions that consider a form of collaboration between these two authors, she favors the view that the Homeric narrator is mainly responsible for the narrative form of the description of the shield. Given the introductory considerations about ekphrasis, it seems convenient to corroborate this view from a slightly different perspective. As the Homeric description of Achilles’s shield is a case of an intermedial reference and intermedial transposition of a fictive source medium, a distinction must be made between the Homeric narrator in the broad and in the strict sense. In the broad sense, everything belongs to Homer’s narration due to the fact that we are reading Homer’s verbal account in book 18 of the Iliad and he is inventing the depictions on the shield. In the strict sense, it would be necessary to distinguish between what can be imagined as Hephaestus’s images on the shield and what cannot have a counterpart on it. This question cannot be examined in full detail in the following analysis, but it will not be neglected either, because it sheds light on the intermedial nature of Homer’s ekphrasis. Achilles’s shield displays different scenes on which the Homeric narrator focusses (it is possible that each scene is to be imagined as a series of pictures, but this question cannot be decided). The different scenes can be summarized as follows (Francis 2009, 9): first mentioned is Hephaestus’s depiction of the earth, sea, and heavenly bodies (Il. 18.483–489). Then follow the three principal scenes: a city at peace (Il. 18.490–508), a city at war (Il. 18.509–540), and a bucolic harvest scene (Il. 18.541–606). Lastly, two lines specify that the River Ocean is depicted around the outermost rim of the shield (Il. 18.607–608). In other overviews, up to nine or ten different scenes are distinguished, as lines 541–606 allow a further subdivision into several scenes (Koopman 2018, 81).

3.2 The Five Characteristic Features There are five features characteristic for Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield (de Jong 2011). The first feature is information about sounds and music. They can be found, for example, in the second scene:

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On it he made also two fair cities of mortal men. In the one there were marriages and feastings, and by the light of the blazing torches they were leading the brides from their rooms through the city, and loud rose the bridal song. And young men were whirling in the dance, and with them flutes and lyres sounded continually; and the women stood each at her door and marveled. (Il. 18.490–496)

This is not merely the representation of an action, for Homer narrates that citizens were escorting the brides from their houses through the city under the light of burning torches. Music is mentioned, for “loud rose the bridal song” and “flutes and lyres sounded continually.” Further examples of sounds and music (in other scenes) might also be quoted: “they shouted their support” (Il. 18.502), “they gave their judgment” (Il. 18.506), “the great din” (Il. 18.530), “silently” (Il. 18.556), “he was playing on a lyre” and “he was singing” (Il. 18.570). Possibly the pictures on the shield themselves could express what Homer explains to his listeners and readers in terms of correspondences. To be sure, it is unlikely that the images contain musical notes. Rather, when Homer says that a wedding song arose and that flutes and lyres sounded continually, it is probable that the picture is intended to show (young) people (in a circle, possibly hand in hand) dancing; also shown are people holding musical instruments that look like flutes and lyres. Thus, an ekphrasis is also to be found on a second level. This assumption is corroborated by Homer’s description of the fourth scene, in which young people appear who are dancing: There were youths dancing and maidens of the price of many cattle, holding their hands on one another’s wrists. Of these the maidens were clad in fine linen, while the youths wore well-woven tunics softly glistening with oil; and the maidens had fair chaplets, and the youths had daggers of gold hanging from silver baldrics. Now would they run round with cunning feet very nimbly, as when a potter sits by his wheel that is fitted between his hands and makes trial of it whether it will run; and now again would they run in rows toward each other. And a great company stood around the lovely dance taking joy in it; and two tumblers whirled up and down among them, leading the dance. (Il. 18.593–606)

Young people holding their hands on one another’s wrists and the description of their clothes are verbal correspondences to a visual representation. Furthermore, the narrator can make-believe that the young people who are dancing and singing are represented with open mouths as is typical for geometrical art, especially pictures of dancing dating from Homer’s time (Simon 1995, 126). On the other hand, Homer’s explanation that the young people are running round nimbly with cunning feet and that they are running in rows toward each other appears to refer to movements that can hardly be depicted on the shield – unless they are different pictures contained inside the same scene. It is clear, then, that in the intermedial transposition of a fictive source medium the poet invents an action that is accompanied by

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sounds and music. He explains his intention and the meaning of what the images should convey, taking the risk that these meanings exceed the mimetic properties of visual representation. A second feature of the Homeric ekphrasis is the use of indirect speech and zero focalization. As instances of indirect speech, two examples might be adduced that belong to the passage in which strife in a city at peace is described: But the people were gathered in the place of assembly; for there a strife had arisen, and two men were striving about the blood price of a man slain; the one claimed that he had paid all, declaring his cause to the people, but the other refused to accept anything; and each was eager to win the decision on the word of an arbitrator. (Il. 18.497–501)

Indirect speech occurs in “he claimed that he had paid all” (Il. 18.499) and in “he refused to accept anything” (500; the Greek expression ἀναίνετο μηδὲν ἑλέσθαι can also mean “he denied having received anything”; see Becker 1995, 111–112). These examples are worth consideration, but indirect speech itself as a form of speech is not so noticeable as the fact that the Homeric narrator knows what the two persons are saying. In this respect, these two examples are more comparable to the following instances (some of which might be termed zero focalization): “each was eager to win the decision” (Il. 18.501), “two different plans were supported, to destroy the city or to agree with the inhabitants to divide up their property” (Il. 18.510–512), “two scouts were posted to wait for the sight of the sheep and cattle” (Il. 18.524). While in some cases the depicted situation might be so obvious that the narrator attributes feelings and thoughts to the characters that they almost necessarily must have, as everyday experiences suggest, other cases must be regarded as instances of zero focalization. It is conceivable that a person who refuses to accept anything (or denies having received anything) is shown in a position and with gestures making it clear he does not want to accept anything (it being more difficult to conceive of a picture that clearly represents him as denying having received anything). The assembly and the arbitrator may give the impression that the two persons are quarreling. However, the information that the other person claims he has paid everything presupposes knowledge of the pictures that they are hardly able to convey. Here again, Homer provides the meaning and leaves it to the reader to imagine the respective images. A third feature of Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield is the poet’s use of two comparisons. One is integrated into the description of how the young people are dancing in the fourth scene (Il. 18.599–601: “as when a potter sits by his wheel [. . .]”; see above). The other is found in this passage: “On it furthermore the famed god of the two lame legs cunningly inlaid a dancing floor like the one which in wide Cnosus Daedalus fashioned of old for fair-tressed Ariadne” (Il. 18.590–592).

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These comparisons cannot have iconic counterparts on the shield. Therefore, Homer’s intermedial transposition of a fictive source medium is not just an ekphrasis that generates Hephaestus’s images, but an intermedial reference in which the visual representation could not possibly contain all the signs and meanings that the verbal representation encompasses. The fourth characteristic feature of the Homeric description is reference to the real-life properties of the entities depicted rather than to the precious metals of which they are made, for example: “polished stone” (Il. 18.504), “loud-voiced heralds” (Il. 18.505), “white-woolled sheep” (Il. 18.529, 588), “a deep-red cloak” (Il. 18.538), “honey-sweet wine” (Il. 18.545), “clear-sounding lyre” (Il. 18.569), “quickfooted dogs” (Il. 18.578). There is also quite a large number of expressions that suit both the verbal description and the fictive source medium, such as, for example, “beautiful cities” (Il. 18.490–491) or “glittering torches” (Il. 18.492). These epithets partly can and partly cannot have a visual counterpart. For example, when Homer speaks of a deep-red cloak (Il. 18.538), one can conceive of a depicted cloak made of a dark metal identifiable as a deep red color. The quickfooted dogs (Il. 18.578) can be depicted either as running or as in a static position. In the second case, Homer would be speaking about a characteristic that dogs exhibit every day. And finally, honey-sweet wine (Il. 18.545) will be characterized as such because it is normally sweet; this is a verbal interpretation that does not have a direct correspondence in the visual representation. Nonetheless, the intermedial blending of narration and description with the effect that the fictive source medium cannot be imagined in the way that the verbal representation demands is clearer in other cases than in the epitheta ornantia, because in the Homeric poems these words are generally employed as embellishing adjectives. The fifth and perhaps most important feature of the ekphrasis is the representation of different moments of time. For instance, in the scene of the dispute between two men (Il. 18.497–508), we are informed of the men pleading their case, the reaction of the excited bystanders, the litigants’ deferral of the case to the elders acting as arbitrators, and the elders voicing their opinion. In the scene of the ambush (Il. 18.516–540), Homer uses adverbs of time in order to express a speedy succession of actions: And these came soon, and two herdsmen followed with them playing on pipes; and of the guile they had no foreknowledge at all. But the ambushers, when they saw them coming on, rushed out against them and speedily cut off the herds of cattle and fair flocks of white-fleeced sheep and slew the herdsmen. But the besiegers, as they sat before the places of assembly and heard much tumult among the cattle, mounted immediately behind their high-stepping horses, and set out, and speedily came on them. (Il. 18.525–532)

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Also with regard to this feature of the Homeric description, the narrator provides more information than the image or images themselves can convey. At most, it can be imagined that Hephaestus employs a “synoptic” method of representation (de Jong 2011, 6) or that he might manufacture a series of pictures that allows him to represent consecutive actions within one scene. The fact that Homer is talking about a speedy action can be influenced by the manner in which, for example, the horses are depicted throwing their legs forward. However, the main reason for the intermedial representation of a speedy action will be the fact that the narrator verbally represents the meanings and that the invented depictions could only partly contain signs that carry these meanings.

3.3 Conclusion The most characteristic feature of the Homeric shield description is the intermedial blending of verbal and visual representation. In many cases it is plausible – or even the only possible explication – that Homer makes up elements that could not be represented as such in Hephaestus’s pictures. A clear case can be seen in the comparisons, because it is almost certain that the second level of the comparison (B, if A is compared with B) does not have a correspondence in the fictive source medium. Finally, the intermedial blending of verbal and visual representation can also be recognized in the term θαῦμα (wonder, marvel). Inside the ploughing scene (Il. 18.541–549), the Homeric narrator makes use of this evaluation in his own reaction to Hephaestus’s shield (Il. 18.548–549): “And the field grew black behind and looked as if it had been ploughed, though it was of gold; that was the great marvel of the work.” Thus, Hephaestus’s promise to Thetis is fulfilled that the armor will be such “that all the many men who see it will marvel [θαυμάσσεται] at its sight” (Il. 18.466– 467; de Jong 2011, 4; Becker 1995, 98, 129). The term θαῦμα directs one’s view from the depicted world to the shield and especially to its mediating depictions. These depictions are made with such craftmanship and are so vivid that the viewer (in this case, the Homeric narrator) almost forgets that he is admiring a visual representation and is not looking at a ploughing scene in the real world. In this sense, the term θαῦμα expresses the illusionistic qualities of Hephaestus’s visual art (as represented by the Homeric narrator) and, at the same time, serves as an explicit intermedial reference that reminds the narratees that an ekphrasis is taking place. (The term θαῦμα is comparable to expressions of the unsayable as they are found in later ekphrases, as in the (Pseudo-)Hesiodic description of the shield of Heracles: Hesiod, Scutum Herculis 144; 161; 218; 230.)

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The intermedial blending of verbal and visual representation is highlighted in the narrativized scenes. If they were real visual adornments, it would suffice to say that these scenes are turned into stories with characters speaking and thinking and events following one after the other. However, as the Homeric narrator develops an intermedial transposition of a fictive source medium, the source and the target medium are inverted: stories are told, and Homer leaves it to the readers or listeners to imagine the respective images. Whereas Homer narrates the fabrication of the shield itself, the depictions on the shield (in contrast to the shield itself) are but loosely related to the action in the main plot: there is no deep connection between the content of the depictions on the shield and its context and the whole plot of the Iliad. This does not mean that the cosmic setting, the cities at war and at peace, the disputes at law, the killing of men and cattle, the agricultural activities, and the dancing have no relation to the main plot of the Iliad. These scenes are not timeless in the strict sense. Indeed, these depictions have been persuasively related to the themes of the Iliad and even to particular events of its plot (Harrison 2019, 777). In any case, there is no inner connection between the depictions on the shield and the actions performed by Achilles. The description of the shield is not proleptic, nor is it a mise en abyme of the content, as it is typical for later Greek and Roman ekphrases. As an example of mise en abyme (sometimes contested), one might think of Catullus’s famous ekphrasis in his epyllion in which he starts to relate the wedding between Peleus and Thetis, but interrupts his account with a description of the coverlet that can be seen on their bed and on which the tale of Theseus, Ariadne, and Bacchus is depicted (Catull. 64.50–266). A clearer case of an intermedial mise en abyme reflecting narrative content is Ovid’s description of the contest between Arachne and Athena (Minerva), since Athena, who will transform her rival into a spider (“Arachne” being the Greek word for spider) in a further act of divine punishment, weaves into her fabric many examples of persons who have competed with and committed crimes against the gods, for which reason they were punished (Ov. Met. 6.1–146). Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield is a mise en abyme in another respect, namely a poetological mise en abyme of the Homeric epic poem(s) in general. Homer is not only celebrating Hephaestus’s marvelous visual art, but at the same time his own marvelous narrative art, which brings people and events from the past back to life and puts them before the eyes of the narratees (de Jong 2011, 10–11; cf. Becker 1995, 139–141). As a consequence, Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield is an ekphrasis of a specific object (even though it is a fictive source medium) that reflects on his own art of writing poetry, that is, on ekphrasis in the sense of a vivid style of writing based on ἐνάργεια/evidentia.

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In this regard, ekphrasis fulfills a similar function as the invocation of the Muses in book 2 at the beginning of the catalogue of ships (de Jong 2011, 4–5). The Muses allow the poet to relate in every detail which Greek and Trojan contingents participated in the Trojan war, including comments on their leaders, the number of their ships, and remarks about the geography of their homelands (Il. 2.484–877). These details exceed the powers of normal visual perception; moreover, it is impossible for them to be transmitted in a historically reliable way (Primavesi 2009, 106–107). Therefore, the Muses, who are eyewitnesses of everything that happens in history (Il. 2.485: ὑμεῖς γὰρ θεαί ἐστε, πάρεστέ τε, ἴστε τε πάντα, “for you are goddesses, are present, and know everything as witnesses”), underwrite the poet’s knowledge of these matters. From the ancient point of view, Homer’s representation of the Trojan war is a fictionalization of historical events occurring in the distant past (Homer himself would have denied a clear distinction between historical and fictive elements). One important aspect of the fictionality of the Iliad is the detailed report that cannot be historically reliable and was easily recognizable by listeners and readers as a fictionalization. Just as the invocation of the Muses, the ekphrasis seeks to give the illusion of a historical account through the vivid and detailed mode of representation. At the same time, however, the ekphrasis reminds us of the fictive elements of the story because the depictions on the shields cannot represent everything that Homer is telling us.

4 Virgil’s Description of Aeneas’s Shield 4.1 “Unnarratable” Ekphrasis If Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s shield is compared with Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield, one difference immediately stands out for the reader of book 8 of the Aeneid: what in Homer is not only an ekphrasis, but also the fabrication of the armor, is split up by Virgil into two scenes: narration of Vulcan’s fabrication of the shield (Aen. 8.407–453; see Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2008), followed by description and explanation of the depictions on the shield (Aen. 8.617–728). Virgil’s ekphrasis is a static description during which no action takes place in the main plot (for commentaries and bibliography, see Binder 2019, 189–209; Fratantuono and Smith 2018, 642–749; Gransden 2003, 160–187; Fordyce 1977, 269–288; Eden 1975, 162–192). At the beginning of the ekphrasis, Aeneas’s mother, Venus, gives a shield to her son as part of the armor manufactured by her husband, Vulcan, before Aeneas’s combat with Turnus:

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He, delighting in the gifts of the goddess and in so great an honor, could not be satisfied and he turns his eyes to each piece individually, and he admires them one by one. Between his arms and hands, he turns each over, the helmet, frightening in its plumes and spewing flames, the death-dealing sword, the breastplate stiff with bronze, blood-red, huge, as when a dark cloud is lit by the sun’s rays and from afar casts its gleam back; then the smooth greaves made of electrum and recast gold, then the spear, and the shield’s indescribable weave. (Aen. 8.617–625; here and subsequently, trans. Fratantuono and Smith)

The depictions on the shield are qualified as non enarrabile textum (Aen. 8.625), translated by Fratantuono and Smith as “indescribable weave.” This has been taken to refer to Aeneas’s lack of knowledge of the events depicted on the shield (Eigler 1994) or to an interweaving of plot with image that both demands and denies comprehension (Boyd 1995). As the Trojan hero, Aeneas, sees images of future Roman history in a proleptic description, this is a tempting interpretation, but it puts too much emphasis on the character of Aeneas. For a better understanding of the meaning of this expression, and in order to gain fuller insight into (the proleptic nature of) Virgil’s intermedial description of Aeneas’s shield, the following lines containing a programmatic statement about the content of the depictions on the shield and the depictions themselves must be taken into account. Virgil presents the images on the shield as follows: There the one mighty in fire, by no means ignorant of the prophets or unknowing of the age to come, had rendered the Italian affairs and the triumphs of the Romans; there was every generation of the future offspring of Ascanius and, in order, the wars they fought. (Aen. 8.626–629)

The depictions on the shield show the (proto-)Roman future in chronological order, beginning with the offspring of Aeneas’s son, Ascanius. The proleptic nature of the description becomes clear when the different times are singled out: that of the author, Virgil (and the Roman addressees), that of the plot of the Aeneid, and that of the events depicted on the shield. The Augustan poet Virgil (70–19 BCE), whose epic poem was never completed (as unfinished half-lines in the work show), writes about events that occurred more than a thousand years earlier, given that the Trojan War and Aeneas’s subsequent flight from Troy and wanderings took place (according to the ancients) around 1200 BCE. To a certain extent, the events depicted on the shield fill the gap between the time of the narrated events and the author’s time, since they end with Augustus’s victory at the Battle of Actium (31 BCE). Given these considerations, Virgil’s description is an extradiegetic proleptic ekphrasis that covers a long period of time. Like a few other famous passages in the Aeneid (especially Jupiter’s prophecy in the first book, Aen. 1.254–296, and the parade of the heroes in book 6, Aen. 6.756–892), the depictions on the shield contribute to the teleological character and panegyric aspect of the epic poem, with Augustan times as the culmination of the narrated and foreshadowed events

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(for the panegyric aspect of the Aeneid, see the preface in Servius’s late antique commentary). This is probably the most important difference from the Homeric description of Achilles’s shield, reflecting the different eras in which these poems were composed: Virgil understands the development of the events from the Trojan War to Augustan times as a linear progression of history. Seven scenes can be discerned on the shield. The first three belong to the period immediately before the foundation of Rome and to the time of the Alban kings: (1) the she-wolf and the twins Romulus and Remus (Aen. 8.630–634), (2) the rape of the Sabines (Aen. 8.635–641), and (3) the threat imposed on Rome by the Alban dictator Mettus Fufetius (Aen. 8.642–645). The last four scenes belong to the Roman Republic: (4) Porsenna and the attempted return of the Tarquins (Aen. 8.646–651), (5) the crisis of the 390s BCE (Aen. 8.652–666), (6) Catiline and Cato (Aen. 8.667–670), and (7) Actium and the triumph of Augustus (Aen. 8.671–728). (For considerations on the inner coherence of these scenes, see Harrison 1997.) From this perspective, Virgil’s ekphrasis is comparable to Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in that different scenes can be identified. At the same time, however, differences between the two ekphrases stand out clearly. In Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s shield, narration is more prominent, and the depictions on the shield can be characterized as visual narration, although it is a narration with many ellipses. Aeneas is faced with a temporal sequence of events that belong to (proto-)Roman history. The poet himself expresses this fact explicitly when he speaks of the (chronological) order in which the wars fought by Ascanius and his descendants are represented on the shield (Aen. 8.628–629). As did Homer, Virgil develops an intermedial transposition of a fictive source medium in which stories are told, it being left to readers or listeners to imagine the respective images. An example is the Battle of Actium, the scene described in most detail: Here stands on the lofty deck Augustus Caesar, leading Italians into battle, together with the fathers and people, and the great gods, the Penates; [. . .] Here Marc Antony, with barbarian help and varied weapons, victor from the nations of the dawn and from the red shore, brings along with him Egypt and the power of the East and furthest reaches of Bactra; and his Egyptian wife – an abomination! – follows. All rush together at once, and the entire sea, upturned by the oars, now withdrawn, and the three-pronged prows, foams up. They seek the depths; you might believe that the Cyclades, uprooted, were swimming in the sea, or that high mountains were battling with mountains: in such a mass do the men press upon the towering ships. (Aen. 8.678–693)

The picture is probably meant to represent Augustus on one side and Antonius and Cleopatra on the other, a constellation that makes it clear that these two leaders are moving and fighting each other. The many verbs of motion (especially the verb agere in line 678) leave no doubt that we are faced not with a static moment of the

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fight, but with an action. Since Virgil indicates in a later passage of the same scene that “the queen herself, winds invoked, appeared to put up her sails in retreat” (Aen. 8.707–708), this scene represents a clear sequence of events. The readers or listeners could imagine that different images represent this action; but it is equally possible that the Virgilian narrator leads us to believe that he is explaining only one depiction. Some elements of the ekphrasis can hardly be direct references to the visual representation. For example, the parenthetical exclamation “abomination!” (Aen. 8.688: nefas) is the narrator’s judgment of Augustus’s enemies in the civil war, directed in particular against the participation of Cleopatra. Furthermore, the last lines quoted introduce with “you might believe” (Aen. 8.691: credas) a comment on this scene that can be regarded as a kind of comparison: the collision of the two parties is represented as so powerful that it can be compared with the uprooted Cyclades, swimming in the sea, and high mountains battling with mountains (Aen. 8.691–693). Aeneas himself cannot understand the meaning of the depictions on the shield because no prophetic character explains them to him. This is in contrast to the underworld scene in book 6, where his father, Anchises, shares with him his knowledge about future Roman heroes. As Virgil explicitly states, Aeneas can but wonder at the aesthetic quality of the shield: “Such things does he marvel at on Vulcan’s shield, the gift of his parent, and though ignorant of its contents, he rejoices at the image, hoisting on his shoulder the fame and fate of his children’s children” (Aen. 8.729–731). While the content of the depictions on the shield was familiar to every Roman reader, this was not the case for Aeneas. But this fact is no reason to call it non enarrabile (mostly translated with “indescribable”). In its literal meaning, the adjective enarrabile – as it is negated – can be paraphrased as meaning something cannot be told (“unnarratable”) in detail, given that the adjective derives from narrare (to tell, narrate) and the prefix e- often expresses intensification. On the other hand, the adjective might mean that something cannot be explained (in detail), because enarrare has the meaning of explaining something (e.g., poetic texts to pupils). However, even if the last meaning is allowed in the context of the description of Aeneas’s shield, this would refer to the poet’s activity (in addition to the shield’s quality). It does not seem probable that the meaning of the adjective is that the depicted events cannot be explained to Aeneas, that they would not be understandable for him even if they were explained to him. The problematic expression non enarrabile must be explained in connection with another important term that attracts the attention of every reader who is familiar with Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield: the verb mirari (to marvel (at); Aen. 8.730; in line 619 the same verb expresses the thought that Aeneas is

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marveling at the outward appearance of the armor) is similar to Homer’s use of the term θαῦμα (wonder, marvel). As already seen, in the Iliad this noun denotes mediation through fictive images in the sense that the depictions on the shield are made with such craftmanship and are so vivid that the viewer almost forgets that he is admiring a visual representation rather than the corresponding things in the real world. In a comparable way, the verb mirari expresses this idea with regard to the fictive source medium of this ekphrasis. Unlike Achilles, Aeneas cannot know the meaning of the depictions. Consequently, the term mirari denotes the aesthetic and illusionistic quality of the imagined depictions on the shield with regard to the unknowing viewer. Therefore, it is probable that the expression non enarrabile refers to the ekphrasis itself. This qualification possibly implies that the extraordinary depictions manufactured by Vulcan cannot be verbally described in an accurate and detailed manner. In this (quite general) respect, the Latin expression may be compared with the Greek words οὔ τι φατειός (unsayable) employed in the (Pseudo-)Hesiodic description of Heracles’s shield (Hes. Sc. 144). There, these words convey the inexpressibility of the awful, invincible figure of Phobos glaring with eyes of fire (according to Faber 2000, 49–50, Virgil is imitating this Greek passage). More specifically, the expression non enarrabile is a poetological reflection that concerns not only Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s shield, but also his art of writing poetry. If they were real images, these words would mean that Virgil cannot adequately explain with words what is depicted on the shield because of the different mimetic characteristics of verbal and visual representation. However, as Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s shield is an intermedial transposition of a fictive source medium, his verbal account is at the origin of the visual representation, so that the expression non enarrabile characterizes Virgil’s narrative even more than the fictive images. Given this nature of the Virgilian (as well as the Homeric) ekphrasis, the specific content of the depictions will be responsible for the use of the words under scrutiny.

4.2 The Metanarrative Function As did Homer, Virgil uses the description of the shield for poetological reflections. The main aspect of this reflection is the vivid and detailed mode of representation (ἐνάργεια/evidentia) that pervades the whole epic poem and causes marvel. In this regard, ekphrasis fulfills the same function in both the Greek and the Roman epics. This function corresponds to the epic genre and content insofar as both poems are fictionalizations of historical events that occurred in the distant past and so cannot be transmitted in detail. In addition to these reflections, the specific

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content of the images described by Virgil allows for and almost demands being qualified as non enarrabile due to the fact that the Augustan poet understood the development of the events from the Trojan War up to his own time as a linear progression of history and thus could only narrate a selection of events from (proto-) Roman history. Virgil himself describes the content of the depictions, indicating that “there was every generation of the future offspring of Ascanius and, in order, the wars they fought” (Aen. 8.628–629). In the main part of the ekphrasis, however, the poet does not (and cannot) mention all the wars fought by generations of Romans, thus limiting himself to the narration of seven decisive moments in (proto-)Roman history, the Battle of Actium being described in most detail. Since Virgil’s description is not only an intermedial, proleptic, and extradiegetic, but also an elliptic ekphrasis, the expression non enarrabile means that the narrator is unable to report in detail all the fights and wars that might come to mind, leaving him to select a number of crucial episodes in (proto-)Roman history. In this respect, the description of Aeneas’s shield can be compared with the parade of heroes in book 6 (Aen. 6.756–892) due to the fact that Anchises also selects important events in (proto-)Roman history. It is for this reason that the poet endeavors not to repeat the foreshadowing of the same events in book 8. The phenomenon of non enarrabile forms a subtype of Gerald Prince’s (1988) “disnarrated” – unnarratable events in which the unnarratable defies the powers of a particular narrator or those of any narrator. Moreover, (proto-)Roman history is unnarratable because Virgil chose another main topic for the Aeneid. The epic poem focuses on the end of the Trojan War and Aeneas’s subsequent flight from his home city and wanderings. It also contains recent Roman history, as shown by the account of the Battle of Actium (the parade of heroes ends with Marcellus, the nephew and crown prince of Augustus, who died in 23 BC; Aen. 6.860–886). However, Virgil decided to limit the main plot of the Aeneid to Aeneas’s flight, wanderings, and the struggles he was forced to endure; he connects this main plot with Augustan times by inserting proleptic passages to which the ekphrasis belongs. Since a passage in Virgil’s earlier Georgica (3.1–48) suggests that the poet originally wanted to write an epic poem about Augustus’s deeds, it is probable that he changed the focus of the presentation. Virgil maintains the panegyric aspect of the epic poem by using embedded prolepses, while at the same time he adds a teleological dimension to his plot by establishing Augustan times as the culmination of the foreshadowed rather than the narrated events. With the term “unnarratable,” Virgil appears to justify his solution to the impossibility of writing a coherent and vivid work that incorporates Augustus’s deeds in an epic about Aeneas and imitates Homer.

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4.3 Further Examples of Ekphrasis Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s shield is the poem’s largest ekphrasis, but not the only instance. Other more or less elaborate intermedial descriptions must also be mentioned: the murals in the temple of Juno at Carthage (Aen. 1.450–493), Cloanthus’s cloak (Aen. 5.250–257), Daedalus’s sculptures on the temple of Apollo (Aen. 6.14–41), Turnus’s shield (Aen. 7.789–792), and Pallas’s sword belt (Aen. 10.497–498). All of these descriptions are intermedial transpositions of a fictive source medium. In some way or other, they concern the whole plot of the Aeneid and contain metanarrative reflections on the (own) art of writing poetry (on these ekphrases, see Putnam 1998). The ekphrasis of Aeneas’s shield is the only proleptic (extradiegetic) description inside the Aeneid. However, Virgil also uses other narrative forms to anticipate future events of Roman history (especially Jupiter’s prophecy, Aen. 1.254–296, and the parade of the heroes in the underworld, Aen. 6.756–892), and his conception of a linear progression of (Roman) history beginning with the Trojan War is a feature of another intermedial description as well. The depictions on the temple of Juno in Carthage show scenes from the past Trojan War and cause the spectator Aeneas to shed tears (Aen. 1.450–493). The narrator introduces this ekphrasis in a similar way as in the case of the description of Aeneas’s shield, pointing to the chronological order in which Aeneas watches the images: “he sees in order the battles at Troy and the warfare now known by reputation throughout the whole world, the sons of Atreus, Priam, and Achilles fierce to both” (Aen. 1.456–458). The chronological order is not unambiguous, because the third scene could be regarded as pre-Iliadic in the sense that Troilus’s murder took place before the Trojan War and is only mentioned in Homer’s Iliad (24.257; Putnam 1998, 27–29). However, in Virgil’s account Troilus seems to have fallen during the struggles at Troy (Aen. 1.474–478). The murals of the temple might show the events and fights not in a strict chronological order, but all of them belong to the pitiful fall of Troy. However, pitiful moments and events are a recurring theme of the Aeneid. Moreover, Aeneas recognizes these events and the portrayal of himself fighting the Greeks (Aen. 1.488–489) as part of his history, and this ekphrasis takes place in Carthage, the site of the later Roman enemy, seven years after the fall of Troy. The opening lines of this ekphrasis (Aen. 1.456–458) are a metanarrative reflection also insofar as the statement that the battles at Troy are famous in the whole world is an allusion to Homer’s Iliad and to the Epic Cycle. Maybe the allusion to the Epic Cycle is even highlighted by the word orbis (circle, world), used in line 457 in the primary meaning of “world” (Barchiesi 1997, 273). Given our considerations on the description of Aeneas’s shield as non enarrabile, the ekphrasis of the murals

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of the temple sheds further light on how Virgil composed a coherent and vivid epic poem in which he imitated Homer, praised the Romans (especially Augustus), and narrated Aeneas’s deeds, avoiding thereby a thematic overlapping with his famous Greek predecessor.

5 Conclusion Homer’s and Virgil’s ekphrases are metanarrative passages in which the poets reflect on their art of writing poetry. They use an intermedial transposition of a fictive source medium to illustrate and comment on their vivid and detailed representations of basically historical events. By these means, their ekphrases partly try to build the illusion that we are dealing with a historical account because of the vivid and detailed mode of representation. At the same time, however, the intermedial descriptions, not least the explicit references, remind us of the fictive elements of the story because the depictions on the shields cannot represent everything that Homer and Virgil are narrating. Apart from this general function, Homer’s and Virgil’s ekphrases reflect the development of this narrative form from archaic Greece to Augustan Rome. In Homer’s account, the intermedial description is a narration of how Hephaestus manufactures Achilles’s shield with its images. In Virgil’s presentation, by contrast, the main plot has stopped and the poet describes what can be seen on Aeneas’s shield as a finished object. More important than this difference with regard to the procedure are the differences in the content of the ekphrases. Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield does not display a deeper connection between the content of the depictions on the shield and its context or even the whole plot of the Iliad. Virgil’s ekphrases, in some way or another, concern the whole plot of the Aeneid, for example by hinting at pitiful events and shedding light on the imitation of Greek authors, especially Homer, with regard to the choice of subject matter. Moreover, Virgil adds a proleptic dimension to his epic poem that stands out in some passages to which his intermedial descriptions belong, though not all of them. Especially the ekphrasis of Aeneas’s shield contributes to the teleological character of the epic poem and corresponds to the perspective of a linear progression of history from the Trojan War up to Augustan times.

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References Arpaia, Maria. 2010. “Bibliografia sullo Scudo di Achille (1945–2008).” In Lo scudo di Achilles nell’ Iliade: Esperienze ermeneutische a confronto, edited by Matteo d’Acunto and Riccardo Palmisciano, 233–245. Pisa: Serra. Barchiesi, Alessandro. 1997. “Virgilian Narrative: Ekphrasis.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, edited by Charles Martindale, 271–281. Cambridge: University Press. Bartsch, Shadi, and Jas Elsner (eds.). 2007. “Ekphrasis.” Special issue, Classical Philology 102, no. 1. Becker, Andrew S. 1995. The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Binder, Gerhard. 2019. P. Vergilius Maro: Aeneis; Ein Kommentar, vol. 3, Kommentar zu Aeneis 7–12. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Boyd, Barbara W. 1995. “Non enarrabile textum: Ecphrastic Trespass and Narrative Ambiguity in the Aeneid.” Vergilius 41:71–90. de Jong, Irene J. F. 2011. “The Shield of Achilles: From Metalepsis to Mise en Abyme.” Ramus 40:1–14. de Jong, Irene J. F. 2015. “Pluperfects and the Artist in Ekphrases: From the Shield of Achilles to the Shield of Aeneas (and Beyond).” Mnemosyne 68:889–916. Dinter, Martin T., and Bettina Reitz-Joosse. 2019. Intermediality and Roman Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter. Eden, Peter T. 1975. A Commentary on Virgil: Aeneid VIII. Leiden: Brill. Egelhaaf-Gaiser, Ulrike. 2008. “Werkstattbesuch bei Vulcanus: Triumphale Geschichtsbilder aus Vergils intertextueller Waffenschmiede (Aen. 8,407–453).” In Triplici invectus triumpho: Der römische Triumph in augusteischer Zeit, edited by Helmut Krasser, Dennis Pausch, and Ivana Petrovic, 209–237. Stuttgart: Steiner. Eigler, Ulrich. 1994. “Non enarrabile textum (Verg. Aen. 8,625): Servius und die römische Geschichte bei Vergil.” Aevum 68:147–163. Elsner, Jas (ed.). 2002a. “Ekphrasis.” Special issue, Ramus 31. Elsner, Jas. 2002b. “Introduction: The Genres of Ekphrasis.” In “Ekphrasis,” edited by Jas Elsner, special issue, Ramus 31:1–18. Faber, Riemer. 2000. “Vergil’s ‘Shield of Aeneas’ (Aeneid 8.617–731) and the Shield of Heracles.” Mnemosyne 53:49–57. Feddern, Stefan. 2021. Elemente der antiken Erzähltheorie. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fordyce, Christian J. 1977. P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos libri VII–VIII. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fowler, Don. 2000. Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Francis, James A. 2009. “Metal Maidens, Achilles’ Shield, and Pandora: The Beginnings of ‘Ekphrasis.’” American Journal of Philology 130:1–23. Fratantuono, Lee M., and Alden Smith. 2018. Virgil: Aeneid 8: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Leiden: Brill. Gransden, Karl W. 2003. Virgil: Aeneid, Book 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Stephen. 1997. “The Survival and Supremacy of Rome: The Unity of the Shield of Aeneas.” Journal of Roman Studies 87:70–76. Harrison, Stephen. 2019. “Artefact Ekphrasis and Narrative in Epic Poetry from Homer to Silius.” In Structures of Epic Poetry, edited by Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann, vol. 1, 773–806. Berlin: De Gruyter. Herman, David. 2005. “Events and Event-Types.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 151–152. London: Routledge. Kablitz, Andreas. 1982. “Erzählung und Beschreibung: Überlegungen zu einem Merkmal fiktionaler erzählender Texte.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 33:67‒84.

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Klarer, Mario. 2005. “Ekphrasis.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 133–134. London: Routledge. Koopman, Niels. 2018. Ancient Greek Ekphrasis: Five Linguistic and Narratological Case Studies. Leiden: Brill. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. (1776) 1990. Laokoon. In Werke und Briefe, vol. 5.2, Werke 1766–1769, edited by Wilfried Barner, 9–206. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Martínez, Matías, and Michael Scheffel. (1999) 2016. Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. 10th ed. Munich: Beck. Pflugmacher, Thorsten. 2005. “Description.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 101–102. London: Routledge. Primavesi, Oliver. 2009. “Zum Problem der epischen Fiktion in der vorplatonischen Poetik.” In Fiktion und Fiktionalität in den Literaturen des Mittelalters: Jan-Dirk Müller zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Ursula Peters and Rainer Warning, 105–120. Paderborn: Fink. Prince, Gerald. 1988. “The Disnarrated.” Style 22:1–8. Putnam, Michael C. J. 1998. Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rajewsky, Irina O. 2002. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke. Ratkowitsch, Christine. 2006. Die poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken: Eine literarische Tradition der Großdichtung in Antike, Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften. Schmid, Wolf. (2005) 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin: De Gruyter. Simon, Erika. 1995. “Der Schild des Achilleus.” In Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung: Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer, 123–141. Munich: Fink. Stempel, Wolf-Dieter. 1973. “Erzählung, Beschreibung und der historische Diskurs.” In Geschichte – Ereignis und Erzählung, edited by Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, 325–346. Munich: Fink. Wolf, Werner. 2005. “Intermediality.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 252–256. London: Routledge.

John Pier

Mise en Abyme in the Baroque Era and in Modernist and Postmodernist Narrative Fiction 1 Definition In its strict sense, mise en abyme obtains when, at a lower level and on a smaller scale, there appears a narrative segment that stands in an iconic relation with the story in which it is contained. In its broad sense, mise en abyme additionally obtains when such a relation is projected forward and/or backward at the same level. By “iconic relation” is meant a relation of resemblance between representamen and object wherein a sign is “both self-representing and other-representing” (Ransdell 1986, 70; see Peirce 1931–1958, 2:243, 249, 276; Bal 1978; Pier 1999; White 2001).

2 Development Typologically and historically, this basic schema admits of numerous variants, combinations, degrees, and effects. The initial treatment of what was later to be dubbed mise en abyme dates from André Gide’s Journal (1893) and has since developed in several phases. The present discussion focuses on mise en abyme as a form of iconicity. (1) Gide, taking a cue from Victor Hugo, identified a device whereby a miniature of the work is contained within the work, Les faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1925) being a case in point (on the genesis of mise en abyme, see, e.g., Dällenbach 1977, 15–40; Hallyn 1980; Izzo 1990; Peccatte 2018; Bertrand 2019). In 1893, Gide affirmed his preference for works of art in which can be found “transposed, on the scale of the characters, the very subject [sujet] of that work. Nothing throws a clearer light upon it or more surely establishes the proportions of the whole” (1967, 30). At the same time, Gide employed two ambiguous metaphors drawn from pictorial works – mirrors (including “a small convex and dark mirror”) represented in various paintings – and “the device of heraldry that consists in setting in the escutcheon a smaller one ‘en abyme’, at the heart-point” (30–31). However, the literary examples he cites – Hamlet, Wilhelm Meister, The Fall of the House of Usher – fail to square with the three criteria (on Gide’s use of heraldry, see, e.g., https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-026

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Morrissette 1971, 128; Dällenbach 1977, 143–148; Ron 1987, 420, 430–431; White 2001, 34–35). The first attempt to elucidate Gide’s passage (and the first to employ the expression mise en abyme) was Claude-Edmonde Magny’s obscure but nonetheless influential chapter “La mise en abyme; ou, Le chiffre de la transcendance” (1950). Rereading Gide, Magny combined mathematics (the theorem of recursive sequences in which an infinite set corresponds term-for-term to a part of itself); the metaphor of “infinite parallel mirrors” in which Gide’s “transposed” becomes a mirroring or reflection of infinite character-narrative relations; and the “abyss,” a “cipher of transcendence” eliciting either a cryptic system of encoding or an empty code with echoes of metaphysical vertigo and Sartrian “nothingness” (Dällenbach 1977, 33–38; Snow 2016, 33–44). Pierre Lafille, preferring construction or composition en abyme over mise en abyme, characterized the inescutcheon as a reduced reproduction within the coat of arms itself; but he also pointed to the paradox in The Counterfeiters as to who – Édouard (a character in that book writing a book bearing the same title) or Gide – actually narrates, thereby equivocating between the metaphor in heraldry and the mirror metaphor in painting (Lafille 1954, 25, 206). (Structure en abyme has also been proposed; Genette [1972] 1980, 233.) (2) The following phase of reflection on mise en abyme took place in the context of the French New Novel. Bruce Morrissette, considering Magny’s term a “false metaphor” (1971, 128), referred to the device as “interior duplication.” At issue is neither the metaphor of infinitely reflecting mirrors nor the image of infinitely regressive heraldic shields and reflections on the abyss, but rather the doubling, through miniaturization, of the main story: “interior duplication, or its prototype, functions nearly always to advance the story, to justify the transition to other matters” (130). Jean Ricardou (1967, 172), by contrast, insists on mise en abyme as a “factor of contestation” of the development of the story. Lucien Dällenbach’s Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme (1977) remains foundational to this day (e.g., Raus and Tore 2019). Through a critical reading of Magny and Lafille on Gide, and taking exception to Morrissette’s interior duplication by pointing to the disruptive nature of mise en abyme (Dällenbach 1977, 82; cf. Ricardou 1967, 181, but also Jefferson 1983), Dällenbach proposes, with reference to the mirror metaphor, to conceive of the device as a “specular reflection.” Accordingly, three elementary mises en abyme are delineated (of the énoncé, of the énonciation, of the text’s code) that underlie three main types of reflexivity, each with its specific type of similarity: (a) Simple duplication: a fragment that has a relation of similarity with the work within which it is included [similarity: a story within the story]

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(b) Infinite duplication: a fragment that has a relation of similarity with the work within which it is included and within which a fragment is embedded within which. . . [mimetism: a story within the story within the story. . .] (c) Aporetic duplication: a fragment supposedly including the work within which it is included [identity: the story of the story] (Dällenbach 1977, 51; cf. 142) Hence, Dällenbach’s “pluralistic” definition: “mise en abyme is any internal mirror reflecting the narrative as a whole by simple, repeated, or specious duplication” (52; for a fuller summary, see Carrard 1984, 841–844; for a critical view, Bal 1978, 118–122, and Ron 1987, 418–421). (3) Various applications of and commentaries on Dällenbach’s richly illustrated model have appeared, not only in French- but also in English- and German-language scholarship (for mise en abyme in Russian literature, see Larisa Murav’eva’s contribution to this volume). In these pages, a semiotic approach is adopted. Drawing attention to a number of disparities between Dällenbach’s penetrating analyses and the somewhat ad hoc use of structural linguistics as a theoretical frame of reference, Mieke Bal pleads for a semiotic reconceptualization of mise en abyme. She equates the device not with mirror images but with iconicity, an icon (alongside index and symbol) being defined by Peirce as a sign that “represent[s] its object mainly by its similarity, no matter what its mode of being” (1931–1958, 2:276), or that “stands for something merely because it resembles it” (3:362). For Bal, mise en abyme is “any sign having as referent a pertinent and continuous aspect of the text, the narrative [récit] or the story that it signifies, by means of resemblance, one or several times” (1978, 123; italics in original). What stands out in particular is that resemblance, unlike duplication or reflection, admits of degrees. Moreover, iconicity, when considered in conjunction with narrative level and scale, is susceptible of generating three forms of mise en abyme: (a) Topological mise en abyme occurs in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) on the page with squiggly lines representing the book’s wildly digressive storyline (cf. Peirce 1931–1958, 2:277: images are icons that “partake of simple qualities”). (b) Diagrammatic mise en abyme is exemplified by Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici, exhibiting a form of icon “which represent[s] the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts” (Peirce 1931–1958, 2:227). This form, in its analeptic and proleptic dimensions, plays out at the same level, the proleptic form being comparable to Werner Wolf’s mise en reflet/série (2010, 68–69) and to Klaus Meyer-Minnemann and Sabine Schlickers’s “horizontal” (as opposed to “vertical”) mise en abyme de

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l’énoncé/de l’énonciation (2010, 99–101; cf. Lang 2006, 36–38; see also Ron 1987, 428–429). (c) Metaphorical mise en abyme in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) results from the superpositioning of two levels in such a way that the interpolated text, “The Haunted Palace,” both echoes and foreshadows the fate of the protagonists, the family, and the castle (a metaphor being an icon “which represent[s] the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else”; Peirce 1931–1958, 2:227). Mirror images and the abyss are metaphorical forms of the device. Mise en abyme, understood as a form of iconicity whose saliency consists in “a pertinent and continuous aspect of the text,” breaks down into simple, recursive, and aporetic forms; significantly, it scales down any strict isomorphism between mise en abyme and the main story associated with mirror images and interior duplication, since it allows for degrees of similarity and difference (White 2001, 45, 49) in the processes of narrative semiosis. Moshe Ron reiterates the topological, diagrammatic, and metaphorical forms of mise en abyme and defines the device as follows: “Any diegetic segment which resembles the work where it occurs, is said to be placed en abyme” (1987, 436). It is specified that (1) “the resembling diegetic segment must be [. . .] smaller (in textual extension) than the work it resembles” (437), and (2) this segment “must be located at the same or at a lower diegetic level than the whole it reflects” (429). He thus adopts mise en abyme in its broad sense (see section 1 above). Moreover, as the part reflects the whole (and not vice versa), the device carries “‘as much’ significance as the whole that contains it.” This being the case, “mise en abyme is not only an iconic relation, it must also be a synecdoche,” or figure of inclusion (430; cf. Sirvent 2019, 61–62). To qualify as a mise en abyme, a story within a story must not only stand for that story because it resembles that story in some respect; it must also be a part that stands for the whole. Also integrated into Ron’s model are Dällenbach’s criteria regarding distribution: the device can occur en bloc, in fragments, or repetitively. One advantage of approaching mise en abyme through the lens of iconicity rather than duplication or reflection is that it opens the way to exploring the device in other media (see the various applications in Raus and Tore 2019; on the inapplicability of Dällenbach’s system of mise en abyme to images, see Peccatte 2018) as well as its occurrence across media (Wolf 2009). More to the point in the present context is that mise en abyme in literary narratives enjoys a pedigree extending back to antiquity and is present from the Middle Ages to the baroque era, from romanticism to symbolism and on to modernism and postmodernism. A survey of the literature shows that relatively few studies have been undertaken on the use of the device during premodern periods, leaving

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considerable gaps in how it has evolved historically and a spotty account of its development within the various literary traditions. One exception is Dällenbach’s book, which, though it concentrates mainly on modern and particularly twentieth-century French literature, also discusses examples from German romanticism. It was with the French New Novel and postmodernism that mise en abyme flowered, and this has led researchers to adopt a number of theoretical positions that fail to hold up under historical scrutiny: “great narratives are recognizable by this sign, that the fiction they propose is nothing but the dramatization of their own functioning” (Ricardou 1967, 178); mise an abyme “always ironically subverts the representational intent of the narrative text, disrupting where the text aspires to integration, integrating where the text is deliberately fragmentary” (Ron 1987, 434). It is in the spirit of gaining a more adequate understanding of the diachronic dimension of mise en abyme that a selection of French and English-language narratives from the early modern period and the modernist and postmodernist periods will now be examined.

3 Early Modern Period Some of the most striking manifestations of the techniques of mise en abyme during the early modern period are to be found in the play within the play. Present in ancient drama (e.g., the chorus in Greek plays), with important antecedents in the Middle Ages, the play within the play gained prominence particularly during the baroque period, a time during which the arts were characterized by excess, paradox, exuberance, and disorder, but also by mobility, illusion, and the ephemeral (see, e.g., Souiller 1988; Colognat-Barès 2003). In his classic study of French literature in the European context from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, Jean Rousset (1953) placed the baroque under the signs of Circe (metamorphosis) and the peacock (ostentation). Historians of English literature have generally restricted the baroque to the so-called metaphysical poets, but another line of research, bolstered by recent studies, has demonstrated that the ties between English literature during this period and the European baroque are both closer and deeper than was previously thought (e.g., Vincent 2020). Mise en abyme as such is not to be confounded with the play within the play. Although both are conveyors of mirror effects, what distinguishes the latter from the former in particular is that one or more players at the primary level become the internal spectators of an enframed play (Forestier [1981] 1996, 11 and passim). A number of consequences flow from this situation, one being that the indexical relation between player and spectator, on the one hand, and between internal

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spectator and audience, on the other, is heightened. This is due to their physical contiguity with an attendant intensification of topological iconicity, a feature not characteristic of the intradiegetic reader of a mise en abyme in written narratives, for example. Moreover, mise en abyme, when it occurs in the theater, is not compatible with the multiplication of levels and, unlike in written texts, rarely extends beyond two levels (cf. Dällenbach’s simple duplication). As a result, theatrical mises en abyme are generated vertically, but they develop horizontally and, contrary to the disruptive effects produced by the device in postmodern fiction, tend to extend and at the same time reflect the action of the primary level, leaving both the internal spectator and the public before a sort of trompe l’oeil whose levels may be difficult to disentangle (cf. Forestier [1981] 1996, 151). The use of mise en abyme in baroque theater produces reflections between the player-spectators internal to the play and the public, thereby contributing to a certain metatheatricality that projects beyond the play proper while it also instills a sense that the world of the play itself is a world of illusion. It is important, when considering baroque theater, to bear in mind the cultural influence of the theatrum mundi, an idea with roots in ancient philosophy that grew into a powerful topos during the Middle Ages. Described in the twelfth century as “the life of man on earth is a comedy where each forgetting his own plays another’s role” (John of Salisbury, Politicraticus 1159), sometimes taking on religious inflections (God is the author, man the player, the world the stage), the theatrum mundi was not invested with an actual theatrical form until the Renaissance (Christian 1987). The topos found expression in Shakespeare’s well-known words: “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, II.7.139–140), and “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more” (Macbeth, 5.5.24–26).

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1599–1601) by William Shakespeare In the tradition of the revenge play inaugurated by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie (ca. 1587), Shakespeare’s play centers around Hamlet’s drive to avenge himself for his father’s death at the hands of his uncle Claudius, who subsequently married Hamlet’s mother (Gertrude) and became king of Denmark. The ghost of the murdered father appears before Hamlet, exclaiming “Revenge this foul and most unnatural murder” (1.4.25). To this aim, Hamlet begins by staging a play, The Murder of Gonzago (which he also calls The Mouse-Trap), claiming “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.633–634). The play within the play re-enacts the scene, in a thinly disguised form, in which Hamlet’s father was poisoned. The strategy is to devastating effect, for Claudius’s state of

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agitation during the performance betrays his guilt. Subsequently, Hamlet refrains from killing Claudius, who is kneeling in prayer, but then kills Polonius, mistaking him for Claudius. Justice not having been done, the ghost returns, egging Hamlet on: “Do not forget: this visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose” (3.4.110–111). Meanwhile, Polonius’s daughter, Ophelia, is driven to distraction and drowns (perhaps by suicide). Hamlet is exiled to England by Claudius, but he returns to Denmark, where Claudius and Laertes (Ophelia’s brother) plot to kill him. Hamlet kills Laertes in a duel and then stabs Claudius, only to succumb himself under the effect of the poison-tipped sword with which he was grazed by Laertes. Though brief, this summary illustrates how a mise en abyme in its basic form, occurring at a lower diegetic level and on a smaller scale, can form an integral part of the principal dramatic action. As a play within the play, The Mouse-Trap contributes to the thickening of the plot, intensifying the already existent conflict between Hamlet and Claudius that culminates in their deaths. However, this internal play does not possess the synecdochic quality characteristic of the mise en abyme, since the theatrical representation before the very eyes of Claudius and Gertrude of an event that occurred prior to the opening lines of Hamlet cannot be construed as a part that stands for the whole. Due to the indexical relations that prevail in theatrical performance (on the illusion-building techniques of the Shakespearean stage, see Werner Wolf’s contribution to this volume), the resemblances between the play within the play and the larger dramatic framework fall more within the scope of topological mise en abyme than they do within the diagrammatic or metaphorical varieties. Mise en abyme in Shakespeare’s play thus functions differently from the device in The Fall of the House of Usher. Here, a full-blown example of the device comes in the form of the ballad “The Haunted House,” encapsulating in allusive language the story of the extinction of Usher – both the family of ancient lineage and the age-old family castle. On another scale, however, it must be observed that The Mouse-Trap is not only a play within a play but also theater within theater – the mise en abyme of theater as theater within one and the same production. In this regard, the parallels between Shakespeare’s and Hamlet’s plays can hardly be overlooked, especially when viewed from the angle of the theatrum mundi.

L’Illusion comique (1639) by Pierre Corneille A masterpiece of French baroque theater, this work incorporates not so much a play within a play, as in Hamlet, as it does theater within theater. Corneille’s play departs from the rule of the three unities (time, place, action) adhered to by French

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classical theater (gaps in time between certain acts while the action, unfolding at three levels, takes place in a magician’s grotto, before the heroine’s house, in a prison, and in a castle garden). In addition, the play mixes genres: allegory, comedy (including elements of commedia dell’arte), tragicomedy, and tragedy. The first act presents Pridamant desperately imploring the magician Alcandre for information about his long-lost son, Clindor. With a wave of his wand, Alcandre opens a curtain behind which is a nobly dressed troupe of actors, and he declares: “Judge your son by such fine dress and grooming. / Does that of a Prince have greater splendor? / Can you still doubt his greatness?” (Illusion comique, I.2.34–36). Pridamant, but also Alcandre, then become the spectators of “speaking ghosts” (212) in the following three somewhat burlesque acts in which Isabelle, true to Clindor, must contend with the advances of several suitors. In act 3 a duel takes place in which Adraste (favored by Isabelle’s father) is killed by Clindor; apprehended by a crowd, Clindor is thought by his father to have been killed, whereas he is in fact taken to prison, condemned to be executed. Pridamant, the spectator, has effectively taken the actor playing the role of Clindor to be Clindor himself, unaware of the fact that his son, after a series of picaresque adventures, has become an actor. He asks Alcandre to intervene with his magical charms, but the latter replies, saying: “A bit of patience, and without such help / You shall soon see him happy in his loves” (3.12.979–980). The following act includes two tragic soliloquies on impending death, one by Isabelle, the other by Clindor, but also a series of intrigues by which Clindor escapes prison and flees with Isabelle. Pridamant is relieved, all the more so with Alcandre’s reassuring words: “Fear no longer for them either perils or disgrace, / Many will follow them without finding their trace” (4.10.1329–1330). The act ends with Alcandre projecting forward two years (to act 5), without mention of Clindor and Isabelle’s intervening rise in social station, when he declares: “I shall show you them in their high fortune” (1338). Indeed, Alcandre’s magical evocations of the past or of the present form the basis of the entire play, blurring the line between demiurge and dramatist (cf. Forestier 1987, 130–131) and capturing the sense of the word “illusion” in the play’s title. Acts 2 through 4 form a level subordinate to act 1 (a “prologue,” as Corneille termed it in his 1660 “Examen”) to the extent that it is this act that enframes the staging of the past adventures of the protagonists. The three acts do not, however, constitute a mise en abyme, but are rather an instance of theater within theater: exceeding the scale of act 1, they neither stand for nor resemble the story in which they are contained, but rather serve to illustrate and extend the main dramatic action. Act 5 brings in a subtle but consequential change. Unknown to Pridamant (and by extension the audience), Clindor and Isabelle, dressed in princely garb, are now actors by profession, and the story they act out “is related to their own and seems to

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be the continuation thereof” (“Examen”). A confrontation takes place between Isabelle and her “insidious husband,” who has had an adulterous affair with Princess Rosine. Clindor attempts by all rhetorical ruses to downplay his fleeting passion and then to disengage himself from Rosine, who is burning with desire for him. Her husband, Prince Florilame (to whom Clindor is indebted for his social ascension), has himself long been consumed with desire for Isabelle and has Rosine and Clindor put to death. Pridamant is totally taken aback by this cascade of diguises and metamorphoses and inconsolable at the loss of his son. He – and the audience – have been caught unawares by the theatrical trompe l’oeil. At this point, a curtain is drawn back and a troupe of actors is seen by a member of the stage audience divvying up their takings: “What do I see! Money being counted by the dead?” (5.6.1747). The final scene, returning to level 1, is an apology for the dramatic art by Alcandre. Up to this point, Pridamant has been insensitive to the seductive power of the theater; but now, on seeing his son an actor rather than a nobleman, he is fully under its spell. The true “apology” of the theater in Comic Illusion, however, is built into the play itself in the form of theater within theater. This becomes evident in act 5, in which it initially appears that the dramatic action merges seamlessly with that of the previous acts. But it turns out that this act is structured by a barely perceptible mise en abyme. Unmarked as such, this mise en abyme, a trompe l’oeil, is not a reflection or a duplication of the larger dramatic action of which it forms a part; nor does it echo or foreshadow the development of the dramatic action: rather, it both extends and, abruptly, departs from that action. Mise en abyme in Comic Illusion is, to begin with, metaphorical to the extent that while the developments of the three earlier acts occur in the past, those of act 5, purportedly involving the same “speaking ghosts,” take place in the present – concurrently with the time and space of theatrical representation, thus corresponding rigorously to the time and space of Alcandre’s and Pridamant’s interactions at level 1. As a result, any parallelisms in the mise en abyme in act 5 (level 3) to the previous three acts (level 2) betray an illusory semblance – a trompe l’oeil – of iconic features that are both self- and other-representing. The other aspect of mise en abyme that underlies theater within theater in this play is the diagrammatic form. This shows up sporadically in the first four acts during exchanges between Alcandre and Pridamant, hinting proleptically at the trompe l’oeil that will be unmasked in the final scene. At the end of act 1, for instance, the magician declares “I want to show you with vividness and glory, / The same action he practices today” (1.3.202–203). Only in act 5 is it clear what Alcandre is referring to: Clindor has become a professional actor. Similarly when Alcandre says “See appear already / Under two unreal ghosts, your son and his Master” (2.1.3–4). These and other moments are conditioned by Pridamant’s (and the audience’s) confusion between Clindor the son and Clindor the actor through-

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out the course of the dramatic action, peopled by “speaking ghosts,” but ultimately proving to be one and the same. Now, if mise en abyme as trompe l’oeil in Corneille’s play pertains to levels 2 and 3, the relations between levels 1 and 2 run along the lines of the theatrum mundi: Alcandre the demiurge sets the scene for the illusory happenings of the world that play out on the stage before our very eyes. Technically speaking, this topos cannot be described as a form of mise en abyme. Nevertheless, integrated into baroque poetics and esthetics, it establishes the framework of baroque theatrical production within its cultural context. In contrast to the more religious forms of theatrum mundi (e.g., Calderón de la Barca’s El gran teatro del mundo, 1655, described as “dramatized theology”; Christian 1987, 170), Comic Illusion exemplifies the secular development of this topos. (On the transition from the sacred to the secular in narrative logic from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, see Anne Duprat’s contribution to this volume.)

4 Modernism Although these examples from early modern theater give but a glimpse at the use of mise en abyme during this period, they do provide an idea of the place occupied by illusion in baroque aesthetics. Moving forward to the nineteenth century, it can be seen that illusion was transformed into the illusion of the real (cf. Roland Barthes’s effet de réel), the verisimilitude of realist fiction. One of the many innovations ushered in by modernism was to call the realist ethos into question. Broadly speaking, artistic works became the expression of fragmentation and of the crisis of representation. Factors such as increased self-consciousness and self-reflexivity invested existing techniques, including mise en abyme, with a new profile and prominence.

Les faux-monnayeurs (1925) by André Gide Gide’s novel is composed as an intricate web of plots and subplots bound together through the relations and rivalries between the characters and the filtering of events through multiple perspectives. Bernard accidently finds Édouard’s journal, and on returning it to the author becomes his secretary, leading to a series of encounters, including with Olivier, Édouard’s nephew, around whom much of the action takes place. It is within this diegetic space that Édouard writes a journal whose entries are dispersed throughout the text, portions of them forming mises

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en abyme in which the writing of a novel entitled The Counterfeiters is projected but never undertaken. Indeed, Édouard exclaims: “if I don’t manage to write it, this book, it’s because the story of the book interests me more than the book itself” (186). Hence, comments in the journal such as the following: “It will be difficult, in The Counterfeiters, to get it across that the one who plays my character here might not, while remaining on good terms with his sister, know her children” (93). At certain points, elements of the primary level appear in the journal (“That [Bernard] is Olivier’s closest friend – that’s what weaves a network between us, and it’s only up to me to tighten the stitches”; 156), while at other times parts of the journal are read by some of the characters. Occasionally, it is Gide himself who intervenes: “What I don’t like about Édouard is the reasons he makes up.” Or metaleptically: “Let’s take advantage of this summertime while our characters are away to examine them at our leisure. [. . .] Bernard is surely much too young to take over a plot” (216). The construction of The Counterfeiters reflects the diagrammatic dimension of mise en abyme due to the fact that the primary level and the mise en abyme of the novel by the journal both diverge and converge, elements of each slipping into and out of the other. This situation leads to “irreconcilable demands” which are denounced by Gide: “My novelist will seek to withdraw from it [reality],” declares Édouard, “but I will lead him back to it ceaselessly. This in fact will be the subject: the struggle between the facts set before us by reality and ideal reality” (185). According to Michel Raimond, only one “aesthetic solution” remains: “pouring into the impure novel one writes [The Counterfeiters] the theory of a pure novel it is impossible to write [journal of The Counterfeiters]” (1966, 249). The compositional form of Gide’s novel is revealingly expressed in the journal when Édouard, speaking of his notebook, declares: “This is the mirror I walk about with” (155; cf. Stendhal’s “Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror walking along the high road”). The ambulatory mirror image connotes the metaphorical nature of the mise en abyme of The Counterfeiters by Édouard’s journal. Midway through the novel (at the primary level), mention is made of Édouard’s rival, the writer Passavant, editorin-chief of the newly founded literary magazine Avant-Garde, as a counterfeiter; in a parallel development, Édouard, reflecting on his projected novel, swerves toward abstraction: “Bit by bit, the ideas of exchange, devaluation, inflation invaded his book like the theories of clothes in Carlyle’s Sartor Resaurus, where they usurped the place of characters” (188). These ideas serve as a pattern for various other developments involving counterfeit writers, both earlier and later in the novel; toward the end, a band of real counterfeiters is found to be working under the guidance of Strouvilhou, a friend of Passavant’s. The journal/mirror carried about by Édouard serves as a metaphor for these parallels. Are Gide and Édouard one and the same – Gide the novelist and Gide the theoretician? Two earlier works, Tentative amoureuse (1893), and particularly Paludes

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(1895), credited with being the first “modern novel” in French literature, point in that direction. Here, the “I” author of “Paludes” is projected into the “I” author of his journal, “or Paludes,” the identity of the latter fleetingly maintained when he speaks in his own name: Tityre. These vacillating identities, evocative of the “convex mirrors” portrayed by the painters mentioned in Gide’s Journal of 1893 (Dällenbach 1977, 44), come in the wake of the crisis of the symbolist novel, with Paludes breaking the bonds of the symbolist-naturalist-psychological triad reigning over prose fiction of the day (Bertrand 2019, 25–27). What mattered for Gide was “reciprocity” or “retroaction of the subject with oneself” (1967, 29). This is an important point that distinguishes Gide from later writers, for it shows that the abyme (abyss) is a metaphor for the creative élan born out of the intertwining of life and art that so preoccupied the author. The mise en abyme of Édouard’s journal by The Counterfeiters can be characterized not as an interior duplication but as a “novel in the novel” and as a “novel of the novel” (and thus a “novel of the novelist”) as well as a “novel of the novel of the novel” (Dällenbach 1977, 51).

Point Counter Point (1928) by Aldous Huxley As in Gide’s work, the English modernist’s novel contains a notebook authored by one of the characters, Philip Quarles, which “put[s] a novelist in the novel.” In other respects, however, the two works differ markedly. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on into infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which etc., etc. At about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood-pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands and reaction times. (Huxley [1928] 1956, 385)

Other ways of telling a story, variation on a theme, infinity of embedded narrators, increasing degrees of abstraction, reversion to biological functions, . . . none of this is found in Gide’s use of mise en abyme. Indeed, the principle of infinity is introduced into Huxley’s novel with no reference to escutcheons or heraldry. In another passage in Quarles’s notebook, the analogy of mise en abyme with painting disappears in favor of music. “The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. [. . .] But on a large scale, in the construction.” Referring to one of Beethoven’s string quartets and to the Diabelli Variations, Quarles speaks of “modulations, not merely from one key to another,

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but from mood to mood. [. . .] A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters.” Also evoked is the fugue: “All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots” (384). These lines have been seen as encapsulating music as a structural metaphor that spans the entire novel: for example, counterpoint orders the plot parallel to the fugue with the novel’s polyphony of voices (Meckier 1969). Close-grained analysis of explicit parallels between text and music, however, moderates such grand designs. From this it results that the novel is “a self-conscious exercise” in how to write a novel in which “Huxley uses the art of music as a contrapuntal variation on his own art and the art of Philip Quarles” (Bowen 1977, 492): Point Counter Point is not – or not only – a novelistic attempt to imitate musical form. This is all the more so in that Huxley’s sprawling opus represents not only a “musicalization of fiction” and a polyphonic novel but also a “novel of ideas,” a roman à clef, a multi-perspective novel, and a Swiftian satire, thus rendering it resistant to any globalizing schemes. Also to be borne in mind is the intermedial dimension of musical allusions in Huxley’s novel (cf. Wolf 1999, 165–182), which provides the mise en abyme of Quarles’s notebook with a distinctly intermedial flavor not found in the mise en abyme of Édouard’s journal. Fragmentarily distributed throughout the text in variegated forms, the musical allusions, as presented on a reduced scale in the notebook, mark the diffuse presence of mise en abyme in the novel, the device thus being characterized by a low degree of diagrammicity. Unlike Édouard’s journal, a work-in-progress read by other characters, or the “Mad Trist” in Poe’s tale, whose narration is simultaneous with that of the primary diegesis, eerily foreshadowing impending doom, the introduction of Quarles’s notebook into the text temporarily immobilizes the general flow of the narrative. As a consequence, the mise en abyme of the notebook is predominantly metaphorical – “represent[ing] the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else,” in Peirce’s words. The paradigmatic (as opposed to the syntagmatic) quality of mise en abyme in Huxley’s novel is underscored by the image of the Quaker Oats advertisement. Putting a novelist in the novel (Quarles, who writes Point Counter Point) triggers a process that can be repeated to infinity. For this reason, the “musicalization of fiction” is somewhat tempered by the introduction of the Quaker Oats principle and the possibilities of infinite regress. It is not possible to substantiate this observation here with further concrete examples. In any case, Point Counter Point does illustrate the panoply of potential configurations opened up by the introduction of a narrative segment having an iconic relation to the narrative within which it is contained.

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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) by Vladimir Nabokov The canonical uses of mise en abyme generally stand out clearly (Hamlet, The Fall of the House of Usher, etc.). But the device can also take a lower profile, entering a work in ways that may not be immediately perceptible. Such is the case of Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the author’s first novel in English, and the first to be published in his own name. His previous six novels, in Russian, appeared under the nom de plume of Vladimir Sirin. Herein lies the central theme and dynamics of the novel: the transformation of authorship and identities as Sirin, the Russian writer, mutates into Nabokov, the English-speaking writer. A biography of the deceased Russian-born English novelist is undertaken by his half-brother, V., a first-person narrator, who consults friends, acquaintances, and lovers of the deceased, reads his correspondence, and, with additional help from the author’s five published works, seeks to reconstruct the “real life” of the author. The narrative ends with an affirmation of the near-identity of Sebastian and V: the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian’s mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows. (Nabokov [1941] 1992, 203)

It has been debated, inconclusively, whether Sebastian is the author and V. his creation; whether the two are separate entities, with the former exerting influence over the latter from beyond the grave; whether V. is the author recounting his quest for his half-brother and author of the passages quoted from his books; or whether V.’s biography of Sebastian gradually turns into an autobiography, with V. becoming Sebastian. Whatever the case, Sebastian Knight can be regarded as a narrative about the creation of a narrative. Various factors contribute to mise en abyme in the book, both external and internal. Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift (1937–1938), the émigré author’s farewell to Russian literature, ends with the protagonist, Fyodor, projecting the writing of a novel entitled The Gift. To what degree this work will be similar to or different from the work just read, possibly by a pseudonymous author, is left in suspense. In any case the reflexive compositional structure of Sebastian Knight is foreshadowed. Equally telling is the convergence of the name “Knight” and Knight’s Move, the title of Viktor Šklovskij’s collection of essays in which the formalist notion of literary device is likened to the one chessman which, contrary to the others, “moves laterally because the straight road is forbidden him” ([1923] 2005, 47). The knight’s move, implicit in the protagonist’s name and reflected at various levels throughout Nabokov’s novel thanks to numerous parallelisms, both summarizes and foretells elements of V.’s account of his half-brother’s literary career and death – “Knight’s move,” one might say, being enacted by V. It is thus no coincidence

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that Sebastian signed his early Russian poems “little black chess-knight” or that he dies and is buried in St. Damier (“chessboard” in French). As a consequence, the knight’s move, though never mentioned as such, stands as a metaphorical mise en abyme implanted in Sebastian Knight. Examples of the device appear in the novel at varying scopes and on multiple levels. One is Knight’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale” summarized by V. (chap. 10). A certain G. Abeson, resident at a boarding house, is found murdered in his room. With the corpse still lying in the room, a police investigation gets underway, during which it is discovered that the occupant of room 3 is the mother of the violinist in room 11, that an art student is engaged to a fat woman in room 5, and so on. All residents are judged suspicious, except for Nosebag, an elderly, mild-mannered gentleman who has dropped by to inquire whether a room might be available. Suddenly, the policeman announces that no corpse is to be found in G. Abeson’s room. Nosebag then removes his disguise. “‘You see’, says Mr. Abeson with a self-deprecating smile, ‘one dislikes being murdered’” (93). This comically anagrammatic dissimulation of identities points toward the larger thrust of V.’s narration, namely to discredit the commercially successful but misleading portrayal of V.’s half-brother in Mr. Goodman’s The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight (dubbed The Farce of Sebastian Knight by V.), to explore Sebastian’s “real life,” and to intimate that the Russian writer Sirin has not been “murdered.” The transfer of identities, captured here by the metaphorical use of mise en abyme, is evocative of the laterality of the knight’s move. Moreover, the very title of the book, containing the words “prismatic” and “bezel,” hints at perspectives of a largely different order from those of the mirror metaphor habitually associated with mise en abyme (see the dictionary definitions of these terms). The presence of this novel in Sebastian Knight illustrates particularly well the multifaceted effects produced by mise en abyme, ranging from lexical choices to subtle allusions. Prismatically structured (as Nabokov’s works generally are), V.’s biography of his half-brother draws the narrative toward configurations wrought by the presence of mises en abyme. This is borne out in the form of several parallelisms, with meaningful divergences, between V.’s rendering of The Prismatic Bezel and his fictional resuscitation of Sebastian that underscore the metaphorical quality of the mise en abyme of the one by the other. Most notable is the feigned murder of G. Abeson as compared with the actual death of Sebastian: whereas Nosebag proves to be none other than “the deceased,” V., affirming his identity with the dead author, concludes with the proviso: “perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows” (203). This pattern is duplicated at another point in the novel (chap. 6), where V., addressing the extradiegetic reader, declares: “Remember that what you

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are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed by the dead man of the tale” (50).

5 From Modernism to Postmodernism The use of mise en abyme in Gide’s, Huxley’s, and Nabokov’s modernist fiction shows to what degree the device can permeate narrative in its multiple dimensions, confirming the self-reflexive quality of narrative during this period. Its employment in postmodernist narratives is more disruptive, contributing to the “anti-illusionism” that characterizes these works (see Werner Wolf’s contribution to this volume).

5.1 The French New Novel The French New Novelists lie at a transition point between modernism and postmodernism. On the one hand, they distanced themselves resolutely from realism and from the anthropomorphic worldview associated with it, a reflection, in part, of the nascent French structuralism, but also of the ongoing crisis of representation. It was in this context that the conventional treatment of such staples as plot, character, omniscience, and psychological portraiture were called into question and even undermined. These features reflect what Brian McHale (1987) has termed the “epistemological” dominant of modernist narrative. On the other hand, the New Novel, which is also characterized by the “ontological” dominant of postmodernist narrative, plays with the boundaries of narrative through the use of “short-circuiting” techniques such as mise en abyme and metalepsis.

L’Emploi du temps (1957) by Michel Butor As signaled by the title, the format of this work is that of an agenda, a “grid” that displays the characteristics of diagrammatic iconicity. Revel, the protagonist and first-person narrator, spends one year (from October to September) in a fictive English town, Bleston. In May, with five months remaining, he begins writing in his agenda but is faced with the dilemma of segmenting twelve months of diegetic material into five chapters. The first contains material from May and October. The second, written in June, covers June and November, but also refers back to May. From the third chapter on, dating from July and devoted to that month and to December, but still with references to May, Revel’s attempts to keep to the agenda

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format clash increasingly with the possibilities of condensing the six as yet to be narrated months into the two remaining months of narration. Key to the composition of L’Emploi du temps is topological mise en abyme, generated through discordances between the months of the telling/of the told and the fleeting possibility of closing the seven-month gap as the time of the telling remaining dwindles to nothing. This feature of topological mise en abyme has repercussions for other aspects of the text, notably sentence structure. A separate paragraph is devoted to each sentence throughout, ranging from two or three lines to upward of a hundred (particularly in the second half of the text), the latter in sprawling paratactic formations with a minimum of subordinate clauses. In these sentences, numerous loosely connected minutiae are strung together, among them meticulously dated analepses referring back to earlier portions of the text. The result of this entropic informational overload is to forestall any sense of narrative tension or resolution. The paratactic sentence structure is the microstructural counterpart of the agenda-like macrostructure established by the chapters. This sentence structure is also implicated in one of the novel’s three mises en abyme: the story of Theseus and Ariadne as portrayed by the eighteenth-century tapestries hung in the Bleston Museum of Fine Arts and described by Revel. The thread spun by Ariadne to guide Theseus out of the labyrinth stands as a metaphor for the meandering sentences of Revel’s prose, tracing the protagonist-narrator’s way out of the Bleston labyrinth: The string of sentences that coils up in this pile and connects me directly to that moment on May 1st that I began to weave it, this string of sentences is an Ariadne’s thread because I am in a labyrinth, because I am writing to make my way through it, all these lines being marks whose already recognized trajectories I am tracing out, the labyrinth of my days in Bleston, incomparably more baffling than the palace in Crete, since it grows as I go through it, since it becomes more deformed as I explore it. (Butor 1957, 187)

The Theseus and Ariadne tapestries (“that have so often served me as terms of reference for deciphering you, Bleston”) are closely intertwined with two other mises en abyme: the stained-glass window representing Cain at the Old Cathedral (“that major sign that organized my entire life during our year, Bleston”; 295); and the ambiguously titled murder mystery, Meurtre de Bleston, published pseudonymously by an acquaintance of Revel and whose real name, Burton, is a near-anagram of Butor. The story that takes place in this novel is never revealed although it is learned, in Revel’s agenda, that the author is nearly killed in an “accident.” What does emerge is the narrative schema of the murder mystery – “the days of the investigation that begin with the crime, and the days of the drama that lead up to it” – that patterns the agenda-like chapter design and its counterpart in the sentence structure of Butor’s novel, “which is entirely natural, since in reality, this

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work of the mind turned toward the past is carried out at the same time as other events are accumulated” (171). Meurtre de Bleston thus forms an integral part of the diagrammatic mise en abyme identified above. Together, these three mises en abyme provide L’Emploi du temps with a center of gravity. However, they are not so much stories that “reflect” a larger story as they are (part of) Revel’s story of the story, a series of refractions projected throughout the novel. The tapestries stand as a mise en abyme of the labyrinthine patterns of Revel’s discourse and of his portrayal of Bleston, as well as of the “thread” of sentences running through the book, even extending to the allusively Proustian “labyrinth of time and memory” (293); the stained-glass window, representing a story of fratricide, is a mise en abyme of the muted rivalry between Revel (cf. “rival”) and the author of Meurtre de Bleston; the passing around of copies of the latter among Revel’s acquaintances – a wink to the readers of L’Emploi du temps – constitutes a mise en abyme of the reading process. “One might thus be tempted to read mise en abyme as the center [foyer] of a convergence, the essential place of a putting together [rassemblement],” says Ricardou of Butor’s novel, adding that “to the concentration of mise en abyme there more often corresponds an explosion of the micro-story whose fragments, dispersed to all points of the primary narrative, trigger incessant inflections everywhere” (1957, 185).

La Jalousie (1957) by Alain Robbe-Grillet Emblematic of the French New Novel, La Jalousie employs four mises en abyme, two of which in particular permeate nearly every aspect of the work. The title itself is ambiguous, designating both the fear of displacement in another’s affections and slatted blinds, designed to keep out the sun’s rays. At its barest level, La Jalousie is a love triangle, the story of Franck (a married man), A. . ., and her narrator-husband. The latter, however, is a disembodied intradiegetic voice speaking in the present tense who never uses the first-person pronoun, an entity shorn of all the character traits and psychological attributes and motivations typically found in realist fiction. The narrator-husband never alludes to the past (his own included) or directly mentions any subjective feelings or thoughts. His narration is conducted in a rigorously camera-like internal focalization, and in place of any interaction with Franck or A. . ., in word as in deed, is a series of obsessively meticulous descriptions, notably of the house and its surroundings (a banana plantation in Martinique). In addition, the narration returns repeatedly to certain objects (e.g., a crushed centipede, symptomatic of Franck’s suppressed drives) and to scenes such as Franck and A. . .’s cocktail hour, it being difficult to draw a line between single occurrences reported repeatedly and distinct occurrences, each reported once, or even to determine

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over what period of time (in days, weeks) these encounters take place; on certain occasions, a third lounge chair or a third place setting is brought in, obviously for the narrator-husband, but no sign of his physical presence materializes. The narrator-husband, far from being omniscient, is in fact the observing consciousness of “l’être-là des objets” (the being-there of objects), a principle central to Sartre’s existential phenomenology; Robbe-Grillet, considering the existentialist novel to be an unfulfilled attempt at a “novelistic phenomenology of the perceptions of the world” (1994, 179), sought in his novels and films to achieve precisely this (on the connection between the phenomenology of consciousness and the techniques employed by the French New Novel, and La Nausée [1938] as a precursor, see Baudelle 2010, 140–146; on the gap between the things of the world and the observer’s radical subjectivity, Schmid 2020, 176–181). La Jalousie, as the title suggests, develops along two closely intertwined paths, one organized around the obsessions of a faceless character (“never perhaps has the demented nature of jealousy been rendered perceptible [sensible] with this intensity”; Mauriac 1958, 280; cf. Robbe-Grillet 1963, 117–118, on “the most obsessive of passional adventures,” leading his protagonists to deformed “visions” and “imaginations close to delirium”), the other around a proliferation of variants: particular scenes and objects described repeatedly with slight changes of detail – “a system of repetitions with variants which, bit by bit, considerably modify the initial elements” (Robbe-Grillet 2005, 88). It is within the latter context in particular that the work’s main two mises en abyme – the African novel read and discussed by Franck and A. . . and the native song sung by one of the plantation employees, both irregularly spread out through the novel – are to be understood. Unlike what occurs in the “novel of the novelist” (Gide, Huxley, Nabokov, etc.), however, these devices do not serve as occasions for the writer (or narrator) to expound his views on the narrative art; rather, “it is the novel that thinks itself [. . .], not through characters indulging in idle commentaries; but through constant reflection, at the level of narrative [récit] and writing [écriture], of each element on itself: gestures, objects, and situation” (Robbe-Grillet 1963, 8). As a result of this self-reflexive quality and other features of the French New Novel pitted against realist fiction by Robbe-Grillet in Pour un nouveau roman and elsewhere, not to speak of his rejection of Butor’s “external symbolism,” the device of mise en abyme is diverted from its more customary role. The segments forming the work’s mises en abyme resist any metaphorization or depth of meaning of the kind found in The Fall of the House of Usher, for example. The African novel, like La Jalousie, is based on a love triangle. But almost nothing that occurs in that work is reported in the primary narrative, so that it does not serve as a “key” to understanding the novel in which it is contained. The emphasis falls on Franck’s and A. . .’s observations about that work, among them the meanderings of

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the plot (“this is not by chance”), which prompts them to hypothesize “other bifurcations [. . .], along the way, that all lead to different ends. The variants are extremely numerous; the variants of the variants even more so” (Robbe-Grillet [1957] 2012, 65). Toward the end of the novel, the discussion turns to variants and bifurcations so numerous that they culminate in a series of irreconcilable contradictions: The principal character of the book is a civil servant in the customs department. The character is not a civil servant, but a high-level employee in an old commercial company. The business of this company is going badly, moving quickly toward swindle. The company’s business is going very well. (170)

It can be concluded that, at this level, diagrammatic mise en abyme enters La Jalousie – in effect, the deployment of iconicity along the lines of Veni, vidi, vici. Included here are not only variants such as the ten slightly modified accounts of Franck and A. . .’s day trip to the colonial capital but also the mobility of fixed segments that are employed over and over again: the cocktail hour, A. . . writing a letter, a minute description of the crushed centipede on the wall, and so on, reordered in different combinations. The native song, also distributed irregularly throughout the novel, tends more toward topological mise en abyme than toward the diagrammatic form. A long sentence without words, interrupted intermittently for no apparent reason, only to abruptly start again, the song seems, at certain points, to have reached its final note, but there then follows another note, devoid of any logic of continuity (79). Further on, the song is described as a poetic lament or a refrain rather than what Western listeners would recognize as a song, for the sounds seem bound together by no musical law, without melody, without rhythm (154). Now, it is noteworthy that only a part of the singer’s voice, weakened because it comes from a building on the other side of the house, reaches the listener – and this after passing through the slatted blinds (cf. Schmid 2020, 177, on the “isolating and schematizing perception of the world” in La Jalousie). A certain complementarity stands out here between the disjunctive performance of the song and its perception through the spaces between the slats. This seemingly minor notation ties up, more broadly, with an entire système de jalousies that runs throughout the work. Depending on the degree of inclination of the slats, the perception of objects by the narrator-husband, whether from outside or inside, can vary greatly: “A. . .’s shadow, cut up into horizontal strips by the slatted blind, behind her bedroom window, has now disappeared” (32); “Through the slits of a half-open slatted blind – a bit late – it is obviously impossible to make out anything whatsoever” (135); “When the slatted blinds are fully open, the slats are nearly horizontal and show their edge. The slope on the other side of the valley then appears in successive, superposed bands, separated by blanks that are a bit narrower” (142). In forms too numer-

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ous and pervasive to elaborate here, the patterns of topological mise en abyme that course through Robbe-Grillet’s novel betray the symbiotic relations between the dual meanings of its title.

5.2 Metafiction When self-reflexivity is intensified to the point where attention is drawn to the work’s status as artifact, highlighting its “constructedness” and laying bare the very stuff narrative is made of, postmodern writing enters the domain of metafiction (cf. Waugh [1984] 2003, 2).

Chimera (1972) by John Barth Historically, the device of mise en abyme manifests itself in different ways, from salient to diffuse, disrupting narrative coherence here, ensuring it there, with many variations and configurations in between. Barth’s metafictional novel Chimera illustrates more vividly than most narratives how mises en abyme can course through texts concurrently with other devices, transforming them at certain points and merging with them at others. When reading Barth’s works, it is useful to keep in mind his “much-misread essay” entitled “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in which “exhaustion” refers to “the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” (Barth [1967] 1984, 64). This situation prompted Barth to turn the exhaustion of literary forms against itself by writing “novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of the Author” (72). It is in this spirit that he returns to the sources of storytelling, as found most notably in The Thousand and One Nights, in order to fully exploit the resources of the story within the story in the service of metafictional constructedness and self-reflexiveness. Chimera (a fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent as tail; also, a fanciful conception, an unrealizable dream) consists of three novellas: Dunyazadiad, Perseid, and Bellerophoniad. The first is named after Scheherazade’s younger sister, Dunyazade (not present in The Thousand and One Nights), who is the principal character and primary narrator. In this radical transformation of the source text, it is not Scheherazade who invents a story each night in an effort to ward off her fate, but Dunyazade, who persuades her to do so in order to prevent the King from ordering the daily post-coital killing of a deflowered virgin. “At the foot of Shahryar’s bed by night and in Scheharazade’s by day, I learned more about the arts of making love and telling stories than I had imagined there was to know” (Barth 1972, 31); “writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways

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of making love” (32); “narrative, in short [. . .] was a love-relation” (34). This metaphor, in one sense an allusion to the Borgesian Library of Babel, permeates the novella and relates to its elaborate system of tales within tales. Mise en abyme enters the novella by circuitous means. It is not Scheherazade who invents the stories she tells the King, but rather a certain Genie, alias Barth, an extradiegetic metaleptic intruder in the novella and avid reader of The Thousand and One Nights, who provides her with tales, heretofore unknown to her, taken from that very book (on metalepsis and the theory of reading in Dunyazadiad, see McHale 1987, 226). On entering the diegetic space of the novella, the Genie, quoted by Dunyazade, says “‘Are you really Scheherazade?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never had a dream so clear and lifelike! And you’re little Dunyazade – just as I’d imagined both of you!’” (16). The Genie is thus a character in the novella (unlike in LETTERS, 1979, where communication between the characters and the Author takes place by correspondence); at the same time, he is an intradiegetic metanarrative commentator and a figure of the author of Dunyazadiad. As the Genie explains to Dunyazade, having completed two other novellas, he is now in the middle of a third: “Dunyazade’s story begins in the middle; in the middle of my own, I can’t conclude it – but it must end in the night that all good mornings come to” (64). It is within this metaleptic environment that mise en abyme in the first novella of Chimera – and indeed in the novel as a whole – must be considered. Metanarrative commentary takes on various forms in Dunyazadiad. For example, the Genie and Scheherazade associate storytelling and “libidinal hypercatharsis” – indifferent as to whether this association is factually true, yet speaking of it “as if it were”: they “accounted thereby for the similarity between conventional dramatic structure – its exposition, rising action, climax, and dénouement – and the rhythm of sexual intercourse from foreplay through coitus to orgasm and release” (32–33; emphasis original). Regarding a related matter – “mere plot-function” (in the case of the two sisters: “preserving our lives and restoring the King’s sanity!”) – the Genie prefers a type of “metaphorical construction” wherein the resolution of the enframed story also resolves the story by which it is enframed; in a manner evocative of Dällenbach’s aporetic duplication, this leads to speculation as to the possibility of a story that “might imaginably be framed from inside, as it were, so that the usual relation between container and contained would be reversed and paradoxically reversible.” Expanding on this unconventional organization of narrative framing, the Genie conceive[s] a series of, say, seven concentric stories-within-stories, so arranged that the climax of the innermost would precipitate that of the next tale out, and that of the next, et cetera, like a string of firecrackers or chains of orgasms that Shahryar could sometimes set my [Dunyazade’s] sister catenating. (32; emphasis original)

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Intradiegetic, as it forms part of the story of Scheherazade told by her sister, the Genie’s, alias Barth’s, metanarrative commentary is at the same time a metaphorical mise en abyme. This stands out in the storytelling/lovemaking analogy that runs throughout the novella, wherein each is a metaphor for the other. The metaphor is amplified by the reversibility of the seven levels of tales within tales (whose presence is confirmed in an analysis by Davis 1975), as envisioned by the Genie: tales can be framed from the inside as well as from the outside. That the mise en abyme should be constituted in this way is reinforced by the fact that the Genie, being the metaleptic author of the tale, is in the process of writing the story and has yet to outline the climax and dénouement of the plot. By becoming the story of its own story, Dunyazadiad incorporates a central mise en abyme that reveals both metaphorical and topological qualities. As reported by Dunyazade, the Genie likens his course to that of a snail: There’s a kind of snail in the Maryland marshes – perhaps I invented him – that makes his shell as he goes along out of whatever he comes across, cementing it with his own juices, and at the same time makes his path instinctively toward the best available material for its shell; he carries his history on his back, living in it, adding new and larger spirals to it from the present as he grows. That snail’s pace has become my pace – but I’m going in circles, following my own trail! (18)

If for Stendhal “a novel is a mirror that takes the high road,” for the Genie, Dunyazadiad (in a process that extends outward to Perseid and Bellerophoniad, yet turns back on itself) is a snail moving in circles whose history cumulates in growing spirals on its shell. Spirals are the image of infinite regress, and Barth’s narration of the spiral-laden snail a topological mise en abyme of Chimera. Although it is organized differently, Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), consisting in a series of fourteen stories, is structured by two topological mises en abyme, one being “Frame-Tale,” constructed in the form of a Möbius strip (cf. Dunyazadiad’s spirals), the other “Menelaiad,” with seven levels of embedding progressing inward, then outward: it is not by coincidence that the Genie in Chimera evokes “seven concentric stories-within-stories.” Following these patterns, the fourteen stories are ordered nonlinearly into seven reversible series (Pier 2011).

6 Conclusion Mise en abyme is a narrative device whose manifestations stretch far beyond the few works taken into consideration here. Canonical examples of the device in the strict sense – a narrative segment at a lower level and on a smaller scale that stands in an iconic relation with the story in which it is contained  – can be identified

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in a fairly straightforward manner. But even at this level, no systematic or extensive corpus of narratives has yet been established that spans the major historical periods or the various national literatures. Taken in its broad sense, where mise en abyme is not a clearly marked local phenomenon but spreads its effects out syntagmatically, establishing a comprehensive corpus would be an even more daunting undertaking. Despite these limitations, a few observations are warranted. (1) Analysis of works from two different epochs, even when they are widely separated in time, can reveal characteristics that may escape attention when the device is examined in a single epoch. Example: mise en abyme appears to operate in tandem with illusionistic effects during the baroque age, but tends to “lay bare” the workings of narrative in the modern period. (2) The device is configured differently according to which genre it is employed in. Example: theatrical production is more likely to restrict the number of diegetic levels on which mise en abyme is deployed than text-based narratives. (3) As for the characteristics of mise en abyme in the history of the various national literatures, the elements to be taken into consideration are highly variegated and difficult to pin down with precision. Example: the theatrum mundi was a widely shared cultural value during the early modern period that fed into Elizabethan and baroque dramaturgy, imparting religious overtones to the use of mise en abyme. By contrast, the crisis of representation in the modern era is indissociable from a philosophical skepticism revealed in the use of mise en abyme in the post-symbolist context in France (Gide), but also in the esthetics of metafictional “constructedness” in the United States (Barth). Such are some of the parameters that will lead to a broader understanding of mise en abyme in its diachronic dimension.

References Bal, Mieke. 1978. “Mise en abyme et iconicité.” Littérature 20:116–128. Barth, John. 1972. Chimera. New York: Fawcett Crest. Barth, John. (1967) 1984. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” In The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction, 62–76. New York: Putnam and Sons. Baudelle, Yves. 2010. “La Jalousie: Les ambiguïtés d’un classique.” Roman 20–50, no. 3:131–150. Bertrand, Jean-Pierre. 2019. “Inventer la mise en abyme.” In Comprendre la mise en abyme: Arts et médias au second degré, edited by Tonia Raus and Gian Maria Tore, 25–31. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Bowen, Zack. 1977. “Allusions to Musical Works in Point Counter Point.” Studies in the Novel 9, no. 2, 488–508. Butor, Michel. 1957. L’Emploi du temps. Paris: Minuit.

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Carrard, Philippe. 1984. “Reflexivity to Reading: The Criticism of Lucien Dällenbach.” Poetics Today 8, no. 4, 839–856. Christian, Lynda C. 1987. Theatrum Mundi: The History of an Idea. New York: Garland. Colognat-Barès, Annie. 2003. Le baroque en France et en Europe. Paris: Pocket. Corneille, Pierre. (1639) 1987. L’Illusion comique. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. Dällenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil. Translated by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes as The Mirror in the Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Davis, Cynthia. 1975. “‘The Key to the Treasure’: Narrative Movements and Effects in Chimera.” Journal of Narrative Technique 5, no. 2, 105–115. Forestier, Georges. 1987. “Dossier.” In L’Illusion comique, by Corneille, 119–158. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. Forestier, Georges. (1981) 1996. Le théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVIIe siècle. Geneva: Droz. Genette, Gérard. (1972) 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gide, André. 1967. Journals 1889–1949. Translated by Justin O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gide, André. 1925. Les faux-monnayeurs. Paris: Gallimard. Hallyn, Fernand, ed. 1980. Onze études sur la mise en abyme. Ghent: Romanica gandensica. Huxley, Aldous. (1928) 2018. Point Counter Point. London: Vintage. Izzo, Donatella, ed. 1990. Il racconto allo specchio: Mise en abyme e tradizione narrativa. Rome: Nuova arnica. Jefferson, Anne. 1983. “Mise en abyme and the Prophetic Narrative.” Style 17, no. 2, 196–208. John of Salisbury. 1159. Politicraticus. Quoted in “Theatrum mundi.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Theatrum_Mundi (accessed 17 October 2021) Lafille, Pierre. 1954. André Gide, romancier. Paris: Hachette. Lang, Sabine. 2006. “Prolegómenos para una teoria de la narración paradójica.” In La narración paradójica: “Normas narrativas” y el principio de la “transgesión,” edited by Nina Grabe, Sabine Lang, and Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, 21–47. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert. Magny, Claude-Edmonde. 1950. “La mise en abyme; ou, Le chiffre de la transcendance.” In Histoire du roman français depuis 1918, 242–251. Paris: Seuil. Mauriac, Claude. 1958. L’alittérature contemporaine: Artaud, Bataille, Beckett, Kafka, Leiris, Michaux [. . .]. Paris: Michel. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge. Meckier, Jerome. 1969. Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure. London: Chatto & Windus. Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus, and Sabine Schlickers. 2010. “La mise en abyme en narratologie.” In Narratologies contemporaines: Approches nouvelles pour la théorie du récit, edited by John Pier and Francis Berthelot, 91–108. Paris: EAC. Morrissette, Bruce. 1971. “Un heritage d’André Gide: La Duplication Intérieure.” Comparative Literature Studies 8, no. 2, 125–142. Nabokov, Vladimir. (1941) 1992. The Real Life of Sebastien Knight. New York: Vintage. Peccatte, Patrick. 2018. “L’image mise en abyme – pour une typologie historique.” Pts. 1 and 2. Déjà Vu, 25 June 2018. https://dejavu.hypotheses.org/3836 and https://dejavu.hypotheses.org/3838 (accessed 20 September 2021). Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–1958. Collected Papers. Edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Pier, John. 1999. “Versions of the Iconic.” In Ré-inventer le réel/Re-Inventing the Real, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Trevor Harris, 209–219. Tours: Presses de l’Université François Rabelais de Tours.

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Pier, John. 2011. “Narrative Embedding in the Multilinear Text: The Case of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse.” In Théorie analyse, interprétation des récits/Theory/Analysis/Interpretation of Narratives, edited by Sylvie Patron, 119–146. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Raimond, Michel. 1966. La Crise du roman, des lendemains du naturalisme aux années vingt. Paris: Corti. Ransdell, Joseph. 1986. “On Peirce’s Concept of the Iconic Sign.” In Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture; Festschrift for Thomas A. Sebeok, edited by Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner, 51–74. Tübingen: Stauffenberg. Raus, Tonia, and Gian Maria Tore, eds. 2019. Comprendre la mise en abyme: Arts et médias au second degré. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Ricardou, Jean. 1967. Problèmes du nouveau roman. Paris: Seuil. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1963. Pour un nouveau roman. Paris: Minuit. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1994. Les derniers jours de Corinthe. Paris: Minuit. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 2005. Préface à une vie d’écrivain. Paris: Seuil. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. (1957) 2012. La Jalousie. Paris: Minuit. Ron, Moshe. 1987. “The Restricted Abyss. Nine Problems in the Theory of Mise en Abyme.” Poetics Today 8, no. 2, 417–438. Rousset, Jean. 1953. La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France, Circé et le Paon. Paris: Corti. Schmid, Wolf. 2020. Narrative Motivierung: Von der romanischen Renaissance bis zur russischen postmoderne. Berlin: De Gruyter. Shakespeare, William. (1599–1601) 1961. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Craig Hardin, 903–943. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co. Shklovsky [Šklovskij], Viktor. (1923) 2005. Knight’s Move. Translated by Richard Sheldon. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press. Sirvent, Michel. 2019. “Réflexions sur la mise en abyme: Entre écrit et récit filmique.” In Comprendre la mise en abyme: Arts et médias au second degré, edited by Tonia Raus and Gian Maria Tore, 61–72. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Snow, Marcus. 2016. “Into the Abyss: A Study of the mise en abyme.” PhD thesis, London Metropolitan University. Souiller, Didier. 1988. La littérature baroque en France. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Vincent, Robert Hudson. 2020. “The English Baroque: The Logic of Excess in Early Modern Literature.” PhD thesis, Harvard University. Waugh, Patricia. (1984) 2003. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Referential Fiction. London: Routledge. White, John J. 2001. “The Semiotics of the Mise-en-Abyme.” In The Motivated Sign, edited by Olga Fischer and Max Nänny, 29–53. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Wolf, Werner. 1999. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolf, Werner. 2009. “Metareference across Media: The Concept, Its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Function.” In Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies Dedicated to Walter Bernhart on the Occasion of His Retirement, edited by Werner Wolf, Katharina Bantleon, and Jeff Thoss, 1–85. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolf, Werner. 2010. “Mise en Cadre – a Neglected Counterpart to Mise en Abime: A Frame-Theoretical and Intermedial Complement to Classical Narratology.” In Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, 58–82. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Larisa Murav’eva

Mise en Abyme in Russian Literature 1 Definition Mise en abyme in narratology is understood as a figure multiplying narrative reality by including elements that correlate in accordance with the principle of semantic similarity with the text containing them. In current research, mise en abyme is interpreted in a more nuanced way: following Lucien Dällenbach, the device is “any enclave entertaining a relation of similarity with the work within which it is contained” (1977, 17). In other words, the term should not be applied to any textwithin-the-text (Lotman 1997) or embedded narrative, but only to those cases of reduplication in which the relation of similarity is established between an embedded fragment (mise en abyme) and a whole narrative. Three clarifications related to the ambiguity of this term in theoretical discourse should be made. The first is related to the subject of reduplication and goes back to the reasoning of André Gide, who introduced the term. In an entry to his Journal in 1893, Gide reflected on the narrative technique he used in his early symbolist texts through which “the very subject [sujet]” of a work of art is “transposed, on the scale of the characters” ([1893] 1967, 30). As noted by Mieke Bal (1978), the impetus for the different interpretations was the ambivalence of the term sujet in Gide’s writings: the French word sujet in this context can refer either to the subject of narrative representation (or theme) or to the speaking/writing subject. Indeed, internal doubling can involve both event elements and the event of telling (Baxtin 1975, 403). While the first case involves mise en abyme at the level of story (histoire), i.e., the reduplication of some event at the hypodiegetic level, the second case involves reduplication at the level of discourse (discours), involving self-thematization of the narration process. This distinction results in mise en abyme assuming two fundamental forms: reduplication can occur either at the level of the told – the storyworld created by the author – or at the level of the telling – an element of the communicative event. The second clarification concerns the similarity that this figure defines in the text. A number of specialists such as Mieke Bal (1983), Moshe Ron (1987), and others insist on the iconic nature of reduplication; as Dällenbach also wrote: “mise en abyme is any internal mirror reflecting the narrative as a whole by simple, repeated or specious [aporetic] duplication” (1977, 52). At the same time, the abundance of examples of mise en abyme in literature – from ancient Greek novel to the French nouveau roman and postmodern literature  – shows that the device is capable of varying the reduplicated event across a broad semantic range, from total similarity https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-027

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to partial or even inverted similarity. The metaphor of the “mirror” in this regard should be applied with caution: in the diachronic perspective, the potential of this figure is closer to allegory, parody, and circumlocution than it is to strict iconic representation of the original. Finally, the third clarification is closely related to the second and concerns the self-reflexivity of mise en abyme. Despite the fact that this technique is one of the most productive ways of creating self-reflexivity in a narrative, it is no coincidence that the theorist of postmodernism Linda Hutcheon considers it to be “one of the major modes of textual narcissism” (1980, 4). But at the same time, mise en abyme almost never seeks to identify fully with a framing narrative. As Christine Baron points out, “reflexivity never comes down to a pure reduplication of a work or act of writing” (2002, 43). On the contrary, mise en abyme creates a complex palette of relationships between narrative levels, involving the introduction of dual motifs, curved mirrors, a game between fictionality and factuality, and reliability and unreliability of the events presented in the text. In this article, mise en abyme is interpreted in a broad sense: both as an explicit narrative method of reduplicating and as a sign of literary self-reflexivity. In Russian literature, this technique, which has never been studied from a diachronic perspective and, moreover, has not stood out as a specific narrative phenomenon, represents a unique paradigm of functional and semantic effects.

2 Polysemiotic Mise en Abyme in Russian Baroque Poetry In contemporary narratology, it is generally agreed that mise en abyme is a figure that extends beyond narrative discourse and the verbal medium. Not only narrative but also visual, graphic, plastic, and polysemiotic forms of mise en abyme are widely known (e.g., Dubois 2006; Fevry 2000; Wolf 2009; Raus and Tore 2019). It must be borne in mind that Gide, reflecting on this narrative technique, also turned to examples from the visual arts in which he found the same technique: “Thus, in certain paintings of Memling or Quentin Metzys a small convex and dark mirror reflects the interior of the room in which the scene of the painting is taking place. Likewise, in Velásquez’s painting of the Meniñas (but somewhat differently)” (Gide [1893] 1967, 30). While it is possible to speak about mise en abyme as a narrative figure in Russian literature from the nineteenth century onward, its precursor is well known in literary tradition. The forerunner of mise en abyme in Russian literature appears in the baroque court poetry of the seventeenth century, reaching its peak with the poets Symeon of Polotsk, Sylvester Medvedev, Karion Istomin, and others, whose

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work was influenced by Western European and Polish baroque rhetorical modes of writing. Their emblematic poetry (picta poesis) and the genre of figurative verse employ a technique that can be described as polysemiotic mise en abyme (mise en abyme expressed in various semiotic languages). The hallmark of Russian baroque poetry was the attempt to “combine various artistic languages” (Sazonova 2006, 228) by incorporating graphic, verbal, and visual elements into a work. According to Symeon of Polotsk’s definition, the key motif in baroque poetry is “multi-track scripture” (skrižal’ mnogoputnaja), which includes the metaphor of the labyrinth, the ability to read text from left to right and from right to left, and to look for the “key” to the labyrinth encrypted in the symbolic motif represented graphically or visually. Despite the fact that the genres of baroque poetry were far from narrative discourse, the semiotic model of mise en abyme was formed in its aesthetic system; it involved both the semiotic doubling of the code (e.g., in the format of visual or figurative verse) and the text-within-the-text. Thus, the development of the tradition of “parade books” presupposed the creation of synthetic text. The visual quality of these texts was enhanced “not only verbally, but also by paintings, graphics, and even specific architectural motifs” (Erëmin 1948, 131). A special place was given to “visual forms of representation of meaning” within the framework of “artificial poetry” (poesis artificiosa; Sazonova 2006, 233). Artificial poetry, known since the Kiev poetics of the late sixteenth century, adopted the methods of designing poems in the graphic form of pyramids, colossus, obelisks, eggs, hearts, and so on (233–234). At the same time, visual poems are not limited to the decorative function. Behind the graphic form lies a hidden semantics “expressing the most spectacular concept of the work: this form represented for the poet the possibility of diversifying the theme, transferring it from the level of speculative abstraction to the level of visual specificity,” which allowed for the implementation of the “visual representation of the idea, metaphors in graphic form” (236). This technique developed in baroque poetry and represented in the duplication of the verbal content by graphic form can be considered as polysemiotic mise en abyme. This device is closely intertwined with the emblematic representation of meaning. Thus, the famous Greeting . . . (1665) of Simeon of Polotsk – offering congratulations to Tsar Aleksej Mixajlovič on the occasion of the birth of his son, Carevič (Prince) Simeon – was translated by the poet into a graphic form, drawing an eight-pointed star with poetic lines, at the origins of which was an acrostic with the name of the newborn prince. This text performed the function of duplicating the symbolic meaning of birth: the eight-pointed star, encrypted in verbal and graphic symbols, refers to the Star of Bethlehem and symbols of the birth of the holy child. In addition to semiotic reduplication, Russian baroque poetry of the seventeenth century widely adopted structures, later called text-within-the-text, as well

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as multilevel compositions based on both the emblematic hierarchy and the hierarchy of meanings. Examples of such works are Karion Istomin’s The Book of Love Is A Sign of an Honest Marriage (1689), based on “tiers of emblems” (Sazonova 2006, 285), and Simeon of Polotsk’s The Garden of Many Flowers (1676–1680), a collection of poems organized in the form of a compendium in which the multidimensionality of the text is created by “correlating each individual poem with the whole, and often with each other” (Sazonova 1996, xxv). Although the methods involved in polysemiotic mise en abyme in Russian baroque poetry had no relation to narrative discourse, this phenomenon should be taken into account in a diachronic review of the figure. In the same way that European baroque literature developed techniques that violated the “pact of representation” (including mise en abyme) and were later borrowed by experimental literature, Russian baroque poetry, with an eye to the European tradition, used rhetorical figures that were later adapted by the classic Russian novel.

3 Mise en Abyme and Origins of the Self-Reflexive Tradition 3.1 Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Puškin The use of mise en abyme in the narrative tradition of Russian literature is associated with the first Russian novel of the new European type, Aleksandr Puškin’s Eugene Onegin (1825–1832, serial form; 1833, complete edition). This is a novel of “intense literary self-consciousness” (Strada 1997, 51) as well as the first Russian meta-novel, opening the way to a series of works during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries characterized by their self-reflexive poetics and explicit authorial self-consciousness. In general, Puškin is known for his self-reflexive writing. A case in point is The Little House in Kolomna (1833), a poem based on comments on the process of creating a poem: “even when the poet does immerse himself in the told story [. . .] he comments on the ‘situation of creation’” (Jaccard 2011, 21). Similarly, the narrative in Eugene Onegin is organized in a complex, multilevel way that is aimed at exposing the dialogue between the creator and his work. Mise en abyme in Eugene Onegin works on two levels. First, on the level of discourse, in the representation of a “self-conscious poetics” in such a way that “the very process of creating a novel, as well as the author himself – in the form of a character in the novel – are included in his plot” (Piskunova 2013, 27). The author’s comments and intrusions related to the process of the creative act, inherited from Tristram Shandy (Šklovskij [1929] 1991), problematize the boundary between

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fiction and reality, between the narrating and the narrated. “Documentary inclusions” in the novel, including Tat’jana’s letter, Lenskij’s suicide poems, and references to real spaces (“beside the Neva’s shore”), are ironically commented on by an authorial narrator acting in the diegetic world alongside his characters. The novel moves by a constant switching back and forth from the author’s level to the heroes’ level, with the levels not separated from each other. The reality of the novel is a hybrid of two worlds. The world in which the novel is written and read is mixed with the “world” of the novel. The frame, the boundary between worlds disappears, the depiction of life is mixed with life itself. (Čumakov 1983, 10)

This type of mise en abyme, which amounts to the representation of the work in the work itself, is a reduplication of the event of telling (Baxtin) and covers the entire narrative. Second, in Eugene Onegin there is a mise en abyme on the level of the story. It occurs as the famous dream of Tat’jana, in which she sees the death of Lenskij by Onegin. From the point of view of narrative structure, Tat’jana’s dream is at a hypodiegetic narrative level and reduplicates the climactic event of the duel in the embedded narrative. Being a canonic level of mise en abyme, Tat’jana’s dream primarily performs the function of prolepsis and serves as a symbolic prediction of subsequent developments in the story (Gogol’s A Terrible Vengeance, 1831; Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839; etc.), in particular the duel between Onegin and Lenskij with its tragic outcome. In addition, the dream encrypts the image of Tat’jana’s future husband in symbolic and folkloric terms: the bear that helped her in a dream to cross the torrent anticipates the general who later becomes her husband. The image of the bridge crossing the torrent is not coincidental, since in Russian fortune-telling rites, girls were called upon by a soulmate to take them across the bridge in their sleep (Nabokov [1964] 1998, 404). In this way, Tat’jana’s dream reduplicates and foreshadows the poem’s future events, encrypting them in various semiotic ways, and is thus a dual form of eventfulness combined with folklore and ritualized conventionality. Moreover, attentive commentators have shown that Tat’jana’s dream serves not only as a prolepsis but also as an analepsis, correlating with both future and past events in the novel. Nabokov, in his Commentary on “Eugene Onegin,” points out that Tat’jana’s prophetic dream is a travesty of both the past and the future due to the fact that the verses from the dream rhyme verbally and rhythmically with Tat’jana’s state in the previous chapter (404). Lotman observes that Tat’jana’s dream is not only psychologically motivated but also that it plays a compositional role, linking the content of the earlier chapters to the culminating sixth chapter, where dramatic events are played out (1997, 651). Drawing on the European Romantic tradition, mise en abyme in Eugene Onegin is organically integrated into the structure of dream, allowing for the combination of mirror motifs with the compositional frame.

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In sum, two types of mise en abyme interact in Eugene Onegin: the process of creating a work, represented in the work itself; and the formal text-within-the-text, reduplication at the hypodiegetic level of the climactic event of the embedding narrative. The combination of the two types is no chance occurrence, for historical analysis of this phenomenon shows that the device almost always occurs at different levels within the work as a kind of strategy for providing a self-reflexive mode of writing, as in Gide’s The Counterfeiters (1926) or in Nabokov’s The Gift (1938–1938) or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), for example. In this context, Eugene Onegin is a narrative in which the embedded levels, the creator’s diegesis, and the diegesis of the characters become mutually reinforcing, but ontologically independent worlds.

3.2 Dead Souls by Nikolaj Gogol’ The second most important text for the formation of self-reflexive narrative practices in the Russian novel is Nikolaj Gogol’s poem Dead Souls (1842), which represents the heritage of the rhetorical tradition that goes back to the metanarrative novel of early modern literature. As Dmitrij Segal has observed, “Gogol’ himself places Dead Souls in a diachronic series, known in particular by the names of Cervantes, Fielding, and Puškin, that is, writers who built their works on the principle of constant control over structure” (2006, 71). At the same time, the genesis of metanarrative in Dead Souls is quite complex. It is well known that the idea of Dead Souls was given to Gogol’ by Puškin in reference to Don Quixote and that the plot of the poem, a chain of events of the Cervantes type, is thus inherited from the picaresque novel. At the same time, the second volume of Dead Souls goes back rather to Cervantes’s Persiles, thanks to which “the path of Čičikov the adventurer, semi-picaro and semi-Don-Quixote [. . .] is transformed into an allegorical search by the hero and readers of the ‘prosaic poem’ of spiritual resurrection, which Gogol’ associates with self-knowledge” (Piskunova 2013, 71). The rhetorical tradition that is refracted in the specificity of Gogol’s poem influences a distinctive use of metanarrative and self-reflexive techniques. The narrative structure of the poem is complex and includes many rhetorical constructions that violate the pact of representation. They include intrusions of the narrator, direct appeal to the reader (“Reader, whosoever or wherever you be, and whatsoever be your station – whether that of a member of the higher ranks of society or that of a member of the plainer walks of life  – I beg of you, if God shall have given you any skill in letters, and my book shall fall into your hands, to extend to me your assistance”), metanarrative comments, and text-within-the-text (The Tale of Captain Kopejkin).

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The material of the poem clearly shows discrepancies between the structures of the text-within-the-text and mise en abyme. Formally, Gogol’s poem contains only one text-within-the-text, The Tale of Captain Kopejkin, which obviously refers to the image of Čičikov, the main character of the poem. However, mise en abyme does not function only at a compositional level. Carla Solivetti convincingly proves that the poem’s structure also contains several mises en abyme at a more complex discourse level. The narrative of the poem includes numerous refractions of the event sequence presented in the form of gossip, rumors, and conjectures, which generates a kind of secondary narrative reality. This secondary reality, with the abundance of storytellers, finally dissolves for the reader in the game of different (subjective) perceptions – the mirrors in which it is reflected. Thus, it acquires a metanarrative function, transforming the text-within-the-text into a kind of research on the structure of the narrative, including at the level of language. (Solivetti 2011)

According to Solivetti, the interpretive function of gossip, functioning as hypodiegetic fragments, performs a “retro-prospective role” that triggers a network of meanings in the structure of the poem. In addition to the discursive mise en abyme, the structure of the poem contains a curious example of the function of the “generating image” in the text that also participates in the formation of narrative self-reflexivity. This is the deployment of metaphorical images in eventfulness. Thus, the comparison of Nozdrev with the Lieutenant contains the embryo (at least partly) of the future story about Captain Kopejkin while it also alludes to the guests as flies and foreshadows scenes at Tentetnikov’s and at Petr Petrovič Petrux’s estates; , and the unsuccessful rescue of the drowning contains a comparison, with the future unwritten text (from the third volume of the poem) about the tragic rebirth and revival of Pljuškin’s dead soul. (Segal 2006, 72)

Due to the function of development of “folded images,” “Gogol’ seems to be building a new system of ‘micro-mirrors’ reflecting both a single fragment and an entire poem, giving it an additional epic dimension” (71–72).

4 Mise en Abyme as a Representation of the Fantastic in Romanticism: A Terrible Vengeance by Nikolaj Gogol’ In Russian romanticism, mise en abyme is a figure that makes it possible to emphasize the blurring of boundaries between the real and the fantastic, allowing intrusion into the fictional world by a world that is ontologically unreal.

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A Terrible Vengeance (1831), which illustrates “Gogol’s distinct complexity of fictional writing” (Mann 1996, 39), is a curious case of mise en abyme. As in a number of Gogol’s works, the device works on different levels, building a complex narrative structure, and is both a system of dreams and an “inverted” text-within-the-text. The main characters of the story, Danilo Burulbaš and his young wife Katerina, are walking to the wedding of the yesaul Gorobec’s son when a sorcerer suddenly appears. Danilo suspects that the sorcerer is Katerina’s father, who has been away for over twenty years. Thus, the main active force of the story is the struggle against evil, embodied in the figure of the sorcerer, wh, in turn, is overcome by an ancient family curse. It is a narrative based on a plural aposiopesis transmitted through a complex system of points of view and mise en abyme. On the one hand, this mise en abyme is based on prophetic dream, a common feature of romanticism. There are several dreams in A Terrible Vengeance, all of them dreams of Katerina, the sorcerer’s daughter. Thanks to these dreams, Katerina learns, for example, that her father is a sorcerer and that her child will die. These terrible predictions are later confirmed on the level of the primary diegesis. The principle of the prophetic dream in Gogol’s poetics is complicated by a fantastic motivation: Katerina dreams not because of her special sensitivity, but because the sorcerer calls to her soul at night. This kind of Romantic motif reveals the boundaries between reality and fiction, while also emphasizing their fragility. A dream, presented as an embedded narrative, is an irruption into the ontology of the storyworld and the most adequate form of intrusion of the fantastic in fictional reality. The other mise en abyme relates to the main diegetic level, presenting it in two different narrative modalities: eventful and mythological. In addition to the system of embedded dreams, the story is constructed on the reduplication of the main diegesis. At the end of the story, the events of the present time (the story of Danilo and Katerina) are replaced by an ancient legend sung by an old singer Bandurist. This legend explains the events of the main narrative level – a terrible curse that caused the main conflict. The overlapping of the two narrative planes, myth-based and event-oriented, inverts the plot of the story and provides the key to understanding the events that unfold on the main narrative level. As Jurij Mann points out, the irrefutability of the myth, its coincidence with the events of the story, turns the perspective. The end of the story becomes its starting point and the culmination, whereas the fate of the sorcerer and of Danilo and Katerina becomes its real ending. (1996, 4)

Gogol’ researchers have repeatedly emphasized that A Terrible Vengeance embodies the clash of an archaic worldview with a system of modern values. Furthermore, the worldview counterpoint is built through a complex narrative structure of the text, which is based on mise en abyme.

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5 Mise en Abyme as a Representation of Madness: The Black Monk by Anton Čexov In realism, the potential of mise en abyme is extended. In contrast to romanticism, where the tasks of rhetorical narrative constructions are mainly confined to the creation of the duality of this world and to the introduction of an irrational component into fictional reality, mise en abyme in realism does not violate the coherence of the storyworld. Rhetorical narrative techniques are used to show the shades of psychological states associated with the inner worlds of the characters. One of the tasks of metanarrative and self-reflexive techniques is to represent the madness and mental disease of the characters. A vivid example of the connection between mise en abyme and the representation of madness is the short story The Black Monk (1894) by Anton Čexov. The author repeatedly described it as a “medical novella” in which he depicted a “young man suffering from delusions of grandeur” (quoted in Suxix 1987, 102). The protagonist of the story, the scholar Kovrin, who is consumed with thoughts about his great destiny, is engaged in dialogues with a black monk who turns out to be his own double or hallucination. On the one hand, mise en abyme in the story marks the stratification of reality and the emergence of hallucinatory delirium, while on the other it is included in the strategy of presenting the mismatch between two worldviews that underlines Čexov’s irresolvable antinomy: the misalignment between the genius’s madness and philistine ideology. The narrative is constructed through a series of mises en abyme with a proleptic function. The first appearance of the monk is introduced by a hypodiegetic mise en abyme in which Kovrin tells his fiancée Tanja the legend of a black monk who, as a mirage, is reflected many times in the atmosphere and beyond. According to the legend, the mirage must return to earth after a thousand years, which time already at an end. After a while, Kovrin really does meet the black monk and has long conversations with him. The blurring of the boundaries between reality and hallucinatory delirium, which at the beginning of the story takes on a fantastic shape, confirms Kovrin’s diagnosis of mental disorder. Another mise en abyme emerges from the character’s conversations with the black monk, such that the monk predicts Kovrin’s death. The third important “mirror in the text” to which the main character is sensitive is Braga’s serenade. The serenade heard by Kovrin foretells the meeting of the hero with the supernatural. Compositionally, Braga’s serenade appears twice in the text: the first time, it anticipates the black monk’s invasion into Kovrin’s life; the second time, at the end of the story, it anticipates the last visit of the black monk, after which the main character dies. Curiously, the serenade not only reduplicates

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the main event of the narrative (the meeting with the black monk) but also refracts the plot-forming situation of misunderstanding. Just as Braga’s serenade represents a “dialogue of misunderstanding” between a mother and her daughter who hears strange voices, so the story of Kovrin and Pesockij is a confrontation between two incompatible types of worldview. Sensitivity to the supernatural is also underlined by the choice of narrative point of view Both Braga’s serenade and the legend of the black monk, blurring the boundary between reality and hallucination, are presented from an internal point of view. The introspective mise en abyme, known only to one character in the storyworld, is a narrative invention that corresponds with the fundamentals of Čexov’s poetics, where the narrator declines the responsibility of constructing a secondary narrative, thus drawing the reader into more complex reception activity.

6 Modernism In modernism, narrative self-reflexivity becomes one of the leading forms of representation. Literature explores new forms of interaction with reality, bringing to the fore aspects of its own production and reception in which the writer’s mission is rethought as the mission of the creator of reality in a new relationship between life and art, the real world and fiction. The self-reflexive characteristics of modernism are materialized in the radical renewal of mise en abyme (it is no coincidence that the first reflection on the figure belongs to the modernist André Gide), whose functions are significantly transformed. Russian prose of the early twentieth century actively uses mise en abyme, giving it new features in relation to the classic novel of the nineteenth century. Russian modernism mainly uses the second type of figure – mise en abyme on the level of discourse – problematizing the relationship of the author-creator with the fictional reality he creates. First of all, the prevalence of the second type of mise en abyme corresponds to the “pan-aesthetic” perception of artistic reality. With the Russian novel bypassing the school of Kafka, Proust, and Joyce, the origins of self-reflexivity are related to the Russian symbolist novel, in which the boundaries of artistic reality are rethought and the concept of life-creation is emphasized. Second, the updating of narrative language with a new use of self-reflexive techniques became a reaction to the historical trauma of the early twentieth century. As Mark Lipoveckij has noted, the barely articulated trauma of these times triggers self-reflexive mechanisms in the literary text. In the poetics of writers of the 1920s and 1930s, “an incredibly productive link is established between trauma

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and aesthetic reflection on the themes of the terrible and unpredictable power of language and the power over language appropriated by modernist writers” (2008, 73). The “pan-aesthetic” approach to artistic reality and the search for the language of trauma activate the development of self-reflexive narrative techniques in modernist poetics. Petersburg (1913/1922) by Andrej Belyj, The Egyptian Stamp (1927) by Osip Mandelštam, Satyr Chorus (1928; other titles: Goat Song; Tower) and The Works and Days of Svistonov (1928) by Konstantin Vaginov, Despair (1934) and The Gift (1937–1938) by Vladimir Nabokov, The Master and Margarita (1928–1962; published 1966–1967) by Bulgakov, Poem without a Hero (1940–1940; published 1967) by Anna Axmatova, Doktor Živago (1945–1955; published 1957) by Boris Pasternak, as well as works by Jurij Oleša, Evgenij Zamjatin, Andrej Platonov, and others, thus form a special group of texts in which the types of relationship between the writer and the world he creates are radically reshaped. In these works, the boundaries between fiction and reality are refracted and transformed. In all of these texts, though in different ways, there are signs of metafictionality and “self-closure of the text, inside of which the effect of ‘double exposure’, ‘mirrors’ is created” (Segal 2006, 61). The principles of modernist prose tend to complicate narrative form. In this regard, the form of mise en abyme changes, moving from simple reduplication, close to the structure of text-within-the-text (in Gogol’ and Čexov) or embedded narratives with the embedding diegesis of the author (Eugene Onegin), toward more complex hybrid forms. At the same time, in Russian literature (as opposed to the French nouveau roman or American postmodernist fiction, for instance) mise en abyme almost never becomes a “destructive element” in poetics aimed solely at exposing a technique or creating a paradox, along with endlessly reproducing the same narrative situation ad absurdum (as in novels by William Burroughs or John Barth). On the contrary, mise en abyme in the Russian literature of the twentieth century, transforming its functions toward the representation of self-reflexive thinking, maintains a close connection with the ontology of the storyworld.

6.1 Konstantin Vaginov Mise en abyme plays an important role in Konstantin Vaginov’s metanarrative prose. In his novel Satyr Chorus (1928), which describes the cultural tragedy associated with the collapse of Russian Silver Age culture (first decades of the twentieth century), the importance of creating a text and infusing life into a literary work are emphasized. However, this process of text-creation on the ruins of culture is subject to close reflection, and even deconstruction, in Vaginov’s fictional world.

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The peculiarity of the narrative construction of Satyr Chorus consists in doubling the instance of an explicit author who turns reality into text. Thus, one of the main characters in the novel is the Author (a first-person diegetic narrator) commenting on his characters, discussing whether they are represented correctly or addressing the reader directly: In this unexpected return of summer, I think my heroes partly imagine themselves as some sort of Philostratus, who falls together with the last autumn leaves, sinks together with buildings into an embankment, and goes to ruin together with a bygone people.

The self-reflexive commentary on the writing-process, heroes, and their actions gives the text a metafictional dimension. As Segal notes, “the author figure, occasionally intruding into the narrative, organizes the frame of the novel, declaratively proclaims the creation, the conventionality of its construction” (2006, 103). At the same time, the metaphysical dimension of the novel is supported not so much by the deliberate presence of the author creating his characters as it is by the strangeness and specificity of this Author. The Author, who tries to prove his “intentional omnipotence,” his “coldness and impartiality,” is not a double of the writer, but rather a construction “increasingly becoming inhuman” (103). Ultimately, the Author takes on the features of a “magical monster” (103) devoid of a human image: “I finished my novel, raised my pointed head with eyes, half-closed by yellow membranes, looked at my ugly hands that I’ve had since birth: three fingers on the right hand and four on the left.” The dehumanized Author becomes a symbol of dehumanization of culture and the semantic center of the novel. This narrator turns into a “pseudo-demiurge, manipulating the signs of decayed culture, and a kind of ‘Undertaker’ (as the Author of Satyr Chorus calls himself), invading the lives of characters” (Žiličeva 2013, 52). At the same time, the novel’s design has another narrative level. At the end of the story, “the real” author emerges “through theatrical scenery of the plot”: The type-setters have already put together half of Satyr Chorus and the author comes out of the little restaurant with his real friends into a lovely Petersburg spring night casting souls up over the Neva, over the palaces, over the outskirts teeming with centaurs, a night rustling like a garden, singing like youth, and flying like an arrow for the ones already flown.

Embedded narration, providing for the dissociation of two explicit diegetic narrators and working via the principle of defamiliarization of the Author, testifies to a radical rethinking of the relationship between fiction and reality, between literature and life, and it conveys the tragic worldview of Satyr Chorus. The relationship between reality and fiction is even more clearly revealed in the novel The Works and Days of Svistonov (1929). Here mise en abyme is the main technique for structuring the narrative: the writer Svistonov creates a novel that

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absorbs fragments of the surrounding world and, as the plot develops, begins to model real life. A special role is played by a metaphor that compares the creation of a novel with a “hunt for a curious game” (Segal 2006, 121): in search of material for the novel, the protagonist kills and devalues his life. The mirror structure of the narrative in The Works and Days of Svistonov works not only on the principle of retrospective reflection of the two diegetic levels. It is not only the world surrounding Svistonov that becomes the material for his novel, but the novel itself that gradually begins to predict, design, and even destroy reality. This two-way orientation, which provides not only a refraction of life in the space of literary representation but also the ability of the text to “absorb” reality, becomes part of Vaginov’s philosophical and aesthetic system aimed at understanding the anti-demiurgical function of literature in the context of the general decline of culture.

6.2 Vladimir Nabokov Among all Russian authors, Vladimir Nabokov, the forerunner of Russian postmodernism, most consistently addresses mise en abyme as his fundamental narrative strategy (Lipoveckij 1997). In this essay, we consider only Nabokov’s Russian novels, but it should be noted that mise en abyme is also an essential feature of his later English-language novels such as The Real Life of Sebastien Knight, Pale Fire, and so on (Lipoveckij 1997). Nabokov’s textual universe repeatedly plays up the “collision of relations between the creator and the created world” (Dymarskij 2001, 268), the result of which is the self-reflexive separation of the space of his novels into narrative levels of two orders: the narrating and the narrated. According to Jean-Philippe Jaccard, “from the earliest years, Nabokov defines his main aesthetic task: to tell in his work how it is created” (2011, 59). It is quite natural that mise en abyme becomes a fundamental technique of Nabokov’s poetics. Present in his early novels (Mary, 1926; Despair, 1934; Invitation to a Beheading, 1935–1936), the figure becomes his main text-based technique in the apical Russian novel The Gift (1937–1938). Thus, unlike Vaginov’s prose, which is mainly focused on the tragic anti-demiurgical vision of relations between reality and text, in Nabokov’s novels these relations are emphatically ludic. In Despair, self-reflexive writing practices play an important role. The novel is built on the principle of mise en abyme, represented in both types: (1) the process of creation of the work, shown within this work, and (2) the internal “mirror in the text,” which reproduces the proportions of the whole text at a hypodiegetic level. First, the novel is the story of the murder of the doppelgänger (Hermann’s

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double), narrated by Hermann, and this writing gradually fades from the format of the novella into that of a personal diary. Self-reflexivity plays an important role here, for it consists in comments related to the process of writing and reflections on literature, and in observations on various pieces of handwriting, numbered by Hermann at twenty-five. Second, inside the story a kind of internal mirror is produced at the hypodiegetic level that foreshadows further development of the narrative. This is the story of a certain Mr. X. Y., who met his double-fisherman on the seashore: Once upon a time there lived a weak, seedy, but fairly rich person, one Mr. X. Y. He was in love with a bewitching young lady, who, alas, paid no attention to him. One day, while traveling, this pale, dull man happened to notice, on the seashore, a young fisherman called Mario, a merry, sunburned, strong fellow, who, for all that, was marvelously, stupendously like him. A cute idea occurred to our hero: he invited the young lady to come with him to the seaside [. . .] ✶

In the end, however, the plan fails, for Mr. X. Y. “sat, very glum and downcast, thinking what a fool he had been to betray and annul his own glorious plan.” This internal story, written by Hermann as a literary exercise, has a proleptic function in that it projects the failure of the protagonist’s plan. Curiously, mise en abyme in Despair is multilayered. The intradiegetic story of Mr. X. Y. becomes part of another mise en abyme, located at the highest diegetic level – that of Hermann’s diaries – which in turn becomes a reduplication of events that occur at the primary narrative level with Hermann himself. In addition, Nabokov’s narrative mirrors are supported by various structural and semantic techniques. Thus, self-reflexivity is found at the level of intersubjective relations which are inverted and reflected in each other. Hermann’s plan was to change roles with his double Felix by killing him in order to pass his corpse off as himself and hide under another’s name. But in the end, the idea does not work, and events occur exactly in the opposite way: Felix is not mistaken for Hermann, while Herman becomes a killer. The killer wanted to stand in the place of his victim, but in the end he remained himself. Thus, the semantic mechanism of self-reflexivity in Despair is based on a complex, multilevel form of mise en abyme. In The Gift, “the brightest example of metafiction in Russian literature” (Lipoveckij 1997, 55), mise en abyme becomes a leading narrative device. The novel, continuing the Russian self-reflexive tradition, at the same time updates the genre of metaprose. Veronika Zuseva-Özkan studies The Gift from the point of view of historical poetics and argues that its structure is one of the special types of metanovel. She stresses that The Gift is characterized by the merging of ontological narrative planes, the indistinctness of narrating and narrated worlds, observing that “the fundamental property of its artistic structure that distinguishes this novel from Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls [. . .] is that there is no ontological independence of two planes: being (the fictional reality where characters live) and creative con-

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sciousness” (2014, 316). The composition of the novel is motivated by its metanarrative features, thanks to which “reality is born out of the creative consciousness of the hero-author, while the ‘other’s’ (fictional) consciousness simply does not exist” (316). This narrative logic is reflected in a number of specific features of the work, such as the alternation of first- and third-person narration, self-reflexive interchanges between the novel about Fëdor and Fëdor’s novel about Černyševskij, which in turn contains numerous hypodiegetic levels and a circle composition supported by the recursive symbol of a circle, and so on. However, the most problematic question in The Gift is the ambivalence of the author’s status created by self-reflexive means: is the novel about Fëdor written by Fëdor? The last line of The Gift, which refers to Puškin’s Eugene, is seemingly an invitation for the reader to reread the novel, knowing this time that Fëdor is the narrator. In my opinion, this issue cannot be fundamentally solved. The narrative creates a balancing of two equal diegetic levels, neither of which is primary (a strategy later used in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). It is impossible not to agree with Jaccard that “Nabokov seems to have reconciled (at least on the level of parody) the invention of modernism with ‘tradition’ and thus created a new type of novel where an absolute balance is achieved between Signified 1 (narrative) and Signified 2 (metanarrative)” (2011, 59). In Dällenbach’s terms, this type of mise en abyme, which assumes infinite self-references within one semiotic system, is called aporetic duplication. In the case of The Gift, the entire diegetic level is subject to reduplication, which coincides finally with its reflection. This self-reflexive strategy of writing that provides Nabokov’s novels with a ludic dimension is related to the idea of a decentering structure in Jacques Derrida’s ([1966] 1970) terms.

6.3 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Another important text of modern Russian literature built on the principle of mise en abyme is The Master and Margarita (1928–1940; published 1966–1967) by Mixail Bulgakov, a novel that combines the traditions of European and Russian romanticism with the prose of Russian modernism (researchers have repeatedly noted the influence of Gogol’, Hoffmann, and Andrej Belyj) and is to a large extent heir to the principles of metanarrative poetics. At first sight, the compositional structure of the novel is an ordinary text-within-the-text rather than a mise en abyme, as it embeds the Jerusalem chapters (the Master’s novel) in the main diegesis representing the Moscow events. However, the narrative, compositional, and discursive dimensions of the novel are much more complex, for the text is built up out of a network of self-references, interchanges, and reduplications that ultimately determine the self-reflexive tissue of the narrative.

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First of all, the complication of the text-within-the-text structure occurs due to the fact that the Master’s novel is closely related to a novel about modernity: the main collisions and even the plot nodes of the two novels are similar, so that the reader always feels the connection of contemporary events with the tragedy that occurred in ancient Jerusalem, and at the end (chapter 32 and epilogue) their plot lines merge. (Lesskis and Attarova 2016, 472)

At the same time, the interaction of the two diegeses and the embedding of the novel about Pontius Pilate in the Moscow novel are very peculiar because the shifts between diegetic levels are constantly marked by the fantastic. The novel is never narrated directly by the Master, who wrote it, but only indirectly, by other characters who, inexplicably and sometimes fantastically, bring the novel together. Thus, “Pontius Pilate” (chapter 2) is told by Professor Voland at Patriarch’s Ponds, “The Execution” (chapter 16) is dreamed by Ivan Bezdomnyj in a mental hospital, and the final Jerusalem chapters (25 and 26) are read by Margarita. The novel about Pontius Pilate turns out to be dissociated from the Master and enters into a phantasmagoric contact with the framing diegetic narrative. This relationship between the two diegeses is supported, among other things, by the fact that the final and initial replicas at the junction of the Moscow and Jerusalem chapters coincide. Thus, at the end of the first chapter, Voland tells of Pontius Pilate as proof of Jesus’s existence: “‘There’s no need for any proof,’ answered the professor. In a low voice, his foreign accent vanishing altogether, he began: ‘It’s very simple – early in the morning on the fourteenth of the spring month of Nisan the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, in a white cloak lined with blood-red . . .’.” This last statement is repeated at the beginning of the next chapter. Such montage shifts are also due to the fact that in the early editions of the novel there was no clear separation between the Moscow and the Jerusalem chapters. Their inseparability was also maintained lexically and stylistically: the chapters about Yeshua Ha-Notsri and Pontius Pilate contained a number of modern lexemes that are incompatible with the realities of the ancient world. In the later editions of the novel, almost all stylistic inaccuracies were removed. The diegetic levels of the novel were divided into chapters, highlighting a sharp contrast between the two diegeses of the novel: between the primary diegesis describing the Moscow events and the secondary diegesis in which the tragedy in ancient Jerusalem takes place (Lesskis and Attarova 2016). Second, the self-reflexivity of the text is achieved through a variety of means organized at the level of repetitive leitmotifs, events, and duplicate characters. As Boris Gasparov observes, the plot of The Master and Margarita is saturated with iconic coincidences. Thus, “an epilogue with a cat dragged by a drunken citizen to the police” parodies “a procession to Golgotha,” “the face of Stepa Lixodeev, swollen after drinking,” corresponds to “the face of Yeshua on the cross,” and “the meeting

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of Judas and Niza in the streets of the Lower Town was staged in the first meeting of the Master and Margarita” (Gasparov 1994, 30). Such coincidences semantically approximate different narrative levels of the novel, often inverting the tragic nature of the Jerusalem events in a comic or parodic equivalent. In addition to the leitmotif self-references, the novel features event reduplication. For example, the final scene of the novel, which is dreamed every full moon by Ivan Bezdomnyj, repeats the last episode associated with the life of the Master. Moreover, the system of parallels is also found in the system of characters. In this way, the Master and Ešua, Voland and Pontius Pilate, Ivan Bezdomnyj (a pupil of the Master), and Matthew the Levite (a pupil of Yeshua) form dichotomous pairs separated by two diegeses. The mirror-like structure of The Master and Margarita also includes a rather standard mise en abyme in the form of a prophetic dream. Thus, Margarita’s dream precedes one of the final scenes of the novel in which the Master retires to rest: Margarita had dreamed of a place, mournful, desolate under a dull sky of early spring. The sky was leaden, with tufts of low, scudding grey cloud and filled with a numberless flock of rooks. There was a little hump-backed bridge over a muddy, swollen stream; joyless, beggarly, half-naked trees. A lone aspen, and in the distance, past a vegetable garden stood a log cabin that looked like a kind of outhouse. The surroundings looked so lifeless and miserable that one might easily have been tempted to hang oneself on that aspen by the little bridge. Not a breath of wind, not a cloud, not a living soul. In short – hell.

Curiously, Margarita’s dream echoes one of Tat’jana’s dreams from Eugene Onegin (see 3.1 above), functioning proleptically and referring to the image of the bridge, a symbol of transition to the other world. It is necessary to emphasize the blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality in The Master and Margarita, a boundary that is constantly being challenged, both through the use of narrative constructions and through the stylistic heterogeneity of narrative levels. The traditional model of mise en abyme and the text-within-the-text usually involves an increasing gradation of fictionality from the primary diegesis to the hypodiegesis. The embedded narrative level is commonly identified with a more fictional world than the one embedding it. In Bulgakov’s novel, this proportion is clearly disputed. The more contemporary and seemingly reliable level of the Moscow events is marked by a constant invasion of the fantastic, while the Jerusalem events are characterized by the “absence of the miraculous.” In addition, the novel created by the Master turns out to be more believable and accurate in Bulgakov’s fictional reality than the implied text of the Gospel. As Gasparov observes, “Matthew the Levite’s notes [. . .] are judged by Yeshua to be completely inconsistent with [. . .] ‘reality.’ Accordingly, the novel acts as a ‘true’ version of ‘biblical events’” (1994, 28).

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7 Russian Postmodernism and Post-Soviet Literature Russian postmodernism develops under a qualitatively different set of cultural-historical circumstances from those of European and American postmodernism. Nevertheless, a number of ideological, philosophical, and aesthetic features are common to these versions of the postmodern: the disintegration of master narratives (according to Jean-François Lyotard), the crisis of legitimization, and the flattening of hierarchies in dominant ideological discourses (Lipoveckij 1997, 108–121). This also concerns the narrative structure of postmodernist texts, since the narrative techniques employed by Western and Russian versions of postmodernism are similar. A special role in the development of postmodernist narrative practices is played by the mechanisms of self-reflexivity, metanarration, the laying bare of narrative structures, and, of course, mise en abyme. Such programmatic texts for Russian postmodernism as Moscow to the End of the Line (1973) by Venedikt Erofeev, A School for Fools (1976) by Saša Sokolov, and Pushkin House (1978) by Andrej Bitov turn to self-reflexive mechanisms, emphasize their metafictional status, and make extensive use of internal mirrors, although these features differ from those of modernist practices. As Rolf Hellebust has pointed out, in Pushkin House the author seems to have used the subversive literary devices of every postmodern writer he has read as well as some he has not. These include the essays of Musil, the paratextual apparatus of Borges, Nabokov’s exposure of fictional artifice, Eco’s concern with intertextuality, and the repetition and narrative multiplicity of Robbe-Grillet. (1991, 267)

One of the essential tasks for the renewal of narrative language becomes the development of “total simulation” that aspires to the philosophical and aesthetic objectives of postmodernism. The problem of the relationship between reality and text, in particular, is the main one in Bitov’s novel, The Symmetry Teacher (1989), built on a frame-tale principle (the epigraph contains a reference to Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 1805) and published with the subtitle “novel-echo.” The narrative and compositional structure of the novel, resembling an echo, works on the principle of multilevel mise en abyme: an endless recursion of motifs and events as well as of embedded narrative levels (texts written by Urbino Vanoski and retold by Urbino Vanoski himself are embedded in the narrative about the life and death of Urbino Vanoski). At the same time, the entire narrative about Vanoski seems to be a translation, poorly executed, of a lost book by an unknown English writer, Tired-Boffin, entitled The Teacher of Symmetry. As a result of this self-substitution, the status of the narrator changes. The metacommentaries of the first-person

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diegetic narrator are typographically masked as notes by the translator, whereas the intradiegetic narrators infinitely multiply the figure of the author in his endless reflections: Tired-Boffin writes about Urbino Vanoski, who writes about himself. As Irina Surat observes the key question of Bitov is the text instead of life, and this problem corresponds to the theme of reflections in The Symmetry Teacher – a key topic of photos and mirrors. [. . .] This is how life is killed, this is how it becomes the lure of endless search and lure of writing. (2008, 395)

In post-Soviet literature, due to the decline of postmodernism, interest in mise en abyme as a metafictional technique declined noticeably, but not entirely. Mixail Šiškin’s prose continues postmodern aesthetics and fits into the logic of a “logocentric paradigm in relation to the artistic word” (Orobij 2012). In Šiškin’s novel The Taking of Izmail (2010), behind its deliberately constructed anarrativeness one finds a writing consciousness that is trying to create a novel. As the writer comments, there is a certain author who wants to write some classic book, he begins to write, heroes are born, but at some point, the action scrolls, and he leaves this book, and begins another one. And with the other the same thing happens – all the plots come across the writer’s life and his reality, and in the end everything invented is rejected, and reality “pierces through” the literature; there ensues a description of the writer’s real life. (Šiškin 2010)

Such a collapse of narrative consciousness seems to be the ultimate case of narrative self-reflexivity, which has almost no other embodiment in the text than a juxtaposition of different styles (“scratching styles,” in Šiškin’s words) while fragments of stories seek to break into the plot. The contrasting way of using mise en abyme is found in the prose of the modern Russian writer Evgenij Vodolazkin, where there is a return to the first type of figure – mise en abyme at the level of the story. Unlike postmodernist texts, where mise en abyme produces the effect of simulation and exposes the structure of the text, dissolving the fabula elements in their infinite variations, in Vodolazkin’s texts narrative reduplication plays the role of a mechanism to preserve cultural memory. As one observer shows, a special function in Vodolazkin’s prose is performed by a special type of reduplication known as “intertextual mise en abyme” (Kalafatics 2019). Intertextual mise en abyme is a special type of narrative figure in which reduplications refer to another fictional or non-fictional text that builds up a similarity relationship with the text in which they are included (Murav’eva 2017, 317). This type of mise en abyme is described by Kalafatics in the novels of Vodolazkin. Analyzing the narrative structure of the novels Laurus (2012) and The Aviator (2017), Kalafatics concludes that they enter a network of semantic and structural echoes with the Alexander Romance and Robinson Crusoe quoted in them (this type of text

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structure could also, be described by the term “rewriting” – réécriture – common in current French criticism). At the same time, references and allusions to texts prior to Vodolazkin’s novels are not infrequent and are actively involved in the level of events. It should be added that in addition to references to Robinson Crusoe, a special place is given in The Aviator to the biblical parable of Lazarus, resurrected, like the main character, as a former prisoner of the “Solovki” camp. Being an allegory, the legend of Lazarus forms a special narrative ethos in which the protagonist rethinks the fact of his “revival” in light of moral responsibility for his own salvation. Thus, intertextual mise en abyme in Vodolazkin’s texts is focused not on creating a game with the reader but on transmitting cultural and biblical texts that often serve as a narrative foundation.

8 Conclusion Contrary to the widespread belief that Russian literature makes little use of mise en abyme, this self-reflexive narrative figure is widely employed in the Russian novel during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mise en abyme can be found in such emblematic texts of Russian literature as Eugene Onegin, Dead Souls, Satyr Chorus, The Gift, The Master and Margarita, Pushkin House, and others. It is important to note that Russian literature is characterized by an inseparable link between poetics and ontology. For this reason, in the majority of narratives using mise en abyme as a constructive principle, reduplication does not disrupt the internal coherence of the storyworld. The palette of semantic effects defined by this technique in Russian literature is diverse, extending from proleptic function or allegorical circumlocution to the metafictional blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction. The functions of mise en abyme in Russian literature change under the influence of historical dynamics. In nineteenth-century literature, this figure operates predominantly at the level of story (mise en abyme de l’énoncé). At this level, the narrative technique is connected with the aesthetics of Russian romanticism. The Russian Romantic novel, appropriating the tendencies of Western European romanticism,  also borrows from there its major motifs, such as doubling, dreams, and madness, which are embodied in the device of narrative reduplication (Puškin, Lermontov, Gogol’, etc.). At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the heyday of modernism, a significant transformation of the figure takes place: mise en abyme serves to represent the process of creation in the work itself. Another type of mise en abyme, reduplication at the level of discourse (mise en abyme de l’énonciation) comes to prevail in Russian literature (Belyj, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Pasternak). In Russian post-

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modernism (Erofeev, Bitov, Sokolov), there is a convergence of different aspects of the self-reflexive potential of mise en abyme which is aimed at blurring the relation between reality and fiction, life and literature, the writer and his text. The constant that runs throughout the diversity of functions performed by mise en abyme is its potential to exploit the experimental sources of narrative.

References Bal, Mieke. 1978. “Mise en abyme et iconicité.” Littérature 29:116–128. Baron, Christine. 2002. “La question de l’autoréférence: Tentative d’interprétation symbolique et idéologique.” In Littérature, modernité, réflexivité: Conférences du séminaire de littérature comparée de l’Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle, edited by Jean Bessière and Manfred Schmeling, 43–58. Paris: Champion. Baxtin, Mixail. 1975. Voprosy literatury i ėstetiki. Moskva: Xudožhestvennaja literatura. Čumakov, Jurij. 1983. «Evgenij Onegin» i russkij stixotvornyj roman. Novosibirsk: Nauka. Dällenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil. Translated into English as The Mirror in the Text by Jeremy Whitely and Emma Hughes. Oxford: Polity, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. (1966) 1970. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, 247–264. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dubois, Christine. 2006. “L’image ‘abymée.’” Images Re-vues, no. 2. http://journals.openedition.org/imagesrevues/304 (accessed 29 August 2020). Dymarskij, Mixail. 2001. “Deus ex texto, ili Vtoričnaja diskursivnost’ nabokovskoj modeli narrativa.” In Nabokov: Pro et contra; Antologiya, 236–260. Sankt-Peterburg: RHGI. Erëmin, Igor’. 1948. “Poétičeskij stil’ Simeona Polockogo.” Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoj literatury 6:125–153. Fevry, Sébastien. 2000. Mise en abyme filmique : Essai de typologie. Liège: CEFAL. Gasparov, Boris. 1994. Literaturnye lejtmotivy: Očerki po russkoj literature ХХ veka. Moskva: Nauka. Gide, André. (1893) 1967. Journals 1889–1949. Translated, selected, and edited by Justin O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hellebust, Rolf. 1991. “Fiction and Unreality in Bitov’s Pushkin’s House.” Style 25, no. 2, 265–279. Hutcheon, Linda. 1980. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York: Methuen. Jaccard, Jean-Philippe. 2011. Literatura kak takovaja: Ot Nabokova k Puškinu; Izbrannye raboty o russkoj slovesnosti. Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Kalafatics, Zsuzsanna. 2019. “Semantičeskaja funkcija ritoričeskoj konstrukcii mise en abyme v proizvedenijax Evgenija Vodolazkina.” In Vodolazkin: Znakovye imena sovremennoj russkoj literatury, 109–120. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. Lesskis, Georgij, and Kseniya Atarova. 2016. Moskva – Eršalaim: Putevoditel’ po romanu M. Bulgakova «Master i Margarita». Moskva: BSG-Press. Lipoveckij, Mark. 1997. Russkij postmodernizm: Očerki istoričeskoj poètiki. Ekaterinburg: Ur. gos. ped. universitet. Lipoveckij, Mark. 2008. Paralogii: Transformacii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoj kul’ture 1920–2000-x godov. Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.

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Lotman, Jurij. 1997. Puškin: Biografija pisatelja, stat’i i zametki; 1060–1990, «Evgenij Onegin»: Kommentarij. Sankt-Peterburg: Iskusstvo-SPb. Mann, Jurij. 1996. Poétika Gogolja: Variacii k teme. Moskva: Coda. Murav’eva, Larisa. 2017. “Mise en abyme v fokuse intertekstual’nosti.” Kritika i semiotika 1:311–328. Nabokov, Vladimir. (1964) 1998. Kommentarij k romanu A. S. Puškina «Evgenij Onegin». Sankt-Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb. Orobij, Sergej. 2012. “Istorija odnogo učeničestva (Vladimir Nabokov – Saša Sokolov – Mixail Šiškin).” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 118. https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2012/6/istoriyaodnogo-uchenichestva.html (accessed 5 July 2020). Piskunova, Svetlana. 2013. Ot Puškina – do «Puškinskogo doma»: Očerki istoričeskoj poėtiki russkogo romana. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury. Raus, Tonia, and Gian Maria Tore, eds. 2019. Comprendre la mise en abyme: Arts et médias au second degré. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Ron, Moshe. 1987. “The Restricted Abyss: Nine Problems in the Theory of Mise en Abyme.” Poetics Today 8, no. 2, 417–438. Sazonova, Lidija. 1996. “«Vertograd mnogocvetnyj» Simeona Polockogo: Istorija sozdanija, poėtika, žanr.” In Polockij, Simeon: Vertograd mnogocvtnyi. Edited by Anthony Hippisley and Lydia I. Sazonova, xi–lii. Köln: Böhlau. Sazonova, Lidija. 2006. Literaturnaja kul’tura Rossii: Rannee Novoe vremja. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury. Segal, Dmitrij. 2006. Literatura kak oxrannaja gramota. Moskva: Vodolej Publishers. Šiškin, Mihail. 2010. “Napisat’ svoju Annu Kareninu.” Interview. https://archive.9tv.co.il/news/2010/12/05/89804.html (accessed 5 July 2020). Šklovskij [Shklovsky], Viktor. (1929) 1991. “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 147–170. Elmwood Park, IL: Darkey Archive Press. Solivetti, Carla. (2009). “Spletnja kak geral’dičeskaja konstrukcija (mise en abyme) v ‘Mertvyx dušah.‘” Toronto Slavic Quarterly, no. 30. http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/30/solivetti30.shtml (accessed 5 Feb 2019). Strada, Vittorio. 1997. “Lukač, Baxtin i drugie.” In Baxtinskij sbornik. Vol. 3. Edited by Konstantin Isupov, Vitalij Maxlin, and Oleg Osovskij. Moskva: Labirint, 21–55. Surat, Irina. 2008. “Meždu tekstom i žizn’ju (Formula treščiny).” In Bitov, A. Symmetry Teacher, 389–402. Moskva: Fortuna EL. Suxix, Igor’. 1987. “«Černyj monax»: Problema ierarxičeskogo myšlenija.” In Problemy poėtiki A. P. Čexova, 100–116. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta. Wolf, Werner. 2009. Metareference across Media: Studies in Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Žiličeva, Galina. 2013. “Narrativnaja strategija romanov K. Vaginova.” Vestnik RGGU 20, no. 121, 52–65. Zuseva-Özkan, Veronika. 2014. Istoričeskaja poėtika metaromana. Moskva: Intrada.

Simon Grund

Eventfulness in Classical Greek and Latin Literature 1 Definitions The concept of event has been under scrutiny within various fields for a number of years. In narrative theory, the term refers to a change of state that meets certain additional conditions. The concept of eventfulness, developed more recently, is a generic term that refers to the criteria by which a change of state becomes an event (Hühn 2008; 2010, 1–10; [2009] 2014; Schmid 2003; 2010, 1–21; 2017, 63–88; 2018, 312–313). As any narrative is “the representation of one or more changes of state” (Prince [1987] 2003, 92; cf. 1973, 16–23), events distinguish narration from other, non-narrative genres such as description or argumentation (Chatman 1990, 9–11; Herman 2009, 79–100; Martínez and Scheffel [1999] 2016, 113–116; Schmid 2003, 17–23; 2010, 1–7). Having said this, there is a difference between a mere temporal series of events and a sequence based on further causal or inherently logical principles that motivate their unfolding. This distinction applies both to the structure of a particular text (most famously, Forster [1927] 1985, 86; cf. Busse 2004; Martínez and Scheffel [1999] 2016, 116–125; Rimmon-Kenan [1983] 2002, 7–21) and to its semiotic mediation (Pier 2003). With this in mind, Hühn (2010, 1–3; cf. 2008, 145) draws a line between what he calls “process narration” and “eventful narration.” The former is employed as a mostly descriptive device, whereas the latter contains “an unexpected, exceptional or new turn in the sequential dimension, some surprising ‘point.’” It appears, then, that eventfulness counts as the distinguishing criterion between an event in the broad and in the narrow sense of the word. Eventfulness is both a “binary” and a “scalar category” (Hühn 2010, 3; cf. Herman 2002, 90–92; Schmid 2010, 9); in other words, either a text contains events or it does not, and these events can have degrees of eventfulness, depending on certain criteria. There are many considerations on the conditions of eventfulness (for a widespread overview, see Hühn 2008; [2009] 2014; Nünning 2013). One of the most influential modern conceptions of eventfulness is the space semantic model developed by Jurij Lotman ([1970] 1977). For Lotman, an event is “the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field” that introduces “a revolutionary element” (233–234) into the predominant (spatial) order of the text, which, he claims, metaphorically resembles normative values or expectations in a specific cultural setting (cf. Hühn [2009] 2014, 170–172; Schmid 2018, 313–317). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-028

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This assumption is also reflected in Hühn’s schema-theoretical approach (2008, 144–149; 2010, 1–10; [2009] 2014, 173–174; cf. Hühn and Kiefer 2005, 246–251). Hühn argues that whatever is taken as “unexpected” or “revolutionary” is measured against culturally determined norms that emerge in the text on the basis of predetermined knowledge structures “such as conventional patterns for how to proceed in choosing a partner, etc., or literary, genre-specific plot schemata” ([2009] 2014, 173; cf. Bruner 1991, 11–13; Herman 2002, 85–92). A narrative text that only invokes familiar narrative patterns or schemata is not per se eventful. Rather, an event depends on the introduction of something new and unexpected, resulting in a “departure from a schematic pattern or script activated in the text” (Hühn 2010, 6). To be considered eventful, any change of state, according to Schmid (2003; 2010, 8–12; 2017, 63–88; 2018), must fulfill the two necessary conditions of “reality” and “resultativity.” Reality means that the change concerned has to extend to the happenings presented in the text as real (for the presentation of contrafactual events, see Prince 1988; Ryan 1991, 119–123). Resultativity means that it must actually be completed. In addition, Schmid introduces an elaborate framework that consists of five hierarchically listed conditions (relevance, unpredictability, persistence, irreversibility, non-iterativity) that are gradational and relative to individual interpretation. In this regard, Schmid also highlights the importance of contextual factors (2009; 2010, 13–16). Eventful change, according to Hühn (2010, 9–10; Hühn and Kiefer 2005, 246–247), can occur both on the diegetic level of the characters (in happenings) and at the level of narratorial discourse (in presentation). This separation between diegesis and exegesis is also introduced by Schmid, who adds the distinction between external and internal (i.e., mental) events, described as internal changes of state of one of the characters or the narratorial instances (2017, 64–66, 81–87; 2018, 318–320). As a third group, Hühn refers to a kind of event that the text suggests indexically but that is not realized by the narrator or any of the characters (reception events). Instead, the actualization of the event is transposed to the level of the (implied) reader, who then performs a mental change “as a result of the reading process” (Hühn and Kiefer 2005, 246–247). Although this category is rather difficult to pin down in a text (cf. Schmid 2017, 87–88), it has an antecedent in the Aristotelian conception of catharsis (κάθαρσις), which can be thought of as a “cognitively mediated change” that accompanies the audience of drama in the course of the action and its aesthetic experience (Halliwell 2012, 248; cf. Janko 1992). As with catharsis, many of the concepts sketched above are already present in the poetic treatises of Aristotle (see Baumbach 2019, 239–243). In his Poetics, he develops a concept of eventful “change” or “transition” (μετάβασις or μεταβολή, translations mine unless otherwise indicated; on the etymology of these terms, see Lucas 1968, 128) as the central constitutive element of a tragic (and epic) “plot”

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(μύθος). This binary understanding of eventfulness is further specified by the wellknown devices of “reversal” (περιπέτεια) and “recognition” (ἀναγνώρισις), which are considered as “hinge-like junctures at which the general tragic pattern of transformation is encapsulated in a particularly intense and decisive manner” (Halliwell 1995, 15). Reversal can be defined as an “unexpected yet logical shift in the events of the play” (Else 1957, 344, emphasis in original; cf. Arist. Poet. 1452a22–24). It shows similarities to Hühn’s conception of eventfulness as a “departure from a schematic pattern or script” (2010, 6). Additionally, it is similar to Schmid’s condition of unpredictability, which is second in his hierarchical order of eventfulness. Recognition, on the other hand, can be seen as the internal change of state that, due to the psychological transformation of the plot’s characters “from ignorance to knowledge” (ἐξ ἀγνοίας εἰς γνῶσιν; 1552a29–31), can be termed mental event, according to Schmid (2017, 64–65). Both concepts are closely interrelated in terms of eventful change. As with many narrative concepts, eventfulness is a ubiquitous feature of narrative texts that looms large in both Greek and Roman literature. This is true for tragedy and epic, but especially for historical narratives that deal with and assess the value of past happenings in which events feature most prominently.

2 Eventfulness in Attic Drama: Complex Plots and Tragic Competition Eventfulness plays a major role in ancient Attic drama. Tragic plots, as Aristotle famously remarks in his Poetics, revolve around a crucial transformation “to prosperity from adversity or from prosperity to adversity” (εἰς εὐτυχίαν ἐκ δυστυχίας ἢ ἐξ εὐτυχίας εἰς δυστυχίαν; 1451a11–15). In general, Greek tragedy is divided into a classical and a postclassical phase. The classical phase (fifth century BCE) is dominated by the three great tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who were regarded as canonical even in antiquity (Zimmermann 2016c, 738). Although a qualitative decline, long claimed for the plays of the postclassical period, can be decisively rejected (Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980; Hall 2007), the tragedies of the classical triad were still considered exemplary in later times, as can be seen, for example, in the frequent revivals of their plays from 386 onward (Hall 2007, 279– 281). Originally, the tragic “contest” (ἀγών) was an integral part of the Attic Dionysian festival and thus of cultic origin, firmly linked to the city of Athens. This religious background is also related to the choice of mostly mythological topics which, for competitive reasons, narrowed down over time to a few selected central myths (Zimmermann 2016c, 736–737).

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2.1 Sophocles, Oedipus the King: Recognition and Reversal One of the most prominent examples of eventful change in a tragic plot can be seen in the Sophoclean adaptation of the myth of Oedipus in his Οἰδίπυος Τύραννος (Oedipus the King). The story of Oedipus is part of a larger context of narratives that revolve around the mythical history of the Theban dynasty. As such, it is a widespread myth that has been adapted countless times in literature and art since antiquity (Henrichs 2016; Iakovou 2020). Sophocles’s tragedy fixes on the decisive day when Oedipus, king of Thebes and solver of the famous Sphingian riddle, recognizes the truth about the secret of his parentage, which ultimately leads to his downfall. At the beginning of the play we are told that the city of Thebes is afflicted by a devastating plague that destroys the meadows and the cattle and kills the children in their mothers’ wombs (22–30). Asked for advice and help, the Pythian oracle proclaims to the king’s brother-in-law Creon that the plague will not disappear from the city until the murderer of the previous king, Laios, has been driven out or killed to avenge his death. However, because the name of the murderer remains unnamed, Oedipus sends for the seer Tiresias, from whom he hopes to obtain more detailed information about the person to be dealt with (284–289). The seer, in turn, tells the king that the latter himself is “the unholy polluter of this land” (γῆς τῆσδ’ ἀνοσίῳ μιάστορι; 353, trans. Lloyd-Jones 1997, 359), for he has killed his own father (362) and married his own mother (366–367). While he, as the seer, proclaims the “truth” (τἀλεθὴς; 356), Oedipus, “who knew nothing” (ὁ μηδὲν εἰδὼς Οἰδίπους; 397), for his part, is unable to recognize it. Through this divination, it becomes clear that the external storyline surrounding the fate of the city and its inhabitants, and the internal storyline of Oedipus’s (dis-)ability to know himself, are closely interrelated: after all, Oedipus’s self-knowledge is necessary for the city to be saved, while the situation of the plague makes it necessary for him to strive for recognition in the first place. The underlying structure of the plot and its complication is based on the interweaving of two oracular spells, one given to Laios and the other to Oedipus in earlier times. King Laios, as it is told by his former wife Iocaste, who is now the wife of Oedipus, had once received a prophecy from Apollo that he would meet death by his own son’s hand (707–725). Oedipus, on the other hand, had been told exactly what Tiresias had confirmed shortly before, namely that he would kill his father and marry his own mother (788–793). However, both Oedipus (798–833) and Iocaste (851–854) fail to link the two predictions, believing Oedipus to be the son of the Corinthian king Polybos. It is toward the end of Sophocles’s play that the truth not only about the murder of Laios but also about the parentage of Oedipus is revealed: in the midst of the action, a messenger from Corinth suddenly appears,

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revealing that Oedipus is not the son of Polybos, but a foundling from the mountains (1000–1045). At the same time, an eyewitness to the murder of Laios is found, who recognizes Oedipus as the stranger who once killed the king in a quarrel (1110–1181). It is on the basis of these reports that Oedipus recognizes himself as the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother: ἰοὺ ἰού· τὰ πάντ’ ἂν ἐξήκοι σαφῆ. ὦ φῶς, τελευταῖόν σε προσβλέψαιμι νῦν, ὅστις πέφασμαι φύς τ’ ἀφ’ ὧν οὐ χρῆν, ξὺν οἷς τ’ οὐ χρῆν ὁμιλῶν, οὕς τέ μ’ οὐκ ἔδει κτανών. (Oh, oh! All is now clear! O light, may I now look on you for the last time, I who am revealed as cursed in my birth, cursed in my marriage, cursed in my killing!; 1182–1185, trans. LloydJones 1997, 453)

The recognition scene of Oedipus is one of the best known instances of ἀναγνώρισις. When he realizes that the two prophecies are actually dependent on each other, he goes “from ignorance to knowledge,” and in this inner change of state a mental event occurs in the diegesis. Thus, the unexpected deviation of a previously established set of beliefs (which Schmid refers to as the condition of unpredictability) relates to the level of the narrative world and its diegetic characters’ expectations (doxa). What makes this mental event tragic is that it is based on a crucial “error” (ἁμαρτία), since it is inevitable for Oedipus to “miss the mark” (cf. Sherman 1992, 177–179), given his previous state of knowledge (Cave 1988, 33–37). Moreover, the inner change of the play’s protagonist also contributes to the reversal of the external state of affairs. In a metaphorical double meaning of seeing as a physical and intellectual means of perception, Oedipus is literally transformed from a “seeing blind man” (370–373) into a “blind seeing man” when he gouges out his own eyes in reaction to his recognition (1266–1274). In this respect, an eventful, because tragically unexpected, reversal of affairs on the level of the plot can also be observed, as the fates of Oedipus and that of the plague-struck city change reciprocally from good to bad and from bad to good. In his Poetics, Aristotle describes the interaction of recognition and reversal as particularly artful, calling it a “complex” plot (πεπλεγμένος; 1452a14–18, cf. MacFarlane 2000, 375–381). For this reason, he also considers the Sophoclean drama a “model play” (Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980, 19). This kind of eventfulness, taking place in the form of complex plots, can also be explained by the agonal context of the Dionysia, where the dramatic setting and the reactions of the audience must always be taken into account. The choice of the recurring mythological content poses a challenge to the poets, as the overall fabula of the myth (cf. Bal 2017, 154–187) is already known in the run-up to the performance. With regard to the “paradox of suspense” (cf. Prieto-Pablos 1998; Carroll 2001, 254–270), one must thus consider

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the fact that the audience, in such a case, is more likely to be surprised by the “how” than by the “what.” The interweaving of external and internal changes of state is particularly well suited for this.

2.2 Euripides, Medea: Staging Eventfulness Further evidence of how eventfulness in Attic drama is thought of in the context of the audience is the dramatic technique employed by Euripides. His Orestes, for instance, was “perhaps the most talked-about theatrical event of the time,” for it was staged in a “hilariously funny” way and “nobody knew how the plot would turn out” (Hall 2007, 275). However, one of the most striking examples of Euripides breaking with the audience’s expectations points in exactly the opposite direction. In his Medea, he adapts the myth of a woman who, from ancient times on, was regarded as a symbolic incarnation of revenge, killing not only her brother but her two children in order to bring the life of her former husband, Jason, to ruin. There is some evidence that the murder of the children (who die in different ways in different variants of the myth) was not added until Euripides’s tragedy, composed for the tragic ἄγων in 431 BCE (Grube 1973, 147–165; Worthington 1990; more sceptical Kovacs 2001, 276–277). The inclusion of a maternal infanticide must have been particularly shocking for the audience, as evidenced by the fact that the drama only won the third prize – admittedly in the face of stiff competition (cf. Kovacs 2001, 277). At least as unexpected as the murder scene itself is how Medea escapes Jason’s revenge. At the beginning of the play, we learn that Jason, after escaping to Corinth with Medea’s help, has taken Glauke, the king’s daughter, as his new wife (16–35). In addition, King Creon informs Medea that he intends to banish her from the city (271–276). Having nothing left to lose and because she feels betrayed, Medea decides to kill not only Glauke and her father with poisoned gifts but also her own children, the culmination of her revenge (772–810). When she learns that the king and his daughter fell victim to her deadly “medicine” (φάρμακον; 1125–1126), she goes behind the scenes and kills her own two sons (1270–1277). After hearing of the disaster, Jason rushes off to “bring about justice” (τὴν δὲ τείσωμαι δίκην; 1316). However, when he finds Medea, he must face the fact that she has been miraculously saved because the god Helios has sent her a winged chariot on which she can escape without punishment (1317–1322). The resolution of the plot by means of deus ex machina is a hallmark of Euripides’s innovative dramatic technique. Until that time, using the theater crane (ἀπὸ μηχανῆς) was mostly reserved for sudden appearances of flying gods, such as the divine entrance of Oceanus on a winged steed in the Aischylean Prometheus Bound (284–297) who appears all of a sudden and offers his support to the helpless victim

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(cf. Zimmermann 2016b). Medea’s flying appearance thus leaves her ambiguously split between human and deity (Cowherd 1983), while, as Grube remarks, the “incredible device” of the chariot “probably seemed awkward even to a Greek audience” (1973, 164). The single-handed infanticide along with the unexpected rescue are novel elements in the prefigured myth surrounding Medea and serve to break with the anticipated course of action while still conforming with the story’s fabula: “The tradition dictated that Medea must end up in Athens. [. . .] An unusual twist or innovation in the Medea tradition might well call for an unconventional ending, and that is what Euripides gives us” (Worthington 1990, 504). Yet this solution to the plot is not only aimed at surprising the audience but is also explicitly reflected within the text: πολλῶν ταμίας Ζεὺς ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ πολλὰ δ᾿ ἀέλπτως κραίνουσι θεοί· καὶ τὰ δοκηθέντ᾿ οὐκ ἐτελέσθη, τῶν δ᾿ ἀδοκήτων πόρον ηὗρε θεός. τοιόνδ᾿ ἀπέβη τόδε πρᾶγμα. (Zeus on Olympus has many things in his treasure house, and many are the things the gods accomplish against our expectation. What men look for is not brought to pass, but a god finds a way to achieve the unexpected. Such is the outcome of this story; 1415–1419, trans. Kovacs 2001, 413)

These concluding words of the chorus show that the plot of the Medea, even aside from its effect on stage, revolves around a central eventful change that is “contrary to expectation” (παρὰ τὴν δόξαν; Arist. Poet. 1452a4) and thus comes close to the Aristotelian notion of reversal. But due to its missing connection to the action, it is dismissed in the Poetics as an “irrational element” (ἀλογον; 1454a37–b6). Ultimately, however, it is not only the criterion of unpredictability but also the effects of Medea’s deeds that are persistent, irreversible, and highly relevant for the course of action and the protagonists. Both the killing of the children – which goes against moral and, in the case of Euripides’s drama, narrative patterns as well – and the miraculous escape in the chariot are highly eventful on a diegetic and an exegetic level, enriching the plot with an event in the happenings as well as a reception event for the audience. The tendency to emphasize eventful change through the use of certain structural elements of complex plots continues into the postclassical period (from 406 BCE onward). Poets at this time were concerned with innovating the existing material and also relying on effectful surprises for performances on stage (cf. Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980, 6–14; Zimmermann 2016c, 738–739). This development reached a climax in the Roman Republic, where theater utlimately became a spectaculous “event,” albeit one “more of style and emotion than of intellect” (Goldberg 1996, 270).

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3 Eventfulness in Epic: Scenic Action and Epic τέλος Ancient heroic (epic) poetry is a highly eventful kind of narration. Aristotle defines the nature of epic poetry by distinguishing it from tragedy in his Poetics (chs. 23–26, 1459a16–1462b19; cf. Fuhrmann 2003, 48–61). He states that epic is in many respects comparable to tragic poetry, with both genres focusing on a unified plot showing certain common characteristics such as reversal and recognition (1459a16–b16) and thus revolving around eventful change in its macrostructural disposition. A central difference, however, is that the structure of epic plots exceeds that of tragedy in terms of length and can present various individual episodes in addition to the central storyline – episodes that are not feasible in scenic form (1459b17–31). These subepisodes often follow a generic pattern that occurs in various epic texts, as has been observed in antiquity and also more frequently in recent times (Reitz and Finkmann 2019). Thus, while the epic as a whole is directed toward a teleological event that unites the plot as a whole, narration is driven forward by individual episodes that may themselves imply eventful change at the microstructural level.

3.1 Homer, Odyssey: Recognition and Reunion This is shown clearly in the Odyssey by Homer, whom Aristotle regards as the best of the epic poets due to the fact that his plots come closest to those of tragedy (Poet. 1459b12–13). The plot of the Odyssey is “complex” and “full of recognition” (ἀναγνώρισις γὰρ διόλου; 1459b15). This statement pertains in particular to the second half of the epic (books 13–24), where no fewer than fifteen individual scenes of recognition are presented (for an overview, see Gainsford 2003, 46–47). Recognition scenes are a characteristic feature of Homeric epic that is found “nowhere else in Archaic poetry” (Gainsford 2003, 41). In this regard, they have received a good deal of attention (e.g., Cave 1988, 40–46; Gainsford 2003; Walter 1992). These scenes follow a set pattern of eventful change inside a character’s mind, in line with Schmid’s definition of a diegetic mental event. The general constellation of recognition with regard to persons (as opposed to artifacts and actions; cf. Zimmermann 2016a, 642) presupposes that one of the persons involved is unaware of the identity of the other, therefore making the condition of “ignorance” the prerequisite for this type of scene (Walter 1992, 64; cf. Arist. Poet. 1552a29–31). As for the structure of recognition itself, Gainsford (2003, 42–44) proposes a schema that consists of four elements: at the beginning, there is a testing in which Odysseus explores the loyalty of his friends and family members who do not yet recog-

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nize him. This may be followed by a deception where the returning person further conceals his identity by telling lies about his travels (on Odysseus’s lying tales, see de Jong 2001, 596–597). The last step is either the actual recognition with the hero revealing himself or a foretelling in which he retains his disguise. These last two elements are mutually exclusive and depend in each case on whether Odysseus decides to reveal himself or not. In view of this multi-stage process of recognition, de Jong speaks of a “‘delayed recognition’ story-pattern” (2001, 386–387). One striking example is the recognition of Odysseus and his son Telemachus in 16.1–220. After his arrival at the coast of Ithaca, the hero in beggar’s clothes first encounters Eumaeus, the loyal swineherd. He is welcomed kindly and informs himself about the state of affairs on the island, without being recognized (14.1–173, 185–408, 453–533). At the same time, Telemachus, who has been away from the island in search of his father, arrives at the swineherd’s hut after returning home in order to support his mother, as recommended by the goddess Athena (15.1–42). When father and son meet in the hut, Odysseus is not immediately recognized but taken as a “stranger” (ξένος; 16.44) due to his appearance as a beggar. At first, then, Telemachus is ignorant of the traveler’s real identity. A meal and a short conversation follow, in which Eumaeus tells a tall tale about Odysseus’s false identity, previously intended to deceive the swineherd (14.192–359), while Odysseus himself, still in disguise, tests his son’s character and sympathies (46–129). When Eumaeus is sent to the palace to tell the mother about the return of her son (130–155), Athena suddenly appears and counsels Odysseus to reveal himself (155–171). She touches him with her “golden wand” (χρυσείῃ ῥάβδῳ; 172) and changes his look to the former heroic appearance. But when the hero reveals himself, Telemachus at first does not believe him and suspects him of being a god (177–185, 192–200). What follows is the actual recognition: ἀλλ᾽ ὅδ᾽ ἐγὼ τοιόσδε, παθὼν κακά, πολλὰ δ’ ἀληθείς, ἤλυθον εἰκοστῷ ἔτεϊ ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν. αὐτάρ τοι τόδε ἔργον Ἀθηναίης ἀγελείης, [. . .] ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας κατ’ ἄρ’ ἕζετο, Τηλέμαχος δὲ ἀμφιχυθεὶς πατέρ’ ἐσθλὸν ὀδύρετο δάκρυα λείβων. ἀμφοτέροισι δὲ τοῖσιν ὑφ’ ἵμερος ὦρτο γόοιο. (“but I here, I, just as you see me, after sufferings and many wanderings, have come in the twentieth year to my native land. But this, you must know, is the work of Athene” [. . .] So saying, he sat down, and Telemachus, flinging his arms about his good father, wept and shed tears, and in the hearts of both arose a longing for lamentation; 16.205–207, 213–215, trans. Murray and Dimock 1995, 133–135)

The mental event of Telemachus’s recognition is reflected in the wording πατέρ’ ἐσθλὸν (his good father). This is not only an indication of the change in attitudes toward the former “stranger” (44), who is now seen as a close family member. In

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addition, the evaluative attribute ἐσθλὸν (good, brave) can be taken as an instance of embedded focalization (Bal 2017, 141–148; de Jong 2014, 47–72), conveying evaluative judgments and the perspective of a textual character in the narrator’s speech (explicitly or implicitly). The reunion of father and son is also highly eventful in terms of the plot: for the son, the realization that the father is alive and everything can now change for the better is not only highly relevant but also contrasts with his diegetic doxa, since, at the beginning, he is firmly convinced that the stranger is a traveler or later a divine figure. The same holds for the father who realizes that he has not been forgotten, but that his return is eagerly awaited instead. As the story progresses, there are many similar scenes, such as Odysseus’s meeting with his wife Penelope (book 23 passim) or with his father Laertes at the end of the epic (24.205–360). Each of these individual scenes contributes at a subordinate level to the success of the central event of the “homecoming” (νόστος), that is, reintegration of the hero into the household. The homecoming, in fact, is connected to a central change of state which links the fate of the hero with that of his family. “Just as Odysseus’ presence equates to a state of reintegration (for the oikos, for Odysseus’ own heroic identity, and for the status of Telemachos, Penelope and others [.  .  .]) so also his absence equates to disintegration, disjunction and disorder” (Gainsford 2003, 54). As he reveals himself to the individual members of the family step by step, his central disposition also gradually changes from an absent to a present hero. Thus, to achieve unity and balance on a macrostructural level, the plot is embellished with numerous ancillary events, making it even more eventful.

4 Eventfulness in Historical Narratives: The Crossing of the Rubicon While there is some discussion about the relation of historical and literary events (Rathmann 2003), it can be claimed that writing history is always a process of individual storywriting. As Hayden White has argued (1973, 4–11), historiography, through the “arrangement of selected events of the chronicle into a story” (7), is in many ways comparable to narrative fiction. Thus, by means of “emplotment” (cf. Roberts 2001), historians, like authors of narrative fiction, turn a series of events into a coherent structure that is fundamentally subjective in nature. While subjectivity can be regarded as a common feature of all storytelling (Bal 2017, 132; Fludernik 1996, 19–22), ancient historiography in particular tends to be morally charged, presenting the course of action from a biased point of view (Pausch 2011, 125–129; 2019, 138–140). This is also due to the fact that ancient historians are

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“heavily indebted” to epic poetry in terms of content and form (de Jong 2014, 172). In this light, the selection and presentation of events reveals not only the historian’s attitude toward the happenings concerned but also intensifies eventfulness so as to highlight some particular event. As an illustration of eventful narration in ancient historiography, one need only turn to an extraordinary historical border crossing – Caesar’s famous crossing of the Rubicon river – regarded even today as one of the most momentous events in antiquity. The crossing of the Rubicon with an army was a declaration of war against the Roman Republic, since the area south of the river had been officially demilitarized by Sulla in the year 81 BCE (Rondholz 2009, 448). When Caesar invaded Italy in 49 BCE and crossed the geographical (and legal) borderline of the river, he is said to have uttered the well-known exclamation “The die is cast!” (Suet. Iul. 32). In doing so, he set in motion the great “Roman Revolution” (Syme 1939) that eventually changed not only Rome’s history, but also “the history of the western world” (Tucker 1988, 248). It is striking, however, that Caesar himself made no mention of this allegedly impactful step in his own commentaries (on this issue, see Peer 2015, 59–61; Rondholz 2009, 434–435), and neither did his contemporaries Cicero, in his epistles, or Livy, in his Ab urbe condita (Beneker 2011, 74–76). Only after Neronian times was the crossing of the river considered as “an event of epic proportions” (Peer 2015, 61), at which time it took on symbolic significance: writers reflected on the end of the Republic and sought a decisive turning point in its fate in retrospect. It is therefore safe to say that the “myth of the Rubicon” – the highly eventful transgression as we see it today – is a literary construction rather than a historical (i.e., factual) event, and for this reason it is well suited as an object of investigation for ancient notions of narrative eventfulness. From a diachronic perspective, there are three narratives in particular that shaped the “myth” of the river crossing, each eventful in its own way: Lucan’s historical epic Bellum civile (ca. 64–65 CE), Plutarch’s Life of Caesar (after 99 CE), and Suetonius’s Divus Iulius (ca. 120 CE).

4.1 Lucan, The Civil War: Intertextual Framing and the Secularization of Epic In the opening lines of his first book, the Lucanian narrator announces that he will sing of a great and bloody war caused by a “criminal violation of the law” (iusque datum sceleri canimus; 1.2). Some fifty lines later, he adds more details to these announcements:.

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fert animus causas tantarum expromere rerum, inmensumque aperitur opus, quid in arma furentem inpulerit populum, quid pacem excusserit orbi. (My mind moves me to set forth the causes of these great events. Huge is the task that opens before me – to show what cause drove peace from earth and forced a frenzied nation to take up arms; 1.67–69, trans. Duff 1962, 7)

The poet stresses the degree of eventfulness in his epic by calling out the “great events” he will sing about and the passage from “peace” to “war.” He thus cites the famous opening lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (“fert animus”; Ov. Met. 1.1) which, certainly not by accident, take continuous change as their essential subject. A second text is alluded to in the question about the causes of this movement (“causas,” “quid [. . .] impulerit”) that evokes the intertextual frame of Virgil’s Aeneid (1.8–11). The allusions to both epics arouse the expectation of a hero-like figure (Virgil) whose agency brings about eventful transformations of states (Ovid). However, Lucan’s Caesar shares no similarities with the multifaceted, yet virtuous Virgilian hero Aeneas (Rutledge 1987). Instead, he is depicted as “a bloodthirsty ogre” (Duff 1962, xv) throughout the epic that caused more damage to his people than even Hannibal had (Ahl 1976, 107–112; Rondholz 2009, 443–444; on heroic ambiguity in Lucan, see Nill 2019). It is no coincidence that a comparison to Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps is stressed right before Caesar’s arrival at the Rubicon (1.183–185). Lucan’s conception of Caesar as anti-hero can already be observed in the introductory characterization of his destructive agency (1.143–150): always restless and impetuous (1.143–145), “his arms answered every summons of ambition or resentment” (“quo spes quoque ira vocasset”; 1.146, trans. Duff 1962, 13), leaving nothing in his way but “destruction” (“ruina”; 1.150). In contrast, the “destruction of Troy” (“Troiae [. . .] ruinas”; Virg. Aen. 1.238) is the driving force for Aeneas’s own journey with the intention of creating a new city (on this intertextual dependency on the Aeneid, see Williams 2017, 96–98). It is a common strategy of Greek and Roman poets, especially after Callimachus (third/fourth century BCE), to introduce certain frames that are familiar to the audience (storylines, intertextuality, genre conventions, etc.), only to then deliberately modify and alter them in order to surprise the narratees (Asper 2004, 51–53). In breaking with the “expected course of things” (Hühn [2009] 2014, 160) induced by the thematic/intertextual frame of the Aeneid, the poet lays emphasis on the significance of the change stirred up by the epic’s hero, thus highlighting its eventfulness in a decisive manner. The Rubicon is not only depicted as a fixed geographical landmark (“certus limes”; 1.215–216), but serves as the boundary of several semantic oppositions in the sense of Lotman ([1970] 1977, 217–239).

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Ut ventum est parvi Rubiconis ad unda, Ingens visa duci patriae trepidantis imago Clara per obscuram vultu maestissima noctem. (When he reached the little river Rubicon, the general saw a vision of his distressed country. Her mighty image was clearly seen in the darkness of night; 1.185–187, trans. Duff 1962, 17)

The whole passage is explicitly presented in embedded focalization. From Caesar’s point of view (visa), the river is just a small obstacle (parvus) that can easily be overcome (Görler 1971, 305). Yet the commander’s vision of his homeland that appears as a “mighty image” (“ingens [. . .] imago”) right before his eyes hints at the legal implications that underlie the spatial transgression. One could even say that the crossing of the Rubicon, as presented by Lucan, seems to be “a small step for a man, but a giant leap for Romanity.” In a similar way, the opposition between light (clara) and darkness (obscura) is handed down from a morally charged tradition (cf. Cic. S. Rosc. 91; Sall. Iug. 85.23), thus creating tension in relation to the “sacred” border of the river. The impression of the Rubicon as a clear-cut and impenetrable borderline between legal and illegal or good and bad is enhanced by the direct speech that the apparition of patria utters to Caesar: [. . .] quo tenditis ultra? quo fertis mea signa, uiri? si iure uenitis, si ciues, huc usque licet. (Whither do ye march further? And whither do ye bear my standards, ye warriors? If ye come as law-abiding citizens, here must ye stop; 1.190–192, trans. Duff 1962, 17)

The portentous exclamations explicitly mark the crossing of the river as a violation of prevailing law (“iure,” “huc usque licet”). It is clear at this point that the crucial conversion from law to crime pronounced in the opening lines (“iusque datum sceleri”; 1.2) is to be seen in the symbolic transgression of the River Rubicon (Beneker 2011, 89–90). Consequently, the subversion of law can be equated with the transformation from peace to war in the second proem (1.64–65). It is the realization of the legal, moral, and military dimensions supplementing the spatial crossing that causes the general to tremble and halt at the very “edge of the river-bank” (“in extrema [. . .] ripa”; 1.194, trans. Duff 1962, 17). Caesar’s hesitation is accompanied by a slowing down of narrative speed (Görler 1971, 294–295), stressing the “final chance for him to respect what is right” (Beneker 2011, 90). With respect to the narratees, the unassertive, and indeed fearful reaction to the warnings (“perculit horror”; 1.192) underscores the high degree of relevance of Caesar’s plans and actions.

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Caesar directly replies to the appearance of patria in an act of justification: Roma, fave coeptis; non te furialibus armis Persequor; en adsum victor terraque marique Caesar, ubique tuus – liceat modo, nunc quoque – miles. (O Rome [. . .] smile on my enterprise; I do not attack thee in frantic warfare; behold me here, me Caesar, a conqueror by land and sea and everywhere thy champion, as I would be now also, were it possible; 1.200–202, trans. Duff 1962, 17)

By claiming support for his cause, he not only locates himself in the semantic domain of legal integrity (“fave coeptis,” “tuus [.  .  .] miles,” “liceat”), but he also portrays himself as a harbinger of peace, refraining from war (“non te furialibus armis / Persequor”). Having so presented himself, he finally crosses the river, which is no longer a “little river” but a “swollen stream” (“tumidum [.  .  .] per amnem”; 1.204), thus reflecting the extension of the geographical border into a “boundary between respect for and transgression of what is right” (Beneker 2011, 91; cf. Rondholz 2009, 443–444) that emerged during the conversation between Caesar and the homeland’s imago. In doing so, the narrator once more indicates the highly eventful nature of the Roman commander’s transgression of both the physical and the normative borders looming in the Rubicon (on the swollen stream as “narrative delay,” see Williams 2017, 99). Additionally, there is a notable peculiarity in the script (cf. Schmid 2010, 10) of the narrative sequence. To further emphasize the significance of the crossing, “as if the reader might not have perceived exactly what Caesar has done” (Beneker 2011, 91), it is, paradoxically, described a second time (1.220–222). Unlike the first description, which resembles the point of view of Caesar, who is now aware of the eventfulness of his actions, the second description reflects the soldier’s perspective, thus presenting the whole scene once again from a different angle (Görler 1971; for a different interpretation, see Radicke 2004, 175–176). Since the two descriptions picture the same, singular event in the storyworld, it is not a case of intradiegetic repetition, defined by Schmid as representing “a low level of eventfulness” (2010, 12). Instead, the additional description of the crossing serves to stress the relevance of the event, displaying its unpredictability in the narratees’ script and its irreversibility in the twofold affirmation of the happening. Even more striking than the transgression itself are the reflective assertions of Caesar right after his arrival at the opposite riverbank: Caesar, ut adversam superato gurgite ripam Attigit, Hesperiae vetitis et constitit arvis, “Hic,” ait, ‘hic pacem temerataque iura relinquo; Te, Fortuna, sequor. Procul hinc iam foedera sunto; Credidimus satis his, utendum est iudice bello.” Sic fatus noctis tenebris rapit agmina ductor.

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(When Caesar had crossed the stream and reached the Italian bank on the further side, he halted on the forbidden territory: “Here,” he cried, “here I leave peace behind me and legality which has been scorned already; henceforth I follow Fortune. Hereafter let me hear no more of agreements. In them I have put my trust long enough; now I must seek the arbitrament of war.” Thus spoke the leader and quickly urged his army on through the darkness of night; 1.223–228, trans. Duff 1962, 19)

Having crossed the river, Caesar exhibits a crucial change in his attitude toward the event. His hesitation at the edge of the river unveils the “conflict over his status” (Beneker 2011, 90) that was held in suspense during the retardation of the scene. Yet it is remarkable that the general’s central ambivalences are not only resolved but have undergone a significant transformation. While initially purporting to be a defender of his homeland (“tuus [. . .] miles”), who postulated legal integrity for his actions (“Roma,” “fave coeptis,” “liceat”), Caesar now openly rejects both peaceful intentions (“pacem”) and public law (“iura”). Instead, he claims that he despises contracts and agreements (“procul [. . .] foedera sunto”) and will wage an open war against his enemies. This diegetic mental event is reinforced by the eventful change in the structural disposition of the plot: in crossing the Rubicon, the figure of Caesar is also shifted across the borders of the semantic subfields of right or wrong and peace or war, constituting an external event in the sense of Lotman ([1970] 1977, 233; for a similar example in Ovid, see Kirstein 2019). The semantic augmentation of the spatial transgression is further emphasized by the continued darkness (“noctis tenebris”) that accompanies his further campaign, showing the transformation of patria, which once was clara (1.187) and is now blurred with obscurity. Lucan’s Civil War represents an entirely new way of writing poetry (Radicke 2004, 1–3). In the shadow of Lucan’s epic predecessors, Virgil and Ovid, the intertextual framework serves as a trenchant way to highlight important aspects and relations. On the other hand, his work is genuinely Roman in the sense that he documents a critical point in Roman history and presents it in a way that is consistent with the Stoic tendencies of the early Principate (cf. Wiener 2006, 15–17). Rather than a coterie of gods bringing about (or preventing) eventful change, the crossing of the Rubicon is presented as a transgression of human responsibility, a morally consequential outcome of human deeds.

4.2 Plutarch, Life of Caesar: Mental Change within Character and Narrator Some years later (after 99 CE; Jones 1966, 66–70), the Greek writer Plutarch compared the lives of Caesar and Alexander the Great in his famous Parallel Lives (Βίοι παράλληλοι). Like Lucan, Plutarch regards the crossing of the Rubicon as “a vital

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moment” in the general’s life (Duff 1999, 79), which is why he presents the story in a deeply eventful manner. Generally, Plutarch’s Lives are morally charged to a high degree. By focusing on the depicted characters’ decisions, Plutarch makes his audience reflect on philosophical predicaments and their attitudes toward them, prompting self-assessment and moral edification (Duff 1999, 3–5; Pelling 2016). Here too, the crossing of the Rubicon is portrayed as a moral dilemma that, more than anything else, emphasizes the inner movement of the protagonist and its evaluation by the narrator: ὡς ἦλθεν ἐπὶ τὸν διορίζοντα τὴν ἐντὸς Ἄλπεων Γαλατίαν ἀπὸ τῆς ἄλλης Ἰταλίας ποταμὸν Ῥουβίκων καλεῖται, καὶ λογισμὸς αὐτὸν εἰσῄει μᾶλλον ἐγγίζοντα τῷ δεινῷ καὶ περιφερόμενον τῷ μεγέθει τῶν τολμωμένων, [5] ἔσχετο δρόμου καὶ τὴν πορείαν ἐπιστήσας πολλὰ μὲν αὐτὸς ἐν ἑαυτῷ διήνεγκε σιγῇ τὴν γνώμην ἐπ᾽ ἀμφότερα μεταλαμβάνων, καὶ τροπὰς ἔσχεν αὐτῷ τότε τὸ βούλευμα πλείστας· πολλὰ δὲ καὶ τῶν φίλων τοῖς παροῦσιν, ὧν ἦν καὶ Πολλίων Ἀσίννιος, συνδιηπόρησεν, ἀναλογιζόμενος ἡλίκων κακῶν ἄρξει πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ἡ διάβασις, ὅσον τε λόγον αὐτῆς τοῖς αὖθις ἀπολείψουσι. (When he came to the river which separates Cisalpine Gaul from the rest of Italy (it is called the Rubicon), and began to reflect, now that he drew nearer to the fearful step and was agitated by the magnitude of his ventures, he checked his speed. [5] Then, halting in his course, he communed with himself a long time in silence as his resolution wavered back and forth, and his purpose then suffered change after change. For a long time, too, he discussed his perplexities with his friends who were present, among whom was Asinius Pollio, estimating the great evils for all mankind which would follow their passage of the river, and the wide fame of it which they would leave to posterity; 32.4–6, trans. Perrin 1958, 521–523)

In Plutarch’s version, the River Rubicon is presented as a stable geographical border that separates (διορίζοντα) Italy from the northern provinces. Caesar, upon his arrival, begins to consider the legal and moral consequences resulting from the transgression: the embedding of the character’s focalization in the narrator’s speech (λογισμὸς) reveals that Caesar remains reluctant to cross the stream because he fears the uncertain outcome of his supposedly fateful step (δεινῷ, τῷ μεγέθει τῶν τολμωμένων). Together with his friends, he ponders the potential risks and spoils, balancing his individual gain of renown (λόγον) against the sufferings of the majority of the people (πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις). Standing at the edge of the river, Caesar is displayed as utterly torn (ἐπ᾽ ἀμφότερα μεταλαμβάνων), which stands in contrast to the self-confident miles portrayed by Lucan (see above). On a deeper level, the general’s hesitant deliberation signifies a stalemate of his “inner moral struggle” (Duff 1999, 80) between proper reason and ambition that pervades the whole biography (Beneker 2011, 86–88; Duff 1999, 79–80, 86–87). Ultimately, the crossing of the Rubicon allows Plutarch to externalize the inner change of state of the story’s character:

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τέλος δὲ μετὰ θυμοῦ τινος ὥσπερ ἀφεὶς ἑαυτὸν ἐκ τοῦ λογισμοῦ πρὸς τὸ μέλλον, καὶ τοῦτο δὴ τὸ κοινὸν τοῖς εἰς τύχας ἐμβαίνουσιν ἀπόρους καὶ τόλμας προοίμιον ὑπειπὼν, ‘Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος,’ ὥρμησε πρὸς τὴν διάβασιν. (But finally, with a sort of passion, as if abandoning calculation and casting himself upon the future, and uttering the phrase with which men usually prelude their plunge into desperate and daring fortunes, “Let the die be cast,” he hastened to cross the river; 32.6, trans. Perrin 1958, 523)

Caesar’s mental shift is presented in Platonic psychological terminology (μετὰ θυμοῦ; cf. Duff 1999, 80). The abandonment of reason (λογισμοῦ) in favor of ambition is also consistent with Plutarch’s second account of the river crossing in the biography of Pompey (60.1–2). In both descriptions, the transgression of the physical borderline of the river goes hand in hand with a realignment of the character’s attitudes and moral concepts. After being uncertain at first, Caesar gives up his former reservations in surrendering himself to the arbitrariness of fate (cf. “Te, Fortuna, sequor”; Lucan 1.226, see above). This is also apparent in the proverbial exclamation “Let the die be cast,” which in its Greek formulation is projected into the future (on the heritage of the proverb, see Beneker 2011, 86–87; Tucker 1988, 245). The eventual crossing of the river again symbolically represents a mental event that is performed by the diegetic character. In addition, this change of state in the character’s mind is reflected in the narrator’s attitude toward Caesar’s decision, thus constituting a second mental event at the level of exegesis. This is shown indexically in the mode of presentation. First, the narrator embeds the focalization of Caesar in his own speech (λογισμὸς), expressing the general’s feelings about the imminent crossing (δεινῷ, μεγέθει), providing insight into the character’s inner life, and thus empathizing with the Roman commander and his moral aporia. Second, when the river is finally crossed, the report is focalized externally while the narrator draws on his own assessment of the affairs (ὥσπερ) and on his own understanding of the “usual” course of action (τὸ κοινὸν). The shift of focalization away from the character’s mind creates a distancing effect that sheds light on the narrator’s moral judgment of the transgression concerned. The impression of narratorial disavowal is further enhanced by the closing remarks of the Rubicon passage: λέγεται δὲ τῇ προτέρᾳ νυκτὶ τῆς διαβάσεως ὄναρ ἰδεῖν ἔκθεσμον ἐδόκει γὰρ αὐτὸς τῇ ἑαυτοῦ μητρὶ μίγνυσθαι τὴν ἄρρητον μῖξιν (It is said, moreover, that on the night before he crossed the river he had an unnatural dream; he thought, namely, that he was having incestuous intercourse with his own mother; 32.6, trans. Perrin 1958, 523). By relating the crossing of the river to an incestuous encounter, the narrator hints at the common ground of both actions as consisting in the appropriation of “forbidden territory” (Duff 1999, 80 n. 29). The impersonal wording “it is said” (λέγεται), in conjunction with the offensive subject of the dream and its evaluation as “morally disgusting” (ἔκθεσμον), marks the nar-

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rator’s final distancing move to indicate his disregard for Caesar’s ethical decision that underlies his physical transgression. Not only Plutarch but also Suetonius reports on the dream that Caesar is said to have had as quaestor in Spain (Iul. 7). According to Suetonius, this omen is supposed to have announced his future domination of the world, since the earth is “the mother of all” (“omnium parens”). However, in Plutarch’s account the vision is not explained in a positive way but is left open for interpretation, making the moral aporia “even more troubling for Caesar, and perhaps for the reader as well” (Beneker 2011, 86). In this regard, a psychagogical function of the dilemma (as a reception event) can also be observed. In illustrating “the dangers of unrestrained ambition” (Beneker 2011, 87), the paradigm of the river crossing prompts the audience to rethink moral values and standards and thus serves, as Hühn and Kiefer put it, to “stimulate [. . .] ideological reorientation in the reader” (2005, 247). Similarly to Lucan, Plutarch also gives a moral coloring to the river crossing. However, he makes use of different narrative devices to highlight the eventful change the transgression is accompanied by. Instead of the distanced report of the epic narrator, the diegetic events presented are reflected at the level of the narrator, who then appears as an implied moral teacher.

4.3 Suetonius, Divine Iulius: Symbolic Augmentations A final account of the Rubicon scene is given by Plutarch’s contemporary Suetonius in his Divus Iulius (ca. 120 CE). Despite the fact that both writers may have based their record on the same primary source – the war report of Asinius Pollio (Beneker 2011, 74n1; Pelling 2009, 253; Rondholz 2009, 438n13) – and probably wrote their biographies in the same time span, there is no evidence that they knew each other’s work in any detail (Pelling 2009, 252). Suetonius applies an implicit technique by which he draws attention to particularly significant events (Pelling 2009, 259–261). By slowing down narrative speed, he emphasizes the factor of relevance and the importance of a certain episode (on this technique in general, see Bal 2017, 92–93; on Suetonius’s application of the technique, see Kirstein 2020). Similarly to Lucan’s account (see above), the crossing of the Rubicon marks the first step in Caesar’s unleashing of the Civil War. Immediately before describing the actual transgression, the narrator extensively explores the possible motivations for waging a war against the Republic, and thus steers away from the unfolding of the events proper (Iul. 30.1–5). This narratorial digression leads to the portentous quotation from Euripides’s Phoenissae (524–525) in its Roman translation provided by Cicero (Off. 3.82): .

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Nam si violandum est ius, regnandi gratia violandum est; aliis rebus pietatem colas. (If wrong may e’er be right, for a throne’s sake Were wrong most right: – be God in all else feared; Suet. Iul. 30.5, trans. Rolfe 1979, 43)

The insertion of this tragic phrase in the Rubicon scene hints at the larger context of the infamy of attacking one’s own “homeland” (patria), a connotation that goes back to Cicero’s treatment of the Phoenissae in his own philosophical works (Beneker 2011, 76–85). Yet in Suetonius’s account, the allusions are only implicit. Rather than serving as a moral statement, the quotation bestows on the crossing of the Rubicon a tragic overtone that marks it as eventful. Having arrived at the Rubicon at night (Iul. 31.1–2), Caesar is struck with the same hesitation that features in both Lucan’s and Plutarch’s accounts by realizing the irreversibility of his intended action: Consecutusque cohortis ad Rubiconem flumen, qui provinciae eius finis erat, paulum constitit, ac reputans quantum moliretur, conversus ad proximos: “Etiam nunc,” inquit, “regredi possumus; quod si ponticulum transierimus, omnia armis agenda erunt.” (Then, overtaking his cohorts at the river Rubicon, which was the boundary of his province, he paused for a while, and realising what a step he was taking, he turned to those about him and said: “Even yet we may draw back; but once cross yon little bridge, and the whole issue is with the sword”; 31.2, trans. Rolfe 1979, 45)

Suetonius, too, stresses the far-reaching consequences of the spatial transgression by means of antithetical phrasing. It is the secondary narrator, Caesar, who points out the contrast between the “little bridge” (“ponticulus;” cf. “parvus Rubicon,” Lucan 1.185; see also Rondholz 2009, 441) that separates peace from war and the crossing of which would result in “the whole issue” (“omnia”) being brought to a head. He seems to have a fair grasp of the situation and the moral dilemma he and his soldiers are facing. However, in contrast to Plutarch, the dilemma is not resolved in the form of a mental shift inside the character. Instead, it is a divine omen that – much like a deus ex machina – brings about the central change of state: Cunctanti ostentum tale factum est. Quidam eximia magnitudine et forma in proximo sedens repente apparuit harundine canens; ad quem audiendum cum praeter pastores plurimi etiam ex stationibus milites concurrissent interque eos et aeneatores, rapta ab uno tuba prosiliuit ad flumen et ingenti spiritu classicum exorsus pertendit ad alteram ripam. Tunc Caesar: “Eatur,” inquit, “quo deorum ostenta et inimicorum iniquitas vocat. iacta alea est,” inquit. (As he stood in doubt, this sign was given him. On a sudden there appeared hard by a being of wondrous stature and beauty, who sat and played upon a reed; and when not only the shepherds flocked to hear him, but many of the soldiers left their posts, and among them some of the trumpeters, the apparition snatched a trumpet from one of them, rushed to the river,

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and sounding the war-note with mighty blast, strode to the opposite bank. Then Caesar cried: “Take we the course which the signs of the gods and the false dealing of our foes point out. The die is cast,” said he; 32, trans. Rolfe 1979, 45)

While still in doubt about his decisions (“cunctanti”), some apparition (“Quidam”) playing on a pastoral reedpipe (“harundine”) gives the signal for the assault on the opposite riverbank after transforming the pipe into a war trumpet (“tuba”). It is under discussion whether this report is based on facts such as the “divine omen” being “a charade put up by Caesar, in order to motivate and persuade his soldiers to follow him across the Rubicon” (Rondholz 2009, 441). What is most striking in Suetonius’s account is the transformation of the figure’s symbolic appearance. While the reedpipe is a common element in bucolic poetry and thus often associated with peace and pastoral harmony (e.g., Virg. Ecl. 6.8; Ov. Rem. 181), the trumpet is explicitly associated with military operations (e.g., Caes. Gal. 7.81.3; Virg. Aen. 11.424). With this in mind, the supposedly “divine” apparition turning a peaceful instrument into a military one and signalling military engagement can be seen as a metaphorical account of “the transition from peace to war which results from the crossing of the Rubicon” (Rondholz 2009, 442). Most of all, it is this deeper symbolic meaning in Suetonius’s narration that renders the transgression of the geographic borderline of the river an eventful change of state. Other than Plutarch, Suetonius refrains from any moral judgment of Caesar’s “transgressive step” (Rondholz 2009, 433). Instead, he not only uses symbolic concepts of previous literary works but also fantastic elements balancing between fact and fiction in order to emphasize eventfulness for his readers. In doing so, he presents it as an inevitable, yet highly momentous incident during the Republic’s demise (Beneker 2011, 85). There is no doubt that it is due to the eventful presentation of the crossing in the three narratives that this view still prevails today.

5 Summary Eventfulness is a narrative device used by ancient Greek and Roman authors to highlight crucial changes of state in a narrative’s plot, characters, or narratorial instances, as recent theoretical reflection on the term suggests. Events marked in this way not only provide a story with temporal structure but also contribute to its raison d’être by drawing attention to certain important aspects (cf. Hühn [2009] 2014, 159–160). The general assumption that the conditions for a change of state to be regarded as an event are “subject to the influence of interpretation” (Schmid 2010, 14) is also evident in the diachronic examination of the case studies presented: eventfulness can be determined especially against the background of the

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particular literary, intertextual, historical, or situational contexts of a narrative work, as they provide the text with “canonicity” (cf. Bruner 1991, 11–13), that is, a system of pre-established norms and expectations about what counts as eventful in a particular narration. Of these, generic considerations were perhaps the most decisive factor for ancient writers. This is because while generic features are historically variable, they also set out preconditions and expectations regarding the form and content of a work (cf. Conte 1986). In historiography the relevance of an event can be gauged retrospectively as a sequence of happenings and thus as having occurred in an eventful manner, whereas in epic poetry the interaction of the central τέλος, which is usually announced in the proem, and its development in various episodes and scenes play a special role. Tragic authors, in turn, strive to achieve unity by focusing on a central eventful change in the plot or in the characters involved, while at the same time taking into account the audience present at the performance. Τhere has been little theoretical treatment of eventfulness in antiquity beyond the theory of poetry. This general theoretical discussion together with a few representative examples suggests the ubiquity of eventfulness in ancient literary practice.

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Peter Hühn

Eventfulness in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature Narratives represent changes of state ascribed to a character, either an agent or a patient, that is, to a character who actively initiates or passively undergoes a change. However, narrative requires something more crucial than mere succession and change: a decisive, unexpected turn, some significant departure from the established state of affairs: an event (Hühn 2010, 1–13; 2014, 159–178). Such a crucial “point” normally functions as the raison d’être of a narrative, underscoring its meaning and constituting its “tellability” (Ryan 2005, 589–594). Eventfulness is context-sensitive and thus culturally, historically, and generically variable. Context-sensitivity is dependent on the relation of the event to the social and cultural setting of the narrative as well as to social and cultural phenomena outside the text (Bruner 1991, 14–17).

1 Definition of Eventfulness The most elaborate proposal for a definition of eventfulness is Schmid’s (2010, 8–12) list of seven criteria. Schmid names two absolute or necessary conditions: reality and resultativity. Changes must actually occur and must be complete in order to qualify as events. He adds five relative or gradational criteria: relevance, unpredictability, persistence, irreversibility, and non-iterativity. The relative significance of these five criteria for measuring eventfulness is largely conditioned by the context, by historical factors and sociocultural phenomena. The definition of eventfulness can be elaborated on the basis of two concepts of modeling sequentiality: cognitive schema theory and Lotman’s semiotic model of the artistic text. Schema theory (Herman 2002) shows how recipients make sense of narratives by drawing on their knowledge of the world as determined by cognitive structures already existing in their minds. Two types may be distinguished: frames, i.e., situational or thematic contexts into which a text is placed so as to be understood, and scripts, i.e., sequential or procedural patterns which underlie a course of actions or incidents. However, a narrative text that conforms closely to a schema is not noteworthy and therefore not eventful, since it only reproduces what is already known and expected. Eventfulness involves departure from a schematic pattern or script activated in the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-029

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text. Departure from an established pattern may vary in degree by dint of being more or less exceptional, so that the concept of eventfulness is gradational (Schmid 2010, 9). Relevant schemata vary both diachronically and synchronically: what counts as an event must thus be assessed with reference to the context in terms of genre, culture, social group, historical period, and author. The cognitivist description of eventfulness and tellability can be supplemented by Lotman’s ([1970] 1977, 233–240) concept of sujet. Lotman describes the normative order underlying a narrative text as a “semantic field,” using spatial metaphors. The semantic field is subdivided into two subfields by a boundary which separates the scope of one set of norms from the domain of a different order with opposing norms. Crossing the boundary is normally impossible for the characters within this subfield, and if it occurs, this is significant and constitutes an “event.” Lotman defines events in gradational terms, since the degree of “resistance” a boundary puts up to being crossed conditions the degree of eventfulness. The spatial terms of “field,” “boundary,” and “boundary crossing” serve as metaphors for the modeling of normative orders. These norms can adopt diverse forms such as different social ranks, developmental stages, concepts of morality, or mental attitudes. Since these orders are constituted by binary oppositions, they can be described in pairs of opposites: middle classes vs. aristocracy, immature youth vs. mature adulthood, ignorance vs. knowledge, and so on. These categories determine the relation between the narrative text and its social or cultural context(s), defining the significance of the narrated change. Lotman’s model allows for the conceptualization of progressive, but also of regressive events. The protagonist may become immobile in the new subfield or progress further, in which case the semantic field is redefined, the previous second subfield changing into a new first subfield, which in turn is delimited by another boundary the protagonist may cross. It is also possible for the protagonist, having crossed the boundary, to retrace his steps, re-entering the initial field and nullifying the event. The cognitivist and the semantic approaches complement each other in that schema theory offers a rigorous conceptualization of the sequential coherence of actions and happenings, while Lotman provides a clear description both of the semantic framework and of the decisive turn within the sequential dimension, as well as an explicit definition of the status of the event in cultural and historical terms. The causes of change are an important issue. Individual changes can be caused by physical, social, or psychological actions. These individual sequences form different storylines which usually interact to produce the complex overall plot of the text. Changes can also be brought about by superhuman intervention such as fortune or fate.

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2 Classification of Events A narrative text typically presents a character’s life and experiences during a period of time in the course of which a decisive change of state takes place or fails to take place (Hühn 2010, 201–213; Schulz [2012] 2015, 159–291). Striving for such an eventful change and its eventual realization (or failure) constitutes the meaning of the story. Changes can be of various types. The two most fundamental changes concern, first, the character’s social status and achievement: a particular position, rank, power, or a particular feat or acquisition (event type A). Second, an interpersonal relationship: to another significant character, especially in a love relationship (event type B). To these changes in the physical or social dimension a third type can be added: a mental event (Schmid 2017), consisting in a change of a character’s attitude or knowledge (event type C). Mental events usually occur in combination with event types A or B. Eventful changes of state within these frameworks can vary in a number of ways: degree of eventfulness (whether to be expected or coming as a surprise), degree of realization (whether fully or partly realized), whether event types appear in combination or separately. Furthermore, one can distinguish between positive events (victory, success, achievement, insight) and negative events (defeat, failure, punishment, misunderstanding). One additional aspect is the reason for success or failure: personal qualities (competence vs. incompetence, strength vs. weakness, insight vs. ignorance) or the intervention of a superior agent (fate, Fortune, or God). The fairy tale can serve as a prototypical example (Wolf 2002, 35–37, 43–53; Hühn 2010, 201–203). In “Cinderella,” for example, the event consists in a significant change of state for the protagonist in two respects: winning a husband (B), and gaining an elevated social position, becoming a queen (A). These changes are not accompanied by a significant mental change (C). The eventful change of state is brought about by the combination of individual efforts and supernatural assistance. In the genre of the fairy tale, this event is conventional and thus foreseeable – for the reader, but not for the character. In the following overview, eventfulness in narratives will be analyzed with respect to type and circumstance. That is, eventful changes of state will be described as structural variants, varying in degree of modification and transformation, of the two central prototypical events (A and B) with regard to the protagonist’s personal relationship or his status, position, or achievement as they occur in combination or separately, possibly accompanied by a mental change (C). An additional aspect concerns the causes of eventful change and the forces (personal, natural, supernatural) underlying its manifestation or realization.

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3 Medieval Period, 1100–1500 Medieval English non-devotional narrative literature can be subdivided into two broadly defined groups or genres: romance, usually longer texts (in verse, later sometimes in prose) with a variety of national settings and thematic orientations – Arthurian, English, French, Breton, Roman, Greek (Cooper 2004; Chism 2009; Tether and McFadyen 2017) – and shorter tales with a wide thematic spectrum, comprising various subtypes such as fabliau, fable, and exemplum (Scanlon 1994).

3.1 Romance Romance is the dominant genre throughout this period, typically concerned with the identity, self-confirmation, and fate of a protagonist of noble birth, a knight or chivalric leader, in martial and amorous adventures (Chism 2009, 59, 65). A close coupling of the two event types A and B occurs with various degrees of complexity in the majority of romances throughout the medieval period. Due to complications and obstacles, the progress toward an eventful climax is often stretched out into long episodic sequences during which the eventful change is lost sight of and intermediate changes turn out to be only temporary. A simple example is Havelok the Dane, one of the earliest romances in Middle English (ca. 1280–1300). Two plotlines intersect: Havelok, the son of the Danish king, and Goldborow, the daughter of the English king, are displaced as children. In both cases, the father dies and leaves the child in the care of a regent who tries to usurp power for himself. Havelok wanders around England; Goldborow is imprisoned. Finally, it is revealed by supernatural signs who they truly are and that they are destined to be king and queen of England and Denmark. Being granted the intended spouse (B), Havelok then wins the Danish throne and claims the English throne in Goldborow’s name (A), defeating the two usurpers. With these developments, the dual event of this story – gaining a spouse and achieving a position, for both hero and heroine – is brought about and sanctioned by destiny. A plot structure of this type, a form of “motivation from the end” (Martínez 1996, 20), is pervasive throughout the Middle Ages (Schulz [2012] 2015, 296–299). The same two events, winning a position (A) and a spouse (B), feature in the story of King Arthur, the most popular narrative material throughout the entire medieval period. Arthur’s story appears for the first time in Middle English as the centerpiece within a mainly fictional chronicle of Britain in Layamon’s Brut (1189– 1250), named for the mythical founder of Britain, Brutus of Troy (Pearsall 2003, 15–20). Arthur’s story is presented as a national epic. At his birth he is prophetically endowed, by Merlin the magician, with superior strength and power, wealth, long

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life, and all virtues. Subsequently, these prophecies all come true over the course of a long sequence of changes of state. The major event (A), the achievement of his superior status, occurs early on, when Arthur is made king of Britain at the age of fifteen. But this significant change of state proves precarious in that his position as king is continuously under threat from hostile foreign forces and through betrayal. Arthur must defend himself against the Scots, the Saxons, the Irish, and the Germans to secure his powerful position. Continuing his triumphs in warding off these assaults, he himself starts conquering neighboring countries. To consolidate his rule as well as to demonstrate a civilizing code of honor, Arthur establishes the Round Table. Thus, the major event of gaining his superior position as king is embedded as one victory among many in the sequence of Arthur’s long career of military triumphs. The other prototypical central event, winning a suitable spouse (B) by marrying Wenhaver (otherwise Guinevere), also occurs early on, but is less prominent than Arthur’s winning of his social position. The significance of both events is ultimately reduced by subsequent developments. While Arthur is fighting in Rome, he is betrayed at home by Modred (otherwise Mordred), his son by his half-sister, who in collusion with Wenhaver has usurped power in Britain. In the ensuing fight, Modred is killed and Wenhaver flees. Arthur is wounded and brought to Avalon to be healed. The future is uncertain: there is a vague hope that he will return one day to resume his rule in Britain. Thus, in the end, both positive eventful turns (A and B) in Arthur’s life are nullified and replaced by two negative events. One continuous feature of Arthur’s story is the pervasive presence of Merlin’s supernatural craft and foreknowledge: he predicts both Arthur’s rise and fall. His prophetic pronouncements ascribe to Arthur’s life and the two events a superhuman guidance, motivating the plot from the end. On the other hand, positive eventful achievements prove to be transient due to the corruptibility of people and the basic instability of conditions in the world. The matter of Arthur is subsequently taken up in variations and selective modifications, of which three will be discussed here. The Alliterative Morte Arthure (ca. 1400; Pearsall 2003, 64–70) focuses on one specific episode out of Arthur’s long career as king and military leader: the confrontation with Lucius, emperor of Rome, and his demands for submission. In order to defend his power over an independent Britain, Arthur embarks on a campaign against Rome, entrusting Britain to Mordred as viceroy, and succeeds in defeating the Romans. Just as at the outset of Arthur’s campaign, his victory over the emperor had been prophesied in a dream, so now another dream warns him of his imminent downfall, caused by the turn of Fortune’s Wheel. This is confirmed when a messenger brings the news that Mordred has usurped power over Britain and married Waynor, Arthur’s wife (Guinevere). Arthur returns, defeating and killing Mordred, but is himself mortally wounded and eventually buried in Glastonbury.

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Of the two prototypical events, the second, establishing a vital relation to a significant person (B), does not occur at all. The first event (A), uniting and ruling Britain, the main focus of the narrative, is more than a superior chivalric achievement: it has a patriotic dimension in that Arthur functions as the embodiment and leader of the nation. In contrast to Layamon’s chronicle, the eventfulness is more precarious: the superior position is continuously under threat  – first from the outside, by a foreign enemy, later from the inside, by a close relative, his own son. Just as in Layamon (and in Havelok the Dane), the plot development is guided and “motivated from the end” by superhuman agents, as indicated by the prophecies in two dreams. Arthur’s final fall and death is presented as one more example of a universal rule: the changeability of all gains and successes. The Stanzaic Morte Arthur (ca. 1350) features the same prototypical eventful attainments (A and B; Pearsall 2003, 70–75). However, it partly links them to different protagonists in a complex configuration, intertwining two interacting plotlines: Lancelot’s adulterous affair with Arthur’s wife, Gaynor (Guinevere; B), and Arthur’s position of power in England and over the Round Table (A). The plot is not restricted to winning the two victories, woman and power. Rather, having won them, the protagonists are confronted with the challenges of retaining their gains in precarious situations. Lancelot’s love relationship with Gaynor, which forms the primary plotline, is highly precarious in that it is illicit, violates the king’s rights, and has therefore to be kept secret. It is threatened from two sides: internally, by jealousy and quarrelling among the lovers themselves; externally, by the attempts of enemies to betray the affair to the king. The threats become increasingly severe and Lancelot’s rescue operations more desperate, proving Gaynor guiltless through fighting the denouncer and defending her and himself against attempts on their lives. There is hardly a moment when the lovers can enjoy their love. In the end, Lancelot is forced by order of the Pope to return Gaynor to her husband. The other plotline, Arthur’s attempts to ward off threats to his position of power (A), starts when Lancelot’s ongoing secret affair with his wife is revealed to him and made public. The ensuing confrontation between Arthur and Lancelot results in Arthur’s campaigns against Lancelot in France, which finally prove inconclusive on account of Lancelot’s superior strength. In a dream, his downfall is foreshadowed in the image of Fortune’s Wheel. Arthur’s position is then attacked more severely from another angle when his steward in England during his absence, Mordred, his son by his half-sister, rebels and decides to marry Gaynor. On his return to England, Arthur succeeds in killing Mordred but is himself mortally wounded and brought to Avalon to be buried. In the end, both Gaynor and Lancelot repent their immoral and destructive behavior (C): she becomes a nun, he a monk. So, ultimately there is no positive event in either respect – winning the beloved

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woman (B) or gaining a position of power (A). The concluding negative eventful turns (defeat and death) are here given a Christian form with a moralistic bias, and thus lack the tragic aspect they have in other versions of the Arthurian matter. As is typical of Arthurian romance and its episodic structure, all achievements prove merely inconclusive and temporary. The impact of supernatural agents (apart from Arthur’s dream of Fortune’s Wheel) is here omitted. Both features indicate a low degree of eventfulness. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1485) is the most comprehensive cycle of Arthurian legends (Mitchell 2009, 111–130). Written in prose, it is subdivided into eight books, each focusing on a different protagonist or a different phase of Arthur’s career. All the books are characterized by an episodic structure with a broad array of subsidiary characters and inserted narratives. In addition to the topics treated before in the alliterative and the stanzaic Arthurian tales, Malory narrates the stories of Lancelot (prior to his affair with Guinevere), Gareth of Orkney, Tristram de Lyones, and the Holy Grail. The protagonists’ aspirations are overwhelmingly directed at proving their superior prowess in fights with other knights and thereby winning honor and power, indicative of the self-confirmation of nobility (A). Only rarely does the aim concern a relation to a specific significant person such as a lover (B). The event structure largely resembles that of the other Arthurian variants: a great number of intermediate turns and achievements, which in almost all cases are not enduring or function as decisive changes of state structuring the narrative sequence. The individual plotlines demonstrate to varying degrees how individual intentions and actions, due to accidental and opaque circumstances, repeatedly lead to unforeseen and unwanted consequences, resulting in diffuse negative events. A decisive factor contributing to these tendencies is the growing social disintegration of Arthur’s court and of the chivalric order and the final negative event of Arthur’s death, which also provides the title for this as well as for the previous two texts. With respect to Arthur’s career and to Merlin’s and later Morgan le Fay’s presence, various pronouncements and interferences indicate some kind of supernatural guidance, or at least a foreshadowing of the course of the protagonist’s life (again, motivation from the end). Tristram and Isode’s story can serve as an example of Malory’s narrative technique regarding eventful turns in the form of constant changes and reversals as well as intertwinings with other plotlines. Aside from proving his superiority as a knight (type A), Tristram is characterized by his intense love for La Beale Isode (B), comparable to Lancelot’s relationship with Guinevere. In both cases, the distinguishing mark of this love is its illicit nature, the desire for another man’s (a king’s) wife. Two incidents determine the beginning of Tristram and Isode’s story: wounded, Tristram is nursed back to health by Isode, the Irish king’s daughter, and they fall in love. Later, Tristram triumphs over his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall,

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in their competition for the favor of a woman, and thereby rouses his uncle’s animosity toward him. To spite him, Mark employs Tristram as an envoy to the king of Ireland to seek marriage with Isode. On their way back to Cornwall, Tristram and Isode’s love is kindled when, by mistake, they drink the love potion intended for Mark. Their love endures undiminished even after Mark and Isode’s wedding. The situation changes several times, with references to their relationship increasingly submerged in stories about other knights: the lovers commit adultery and are discovered; Tristram is arrested and Isode is sentenced to death, but he escapes and rescues her; Mark and Tristram fight and are reconciled; later, Tristram marries Isode de Blanche Mayns, the duke of Brittany’s daughter, but without consummating their marriage, out of his love for La Beale Isode. Tristram is banished from Cornwall by Mark and later recalled; the lovers are separated and later reunited, and for a while they live at Lancelot’s castle in France. In the end, Tristram is treacherously murdered by Mark, as mentioned much later in retrospect. A pervasive feature of the comprehensive retellings of the Arthurian stories seems to be the distinct downgrading of eventfulness as a result of the episodic structure of these renditions, a feature which is indicative of the growing disorder and changeability of the social world. One major deviation from these tendencies with respect to the degree and nature of eventfulness occurs in a singular and complex spin-off from the conventional Arthurian romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1375–1400). This is a tale about the testing of the chivalric qualities of Gawain, the most exemplary representative of Arthur’s Round Table, itself the epitome of moral integrity and chivalric prowess. The story starts with a mysterious Green Knight challenging King Arthur’s court to a “beheading match.” Gawain accepts the challenge on behalf of Arthur. In the ensuing encounter, he strikes the green knight’s head off and is then summoned to a return match a year later. When the time comes, Gawain sets out on his quest and comes to a castle where he is welcomed by the host and his wife. To fill the three days before Gawain’s encounter with the Green Knight on New Year’s Day, the host suggests a kind of exchange game: during the day, the host will go hunting and Gawain will stay in bed; in the evening, they will exchange winnings. While the host goes hunting, Gawain is visited by the host’s wife trying to seduce him. But Gawain resists her advances, preserving his chastity and his host’s honor while behaving with perfect courtesy toward his hostess. In the evenings, the host and his guest exchange their winnings: hunted game for chaste kisses and embraces. On the third day, however, Gawain accepts from the hostess a belt which will protect him in the coming fight on condition that he conceals it from her husband, thereby breaching their agreement. In the encounter with the Green Knight the next day, Gawain flinches at the first blow of the axe but confronts the second and third strikes. The Green Knight then reveals himself as his host and instigator of his

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wife’s temptations, declaring that Gawain passed the first two tests but partly failed the third one because – out of fear – he accepted and concealed the gift of the protective belt. The events in this story consist in Gawain’s nearly perfect success in two tests which turn out to be intimately linked: proving his superior courage as a warrior (A) and his superior morality and courtesy toward women as a knight (B). These are the two prototypical events with a surprising twist to one of them (B): not winning the woman but refraining from winning her is the event, combined with a mental event (C). This serves as proof of his chastity and moral rectitude, which stands in stark contrast to the prominence of illicit love affairs as the major events in previous renderings of the Arthurian cycle (Lancelot and Tristram). Both prototypical aspirations (A and B) also motivate the protagonist in the popular romance Guy of Warwick (“Later Couplet Version,” ca. 1420). Guy, the son of a steward, falls in love with the lady Felice, the daughter and heiress of the earl of Warwick and thus of much higher social rank than him. As a precondition for marrying him, she demands that he first prove his chivalric prowess as a knight. So he sets out to win glory in a string of victorious fights with monsters, giants, and warriors. When he returns and Felice finally accepts him in marriage, he has achieved two important goals: he has won both his beloved (B) and a high social position (A). But full of remorse for his violent past, and by way of penance for his sins, he leaves his wife and his fortune and now goes on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Upon his return, he spends the rest of his life as a hermit. Thus, the two principal aims (A and B) are first achieved but later renounced due to the unsavory means he had used to acquire them; they are replaced by another type of eventful turn: that of radically changing his attitude by becoming a pilgrim and ultimately a hermit – a mental event (C). Still another romance theme features in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1381–1385): the story of the Trojan prince Troilus’s love for Criseyde, the daughter of a Trojan defector to the Greeks (Windeatt 1992). Of the two prototypical aims only one, winning the desired person’s attachment (B), is relevant here. Troilus’s heroic exploits are mentioned, but they are not central. The decisive event (the consummation of Troilus’s love for Criseyde) does then in fact take place, but its significance is radically reduced. On the one hand, Criseyde’s love proves to be unstable: after being transferred to the Greek side in an exchange of prisoners of war, she forsakes him for the Greek Diomedes. On the other, Troilus’s love lacks true motivation: his falling in love with Criseyde comes about as a retribution by Fortune for Troilus’s mocking of other lovers. His own love turns out to be as excessive as that of the mocked lovers, rendering him incapable of actively pursuing his desire. So it is Pandarus, Criseyde’s uncle, who then engineers the gratification of Troilus’s desire. Individual agency is generally devalued through repeated references to Fortune and Fate, which are said to govern all human affairs. In the

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end, Troilus is killed in a fight by Achilles and, taken up after his death to a higher sphere, gains a critical distant perspective. This is an emphatically Christian view, constituting a mental event (C) which teaches him the “vanitie” of everything on earth, especially that of striving for fulfilment in love.

3.2 Shorter Tales While eventfulness is frequently not central to romance narratives, shorter tales tend to feature eventful turns, usually with a moral twist, highlighting correct or incorrect behavior on the part of the protagonist, who is either rewarded (positive event) or punished by circumstances or by Fortune (negative event). While longer romance texts bury the event in episodic sequences, short tales are specifically focused on a surprising eventful turn, stressing it as its raison d’être. Another significant feature of this literature is the grouping of tales with analogous event structures into a single collection. One such collection is Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women (ca. 1385), which the author offers as atonement for accusations (by the god of love) that he had disparaged womanhood with Criseyde’s infidelity in Troilus and Criseyde (Text F). The tales narrate women’s acts of faithful love, thus combining type-B with type-C events. Examples are Cleopatra, Thisbe, and Dido, who kill themselves out of loyalty to their lovers, and Lucretia, who, by her suicide, proves herself to be chaste. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (ca. 1386–1390) is a collection of tales within a frame: an aging lover (“amans”) complains to Venus about the woes of love (Mitchell 2009, 69–86). Venus sends her chaplain Genius as a confessor and instructor, warning the protagonist against succumbing to the lure of the five senses and committing any of the seven deadly sins. The instruction then takes the form of narrating cautionary tales which illustrate the negative consequences of giving in to temptation and stress the necessity of rational self-control and moral fortitude. The two alternative courses of action, either succumbing to temptation or resisting temptation, guided by reason and prudence, lead respectively to a negative or a positive event: either punishment or reward. Although some of the embedded stories feature one of the two prototypical desires in life, striving for power and achievement (A) or for love (B), the overriding focus is moralistic, illustrating the dangers of lust-driven action and advocating restraint and guidance by reason (C). The tale of Acteon, for example, demonstrates the dangers of enjoying the lust of looking (at the naked Diana): Acteon is mauled by his own hounds. By contrast, Perseus refrains from looking at Medusa and is thereby able to protect himself against her lethal gaze and cut off her head. In some cases, the eventful turn comes in two phases or steps, a characteristic form which could be called a staggered

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event (see Šklovskij [1919] 1998). In the tale about Nebuchadnezzar, for instance, the Babylonian king’s vainglorious behavior is punished by his transformation into an ox; and when he has learned humility, he is given back his human shape. The outcome of this story thus consists in a negative event which in turn triggers a final positive event (C). Other collections of analogous tales with similar event types are Chaucer’s “The Monk’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales (1386–1400; Windeatt 1986; Edwards 2000), John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes (1431–38; Mitchell 2009, 87–109) and its continuation, The Mirror for Magistrates, by various authors (1559). These tales narrate the rise and fall of important personages from history, mythology, and the Bible. These lives all result in eventful negative turns (A) brought about by Fortune, indicative of the changeability of the world. In particular, the fall occurs as a result of misbehavior within a wide spectrum of situations: punishment for sinning and violating norms, or for acting foolishly and unreasonably, or for trusting arrogantly the invincibility of one’s elevated position and happiness. Thus, negative type-A events are closely linked to mental causes (C). These happenings testify (as in Gower’s collection) to the existence of a superordinate power judging and controlling developments in the world (in the form of “motivation from the end”), endorsing Christian values. Examples narrated by Chaucer’s monk range from Lucifer and Adam via Sampson and Hercules to Nero, Holofernes, and Julius Caesar. Lydgate, with his nearly five hundred personages from biblical, classical, and medieval sources, and The Mirror for Magistrates multiply the range of examples, featuring similar eventful (negative) turns in the lives of the protagonists (type A). While these tales are characterized by parallel event structures reducing the degree of eventfulness because of the high degree of predictability, the majority of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales differ considerably from one another with respect to theme and complexity of plot structure (Cooper 1989). Moreover, they also represent different genres such as romance, fabliau, Christian legend, allegory, and fable. But here, too, the overall focus is ultimately moral and mental: the eventful turns in the course of the stories reward observance of the appropriate norms, especially rational self-restraint, or they punish violation of those norms (thus stressing the relevance of the mental dimension, implying type-C eventfulness). Although the tales do not narrate longer sections in the protagonists’ lives (as in romance), but select short crucial phases, the two prototypical pursuits – for love (B) and achievement (A) – generally act as a dynamic force. A simple example is the beast fable “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” The dominant motivation is pride and striving for superiority. The cock Chauntecleer dreams about a coming danger, but ignores the warning. When a fox invites him to a singing contest, he accepts the challenge out of pride, allowing the fox to grasp him and make off with him. But this eventful defeat (negative type A) teaches Chauntecleer

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self-critical rational insight (C) and enables him to save himself. He flatters the fox inducing him to sneer at his pursuers. When the fox opens his mouth to agree, Chauntecleer can escape (A). This is a staggered event, for Chauntecleer’s almost fatal fall out of foolish self-conceit teaches him rational insight and how to use the same trick against the fox. Punishment for misbehavior is followed by a reward for having learned the lesson (C combined with A). The sudden changes of situation are attributed to Fortune or, more abstractly, to the just order of the world. “The Miller’s Tale” (see Hühn 2010, 17–30) is a more complex tale based on the force of striving for love. The three male characters, the carpenter, Nicholas, and Absolon, all desire Alison. The old carpenter, as her husband, has a legal claim to her, but due to his age lacks her erotic feelings; Nicholas has only a sexual interest in her, which she reciprocates; Absolon’s attitude is romantic adoration with the aim of a kiss. Nicholas’s success in winning Alison (B) is enabled by the carpenter’s foolish behavior: old men should not marry young women. Absolon’s adoration is likewise foolish because it is a conventional ritual. Both misguided courses of action are punished in the form of negative events (B): the carpenter is secretly cuckolded in his own bed, and Absolon is induced to kiss Alison’s naked behind. Then Nicholas, in his turn, acts foolishly and is punished for wanting to repeat Alison’s feat by inducing Absolon to kiss his naked behind. He is punished for this error of judgment: Absolon has learned from his mishap and can now punish Nicholas by hitting his behind with a red-hot plowshare. His cry for water is misunderstood by the carpenter, who had foolishly believed Nicholas’s prophecy of an imminent flood: he cuts the ropes which hold the trough which he had prepared for the expected flood, falls, and breaks an arm (a second eventful punishment for a second error of judgment). “The Miller’s Tale” thus features three elaborate staggered negative events (punishments) assigned to the male characters for their misguided behavior (A combined with C). Alison is not punished because she does not act and makes no mistakes. Absolon learns from his mistake and becomes clever (C). “The Shipman’s Tale” thematizes both prototypical pursuits (A and B) in their interchangeability. The merchant’s wife grants her love to the monk Daun John for a sum of money which he had earlier borrowed from the merchant. When the merchant later reclaims the loan, Daun John tells him that he had already paid it back to his wife, which she cannot deny. Since she had already spent it on herself, she pays her husband back with intensified sex (B). This is an intricate staggered event, consisting in the ingenious trick of exchanging money for sex and sex for money (A and B), basically at the cost of the duped husband (lack of understanding: C). The first event consists in Daun John’s love-making with the merchant’s wife (B) thanks to the money borrowed from him. This is followed by Daun John’s claim that he had already repaid the wife (successful cheating: A). The third and final event is the wife’s offer to pay back the money in the form of passionate sex, which repeats

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and reverses the original eventful exchange of money and sex (also a successful move of self-protection). Here, the basis of eventfulness is not, in contrast to the other cases, reward or punishment for reasonable or unreasonable behavior, but the particularly ingenious trick of trading sex for money and money for sex (interchanging A and B).

3.3 Summary: Patterns of Eventfulness in Middle English Narratives A distinction must be made between the two broad genres prevalent during the medieval period, between romance plots and plots in short tales. Romance plots, especially from the Arthurian cycle, but also, for instance, in Guy of Warwick, tend to downgrade eventfulness with respect to degree and persistence. Romance narratives often come in long, drawn-out episodic sequences with frequent changes and reversals in which decisive positive turns (A and B) prove unreliable, inconclusive, or unstable, and are occasionally superseded by an eventful religious turn (C). Exceptions are stories about specific protagonists from outside the Arthurian complex such as Havelok the Dane. One singular exception linked to the matter of Arthur is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an original story about one specific incident. Moreover, these exceptional cases link both prototypical event types  – winning a powerful position (A) and securing a significant personal relationship (B)  – whereas episodic Arthurian tales present problematic love relationships tainted with infidelity. Problematic eventfulness in a love relationship is also apparent in the Greek romance of Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer. Instability of events in these cases is indicative of the general changeability of the world. On the other hand, however, there are frequent hints that a superhuman agent (Fortune, Fate) will interfere with developments in human affairs, revealing the existence of a hidden order (motivation from the end). By contrast, the other broad genre, shorter tales in collections, is characterized by the pronounced eventfulness of the stories. The underlying order of norms which serves as the frame of reference for the events is decidedly moral. The relevant category is the question of right or wrong behavior, which concerns the application of reason to one’s actions as opposed to being motivated by the senses, desires, and fears. The eventful turn (punishment as a negative event or reward as a positive event) testifies to the validity of the normative order in the world. Such turns can refer to either of the two prototypical motives: desire for achievement (A) and desire for love (B). In respect of the functioning of such a moral frame of reference, there exists a difference in complexity and degree of eventfulness between the collections by Gower, Lydgate, the Mirror for Magistrates, and Chaucer’s “The Monk’s

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Tale” on the one hand, and the majority of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales on the other. While those four collections exemplify the positive effects of applying the norms and the negative results of violating them, Chaucer’s tales demonstrate the witty application and violation of these norms in the form of staggered events, occurring with several decisive turns for the protagonist or other characters. Whereas the degree of eventfulness is relatively low in the parallel collections on account of repetitiveness and conventionality, Chaucer enhances the degree through surprising turns in the staggered developments. Thus in spite of the differences between the collections and most of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the event as a crucial clue is central to the shorter tales, constituting their tellability. This result seems to be that the occurrence of clear events in stories must be considered as a genre-specific phenomenon in the late Middle Ages, possibly comparable to the Renaissance novella.

4 Eighteenth Century Narrative literature in the eighteenth century is characterized by the rise of the novel (Watt 1957). One central innovation is the shift from traditional plots and characters to original, contemporary ones. A great many of these novels narrate the protagonists’ life-stories, frequently signaled by the protagonist’s name in the title. Although Daniel Defoe’s novels, the earliest examples of the genre, claim to be factual biographies told by the protagonists themselves and merely edited by the author, they are in fact fictional. Defoe’s first novel, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719), follows the protagonist’s life from childhood to old age. Robinson leaves his family against his father’s wishes and goes to sea, driven by a strong spirit of enterprise. There follows a long sequence of changes and reversals in circumstance and achievement. He is captured by pirates and sold into slavery, escapes, settles in Brazil as a plantation owner, sails to Africa to buy slaves, is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, cultivates it and survives there for twenty-eight years, has encounters with natives as well as with European sailors and settlers, before finally returning to England, where he reclaims the profits from his estate in Brazil and spends his old age as a rich man. Of the two prototypical aims in life, achievement and love, only the first is relevant to Robinson. His central motive throughout his career is acquiring wealth and gaining a secure position, fulfilling what Watt (1957, 62–77) calls “economic individualism.” He is a radical individualist without personal attachments to anyone, apart from his faithful servant Friday. The eventful turn in Robinson’s life occurs in stages. After a few years on his island, he becomes a devout Christian, repenting his sins, reading the Bible, praying

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to God, and worshipping on Sunday (C). After complaining so long about his outcast situation, he becomes aware of the miracle of his preservation on the fertile island, attributing this condition to God’s Providence. It is in this light that he interprets the development of his life, resulting in a position of wealth and security as an event (type A combined with C). The frame for this definition of eventfulness can be identified as the (secularized) Calvinist notion that only a limited number of men are predestined by God’s Providence to be redeemed from damnation, and that a person’s economic success is a sign of belonging to the elect. The event is thus sanctioned as a divine gift. In retrospect, the protagonist recognizes the coherence of the episodic development of his life as having been guided by God’s “invisible hand” (motivation from the end). At the same time, the development resembles the abstract Christian script, the narrative of the “happy fall”: the deep fall of humankind into sin and desolation turns out to be the precondition for eventual redemption through Christ. The radical change in Robinson’s life therefore acquires a high degree of eventfulness, since the event is unexpected and unearned. It was the very breaches of the norms, his disobedience and spirit of adventure, that were the preconditions for his eventful success. Defoe’s second novel, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722), replicates this pattern of eventfulness under changed conditions (Kroll 2010, 49–62). The protagonist is a woman who starts life in the worst imaginable circumstances: born in prison as the daughter of a deported criminal. She then pursues both central aims: an economically secure existence (A) and a suitable partner (B), mainly the former through the latter by securing a respectable social position through marriage. Her career is an episodic chain of constantly changing circumstances: five marriages interspersed with working as prostitute, pickpocket, and shoplifter. In the end, she is arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. But the prison chaplain induces her to repent and has her death sentence commuted to deportation together with her “favorite” husband, Jemmy, whom she meets again in prison, convicted for highway robbery (B). They had separated years before when they discovered after the wedding that they had cheated each other about their wealth. The novel ends with a middle-class success story. In the colony of Virginia, Moll and Jemmy build up considerable wealth (A) from the proceeds of her criminal activities, an inheritance from her mother, and her own hard work. After serving their sentence, they return to England with honor and riches. Here again the event comes about in a protracted process, starting with the protagonist’s repentance (C) and culminating in her final resettlement in England. And as in Robinson Crusoe, the eventful turn, the happy fall, is ascribed by the protagonist to the influence of God’s Providence, his “invisible hand,” endowing the event with divine sanction (motivation from the end). The main emphasis lies here on acquisition (A),

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coupled with establishing a significant personal attachment (B). In both novels the event emerges from the long episodic sequence as the essential raison d’être of the story. The plot of Moll Flanders shares structural features with two different contemporary types of narrative. With the picaresque novel it shares an episodic structure, ending with a radical turning away from secular reality altogether; with criminal biographies it shares the structure of a criminal career, generally resulting in the criminal’s execution. Thus Defoe’s novel basically takes over the plot structure from these earlier texts, but concludes on a more positive note. Historically, the most influential plot and type of eventfulness in the eighteenth century is the epistolary novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson (see Hühn 2010, 63–73). Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, of petit-bourgeois origins, works as a servant girl in the aristocratic household of young Squire B., where she is exposed to the persistent sexual advances of her master. The plot consists in the drawn-out dynamic contest between Squire B.’s persistent sexual harassment and attempts at seduction and Pamela’s equally firm virtuous resistance, defending her virginity out of a high sense of morality. The eventful turn is prepared for by Pamela’s diary falling into Squire B.’s hands, revealing to him her quiet suffering and the moral basis of her resistance as well as inadvertent indications of her emotional attachment to him. As a consequence, he begins to change his attitude and behavior (C) and in the end proposes to her. The eventful turn is then completed with their wedding, which, for Pamela, results in gaining both the beloved person (B) and an elevated social position and wealth (A), that is, both prototypical events together (as in the fairy tale). The title of the novel defines this double eventful achievement as a reward for her personal moral firmness, but there are also utterances in Pamela’s letters which attribute this success to Providence. The event is not recognized here belatedly (as in Defoe) but comes about more as a surprise due to the prevailing perspective. Pamela presents her own development spontaneously in letters written out of the ongoing experience itself (“writing to the moment”). This is an event of a high degree – even more so than in Moll Flanders, since the rigidity of the British class system made such a crossing of social boundaries absolutely impossible. The plot in Richardson’s much longer and more complex second epistolary novel, Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady (1747–48), is based on a dynamic and antagonistic configuration of man and woman roughly similar to Pamela, but leads to a completely different kind of event. An aristocratic libertine, Robert Lovelace, desiring a beautiful and virtuous woman, Clarissa Harlowe, tries to overcome her resistance and seduce her. Socially and in terms of character configuration, the plot is comparable to that of Pamela, but at a higher social level. Clarissa comes from a rich bourgeois family ambitious to ascend to the nobility but whose social status is

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still low. The family’s strategy is to promote suitable marriages for the two daughters: Arabella with Robert Lovelace, heir to an earldom; and her younger sister Clarissa with Roger Solmes, a wealthy man who would help her brother James to become Lord Harlowe. But Clarissa detests Solmes and refuses to marry him. Lovelace turns away from Arabella and begins to court Clarissa, who is fascinated by his charm but repelled by his attitudes and wants to rescue him from his evil ways. They pursue a secret correspondence. Neither of the two prototypical aims (position and personal attachment) pertain to the protagonist Clarissa. She is not the agent of the development but the passive object and means for other people’s aims and plans: for her acquisitive family, she is the means to achieve social advancement; and for Lovelace, she is the object of his desires. When the Harlowes’ pressure on Clarissa to marry Solmes increases, Lovelace takes advantage of her fear of a forced marriage by eloping with him. Clarissa is then in Lovelace’s power, kept in various lodgings and in the end, unawares, in a brothel. Finally, overcome by his passion, Lovelace rapes her. She refuses to marry him and after many vicissitudes falls ill and dies in full consciousness of her virtue, forgiving everyone and setting her mind on God, having virtually become a saint. This eventful change (C) in the protagonist Clarissa’s life, although based on the same unshakable adherence to virtue as in Pamela’s case, is more radical: the preservation of virtue despite the physical fact of rape together with the rejection of worldly life in favor of eternity. She adamantly refuses to comply with the two prototypical desires and aims of others, her family’s and Lovelace’s, i.e., achievement (A) and love (B). In doing so, she thwarts both in a radical act of rejecting worldly aims altogether in favor of an otherworldly, Christian ideal – a change of state with a high degree of eventfulness on account of its unexpectedness. An eventful social rise both comparable to Pamela’s and in contrast to it occurs in Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749; Kempf 2010, 74–83). The novel follows the development of the protagonist from the moment he is found as an abandoned baby, supposedly of socially low origin, and adopted by Squire Allworthy, up to the disclosure, at the age of twenty-one, of his true parentage and to his marriage, the eventful achievement of both prototypical aims. In the end, Tom is established in an aristocratic position as Squire Allworthy’s heir (A), and he is united with his beloved Sophia, daughter of a neighboring squire (B). Though structurally similar to the double eventful turn in Pamela, Tom Jones represents an aristocratic counterpart to the bourgeois example of Pamela. While Pamela crosses the class barrier from low to high, the foundling Tom Jones is finally discovered to be of aristocratic birth as the illegitimate son of Squire Allworthy’s sister, Bridget, thus being of high status all along without knowing it. In the course of the story, Tom crosses the class barrier twice. The first time is his adoption as a low-class foundling by Squire Allworthy. But this position is not permanent, for he loses it

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again when he is expelled by Allworthy as the result of false accusations by various envious members of Allworthy’s household, exploiting Tom’s youthful imprudence. As a consequence, he is forced into an extended confrontation with social reality on the road to London and within London society, through which he acquires a mature personality with insight, prudence, and self-discipline. When Allworthy, having seen through the false accusations, takes him back, Tom has morally and cognitively “earned” his aristocratic status, which entitles him also to marry his love. Thus, the final eventful turn in the protagonist’s life couples the aristocratic principle of descent with the acquisition of middle-class morality and enlightened mentality (C). An analogous event structure underlies the popular “courtship novels,” notably of Frances (Fanny) Burney, the first great female novelist of the eighteenth century. The protagonist, always a young woman of aristocratic birth, is introduced into contemporary society, in London, seeking and in the end obtaining marriage in order to establish her identity (B) together with a respectable social position (A). To achieve these aims, she has to find her way through a complex net of friendly, antagonistic, seductive, or deceptive persons and relationships. The final eventful marriage is typically delayed for hundreds of pages by intrigues, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations. Burney’s first (epistolary) novel, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778), develops this pattern along the following lines. Evelina is the daughter of the dissipated Sir Belmont, who, disappointed in his expectation of a fortune, had abandoned his family. Evelina is brought up by a guardian. But at the age of seventeen she visits a female friend in London and is thus introduced into high society. Ignorant of the social conventions, she first makes a series of humiliating faux pas but gradually acquires self-discipline, the capacity to make ethical judgments and to navigate complex situations. She falls in love with Lord Orville. But a series of estrangements and misunderstandings hinders the development of their relationship: the behavior of her ill-bred relatives seems to estrange her from noble Lord Orville; she is mortified by the pursuit of the duplicitous Sir Willoughby. In the end, the last obstacle, her status as an unacknowledged daughter, is removed when it is discovered that her former wet nurse had passed her own daughter off as Sir Belmont’s. Sir Belmont now acknowledges his marriage and Evelina as his daughter. Consequently, Lord Orville and Evelina can marry. The event – Evelina’s winning her beloved as her husband (B) together with a secure elevated social position (A) – signifies not the crossing of a class boundary (as in Pamela) but the overcoming of barriers within a single class, within aristocratic society itself – barriers constituted by human selfishness in various forms: greed, desire, jealousy, malice, snobbery, and ignorance. These motives act as factors separating the lovers. The persistence of these factors is the reason for the

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great length of the novel. Although both aims, love and social status, are intimately connected, the primary emphasis lies on the love element. One important aspect is the emphasis on the fact that the protagonist is a young woman, and the plot is a female initiation story, narrating the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Alongside the rise of the mainstream novel, the eighteenth century saw the emergence of two novelistic subgenres: the crime novel and the gothic novel. Crime novels narrate the beginnings, developments, and endings of criminal careers. One model for these novels are (partly fictionalized) criminal biographies about notorious highwaymen and other villains whose misdeeds and punishment provide entertainment in combination with moral instruction. Defoe’s Moll Flanders uses some of these elements. Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) exemplifies features of this subgenre. The story, set during the wars in the early eighteenth century, traces the course of the protagonist’s life in mock-heroic style on the Continent and in England. Ferdinand Fathom is the son of an English sutleress who saves the life of Scottish Count Melvil in a battle. Out of gratitude, Melvil adopts Fathom and raises him as a companion to his own son, Renaldo. While growing up, Fathom acquires exquisite social skills but totally lacks moral sense. He avails himself of these skills exclusively in the service of his criminal leanings, motivated by the two classic aims in life, love (B) and achievement or status (A), perverted, however, into indiscriminate sexual desire and into avarice and cupidity. He pursues these aims in a chain of changing situations and settings during which he plays various roles, inter alia that of a count, constantly scheming and deceiving. In the beginning he is successful on account of people’s naivety and gullibility. But these successes (seducing women and cheating people) are only short-term achievements and do not represent permanent changes of state and thus do not constitute events. And in the long run, Fathom starts to lose and finally fails completely, because people have become suspicious and see through his schemes. His defeat is attributed to Providence. The novel ends with Fathom’s downfall and repentance (C). However, he is forgiven and even granted the fulfilment of his two aims, though in a severely restricted way: he marries one of his victims (B) and lives on a small income (A). His criminal activities are retrospectively seen as having served to correct people’s deficiencies (naivety, credulity, stupidity). Thus, the defeat of the criminal, by endorsing the validity of the right moral order in society, must be seen as the ultimate event underlying the plot, replacing the eventful achievement of the two prototypical aims in life, which here occur in perverted forms and ultimately as failures. In addition, the protagonist’s fate contrasts with the positive foil of Renaldo’s life. The gothic novel is represented here by the first specimen of this genre, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), set in medieval southern Italy. The convoluted plot, which in the complicated interrelationship of the various

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characters and in its references to past actions and incidents is only gradually disclosed to the reader, concerns the ownership of the principality of Otranto, for which two men from two families compete with each other, thereby pursuing one of the two prototypical aims, superior position and status (A): on the one hand, Manfred, the present prince of Otranto, whose grandfather killed the rightful owner, Alfonso, and usurped the principality, with his wife and children; on the other hand, Theodore, the grandson of the murdered rightful ruler, as well as Frederic and his daughter Isabella, the actual heirs to the principality after Alfonso’s death. Manfred strives to legitimize his claim to the title, first by marrying his son to Isabella and, when his son is killed, by divorcing his wife and marrying Isabella himself. The significant personal relationship (the second prototypical aim: B) is merely utilized by Manfred, but also by Theodore, as a means of achieving the first aim: possession and power (A). In the course of the complex interactions, Manfred is finally defeated and Theodore installed as the rightful prince of Otranto, to be married to Isabella. Thus, the negative event of Manfred’s loss contrasts with the positive eventfulness of Theodore’s succession to power and woman. But because Theodore had originally been in love with another woman and was obliged to shift his attachment to Isabella for the sake of reasons of state, his political and personal success is somewhat qualified. One significant feature of the plot development leading to the defeat of usurpation and the restitution of lawful order is the supernatural interference by Alfonso, whose murder had been the origin of injustice and disorder. The last example of eighteenth-century fiction to be analyzed is Things As They Are or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) by the political and social philosopher William Godwin. This novel possesses an involved plot interlinking crime, detective, and political elements. The basic configuration underlying the plot is the relation between Caleb Williams, a poor orphan, and the landowner Squire Falkland, who employs him as his secretary. The driving motives of the characters differ fundamentally from one another. Falkland’s dominant desire is a variant of one of the two prototypical aims: striving for an elevated powerful position in society (A). In his case, however, he inherited this status and possesses it already, so that his main aspiration is to gain the recognition of others, as constitutive of his identity. Caleb Williams, by contrast, strives for knowledge and truth, for revealing covered-up states of affairs, and for punishing the abuse of power – hence, a moral and judicial achievement (also to be classified as a variant of A). The plot development starts with Williams’s curiosity about Falkland’s past, about which he is later informed by Falkland’s steward, notably an old conflict with his tyrannical neighbor, Tyrrel, and the latter’s death after a violent quarrel. Falkland was acquitted on account of his stainless reputation, and two tenants of Tyrrel were convicted instead. Williams starts to spy on Falkland, finally forcing him to confess that he had indeed killed Tyrrel but could not admit his guilt because of his

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dependence on honor and reputation. Falkland forces him to keep his secret under penalty of death. Thereafter, Williams is subjected to acts of intimidation, despotism, and terror in a long history of persecution by Falkland, which reveals the scope of the latter’s tyrannical power and the corruption of legal institutions. At long last, Williams succeeds in taking Falkland to court. In his deposition, he both confirms his discovery of Falkland’s guilt and his deep reverence for his nobility, deploring his decision to take him to court. Falkland throws himself into his arms, confesses his guilt, and praises the greatness of Williams’s mind. Soon afterward Falkland dies. The story of Caleb Williams’s life demonstrates the corruption of contemporary society (“things as they are”) on account of despotism and injustice, both through the behavior of (privileged) individuals and the functioning of (legal) institutions and through status, wealth, and power, including the inordinate preoccupation with honor and reputation motivating the behavior of the aristocracy. These driving forces produce conditions of inhumanity and crime, regardless of the moral stature of individuals. Noble Falkland is almost as despotic in the treatment of his victim as is Tyrrel. In the corruption of interpersonal relationships and social institutions, no eventful changes and achievements are possible, either as the result of human aspirations and actions or through the intervention of a superhuman agent (conspicuously absent from this novel). Nor is a fundamental reformation of the general situation envisaged. Under these conditions, no events occur in the novel: neither Williams’s discovery of Falkland’s guilt, his escape from persecution, nor his later indictment of Falkland are eventful. The same goes, however, both for the well-meaning Falkland and the evil Tyrrel. The death of the emaciated Falkland at the end does not come as an event either, for his life simply runs out, with no satisfaction for Williams or anyone else.

4.1 Summary: Patterns of Eventfulness in Eighteenth-Century Narrative Fiction A general comparison of the novels analyzed as representative of narrative fiction in the eighteenth century shows two pervasive tendencies: the plot in almost all of them is characterized by a high degree of eventfulness in the development of the protagonists’ lives, and the context for the definition of eventfulness is the English class system, with a clear divide between the upper wealthy (aristocratic) class and the subordinate class of the bourgeoisie (and the lower classes of workers and peasants). Interestingly, in some of the novels, the achievement of the event is due to the interference of a superhuman agent (Providence) comparable to some of the medieval texts: in Defoe, in Richardson’s Pamela, in Smollett, and in Walpole. These plots are “motivated from the end” (indicative of still effective Christian concepts).

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The event concerns mainly one of the two prototypical aims: reaching a high position in society (A), in conjunction with or through the means of achieving the second prototypical aim: finding a suitable partner (B). Eventfulness occurs in the lives of both men and women. This pattern is found in Defoe’s novels, Richardson’s Pamela, and in forms of variation (restitution of an inherited position, relative rise within the upper social stratum) in Fielding’s Tom Jones, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, and Burney’s novel. In some cases (e.g., Walpole), the eventful achievement is qualified in its degree. Three novels deviate from this pattern. Smollett’s Count Fathom leads to the essential disappointment of both aims because the event is first sought by criminal means, only to be granted in a severely reduced form. Richardson’s Clarissa abandons this pattern radically, replacing it with an event of a different type: rejecting worldly aims in favor of an otherworldly orientation (C). By contrast, Godwin’s Caleb Williams does not feature an event at all, with the implied reason that the rigorous class structure and its corrupting effect on all human relations, which precludes any kind of positive change. The social and historical context for pervasive eventfulness in eighteenth-century novels can be seen from the perspective of changes in English society in the wake of the industrial revolution and the reorganization of the economy through the growth of the market principle, the expansion of trade, and the establishment of capitalism, triggering an increase in social mobility. A contributing factor also appears to be the emergence of individualism in the course of the eighteenth century with the growing emphasis on personal achievement and self-confirmation. In this respect, one reaction to the awareness of class society is the desire to change one’s social station and establish a place in society without changing society itself, which is found in most novels. A very different reaction is the demand for fundamental social change, as in Godwin’s novel, where change is not explicitly called for but is a corollary to the depiction of “things as they are.”

References Bruner, Jerome. 1991. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18:1–21. Chism, Christine. 2009. “Romance.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100–1500, edited by Larry Scanlon, 57–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Helen. 1989. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooper, Helen. 2004. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edwards, Robert R. 2000. “Narrative.” In A Companion to Chaucer, edited by Peter Brown, 312–331. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hühn, Peter. 2010. Eventfulness in British Fiction. With contributions by Markus Kempf, Katrin Kroll, and Jette K. Wulf. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hühn, Peter. 2014. “Event and Eventfulness.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. 2nd ed. Vol. 1, 159−178. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kempf, Markus. 2010. “Henry Fielding: Tom Jones.” In Eventfulness in British Fiction, by Peter Hühn, with contributions by Markus Kempf, Katrin Kroll and Jette K. Wulf, 74–83. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kroll, Katrin. 2010. “Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders.” In Eventfulness in British Fiction, by Peter Hühn, with contributions by Markus Kempf, Katrin Kroll and Jette K. Wulf, , 49–62. Berlin: De Gruyter. Lotman, Jurij. (1970) 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated by G. Lenhoff and R. Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Martínez, Matías. 1996. Doppelte Welten: Struktur und Sinn zweideutigen Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Mitchell, John Allan. 2009. Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pearsall, Derek. (2003). Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “Tellability.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 589–594. London: Routledge. Scanlon, Larry. 1994. Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmid, Wolf. 2003. “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” In What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, 17–33. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2017. Mentale Ereignisse: Bewusstseinsveränderungen in europäischen Erzählwerken vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schulz, Armin. (2012) 2015. Erzähltheorie in mediävistischer Perspektive. Edited by Manuel Braun, Alexandra Dunkel, and Jan-Dirk Müller. Berlin: De Gruyter. Shklovsky [Šklovskij], Viktor. (1919) 1998. “The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, introduction by Gerald L. Bruns, 15–51. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Tether, Leah, and Johnny McFadyen, eds. 2017. Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press. Windeatt, Barry. 1992. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Werner. 2002. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie.” In Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, edited by Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, 23–104. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

Florian Remele

Eventfulness in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature 1 Definition Not every occurrence is an event. Whether an occurrence is considered an event depends on its eventfulness, i.e., the degree to which it qualifies as a relevant change of state that differs from conventional expectations (Schmid 2003, 24–25). Since these expectations and the evaluation of an occurrence as relevant vary according to the observer’s perspective and prior knowledge, the eventfulness of an occurrence cannot be assessed objectively (Hühn 2009, 90). There are no events per se (Renner 2004, 362). Events are rather the result of eventfulness, which emerges as part of the interaction between observer and occurrence (Bleumer 2020, 21). For narratives, the concepts of “event” and “eventfulness” are crucial, since narratives are constituted by changes of state and often operate with the tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the conventional and the unconventional, the expected and the unexpected. Therefore, narratology sets out to analyze and categorize how eventfulness and events emerge on different levels of a narrative.

2 Narratological Approaches to Events and Eventfulness Based on Jurij Lotman’s influential postulate that an “event in a text is the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field” ([1970] 1977, 233), Wolf Schmid defines “event” in a broader sense “as a change of state that fulfils certain conditions” (2003, 24). Since not every change of state qualifies as an event, Schmid suggests two indispensable conditions and five gradational features for categorizing an occurrence as an event and determining its degree of eventfulness (1992, 108–109; 2003, 24–29; 2014, 14–19; 2017b, 68–81). The first condition that must be fulfilled to classify something as an event concerns the event’s status as “factual, or real” (Schmid 2003, 24). In this case, “factual” and “real” do not refer to an extra-textual reality; the terms rather emphasize that the event must actually happen within the narrated world (24). The second mandatory requirement is “Resultativity,” and demands that the change of state “reaches completion in the narrative world of the text” (24). While these two conditions are binary categories, the five additional critehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-030

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ria are designed as gradational features. These criteria are (1) relevance, (2) unpredictability, (3) persistence, (4) irreversibility, and (5) non-iterativity, which means that events must, to some degree, be (1) relevant to the observer of the event, (2) a deviation from conventional expectations, (3) consequential within the narrated world, (4) unlikely to be reversed to a previous state, and (5) unlikely to occur again (Schmid 2003, 26–29). Hartmut Bleumer (2020, 38–64) has most recently argued that Schmid’s categories were developed on the basis of modern realist literature and must therefore be modified to be applicable to premodern narratives. He especially questions the prioritization of the category “real” and assigns a higher priority to the remaining features (61). While Schmid’s ranking might be appropriate for modern realist literature, the categories “relevance” and “unpredictability” are, from a historical perspective, considerably more significant (62). Bleumer’s approach is explicitly hermeneutical in that he stresses that events cannot be assessed objectively, since they come into existence through narration and emerge in the interaction between observer and occurrence (59, 21; also Schulz 2012, 180–181; Waltenberger 2016, 39–43). Schmid’s categories remain, nevertheless, crucial for describing how a narrative creates eventfulness. In a hermeneutical perspective, however, these features are not understood as mandatory requirements that need to be fulfilled, but rather as narrative strategies that encourage the observer to perceive an occurrence as an event. Since these narrative strategies depend on historical, cultural, and literary contexts, certain criteria need to be modified, added, or dismissed when applied to premodern times. Although there are many disputes over the defining features of events (Rathmann 2003), the majority of researchers agree that events emerge by differing from what an observer deems expected and/or ordinary (e.g., Lotman [1970] 1977, 234; Bruner 1991, 11; Suter and Hettling, 2001 24; Schmid 2003, 26; Mersch 2008, 28; Hühn 2009, 89; Gruber 2014, 98; Bleumer 2020, 22). Depending on the narrative level, an event contrasts (1) with the order within the narrated world, (2) with the previous established attitude of the narrator, (3) with conventional narrative patterns, or (4) with social and cultural norms in the reality of the recipient. Peter Hühn and Jörg Schönert call these different types of event (1) “event in the happenings,” (2) “presentation event,” (3) “mediation event,” and (4) “reception event” (2005, 7; see similary Gruber 2014, 67). To identify the discrepancy between norm and occurrence, the norm against which the occurrence stands must be determined, which poses particular methodological challenges, especially in historical contexts. For the first two types of event (event in the happenings, presentation event), the assessment is relatively straightforward, since most literary texts provide information both on the conventional setup of the narrated world and the narrator’s attitude (Schmid 2014, 21). However, this is not the case for mediation events and

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reception events. Describing an unexpected change in the way the story is narrated or a transformation of the recipients’ ideological position requires reconstruction of the contemporary expected narrative conventions and dominant social and cultural norms. In most cases, research on modern literature can rely on available contextual data to ascertain the literary conventions of a specific time period (Michler 2015, 37); however, extra-literary information on the medieval conditions of producing and receiving literature remain scarce. Medievalists mostly still need to reconstruct the literary field and its conventions based on indications within literary texts (Grubmüller 1999, 195; Gerok-Reiter and Robert 2019, 20–21). There are no extra-literary poetological treatises in the vernacular which prescribe the features of a certain genre or document the common literary practice. Nor is there a functionally differentiated literary system providing a contextual theoretical discourse on literature and its conventions. To avoid ahistorical hypotheses, it is thus necessary to focus on an aspect that, according to Schmid (2014, 22), is often underestimated when discussing events and eventfulness: intertextuality. Examining intertextual references allows the determination of the contexts and expectations that are evoked by the texts themselves. This perspective is, of course, not unique to medieval literature, but it is especially relevant for historical periods for which there is little contextual information. Instead of deciding in advance that a narrative should be interpreted in light of certain abstract patterns, which might not even have been established at the time, it is methodologically more precise to reconstruct the conventions against which mediation events stand by analyzing the tangible references to other texts (Remele 2021). By referring to a previous text, a narrative can suggest a given reception against the background of the referenced pre-text. Intertextuality can be used as a narrative strategy to evoke certain narrative expectations, in order to subsequently offer alternatives that differ from the prompted expectations and are, for this reason, regarded as eventful (Schmid 2014, 22). Moreover, this perspective takes into account the fact that texts do not only refer to narrative phenomena that are already considered conventional. Texts can also stage a referenced narrative phenomenon in a certain manner so that it appears as conventional. Consequently, the convention against which an event stands is not necessarily previously given; it can also be created in the process of narrating an event. Conventions and events are mutually dependent and generate each other: an event needs to differ from a convention to be considered an event, and a convention appears as conventional by being compared to an extraordinary event (Remele 2020, 254–255). For earlier periods of literary history in particular, this approach to reconstructing conventional expectations and their relationship with events ensures a historically appropriate assessment of what is considered eventful or conventional at a certain point in time. This method is specific to the analysis of medi-

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ation events, in other words, the changes in the way a story is narrated that are perceived as unconventional by contemporary recipients. This aspect touches on pivotal questions in medieval studies including re-narrating or the formation of narrative alternatives. In the context of these characteristic phenomena of medieval literature, the historical applicability of the categories of “unpredictability” and “iterativity” in particular must be reviewed.

3 Literary Practices: Re-Narrating and Eventfulness Large parts of medieval narrative literature in the vernacular were rewritings of well-known stories. Consequently, narrating in the Middle Ages means re-narrating (Bumke and Peters 2005; Zacke et al. 2020), which is why some plot elements might have been anticipated by the recipients and thus have appeared less eventful to them. It was not uncommon for the recipients to be familiar with the general plot of a narrative because the same or a similar story had been told before. Sometimes, as in the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), the narrator even outlines at the beginning how the story will end (1, 6; edition: Heinzle 2013). In modern times, most recipients would be bemused by the lack of suspense, whether a certain event occurs or not. The books A Song of Ice and Fire (1996 to present), and especially their TV adaptation Game of Thrones (2011–2019), for example, were celebrated for their extremely unpredictable and eventfully staged deaths of important characters, as during the Red Wedding. In the Nibelungenlied, in contrast, the eventual death of almost everybody is in no way surprising or unexpected, since the narrator emphasizes in the beginning and throughout the text that the story will end in disaster and that most of the characters will die. Regarding these differences, Clemens Lugowski ([1932] 1994, 40–41) introduced the distinction between Ob-Überhaupt-Spannung (whetherat-all-suspens) and Wie-Spannung (how-suspense) to distinguish between whether something happens at all and how something that is known to occur happens. Regardless of Lugowski’s controversial assumptions about the connection to mythology, the difference between “whether” and “how” might be helpful for specifying the category of unpredictability when investigating medieval narratives. For medieval texts, it is mostly the way in which the plot is narrated that is unpredictable or different from expected conventions, while the plot itself is mostly already known. Of course, re-narrating and the predictability of plot elements are not exclusive to the Middle Ages (Hufnagel 2020a, 55–62). In modern times, however, those texts are often judged as less original and “regarded as having low aesthetic value” (Schmid 2017a, 242). This is not the case in medieval times. When reading

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or listening to the Nibelungenlied, the medieval recipients presumably did not focus on whether the story ends well or not, but on how it is narrated and why the displayed conflict inevitably leads to the well-known demise of the Burgundians (Müller 1998). Nadine Hufnagel (2020a, 2020b) has recently shown that not only the earliest preserved versions of the Nibelungenlied, but also its re-narrations in the fifteenth century, predominantly uphold the main plot elements but differ greatly concerning the narrative construction of the characters’ motivations. From the recipients’ point of view, the eventfulness of those versions of the text thus emerges not because the plot is particularly different from that of the Nibelungenlied around 1200, but because of its specific narrative mediation. The same holds true for the adaptations and re-narrations of Arthurian romances around 1200. The relationship between the Arthurian romances by Hartmann von Aue and the earlier texts by Chrétien de Troyes can be described neither as a mere translation nor as a complete reworking of the plot (Worstbrock 1999). Hartmann’s texts are rather re-narrations in which the main plot elements are retained but the way the story is narrated changes  – drastically in some cases. Researchers have pointed out, for example, that in Hartmann’s Erec (ca. 1180) the narrator has a more pronounced status (Ridder 2001, 545), that Enite and her lament are portrayed quite differently (Worstbrock 1985), or that the poetological descriptive passages are sometimes increased in comparison to Chrétien’s Erec et Enide (ca. 1170; Mertens 1998, 53). Recipients who already knew the story about Erec and Enite would have anticipated the occurrences in Hartmann’s text but nevertheless perceived the narrative mediation as eventful, since it differs greatly in some respects from Chrétien’s version. Similar phenomena have been observed for Hartmann’s Iwein (ca. 1200), such as the alternative conceptualization of minne (Ridder 2001, 555) or the change of Laudine’s social rank insofar as she is the daughter of a duke in Chrétien’s version and a reigning queen in the Middle High German text (Mertens 1978, 36). Additionally, and especially for Hartmann’s Iwein, the eventfulness of some passages might emerge when recipients read or listen to different versions of the text, because the manuscripts in which Iwein is transmitted vary significantly in pivotal aspects. One difference, which has been discussed at length in the literature, is Laudine’s kneeling before Iwein during their reconciliation, which is narrated in some manuscripts while omitted in others (Bumke 1996, 122). For recipients familiar with one version, reading or listening to the alternative ending causes the scene to appear eventful. Laudine’s behavior is, from this perspective, quite unexpected and has an impact on the gender and power dynamic between the characters (Bumke 1996, 122; Hausmann 2001, 91–92). Although the overall ending of Iwein stays the same and is not unconventional (Iwein and Laudine are reconciled), the manner in which the reconciliation is staged changes and can, under certain circumstances, be perceived as a mediation event.

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Other literary genres which, though not directly connected to a narrow sense of re-narrating, contain relatively fixed plot elements are hagiography and legends. Schmid, for example, states that miracles are by no means unexpected in legends, but rather a common aspect of hagiography (2014, 25; 2017a, 239). This can hardly be denied, but in a historical perspective the iterativity and predictability of miracles should not be dismissed as “unoriginal” (Schmid 2014, 25). Narrating miracles and holiness poses, in fact, religious and aesthetic challenges which are partly solved by iterativity and re-narration. Holiness per se is inaccessible and incommensurable, which is why legends merely attempt to bridge – not to suspend – the distance between secularity and sanctity through narration (Strohschneider 2000, 105). Narrating miracles is one way of demonstrating God’s salvific power and proving the saint’s holiness (Hammer 2015, 2; Weitbrecht et al. 2019, 30–31). However, the narrators never claim that they are able to access directly the truth behind the miracles; rather, they constantly point out their incommensurability (Köbele 2012, 373). This results in the problem of how evident a miracle can be if even the narrators cannot guarantee that the miraculous occurrence is indeed a result of God’s transgression from transcendence to immanence. Holiness is not self-evident but is dependent on infinite testimony and needs to be believed (Köbele 2012, 378; Bleumer 2010, 250; Koch 2020, 102). One strategy for creating evidence is re-narrating and thus permanently generating testimony of miracles, saints, and God’s salvific power: legends confirm evidence by repeatedly narrating against the loss of evidence (Köbele 2012, 373). In a historical and religious understanding, these iterations cannot simply be categorized as redundant and uneventful, because every miracle is considered a realization and repetition of the one miraculous event of salvation, the incarnation of God (Bleumer 2020, 157–158). The iterations of this event are not perceived as less eventful. On the contrary, the narration of miracles creates anew each time the singular, highly relevant, irreversible – in short, eventful – presence of God’s salvific power. Repetition, therefore, does not diminish the eventfulness of miracles, but generates it in the first place, since iteration actualizes the eventfulness of the original event of salvation. As a consequence, the concepts of iterativity and predictability must be evaluated differently when interpreting medieval texts. The categorization of a narrative as less eventful due to its well-known or frequently narrated plot would transfer the modern concept of “originality” to premodern times, in which re-narration is one of the most common aesthetic phenomena. It would be ahistorical to associate the iterativity of an occurrence with a loss of eventfulness, since repetitions might have a specific function within a historical culture. Nevertheless, there are prime examples of unpredictable and unconventional mediation events in medieval literature, which is why the categories “unpredictability” and “non-interativity” are still relevant for analyzing eventfulness in medieval narratives. It is important, however, to

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distinguish between the various narrative levels of a text and to take into account the literary and cultural preconditions in order to determine how “unpredictability” is perceived in different contexts. In the following, a concrete textual example will be used to demonstrate which categories can usefully be applied at what levels of a medieval narrative. As in the previous examples, it will become apparent that, with regard to mediation events, “unpredictability” strongly contributes to the emergence of eventfulness, while, with regard to plot, it has little significance. Moreover, it will be shown that the differentiation between the characters’ and the recipients’ perspective is  – as for any narrative  – crucial, since occurrences are ascribed a different level of eventfulness by the various observers.

4 Conventionality and Eventfulness in Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Romances 4.1 Narratives of Abduction: Eventfulness within the Narrated World A prerequisite for abductions to succeed is that they are unexpected. In Arthurian romances, however, abductions become an increasingly frequent plot element during the thirteenth century, such that the recipients might eventually have expected abductions to occur. The characters within the narrated world, by contrast, hardly ever suspect that a member of the Arthurian court might be abducted. These differences make narratives of abduction a prime example with which to discuss the dependency of eventfulness on the observer’s perspective. A particularly interesting scene is the beginning of Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois (ca. 1220). After the prologue, the narrator explains that there is a custom at King Arthur’s court according to which Arthur does not eat anything until he has heard the tale of an adventure (âventiure, line 251; edition: Seelbach and Seelbach 2014). This time, however – a first, according to the narrator – it is well past noon, and nobody has got word of an âventiure. All the members of the court complain about the lack of âventiure, and Queen Ginover goes to her chamber. From there she looks down the castle wall and sees a foreign knight waiting for her. The foreign knight, Joram, demands a boon from Ginover without her knowing what it is; but Ginover insists on hearing first what the request will be. Joram wants her to take a valuable belt from him and to keep it until the next day to decide whether she wants to accept or decline the gift. If she decides to refuse the belt, Joram would not simply take it back, but would reclaim it in battle against an Arthurian knight.

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Ginover agrees to the terms and takes the belt. She is fascinated by it, but Gawein, one of the most respected knights of the court, convinces her to give it back. Joram returns the next day, is furious about Ginover’s decision to return the belt, and demands a fight with an Arthurian knight. One by one, the knights Keie, Didones, Segremors, and Gawein fight him, but all of them are defeated, and Joram eventually abducts Gawein. The narrative strategies used in this scene create the eventfulness of these occurrences within the narrated world. The narrator’s emphasis that the court has never had to wait this long for an âventiure to appear introduces the situation as exceptional. Throughout this part of the text, there are comments by the narrator which highlight that nearly everything about this occurrence is extraordinary: the belt that Joram offers to Ginover is described as the most valuable and magical one, which nobody could ever manufacture again in a similar quality (lines 327–328); the defeat of Keie, Didones, and Segremors in combat is called the worst dishonor the court has ever suffered (lines 512–513); Gawein is introduced as the most honorable and fearless knight of Arthur’s court who has never been vanquished (lines 504–505), even though in the end, Joram manages to subdue him. Since this is so outrageous, the narrator even seems to feel the need to defend Gawein and explains that Joram was only able to defeat him because of the belt’s magical powers (lines 567–568). The court’s subsequent lament about this situation is extreme because these occurrences are highly relevant to the court’s internal organization and functioning. First, it is necessary to understand why Queen Ginover could not have simply accepted the belt and thus prevented the combats. Various researchers have explained that the transfer of the belt is a symbol both for the transfer of power over the married queen (Fasbender 2010, 57) and for the queen’s sexual integrity, which would be questioned had she agreed to keep the belt (Eming 1999, 150). Armin Schulz (2010b, 121) has concluded that in scenes in which foreign knights try to gain power over Ginover, the claims to rule over Arthur’s realm are metonymically negotiated via the queen’s body. This political dimension makes Joram’s request eminently relevant to the court, since it challenges the very foundation of its existence. Gawein is also of high importance to the court. He is regarded as the ideal Arthurian knight against whose example the behavior of the other knights is measured, given that he imbodies the Arthurian virtues (Cormeau 1977, 140). In Wigalois this idea of Gawein is highlighted in that Ginover asks him for advice and praises his unwavering morality (lines 357–358). Gawein’s pivotal importance at court is also expressed in the text by the fact that his absence causes great despair, with Arthur still lamenting his disappearance half a year later (lines 1134–1136). Another reason why the court is this devastated is that its members believe that Gawein is dead due to the fact that nobody had observed the combat. The narra-

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tive strategy for making the characters believe that Gawein is dead increases the eventfulness of this scene in the narrated world. While Gawein could be saved from an abductor, death is an irreversible and persistent state. Although the recipients, Gawein, and Joram know that Gawein is in fact not dead, the characters at court take it to be true that he is. The way Gawein’s abduction is narratively constructed generates a significant degree of eventfulness within the narrated world. From the perspective of the characters at court, Gawein’s disappearance is real, resultative, of high relevance to them, and unpredictable, since Gawein normally always succeeds in combats; it is also persistent, irreversible, and impossible to happen again because the members of the court believe that Gawein is dead. Later in the text, the occurrences might seem less eventful in retrospect because Gawein returns to Arthur’s court unharmed, and the narrator even states that everything at court is like before (lines 1161–1162). The eventfulness of an occurrence – not only in medieval texts, but in every narrative – needs to be determined for both a specific point in time within the narrative and a particular perspective. The degree to which an occurrence is eventful cannot be assessed objectively; nor is it valid throughout the text. It is rather necessary to analyze the narrative strategies through which an occurrence temporarily appears as eventful from a certain point of view.

4.2 Eventfulness of Narrating Abductions: The Recipients’ Perspective For the recipients, the eventfulness of Gawein’s abduction is not created through the same narrative means. Since the recipients know that Gawein is not indeed dead, to them the plot is not as eventful as it is to the characters. For answering the question as to whether Gawein’s abduction is considered eventful from the recipients’ point of view, the focus thus needs to lie on the unexpected manner of narrative mediation. For this purpose, it is necessary to reconstruct the recipients’ expectations regarding narratives of abduction in order to determine whether the way of narrating in Wigalois is perceived as an eventful variation. As discussed above, a useful historical approach to identifying recipients’ expectations includes analyzing intertextual references, since such indications prompt certain narrative expectations against the background of which an occurrence potentially emerges as eventful. In Wigalois, there are several intertextual references that link Gawein’s abduction to the abduction of Ginover in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein (Remele 2021, 20–21). The general setting, for example, is quite similar: in Iwein, a foreign knight appears at Arthur’s court and demands an unconditional promise from the king.

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Arthur has to agree, since his reputation is based on his limitless generosity. The foreign knight, Meljaganz, subsequently demands Queen Ginover and abducts her. The Arthurian knights Keie, Didones, and Segremors try to free Ginover, but it is Gawein who eventually manages to defeat Meljaganz and to return the queen to Arthur’s court. In Wigalois, there are unambiguous intertextual references to this specific passage in Iwein: the knights who try to defeat Joram in Wigalois are the same knights who attempt to subdue Meljaganz in Iwein. Moreover, in both texts, the members of the Round Table prepare for the fight against the foreign knight with the same phrase: “harnasch unde ors her” (Bring me armor and horse!; Iwein, line 4626; editon: Benecke et al. 2001; Wigalois, line 448). These literal references to Hartmann’s Iwein encourage recipients to associate Gawein’s abduction with Ginover’s abduction. The expectation thus produced in Wigalois is that, as in Iwein, Ginover will be abducted due to an unconditional promise and ultimately freed by Gawein. This intertextually created expectation, however, is not fulfilled; instead, the text offers a narrative alternative. The knight who rescues the abducted queen in Iwein now becomes the victim of the abduction himself. The text intertextually establishes an expectation that is subsequently used to frame Gawein’s abduction as an unexpected way of narrating abductions in Arthurian romances, since the intertextual reference suggests that conventionally it is the queen who gets captured. This alternative to the induced expectation contributes to the recipients’ perception of the opening scene in Wigalois as an eventful mediation event. While at the time Wigalois was created this turn of events was rather unexpected for recipients, abductions become increasingly conventionalized in the thirteenth century, since nearly all of the Arthurian romances include the abduction of a character. In Lanzelet (ca. 1200) by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, Ginover is abducted by a foreign knight, but Arthur also loses his knights Walwein and Erec in the process of her retrieval due to an unconditional promise; in the Crône (ca. 1230) by Heinrich von dem Türlin, Ginover is taken, first by her brother, who wants to kill her, and then by a knight, who initially intends to rescue her but then tries to rape her so that Gawein needs to free the queen; and in Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal (ca. 1230), it is not Ginover who is captured, but Arthur himself. Within the narrated worlds, these abductions are always presented as extremely eventful in that, as in Wigalois, they are unexpected for the characters, relevant to the court, and mostly unique cases. For recipients who know the history of the genre, the occurrence of abductions becomes gradually less eventful, since they are frequent, become more foreseeable, and always end with the happy rescue of the abductee. However, constant changes in narrative mediation cause the narration of abductions to continue to be perceived as eventful. It is not the occurrence of the abduction that is eventful to the recipients, but its ever-changing narrative mediation.

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4.3 Eventfulness and the Act of Narration: The Logic of âventiure Based on the opening scene in Wigalois, it can also be demonstrated how Arthurian romances themselves reflect upon eventfulness as a crucial element of both Arthur’s court and Arthurian narration. Arthur’s custom of not eating until he has heard of an âventiure refers to a lack of eventfulness which hinders the court from taking its usual course. This not only occurs in Wigalois, but also, in different forms, in Chrétien’s Le Conte du Graal (ca. 1190), in Wolfram’s Parzival (ca. 1210), in Ulrich’s Lanzelet, in Heinrich’s Crône, in Stricker’s Daniel, and many more (Wandhoff 2002, 130–131). Peter Strohschneider (2006, 378) has explained that Arthur’s fast establishes the connection between narration and community: the constitution of the Arthurian community through the shared meal presupposes the narration of âventiure. Narrating âventiure is a fundamental prerequisite for the existence and functioning of Arthur’s court. One reason why narrating âventiure is that important to Arthur and his knights is that their honor (êre) depends on being permanently demonstrated (Wandhoff 2002, 131). The lack of âventiure reveals, on the one hand, that no challenges have come to Arthur’s court through which the knights could gain honor. On the other hand, the absence of âventiure shows that none of the knights has mastered an âventiure that they could talk about. Since honor cannot be preserved over a longer period of time, the shortage of âventiure endangers the reputation of the court (Wandhoff 2002, 131–132). In Wigalois, Joram threatens the court that he will never speak of Arthur and his knights again and that he will claim that âventiure has never taken place at this court (lines 437–440). The absence of narration about the court’s âventiure would lead to its demise, since it is the very foundation of its reputation. Âventiure, however, cannot be mechanically sought out to increase one’s honor, for it is something that approaches the knight (Latin advenire), something that happens to him. Although âventiure is constantly expected and desired by the members of Arthur’s court, it occurs abruptly and is completely different from what was expected (Bleumer 2020, 112). And precisely because âventiure is extraordinary, unusual, and barely manageable, mastering it dramatically increases the prestige of the knight and hence of the court (Fischer 1983, 24). Consequently, âventiure is dependent on being narrated: if nobody observes the âventiure or if it is not narrated at court, the knight cannot receive praise from his peers. In Hartmann’s Iwein, for example, Iwein worries that there are no witnesses to the fact that he defeated the foreign knight Ascalon (line 1069). Iwein needs proof in order to return to the court and be honored for his victory. The âventiure only emerges in the process of being narrated and in the perception by the public that assigns the status of an event to the occurrence (Schnyder 2006, 369–370). The word âventiure itself refers both to the event and to the narration of

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the event, which highlights the intertwined relationship between event and narration (Mertens 2006, 339). This is one reason why Bleumer is right when he states that it is historically more appropriate to stress the performativity of narrativity (2020, 51). Âventiure, which encompasses all elements of eventfulness, is historically thought to come into existence through narration. The status of an occurrence as relevant and extraordinary is not considered a given, but rather a product of being narrated and acknowledged as eventful.

5 Coping Strategies for Eventfulness in Early Modern Prose Romances The way characters deal with eventfulness in medieval texts is quite different from the characters’ strategy for handling eventfulness in early modern literature. While in Arthurian romances characters are portrayed as wishing for eventful âventiure (as seen in Wigalois), early modern characters are depicted as desiring to control the eventfulness of occurrences. It is of course an overgeneralization to claim that there is a coherent development from the Middle Ages to the early modern period or that the phenomena that will be discussed are exclusive to one of the two periods. With regard especially to “predictability,” researchers have sometimes too broadly claimed that in the Middle Ages, unpredictability is mostly non-existent due to salvation-historical providentialism, while the early modern period marks the birth of modern contingency (von Graevenitz and Marquard 1998, xii). At least since the anthology edited by Cornelia Herberichs and Susanne Reichlin (2010; also, Hufnagel et al. 2017), it has become clear that this master narrative does not apply in this radical form. Closely related to literary contexts, the question is not so much whether an occurrence is either predetermined or contingent, but whether it is depicted or perceived as being more predetermined or more contingent (Reichlin 2010, 45). Depending on the observer’s perspective and prior knowledge, the perception of an occurrence as being predetermined or contingent may as result vary between characters, narrator, and recipients. Nevertheless, trends can be detected as to how the perception and, more importantly, the literary depiction of eventfulness changes progressively from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Susanne Knaeble (2019) has demonstrated that there is a significant shift from medieval to early modern configurations of narrating the future. She identifies a pluralization of conceptions of time in the early modern period, when the concept of an “open future” was introduced alongside medieval eschatological, genealogical, and mythical logics of time (Knaeble 2019, 32). “Open future” denotes an indefinite period of time that needs to be filled with

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plans, wishes, calculations, and so on, and that can be shaped by the characters, for example (1). Although the Early New High German word kunfft or zuokunfft continues (as does âventiure) to denote something that advances toward someone or the occurrence of a predetermined incident, in early modern prose romances there is a tendency for characters to begin to shape their future (2–3). This can be observed in the increased depiction of planning and in the way the texts provide insight into the characters’ calculations as they weigh up different courses of action (2). Of course, there are also scenes in medieval texts in which characters reflect upon their future and make plans (Eming 2017), but the result, or at least the desired outcome, of their actions is for the most part already known by the characters. In early modern prose romances, these elements are amplified, and the characters’ attempts to control and change impending occurrences increase. While it is precisely the unpredictability and outright otherness of âventiure that makes it desirable to Arthur and his court, early modern prose romances focus more on the characters’ strategies for dealing with unpredictability. In medieval texts, the characters often cope with contingency through how they believe âventiure is supposed to take place, considering that the knight who accepts it is chosen to master the task. Therefore, those texts often do not present contingency as a problem that needs to be negotiated, for it is embedded in an encompassing order that generally guarantees a favorable outcome (Schulz 2010a, 209). There are still similar phenomena in early modern prose romances, but these texts additionally demonstrate a different approach to contingency. The characters try to overcome contingency and render it predictable by planning their actions and considering possible alternatives instead of placing trust unreservedly in a predetermined order. The narratives are thus designed to convey the experience of contingency to the recipients by making the process of decision-making and planning visible (Knaeble 2019, 37). Concerning eventfulness, early modern prose romances are thus prime examples for analyzing both the narrative production of eventfulness and the narrative strategies employed to demonstrate how characters cope with eventfulness. The mid-fifteenth century Melusine by Thüring von Ringoltingen may be suitable for showing that this new way of dealing with eventfulness was not an abrupt or radical change, but that different ideas for dealing with unpredictability overlap in early modern texts. At the beginning of the text, the powerful and rich Count Emerich visits the Count of the Forst, who is impoverished and burdened with many children. During a feast, Emerich thus offers to raise one of the Count of the Forst’s as his own. The latter agrees, and Emerich chooses the youngest son, Reymund, who immediately goes with him. One day, during a hunt, Emerich and Reymund lose track of the hunting party while chasing a wild boar and get lost in the forest until late at night. Emerich reads in the stars that whoever kills his lord at that hour will one day come to rule over a rich and powerful realm. Reymund ful-

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fills this prophecy shortly thereafter. Attempting to save Emerich from an attacking boar, he misses the animal and slays Emerich with a spear. The death of Emerich in this scene is an interesting example of eventfulness, for it oscillates between providential predestination and human agency. Although Emerich reads in the stars “ettwas künfftiger ding” (something about future things; 18.14; edition: Müller 1990), his prediction is quite abstract and is not directly connected to his or Reymund’s personal future (Knaeble 2019, 154). Neither Emerich nor Reymund are depicted as particularly worried about whether the prediction about a lord’s death by his servant’s hand might refer to them. The recipients might certainly associate the prophecy with the characters, but the text does not give any insight into the characters’ interpretation of it (Knaeble 2019, 154–155). There are, however, indications that encourage the recipients to assume that neither of the characters expects the prophecy to be fulfilled by them. The actual killing of Emerich, for example, is narrated as an instantaneous and (for the characters) unpredictable event. The narrative pace increases dramatically, as suddenly a wild boar bursts out of the undergrowth and Reymund and Emerich reach for their weapons. Reymund tells Emerich to climb a tree, but he refuses. Emerich tries to stab the boar but fails to hit it, so Reymund grabs the spear, misses the boar as well, and stabs Emerich. The scene is narrated in such a way that the characters do not reflect for one second on their decisions or on the consequences related to the prophecy, so that Emerich’s death appears as an unforeseen accident (Knaeble 2019, 156; Müller 1990, 1046). Reymund himself is shocked by the event and starts to lament Emerich’s death. Knaeble (2019, 158–159) has shown that Reymund offers two conflicting concepts of responsibility in reaction to his actions: on the one hand, Reymund is worried that the court will accuse him of killing Emerich intentionally, but on the other hand, he describes himself as a victim of the events that Fortuna has allowed to occur. In the narrated world, Emerich’s death is not perceived simply as something that needed to happen and over which Reymund had no control. The conflict between predestination and human agency is much more complicated and remains unresolved by the text. There is no authority within the narrative that would once and for all decide whether Reymund is to blame for his actions or whether his path was determined from the beginning, or whether even both could be true. It is Reymund who decides to view himself as being at the mercy of fate in order to reduce his moral responsibility for Emerich’s death (Knaeble 2019, 159). Since the scene oscillates between predestination and human agency, the recipients are presented with different ways of dealing with eventfulness. Unforeseen events do not necessarily have to be interpreted as divine Providence; rather, they are situated between the two extremes of total predestination and total human responsibility. Eventfulness is no longer a desired challenge that a knight tackles head on, but rather something that can be interpreted and dealt with

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in different ways. It is the process of negotiating these various options of how to handle eventfulness that makes early modern prose romances an important source for narratological questions regarding eventfulness. In the following, and last, example, the focus will lie on a different aspect: relevance. The question will be how literature incorporates historical occurrences that are already considered eventful outside of literature, and how texts increase their eventfulness for the recipients through literary means.

6 Creating Relevance: The 1631 Eruption of Vesuvius in Early Modern Literature On 16 December 1631, the volcano Vesuvius terrified the area around Naples with the most powerful eruption since 79 CE. The eruption lasted several days, and smaller aftershocks were still felt until early 1632. This eruption became an event that drew attention throughout Europe and was discussed in various forms (Schreurs 2008). A broadside from 1631/1632, printed in Augsburg (Warhaffter Bericht / und eigentliche Contrafattur / der erschroͤcklichen Erdbidem / und Fewrsgewalt / so auß dem Berg Vesuvij . . . nicht weit von Neapoli / entsprungen / im Jahr 1631. den 15. December. Gedruckt zu Augspurg / bey Daniel Mannasser, 1631; BSB Munich), informed the German-speaking public about the eruption, underscoring its unpredictability and improbability and stressing that nobody had ever heard of something so horrible. The broadside also reported on the irreversible damage, amounting to two million Cronen, and mourned the death of at least four thousand people. A different broadside from 1632, whose place of printing is unknown (Eygentlicher Abriß vnd Beschreibung Deß grossen Erdbebens / vnd erschroͤcklichen brennenden Bergs im Koͤnigreich Neapolis, 1632; The British Museum) also reported the death of several thousand people and the devastation of Naples and its surrounding areas. It can hardly be denied that the eruption of Vesuvius was at the time depicted as real, resultative, unpredictable, consequential, irreversible, and unlikely to happen often. However, the question as to why the eruption should be relevant to people outside of Campania was not obvious, and was discussed at the time. Both broadsides include a copper engraving showing the immediate effect the eruption had on the Neapolitan population. The second broadside even offers a legend to its engraving, on which the various landmarks in Naples and its surroundings are indicated in order to describe precisely which areas were afflicted by Vesuvius. But the broadside also raises the more general question as to why this eruption occurred: “Was nun diese erschroͤ ckliche Wunderzeichen bedeuten / vnnd ferner mit sich bringen werden / ist allein Gott dem allmaͤ chtigen bewust” (Only God Almighty

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knows what these terrible miraculous signs mean and what they will bring with them). The broadside from Augsburg does not wonder about the meaning of this catastrophe, but nevertheless offers an interpretation: it hopes that “es werde die letzte Warnung der vnbußfertigen Menschen sein. GOtt der Allmaͤ chtig woͤ lle vns vnser Suͤ nden vnd Missethaten / durch sein grosse Barmhertzigkeit / gnaͤ dig vnd vaͤ tterlich verzeyhen” (it will be the final warning to unrepentant people. May God Almighty graciously and fatherly forgive our sins and misdeeds through his great mercy). The words Wunderzeichen and Warnung, in particular, connect the eruption of Vesuvius to the common idea that natural disasters can be interpreted as a sign and warning from God (Schenda 1997, 15–16). Accordingly, the broadside from Augsburg interprets the catastrophe in Naples as a punishment and warning for the sinful, but it does not specify for which sins the people are being punished. In his didactic poem Vesuvius: Poëma Germanicum (1633), Martin Opitz is much more specific in this regard. He links the eruption of Vesuvius to occurrences in the Holy Roman Empire and thus generates the relevance of the natural disaster in Naples for his German-speaking audience. Although the poem is not entirely narrative in a narrow sense, it includes narrative passages that are mostly concerned with endowing the eruption with eventfulness and making it relevant to recipients. In the first part of the poem, Opitz outlines the mechanics of volcanic eruptions without theological interpretation. He explains that volcanos erupt because there is too much air in the underground tunnels of the earth, causing the air to push outward and eject sulphur and other flammable substances with it. This theory corresponds to the scientific knowledge of the time (Zittel 2008, 412–414). However, Opitz is not only interested in how volcanos erupt, but also in why Vesuvius, in particular, erupted in 1631. Like the broadsides, Opitz interprets the natural phenomenon as a miraculous sign from God which is no longer recognized by people (Häfner 2009, 44; Robert 2018, 206). The eruption of Vesuvius cannot be dismissed as a mere natural phenomenon or as something that happened in Campania devoid of relevance to the people in the Holy Roman Empire. Opitz strongly emphasizes that, metaphorically, the eruption of Vesuvius is everywhere: Dein Vesvius ist hier. Der leib der seele wagen / Der kercker den der mensch muß an dem halse tragen / Der mensch des Glückes ball / die fantasey der zeit / Darff nicht erwarten erst biß Etna fewer speyt / Biß plitz vndt donner kömpt / biß stadt vndt landt versincken. (295; edition: Bamberger and Robert 2021) (Your Vesuvius is here. The body, the wagon of the soul, the prison which man must carry around the neck. Man, the plaything of Fortune, the illusion of time, cannot wait until Etna spits fire, until lighting and thunder begin, until city and surroundings perish.)

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Opitz asks people to take heed of their mortality and of the current situation in Europe. To him, the reason for the eruption is the Thirty Years War and the barbaric acts committed by man: [. . .] Das bürgerliche schwerdt Hatt Deutschlandt durch vndt durch nunmehr fast auffgezehrt [. . .] Die Elbe roth gefärbt / (wer ist der nicht berewt Die arme Stadt dabey!) (298) ([. . .] The civil sword has now almost completely destroyed Germany through and through. [. . .] The Elbe was dyed red. Who does not lament the poor city next to it!)

The “poor city” on the Elbe can be identified as Magdeburg, which was destroyed during the “Magdeburg Wedding” (commentary in Bamberger and Robert 2021, 298). General Tilly besieged and eventually conquered the city of Magdeburg in May 1631, killing thousands of people in the process. Already at that time, the conquest of Magdeburg was perceived as one of the most gruesome events of the war, and news of the disaster spread in the media accordingly (Dröse 2018). Opitz directly connects the natural disaster of the volcanic eruption in Naples with a human catastrophe taking place within the Holy Roman Empire. Although the people in the Empire are not directly affected by the eruption, Opitz instills the relevance of this event in his German-speaking audience by interpreting it as God’s punishment for the atrocities committed during the Thirty Years War. For the German-speaking public, the relevance of the destruction wreaked by Vesuvius on its surroundings is not a given. Rather, its relevance and eventfulness is wrought by Opitz in establishing a connection between the eruption and a well-known local situation. This example shows that the “relevance” category is not inherent to the event itself, but that it depends on the perspective of the observer and can also be established through literary means.

7 Conclusion The analysis of these quite diverse literary examples has shown that the various aspects of eventfulness require further modifications when applied to premodern narratives. First of all, one comes closer to a historical understanding of events by stressing the performativity of eventfulness and narrativity. As the discussion of âventiure in Arthurian romances has shown, events and eventfulness are, even within the narrated world, considered to emerge through narration. The characters find themselves in a tight spot if there are no witnesses around to recount what has occurred and to vouch for the knight’s honorable deeds. It is the process of

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narration at the court that generates the eventfulness of an occurrence, since only then can the knight receive the recognition of his peers. If nobody observes and narrates an occurrence, eventfulness cannot unfold. There are no occurrences that are inherently relevant or unexpected; relevance and unexpectedness, and with it eventfulness, emerge in the process of narration and in the interaction between observer and occurrence. The dependence of eventfulness on the observer also affects the various features proposed by Schmid, especially when analyzed in a historical perspective. The prerequisite that an occurrence must be real to be categorized as an event might  – not just in regard to medieval narratives, but in general  – need to be phrased more precisely. The occurrence must be believed to be real: the members of Arthur’s court in Wigalois, for example, believe that Gawein has not only been abducted, but that he is dead. For them, the occurrence of Gawein’s disappearance is much more eventful, since death is an irreversible change of state, while characters could be saved from abduction. The recipients know that Gawein is still alive and safe, but this does not make the occurrence less eventful to the characters within the narrated world. Consequently, eventfulness must always be described from a specific point of view, and researchers need to assess what counts as real for an observer at a specific point in time. The same holds true for the concepts of resultativity and irreversibility. At a certain point in Wigalois, Gawein returns to Arthur’s court and its members realize that he is not dead after all. This, however, does not change the eventfulness of his abduction at the time it occurred. The abduction might appear less eventful in retrospect, since it did not result in his irreversible death. But at the time, when he disappeared, the occurrence was extremely eventful because it was believed to be irreversible and resultative. The question is not whether an occurrence is objectively eventful; rather, it must be determined what occurrences emerge as eventful at a certain point in time and whether, in retrospect, their eventfulness decreases due to a later change in the characters’ or recipients’ knowledge about the resultativity and the irreversibility of the occurrence. The same applies to the category of “relevance.” Occurrences are not relevant on their own but become relevant in the eye of the observer. The analysis of early modern broadsides and Opitz’s Vesuvius has shown that texts can produce relevance for occurrences by connecting them to the recipients’ immediate environment. Opitz interprets the eruption of Vesuvius, which occurred in distant Naples, as a warning and punishment from God for the gruesome crimes committed during the Thirty Years War, especially the siege of Magdeburg in the Holy Roman Empire. The eruption of Vesuvius is not immediately relevant to Opitz’s German audience, but becomes so by being linked to the reality of the recipients’ lives.

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Unpredictability and iterativity have proven to be the two most difficult aspects of eventfulness when analyzing premodern narratives, especially from the medieval period. While in modern times the originality and singularity of a literary text are considered crucial in determining its aesthetic value, medieval narratives are mostly re-narrations and are not judged by the uniqueness of their plots. Medieval narratives tend to be eventful in their narrative mediation. Since the overall plot is often already known, it is the way this plot is narrated that is potentially eventful for the historical audience. Consequently, medieval narratives offer various versions of how a story can be narrated, thus creating unexpected narrative alternatives that are perceived as eventful by the recipients. Concerning mediation events, however, it is of great importance to reconstruct the historical expectations against which a certain type of narration can be perceived as eventful. Focusing on intertextual references that evoke a certain expectation which is subsequently not fulfilled is one way to avoid generalizations or ahistorical applications of modern expectations. Furthermore, a historical perspective reveals that iterativity has not always been perceived as a reason to dismiss a narrative as less eventful. In some contexts, iterativity even has the specific function of creating eventfulness. In legends, for example, the persistent re-narration of well-known miracles serves the purpose of continually re-establishing evidence of God’s salvific power and actualizing the eventfulness of the original event of salvation. Another important matter that needs to be considered when analyzing unpredictably is the difference in how characters or the narrator deal with unexpected eventfulness in the Middle Ages and in early modern times. Although there is no abrupt change from total providentiality to absolute contingency, gradual transformations can be detected. The pluralization of narrative conceptualizations of the future in early modern prose romances, for example, leads to a juxtaposition of various ways that characters cope with eventfulness. The scenes in which characters begin to plan their futures or reflect on how to deal with the tension between predestination and human agency increase significantly. A historical perspective on unpredictability thus needs to take into account the fact that the understanding of unpredictability is historically and culturally dependent and that the characters’ approach to unpredictability changes with time. In the end, the question remains as to whether the concept of eventfulness, which does not yet belong to the concepts generally employed in Medieval German Studies, offers new insights into medieval narratives. One might argue that many of the phenomena discussed in this article have been analyzed before, using other narratological terms. Eventfulness, however, could be a concept that brings these very different phenomena into a systematic order. While individual features have certainly been well researched, the principle of eventfulness may enable researchers to identify overlaps and interdependencies in existing research and thus to open up new paths of inquiry.

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Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky

Eventfulness in Late Antique Jewish Literature 1 Defining Eventfulness in a Diachronic Perspective Narratives in prose literature are usually composed of a sequence of changes of states which relate to each other by means of chronological, causal, or formal connections, explicit or implicit, and which are mediated by a narrator (Schmid 2010, 1–7). The building blocks of these changes of states are unequal in their contribution to plot construction, and narratology offers various effective ways to distinguish them: from the initial distinction between elements of description and elements of narration (Schmid 2010, 5), to the distinction between the narration elements themselves, as in Roland Barthes’s rough categorization of “cardinal functions” vs. “catalyzers” ([1966] 1975, 247–248). A particularly sharp and detailed suggestion, elaborated similarly but not identically by Wolf Schmid (2003) and Peter Hühn (2014), uses the term eventfulness to describe a distinction between any change of state and one which is meaningful, and which thus inherently and heavily depends on the reader’s processing of the text and interpreting of the plot. Whether it is a binary categorization (type 1 / type 2 event, respectively) or more scalable one (from low to high eventfulness), the two theorists clarify that not all occurrences deserve the name of an event; an event is an occurrence which has to be more than a usual happening (Schmid 2010, 8). It is easy to see that these analyses work well when it comes to long modern narrative structures such as the novel, or even the complex non-long narrative structures such as the twentieth-century short story (Hühn 2008, 150–160). Occasionally, in certain literary forms, under certain cultural conditions  – as Franco Moretti (2013, 67–83) shows in his investigation of the bourgeois novel – the most significant (or at least symptomatic) events can be, paradoxically, what Barthes called “catalyzers,” which he himself translates as “fillers” (vs. “turning points”). By contrast, miniature stories – not those created in the first place as theoretical exercises such as “The king died and then the queen died” (Forster 1927), but stories that have played a real role in real given (historical) cultures – tend to be organized around single important changes, sometimes around only one event. Their tiny scope is largely subservient to the same change of state, leaving little room for “fillers” whose contribution to the plot is small. However, in the novel, the short story, and the premodern miniature story, characterizing an occurrence as an event does not necessarily mean that this event https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-031

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has fully met its potential eventfulness. According to Schmid’s strict categorization, events must be (1) real (real in the fictional world of the text) and (2) resultative (i.e., bringing about a complete change of state in the narrated world) – the two minimal and essential features that make events eventful. At the same time, as Schmid clarifies, they can manifest different levels of five scalable characteristics: (a) relevance (some events are interpreted as trivial in the narrative world, while others appear as germane and intrinsically relevant to the narrated world), (b) unpredictable (some being more surprising than others – both for the protagonists and the readers), (c) persistence (some events cause a constant change in the hero’s life, while others produce more temporary changes), (d) irreversibility (some events generate an unchangeable change, while others generate changes which may be reversible), and (e) non-iterativity (some are disposable, while some are cyclical). Like many other narratological categories, the classification of events and, consequently, degrees of eventfulness, takes place not only at the level of histoire but also at the level of discours. Following Jan Christoph Meister (2003, 107), a distinction must be made between an “object event,” namely “an occurrence which manifests itself in the objects we can locate at the level of symbolically represented fictional objects,” and a “discourse event,” which “occurs with each successive linguistic or narrative act which tells us about significative objects and fictional changes in their properties.” The problem becomes complicated when the response to the story is explicitly presented or implicit in the text; not as a literary-artistic trick as in the famous example of Don Quixote, but as a result of the very fact that in many premodern kinds of literature, the story is embedded in a non-narrative framework which brings together the editor, narrator, and reader into one structural entity lacking any (fictional) “self.” In medieval narratives, for instance, as von Contzen (2014, 8) has noted, “one may legitimately question the existence of a narrator figure in the first place.” In this situation the relationship between the degree of eventfulness in a text and its being worth telling, as well as between an “object event” and a “discourse event,” becomes even more puzzling.

2 Eventfulness as a Historical and CultureDependent Category: The Case of Late Antique Jewish Literature The complexity of defining eventfulness in different cultural and historical contexts frequently faces a linguistic challenge that might affect terminology. In Modern

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Hebrew, as in other languages, an event, ‫( אירוע‬eru’a), derived from the root ‫ע‬.‫ר‬.‫א‬ (happen), is a special occurrence, one which extends beyond the routine, and which is noteworthy. But the Hebrew of the Talmudic period (roughly from the first to the seventh centuries) has given it the term ‫( מעשה‬ma’a’se), which is used in many texts (especially from the first three centuries of the period) as a title for stories. This term may be somewhat confusing because it is derived from the root ‫ה‬.‫ש‬.‫( ע‬act). However, it should not be understood as a description of an action in the narrow sense, or as a summary of a story in the broad sense, as it was sometimes translated (“it was told that [. . .]”) and as it has found its way into Modern Hebrew. It should be understood, most of all, as a way of drawing the reader’s attention to an occurrence, one which may be minimal but which, in the opinion of the text editors, is noteworthy. An appropriate English translation for this idiom would be, therefore, “it occurred/happened that [. . .],” as can be found in English translations of the New Testament. This linguistic clarification is enough to claim, as Schmid (2010, 16) has shown, that “eventfulness is a culture-specific and historically changing phenomenon of narrative representation. The category is therefore particularly important when it comes to dealing with problems of cultural typology and the history of literature and thought.” And indeed, beyond the question of terminology, the fruitfulness of using it under very specific historical and cultural conditions is well evident in the miniature Hebrew and Aramaic stories preserved in the main texts of Jewish culture in late antiquity, known as Talmudic (or rabbinic) literature. Thus, attention to changes in the level of eventfulness in this corpus, without ignoring the complexity of the corpus and the literary phenomenon under examination, makes it possible to draw a fairly clear evolutionary line between early materials in the corpus, and later ones. Despite Jewish culture’s contacts with surrounding cultures, such evolution is largely the result of internal literary development: a development reflected in the refinement of artistic expression, as well as in changes in structural conventions relating to the narrative’s role in the textual framework in which it is preserved. This Hebrew conceptual framework, as reflected in the stories of the time, closely follows the definitions of eventfulness as presented by Schmid (2010), even if some of its seven parameters may require slight reconfiguration. In a way, it follows also Jurij Lotman’s famous conception of the event as “shifting a persona across the boundaries of a semantic field” and “meaningful departure from the norm” ([1970] 1977, 233–234); although the cross-border image is too general, perhaps, it will be especially important in our discussion below – both literally and metaphorically.

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3 The Story in Classic Talmudic Literature: A Very Short Introduction 3.1 Historical Background Talmudic (or rabbinic) literature is a general name for a group of texts that were orally edited in Palestine and Babylon during the first centuries AD – from (roughly) the beginning of the millennium to (roughly) the sixth or seventh century AD. These texts are extremely varied, but what makes them nonetheless one corpus is (a) the intensive referential system which connects them, be it explicitly (e.g., when one text interprets another) or implicitly (e.g., when any textual component appears differently in more than one text); (b) the basic sense that arises while reading these interrelated texts that, despite countless disputes which can be fierce and sharp at times, are the work of a group that is largely affiliated to a single multifaceted stream of Jewish tradition – one that is now known by contemporary scholars as the rabbinic stream (Balberg 2013, 28–29). Although we know many characters of the period by their names, we do not know exactly how and by whom the texts were formulated, and what the contribution of each character (known or anonymous) to their final formulation was. Accordingly, we must treat the sages’ literature as collective literature whose authors are unknown, and which has been shaped by complicated oral transference processes (and then by written ones). Despite the relative continuity of the period, there is a clear line dividing it into two: the Tannaitic period, whose central text is the Mishnah (finally edited in the early third century in Palestine), and the Amoraitic period, whose main texts are the two Talmuds: the Palestinian (traditionally called the “Jerusalem Talmud,” edited in the late fourth century in Palestine) and the Babylonian (traditionally called the “Bavli,” edited during a long process in Babylon in the sixth and seventh centuries; hereafter: BT). The two periods differ in many respects. Geographically, the first reflects a reality of one dominant center in the Land of Israel, while the second reflects a reality of exile in which, alongside the languishing center in the Land of Israel, a powerful alternative center has begun to flourish in Babylon. The geographical difference is followed by a difference in points of contact with foreign cultures: while the sages in the Land of Israel come into contact with Christian sages and Greco-Roman culture as a whole, the Babylonians probably not only know something of the Greco-Roman world, but also the plethora of Iranian religions. The periods differ also linguistically from one another: the compositions of the first are all in Hebrew (with some Greek words here and there), while those of the second are largely blend of Hebrew and various dialects of Aramaic (and, again, here and there, some foreign words, Greek and Persian). Most importantly, for our

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purposes, the periods also differ in literary terms: while the Mishnah is an authoritative text, written in an economic and concise style, focusing on religious law and its practical implications, the two Talmuds are often texts that open up possibilities, wherein it is often very difficult to derive a clear and unambiguous “bottom line.” Most of the examples discussed below rely on all aspects of this distinction between early and late, and provide the basis for the diachronic examination.

3.2 Literary Background As noted above, the focus of this literature is on the Jewish system of law, known as Halacha (‫)הלכה‬. However, this literature encompasses much more than the law: it includes both simple and creative readings of the Bible, beliefs, various opinions in various fields, historical descriptions (in the ancient sense of “history”), proverbs, as well as many other tiny genres and subgenres, and, last but not least, a lot of stories. Most of the stories are very short – from a few words to a few sentences – but at best they are poetically concentrated and rich: miniature works that, in just a few words, using minimalist techniques, manage to portray a (fictive) world in its entirety (Fraenkel 1981, 2001). These materials are all included under the general title “aggada” (‫)אגדה‬, which, due to its intrinsic diversity, has been defined since Leopold Zunz’s research in the nineteenth century in a negative way only, as “all that is not Halacha.” Under this negative definition, a distinction should be made – even if not easily – between narrative and non-narrative materials; and, within the narrative materials, between two main genres: (1) The Midrashic story – an untranslatable term that can be described roughly as “the homiletic story” – which retells and expands the biblical story, usually with the addition of plot elements that are not part of the original story. The heroes of the homiletic story are the biblical protagonists themselves. (2) The sage story, whose heroes are the wise figures of the Talmudic period, and their circles. These stories, for the most part, do not draw a complete or even partial biography of even one of the sages, but focus on one or two events of their lives, meaningful to themselves, and/or to the narrators, and/or to the readers. It is especially important to note that these stories, in the genres mentioned here as well as in other genres, are almost always embedded in a non-narrative textual framework, and therefore, the boundaries between narrative and non-narrative elements in these frameworks are often extremely fluid. This fact has two implications: (a) a major theme of the rabbinic story is the law (the Halacha) and the interpretation of the Bible as well as the interpretation of other rabbinic sources,

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the process of their formation, the institutions that establish them, and the social tensions that affect them; and (b) during the chronological development of Talmudic literature, Halacha and interpretation themselves are more often delivered in narrative templates, which in colorful language denote the discussion that shaped them (or more precisely, the discussion that the rabbis would like us to think shaped them; Wimpfheimer 2011; Vidas 2014). These phenomena profoundly affect the nature of events in this literature.

4 Eventfulness in the Midrashic Story and Its Internal Evolution The term “Midrash” has several meanings in the Talmudic world. The most important meaning, for our discussion, is Midrash as the practice of reading the Bible which diverges from the simple meaning. The sages, of course, could distinguish between a simple reading of the Bible and what can be called a creative reading, and many times they preferred the second. Underlying the practice are several techniques, one of which is to weave connections between similar words that appear in far-off verses – usually, verses with no apparent connection. Chaining the verses together gives a surprising new perspective on the text, a perspective that is intertextual by its very definition (Boyarin 1990). The result often seems far removed from the written text, and is reminiscent of deconstructivist interpretation exercises. The Midrashic practice does not focus on stories, but on every biblical verse that the sages seek to discuss. However, when applied to stories, the result – the Midrashic story – is a very hybrid outcome: on the one hand, it acts as a Midrash in its usual sense, that is, an attempt to reread the Bible; and on the other hand, it acts as a story, which is committed to the basic narrative framework of the Bible. The starting and ending points of the Midrashic story are in fact the starting and ending points of the biblical story itself (although many times they are not explicitly mentioned in the rabbinic text), and all the intricacies of it are expressed in the middle stages of the plot – a matter that has a fundamental effect on its eventfulness. To start with, what has already happened and is going to happen in the biblical story cannot be erased; it can only be expanded or reshaped. Thus, the element of surprise, which as noted above plays a key role in regulating the level of eventfulness, changes here. The relevant questions now are not what will happen now or what will happen in the end, but (a) what plot twist will be added (or refashioned) by the Midrashic narrator, and (b) how the plot thread will get back from its new additions to the existing biblical ending. These questions almost inevitably make the

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reader more aware of the narrative art of the narrator, but the answers to them also vary throughout the pre-history of the genre. In contrast to earlier narrative traditions of the Second Temple period, which also recounted the biblical story but were completely disconnected from it (because its retelling was not based on close reading of the original), the Midrashic story did not come to replace the biblical story, but to accompany it, to stand side by side with it. The abstract reader of the Midrashic story is someone who engages in what Joshua Levinson (2005) called “dialogic reading” of the two stories together – of the biblical story, and of the Midrashic story – while remaining constantly alert to their differences. Formalist historical examination of the Midrashic story reveals a constant tension in its movement between two poles  – its functioning as a Midrash, that is, as a kind of interpretation, and its desire to tell a story – while movement from the first to the second constituting a clear development over time (Levinson 2005): while early Midrashic stories invest most of their effort in rereading the verses that make up the original biblical story, later Midrashic stories invest most of their effort in creating a clear and coherent plotline. Against this background, it is clear why the Midrashic (or homiletic) story is quite complicated to present in translation: it is based on the unique attentiveness of the Midrashic authors to the Hebrew text of the Bible, far beyond its direct denotative aspects. The Midrashic authors emphasize far more connotations, similarities between sounds, figurative uses of language, and the like. The following will present a first example. One of the most dramatic stories in the Torah is the story of the sin of the calf – the golden calf – committed by the Israelites in the wilderness, while Moses stayed with God and was late to descend from Mount Sinai (Exod. 33:1–6). Of course, this is not the only story of sin on the part of the Israelites on their way from Egypt, but unlike other stories, here the religious leaders of the people make a special contribution to the sin: Aaron is described as having himself helped in the actual making of the calf, and even as defining the expected event following its preparation as a holiday – indeed, as the sages of the Midrash note, a holiday to God, not to the golden calf. However, it is difficult to understand from the Torah language what causes Aaron to cooperate with the dangerous initiative of the people. Sages dealt with this question in Midrash, and based on the typical ways of Midrashic reading, added a stage to the story plot. According to them (Midrash Leviticus Rabba 10:3), before the people turned to Aaron to make a calf, they turned to Chur – one of the other leaders – and asked him to help. After Chur refused, they killed him. The Midrashic story, in its early version, ends with Aaron, fearing that he would be killed as well, thus following the words of another verse in Lamentations (2:20), describing a killing of a priest at worship as the culmination of religious corruption. For our purposes, it is important to emphasize that the Midrashic story ends here.

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The reader knows that Aaron is going to make the calf, because that is how the original biblical story continues, which the sages cannot replace; however, this phase of the narrative is not explicitly described in the Midrash, but requires an interpretative involvement of the reader moving back and forth from the biblical text to its reworked Midrashic version, explaining to himself how an event delivered in the Midrashic text re-enlightens the result described in the biblical text. Despite this background, in later versions of the same Midrash, the reasoning is already explicit in the body of the story: according to these versions, Aaron told himself that it would be better for them to make a calf and delay in preparing it so as to allow them time during which they might wake up and return to the good way (BT Sanhedrin 7a). This is not only an interpretation, but also a “smoothing” of the transition, from the description of the event in one text to the result described in the other text and supposedly “stemming” from it in light of two texts being read together. As Joshua Levinson (2005, 239–307) has shown, this is a systematic phenomenon that is repeated over and over: with the development of the Midrashic story, it moves away from the fragmentary characteristic of an interpretative narrative text and becomes a more coherent and reasonable “standalone” narrative. By this process, the most eventful events are transformed from being hints by which the biblical text must be read, into detailed and clear building blocks of the plotline. The resultativity of the narrative becomes more explicit, and, respectively, the degree of their eventfulness increases. This development reflects in a nutshell the movement from interpretation of a story toward a quasi-independent story.

5 Eventfulness in the Sage Story Sages’ stories are a completely different kind of story and appear to be a unique cultural variant of an exemplum common to many other cultures. Here, it is not the biblical story and its protagonists that stand at the center, but the sages of the Talmudic period itself. Each story of this genre is not read on the basis of a different story but on its own terms. Of course, reading it set against other texts, whatever they may be, may illuminate certain aspects not to be noticed in any other way, but such a reading is not essential to its understanding. From a purely formalist perspective, this story is a closed autarkic economy of plot and meaning (Fraenkel 2001). Therefore, unlike the Midrashic story, every significant event within it fulfills its eventfulness, as described by Schmid, without necessarily being based on a more comprehensive different story. However, a range of features in the development of the genre suggests different realizations of such eventfulness.

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Some of the fundamental characteristics of the genre are of importance to our cause. First, the genre is characterized by a relatively low level of conventionalism. Even if different themes are repeated in different stories, the textual realization of these repetitions – at the beginning of the Talmudic period more than in its later stages – is usually characterized by a unique design, influenced mainly by the local needs of the story in its given context (Fraenkel 2001; Marienberg-Milikowsky 2016b), even though doubts often arise regarding the extent to which one story editor is familiar with the work of another story editor. Second, a relatively broad thematic characteristic, which is not self-evident in regard to religious literature in general, is its tendency to criticize its heroes sometimes sharply: this literature is far from being an innocent hagiographical literature (Faust 2010), and there are scholars who even identify large parts of the genre as a Jewish version of the familiar Western literary tradition of the Menippean satire (Boyarin 2009). Third, although miracles and supernatural events are undoubtedly part of the cultural world of the Talmud and its surrounding cultures and occasionally appear in their stories, they are not very common in the corpus. In other words, (literal) deus-ex-machina solutions for situations of conflict and imbalances in the narrative sequence of stories are possible, but for the most part will only appear in certain contexts. As a rule, the Mishnah – the main text of the Tannaitic period – does not often tell stories. Its language is minimal, focusing almost exclusively on the characterization of religious law. However, in the first Mishnah (as confusing as it may be, the term “Mishnah” refers at the same time to the entire composition, as well as to its minimum textual unit) a surprising short story is presented, woven into a Halachic context. The text before the story deals with the appropriate time for the observance of the “Shema” reading (a ritual reading of verses of Deuteronomy 6:4–8, and more, twice a day – morning and evening). According to the statement at the beginning of this Mishnah, the sages of the period were in disagreement: some of them allowed this ritual reading until the end of the first watch, some of them until midnight, and there were others who allow reading until dawn. This last opinion is attributed to Rabban Gamliel, a figure who combined political power and religious authority. And here, the Mishnah tells, it once happened that Rabban Gamliel’s sons did not read the “Shema” on time because they were delayed at a feast (it is unclear if it was a wedding). Their father, in response, allowed them to keep the commandment even after midnight, provided they did so before dawn. This story demonstrates both its full attachment to its Halakhic context, and the resulting complexity: if the sons are aware of the position attributed to their father one line earlier in the framing text of the Mishnah, the story has no surprise, and then it is difficult to understand why the Mishnah mentioned it at all; and even if they are unaware of such a position (which is most probable), the reader is aware of it, and therefore knows more than the protagonists of the story itself. Thus, for the

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sons, the most surprising event is the permission they received from their father; philologically, it is more than possible that Rabban Gamliel’s position, mentioned in the text before the story, was in fact only formulated as a conclusion of the story. But at the same time, for the implied reader, the surprising event is not at all what Rabban Gamliel said to his sons, but the fact that they do not meet the normative requirements of the commandment because of their spending time at the feast. The almost hidden shift between the most eventful events, highlighted by reading the story synchronously both within its Halakhic context and separate from it, contributes to a poetic embodiment of a tension “between Apollonian order and Dionysian exuberance” (Simon-Shoshan 2012, 1). Thus, the narrator achieves two goals at the same time, and perhaps three: he expands the Halakha, the religious law, and shows that it allows different levels of observance; he signals to the reader that the law is equal for all; and perhaps he also derides the character of Rabban Gamliel’s house. However, this Mishnah is the exception that does not indicate the rule. Because, in the vast majority of the corpus, the Halakha is delivered without any narrative frame at all. A simple example is the following: A person who offends another person must compensate him for five clauses of the law: for the damage done to him, for the grief he has suffered, for the healing expenses, for disabling him from work, and for the shame he has suffered. (M. Bava Kama 8:1)

It is worth noting that this Mishnah is so far from storytelling that we do not even know who is saying it; in contrast to the one quoted above, in which at least named sages argue between them and offer different positions, the wording here is completely anonymous. This situation is the most common in the entire text of the Mishnah. Against this background, one can easily understand why the mere appearance of stories in this text is a strange textual occurrence; what will cause the text editor, who arranges a dry rule book, to go into story descriptions during the presentation of the law? And here, a few lines later (M. Bava Kama 8:6), we meet another example, which can offer an answer to this question: It happened that a man unloosed a woman’s hair in the street and she came before Rabbi Akiva, who then ordered the man to pay her 400 zuz [a singular form of zuzim, the main coin at the time]. The man said, “Rabbi, give me time.” And he gave him time. The man was waiting for her while she was standing at the entrance to her courtyard, and he broke a jug [. . .] of oil in front of her. She unloosed her hair and used her kerchief to scoop up the oil and then laid her hand on her head. He had set up witnesses against her and he came before Rabbi Akiva and said to him, “Rabbi, should I give one such as this 400 zuz?” R. Akiva answered, “You have said nothing. A man who injures himself, even though he is not allowed to do so, is not liable. But others who injure him are liable.”

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Interestingly, there is no indication in this Mishnah that Rabbi Akiva knows about the manipulations of the offending man to hurt this woman the second time; the narrator appears to leave it deliberately unsaid, thus exploiting the gap between the reader’s knowledge and the character’s knowledge in order to produce a general legal position rather than a private one. The implied reader may be sorry that Rabbi Akiva does not condemn the man for his actions, but if Rabbi Akiva’s reaction were based on the offending man’s behavior, that would diminish its force. The importance of the answer lies precisely in the fact that it completely neutralizes the question of the circumstances which caused it to occur and states a principle: a person must pay if he shames another person, even if the second person has shamed themselves in turn. This story is a good example of the function of eventfulness in the early strata of rabbinic literature. First, the event is made subservient here, as in many other cases, to a Halachic purpose: using it is a way of enriching Halacha in complex cases that the standard language of the law may miss. Without this goal, the text redactor would probably prefer to stick to his minimalist, non-narrative language. One can definitely say that the very choice of the narrative mode is an event in its own right on the level of narration mediation. Against this background, an event of this kind deserves to be considered a unique case – though not exclusively – of a “discourse event” as defined by Meister (2003, 107). Second, the close connection between a story and the textual frame in which it is embedded underlines the need to add another factor to what we are accustomed to calling the “cultural sensitivity” of the event: alongside the historical, social, cultural, and ideological conditions that play a role in the evaluation of every event – of every story, in all cultures, and at all times – while reading the Mishnah stories, like many other premodern world stories, we also have to pay special attention to the story’s function. This function itself, directly or indirectly mediated through the non-narrative textual frame within which the story is integrated, often determines how we should assess the nature and intensity of the fundamental event around which the story is organized. Reading the story out of context is an entirely legitimate practice, and it can often shed light on many phenomena within the story. But alongside that, attention must be paid to the external framing of the narrative unit and to the relationship, often quite complex, between them (Marienberg-Milikowsky 2016b).

5.1 The Rise and the Fall of Eventfulness in the Sage Story The eventfulness of the early sage stories must therefore be seen, first and foremost, as a choice: the redactor could deliver Rabbi Akiva’s conclusion without any

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prior story, or even without attributing it to Rabbi Akiva: that is the way it is in the vast majority of the text. But he chooses not to do so. Instead, he frames the Halachic statement in a narrative structure, giving it a special status. He tells a story only because he has something important, relevant, and unusual to say. This level of eventfulness is relatively high, if only because the choice of narrative tone in this text is – from a quantitative point of view – so unusual. Considering the essence of this text, the words of the sages – their actual statements – are one of the major events in this literature. It is not surprising that people talk and that their words are mediated, but the content of their words may be surprising, and their impact on the plot is crucial. In the later sages’ stories, this phenomenon, as well as the genre of the sages’ story itself, becomes much more common and much more complex, and accordingly its weight as a discourse event goes through far-reaching transformations. Gradually, it changes from being a rare choice to becoming a familiar textual routine. Once we read the Talmud while observing how a phrase becomes an event, we can follow a process of emplotment and notice narration strategies that construct it: we can diachronically trace their birth, their life, and their death (or at least their decline). This process was neither necessary nor inevitable, considering the content of this literature. To describe the process, we will follow the development of a small expression which does not really develop into a story on its own but does color some texts with narrativity and eventfulness. A brief introduction is needed. According to Jewish law, each day begins with the sunset of the day before. Thus, the sun setting on Friday evening ushers in the Sabbath. This moment is signified by the lighting of candles, an essential practice in a world with no electricity, but one that soon becomes a religious ceremony. The transformation from a technical act into a religious one raises questions which are typical to ritual thought: is oil of all sorts adequate for the ceremony? On this question the sages disagree in the Mishnah (M. Shabbat 2:2): R. Ishmael says: For the honor of the Sabbath it is forbidden to light with the dregs of tar. [But] the sages allow with all [sorts of] oils: with sesame oil, with nut oil, with radish [seed] oil, with fish oil, with gourd seed oil, with dregs of tar, and with crude oil. R. Tarphon says: it is forbidden to light with anything but olive oil.

It is important to notice that the sages are not conversing with each other here. The Mishnah, following what was mentioned before, is the most quiet and non-narrative text of Talmudic literature, and the disagreement is described as a mere summary of different opinions. It is marked by using, almost always, the present tense. The sages “say,” not “said.” In many instances, as we already saw, the phrases are not even attributed to a certain sage, but are an anonymous summary of the law, as is common in other legal literature, both ancient and modern.

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However, another version of this disagreement appears in a different text, called the Tosefta, being a transitional text linking historically and stylistically the Mishnah and the Talmud, even if formally it is much closer in time, style, and structure to the Mishnah. The opening point of this version (T. Shabbat 2:3) is the ending of the Mishnah version: R. Tarphon says: it is forbidden to light with anything but olive oil. R. Yochanan son of Nuri stood up on his feet and said: “what will the people of Babylon do, who have but sesame oil? What will the people of Medes do, who have but nut oil? What will the people of Alexandria do, who have but radish [seed] oil? What will the people of Cappadocia do, who have none of any of these? One must follow what the sages said [that one can use any oil].”

The disagreement in the academy now comes to life: opposing the strict opinion that one can use only olive oil, Rabbi Yochanan son of Nuri stands up, demanding recognition for the limits of those who cannot withstand such a verdict; in the ancient world, people could only use what was cultivated in their vicinity. The raw materials of narrativity are easily revealed: present tense gives way to past tense, and if that is not enough, the quiet documentation gives way to a physical gesture – standing, or rather, standing up, which we rightly recognize as criticism. The gesture matches the rhetoric of the speaker, and more importantly, his crucial message: the speaker does not limit himself to a minor statement, that one who cannot obtain olive oil can light with a different oil. Instead, he attacks with a line of questions, and demands a differential law. Even if formalistically this story is simple, it is entirely eventful, which cannot be said about the “cleaner” version of the controversy in the Mishnah. Its repetitive rhetoric with its critical and ethical content (arguing for equality) allows not only the “ideal reader” to recognize it as such, but also the reader that comes from a different background. As mentioned above, at this stage of Hebrew literature, the mere choice of a story – preferred over a dry transmission, as was conventionally accepted – is in itself eventful on the level of mediating. But what happens to this eventful mediating of a debate with time, when its narrative form continues to develop? Following just a little more than the physical gesture of standing up, for example, one can see how it evolves. In the ancient layer of rabbinic literature it appears only twice, both times in the Tosefta (T. Shabbat 2:3; T. Ta’anit 2:5), and in both it is the same character that stands up – Rabbi Yochanan son of Nuri – and in both it is severe criticism of some other sage’s opinion that makes him stand up. Both stories are very simple and very short, and can maybe follow the narrow formalistic definitions of a minimal story. But when this physical representation turns up later in the Talmud, it splits into two branches. In the first, the story persists in a short version – someone stood up and said such and such –

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but the context becomes incredibly banal and trivial, and almost scandalously unimportant. The event becomes uneventful. Here is an example from a discussion about the type of shoes to be worn on fasts (BT. Yoma 78a): R. Yizthak son of Nachmani stood up on his feet and said: “I saw Rabbi Yehoshua son of Levi, who walked in the street with cork sandals on the Day of Atonement, and I said to him: ‘Is it allowed on other fasts?’ He said to me: ‘There is no difference.’”

Walking in cork sandals on a fast day is not so exciting, and therefore not very eventful, even from a traditional perspective, and it seems Rabbi Yitzhak son of Nachmani knows that; the laconic answer of Rabbi Yehoshua son of Levi is far from being charged too. True, at this point one can argue that this analysis is too subjective; however, there is clear textual evidence for the opposite. Choosing the standing-up event for dramatizing the text is not an incident. It reflects poetic convention in the Babylonian Talmud according to which the redactor of the text plays with ready-made elements from other sources, not because they fit thematically but because they fit poetically: in this case, the standing-up gesture  – a physical gesture that has to do with legs – echoes the issue of the certain type of shoes that one can or cannot use on fasts. Prioritizing style density over balancing the text according to its eventfulness is a typical artistic means of the Babylonian Talmud (Marienberg-Milikowsky 2016a). Admittedly, this is not a one-way process. The stylization of the text surface, on the one hand, weakens the eventfulness of the mediated events, but on the other it encourages the dramatization of simple events: what could have been considered as a type 1 event has, almost perforce, increasingly become a type 2 event. It is framed as more relevant, on the discourse level, than it might have been. Then, typically of an inflationary process, the Talmudic editors were required to dramatize other events, including events that were quite “eventful” in the previous stage and that now needed further, sometimes artificial, emphasis. As a result, the economy of both object event and discourse event in Talmudic literature has changed tremendously.

6 Eventfulness in Hybrid Forms The fundamental distinction between the two main genres of Talmudic stories would make impossible a combination of the two: one tells the story of biblical heroes and the other the story of heroes of the Talmudic period; the basic fidelity of this literature to the unity of more or less realistic time in the fictive story would not allow for mixing such different periods in one plot. However, this general rule has exceptions, and these may well complement our discussion so far, precisely

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because they stretch the realization of eventfulness beyond its normal norms in most of the corpus. The main feature to be tested here is the effect of the supernatural factor – the presence of which is due to a breach of the unity of time – on the degree of the eventfulness of the stories.

6.1 Eventfulness in Elijah Stories Elijah is not the usual prophet of the Bible. The Bible itself emphasizes his exceptionalism, his zealousness, even with explicit divine criticism of this zeal (1 Kings 19:9–16). Unlike ordinary mortals, Elijah does not die as a regular man would, but instead rises in the heavenly storm (2 Kings 2:11), and elsewhere he is said to have a role as the precursor of the future redemption (Mal. 3:3). This unique background underpins the many mythical and symbolic roles of the Judeo-Christian tradition in its various branches, including a literary tradition that is a cornerstone of the development in the Jewish context of Elijah’s narratives: a group of stories that describe daily meetings between Elijah the Prophet and the Talmudic scholars. There are dozens of places in Talmudic literature (most of them in the Babylonian Talmud and other late texts) which deal with such meetings where Elijah is suddenly revealed – or prevented from being revealed – to human sages. In these stories, Elijah usually performs one of two main functions: either his job is to bring the word of God to the human rabbinic academy (which is called “beit-midrash”; literally: a house for learning and interpreting), or to help – or avoid helping – the wise in times of trouble, usually in light of his entanglement in moral matters. In both cases, his character seems far more pleasant and sympathetic than that portrayed in the Bible, and the background to this may be the sages’ attempt to convey a process of sublimation: to a large extent, these stories ignore completely both Elijah’s zealous past as a character in the biblical story and the threatening eschatological future. In this way, the sages make him a tolerant and friendly hero of the present, that is, of their own era. In commenting on eventfulness in premodern Christian literature, Schmid (2010) points out that miracle, in itself, is not a surprising occurrence, but part of the natural world picture reflected in this literature. Against this background, it is interesting to note that Elijah’s magical revelations to the sages in the Talmudic period are characterized, first, by a marked reduction in supernatural traits: Elijah does not come through a storm, and his presence is presented usually as completely natural and mundane. In other words, what could have been presented as a miracle – even if not surprisingly, as Schmid says – is deliberately presented as an event that is not at all miraculous.

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Second, Elijah’s crossing of the boundaries between heaven and earth and between the human and the divine – both literal and metaphorical – lacks any mythical or mystical context, and is often used to reflect the importance of highly significant human missions such as remedying social and class injustices, often with deep identification of Elijah with the poor (the similarity to Jesus and his disciples in this context is not accidental, of course). It is told, for example, about two brothers, one of whom properly cared for his servant’s supper while the other did not; Elijah, in response, met and talked with the former and avoided meeting with the other (BT Ketubot 61a). The Aramaic word indicating their meeting, ‫אישתעי‬, means, literally, “spoke, told” (Sokoloff 2002, 1167). This might have served as an indication of Elijah’s role as a messenger, to deliver heavenly statements. In many stories, however, it has to be understood more or less as “socialize by talking,” without even a hint of “revelation” and the like, being habitually used to describe encounters between “ordinary” human beings. In another story (BT Ta’anit 22a), this word is used to tell how Elijah stopped talking with one pious man from the day he set up a notable gate at his doorstep and thus (according to the accepted interpretation of the story) prevented the poor from knocking easily on his door. Sometimes it is not about remedying injustice and immoral situations, but about the trivialities of everyday life. For example, it is told elsewhere that one day Elijah surprised one of his friends in the market when he pointed to two brothers and told him they would live in the world to come simply because they were merrymakers that entertained the people with sadness and anger. And third, if it is not enough that Elijah’s stories are focused on human society and human needs, more than once Elijah comes to express their superiority to the divine. The most striking example of this comes from a well-known story about a dramatic controversy in the sages’ academy, a story that rather extravagantly compares a series of miraculous occurrences. This story is known as the story of the “oven of Akhnai,” in which debate among scholars in the academy is democratically and relativistically decided by man, even though a series of miracles indicate that the divine truth is different (BT Bava Metzia 59a-b). The story begins with a minor legal issue, but it soon develops into one of the most aggressive arguments in the entire rabbinic literature: [. . .] On that day R. Eliezer responded with all the responses in the world, but they did not accept them from him. He said to them, “If the law is as I say, let the carob [tree] prove it.” The carob uprooted itself from its place and went one hundred cubits – and some say four cubits. They said to him, “One does not bring proof from the carob.” The carob returned to its place. He said to them, “If the law is as I say, let the aqueduct prove it.” The water turned backward. They said to him, “One does not bring proof from water.” The water returned to its place.

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He said to them, “If the law is as I say, let the walls of the academy prove it.” The walls of the academy inclined to fall. R. Yehoshua rebuked them. He said to them, “When sages are contesting with one another in law, what is it to you!” It was taught: they did not fall because of the honor of R. Yehoshua, and they did not stand because of the honor of R. Eliezer, and they are still inclining and standing. He said to them, “If it is as I say, let it be proved from heaven.” A heavenly voice went forth and said, “What is it for you with R. Eliezer, since the law is like him in every place?” R. Yehoshua stood up on his feet and said, “It is not in heaven” [Deut. 30:12].

It is hard not to notice the surprising theology that arises out of this text, wherein God is instructed, with all due respect, to stay out of the academy and not interfere in the argument. More importantly, it is hard not to notice how great the tension is between the physical events and the verbal events: here stands Rabbi Eliezer who is sided by nature, architecture, and the heavens, after he instructs them to adhere to him. Opposed to him are the other sages led by Rabbi Yehoshua, who reject any element that is not human. The climax of the story, its most unheard-of occurrence, is no doubt when Rabbi Yehoshua stands on his feet and declares, “It is not in heaven.” The precedence of discourse event over physical event fits well with the worldview described previously: a worldview where speech, or argument, is no less “real” and “consequential” than physical events. The eventfulness, again and again, culminating in this literature in the act of speaking. However, another peak of the story comes a few lines later, in another episode, when Elijah is asked by one of the sages what God was doing in his residence during the argument. Elijah is simply presented, and nothing prepares the reader for this meeting with him, and, even less, for his answer. Elijah answers that God “smiled and said, my sons have won, my sons have won.” This unpredictable answer, which would have been inconceivable in earlier strata of Talmudic literature, is not at all surprising for the sage asking the question, but it certainly seems to overwhelm the reader with its inherent paradoxes (Rubenstein 1999, 34–64). Its eventfulness is thus emphasized through the breaking of the reader’s set of expectations, which until now has been influenced by other traditional conventions.

6.2 Eventfulness in the Story about Moses’s Visit to R. Akiva’s Academy A quite unique story from a poetic point of view is the story about Moses’s visit to the rabbinic academy (BT Menachot 29b) because the way in which it breaks with the unity of time is almost unparalleled in the classical strata of rabbinic literature. The two main genres of the period described earlier at length – the Midrashic story and the sages’ story – are here merged into one in a spectacular artistic act. Despite

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its uniqueness  – much like the story of the “oven of Akhnai” discussed above, a story which is unique in its own right – for many scholars it is considered one of the most important and representative of all the Talmudic stories. The reference to the story is the biblical description of Moses’s ascension to Mount Sinai, where he is with God, and is about to deliver God’s words, the Torah, to earth. The Talmud deflects the image from the mount to heaven, at least at first: At the time when Moses ascended to heaven [to receive the Torah] he found the Holy One, Blessed be He, sitting and tying crowns to the letters. He said before him, “Master of the Universe! Who restrains your hand [from giving the Torah immediately, without the crowns]?” He said to him, “There is a certain man who will live in the future at the end of some generations, and Akiva b. Yosef is his name, who will, in the future, derive heaps and heaps of laws from all the tips [of the crowns of the letters].”

Akiva son of Joseph, or Rabbi Akiva, is considered, to a great extent, a founding father of Talmudic learning. He is often represented as a radical interpreter, and for this, he often provokes within the texts contrary sentiments of either great admiration or condemnation for exaggerated originality. This is also an issue in the present story: He [Moses] said to him, “Master of the Universe! Show him to me.” He said to him, “Turn around.” He [Moses] went and sat at the end of eighteen rows of students, but he did not understand what they were saying. His strength failed him. When they came to a certain matter of law, his [Akiva’s] students said to him, “Master, how do you know this?” He said to them, “It is a law [given] to Moses at Sinai.” His [Moses’s] mind was settled. He [Moses] returned and came before the Holy One, blessed be He. He [Moses] said to him, “Master of the Universe! You have such a one in your world and you give the Torah by my hand?” He said to him, “Silence! Thus it arose in thought before me [i.e., thus have I decided].”

Reading this text as an expanded biblical story, or as a new version of it, points to some of its generic characteristics. While the biblical story describes an ascension to Mount Sinai, and, more importantly, does not really tell us what happened there, in that revelation of God to man, the Midrashic story completes the picture. But the picture, paradoxically, is not one of the total sublimity of God, but to a great extent the opposite: Moses is surprised to learn that the words of God, which are about to be delivered to earth, are not yet ready; that something is still missing. The reason, as soon becomes clear, is that a person whom Moses cannot know, for he is from the future, will interpret the Torah in ways that are unfamiliar to Moses, and therefore God must prepare the Torah for that person as well.

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The biblical protagonist then travels through time, a very rare occurrence in rabbinic literature, and arrives at the school of that man, Rabbi Akiva, but surprisingly, he cannot understand what is being said. That must be a painful experience. Furthermore, what he cannot understand is being attributed to him; one can imagine, and find support for that in the story, so that even though for a moment Moses is flattered to hear his own name, he is only slightly calmed. Acting on his feelings, he returns to God and questions the decision to hand him the Torah, and not to that teacher of the future. God’s answer, this time, is more like what we expect from a God, or at least from some gods: shut up, you cannot understand, you do not know; I decide. For the second reading, the reader can manifest the story as an exemplum. It is centralized around a Talmudic sage, Rabbi Akiva, in his comfortable academy. Obviously, he does not know who the new student sitting in the last row is – an immigrant from different times. He converses with his students, and when they undermine his interpretation, they push him to the point at which he has no choice but to declare authoritatively, like God, “I know [. . .] because I know; that is – this is what has been handed down to Moses at Sinai, and from Moses, generation after generation down to me, and even if you cannot find this in the text, it is its truth.” Rabbi Akiva cannot realize the effect his answer has on the new student – and, considering his presence there, how confusing and bewildering it is. However, for generations of readers who identified the two perspectives in the story – that of Moses who cannot understand, and that of the Talmudic scholar who relies on him when he can no longer call on his own capacity for understanding – the story was read as an intensified representation of a very reflexive scholarly culture, which knows that the cord connecting their human Torah to the divine one of Moses is a loose one, but nevertheless one that should not be dissolved (Marienberg-Milikowsky 2016b, 37–86). In a third reading, one can read this story as a story of a conversation or a dialogue. From this perspective, what is the most eventful event in the story? What is its point? It cannot be Moses’s ascension to heaven, or his descent back to earth; in fantastical literature, even when it does not generally use miracles as building blocks for a plot, the unreal aspects appear as the real, and they are not especially interesting. God’s final response is also not surprising – while the story’s relation to its biblical nucleus is a free one, the codes of the genre bind the ending of the story with that of its biblical core, and therefore it is known already from the start that Moses will deliver the Torah to Earth, and not Akiva son of Joseph. Therefore, it seems that the most profound eventful moment of the text happens in the school of Akiva, at that moment when Moses sits there and does not understand a thing. This is the point when that unheard-of-occurrence occurs. And if this is the most eventful moment, then the question arises: of what is it constructed? Perhaps there

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are two things: the first is mental, cognitive, and internal – Moses does not understand. The second is enacted in the world of the story – the conversation, the act of speaking. And if we seek a more minimalist definition, it is the phrase, the one thing the teacher says, which creates a chain reaction of more events. Interestingly, we do not know what the conversation revolved around. While we grasp the scene, its content remains sealed. Why do we not know what was said in the academy? Why is the most important event rendered as an empty frame? One can offer some answers to this question, but the most significant one would be that, if the narrator wants to portray the distance between the world of the Talmud sages and the world of Moses, the best way is to leave the conversation as a frame: the reader can complete the picture, while Moses must stay distressed. What the story demonstrates here, then, is not any specific content of learning and conversing, but a conversation as an occurrence, as a sphere replete with events and feelings. In this space there are arguments and conversations: some there understand and some do not; the authority of the teacher is not unlimited, even if he can play tricks when a crisis arises. And if a conversation is an event, then it will not be wrong to claim that its smallest formal unit, as we have already seen in the Mishnah, is the phrase, whether or not it is a phrase which invites another phrase and thus creates dialogue, whether it transmits concrete contents, or whether it is just a report that something has been said. Combining the two hybrid stories discussed in this section raises an important insight. An accepted argument is that religious stories cannot fully realize eventfulness. In Schmid’s words, there is little unpredictability in hagiography [. . .] of course, hagiographical texts, as a rule, represent changes of state, and they often culminate in miracles. Miracles are, however, not genuinely surprising and unforeseeable in this textual world, as they follow holy models and affirm the Christian world order. Essentially, the hagiographical world does not admit fundamental surprises. (2010, 16–17)

This argument is undoubtedly also true of Jewish hagiographical stories from the long history of Jewish/Hebrew literature (perhaps mainly in the Middle Ages and among traditional subcultures that maintain their character into the modern era), but it is worth noting when instances of religious thought are not what we thought them to be. In the cases presented here, where miracles are almost necessarily a solution to a problematic plot bridge, built to connect two divided genres, and maybe precisely in these cases, the miracles seem to be excessive. Eventfulness is rebuilt not around the wondrous and the magical, but around the humanized. And in its fullest and most developed performances, around the concentric power of the Talmudic story – the drama of the academy.

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Like the reader, Moses does not wonder at the very possibility of moving in time; he accepts it as a natural possibility, derived from the power of the divine. What surprises him is the apparently incomprehensible behavior of God, and especially its connection to the words of yet-unborn human beings. The inherent paradox of these words, which remind him of the source of tradition even though he cannot understand the tradition, intensifies the level of the eventfulness of the moment into one that makes the task of his life an unsolvable riddle. From a diachronic perspective, it is no coincidence that stories like this reach their ultimate actualization precisely in the Babylonian Talmud, where this drama plays such a central role (Rubenstein 1999, 2003, 2010).

7 Conclusions: Features of Eventfulness in Light of Talmudic Art of Narration Narratology has already had a significant influence on the study of Talmudic literature (Simon-Shoshan 2012), but diachronic narratology is still in its early stages. Only a few rabbinic genres, such as the Midrashic parable (Stern 1994), the Midrashic/homiletic story (Levinson 2005) and the discussion (sugya) story (Marienberg-Milikowsky 2016a), have been considered from this perspective, while the entire Talmudic genre system, with its sophisticated array of artistic devices, has almost never been placed within broad diachronic frameworks. The main conclusions to be drawn from this, which might contribute to a better historical and typological conceptualization of eventfulness, are as follows. (1) The Midrashic story that requires the recipient to read two stories simultaneously (the original biblical story, and the story reworked by the sages) redefines the demand for resultativity. An incident that occurs in one story affects the other, and often changes the reason that caused a certain result in the original story. Following Levinson, who showed narrativity gradually rising as Midrashic motivations decreased, one could say that over time the (textualization of the) resultativity of stories of this genre becomes more complete, more coherent. (2) This genre redefines the scalable parameter of unpredictability. The basic rules of the genre determine its boundaries – it begins at the point of origin of the biblical story and ends at its end – and so the main surprise occurs in what lies in the middle, that is, in the way the narrator both designs a new plot and maintains a connection with the original. However, this surprise is only from the point of view of the abstract (ideal) reader; the characters in the story do not know that they were taken out of their original context.

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(3) The very fact that the Talmudic stories, like many other stories in the premodern world, are integrated into non-narrative textual frameworks, must encourage us to pay attention to the non-narrative function that these stories are intended to serve. This function may sometimes be manipulated by the text editors, but it must be taken into account when we evaluate events. Moving back and forth from the dry, minimalist, and non-narrated documentary tone of the law recorder to the dramatic tone of the storyteller can itself be considered an event on the level of mediation. (4) With the development of the Talmudic story over time, it is evident that one typical event has been gaining momentum, becoming a magnet of a plot, becoming more and more eventful: this event is the sages’ saying, especially when it is presented in the discursive setting of the Beit Midrash – the rabbinical academy. In this development, which takes place on the level of narration, one can often notice an evolutionary process whose main points are as follows. In the first stage, the story stands for itself, and a narrative envelope is needed only when something important is at stake. In the second stage the story mantle becomes the main one, and the function it serves – secondary; at this point, there is a dual movement: on the one hand, seemingly unimportant stories are often dressed in storytelling, and on the other, the dramatization of discourse is also adapted to empty statements, that is, to stories of loaded sayings whose actual content is not communicated to the reader at all. (5) The rise of the story mantle – a phenomenon that we pointed out as present in both genres, the Midrashic story and the story of the sages – at some point leads to the reproduction and copying of identical narrative elements from one story to another. As a result, unique events that were at first non-iterative on the level of narration lose out in their eventfulness. They are becoming predictable, sometimes even iterative. Instead of realizing the relevance they had in ancient stories, they sometimes become ready-made building blocks in plot construction. (6) The argument that religious literature (without entering into the complexity of this term) can demonstrate only a low level of eventfulness is not always true in the same way. It is based on an overly close identification of the magical with the religious. And while the Talmudic story does not undermine the feasibility of miracles, (a) it does not often use them as a narrative tool, and (b) even when it does so use them, they are marginally disproportionate to the non-miraculous events of the story, and especially moments of a scholarly give and take, whose level of eventfulness – thanks to their intrinsic role in the highly intellectual culture represented in the stories – is much higher.

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In her manifesto for medieval narratology, Eva von Contzen (2014, 7) stated that efforts in this direction “cannot only address a major lacuna in the field of (post-classical) narratology, but also make a significant contribution to the history and the development of narrative genres, forms, and functions.” The importance of diachronic narratology, therefore, lies in the ability to test universal narrative theories and in the need to rephrase them or at least adapt them to diverse premodern literary fields (Fludernik 2003). Examining the evolution of eventfulness in Talmudic literary stories, it would seem, proves that this may be beneficial not only to the examined literature but also to the expansion and development of the theory itself.

References Balberg, Mira. 2013. Introduction to Rabbinic Literature. [In Hebrew.] Ra’anana: Open University of Israel Press. Barthes, Roland. (1966) 1975. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”, New Literary History 6, no. 2, 237–272. Boyarin, Daniel. 1990. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Boyarin, Daniel. 2009. Socrates & the Fat Rabbis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Faust, Shmuel. 2010. “Criticism in the Sage Stories.” [In Hebrew.] PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “The Diachronization of Narratology: Dedicated to F. K. Stanzel on His 80th Birthday.” Narrative 11, no. 3, 331–348. Forster, Edward Morgan. 1927. Aspects of the Novel. London: Arnold. Fraenkel, Jonah. 1981. Studies in the Spiritual World of the Aggadic Narrative. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Fraenkel, Jonah. 2001. The Aggadic Narrative: Harmony of Form and Content. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Hühn, Peter. 2008. “Forms and Functions of Eventfulness in Narrative Fiction.” In Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 141−163. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hühn, Peter. 2014. “Event and Eventfulness.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, vol. 1, 159–178. 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter. Levinson, Joshua. 2005. The Twice Told Tale: A Poetics of the Exegetical Narrative in Rabbinic Midrash. [In Hebrew.] Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press. Lotman, Jurij. (1970) 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated by Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Marienberg-Milikowsky, Itay. 2016a. “Beyond the Matter: Stories and Their Contexts in the Babylonian Talmud – Repeated Stories as a Test Case.” [In Hebrew.] Ph.D. diss., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Marienberg-Milikowsky, Itay. 2016b. We Know Not What Has Become of Him: Literature and Meaning in Talmudic Aggada. [In Hebrew.] Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press. Meister, Jan Christoph. 2003. Computing Action: A Narratological Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter. Moretti, Franco. 2013. The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. London: Verso.

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Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. 1999. Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.  Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. 2003. The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. 2010. Stories of the Babylonian Talmud. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schmid, Wolf. 2003. “Narrativity and Eventfulness.” In What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, 17–33. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter.  Simon-Shoshan, Moshe. 2012. Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah. New York: Oxford University Press.  Sokoloff, Michael. 2002. A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press; Johns Hopkins University Press. Stern, David. 1994. Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature. Harvard University Press. Vidas, Moulie. 2014. Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud. Princeton and Oxford University Press. von Contzen, Eva. 2014. “Why We Need a Medieval Narratology – a Manifesto”, Diegesis: Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 3, no. 2, 1–21. Wimpfheimer, Barry S. 2011. Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Peter Hühn

Poetic Narratives: The Sonnet Sequence (1400–1900) 1 Definition  The sonnet sequence (sometimes called sonnet cycle) is a hybrid genre in which individual sonnets are assembled to form a quasi-narrative sequence, the collection thus straddling the border between lyric poetry and story or novel, constituting a narrative through poems. The sonnet sequence can be considered a special subgenre within the broader confines of narrative poetry collections, which Henrieke Stahl (forthcoming) has termed “novel in poems” and Adrian Kempton (2018) has circumscribed, loosely and somewhat inaccurately, as “verse novel.” The sonnet sequence is the only such subgenre within this broader field of collections of narrative poetry or the “novel in poems” which has developed recognizable conventions, at least in English (and Western European) literary history. The specific subgenre of the sonnet sequence is defined more narrowly as an ordered collection of individual sonnets (sometimes mixed with songs). The hybrid genre of the sonnet sequence (Kambasković-Sawers 2010, xi–xiii) can be defined as a combination, on the level of sonnets as units, of a paradigmatic and a syntagmatic axis: the paradigmatic axis of momentary lyric situations, of various states of affairs within each individual sonnet, and the syntagmatic axis of the narrative concatenation of the individual sonnets to form a narrative development, a storyline, a succession of changes of state.  As a specific form of lyric poem, the sonnet is characterized by a speaker and his monological speech situation, a focus on the mental dimension (consciousness, perception, desire, recollection, attitude, etc.) primarily concerned with his own existence, situation, and motivations. Moreover, the speaker’s utterance presents a momentary state of affairs, frequently addressed to an addressee and performed at the moment of speaking. The focus on the present moment is assisted by the specific form of the sonnet, the restriction to fourteen lines and the argumentative turn at the volta (after line 8 in the Petrarchan, additionally after line 12 in the Shakespearean form). The narrative organization of the sonnet sequence, i.e., the implied changes of state underlying the succession of the sonnets, can vary in degree (between stronger and weaker narrative lines; consider the notion of “weak narrativity” in McHale 2001) or in content (between situational and mental changes). Prototypically, the speaker, narrator, and protagonist are one. There may be one or more plothttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-032

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lines driven by one or more dynamic motives resulting in a sequence of changes of state, possibly with a decisive eventful turn, an event, presented by the narrator from one specific perspective. Narrative development, or change of state, usually occurs between sonnets but can also be indicated within individual sonnets. Historically, the sonnet sequence is closely associated with one specific thematic frame: a male lover expressing desire for his beloved and ultimate denial of fulfillment, in line with the medieval Christian doctrine of sexual abnegation.

2 Early Modern Age: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries  The development of the sonnet sequence in England from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the nineteenth century cannot be understood without a reference to the origins of this poetic subgenre in medieval Italy, particularly to Dante in the thirteenth and Petrarch in the fourteenth century. Especially Petrarch’s Canzoniere served  – directly or indirectly  – as a model for subsequent sonnet sequences, with respect both to form and subject matter.

2.1 Francesco Petrarch, Canzoniere (ca. 1336–1374, printed 1470)  The hybrid genre of the sonnet sequence (or cycle) originated in medieval Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Like the isolated sonnet itself, the grouping of sonnets into a sequence was originally reserved mainly for the topic of love, and in that respect it is closely associated with the Provençal, French, Italian, and European medieval tradition and conventions of troubadour, courtly, or chivalric love poetry (fin’amor, Minnesang). The first Italian sonnet sequence is Dante’s La Vita Nuova (ca. 1294), a book combining explanatory prose passages with twenty-five sonnets (along with a number of other poems) telling the story of the speaker’s love for Beatrice from his first sight of her as a child to her death and his mourning for her, with a final redirection of his thoughts to divine love (taken up in his Divina Commedia, 1321). The most influential Italian sonnet sequence is Francesco Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, also called Canzoniere, consisting of 366 lyric poems, among them 317 sonnets and 29 songs; it is the seminal pre-text for all subsequent sonnet sequences, whether directly known by later authors or not. Briefly summarized, it is characterized as follows (Hainsworth 2015). The speaker, a partly fictionalized

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image of the author Petrarch, falls in love with the beautiful and adamantly virtuous lady Laura, whom he praises, adores, and worships for her bodily and spiritual perfection, without his love developing in any way or coming to fulfillment. This devotion continues after Laura’s death, which marks the division of the sequence into two parts. Most of the sonnets focus introspectively on his changing states of mind over the years, alternating between exhilaration, despair, contemplation, admiration, frustration, and dejection, sometimes interspersed with moments of anxiety about his infatuation as an unworthy passion and the risk to his immortal soul. In fact, the strong urge for introspection and self-exploration is an important aspect of the sonnet sequence. While the basic relationship between the speaker and Laura is thus characterized by stagnation and lack of change, the sequence is pervaded by a string of temporal references, some with precise dates, thus constituting a conspicuous quasi-narrative dimension: the ongoing story of the speaker’s love, which is not constant in every respect. The speaker meets Laura on Easter Sunday 1327 in Avignon; she dies on the same day in 1348. Numerous incidents are reported such as their travels, the painting of her portrait, her receiving a visitor, their meetings. The passing of time is marked by occasional annual commemorations of his falling in love by “anniversary poems.” Throughout, the speaker thematizes his role as a writer of the present poems, elaborated through allusions to the Ovidian myth of Apollo and Daphne and her transformation into a laurel tree (laura), linking this role with his beloved and her name. In the end, with his own death approaching, the speaker reflects on the state of his immortal soul and finally addresses a prayer for help to the Virgin, regretting the wasted time and emotion.   The narrative frame and the references to the speaker’s role as a poet became part of the convention of sonnet sequences in subsequent centuries, as did the implied claim of autobiographical authenticity (not discussed in the subsequent overview; for further details, see Buchbinder 1988). The sonnet sequence is thus a clear instance of what Lotman ([1971] 1977, 288–291) calls the “aesthetics of identity” (as opposed to the “aesthetics of opposition”). The inherent narrativity of the sonnet sequence is constituted by the dynamic tension between the lover’s motivating desire and resistance by the beloved, a tension that can be understood in a variety of ways.

2.2 Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella (ca. 1582, pr. 1591, 1598)  The sonnet sequence was first introduced into England by Philip Sidney, whose Astrophel and Stella triggered a veritable sonnet vogue during the following decades (from the 1590s to the 1620s) when (in addition to innumerable single sonnets)

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twelve notable sonnet sequences were published, often in several editions (Neely 1978). The majority of these sequences reproduce the conventional scheme of love experience as derived from Petrarch’s model and subsequently made popular as the Petrarchan story of unrequited love, as exemplified in the following overview by Samuel Daniel’s To Delia (1592). Further variations of the conventional scheme can be found, for instance, in Henry Constable’s Diana (1592), Thomas Lodge’s Philis (1593), and Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1594). Three sonnet sequences present more or less decisive departures from the scheme: Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), and Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621).  Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (Kambasković-Sawers 2010, 61–95) establishes the sonnet sequence as a subgenre in English and serves as the model for a large number of imitations, adaptations, or variations in the subsequent decades, not so much with respect to the development of a specific narrative plotline as to framing and choice of subject matter: Petrarchan love for a beautiful and virtuous lady, a love which remains unrequited but ennobles the devoted lover. In this respect, Sidney’s cycle ultimately goes back to Petrarch’s Canzoniere. The constellation of Astrophel and Stella reproduces the basic Petrarchan convention, namely the persistent passionate and ennobling love of a young man for a beautiful and virtuous young lady, who for moral reasons of chastity rejects his advances, a relationship which is already made explicit in the title of the sequence: the love of the star-lover (Latin and Greek: aster + philos) for the star (stella), which indicates both heavenly perfection and human inaccessibility of the beloved.   The great majority of the 108 sonnets and eleven songs explore and depict the basically unchanging love constellation in its various dimensions by repeatedly varying rhetorical devices, perspective, mood, aspect (such as admiration of beauty and adoration of purity and perfection), love, longing and desire, frustration and complaining, social behavior, and (poetic) communication with the beloved. Within these successive momentary situations, both the potentially dynamic drive on the lover’s part (desire, longing, complaining) and resistance on the beloved’s part (due to virtue, chastity, honor) are pervasively present in various combinations. The focus on the beloved shifts between joy about Stella’s beauty, unrequited desire, pride about loving Stella, gaining strength from this love for his public achievements, and despair coupled with frustration. These situations are full of tension but usually do not progress. An example of tension between virtue and desire is Sidney’s sonnet 71, which begins with “Who will in fairest book of Nature know / How Virtue may best lodg’d in beauty be [. . .]” and ends with “So while thy beauty draws the heart to love, / As fast thy Virtue bends that love to good: / ‘But ah, ‘Desire still cries, ‘give me some food.’” While most sonnets present the basically unchanging configuration of lover and beloved in a great variety of aspects, some poems (especially toward the end of

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the collection) indicate stages in a narrative development, not so much within individual poems as between them. All in all, the poems are ordered chronologically, and the collection spans the development of the speaker’s love experience starting from sonnet 1, where he feels an urge to communicate his newly arisen love to Stella through poetry, to the last poems, where he laments Stella’s departure and absence as well as his utter despair: “O absent presence! Stella is not here” (106.1); “Most rude despair, my daily unbidden guest, / Clips straight my wings, straight wraps me in his night” (108.7–8). This is a narrative development in three phases (Brodwin 1969): from the expression of Astrophel’s desire for love (sonnets 1–35) to the cautious stirring of Stella’s affection (sonnets 36–87), which is then unintentionally spoiled by Astrophel’s overly impulsive action with the resulting state of rejection and despair (sonnets 88–108).  The first indication of a change of state occurs in sonnet 69, when the speaker is given the impression that Stella cares for him: “For Stella hath with words where faith does shine, / Of her high heart giv’n me the monarchy: / I, I, O I may say that she is mine” (6–8). In the second song, Astrophel finds Stella asleep and steals a kiss from her, reprimanding himself for not being bolder: “Oh sweet kiss, but ah she is waking; / Lowering beauty chastens me: / Now will I away hence flee: ‘Fool, more fool, for no more taking’” (25–28). When Stella notices this, she is angry with the speaker (73). And she seems to deny him any further kisses: “But she forbids: with blushing words, then says / She builds her fame on higher seated praise” (81.9–10). In the fourth song, Astrophel describes his attempt to obtain fulfillment of his desire from Stella and her angry rejection of his attempt: “Woe to me, and do you swear / Me to hate, but I forbear?” (47–48). The eighth song, which is distinguished from all the other poems by being told not by Astrophel but by some impersonal narrator, finally narrates the disruption between the lovers, apparently caused by her sense of honor in spite of her affection. They meet for “mutual comfort [. . .] / Both within themselves oppressed, / But each in the other blessed” (5–8). Encouraged by their mutual understanding, he boldly begs her to give herself to him: “Grant – O me, what am I saying? / But no fault there is in praying” (47–48). However, she instantly rejects him: “But her hands his hands repelling, / Gave repulse all grace excelling” (67–68). Apparently, he has stepped across a boundary, meaning that she has to reject him: “Trust me, while I thee deny, / In myself the smart I try; Tyrant honour doth thus use thee, / Stella’s self might not refuse thee” (93–96). This results in their final separation: “Therewithall away she went, / Leaving him so passion-rent / With what she had done and spoken, / That therewith my song is broken” (104–108). There is some indication that their separation is caused by Stella’s sense of honor: “Stella, while now by honour’s cruel might / I am from you, light of my life, misled.” (91.1–29). And Astrophel blames himself for having inadvertently caused the disruption with his incautious behavior: “my foul stumbling so / From carelessness

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did in no manner grow, / But wit confus’d with too much care did miss” (93.6–8). He has harmed her and cannot forgive himself, suffering from “self-inflicted misery” (Kambasković-Sawers 2010, 62), this event being the only decisive change of state in this sequence. The ultimate reasons for the failure of their love seem to be twofold: moral and social norms (governing her behavior) and careless, incautious impulsiveness (guiding his actions). This is a significant deviation from the Petrarchan love concept: The kind of relationship the lovers were moving toward, based on mutuality of affection, would have amounted to what Taylor (2011) has called “a companionate marriage.” Thus, the narrative development can be seen to move toward an eventful resolution on the inherent tension of the love constellation but it is finally broken off. 

2.3 Samuel Daniel, To Delia (1591, revised and reprinted several times; quoted edition 1594)  Samuel Daniel’s To Delia, the first sonnet sequence after Sidney, consisting of fifty-five sonnets (in the English or Shakespearean form with a concluding couplet), reproduces the prototypical Petrarchan situation precisely, but with a vengeance. The beloved’s name, “Delia,” another designation for Diana, the chaste Greek goddess of the moon, indicates already, like “Stella,” both her superhuman superiority and her inaccessibility. In contrast to Astrophel and Stella, there is not even the abortive beginning of a possible change and its subsequent failure in To Delia. Instead, all the sonnets are basically descriptive variations of the speaker’s longing for love, his complaining about Delia’s unrelenting disdain, his accusation of her cruelty, his pain and suffering (Kambasković-Sawers 2010, 129–197). Narrative elements occur in a number of very reduced indications of change. Sonnet 1 opens exchanges with Delia about the speaker’s love in the form of sonnets, which she is asked to read. Sonnet 22 refers to his deteriorating physical and mental condition as a result of the frustration of his love: “My flower untimely’s withered with my tears, / And winter woes, for spring of youth unfit” (7–8). Sonnet 26 mentions that his “love affair” has already gone on for three years. Sonnets 29–31 imply that somehow raised hopes have definitively been disappointed. Sonnets 33–37 and 45–46 proleptically foresee Delia’s loss of beauty in coming old age and her future repentance about her present disdain. Sonnets 37–40 and 50 also predict that the speaker’s poems will preserve the memory of Delia’s beauty and of his love for her: “This [sonnet] may remain thy lasting monument, / Which happily posterity may cherish: / The colours with thy fading are not spent; / These may remain when thou and I shall perish” (37.9–12). The sequence ends on a contradictory double note: while sonnet 54 promises the celebration of Delia in the speaker’s poetry irre-

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spective of success or failure, the final sonnet 55 is a corroboration of his grief and pain about the frustration of his love: “These tributary plaints fraught with desire / I send those eyes, the cabinets of love, / The paradise whereto my hopes aspire, / From out this hell, which mine afflictions prove” (5–8). To Delia, similarly to Astrophel and Stella, represents the Petrarchan love experience in its basically static, unchangeable form and ultimately weak narrative development. In both sequences, the predominant emphasis is placed on the repetitive lyric presentation of the love situation with very little indication of the other component of the hybrid genre of the sonnet sequence, the narrative change of state and progression.

2.4 Edmund Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595) The same basic Petrarchan opposing configuration of speaker and beloved as in the other examples underlies Edmund Spenser’s sequence of eighty-nine sonnets (named not after the beloved, but after the Italian genre of light love songs): the lady’s superior beauty triggers the speaker’s adoration and love, while her adamant chastity and unrelenting morality cruelly deprive him of fulfilling his desire. As in the other sequences, the majority of the sonnets present the enticing and frustrating situation of lover and beloved, the mixture of praise and desire on the one hand and pain and complaint on the other, in a repetitive variation of aspects and moods (Kambasković-Sawers 2010, 97–128), often succinctly summarized in the self-contradictory formula with which the speaker addresses the lady: “fair proud” (17.1), “fair cruel” (49.1), “sweet warrior” (57.1). Conceits used to render this relationship vary, too, including for instance metaphors of war, hunting, sea voyage, Pandora’s box, and service in a temple. The narrative development is stronger and much more pronounced than in the previous (and subsequent) sequences. As in Sidney and Daniel, the speaker begins wooing his lady by self-referentially naming the sonnet as the poetic medium of communication (sonnet 1). From early on, an underlying narrative development is indicated through pervasive temporal references. Sonnet 4 is set at the beginning of the new year, combined with the concrete hope of a positive outcome, which in sonnet 6 is implicitly defined as marriage. Throughout the sonnets, allusions constitute an elaborate chain of close calendrical and liturgical correspondences with the progress of the church year (Deneef 1982, 62–76; Larsen 1997, 1–59). Thus, sonnet 22 refers to the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, a prospect which is taken up with the expectation of grace and pleasure in sonnets 25 and 26 or 51 and 52, for instance. Sonnet 60 and especially sonnet 62 mention that one year has passed. The hope of imminent “bliss” in sonnet 63 and then kissing and fondling in sonnet

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64 show a prospective advance in the relationship, which in 67 leads to the actual meeting and touching of the lovers on Easter Sunday (68), associated in sonnet 69 with the redemption of mankind. In subsequent sonnets a temporary, unexplained absence seems to occur (87, 89), which the speaker copes with by spending it “with expectation” of the imminent resolution (sonnet 87.9). Temporary deferral is finally resolved in the marriage of the speaker and his beloved. This event is praised ritually and celebrated publicly in the “Epithalamion,” a wedding song added as an eventful closure to the sonnet sequence (twenty-four stanzas, not in sonnet form, possibly reflecting the twenty-four hours of the wedding day). The Christian orientation of this relationship and of the concluding marriage is stressed by, for example, describing the source of inspiration (Helicon) in sonnet 1 with Christian images, associating fulfillment with Easter in sonnet 68, and, throughout, by allusions to the church year. Amoretti thus ends with the type of mutual and affectionate relationship which was envisaged without coming to pass in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (Taylor 2011).  

2.5 William Shakespeare, Sonnets (1609) Shakespeare’s collection of 154 sonnets was published in 1609, after the “sonnet craze” had subsided. Whether this publication and the arrangement of the sonnets were authorized by Shakespeare is not clear, but it can be assumed that they were (Jackson 1999). The first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man of outstanding physical beauty (the “lovely boy”; 126), while sonnets 127 to 152 revolve around an erotically fascinating, willing, and even promiscuous woman, the “dark lady.” (The last two sonnets are unrelated versions of the traditional Cupid motif.) The basic contradictory motivations underlying the Petrarchan love configuration inform the speaker’s attitude in Shakespeare’s sequence, too, but here they are essentially redistributed. The paradoxical tension in Petrarchism is caused by the fact that the lady, through her beauty, attracts the lover’s selfless adoration and his sexual desire and at the same time denies gratification of the desire on account of her unrelenting chastity and strict moral purity, thus invariably inflicting frustration and suffering on the lover. Shakespeare’s sequence is innovative in that it resolves this problem by disentangling the two motivations of ideal love and sensual pleasure and concentrating them not in one and the same person but in two different persons (Hühn 1995, 83–99; Jackson 1999, 122). On the one hand, unselfish, pure admiration and adoration of beauty is focused on a young man, the “fair friend” (sonnet 104) with whom a sexual relationship is declared early on to be out of the question: “since [nature] pricked thee out [i.e., provided you with a penis] for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their pleasure” (sonnet 20). On the other hand, the selfish

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desire for sexual gratification attaches itself to a seductive woman, the “dark lady,” who readily gives herself to the lover. But this potentially harmonious resolution of the Petrarchan love dilemma proves unstable, for it is increasingly eroded and eventually collapses in the course of the sequence. Although the arrangement of the sonnets is not strictly chronological (the dark-lady sonnets follow those about the fair friend en bloc), there are clear indications of progressive changes of state in both respects with a tendency to revisit previous states. And these pervasive, continuous changes of state can be reconstrued as two strong underlying narrative lines within this sonnet sequence (Jackson 1999, 120–131; Kambasković-Sawers 2010, 199–202, 204–205), which manifest themselves both between successive sonnets and within individual sonnets. On the one hand, misunderstanding, mortification, quarreling, renewed reconciliation, and finally valediction (sonnet 125) characterize the gradually deteriorating experience of ideal male love and friendship. On the other hand, the speaker’s obsessive sexual fixation on the dark lady, together with his awareness of her deceitful promiscuous behavior, destroys the happy experience of fulfilled love. The ready gratification of desire, passionately longed for by all Petrarchan lovers, here proves frustrating in its oscillation between craving and surfeit (“Past reason hunted, and no sooner had, / Past reason hated”) and as a result deeply degrading: (“the expense of spirit in a waste of shame”; sonnet 129). If the Petrarchan lover suffers from the lady’s unrelenting moral rigor, so Shakespeare’s speaker suffers from the dark lady’s lack of sexual restraint, her indiscriminate promiscuity (sonnets 131, 152). And when in the end he suspects that his friend and his lady are together deceiving him by having an affair with each other (sonnets 40, 42, 134, 144), the two love relationships can no longer be kept separate: “[. . .] being both from me, both to each friend, / I guess one angel in another’s hell” (144). The outcome for the speaker (as in the conventional Petrarchan situation) is frustration, suffering, and pain, which constantly forces him into greater self-reflection and self-exploration. The strong indication of narrative development, based on scattered references, is connected within the sonnets with the reflections on the phenomenon of time and the unstoppable transience of life, on account of which nothing is stable. The intense painful experience of transience within both relationships constitutes a high degree of narrativity in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In this context, the speaker explicitly presents himself as a poet whose work will resist temporal decay and preserve his friend’s memory (e.g., sonnets 18, 63, 65, 107). 

2.6 Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) Mary Wroth, the niece of Sir Philip Sidney, published the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus at the end of her prose romance The Countess of Montgom-

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ery’s Urania, the first collection of love sonnets written by an English woman. The sequence comprises eighty-three sonnets and twenty songs (P1–P103), including a “crown of sonnets” or “sonnet corona”, “dedicated to Love,” where fourteen sonnets are linked by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as the first line of the succeeding one and using the first line of the first sonnet as the final line of the last one. The sequence is loosely modelled on Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, but with significant departures from this pattern (Pritchard 1996, 11–14). The speaker, Pamphilia (“all-loving”), is a woman who falls in love with Amphilanthus (“lover-of-two”), as described in sonnet 1, with the stereotypical image of Cupid shooting his arrow into her heart. On account of the reversed gender roles, the configuration of speaker and beloved deviates considerably from the Petrarchan model. The conventional praise of the beauty and perfection of the beloved is lacking. Only his eyes are occasionally mentioned. Otherwise, he is not characterized at all. And he is hardly ever addressed in the sonnets. The Petrarchan lady’s customary coldness on account of her chaste self-restraint is not applicable to a male beloved, and is replaced here by his inaccessibility and absence, possibly because of his unfaithfulness and unreliability. Her socially subordinate role as a woman essentially condemns the speaker to passivity vis-à-vis her beloved. On the whole, her attitude toward Amphilanthus is characterized by excessive introversion and emotional instability, oscillating between desire, despair, hope, grief, and the complaint of being conquered and having lost her liberty. But the underlying pervasive attitude is the constancy of her love despite the sufferings and complaints. Thus the first part, consisting of forty-eight sonnets and seven songs and signed by her name, ends with the emphatic confirmation of her love: “How like a fire doth love increase in me, / The longer that it lasts, the longer still” (P55). And in the subsequent “crown of sonnets,” Pamphilia describes herself as wandering in a “strange labyrinth” and taking “the thread of Love” (P77), wondering “So though I fervently do burn, / In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?” (P90). And the very last sonnet (P103) concludes with the confirmation: “what’s past, shows you can love, / Now let your constancy your honour prove.” There is little indication of narrative development in the succession of the sonnets and songs, apart from the increasing commitment to the constancy of love as a stabilizing factor. The main impression is that of an extended poetic variation upon setting, configuration, and theme. The collection explores the tensions and contradictions for a woman that are inherent in the Petrarchan love concept, the extent of her erotic suffering. These tensions include the inequalities of power between the genders as well as the complex relations of position, desire, and politics – a focus that clearly distinguishes this collection from those by male authors and stresses the extent to which a possible narrative development is blocked by the unequal power dynamic between the genders. The presentation of these painful and frustrating experiences and the faithful allegiance to love betray the disposi-

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tion of a melancholic mind, the mind of a genial melancholic, traditionally associated with creative inspiration, whereby the speaker fashions herself implicitly as a creative artist (Bullard 2015).

3 Nineteenth Century  After the dominance of neoclassicist concepts during the eighteenth century, when hardly any sonnets were written, the sonnet sequence gained new popularity in England in the course of the nineteenth century, probably in connection with the revival of interest in the sonnet as a lyric form during the Romantic period (especially Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley). Thematically, the sonnet sequence still retained a focus on the love experience, but was clearly affected by the social and cultural contexts peculiar to Victorian England (Rigg 2019).

3.1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)  The speaker of the forty-four sonnets is a woman, as is only later revealed (3.1). She recounts the development of her love story chronologically from the first “call” of the allegorical figure of “Love” (1.14) to the explicit definition of her affection for her beloved (43) and the elaborate summing up of their mutual exchange of love tokens in the course of their love story, resulting in the self-referential completion and handing over of the present sonnet cycle (44) to the beloved. The dynamic impetus of the love story comes from the outside, initially – and transcendentally – from the call or announcement of a “mystic Shape” (1.10), then from the beloved’s continuous active wooing, which in the first sonnets is more implied than directly expressed and acknowledged, hidden beneath the speaker’s reluctance, as for example in “What hast thou to do / With looking from the lattice-lights at me” (3.9–10). There is some basic similarity in the situation of man and woman to the conventional sonnet cycle of the sixteenth century in that the male lover’s desire provides the driving force of the love story against the resistance of the woman. While the conventional lady has to reject the lover’s advances for moral and religious reasons – female chastity, purity, and perfection – the resistance of Barrett Browning’s speaker is motivated differently. There is still a residue of female reserve and modesty (“the silence of my womanhood”; 13.9), but the main motives are on the one hand her severe illness, which she interprets as primary orientation to death and God (15.7), and on the other hand her low social and economic status (3. 1–2). These obstacles are grad-

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ually overcome in stages and with frequent retractions and renewals (12.11–14). Although the ultimate aim and outcome is foreshadowed early on, the underlying basic doubts and obstacles are so strong that they have to be overcome again and again. Thus, the development is protracted to great lengths. This protraction is also emphasized through frequent analepses back to past stages of their love story, the returning doubts and retarding obstacles (e.g., 25.1–2, 9–11). Such returning doubts are remembered again and again (e.g., 36. 1–4). But ultimately these obstacles are overcome, mainly by the beloved’s persistent love, as in 39: “Because thou hast the power and own’st the grace / To look through and behind this mask of me“ (1–2) and “Nothing repels thee. [. . .] Dearest, teach me so / To pour out gratitude, as thou dost, good!” (13–14).  Although the beginning of love is clearly marked in the very first sonnet, the sequence does not straightforwardly lead to the moment of mutual recognition of love. There is no eventful turn on the way to this final goal. Instead, their mutual love is indicated early on in the sequence, notably in 10: “Yet, love mere love, is beautiful indeed / And worthy of acceptance” (1–2) and “I love thee . . . mark! . . . I love thee – in thy sight / I stand transfigured, glorified aright” (6–7). Moreover, the speaker states that her love constitutes a fundamental reorientation of her life, overcoming her previous dedication to God and Heaven: “I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange / My near sweet view of Heaven, for earth with thee!” (23.13–14). This is ultimately the opposite of the development in Petrarch, where the male speaker is guided by the worshipped lady from erotic love to love of God.  Thus, the sequence as a whole is made up of sonnets which present states characterized by tension between the movement toward the acknowledgement of love and various forms of resistance, depicting the continuous variation of the struggle between love and its obstacles. The last sonnet (44), marking the completion of the trajectory toward love, is the description of the record of the beloved’s continuous wooing and the speaker’s equally continuous responsive acknowledgement and final acceptance: “Belovèd, thou hast brought me many flowers / [. . .] / So, in the like name of this love of ours, / Take back these thoughts [. . .] take them, as I used to do / Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine” (1, 5–6, 11–12).  Thus, the forty-four sonnets between the beginning and the end of the sequence present the stages and situations on the way to the final fulfillment of mutual love, slowing down the dynamic progression, exploring the various shifting configurations of desire, resistance, doubt, hope, acknowledgement, and so on. The sonnets between the beginning and the end of the cycle either recapitulate the various obstacles to union, especially in the first part (e.g., 8), or recount, often retrospectively, the successful development of the love story. The majority of the poems are narrative in themselves, recounting again and again the eventual emergence of mutual love. Thus, in sonnet 25 the speaker rec-

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ollects the past experience of the advent of love in her past situation of despair: “A heavy heart, my Belovèd, have I borne / From year to year until I saw thy face” (1–2); “Then thou didst bid me bring / And let [my heavy heart] drop adown thy calmly great / Deep being!” (9–11); his heart “doth close above it, mediating / Betwixt the stars and the unaccomplished fate” (13–14). The fulfillment of love is described as the protective incorporation of her heart into his, on his initiative, thereby determining and shaping their fate. This experience emerges, in her memory, as a completed achievement, as an event. But since the certainty of the achievement is stressed repeatedly, the eventful turn is not presented as a sudden unexpected incident. Thus, the eventful consummation of the love story underlies the overall structure of the sonnet cycle and also a great many of the individual sonnets, always against the backdrop of resistance in the speaker’s existential condition.

3.2 George Meredith, Modern Love (1862)  The sequence Modern Love, consisting of fifty sonnets in a uniquely extended version of sixteen instead of fourteen lines, arranged in four quatrains, tells the story of the failure of a marriage on account of double adultery (Rigg 2019, 204–207; Moore 2013; Kempton 2018, 86–94). In the great majority of the sonnets, the speaker is the husband, although in some (at the beginning and at the end) a heterodiegetic narrator presents a more distanced view and assessment of the development and its causes. The story begins with the husband’s apparently sudden awareness of his wife’s grief about their failing love, and it ends with the wife’s suicide (49), followed by an explanatory summary of this “modern” love story: “Thus piteously Love closed what he begat: / The union of this ever-diverse pair!” (50.1–2), which also hints at the cause of this failure: Lovers beneath the singing sky of May,  They wandered once; clear as the dew on flowers:  But they fed not on the advancing hours:  Their hearts held cravings for the buried day.  Then each applied to each that fatal knife,  Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole. (50.5–10)

The implied reason is that their expectations continued pertinaciously to cling to their original spontaneous union in their first love and failed to grow over time. This is reflected on earlier by the husband: “My crime is, that the puppet of a dream, / I plotted to be worthy of the world” (10.11–12). In other words, by relying on the secure stability of their love, he had shifted his focus to his personal achievement in the world, thus violating his role as “[h]er much-adored delightful Fairy

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Prince” (16). She had reacted by taking a lover. He realizes this but still clings to her in spite of her infidelity: “But she is mine! Ah, no! I know too well / I claim a star whose light is overcast; / I claim a phantom woman in the Past” (3.13–15). But then he takes a mistress too (called “a lady” here), as a cure, as a “distraction,” “a Panacea” (27.1): “O sweet new world, in which I rise new made! / O Lady, once I gave love: now I take! / Lady, I must be flattered. Shouldst thou wake / The passion of a demon, be not afraid.” (27.13–16). Meredith’s sonnet sequence is structured by a strong narrative line, which is not driven, however, by a straightforward causal movement toward the fatal ending but interrupted and slowed down several times throughout by attempted reconciliations and possible reversals, mutual jealousy, dissatisfaction with infidelity, misery, and suffering because of their failed love, a progressive development which might be described as contingent (Williams 2017). The progress of the narrative occurs between sonnets, as is the normal case in sonnet sequences. Far more often, however, the changes are narrated here in the form of small scenes within individual sonnets which feature various configurations of the four characters (husband, wife, mistress, and lover), as for example in sonnet 39, which starts with the husband’s perfect union with his mistress, which starts with “She yields: my Lady in her noblest mood / Has yielded [. . .] / The bride of every sense!” (39: 1–3), “O visage of still music in the sky! / Soft moon!” (5–6) and ends with the disturbing arrival of wife and lover: “What two come here to mar this heavenly tune? / A man is one: the woman bears my name, / And honour. Their hands touch! Am I still tame? / God, what a dancing spectre seems the moon?” (13–16). The changing moods and forms of behavior are presented and explored in these and numerous other scenes.  In addition, there is a kind of satirical metanarrative reflection on the adultery plot found in the summary of a French novel addressed by the speaker to his wife: “The actors are, it seems, the usual three: / Husband, and wife, and lover. She – but fie! / In England we’ll not hear of it.” (25.2–5). And further on: Meantime the husband is no more abused:  [He] forgives her ere the tear is used.  Then hangeth all on one tremendous IF: – If she will choose between them. She does choose;  And takes her husband, like a proper wife.  Unnatural? My dear, these things are life:  And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse. (25.10–16)

This is an indication of how scandalous the adultery plot was in Victorian England. The central situation in Modern Love differs, however, from the situation in the novel: in the sonnet sequence, the initial disruption of the marriage is perpetrated even more scandalously by the wife, not the husband. And although an analogous solution, a final reconciliation, is also a possibility in the sonnet sequence, as the

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wife makes stealthy advances, tries to propitiate the husband, and expresses her own unhappiness about their disagreement, the husband repudiates her: “Madam would speak with me. So now it comes: / [. . .] she thanks / My husbandship. [. . .] By stealth / Our eyes dart scrutinizing snakes. She’s glad / I’m happy, says her quivering under-lip. [. . .] / ‘[. . .] / For happiness is somewhere to be had.’ / ‘Nowhere for me!’ Her voice is barely heard. / I am not melted, and make no pretence. / With commonplace I freeze her, tongue and sense” (34.1–15). In the next sonnet, his repudiation is even more brutal and hurtful: “Save her? What for? To act this wedded lie!” (35.16). His final rejection seems to cause her suicide in the end: “Lethe had passed those lips, and he knew all” (49.16). 

3.3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life (1881)  Rossetti’s sonnet sequence The House of Life, comprising 101 sonnets introduced by a programmatic sonnet on the sonnet (“A Sonnet is moment’s monument”), traces the speaker’s progress (as a poet) through life, with a focus on the multifaceted experience of love and the confrontation with change, transience, and death. The sequence is divided into two parts, which in their proportion roughly mirror the division of the sonnet into octave and sestet: “Youth and Change” (sonnets 1–59) and “Change and Fate” (sonnets 60–101). While part 1 mainly presents the complex sensual experience of two youthful love affairs through the various stages and internal tensions of their narrative development, part 2 is largely reflective, dealing with the changing states of hope and despair, loss, transience, and disillusionment, but pervasively elaborating the dedication to and function of poetry (Baker 1970). The style is predominantly abstract, idealistic, and frequently allegorical. The narrative of the two love relationships spans the first forty-five sonnets of part 1 (Fredeman 1965, 324–327). On account of the abstract style, some of the narrative references are rather elusive and dependent on interpretation. The development begins with “Love enthroned” (sonnet 1) over all other “Powers [that] the heart finds fair,” combining passion and spirituality: “the body and blood of Love in sacrament” (sonnet 2). The next six sonnets then celebrate the joys of physical fulfillment, as in sonnet 7, for example: “The bliss so long afar, at length so nigh, / Rests there attained” or in sonnet 9: “Then said my lady: ‘Thou art Passion of Love, / And this Love’s Worship: Both he plights to me.’” The following twelve sonnets refer to the lovers’ shared experiences, such as a love letter (sonnet 11), a walk (sonnet 12), reciprocal vows (sonnet 13), a day of love from “Silent Noon” (sonnet 19) to “Gracious Moonlight” (sonnet 20). Then, in sonnet 24, the old love is replaced by a new one: “so the winged New Love smiles to receive / [. . .] the auroral wind, / Nor [. . .] casts one look behind / Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.”

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The ensuing sonnets refer to the speaker’s subsequent commitments to either of his loves, until sonnet 26 indicates the death of the old beloved: there “[l]ies all that golden hair undimmed in death.” In sonnet 37, he accuses himself of inconstancy, but then justifies himself by combining both loves as a means of gaining the ideal of Love itself: “in these twain I have confess’d / Two very voices of thy [Love’s] summoning bell.” The dissolution of the relationship with his new beloved occurs in sonnet 45 (“Secret Parting”) and especially in sonnet 46 (“Parted Love”), which is then sealed in sonnet 48, where love and death are identified: “‘I and this Love are one, and I am Death.’” The definitive loss of love is then corroborated in the semi-allegorical sequence of “Willowwood” (sonnets 49–52), followed by a series of reminiscences. In sonnet 53, the speaker painfully feels his beloved’s absence. The three sonnets of the concluding series known as “True Woman” (56–58), entitled “Herself,” “Her Love,” and “Her Heaven,” then present a summary of what perfect love is. In the very last poem of part 1, sonnet 59, the story of love is recuperated in the change of the seasons from spring to autumn in view of coming winter, which is countered by self-reference to the speaker as the poet, who preserves the love experience in poetry, as acknowledged by personified Love addressing the speaker: “Only this laurel dreads no winter days: / Take my last gift; thy heart hath sung my praise.” Part 2 lacks the narrative continuity of the first part. Instead, it offers in a great variety the attitudes and reactions to and reflections on the experiences described in the first part, especially despair, unhappiness, disappointment, loss of hope, preoccupation with death, and transience. These are static, momentary lyric presentations of perception and imagination, examples of what Rossetti in his introductory sonnet calls “a moment’s monument.” The overall narrative movement of the sonnets in the two parts is a progression from a narrow to a broad conception of life as well as of the function of poetry. All in all, Rossetti’s House of Life is thematically in keeping with the convention of the love sonnet sequence, although the details deviate significantly due to emphasis on physical fulfillment and the meticulous exploration of states of mind vis-à-vis the experience of love. Narrativity in Rossetti’s sequence appears in two forms and degrees: first, strongly, as a consecutive experience of two love relationships; then, more weakly, as a broadening perception of life.

3.4 Christina Rossetti, Monna Innominata (1881)  Monna Innominata (The Unnamed Lady), a sequence of fourteen sonnets by Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sister, is called A Sonnet of Sonnets in the subtitle. Through the two epigraphs in Italian, from Dante and Petrarch, at the head of

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each sonnet, this sequence is explicitly placed in the historical context of medieval courtly love poetry. As Christina Rossetti explains in her introductory note, this sequence is meant to give a voice to those unnamed ladies to whom conventional love songs were addressed and who were never allowed to speak for themselves. This sequence thus presents itself as an imaginative reconstruction of the conventional male love story from the perspective of the conventionally silent lady. The conventional roles are thus reversed with the lady addressing her lover (Whitla 1987, esp. 116–131).  The underlying situation of female speaker and male addressee in this sequence is defined by mutual love, which is declared at the outset: “one man is my world of all the men / [. . .] O love, my world is you” (sonnet 1); “I loved and guessed at you, you construed me / And loved me for what might or might not be” and “For one is both and both are one in love” (sonnet 4). This basic situation does not seem to change in the course of the sequence. Rather, the succession, in the fourteen individual sonnets, of momentary impressions, descriptions, and assessments of the lovers’ relationship is ultimately characterized by non-progression and non-eventfulness and does not constitute a pronounced narrative development of their situation. No clear obstacle – such as the Petrarchan lady’s customary chastity and resistance – can be identified as responsible for the lack of progression toward gratification. Rather, there seems to be a lack of initiative and active desire on the part of the speaker, possibly conditioned by conventionally prescribed female reserve and passivity. This is already apparent at the very beginning of the sequence. Sonnet 1 commences with the retraction of an invitation to the beloved, because every meeting necessarily entails parting: “Come back to me, who wait and watch for you: – / Or come not yet, for it is over then.” Her expectations are unstable: “waning, waxing, like a moon,” explained by this comparison with the moon, associated with her female gender. While conventional love stories usually begin with a propitious encounter, the speaker here has no memory whatsoever of their first meeting: “So unrecorded did it slip away, / So blind was I to see and foresee” (sonnet 2). Sonnet 3 reduces their meeting to a dream: “Thus only in a dream we are at one,” and that experience leads to the transition from sleeping to dying: “To die were surely sweeter than to live.” This proleptic projection of their love into a transcendent realm is next stressed by the speaker’s recognition that her love for her beloved is inextricably intertwined with her love of God: “I cannot love you if I love not Him, / I cannot love Him if I love not you” (sonnet 6). As a kind of counter-model to herself, she cites Esther, whom she admires but cannot imitate: “If I might take my life so in my hand” (sonnet 8). Instead of acting, she reflects on past – missed – chances: “Thinking of you, and all that was, and all / That might have been and now can never be,” considering herself a passive object “[r]eady to spend and be spent for your sake” (sonnet 9). And she foresees future reactions of readers to

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their love: “Many in aftertimes will say of you / ‘He loved her’ – while of me what will they say?” Future readers will be ignorant of her intense suffering: “Hopeless on earth, and heaven is out of view” (sonnet 11). Her self-abasement and subjection to grief even lead her to recommend to her beloved taking another partner – to “commend [him] to that nobler grace” (sonnet 12). The sequence ends with the acknowledgement of loss and the reaction of silence: “Youth gone and beauty gone, what does remain? / The longing of a heart pent up forlorn, / A silent heart whose silence loves and longs / [. . .] / Silence of love that cannot sing again” (sonnet 14).  This story of the silent beloved, the “monna innominata” in Petrarchan love sonnets, is thus revealed as a story of self-postponement, renunciation, missed life, and unrequited love, amounting to a form of regressive development. Ultimately, this negative development does not seem to be caused by external suppression, but rather by a lack of forceful desire and self-confidence.

3.5 John Addington Symonds, Stella Maris (1884)  Symonds’s Stella Maris is one of three Victorian sonnet sequences which present a homosexual love story under the cover of a heterosexual relationship; the others are Wilfrid Scawn Blunt’s The Love Sonnets of Proteus (1881) and A. Mary F. Robinson’s Tuscan Sonnets (1886). As in the other cases, it is mainly from his private memoirs that the autobiographical source of Symonds’s sequence can be gathered, although his homosexual leanings had become an open secret toward the end of his life (Rigg 2019, 214). But the formulations in some of the sonnets also insinuate that the beloved is male (see below). Stella Maris is a sequence of sixty-seven sonnets, published as part of Vagabunduli Libellus (1884). The love story is set in Venice, and the beloved is a young person of seventeen (sonnet 15) called “Stella Maris,” closely associating him with Venice’s connection to the lagoon and the sea: “When thou wert born, star of the salt sea-spray, / Deep slumber brooded on the swarth lagoon” (sonnet 5). At the same time, the name refers, of course, to the Virgin Mary as a mediator with Christ and salvation, thus endowing the beloved with a supernatural aura. The narrative of the love relationship is dynamic and ultimately progressive, characterized by passionate desire, hope, and sensual fulfillment, but intermittently also by absences, disturbances, and mortifications. The speaker is totally committed to the beloved: “I may not flee, for I am wholly, / Already thine, and dare not dream of loss!” (sonnet 11); “From eve to dawn, waking, I toss and languish: / For thee, for thee” (sonnet 15). He longs for passionate embrace: “That last bliss / We long for [. . .] Hands that will clap our hands, lips that might kiss” (sonnet 18). He asks the beloved to give herself to him, even if it were for gold, even if that will cause him pain: “Give me

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thyself! Nay, if to gold thou clingest, / Gold in abundance I will shower on thee! [. . .] It were heaven to gain / Communion with thee, even in the clasp of pain!” (sonnet 24). His desire is unashamedly “lust intellectual, carnal pride!,” and he even accepts the damage to his honor and his name (sonnet 25). Sometimes doubts about the genuineness of love occur: “How sever true from false” (sonnet 32). Then “that last supremest consummation” is coming (sonnet 33): “I clasped her in my arms [. . .] I drank her lips” (sonnet 39). But this consummation is followed by disappointment and disillusionment, also because she sold herself for gold: “‘There neither is, nor can there ever be, / Twixt that white body and thy weak heart’s desire / Communion’” (sonnet 40). But this disturbance is then overcome again by the experience of a perfect union: “we blend one moment, thou with me” (43). Then suddenly she flees: “Stella hath fled, and fled with her my dream [. . .] / That love, so late attained, pursued so long, / Why couldst thou not have plucked the fruit thereof?” (sonnet 47). Looking back, she changes and is “sacred now, assoiled of sin / [. . .] I understand thee now, and weeping win / Solace” (sonnet 52). And he sees in her – and in himself – two sides, “Spirit of light and darkness! I no less / Twy-natured” (sonnet 54) and “My love was madness! Thy love, too, my dear, / Bred madness!” (sonnet 55). He ultimately hopes for Christ to redeem them both: “Ah, could I think that Christ for thee and me / Yearneth, to bring back both into his fold” (sonnet 58). This vision then seems to be corroborated: “with heaven’s hope my heart is filled. / Where God is, I am, and Thou art” (sonnet 62), and “Goodness and Truth and Loveliness” are preserved (65). The sequence ends with a final insight: “Love [. . .] / Is [. . .] / [. . .] A close bond wedding two selves in one; / However disparate those selves may grow / Toward diverse issues” (sonnet 67).   In most sonnets, the sex of the beloved is not specified explicitly, the formulations in many cases being neutral. But there are a few subdued indications throughout that the beloved is a man. Sonnet 1 stresses the problematic nature of the love relationship: “I mused [.  .  .] On loves that know themselves shameful and blind / Fierce cruel loves that crucify the mind.” The comparable threat to the speaker’s “honour and name” mentioned in sonnet 25 points in the same direction. In sonnet 21, the bodily strength of the beloved is praised, which is more appropriate to a man than to a woman: “the rhythm of thy strength at rest, / Or rhythm of thy limbs so lightly swung.” One pervasive cryptic reference to the male sex of the beloved (and the biographical source of the sequence) is contained in the frequent use of the word “angel” (sonnets 12, 16, 50, 53, 54, 58, 61), which can be taken as alluding to the name of Symonds’s actual lover, the gondolier Angelo Fusato in Venice (Rigg 2019, 214).  Narrativity, the narrative line of changes of state running through the individual sonnets, is particularly pronounced in Stella Maris, balanced throughout by a focus, within the successive individual sonnets, on the respective momentary situation and state of affairs.

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4 Conclusion  Comparison of examples of the hybrid narrative sonnet sequence from both periods, the early modern age and the Victorian era, has shown both continuity and change. Thematically, the overview has revealed a surprising adherence to the broad topic of love. The examples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are all modelled on the original Petrarchan text, although with significant variations with regard to character configuration, narrative, and outcome. These variations range from an essential adherence to the uneventful model in Daniel and Sidney, through the progression toward a positive outcome in Spenser and the reversal of the sex of the speaker and the addressee without significant narrative development in Wroth, and on to the radical reorganization of the character configuration in Shakespeare, which results in unexpected narrative changes of state. The Victorian authors all retain the thematic frame of love, but with significant and far-reaching changes both in character configurations and outcomes on account of the intermediate historical changes in the social, cultural, and moral contexts. Christina Rossetti’s sequence adheres most closely to the Petrarchan model, although it reverses the roles and aggravates uneventfulness even to the point of a regressive development. Barrett Browning’s cycle, too, is based on the original model, similarly to Christina Rossetti’s cycle, with a reversal of roles but with narrative development overcoming all obstacles. Dante Gabriel Rossetti reproduces the schema, but deviates radically from the model by allowing for the passionate fulfillment of desire, adding another love narrative and ending with an intense exploration of frustration and suffering. Meredith and Symonds introduce morally deviating love experiences: (open) adultery and failure of a marriage and (hidden) homosexuality. Variations of the thematic frame of love is coupled with a greater degree of narrativity.  As a result of these thematic variations, the structure, directedness, and strength of the narratives vary. The Petrarchan model, with almost no narrative development, is retained in several sequences: Sidney (with a failed attempt at a solution), Daniel, and also Wroth, while Spenser presents a positive solution to longing for love  – not illicit consummation of desire but conventional marriage. Shakespeare’s sequence shows the breakdown of the attempted separation of the two plotlines, each failing in itself but affecting each other nonetheless. In the Victorian sequences, narrative development is generally more pronounced, although it is also interrupted and slowed down by the concentration on successive momentary states of affairs in the individual sonnets. Most straightforward are the storylines in Barrett Browning, Meredith, and Symonds. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the cycle is divided into a more narrative and a more static non-narrative part, while in Christina Rossetti’s sonnet sequence the predominant impression is that of stagnation and even regression.

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The hybrid lyric-narrative genre of the sonnet sequence is generally characterized by a pervasive tension between the dynamic narrative impetus inherent in the speaker’s relationship to the addressee and the retarding lyric presentation of the speaker’s momentary mental states and his perception of himself and his addressee. The resistance to narrative change and progress, as conveyed by the speaker’s perception of his situation, is caused by such factors as specific moral values (chastity, infidelity) or personal circumstances (socially subordinate position). The overview of the development of the sonnet sequence from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has shown to what extent form and the degree of narrativity are affected by such historically and socially variable conditions. 

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McHale, Brian. 2001. “Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry.” Narrative 9, no. 2, 161–168. Moore, Natasha. 2013. “Finding a Form for Modern Love: The Marriage of Form and Content in George Meredith’s Modern Love.” Sidney Studies in English 39:25–44.  Neely, Carol Thomas. 1978. “The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences.” In: ELH 45, no. 3, 359–389.  Pritchard, R. E., ed. 1996. Lady Mary Wroth: Poems; A Modernized Edition. Keele: Keele University Press.  Rigg, Patricia. 2019. “Gendered Poetic Discourse and Autobiographical Narratives in Late Victorian Sonnet Sequences.” Victorian Poetry 57, no. 2, 201–223. Stahl, Henrieke. Forthcoming. “Der Gedicht-Roman: Prototyp und seine Erscheinungsformen in der Gegenwart.” Taylor, Amanda. 2011. “‘Mutual Comfort’: Courtly Love and Companionate Marriage in the Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser.” Quidditas 32:172–213.  Whitla, William. 1987. “Questioning the Convention: Christina Rossetti’s Sonnet Sequence ‘Monna Innominata.’” In The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Edited by David A. Kent, 82–131. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Williams, Alicia. 2017. “The Search for a Good Cause in George Meredith’s Modern Love.” Victorian Poetry 55:211–228.

Veronika Zuseva-Özkan

Poetical Narration in Russian Literature from the Eighteenth Century to the Present 1 Definition Polysemous to its core, “poetical narration” is a difficult term to define. In this article, I propose a tripartite typology. (1) Poetical narration I – narration in poetry, wherein “poetry” is opposed to “prose” (i.e., narration in verse form). (2) Poetical narration II – narration in the lyric (i.e., not in epos or drama), a highly contested type. As understood here, the lyric is fundamentally performative and its narrativity optional or secondary: “Narration has the structure of human experience (recollection, evidence), while the performative utterance has the more archaic structure of revelation (epiphany, insight, illuminaton)” (Tjupa 2013, 115). Still, events are portrayed in the lyric, albeit of a specific kind. As Jurij Lotman (1976, 103–104) puts it, the poetic plot “does not aspire to be a narrative about some one event among many, but rather a story about The Event, monumental and unique, about the essence of the lyrical world.” In other words, lyrical plot appears not as a string of events (or episodes, as in epic genres) but as a process of reflection during which a unique event is generated. The nature and peculiarities of this event, and of lyrical plot itself, will be discussed. Also, the roles of “hero” and “narrator” are, to some extent, both played in the lyric by the lyrical subject of speech (which evolves greatly from one age to another). Finally, (3) poetical narration III – narration in poetic or ornamental prose (Schmid [2009] 2014, 720–725).

2 Eighteenth-Century Classicism and Baroque: Last Stage in the Poetics of Reflective Traditionalism Russian literature of the eighteenth century was firmly fixed within the framework of the poetics of reflective traditionalism (Averincev 1981) or eidetic poetics (Brojtman [2001] 2004). This poetics is characterized by a traditionalist mindset, an orientation toward canon, and self-reflexivity. The latter is expressed in the form of the “rules” of poetics and rhetoric, but it also inhabits the literary work itself, notably when the author simultaneously represents and interprets his creation, transforming the work into a manual on rhetoric and poetics. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-033

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Within the scope of this poetics, the world appears as complete, its causes and mechanisms already determined; art is a game whose principles have been laid down by divine precedent. The model for the author is God’s creative act, and its recurrence/replication is perceived as an act of creation, an initiation to the divine, and a staving off of chaos, thus keeping the world in a state of harmony. Consequently, the creative personality functions as a mediator among other mediators: here, the new and the original are not without precedent; rather, it is an approximation of something that occurred once and prevails thereafter. Under these circumstances, the author does not own his creation as a demiurge, but instead resides within: he is at once author, function, creator, and creation. In a sense, just as the characters are “plunged” into the inner world of the book, so too is the author. This becomes particularly evident when he enters his work not only as an artist but as an aesthetically non-mediated subject who has a predetermined moral goal. During this period, poetical narration mostly manifests itself as what I term poetical narration I: it occurs in narrative poetry, mainly in long poems of various types (epic, allegoric, mock-heroic, etc.) and in tales in verse. The story typically unfolds in the form of authorial narration (Stanzel [1979] 1984), where the narrator keeps his distance from the represented world: he does not become a character but announces his presence by speaking in the first person and reflecting on his narrative. Characteristically, the author’s commentary appears in various forms: (1) as a “lyrical digression” within the poetical text (i.e., in verse); (2) as a prosaic commentary “on the margins” of the poetical text; and (3) as an almost obligatory introduction (in prose or in verse), where the author expresses his views on the genre together with its rules and goals. Following the model of Homer’s invocations to the Muse and accounts of his “song,” such authorial commentary nearly always appears at the beginning of heroic poems. Eighteenth-century Russia saw numerous (mostly unfinished) attempts to create a national epic comparable to the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. We might take, for example, the beginning of the epic poems Peter the Great by Mixail Lomonosov (1756–1761), The Rossiad (1771–1779) by Mixail Xeraskov, and Petrida (1730) by Antiox Kantemir. This type of poetical narration is characterized by rhetorical questions, exclamations, imperative verbs, allusions to the ancient models – all them signs of authorial presence. The mock-heroic poem demonstrates the travesty of serious and elevated authorial interventions of the epic poem, turns them inside out, and proposes comic, low models (such is the case of Elisej; or, Bacchus Enraged by Vasilij Majkov, 1769). The tale in verse by Ippolit Bogdanovič Darling (1778) is based on a different strategy: the author wants to “sing” not heroic deeds or their comic travesty but love and beauty and private life. While Bogdanovič drew for his plot model from Apuleius and Jean de La Fontaine (the tale of Psyche), the narrative principles and style of this work strongly recall Ariosto.

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We find a striking example of text in verse coupled with prosaic commentary in the late baroque poem by Pёtr Buslaev, The Speculations of the Soul (1734). In this case, the poetical text and its commentary are bound together: “Their interaction, the tension between the poetic word and scientific, mundane words establish the semantic scope of the poem” (Sazonova 2019, 510). In his commentary, the author demonstrates his creative laboratory, provides historical and cultural information, explains Christian symbols, literary devices and rhetorical tropes (metaphors, hyperboles, allegories), realia and etymology, elaborates on the meaning of visionary images, makes references to the sources of his poetic imagery (Holy Scriptures, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, etc.), and remarks on the structure of his poem, thus translating poetic imagery into the language of “real” description. Hence, the author appears not only as a poet but also as a glossator of his own text, a scholar, an artifex doctus. His authorial commentary is a sort of academic treatise revealing the relevance of text in verse and text in prose in the semantic field of the work and is thus the conjunction of poetic and scientific languages. This poem belongs to the long – and especially important for the baroque – tradition of “learned poetry,” where literature had not yet been counterposed to science and the sharp delineation between artistic and scientific genres had not yet been drawn. We turn now to poetical narration II and authorial prosaic commentary, frequently found in the eighteenth-century lyric. Vasilij Trediakovskij, Lomonosov, and even Gavrila Deržavin provide their lyrical works with detailed notes explaining the literary stance of the authors, their attitudes toward the poetic word, and their principles of word usage. Such “down-to-earth” commentary contrasts markedly with the high poetic tension of the text in verse and thus creates a strong artistic effect. At times, this effect can be quite comical. For example, a fearsome line: “Where once a feast was spread a coffin lies” from Deržavin’s ode “On the Death of Prince Meščerskij” (1779) received the following authorial remark: “He was very hospitable and lived in luxury.” Thus arises an effect of the presence of two planes of the poetic world in which a contrast between a mundane phenomenon and its poetical transfiguration is revealed. The subject structure of the lyrical genre during this period, emphasizing the closeness of author and hero, has been characterized as “indivisibility-unconfusedness” (Brojtman [2001] 2004, 342). The author appears as a bearer of an authoritative perspective which is justified by tradition and gradually becomes interiorized. The “solo” lyric directed to the audience is replaced progressively by the meditative lyric focusing on “I” and its depths. This “I,” however, had not yet taken the full measure of its autonomy and perceived its own self as a free individual. Consequently, speech in the first-person plural (“we”) is common in this period, as is a penchant for generalizing and for the affirmation of universal moral truths. It is still the “eidos” of man, “a paradigmatic personality which does not possess its own sovereign inner territory and in the depth of its soul finds not itself but the other” (Brojtman [2001] 2004, 222), namely, God.

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In the lyric, the “ready-made” genre plot (that of an ode, an Anacreontic ode, satire, idyll, elegy, etc.), where the events unfold in highly conditional time and space, is predominant: the chosen motif becomes a coercive force guiding the plot development in a certain direction. For example, the initial situation in the genre of elegy with its clichés is formed by the sorrow of the lyrical subject impacted by love and death – two of the main themes of elegy. The developing reflection usually leads to the event of self-determination when the lyrical subject defines his position in the face of the inevitability of death. Still, during this period it is more an exercise in rhetorics than it is one of a true, that is to say, individual and personal, event of self-definition. Sometimes a poet decides to develop a more “epic-like” plot containing a number of episodes and more than one perspective; such is the case of the fourth and fifth poems from the book of Elegies (1769) by Fëdor Kozel’skij, in which the speakers are the male and female lovers, respectively. Or let us take Xeraskov’s Anacreontic Odes (1762) and Philosophical Odes (1769), which promote the ideal of a wise man living a quiet life. Of note here is the high level of self-reflexivity: in several of the poems, Xeraskov addresses poetological questions and, in so doing, turns an Anacreontic ode into a kind of treatise in verse (“To My Lyre,” “On the Significance of Versification,” “Some Tune the Lyre,” etc.). The moralistic sentences of the lyrical subject who adopts the privileged position of omniscience are ubiquitous in our period of interest. The identity of the lyrical subject in Russian classicist poetry of the eighteenth century is the identity of genre: there is almost no hint of the individuality of the author himself – of his feelings and his life. Toward the end of the period, a new type of plot begins to germinate. It unfolds as the reflection of the lyrical “I” where the central event consists in a change of perspective, in the emergence of a new understanding, and in a new sense of self (which also may be perceived as “the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field”; according to Lotman’s [1970] 1977, 233, definition of event). In such cases, an autobiographical impression and an illusion of one-on-one interaction between poet and reader are fostered. In this respect, we might consider the lyrical works of Mixail Murav’ëv, whose poem “To the Neva Goddess” (1794) takes an individual, personal note (“I love your baths”) despite displaying traditional classicist signs such as allegories of gods and appeals to ancient models. At the end of the work, a vivid visual image of an “ardent poet” “leaning on the granite” of the embankment is painted. Murav’ëv was among the first Russian poets to introduce into lyrical works an individual observer and to “commensurate” human feelings with the outer world (see “The Night,” 1785). A curious example of poetical narration II is provided in an “irregular” ode by Deržavin in Felica (1782), dedicated to the empress Catherine the Great. The speaker of the poem is a mirza (oriental nobleman) who admires Felica (a name

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borrowed by Deržavin from the Tale of Prince Chlorus written by Catherine herself and which imparts to the ode a metareflexive dimension) and, next to her, better understands his own flaws. Although “mirza” is a satirical mask hinting at the courtiers surrounding the empress (Potëmkin, Orlov, and others), who are mocked for their numerous vices, he is also a quite serious figure (Deržavin himself thought his ancestor to be a Tatar mirza named Bagrim), the author’s alter ego. Heterogeneity of the lyrical “I” correlates with stylistic inconsistencies: some fragments of the ode are written in the high style typically employed in odes, but others are so “low” that Deržavin’s contemporaries would have avoided using them even in a work of low style. This intersubjective entity of “I” and “other” signals the beginning of a new epoch of poetics.

3 First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Sentimentalism and Romanticism; Beginning of the Poetics of the Artistic Modality The turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a cultural shift with respect to the individual. As Brojtman ([2001] 2004, 222) writes, “the new epoch revealed the personality in all its intrinsic value and singularity.” In this personality it is the uniqueness of man rather than man as an abstract idea that stands out. The personality becomes “a point in the world from which all universal meanings are counted down” (Mixajlov 1991, 160). For such an “I,” “there is nothing ready-made, everything is subject to its personal verification” (160). Such an understanding of the autonomy of “I” clarified its association with the “other.” The real form of the existence of personality becomes not an isolated “I” but the bi-unity (“diplasty”) of “I” and “other.” The personality appears as a changing inner measure of “I” and “other,” as their mobile, modal relationship. The new epoch renounced preset, clearly defined “truths” and the privileged point of view, an approximation of which offers one an absolute perspective on reality. Thus, in his lyrical works, Nikolaj Karamzin demonstrates the possibility of narrating one thing from two diametrically opposed points of view. For example, his poem “The Cemetery” (1792) is structured as the speeches of two voices on the same subject, namely, death: these voices cannot be reconciled with one another or amalgamated into a single resolution. The similar situation of praising two mutually opposed elements (nature and civilization, heroic deeds and humanism) with the same intensity is replayed in the poems “Proteus; or, A Poet’s Contradictions” (1798) and “To Melodor in Reply to His Love Song” (1795).

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While discussing new phenomena in the field of poetical narration II, let us take note that, at this time, the forms of indirect representation of the lyrical subject spread. This means that the lyrical subject views himself as the “other” – as “you” or “he,” a collective and undefined subject, a condition not matching its bearer. (See Mixail  Lermontov’s “Justification,” 1841, where “your friend” is precisely the lyrical hero who sees and judges himself as the “other.”) The individuation of the lyrical “I” corresponds to the increasing role of the private sphere in the lyric. Thus, the familiar epistle, with its deliberate “prosaization” (not in the sense of non-versification but of worldview) and affirmation of the private life and the “private person,” comes to the fore. An intonation of casual, familiar conversation is established, sometimes with a touch of self-mockery. At the same time, the lyric appears to become more and more plotless: more precisely, the number of “omissions” (things left unsaid about which the reader himself is supposed to guess, using some hints) increases. At times, one may speak of the “principle of plot uncertainty” (Brojtman [2001] 2004, 298) in lyrical works. Such is the case of Lermontov’s “The Dream” (1841), where even the modality of the main event is unclear – the reader cannot be sure whether the lyrical hero is dead (if so, it would be a curious case of narration from beyond the grave) or is simply dreaming. The same phenomenon is found in poetical narration I: narrative poetic genres such as the Romantic (“Byronic”) poem, which stands out in this period, and the ballad are characterized by the principle of plot uncertainty. In this case, the narrator possesses the key to the events, but for the reader the plot remains probabilistic; or when the text contains hints of a different plot development than what we ultimately have (in this case one could speak of “potential plot”). For example, it is often the reason for escape (or “alienation,” as Jurij Mann 2007, 130, puts it) by the main character of the Romantic poem that remains unclear: the past of the hero of Aleksandr Puškin’s Prisoner of the Caucasus (1821) is rather murky; the crime committed by Aleko in Puškin’s Gypsies (1824) is not disclosed to the reader, although it is precisely this crime which makes him flee to the gypsies in the first place; nothing is known about Mcyri’s family in the eponymous poem by Lermontov (1839). In Puškin’s The Fountain of Baxčisaraj (1823), the crucial event is omitted, for the reader never learns what happened to Marija: From earth the orphan maid was swept. But who knew when, or where, or how?

The Russian Romantic poem, like Byron’s poems, which served as its model, is structured as a series of “peaks” (Žirmunskij 1978, 54–69), that is, moments of high plot tension (episodes of battles, flights, rescues, deaths, recognitions, important conversations, etc.) that lie between intermediary fragments: descriptions and lyrical digressions of the narrator. These authorial intrusions differ from those of

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the previous period: departing from commentary, they turn into meditation, into authorial self-reflection which is often (and at least partly) autobiographical. Moreover, poetical narration in the Russian Romantic poem is generally characterized by the presence of a “graphic equivalent” of text (Tynjanov [1974] 1977, 60) such as ellipses, empty lines and stanzas, which stimulates the reader’s imagination and provokes a feeling of ambiguity. The fragmentary character of the narrative poem is consistent with a similar phenomenon in the lyric (i.e., the dominance of the lyrical fragment as a genre). Additionally, an open ending is cultivated. All the aforementioned could be also said about Eugene Onegin (1831), a novel in verse by Puškin signaling the birth of a new genre, examples of which remain rare in Russian literature. The overriding narrative principle of Eugene Onegin is its self-reflexivity: this is a meta-novel reflecting its own coming-into-being and debating the relationship between art and reality, between “literature” and “life.” Poetical narration here goes beyond mere metanarrativity and makes the transition to metafictionality. We might call a further important constructive principle of this novel’s narration the “principle of contradictions” (Lotman [1975] 1995, 395). According to this principle, contradictory (seemingly irreconcilable) statements are made by the narrator in various parts of the text (“I have strictly revised all this; there are very many contradictions, but I do not wish to correct them”). In Puškin’s time, fictional narrative was viewed as more organized and orderly than the stream of life; this being the case, Onegin’s narration, in Lotman’s view, tries to imitate life, to bring the novel and reality into closer contact. Furthermore, Eugene Onegin is characterized by purely prosaic “heteroglossia” (Baxtin [1934/1935] 1981, 354) typical for the genre of the novel, with its decentralization of language, orientation toward the “alien word,” and stylistic norms of prosaic speech. Prose was associated with “reality,” poetry with a higher level of artifice – with “fiction.” In this way, the poetical narration of a fictional text (i.e., a text organized on many levels) such as Onegin imitates “unfictionality” (lack of organization of “real” life). This period is also marked by the appearance of poetical narration III, that is, of the poetic (ornamental) prose we associate with the novel Dead Souls by Nikolaj Gogol’ (1842). This is a text in prose that the author himself labeled not as a novel but as a “poem,” reflecting not only the semantics and orientation of the plot toward Dante Alighieri’s great narrative poem, the Divina Commedia (1320), where the hero passes through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, but also the poetic principles of textual organization. On this point, Lotman has written, “the distinctive quality of the poetical plot is the presence therein of a certain rhythm, of repeatabilities, parallelisms. In certain cases they rightly talk about the [sic] ‘rhyming situations’. Such a principle can also infiltrate prose (the repeatability of details, situations, and circumstances). . .” (Lotman 1972, 106). This quality is obvious in Dead Souls. Also to be borne in mind are the lyrical digressions in which the authorial figure speaks

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about himself, his creation, and his sentiments. Over the course of the novel, the initially adventurous, picaresque plot of Dead Souls weakens and mechanisms that affect the reader poetically become more salient. This is particularly true of the novel’s frequent lyrical digressions, with the enhanced rhythmization and phonaesthetics typical of poetry.

4 Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: Realism; Classical Phase of the Poetics of the Artistic Modality This period, known in Russian literature as “the epoch of prose,” saw the rise of prose epic texts along with the decline of poetry. Still, poetical narration experienced certain innovations, related primarily to its rapprochement with prose narration. Dina Magomedova (1992) labeled this phenomenon, which began with Nikolaj Nekrasov and continued in the work of Vasilij Kuročkin, Dmitrij Minaev, Aleksej  Apuxtin, Konstantin  Slučevskij, and Semёn  Nadson, the “novelization of poetry.” Poetical narration I is characterized in this period by a productive development of the tale in verse. This genre often features third-person narration of a subject who is not included in the world of characters; an extensive system of episodes; detailed elaboration of the plot and psychological situations; “democracy” of plot (“commonness” of story); characterization through speech, the interplay of language and speech manners; multiple points of view; and the general “prosaization” of language. Nekrasov’s Saša (1856) provides a good example of this genre. As Boris Ėjxenbaum has written, narrative skaz appears in Nekrasov very often due to his general gravitation toward the tale form. Frequently, narration is put into the mouth of a character so that a peculiar narrator emerges – a device commonly found in prose developed on the basis of skaz (Leskov). (1969, 67)

At this time, the “high” poem fades into the background, and the satirical poem, parodying antiquated genres, styles, and languages, comes to the fore. This is well represented in the artistic work of Aleksej Tolstoj (Potok the Bogatyr, 1870, and The Dream of Councillor Popov, 1878) and in that of Nekrasov, including the long poem Who is Happy in Russia? (1863–1876). In Baxtin’s assessment, the plot and composition of this poem are “remarkable in terms of satirical technique” (1996, 33). Poetical narration II is marked by the reinforcement of the plot element in the lyric such as “Musings at the Front Door” (1858) by Nekrasov. Here, the reader

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may trace not only the “inner” plot with mental events but also, parallel to it, the “external” plot which lends itself to basic retelling. For example, Nekrasov’s poem contains a number of episodes: the peasants come to a nobleman and high official with a petition, the doorman banishes them, the opulent lifestyle of the nobleman is narrated down to the last detail as opposed to the sufferings of the common people. But even though there are “external” events, the specific lyrical plot, with its single mental event, is ever-present and can be formulated as the encounter between state power and the people which fails to take place in the “reality” of the poem, but is acted out with the mediation of the poet. Mention should also be made of the flourishing of persona poems, where the speaker is a character who is clearly distinguished from the poet. A persona poem can be “unidirectional,” where “own” and “alien” words are mutually complementary (“The Madman,” 1859, by Jakov Polonskij; “The Gardener,” 1846, by Nekrasov) or “bidirectional” (Artëmova 2008, 215), where the “alien” voice ideologically or psychologically opposes the “own” voice, as in “A Moral Man” (1847) by Nekrasov. Nekrasov also cultivates the genre of feuilleton in verse (e.g., “A Perfect Match,” 1856, and “The Trial,” 1867) and forms that replicate an “alien” style such as parody: his poem “The Secret” (1855) is a parody of Lermontov’s ballad “Airship” (1840). At the same time, a renaissance of archaic cumulative plot – or linear plot, in Lotman’s terms (1973, 26) – occurs in the lyric. Afanasij Fet’s poem “This Morning, This Joy” (1881) exemplifies this development. Here, the homogenous links are connected in a chain with a clear “build-up,” resulting in the event of recognition and, consequently, of finding the single most adequate word (“spring”). This phenomenon approximates the non-classical phase of the poetics of the artistic modality. For its part, poetical narration III in this period is marked by the inception of the “poem in prose.” This genre, which Ivan Turgenev first introduced into Russian literature (Senility, 1882), was later developed by Vsevolod Garšin, Vladimir Korolenko, and others. The constructive principle of this variant of poetic prose is “the focus on the mental event which occurs in the speaker’s consciousness” (Tjupa 2008, 253). Texts in this genre tend to form cycles, as is typical for lyric works.

5 First Third of the Twentieth Century: Modernism; Non-Classical Phase of the Poetics of the Artistic Modality By the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new subject forms emerged alongside traditional ones. These new subject forms are based not on an analytical

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distinction between “I” and “other,” as it was before, but on intersubjective integrity. The personality is viewed in the period of interest not as a monological entity but as an “undefined,” probabilistically multiple entity. This results in the rise of the non-classical type of relationship between author and hero. Poetical narration II is characterized by this peculiarity, which Brojtman referred to as the “neo-syncretism of subject.” This development revives the syncretism of the subject of archaic consciousness (Brojtman [2001] 2004, 257). In archaic texts, the absence of clear boundaries between subjects and the specifics of early speech forms resulted in the “indivisibility of author and hero” (21). The visible manifestation of this kind of organization of subjects consists in the seemingly unjustified change of pronouns in narration, for example, from “I” to “he” or “she,” or vice versa. Brojtman identified three possible forms of syncretism of the subject in non-ritualistic Russian poetry: transition from speech in the third person to speech in the first person occurs “when the main character (hero) is involved and his potential indivisibility from the speaker is expressed” (1997, 45); transition of the opposite kind – from first-person to third-person narrative – which typically occurs when “the speaker talks about himself in such a way as the others should speak about him” (46); and finally, transition from the hero’s speech into the heroine’s speech, and vice versa. Neo-syncretism in the lyric signaled its presence at the start of the twentieth century in a number of ways: abrupt change of personal pronouns; abrupt change of speakers, actors, and observers (points of view); use of the same pronoun as applied to various subjects; absence of distinct boundaries between various speech forms (direct, indirect, free indirect); abrupt change of spatial, temporal, outer/ inner points of view, etc.; and the appearance of a subject possessing consciousness, capable of speech or action that was previously represented as an inanimate object (Malkina 2019, 35). Thus, neo-syncretism of the subject can be defined as a blurring of the lines between various subjects and their functions in a literary text in order to aesthetically reflect on the complementarity of the categories of “I” and “other.” Neo-syncretism of the subject is conducive not only to play with the “indivisibility-unconfusedness” of “I” and “other” and to the creation of an undefined modality of “I,” but also to forming a voluminous, multidimensional perspective on the relationship between “I” and “other” from multiple points of view. Narration in the lyrical works of Innokentij Annenskij, Aleksandr Blok, Osip Mandel’štam, and Velimir  Xlebnikov often becomes polysubjectival. In this respect, one might consider such vivid examples as the poems “Upon a Horse-Sleigh Laid to Brim with Straw” (1916) by Mandel’štam and “The Song of Rain” (1928) by Pavel Antokol’skij. Similar processes affect poetical narration I. This period is marked, above all, by long lyrical poems (in the artistic work of Konstantin Bal’mont, Aleksandr Blok, Andrej  Belyj, Vladimir  Majakovskij, Marina  Cvetaeva, and Sergej Esenin) where

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the epic plot may be reduced or absent and where the hero is represented by the lyrical “I.” This type of poem is difficult to differentiate from the lyrical cycle. Narration here is often deprived of the usual structural and graphic layout, and the reader is not provided with the customary guidelines that would allow him to identify the speakers and follow character discourses and plot development. The dialogue parts are at times assembled according to the montage principle, namely, without marked boundaries and transitions. Let us take, for example, Cvetaeva’s folklore-style poem Byways (1923). To understand this poem, the reader has to “reconstruct” its plot contained in the change of dialogical fragments and their inner dynamic, while the only regular reference points are the differences and repetitions of verse forms and stanza schemes. Additionally, in this period poetical narration I shows the emergence of the neo-cumulative plot, both in its temporal, diachronic form (where the listing of events and their adjacency are arranged in time sequence) and in its spatial, synchronic form (where the events are perceived in their simultaneity, dramatically collated and opposed). Appeal to the archaics, typical of this period, also expresses itself through the occurrence of the lyrical epic oriented toward a syncretic “book” perceived as more ancient than the epic poem. Such are the “supersagas” of Xlebnikov’s Otter’s Children (1913), Azy iz Uzy (1920–1922), and Zangezi (1922). At this point, poetical narration III is in full bloom: poetic prose presents masterpieces in the work of Andrej Belyj, Mandel’štam, Cvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak. It is at this moment that the term itself arises, proposed by Viktor Šklovskij in his article “Ornamental Prose” (1929). As Wolf Schmid has demonstrated, poetic prose typically features a “weakening of narrativity,” and this can go so far that “no eventful story is formed at all” ([2009] 2014, 723). An extreme case of this “denarrativization” occurs when the plot is called into question altogether as an artistic eventful reality. Its probabilistic nature and illusiveness are laid bare in Andrej Belyj’s novel Petersburg (1913), which at the same time can be labeled a meta-novel. In this book, terrorists plan to assassinate a high government official, Ableuxov, and his own son agrees to help them. In one of the chapters, an opposite version of the plot is provided: no one was going to assassinate Ableuxov, but, fearing an attempt on his life, he imagined everything narrated, all the events that putatively took place, while they were nothing but the character’s “cerebral play”. And the narrator proposes yet a third version: the terrorist initially emerged as “cerebral play,” but Ableuxov’s thought “evolved into a spatiotemporal image” and “had begun to live and breathe”. On the next level of the unfolding plot (in the narrative sense), both Ableuxov and the terrorist created by his consciousness are nothing but the “cerebral play” of the author. But the author himself is represented as a medium, a conduit for superphysical forces which are not plot-related.

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6 1930s–1980s: Soviet Literature; Socialist Realism and Efforts to Surpass It In the USSR, early twentieth-century poetry was viewed as “socially alien” (and thus artistically alien). Starting in the mid-1930s, it was opposed to “learning from the classics,” that is, the aspiration to return to the artistic values of the nineteenth and even the eighteenth century (for discussions of the “normative, neo-classicist nature” of Socialist Realism, see Lejderman and Lipoveckij [2001] 2013, 1:22; Terс 1989, 457–458). After 1935, a dramatic shift from innovative artistic means to traditionalism occurred, so that an increase in poetic experiments started only in the mid-1950s. During the last decades of the Soviet Union, traditionalist and innovative poetry coexisted. The main artistic tendency of this period is still Socialist Realism, with, in the words of Tjupa, its “imperative strategy” of politically engaged, propagandist writing oriented toward the monologic unity of subjects and the discourse of power, that is, the “communicative event of dominance and violent overcoming of secluded inner selves” (2009, 137). Here, poetical narration II is characterized by dissolution of the individual lyrical “I” into the collective “super-I” and by the downgrading of personhood, the reduction of self. The lyrical “I” dissolves into a nameless and faceless “we,” which becomes the main speaker in the Soviet lyric. The situations of authoritarian self-determination in which the lyrical “I” starts to reflect upon himself in the third person are also significant. Let us take, for example, the poems “The Carpenter” (Sergej Narovčatov, 1948), “As a Boy I Went to War” (Anatolij Čepurov, 1966, ending with the line “As a boy he went to war”), “At School” (Julija Drunina, 1945), and “The Memory has Such a Feature” (Konstantin Vanšenkin, 1955). These transitions from “I” to “he” signify not the modernist play with the “indivisibility-unconfusedness” of “I” and “other” but a shift from intimacy to the detachment of self. This authoritarian self-definition reaches its limits as a “thingish” externalization of the “I” in Boris Sluckij’s “The Monument” (1953) and in Mixail Lukonin’s “Obelisk” (1963), which is narrated by a lyrical “I” who appears as a monument from beyond the grave. As Tjupa writes, the chanting of memorials, obelisks, monuments – materialized extracts of active subjectivity, substitutes for a mortal man in the perspective of eternity – is, in general, one of the topoi of the Social Realist lyric. Such is the hymn to “Suvorov in bronze” by Vsevolod Roždestvenskij or to “Stalin’s soldier on the pedestal” by Mark Maksimov. (2009, 158)

The lyrical “you” is just as reduced and impersonal as “I”; it becomes purely functional, lacking inner individual depth. Even in love, the relationship between “I” and “you” acquires a mainly functional, role-based status. In “Farewell” (1935), by

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Mixail Isakovskij, role compatibility is paramount, and the “near” person in terms of ideology and class is no longer “other.” The limit of downgrading the personal dimension of life appears as a lyrical appeal to pure function without its specific performer (e.g., Vera Inber’s poem “To a Son Who Doesn’t Exist” (1927). The lyrical super-plot of this period becomes the heroic plot of the “common path” toward a future utopian society and confrontation with the ideological enemy. The quintessential expression of the “collective personality” became the genre of song, particularly songs written for films such as “Song about a Stranger” (1932, lyrics by Boris Kornilov) and “Three Tank Men” (1939, lyrics by Boris Laskin). Since the mid-1950s, these phenomena have coexisted with others in the lyric of the so-called “Sixtiers.” The neo-syncretism of subjects continued to develop, as for example in the work of Bulat Okudžava, in whose lyrics a symbolic ambiguity appears alongside the seemingly separate identities of the subjects of narration, in this way making the reader (listener) assume a sense of profound secret connection. To be mentioned in particular are “A Sentimental March” (1957), “A Bosom Talk with My Son” (1971), “An Old Street Organ was Grinding” (1974), and “How the Young Flutist Smiles” (1997). Significantly, unlike the case of the modernists, where the “other” (hero) is elevated to the plane of “I,” here the lyrical “I” must become more than he is in order to effect his “happy duo” with the hero, who is usually represented by Okudžava as a creator type (poet or musician). Persona poems play a leading role during this period, including in the artistic work of the popular poets and performers Aleksandr Galič and Vladimir Vysockij. The speakers in these poems are drifters, mountain climbers, pirates, brigands, sportsmen, soldiers of a penal military unit, and even an ambling horse and a plane. The subject of poetical narration is a grotesque one whose image is created by the crossing of the border between different consciousnesses. Moreover, Galič uses skaz in his lyrics (e.g., “Ballad about How Klim Petrovič Spoke at a Meeting in Defense of Peace,” 1968). If in Galič’s lyric it is easy to distinguish between author and narrator, in Vysockij’s works the distance between them is much shorter. His poetry is characterized by the “variable experience of reality,” an image of a “polyvariant world” (Lejderman and Lipoveckij [2001] 2013, 2:143) in which “its own” is uttered even from the mouth of the “other.” As for poetical narration I, in the 1930s the epic poem flourished. In Il’ja Kukulin’s words, “their ‘serial production’ became inevitable because it made it possible to ‘put off’ the dangerous question of poetical personality or to conceal a too ‘seditious’ personality behind a showy plot” (2014, 10). The narrative peculiarities of these long poems are the “chorus register,” that is, unanimity in which the narrator’s voice tends to dissolve into the people’s choir and speak on behalf of the collectivity. These poems are further characterized by simplicity and “non-artificiality” of style, the heroic aesthetic mode, and mythologization of reality in which the “how

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it should be” is represented as already being (while the horrible experience of collectivization is temporally shifted and transformed into history). The collective farm poem, or “kolxoz poem,” is a variant of the Social Realist epic poem. This form was greatly influenced by Aleksandr Tvardovskij’s The Land of Muravia (1936), which shows a melding with folklore, particularly with the genre of lubok. This same folkloric streak defines the narration of Tvardovskij’s masterpiece, the war poem Vasilij Tërkin (1941–1945). In the 1930s, together with the establishment of the Stalinist Empire style, the genre of the historical poem gains influence, a move that is spearheaded by Dmitrij  Kedrin. In the 1950s, the “travelogue poem,” replacing the genre of the travel sketch, and the lyrical poem, centered around the landscape of the soul reliving its relationship with the country, its history, and its fate, achieve prominence, as for example in the huge Midcentury (1958) by Vladimir Lugovskoj, Sold Venus (1956) by Vasilij Fëdorov, Stern Love (1956) by Jaroslav Smeljakov, and Distance Beyond Distance (1960) and By Right of Memory (1968) by Tvardovskij. Here, the “we”-consciousness of the hive tapers off before “I”-consciousness. This tendency further increases with the “Sixtiers,” but the “hive” voice, panoramic vision, and aspirations toward broad historical and geographical coverage continue to define poetical narration II, as in Requiem (1962) by Robert Roždestvenskij and The Bratsk Station (1965) by Evgenij Evtušenko. During this period, poetical narration III retreated into the background. This waning can be traced to a general trend toward “simplicity” and “non-artificiality,” on one hand, and to the downgrading of personhood (thereby undermining poetic prose), on the other hand. Still, we find outstanding samples of this technique in the work of Isaak Babel’, Mixail Prišvin, and Konstantin Paustovskij, where “I”-consciousness does not give way to the collective “we”-consciousness.

7 From the 1990s to the Present: Postmodernism Contemporary poetical narration features a vast array of possibilities. Lyric poetry has witnessed experiments with the figure of the speaker. Let us consider Iosif Brodskij, who had an immense impact on subsequent Russian poetry and, in particular, on poetical narration II. In his work, the lyrical “I” appears as “defamiliarized” and alienated: the poet rarely speaks in the first person or uses the pronoun “I,” and he equates “I” with “emptiness” (“It’s not that the Muse feels like clamming up,” 1980). The poem “From nowhere with love, Marchember the enth. . .” (1975) represents the apotheosis of facelessness, of blurred identity, space, and time. Here, the lyrical “I” is infinitely lonely, and the specific, living “other” is transformed by Brodskij into “Language” and “Speech,” thus ensuring the essentially metatextual character of his lyrical works.

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Conceptual poetry continues to follow this line, leaving behind the traditional lyrical speaker as defined by Plato. Thus, Dmitrij Aleksandrovič Prigov creates multiple quasi-authors, or authorial masks which embody, in a highly concentrated manner, the popular archetypes of Russian and Soviet cultural myths. As Lejderman and Lipoveckij have noted, the “backbone” of the organization of subjects in his lyrical works is the “dynamic relationship between two polar archetypes of Russian culture [. . .] – between a ‘little man’ and ‘great Russian poet’” ([2001] 2013, 2:430), which sometimes blend into one. The essential features of poetical Russian postmodernism become “factoring out the ‘I,’” the play of lyrical masks, and the broad advance of persona poems (e.g., Èduard Limonov, Marija Stepanova, and Marija Galina). In the 2000s, the central poetic genre was the so-called “antological miniature.” This genre is highly visual, contemplative, intolerant of self-reflexion, and focused on admiring the chosen object. Even for the traditionalist poets who had left postmodernism behind, the lyrical “I” turns out to be primarily the subject of vision, point of view (Aleksandr Kušner), or the subject of hearing (Oleg Čuxoncev). Irina Rodnjanskaja calls such phenomena “indirect lyricism” (Čuprinin 2012, 203). In it, the “I”-subject is not so much the authorial theme as it is the “prism” of consciousness refracting the surrounding world. As for the syntagmatic deployment of poems, the coherence of fragments, whose relationship the readers themselves have to build on  – sometimes manifestly to no avail (as in Dmitrij Tonkonogov’s lyrical poems, where formal narrativity is yet often present) – is destroyed. Consider the library index card poems of Lev Rubinštejn, a pioneer of poetic postmodernism in Russia. Rubinštejn worked as a librarian, and, in his telling, he simply used cards for writing poem drafts before he started to consider them a genre form. Later, the brevity, fragmentariness, and, vitally, the variability of sequence of the “poems on cards” became a superordinate metaphor for the impossibility of creating a universal order of life. It is also interesting that Rubinštejn’s text turns out to be a plastic model of “I” – a model of dynamic (self-)consciousness: “‘I’ as chaosmos, as alignment of non-persistent orders emerging from the chaos of the alienated forms and going back into it  – that’s where Rubinštejn’s text leads” (Lejderman and Lipoveckij [2001] 2013, 2:444). Meanwhile, contemporary literary critics discuss today’s gravitation of lyrical poetry toward epos, narrativity, and action-packed plots, sometimes evocative of the novella, which correlates with the disappearance, or elimination, of “I” from the lyric. Many poems by Boris  Xersonskij, Fëdor  Svarovskij, Grigorij  Daševskij, Marija Stepanova, Linor Goralik, Andrej Rodionov, and Olesja Nikolaeva fall into this category. Poetical narration I is also marked by increased narrativity: the genres of the long narrative poem and of the ballad (as in the work of Rodionov), the novel in

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verse (such as All about Liza, 2013, by Galina) and the tale in verse (e.g., Ivan Sidorov’s Prose, 2008, by Stepanova) gain further traction. If, at the end of the Soviet era, the greatest artistic achievements were related to the long lyrical poem whose plot is centered around the lyrical hero merged into the author (such are the poems by Timur Kibirov including Through Tears of Parting, 1987, or Toilets, 1991), more recently, poems accentuating the differences between the author and the hero have prevailed. In both cases, the plot unfolds within the context of history, past and recent, and of historical traumas. Noteworthy, too, is the organic fusion of “high” and “satirical” narrative modes in contemporary poems and, characteristic of postmodernism, a particular regard for “alien languages and speech manners,” as well as for the genre tradition. Thus, the long poem by Maksim Amelin, The Joyous Science (1999), is a kind of handbook of historical poetics, coming full circle in the Russian poetical narration. This poem, set in Russia during the eighteenth century, during the baroque era, replicates the baroque device of marginalia discussed earlier in relation to Buslaev’s The Speculations of the Soul. In Amelin’s poem, however, the prosaic commentary on the margins of the poetic text does not aim to clarify unclear points for the reader or to alert him to the author’s scholarship, as it did for Buslaev. Instead, the goal of the commentary is to show the collision of prosaic and “modernized” language with elevated poetical language, the semantic gap between them (which was only a side effect in Buslaev’s poem), and the gap between two epochs of Russian history. Direct and deliberate contradictions between the commentary and the “main” text facilitate this contrast. Finally, poetical narration III is currently experiencing a boom, one that rivals its ascendance in the modernist epoch. Numerous intermediary forms lying between poetry as such and poetic prose have emerged, due particularly to the generalized presence of free verse. There are prominent examples of such work in the mnemonic register which oscillate between autobiography and memoir. One might mention, in this regard, Dead Crones (2008) by Kibirov, who labeled the genre of this text “poem” even though it is written in prose, or In Memory of Memory (2017) by Stepanova.

8 Conclusion Poetical narration in Russian literature has gone through several phases in the course of more than three centuries. In the phase of reflective traditionalism (or the rhetorical epoch), toward the end of which “new” or secular and aesthetically oriented Russian literature arose, poetical narration was highly dependent on influential examples and “genre mentality.” It was characterized by following patterns and a

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high level of self-reflexivity which manifested itself, in particular, in the form of authorial narration and constant authorial commentary. Further on, poetical narration (in all its meanings) becomes more and more complicated and acquires fairly refined forms corresponding to general cultural changes. Such major trends are fragmentary narration, the principle of plot uncertainty, and open endings in romanticism; the “novelization of poetry” and overall reinforcement of the plot element in realism; the revelation of personhood as an undefined, probabilistically multiple entity resulting in the “neo-syncretism of the subject” in modernism, so that the events begin to apply to an indefinite, multifaceted subject; “collective personality” and emergence of the super-plot of the “common path” in the lyrical poetry of Socialist Realism, as well as the flourishing of persona poems in the poetical works of the “Sixtiers”; rejection of the lyrical “I” and a penchant for increased narrativity, especially in the mnemonic register, in contemporary literature.

References Artёmova, Svetlana. 2008. “Rolevaja lirika.” In Poètika: Slovar’ aktual’nyx terminov i ponjatij, 214–215. Мoskva: Izdatel’stvo Kulaginoj, Intrada. Averinсev, Sergej. 1981. “Drevnegrečeskaja poètika i mirovaja literature.” In Poètika drevnegrečeskoj literatury, 3–14. Мoskva: Nauka. Bakhtin [Baxtin], M. M. (1934/1935) 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baxtin, Mixail. 1996. “Satira.” In Sobranie sočinenij. V 7 tomax. Moskva: Russkie slovari, 1996– . T. 5, 11–38. Brojtman, Samson. 1997. Russkaja lirika 19–načala 20 veka v svete istoričeskoj poètiki: Sub”ektnoobraznaja struktura. Moskva: RGGU. Brojtman, Samson. [2001] 2004). “Istoričeskaja poètika.” In Teorija literatury. V 2 tomax. Мoskva: Akademia. T. 2, 1–368. Čuprinin, Sergej. 2012. “Stixi bez geroja? Priglašenie k diskussii: Andrej Rodionov, Ivan Volkov, Irina Rodnjanskaja, Aleksej Alëxin, Baxyt Kenžeev, Aleksej Uljukaev, Artëm Skvorcov, Stanislav L’vovskij, Lev Oborin, Marija Stepanova.” Znamja, 11, 197–215. Èjxenbaum, Boris. 1969. “Nekrasov.” In O poèzii, 35–74. Leningrad: Sovetskij pisatel’. Kukulin, Il’ja V. 2014. “Lirika sovetskoj sub”ektivnosti: 1930–1941.” Filologičeskij klass 1(35), 7–19. Lejderman, Naum, and Mark Lipoveckij. (2001) 2013. Russkaja literatura 20 veka (1950–1990-e gody). 2 vols. Мoskva: Akademia. Lotman, Jurij. 1972. Analiz poètičeskogo teksta: Struktura stixa. Leningrad: Prosveščenie. Engl.: Analysis of the Poetic Text. Trans. D. Barton Johnson. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976. Lotman, Jurij. 1973. “Proisxoždenie sjužeta v tipologičeskom osveščenii.” In Stat’i po tipologii kul’tury. Tartu: Tartuskij universitet, 9–41. Engl.: “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology.” Trans. Julian Graffy. Poetics Today, 1979, vol. 1, no. 1/2, 161–184. Lotman, Jurij. (1970) 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated by Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Lotman, Jurij. (1975) 1995. “Roman v stixax Puškina «Evgenij Onegin»: Speckurs; Vvodnye lekcii v izučenie teksta.” In Puškin, 393–462. Sankt-Peterburg: Iskusstvo-SPB. Magomedova, Dina. 1992. “Annenskij i Axmatova: K probleme «romanizacii liriki.»” In «Carstvennoe slovo»: Axmatovskie čtenija. Vyp. 1. Moskva: Nasledie, 135–140. Malkina, Viktorija. 2019. “Sub”ektnyj neosinkretizm v rossijskoj lirike 20 veka: Problemy tipologii i analiza.” Izvestija Rossijskoj Akademii nauk: Serija literatury i jazyka, 78, no. 3, 33–38. Mann, Jurij. 2007. Russkaja literatura 19 veka: Èpoxa romantizma. Moskva: RGGU. Mixajlov, Aleksandr. 1991. “Sud’ba klassičeskogo nasledija na rubeže 18–19 vekov.” In Klassika i sovremennost’, 149–164. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta. Sazonova, Lidija. 2019. “Avtorskij kommentarij v strukture proizvedenija (Poèma «Umozritel’stvo duševnoe» Petra Buslaeva).” In Literaturoman(n)ija: sbornik statej k 90-letiju Jurija Vladimiroviča Manna, 502–511. Moskva: RGGU. Schmid, Wolf. (2009) 2014. “Poetic or Ornamental Prose.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, 2nd edition. Vol. 2, 720–725. Berlin: De Gruyter. Šklovskij, Viktor. 1929. “Ornamental’naja proza.” In O teorii prozy, 205–225. Moskva: Federacija. Stanzel, Franz K. (1979) 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Terс, Abram (Sinjavskij, Andrej D.). 1989. “Chto takoe socialističeskij realizm.” In Cena metafory, ili Prestuplenie i nakazanie Sinjavskogo i Danielja, 425–459. Мoskva: Kniga. Tjupa, Valerij. 2008. “Stixotvorenie v proze.” In Poètika: Slovar’ aktual’nyx terminov i ponjatij, 253. Мoskva: Izdatel’stvo Kulaginoj, Intrada. Тjupa, Valerij. 2009. Literatura i mental’nost’. Moskva: Vest-Konsalting. Tjupa, Valerij. 2013. Diskurs/Žanr. Moskva: Intrada. Tynjanov, Jurij. (1974) 1977. “O kompozicii «Evgenija Onegina».” In Poètika. Istorija literatury. Kino, 52–77. Moskva: Nauka. Žirmunskij, Viktor. 1978. “Bajron i Puškin.” In Bajron i Puškin: Puškin i zapadnye literatury, 9–356. Leningrad: Nauka.

Sonja Zeman

Oral Storytelling in Ancient Greek and German Medieval Literature 1 Definition Storytelling can be oral in various ways. The term “oral storytelling” covers different types of narrative: (1) conversational narratives spontaneously produced in spoken language; (2) traditional narratives transmitted orally from one generation to another without the aid of writing, including oral poetry, but also songs, magic spells, folktales, and genealogies; (3) oral poetry in a narrow sense, i.e., verse-form epic narratives composed in oral performance by a poet in the immediate presence of an audience. “Oral” thus refers not only to the distinction between “spoken” and “written” language, but also to different medial aspects of narratives: their transmission, composition, and performance as well as their cultural context (“oral predisposition”). This is the case particularly for oral poetry, which has been the main focus of diachronic narrativity. With respect to the question of how orality affects the diachronic patterns of ancient and medieval storytelling, it is thus vital to distinguish between different dimensions of orality and their different influence on narrative structure.

2 Dimensions of Orality Investigations of oral storytelling in older stages of language are faced with two problems in particular. First, apparent “oral” residues are analyzed in texts that are preserved only in written form. Second, it is nowadays commonly acknowledged that orality and literacy are not two categories that can be dichotomously distinguished from each other. Rather, many narratives in older stages of language are characterized by the coexistence of orality and literacy (e.g., Bakker 1997b; Niles 1999; Chinca and Young 2005; Hall 2008). As a result, several dimensions of orality have been identified in order to do justice to the variety of different forms of oral storytelling.

2.1 Medial vs. Conceptual/Cognitive Orality To describe orality in written historical texts, it is common to distinguish between “medial” and “conceptual” (Koch and Oesterreicher 1985) or “cognitive” (Fleischman https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-034

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1990a, 1990b) orality. Whereas “medial orality” refers to the dichotomous distinction that language can be mediated either in spoken or written form, “cognitive” or “conceptual orality” is a graduated concept that accounts for the fact that a (written or spoken) text can more or less reflect an “oral style” irrespective of its actual medial realization. In this sense, oral features of written ancient and medieval narrative texts are conceptual/cognitive orality by definition. However, this conception remains vague, since there is no consensus as to what properties can be classified as general characteristics of oral storytelling. Rather, lists of supposed “oral” features are heterogeneous and comprise various phenomena which are not “oral” in the same way. Properties of oral poetry such as formulas and metrical patterns, for example, are supposed to reflect oral “online” composition and are seen as the result of cognitive conditions such as memorization and parsing in spoken language. Interjections, emotive expressions, and references to the “here and now” of the act of narration, on the other hand, are not characteristics of spoken language per se but of a narrative technique commonly referred to in terms of “vividness,” “immediacy,” and “enargeia,” and as such are linked to the concept of “involvement” (Chafe 1982). Conceptual orality thus mingles aspects of orality in the medial sense of the term and secondary phenomena like linguistic markers of deictic immediacy. In this respect, Lord ([1960] 2000, 13) distinguished between aspects in and aspects for performance, and Haferland (2019, 30) between poetic features tracing back to mnemonic techniques and production conditions on the one hand and stylistic choices on the other. This difference is vital for diachronic investigations of oral storytelling, since features linked to the medial restrictions of oral performance decrease with the influence of the written word, whereas features of involvement remain in use as stylistic devices (Fleischman 1990b, 88; Hennig 2009).

2.2 Primary vs. Secondary Orality In the tradition of Walter J. Ong’s 1982 conception of “primary orality,” it is a common assumption that the language of societies that are unfamiliar with writing is “more oral” in general, since it is impacted by oral mental habits (e.g., Fleischman 1990a, 22; for a critical view, see Bakker 1997b; Hall 2008). In this respect, the language of pre-literate societies has been described as additive and paratactic rather than subordinating. It is also said to be more redundant, empathetic, and participatory, more grounded in human experience than in abstractions, and situated in the present, whereas written discourse tends toward distancing, abstraction, and detachment (Ong 1982, 36–56). “Secondary orality,” on the other hand, refers to the use of orality in literate communities, where it is “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong 1982, 133).

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The distinction between primary and secondary orality does not refer primarily to linguistic characteristics but to the oral predisposition of a specific language community and thus to the cultural dimension of orality. This dimension of orality has been emphasized in investigations of oral poetry, as seen in Lord’s definition of oral poetry as “narrative poetry composed in a manner evolved over many generations by singers of tales who did not know how to write” ([1960] 2000, 4). Here, “oral” does not refer to oral communication in actual performance, but to the transmission of the poem from generation to generation (see also Innes 1998, 5).

2.3 Oral Composition, Performance, Reception, and Transmission Many narratives of older stages of language, including epic poems from antiquity and the Middle Ages, cannot be ascribed to primary orality in the strict sense of the term, since writing was already established within certain spheres of life (J.-D. Müller 2012, 297). Due to juxtaposition of the spoken and the written word, narratives from antiquity and the Middle Ages have therefore been described as “semioral,” “transitional,” or “post-oral” texts. These terms have been criticized as they presuppose a straight line of development from orality to literacy, whereas it is nowadays commonly accepted that orality is a gradient property allowing for different constellations with respect to the relationship of spoken and written language within a society (Bakker 1997b; Amodio 2005). This proves to be the case with respect to the large variety of different oral constellations. As shown by Finnegan (1977), the oral features that Milman Parry and Albert Lord described for the Homeric epics represent only one specific type of oral poetry out of many. Cross-linguistically, oral narratives “turn out to be different combinations of processes of composition, memorization and performance, with differing relationships between them according to cultural traditions, genres and individual poets” (Finnegan 1977, 86). In order to describe these varying combinations, it is thus necessary to classify poems according to the different parameters of composition, performance, and reception, as proposed by Foley (2002; Table 1). In sum, oral poetry can be described as “oral” in more than one respect: (1)  whether it is orally composed during the performance (“oral composition”), (2) whether its performance is oral (“oral performance and reception”), and (3) whether the stories belong to traditional knowledge that has been orally transmitted in an non-literate society (“oral transmission”).

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Table 1: Foley’s (2002, 39) differentiation of oral constellations. Composition

Performance

Reception

Example

Oral performance

Oral

Oral

Aural

Voiced texts Voices from the past Written oral poems

Written O/W Written

Oral O/W Written

Aural A/W Written

Tibetan papersinger Slam poetry Homer’s Odyssey Bishop Njegoš

2.4 Elaborated vs. Conversational Storytelling For antiquity and the Middle Ages, records of conversational storytelling are rare and difficult to reconstruct. Investigations of oral storytelling in diachronic narratology have therefore mainly focused on oral poetry. Like conversational storytelling, oral poetry is performed in spoken language. It is thus subject to mnemonic and parsing restrictions and requires a spontaneous form of utterance. Oral narratives are therefore generally supposed to display a lesser degree of elaboration than written ones. Oral poetry, however, is a special type of speech that displays a high degree of elaboration. Both its vocabulary and syntax can differ from colloquial speech and constitute a new variety of language that differs from the vernacular (Finnegan 1977, 109). This has been debated particularly with regard to archaisms and neologisms, formulaic epithets, and dialectal variation in Homer’s Kunstsprache (for an overview, see Bozzone 2016). It is also not uncommon for oral poetry to rely on “long-considered and deliberate composition before the moment of performance” (Finnegan 1977, 127), so that its composition cannot be compared to spontaneous speech production. The artificiality of oral poetry has not only been seen as a result of mnemonic techniques such as meter and formulas, but also of the poet’s intention to mark the content of the poems as extraordinary in comparison to the stories of everyday life (Finnegan 1977, 110). This “other-worldliness” of the narratives (Mellmann 2019, 214) is seen in the fact that in many oral traditions, conventionalized introductory formulas locate the stories in a distant mythical past (see my contribution on time and temporality in this volume). In this way, oral poems are comparable with literary narratives, which are also characterized by a break from the ordinary world of first-hand experience (on the diachronic relationship between the oral tradition and literary narratives, see Mellmann 2019 from an evolutionary perspective; Zeman 2020 from a linguistic perspective).

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2.5 “Fictive,” “Simulated,” or “Pseudo-Orality” Oral poems in ancient Greece and during the Middle Ages deviate from Ong’s primary orality due to the fact that writing was not completely unfamiliar in certain contexts of life. This has led to the question of whether the oral features in these poems might have been not an unconscious reflex of the mental habits and medial conditions of oral composition, but rather a deliberate stylistic choice to imitate oral performance. It has, for example, been discussed whether the formulaic nature of the Nibelungenlied is the result of “authentic” oral composition (Haferland 2019) or an intentional literalization of an oral narrative style (Curschman 1979, 97). In the latter case, the features would not indicate an oral substrate, but rather “fictive,” “simulated,” or “pseudo-orality” (“fingierte Mündlichkeit”; Goetsch 1985). However, the concept of fictive orality has been brought into question. Since fictive orality presupposes a cultural context of secondary orality, it seems questionable whether it is appropriate to talk about fictive orality in ancient and in medieval epics (Knapp 2008; Glauch 2009; Haferland 2019). Consequently, Glauch has proposed the term “virtual orality,” which refers to the fact that the poem is conceptualized as a text that is intended to be performed orally but whose features do not result from fictionalizing an oral style.

3 Comparison between Homeric and Middle High German (MHG) Epic Poems 3.1 Oral Predisposition Both medieval and the Homeric epics belong to “voices from the past” (Foley 2002), in other words to textual artifacts that have reached us in writing but that display features that are supposed to reflect their oral tradition. To evaluate the relationship between individual poems and orality, it is thus necessary to take the oral predisposition of their cultural context into account.

3.1.1 Ancient Greece: The Homeric epics The investigation of oral poetry in ancient Greece is intricately linked to the work of Parry and Lord. Based on comparisons between the Homeric epics and South Slavic guslari, they argued that oral poems are profoundly different from literary ones and that this difference is reflected in particular in the use of formulas

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and metric verse structure as linguistic traces of the oral performance situation. These findings have led to extensive studies within the paradigm of “oral formulaic theory.” While the oral hypothesis as a whole is still supported by many scholars today, recent studies have led to a more nuanced view. It has been shown, for example, that the Homeric epics diverge in several ways from Ong’s (1982) criteria of primary orality (e.g., Stanley 1993, 274, on the Iliad). Whereas the use of formulas, meter, and type-scenes is still seen as an indicator that the Iliad and the Odyssey are “compositions in performance” (see Ready 2019, 4, with references), the high level of artificiality of the Homeric epics has been considered as inconsistent with the conditions of “online” production (Latacz 1989; Friedrich 2019). In this respect, it has been questioned whether macrostructural patterns such as ring composition (the arrangement of thematic elements in a form such as A-B-CB-A) are compatible with the principles of oral composition or should rather be seen as an elaborate technique that presupposes the written word (Stanley 1993). Other features that have been interpreted as elements of literary language are “far-range reference” between different parts of a poem, thematic variability, and the non-schematized nature of Homeric similes (Stanley 1993; Friedrich 2019). The Homeric epics have therefore also been classified as “transitional” and “pastoral” (e.g., Friedrich 2019, who claims that Homer was an oral bard who became literate in the course of his career). On the other hand, investigations stimulated by recent advances in narratological and cognitive approaches have emphasized the oral roots of the Homeric poems anew (e.g., Minchin 2001; Bakker 2005; Bozzone 2016; Ready 2019).

3.1.2 Middle High German: Heroic and Courtly Epics Middle High German (MHG) epic poems rely on both the oral and the written word. It is assumed that the poems were prepared with the aid of reading, since many poets emphasize their book-based erudition and their knowledge of the written sources of the narrated story. It is also assumed that the poems could be presented orally or read as texts, but that free oral presentation was rather the rule than the exception (Haferland 2004, 2019). There are, however, significant genre differences, as seen in the comparison between heroic and courtly epics (Philipowski 2007; Haferland 2019; Zeman 2022). Heroic epics commonly refer to Germanic epic cycles that were traditionally known. Their authors are not mentioned in the poems but remain anonymous, with the story starting immediately or after a short prologue. These properties have been seen as an indication that heroic epics were transmitted without the aid of the written word before their transcription as texts (see

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Philipowski 2007, 49–57, with further references). Courtly epics, in contrast, can frequently be ascribed to a specific author who often mentions himself in a prologue that precedes the actual story, stressing that the “truth” of the story is backed up by written sources. The coexistence of heroic and courtly epics in MHG – which belong to the same cultural background but nevertheless display different oral constellations – suggests that literary and oral textual strategies during the Middle Ages are characterized by symbiosis and interference (Innes 1998, 9; J.-D. Müller 2012, 297; Haferland 2019, 60). The interference of oral and literate features also pertains to individual texts, as seen in the example of the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1190/1200). Its metrical-stanzaic form, the emphasis on visual and spatial representations, stereotypical patterns for the representation of thematic scenes such as battles, festivals, arrivals, and departures, as well as incongruences in the text have been taken as arguments that the production of the text was based on memory (Haferland 2019, 55) and was “without doubt” (J.-D. Müller 2012, 315) composed for recitation in an oral performance. On the other hand, the Nibelungenlied gives no evidence of Stabreimdichtung, and integrates schemata and topoi from the literary tradition of the courtly epos, a feature which is unusual for heroic epics (Haferland 2019, 39). Moreover, there is no formula thesaurus (Miedema 2011, 38–44), and it has been questioned whether the large-scale form and artificiality of the stanzaic structure would have been consistent with oral composition in performance or would have presupposed the aid of the written word. Therefore, the Nibelungenlied has been interpreted both as a “book epos,” an epic composed in written form but intended to be read and performed orally (Heusler 1956; J.-D. Müller 2012; Heinzle 2013), and as a text primarily based on memory that also displays literary principles (Haferland 2019).

3.1.3 Features of Oral Storytelling in MHG and Homeric Epic Poems Various features of narrative have been classified as oral, such as formulas, syntactic breaks, paratactic structure, “illogical” narrative chronology, tense alternations, epithets, “fluidity” of the text, and so on. These features, however, do not represent a homogeneous class but are linked to different parameters of orality. A distinction can be drawn between features of (1) the language of oral composition, (2) the language of “immediacy” and “visuality,” and (3) macrostructural properties that have been discussed in connection with the oral predisposition of the narratives.

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3.2 The Language of Oral Composition 3.2.1 Formula, Formulaic Expressions, and Metrical Form Since the seminal studies on oral poetry by Parry and Lord, formula and meter have been seen as the most prototypical indicators of the oral production of the epic poems. According to Parry and Lord, metrical form and formulas – “a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea” (Lord [1960] 2000, 4) – allow the poet to compose long epic poems “online” in a performance situation. Formulas and formulaic expressions are seen as a mnemonic technique, since they can be used as prefabricated parts and thus unburden the poet’s working memory. According to oral formulaic theory, a high frequency of formulas in a text indicates a high degree of orality. More recent studies have called for a more nuanced view. For example, it has been shown that Homeric formulas are not fixed building blocks but are flexible enough to be integrated into different metrical environments (e.g., Visser 1987). Bozzone (2016, 96–98) distinguishes between more flexible constructions and “fossilized” ones. For MHG epic poems, it has been stated that there is no formula thesaurus (Miedema 2011, 38–44). In the Nibelungenlied, for example, epithets like “Kriemhild the noble queen” are neither fixed nor frequently used, but are employed as sentence patterns that show a rich variation of expression (Miedema 2011, 38–44; Haferland 2004, 337; 2019, 57–58). While the differing formulaic character of MHG and Homeric epics does not allow for a reliable evaluation with respect to their oral character, the use of constructional building blocks can be seen as a common feature characteristic of spoken language. Alongside the formal character of formulaic expressions, semantic aspects have also been discussed in connection with the oral hypothesis. Formulaic expressions in the Homeric epics have been described as words that “store” shared traditional knowledge and represent the world “as all men [. . .] commonly receive it” (Parry 1956, 3). Consequently, epithets such as πόδας ὠκύς Ἀχιλλεύς (swift-footed Achilles) are more than ornamental stylistic devices. By attributing a memorable quality to a character, an epithet refers to the protagonist’s “larger identity across the epic tradition” (Foley 2007, 15). The use of formulaic speech thus reaches beyond technical necessity by pointing toward the protagonist’s status within the larger tradition.

3.2.2 Themes and Type-Scenes In addition to formulas, oral epics are also characterized by the frequent occurrence of conventional themes (“type-scenes”) such as battles, arrivals and departures,

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feasts, and festivals. In the Nibelungenlied, for example, the pattern for arrival at court follows a fixed script: arrival of the envoys, welcome by the servants, the ruler’s asking about the guests, meeting of guests and court society, request for permission to convey the message (Dürrenmatt 1945, 26; see Arend 1933 and Edwards 1992 for an overview of type-scenes in the Homeric epics). Such stereotypical representations of events have been seen as building blocks that facilitate composition in performance. The use of these traditional scripts, however, can also trigger semantic effects within specific contexts. One example is the famous scene where Achilles and Priam share a meal after negotiating the handing over of Hector’s body (Iliad 24.621–627). By referring to a ritualistic context, the description of the feast can be seen as a reference to “the kosmos of the properly functioning Homeric society” (Foley 1991, 34–35). The description of the scene is thus not just a mnemonic device but represents Priam and Achilles’s agreement as a return to “normal human behavior” that is consonant with social values (de Jong 1991, 416). Type-scenes are thus “not merely a structural blueprint for constructing epic narrative, but an opportunity to situate individualized events and moments within a traditionally reverberative frame” (Foley 2007, 16).

3.2.3 Repetitions Another feature that has been classified as a persistent constant of oral poetry is repetition. At first sight, repetitions can be seen as a consequence of formulaic language, since the repetitive use of formulas and formulaic expressions leads to the representation of characters, objects, and “type-scenes” (Arend 1933) in a very similar manner. Longer verbatim repetitions of narrative events (“narrative repetitions”) have also been described as a result of “this kind of recycling process” within the formulaic system (Nagy 2004, 143). It has further been assumed that narrative repetitions facilitate reception of the poem for the reader. In this sense, they are seen as a matter of both performance and composition (Nagy 2004). However, repetitions are not only technical devices but can serve a variety of narrative functions. In the Homeric epics, repetitions are frequent in reported messages as well as in commands, requests, and wishes (de Jong 1991, 414–415; Eide 1999, 97). Such repetitions (e.g., an order to do something and the subsequent report that the order has been executed) often frame the actual event and thus contribute to the structuring of the narratives. In addition, repetitions can be used to perspectivize one event from different angles. An insightful example is the prolepsis of the fall of Troy as uttered by both Agamemnon exhorting his men and Hector in his conversation with Andromache.

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(1) For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it. There will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear. (Iliad 4.163–165, 6.443–449, quoted in de Jong 1991, 415) Attributed once to one of the later winners of the Trojan War and once to one of its later losers, the statement alludes to the outcome of the war from two perspectives: the prospect of glorious victory and the fate of total ruin (de Jong 1991, 416). At the same time, the verbatim repetition links the two passages together and contributes to the dense network of foreshadowing that is typical for the Iliad (Grethlein 2010). Verbatim repetition can thus be used as a “meaningful, instead of a purely mnemonic, device” (de Jong 1991, 417). In MHG epics, repetitions are not restricted to formulaic and schematic expressions, but can be used both to structure the narrative and picture an event from different perspectives. In the Eneasroman (ca. 1190) by Heinrich von Veldeke, for example, the story of Aeneas’s flight from Troy is narrated twice: once at the beginning of the story by the narrator and once by Aeneas in Carthage himself. These two narrations are not verbatim repetitions but elaborate subtle contrasts between narratorial and figural perspective (Fromm 1996; Zimmermann 2017, 93).

3.2.4 Intonation Units Traces of oral composition have also been found in the syntactic patterns of oral poetry. In this respect, it has been claimed that oral poetry – like spoken discourse – is not structured by sentences as units of the written word, but by intonation units, i.e. smaller chunks of information set off by pauses and changes in intonation (Bakker 1998, 39; Bozzone 2016). These intonation units may correlate with one verse line, but they can also exceed the verse boundary. Such enjambments have a variety of stylistic, rhythmic, and narrative effects (Bakker 2005, 54). Clusters of enjambments can, for example, create “areas of metrical turbulence” and emphasize the “emotional high points in the narrative” (54). It can be supposed that the full potential of intonation units is revealed only in live performance (55). Another pattern linked to the intonation unit is “left-dislocation.” From the perspective of written language, left-dislocation is the positioning of a sentential constituent outside a sentence such as My aunt, she used to sing folk songs, which has been described as a general characteristic for oral narratives (Chafe 1994, 67–68). This pattern is a common feature of the Homeric epics (e.g., Bakker 1997a, chap. 5; Bonifazi and Elmer 2011; de Kreij 2016; Ready 2019). See (2), where the “pendant

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nominative” (Patroklos dé) presents the subject as an isolated referent within its own intonation unit. (2)

And PATROCLUS, | as long as the Achaeans and Trojans were fighting around the wall, | far from the ships, | all the while HE, | in the tent of pleasant Eurypylus, | (Iliad, 15.390–392; example from de Kreij 2016, 151)

The frequent use of this pattern in the Homeric epics has been taken as an argument that the Homeric epics are “characterized by a thoroughly oral conception” (Bakker 1998, 41). In addition, it has a discourse functional role, as it marks the protagonist as the center of the following lines of discourse and thus serves as a feature of ‘framing’ and ‘priming’ (Bakker 1997a, 86–111; de Kreij 2016). Once it is conventionalized, moreover, the pattern can become a metanarrative signal to mark the beginning of a new scene (de Kreij 2016, 164). MHG epic poems also display a frequent use of left-dislocations. Consider (3): (3) Four hundred KNIGHTʼS ATTENDANTS | THEY were about to wear knightly clothes | together with Siegfried. (Nibelungenlied B, 30.1) In the Nibelungenlied, this pattern is more frequent in narrative passages than in direct speech (Zeman 2022). This supports the hypothesis that the pattern might be an oral feature but is also conventionalized with respect to different discourse and narrative functions. As such, left-dislocation is not just an “oral” feature but part of the narrative syntax.

3.3 Language of “Immediacy” and “Visuality” Both the Homeric and medieval epic poems have been characterized by their “vividness” and “optic quality” (see Fleischman 1990b for the Middle Ages; Grethlein and Huitink 2017 for an overview of the Homeric epics). According to the common view, it is the simultaneity between the act of performance and the act of reception that leads poets to represent the story “as if observing them now” (Fleischman 1990b, 265), to “appeal expressly to the addressee’s senses” and to “place the object of reference within his or her perceptual sphere” (Elmer 2009, 43). There are two kinds of linguistic elements that are discussed with respect to the language of “immediacy” and “visuality”: (1) linguistic features of the “immediate mode” (Chafe 1994) that establish a shared communicative frame in terms of deictic proximity and involvement such as present tense forms, deictics of the “here and now,” verbs

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of perception, and direct speech representation; (2) linguistic features of “optic poetics” such as detailed descriptions, ekphrasis, and similes.

3.3.1 The Present Tense One of the most prominent expressions in oral narratives that has been discussed under the label of vividness, immediacy, and enargeia is the use of the present tense. To account for the narrative functions of the present tense in the epic poems, two different uses have to be distinguished in particular: the “narrator’s present” and the “historical present.” The narrator’s present refers to “discourse now,” that is, the time of storytelling, linked to the voice of the narrator. In MHG epic poems, it is frequently used to interpret and evaluate the behavior of the protagonists from the narrator’s point of view (4) or to comment on the subsequent story line (5). (4) I [i.e., the narrator] think they are both right. (Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 264.25) (5) Now look, there comes near a distress to them. (Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 407.10) In these examples, the use of the present tense interrupts the sequence of events. Further linguistic means such as the imperative of the verb of perception (“look!”) and the deictic “now” establish a space of communication shared by the poet and the audience, both of whom “look at” the narrated events. In this way, the narrator’s present is not a feature of orality in the technical sense, but of performed narrativity. It can function as a metalinguistic device that “establishes the discourse as something other than narration” (Fleischman 1990b, 306). On the other hand, the present tense can be used to denote past events of the plot in alternation with past tenses (e.g., he came in and sees [. . .]). This “historical present” can trigger a number of stylistic effects. It often emphasizes the dynamic nature of the sequence of events and marks the culmination point of a story (see also my contribution on time and temporality in this volume). In this respect, it has also been argued that it is not the present tense form itself but rather the alternation pattern between past and present tenses that is responsible for the “vivid” effects within the narrative (Wolfson 1980; Fludernik 1991). Accordingly, the oral pattern has been seen not in the historical present itself, but in “tense confusion” (Fleischman 1990b), that is, the use of shifting tense forms which are not necessarily concordant with the respective temporal values of the denoted events.

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The historical present has been attested for many narratives of older stages of language, including Biblical Hebrew (Cotrozzi 2010), Ancient Greek (Sicking and Stork 1997), Old French (Fleischman 1990b), and Middle English (Fludernik 1991, 1992). It does not occur, however, in the Homeric epic poems (Bakker 1997b, 2005) or in MHG (Herchenbach 1911; Boezinger 1912). The development in German, where the historical present in its narrow form is not attested until the sixteenth century (Boezinger 1912, 12), an age characterized by a high level of literacy, raises the question as to whether there is indeed a direct link between the use of the historical present and oral poetry (Zeman 2016).

3.3.2 Markers of Involvement: Deixis, Interjections, Expressives It is commonly assumed that the primary “now” of oral poetry is the moment of performance, and that this “discourse now” also constitutes the primary reference point for the epic’s deictic orientation (Bakker 2005, 175; Kawashima 2004, 146). The discourse now can be marked by several linguistic features throughout the poem including deictic adverbials like “here” and “now,” first-person pronouns, and expressive interjections. A famous example for the reference to the “now” of the act of performance is the invocation of the muses in Homer (‘Sing now to me, Muses’; Iliad 2.484) and the address to the audience in MHG prologues (‘Now listen carefully everyone’; Herzog Ernst [ca. 1180], 1). For the Homeric epics, it is characteristic that the “now” of performance remains actualized throughout the whole narration. This is seen in the fact that features of the immediate mode such as the hearer-oriented demonstrative oὕτως (this) can be used to “point” to a referent within the storyworld as if he were present “before the eyes” within the “here and now” (Bakker 2005, 75–79). In the same respect, other linguistic markers like the augment (127), the aorist (169), and particles referring to ‘”here and now” like ἄρα and several discourse markers (Bonifazi 2008) have been seen as linked to the performance mode of epic poems. Due to the conceptualized simultaneity between the performance and the events happening within the story, it is also possible for the narrator to address the characters directly (de Jong 2009, 93–97), as in (6): (6) Then who was the first, and who the last that you killed, Patroclus, when the gods called you to your death? (Iliad 16.692–693; discussed in de Jong 2009, 93–94) Such apostrophes to the characters give the impression that the protagonists are “real” (de Jong 2009, 95) and can thus be seen as instances of enargeia. This is sup-

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ported by the fact that apostrophes also often mark a turning point in the narrative (de Jong 2009, 96). The “here and now” of the act of narration is also an important reference point in MHG epic poems. This can be indicated by deictic adverbials, the use of the present tense, verbs of perception and interjections that “intrude” on the plot, as in (7–8): (7) and when he came again to Tintajol, to the court, look, there he heard and got to know in alleys and in streets due to laments such a behavior that it troubled him very much. (Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, 6018–6023) (8) alas how many chainmails the bold Dancwart broke there! (Nibelungenlied B, 212.4) In contrast to examples of the narrator’s present above (4–5), (7–8) are not metatextual instances but refer to the narrative events of the plotline in the storyworld. Nevertheless, linguistic features of the immediate mode such as the imperative of the verb of perception (“look!”) are used, which establish a communicative situation shared by the poet and the audience. Similarly, the exclamatory interjection “hei waz” (alas how) in (8) gives the impression that the narrating and perceiving act and the narrated events are happening simultaneously. In both the Homeric and MHG epics, the language of immediacy can thus “intrude” on the narrative mode and lead to the conflation of proximity and distance.

3.3.3 Speech and Thought Representation Oral poetry is characterized by extensive use of direct speech, which has also been seen as a feature intended to make the poems more vivid (Beck 2012). But its relationship to orality is not straightforward. This can be seen in the discussion on speech introductions. Introductory verses of speech are frequent and often tend to be formulaic, as in such patterns as “And to him/her spoke in answer SUBJECT of many devices,” in the Homeric epics or, in MHG: “do sprach SUBJECT” (then spoke SUBJECT). On the one hand, it has been argued that the frequent use of introductory phrases is an oral feature, since the oral performance situation does not allow for the use of typographical signs and hence requires explicit markers that indi-

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cate the beginning of a speech or a change of speaker (de Jong 1991, 409). Maier (2015), on the other hand, has argued that it is due to marking by paralinguistic means in oral performance that explicit markers of direct speech are not necessary. One of his arguments for this position is the fact that the Homeric epics allow for “slipping” from indirect into direct speech within the same construction without explicit marking. A striking pattern of direct speech without explicit introductory formulas in MHG epics before 1200 is stichomythia – a dispute in which the speakers exchange short utterances that commonly end within one verse line. This rhetorical device, originally characteristic for drama (Miedema 2007, 268–269), has also been interpreted as an oral feature, since it mimics conversational disputes. It is assumed that stichomythia was a particularly enjoyable part within the performance, probably combined with paralinguistic means such as intonation, pitch, volume, gestures, and facial expression. This has also been seen as an explanation as to why stichomythia vanishes in postclassical epics when writing became more common (M. E. Müller 2007, 136).

3.3.4 Ekphrasis and Similes Another feature discussed in connection with oral optic poetics is ekphrasis  – detailed descriptions of battles, tournaments, and ceremonials as well as depictions of special objects such as clothes and weapons. Since such descriptions give the impression that the narrator adopts the stance of an eyewitness, they have also been seen as connected with the “vivid” style of oral poetry. However, ekphrasis and other “pictorial” devices are not directly linked to the mode of composition. Grethlein and Huitink have criticized the pictorial theory of perception that underpins descriptions of poetry as “mental pictures” and shown that readerly visualization of the Homeric epics is not the result of the amount of “pictorial” detail, but rather of “multimodal sensory, cognitive and emotional appeal” (2017, 86). For MHG epics, it has been shown that ekphrastic descriptions prototypically describe clothes, weapons, and other artifacts that are marked as exceptional. As Starkey (2016) has shown, they are used not only to create the illusion of a realistic picture, but also to demonstrate the rhetorical artistry of the poet. In a similar way, pictorial similes are often found within the narrator’s reflection on poetic composition (Starkey 2016, 186). Medieval ekphrasis and similes thus involve a metanarrative component. Although they are traditional elements, pictorial descriptions and similes are not primarily oral features (see Ready 2018 for the Homeric simile as interface between tradition and innovation).

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3.4 Macrostructural Properties 3.4.1 Episodic Structure Ancient and medieval stories have often been described as “single-stranded.” For the Homeric epics, it has been argued that they represent the story as a homogeneous, continuous flow of narration, since the poet narrates what he “sees” in front of his mental eyes. The conditions of oral performance are supposed to shape the narrative macrostructure. Since the “stream of memory” makes it difficult to pursue several plots simultaneously, oral poems commonly focus on one main plot. Any subplots that might be introduced into the story do not exist independently from this main plot and are therefore not mentioned until they come into the “vision” of the poet (Kawashima 2008, 115). The connection between these subplots is often left underspecified, which adds up to the impression that they are not represented as happening simultaneously in the different mental subworlds (see also my contribution on time and temporality in this volume for a discussion of Zielinski’s Law). Similar things have also been said about the Nibelungenlied, whereas later MHG romances have been characterized by a more complex network of subplots. An indicator for a change of the narrative macrostructure can be seen in the marking of scene shifts. In the Homeric, as in MHG epics, explicit episode markers are not common. In the Iliad, the progression of the story is often indicated just by particles like de (and, but), marking the units as a new step in the sequence of events (Bakker 2005, 69). In MHG epics, the frequent use of the particle dô (then) structures the progression of the events, as is also known for everyday oral storytelling (“and then she said, and then I said [.  .  .]”). The increase in the number of explicit markers of scene shifts, which are still rare in the Nibelungenlied, seems to correlate with the introduction of multiple subplots. Formulaic expressions, as in (9), indicate a change of focus from one mental subworld to another, while the subworlds are conceptualized as existing simultaneously within the narrative world. (9) die rede lât sîn, hoert waz geschiht dâ wir diz maere liezen ê. (Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 207.4–5) (Let’s leave this talk; listen to what happens where we left this story before.) As Fludernik (2003, 335) has shown, similar scene-shift markers such as “Now lat hem rede, and torne we anon To [. . .]” are used extensively in Middle English verse narratives, namely, in romances and in saints’ legends, but also in Chaucer.

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According to her, these markers served to structure the course of events during oral delivery of the narrative and were later refunctionalized as an ironizing and metafictional technique in Renaissance texts. In German, these patterns become more frequent in complex prose romances like the Prosalancelot, where the expression has been conventionalized as a scene-shift marker. (10) now we will leave the story about Bertelac and his wife for a while and speak further about King Arthur and his wife the queen and about Galahot’s dream. The story tells us that [. . .]. (Prosalancelot II [3, 26])

3.4.2 Narrative Complexity Epics are commonly large-scale poems, and it has been debated whether their length is consistent with oral performance or would require the aid of the written word, as argued by Stanley (1993) and Friedrich (2019) for the Homeric epics and by Jan-Dirk Müller (2012) for the classification of the Nibelungenlied as a “book epic.” Furthermore, the consistency of the plotline and the dense network of prolepses and analepses in the Homeric epics and in MHG epics have been seen as literary rather than oral features. Other macrostructural properties that have been discussed with respect to the oral status of epic poems are lists (e.g., the extensive catalogue of ships, as discussed by Visser 1987) and the ring composition – the representation of thematic elements in an A-B-C-B-A structure. Ring composition has been evaluated both as an oral compositional device and as an artistic pattern of elaboration (e.g., Ready 2019, 10). On the one hand, it has commonly been seen as a result of the medial conditions of oral performance (Nimis 1998, 66; Sale 1996, 40) and as an expansion of common practices found in everyday oral conversation (Person 2016, 30). On the other hand, the A-B-C-B-A pattern has also been characterized as a structure that is characteristic for many narratives cross-linguistically, and thus not specific to oral composition. Furthermore, ring composition has been described as a literate principle of elaboration whose complexity cannot be deduced from the principles of oral composition (Stanley 1993). In this respect, it has also been argued that ring composition might originally have been a mnemonic device, only to become an artistic architectonic principle in the Iliad (Whitman 1958, 98). The different evaluations show once again that elaboration and orality are not categories that exclude each other.

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4 Impact of Orality on the Development of Narratological Concepts As seen above, no single straight line of development from orality to literacy can be assumed. First, both ancient and medieval storytelling are characterized by a mutual interplay between the oral and the literate and thus resist description following a teleological model (cf. Innes 1998, 36). Second, narratives are influenced by various factors including cultural context, genre, and rhetoric. Investigation of the relationship between aspects of orality, oral features, and narrative functions in their diachronic development thus remains a relevant topic for future research. For diachronic narratology, this is particularly important, since it is assumed that orality had a significant impact on the development of basic narratological concepts. In this respect, the following hypotheses have been proposed.

4.1 Hypothesis 1: Shift from “Discourse Now” to “Story Now” Oral poetry has commonly been characterized by the dominance of the teller frame, since it is the memorizing act of the poet that constitutes the primary reference point of storytelling. As described above, oral poetry is characterized by frequent references to “discourse now” and to the common space shared by the narrator and the audience. This “grammar of immediacy” also intrudes on the plot so that deictics of proximity can be used to refer to protagonists in a distant mythical past. As soon as epics become less dependent on active memory and verbal reactualization, the focus on “discourse now” is gradually weakened while the dynamic “story now” in the progression of events becomes the more important reference point (Bakker 2005; Kawashima 2008). One indicator for this general development can be seen in the fact that MHG epic poems establish a clear distinction between the teller frame and the narrated world, reflected in the distribution of verb tenses. While the present tenses indicate the discourse world of the narrating act, the narrative tense of the preterit in combination with the continuous use of dô (then, at that time) denotes events in the storyworld. With respect to Ancient Greek, Bakker (2005, 163) has shown that the particle “now” in Homer is only used to denote “discourse now,” but that it later became a marker of “story now” in the narratives of Thucydides. This might indicate a decreasing focus shift from “discourse now” to the events in the storyworld.

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4.2 Hypothesis 2: Increase of Metanarrativity and the Emergence of a Fictional Narrator It is held by some that the rise of literacy correlates with the increased use of self-reflexive and metanarrative comments. However, this connection is not straightforward. On the one hand, self-reflexive comments that address the difficulties of composition are not uncommon for oral poetry (see Finnegan 1977, 80, for examples in different oral traditions). On the other hand, self-reflexive and metatextual comments have been seen as indicators for a more playful and ironizing mode that is considered to be inconsistent with the memorizing act of the oral poet. Unlike heroic epics, MHG courtly epics, for instance, are characterized by frequent metatextual comments by the narrator on rhetorical decisions, poetic artistry, and references to other poets. Also, dialogues between the narrator and personifications of Minne and Aventiure are characteristic for the artificial style of courtly epics (e.g., Starkey 2016). Furthermore, narrators refer to rhetorical strategies and genre traditions in a more playful way than it is the case in heroic epics. In Iwein (ca. 1200) by Hartmann von Aue, for example, the description of the duel between Askalon and Iwein is interrupted, and the narrator affirms that there have been no eyewitnesses of the event. After that, the fight is described in great detail, including thought representation of the protagonists (Reuvekamp-Felber 2013, 425). Such play with genre expectations is seen as an indication that courtly epics have been removed farther from the oral tradition where the story is composed as an act of memorization. For the Homeric epics, there has been discussion as to whether the inventive and ironic use of traditional language in Homer indicates that the Homeric text is already located “at some remove from its roots in oral tradition” (Foley 1993, 278). The interpretation of metatextual and self-reflexive language in individual poems is thus often controversial. The interpretation of self-reflexive and metatextual comments is closely related to general questions about the status of the narrator. The oral tradition is commonly characterized by the fact that author and narrator are the same person and thus indistinguishable. In contrast, the self-reflexive nature of courtly epics has sometimes been seen as evidence for the emergence of a fictive narrative instance to be distinguished from the actual composer of the poem. While the status of the narrator in MHG is a controversial subject (for an overview, see Glauch 2009), a similar development has been observed in Ancient Greek literature. In contrast to the narrator of the Homeric epics, the later prose narrator “fictionalizes the act of perception” (Bakker 2005, 67). The invention of a fictional voice as “the substitute of the absent author’s actual voice” (Bakker 1998, 32) has thus come to be seen more as a general tendency linked to medial change.

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4.3 Hypothesis 3: The Rise of Fictionality For oral poetry, the narrator has been described as the medial link between the audience and traditional knowledge that has been transmuted from generation to generation. As a bearer of tradition, he does not create a new story but recreates a traditional one during performance. While the general gist of the story is thus a given, the poet can expand, abbreviate, or change the narrative focus in his act of storytelling. Since the story is recreated anew by each poet in each oral performance, tradition manifests itself in countless variations (Jensen 2017, 9). Oral poems have thus been seen as “fluid” and “unstable.” Since there is no fixed text that would allow for a comparison of different versions, the fluidity of oral poetry has also been linked to the fact that oral traditions do not rely on the same distinction between fact and fiction as literary traditions. It has been observed that epic poems do not refer to an “objective reality independent of the narrator (the epic singer),” but to an epic past that exists “only as perception, both in the memory of the singer and the imagination of his audience” (Kawashima 2008, 114), underwritten by the poet’s active mental process of remembering (Bakker 2005; Bäuml 1997, 39). According to Mellmann, what is important for oral poetry is not the opposition between fact and fiction, but rather the “transition from first-hand knowledge to knowledge handed on by nameable persons and, finally, to anonymous tradition” (2019, 219). This becomes different with the rise of literacy. As soon as written sources become available that allow for comparing different versions of one story, narrative “truth” is guaranteed by the literacy of the poet that allows access to a knowledge stored in books. This is reflected in the fact that many narrators in MHG courtly epics showcase their erudition in order to present the “right” version of a story. See, for example, the narrator’s prologue in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan (ca. 1210), which ensures that he will tell the story “rehte” (rightly) by referring to the “right” literary source. (11) I know well, there are many people who have read about Tristan; however, there aren’t many people who have read about Tristan rightly [rehte] [. . .] but as I said, that they haven’t read rightly, this is true, as I tell you: they did not tell it in the right way as Thomas from Britain does,

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who was the master of âventiure and read in Breton books about the sovereigns’ lives and has given it to us as knowledge. As he tells about Tristan, the right version and the truth, I began searching eagerly in books both in Romance and Latin and started to take pains that I in his right way rectify this poem. (Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, 131–162) Such affirmations that address the source of the narrated story are very common (e.g., the metatextual reference in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, 115.27, where the narrator parodies this genre feature by asserting that he does not know a single alphabetic character; J.-D. Müller 2012, 305). Courtly epics thus incorporate a different concept of narrative truth from epics of primary orality, where the source of the story is anonymous tradition. This change of attitude has also been seen as the prerequisite for the “invention” of fictionality in the Middle Ages (for an overview, see Schaefer 1996; Reuvekamp-Felber 2013). In this respect, ironic, parodic, and allegorical elements as described in section 4.2 have been seen as experiments “with the possibilities of fiction” (Starkey 2016, 184).

5 Conclusion: Orality and Diachronic Narratology Orality in general and oral formulaic theory in particular have long been dominant research paradigms for investigations of ancient and medieval narratives. As seen in the comparison between the Homeric and MHG epic poems, the differences with respect to cultural constellations and genre conventions do not allow for tracing out straight lines of development from orality to literacy, but require a more nuanced view (see Hall 2008 and Kelly 2012 for critical overviews). Such a differentiated view is important, since orality remains a crucial concept for diachronic narratology in several respects. (1) As this overview has sought to show, the technicalities of spoken language and the localization of the act of narration within a communicative space shared between the poet and the audience as well as the oral transmission of poetry over historical time leave traces on the language and structure of oral poetry in

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different ways. To understand the development of oral features, it is therefore crucial to investigate which aspects of orality have an impact on which linguistic elements. (2) Comparison between Ancient Greek and MHG epics has shown that many oral features display narrative functions. A better understanding of the relationship between oral features and their influence on linguistic structure is thus a prerequisite to identifying more general mechanisms of change such as the conventionalization of traditional patterns into metatextual discourse and genre markers. (3) Orality is also a relevant concept for investigating the relationship between everyday storytelling and literary genre conventions. As shown in this article, oral poems share many features with everyday oral storytelling and characteristics that are found in later literary narratives, such as considerable elaboration and a break from the ordinary world of first-hand experience. First-hand experience and anonymous tradition must thus be distinguished as two different sources of narratives whose relation to each other as well as to modern literary styles and genres still remains to be explored by diachronic narratology. (4) Most importantly for diachronic narratology, orality is also closely linked to questions about the development of narratological concepts. As seen above, concepts such as narrator, focalization, fictionality, and so on are discussed with respect both to oral communication and to transmission by oral means over historical time. A more nuanced view of orality will thus allow new insights to be gained not only into the specific aestethics of oral storytelling in historical contexts and the development of narrative techniques, but also into the history of basic narratological concepts.

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Veronika Zuseva-Özkan

Metanarration and Self-Reflexivity in Classical Greek, Latin, and Byzantine Narrative 1 Definition The term “metanarration” is a fairly modern concept “referring to the narrator’s reflections on the act or process of narration” (Neumann and Nünning 2012). Studies on this subject generally concentrate on the literature of the twentieth century, rarely touching upon the previous epochs. The objective of this article is to show that this phenomenon, though its name and its research are modern, in fact goes back to Antiquity. Its appearance is connected to the emergence of the novel itself, and the earliest known novels (in European literature) already feature a number of metanarrative and self-reflexive devices. It is important to make three clarifications here. The first concerns the difference between metanarration and self-reflexivity. Self-reflexivity is a broad category and includes all forms of reflexivity of the text on itself and on its coming-into-being. Furthermore, self-reflexivity appears not only in narrative texts which are primarily associated with the prose epic, but also in lyric poetry such as Lope de Vega’s sonnet “Un soneto me manda hacer Violante” and in drama such as Luigi Pirandello’s works. Consequently, self-reflexivity is understood in this article as non-narrative forms of the text’s self-referentiality; by metanarration is understood its narrative forms, and more particularly narrative forms that do not produce metafictional effects calling into question the ontological status of the text and the “inner world” created by it. A second point, closely related to the first, is that even though metanarration already existed during the period under consideration, metafiction had not yet come into existence, and consequently metanarration did not have the same status as it was to gain in later literature. Although metanarration in ancient literature appears to be quite similar to that of modern times, it in fact arose during the age (in the history of poetics and the growth of human consciousness) of reflective traditionalism (Averincev 1981; Brojtman [2001] 2004), extending from about the sixth century BC to the first half of the eighteenth century and strongly marked, in its early stages, by vestiges of the previous age, that of archaic syncretism (Veselovskij 2006, [1913] 2010; Frejdenberg 1997; Brojtman 2004 [2001]). The syncretic age is characterized by the non-dissecting, highly coherent nature of perception at a time when archaic humans did not distinguish between the various senses, between https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-035

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themselves and nature, between “I” and “other,” between word and the object it signifies, between ritual and domestic practice, between art and life. The most important point for this study is the lack of distinction between “I” and “other” which, in the early forms of the novel, produces a number of revealing effects. The third point concerns the material examined in this study. Included are novels and romances of Greek and Latin Antiquity and of the Byzantine Middle Ages written in prose and in verse and sometimes mixing the two, a characteristic trait of these genres. This is a point that will escape most readers, as scholarly translations into English are available only in prose. Even so, whether in prose or in verse, it remains that all works in which self-reflexive and metanarrative effects stand out are found in the novel, a genre still in the process of formation at the time. Although self-reflexivity and metanarration appear in a variety of genres at later times in history, they are constants that occur frequently and are integral to the novel as genre. This phenomenon may be explained by the nature of this genre, as seen by Baxtin, who described the invariant structure of the novel in three basic characteristics: (a) “stylistic three-dimensionality” linked with “multi-languaged consciousness” ([1934/1935] 1981, 11) or “heteroglossia”; (b) specific “temporal coordinates of the literary image” (11) or “the radically new zone for structuring images” (31) marked by “the hero’s inadequacy to his fate or his situation. The individual is either greater than his fate, or less than his condition as a man” (37); and (c) “the zone of maximal contact with the present [. . .] in all its openendedness” (11), “a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (7). These three characteristics contribute heavily to self-reflexivity. The literary work is rendered incomplete by self-reflexivity, and consequently “the semantic openendedness” of the novel is absolute. Self-reflexivity also influences the stylistic level and the system of speech and perspective, since it causes narrative instances to intermingle and overlap. Due to self-reflexivity and metanarration, the hero’s tendency not to coincide completely with his fate or situation also increases, for he often acquires an authorial hypostasis and, therefore, the huge “surplus of un-fleshed-out humanness.”

2 Latin Antiquity An excellent example of the early forms of metanarration and self-reflexivity is The Golden Ass by Apuleius (ca. 153 AD). It begins with a call to readers by the narrator, Lucius, and in so doing turns the event of narration into its own theme: Now, what I propose in this Milesian discourse is [. . .] to charm your ears, kind reader, with amusing gossip [. . .]. So I’ll begin. But who is this? In brief: Attic Hymettus, the Isthmus of

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Corinth, and Spartan Taenarus, [. . .] these make up my ancient ancestry. [. . .] Later, arriving in Rome a stranger to its culture, with no teacher to show me the way, by my own painful efforts I attacked and mastered the Latin language. [. . .] In fact, this linguistic metamorphosis suits the style of writing I have tackled here – the trick, you might call it, of changing literary horses at the gallop. (tr. E. J. Kennedy)

This passage features a number of curious details such as Lucius’s self-presentation in his authorial hypostasis and a focus on language and style which, as it is reported, corresponds to the object of narrative itself. Intrusions at the metanarrative level also occur in other parts of the text. At one point, for example, the narrator reflects on the modality of his narrative: “And with that, dear reader, you know that it’s a tragedy, no mere tale, that you’re reading: from the sock we mount the buskin” (tr. E. J. Kennedy). Sometimes, the narrator plays with the doubts of the reader, to whom he grants a certain initiative: But perhaps at this point the attentive reader will start to pick holes in my story and take me up on it. “How is it, you clever ass you,” they will say, “that while you were confined in the mill you were able, as you say, to know what these women were doing in secret?” (tr. E. J. Kennedy)

At the same time, despite the fantastic nature of the narrated events, the narrator seeks to follow the convention of verisimilitude of the event of narration: All this I learned from overhearing various conversations. However, the exact words used by the prosecutor in urging his case and the precise terms used by the defendant in rebuttal, the various speeches and exchanges – all that, not having been in court but tied up to my manger, I don’t know. (tr. E. J. Kennedy)

Toward the end of the novel, the number of metanarrative interventions increases, and the “play” with the perceiving consciousness grows more complex: I dare say, attentive reader, that you are all agog to know what was then said and done. I should tell you if it were lawful to tell it; you should learn if it were lawful to hear it. [. . .] But since it may be that your anxious yearning is piously motivated, I will not torment you by prolonging your anguish. [. . .] I came to the boundary of death and after treading Proserpine’s threshold I returned having traversed all the elements; at midnight I saw the sun shining with brilliant light; I approached the gods below and the gods above face to face and worshipped them in their actual presence. Now I have told you what, though you have heard it, you cannot know. (tr. E. J. Kennedy)

It is quite significant that the increased level of metanarrative intrusions is related to the metamorphosis of the hero from an ass into a priest of Isis, and of the narrator into the author. Scholars have observed that the information about Lucius provided at the beginning of the novel differs from that which is provided at the end. In the latter case, the priest who consecrates him hears a prophetic voice saying that

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there was sent to him a man from Madaura, quite a poor man, whom he was at once to initiate into his faith. [. . .] Though thus pledged to initiation and eager as I was, I was held back by the slenderness of my means. My modest patrimony had been used up in paying for my travels, and the cost of living at Rome was much higher than in the provinces where I came from. (tr. E. J. Kennedy)

While at the beginning of the novel the narrator-hero speaks about his Peloponnesian origins, toward the end he is presented as a native of Madaura who goes to Rome, where he practices law, a detail that emerges from the biography of Apuleius himself. Samson Brojtman writes that “the second transformation and the convergence of the author and the character that are played up here are particularly expressive, for they occur after the metamorphosis of crisis experienced by the hero” ([2001] 2004, 137). But in my opinion, it is not so much the conscious artistic play of merging subjects as the echo of the ancient syncretism – the indivisibility of author and hero as active and passive divine natures (Frejdenberg 1997, 52–56) that can be discerned in the narrative structure of The Golden Ass. It is not by accident that the convergence of Lucius and the author takes place after the phase of the symbolic death of Lucius and his passage through hell at the time of his rebirth to a new life. In effect, this is the phase of the old cyclical story described by Ol’ga Frejdenberg, a story that concerns a solar or plant divinity. Metanarrative devices, then, and particularly authorial intrusions, arose at the dawn of the novel as a resonance of the former oral nature of narrative as well as of the former indivisibility of the hypostases of author and hero. Metanarration is a “natural” phenomenon in The Golden Ass and not so much a device of artistic play, since it is generated by the fact that author and hero, who also pose as narrator, were still deeply interconnected. Sentences that seem to contain authorial intrusions in the modern sense in fact bear traces of ancient syncretism. It is for these reasons that early novels are narrated in the first person, be it the first-person pronoun of the character, as in The Golden Ass and in Petronius’s Satyricon, or that of the author, as in a number of Greek novels of Antiquity. The Satyricon is not to be discussed here at length: the fragments available (note that this work has survived only in fragments) do not provide representative examples of metanarration and self-reflexivity, for in ancient literature such features tend to appear at the beginning and the end of the text, which, in this case, are missing. Nevertheless, with respect to self-reflexive elements which generally bear on literary matters, it will be noted that among the main characters there are a poet (Eumolpus) and a rhetorician (Agamemnon), and that literature often becomes the subject of the characters’ discussions. Some fragments of Satyricon parody literary clichés employed in Greek novels such as an adventure at sea with a recognition scene, a storm, and so on.

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3 Greek Novels As for Greek novels, the most interesting works from the perspective of metanarration and self-reflexivity are Chariton’s Loves of Chaereas and Callirhoe and An Ethiopian Romance by Heliodorus. Before looking at these works more closely, however, a few important points bearing on two other Greek novels must be borne out. In Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius, the hero, Clitophon, also poses as narrator, and the whole of the narrative turns out to be an incredibly detailed response in his conversation with the author who, at the beginning of the novel, is found contemplating a painting: I was admiring the whole of the picture, but – a lover myself – paid particular attention to that part of it where love was leading the bull; and “Look,” I said, “how that imp dominates over sky and land and sea!” As I was speaking, a young man standing by me broke in: “I may term myself a living example of it,” he said; “I am one who has suffered many buffets from the hand of love.” “How is that?” said I. “What have your sufferings been, my friend?” (tr. S. Gaselee)

Even Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, with its consistent third-person narration, starts with an introduction by the author, who speaks in the first person: On Lesbos while hunting I saw in a Nymphs’ grove a display, the fairest I ever saw: an image depicted, a story of love. [. . .] I looked and marveled, and a longing seized me to rival the depiction in words; I sought out an interpreter of the image and have carefully fashioned four books, an offering to Love and Nymphs and Pan, a delightful posession for all mankind who will heal the sick and encourage the depressed, that will stir memories in those experienced in love and for the inexperienced will be a lesson for the future. [. . .] For our part, may the god grant us proper detachment in depicting the story of others. (tr. Jeffrey Henderson)

Further on, we will return to this motif of the narrative as an offering to the gods and discuss what it means for the study of metanarration. Equally noteworthy is the author’s effort to “detach” himself from the hero, which is made explicit in the above passage. Ol’ga Frejdenberg explains the predilection of ancient literature for first-person narrative in her analysis of the origins of narration: For the most part within this very “I-story”, in the active “I”, there lies a passive “I” which has become the object of the narration. This creates the double system of Classical narration, at first inseparable, when the subject “I” is still present but contains within itself, indirectly, an object “I”. The form of such an original narration is direct speech; the primary topic of the narration is the subject of the story itself. Its contents are deeds and sufferings. (1997, 52)

Related phenomena can be found in ancient drama. Viktor Šklovskij, in his famous article “The Making of Don Quixote,” compares the gnomes at the end of the mon-

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ologues in Euripides’s and Sophocles’s dramas, and shows that in Sophocles, monologues end with a certain moral maxim, regardless of whether the subject of the monologue is moral or immoral. In Šklovskij’s opinion, this happens because “in Sophocles, the ‘speech’ is nevertheless the speech of the author, who does not as yet wish to individualize the speeches of his masks” ([1929] 1990, 72). A number of the curious aspects of the “double system of Classical narration” identified by Frejdenberg can be found in Loves of Chaereas and Callirhoe by Chariton of Aphrodisias (early second century AD). Here too, the author constantly asserts his presence. Chariton begins and ends his novel by stating his paternity: I, Chariton of Aphrodisias, clerk of the lawyer Athenagoras, am going to relate a love story which took place in Syracuse. (tr. G. P. Goold) So ends the story I have composed about Callirhoe. (tr. G. P. Goold)

What is striking here is that the real author (or a biographical, primary author – not a created author), a presumed author (a secondary author, created by a primary author), and an author-creator (to borrow Baxtin’s terminology) have not yet become distinct entities. The Loves of Chaereas and Callirhoe contains a number of narrator’s comments on the novel’s narrated events and manner of narration. The simplest of these comments are aimed at structuring the text: How Chaereas, suspecting that Callirhoe had been handed over to Dyonisius and desiring to revenge himself on the king, had deserted to the pharaoh; how he had been appointed admiral and gained control of the sea; how after his victory he captured Aradus, where the king had secluded his wife and all her retinue, Callirhoe included: this has been described in the preceding book. (tr. G. P. Goold)

Some utterances reflect the idea of the author’s will. The later idea that the narrated events belong to the author’s imagination and thus that their course totally depends on him is not yet present (here they occur as though “objectively,” outside the author’s mind). However, there is already an understanding that how and when these events will be narrated is the author’s prerogative: “But on this day, too, the demon Envy again showed his malice. Just how, I shall describe a little later, but I first want to tell of events in Syracuse during this period” (tr. G. P. Goold). Other comments convey the narrator’s opinion on the narrated events as well as their supposed perception by potential readers: “I think that this last book will prove the most enjoyable for my readers, as an antidote to the grim events in the preceding ones.”(tr. G. P. Goold). Most interesting, perhaps, is the summary of the previous seven books provided in the last book (the eighth) of the novel. This summary is given not in the first person of the author, but in the first person of the hero, Chaereas. The final

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episode in the novel is motivated by the fact that the inhabitants of the hero’s city of origin do not know his story, and it is the people of Syracuse who listen to him. The narrator could attest in a single sentence that Chaereas had told his story to those who were present. Instead, the story is related a second time (although in brief). In other words, the novel exhibits a profound need to duplicate the story by delegating its telling to the hero, thus turning the hero into the narrator. This is precisely what happens in The Golden Ass: convergence of the hero and the author after the symbolic death of the hero (represented by a potentially lethal series of events) and rebirth to a new life, having found his wife and his country again. Yet this final move from the status of hero to that of narrator has a further vital function: the hero’s narration is indispensable for the completion of the novel. Immediately following Chaereas’s narration, the people of Syracuse make a number of sacred decisions, and Callirhoe visits the temple of Aphrodite to thank the goddess for finding her lover. The narrative becomes the sacrifice placed on the altar to end the events narrated in the novel. As pointed out by Frejdenberg with regard to the Greek novel of Antiquity: In its conclusion the hero comes to the temple and recounts before the god everything that he ‘did and suffered’ [. . .] Here the “narration” has a subjective-objective character; it does not distinguish between who narrates and what is told, and to whom. (1997, 51)

From this observation it can be concluded that self-reflexive elements such as reflection of the larger narrative in the smaller one, featuring homological equivalence, result from the indivisibility of the hypostases of author and hero. This ancient foundation is quite conspicuous in the novel An Ethiopian Romance by Heliodorus (third century AD). In the last book, the heroes, Theagenes and Charicleia, are meant to be sacrificed to Helios. Charicleia’s narrative turns out to be the ransom for their lives: the act of narration itself becomes the ransom of substitution for the gods. This is explained in the novel by the fact that Charicleia is now recognized as the lost daughter of the king of Ethiopia. Nonetheless, the semantics of the “ransom narrative” (as in The Thousand and One Nights) is striking, all the more so in that after the heroine’s narrative, the gods renounce sacrificing ten young men and women destined to be sacrificed with Charicleia and Theagenes. Theagenes performs the exploits of the solar hero: he claims victory over the bull (both the incarnation of the sun god and the sacrifice to him) and the giant. At the same time, it bears mentioning that the name (or perhaps the pseudonym) of the author of the novel is Heliodorus, meaning “gift of the sun” (Charicleia, it be should be noted, belongs to the lineage of Helios). In this way, the initial semantic identity of the god and the bull, of the priest and the sacrifice, and of the author, the hero, the listener, and the narrative is restored. Their mutual conversions are reconstituted and form the deep level of the story’s meaning.

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At this point, as in The Loves of Chaereas and Callirhoe, the narrative is duplicated, transferred from the author’s instance to that of the character. Here, selfreflexivity is quite literal due to the framing narrative being reflected in the framed narrative because of their mutual similarity. It is in this way that the origins of metanarration become clear: it evolves out of the slow and faltering divergence of previously syncretic hypostases of author and hero. Like Chariton, Heliodorus clearly states his paternity in the last lines of the novel, as though this were his signature: “This is the end of the Ethiopica, the story of Theagenes and Charicleia. Its author is a Phoenician of Emesa, of the race of the Sun – the son of Theodosius, Heliodorus” (tr. Moses Hadas). The story is told from the beginning by the same author in the first person. Authorial intrusions are few and far between and are mostly limited to formulaic phrases such as “methinks” and “I imagine,” as in the following example: “It was the night, I imagine, that stirred her emotions, since there was no sight or sound to distract her, and she could give herself freely to her grief” (tr. Moses Hadas). It is quite telling, however, that the author’s lengthiest commentary concerns the divine sacraments: the initiates call the land Isis and the Nile Osiris, substituting names for objects. The goddess yearns for the god when he is absent and rejoices when he is present; when he disappears, she again falls into grief and expresses her hatred for the enemy Typhon. Egyptians versed in natural science and theology are, I imagine, loath to unveil to the view of the profane the mysteries so shrouded. To them they communicate these under the form of a myth, but they reserve a clearer exposition for the true initiates, within the sanctuary illuminated by the torch of true reality. So much I may be permitted to say without offense to religion; on the pofounder mysteries let reverential silence be preserved. I return now to the events in Syene. (tr. Moses Hadas)

Just as in The Golden Ass, the narrator teases the reader with a long speech which reveals nothing of importance. As a general rule, however, the effectiveness of narration is associated in this novel with hypotyposis, the use of vivid description to enhance the mimetic quality of the narration. This can be seen when Cnemon, a secondary character in the novel, urges the old man to tell his story: You know, father, how Dionysus takes pleasure in myths and loves comedies. [. . .] he impels me to demand the reward you promised. It is now time for you to raise your curtain on the play, as the saying goes. (tr. Moses Hadas)

The novel is replete with references to the theater and comparisons between the narrative events and theatrical action. Often, these comparisons are attributed to the characters, who view their own life as a play in the state of being performed. Charicleia tells the robbers: “release me from the sorrows that enmesh me, ring the curtain of death over the tragedy of my life” (Heliodorus 1999, 4, tr. Moses Hadas). And Theagenes says:

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he has staged our drama like a play in the theater. Why should we not cut his tragic composition off here, why not deliver ourselves to those who wish to kill us? Perhaps he may yet be ambitious to give the denouement of his play a stunning curtain and force us to take our own lives. (tr. Moses Hadas)

Cnemon demonstrates knowledge of Aristotle’s Poetics when he criticizes an excess of episodes: “Stop [. . .]. Why do you finger and pry into that subject? It is one for tragedies, and this is no time to pile my afflictions onto an act of your tragedy” (tr. Moses Hadas). Other instances of textual self-reflexivity occur when unforeseen and unbelievable events are compared to the device of deus ex machina: Now the king [.  .  .] was angry at what she [Charicleia] said, considering it pure insult and mockery. “[. . .] you see how my patience is tried? The girl is downright crazy. She is trying to put her death off with the most brazen lies. In her desperation, she introduces herself as my daughter, like a deus ex machina.” (tr. Moses Hadas)

Paradoxically, by the end of the novel, this highly conventional device has become the truth of life despite its lack of probability (thus foreshadowing the modern metafictional novel in which the relationship between art and reality is perceived as problematic and controversial): You ought long ago to have perceived that the gods did not favor the sacrifice you prepared for them. Blessed Charicleia they declared to be your daughter from the very altar. Her foster father they brought here from the middle of Greece, like a deus ex machina. (tr. Moses Hadas)

Not only the characters but the narrator himself presents the events as if they were acted out on stage: It was then that some divinity or fortune which is the arbiter of human destiny introduced a novel episode into the tragedy being enacted, as if to prevent the opening of a new drama to compete with the old. At that very day and hour, it prepared an entry for Calasiris, like a deus ex machina, and made him an unhappy witness to the mortal struggle of his sons. (tr. Moses Hadas)

The narrator’s statement appears to be self-reflexive, likening life to art and vice versa. Thus, not only is art perceived as a reflection of life but, reciprocally, life is understood as mirroring art. This marks a significant step forward from other Greek novels and The Golden Ass. It is notable, though, that in Aethiopica the narrated events are compared not with narrative literature but with drama, and only the episodes where events are out of the ordinary.

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4 Byzantine Novels The Byzantine novel, which borrowed several structural elements from the Greek novel, including plot structure, also inherited metanarrative devices, most conspicuously authorial interventions. These devices vary across Byzantine novels with respect to quantity and quality. The closer a Byzantine novel is to rhetorical scholarship, the fewer authorial intrusions seem to appear. When folkloric elements permeate the novel, such intrusions increase in number and become more diverse. This is hardly surprising, as folklore retains ancient syncretic features, particularly syncretism of the subject. One can see this in spontaneous transitions from first-person to third-person narrations and vice versa. Hysmine and Hysminias, written by the twelfth-century author Eumathios Makrembolites, is a good example of a learned Byzantine novel which adheres strictly to the Greek model and features a modest number of authorial intrusions. Like the Greek novel that inspired it, Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius, Hysmine and Hysminias is written in the first person of the hero. Hysminias tells the story of his love to a certain Charidoux, who is mentioned only once, at the beginning of the novel: “Thus the lot falls on me, and I am garlanded, my handsome Charidoux. [.  .  .] My good friend, I come as a herald” (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys). The premise of the protagonist being the narrator receives no further development; there are few metanarrative elements pointing to the text being structured by the narrator. Intrusions on the metanarrative level typically seek to justify the absence of detail: “Why should I dwell at length on what had taken place in the meantime?”; “And what need is there for me to make careful distinctions over delicacies and delights?” (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys). Other intrusions, like those of Heliodorus, bring together the story of the hero and the genre of tragedy, sometimes from the perspective of the characters: “I am your slave; when you ask to know more you are asking for a whole play, a complete tragedy”; “Your affairs are a play in themselves, a complete tragedy” (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys). As is often the case, self-reflexivity increases toward the end of the novel. In the last book, that the hero’s narration is a sacrifice to the divine is made explicit: the priest, who was good in all respects, replied: “Maidenly child, Apollo bestows freedom on you, and joins you in marriage to the handsome Hysminias. Will you not make a sacrifice to Apollo even out of your adventures, so that the narrative persists eternally?” (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys)

At the end of the novel, a curious self-reflexive paradox occurs. On the one hand, the superiority of life and love unto themselves over art and narrative taking life and love as a subject is affirmed: “my wedding exceeded the grandiloquence of Homer, every muse and every tongue made eloquent by rhetoric” (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys). On

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the other hand, the necessity of a verbal memorial for experience lived by the hero is discussed. It turns out that this memorial will be erected even against the will of the gods, who were shamed by the loving couple (they preferred Eros to Zeus, and they defeated Poseidon): So, if Zeus will not place our deeds among the stars, if Poseidon will not inscribe them in the waves, if Earth will not embody them in plants and flowers, our adventures will be set forth on imperishable tablets and slabs of adamant, with the pen of Hermes and ink and a tongue which breathes the fire of rhetoric. And anyone from a later generation will be able to retell these matters and will be able to forge a golden image in words, like an imperishable statue. [. . .] We will grace this story and adorn this book with erotic charm and everything else that decorates books and beautiful words. And the title of this book will be “The adventures of Hysmine and of me, Hysminias.” (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys)

The central question of metafictional texts is thus delineated: that of the relationship between art and life – “poetry” and “prose” as aspects of reality, fiction and truth, book and world, and so on – found at the heart of all metanovels, be it Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Puškin’s Eugene Onegin, Nabokov’s The Gift, or Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, but is resolved in these works in various ways. It is notable that Hysmine and Hysminias provides no answer to these questions, probably because the question was not yet perceived by the author as a problem demanding a specific solution. Here, two different passages simply make two contradictory claims. Additionally, a purely narrative paradox is formed in the final sentences of the novel. The story is told from the beginning by the hero, Hysminias, but at the end it is said that his story (the one being read) will be told by “anyone from a later generation.” Finally, the instability of the subject, a characteristic trait of early novels, is evident in this work. Turning now to Nicetas Eugenianus’s Drosilla and Charicles, a novel in verse written in the twelfth century, we see an intriguing case of increased authorial intrusions as the novel moves from rhetorical erudition to folklore. This tale is situated between two extremes. A. D.  Aleksidze has written about the model it followed, the novel in verse by Theodore Prodromos entitled Rhodanthe and Dosikles, created a little earlier than Drosilla and Charicles: the poem born from the sophistic novel, from rhetorical prose, inherits the rhetorical style, the entire arsenal of rhetorical devices. The rhetorician’s art prevails here over poetic imagination. As a result, the old novel in a new form turns out to be even more artificial and lifeless. Further genre transformation was necessary, i.e., the rehabilitation of the lyric spirit in the frame of the poetic form, the liberation of the novel from bookishness, rhetoric, its recovery through folkloric [. . .] elements. (Aleksidze 1969, 127).

The movement toward folklore takes a further step with Drosilla and Charicles. The novel splits into two parts: one from the first to the fifth book, the other from the

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sixth to the ninth book. The first part owes a great debt to Prodromos’s work, while the second, highly original part is fairly free of its influence as well as of the traditional topoi of Greek novels. This plot and style dynamic parallels the introduction of authorial intrusions, for they are almost entirely absent in the first to fifth books, while in the sixth to ninth books they do occasionally appear. Generally speaking, such intrusions are in the first-person plural and articulate common knowledge. They often refer to literature: Already it was morning and saffron-hued day, and lustrous light had poured everywhere over all creation from the great translucent star that rose from the ocean, as learned poetry wisely puts it. (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys)

Written in a lofty style, Drosilla and Charicles features a slapstick scene. This scene is set off by its emphasis on the bodily sphere, rather unexpected in the artificial, ideal world of this narrative. In the scene, an old woman named Maryllis, in whose home the protagonists meet after much suffering, demonstrates her delight by dancing and drinking. While doing so, she trips and breaks wind, causing much laughter: But Kleandros picked himself up and with difficulty Got the old woman upright again, Afraid, I think, after what had already happened, That she might go one better and foul herself. (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys)

The narrator relates this episode in the first-person singular: the free folkloric element compels him to set aside rhetorical stiffness. In contrast, other scenes and characters’ speeches containing self-referential components maintain their learned, rhetorical character. Consider for example Kallidemos’s (Charicles’s rival) inner monologue in which he compares his own situation to those of various mythological and literary characters, including figures in Greek novels: Remember among those of old Arsake’s love for Theagenes, Archaimenis’ passion for Charikleia. (tr. Elizabeth Jeffreys)

Interestingly, Kallidemos recalls not only ideal couples among lovers, but also characters whose relationship with their beloved was similar to his (Theagenes and Arsace, Archaemenes and Charicleia), as though he possessed the capacity for self-reflexivity and self-analysis as well as the capacity to analyze the plot in which he participates as a literary character.

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Authorial intrusions abound in later Byzantine novels, which borrow heavily from folklore sources and are typologically close to the Western European romance of chivalry. Consider for example The Novel of Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoi, a novel in verse attributed to Andronikos Komnenos (fourteenth century). In this work, the narrator expresses his sentiments explicitly, and the story is repeatedly interrupted by his agitated exclamations: In the middle (grievous to tell) a solitary girl was hanging by the hair. (My senses reel, my heart quivers!) [. . .] By the hair! (Perverse invention of Fortune!) [. . .] She was hanging by the hair! (Words fail me. [. . .] I write this with a heavy heart.). (tr. Gavin Betts)

Such emotionality, which exposes the narrator’s attitude, also colors his characterizations: the evil witch – who was the demons’ tool, the lightning’s companion, the thunder’s mother, the devil’s nursling, the grandmother of the Nereids; indeed, an accessory to every wickedness – threw the golden apple at Kallimachos. (tr. Gavin Betts)

As in the previously discussed novelistic tradition, the narrator applies the terms of the literary metatext to structure his narrative: Once again, I am spinning my tale and extending its length, but a little patience! Wait just a moment and you will learn the whole story in detail. (tr. Gavin Betts) If [. . .] you read this tale and learn the matter of its verses you will see the workings of Love’s bitter-sweet pangs. (tr. Gavin Betts)

Entirely rejecting the convention of the reader being included within the frame of the inner world of the novel, the narrator makes the extradiegetic reader his constant companion. This move is rather uncharacteristic for Greek and early Byzantine novels, which tend to respect the convention of the intradiegetic listener, even when such a listener is a mere conditionality. It is to the extradiegetic reader that the words of the narrator are addressed in the body of the text, but also in the titles of the chapters, which are thus metatextualized: “Prologue on the ways of the world. We begin the story of a man sorely tried [. . .]”; “The beginning of the story”; “A superb description of the castle of the dragon”; “Amid groans, the author describes how the lady was hanging”; “Observe and marvel at the old woman’s evil trick!”; “Learn of the song of the unhappy Kallimachos”; and so forth (tr. Gavin Betts). These authorial interventions appear to be closer to those of modern literature: the former syncretism of the author and the hero practically disappears, while the hero is separated from the author and objectified.

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5 Conclusion Significantly, the works discussed above display an essential difference with regard to metanarration and metafiction, which, in later times, occur in the context of the three narrative situations identified by Franz K. Stanzel ([1955] 1971): authorial, first-person, and figural. To a large extent, twentieth-century metafiction developed in reaction to the predominance of figural narration where the narrator is apparently absent from the inner world of the narrative and the event of narration. The literature of the period under study in this article, by contrast, has no knowledge of this narrative model, for the narrator’s activity in these works is a constant. Authorial presence in the inner world of the novel, metanarrative intrusions, and the “permeability” of the boundaries between reality and fiction were “natural” phenomena. These intrusions are the result of echoes of ancient syncretism and the indivisibility of author and hero as active and passive divine natures; they are not an artifice employed in the name of some artistic objective. The breaching of the boundary between the “inner world” of the literary work (i.e., the world of the characters) and the world in which this work is written, typical for metanarrative literature, was not created deliberately during this period, for indeed the very existence of this boundary was not yet well perceived. This is why metanarrative and self-reflexive elements in early novels, similar at first sight to those in modern metanarration, are in fact produced by a totally different kind of consciousness. Metafiction as such appears only later, beginning with Don Quixote, when the urge to play arises and the relation between art and reality is perceived as problematic and controversial. Even then, Cervantes’s novel remained unique for many years. Writers who admired and followed Cervantes such as Paul Scarron or Charles Sorel were successful in creating rather refined examples of novels with authorial intrusions (i.e., metanarrative), but not metafictional novels. Only with the beginning of the age of artistic modality at the end of the eighteenth century (Brojtman [2001] 2004) did metafiction get underway in earnest.

References Aleksidze, Aleksandr D. 1969. “Vizantijskij roman 12 veka i ljubovnaja povest’ Nikity Evgeniana.” In Nikita Evgenian: Povest’ o Drosille i Xarikle, 121–145. Moskva: Nauka. Averinсev, Sergej S. 1981. “Drevnegrečeskaja poètika i mirovaja literature.” In Poètika drevnegrečeskoj literatury, 3–14. Мoskva: Nauka. Bakhtin [Baxtin], M. M. (1934/1935) 1981. “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 3–40. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Brojtman, Samson N. (2001) 2004. “Istoričeskaja poètika.” In Teorija literatury. V 2 tomax. Мoskva: Akademia. T. 2, 1–368. Freidenberg [Frejdenberg], Olga [Ol’ga] M. 1997. Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature. Edited and annotated by Nina Braginskaia and Kevin Moss. Translated by Kevin Moss. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Neumann, Birgit, and Nünning Ansgar. 2012. “Metanarration and Metafiction.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. https:// www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/50.html (accessed 31 March 2020). Shklovsky [Šklovskij], Viktor. (1929) 1990. “The Making of Don Quixote.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 72–100. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press. Stanzel, Franz K. (1955) 1971. Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby-Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses. Translated by James P. Pusack. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Veselovskij, Aleksandr N. 2006. Izbrannoe: Istoričeskaja poètika. Мoskva: ROSSPEN. Veselovskij, Aleksandr N. (1913) 2010. Izbrannoe: Na puti k istoričeskoy poètike. Мoskva: Universitetskaja kniga; Sankt-Peterburg: TSGI.

Françoise Lavocat

A Diachronic Perspective on Metalepsis 1 Definition Much has been written about metalepsis in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: in the nouveau roman (Herman 1997; Wagner 2011), in postmodern literature (McHale 1987), and in popular culture (Kukkonen and Klimek 2011). Studies of metalepsis in cinema (Schaeffer 2005; Delaune 2008; Willis 2011; Limoges 2012), comics (Kukkonen 2011; Langlet 2012; Thoss 2011), cartoons (Limoges 2011), video games (Ryan 2006; Harpold 2007, Allain 2018), and advertising (Dahlberg 2010) have renewed reflection on this topic and demonstrated that metalepsis is now abundantly present across many forms of media: in cinema (Hitchcock appears in no fewer than forty of his films!), in television series, and in bestselling romance novels. In the twenty-first century, whole series of works, including novels (e.g., Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, published between 2001 and 2012) and graphic novels (e.g., Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s Julius Corentin Acquefacques series, published between 1991 and 2013) use metalepsis as their central rhetorical device. For better or worse, authors, readers or spectators, and characters are continually coming into contact with one another with the result that the characteristics of the media in question are not only exposed to view but also fictionalized. These encounters constitute metalepsis in its most explicit form, and potentially at its most comic, dramatic, and rich in theoretical and even existential and metaphysical implications. Of course, metalepsis is much older than this. Gérard Genette discusses examples from Diderot and Sterne in the eighteenth century, examples that look tame when compared to the displays of metaleptic fireworks witnessed for a little over a century. Following Genette, several theorists have declared that earlier periods were limited to the sort of “rhetorical” metalepsis found in Jacques le fataliste and Tristram Shandy, and that “ontological” metalepsis (to provisionally adopt MarieLaure Ryan’s terminology) is limited to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Fludernik 2003; Wagner 2002). These terms refer to the fundamental distinction between forms of metalepses that are aspects of discourse and those that belong to the field of action respectively (Pier 2005, 2016). Following Genette, William Nelles distinguishes between “verbal” or “epistemic” metalepses (Cohn [2005] 2012: “discursive metalepsis”) and “modal” or “ontological” metalepses (Nelles 1997, 155). Ryan (2006) calls these types of meta-

Note: Translated from the French by Sam Ferguson. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-036

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lepsis “rhetorical” and “ontological” respectively (the latter term having been used by Brian McHale in 1987); this terminology has been widely adopted. To synthesize these approaches and use the simplest and most neutral terminology possible, “discursive” metalepses (functioning on the level of discourse) and “fictional” metalepses (functioning on the level of plot) will be used. Genette uses the term “fictional metalepsis” (2004, 88). Whereas he envisaged the difference between these two types of metalepsis as a matter of degree, his successors conceived of it as a qualitative distinction. They thereby widened the gulf between these two types of metalepsis, and consequently between their manifestations in modern and earlier periods. Many of them, following Genette, consider that metalepses of the second type did not exist before the nineteenth or even the twentieth century. The aim of this article is to show that another history is possible. It requires an investigation that raises the following question: does taking a diachronic view of metalepsis involve modifying the broadly accepted definition formulated by Genette in 1972 (“any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe [. . .], or the inverse [that] produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical [.  .  .] or fantastic”; [1972] 1980, 234–35)? It should be recalled that, despite the clarity of this definition, there has never been agreement on what constitutes metalepsis, even with regard to canonical examples (Hanebeck 2017). Where does this leave us with regard to more distant periods, in contexts where the modalities of metalepsis are no longer familiar to us? A middle way will be followed here, retaining part of Genette’s definition (including his view of metalepsis as a matter of degree), but adjusting it (particularly with regard to the pragmatic effects that metalepsis is assumed to exert). After a brief review of the history of metalepsis, or rather the version of this history that has been widely shared, starting with Genette’s account of it, I will retrace the evolution of metalepsis in European literature from antiquity to the twenty-first century, focusing in particular on the most problematic, and lesser known, cases of earlier periods. Not examined here are other world literatures or metalepsis from an intermedial perspective (Wolf 2005).

2 Theoretical Framework 2.1 The History of Metalepsis According to Gérard Genette ([1972] 1980, 2004) Genette produced no more than a rough outline of metalepsis from a diachronic perspective. In Discours du récit (1972), metalepsis is first used to describe the

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phenomenon in Balzac’s novels whereby a narrator identified with the author intervenes to point something out to the reader while the characters are busy doing something else. Most of his examples are taken from nineteenth-century literature and are described as being “banal and innocent.” To find “bolder,” more “audacious” examples ([1972] 1980, 235–236), one has to look to works from the eighteenth century: Jacques le fataliste and Tristram Shandy. Genette considers that the twentieth century gives rise to a “vast expansion of metalepsis.” This expansion goes hand in hand with an extension of its definition: metalepsis, defined as the transgressive passage from one narrative level to another (234), was formerly centered on the author and his manifestations within the fictional world, but it now includes all the escapades of a work’s characters: “characters escaped from a painting, a book, a press clipping, a photograph, a dream, a memory, a fantasy” (235). “Boldness” and “expansion” are explicitly associated with “literary” value. In Métalepse: De la figure à la fiction (2004), the emergence of a clearer diachronic model can be seen. The movement from rhetorical figure to fiction, from banality to boldness, from metaphorical to literal transgression, is now seen to develop over time, even if the chronological reference points provided by Genette remain vague. While discussing Woody Allen’s short story “The Kugelmass Episode” (in which a twentieth-century New York professor steps into the novel Madame Bovary and brings the heroine back to his own world), he observes that the “classical theory” of metalepsis could not conceive of the intrusion of a fictional character into real life, but only that of the author pretending to enter his fiction: This mode, or sub-mode [. . .] corresponds more closely to our conception – let’s say romantic, modern, postmodern – of creation, which willingly grants creation a certain freedom of its own, and its creatures a capacity for autonomous action, that the classical ethos, being more down-to-earth or timid, could hardly conceive of. (Genette 2004, 27)

Genette does not provide many examples of actual encounters between authors, readers, and characters, although he refers to some of the works considered canonical in this respect, such as Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo of 1985 (Genette 2004, 60), Julio Cortázar’s Continuity of Parks of 1956 (25), and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman of 1969 (34). He also draws a comparison between Molière’s L’impromptu de Versailles of 1663, Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise of 1928 (53), and Giraudoux’s L’Impromptu de Paris of 1937 (52–55). Nevertheless, the historical perspective remains minimal. Genette merely notes that the transgression of the boundary between the auditorium and the stage seemed much less transgressive when the fourth wall had not yet been erected. Moreover, the effect initially produced by the spectacle of actors playing the role of actors dwindles and fades away over time.

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2.2 After Genette: Entrenching the Dichotomies There is a long history of critics trying to trace the history of metalepsis as a rhetorical figure. Genette alludes briefly to this tradition through his reference to Pierre Émile Fontanier. John Hollander (1981), following in the footsteps of Angus Fletcher (1964) and Harold Bloom (1973; Bloom associates metalepsis with the phenomenon of influence), makes a more precise and erudite use of the rhetorical tradition than Genette does. Nonetheless, it is Genette’s definition that has become the common point of reference. His simplification and specialization of the concept facilitated the growth in interest in metalepsis, preparing the ground for studies of metalepsis in texts from earlier periods. The few studies that have approached metalepsis from a diachronic perspective have reinforced the idea that fictional metalepses do not exist in works from earlier periods. Monika Fludernik (2003) studied metalepsis as “scene shifts” between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, highlighting the evolution of formulas from the medieval construction of the type “let’s leave this [. . .] to turn towards that” to expressions that allow for flashbacks and the insertion of narrative commentary. She shows that these metalepses, while revealing to the reader the mechanisms of the narrative, do not have anti-illusionist effects, and instead tend to reinforce the realist illusion. By her account, other types of metalepses only developed from the eighteenth century onward (396). Frank Wagner recognizes the existence of metalepses since antiquity (2002, 237), but since he believes that a “narrative pact” inspired by Aristotelian poetics is a necessary condition for their production and recognition by readers, he follows their history starting from a relatively recent period (the oldest example given being Don Quixote). He distinguishes between intentional and unintentional metalepses (the latter corresponding to the metalepses of control subsequently studied by Fludernik), but he gives pride of place to the former, to which he attributes a “polemical” value (236). He thereby traces a rich history of these metalepses that “constitute a threat to all the certainties of representation” (243), leading from the anti-novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Scarron’s Le roman comique, Furetière’s Le roman bourgeois, Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) to the most contemporary novels, which “call into question the primacy of mimesis” (243). Wagner’s short history of metalepsis is based on a coherent premise: that the main effect of metalepsis, to varying degrees, is to expose the writing process and combat the illusion of mimesis. By undertaking an examination of earlier periods (antiquity and the medieval period), as well as paying closer attention to fictional metalepses, this contribution seeks to add another dimension to this history.

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3 A Partial History of Metalepsis Researchers who have shed light on the modalities of metalepsis in earlier periods use a definition of metalepsis inspired by Genette’s work. This shared theoretical framework facilitates a certain consensus but also creates some problems. Since identifying an instance of metalepsis is a hermeneutic process (Hanebeck 2017), it presupposes, at the very least, the recognition of a boundary between narrative and discourse (Wagner 2002; Fludernik 2003). The knowledge of this poetics conditions the effects of metalepsis (the sense of the comic or the fantastic). Yet it is highly unlikely that the authors and readers or listeners of most of the texts of antiquity and the medieval period (with the exception of the works of Lucian of Samosata and Martianus Capella) would have viewed the works from this perspective. The pragmatic dimension of Genette’s definition must therefore be temporarily set aside.

3.1 Antiquity: The Alternating and Merging of Voices Genette refers to works from antiquity (the description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad, that of the bridal veil in Catullus’s poem “The Marriage of Thetis and Peleus”) in a passage in Métalepse devoted to the effects of “fictional animation” (2004, 81–89). In these cases, metalepsis consists in an exaggeration of the effects of ekphrasis, which is then treated as if the characters described in a painting not only seemed to be alive but really were “animated.” There is certainly a fictional effect in ekphrasis based on an implicit mode of “as if,” but the characters do not move from one world to another. The difference is the same as that which exists between an author-narrator’s intrusions into a fiction and their appearance as a character in that fiction. As a result, narrative animation of the painting belongs to the category of discursive metalepsis; it has a fictional variant that developed – with some modifications – only from the nineteenth century onward. Research on metalepsis in the wake of Genette developed in particular under the impetus of Irene J. F. de Jong, whose work is centered on the narratological analysis of ancient Greek literature (2009, 2011, 2013). In her view, metalepsis abounds in ancient literature in various forms, among which she favors the “merging of voices.” She analyzes this phenomenon in particular in Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Bacchylides, considering that the passage from one world to another (extradiegetic and diegetic respectively) takes place when the narrator’s voice merges with that of the Muses or with that of a character. From this same perspective, she analyzes the passage from book 18 of the Iliad devoted to the description of Achilles’s shield (lines 478–608), “the mother of all ekphrasis” (de Jong 2011, 1): just as the Homeric narrator, in book 7 of the Odyssey, merges his voice with that of the bard Demodocus, here

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there is a fusion between the creative power of the god Hephaestus and that of the Homeric narrator. Unlike the effects of metalepsis in postmodern literature, those of antiquity do not provoke any sense of surprise, or any comic or fantastic effect; nor do they lay bare the narrative process. On the contrary, they have the effect of accentuating realism and reinforcing the authority and prestige of the author, who is thereby imbued with supernatural power (de Jong 2011, 10). Moreover, metalepsis occurs in these contexts gradually rather than abruptly (de Jong 2013, 101), with the result that at the end of certain texts, such as Bacchylides’s Ode to Apollo, a “fadeout” effect occurs in which the human and divine spheres merge (de Jong 2009, 106–113). De Jong believes that these effects are produced intentionally by ancient authors. She highlights the grammatical anomalies that they can produce, such as, in Pindar, a shift from the free indirect discourse of a character to direct discourse that can be attributed to the narrator; or cases in which the narrator’s discourse incorporates the indirect discourse of a character (2013, 99). De Jong also identifies other forms of discursive metalepsis, such as apostrophe addressed to a character (as in Homer; 2009, 93–97). She also considers that an allusion to the text and its posterity in the mouth of a character constitutes a form of metalepsis (98). But does the definition of metalepsis not become too broad if it is conceived as the meeting of worlds of a different ontological status, and if this “meeting” may be no more than an allusion or a double meaning? De Jong is right to fear the risk of exaggeration when she sees metalepses in indirect references to the current reality of the poem’s audience arising within the myths evoked in Pindar’s odes (2013, 103, 115). This leads her to consider that the genre of the Epinician ode (a hymn dedicated to gods or heroes) is eminently and intrinsically metaleptic. On the other hand, de Jong rejects the episode in Lucian’s A True Story in which Homer and Odysseus listen to passages from the Iliad and Odyssey and meet Lucian himself (2.15), as well as the episode where Homer meets his fictional characters in Philostratus’s Heroicus (22.45, 43.15). Yet these are precisely examples of the fictional metalepses that are supposedly unknown before the nineteenth century! Her argument is that Homer, in a fiction, himself becomes a fictional character and that there is therefore no fusion of worlds (consisting of personal communication) in these examples. It must be pointed out, however, that author-characters and conventional characters, even in a fiction, do not have the same ontological status, and to exclude them would be tantamount to dismissing most of the metalepses of the twentieth century! Nevertheless, de Jong, a leading authority in this area, has been followed by many other researchers who promote a conception of discursive metalepsis that consists of different ways of merging narrative voices or discursive functions. For example, Lieve Teugels (2013) analyzes, in the rabbinic literature of the Midrashim, the impossibility of differentiating between narration and commentary, translation and interpretation, narrative and metanarrative, treating this impossibility as a

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vast metaleptic device. Anja Cornils (2005) considers that, in the Acts of the Apostles, metalepsis is to be found in the passage from heterodiegetic to homodiegetic narration; whereas the narrator (Luke) recounts events in the first part as an external narrator, in the second part he becomes an eyewitness of the events. Cornils acknowledges the difference between this intriguing phenomenon and Genette’s definition, and shows that this process aims above all to increase the credibility of the text. She also argues for treating evidentia and phantasia (when the speaker, overcome by emotion, believes he sees what he describes and “places it before the eyes” of the audience, in accordance with Longinus’s On the Sublime) as tropes that prefigure metalepsis as it is understood today (106). Is this definition of metalepsis, which is apparently a matter of consensus for a number of researchers specializing in ancient texts, too broad? Defining metalepsis as the meeting of two worlds leads to the inclusion of too many textual phenomena (such as allusions to contemporary people or events). Moreover, for a boundary to be crossed, and possibly transgressed, it must actually exist. The process by which ancient authors lend their own voice to the gods in order to speak with greater force and grandeur, as at the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony, takes place through successive shifts, enunciative vagueness, skillfully calculated ambiguities. This metamorphosis through gradual substitutions does not produce any sort of irruption. Finally, as de Jong repeatedly observes, in the case of texts that were sung or performed out loud, the merging of voices may have been made clearer through changes in intonation. Nonetheless, it is significant that the examples discussed by Cornils, de Jong, and Teugels have almost all been the object of conflicts of interpretation: although little is known of these works’ reception at the moment of their production, the different interpretations they gave rise to highlight their grammatical and linguistic anomalies, creating confusion for a reader. This confusion could be compared to that produced by metalepsis. Even if certain questionable cases are discounted, there are so many and such diverse examples of metalepses in ancient literature that we can say that almost all forms of this figure (except for that in which a character expresses an awareness of their diegetic status) were used at that time: narrative animation of a scene depicted in art; apostrophes addressed to the reader or listener, or to a character; transformation of the narrator into a character; entry of the narrator into diegesis (as a witness). These figures and devices (including “fade-out”) have a long posterity. Finally, although most cases belong to the category of discursive metalepsis, it is worth emphasizing the novelty and importance of the examples of fictional metalepses in Lucian and Philostratus, where characters and authors (invariably Homer!) actually meet. It is significant that it is precisely in these comic, critical, and transgressive texts, including elements of fantasy, that we come closest to the phenomenon that, since Genette, we have termed “metalepsis.”

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3.2 From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Metalepsis and Allegory In the period of late antiquity we find the association of metalepsis with allegory becoming more strongly established. Siegmar Döpp (2013) identifies metaleptic processes in five Latin works of late antiquity: St. Augustine’s Soliloquies (387 CE), Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury (between 410 and 439 CE), Avitus of Vienne’s De spiritalis historiae gestis (ca. 500 CE), Fabius Planciades Fulgentius’s Expositio Virgilianae continentiae secundum philosophos moralis (between the fifth and sixth centuries CE), and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (524 CE). Aside from the example of fictional metalepsis found, among other types of metalepsis, in On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, the other metalepses are all discursive: St. Augustine and “Ratio” (a personification of “reason”), engaged in a dialogue, both frequently mention the writing process and specifically the medium of the book, which is normally excluded from the fictional framework. The work by Avitus of Vienne includes several fierce apostrophes to Eve. In a fictional dialogue, Fulgentius and Virgil refer several times to Fulgentius’s own works. Finally, in the fictional dialogue between Boethius and the personified Lady Philosophy, the latter sometimes addresses mankind as a whole. However, the dialogues between a character identified with the author (St. Augustine, Boethius) and an allegorical entity do not constitute the sort of fiction that would be transgressed by the appearance of an entity from the extradiegetic universe. Indeed, in the case of the Soliloquies, Ratio is a part of St. Augustine himself. It is tempting to take the same view of the apostrophe of Avitus to Eve and that of Lady Philosophy to the peoples of the Earth: the degree of fictionality of these figures and of the genre in question is minimal, and the boundary between the planes of discourse and narrative is barely discernible. Yet it is true that Virgil’s reference to Fulgentius’s works seems incongruous – so much so that other commentators, as Döpp explains, assumed an error on the part of the author (2013, 457). This manipulation of time, making Virgil into a contemporary of Fulgentius, could certainly be likened to metalepsis, and in this case the effect is perhaps one of emphasizing the fictionality of the dialogue. The case of On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury deserves special attention. A character named Martianus Capella dialogues with allegorical and metapoetic figures (Satura and Camena) on metanarrative and metafictional issues: at stake is the defense of ornament, that is to say fiction, as well as the ludic dimension of this didactic and encyclopedic work (Döpp 2013, 455). Can we relate this explicitly comic character of the work, traditionally defined as a Menippean satire, to the fact that it includes a fictional metalepsis? More specifically, we see Martianus Capella

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and Camena (“Poetry”) attending the wedding of Philology; in other words, the author-character and the allegorical figure of poetry are witnesses to the wedding which is the invention of this author, who thereby enters the universe of his fiction. Here, rhetorical and fictional metalepses seem to give rise to one another in a sort of continuum. It is allegory that allows discourse to slip from a dialogical form to a paradoxical fictional event. This allegorical novel, far removed from modernity, confirms Genette’s proposal to consider the different forms of metalepsis as a matter of degree. Metalepses proliferate in medieval literature, according to specialists who have recently studied the subject (Glauch 2018; Uhlig 2018). If the presence of the author as a character within the fictional universe constitutes a metalepsis, the entire Roman de la Rose is one such example. Sonja Glauch argues that in this kind of narrative, in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, the non-allegorical first-person character-narrator, explicitly identified with the author, is ontologically distinct from the personifications that they encounter; furthermore, this encounter takes place in a special and separate place (the garden, which is doubly remote since the action takes place in a dream). As will be seen below (3.3.4), this specialization of the scene of metalepsis and the dreamlike quality of the story told was to have a long-lasting influence. Moreover, this encounter manifests the same paradox encountered earlier: the author-narrator presents himself as the pupil and disciple of the allegories he has created. This is the exact opposite of modern metalepsis as defined by Fontanier and subsequently by Genette (“a poet or writer is represented or represents himself as producing himself what he is really only relating or describing”; Fontanier [1821] 1968, 128): here the poet instead represents himself as the interlocutor and subordinate of his creations. Allegories sometimes take on an explicit metanarrative dimension (as discussed in this volume with reference to ancient Greek, Latin, and Byzantine literature by Veronika Zuseva-Özkan). This is the case at the beginning of book 9 of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1210; Glauch 2018, 93–95), where a character speaks with an entity named “Adventure” about the story. Once again, a shift occurs that supports, from a historical perspective, the thesis that the difference between the two types of metalepsis is a matter of degree. In Parzival, as in most medieval romances, formulas such as “Adventure tells us that” abound. According to Glauch, “Adventure,” in these expressions, is a semi-personalized extradiegetic entity. It becomes more concrete when it meets and dialogues with a character. The personification of “adventure” can be found in another great romance in the Germanic tradition, Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois (ca. 1200). (Metalepsis in Parzival and Wigalois is being studied by Martin Sebastien Hammer as part of a doctoral project.) For Marion Uhlig, metalepses are not only present in but even constitutive for medieval literature. She identifies several discursive and fictional metalepses

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in La Vita de Barlaam et Josaphat (1190–1195), traditionally attributed to Jean Damascène but translated and extended by Gui de Cambrai in the twelfth century (twelve French versions of this text appeared between the end of the twelfth and the middle of the fifteenth century). She analyzes in particular a passage in which Josaphat meets a cleric who turns out to be Jean Damascène himself. The latter participates in the action (in a fictitious battle) and is even presented as writing the text itself (Uhlig 2018, 3, 9)! The (presumed) author appears in his own fiction, and in accordance with a paradox peculiar to metalepsis, he is present within the text that he produces. Uhlig defends an interesting and controversial thesis. She believes that metalepsis in medieval literature gives fluidity to the text and creates an effect of “osmosis” (2018, 3) between the different levels: intra-, extra-, and metadiegetic. It then becomes irrelevant to speak of crossing boundaries, let alone transgressing them, since the medieval text, with its copies, translations, adaptations, and interpolations fragmented in various compilations, actually gives rise to a flow of texts that refer to one other. Séguy (2010) tends toward this same approach when she uses the concept of “intrafictional” metalepsis to analyze the interpolation of the character of Balaain, who belongs to a later text (La Suite de Merlin, ca. 1230) in a rewriting of La Première continuation de Perceval (initially composed at the end of the twelfth century). Séguy remarks that the medieval text is “multiple and moving, [and] stands in a state of spatial and temporal instability that blurs the boundaries between manuscripts and works and fosters the processes of authorial supposition, forgery, or plagiarism” (2010, 126). Uhlig goes even further in saying that “metalepsis presides over the diffusion of material between forms that are permeable to one other” (2018, 7). Would it not be preferable to avoid dispersing metalepsis in this flux? Plagiarism, forgeries, translations, and interpolations are not metalepses. Paradoxical and metanarrative situations such as those analyzed in Martianus Capella, the romances of Wolfram von Eschenbach, and La Vie de Barlaam et Josaphat constitute sufficiently substantive examples of fictional metalepses – even with regard to a modern definition of the concept – that there is no need to extend its definition to such a degree.

3.3 From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: The Sites of Metalepsis The long period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment sees several boundaries become established; the boundary of narration is gradually consolidated and the concept of fiction becomes more precise over the course of debates following

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the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics (Chevrolet 2007). The recommendation made to playwrights and actors by the Abbé d’Aubignac in 1657 not to address spectators – a device limited to popular theater – prefigures Diderot’s theorization of the fourth wall a century later in 1758. It is obvious that it is only when this imaginary wall is erected in minds and practices that its crossing constitutes a transgression. Furthermore, discursive metalepses, in the form of intrusions by an author humorously describing what he is doing (e.g., focusing on one character rather than another) begin to appear at this time: Francesco Montorsi (2017) shows that this phenomenon became popular in the sixteenth century in imitation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516/1532) In Ariosto’s case, just as for Cervantes, and in continuation of the practices of antiquity and the medieval period, metalepses serve above all to strengthen the figure of the author, to assert or defend his prerogatives, and to demonstrate his powers. However, metalepses are by this point no longer part of the ordinary patterns of narrative, as they may have been in medieval literature. Strengthening the need for verisimilitude (Duprat 2009) and the abandonment of paradoxes probably had the effect of consigning metalepses to the margins of the text, associating them with the comic genre and anti-novels, relegating them to works in a popular register, or even limiting them to separate places, such as the Underworld or various manifestations of “the Land of Romances” these separate places are partly the legacy of antiquity and of the medieval period, and in any case they reveal the same allegorical dimension. However, this period also gives rise to the few really spectacular examples of fictional and rhetorical metalepses, or at least those which have attracted the attention of researchers, notably in the works of Cervantes, but also and especially during the eighteenth century in the works of Diderot and Sterne. The latter two authors are so well known that they need only be mentioned in passing here.

3.3.1 Metalepsis of the Reader in the Fifteenth Century The fifteenth century contains a rare and intriguing specimen of metalepsis. Should we follow Bertrand Daunay (2017) in calling this phenomenon the “metalepsis of the reader”? Its creator, Juan de Flores (1455–1525), is best known for two novels. The first, Grisel y Mirabella (ca. 1486), which met with great success, tells the tragic love story of the two eponymous heroes. Their death sentence for having had carnal relations gives rise to a debate on the vices and virtues of each of the two sexes. The defender of men is none other than Pere de Torroella, a character with a contemporary historical counterpart (1420–1492) who was active at the court of John II and known for a treatise promoting misogyny (1458). His victory in the fictional debate leads to

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a death sentence for Mirabella. This arouses the queen’s ire and desire for revenge, and she has Torroella put to death. The intertwining of fiction and a contemporary debate, along with the fictional killing of a contemporary of the author, the famous exponent of a controversial thesis, has the hallmarks of metalepsis. The second novel features a full-fledged metalepsis by means of an intertextual game. Grimalte y Gradissa is considered as a “continuation” of Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (Matulka 1931; Waley 1969), but it perfectly illustrates the change in perspective that takes place when one considers a text from the past with a focus on its use of metalepsis. Its astonishing use of this device, unprecedented at the time, involves metalepsis both of the author and of the reader. The story revolves around the effects of Gradissa’s reading of the story of Fiammetta (“Fiometa” in Juan de Flores’s work). Gradissa assumes that this novel, narrated in the first person in the form of a letter, is true. The author does not contradict her. In a short introduction in which he announces that he has “changed his name from Juan de Flores to Grimalte,” he summarizes Boccaccio’s work without referring to Boccaccio by name. Although he uses the word “invention,” he does not draw attention to the fictional nature of the letter written by Boccaccio’s heroine: “Here begins a brief composition by Juan de Flores, who in the following work changed his name to Grimalte, and whose invention is about Lady Fiometta.” The translation by Maurice Scève (La deplourable fin de Fiamette, 1535), quoting Boccaccio, makes the metalepsis more explicit: “A fine retelling by Jehan de Flores, who changed his name for this purpose to Grimalte, and whose invention is based on Boccaccio’s work Fiammetta.” Gradissa instructs her suitor Grimalte to find Fiometa and reconcile her with her lover Pamfilo. The outcome of this enterprise is supposed to reveal the possibility of happiness in love and to help her decide how to respond to Grimalte’s love for her. Grimalte does indeed find Fiometa, at the end of a long journey, in a wild, remote, woodland setting, which indicates the extraordinary character of this metaleptic encounter. He also finds Pamfilo, who has no desire to renew his relationship with Fiometa, who dies of grief. Gradissa’s interpretation of these events is so unfavorable to men that she rejects Grimalte. The latter then joins Pamfilo, who is living a life of penance in the woods on the edge of the world. Both men are afflicted by dreams in which they see Fiometa subjected to the torments of Hell. The text of the novel is made up of an exchange of letters between the protagonists, mostly written by Grimalte to Gradissa, and narrative passages introduced by formulas such as “Grimalte speaks as the author.” Grimalte is therefore both a character whose action and fate are the main topic of the novel and the author of that novel: his status as author rests not only on the preliminary statement that formally identifies him with Juan de Flores, but also on the fact that his correspondence constitutes the text of the romance. There are three different motivations for this astonishing combination of different eras

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and narrative and ontological planes which we now call metalepsis: (1) writing the sequel to a well-known text that was popular during the Renaissance; (2) representing oneself simultaneously as an author (or translator) and as a lover involved in the story, which calls for transforming the author into a character; and (3) taking a position on the contemporary querelle des femmes (since Gradissa’s ordeal and the torments endured by Fiometa after her death are part of this debate). This short novel also presents itself as a fable about the reading and use of texts at the dawn of the Renaissance (Lavocat 2007, 165–169). This work by Juan de Flores illustrates two tendencies of fictional metalepsis that would become more pronounced in the following centuries. The first is the use of a preface as part of the metaleptic game; the second, which is not new, is to situate it in special places within the fictional world.

3.3.2 Metaleptic Prefaces Prefaces, poised on the threshold of the text, offer a propitious site for metalepses, for it is here that the boundary between serious discourse and fictional utterance can be blurred. These metalepses can take several forms, from the most subtle to the most explicit. If the text is a homodiegetic narrative, the first and most discreet form consists in the author shifting from an authorial posture to that of a character. This is perhaps the form that comes closest to the enunciative confusion analyzed by specialists of ancient literature. In several first-person novels between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the text appears as an extension of the paratext. Example: in Les amours de Melite et de Statiphile (1608), an anonymous novel, the author announces to the reader that he is dedicating his work to his friend Theseus. This fictional name is also that of a character with whom the author-narrator-character takes refuge in the course of the novel (Lavocat 2014, 73–78). Here, the erasing of the border between fiction and nonfiction has the aim of presenting the events related as being authentic: one is led to believe that “Theseus” is a pseudonym for a real person to whom the work is dedicated. The second type of metalepsis that makes use of a preface plays on the literal meaning of the traditional metaphor of the book as a person, often treated as the author’s son or daughter, and which emphasizes the author function. This metaphor goes back a long way: Horace addresses his book as a child who is annoyed at not having a larger audience (Epistles 1.20, lines 4–5). The metaphor of the journey to represent the reception of the book also has a long heritage. Ovid, at the beginning of the Tristia, addresses his book in these terms: “Go, little book, I allow it,

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go without me to that city where, alas!, I, your father, am not allowed to go” (lines 1–2). Honoré d’Urfé places an “Epistle to the Shepherdess Astrée” at the start of the first book of L’Astrée (1607), complaining that she wants to leave him. Jean-Pierre Camus, addressing the character Parthénice at the beginning of the eponymous novel (1621), exploits the same metaphor and personification. It is only a small step from here to the device by which the book, as a character, addresses the reader, which can be found in the translation of Cervantes’s Galatea by César Oudin (1611): here, the shepherdess Galatea herself addresses the reader. This example illustrates the third type of prefatory metalepsis, where a character appears in the paratext. Once again we see a slippage from discursive to fictional metalepsis. When characters appear in prefaces, they are often happy to speak or to compose epistles, harangues, verses. At the start of the first part of Don Quixote (1605), after a partly fictional prologue (containing a dialogue on the uselessness of dedications) in which Cervantes presents himself as Don Quixote’s stepfather (and describes his ward as “a sniveling child”), there are ten passages in verse, addressed by literary characters  – Amadís de Gaula, Don Belianés de Grecia, Oriana (Amadís’s wife), Gandales (Amadís’s squire), El Donoso (which may refer to a real poet), Orlando Furioso, El Cavallero del Febo (a character from Espejo de príncipes y caballeros 1555), Solisdán (perhaps Soliman, a character from Amadís), and Babieca (El Cid’s horse)  – and directed at characters from Don Quixote: the eponymous hero, Sancho Panza, Dulcinea, and Rocinante. All this is preceded by a long, enigmatic text, teeming with allusions to literature and current events, which Urganda, the magician in Amadís, addresses to the book. The personification of the book precedes the linking of characters belonging to different books, different eras, and different ontological levels. Most of the later editions and translations omit these verses, sometimes replacing them with devices having a less pronounced metaleptic effect: for example, Jean-François Bassompierre, who published a translation in 1750, begins his own version by addressing a letter to the “Most high, most valiant, and most renowned Don Quixote of La Mancha.” Fictional metalepsis goes one step further in the preface to Laurent Bordelon’s Gomgam; ou, L’homme prodigieux, transporté dans l’air, sur la terre et sous les eaux (published under the pseudonym of Titetutefnosy in 1711). In the preface, the narrator, presenting himself as the author of the preface alone, relates how Gomgam, who has the gift of making himself invisible, appeared to him in order to give him a manuscript that recounts his own adventures (Bokobza Kahan 2004). Just as Cervantes dwells on the absurdity of dedicatory paratexts, Bordelon discusses the uselessness of prefaces and parodies scholarly developments that reinforce irrational beliefs. It is in these critical, ironic, comical, and even outlandish contexts that metalepsis flourishes.

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3.3.3 The Underworld The stay on the Island of the Blessed in Lucian’s A True Story (second century CE) had a long-standing influence on making the Underworld the site of metalepsis par excellence. In the second book, the narrator and his companions travel there to find a varied and ontologically heterogeneous population composed of historical figures, especially philosophers and poets, characters borrowed from the Iliad and the Odyssey (Achilles, Menelaus, Helen, Ajax, Theseus), and minor deities from mythology (such as Narcissus). On two occasions authors are put in contact with one of their characters (Homer and Odysseus), or at least a character whom they have spoken about (Stesichorus and Helen). Metalepses set in modern underworlds deal directly with poetic issues but are also more discreetly metaleptic. In Fontenelle’s Dialogues des morts (1683), Dido complains about the version of her life presented by Virgil, whom she claims to have met (but whom we do not see in her company). Being the shadow of the historical Dido, she is unaware that she is a character and eventually concludes that the lies of fiction are preferable to the truths of history. Similarly, in Fénelon’s Dialogue des morts (1712) the shadow of Achilles, who condemns the shadow of Homer, is presented as a warrior who had a historical existence. The debate over whether it is history or literature that confers fame on the hero concludes in Homer’s favor even though Homer is not, strictly speaking, confronted with his character. The metalepsis only exists from the perspective of the reader, who knows (more or less) that both Dido and Achilles are fictional beings.

3.3.4 The Land of Romances There is a place dedicated entirely to metalepsis which has been curiously neglected in the work devoted to this figure. This is the Land of Romances, variously named “Romanie,” “the plain of Romant,” or “Romancie,” which, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was visited by lovers at times of crisis (Jacques Alluis’s L’Ecole d’amour; ou, Les héros docteurs, 1665), by a character-narrator presenting himself as the author of the book (Angelo Seravalli’s Lo Scoprimento del mondo umano di Lucio Agatone Prisco, 1696), and by two readers of novels (Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant’s Voyage merveilleux du prince Fan Feredin dans la Romancie, 1735). It is also one of the provinces of the allegorical region described by Gabriel Guéret in the form of a fictitious letter to a friend living in the countryside to whom he tries to depict the beauties of the court (La carte de la Cour, 1663). There is a considerable difference between the condemnation of novels found in Bougeant’s work and the subject matter of Alluis or Guéret, for whom

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an encounter with fictional characters provides an apprenticeship in love and fine language. But all of these cases involve a metapoetic reflection on the history of the novel, its generic categorization (distinctions between romans and nouvelles, heroic novels and realistic novels), and the pantheon of its authors: in the seventeenth century, Mlle de Scudéry is the uncontested ruler of these lands. These journeys to the Land of Romances also serve to expose novelistic devices, the best example being the craftsmen’s quarter in Bougeant’s Romancie, where craftsmen are busy forging figures of style and rhetoric. The examples from Alluis and Bougeant constitute metalepses of the reader, since here it is avid readers of novels who meet fictional characters; Alluis’s work provides a neat reversal (later adopted by postmodern literature) in which the two visitors to the Land of Romances discover that they themselves are the sons of a fictional character. The novels of Guéret and Seravalli instead offer metalepses of the author; in La Carte de la Cour, Mlle de Scudéry, under the name of Sapho, controls the lives of her characters as if they were puppets: They do not utter a word that she has not suggested to them, they do not take a step without her order if they conceive some great plan, she alone inspires them; in a word, she leads them as if by the hand in all the places where we meet them.

In Seravalli’s novel, the character-narrator, Agathon, is identified with the book’s author. During his journey through the Land of Romances, he ventures into the city of titles and befriends the title of his own book (the one he appears in and is supposed to have written). In Bougeant’s Voyage merveilleux du prince Fan Feredin dans la Romancie, some characters who are dissatisfied with a boat trip, which parallels their adventures in the book, take legal action against the skipper, in other words, their author. The metalepses in these texts are therefore extremely literal, while being inseparable from an allegorical framework. This is confirmed by the title “Nouvelle allégorique” for a text by Furetière that includes another “Romanie.” Guéret’s La Carte de la cour, partly inspired by the “Carte du Tendre” (in Mlle de Scudéry’s novel La Clélie), is an allegorical description of the court where characters from the novel and real people from the court can mix. Moreover, their names are drawn from the same onomastic repertoire largely borrowed from the pastoral genre, which facilitates this metaleptic mixing. Seravalli’s novel is an extensive and complex allegorical compendium making use of the sort of personifications found in much older novels (Agathon meets a knight who leads him out of the Land of Romances and who is none other than his soul). This kind of metalepsis, found in the spatial and metafictional enclave that is the Land of Romances, could well be a continuation of medieval metalepsis. Later works still draw on this source of allegorical inspiration, such as Walter de la Mare’s Henry Brocken, His Travels and Adventures

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in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance (1904) and even more recently Jonathan Caroll’s The Land of Laughs (1980), which is in a fantastic rather than allegorical vein: this work presents a strange village populated by characters, visited at considerable risk by two readers who are avid followers of the author who created these inhabitants.

3.3.5 The Eighteenth Century, the Golden Age of Metalepsis? Metafictional underworlds and the Land of Romances are now so unfamiliar to today’s readers that attention has focused instead on authorial interventions and presence in Diderot (Genette 2004) and Sterne (Genette 2004; Hanebeck 2017). The exaggerated form and theatricality of this self-representation has precedents, particularly in Ariosto (Montorsi 2017), Cervantes (Schlickers 2005), and Scarron (Bokobza Kahan 2009). It may also have roots in the discourse of the protean shyster (also a drunkard, doctor, philosopher) which Ariane Bayle has identified in the language of the narrator in sixteenth-century comic fictions (2009). Indeed, metalepsis allows for a whole range of attitudes and enunciative postures to be embodied and expressed: Michèle Bokobza Kahan observes, in Scarron, Furetière, and lesser-known authors such as Laurent Bordelon and the Chevalier de Mouhy, the “playful,” “pamphleteering,” and “libertarian” uses of metalepsis (2009). She also remarks on the “syncretic” use of metalepsis by Bordelon, who pursues the irony and fictionalization of his image so far that the status of his discourse becomes undecidable (9): for Bordelon, the aim is a denunciation of the imagination and the novelistic (particularly in L’Histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle, 1710), as it is for Cervantes, Scarron, Furetière, Seravalli, and Bougeant, and this is apparently one of the most fertile uses of metalepsis. But it is in Mouhy’s work that the evolution of metalepsis and its future developments can be perceived most clearly. In Le Démeslé survenu à la sortie de l’opéra dans le Paysan parvenu et la Paysanne parvenue (1735), fictional characters appear in the real world while remaining conscious of their fictional status. Their identity is also known to the opera audience, and this represents a transgression sufficient to trigger commotion when they are recognized. This is the first instance of the irruption of fictional characters into the real world, which would become common in the twentieth century. The characters criticize their author, an entertaining way of talking about one’s own work. The paysanne declares: “my author is shameless [. . .] I was certainly foolish to trust in his discretion, and he claims that I’ve done a thousand things that I’d never dream of doing”. This critical dimension certainly links the work to an existing tradition, but it is entirely innovative in endowing a

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character with an awareness of their nature and with autonomy of judgment: in Fontenelle’s work, Dido in the Underworld criticizes Virgil, but she presents herself as a historical figure, which makes a considerable difference with regard to the type of metalepsis. Mouhy’s other eminently metaleptic work, Lamékis; ou, Les voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la terre intérieure avec la découverte de l’île des Sylphides (1735–1738), is equally innovative. At the end of the first part the author appears under his own name, supposedly owing to a lacuna in the manuscript (just as in chapter 9 of the first part of Don Quixote). This gives rise to an account of a fantastical process of literary creation in which the characters of Lamékis are involved. The narrator presents this episode as a dream or a fit of madness (Bokobza Kahan 2004; 2009, 10–11; Lavocat 2016, 507–508). This is not the first time that metalepsis is associated with a dream: the journey of Prince Fan Féredin is revealed in the final pages of Bougeant’s novel to have been dreamed by a commoner named Des Brosses. But whereas in Bougeant the moment of awakening dissipates the chimeric fog of the novel and heralds the triumph of the reality principle, in Lamékis metalepsis reveals the act of writing by means of the imagination possessed by the fictional creations of that process. The hypothesis of a dream or hallucination only serves to maintain the ontological status of this episode in a state of uncertainty. This is not far from the world of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the metaleptic reversals produced by Romantic irony.

3.4 The Nineteenth Century: This Is Not a Dream In the nineteenth century metalepsis appears in an attenuated form. Already in 1796, when the author of popular novels François Ducrey-Duminil addresses his protagonists, presents himself in the course of writing, or compares his characters (as in Victor; ou, L’enfant de la Forêt), the aim is to foreground his affective relationship with them and to establish a relationship of complicity with the readers, based on emotion; there is nothing transgressive about his interventions. In general, authorial intrusions from this time no longer have the force of those found in comic novels of the past. From Balzac to Flaubert, we find many examples of discursive metalepses that are even more “banal and innocent” (Genette) than those of Ducrey-Duminil. Genette (2004, 38–47) devotes several pages to Gautier’s Capitaine Fracasse (1863), but only minimal metaleptic effects are to be found in its novelistic treatment of a theatrical representation, and in the ambiguity of its protagonists shifting between the status of theatrical players and that of novelistic characters. This

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example illustrates once again Genette’s broadening of the concept in his last work on metalepsis (Lavocat 2020/2022). Yet Gautier’s work offers more striking examples of metalepsis. In Omphale; ou, La tapisserie amoureuse (1834), a character embroidered on a tapestry takes bodily form through the power of love, and it is suggested that what seemed to have been a dream has indeed come true (Meyer-Minnemann 2005). This reversal of the device of the dream is used in a similar way at the end of Paul Féval’s La ville-vampire (ou le malheur d’écrire des romans noirs) (1875): the writer Ann Radcliffe is the heroine of wild adventures, while the reader remains uncertain whether she experiences them in a parallel world or, more likely, writes them herself. In any case, the narrator insists on their reality: “I understand you,” she says in an outraged tone, “you think our story will end up with that tired old formula: ‘It was just a dream!’ Admit it! Well, you couldn’t be more wrong”. The form taken by metalepsis in the nineteenth century often involves a staging of the writing of the work itself and a strategy of questioning the ontological status of the scene represented, which is sometimes associated with a metamorphosis of the characters. This is the case in several short stories and novels by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Cohn ([2005] 2012) chooses Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairytale (1814) to illustrate metalepses she calls “internal” (“fictional” metalepses in this study) and to distinguish them from mise en abyme: a young man put under a spell by a witch ends up disappearing into a fairy-tale world. The author-narrator then appears intradiegetically and receives a letter from a magician, one of the characters in the novella. The magician brings the author to this fairy-tale world (suggested to be the world of poetry) so that he can see what has become of his hero. In The “Adventures of New Year’s Eve” (1818), the narrator encounters legendary creatures, one of whom writes the story of the narrator himself. In “Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio in the Style of Jacques Callot” (1820), an actor and his companion, transported to an imaginary kingdom, become characters from their dreams. The opposite phenomenon is found at the end of Clemens Brentano’s The Story of Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia (1838), where the characters in a fairy tale become children listening to the story of these same characters. At that time metalepsis seems to have been characterized by the shift from one world to another, from the represented world to the world in which the representation takes place, often through some magical power which surrounds the act of creation with an aura of the supernatural.

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3.5 The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: The Intermedial Explosion of Metalepsis From the earliest years of the twentieth century, fictional metalepsis becomes more common than discursive metalepsis, proliferating to the point that it risks disappearing, or at least becoming hackneyed. Nonetheless, it seems to draw new life from the emergence of new media. The earliest films depict the amazement of the novice viewer who tears the screen away in his attempt to enter into the scene being depicted (Uncle Josh at The Moving Picture Show, 1902). Comic strips present the miracle of printing technology that makes their wide diffusion possible (Bécassine chez les Turcs, 1919), and characters readily cross the thin border of their frames. This is often done by Donald Duck, or more conceptually by Julius Corentin Acquefacques (in an entirely metaleptic series by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, 1990–2020). Animated films also exhibit the materiality of their medium: the film spins off the reel in Tex Avery’s Dumb-Hounded (1943) and is eaten away by gremlins in Joe Dante’s Gremlins II (1990). We might expect that the interactivity of video games would make metalepsis redundant in this medium. In fact, it gives rise to new devices that reactivate the transgressive dimension of metalepsis (Allain 2018): in Deadpool the character addresses the player and the makers of the game, and in Stanley Parable (2013) a narrator comments on the player’s actions. Contemporary metalepsis, as diverse as it may be, differs from the forms it has taken in the past in two regards, requiring that they be set in a fictional framework. The first is the extreme dramatization of the relationships between characters, authors, and to a lesser extent, readers or spectators. In fact, these readers and spectators are usually characterized as female (the paradigm is Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo). Second is the increased autonomy of characters, who are thereby aware of their fictional status, something totally alien to the characters of previous centuries. The exception is Mouhy’s Le Démeslé survenu à la sortie de l’opéra, but whereas the paysan and paysanne are perfectly happy being aware of their fictionality, contemporary characters are generally unhappy in this state. There are of course exceptions, such as the joyful hero of Queneau’s Le Vol d’Icare (1968) who escapes from his book, but just as in the legend of Icarus, he comes to an unfortunate end. The paradoxical statement “I do not exist” at the beginning of Benito Pérez Galdós’s novel El Amigo Manso (1884) illustrates the tragicomic disgrace of being a character (this situation is also central to Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921). Here, the painful creation of a character is told from the point of view of the character. This work is a major turning point. Many works of the twentieth century are based on the thought experiment, always a painful one, of discovering that one has been created. Such is the case in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters (1956), which explores the parallel between religious faith and the fictional status of the character. In a lighter

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vein, Marc Forster’s film Stranger than Fiction (2006) depicts a character who knows that he has been condemned to death by his author but manages to persuade her to change his fate. There are many fictions in which the author kills his character (Miguel de Unamuno’s Mist, 1914; Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Mister Sim, 2010); occasionally characters kill, or plan to kill, their author (Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-TwoBirds, 1939; Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, 2008). The sentimental variant of the metaleptic relationship, common in contemporary novels and cinema, is illustrated by perhaps the most famous example of metalepsis, Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Many fictions, often in a popular register, evoke an idyllic relationship, either between a female reader and a male character (Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer’s Between the Lines, 2012) or between a male author and female character (Guillaume Musso’s La fille de papier, 2010; Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Ruby Sparks, 2012). Metalepsis is sometimes so literal that the character takes physical form in the real world (which is not quite the case, from a sexual point of view, in Woody Allen’s film): in Lost in Austen (2008), Mr. Darcy, the beloved hero of Pride and Prejudice, can marry a reader instead of Elizabeth Bennet. Another possibility is for the character to replace the author and begin to write in his or her place – the ultimate development of their access to autonomy and consciousness, as in Stephen King’s “Umney’s Last Case” (1993) and in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters. The emphasis here on the metaphysical and sentimental aspect of metalepsis is no way intended to undermine the experimental character of metalepsis in the nouveau roman and in postmodern fiction (McHale 1987), where revelation of the writing process, aimed at foregrounding the text’s fictional nature, can appear as an end in itself. The greatest novelty in this period is the huge growth in intermedial metaleptic fiction and the dramatization of instances of literary exchange between author, character, and reader. This no longer involves condemning the author (as in the eighteenth century) so much as the temptation to transform the character into a person, with an exploration of the limits of this confusion of status. Nor should the primarily playful use of metalepsis in video games, animated films, and comics be forgotten. For now, these phenomena lead us to conclude this inevitably non-exhaustive overview of the historical development of metalepsis.

4 Conclusion There now arises the fundamental question of defining so as to provide an account of its history, a definition that would be capable of embracing its different manifestations but without losing sight of its specificity. These requirements lead to rejecting

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both Uhlig’s proposals concerning the medieval period and Genette’s concerning the contemporary period: both approaches place metalepsis at the heart of the circulation and production of texts, the very functioning of representation, fiction, and language. Once it is everywhere, it is also nowhere. The following dilemma remains: either it is considered that metalepsis appears only when the limits of the text and the distinction between narrative and discourse become stable over the course of the sixteenth century and even more so in the seventeenth; or it is acknowledged that metalepsis has always existed, but with a different definition from the one that currently prevails. I choose to follow this second approach, maintaining the principle that metalepsis is indeed concerned with the crossing of diegetic levels, and more often a slippage from one level to another. It is the production of an impossible situation, either discursively or fictionally, which brings together entities belonging to different ontological levels. However, I would suggest two modifications to this definition, which is still consistent with Genette’s proposals from 1972. The first is that transgression cannot be essential to the definition, nor the production of comic or fantastic effects. The degree of transgression is impossible to determine in ancient texts, and it is probably absent from many of them. Furthermore, many ancient and modern metalepses (such as Fludernik’s metalepsis of control) are serious in nature, even though fictional metalepses apparently first appeared in Lucian and developed in the wake of the Menippean satire. The seriousness of metalepsis is related to the fact that, from the outset, it seems to be intended to increase the prestige of the author by combining his voice with that of the gods. This essential function appears in many forms up until the twenty-first century, whether the author is portrayed as a vulnerable, sentimental, or cruel deity. The second modification concerns the evolution suggested in the phrase “from figure to fiction,” the subtitle of Genette’s 2004 study. There is nothing linear about the history of metalepsis. Discursive and fictional metalepses have coexisted in all eras, even though the latter are quite rare in the more distant past, only to become the predominant form in the twentieth century. Certainly, the inventiveness and transgressive dimension of discursive metalepses decreased between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their “audacity” did not always increase over time. Moreover, although the distinction between discursive and fictional metalepses is a useful one, the role of allegory should be re-evaluated. Allegory lies in the space between those two categories, and indeed some allegorical metalepses occupy an undecidable position between discursive and fictional metalepsis (in Martianus Capella, for example). The Underworld and the Land of Romances, the two sites dedicated to metalepsis, extend the allegorical tradition up to the nineteenth century.

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Finally, it must be acknowledged that many of the effects of metalepsis considered to be characteristic of modernity are probably very old. This is true of instances where the narrator addresses characters or readers, and also of the ability of metalepsis to “lay bare the devices,” which does not necessarily undermine the foundations of representation but often aims to reinforce the realism and authority of the text. When St. Augustine mentions the act of writing during his dialogue with Ratio, does he not highlight the true nature of the medium he is using, despite the fictional nature of the dialogue? Metalepsis can also be used to make a claim, in a fictional setting, about the nature and effects of fiction. Finally, it appeals to the reader’s desire to enter into fiction, to treat characters as people, a desire which literature, cinema, cartoons, and comics now cater for in abundance; but this desire was already expressed by Gradissa in the fifteenth century! If identifying metalepses is a hermeneutic process, we must re-educate our gaze in order to perceive them in texts from earlier periods. Only then can the strange effects produced by astonishing textual devices that have long gone unnoticed be appreciated. In this respect, metalepsis is a tool of both discovery and defamiliarization.

References Allain, Sébastien. 2018. “Métalepses du récit vidéoludique et reviviscence du sentiment de transgression.” Sciences du jeu, no. 9. https://doi.org/10.4000/sdj.909 (accessed 9 August 2020). Bayle, Ariane. 2009. Romans à l’encan: De l’art du boniment dans la littérature du XVIe siècle. Geneva: Droz. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press. Bokobza Kahan, Michèle. 2004. “Intrusions d’auteur et ingérences de personnages: La métalepse dans les romans de Bordelon et de Mouhy.” In “The Edge of Fiction/Aux confins du roman,” special issue, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16, no. 4, 639–654. Bokobza Kahan, Michèle. 2009. “Métalepse et image de soi de l’auteur dans le récit de fiction.” In “Ethos discursif et image d’auteur,” thematic issue, Argumentation et analyse du discours, no. 3. http://aad.revues.org/671 (accessed 1 August 2020). Chevrolet, Teresa. 2007. L’Idée de Fable: Théories de la fiction poétique à la Renaissance. Geneva: Droz. Cohn, Dorrit. (2005) 2012. “Metalepsis and Mise en abyme.” Narrative 20, no. 1, 105–114. Cornils, Anja. 2005. “La métalepse dans les Actes des Apôtres: Un signe de narration fictionnelle?” In Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 95–108. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Dahlberg, Leif. 2010. “Put a Tiger in Your Text: Metalepsis and Media Discourse.” Nordicom Review 31, no. 1, 103–114. Daunay, Bertrand. 2017. “La métalepse du lecteur; ou, La porosité du métatexte.” Cahiers de narratologie 32. https://journals.openedition.org/narratologie/7855 7855 (accessed 10 Aug. 2020).

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de Jong, Irene J. F. 2009. “Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature.” In Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, edited by Jonas Grethlein and Antonios Rengakos, 87–115. Berlin: De Gruyter. de Jong, Irene J. F. 2011. “The Shield of Achilles: From Metalepsis to Mise en Abyme.” Ramus 40, no. 1, 1–14. de Jong, Irene J. F. 2013. “Metalepsis and Embedded Speech in Pindaric and Bacchylidean Myth.” In Über die Grenze: Metalepsis in Text und Bildmedien des Altertums, edited by Ute E. Eisen and Peter von Möllendorff, 97–118. Berlin: De Gruyter. Delaune, Benoît. 2008. “La métalepse filmique: De la transgression narrative à l’effet comique.” Poétique, no. 154, 147–160. Döpp, Siegmar. 2013. “Metalepsen als signifikante Elemente spätlateinischer Literatur.” In Über die Grenze: Metalepsis in Text und Bildmedien des Altertums, edited by Ute E. Eisen and Peter von Möllendorff, 431–465. Berlin: De Gruyter. Duprat, Anne. 2009. Poétiques et théorie de la fiction, du Cinquecento à Jean Chapelain (1500–1670). Paris: Champion. Fletcher, Angus. 1964. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode.” Style 37, no. 4, 382–400. Fontanier, Pierre Emile. (1821) 1968. Les figures du discours. Paris: Flammarion.  Genette, Gérard. (1972) 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. 2004. Métalepse: De la figure à la fiction. Paris: Seuil. Glauch, Sonja. 2018. “Grenzüberschreitender Verkehr oder uneigentliche Rede? Allegorische Assistenzfiguren des Erzählers und ihr diegetischer Standort.” Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung 1:86–107. Hanebeck, Julian. 2017. Understanding Metalepsis: The Hermeneutics of Narrative Transgression. Berlin: De Gruyter. Harpold, Terry. 2007. “Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture.” Game Studies, n°7, issue 1. http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/harpold (accessed 20 August 2020). Herman, David. 1997. “Toward a Formal Description of Narrative Metalepsis.” Journal of Literary Semantics 26, no. 2, 132–152. Hollander, John. 1981. The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kukkonen, Karin, and Sonja Klimek, eds. 2011. Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kukkonen, Karin, 2011. “Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels.” Metalepsis in Popular Culture, edited by Karin Kukkonen, and Sonja Klimek, Berlin: De Gruyter : pp. 213–231. https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110252804.213 (accessed 20/09/2022) Langlet, Irène. 2012. “Imaginaire du créateur et storytelling métaleptique.” Revue critique de Fixxion française contemporaine. http://www.revue-critique-de-fixxion-francaise-contemporaine.org/ rcffc/article/view/fx09.03/910/ (accessed 20 July 2020). Lavocat, Françoise. 2007. “Transfictionnalité, métafiction et métalepse aux seizième et au dix-septième siècles.” In La Fiction, suites et variations, edited by Richard Saint-Gelais and René Audet, 157–178. Quebec: Nota bene. Lavocat, Françoise. 2014. “Fictions en prose à la première personne (1585–1623).” Études de langue et littérature françaises/Futsubun Kenkyu 45:69–87. Lavocat, Françoise. 2016. Fait et Fiction: Pour une frontière. Paris: Seuil.

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Lavocat, Françoise (2020/2022).“Et Gérard Genette inventa la métalepse.” Nouvelle Revue d’esthétique 26:43–51. Limoges, Jean-Marc. 2012. “La métalepse au cinéma: Aux frontières de la transgression.” Cinergie: Il Cinema e le altre arti, no. 1, March 2012. http://www.cinergie.it/?p=292 (accessed 3 July 2020). Limoges, Jean-Marc. 2011. “Metalepsis in the Cartoons of Tex Avery: Expanding the Boundaries of Transgression.” In Metalepsis in Popular Culture, edited by Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek, 196–212. Berlin: De Gruyter. Matulka, Barbara. 1931. The Novels of Juan de Flores and Their European Diffusion: A Study in Comparative Literature. New York: Institute of French Studies. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen. Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus. 2005. “Un procédé qui produit un effet de bizarrerie.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 133–150. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Montorsi, Francesco. 2017. “La métalepse de régie dans le roman du XVIe siècle.” Poétique, no. 181, 53–65. Nelles, William. 1997. Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. New York: Lang. Pier, John. 2005. “Métalepse et hiérarchies narratives.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 247–261. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Pier, John. 2016. “Metalepsis.” Living Handbook of Narratology. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ node/51.html (accessed 3 July 2020). Ryan, Marie Laure. 2006. “Metaleptic Machines.” In Avatars of Story, 204–230, 246–248. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 2005. “Métalepse et immersion fictionnelle.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 323–334. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Schlickers, Sabine. 2005. “Inversions, transgressions, paradoxes et bizarreries: La métalepse dans les littératures espagnole et française.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 151–166. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Séguy, Mireille. 2010. “Pour en finir avec le Graal: Retour sur un crime du XIIe siècle.” In Pour une critique décalée: Autour de Pierre Bayard, edited by Laurent Zimmermann, 123–151. Nantes: Defaut. Teugels, Lieve. 2013. “Blending the Borders between Literature and Commentary, Interpretation and Self-Reflection: Metalepsis in Rabbinic Midrash.” In Über die Grenze: Metalepsis in Text und Bildmedien des Altertums, edited by Ute E. Eisen and Peter von Möllendorff, 405–430. Berlin: De Gruyter. Thoss, Jeff. 2011. “Unnatural Narrative and Metalepsis: Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.” In Unnatural Narrative, edited by Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, 189–209. Berlin: De Gruyter. Uhlig, Marion. 2018. “Métalepse et flux narratif au moyen âge: Le récit à tiroirs, un éden d’avant la transgression.” In “Le Moyen Âge pour laboratoire,” thematic issue, Fabula-LhT, no. 20, January 2018. http://www.fabula.org/lht/index.php?id=2132 (accessed 18 August 2020). Wagner, Frank. 2002. “Glissements et déphasages: Notes sur la métalepse narrative.” Poétique, no. 130, 235–253. Wagner, Frank. 2011. “Retours, tours et détours du récit: Aspects de la transmission narrative dans quelques romans français contemporains.” Poétique, no. 165, 3–20. Waley, Pamela. 1969. “Fiammetta and Pamfilo Continued.” Italian Studies 24:53–75. https://doi. org/10.1179/its.1969.24.1.15 (accessed 20/09/2022).

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Willis, Jean-Paul. 2011. “Vers un ‘Nouveau Hollywood’? Considérations sur la métalepse dans le cinéma populaire contemporain.” Kinephanos. La légitimation culturelle, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2011. http://www. kinephanos.ca/Revue_files/2011-willis.pdf (accessed 10 August 2020). Wolf, Werner. 2005. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts.” In Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan Christoph Meister, 83–107. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Jan Alber

Metalepsis in English Literature: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernism 1 Definition of Metalepsis The term “metalepsis” denotes real or metaphorical transmigrations (of characters, narrators, or narratees) across worlds that are located at different narrative (or diegetic) levels. It is not only the case that there are several types or manifestations of metalepses across English literary history; they may also serve a wide variety of different functions. It goes without saying that both the functioning and the functions of metalepses are context-sensitive: they depend on the specific cultural and historical contexts in which they come into being. Gérard Genette defines metalepsis as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by the diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse” ([1972] 1980, 234–235). Such transgressions – by characters, narrators, or narratees – concern the boundaries or thresholds between universes that can belong to different narrative levels. With regard to these levels, Genette ([1972] 1980, 228; [1983] 1988, 85) distinguishes between the extradiegetic level of a narrator who produces a narrative at the (intra)diegetic level in which a character might appear, who can become the (intra)diegetic narrator of a metadiegetic (or hypodiegetic; Bal 1981, 43) narrative about a metadiegetic (or hypodiegetic) character, and so forth. For Genette, transgressions of these levels produce effects of “humor” or “the fantastic” or “some mixture of the two,” unless they function as figures “of the creative imagination” ([1983] 1988, 88). Genette also argues that “all fictions are woven through with metalepses” (2004, 131). Since Genette’s original definition of metalepsis in terms of the “transgression of the threshold of embedding” ([1983] 1988, 88), narratologists have devised multiple taxonomies of types and readerly effects (of metalepses). Dorrit Cohn, for instance, discusses “exterior metalepsis,” which occurs “between the extradiegetic level and the diegetic level – that is to say, between the narrator’s universe and that of his or her story” – and “interior metalepsis,” which occurs “between two levels of the same story – that is to say, between a primary and secondary story, or between a secondary and tertiary story” ([2005] 2012, 106). Furthermore, William Nelles distinguishes between “unmarked” and “distinctly marked metalepsis” (1997, 153–154). The former merely involves “a temporary sharing of a common level,” whereas the latter concerns the actual movement into a diegetic world at a different level. With regard to the latter case, Nelles differentiates between “intrametalepsis” (i.e., jumps https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-037

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from a higher to a lower level) and “extrametalepsis” (i.e., jumps from a lower to a higher level; 154). Like Nelles, Marie-Laure Ryan (2006, 204–230) also distinguishes between a “rhetorical” (or unmarked) and an “ontological” (or marked) variety. For her, rhetorical metalepsis only opens a small window that allows a quick glance across levels but the window closes after a few sentences, and the operation ends up reasserting the existence of the boundaries. This temporary breach of illusion does not threaten the basic structure of the narrative universe. (207)

By contrast, ontological metalepsis involves an “interpenetration, or mutual contamination” (Ryan 2006, 207) of diegetic universes. Along similar lines, Monika Fludernik discusses the following four types of metalepsis: (1) “authorial metalepsis” (as in Virgil “has Dido die”), which serves to (briefly) foreground the inventedness of the story; (2) “ontological metalepsis (type 1),” in which the narrator (or a character) jumps to a lower narrative level; (3) “ontological metalepsis (type 2),” in which a fictional character transmigrates to a higher narrative level; and (4) “rhetorical or discourse metalepsis,” where the narrator seemingly enters the narrative level of the characters (2003, 383–389). Nelles (1997, 153–154), Ryan (2006, 204–230), and Fludernik distinguish between “real” and “metaphorical metalepsis,” i.e., “between an actual crossing of ontological boundaries and a merely imaginative transcendence of narrative levels” (Fludernik 2003, 396; emphasis in original). Authorial and rhetorical metalepses are usually described as metaphorical modes in which no actual boundary crossing takes place. The transgressions between narrative levels are here merely suggested. Real or ontological metalepses, on the other hand, “literally place entities in a diegetic universe to which they do not ‘belong’” (Hanebeck 2017, 94; emphasis in original). Indeed, ontological metalepses – which can be descending (“intrametaleptic”) or ascending (“extrametaleptic”) – involve actual violations of world boundaries that might be described as being “unnatural” because in the actual world, entities from two different ontological domains cannot interact (Alber 2016, 203–204; Bell and Alber 2012, 167–168). Julian Hanebeck has developed the most recent typology, which offers a number of new distinctions and terms (2017, 83). Under the heading of metaphorical (or “figurative”) metalepsis, for instance, he discusses (the largely neglected) “epistemological metalepses” that confront us with “a character’s display of knowledge of superordinate diegetic universes” (85; see also Wolf 2009, 52–54). Furthermore, Hanebeck mentions “Moebius strip stories” as another example of ontological metalepsis: “they imply a particular ‘strange loop,’ where the storyworld is created by an act of narrative representation situated within the storyworld it generates” (2017, 101). In the words of John Pier, metalepsis functions with varying

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dosages of the following three parameters: “(a) illusion of contemporaneousness between the time of the telling and the time of the told; (b) transgressive merging of two or more levels; (c) doubling of the narrator/narratee axis with the author/ reader axis” (2014, 328). The attempt to determine the functions of metalepses presupposes an awareness that “the representational logic with which we distinguish represented and representation has been violated” (Hanebeck 2017, 111). This presupposition implies that narratives “have hierarchically organized diegetic levels, each of which is created by an act of narration” (21). Werner Wolf lists the following functions of such metalepses: the ludic function (in analogy with “out-of-character-speaking”), comic valorization, the sensation function (which closely correlates with the surprise element), the enhancing of the narrative’s attractiveness, the celebration of the author’s imagination, the foregrounding of fictionality, anti-illusionism, as well as the metafictional or meta-aesthetic function (2005, 102–103). At the same time, Pier points out that metalepses may heighten [. . .] the sense of immersion” (2005, 304). Indeed, metaphorical metalepses in realist novels typically “suggest that the characters are possibly as ‘real’ as the narrator and narratee, who are, in these cases, to be identified with the actual author and actual reader” (Warhol 1986, 814). Hanebeck takes both metaphorical and ontological metalepses into consideration and argues that the metaleptic dynamic in general “plays with possibilities of human understanding and, ultimately, its inescapable limitations” (2017, 120). He lists the humorous function (metalepses are humorously disengaged from ordinary concerns), the hermeneutic function (a certain thematic motivation is needed to make sense of them), the topic of unmediatedness (they involve attempts to approach unmediated knowing or experiencing), metaleptic realism (they can foster a heightened sense of immersion), and metaleptic madness (they may correlate with the desire to truly become someone else and this leads to the annihilation of the self) (113–120). It goes without saying that the meaning of metaleptic jumps also closely correlates with the phenomenon’s location, amplitude, and frequency (see Häsner 2001, 40–43; Wagner 2002).

2 The Late Medieval Period Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, we can already find ontological metalepses in Middle English narratives. John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1431) contains two ascending metaleptic jumps. This epic poem, an English version of Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas de nobles hommes et femmes (1409), which is itself based on Boccaccio’s Latin text De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–1360), presents its readers with

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“the fall of nobles” (line 77), a series of lamentable tragedies of famous men and women. In the prologue, we are told that we will be confronted with “noble stories” which demonstrate “how al the world shal faile” (lines 158–159). In this narrative, the extradiegetic narrator tells us about the intradiegetic figure of “BOCHAS [Boccaccio] the poete” (line 3844) and the (hypodiegetic) stories he writes. At one point, Boccaccio takes “his penne” to “write the story, and be compendious, / Afforn all other off Duk Theseus” (lines 3846–3850). But then – surprisingly – Thyestes, the son of Pelops, appears before him and urges Boccaccio to forget about Duke Theseus and write down his own story first because he considers it to be the most tragic of all stories: But at his back, Boccaccio saw someone who cried out loud and bid him to stop: “Boccaccio,” he said, “I neither want you to exclude my woeful case nor prevent me from declaring my pitiful complaint to you. I am Thyestes, full of sorrow, drowned in tears, as you can see. [. . .] It is my will that you immediately proceed to change your topic and take your pen before long. Leave Theseus; pay no more attention to him. Describe my tragedy first. I suppose that during all your life, you have never seen anything more dolorous [. . .] than, oh dear, my life.” (lines 3853–3872)

✶

Boccaccio then pauses and listens to Thyestes’s story: “And with that woord John Bochas stille stood, / Ful sobirly to yiue [give] hym audience” (lines 3879–3880). We are here confronted with an ascending metalepsis because a character from the hypodiegetic level of Boccaccio’s book jumps to the intradiegetic level of Boccaccio to talk to him. In his story, Thyestes represents his brother Atreus as being a vicious scoundrel who is responsible for his tragic downfall. According to this story, Atreus wrongly accused Thyestes of adultery, exiled him from their country, tried to kill him, and even gave him his three children to eat. As soon as Thyestes has finished his tale, the furious Atreus appears before Boccaccio to complain about Thyestes’s story: ✶ After this, Atreus approached Boccaccio with a pale and envious face and complained furiously, as if he had fallen into a rage: “How can it be that Thyestes spreads his poison like a madman and accuses me wrongly like a rascal?” (lines 4082–4089)

Again, a character jumps from the hypodiegetic level to the intradiegetic level to argue with Boccaccio. In his story, Atreus represents his brother Thyestes as being a vicious scoundrel who is responsible for his tragic downfall. In Atreus’s version of the story, Thyestes first wronged him because he had three children with Europa, the wife of Atreus, and even a son by his own daughter. After listening to the stories by Thyestes and Atreus, Boccaccio puts away his pen and refuses to write another word about them. When Boccaccio was done listening to the accusations of these two brothers and how they had maliciously replied to each other in their insults, he grew bored of hearing their motions and put up his pen and wrote no more word about their fury or their erroneous discord. (lines 4208–4214) ✶

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These two ascending metaleptic jumps, which are reminiscent of the ways in which sinners pray to God to convince him of their innocence, have to be seen in the context of Roman Catholicism. They serve two functions. First, there is a striking discrepancy between the comic form of the metalepses (characters suddenly appear before their author), and the tragic content of the two stories. The narrative seems to ridicule Thyestes and Atreus for blaming one another without being able to recognize and/or admit their own flaws, faults, or failures. Second, the two ascending metaleptic jumps establish Boccaccio as a moral (perhaps even God-like) authority who can judge the two characters. He listens to the two tales but then decides to write “nat mor a word” about Thyestes and Atreus. In particular, he blames them for being “fals,” i.e., completely mistaken, in their discord. Fall of Princes highlights the idea of the fundamental sinfulness of humankind. However, the characters fail to recognize their sinfulness. In addition, the narrative shows that if Thyestes and Atreus do not behave well, the author Boccaccio (i.e., their creator) will no longer write about them and thus end their existence. By analogy, the message for us humans might be that if we do not please God (i.e., our creator) by behaving well, he might likewise end our existence. Roman Catholicism is one of the most important themes of medieval literature: topics such as the transience of life, the terrors of hell, the security of Christianity, or God’s greatness figure prominently in Middle English narratives. Furthermore, medieval texts frequently stage confrontations between different worlds (such as the realm of the humans and supernatural universes). The metaleptic jumps in Fall of Princes are expressive of an interest in other worlds, namely the higher spheres that are responsible for what happens in our world, and they seek to negotiate the relationship or connection between these realms by merging them.

3 The Renaissance In contrast to Genette, who observes the first instances of rhetorical metalepsis in nineteenth-century realist fiction ([1972] 1980, 235, 244–245), the phenomenon can be traced back to Sir Philip Sidney’s The Old Arcadia (1580) in the case of English literature (Fludernik 2003, 387). As Eisen and von Möllendorf (2013) have shown, there are even examples in ancient forms of art. Sidney’s pastoral prose romance, which was written by a radical Protestant, is about Duke Basilius and his wife Gynecia, who withdraw from their political responsibilities to go to the Greek province of Arcadia together with their daughters Pamela and Philoclea. On the one hand, this Renaissance text idealizes the supposedly unspoilt rural life of the shepherds and shepherdesses as a contrast to the corruption of the court or the

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city. On the other hand, transgressive passions lurk everywhere, and the characters learn to control them through reason. In rhetorical metalepses, the projected simultaneity between the telling of the story and the progression of time in the storyworld (see Pier 2014, 328) metaphorically moves the narrator from the extradiegetic to the intradiegetic level of the characters. In the following passage, for instance, the narrator of The Old Arcadia confronts us with a metaleptic scene shift, i.e., “a move from one setting and set of characters to a different setting and set of characters” (Fludernik 2003, 389). More specifically, he turns his attention (and the attention of the narratee) to the (idealized) shepherds while the aristocratic characters are said to be resting or doing something else: And so, with consent of both parents [. . .] their marriage day was appointed; which, because it fell out in this time, I think it shall not be impertinent to remember a little our shepherds while the other greater persons are either sleeping or otherwise occupied. (my emphasis)

Other passages in this Renaissance narrative suggest even more transgressive interactions across the threshold that separates the extradiegetic from the intradiegetic level. At one point, for example, the narrator seems to talk to the character of Philoclea, the younger daughter of Basilius and Gynecia: But alas, sweet Philoclea, how hath my pen forgotten thee, since to thy memory principally all this long matter is intended. Pardon the slackness to come to those woes which thou didst cause in others and feel in thyself.

We also get the impression that the intradiegetic characters can talk to or communicate with the extradiegetic narrator. In the following passage, one of the figures tries to get the narrator to talk about his adventures: “But methinks I hear the old shepherd Dorus calling me to tell you something of his hopeful adventures” (my emphasis). At one point, the extradiegetic narrator claims to hear the cries of another intradiegetic character, and since the narrator also tells us that he is able to “comfort” this figure, the ontological divide between the two worlds – once again – seems to be rather porous: “But methinks Dametas cries unto me, if I come not the sooner to comfort him, he will leave off his golden work hath already cost him so much labour and longing” (my emphasis) . All of these metalepses are metaphorical ones: the boundary crossings are only suggested. Their primary purpose is presumably to highlight that the narrator – as the creator of the characters – cares about his creations like the benevolent God of Protestantism. One might also argue that the narrator, who partly ironizes the characters (Davis 1978, 32–33), serves as a role model because he ultimately manages to withstand the transgressive desire to literally enter the world at the

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intradiegetic level. Similarly, the characters in the world of this prose romance are supposed to withstand their transgressive passions (which lead to cross-dressing and transvestism), and to control them through reason. Moreover, the metalepses in Sidney’s text foreground and accentuate the significance of the shepherds: the (ultimately) well-meaning narrator sympathizes with the characters and cares as much for shepherds (such as Dorus) and servants (such as Dametas) as he cares for aristocratic figures (such as Philoclea). The metaphorical metalepses are thus connected to (and expressive of) the general world view of The Old Arcadia. Eileen Z. Cohen describes the attitude of Sidney, the author, as follows: “Sidney was by nature conciliatory and himself not divided from his Protestant brethren by doctrinal differences” (1969, 175). Similarly, the narrator of The Old Arcadia treats the characters as equals (perhaps to suggest that we are all God’s children).

4 The Eighteenth Century The metaleptic jumps during the eighteenth century oscillate between the poles of realism and experimentalism. At first glance, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) primarily contains standard rhetorical metalepses. In the following passage, for instance, the novel’s omniscient narrator acts as if he and the narratee (and, by extension, the author and the reader; Pier 2014, 328) could slide down hills in the storyworld, and he also acts as though they could attend Mr. Allworthy’s breakfast: Reader, take care. I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of as high a hill as Mr Allworthy’s, and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck, I do not well know. However, let us e’en venture to slide down together; for Miss Bridget rings her bell, and Mr Allworthy is summoned to breakfast, where I must attend, and, if you please, shall be glad of your company. (1.4; my emphasis)

The high hill in this passage is of course as metaphorical as the presence of the narrator and narratee during the mentioned breakfast. Later on, we come across another rhetorical movement into the fictional diegesis: “The reader will be pleased, I believe, to return with me to Sophia. She passed the night, after we saw her last, in no very agreeable manner” (4.12; my emphasis). Hanebeck points out that this passage constitutes “a strange kind of metaleptic realism” (2017, 117). Indeed, it is not sufficient to see it as a case of projected simultaneity (which involves the synchronization of the temporal progression at the extradiegetic and the intradiegetic level); we rather get the impression that the “we” (i.e., the narrator and the narratee) is present in one location and time in the storyworld, and that the authorial narrator is able to tell the narratee what happened elsewhere during that time (namely that “Sophia suffered during the

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night”). In the words of Hanebeck, “the narrator has to tell ‘afterwards’ what he can no longer metaleptically show” (117). This is also true of the following passage (where the narrator – after a standard metaleptic scene shift – tells us that “Tom Jones had enough time to repent”): As we have now brought Sophia into safe hands, the reader will, I apprehend, be contented to deposit her there awhile, and to look a little after other personages, and particularly poor Jones, whom we have left long enough to do penance for his past offences. (end of book 11; my emphasis)

These last two examples of metalepsis suggest that the extradiegetic narrator was (at least metaphorically) present at two different intradiegetic places at the same time. We can attribute this ability to what Meir Sternberg calls the omniscient narrator’s “godlike privileges of unhampered vision,” the “free movement in time and space,” and his “knowledge of past and future” (1978, 256–257). Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Fielding, as one of the fathers of the realist novel, uses such strange blends of paradoxes (see also Alber 2016, 94–95). Hanebeck argues that it is debatable whether these metalepses have a function that is “realistic”; but they can at least foster “imaginative immersion into the diegetic universe” (2017, 117n90). Laurence Sterne’s highly metafictional Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), which is often seen as an anticipation of postmodernism, also contains a plethora of metaleptic jumps: some of them are merely rhetorical, but there are also ontological ones. At one point, for example, the chatty first-person narrator explains that he “must leave him [his father, Walter Shandy] upon the bed for half an hour” and uncle Toby “in his old fringed chair sitting beside him” to explain the “extravagance” of his father’s “affliction” (vol. 3, chap. 30). This is clearly “only” a standard case of projected simultaneity. My next example is also a case of rhetorical metalepsis, but it is slightly more complex because the narrator, who is prone to digressions, explicitly states that the synchronization between the progression of time at the extradiegetic and the intradiegetic level does not work out: My mother, you must know, – but I have a fifty things more necessary to let you know first, – I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestic misadventures crowding in upon me thick and three-fold, one upon the neck of another, – [. . .] I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour, and five and thirty minutes are laps’d already. (vol. 3, chap. 38; my emphasis)

Hanebeck explains that the temporal deixis in this passage “collapses the distinction between the diegetic and the extradiegetic level, insofar as the diegetic and extradiegetic relations of temporality are arrayed relative to one frame of reference” (2017, 93; emphasis in original). Hence, this (rhetorical) metalepsis

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has a metafictional or anti-illusionist effect – just like the passage in which the narrator asks the narratee (both at the extradiegetic level) to “shut the door” (vol. 1, book 4) at the intradiegetic level: such textual segments foreground the fictionality of fiction. Tristram Shandy also contains proper ontological metalepses: at one point, for instance, the narrator’s permanent digressions (at the level of the discourse) prevent him from getting his father and his uncle Toby “off the stairs” to put them “to bed” (at the level of the story). Tristram Shandy thus decides to pay “a day-tall critick” (at the extradiegetic level) to help him with his task (at the intradiegetic level; vol. 4, chap. 13; emphasis in original). The investment of “sixpence” ultimately pays off: at the end of the chapter, the critic has got the narrator’s father and his uncle Toby off the stairs and into bed, and Tristram Shandy thanks this critic as follows: “here’s a crown for your trouble” (vol. 4, chap. 13). As Wolf (2005, 89–90) has shown, we are here confronted with an actual transgression of worlds that are located at different levels, namely the story of Tristram’s father and his uncle Toby and the extradiegetic “present” of Tristram as narrator: in a descending metaleptic jump, the extradiegetic critic transmigrates into Tristram’s story to put the two characters into bed for him so that the narrator can indulge in further digressions. We can find a special kind of ontological metalepsis in Charles Gildon’s pamphlet “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D— De F—, of London, Hosier” (1719). In this text, Gildon stages a fictional confrontation between the author Daniel Defoe and his characters Robinson Crusoe and Friday. In this case, the transmigration concerns the threshold between the extratextual and the intratextual level. In Gildon’s pamphlet, Crusoe addresses Defoe as follows: “Yes, it is Crusoe and his Man Friday, who are come to punish thee now, for making us such Scoundrels in thy Writing” (emphasis in original). More specifically, Crusoe is unhappy because Defoe represents him as “a strange, whimsical, inconsistent Being, in three Weeks losing all the Religion of a Pious Education,” while Friday complains about the fact that in the novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), he is “able to speak English tolerably well in a Month or two” but not able “to speak it better in Twelve Years after” (emphasis in original). At the end of the pamphlet, the characters force Defoe to swallow his writings and they then “toss him [about] immoderately” until he has to throw up. While the metalepses in Tom Jones closely correlate with the abilities of the omniscient narrator and ultimately heighten the reader’s immersion in the storyworld, the ones in Tristram Shandy have an anti-illusionist effect. They have to be seen in the context of other metafictional strategies that foreground the inventedness of the novel’s narrative discourse. Examples are the jumbled chronology (it begins in 1718 but ends in 1713), the representation of two black blocks to bemoan the death of the character Yorrick (vol. 1, chap. 12); the white page on which we are

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supposed to draw an image of the widow Wadman (vol. 6, chap. 38); and the lines that are supposed to simulate the development of the plot (vol. 6, chap. 40). In his Theory of Prose, Viktor Šklovskij also argues that Tristram Shandy “lays bare the device[s]” and that “the consciousness of form” in fact “constitutes the content of the novel” ([1925] 1990, 149). A similar kind of metafictionality can be observed in the case of Gildon’s pamphlet, where the confrontation between Defoe and characters from Robinson Crusoe serves to critique Defoe’s choices as an author.

5 The Victorian Period In the Victorian novel, we come across two types of metalepsis, namely standard rhetorical ones and a few ontological ones. With regard to the latter, the omniscient narrator suddenly materializes as a character in the story. As I will show, both types of metalepsis primarily serve to enhance the reader’s immersion in the fictional world. The following passage in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), for instance, is an example of rhetorical metalepsis. The extradiegetic narrator and narratee (and, by extension, the author and the reader; Pier 2014, 328) only descend into the novel’s world as if they were inhabitants of the intradiegetic world of the characters: You shall see them, reader. Step into this neat gardenhouse on the skirts of Whinbury, walk forward into the little parlour – there they are at dinner. [. . .] You and I will join the party, see what is to be seen, and hear what is to be heard. (my emphasis)

Another rhetorical metalepsis can be found in George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859). Here, the narrator invites the narratee to enter the dining room of Mr. Irwine, the vicar, so that she can present the setting in great detail: Let me take you into that dining room, and show you the Rev. Adolphous Irwine [. . .]. We will enter very softly and stand still in the open doorway, without awaking the glossy-brown setter who is stretched across the hearth [. . .]; or the pug, who is dozing, with his black muzzle aloft, like a sleepy president. (my emphasis)

One might argue that since the narrator alludes to the possibility of awaking Mr. Irwine’s pets, he and the narratee must be literally present at the scene. However, the fact that they do not awaken them indicates that we are here confronted with another imaginary transgression of boundaries. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), the narrator at one point seeks to justify her earlier comments about the physical appearance of one of the characters: she explains that “I have called her ‘the old woman’ [. . .] because, in truth, her appearance was so much beyond her years [. . .] she always gave me the idea of age.” Again, the narrator does not actually move from the extradiegetic to the intradiegetic level: she

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only acts as if she could enter the novel’s world to get a sense of what the characters look like (see Warhol 1986, 815). The second case concerns the omniscient narrator’s sudden materialization as a character in the story. The authorial narrator of William Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair (1848), for instance, appears in the world of his characters like a peripheral first-person narrator. The narrator describes this encounter with the characters as follows: “it was at the little comfortable Ducal town of Pumpernickel [. . .] that I first saw Colonel Dobbin.” Later on, the narrator tells us that the character of Tapeworm poured out into the astonished Major’s ears such a history about Becky and her husband as astonished the querist, and supplied all the points of this narrative, for it was at that very table years ago that the present writer had the pleasure of hearing the tale. (my emphasis)

The character of Tapeworm is here (somewhat surprisingly) presented as the source of the narrator’s detailed knowledge about Becky Sharp. Such a meeting is only possible if the authorial narrator, “the Manager of the Performance” who opens and closes the curtain, transmigrates from his own fictional realm at the extradiegetic level into the world of the characters by assuming the shape of an embodied person at the intradiegetic level. Interestingly, the authorial narrator of Eliot’s Adam Bede at one point also announces that he has met his character Adam Bede, and that they have interacted with one another: “I gathered from Adam Bede, to whom I talked of these matters in his old age, that few clergymen could be less successful in winning the hearts of the parishioners than Mr Ryde” (my emphasis). As in Vanity Fair, this interaction is only possible if the narrator moves into the world of the characters by assuming a physical existence. Franz K. Stanzel states that in such cases, the authorial narrator tries “to furnish his personality with a physical existence, to transform himself from an abstract functional role into a figure of flesh and blood” ([1979] 1984, 204). With regard to the specific case of Vanity Fair, Stanzel argues that “the young man in Pumpernickel [. . .] does not yet possess the necessary maturity and detachment, and, at this stage, lacks the mild cynicism of the adult narrator” (204). In other words, there is a realist motivation behind such transmigrations: we are confronted with cases of what Hanebeck calls “metaleptic realism” (2017, 120). The metalepses discussed in this section constitute deliberate metanarrative celebrations of the act of narration which add to the illusion of experiencing a stable narrative world. Indeed, Fludernik writes that “they enhance the realistic illusion of storyworld representation, aiding the narratee’s (as well as the reader’s) imaginative immersion into the story” (2003, 383). Alternatively, one might argue that they serve to convey the illusion that the (fictional) characters are actual people because the narrator/author (or the narratee/reader) can literally meet them, talk to them, or oth-

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erwise interact with them. For Robyn Warhol, such “metalepses are meant to reinforce the reader’s serious sense of the characters as, in some way, real” (1986, 815).

6 Modernism The stream-of-consciousness novels of literary modernism do not contain many metaleptic jumps. It is only sometimes the case that we are confronted with ascending metalepses through which the characters address or view their authors. In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), for instance, the figure of Molly Boom at one point talks to her author (she calls him “Jamesy”) to communicate the fact that she is not happy with her overall situation in the novel. Molly Bloom puts this as follows: “O Jamesy, let me up out of this pooh.” Also, in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1932), the characters look over a wall and thus somehow manage to catch a glimpse of their author (called “the lady”) at her desk. They describe their author in the following words: “the lady sits between the two long windows, writing”; “I see the lady writing”; and “the lady at the table sat writing.” In the case of Ulysses, we are merely confronted with an epistemological (and thus metaphorical) metalepsis: Molly Bloom displays “knowledge of superordinate diegetic universes” (Hanebeck 2017, 85) because she knows the name of her author. In The Waves, on the other hand, we witness an ontological metalepsis, which constitutes a short instance of anti-illusionism or metafiction. In other words, the awareness of the fictionality of fiction is briefly acknowledged and communicated to the reader. However, in contrast to postmodernist authors, modernist ones do not pursue this issue for prolonged periods of time. In The Waves, the character of Bernard immediately urges the character of Susan to run away after they have spotted their author: “We shall be shot! [. . .] We are in a hostile country. We must escape to the beech wood.” Postmodernist authors, by contrast, investigate this “hostile country” (where authors create fictional characters) at great length and in great detail.

7 Postmodernism The playful and highly self-reflexive narratives of postmodernism teem with different types of metalepsis. Ontological metalepses are in fact the most common ones. This should come as no surprise. In the words of Brian McHale, postmodernist narratives foreground ontological questions that bear on modes of fictional existence. McHale puts this as follows:

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The dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like [. . .] “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” [. . .] What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured? (1987, 10; emphasis in original)

Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is an early example of postmodernism that is full of metaleptic jumps. The novel consists of numerous diegetic levels: the extradiegetic narrator is the older version of an unnamed student at University College Dublin. This narrating “I” tells us a story about his student days which is located at the intradiegetic level. At the intradiegetic level, the experiencing “I,” the younger version of the narrating “I,” invents the story of a novelist called Dermot Trellis, which he discusses regularly with another student called Brinsley. The story about Dermot Trellis, a proprietor of the Red Swan Hotel, is located at the hypodiegetic level. Dermot Trellis “in turn” writes a novel about characters such as John Furriskey, the legendary Finn MacCool, and Sheila Lamont, and their story is located at the hypo-hypodiegetic level. Some of these characters begin to narrate stories of their own which are located at the hypo-hypo-hypodiegetic level. Moreover, the characters move freely from one universe to the next, thus blurring ontological boundaries. For instance, Dermot Trellis descends (from the hypodiegetic level) into his own novel (at the hypo-hypodiegetic level), where he impregnates his character Sheila Lamont. She then gives birth to the half-human character of Orlick Trellis: since her child is half fictional and half real, nobody knows in which universe he can exist. Furthermore, the (hypo-hypodiegetic) characters which were invented by Dermot Trellis move into their author’s hotel at the hypodiegetic level and drug their creator. Also, during the characters’ journey to the Red Swan Hotel, the hypo-hypo-hypodiegetic Sweeny, whom Finn MacCool told us about, falls from a tree and joins the hypo-hypodiegetic characters in their journey to the hypodiegetic hotel. Later on, at the Red Swan Hotel, Orlick Trellis and the other characters make up a story in which they torture and try their author, and this narrative actually has an effect on him. When Dermot Trellis is about to be executed inside the characters’ narrative, the hypodiegetic maid Teresa (from the Red Swan Hotel) burns the pages of the manuscript, i.e., “the pages which made and sustained the existence of Furriskey and his true friends.” The burning of these pages does not only end the existence of these hypo-hypodiegetic characters but, for some reason, also the events at both the hypodiegetic and the intradiegetic level. Most of the metaleptic jumps in At Swim-Two-Birds are ascending ones. With the exception of Dermot Trellis’s sex with of Sheila Lamont, all metalepses are jumps from a lower to a higher narrative level. At Swim-Two-Birds thus seems to

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celebrate the transgressive freedom of characters that become their own authors. At first glance, the novel appears to express an anti-authoritarian spirit, which closely correlates with what is described as “an inverted sow neurosis wherein the farrow eat their dam.” However, upon closer inspection, one realizes that the extradiegetic level is not involved in the novel’s metaleptic jumps at all: all the metalepses are “interior” in the sense of Cohn ([2005] 2012, 106). In the course of the novel, the intradiegetic narrator, who starts out as a liberal proponent of a democratic approach to the novel, develops into an authoritarian tyrant who enjoys absolute power over his story as well as the many embedded stories. The extradiegetic narrator is not only the dam that does not get eaten by her farrow; he is also “the sow that eats her farrow” because, in the end, everyone is erased, apart from him. The destruction of all the characters expresses the narrator’s tyrannical attitude regarding his creation (see also Thoss 2015, 177). From this perspective, the novel might illustrate that if people are in a position to exercise power over others, they will do so. In John Fowles’s neo-Victorian novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the authorial narrator literally jumps from the extradiegetic level into the storyworld at the intradiegetic level, where he shares a train compartment with Charles, one of the novel’s protagonists. Through this descending metalepsis, the narrator also moves from the twentieth century into the narrated world, which is set in Victorian England. In contrast to the characters, the narrator lives “in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes,” and also comments on sexuality in the nineteenth century from the perspective of his worldview. During the journey, the narrator, who tells us that he has “the look an omnipotent god [. . .] should be shown to have,” thinks about the question of what to do with the character of Charles. In order to come up with an idea regarding the further development of the plot, he descends into the storyworld: Charles has opened his eyes and is looking at me. There is something more than disapproval in his eyes now; he perceives I am either a gambler or mentally deranged. I return his disapproval, and my florin to my purse. He picks up his hat, brushes some invisible speck of dirt (a surrogate for myself) from its nap and places it on his head. (my emphasis)

This case is different from rhetorical metalepsis because the novel represents the narrator as actually jumping down into the world of his character: he can be seen by Charles and the two figures also exchange looks. One might argue that the novel uses this metaleptic jump to parody the conventions of the Victorian novel. The French Lieutenant’s Woman mocks the idea of a (godlike) omniscient narrator by showing that the narrator of this novel does not really know what do with the character of Charles, self-reflexively thematizes this lack of knowledge, and, in order to gain inspiration, hangs out in the storyworld for a while.

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In his short story “The Enigma” (1975), Fowles also uses metalepsis to problematize generic conventions. This narrative begins like a standard detective story about the mysterious disappearance of John Marcus Fielding, a rather conventional Tory MP. Things begin to change when Sergeant Mike Jennings questions Isobel Dodgson because she looks at the case from the perspective of an author of literature. She tells Jennings that nothing is real. All is fiction. [. . .] Let’s pretend everything to do with the Fieldings, even you and me sitting here now, is in a novel. A detective story. Yes? Somewhere there’s someone writing us. We’re not real. He or she decided who we are, what we do, all about us.

Isobel also explains to the sergeant that “there was an author in [Fielding’s] life. [. . .] Something that had written him. Had really made him just a character in a book.” Somehow, this character urged “our writer [. . .] to commit the terrible literary crime of not sticking to the rules.” This is an example of epistemological metalepsis that presents us with “a character’s display of knowledge of superordinate diegetic universes” (Hanebeck 2017, 85). More specifically, Isobel Dodgson knows that she is a character in a detective story which she rewrites by turning it into a tale of seduction. At the end, she sleeps with Jennings: he deprives her of a “pleasing long dress” and notices that she was “quite defenceless underneath, though hardly an innocent victim in what followed.” This is of course not unproblematic either, because although the character manages to transcend the rules and principles of detective fiction, she is pushed into another set of literary conventions, which closely correlates with male fantasies of wish fulfilment. Indeed, as Pamela Cooper has shown, “Isobel’s fledgling creativity is colonized by a mature artist” who turns her into “a mistress for the story” (1991, 178). Gabriel Josipovici’s “Mobius the Stripper” (1974) is an example of a Möbius strip story. In this narrative, each page has a dividing line between the upper and the lower half. The upper story is about Mobius, an overweight male stripper who thinks that his stripping in a nightclub has a metaphysical dimension: “You see. What I do. My motive. Is not seshual. Is metaphysical. A metaphysical motive, see? I red Jennett. Prust. Nitch. Those boys. All say the same. Is a metaphysical need.” Furthermore, Mobius hears voices: “When I walk I hear them. When I sleep I hear them. When I sit in my room I hear them.” At the end of the upper story, Mobius decides to commit suicide: His fingers tightened on the trigger and the voices were there again. Cocking his head on one side and smiling, Mobius listened to what they had to say. He had time on his hands and to spare. Resting the barrel against his brow and smiling to himself in the mirror as the bulb swung in the breeze over his head, Mobius waited for them to finish.

Meanwhile, the story on the lower part of the page is about a first-person narrator, an unnamed writer of fiction, who suffers from writer’s block, and his girlfriend

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Jenny, who urges him to go to the night club to see Mobius the Stripper so that he may regain his inspiration. At the end of the lower story, the writer finally knows what to write about: I picked up the pen and wrote my name across the top of the sheet, for no reason that I could fathom. And then, suddenly, out of the blue it started to come. Perhaps it was only one story, arbitrary, incomplete, but suddenly I knew that it would make its own necessity and in the process give me back my lost self. Dear Jenny. Dear Mobius. Dear Peacock. “Gone out. Do not disturb.” I scrawled on a sheet of paper, pinned it to the door and locked it. Then I sat down and began to write.

There are two ways in which these two stories might be related to one another. On the one hand, the upper story could be the story that the unnamed writer in the lower part finally writes: this assumption makes sense because the writer begins to write something at the end of the lower story, and also because his girlfriend Jenny keeps suggesting to write about Mobius the Stripper. On the other hand, the lower story could represent the voices that Mobius hears throughout the upper story: this assumption makes sense because the lower story begins with the same phrase as one of the voices Mobius hears in the upper story, namely “I first heard of Mobius the Stripper.” In Josipovici’s short story, these two options are true at the same time, and the result is a Möbius strip, an infinite loop. We are here confronted with a case of “metaleptic madness” in the sense of Hanebeck (2017, 120), namely two stories in a mutual relationship of embedding that leads to circularity and a situation without any definite point of origination. We are no longer in a position to distinguish between different narrative levels. They have, paradoxically, become merged. Various ontological metalepses can also be found in Jasper Fforde’s playful novel The Well of Lost Plots (2003). Here, the character of Thursday Next, a female literary detective, hangs out in the Well of Lost Plots, the place where all fiction is created. Next was blackmailed by a sinister multinational organization called the Goliath Corporation, which wanted Next to free their operative Jack Schitt from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1845), where he is imprisoned. Inside the Well of Lost Plots, Next lives in an unpublished novel called Caversham Heights, and she also works as an apprentice to Miss Havisham from Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861). In a descending metaleptic jump, Next transmigrates from the real world (“the Outland”) into the world of fiction. Also, in an ascending metaleptic jump, Next and Miss Havisham drive “through the barriers of fiction and into the real world.” What follows is a passage in which Next contemplates her existence in the Well of Lost Plots:

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Making one’s home in an unpublished novel wasn’t without its compensations. All the boring day-to-day mundanities that we conduct in the real world get in the way of narrative flow and are thus generally avoided. The car didn’t need refuelling, there were never any wrong numbers, there was always enough hot water, and vacuum-cleaner bags came in only two sizes – upright and pull-along. [. . .] The choice of book for my self-enforced exile had not been arbitrary; when Miss Havisham asked me in which novel I would care to reside I had thought long and hard. Robinson Crusoe would have been ideal considering the climate but there was no one female to exchange with. I could have gone to Pride and Prejudice but I wasn’t wild about high collars, bonnets, corsets – and delicate manners.

Such metaleptic jumps are to be associated with the self-reflexivity typical of postmodernism. The Well of Lost Plots can be read as an expression of playfulness that does not really take anything seriously: the primary purpose is to mock hierarchies or boundaries that we take for granted, or to ridicule literary conventions (such as the ones associated with Jane Austen).

8 Conclusions Ontological metalepses proliferate in the self-reflexive or metafictional narratives of postmodernism: here, we can observe a plethora of ontological metalepses (both ascending and descending, as well as disorienting Möbius strip stories). At the same time, however, there are many metalepses in pre-postmodernist narratives that anticipate the transgressions of diegetic levels in postmodernist texts. Most of these earlier metalepses are metaphorical ones in which we are invited to think that narrators or characters transmigrate between different diegetic levels but the boundary crossings are merely imaginary ones. Such examples can be found in the Renaissance, in the eighteenth century, (frequently) in Victorian novels, and in Ulysses. Then there are cases – in nineteenth-century novels such as Vanity Fair and Adam Bede – in which the authorial narrator (at the extradiegetic level) briefly appears in the (intradiegetic) world of the characters. Both the metaphorical metalepses and the brief descents of the authorial narrator into the world of the characters set important precedents for the ontological metalepses in postmodernist narratives, where the boundaries between worlds or universes are actually violated. Some of the examples in medieval or eighteenth-century narratives, finally, are proper cases of ontological metalepsis because we can observe an actual crossing of worlds at different levels. This is also true of The Waves, where the characters manage to look at their author. What about the changing functions? To begin with, ontological metalepses in the late medieval Fall of Princes must be seen in the context of Roman Catholicism. They are expressive of the desire to investigate the relationship between different

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realms, namely the sphere of our creators and the human world. Despite the playfulness of the metaleptic jumps, the ultimate purpose is to instill moral behavior in readers: otherwise they might be wiped out like Thyestes and Atreus. The rhetorical metalepses in The Old Arcadia, by contrast, establish an analogy between the narrator and the benevolent God of Protestantism. The metalepses suggest that he cares about his creations and treats them as equals (no matter whether they are shepherds, servants, or aristocrats). Metaleptic jumps in the eighteenth century oscillate between the poles of realism and experimentalism (like the literary scene as a whole): the (occasionally rather strange) rhetorical metalepses in Tom Jones heighten the overall illusionism and charm us into believing the omniscient narrator, while the rhetorical and ontological metalepses in Tristram Shandy have an anti-illusionist effect. Sterne uses them to parody novelistic conventions such as the direct reflection of experience in transparent prose or the linear developmental narrative. Similarly, Gildon stages a confrontation between Defoe and his characters to mock and ridicule the author of Robinson Crusoe and the genre of the travel narrative. The rhetorical and ontological metalepses in Victorian fiction, by contrast, intensify the illusion of experiencing a stable narrative world and/or invite us to see the characters as real people. Whereas the very few metalepses in modernist fiction serve to briefly communicate an awareness of the fictionality of fiction to the reader, the many metalepses in postmodernist fiction are designed to warn us of the potential dangers of power positions (At Swim-Two-Birds), to critique literary conventions (The French Lieutenant’s Woman or “The Enigma”), to celebrate the collapse of distinctions and the idea of an ultimate origin (“Mobius the Stripper”), or simply to foreground the idea of radical playfulness (The Well of Lost Plots). It will be interesting to see what happens to metalepsis in post-postmodernist fiction, namely the kind of writing of the twenty-first century that continues to use postmodernist self-reflexivity but does so in the context of a new sincerity or a renewed interest in ethical issues (see Alber and Bell 2019).

References Alber, Jan. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Alber, Jan, and Alice Bell. 2019. “The Importance of Being Earnest Again: Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives Across Media.” European Journal of English Studies 23, no. 2, 121–135. Bal, Mieke. 1981. “Notes on Narrative Embedding.” Poetics Today 2, no. 2, 41–59. Bell, Alice, and Jan Alber. 2012. “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology.” Journal of Narrative Theory 42, no. 2, 166–92.

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Cohen, Eileen Z. 1969. “Poet in the Service of Protestantism: Sir Philip Sidney as Ambassador.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 38, no. 2, 167–175. Cohn, Dorrit. (2005) 2012. “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme.” Translated by Lewis S. Gleich. Narrative 20, no. 1, 105–14. Cooper, Pamela. 1991. The Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity, Femininity. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Davis, Walter R. 1978. “Narrative Methods in Sidney’s Old Arcadia.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18, no. 1, 13–33. Eisen, Ute E., and Peter von Möllendorff. 2013. Über die Grenze: Metalepse in Text- und Bildmedien des Altertums. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Scene Shift, Metalepsis and the Metaleptic Mode.” Style 37, no. 4, 382–400. Genette, Gérard. (1972) 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. (1983) 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. 2004. Métalepse: De la figure à la fiction. Paris: Seuil. Hanebeck, Julian. 2017. Understanding Metalepsis: The Hermeneutics of Narrative Transgression. Berlin: De Gruyter. Häsner, Bernd. 2001. “Metalepsen: Zur Genese, Systematik und Funktion transgressiver Erzählweisen.” PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge. Nelles, William. 1997. Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. New York: Lang. Pier, John. 2005. “Metalepsis.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 303–304. London: Routledge. Pier, John. 2014. “Metalepsis.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, vol. 1, 326–343. 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2006. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shklovsky [Šklovskij], Victor [Viktor]. (1925) 1990. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press. Stanzel, Franz K. (1979) 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Translated by Charlotte Goedsche. Preface by Paul Hernadi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, Meir. 1978. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Thoss, Jeff. 2015. When Storyworlds Collide: Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics. Leiden: Brill and Rodopi. Wagner, Frank. 2002. “Glissements et déphasages: Note sur la métalepse narrative.” Poétique 130: 235–253. Warhol, Robyn. 1986. “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot.” PMLA 101, no. 5, 811–818. Wolf, Werner. 2005. “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of the Possibilities of ‘Exporting’ Narratological Concepts.” In Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan Christoph Meister, Tom Kindt, and Wilhelm Schernus, 83–108. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolf, Werner. 2009. “Metareference across Media: The Concept, Its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” In Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies, edited by Werner Wolf, Katharina Bantleon, Jeff Thoss, and Walter Bernhart, 1–85. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Metalepsis in Czech Literature 1 Definition In the context of narratology, the concept of metalepsis is mainly associated with the name of Gérard Genette. He adopted an older term from ancient rhetoric (metalepsis being understood at the time as a type of metonymy) to characterize the situation when contamination or transgression of narrative levels occurs in a narrative. For example, the levels of narrated events and the narrative itself, of the narrator and the characters, and in certain circumstances, of the author/authorial voice and an addressee/the reader. According to Genette “the transition from one narrative level to another can in principle be achieved only by the narrating, the act that consists precisely of introducing into one situation, by means of a discourse, the knowledge of another situation” ([1972] 1980, 234). The transgression of narrative levels alerts the reader to a specific shift. Such a fact in a narrative text, when the narrator or the addressee of the narrative moves from his position to the level of the characters, which can also be the other way around, Genette called narrative metalepsis. Narrative metalepsis (violation of narrative levels) occurs “when an author (or his reader) introduces himself into the fictive action of the narrative or when a character in that fiction intrudes into the extradiegetic existence of the author or reader”; “such intrusions disturb, to say the least, the distinction between levels” (Genette [1983] 1988, 88). This narrative device can be seen as comic, fantastic, or paradoxical. Genette later modified and elaborated his concept of metalepsis in his book Métalepse: De la figure à la fiction (2004), in which he explored the phenomenon of metalepsis not only in narrative fiction but also in the visual arts. In fact, the phenomenon of metalepsis also occurs in other areas of culture: in theater, painting, film, and so on. Genette was followed by scholars who have explored metalepsis in many contexts and from different perspectives (Pier and Schaeffer 2005; Fludernik 2003; Ryan [2004] 2006; Pier [2009] 2014; Lavocat 2016, 473–520; Hanebeck 2017). One of the key problems associated with the description of metalepsis was identified by Marie-Laure Ryan, who differentiated between rhetorical and ontological metalepsis. This is a distinction that is implicit in Genette’s definitions of metalepsis, although Genette himself used the terms “figural” vs. “fictional” metalepsis. The differentiation between rhetorical and ontological metalepsis is based, among other things, on a reflection of the fact that in certain situations, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-038

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metalepsis takes the form of a rhetorical or stylistic figure in a narrative, while in others, it fundamentally affects the structure of the narrative and the fictional world as a whole. According to Ryan, rhetorical metalepsis “opens a small window that allows a quick glance across levels, but the window closes after a few sentences, and the operation ends up reasserting the existence of the boundaries,” while the ontological variety “opens a passage between levels that results in their penetration, or mutual contamination” ([2004] 2006, 207). In this context, however, it should be noted that Ryan introduced both concepts and gave them a specific meaning within her own narrative theory (theory of illocutionary and ontological boundaries). With another conception of the rhetorical and ontological aspects of metalepsis, Fludernik (2003), Schlickers (2005), and Pier (2005, 252–253), but earlier, for example, Wagner (2002), Malina (2002), or Nelles (1997, 152–157), had already developed a different conception. One of the critical points of Ryan’s conception is that it is very difficult to distinguish between rhetorical and ontological metalepsis when analyzing specific texts. In fact, the two types often overlap. This is due, among other things, to the fact that metalepsis is often accompanied by metafictional and (meta)narrative commentary, a device that serves not to construct a fictional world but to interpret and evaluate it. However, metalepsis itself can influence the construction and form of the fictional world. The line between metalepsis that is merely rhetorical and metalepsis that fundamentally influences the ontological form of the fictional world (ontological metalepsis) is thus very thin. The conceptual distinction presented by Ryan can be used to explain the metalepsis that arises when using a specific narrative device: addressing the addressee (the reader). Using Ryan’s conceptual distinction of metalepsis, we can describe the main types of addressing the addressee. The first type, addressing the addressee, has a temporary, de facto rhetorical function (rhetorical metalepsis). The second type, addressing the addressee fundamentally, affects the overall shape of the narrative and the fictional world (ontological metalepsis). In addition to these two basic types, one can refer to a third type of address to the addressee: an invitation to the reader to do something that has nothing to do with reading. This type can be characterized as performative metalepsis. Although the figure of addressing the addressee in a narrative is an important narrative device, it is not always a metalepsis. It is thus necessary to distinguish between when metalepsis (the transgression of narrative levels) occurs and when it does not. Metalepsis occurs when the author or narrator speaks to a character, to the extradiegetic narratee, or to the reader in the narrative.

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2 Addressing the Addressee as a Narrative Device One example of the poet’s or the writer’s concern for the reader that can be found in literary texts across the centuries is the narrative device of addressing the addressee. This is a figure of speech (that can also take the form of an apostrophe) whose function, since the earliest times of literature, has been to arouse the reader’s interest. The author addresses the addressee as in everyday speech. Poetics and rhetoric coincide in this respect. According to Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1404a 10–15; 1415a 1–4, 35–37), the speaker must aim to immediately engage the audience, to sway it to his side. In principle, the figure of address has the same function in literary texts, namely to arouse interest and establish communication. The classical form of addressing the addressee is “dear reader,” “gentle reader,” or simply “reader” (Schmid 2010, 80; Prince [2009] 2014; Jedličková 1992, 45). In one of the earliest surviving late antique novels, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses from the second century CE (Harrison [2000] 2004), the following address appears in the introduction: “Give me your ear, reader: you will enjoy yourself” (Apuleius [1998] 2004, 1). The goal of arousing interest, of giving a feeling of mutual closeness between narrator and reader, has lost none of its effect even after eighteen centuries. Another example of the use of the narrative device of address can be seen in the work of the Czech theologian and educator Jan Amos Comenius, specifically in his The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart ([1623] 1998). Here, in a short introductory section entitled “To the Reader,” Comenius briefly outlines the main motives and intentions of his work. He mentions, among other things, the manner of execution of his writings: “Reader, what you will read is no mere invention, even though it may bear resemblance to a fable” (55). Similarly to the term “reader,” Comenius also used the word “Christian” when addressing his readers. Like many writers, philosophers, and theologians of the time, he was convinced that every reader should first and foremost be a Christian. Concluding his preface, he says: “Farewell, dear Christian” (55). Apuleius and Comenius used the word “reader” in their texts, while of course they could have had no idea of the number, opinions, or experience of the readers they were addressing. They directed their words to the addressee, which was part of their specific textual strategy (Dowden 1982; Tilg 2014). Addressing the addressee (the extradiegetic narratee, the reader) in the prefaces of literary works is one of its most common uses (Prince [1973] 1980; Eco [1979] 1984; Schmid 2014). The addressee of a narrative generally appears at the beginning of the narrative or at the conclusion. It thus forms a kind of framework for the literary work – an “entrance” and an “exit.” Prefaces (but also often postscripts) provide readers with background information about the work, encouragement,

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and a seemingly personal invitation to read, which has a metaleptic effect (the distance between the author/authorial voice and the addressee is minimized), but they are not metalepses sui generis. In this context, it should be noted that addressing the reader in these paratexts  – on the book’s title page in prose as in poetry or before the narrative proper begins – was a common publishing practice until the eighteenth century. In Comeniusʼs The Labyrinth, the entire preface is dedicated to the reader: “To the Reader” (1998 [1623], 54–55). For many years, addressing the reader had an important promotional function.

3 Metalepsis and Types of Addressing the Addressee The narrative device of addressing the addressee has a long and rich history in Czech and world literature (Červenka [1993] 1996). Its use is not an end in itself, but is instead one of many textual strategies employed by the author to appeal to the reader and influence him to cooperate with the text in a certain way, to participate in its “realization.” Every address to the addressee of the narrative aims for a result, a concrete (re)action. From a functional point of view, three types of addressing the addressee of a narrative text can be distinguished. Individual types can also be viewed from a historical perspective. In Czech literature, there are three successive developmental phases in the use of addressing the addressee.

3.1 Addressing the Addressee as a Rhetorical Metalepsis Addressing the addressee directly can be described as rhetorical (or “minimal”) metalepsis (cf. Pier 2005, [2009] 2014). Here the boundary between narrator and addressee (the intradiegetic or the extradiegetic narratee) is broken down. Addressing the addressee is the author’s specific textual and communicative strategy. The author’s intention in addressing the addressee (the extradiegetic narratee) is to focus his attention and motivate him to read further. However, the apostrophe can also have a metaleptic effect. In the history of Czech literature, evidence of rhetorical metalepsis can be found in texts written in Old Slavonic (tenth century) and in medieval legends and chronicles (from the tenth to the fifteenth century). From then until the eighteenth century, however, such instances are quite rare.

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3.2 Address as Part of the Narrative and the Game of Fiction (Ontological Metalepsis) There are a number of narrative texts in which addressing the addressee takes the form of a textual strategy that is part of the narrative and the game of fiction. The author’s metaleptic communication with the addressee can be a dialogue in which the addressee acquires the status of one of the narrative characters. The narrator involves him/her in the plot, playing a game of fiction that they create together. Laurence Sterne ([1759–1767] 1985) was the master of this involvement of the addressee in the narrative. In Czech literature, the first examples of this type of address, which influences the overall construction and ontology of the narrative, can be found in the nineteenth century, when modern Czech literature began to take shape. The works of its main representatives belong already to the twentieth century (e.g., Karel Čapek, Vladislav Vančura, Vítězslav Nezval).

3.3 Call to Action (Performative Metalepsis) Although this way of addressing the addressee has much in common with the previous type (it contributes significantly to the play of fiction and the ontology of narrative), regarding its form and function, it can be defined as a separate type. Although the figure of address is a textual element, its performative effect is often not limited to the narrative text. Extradiegetic narratees are challenged and motivated to take action that is not directly tied to the narrative or in some cases rather distracts from it. This type of call to action by the addressee (the extradiegetic narratee, i.e., the reader) is not very common in world literature. In Czech literature, however, a few notable examples can be found, especially in literature for children and young people, as early as the first half of the twentieth century.

4 The Middle Ages: Forms of Rhetorical Metalepsis Literature written in the Czech language began to appear in the Czech lands relatively late – in the thirteenth century. Until then, the literary tradition developed mainly thanks to Old Slavonic and Latin, but also to Hebrew and German. The oldest literary texts date from the ninth century. These were religious (liturgical) texts that were written in connection with the Christian mission of Constantine and Methodius to Great Moravia. First came the Old Slavonic Proglas – a verse preface

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to the translation of the Gospels – and later also legends about the lives of the two missionaries. Metalepsis as a narrative device does not appear in these early medieval texts. However, one significant rhetorical element that creates a metaleptic effect does appear in these texts: apostrophe. In the Proglas, which was probably written by Constantine the Philosopher, the meaning of books, especially biblical texts, will be enhanced when the reader is addressed. In this context, the author then asks: “What man does not understand this? Who does not use a wise parable that gives us the correct interpretation?” (Constantine [ninth century] 1966). It is evident from the overall composition of the text and the style used (repetition of words, iambic verse, etc.) that the author employed poetic, rhetorical, and narrative devices used in Greek and Byzantine literature (Vašica 1966). The synthesis of Old Slavonic and Latin erudition is represented by another important text – the Latin legend Vita et passio sancti Venceslai et sancte Ludmile ave eius (Life and Passion of St. Wenceslas and His Grandmother St. Ludmilla; also known as Christian’s Legend). The legend was written at around the end of the tenth century. The author (who introduces himself in the text as a Christian) describes the life of the Bohemian saints Wenceslas and Ludmilla. He also narrates the development of Christianity in the Czech territory and the connection with Constantine the Philosopher and Methodius and Great Moravia. The legend is elegant. The narrative is told in the past tense, and direct speech is used to emphasize the authenticity of the speeches. The author dedicates his narrative to the Czech bishop Vojtěch (St. Vojtěch), whom he also addresses directly several times in the text. For example: You read this narrative, gracious bishop, and wonder exceedingly how, what the priests of the Church themselves, by the grace of the highest God, as you know, could scarcely do, a man of the laity did very conscientiously. (“Kristiánova legenda” [tenth century] 2011, 115)

In terms of narrative style and construction, it is interesting that the legend is dominated by the past tense, which is combined with direct speech so as to increase the authenticity of the main characters. However, the address to the bishop is expressed in the present tense. The address itself does not take the form of a narrative figure, as was often the case in ancient literature, but rather of an elaborate reflection. It is a narrative digression that slows down the rhythm of the narrative. Finally, the reflection ends with a sentence: “But let us continue the narrative we have begun!” (115). The author then returns to recounting the life of the Czech martyr Wenceslas. The function of the address and of the whole reflection, which extends the main line of the narrative, is obviously rhetorical. This is confirmed by another narrative device used by the author of the legend to emphasize the similarity of the events that took place in the life of Jesus and in the life of St. Wenceslas. Like the address to the bishop, this device appears in the present tense: “As I write this,

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behold, the memory of [. . .] comes to my mind” (116). The narrator’s sudden intervention in the narrative not only creates the illusion that the events are occurring at the present time, but also informs us of his own creative achievement: writing and reflection thereon. The most famous and influential Latin text written in the Czech lands at the beginning of the twelfth century was Cosmasʼs Chronica Boemorum (Chronicle of the Czechs). Cosmas was the dean of the chapter at the church of St. Vitus in Prague. In this chronicle, he outlines the history of the entire Czech nation from the earliest times to present. In his narrative of the origin of the Bohemians, he recounts the oldest myths and legends even though his focus was primarily on the ruling dynasty of the Přemyslids. Cosmasʼs chronicle is an important historical document because the author critically evaluated the origins of his sources. In addition, it was long a model for how to write and narrate about the Czech past. Cosmas intersperses his narrative with many entries and commentaries, deliberately drawing attention to the construction of his narrative. At the end of an episode, he states “However, enough about that,” asks “What next?,” or comments “But let us be silent about those about whom we are silent and return to where we have retreated a little” (Cosmas [1125] 1991, 27, 30; [1125] 1949, 28). Cosmas often comments on his narrative, but his entries into the narrative remain at the level of rhetorical metalepsis and narrative commentary. The chronicle also contains a passage characterized by metaleptic paradox. This is found in a note written by an unknown author on the last page of the chronicle: “the author of this chronicle, Cosmas, the venerable dean of the church of Prague, died on 21 October [1125]” (Cosmas [1125] 1949, 207). Included in the narrative of the history of the Czechs is information about the death of its author! This note remains an integral part of all subsequent editions of the Cosmas chronicle. Written Czech literature began to emerge in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In terms of genre, works included legends (often in verse), religious songs, sermons, chronicles, drama, and prose. Many of these genres adopted rhetorical metalepsis, but also narrative commentary (Koten 2020), which by then had become a common literary convention. Many legends begin with a call to read attentively or with a direct address to the readers/listeners: “Hear, old men, and you, children, / what I have to tell you [. . .]” (Procopius [fourteenth century] 1997, 107). A remarkable form of address is attested in the texts of the lay theologian Thomas of Štítné. He wrote many of his texts for his children (of which he had five; only one daughter, Anežka, survived him), whom he directly named and addressed in the text. For example: “My God commanded me, as he does every father who has children, whether spiritually or corporeally, that I should lead you, my children, in his path and introduce him to you” (Štítný [1376] 1991, 244). In several of his texts, however, in addition to the

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address and the abundance of apostrophes, concrete examples of metalepsis can be found where he enters as a narrator into his narrative. When explaining the Christian phenomenon of transubstantiation, for example, he pointed out that some university masters could still make him uncomfortable, even though he is past his age: “I am seventy years old” (cf. Gebauer 1900, 101). Thomas of Štítné was an important Czech writer: He was the first to use the vernacular in theological literature and thus to try to enrich the word stock and the means of expression of the Czech language. Also, he was the first prose writer to address himself to a lay public and to introduce his audience to religious concerns. (Schamschula 1991, 243)

A noticeable change in Czech literature occurred in the first half of the fifteenth century in connection with the Hussites, a religiously oriented movement that sought to resolve a deep social and ecclesiastical crisis (cf. Šmahel 2001). The Hussites were a precursor of the great European religious reformations (Luther, Zwingli, etc.). Legends and epic compositions receded into the background at this time, while Hussite manifestos, sermons, and spiritual and war songs spread that contained numerous rhetorical metalepses and apostrophes.

5 Humanism and Baroque: The Spread of Metalepsis While the emergence and spread of European humanist literature dates to the fourteenth century, Czech humanist-oriented literature emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Hussite Wars played a major role in this delay in development. Writers who translated foreign literature into Czech worked to bring Czech literature back into contact with European culture. One of them was Hynek of Poděbrady, who translated several novels by Boccaccio. In them, as is known, there are many examples of metalepsis. Bohuslav Hasištejnský of Lobkovic is one of the main representatives of Latin humanism in Bohemia. He is the author of verse compositions, but also of prose reflections, which testifies to his extensive knowledge of ancient philosophy, poetics, and rhetoric (especially Cicero and Seneca). In his philosophical prose work De miserere humana (On Human Misery, 1495), he describes the development of man and its various stages. He concludes that man cannot find happiness in this life. Only those who are virtuous find happiness, for they attain immortality. Hasištejnský uses various narrative methods in his text: he switches freely between first-, second-, and third-person narratives, asks rhetorical questions, uses

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apostrophe, and significantly interferes with the rhythm of the narrative with his comments and subjective attitudes. It is the abundance of rhetorical metalepsis and narrative comments and external (narrator’s) intervention in the narrative that clearly draws attention to the construction of the text. In his narrative about the behavior of young men in love, he makes the following subjective comments, which creates a metaleptic effect: “I fear that if we did not call them the most miserable creatures, we would seem greater fools than those in love” (Hasištejnský 1997 [1495], 269). It is also important to mention that Hasištejnský is the author of extensive correspondence. The tradition of letters as a literary form has its origins in Czech literature before the Hussite period. In the humanist period, letter-writing became more widespread, and letters began to take on a personal character, often in a stylized literary form. Examples include the correspondence of Hasištejnský or Karel the Elder of Žerotín (Karel starší 1982). Among the literary genres that became dominant in Czech humanism were chronicles and travelogues. There were two reasons for this. First, the spread of the printing press, making books more available to the public. Inseparably linked to this was the proliferation of genres in which narrative was used. Chronicles and travelogues were read for information, but also for entertainment (cf. Kopecký 1988; Petrů 1996). Very popular, for example, were the Czech Chronicle of Bohemia (1543) by Václav Hájek of Libočany and the travelogue by Kryštof Harant of Polžice and Bezdružice (1608). Both books were written in a high style, containing many traditional narrative modes and rhetorical techniques (e.g., direct address to the reader, use of apostrophes, poetic similes). Rhetorical metalepses in the form of addressing readers and the author’s highly subjectivized narrative commentary were already common at this time. The narrator’s entry into the narrative can also be evidenced from entertainment literature. It can be found in the German fantasy story Historia, about the Life of Dr. Jan Faustus, for example. The comments on his narrative employ rhetorical metalepsis when the narrator states “And enough has been said about that. Let us proceed further to what we set out to say” (Historia [1587] 1989, 29). The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) made a significant impact on the history of the Czech nation and literature, the most important event being the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. A scholar and pedagogue, John Amos Comenius, is mentioned in Czech literature as the main representative of the Protestant baroque literature (developed mainly in exile). Although his literary and scholarly (narrative) texts (e.g., The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart [1623] and The Way of Light [1668]) contain many narrative devices of address and apostrophe, they are not always a constitutive element of the narrative itself.

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Things are quite different in the case of the Catholic poet and historian Bohuslav Balbín, a member of the Society of Jesus. In his historical writings, he employs numerous narrative comments and authorial metalepses. For example, in his book Epitome historica rerum Bohemicarum; seu, Historiae Boleslaviensis (Extract from Czech History; or, History of Boleslav, 1677), Balbín constantly interrupts his narrative of Czech history. Through his entries, commentaries, and additional remarks (sometimes very ironic), he presents the reader with a subjective assessment of selected historical events. For example: All the articles of this synod (which I have in an old manuscript book) contain only good and Catholic ideas. But if only Conrad had wanted to defend what he had once rightly and piously established, if only he [. . .]. (Balbín [1677] 1983, 316–317)

Balbín had a superb literary style, and his subjectivized entries into the narrative greatly enhance the appeal of his texts and their readability. It is no coincidence that the baroque is understood in the Czech context as the period when modern subjectivity was born. It is Balbínʼs historical narratives – along with some chronicles and travelogues – that demonstrate how rhetorical metalepsis (but also metanarrative commentary) became an integral part of the narrative. Czech baroque literature is traditionally described as literature dominated by religious (Catholic) themes, the main genres being spiritual poetry, legends, Jesuit dramas, sermons, meditations, and prayers (Malura 2015). It was in homiletic texts, which were in fact narrative, that metalepsis was often used, along with the latest rhetorical and poetic techniques.

6 Nineteenth Century: Romanticism and Realism From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, changes in Czech culture and science began to manifest themselves in connection with the Enlightenment and the reforms of Emperor Joseph II. As a result, the Czech National Revival took shape, the aim of which was to restore the use of the Czech language in science and literature (cf. Novák [1946] 1986). The first half of the nineteenth century was a period when, in addition to national ideas, the ideas of pre-romanticism and romanticism were spreading in Czech literature (cf. Vodička [1948] 1994; Haman 2007; Tureček et al. 2012; Tureček 2018). The main representative of Czech romanticism is the poet Karel Hynek Mácha. He is also the author of several prose works. His masterpiece, however, is the lyric-epic poem May (1836). The theme of the poem is the tragic story of Jarmila and Vilém. Vilém discovers that his girlfriend Jarmila has been seduced. He kills the

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seducer, later discovering that it is his father. He is punished for his crime through execution. The poem is unique in its structure, verse, rhythm, and philosophical reflections. At the very end, there is an apostrophe which has the character of an ontological metalepsis. Next to the name of the main characters, the author’s name also appears: “Hynek! Vilém!! Jarmila!!!” (Mácha [1836] 2005, 117). The appearance of the author’s name in the poem brings about a semantic change that significantly shifts the overall meaning of the work. It is not just the tragedy of the characters about whom the story is told, but human tragedy in general. Of course, Mácha often used metalepsis in his prose as well. His words from the postscript to the historical short story “Křivoklad” (1834) are known and often quoted. The story was part of a larger body of historical prose. The individual stories were named for Czech castles (including “Křivoklad”). In the text, the author of the story again becomes part of the narrative. He describes what his next stories will look like. The last passages of the “Křivoklad” story end with a gentle address to the reader: “I am very pleased if my readers are still expecting something – I am finished” (Mácha [1834] 1986a, 81). Romanticism brought not only new themes to poetics but also new narrative techniques. This includes the role and position of the narrative device of addressing the reader and apostrophes in general. The apostrophe is used much more frequently in prose, but also in poetry, compared to previous periods. Moreover, it is directed to such realities as deserted places, forests, rivers, ruins, and so on. Mácha, for example, many times directs his apostrophes to landscapes or mountains. The metaleptic effect of his apostrophe is clear in the case of his pathetic narrative: “The glorious mountains! Ancient how proudly you lift your foreheads to the cloudy sky; endless are the days of your stay!” (Mácha [1862] 1986b, 83). Realist fiction, which became established in Czech literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, abandoned Romantic pathos. However, apostrophes relating to the landscape and the environment generally remained an integral part of the poetics of Czech realist narrators. For example, the very first sentence in the novel The Village Novel (1869) by the Czech writer Karolina Světlá begins with an apostrophe – an address to Mount Ještěd: “I feel sorry for you, you old Ještěd! If our poets sing of the Czech mountains, your name has never been heard in their songs” ([1869] 2019, 7). The inclusion of this apostrophe is intentional because the author then sets the place and the story of the novel in the surroundings of this mountain in the north of Bohemia. It was evident in several texts from the eighteenth century that addressing the reader is not just a narrative device that takes the form of embellishing or defamiliarizing (Sládek 2018) the narrative, but has an essential function and role in the construction of the narrative. It was primarily realist writers who began to work with the rhetorical device of addressing the addressee as an integral part of the narrative and the game of fiction.

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One of the most famous realist Czech writers, Božena Němcová, author of the novel The Grandmother (1855), in which she recounts her memories of her grandmother and life in the countryside, communicates with the reader in such a way that she involves him/her in the story. At the end of the novel, we can read the following sentences: It is not the purpose of this little book to describe the life of the young people who grew up around Grandmother; neither do I wish to weary the reader by leading him from the gamekeeper’s to the mill and back again, through the small valley with its unchanging way of life. (Němcová [1855] 2011, 327)

The quoted passage clearly has the form of a rhetorical metalepsis. The sentence is part of a summary description of events that happened in the last years of the life of the novel’s main character, the grandmother. The author counts the reader as another participant in the story: Němcová guides him/her through the landscape of the story and is considerate toward him/her. For a moment there is a metaleptic transgression of the narrative planes: the narrator and the reader. The Czech poet, journalist, and novelist Jan Neruda, who in his book Prague Tales from the Little Quarter (1878) uses several narrative techniques to achieve the effect of metalepsis, also counts on the reader. He addresses the reader and uses apostrophes, but often comments on his creative process. In the short story “A Week in a Quiet House,” he links his metaleptic commentary to a description of the place of the story: It is now time for me to describe in more detail the setting and characters of our story. As to the latter, I hope they will emerge of themselves as the week progresses. As for the setting, I can say with certainty that it is one of the quietest houses of the oh-so-quiet Malá Strana [Little Quarter – a quarter in the center of Prague]. (Neruda [1878] 2008, 24–25)

Here, and in other parts of the storybook, Neruda works with setting and space in the sense that it is “ours.” As for him, it is common to both the author and the reader: “It is evening, and the setting of our story is just like [. . .]” (35). It would seem that authorial commentary and metalepsis make it difficult to read literary short stories that realistically depict everyday life. The result (and not only in Nerudaʼs tales) is that it is the author’s communication with the addressee through narrative and metanarrative commentary that makes the story objective and credible (cf. Vodička [1951] 1998; Doležel 1973, [1993] 2014b; Fořt 2014). It is interesting that Neruda – like Mácha or Němcová – used the most effective metalepsis at the end of his narrative. The last story in Prague Tales from the Little Quarter is entitled “Figures: Idyllic Fragments from the Notes of an Apprentice Attorney.” The narrator and main character of the story is a Dr. Krumlovsky looking for a quiet and peaceful place to prepare for his lawyer’s exam. The ideal home should

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be a modest house in the Little Quarter. However, he gradually discovers that the Little Quarter is not as quiet and idyllic a location as he had expected. Disappointed, Dr. Krumlovsky runs away from the Little Quarter in the end. The last sentence of the tale (and indeed of the whole book) then expresses this disappointment, which is addressed to the author as well: “Please, Mr. Neruda, no more tales from the Malá Strana!” (Neruda [1878] 2008, 312). The narrative levels are transgressed as the narrator addresses the author, who thus becomes part of the narrative (cf. Schmid [2017] 2021, 222–223). The fact that this is the last sentence is significant. Metalepsis thus influences the semantics and interpretation of the whole book of tales. A significant feature of nineteenth-century Czech literature was the increased use of rhetorical metalepsis, especially the narrative device of addressing the addressee in the narrative and apostrophe, but also of ontological metalepsis. Metalepsis became an integral part of the game of fiction. However, in combination with other narrative techniques (cf. Doležel 1960, 1973, 2014a, [1993] 2014b; Janáčková 1989; Jedličková and Koten 2018), it paradoxically reinforced the effect of the real in some literary texts.

7 The Twentieth Century: From Modernism to Postmodernism The history of modern Czech literature is also the history of external (historical and political) interventions in its development. It is relatively easy to determine the year when postmodernism entered Czech culture. It was in 1989, following the fall of Communism. Of course, the basic features of postmodernism had already been present in literature before that. However, as a complex paradigm covering the whole of culture and society, postmodernism only came into its own in the 1990s. If we look at the history of Czech literature, the basic elements of postmodern literature, such as the pluralization of narrative, essayistic reflexivity, the multiple meanings of the text, the blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality, metanarrative, and so on, can be found already in the literary works of authors from the first half of the twentieth century who sought to update the poetic language and the novel form, in the direction of the Czech avant-garde (cf. Winner 2014). These included writers such as Vítězslav Nezval, Karel Čapek, and Vladislav Vančura. They often used minimal metalepses in their prose, and ontological metalepses, which are involved in the structural construction of the narrative text and the creation of a concrete fictional world, were a common part of their works of art. Vladislav Vančura is an author in whose literary works one can most likely find various types and forms of metalepsis (cf. Mukařovský [1966] 2001, [1940s, second

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half] 2006, 6–13; Holý 1990; Chitnis 2007). In his novel Markéta Lazarová (1931), the transgression of narrative levels and agents of literary communication is evident. In the text, we find many examples of the narrator addressing the reader with a certain request or demands: Mad acts of folly are randomly sown. Let us give this tale a setting in the Mladá Boleslav region of Bohemia, during a time of trouble, the king struggling to maintain the security of his highways, facing severe difficulties with the literally criminal conduct of the nobles, and worse still, they all but laugh aloud as they spill blood. (Vančura [1931] 2016, 11)

Elsewhere we can read: Ladies and gentlemen, readers, God invents us with such a lust for life that we trust Him even in our hour of death. We surrender to the body, that divine sculpture, and act upon what our magnificent heart whispers to us. (73)

Or elsewhere: “Bear with me, for I will soon relate what became of Alexandra and what fate befell Kristian” (77). Of note is metalepsis in which the distance between the narrator and the characters disappears and where the author himself becomes one of the characters in the narrative. This is not an entirely new and unusual situation (cf. Nezval 1930, 42; Mukařovský [1933] 2021, 102–103). The first use of this form of metalepsis comes, as already mentioned, from the Romantic period. Literary works of art in which metalepsis takes the form of a representation of itself are special cases. The author and his work of art mirror themselves. A prime example is given by Marie Majerová in her book The Dam (1932), which tells the story of the construction of a large dam. In the dialogue of several characters, it is stated that those who want to know more about the dam should read “the history written about the dam by Marie Majerová, who thirty years ago fell madly in love with the River Vltava and its dam” (Majerová [1932] 2010, 279). The book about the dam written by Majerová is mentioned in the book about the dam written by Majerová. It is a classic mise an abyme, where an endlessly repeating sequence is used (cf. Cohn [2005] 2012). Karel Čapek, one of the most famous Czech writers (cf. Harkins 1962), in his dystopian novel The Absolute at Large (1922), describes the events surrounding the invention of a special carburetor which, in addition to processing matter, creates not only electrons but also the Absolute. In his narrative, Čapek addresses the reader in the words of the chronicler of the Absolute, and this is because the next chapter is number 13. This number is commonly associated with misfortune, so the question for the author is whether it should be omitted from the book: There is going to be a mix-up of some kind in this unfortunate chapter, you may be sure. Of course, the author could quite calmly head it Chapter XIV, but the observant reader would feel that he had been cheated out of Chapter XIII, and no one could blame him, since he has paid

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to have the whole narrative. Besides, if you are afraid of the number thirteen, you have only to skip this chapter. It will certainly not cause you to lose much light on the obscure affair of the Factory for the Absolute. (Čapek [1922] 1974, 103)

This quotation is not only evidence of metalepsis, which is an important part of the narrative, but also of metalepsis that can be described as performative. It is such an address to the reader that at the same time it invites him to take further action. The narrator demands cooperation from the addressee. It is noticeable that the figure of address has a specific role in this context. If the fiction is to “work,” the narrator assumes that his assignment will be fulfilled. Because of its nature, the given task – and subsequently the whole passage – has an ironic and comic effect. It was most likely Čapekʼs intention. Although this way of addressing the reader has much in common with ontological metalepsis (it participates actively in the game of fiction), regarding its form and function, it can be defined as a separate type: performative metalepsis. Although the form of address is a textual element, its performative effect extends beyond the narrative text. Readers are urged to act in a way that is not directly related to the story or that in some cases distracts from it. Such calls to action by the reader are not common in world literature. In Czech literature, a number of examples can be found as early as the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in children’s literature. One writer who produced such works was Jaroslav Foglar. Known by the Czech public as one of the promoters of scouting, he had a strong educational and pedagogical focus. Although his stories and novels are not very complex in structure and the literary characters are often schematic, they have long been very popular with readers aged ten to fifteen. In his novels, Foglar often addresses his readers directly. He comments on the narrative and sets various tasks for readers. In Boys from the Beaver River (Foglar [1937] 2019), he tells the story of a group of boys who form a community and spend summer holidays together at a summer camp. The narrator comments as follows on an occurrence that takes place in the novel: “What would you do if you saw a fire or witnessed an accident? Would your legs go numb and your chin shake? Or would you be able to arrange help manfully? Think about it!” (97) This address to the reader will not necessarily interrupt the reading process, for the game of fiction can continue uninterrupted. However, the novel asks the reader to do more than simply read. It presses him to engage in a different activity altogether: Do you have a strong will? Are you a master of yourself? Can you command yourself? You can’t!! YOU CAN’T!!! Just see for yourself! Stop reading now – right at the most exciting part – and write your homework for school tomorrow or clean your shoes. That is the best way to know if you are the master of your will. (192)

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What does the author think the ideal reader should do? Stop reading and do something else? The performative effect of addressing the reader in this way is crucial. If the reader cooperates and follows the instructions given by the author, the game of fiction is not only a matter of the reader’s performance. It is intensified or even (in extreme cases) replaced by an activity (performance) of another kind. Performative metalepsis is not a metalepsis that would complete the previous development. It is not the last and final stage in the development of metalepsis in Czech literature. It is only one of the developmental phases, one of the types of metalepsis. It is an example of metalepsis that originates in the textual sphere but moves beyond the text, forming a distinct type of metalepsis. Underlying performative metalepsis is the assumption that readers respond to each address in a certain way. And of course, not to follow the author’s instructions is also a form of response. A certain paradox of postmodern Czech literature is that in the 1990s, it followed two completely different literary paths. One took the form of quasi-documentary literature (mainly diaries, memoirs, autobiographies were published). The other took the form of imaginative and fantasy literature. This paradox can be explained by the role of the narrator. Writers (and narrators) were aware of their situation following the fall of Communism. Through their literary works and their narratives, they tried either (1) to find their place in the world and make sense of the present (as in the case of the authentic/documentary prose line), or (2) to seek to understand their own ideas, dreams, and fears (as in imaginative prose). The possibility of affecting the past (especially the Communist period) was very limited in this respect for both tendencies. Nevertheless, postmodern Czech literature turned to the past: often, it was able to come to terms with the past only through irony and comedy. One of the most effective ways of achieving this was metalepsis (in its many forms), but also metanarrative reflection and narrative commentary. The most prominent supporters and promoters of postmodernism in Czech prose are Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Jiří Kratochvil, Daniela Hodrová, Karel Milota, Michal Ajvaz, Jáchym Topol, Miloš Urban, and others (cf. Jankovič 1996; Holý [2008] 2010; Steiner 2000; Novotný 2002; Chvatík 2004; Doležel [1993] 2014b; Šebek 2021).

8 Conclusion It is possible to outline the development of metalepsis in Czech literature over several centuries – from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century – only in a schematic way. The phenomenon of metalepsis was grasped by considering the function and posi-

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tion of the figure of addressing the addressee in the narrative. Narrative analysis of a few literary texts shows that the narrative device of addressing the addressee has basically three main forms: (1) rhetorical metalepsis (addressing is part of the author’s textual and communicative strategy), (2) ontological metalepsis (addressing the reader is an integral part of narrative and a game of fiction), and (3) performative metalepsis (addressing requires the addressee to perform various activities). These three types of fictional address are ideal-typical, the types most often encountered in Czech narrative literature from the earliest period to the present. Historical development shows that the use of metalepsis has also changed along with the evolution of the Czech language and narrative methods. While medieval Czech narratives were dominated by rhetorical metalepsis, during the eighteenth, and especially the nineteenth century, metalepsis became a natural part of narratives and their game of fiction. Instructing the reader to undertake certain acts and communicating with him was already widespread in world literature in the nineteenth century. These instructions mostly concerned how to read and interpret the narrative. However, it was not until the twentieth century that literary texts began to make demands on the readers to perform actions that took them “outside” the narrative itself (performative metalepsis). Although this survey of the evolution of metalepsis in Czech literature is brief and selective, it is an invitation to undertake more comprehensive research on the subject.

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Kopecký, Milan. 1988. Český humanismus. Prague: Melantrich. Koten, Jiří. 2020. Poetika narativního komentáře: Rétorický vypravěč v české literatuře. Prague – Brno: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR – Host. “Kristiánova legenda. Život a umučení svatého Václava a jeho báby svaté Ludmily.” (tenth century) 2011. Translated by Jaroslav Ludvíkovský. In Středověké legendy o českých světcích, edited by Jaroslav Kolár and Markéta Selucká, 83–132. Brno: Host. Lavocat, Françoise. 2016. Fait et Fiction: Pour une frontière. Paris: Seuil. Mácha, Karel Hynek. (1834) 1986a. “Doslov ke Křivokladu.” In Dílo, vol. 2, Prózy, zápisníky, deníky, 77–81. Prague: Československý spisovatel. Mácha, Karel Hynek. (1862) 1986b. “Klášter sázavský.” In Dílo, vol. 2, Prózy, zápisníky, deníky, 83–87. Prague: Československý spisovatel. Mácha, Karel Hynek. (1836) 2005. May. Translated by Marcela Sulak. Prague: Twisted Spoon. Majerová, Marie. (1932) 2010. Přehrada. Brno: Host. Malina, Debra. 2002. Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Malura, Jan. 2015. Meditace a modlitba v literatuře raného novověku. Ostrava: Ostravská univerzita. Mukařovský, Jan. (1966) 2001. “Vančurovská prolegomena.” In Studie, vol. 2, 503–553. Brno: Host. Mukařovský, Jan. (1940s, second half) 2006. Vančurův vypravěč. Prague: Akropolis. Mukařovský, Jan. (1933) 2021. “Román a novela.” In Přednášky o epice. Prague: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 94–170. Nelles, William. 1997. Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narratives. New York: Lang. Němcová, Božena. (1855) 2011. The Grandmother (Babička). Translated by Frances Gregor. Prague: Vitalis. Neruda, Jan. (1878) 2008. Prague Tales from the Little Quarter. Translated by Craig Cravens. Prague: Vitalis. Nezval, Vítězslav. 1930. Chtěla okrást lorda Blamingtona. Prague: Odeon. Novák, Arne. (1946) 1986. Czech Literature. Translated by Peter Kussi. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications. Novotný, Vladimír. 2002. Mezi moderností a postmoderností: Úvahy o typologii české prózy z konce tisíciletí. Prague: Cherm. Petrů, Eduard. 1996. Vzdálené hlasy: Studie o starší české literatuře. Olomouc: Votobia. Pier, John. 2005. “Métalepse et hiérarchies narratives.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 247–261. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Pier, John. (2009) 2014. “Metalepsis.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1, 326–343. Berlin: De Gruyter. Pier, John, and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, eds. 2005. Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Prince, Gerald. (1973) 1980. “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee.” Translated by Francis Mariner. In Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, edited by Jane P. Tompkin, 7–25. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Prince, Gerald. (2009) 2014. “Reader.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 2, 743–755. Berlin: De Gruyter. Procopius. (fourteenth century) 1997. “Legenda o sv. Prokopu.” In Čítanka české literatura I: Od počátků do raného obrození (9. století–1. třetina 19. století), edited by Jan Lehár and Alexandr Stich, 107–118. Prague: Český spisovatel. Ryan, Marie-Laure. (2004) 2006. “Metaleptic Machines.” In Avatars of Story, 204–230, 246–248. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Schamschula, Walter. 1991. “The Treatise. Tomáš ze Štítného.” In An Anthology of Czech Literature: 1st Period; From the Beginnings until 1410, edited by Walter Schamschula, 243–244. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Schlickers, Sabine. 2005. “Inversions, transgressions, paradoxes et bizzareries: La métalepse dans les littératures espagnole et française.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 151–166. Paris: Édition de l’EHESS. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. 2014. “Narratee.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, vol. 1, 364–370. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmid, Wolf. (2017) 2021. Mental Events: Changes of Mind in European Narratives from the Middle Ages to Postrealism. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Šebek, Josef. 2021. “ʻPráce, o kterou se pokoušíte, se vám ani v nejmenším nedaří.’ Reflexe psaní v povídkách Karla Miloty.” Svět literatury 31, no. 63, 41–58. Sládek, Ondřej. 2018. “Aktualizace.” In Slovník literárněvědného strukturalismu, edited by Ondřej Sládek, 36–41. Prague – Brno: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR – Host. Šmahel, František. 2001. Husitské Čechy: Struktury, procesy, ideje. Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny. Steiner, Peter. 2000. The Deserts of Bohemia: Modern Czech Fiction in Its Social Context. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sterne, Laurence. (1759–1767) 1985. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. London: Penguin. Štítný, Tomáš. (1376) 1991. “Preface to Sborník Vávrův.” Translated by Walter Schamschula. In An Anthology of Czech Literature: 1st Period; From the Beginnings until 1410, edited by Walter Schamschula, 244–253. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Světlá, Karolina. (1869) 2019. Vesnický román. Prague – Brno: Ústav pro českou literaturu – Host. Tilg, Stefan. 2014. Apuleius´s Metamorphoses: A Study in Roman Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tureček, Dalibor. 2018. Sumář: Diskurzivita české literatury 19. století. Brno: Host. Tureček, Dalibor, Martin Hrdina, Iva Krejčová, and Veronika Faktorová. 2012. České literární romantično: Synopticko-pulzační model kulturního jevu. Brno: Host. Vančura, Vladislav. (1931) 2016. Marketa Lazarová. Translated by Carleton Bulkin. Prague: Twisted Spoon. Vašica, Josef, ed. 1966. Literární památky epochy Velkomoravské: 863–885. Prague: Lidová demokracie. Vodička, Felix. (1948) 1994. Počátky krásné prózy novočeské: Příspěvek k literárním dějinám doby Jungmannovy. Jinočany: H&H. Vodička, Felix. (1951) 1998. “Poznání skutečnosti v Povídkách malostranských: K otázce Nerudova realism.” In Struktura vývoje: Studie literárněhistorické, 260–280. Prague: Dauphin. Wagner, Frank. 2002. “Glissements et déphasages: Note sur la métalepse narrative.” Poétique 33, no. 130, 235–253. Winner, Thomas G. 2014. The Czech Avant-Garde Literary Movement Between the World Wars, edited by Ondřej Sládek and Michael Heim, New York: Lang.

Martin Sebastian Hammer and Ursula Kocher

Narrative Metalepsis in German and Italian Literature of Medieval and Early Modern Age 1 Definition of Narrative Metalepsis The term narrative metalepsis (French: métalepse narrative, German: narrative Metalepse), as first defined by Genette (1980 [1972], 234−235), designates “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse.” Narrative metalepses can thus be described as “play[s] on the double temporality of the story and the narrating” (Genette 1980 [1972], 235) and heuristically be scaled by degrees of intensity: 1) Minimal metalepses, which are based on a temporary synchronization of story time and narrating time (cf. Pier 2005, 249) and “contained embryonically” (Pier 2009, 192) in all following varieties. 2) Author’s metalepses, “which consist of pretending that the poet [resp. the narrator] ‘himself brings about the effects he celebrates’” (Genette 1980 [1972], 234). 3) Epistemological metalepses, “display[ing] [a character’s] knowledge of the other [extradiegetic] world” (Nelles 1992, 94). 4) Ontological metalepses, in which case a narrator or character “moves physically to a different diegetic world” (Nelles 1992, 94).

2 Exploring (Narrative) Metalepsis The term metalepsis (μετάληψις) already had varied definitions in ancient rhetoric (cf. Burkhardt 2001, 1087). Narrative metalepses in the above sense have also existed since antiquity but were not included in metalepsis by contemporaries. It is only with the Dutch rhetorician Gerardus Vossius (1643, 160–165) that the histories of the term metalepsis and of the phenomenon of narrative metalepsis first intersect. Vossius’s analyses form the starting point for the French rhetoricians Dumarsais (1967 [1730], 104−112), Fontanier (1967 [1818], 107−117; 1968 [1821], 127−129), and finally Genette (1980 [1972], 234−237) (cf. Nauta 2013, 480).

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2.1 The History of (Narrative) Metalepsis before Genette Tryphon (first century BCE) first defines metalepsis as the “use of a – in the given context – semantically inappropriate synonym” (Lausberg 1990 [1960], 571) of a homonym, as in “The pharmaceutical industry has a large foyer” (where ‘foyer’ is a semantically inappropriate partial synonym of the homonym ‘lobby’). For Donatus (fourth century CE), the term designates a “(remote) metonymy based on a chain of associations within the same framework of experience” (Burkhardt 2001, 1088), as for example in “I’ve got to catch the worm tomorrow” (hinting at the “association between waking up early and success by allusion to the cliché that the early bird catches the worm”; Walton 2013, 120). But from late antiquity, as in Isidore of Seville (ca 560−636), the term designates primarily a simple metonymy of cause and effect (cf. Burkhardt 2001, 1088, 1091). Genette’s precursors Vossius (1643, 160–165) and Dumarsais (1967 [1730], 104−112) still take metalepsis to be a specific part of metonymy, so that this aspect of the rhetorical definition is significant for narratology. Narrative metalepsis already exists in ancient Greek and Roman literature, without being referred to as such at the time (cf. Genette 1980 [1972], 234; Genette 2004; Rupprecht 2007; Döpp 2009; de Jong 2009; Eisen and Möllendorff 2013a; Tilg 2019, 78–80; Kuhn-Treichel 2020; Matzner and Trimble 2020). An important example is given in Virgil’s sixth eclogue, 61−63: tum canit Hesperidum miratam mala puellam; / tum Phaethontiades musco circumdat amarae / corticis atque solo proceras erigit alnos.

He sings of her whom Hesperidean apples stunned, Then binds, in bitter moss, the sibs of Phaëthon, Turning them (all his sisters) into long tall alders. (Tr. by Krisak 2010, 49)

Servius (fourth/fifth centuries CE) describes the passage as “wonderful praise of the singer, that it seems as if he does not sing of something that has happened, but as if he himself makes it happen by singing of it” (Nauta 2013, 476–477) without, however, calling it metaleptic. More than a thousand years later, Vossius (1643, 161) quotes the passage and Servius’s commentary, citing the substitution of facere (do, act) for dicere (say) or narrare (narrate, report) as an example of metalepsis. Thus, Vossius’s analysis (facere ponitur pro dicere, aut narrare; Vossius 1643, 161) prefigures Genette’s term of author’s metalepsis (Nauta 2013, 480). Through the intermediary of Dumarsais (1967 [1730], 111−112), who also associates the quoted example from Vergil with metalepsis, Fontanier (1968 [1821], 127−128) arrives at the following wording: “metalepsis [...] consists of substituting indirect expression by direct expression, i.e. replacing one thing by another, which precedes, follows or accompanies it. [...] One may also attach to metalepsis the turn by which a poet, a writer, is represented or represents himself as producing that which,

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ultimately, he only tells or describes.” Thus, Fontanier is the first to take apostrophes of characters by narrators to be metaleptic as well (cf. Fontanier 1968 [1821], 129).

2.2 Narrative Metalepsis since Genette’s Definition Genette (1980 [1972], 234−237) combines Fontanier’s already quite broad understanding of metalepsis with his own definitions of the “three aspects of narrative reality [= narrating, narrative, and story]” (Genette 1980 [1972], 27) and of the “narrative levels [= extradiegetic, intradiegetic, and metadiegetic]” (Genette 1980 [1972], 227–234). It is nonetheless the case that the majority of Genette’s examples of narrative metalepses “play on the double temporality of the story and the narrating” (Genette 1980 [1972], 235), such as Balzac’s “‘While the venerable churchman climbs the ramps of Angoulême, it is not useless to explain...,’ as if the narrating were contemporaneous with the story and had to fill up the latter’s dead spaces” (Genette 1980 [1972], 235). Genette’s definition of narrative metalepsis as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse” (Genette 1980 [1972], 234–235), has led to various attempts at further clarification and differentiation: Penzenstadler (1987, 93–94) links narrative metalepses to speech situations: narrative metalepsis is seen as a double breach of “the reporting speech act marked by the narrative act’s posteriority and independence of the events being narrated” (Penzenstadler 1987, 93). Häsner (2005, 40–41), building on Penzenstadler, proposes the following typology of ‘accentuations’ of the basic metaleptic relation of “simultaneity and syntopy [...] of narrating and narrated world”: – Accentuation of the simultaneity of narrating and story – Accentuation of the syntopy of narrating and story – Accentuation of the power of disposition over the story – Accentuation of the autonomy of the story Thus, Häsner does not distinguish between different types of narrative metalepses but between different variants of the accentuation of one temporospatial presence relation between narrating and story, which he calls metaleptic. This basic relation may also be described as minimal metalepsis, as by Pier (2005, 249) – a term doing more justice to the “fluid transitions between [metaleptic] types” (Pier 2009, 192) than do alternative proposals such as rhetorical metalepsis (vs. ontological metalepsis; Ryan 2005, 205–207) or metalepsis at discourse level (vs. metalepsis at story level; Cohn 2012 [2005], 105–106). Häsner’s typology of ‘accentuations’ turns out to be particularly applicable to texts whose metalepses are more isolated and remain on the rhetorical surface,

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rather than persistently influencing the content of the story or reshaping it retrospectively from the ending (cf. Genette 1980 [1972], 234, on Cortázar). This tends to apply to medieval and early modern texts in the same way as it was worked out for antiquity by Eisen and Möllendorff (2013b). Finally, the term of epistemological metalepsis should be added to Häsner’s model: Nelles (1992, 94) takes this to be the displaying of a character’s “knowledge of the other [extradiegetic] world” (cf. Häsner 2005, 72–81: transgressives Figurenbewußtsein “transgressive character consciousness”). Epistemological metalepsis thus defined forms an intermediate level (cf. Wolf 2009, 52–54; Hanebeck 2017, 84–87) between minimal or author’s metalepses on the one hand and ontological metalepses on the other. The latter two types, however, occur less frequently in medieval and early modern literature than do minimal or author’s metalepses, perhaps because they particularly presuppose and reflect the fictional status of literature.

3 Narrative Metalepsis in Medieval and Early Modern German and Italian Literature – Overarching Theses The majority of narrative metalepses in medieval and early modern literature are of types (1) and (2). They feed on the increasing “pluralization of characters, storylines and plots” (Stierle 1980, 260) that may be observed in European romances of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. In terms of narrative technique, this “pluralization” or “wilding” (Stierle 1980) is reflected in a multiplicity of scene shifts. The technique of scene shift or entrelacement is already found in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval (ca 1180–1190): De mon seignor Gauvain se test Ici li contes a estal, Si comance de Perceval. “At this point the tale ceases to tell of my lord Gawain and begins to speak of Perceval.” (Perceval 6180−6182, cf. 6474−6478) It is from such scene-shift formulae that, increasingly over time, (minimal) narrative metalepses developed (cf. Fludernik 2003, 389–392, for English and Häsner 2005, 32–50, for Italian literature), as Häsner (2005, 36–37) exemplifies: a discursive shift between storylines (lascio a dire di x, torno a dire di y) may be transformed into its metaleptic variant (lascio x, torno a y) merely by omitting the verba dicendi. As late as in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, taken by Stierle (1980, 259) to be the “starting point of the modern novel,” most narrative metalepses can be described as different “amplifications” or “accentuations” (Häsner 2005, 40–41) of this paradigm (cf. Häsner 2005, 36–50, 118–142). In German literature, such a “wilding of the romance after Chrétien” (Stierle 1980, 254) may be observed even earlier: unlike Chrétien de Troyes’s Érec et Énide,

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Hartmann von Aue’s Middle High German Erec (ca  1180/90) already shows some narrative metalepses (cf. Huber 2018 on “wild speech” in Hartmann’s Erec). Of particular importance, however, is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca 1200/10): like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso later, Wolfram’s Parzival not only features a “pluralization of characters, storylines and plots” (Stierle 1980, 260; cf. Schuler-Lang 2014, 52–53), but many narrative metalepses as well. Finally, the close link between wildekeit (wildness) and narrative metalepses is evidenced by Johann von Würzburg’s Wildhelm von Österreich [WvÖ] (1314): in this text, marked by narrative metalepses like no other medieval German text, the very name of the protagonist implies wildekeit. Nevertheless, almost all the metalepses in Erec, Parzival, and Wildhelm von Österreich are limited to types (1) and (2) – only Wildhelm’s answer to being addressed by the narrator (WvÖ 9158−9174) suggests his “knowledge of the other [extradiegetic] world” (Nelles 1992, 94). It is only in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age that such epistemological metalepses become more frequent – likely because this type presupposes a character’s consciousness of having been created by a (fictional) narrator rather than by God. Pithy examples are then mostly found in the Humanist Italian literature of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, such as in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349–53), where Filostrato alludes to being named by the extradiegetic narrator (Decameron, III,10; cf. Marino 1979, 32; Kocher 2005, 151–152), or in the most famous metalepsis in Orlando Furioso (XV, 9,5–10,2). It may be assumed that the more massive variants (3) and (4) only appear in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age because they are directed more strongly at the recipient’s critical reflection than at the demonstration of authorial power on the part of the narrator. While in Parzival, “references to fictionality” tend to apply “only to the detail, not the whole of the narrative” (Nellmann 1973, 69), the metalepses in Decameron, Orlando Furioso or in the Early New High German Lalebuch (1597), conversely, trigger a reflection on the fictionality or reality of the narrative as a whole on the part of the recipient (cf. Lalebuch 139).

4 Narrative Metalepsis in Middle High German Courtly Romance: Erec, Parzival, Wildhelm von Österreich 4.1 Hartmann von Aue, Erec (ca 1180−1190) A notable variety of narrative metalepses already occurs in the first Middle High German Arthurian romance, Hartmann’s Erec [Er.]: the extradiegetic narrator, in

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the mode of a metaleptic co-presence of narrating and story, begs God’s assistance for his characters – nû sî got der in ner! “May God protect him!” (Er. 6901; cf. Er. 5527, 6698−6701, 7077, 8891−8895, 9129−9130, 10072−10073, Iwein 6719, 6752) – he involves the audience in the progress of the story – nû waz welt ir daz der künec tuo? “What do you want the king to do?” (Er. 6902; cf. Er. 9263, Iwein 3309) – and invites an individually addressed narratee into the diegetic universe (cf. Hammer 2021): nû jage selbe swaz dû wilt hie sint hunde unde wilt und swaz ze jagenne ist nütze, netze und guot geschütze und swes vürbaz gert dîn muot. hie was diu kurzwîle guot. (Er. 7182−7187)

Now hunt anything you want. Here are dogs and game and what one needs for hunting, nets and good bows, and whatever else your heart desires. It was easy to pass the time here. (Tr. Keller 1987, 101)

The just over 500 verses of the description of Enite’s horse are metaleptically framed. Where the extradiegetic narrator continues the plot only once the diegetic horses have been brought up for the ride, he accentuates, above all, the temporal dimension of the metalepsis: ouwê vrouwen Ênîten! waz solde doch si nû riten, diu schœne guote wol geborn? wan si hâte ir pherit verlorn, als ir ê wol hôrtet sagen, [...]. nû ist zît daz si rîten, wan in sint diu ros komen. (Er. 7264−7768)

Alas, Lady Enite! What is she supposed to ride, the beautiful, good, noble lady? For she had lost her palfrey, as you heard earlier, [...]. Now it is time for them to ride, since their horses have been brought up. (Tr. by Keller 1987, 102−108)

Direct interventions of the narrator in the diegetic story-world, however, are absent from Hartmann’s Erec – with the exception of one hint of an author’s metalepsis: er gedâhte, des lîhte niht geschach, mit ir vil guote naht hân. ich enruoche, trüge ich sîn wân. (Er. 6355−6357)

He expected – but it did not happen – to spend an enjoyable night wither her. It does not bother me *if I deceived his hopes. (Tr. after Keller 1987, 90; our literal translation of 6357 marked by asterisk.)

This alludes to the power of disposition over the story in the hands of the narrator. While most editors here amended the text (trüge in sîn wân; cf. Keller 1987, 90: “if his hopes deceived him”), this is nonetheless the only extant variant of the verse (cf. Lembke, Müller, and Zudrell 2018, 71–72).

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4.2 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival (ca 1200−1210) In Wolfram’s Parzival [Pz.], narrative metalepses are noticeably more frequent than in Hartmann’s Erec. This often takes the form of involving the narratees in the progress of the plot (cf. Nellmann 1973, 40–43): they are to erlouben “permit” (Pz. 14,12−14), wünschen “wish” (Pz. 35,25−26, 293,24−25) or râten “advise” (Pz. 309,3) what happens at story level, such as deciding where the characters go to sleep (Pz. 271,14−15). Particularly often, it is by phrases with lâzen “to let” plus verb of movement (Pz. 101,5; 224,5; 443,5; 597,25; 652,15; 667,1; 778,26) and weln “to want” (Pz. 327,26; 349,28; 353,1; 639,1−2; 815,21) that narratees are invited to a metaleptic co-construction of the story. But every now and then, the narrator of Parzival also highlights his authorial power of disposition over the story – an author’s metalepsis is found in Book II: wê wie gefüege ich doch pin, daz ich den werden Berteneis, sô schône lege für Kanvoleis [...]. (Pz. 74,10−12)

Alas, how courteous am I, to land the noble Briton low in such a pretty way before Kanvoleis [...]. (Tr. after Edwards 2004, 24)

At the beginning of Book XV, before Parzival’s final fight against his half-brother Feirefiz, there is a particularly rapid succession of various metaleptic accentuations: on the one hand, the narrator must have his characters ride towards one another because they have themselves claimed the right to do so (Pz. 737,10−11); on the other hand, he claims to have brought Parzival to the battlefield himself (Pz. 737,25). He cannot keep the opponents away from each other (Pz. 738,11−12), yet tries actively to assist Parzival – wie tuon ich dem getouften nuo? “What am I to do with the Christian now?” (Pz. 740,14) – by successively apostrophizing the grail (Pz. 740,19), Parzival’s wife Condwiramurs (Pz. 740,20), God (Pz. 742,14, 744,21−24), and Parzival himself (Pz. 742,27−30, 743,14−22) in a metaleptic way. The power of disposition over the story and its autonomy are thus interwoven; the diegetic fight between the brothers can be interpreted as being reflected, on the extradiegetic level, in a fight of the narrator with himself. Two further passages must be discussed in detail: the narrator’s apostrophe directed at Hartman von Ouwe (Pz. 143,21−144,4) and the dialogue with narration personified, Lady Adventure (Pz. 433,1−434,10):

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mîn hêr Hartman von Ouwe, frou Ginovêr iwer frouwe und iwer hêrre der künc Artûs, den kumt ein mîn gast ze hûs. bitet hüeten sîn vor spotte, ern ist gîge noch diu rotte: si sulen ein ander gampel nemn: des lâzen sich durch zuht gezemn. anders iwer frouwe Enîde unt ir muoter Karsnafîde werdent durch die mül gezücket unde ir lop gebrücket. sol ich den munt mit spotte zern, ich wil mînen friunt mit spotte wern. (Pz. 143,21−144,4)

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My lord Hartmann von Aue, a guest of mine is coming to Lady Guinevere your mistress and to your lord, King Arthur, to their castle. Pray protect him from scorn. He’s neither fiddle nor rote – let them take another playing! Let them, out of courtesy, rest content with that. Otherwise your Lady Enite and her mother Karsnafite, will be dragged through the mill and their reputation crushed. If I am to wear out my mouth with mockery, with mockery I will defend my friend. (Tr. Edwards 2004, 46)

It is not only the direct address of the ‘fellow poet’ that is noteworthy, but above all its content. Hartmann is to ask ‘his’ characters (King Arthur and Lady Guinevere) to protect the “guest” Parzival from scorn, so as to stave off adverse consequences for Enite and Karsnafite − two female characters from Hartmann’s Erec (Pz. 143,29−144,4). Acceding to this request (Pz. 143,25) would presuppose a spatiotemporal co-presence (1) of the two narrators, Wolfram and Hartmann, and (2) of Hartmann and ‘his’ Erec characters. While the first case is not yet a metalepsis, it is all the more remarkable that the request involves a metaleptic apostrophe of the characters: bitet hüeten sîn vor spotte “Pray protect him from scorn” (Pz. 143,25). By not only having Wolfram’s narrator make use of metaleptic transgressions himself but also demanding the same of the Hartman von Ouwe (Pz. 143,21) inserted into the Parzival romance, metaleptic narrating is ‘conceptualized’: “[M]etaleptic transgressiveness becomes the object of explicit narrative-poetic reflections” (Häsner 2005, 41). Wolfram’s conversation with Lady Adventure (Pz. 433,1−434,10) leads back to the scene-shift hypothesis mentioned above: the switch from the Gawan plot to the Parzival plot is implemented as a scene-shift formula in the Old French original (cf. Perceval 6180–6182), Wolfram von Eschenbach develops this pretextual scene shift into a metaleptic dialogue passage:

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‘Tuot ûf.’ wem? wer sît ir? ‘ich wil inz herze dîn zuo dir.’ sô gert ir zengem rûme. ‘waz denne, belîbe ich kûme? mîn dringen soltu selten klagn: ich wil dir nu von wunder sagn.’ jâ sît irz, frou âventiure? wie vert der gehiure? ich meine den werden Parzivâl, den Cundrîe nâch dem grâl mit unsüezen worten jagte, dâ manec frouwe klagte daz niht wendec wart sîn reise. von Artûse dem Berteneise huop er sich dô: wie vert er nuo? (Pz. 433,1−15)

‘Open up!’ To whom? Who are you? ‘I want go into your heart.’ That’s a narrow space you want to enter! ‘What of it, even if I barely survive! You’ll seldom have cause to complain of my jostling! I want to tell you of wonders now!’ Oh, it’s you, is it, Lady Adventure? How fares the comely knight – I mean noble Parzival, whom Cundrie, with ungentle words, chased in pursuit of the Grail, when many a lady lamented that his journey was not averted? It was from Arthur the Briton that he then set off. How does he fare now? (Tr. Edwards 2004, 139)

The metaleptic simultaneity of narrating (Wolfram, Lady Adventure) and story (Parzival) is marked twice (Pz. 433,8, 433,15). The look back at core elements of the Parzival plot so far is thus framed in just the way that Fludernik (2003, 390) has mapped out for eighteenth and nineteenth-century English novels: “the shift becomes less a shift from scene A to scene B than a retracing of the narrative from progression to a flashback of delayed orientation.” This example allows us to look at the functions of metaleptic narration in the context of Wolfram’s Parzival: on the one hand, the dialogue with Lady Adventure fits into the medial self-fashioning of the work as an oral narrative successively completing itself (cf. Pz. 115,29−116,4); on the other hand, it is particularly the narrative metalepses that distinguish Parzival from genuinely oral texts of its period, such as heroic epics. They point to the fact that the courtly narrator himself creates the object of his narrative (cf. Philipowski 2007, 282) – while at the same time reflecting on this narrative and creative act.

4.3 Johann von Würzburg, Wildhelm von Österreich (1314) No other German-language medieval text has as many metalepses as Johann von Würzburg’s Wildhelm von Österreich. Again and again, the narrator, in the mode of the metaleptic co-presence of narrating and story, asks for advice or assistance, be it from God (e.g., WvÖ 931−941, 1106−1115, 3113−3119, 9062−9065, 10511−10537, 12100−12103), from Lady Love (e.g., WvÖ 1815−1837, 2942−2945, 6525−6532, 8530−8541, 9070−9130, 12110−12126, 15344−15346, 15625−15631), or from Lady Adventure (e.g., WvÖ 889−895, 3585−3589, 7761−7765, 8241−8251, 13585−13591,

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15671−15673). The narrator makes particularly excessive use of metaleptic apostrophes of characters; specifically, he keeps addressing the protagonists Wildhelm (e.g., WvÖ 6255−6260, 6384−6398, 8264−8268, 11629−11635, 14049−14063, 14358−14363, 14777−14787, 14888−14897, 15290−15298, 16138−16165) and Aglye (e.g., WvÖ 8326−8327, 8485−8493, 12122, 13025−13033, 15315−15329, 15761−15769). The metalepses in Wildhelm von Österreich accentuate syntopy more than simultaneity. In Mannerist fashion, the phrase nu dar! “Now there!” occurs 47 times, often in the narrator’s metaleptic contact with personifications or diegetic characters, as in Nu dar! nu dar! wes bit ir nu? kert hurteclichen zu, sit iu ist an ain ander haiz! “Now there! Now there! What are you now waiting for? Ride towards each other fighting, for this is what you’re longing for!” (WvÖ 8331−8333) Overall, the text features every kind of accentuation of metaleptic narrating short of ontological metalepsis. Thus, prototypical author’s metalepses aim at the power of disposition over the story at the hands of the narrator, as in the following example: Wie wil ich nu daz niderligen wider tuͦ n, daz ain gesigen werlich zainer hant erge? (WvÖ 3741−3744)

How can I now prevent his [Wildhelm’s] defeat, so that his hand emerges victorious from the fight?

Conversely, other metalepses accentuate the autonomy of the story: both in respect of an individual character, such as when the narrator states ich tuͦn swaz sie [Aglye] gebuͤtet (WvÖ 15146) “I do, whatever she [Aglye] commands,” and in respect of the narrative itself where it literally escapes the narrator: der abentuͤ r ich geben wolt ain ende: so ist si so behende daz si mich da von lazzet niht. doch wil ich jagen si die riht, so ich aller snelste mac. (WvÖ 16034−16037)

Just now I wanted to end the narrative: but it is so nimble that it will not let me get away. But I will chase it whichever way it goes, as fast as I can.

Among the many metaleptic apostrophes of characters, the following special case bears singling out:

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ach wa ist nu der gehuͤ r Wildehelm von Österrich? wa bistu nu? man wil hie dich enterben alles des du hast. swie du nu Aglyen last zuͦ legen Wildomise, so werdent dine prise in jamers hol gesenket, ob ez hie niht bedenket mænlich kraft oder din sin. er sprach: ‘on alle witz ich bin: waz schol ich denne bedenken? mich muͦ z daz sterben krenken. schol ich mit augen sehen an daz man min liep aim andern man legt zuͦ , ach ach owe! waz schol mir danne daz leben me?’ (WvÖ 9158−9174)

Oh, where is the virtuous Wildhelm of Austria now? Where are you now? They here want to take away from you all that you have! If you now allow Aglye to be given to Wildomis as his wife, all your glory will be lowered into a hole of sorrow – if you do not think on the matter with virility and with your sense. He said: ‘But I am at my wits’ end! What more shall I think on? Death will destroy me! Shall I see with my own eyes that my beloved is given to another man as his wife, oh, oh, woe is me! What then shall I live for?’

While the narrator of Parzival was only able to speak to his hero in a one-sided conversation (Pz. 742,27−30; 743,14−22), Wildhelm seems to be able to hear ‘his’ narrator and even to enter into a dialogue with him. Hence, Wildhelm “displays knowledge of the other [extradiegetic] world” (Nelles 1992, 94) – an epistemological metalepsis. In sum, the use of narrative metalepses in medieval German literature reaches both its quantitative and its qualitative peak in Wildhelm von Österreich. The influence of Wolfram von Eschenbach (who is also explicitly apostrophized: WvÖ 14517−14551) remains apparent; his Parzival may be regarded as the Archimedean point of metaleptic narrating in medieval German literature. Without Parzival, the various accentuations of the metaleptic paradigm in the late medieval Wildhelm von Österreich would be inconceivable.

5 Narrative Metalepsis in the Early New High German Prose Novel: From Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring (ca 1410) to the Anonymous Lalebuch (1597) The minimal and author’s metalepses presented above, conventionalized during the High and Late Middle Ages, become rarer after Wildhelm von Österreich: in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, unlike in the Middle High German Arthurian

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romances (Er., Pz.) or in Wildhelm von Österreich, the state of being fabricated is no longer specifically highlighted by the narrator, but is apparent from the plot itself, which may be grotesquely exaggerated. The best example of this is a late verse epic, Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring (ca 1410), where in the second part of the plot a peasants’ wedding banquet descends into a downright world war. During the feast, one of the characters parodies a quotation from the heroic epic Eckenlied (first half of the thirteenth century). The verses Es sasen held in ainem sal; si rettont wunder ane zal “Heroes were gathered in a hall; they spoke of countless astounding deeds” (Eckenlied E2, 2, 1−2) become, in Ring (5929−5930): Es sassen held in einem sal, Die assen wunder über al “Heroes were gathered in a hall; they had an astoundingly large feed.” What is noteworthy about this is that Eckenlied not only exists as a quotable heroic epic in the diegetic universe of the Ring, but that, in the course of the peasants’ war, Dietrich and Ecke also appear as characters (cf. Ring, 9008−9072). The co-presence at story level in the Ring of the quotation from Eckenlied and of Eckenlied protagonists appearing thus has metaleptic potential: for although it is not explicitly narrated that Dietrich and Ecke would “move physically to a different diegetic world” (Nelles 1992, 94), the (meta)diegetic story-world of Eckenlied appears to be plugged into the diegetic story-world of the Ring (cf. Neukirchen 2010, 254–255). We propose, therefore, to refer to metaleptic transtextuality in respect of these two passages. Apart from this example, however, the Ring is not very metaleptic. The same is true for the early prose novels of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as in Thüring von Ringoltingen’s Melusine (1456) (cf. Schneider 2021, 155–156, who notes a number of scene-shift formulae in Melusine, all of them non-metaleptic). As Fludernik (2003, 389) convincingly argues, the absence of narrative metalepses in that period may be due to the invention of the book chapter, “which made chapter beginnings logical points at which to place a scene shift and reduced the necessity of marking such a scene shift by additional [i.e., metaleptic] formulae.” On the one hand, the most frequent forms of scene-shift metalepses since Wolfram’s Parzival and into the fourteenth century, as in nû lâß ich in haim reiten; ain anders wil ich iuch bediuten. “I will let him ride home now. I want to tell you about something else.” (Friedrich von Schwaben, 1575−1576) become obsolete – on the other hand, early prose novels do not yet constitute a basis for more massive types of narrative metalepses. It is only in the prose novels of the late sixteenth century that metalepsis is rediscovered. Now, metaleptic phrases are supported, in particular, by complex frameworks: the paratextual limits – marked by prefaces, chapter headings, etc. – now provide the framework for epistemological and ontological metalepses. This thesis is illustrated by Johann Fischart’s Eulenspiegel reimenweis (1572) and the anonymous Lalebuch (1597): Eulenspiegel reimenweis [EuRw] begins with an epis-

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temological metalepsis, i.e., in a paratextual address by Eulenspiegel/ zum Leser. / NVn hab ich guter Eulenspiegel Bekommen auch Poetisch fluͤgel “Eulenspiegel to the reader: Now I, good Eulenspiegel, have been given poetic wings.” The diegetic protagonist not only addresses the extradiegetic narratee directly, but also has transgressive character consciousness. The phrase Bekommen [...] Poetisch fluͤgel “having been given poetic wings” (EuRw, 1−2) can be seen to refer to the verse form of Eulenspiegel reimenweis, of which a narrated character should not be aware. In the course of the narrative, the narrator again and again apostrophizes Eulenspiegel in the present (e.g., EuRw, 359−370, 373−382, 657−686, 1145−1151), and there are hints of other metalepses, such as when Eulenspiegel is roasting two chickens and the narrator admits: Jch hett ein lust daß ich eins hol. “I feel like taking one of them” (EuRw, 1286). Lalebuch [Lb.] even has a “threefold fictionalization of localization, historicization, and narrative fiction [...][,] supplemented by a source fiction that is itself overlaid several times” (Bachorski 2006, 266). This picture is completed by “the complete obfuscation of the spatiotemporal distance between the level of the narrator and the narrative” (Bachorski 2006, 272), which Bässler (2003, 298–301) describes as metaleptic. In addition to some “hint[s] of metaleps[es]” (Bässler 2003, 299; e.g., Lb. 29, 80), there are also explicit examples (cf. Bässler 2003, 299–300): Oh wie hab ich so vbel gefoͤ rchtet / man nemme mich auch dareyn / vnd gebe mir ein Narrn Ampt [...]. (Lb. 56)

Oh, how I feared that I, too, would be taken there  [to the town hall] and given the office of fool [...].

Ich zwar wuste wol / daß es brennende Nesseln weren gewesen / [...] / wolt es jhnen doch nit sagen / sonder sie in jrer Thorheit lassen fuͤ erfahren [...]. (Lb. 65)

Of course I knew full well that they were nettles [...], but did not want to tell them, letting them carry on with their folly [...].

The ending of Lalebuch has an ontological-metaleptic quality: here, the seemingly fictitious diegetic world of the ‘Lalen’ opens up to the extradiegetic world of the narrator and his narratee: although their name and clan had become extinct, ist jhr Thorheit vnd Narrey [...] vbergeblieben / vnnd vielleicht mir vnnd dir auch ein guter theil darvon worden. Wer weist obs nicht war ist? “their stupidity and folly [...] survive; and perhaps a good part of it has been given to me and you? Who knows if that might not be true?” (Lb. 139) Thus, the ending of Lalebuch matches what Genette affirms with regard to a quotation from Borges: “The most troubling thing about metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his narratees – you and I – perhaps belong to some narrative” (Genette 1980 [1972], 236).

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6 Narrative Metalepsis in Early Modern Italian romanzo (Orlando Innamorato, Morgante, Orlando Furioso) and beyond (Wieland) The route taken by narrative metalepsis into the German literature of the Enlightenment, however, does not go by way of Fischart or Lalebuch, but via Italy: Rivoletti (2014, 204–213) shows that Christoph Martin Wieland in particular, in Idris und Zenide (1768) and Der neue Amadis (1771), imports metaleptic formulae from the early modern Italian romanzo, specifically from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso [O. F.] (1516/32). We conclude by tracing this development; in so doing, we are able, for Italian (unlike German) literature, to draw on important research into metalepsis (cf. Penzenstadler 1987, 93–94, 158–162; Hempfer 1995, 69–74; Häsner 2005; 2019, 32–35, 86–118).

6.1 Matteo Maria Boairdo, Orlando Innamorato (1483/1495) and Luigi Pulci, Morgante (1481–1483) The early epic poem La Spagna (second half of the fourteenth century) already shows “the beginnings of metaleptic phrasing, in particular in connection with changing plotlines” (Penzenstadler 1987, 158), as in Lasciamo Ferraù e ritorniamo al forte Orlando “Let us leave Ferraù and return to strong Orlando” (La Spagna, V, 5; cf. Häsner 2005, 37; Häsner 2019, 103). Just over 100 years later, metalepses are among “the common techniques in romanzo” (Penzenstadler 1987, 158). That period includes, in particular, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato [O. I.] (1483/1495) and Luigi Pulci’s Morgante [Morg.] (1481–1483): In both Orlando Innamorato and Morgante, narrative metalepses of the type Lasc(iam)o/torn(iam)o are the most frequent, as in [L]ascio loro e torno a Bradamante “I leave them and turn to Bradamante” (O. I. Book III, VI, 20,6; cf. Book I, I, 8,1–3; I, 41,2; XVI, 60,5–6; XXV, 35,1–3; XXVI, 14,1–3; Book II, XIV, 28,5–6; XXII, 20,7–8; XXIII, 2,5–8; Book III, VI, 20,6) or Lasciamo Orlando star col saracino, e ritorniamo in Francia a Carlo Mano. “Let’s leave Orlando with the pagan king, and go right back to Charlemagne in France” (Morg., III, 20, 1–2; cf. V, 4,6–8; VIII, 14,1–3; IX, 7,1–2; X, 154,3, XV, 4–6; XVII, 138,1–2; XIX, 181,1–2; XXI, 155,2–4; XXIV, 147,1–2). Nevertheless, both texts contain further amplifications and accentuations of the metaleptic paradigm: The extended variant Lasci(am)o andar “We shall let him go” (cf. O. I., Book I, II, 21,1; II, 29,2; Morg. III, 33,5–6; XXII, 74,2; XXII, 262,6; XXIII, 29,1; XXV, 168,1) occurs frequently; in addition, in Orlando Innamorato, the verb volere “to want”, used several times in metaleptic constellations, attests the narra-

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tor’s authorial creative will (cf. Hempfer 2002 [1982], 95, and Häsner 2005, 109, n. 182, with examples from O. F.), as in Or qui lasciar lo voglio nel giardino [...] E tornar voglio a Orlando paladino “I want to leave him in that garden [...] and want to turn to Orlando, the paladin” (O. I. Book I, V, 56,1–3; cf. Book I, XI, 46,5–6; XXV, 23,2; XXVI, 25,2; Book II, 2, 32,4; 14, 8,5; 23, 69,6). In some passages, metalepsis is semantically charged by the immediate context: Lasciamo lui, che vivo è sotterato, E ritorniamo al saracin diverso “Let us leave him buried, still alive, and turn to this rare Saracen” (O. I. Book II, XIV, 28; cf. Book II, XXIII, 2,5–8). The examples of metalepses in Morgante are even more multifaceted than in the contemporaneous Orlando Innamorato. Thus, metaleptic phrases enter into some of the religious invocations at the beginning of the canti in Morgante, as in donami grazia, Signor, se ti piace, ch’io conduca a Parigi le mie squadre e tragga Carlo fuor di contumace. “[G]rant me, Lord, if Thou desirest so, that I may bring to Paris all my troops and thus aid Charles in his predicament.” (Morg. X, 1,4–6; cf. VIII, 1,1–6; XIX, 1,7–8) But the significantly increased variation in metaleptic phrases in canti XXIV–XXVIII, added in 1483, is particularly striking: Canto XXIV of Morgante starts off with a metaleptic amalgamation of the act of writing with the story being narrated – io non posso altro far che la mia penna tosto non bagni nel sangue di Senna “I now can only dip and fill into the bloody Seine my very quill” (Morg. XXIV, 1,7–8; cf. XXIV, 146, 1–4). The following linkage is even more impressive: Dunque vegnamo alla battaglia tosto, sì ch’io non tenga in disagio la Morte, che con la falce minaccia ed accenna ch’io muova presto le lance e la penna. (Morg. XXVI, 49,5–8)

So to the battle we shall come right now, not to keep Death still waiting – Death already threatening with his scythe and telling me to speed up scale and quill accordingly. (Tr. Tusiani, 652)

Of further note is the fact that the narrator not only makes use of various metaleptic variants – including metaleptic addresses of characters and recipients (cf. XXIII, 48,1–49,2; XXVI, 79,2–3) – but, in addition, metanarratively reflects on metaleptic narration: Or lasciam Astaròt andar per l’aria, ché questa notte troverrà Rinaldo: la nostra istoria è sì fiorita e varia ch’i’ non posso in un luogo star mai saldo. (Morg. XXV, 168,1–4)

Let Astaroth now fly up in the air, for our Rinaldo he will find tonight. Our story is so varied and adorned that I cannot stay always in one place. (Tr. Tusiani, 609)

Ultimately, even God seems to have been disempowered by the narrator’s authorial power, as the final verses of canto XXV show: Or lasciàn questi così ragionando. Cristo ci scampi, se si può, Orlando. “Let us leave here, conversing still, our men. Christ save our Count Orlando, if He can.” (Morg. XXV, 332,7–8; cf. Hempfer 1976, 89–90, on Pulci’s “humanist scepticism”) In sum, Pulci’s Morgante, especially in

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canti XXIV–XXVIII, paints a panorama of metaleptic accentuations, which in early modern romanzo is surpassed only by its most important exponent, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

6.2 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516/1532) Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso also features examples of the ‘standard cases’ cited in the previous chapter, such as: Ma lascio lui, ch’al suo frate Aquilante et ad Astolfo in Palestina torno “But I shall leave him and return to his brother Aquilant and Astolfo in Palestine” (O. F. XVIII, 70,3–4). However, the conventional formulae appear to have been systematically ‘freshened up’ in Orlando Furioso: the very first metalepsis in Orlando Furioso points the way: ma seguitiamo Angelica che fugge. “But let us pursue Angelica in her flight.” (O. F. I, 32,8) Häsner (2005, 43–44) emphasizes that the substitution of seguire “to pursue” for the conventional tornare reinforces both the spatial dimension and that of the autonomy of the characters vis-à-vis ‘their’ narrator – a tendency also reflected in the frequent use of trovare “to find” instead of tornare: Ma tempo è ormai di ritrovar Ruggiero, che scorre il ciel su l’animal leggiero. “But now it is time to return to Ruggiero, still coursing through the sky on the wind-borne beast.” (O. F. VII, 16,7–8; cf. VIII, 21,7–8; XXII, 4,5–8, and Häsner 2005, 44) The following is a particularly multifaceted example: Ma lasciamolo andar dove lo manda il nudo arcier che l’ha nel cor ferito. Prima che più io ne parli, io vo’ in Olanda tornare, e voi meco a tornarvi invito; che, come a me, so spiacerebbe a voi, che quelle nozze fosson senza noi. (O. F. IX, 93,3–8)

But let us leave him to go where he is sent by the Naked Archer who has wounded him to the heart. Before I say any more about him, I want to return to Holland, and I invite you to return with me, for I know that you would be as sorry as I would if the wedding took place without us. (Tr. Waldman, 92)

Of note here is the fact that “the story [...] can [be presumed to] play out independently of its being narrated and, as it were, behind the narrator’s and the reader’s back” (Häsner 2005, 45) – the wedding, it seems, could as well take place without them. Furthermore, the phrase e voi meco a tornarvi invito “and I invite you to return with me” seems to allude to the narrative context: the narrator invites his audience to the narrated wedding. An even stronger affinity between metaleptic phrasing and narrative context is shown by the following stanza at the end of the episode of the trip to the moon:

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Resti con lo scrittor de l’evangelo Astolfo ormai, ch’io voglio far un salto, quanto sia in terra a venir fin al cielo; ch’io non posso più star su l’ali in alto. Torno alla donna a cui con grave telo mosso avea gelosia crudele assalto. Io la lasciai ch’avea con breve guerra tre re gittati, un dopo l’altro, in terra. (O. F. XXXV, 31,1–8)

But let us leave Astolfo with the Gospel-maker, for I want to leap the distance between heaven and earth – my wings can no longer support me at such heights. I am returning to Bradamant, the damsel who had suffered a cruel attack from Jealousy wielding a heavy spear. When I left her, she had after a brief combat floored three kings in succession. (Tr. Waldman, 425)

What is striking here is, above all, the reason given for the change in plotlines and the accompanying “image of the winged narrator” (Häsner 2019, 110): io non posso più star su l’ali in alto “my wings can no longer support me at such heights.” In a possible but not obligatory reading of the metalepsis, the narrator here appears as the third participant of the trip to the moon. Finally, reference must be made to a famous passage expressing Astolfo’s transgressive character consciousness (cf. Häsner 2019, 32–33) and consequently qualifying, in Nelles’s (1992, 94) terms, as an epistemological metalepsis: Di questo altrove io vo’ rendervi conto; ch’ad un gran duca è forza ch’io riguardi, il qual mi grida, e di lontano accenna, e priega ch’io nol lasci ne la penna. Gli è tempo ch’io ritorni ove lasciai l’aventuroso Astolfo d’Inghilterra [...]. (O. F. XV, 9,5–10,2)

Later I shall relate to you what happened; now I must turn my attention to a great duke who is calling and beckoning to me from a distance, entreating my pen to release him onto the page. It is time for me to return to where I left Astolfo, the adventurous English duke [...]. (Tr. Waldman, 154)

These verses combine the performativization of the act of writing already known from Morgante with the authority of the characters over the narrator previously hinted at in Orlando Furioso (cf. O. F. XII, 66,5–8). The consequence of this singular combination is a “pirandellism avant la lettre” (Häsner 2005, 50) – and likely the most modern metalepsis in Humanist Italian literature.

6.3 Outlook: Wieland (1768/1771) Through the intermediary of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, narrative metalepses reenter German literature: Christoph Martin Wieland, first referred to as a ‘German Ariosto’ in 1768 (cf. Martin 2020, 256), like his role model uses narrative metalepses mostly in connection with scene shifts (cf. Rivoletti 2014, 207), as in Hier lassen wir ihn gehen, Um wieder uns nach Idris umzusehen. “Here we shall let him go, to look for Idris again.” (Idris und Zenide IV 74,7–8) This clearly reflects Ariosto’s Lascianlo andar (e.g., O. F. IV, 50,7–8). Using this and several other examples (e.g.,

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Der neue Amadis IV, 9,6–8), Rivoletti (2014, 204–213) argues that the use of narrative metalepses by Wieland appears to owe much more to Ariosto than to Cervantes or Sterne. Thus, our review of narrative metalepses in medieval and early modern German and Italian Literature ends with the open question of the intersection of the reception of Ariosto (cf. Rivoletti 2014; Aurnhammer and Zanucchi 2020) and the diachronicity of narrative metalepsis beyond the eighteenth century.

References Aurnhammer, Achim, and Mario Zanucchi, eds. 2020. Ariost in Deutschland: Seine Wirkung in Literatur, Kunst und Musik. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. Bachorski, Hans-Jürgen. 2006. Irrsinn und Kolportage: Studien zum Ring, zum Lalebuch und zur Geschichtklitterung. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Bässler, Andreas. 2003. Sprichwortbild und Sprichwortschwank: Zum illustrativen und narrativen Potential von Metaphern in der deutschsprachigen Literatur um 1500. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter. Burkhardt, Armin. 2001. “Metalepsis.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, edited by Gert Ueding, 1087–1099. Tübingen: Niemeyer, vol. 5. Cohn, Dorrit. 2012 (2005). “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme,” translated by Lewis S. Gleich. Narrative 20, no. 1, 105–114. Döpp, Siegmar. 2009. “Narrative Metalepsen und andere Illusionsdurchbrechungen: Das spätantike Beispiel Martianus Capella.” Millennium 6, 203–222. Dumarsais, César Chesneau. 1967 (1730). “Des Tropes, ou des différents sens dans lequels on peut prendre un même mot dans une même langue.” In Les Tropes, publiées avec une introduction de M. Gérard Genette. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, vol. 1. Eisen, Ute E., and Peter von Möllendorff, eds. 2013a. Über die Grenze: Metalepse in Text- und Bildmedien des Altertums. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. Eisen, Ute E., and Peter von Möllendorff. 2013b. “Zur Einführung.” In Über die Grenze: Metalepse in Text- und Bildmedien des Altertums, edited by Ute E. Eisen and Peter von Möllendorff, 1–9. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode.” Style 37, no. 4, 382–400. Fontanier, Pierre. 1967 (1818). “Commentaire raisonné sur Les Tropes de Dumarsais.” In Les Tropes, publiées avec une introduction de M. Gérard Genette. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, vol. 2. Fontanier, Pierre. 1968 (1821). Les Figures du discours. Introduction par Gérard Genette. Paris: Flammarion. Genette, Gérard. 1980 (1972). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Genette, Gérard. 2004. Métalepse: De la figure à la fiction. Paris: Seuil. Hammer, Martin Sebastian. 2021. “Nû jage selbe, swaz dû wilt! Narratologische Analyse und poetologische Interpretation einer metaleptischen ZeitRahmenÜberschreitung im Erec (V. 7182–7187).” In ZeitRahmenÜberschreitungen im vormodernen Erzählen, edited by Amelie Bendheim and Martin Sebastian Hammer, 13–42. Oldenburg: BIS. Hanebeck, Julian. 2017. Understanding Metalepsis: The Hermeneutics of Narrative Transgression. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter.

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Häsner, Bernd. 2005. Metalepsen: Zur Genese, Systematik und Funktion transgressiver Erzählweisen. Freie Universität Berlin: PhD Dissertation. Häsner, Bernd. 2019. Erzählte Macht und die Macht des Erzählens: Genealogie, Herrschaft und Dichtung in Ariosts Orlando Furioso. Stuttgart: Steiner. Hempfer, Klaus W. 1976. “Textkonstitution und Rezeption: Zum dominant komisch-parodistischen Charakter von Pulcis Morgante, Boiardos Orlando Innamorato und Ariosts Orlando Furioso.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 27, 77–99. Hempfer, Klaus W. 1995. “Ariosts Orlando Furioso: Fiktion und episteme.” In Literatur, Musik und Kunst im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Bericht über Kolloquien der Kommission zur Erforschung der Kultur des Spätmittelalters 1989 bis 1992, edited by Hartmut Boockmann, Ludger Grenzmann, Bernd Moeller, and Martin Staehelin, 47–85. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hempfer, Klaus W. 2002 (1982). “Die potentielle Autoreflexivität des narrativen Diskurses und Ariosts Orlando Furioso.” In Klaus W. Hempfer (2002): Grundlagen der Textinterpretation, edited by Stefan Hartung, 79–105. Stuttgart: Steiner. Huber, Christoph. 2018. “Wilde Rede bei Hartmann von Aue? Beobachtungen zum Erec.” In wildekeit: Spielräume literarischer obscuritas im Mittelalter. Zürcher Kolloquium 2016, edited by Susanne Köbele and Julia Frick, 119–134. Berlin: Schmidt. Jong, Irene de. 2009. “Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature.” In Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, edited by Jonas Grethlein and Antonios Rengakos, 87–115. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter. Kocher, Ursula. 2005. Boccaccio und die deutsche Novellistik: Formen der Transposition italienischer novelle im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi. Kuhn-Treichel, Thomas. 2020. “Was tut ein Geschichtsschreiber? Formen auktorialen Handelns in Lukian, De historia conscribenda.” Philologus 164, no. 2, 250–268. Lausberg, Heinrich. 1990 (1960). Handbuch der Literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner. Lembke, Astrid, Stephan Müller, and Lena Zudrell. 2018. “Trojanisches Erzählen: Narrationseffekte an den Grenzen der Diegese und einige Überlegungen zu den Regeln der Erzählkultur des Mittelalters.” In Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung 1, 64–85. Marino, Lucia. 1979. The Decameron ‘Cornice’: Allusion, Allegory, and Iconology. Ravenna: Longo. Martin, Dieter. 2020. “Wielands Ariost.” In Ariost in Deutschland: Seine Wirkung in Literatur, Kunst und Musik, edited by Achim Aurnhammer and Mario Zanucchi, 256–272. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. Matzner, Sebastian, and Gail Trimble, eds. 2020. Metalepsis: Ancient Texts, New Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford UP. Nauta, Ruurd. 2013. “The Concept of ‘Metalepsis’: From Rhetoric to the Theory of Allusion and to Narratology.” In Über die Grenze: Metalepse in Text- und Bildmedien des Altertums, edited by Ute E. Eisen and Peter von Möllendorff, 469–482. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. Nelles, William. 1992. “Stories Within Stories: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 25, no. 1, 79–96. Nellmann, Eberhard. 1973. Wolframs Erzähltechnik: Untersuchungen zur Funktion des Erzählers. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Neukirchen, Thomas. 2010. “Am Nullpunkt der Literatur: Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring und die Tradition der Literaturverachtung.” Euphorion 104, no. 3, 247–266. Penzenstadler, Franz. 1987. Der Mambriano von Francesco Cieco da Ferrara als Beispiel für Subjektivierungstendenzen im Romanzo vor Ariost. Tübingen: Narr. Philipowski, Katharina. 2007. “Die Grenze zwischen histoire und discours und ihre narrative Überschreitung: Zur Personifikation des Erzählens in späthöfischer Epik.” In Grenze und

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Grenzüberschreitung im Mittelalter: 11. Symposium des Mediävistenverbandes vom 14. bis 17. März 2005 in Frankfurt an der Oder, edited by Ulrich Knefelkamp and Kristian Bosselmann-Cyran, 270–284. Berlin: Akademie. Pier, John. 2005. “Métalepse et hiérarchies narratives.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 247–261. Paris: Éd. de l’ÉHESS. Pier, John. 2009. “Metalepsis.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 190–203. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter. Rivoletti, Christian. 2014. Ariosto e l’ironia della finzione: La ricezione letteraria e figurativa dell’Orlando furioso in Francia, Germania e Italia. Venezia: Marsilio. Rupprecht, Kai. 2007. Cinis omnia fiat: Zum poetologischen Verhältnis der pseudo-vergilischen Dirae zu den Bucolica Vergils. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “Logique culturelle de la métalepse, ou la métalepse dans tous ses états.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 201–223. Paris: Éd. de l’ÉHESS. Schneider, Christian. 2021. Logiken des Erzählens: Kohärenz und Kognition in früher mittelhochdeutscher Epik. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. Schuler-Lang, Larissa. 2014. Wildes Erzählen – Erzählen vom Wilden: Parzival, Busant und Wolfdietrich D. Berlin: Akademie. Stierle, Karlheinz. 1980. “Die Verwilderung des Romans als Ursprung seiner Möglichkeit.” In Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, 253–313. Heidelberg: Winter. Tilg, Stefan. 2019. “Autor und Erzähler – Antike.” In Handbuch Historische Narratologie, edited by Eva von Contzen and Stefan Tilg, 69–81. Stuttgart: Metzler. Vossius, Gerardus Johannes. 1643. Commentariorum rhetoricorum sive oratoriarum institutionum: Liber IV. Leiden. Walton, Mélanie Victoria. 2013. Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and Pseudo-Dionysius: Bearing Witness as Spiritual Exercise. Lanham: Lexington Books. Wolf, Werner. 2009. “Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” In Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Dedicated to Walter Bernhart on the Occasion of his Retirement, edited by Werner Wolf. Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi, 1–85.

Christine Putzo

Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature 1 Preliminary Remarks The term “fictionality” describes a quality of those texts (or other media) that are considered “fiction” inasmuch as they are attributed a special status with regard to their claim to truth. In spite of this intuitively clear explanation, formulating an analytically precise definition of fictionality can be considered one of the main problems of literary theory (Klauk and Köppe 2014). This is all the more pressing where a diachronic perspective is concerned, given the alterity of the worldview of the medieval and early modern epoch, which, from the outset, impedes thinking in terms of artistic autonomy, human creativity, a reality-based concept of truth, or the ability to operate outside the constraints of veracity, all of which, being self-evident from today’s perspective, are axiomatic components of fictionality in literary theory. If the question of premodern fictionality has, nonetheless, been a much-discussed topic in medieval German studies for decades, this debate has taken place on quite different grounds and under different analytical premises from those of modern literary theory. A careful methodological approach is therefore needed when developing a diachronic perspective on fictionality, one that builds on the analytical achievements of contemporary theory while taking into account the premodern literary situation. The present article aims to establish the necessary analytical basis for a historical view of premodern literary practices that can potentially be classified as fictional, while maintaining the objective of outlining how to describe the corresponding literary phenomena in their own historical particularity. Taking general literary theory as a starting point, an approach is set out that can be applied to potentially fictional medieval and early modern narratives (see my article “Fictionality in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature” in this volume).

2 Current Definitions of Fictionality 2.1 Orientation The formation of theories of fictionality in recent decades has been interdisciplinary and highly diverse (overviews in Zipfel 2001; Gertken and Köppe 2009; Klauk and Köppe 2014; Zetterberg Gjerlevsen 2016; Missinne, Schneider, and van Dam https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-040

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2020), with the majority of theories being based on the question of whether or not a given text can be classified as fictional, not factual, and by whom or what this is determined. Depending on which part of the model of literary communication these theories emphasize, they can, albeit not without overlaps, be grouped into text-oriented, production-oriented, reception-oriented, and context-oriented approaches (Gertken and Köppe 2009; Klauk and Köppe 2014). Text-oriented theories identify fictionality on the basis of linguistic properties, for instance free indirect discourse or the grammatical peculiarity of an “epic preterit” (“episches Präteritum” as in “Tomorrow was Christmas”; Hamburger [1957] 1994), but also on the basis of textual signposts of fictionality (Cohn 1990, 1999; cf. Zipfel 2014). These signals can be located on the level of the story, as for instance in the case of fantastic or other clearly unreal elements, or on the level of discourse, as for instance when the narrator’s insight into characters’ inner thoughts and feelings is displayed. In a wider sense, paratextual signposts also fall into this category, including, in the simplest case, a genre designation like “fiction” or “novel” on the title page. In Klauk and Köppe’s (2014) classification, text-oriented theories also include those approaches which are based on the semantic functioning of reference in a text. Drawing on modal logics and possible world theories, these approaches define fictional texts by their reference to objects, circumstances, and events that do not exist or, more precisely, possess an ontologically distinct status in that they are part of a possible (fictive), not the actual world (Pavel 1986; Doležel 1988; Ronen 1994; cf. Klauk 2014). In Gabriel’s (1975) influential theory, fictional texts are characterized by not raising any claim to reference. In contrast to this, production-oriented approaches base their definition of fictionality primarily on the author’s intention and his relation to the text. The most prominent of these is John Searle’s speech act theory, which describes fictional discourse as the pretense of an illocutionary act, or a series of illocutionary acts, which become suspended by convention and thus do not relate to the world as they normally would (Searle 1975; cf. Onea 2014). Reception-oriented approaches, on the other hand, connect the fictionality of a text primarily with the way in which it is processed by the recipient. In Kendall Walton’s influential theory, representational art is understood as a game of “make-believe” in which narrative representations are seen as props for the recipient that prompt them to imagine things (Walton 1990; Bareis 2008, 2014). Finally, context-oriented theories, which typically comprise components of text-, production-, and reception-oriented approaches, emphasize the social norms and conventions that determine the behavior of both authors and recipients in the narrative process, and thus describe fiction as a communicative practice. Examples are the models of Gregory Currie (1990), who understands fiction as constituted by a “fictive intention” on the part of the author and by an attitude of “imaginative involvement” on the part of the reader, or of Richard Walsh (2007), who presents a

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pragmatic explanation of fictionality as a mode of interpretation deployed by the recipient in order to maximize the relevance of the message in a given context (see also Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh 2015). Although there is no universally accepted theory, the currently prevailing definition of fictionality corresponds most closely to the context-oriented category. Recent literary theory tends to consider fictionality as an institution (Currie 1990; Lamarque and Olsen 1994; cf. Köppe 2014): a coordinated social practice based on shared knowledge of conventions and rules on how to signpost, recognize, and process fictional texts, both on the side of the author and on the side of the recipients. At the same time, fictionality is considered to be predominantly determined by the author, who, in producing a text, intends his recipients to adopt an attitude that lends itself to fiction, termed “fictive stance” by Lamarque and Olsen (1994) – treating the fictional statements as true, while knowing that they are not – and who furthermore assumes that the recipients will, on the grounds of a shared social practice, have sufficient reason to do so. The fictional stance of reception implies following a complex set of semantic rules and restrictions, as well as following the prompts to imagine conveyed by the text. In contrast to Searle’s definition, Konrad (2014, 288–372; 2017, 54) describes the underlying speech act as a genuine assertive illocution, but with the distinct, twofold characteristic  – unique to fictional discourse – that it demands imagining its propositional content, including filling in what is indeterminate, but at the same time demands imagining this same illocution to be of the normal assertive type.

2.2 Range and Scope While the approaches mentioned so far all aim to set out criteria with which to identify fictionality in a given text or narrative communication, most of them can also be grouped according to how they are oriented toward the range and scope of fictionality in relation to factuality (Blume 2004; Konrad 2014, 2017). Apart from the radical constructivist theory of panfictionalism, which considers all human models of reality as fiction and denies any difference between fictionality and factuality, most theories can be classified as either autonomist approaches, which postulate the complete autonomy of fiction from the factual, or compositionalist approaches, which take an intermediate position in that they acknowledge the potential existence of factual components in fictional texts, thus considering fictional discourse a possible mixture of both elements. Further, recent literary theory has emphasized that fictionality can be effectively defined in relation to factuality (Fludernik 2001, 2015; Hempfer 2018, 96–106; Fludernik and Ryan 2020) or, along similar lines, to the intermediate status of

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non-fictionality (Missinne, Schneider, and van Dam 2020, 30–36). This view is based on the premise that the distinction between fictionality and factuality, or non-fictionality, is scalable: just as texts can display absolute or gradational attributes of fictionality, they can be received in different ways. In many cases, this perspective widens the scope to include intermediate positions on the scale of fictionality. Depending on the cultural standpoint of the recipient, certain texts, for instance travelogues or narratives based on mythological material, can be read purely factually; or non-fictionally, but with little concern for their factual relevance; or, finally, purely fictionally, as intentionally crafted pieces of narrative art without any claim to truth (Fludernik 2018). This perspective is not only recipient-related but can be linked back to authorial intention (Karnes 2020).

2.3 Historical Accentuation Regarding the difficult question of whether and how the modern concept of fictionality can be applied to premodern literature, or, alternatively, whether and how premodern practices of fictionality can be described differently, the wider compositionalist view offers the most potential, all the more so if it allows for a scalar conception, including intermediate shades between the dichotomies of the fictional and the factual. The specification of a unique fictional speech act (Konrad 2014, 2017) can in this sense be adapted such that its second demand – to imagine the demand to imagine as being an assertive act – is scalable rather than absolute, thus providing more scope regarding the methodological questions of a special truth value of fiction and the problem of reference to reality, both of which are difficult to reconcile with medieval concepts of truth and reality (see below, 3.4). Where the point of reference that determines fictionality is concerned (see 2.1), the prevailing theory – of fiction as institution – offers the advantage of being intrinsically open to cultural and historical variability (Orlemanski 2019; Gittel 2020; Manuwald 2020; Konrad 2020). A working definition of fictionality (cf. Konrad 2014, 477–478, 2017, 55, slightly modified here) for the following exposition could read as follows. A text, or parts of a text, are considered fictional if they comply with institutional presuppositions consensually acknowledged by the author (convention of decision) and the intended reader (convention of execution), according to which the author has two intentions: first, the fictional intention that the reader will receive those sentences of the text that are not signposted otherwise as demands for imagination according to their propositional content, while at the same time either imagining them to be assertive speech acts or being indifferent in this regard (convention of gradational specification); second, the reciprocal intention that the reader will recognize the fictional

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intention and judge it appropriate to process the text accordingly (convention of reciprocity). At the same time, the author must convey his intention in a conventional way by the means of signposts (convention of signalization).

3 Outline of the Problem 3.1 Lines of Research While there are few genuinely universalist theories of fictionality (but see Currie 2014), the “invention” of fiction in occidental culture has been asserted for several points in history, depending on the disciplinary perspectives and methodological assumptions in any given case. They range from Aristotle’s Poetics, the Greek novel, the medieval vernacular romance, and the Renaissance to the eighteenth-century realist novel (Fludernik 2018; Orlemanski 2019). This is in line with recent literary theory, which considers fictionality a culturally varying practice rather than an ontological absolute, and accordingly allows for historical fluctuations (Lavocat 2016). However, theories that proclaim the emergence of fictionality at a particular point in time have justifiably been criticized as being teleologically biased toward modern literature, especially the cultural norms set by the novel (Orlemanski 2019). Mirroring the epistemic path that led to the modern concept of fictionality, famously expressed by Philip Sidney (2002, 103) as “of all writers under the sun the Poet is the least liar,” teleological theories typically base their assertion on the premise that at one particular point, the participants of literary discourse developed an awareness of the distinction between fact, falsehood, and  – as a newly recognized third possibility that neither claims literal truth nor intends to deceive – fiction (Gallagher 2006). This reasoning is also at the core of the most influential theory on the emergence of fictionality in the Middle Ages in German research, that of Haug ([1985] 1997), and it is precisely this point in Haug’s argumentation that has subsequently been contested from various perspectives. Haug’s starting point is the prologue to Chrétien de Troyes’s (1994) Arthurian romance Érec et Énide (ca. 1170), in which it is stated that Chrétien “tret d’un conte d’avanture / une mout bele conjointure” (derives from a story of adventure a beautifully constructed composition; lines 13–14). This idea of a certain authorial liberty  – to rearrange freely the components that have been transmitted and to create a new, experimental composition that is different from the sources and only gains its meaning in this new form – is interpreted by Haug as an expression of a new fictional awareness, the “discovery of fictionality” (Entdeckung der Fiktionalität, Haug 2003, title). While fictionality in

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a modern sense may have existed before, it is, according to Haug, understood from this point onward as “defined by a new, free relationship to truth, a relationship that implies detachment from any previously given truth in favor of a truth which is to be newly constituted” (2003, 138). Haug’s approach has been criticized by various medievalists, leading to a discussion in German literary theory over the years that has ultimately led to little progress (Kiening 2012). There is no doubt whatsoever that there was a “burst of fictionality” (Fiktionalisierungsschub; Wolfzettel 2002, 97) in late twelfth-century Europe, which saw the emergence of a hitherto unprecedented secular literature in the vernacular. What has been debated, however, is whether this designation is true only from an anachronistic viewpoint – as a legitimate category of retrospective literary historiography – or whether the emergence of what modern scholars would unanimously describe as “fictional” actually implies the development of a historical concept of fictionality that is comparable with that of modern literary theory. The main objection to Haug’s theory was that his reasoning was guided by a modern idea of fictionality projected onto medieval texts, while neglecting both historical concepts of truth and reality and historical literary theory (Huber 1988; Heinzle 1990; Knapp 1997; responses in Haug 2003). Subsequent research in German literary studies on a possible medieval concept of fictionality in the vernacular romance has been wide-ranging and is difficult to survey. However, three main positions can be distinguished (Schneider 2020, 81–82). The first discusses the question within the context of Latin literary theory and the theologically shaped worldview of the Middle Ages. In this view, since no other truth than that of God and his plan could have been deemed possible, the idea of an alternative fictional truth in its own right is considered inconceivable or, at best, to have remained “a very rare special case within romance production, which was otherwise dominated by pseudo-history” (Knapp 2014a, 185; cf. Knapp 2005, 2014b; Schmitt 2005, 136–157; Meincke 2007). In contrast to this, the second position identifies certain features of vernacular romance as signals, or even indicators, of either a conscious use of fictionality or, alternatively, a reflection on it, which, even though it can be more or less clear or occur within a tiered model, is considered essentially comparable to the modern concept (Meyer 1994; Grünkorn 1996; Ridder 1998, 2001, 2003; Neudeck 2003; Reuvekamp-Felber 2013; Dimpel 2013). The third, more cautious position aims at a differentiated view of the historical theory, practice, and perception of what may be termed “fictionality.” It emphasizes the unsettled status of medieval vernacular literature between factuality and fictionality and concludes that most texts can only vaguely, if at all, be classified as one or the other (Müller 2004, 2014; Glauch 2005; 2009, 137–197; 2104a; 2014b; Raumann 2010; Herweg 2010; Braun 2015; Manuwald 2018; Schneider 2020).

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3.2 Medieval Textual Culture Medieval textual culture was subject to conditions that are very different from those of the literary industries of modern epochs. Since these prerequisites inevitably affect the manifestation of fictionality as an institutional conception, they will be outlined briefly here. First of all, it must be pointed out that vernacular narrative literature conceived in writing was, at the time of Chrétien and the courtly classics, a relatively young phenomenon. Quantitatively, it remained a peripheral aspect of a literary culture that was predominantly Latin and predominantly concerned with (mostly non-narrative) scholastic, religious, or historiographical writing. Medieval culture was bilingual, characterized by the dualism of Latin and the vernaculars, which, in terms of education, function, and status, belonged to clearly demarcated spheres: that of the clerics – the Latinate litterati – on the one hand, and that of the laymen – the aristocratic illitterati – on the other. The cultural techniques of writing and reading were, for the most part, restricted to the former. They were acquired by means of the Latin language and, in principle, limited to Latin texts in their use. The transfer of these techniques to the vernaculars was only secondary, the slow result of the long-term process of literarization of the vernaculars that had begun around AD 800 and was still not complete by the end of the Middle Ages, even though it gained considerable impetus from the twelfth century onward due to the establishment of aristocratic residences and the rise of a new secular court culture, which involved the need for aristocratic self-representation in art and literature. This important cultural shift saw its beginnings in France, whose new courtly ideals radiated rapidly to other European cultures. Consequently, written German literature around 1200 is, to a large extent, “reception literature,” rewritten from French sources. This corresponds to the medieval concept of authorship, which differs fundamentally from the modern understanding, being based on continuity and retextualization rather than on originality or creativity. Before the twelfth century, secular poetic literature in the vernacular had been exclusively oral; as a consequence, it is almost entirely lost today. Within the context of the new courtly culture, which included worldly scriptoria (staffed with Latinate clerics), not only did some older oral epics find their way onto parchment, still bearing traces of their former orality, but, in the second half of the twelfth century, the romance, a new type of secular verse narrative, emerged; from the start, it was conceived in writing and soon displayed sophisticated poetic designs in complex structures. Yet it was still largely based on the material of the older oral traditions, such as heroic sagas or the Arthurian myths, or else on classical Latin epics. At least for the decades around 1200, it also remained connotatively connected to the oral, illiterate sphere, even though, in this period, the authors can only have been literate clerics. Their patrons and, in general, their recipients, by contrast, were the mostly illiterate members of the

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court. This led to a form of reception that was typically (but not exclusively) linked to oral communication: unlike Latin literature, vernacular literature was recited or sung in oral performances that included vocal variation, rhythm, gestures, and facial expression. Any messages or undertones, including possible signposts of fictionality, that might have been conveyed by these means must be considered blind spots for today’s literary analysis. This type of secondary orality has been termed “vocality.” It is to be distinguished from the genuinely oral literature that, as many indications reveal, still thrived at this time in the same circles, drawing in parallel on the same material as the written courtly literature that is the subject of today’s research. Independently of the medial disposition of a text, throughout the Middle Ages, the opposition between “vernacular” and “Latin” remained connected to the connotations of the coexisting illiterate and literate spheres, such as “oral” versus “written” or “secular” versus “spiritual,” which, in turn, were associated with evaluations as “unreliable” versus “reliable” or “dubious” versus “serious” – “something that, at least from the standpoint of the literate, comes very close to our modern understanding of the difference between ‘fictional’ and ‘factual’” (Glauch 2014a, 389). Yet, in contrast to the modern literary world, medieval vernacular literature did not possess an institutionalized genre system with clearly defined designations that could in themselves indicate fictional or factual discourse.

3.3 Historical Literary Theory Medieval literary theory does not possess any theoretical concept of literary fictionality. Aristotle’s Poetics, which can be considered a cornerstone of the modern discourse on fictionality, was virtually unknown before its rediscovery in the Renaissance. However, there is an elaborate discourse on ficta and facta in narrative (Ernst 2004), which mainly goes back to ancient textbooks of rhetoric, in particular to Cicero’s De inventione (On Invention) and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (Rhetoric for Herennius, formerly attributed to Cicero), both dating to the first century BCE. These textbooks were studied in medieval cathedral schools on a basic level, the trivium, and they were taken up in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin poetics. They were presumably known to most authors of courtly literature, whose Latin education is obvious in many cases. The Rhetorica ad Herennium (Ad C. Herennium libri IV 1964, 1.8.13) differentiates three types of narrative, distinguished by the way they represent events: fabula, historia, and argumentum: Fabula est quae neque veras neque veri similes continet res, ut eae sunt quae tragoediis traditae sunt. Historia est gesta res, sed ab aetatis nostrae memoria remota. Argumentum est ficta res quae tamen fieri potuit, velut argumenta comoediarium.

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(The fabula comprises events neither true nor probable, like those transmitted by tragedies. The historia is an account of exploits actually performed, but removed in time from the recollection of our age. The argumentum recounts invented events, which yet could have occurred, like the plots of comedies.).

Earlier views deemed the category of the argumentum – the narration of invented but possible events (ficta) – to represent an early concept of narrative fiction (Jauß 1983). However, this connection is rejected in current research (Knapp 1997, 171– 174; Glauch 2014a, 411; for a different view, see Green 2002, 1–17), both on the grounds of the total lack of reference to these rhetorical categories in the metapoetic or self-reflexive passages of courtly romances or historiographical narratives, and because of the lack of terminological or conceptual coherence in medieval Latin discourse (Mehtonen 1996). This is also true for the early medieval adaptation of the categories by Isidore of Seville in his widespread Etymologiae (Etymologies, ca. AD 630). Even though Isidore quotes the classical tripartite classification (1911, 1.44.5), his main focus is on fabula and historia. Fabula is reinterpreted, much in the sense of the original argumentum, as being characterized by representing ficta: “Fabulas poetae a fando nominaverunt, quia non sunt res factae, sed tantum loquendo fictae” (Poets have named the fables after fando – “speaking” – because they do not represent things that happened, but what is invented in words; 1.40.1). Isidore further differentiates three types of fabulae (1.40.3): those that have been invented “delectandi causa” (for the sake of entertainment), those that are to be interpreted “ad naturam rerum” (with regard to the nature of things), and those that are to be read “ad mores hominum” (with regard to the morals of people). The first type is dismissed quickly as corresponding to “quas vulgo dicunt” (those that are told to the folk) or to Plautus’s and Terence’s comedies. Isidore only elaborates on the other two types (1.40.4–6): while the second type conveys what can be described as general knowledge, the third type, which is represented by the Aesopian fable, allows, by means of the invented narrative (“per narrationem fictam”), the represented events to be linked to a “true meaning” (verax significatio). Narrative invention is thus bound back to revealing religious or moral truth, which is in fact the only usage in which it is legitimate from the viewpoint of medieval theology, as stated by the Church Father Augustine: “quando id fingimus quod nihil significat, tunc est mendacium. Cum autem fictio nostra refertur ad aliquam significationem, non est mendacium sed aliqua figura ueritatis” (When we invent (feign) something that signifies nothing, then it is a lie. But when our invention (fiction) refers to a signification, then it is not a lie, but a figure of truth; 1980, II LI, 4–6). Another concept of Latin literary theory that has been discussed as a possible medieval correspondence to narrative fictionality is that of the integumentum, a hermeneutic concept of twelfth-century scholastics (Knapp 1981; Huber 1986; 1994; Haug [1985] 1997, 228–240). Integumentum refers to texts that convey a moral or

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religious truth that is hidden under the cover or “dress” of an invented narrative (“fabulosa narratio”; Bernardus Silvestris 1977, 3). It has been linked to vernacular romance mainly because of a passage in Thomasin von Zerklaere’s ([1852] 1965) didactic poem Der Welsche Gast (The Romance Stranger), where it is claimed that in romances – initially described as “frivolities that are untrue” (spel diu niht wâr sint; line 1085) – “one dresses truth in lies” (daz wâr man mit lüge kleit; line 1126). However, even if one concedes that in these verses Thomasin may have had the concept of integumentum in mind (which is debated: Knapp 1997, 65–74), this single short passage cannot be considered sufficient to ascribe the systematic practice of using a second level of meaning to vernacular romance (Schneider 2020, 84). In any case, just as with Isidore’s fabula, that meaning would essentially be only secondary, with reference to the truth remaining primary  – an idea that differs so significantly from the modern idea of autonomous fiction that it would be difficult to speak of any conceptual equivalence.

3.4 The Other Factual: Medieval Concepts of Truth and Reality Matters are further complicated by the fundamental alterity of medieval understandings of what is “factual” and of how “truth” and “perceivable reality” relate to each other (Glauch 2005, 45–51; 2014a, 389–393; Braun 2015; Manuwald 2018; Schneider 2020, 85–97). This can be elucidated in at least three respects. First, the marvelous and the miraculous formed an integral part of the medieval concept of reality. Mirabilia were considered as scientifically true (Rothmann 2001). They typically occurred in genres like historiography, travelogues, or encyclopedic literature, while miracula were a fundamental part of religious genres, like hagiography, whose veracity was unimpeachable. But they could equally occur in secular vernacular verse epics that, from a modern point of view, are clearly fictional. Additionally, creatures like unicorns or dragons are accounted for in medieval bestiaries or appear in saints’ legends. From this perspective, they are no more unreal than, for instance, a lion or an elephant, which were not part of visible reality either. This not only means that seemingly fantastic and unrealistic elements or events cannot be considered signposts of fictionality in medieval literature; it is also a first important factor in recognizing that people’s relationship with perceivable reality in the Middle Ages was different from what might be assumed from a modern perspective. Second, there is a common cultural practice in medieval writing that has been described as making “corrections to reality” (Realitätskorrekturen; Herweg 2010, 196). Its basic idea is to facilitate access to reality by shaping more clearly or adding to what is perceived as real – by means of what, from a modern viewpoint, could

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only be described as fictional, if not as fake, but from a historical perspective is more adequately characterized as a practice of “lazy hypotheses” that treat what helps solving a problem as true (Althoff 2014). In this sense, the practice is clearly factual. Obvious examples are etiological narratives, founding narratives, fictitious genealogies, or episodes that marvelously connect the past to the present, all very much part of aristocratic self-representation and, consequently, of courtly literature. They are all intended to convey what is considered to be true by freely visualizing what may be hidden – legitimately so, because in medieval thought, truth exceeds the visible. In some views, this practice applies equally to classical rhetorical technique: according to one – albeit controversial – interpretation of a passage in Cicero’s De oratore (On the Orator), in historiography only the fundamenta, the historical essence, was required to be literally true, while, at the same time, it could be expanded by a superstructure, the exaedificatio, that only required verisimilitude (Cicero 2007, 2.15.62–63; cf. Knapp 2014a, 181–182; Schorn 2019). Third, along similar lines, from the religious viewpoint of the Middle Ages, the perceivable substantiveness of the world is only the expression of a higher transcendental truth: the message of God, which is considered to be present in all creation and, in principle, discernible for everybody who endeavors to read it. In this view, veracity is determined not by reference to reality but by reference to truth, which, in turn, arises precisely not from representing but from transcending reality. It remains debatable whether this hermeneutic perspective can be transferred from the Latin scholastic sphere to that of the illitterati of the courtly world, and even more so, whether the participants in courtly discourse would apply the corresponding biblical exegetical practice to the reception of secular narrative literature. Still, it must be concluded that medieval recipients of what we would call fictional narratives may not have perceived the difference between reference to reality and reference to a possible world particularly clearly (Schneider 2020, 87).

4 Possible Conceptual Adjustments 4.1 Reference and Mode 4.1.1 Differentiating Facticity and Factuality Overall, it is apparent that medieval literature could deviate in many ways from representing (empirical) reality, without necessarily falling into the (modern) category of fiction. The claim to truth and reference to reality can quite naturally drift

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apart. The modern premise of a supposedly objective “factual,” as a kind of default from which the “fictional” is set apart, turns out to be the expression of an empiricism (or the claim to it) that postdates the Middle Ages by quite some way. Consequently, if the difference between factuality and fictionality is to be maintained, it becomes necessary to distinguish between facticity as the quality of what is represented and factuality as the mode of representation, analogously to the differentiation between fictivity and fictionality that has been emphasized in German literary theory since the early 1990s (Rajewski 2020, 34–38). Factuality does not depend on facticity. With regard to medieval writing, it should not be asked whether something is true in point of fact, but whether it is presented in a factual mode or not (Müller 2004, 2014; Manuwald 2018, 78–82). Yet how exactly factuality (and, as a relative quality, fictionality) can be determined in premodern narrative must be resolved carefully with regard to individual texts or genres; as stated above, a scalar rather than a binary model must be adopted (von Contzen 2020; cf. Glauch 2014a, 406–410). This is no easy matter in most cases, but in some instances, the methodological differentiation between facticity and factuality provides an immediate solution to otherwise complicated problems. Medieval historiography is an example. Many chronicles refer to elements or events that are, from a modern point of view, clearly fictive, such as the descriptions of the monstrous people of India that, ultimately going back to Pliny, are part of many universal chronicles. Some are also obviously feigned, but without intent to deceive, such as the “lazy hypothesis” of Mohammed being an apostate Christian who founded Islam out of affront at having been passed over in a papal election (Melville 2002, 2009). While it is difficult to determine to what extent authors or their recipients considered this content as real, there can be no doubt as to the authors’ factual intention.

4.1.2 Differentiating Factuality and Fictionality Approaching fictionality with a negative logic has also been proposed in a recent programmatic essay on the shortcomings of historically unfounded concepts of fictionality in modern literary theory (Orlemanski 2019), which has received considerable scholarly attention, triggering a special issue of New Literary History on “Medieval Fictionalities.” Stressing not only the need for an institutional conception of fictionality but also the need for descriptive approaches that explain how and under what conditions that which is conceived as fictional stands out from other linguistic representations, Orlemanski conceives fiction

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as a demarcational phenomenon, a semantic mode of unearnest reference that depends on the recognition by some interpretive community of a representation’s distinction from one or another idiom of actuality – from history, philosophy, factuality, religious doctrine, a sacrament’s performative efficacy, or everyday speech (147).

However well founded methodologically, this approach leaves questions open. Orlemanski proposes a provisional catalogue of motifs, genres, modalities, and performative contexts which indicate non-actuality (158–160). Many of them, however, are part of medieval discourses on “covered” truth, for instance involving allegory; or refer to a moral truth in the sense of Isidore’s fabula; or, like marvels, are a distinct part of medieval concepts of reality. All that may be non-actual, but it is still essentially factual. Reuvekamp-Felber (2013) suggests differentiating between factuality and fictionality on the grounds of indicators or, more cautiously, signals on the level of discourse, some of which are also listed by Orlemanski. The catalogue he proposes ranges from generic terms, formulaic phrases, or the staging of a narrator to forms of structural organization, compositional principles, techniques of focalization, and digressive passages with metanarrative reflections, even though these features can be more or less clear-cut in any given case. This approach, partly mirroring Haug’s landmark contribution, may work for texts that tend toward the extreme ends of the scale, such as chronicle literature on the one hand and Arthurian romance on the other. However, as Reuvekamp-Felber points out himself (437), for many texts – in fact, it must be feared, for most of them – this approach alone does not lead to any clear classification or even allow an approximate localization on the scale from factuality to fictionality. In general, narrative techniques such as focalization, and even the narratological differentiation between author and narrator, which are often cited as text-related indicators of fictionality, can rarely be applied directly to medieval literature (Hübner 2003; Haferland 2014, 2019; Schneider 2020, 95–97).

4.2 Function and Level: Qualifying Fictionality Considering the alterity of the medieval understanding of factuality, it has repeatedly been proposed that we should distinguish between different qualities of fictionality in order to conceptually grasp what we encounter in medieval narrative. The most influential distinction is between “functional” and “autonomous” fictionality (Burrichter 1996, 15–22). The latter corresponds to the modern concept of fictionality as a self-referential, non-utilitarian artistic practice, the occurrence of which in premodern literature is subject to debate. In contrast, what has been termed “functional” fictionality is undisputedly an ubiquitous phenomenon in medieval literature. This refers to creative embellishments of what was believed to be

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true, for instance by adding descriptions, dialogues and speeches, or psychological motivations, which could all pass as merely shaping the historically veracious in order to make it more accessible. The same distinction has been made using other terms, as in “rhetorical” versus “generic” fictionality (Green 2002, 151), “suppletive” versus “substitutive” fictionality (Knapp 2002, 147), or “superficial” versus “massive” fictionality (Glauch 2009, 181–182; cf. 2014a, 393–394). Parallels can be drawn between all these differentiations and the distinction between story and discourse, and it has in effect been argued that medieval and modern forms of fictionality can be distinguished in terms of the structural level on which they were located (Schmitt 2005). A further approach is to complement the twofold distinction with a third type of fictionality, which has been termed “significative” (Knapp 2005, 10), “theoretical,” “theological” (Nichols 2009, 454), or “speculative” (Glauch 2014a, 396), referring to the concepts of Latin literary theory (see 3.3 above), according to which imaginative content can be a legitimate intermediary for conveying a deeper, be it doctrinal, dogmatic, or moral, truth. There are two main counter-arguments against approaches that rely on qualifying (rather than scaling) fictionality. First, it has justifiably been argued that there is little methodological gain from referring to “functional fictionality” as fictionality at all (Glauch 2014a, 395–396; Konrad 2020, 184–186). Second, this view seems to somewhat undervalue the innovative achievement of courtly literature. Authors of vernacular romances went far beyond rhetorically embellishing the stories they were rewriting. In fact, from the early romances onward, there is a marked tendency to make modifications on the level of the story, for instance by adding background stories or side-stories. Green (2002, 187–201) describes this phenomenon as “episodic” fictionality. He judges that it still falls under “functional” (“rhetorical”) fictionality, but at the same time considers it to be a precursor to the later “autonomous” (“generic”) fictionality of the Arthurian romance. This indicates that the differentiation is essentially gradational rather than categorical and can more sensibly be absorbed in a scalar model.

4.3 Modes of Reception 4.3.1 Interpassivity Even upholding as a defining factor of fictionality the broad criterion of an “attitude of indifference toward the truth value” of what is narrated (“Vergleichgültigung”; Kablitz 2013, 167) is, in a diachronic perspective, a question of identifying a range of historical variants rather than a prototypical model. Braun (2015, 106–111) has proposed modifying the question of whether something was believed or not

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into the question of how something was believed or not. He points out that Pfaller’s ([2000] 2007, [2002] 2014) concept of interpassivity – the sociocultural practice of delegating one’s own acts and sensations to external parties or devices, as in the case of “canned laughter” in American sitcoms – allows us to describe how medieval recipients may have assessed narratives with extraordinary content without having to make clear decisions about their truth value. Rather than replacing the concept of fictionality, as Braun suggests, this perspective actually allows us to conceptually adjust it by circumventing the precarious question of the truth value that recipients are thought to assign to a text, which, in one way or another, is part of all contemporary theories. It extends the range of possible modes of fictional reception to include receiving the narrated content while taking part in a collective imagination – “illusions without owners” (Pfaller [2002] 2014) – without being individually concerned with the veracity of the content. In an interpassive mode, the claim to truth can be suspended – albeit only as far as the participants in the ongoing literary discourse are concerned. Once the active, subjective role of the recipient has been taken out of the equation, it becomes apparent that the presupposition of a consciously recognized irrelevance of truth in fiction – Coleridge’s ([1817] 1983) “willing suspension of disbelief” – is in fact only a cultural habit restricted to the modern epoch. In conclusion, rather than as a “game of make-believe” (see 2.1 above), a possible mode of reception of fictional narrative in premodern times can be described as a practice of “delegating belief.” Strictly speaking, the difference is not great: it is just a shift in the accent from, in medieval logic, not interacting with a problem that does not concern the individual (remaining “interpassive”) to, in modern logic, interacting with that problem in a very special, habitually acquired manner. The result in either case is that in receiving what can be classified as fictional, the question of truth is simply not raised.

4.3.2 Experientiality and Immersion One of the most innovative approaches in recent medieval German studies is that of Schneider (2013; 2020, 98), who proposes linking the concepts of fictionality and narrativity more closely. Based on Fludernik’s (1996) notion of “experientiality,” Schneider defines fictionality in terms of the immersive effect of narrative as described by Ryan (2000). In this view, fictional texts are those that call for a form of reception that includes a semantic augment: the listener or reader receives the story as if it were part of his own experiential world and as if he were emotionally involved, while at the same time knowing it to be part of a different state of the world with no relation to his own personal experience, acts, or emotions. Given

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that this cognitive process is evoked by psychological effects that narratives strategically trigger in order to plunge the recipient into the story, it can be linked back to features of the text that simulate actuality, for instance shifts from preterit to present tense, or techniques of envisioning, visualization, or metalepsis. Depending on the degree to which a narrative is shaped accordingly, and also on the extent to which immersive reception is socially institutionalized, the effect can be of varying intensity, which correlates with a scalar conception of fictionality. Even though Schneider (2013, 69) adds the qualification that the approach does not explain the problem of reference, one of its advantages seems to me that it does precisely that. Reference or the claim to truth may not be suspended in immersive reception – but they do become blurred, at least as long as the immersive dynamic is in effect. This is due to the cognitive splitting of two separate states of the world: questions of reference and veracity necessarily lose their relevance when they are deflected toward a state of the world that does not concern the recipient. The resulting effect corresponds to what has been described above as “delegated belief,” a functional equivalent to the modern practice of “make-believe.” In this sense, it complies with the convention of gradational specification. As a whole, the concept offers a convincing explanatory framework for what has been called the “burst of fictionality” in the late twelfth century (see 3.1 above), which in effect can be described as the systematic emergence of a literature that encourages immersion – and does so with secular plots, which was entirely innovative, at least in written literature. Yet it must be noted that this definition basically applies to any narrative text – more or less so depending on its artistic design, indeed, but certainly including, for instance, legendary, mystical, or even biblical narratives. This is not necessarily inappropriate from a historical perspective, but is it methodologically satisfying? Many late medieval chronicles also build on the effect of narrative immersion. Just like religious narratives, they would need to be classified as fictional texts with what is considered factive content, falling into the borderline region of what Christian Klein and Matías Martínez (2009) have termed, from a modern perspective, “reality narratives” (Wirklichkeitserzählungen).

5 Conclusion The new court culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the most important development in fictional narrative in European history: the emergence of secular vernacular literature. Yet, even though this evolution may, in retrospect, display all the signs of fictionality and be confidently describable as a “burst of fictionality,” it is much more difficult to judge whether and to what extent it can also

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be designated as such analytically. This is due to the almost total lack of pertinent metapoetic statements or relevant theorizing from the time, but also to the alterity of the worldview of the Middle Ages. But the methodological dilemma in discussing premodern fictionality is not only to avoid making ahistorical projections on the one hand and overcautiously downplaying true literary innovations on the other. It is also to strike a balance between efforts to painstakingly extract early indications of a notion that was to become a cornerstone of modern literary history (and is of interest primarily for this reason) and to develop an independent concept of a premodern phenomenon (or possibly, various phenomena) that is of actual descriptive relevance for medieval studies. Still, a balance between these two equally legitimate interests seems possible and heuristically profitable on the basis of a careful, wide definition of fictionality, which, apart from addressing basic factors as set out in section 2.3 above, allows for – a negative derivation from factuality, which, in turn, is not defined in relation to facticity; – a scalar conception according to which the concrete fictional or factual status of a text or genre can be more or less pronounced relative to an abstract prototypical conception; – composite texts that include both fictional and factual parts; – historical fluctuations even within relatively short periods of time (see my article “Fictionality in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature” in this volume); and, not least, – varying institutional practices. Regarding the last aspect, it is primarily the convention of gradational specification, corresponding to the modern technique of “make-believe,” which must be addressed. Among the possible adjustments that have been discussed in this article, two that seem particularly promising cover – immersive reception, which tends to shift concerns about veracity away from the recipient by encouraging cognitive splitting (even though this criterion is not definitive); and – the interpassive mode of reception, which delegates concerns about veracity to an indistinct external instance. This has an inherent logic in that both immersive and interpassive dynamics tend to be intuitive, while the technique of “make-believe” in fiction is in fact a (modern) cultural habit that is learned from an early age. In contrast, immersive or interpassive reception, even though possibly based on the particular conditions of a given genre or context, relies less on an overall, culturally established mutual understanding, which, in premodern times, simply had not yet been firmly institution-

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alized. Describing functional equivalents of the modern game of “make-believe” has the double analytical advantage of promoting the historical understanding of premodern narrative and of helping to identify modern habitual patterns that are, in fact, not a defining part of fictionality as such, but need to be traced back to a more abstract foundation.

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Konrad, Eva-Maria. 2017. “Signposts of Factuality: On Genuine Assertions in Fictional Literature.” In Art and Belief, edited by Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Helen Bradley, and Paul Noordhof, 42–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Konrad, Eva-Maria. 2020. “On the History of the Practice of Fictionality – and the Recurring Problems in Its Investigation.” In “History of the Modern Practice of Fiction,” special issue, Journal of Literary Theory 14, no. 2, 173–193. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. 1994. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lavocat, Françoise. 2016. Fait et fiction: Pour une frontière. Paris: Seuil. Manuwald, Henrike. 2018. “Der Drache als Herausforderung für Fiktionalitätstheorien: Mediävistische Überlegungen zur Historisierung von ‘Faktualität.’” In Geschichte der Fiktionalität: Diachrone Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Konzept, edited by Johannes Franzen, Patrick Galke-Janzen, Frauke Janzen, and Marc Wurich, 65–88. Baden-Baden: Ergon. Manuwald, Henrike. 2020. “Fictionality and Pleasure: Traces of a Practice of Fictionality in Medieval German Short Verse Narratives?” In “History of the Modern Practice of Fiction,” special issue, Journal of Literary Theory 14, no. 2, 215–240. Mehtonen, Päivi. 1996. Old Concepts and New Poetics: “Historia”, “Argumentum”, and “Fabula” in the Twelfth- and Early Thirteenth-Century Latin Poetics of Fiction. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica. Meincke, Anne Sophie. 2007. “Narrative Selbstreflexion als poetologischer Diskurs: Fiktionalitätsbewußtsein im ‘Reinfried von Braunschweig’?” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 136:312–351. Melville, Gert. 2002. “Fiktionen als pragmatische Erklärungen des Unerklärbaren: Mohammed, ein verhinderter Papst.” In Historisches und fiktionales Erzählen im Mittelalter, edited by Fritz Peter Knapp and Manuela Niesner, 27–44. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Melville, Gert. 2009. “Durch Fiktionen von der Wirklichkeit zur Wahrheit: Zum mittelalterlichen Umgang mit Widersprüchen zwischen Empirie und kultureller Axiomatik.” In Fiktion und Fiktionalität in den Literaturen des Mittelalters, edited by Ursula Peters and Rainer Warning, 83–104. Paderborn: Fink. Meyer, Matthias. 1994. Die Verfügbarkeit der Fiktion: Interpretationen und poetologische Untersuchungen zum Artusroman und zur aventiurehaften Dietrichepik des 13. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Winter. Missinne, Lut, Ralf Schneider, and Beatrix van Dam. 2020. “Einleitung.” In Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft: Fiktionalität, edited by Lut Missinne, Ralf Schneider, and Beatrix van Dam, 3–49. Berlin: De Gruyter. Müller, Jan-Dirk. 2004. “Literarische und andere Spiele: Zum Fiktionalitätsproblem in vormoderner Literatur.” Poetica 36:281–311. Müller, Jan-Dirk. 2014. “Die Freiheit der Fiktion.” In Zwischen Fakten und Fiktionen. Literatur und Geschichtsschreibung in der Vormoderne, edited by Merle Marie Schütte, Kristina Rzehak, and Daniel Lizius, 211–231. Würzburg: Ergon. Neudeck, Otto. 2003. Erzählen von Kaiser Otto: Zur Fiktionalisierung von Geschichte in mittelhochdeutscher Literatur. Cologne: Böhlau. Nichols, Stephen G. 2009. “Enigma of Wisdom: On Narrating Origins and Ends in 13th and 14th Century France.” In Fiktion und Fiktionalität in den Literaturen des Mittelalters, edited by Ursula Peters and Rainer Warning, 451–470. Paderborn: Fink. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh. 2015. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative 23, no. 1, 61–73. Onea, Edgar. 2014. “Fiktionalität und Sprechakte.” In Fiktionalität, edited by Tilmann Köppe and Tobias Klauk, 68–96. New York: De Gruyter.

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Christine Putzo

Fictionality in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature 1 Preliminary Remarks Based on the working definition of fictionality established in my “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature” in the present volume, and considering the possible adjustments set out there (section 4), the aim of this article is to describe the conventions of potential institutional practices of fictionality in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The chief focus will be on German courtly literature from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, and also on the main secular genres (romance, heroic epic, short narrative); religious and didactic narrative literature can only be considered marginally. Lyric poetry will be set aside as an essentially non-narrative genre, even though it has played a role in the discussion of practices of fictionality in courtly literature (Schneider 2020, 92–93). According to the institutional convention of decision (see “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature”, 2.3), the main emphasis must be on the author. While it will be shown that this convention does not make equal sense for all narrative genres treated in this article, there are some that provide examples of what can reasonably be interpreted as a fictional intention on the part of the author, albeit under conditions that differ from the modern ones. An authorial fictional intention (see “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 2.3) has been defined as consisting of two components: the intention that the reader will to some extent “make-believe” or, to put it more accurately from a historical point of view, “delegate belief” in what is said – that is, that he will follow the convention of execution in abiding by the convention of gradational specification – as well as the intention that the reader will recognize the author’s intention and consider this reason enough to process the text as expected (convention of reciprocity). This clearly implies an awareness of this practice on the part of the author and, albeit potentially to a lesser extent, on the part of the intended recipient – understood here, for the sake of simplicity, as a kind of model recipient representative of the audience or readership at the secular courts and, in early modern times, among the urban bourgeoisie. Some narratives indicate that a more heterogeneous audience must be reckoned with: both the prologue of Herzog Ernst (Duke Ernst, version B, ca. 1200), a literarized former oral epic, and the opening lines of Herrand von Wildonie’s short narrative Der betrogene Gatte (The Deceived Husband, ca. 1250/1270) differentiate between recipients who have a courtly attitude, or even perform courtly deeds, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-041

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and recipients who are either non-courtly, possibly clerical, or do nothing but sit on their land. In both cases, only the courtly recipients are presented as being open to receiving the narratives appropriately – that is, taking the stories for true – while it is stated that the others doubt them or ask for witnesses. This obviously has to be taken with a grain of salt, but it may indicate an awareness of divergent attitudes toward fiction among possible recipients. Although this question cannot be pursued much further due to the scarcity of sources, the passages mentioned bring us to a characteristic feature of vernacular courtly literature that, with regard to the convention of decision, needs to be noted first of all. At first glance, this feature seems to point in the exact opposite direction from a fictional intention: the authors’ – or narrators’ – ubiquitous assertions that they are not lying but tell the authentic truth as they have learned it from their source. They occur as part of the conventional topoi in prologues or epilogues, but are also sprinkled across texts at fairly regular intervals. “If my sources speak truthfully,” “our truthful source tells us,” “as we have truthfully heard,” and “since I must tell the truth” are just a few examples from Erec, the earliest Arthurian romance in German (Hartmann von Aue 2001, lines 185, 2094, 2742, 5333). In their more elaborate form, they come with a set of conventionalized rhetorical strategies of authentication, usually references to authorities or written sources, or even to ostensible eyewitness accounts (catalogued in Schmitt 2005) – techniques that were adapted from the early medieval religious epic in the vernacular and at the same time mimic the conventions of clerical culture (Grubmüller 1995). All this may correspond to the general logic of marking factuality in medieval academic practice, which is achieved by reference to classical or scriptural authority rather than by verifiability (Minnis [1984] 2010). Yet the almost mechanical gesture in the secular context – referring to some sort of authority that or who guarantees truth – also has the inherent logic of delegating the responsibility for trustworthiness to an indeterminate third party. In thus assigning an “interpassive” role to the recipient (see “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 4.3.1), this logic liberates him from raising the question of veracity at all. Hence, the formulaic authentications – which modern research has, in certain cases, already determined are not to be taken literally or are even to be understood as ironic markers of fictionality (Glauch 2009, 189–191) – can likewise be interpreted as expressions of the authors’ fictional intention that their narrations be received in the mode of “delegated belief.” This is strengthened given the fact that they sometimes explicitly include the possibility that the authority may not even tell the truth, which, however, still absolves the author from any responsibility (Reuvekamp-Felber 2013, 428–429). In this sense, formulaic authentications can actually signpost fictionality (convention of signalization), although the degree to which this is the case must be evaluated carefully for individual texts or genres.

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2 A Special Case: Arthurian Romance Not coincidentally, the most noticeable examples are provided by Arthurian romances, which even go further by openly ironizing or disavowing the traditional topoi of truthfulness. In his Iwein (ca. 1200), Hartmann von Aue plays on the topos of the adtestatio rei visae, account of an eyewitness, when he interrupts his narration of the fight between Iwein and his opponent Ascalon, the subject of a long description in his source, the French Chevalier au lion by Chrétien de Troyes. In contrast to Chrétien, Hartmann ostentatiously refrains from giving any details on the grounds that he simply cannot know them, since apart from the two fighters – of whom, he notes, one was killed and the other was too courtly to praise himself – no one was there to witness the fight (Hartmann von Aue 2001, lines 1029–1044). Also in Hartmann’s Iwein, there is a much-cited passage in which the author demonstrates, if not the fictional nature, then at least the constructed quality of the narrative by staging a dialogue between the seemingly ignorant narrator and the personified Lady Love. The former misunderstands the metaphorical sense of what he himself has just said – that Iwein and his lady had exchanged hearts – and can “only defend myself by saying it was true, for it was told me as fact” (niht baz bewarn, wan ich sagt irz fur die wârheit, ez was ouch mir fur wâr geseit), even though he worries about how Iwein was supposed to fight with a female heart in his breast. Lady Love does not bother to explain to him what, as can be inferred, must be perfectly clear to the recipient (Hartmann von Aue 2001, 2017, lines 2974–3028). Other passages in Hartmann’s romances that have often been cited as evidence of a conscious use of fictionality actually reflect the precarious relationship between truth and perceivable reality. They typically belong in the context of the long descriptive passages that, based on the model of classical authors, are a characteristic feature of medieval narration. Thus, when describing a miraculous, multicolored palfrey in Erec, Hartmann counters possible objections to the veracity of his narrative by explaining that the animal was taken from a savage dwarf in a mountain cave in an indistinct land of adventures. He trusts that, on these grounds, a possible critic “will realize that these things are not a lie” (daz er rehte erkenne daz diu rede wese ungelogen; Hartmann von Aue 2001, 2008, lines 7389–7425, here 7391–7392). Similarly, when describing the cloth with which the saddle of the same palfrey was covered, embroidered with “all the wonders of the world and whatever the heavens enclose” (aller werlde wunder und swaz der himel besliuzet; lines 7589–7590), he encourages recipients who might wish to identify the countless fish and wonders of the sea that are displayed on the cloth to set out

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[. . .] drâte, vart selber zuo dem mer: dâ vindet ir inne des ein her. gât an den stat stân unde bitet si gân ûz ze iu an den sant: dâ werdent si iu erkant. hilfet danne daz niht, daz aber lîhte geschiht, sô suochet selbe den grunt: dâ werdent si iu danne kunt mit grôzem schaden, mit lützelm vrumen. nû rate ich mînen vriunden sumen daz si die niugerne lân und hie heime bestân. swes ein man wol allen tac sô rehte lîhte engelten mac und nimmer niht geniezen, des lât iuch, vriunt, erdriezen. (Hartmann von Aue 2008, lines 7623–7641) ([. . .] quickly and go yourselves to the ocean. You will find a great many creatures in it. Go and stand on the shore and ask them to come out to you on the sand. Then you will learn what they are. If that does not work – which is also quite possible – then look at the seafloor yourselves. There you will find out about them with great loss and little gain. Thus I advise some of my friends to suppress their curiosity and stay home. Whatever one always has to pay for dearly, without ever gaining any benefit from it, that, my friends, will be bothersome; Hartmann von Aue 2001, line 137)

The underlying message of both passages is that readers must refrain from attempting to verify the narrated content with reference to the accessible world, but not – and this makes the explanations expressions of a genuinely artistic fictional intention  – because of religious perceptions of truth or license to shape more clearly what is true anyway (see “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 3.4), but because it is not worth it, or just “bothersome,” to make the effort of verifying the content. The recipient is discharged of any such obligation, as is, in fact, the narrator himself, who goes by the name of “Hartmann” in Hartmann’s romance. Even under these conditions, he does claim the truth of his description, but only by delegating responsibility: he emphasizes “the fact that I have not seen the saddle” (daz ich den satel nie gesach) and consequently can only describe it “as I was told by the person from whom I have the story, as I read in his book” (als mir dâ von bejach von dem ich die rede hân; Hartmann von Aue 2001, 2008, lines 7486–7490). While its interpretation is debated, by far the most elaborate disqualification of the claim to truth by reference may well be the staging of a feigned source in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, known as the “Kyot fiction” in today’s research, even

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though, in a telling demonstration of how difficult it is to differentiate between fact and fiction from a distance, it has often been taken for authentic. Wolfram claims here to follow the Provençal work of a certain Kyot in preference to his demonstrable actual source, the Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail) by Chrétien de Troyes, on the grounds that it was Kyot, not Chrétien, who provided the authentic version of the Grail story – even though, at the same time, he consistently mocks the convention of source-references throughout his work and repeatedly hints that Kyot’s information may be questionable (Green 2002, 55–92). In addition, Wolfram spins a complicated story around Kyot, how he gained his knowledge, and the literary tradition of his alleged book, which ultimately goes back to reading from the stars. Other than in Arthurian romances, however, significant passages like these are rarely to be found in vernacular narrative around 1200. This is not surprising given the special position of the Arthurian legend, especially in the German-speaking countries. In Anglo-Norman England and in continental France, the myth had gradually developed from material in chronicles and factual Latin historiography, complemented by Celtic oral tradition, into vernacular romance. While the historical veracity of King Arthur was keenly debated in thirteenth-century England, and, for that matter, well into modern times (Fulton 2017), Chrétien’s principal source, Wace’s Roman de Brut (The Romance of Brut, ca. 1155), places itself on the borderline between historiography and fiction simply by virtue of its language and form alone: albeit in an essentially factual mode, Wace tells the story of the kings of Britain by adapting his source, the Latin Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, in vernacular verse. He is the first to mention King Arthur’s famous Round Table, which, according to Wace, was established in a twelveyear period of peace during which all the adventures that are told about the knights are supposed to have happened. Wace places these stories, apparently known to his audience from oral tradition, in an intermediate zone between fact and invention, ingeniously playing on this opposition by ostentatiously using ambiguous verbs: en cele pais que jo di – ne sai si vus l’avez oï – furent les merveilles provees e les aventures trovees que d’Arthur sunt tant recuntees que a fable sunt aturnees: ne tut mençunge ne tut veir, ne tut folie ne tut saveir, tant unt li cuntëur cunté e li fablëur tant fablé pur lur cuntes enbeleter, unt tut fait fables sembler. (Wace 1993, lines 1059–1070)

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(It was in this period of peace that I mentioned – I do not know if you have heard about it – that all the miracles were tried/proven to be true [provees] and the adventures were composed/ met [trovees] that are told about Arthur in such a way that they have become/are interpreted as [aturnees] fables. Yet they are neither sheer bare lies nor the strict truth, neither utter folly nor pure wisdom. The minstrels have sung so much and the storytellers have fabricated so much to embellish their stories that they have made all the accounts seem fables.)

Similarly, in his Roman de Rou (Romance of Rou, ca. 1160/1175), Wace recounts wandering into the forest of Brocéliande in search of the miraculous fountain of Barenton, where, according to Breton oral tradition, fairies live and marvels happen: La alai jo merveilles querre vi la forest e vi la terre, merveilles quis, mais nes trovai, fol m’en revinc, fol i alai; fol i alai, fol m’en revinc, folie quis, por fol me tinc. (I went there in search of marvels; I saw the forest and the land and looked for marvels, but found none. I came back as a fool and went as a fool. I went as a fool and came back as a fool. I sought foolishness and considered myself a fool; Wace 2002, lines 6393–6398)

While these passages have been interpreted as skepticism toward the fabrications of vernacular oral tradition (Wace 1993, 334nn), they can just as well be read as playing on the question of fictional truth. Similarly to what Hartmann will convey a few decades later, attempting to verify what is narrated is, in this view, nothing but foolishness. By opening epistemic perspectives like this, as well as with its language and form, Wace’s work threw open the doors to vernacular written narratives on the Arthurian material. It is only against this background that Chrétien de Troyes’s innovative poetological project can be understood, as well as his step toward what, since Haug, has been described as the emergence of autonomous fiction in the Middle Ages. In the German-speaking countries, the underlying historiographical tradition was known little, if at all. The German courtly audience encountered the Arthurian material only through the reception of French vernacular literature, a process that began in the second half of the twelfth century. In contrast to other material, that of Arthur did not compete with parallel factual literature and, consequently, was less burdened with questions of historical truth or dynastic history. This circumstance obviously contributed to the special position of Arthurian romance within German courtly literature, which allowed a much more overt display, or even mocking, of the convention of “delegating belief.” Inasmuch as this mode can be described as a functional equivalent to the modern practice of ‘make-believe,’ as has been argued in “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 4.3.1, this can

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be interpreted as a pronounced awareness of fictionality. It may have contributed to the particularly dynamic fictional development of the genre (Meyer 1994): after the early adaptations of Chrétien’s romances, the entry of Arthurian material into German courtly culture rapidly sparked off an independent tradition of German Arthurian romance, which, while self-reflexive rather than originally inventive, and never explicit or programmatic, displays a high degree of creative innovation. This tendency is best described as a continuous process of formation of alternatives to the narrative configurations of the earlier romances (Remele 2020), and has, in this sense, been termed “possibilitarious fictionality” (possibilitäre Fiktionalität; Przybilski 2011, Przybilski and Ruge 2013). This is, at the same time, the best indication we have as to the convention of reciprocity. Given the historical distance and the lack of direct testimony, it is otherwise difficult to establish to what extent an author could trust that his recipients would recognize his fictional intention and process the text adequately. The creative development of the genre by contemporaries, as well as by authors of the next generation, however, bears witness to a successful literary communication. It is in this sense that the continued practice of using formulaic authentications – now ostentatiously lacking in substance (Däumer 2018, 57–62) – in the later Arthurian romances must be understood. All the same, there is evidence that this may only have been the case for a limited period of time. By the late Middle Ages, Arthur had made a belated entry into German historiography (Wolf 2011). Among the few direct testimonies of the reception of Arthurian romances from this period, there is a manuscript whose compiler combined two Arthurian romances and shorter narratives with a series of historiographical texts, including a biographical note on the life of King Arthur that, through intermediate sources, goes back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (Putzo 2002). It is highly unlikely that this reader processed the romances abiding by the convention of execution. According to the definition in “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 2.3, this does not affect the fictional status of the text as long as the author intended it to be read as fictional (convention of decision) and had good reason to do so in his time (convention of reciprocity). But it does throw light on the history of fictionality in the German Middle Ages: while there are sound reasons to assume a working social practice for a certain genre in a certain cultural context from the end of the twelfth century until well into the thirteenth, there is little indication that we should do so for the same narrative material in the centuries that followed. Also, the matter is less clear when it comes to the Tristan romances (Chinca 2003; Glauch 2005), which, as another branch of the matière de Bretagne, are closely related to the Arthurian material. A cautious view is appropriate from the outset where other narrative genres are concerned. Other than Arthurian romance, the two main long forms around 1200 were romances of antiquity and heroic epic. Within French culture, these

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were already described respectively as “wise and instructive” and “permanently true” by the poet Jean Bodel, in contrast to the Arthurian material, which Bodel labeled “pointless and amusing” (“sage et de sens aprendant,” “voir chascun jour aparant,” “vain et plaisant”; 1989, lines 9–11).

3 Heroic Epic Heroic epic – represented in the German-speaking countries by various cycles set in the Age of Migrations and in France by the chansons de geste about Charlemagne and his paladins, of which a few were adapted into German – is characterized by recounting events of a bygone era that are taken as formative for a cultural community and form an important part of its early history. Even though these events are related in a mythologized form through narratives that stylize, simplify, idealize, or personalize them, this represents the historical memory of oral and, to some extent, semi-oral cultures. It is difficult to determine to what degree they were still recognized as such within the written culture of the high Middle Ages and how the authors dealt with their historical implications in a literary context. The opening strophe of the genre-founding Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs, ca. 1200) certainly invokes precisely this background when the narrator directs the audience to events of a glorious past that have been told to “us.” As in most heroic epics, this narrator remains low-profile and indistinct in comparison to the pronounced narrator figures in Arthurian romances. In general, the narrators of heroic epics assume the role of acting as part of a collective, and this also seems to be the position in which many authors place themselves: virtually always remaining anonymous, they appear simply to be telling about what has always been known, by no means personally to the author, but collectively. While this can obviously also be described as an artistic pose and is subject to change in the course of the development of the genre (Kropik 2008), it is questionable whether literary communication on these grounds even meets the convention of decision, given that this implies an author who consciously and deliberately makes a decision about how his text is supposed to be received. This cannot easily be assumed for authors who, as in the case of heroic epic, typically do not adopt an auctorial position at all but rather seem to have understood themselves as mediators. Even though, similarly to what has been described above, this attitude liberates authors and recipients alike from any responsibility as to the truth of what is narrated, it is more difficult than in the case of Arthurian romance to define this as indifference to veracity. The question of truth is not raised: rather than being deindividualized and deprived of relevance by being delegated to an indistinct external instance, it is, on

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the contrary, bound back to the collective to which everyone in the literary process belongs. At the same time, while the epics certainly work on the basis of immersion, they also undermine the immersive effect by linking the fictional experience back to the individual recipients whose cultural identity they shape. Along similar lines, Lienert (2010, 231–246) concludes that the factual or fictional nature of heroic epic can only be determined flexibly, with the different circles of recipients in mind. This does not meet the institutional definition of fictionality underlying the present article. Still, it is to be noted that almost all testimonies of reception belonging to the Latinate literate sphere deal with heroic epic in terms of truth or lies, that is, in the factual mode – be it by uncritically incorporating information from the epics into Latin chronicles, or be it by criticizing or apologizing for the chronological inaccuracies of heroic tradition (Lienert 2010, 171–172, 36). A notable exception is Engelbert von Admont’s Speculum virtutum moralium (Mirror of Moral Virtues, ca. 1300), which discusses heroic epic against the background of Isidore’s opposition between historia and fabula (see “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 3.3), classifying it as the latter. This is not only a rare example of a connection being made between Latin literary theory and vernacular literature, but also remarkable in that there is no pejorative undertone to Engelbert’s depiction of the epics as invented fabulae, which he positions in the Horatian logic of prodesse et delectare (Lienert 2010, 238). A subgroup of German heroic poetry, the so-called “fantastic” (aventiurehafte) Dietrich epics, deserves particular attention. In contrast to the so-called “historical” Dietrich epics, which are loosely based on the historical deeds of Theodoric the Great, the “fantastic” Dietrich epics relate the same king’s battles against dragons, giants, or dwarfs. Even though this is done with an equal claim to truth as the “historical” epics, the “fantastic” Dietrich epics can less clearly be classified as a means of understanding one’s own past or representing cultural memory. In fact, plot elements and structural features place the “fantastic” Dietrich epics nearer to the Arthurian romance than to heroic epic, which may have encouraged a fictional intention (Meyer 1994).

4 Romances of Antiquity Much of what has been said about heroic epic is also true for romances of antiquity, the third major narrative genre at the beginnings of secular literature in the vernacular – except that in this case we are dealing not with the traditional oral memory of a culture but with a more recently constructed written memory. Romances of antiquity, which in German literature concern the stories of Troy, Aeneas, and Alex-

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ander the Great, go back to Latin texts of the Roman Republic and late antiquity. In the Middle Ages, the Trojan War was unquestioningly taken as a historical fact. Through the story of Aeneas, it was also considered as the event that ultimately led to the founding of the city of Rome, which in turn was believed to be the origin of the medieval Roman Empire in which the participants in courtly literary discourse themselves lived. Medieval dynasties traced their genealogies back to Troy, as was also done for several peoples, among them the Franks, in chronicle literature from the early Middle Ages onward. Alexander the Great’s unheard-of military successes as well his expedition beyond the borders of the known world were actual historical facts. They were not only mentioned in the Old Testament (1 Macc. 1:1–8), but, furthermore, based on the Christian interpretation of the Book of Daniel, Alexander’s establishment of the Greek Empire was considered an important step toward the salvation of the world in the medieval concept of universal history. Also, features of their narrative design, as well as, in some cases, the manuscript context in which they are preserved, place romances of antiquity particularly close to historiography (Lienert 2001, 176). In short, where this genre is concerned, there is even less doubt than in the case of heroic epic that its content was considered to be historically true. In addition, the genre is not based on or connected with oral illiterate traditions but relates to the Latinate literate sphere from the beginning. Both aspects strongly suggest these texts should be treated as a largely factual discourse without fictional intention on the part of the authors. Still, romances of antiquity are particularly interesting for a historical perspective on fictionality, because they were in fact the first vernacular romances that were composed both in France and in the German-speaking world, even before Chrétien’s innovative Arthurian romances or Hartmann’s German adaptations. Strictly speaking, these are the first small testimonies to the significant “burst of fictionality” (Fiktionalisierungsschub; Wolfzettel 2002, 97) in late twelfth-century Europe. Especially in France, those early attempts are already far from faithful to the Latin sources they refer to. While remaining close to their sources in following the course of the narrated events, they display a considerable amount of creative inventiveness alongside this, in the first place by interweaving plots of courtly love into the more sober Latin narratives. They also display techniques, such as interior monologues, perspectivization, or the development of a narrator figure, that characterize romance in contrast to historiography. Green (2002, 168) describes this phenomenon as “incipient or episodic fictionality,” but characterizes it as an essentially rhetorical embellishment. While he justifiably emphasizes that this restricted form of fictionality should be kept distinct from Chrétien’s much more radical project, there is no need to classify it as purely functional or conflicting with the dominant factual mode. A compositionalist and scalar definition of fictionality allows us to evaluate the fictional parts of the early romances of antiquity in their own right.

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5 Late Courtly Romances While it is not possible in the limited scope of this article to trace the development of vernacular romance through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in much detail, some tendencies can be outlined. The one genre that displayed a recognizable tradition of nonmimetic creative innovation in a fictional mode, the Arthurian romance, had essentially expired by the end of the thirteenth century, around the same time as King Arthur started to become more prominent as a figure of historiography. New types of romances emerged, most of which have been classified under the umbrella term of “romances of love and adventure” (Minne- und Aventiureromane). Among their few common traits is their “realistic” setting in a European aristocratic society, often sprinkled with references to territorial dynastic history. This sphere becomes the starting point for protagonists’ extensive travels to the Mediterranean or the Orient, which then stand under the sign of learning and universal history. Late courtly romances are characterized by their tendency to impart encyclopedic knowledge, similar to the kind that is conveyed in contemporaneous universal chronicles, which, in turn, in this period increasingly tend to deploy literary strategies borrowed from the romances. This is, to a degree, also true for the new romances of antiquity: after receding soon after the emergence of the dominant Arthurian romance, the genre saw a revival in the second half of the thirteenth century, thus contributing to the general trend of (re)historicization of vernacular narrative literature. The encyclopedic tendency of late romances can take such extreme forms that the plots in some cases seem to only serve “as a hook or prompt for extensive poetological and/or specialist digressions” (Herweg 2014, 200). At the same time, they can display plots of such complexity that it is hard for modern readers to keep track of them at all. Both tendencies lead to a form of narrative that calls for diagrammatic rather than linear modes of narrative perception, but also hinders immersion. In this sense, late courtly romances are much more foreign to today’s recipients and contemporary literary theory than the older romances of the decades around 1200 (Putzo 2014). This makes it considerably more difficult to apply to them categories that have been developed on the grounds of modern literary conventions. Even though late courtly romances have often been read against the background of an established institution of fictionality (Ridder 1998), which all too easily tends to be taken for granted once accomplished by Chrétien, current research has questioned whether the concept of fictionality is appropriate or heuristically useful for this kind of romance at all, and asked whether its characteristics might not be better grasped by means of more general concepts such as artificiality, literariness, or poeticity (Herweg 2014).

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This, of course, makes late courtly romances a prime example of the methodological advantages of a compositionalist understanding of fictionality, which allows us to discuss as fictional only those parts of the romances that were potentially intended as such, without marginalizing the undoubtedly factual parts. Nevertheless, given the “paths toward factuality” (Wege zur Verbindlichkeit; Herweg 2010) that late romances are visibly eager to clear, it can confidently be said that, in a scalar model, they are less fictional and more factual than many of their thirteenth-century predecessors.

6 Short Narratives Short narratives in verse, both secular and religious in content, are a dominant literary form from the thirteenth century onward and, in prose, well into the early modern period. Based on an international narrative tradition that seems to have been largely oral, but also on Latin exemplary literature, they include a number of explicitly didactic subgenres, such as animal fables, parables, or bîspel (examples), which combine a story with an exposition on the lesson to be learned from it. The most important subgenre in the context of establishing historical perspectives on fictionality, however, is the secular Märe, a diverting tale of worldly character with a simple plot, sometimes exemplary or gallant, but more often comic or even farcical in nature. Those tales, too, are typically framed by didactic or exemplary explanations. Yet the actual narrative and the alleged moral are very often ill-matched or incongruent. For instance, in the thirteenth-century Das Almosen (Alms), a miserly peasant who locks away all the food discovers his wife fulfilling her duty to give alms by sleeping with a passing beggar. The moral of the story, it is explained, is that giving this kind of alms was no sin. An even clearer example are the obscene tales that, from the thirteenth century onward, emerge in considerable number. In view of their extreme content, without any reference to reality or history and without any plausible instructive function, they can be taken as the most obvious representatives of autonomous fictionality in the modern sense. Casually claiming a written source, the late thirteenth-century tale Die halbe Birne (The Half-Pear), possibly by Konrad von Würzburg, tells the story of a knight who, after being mocked by a princess for violating courtly table manners, tricks her into having frenetic sexual intercourse with him, which, by another turn of the story, develops into a threesome in which the knight becomes a kind of living toy handled by the princess’s maid. By later threatening to expose her behavior to the public, he makes the princess marry him. The marriage turns out to be unhappy, because the knight remains distrustful toward his wife. A short epilogue explains the moral: men and women should learn

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from this to behave according to the standards of common decency. Der Rosendorn (The Rose Thorn, ca. 1300), the oldest in a series of tales about personified genitals, relates (not without the conventional assertion of truth) how a woman and her vulva decide to part and go their separate ways. Both, however, learn that men do not appreciate the one without the other. They are rescued by the first-person narrator, who “nails” the genital back onto the woman. The lesson to be learned, it is explained, is that any man who loves a woman should take care to nail her vulva onto her body well so that love will persist. Apart from Arthurian romance, there is hardly any other literary genre that displays creative inventiveness to such an extent as the secular Märe, with artistic freedom going so far that even obscenity becomes possible in a courtly context. As with the Arthurian romance, it is hard to deny that many secular short narratives have a fictional intention, notwithstanding the revealing attempts scholars have made to detach the content from authorial intention by describing the former as something that got, as it were, out of hand (see, e.g., Hübner and Schulz 2011, 195). These two genres at the extreme end of the scale have further points in common. Like the Arthurian romance, short narratives cultivate the custom of formulaic authentications, often in an openly ironic manner (Grubmüller 2006, 133–134; Manuwald 2020, 225–232), and, also like the Arthurian romance, they tend to play on the relationship between truth, reality, and narration (Däumer 2018). Short narratives are also, again like the Arthurian romance, based on both oral vernacular tradition and on Latin clerical culture. This circumstance seems to have favored a development toward something that, with all due caution, may be described as artistic liberty and creative composition. In the case of the Märe, an interpassive explanation for this phenomenon suggests itself. Stemming from exemplary literature, the didactic claim still resonates in short narratives, albeit in a “frozen,” dysfunctional way, best expressed by the incoherent moralizations. Even though these moralizations appear reduced to mere formulas without any plausible claim to validity, they are still functional in that they work as an interpassive behavior signal that delegates judgment on the legitimacy of the fictional story. However implausible, the formulaic moralization puts a didactic stamp on the narrative, formally marking it as a legitimate fabula in the Isidorian tradition (see “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 3.3), thus taking away any concerns that individuals might have about the veracity of the story. Along similar lines, Manuwald (2020) has pointed out that in a number of short narratives, the claim to truth, although formally upheld, is undermined by prologues that anticipate a specific reception, namely that certain emotions, not least pleasure, will be evoked. She concludes that the strategy of foregrounding the emotionally stimulating power of the narrative makes the question of its authenticity appear irrelevant, which may be classified as a historical practice of fictionality.

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Even though Manuwald does not describe it as such, this effect could equally be conceptualized within the methodological framework of interpassivity (see Pfaller [2002] 2014, 15–34, on “delegated enjoyment”).

7 Early Modern Prose Romances While twelfth- and thirteenth-century verse romances continued to be copied and received all through the Middle Ages, the mid-fifteenth century saw the inception of prose romances. As the new form entailed profound changes in structure, style, and narrative design, the concurrent emergence of printing and a commercial book trade allowed much new material to enter German literature, originating not only from French but also from Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, or Early Modern Latin sources. Apart from very few exceptions, no original compositions came into being: early modern prose romances essentially remained a literature based on the reception of other texts. Their plots, too, were similar to those of medieval romances: stories of love and adventure, but with a renewed interest in outlandish elements, exceptional events, and the marvelous in general. However, just like their medieval predecessors, these early modern authors firmly asserted the truth of their stories, no matter how extraordinary the content. But whereas the authors of medieval verse romances were able to satisfy this claim by brief formulaic, often implausible authentications, potentially triggering an interpassive indifference to veracity, the authors of early modern prose romances appear to have been under much greater pressure to legitimize their narratives. The increasingly emphatic factual claim of narrative is reflected by the generic term historia, which prevailed for the new prose romances but was also applied to essentially factual genres such as chronicles, travelogues, or legends (Knape 1984). In certain instances, romances were actually treated as scientific sources, as in the case of the fairy Melusine, who transforms into a half-serpent on a weekly basis. The German version by Thüring von Ringoltingen (1456) was repeatedly cited in the early modern theological discourse on demonology, among others by Paracelsus (Liber de nymphis [A Book on Nymphs], 1566). In line with this trend, textual authentications became more elaborate in early modern prose romances in comparison to medieval times (Schmitt 2005, 163–263; 2006). It is doubtful whether any attitude of indifference toward the truth of what was narrated could have been intended or conveyed under these circumstances. This development must be seen in connection with a newly emerging tradition of humanist treatises on fiction (Wels 2009). Some of them defend it, but, in taking up medieval traditions, cannot be called progressive. Examples include Sigismund

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Gossembrot’s Rechtfertigung der Poesie (Justification of Poetry, 1466), in which he dwells on what he terms “adinventio” (1935, 95), the legitimate expansion of the real in the service of truth (see “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 3.4), or Heinrich Steinhöwel’s (1873) preface to his Aesopus (1476/1477), which elaborates Isidore’s tripartite distinction (see “Fictionality and the Alterity of Premodern Literature,” 3.3). Often, the treatises are severely condemnatory, as for instance in the first edition of Juan Luis Vives’s Veritas fucata (Painted Truth 1514/1519) or Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and Arts, 1526). This tendency, in turn, triggered a tradition of poetological rationalizations of fiction, written by authors, translators, or publishers in prefaces or epilogues to prose romances. These rationalizations are often based on entirely new strategies that stood out from the medieval tradition and have sometimes been judged to point toward a modern understanding of autonomous fiction (Kleinschmidt 1982). This, however, should be questioned. Particular scholarly attention has been paid to the author’s (or rather translator’s) preface to the first edition of Wilhelm Ziely’s prose romances (1521), which seems to offer innovative solutions to the problem of truth in fiction. Ziely asks anyone who reads his book “to believe it as far as it is consistent with truth. Read it according to its worth. It is not appropriate to read it with the same belief as one reads the holy Gospel” (das er im ſo vil gloubens geb/ als der warheit glychfoermig ſyn mag/ liß es für ſyn wert/ daß man es leß mit semlichem glouben als man lißt das heilig euangelium/ das kan man nit thuon; fol. a1v). At first glance, this assertion seems spectacularly modern in that it ascribes to the romances a specific, reduced claim to truth differentiated from the unimpeachable truth of the Bible. However, this is qualified by the following sentences, in which Ziely explains that it was a common practice to embellish true stories (“historien”) with invented additions – which in the end only repeats the traditional notion that Gossembrot had referred to as “adinventio.” Furthermore, the criterion of being “der wahrheit glychfoermig,” which has been understood to mean “formed like truth” and could potentially be interpreted as a vernacular equivalent to verisimilis, has been shown, in this context, to have been borrowed directly from the 1520s juridical discourse of the Berne council, of which Ziely was a member. In legal usage, it designated a generally accepted truth, often linked to accordance with Scripture (Putzo 2011). Other than in this immediate context, Ziely’s justification remained out of place in sixteenth-century literary discourse: later editions of his romances omit this passage of the preface. The most important contribution to a historical conceptualization of what in today’s terms would be classified as fiction has been made by Georg Wickram, even though his approach did not lead to the modern concept either. Wickram (d. ca.

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1555/1560) was one of the very few early modern authors – and is in fact the first to be known by name – who invented the plot of his narratives rather than adapting or translating existing ones. Still, several of Wickram’s novels are labeled “historien” in the titles, and they are presented as historical in the opening sentences, which connect the narrated events to the lives of kings or other rulers (Schmitt 2006, 8–10). The fact that these references are either vague and casual or mention an obviously fictive king could lead to the interpretation that at this point, by the middle of the sixteenth century, an interpassive dynamic had (re)developed, within the logic of which a formulaic historicization was sufficient: a gesture that delegated any responsibility for judgment and liberated the recipient from having to raise the question of veracity. More interesting, however, is Wickram’s Dialog von einem ungeratenen Sohn (Dialogue of a Wayward Son, 1554), a treatise in dialog form, which he had printed to justify one of his non-historical novels, Der Knabenspiegel (The Young Men’s Mirror, 1554). In this “rudimentary theory of the novel” (rudimentäre Romantheorie; Müller 1990, 1281), an author, called Georgius, obviously representing Wickram himself, and a reader called Casparius discuss the truth of Wickram’s novel. Casparius tells Georgius in an ironic manner that he had visited all the settings of the Knabenspiegel and found everything exactly as described in the book. Yet he wondered how Georgius could have come up with such an “invention” (inuention; ed. Müller 1990, 816), given that he had never been to these places and had not witnessed the events. With this artifice, Wickram’s Casparius raises the old question of the relationship between narrative truth and perceivable reality that, before him, Hartmann von Aue or Wace had treated just as ironically (see section 2 above). Georgius explains to Casparius that similar stories to the one told in the Knabenspiegel had happened nearby, in the personal surroundings of Casparius himself. The events of the Knabenspiegel, it is implied, may not be factively true, but they are true in an exemplary sense. While this is indeed an innovative idea with regard to the secular romance or novel at this time, it would be rash to see in Wickram’s “rudimentary theory of the novel” an early form of the notion of verisimilitude that was later to be critical for the modern concept of fictionality. Even in Wickram’s approach, the decisive criterion for the legitimacy of the narrative remains its reference to truth and reality, even though it may depict types rather than facts. An alternative reality or any form of artificial autonomy are unthinkable on a conceptual level. Further, it must be noted that the Knabenspiegel is based on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. While it is set in contemporary surroundings and the plot is heavily elaborated, Wickram, in this case, was able to implicitly base his theory of exemplary truth on the biblical genre of the parable as the prime model for exemplary storytelling. Yet he would also claim that theory for his later novel Von guten und bösen Nachbarn (On Good

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and Bad Neighbors, 1556), which opens with the assertion that the protagonists of the story were not particular real persons but representatives of a type that could be found anywhere (Wickram 1969, 11–12). The strategy of the non-actual but exemplary truth of fiction is taken up several times by later prose romances, notably in the “Vorrede Des Teutschen Tranßlatoris, an den Leser” (Preface of the German Translator, to the Reader) to the first volume of the Amadis romances (1569). For the “Tranßlator,” it is no longer problematic to openly admit the fictional nature of the romance, which he concedes might possibly be an “invented narrative” (erdicht[e] Narration) as opposed to a “true story” (wahrhafft[e] History). However, according to him, invented narratives are legitimate on the grounds of their didactic potential. He declares them to be even better suited to setting positive and negative examples than true stories, and furthermore states that supposedly true stories contain fictional elements as well. While invented stories “openly tell untruths” (offentliche lügen erzelen), stories that claim truth will “embellish [it] as much as possible to be as convenient as possible, and paint [it] with colors” (zum füglichsten vnnd müglichsten verklügen vnd mit Färblin bestreichen; 8). Prefaces to other volumes or editions of the multivolume German Amadis romances, which continued to be published by various authors or translators until 1595, vary this argumentation (Schmitt 2005, 193–214). While the fictional license is granted – and the fictional intention explicit – at this stage in the late sixteenth century, it remains formally dependent on didactic purposes or on the claim to exemplary truth. Within this logic, fictionality remains tied to the given reality rather than allowing the evocation of an alternative fictional world.

8 Later Developments The notion of a conditional fictional license that had emerged in the second half of the sixteenth century persisted through the entire baroque period (Voßkamp 1973). One of the important theoretical treatises of the time is Sigmund von Birken’s “Vor-Ansprache zum Edlen Leser” (“Pre-Address to the Noble Reader,” 1669), which he placed as a preface to Duke Anton Ulrich’s novel Die durchleuchtige Syrerinn Aramena (The Serene Syrian Aramena, 1669). Von Birken differentiates between “Geschichtgedichten” (story poetry) and “Gedichtgeschichten” (poetic accounts; 1999, 62). Whereas the latter are true stories embellished with invented elements and not necessarily told in chronological order, the former are either stories woven around a true kernel on the basis of verisimilitude (heroic epics) or purely fictitious stories (romances or novels) that may serve the author as an intellectual and stylistic exercise or may have a didactic purpose. Like the translator of Amadis, von

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Birken deems pure fiction more useful than true stories in view of moral instruction, because only fiction can be shaped according to purpose. Von Birken’s influential distinction between fictionally embellished historiography (“Gedichtgeschichten”) and mainly or purely fictional narratives (“Geschichtgedichte”), from which he further distinguishes pure factual historiography as a third type (“annals or yearbooks [Annales oder Jahrbücher]”; 1999, 62), is in fact historical testimony to a compositionalist conception of fictionality. It can also be interpreted as early evidence of the difference perceived between literariness or narrativity on the one hand and literary narrative fictionality on the other, which has often been questioned with respect to the medieval period. In literary practice, conversely, the Middle Ages had established, albeit in certain limited areas only, a much more vivid institution of artistically intentional fictionality than the early modern or the baroque period – with the added twist that it seems to have thrived on its very undertheorization. Neither of the two models pointed toward the future. The modern notions of self-referential, non-utilitarian artistic fictionality and of autonomous fictional worlds developed on the basis of changing aesthetic premises, in which the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in French classicism (notably in Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Traité de l’origine des romans, 1670) and in the German Enlightenment played a decisive role. In a key text for the modern understanding of the novel, a feigned editorial preface to his own Geschichte des Agathon (Story of Agathon, 1766), Christoph Martin Wieland defines fictional truth such that “everything be composed in such a way that no sufficient reason could be cited according to which it could not have happened just as it is narrated, or could not actually happen so in the future” (alles so gedichtet sey, daß kein hinlaenglicher Grund angegeben werden koenne, warum es nicht eben so wie es erzaehlt wird, haette geschehen koennen, oder noch einmal wirklich geschehen werde; 1999, 162). It is at this stage that fictional “truth,” now based on verisimilitude alone, formally becomes detached from factuality.

References Bodel, Jehan. 1989. La Chanson de Saisnes. Edited by Annette Brasseur. Geneva: Droz. Chinca, Mark. 2003. “Mögliche Welten: Alternatives Erzählen und Fiktionalität im Tristanroman Gottfrieds von Straßburg.” Poetica 35:307–333. Däumer, Matthias. 2018. “Was man neu erfinden kann, darüber muss man schweigen: Die Mären des Strickers als Fiktionalitäts-Kompensatoren.” In Mären als Grenzphänomen, edited by Silvan Wagner, 57–72. Berlin: Lang. Fulton, Helen. 2017. “Historiography: Fictionality vs. Factuality.” In Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, edited by Leah Tether and Johnny McFaden, 151–165. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Glauch, Sonja. 2005. “Die fabelen sol ich werfen an den wint: Der Status der arthurischen Fiktion im Reflex: Thomas, Gotfrid und Wolfram.” Poetica 37:29–64. Glauch, Sonja. 2009. An der Schwelle zur Literatur: Elemente einer Poetik des höfischen Erzählens. Heidelberg: Winter. Gossenbrot, Sigismund. 1935. “Rechtfertigung der Poesie.” In Humanismus und Renaissance in den deutschen Städten und an den Universitäten, edited by Hans Rupprich, 93–100. Leipzig: Reclam. Green, Dennis Howard. 2002. The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grubmüller, Klaus. 1995. “Das buoch und die Wahrheit: Anmerkungen zu den Quellenberufungen im Rolandslied und in der Epik des 12. Jahrhunderts.” In bickelwort und wildiu mære, edited by Dorothee Lindemann, Berndt Volkmann, and Klaus-Peter Wegera, 37–50. Göppingen: Kümmerle. Grubmüller, Klaus. 2006. Die Ordnung, der Witz und das Chaos: Eine Geschichte der europäischen Novellistik im Mittelalter: Fabliau – Märe – Novelle. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hartmann von Aue. 2001. Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue. Edited by Frank Tobin. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hartmann von Aue. 2008. Erec. Edited by Volker Mertens. Stuttgart: Reclam. Hartmann von Aue. 2017. Iwein. Edited by Rüdiger Krohn. Stuttgart: Reclam. Herweg, Mathias. 2010. Wege zur Verbindlichkeit: Studien zum deutschen Roman um 1300. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Herweg, Mathias. 2014. “Fiktionalität und enzyklopädisches Schreiben: Versuch einer Standortbestimmung.” In Zwischen Fakten und Fiktionen: Literatur und Geschichtsschreibung in der Vormoderne, edited by Merle Marie Schütte, Kristina Rzehak, and Daniel Lizius, 197–209. Würzburg: Ergon. Hübner, Gert, and Armin Schulz. 2011. “Mittelalter.” In Handbuch Erzählliteratur: Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte, edited by Matías Martínez, 184–205. Stuttgart: Metzler. Kleinschmidt, Erich. 1982. “Die Wirklichkeit der Literatur: Fiktionsbewußtsein und das Problem der ästhetischen Realität von Dichtung in der Frühen Neuzeit.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 56:174–197. Knape, Joachim. 1984. “Historie” in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit: Begriffs- und gattungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen im interdisziplinären Kontext. Baden-Baden: Koerner. Kropik, Cordula. 2008. Reflexionen des Geschichtlichen: Zur literarischen Konstituierung mittelhochdeutscher Heldenepik. Heidelberg: Winter. Lienert, Elisabeth. 2001. Deutsche Antikenromane des Mittelalters. Berlin: Schmidt. Lienert, Elisabeth. 2010. Die “historische” Dietrichepik: Untersuchungen zu “Dietrichs Flucht”, “Rabenschlacht” und “Alpharts Tod.” Berlin: De Gruyter. Manuwald, Henrike. 2020. “Fictionality and Pleasure: Traces of a Practice of Fictionality in Medieval German Short Verse Narratives?” In “History of the Modern Practice of Fiction,” special issue, Journal of Literary Theory 14, no. 2, 215–240. Meyer, Matthias. 1994. Die Verfügbarkeit der Fiktion: Interpretationen und poetologische Untersuchungen zum Artusroman und zur aventiurehaften Dietrichepik des 13. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Winter. Minnis, Alastair. (1984) 2010. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Müller, Jan-Dirk, ed. 1990. Romane des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts: Nach den Erstdrucken mit sämtlichen Holzschnitten. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Pfaller, Robert. (2002) 2014. On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without Owners. London: Verso.

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Przybilski, Martin. 2011. “Paradoxes Erzählen; oder, Wissen die Figuren des Artusromans um ihre eigene Fiktionalität?” In Orte, Ordnungen, Oszillationen. Raumerschaffung durch Wissen und räumliche Struktur von Wissen, edited by Natalia Filatkina and Martin Przybilski, 41–55. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Przybilski, Martin, and Nikolaus Ruge. 2013. “Die erzählte Welt als Entwurf von Möglichkeiten: Fiktionalität im mittelhochdeutschen höfischen Roman des 13. Jahrhunderts.” In Aktuelle Tendenzen der Artusforschung, edited by Brigitte Burrichter, Matthias Däumer, Cora Dietl, Christoph Schanze, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, 3–16. Berlin: De Gruyter. Putzo, Christine. 2002. “Cod. germ. 6.” In Von Rittern, Bürgern und von Gottes Wort: Volkssprachige Literatur in Handschriften und Drucken aus dem Besitz der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, edited by Eva Horváth and Hans-Walter Stork, 64–67, 136–141. Kiel: Ludwig. Putzo, Christine. 2011. “Wilhelm Ziely (‘Olwier und Artus’, ‘Valentin und Orsus’, 1521) und das Fiktionsproblem des frühneuhochdeutschen Prosaromans.” Oxford German Studies 40:125–152. Putzo, Christine. 2014. “Narrative Diagrammatik: Mit einer Modellanalyse: Die Diagrammatik des Decameron.” In Diagramm und Text: Diagrammatische Strukturen und die Dynamisierung von Wissen und Erfahrung, edited by Eckart Conrad Lutz, Vera Jerjen, and Christine Putzo, 413–450. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Remele, Florian. 2020. “Konventionalisierung und Alternativenbildung: Transformationen des deutschsprachigen Artusromans im 13. Jahrhundert am Beispiel der Crône Heinrichs von dem Türlin und des Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal des Strickers.” In Jenseits der Epigonalität: Selbst- und Fremdbewertung im Artusroman und in der Artusforschung, edited by Cora Dietl, Christoph Schanze, and Friedrich Wolfzettel, 245–270. Berlin: De Gruyter. Reuvekamp-Felber, Timo. 2013. “Zur gegenwärtigen Situation mediävistischer Fiktionalitätsforschung: Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 132:417–444. Ridder, Klaus. 1998. Mittelhochdeutsche Minne- und Aventiureromane: Fiktion, Geschichte und literarische Tradition im späthöfischen Roman: “Reinfried von Braunschweig”, “Wilhelm von Österreich”, “Friedrich von Schwaben.” Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmitt, Stefanie. 2005. Inszenierungen von Glaubwürdigkeit: Studien zur Beglaubigung im späthöfischen und frühneuzeitlichen Roman. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Schmitt, Stefanie. 2006. “Historische Situierung, Exemplarizität und Wahrscheinlichkeit: Zur Beglaubigung in Wickrams Romanen.” Oxford German Studies 35:3–20. Schneider, Christian. 2020. “Fiktionalität im Mittelalter.” In Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft: Fiktionalität, edited by Lut Missinne, Ralf Schneider, and Beatrix van Dam, 80–102. Berlin: De Gruyter,. von Birken, Sigmund. 1999. “Vor-Ansprache zum Edlen Leser.” In Romantheorie: Texte vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Hartmut Steinecke and Fritz Wahrenburg, 61–64. Stuttgart: Reclam. von Keller, Adelbert, ed. 1857. Amadis: Erstes Buch nach der ältesten deutschen Bearbeitung. Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein. Voßkamp, Volker. 1973. Romantheorie in Deutschland: Von Martin Opitz bis Friedrich von Blanckenburg. Stuttgart: Metzler. Wace. 1993. “Roman de Brut.” La Geste du roi Arthur, selon le Roman de Brut de Wace et l’Historia Regum Britanniae de Geoffrey de Monmouth. Edited by Emmanuele Baumgartner and Ian Short, 27–259. Paris: Éditions 10/18. Wace. 2002. The Roman de Rou. Edited by Glyn S. Burgess and Anthony J. Holden. St Helier: Société jersiaise. Wels, Volkhard. 2009. Der Begriff der Dichtung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Wieland, Christoph Martin. 1999. “Vorrede.” In Romantheorie: Texte vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Hartmut Steinecke and Fritz Wahrenburg, 161–165. Stuttgart: Reclam. Wickram, Georg. 1969. Von guoten und boesen Nachbaurn. Edited by Hans-Gert Roloff. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolf, Jürgen. 2011. “Verlorene Historizität; oder, Warum einer der neun größten Helden der Welt in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung des Mittelalters nur Randfigur ist.” In Artusroman und Mythos, edited by Friedrich Wolfzettel, Cora Dietl, and Matthias Däumer, 183–202. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolfzettel, Friedrich. 2002. “Historizität und Roman: Zu einer alternativen Sicht der altfranzösischen Gattungsgeschichte.” In Historisches und fiktionales Erzählen im Mittelalter, edited by Fritz Peter Knapp and Manuela Niesner, 91–114. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Ziely, Wilhelm. 1521. Olwier und Artus: Valentin und Orsus. Basle: Adam Petri.

Werner Wolf

Aesthetic Illusion: A History of ‘Immersion’ and Western Illusionist Literature since Antiquity 1 Definition Aesthetic illusion  – today often termed “immersion”  – is a basically pleasurable mental state that frequently occurs during the reception of a plurality of representational media and genres and is thus a widespread transmedial as well as transgeneric phenomenon (Wolf, Bernhart, and Mahler 2013). Illusionist representations may be fictional or factual, narrative or descriptive. Like all reception effects, aesthetic illusion is elicited by a conjunction of factors that are located (1) in the representations themselves, (2) in the reception process and the recipients, and (3) in framing contexts, e.g., cultural-historical, situational, and generic ones. Aesthetic illusion consists of a feeling, with variable intensity, of being imaginatively and emotionally immersed in a represented world, and of experiencing this world as a presence (even if the world in question is represented via a narrative of the past) in an as-if mode, that is, in a way similar, but not identical, to real life. The impression of experiential immersion is counterbalanced by a latent rational distance resulting from a culturally acquired metareferential (and never totally eclipsed) knowledge of the difference between representation and reality (media-awareness). Aesthetic illusion is thus an ambivalent reception effect leading to a “double consciousness” (Felski 2008, 74), which contains both a predominant element of immersion and a subdominant element of distance. Illusion-breaking, then, is an epiphenomenon whose seed is already contained in the very concept of aesthetic illusion itself: it occurs when the element of distance becomes dominant. While aesthetic illusion is not restricted to narratives and thus not exclusively an object of narratology, it is especially intense in narrative representations owing to their temporal dynamics, which renders them similar to the flow of real-life experience. Moreover, aesthetic illusion is gradable and may be discontinuous during a given reception process (i.e., phases of intense aesthetic illusion may alternate with less intense ones or ones in which immersion is absent).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-042

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2 Methodological Problems, General and Historical The theoretical and historical elucidation of aesthetic illusion is beset by a number of problems. One of them is the terminological heterogeneity encountered in research (Wolf, W. 2013a, 19–20). Currently, one of the most frequently employed terms is “immersion” (Ryan 1991, 21–23), which in the above definition is used for the dominant pole of aesthetic illusion. The term “aesthetic illusion” has been criticized (Troscianko 2017; Petterson 2017) because it does not really refer to an “illusion” in the everyday sense of the word (as erroneous perception or idea). Indeed, aesthetic illusion is not a delusion; yet the term will be retained here nevertheless, because “illusion” has most often been used in poetics and aesthetics since the seventeenth century and the collocation “aesthetic illusion” has also frequently appeared in research since the 1890s (Groos 1892, 191, quoted in Eisler [1904] 2004, s.v. “Ästhetik”; Strube 1971, 1976; Brinker 1977; Burwick and Pape 1990; Koblížek 2017). The epithet “aesthetic,” although not exclusively referring to art in the modern sense, implies a predisposition typical of art reception and beyond (namely to be aware of mediality and consequently remain distanced from an older “mythical” or magical reception). Another problem of aesthetic illusion is its elusiveness as a reception effect. As such, it depends on the recipient’s ability and willingness to “suspend disbelief.” This is in turn predicated on cultural-historical frames (a historical dimension is thus a necessary part of the theory of aesthetic illusion) but also on personal predispositions and situational frames, which may include  – as far as theatrical performance is concerned – even the physical position of the individual spectator, as McGavin and Walker (2016) have argued for medieval to early modern theatre. The elusiveness of aesthetic illusion also derives from its mental nature, which renders empirical verification difficult if not impossible (even empirical research, as conducted, e.g., by Miall 1995, 2008, does not give direct access to what goes on in recipients’ minds). For the past, empirical verification is impossible, thus aggravating the methodological problem, since extrapolation from a modern researcher’s introspection is problematic. This, however, does not mean that the question of aesthetic illusion is unanswerable from a historical perspective, for there is evidence in various forms: in indirect reception testimonies (historical aesthetics, poetological texts, anecdotes, and documents concerning the reception of artworks), and last but not least, in the artworks themselves. In addition, we know something about the cultural conditions in which artifacts were received in the past, and there is also evidence from material frameworks such as theaters.

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As for (potentially illusionist) artworks, they generally aim for verisimilitude and follow certain principles (including an emphasis on kinetic “embodiment” in the representation of anthropomorphic characters as theorized by Kuzmičová 2012, Caracciolo 2014, and others) whose realization in the creation of illusionist worlds is based on the structure of experience of real life and creates analogies to it (Wolf 2013a, 32–51). The fulfillment of these principles concerning what, for instance, is deemed to show verisimilitude or what appears to be “interesting,” is, however, historically variable. The workings of these principles can be seen in the historical pull which they seem to exert on the “technical” development of devices such as the imitation of an ever stricter lifelike perspectivity in the representation of narrative fiction from the Middle Ages to twentieth-century modernism, or in the development of theatrical devices and performance conventions, which, in the evolution from medieval pageant wagons and Shakespeare’s platform stage to the modern proscenium-arch stage, favoured the impression of watching an autonomous stage world complete with ever more lifelike sets, lighting, sound effects, and so on (a similar illusion-enhancing evolution can be observed in the development of the representational media since the invention of photography and moving images in the nineteenth century). What complicates matters is the fact that, in all periods, individual media are part of evolving media systems in which competition reigns, also with respect to aesthetic illusion. Thus, the greater facility with which aesthetic illusion can be elicited in the new media, starting with film, led to a devaluation of aesthetic illusion in twentieth-century theater and also in fiction. The development of illusionist devices is also responsible for the fact that devices of the past which were illusionist enough for the contemporaries may lose their persuasiveness for present-day recipients who have become accustomed to new and better technical standards. All in all, historically variable conventions play an important part in the history and functioning of aesthetic illusion and are able to overrule what may appear as lifelike or lacking in verisimilitude from a twenty-first-century perspective. Aesthetic illusion and the principles structuring illusionist texts and artifacts work on a level below consciousness and appeal in particular to the recipients’ affects and emotions rather than to their conscious reflection on, and appreciation of, the specific mediality of the artifact in question. This relative “transparency” of the illusionist medium, however, does not invalidate the fact that aesthetic factors such as beauty, a particular aesthetic, or certain “artifices” may also “seduce” and “enchant” us (Felski 2008, 74).

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3 Antiquity: Emergence of Aesthetic Illusion in the Western World A comprehensive discussion of the development of aesthetic illusion in all relevant narrative media of Western cultural history being impossible, the following survey is limited to what today is termed “literature” in the field of “fiction” and “drama” in selected areas and periods from Antiquity to the present with an emphasis, in modern times, on English literature (for the problem of aesthetic illusion in lyric poetry, which is not typically a narrative genre in the first place, see Wolf 2013b). As for the origin of the term “aesthetic illusion,” Latin illusio (from illudere, in + ludere, “make fun of,” “jeer,” “deceive”) has both a negative sense (“deceit,” “jeering”) and a neutral or positive sense, notably in classical rhetoric, where illusio is an acceptable device sometimes used as a synonym of “irony.” Both the negative and the positive connotations of the term play a role in cultural history. The history of aesthetic illusion as a concept, however, is independent of the term’s etymological origin. As discussed by Gombrich for art history ([1960] 1977), aesthetic illusion as a media- or artifact-induced lifelike experience emerges with the change from an archaic reception mode to an aesthetic one. In the former, artifacts were perceived  – without aesthetic distance  – as a magical presence of the re-presented phenomenon (deity, human being, animal) or as sacred texts in a pragmatic context (ritual, magic, religion), while in the latter mode, representational artifacts and texts began to be received and valued also for their specific artistry, “beauty,” and verisimilitude  – in non-pragmatic contexts and frames. From the point of view of the producer of artifacts, this change went along with the switch from schematic, and therefore particularly efficient, “making” for the sake of easy readability to ever more lifelike “matching” (Gombrich [1960] 1977, 100) between artifacts and structures or conventions of real life (experience). The epistemic context of this emergence of aesthetic illusion is a tendentially secularized one in which objects of art (including verbal art) can be appreciated for the sake of their beauty, artfulness, and the degree to which they approach lifelikeness. It is a frame in which the ontological distance between reality and representation, and the metareferential awareness of the medial nature of representation, enter into the reception process and allow the kind of aesthetic distance which is typical of aesthetic illusion (and manifests itself, for example, in the appearance of sculptures representing deities outside temples as garden ornaments and in the celebration of authors and artists). Gombrich terms the transition under discussion the “Greek revolution” ([1960] 1977, 99). Historically, this is a long process, the beginnings of which he locates in literature, namely the Homeric epics (113), and which reaches its full state in the mid-fourth century BC (108; for antiquity, see Wolf 2019).

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In fact, ample evidence corroborates the view that aesthetic illusion can already be found in ancient Greek culture, with Roman culture following suit. There is the well-known anecdote (Gombrich [1960] 1977, 173) about a trompe-l’œil contest between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios as reported by Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia (XXXV, 36, ca. 77 AD)  – a liminal case of aesthetic illusion: the confusion between reality and artifact disappears, once the artifice is recognized as such. In addition, ancient aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric provide many clues that point to aesthetic illusion from a theoretical perspective, albeit with a different terminology. When it comes to reflection on verbal representations, the most important ancient concept (and term) for our context, besides ekphrasis (in the original sense of a “vivid vision” or “description of a landscape, a scene, or work of art” [Hardie (2006) 2002, 7; also Webb 1999, 2009]) and mimesis (in Aristotle’s sense), is enargeia (Allen, de Jong, and de Jonge 2017). The term and concept can be traced back to ancient Greek rhetoric (occurring in Lucian; Walker 1993). The concept is also used by Quintilian (De Institutione Oratoria 6.2.32; von Rosen 2000, 171, 198) and before that by Cicero, who, in his dialogue Lucullus (2.6.17; von Rosen 2000, 198), translated it as evidentia. Enargeia was originally restricted to non-performative verbal representations and would thus exclude drama. However, as von Rosen (2000) has shown, the concept was extended to works of art and literature and merged with the Horatian topos ut pictura poesis. A counterpart to the concept of enargeia, which centers on the artifact’s contribution to aesthetic illusion, is the concept of agonia (Grethlein 2015b): the recipient’s “involvement” in narrations, especially in suspenseful ones. The rich material in the area of theoretical reflection on reception effects that can be likened to aesthetic illusion finds its parallel in art and literature of the period and even in historiography (see Walker 1993). As pointed out by Gombrich, Homer’s epics, with their vivid representations of settings, objects, characters, and actions/adventures (ca. 700 BC), are important landmarks in the evolution of aesthetic illusion (see de Jong 2005; Grethlein 2015a, 2017a, 2017b). Episodes of particular illusionist interest are, for example, the vivid descriptions (or “ekphrases” in the ancient sense) of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, book 18, or of Alcinous’s garden in in the Odyssey, book 7, as well as mise en abyme reception situations in which a fictional character mirrors the intended emotional reactions of the actual audience. One of these can be found in the Odyssey, book 8, where Odysseus is received at the court of King Alcinous and listens to the recital of Demodocus after the meal. Incidentally, this rhapsode tells part of Odysseus’s own story (the quarrel between him and Achilles), which moves Odysseus to tears. A fictional hero weeping over his own story is a reaction that indicates that he is “overwhelmed” by, and therefore immersed in, what is being told, a response which may point to similar immersive feelings on the part of the actual contemporary recipients. Another illusionist text

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is Heliodorus’s Aethiopica (third/fourth century AD), which contains a perspectival description in the opening pages (Grethlein 2015a). One may also point to Greek tragedy, whose main effects, according to Aristotle’s Poetics, namely eleos and phobos (pity and fear), presuppose an emotional relatability to the tragic hero and thus a strong immersion in the represented world. The next stage in the ancient history of aesthetic illusion is Latin classical literature, for instance, immersive texts such as Virgil’s Aeneid (first century BC) and Ovid’s works (Hardie [2002] 2006). The fact that aesthetic illusion existed in ancient literature can also be corroborated by playful devices of breaking aesthetic illusion (which presupposes the existence of aesthetic illusion in the cultural context). Examples can be found in comedies such as Aristophanes’s Batrachoi (405 BC), in which metadramatic fun is poked at jokes used in the theater right from the beginning, or in Pseudo-Homer’s mock-epic Batrachomyomachia (presumably first century BC), which is a parody of the sublimity of Homer’s epic battles. All in all, as an increasing number of scholarly discussions have shown, there is ample evidence for the existence of aesthetic illusion in antiquity in spite of the various terms used by the ancients.

4 Middle Ages: Disappearance of Aesthetic Illusion? The research situation is different when it comes to the Middle Ages, for which fewer discussions of aesthetic illusion (or similar effects termed differently) exist (exceptions being Bleumer 2012 and the rest of issue 42 of the Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik [2012], devoted to immersion in the Middle Ages). As in antiquity, the history of the term is independent of the history of the concept. “Illusion,” in the context of Christianity in postclassical times, is used with a negative meaning of “derision” (as in Psalm 78:4: “Facti sumus opprobrium vicinis nostris: subsannatio et illusio in his, qui in circuitu nostro sunt”; Vulgate [We are become a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to them that are round about us; King James Bible]) or – with respect to the devil as the great deceiver – as illusiones diaboli (the devil’s deceits), a negative meaning which the term retains through Medieval Latin, Old French, and Middle English to Shakespeare’s time. As for the concept of aesthetic illusion, if one believes Gombrich’s ([1960] 1977, 124–125) assessment of art history after the fall of Rome (in fact already in the last phase of the Roman Empire), “the achievements of Greek illusionism were gradually discarded” (124). This means that artworks are now again (as in archaic times before the “Greek revolution”) predominantly produced and perceived in the

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frame of religion, which points to a revival of a pragmatic and “magic” reception as re-presentations of Truth (as in Eastern Orthodox icons) rather than as verisimilar mimesis. At the same time, the position of the artist declines to a frequently anonymous agency in this pragmatic context. For the history of aesthetic illusion in literature (and perhaps also for art), this alleged return to magic rather than aesthetic illusion may appear insufficiently nuanced, given the fact that we are dealing here with a period extending over a thousand years, and one with a plurality of genres and hence generic expectations. A differentiation between drama and epic literature appears to be of particular importance in this context. Religious drama is perhaps closest to this departure from ancient aesthetic illusion. It is mostly transmitted anonymously and appears in the form of mystery plays (originally in Latin and from the thirteenth century on in the vernaculars), miracle plays (saints’ lives), and morality plays (Weiß 2009, 47–51). The change is discernible in the disappearance of stable material frames of performance in the form of permanent theaters as distinct spaces of aesthetic art and aesthetic illusion. Instead, makeshift theatrical spaces were created in, or pageant wagons were drawn through, ordinary everyday spaces in towns and cities such as streets, inn courts, and squares (see Wiles 1995), which leads to a less clear division between performance space and reality than in antiquity. Apart from some emblematic stage properties and sumptuous costumes, little attention to visual illusionist verisimilitude was given. An awareness of the staged nature of the performances as ludus and thus of the difference between the world of the play (which may have included the audience space) and surrounding reality existed in medieval drama. This may also have been the case in the secular humorous genres (interludes and farces), in which immersion generally tends to be weaker than in serious representations, owing to the distancing effect of carnivalesque laughter and the reduced attention to verisimilitude in these genres. In this context, it is perhaps no coincidence that in the late Middle Ages the first fully fledged comedy transmitted in English literary history, Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece (ca. 1497), comprises a mise en abyme of playacting in the form of a framed play-within-a-play and that this comedy metareferentially plays with illusion (by having frame characters interfere with the framed play). Humor and even farcical elements also appeared in religious drama, testifying to a lack of division between the serious and the humorous, between the sacred and the profane, which remained influential until Shakespeare’s time and only became lost in the neoclassicist tradition. The awareness of playacting elicited an intermediate form of illusion between magical and aesthetic illusion, which one may term “ludic illusion” (Wolf 1993b, 281–283). It implies a relative continuity between stage world

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and audience (Munson 1982, 185, 191), but at the same time a separation of the performance space from the outer, non-ludic world. However, the subsistence of archaic, “magical” reception attitudes cannot be entirely dismissed, in particular with respect to mystery plays as re-enactments of stages in the biblical history of salvation and thus of Truth (with moralities, in spite of their allegorical and hence “conspicuously artificial” nature, re-presenting other, moral, facets of Truth). A “sacramental [. . .] experience,” as in the re-enactment of the Crucifixion “as if you were actually present at the very time when He suffered,” eliciting a “numinous relationship with the Saviour,” may have existed side by side with the “simultaneous awareness of being [.  .  .] a spectator of a performance” (McGavin and Walker 2016, 10–11, 13). The fact that a partially magical illusion was constitutive of medieval reception attitudes toward religious drama is corroborated by its occasional subsistence in early modern theater with the well-known anecdote of a “real” devil having been called on stage by the eponymous hero of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (ca. 1589) as a particularly graphic illustration (Sofer 2009; Guenther 2011), although research pays too little attention to the audience’s predisposition in terms of the history of aesthetic illusion, or rather its magical forerunner, which renders fear of a “real” devil being conjured during a stage performance possible in the first place. All of this does, however, not mean that aesthetic illusion disappeared from cultural history entirely. The theater, including religious drama, was an amusing entertainment in the Middle Ages, as not only the humorous parts of mysteries show, and immersion may have been an enhancement, if not a precondition, of this theatrical entertainment (with humor weakening but not precluding immersion). The ambiguous status of medieval drama with respect to aesthetic illusion is mirrored in the fact that research is divided about the existence of aesthetic illusion in it: Kolve (1966), for instance, denies it, citing the ritualistic nature of early religious drama and the lack of mimetic realism (compared to nineteenth-century theater) in late medieval drama, as well as the allegedly anti-illusionist elements in meta-dramatic out-of-character speaking and “epic” commenting characters (Hanning, 1982). Others insist on the illusionist potential of what they consider dramatic realism (Weimann 1967; Davidson [1975] 1984) or on the emotional engagement elicited by religious play (Hacker 1985). When it comes to medieval cultural history outside the theater, the case for an existence of some kind of aesthetic illusion may even be stronger. Interestingly, something like aesthetic illusion could even be harnessed to religion in the form of imaginative, immersive meditation on biblical scenes in order to experience them as if one were present in them, which Ludolf von Sachsen recommended in his Vita Christi (1374; McGrath 1999, 85–86), and in which he became a forerunner of Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercitia spiritualia (1522–1524). (For these “exercises” as a

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practice in which the “exercitant” was invited to “immerse” himself in imagination “as a corporeal presence into the textual world” of biblical scenes, see Ryan 2001, 115–119, here 117–118.) As for medieval epic fiction, there is no reason to believe that readers were not immersed in chivalric romances and other stories such as Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan and Isolde (ca. 1200), Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1210), or Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1380), at least since what Hans Robert Jauß (1983, 426–428; see Wolf 1993a, 49) called the “epochal change in the twelfth century,” in which a former lack of differentiation between the real and the fictitious gave way to a heightened awareness of literary fiction. In fact, there is evidence that this was indeed the case. One piece of evidence (Carruthers1990, 341) is an extract from Richard de Fournival’s (1201–1259/1260) Li Bestiaires d’Amour (ca. 1250) in which reading is likened to viewing pictures, since both produce an imaginary impression of presentness (Wolf 2013a, 30). With some readers, immersion may have been so powerful that the differentiation between reality and fiction appeared to be temporarily suspended even after the twelfth century. This, at least, is the attitude to which Cervantes gave both critical and humorous immortality in Don Quijote (1605/1615) with his hero: an avid reader of chivalric romances to the extent that he still believes the medieval worldview of divinely guaranteed order and justice, as implied in these romances, together with their representation of a partially magical world, to be real. A strong indication of the existence of aesthetic illusion is also, as in antiquity, a metareferential playfulness with respect to the text one is reading or general textual conventions in some works, especially when such metareference interrupts a previous narrative. In this case, but also generally, the breaking of immersion implies its previous existence in the (cultural) context. Examples can be found in the romances of Gottfried von Straßburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach (Wolf 1993a, 487–488) as well as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. At one point in the latter, the host angrily interrupts the “Tale of Thopas” in the middle of a verse and criticizes Chaucer’s use of doggerel verse by crying “Namoore of this” and “Thy drasty [crude] ryming is nat worth a tord” (Chaucer [1380] 2005, 509–510) – playing with the reader’s illusion-breaking awareness of the text’s real quality and, in particular, of the fact that its author Chaucer is anything but a stupid rhymester as the host pretends here. All of this points to the fact, corroborated by Bleumer (2012), that aesthetic illusion cannot be said to have entirely disappeared in medieval literature at large. Gombrich’s claim about the discarding of Greek illusionism is thus inappropriate in its generality when applied to literature, and is also questionable when one thinks of the realism of late medieval sculpture, for instance. What can be claimed, however, is that, in the Middle Ages, aesthetic illusion not only lost its former pre-

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dominance in some literary areas, where it was permeated with, or superseded by, older, archaic forms of reception, in particular in remnants or partial revivals of “magic illusion” in religious drama, but that in drama in general the means for triggering aesthetic illusion (both with respect to the texts and the theatrical performance frame) also become less elaborate than in antiquity.

5 Renaissance to Seventeenth Century: Continuity and Renaissance of Aesthetic Illusion The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the period in which, in spite of some remnants of magic illusion in some rare instances (as in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus), aesthetic illusion loses the weak position it held in medieval drama and shows a remarkable, unalloyed renaissance in drama and a no less remarkable continuity in “epic” fiction. “Continuity” does not, however, preclude change and new developments. In both fields, the generic spectrum is enlarged: in drama, the return to tragedy and comedy as in antiquity is most noticeable besides the emergence of the history play. In epic fiction, Milton’s elaboration on biblical episodes, in particular in Paradise Lost (1667), is noteworthy as an attempt to permit readers to immerse themselves in the history of the Fall of both Satan and mankind, not unlike the spiritual exercises mentioned in the preceding section, thanks to elaborate descriptions and, above all, a psychologization of the biblical figures with the insights into Satan’s psyche playing a remarkable role. In the field of prose narratives, romance develops into pre-forms of the later “rise of the novel,” as in the picaresque novel (Lazarillo de Tormes, 1553; Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, 1594, with its emphasis on lower-class life), the French roman héroïque of the seventeenth century (e.g., Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie 1654–1660, with its early psychological realism), or the prose romance Arcadia by Sir Philp Sidney (1581/1584), as well as late-seventeenth-century novels such as Aphra Behn’s Oronooko (1688) with its graphic descriptions of exotic settings. It is also noteworthy that a number of texts clearly toy with aesthetic illusion and its disruption by the use of obtrusive metafiction, as in Ludivico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516–1532; Hempfer 1982), Antoine Furetière, Le Roman Bourgeois (1666), or Cervantes’s Don Quijote. What is unprecedented is the fact that major parts of plays and novels now engage in implicit and sometimes explicit discussion of aesthetic illusion itself in order to promote adequate “modern” reception attitudes. Don Quijote looms large in this context as a humorous critique of both an outmoded (romance-induced) worldview and an erroneous reception attitude. This attitude is represented in the hero’s locura, in which reality and fiction become

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confused so that his de-lusion (his belief in the verbatim truth of medieval chivalric romances) becomes the negative foil against which aesthetic il-lusion is set off. Aesthetic illusion is in fact the intended reader response to a novel which combines realistic representations of early seventeeth-century Spain with a plethora of metareferential devices (including a sudden interruption of a battle scene owing to the alleged end of a manuscript and, in the second part, a confrontation of the Don with the report of a spurious double against whom he must assert his “reality”). These metareferences remind the reader that aesthetic illusion is no delusion, for it also entails distance and textual awareness. In drama, some play-within-the-play texts also deal with “wrong,” archaic reception modes that are reminiscent of magic illusion and the forgetfulness of distancing media-awareness as part of the aesthetic-illusionist “reception contract.” Examples are Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (ca. 1607), in which the inadequate attitude of the framing spectators includes a lack of aesthetic distance with reference to the framed play, as well as Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique (1636), which contrasts the “new” aesthetic illusion with the old, magical form of a magician’s conjuring (Wolf 2016). Shakespeare is of special importance in this context for the renaissance of dramatic illusion (Wolf 1993b). As critics from Beckerman (1962) to Kiernan (1999) have emphasized, the public theaters of Shakespeare’s time, with their platform stages, lack of wings, few props, and a concomitant reliance on “word scenery,” were not illusion-friendly and still a far cry from the development of elaborate illusionist stage designs, movable wings, machinery, lighting effects, and the proscenium arch for which Inigo Jones (1573–1652), stage designer for Stuart masques and architect, is memorable in English early seventeenth-century theatrical history (Thomson 1995, 200). However, Shakespeare’s plays, thanks to the powerful magic of his words, the eventfulness of his plots, and the psychological realism of his “round” characters, who, in many instances, make the actors disappear behind the characters in the contemporary audience’s imagination in spite of the closeness between stage and audience space (Kiernan 1999, 51), are prime examples of “a self-contained dramatic illusion” (52) and thus of aesthetic illusion in Renaissance practice. The character-related quality of Shakespeare’s plays has especially captured audiences, readers, and critics alike for centuries (sometimes to the point of making them forget the fictional nature of these characters). The illusionist persuasiveness of Shakespeare’s in this respect becomes clear when one compares the flatness of the allegorical Everyman figure in the late medieval morality play of the same name (after 1485) with, for example, the deep insights into the origins and workings of Othello’s growing jealousy of his wife, which Shakespeare provides us with, as in Othello’s soliloquy 3.3.262–283 (Shakespeare 1997). In this speech, we see how Othello has been led astray by Iago’s allegations, but also how his inner

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predispositions make him easy prey: he is beset by an inferiority complex fuelled by his self-perception of his race and social skills as inferior, his advanced age, his misogynic view of women, his belief in “destiny,” all of which is expressed in a hyperbolic language indicating his sanguine nature – and, at long last, leads him to a volte-face and a rejection of Iago’s insinuation (“I’ll not believe it”). The illusion elicited by this kind of “round” character construction and other aspects of Shakespeare’s plays is certainly not what Kiernan (1996) conceives of as a naive mimetic illusion of life (without the media-awareness, as implied in aesthetic illusion), but it is on the other hand misleading to claim that Shakespeare’s theater “at no time [. . .] asks us to see the illusion as if it were life” and that “at those moments when it draws our attention to its theatrical status it is not therefore disrupting an illusion of reality” (94). A short glance at one of the scenes in which Shakespeare metareferentially deals with aesthetic illusion will illustrate this. When, in Henry V, the prologue, in an opening captatio benevolentiae, asks the spectators to disregard the shortcomings of the representation of so vast a subject as the epic battles fought by Henry V; and when, at the same time, the prologue invites them to use their “imaginary forces” to “Suppose within the girdle of these wall [. . .] two mighty monarchies” and to “Think, when we talk of horses” that they “see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’th’receiving earth” (prol. 18–20, 26–27). What, if not the impression of experiencing the performance as if it were (historical) reality (note that “as if” does not equal “as”!), is the object of this invitation? Shakespeare, apparently, considers this experience possible in spite of the “imperfections” of theatrical representation in “this wooden O” and on “this unworthy scaffold” (prol. 10, 13), thanks to the audience’s “thoughts” (prol. 23) and “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment” of reception (Coleridge [1817] 1965, 169). All media contain “imperfections” which differentiate their representations from reality. However, imagination can, in order to produce the effect of aesthetic illusion, “amend” these imperfections – another metareferential comment of Shakespeare’s on his art, this time taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595). In this play, the meditation on the aesthetics of the theater is focused on the mechanicals’ playacting as negative, parodic, and illusion-breaking (or -preventing) exemplification. They are not only funny owing to their incompetent acting and the poor quality of the text performed in the play-within-the-play, “Pyramus and Thisbe,” but also because they repeatedly lay bare the fictionality of their play in metaleptic, illusion-breaking ad spectators as, for example, when Snout as Wall exits with the words “Thus have I, Wall, my part dischargèd so; / And being done, thus Wall away doth go” (5.1.202–203). This elicits ironic remarks from the on-stage audience, which already point to the contemporary dissatisfaction with similar kinds of ad spectators. Above all, this triggers Hippolyta’s critique: “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (5.1.207). Interestingly, what follows is an implicit mini-theory of

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aesthetic illusion, when Theseus answers: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them,” whereupon Hippolyta remarks: “It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs” (5.1.208–210). At the beginning of act 5, Theseus still appeared to be critical of poetic imagination, when he aligned the poet with a madman: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact” (5.1.7–8). However, later in his speech he starts to praise the imagination of a poet who is able, thanks to his “pen,” to give even non-existing “Things unknown,” “airy nothing[s],” “shape,” “local habitation and a name” (5.1.15–17). To this extent, aesthetic illusion in fact goes beyond “mere” mimesis of existing reality, but the effect is nevertheless to offer the recipient an experience as if this were reality, provided the recipients are willing to cooperate. The mechanicals, however, lack the awareness of the cooperative reception mechanism as a basis for theatrical (and illusionist) reception, and this renders them ridiculous. Moreover, they seem to be unaware of the audience’s capacity to fill in lacunae created by what cannot be properly represented on stage. This lack of confidence in the spectators’ imagination is the opposite of what Shakespeare presupposes in his audience. The confidence in the recipients’ imaginative capacities also allows him to disregard an aesthetic which tries to simulate reality as closely as possible (parodied by the mechanicals when, in 3.1, they regard the question as relevant as to whether the moon, which their text mentions, is really shining on the night of performance). This is also why the three “Aristotelian” unities, which had begun to influence theater aesthetics since Lodovico Castelvetro’s Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (1570/1576) in the interest of a narrow view of verisimilitude, are irrelevant for Shakespeare. Later theatrical history seems to approve of Shakespeare’s position, if one considers Victor Hugo’s rejection of the three unities (originally established in the interest of illusionist verisimilitude!) in his Préface de Cromwell (1827). Finally, and most importantly, the mechanicals are also ridiculous because they testify to an outmoded, in part quasi-magic, conception of theatrical illusion on the part of their audiences. (Magic, incidentally, does play a role in the comedy, but can only be relevant for the implied reception attitude toward the theater if it is accompanied by an awareness of its shadow-like distance from actual reality.) The mechanicals’ deficient theater aesthetics appear, for instance, when they advise the ladies not to be afraid of a staged lion (5.1.214–220). As a consequence, they think themselves obliged to resort to a repeated metareferential laying bare of the fictionality of their play (if illusion has been elicited by their play in the first place) and, with this, show that their idea of theatrical illusion lacks the moment of distance and the awareness of aesthetic conventions. It is perhaps no coincidence that Shakespeare made representatives of this old form of quasi-magic illusion come from the same class which, in the Middle Ages, had provided the lay actors of the

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guilds who performed the mystery plays (Lheureux 2010) and were thus doubly removed from the professional companies of Shakespeare’s day. All of this testifies not only to Shakespeare’s awareness of the problems of theatrical representation in general and of the restricted frame of his public theaters in particular, but also to the underlying concept of aesthetic illusion as part of what one may call his implied aesthetics when it comes to his ideas about both good theater and successful theatrical reception. In his practice of an already relatively modern and certainly no longer archaic idea about aesthetic illusion, Shakespeare wrote in a cultural climate that was remarkably illusion-friendly. To substantiate this, one can point to the aforementioned development in fiction to the evolution of the theater toward a more illusionist “show” in the course of the seventeenth century (despite the well-known interval of the Puritan-enforced closure of public theaters in England from 1642 to 1660), but also to the growing popularity of the opera in Europe since the seventeenth century. The opera was a form of musical theater, the entertainment character of which was at least partly due to the unfolding of spectacular theatricals that coalesced with words and music – what today one might call a highly immersive multimedia show. Last but not least, the seventeenth century is also the era in which a steadily growing and mostly affirmative aesthetic and poetological reflection on aesthetic illusion started. France is of particular importance here, with the Abbé d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre ([1657] 1991) providing an early example in which dramatic illusion is praised as “agreable illusions.” It is praised because it is charming and at the same time not real but a transparent “deception” and thus only faintly reminiscent of magic.

6 Eighteenth to Nineteenth Century: Toward the Undisputed Triumph of Aesthetic Illusion Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory and poetics continue the reflection on, and positive evaluation of, what now is increasingly termed “illusion,” frequently with respect to theatrical illusion, which is still occasionally related to “magic,” as in Corneille’s L’Illusion comique, although now, as in d’Aubignac ([1657] 1971, 319), only as a metaphor with an exclusively secular meaning. This is the case, for example, in Charles Batteux, Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (1746), in which he calls “poetry a kind of magic” as “it creates an illusion for the eyes, the imagination, even for the mind” ([1746] 1967, 223, my translation). See also the entry “Illusion” by Marmontel (1778) in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie;

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ou, Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (1751–1772); Moses Mendelssohn, “Von der Illusion” ([1844] 1972, 44); Henry Home, Lord Kames’s reflections on what he terms “ideal presence” in Elements of Criticism ([1762] 1970, 1.108); or Coleridge’s defence of “stage illusion” from 1805 against the “false criticism” which regards it “as actual delusion” while it is but a “temporary half-faith which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part” ([1804/1805] 1960, 178–179). Among the many nineteenthcentury authors who propagate “illusion” as a central effect of drama, novels and short stories, Henry James deserves a special mention for his insistence on “the illusion of life” as “the supreme virtue of a novel” ([1884] 1957, 33) The increased attention paid to aesthetic illusion in the course of eighteenthand nineteenth-century aesthetics has its counterpart in an equally intensified endeavor to enhance aesthetic illusion in both theater and fiction. Illusionism, in the development of the theater, includes the continuation of Inigo Jones’s innovations in the English Restoration theater and in particular the tendency to separate the stage from the audience space. (However, until well into the eighteenth century privileged spectators were tolerated on stage, a practice that came to an end as late as 1759 in the Parisian Comédie française, for instance; Holland and Patterson 1995, 273.) This separation is accentuated by the use of “the drop-curtain that shuts off the scenic stage” (Thomson 1995, 206). Stage scenery, as created, for example, by Philip de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), and gripping acting styles by famous actors such as David Garrick, also contribute to immersing the audience in the represented world. It is not until the nineteenth century, however, that theatrical illusionism reaches its technical climax. A box stage, often virtually framed by something resembling a picture frame, “the box set, with walls and ceilings [. . .] and solid three-dimensional scenic structures” instead of the former painted scenery, the regular use of the drop-curtain to conceal scenery changes, the perfection of stage lighting with gas lighting introduced in the 1820s in London, limelight in the 1830s, and electrical lighting in the 1880s (Booth 1995, 302), and, above all, the darkening of the auditorium during performances are factors in this climax. This lighting change in the late nineteenth century (Burdekin 2018, 40), is of particular illusionist relevance, since it isolates the individual spectator from the rest of the audience, reduces the awareness of the theatrical situation, and encourages an exclusive focus on the lit stage and the world represented there. In the contribution of the history of drama to the development of aesthetic illusion, the heightened importance of eliciting strong emotions in the context of eighteenth-century sensibility (in both domestic tragedy and sentimental comedies) is noteworthy, as is the attention given to stage directions; in Ibsen’s theater (e.g., The Pillars of Society, 1877) this reaches the dimension of detailed authorial descriptions in fiction and is the counterpart to the perfection of illusionist stage

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settings. In the nineteenth century, a forerunner of modern-day TV soap operas is worth mentioning, namely the highly popular melodrama with its emotional roller-coaster between dark, tragic, and humorous atmospheres, the use of stage effects, and music, which is no longer reduced to filling gaps between parts of a theatrical performance but now accompanies it as film music would do later. In music theater, the popularity of opera as an illusionist spectacle with G. F. Händel as its most important representative in England in the first half of the eighteenth century should be noted. In the nineteenth century, Wagner’s creation of an operatic Gesamtkunstwerk is relevant to our context since, besides other functions, it also serves to enhance aesthetic illusion and can in this respect be regarded both as the realization of eighteenth-century ideas of Diderot, who had already advocated the combination of drama and other arts in the interest of aesthetic illusion, and as predecessor of modern-day multimedia shows. As for fiction, the eighteenth century is known as the period of the “rise of the novel” (Watt [1957] 1972). The new, “proto-realistic” novel now supersedes the old romances and becomes the most popular literary genre for a wide reading public, a position which it still holds today. This development, which is fuelled by the rise of the middle class and the growing importance of individualism, empiricism and other secular approaches to reality, is important for the history of aesthetic illusion because of the increased attention given to “realism” in a modern sense. In fiction, this means the telling of plausible, individual stories set in contemporary, wellknown locations, stories that are focused on middle- and lower-class heroes, such as Moll Flanders in the Defoe’s novel of that title (1722). Main characters become “round characters,” who are represented seriously (as opposed to the former tendency to represent lower-class characters in a humorous way only) and are involved in actions which eschew the supernatural. Authors such as Samuel Richardson set much store by the psychological motivations of their main characters as well as by explanations of events. Fictions of authenticity (as in the preface to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, 1719, a novel allegedly merely edited by the author, a device already metareferentially laid bare as such by Cervantes) and disclosure of the sources of information in first-person narratives (as in the memoires of Moll Flanders about her infancy) contribute to the immersive quality of fiction in the changed social and epistemological framework of the eighteenth century, which also alters views about what is lifelike. Descriptions become more elaborate and important, both as representations of certain spatial and social milieus for the explanation of characters and their development and as immersive visualizations of settings. From the end of the eighteenth century onward, in works such as Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), descriptions even start to imitate the structure of visual perspective (Wolf 2001). The intensified attention paid to lifelike realism also includes the use of colloquial style and dialect in direct speeches, a practice already found in

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parts of seafarer speech patterns in Robinson Crusoe and intensified and enlarged by Charles Dickens in, for instance, Hard Times (1854) in the style given to the working-class hero Stephen. Shakespeare and others had already made secondary characters speak with dialect elements (the Scotch Jamy, the Irish Macmorris, and the Welsh Fluellen in Henry V), but most of such earlier examples came along with humorous overtones (Reynolds 2008); in contrast to this, Stephen’s use of dialect in his confrontation with his boss (in 2.5) does not render him ridiculous at all. Since Cervantes’s seminal Don Quijote, which may be seen as the inauguration both of post-medieval illusionist realism in fiction and an illusion-breaking, metafictional play with immersion, the rising importance of aesthetic illusion finds its counterpoint in more or less anti-illusionist fiction such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) or Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste (published posthumously, 1796; see Wolf 1993a). The nineteenth century novel, in general, is considered the climax of illusionist fiction. Proto-realist tendencies in the fiction of the previous century are intensified; metafiction, where used, serves pro-illusionist purposes as a rule (as in fictions of authenticity). New devices are found to enhance lifelikeness and hence immersion, among which are the use of free indirect discourse, as in Jane Austen’s novels, and, at the end of the nineteenth century, stream of consciousness in Edouard Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887), which became a model for James Joyce’s later use of the same technique, and the employment of the figural narrative situation with its effect of a quasi-narratorless immediacy. While the great realistic novels by authors such as Balzac, Zola, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Theodor Fontane, and the great Russian realists are generally considered the best exemplification of nineteenth-century novelistic illusionism, the emergence, or intensified use, of new suspenseful and thus immersive genres also plays a role in the history of aesthetic illusion. First and foremost, one must mention a late eighteenth-century reaction against the demise of the supernatural in proto-realist fiction, namely the rise of gothic fiction (with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, 1764, as the inaugural text). Also of note are historical fiction, for which Sir Walter Scott became world-famous and which employed the techniques of realistic representation, and, also in the nineteenth century, science fiction (with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1818, as the inaugural text and H. G. Wells and Jules Verne as the most important nineteenth-century authors of this genre). In the nineteenth century, which forms a period of undisputed triumph of aesthetic illusion, a development that had already started in the preceding century and that was to lead to a decline of illusionism in literature took root: namely, the influence of other illusionist arts and media on fiction. Initially, it was the art of painting to which authors from Radcliffe onward referred and which they sometimes sought to imitate (realism originally being an art-historical term referring to

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a new school of painting in France, represented, inter alia, by Courbet); later on, photography and the daguerreotype exercised a similar influence on some novelists. In the following centuries, this intermedial relationship was to become even more important for the history of aesthetic illusion, beyond mere emulation and intermedial references.

7 Twentieth Century to the Present: Unprecedented Hostility toward, but also Perfection of, Aesthetic Illusion The period from the nineteenth century to the present is highly ambivalent with regard to aesthetic illusion: it covers both an unprecedented hostility toward aesthetic illusion and various attempts at perfecting it, although the latter development took place mostly outside literature in the “new media.” Drama continued the illusionism of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, notably in England in the variant of the middle-class-orientated well-made play, as exemplified by Terence Rattigan’s (1911–1977) theater. The well-made play remained dominant well into the 1950s, when the New British Drama  – at first focusing on the kitchen-sink milieu staged by the “angry young men” (as in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, 1956, which for all its anti-middle class tendenices is still based on illusionist aesthetics)  – and other movements mark a departure from tradition. The undermining and eventual destruction of both dramatic narrativity and aesthetic illusion in Beckett’s theater of the absurd (with Waiting for Godot, 1953/1956, as the inaugural play) is as noteworthy as Brecht’s anti-illusionist epic drama (taken up in America by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, 1938) and avantgarde theater (e.g., Antonin Artaud’s théâtre de la cruauté in the 1930s, which on the one hand tries to involve the audience on an emotional level and thus still aims for an immersive quality, but whose shock aesthetics, on the other hand, no longer aims at traditional verisimilitude). Theatrical illusionism is no longer a serious aim in postmodernist plays such as Tom Stoppard’s metaleptic deconstruction of the reality/fiction distinction – whose existence is a cornerstone of all “as-if” illusionism  – as in the parody of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in The Real Inspector Hound (1968), with the adjective “real” turning out to be highly ironical. The same applies to contemporary “post-dramatic theater” with its emphasis on performativity and dissolution of fixed character and plot. However, immersion appears to be reinstated in a recent development in drama history: so-called immersive theater,

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in which the audience is invited to interact with dramatic performances (Bucher 2018, 80–92; Marchive 2019). Illusionism in fiction reaches a climax in parts of modernism with the techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue employed on a large scale for a mimesis of consciousness which enhances the impression of immediacy and allows the reader to get direct access to characters’ (focalizers’) minds, as in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, or James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). However, the increasing difficulties created for readers having to navigate through storyworlds without reliable guidance (which authorial narrators used to provide) can also be a disturbing factor with regards to aesthetic illusion, and this also applies to the increasing tendency toward a metareferential and sometimes “experimental” focus on the artistic medium, its potentials, and limits in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), whose language games foreshadow postmodernism. After a short return, in English literature, to a social-critical realism and concomitant traditional illusionism in the 1950s, the period of “the reaction against experiment” (Rabinovitz 1967), postmodernism starts a new assault on aesthetic illusion by often radical experimentations with, and departures from, the traditional use of language and the conventions of realistic storytelling. Of particular importance here is the employment of a critical metareferentiality whose intrusiveness and “destructiveness” must be differentiated from the often illusion-compatible metafiction employed in previous periods, which – when it was not downright supportive of aesthetic illusion, as in protestations of authenticity – was frequently motivated by author or artist figures. In France, the nouveau roman can be considered a precursor of postmodernist anti-illusionism even though at first it was misunderstood as a new form of realism. As exemplified by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur (1955), this “new novel” is in fact bent on destroying the realistic effet de réel by deconstructing plot-centered narrativity, notably through the use of serial techniques and overblown descriptions which lay bare the limits of verbal representation rather than creating a coherent picture in the reader’s mind. In the US of the 1960s, postmodernist experimentation often sports radical and surprising variants of metafiction which are frequently, if unhistorically, considered a continuation of Sterne’s experimentations in Tristram Shandy, a work in which the meaningful mimesis of character is never questioned. Typical representatives of this new kind of avant-garde fiction are authors such as Paul Auster, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Ronald Sukenick, and John Barth. The reasons for anti-illusionism in the era of postmodernism are no longer predominantly of a political and social-critical kind as with Bertold Brecht. To a considerable extent, anti-illusionism in theory and practice now stems from a philosophical deconstructionist skepticism and its denial of all access to truth and

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truthful representation of reality. Of particular relevance in this context is the conviction that our perception of reality is determined by language alone and thus is permeated by the fictions of language and its structures such as metaphors and binary oppositions. As a consequence of this skeptical epistemology, laying bare the workings of language and thus of the fictional constructedness of all of our (verbal) representations and their conventions becomes a powerful motivation for postmodernist, anti-illusionist metareferentiality. The impression of the exhaustion (Barth 1967) of all traditional genres and ways of storytelling is an important reason to resort to a merely ironical and openly playful recycling of old forms and styles, which again undermines aesthetic illusion. And finally, aesthetic illusion is also subject to attack in verbal art by the increasing awareness of competition from other illusionist media. While the emergence of photography and film in the nineteenth century had led fiction to emulate these media – a trend that continued until modernism, with occasional attempts to imitate non-literary media – US postmodernism in particular seems to have given up on such competition, especially with film as the most powerful and (in TV) extremely widespread illusionist medium since the mid-twentieth century (Scholes 1967, 11–12; Wolf 1993a, 684), and to have resorted to a pronounced anti-illusionism. In these post-1950s developments, English literature was relatively reluctant to follow suit, at least as far as radically anti-illusionist postmodernism is concerned (with some exceptions such as Christine Brooke-Rose and B. S. Johnson). However, less radical authors such as John Fowles (e.g., in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1969, which sports three different endings) and David Lodge (e.g., in The British Museum is Falling Down, 1965, which combines a realistic depiction of the protagonist’s fate during one day of his life with a pastiche of various styles of English, mostly modernist, literature) also undermine aesthetic illusion, at least in part. In fact, ambivalence with respect to aesthetic illusion became the hallmark of what Lodge terms “the problematic novel” ([1969] 1977), a double-layered kind of fiction in which illusion-undermining metafiction exists side by side with seemingly realistic heteroreferentiality, thus still allowing some degree of aesthetic illusion. After the demise of radical postmodernist experimentation from the 1980s onward, this formula has proved to be influential and appears to inform much of contemporary fiction (e.g., A. S. Byatt and Ian McEwan). The situation of aesthetic illusion in present-day culture shows a wide range of attitudes: in avant-garde theater and some rare continuations of postmodernist experimentation (as in Coover’s collection of short fiction A Child Again, 2005, which contains a story in the form of a card game whose fifteen cards, except for the first, can be freely shuffled), radical anti-illusionism still exists. However, there is also a “soft,” playful attitude toward aesthetic illusion and the conventions of verbal representation, such as the experimentations with the medium of the printed book

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in Mark Z. Danielewsky’s House of Leaves (2000) and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S (2013). Moreover, the formerly mostly illusion-disturbing devices such as explicit narratorial metafiction and metalepsis seem to have become so widespread that they have been absorbed into mainstream and even popular (e.g., children’s) fiction (Klimek 2010), thus causing their anti-illusionist potential to fade considerably. There is also a revival of completely illusionist fiction such as the neo-realism of Jonathan Franzen, which seems to heave traditional storytelling back onto the level of “high art.” Illusionism was never really abandoned in the more popular genres such as fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, and children’s fiction (although there are examples of metareferential and other forms of experimentation in these genres, too, notably in detective fiction and science fiction). The appeal for powerful aesthetic illusion is also regularly used by bestselling authors of gothic and horror fiction as well as dystopias and thrillers (e.g., Stephen King; the Hodder edition of his novel Under the Dome, 2009, contains ads that include a perfect micro-definition of immersion: “you don’t read it, you live it”). Where illusionism has, however, reached an unprecedented level of perfection is in contemporary digital media (Murray [1997] 2016; Ryan 2001; Grau 2003; Liptay and Dogramaci 2015), in which the development toward an extremely persuasive simulation of reality by involving more than the visual and auditory senses has spawned amazing results (including devices that “augment” reality). Immersion also plays a role in theme parks (Bucher 2018, 83), whose tendency to surround visitors with truer-than-life (e.g., historical or pseudo-historical) “hyperrealities” that blur reality and fiction was brilliantly and presciently satirized in Julian Barnes’s novel England, England (1998), and, perhaps most importantly today, in interactive computer games (which, in the era of “transmedia storytelling,” Jenkins [2006] 2008, may even be based on literary models). One may even question whether these new developments which, to a large extent, are commercially motivated (cf. also the commercial applicability of the “methods and principles of crafting immersive narratives” propagated – without mentioning aesthetic illusion – in Bucher 2018), can still be accommodated under the concept of aesthetic illusion, since they aim at what formerly was termed, in the visual arts, trompe l’œil, but without the saving grace of the eventual revelation of the artifice being pre-programmed in the reception process. The concomitant advancement of the media-awareness of “media-savvy” “users” may, however, safeguard the distance inherent in all aesthetic illusion and thus ensure that even the most immersive virtual realities do not lead to an actual confusion of reality and fiction. One may thus be confident that the long history of aesthetic illusion since antiquity will continue both inside and outside literature regardless of what level of perfection life-like representations may reach.

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List of Authors Andrey E. Agratin, Associate Professor at Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow; Associate Professor at Pushkin State Russian Language Institute Jan Alber, Professor of New English and American Literature at the University of Giessen Brigitte Burrichter, Professor of French and Italian Literature at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Eva von Contzen, Professor of English Literatures, including the Literatures of the Middle Ages at the University of Freiburg  Davis Craig, Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College Michal Beth Dinkler, Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Yale University School of Divinity  Anne Duprat, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Picardie-Jules Verne – Institut Universitaire de France Stefan Feddern, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Kiel Monika Fludernik, Professor of English literature, University of Freiburg Bohumil Fořt, Senior Researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences Alice Gaber, Visiting Faculty in Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison Simon Grund, Research Assistent of Classical Philology at the University of Tübingen Inke Gunia, Professor of Hispanic Literatures at the University of Hamburg Harald Haferland, Retired Professor of Medieval German Literature and Language at the University of Osnabrück Martin Sebastian Hammer, Research Assistant for Early German Literature in the European Context at the University of Wuppertal Yonina Hoffman, Assistant Professor of English at the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York Peter Hühn, Professor of English Literature (retired) at the University of Hamburg Robert Kirstein, Professor of Classics, University of Tübingen  Ursula Kocher, Professor of General Literary Studies and Early German Literature in the European Context at the University of Wuppertal Jiří Koten, Associate Professor of Czech Literature at J. E. Purkyně University, Ústí nad Labem Françoise Lavocat, Professor of Comparative Literature, University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Institut Universitaire de France Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Sophie Marnette, Professor of Medieval French Studies at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford Larisa Muraveva, Ph.D., Independent Scholar Christine Noille, Professor of rhetoric and french literature at Sorbonne University John Pier, Professor of English (retired) at the University of Tours and Member of the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CNRS), Paris Christine Putzo, Senior Lecturer of Medieval German Studies at the University of Lausanne Florian Remele, Research assistant in Medieval German Studies at the University of Lausanne Wolf Schmid, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Literatures at the University of Hamburg

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Ruth Scodel, D. R. Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin emerita, The University of Michigan and Research Associate, UC Davis Ondřej Sládek, Associate Professor of Czech Literature and Deputy Director for Brno Branch, Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences Stefan Tilg, Professor of Latin at the University of Freiburg Valerij Tjupa, Professor Emeritus at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow Werner Wolf, Professor of English and General Literature at the University of Graz Sonja Zeman, Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Augsburg Galina Žiličeva, Professor at the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University Veronika Zuseva-Özkan, Senior Fellow at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Index Abbé d’Aubignac 735 – Pratique du théâtre 867 Abbé Dubos – Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture 867 Abraham, H. 351 Abramov, F. 49, 197 Abrams, J. J. 874 Achilles Tatius 22, 38–39, 87 – Leucippe and Clitophon 21–22, 38, 88 Ackermann, K. 462, 477 Acosta-Hughes, B. 20, 37 Adamson, S. 212, 221–224, 245 Adenet le Roi 134 Aeschylus – Agamemnon 379 Aesop 303 – Fables 310 Aethiopica 718 Agratin, A. 78 Agrippa von Nettesheim – On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and Arts 847 Aguilar Perdomo, M. d. R. 463, 477 Aksënov, V. 80 – Oranges from Morocco 49 Álamo Felices, F. 459, 481 Alber, J. 751 Alcman 23–24, 36 Apuxtin, A. 673 Aleksidze, A. D. 720, 723 Aleman, M. – La Vida de Guzman de Alfarache 435 Alexander 61 Alexander, M. 398, 417 Alexandreis 58 Allen, R. 858 Alter, R. 57 Althoff, G. 820 Álvarez Barrientos, J. 469, 477 Amadís de Gaula 463–468, 476–478, 480, 849 Amelins, M. – The Joyous Science 681 – Time’s Arrow 29 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617481-044

Amodio, M. C. 686 Amory, A. 163 Andersson, T. 332 Andocides – On the Mysteries 165 Andrianova, M. 49 Annenskij, I. 675 Anthologia Palatina 174 Antoine Furetière, A. – Le Roman Bourgeois 863 Anton Ulrich – The Serene Syrian Aramena 849 Anz, T. 459–460, 477–478 Aphthonios 302, 308 Apollonius 38, 167, 174 182, 288 – Argonautica 174, 289, 291 Apuleius 86–87, 667, 713, 772 – The Golden Ass 22, 87–88, 401 – Cupid and Psyche 88 Aragon, L. 278 Arbes, J. 67 Arend, W. 692 Arguello Manresa, G. 462, 478 Ariosto 667 – Orlando Furioso 429, 793, 803–806 Aristophanes – Batrachoi 859 Aristotle 372, 397, 428, 456, 478, 858 – On Rhetoric 314 – Poetics 55, 314, 348, 397, 400, 422–423, 425, 431–432, 441, 443–445, 464, 466, 718, 814, 817 – Rhetoric 308, 314, 772 Artaud, A. 871 Artëmova, S. 674 Arua, A. E. 249 Asclepiades – Anthologia Palatina 168 Astaf’ev, V. 80, 197 Atkins, S. 187 Atlakviða 120, 349–351, 354 Attridge, D. 298 Aubignac, H. H. de 431 Augustan History 90

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 Index

Augustine 372, 818 Austen, J. 25–26, 39, 183, 230–231, 238–242, 252, 275, 295, 870 – Catharine 295 – Emma 26, 38, 238–239, 252 – Mansfield Park 208, 238 – Northanger Abbey 26, 295 – Persuasion 241 – Pride and Prejudice 238, 241 – Sense and Sensibility 296 Auster, P. 28 Averincev, S. 73, 666, 710, 723 Avvakum, P. 41 Babel’, I. 47, 418, 409, 679 – Red Cavalry 79 Bacchylides 24, 40 Bachorski, H. J. 802, 807 Bacon, F. – New Atlantis 221 Baker, H. A. 658 Bakhtin see Baxtin Bakker, E. J. 18–19, 37, 374, 377, 382–383, 390–392, 684–686, 689, 693–694, 696, 699, 701–703 Baklanov, G. 80 Balberg, M. 623 Balbín, B. 779 – Extract from Czech History or, History of Boleslav 779 Baldwin, J. – Giovanni’s Room 30 Bally, C. 179 Bal, M. 8–9, 84, 99, 283, 502, 504 Balzac, H. de 355, 792, 870 Bancroft, C. 34–35, 37 Bandello, M. 434, 437 – Novelle 426 Banfield, A. 177, 179, 204–206, 212–213, 221, 269, 394 Baquero Goyanes, M. 453–456 – Estructuras de la novela actual 454 Baragwanath, E. 90 Barchiesi, A. 92–93, 96–97, 498 Bareis, J. A. 811 Barker, N. – Darkmans 252 Barnes, D. 249

Barnes, J. – England, England 874 Barnet, S. 459, 478 Baroni, R. 46, 398, 413, 417, 420, 441, 459, 462, 478 Barrett Browning, E. 663 – Sonnets from the Portuguese 654–656 Barrett, J. 168 Barthelme, D. 249 – The Balloon 32 – The Dolt 32 Barthelme, F. 249 Barthelme, S. 872 Barthel, V. 105 Barthes, R. 95, 312, 620 Barth, J. 249, 525, 872, 873 – Chimera 522–524 – The End of the Road 30 – Lost in the Funhouse 524 Bartsch, S. 87–88, 482 Bässler, A. 802, 807 Batrachomyomachia 859 Batteux, C. – Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe 867 Battles, P. 108 Baudelle, Y. 520 Bauer, M. 95 Bauman, R. 332 Bäuml, F. H. 703 Bauschke, R. 107 Baxtin, M. 45, 71–72, 75, 178–179, 194, 200, 261, 279, 387, 389, 392, 394, 403, 406, 417, 672, 673, 711, 715, 723 Beard, M. 91 Beaumont, F. – The Knight of the Burning Pestle 864 Beck, D. 697 Becker, A. 482, 488, 490–491 Beckerman, B. 864 Beckett, S. 27, 32, 38 – The Unnamable 32, 36 – Waiting for Godot 871 Beecher, D. 459, 478 Behn, A. 212, 221, 224–226, 232, 234, 253 – Love Letters 25, 224 – Oroonoko 224–225, 863

Index 

– The Fair Jilt 225 – The Story of the Nun 226 Bein, T. 112 Belaja, G. 49 Belinskij, V. 44, 193 Belleforest 437 Bellerophoniad 522, 524 Bellow, S. 249 Belov, V. 80, 197 Belyj, A. 47, 197, 409, 675–676 – The Masks 410 – Petersburg 676 – Moscow 409 Bemong, N. 389, 392 Bender, J. 230, 236 Bennett, A. 249 Bennett, A. M. – Agnes 230 Benson, G. 87 Beowulf 108 Berend, A. – Die Bräutigame der Babette Bomberling 179 Berendsen, M. 84 Bergson, H. 394 Berman, M. 459, 478 Bernardus Silvestris 819 Bernhart, W. 854 Béroul – Le Roman de Tristan 265 – Tristan 273 Bertrand, J.-P. 502, 513 Biber, D. 245 Binder, G. 492 Birke, D. 234 Bishop Njegoš 687 Bishops Sagas 333 Bitov, A. 197 – Puškin House 49 Blair, H. 456 – Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres 450 Blanckenburg, F. von – Versuch über den Roman 183, 361 Bleumer, H. 7, 862, 859 Blok, A. 675 – Irony 47 Blume, P. 812 Boaistuau 434, 437 Bočarov, S. 43

 883

Boccaccio, G. 431, 437, 777 – Decameron 121, 426, 438, 794 – Genealogia Deorum Gentilium 427 Bode, C. 381, 392 Bodel, J. 840 Boden, D. 362 Boethius – Consolatio philosophiae 362 Boezinger, B. 696 Bogdanova, O. 51 Bogdanovič, I. 667 – Darling 667 – Dušenka 401 Boiardo, M. M. – Orlando Innamorato 429, 803–804 Boileau-Narcejac 455, 456 Bolte, J. 360 Bomhoff, J. G. 443, 456 Bondarev, J. 80 Bonheim, H. 55–56, 443, 456 Bonifazi, A. 383, 393, 693, 696 Book of Settlements 325 Booth, M. R. 868 Booth, W. C. 29, 37, 41, 84–85, 99 Borges, J. L. 523, 802 Borghart, P. 389, 392 Boron, R. de – Estoire du Graal 270 Borringo, H.-L. 443, 445, 456, 459, 461–463, 478 Bossuet, J. B. 308 Boulton, M. 460, 478 Bourget, P. C. J. – André Cornélis 452 Boursault, E. – Le Portrait du peintre ou la Contre-Critique de l’Ecole des femmes 435 Bowen, Z. 514 Bowen, P. 239 Bowersock, G. 293 Bowie, E. L. 88 Boyarin, D. 625, 628 Boyd, B. W. 493 Bozzone, C. 687, 689, 691, 693 Bracciolini, P. 60 Bradburn, E. 225 Brant, S. 60 Braun, M. 815, 819, 823–824

884 

 Index

Brautigan, R. 249 Bray, J. 25, 37, 216, 230–231, 233, 239–240 Brecht, B. 871, 872 Bremond, C. 420, 441 Brewer, W. F. 459–462, 478 Brinker, M. 855 Brinton, L. 209, 245 Brodskaja, V. B. 193 Brodskij, J. 679 Brojtman, S. 399, 417, 666, 668, 670–671, 675, 710, 723, 724 Brontë, C. – Jane Eyre 240 Brontë, E. – Wuthering Heights 26 Bronzwaer, W. J. M. 177 Brooke-Rose, C. 249, 873 Brooks, C. 111 Brown, C. B. 230 Brown, G. 396, 417 Brown, R. 468, 478 Bruña-Cuevas, M. 260, 262, 264 Bruner, J. 56, 72 Buchbinder, D. 646 Bucher, J. 872, 874 Bühler, K. 178, 205, 245, 383, 393 Bühler, W. 217 Okudžava, B. 678 Bulgakov, M. 50, 52 – The Master and Margarita 50, 52, 79, 412 Bullard, A. 654 Bunin, I. 47–48, 52, 411 – Light Breathing 409 – The Life of Arseniev 47 – Waters Aplenty 47 Bunyan, J. 212, 221, 232 – Grace Abounding 221–222, 232 – Pilgrims Progress 222 – The Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan 222 Burdekin, R. 868 Buridant, C. 262 Burkhardt, A. 790–791, 807 Burney, F. 231–233, 236 – Camilla 233 – Cecilia 233 – Evelina 233 Burnley, D. 211

Burn, S. 34, 37 Burrichter, B. 110, 117, 822 Burto, W. 459, 478 Burwick, F. 855 Buschmann, A. 456 Buslaev, P. 681 – The Speculations of the Soul 681 Butler, S. 240 Butor, M. 518, 520 Byatt, A. S. 249, 873 Byock, J. L. 336 Byram, K. A. 31, 37 Cacho Blecua, J. M. 465–466, 468, 478, 480 Caesar 504 Calame, C. 18, 21, 37 Calatrava, V. 452 Calderón de la Barca, P. – El gran teatro del mundo 511 – La Vida es Sueño 433 Callejón y Asme, J. – Elementos de literatura preceptiva ó de retórica y poética 452, 456 Callimachus 20, 37–38, 93, 95, 98, 168, 174 – Aetia 20, 92–93, 96–97 – Hymn to Apollo 93 – Hymn to Hecale 93 Campillo y Correa, N. 452 – Retórica y poética ó literatura preceptiva 451, 456 Čapek, K. 774, 782–783 – Továrna na absolutno 784 Capgrave, J. – Legend of St Katharine of Alexandria 212 Capmany y Montpalau, A. – Filosofía de la elocuencia 450, 456 – Caracciolo, M. 856 Carey, P. – Oscar and Lucinda 33 Carnero, G. 469, 478 Carnero, G. 479 Carrard, P. 504 Carreter, L. – Diccionario de términos filológicos 454 Carroll, N. 459–460, 462, 478 Carruthers, M. J. 862 Carter, A. 249

Index 

Cassirer, E. 389 Castelvetro, L. 423, 441 Castillo, A. – The Guardians 34 Catullus 491 Cavaillé, J.-P. 434, 441 Céline, L.-F. 278–279 Čepurov, A. – As a Boy I Went to War 677 Cerquiglini, B. 262–263, 270 Cervantes Saavedra, M. de 723, 862, 869 – Don Quixote (Quijote) 321, 429, 436, 463, 468, 621, 720, 723, 862, 863, 870 – Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismonda 424, 430, 441 – Novelas Exemplares 437 Červenka, M. 773 Čexov, A. 46–50, 52, 72, 77–79, 81, 195–196, 200, 358, 407–408, 416, 418 – About Love 46 – Gooseberries 46 – Ionyč 77 – The Bishop 78 – The Black Monk 77 – The Book of Complaints 408 – The Darling 78 – The Lady with the Little Dog 46, 77 – The Man in the Case 46, 77 – The Student 196 – TheTeacher of Literature 77 Chafe, W. 207, 381, 393, 685, 693–694 Chambers, A. – Dance on My Grave 34 Chandler, R. – The Big Sleep 29 Chanson de Roland 263, 266, 268, 271–272 Chapelain, J. 431, 441 Chariton – Chaereas and Callirhoe 286, 294, 714 Chatman, S. 56–57, 206, 209, 455, 456, 459, 461, 478 Chaucer, G. 11–14, 209, 212, 437, 699, 862 – Canterbury Tales 11–12, 211, 426, 862 – The Knight’s Tale 12–13 – The Shipman’s Tale 210 Chrétien de Troyes 117, 181–182, 198, 209, 261, 365, 816, 838, 839, 842–843 – Chevalier au lion 835 – Erec et Enide 110, 266, 271, 793, 814

 885

– Perceval 119, 366, 380, 793, 814 – Yvain 123, 209, 271–272, 366 Chinca, M. 111, 839 Chion 22, 37 Chitnis, R. A. 783 Christian, L. C. 507, 511 Christie, A. – The Mousetrap 871 Christy, J. P. 22, 37 Chronicle of Bruncvík 60, 62, 65 Chronicle of Dalimil 58 Chronicle of Štilfríd 60, 62, 65 Chvatík, K. 785 Cicero 447, 777, 820, 858 – De legibus 89 – De oratore 820 – Dialogue Concerning Oratorical Partitions 316 – Lucullus 858 – Pro Milone 308–309, 311, 313, 316 – Treatise on Rhetorical Invention 302, 312, 315, 318, 817 Cilevič, L. 46 Cinzio, G. G. 434 – Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi 428 – Ecatommithi 426, 439 Clark, K. 411, 417 Clark, M. H. – Where Are You Now? 35 Clédat 262 Cleland, J. – Fanny Hill 25 Clementine Homilies 363 Clementine Recognitions 363–364 Clore, G. L. 459–460, 480 Clover, C. 331 Clunies Ross, M. 333 Coetzee, J. M. 28 – The Master of Petersburg 180–181 Cohn, D. 27–28, 34, 37, 85, 98, 163–164, 177–178, 182, 206, 209, 222, 226, 258, 282–284, 371, 393, 783, 792, 811 Coleridge, S. T. 824, 865, 868 Collins, A. 459–460, 480 Collins, W. – The Moonstone 33 – The Woman in White 33 Colognat-Barès, A. 506

886 

 Index

Comenius, J. A. 772, 778 – The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart 772, 773 Contzen, E. von 42, 62–3, 7, 12, 86, 621, 821 Compton-Burnett, I. 249 Conan Doyle, A. 452–453 Conrad, J. 27, 240 – Heart of Darkness 30–31, 85 Constable, H. – Diana 647 Constantine 774–775 – Proglas 775 Conte, G. B. 87 Coover, R. 249 – A Child Again, 873 Cormeau, C. 365, 367 Corneille, P. 431, 441 – Comic Illusion 508–511, 867 Cortázar, J. 793 Cosmas 776 – Chronicle of the Czechs 776 Coste, D. 34, 37 Cotrozzi, S. 696 Coulmas, F. 261 Courbet, G. 871 Covarrubias, S. de 478 – Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española 465 Crébillon, C.-P. – Contes 437 Cresphontes 445 Crevier, J.-B. 304, 311, 313, 315, 317–319 Crofts, F. W. – Mystery in the Channel 246 Cross, R. 386, 391, 393 Čudakov, A. 195 Čulkov, G. – The Comely Cook 73, 400, 401 Čumakov, J. 42, 404, 417 Čuprinin, S. 680 Currie, B. 163 Currie, G. 811, 812, 814 Curschman, M. 688 Cusset, C. 98 Cvetaeva, M. 676 – Byways 676

d’Aguesseau – Mercuriales 309 Dahlberg, M. M. 224 Dällenbach, L. 502–504, 504–507, 513, 523 Dames, N. 244 Daniel, S. – To Delia 649–650, 663 Hodrová, D. 785 Dante Alighieri 645, 659, – Convivio 427 – Divina Commedia 404, 645, 672 – Vita nova 111, 645 Daphnis and Chloe 164 Daševskij, G. 680 d’Aubignac, F. H. 441 Däumer, M. 839, 845 Davidson, C. 861 Davis, C. 524 Davydov, S. 410, 417 Dawson, P. 27, 31–32, 37, 233–234, 251–252 de Bakker, M. 90 de Beaugrande, R. 396–397, 417 Defoe, D. 231–232, 234, 442 – Colonel Jack 231 – Journal of the Plague Year 434 – Moll Flanders 231 – Robinson Crusoe 26, 231, 869 – Roxana 231–232 de Jonge, C. 858, 875 de Jong, I. J. F. 8–9, 13, 19, 24, 37, 84, 86, 89–90, 113, 168, 373–374, 379, 393, 482, 485–486, 490–492, 692–693, 696–698, 791, 808, 858, 875 de Kreij M. 693–694 de La Fontaine, J. – The Loves of Cupid and Psyche 401 Delamalle, G.-G. 304, 319 Deleuze, G. 394 DeLillo, D. 251 Deloney, T. – Jack of Newbury 218–219 – The Gentle Craft 218–219 de Mattia-Viviès, M. 235 DeMille, N. – The Lion’s Game 35

Index 

Demosthenes – Philippics 167 Deneef, A. L. 650 Diderot, D. – Jacques le fataliste 870 Deržavin, G. R. 668, 670 – Felica 669–670 – On the Death of Prince Mečerskij 668 de Sade, Marquis – The 120 Days of Sodom 303, 304 Descartes, R. 434 de Sévigné, M. 312 Deupmann, C. 443, 456 Deuteronomy 286, 628, 636 de Wied, M. 461, 463, 479 Dibelius, W. 322 Dickens, C. 240–242 – Barnaby Rudge 239 – David Copperfield 241 – Dombey and Son 242 – Great Expectations 240 – Hard Times 870 – Little Dorrit 208, 246 Diderot, D. 434, 436, 438, 869 – Encyclopédie ou, Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers 868 – Jacques le fataliste et son maître 321 – La Religieuse 321 Dimpel, F. M. 105, 353, 815 – Encyclopédie ou, Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers 868 Dinkler, M. B. 182, 292 Dinter, M. T. 482 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 167 Dix, H. 28, 38 Döblin, A. 188 Doctor Faustus 63 Doctorow, E. L. 249 Dogramaci, B. 874 Doležel, L. 55–56, 178, 781–782, 785, 811 Dolinin, A. 411, 417 Dolle-Weinkauf, B. 443, 457, 459, 479 Donaldson, E. T. 11 Donatus 791 Donleavy, J. P. – The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B 34 – The Ginger Man 34

 887

Donoghue, E. – Room 30 Don Tomazo 218, 220 Döpp, S. 791, 807 Dörner, D. 459, 479 Dostoevskij, F. M. 45, 47, 52, 75–76, 180, 190, 193, 417, 472 – A Raw Youth 45 – Crime and Punishment 45, 77, 195, 406 – Mr. Proxarčin 75 – Poor Folk 193 – The Adolescent 195 – The Brothers Karamazov 45 – The Double 47, 181, 193, 194 – The Gambler 45 – The Idiot 45 Dovlatov, S. 51 Dowden, K. 772 Drabble, M. 249 Dragon Killer 360 Dressler, W. 396, 417 Drosilla and Charicles 720–721 Duby, G. 365 Duchan, J. F. 205 Ducrot, O. 257, 260 Dujardin, É. 282 – Les Lauriers sont coupés 282, 284, 870 Drunina, J. – At School 677 Dumarsais, C. C. 790–791, 807 Dunyazadiad 522–524 Duprat, A. 420, 424, 431, 441, 511 D’ Urfé, H. – L’ Astrée 309, 321, 430 Dürrenmatt, F. 692 Eco, U. 772 Eckenlied 801 Edel, L. 283 Eden, P. T. 492 Edgeworth, M. 231 Edwards, M. W. 692 Egelhaaf-Gaiser, U. 492 Eggers, D. 28 Ehrlich, S. 257–258, 269 Eide, T. 692 Eigler, U. 493

888 

 Index

Eilhart von Oberge – Tristrant 351–352 Eisen, U. 791, 793, 807 Eisler, R. 855 Ėjchenbaum, B. 55, 192, 322, 673 Eliot, G. 238, 245, 248, 252, 870 – Adam Bede 243, 767 – Felix Holt 239 – Middlemarch 238, 242–243, 245 Eliot, T. S. 27, 38 Ellis, B. E. 28 Ellison, R. 249 Elmer, D. F. 693–694 Elsner, J. 482 Emmott, C. 397–398, 417 Engelbert von Admont – Mirror of Moral Virtues 841 Erdrich, L. – The Plague of Doves 34 Eneas 375 Ernst, U. 358, 817 Erofeev, V. – Moscow to the End of the Line 50, 79 Eumathios Makrembolites – Hysmine and Hysminias 719–720 Euripides 715 – Bacchae 174 – Hippolytus 290 – Medea 173, 289–290 – Orestes 172 Faber, R. 496 Faulkner, W. 27, 30–31, 33 – Absalom, Absalom! 33 – As I Lay Dying 30–31, 33–34 – Go Down, Moses 30 – Light in August 30 – The Mansion 33 – The Sound and the Fury 30, 33 – The Town 33 Faust, S. 628 Faustov, A. 71, 75 Feddern, S. 86, 483 Federman, R. 249 Fedunina, O. 49 Feeney, D. C. 91, 94–95 Fehling, D. 90

Fellini, F. 87 Felski, R. 854, 856 Fénelon, F. 400 – Télémaque 309, 321, 400 Fergus, J. 231 Ferguson, F. 239–240 Fet, A. A. – This Morning, This Joy 674 Feuchtwanger, L. – Der jüdische Krieg 180 – Josephus 180 Fichte, J. O. 364 Fielding, H. 231, 234–235, 239, 252, 437, 442 – Amelia 234 – Jonathan Wild 234 – Tom Jones 26, 234, 434 Fielding, S. 231 – The Adventures of David Simple 235 Figes, E. 250 Finch, C. 239 Finkmann, S. 389, 395 Finnegan, R. 686–687, 702 Fischart, J. – Eulenspiegel 801–803 Fitzgerald, F. S. 27, 30 – The Great Gatsby 30 Flaubert, G. 264, 275–276, 280 – L’ Éducation sentimentale 275–276 – Madame Bovary 193, 244, 264 276 Fleischman, S. 261, 267–268, 385–386, 393, 685, 694–696 Florenskij, P. 51 Flore und Blanscheflur 394 Remele, F. 597 Flower, M. A. 90 Fludernik, M. 2, 5–6, 13, 26, 32, 38, 57, 85–86, 162, 179, 204–209, 211–212, 222, 224, 226, 239, 250, 257–258, 260, 296, 377, 381, 385, 393, 642, 695–696, 699, 770–771, 793, 798, 801, 807, 812–814, 824 Foglar, J. 784 – Boys from the Beaver River 784 Foley, J. M. 332, 686–688, 691–692, 702 Fónagy, I. 460, 463, 479 Fontanier, P. 790–792, 807 Ford, F. M. 249 Fordyce, C. J. 492 Forestier, G. 506–507, 509

Index 

Formarier, M. 311 Fornara. C. W. 293 Forradellas, J. 457 – Diccionario de retórica, crítica y terminología literaria 454 Forster, E. M. 76, 248, 426, 441, 444, 457, 620 – Maurice 246 Fořt, B. 781 Fowler, D. 91, 482 Fowler, J. 249 Fowles, J. – The French Lieutenant’s Woman 873 Foxe, J. – Book of Martyrs 212, 221 Fraenkel, J. 624, 628 Francis, J. A. 486 Frank, B. – Tage des Königs 180 Frank, M. 231, 233, 240 Fränkel, H. 377, 389, 393 Franzen, J. 37, 251 Fratantuono, L. M. 492–493 Fredeman, W. E. 658 Freese, E. 117 Frejdenberg, O. 398, 418, 710, 713, 715–716, 724 Frenk, M. 464, 479 Frey, J. – A Million Little Pieces 28 Frick, W. 365 Friedman, N. 111 Friedrich, R. 689, 700 Friedrich von Schwaben 801 Fromm, H. 375, 393, 693 Fuchs, A. 444, 446, 457 Fuchs-Jolie, S. 376, 393 Fuhrmann, M. 444, 457 Fulton, H. 837 Furetière, A. – Le Roman bourgeois 320–321 Gabriel, G. 811 Galič, A. 678 – Ballad about How Klim Petrovič Spoke at a Meeting in Defense of Peace 678 Galina, M. – All about Liza 681 Gallagher, C. 814

 889

Gamelyn 211 Ganghofer, L. 191 Garcia, L. F. 391, 393 Garlandius, J. von 348 – Parisiana Poetria 348 Gascoigne, G. – The Adventures of Master F. J. 213, 224 Gaskell, E. – Cranford 238 Gasparov, B. 412, 418 Gass, W. 249 – Cartesian Sonata 32 Gazdanov, G. 79 Gebauer, J. 777 Gellert, C. F. – Life of the Swedish Countess of G✶✶✶ 183 Genette, G. 16–17, 20, 38, 56, 95–96, 105, 114, 119, 182, 238, 284, 302, 318, 371, 393, 420, 441, 503, 770, 790–793, 802, 807 Geoffrey of Monmouth – Historia regum Britanniae 839 Gerrig, R. 462, 479 Gertken, J. 810–811 Gesta Romanorum 59–60, 62, 64 Gibbons, L. 247 Gide, A. 278, 502–503, 513, 517, 520, 525 – Journal 502, 513 – Les Faux-Monnayeurs 277–278 Gill, C. 282, 293 Gil y Zárate, A. – Manual de literature 451 – Principios de poética y retórica 457 Gilgamesh 348 Gísla saga 344 Gittel, B. 813 Gladilin, A. 80 Glauch, S. 105, 111, 113, 688, 702, 815, 817–819, 821, 823, 834, 839 Godwin, W. 236 – Caleb Williams 230, 233 – Fleetwood 230, 233 – St. Leon 233 Goethe, J. W. 186, 199 – The Elective Affinities 186–187, 189, 199 – The Sorrows of Young Werther 186 – Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 186 Goetsch, P. K. 242, 688 Gogol’, N. 43, 52, 75, 403

890 

 Index

– A Terrible Vengeance 535 – Dead Souls 43, 75, 404, 672–673 – Diary of a Madman 47, 403 – The Overcoat 192–193, 403 Goldhill, S. 92 Gomberville, M. de – Polexandre 430 Gombrich, E. H. 857–859, 862 Gončarov, I. 76, 192 – A Common Story 75, 193 – Oblomov 45–46, 76 González Herrán, J. M. 472, 479 González Rovira, J. M. 469, 479 Gorkij, M. 48 – Mother 79 Gossembrot, S. 847 Gottfried von Straßburg 181, 349, 862 – Tristan 112–113, 115–118, 182, 349, 351–353, 355–357, 359–362, 364, 378, 384, 388, 393, 697, 703, 704, 862 Gower, J. 209 Grabes, H. 396, 418, 420, 441 Gransden, K. 492 Grau, O. 874 Gray, A. 249 Green, D. H. 818, 823, 837, 842 Greene, R. – Pandosto 213–214 Green, G. – The Quiet American 29 Grethlein, J. 10, 90, 162, 170, 173, 373–375, 379, 390, 393, 693–694, 698, 858, 859 Grimova, O. 51, 80–81 Griselda 60 Grishakova, M. 34, 38 Groos, K. 855 Grossman, V. – Life and Fate 49, 79, 413 Grubmüller, K. 834, 845 Grüne, M. 178 Grünkorn, G. 815 Guarini, G. 431, 441 Guðmundsson, Á. – The Outlaw 344 Guenther, G. 861 Gunia, I. 443, 451–452, 457, 469, 479 Gunnars saga 337

Gunn, D. P. 26, 38 Gunnlaugsson, H. – Embla 344 – The Raven Flies 344 – In the Shadow of the Raven 344 Günther, W. 179 Gurvič, I. 75 Hacker, H.-J. 861 Haferland, H. 5, 105, 116, 120, 347, 353, 359–360, 685, 688–691, 822 Hägg, T. 363 Hainsworth, P. 645 Hall, A. 684–685, 704 Hallgrímsson, J. 342 Halliday, M. 397, 418 Hallpike, C. R. 336, 362 Hallyn, F. 502 Haman, A. 779 Hamburger, K. 221–222, 811 Hammer, M. S. 795, 807 Hammett, D. – Arson Plus 29 Händel, G. F. 869 Hanebeck, J. 770, 793, 807 Hanning, R. W. 861 Hansen, P. K. 85, 98 Harder, M. A. 20, 38, 92, 95–96 Hardie, P. 89, 858–859 Hardy, T. 238, 240, 242, 248 Harkins, W. E. 783 Harman, T. – A Caveat for Common Cursitors 219–220 Harries, B. 92 Harris, J. 340 Harrison, S. 87–88, 91, 482, 491, 494, 772 Hartmann von Aue 182, 834, 835–836, 838, 842, 848 – Erec 109–110, 367, 392, 794–797, 835, 836 – Iwein 110, 112, 123, 366, 388, 393, 702, 795, 835 Hartner, M. 34, 38 Hasan, R. 397, 418 Hasištejnský Lobkovic, B. 777–778 – On Human Misery 777 Häsner, B. 792–793, 803–806, 808 Haug, W. 352, 814–815, 818, 822 Hawkes, J. 249

Index 

Hays, M. 233 – Hermione 297 Head, R. Jacksons Recantation 218 Heath, M. 444–445, 456, 457, 466, 478 Heininger, B. 291, 293 Heinsius, D. 423, 441 Heinze, R. 22, 38 Heinzle, J. 351, 690, 815 Heliand 108 Heliodorus 122, 719 – Aethiopica 90, 122, 170, 374, 387, 428–429, 714, 716–718, 859 Hemingway, E. 27, 249 – Hills Like White Elephants 121 – The Killers 121, 122 – The Old Man and the Sea 121 – The Sun Also Rises 29 Hempfer, K. W. 803–804, 808, 812, 863 Hennig, M. 685 Henrichs, A. 24, 38 Herchenbach, H. 385, 393, 696 Herdin, E. 191 Herman, D. 1, 56, 482 Hermogenes – Preliminary Exercices 318, 320 Herodotus 90, 164, 293 – Histories 89–90, 320 Herrnstein Smith, B. 357 Herweg, M. 815, 819, 843–844 Herzog Ernst 110, 381, 387, 696, 833 Hesiod 20–21, 39, 490, 496 – Theogony 20, 163 – Works and Days 20 Heusler, A. 350, 690 Hägg, S. 251 Wells, H. G. 870 Hįjek, V. of Libočany – Chronicle of Bohemia 778 Hildebrandslied 120 Hinds, S. 93 Hirsh, J. 283–284 Historia, about the Life of Dr. Jan Faustus 65, 778 Geoffrey of Monmouth – History of the Kings of Britain 837 Koriockij, V. – History of the Russian Sailor 61, 62, 399

 891

Hitchcock, A. 455, 460, 481 Hodel, R. 190, 197 Holcroft, T. 236 Holinshed, R. 221 Holland, P. 868 Hollis, A. S. 93 Holthusen, J. 195 Holý, J. 783, 785 Holzberg, N. 93, 97 Home, H. – Elements of Criticism 868 Homer 8–10, 13, 17–20, 37–38, 89, 162–164, 168, 171, 182, 289, 293, 374, 376–378, 388, 390, 392–393, 400, 482–485, 487–492, 494–499, 667, 668, 687, 689, 696, 701, 859, 686, 688–689, 691–694, 696–700, 702, 704, 857, 858 – Hymn to Apollo 163 – Hymn to Demeter 163 – Iliad 19, 37, 113, 163, 165–169, 171–172, 348, 373–374, 377, 379, 383, 391, 393, 484–487, 485–490, 491–492, 496, 498–499, 667, 689, 692–694, 696, 699–700, 858 – Odyssey 8–10, 16, 19–20, 37, 163, 165, 167–172, 290–291, 294, 298, 358, 373–374, 377, 379, 430, 480, 687 Horace 422, 858 – Ars Poetica 426 Horn, K. 366 Horstmann, J. 18, 38 Horváth, M. 397, 418 Hough, G. 223, 232 Howard, E. J. 35 – Falling 34–35 – The Sea Change 34 – Hrabal, B. 785 Hruìts saga 336–337 Huber, C. 105, 808, 815, 818 Hübner, G. 107, 114, 117, 181–182, 209, 348, 380, 389, 393, 822, 845 Hühn, P. 324–325, 371, 479, 620, 651 Huitink 694, 698 Hume, D. 439 Hume, K. 327, 341 Hutcheon, L. 57 Hutchinson, G. O. 93, 96

892 

 Index

Huxley, A. 248, 513, 517, 520 – After Many a Summer 208 – Point Counter Point 513–514 Hynek of Poděbrady 62, 777 – Boccaccio’s Decameron 62 – Lady Salomena 62 Ibsen, H. – The Pillars of Society 868 Icelandic family sagas 325, 330, 332, 341 Ignatius of Loyolas – Exercitia spiritualia 861 Ikeo, R. 247 Ilf, I. – The Twelve Chairs 412 Innes, M. 690, 701 Isakovskij, M. – Farewell 678 Iser, W. 27, 38 Ishiguro, K. 249 – The Remains of the Day 29 Isidore of Seville 791, 818–819 – Etymologies 818 Iskander, N. 41 Isocrates 167 Ivanov, V. 47 – U 410 Izzo, D. 502 Jackson, E. 651–652 Jackson’s Recantation 220 Jacobi, F. H. – Woldemar 184 Jahn, M. 34, 38 James, H. 240, 275, 868 James, W. – The Principles of Psychology 298 Janáčkova, J. 782 Janka, M. 446, 448, 457 Jankovič, M. 785 Jannidis, F. 71 Janssens, M. 33, 38 Jauß, H. R. 818, 862 Jeanroy 262 Jedličková, A. 772, 782 Jefferson, A. 503 Jenkins, H. 874

John of Salisbury – Politicraticus 507 Johann von Würzburg – Wildhelm von Österreich 794, 798–801 Johnson, B. S. 249, 873 Jose, P. E. 459, 478 Joseph and Asenath 286–287, 290 Josipovici, G. 249 Jouvancy, J. de 305–306, 319 Joyce, J. 34, 239, 246–249, 870 – Dubliners 246 – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 27, 246, 872 – Ulysses 34, 246–247, 284, 298, 872 Junkerjürgen, R. 443, 457, 459, 461, 479 Kablitz, A. 484, 823 Kafalenos, E. 420, 435–436, 441 Kafka, F. 188 Kahlo, G. 366 Kahn, L. W. 187 Kaiserchronik 108, 364 Kakridis, T. 168 Kalepky, T. 181 Kambasković-Sawers, D. 644, 647, 649–650, 652 Karamzin, N. 41–42, 44, 51–52, 73, 191, 419 – Proteus or, A Poets Contradictions 670 – To Melodor in Reply to His Love Song 670 – Bornholm Island 42, 73 – History of the Russian State 42 – Natalia, the Boyars Daughter 42 – Poor Lisa 42, 73, 402 – What Does the Author Need? 41 Karel the Elder of Žerotín 778 Karnes, M. 813 Karpf, F. 231–232 Kawabata, Y. – Snow Country 414 Kawashima, R. S. 377, 383, 389–390, 393–394, 696, 699, 701, 703 Keats, J. 654 Kedrin, D. 679 Keller 795 Keller, A. 123 Kellogg, R. 282, 288–289 Kelly, A. 31, 38, 704 Kempton, A. 644, 656

Index 

Kerby-Fulton, K. 12 Kesey, K. – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 30 Keunen, B. 389, 392, 394 Kibalnik, S. 51 Kibirov, T. – Dead Crones 681 Kiening, C. 815 Kienpointner, M. 348 Kiernan, P. 864–865 Kimmerle, N. 86, 89 Kindt, T. 84 King Horn 210 King, S. – Christine 35 Kingsolver, B. – The Poisonwood Bible 34 Kipf, K. 379, 394 Kirkman, F. – Counterfeit Lady Unveiled 220 – The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled 218 Kristiánova legenda. 788 Kirstein, R. 86, 91, 95 Kite, C. M. 463, 480 Kittel, H. 230 Klarer, M. 482 Klauk, T. 810–811 Klein, C. 825 Kleinschmidt, E. 847 Klíma, J. R. 366 Klimek, S. 874 Klinger, J. 376, 394 Klooster, J. 19, 38 Klopsch, P. 358 Knabenspiegel 848 Knape, J. 95, 846 Knapp, F. P. 688, 815, 818–820, 823 Knights sagas 333 Koblížek, T. 855 Koch, P. 684 Kocher, U. 794, 808 Köhler, E. 355 Kolobaeva, L. 79 Kolve, V. A. 861 Komnenos, A. – The Novel of Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoi 722 Konrad, E.-M. 812–813, 823

 893

Konrad von Würzburg – The Half-Pear 844 Koopman, N. 482, 485–486 Kopecký, M. 778 Köppe, T. 810–812 Kornilov, B. 678 – Song about a Stranger Korolenko, V. 674 Koten. J. 776, 782 Kovtunova, I. 177 Kozelskij, F. – Elegies 669 Koževnikova, N. 197 Kozlovskij, P. 178 Kragl, F. 372, 380–381, 394–395 Kratochvil, J. 785 Kraus, C. 28 Kraus, C. S. 293 Krebs, C. B. 90 Kreuzig, H. W. 479 Krischer, T. 377, 389, 394 Kroeger, B. 463, 480 Kroon, C. 385, 395 Kropik, C. 840 Kryštof Harant of Polžice and Bezdružice 778 Křivoklad 780 Kuhn-Reichel, T. 791, 808 Kukkonen, K. 324, 397, 400, 418 Kukulin, I. 678 Kullmann, D. 181 Kullmann, W. 9–10 Kundera, M. 785 Kuročkin, V. 673 Kušner; A. 680 Kuzmičová, A. 856 Kyd, T. – The Spanish Tragedy 507 Lafayette, Mme. De 427 – La Princesse de Clèves 320 – Zaïde 430 Laferl, C. F. 445, 457, 459, 479 Lafille, P. 503 La Fontaine, J. de 263, 437, 667 – Fables 309 Låftman, E. 181 Laín Entralgo, P. 453, 457

894 

 Index

Lalebuch 794, 800–803 Lamarque, P. 812 Lämmert, E. 358 La Mort Le Roi Artu 262 Lancelot en Prose 441 Lancelot-Graal 428 Lang, S. 505 Langlois 262 Lanser, S. S. 17, 28, 38 La Prise d’Orange 268 La Quête du Saint-Graal 554 Larsen. K. J. 650 Laskin, B. – Three Tank Men 678 La Spagna 803 Latacz, J. 689 Lausberg, H. 446–447, 457, 791, 808 Lavee, M. 287 Lavocat, F. 770, 814 Lawrence, D. H. 275 – Sons and Lovers 245 – The Rainbow 248 – Women in Love 247 Lawson, M. 443, 459, 479 Laxness, H. 342 Lazarillo de Tormes 113, 429, 863 Lebsanft, F. 181 Lecarme 28 Leech, G. 258 Lejderman, N. 677–678, 680 Lejeune, P. 28, 38 Lembke, S. 795, 808 Leone, S. – For a Few Dollars More 344 Lerch, G. 179 Lermontov, M. J. 42, 49, 52, 75, 192 – A Hero of Our Time 42–43, 74, 192, 404 – Airship 674 – The Demon 74–75 – The Dream 671 – Justification 671 – Mcyri 671 – Princess Ligovskaja 43 – Vadim 192 Lerner, B. 28 Leskov, N. S. 673

Lessing, D. 249 Lessing, G. E. 361, 371 – Laokoon 394, 485 Levinson, J. 626–627, 640 Lewin, K. 459, 479 Lheureux, G. 867 Liapis, V. 18, 38 Lichtenstein, E. H. 459–460, 478 Lienert, E. 841–842 Limonov, È 680 Lipoveckij, M. 677–678, 680 Lips, M. 261–262, 264, 269 Liptay, F. 874 Liveley, G. 397, 418 Lixačëv, D. 73 Lock, R. 380, 389–391, 394 Lodge, D. 295, 873 – The British Museum is Falling Down 873 Lodge, T. – Rosalynde 213 – Philis 647 Loehr, J. 94–95, 97 Lohengrin 111–112 Lombardi, B. 423, 441 Lomnicius, S. of Budeč 63–64 – Cupids Arrow 63 – History of Genoveva from Brabant 65 – Tract about Dance 63 Lomonosov, M. V. 668 Longus 182 – Daphnis and Chloe 714 Lope de Vega – Un soneto me manda hacer Violante 710 López Pinciano, A. 441, 449, 457, 479 – Philosophía antigua poética 428 Lord, A. 685–686, 688, 691 Lotman, Ju. M. 622, 646, 666, 669, 672, 674 Lucan 182 – On the Civil War 89 – Pharsalia 88–89, 91 Lucian 22, 86–87, 858 – A True Story 22, 88 Ludolf von Sachsen – Vita Christi 861 Ludwig, O. – Between Sky and Earth 187–188, 199

Index 

Lugowski, C. 10, 353, 360, 365 Lugovskoj, V. 679 – Midcentury Lukin, V. 399 Lukonin, M. – Obelisk 677 Lully, R. – Libre del orde d’cavayleria 464 Lumiansky, R. M. 11 Luther, M. 777 Lüthi, M. 362 Luzán, I. de 449, 457 Lyly, J. – Euphues 213 Lytle, E. 88 Mácha, K. H. 779 – Křivoklad 780–781 Maggi, V. 423, 441 Magny, C. E. 503 – Encyclopédie ou, Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers 868 Mahler, G. 854 Maier, E. 698 Majerová, M. – The Dam 783 Majakovskij, V. 675 Majkov, V. – Elisej or, Bacchus Enraged 667 Major, C. – Reflex and Bone Structure 32 Mäkelä, M. 207 Malina, D. 771 Malkina, V. 675 Malura, J. 779, 788 Mamleev, J. – Rogue Bears 80 Mamurkina, O. 399 Mandelštam, O. 675–676 – The End of the Novel 78–79 – Upon a Horse-Sleigh Laid to Brim with Straw 675 Manganaro, T. S. 230, 233 Mann, H. 188 Mann, J. 74, 76–77, 404, 418, 671 Mann, T. 188 – Death in Venice 367

 895

– Doctor Faustus 84 – The Magic Mountain 388 Mansfield, K. 872 Manuwald, H. 813, 815, 819, 821, 830, 845–846 Marchello-Nizia, C. 263, 268 Marchese, A. 457 – Diccionario de retórica, crítica y terminología literaria 454 Marchive, L. 872 Margolin, U. 84 Marguerite de Navarre 263, 437 – Heptaméron 321, 426, 439 Marie de France – Chèvrefeuille 273 – Fables 262 – Lais 262, 264, 271 – Lanval 267 – Les espurgatoire saint Patrice 262 Marienberg-Milikowsky, I. 628, 630, 633, 638, 620, 640 Marino, L. 794, 808 Marivaux, P. C. – La Vie de Marianne 321 Markovič, V. 43–44, 51, 71, 76, 406, 418 Marlowe, C. – Doctor Faustus 861, 863 Marnette, S. 181, 205, 209, 211, 263–264, 268–272, 275, 278 Martens, G. 89 Martin, D. 806, 808 Martínez Colomer, V. 469, 471, 477–478 El Valdemaro 468, 469, 479 Martínez, M. 86–88, 348, 353, 355, 357, 364, 367, 381, 394, 482. 825 Martin, M. P. 84–85, 98 Martin of Kochem – Life of Christ 64 Mattenklott, A. 463, 479 Matzner, S. 808 Maugham, S. 46 Maupassant, G. de 275 Mauriac, C. 520, 526 Mayans y Siscar, G. 449, 457 May, R. 88, 92 McCourt, F. – Angela’s Ashes 30 McEwan, I. 249. 873

896 

 Index

McGavin, J. 855, 861 McGrath, A. 861 McHale, B. 27, 32, 38, 177–178, 204, 232, 248, 258, 517, 523, 644 Meckier, J. 514, 526 Medwalls, H. – Fulgens and Lucrece 860 Mehtonen, P. 818, 830 Meyer-Minnemann, K. 504 Meincke, A. 815, 830 Meister, J. C. 114, 372–373, 394, 630, 621 Mellmann, K. 459, 462, 479, 687, 703 Melville. H. 821 Menander 291 Menéndez Pelayo, M. 468, 480 Mendelssohn, M. – Von der Illusion 868 Menhard, F. 88 Meredith, G. 240, 663 – Modern Love 656–658 Methodius 774–775 Metz, C. 322 Meyer, M. 5, 815, 839, 841 Mezei, K. 239 Miall, D. 855 Micha, A. 441 Miedema, N. R. 690–691, 698 Mikos, L. 459, 462, 480 Miller, C.-L. 284 Miller, D. A. 239, 252 Miller, J. M. – Siegwart: A Monastery Story 185 Miller, W. I. 336 Milton, J. – Paradise Lost 342, 863 Milota, K. 785 Minaev, D. 673 Minchin E. 689, 706–708 Minnis, A. 834 Missinne, L. 810, 813, 830 Mitchell, S. 341 Mixajlov, A. 670, 683 Moles, J. 445, 458 Molho, M. 429–430, 441 Molière – La critique de l’école des femmes 435

– L’école des Femmes 435 – L’impromptu de Versailles 435 Möllendorff, P. von 791, 793 Montesquieu, M. – Lettres Persanes 437 Montiglio, S. 295 Moody, R. – The Ice Storm 33 Moore, G. 247 Moore, N. 656 Morales, H. 22, 38 Moretti, F. 620 Morgan, J. 22, 38, 87–88 Morgan, K. A. 21, 39 Morrison, A. 20, 39 Morrison, T. – Recitatif 29 Morrissette, B. 503, 526 Mukařovský, J. 56, 782–783 Mullan, J. 26, 39 Müller, G. 371, 385, 393–394 Müller, J.-D. 109, 111, 351, 686, 690, 700, 704, 815, 821, 830, 848 Müller, M. E. 698 Müller, S. 795, 808 Munson, W. F. 861 Murav’ëv, M. – To the Neva Goddess 669 – The Night 669 Muraveva, L. 504 Murdoch – The Sea, the Sea 720 Murray, J. H. 874 Musil, R. 188 Myers, K. S. 92–98 Nabokov, V. 48, 79, 249, 410–411, 417–418, 517, 520 – The Gift 515, 720 – Christmas 48 – LInconnue de la Seine 411 – Lolita 29, 50 – The Defense 411 – The Luzhin Defence 79 – Torpid Smoke 411 – The Real life of Sebastian Knight 516–517

Index 

Nadson, S. 673 Nagy, G. 692, 708 Narovčatov, S. – The Carpenter 677 Nashe, T. – Unfortunate Traveller 218–219, 222, 863 Naumann, T. 113 Nauta, R. 790, 791 Neely, C. T. 647, 665 Nehrlich, M. 425, 441 Nekrasov, N. A. – A Moral Man 674 – Musings at the Front Door 673 – A Perfect Match 674 – Saša 673 – The Secret 674 – The Trial 674 – The Gardener 674 – Who is Happy in Russia? 673 Nell, V. 459, 480 Nelles, W. 771, 788, 790, 793–794, 800, 806, 808 Nellmann, E. 794, 796, 808 Němcová, B. – The Grandmother 781 Neruda. J. 66, 68 – Prague Tales from the Little Quarter 781–782 Nestor Chronicle 190 Neudeck, O. 815, 830 Neukirchen, T. 801, 808 Neumann, A. W. 230 Neumann, B. 710, 724 Neuschäfer, H.-J. 121 Neuse, W. 183, 186, 188 Newlands, C. E. 91–92 Nezval V. 774, 782, 783 Nichols, S. G. 823, 840 Nicol, B. 28, 39 Nicolini, L. 88 Nikolaeva, O. 680 Niederhoff, B. 105 Niehoff, M. 284, 288 Nielsen, H. S. 33, 39, 812, 830 Nikiforidou, K. 223 Nikiti, A. 41 Niles, J. D. 684, 708 Nill, H.-P. 89

Nimis, S. A. 700, 708 Nitsche, B. 388, 392, 394 Noille, C. 302–323 Novák, A. 779, 788 Novotný, V. 785, 788 Nowakowski, N. 121 Nünlist, R. 20, 39, 373, 379, 393 Nünning, A. 1, 6, 57, 84, 86, 89, 710, 7 Nünning, V. 1, 84, 86 O’Brien, F. – At Swim-Two-Birds 32 Oesterreicher, W. 684, 708 Okudžava, B. – A Sentimental March 678 – A Bosom Talk with My Son 678 – An Old Street Organ was Grinding 678 – How the Young Flutist Smiles 678 Olsen, S. H. 812, 830 Olson, D. R. 478 Onea, E. 811, 830 Ong, W. J. 685–686, 688–689 Orlemanski, J. 813–814, 821–822, 830 Orlova, V. 418 Orrells, D. 91 Ortland, E. 348 Ortony, A. 459–460, 480 Osborne, J. – Look Back in Anger 871 Ovid 84, 91, 93, 95–99, 182, 491, 668, 859 – Amores 98 – Ars Amatoria 98 – Fasti 91–92, 97 – Heroides 99 – Letters from the Black Sea 91 – Metamorphoses 84, 87, 91–99, 491 – Tristia 91 Padučeva, E. 179 Page, N. 178 Paige, N. 34, 39 Pajot, C. 304 Palmer, A. 78, 162, 178, 208, 226, 241, 282 Pamuk, O. – My Name is Red 34 Panova, V. 197

 897

898 

 Index

Pape, W. 855 Paracelsus – A Book on Nymphs 846 Pardo Bazán, E. 452, 453, 457–458, 472, 477, 479–480 – The Burning Question 473 – Los pazos de Ulloa 472–477 Paris 262 Parra Sandoval, V. 470, 480 Parry, M. 686, 688, 691, 708 Pascal, R. 177, 179, 186–187, 206, 251, 258 Pasternak, B. 676 – Doktor Živago 50–52, 79, 412–413, 418 Patron, S. 206 Patterson, J. – Cat and Mouse 35 Patterson, M. 868, 856 Paul, J. 191 – Titan 185 Pausch, D. 89–90, 122 Pausch, Dennis 90 Paustovskij, K. 679 Pavel, T. G. 811 Peccatte, P. 502, 505, 526 Peirce, C. S. 502, 504–505 Pèlerinage de Charlemagne 262 Pelevin, V. 51 – Čapaev and Void 415 – Generation “II” 80 – Generation P 51 – The Clay Machine-Gun 51 Pennacchio, F. 27, 39 Penzenstadler, F. 792, 803, 808 Peresvetov, I. 41 Perlstein, A. 26, 39 Person, R. F. 700 Petrarca, F. 644, 647, 649–653, 659–660, 663 – Canzoniere 645 Petrů, E. 778 Petronius – Satyricon 22, 87, 713 Petrov, E. – The Golden Calf 79 – The Twelve Chairs 79 Petsch, R. 56 Petterson, A. 855 Pfaller, R. 824, 831, 846

Pfister, M. 460–463, 480 Pflugmacher, T. 482 Phelan, J. 28–30, 39, 84–86, 98–99, 420, 441, 812 Philipowski. K. 379, 382, 394, 689–690, 798, 808 Philo of Alexandria – In Flaccum 287–288 Pier, J. 420, 442, 502, 524, 770–771, 773, 790, 792, 809 Pigna, G. – I romanzi 428 Pil’njak, B. 47, 197, 409 Pindar – Fifth Nemean 24–25 – First Olympian 24 – Olympian 164 Pirandello, L. 710 Plato 20–21, 37, 39, 55, 182, 680 – Republic 21 – Symposium 21 – Theaetetus 282 Plautus 291, 818 Plazenet, L. 429 Pliny 821 – Naturalis Historia 858 Plotke, S. 86 Plutarch – Dio and Caesar 167 Poe, E. A. 514 – The Fall of the House of Usher 502, 505, 508, 515, 520 Poetic Edda 326 Polívka, G. 360 Jakov Polonskij, J. – The Madman 674 Polybius 165 Pons-Sanz, S. 209 Portugal, F. de 480 – Arte de galantería 468 Powers, R. – Gold Bug Variations 34 Pozdnev, M. 377–378, 394 Prévost, Abbé – Manon Lescaut 427 – Mémoires et aventures dun homme de qualité 427 Prigov, D. A. 680 Primavesi, O. 492

Index 

Prince, G. 420, 442, 772, 778 Prišvin, M. 679 Pritchard, R. E. 653, 665 Procopius 776 Prodromos, T. – Rhodanthe and Dosikles 720–721 Proglas 774–775 Propertius – Elegy 96–98 Propp, V. 71, 348, 398, 415, 418 Prose-Lancelot 376, 378, 380, 387, 393–395, 700 Prose Edda 326 Proustian 519 Przybilski, M. 839 Pseudo-Clementine Writings 363–364 Pseudo-Philo – Liber antiquitatum biblicarum 287 Pulci, L. – Morgante 803, 804, 806 Puškin, A. 49, 52, 199 – Eugene Onegin 42–43, 50, 74, 190, 404, 417, 672, 720 – Prisoner of the Caucasus 671 – The Captains Daughter 42 – The Queen of Spades 45, 74 – The Station Supervisor 191 – The Tales of Belkin 42–43, 74, 191, 403 – The Gypsies 671 – The Fountain of Baxčisaraj 671 Putnam, M. C. J. 498 Putzo, C. 839, 843, 847 Pütz, P. 460, 480 Pynchon, T. 249, 251 – Gravity’s Rainbow 250–251 – Mason & Dixon 30–31 Queneau, R. 278–279 Quintilian 458 – De Institutione Oratoria 302, 306, 311–312, 317, 426, 442–443, 446, 858 Rabelais, F. 263, 437 – Pantageruel 428 Rabinovitz, R. 872 Rabinowitz, P. J. 86 Rabkin, E. S. 460, 480

 899

Racine, J. – Phaedra 309, 310 – The Litigants 304 Radcliffe, A. 231, 238, 453, 870 – Mysteries of Udolpho 869 – Romance of the Forest 237 – The Italian 237 – The Mysteries of Udolpho 236 Radiščev, A – A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow 401 Rahn, W. M. 463, 480 Rajewsky, I. O. 482, 821 Ransdell, J. 502, 527 Rasputin, V. 49, 80 Ratkowitsch, C. 482 Rattigan, T. 871 Raumann, R. 815, 831 Raus, T. 503, 505 Rawles, R. 23, 39 Ready, J. L. 689, 693, 698, 700, 708 Reardon, B. P. 22, 39, 286, 288 Reformatski, A. A. 322 Reichlin, S. 378, 388, 392, 394 Reither, F. 479 Reitz, C. 389, 395 Reitz-Joosse, B. 482 Remele, F. 597–619, 839, 852 Remizov, A. 47, 197, 409 Rengakos, A. 377, 389, 395 Reuvekamp-Felber 702, 704, 815, 822 Reuvekamp-Felber, T. 834 Reynolds, E. 870 Rhetoric for Herennius 302, 817 Rhetoric to King Alexander 313, 316 Ricardou, J. 503, 506, 519, 527, Richard de Fournivals – Li Bestiaires d’Amour 862 Richardson, B. 33–35, 39, 425, 432, 442 Richardson, D. – Pilgrimage 284 Richardson, S. 230–231, 242, 442, 869 – Clarissa 25, 232 – Pamela 25, 183 – Sir Charles Grandison 232 Ricoeur, P. 46, 72, 77, 371, 395, 398, 405, 407, 418, 423, 442 Ridder, K. 815, 831, 843, 852

900 

 Index

Rigg, P. 654, 656, 661–662, 665 Riggan, W. 29, 39 Rimmon-Kenan, S. 56–57, 204, 259–260, 461, 480 Rivoletti, C. 123, 803, 806–807, 809 Robbe-Grillet, A. – Jealousy 519–522 – Le Voyeur 872 – Pour un nouveau roman 520 Robert de Boron – Estoire del Graal 262, 269, 270 Robinet – Panégyrique de l’Ecole des femmes ou Conversation comique sur les œuvres de M. De Molière 435 Robinson, A. M. F. – Tuscan Sonnets 661 Robortello, F. 423, 431, 442 Rodionov, A. 680 Rodnjanskaja, I. 680 Rodríguez de Montalvo, G. 478, 480 Röhrich, L. 360 Roiland, J. 28, 39 Rolandslied 395 Romberg, B. 22, 26–27, 39 Ron, M. 503–506 Ronen, R. 811, 831 Roper – Life of Sir Thomas More 221 Rosier, L. 258, 260 Rossetti, C. 663 – The Unnamed Lady 659–661 Rossetti, D. G. 663 – The House of Life 658–659 Roth, K. 351 Roth, P. 28 – The Human Stain 30 Rothmann, M. 819, 831 Roulston, C. 239 Rousset, J. 506 Roynon, T. 91 Roždestvenskij, R. 679 – Requiem Rubenstein, J. 636, 640, 643 Ruberg, U. 378, 387, 395 Rubinštejn, L. 680 Rudolf von Ems – Der gute Gerhard 112

Ruge, N. 839 Rundquist, E. 247 Rupprecht, K. 791, 809 Rushdie, S. 249 – Midnight’s Children 31 Ryan, M.-L. 78, 162, 770–771, 792, 809, 812, 824, 855, 862, 874 Rychner, J. 257, 260, 262–263, 273 Sade, Marquis de 120 – Journées de Sodome 321 – Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu 321 Safronova, L. 51 Saga of Burning Njál 333 Saga of Eirík the Red 329 Saga of Hrólf Kraki 331, 340–341 Saga of Grettir 341–342 Saga of the Greenlanders 327–329 Saga of the People of Laxriverdale 329, 334–336 Saga of the Sturlungs 332 Saga of the Völsungs 331 Sagas of Ancient Times 331 Sagas of the kings 333 Sahlins, M. 324 Sainz de Robles, F. C. 458 Šalamov, V. – The Left Bank 413 Sale, W. M. 700, 708 Salinas, M. de 449, 458 Salinger, J. D. – The Catcher in the Rye 28–29 Saltykov-Ščedrin, M. – The History of a Town 405 Sánchez Barbero, F. 450, 458 – Principios de Retórica y Poética 450 Sappho 174 Sarraute, N. 278 Sartre, J.-P. 520 Šatin, J. 51 Savinkov, S. 71, 74–75 Sayings of the High One 330–331 Sazonova, L. 668, 683 Scarron, P. 263, 723 – Le Roman comique 321 Schadewaldt, W. 290 Schaefer, U. 704, 709 Schaeffer, J.-M. 770, 788

Index 

Schamschula, W. 777, 787, 789 Scheffel, M. 86–88, 353, 355, 357, 381, 394, 482 Scheve, C. von 459, 480 Schissel von Fleschenberg, O. 322 Schlichter, J. J. 385, 395 Schlickers, S. 504, 771 Schmeling, G. L. 87 Schmid, W. 41, 45–46, 48, 55, 73, 78, 84, 105, 114–115, 177–179, 182–183, 190, 193–194, 196–197, 205–206, 232, 240, 244, 260, 283–284, 325, 358, 371, 373, 380, 395, 397, 408–409, 418, 460, 469–470, 480, 482, 520–521, 620–622, 627, 634, 639, 666, 676, 772, 782 Schmidt, E. A. 95 Schmitt, S. 815, 823, 834, 846, 848–849 Schmitz, T. 462, 480 Schnabel, J. G. 183 – The Island of Felsenburg 184 – Wonderful mirage of some sailors 184 Schneider, C. 353, 801, 809–810, 813, 815, 819–820, 822, 824–825, 833 Schnitzler, A. 188, 298 – Fräulein Else 298 – Lieutnant Gustl 298 Scholes, R. 282, 288–289, 873 Schorn, S. 820, 831 Schuler-Lang, L. 809 Schulte-Sasse, J. 348 Schultz, J. A. 351 Schulz, A. 112, 182, 845 Scodel, R. 377, 395 Scott, W. 238, 241, 870 – Heart of Midlothian 239, 242 – Redgauntlet 230, 241 Shelley, M. – Frankenstein 870 Scudéry, M. de 427 – Clélie, histoire romaine 321, 863 Scudéry, M. and G. – Artamène ou, Le Grand Cyrus 430 Searle, J. 57, 811–812 Šebek, J. 785, 789 Sebold, A. – The Lovely Bones 31 Sedelmeier, D. 362 Seeber, S. 123

 901

Seeck, G. A. 376, 395 Self, W. 28 Sellew, P. 182 Semino, E. 208, 212, 216, 250 Seneca 777 Serafimovič, A. – The Iron Flood 412 Servius 791 Sévigné, M. de 312, 313 318 Shakespeare, W. 644, 647, 663, 856, 859–860, 864–867, 870 – As You Like It 507 – A Midsummer Night’s Dream 865 – Hamlet 470, 502, 507, 508, 515 – Henry V 865, 870 – Macbeth 507 – Othello 864 Shelley, M. 654 – Frankenstein 26, 870 Shen, D. 84–86 Shields, D. 27, 39 Shigematsu, E. 231–232 Shimazaki, H. 231 Short, M. 207–208, 212, 216, 250, 258 Sicking, C. M. J. 696, 709 Sidney, P. 253, 649–650, 663, 814 – Astrophel and Stella 646–649, 649–650, 651, 653 – Arcadia 239 – New Arcadia 213, 216–218, 221 – Old Arcadia 213, 215–216, 222–224 Silant’ev, I. 51, 80 Simon, E. 487 Simonov, P. V. 460, 480 Simon-Shoshan, M. 629, 640, 643 Singer, R. 446, 458 Sirvent, M. 505, 527 Šiškin, M. 80 – The Taking of Izmail 51 Skinner, J. 225, 231–234 Šklovskij, V. 55, 322, 515, 676, 715, 724, Slaby, J. 459, 480 Sládek, O. 770–789 Sluckijs, B. – The Monument 677 Slučevskij, K. 673 Šmahel, F. 777, 789

902 

 Index

Smeljakov, J. – Stern Love 679 Smith, A. 492–493 Smith, C. 231 Smith, S. 28, 39 Smith, Z. 251 Smollett, T. G. 236 – Ferdinand Count Fathom 236 Smuts, A. 462, 480 Snow, M. 503, 527 Söder, R. 364 Sofer, A. 861 Sokoloff, M. 635, 643 Sokolov, S. 51 – A Song of Ice and Fire 600 – A School for Fools 50, 80, 545 Sokolova, L. 177 Solodow, J. B. 91, 94, 99 Sologub, F. – The Petty Demon 47, 51 Šoloxov, M. 79 – And Quiet Flows the Don 79 Solženicyn, A. 197 – Matryonas Place 80 – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 49, 80, 197–198 Song of the Nibelungs 108, 349–351, 353–354, 356–358, 361, 375–376, 378, 383, 688, 690–692, 694, 697, 699–700, 840 Sophocles 715 – Oedipus Rex 425 – Sorokin, V. 51, 415 Sorel, C. 723 Sotirova, V. 244–245, 247 Souiller, D. 506, 527 Spark, M. 249 Sparks, B. – Go Ask Alice 28 Spenser E. 650, 663 – Amoretti 647, 650–651 – Epithalamion 650–651 Spiess, C. H. 65 Spitzer, L. 179, 191, 196 Stahl, H. 644 Stanley, K. 689, 700, 709 Stanzel, F. K. 17, 29, 34, 37, 39, 57, 111, 187, 207, 222, 232, 238, 241, 244, 247, 667, 723, 724

Starkey, K. 698, 702, 704, 709 Stark, I. 364 Stäudel, T. 479 Steinberg, E. R. 244 Steinberg, G. 179, 191, 205, 209 Steiner, P. 785, 789 Steinhöwel, H. – Preface to Aesopus 847 Steinhoff, H. H. 378, 395 Stempel, W.-D. 181, 484 Stendahl, K. 282 Stendhal 512, 524 Stepanov, A. 408, 418 Stepanova, M. 680 – In Memory of Memory 681 – Ivan Sidorovs Prose 681 Stephens, S. A. 20, 37 Stern, D. 640, 643 Sternberg, M. 17, 40, 84, 179, 397, 418, 420, 442, 459–460, 480 Sterne, L. 434, 436, 438, 774 – Tristram Shandy 26, 36, 84, 233, 440, 504, 720, 870, 872 Stierle, K. 793–794, 809 Štítný, T. 776 – The Game of Chesse 62 Stone, H. 284 Stoppard, T. 871 Stork, P. 696, 709 Störmer-Caysa, U. 113, 372, 378, 386–388, 390–392, 395 Störmer, W. 365 Straßburger Alexander 108 Strauch, G. 221, 230, 232, 236 Strauch. G. 258 Stricker 121 Strube, W. 855 Sturluson, S. – Prose Edda 326 Suárez Coalla, F. 455, 458 Sukenick R. 872 Šukšin, V. 49, 80, 197 Svarovskij, F. 680 Světlá, K. 65–66, 68 Swift, G. 249 Swift, J. 231, 437 – Gulliver’s Travels 26

Index 

Světlá, K. – Village Novel 780 Syme, R. 90 Symonds, J. A. 661, 663 – Stella Maris 661–662 Tale of Frol Skobeev 73, 670 Tamarčenko, N. 76, 398, 405, 418 Tartt, D. – The Secret History 30 Tassos, T. – La Gerusalemme liberata 424–425, 442 Taylor, A. 649, 651 Tendrjakov, V. 197 Terс, A. 677, 683 Terence 818 – Andria 307 – Phaedra 303 Terreros y Pando, E. de 448, 458 Thackeray, W. M. 239, 242, 252 – Vanity Fair 26 Theocritus – Idylls 174 Thousand and One Nights 522–523, 716 The Witchs Prophecy 330 Thinnes, I. 351 Thomas d’Angleterre – Tristan 182 Thomasin von Zerklaeres 819 – The Romance Stranger 819 Thomas of Britanje – Tristan 359, 362 Thomas of Erceldoune – Guingamor 393 – The Story of Meriadoc 393 – The Tale of King Herla 393 Thomas of Štítné 776–777 Thomson, P. 864, 868 Thorgilsson, A. – Book of Icelanders 325 Thóroddsson, J. – Lad and Lass 342 Thousand and One Nights 438–439 Thucydides 164, 167, 293, 320, 701 Thüring von Ringoltingen 846

 903

– Melusine 801 Tilg, S. 2–3, 5–15, 86, 381, 393–395, 772, 791 Till Eulenspiegel 379 Timotheus – Persians 172 Tjupa, V. 43, 45–50, 76–78, 398, 403–404, 408, 413, 418–419, 666, 674, 677 Tobler, A. 177–178 Todorov, T. 55, 398, 420, 430, 442, 460, 480 Toker, L. 413, 419 Tolstaja, T. 415 Tolstoj, A. – Potok the Bogatyr – The Dream of Councillor Popov 673 Tolstoj, L. 44, 46, 52, 76–77, 193, 195, 472 – Anna Karenina 405 – Resurrection 77 – War and Peace 44, 49, 76, 407 Tomaševskij, B. 321, 358, 397, 419 Tonkonogov, D. 680 Toolan, M. 396–397, 419 Topol, J. 785 Toporov, V. 399, 402, 419 Tore, G. M. 503, 505, 527 Trediakovskij, V. 400, 407, 668 – Telemachiad 400 Trifonov, J. 49, 80, 197 Trimble, G. 808 Tristan and Iseult 58 Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar 362 Trollope, A. 238, 240–242, 244 – Doctor Thorne 241 Troscianko, E. T. 855 Truffaut, F. 460, 481 Tryphon 791 Tureček, D 779, 789 Turgenev, I. 46, 52, 76, 418, 674 – Asja 45 – Fathers and Sons 44–45, 76–77, 406 – First Love 45 Tvardovskij, А. Т. – By Right of Memory 679 – Distance Beyond Distance 679 – The Land of Muravia 679 – Vasilij Tërkin 679

904 

 Index

Twain, M. – Huckleberry Finn 84 Tyl, J. K. – The Last of the Czechs 67 Tynjanov, J. N. 672 Uddén, A. 231, 236 Ueding, Gerd 457–458 Uhlig, A. 18, 40 Ulickaja, L. – Daniel Stein, Interpreter 51, 80 Ulrichs von Etzenbach – Wilhalm von Wenden 394 Ulrich von Liechtenstein – Frauendienst 111 Ulrich von Zatzikhoven – Lanzelet 119 – Underwood, T. 27, 40 Updike, J. 249 Urban, M. 785 Uspenskij, B. A. 73, 105, 177, 205 Uther, H.-J. 360 Vaginov, K. 49, 80 – The Works and Days of Svistonov 410 Vale, E. 455, 458 Valles Calatrava, J. R. 458–459, 481 Vančura, V. 774, 782 – Markéta Lazarová 782–783 van Dam, B. 810, 813, 830, 831 van Gils, L. 385, 395 Vanšenkin, K. – The Memory has Such a Feature 677 Vašica, J. 775, 786, 789 Veldeke, H. von – Eneas 108, 375, 393, 693 Vermeule, B. 231, 233, 238–240 Verne, J. 452, 457, 479, 870 Verschoor, J. A. 262 Veselovskij, A. N. 710, 724 Vetters, C. 265 Vidas, M. 625, 643 Villeneuve, J. 398, 419 Vincent, R. H. 506, 527 Vinogradov, V. 192 Virgil 182, 482–485, 492–499, 668

– Aeneid 89, 309, 358, 363, 375, 484–485, 492–495, 497–499, 667, 859 – eclogue 791 – Georgica 497 Visser, E. 691, 700, 709 Vita Aureliani 90 Vitae sanctorum 333 Vita et passio sancti Venceslai et sancte Ludmile ave eius 775 Vivess, J. L. – Painted Truth 847 Vladimov, G. 80 – The Great Ore 49 Vysockij, V. 678 Vodička, F. 779, 781 Vodolazkin, E. – Aviator 52, 81 – Laurus 51 Vöhler, M. 86 Vojnovič, V. – The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin 80 – Pretender to the Throne: The Further Adventures of Private Ivan Čonkin 412 Volksbuch vom Hl. Karl 385 Vološinov, V. N. 178–179 Voltaire – Contes 437 Von Birken, S 849–850, 852 Vonnegut, K. 249 von Rosen, V. 858 Voßkamp, V. 849 Vossius, G. J. 790–791, 809 Vrchbělský, J. A. 60 Vygotskij, L. 78, 409, 419 Vysockij, V. 678 Wace – The Romance of Brut 837–838, 852 Wagner, F. 771, 789 Wagner, R. 869 Walde, C. 99 Waldner, K. 91, 94, 96 Walker, A. D. 858 Walker, G. 855, 861 Wallace, D. F. 34

Index 

– Good Old Neon 31 – Infinite Jest 34 – Reality Boundary 39 Walpole, H. – The Castle of Otranto 236, 870 Walsh, R. 811–812 Walton, K. L. 811, 831 Walton, M. V. 791, 809 Wardle, D. 465, 481 Warren, R. P. 111 Watson, J. 28, 39 Watt, I. 26, 40, 869 Watts, I. 434, 442 Waugh, P. 57, 522 Webb, R. 858 Weimann, R. 861 Weiß, W. 860 Weixler, A. 388, 395 Weldon, F. – The Cloning of Joanna May 34 Wellershoff, D. 188, 199 – The Love Desire Wells, H. G. 27 Wels, V. 846 Wenceslas 775 Wenzel, P. 459, 481 Werfel, F. 188 Werner, L. 6–7, 372–373, 388, 395 Wessel, B. 446, 458 Wezel, J. C. – Life Story of Tobias Knaut the Wise 185 Wheeler, S. M. 92, 97 Whitcomb, S. L. 105, 115 White, J. J. 502–503, 505, 527 The White Viking 344 Whitla, W. 660, 665 Whitman, C. H. 700, 709 Whitmarsh, T. 17–18, 40, 86–88 Wickram, G. 847, 848–849 – Dialogue of a Wayward Son 848 – On Good and Bad Neighbors 123, 849 – The Rose Thorn 845 – The Young Men’s Mirror 848 Wieland, C. M. 183, 199 – Der Neue Amadis 803, 807 – Idris und Zenide 803, 806

 905

– The Adventures of Don Sylvio of Rosalva 186 – The History of Agathon 186, 850 Wienhold, G. 460, 481 Wilder, T. – Our Town 27, 871 Wildonie, H. von – The Deceived Husband 833 Wiles, D. 860 Wilkomirski, B. – Fragments – Memories of A Wartime Childhood 28 Will, F. 388, 395 Williams, A. 657, 665 Williams, B. 389, 395 Williams, G. 92 Willich – In omnes Terentii fabulas compendiosa commentaria 307 Willms, E. 366 Wimpfheimer, B. S. 625, 643 Winkler, J. J. 87–88, 95 Winner, T. G. 782, 789 Wiseman, T. 293 The Witchs Prophecy 330 Wittenweiler, H. – Ring 800–801 Wolf, J. 839 Wolf, K. 333 Wolf, W. 57, 448, 458, 462, 481–483, 504–505, 508, 514, 517, 793, 809, 854–878 Wolfdietrich 359 Wolfe, T. – I am Charlotte Simmons 252 Wolfram von Eschenbach 122, 837, 862 – Parzival 106, 109, 111–112, 118–121, 124, 366, 378, 380, 384, 394, 695, 699, 704, 794, 796–798, 800–801, 836, 862 – Willehalm 384, 395 Wolfson, N. 385, 395, 695, 709 Wolfzettel, F. 815, 842 Wollstonecraft, M. 238 – Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman 233–234 Woolf, V. 245, 247–248, 275 – A Room of One’s Own 296 – Between the Acts 244 – Jacobs Room 248

906 

 Index

– Mrs Dalloway 248, 296–297, 872 – To the Lighthouse 180, 240, 248 Wordsworth, W. 654 Worstbrock, F.-J. 347, 352 Worthington, M. 28, 40 Wright, C. 88 Wroth, M. 653–654, 663 – Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 647 Wulff, H. J. 461–462, 481 Würzburg, K. von – The Half-Pear 844 Wuss, P. 459–460, 481 Xenophon 182 – Anabasis 173 – Ephesian Tale 286, 295 – Hellenica 167 Xeraskov, M. – The Rossiad 667 – Philosophical Odes 669 – To My Lyre 669 – On the Significance of Versification 669 – Some Tune the Lyre 669 Xersonskij, B. 680 Ximenez Patón, B. 481 – Eloquencia, española en arte 468 Xlebnikov, V. 675 – Azy iz Uzy 676 Yacobi, T. 84 Yagoda, B. 27, 40 Yamashita, K. T.

– The Tropic of Orange 34 Young, C. 684, 706 Yule, G. 396, 417 Ywain and Gawain 209 Zalygin, S. 197 Zamjatin, E. 47–48, 197, 409, 418 Zanin, E. 442 Zanker, A. 389, 392, 395 Zeman, S. 375, 382, 385, 390, 394–395, 687, 689, 694, 696 Zerweck, B. 86 Zetterberg Gjerlevse, S. 810, 832 Zielinski, T. 376–378, 395, 699 Ziely, W. 847, 853 Žiličeva, G. 49, 80, 410, 413, 396–419 Zimmermann, J. 375, 395, 693 Zindel, P. – The Pigman 34 Žinkin, N. 78 Zipfel, F. 810–811, 832 Žirmunskij, V. 671 Zočenko, M. 79 Zola, É. 264, 275–276, 279–280, 870 – Le roman expérimental 472 – Les Rougon-Macquart 264, 276 – Son excellence Eugène Rougon 276 Žolkovskij, A. 409, 419 Zudrell, L. 795, 808 Zunshine, L. 248 Zunz, L. 624