Nature has no outline, but Imagination has.
William Blake, Notebooks
Imagination is the core of desire. It acts at the core of metaphor. It is essential to the activity of reading and writing. In the archaic lyric poetry of Greece, these three trajectories intersected, perhaps fortuitously, and imagination transcribed on human desire an outline more beautiful (some people think) than any before or since. We have seen what shape that outline took. Writing about desire, the archaic poets made triangles with their words. Or, to put it less sharply, they represent situations that ought to involve two factors (lover, beloved) in terms of three (lover, beloved and the space between them, however realized). Is this outline just a fetish of the lyric imagination? No. We have looked at tragedians and comic poets and epigrammatists concerned with the bittersweetness of desire. We have discovered the roots of the notion in Homer’s Aphrodite. We have seen Plato turn the problem over. There is something essential to eros here.
The lyric poets caught its outline with sudden sharpness, and left that in writing. ‘What does the lover want from love?’ is the question to which the lyric evidence led us. But now we should consider the matter from another side, for the nature of the lyric evidence cannot be separated from the fact of its transcription, and that fact remains mysterious. I mean by this that the lyric poets present a borderline case, living as they did in the first outburst of literary activity that followed the alphabet, commissioned as they were to compose lyrics for oral and public performance but somehow involved also in making written record of these poems. They are poets exploring the edge between oral and literate procedure, probing forward to see what kind of thing writing is, reading is, poetry can be. The position is not an easy one. Perhaps that is why the poems are so good. At any rate, the position gradually became easier as literacy spread throughout the Greek world. New genres of expression developed to meet its demands. Let us look at the most influential of those genres, evolved expressly for the delectation of writers and readers. Let us superimpose on the question ‘What does the lover want from love’ the questions ‘What does the reader want from reading? What is the writer’s desire?’ Novels are the answer.
“I composed it in writing [synegrapsa],” says the Greek author Chariton at the beginning of his Chaereas and Callirhoe, earliest extant example of the genre that we call the novel or romance. The novel was from the beginning a written literature, which flourished in the Graeco-Roman world from about the third century B.C., when the spread of literacy and a vigorous book trade created a wide popular audience. Our terms ‘novel’ and ‘romance’ do not reflect an ancient name for the genre. Chariton refers to his work as erōtika pathēmata, or “erotic sufferings”: these are love stories in which it is generically required that love be painful. The stories are told in prose and their apparent aim is to entertain readers.
Four Greek novels from the ancient world are extant, as well as some fragments and epitomes dating from about the first century B.C. to the fourth century A.D., and a number of Latin romances. The plots are much the same, being love stories devoted to keeping the lovers apart and miserable until the last page. One editor has summed up the genre this way:
A romantic love story is the thread on which is hung a succession of sentimental and sensational episodes; the two main characters either fall in love with one another soon after the opening of the story, or in some cases are actually married and immediately separated; they are sundered time and again by the most improbable misfortunes; they face death in every form; subsidiary couples are sometimes introduced, the course of whose true love runs very little smoother; both the hero and heroine inspire a wicked and hopeless love in the breasts of others, who become hostile influences, seeming at times likely to accomplish their final separation, but never with complete success; occasionally the narrative stops for the description of a place, a scene, or some natural object only to be resumed at once with the painful adventures of the loving couple; and on the last page all is cleared up, the complicated threads of the story fall apart with detailed and lengthy explanations, and the happy pair is united for ever with the prospect of a long and prosperous life before them. (Gaselee 1917, 411)
Tactics of triangulation are the main business of the novel. These tactics are the ones familiar to us from the archaic poets, now employed prosaically and in extenso. The novelists play out as dilemmas of plot and character all those facets of erotic contradiction and difficulty that were first brought to light in lyric poetry. Rival lovers appear around every corner of the plot. Pretexts for pursuit and flight ramify from page to page. Obstacles to romantic union materialize in tireless variety. The lovers themselves devote considerable energy to obstructing their own desire—should interfering parents, cruel pirates, bungling doctors, dogged graverobbers, dull slaves, mindless divinities and the whims of chance not suffice. Aidōs is a favorite stratagem. Romantic heroes and heroines operate in a vague, exciting borderland between purity and sensuality. Whenever passion seems within reach, aidōs falls like a veil between them. This aidōs is the archaic ethic of ‘shamefastness’ reinterpreted now in the narrow sense of chastity. Its mischievous machinery pervades romantic plots and exacts feats of virtue from lovers in return for protraction of the story.
“Aphrodisian chastity” is the name given by one critic to this pleasing torment, for Aphrodite is the divinity in charge of the perversities of aidōs within the novel. She is chief designer and chief subverter of the story’s changing triangles, both patron and enemy, inspiring lovers with a passion strong enough to resist all the temptations that she herself proceeds to hurl against it. Chaste lovers make her the object of their devotion, and become the object of her abuse.
Aphrodite’s role in novels is an ambivalent, not to say paradoxical, one like the role of Eros in archaic poetry. In his Ephesiaca, Xenophon of Ephesus gives us a summary image of Aphrodisian ambivalence. Describing the bridal chamber of his hero and heroine, Xenophon goes into details of the eikōn embroidered on the bedcover. Its subject is Aphrodite, the divinity responsible for bringing bride and groom together in the chamber. But the scenario worked on the coverlet is not one that bodes well for the marriage. Aphrodite is pictured not as the dutiful wife of Hephaistos but rather as mistress of Ares. Ares is decked out for an assignation with his beloved and Eros is leading him by the hand toward her, holding up a flaming torch (1.8). Xenophon’s description of the eikōn would strike a note of recognition in any Greek reader. It evokes a scene pictured on numbers of ancient vases and no doubt familiar from daily life: the scene of the wedding procession, wherein a new bride was led by the hand to her husband’s house, preceded by flaming torches. The eikōn is a parody of standard wedding ritual, in concept and in design. So much for marriage.
Yet marriage remains the professed objective of every romantic hero and heroine. This puts them at odds with themselves and with Aphrodite. More important, the intention to consummate desire puts the lovers at odds with the novelist, whose novel will end unless he can subvert their aim. There is something paradoxical in the relations between a novelist and his lovers. As a writer he knows their story must end and wants it to end. So, too, as readers we know the novel must end and want it to end. “But not yet!” say the readers to the writer. “But not yet!” says the writer to his hero and heroine. “But not yet!” says the beloved to the lover. And so the reach of desire continues. What is a paradox? A paradox is a kind of thinking that reaches out but never arrives at the end of its thought. Each time it reaches out, there is a shift of distance in mid-reasoning that prevents the answer from being grasped. Consider Zeno’s well-known paradoxes. They are arguments against the reality of reaching an end. Zeno’s runner never gets to the finish line of the stadium, Zeno’s Achilles never overtakes the tortoise, Zeno’s arrow never hits the target (see Arist., Ph. 239b5-18; 263a4-6). These are paradoxes about paradox. Each one contains a point where the reasoning seems to fold into itself and disappear, or at least that is how it feels. Each time it disappears, it can begin again, and so the reach continues. If you happen to enjoy reasoning, you are delighted to begin again. On the other hand, your enjoyment of reasoning must entail some wish to arrive at a conclusion, so your delight has an edge of chagrin.
In the bittersweetness of the exercise we see the outline of eros. You love Zeno and you hate him. You know there is a ruse operating in his paradoxes, yet you keep going back over them. And you keep going back to the paradoxes not because you would like to see Achilles overtake the tortoise but because you like trying to understand what kind of thing a paradox is.
You like being situated at that blind but lively point where your reason is viewing itself—or almost viewing itself. Why? We have come round to this blind point before, when contemplating Velazquez’ Las Meninas and considering the paradoxical action at the heart of metaphor. Novels give us another, and broader, access onto the blind point, for they sustain the experience of paradox over many pages, by means of many ruses. Let us see what we can read from the ruses of the novelists about the blind point and its desirability.