Critics of the novel find paradox to be “a principle of the genre” and note the frequency with which the romances speak of situations as “new and strange” (kainos) or “against reason” (paralogos), or “unthought of” (adokētos) (Heiserman 1977, 77 and 226 n. 4). Techniques of paradox enrich these stories at all levels of plot, imagery and wordplay. Paradox is especially essential to their emotional texture. This can surprise no one familiar with the lyric precedents of erotic fiction, “I’m crazy! I’m not crazy! I’m in love! I’m not in love!” said Anakreon in the sixth century B.C. (413 PMG). “I don’t know what I should do. Two states of mind in me …” said Sappho (LP, fr. 51). Characters in novels luxuriate in such moments of emotional schizophrenia, when the personality is split into two warring factions. Novelists expand these moments into full-scale soliloquies of the soul, so that a character may debate his erotic dilemma with himself, usually at length and to no purpose. But emotional schism is not the exclusive property of heroes and heroines in novels. All who observe their fortunes, within and without the text, are programmed to respond in this way.
Take, for example, the ending of Xenophon’s Ephesiaca. As the heroine Anthia falls into her lover’s arms, the townspeople standing around are stirred by “pleasure, pain, fear, memory of the past, apprehension of the future, all mixing in their souls” (5.13). So too at the end of Heliodoros’ Aethiopica, the lovers’ union is witnessed by their fellow citizens, in whom:
… ὑφ’ ἧς καὶ τὰ ἐναντιώτατα πρὸς συμφωνίαν ἡρμόζετο, χαρᾶς καὶ λύπης συμπεπλεγμένων, γέλωτι δακρύων κεραννυμένων, τῶν στυγνοτάτων εἰς ἑορτὴν μεταβαλλομένων
… absolute contrarieties were fitted together as one sound: joy interwoven with grief, tears mixed with laughter, total gloom turning into festive delight.… (10.38.4)
Earlier in Heliodoros’ novel a certain character named Calasiris records his reaction to the erotic sufferings of the heroine:
… ἡδονῆς δὲ ἅμα καὶ λύπης ενεπλήσϑην. καὶ πάϑος τι καινότερον ὑπέστην, ὁμοῦ δακρύων καὶ χαίρων
… at the same time I was filled with pleasure and pain: I found myself in quite a novel state of mind [pathos ti kainoteron] weeping and rejoicing simultaneously.… (4.9.1)
As readers we too are meant to feel this paradoxical mix of feelings, if the novelist is in proper command of his ruses. So Chariton implies when he turns to us, at a particularly brilliant moment in the action of his plot, and demands:
Ποῖος ποιητὴς ἐπὶ σκηνῆς παράδοξον μῦϑον οὕτως εἰσήγαγεν; ἔδοξας ἂν ἐν ϑεάτρῳ παρεῖναι μυρίων παλῶν πλήρει. πάντα ἦν ὁμοῦ· δάκρυα, χαρὰ, ϑάμβος, ἔλεος, ἀπιστία, εὐχαί.
What poet ever produced such a paradoxical scenario [paradoxon mython] on the stage? You must have thought you were sitting in the theater filled with a thousand emotions, all at the same time: tears, joy, amazement, pity, disbelief, fervent prayers! (Chaereas and Callirhoe 5.8.2)
To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist’s aim. We should dwell on this point for a moment. It is of some importance that, as readers, we are typically and repeatedly drawn into a conflicted emotional response which approximates that of the lover’s soul divided by desire. Readership itself affords the aesthetic distance and obliquity necessary for this response. The reader’s emotions begin from a privileged position of knowledge. We know the story will end happily. The characters within the story do not seem to know this. So we stand at an angle to the text from which we can see both the narrated facts of the case and also what the characters believe to be the facts of the case: two levels of narrative reality float one upon another, without converging, and provide for the reader that moment of emotional and cognitive stereoscopy which is also the experience of the desiring lover.
We saw Sappho construct this stereoscopic moment in fr. 31 as a three-point circuit of desire joining herself, her beloved and “the man who listens closely.” The verbal action of eros in fr. 31 allows our perception to jump or shift from one level of desire to another, from actual to possible, without losing sight of the difference between them. In Sappho’s poem the shift of view is momentary, a vertigo and sudden sense of being very close to the core where feelings form. In the novel this technique of shifting distance is taken over as the permanent attitude from which the reader views the action. Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.