A few examples are in order. The novelist Longus (second-third century A.D.) prefaces his novel Daphnis and Chloe with a bold statement of the triangular tension that is its structure and raison d’être. He was moved to write the tale, he tells us, because he encountered “a painted image of the history of Eros” that struck him as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Longing (pothos) seized him to “create a rival image in writing” and he set to work on the novel. There are three components in Longus’ opening conceit. There is the painted icon of Eros, an object of ideal beauty (kalliston) transcending all the actual beauty of woods and waters around it, Longus says. There is the verbal icon, the novel itself, reaching out to rival or to approximate the perfect beauty of the painting in an act of writing. In between the ideal and the rival icon is the motive force of desire (pothos) that impels Longus to try to bring these two heterogeneous images together on the screen of imagination.
The two icons are like the two parts of a metaphor: an already existing image or sense and a novel image or sense are brought close by an act of imagination. Together they compose one meaning. Longus’ imaginative effort, like the verbal innovation that we call metaphor, is an erotic action, reaching out from what is known and present to something else, something different, something desired. The meaning he composes is a dynamic meaning, not a still point, that comes alive as the novel shifts from plane to plane of its various triangles. Something paradoxical is inherent in these shifts, and as readers, we are invited into its experience, standing on the edge of other people’s desire, arrested, wooed, triangulated and changed by a series of marks on a piece of paper. “My Page makes love, and understands it feelingly,” says Montaigne (1603, bk. 5, ch. 3).
Longus’ page makes love to the reader, first and obviously, by drawing him into the bittersweet emotion of lovers in the story. But this narrative voyeurism is only the surface. A much more arresting act of love is going on at depth, in the whole metaphorical undertaking of setting one icon against another.
Daphnis and Chloe is the story of a boy and girl discovering eros. Everything they do and say sounds symbolic. All lovers believe they are inventing love: Daphnis and Chloe actually do invent love. They live in a pastoral wonderland, swell to desire with the buds of spring and, after many discouragements, marry one another on the last pages in a cave of Eros. They are, as one critic puts it, “emblematic innocents in emblematic predicaments undergoing an emblematic growth in erotic knowledge” (Heiserman 1977, 143). Here, for example, is what happens when Daphnis wins his father’s consent to marry Chloe and rushes out to tell her the news. The lovers find themselves in an orchard rich with fruit trees:
μία μηλέα τετρύγητο καὶ οὔτε καρπὸν εἶχεν οὔτε φύλλον· γυμνοὶ πάντες ἦσαν οἱ κλάδοι. καὶ ἓν μῆλον ἐπέτετο ἐν αὐτοῖς ἄκροις ἀκρότατον, μέγα καὶ καλὸν καὶ τῶν πολλῶν τὴν εὐωδίαν ἐνίκα μόνον. ἔδεισεν ὁ τρυγῶν ἀνελϑεῖν, ἠμέλησε καϑελεῖν· τάχα δὲ καὶ ἐφυλάττετο 〈τὸ〉 καλὸν μῆλον ἐρωτικῷ ποιμένι.
There stood one apple tree whose apples had all been gathered. It had neither fruit nor leaf. All the boughs were bare. And a single apple floated on the very top of the topmost boughs: big and beautiful and more fragrant in itself than many others. The applepicker was afraid to go up so high, or he overlooked it. And perhaps that beautiful apple was saving itself for a shepherd in love.
Daphnis is eager to pick the apple. Chloe forbids him. Daphnis picks the apple. To mollify Chloe he then says:
“Ὦ παρϑένε, τοῦτο τὸ μῆλον ἔφυσαν Ὧραι καλαὶ καὶ φυτὸν καλὸν ἔϑρεψε πεπαίνοντος ἡλίου καὶ ἐτήρησε Τύχη. καὶ οὐκ ἔμελλον αὐτὸ καταλιπεῖν ὀφϑαλμοὺς ἔχων, ἵνα πέσῃ χαμαὶ καὶ ἢ ποίμνιον αὐτὸ πατήσῃ νεμόμενον ἢ ἑρπετὸν φαρμάξῃ συρόμενον ἢ χρόνος δαπανήσῃ κείμενον, ϐλεπόμενον, ἐπαινούμενον. τοῦτο Ἀφροδίτη κάλλους ἔλαβεν ἆϑλον, τοῦτο ἐγὼ σοὶ δίδωμι νικητήριον.”
“O maiden, beautiful seasons begot this apple, a beautiful tree nourished it in the ripening sun and fortune kept close watch. Having eyes, I could not let it be—it might have fallen to the ground and been trampled by grazing flocks or poisoned by some creeping creature or used up by Time as it waited there, gazed at, object of praise. This was the prize Aphrodite won for beauty, this I give to you as victory-prize.” (3.33-34)
Daphnis drops the apple in Chloe’s lap, she kisses him “and so Daphnis repented not at all of having dared to go up so high.”
Daphnis is a lover who takes literary motifs literally. Here he woos his beloved with the very symbol of wooing and acts out the paradigmatic reach of desire. Longus expects you to recognize the high apple on the highest branch from Sappho’s poem (fr. 105a) and to read Daphnis’ action as emblematic. At the same time the apple is typical of all love gifts, well-known throughout Greek poetry and visual art as the favorite offering of lover to beloved. The apple’s traditional association with Aphrodite and the judgment of Paris is another strand of erotic symbolization, evoked here by Daphnis himself. And the apple might be thought to represent Chloe as bride, blooming in the wild and soon to be plucked for marriage. The respective attitudes of lover and beloved are stereotypical too: irrepressible desire meets adamant resistance. He insists, she submits, the apple is the loser. These various levels of inference float upon the essential narrative fact: it is a real apple and wins a real kiss, or so we read.
Longus’ novel is a continuous fabric of such levels, held in rich and transparent suspension against the facts of the plot, like the apple as it “floats” upon the tree. Look closer, for a moment, at this apple in Longus’ text. Longus has chosen a somewhat curious verb with which to suspend the apple from the tree: epeteto (3.33) is from petomai, the verb ‘to fly.’ It is generally used of creatures with wings or of emotions that swoop through the heart. Especially frequent of erotic emotion, this verb is used, for example, by Sappho in fr. 31 to say that eros “puts the heart in my chest on wings” or “makes my heart fly.” Here Longus puts the verb in the imperfect tense. That is, he stalls the action of the verb in time (the imperfect expresses continuity) so that, like the arrow in Zeno’s paradox, the apple flies while standing still. Moreover, the sentence in which the apple flies is a sentence floating in paradoxical, paratactic relation to the sentences before it. The relation is paratactic because the connective joining this sentence to the text is simply and (kai). The relation is paradoxical because the statement “and one apple was floating” is a flat contradiction of the three foregoing statements which tell us that the tree had been picked clean, neither fruit nor leaf remained, every single branch was bare. Translators of Longus invariably change his “and” to a “but,” so that the impertinent apple darts out suddenly into your grammatical purview from an adversative clause. But Longus’ aim is not so ordinary. His grammar intercepts your complacent purview and splits it in half. On the one hand, you see a tree picked bare. On the other hand, an apple floats. “And” the relation between them is something paradoxical. Longus’ “and” places you at a blind point from which you see more than is literally there.
Longus expects a lot of his reader. The privileged position of knowledge you enjoy as you read Daphnis and Chloe does not simply rest on believing things will end well. Longus assumes, and plays upon, the whole history of erotic topoi and grammatical acumen available to a literate audience. He wishes to give you a sustained experience of that register of mental activity, metaphor, which best approximates eros. Think how it feels. As you read the novel your mind shifts from the level of characters, episodes and clues to the level of ideas, solutions, exegesis. The activity is delightful, but also one of pain. Each shift is accompanied by a sharp sense that something is being lost, or has already been lost. Exegesis mars and disrupts pure absorption in the narrative. The narrative insists on distracting your attention from exegesis. Yet your mind is unwilling to let go of either level of activity, and remains arrested at a point of stereoscopy between the two. They compose one meaning. The novelist who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing. “The book and its author was our pimp!” cries Francesca in hell, or so we read in the Inferno (5.137).