‘Letters’ (grammata) can mean ‘letters of the alphabet’ and also ‘epistles’ in Greek as in English. Novels contain letters of both kinds, and offer two different perspectives on the blind point of desire. Letters in the broad sense, that is to say the floating ruse of the novel as a written text, provide erotic tension on the level of the reading experience. There is a triangular circuit running from the writer to the reader to the characters in the story; when its circuit-points connect, the difficult pleasure of paradox can be felt like an electrification. Letters in the narrower sense, epistles or written messages, function within the plots of various novels as a means of erotic subterfuge between characters. The effect is as you would expect: triangular, paradoxical, electric. In the numerous epistolary scenarios to be found in ancient novels, letters are never used to convey a direct declaration of love between lover and beloved. Letters stand oblique to the action and unfold a three-cornered relation: A writes to C about B, or B reads a letter from C in the presence of A, and so on. When letters are read in novels, the immediate consequence is to inject paradox into lover’s emotions (pleasure and pain at once) and into their strategies (now obstructed by an absent presence).
Consider a novel of Achilles Tatius (third-fourth century A.D.) called Clitophon and Leucippe. The hero (Clitophon), who believes his beloved (Leucippe) to be dead, is on the point of marrying another woman when he receives a letter from Leucippe. He interrupts the wedding to read Leucippe’s letter, which brings her “before the eyes of his soul” and starts a deep blush of shame on his cheek “as if he had been caught in the very act of adultery” (5.19). Clitophon immediately sits down to write a reply “dictated by Eros himself.” Its opening lines neatly plot out the three-point circuit connecting lover, beloved and grammata in their standard angles:
“Χαῖρέ μοι. ὦ δέσποινα Λευκίππη. δυστυχῶ μὲν ἐν οἷς εὐτυχῶ, ὅτι σὲ παρὼν παροῦσαν ὡς ἀποδημοῦσαν ὁρῶ διὰ γραμμάτων.”
“Hail, my lady Leucippe. I am miserable in the midst of joy because I see you present and at the same time absent in your letter.” (5.20)
Clitophon goes on in the letter to proclaim his love and entreat Leucippe to maintain her desire until he can unite with her. Written letters have the presence and authority of a third person, who is witness, judge and conduit of erotic charges. Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet. Letters construct the space of desire and kindle in it those contradictory emotions that keep the lover alert to his own impasse. Letters arrest and complicate an existing two-term situation by conjuring a third person who is not literally there, making suddenly visible the difference between what is (the actual and present erotic relation between Clitophon and the other woman) and what could be (the ideal love of Clitophon and Leucippe). Letters project the ideal on a screen of the actual. From within letters, Eros acts.
A more hieratic example comes from Heliodoros’ novel Aethiopica. Here the written text is not a letter but functions in the same way. Heliodoros’ heroine (Charicleia) is the white-skinned daughter born to the black queen of Ethiopia. The queen elects to abandon her child at birth rather than face the suspicious questions of her husband, and so Charicleia is exposed, wrapped in a tainia (fillet or headscarf). No ordinary tainia, however: the queen inscribes it with a written text explaining the baby’s history and white skin. As it happens the infant is rescued by priests and reared at Delphi. Years pass and the novel is in its fourth book before the novelist discloses to us the text on the tainia. The scene of its reading is reserved for a moment of erotic crisis: Charicleia is on the verge of dying of love for a certain Theagenes when the tainia is read by a priest who hopes to save her life. The queen of Ethiopia speaks from the tainia:
… ἐπειδὴ δέ σε λευκὴν ἀπέτεκον, ἀπρόσϕυλον Αἰϑιόπων χροιὰν ἀπαυγάζουσαν, ἐγὼ μὲν τὴν αἰτίαν ἐγνώριζον, ὅτι μοι παρὰ τὴν ὁμιλίαν τὴν πρὸς τὸν ἄνδρα προσβλέψαι τὴν Ἀνδρομέδαν ἡ γραϕὴ παρασχοῦσα, καὶ πανταχόϑεν ἐπιδείξασα γυμνήν (ἄρτι γὰρ αὐτὴν ἀπὸ τῶν πετρῶν ὁ Περσεὺς κατῆγεν), ὁμοειδὲς ἐκείνῃ τὸ σπαρὲν οὐκ εὐτυχῶς ἐμόρϕωσεν.
… when I gave birth to you with your white skin radiant as light—an incongruous thing in an Ethiopian—I recognized the reason. You see, at the very moment when my husband penetrated me I was staring at a painting of Andromeda. The painting showed her completely naked, just as Perseus was claiming her from the rock. Her likeness changed my seed—not luckily. (4.8.5)
Now here is an interesting triangle. Charicleia’s desire for Theagenes unfolds backwards in time to include an aesthetic infidelity on the part of her mother. At the moment of coitus with her husband, the queen was thinking of something else. Her attention was caught by a different love affair, the mythical or ideal eros of Perseus and Andromeda. The queen triangulated.
It is not a simple triangle. Heliodoros is not a simple author. One Byzantine critic likened Heliodoros’ narrative to a cluster of snakes with tails exposed, heads hidden (Michael Psellos; Colonna 1938, 364). Moreover, Heliodoros warns us in advance that the queen’s writing style is recondite, for she chose to inscribe the tainia
… γράμμασιν Αἰϑιοπικοῖς, οὐ δημοτικοῖς ἀλλὰ βασιλικοῖς, ἐστιγμένην, ἃ δὴ τοῖς Αἰγυπτίων ἱερατικοῖς καλουμένοις ὡμοίωνται.
… not in the demotic Ethiopian alphabet but in the ‘royal’ letters [grammasin basilikois] which resemble Egyptian hieratic script. (4.8.1)
The script is precious and the meaning convolute. Nonetheless the familiar components of an erotic triangle are recognizable. We see the king of Ethiopia reaching out to unite with his beloved wife. As he does so, an act of interception occurs, a third angle opens. By a shift of distance from far to near, from ideal to real, Perseus and Andromeda intercept the queen’s glance and split her desire. Her imagination leaps. And as her imagination reaches out from actual (husband) to possible (Perseus and Andromeda), something paradoxical happens: Charicleia.
Charicleia is a paradox first on the level of fact (white from black) but also on the level of inference. Although in her own person she has not compromised her love for Theagenes, yet her perfect chastity (of which the white skin might have been thought a symbol) is now seen to have been colored (white) from before her birth by a momentary inconstancy in the mind of her mother. Whiteness is in her case a clue to impurity: you see the sense of this projected on its incongruence, as the tainia unfolds its tale. You contemplate that point of incongruent congruence and the data of the reasoning seem to go askew in your mind. Can a painting change real flesh? Can a metaphor turn reality white? It is a delightful story but unsatisfying as an exegesis, and your mind keeps reaching out for an answer. Each time you reach, conception shifts to interception: the black seed of Charicleia folds into the white skin of Andromeda and disappears.
Placed at the blind point of that ruse you feel delight and chagrin. Your mixed response is echoed by the reader within the novel. The priest (Calasiris) who reads the tainia in hope of discovering how to save Charicleia records his reaction:
… when I read these things, I recognized and marvelled at the economy of the gods and at the same time I was filled with pleasure and pain: I found myself in quite a novel state of mind, weeping and rejoicing simultaneously. (4.9.1)
Let us be clear about the importance Heliodoros has given to reading and writing in this pivotal scene of his novel. Because of the way he has ordered his narrative, it is an act of reading that arrests and complicates the erotic situation (between Charicleia and Theagenes) by unfolding a third angle (the history of Charicleia’s conception). At that third angle the ruse of eros operates. Paradox is generated. Emotions divide. From within a written text eros acts upon Calasiris to create in him the state of mind typical of the readers of novels. Into that hieratic text you reach for the meaning of Charicleia’s white skin. The meaning shifts, changes and eludes you, but you continue to long to pursue it, as if it were the beloved itself.
We might compare with these Greek novels an anonymous Latin romance of the fifth or sixth century A.D. entitled History of Apollonius of Tyre, which relates the love of Apollonius for the daughter of the king of Pentapolis. Apollonius contrives to win the girl by becoming her tutor and distracts her attention from rival suitors with the seductive power of letters themselves. When she falls in love it is with Apollonius’ learning, the novelist tells us (ch. 17). Rivals demand audience but her father waves them away:
Rex ait non apto tempore interpellastis. Filia enim mea studio uacat et pro amore studiorum inbecillis iacet.
Now is not a good time to press your suit, for my daughter is entirely absorbed with learning and is so in love with her studies that she lies ill in bed. (ch. 19)
King Antiochus then employs the mechanism of letters to set up an erotic triangle. He invites each suitor to write down his name and dowry on a tablet, which he will forward to his daughter so that she may choose among them. Apollonius carries the tablet to her and, as she stands reading it before him, the familiar triangle of lover, beloved and rivals-in-writing is marked out. But this heroine is not unlettered herself. Displeased with the geometry of the triangle before her, the king’s daughter reshuffles the angles. She writes Apollonius’ name on the tablet and sends it back to her father with her seal (ch. 20-21). Literary critics of the novel are impatient with this “letter-writing farce” and pose plausible questions like “Why does the king suggest the extraordinary and cumbersome procedure of writing letters to someone a few yards away?” (Perry 1967, 306-307). Do the letters say anything that could not be said otherwise?
Letters in this romance, as in Heliodoros’ novel, bespeak their own power, a power to change reality erotically. It is letters that stir the fire of love in the king’s daughter when she meets Apollonius. It is letters that pose the dilemma of absent presence for lover and beloved when she stands before Apollonius reading out the names of his rivals. It is letters that permit her to set the triangle of eros on its head when she reaches through literary convention and rewrites the love scene to suit her own desire. This heroine understands the erotic art of letters as thoroughly as her own author. As feelingly as Montaigne’s, her Page makes love.
There are two kinds of letters here (alphabet and epistle) and there are two kinds of love being made (as reader, you also are being wooed). Each one fits within the other. As letters of the alphabet compose lovers’ epistles, so the love affair of Apollonius and the king’s daughter composes the seductive action of this novel. But the page is taken over by the heroine. She commandeers the letters of a particular epistle and constructs for herself the love story that she wishes the novel to tell. By a shift of distance she reaches from within the plot to triangulate that plot (inscribing Apollonius’ name among his rivals) as if she herself were the novelist, as if letters themselves were an inescapably erotic form of understanding.
When she makes that shift, the king’s daughter does so by an act of imagination, reaching out from actual (the list of suitors named on her father’s tablet) to possible (the unnamed suitor of her own preference). When she makes that shift she takes over the letter-writing topos from her author, stepping from one (literal) plane of storytelling to a different plane. That shift is an act of lettristic impertinence and it delights you. At the same time you may find the whole procedure of the scene “extraordinary and cumbersome.” But by your understanding of letters as a novelistic topos, you are pulled into a kinetic, triangular, delightful and disturbing action of eros. As she writes her lover’s name on the tablet, the king’s daughter seduces you.