Classical narrative texts often exhibit qualities that today strike us as being practically cinematic. The first instances appear in Homer’s Iliad (Winkler 2006). Centuries later, the Greek novels bear out Simonides of Keos’ saying that painting is silent poetry—in modern terminology, literature—while poetry is painting that speaks (on Simonides and the Greek novels, especially the prologue to Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, cf. Winkler 2009, 22–26, with references). The conversation of Kalasiris and Knemon in Book 3 of Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story about the festival of Apollo at Delphi makes explicit the parallels between telling a story and mentally visualizing it (Winkler 2009, 5–6). More significantly, Heliodorus’ opening scene is a virtual blueprint for a screenplay (Winkler 2000–2001).
The following pages illustrate the affinity between ancient novels and the cinema by examining a specific narrative device, a shocking turn of the plot through the unexpected deaths of major characters. Two Greek novels, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story, and one film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, all with romance–adventure–mystery plots, adhere to formulaic ways of storytelling, that is to say, they are driven primarily by plot requirements, not by any nuanced presentation of their characters’ psychology as in the works of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists or many modern filmmakers. If pursuit of psychological depth requires a narrative in which character is plot, as a common phrase has it, genre stories usually work in the opposite way: plot determines or restricts characterization: “By giving narrative emphasis to a constant flow of action, the writer avoids the necessity of exploring character with any degree of complexity” (Cawelti 1976, 19). The statement accurately describes the works of the Greek novelists. Psycho and most of Hitchcock’s mature work, however, significantly transcend mere formula while still adhering to and playing with, but never breaking, the rules of the thriller genre.
In his Poetics, Aristotle defends the tragic poet’s use of “the wondrous” (τὸ θαυμαστόν) and the epic poet’s use of “the irrational” (τὸ ἄλογον), “on which the wondrous depends for its chief effects” (Aristotle, Poetics 1460a11–13; Butcher 1907, 95). By extension, storytellers in all genres of fiction rely on implausible or nearly impossible plot turns in order to ensure or deepen their audience’s emotional involvement with the fate of their characters. For such cases, Aristotle advises that an author “should prefer probable impossibilities (ἀδύνατα εἰκότα) to improbable possibilities (δυνατὰ ἀπίθανα)” (Aristotle, Poetics 1460a26–27; Butcher 1907, 95). This is because “what is possible (τὸ δυνατόν) is credible (πιθανόν): what has not happened we do not at once feel sure to be possible; but what has happened is manifestly possible: otherwise it would not have happened” (Aristotle, Poetics 1451b15–19; Butcher 1907, 37). As Aristotle also said (Rhetoric 1356b28): “what is credible is what is credible to someone.” Aristotle even goes so far as to admonish spectators and readers that, “once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of its absurdity. … If he [an author] describes the impossible (ἀδύνατα), he is guilty of an error; but the error may be justified, if … the effect of this or any other part of the poem [i.e. of any narrative] is thus rendered more striking (ἐκπληκτικώτερον)” (Aristotle, Poetics 1460b24–27; Butcher 1907, 99). Butcher’s translation of ἐκπληκτικώτερον is appropriate, but since the term derives from ἐκπλήττω (“to scare away, to scare out of one’s mind”), the translation “more shocking” is also apt. The context in which the irrational or impossible occurs is decisive, for it justifies an author’s use of the impossible or incredible and prepares the way for its acceptance by an audience. Aristotle concludes:
In general, the impossible (τὸ ἀδύνατον) must be justified by reference to artistic requirements, or to the higher reality, or to received opinion. With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility (πιθανὸν ἀδύνατον) is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible (ἀπίθανον καὶ δυνατόν). … To justify the irrational (τἄλογα), we appeal to what is commonly said to be. In addition, we urge that the irrational sometimes does not violate reason. (Poetics 1461b9–12 and 14–15; Butcher 1907, 105 and 107)
Credo quia absurdum—to paraphrase Tertullian: I believe it because it makes no sense whatever. If it can be the case that the irrational does not violate the rational, that is to say, if a crucial moment in the development of a plot does not simply make us throw up our hands in frustration with the nonsense we are reading or watching, then a storyteller has succeeded in making us care, and we are willingly suspending our disbelief. As a modern scholar has put it: “Aristotle shows that an argument from probability can be drawn from the sheer improbability of a story: some stories are so improbable that it is reasonable to believe them” (Sider 1980, 417–418).
Aristotle’s “more striking” is an apt term to describe the ancient Greek novels and, beyond antiquity, all romantic–adventure fiction and most of our suspense and detective stories, whether they are told in texts or images. Modern mystery fiction has some precursors in the Greek and Roman novels. Heliodorus’ Kalasiris is the first “private eye” in Western literature. In escapist fiction, the plausibilities of real life are set aside in favor of striking implausibilities. The same had been the case in fifth-century tragedy, Aristotle’s subject in the surviving parts of the Poetics. The tragedians derived most of their plots from myths, which are by nature unrealistic and implausible to the rational and logic-minded because of the ubiquitous appearances of gods, monsters, and other manifestations of the supernatural. Aristotle provides the classic explanation in ancient literature of how the implausible functions and why it is an important, indeed crucial, aspect of narrative literature. Dorothy Sayers even advanced the thesis that Aristotle’s Poetics could be regarded as a kind of theoretical blueprint for such fiction:
Aristotle … contrived to hammer out … a theory of detective fiction so shrewd, all-embracing and practical that the Poetics remains the finest guide to the writing of such fiction that could be put, at this day, into the hands of an aspiring author (Sayers 1947, 222–236; quotation at 223).
Discussing verisimilitude in narrative literature, a concept akin to that of probability as outlined earlier, Tzvetan Todorov observes:
The law of reconstruction [of a fictional crime] is never the law of ordinary verisimilitude. ... The guilty man in a murder mystery is the man who does not seem guilty. In his summing up, the detective will invoke a logic which links the hitherto scattered clues; but such logic derives from a scientific notion of possibility, not from one of verisimilitude. The revelation must obey these two imperatives: possibility and absence of verisimilitude.
The revelation, that is, the truth, is incompatible with verisimilitude, as we know from a whole series of detective plots based on the tension between them. Todorov concludes from this:
Verisimilitude is the theme of the murder mystery; its law is the antagonism between truth and verisimilitude. … By relying on antiverisimilitude, the murder mystery has come under the sway of another verisimilitude, that of its own genre.
The author of mystery fiction “establishes a new verisimilitude, one linking his text to the genre to which it belongs” (Todorov 1978, 85 and 86–87).
Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon is a prime example of an adventure plot thoroughly imbued with implausibilities of the kind that recur in modern mystery fiction: a series of hair-raising twists and turns in the story. Aristotle might characterize such a plot as an ἐκπληκτικον, something striking. A shocking and utterly unexpected incident occurs about a third into the novel. Clitophon, the hero and narrator, becomes a helpless eyewitness to the fate of Leucippe, his beloved, who has been kidnapped by a gang of outlaws. He recounts the scene in harrowing detail (3.15):
We could in fact see brigands aplenty and fully armed. … They had improvised an altar of earth and near it a coffin. Two of them were leading a girl to the altar with her hands tied behind her back. … One of the attendants laid her on her back and tied her to stakes fixed in the ground. … He next raised a sword and plunged it into her heart and then sawed all the way down to her abdomen. Her viscera leaped out. The attendants pulled out her entrails and carried them in their hands over to the altar. When it was well done they carved the whole lot up, and all the bandits shared the meal.
As each of these acts was performed … I, contrary to all reason, just sat there staring. It was sheer shock; I was simply thunderstruck by the enormity of the calamity. … When the [sacrificial] ceremony was concluded … they placed her body in the coffin, covered it with a lid, razed the altar, and ran away without looking behind them. (translation from Winkler 1989 216)
An author’s killing off his heroine is an intentional violation of the one plot element with which writers of romance–adventure fiction must never tamper: the happy ending. The shocking manner of Leucippe’s unexpected death in a perverted religious ritual that includes cannibalism is made thoroughly believable by its gruesome details. The moment is a thrilling example of an ἐκπληκτικόν. The story appears to be irrevocably over, especially when Clitophon is about to kill himself over the loss of his beloved (3.16–17).
Readers will be dumbfounded and stunned. How can the story possibly continue? Fortunately, they are in the hands of a master storyteller. In a plot twist that restarts the adventure plot and the protagonists’ romance and that is almost equally ἐκπληκτικόν both to the narrator and his readers, Achilles brings Leucippe back to life. Within the story, this occurs on the following day; within the text, it occurs on the following page (of a modern edition)—that is to say, as soon as possible. If Leucippe’s graphic death and disembowelment resemble comparable scenes in modern shockers such as slasher films, her reappearance (3.17) is akin to the apparition of a living corpse in a horror film, replete with supernatural overtones:
He [Clitophon’s friend Menelaus] opened the coffin, and Leukippe rose up, a frightening (O gods!) and blood-chilling sight. The entire length of her stomach hung open, and the visceral cavity was hollow. She fell into my arms’ embrace … and then we both collapsed.... “And now,” said Menelaus, “she will recover her innards, her frontal gash will grow together, and you will see her once more sound…” … Then, as he spoke, he removed a contraption from her stomach and restored her to her original condition. (translation from Winkler 1989, 217–218)
The improbable explanation follows in minute detail (3.19–22). Menelaus’ account makes what had happened not so much plausible as understandable. Everything had been fakery—engineered to save Leucippe’s life, a deception played on the outlaws by Menelaus, a wily Egyptian, with the help of stage props borrowed from an actor who happened to be at hand. The sword had a retractable blade—it is the direct ancestor of countless such props used in modern plays and films. A soft animal hide filled with animal entrails had been tied across Leucippe’s stomach. Credimus quia absurdum: we believe it because it is a perfectly good explanation from a realistic point of view. It is nonsensical but clever and appealing in its ingenuity. And that is all that counts.
So, the novel is back on track: hero and heroine are reunited, and the happy ending is possible again. However, after we have read through another third of the novel, the master storyteller sets out to trick us again. In Book Five, he kills Leucippe a second time, again in full view of a helpless Clitophon, only to resurrect her a second time. Experienced readers will mentally have fortified themselves against their author’s narrative trickery. At the end of Book Three, we can readily imagine their state of mind: How dare he kill one of the two characters who must not be killed under any circumstances and then bring her back to life? I fell for this, but I’m certainly not falling into the same trap again! In order to pull off his second bamboozlement of his readers, Achilles must up the ante. Tzvetan Todorov (1978, 84) helpfully explains why: “according to a general narrative law, temporal succession [of plot elements] corresponds to a gradation of intensity, so that the final episode is to be the most impressive one.” This narrative law applies especially to mystery fiction and to action or adventure stories. With its increasingly bloody progression of duels and slaughters, Homer’s Iliad is the first example in Western literature.
How does this work in Achilles Tatius? The second murder and resurrection of Leucippe and the explanation to follow must be different from the first. So they are. Clitophon reports (5.7) that Leucippe was kidnapped by pirates, but their pursuers were about to catch up:
When the pirates saw our vessel closing in and us prepared to fight, they stood Leukippe on the top deck with her hands tied behind her, and one of them cried out in a loud voice, “Here’s your prize!” and so saying, he cut off her head and toppled the rest of the body into the sea. (translation from Winkler 1989, 236)
The manner of Leucippe’s murder is significant: as unlikely or antiverisimilitudinous (to coin a term after Todorov) as it may appear, trickery involving death by disembowelment may just be πιθανὸν τινὶ, “credible to someone,” in this case to readers of adventure fiction willing to suspend disbelief. But decapitation? No one has ever survived such a death. There is then no possibility for Leucippe to be resurrected—or so it seems to us and to Clitophon. Achilles is careful to drive home this very point. First, he has Clitophon report that Leucippe’s head and torso are separated beyond question when the pirate throws her body (but not the head) into the sea. Shortly after, he has Clitophon reinforce the point in his lament, holding Leucippe’s body (but not the head) in his arms: “This time, Leukippe, you are without doubt dead twice over, divided in death between land and sea. I hold a headless relic; I’ve lost the real you. … let me kiss your butchered neck” (translation from Winkler 1989, 236–237). Finally (5.8), Achilles has Clitophon bury the torso (but not the head).
To Clitophon, the finality of Leucippe’s death is beyond doubt. So, at this moment, it is to readers. A narrative dead end has occurred again, this time two-thirds into the story. Achilles even stops the narrative altogether, as it were, by having Clitophon return to Alexandria and by jumping ahead in time (“Six months had now passed”). Clitophon begins to get over his loss: “Even extreme grief … cools when it is overcome by the soothing passage of time” (5.8; translation of quotations taken from Winkler 1989, 237). Achilles’ technique anticipates the cinema’s: in a film, we would watch a fade-out in which this strand of the story comes to an end, albeit an unresolved one, followed by a fade-in which shows us Clitophon at a different time and in a different place.
Leucippe’s two false deaths occur in full view of her beloved Clitophon, from whose perspective we follow the entire story. Like Clitophon, we are convinced that Leucippe is dead. The second instance appears to be irreversible because of her decapitation. Yes, we have fallen into the same trap twice. Still, readers suspect that Leucippe will come back, although Achilles does not let us off the hook as quickly. The first explanation of Leucippe’s false death had followed immediately; now it is delayed for as long as possible. It comes shortly before the novel’s very end, at 8.16 (the book’s last chapter is 8.19), after we have seen her reappear in the story (5.17) and have heard about yet another death of hers. Moreover, the explanation provided is even more unlikely than the first; in Aristotle’s terms, it is still more striking. Leucippe provides the solution to “the riddle of the severed head” (8.15) in her own account (8.16):
The bandits deceived a woman,” she said, “one of those unfortunate creatures who sell their favors for money. … Removing that poor woman’s ornaments and clothes, they dressed me as her and put my modest little shift on her. Stationing her on the stern, where you in pursuit would see her, they sliced off her head and hurled the body (as you saw) down into the sea, but the head, as it fell, they caught and kept on the ship. A little later they got rid of this too, tossing it overboard … they slew her in my place to deceive their pursuers, thinking they would stand to gain more profit from my sale than from hers. (translation from Winkler 1989, 281–282)
We learn that the decapitation was real enough: the victim was “without doubt dead,” as Clitophon had exclaimed. It was just not the person he and we had been led to believe it was. The introduction of the unfortunate creature who has to serve as a substitute for Leucippe and her nearly simultaneous ejection from the story is a clear instance of authorial manipulation necessary in a mystery that is incompatible with verisimilitude. Achilles considerably increases the effect that the shocking and the apparently impossible can have on the reader. Not in spite of but by means of near-impossible implausibilities, and with an increasing level of ἀδύνατα εἰκότα, he makes his story ἐκπληκτικώτερον before bringing his hero and heroine to their well-deserved happy ending. Readers who are committed to realism or plausibility are not the kind of readers Achilles is addressing.
Having twice pulled off the same trick of presenting his readers with a narrative ἀδύνατον—the impossibility for an adventure–romance plot not to have a happy ending—that incorporates two instances of the ἐκπληκτικόν, will Achilles try for a third time? As befits the complexity and anti-verisimilitude of his plot, the answer to this question is yes and no. Yes, there will be a third pretended death for Leucippe; but no, it is reported only verbally. In Book Seven, Clitophon is in prison, and his romantic rival Thersandros is planning revenge. Under false pretenses, Thersandros contrives a henchman of his to become Clitophon’s cell mate (7.1):
The plan was that this man, on instructions from Thersandros, was very artfully to introduce the news that Leukippe had been killed. … This fiendishly clever strategy was devised by Thersandros to throw me into despair at the death of my beloved so that even if I was judged innocent at [my] trial, I would not set out to find her.
The accomplice gives Clitophon a false eyewitness account of Leucippe’s death (7.3–4). Clitophon, who might be expected to know better by now, immediately believes the lie (7.4–5) and yields to despair: “O my Leukippe, how many times have you died on me!” (7.5). His friend Kleinias tries to talk some sense into him (7.6): “Who knows whether she is alive this time too. Hasn’t she died many times before? Hasn’t she often been resurrected?” (translations from Winkler 1989, 260 and 261). At the end of Book 7, the two lovers are reunited (7.16) shortly after readers have found out what had happened to Leucippe this time around (7.10 and 13).
The difference between this episode and the two others involving Leucippe’s death is instructive about Achilles’ narrative strategy. Since he cannot expect to fool his readers a third time, he changes tactics. Death is only reported, not witnessed; in theater or film terminology, it happens off-stage or off-screen. The mystery is resolved soon after. The episode barely qualifies as an ἐκπληκτικόν, but is it a miscalculation on Achilles’ part? Not quite, because the change from deaths witnessed to death told still works, at least on Clitophon. The effect on his readers that Achilles apparently aims for is more complex than the brief episode might make us think. We can imagine him saying: If you think I cannot deceive you a third time, you are right, but I can still turn the screw of false deaths once more by changing the way in which I tell you about it. It is also noteworthy that, after the gruesome details in the eyewitness accounts, Achilles completely withholds how the third murder of Leucippe was supposedly committed. Thersandros’ accomplice only tells Clitophon (7.4): “All I heard from the murderer was that he had killed the girl. He didn’t tell me where or how!” (translation from Winkler 1989, 261).
The third death of Leucippe is anticlimactic, as Achilles must himself have known. The radical change of moving this death off-screen does not save it from being less gripping than the other two. Only an author’s joy at playing narrative games with his readers can justify the inclusion of this episode. With it, Achilles does not really deceive his readers, but he does not simply give up the game of deception either.
Scholarly consensus dates Leucippe and Clitophon to around 150–175 AD. Achilles Tatius’ is the second-longest and second-most-complex Greek novel surviving from antiquity. The longest and most complex is Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story, best dated to after 350 AD. Its ten books represent the apex of the extant Greek novels. Heliodorus’ narrative trickery is even greater than that of Achilles, in spite of and because of the fact that both authors tell virtually the same kind of romance story in the same manner. What Todorov observes about the narrative law in a particular story applies to the genre as well: temporal succession demands a gradation of intensity. Readers want to be surprised, and clever authors take readers’ generic experiences into consideration. However, they adhere to the formulaic demands of their genre. To make his plot ἐκπληκτικώτερον, Heliodorus uses a third-person narrative that contains not only first-person narrators but also narrators speaking within another narrator’s account. The novel’s entire first half is told by means of an intricate non-linear structure. Heliodorus contrives a strikingly fake death for his heroine as well, one that outdoes what had occurred in Leucippe and Clitophon.
Theagenes and Charicleia, the hero and heroine, undergo all manner of dangerous plot twists until the inevitable happy ending. In Book One, we also become familiar with Knemon and Thisbe, a secondary pair erotically linked to each other in a radically different way. In Egypt, Theagenes and Charicleia become the captives of Thyamis, the leader of a local gang of robbers. He sets Knemon, a young Athenian, to guard the two. Knemon tells them his story (1.9–17). As he reveals, Thisbe, a slave girl, was in cahoots with Knemon’s unscrupulous stepmother Demainete; both women are clever and unscrupulous connivers. On Demainete’s orders, Thisbe seduced Knemon, who had earlier had to fend off the advances of Demainete. As a result of Demainete’s plots against him, Knemon was exiled from Athens and left Greece for Egypt. En route, he hears that Demainete and Thisbe had started turning against each other. Demainete’s machinations are exposed by Thisbe’s own, and the former comes to a well-deserved end. The Athenian part of the plot is complete.
Thyamis has fallen in love with Charicleia and proposes to marry her (1.18–21). In a dream vision, he learns that he will have her and yet will not (1.18). However, the robbers find themselves under attack by a large enemy force, and Thyamis orders Knemon to hide Charicleia in a cave. Knemon does as instructed (1.27–29). After a fierce battle, Thyamis despairs of ever possessing Charicleia. In wrath and frustration, he decides to kill her (1.30–31). As the omniscient narrator tells it:
Once embarked on a course of action, the heart of a savage brooks no turning back. And when a barbarian loses all hope of his own preservation, he will usually kill everything he loves before he dies .... crazed with love and jealousy and anger, he [Thyamis] went to the cave as fast as he could run and jumped down into it, shouting long and loud in the Egyptian tongue. Just by the entrance he came upon a woman who spoke to him in Greek. Guided to her by her voice, he seized her head in his left hand and drove his sword through her breast, close to the bosom. With a last, piteous cry, the poor creature fell dead. (translation from Morgan 1989, 377)
Readers have been told of the presence of only one person in the cave. So it appears that, less than one-tenth into the tale, its heroine is dead, a greater shock (ἐκπληκτικώτερον) than the stabbing of Leucippe in Achilles’ novel because this death occurs extremely early. However, the narrator does not actually name or otherwise identify the victim except to say that she is Greek. And this points us to the explanation. At the beginning of Book 2, the robbers have been routed. Theagenes, who does not know about the cave, presumes his beloved Charicleia dead and decides to commit suicide (2.1). Knemon, however, tells him that she is alive and leads him to the cave. “Theagenes’ spirits revived,” we are told, only to be informed immediately: “Little did he know what sorrow awaited him there!” (translations from Morgan 1989, 380). The narrator’s comment conforms to what we know or assume to know: Charicleia is dead; Knemon is not aware of any death in the cave. Once they are in the cave, Theagenes and Knemon immediately find the corpse and assume it to be Charicleia’s. Theagenes is ready to kill himself again (2.3–5). However, from deep inside the cave, he is called by a voice, which Knemon identifies as Charicleia’s. He looks at the dead woman’s face and recognizes Thisbe, who is carrying a writing tablet under her arm (2.5–6).
Stunning as the identification of the corpse must be to Knemon, it is an even greater surprise to readers: What is Thisbe doing here? How did she, last left in Athens at the end of Knemon’s story, get to Egypt and into this cave? The revelation that Charicleia is not dead after all is no huge surprise to readers familiar with such fiction; the reappearance of Thisbe, a character whose narrative function had supposedly been fulfilled before, may have struck ancient readers as nothing less than an ἐκπληκτικώτερον. Knemon himself serves as our mouthpiece when he exclaims (2.5): “What is this? O gods, you have brought about the impossible!” A little later, he comments to Theagenes (2.7): “you found that the dead woman was who you least expected it to be.” Half a page on, we read (2.8): “Charicleia was astounded. ‘It is not possible, Knemon!’ she said. ‘How can someone suddenly be spirited away … out of the heart of Greece to the remotest parts of Egypt?’” (translations from Morgan, 1989, 382 and 383). Our questions exactly.
Unlike Leucippe’s deaths, Thisbe’s is real. Thyamis could not have used a trick sword and had no reason to deceive anybody. However, we do not at first know that Heliodorus is using a narrative trick to surprise us. So what led to Thisbe’s presence in the cave? The explanation arrives soon enough. First, Knemon continues his own story and reports that Thisbe had left Athens to escape punishment for the death of her mistress Demainete (2.8–9). Then Thisbe’s tablet solves the main part of the riddle: she had been the robbers’ captive for several days (2.10). Knemon has also recognized the murder weapon still protruding from the corpse as belonging to Thyamis (2.6 and 11), so everybody now knows the essentials. The only part still unclear is how Thisbe ended up in the cave (2.11). This last piece of the puzzle falls into place when the narrator tells us in a third-person flashback that Thyamis’ second-in-command Thermouthis had secretly shut Thisbe in the cave near its entrance to keep her for himself (2.12). Thermouthis is just as surprised at discovering Thisbe dead as we were a little earlier.
Credo quia complexum: the apparent death of Charicleia is the real death of Thisbe and occurs as a result of false pretenses and mistaken identity. It is at first as sudden and ἐκπληκτικόν as it is mysterious, more so because Thisbe is not the story’s heroine and has already been dropped from the narrative and the readers’ consciousness. Ancient readers are unlikely to have expected a secondary character to receive such prominence in the plot, and the same is true for modern readers. How did this woman whom we had left in a faraway place end up in a different country, in an improbable place, and at a time when the heroine’s life but not her own—i.e. Thisbe’s—is in danger? The greater is the effect of the ἐκπληκτικόν at this point. It is evident that Heliodorus was counting on just this kind of readers’ thinking to spring his narrative trap: a willing suspension of disbelief coupled with the secure, if here false, sense that secondary characters play only minor parts in stories. The extreme complexity of Heliodorus’ plot and that of his presentation make it all possible, because the death in the cave is one comparatively small instance of an ἄπιστον that is fully integrated into a whole series of larger ones, all of them interconnected.
Through enigmatic foreshadowing, Heliodorus had thrown us a narrative gauntlet even before we learned of the existence of the cave, which is first mentioned at 1.28. At 1.18, Thyamis had a dream in which Isis delivers Charicleia to him: “you shall have her and not have her; you shall do wrong and slay her, but she shall not be slain.” Ancient dream visions, oracles, and other prophecies routinely contained enough enigmas, illogicalities, and impossibilities to cause headaches in those blessed or cursed enough to receive them. So it is with Thyamis. His reaction to the dream is an apt summary of any mystery reader’s absorption in a complex plot: “The dream caused him great perplexity, and he turned the vision over and over in his mind, wondering what it could mean. Eventually, in desperation he forced the interpretation to conform with his own desires” (translation from Morgan, 1989, 369). Readers do the same thing: perplexed, they force the kind of solution they wish to be true by trying to make sense of something that only the author can clear up. In An Ethiopian Story, this process is pushed even further. At the beginning of its second half, Knemon hears Thisbe’s name mentioned again and assumes that she is still alive, although, as he remembers, “with my own eyes I saw and recognized her lifeless body, and with my own hands I buried her” (translation from Morgan, 1989, 446). He then overhears a woman’s lament, in which she refers to her narrow escape from a violent death and calls herself Thisbe (5.2). The narrator at once provides the correct identification: “the woman he had heard lamenting was not Thisbe, but Charicleia!” The next sentence brings the explanation in a flashback: “This is what had happened to her…” (5.4; translations from Morgan, 1989, 448). Here is another ἐκπληκτικόν, made more effective by its reversal of identities: first, Thisbe had been mistaken for Charicleia, now Charicleia has been mistaken for Thisbe. Why the latter should call herself by the name of the former, whom she had not known and of whose presence in the cave alongside her own she had been unaware, is enough to make us react as Knemon does (5.2): “he racked his brains in bewilderment and despair to make sense of it” (translations from Morgan, 1989, 446). The information that makes it all clear comes a little later (5.8).
To literate ancient readers, the kind that Heliodorus is writing for, there will have been one other aspect in the story of Thisbe that made this part of the plot even more of an ἐκπληκτικόν than it may be to many modern readers. Death by the sword near, if not in, a cave had come to another and more famous Thisbe as a result of a misunderstanding, not through mistaken identity but through incorrect interpretation of what had happened before. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid told the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the star-crossed lovers from the city of Babylon (Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.55–166). Ovid’s Thisbe sought refuge from a lion in a cave; Heliodorus’ Thisbe was put in a cave for safekeeping. Ovid’s Thisbe killed herself with Pyramus’ sword when she found him dead—Pyramus had rashly assumed her killed by a lion and had carried out what Theagenes is prevented from doing; Heliodorus’ Thisbe is killed by someone else. Thisbe’s name practically preordains her fate. Nomen est omen: Beware of caves if your name is Thisbe! Heliodorus cleverly plays with the earlier tale; he expects his readers to notice his deviations.
Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus are masters of the πιθανὸν ἀδύνατον and the ἐκπληκτικόν. In cinema, there is one other master of mystery who can claim to be the others’ equal, even if he was unaware of their existence. His most profound work we might characterize as ἐκπληκτικώτατον: “perhaps the most terrifying film ever made” (Wood 2002, 142).
Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous thriller is Psycho (1960). Its most famous sequence is the murder of Marion Crane, its heroine, in the shower. The crime occurs a little over halfway into the film. Marion’s death is even more shocking to viewers than Leucippe’s and Thisbe’s ordeals must have been to ancient readers. The striking plot turns in Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Hitchcock are high points in a long narrative tradition that uses plausible implausibilities and antiverisimilitudinous shocks as means to create thrilling stories unsurpassed at their time for their vividness and effect. How does Hitchcock accomplish this in Psycho? Why is Marion Crane’s death still shocking after more than half a century of murder and mayhem on our screens, most of it far more explicit than anything Hitchcock would have believed possible or necessary?
The first thing to note is that Hitchcock closely adheres to one of the basic rules for gripping narratives as outlined by Aristotle: unity of action (cf. Butcher 1907, 274–301). From the very beginning, when we are introduced to Marion Crane, we are drawn inexorably into her world, for until her death we never leave her. (I have discussed the film’s opening in connection with that of An Ethiopian Story in Winkler 2000–2001, 175–177.) Wood (2002, 142) rightly observes about the beginning of Psycho: “this … could be us.” Rarely does a film make a viewer’s identification with a character more compelling: “So far in the film [i.e. up to her death] the spectator has shared Marion’s consciousness almost exclusively” (Perkins 1972, 108; cf. Wood 2002, 144–145). Not only do we side with Marion emotionally but we also understand her when she commits a crime and hope for her escape. By the time that Marion encounters a policeman, one of the most intense scenes of the film, we have completely committed ourselves to her. First, and in a reversal of the rule that crime must never be shown to pay, we want her to go scot-free after her embezzlement of a large sum of money. Later, when in a crucial conversation with Norman Bates, the nice young man who rents her a room in his motel, she decides to return and face the consequences of her action, we hope that her punishment will be lenient or waived. We want Marion to live happily ever after with her lover. Even when she steps into her shower, we are with her and see her in close-ups. By now she has become practically inseparable from us. Then the killer strikes. When Norman sinks Marion’s car with her dead body in the trunk into a nearby swamp and the scene fades out, the film seems to be over. We have no clue why Marion was killed. Our emotional bond with her had become so close that we are at a loss to understand how her story can be continued. Only later will we find out that Psycho is not, after all, Marion’s story, or rather, not only her story. The fact that Janet Leigh, the most popular star of Psycho and prominently featured in the film’s advertising, does not receive first or second billing in the credits also gives us a clue. Hers is the last of six title cards naming the cast, even if her importance is indicated by the same size of her name’s letters as those of the three actors receiving star billing and by the inclusion of her character’s name, which occurs only this once. And again nomen est omen. If your last name is Crane, beware of anyone who stuffs and displays dead birds!
Ancient authors did not give interviews, keep diaries or other notes on their creative processes or intentions, or let their readers know what they had in mind in their works. Today, we are better off. Hitchcock repeatedly spoke about Psycho and its shower sequence. Concerning the two ancient novels’ and the film’s scenes of sudden death and their common function to make each story ἐκπληκτικώτερον, Hitchcock’s words about Psycho are instructive. With some obvious adjustments, we could be hearing Achilles Tatius or Heliodorus.
Hitchcock comes right to the heart of the matter, the ἐκπληκτικόν: “I think that the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture was the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue. That was about all” (Truffaut and Scott 1984, 268–269). The shower murder “took us seven days to shoot … and there were seventy camera setups for forty-five seconds of footage. … Naturally, the knife never touched the body; it was all done in the montage” (Truffaut and Scott 1984, 277). The extreme care and labor that went into the filming revealed Hitchcock’s enjoyment in telling such an effective story: “It was rather exciting to use the camera to deceive the audience. … I don’t care about the subject matter … but I do care about the pieces of film … and all of the technical ingredients that make the audience scream. … They were aroused by pure film” (Truffaut and Scott 1984, 277 and 283). If they could, Achilles and Heliodorus would agree: It was rather exciting to use the stylus to deceive the readers. We care about all the ingredients that make the audience react. They were aroused by pure plot. Hitchcock concludes about Psycho in particular and about his kind of thriller in general: “It’s an area of film-making in which it’s more important for you to be pleased with the technique than with the content” (Truffaut and Scott 1984, 283). We can imagine the ancient novelists nodding their assent.
Unlike Leucippe but like Thisbe, Marion Crane is really dead. Unlike the cases of both Leucippe and Thisbe, the main reason for Marion’s death is a plot development of such deviousness that viewers will be in for a bigger shock when they receive the explanation. Hitchcock, master creator of mystery and suspense and, as here, of shocking twists, is the modern heir to Achilles and Heliodorus. Hitchcock was not a student or reader of Aristotle, Achilles Tatius, or Heliodorus. Still, he adheres to the theory of ἀδύνατα εἰκότα and the ἐκπληκτικώτερον as outlined by Aristotle; he also applies this theory in the manner practiced by Achilles and Heliodorus. The similarities and the comparable plot functions in their respective stories of a heroine’s (or a comparable character’s) sudden murder justify juxtaposing the ancient authors and the modern director.
Like the Greek novelists, Hitchcock was aware of the gap between fictional stories based on realism and his own thriller plots. He repeatedly made fun of critics who objected to improbabilities in his films and sarcastically dismissed them as “our friends, the plausibles and logicians” (Truffaut and Scott 1984, 151). Disarmingly, Hitchcock added: “On the one hand I claim to dismiss the plausibles, and on the other I’m worried about them. After all, I’m only human!” His artistic creed was this: “We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it’s not dull. A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow” (Kapsis 1992, 81). In other words: “Film should be stronger than reason” (quoted from McGilligan 2003, 24). So the ἄπιστον or ἀδύνατον has become the πιθανόν. As Aristotle had said: πιθανὸν τινὶ πιθανόν—what is credible is so because it is credible to someone. Hitchcock has made Psycho credible to us.
S.H. Butcher, one of the most perceptive commentators on the Poetics, concluded about Aristotle’s discussion of possibilities and impossibilities: “These so-called ἀδύνατα are the very δύνατα of art, the stuff and substance of which poetry [i.e. every story] is made. … The ἀδύνατα, things impossible in fact, become πιθανά [things credible or convincing in a narrative]” (Butcher 1907, 170–171 and 173). His words apply to Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, and Hitchcock in equal measure.
“What is drama after all, but life with the dull bits cut out” (Truffaut and Scott 1984, 103). This definition by Hitchcock fits all narrative literature from antiquity to today, from mysteries and adventure–romances to serious epics, dramas, and novels. It also applies to narratives in images. Equally, Hitchcock’s witty description of the differences between a cinema that adheres to drab reality and probability at any price and his own work, exciting at the expense of verisimilitude, may stand as a final comment on our topic: “Some directors film slices of life, I film slices of cake” (Truffaut and Scott 1984, 339; cf. 103). Aristotle, Achilles Tatius, or Heliodorus would have had no problem understanding Hitchcock’s meaning. From an Aristotelian perspective, the striking plot turns here examined confirm the modernity of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus and the classical timelessness of Alfred Hitchcock.
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