Epilogue

The epilogue rounds out the argument of the volume by considering the declining cultural authority of the novel, the value of history versus the history of the arts, Bakhtin’s most famous aphorism, the concept of great time, and the explanatory power of Bakhtin’s approach to the novel as a distinct form of discourse.

Inventing the Novel

This chapter offers a brief account of how Bakhtin conceived of the ancient novel in the 1930s, asking whether his work provides a proper theoretical underpinning for any historical approach to the genre and, given such an approach, how narrative evolved in antiquity. Although written some fifty years earlier, Bakhtin’s essays on ancient literary history were unavailable in English until collected and translated in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). Although not literally new, these essays are novel both to many students of fiction precisely because Bakhtin focuses his discussion on antiquity—the significance of which for the novel, he argues, has been “greatly underestimated”—and to classicists besides because these scholars are unlikely to know the studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais for which Bakhtin first became known in the West.

Discourse in a Novel

Plato points out in the Republic that epic, antiquity’s most influential narrative form, alternates between diēgēsis and mimēsis. The poet either speaks narratively (diēgēsis) or imitates characters’ speech (mimēsis). (Indirect speech is rare in Homer.) The poet-narrator’s speech is kept clearly distinct from the characters’ because they are so linguistically homogeneous. Characters and narrator speak identically, so the individuality we expect in novelistic speech is impossible. Access to characters’ consciousness is limited to poetic diēgēsis of their actions and mimēsis of their words. Plato’s distinction is fundamental, but Lodge argues it is not “adequate to describe novelistic discourse.…[T]he relationship between mimēsis and diēgēsis in the novel is much more subtle and complicated…; we encounter in the novel a third kind of discourse[,] which…Bakhtin calls doubly-voiced or doubly-oriented.”

The Poetics of Genre

This chapter explores why Bakhtin asserted the Satyrica was proof that “Menippean satire can expand into a … realistic reflection of the socially varied and heteroglot world of contemporary life”—an arguably false assertion containing much truth. For Bakhtin, ancient fiction emerged chiefly under three rubrics: novelistic discourse, space-time (chronotopes) in fiction, and minor novelistic history envisioning Menippea as catalyst. The first two isolate forms specific to ancient fiction, distinguishing dominant types; the final rubric investigates how prose fiction relates to the genres it arises from. Although Bakhtin’s conception of Menippea is not so ahistorical as it sometimes seems when removed from his three-dimensional approach, it is sweeping, idiosyncratic. This chapter begins with Bakhtin’s characterization of Menippea amid accounts specifying what makes it crucial for novelistic discourse; it then asks how Bakhtin sheds light on literary history as a dialogue of genres.

Introduction

Who was Petronius Arbiter? The twentieth century’s most famous ancient novelist is one good answer. Of all the works of ancient prose fiction—by Apuleius, Xenophon, Chariton, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus—only Petronius’s Satyrica resonated with the twentieth century, providing Eliot with the epigraph for The Waste Land and Fitzgerald with the ur-text for Gatsby—originally entitled “Trimalchio at West Egg”—and Fellini with his film. The fascination of the arbiter elegantiae—as Nero’s court called Petronius—on twentieth-century avant-gardists is quite puzzling. What sets this fragmented text apart from kindred others? Is the answer precisely that it is one of a kind? Why did Petronius’s scabrous text become modern experimentalists’ favorite ancient analogue? That Auerbach’s Mimesis identified Petronius as one of three authors who exemplify classical representation could also be adduced as evidence of Petronius’s newfound status in the modernist century.

Mapping Time and Space in Ancient Fiction

This chapter aims at a Bakhtinian account that does justice to the insight of Ian Watt that a new form emerged in eighteenth-century fiction, reflected in the term “novel”. However, this development was hardly unprecedented: novelistic fiction had already appeared at least twice, in Renaissance Spain and the Roman empire. Various eighteenth-century English novels are canonical examples of the genre, but their genealogy can be traced back to antiquity, illuminating what distinguishes novelistic discourse and what is or is not modern about it. Ancient examples of novelistic fiction (e.g., Apuleius and Petronius) can be generically distinguished from Greek romance. Novelistic fiction has been invented more than once, and its earliest examples provide interesting precedents for what have been considered among the modern novel’s distinguishing features—such as contemporaneity and certain kinds of realism.