NYMPHS, NEIGHBOURS AND NARRATORS: A NARRATOLOGICAL APPROACH TO LONGUS

John Morgan

Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe is a devious and elusive text. A not un- common experience of readers is to be left with a sense of uncer- tainty as to exactly how seriously one is supposed to take it, a feeling in some quarters that it makes claims on which it does not deliver, and in others that it reaches for a profundity belying its superficial simplicity. This paper will suggest that Longus’ apparent ambiguity can best be read as the product of his particularly subtle narrative technique.1 My interest began with the effects produced by a polyphony of narrating voices, particularly in cases where there is a separation of ‘authorial’ and ‘narratorial’ voices, where the story is told not di- rectly by the author but by a narrator whose fictional status and char- acter determine both how he tells the story and how the reader is cued to actualise it. Before exploring how this idea can be applied to Daphnis and Chloe, let me circle around it a little and set it in con- text. An obvious example of such a separation of voices occurs in Lucian’s True Histories, where there is a definable moment of tran- sition from one to the other. The preface, in a voice that we may as well call the author’s, forcefully makes the point that nothing in the ensuing narrative is true. It is hard to imagine a more radical dis- tancing from the voice that narrates the body of the text, a first- person account of a fantastic voyage using all the standard tropes of authorisation and authentication. The point of course is precisely to subject the narrator’s use of those tropes to authorial irony, ostensi- bly as a criticism of historians and other writers who have told as true what they know to be untrue. However, both voices are ‘I’ and both are equally ‘Loukianos’;2 the ambiguity of their relationship al-

1 The ideas advanced in this paper derive from my commentary on Daphnis and Chloe (Morgan [2003]), where they will be found more fully exemplified. All translated quotations from Daphnis and Chloe in this paper are from the translation accompanying the commentary. 2 The narrator casually reveals his name at VH 2.28. 172 JOHN MORGAN lows the narrative to develop its own impetus, and to be read as a story in its own right as much as a satirical descant on the work of others. The separation of author from narrator is an obvious feature of novels narrated in the first person, whose narrator is, by definition, a fictional character operating in a fictional world created by the author. In novels of this sort, the author’s communication with the reader is of necessity devious and indirect: the author’s voice is si- lent, and the narrator is, in varying degrees, denied the ‘authorial’ qualities of omniscience and definitive judgement. First-person nar- rators can occupy almost any point on a spectrum from complete re- liability (the author’s mouthpiece) to complete unreliability; wher- ever they stand their narrative becomes readable only when the reader can get a ‘fix’ on them and so see what distortions, if any, they are imposing on their material. The independence of narrator from author forms the basis of Gian Biagio Conte’s reading of the Satyrica: Behind the protagonist’s narrative we meet the hidden author, who is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narrative – and along with the reader is smiling at it. Behind the naïve narrator who in speaking of ‘I’ exposes himself and his desires, an agreement is being reached between the author and the reader of the text…The two voices are kept forcefully apart, if only because Encolpius is kept far from…every value that a sensible author could reasonably expect to be shared by his readers. The result of this distancing is precisely an “unacceptable” narrative.3 This interpretive strategy is close to one that I tried myself to apply to Achilleus Tatios’ Leukippe and Kleitophon, the only surviving Greek novel with a first-person narrator. Suspended between a first-person narrator of dubious reliability and a mischievously subversive implied [or in Conte’s terminology, hidden] author… Kleitophon’s voiced perceptions often do not coincide with those of a careful reader.4 My argument was that Achilleus so arranges his material that behind Kleitophon we can find hints of a truer story, the author’s story, that the narrator is incapable of telling about himself: “throughout the

3 Conte (1996) 21-2. 4 Morgan (1996b) 179-80.