I. Genre and Meaning

EPILOGUE* Christopher Pelling I. Genre and Meaning Once upon a time, the Starship Enterprise boldly came upon a strange new vessel, manned by a people called Tamarians. The universal translator proved useless. The Tamarians responded to overtures by using single phrases, centered on proper names: 'Darmok and Jelad at Tenagra,' 'Shaka, when the walls fell,' 'Sokath, his eyes uncov ered,' 'Temba, his arms wide.' Gradually, enlightenment steals over the Enterprise's Captain Picard. The Tamarians 'communicate through narrative imagery': these are shorthand references to stories from their mythology, providing examples for the current predicament. Darmok was a mythical hunter who had joined with Jelad to fight a dangerous animal, and the union had harmonized their peoples: now Picard should join with the Tamarian leader Dathon to fight a new threatening beast. Now that incomprehension (on the model of Shaka) has given way to enlightenment (Sokath), Picard accepts the welcome (Temba), signaling acceptance by telling an Earth-born story of his own, 'Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.' But all goes wrong. Dathon dies, and the starship's destruction is imminent until Picard uses his new narrative skills to persuade the Tamarians that his intentions had been good. A new story-example has been created: 'Picard and Dathon at Eladril,' muses a Tamarian. The episode ends with Picard thoughtfully studying his text of the Homeric Hymns. 1 Stories are potent things: but, as the starship found, they are not simple to interpret, and can be incomprehensible to an audience without the right expectations. When stories are told in full (and not merely alluded to, Tamarian fashion), those expectations will cover * My thanks are due to the editor not merely for sharing a taste for Star Trek but for inviting me to contribute to this volume, for letting me loose on her con tributors, and for frequent helpful discussion. 1 'Darmok': Star Trek: The Next Generation episode l02 (Fifth Season no. 2), first screened 1991. 326 CHRISTOPHER PELLING shape and manner and register and length, and probably truth or falsity-or at least the level of truth which the author intended. 2 But, as the Enterprise example suggests, there also needs to be some under standing, even if provisional, of what a story is for. Stories typically (probably indeed universally) fit into a 'discursive exchange': they communicate, and respond to earlier communications. That is true of stories told over the dinner table or in the cafe; it was true of the stories summoned up by the Tamarians, both as they discussed among themselves how to respond to the overtures and as they tried to communicate with the outsiders; and in a more elaborate way it is true of the narratives of written historiography. Previous narra tives have prepared readers and conditioned their expectations; even if those expectations go on to be revised, re-nuanced, even eventu ally frustrated, they provide the indispensable foothold to allow inter pretation to begin. Our Enterprise example allows a further suggestion as well, the way in which a new production not only builds on pre vious generic expectations but also helps to revise those expectations for future productions. At the end of the episode 'Picard and Dathon at Eladril' has become an example in its own right, a point of ref erence for future Tamarians-not to mention the odd classical scholar. The simplest sort of 'discursive exchange' comes when one text continues another, picking up where the first left off. Thus within the Greco-Roman tradition (and as a classicist I shall have to draw examples mainly from that tradition) various authors set out to con tinue Thucydides-Xenophon in Hellenica, Theopompus, Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, Cratippus; later Phylarchus continued Duris of Samos; the phenomenon is as early as Thucydides himself, picking up the narrative of the 'Pentecontaetia' at the point where Herodotus finished (at Sestos, 1.89). Continuation was even more frequent on the Roman side, with various writers establishing their place in a serial canon of Roman history-Sempronius Asellio (probably) continuing Polybius, Sisenna continuing Asellio, and Sallust's Histories continuing Sisenna; later Aufidius Bassus continued Livy, the elder Pliny began 'from 2 Cf. Bolin 122 on the importance of authorial intent to generic designation: a work does not change genre if it is subsequently demonstrated to be less accurate than the author wished. But perhaps we should speak here not of authorial intent tout court, but of the reader's inference of that intent. What of a writer who sets out to write a spoof romantic novel and produces something which is indistinguishable from, and is read by the public as, the real thing? Generically, that writer has surely written a romantic novel. .

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