READING FOR PLEASURE: NARRATIVE, IRONY, AND EROTICS IN ACHILLES TATIUS

Tim Whitmarsh

Leucippe & Clitophon is exceptional among the corpus of extant Greek novels in that it is almost entirely narrated by a central pro- tagonist in the narrative.1 The opening words are those of an un- named figure explaining how he met Clitophon lamenting his experi- ences in love; and in response to his request, Clitophon narrated his tale. That tale then becomes the remainder of the novel (there is no return to the outer frame at the conclusion). This feature—so-called ‘ego-narration’ (or, to use a technical phrase, ‘character-bound nar- ration’2)—has often been remarked upon from a narratological per- spective: commentators have shown how subtly Achilles manipulates his readers’ knowledge and ignorance of events for the purposes of narrative tension and drama.3 In this essay I want to take a rather dif- ferent approach. What sort of narrator is Clitophon? How does his identity affect his selection and interpretation of material? And what pleasures are to be had from observing his partisanship and blind- spots? In other words, does Clitophon’s narrative dramatise a certain kind of approach to novel-reading, an approach that is itself explored, distanced, problematised, ironised? Ego-narratives are not in and of themselves ironical, they become so when they are read as such; when, that is, a gap (be it cognitive, moral or intellectual) opens up between the focalization of the nar- rator and that of the reader. But for a narrative to be read as ironical (rather than, say, simply contemptible), the reader must recognise a complicity with a figure (not necessarily a character, but an identifi- able perspective) within the text who shares her perspective.4 The

1 If we restrict the corpus to the canonical five, that is. Lucius, or the ass and Lucian’s True stories are first-person narratives, as was Antonius Diogenes’ Mar- vels beyond Thule (see Hägg [1971] 319; Stephens, Winkler [1995] 116-18). 2 Bal (1997) 22. 3 Hägg (1971), esp. 124-36; 318-22; Fusillo (1991) 97-108; Reardon (1994). 4 “Whenever an author conveys to his reader an unspoken point, he creates a sense of collusion against all those, whether in the story or out of it, who do not get the point. Irony is always thus in part a device for excluding as well as including … 192 TIM WHITMARSH

‘real’—or, better, the exodiegetic—reader, then, must side with an ‘implicit’ reader, who is a construct of the text.5 The latter figure can be confected in a number of ways. In Conte’s trenchant and invigo- rating analysis of Petronius’ Satyricon, for example, a distinction is drawn between the voice of the ego-narrator and the subtle prompts of the ‘hidden author’, mocking and tripping up the ego-narrator.6 On this interpretation, Petronian irony is generated by the exodiegetic reader’s (or, at least, one exodiegetic reader’s, Conte’s) perception of shared values with the ‘implicit’ reader, a figure who looks down upon the ego-narrator. But ‘irony’ is notoriously slippery. How do we definitively locate tone, nuance, innuendo? And again, how can we be sure that we have exhausted the irony? That our esodiegetic allies are not playing us false, turning the joke against us? “I notice,” writes Booth, “only those clues that I am prepared to notice, and I am therefore not usu- ally aware of irony as something that gives me real trouble. We al- ways like to think of the other reader as the one who is taken in.”7 Locating narrative irony is an exercise in self-projection, in casting oneself in the role of sophisticate at the expense of others (others in the text, or other exodiegetic readers: earlier Classical scholars, for example …). I want to argue that the narrative ironies of Leucippe and Clito- phon are subject to such indeterminacy: HOW you read, WHERE you locate irony, depends very much upon what kind of reader you want to make yourself into. That is to say, there is no one implicit reader, sneering at the ego-narrator, but a variety of possible posi- tions. I do not mean simply that readers make meanings, that inter- pretations are subjective, that there are potentially infinite ways of approaching this text: this seems to me obviously true of this (as of any) text, but trivially so. What I want to argue is that Achilles spe- cifically and artfully subverts the authority of the narrator by pro- posing contrary readings, and that these alternative perspectives are

In the irony with which we are concerned, the speaker [i.e. the narrator] is himself the butt of the ironic point” (Booth [1983] 304). 5 “ … the implied reader as a concept has his roots planted firmly in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader … The concept of the implied reader is … a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him” (Iser [1978] 34). 6 Conte (1994). 7 Booth (1983) 305.