“I grasp, oh, artist, your enigma, I grasp your drama” 463
Chapter 18 “I grasp, oh, artist, your enigma, I grasp your drama”: Reconstructing the Implied Audience of the Twelfth-Century Byzantine Novel*
Panagiotis Roilos
As is the case with many Byzantine texts, the precise dates of the Komnenian novels remain more or less open to debate. Their production most probably spanned the years from the late 1130s to the late 1150s, the order of their com- position having been as follows: 1). Rhodanthe and Dosikles by Theodore Prodromos before 1138, 2). Aristandros and Kallithea by Constantine Manasses in the 1140s, 3). Hysmine and Hysminias by Eumathios Makrembolites in 1143-mid-1150s and 4). Drosilla and Charikles by Niketas Eugenianos in the late 1150s.1 Those texts were the products of a vibrant intellectual environment, which fostered a systematic revival of a number of ancient Greek genres and discursive modes.2 The appropriation of elements of the ancient Greek tradi- tion (most notably of literature and mythology) by the novelists invested their works with considerable cultural capital, which could be appropriately mar- keted and evaluated in the elite social and cultural circles of Constantinople. The rediscovery and adaptation of the pagan “Hellenic” heritage to the Chris tian medieval Greek present was often defined by a broader cultural and discursive stance that should be described in terms of amphoteroglossia (“double-tonguedness”).3 Although in Byzantium the ancient Greek novel had been the object of noteworthy rhetorical and moralistic approaches in previous centuries as well, the creative engagement with fictional writing of that kind had to wait until the Komnenian period, a considerable part of which could be described in
* For Jacques Bouchard, dear friend and colleague. 1 For relevant arguments, see Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, pp. 7–11, where also earlier bibliography; cf. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels. Landmarks of the early study of the Komnenian novels include Alexiou, “A Critical Reappraisal”; Hunger, Antikes und byzantinisches Roman; Beck, Byzantinisches Erotikon. 2 For the broader cultural context of the Komnenian period with an emphasis on the reign of Manuel I, see Magdalino, The Empire; cf. Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, pp. 4–13; Kazhdan / Wharton Epstein, Change. 3 On the concept of amphoteroglossia, see Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, esp. pp. 15–24.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004307728_020 464 Roilos terms of a cultural Renaissance. The elucidation of the issue of the possible synchronic recipients of the Komnenian novels, their educational and social status, and their expectations is of major importance for our scholarly explora- tion of the “worldliness” of those texts – of the conditions, that is, of their production, circulation, and consumption in their original historical contexts. The reconstruction of their intended audience constitutes a crucial parameter of any study that aspires to go beyond traditional formalistic analyses and to address, instead, issues of historical anthropological relevance, including the “ethnography of the vehicles of meaning” activated by those works.4 The specific audiences of the 12th-century Byzantine novel may to some extent, albeit hypothetically, be reconstructed on the basis of evidence gleaned indirectly from the texts themselves and from certain paratextual information originating from the authors or from later scribes.5 Relevant extratextual sources are almost nonexistent, with the exception of a “letter” composed by Niketas Eugenianos and addressed to a certain “grammatike,” a lady of perplex- ing identity. In that letter, Niketas attests to the appeal that his novel could have to particular members of his contemporary audience.6 The letter pro- vides no conclusive information about the specific social, family, or any other background (except for the educational one) of that lady. Even the very factu- ality and the name of that passionate female reader of Drosilla and Charikles cannot be established beyond any reasonable doubt. Be that as it may, what can be said with certainty is that the (actual or imagined) female addressee of Eugenianos’ letter is depicted as exceptionally educated, familiar with, and capable of appreciating the aesthetic effect of, different sophisticated poetic meters. In the case she was a real person, Eugenianos’ eromene grammatike seems to have belonged to that category of 12th-century women who fostered and encouraged the production of (often “high”) literary works and other cul-
4 For the need of a historical anthropological approach to premodern literature in general and to Byzantine cultural production in particular, see Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, pp. 23–24; also Roilos; “Phantasia”. For literature’s worldliness, see Said, The World, the Text, pp. 33–35. As I have argued elsewhere (Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, p. 23), an “ethnography of the vehicles of meaning” (on this concept see Geertz, Local Knowledge, pp. 118–19) of a literary text of the past elucidates the ways in which that work might have been composed and received in its original context in terms of a synthesis and activation of different cultural textures. For the concept of the “intended reader”, see Wolff, “Der intendierte Leser”. 5 The term “paratext” refers to those elements of the physical presentation of a literary work that surround (“para”-) the corpus of the main text: see Genette, Paratexts. 6 Ed. in J.-F. Boissonade, Nicetae Eugeniani narratio amatoria et Constantini Manassis fragmenta, Paris 1817, pp. 7–10.