Perspective and Perception:
The limits of narratology in the ancient novel

Stephen A. Nimis (Miami University)

Narratological analyses of ancient narratives of all kinds (epic, history, the novel, etc.) have now become quite common. Although there are many varieties of narratological analysis, the kind spearheaded by G. Genette has proven most popular. Genette is famous for identifying a whole series of distinctions in narrative presentation, mostly with regard to the modern novel, and a complementary vocabulary for these distinctions that has now become part and parcel of literary discussions of narrative: heterodiegetic, homodiegetic, focalization, etc. Genette’s famous question: “Who sees this?” foregrounds questions of point of view, partial knowledge and the possibilities of authorial manipulation based on such distinctions. There can be no doubt that this body of criticism has allowed modern readers to see and discuss a whole range of issues in a more effective manner. This paper asks whether a type of analysis that emerged in modern times to analyze modern texts has any limitation when applied to ancient literature. I will survey a few outstanding examples of narratological criticism of the ancient novels and then analyze a passage from Heliodorus’ Aethiopica to draw a distinction between “perspective” and “perception.”

Perceptual concerns predominate when the representation is considered from the point of view of an agent, a character in the story; perspectival concerns dominate when the point of view is that of the audience or reader. Perceptions entail some sort of embodied point view, a person who occupies a certain space that is simultaneously a vantage point and a limit of some sort. Perspectives are more abstract and can involve a kind of seeing and knowing that escapes any somatic requirements. Performance-based texts inevitably require characters who see and say certain things from their point of view, who are in turn organized by the body of the performer, who omnisciently mediates among these different positions. In a text that is meant to be read instead of to be performed (or in a text that does not take for granted the organizing activity of a performer), various textual functions evolve to stand in for the performer, which narratologists identify as narrator, implied narrator, internal narrator, etc.; and these “perspectival” functions tend to be referred back to a particular agent of some kind. However, such an analysis runs the risk of seeing all narrative from the standpoint of characters and agents, whereas the emergence of prose narratives that move away from the context of performance entailed a series of experiments and innovations that seek both to compensate for the loss of a performer and to explore possibilities a performer’s absence provides. An example of the so-called “free indirect discourse” in book one of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica will be used to illustrate the difference between perception and perspective, and suggest another way of accounting for perspectival differentiation that is not based on characters.