Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction Jon Steffen Bruss Mark Payne . Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. viii + 183 pp. Cloth, $96. Whether one accepts his initial argument or not-that there is no real, true fiction until Theocritus' Idylls-Mark Payne's Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction admirably demonstrates that the idyllic "world" of Theocritus is fiction on a level theretofore unknown in Greek literature. Payne prefers to describe this new, fictional world as "realms of the unreal" (introduction). Distinct from earlier fictional worlds, such as that of the Iliad and Odyssey or of Old Comedy, the "realms of the unreal" in Theocritean bucolic neither attach themselves to myth nor do they utilize Old Comedy's surreal and fantastic engagement of the real world of fifth-century Athens. There are, of course, Idylls that do, as, for example, Idyll 15, where New Comedy conventions issue forth with a mimiambic aspect. But Payne's focus is on those Idylls where the disjunct between mythical world and real world is so jarring as to create a "realm of the unreal," specifically Idylls 1, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13. In chapter 1, "The Pleasures of the Imaginary," Payne addresses himself to Idyll 1. Here, the gap between the fictional world of the idyll and reality is so great that Theocritus takes no pains at all, either through the poet's voice or through the words of the bucolic characters, Thyrsis and the unnamed syrinx player, to establish any sort of referentiality from reality to the "realm of the unreal." The poetic function of the completeness of this fiction is to create a sort of poetic involture, to "invite us to go further with the game of world-building that [the characters] initiate. If the poem does not tell us how to arrange the shepherd's seat and the oaks in relation to the elm, Priapus, and the springs, we may nonetheless work out these details for ourselves." In short, "while the herdsmen may not know they are in a landscape, the audience surely does" (28). The ecphrasis of Idyll 1 is also, so Payne, a constituent element in completing the fiction of the poem. Its poetic function is to "offer the reader . . . a concentrated experience of fictional involvement and a paradigm of the way in which this involvement can further fictionalize fictional facts by providing them with all kind of imaginary motivations and contexts" (38); in short, the ecphrasis provides an example of how the reader of fiction can participate in the fiction of a work of art. A final marker of fiction in Idyll 1 is the song itself. The very non-performativity of the text "becomes another marker of its fully fictional character" (48). Chapter 2, "The Presence of the Fictional World," examines Idylls 3, 11, and 13. Idyll 3 establishes its full fictionality right off the bat: "the speaker reveals, by his opening words, that he is alone. He is not speaking to anyone, and so, by the [End Page 595] standards of the real world, has no reason to be talking in the first place" (60). But again, Theocritus ruptures the gap normally bridged between fictional world and reality. In the normal scheme of things, the reader or audience expects the soliloquy to be addressed outwardly to the audience. In Idyll 3, however, "the goatherd . . . breaks off this communication as soon as it is begun, and turns instead to apostrophizing his absent friend" with the result that it is "disconcerting . . . to have to trade places, and imagine the world of the poem through the eyes of someone within it." Finally, "the voice [of the shepherd] speaks from the page in a place we are not given to imagine" (61). This constitutes a rupture with dramatic and narrative convention, more fully than creating a completely fictional realm, a literary space where neither mimesis nor diegesis really functions. Idyll 11 likewise ruptures the communicative situation a reader comes to expect from experience with ancient narrative and drama, albeit more radically than in Idyll 3, for 11 introduces first one "scene," an encounter between the poet's voice and Nicias, only to...