Suspense in Ancient Greek Literature

Ioannis M. Konstantakos, Vasileios Liotsakis, Ioannis M. Konstantakos, Vasileios Liotsakis

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110715583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The use of suspense in ancient literature attracts increasing attention in modern scholarship, but hitherto there has been no comprehensive work analysing the techniques of suspense through the various genres of the Classical literary canon. This volume aspires to fill such a gap, exploring the phenomenon of suspense in the earliest narrative writings of the western world, the literature of the ancient Greeks. The individual chapters focus on a wide range of poetic and prose genres (epic, drama, historiography, oratory, novel, and works of literary criticism) and examine the means by which ancient authors elicited emotions of tense expectation and fearful anticipation for the outcome of the story, the development of the plot, or the characters' fate. A variety of theoretical tools, from narratology and performance studies to psychological and cognitive approaches, are exploited to study the operation of suspense in the works under discussion. Suspenseful effects are analysed in a double perspective, both in terms of the artifices employed by authors and with regard to the responses and experiences of the audience. The volume will be useful to classical scholars, narratologists, and literary historians and theorists.

Part I: Literary Criticism

ἵν’ ὁ θεατὴς προσδοκῶν καθῇτο: What Did Ancient Critics Know of ‘Suspense’?

Anna A. Novokhatko

I am grateful to Professor Glenn Most for his encouraging comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

The search for a discussion of an audience-oriented device termed ‘suspense’ in antiquity would be highly anachronistic in and of itself. Theories of suspense were for the most part developed in the 20th century, supported by the new medium of film viewing. This paper will argue, however, that suspense was an important category of text processing from the earliest texts on.¹ Ancient critics were aware of this category and elaborated strategies that create suspense in the text, although the concept of narrative and dramatic suspense had a variety of designations.

Even today, there is no single definition of suspense: a wide range of approaches are discussed in the introduction to the present volume.² Cognitive psychologists have often enough argued that suspense is a composite emotional state, an emotional amalgam, comprised of fear, hope, surprise, anxiety, and the cognitive state of uncertainty.³ In this paper I will argue that affects such as recipients’ experience were well-known in ancient critical thought and were discussed from the perspective of text production and also text reception. In other words, rival poets and critics determined the extent to which texts were ‘suspenseful’ in a modern sense, including uncertainties in the narrative outcome, the degree of danger a protagonist faced, anticipation of time, and such like. Their focus was on the reception process, the cognitive activities of the audience, the expectation and curiosity of recipients, and the recipients’ emotions (hope, anxiety, fear, surprise). Audience responses to specific features and characteristics of the text were of crucial importance for ancient authors and playwrights, and for their critics.

Thus, it will be argued, although the term and notion of ‘suspense’ per se was not elaborated upon in ancient criticism, the elements of the text regarded as prerequisite conditions for suspense, and the question how and for what reasons these elements were combined together in order to influence the recipient in a certain way, were discussed and analysed in detail.⁴ In what follows, the categories and criteria of text processing will be discussed, on the levels both of text production and reception, as commented upon by ancient authors such as Old and Middle comic playwrights, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, and later literary critics.

Self-referential deliberations of the poets should not be equated with critical analysis.⁵ The earliest Greek notions connected to text exegesis reveal a growing interest in early Greece in the written (mostly, but not only, Homeric) text, its evaluation and interpretation, and stylistic and hermeneutic analysis. All of these we could define as textual and literary criticism today.⁶ Archaic poetics has been thoroughly investigated.⁷ Many pre-Socratics and sophists engaged in text exegesis, commented on literary techniques and certain text elements.⁸ However, the best surviving evidence for the early development of literary criticism comes from the extant comedies of Aristophanes and from fragmentary Sicilian and Athenian Old Comedy. Playwrights such as Epicharmus, Telecleides, Crates, Cratinus, Eupolis, Strattis, and many others wrote plays on literary themes, commented on their own dramatic technique and on that of their rivals, and played around with notions and theories from contemporary intellectual debates.⁹ Certain criteria emerge from comedy for the evaluation of literary texts and reflect the authors’ own literary tastes and those of their recipients. The approach to text elements that served to create narrative suspense, such as the cognitive state of uncertainty, prospective emotions of hope and fear, surprise, anguish, expectation, keeping recipients’ attention, and desire-frustration, as seen in the critical considerations of ancient authors, will be the focus of this chapter.¹⁰

Modern theory has sought to answer a so-called ‘paradox of suspense’. In what ways might a text with a ‘certain’ and well-known outcome, such as Greek tragic myths, generate feelings of suspense?¹¹ It has been argued that knowledge of the outcome can in certain conditions render a narrative more rather than less suspenseful. As the audience knows what has occurred/will occur to Agamemnon, what Oedipus has learnt/will learn about his past, in other words, as the audience knows what the outcome has been/is going to be and that it has been/will be both awful and tragic, a more suspenseful viewing or reading is guaranteed. The contrast here is with a reading where the outcome would be uncertain. Recent studies in cognitive psychology question the interdependency of suspense and uncertainty and argue that “uncertainty is processed separately as management of the amount of knowledge about the outcome available to the spectator, which acts as a control signal to modulate the input features, but not directly in suspense computing”.¹²

The enigmatic effect of tragedy on the recipient, the evaluation of uncertainty, and the acknowledgement of the awareness of the plot prior to viewing the play had already been questioned in Classical Greece, together with the growth and development of theatre and dramatic performance.¹³ In the only surviving fragment from Antiphanes’ comedy Poiesis (after 388/384 BCE) a character (a comic playwright?) complains about the ‘advantages’ tragic playwrights hold over their rival dramatic genre of comedy (fr. 189.2–4 Kassel/Austin):

[...] εἴ γε πρῶτον οἱ λόγοι

ὑπὸ τῶν θεατῶν εἰσιν ἐγνωρισμένοι,

πρὶν καί τιν’ εἰπεῖν.

Firstly, the plots are known to the spectators before they are uttered.

It is significant that the spectators (to a certain extent) know the myths and thus the tragic solemn plot (the σεμνὸς λόγος according to Crates fr. 28 Kassel/Austin) in advance (πρὶν καί τιν’ εἰπεῖν). Further, Antiphanes formulates the effect on the recipient. When no particular verbal or dramatic means are available and dramatic suspense is reduced, the tragic playwrights, Antiphanes’ character argues, use the theatrical crane as a last resort (fr. 189.13–16):

ἔπειθ’ ὅταν μηδὲν δύνωντ’ εἰπεῖν ἔτι,

κομιδῇ δ’ ἀπειρήκωσιν ἐν τοῖς δράμασιν,

αἴρουσιν ὥσπερ δάκτυλον τὴν μηχανήν,

καὶ τοῖς θεωμένοισιν ἀποχρώντως ἔχει.

And then when they cannot say anything anymore and entirely give up (are lost) in their plays, they raise the theatrical crane like the (middle) finger, and it is enough for the spectators.

The discussion of different effects on the audience as a result of different genres is significant. The genres are opposed and juxtaposed. For the comic playwrights the situation is more complicated than for tragedy, as they lack a range of devices (17, ἡμῖν δὲ ταῦτ’ οὐκ ἔστιν). Whilst tragic playwrights, according to Antiphanes, work with ready material, comedians have to invent plots, the background, names, and the structure with prologue and epilogue and so on (fr. 189.17–21):¹⁴

ἀλλὰ πάντα δεῖ

εὑρεῖν, ὀνόματα καινά — X — U —

X — U — κἄπειτα τὰ † διῳκημένα

πρότερον, τὰ νῦν παρόντα, τὴν καταστροφήν,

τὴν εἰσβολήν.

But we have to invent everything, new names [...] and then † what happened before, what is going on now, the ending, the beginning.

A number of components which help determine the effect on the audience are listed here, the comedian discussing the tools which he employs in his work. The character on stage claims that if a comic character were to forget to employ these tools, he would immediately be criticized by the audience. Tragic characters enjoy much more freedom (fr. 189.21–23):

[...] ἂν ἕν τι τούτων παραλίπῃ

Χρέμης τις ἢ Φείδων τις, ἐκσυρίττεται·

Πηλεῖ δὲ ταῦτ’ ἔξεστι καὶ Τεύκρῳ ποιεῖν.

If one of these (devices/means) a Chremes or a Pheidon leaves out, he is hissed off (the stage); however to Peleus and to Teucrus it is allowed to do this.

We do not know the context in which the comparison takes place, who is speaking, how seriously and/or ironically this statement was intended. However, the very fact of this deliberate generic juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy reveals that the discourse on the production and reception of dramatic effects on stage was significant in Athens. The specific category ‘suspense’ is not mentioned, but the playwrights are interested in what we would today call ‘the paradox of suspense’. Although the outcome is well-known, this information and its modulation do not reduce the eagerness of the recipient to watch until the end. The effect of such knowledge is mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics as well (1451b25–26):

[...] ἐπεὶ καὶ τὰ γνώριμα ὀλίγοις γνώριμά ἐστιν, ἀλλ’ ὅμως εὐφραίνει πάντας.

Even if the well-known (myths) are known to only a few, however, they give pleasure to everyone.

The juxtaposition of the certainty and uncertainty of the outcome, as well as the criterion of uncertainty as a narrative issue, were discussed by ancient critics in various forms. The nearest form of ‘uncertainty’ to the modern notion of ‘suspense’ is the semantic field of ‘hanging/suspending’ in Greek. The verb in passive voice κρέμασθαι (“to be hung up”) and ἀναρτᾶν (“to suspend the recipient’s mind”) belong here.

The locus classicus is the analysis of narrative suspense by the so-called ‘Demetrius’, the author of the treatise On style (2nd cent. BCE – 1st cent. CE). The author comments on suspense discussing the narrative techniques of the 5th/4th-cent. BCE historian Ctesias of Cnidus and his Persica (Eloc. 216):¹⁵

δεῖ τὰ γενόμενα οὐκ εὐθὺς λέγειν, ὅτι ἐγένετο, ἀλλὰ κατὰ μικρόν, κρεμῶντα τὸν ἀκροατὴν καὶ ἀναγκάζοντα συναγωνιᾶν. τοῦτο ὁ Κτησίας ἐν τῇ ἀγγελίᾳ τῇ περὶ Κύρου τεθ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Literary Criticism
• Part II: Archaic Poetry
• Part III: Tragedy
• Part IV: Comedy
• Part V: Historiography
• Part VI: Oratory
• Part VII: Novel
• List of Contributors
• Index Νominum et Rerum
• Index Locorum