Anders Petterson’s phrase denoting “a type of literary work which is generally recognised within a culture, as a special type of work.”9 Rather than defining genre in formalist terms, she argues, we should be viewing the “novel” as an “imaginative mode” with various recurrent features: a concern with boundaries and limits, an attempt to map out morality, an opposition between chastity and prostitution. A “ ‘novelistic’ mode of imagination is one that both heightens and exaggerates things, that simultaneously reveres and degrades women, and that suggests that the domestic . . . as opposed to the mythic is a place for the instauration of significance.”10 Once we view “the novelistic” in this way, then we can begin to see new points of connection with, for example, Nonnus’s Dionysiaca and Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, and with Roman declamations.
This approach, I think, offers both opportunities and risks. Opportunities, because it challenges the misleading view that genres are somehow ontologically nonnegotiable, a view that the disciplinary practices of the modern academy perpetuate. How many undergraduate courses on the ancient novel include Seneca the Elder, Christian martyrology, and Nonnus? Yet as Morales rightly observes, there are all sorts of points of contact between these different works, and a rich cultural history of the imperial age would need to map out the contraflowing traffic between these many different types of text. That very formulation, however, points to the problem: we need to account for difference as well as identity, for it is intuitively implausible to imagine that ancient readers would turn from Longus to a declamation to a hexameter epic without registering any generic jolt. It might be countered that this jolt occurs because of the generically determined nature of declamation and epic and not of novel/romance, which lacks decisive formal (e.g., epic’s meter and diction) and contextual markers (e.g., a sophistic auditorium, in the case of declamation). Here I would agree up to a point: novelistic writing in general is uniquely fluid and multifarious, generically speaking. But within the broad category of “the novelistic,” the romance is, I think, coherently generic. This, indeed, is precisely why we can feel the hybridity of an erotic epic like Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, which imports motifs (and the titling convention) from the romance:11 the effect depends on the reader’s ability to perceive that process of generic cross-pollination, which itself implies an awareness of romance as a distinct literary identity. My argument, then—yet to be fully substantiated—is that Morales is right about “the novelistic” as a general category, but that romance operates according to tighter generic rules. This does not mean that there are no ambiguous cases: clearly Iamblichus’s Babyloniaca, for example, was a heterosexual romance but also a radical experiment in setting and content (and length). But as with Hero and Leander, the fact of the Babyloniaca’s generic experimentation reinforces the argument that there was a genre to experiment with.
My discussion above has, in fact, effected a small but significant shift in definition. What Morales resists, quite rightly, is a conservative, rigid, formalist conception of genre. Yet genre should not be thought of in this way, as an intrinsic property of individual texts, like a gene that can be sequenced; it is, rather, a relationship between texts, a relationship invoked for specific, tactical reasons and to shape the reader’s literary reception of the work in question. It is—this is Fowler’s central point—a communicative device rather than a classificatory one.12 Indeed, it might be said that genre is essential to all human communication, to the extent that (as Mikhail Bakhtin argued) speech has its own genres, each with their own sets of expectations that can be met, intermixed, flouted, or rewritten (greeting, thanking, joking, etc.)13 Literature, in a similar but arguably much more complex way, rests on a contract of accepted rules between author and reader: a contract that is unwritten, certainly, and can be reneged on or rewritten, but is always there. It is this contract that dictates whether a particular action or utterance within a text is received as vraisemblable or transgressive. “Our intuitive sense of this vraisemblance is extremely powerful,” writes Jonathan Culler. “We know, for example, that it would be totally inappropriate for one of Corneille’s heroes to say, ‘I’m fed up with all these problems and shall go and become a silversmith in a provincial town.’ Actions are plausible or implausible with respect to the norms of a group of works.”14 Corneille’s fed-up hero would be acting in much the same way as a real-life person who, when offered a hand to shake, responded with a punch to the belly: both would be in effect breaching a generic contract (or perhaps in the second case refusing to accept one).
Let us at this stage dispose of a potential objection. It is true that extant Greek lacks any consistently attested word for designating the ideal romance.15 In fact, there is not even any consistent word for novel: the best candidate, dramatikon (diēgēma) (dramatic [story]), does not appear before Photius in the ninth century C.E. and even then seems to refer to the “dramatic” aspects of the plot (sufferings and reversals of fortune) rather than to anything distinctive to this kind of text.16 At first blush the absence of any name for or theorization of the novels or the romances would seem to support the view that the boundaries of the genre were not clearly defined. Yet we can plausibly explain the absence of any explicit label in our pre-Byzantine sources by other means. As one recent critic has observed (in the context of a different kind of argument), the labor of classification was the legacy of Hellenistic Alexandria, an earlier phase in the cultural history of Greek literature. Genre names are not attached to other innovations of the imperial period either: for example Lucian’s comic dialogues and Aristides’s prose hymns.17 The absence of an attested ancient name, therefore, is not decisive, and we can proceed with the hypothesis that ideal romance thus constitutes a genre in much the same way that (e.g.) Latin love elegy does: although undertheorized in ancient criticism, indiscriminately cannibalistic in its approach to other literatures (in respect to both form and content), and tolerant of all kinds of hybridizations (e.g., Ovid’s Fasti), it nevertheless rests on distinctive and recognizable conventions of generic vraisemblance.
So what is the positive evidence for a romance genre? The answer lies in the texts themselves, but we shall not find it through exhaustive itemization of lieux communs. The best place to look for generic thinking is, as I have already intimated, in those moments where the generic contract is transgressed: where the effect depends on perceptible refusal to meet readerly expectations or on contamination of different generic codes. Indeed, I would submit that it is here, at the borders, that generic identities are at once most securely determined and most open to revision. They are securely determined, on the one hand, in that acts of transgression reinforce our awareness of the very norms they transgress. Let’s return to Culler’s example of the fed-up hero of Corneille who wishes to retrain as a silversmith: this example highlights the classicizing, aristocratic conventions of action in the French tragic theater. But at the same time (this is where the revision comes in) such an instance would effectively rewrite the rules of the genre for future tragedians. Such cases of aggressively ostentatious rule breaking are relatively rare: Euripides’s Alcestis represents one example from literary history. But minor adjustments of generic codes happen all the time: this is what makes literature fresh, nimble, and inventive rather than repetitively hidebound. And as a result, generic codes are always in process. “Every literary work,” writes Fowler, “changes the genres it relates to. . . . Consequently, all genres are continuously undergoing metamorphosis.”18
This, I think, is the crucial point, and it bears emphasizing. Classicists have been far too prone to assess the validity of the romance genre synchronically, as though we should be asking the same questions of the earliest texts as of the later ones. It is (to exaggerate, but only marginally) as if we were to put together a magic lantern show, Casablanca, and Avatar and ask whether the category “Hollywood blockbuster” worked for all of them. What we need instead is an account of genre that respects the diachronic fluctuations and the way in which each new novel both projects its predecessors as paradigmatic and signals its own generic reinventions.
I cannot, in the compass of a single chapter, map out this process in its entirety, but let me make some general observations and visit some particular instances. For the remainder of this chapter, I shall consider three stages in the history of the romance: the initial phase, namely Chariton’s Callirhoe and Xenophon’s Anthia and Habrocomes; Achilles Tatius’s
