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Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster (1927)

‘Aspects of the Novel’ is based on a series of weekly lectures which E. M. Forster gave at Trinity College Cambridge in 1927, in which he discussed the English novel. Forster used examples from classic novels to describe what he claimed to be the seven universal aspects of the novel, namely:

  • story
  • characters
  • plot
  • fantasy
  • prophecy
  • pattern
  • rhythm

The book was mocked when I was a student for its rambling, amateurish, belle-lettreist approach, lacking all reference to any kind of smart theory. Forster knew it lacked intellectual depth and modestly described it as ‘a ramshackly survey’, but he deprecates to deceive. Although eschewing scholarship and expertise, he says many interesting things, and it’s fascinating to read the comments on eminent books and authors by one of themselves.

Introduction

Forster doesn’t make grand statements or general rules, in fact he’s all about how difficult it is to define or discuss the novel. What, even, is a novel?

He adapts the suggestion of Monsieur Abel Chevalley that it is ‘a fiction in prose of a certain length’, adding it probably needs to be over 50,000 words long. He doesn’t say this, but the issue reminds me of all those Joseph Conrad stories which are too long to be short stories but don’t quite make Forster’s word count. ‘Heart of Darkness’ is 37,906 words long. Is it a novel or a novella? D.H. Lawrence wrote half a dozen works more complex than short stories, but without the full weight and length of novels, so they are called novellas.

Forster wants to talk about the ‘English’ novel, so what does ‘English’ mean in this context? Does it refer to the country? No. To any long fiction work written in English.

It’s notable that Forster doesn’t worry about the implications of American fiction swamping British fiction. In 1927 maybe it was still seen as the poor relation. He’s much more concerned with the influence on the English novel of the Continent. But this, he says, is in fact negligible. English fictions writers are sometimes influenced by the French, but rarely by the Spanish, Italian, Germans or any other national literature. In this, as everything else, the English are insular and generally hold aloof from the Continent.

But he makes a few chastening points about English fiction in a nominal league table of achievement:

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy—that is to say has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

English poetry is world class. English fiction less so. He cites Bronte, Hardy, Gaskell, Meredith and says they’re fine in their way, often give vivid portraits of particularly English areas and types. But set next to War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov? No.

He is extremely averse to the notion of ‘periods’ (the Victorian novel, ‘Edwardian fiction’ etc) much beloved by academics. Ditto the idea of ‘influence’, that this or that writer is writing under, or seeking to evade, the influence of this or that other writer.

Forster prefers to think of all the writers he deals with sitting in the British Library Reading Room with pens in hand, at the same time, dealing with the same kinds of problems, unaffected by their times or predecessors, an attitude he summarises as:

History develops, Art stands still.

A note on scholarship. Genuine scholarship, defined as having read everything in your subject and something from around the fringes and having taste and discrimination, is extremely rare. Most people are pseudo-scholars who know about particular authors or periods. This is why pseudo-scholarship likes specialising in particular periods, or authors, or subjects, and compiles a mocking list.

The literature of Inns, beginning with Tom Jones; the literature of the Women’s Movement, beginning with Shirley; the literature of Desert Islands, from Robinson Crusoe to The Blue Lagoon; the literature of Rogues—dreariest of all, though the Open Road runs it pretty close…

Obviously all these objections have been swept away by a century of pseudo-scholarship. His approach is going to be to quote from various classic novelists and make comments.

He gives passages from Samuel Richardson and Henry James before making the point that both are anxious rather than ardent psychologists. Each is sensitive to suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice but falls short of the tragic, though a close approach is made.

Then H.G. Wells (Mr Polly) and Dickens (Great Expectations). They are both humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details. They are generous-minded and hate shams. They are valuable social reformers. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears. Neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells.

Then Tristram Shandy and Virginia Woolf. They are both fantasists. They start with a little object, take a flutter from it, and settle on it again. They combine a humorous appreciation of the muddle of life with a keen sense of its beauty. There is a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all and sundry that they do not know where they are going. But their tones are very different. Sterne is a sentimentalist, Virginia Woolf is extremely aloof. Virginia Woolf’s her aim and general effect both resemble Sterne’s (discuss).

Technique changes and develops. Sterne and Woolf may have certain things in common but Woolf’s way of expressing them is more developed and advanced.

Anti-theory (obviously). The Bloomsbury emphasis on friendship and affection as the ultimate moral criteria.

Principles and systems may suit other forms of art, but they cannot be applicable here… I am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Sentimentality… will lurk in the background saying, ‘Oh, but I like that,’ ‘Oh, but that doesn’t appeal to me,’ and all I can promise is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon. The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided. The novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism.

Story

The basis of a novel is a story, and a story is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence

He postulates three (rather wishy-washy silly) attitudes to story in the novel, and says his one is:

Yes — oh, dear, yes — the novel tells a story.

He is really against the need for a story in a novel. Some call it the backbone of the text, but he calls it the tapeworm. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.

He calls it the ‘low atavistic form’ and paints a picture of the crudest Neanderthal people sitting round a fire at the end of a day hunting mammoth and being enthralled by the group’s resident storyteller, the urge to tell goes back that far and the urge to hang on each development of the plot.

The classic example is the Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade tells a story each night but ends abruptly when the sun rises, this keeping her wicked husband in perpetual suspense to hear what happens next.

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other literary judgments are ludicrous. And now the story can be defined. It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence — dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms. Yet it is the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.

He then posits two ways of thinking about time. One is pure chronology, one event after another, what he calls the time-sense. But there is also ‘life by values’ where we live for, and remember, only certain special intense moments. The cheapest novels (typically, detective novels and thrillers) exist simply to tell what happens next. More sophisticated examples dwell on values i.e. on the special moments, for example turning points, in characters’ lives. Thus the novel has a double allegiance, to life by time and life by values.

But no matter how much you prefer the values approach, you can never relinquish plot. The novelist must cling, however lightly, to the thread of their story, they must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise they become unintelligible.

One novelist has tried to abandon all signs of plot, Gertrude Stein who ‘hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values only.’

She fails because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all… [it was a noble experiment but doomed to failure because] the time-sequence cannot be destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless.

Back to the basic need for a story, Walter Scott is a prime example of a storyteller which is why Forster doesn’t like him. Scott has ‘a trivial mind and a heavy style.’ He cannot construct. He has neither artistic detachment nor passion. He only has a temperate heart and gentlemanly feelings, and an intelligent affection for the country-side and this is not basis enough for great novels.

Forster gives a long summary of the plot of Scott’s (1816), the third of the Waverley novels to show how one damn thing happens after another, Scott deploying characters’ comings and goings purely to extend the plot, till he runs out of steam and ties everything up with the wedding of the nice young people. It is a classic example of a novelist focusing on ‘the life in time’, which leads to ‘slackening of emotion and shallowness of judgment, and in particular to that idiotic use of marriage as a finale’.

He compares this with Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale which is a book dominated by time: ‘Time is the real hero of The Old Wives’ Tale’, showing the growth and ageing and death of the lead female characters. This has more integrity and depth than Scott plonking down event after event but, in the end, isn’t enough. The Old Wives Tale is ‘strong, sincere and sad but misses greatness.’

He contrasts both these with Tolstoy’s War and Peace which also shows characters growing old but makes the interesting point that the hero of Tolstoy’s novel is not time but space, the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them.

Many novelists have the feeling for place — Five Towns (Bennett), Auld Reekie (Scott), and so on. Very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy’s divine equipment. Space is the lord of ‘War and Peace’, not time.

A note about ‘voice’. Forster reverts to his description of:

the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the audience falls asleep among their offal and bones. The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us.

People

Characters are ‘word masses’ arranged and grouped by the writer, given characteristic gestures or phrases, and assigned names and slowly accumulating into characters.

What is the difference between people in life and people in books? History gives us the outward actions of people. Only the novelist can take us inside minds to show their motivation.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life.

He suggests there are five basic facts of human existence: birth, food, sleep, love and death (you could add others, but these seem central), then gives a brief description of each.

About birth we know nothing and Forster is surprised how few novelists really describe it or the mental state of the baby or infant. Tristram Shandy and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stand out as two exceptions.

Death on the other hand, is extremely popular with novelists, for two practical reasons. 1) The death of a character in the middle of the story can be used to trigger emotion; 2) death of the main character is a handy and time-honoured way to end the story. He doesn’t mention them, but think of the tragedies of the ancient world.

Food is strangely ignored in fiction; often characters just eat something, sometimes provender is ignored for pages and days.

Sleep is also usually neglected in fiction. We all sleep for about a third of our lives, yet fiction ignores this unless it needs to mention disturbed sleep or specific dreams.

Love:

You all know how enormously love bulks in novels, and will probably agree with me that it has done them harm and made them monotonous. Why has this particular experience, especially in its sex form, been transplanted in such generous quantities?

( Forster has no answer but I have: Darwin. Of course we obsess about love (and sex) because it is one of our deepest biological imperatives, to mate and breed, and even after breeding the imperative (in men at any rate) to mate and ejaculate continues as an urgent force until the end of our lives. Women on the other hand, bearers of babies for nine long months and then their carers for decades afterwards, naturally want to marry well, and so spend an inordinate amount of time picking and choosing who to marry / mate with. It is the theme of all Jane Austen’s novels.)

Back to Forster, he sees two reasons why love is so monotonously prominent in fictions:

1) As part of the general over-sensitiveness of all fictional characters:

The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other — even in writers called robust like Fielding — is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure. Passion, intensity at moments — yes, but not this constant awareness, this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe that these are the reflections of the novelist’s own state of mind while he composes, and that the predominance of love in novels is partly because of this.

2) We wish love to be perfect. This is one reason so many narratives end in marriage, while the future is imagined to be a perfect harmony which the reality of being married, obviously, undermines. Ending narratives with marriage is ending with hope and promise.

He introduces the entertaining concept of Homo fictus. He

is generally born off, he is capable of dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships. And — most important — we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one.

He ends with an extended meditation on the character of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, admiring her good sense, high spirits, kindness and humour. He thinks Moll Flanders is an:

example of a novel, in which a character is everything and is given freest play. Defoe makes a slight attempt at a plot with the brother-husband as a centre, but he is quite perfunctory, and her legal husband (the one who took her on the jaunt to Oxford) just disappears and is heard of no more. Nothing matters but the heroine; she stands in an open space like a tree, and having said that she seems absolutely real from every point of view.

He asks when do we feel that a character in a book is ‘real’?

It is real when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose to tell us all he knows — many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.

I was really comforted by Forster’s explanation. I worry all the time that I don’t really ‘get’ people, the people at work and people in social situations (at the school pickup, at parties). I worry all the time that I don’t understand people and so am saying the wrong thing. It is precisely because novels give us the illusion that we can and do understand people, that we find them so comforting. This is Forster’s view.

Human intercourse… is… haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly and… can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. [Fictional characters] are… people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible. And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

They give us the comforting illusion that life is more ‘manageable’ than, in reality, it actually is. Or indeed, more explicable.

People (part 2): types of character and points of view

But Moll is an exception. She is a solitary. Most characters in most novels exist in relationship to a number of characters. Taking them out of context is like taking half the bushes out of a mature and well planned shrubbery: everything looks sparse and bare as a result. Their canny arrangement is the key.

But characters can be anarchic. Given too much vigour they can destroy the plan and lopside the plot.

1. Two types of character, flat and round

Flat characters used to be called humours or caricatures, can be summarised in a line.

Flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere — little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars… He is the idea, and such life as he possesses radiates from its edges and from the scintillations it strikes when other elements in the novel impinge.

They are often more memorable than main characters precisely because they don’t change and so comforting or reassuring.

All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art. We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on this account.

The special case of Dickens, almost all of whose characters are ‘flat’, yet his incredible vitality gives his books an amazing depth. Similarly most of H.G. Wells’s characters are flat but come to life because of the author’s tremendous brio. Dickens and Wells are good at transmitting force which animates everything, even when they’re only puppets.

Why are Jane Austen’s characters round?

She is a miniaturist, but never two-dimensional. All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity… her characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate… All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily.

The test:

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat.

2. Point of view

He cites Percy Lubbock who said point of view is the central weapon in the novelist’s armoury and defined three types:

  • from outside characters, as an onlooker
  • omniscience i.e. can describe everything from within
  • take the part of one of the characters and be in the dark about the motives of all the others

Forster thinks this privileging of point of view is a symptom of ‘critics’ wanting to make The Novel a special case with its own rules and techniques. Personally, he thinks it less important than a proper mix of characters and the writer’s ability to ‘bounce’ us into believing them.

Gide’s ‘Les Faux Monnayeurs’ plays with different points of view and tactics but is too clever to be involving.

The Plot

Aristotle thought character was revealed through action, but then he was talking about drama, the stage. Forster thinks action (the plot) is less important for the novel.

A story is a series of events. A plot is a series of events with some element of causality and explanation involved. Curiosity is enough to understand a story (‘when happened next?’). Understanding a plot requires memory (for facts scattered earlier) and intelligence (to piece together and interpret them).

George Meredith is now unfashionable but was once, around 1900, all the rage. Forster thinks he is one of the great contrivers of plots. His contrivances are plausible and they alter characters.

A writer who is far greater than Meredith, and yet less successful as a novelist — Thomas Hardy. Hardy seems to me essentially a poet, who conceives of his novels from an enormous height. They are to be tragedies or tragi-comedies, they are to give out the sound of hammer-strokes as they proceed; in other words Hardy arranges events with emphasis on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the characters are ordered to acquiesce in its requirements. Except in the person of Tess (who conveys the feeling that she is greater than destiny) this aspect of his work is unsatisfactory. His characters are involved in various snares, they are finally bound hand and foot, there is ceaseless emphasis on fate, and yet, for all the sacrifices made to it, we never see the action as a living thing as we see it in Antigone or Berenice or The Cherry Orchard.

Most novels are feeble at the end because the plot takes over. The novelist needs to end the thing and so character and other aspects are all put on hold while the bits and pieces of the plot are tied up. Which is why novel ending are so often flat and disappointing.

Forster devotes five pages to describing Gide’s attempts to deconstruct novel writing in ‘Les Faux Monnayeurs’ which, I must say, sound contrived and clunky.

Fantasy

There is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than Fate. And by ‘more’ I do not mean something that excludes these aspects nor something that includes them, embraces them. I mean something that cuts across them like a bar of light, that is intimately connected with them at one place and patiently illumines all their problems, and at another place shoots over or through them as if they did not exist. We shall give that bar of light two names, fantasy and prophecy.

His sections on fantasy and prophecy are suddenly incoherent, under-developed. He gives no very useful definition of fantasy. He sounds very like Forster in introducing the notion of fauns and dryads and Pan: this sounds like his strange short stories. He also sounds like Forster in claiming the great god Muddle stands behind Tristram Shandy. This is the first place where I felt his opinion was inadequate and embarrassing.

He gives a long rather embarrassing summary of a now unknown book called ‘Flecker’s Magic’, by Norman Matson, in which a boy is given a wishing ring by a witch etc. He goes on to summarise and quote Max Beebohm’s fantastical comic novel ‘Zuleika Dobson’, ‘a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical’. His quotes make it sound tiresome. Much has happened to the genre of Fantasy over the past 100 years to make his comments seem vain.

Parody. Very useful for the type of writer who has a lot to say but doesn’t take to creating characters: they can simply parody someone else’s. After mentioning Lowes Dickinson’s book ‘The Magic Flute’ he wastes a couple of pages giving a surprisingly unsympathetic summary of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. I was disappointed to see Forster takes the Bloomsbury / Virginia Woolf line that Ulysses is a book about dirt and smut:

It is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, it is an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell (!).. an epic of grubbiness and disillusion.

He thinks the aim of the book is ‘to degrade all things and more particularly civilization and art, by turning them inside out and upside down’. On this page I stopped respecting Forster’s opinion and realised how trapped he is in his timid, bourgeois English tea-party provincialism.

Prophecy

When the author wants to say something about the universe, a visionary, bardic strain. It is predominantly a tone of voice. To fully appreciate it you have to suspend your sense of humour, your sense of the absurd. He mentions D.H. Lawrence in this regard.

He quotes a long passage from ‘Adam Bede’ by George Eliot and makes the sage point that her writing depends on her ‘massiveness,’ because ‘she has no nicety of style’. Then a passage from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to show what it means to say that Dostoyevsky was a prophet. It means that everything means more than it says, reaches out to have cosmic implications.

We are not concerned with the prophet’s message, or rather (since matter and manner cannot be wholly separated) we are concerned with it as little as possible. What matters is the accent of his voice, his song.

Fantasy is diffuse, sparkles with fragments, whereas prophecy is focused on a great central vision. Fantasy is more often than not funny whereas prophecy requires suspension of humour.

Forster gives an extended summary of Herbert Melville’s classic novel ‘Moby Dick’, dwelling on its visionary prophetic character. It is more song than novel. And he adds a summary of the short story ‘Billy Budd’. Both of them are allegories of good and evil (though he doesn’t use the word allegory).

He makes the striking point that Melville wasn’t hampered by a conscience ‘that tiresome little receptacle… which is often such a nuisance in serious writers and so contracts their effects.’

Then D.H. Lawrence, ‘the only prophetic novelist writing today’. He makes the shrewd point that Lawrence was also a preacher and lots of people are irritated or angered by the preaching. But the real writer lies ‘far, far back’ behind the surface antagonisms and speaks with the voice of the Norse god Balder.

The prophet is irradiating nature from within, so that every colour has a glow and every form a distinctness which could not otherwise be obtained. Take a scene that always stays in the memory: that scene in ‘Women in Love’ where one of the characters throws stones into the water at night to shatter the image of the moon. Why he throws, what the scene symbolizes, is unimportant. But the writer could not get such a moon and water otherwise; he reaches them by his special path which stamps them as more wonderful than any we can imagine. It is the prophet back where he started from, back where the rest of us are waiting by the edge of the pool, but with a power of re-creation and evocation we shall never possess.

He rightly realises that Lawrence writes as if from an entirely new world.

He ends with ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë. It is a book of storms, visions and prophetic tone of voice. The notorious thing about ‘Wuthering Heights’ is that no one can remember the plot, they just remember the giant passion of the central characters.

Pattern and Rhythm

He discusses some books with patterns: the hour glass of ‘Thais’ Anatole France in which two characters swap plights; the daisy chain in ‘Roman Pictures’ by Percy Lubbock in which one character is passed along through a sequence of encounters with others.

Pattern and Henry James

Far more complicated is ‘The Ambassadors’ by Henry James. He summarises the plot and has a few words of praise for James:

He is so good at indicating instantaneously and constantly that a character is second rate, deficient in sensitiveness, abounding in the wrong sort of worldliness; he gives such a character so much vitality that its absurdity is delightful.

Like a lot of people I am put off reading James by the reputation for hyper-sensibility which surrounds him and then, on the few occasions I’ve tried, have struggled to penetrate through the prose and understand what is going on. So it is a relief to read Forster’s criticisms of The Master.

The basic one is that 1) James wrote works of art but at the cost of leaving most of human life out of them. And then 2) Forster says he has a very restricted number of character types who recur in all his novels, namely:

  • the observer who tries to influence the action
  • the second-rate outsider
  • the sympathetic foil, very lively and frequently female
  • the wonderful rare heroine
  • sometimes a villain
  • sometimes a young artist with generous impulses

Forster’s summary is comic: ‘And that is about all. For so fine a novelist it is a poor show.’ And then 3):

The characters, beside being few in number, are constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income, their servants are noiseless or resemble themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible for them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James’s pages — maimed yet specialized.

As interesting as Forster’s points is the vivid way he expresses them:

The longer James worked, the more convinced he grew that a novel should be a whole—not necessarily geometric like The Ambassadors, but it should accrete round a single topic, situation, gesture, which should occupy the characters and provide a plot, and should also fasten up the novel on the outside—catch its scattered statements in a net, make them cohere like a planet, and swing through the skies of memory.

And:

Put Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon into a Henry James book, and the book will burn to ashes.

Conclusion:

Though they [Henry James characters] are not dead — certain selected recesses of experience he explores very well — they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in other books, and ourselves. And this castrating is not in the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no philosophy in the novels, no religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular æsthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.

H.G. Wells wrote a very funny satire of James which he cheerfully sent to The Master and was surprised when James was profoundly upset. Wells thinks the novel should overflow with people and ideas and life. Interestingly, Forster concludes:

My own prejudices are with Wells. The James novels are a unique possession and the reader who cannot accept his premises misses some valuable and exquisite sensations. But I do not want more of his novels.

So James demonstrates the limitations of seeking Pattern, which is to say, seeking formal Beauty, in a novel. The chances are: the more Beauty, the less life and humanity.

To put it in other words, the novel is not capable of as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness of its material hinder it (use whichever phrase you like). To most readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to justify the sacrifices that made it.

Rhythms large and small

Two types of rhythm, large and small, macro and micro.

Micro rhythms Proust has examples of micro rhythms but not macro. Forster makes the bold claim that ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ ‘is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.’

By rhythms what he appears to mean are recurring facts, connections and coincidences. He gives the specific example of a phrase from a piece of music which recurs only at long intervals of hundreds of pages:

Rhythm can develop, and the little phrase has a life of its own, unconnected with the lives of its auditors, as with the life of the man who composed it. It is almost an actor, but not quite, and that ‘not quite’ means that its power has gone towards stitching Proust’s book together from the inside, and towards the establishment of beauty and the ravishing of the reader’s memory. There are times when the little phrase — from its gloomy inception, through the sonata into the sextet — means everything to the reader. There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.

Macro rhythms Very large scale repetitions and shape as in a classical symphony (in this case, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). In fact, very candidly, Forster tells us he can’t think of an example of this macro rhythm in fiction.

Maybe in drama because drama is more tightly structured, in drama characters submit to the dramatic shape which is known from the start. But fiction, as he sweetly puts it, ‘Human beings have their great chance in the novel.’

Early on, in the chapter about plots, Forster lamented that novels have to end, pointing out how lifeless the endings of most novels are, as the logic of closing the plot overrides the human vitality which has preceded it. Now, at the end of the book, he returns to the same idea. He says that at the end of a performance of a Beethoven symphony you hear chords or sense shapes which were never actually expressed in the music, which tower behind it. Then optimistically wishes the same kind of aesthetic effect could be achieved in a more open-ended type of fiction.

Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out.

When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not there something of it in ‘War and Peace’? the book with which we began and in which we must end. Such an untidy book. Yet, as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished does not every item even the catalogue of strategies – lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?

Conclusion

It’s fashionable to make predictions about The Future of the Novel but he won’t. All sorts of scientific discoveries and social transformations may occur but the task of the novelist will stay broadly the same. He repeats his motto: ‘History develops, art stands still.’ He imagines human nature will remain pretty fixed but gives himself a slight glimmer of hope.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect…

Maybe he meant his friends in the Bloomsbury Group, overinflating, as they all did, their own importance. Anyway, the state and the family have hardly been abolished because it seems like we need both of them. Organised religion, on the other hand, the personal repression, legal persecution and censorship exercised in the name of the Church of England, have largely withered away, like the Church itself. But, it turns out, via social media, the philistine press and other, rising religious organisations, we have invented new ways to judge and censor ourselves. That will never change.

As to The Future of the Novel, despite a century of pessimistic prognostications, this year, 2024, more novels than ever before were published. The Novel is doing fine.

Thoughts

1. Style

Only towards the end of the book did I notice the absence of Style from his handful of aspects. Style, the order of words in the sentence, the way sentences are assembled into paragraphs, is probably the aspect of novels which interests me most. It feels like Forster consciously avoided it, knowing what a minefield it is.

2. Forster’s oddly strange or incisive phrasing

Forster almost goes out of his way to appear a gentlemanly old buffer, an amiable old cove, and yet his writing often contains disconcerting turns of phrase and thought, which seem unexpectedly modern, harsh or violent.

In his fiction this is most obvious in the short stories, which are surprisingly weird, but these oddities crop up continually in everything he writes. For example, his opening comparison of ‘the story’ to a tapeworm. Here are some other oddities:

We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of view about both. But it is all from the outside, and the two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so, because their apparatus for communicating their experiences is not attuned to our apparatus for reception.

Then food, the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.

When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of having been posted.

[Characters] are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.

One of our foremost writers, Mr. Norman Douglas, is a critic of this type, and the passage from him which I will quote puts the case against flat characters in a forcible fashion. The passage occurs in an open letter to D. H. Lawrence, with whom he is quarrelling: a doughty pair of combatants, the hardness of whose hitting makes the rest of us feel like a lot of ladies up in a pavilion.

Credit

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster was published 1927 by Edward Arnold. References are to the 1962 Pelican paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 24, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 24, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/01/24/aspects-of-the-novel-e-m-forster/

The poems of Propertius translated by Ronald Musker

He errs who expects the madness of love to end;
Love that is true can know no measure…
In life I shall always be hers; in death
I shall be hers still.
(Book 2, elegy 15)

Robert Maltby’s introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of the elegies of Tibullus is outstanding in its clarity and authority and includes elements which make a good introduction to Propertius, too.

Maltby explains that in the last decades of the first century BC, Rome was home to a small cohort of leading Roman poets who took the Greek metre associated with elegies and which had come to be called ‘elegiacs’, and repurposed them as vehicles to describe very personal (or personal sounding) love affairs. Or, in Propertius’s words:

Priestlike I lead the way from the crystal spring
To adapt Italian rites to Grecian measures.
(3.1)

To repeat what I wrote in the Tibullus review:

What is an elegy?

The modern sense of ‘elegy’ as a lament for the dead only crystallised during the 16th century. Two thousand years ago, for the ancient Greeks and Romans the word had a much wider definition – elegies could cover a wide range of subject matter (death, love, war).

The defining feature of them was that they were written in elegiac couplets or ‘elegiacs’, which consist of a dactylic hexameter line followed by a dactylic pentameter line i.e. six ‘feet’ in the first line, five in the second. In English it looks like this, 6 beats, followed by 5:

My girl is now held hostage by a surly guard (6)
and her stout door is shut and bolted tight. (5)

I’ve often tried to banish pains of love with wine,
but sorrow turned the uncut wine to tears.

Obviously you’re not meant to say it out loud emphasising these beats, that would be silly. It’s just a structuring device, a convention, a code buried under the words, a rhythm you’re meant to be only dimly aware of, if at all, which gives a subliminal sense of regularity and rhythm.

The effect of a long line followed by a slightly shorter one was to create a kind of dying fall, repeated every two lines – hence its attraction for poets who wanted to write an elegy in our sense, a lament for someone who’d died, and the elegiac couplet was in fact the metre used for writing funeral inscriptions and sometimes examples of these were included in elegiac poems. However, the most famous of the Roman elegists copied the way that late Greek or Hellenistic poets had taken to using it to express personal and often ‘amatory’ subject matter.

The variation between the two lines helped to build the impression that elegiac couplets were more appropriate for the expression of ‘direct and immediate concerns’ i.e. the poet’s personal life, than a poem written entirely in hexameters, which was felt to be the metre for continuous narrative, as in Homer’s epics.

Catullus (84 to 54 BC) was the first Roman poet to co-opt the form from the Greek Hellenistic poets and adapt it to Latin for his scandalous love poems and execrations. Catullus was followed by Tibullus (55 to 18 BC, in his elegies), Propertius (50 to 16 BC in his elegies) and Ovid (43 BC to 18 AD, in a series of works, namely the Amores, Heroides, Tristia and Letters from Pontus).

Elegiacs as love poems

The classic Roman elegists used the form to write love poems, often surprisingly candid about their own love affairs. The convention quickly arose of devoting some or all of the poems to a Beloved Mistress, who receives the poet’s devotion despite being often capricious or antagonistic.

‘Your theme shall be flower-wreathed lovers at someone’s door,
And the signs they leave of their drunken flight through the night…’
(The Muse Calliope telling Propertius what his subject should be, book 3, elegy 3)

Catullus (b.84 BC) can be said to have invented many aspects of this convention in his poems to ‘Lesbia’, universally taken as a pseudonym for the Roman aristocrat Clodia Metelli with whom he (if the poems are to be believed) had a passionate affair and then an equally emotional falling-out. (Catullus and Lesbia are mentioned a couple of times by Propertius; he consciously compares his love for Cynthia with Catullus’s for Lesbia, 2.32, 2.34C).

In the next generation Tibullus (b.55 BC) is a little unusual in addressing elegiacs to three figures, two women and a boy. The dates of publication of Tibullus’s two books interlink with the first books by Propertius. Propertius (b.50 BC) is more typical in addressing most of his elegies to just the one figure, who he names ‘Cynthia’. A little later, Ovid (b.43 BC), wrote love elegiacs addressing a figure named ‘Corinna’, though there is widespread agreement that she probably didn’t exist but was a poetic convention.

In Maltby’s opinion Ovid rang pretty much every possible permutation on the use of elegiac as love poem and made it obvious that he was experimenting with the form for its own sake. Maltby thinks he used it up and hollowed it out and as a result the metre fell out of fashion.

Publishing in ancient Rome

Using the word ‘publishing’ gives a misleading impression. There were no printing presses in the West for another 1,500 years. ‘Publishing’ meant that a hand-written manuscript of the text was given to secretaries or amanuenses to copy out in full, by hand, on rolls of papyrus. These rolls were then rolled up and slipped into tubular containers. A library’ consisted of numerous tubes containing manuscripts.

As this implies, not many copies were made, generally scores, rarely into the hundreds. There was no question of making money from this process. The aim was a) if you were rich, to gain a reputation among the people who counted, the educated class or b) if you were less well-off (as Virgil, Horace and Propertius were) to win the patronage of a rich sponsor, as all three were lucky enough to do with Maecenas, who gave land, property and money to both Horace and Virgil.

Ronald Musker’s introduction

I read Propertius’s poems in the 1972 Everyman edition translated by Ronald Musker. In his introduction Musker points out that Propertius came from the equestrian class i.e. the second rank of the aristocracy below the senatorial class. His family had extensive lands in north-central Italy but, like many of his class and generation, lost a substantial amount during the enforced confiscations of Octavian after the Battle of Phillippi.

Too early you gathered up your father’s ashes;
And you had to accept a straitened hearth and home,
For many an ox had turned your rich lands over,
But the ruthless surveying rod took your wealth away. (4.1)

It also appears from one of the elegies, that a close relative or perhaps guardian was killed in the bitter localised civil war known as the Perugine War because it ended up with the rebels (led by Mark Anthony’s wife and brother) holed up and besieged by Octavian’s forces in the city of Perugia, near Propertius’s birthplace. Musker considers the trauma of these events may explain the tone of melancholy which recurs throughout his poems.

In Rome young Sextus Propertius was a friend of fellow poets Gallus and Virgil and, through them, was adopted by the renowned patron of the arts, Gaius Maecenas. His poems survive in 4 books containing around 92 poems. Actually the number varies because editors of book 2 in particular think some poems are jumbled together which must once have been separate poems and so snip and separate them; other scholars disagree; hence the difficulty of giving an exact number.

The translator, Musker, appears to have given each poem a tabloid-style title, which aren’t in the original. These are actually quite helpful in distinguishing between them and indicating the topic of each poem at a glance.

Book 1, 25 BC (23 poems)

Cynthia is the main subject, the first word of the first poem and mentioned in over half the other poems. The poems proceed through the set subjects and attitudes of the afflicted male love for his mistress, including mad declarations of love, promises to be true, lists of her achievements and perfections, jealousy of other men, despair at being abandoned, rage at being abandoned, laments on why women are so fickle and/or easily bought by rich men with shiny trinkets – and so on.

It includes a paraclausithyron i.e a poem describing the lover at the locked door of his beloved. Apparently, Propertius’s version of this is a novelty because he has the door itself speak – we get the door’s point of view, a rather cutting description of the wretched poet pining outside.

I noticed, reading Propertius, that the way these poets created the bulk of a poem, most of its content, is to address a friend, sometimes a rival or enemy – either calling them to witness aspects of your sorrow and affliction, or giving wise advice to them if they fall in love, or any other kind of address.

This conceit of addressing the poem to a pal a) makes it more dynamic b) makes it more like a speech than a solitary meditation. At many points a poem reminded me of Cicero’s legal speeches. All of them, without exception, make a case.

Also, addressing a friend in a poem makes it very public because you have to respect politeness and decorum. The two friends whose names crop up most frequently are Gallus and Tullus, apparently, historically verified real people.

Why, Bassus, by praising all these other girls
Must you try to change me… (1.4)

Put an end, my envious friend, to your tiresome talk… (1.5)

I am not afraid, my Tullus, to learn with you
The Adriatic’s moods… (1.6)

While you, my Ponticus, tell of the city of Cadmus… (1.7)

I told you, my scornful friend, that love would visit you… (1.9)

You, as your way is, Gallus, will be delighted
At my plight… (1.13)

I suppose it’s worth pointing out that the poet addresses a cohort or circle of friends and they are all men. A group of men talking about a woman, one woman’s behaviour. Hmmm. Very much a one-sided perspective, not just a guy talking about a girl but a buy recruiting all his mates to pile in behind him and back up his interpretation.

Although the Cynthia poems felt competent, the single poem which stood out for me was the ante-penultimate one, number 20, which Musker titles ‘Beware of the nymphs!’. This advises his friend, Gallus, on his love affair with a boy, warning him that the (unnamed) boy is so beautiful that he, Gallus, should keep him away from predatory girls, otherwise he’ll lose him, just as the legendary Hylas was lost to Naiads (spirits of the water) on the voyage of the Argonauts. Apart from 4 or 5 lines at the beginning and end, this is a verse description of Hylas’s story i.e. an extended fantasia into Greek legend, describing the way Hylas was sent off by Hercules to gather firewood but wandered too far and was seduced by the water nymphs while Hercules’ voice echoed wanly from afar. This was genuinely haunting.

This raises the issue of the extent to which Propertius not just incorporates Greek myth and legend into his poems, but packs them with mythological references (see below).

Book 2, 24 BC? (55 poems, including 10 or more ‘fragments’)

Book 2 for the first time features poems addressing Augustus’s great ‘minister for the arts’, Maecenas. He is described, rather unctuously, in the first poem as:

True heart alike in peace or war

and:

hope of the youth of Rome
And their envy, and my true glory in life and death…

Scholars deduce that the first book brought Propertius to Maecenas’s attention and in this second one he has become one of the great man’s circle. So not only does it address Maecenas himself but also, as was required, directly addresses Augustus.

Book 2 contains as many poems as 1 and 3 put together so some scholars think it actually combines 2 separate books. This is also suggested by the poor state of many of the poems in it. This has led some scholars to drastically rewrite the poems, taking bits which from poems where they seem out of place and stitching them into other poems where they seem to fit better. I can imagine this leads ultimately to a nightmare jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of fragments on the table in front of you as you rack your brains to recombine them in more ‘sensible’ ways.

Musker explains all this and concludes that, although many of these scholarly editions are intriguing for experts in the field, in this edition he rejects almost all of them. Because there is an alternative explanation – which is that Propertius deliberately made sudden swerves and juxtapositions in his verse, as policy. One of the elements that contributes to what Musker calls Propertius’s ‘elusiveness’ and has made him less popular in modern times that the far more sensible, down-to-earth Horace, or the scandalously sexy Catullus.

The subject matter of the poems is more varied though still circling round the figure of Cynthia. Several describe a rich rival who appears to have won her affections with jewels, and throw deep hatred his way. But then the next one might be another hymn of fulsome love and devotion. So the poems follow no order i.e you can’t make out a narrative, in fact they seem almost deliberately randomised.

Book 3, sometime after 23 BC (27, including 2 ‘fragments’)

The poems start to range in subject matter beyond simple love songs to tackle more public themes. For example, several invoke Augustus’s previous victories against Antony and Cleopatra and his current campaign in Parthia (3.4) (cf the long poem in book 4 celebrating the battle of Actium and repeatedly criticising Cleopatra).

There’s one very close to the royal family, lamenting the death of young Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Augustus’s nephew, who he legally adopted then married to his daughter Julia, only for him to die in 23 BC, his twentieth year (3.18).There’s one on the standard topic of how Rome has become corrupted by foreign riches and let its shrines and temples fall into shameful disuse:

Proud Rome is falling, crushed by her own prosperity. (3.13)

Several of the early ones are recusatios, a stock type of poem in which the poet bashfully excuses himself from writing the grand epic poem about Rome’s heroic military victories which society expected, and instead gets a Muse or god to explain that the poet’s real vocation is love poetry.

Wars I would tell of in patriotic verses,
But, alas, how weak the notes that sound on my lips! (4.1)

He writes a long poem to Maecenas saying everyone has his own nature and his (Propertius’s) is emphatically not either going to war or writing about war. The only war he enjoys is the battle of love (‘love’s sweet strife’, 3.20B). In fact this is continuing a trend which began in book 2, with 2.34 actually mentioning Virgil as the great epic poem of Propertius’s time.

Cynthia still pops up. In some he celebrates Cynthia’s birthday (3.10), but overall he seems to be tiring  of her, and the final poems declare himself well shot of her:

False is that trust of yours in your beauty, woman,
Whom my favouring eyes have long made overproud.
Yes, Cynthia, greatly indeed my love has praised you;
It shames me now that through my verses
You gained such fame. (3.24)

And the last poem in the book is an execration, calling down curses on her, and looking forward to her aging and withering and losing her beauty (3.25).

Book 4, published sometime after 16 BC (12 poems)

Book 4 contains only half the number of poems as book 1, leading some scholars to speculate that it may have been published posthumously, a tidying-up operation. Several of the poems imply that Cynthia is dead – in 4.7 her ghost complains to Propertius that her funeral wasn’t lavish enough.

The other poems move well beyond love poetry, addressing a variety of subjects. They include several ‘aetiological poems’, a genre which explains the origin of various Roman rites and landmarks. They’re longer than before, too. Many poems in book 1 were one page long. All those in book 4 are at least 2 pages long, some 3 or even 4.

  1. The poet describes the early history of Rome for 2 pages and the original rural appearance of Rome in terms very reminiscent of the Aeneid before the second half is spoken by a Babylonion priest predicting Propertius’s horoscope.
  2. The Etruscan god Vertumnus speaks, speculating about his own origins and purpose; he is a chameleon and can be male or female or take any role or profession.
  3. Two-page poem in which a young wife, Arethusa, writes to her husband, Lycótas, away at the wars, describing her sadness and devotion.
  4. Three pages describe the iniquity of Tarpeia, a vestal virgin back in the earliest days of Rome, when it was little more than a village, who falls in love with Tatius king of the neighbouring tribe of the Sabines; she betrays a secret path up the Palatine Hill into Rome but when Tatius marries her, as he promised, he gets his men to crush her with their shields for her treachery. This, supposedly, is the origin of the name of the Tarpeian Rock on the Palatine.
  5. Execration of a procuress named Acanthis, who incited his (unnamed) love to spurn the gods, whore after gold, reject his love, and so on.
  6. Three pages celebrating Augustus’s victory at the Battle of Actium. Always good policy to suck up to the emperor.
  7. Cynthia’s ghost comes back from the tomb to upbraid him on the evening of her funeral. At the end he tries to embrace her but her ghost vanishes into air which reminds me of the umpteen time the same thing happens in the Aeneid.
  8. To get his own back on Cynthia (see how the poems are not in any narrative order) the poet organises a little orgy with two hand-picked courtesans at the height of which Cynthia storms in, drives the girls out scratching and screaming, then demands complete submission from the poet, before fumigating the place. Then they have championship sex.
  9. Another poem describing what Rome looked like before it was founded i.e. was idyllic countryside – very reminiscent of book 8 of the Aeneid – here the backdrop for the legendary moment when Hercules stopped on the site only to have his cattle stolen by Cacus. The poem describes the Forum when it was just a grazing ground and explains the origin of the Great Altar which still stood in Propertius’s time. I wonder if it was Augustus and Maecenas’s pressure which led him to drop love poetry and turn to accounts of Rome’s founding legends.
  10. If a Roman military leader defeated the leader of the enemy in single combat and kept the latter’s arms and armour, these were called the spolia opima and brought back to be dedicated in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius. It had only happened three times in Roman history and this poem describes those three great personal achievements, by Romulus, Aulus Cornelius Cossus (consul in 428 BC) and Marcus Claudius Marcellus (consul in 222 BC).
  11. The final poem is a touching address by the recently deceased Cornelia consoling her husband, Paullus Aemilius Lepidus (77 to 11 BC). This man’s father had been brother to the Lepidus who was in the Second Triumvirate alongside Anthony and Octavius. Not long after Cornelia’s death, he married Claudia Marcella Minor, a daughter of Octavia the Younger, sister of Augustus. So like the lament for Marcus Claudius Marcellus (3.18) this is by way of being an imperial commission. However, its stately beauty has led to it being described as the ‘queen of the elegies’ and it is commonly considered the best poem in the entire collection.

Musker’s translation

Having carefully explained what the Latin elegiac metre was, Musker then goes ahead and cheerfully ignores the strictness of it in his own translation. His versions are very free and all the better for it. Try and spot traces of the hexameter-pentameter combination in the following:

Whence, you ask me, come all my poems of love,
And my book that sounds on men’s lips its note of langour.
Calliope does not sing me these songs nor Apollo;
A girl provides me with all I have
Of poetic talent.
(2.1)

Instead of couplets defined by the elegiac metre, Musker uses the verse paragraph. Each poem, instead of presenting a solid column of verse –as they do in the original Latin – is divided into 3 or 4 or 5 verse paragraphs of 5 or 6 lines, the last one or two lines always notably shorter, maybe a kind of recreation of the ‘dying fall’ of the original. Thus:

Penelope, who was worthy of many suitors,
For twice ten years was able to live untouched;
To defer remarriage by feigning a womanly industry,
Then unwinding by nightly stealth the weft of the day.
And though, grown old with waiting, she had no hope
Of ever seeing Ulysses again,
She yet stayed true.
(2.9A)

This not being faced by a wall of verse, instead being able to read a paragraph at a time, makes the poems immensely more readable, as does Musker’s relaxed approach to metre

Conventions of the love poem

Scholars have suggested various real-life models for Cynthia but there is no consensus. As usual all we have to go on is hints within the poems and one remote historical reference.

Propertius mentions that Cynthia is a descendant of the Roman poet Hostius. He frequently compliments her as docta puella meaning ‘learned girl’. He tells us that she herself was a writer of verse. This kind of autobiographical clue-hunting strikes me as pointless. Even when you have confirmed that Lesbia was a codename for Clodia…does it change anything? If anything, it reduces the impact of the poems, which they gain from being about a shadowy unnamed woman.

Instead, the poems are artifices; they rehearse a number of postures or attitudes or emotions related to love affairs. These may or may not ever have been ‘genuine’ or related to ‘a real person’ but it’s a question of taste whether you need to believe that to enjoy them. I don’t.

Poems are verbal machines designed to evoke psychological states in the reader; some of these might be mimetic, directly replicating the emotion described in the poem. But once you’ve read a certain number of poems and start to recognise the same topics recurring in the same treatment, at least part of your mind becomes capable of detachment, regarding even the most moving poem as a verbal artifact, a device.

Mythology

Apparently, Propertius is often criticised because of his excessive use of references from myth and legend. For example, elegy 2.6 kicks off with a flurry of mythological comparisons: he cites three of the most famous courtesans from ancient times and the crowds of men who flocked around them and then claims they were all nothing compared to the hordes of men who swarm at Cynthia’s door. In other words, it is a poem about male jealousy.

The house of Laïs at Corinth, though at her door
All Greece paid court, was never thronged like yours;
Thaïs, famed by Menander and once the darling
Of Athens, attracted no such swarm;
Nor yet did Phrynë, enriched by all those lovers
So that she could have re-erected
Demolished Thebes. (2.6)

In his introduction Musker defends Propertius against the charge of introducing too much mythological matter into his poems. His defence is:

  1. The ancients thought through mythology. Lacking anything remotely like a modern scientific understanding of the laws of nature, their extremely dense and multi-layered mythology provided not exactly rules or laws but stories from history which suggested underlying tendencies, among humans and among the fate which seems to hover over them. Mythology helps to make sense (albeit a chaotic and violent sense) of the world.
  2. Sheer swank. Propertius’s jealousy risks coming over as petty, small-minded, unaristocratic. But if he devotes a paragraph to comparing himself and Cynthia to figures from myth and legend then he obviously flatters her, bigs himself up, and turns a personal peeve into what sounds like the grand statement of some general law rather than a trivial tiff between pampered layabouts.

Personally, I enjoyed Propertius’s use of mythology. In Horace the mythological references often felt dragged in – I think it’s because Horace is such a regular guy, his entire schtick is about living for the moment and enjoying life in a very realistically described Rome, his is such a down-to-earth, sensible philosophy, that Achilles and Apollo seem wildly out of place in it.

Whereas Propertius from the start is more intense and shrill, a little more hysterical and extreme, and so his use of myth and legend genuinely helps to expand and enhance the poems, gives them size, like adding echo to a voice track.

The Romans expected their lovers to give them prominent love bites (note to 4.3, p.220, and 4.5).

Credit

Poems of Propertius, translated by Robert Musker, was published by Everyman books in 1972. All references are to the 1972 paperback edition.

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by Simon on November 4, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Poetry, Translation
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Posted by Simon on November 4, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/04/propertius-ronald-musker/

Eunuchus (The Eunuch) by Terence (161 BC)

‘Whatever’s happened here, it wasn’t my fault.’
(The cowardly servant Parmeno to his master Demea, page 212)

In her introduction, the editor and translator of the Penguin edition, Betty Radice, observes that The Eunuch was Terence’s most popular play and is also the most Plautine of his plays, as if these are coincidental facts. When I opened the The Ghost by Plautus I was laughing by the end of the first page. By contrast, wading through Terence’s play, The Self-Tormentor, made me want to stop reading Terence altogether, it was so contrived, impenetrably complex, and without a single laugh in the entire text. Plautus is my man.

Fortunately, The Eunuch is a lot clearer and a lot funnier than The Self-Tormentor. According to Suetonius’s life of Terence, it was performed twice in one day at the Megalensian Games in 161 BC and won its author 8,000 sesterces, ‘the highest fee ever paid for a comedy’. Like all Plautus and Terence’s plays, it is based on a Greek original, in this case by the Greek playwright Menander.

Incidentally, this play is apparently the earliest surviving Latin text to use the word ‘eunuch’, making it an important resource for academic histories of the (very varied roles played by) ‘the eunuch’ in the ancient world.

The plot

As usual, the scene consists of a street and two houses, showing the front doors of Demea, father of two errant sons, and Thais, a courtesan. As usual, the worthy father, Demea, is struggling to cope with two sons who have made inappropriate love matches: Phaedria is in love with a courtesan, Chaerea is in love with a slave girl.

Phaedria and Parmeno

Parmeno is the elderly family servant. When Phaedria tells him he is mad with love for Thais, Parmeno tells him to grow up, pay up and get rid of her.

Enter Thais

Phaedria goes weak at the knees. Thais apologises to him for locking him out of her house the day before but then goes on to give some key exposition. Thais says her mother came from Samos and lived on Rhodes. A merchant made her a present of a little girl stolen from the area where the play is set, Attica. The little girl knew her father and mother’s name but not where she came from or whether she was free or slave. The merchant had bought her off pirates who claimed to have stolen her from Sunium. This kidnapped girl was brought up alongside Thais as her sister. Then Thais found a ‘protector’, a soldier, Thraso, who brought her here to Athens (where the play is set) and set her up as his courtesan. is soldier, Thraso, then went off to Caria and Thais has found a new protector/sponsor/lover in Phaedria. And that brings the backstory up to date.

But there’s more. Recently Thais’s mother died, leaving the house and goods to her brother, including the foster sister. Since the latter was pretty and could play the lyre, Thais’s brother put her up for sale and, in a spectacular coincidence, she was bought by Thais’s very same protector, the soldier Thraso. He has recently returned to Athens, intending to give Thais the girl as a servant but, when he found out that Thais has been seeing another man (i.e. Phaedria) Thraso changed his mind. He won’t come to see her or hand over the slave girl while Phaedria is on the scene.

So now she gets to the point: will Phaedria agree to lie low for several days so that Thraso can resume his position as her lover, and give her the gift of the slave girl – so that Phaedria can then do a good deed and track down the girl’s family and return her to them?

Phaedria is angry. He thinks it’s all a story to cover wanting to go back to the soldier. Hasn’t he bought her everything? Only yesterday he paid 2,000 drachmas for an Ethiopian slave girl and a eunuch Thais said she wanted. Doesn’t he buy her whatever she wants?

Thais begs, pleads and wears him down and eventually Phaedria promises to leave town for a couple of days so the soldier can return and give Thais the slave girl. But he begs her to remain loyal in her heart. Then Phaedria turns and walks back into his father’s house. Nothing especially funny about this, is there?

Thais tells the audience one further fact, which is that she thinks she’s already identified and contacted the slave girl’s brother and he’s coming to meet her (Thais) today to discuss the matter. Then she goes into her house.

Re-enter Phaedria and Parmeno

Phaedria weeps and wails but we aren’t to take his anguish seriously; he is played for a figure of fun. He instructs Parmeno to fetch the eunuch and Ethiopian slave girl and give them to Thais and to keep an eye on his rival. Then he shoulders his bag and walks offstage, planning to stay out of town for the two days he agreed with Thais.

Enter Gnatho

Gnatho is the bumptious servant of the soldier Thraso. He is bringing the slave girl Pamphila to give to Thais. Parmeno is impressed and says the slave girl is even more beautiful than Thais.

Gnatho soliloquises, saying how proud he is of his status and profession of sponger and hanger-on. He gives a little explanation of the key requirements of the trade, namely to agree shamelessly with whatever your patron says.

The old servant Parmeno overhears all this, then cocky Gnatho spots him and likes the way he looks glum, indicating that he and his master (Phaedria) are not doing well with Thais. Good. Gnatho shows off the slave girl to Parmeno and teases him and then goes into Thais’s house. Having delivered the slave girl, he makes a few choice comments to Parmeno then exits.

Enter Chaerea

Chaerea is Demea’s other son, younger brother to Phaedria. He is a very young man in a frenzy about his new love. Parmeno overhears him talking, rolls his eyes, and pities his poor master (Demea) for having two such lovestruck puppies for sons. Chaerea announces he’s in love with a plump and juicy girl. Parmeno asks how old. 16. Parmeno rolls his eyes. As Chaerea goes on to describe falling in love with her in the street, and that she was accompanied by one of those spongers, Parmeno realises he’s talking about Pamphila, the slave girl who Gnatho has just delivered to Thais.

Parmeno explains all this and that she’s been given as a present to Thais by her soldier lover. ‘What, the rival to his brother?’ says Chaerea. ‘Yes,’ replies Parmeno. Parmeno goes on to explain that Phaedria is giving Thais the old eunuch he brought home yesterday. Not that smelly old man, Chaerea says. How unfair it is that he’ll get to be under the same roof with the fair Pamphila etc.

At which Parmeno jokes that maybe he, Chaerea, could pretend to be a eunuch and gain access to Thais’s house. YES, shouts Chaerea, yes, he can wear a eunuch outfit and pretend to be the gift from Phaedria to Thais. That way he can be close to his new beloved all day long, yes, YES! And he bundles Parmeno into Demea’s house to help dress him up as a eunuch, despite all the latter’s protestations that it was only a joke, he didn’t mean it seriously, he’ll be the one to suffer when it’s all found out etc.

Enter Thraso

Thraso is the middle-aged soldier and lover of Thais. He is a version of that well-established type, the miles gloriosus, full of sound and fury about his brave military exploits, while in fact being a pompous coward and bore.

Thraso enters accompanied by his sponger, Gnatho. Parmeno hears them arrive and opens Demea’s front door to spy on them. He watches while Gnatho shamelessly sucks up to Thraso, laughing at all his bad jokes and nodding at his stories about being the favourite of the king of Caria.

GNATHO: Heavens above, what wisdom! Every minute spent with you is something learned. (p.202)

Thraso asks Gnatho whether Thais loves him and the sponger, of course, insists that she is devoted to him i.e. reassuring Thraso’s delicate ego, as spongers are paid to do.

Enter Thais

Thais enters from her house and encounters Thraso and Gnatho. The soldier says he hopes she likes the slave girl Gnatho gave to her a bit earlier on and invites her for dinner. Parmeno takes the opportunity to present Phaedria’s gifts to Thais. He calls for the Ethiopian slave girl to be brought out, and Thraso and Gnatho make comedy insults about how relatively cheap she looks. Then Parmeno has Chaerea dressed as a eunuch brought out and presented to Thais. She is struck by how handsome Chaerea is, as are Thraso and Gnatho. I think Thraso makes a joke to the effect that, given half a chance, he’d have sex with this handsome eunuch (p.186).

Thais takes her new properties into her house while Thraso tries to mock Parmeno for having a poor master, but Parmeno easily gets the better of him, and strolls away. Gnatho quietly laughs at Thraso being mocked but hurriedly adopts a straight face when Thraso turns to him.

Thais re-enters with an elderly woman slave, Pythia. Thais tells Pythia to take good care of the new acquisitions and that, if Chremes turns up, to tell him to wait. Then she goes off to dine with Thraso and Gnatho, leaving the stage empty.

Enter Chremes

Chremes is the young man who Thais thinks is the next of kin of the slave girl she grew up with and who Thraso has just given to her, Pamphila. He enters and delivers a long speech explaining he’s puzzled why Thais contacted him, asked him a load of questions about a long lost sister, and then asked him to come see her today. He wonders whether Thais is going to pretend that she’s the long lost sister, but Chremes knows the sister would only be about 16, and Thais is much older, so it can’t be her.

Chremes knocks on the door, Pythia opens it and asks Chremes to wait for her mistress but he, suspicious and irritated, says no, so Pythia calls for another servant to take Chremes to see Thais at Thraso’s dinner, and they exit.

Enter Antipho

Antipho is a friend of Chaerea’s. A bunch of the lads had decided to club together for dinner and Chaerea’s meant to be organising it but he’s disappeared, so the lads chose Antipho to find him and ask what’s going on. At just this moment Chaerea emerges from Thais’s house but dressed as a eunuch so Antipho is understandably astonished. But Chaerea explains to him the whole scam, how he’s madly in love with the young slave who’s just been given to Thais as a present, how Parmeno suggested he pretend to be the eunuch Phaedria planned to give to Thais, how it’s worked like a dream, how he’s even been tasked with looking after her, how she’s had a bath and emerged fragrant and beautiful.

Chaerea goes on to explain how all the other serving girls left them to go off and bathe so he…locked the door and…apparently had sex with Pamphila!

This is quickly skipped over as Antipho is interested in the dinner. Chaerea says he rearranged it to take place at Discus’s house. Antipho invites Chaerea to come to his place and change out of the eunuch’s clothes first, and off they both go.

Enter Dorias

Dorias is a maid of Thais’s. She’s just come back from the dinner party where things turned sour. When Chremes turned up, Thais insisted he be brought in. But Thraso thought he was a rival for Thais’s affections, got very angry and insisted that Pamphila be brought in, in retaliation. Thais insisted that a slave girl should not be invited to a dinner and so they had a big argument.

Enter Phaedria

Phaedria should, of course, be at the family farm in the country, as he’d promised Thais. But he couldn’t keep away and has come all the way back to town, casual-like, just to catch a glimpse of his beloved.

Enter Pythias

Which is the exact moment when Pythias, Thais’s head slave, comes bursting out of her house, livid with anger. She explains to an astonished Phaedria that the eunuch who he, Phaedria, recently gave to Thais was no eunuch at all but has raped Pamphila, tearing her clothes and messing her hair. She’s inside now, in floods of tears. Pythias blames Phaedria but Phaedria disavows any knowledge that the eunuch was not a eunuch, and says he’ll go look for the eunuch straightaway. Maybe he’s in the family home, so he goes into Demea’s house to see.

Re-enter Phaedria

Phaedria almost immediately re-enters dragging the real eunuch, Dorus, out of his house. Dorus is wearing Chaerea’s clothes (Chaerea having insisted they do a swap) so Phaedria mistakenly accuses him of stealing his brother’s clothes and making ready to flee. But when he presents Dorus to Pythia and Dorias, Thais’s servants, they both claim never to have seen him before. This is not the rapist!

They all cross-question the eunuch who quickly explains that Parmeno and Chaerea came and ordered him to swap clothes with Chaerea, then they both left. Now they all understand. Chaerea impersonated the eunuch in order to be near Pamphila and then raped her.

Phaedria is terribly embarrassed. It looks like he might be in on the scam, and it certainly reflects badly on his family. So in an aside he tells Dorus to reverse his story and deny everything he’s just said. When the bewildered man does so, Phaedria says the man is an obvious liar and he’ll take him into his house to ‘torture’ him to find out the truth

Re-enter Chremes

Pythias and Dorias are just wondering whether to tell Thais about all this when Chremes re-enters. He’d got drunk at Thraso’s dinner party and now he makes a bit of a pass at Pythias (Thais’s female head slave) who primly fends him off. Instead she extracts from Chremes the fact that there was a big argument at Thrasos’s dinner party.

Enter Thais

Thais is still angry from the argument at Thrasos’s dinner party. She warns her servants that Thraso is on his way to reclaim Pamphila but that he’ll do so over her dead body. She’ll have him horsewhipped first.

First of all she briskly tells Chremes that Pamphila is his long lost sister. Not only that, but Thais hereby gives her to him, free, gratis. Chremes is immensely grateful though not quite as surprised or emotional as you might expect.

Then Thais tells Pythias to hurry inside and fetch the box of ‘proofs’ which prove Pamphila’s identity. But just then Thraso approaches.

Thraso is, of course, a seasoned soldier, albeit a bullshitting braggart. Thais instructs Chremes to stand up to him and hands him the proofs of Pamphila’s identity that Pythias has just fetched out of the house. There is comedy in the way Chremes is a complete milksop, refuses to face Thraso and wants to run off to the market to fetch help, but Thais physically restrains him and tells him to be a man.

THAIS: My dear man, you’re not afraid are you?
CHREMES: [visibly alarmed]: Nonsense. Who’s afraid? Not me. (p.200)

Thais and all her people go into her house.

Enter Thraso and followers

Enter Thraso and Gnatho with six followers. There is quite a funny parody of a military campaign, with Thraso bombastically issuing complex orders for storming Thais’s house to his motley crew of incompetent ‘soldiers’. Thais and Chremes appear at a window overlooking the action. Chremes is fearful while Thais gives a fearless and comic commentary on Thraso’s cowardly and ineffectual ‘military’ orders.

Thraso now parleys with Thais at her window. He reminds her that she promised him the next couple of days, no? And has gone back on her word? So that’s why he wants Pamphila back.

Now Chremes steps forward and confronts Thraso with the new facts: Pamphila is a) a free-born citizen b) of this region, Attica and c) Chremes’ sister. Therefore she cannot be anyone’s property. Thraso thinks he’s lying, but Chremes sends for the box of proof documents.

This is sort of funny if we buy into the play’s premises, but it is also a fascinating slice of social history on a huge subject, namely the definition and rights of free citizens and slaves in the ancient world.

Disheartened Thraso hesitates about what to do next. At which point his parasite, Gnatho, suggests they make a tactical withdrawal on the basis that women are well known for being perverse and so, if Thraso stops asking for something (which is making Thais obstinate), if he changes his approach, maybe Thais will change hers and come round. Rather doubtfully, Thraso calls off the ‘assault’ and he and his men all leave.

Enter Thais and Pythias

With Thraso gone, Thais turns her thoughts to Pamphila who she has discovered in her house with torn clothes and inconsolably weeping i.e. having been raped. Thais is furious with Pythias for letting it happen but Pythias explains that they’ve established it wasn’t the eunuch Phaedria gave her who raped Pamphila, it was Phaedria’s younger brother impersonating the eunuch who did it. At which point the culprit, Chaerea himself, strolls onstage, wearing the eunuch’s clothes.

Enter Chaerea

Chaerea had gone along to Antipho’s house to change for the lads’ party, but Antipho’s parents were home so he was scared to go in and has returned to Thais’s house by backstreets in case anyone recognises him. Now he sees Thais standing in her doorway and momentarily hesitates but decides to brazen it out and continue in character as the eunuch Dorus, so he steps forward.

But after a few exchanges of him pretending to be Dorus, Thais drops all pretences and calls him by his real name, Chaerea. About this point it began to dawn on me that Thais is the real ‘hero’ of this play, easily the most manly, resolute, strong and decisive character on the stage – and that, by the same token, all the men (Thraso, Chremes, Chaerea) are weaker and feebler and morally flawed than she is.

Thais and Chaerea come to an arrangement. Chaerea insists he meant no disrespect to Thais and that he genuinely loves Pamphila. Grudgingly, Thais accepts his apology, despite the scorn of her aggrieved servant, Pythias. In fact, Chaerea grovellingly offers to put himself completely under Thais’ guidance. She is a strong woman.

At this point they both see Pamphila’s brother Chremes approaching and Chaerea begs to be let inside so he can change out of his shameful costume. Thais laughingly agrees and they all go into her house.

Enter Chremes and Sophrona

Sophrona was Chremes’ and Pamphila’s nurse when they were small. Chremes has shown her the tokens Pamphila had and the nurse recognised them all. Now he’s brought the nurse along for the final ‘recognition scene’. The servant Pythias welcomes them and tells them to go into Thais’ house.

Enter Parmeno

As mentioned, Thais has emerged as the main driver of the plot. Usually it’s the cunning slave, in this case Parmeno, but in this play he has been totally overshadowed by Thais’ control of the narrative.

There follows a carefully staged and prepared scene in which Parmeno gets his comeuppance. He had swaggered onstage feeling very pleased with himself because his ruse (disguising Chaerea as the eunuch) had secured Chaerea his beloved, and he had also educated the young man in the ways of courtesans and their wicked ways (by which he is casting a slur on the house of Thais who is, we are reminded, a courtesan by trade).

Pythias, the angry housekeeper overhears all this, including the slur on her mistress and household, and decides to take Parmeno down a peg or two. She comes onstage pretending not to see Parmeno and lamenting and bewailing. When Parmeno asks her what the matter is, Pythias tells him that the young man he introduced into Thais’s household, Chaerea, assaulted Pamphila but now it has emerged that the latter is a free citizen, and has a well-born brother, and the brother has found out and had Chaerea tied up and is about to administer the traditional punishment for adultery and rape – castration!!!

Parmeno is devastated and thrown into a complete panic about what to do, specially when Pythias goes on to tell him that everyone blames him for what’s happened, and are looking to punish him, too. At this moment they both see the two errant sons’ father and Parmeno’s master, Demea, coming up the street. Pythias advises Parmeno to tell Demea everything, before disappearing back onto Thais’ house.

Enter Demea

Parmeno greets his old master and tells him everything (one son in love with Thais, the other in love with a slave woman who’s in Thais’s house, impersonated a eunuch to gain admission, was caught in a rape and is tied and bound and about to be punished). Suitably appalled, Demea rushes into Thais’ house to rescue his son.

Enter Pythias

Re-enter Pythias crying with laughter. Oh, she tells the audience, the comedy of misunderstandings she has just seen! And only she understood why Demea was in a panic about his son being castrated (because she’d just invented it). Hardly able to speak for laughing, she tells Parmeno she properly took him in and made him look a right fool. Now both son and master are furious with him, Parmeno, blaming him for everything. She stumbles back into the house, helpless with laughter.

Enter Thraso and Gnathos

The braggart soldier and his parasite. Thraso has decided to throw himself on Thais’ mercy but they haven’t gone far before Chaerea bursts out of Thais’ house, delirious with happiness. He rushes up to a surprised Parmeno and hugs him and calls him the ‘author and instigator and perfecter’ of all his joys. Obviously the ‘recognition scene’ has just taken place and Pamphila has been confirmed as a free citizen of Attica and therefore an entirely eligible woman for Chaerea to marry. Also, Thais has agreed to marry Phaedria, and thus put herself and her household under Demea’s protection and patronage. It is an entirely happy ending for both sons and the father.

Parmeno dashes into Demea’s house and returns with Phaedria who they tell the good news: he is going to be married to his beloved Thais!

Thraso and Gnatho have overheard all this and Thraso drily remarks that it looks like all his hopes of winning Thais have been dashed. For once Gnatho can’t find words of sycophantic support. But Thraso asks him to make one last sally and see if he can remain in Thais’s good books, if only as a friend. Gnatho extracts a promise from Thraso that, if he pulls this off, Thraso’s house and table will be open to him (Gnatho) for evermore, which Thraso agrees to. Then Gnatho goes up to the two happy brothers.

Phaedria’s first response of Thraso’s offer of friendship is to tell Thraso to clear out and if he ever sees him in this street again, he’ll kill him (!).

Gnatho asks him to calm down, ushers Thraso aside, and speaks confidentially to Phaedria. He proposes a very cynical offer. He suggests that Phaedria accepts Thraso as his rival i.e. a sort of official lover for Thais. ‘What? Why?’ Phaedria asks.

Because Thraso is such a dimwit he presents no threat whatsoever to Thais and Phaedria’s love, but he is very prodigal with gifts and money. These he will lavish on Thais and thus keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed and which, let’s face it, Phaedria can’t afford. Hmm. The brothers confer. It is quite a tidy plan and they agree on it.

Lastly, Gnatho asks if he can be accepted into their circle of friends. Again the brothers agree, and with that, Gnatho mockingly presents them with Thraso! ‘For the laughs and everything else you can get out of him’ (p.218).

Gnatho calls Thraso over and announces that the deal has been struck. Thraso recovers his composure and starts to strut and swank, and the two brothers laugh at his pompousness and foresee years of milking him for his money and mocking his pretensions.

And that is the end. Phaedria abruptly turns to the audience, asks for their applause and they all go into Thais’s house.

*******

Dark thoughts

The Eunuch has plenty of genuinely funny moments, the increasingly funny role of the bombastic soldier Thraso, the comedy swapping of the eunuch’s identity, Chremes’ cowardice, Pythias’s humiliation of Parmeno and so on.

But at the same time, I struggled to get past the ‘otherness’ of Roman society. I can’t really get past the way the entire story rest on the buying and selling of slaves and giving and receiving them as gifts.

Then, when Chaerea rapes the sleeping Pamphila, the entire tone changed for me, and I found it difficult to find anything after that very funny.

And the casual way Phaedria remarks that the only thing which will extract the truth from Dorus is ‘torture’, the casual way Pythias declares that Chaerea is about to be castrated, and the casual references to the way slaves are routinely whipped as punishment – once again I found myself being brought up short and the smile being wiped right off my face by the casual references to hyper violence (torture, whipping, chains, even crucifixion) in these Roman plays.

Sunny thoughts

If you can manage to put those dark thoughts aside then, yes, this is a funny play, by far the funniest of the three I’ve read so far. I think this is because, even though the plot is quite convoluted, of two things:

  1. Once the backstory of the abandoned slave girl and the two brothers in love with two girls is established, everything follows reasonably logically from those premises.
  2. Second reason is that the scenes are quite long and leisurely meaning that – crucially, for me at any rate – the characters thoroughly explain what is going on, what is happening and what they intend to do. For example, the idea for Chaerea to dress up as a eunuch develops quite naturally out of Parmeno’s joke suggestion which then, as it were, gets out of hand. This scene has great psychological and/or comic realism, in the sense that all of us know the experience of making a jokey, off-hand remark which our interlocutor picks up and takes far more seriously than we’d intended, and which we then regret ever mentioning. 2,200 years ago the same experience was common enough to be a comic gag in onstage.

Compare and contrast these two attributes with Terence’s play The Self-tormentor where the plot very much does not follow from the basic premise, but is 1. the result of a whole series of ad lib schemes dreamed up by the naughty slave Syrus and 2. which he keeps to himself; which he does not explain; which may well keep the characters comically in the dark about what he’s up to, but also had the result that I couldn’t follow what was happening half the time and so gave up on the play and almost gave up on Terence as a whole.

The Eunuch restored my faith in Terence as a comic playwright and confirmed my determination to continue and read all six of his plays.

Credit

Page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies, edited and translated by Betty Radice.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on April 13, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Comedy, Play, Slavery, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on April 13, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/13/eunuchus-the-eunuch-terence/