Posted By BillHeise on June 15, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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As I have said on this blog many times, I read a lot of the lost and forgotten works. This is a habit I developed in graduate school. Before I was in graduate school, I was attempting to read every book I could find in the major traditions. One summer I read 100 plays. Another I read French novels, major and minor and extremely minor. I did this to feed my appetite for literature, but I also did it because I was looking for answers to how literature worked.

The problem was, it seemed to me, that writing textbooks tended to emphasize the metaphysics of writing, that is they emphasized paradox shifts and challenging your assumptions into the heart of writing. The problem that I had found was that actual literature do not seem to always be built upon the principles that we were teaching in our classes. Some literature, it was true, did challenge assumptions nd shift paradoxes. However other literature–and I would say most literature–operated on other principles. My job was to figure out the general principles on which literature ran, if not on the metaphysical model.

So I kept reading until I figured out. And I actually did figure it out quite suddenly during a class I took with Joel Relihan on Greek Romance. We were reading the very first novel ever written, Chariton’s Caereas and Callihroe. Relihan lectured us on the various theses that have been proposed for the structure of Caereas and Callihroe. Many saw the works in the sociological context of Ian Watt, whose work had been among the first to emphasize the middle-class existence during the rise of the novel. By this standard, Chariton’s work yielded paltry bits of sociological information. Chariton had falsified too much of his story for his dim-witted bourgeois audience.

Another of those theses was a thesis that the literary critic Northop Frye had proposed in his Secular Scripture. Frye’s thesis was fitted in to his archetypal pattern of literature. Romance, he said, was “vertically oriented,” by which he meant that it featured themes of ascent and descent. Dante is a romance because he goes down to Hell and up to heaven. So is the Odyssey. Chariton’s work had a scheintod episode–a death and rebirth episode–which was so important to Frye’s judgment about romance. Chariton’s work was so weak that, even though it was the first romance that ever appeared, it didn’t warrant an appearance in Frye’s book.

However, this was another of those mystical theories that I had been struggling with for years. I had now become convinced that these sort of theories work only if we allow an element of fiction in our portrayal of the truth. Fiction is opposed to truth, and this left a contradiction at the center of literature. And what was more, Frye’s theory had skewed the romance considerably into his comfort zone. His approach left out huge swaths of the narrative action to focus on a very minor instance of scheintod at the beginning of the work. All of the judgments about the success or failure of a given work as a romance depended upon skewing our approach to literature likewise.

So when Relihan opened up the question to what was happening in Chariton’s romance, I answered that I thought that what was happening was this:

• The status quo is established. Caereas falls in love with Callihroe and she with he.
• They are young, and their use introduces a conflict. Caereas knocks her on the head. The townspeople rush in and believe that he has killed her. They bury her in a tomb.
• At this point the action sequence starts. In the first stage, a pirate opens up the cave where he is in the habit of storing his unused treasure. He is a lawless man.
• In the second stage, he sells Callihroe to a satrap–a provincial leader in the Persian Empire.
• In the third stage, the Persian Emperor notices her and has her delivered to his harem.
• Back at home, Caereas has been sulking, but he eventually goes out and conquers the Persian Empire, bringing it under control of Greece.
• We end up back in Greece again. Caereas and Callihroe have grown out of their immature puppy love through their experience, and they can now understand means to fully love one another. They are now also the king and queen of this world (as opposed to Frye’s otherworld).

It was at this moment that I realized that I had found the key to writing literature. It was not at all what Nortrop Frye had said. Instead, literature was best explained as a guide through this life, not the next. And it progressed in stages. Callihroe travels from the lawless pirate to a man of law (the satrap) to the giver of laws (the Emperor). And it is only then that Caereas stops whining and goes out and conquers the entire world. This had nothing to do with a journey to another world. It has everything to do with the journey in this. The purpose of literature seems to be giving us enough tools to work with.

In that sense, both the modern and the postmodern thinker were struggling with vertical structures. The Modern thinker thought he could build a bridge out of this world to Heaven. The postmodern thinker was (justly) skeptical. But in my system, both the Modern and postmodern thinker had misconstrued the entire problem. Literature was not defined by its vertical ascent, but by its horizontal breadth. And in that sense I could see why Chariton’s work was so popular. It reenacted the coming of learning from Persia to Greece, a point that would make is reappearance in the medieval romance. The spectacular breadth of Caereas’ accomplishment interposed love, learning, and adventure in the conquest of the world.

This was another reason that I think I could not get along with my professors, who were quick to assume that if I wasn’t on their side of the Modern/postmodern divide I was on the other. Que sera.

Anyway, my work on Chariton forms one of the bases for my Writing for People Who Hate Writing. In the work I explain why writers must have a plot structure that takes them through a series of discrete stages so that when their reader is finished reading they have been rewarded with some bit of knowledge that can help them towards a goal.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
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