This collection of essays follows a trend that characterises the last decade in Classics, drawing out the potential of the so-called ‘second-generation cognitive sciences’, which emphasise the embodied and enactive nature of the human condition (in contrast to the ‘first generation’ influenced by the computational theory of mind). This second wave provoked a profound reorientation in thinking about the mind, the body and their relationship to the natural and cultural environments. Significantly, cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics contributed to a certain blurring of the traditional disciplinary boundaries between literary criticism and cognitive linguistics (see R.J. Allan's essay, p. 21 in the present volume).
Two recent reference works should be viewed as constituting the background to this process in classical studies: Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity (the first volume of the Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition), ed. by D. Cairns, M. Anderson and M. Sprevak (2018) and The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory, ed. by P. Meineck, W.M. Short and J. Devereaux (2019). The present volume (thirteen chapters) applies this theory to ancient Greek narrative in various media. A strong feature of this book is that it has been structured as an integral whole. The editors ensured that all contributions are in interaction with each other, referring to and quoting from the other articles in the volume. This makes reading easier and more pleasant.
Part 1, ‘Ancient Narrative’, contains five papers and focuses on the experiential quality of ancient Greek narrative in various genres such as epic, lyric, historiography, tragedy and early Christian literature. Allan provides a sound theoretical introduction to the whole book, explaining the use of the term ‘immersion’ from game studies and also narratological ‘experientiality’. Both concepts function as a thread running through the volume. The intensity of experience of ‘being immersed’ depends on various cognitive and emotional aspects of the immersed subject. Allan further proposes a set of linguistic and narratological elements that are conducive to immersion: (1) verisimilitude (the text evokes a lifelike vivid mental representation of persons, objects, actions and their setting), (2) perspective shift (a spatio-temporal deictic centre within the described scene), (3) transparency of the text (the text defocuses from the text itself as a medium and from the narrator as a mediating voice), (4) interest and emotional involvement (factors such as subjective-evaluative vocabulary and text segments crucial to the main storyline and the creation of suspense), and (5) the principle of minimal departure (aka realism). Allan argues for a link between immersion and plot structure, for immersive narrative occurs at suspenseful turning points, whilst proems, digressions and closures tend to be non-immersive. A number of case studies, such as Il. 16.104–11 (Ajax is beset by the Trojans’ flying spears), Il. 22.317–27 (Achilles’ killing of Hector), Thuc. 2.84.1–3 (a naval battle fought by Phormio) and Thucydides’ conclusion on the disaster of the Sicilian expedition (7.75.6–7 as Athenians’ voice vs 7.87.5–6 as narrator's voice) are discussed.
The following four essays deal with specific genres. D. Fearn analyses the intertextual aesthetics of lyrics and makes a claim for the fundamental role of ancient lyric in the shaping of the history of aesthetics. He discusses how Stesichorus and Bacchylides use narrative in choral lyric, the extent to which the small-scale sympotic lyric of Anacreon evokes erotic scenarios that can be constructed and imagined by audiences and performers, and finally the ways in which Pindar reflects on the archaic lyric traditions of both choral lyric and monody.
F. Budelmann and E. van Emde Boas demonstrate that messenger speech operates at the three levels of actor, character and narrative, functioning as a combination of the diegetic/epic and the mimetic/dramatic. Here the psychology term ‘attention’ is the focus. Messenger speeches are reflected in vase painting (‘depicted attention’), evoke bodily actions, seeing, sounding (‘cued attention’), open up a world beyond the stage, when the audience needs to agree to un-see the messenger and see the imaginary of the world offstage instead (‘divided attention’).
L.I. Hau elaborates upon the characteristics of ‘sensationalist’ historiography and argues that Diodorus Siculus based parts of his work on Hellenistic sources; Polybius and Agatharchides of Cnidus are discussed, who wrote in the ‘sensationalist’ tradition.
Tagliabue claims that the apocryphic second-century ce text Shepherd of Hermas, and in particular its Book of Visions, is focused on experiential qualities, whilst ancient narrative expresses the divine, rendering it tangible and experiential to the reader (personified allegories of the Church as an elderly lady and as a tower are discussed). An enactive and immersive narrative focused on Hermas’ interaction with the Lady Church invites readers to experience both the sequentiality and the rejuvenation of the manifested Church through the mediation of Hermas, conceived as an exemplary Church member.
The central part of the volume, ‘Ancient Criticism’, examines how experience and immersion were in fact of interest in ancient Greek thought. Building on the studies of R. Webb, Grethlein reveals the tension between experience and the reflection of contemporary intellectual discourses that coexist in Heliodorus’ Ethiopica.
C.C. de Jonge argues that ps.-Longinus emphatically seeks to understand the complex relationship between narrator, audience and language, whilst his consistent terminology of movement, ecstasy, disorder and dislocation suggests a direct communication between (1) the stirred mind of the author, (2) the ecstatic experience of the listener and (3) the moved, disrupted or confused organisation of the text. Whereas immersion is understood as primarily experienced by the recipient, ecstasy in ps.-Longinus is presented as a common experience shared by both author and audience.
A. Purves explores a mode of reading closely connected to the sense of touch in a directly somatic sense in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ rhetorical and literary treatises. She considers the notion of ‘rough’ object words related to stone and wool, suggesting that the traction on their surfaces invites a different experience of reading and aesthetic perception. Dionysius provides evidence that is excerpted from narrative, but the intense focus on the embodied properties of immersion for two notably ‘stuck’ characters allows the reader to experience Homer dually: to see the whole, through the reflective perspective of literary criticism, and to participate in an immersive, haptic engagement with the text, relishing the experience of reading from the inside.
Huitink's contribution is one of the strongest, notwithstanding the fact that its sibling was published in the 2018 volume on distributed cognition by D. Cairns et al. (see above). Huitink applies the concept of ‘embodiment’ (cognition shaped by aspects of the entire body, its motor and perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment) to the much-discussed stylistic concept of enargeia. He argues that enargeia carries with it an emotional and experiential grasp, as opposed to higher-order, intellectual understanding. The claim of the ‘failing’ of mental-image-theory to contribute to the reading experience seems unnecessary. The embodied exploration of what is imagined constitutes an essential and additional element to imagination, mental-image-theory being consolidated and further constructed rather than replaced by an uncompromising new doctrine. Mental images emerge from the broader spectrum of one's perception and constitute an integral part of the recollected and revived experience. Reading experience is thus hardly possible without mental images, which are moving and voluminous. Huitink presents examples based on skilful close-reading, and these render his contribution a pleasure to think through.
The last four contributions each cover a particular field in classical studies and demonstrate how immersion and experience can work within these fields: in the second part of the volume linguistics (A. Vatri), and in the third part dance studies (L. Gianvittorio-Ungar), sculpture and architecture (N. Dietrich), and philosophy and aesthetics (A.-E. Peponi).
Vatri argues for the salience of immersive experience for ancient theorising on the figure of asyndeton. Primary effects of asyndeton – of multiplication and rapidity – are directly connected to its iconic character and may be explained in cognitive and psycholinguistic terms. Furthermore, Vatri proposes a strong connection between asyndeton and narrative, which was already well known to ancient critics, inducing as it does a number of psychological rhetorical effects related to imagery and immersion.
Part 3, ‘Media and Context’, is made up of perspective case studies, which demonstrate how immersive narrative and experientiality can be applied to non-verbal media. Gianvittorio-Ungar uses testimonies on a performance of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes in Athenaeus to highlight the impact of dance as a narrative medium on the responses of ancient audience to Greek tragedy. She builds an argument that during the parodos a weapon dance was performed in parallel, mirroring the verbal narrative of the chorus and complementing the chorus’ choreography. She considers two potential actors for this dance, a certain Telesis/Telestes, who was employed as a dancer by Aeschylus in 467 bce, and a certain orchestodidaskalos Telesis/Telestes, who lived after the third century bce and specialised in pantomimes. Little is known about early classical performances; ‘visual vocabulary’ and the use of deictics by the chorus (see the ‘Drama’ section in A. Kampakoglou and A. Novokhatko [edd.], Gaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Geek Literature [2018]) might point to alternatives to a specific physical figure on stage. Gianvittorio-Ungar's argument that the medium of dance (reconstructed mainly from depictions on vases) complemented verbal narratives and enhanced their experientiality, and that body movements (either alone or in combination with other media) were used to narrate stories, is convincing.
The brilliant essay by Dietrich introduces a hermeneutical tool in the discussion of the imperial age phenomenon of incomplete copies of sculptural groups (the so-called Pothos of Scopas, the so-called Hanging Marsyas and the crouching Scythian slave, the Pan-Daphnis group). He proposes a distinction between two kinds of image-related ‘presence’: the presence ‘of the image’ versus the presence ‘in the image’. Isolated figures exhibit a narrative potential, argues Dietrich, but they need a shared experience with an educated viewer who can recognise and interpret the void, and whose cognitive capacities are challenged when they are obliged to imagine the absent figure in the present piece of art.
The concluding essay by Peponi bridges ‘lived aesthetics’ in ancient theoretical and literary texts with modern (G. Genette, M.C. Beardsley, F. Braudel) discussions. Developing Beardsley's idea, she introduces the term ‘aesthetic symbiosis’ and explains an inclusive approach to aesthetic experience, which is not limited to a given period of time of contemplation, but continues to resonate after the recipient has attended to the aesthetic object. Three examples (Subl. 7.2–4, Lucr. 4.973–83 and Lib. Or. 64.116) illustrate the argument that aesthetic stimulus resurfaced in one's consciousness does so under specific spatio-temporal, sensory, emotional and generally ‘bodily’ circumstances.
This is a carefully prepared, clearly written and convincingly argued work with many worthy contributions, which offer fresh and exciting insights into a promising area of current research related to the cognitive sciences.
