This is the seventh in the series of volumes arising out of the ‘Groningen Colloquia on the Novel’ which have been held in Groningen, usually every spring, since 1986. These colloquia in turn have helped spawn a distinguished series of commentaries on Apuleius’Golden Ass which began to be published in Groningen in 1977, and related volumes such as Aspect’s of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, ed. B.J. Hijmans and R. van der Paardt (Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhuis 1978) which has become a standard reference work in its field.
In the current volume there are no outright losers, but some of the contributions are stronger than others. The initial essay by John Birchall, “The Lament as a Rhetorical Feature in the Greek Novel,” is a careful tracing of laments in the novel to the practices of the Greek rhetorical schools in late antiquity. Laments can be reduced to a series of five stylized features, Birchall argues, including “an address; often a comparison between past and present; asyndeton; simple sentence structure; and rhetorical questions” (10). In the case of Heliodorus in particular, Birchall argues that the lament is used in a complicated and sophisticated way to advance the plot. An idea which Birchall could profitably develop further is the connection between laments in novels and tragedy (mentioned e.g. p.5); it appears that when a novelist causes the hero or heroine in a novel to burst into the formal language and style of lament, the effect is to make them move out of their humble prose context to touch base with a higher and more sophisticated genre, sometimes very explicitly and self-consciously; a striking example is the verb epitragodein used twice by Heliodorus of the laments of Chariclea ( Aeth. 1.3 and 7.14); the lament is also sometimes used by the novelist as an ironic or comic device (cf. Lamo’s lament over the broken rose-beds in Daphnis and Chloe 4.8, quoted by Birchall on p.9; or the expression aulaeum tragicum dimoveto in Apuleius G.A. 1.8; Petronius Sat. 115). Thus the novelist calls attention to the distance between himself and the elevated genres of the past.
The most interesting and controversial essays in the GCN are often those which explore new areas of literary comparison or put modern methods of criticism to the test in unexpected ways. So in the fourth essay of this volume Maria Kardaun with “A Jungian Reading of the Cena Trimalchionis” continues an approach which she had introduced in GCN VI, that is, an attempt through the concepts of Jungian psychology to add new insight to the characters. Her insights are thoughtful but also a reminder of the pitfalls of adhering to a theoretical system too dogmatically. Thus: “To arrive at Trimalchio’s house one has to cross water and to pass a (painted) dog. Trimalchio’s house shares these features with the underworld, a common symbol of the unconscious” (p.57). Trimalchio’s house as underworld seems a fruitful idea (see John Bodel, “Trimalchio’s Underworld,” in Tatum and Vernazza, eds., The Ancient Novel…, Hanover, N.H. 1990, 63; not cited by K.). But how is it developed? Encolpius enters Trimalchio’s house, thereby entering the “unconscious.” But to enter the unconscious means “to change irrevocably.” As far as we can see, Encolpius does not in fact change, so Kardun is forced to make the plea, “he may still have learned something.” In fact it turns out, Trimalchio “represents a shadow in the unconscious of Encolpius,” a lurking aspect of his personality; but characters in the novel are all frozen, trapped in their unwillingness to change. Since Encolpius is both character and narrator he becomes the universal Roman satirist who bears an essential likeness to the characters whom he mocks.
Another attempt to look at the Satyricon with new eyes is found in ch. 5, van der Paardt’s “The Market-scene in Petronius’Satyricon (