The Author and the Magi: Magic in the Ancient Novel and its Implications for Readership

The Author and the Magi: Magic in the Ancient Novel and its Implications for Readership What argues most strongly for the recognition of the ancient " novel " as part of the novel genre in its proper sense is its familiarity. These texts, picaresque, romantic, concise and designed to thrill, offer no generic convention unfamiliar to us from the modern novels of western Europe—the improbable escape, the enduring love, the cunning and doublecrossing pirate, are all commonplaces in long prose fiction. In recent centuries an artificial distinction has been made in prose fiction between " literature, " that is, The Canon of influential novels as delineated by various critics, and " not literature " —drugstore paperbacks, erotica, science fiction (a category with internal categorical anxieties of its own), and other ne'er-do-wells of the print trade. By comparison of the aforementioned narrative commonplaces, the ancient novels are seen as similar to the latter set of modern works, a probable source of the " fastidious distaste " that Margaret Anne Doody identifies in her study of the history of the novel genre, The True Story of the Novel (Doody 9). But the ancient novels' relative simplicity and flatness of character are reflective, in my opinion, of the state of psychology of the time rather than any primitivity of narrative sophistication. Doody has expressed Mikhail Bakhtin's dismissal of the ancient novel as rudimentary with this summation: " Ancient novels have nothing important to say about the individual " (2). And yet, the " private individual " (Bakhtin 110) in the sense Bakhtin seems to mean is a figure whose genesis came in the Enlightenment and whose development in literature appeared at the same time, in such books as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. It is spurious, indeed a temporal " chauvinism, " as Doody puts it, to judge the quality