Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (review)

Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction offers a fresh and stimulating look at Theocritus’ bucolic poetry. Payne’s monograph is based on a doctoral thesis from Columbia University, chapters one and three having already been published as journal articles, now slightly modified (GRBS 42 [2001] 263–287 and Arethusa 36 [2003] 37–48). The book is organized in four major chapters dealing with “The pleasure of imaginary,” “The presence of the fictional world,” “Becoming bucolic,” and “From fiction to metafiction.” An extensive and elaborate theoretical introduction and a comprehensive conclusion frame the book.

Most interesting is the theoretical introduction, “In the realms of the unreal.” It takes its beginning from a fundamental distinction between two different kinds of fiction: first, “fictions that are a useful model for understanding the reality that we ourselves inhabit” and, secondly, “fictions that offer an alternative to it” (1–2). Payne offers a close discussion of the various degrees of fiction as seen in modern literary theory as well as in ancient texts like Aristotle’s Poetics (the author is, however, wise enough to avoid forcibly imposing these documents). The thesis of the book, in brief, is that the bucolic poetry of Theocritus represents the first literature to invent a fully fictional world that is not an image of reality but rather an alternative to it. In the line of this argumentation, “the bucolic characters (i.e., of Theocritus) . . . cannot easily be understood as imitations of anything outside the bucolic poems themselves, they are frequently imitations of one another” (17). As examples for this kind of bucolic “auto-reference,” Payne discusses Thyrsis in Idyll 1, who imitates Daphnis, and the unnamed goatherd in Idyll 3, who refers in his catalogue of lovers to pastoral figures from the mythical world. In the four major chapters of his book Payne exploits this approach by a closer analysis of some of the Idylls, with special focus on 1, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12 and 13. The second chapter, for example, “looks at the functionality of the bucolic world from the perspective of narrative mode” (49). Payne investigates how the bucolic world comes into being by the different narrative modes, such as dramatic speech and authorial narration. The framing parts of the Idylls 11 and 13 are looked at as the means whereby the author establishes a distinct line between the fictional “bucolic” and the “real” world. The third chapter proceeds along this line by arguing “that to be a bucolic character means to have a character that is shaped by its relationship to an imagined world, the fictional world of bucolic poetry itself” (92). This is one of the most stimulating parts of the book, since it offers a new look at the striking tendency of Theocritus’ bucolic poetry toward self-referentiality: “Polyphemus envisions a pastoral world that he shares with Galateia, who has left the ocean to become his wife. These characters are able to achieve a temporary distraction from their present suffering by invoking a more perfect version of their own bucolic experience” (93). Likewise Thyrsis in Idyll 1 refers, by naming Daphnis, to a famous singer from the pastoral world and Comatas in Idyll 5 claims that the Muses love him (even) more than Daphnis (lines 80–81, see p. 93). In his treatment of Idyll 3 and its catalogue of pastoral lovers a comparison with the very similar catalogue in the disputed Idyll 27 would have been welcome.

The book is nicely produced and shows only very few and minor misprints. It does not aim to answer every possible queston, but it is to be recommended as a book that pleasantly stimulates the reader to read well-known texts afresh.