Psychological Realism in Early Prose Narrative: Dreams in the 1001 Nights and the Greek Novel

The erstwhile dominant received wisdom that psychological “realism” is unique to the European novel after the seventeenth century is now definitively untenable. Subjugation of deed and act to psyche and affect is, as this article shows, neither especially Modern nor especially European. “Realism” of heart and mind suffuses post-Classical Greek and Arabic prose narrative, appearing as it does in the guise of the various species of the pathetic fallacy, or the externalizing of affect in free-indirect discourse, perspectival ekphrasis, and phantasy (diurnal or no). As in the Modern novel, inordinate focus on characters’ “inner” life seems related to a democratizing of literature in urban milieux, the banal desire of non-heroic characters finding itself subject to unusually earnest treatment. This article examines feeling’s displacement, especially in the oneiric phantasy, in Daphnis kai Chloē, Longus’s novel of the fourth century CE, and al-Nāʾim wa-l-yaqẓān (The Sleeper and the Waker), a cycle of Alf layla wa-layla (The 1001 Nights). Plot in each bends to the characters’ erōs (love) and shahwa (desire), as the guileless lovers of the first learn to realize their mutual lust in phantasy first and the dissolute wag of the second is made “caliph for a day” in a factitious dream.