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  • 1997 NAPS Presidential Address “Differential Networks”: Relics and Other Fragments in Late Antiquity
  • Patricia Cox Miller (bio)

In his engaging book Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino wrote in a chapter entitled “Quickness” that he “would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line.” He narrates a story by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso as one that he would include in this collection of narrative lines. Here is that story in its entirety: “When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there.” 1 Like Calvino, I too am interested in narrative structures of a particular type, like his collection of one-liners, in which the genre of the collection is just as important as what it contains. That is, I am interested in narrative “lines”—strategies of narration—that operate on the basis of two functional criteria: one, they leave out unnecessary details, and two, they emphasize repetition. 2 By omitting unnecessary details, such narratives foreground the objects around which they are structured. These objects are “charged with a special force” and become “like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships.” 3 However, by emphasizing repetition, they enable a recognition of, and a certain pleasure in, the structure of the form itself, as when a child finds pleasure in fairy tales precisely because of the expectation that certain situations and formulas will be repeated in new-but-familiar ways. Narrative lines like this are effective, writes Calvino, because they are “series of events that echo each other as rhymes do in a poem.” 4 [End Page 113]

“Dissonant echoing” is the phrase that I am going to use to characterize a certain aesthetic of the narrative line which is found not only in literature but also in the art and ritual practice of the fourth and early fifth centuries of the late ancient era. Originally I was going to name this dissonant construing of narrative lines as an “aesthetics of discontinuity” until I discovered that I had been anticipated in this by Michael Roberts’ study of poetics in late antiquity, entitled The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity. 5 Briefly, Roberts characterizes the aesthetics of discontinuity as a taste for the densely textured play of repetition and variation. 6 There is a preference for effects of visual immediacy, achieved by an emphasis on the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes. 7 Furthermore, the relationships among such “parts” operate at an abstract level and must be reconstituted or imagined by the reader or the observer. 8 Thus parataxis, juxtaposition, and patterning are among the formal principles which both govern and reveal the disjunctive composition of these “narrative lines.” As Roberts remarks with an appropriately linear metaphor, “[t]he seams not only show, they are positively advertised.” 9

The tendency of this aesthetics toward fragmentation can be seen linguistically in poetry, where words are handled as though they possessed “a physical presence of their own, distinct from any considerations of sense or syntax.” 10 In fact, Roberts argues, “[i]n late antiquity . . . the referential function of language [and] art lost some of its preeminence; signifier asserts itself at the expense of signified.” 11 This “liberated” signifier then takes on the brilliance, dazzle and value suggested by the “jeweled style” of Roberts’ title. 12

A brief look at certain stylistic features of the art of this period will add an important visual component to the aesthetic disposition that is my focus. While it may be an exaggeration to follow Ernst Kitzinger in characterizing developments in the art of the late Roman era as “a great [End Page 114] stylistic upheaval,” nonetheless there are striking changes in artistic representation in this era that have enabled historians of art to discern the emergence of a coherent stylistic tendency. 13 Although my focus will be on the sculpting of human figures, particularly on sarcophagi, similar stylistic trends have been discerned in the mosaic and painterly arts of the period. 14


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Figure 1.

Figure 1. Arch of Constantine, Rome.

One of the basic changes is graphically represented...

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