Exemplarity, Ethics, Narrative

Apollonius’ contribution to ancient discourses of exemplarity is the subject of Chapter 4. The first part of the chapter discusses the ecphrasis of Jason’s cloak, the second Jason’s conversation with Medea at the temple of Hecate. The former invites readers to measure paradigmatic frameworks against subsequent events, and encourages attention to the relationship between frameworks of understanding and the sensuous realities through which they are experienced. The latter, by showing an exemplum subject to dispute in a specific situation, explores the affective responses through which exempla become meaningful for characters and readers alike. Both passages invite readers to question exemplarity’s practical workings and conceptual underpinnings.

Past Encounters

Examining episodes such as the Argonauts’ catching sight of the eagle that tortures Prometheus, the description of the shepherd Dipsacus, the rituals in which the Argonauts participate, the argument and reconciliation between Jason and Telamon, and the Argonauts’ meeting with the Hesperides, Chapter 3 argues that the Argonautica brings about shifts in the understanding of reading as an ethical act that are closely connected to readers’ temporal situation. In order to grasp the significance of these encounters, readers need to project themselves into the world of the poem in a manner that entails a displacement, and consequently a heightened awareness, of their interpretative habits and acculturation.

Untimely Performances

Chapter 2 focuses on three performances, the Argonauts’ paean to Apollo on Thynias, the Heliades’ lament, and Orpheus drowning out the song of the Sirens. Albeit in very different ways, each episode promotes various understandings of historical difference or distance, and an enhanced sense that relating to performances is always a temporally situated activity. Each invites readers to consider fundamental questions about poetry’s purposes and effects: particularly important are the complex forms of presence that poetry creates, empathy and affective response, and the limits and allure of mimesis.

Imagined Worlds

Chapter 5 addresses how the Argonautica makes a world of the imagination accessible to its readers, focusing chiefly on visualization. The chapter’s central argument is that such visualizations are always temporally inflected. Although the effects that they create vary considerably, the most important is that readers are endowed with a heightened consciousness of the multitemporal aspects of objects and imaginative processes. It focuses on passages in which the narrative’s climactic events are related, such as Jason’s battle with the Earthborn and the taking of the Golden Fleece. Prominent in such passages is a tension between the development of new imaginative capabilities that enable a closer engagement with disturbing phenomena, and containment or displacement of the myth’s more violent elements.

Affecting Time

The first part of Chapter 1 examines the Argonautica’s intertextual relationships, especially but not exclusively with Homer, as a means of affording and shaping access to an imagined world, before considering the figure of Heracles as an articulation of the poem’s concern with temporal change. The rest of the chapter focuses on Apollonius’ ‘philological’ poetics. Building on previous studies, it argues that Apollonius’ use of unusual words should be seen as a form of creative curiosity that draws readers into exercising their world-projecting capabilities. Responding to the poem’s particular version of authorial subjectivity also entails seeing the text as a multilayered expressive act. Both parts of the chapter make the case for seeing the temporal character of reading itself as a crucial source of meaning.

Introduction

Introducing the main concerns of the book, this chapter begins with a discussion of the critical language that can be employed to capture Apollonius’ concern with the status of objects, characters, and language in time. A series of case studies follow: the first demonstrates that descriptions of performances within the world of the poem are a means of generating a sense of ‘folded’ time, while the second describes the demands that the Argonautica’s poetics make on readers’ ethical commitments. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the different temporal registers through which the poem’s world is experienced.

Conclusion

The Conclusion situates the significance of the Argonautica’s handling of time in relation to a strand of the philosophical tradition, represented by Gorgias, in which humanity’s temporal implication is a source of cognitive frailty. While the Argonautica presents its readers with a world that resists being grasped in simple conceptualizations and repeatedly highlights the limits of forethought, it also offers readers the possibility of an enhanced self-understanding by opening to scrutiny the means by which readers situate themselves in history.