Françoise Lavocat

Dido Meets Aeneas: Anachronism, Alternative History, Counterfactual Thinking and the Idea of Fiction

(Abstract)

Full-length article in: JLT 14/2 (2020), 194–214.

The anachronistic character of the loving relationship between Dido and Aeneas was widely and commonly discussed among commentators, critics, and writers in the early modern period. From the 16th century onwards, when the word »anachronism« appeared in vernacular languages, its definition was even inseparable from the example borrowed from the Aeneid. The purpose of this article is to interrelate early modern debates on anachronism, reflections on the status of fiction and the history of fiction.

Starting with the hypothesis that anachronism is a form of counterfactual, the questions posed in this article are: did forms of counterfactuals exist before the 19th century, to what extent did they differ from contemporary alternative histories and, if so, why? The story of Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid can be considered »counterfactual«, because this version of the narrative about the queen of Carthage was opposed to another, which was considered to be historical and which made Dido a privileged embodiment of female virtue and value.

Several important shifts are highlighted in this article. With the exception of St. Augustine (who saw in Vergil’s anachronism confirmation of the inanity of fiction), before the 16th century indifference towards anachronism prevailed: the two versions of Dido’s story were often juxtaposed or combined. If Vergil’s version of Dido’s story was condemned, it was for moral reasons: the exemplary version, considered more historically accurate, was favored throughout the Middle Ages, notably by Petrarch and Boccaccio.

From the 16th century onwards, however, increased acquaintance with Aristotle’s Poetics promoted greater demand for rationality and plausibility in fables. This coincided with the appearance of the word »chronology« and its development, which led to a new understanding of historical time. Anachronism then appeared to be a fault against verisimilitude, and as such was strongly condemned, for example by the commentator on Aristotle, Lodovico Castelvetro. At the same time, the argument of poetic license was also often invoked: it actually became the most common position on this issue. Vergil’s literary canonization, moreover, meant that the version of Dido’s life in the Aeneid was the only story that was known and cited, and from the 17th century onwards it totally supplanted the exemplary version. Strangely enough, permissiveness towards anachronism in treatises, prefaces, or comments on literary works was not accompanied by any development of counterfactual literature in early modern period. Indeed, in both narrative and theatrical genres fiction owed its development and legitimization to the triumph of the criterion of plausibility.

This article, however, discusses several examples that illustrate how the affirmation of fiction in the early modern period was expressed through minor variations on anachronism: the counterfictional form of Ronsard’s epic, La Franciade, which represents an explicit deviation from the Iliad; the metaleptic meeting of Vergil and Dido in the Underworld in Fontenelle’s Le dialogue des morts; and the provocative proposal for a completely different version of Dido’s life, which was made in an early 17th century Venetian operatic work by an author who claimed to be anti-Aristotelian. This study thus intends to provide an aspect of the story of fiction. The change of perspective on anachronism marks a retreat from moral argument, with privilege given to aesthetic criteria and relative independence with regard to history – while still moderated by the criterion of verisimilitude, as underlined by the abbé d’Aubignac, as well as Corneille.

References

Albrecht, Andrea/Lutz Dannenberg, First Steps Toward and Explication of Counterfactual Imagination, in: Dorothee Birke/Michael Butter/Tilmann Köppe (eds.), Counterfactual Thinking – Counterfactual Writing, Berlin/Boston 2011, 12–29.

Aubignac, François Hédelin d’, La pratique du théâtre, ed. by Hélène Baby, Paris 2001.

Aubignac, François Hédelin d’, The Whole Art of the Stage, transl. of La pratique du théâtre [1657], London 1684.

Augustine, The Confessions, transl. by E. B. Pusey (Edward Bouverie), Chicago 1948/1949, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-h/3296-h.htm (3 July 2020).

Bjaï, Denis, La Franciade sur le métier. Ronsard et la pratique du poème héroïque, Geneva 2011.

Boccaccio, Giovanni, Famous Women, ed. and transl. by Virginia Brown, Cambridge, MA 2001.

Bono, Paola/M. Vittoria Tessitore, Il mito di Didone. Avventure di una regina tra secoli e culture, Milan 1998.

Busenello, Giovan Francesco, La Didone. Dramma per musica. Testi di Giovan Francesco Busenello, musiche di Francesco Cavalli. Prima escuzione carnevale 1641. Venice, Libretto n. 43, http://www.librettidopera.it/didone/pdf.html (3 July 2020).

Calame, Claude, La pragmatique poétique des mythes grecs. Fiction référentielle et performance rituelle, in: Françoise Lavocat/Anne Duprat (eds.), Fiction et Cultures, Nîmes 2010, 33–56.

Castelvetro, Ludovico, Poetica d’Aristotele [1570], Munich 1978.

Chevrolet, Teresa, L’Idée de fable. Théories de la fiction poétique à la Renaissance, Genève 2007.

Clavier, Tatiana, L’exemplarité de Didon dans les Vies de femmes illustres à la Renaissance, CLIO. Histoire, femmes et sociétés 30 (2009), https://journals.openedition.org/clio/9444 (3 July 2020).

Cooper, Richard, The Theme of War in French Renaissance Entries, in: J. R Mulryne et al. (eds.), Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe. The Iconography of Power, Burlington 2015, 15–36.

Corneille, Pierre, Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique [1660], ed. by Bénédicte Louvat/Marc Escola, Paris 1999.

De Grazia, Marta, Anachronism, in: B. Cummings/J. Simpson (eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and renaissance in Literary History, Oxford 2010, 13–32.

Deluermoz, Quantin/Pierre Singaravélou, Des causes historiques aux possibles du passé? Imputatation causale et raisonnement contrefactuel en histoire, Labyrinte 39:2 (2012), 55–79, https://doi.org/10.4000/labyrinthe.4269 .

Dick, Philip K., The Man in the High Castle, New York 1962.

Doležel, Lubomír, Possible Worlds of Fiction and History. The Postmodern Stage, Baltimore, MD 2010

Duprat, Anne, Vraisemblances. Poétique et théorie de la fiction en France et en Italie (XVIe-XVIIe siècles), Paris 2009.

Esmein, Camille, L’Essor du roman. Discours théorique et constitution d’un genre littéraire au XVIIe siècle, Paris 2008.

Ferguson, Niall, Introduction – Virtual History: Towards a ›Chaotic‹ Theory of the Past, in: N.F. (ed.), Virtual History: Alternative and Counterfactuals, London 1997, 1–90.

Fontenelle, Œuvres completes, Vol. 1, Paris 1990.

Fontenelle, Dialogues of the Dead […] [1683], transl. by John Hugues, London 21723.

Forestier, Georges, Théorie et pratique de l’histoire dans la tragédie classique, Littératures classiques 11 (1989), 95–107.

Forestier, Georges, Littérature de fiction et histoire au XVIIe siècle. Une suite de raisonnements circulaires, in: Georges Ferreyrolles (ed.), La Représentation de l’histoire au XVIIe siècle, Dijon 1999, 123–138.

Gallagher, Catherine, The Rise of Fictionality, in: Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, Vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, Princeton, NJ 2006, 336–364.

Gallagher, Catherine, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction, Chicago 2018.

Genette, Gérard, Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction, Paris 2014.

Genette, Gérard, Discours du récit, Paris 2017.

Harris, Robert, Fatherland, London 1992.

Heinze, Rüdiger, Temporal Tourism: Time Travel and Counterfactuality in Literature and Film, in: Dorothee Birke/Michael Butter/Tilmann Köppe (eds.), Counterfactual Thinking – Counterfactual Writing, Berlin/Boston 2011, 213–226.

Hiatt, Alfred, The Making of Medieval Forgery. False Document in Fifteenth-Century England, Toronto 2004.

Klauk, Tobias, Thought Experiments and Literature, in: Dorothee Birke/Michael Butter/Tilmann Köppe (eds.), Counterfactual Thinking – Counterfactual Writing, Berlin/Boston 2011, 30–44.

Lavocat, Françoise, Fait et Fiction. Pour une frontière, Paris 2018.

Lavocat, Françoise, Kontrafaktische Narrative in Geschichte und Fiktion, in: Johannes Franzen et al. (eds.), Geschichte der Fiktionalität. Diachrone Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Konzept, Würzburg 2018, 253–267.

Lebow, Richard Ned, Counterfactual History and Fiction, Historical Social Research 34 (2000), 57–68.

Lewis, David K., The Paradoxes of Time Travel, American Philosophical Quaterly 13:2 (1976), 145–152.

Lord, Mary Louise, Dido as an Example of Chastity: The Influence of Example Literature, Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (1969), 22–44 and 215–232.

Monfrin, Jacques, L’histoire de Didon et Enée au XVe siècle, Etudes littéraires sur le XVe siècle 3 (1986), 160–197.

Nünning, Ansgar, Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion. Theorie, Typologie und Poetik des historischen Romans, Trier 1995.

Paige, Nicholas D., Before Fiction. The Ancien Régime of the Novel, Philadelphia, PA 2011.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, ed. by D. Descotes/G. Proust, http://www.penseesdepascal.fr (3 July 2020).

Rigolot, François, Between Homer and Virgil, Mimesis and Imitation in Ronsard’s Epic Theory, in: M. C. Horowitz (ed.), Renaissance Rereadings. Intertext and Context, Urbana, IL 1988, 67–79.

Ronsard, Pierre de, La Franciade [1572], in: Œuvres complètes, Vol. 16, ed. by P. Laumonier, Paris 1959.

Ronsard, Pierre de, TheFranciad, transl. by Phillip John Usher, New York 2010.

Rood, Tim/Carol Atack/Tom Phillips, Anachronism and Antiquity, London 2020.

Ryan, Marie Laure, Temporal Paradoxes in Narratives, Style 43 (2009), 142–164.

Saint-Gelais, Richard, Fictions transfuges. La transfictionnalité et ses enjeux, Paris 2011.

Simpson, James, Subjects of Triumphs and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Africa and Trionfi, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 25 (2005), 489–508.

Squire, J.C. (ed.), If It Had Happened Otherwise, London 1931.

Vaihinger, Hans, Die Philosophie des Als-Ob. System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus, Berlin 1911.

Ziolkowski, Jan M./Michael C. J. Putnam (eds.), The Virgilian Tradition. The First Fifteen Hundred Years, New Haven/London 2008.

2021-07-02

JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990

Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved.
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and JLTonline.
For other permission, please contact JLTonline.

How to cite this item:

Abstract of: Françoise Lavocat, Dido Meets Aeneas. Anachronism, Alternative History, Counterfactual Thinking and the Idea of Fiction.

In: JLTonline (02.07.2021)

URL: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/articles/article/view/1111/2549

A Persistent Identifier can be found in the PDF-Version of this article