Coming Up for Air: Immersion, Authorship, and the “Augustine Paradox”

In an article first published in this journal, Jonas Grethlein responds to the present author's discussion of the fact that ancients did not—unlike modern narratologists—differentiate between (extratextual) author and (intratextual) narrator. Grethlein attempts to qualify Whitmarsh's position in two respects: (i) he believes that the ancient author was conflated not just with literary narrators but also with characters; (ii) he believes that the best explanation for this conflation lies with the phenomenon known as immersion, which he believes to be central to ancient conceptions of reading (and indeed central to all language processing in general). This article argues that Grethlein overstates the centrality of immersion to ancient models of literary experience, an overstatement that leads him to a misleadingly static model. A more flexible model is needed, one that does justice to the complex play of immersion and detachment in ancient theories of fictional world-building. Grethlein's claim that author and character were conflated in ancient thought, it is argued, is also overstated. The article concludes by restating the power of metalepsis as a conceptual tool. Ancients perceived metalepsis, however, in a non-narratological way: as a conflation not of narrative levels, but of real and fictional worlds.