Narcissus has been with us all along: Ancient stories as narcissistic narratives
- Authors
- Type
- Published Article
- Journal
- Frontiers of Narrative Studies
- Publisher
- De Gruyter
- Publication Date
- Aug 08, 2017
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 33–49
- Identifiers
- DOI: 10.1515/fns-2017-0003
- Source
- De Gruyter
- Keywords
- License
- Yellow
Abstract
Taking her cue from Freud’s insistence that narcissism is the “universal original condition” of humanity, Linda Hutcheon argues in her book Narcissistic narrative: The metafictional paradox that narcissism is “the original condition of the novel as a genre” (1984: 8). Such “metafictional” or “self-reflexive” literature is regularly dated to the seventeenth century. However, this essay argues that narrative narcissism has been with us since ancient times, not just since the rise of post/modern novelistic discourse. Narratives from various ages and places, across diverse corpora, draw attention to their own textuality, even if they do so to differing degrees and in different ways. To relegate all considerations of narrative narcissism to overt examples of post/modern “metafiction” is a categorical mistake. Making my case with reference to a wide range of ancient narratives, I argue that narrative narcissism can be a useful, nuanced analytic lens through which to read ancient literature, and that ancient examples of narcissism can nuance our understanding of this narratological concept.