ABSTRACT
In the introduction to his translation of The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon. a Greek novel of the second century C.E., Jack Winkler gives the following advice to its readers:
The unanswerable enigma of its contradictory style should be enjoyed directly as a lascivious surface and nothing more, making us conscious that the quest for depth, for meaning, and for unity is a fraud of the ages. That cannot quite be the author’s intention, since he could not have foreseen the time when tentative endeavors for unity of meaning, perspective, and point of view would one day have created a system of seeing and reading that knew no other possibility, but as children of that system it must be part of the author’s meaning for us. Otherwise we will misread his stressful irresolutions as bad rather than purposefully ineffable.
