Big Mama Is Watching You—A Bedtime Story About How Giraffes Sleep
Research by Anna Lena Burger and colleagues. Frontiers for Young Minds, 2023
Publication
Frontiers for Young Minds, 2023
Article
10.3389/frym.2023.1086538Full citation and authors
Anna Lena Burger; Paul Wilhelm Dierkes
Anna Lena Burger, Paul Wilhelm Dierkes (2023). Big Mama Is Watching You—A Bedtime Story About How Giraffes Sleep. Frontiers for Young Minds. https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2023.1086538
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which challenges him into interpretative activity, into being a solver and realizer of the text rather than just a passive consumer of it. I have subjected the giraffe to such prolonged analysis because it is an emblematic beast. The point I want to stress in this paper is that Heliodoros’ whole novel demands an active interpretative response from his reader. The Aithioptka is a much more challen ging read than any of the other Greek novels, precisely because it is pervaded at every level by the kind of self-conscious game-playing typified by the riddle of the giraffe. Here, for instance, is the Egyptian priest, Kalasiris, who acts as narrator for about a third of the whole novel, describing a dream he had on the island of Zakynthos: as I slept, a vision of an old man appeared to me. Age had withered him almost to a skeleton, except that his cloak was hitched up to reveal a thigh that retained some vestige of the strength of his youth. He wore a leather helmet on his head, and his expression was one of cunning and many wiles; he was lame in one leg, as if from a wound of some kind. (5.22.1) The vision reproaches Kalasiris for failing even to pay him a visit while in the vicinity, prophesies punishment for the omission, but conveys greetings from his wife to Kalasiris’ charge, the heroine Charikleja, ‘since she esteems chastity above all things’ (5.22.3). Again a riddle is set up by not immediately identifying the old man, and again the description is presented from the point of view of a character within the story. Here, however, the situation is rather more complicated, since Kalasiris himself has two aspects, as narrator and character within his own narration. As narrator he knows the identity of the dream figure, but in his presentation of his own experience he omits any explanatory gloss, and re-enacts the perplexity of his initial reaction. He describes the dream as he saw it, rather than as he subsequently understood it. Again the reader is challenged to disambiguate the riddle by matching the points of the description with knowledge acquired elsewhere. Every detail corresponds to something in the Homeric poems.4 This time Heliodoros has succeeded in keeping the easiest clues to the end, particularly the formulaic epithet polytropos (‘of many wiles’), proverbially associated with one epic individual, and the reference to a wound in the leg which also clinches its owner’s recognition in the original. Further clues are offered by the fact
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