This issue of ACTA, printed and electronic

Topic matches, not cited references.

• spontaneously invented a name for the creature derived from the most prominent features of its anatomy: kamdopardalis [the normal Greek word for ‘giraffe*]. (10.27.1-4) It is worth spending a little time analysing what is going on in this passage. The first point to note is that an essential piece of information, the creature’s name, is not divulged until the last possible moment, after the description is completed. The information contained in the description itself is not imparted directly by the narrator to the reader. Instead it is chan nelled through the perceptions of the onlooking crowd. They have never seen a giraffe before, and the withholding of its name from the reader re-enacts their inability to put a word to what they see. From their point of view the creature is novel and alien: this is conveyed partly by the naive wonderment of the description, and partly by their attempts to control the new phenomenon by fitting it into familiar categories. Hence the comparisons with leopards, camels, lions, swans, ostriches, eyeliner and ships. Eventually they assert conceptual mastery over visual experience by coining a new word to name the animal, derived from the naively observed fea tures of its anatomy. However, their neologism is given in Greek (kamdopardalis), although elsewhere Heliodoros is scrupulously naturalistic in observing that Ethiopians speak Ethiopian. The reader is thus made to watch the giraffe from, as it were, inside the skull of a member of the Ethiopian crowd. The narration does not objectively describe what they saw but subjectively re enacts their ignorance, their perceptions and processes of thought. This mode of presentation, involving the suppression of an omniscient narrator in direct communication with the reader, has the effect that the reader is made to engage with the material with the same immediacy as the fictional audience within the frame of the story: it becomes, in imagination, as real for him as it is for them. But there is a double game going on, since the reader, as a real person in the real world, differs from the fictional audience inside the novel precisely in that he does know what a giraffe is. This assumption is implicit in the way the description is structured. If Heliodoros* primary aim had been to describe a giraffe for the benefit of an ignorant reader, he would surely have begun with the animal’s name, not withheld it. So for the reader the encounter

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