The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative, 130–163 Below the Belt: Looking into the Matter of Adventure-Time J ENNIFER R. B ALLENGEE Towson University Bakhtin’s discussion of the Greek romance in his essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ 1 has prompted a significant amount of de- bate among classical scholars. Critics chiefly contest Bakhtin’s conceptuali- zation of the chronotope ‘adventure-time’ that Bakhtin posits as characteris- tic of this ancient novelistic form, arguing that Bakhtin’s chronotope seems to deny the significance of the events that occur between the beginning and end of the novel. Indeed the adventure-time chronotope does leave relatively unexplored the bulk of the events that constitute the narrative. Yet, at the same time, the concept helpfully demarcates a problematic gap in these Greek romances between the narrative frame that begins and ends the novels and the matter of adventure-time, which I will henceforth refer to as “con- tent,” contained within this frame. 2 For the events of the romances describe the tensions and torments of erotic subjectivity, played out upon the surface of physical bodies that are only obliquely acknowledged in Bakhtin’s con- ception of adventure-time. The bodies of the hero and heroine, in suffering the hidden pains of eros, express inner complications that prove as resistant to any normalizing theory of narrative as they do to the ideology of the soci- ety which seeks to constrain them. Thus adventure-time, in veiling over the insistent persistence of the biological bodies that provoke these adventures, in fact emphasizes a gap that occurs on both the level of the narrative and of the characters themselves. The disconnect between the narrative frame and the erotic adventures (or content) of these novels is recapitulated in the gap ————— 1 Bakhtin 1981, 84–258. 2 In her sociological study of the ancient Greek novel, S. MacAlister also notes the produc- tive frame that Bakhtin’s adventure-time chronotope creates. MacAlister 1991, 39.