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1. If one were to impose a genealogical shape upon the shifting kaleidoscope of discourses and practices that is human history, the stemma of the Western cultural tradition would run back to four primary sources of origin. One the one hand, there is the heritage of Judaism and Christianity; on the other the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. The former finds its most influential articulation in the Old and New Testament of the Bible. The latter lacks any such central text. Yet if a single work from pagan antiquity had to be placed next to the Holy Scriptures of the Jews and the Christians, it would have to be - Ovid's Metamorphoses. Homer might be the Bible of the Greeks, but the Metamorphoses is the Bible of paganism for the art and literature of the Western tradition. [1] Much like Christianity, which fashioned something new out of the religious vision of Judaism, the Metamorphoses modified and changed, but also codified and preserved the initial Greek way of making sense of the world: myth. 2. Over the centuries Greek and Roman mythology has proved to be a remarkably flexible multi-purpose medium: it is a source of sheer aesthetic pleasure, it offers inexhaustible conceptual challenges, and it provides an idiom in which to negotiate reality. In certain cases, mythic figures like Oedipus and Narcissus have acquired the status of icons for some of our own cultural obsessions. But the fact that ancient myths may evince archetypal human impulses and fears does not in itself explain why these stories have captivated the Western imagination for almost three millennia. Rather, the longevity and charm of ancient mythology is largely due to specific literary versions which endowed abstract patterns of plot with a particularly powerful poetic design and cultural identity. Again, Ovid's Metamorphoses is pivotal in this respect. Like no author before or after him, Ovid managed to outfit a comprehensive compendium of myth with a literary format of the highest sophistication that would continue to resonate with ever-changing audiences. 3. Though for many readers of the poem, its most distinctive feature are "the gods made flesh," an obvious affront to monotheism, today I want to focus on a tale in which human characters take center stage. In Book 6 of the Metamorphoses, a narrative caesura occurs. The anthropomorphic gods and goddesses who have so far dominated the poem recede into the background for an episode that, for the first time, does not feature a divine protagonist. The main characters who here take the narrative limelight are Tereus, Procne, and Philomela. What they do to each other is quickly told. Tereus, king of Thrace, marries Procne, the daughter of Pandion, king of Athens. When Philomela comes to visit her sister Procne in Thrace, Tereus rapes the virgin, cuts out her tongue to prevent her from telling anybody about the crime, and locks her up deep within the Thracian woods. Philomela manages to convey what happened to her by weaving the events into a piece of cloth which she sends to her sister. Procne frees her, and together they take revenge on Tereus by slaughtering his son Itys and dishing him up to his father. After the crime is revealed in no subtle fashion - Philomela throws the still uneaten head of Itys right into the face of his father, the three protagonists are transformed into birds - hoopoe, nightingale, and swallow. 4. Ovid's harrowing ghoul-fest goes back to the now lost tragedy Tereus by Sophocles and has in turned spawned a distinguished history of reception that continues unabated. With his characters of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela, Ovid created the poetic archetypes who have mediated, in its purest form, the obsession of Athenian drama with violent transgression for the Western tradition. In this paper, I want to look at some instances of reception and the larger issues raised by the ongoing translatio mythologiae. 5. The obvious place to start is Shakespeare, more specifically his Titus Andronicus. Few plays of Shakespeare have so lurid a reputation as this one. Seemingly gratuitous violence abounds. The play features human sacrifice, several beheadings, three chopped off hands, one of which is carried off-stage in the bloody mouth of glossectomized Lavinia. But as critics are increasingly realizing, the slaughter comes with a sophisticated poetics. The most literary moment in all of Shakespeare occurs in this drama. In the crucial moment of peripeteia, Ovid's Metamorphoses is brought on stage. In a previous scene, the poem had already provided narrative guidance for the gruesome mutilation of Lavinia who was gang-raped by Demetrius and Chiron. Unlike their Ovidian predecessor Tereus, however, they not only cut out Lavinia's tongue but also severed her hands. For as classically educated readers, they knew that removing the tongue of a rape victim does not suffice to silence her. Eager students of Latin literature, Demetrius and Chiron engage in an exercise of practical criticism, applying their knowledge of the classics to solve a problem they face in real life. 6. It is Ovid's text again that comes to the rescue of Lavinia who has seemingly been rendered incommunicado. In a paradoxical reversal of the previous scene, an edition of the Metamorphoses allows her to regain her voice. Using the truncated stumps of her arms together with her teeth, she flips through the pages of the text, until she reaches the story enacted on her own body. Those who watch realize that she suffered through a re-reading of the Philomela story. Her father Titus Andronicus picks up on the metaliterary spirit of imitation and emulation that patterns the play. Before exacting his revenge on the perpetrators, he announces: "For worse than Philomel you used my daughter,/ And worse than Progne I will be revenged." As a recent editor of Titus Andronicus notes, "When the characters are not revenging or raping, they spend their time reading - reading events, reading texts and citations, reading the book of Ovid in which the narrative of the drama is pre-written." 7. One of the market-wise most successful engagements with ancient literature in recent years has been Christoph Ransmayr's The Last World - a novel with an Ovidian repertory. At its opening, Maximus Messalinus Cotta, an avid fan of Ovid's poetry, is on his way to the Black Sea. Rumors have reached Rome that Naso has vanished in the wilderness around Tomi, and Cotta is determined to find out what happened to his former friend. At the same time, he harbors the secret hope of discovering another edition of the Metamorphoses. For Ovid, so the novel has it, incinerated the only available copy of his masterwork in a fit of anger before departing for his exile. In The Last World, a whimsical tyrant is in charge of Rome, who presides over an anonymous and relentlessly efficient state-bureaucracy. Yet the oppressive order of the capital fades if compared to the atmosphere of doom and desperation that awaits Cotta in Tomi. Ransmayr calls the place a "backwater," located "in the middle of nowhere," a "town of iron" - fit only for inhabitants of a degenerate age. 8. The novel chronicles Cotta's adventures in this visionary world of moral and ecological decay. At first Ransmayr's protagonist does not realize that in the pernicious environment of Tomi the figments of Ovid's imagination have come to life - more often than not to appalling effect. [2] Through his endeavors to solve the enigmas surrounding Ovid's disappearance, a nonplussed Cotta becomes an involuntary character in the mythic dramas of the very poem he is pursuing. His quest for Ovid and his work, aided by such mysterious intermediaries as Pythagoras, Naso's former servant, the town-whore Echo, or the gossip-prone shopkeeper Fama becomes increasingly frenzied until he is in danger of losing his bearings in a world beyond the grasp of ordinary common sense. Only in chapter fifteen, the last of the book, which Ransmayr invested with a peculiar kind of eschatology, an enlightening trauma puts a halt to his vertiginous descent into the madness of Ovidian myth.[3] In a scene of terminal (dis)closure, a demented Cotta acquires the degree of metaliterary awareness necessary to end his tailspin. 9. The catalyst that triggers Cotta's revelation is a close encounter with the rebarbative powers of Ovid's art. Just when he is about to despair of deciphering the hermeneutic puzzles posed by the bewildering figures of Tomi, he is accidentally drawn into the family affairs of the town butcher Tereus. In Ransmayr's spin on what is out and away the most forbidding episode of the entire Metamorphoses, Cotta becomes a participant-observer to a harrowing ghoul-fest of rape, mutilation, infanticide, and cannibalism. [4] Unsurprisingly, this gut-wrenching material came to Ovid and Ransmayr preshaped by Athenian and Roman playwrights, and Cotta's reaction to the staples of tragic horror is, aptly, a moment of lucidity: the welter of blood and atrocity shocks him right out of his delusions. [5] Cotta realizes in the fictional version of a postmodern epiphany that the world of the poem stands in for the elusive creator whom he is unable to set eyes on. Moreover, watching the ghastly events with mounting dismay, Cotta is finally able to see with the requisite clarity what is happening to himself - that the literary cosmos of the text he is seeking to recover is in truth a consuming artifact about to absorb him too. [6] 10. This hair-raising conclusion makes for a brilliant climax to The Last World, a novel that celebrates throughout a poetics of literary self-consciousness. Appropriately, being the last of Ransmayr's allusive overtures to the Metamorphoses, Cotta's anagnorisis offers an analogue to the triumphant finale of Ovid's poem. In his epilogue, Ovid envisioned his own apotheosis through the everlasting reception of his work, a form of immortality predicated on countless readers immersing themselves into his poetry. [7] At the end of The Last World, Cotta meets Naso literally on those terms. His witness of the massacre in the house of Tereus brings him to the fulfillment of his destiny - a destiny long since predicted in "the scraps and pennants" of the Metamorphoses which Cotta had discovered littered across the landscape of squalor and pain that is Ransmayr's Tomi. Against the backdrop of this terrain, saturated as it is with the power of Ovid's art, Cotta morphs into a symbol for the act of reading, an act where author and reader find each other in the territory mapped out by the literary work. 11. Yet the implications of the novel's end transcend the genteel urbanity of metapoetic sophistication. While the intertextual pas de deux with the sphragis of the Metamorphoses may be artistically scintillating, it also contains a mortifying subtext. Unlike Ovid's metaliterary gesture, Ransmayr's reprise does not direct our attention skywards - but to hell on earth. Of all the Ovidian myths that might have triggered Cotta's insight into his destiny, he resolved that a tale of grotesque savagery should bring about the moment of apocalyptic truth. By Ransmayr's account, so it seems, the most profound understanding of Ovid and his work derives from an encounter with the most offensive of his literary phantasies. In The Last World, the viewing of inexplicable violence turns out to be strangely cathartic in that it restores a sense of reality to Cotta who had for some time been teetering on the brink of insanity. A disturbing collusion of privileged knowledge with the representation of barbarity emerges, as Ransmayr makes special insight contingent upon the vicarious experience of personal trauma. Cotta, as he watches the ghastly events with mounting dismay, becomes an unwitting chiffre for the pornographic epistemophilia that fuels our compulsive interest as readers and viewers of violence. 12. My final example is the drama 'Cleansed' by Sarah Kane which is also patterned on the myth of Tereus -- but takes the escalation of violence a step further. One of the inmates of a mental institution suffers the loss of his tongue, his hands, and, when he tries to express himself through dancing, his feet. The shrill absurdities of Shakespeare reappear in Kane in a more muted guise, a sad and melancholy exploration of the inabilities of lover and beloved to communicate, to find a voice that reaches out to another person beyond the infernal din of modern institutions. The god-forsaken woodlands of barbarian Thrace where the forces of Hell overpower Tereus to stage a furious rebellion against the constraints of civilized society, against communitas and societas ciuilis, are now the apparatuses of the state itself that progressively castrates and normalises its subjects. Kane zooms in on a crucial element of the myth: how to link up as an individual to the environment, how to establish human contact, how to communicate one's inner-most feelings to the outside world, how to find the alter of the ego. The haunted existence of modernity, the existentialist scream of Munch that articulates the metaphysical loneliness of modern man, here finds a postmodern, feminist analogue. Yet despite the Foucauldian gender-bending and play with the dis-membered fragments of the human body, there is not much hope in Kane that individuals will succeed in resisting the institutional disciplines imposed upon them. 13. Artists, then, have found this part of the Metamorphoses a seemingly irresistible source of inspiration. Yet where artists see a potential, scholars see a problem. Being at once fascinating and repelling, the myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela has become a vital touchstone for modern critics who debate Ovid's role and popularity in the contemporary canon. At times the secondary literature on this episode bears a distinct resemblance to a case argued in front of the international tribunal at Den Haag. Ovid's representation of the rape of Philomela has been indicted as the height of obscenity, bad taste, and authorial self-indulgence - the artistic equivalent as it were of a crime against humanity, a highly objectionable kind of pornographic pandering to the sick instincts of a male imagination. Others have rallied to the poet's defense. Some readers, digging deep into the tool box of modern literary criticism, have even detected latent feminist sensibilities in Ovid's take on Tereus' outrage. A particularly popular move involves the drawing of a distinction between the flesh-and-blood author and his narrative persona. In trying to exonerate Ovid from the charge of evil intent, these literary "shysters" avow that Ovid, the individual, was surely a humanist at heart, and distance the man himself from the incriminating passages in his poem. 14. I want to conclude by returning to the origins of the myth in ancient Greece. For one question that remains to be asked is: what is wrong with a culture that invents a myth such as this in the first place? This tale constructs barbarity by demonizing the other. It creates the outside of civilization by instantiating an us vs. them in ethnocentric terms: the civilized Athenian victims of Thracian violence. Paradoxically, however, such a construction of the world in turn offers a convenient apologia for brutality, because it stimulates a visceral loathing of the foreign, whether conceived of in terms of race, ethnicity or culture. The very Greek notions of autochthony, racial purity, cultural superiority acquire paradigmatic power in the myth of Tereus. Tragedy is the form of art that permitted Athenian society to act out its own murderous fantasies, give artistic shape to their loathing, anxieties and resentments. They have stayed with us, and are, in a sense, ineluctable. Footnotes[1] A case forcefully argued by Barkan (1986). [2] Among the characters Cotta meets are such "rationalizations" of Ovidian myths as Lycaon, the werewolf, or Arachne, the deaf-mute weaver, but also intertextual hybrids such as the German Dis. In Ransmayr, the god of death is a master from Germany, and the reference to Paul Celan's haunting lyrics on Auschwitz is symptomatic of the narrative ethos that prevails throughout the entire work. (Whether the moral calculus behind this particular allusive gesture leaves no remainder is another matter. See the remarks by Hage (1997) on the questionable practice of Ransmayr's world-historical collage that, without apparent qualification, blithely juxtaposes the fictional horrors of Ovid's epic with nightmarish memories of the Nazi death-camps.) [3] Cf. Fuhrmann (1994) on the paradoxical evocation of the "four last things" of Christian theology (Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell) in the title to a work of unremitting nihilism. [4] Ovid had elaborated on the rather dysfunctional Thracian household at Met. 6.424-674. [5] In allusive form, basic elements of the story are already present in Homer (cf. Od. 19.518-23). Yet the myth became a generically authenticated fiction in its own right through Sophocles' rendition of the material in his tragedy Tereus. The subject also found great favor with Roman theater goers. The Tereus of Accius, not necessarily a translation of the Sophoclean play, seems to have been "a stage favorite of the late Republic" (Otis (1967) 377); cf. Cicero Att. 16.2.3 and 5.1. [6] Cf. the very end of The Last World: "One thing drew Cotta into the mountains - the only inscription he had not yet discovered ... He was sure it would be a small banner - after all, it carried only two syllables. When he stopped to catch his breath, standing there so tiny under the overhanging rocks, Cotta sometimes flung those syllables against the stone, and answered, Here! as the echo of his shout came back to him. For what reverberated from the walls - broken and familiar - was his own name." [7] Cf. Ovid's own link between reading and afterlife at 15.877-9 ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / siquid habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam. A perceptive discussion of Ovid's epilogue and its metaliterary agenda is now available in Hershkowitz (1998). Related Articles: Ovid's Poetology; Erotic Exclusion; Bibliography |