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Recent reading: Ovid
Nov. 16th, 2007 11:47 amOvid, Metamorphoses, tr. Mary Innes
I keep wanting to find textile metaphors for the way the tales are connected. Some tales start from the middle of others, when characters tell each other stories; some start when the end of one tale reminds the narrator of another; some are part of a set illustrating an aspect of a god or explaining what has happened to a family. So from Anaeas passing Scylla and Charybdis on his journey from Troy, we see Scylla listening to Galatea's story of the death of Acis, then Scylla being transformed herself first into a monster then into a dangerous reef, before we rejoin Anaeas's tale. I keep thinking of the way fibres are joined in spinning, with the fibres teased into the same direction, overlapping and twisted together into something new. That's not quite right, though - the threads here loop forwards and backwards as the narrative moves in and out of nested tales. The text itself supplies the possible alternative metaphor of ripples in a river, in Pythagoras' speech about changes in nature:
As wave is driven on by wave, and, itself pursued, pursues the one before, so the moments of time at once flee and follow, and are ever new.
This isn't quite right either - the complexity is represented but the agency is gone. In a way, what Ovid represents Pythagoras as saying - at length - is contradicted by the rest of the text. Pythagoras depicts change as an inevitable, natural process, but the metamorphoses in the tales take place because someone causes them to: a god transforms someone in anger or pity; a human changes through the force of their own emotion; the narrator shapes the narrative as it flows from one tale to the next.
I keep wanting to find textile metaphors for the way the tales are connected. Some tales start from the middle of others, when characters tell each other stories; some start when the end of one tale reminds the narrator of another; some are part of a set illustrating an aspect of a god or explaining what has happened to a family. So from Anaeas passing Scylla and Charybdis on his journey from Troy, we see Scylla listening to Galatea's story of the death of Acis, then Scylla being transformed herself first into a monster then into a dangerous reef, before we rejoin Anaeas's tale. I keep thinking of the way fibres are joined in spinning, with the fibres teased into the same direction, overlapping and twisted together into something new. That's not quite right, though - the threads here loop forwards and backwards as the narrative moves in and out of nested tales. The text itself supplies the possible alternative metaphor of ripples in a river, in Pythagoras' speech about changes in nature:
As wave is driven on by wave, and, itself pursued, pursues the one before, so the moments of time at once flee and follow, and are ever new.
This isn't quite right either - the complexity is represented but the agency is gone. In a way, what Ovid represents Pythagoras as saying - at length - is contradicted by the rest of the text. Pythagoras depicts change as an inevitable, natural process, but the metamorphoses in the tales take place because someone causes them to: a god transforms someone in anger or pity; a human changes through the force of their own emotion; the narrator shapes the narrative as it flows from one tale to the next.
