"A Lover's Discourse": Byblis in Metamorphoses 9*

Some people would never have been in love, had they never heard love talked about.

François La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Character is not intrinsic, but literary, a compendium of all one has read.

Linda Kauffman, Special Delivery

In Metamorphoses 9, Ovid gives us the story of Byblis, a young woman in love with her brother Caunus. Critical discussion of the tale has focused on the ethical aspects of incest, ¹ the mixture of genres in the story, ² and, more recently, the play of repetition and difference in the episode. ³ This paper argues that, in the Byblis episode, Ovid suggests that the process of "being in love" is a discursively constructed experience. Throughout the tale, Byblis is obsessed with the idea of language as the creator of reality; she speaks of her problematic love for her brother as a dilemma of names and words. In addition, Ovid exploits the pun implicit in Byblis's name ⁴ in order to highlight the close connection between being a lover and being a reader and writer. Byblis's monologues and amorous ploys consist wholly of literary tropes and conventions and are modeled upon Latin elegy. Her entire love affair is conducted as if Byblis has "read" all of Latin elegy as well as the Heroides and the Ars Amatoria.

In positing a link in the story of Byblis between "being in love" and reading, I draw upon Roland Barthes's claim in A Lover's Discourse that "no love is original" (1978.136). The premise of Barthes's work is that the discourse of love is a repository of cultural conventions. How we appear and what we do while "in love" are little more than enactments of a script that has been played out by many before us. In A Lover's Discourse, Barthes interweaves literary allusions and the first-person laments of an unnamed lover and demonstrates how the process of "being in love" is intimately associated with that of reading and writing. In the introduction to his work, Barthes himself calls a lover's discourse "a discourse whose occasion is indeed the memory of the sites (books, encounters) where such and such a thing has been read, spoken, heard" (1978.9).

But while A Lover's Discourse is useful in shedding light on the recycling of Latin elegy in the Ovidian tale, it cannot account for the gender dynamics of the story. Byblis's status as a female lover and reader (and writer) of elegy plays a primary role in her "erotic failure" and her ultimate destruction at the end of the tale. To address the question of gender in the tale, I turn to recent feminist criticism on elegy. Various scholars have contended that despite the appearance of egalitarian unions between men and women, the amatory relations depicted in elegy are asymmetrical. ⁵ The elegiac puella is a constructed and passive object of desire (both erotic and artistic) rather than an active subject, the written rather than the writer. I would argue that, in the tale of Byblis, Ovid makes explicit the gendered power relations of the genre by staging the intervention of a female desiring subject in the world of elegy. Byblis transgresses gender boundaries when she aligns herself with the male amator and suffers the consequences of her actions. Ovid suggests that although love is a textual construct, in the world of elegy, erotic experience exists within a gendered hierarchy.

I. Readers and Lovers

When the text opens, Byblis is unaware of her romantic feelings for her brother. She recognizes her passion only through a dream (Met. 9.468-71). The manner in which Byblis comes to realize her feelings is patterned after the initial poems of Book 1 of the Amores. ⁶ In Amores 1.2, the narrator represents himself as tossing and turning and questioning why he is unable to sleep. He initially rejects the notion that love is the cause of his restlessness, since he...