The Image of the Poet in Ovid's Metamorphoses (review)
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The unifying idea of this book is that Ovid models mythological characters in the Metamorphoses as surrogates for himself in order to reflect on his poetic commitments. Barbara Pavlock takes it as a given that one such surrogate is the mortal weaver Arachne, whose asymmetrically structured tapestry of divine love affairs mirrors the subject and style of the Metamorphoses. Pavlock assumes further that Ovid aligns himself with Arachne against the Olympian Minerva, whose symmetrical tapestry of divine punishments displays an "aesthetic and . . . ideology . . . in accord with the Aeneid, as manifested in miniature form by the shield of Aeneas" (5). Pavlock's object is to explore other major characters in the Metamorphoses "that supplement Arachne's function as a surrogate for the poet" (6). The core of the book consists of five chapters devoted to the characters Narcissus, Medea, Daedalus, Orpheus, and Ulysses. Pavlock generalizes that Ovid reveals through these surrogates a poetic program that destabilizes traditional epic narrative and values, favors Hellenistic aesthetics, and is "governed by tensions, not least between traditional epic and the low genre of elegy" (7). She limits her analysis to these characters because others that have programmatic significance "are not transgressive to the same degree through boundary violations that resonate on moral and ethical levels as well as in the aesthetic sphere." Consequently, the Muse Calliope is ruled out as a surrogate for Ovid because she is a spokesperson for Olympian authority and condones punitive transformations and is therefore aligned against Arachne. In the case of Pythagoras, another well-known stand-in for the poet, Pavlock says that Ovid "does not engage in a deep exploration of this character so as to suggest a complex association between surrogate and poet" (8).
The introduction does not provide an overview of other characters that could qualify as surrogates for the poet nor does it discuss the considerable [End Page 158] scholarship on the Metamorphoses devoted to "metapoetics" or "poetology." Numerous items are missing from the bibliography: e.g., Karl Galinsky, "Ovid's Poetology in the Metamorphoses," in Werner Schubert, ed., Ovid. Werk und Wirkung, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt 1999), 305–14; and Lothar Spahlinger, Ars latet arte sua: Die Poetologie der Metamorphosen Ovids (Stuttgart and Leipzig 1996). One might reasonably expect Pavlock to justify yet another contribution to a line of inquiry that nearly two decades ago prompted Elaine Fantham to comment in a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of Ovidian criticism: "Have we become too obsessed by meta-poetics? If poets were entirely or predominantly concerned with their own creativity, such narcissism would turn away readers. We as critics have done much to devalue the poets we recommend to our students by our insistence on reading them in terms of their poetical apparatus" (in Karl Galinsky, ed., The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics [Frankfurt 1992] 197).
The first chapter entitled "Narcissus and Elegy" is not concerned with the poetics of Ovidian epic per se but with the poetics of love elegy. Pavlock suggests that Ovid encodes in the Narcissus story a critique of the narcissism of love elegy; the demise of Narcissus explains Ovid's own movement away from elegy (32). Pavlock demonstrates that when Narcissus falls in love with his own image, he is like the Ovidian poet-lover of the Amores who desires a self-manufactured image of Corinna. Narcissus' love is ultimately about the elegiac poet's love of his own creativity. (Pavlock fast-forwards to Pygmalion briefly at the end of the chapter to support her reading and later develops the idea of narcissistic desire in her Orpheus chapter.) The rest of the chapter traces the development of the elegiac genre in a series of discrete studies, some of whose points are: Narcissus fails to know himself as Ovid recommends in the Ars amatoria and therefore cannot manipulate his image to win his love; he laments his separation from his beloved in the wilderness as the suffering love poets Propertius and...
