Simile and Identity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Marie Louise von Glinski (review)

This slender and elegant monograph sets a positive standard for first books based on dissertations about intensively studied texts: it wastes no time on paraphrasing, discussion of doxography, and lists of parallel passages. I have not seen the Princeton dissertation, but certainly the book reads like a fresh and intense essay, and offers more than one might expect given the announced topic, the similes in Ovid’s epic. In fact von Glinski’s topic turns out to be a refreshing one: not a systematic reexamination and a listing of the similes, or an investigation of sources, techniques and models, but rather a series of illuminating close readings, organized around four ideas of what the similes do in the narrative. Similes complicate and anticipate our reactions to metamorphosis; they comment on the crucial issue of a tripartite universe, made of gods, humans, and animals; they destabilize and problematize genre; they measure and puncture the limits of fictionality and illusion. In general, they never stop addressing the reader with provocative new questions.

Some of the results of the book are a convincing development of approaches initiated in pioneering studies by Rosati (especially on illusion and spectacle), Hardie (identity, fictionality) and by Feldherr (power play), but von Glinski never replicates familiar observations. The style is pleasant and concise, and the choice of similes brings out the inexhaustible creativity of Metamorphoses. Similes can show how an animal, a human, and a god all in their own way look at the act of bloody sacrifice (not in itself a common image in epic, if we look for physical detail and emotional response). There are similes with images that are indicated by deixis in direct speech: “just like Mt Ida here in front of us” says Nestor in a metafictional moment; Venus uses herself as a simile (“just like my own body”), drawing attention to her status as a statue in the nude, à la Aphrodite of Cnidos. Achilles is likened to a raging bull, hardly a surprise in itself after Homer and Vergil, but the bull turns out to be part of a spectacle in a plaza de toros. Atalanta’s body, under the desiring gaze of Hippomenes, changes from white to blushing redness, just like (just like?) a purple cloth over a marble atrium “dyes” the marble with artificial shade—a situation that would be typical of an auditorium or a recitation hall in Rome. Then there are the innovations at the level of tenor: note for example the case of the centaurs: “The problem is . . . not the simile’s vehicle but its tenor. The enormous range of the epic simile is only possible because of the undisputed human status of the tenor that grounds it. . . . By contrast, the centaurs’ ambiguous nature, half-human, half-animal, makes such comparisons inherently problematic” (p. 111).

Simile and Identity is accessible to readers at all levels of expertise, including undergraduates, and would also make ideal reading for all people who like fiction and literary experiments.