The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors

The Backward Glance

1 the backward glance Of all the turning points in the history of poetry, the most important lies just below the surface of the earth, almost at the end of the steep climb up from Hell. This is the spot where Orpheus ignored the terms imposed upon him and looked over his shoulder at the wife he had just won back from death with a song. Those who tell the story expand the instant in which Eurydice vanishes into a brief chaos of futile grasps and fleeting words, just enough to make this point in time visible to us. And into this vertiginous moment they mix only the rudest beginnings of an answer to the question she and we have only barely time to ask: why? In the intervening eons, which comprise nothing less than the whole of literary history—for Orpheus was the first poet, we are told—that cataclysm has so often been remembered that it has acquired a tragic inevitability: Orpheus must look back; else, this is not his story. So too must his new wife die to begin with, and he himself must finally be dismembered.1 But the story of the first poet surely seeks to tell us something about all poets, and indeed, its beginning and end are bound up in familiar if complicated themes about the relationship between poetry and death, body and song, tradition and immortality. Nevertheless, the midpoint of the myth has remained elusive: why must the poet look back? Let us begin with what we are told by poets themselves, specifically Vergil and Ovid, the former in his fourth Georgic, the latter in the tenth book of his Metamorphoses, our two main sources for the myth.2 We start with Vergil: 13 b Iamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnis, redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras, pone sequens, namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem, cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem, ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes. Restitit, Eurydicenque suam, iam luce sub ipsa, immemor, heu, victusque animi respexit. Ibi omnis effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni foedera, terque fragor stagnis auditus Avernis. Illa ‘quis et me’ inquit ‘miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu, quis tantus furor? En iterum crudelia retro fata vocant, conditque natantia lumina somnus. Iamque vale: feror ingenti circumdata nocte invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas.’ Dixit et ex oculis subito, ceu fumus in auras commixtus tenuis fugit diversa, neque illum prensantem nequiquam umbras et multa volentem dicere praeterea vidit . . .3 A sudden dementia, the poet writes, “seized [Orpheus], careless even as he loved.” He was for a moment immemor, “forgetful”—presumably of Proserpina ’s injunction not to look back until free of the Underworld. Or perhaps he was simply unable to remember Eurydice’s face? Victus animi, something like “mentally undone,” respexit, “he looked back.” We are as puzzled as Eurydice, who with her last words begins to ask, “Who has ruined you and poor me, Orpheus?” Quis et me miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu?—and this last vocative rings like an unfinished answer to her own question, for the same Orpheus who won her release from death now sends her back. But her quis? turns out to be not a “who” but a “what”: quis tantus furor, she continues, “what madness so great . . . ?” And with that, she slips away. Stretching out her arms and crying a last “farewell,” she vanishes, “like smoke dissolved in insubstantial air,” leaving him still “wanting to say many things.” Any hope for clarification from Ovid finds, instead, only amplified uncertainty: Carpitur acclivis per muta silentia trames, arduus, obscurus, caligine densus opaca, nec procul abfuerunt telluris margine summae. Hic ne deficeret metuens avidusque videndi flexit amans oculos, et protinus illa relapsa est, bracchiaque intendens prendique et prendere certans 14 t h e b a c k w a r d g l a n c e b nil nisi cedentes infelix adripit auras. Iamque iterum moriens non est de coniuge quidquam questa suo (quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam?) supremumque ‘vale’, quod iam vix auribus ille acciperet, dixit, revolutaque rursus eodem est.4 Orpheus “fears that strength is failing”—hers? his? The Latin is unclear. He is “anxious to see,” avidus videndi, but, significantly, Ovid provides no object here, as if that desired vision were an end to itself: Orpheus does not want his wife; he simply wants to see. “What complaint could she offer except...