Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (review)

Stories of metamorphosis "in poetry, art, and fictions, born at moments of historical and cultural metamorphosis, . . . convey ideas about ourselves and exact processes that move and structure imagination" (212). So concludes Marina Warner's potent volume, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. Delivered within the Clarendon Lecture Series 2001, the four internal chapters ("Mutating," "Hatching," "Splitting," and "Doubling") nod in the direction of more conventional treatments of metamorphosis but expand beyond them in provocative ways. Fantastic Metamorphoses is highly recommended not only for its insights into the processes of metamorphosis but also for its interweaving of literary, artistic, postcolonial, biological, and anthropological perspectives (among others) in depicting ideas about persons and personhood.

The "inexhaustible granary" (17) of Ovid's Metamorphoses serves as framework and reservoir for Warner's investigations. In his poem, Ovid views creation dynamically, exploring the migration of life across form. There, Warner writes, metamorphosis is the "principle of organic vitality as well as the pulse in the body of art" (2). The literary and artistic works she treats are shown to resonate with Ovid's "cyclical rhythm of generation, emergence, decay, and re-emergence" (1).

Chapter 1, "Mutating," focuses on the impact of New World native myths on then-current European thought. For Warner, the New World is a chrysalidal image and location of discovery and change: "[I]t offered extraordinary possibilities for thinking differently" (35; emphasis in source). Warner turns therefore to the first ethnographic document extant on the Americas, Fray Ramón Pané's Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, which contains Taino myths of "translation between worlds, between sexes, between cultures" (32). As with Ovid's reception in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, these native myths challenged Judeo-Christian tenets of the "unique individual integrity of identity" (2). For its part, metamorphosis was regarded as the trademark of the Devil and of hell. An important exception to this established thinking was Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1504), which, to Warner, "dazzlingly condenses the themes [she is] tackling in this book" (43). In a new reading of the triptych, Warner contends that its intent is to actively embrace the issue of difference in metamorphosis, personhood, and ideas about good and evil that was emerging in Europe as the result of the impact of New World experience. The triptych provided alternate ways of considering the "new strangenesses in incipient modernity" (68).

"Hatching" as chapter and metaphor looks closely at metamorphosis's assertion of consistency within dynamism: that the "same spirit/soul/essence appears to occupy different forms and yet remain itself" (118). In one of her many interdisciplinary moves, Warner begins her discussion in the domain of lepidoptery with Meria Merian's treatise Of the Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (1699–1701). Grounded in the New World, Merian's study, like Taino myth, was representative of a new way of looking at metamorphosis. The "permutations of dissimilarity" (79) through which the butterfly moves in its development serve Warner as analogues for ideas about plurality within the self. She then takes up the "scandal" of this perspective most directly with Yeats's poem "Leda and the Swan." Afterward, Warner returns to the entomological pattern with Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and its treatment of twentieth-century despair to, finally, the reemergence of hope in Nabakov's "Christmas." In each case, hatching (and its analogue, pupation) represents a kind of permutation in the ways in which selfhood can develop: in Warner's terms, consistency within inconsistency, contradiction within integration.

According to Warner, tales of metamorphosis often arise in "spaces (temporal, geographical, and mental) that were crossroads, cross-cultural zones" (17). Within the early modern world, nowhere is this crucible more evident than in the confluence of traditions surrounding slavery in the New World. Warner devotes the third of her chapters, "Splitting," to a genealogy of the zombie personality—a condition of "spellbound vacancy" (24). For Warner, the zombie offers a way of seeing new metamorphoses...