The Image of the Poet in Ovid's Metamorphoses (review)

That Ovid's Metamorphoses mirrors within itself the entire procedure of narration (in part through multiplication of the narrators of embedded tales) and creates surrogates of the external poet-narrator is hardly a new idea in the critical debate on the poem. Some of these figures are quite evident and well known (Arachne, Calliope, Orpheus, Pythagoras, et al.), so it is noteworthy that, except for Orpheus, they are neglected by Pavlock, who examines instead some less obvious characters such as Narcissus, Medea, Daedalus, and Ulysses. Each of them (including Orpheus) is allotted in a chapter of this nicely produced volume, which opens with an introduction tracing the guidelines of this study and closes with a brief conclusion (plus a rich bibliography and an index). Pavlock's reason for selecting these characters (who are not all narrators) as surrogates of the poet is that they "blur boundaries, often hubristically, by undermining operative social norms and traditional antitheses between feminine and masculine, weak and strong, fluid and stable" (7), and thus destabilize central epic values, in line with "the principle of instability" that affects Ovid's poetics and vision of the universe.

Not all of Pavlock's arguments are equally persuasive: several of Ovid's readers may remain skeptical about her idea that Medea symbolizes "Ovid's own interest in creating intricate plots revolving around intrafamilial strife" (134), or about some alleged etymological wordplays (e.g., 53, 57), but her insights are often refreshing and thought-provoking. Thus, for example, we are invited to see Narcissus as an elegiac lover who brings to light an underlying truth of elegy: "The elegist, in rendering the beloved an object and in obsessively gazing on and pursuing the image of his own making, reveals his inherent narcissism" (15). The individual points of her thesis are quite convincing, even if her arguments could have been better supported by paying more attention to the metapoetic hints of Narcissus' lament (the address to the woods in Met. 3.442-445 is a pointed allusion to Prop. 1.18.19-32 and, beyond it, to the Callimachean Acontius' lament, the archetype of this topos and of the unhappy lover of elegy). Pavlock's view would also have gained weight by a better definition of what is distinctively elegiac: Ovid's Amores is not perhaps a quintessentially elegiac work (no more probably than Propertius' or Tibullus') and the appositional scheme "geminum, sua lumina, sidus" is much more a Gallan, that is elegiac, rather than a neoterical marker (18).

The reader may also feel sometimes perplexed by the use of somehow vague ideas such as "labyrinthine narrative" and "repetition" (e.g., 88) in Daedalus' book, features that affect the style of the "bad" narrator Achelous, to whom Ovid opposes his own restraint as storyteller, a master in the art of repetition and in establishing a good relationship with his readers. (On the narrative syntax analysis of this book Pavlock would have found stimulating hints in C. Tsitsiou-Chelidoni, Ovid. Metamorphosen, Buch VIII. Narrative Technik und literarischer Kontext [Frankfurt 2003]). Nonetheless, the discussion is always lively and interesting, and deals with topics and issues of great relevance in the critical debate on Ovid, combining intertextuality, narratology, and linguistic analysis with attention to political and cultural context. Beside the observations and suggestions disseminated in the analysis of single texts, the best of the volume is probably the chapter on Ulysses, although Pavlock surprisingly overlooks the praise of his narrative skill, based just on repetition, in Ars 2.128 ille referre aliter saepe solebat idem. For Pavlock, Ulysses is "the strongest surrogate of the poet" (132): he is distinguished by his self-awareness (a distinctive feature of Ovid himself), and his victory over Ajax in the armorum iudicium, that is of the versatile modern man over the archaic symbol of Homeric heroism, is somehow Ovid's victory over his epic authorities (and antagonists) Homer and Vergil, and the values celebrated...