Distanz und Bedeutung. Ovids Metamorphosen und die Frage der Ironie by József Krupp (review)

Irony in Ovid’s poetry resembles the smile of the Mona Lisa. Impossible to resist, yet hard to pin down, irony presents a challenge to the interpretation of Ovid’s texts, in this case the Metamorphoses, a poem that in itself embodies flux. Krupp’s monograph, a revised version of the author’s dissertation, picks up this challenge in a series of close readings of central passages of the poem, such as Lycaon, Actaeon, Narcissus and Echo, Adonis and Atalanta, and the “little Aeneid”. He aims to show not whether (ob) but how (inwiefern) the Metamorphoses can be considered ironic. Krupp builds on the work of Barchiesi, Rosati, and Hardie on textual and visual illusion as well as on the intricate puzzle of narrative instances. He uses the notion of Romantic irony to tease out the tension produced by the distance between sign and signification.¹

Krupp’s first chapter serves as a critical introduction to the history of irony from antiquity to Schlegel, and to the work of Derrida, de Man, and Gadamer. He sees the distance between what is said and what is meant as the central feature of irony, leading to a break in the text’s meaning (Textsinn), a subversive force that opens the text to a multiplicity of references (Bedeutungen). Taking his cue from Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Krupp sees irony as a test case for the interpretability of the Metamorphoses in its fragmented, nonlinear, and heterogeneous nature.

With the second chapter, Krupp takes the wolf by the ears in the much-discussed first metamorphosis of the poem, Lycaon. The episode provides a methodological introduction as Krupp distances himself from reading irony as a tool of Augustan subversion. He mistrusts Ovid’s overt parallel of Jupiter and Augustus and teases out how the codes, or levels, of the narrative, namely the gods, Rome, and the intruding narrator, resist such easy compartmentalization and instead threaten to blend into each other. The next chapter deals with Actaeon’s ironically cut-off vision of Diana, which is suggested by the expectations of the reader rather than explicitly described. The limitations of sight and speech are also present in the fourth chapter where Krupp considers Narcissus and Echo. Krupp shows their inability to shape their unresponsive environment as Narcissus fails to animate art (unlike Pygmalion) and Echo speaks a language that negates communication even as it follows its own linguistic logic. The fifth chapter concentrates on the linearity of narrative in the inset tales of Orpheus telling of Venus telling of Atalanta. The interruption of Venus’ tales by kisses draws attention to the parallels of narrator, narratee, and subject resulting in an oscillating effect. In his last chapter Krupp considers the incorporation of the Aeneid in which parody and irony work within the framework of the Metamorphoses to rob the hypertext of its teleological outlook and its narrative necessity while exposing its fictionality.

Krupp’s book is a subtle and persuasive appeal to tolerate and explore inconsistencies and contradictions of the Metamorphoses. With his focus on irony, Krupp has found a red thread through much of recent Ovidian scholarship, and successfully combines theory and his own sensitive close readings. Krupp’s radically text-centered approach deliberately excludes the poet from the picture, a move that would have probably amused Ovid, given his own ironic stance towards the self-sufficiency of the text changing under his fingers (see Met. 1.2). That, perhaps, is a case of Schlegel’s “irony of irony,” and for another book.