Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form

Polemical Preface

ix Polemical Preface A preface, it seems to me, is an appropriate place to claim what a book is and does, to warn of what it isn’t and doesn’t, and to dispel misconceptions of how it does and aims to do. This book does not contribute to studies of classical influence in the traditional sense. It does not survey sources and analogues. The archeology of literary allusion falls outside its province. Stones are left unturned. While this book negotiates passages of literature at close quarters, it discovers in them issues of intellectual history and social and generic form. At its broadest, this is a history of what Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a collaborative fantasy between society and the literature of civic values that shapes and provides the material grounds of culture. For Elias, the locus of this process lay in courtesy manuals. For me it lies in romance, a genre that absorbs from Ovidian models a struggle between the desire for individual self-realization and the desire for group identity, between inclusion and exclusion, between the love of the body as a material thing and as a synecdoche of the larger body of society. The animating theory of this book turns on the odd contest in the first sentence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses between the terms corpus and forma, which function as structuring principles of civic and poetic unity. Their thematic importunity and connection to Ovid’s perpetuum carmen, however, also suggest an anxiety underlying the work, a sense that formal cohesion, societal or poetic, cannot truly exist or that if it does exist it cannot long endure. If the Metamorphoses teaches one lesson, it is that the defining moment of humanness realizes a reversion to animalism. As the bodies of Ovid’s protagonists devolve, so too do the associational bonds that limn our collective humanity, leaving the individual to expire in solitude and the collective in anomie . Desiring Bodies confronts this anxiety of flux and metamorphosis in social and generic forms as an existential condition of romance. The peril of Ovidian romance, however, is that to understand it, to be its mimic or critic, is to participate in its formal consequences. Just as the Metamorphoses was criticized for its ambiguity of genre, its indecorum and resistance to traditional civic forms and formalities, so this book absorbs into its own structure the romance fear of formal cohesion. Indeed, the very need for this prologue betrays my own anxiety that chapters covering the works of authors over six centuries cannot satisfactorily cohere under so catholic a rubric as romance. I am assuaged, however, encouraged even, that for Chaucer, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton at least, that same Ovidian fear of formal incoherence is the weak force holding their literary universes together. At its most polemical, this book attempts to redefine the grounds and assumptions of cultural history practiced on and through literature , a medium that historians, and especially Marxist historians, have chivvied into the narrow fit of antirealism. In his general introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx frames a distinction between an idealist and a materialist “history of civilization,” the former of which indulges in a “mythology” of societal origins (he cites Proudhon as an example). This mythology, he argues, drapes the facts and figures of human association in spurious teleology, substituting metaphors for material in its earliest accounts and inventing a predicate that he elegantly terms a “phantasierende locus communis.”1 The only historical spoor of the polity, for Marx, is material production; it alone records the energies of society and cultural value as measurable artifacts. Nor is Marx’s vexation with an unempirical historiography of civilization unjustified as long as we accept his premise that cultural history is the story of a social collectivity and that society, in its collective singularity, is the infissile nucleus of culture. Reasonable as such an assumption may seem—no less an authority than Aristotle, after all, defined man as a politikon zoon—­ collective forms are not civilization’s only conceivable predicates. In the Metamorphoses’ opening line, the phrase “forms changed into new bodies” is problematic enough for translators that they have, with only a few recent exceptions, reversed the position of the two main quantities to make the sentence more comprehensible. In fact, ­Ovid’s formula is deliberately problematic and momentously inverted. Here,  Polemical Preface for the first time in the history of...