Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction (review)

Ovid’s last word in the Metamorphoses—“vivam” (I shall live)—has seldom resonated more powerfully than in the scholarship of the last twenty years. In this period, Ovid has figured resiliently as an ancient poet for our tempora, richly responsive to contemporary literary critical concerns from the narratological to the political, gracefully participatory in a range of theoretical exchanges (for example, reception studies, intertextuality, psychoanalysis, gender studies). This culturally fluent, wisely irreverent, and unabashedly contemporary Ovid is the poet studied from a dizzying—yet compelling—range of conceptual angles in Andrew Feldherr’s Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Feldherr’s nuanced, critically sophisticated argument centres on the dynamics of perspective activated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as its participation in the forum of vision more generally—concerns pursued both within the text (that is, in embedded artwork and ecphrasis) and in the sphere of physical reality occupied by the Roman reader. Attendant upon this approach is a keen investment in the poem’s relationship to contemporary visual art, to civic expression and custom, and to modes of reception as actively imagined (and shaped) by the text. In a challenging argument that traverses unusually wide disciplinary terrain, Feldherr largely succeeds in demonstrating that the Metamorphoses deserves recognition not only as a literary text that thematically explores vision but as a public artifact that stood in creative dialogue (and competition) with other forms of civic expression in shaping how the Roman subject “sees.”

Feldherr’s premise, centred upon an interpretation of metamorphosis first developed in his chapter on the subject in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, edited by Philip Hardie (2002), is that radical Ovidian transformation creates a “hermeneutic puzzle” for the reader (26), who must continually reflect on and revise her view of the poem by intentionally adopting one available perspective and refusing others (which remain strategically in play for alternative readings). The choice between perspectives—for example, whether one sees the laurel tree as Apollo sees it or as Daphne experiences it—often involves a contrast between external and internal frames of reference, between detached and sympathetic points of view, and between the priorities of the world (the “real” or “historical”) and of the text (the “fictive”). These differing “focalizations” (149), Feldherr contends, function essentially as planes of reception, raising issues of identification and differentiation between fictional roles that also shape social relations. Such competing viewpoints also manifest themselves in contrasting critical interpretations of key aspects of the Metamorphoses, which Feldherr productively shows are encouraged by the poem’s cultivation of this aesthetic of double perspective. Feldherr’s approach is broadly appealing because it, too, straddles perspectives in the form of disciplinary commitments: balancing intensive close reading, often along loosely deconstructive lines, with an avowedly historicist attention to the public role of fiction, imperial politics, and material culture, Feldherr thoughtfully illuminates what he variously calls the “politics of textualization” (77) and the “political role of literature” (349) exemplified by the Metamorphoses. Laudably, Feldherr accomplishes this delicate balance between the narratological and the sociohistorical without oversimplifying either critical domain; indeed, he incites many a well-studied Ovidian passage to sparkle afresh in poetic terms when considered as an interlocutor in non-literary forms of public expression.

Feldherr’s most noteworthy and sustained achievement in Playing Gods is to incorporate the Metamorphoses’s own attention to the interpretive variables of perspective with a range of public artistic modes that feature the visual dynamics also active within Ovid’s poem. Ovid’s text (as it activates a “visual” experience for the reader) is yoked, that is, with artworks and forms of spectacle which also deploy Greek myth to fashion a Roman sense of identity. The relationship between the textual and artistic spheres is not statically formal but actively reciprocal, both being informed by an ethic of spectatorship. As Feldherr puts it, “Ovid generates a dialogue between what his text can make a...