The postmodernity of Ovid's Metamorphoses has been an echoing theme of literary criticism since the heyday of postmodernism. The concept was enshrined and distilled in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid's Metamorphoses and its Reception (edited by P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi and S. Hinds [1999]), which marked the culmination of the ‘third wave’ of the poet's revival in the twentieth century (see T. Ziolkowski, ‘Ovid in the Twentieth Century’, in P.E. Knox [ed.], A Companion to Ovid [2009], pp. 455–68). Whether the era of the ‘postmodern Ovid’ persists or whether criticism has multiplied and mutated into definitive new forms, is a question that persists below the surface of Metamorphic Readings. (This same question was at the heart of ‘Ovid and Identity in the Twenty-First Century’, a special issue of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, edited by T. Roynon and D. Orrells [2019].)
The editors of this new volume – consisting of ten essays by an international range of scholars – open with a reflection on the metamorphosis of the Heliades. This story, from Book 1 of Ovid's epic, describes how the sisters of Phaethon turned into trees in their grief. The episode invokes an earlier poetic-philosophical tradition of cosmology while prefiguring later transformations in the Metamorphoses. It also bridges the deep mythic time of the poem with Ovid's own day, where issues of dynastic succession (such as the Phaethon myth turns on) persisted and where trees – by the logic of aetiology – still wept sap.
The story is emblematic, the editors suggest, of how ‘metamorphosis is not just a matter of stories of people (especially women) becoming trees, spiders, lizards, horses, birds, rocks, water, gods, and poems, etc., but also a pervasive transformative force explored in the metamorphic manifestations of identity, imagery, narrative, intertextuality, intratextual structure, and interpretation, throughout the epic and its reception’ (p. 4).
By gesturing towards this metapoetic force, the editors aim to couch metamorphosis in ‘an extended sense’. Their intention is perhaps little different from that of Ovidian Transformations, which remains the most cited collection of essays on the poem, and one of relatively few multi-authored volumes (J. Miller and C. Newlands's Handbook to the Reception of Ovid [2014] has been a notable contribution in the field of classical reception studies). But it is more programmatically expressed, seeming to capture a cultural moment in which questions of gender, transformation and language – especially as they relate to identity – have become ever more urgent.
The book is divided into three parts: ‘Transformations into the Metamorphoses’, dealing with the tradition leading up to Ovid, ‘Transformations in the Metamorphoses’, providing new readings of the poem itself, and ‘Transformations of the Metamorphoses’, or reception. The first ‘section’ is really a prologue, consisting of an essay by A. Barchiesi, entitled ‘Reading Metamorphosis in Ovid's Metamorphoses’. This rests on the proposition that ‘our current general idea of Greek myth has been conditioned by Ovid's Metamorphoses’, to the extent that ‘Greek material has been thought of either as a “source” of Ovid, or as a background that allows us better understanding of the continuities and even innovations in his work’ (p. 13). Barchiesi re-angles the focus onto Greek texts, seeking to circumvent the refractory effects of Ovid's poem in conditioning our understanding of metamorphosis. The ‘Ovidian signature’, he concludes, ‘is the focus on pathos, extreme situations, loss, displacement, and bodily change, versus a traditional Greek emphasis on aetiology and permanence of the myth in situ and inside Greek culture’ (p. 24).
In an essay on ‘Gender and Transformation’ Sharrock eloquently reassesses the nature and extent of the poem's (and poet's) sympathy with female victims. Observing that ‘female characters seem to have more to do with the abstract notion of gender than male characters – which is a problem’ (p. 35), she considers how modern readers have responded to this abstract notion through a variety of ‘resistant’ and ‘releasing’ or recuperative interpretations, variously positive and negative in their assessments of the poet. Of this latter dichotomy, she points out, crucially, that ‘our readings need to acknowledge both possibilities at once and to accept that the coexistence of objectification and empathy should make it impossible for us either to convict or to exonerate the poet’ (p. 37).
A. Feldherr concentrates on the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha – the sole survivors of the flood in Book 1, who were bidden by an oracle to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders. In the story Pyrrha interprets the command literally, while Deucalion sees – and readily ‘mansplains’ – that the oracle is a metaphor for throwing the stones of Mother Earth. Feldherr proposes that their different approaches reflect divergent perceptions of reality – one that refers words to nature as it exists (and thus is retrogressive, harking back to an earlier, disordered universe) and one that understands how representations might ‘change an understanding of reality, by seeing stones as bones’ (p. 55).
In these two viewpoints Feldherr perceives two modes of reading the Metamorphoses that inevitably work in tandem, with the poem's own language dually constructing a new world and being understood in terms of the world as it really exists. Gender provides a further model for conceptualising the two approaches. Feldherr's recurring question is ‘what came first?’ – gods or men, representations or the things represented, ungendered homo or ‘men and women’? The argument is subtly and densely woven, if at times taking on an oracular quality of its own.
Each of the following two essays focuses on a female character. E. Ntanou analyses the story of Arethusa – the nymph who turned into water, flowing away from the predatory Alpheus in both Greece and Sicily: ‘Ovid uses Arethusa's geographical transition to thematize her transposition into a different cultural context, that of Rome, as well as a new generic frame, as she “migrates” from pastoral to epic poetry’ (p. 85). Ntanou traces the way in which Arethusa anticipates Aeneas, as both a migrant and coloniser.
A.J. Kachuck concentrates on the character of Byblis, who confesses her love for her brother in a letter. Through Byblis, he suggests, Ovid restages Latin literature's ‘primal scene’ of instruction – the so-called Dream of Homer with which Ennius opens his Annales. Byblis looks for precedents for her desire in stories she knows – the incestuous marriages of the sons and daughters of Aeolus or the tale of Canace, found in the eleventh letter of Ovid's own Heroides. Kachuck concludes: ‘We thus watch Byblis learning to read herself and her thoughts – for her, as for Ovid, autobiography can be autobibliography, an account of one's own reading’ (p. 112). His essay is among the most lucid and stylish in the book.
M. Hanses's chapter, on the acrostics or ‘intexts’ concealed in Ovid's verses, focuses on the poet's possible embedding of ‘signatures’; for instance, the deus acrostic of 1.29–32, which Hanses reads as a counterpoint to the less obvious – more speculative – Naso telestich of lines 452–5, the point at which the cosmos created by deus crystallises into the world of Apollo and Daphne. Ovid the poet-creator is made analogous to the deus who creates the world at the start of the poem. Clever and compelling, this essay nonetheless conveys an air of Alexandrian minuteness – and adds to a larger sense of miscellaneousness, from one chapter to the next, that is not wholly redeemed by the division of the book into sections.
M. Asztalos initiates Part 3 by looking at lines that have traditionally been bracketed as likely interpolations. She argues, in the case of a line from the story of Echo, that the repetition of the phrase latet silvis, far from being clumsy repetition, is a thematically apt ‘echo’ that underscores the difference between Echo as a nymph, hiding in the forests, and Echo as a sound that remains invisible (the other meaning of lateo) in those same forests. Sameness elucidates change. Her contention that ‘repetitions of words do not involve repetitions of meaning’ (p. 161), seemingly a statement of the obvious, is a timely corrective to the generations of textual critics who have waged a campaign against ‘bizarre locutions’ without stopping to consider their literary effects.
Those generations can be traced back to the author of the Bavarian commentary (Clm 4610) of c. 1100. R. Wahlsten Böckerman calls this document ‘the first comprehensive witness to the study of Ovid's text’ (p. 162) following the dark ages. Despite its seminal status, the commentary is still routinely accessed via a partial transcription in a nineteenth-century article. Wahlsten Böckerman traces various forms of interpretation – mythological and genealogical, textual and linguistic, or euhemeristic and allegorical readings that anticipate the Ovidius Moralizatus. And yet, as he points out, theological-style explanations are few. The traditional assumption that Clm 4610 exemplifies a Christianisation of Ovid reflects the paucity of access scholars have had to the document.
P. Hardie looks at three Christian poets – Milton, Dante and Prudentius –, showing that ‘writing Christian metamorphosis is compatible with Ovidian ingenuity and playfulness’ (p. 184). He considers the topos of humans turning (often falling down) into snakelike creatures, as Cadmus does in Book 3: having slain the Theban serpent, he becomes one. In Milton's Paradise Lost Satan undergoes a periodic – ritualistic – transformation into the debasing form: he returns to Pandemonium having orchestrated the fall of Adam and Eve only to find his acolytes – and then himself – reduced to a pit of hissing snakes. It is, Hardie notes, not only a reanimation of Cadmus’ fall, but ‘a contrappasso of a peculiarly fitting kind, “punished in the shape he sinned”, as Milton puts it’ (p. 193).
The concluding essay is dually authored by L. Vinge and N. Johansson, who have published studies on the Narcissus myth in 1967 and 2017 respectively. Their dialogue throws light on the ever-evolving triangulation of ‘original’ text, present-tense response and intermediary reading(s). As Johansson remarks, this process is one of omission as much as recuperation: ‘one of the most common approaches to Narcissus has been to take the shortcut from the Metamorphoses to the early twentieth century’ (p. 203). Vinge admits that, when she began her thesis in the early 1960s, ‘Structuralism had not had its breakthrough … Nor had we learned to say “intertextuality”’ (p. 199). This chapter affords a vital sense of the bigger (shifting) picture of reception studies, a picture that recedes from view during the volume's more rarefied and microscopic phases. It is a fitting epilogue.
As a sum of parts, the book steers a little too resolutely around the essence of the Metamorphoses, seeming to ‘take as read’ the poem's thematic sweep and variety, and to offer instead an anthology of marginalia – albeit many of them valuable and fascinating readings. Moreover, the promised topicality of the book – in its stated focus on transformation, language and gender – is never quite capitalised on, other than in Sharrock's probing essay. That said, the collection lays bare much of the plurality and dynamism of contemporary approaches to Ovid. The concept of the ‘postmodern Ovid’ does begin to feel quaintly (and ironically) cohesive – outmoded, finally – even if it remains hard to tell what has come along to replace it.
