Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination

by Victoria Rimell

Overview

Central to Ovid's elegiac texts and his Metamorphoses is his preoccupation with how desiring subjects interact and seduce each other. This major study, which shifts the focus in Ovidian criticism from intertextuality to intersubjectivity, explores the relationship between self and other, and in particular that between male and female worlds, which is at the heart of Ovid's vision of poetry and the imagination. A series of close readings, focusing on both the more celebrated and less studied parts of the corpus, moves beyond the more often-asked questions of Ovid, such as whether he is 'for' or 'against' women, in order to explore how gendered subjects converse, compete and co-create. It illustrates how the tale of Medusa, alongside that of Narcissus, reverberates throughout Ovid's oeuvre, becoming a fundamental myth for his poetics. This book offers a compelling, often troubling portrait of Ovid that will appeal to classicists and all those interested in gender and difference.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521117807
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/30/2009
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Victoria Rimell is Associate Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Rome, La Sapieza. She has published Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (2002), Ovid's Lovers (2006) and Martial's Rome (2008), and has also contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (edited by Kirk Freudenberg, 2005) and Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (edited by Jason Konig and Tim Whitmarsh, 2007).

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Cambridge University Press
0521862191 - Ovid's Lovers - Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination - by Victoria Rimell
Excerpt

Introduction Narcissus and Medusa: Desiring subjects and the dialectics of Ovidian erotics

Ovid’s structure is not merely like a Russian doll, one story inside another, it is like a snake-pit, in which a pretty indeterminable number of snakes are devouring and being devoured by each other.¹

All love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts.²

This book explores the gaps in which same and other, male and female can be seen to relate, converse, compete, and co-create in Ovidian poetry. The chapters included span a large portion of Ovid’s corpus, starting with the Medicamina, his little-read treatise on cosmetics in which women are made up in men’s image and vice versa, and ending with the ‘double’ Heroides, where heroes and heroines of ancient myth write to and from (over and across and with) each other. I am interested here in the many (flash-) points in Ovidian poetry where male and female artists/lovers are twinned as vying, mutually threatening subjects, and where a narcissistic impulse to collapse other into same/self is rivalled by a more complex dialectic or exchange which seems itself to fire and propel desire. One of the core aims of this study is to counter some curious imbalances and repressions inrecent Ovidian criticism: in particular, I discuss the extent to which the dominant model for the Ovidian artist, the male viewer who spurns woman and/or (re)creates her as artwork and fetish (Narcissus, Orpheus and Pygmalion are key figures) has tended to foreclose investigation of the relationship between gendered creativities in Ovid. For sure, we can all spot competing models of the artist – from Echo, who turns repetition into originality, pronouncing novissima verba with typical satiric, Ovidian wit,³ to spinner Arachne,⁴ tortured embroiderer Philomela,⁵ or the daughters of Minyas, stitching rebellion into Metamorphoses 4 – but these are not the characters usually identified with the poet himself, and feminist critics have been more concerned with making such figures visible, rather than (in addition) with scrutinizing how gendered readings and writings contend and overlap. Male artists, however, are frequently construed as synonymous with the poet. As Segal writes, for example: ‘Through Orpheus, Ovid provides a metaphorical reflection of the creative and restorative power of his own art’.⁶ For Anderson, Pygmalion ‘is the creative artist par excellence’,⁷ or as Rosati puts it, reaffirmed many times over in Hardie’s recent book: ‘Ovid is the poet Narcissus, the poet bent over in admiration of his own virtuosity, triumphantly mirroring himself in the astonishment of his public’.⁸ For Hardie, narcissistic desires (aligned with a bid to conjure up presences) lie at the psychological heart of Ovid’s poetry, fuelling an obsession with sameness and doubling (not least, between art and nature).⁹ Thus the Narcissus–Echo plot can be seen to ghost-write a string of Ovidian couplings (Ceyx and Alcyone, Leander and Hero, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Pyramus and Thisbe), in which beloveds become mirror images of lovers.¹⁰ Indeed, Narcissus reigns in recent criticism as the figure both for the poet (as he flits between credulity and cynicism, primal magic and urbane irony) and for the desiring, seduced, self-conscious reader. His myth offers a neat allegory for the move from naïvety to knowingness, nature to art celebrated by postmodernism, a field of thinking owed much of the credit for Ovid’s flight to stardom at the end of the second millennium.¹¹ We might even say that Narcissus’ psychodrama has come to define Ovidian poetics as obsessed with linguistic surfaces and passing intensities, with visual display, duplicity and (obvious) feigning.¹²

   Yet the self-love of Narcissus is only one, limited model for Ovidian desire and Ovidian representation. Ovid stages many different complications, variations or contestations of the Narcissus plot, and writes desire as a fractured, competitive process. The emphasis on Narcissus as Ovidian artist in recent criticism fascinates me especially because of the way in which it grounds Ovidian illusionism and fiction in mimetic male desire. This book offers a rather different (and at the same time often complementary) take on Ovidian art and erotics, suggesting ways in which this experimental poet takes his readers far beyond Narcissus’ experience. Much valuable work has been done already on how Ovid writes the decentred self, and blurs or snags what are perceived to be traditional gender categories, especially of masculinity.¹³ What I would like to do here, however, is to draw out discussion of what Miller calls the ‘split nature’ of elegiac subjectivity by looking closely, in addition, at how Ovid construes intersubjectivity.¹⁴ Broadly, I want to rethink power in Ovidian poetry as relational (rather than hierarchical), and to push against the tendency of Ovidian criticism in the last thirty years to fall into polar camps. As Miller puts it in his discussion of the Amores:

Depending on whom one reads, elegy is either in league with the Augustan political regime (Kennedy 1993, 35–6; Newman 1997, 6) or implacably hostile to it and the traditional values it sought to promote; either political allegory (Edwards 1996, 24) or an apolitical, ludic discourse that gently mocks social custom (Veyne 1988: 31–2, 104–8; Kennedy 1993: 95–6; Fantham 1996, 108); either exploitative of women (Kennedy 1993: 38, 56, 73) or bent on satirizing Roman misogyny (Greene 1994).¹⁵

Similarly, the inclination of debate on gender in ancient texts has been, almost entirely, towards analysing either female or male figures, either constructions of femininity or masculinity.¹⁶ This has much to do with a reluctance, deeply engrained in the Western tradition, to entertain two parallel (same but different) subjects, an aversion magnified by an Anglo-American feminist ideal of a gender-neutral human subject. In this book, I want to sidestep the kinds of questions that have repeatedly been asked of Ovid in the last thirty years, by asking not (simply) about constructs of femininity, or of masculinity, or about whether Ovid can be judged a anti-, proto- or pseudo-feminist,¹⁷ but instead about relationality, about the desiring subject in Ovidian poetry as a being-in-relation.¹⁸

   For although in the Amores, Ovid’s first published work, erotic relations appear more straightforwardly formulated (at least, in parts) as lover/beloved, and Corinna appears to be little more than elegiac subject-matter, with no voice of her own, in the Heroides, Ars Amatoria, Medicamina, and Metamorphoses, we can read varied experiments in juxtaposing canny, rival lovers and in juggling unstable subject/object positions, experiments which postpone any final determination.¹⁹ All these texts, with the exception of Heroides 1–15,²⁰ were written between four and eight years of each other, and make up the backbone of Ovid’s life’s work. The core elegiac texts (Heroides, Ars, Medicamina, as well as the Remedia Amoris, which I discuss only briefly) are all concerned with how desiring subjects interact and seduce each other, and it is this idea of imagining the intersection of male and female worlds which perhaps distinguishes the originality of Ovid’s contribution to Augustan literature, and takes the concept of the uneven, sexy pairing visualized in the elegiac couplet as far as it can go. While elegy, traditionally, has room ‘for one voice only’, tending to reduce everything to the persona of the poet–lover,²¹ Ovid’s image-conscious poetry is often focused on dialogue over monologue, moving at the borders of known worlds, both real and imaginary.

   Thus, while in the Ars Amatoria especially, Ovid surely baits the kind of deliberation which has preoccupied feminist critics of his poetry (‘whose side is he on, anyway?’),²² this poetry does everything it can to foil our verdict, or to show up its own ingenuousness (which is not to say that men and women ultimately come out quits in the Ars, only to stress that the tussle of ‘foe against foe’ in this text is without resolution). Ovidian desire often works to break down boundaries, and thus to threaten autonomy, identity, and to collapse difference into incestuous sameness, yet at the same time it often resists and dodges Narcissus’ fate, recognizing that connectedness is not synonymous with homogeneity, that the dynamic of relationality is also the vim of creative process, both of writing and reading. Ovidian erotics can be read as a constant battle to transcend a compulsive logic of the same in order to sustain desire, or poetry itself.

   In this way, Ovid discerns and wrestles with the fundamental problem of what Irigaray calls the ‘specularisation’ underlying all Western philosophical discourse,²³ confronting head-on the perilous implications of a self-perpetuating mode which creates man’s desired object as the reassuring negative of his own reflection. Similarly, even in relationships which appear to be self-contained, Ovidian sex depends on multiplications, triangulations, substitutions, go-betweens, which inevitably render mirroring interactions much more complex than the Narcissus–Echo, subject–object (male–female) prototype would suggest.²⁴ Thus in the Ars Amatoria, Ovid’s pupils are asked to negotiate a tangle of contrary advice, to perceive parallel scenarios through the eyes of men and women, husbands and lovers, Echoes and Narcissuses, viewers and viewed; with Ovid’s lovers, we reach a climax at the end of Ars 2 only to realize there is one more book to come – yet the Remedia Amoris erases that end, too (and let us not forget the other appendix to Ars 3, the Medicamina).²⁵ In the double Heroides, similarly, partnerships swell into love triangles and more messy relationship-maps, while in (the aptly numbered) Amores 2, Ovidian aspirations and desires stretch and splinter elegiac distichs/diptychs, producing a kaleidoscopic effect: multiple affairs, accomplices, scenarios and readings load the book with epic potential, yet for the oversexed poet–lover, nothing is ever satis.²⁶

   In this introductory chapter, I use the Medusa myth (which, as we’ll see, feeds subtly into Ovid’s corpus throughout) as an illustrative way into exploring how a narcissistic logic in Ovidian poetry is contextualized and challenged, first of all by the troubling existence and (not quite visible) vision of the Other (paradigmatically, Woman), and secondly by an ongoing meeting/clash/interaction of desiring subjects and poetic drives, male and female. This opening discussion is more abstract and theoretical than the close readings of individual texts that follow, and it is also more literal in its exploration of the Medusa and Narcissus myths, which often (particularly in the case of Medusa, a figure who, in more ways than one, can rarely be seen head-on) become shadows, reflections and backgrounds to understanding erotic relationships in Ovidian poetry itself. Throughout the book, then, I will be probing the limits of a fixation on the myth of Narcissus in Ovidian criticism: readings of Ovidian desire and poetics as rooted (only) in the paradigm of Narcissus have tended to reject and quell the Other (the female), underemphasize the extent to which the Ovidian poet is identified, often simultaneously, with other artist figures and with other models for individuation, and suppress the horror of self-consciousness, as well as the risk of incredulity (as dramatized in the parallel catoptric myth of Perseus and Medusa told in Metamorphoses 4 and 5).

   Medusa’s presence, insidious but little discussed, gnaws into and rivals the Narcissus archetype, asserting two desiring/creative subjects whose intercourse spikes the paradoxes of Ovidian illusionism. Both myths, told in Met.3–5, are fundamental models in Ovid for the birth of poetry and for the individual’s path to subjectivity. Crucially, too, they both make the mirror a symbolic tool for (painful, dangerous) self-realization, a idea Ovid also explores in the Amores, Medicamina and Ars Amatoria. Narcissus, petrified with amazement in Met.3, comes of age and becomes a symbol of Ovidian self-consciousness when he understands that he is seeing himself in the reflective pool, while those who see Medusa in Met.4 and 5 look (their own) death in the face, and are turned into perfect stone statues (unless, like Perseus, they avoid looking at her straight on by using a mirror – in which Medusa, like Narcissus, may also see herself). Medusa is a paradigmatic female viewer and artist, and the myth of her rape, monstrous transformation, and perpetual afterlife as global sculptress is located (alongside Narcissus’ transformation) at the core of the Metamorphoses. But while Narcissus looks at and is in love with himself, the myth of Medusa always involves encounters between spectators. Simply put, this is a myth about looked-at woman becoming ultra-powerful viewer (snake-haired Medusa still turns her audience on, and is compulsive viewing, yet her audience is ‘castrated’ even as it is permanently fixed in the state of open-mouthed arousal). But it is also, crucially, about the convergence and collision of gazes, for her narrative culminates at the end of Met.4 in the moment at which Perseus sees (or does not see) her gruesome face in his mirror-shield – itself a giant, surrogate eye.

   Indeed, although she gets only passing mention in one chapter of Frederik’s recent The Roman Gaze (2002), and is barely glimpsed in studies of Ovidian spec(tac)ularity and desire,²⁷ Medusa is everywhere in Ovid, just as she looms large (alongside Narcissus) in twentieth-century philosophy and creative writing, in psychoanalysis and French feminist thought.²⁸ This book attempts to engage with and encompass insights developed in other fields of the humanities that have often tended to be neglected by classicists; just as, in turn, it hopes to show that the classical foundations of mythical archetypes and their treatment in authors such as Ovid cannot be sidestepped or underestimated in the elaboration of critical theory. Medusa’s stage presence, I’ll argue, ensures that Ovidian desire does not simply revolve around intoxication and restoration, possession, loss and evanescence, but is infused with aggression, revenge, conflict, mystery, suspense, renewal, and above all, fear. And while desire’s mission, as Hardie stresses, is usually to embrace and consume the other (this is, above all, Narcissus’ fantasy),²⁹ we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are numerous places in the Ovidian corpus where we can recognize precisely the opposite conclusion, where the poet is not only hampered in his quest but obsessively concerned with privileging and revelling in the journey itself rather than the destination, to the point that the apparent target is rendered redundant, cosmetic. The repeated and delusional displacements and substitutions that define Lacan’s desiring subject are often self-consciously celebrated (as the real point, the real victory) in Ovidian erotics.

   Perhaps the most flagrant instance of this occurs at the end (which is also a middle and re-beginning) of Amores 2, where the poet, disgruntled at a rival’s literal and slavish reading of his seduction campaign, blurts out: si tibi non opus est servata, stulte, puella, / at mihi fac serves, quo magis ipse velim (‘If you’re not bothered with guarding the girl for your own sake, cretin, at least guard her for mine, so that I’ll want her all the more’ 2.19.1–2). One spiteful Medusan look spells out the magic and cracks the fantasy, evoking Narcissus’ disillusionment: yet the collapse of Narcissus’ deluded lust can coexist with Medusa’s fatal attraction (especially in a book which sets up ‘straight talking’ as a painful trap for its readers, exposing possibilities rather than dealing the bottom line).³⁰ In other words, it is not only the case, as Hardie emphasizes, that Ovidian poetry continually yearns to substitute textual ecstasies/fallacies for actual bodily union, resulting in concatenations of absent–presences: Ovid is also concerned, sometimes very obviously, to shun and undermine the drive for possession/unity/symmetry in order to animate dynamic relationships between subjects.

   This opening chapter is followed by six close readings which work through the Ovidian corpus, from elegiac didactic to epic to the late ‘double’ epistles, the last Augustan elegy we have. These texts, or bits of texts, are all in different ways concerned (and I want to stress, more concerned than any other of Ovid’s poems) with developing dialectical relationships between desiring subjects. Ovid’s fascination with communication between lovers, and with doubling, interaction, competition and exchange more generally, might be seen to culminate in Her.16–21, when men and women get to write simultaneously and side by side. But I do not so much want to plot a teleology of Ovidian erotics as to suggest that when we review Ovid’s poetry in the light of these ideas, accentuating parts of the corpus which have as a whole received less critical attention,³¹ new or forgotten grains and colours emerge. Together, Ovid’s experiments in partnering male and female add up to an intricate and shifting examination of human (inter)subjectivity which is ever concomitant with parading the origins, nature and scope of poetry.

   Chapter 1 looks (while trying not to squint) at the Medicamina, and considers how the poem relates to Ovid’s advice on make-up and mirrors, and also to the catoptric encounter (rivalling that between Narcissus and himself/Echo) between Perseus and Medusa, elsewhere in the corpus – especially the Ars Amatoria. I argue that this is a poem about male scopophilic desire to create woman as same: in a straightforward reading of the Medicamina, Ovid’s cosmos of cosmetics enacts a specular logic in which women are denied the pleasure of self-representation and permitted only the hysteria of mimicry. In holding his own mirror up to women in this poem, Ovid turns their tool for self-formation against them, like Perseus assaulting Medusa, and the narcissus bulb face-pack which leaves faces as bright as a mirror only rubs this in. Yet by stealing cosmetics and their accessories to colour his poetics, Ovid also adopts the worries and ambiguities invested in mirrors and masquerade. Mirrors in the ancient world are highly paradoxical: they give women the power to know and control appearances, but in doing so expose the limits of female individuation – they are her weapon/shield/Achilles’ heel, or Narcissus’ trap. Ovid also exploits the Platonic idea that mirror images share with semblances of all kinds an ambiguous mixture of being and non-being, challenging the mentality that thinks in terms of here and there, self and not-self. So while the Medicamina strives, like Pygmalion, to forge women in man’s image, as same, as artwork, what it also does is to turn that scopophilic gaze back on the supreme, imperialist, desiring (male) subject. This is, of course, one of the many instances in Ovidian poetry where the Narcissus tragedy gets replayed, albeit in a typically metaphorical way. But here we have two subjects (and two Narcissuses/Medusas), not one: and those two subjects, man and woman, never totally collapse into unity, as in the Narcissus denouement. The mirror, now women and men’s tool for self-formation, confuses subject/object, self/other, or rather (at the same time), it fuels a battle for subject position. The (near-)sameness of the narcissistic encounter produces the tense energy of desire, while risking killing that desire, or castrating both desiring subjects – a threat which itself adds sparkle to elegiac sport.

   Chapter 2, on Ars Amatoria, tries to unscramble the difficult interactions between the three books, and explores how this text revels in anxieties germane to the art of relationships. Ovid’s textbook is littered with traces of the two primordial mirror-myths, Medusa/Perseus and Narcissus/Echo, models which are both interwoven and let loose, so that male and female lovers/artists trade places or play multiple roles. Neat symmetries and chess-board patterns are arranged only to be confounded or messed up, with the result that neither men nor women (artists nor readers, lovers nor rivals) can keep the upper hand for long, and the sexes are propelled into seemingly endless rounds of competition. While chapter 2 ranges at speed through the Ars to trace the energetic criss-crossing between lovers and books, chapter 3 magnifies just one slow-motion episode in the Metamorphoses, Orpheus’ lethal backward glance at Eurydice on the boundary between upper and lower worlds in Book 10. This chapter dissects the crucial moments of realization and amazement at art and beauty that pepper Met.10. I argue that Orpheus’ song, and the Ovidian narrative that frames it, continually revisit instances of the uncanny, or mirror-stages, in which hierarchies of subject–object are unbalanced or even non-sensical. Once again, the Medusa myth is important here (both in Eurydice’s double death and in Orpheus’ murder in Book 11), its theme of threatening confrontation infecting Orpheus’ apparent retreat into narcissism and boy love. In parodying the Ars Amatoria (Orpheus gives us dangerous, criminal eros over Ovid’s ‘safe sex’³²), Met.10 teaches us how metamorphosis, desire and Ovidian poetry itself are inspired by points of suspension and movement between two states, identities and subjects.

   Chapters 4, 5 and 6 move one step away from ocularcentrism to explore other aspects of Ovid’s interest in the relational subject. In chapter 4 in particular, our palette of images will be rather different from that which we have seen so far: in Her.15, the relation between self and same/self and other, is dramatized less in the contrast between Narcissus’ and Medusa’s/Perseus’ experiences (although the landscape of Narcissus’ myth is still very much in evidence) than in the slippage between homo- and heterosexual desire, within a complex love triangle created by (once-Lesbian) Sappho, Phaon and Ovid. This strange epistle at the end of the single Heroides (in most editions, ‘between’ the single and double Heroides), becomes the site for a fascinating performance of Ovid’s agonistic affair with female predecessor and ‘original’ voice of personal amatory poetry, Sappho. Our focus is now on a single, hybrid, artist–lover, whose letter subsumes several layers of dialogue. Sappho–Ovid’s often cacophonous duet, I’ll argue, takes us one move closer to the lovers’ exchange of letters in Her.16–21. In assuming the voice of Sappho, Ovid in many ways writes over and through his female rival (and possible partner), aggressively asserting a hierarchy of male over female, heterosexual over homosexual, writing subject over written object. Yet ultimately that simple reading cannot stand. Ovid’s authorial identity is blatantly and inextricably intertwined with Sappho’s, so that the question becomes not only ‘what is Ovid doing with Sappho/woman?’, but ‘how does Sappho’s voice write Ovidian desire?’, ‘how do Ovid and Sappho interrelate and to what effect?’ and ‘what does count as a genuine Ovid/Sappho?’ Intertextuality in the letter now becomes a model and vehicle for intersubjectivity, and for authorial and sexual interdependency. This is not to say that authorial identities ultimately fuse or blur into one, or that Ovid and Sappho are (just) constructed as ‘equals’, but that Ovid’s alliance/overlapping of writing voices hypes up power-play and involves readers in a drama full of suspense. It is in and with this relationality, I argue, that Ovid creates a space for desire and/as creativity, and makes reading seductive.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Introduction: Narcissus and Medusa: desiring subjects and the dialectics of Ovidian erotics; 1. Specular logicis: Medicamina; 2. Double vision: Ars Amatoria I, II, and III; 3. Seeing seers: Metamorphoses 10-11.84; 4. Co-creators: Heroides 15; 5. What goes around: Heroides 16-21; 6. Space between: Heroides 18-19; Conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

'The serious reader will profit from engaging with Rimell's central thesis and detailed examples. … Her brief account of the characteristic moment of metamorphoses in Ovid's great compendium is well worth reading, and her discussion of the gorgon's gaze prompts new ideas about the relationship between Ovid's poetry and the visual arts.' Britannia

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