One of the very Italian things about Ovid is his sprezzatura -- his art of concealing art. Every time we blithely skate from one tale to the next as though we were changing channels on TV, we run the risk of missing some degree of pertinence arising from the relation of one tale to the next.
At least we might ask, as we run, say, from the tale of the flood in Metamorphoses 1 to that of Apollo slaying the Python to the vivid pursuit of Daphne, whether there is some connection to be made, some relation worth considering, between these tales. Are they just individual items on a chain, or could they form segments of a larger semantic structure?
From the point in Book 5 when Athena first speaks with the Muses, the violation of young virgins has been a steady motif -- whether in the tapestry of Arachne, now re-created in the human register of Philomela's web, or in the tale of the Muses threatened by Pyreneus, or in Calliope's story of Persephone, echoed in the tale of Arethusa. Indeed the motif is so fundamental to the warp and woof of the Metamorphoses as to raise the question as to whether we are dealing primarily with the literal question of human sexuality and virginity, or whether this recurrent series of rapes and seizures is infused with more complex themes relating to security, freedom, desire, art, political order, civility, peace and possession (whether by self or other).
For example, here is Nietzsche mulling the strange exhilaration of Greek tragedy, and of the way that subsequent Western understanding of the Greeks has emphasized the bright and Apollonian cheerfulness of their culture -- often in contrast with the darker, more melodramatic colors of, say, the German penchant for sturm und drang. The brilliant Greek visions, Nietzsche says, are like light spots that appear when one looks too deeply into the abyss.
He goes on to say:
Only in this sense may we believe that we properly comprehend the serious and important concept of "Greek cheerfulness." The misunderstanding of this concept as cheerfulness in a state of unendangered comfort is, of course, encountered everywhere today. (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 9.)
It is precisely a state of respite from war -- the "of unendangered comfort" -- that is necessary to the cultivation of Ceres, and to the Muses in order that they may give themselves to their arts. Athena admires the locus amoenus of the Muses on Helicon, which Ovid describes in detail:
And Pallas, after she had long admiredthat fountain, flowing where the hoof had struck,turned round to view the groves of ancient trees;the grottoes and the grass bespangled, richwith flowers unnumbered—all so beautifulshe deemed the charm of that localitya fair surrounding for the studious daysof those Mnemonian Maids.
We note in this description of place the emphasis on study, the contemplative life. The Muses are all too aware of the provisional nature of their happy spot. As they tell Athena about the marvelous spring of Hippocrene struck by Pegasus, they wish this warrior Goddess were one of their regular members:
‘O, Tritonia, who would have been one of our choir, if your virtues had not formed you for greater things, what you say is true, and you rightly approve our arts and our haunts. Our life is happy, if only it were safe. But (nothing is sacred to the wicked), all things frighten virgin minds. Dread Pyreneus’s destruction is in front of my eyes, and my mind has not yet recovered fully. (Meta 5.260 ff)
The suggestion is that Wisdom and the Arts ought to be together, but aren't always able to be. The goddess of craft is also adviser to warriors like Odysseus and to heroes like Perseus -- her opera maiora clearly involve her, at least in part, in the active life, in politics and war. So if the Arts benefit from Wisdom, how do they do so? Is it a matter of having more illuminating content? Or is it the benefit of having the tranquility, the "unendangered comfort," to make good art because Wisdom, a martial Goddess, is there to protect the Muses from those who would try to possess and misuse them?
This question runs through Book 6, beginning with the confrontation of Athena and her obstinate pupil Arachne, and returning in the only tale that directly involves only humans: the tale of Tereus (a son of Ares) and the daughters of Pandion, Procne and Philomela. Each of these characters in turn creates a representation, an image, under the duress of need, desire, great grief and/or great trouble, under conditions lacking all comfort and tranquility. The images, instead of disinterested art, become weapons in a savage web of rape and vengeance.
Is there a relationship of the exceedingly gruesome events of this tale to the themes of imagination, desire, hubris, and representation found in the other tales of Book 6? Is the cunning (sollertia) that springs from the miseris rebus here seen as a different mode of inspiration from that seen in Athena's and the Muses' works?
And finally, Boreas and his rape of Oreithyia serves both as the conclusion of this book and the segue to the tale of the Argonauts in Book 7. Is this rape of this virgin another kettle of fish? And the Boreads -- Zetes and Calais, their twin boys with pubescent wings -- is Ovid just ending with a cute twist? What do we make of the image below?
One theory of art that Ovid would certainly have known is found in Aristotle's view of art as mimesis, or imitation. In relation to the competition of Athena and Arachne, it seems necessary to distinguish between art as imitation and another kind of art.
The first kind -- Arachne's -- offers us imitation as fidelity to appearance -- making a careful copy of something. If you are a very good imitator, your copy can be said to rival Nature. Trompe l'oeil art is, in a sense, the ultimate in imitative success, since it actually fools us into thinking something is real, when it's an artistic illusion. Arachne's art is of this kind -- not only do her images rival those of nature, but there is a double rivalry, because what she's imitating is the power of the gods to imitate natural things - bulls, golden showers, horses, etc. Just as Zeus successfully impersonated a bull and seduced Europa, so Arachne's tapestry seduces the viewer into believing one is actually seeing Zeus as bull seducing Europa.
Of course this imitation of divine imitation is also a distinct echo of Ovid's tale of Zeus and Europa which ended Book 2 of the Metamorphoses, so there is a mirroring of imitative reflection that verges on a mise en abyme. The endless mirroring suspends the viewer in an undecidable predicament, which nonetheless requires a decision. Think of the final scene of Orson Welle's The Lady from Shanghai, where the characters shooting the guns have to tell, but can't tell, if they're aiming at the actual person, or at a reflection:
The labyrinth of Arachne's tapestry leads one into a world where all is imitation, cheat, illusion, and virgins are forever being seduced by clever divine rapists.
Despite the undeniable similarity of Arachne's subject matter to that of the very book in which she appears, we should at least look at Athena's image before deciding that the theory of art as mimesis in Arachne's sense of it is Ovid's own.
Clearly Ovid is setting up an opposition between Athena and Arachne to at least offer an alternative theory of art; so what can Athena's tapestry tell us?
At first glance, her image seems very much in the same vein of imitation. Athena has presented the story of how she won a contest with Poseidon at Athens. We see Poseidon striking water from the Acropolis, and then Athena striking the rock and giving the Athenians the precious olive tree, a living source of health and wealth, of culture and strength.
One thing about the goddess's image should be clear: the excellence of the work does not lie solely in its verisimilitude. Doubtless the Athena in the tapestry resembled the goddess who wove her, but that's not what really matters here. What matters is the act that that this is an image of -- the act of making, creation, poesis. Athena didn't merely put a copy of an olive tree in Athens, as if the city could have found another one elsewhere. She is putting something brand new into the world. The gift of the goddess is not something anyone else could have given the city, it is a novum, a thing so extraordinary that even the gods marvel at it.
The story Athena tells in her tapestry culminates in the people choosing her as their patron, an act that is marked by naming the city, and themselves, after Athena. Not only is there a new kind of tree, but a new word. Athena's image is about this non-mimetic creative power, the poetic power of naming.
There's another difference between Arachne's mode of art and that of Athena, and it has to do with how, or to what, each directs our attention. Arachne's art is essentially about itself. It says, "look at how well I have feigned this story of a god feigning to be a bull." Athena's image is not very interested in making a faithful copy of something, because it's concerned with something that is fundamentally other than copying. It's interested in the powers of imagination. As an image, it points beyond itself, it tells us not to look at how well it's copied some event, but instead to think about an act of origination, the origin of "Athens."
How are we to understand what Ovid is telling us about art? It seems that there are certainly two kinds, or theories, of what art can be, but which is to be preferred? Would it not seem that the similarity of Arachne's images to events described in his poem would tilt the balance toward the imitative art of the girl? Or is this yet another twist of Ovidian irony, in which he's suggesting that if we read his poem as an imitative work of fancy, we are getting it all wrong? Is Ovid perhaps giving us a hint about how his poem is to be read? Or is he just offering a kind of sampler of aesthetics, saying, "here are two kinds of art"?
Given that these two modes of art seem in some sense to be opposed -- in one, the image is about its own intrinsic "imageness," in the other the image points to something beyond mere imitation -- perhaps a decision is important, and not simply for aesthetic reasons. Note the relation of each artist here to the theological, for example. And then there's the relation of all of this to hubris.
The violent climax of Ovid's story might make us suspect that the two modes of "art" -- in the larger sense to which we have been led -- are not simply opposite, but fundamentally incompatible. At this point we have to ask whether the brutal conclusion to the contest resolves the enigma posed by the conflicting webs of Athena and Arachne, or destroys any hope of doing so.
