Elements of a symphony

Doubtless every reader of the Metamorphoses will come up with his/her own sampling of parts -- themes, motifs, structuring elements, poetic devices, salient features -- that work in concert to produce, if not wholes, at least larger parts.

Below are some that have captured our attention as we've threaded the labyrinth of the poem -- obviously incomplete, overlapping, ongoing:

1. Amor, quest, pursuit, chase, desire, possession, incorporation, motion, seeking. Eros and the stirring of the mind to know, to grasp. Apollo - Daphne, Pan - Syrinx, Atalanta - Hippomenes, Polyphemus - Galatea, Jupiter -> many.

2. Knowledge and Power, saying and doing, word and act, action and understanding, aiming and erring, science and magic. Minos and Daedalus, Ajax and Ulysses, Heracles and Pythagoras, Romulus and Numa, Glaucus and Circe.

3. Nature and Art, Convention and nature, speech and writing, cultivation vs. wildness, symbol and usus. Io, Orpheus, Arachne, Muses, Pierides, Pygmalion, Byblis vs. Iphis.

4. Order and Chaos, Love and War, Marriage and Alliance. Jupiter and Juno, Apollo and Coronis, Mars and Venus, Perseus and Andromeda, Pirithoos and Hippolyta, Minos and Pasiphae.

5. Dreams, visions, prophecies. Ceyx and Alcyone, Morpheus, Myscellus, Aesculapius, Tages and Cipus, Caesar's omens.

Assassination of Caesar

6. Paired tales, framed tales. Jupiter and Io, Pan and Syrinx; Philemon and Baucis, Erysichthon; Pomona and Vertumnus, Anaxarete and Iphis; Byblis and Caenis, Iphis and Ianthe.

7. Greece and Rome. Odysseus and Aeneas, Pomona and Anaxarete, Apollo and Aesculapius; Cadmus and Romulus; Phaethon and Augustus, Hippolytus.

8. Structure: Circle, Ring, Linear, Spiral, Rhizome. Cadmus, Theseus, Aeneas, Apollo and Aesculapius, Augustus.

9. Death and the new: Creation; mutation; magic; nova corpora, mutatas formas, terra nova. Persephone and Hades, Achelous and Perimele, Earth and Serpent, Orpheus, Arethusa, Quirinus, Virbius.

10. Ovid as meta-poet. Genres deformed, modes of irony, parody, tropes, modes of myth, epic, history, legend, defamiliarization, wit. The wedding of Perseus, battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, tales of Minyas, Trojan War.

11. Images of speech as system, potentially confusing, echoic world of sound. Gossip, chatter, redundancies, poetics. Fama, Morpheus, Apollo, Corvus and Coronis.

12. Eros and Polis, personal and political, desire and the human order. Io and Juno, Phaethon, Scylla and Minos, Pasiphae and Minos, Acoetes and Pentheus; Medea; Meleager, Atalanta and Althea.

13. Reading: determination and overdetermination, author and mimic; semantic drift, puns, homonyms, enigmas, wonders, and interpretive systems. Etruscan haruspicy, Cephalus and Procris, Corvus and Coronis.

14. Minding the gap: Unspoken relations between seemingly incongruous tales; discontinuity, allegory, irony.

The chase

It was in February of 2011 that our small group began reading Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the time since then, we've encountered more than 200 characters in some 250 mythic tales rendered by a variety of translators, tales told told by a poet who knew a good story when he heard one. It's a natural human impulse to want to sum it up, put it all together, master the whole ball of wax with pith and brevity.

Yet as Stephen Michael Wheeler says in his Narrative Dynamics in Ovid's Metamorphoses, "from hindsight, the vastness of the Metamorphoses is difficult to grasp in overview." Reading a bit of Wheeler suggests that we are far from alone in finding the text rich in intricate pattern and elusive in unifying structure:

In our final meeting, we'll explore some of the recurrent themes, motifs, structures, and gestures of Ovid's work. It would not surprise to find that our poet foretells this very problem of mastery. As with Apollo's straining for Daphne, as with Augustus' grappling with the synthesis of empire, grasping the poem as a totality in which form embodies meaning, and meaning is produced and rendered intelligible through richly integrated form, is no easy pursuit.

Ovid's shifting texture

Ovid's grouping of tales is enormously suggestive, and infinitely elusive. One sees patterns everywhere, but when one tries to tie them up into neat thematic or formal packages, the actual linkages and segues from one tale or set of tales to the next seem designed to defeat any basic order that might fit neatly into a PowerPoint demonstration.

We can say that books 1-5 appear to form a unit, and again, books 6-10 seem a middle group. And taking just the books we've read so far within the latter group, one can see certain thematic concerns:

Niobe

Book 6 - Matters of Art, mimesis, hubris, human making vs. divine creation. (Arachne, Niobe, Marsyas).
            - Human rape and privation of speech (Tereus, Procne, Philomela); divine rape (Boreas and Orithyia).

Book 7 - Foedera - Bonds of trust and mistrust - how well can one know the other? Bond between men, cities, men and gods, men and women. Tales of rejuvenation. (Medea and Jason, Plague of Aegina, Aeacus and Minos, Cephalus and Procris). 

Book 8 - Love, Defenses and Vulnerability, Randomness vs. Necessity. (Scylla and Nisus, Minos and Daedalus, Daedalus and Icarus, Diana and Oineus, the Boar, Meleager, Atalanta, Althea).
            - Hospitality, Desire, Economics: (Achelous, Philemon and Baucis, Erysichthon and Mestra).

One "pattern" that emerges is that in each of these books, the major narrative thrust seems to break, or shift gears, near the middle. For example, the tales of human artists and the gods they anger in the first half of book 6 give way to the long, bloody account of Tereus and the violent "art" of Philomela and Procne.

In 7, the very long narrative of Medea ends abruptly with the advent of Theseus, and the second half of the book relates to humans grappling with divine gifts.

In book 8, a series of tales involving love and or vengeance penetrating and destroying fortified places is followed by stories of hospitality and its absence.

It would seem that Ovid is going out of his way to disrupt some easy order of coherent narrative units that would coincide with the beginnings and endings of his poem's books. He would much rather introduce new matter in the middle of a book and have it wash over into the beginning of the next, as he does with the figure of the river god Achelous in book 8. The god appears in the middle to divert Theseus from attempting to cross him, and the ensuing symposium lasts until well into book 9, ending with the defeat of Achelous at the hands of Heracles.

Hercules vs. Achelous as bull

In another post I'll examine some of the patterns within a single book that might be worth considering.