Mendelsohn on McCarter's Metamorphoses

In this New Yorker review of Stephanie McCarter's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Daniel Mendelsohn offers some thoughtful observations about Ovid's style and content:

Ovid announces the nature of his epic in its opening lines, where he asks the gods to “delicately spin out” a song so vast as to be “unceasing,” starting with the beginning of the world and ending in the poet’s own time. 

He opens with an evocation of the primal chaos from which all creation arose, shifting, as the poem progresses, to the establishment of Jove’s rule in heaven and the creation of the human race (which, as in the Bible, has to repopulate itself after a devastating flood). There follows a panoply of myths about the interactions of gods and humans, including the many instances of divine violence against mortals which lead to all those baroque mutations.. . . .

Apollo flaying Marsyas - Ribera
Ringling Museum

If there are any heroes in this violent and kaleidoscopic work, they are artists. The Metamorphoses returns again and again to the ingenuity of artists and musicians and poets, from sculptors like Pygmalion to the musician Marsyas, from inventors like Daedalus, who both creates and then must escape from the Labyrinth, to the semi-divine poet Orpheus, the preëminent representative in the Western tradition of poetic genius in both its positive and negative aspects. (He can charm trees and rocks, but famously fails to bring his wife, Eurydice, back from the dead.) The long Orpheus sequence in Book 10—a mini-epic all its own—is characterized by a dizzying, almost Calvinoesque series of nested narratives. At one point, you realize you’re reading Ovid telling a story about Orpheus telling a story about Venus telling her lover Adonis a story about another pair of lovers.

As if eerily anticipating his own fate, the poet lingers on the tales of artists—and critics!—who suffer dreadful punishments for speaking uncomfortable truths to power. Marsyas is flayed alive for challenging Apollo to a musical contest; when the mortal Midas questions a decision in another contest, Apollo gives him an ass’s ears. Art and literature, Ovid seems to say, are powerful if dangerous means of confronting arbitrary authority. 

~ Daniel Mendelsohn, Should Ovid’s Metamorphoses Have a Trigger Warning?, New Yorker, 11.7.2022

The Classicist and the Ovid-citing supremacists

In an interview on "To the Best of Our Knowledge," the editor of the classics journal Eidolon takes on USian white supremacists who cite Ovid's Ars Amatoria as precedent and support for their view of male patriarchal power

Donna Zuckerberg, who also teaches at Stanford, talks about how she encountered threatening pushback for taking on this ham-handed appropriation of ancient authorities by contemporary ideologues, many of whom fetishize Nazism.

In the brief conversation with the program's host, Zuckerberg notes that she loves Ovid and allows that he's neither simple nor direct, in fact he's rather nuanced and complex. This nine-minute conversation, however, which isn't focused on the poet, leads to the categorizing of the book as a pick-up artist's manual -- the very trope the poet is using to expose the hilarious pretensions of matchbook-course experts on Amor.

Reading a passage in which the Praeceptor avers that women love to be taken by force, Zukerberg verges dangerously close to taking the poet at face value in the very way she faults the supremacist readers for doing. Predicting a vein of unimaginative male discourse doesn't qualify one as a prophet, but neither does it convict one of the dastardliness foretold.

Zuckerberg knows Ovid is a complex poetic craftsman. The problem with those who cite his "authority" on male-female relations is that his examination of desire in all its self-contradiction makes it quite clear that both sexes are equally the playthings of Amor, and the games played, the intricate commerce of sexual relations, do not rely on any a priori assumptions about male power and female inferiority. Indeed, there would be nothing to talk about if Amor rested on a fixed hierarchy of the sexes.

Ovid teaches us by putting into lively verse an entire dictionary of memes and cliches about love. What people say -- including Trumpian lockerroom trash about women liking to be forced -- is part of the poet's subject. It doesn't make the poet a one-sided USian white supremacist.

One might argue that Ovid's lucidity about the impossibility of his own pretended enterprise -- that there is such a thing as an "art" of love -- is fundamentally incompatible with the meathead sensibility of one who would extract from his lively and witty text a reading as ponderously dull as that of these wannabe classicizing supremacists.

That sort of fatuity is as far from Ovid as it is from the author of Bouvard et Pecuchet and the Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Whether there is any common ground upon which to discuss the Ars Amatoria with the Bouvards of white USian Nazism is a question best left for another moment.

For her efforts, Zuckerberg earned threats of brutal violence to herself and her family. The gap between the literal and the literary reading of a text can be a perilous one, as this text's own author was to learn.