Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History

Kenneth J. Knoespel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138942028
• eBook ISBN: 9781317377252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1985. This investigation of Ovid's fable takes a different tack to previous studies of the love lyric or the themes but looks at the creation of narrative strategies to explain Narcissus' experience. The story has always been understood as literally impossible but invites readers to ask what is meant by the puzzling tale of deception and death.

The limits placed on the fable by the commentaries of the medieval period allow us to appreciate the narrative expansion of the fable in twelfth and thirteenth-century poetry. Themes in this book are the way the fable is used as a means for knowledge of physical nature and the development of science; the importance of language in the fable and in its settings when rewritten in other texts, and psychoanalytic aspects of Echo and Narcissus. The fable has the capacity to represent mental life and psychological crisis within other narratives and this is also an important discussion point, based around the medieval text Roman de la Rose. The book also considers the wider Metamorphoses and Ovid's importance for literature.

CHAPTER ONE
The Language of Thebes

The story of Narcissus (Met. 3:339-512)¹ receives almost constant attention, yet its study is marked by curious limitations. ² Classicists examine the epi sode in detail but have only begun to ask how the story fits into the narrative and thematic structure of Book III. ³ Textual, rather than narrative criticism, continues to dominate the study of the text. ⁴ Medieval and renaissance schol ars, drawn to the moral function given the story in later periods, or interested in the imitation of the story in vernacular literature, look to Ovid as an auctor who permits access to other texts. ⁵ Literary theorists play Ovid against him self to find contradictions about reading and writing⁶ and modernists from numerous disciplines probe the text to further their own commentary on nar cissism. ⁷ That Narcissus can be perceived in such a manner is not surprising considering the ambiguous position of the Metamorphoses in literary study. Is it a mythological handbook, a collection of stories, or universal history?⁸ More often than not it continues to be read as a dictionary of mythological figures where the apparently fixed authority of each may be consulted. The work remains what a famous edition in the fifteenth century called The Bible of the Poets. ⁹

As classicists seek sources for Narcissus, as literary historians treat Narcissus as a source, and as theoreticians find Narcissus a source for psychological data, Ovid's own creation slips away. It is revealing that the most extensive thematic study of Narcissus devotes only a few pages to Ovid's text.¹⁰ This points to a critical assumption that is seldom identified. By designating a text as a source, scholarship conveys an idea that it carries authority and stability and that its meaning is self-evident. The opposite is more correct. Texts called sources are often the ones that have the least hermeneutic stability. The history of their reception in later literature points in this direction.

Reception of the Narcissus story raises additional questions. Frequently reference to Narcissus does not mean reference to Ovid's text at all but reference to a general version or even interpretation of the story. The manipulation of the story in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through moral allegory determined perception of the fable. Today discussion of Narcissus continues to be shaped but now by the new allegories provided by psychoanalytic theory both in popular and more specialized forms.¹¹ If people think about Narcissus at all it is usually in an interpretive context. Few ever look at Ovid's story and challenge the abbreviated form of the fable which so often distorts Ovid's creation.

If the Narcissus text is infrequently studied by itself, it is even less often regarded in its narrative context. The fragmentation of the Metamorphoses started by medieval commentary and continued by nineteenth-century Quellenforschung has made it unusual to ask what relation the story has to Ovid's book of Theban stories.¹² Only recently have critics like Brooks Otis begun to consider how the story functions in its larger context.¹³ It is even rarer that the larger chronological structure of the Metamorphoses is taken seriously and that we are reminded that Ovid's narrative approaches history.¹⁴

This essay emphasizes the importance of returning to Ovid's own text through commentary on the Narcissus episode and discussion of its function in Book III. Its approach is historical. This does not mean that psychology or problems of writing and speech raised by recent theoretical discussion are ignored. Historical study actually expands the importance of perception in the fable by showing the meticulous manner in which the carefully ordered narrative ironically conveys the instability of meaning. The question of meaning raised by the story is not restricted to the episode itself. By placing the story in its larger narrative setting we see that it articulates the problem of meaning in early Theban history and finally in history itself. This discussion is divided into three parts. Mythic and genealogical matter relevant to the episode comes first and is followed by close study of the narrative. Questions about the fable and history, though anticipated throughout, come last.

Myth and Genealogy

The mythical significance of the narcissus flower preceded its personification.¹⁵ This is evident from the criticism of the story found in Pausanias and from the presence of the narcissus flower in the cyclical myths of Hera and Dionysus.¹⁶ In the Hymn to Demeter, Persephone gathers narcissus flowers before she is seized and drawn into the underworld by Pluto.¹⁷ The association of the flower and death in this myth is furthered by Greek funerary use of the flower.¹⁸ Such custom, in turn, corresponds with the soporific or death like effect attributed to the flower medicinally.¹⁹ In antiquity the name of the flower in Greek itself conveyed its physical effect and its symbolic association with death.²⁰ An etymological link between the Greek words narcissus and narcotic was observed as early as Pliny.²¹ The death-like qualities associated with the flower stand behind Strabo's report, in his first century A.D. guidebook, that Narcissus' monument was a place of silence.²²

Greek poetry also associated the flower with Dionysus because of its beauty and probably because of the physical effect it could have on the body. In Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, a narcissus flower appears in a grove sacred to Dionysus.²³ The connection with Dionysus appears in later works as well. In Nonnus' work the Dionysiaca, from the fifth century A.D., the flower is special to Dionysus.²⁴

The personification of the narcissus flower probably developed from folk stories. Two stories, mentioned in classical literature, deserve special attention. Conon, a contemporary of Ovid, tells that Narcissus caused the suicide of a certain Ameinias because he refused to love him.²⁵ When Narcissus looked into a spring he became "in a strange way his own lover." Later Narcissus, who believes he has been justly punished, kills himself. Pausanias' version, already mentioned above, is especially notable because it shows the effects of euhemeristic criticism.²⁶ After discounting the possibility that a person could actually fall in love with his own reflection, Pausanias tells a more reasonable version. After the death of his twin sister, Narcissus thinks he sees her image in a pool and drowns while trying to reach the figure in the water. In comparison with Ovid's developed narrative, these stories appear more like folktales or legends.²⁷ Tracking the Narcissus story within the matrix of Greek myth and legend calls attention to the distinction that must be made between myth and narrative in regard to Ovid's text. While Ovid alludes to cyclical myths such as Persephone in the story, it is for narrative not mythic considerations. The story that Ovid shapes around Narcissus is far more important than the underlying mythic ground.

The distinction between myth and narrative raises questions about Ovid's knowledge of mythography and its relation to his work. Although it appears as if the story of Narcissus in the Metamorphoses is Ovid's invention, we do not know for certain. His method of composition suggests that he probably knew other versions such as Conon's. Numerous handbooks and guides were available in Augustan Rome and textual criticism has shown that Ovid used some of them.²⁸ Because the stories of Echo and Narcissus play with the relation between reflected sound and light, the attention such phenomena receive in earlier poetic philosophy such as Lucretius may also play a limited role in Ovid's creation.²⁹ While there is no single version of Narcissus that is comparable to Ovid's story, Apollodorus' Library provides insight into Ovid's composition of the Theban material in Book III and his invention of Narcissus. Although we cannot say that Ovid knew the Library, as a work from the first century B.C. it gives us a glimpse of the kind of handbooks to which he had access.

In contrast to Apollodorus who follows the orthodox version of Cadmus and his offspring, Ovid rearranges family history by mixing children and grandchildren.³⁰ For example, the story of Actaeon, a grandson of Cadmus, comes before Semele, a daughter. This is not an oversight. By drawing the stories of Semele and Pentheus together, Ovid shapes a more dramatic relation between the violent origin of Bacchus (conceived through the annihilating intercourse of Zeus and Semele) and Bacchus' own subsequent destruction of Pen the us. The stories of Semele and Pentheus, however, are not simply juxtaposed. They are linked by the story of Narcissus. To regard the Narcissus episode as a digressive link does not diminish its importance. The realization that it does not appear in traditional accounts of Thebes gives special importance to its placement in Book III. In part the story solves a problem of time. If Semele and Pentheus were side by side the reader would move too quickly from the god's birth to his manifestation as a young man.

But there are more strategic reasons for such a link as well. The story establishes the reputation of Tiresias and gives authority to the warning he gives Pentheus about the young Bacchus. At the same time that it functions as narrative digression, it works rhetorically as an exemplum. Significantly, it works as a very special kind of exemplum, for instead of affirming something that is already known it becomes a vehicle for new knowledge about Tiresias and psychology. At the very beginning of the story we learn that what we are about to hear will make known "a new genus of insanity" (genus novitasque furoris, 350). The revelatory function of the episode, underscored by the text itself, is extremely important. By referring to a new category of thought at the beginning of the story, Ovid invites his auditors to substantiate its presence in his subsequent description. As we will see further on, what initially appears as a narrative digression becomes not only an exemplum but even a diagnostic commentary on the course of Theban history. At this point it is sufficient to emphasize the strategic location of the Narcissus episode, for such an awareness prepares us for the detailed explication of the episode to which we now turn.

Narrative

To facilitate analysis of the story, I have divided it into several parts: l) prologue, 339-58; 2) Echo, 359-69; 3) Echo and Narcissus, 370-401; 4) retribution and description of the pool, 402-12; 5) deception at pool, 413-31; 6) narrator's intervention, 432-36; 7) complaint, 437-73; 8) dissolution, 474-503; 9) conclusion, 504-10. Each will be considered in turn.

PROLOGUE

Ovid's narrative evolves through a series of puzzles introduced in the prologue.³¹ One involves Narcissus' origin, another an ironic reversal of the famous Delphic injunction to know thyself, and yet another the amplification and playful synthesis of details concerned with light and sound. By posing and then resolving such puzzles, Ovid displays remarkable synthetic ingenuity. Part of the fascination the story holds comes from these puzzle-like characteristics which the reader reexperiences each time he hears or reads the story.

The genealogy Ovid invents for Narcissus separates Narcissus from Cad mus' relatives and anticipates his own water-generated transformation into a flower. His mother, Liriope, is a nymph whose name Ovid has created from the Greek word lily, λείριον, the plant family to which the narcissus flower belongs.³² His father is the river Cephisus and his rape of Liriope (which suggests the effects of a swollen river on its flowering banks) anticipates the importance of water as a deceptive agent throughout the story. Thus genealogy not only helps create a natural setting; it connects human genealogy with natural history and physics.

Ovid reverses the traditional authority of the Delphic oracle in Tiresias' prophecy about Narcissus' future. In contrast to the oracle (also of Theban origin) Narcissus will grow old only if he does not know himself-"si se non noverit" (348). Actually the subsequent narrative becomes a formal test and proof of Tiresias' ability. The reader need not wait, however, to the end of the story for such confirmation. By abbreviating the plot in the prologue, Ovid celebrates the seer's perspicacity and generates further interest in the story. Although Tiresias' words long appear vana (349) they are subs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Language of Thebes
• 2. Medieval Ovidian Commentary
• 3. The Invention of Personal History
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index