Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE METAMORPHOSES
by contrast, now by ingenious and unscrupulous legerdemain. Though flexible
the structure is far from anarchic; but it is not easy to reduce to system.
Attempts have been made to show that under this informal, though not formless,
arrangement of the material there may be detected a more strictly ordered
architecture of proportion and symmetry. It seems a priori unlikely that Ovid,
who is sometimes elusive but almost never obscure, should have expected
readers of the Metamorphoses to detect structural subtleties on which modern
critics disagree so sharply; and difficult to see what emphases he intended them,
when detected, or subliminally apprehended, to convey. Moreover he has
incorporated in the structure of the poem one hint which seems to point the
other way. In the Aeneid the division into books, originally a matter of practical
convenience, 1 is made to play an essential literary role in the economy of the
poem. Ovid's narratives are deliberately contrived to overrun these divisions,
which in consequence have a merely local effect, by way of surprise or creation
of suspense; and the individual books have a unity only in so far as the poet
takes care that the literary texture of each one should in its variety reflect the
texture of the poem as a whole. This can be read as a tacit declaration that
balance and symmetry of the Virgilian type, with such emphases as they may
connote, are not to be looked for in this quite un-Virgilian epic.
Little or nothing, therefore, of the poet's intention appears to emerge from
the structure of his poem except for an evident intention to surprise, divert
and amuse. A clue to deeper meaning has been sought in the symbolism of,
for instance, his descriptions of landscape. There can certainly be no question
of the symbolic significance of the setting of some of the stories, notably the
pool of Narcissus (3.407—12). These landscapes, it is suggested, are places
where anything can happen; and that accords with the sense of otherness (so to
call it) with which Ovid has invested this world of his own creation. This is
an autonomous universe in which for the most part it is divine caprice that
reigns unchecked. But such symbols as these seem to possess no more than a,
so to say, local validity when compared with the pervasive symbolism of the
Aeneid or the imagery on which Lucretius relies to enforce his argument, and
they cannot be seen as a strongly unifying element in the Metamorphoses. At
most they provide immediate but limited emphasis.
If the Metamorphoses is in some important sense significant — if, that is, it
ought to be regarded as something better than a graceful florilegium of ancient
mythology — it can only be on the strength of Ovid's treatment of his material,
the myths themselves. Outside a purely factual handbook myth cannot be
treated 'straight'. Literary treatment of myth inescapably entails interpretation,
and it would have been impossible for Ovid to avoid imparting an individual
colouring to the stories that he chose to tell, even had he wished to. Of course
1
Cf. above, p. 18.
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