It’s Narrative All the Way Down

In my decade of experience as an educator and academic, I’ve realized that I and many of the people I’ve met and worked with read Ovid’s Metamorphoses the wrong way. We tend to reduce it to an anthology of Greek and Roman myths. Which it is. Yet, as I pointed out in my previous post, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is, in fact, a tightly structured and complex and coherent narrative that takes, as its subject, the origins of the cosmos and development of civilization up to the reign of Caesar Augustus. There are so many levels of narrative framing deployed throughout the Metamorphoses used to accomplish this goal.

Ovid’s core narrative technique is the mise en abyme–the setting of a story within a story. He accomplishes this primarily through metadiegesis, which establishes multiple narrators telling many of the stories within the larger narrative of the Metamorphoses.¹ In these instances, Ovid substitutes the external narrative voice of the Metamorphoses for the voice of a character internal to the story. Gianpiero Rosati notes that approximately a third of the Metamorphoses, which includes 60 of the episodes, “is narrated not by the external narrator, but by about 40 internal characters.”

The variety of internal narrators of the story emerge through various techniques. For example:

• Homo/Hetero-diegetic Analepsis: Moments when the protagonist (homo) or a report heard from another character (hetero) of a story narrates events which happened prior to the main events of the story.
  • Prolepsis: the opposite of analepsis–i.e., when a character anticipates the events of the future

Why bring all of this up? Two reasons:

1) Hermeneutics: Attending to the narrative complexity of a literary work raises all kinds of hermeneutical questions about the motives of the narrator, the narrative context in which the story occurs, and who the story is for (i.e., audience). Such questions will affect the way we interpret the meaning of these stories.
2) Reception: Attending to such narrative complexity sheds some light on Ovidian reception in the Middle Ages and beyond. For medieval writers–Chaucer in particular–Ovid was a literary treasure trove. He did not merely provide mythological content; he exemplified adroit literary craftsmanship. Ovid could take a familiar myth, embed it in a complex narrative world, and thereby create a whole new set of interpretations and ideas around an otherwise simple and straightforward story. How Ovid accomplished this is one of the main reasons medieval writers kept returning and alluding to his works.

There’s much more that could be said on both of these fronts. I’m also interested, for example, in the way Ovid becomes a model for how a writer can receive and relate to the literary legacy set by his predecessors–the great auctores of the past. Ovid is in conversation with figures such as Homer and Virgil, sometimes criticizing, correcting, and admiring their work. And there is rarely a moment when Ovid is interacting with these auctores without a humorous flair. The combination and balance of humor and criticism was indispensable to Ovid’s literary successors who treated him in much the same way.

I’m going to try to keep reading and moving as quickly as I can through the Metamorphoses (Exam deadlines are like honey badgers…). But it’s hard not to linger. Such, I guess, is the sign of a truly great work of art.

Footnotes

1. “Diegesis” in this context refers specifically to the narration of a story, as opposed to the “mimetic” demonstration of a story. The distinction is easier to see in the difference between a novel and a play. The novel must narrate/tell the events and actions of a story, whereas a play shows the actions. It’s all in Aristotle. ↩︎