Desiring Bodies
Ovidian Romance
and the
Cult of Form
m
G r e g o ry H e y w o rt h
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Copyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heyworth, Gregory, 1967–
Desiring bodies : Ovidian romance and the cult of form / Gregory
Heyworth.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-03106-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-268-03106-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism 2. Literature,
Medieval—Roman influences. 3. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.—
Influence. 4. Human body in literature. 5. Desire in literature.
6. Romances—History and criticism. 7. Romances, English—History
and criticism. 8. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—
History and criticism. I. Title.
PN681.5.H49 2009
809'.933561—dc22
2009017561
This book is printed on recycled paper.
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora.
[My mind is bent to tell of forms changed into new bodies.]
Ovid Metamorphoses 1.1
How early Europe confronted the cult of Ovid, an author
whose literary corpus is indelibly inscribed in the bedrock of European culture, is a question neither so vast nor so vague that it defies synopsis. Prospect on the answer may be found in a bit of faux
Ovidiana entitled De vetula or De mutatione vitae that enjoyed wide
currency in the later Middle Ages. In it, the libertine poet falls in love
with a beautiful young woman. Through the intercession of a crone
(vetula) friendly to both, Ovid arranges a tryst, only to fall victim to
a bed-trick in which the vetula replaces his beloved, a metamorphosis
he perceives by blindly tracing the lineaments of her changed form in
the night. Twenty years later, Ovid encounters the lady again, now
a widow, and repeats the affair. This time, however, she really has
become the vetula; what was once artifice is now truth. “I have sung of
forms changed into new bodies,” laments the poet, “but no more miraculous a change can be found than this one.”1 Her mutatio vitae begets his own: he abjures the license of his past, renounces women and
poetry, embraces philosophy and religion, and becomes a Christian.
The attractions of this imitation Ovid are many, not the least of
which is the frugal symmetry with which the author integrates three
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction
Metamorphoses—a pseudo-Ovidian text into the genuine canon, the
ersatz vetula into the real, the pagan love poet into the Christian
philosopher­—under the rubric of the famous first line of the Metamorphoses, “forms changed into new bodies.” The appeal of the Ovidian
amatory cult, its urbanity, irony, and philosophy of change, balances
in self-ironic contest with the stoic moralism of the Christian cult.
Each desires the other.
What reveals most acutely medieval Europe’s cultic reception of
Ovid, however, is the accessus or prose introduction appended to the
De vetula that recounts the discovery of the codex: “Nuper autem
in suburbio civitatis Dioscori, que regni Colchorum caput est, cum
extraherentur quedam gentilium antiquorum sepulchra de cimeterio publico, quod iuxta oppidum Thomis est, inter cetera unum inventum est, cuius epigramma litteris Armenicis erat sculptum in eo,
eiusque interpretatio sic sonabat: Hic iacet Ovidius ingeniosissimus
poetarum. In capite vero sepulcri capsella eburnea inventa est, et in ea
liber iste nulla vetustate consumptus.”2 [Not long ago, near the city of
Dioscurias, the capital of the kingdom of Colchis, the burial plot of a
certain ancient family was being removed from a public cemetery next
to the town of Tomis, when one (tomb) in particular was found on
which was inscribed an epitaph in Armenian, the translation of which
proclaimed the following: “Here lies Ovid, the greatest of poets.” At
the front of the tomb an ivory capsule was found, and in it this book
unconsumed by age.]
Cognates of the Latin cultus, “cult” and “culture” are equal con­
stituents of civilization. While the one defines the sum of a society’s
ethical and metaphysical beliefs, the other defines its aesthetic, poetic,
and intellectual predilections. Both ideologies are contained in a book
and fetishized in a body; in both, the literary corpus is coextensive with
the literal corpus. The accessus above marks a signal translatio in the
history of European culture. In literary terms it figures a movement of
language from Armenian to Latin, from a barbarous East to a cultured
West, reversing Ovid’s banishment from urbane Rome to unlettered
Tomis. More importantly, it follows the movement through time of
a book encased in its own time capsule and with it the Augustan cultus
of urbanity enclosed within Ovid’s literary corpus. In religious terms,
the passage figures the translation of a body through death to love.
Like Mary Magdalene before Christ’s tomb, we witness the miracle
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction of a missing body desired all the more for its absence, its physical unpossessibility. The juxtaposition is apt: like Christ, Ovid is a magister
amoris, a teacher of a philosophy of love. Nor are their philosophies as
antithetical as they may seem; just as Christian charity denies virtue to
the desire to possess materially, so Ovidian love, as we learn from the
De vetula and nearly every tale in the Metamorphoses, places desiring at
odds with having. One of the great, unrecognized attractions of Ovid
for Christian Europe is that Augustinian caritas and Ovidian cupiditas
obey the same cultic injunction.
Crucial to both the Ovidian and Christian cults is the miracle of
apotheosis, the body’s triumph over mortality. If the De vetula is careful to observe the significance of the Metamorphoses’ first line in its
discussion of the metamorphosis time works upon the young woman’s
body, so it looks to the Metamorphoses’ last lines to give meaning to the
“book unconsumed by age”:
Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis
nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas.
cum volet, ilia dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius
ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi:
parte tamen meliore met super alta perennis
astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum,
quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama,
siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.
(Metamorphoses 15.871–79)
[And now my work is done, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor
fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able
to undo. When it will, let that day come which has no power save
over this mortal body, and end the span of my uncertain years.
Still in my better part I shall be borne immortal far beyond the
lofty stars and I shall have an undying name. Wherever Rome’s
power extends over the conquered world, I shall have mention on
men’s lips, and, if the prophecies of bards have any truth, through
all the ages shall I live in fame.]
The first-century BCE pseudo-Platonic Axiochus depicts a Greek
afterlife epitomized by “discussions for the philosophers; theatres for
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction
the poets; dancing; concerts; discreet conversation round the banquet
table.”3 Epitaphs on Greek funerary monuments frequently recommended their tenants to membership in this cultural heaven, citing
life achievement in philosophy, arts, and letters and friendship with
the Muses.4 In this “religion of culture” that Roman Hellenizers emulated from the Greeks, to attain renown in the arts while living was
to partake in that anagogic ideal, to undergo apotheosis by culture, to
become immortal. The resemblance of these passages, the Ovidian
original and its medieval imitation, to Greek epitaphs in tone and portent is not inconsequential. Building on Horace’s conceit of the verbal
monument in Carmina 3.30, Ovid and his medieval imitator are doing
exequies to the antique religion of culture. In the De vetula, the Ovidian corpus changed into the Ovidian opus effects a transformation
that is also a transcendence, joining classical and Christian traditions
of metamorphosis.
One aim of this book is to unpack the societal and poetic consequences of the connection of corpus to cultus that I have gestured
at above. That connection is summed up in the first sentence of the
Metamorphoses, a line to which this book is a response. I do not mean,
of course, to slight the rest. Ovid’s aitia, or stories of origin, amount to
nothing less than the narrative of civilization in the making. They answer in poetic measure the questions of where social and political customs come from and why things have the names they do; they tear the
counterpane off Olympian scandal and reveal the occult psychology
of gods, heroes, and royalty to be every bit as mean and libidinous as
we suspected; they collate and reshape Greco-Roman ethical postures
from behind the foil of irony. But the invocation, and especially the
first sentence, differ in tone and subject from what follows. Whereas
the tales make up a history of custom, the invocation is a contribution
to the history of ideas. Here the poet confides to us the kernel of his
philosophy. In the straitened compass of a few lines, Ovid furnishes
both a vocabulary and a method for describing civilization’s struggle
to transcend the primitivism that dwells stubbornly in its unconscious
and that erupts periodically in metamorphic spasms. In short, the incipit articulates a general theory of cultural evolution through a study
of instances of bodily mutation. Metamorphosis, of course, was not a
new conceit. But while the physics of flux was as old as Heracleitus
of Ephesus and as current as Lucretius, Ovid was the first to construe
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction the mutability of form as the simultaneous principle behind both poetry and civilization. In prosecuting this reciprocity wherein poetic
postures commute societal customs and vice versa, Ovid invented the
history of culture.
Culture or “cult” is the main abstraction of this book’s title, yet
no less important to my argument are its ancillaries, “body,” “form,”
and “romance,” and the generic theory that correlates them. Of these
terms, the most overdetermined is the “body,” from whose coattails
trail all manner of ideologies. Amid the recent welter of body studies,
however, the actual body, as Caroline Bynum has noticed, is remarkably absent. In a seminal essay, she quotes as apothegm the complaint
of a friend: “There’s so much written about the body . . . but it all
focuses on such a recent period. And in so much of it the body dissolves into language. The body that eats, that works, that dies, that
is afraid—that body just isn’t there.”5 There is something perhaps
inherent to the scholarly temper that avoids the body, “hiding behind associative or institutional identities (academia, scholar, fellows,
university, reading rooms, libraries) making observations without an
observer.”6 Roland Barthes has attempted to redress that oversight for
the modern period, and Bynum for the medieval.7 My focus, therefore, is not upon the body in its material presence but precisely upon
that apophatic history of absence that Bynum and Barthes have lamented. The question that this book asks is: How can the absence of
the body be construed as a formal, generically structuring presence?
How does an erotic desire felt by the individual for the missing body
give way to an intellectual desire for formal cohesion and wholeness
that comes from accepting the material fact of absence? Put differently, how is an individual’s failure to regain possession of an absent
lover in romance literature mitigated emotionally by synecdoches of a
corporate body that deliver social inclusion in compensation for lack
of individual fulfillment? Finally, how does romance respond when its
protagonists recognize that the price of social inclusion, of assimilation to the form, spells the loss of a new and different body—not the
desired other but the self in its autonomy?
Inscribed in the history of genre between antiquity and the Enlightenment, the cult of bodily absence plies cyclically between immanent and transcendental, romance and epic phases. Christ’s risen
body, for example, the questic object and fetishized subject of the
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction
quem quæretis trope, occupies the central conceit of medieval Christian genres of literature in the romance mode ranging from drama to
hagiography. In antique literature, a parallel cultic desire nucleates
in absent elegiac, tragic, and epic bodies. Homer’s Helen, Sophocles’
Philoctetes, Propertius’s Cynthia, although traditionally belonging to
genres other than romance, inaugurate a narrative pattern of desire
for literal bodies that betrays a romance core.
The cult of absence in its transcendental phase is characterized by
a gradual abandonment of the physical body for the idea of form.
W. B. Yeats perceived this erasure as a historical phenomenon linked
to the advent of the early modern period. “I detest the Renaissance,”
he once commented, “because it made the human mind inorganic; I
adore the Renaissance because it clarified form.”8 Similarly, Russell
Fraser has argued that in the Renaissance “the spectre of formlessness
emerges from its long incubation [and] attention to form becomes
obsessive,”9 a cult evinced by the tutelary deities of Milton’s Comus,
who invoke their neo-Platonic insubstantiality (“We that are of purer
fire . . .”). The cycle reaches its climacteric, finally, in Descartes’ definitive erasure of the body: “I think, therefore I am.”
For its part, this book culminates in Adam and Eve’s departure into
a postlapsarian world that Milton would like to divest of the traces
of immanence. Paradise Lost is a work whose verse form declares a
generic aggiornamento of the abstract body, denying the sensuality of
rhyme and the centrality of romance with which it is associated. But
the final organic image of Adam hand in hand with Eve equivocates,
like Yeats’s Renaissance, in its purposes: an epic moment of foundation, it can be read equally as a romance affirmation of Adam’s archetypal desire for the immanent body, a ressourcement that returns
Milton’s cult of form to the figures and motives of Ovidian romance.
The preceding paragraphs have attempted to define a diachronic
connection, somewhat obscure and not altogether satisfactory, between the history of the body and that of genre, arguing paradoxically
that bodily absence, rather than presence, is the structuring force behind the formulas of emotional reward that we call genre. The chapters that follow treat the same problem synchronically: each discovers
absent or incomplete bodies as a motor of desire. To the extent that
the authors I read here all negotiate the restitution or reintegration
of a body and largely fail, they also negotiate the generic parameters
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction of romance in and among genres, again without definitive success. In
Marie de France’s Lais, the wounded bodies of Guigemar, Bisclavret,
and Guilliadun seek completion and cure; in Chrétien de Troyes, the
ethics of chivalric and eschatological reward are at stake in the abduction of Fenice and the quest for healing of the Fisher King; in Chaucer,
Dorigen’s desire for the absent Arveragus summons into presence obstacles that challenge courtly and conjugal obligations, while symbolism of the hybrid Minotaur ominously superintends the disunity of the
Athenian body politic; for Petrarch, the poetic desire to reassemble
the tessera of his scattered rhymes into the literary corpus of the Rime
sparse is an attempt to redress his failure to reclaim the physical Laura;
in Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet are crucially absent from each other
in time and place, an asynchrony that finds generic overlap between
romance and tragedy; finally Milton’s Adam pursues the absent Eve in
contravention of social and poetic decorum. No less important to the
prospect of this book, however, is the concept of form that exists in
dialectic with the body and is its diachronic aspect.
If absence defines the concept of body generically, unity, as Schiller
has taught us, defines the body as an aesthetic and social object. Unity,
of course, is not merely an aesthetic category, but if we accept Schiller’s
contention that “in order to solve any political problem in practice, the
way lies through the aesthetic,” it is also therefore a political one.10
This book borrows from Ovid the correlation of aesthetic with political unity, but the consequences of that connection and its role as the
basis of social form beg definition. According to Johan Huizinga, central to cultural history is “the age-old metaphor that even myths and
fables transferred the structure of the human body to abstract things,
in order to be able to grasp them.”11 As an aesthetic object, in other
words, the body is the default intermediary between content and form,
the instinctive point of reference the human mind uses when moving
conceptually between things and a single idea of thingness, concrete
plurality and abstract unity. This synecdochal leap takes place most
tendentiously in the social and political spheres, where it is used to
consolidate power. Literature and art that evoke a desire for the body—
that is, in the romance mode—become the ideal aesthetic conduits in
the Schillerian sense for the manipulation of socio­political form. In the
Metamorphoses, Ovid thinks about politics in terms of the body, making
it the objective correlative in the evolution of culture from corporeal
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction
to poetic to social and political forms. Ovidian romance, as I conceive
of it in this book, is the literary form that treats the epic synecdoche
of body and nation as a fiction of form, a mythology it deconstructs
by narrating the individual’s alienation from the group or any unitary
construct.
The term social form as I employ it is not an arbitrary but a technical designation that exists in a dialectic with the concepts of the body
and unity. Similar in many respects to the habitus of Marcel Mauss
and Norbert Elias, it is a construct I have adapted from the sociology of Georg Simmel, who in turn developed it from Kantian form/­
content dualism. For Simmel, a body is a content (political or social)
whose institutional organization may be hierarchical or cooperative,
solidary or antagonistic, unitary or hybrid, but that is reflexively apprehended by the human mind in terms of its own phenomenological experience. Form, he argues in an essay on the philosophy of art,
is the product of a kind of aesthetic self-awareness of the body, a
reciprocity (“Wechselwirkung”) that occurs, for example, when one
views a portrait. “The bodily appearance,” he contends, “because of
its artistic affinity with the viewer, summons up in him the impression of a soul, which in return gives the portrait the appearance of
a heightened unity, substan­tiality, and a mutual justification of features.”12 Literary representations of social groups provoke in macrocosm a similar phenomenological reciprocity. What we perceive
reflected in the associative bodies of literature is a plural unity or
“social form,” anatomy as societal taxonomy. Social forms, then, are
the solid geometries of human association viewed in the mirror of
artistic or literary representation.
Part I of this book occupies itself with social forms. Part II treats
form as a poetic or generic quantity, one that is bound in a material
dialectic with a literary corpus—that is, with the book as body. As
a concept poetry shares with philosophy, form has gathered some
vogue of late. Christopher Cannon invokes the idea of form in an
attempt to find an aesthetic unity in early Middle English literature’s
morphological resistance to generic categories. For Cannon, literature has two aspects: form (the transcendent aspect) and “grounds”
(literature’s material connection to place). The dichotomy of form
and grounds functions for Cannon much as that of form and body
does for me. And like this book, Cannon’s work struggles with the
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction perceived priority of form over matter, finding a compromise in the
Aristotelian hylomorphism (although he does not call it that) that
proved crucial to Aquinas’s philosophical and political thought.13
Drawing inspiration from Marx and Althusser, he posits form as
“that which thought and things have in common.”14 This is a felicitous definition, although we can be more specific still. When Aristotle locates form between substance and essence, he credits it not with
priority to matter but with posteriority. Thus in Metaphysics Z “Form
explains matter, and yet the matter is what a given form requires for
its realization.”15
What is at stake in this negotiation of priority is nothing less than
the autonomy of the individual body, as both a political and a poetic
object. Matter is that which confers individuality upon a thing, while
form confers universality. If form is prior, as Plato would have it, individuals per se could not exist outside society; category would define
the particular; the individual corpus—by which I mean a person or a
book—would be entirely, wholly, generic. In such a totalizing, totalitarian world without the individual and individuality, art and culture
would effectively cease to exist.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses mounts a profound and nuanced opposition
to precisely this political and artistic worldview, an opposition born
of the author’s resistance to the totalizing rule of Augustus Caesar.
While the Ovidian forma participates in an act of mediation between
substance and essence, form can be conceived of only in terms of the
body. Form is the shape of the body translated onto an object of
human desire. The problem Ovid seeks to redress in this notion of
forma is that history, ceding priority to form, finds in it a purposive
predicate. To the extent that history recognizes the body at all as a
structuring principle, it conceives of it as an institutional, corporate,
political collective, because only in its unity, its rejection of eccentric
or individual character, does the body have a social purpose in the
progress of civilization.
Yet history’s metamorphosis of the body into a form, a purposive
predicate, violates the autonomy of the body in its immanence. The
reverse is true of the metamorphoses that occur in Ovid’s book of
cultural history. There the corporate, the collective, the institution
invested with authority devolves into a mere body, while the defining
human experience is that of privation, incongruence, estrangement
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
10 Introduction
from and frustrated desire for the group. “Romance,” says Geraldine
Heng, “must be defined by the structure of desire which powers its
narrative.”16 Existential estrangement is the structuring motive of romance desire. Romance’s narrative method is to create situations of
estrangement that feed a vexed desire whose by-product is an art of
loneliness and its consolations. It learns this technique from Ovid.
Generically, romance situates its perspective of society from the position of the outsider, the marginal, the individual; it locates social
value in the intimacies of at most two people. Anything more risks
movement toward collectivity and social form and away from the phenomenal experience of the body in love.
Finally, the cultural history I am proposing here that accords priority to the body and the individual over form and group risks confusing the reader familiar with traditional sociological approaches to
literature. Let the following passage from Frederic Jameson’s Marxism and Form serve as an example and point of refraction:
In the realm of literary criticism, the sociological approach necessarily juxtaposes the individual work of art with some vaster form
of social reality which is seen in one way or another as its source
or ontological ground, its Gestalt field, and one of which the work
itself comes to be thought of as a reflection or a symptom, a characteristic manifestation or a simple by-product, a coming to consciousness or an imaginary or symbolic resolution. . . . Clearly,
then, a sociology of literature has its origins in the Romantic era
along with the invention of history itself, for it depends on some
prior theorization about the unity of the cultural field.17
Whether or not Jameson is correct that this schema indeed typifies
“the sociological approach” to literary criticism, it is the obverse of
this book’s sociological approach. The “vaster form of social reality”
is, in Ovidian romance, neither a “source” nor an “ontological ground”
of the individual work of art but the opposite, while the product of its
dialectic is not a reality but a cultural fiction or myth of social history whose most hallowed credo is unity. While Jameson goes on to
criticize the “value-free” syncretism of this approach, his own Marxist
lights obey a similar precedence of form and collective unity as rep-
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction 11
resenting social reality. The cult of form is, after all, a hermeneutic as
well as a literary piety.
Drawing upon sociology, economics, and political theory, Part I of
this book dwells on the tensions between individual and group that
attend the formation of the corpus politicorum. Chapter 1 examines that
tension in the ritual of the hunt that appears as an anthropological allegory in Ovid and Marie de France. The hunt signifies in the three
spheres simultaneously: the personal, the familial, and the political.
On the personal level, the hunt reveals a schizophrenic duality within
the male psyche. The ritual hunter pursues the most dangerous animal as a sign of the triumph of humanness over animalism, reason
over primal bloodlust. Yet in emulating the predator he becomes the
thing he seeks to conquer. In the familial sphere, that same desire for
dominion informs the gendered metaphors of courtship. Man “hunts”
woman. Here again, though, when the man has won his wife and incorporated her into his hegemony, her body makes their collective
body vulnerable to adulterous predation. Vicariously, he becomes the
sexual prey; his masculine act of sexual conquest forces him into a
feminine posture, elements of which we find throughout medieval romance, from Marie de France’s Lais to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
or Troilus and Criseyde. Of course, hunting is a collective activity pitting the social and civilizing bonds of a comity against the lone power
of the animal. Invariably, though, a lone hunter distinguishes himself
from the group at the moment of the kill, earning individual renown
and with it a jealousy from his comity that erodes their social bond. In
all three spheres, a metamorphosis occurs of a type unique to Ovid, a
reversion to an essential form of what one always already is. The literary burden of the chapter rests mainly upon Marie de France’s Lais,
which, more than any other medieval work, comprehends the social
and gendered tensions of the hunt and the weaknesses it exposes in
the civic values of courtly life.
The word cultus I have been using brackets a range of meaning at
once broader and more specific than “culture.” Misplaced in our understanding of the term is its original context: cultivation, the tilling of
the soil, whence derive the material conditions of high culture—­leisure,
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
12 Introduction
learning, religion. Vergil’s Georgics celebrated the cultus arvorum, the
tillage of fields, as the nostalgic locus of conservative Roman values.
And for good, if reactionary, reasons. Because agriculture provided
the marketplace for the earliest economies of exchange in which the
value of human labor was negotiated against the value of goods, it was
also, therefore, the archetype for all systems of value, both economic
and moral. The Latin word denoting work as an ethical quantity is
the same as “business”: negotium, literally “nonleisure,” an issue that in
conjunction with the former will occupy chapter 2.
But even for republican Rome the rural cultus was at best archaic.
Cicero speaks of an “uninhabited countryside” empty of forum and
law court.18 In practice, and despite a certain political tendentiousness, Augustan Rome looked to the sophistication of its major cities
for cultural self-definition. The urban cultus, as Ovid represents it,
explicitly repudiates conservative nostalgia for the mores of a rural
past, embracing modernity with both hands.
Prisca iuvent alios : ego me nunc denique natum
Gratulor : haec aetas moribus apta meis.
Non quia nunc terrae lentum subducitur aurum,
Lectaque diverse litore concha venit:
Nec quia decrescunt effosso marmore montes,
Nec quia caeruleae mole fugantur aquae :
Sed quia cultus adest, nec nostros mansit in annos
Rusticitas, priscis ilia superstes avis.
(Ars amatoria 3.121–28)19
[Let ancient times delight other folk: I congratulate myself that I
was not born till now; this age fits my mores well. Not because now
stubborn gold is drawn from out the earth and shells come gathered from divers shores, nor because mountains diminish as the
marble is dug from them, nor because masonry puts to flight the
dark waters; but because culture (cultus) is with us, and rusticity,
which survived until our grandsires, has not lived to our days.]
Ovid understood culture to be only the incidental product of physical work. Philosophy, poetry, and the arts, the pillars of high culture,
were rather the fruits of leisure, what Statius called otia docta, learned
leisure.20 In pursuit of a model of urban culture, Rome’s Hellenizing
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press
Introduction 13
poets, or neoteroi, as Cicero styled them, looked beyond the rustic idyll
of Vergil’s Georgics, past Latin cultural precedent, to the Greek origins of the modern city-state, which discovered civilization’s dearest
bequest to the citizen as the leisure necessary to contribute intellectually and artistically to the life of the mind.21
If chapter 1 is an examination of cultural values in the twelfth century, chapter 2 investigates the value of culture. The romances of
Chrétien de Troyes depict a world divided in its vocations among
agricultural work, prayer, and warfare, where the chivalric romance,
an endeavor created and consumed in leisure, must invent an economic and ethical justification for itself as a cultural commodity. To
this end, Chrétien invokes the Ovidian cultus and the nexus it forges
among agriculture, warfare, poetry, and leisure, locating the poetic
fruits of leisure in a feudal economy of contrapassum, the exchange of
goods and services.
The Canterbury Tales stages the reprise from chapter 1 of the problem of societal cohesion, the tension between the one and the many,
played out in the drama of marriage. For Chaucer, a poet inordinately
fond of one Ovidian sentence, “Non bene conveniunt maiestas et
amor,” marriage exists in a dialectic of opposing desires for integration
and dominion, love and mastery, both of which achieve a corporate
union. Chapter 3 begins by placing Chaucerian marriage within the
classical tradition of the family-state metaphor, wherein the rules of
marital union in individual bodies govern as well the rules of association in the body politic. Two tales place the maiestas/amor opposition
at the center of their social arguments: the Franklin’s and the Knight’s.
The former, often viewed as Chaucer’s solution to the desire for maistrie in marriage, serves rather to illustrate the ineluctability of the desire
for dominion by sponsoring a contest for who is “most fre,” making
vice of virtue. My reading of what Kant calls “unsocial sociability” in
the Franklin’s Tale lays the groundwork for a political reading of the
associative bonds of love and friendship in the Knight’s Tale. Here the
hybrid monstrosity of the Minotaur looms spectral over the proceedings of marriage, friendship, and political union, a cautionary symbol
of the danger of love as an integrative force.
In laying out the argument for Part II, I return to the Metamorphoses to insist upon the oddity of its first sentence. “In nova fert animus
mutatas dicere formas corpora” does not actually mean “My mind is
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14 Introduction
bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms,” as nearly all current
English translations, in some form or another, render it. What Ovid
actually says is “My mind is bent to tell of forms changed [formas
mutatas] into new bodies [nova corpora].” Syntactically and logically,
this is an awkward formulation of the act of metamorphosis. Because
forma can designate the shape of a body, translators have chosen to
treat forma and corpus as semantically interchangeable. The difference is categorical: corpus refers to the body in its physical, historical
immanence; forma, which can also mean “beauty” in Latin, refers to
the body in its aesthetic transcendence. Treating the two terms as
synonyms obliterates the alternate, metapoetic meaning of the first
sentence. The Greek Alexandrian Callimachus, poetic father to the
Roman neoteroi, famously began his hybrid epic Aitia by challenging
the generic protocols of the epic, constructing his new form from a
series of narremes conjoined by a shared theme of etiology. Imitating Callimachus, Ovid’s mind in the first sentence is also bent on the
Metamorphoses’ epic forma and how genre can be changed by manipu­
lating sequence and linkages among textual elements (corpora) and
the time frame against which they are transacted to create new formulas of emotional reward. Read this way, the Metamorphoses serves
as a primer for generic experimentation in the late Middle Ages and
Renaissance.
A metapoetic interpretation of the first sentence, however, was
not possible during most of the Middle Ages for both cultural and
terminological reasons. The medieval penchant for grammatical and
rhetorical effectiveness, the method and strategy of persuasion, occluded those notions of literary affect and narrative quality that seem
axiomatic to us. Criticism in the grammatical vein ventriloquized such
models as Servius and Macrobius, antiquaries of rhetoric and mythology whose linguistic tastes lay in precincts remote from literary sensibility: lexicography, grammar, etymology. Literary kind and style,
for them, were at most an actuarial account of variation. When at the
beginning of his great accessus to the Aeneid Servius identifies his critical objectives (author, title, intention, etc.) he promises to treat the
qualitas carminis or “quality of the poem,” a rubric that served thereafter as the medieval term for genre. Quality, in the modern sense of
the word, requires literary taste and generic judgment. Servian exegesis, however, is peremptory and actuarial. The Aeneid’s meter, he
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Introduction 15
concludes, makes it epic; the narrative is mixed, which is to say both
diegetic and mimetic; the subject is likewise mixed, both true and fictive, divine and mortal; and the style is high, in both diction and sentiment.22 In other words, the quality of form is incidental to the artistic
life of the work.
The appearance of a Latin translation of Aristotle’s Physics in the
thirteenth century, however, forever altered the critical sensibilities
and language of poetic genre. In Physics, book 2, Aristotle lays out
his theory of the four causes of created things. Matter, he argues, is
the first cause, inasmuch as bronze can be said to be the cause of a
sculpture. Second is the formal cause. “Then, naturally, the thing in
question cannot be there unless the material has actually received the
form [Gr. = paradeigma; L. = forma] or characteristics of the type, conformity to which brings it within the definition of the thing we say
it is, whether specifically or generically [Gr. = geni; L. = genera].”23
What, then, asked early Aristotelians like Bartholomew of Bruges, is
the formal cause of a particular book? His answer comes in a 1307 investigation of Averroes’ commentary on the Poetics: “The form of the
treatise [forma tractatus] is the ordering of the book [ordinatio libri]
in terms of all the factors which arise out of the relationships which
obtain among many parts; the order is its form [ordo est sua forma].”24
His pronouncement is significant not only because it applies the new
term forma tractatus to genre but because he correlates genre to the
order and linkages among parts of a literary work. And because ordo
is alterable, so genre is mutable. Medieval critical theory, then, has at
last returned to the question at issue in the Metamorphoses’ first line.
At the same time, others were arriving at the same point via a different route. Given the expense of bookmaking in the Middle Ages,
literary manuscripts tended to collect a variety of works in a single
tome. Governing this collection was the editorial principle of divisio
or coherence of parts, which in turn necessitated a notion of affinity by kind, a process known as “transmissional genrification.”25 Accordingly, romances were often grouped with other romances, while
didactic, homiletic, or hagiographical literature found like company.
In fact, sumptuary motives drove manuscript compilers to ever more
particular taxonomies; hence lyric was often grouped by subform
(sonnet, ballad, etc.) or by decorum (pastoral, erotic, elegiac, etc.).
Rarer, and comparatively late in development, was the mixed-genre
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16 Introduction
anthology, which, beyond literary kind, also observed thematic affinities among works, leading to cross-genre groupings. Genre, in other
words, was beginning to be understood as an equilibrium between a
subjective and an objective qualitas carminis, between form and matter.
Petrarch’s pioneering mixed-genre book the Rime sparse represents
the great leap forward in the medieval notion of genre as mutable,
changing forever the idea of forma by creating a romance out of a lyric
sequence. Part II begins with Petrarch and his book of changed forms
as a way of theorizing metamorphic genre in the Renaissance.
In chapter 4, I argue that the Rime sparse coheres lyrically around the
relationship of the poet to Laura, becoming a new generic ­hybrid—the
lyrical romance. As a whole, the ensemble responds to the fear that
it is not a whole, that its form, like its music, is fractured, dispersed,
as the title suggests. When in Poem 23, the so-called “Canzone della
metamorfosi,” Petrarch resists the flux that might separate him from
Laura, “né per nova figura il primo alloro / seppi lassar” (nor for a
new form could I leave the first laurel),26 his “nova figura” consciously
translates Ovid’s “novas formas,” asking us to recognize at once his
commitment to his lady and to the lyric form of elegiac poetry. The
splintering, or, to use Thomas Greene’s word, Orphic “dismemberment,” of Laura’s body into parts scattered in poetic images across the
corpus of the Rime also invites the opposite motion. Like an expanding
universe of private emotion that has reached its moment of recoil, the
Rime sparse has within it a centripetal impulse to re-member its subject
and thus to reintegrate and reorder the discrete tessera of the sonnet
sequence into something singular and formally new.
Chapter 4, however, is also about how Petrarch’s editorial manipulation of the corpus of the Rime sparse, an obsessive thirty-year process
of revision and reordering, stands in for his missing physical relationship with Laura and how these twin obsessions fetishize form into
a cult. An acute reader of Ovid, Petrarch had imbibed his model’s
near-constant poetic self-reflexivity, what Ovid called the culta carmina (stylish or rhetorically cultivated poetry),27 which, through the
crambe repetita of imitation, would ripen into the mannered decadence
of Petrarchism. By the seventeenth century, Ovid’s poetic cult had
fathered the culteranismo of Góngora, whose thoroughly Ovidian Soledades and Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea push the metapoetics of form to
the dizzy limits of comprehensibility. In English letters of the same
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Introduction 17
period, Milton, in the generically mixed and poetically self-­reflexive
Comus, had interpreted the Ovidian cult of form literally. When
­Comus, Milton’s sorcerer-priest, praises pagan sublimity—“We that
are of purer fire / Imitate the Starry Quire”28—he is articulating a cultus whose gods (“Starry Quire”) are the poets and theorists of poetic
form. The metamorphic rites at Ludlow Castle, Circean and Ovidian
in their magic, Platonic in their philosophy, are designed to effect a
synthesis of Christian virtue with classical art. First, however, Milton
must acknowledge the beauty of pistic and poetic form, the “purer
fire” inherited from Plato, Homer, and Ovid, who are his sources. A
pastiche of genres and styles, Comus is itself a monument to form as a
poetic virtue and object of artistic worship.
The two salient characteristics of Ovid’s cult of form are (1) the
trim link he defines between time and genre; and (2) the discomfiture
he visits upon the notion of decorum, which is to say social and poetic
formality. Central to the unifying architecture of the Metamorphoses
is the temporal continuity of his myriad narratives. The second line
of the invocation asks the gods to “bring down my song in unbroken
strains from the world’s very beginning even unto the present time”
[ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen]
(1.4–5). The carmen perpetuum functions as both a temporal and a poetic principle. Its success as a formal innovation is ultimately designed
to confer perpetuity on the poet himself, who will, as he boasts in the
final lines of the poem, “live in fame through all the ages” [perque
omnia saecula fama . . . vivam] (15.878–79). Ovid’s triumph over death
achieved by making literary time the paradigm of human memory
constitutes a key dogma of his cult. Playing on the double meaning of
tempora in Latin, “times” and “temples” (of the head), Ovid wants to
suggest that bringing down his song “to my times” (ad mea tempora)
is equivalent to eternizing and consecrating the song in his mind by
an act of memory.29
In the Renaissance, the carmen perpetuum challenged not only the
concept of generic form and subject but more overtly the unities of
time, place, and action and the Aristotelian dispensation by which they
were commonly adjudicated. Genre theorists have long agreed that
time is a critical correlate of genre: classical epic, as Northrop Frye
has argued, follows long cycles of rise and fall, Vergil’s labentibus annis; tragedy, for Aristotle and a fortiori for Renaissance Aristotelians,
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18 Introduction
was brief, moving in an ephemeral circuit; romance, as we learn from
Bakhtin, is framed by random disjunctions in time and, as Patricia
Parker maintains, by a logic of infinite temporal extension or resistance to closure.30 The plasticity of time in the Metamorphoses, which,
manipulated to suit various emotional effects, manages to satisfy all
the generic criteria just mentioned, is perhaps Ovid’s most consciously
poetic device. Many of the tales (Phaëthon in particular) thematize the
problem of time in a way that presented Renaissance authors with a
poetic counterpoint to Aristotle. Shakespeare, for one, was particularly
attentive to Ovidian timing. In light of his thoroughgoing Ovidianism,
it is no wonder that he paid more attention to
. . . jumping o’er times,
Turning th’accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass.
(Henry V Prol. 29−31)
This practice contravenes, consciously I would argue, Aristotle’s
warning against dramatic time limits, which, he argues, are not to be
measured by perception and should not “time performances by the
hourglass.”31
In chapter 5, I argue that early modern distinctions between the
poetics of romance and tragedy begin in parallel readings of Ovid
and Aristotle. Shakespeare, in particular, seems to have been concerned with the way the time signatures of dramatic genres clash
productively. How does Ovid’s romantic mistiming—lovers’ inability
to meet at the same time and place—produce both tragic and comic
situations? The temporal relationship between romantic and comic
timing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, or, as I discuss in
chapter 5, romantic and tragic timing in Romeo and Juliet, is a poetic
issue to which Shakespeare found answers in the tales of Pyramus and
Thisbe, Narcissus, Phaëthon. For Shakespeare, at least, Ovid is the
medium of coherence in a theory of romance that filled in the generic
gaps left by the Poetics.
Literary form, too, exists in sympathy with culture, or rather with
those protocols of culture better captured by the words style, formality,
decorum. Decorum is best known as a metric of social quality. Classically, however, decorum also designated a generic taxonomy of style,
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Introduction 19
the stilus humilis, mediocris, and gravis. This influential doctrine was
first articulated by Cicero, who asserted that “the same style and the
same thoughts must by used in portraying every condition in life, or
every rank, position or age, and in fact a similar distinction must by
made in respect of place, time, and audience. . . . [Decorum] depends
on the subject under discussion and on the character of both the
speaker and the audience.”32 In cultivating generic plasticity in the
Metamorphoses, however, in answering epic questions with elegiac responses, fleering at propriety by comparing great things to small and
juxtaposing elevated characters and speech with humble, Ovid destabilized social equilibrium by destabilizing genre. “By yoking ­Roman
history, sublime mythology, and techniques for picking up girls,” remarks Robert Hanning, “Ovid attacks the very notion of decorum:
the noble becomes trivialized, the trivial elevated to nobility.”33 The
phrase novas formas is designed as a challenge to decorum.
Consider, for example, the impropriety with which Ovid treats the
Muses in the peroration to Amores 3, where forma canvasses both the
physical aspect of Ovid’s Muse and the poetic quality she represents:
Hic ego dum spatior tectus nemoralibus umbris—
quod mea, quaerebam, Musa moveret opus—
venit odoratos Elegia nexa capillos,
et, puto, pes illi longior alter erat.
forma decens, vestis tenuissima, vultus amantis,
Et pedibus vitium causa decoris erat.
(Amores 3.1.5–10)34
[While I was strolling here enveloped in woodland shadows, asking
myself what work my Muse should venture on—came Elegy with
coil of odorous locks, and, I think, one foot longer than its mate.
She had a comely form, her robe was gauzy light, her face suffused
with love, and the fault in her carriage added to her grace.]
Ovidian elegy is a picture of willing incongruity. With “odorous
locks” trailing down to a clubfoot, Elegy is quite simply deformed.
Through fault of meter, her gait is foreshortened from hexameter to
pentameter, stately gravis to gimpy humilis, an effect that would seem
comic if not for the charm with which Ovid limns his Muse in the last
line of the passage. The key poetic words are forma decens (comely or
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20 Introduction
decorous form) and causa decoris (grace or, literally, decorous cause).
Form and decorum, for Ovid, share close affinity. To transgress the
rules of form, he is arguing, is to discover a more sublime decorum
in the grace of poetic sprezzatura. Nor is this the only moment in the
Amores when Ovid mocks the impropriety of his own divagations from
accepted genre. His first attempt, Ovid complains in 1.1, was at an epic
of Vergilian gravity, but Cupid snatched decorum from his line:
Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
edere, materia conveniente modis.
par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido
dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.
“Quis tibi, saeve puer, dedit hoc in carmina iuris? . . .”
(Amores 1.1.1–5)
[Arms, and the violent deeds of war, I was making ready to sound
forth—in weighty numbers, with matter suited to the measure.
The second verse was equal to the first—but Cupid, they say, with
a laugh stole away one foot. “Who gave thee, cruel boy, this right
over poesy?”]
When Tragedy intervenes indignantly to vie with Elegy for Ovid’s
loyalties, the poet proposes compromise: “come then and join short
verses with the long!” (Amores 3.1.66). So much is the concept of form
at the center of Ovid’s poetry that his vocabulary of love must at all
moments double as poetic terminology. Thus when Ovid relinquishes
Elegy in the final poem he defends the decorum of love poetry, saying, “nec me deliciae dedecuere meae” (Amores 3.15), which the Loeb
edition renders as “nor have these delights dishonoured me.” The
treachery of this sentence, as another translator has remarked, lies in
the metapoetic duplicity of the words deliciae and dedecuere.35 Deliciae
(delights) can refer (1) to a lover, in this case Elegy; or (2) to light
verse, much as nugae (trifles) can refer to prose that is not aimed at
edification. Dedecuere (dishonor) from decus (decorous), means literally “to take away decorum.” Thus Ovid is saying both that his lover
Elegy has caused him no dishonor and that his love poetry, despite
its experiments in form, has retained, even furthered, the lyric genre.
The Amores, then, is framed by an allegory of the relationships among
genres; the pathetic sentiment shared by tragedy and elegy, the spec-
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Introduction 21
trum of emotions the experience of love embraces, discovers in Ovid’s
poetry broad pastures of generic overlap resisted by poetic convention, a resistance that, by chronicling, Ovid surmounts.
Chapter 6 addresses the problem of decorum and generic drift in
Paradise Lost, a text whose cultic connections with Ovid jar with its
religious aspirations. Taking the Bible, the Aeneid, and the Metamorphoses as its poetic models, Milton’s prelapsarian paradise is a precarious experiment in cosmogony and poiesis, in the linkage between the
world and the word, where all is held in fragile harmony by physical
and verbal boundaries. In this world of linguistic contingency, even
the most mundane infractions of decorum—Eve’s speaking out of
turn—can untune power hierarchies and tilt emotional scales, shifting
the ethical and generic balance of poem from epic toward romance.
Of course, Milton’s Icarian project to soar “with no middle flight, /
Above the Aonian mount” courts its own fall, yet, I argue, it cannot
contain the poetic consequences as neatly as Stanley Fish has so influentially suggested. Facing Eve’s eternal banishment without physical
love, and caught in the cultic predicament of desiring a missing body,
Adam chooses to follow her into banishment, playing Echo to her
Narcissus. These infractions of social and literary decorum provoke in
Paradise Lost an acute crisis of generic identity. Parallel to the poem’s
great theme of the Fall, we sense a fall in generic expectation, a compromise of Vergilian piety to Ovidian desire, Christian to Ovidian
cults, epic to romance.
© 2009 University of Notre Dame Press