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response.24 Parker refers with apparent approval to Fränkel's interpretation of 1.7 as one of Ovid's 'deepest and most moving elegies'25 but this, like the poem, seems to me ridiculous. Commenting on lines 612, for instance: |
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ter tamen ante pedes volui succumbere supplex,
ter formidatas reppulit illa manus |
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Parker remarks that 'the alienation of the lovers at this moment of spiritual juncture is put into relief by an epic tone, the triple frustration usually employed when a hero tries to clasp a goddess or a ghost',26 but the gap between the situation of the text and the epic moments alluded to and Parker omits the most obvious, Priam with Achilles' man-slaying hands is too great for anything other than burlesque. Can any reader take Ovid seriously for a moment here or in most of the other poems mentioned? For me, the effect of the throwaway coda in them is not that of Romantic Irony.27 |
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Why do I want to do this? My argument will of course appeal to 'objective' features of the poems, to plausible intertextual links, and generally to the context in the book of the Amores. But it will above all depend on the literary-historical narrative into which I want to insert the Amores. If we make the Ovid of the Amores an ironist, what do we do with Propertius? How do we make the Amores come after Propertius unless we are allowed to see Ovid pushing over into simpler burlesque the complex balance of humour and seriousness we ascribe to Propertius? My point is obviously again that what determines my reading is the larger stories I want to tell. One of the paradoxical effects of having stories like this is that one has to read some texts unironically: if one is seriously into irony, one has to be more than ironically into straightforwardness. This is one of the factors in the familiar phenomenon of literary history whereby texts pass in and out of complexity depending on whether they are serving as target or as model: the Aeneid of Vergilian scholars is very different from the Aeneid of Lucan specialists. |
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24 Cf. McKeown (1989) 164. |
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25 Fränkel (1945) 54. |
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26 Parker (1969) 85. |
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27 I confess, however, to feeling much less confident about Amores 1.13, which was Parker's starting-point: the address to dawn with a bid to delay which concludes with the couplet: |
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iurgia finieram. scires audisse: rubebat |
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nec tamen adsueto tardius orta dies. |
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It is easier to 'take this seriously': a cynical, wholly humorous, reading of the opening is hard to sustain, there is hardly any Ovidian 'bad taste', and the poem, like 1.5, is a favourite amongst Ovidian critics like Fränkel, who expounds it at length. Even here, however, I feel rather inclined to take the path of heroic cynicism and thus to read the first part of 1.13 also as humorous. And naturally, I do not mean to imply that reading these poems humorously is an ideologically innocent act . . . |
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