|
|
|
|
|
|
|
rites (56670). This is an appropriate response, of course, to the news of her sister's death; but her gestures also enact her sympathetic involvement and identification with her sister, whose suffering she now mimetically repeats in her sorrowful rituals. She thus prepares for the solidarity of the two women in the ensuing narrative. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There is also a shift to a perspective of self-conscious textuality here, aided by a major narrative break. Ovid introduces the artificial temporal marker, "The god had traversed twice six constellations as the year drove past" (571), all the more striking because of the absence of gods from the narrative proper. He thus calls attention to his narrative frame, but he also effects a sharp transition to the imprisoned Philomela. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What resumes the thread of the narrative after this break is Philomela's device of getting her story told and heard. Her mode of narration exactly corresponds to Procne's mode of reception, that is, silence. When the narrative shifts to a female teller and a female audience, in other words, the male skill in rhetoric and persuasion changes to a non-verbal, gestural and pictorial mode involving garments or cloth, typically the work of women. Procne, in silence, tears off her velamina (566); Philomela's "silent mouth lacks a witness to the deed" (os mutum facti caret indice, 574), but she "weaves purple marks upon the white threads in witness to the crime" (purpureasque notas filis intexuit albis / indicium sceleris, 57778). This silent craft of weaving proves itself a match for the rhetorical craft of ''tears" by which Tereus reinforced the verbal arguments of his lie and so won "credence" for his lie (566). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Weaving adds the element of gender to the implicit representation of poetic creation and reception (weaving is an ancient metaphor for poetic construction). Along with the related motifs of verbal and non-verbal media and modes of narrating, it calls our attention to the textuality of the work.16 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
16 I draw here on the structuralist notion of "text" (e.g. in Barthes, 1974) that emphasizes the construction of codes and conventions from which the reader reconstructs meaning in an endless production of possible readings. Barthes (and other deconstructionists) emphasize the interactive process between text and reader that always refuses control or limit and so issues into an endless chain of further readings and writings: see "On Reading" (1976) in Barthes (1986) 3343 and "From Work to Text" (1971), ibid, 5664. Here meaning can never be fixed but is always created anew in an infinite series of displacements and a never-ending play between signifier and signified. Literature thus consists not of definitive "works," only of "text," which consists of "a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture" ("The Death of the Author," 1968, in Barthes, 1986, 53). My emphasis in "textuality," however, is on the way in which the work is continually creating and throwing off figures of its own processes of creation. At the same time, I would not say that these self-reflexive figures are the work's only or most important concern or that the work can refer only to itself. Rather, the production of such self-reflexive figures seems to be part of the creative activity of a self-conscious narrative poet like Ovid. Sometimes the self-reflexive impulse becomes central, as in the Arachne episode of book 6 or the Orpheus and Pymalion episodes |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
(footnote continued on next page) |
|
|
|
|
|