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Behind Philomela's weaving is Ovid's own web of words (textus) that recreates events which are spectacular for their suppression of speech. The notae of Philomela's weaving are virtually the "letters" of a written message in fact, a "song," or "poem," carmen, like the present one which Procne ''reads" (legit, 582), as if "unrolling" a scroll (581f.): evolvit vestes saevi matrona tyranni / fortunaeque suae carmen miserabile legit ("The consort of the cruel ruler unrolls the fabric and reads the woeful tale [song] of her misfortune").17 But Procne immediately represses this communication into silence a silence which another authorial intrusion marks as extraordinary (mirum potuisse, 583). Unlike Tereus, Procne does not weep, for she has neither words nor tears, but is totally absorbed in the "image" that those "purple marks" have made her see (58386): |
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et (mirum potuisse!) silet: dolor ora repressit,
verbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae
defuerunt, nec flere vacat, sed fasque nefasque
confusura ruit poenaeque in imagine tota est. |
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And she keeps silent a wonder that she could! Grief checks her countenance, and words of sufficient wrath were lacking to the tongue that sought them, nor was she free to weep, but she rushes about, going to mingle justice and crime, and is totally given over to the image of the punishment. |
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The self-reflexive nature of these gestures is interesting in itself, but particularly noteworthy is the contrast between Tereus' convincing oral performance of a plausible lie and Procne's silent response to a different version of the same story, a version whose form is itself a figure for a written text. This contrast creates the textual space in which doubts about the story can arise. By textual space I mean the awareness of the distance analogous to Derrida's "space of writing" or "space of inscription" (Derrida, 1976, 28991) between the events and the representation of the events, between the effect of "reality" in the tale and the means of creating that effect, or between the signified (a coherent, believable story) and the narrative equivalent of the signifier (the conventions of reading and writing that join author and audience in the communicative act of story-telling and story-listening). This textual space is the area in which the reader can refuse the games of verbal eloquence and the smooth, convincing vraisemblance of narrative surface with which Tereus and Ovid himself are so facile. |
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In Ovid's tale the process of unravelling a false, constructed tale also rests with a gendered reader, the victim's sister. To what extent Ovid's female reader within the text reflects his awareness of and interest in actual female |
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(footnote continued from previous page) |
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of book 10; at other times, as in the Tereus episode, it is incidental or interwoven with moral concerns, like violence here. |
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17 The identification of Philomela's web with a mode of writing seems to have been part of the tradition: see Bömer (1976) ad 582 (p. 158). |
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