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readers in his audience we can probably never know; but the silent, true version of Philomela's story, told only by the silent notae, dramatically refutes Tereus' specious oral narrative and creates the point of view of an emotionally involved and sympathetic onlooker. From this perspective, we can separate ourselves from the narrator of the false version and look critically at his point of view. |
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These notae are not just the "letters" of his text; they are also the "marks" of a brutal crime, to which their color bears "evidence," indicium.18 They return at the end of the episode not just as the marks of textuality, but as the stains of blood that remain stamped upon the face of nature in perpetual witness of the savage deed (66970): |
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neque adhuc de pectore caedis
excessere notae, signataque sanguine pluma est. |
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Nor do the marks of the murder depart from the breast, and the plumage is stamped with blood. |
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The notae in this passage shift from being textual to being extra-textual marks. Earlier, in the middle the story, "purple signs woven into the white threads" (577) are virtually the "letters" of a woven "text": etymologically, that is what a "text" is (cf. Latin textus). At the end, in 66970, the notae, still of the same bloody color, are the "marks'' left in the world of nature as the "signs" of this crime. Ovid is thus able to look beyond the frame ("text") of his tale to the moral codes that surround it. Philomela's weaving is both the art-work of the tale and the agency of a vengeance that changes the face of nature. |
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The weaving exemplifies the mimetic skill that, in the depiction of sadistic sexual pleasure, may invite the male reader or hearer or critic to voyeuristic complicity in the crime,19 as it perhaps may invite the female reader to complicity in the vengeance. But, as the web of words that calls attention to its textual origins, it objectifies the crime and in that way enables the reader to take the full measure of its horror. The statement of disbelief by the external narrator (i.e., Ovid) parallels the shocked reaction of the "audience" of the rape tale (vix ausim credere), in directing us to the appropriate response. |
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This overdetermination of the horrified response stands in counterpoint to the fact that the crime is doubly repressed into silence. Tereus physically silences his victim by ripping out her tongue, and Philomela can re-present |
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18 I should agree with Joplin (1991) 36 when she criticizes Hartman (1970) 337 for eliding the violence against the female body and making the focus language and the power of language. A reading centered on semiotics and a poetics of textuality is not an adequate interpretative tool for this episode. Ovid does not forget the message in the medium. |
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19 See the comment on Shakespeare's version of the rape scene in Lucrece by Joplin (1991) 58, note 14: "The poet's eyes are hardly less lewd than the rapist Tarquin's . . ." |
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