Purple notes

At the center of Ovid's Metamorphoses lie violated bodies. Sometimes male, at other times female, a few of these ruined forms elude the grasp of gender and its reductive nominations. Fractured and fragmented bodies from Ovid's poem cast long, broken shadows over European literary history. Sometimes, these shadows fall back on the poem that gave them shape. As Quintilian put it when deliberating the frequently heard charge that Ovid's manner is too ingenious, there is “some excuse” for his invention, since so much of it is required if this poem's author is to “assemble” such extremely diverse things into “the appearance of a unified body” (“res diversissimas in speciem unius corporis colligentem”). That a poem fascinated with the fracturing of bodies should have been passed down through the middle ages and into the Renaissance, thanks to Lactantius, predominantly in fragments, a reordered collection of pieces torn away from their original arrangement, is one of the ironies of literary history that continues to echo and ramify. For it is not merely that the body's violation is one of the poem's prominent thematic concerns. As Philomela's severed “lingua” mutely testifies – her “murmuring tongue” designating both the bodily organ and “language” as such – dismemberment informs Ovid's reflections not only on corporeal form, but linguistic and poetic as well. An elaborately self-reflexive poem, the Metamorphoses traces, in minute and sometimes implacable detail, the violent clashes between the poem's language and the many bodies of which it speaks.