Introduction: genre and supergenre

'Within elegy [Ovid] achieved an unparalleled variety of output by exploiting and extending the range of the genre as no poet had done before.' This consistently inventive and radical expansion of a highly conventional poetic kind suggests that 'supergenre' might be a better term than 'genre' in discussing the extraordinary Ovidian use of the elegiac form, beginning with traditional erotic discourse but expanding and diversifying to include practically every poetic topic. Ancient genres are often classified by features such as metre and vocabulary, thematic concerns, and generic codes and models; in all but the first, the Ovidian elegiac output shows a remarkable and highly self-conscious variety. Here as so often, Ovid’s work confounds and subverts conventional categories.

The choice of elegy, even redefined as a supergenre, nevertheless needs to be set within the broad range of genres available for Roman poets in the first century bc, and against the ideological and literary factors influencing that choice. First, the impact of the evident political pressure for encomiastic epic for Augustus encountered by all the major Augustan poets: like Horace and Propertius, Ovid avoids this by a firmly non-epic generic policy until the Metamorphoses, though some of his elegiac poems show concern with epic and (the poet later claimed) with political conformism.

Ovid’s sudden banishment from Rome in AD 8 was precipitated by two admitted causes, carmen et error (Trist. 2.207), the second of which - an apparently 'innocent' misdemeanour (cf. e.g. Trist. 3.5.49-52, 3.6.29-36, Pont. 1.6.21-6), possibly political in nature - receives only passing mention in the exile poetry and remains mysterious despite the speculations of modern theorists. Whatever the truth of the matter, this error appears to have compounded the disfavour which Ovid had already incurred by the publication (c. 1 bc-ad 2) of the risqué Ars amatoria ('The Art of Love'), harmless on a 'sensible' reading (that naturally urged by Ovid in his defence of the poem in Tristia 2, addressed directly to Augustus) but fatally out of step with official tastes, themselves shaped by the programme of moral reform undertaken by Augustus (including legislation in c. 18 bc promoting marriage and curbing adultery). If the Ars amatoria immediately aroused hostility in high places, Ovid’s error may have supplied the pretext in ad 8 for a late but devastating retaliatory blow: relegation to Tomis (modern Constanza, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea), a penalty less severe than exilium (which would have deprived him of Roman citizenship and property) but still extreme in its deracinating physical and psychological effects.

Born in 43 BC, Ovid enjoyed the benefits of the Augustan principate without witnessing the struggles that brought it into being. As a result, the political and social concerns that find their way into his poetry differ from those that preoccupy his predecessors, such as Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. This generational difference, while routinely acknowledged by Ovidian criticism, is not always given the weight that it deserves, inasmuch as it is still possible to read of an 'anti-Augustan' Ovid, or an Ovid who endorses libertas in its republican connotation of free political speech. At the same time, the fact that Ovid neither experienced nor shaped the transformation of Rome from republic to principate does not entitle us to interpret his poetry as apolitical, either in intention or impact. Romantic Ovid is as anachronistic as Romantic Virgil or Lucan. The political commitments of Ovid’s poetry differ from those of his predecessors (and successors), but they are no less complex and consequential. Indeed, much as the principate, during Ovid’s lifetime, evolved from a set of institutional arrangements and personal loyalties into a broadly based cultural hegemony that incorporated new or revised discourses of authority, sexuality, and religion, and new conceptions of space and time, so too does Ovid’s poetry raise the stakes on his predecessors, moving outward from the quintessential early Augustan concern with the refoundation of Rome to a late Augustan survey of empire.

The first sentence in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a work whose moral seriousness has sometimes seemed to place it at the opposite pole from Ovid’s epic in the literature of transformation, is as baffling for the reader as the event it describes is for Gregor Samsa. As he has become a monstrous insect so we are immediately confronted with the question of how to make sense of and interpret this monstrous and bizarre subject. The first words, with their resemblance to the classic fairy tale beginning 'once upon a time', seem to offer one possibility: we can normalize this supernatural event by assuming the story belongs to a genre that doesn't ask us to take it seriously, and even rejoice in the distance that separates us from a fictional world where such things are possible. So for Samsa there is the fleeting possibility that he is still dreaming. But if the time when this event takes place is re-assuringly indeterminate, other elements of the story bring it much closer to home. Gregor Samsa is too specific to be the name of a fairy tale prince, and the transformation takes place in his own bed – it could indeed be ours. Throughout the story, the particularity with which Gregor’s condition is described suggests a kaleidoscopic variety of strategies for making sense of it. Perhaps one of the most tempting is to neutralize its strangeness by treating it as a figure of speech, so that its significance becomes symbolic rather than literal.

Ovid was the most important literary source for mythological subjects in the art of the Renaissance and the subsequent centuries. 'No other classical author,' as Panofsky wrote, 'treated so great a variety of mythological subject matter and was so assiduously read, translated, paraphrased, commented upon and illustrated.' No other great poet of antiquity, indeed, had made the recounting of myth the main purpose of his work. The carmen perpetuum of the Metamorphoses, which will be the focus of this essay, became a kind of handbook whose influence can be found everywhere in the painting and sculpture of the early modern period. Svetlana Alpers goes so far as to say: 'The “painter’s bible”, as the name implies, was first of all the most popular and convenient source for mythological narratives. In this sense, “Ovidian” is simply synonymous with mythological, although some of the frequently represented myths, such as Cupid and Psyche, and Diana and Endymion, are not found in Ovid’s compendium.'

As these last remarks suggest, however, the apparent ubiquity of Ovidian influence can disguise the difficulty of explaining precisely what we mean by an ‘Ovidian subject’. To put the matter schematically, we could say that the field of mythological painting is both broader and narrower than the field of the Ovidian text. It is broader because Ovid may be supplemented by material from other authors (including his own sources), and even stories he does not tell may find themselves generically grouped under his label.

Ovid on myth

Ovid’s Metamorphoses was the book from which centuries of European culture drew their knowledge of Greek and Roman myth, and until the beginning of mythological studies in the eighteenth century, under the influence of the ethnographical discoveries and missionaries' reports, this work determined what myth had to be: fantastic stories about gods and heroes - or, as an early and sharp-tongued critic, Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757), described myth, 'un amas de chimères, de rêveries et d'absurdités'. From our own understanding of myth, as shaped by the generations of scholars since the mid-eighteenth century, this has not always surprised and puzzled as much as it should have done: the deep seriousness of our own concept of what myths are - 'a traditional tale … held to be not a passing enjoyment, but something important, serious, even sacred', 'traditional tales with immediate cultural relevance' - seems to clash violently with Ovid’s irreverent playfulness, as he most often is perceived. And although there is no doubt that the modern understanding of myth as something profound is a reaction to the earlier, less ‘deep’, way of thinking about myth as shaped by Ovid, it is by no means certain that playfulness and irreverence is all that there is to be said about Ovid’s mythical narratives.

'He was writing at a major point of change in Roman literature, and was himself no small part of that change. Some of his work … can be read as putting the finishing touches to earlier types of poetry; but the major part of it looks unmistakably to the future.' Gordon Williams' statement is typical of a literary history that places Ovid at a point of transition between two periods of Latin literature, frequently conceived in evaluative terms as a transition from a 'Golden', Augustan, to a 'Silver', Imperial, age, or from a classical to a post-classical period that is sometimes labelled 'mannerist' or 'baroque', on the analogy of the periodization of Renaissance art. These aesthetic labels have political and moral implications: 'Augustanism' is seen as the spirit of a golden age of political and cultural stability and harmony, followed by a descent into an oppressive autocracy, under which literary activity becomes detached from a constructive symbiosis with political and cultural reality, a literature either of escapism or of protest.

Ovid’s dates conveniently fit this scheme: he was born in 43 bc, the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar, and his first works appeared in the bright days of the early Augustan principate, a celebration, albeit on Ovid’s own terms, of the prosperity and sophistication that flourished in the pax Augusta. Ovid lived on into the reign of Tiberius, detached now physically by exile from the centres of political and cultural life. The change from Golden to Silver is often located not at the succession from Augustus to Tiberius, but within the reign of Augustus himself, as he mutates from approachable princeps into suspicious autocrat.

There are sections taken directly from his work in the poetry of Chaucer and Gower, but translation of Ovid into English as a distinct process starts in the cradle of printing, with William Caxton’s version of the Metamorphoses in 1483 and Wynkyn de Worde’s Flores de Arte Amandi in 1513. It traces a path through the history of publishing, its latest manifestations being phenomena of the modern industry: the Loeb parallel text, the Penguin Classic, and the Faber and Faber poetry volume. Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses (1565–7) is one of several translations in his period: Turbervile’s Heroides (1567), Churchyard’s Tristia (1572), and Underdowne’s Ibis (1569) follow soon after. Each text has its own origins, Golding’s being dedicated to the Earl of Leicester under whose patronage various translation projects were under way.

Aston Cokayne’s The Tragedy of Ovid is the only English play which tells the story of the Latin poet’s exile and death in Tomis. In the final scene the focus turns to the poet’s suffering as he receives a letter from his wife, with the news that her efforts to arrange his return have failed. Ovid connects this to news in another letter:

And Ovid does indeed die then and there. His relationship with Augustus’ grand-daughter Julia is treated decorously by Cokayne, but at this point Ovid’s grief and the possibility of ambiguity in the word ‘friend’ connect his exile and the stories of unlawful love in his Roman past. In the play the traditional equation of Julia and Corinna is given credence, but the poet’s adoration for the princess is said to be an honourable thing, more or less (‘if I er’e enjoy’d her, it was through | Her craft; I taking her to be another,’ 4.3.21–2).

'Ovid is not a researcher,' claimed Concetto Marchesi nearly a century ago, a remark recently echoed by John Scheid: 'Ovid is not a colleague.' Undoubtedly. Yet Ovid’s poetry is permeated with knowledge, from the religious and aetiological focus of Fasti, ostensibly the result of dogged antiquarian investigation, to the mythological feats of the Metamorphoses, but also in the abundance of, for instance, legal vocabulary in his love poetry or of recherché anecdotes in Ibis. It is hardly surprising that Ovid’s encyclopedic aspirations gained a telling, if dubious, recognition: he was considered the author of the Halieutica, a rather detailed poem on the art of fishing, as well. Equally, it is perhaps unfair further to complain that modern scholars have unduly exploited Ovid as a wealthy repository of information, since didacticism is a fundamental component of his narrative strategy even in the unexpected form it takes in the Ars amatoria and Remedia. Indeed, throughout his oeuvre Ovid plays extensively with the well-established traditions of Greek and Roman didactic poetry. On his profound knowledge of, and admiration for, the masters of the genre – Empedocles, Lucretius, Virgil – he builds a radical revision of the objectives and strategies of a form of poetry which was supposed to provide an authoritative interpretation (or at the very least a compelling description) of the universe and its fundamental principles.

In Book 3 of his Ars amatoria, Ovid rounds off a survey of authors put forward as suitable reading for the would-be female lover with a characteristic claim that his works will bring him immortality. Perhaps, he surmises, his name will be ranked with those of Sappho, Propertius or Virgil; perhaps 'somebody will say: “read the cultured poems of our maestro, in which he draws up the battle-lines of the sexes”' - the Ars amatoria itself -' “or the Amores, or recite a Letter in an assumed voice; this type of work, unknown to others, he pioneered”' (uel tibi composita cantetur EPISTVLA uoce; | ignotum hoc aliis ille nouauit opus, 3.345-6). The nature of Ovid’s claim for this last work - universally agreed to be what we have grown accustomed to call the Heroides - continues to generate considerable scholarly debate. It is unlikely that the poet who was to go on to write the Metamorphoses would seek to claim that the emergence of any form – still less the invention of a literary one – takes place ex nihilo. The epistle of Penelope to Ulysses, which stands first in the collection of fifteen as we currently have it and may have been put in first place by Ovid himself as a programmatic gesture, is itself a transformation of Homer’s Odyssey, and the lament voiced by a heroine abandoned by her lover had had a long history in various generic manifestations in Greek and Latin literature, notably Euripidean tragedy and Alexandrianizing epic. Nor

Ovid was the most imitated and influential classical author in the Renaissance. This is not surprising, since many of the central preoccupations of his work seem almost to have been calculated to appeal to imitators. He is interested in how texts survive, and in their physical frailty. His writing also repeatedly meditates on the relationship between continuity and change in the universe, in individual lives, and within a poetic oeuvre. This passage from an epistle to his wife in the Tristia brings out all of these concerns:

One of the images of Kafka propagated by Kafka criticism, and supported by a much-quoted remark Kafka made in his diary, is of the solitary writer whose subject matter is his own 'dreamlike inner life' (6.viii.14; D2: 77). Occasionally Kafka's diary entry on the outbreak of the Great War four days earlier is cited as proof of his distance from the political world: 'Germany has declared war on Russia. - Swimming in the afternoon' (D2: 75). But the interpretation sometimes placed on these words, that they belong to a writer far removed from the great events of his time, warrants investigation. Do they or do they not articulate emotional or intellectual distance, unconcern, even aloofness? In contrast, another diary entry, from the previous year: 'Don't forget Kropotkin!' (15.x.13; D1: 330) has attracted relatively little critical attention, even though Max Brod recalls that the memoirs of this nineteenth-century Russian anarchist were amongst Kafka's favourite books. Where it has been commented on it has often been played down. Here, too, the elliptical form of the diary entry itself does not help us make up our minds. What are we to read into these words: an intellectual or emotional commitment, a special indebtedness - or simply a note on an overdue library book?

Kafka has inspired numerous artists in their creative work: in poetry, fiction, drama, film, painting, even music. Susan Sontag aptly observed that he has 'attracted interpreters like leeches'. Out of the vast material available, I have selected a few texts from three genres: comic book, science fiction, and film. By referring to Kafka as an 'inspiration' for these artists, I do not mean to suggest that they were merely 'influenced' by him. On the contrary, reading Kafka through them will show how they have left their mark on Kafka, inasmuch as their readings contribute to the ways in which we read his texts. In his famous essay, 'Kafka and His Precursors', Jorge Luis Borges stated: '[Every writer's] work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.' A similar relationship can be said to exist between Kafka and the artists who followed him.

‘The Metamorphosis’ clearly serves as an intertext for Woody Allen’s comic film Zelig (1983). After a round of medical experiments Zelig ends up walking on the walls of his room. The film is set in America (and Europe) in the interwar period. Leonard Zelig, the central character, is a ‘human chameleon’, who takes on the personal and physical characteristics of individuals whom he encounters. Thus he is found in Chinatown as a ‘strange looking Oriental’ and arrested, but when he emerges ‘incredibly, he is no longer hinese but Caucasian’. Zelig becomes a great celebrity, a freak, and a performer – a movie is even made of him, called The Changing Man. The public goes Zelig-crazy, they make him perform with ‘a midget and a chicken’, put him into a room with two overweight men and wait for Zelig to puff himself up, or show how ‘in the . . . presence of two Negro men, Zelig rapidly becomes one himself’.6 Even the reporter seems to suggest that this is a little too much: ‘What will they think of next?’

Despite the immense amount written about Kafka's work, a number of the stories (and parables and fragments) composed during the last years of his life have gotten too short shrift. These pieces, produced in the years after 1915, following Kafka's abandonment of work on The Trial, include diary entries, the aphorisms of 1917/18 that Max Brod entitled 'Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way', and lengthier stories like 'The Great Wall of China', 'The Investigations of a Dog', 'The Village Schoolmaster', 'The Little Woman', and 'Josephine, the Songstress or: the Mouse People'. Their relative neglect may be due to the fact that, to employ Martin Greenberg's useful distinction, they are 'thought' stories rather than 'dream' stories, the reflections of a narrator absorbed in exquisitely refined 'research'. A piece like the unfinished 1922 story 'The Researches' [or, more commonly, Investigations] of a Dog' ('Forschungen eines Hundes') exemplifies this late style.

The inquiries of such narrators address a matter that often falls short of visual realisation. ‘The Village Schoolmaster’ (‘Der Dorfschullehrer’, 1915), also known as ‘The Giant Mole’ (‘Der Riesenmaulwurf’), for example, begins with the report of a giant mole:

Kafka's trials and animal metamorphoses are very common motifs in Jewish folklore; he also rewrote ancient myths and legends and frequently used a mock-midrashic, rabbinic discourse. Of course, many folk elements discussed in this chapter are not restricted to Jewish folklore but share characteristics with other folk traditions. What is of interest is the way Kafka recreates folk motifs and legends within a modern Jewish cultural framework and thus gives them new meaning. Folk elements, whether Jewish or non- Jewish, never exist for their own sake but rather merge with the author's own imagination. Thus, the nineteenth-century writer Mendele Moykher Sforim (c.1836-1917) has a downtrodden mare represent the Jewish people in Exile. Yudl Rosenberg (1860-1935) writes a story about the Prague Golem, pretending that the sixteenth-century Rabbi Löw created this humanoid monster 'to wage war against the Blood Libel' ('ritual murder') - the anti-Semitic charge according to which Jews needed Christian blood for their Passover rituals and slaughtered Christian children in order to obtain it. Rosenberg knew full well that his version of the Golem legend was historically incorrect. The Golem, a creature made from clay, was supposed to help in times of persecution, but no legend had ever connected it with the scandal of blood libel. Still, when Rosenberg was composing his story, charges of ritual murder were ubiquitous. For this reason he used a prominent motif from Jewish folklore to recreate for his time a superhuman folk hero who could help fight injustice.