Ovid Literary History Goes Forwards

Ovid

Literary history goes forwards as well as backwards." - Burrow, 273.

While so much novel work since the Metamorphoses incorporates Ovid, Ovid used the literary styles of others in his own work to accomplish the greater goal. The movement of new formalism focuses Ovidian scholars directly on this parallel, noting the master's use of and deviation from standard forms in his poetry. The intertextuality of his works and those from the past affected not only the way his literary style limned the meaning of his words, but also their course of reception. The Metamorphoses, which moves from the image of the poem as a bookish body to that of the poem as a disembodied song, both utilizes and deviates from these standard literary tools. (Joseph Farrell, 'The Ovidian Corpus: Poetic Body and Poetic Text, p. 128) Using the Hesiod's platform for organizing the cosmos, the tragedy for the story of the Phaethon, and the epic for Ajax and the Odyssey, he intertwines the verbal tools of the past to create an immediately disjointed but ultimately coherent movement through the history of literary styles and meat of material text.

One of the many attributes that makes the history of Latin literature so powerful is the author's use of literary tools to divine a different meaning from their words that might otherwise be had. Hesiod, in the Illiad, mastered this usage of conflicting words and styles, and Ovid reinforces it in his discussion of the cosmos. This is particularly true in his use of horrific material as a source of comedy, which requires the reader to take the words and context nominally, and as such more embodied in the demand for the superficial reader to relate his reading style with the content of the text. The Metamorphoses keeps the reader involved on the surface, uninviting in the observance of the disasters that may lie below. Its momentary existence is for enjoyment and delight, one that does not demand greater cosmic understanding. Hesiod reveals his interpretation of the nature of the cosmos as vengeful with his rampant use of violence, but while Ovid carries his style, the galvanizing force behind it is starkly different. In Hesiod's work, it is clear that the divine (and angry) nature of the cosmos is omnipotent; Ovid even questions the divine. Instead, his use of violence mirrors Hesiod's in the commonplace, like the rape of Proserpine, the anger of Medea, the deceit of Ulysses, and the anger of Olympus, but the greater context of the violence is not meaning, it is, merely, literary.

While each tale of his poem is meant for superficial literary enjoyment, it is always ripe with metamorphoses. However, Ovid reaffirms the nature of his writing as entertainment by making these metamorphoses somehow incidental, as evidenced in Pentheus, Heracles, and, most particularly, Phaethon. What is clear throughout his work is that one universal principle maintains the world - while to Hesiod this is a divine power, to Ovid it is the power of the temporary. Troy falls, Rome rises, and nothing is permanent. The incidence of these metamorphoses as coincidental, or merely side-lined, can be seen in the power of the transitional links he uses; Ovid uses this form of literary style to pull the reader out of the deep meaning which he might use as a crutch to a more surprising, accidental, and haphazard form that mirrors the actuality of life: continuously transitional. He achieves this by following the same character through different adventures (Perseus, Hercules) and putting one story inside another (putting Argus to sleep, Mercury's narrations), so that the character might become an internal narrator. This is also accomplished by "sliding" from a story centered around one character to that of a friend or relative (Epaphus and Phaethon, end of Book 1). These different links, or disjointed continuations, reaffirm the superficiality with which Ovid demands the reader to operate.

Ovid uses the conformities of the epic throughout the Metamorphoses, but the height of this usage is achieved in the Ajax-Odyssey debate. Ovid's use of the epic begins with the general stylist selection he makes throughout the story, particularly by positing the tragic victim as a struggling object expressed through a series of present participles. As is common in epics, tales of particular meter and form, he then uses a verb to signal death and mutilation, represented by the use of enjambment (continuation of syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause). (Met. 6.555-57, 636-41.) Sometimes, positioning his tragic characters into the epic came with consequence, as can be seen in the Hippolytus-Virbius sotry, where he ultimately contrasts the cultural ideals of Greece and Rome by examining the tragic characters in the pain of the body. Some critiques suggest that his repetition of this, particularly in the Ajax-Odyssey story, suggests Ovid's use of his style as a way to question society, asking if Romans are in fact capable of appreciating the emotionality and the tragic vision so essential to Greek plays. (Ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos, "Somatic Economies: Tragic Bodies and Poetic Design.")