Dissertation

Narrative experimentation in Ovid's \Metamorphoses\, Books 12-14

Musgrove, Margaret Worsham

1991

Overview

In the stories of the Trojan War and Aeneas in Metamorphoses 12-14, Ovid confronts the greatest of his epic predecessors, Homer and Vergil. By stripping the Homeric and Vergilian poems of their most essential features--heroism, justice, even their literary genre--Ovid questions the moral values and the literary style of the epic tradition. Chapter I outlines some of the problems encountered by previous readers of the Metamorphoses and the ways narratological theory, as developed by Gerard Genette, can help solve some of these problems. Chapter II (\"Epic Chronology\") introduces Genette's levels of narrative time (story, narrative, and narrating) as a tool for analyzing the structure of Ovid's \"Iliad.\" By presenting many events of the Trojan War out of their chronological order, Ovid divides the theme of the Iliad from its temporal context and spreads \"the wrath of Achilles\" throughout the story of the entire war. In the story of Aeneas, Ovid's extreme condensation or even omission of some of Vergil's important episodes provides a startling contrast of pace with the longer, \"inset\" stories not involving Aeneas. One of these stories, the story of Scylla, is a complex example of overlapping stories and anachronistic arrangement. Chapter III (\"Focalized Narrative\") uses Genette's concept of focalization (roughly equivalent to \"perspective\") to analyze three central stories in Met. 13 and 14: the Judgement of Arms, Hecuba, and Aeneas. The characters in these stories speak from perspectives unlike those found in Homer or Vergil. Ajax and Ulysses present highly subjective, conflicting views of the Trojan War; Hecuba discusses the war from the victim's perspective; and the characters who speak in Aeneas' story all represent the non-heroic world. By changing the focalizations found in his literary predecessors, Ovid raises questions about war, traditional literary heroes, and forgotten people's experiences. The Conclusion considers Ovid's experiments with chronology and focalizations as a series of questions. The characters in the poem and the poet himself seem to ask \"what if the story were different? what if this were an epic? a tragedy? a comedy?\" Ovid thus asks the readers to imagine alternate epic styles and stories, unlike those found in previous epic poetry.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Classical literature / Classical Studies
• ISBN: 9798207359946