Artificial I's: The Self as Artwork in Ovid, Kierkegaard, and Thomas Mann [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9783110925968, 9783484181274

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STUDIEN ZUR DEUTSCHEN LITERATUR

Band

Herausgegeben von Wilfried Barner, Richard Brinkmann und Conrad Wiedemann

Eric Downing

Artificial Ts The Self as Artwork in Ovid, Kierkegaard, and Thomas Mann

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1993

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Downing, Eric: Artificial I's : the Self as Artwork in Ovid, Kierkegaard, and Thomas Mann / Eric Downing. - Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1993 (Studien zur deutschen Literatur ; Bd. 127) NE: GT I S B N 3-484-18127-3

ISSN 0081-7236

© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Tübingen 1993 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Satz, Druck und Einband: Allgäuer Zeitungsverlag GmbH, Kempten

Contents

Introduction

ι

Chapter i: Ovid and the Ars Amatoria I. The Problem II. The didactic imitation III. The elegiac imitation IV. Book I and the nullus pulvis principle V. Book II and the servitium artis VI. Book III and the anti-Pygmalion principle Appendix: Amores 111,2 and Ars I, 135-162

6 15 26 39 48 57 71

Chapter 2: Kierkegaard and the »Diary of the Seducer« I. Kierkegaard and the Ars Amatoria II. Literary form and personal identity III. Johannes' life as literature IV. The dialectic of self-fashioning V. Cordelia and the anti-Pygmalion principle

75 82 91 101 112

Chapter 3 : Thomas Mann and the early Felix Krull I. Manolescu in the mirror II. Inheritance and imitation: Goethe in Felix Krull III. Interlude: the new and novel play between IV. Felix's retrospective life as literature V. Felix's dialectic of self-fashioning VI. Conscription

128 145 163 169 184 196

Chapter 4: Thomas Mann and the late Felix Krull I. »Wiederkehr« II. »Das zitathafte Leben« Conclusion Bibliography

208 218 236 238

V

Introduction

In his recent study of Nietzsche's aestheticism entitled Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas poses the following question: »How can one achieve the perfect unity and freedom that are primarily possessed by perfect literary characters? How does one become both a literary character who really exists and also that character's very author?«1 It is a startling question, one that engenders its own questions sooner than answers. Why should one want to become a literary character as well as that character's author, instead of simply »who one is«? What happens to someone who takes up the challenge? Does he remain real, or does he become a fiction? or if both, as »a literary character who really exists« suggests, what does the fictionalization do to the reality, the self? And is it really so desirable, so harmless a project as Nehamas' confident formulation suggests? What, rather, are its hidden costs, its secret perils? and even more, its privilege and vaunted freedom? These are some of the major issues which I explore in this study of three relatively minor works by three major authors: Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Kierkegaard's »Diary of the Seducer,« and Thomas Mann's Felix Krull. All three feature protagonists who are at once seducers, aesthetes, and fiction-making artists, who individually undertake to live »by art,« »poetically« and »im Gleichnis,« and who in doing so all undertake to fashion something of a literary artwork out of the self. Kierkegaard and Ovid also present a variation on the project that I consider for comparative purposes, namely the attempt to fashion a literary artwork out of another, out of the woman who in each case is the object of the protagonist's aesthetic and erotic designs. As we shall see, this variation shares in and in some ways further accentuates many of the ambivalences evident in the collusion of life and literature that the protagonist enacts in his own character. Since all three works are themselves literary artworks, I also explore a dimension not explicitly included in Nehamas' program, namely the self-conscious interplay between the author's own project of book-making and his character's project of self-making. Each work is a minor masterpiece in the literary mode that Robert Alter describes as »self-conscious fiction«: each calls systematic, even 1

Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. (Cambridge M A : Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 195.

ι

ostentatious attention to its condition and operation of literary artifice, and in doing so initiates its own exploration into the often problematic relationship between real-seeming fiction and »reality.«2 The juxtaposition of these two dimensions, of the author's and the character's literary projects, proves essential to the significance of each in each work. On the one hand, because the obtruded emphasis on the operations of the author's literary fiction in each case fuses with the actual fictional undertaking of its protagonist, each work's deliberately and playfully exposed artifice always remains seriously engaged in issues arising out of real life. On the other hand, because the two projects nonetheless take place in different realms, the test is constantly set as to whether or not the operations of literary fiction-making can be successfully transposed to the other, living sphere: whether what works for literature and literary characters also works for real life and human beings, or whether a tension issuing from the possible incommensurability of life and literature threatens to subvert the protagonist's conflation of the two spheres, even as it sustains the author's own. There is one more dimension to these three works and their respective interactions of life and literature that I explore. Since in each work the author inserts between his book-making and his character's self-making a first person narrator, I also consider how, at yet another level of the text, the two projects compete and collaborate, as the author makes a self while the self makes a book - of the self. The first section of the Ovid chapter is designed to introduce most of the formal and thematic features of the literary problem the study as a whole addresses. I would like here simply to preface that introduction with a few general points about both my methodology and my choice of texts. It will be noted that I engage many issues which are of concern to both contemporary literary criticism and theory. The formative influence especially of Robert Alter's Partial Magic, Marthe Robert's The Old and the New,1 and Alexander Nehamas' Life as Literature is readily and directly evident, that of theorists such as Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and Ricoeur implicitly and indirectly so. Like Alter and Robert, I am particularly concerned with the »quixotic« task that sets out to test the world and conventions of literature against the world and claims of real life. In fact, the protagonists I discuss could all be described as a specific variant of the Don Quixote figure, insofar as they are all secret Don Quixotes, all secretly turning their lives into literary events. This variant alone sufficiently distinguishes my project from theirs, but that I place at the beginning of my study not Cervantes (as do both Alter and Robert) but rather Ovid also contributes something new, especially insofar as it resets the roots of self-conscious fiction in classical antiquity itself,

2

3

2

Cf. Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. x. Marthe Robert, The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka, tr. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

and so indirectly questions some of the basic premises about »modernity« which underlie each of their approaches. On the other hand, like Nehamas and many other modern theorists, I am especially interested in the ways the »I« can be constructed and deconstructed along the same lines as literary texts, in particular the literary texts in which these »I«'s themselves appear. As a result, my analyses of these three texts and their protagonists take place in a context largely fashioned by my readings in contemporary literary theory. If my discussion nonetheless proceeds without explicitly engaging overtly theoretical issues, the reason is that I am interested in the testing of these contemporary concerns within specific texts, in the consequences of these issues when they are fleshed out and enacted by the literary imagination of different writers writing in different times and in different literary traditions. Perhaps the best justification for my methodological specificity comes in the surprisingly different and often darker conclusions at which this study arrives from those of, for example, Nehamas' more cleanly theoretical approach. These conclusions are different not only from those of Nehamas, but also for each work considered, providing a range of possibilities to the realization of life as literature such as no single theoretical position could easily anticipate or accommodate. 4 The texts I have chosen to provide that range belong to widely separated historical and literary-historical contexts. Ovid's Ars is a product of the late Augustan period of Roman literature, written in elegiac couplets and drawing on the conventions of both Latin love-elegy and didactic verse. Kierkegaard's »Diary« is a product of the late or even post-Romantic period of nineteenth century Danish and German culture, written in the form of and drawing on the conventions of the prose novella, the diary, and the early epistolary novel. Thomas Mann's Felix Krull is a product of both pre-World War I and, in its continuance, post-World War II German culture, written first as a novella exploiting the conventions of the

* Besides the notably muted engagement with issues of (mostly) French theory, there is an equally notable, and equally muted, engagement with issues of (mostly) AngloAmerican theory, namely: with the issues of »improvisation« that are central to Stephen Greenblatt's notions of self-fashioning, and with those of the interplay of literary aesthetics and social ideologies that are central to Terry Eagleton's school of thought. Each of the protagonists I discuss prominently displays the skills and strategies of improvisation, impudently displacing and absorbing the terminology of the reigning value systems of their times in order to subvert those same systems. Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, »The Improvisation of Power,« in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: Form More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 222-254, esp. p. 230. And each work makes clear the connections between the operant literary values and the contemporary social values within which the protagonist moves. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), esp. pp. 1-12. If I nonetheless do not overtly pursue these aspects of my protagonists' projects, and instead subordinate them to my concern with personal identity and fiction, this is simply because my own critical interests happen to be so constituted. 3

»Bildungsroman« and then later expanded to a novel in something closer to the picaresque mode. Despite these diverse origins, however, the works have significant connections which, I think, justify their grouping. This is true in the simple sense that Kierkegaard quotes and borrows fairly consequently from Ovid's Ars; that Mann's earliest notes to Felix Krull identify Kierkegaard's »Diary« as a potential model for his own project; or that Kierkegaard's text seems to have had a formative influence on the late Krull as well. These more or less explicit connections have all been noted in the secondary literature on Kierkegaard and Mann, respectively, but until this study no one has pursued them in any extensive way. More importantly, the grouping of these three texts is motivated by the similarity in the literary problem each addresses and by the variety in conclusions to that problem at which each one arrives. All explore the attempt to fashion a literary artwork out of the self, but in each case the specific historical context of both the author and work yields different conceptions of the benevolence of fiction and literary imitation, of the intransigence of the »reality« of the self, and so too of the ultimate reconcilability of the realms of life and literature. An implicit argument that runs throughout this study is that changing conceptions of the nature of personal identity account for a recognizable historical development in the attitudes toward the artificial »I.« Put simply, we can say that in Ovid a strongly classical sense of the natural self undermines efforts at refashioning the »I« by literary strategies. In Kierkegaard, a more Romantic sense of the fragmented, disunified self makes such literary refashioning no longer impossible. In the early Krull, a Nietzschean sense of the self as a fictional construct casts literary fashioning into a crucial, paradigmatic role; and in the late Krull, a mythical-textual model for the unconscious makes literary imitation and artificial »I«'s unavoidable operations and conditions.® It is, then, the specific illumination that the project of the artificial, literary I brings to the problem of personal identity in each work and period, and that the range of possible, historical responses brings to the common theoretical issue of life as literature that provide the initial justification for this study. What follows, I hope, provides more.6 Small portions of the book have already appeared, in somewhat different form, as articles. Part of the first chapter was published as »Anti-Pygmalion: The 1

6

4

Perhaps it goes without saying that the artificial »I« fashioned by each protagonist reflects not only the notion of personal identity operant at the time, but also the notion of literary form. Thus in Ovid, the attempt is to construct an elegy-derived self, in Kierkegaard a Romantically »poetic« self, in the early Krull »ein romanhaftes Leben« and in the late Krull a »mythical« self. Thus, it is not only a different notion of reality that is at stake in each case, but a different notion of fiction as well, and the latter contributes perhaps as much to the eventual success or failure of the collusion as does the former. N o doubt some readers at this point and many more later on will wonder why I neglected to include in this study a discussion of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. I can only plead that the study is long as it is, and urge the reader to keep Nabokov in mind, especially while reading the chapters on the »Diary« and the late Felix Krull.

Praeceptor in Ars Amatoria, Book 3« in Helios 17,2 (1990), and part of the second as »Ovid's Danish Disciple: Kierkegaard as Reader of the Ars Amatoria« in Pacific Coast Philology 23,1-2 (1988). I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these journals for their permission to reprint this material in revised and expanded form. I would also like to thank the publishers of the Loeb Classical Library for their permission to use the translations from Ovid: The Art of Love and Other Poems, translated by J. H. Mozley and revised by G. P. Goold, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979; and from Ovid: Heroides and Amores, translated by Grant Showerman and revised by G. P. Goold, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. Special thanks are due to Blake Lee Spahr, William S. Anderson, and especially Richard Brinkmann, whose encouragement and guidance were invaluable throughout this project. I also wish to thank the many friends and colleagues who read parts or all of the manuscript along the way and offered useful advice and criticism: George Avery, Elisabeth Bronfen, Dorrit Cohn, Nancy Daukas, Chris Downing, Margret Guillemin, Robert Holub, Judith Ryan, Charles Segal, Richard Tarrant, Maria Tatar, and Ken Weisinger. Finally, I wish to thank my father, George V. Downing, for his endless help with my computer.

5

Chapter ι: Ovid and the Ars Amatoria

I.

The Problem

A. S. Hollis has called the Ars Amatoria »in every sense the most artificial of Ovid's creations.«1 The description is primarily pointed at the »glittering surface« of the poem, at its aggressively advertised condition and operation of artifice: at its elaborate labyrinth of ironies and verbal wit; at its parodie juxtaposition of the conventions of didactic verse and love-elegy, whose highly stylized subject-matter assured that the poem »had only a tenuous and intermittent connexion with real life«; and at its invention of a narrative persona whose own parody comprises one of the chief delights of the poem. 2 All such ostentatious, even systematic flaunting of the fiction as an authorial construct, set up against a background not of »reality« but rather of literary convention and tradition, has contributed to a characterization of the Ars as frivolous, self-indulgent, and merely clever: as a comic tour de force concerned only with cunningly devised verbal designs and deeply uninterested in the serious business of »real life.«3 But the Ars is »artificial« in another, equally essential sense. It takes as its subject the pursuit of what we can call artificial love, and therein engages its would-be practitioner in a labyrinth of ironies, an exploitation of literary convention and an adoption of performing personae in every way analogous to its own, poetic enterprise. For this reason - that the obtruded emphasis on the verbal edifice, the borrowed trappings of literary tradition, etc., fuse so essentially with the actual fictional predicaments and undertakings of the poem's protagonists, with the way they construe and construct their worlds - the poem's deliberately exposed artifice, far from isolating or eliminating it from any serious engagement with issues arising out of »real life,« can be seen as the necessary precondition and reflexive expression of its consequent exploration into the very real and serious, problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality, between literature and life. 1

A. S. Hollis, »Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris,« in Ovid, ed. J. W. Binns, (London,

1973). P· » 3 · ' Ibid, p. 85. 3 Even by its admirers such as Hollis or R . Durling (see below, note 13).

6

A central aspect of that exploration into the often precarious interaction between fiction and reality is its concern with the student's attempt - or rather, the praeceptor's attempt through the student, and a significantly different attempt for the male and female student - to fashion something of an elegy-derived, literary artwork out of him- (or her-) self, to regulate his life by the rules and ratio of ars, to construct an artificial I. It is this aspect of the poem's exploration on which I intend to focus in the following discussion of the interplay between the poet's and his would-be lover's respective enterprises. si-

The functional identity between the activity of the poet and lover is nothing new to the tradition of Roman elegy, and is of course central to Ovid's immediate predecessor in the genre, Propertius. What is new to Ovid, radically new, is the conception of the kind of art practiced, the aesthetic elements correlative to the erotic condition, and thus, too, the fundamental significance and even soundness of the conflation of the two spheres. For Propertius, one begins with the girl - »Cynthia prima« are the first words to his oeuvre - because one begins with love.4 Love comes as an overwhelming, often violent force, an involuntary obsession »which carries the poet by storm; he has little choice as to whom he falls in love with, and little freedom of manoeuvre once he has succumbed.«' Once under the sway of his uncontrollable, controlling passion, he finds himself cut off from traditionally more honorable activities in either the political or military spheres, and likewise from traditionally more honorable modes of poetry such as political panegyric or heroic epic, and confined instead to the infinitely less serious and respectable private sphere, to love and elegy. The same puella, or domina, dictates his exclusive activity in both spheres, his person in both roles. It is the inescapable dependency of the poet's output on the lover's passion that the identity underscores. Nor, of course, is the identity and dependency only expressed or experienced in such negative, limiting terms. Rather, the passion the beloved inspires, even the beloved herself, becomes the absolutely sufficient source for the poet's inspiration; it guarantees both the sincerity and, in the most meaningful sense of the term, originality of his art. »Non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantai Apollo,« Propertius claims, »ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit« (»It is not Calliope nor Apollo who sings to me these songs,/ It is the girl herself who makes my talent«). Cynthia herself provides the poetic impulse, the imaginative drive equally at work in the artist and the lover/ 4

References to Propertius follow the text of E. A. Butler, Sexti Properti, Carmina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). The translations are my own. ' Hollis (Binns), p. 94. See also A. W. Allen, »Elegy and the Classical Attitude toward Love: Propertius 1,1.« Yale Classical Studies 11 (1950) 255-77. 6 Propertius II,1, }i. Cf. Tibullus II,5,inf.; Heroides XV, 206. References to Tibullus follow the text of J. P. Postgate, Tibulli Aliorumque Carminum Libri Tres (Oxford:

7

Like Propertius, Ovid in the Ars begins with a disclaimer, saying that neither Apollo nor any one of the Muses has taught him his task. But unlike Propertius, no passion or beloved is put forth as the new motivation for his art. Rather, drawing on the language of didactic verse, Ovid substitutes something he calls usus:7 non ego, Phoebe, datas a te mihi mentiar artes, nec nos aeriae voce monemur avis, nec mihi sunt visae Clio Cliusque sorores servanti pecudes vallibus, Ascra, tuis: usus opus movet hoc: vati parete perito; vera canam: coeptis, mater Amoris, ades. (1,25-30) I will not falsely claim that my art is your gift, Phoebus, nor am I prompted by the voice of a bird of the air, neither did Clio and Clio's sisters appear to me while I kept flocks in your vale, Ascra: usus inspires this work: give ear to an experienced bard; true will be my song: favour my enterprise, mother of Love! Exactly how »usus« is to be understood, and so exactly what is to be taken as the foundation of the praeceptor's art, is a rather slippery subject. The most common translation is »personal experience,« and in some sense this is surely right; but then »personal experience« must first be qualified by contrast with its Propertian precedent. Usus as personal experience is not deeply felt, all-controlling passion which inspires and shapes one's poetic output. In fact, the substitution of usus for such a passion is indicative of the magister's entire enterprise, which specifically designs to eliminate passion and »personal experience« from the field, or fields, of action. We can even say that, insofar as passion and personal impulse do inspire his »art,« his art fails. Thus in some sense, Ovid reverses - or rather, his praeceptor strives to reverse - the Propertian identity of »personal experience« and poetry, and so too the traditional link between lover and poet. Rather, usus stresses an aspect of experience far more impersonal, even scientific: experience as practice. Vergil uses the word to explain why Jove made uneasy the way of husbandry, »ut varias usus meditando extunderet artis« (»so that practice, by taking thought, might [gradually] hammer out diverse arts«). Lucretius likewise uses it to explain the development of man's diverse arts, -»carmina picturas, et daedala signa polire,/ usus et impigrae simul experientia

7

8

mentis/paul-

Oxford University Press, 1915); those to the Heroides that of Grant Showerman, Ovid. Heroides and Amores, ed. and rev. by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). For a detailed discussion of the topos of poetic inspiration among classical poets, see Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study, (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 2-16. Except where otherwise noted, references to the Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, and Amores follow the text of E. J. Kenney, P. Ovidi Nasonis, Amores, Medicamina faciei feminineae, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). Translations, with occasional emendations, are taken from J. H. Mozley, The Art of Love and Other Poems, ed. and rev. by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) and from Grant Showerman, Heroides and Amores.

atim docuit pedetemptim progredientis« (»poetry and pictures, artfully wrought polished statues, all these as men progressed gradually step by step were taught by practice and the experiments of an active mind«). And later on in the Ars, Ovid uses it to explain the advantage of older women, »adde, quod est Ulis operumprudentia maiorj solus et artifices qui facit, usus adest« (»Add this, that they have greater acquaintance with their business, and they have practice, which alone makes artists, on their side«).8 In each case, usus is closely linked with protracted efforts, technical mastery, and rational, intellectual deliberation and calculation.' For Ovid, then, the basis for his praeceptor's art becomes practice, not passion, technical accomplishment rather than inspired condition. The notions of technical control and intellectual acuity are also central to Propertius' poetry, indeed to the entire elegiac tradition. From Callimachus on, exacting attention to polished detail and a sovereign control over the literary domain were trademarks of the elegists, and they played a large, albeit conventionalized role in the »Stilkampf« with the writers of voluminous, popular epics. In Propertius and the others, however, these notions are pointedly not part of the shared identity of poet and lover. In fact, such control and sovereign deliberation are precisely what the lover lacks.10 Ovid not only places a renewed and more pronounced emphasis on the technical foundation of art. He also makes this the primary basis for the correlation of lover and poet. Love itself becomes a practice, not a passion, a craft instead of a condition. This of course radically reformulates the traditional association of the two spheres, and not least in its revision of the order of genesis. We see this in the poem's infamous first couplet: si quis in hoc artem populo non novit amandi, hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet. If anyone among this people knows not the art of loving, let him read my poem, and having read it be skilled in love.

Besides the sudden freedom from the traditional social isolation of the helplessly impassioned elegist, we note also how the couplet begins with the song and only 8

Géorgies, 1,133; Lucretius V,i4j2f.; Ars, 11,675!. References to Virgil follow the text of R. A. B. Mynors, P. Vergili Maronis, Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); those to Lucretius that of C. Bailey, Lucreti, De Rerum Natura, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922). Translations, with occasional emendations, are taken from H. R. Fairclough, Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1-6 (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 1935) and W. H. D. Rouse and M. F. Smith, Lucretius. De Rerum Natura, (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 1982), respectively. ' For technical mastery, cf. varias artes, daedala polire, artifices·, for rational calculation, cf. meditando, experientia mentis, prudentia. 10 The most programmatic statement of this is Catullus' famous epigram, odi et amo. quaere id faciam, fortasse requiris?! nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. See also A. W. Allen, »Elegy and the Classical Attitude toward Love.« 9

arrives at the lover, the exact reverse of the Propertian universe, where the love makes the poem. The audacity of the claim is decisive, its promise programmatic. The would-be lover has but to incorporate this book into his person, to substitute its system for his own version of »Propertian« passion, in order for the entire enterprise to be realized. The book becoming a self, the self becoming a book: this is the correlation of life and literature which Ovid's radical revision proposes - the artificial I, the I as artwork. There is another critical distinction between the kinds of art practiced by Propertius and Ovid's praeceptor. When Propertius invokes and then disclaims the figures of Apollo and the Muse, he does so to underscore the signal originality of his verse. For all his obvious indebtedness to his literary predecessors, Propertius' poetry still purports to travel an »intacta via« (»untrodden path«). The unparallelled uniqueness of his work closely corresponds to the unparallelled uniqueness of his passion." But when Ovid invokes and then disclaims the same figures, he does so to underscore not the originality, but rather the imitativeness

of

his verse. For all the indisputable newness of Ovid's Ars, it is still essentially founded on the principle of imitation. In fact, making imitation - or perhaps better, intertextual imitation - a primary creative strategy to the poem is one of its major and most far-reaching innovations.12 In his invocation and disclaimer of Apollo and the Muses, for example, Ovid not only purposefully imitates Propertius, but also, in both positive and negative form, Callimachus and Hesiod and, less directly, Homer and Vergil as well. That is, he invokes, if only apparently to disclaim, a whole pantheon of prior texts, of other literary invocations and disclaimers. And this aggressive advertisement of the conventional artificiality to the invocation introduces a host of considerations essentially alien to Propertius and these other precedents.15 For them, the invocation was in some sense the guarantee for both the originality and reliability of their opera, for both the directness and sincerity of their utterances. Ovid's imitation undercuts the claims of originality, or rather partially undercuts them, but the effects are no less decisive for being partial. On the one hand, the imitation affects a certain parodie, deliberately devised distance from the pose of its sources, a ludic mobility and autonomy from its claim and profession. O n the 11 Ia

13

10

Propertius ΙΙΙ,ι, i8. See also Commager, The Odes of Horace, p. iif. For an introduction to the role of intertextual imitation in Ovid's poetics, see I. M . Le M. D u Quesnay, »The Amores* in Ovid, pp. 1 9 - 2 9 . He says, for example, »The most complex aspect of Ovid's art in the Amores is his imitation of earlier writers. This does not, of course, mean that he slavishly copied his predecessors because he lacked imagination and originality. O n the contrary his is a creative imitation: out of the raw materials of the genre, its language, metaphors and themes Ovid created something quite new.«(i9). See R. Durling, »Ovid as Praeceptor Amoris,« CJ, 53 (1958), reprinted in revised form in idem, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, (Cambridge M A : Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. z6i.

other, it still allows itself to draw upon the authority, the evocative power implanted in the imitated material - for this, too, is part of the mobility afforded by imitation. In any case, the imitation renders the issues of reliability and sincerity fundamentally obsolete. One can hardly even place the speaker, poised as he is between the voices of the prior texts, the re-citer of the prior texts, and the speaker of the new. Like usus, the concept of art as based on imitation also becomes directly translated into the erotic sphere, the >live< sphere. Mimesis, the point of departure for all literary creation, thus becomes part of the subject-matter of the poem itself. The would-be lover's art is also to be essentially founded on the principle of imitation; first and foremost of the »book« itself and its praeceptor's prescriptions, but also through the book of all the conventions of elegiac and »didactic« deportment which the magister himself imitates. And he can thereby promise himself a similar range of mobility, a similar distance from the affections of his literary models, and a similar access to their authoritative, evocative powers. We can see this shared principle of imitation already at work in the praeceptor's first instructions to his student, immediately following his invocation and then, continuing the didactic imitation, his brief summary of proposed topics: dum licet et loris passim potes ire solutis, elige cui dicas >tu mihi sola places.< (4if.) While yet you are at liberty and can go at large with loosened rein, choose to whom you will say, »You alone please me.« »Tu mihi sola places« is of course the conventional claim of the elegiac poet/lover. In fact, the same half-line occurs in Propertius 11,7,19, and then again in the pseudo-Tibullan 111,19,3. When Propertius and pseudo-Tibullus invoke the expression, they intend to convey the involuntary exclusivity of their attraction, the unshakable enslavement to a single, consuming, and sincere passion. Ovid's praeceptor, however, presents the same line not as an original declaration, but as a decidedly literary citation. That is, as with the invocation of the sources of inspiration, he deliberately invokes the prior text(s) and thus conveys the mannered artificiality of the claim. The very act of citation subverts at once the sense of exclusivity and of emotional compulsion; the line is freely and intellectually selected, and effortlessly transferred to another context. Moreover, by presenting the line as a citation, the magister again affects a certain parodie distance from its pose, an autonomy from its profession, even as he avails himself of its original, indelible power. This time, however, the lover is invited to participate with the poet in the act of imitation and citation. That is, he is invited to cite this literary line himself as his first, representative venture into the praeceptor's ars. And in his imitation, his citation, he too is offered an all-important immunity to the affections of his II

model. H e too approaches the half-line with cool, intellectual calculation, as expedient literary artefact; he too, in its invocation, retains the freedom to select its object (»elige«); he too maintains mobility and a secret, insincere distance, even as he avails himself of the line's authentic persuasive power. Of course, the first line of the couplet, especially »dum licet,« subversively anticipates another aspect of imitation, the superseding, infectious effect of the imitated material on the imitator himself. 14 For the moment, however, the lover is innocently invited to imitate the poet in his imitation, and thereby share in his self-conscious creation of fictional artifice. Ovid establishes, then, something of a functional identity between the respective activities of the poet and the would-be lover, primarily secured by the shared reliance on usus - sustained efforts, rational calculations, and technical craft and imitation - artificial stuff, hidden detachment, ludic mobility. The functional identity, moreover, is not merely tacitly suggested, thematically latent but unexplored. Rather, several major imagery systems maintained throughout the poem emphatically insist on the correlation, and draw it to the center of thematic concern. The two most prominent of these are the images of chariot-riding and seafaring. Both are used simultaneously to depict the course of the poem, of the instruction, and of the student's - i.e., the reader's - love affair. As befits their »didactic« derivation, both stress the common ground in usus, the common commitment to toil and control, and extension through time. 1 ' Another field of shared semantics, this time deriving from the elegiac tradition, revolves around the terms iocus (»jest«) and Indus (»play«). The poetry itself is playful, sportive and intensely unserious; moreover tricky, deceitful and, overall, an act; and the love affair is invited to shape itself in the same image. That is, the terms stress the common ground in »unreal« imitation, the common commitment to play and detachment. So far the parallels, and the evidence that Ovid intends his reader to focus quite carefully on the common conditions and operations of artifice of the poet and student-lover. But one cannot stop here without missing Ovid's main point, what he also intends us to focus on quite carefully: that »art« so conceived does not survive its transposition into the erotic, living sphere. What might well make for delightful poetry makes for a disastrous affair when translated into life: the kind of playful games one engages in with words and readers in a fictional world take on entirely new associations and consequences when played with real human lives in a real human world. This is not to say, as for instance Durling does, that we are therefore not expected or allowed to make the transposition from an ima14

Cf. I,6i 5 ff.; RA 4 9 7 f f . ' ' Although ultimately derived from Greek lyric, Ovid's use of these two imagery systems seems clearly to be based on Vergil's in the Georgics where, as in the Ars, the images are used as a pair. See Geo. II,4iff. and 54iff., also I, I94ff. and jiif.; also IV, iiéf.; I» 303. 373. 43 6 ·

12

ginary world of poetic fiction to a real world of genuine life, simply because »if we mistake... this pretended world for the real world, we lose the effect of the wit [and] the cynical manipulation of others can no longer be treated so lightly« ;' 6 that we must somehow leave the lover in the poet's sphere, because otherwise the comedy breaks down. Rather, this is the point, that when in this fashion literature becomes life, the comedy does break down and the violation begins. As the magister himself insists, there is nothing quite so violent as people »at play« in their everyday lives (III, 37off.). In order to perceive this point, we must allow the transposition and admit »reality«; in order for the play of the competing ontologies of fiction and reality to maintain the vigorous to-and-fro energy it requires, we must allow the latter its sufficient vitality. We must, that is, ourselves maintain that curious, stereoscopic optic which perceives both the comic fictional pretence and the disconcerting human violence.17 This is part of Ovid's radical revision of the Propertian equation of poet and lover, that part that propels him further into taking not literature frivolously, but life seriously. The two spheres are incongruous, incommensurable; in the final analysis, life does not yield to the conventions and practices of literature. The recognition of the deliberately self-defeating nature of the poem's preceptorial project, of its translation of the codes of art into those of erotic conquest, is not a new one. In one form or another, it has informed the perspective of most modern critics. However, different commentators have stressed different reasons for the failure, each of which emphasizes a slightly different aspect of the poem and a slightly differentflawthat the failureflaunts.Some note the apriori superfluousness of the poem. For example, if all one needs do to strike up an amorous relationship with a woman is ask (1,711), what need for the praeceptor's involved stratagems ? and if »in the beginning« men and women managed without any magister and without any ars (II,479f.), why should anything be any different at present?18 Others locate the project's weak point in the recalcitrant, uncontrollable character of the very stuff the praeceptor and pupil attempt to legislate, whether that be the furor in women, the vis (»force«) or ingenium in men, the chaotic powers of passion itself, or the prior, undeniable numen of nature as a whole. »Amor« was not meant to be enclosed in a rational framework: and so nature asserts its disruptive forces, subverts the system, and thereby restores its more legitimate rule, which admits chaos, the irrational, the limited, the »human.«1' Durling, pp. 35, 30. N o one has put this point quite so eloquently and succinctly as W. S. Anderson in the introduction to his edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Books 6-10 (Norman, Okla: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972): »What might seem trivial or playful on the surface may barely conceal frightening perspectives into the irrationality of men and the cruelty of the universe« (13). 18 C f . Durling, p. 29. C f . also 11,703-708. ' ' This has, I think, proved the most fruitful approach, and certainly the one that has 17

!3

Still others point to contradictions in the system that sabotage it from within, without any need for an external disruption. For example, at one point men are told to brown their bodies by exercising in the Campus Martius (1,513). Some 200 lines later they are advised to appear pale and piteously thin (I,733ff.). Similarly, at one moment men are advised to conceal their outside affairs, even if manifest, while at the next they are urged to disclose them, even if successfully concealed and even if we grant the magister's claim that different circumstances necessitate different tactics, the ideal of a practice that can be completely taught and governed simply by rigid rules and prescriptions, without personal imaginative input and intuition, seems to show its seams. 20 Finally, and in some sense combining much of the preceding: some place the blame for the failure squarely on the metaphorical shoulders of the praeceptor, on the failures in his personality which defeat the project from the outset: on his thinly disguised hatred and fear of women, which exposes the motivation for this »art of love« to be »without love,« to be in fact revenge and eventually the naked, ever escalating plays for power of an early Valmont and Merteuil; 21 and on his own ungovernable imaginative sympathy and barbaric jealousy, which seem continually to cause the praeceptor to fail at his own program. 22 Whether we regard these failures as unique pathological perversions of the individual persona or as merely exaggerated examples of everyday human, and healthy, tendencies, we cannot help but hesitate when even its own teacher cannot succeed at his system, and moreover suspect that the same flaws that invite his failure might well inform his system, too. 2 ' For all the variety these different perspectives present, all share a few fundamental features. First, all emphasize the failure of the ars in its failure, in its »not working,« whether the reason for that inadequacy be the poem's superfluousness, its inconsistency, the unbridled backlash of nature and human passion, or the seriously, comically flawed personality of the praeceptor himself. Second, especially the latter, more engaged perspectives emphasize the violence inseparable from the chaotic forces of nature and human passion, a violence which eruptively

20 21 22 23

14

exerted the most widespread influence. Among its major proponents are W. R. Johnson, »The Problem of the Counter-classical Sensibility and Its Critics,« CSCA 3 (1970) 123-51; J. M. Fyler, »Omnia Vincit Amor: Incongruity and the Limitations of Structure in Ovid's Elegiac Poetry,« CJ 66 (1971) 196-203 (reprinted in Chaucer and Ovid. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], pp 1-22); E. W. Leach, »Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid's Metamorphoses,« Ramus 3 (1974) 102-42; and F. Verducci, »The Contest of Rational Libertinism and Imaginative License in Ovid's Ars Amatoria,« Pacific Coast Philology 15,2 (1980) 29-39. My debt to all their work is considerable. see Durling, p. 4off.; Verducci, 33. Cf. Emile Rupert, cited by Durling, p. 28 (see n. 13, p. 243). See Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, p. 21; also Verducci, 37ff. See Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, p. 16.

exerts itself, whether from within the praeceptor himself or from other sources, against the fundamentally fragile control and order which he, the magister, attempts to impose, and which for better or for worse violates the student and exposes him to a world wherein safety in love (»tuta venus«) is an impossible, and demonstrably mistaken, ideal. But while these are surely true insights, and demand prominent display in any discussion of the Ars, they nonetheless by and large overlook another basic dimension to the project's »failure,« another basic source for the violence set loose against the pupil in the poem. The failure of the ars can also be seen, can perhaps most disconcertingly be seen, in its success, in its adequately achieved substitution of conscious work and artifice for involuntary spontaneity and interiority - in its actual achievement of its boast, quod nunc ratio est, impetus ante fuit (»What before was impulse now is system«). The automatization and »literalization« of the would-be lover also exert their own brand of violence, dehumanizing violence, on his person. Nature, passion and vis by no means hold an exclusive monopoly over violation; ars and cultus, usus and mimesis prove equally potent sources as well. And it is this aspect of the project which I would like to emphasize, the violence in its success, in its conception of the self as an artwork, in its creation of an artificial I.

II.

The didactic imitation

Let us begin by looking at the poem's use of the didactic tradition. It is here that the idea and terminology for systematic control are most at home, and here that the opportunities for literary imitation most apparent, and so here, too, that we can most clearly begin to identify the effects that both breed. Again, we need to remember to distinguish between and to compare the poet's and the pupil's involvement with the conventions of the tradition; for again, the interplay between the different orders is very much at issue. The adoption of the didactic mode has several immediate consequences for the poem. For the poet, it at once provides a project, a plan, and in a curious fashion, a personality as well. The project, the poet's opus or labor, is encyclopedic and programmatic by nature. He identifies and circumscribes a field of activity or body of knowledge, collects and considers all relevant data and explores their every aspect, and organizes the whole into a coherent, versified schema. As A. S. Hollis says, the challenge is both poetic and scientific. It involves both technical craft in molding the recalcitrant, often literarily preformed material into formal order, and extensive erudition and intellectual facility in encompassing the entire range of the engaged activity.24 In its way, then, it automatically imposes an undertaking on the poet roughly, or functionally, equivalent to that which the 14

A. S. Hollis, in Ovid (Binns), p. 89^ !5

poet himself will impose on his audience of readers, who are likewise exhorted to systematize their activity and to attain mastery over their chosen realm in all its conceivable aspects. At the same time that the adoption of the didactic mode proposes to the poet a project, it also offers him a procedure: for the imitation of its literary conventions provides him with a practical, and sufficiently strict, code of conduct, a technically simple method of invention which nonetheless serves as a supply complex method of expression. The poet has but to imitate an ideal and procedure fixed by tradition and literary convention; his activity and direction will be guided and conducted by the model of prior texts. A t its simplest, he is given a language, a style filled with certain formulaic phrases and set rhetorical strategies.2® Somewhat more complexly, the genre suggests certain structuring principles: a division of the subject-matter into several stages, initially marshalled in a summary of proposed procedures; 26 regrouping points which signal the transition between stages,27 retardation devices to open up the staged structure somewhat, 28 and perhaps most importantly, the mythical exempta and digressions with which the poet punctuates his didactic structure and explores his abstract themes in imagistic and narrative forms. 29 There are also some vaguely general guidelines for points to cover: for example, where to begin, the kinds of requisite skills, the physical and sartorial requirements, the considerations of changing conditions, and so forth.' 0 And as we will discuss in a moment, there is also a rich fund of imagery to imitate by analogy, which also helps to organize the »several divisions of (the poet's) topic within a comprehensive structural design.« 31 For now, we need only note that insofar as the prior texts provide a practical model for the guidance of the poet's project, they too are roughly, functionally equivalent to the poet's own text in its role as practical guide for his followers' project. The tradition also, as I said, provides the poet with a narrative persona·, the seasoned and sagacious vates (»sacred bard«) who, slightly pessimistic and yet still suitably benevolent, instructs his ignorant charges in useful skills to their own and society's advantage. Ovid can adopt this persona, simulate its mannerisms, ape its tone - and by comically dissociating it from its ideological support, turn it M

E.g., formulae such as adde quod, principio, praeterea, hactenus, and strategies such as the prescriptive voice (e.g., quaere, nun age, disce, adspicio, iubebo) or the rhetorical question/category (e.g. quid tibi femíneos coetus venatibus aptos/ enumerem ?, 1,253^; cf. Ge0.II,i03ff., n8ff.). *6 I,3$ff.: principio, proximus, tertius. 17 Ï,z6}i{., cf. Geo. II,iff.; ll,9tí., 3 36ff., 4 2 5 ff., etc. 28 E.g., 1,2690. and Hollis' note, ad loc., in Ovid: Ars Amatoria Book I, ed. A. S. Hollis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 19 Hollis, in Ovid (Binns), p. 91. See alsoE. W. Leach, »Geòrgie Imagery in the Ars Amatoria,» TAPA 95 (1964) 15off. 30 These points are brought up ad loc. by Hollis in his commentary to Book I. 31 Leach, »Geòrgie Imagery in the Ars Amatoria,« i48f. 16

against itself. Ovid parodies his adopted didactic, vatic persona in two ways. First, he exposes the artificiality of its literary conventions and so robs them of their solemn, sentimental authority.'2 And second, he hybridizes it with features of its elegiacally debased counterpart, the lena (»bawd«) or, alternatively, Priapus figure; of his own literary persona from the Amores; and even of his own public persona as published poet. We will inevitably have to return to this issue of hybridization and self-impersonation later, when we discuss the pupil's analogous adoption of an elegiac lover's persona and embarkment on a similar course of selfimpersonation. For now, let us simply note that i) Ovid borrows not only a project and plan from the didactic tradition, but also a vatic persona, which in its way also provides a code of conduct, and that 2) in adopting such a persona, he is again roughly, functionally parallelled by his pupil, who is similarly offered a didactically-derived persona, or ratherpersonae, to assimilate and imitate: the farmer and hunter. Ovid's major innovation, of course, was to apply the conventions, imagery and traditional authority of didactic verse to the (meter and) materia of erotic elegy. The mere juxtaposition of the two genres created numerous modes for mutual parody. One of these is that it allowed Ovid to approach »his frivolous subject with an air of studious gravity.«33 Hesiod and then Vergil had used the genre to impart solemn instructions to honest farmers; others had used it to dictate precepts for hunting, fishing, and fowling. To the conventional Roman way of thinking, Ovid's application of this genre to erotic endeavors would be altogether startling, not only insofar as love seems so totally unsuited to rational systematization, but also and far more goadingly insofar as it is made to appear »as a worthy and strenuous occupation, like farming or hunting.«34 Ovid's comic imitation achieves this effect by metaphorically transferring the Vergilian and Hesiodic concepts of labor and cultus, and the georgic imagery of breaking cattle and horses, tending fields, and so on, to the private, urban, and modern erotic realm. This furthers his parody in two distinct ways, each of which commits a kind of civilly violent assault on conventional Roman sensibilities and traditional didactic solemnity. First, the metaphorical shift displaces the georgic language and activity from a »real« world to a merely figurative one; that is, it reduces them to and treats them as mere literary conventions and so deprives them of the dignity of their actuality and original context. (The »real« world for which they now become a figure is a further and slightly different indignity.) Second, as mentioned, the shift nonetheless still suggests that the two actual activities of farming (etc.) and loving are analogous and analogously serious undertakings - and by extension, that Vergil's and Ovid's literary enterprises are likewise comparable and

31 33 34

see Fyler, p. 14. Leach, ρ iji. Hollis, Ars Amatoria: Book I, p. xvii.

17

comparably significant. His use of the venatic or military imagery has the same parodie effect. Where the traditional poems move along on a real and engaged level, Ovid's moves along on an unreal and metaphorically disengaged level; and yet at the same time he can impudently maintain the appearance that they are nonetheless similarly noble activities, for both poet and lover. As subversive as these parodie ploys are, they are still themselves open to a further subversion, to a suspension of the parody, and likewise in two distinct fashions. First, I think there is an important sense in which Ovid does seriously and legitimately assume that his undertaking is every bit as »worthy« and »grave« as those of his predecessors; that the (parodie) presentation of the labor and cultus of love and the private self brings him as close to what is important to the human condition - even the Roman condition - as, for example, Vergil comes in his (solemn) presentation of the labor and cultus of farming and the public self (cf. RA 39jf.). 3S The validity of his claim, however, does not rest on a naive affirmation of his project, on an unreflective embrace of the virtue of love and art entwined. This becomes clear when we examine the second way in which his subversive parody of his didactic predecessors subverts itself. This happens whenever the metaphorical imagery systems he derives from the »real« worlds of those predecessors exceed their merely innocuous figurative status and cease to function as simple literary metaphors, and begin instead to exert their own evocative powers over the material of the new context. When they do, the very real dissimilarities between the now figurative and now real spheres necessitate a radically different reaction to the poet's equation of the two spheres, because they also occasion radically different effects. This can most easily be grasped in relation to the poem's venatic imagery, which casts men as hunters and women as wild prey. The more amorous activity is parodically invited to shape itself in this »respectable« image, the less amorous and the more violent it becomes. The very serious and almost inexorable effects of regarding women as hunted animals are mythically exemplified by Cephalus and Procris at the end of Book III, but are no less evident, and far less sympathetically presented, throughout the body of the poem itself. For example, with a dry didactic flourish (quaeris an), the praeceptor takes up the question as to whether one should seduce literally »violate« (violare) - one's mistress's handmaid in the course of the pursuit. His advice is, »either make no venture or be successful,« and he illustrates his precept with examples drawn from fowling, hunting and fishing: 35

18

This is a claim tacitly assumed by most proponents of Ovid's counter-classical sensibility (see above), and given perhaps its most emboldened expression by Charles Segal in his article, »Ovid's Orpheus and Augustan Ideology,« TAPA 103 (1972) 473-494, and its most extended expression by Molly Myerowitz,Ovid's Games of Love (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985). Both, however, argue that Ovid's claim to gravity rests upon an affirmation of his fusion of art and love: it is the legitimacy of this view, and not of Ovid's seriousness, which I undertake to challenge.

non avis utiliter viscatis effugit alis, non bene de Iaxis cassibus exit aper, saucius arrepto piscis teneatur ab hamo: perprime temptatam nec nisi victor abi.

(I,39iff.)

The bird cannot make good its escape when once its wings are limed; the boar issues not easily from the entangling nets. Let the fish be held that is wounded from seizing the hook; once you assail her, press the attack, nor depart unless victorious.

This is, we should note, the same triple analogy with which the praeceptor had launched the metaphorical correlation of loving and hunting, fowling, and fishing (I,4jff.); the repetition seems designed to underscore the logical consequences of the correlation, or imitation, when it begins to become real. By equating the woman with a bird, a boar or a fish, the would-be lover is provoked into committing an act of uncompromised assault, which is not »like« trapping birds but is in every way »like« violently hurting another real human being. The imitation is no longer playfully parodie, but seriously psychotic: literary pretence gives way to human violence. What Ovid makes us see, I think, is that the violence done to conventional literary sensibilities by the parodist in equating hunting with loving is one thing, but the violence done to real people - both women and men - by equating loving with hunting is another and far more serious thing. In this respect at least, the imitative relationship to the venatic »text« is radically, irresolvably different for poet and lover. It is, however, the didactic georgic imagery which most pervasively undergoes this slippage from the merely metaphorical into something far more real, and insofar as it carries with it the key concepts of labor and cultus, it is also the most important to our study. In her groundbreaking article on »Geòrgie Imagery in the Ars Amatoria,« Eleanor Leach establishes some of the central features of this metaphorical shift, and we would do well to examine briefly some of her emphases. Taking the Pasiphae digression in Book I (289-326) as her point of departure, Leach explores the poem's »constant metaphorical equation between the nature and conduct of women and that of animals.« »Women,« she says, »are creatures of untamed nature. They are the raw material of love.« Like Pasiphae herself, and like all the female members of the various species listed in the Lucretian-like cosmogony of Book II (477-88; cf. I,279f.), women are constantly depicted as by nature endowed with savage sexual desires, with a »furiosa libido« (1,281). Their wild natures remain unruly and threatening at all times, and so, for example, a man must always beware of provoking their jealousy, when they will show themselves »more violent than the hunted boar, the lioness protecting her cubs or the snake trodden by an unwary foot« (II,378ff.).36 36

The metaphorical correlation of women with fields and elements of the plant world, especially prevalent in Book II, although it downplays active violence and stresses instead passive complaisance, still maintains the association with untamed and often recalcitrant raw nature.

19

With this state of affairs as his acting assumption, a man must attempt, through dedicated labor and a proven modus operandi, to attain to some sort of mastery over their animal nature, to »cultivate« them, even as refractory oxen are accustomed to the plow and horses taught to endure the rein (I,47if.). As Leach says, »It is the bounden duty of the amator to govern the appetites of nature [in women] and to mold formless material into civilized form.« It is in this respect that the lover comes most, and most seriously, to resemble Vergil's honest farmer, in his labor at cultus, at improving and governing female nature by means of the techne expounded by the praeceptor. It is in this respect, too, that he comes most to resemble the artist, in undertaking to refashion the raw materia of female nature by the application of the appropriate techne. Leach states this with characteristic succinctness: »Just as the artisan or farmer imposes his skills upon the objects of his trade, so does the lover impose his craft upon the race of women whose natures must be forced into conformity with an orderly system of love.« This imposition, she adds, is the essence of cultus. Thus, Leach concludes, the georgic imagery in the poem exceeds its merely figurative function in two distinct fashions, one in respect to women, one to men, both equally important but opposite in their implications. First, there is the »well-organized pattern of anti-feminist humor« throughout the Ars, Book III not excluded (in fact, especially Book III), which debases and dehumanizes women by regarding them as violent animals, stubborn earth, and so on. Second, there is the equally comic, but still serious »glorification of cultus« as the »climax of Roman ingenuity,« transferred however from its natural agrarian world to Ovid's own social, urban context. In the one case, the conflation of the two worlds is jarring and demeaning, and much to the disadvantage of Ovid's modern reality. In the other, the conflation is far more harmonious, even elevating, and very much to the advantage of the new sphere. Leach's analysis does much to underscore the complex interplay at work in Ovid's imitation of Vergil's didactic poem, especially in its foregrounding of the ungovernable natural order that looms out from behind the extended georgic imagery system, and in its identification of two of the poem's major dynamic forces, or orders, as natura and cultus. She does, however, leave some tricks untaken: mostly minor points which merely extend her argument in directions not fully essential for the support of her topic, but absolutely so for the generation of ours; but some too which partially deconstruct her schema and point toward different conclusions concerning both her topic and ours. Let us begin with three minor distinctions. First, Leach makes explicit how both the georgic and venatic imagery dehumanize women by regarding them as wild and violent creatures or, at best, as passive and complaisant fields. However, she merely leaves implicit the effects of regarding them as materia. The perspective is, as Leach rightly points out, endemic to the Ars. One is first instructed to labor to find quod amare velis (»what you wish to love,« 1,35; cf. 9if.). Then maio

teriam longo qui quaeris amori (»whoever seeks material for a long love«) is urged to learn the gathering grounds of girls, even as hunters learn the boar's haunts, fowlers the birds', and fishermen the fish's (I,45ff.). Such a regard also dehumanizes, but in a significantly different fashion; and while perhaps a part of the georgic strain to the didactic tradition, it resonates with other strains as well. Rather than regarding women as autonomous animals, one regards them as inanimate objects, far more inanimate than even earth: as »stuff«, as fundamentally neutral matter needed for one to practice his ars. In the Ars Poetica, Horace uses the word to describe the subject-matter for would-be writers: sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, aequam/ viribus (»you who write, take up material proportionate to your strengths«).37 In Book II of the Ars, Daedalus uses the word to describe the fit occasion for the practice of his artistic talent: materiam, qua sis ingeniosus, babes (»[now] you have material for which you are suited,« 11,34). And in the Amores, Ovid uses the word to describe his would-be girlfriend as felicitous subjectmatter for his love poetry: te mihi materiam felicem in carmina praebe (»give yourself to me as happy material for song,« 1,3; cf. 1,1,19). Much of the same orientation, and especially the comically callous attitude of the Amores, survives in the use of the word in the Ars as well: woman as inchoate artwork and little more. The dehumanizing effects are similar to those of the animalizing imagery, but the optic is quite different, in the one case bestializing and in the other literalizing; that is, in the one case deriving from the natura and in the other from the cultus perspective of the poem's georgic imagery. While in many ways the two characterizations clearly reinforce one another and contribute to a common attitude, it is also true that some potential tension lies latent between the two, not of central concern to Leach's purposes but certainly to ours. Insofar as it does affect her argument it does so by stressing some of the first negative repercussions of the cultus at work in the poem; for cultus, too, all by itself and without natura, begins with a gesture of somewhat violent, and certainly violating, depersonalization. The second distinction affects her argument more directly and more seriously qualifies her rather generous attitude toward men and cultus in the poem. In men's attempts to attain mastery over women so as to govern them, Leach stresses the part of »persevering labor,« which »will insure its own reward.« In two of her own examples, however, it seems clear that the determining, reward-bringing factor is not so much work as it is simple force, not labor but vis. She cites 11,179 t o show that »the stubborn branch will bend under discreet force« (vires). And she quotes 1,673, wherein the praeceptor assures, vim licet appelles: grata est vis ista puellis (»You may use force: force is pleasing to girls«). To these two we can add all three of the major mythical exempla involving male protagonists in Book I 17

Horace, Ars Poetica, j8f. AU references to Horace follow the text of E. C. Wickham, Q. Horati Flacci, Opera, rev. by H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1912). Translations are ray own.

21

the rape of the Sabines, of Ariadne, and of Deidamia - in each of which women are »mastered« by only the most thinly disguised acts of violence. Of course, the presence of force is most conspicuous in Book I, especially in the somewhat wishful, idealized imaginings of the exempla and then again when things grow increasingly desperate at the end.'8 For the most part no such directness is either viable or desirable, and vis must find more subtle, sublimated avenues for effective expression - cultus. Nonetheless, the presence of exclusively male vis in the poem has a number of crucial consequences for Leach's schema. First, it identifies two mutually informing approaches to men's »cultivation« of women, vis and labor, which are admittedly often difficult to keep separate and yet still need to be distinguished. Second, the presence of vis in men means that women by no means have an exclusive hold over the »natural« violence loose in the poem, and this of course upsets the smooth opposition between men and women and between cultus and natura which structures Leach's analysis. Because third, identifying vis immediately exposes some of the violence at work not in female nature, but in and through male cultus itself. The constant references to »breaking« horses and cattle, »working« the soil, and so on, quite apart from the constant contamination with the venatic and military-campaign imagery, convey a strong sense of carefully orchestrated and systematized violence: no less well-organized than the depiction of women as savage animals; and no less savage for being systematized.3' Ovid does not, I would say, intend a »glorification of cultus,« much less of his own doctrine of cultus in the poem. Rather, I think, he intends an exploration of its own brand of violence. The third distinction is more difficult to draw because broader in its ramifications. It concerns the violence done by labor to its male agent as opposed to its female object, and it is based upon the prior recognition of and respect for the quite different character to the activities of loving and farming, hunting, and so forth. No matter how morally questionable a principle of love the magister seems to propound, he still proposes a love based on an aesthetic principle of pleasure. Freed at once from the seriousness and harshness of consuming passion and of socially committed service, the pupil is exhorted to enjoy a certain lightness, freedom, playfulness and ease. The praeceptor frequently stresses this: for example, that one needn't spread sails nor wear out a long road in the search for a girl (1,51 f.), nor carry nets upon the neck nor expose the breast to arrows: artis erunt 58

Two strategically timed, admitted outbursts of uncontrol on the praeceptor's part in Book II (iôçff.; J47ff.) are the only significant subsequent examples, but see also 11,691,

723> 741·

"

22

In fact, as the example of Romulus' orchestration of the carefully controlled and engineered rape of the Sabines perhaps best makes clear, there is something almost more disconcerting in systematized violence than in simple, natural passion, which is at least honest.

cautae mollia lussa meae (»soft will be the biddings of my cautious art,« 11,196). But the concept of labor is fundamentally at odds with such promises, as the praeceptor himself acknowledges (difficilis nostraposcitur arte labor [»stern toil is demanded by my art«], 11,538), and as a well-known couplet testifies: nox et hiems longaeque viae saevique dolores mollibus his castris et labor omnis inest. (II,23jf.) Night and storm, long journeys and savage griefs: every kind of toil belongs to this soft service. While motivated neither by a lover's passion nor a soldier's or farmer's respectably grave mission, the pupil's pursuit of pleasure via labor betrays him into an »imitation« of their sufferings which essentially negates his ends, without approaching theirs. Ceaseless industry commits its own kinds of violence on its practitioner, which might seem fine for the farmer but »comically« out of place for the pleasure seeking amator. In this respect, too, then, the conflation of the two spheres, while comically effective, does not at all result in a simple affirmation or glorification of cultus when transferred into the erotic sphere. Again, Ovid's own doctrine proves self-subversive. These three minor distinctions help us to recognize some of the major ambivalences toward the respective roles of men and cultus in the poem's georgic schema, even within the terms of Leach's emphases. However, there is another dimension to the didactic model and georgic imagery which Leach largely ignores, and which throws these ambivalences into even greater relief. This is the effort, by men, to achieve a cultus not of women, but of themselves; to refashion the raw materia of their own essentially irrational and sometimes savage sexual nature by the application, or imposition, of the techne expounded by the praeceptor. That is, they are asked to assume the role of artisan or farmer over and against themselves, to make themselves the objects of their trade - to make themselves artificial I's. In this schema, male vis, or eroticism, becomes the relevant raw, recalcitrant, and violent natura that men are then asked to regard as neutral, malleable subject-matter for aesthetic ends. Similarly, the schematizing violence of cultus becomes directed against the men themselves, even as they undertake its equally violating ceaseless industry. All three modes of violence are gathered within the space of a single self, and the results are every bit as ambivalent as those in the broader, externalized field of Leach's focus. The transference to the self of the forces of natura and the efforts at cultus is absolutely essential to the poem, 40 and it has important ramifications for both the »artistic« and georgic parallels. The former can perhaps most clearly be seen in lines such as the injunction near the outset of Book II:

40

For natura, cf. 11,503, 693; cultus, III,108, 681. 23

iam molire animum, qui duret, et adstrue formae: solus ad extremos permanet ille rogos, nec levis ingenuas pectus coluisse per artes cura sit et linguas edidicisse duas. (11,119-122) N o w strive to construct a soul that will abide, and add it to your beauty; only that endures to the ultimate pyre. Nor let it be a slight care to cultivate your mind through liberal arts, and to learn well the two languages.

Although here a pessimistic sense of the inadequacy of the merely natural empowers the precept (as opposed, as in Book I, to its ungovernableness), it is still evident that the primary object of cultivation (coluisse) and labor (molire) is the pectus of the pupil himself - which is, moreover, envisioned as approaching the acme of artistic realization, unassailable endurance through time. He is the one to be fashioned and formed by »ingenuas artes«; his is the body upon which the ingenti dotes (»gifts of genius«) are applied (II,112). The task in a sense is that of Daedalus, sunt mihi naturae iura novanda meae (»new laws must be devised for my nature«), but the body, or nature, to which the artes and dotes are assigned is, as it were, that of Icarus, the student-follower. And it is in respect to the »Icarus« that the multiply dangerous consequences of natural, irrational desires and the glorified inventa of the praeceptor's ars become most conjoined and conspicuous, and that the ingenious artificer's confident creation of artificial I's proves most disastrous. Whereas Daedalus and Icarus at the beginning of Book II provide perhaps the most explicit illustration of the unnatural and eventually untenable artefaction of the self inherent to the praeceptor's didactic-aesthetic enterprise, it is another pair at the beginning of Book I that provides the best example of the inherent violence to the process and its place within the poem's »natural« imagery: Chiron and Achilles. Ovid has just introduced his programmatic proposition, arte regendus amor (»love must be ruled by art«), by a comparison with the technical requirements for the far more impersonal governance of ships and chariots: as Tiphys was the magister of ships and Automedon of chariots, so Ovid becomes the artifex Amori. By a characteristically Ovidian turn, the abstract amor is momentarily metamorphosed into the deity Amor - savage, but nonetheless a boy of tender and tractable age - and this in turn prepares for the example of Chiron and Achilles: Phillyrides puerum cithara perfecit Achillem atque ánimos placida contudit arte feros. qui totiens socios, totiens exterruit hostes, creditur annosum pertimuisse senem; quas Hector sensurus erat, poscente magistro verberibus iussas praebuit ille manus. Aeacidae Chiron, ego sum praeceptor Amoris; saevus uterque puer, natus uterque dea. sed tarnen et tauri cervix oneratur aratro,

24

frenaque magnanimi dente teruntur equi: et mihi cedet Amor, quamvis mea vulneret arcu pectora, iactatas excutiatque faces. (11-22) The son of Philyra made the boy Achilles accomplished on the lyre, and by his peaceful art subdued those savage passions. He who terrified his friends so often and so often his foes, cowered, we are told, before an aged man. Those hands that Hector was to feel, he held out to the lash obediently, when his master bade. Chiron taught Aeacides, I am Love's teacher: a fierce lad each, and each born of a goddess. Yet even the bull's neck is burdened by the plough, and the high-mettled steed champs the bridle with his teeth; and to me Love shall yield, though he wound my breast with his bow, and whirl aloft his brandished torch.

As Peter Green notes, »The images of Chiron moulding Achilles and of bulls or horses broken in for domestic use stress the fact that Ovid is presenting himself, Chiron-like, as a purveyor of cultus, of civilized instruction.« 41 Strictly speaking, Chiron's subject, Achilles, functions here as an analogue for Amor, that is, a representation of love which is externalized and not specifically situated in or as the would-be lover himself. However, both the continued, prominent use of Achilles throughout Books I and II as an analogue not to Amor but to the student-lover,4* and basic points of correlation in the depicted teacher/student relationship with that of Ovid's praeceptor and pupil,43 suggest that Achilles does something of double service here, representing also the male student-lover, with feros ánimos, rather than Achilles himself, the point of comparison with amor.*4 And in this respect, we should note that the first real, programmatic references to the georgic world - the breaking of bulls and horses - occurs in a context which focuses not on a savage female nature but on a savage male one. Herein the labor, herein the toil to the praeceptor's efforts at cultus. As a programmatic illustration of the poem's working assumptions and active intentions, the pair of Chiron and Achilles embody some of its most important attitudes toward both human nature and cultus. In the person of Achilles, we have a depiction of unschooled passion as savage, irrational and uncontrollable, ready at almost any moment to erupt in an indiscriminate display of force which sweeps all considerations of decorum and measure aside - easily a match, when crossed, for the unleashed furor of a woman scorned. In fact, the pointed allusions to Achilles' post-Chironic, destructive wrath, following the loss first of Briséis and then of Patrokles, comically - and yet still deeply disturbingly - anticipate the ultimate failure of the praeceptor's own attempt to constrain and control human passion and, in its place, the resurgence of the chaotic forces of nature's own order: those primal impulses which reassert themselves in Achilles' Book I count-

41 41 43 44

Peter Green, Ovid: The Erotic Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 338. Esp. at climactic moments at the end of each Book: 1,681-704; II,711-716. Including the senes/puer distinction; cf. Daedalus/Icarus, 11,30. Cf. ferus, 9; also mea pectora, 2if.

25

erparts, Bacchus and the cohorts of Romulus; in his Book II reformulation, Icarus; and even in the praeceptor himself, whose barbarus amor at times transgresses the restrictive precepts of his own civilizing system. His audacious expectation, et mihi cedet Amor (»and Love shall yield to me«), seems already at the outset poised to revert to the Vergilian position it aimed to subvert, et nos cedamus Amori (»and let us yield to Love«) yet stripped of any illusion that such an Amor would be a gentle victor. What we need to note, however, is that Achilles as the embodiment of (male) natura is by no means the only source for potential violence in this program. Chiron as the »purveyor of cultus« proves an equally potent source as well. Hollis points out the paradox to placida contudit arte and calls it »an effective word order, since by itself the verb would imply a violent subjection,« contundo meaning >to break, grind, crush or pound.° C f . III,343f.; RA

361.

''

E.g., Tibullus I , 2 , 2 i f . ;

51

Thomas, ρ 7 1 4 .

Amores

1,4,

ιγίί.; Tristia 1 1 , 4 5 1 - 5 4 .

29

in the pentameter: cui tarnen ipsa faves, vincat ut ille, precox (»but the one you favor I pray may win«). As this line and the following two couplets make clear, he may not be zealously attached to high-bred horses, but he certainly is to his would-be mistress. This is the witty contrast worked out especially in lines 5 and 6 but thematically motivating the whole poem, and it more than justifies the emphatic placement of studiosus in the first line. It is in a sense the signature of the protagonist's personality. In the Ars, on the other hand, studiosus is moved farther down to a less programmatic position, and even there it occurs in a slightly different form: cuius equi veniänt facito studiose requires, nec mora, quisquís erit cui favet, fave. (i4jf.) Make sure you ask, devoted one, whose horses are running, and quick! whomever she favours you favour too.

As Hollis quite correctly notes, the vocative here conveys a subjunctive, or contraryto-fact conditional, tone: »as if you were genuinely interested, actually devoted but are not.« That is, it describes not the intending student himself, but his imitative performance. Of course to some extent, the imitated Studium applies to the feigned interest in horses, an insincere and intentionally somewhat transparent imitation that the student shares with the elegy's protagonist. However, this time the imitated Studium seems to apply to a feigned devotion to the domina as well, to a more general feigned, and fully hidden, basis for overall behavior - to a studiosus decidedly not feigned by the elegy's protagonist. In the Amores, the lover imitates or »cites« the behavior of the hippophile; in the Ars, the student imitates or »cites« this behavior of the lover himself. In the process, the studiosus of the lover, his personal authenticity, becomes just as artificial and ludically unreal as the originally assumed studiosus of the derby-devotee. By a simple strategy of re-presentation, the reality behind the pretence is changed almost beyond recognition: what was genuinely original is deliberately reduced to secondhand, literalized, and dehumanized convention. Significantly, the strategy is the same as the poet's : as he imitates or represents his poem, so does the student his lover. The basic change in strategy which the change in studiosus suggests soon emerges as the organizing principle to Ovid's reworking of the entire elegy. Almost every exclusion, every repositioning, every addition can be traced back to the attempt to replace personal originality with literary convention, natura with materia - by no means an easy task. Exclusion is easily the most conspicuous facet of Ovid's reworking: an original 84 lines become an economical 27, over two thirds less. Omissions are every bit as important as repetitions, and in some ways more important, insofar as they constitute what the imitation would render obsolete, overcome, or absent. And just about every omission follows from the first, the exclusion of the second couplet, in which the protagonist explains why, if uninterested in horses, he has come: jo

ut loquerer tecum, veni, tecumque sederem, ne tibi non notus, quem facis, esset amor. I came to talk with you, and to sit with you, so that y o u might not miss knowing the love y o u stir.

As we will have occasion to emphasize again, the reason for the protagonist's presence, indeed for his whole pattern of zealous behavior, is precisely this amor. The word itself occurs three more times in the course of the elegy, each time again in the emphatic final position of the couplet (40; 46; jo); amari, a variation, occurs at line-end of j7. This is hardly noteworthy in a love elegy, even in as comically angled a one as 111,2. What is noteworthy is its studied exclusion from the Ars passage. The word, in any form or variant, simply does not occur, and its suppression is so systematic as to be all-decisive. The poet's omission is also, essentially also, to be the lover's. What the imitation attempts to exclude from the student's activity is the original impetus, the lover's authenticity - his amor. This is made clear in two other instances of editorial litura, the exclusion of the somewhat whimsical witticism in the lover's waving about his program and of the lengthy description of the aurea pompa (»golden procession«). In the first case, two couplets in the elegy are reduced to a single line in the Ars: profuit et tenui ventos movisse tabella (»It has helped too to stir the air with a light tablet,« 161). In the elegy, the gesture is closely connected with the conceit that the troublesome heat comes from the protagonist's own amor, his own animus: V i s tamen interea faciles arcessere ventos, quos faciet nostra mota tabella manu? an magis his meus est animi, non aeris, aestus, captaque femineus pectora torret amor?

(39Í.)

Would y o u like, while w e wait, to bid soft breezes blow? I'll take the tablet in m y hand and start them. O r is it rather the heat of m y heart and not of the air, and does love for a w o m a n burn m y ravished breast?

The image, standard fare for the elegiac lover, was broached earlier, in a couplet also excluded from the Ars, in connection with the adroitly-gained glimpse at the lady's legs: his ego non visis arsi; quid fiet ab ipsis? in flammam flammas, in mare fundís aquas.

(33f.)

I burned before, when I had not seen them: what shall become of me n o w that I have? Y o u add flames to flame, and waters to the sea.

In each instance, although the gesture is retained, the conceit is conspicuously absent from the Ars. There is to be no burning in the pupil's breast, no driving erotic desire, no flame consuming and uncontrolled. All that Ovid and the student borrow from the protagonist are his program and his conjured airs; the imitation attenuates the original to a tenuis tabella and no more. In the case of the aurea pompa, 16 lines in the elegy are reduced to 2 in the Ars, the longest, continuous passage suppressed in the imitation (43-58; cf. ΑΑ,ι^ί.). îi

In the Amores, the account includes numerous patron deities who, in the form of ivory statues, are carried past the stands of spectators. Each group then applauds its patron - soldiers Mars, hunters Phoebe, artifices Minerva, and farmers Ceres all of whom the protagonist spurns. Then at the end he applauds tibi, blanda Venus, puerisque potentibus arcu (»you, alluring Venus, and your child potent with the bow«) and invokes her aid in his seduction. In the Ars all the deities go unmentioned except Venus, whom the student is instructed to clap favente manu·. at cum pompa frequens caelestibus ibit eburnis, tu Veneri dominae plaude favente manu. (i47Í.) But when the long procession of ivory statues of the gods passes by, applaud lady Venus with favouring hand.

This need not, however, be considered merely a matter of severe »compression.« Rather, the poet's silence is also necessary insofar as the particular »group« to which the student belongs needs to be concealed as well. He is after all, unlike the elegy's lead, secretly engaged as soldier, hunter, artifex, and farmer (cf. Am 4953). What he is secretly not engaged as, however, is lover: this is in a sense the reason for all the other roles, to protect him from pueri potentes arcu. Thus his applauding Venus is radically different from the protagonist's in the elegy. The latter invokes her aid and includes her in his plans, whereas the former merely shows her the samt favor that in the preceding couplet he showed the lady's choice of driver, and with the same fundamental unconcern." He is no more, or less, an actual supporter of the one than of the other. Venus per se is uninvoked and excluded from his plans. The student is to put his trust not in her powers of domination, but in his own powers of imitation. If the exclusion of Venus, amor and ardor from the Ars shows what the poet and praeceptor seem to be doing, the exclusion of the relationship, in the elegy, between the protagonist and favored driver - thematically the most central aspect of the episode - shows why. In the Amores, not only are the role and fate of the favored driver closely connected with those of the lover. The protagonist's personal, imaginative identification with the role of the racer is also closely connected with his personal identification with and participation in his own role of lover. Both arise out of the same imaginative license; both expose the protagonist to similar risks. He immediately feels drawn to the figure of the racer, by virtue of the favor he enjoys in the eyes of his would-be mistress: o cuicumque faves, felix agitator equorum! ergo illi curae contigit esse tuae? hoc mihi contingat (7-9) O happy driver, whoever he be, that wins your favor! Ah, so 'twas he had the fortune to enlist your concern? Be that fortune mine [!] " favet/fave,

32

146; favente manu, 148.

Like the figure of the elegiac lover, the rider's success or failure, his happiness and misery are seen as wholly dependent on the woman's favor (cf. 18, vincamus dominae quisque favore suae [»let us each win through the favor of our lady«]). Conversely, like the figure of the rider, the lover's self seems gambled, at risk, exposed to the dangers of his uncertain enterprise. The two figures are thus thematically linked. Against this background, at the moment when the racer enjoys the desired favor, the protagonist's initial, apostrophic envy flows into an imaginative fantasy in which he actually becomes the rider and then, in turn and as the rider, the dumbstruck elegiac lover, who loses hold of the reins at sight of the girl. That is, his amor, a distinctly imaginative passion, fosters a close, sympathetic identification with his desired acquired role. This is the source of the »personal interest and participation« that the critics so admire. But another side to this personal participation emerges near the end when, due to insufficient skill, the rider appears to have lost both his race and the lady's grace : quid fads, infelix ? perdis bona votapuellae (»What are you doing, unhappy one ? You will lose the girl's good wishes«). Due to his close, imaginative identification with the role of the racer, the protagonist has also exposed himself, set himself at risk. The result is that, when the rider appears infelix, the protagonist is ineluctably drawn into the all-defining elegiac lament, me miserum! B y allowing himself the imaginative license inseparable from his passion, the protagonist unwittingly betrays himself into an identification with and personal participation in a role not fully in his own control, and this constantly threatens personal miseria. This is not only true of the role of the racer, but also and more importantly of his own role as elegiac lover: miseria is the chanced condition of its personal engagement. There is, then, a studied exclusion of this figure of the racer in the Ars, as well as of the protagonist's personal interest and participation in his fortunes: on the one hand because such a figure no longer functions as a correlate to this would-be lover's via;54 and on the other because such personal, imaginative identification with assumable roles is just what the elimination of amor and mediation of mechanical imitation are designed to guard against and prevent. The aim is twofold. First, imitation instead of identification should fend off the defining me miserum! by separating the self from the role at risk and dependent upon favor. Second, it should undo the traditional loss of power and control over his own fortunes by strengthening his skills to »hold on to the reins« the lover so willingly drops. The imposition of the principle of imitation is not only designed to regulate the imaginative participation which seems inseparable from amor and so potentially self-violating. It is also designed to govern the natural spontaneity and irra-

H

There is of course a sustained use of the figure of a chariot-rider throughout the Ars as a functional parallel to both the poet's and student-lover's activity, but unlike the figure in ΙΙΙ,ι the one in the Ars is a representative of technical control and skill. That he nonetheless so often seems out of control is another matter. See below. 33

tionality which also adhere to genuine emotion and likewise threaten the lover's self-control. This is perhaps more evident in the poet's rearranging rather than excluding of original elements; for example, in his reworked imitation of the passage in the elegy where the protagonist abruptly turns his attention away from his imaginative identification with the racer and addresses the just jostled domina·. quid frustra refugis? cogit nos linea iungi; haec in lege loci commoda Circus habet, tu tarnen, a dextra quicumque es, parce puellae: contactu lateris laeditur illa tui; tu quoque, qui spectas post nos, tua contrahe crura, si pudor est, rigido nec preme terga genu. (19-24) Why draw back from me? It will do no good: the line compels us to sit close. This advantage the circus gives, with its rule of space - yet you there on the right, whoever you are, have a care; your pressing against the girl's side annoys. You, too, who are looking on from behind, draw up your legs, if you care for decency, and press not her back with your hard knee!

The spontaneous interjection, quid frustra refugis ?, arises here disjointedly and »naturally,« in reaction to an action. In fact, such disjointedness and naturalness are characteristic of the whole monologue and, consequently, of the protagonist's personality as well. This is grammatically secured by the number of disjunctive tamens and seds which dis/connect the abruptly swerving actions of the protagonist: his commands to his neighbors (tamen, 21), lifting of the lady's trailing cloak (sed, 25), fanning her with his program (tamen, 37), brushing off offending dust or looking out for the welfare of her little feet (sed, 63)." This grammatical looseness and lack of careful coordination is expressive of what Laclos' Valmont calls »that disorder which alone can portray feeling«:' 6 the lover's natural spontaneity involuntarily articulates the genuineness of his desire by betraying its control over his actions. The Amores passage also expresses the protagonist's uncontrolled irrationality. In the second two couplets (21-24), he demands that the surrounding others desist from doing precisely what he is doing and precisely what, in the preceding couplet (i9f.), he claimed was in any case an unavoidable in/convenience of the place, namely, crowding close in on one another. His amorous impulsiveness leads him to, and blinds him to, unwittingly comical and contradictory actions. Equally importantly, it infuses him with an unwarranted, exaggerated sense of control and influence over his engaged reality. This is modestly the case here, insofar as he thinks he can successfully control the behavior of the other spectators. It is more outrageously so later on, when he imagines that the statue Venus nods to him in answer to his prayer, that the racer's horses know his and his lady's " !Grand cru Chateau Mouton Rothschild< - zwei elegante Tropfen« (278). In each latter case, our readerly access to the original is occluded, cut off: and if this promotes discretion and good taste, it does so by denying the reader any discretion or »taste« at all. An example that brings out the consequences of this stylization for character might come in a look at Felix and his father. »Mein Vater,« explains Felix, »wiewohl dick und fett, besass viel persönliche Grazie und legte stets Gewicht auf eine gewählte und durchsichtige Ausdrucksweise, [und] gern liess er - und zwar in vorzüglicher Aussprache - Wendungen wie >c'est ça, épatant< oder >parfaitement< in seine Rede einfliessen« (265^). His father's command of select and »lucid« language manages to impart grace, attractiveness, even style to what still remains - or does it? - his basic, solid fat. This is, after all, the man from whom Felix acquired his love of language, his love of life in language; it is also and hardly accidently the man from whom he learned to give »dem Publikum, woran es glaubt,« by means of »gewählter« although hardly »durchsichtiger« language. But as we have seen, when Felix applies this practice to his own character, his position as narrator allows him to take it one step further. For when Felix uses his command of language to impart grace and style to his character, there is nothing that needs remain basic, solid, distasteful, or original: the stylization is complete and so the »public« completely satisfied, that is, deceived. »Wer die Welt recht liebt, der bildet sich ihr gefällig« (330), says Felix concerning his own body: where Felix applies all his narratorial efforts to fashioning his character-self in the image of this partly self-fashioned beloved's desires and expectations; and where the public, the reader is granted the determinative role Felix earlier denied, but conversely robbed of his discriminatory role. And yet again, this is but the half of it. If on the one hand the reader functions as the (excluded) audience for Felix's self-stylization, on the other he functions as the (included) attestant to »dem Geheimnis seiner feinen Existenz« (272), that is, of his imaginary, artificial existence. For even as Felix would stylistically conceal from his reader much that is distastefully »natural,« he will also continually expose to him the condition and operation of the otherwise silent and unseen artifice which distinguishes his life from the merely natural. This is the other pole to the ludic relationship Felix constructs with and through the reader, the other turn to his constant game of hide and seek. For instance, Felix awakes one morning with the resolve to »be« a certain Prince Karl, an imaginary existence hidden to all others and yet still the basis for his claim to superiority over »die gewöhnlichen 189

Burschen mit hartem Haar und roten Händen« (273): and Felix needs his reader to acknowledge his elevating invention, the self-stylization that separates him from unshaped »reality.« Similarly but more pointedly, when Felix plays school-sick the reader plays as essential a role in Felix's performance as the doctor, although in a diametrically opposed capacity. If Felix is intent not to reveal to the doctor for a moment or with the slightest of hints that he is counterfeiting his condition - for paradoxically, just this would make his case »natural« and commonplace - he is equally intent to show the reader at every moment and in the smallest details that he does mechanically produce his symptoms and never is »really« sick - for paradoxically again, just this would make his case natural and commonplace. In fact, this need for a discriminating witness, for an attestant to the stylistics behind the production, occasions Felix's first direct address to the reader, a slight but significant shift from the »in zweiter Linie« status ceded in the previous chapter (our first citation), and an equally significant shift from the merely implicit audience status in Felix's stylization. »Der Leser wird die Uberzeugung gewonnen haben, und ich gebe ihm mein Ehrenwort zum Pfände, dass ich nicht im gröberen Sinne krank war« (305), insists Felix, and with this remark he initiates a more conscious and articulated relationship with his equally more conscious and articulated reader. This more conscious implication of the more conscious reader begins radically to affect Felix's narratorial practice in the following chapter, in which he reports his chocolate theft. Wishing to retain the propriety that he feels his reader demands - or rather, demands his reader demand - Felix is almost compelled to adopt certain inventive and imaginative literary strategies for self-presentation which inevitably draw him away from a simple, immediate report of a first person toward a more self-consciously fictional creation of character. At the same time, he is forced more and more to acknowledge his reader, not only as a collusive but also as a competitive, independent consciousness, which in turn leads to the increasingly agonistic character of his narration - hence the need for literary strategy. We mentioned earlier two of these strategies, the fairy-tale/ dream device and the moral sophistry whereby the narrator forcibly intervenes and seeks to impose the optical system through which his character's actions are to be viewed. Immediately following the most extended instance of the latter, Felix offers this rather defensive aside: Der etwaige Leser verzeihe mir diese Abschweifung ins rein Betrachtende . . . Allein ich erachte es für meine Pflicht, ihn nach Möglichkeit mit den Eigentümlichkeiten meines Lebens zu versöhnen, oder aber, wenn dies unmöglich sein sollte, ihn beizeiten vom Weiterblättern in diesen Papieren abzuhalten. (309!)

The similarities with the narrative situation that provoked the previous apology in Chapter 5 (»ich müsste mir vorwerfen,« etc.) are obvious: the narrator pauses to note how he has departed from a straightforward report of factual details and 190

slipped into analytical elaboration of more abstract issues. But the differences in his relationship with the reader are equally obvious. Whereas before the right to judge was retained by Felix alone {»ich müsste mir vorwerfen«), here it is yielded to the »possible« reader; whereas before Felix admitted to no obligation to his reader (beyond style), here he most emphatically does. For whereas before he claimed that »ich lediglich mein eignes, eigentümliches Leben vortrage,« here he allows the added responsibility, »ihn [den Leser] nach Möglichkeit mit den Eigentümlichkeiten meines Leben zu versöhnen,« that is, actively and consciously to mediate, to accommodate his »personal, original life« to the concerns and expectations of his reading public. And as he decided then, these expectations were to include not only a concern for stylistic and moral decorum, but also for art-work, for aesthetically disciplined artifice - for subjecting his character to the codes and controls of literary creation. We cannot afford to lose sight of the effect of the narrator's increasing realization of his relationship with his reader, and that is the increasing de-realization of his relationship with his character: the paper-work made more conscious is bound to make the character just that - more consciously paper-work. The shift in the optic of Felix's art away from the intimate and monologic and toward the public and performative - or if you will, toward the dramatic and dialectic - receives emphatic expression in the apostrophe that opens the following chapter: »Unbekannter Leser!« (311). And the motivation behind the apostrophe is equally significant. Felix is about to recount his first sexual encounter, and this causes him to pause: »Nicht ohne zuvor die geläufige Feder beiseite gelegt... zu haben, betrete ich hiermit ein Gebiet,« etc. (311). Felix desires to strike the right tone, affect the appropriate style »in den folgenden Zeilen,« not only out of his own inclinations, nor only out of his respect for his reader's moral sensibilities, but also and more importantly out of respect for his reader's literary sensibilities. That is, he wants to give his audience a suitably literary character. Felix explains, »Ich bin weit entfernt, mich ausführlich über eine Episode verbreiten zu wollen, die zu gewöhnlich ist, als dass ihre Einzelheiten das gebildete Publikum fesseln könnten« (313). Felix displays here a deference to the aesthetic interests he imputes to his reader - and we note how through this imputation, the reader is himself further fashioned and >improved< (»gebildet«) - which enforces both an editorial discretion and literary stylization on his character. The »personal, original life« is thereby, on the one hand, more and more suppressed (or omitted) and replaced by concerns for a well-proportioned and disciplined »Kunstwerk« and, on the other, itself invested with all the tastefulness of its retrospective literary representation. By that most essential act of artefaction and animation, style becomes character, aesthetic propriety a kind of moral propriety, and public notions of literary decorum private attributes of »spiritual« persuasion. Thus, when Felix closes off this episode with the claim, »Hiemit verlasse ich diese Materie, bei deren Bearbeitung ich den Kanon des Schicklichen keinen 191

Augenblick durchbrochen zu haben glaube« (315), he is calling our attention to a rather complex set of interrelated points. First, simply to his narratorial presence and process and implicit awareness of his implicit reader; for as modest as such a gesture may seem, it nonetheless arrests our focus on the interceding paper-work. Second, to his increased awareness of his original life as literary material, and his report as a working, or rather reworking, of that material. And third, to his reworking of that material as explicitly involving the accommodation of his character to canonical, that is, literary (as well as moral) standards and controls, both attributed to and generated by the reader. The reader himself becomes more »tasteful,« shaped and determined by the imposed, imputed norms; but so too and in turn does Felix's character, upon whom this consequent, code-controlled literalization ultimately and inevitably devolves.84 We can see, then, that something of a tension has built up between the twin pulls of Felix's literary endeavor, the desire on the one hand to render an unshaped, im-mediate, and intimate account of his first-person character and, on the other, to produce »ein schönes und regelmässiges Kunstwerk« of appropriate literary character. This tension comes to a head at the beginning of Book II, where Felix openly admits not only to the prominent role the reader has played all along in his writing, but also to the attendant pressure toward a more radical fictionalization of his material: Lange haben diese Papiere unter Verschluss geruht... Denn obgleich ich auf den vorstehenden Seiten mehrfach versichert habe, dass ich diese Denkwürdigkeiten hauptsächlich und in erster Linie zu meiner eigenen Unterhaltung und Beschäftigung aufzeichne, so will ich nur auch . . . eingestehen, dass ich insgeheim . . . beim Schreiben doch auch der lesenden Welt einige Rücksicht zuwende . . . Da aber musste mir die Frage vorlegen, ob wahrhaftige und bescheiden der Wirklichkeit sich anschliessende Vertraulichkeiten aus meinem Leben mit den Erfindungen der Schriftsteller würden wetteifern können. (322)

Felix's response to the challenge is, characteristically, split. Whereas on the one hand he still intends to report his »bescheiden der Wirklichkeit sich anschliessenden« intimacies (and we duly note that this approximation, this »Gleichnis,« is as close as Felix ever cares to come to reality), on the other he nonetheless intends to report them in such a way that they compete more successfully with the inventions of novelists for the entertainment of his audience. The obvious implication is that, in his own way, Felix intends to be equally novelistically inventive in his handling of his character-self (and we duly note the self-citation, »in erster Linie zu meiner eigenen Unterhaltung,« which in turn exposes the specific force to the similarly repeated »Rücksicht«: the artefaction has already begun, the solution 84

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None of this excludes the possibility for Felix to »improvise« on the reader's values, to engage in a process of deformation through seeming conformation such as that described in relation to the »Erbschaft« in our second section.

preceded the dilemma). His final promise in this proemio chapter underscores his intended foregrounding of refined literary design in a modest way. He assures us, »Ich beabsichtige, mir dabei, was Reinlichkeit des Stiles und Schicklichkeit des Ausdrucks betrifft, womöglich eine noch grössere Sorgfalt aufzuerlegen als bisher« (323), a strategy which, through the detour of a more clean, proper, and stylized reader, translates into similarly improved, and similarly literary, »character.« But what follows reveals a realization of literary machinations and contamination that exceeds even this admitted escalation in literary design: Felix rises, as it were, to the literary occasion, and this has important repercussions for both reader and character. This more consciously literary handling of his self and reader manifests itself in a number of ways. At its simplest, we have direct addresses to the reader which emphasize Felix's greater awareness of and concern for the audience's independent and detached perspective on his report - an independence and detachment, moreover, which become matched by the narrator's own perspective. For example, when Schimmelpreester announces, »jetzt komme ich drittens zu unserem Kostümkopf,« Felix slips in the parenthetical aside, »(Der Leser versteht die in diesem Namen enthaltene Anspielung)« (333). As innocuous a remark as this may seem (and be), it nonetheless hints at a subtle shift in Felix's attitude toward his »seif«: a certain literary distance from that self, an optic which almost makes that self more of an independent creature of the text than an attached, existential part of his own identity. Felix comes, that is, to view himself from as detached and literary a position as does the reader, while still maintaining an equally detached because equally literary - position from that reader. The same codes and controls come to mediate both relationships and to shape both roles. In the same mode, when Schimmelpreester admits to his powerlessness in relation to Felix's military obligations, Felix observes, »So sah ich mich in einem so kitzligen Falle allein auf mich selbst gestellt, und der Leser wird sehen, ob ich seiner Herr wurde« (335). Here Felix momentarily occludes our access, and his own, to his experience in an admittedly modest attempt to create literary suspense and arouse readerly curiosity (cf. »bis ich nach Paris abgehen oder zweifarben Tuch würde anlegen müssen,« 339). That is, he begins consciously and purposefully to arrange, dispose, and manipulate his reader and his original material according to literary, and specifically novelistic, principles of calculation and design, to which he calls attention. Quite simply, his »life« begins to become literature as Felix depersonalizes, de-realizes, and formalizes his relationship with his character and his reader, and thereby gains »literary« control over both. Similar occlusions calculated to maintain readerly interest and apportion proper proportion to the represented material are at work in the opening lines of the chapter immediately preceding the conscription episode, Chapter 4: »Geschwind schlüpfe ich über die ersten, verworrenen Tage hin, die unserer Ankunft in Frankfurt folgten, denn . . . [ich] müsste besorgen, durch eine breite Schilde-

m

rung unserer damaligen Umstände den Missmut des Lesers zu erregen« (336). Again, Felix manipulates access to »reality« for literary effect, arranging the highlights and tempo, the perspective and shadows (e.g., »Ich schweige von,« »Ich schweige auch von«); again, he forms and deforms his character to aesthetic controls, concerned to accommodate the (equally formed and deformed) reader; and again, he calls emphatic attention to his literary designs, his interceding work and mediatory presence between reader and character, reader and reality, or rather: reader and representation. Especially coming here at the opening of its chapter, this sentence advertises how Felix is novelistically »staging« his character throughout, binding him to literary conventions, and presenting him as moving as much through his text as through his original life. The implicit consequences or results of this increasingly literalized, formalized, and de-personalized relationship with his character can most clearly and forcibly be seen later on in Chapter 4, when Felix actually begins to present himself in the third-person: »Nun seht den unscheinbar gekleideten Jüngling, wie er, allein, freundlos und im Getriebe verloren die bunte Fremde durchstreicht!« (340). Felix is no longer »himself,« but split, fragmented into a literary creator and a literary creation, a self who creates textual artifice and a self who is a creature of that textual artifice. This is, we should note, radically different from the initially conceived split between the elderly memorialist and »dem fremden Wesen« of his earlier self, for then the split was determined by nature, but here by art. And as Felix himself might say, this new relationship to his character-self is »als ein Produkt der Selbstüberwindung zu würdigen«: the narrator realizes his »seif« as literary character by de-realizing, destroying, and violating the original, natural, and immediate grounding of that self in - himself. We should just briefly note that Mann was particularly concerned to maintain and even augment the increasingly self-conscious practice of the narrator, his more literary handling of his self and more active engagement with the reader when he (Mann) reworked the ending of Chapter 4 for the 1954 edition (the chapter breaks off in mid-sentence in the 1937 edition). A few representative examples. In the paragraph that begins, »O Szenen der schönen Welt!«, Mann has Felix explicitly identify himself as an »Erzähler« (»als solcher betätige ich mich doch auf diesen Blättern,« 344), a slight but significant move away from the mere memorialist or confessor of a less literarily conceived enterprise. Moreover, Felix makes the self-identification as he discusses with his reader his awareness of the codes for literary production, and especially of the principles governing plotting, principles that he is quite self-consciously intending to transgress. A bit later on, Felix begins a paragraph, »Schwärmer und Gaffer! höre ich den Leser mir zurufen . . . Gedenkst du mich durch dein ganzes Buch hin mit solchen . . . Quisquillen . . . zu unterhalten?« (346). Here Felix actually gives his reader a voice, a dramatic presence and occasion to express his demand for entertaining, that is, code-controlled »Kunstwerk.« He goes even further and (explicitly) makes his reader 194

»make« his character: »Drücktest auch wohl, bis etwa ein Konstabier dich weitertrieb, Stirn und Nase an grosse Glasscheiben . . . ? - So tat ich - und bin überrascht, wie treffend der Leser . . . meine Schaugenüsse wiederzugeben weiss« (346). In the 1937 version, the same passage was simply rendered in the declarative first-person (»Ich drückte,« etc.): its revision brings out not only Felix's more playful and agonistic relationship with his reader, but also his more playful attitude toward his character-self, who is become more and more a plaything between himself and his reader. 8 ' In fact, Felix even goes so far as to have his reader become his character (»gerade als hätte er [der Leser] selbst seine Nase an den erwähnten Scheiben plattgedrückt«). While still maintaining a certain critical, calculated distance from the reader's position, Felix nonetheless gives graphic expression here to that dialectical process of literalization in which both his reader and character are joined: where the reader is increasingly fashioned in Felix's, and Felix in the reader's image, and both according to the codes of novellistic fiction. Finally, in the last paragraph of the 1954 edition, Felix declares »das sage ich [>jedes Wort sei an und für sich und als solches bereits eine Phrase