The Ovidian Soundscape: the Poetics of Noise in the Metamorphoses
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The Ovidian Soundscape: The Poetics of Noise in the Metamorphoses Sarah Kathleen Kaczor Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Sarah Kathleen Kaczor All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Ovidian Soundscape: The Poetics of Noise in the Metamorphoses Sarah Kathleen Kaczor This dissertation aims to study the variety of sounds described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and to identify an aesthetic of noise in the poem, a soundscape which contributes to the work’s thematic undertones. The two entities which shape an understanding of the poem’s conception of noise are Chaos, the conglomerate of mobile, conflicting elements with which the poem begins, and the personified Fama, whose domus is seen to contain a chaotic cosmos of words rather than elements. Within the loose frame provided by Chaos and Fama, the varied categories of noise in the Metamorphoses’ world, from nature sounds to speech, are seen to share qualities of changeability, mobility, and conflict, qualities which align them with the overall themes of flux and metamorphosis in the poem. I discuss three categories of Ovidian sound: in the first chapter, cosmological and elemental sound; in the second chapter, nature noises with an emphasis on the vocality of reeds and the role of echoes; and in the third chapter I treat human and divine speech and narrative, and the role of rumor. By the end of the poem, Ovid leaves us with a chaos of words as well as of forms, which bears important implications for his treatment of contemporary Augustanism as well as his belief in his own poetic fame. Contents Acknowledgments ii Preface: Initial Soundings iii Chapter 1 1 The Resounding Cosmos: Chaos, Fama, and the Cosmology of Noise Listening to the House of Fama 1 The Metamorphoses’ Chaos and its Echoes 4 Lucretius: a Cosmological Echo 7 Ovid’s Two Chaoses 10 Flood, Fire, and the Lament of Earth 16 Vocal Elements and Chaotic Narration 25 The Elements at Home: Achelous 29 The Tiber and Virgilian Echoes 36 Chaos and Cosmic Din 44 Pythagoras: Fama Narrates the Cosmos 53 Chapter 2 61 Sonorous Nature: The Voices of Reeds and Willful Echoes The Living Landscape 61 The Chaos of Reeds in Words and Music 67 The Reeds’ Lament: Syrinx 67 The Pipe, the Lyre, and Speaking Reeds 74 A Violent Pipe and Defiant Reeds 84 The Deconstructed Pipe 88 Resonabilis Echo 92 Echo: Nature’s Fama 103 Chapter 3 107 The Sounds of Gods and Mortals: Speech, Rumor, and Narrative The Beginnings of Language and Speech 108 The First Speakers 114 The Gods Speak to Mortals 125 Mortals Talk Back 137 Inklings of Rumor 142 Fama Crescens 148 The Growing Registers of Human Speech 150 The Achievements of Human Speech 160 The Triumph of Human Speech 164 Epilogue 176 Bibliography 190 i Acknowledgements My thanks must go first to Gareth Williams, without whose constant encouragement and endless patience this project could never have come to fruition. I am so very grateful for his kindness, humor, and generosity with his time, knowledge, and insights. I am greatly indebted also to Katharina Volk, for her kind interest in and encouragement of my work over the years, and for fanning the flames of my love for Ovid. I thank the other members of my committee, Matt McGowan, Joe Howley, and Kristina Milnor for the gift of their time and their thoughtful comments. Thanks go also to Liz Scharffenberger, Nancy Worman, Liz Irwin, Marco Fantuzzi, Jim Zetzel, and the Columbia professors who have listened to my ideas and willingly shared their own experience and expertise. To Molly, Charley, Joe, Caleb, and Kate, I thank you for the camaraderie, friendship, and laughter that filled my days in Hamilton Hall. Immense gratitude goes to my parents, who bought me my first mythology book and with unfailing support and constant enthusiasm have cheered me on in my studies and my work ever since. Finally, I thank my husband, Tony, who did all the cooking and cleaning and walked the dog so that I could write, and made sure that I remembered to laugh. Your love and kindness assisted this project in so many ways, and I am more grateful than I can say. ii Preface: Initial Soundings Ovid’s Metamorphoses may be regarded, in a particular sense, as an extremely noisy work. While the mind’s eye is captivated by the spectacle of the shape shifting and varied transformations of gods, people, and the natural world, if one attempts not only to look at the poem’s changeable universe but also to listen to it, then the cacophony of the Metamorphoses becomes strikingly audible to the attentive ear. Housed within the narrator’s all-encompassing deductum carmen are the voices of gods and humans, animals and birds, and human voices that become animal or bird voices. There are sounds of wind, water, and thunder. There are voices telling stories, laughing, crying, screaming, and prophesying. While instances of such sounds and situations are present in many ancient poems, the quick transitions and juxtapositions of such a variety of noises are a hallmark of Ovid’s style in the Metamorphoses and call attention to the layers of meaning in the poem. This dissertation aims to explore not the landscape but the soundscape of the poem, in its variety of noises and the times and places in which they are heard; and to examine how this soundscape contributes to the thematic undertones continually sustaining and complicating the poem’s messages, just as the somber notes of predestination that are heard throughout Virgil’s Aeneid, or the random collisions of Lucretius’ atoms, contribute fundamentally to the meanings of those works. Noise in the ancient world, and in Ovid, has been studied from a rich variety of angles and with an assortment of focal points. The sense of hearing and the role played by vocal and non-vocal noise in texts have enjoyed greater attention in classical studies in the last few decades, as evidenced by Hans-Georg Niklaus’ 1994 study of cosmological sound, Die Maschine des Himmels: Zur Kosmologie und Ästhetik des Klangs; Maurizio Bettini’s 2008 book Voci: iii Antropologia sonora del mondo antico, a study of the characterization of different types of animal and human vocal sounds in ancient literature; and more recently, Shane Butler’s 2015 exploration of ancient sound theories, The Ancient Phonograph. These works aim to answer the question of how the ancient Greeks and Romans aimed to understand and interact with their surroundings through vocal and audible means. Works such as these take into account the sociological, psychological, and physiological backgrounds and implications of speech, hearing, and verbal interpretation in the ancient mindset, as well as their literary deployment. The particularities of Ovidian sound are most often studied in connection with his portrayal of the politics and psychology of speech and speech loss or deprivation (for example, Bartolo Natoli’s recent book Silenced Voices (2017); Lynn Enterline’s The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000); and Denis Feeney’s 1992 article “Si Licet et Fas Est: Ovid’s Fasti and The Problem of Free Speech Under the Principate”); also with regard to the wordplay and “linguistic acrobatics”1 between the level of the word and its meaning that become apparent when the poem is read aloud – an approach exemplified in Frederick Ahl’s 1985 Metaformations and renewed in Garth Tissol’s 1997 book The Face of Nature; and in terms of the significance of the many narrative voices in the Metamorphoses (for example, Alessandro Barchiesi’s “Voices and Narrative Instances in the Metamorphoses” (2001), Stephen Wheeler’s Narrative Dynamics in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2000), and Gianpiero Rosati’s “Narrative Techniques and Narrative Structures in the Metamorphoses” (2002)). This dissertation aims to take a step toward a broader understanding of Ovidian noise by looking at the thematic links among the varied types of noise that occur in the Metamorphoses – human and non-human, verbal and non-verbal. Like Ovid’s poem, my study begins in Chaos and 1 Rosati (1983) 153. iv ends with Augustus and the poet. My discussion is arranged in three complementary parts, each building from and referring back to the others with appropriate echoes: in Chapter 1, the sounds of the poem’s cosmology; in Chapter 2, the sounds of the natural world; and in Chapter 3, the sounds of the human and divine realms. Through close readings of significant passages, not least with reference to epic models provided by Virgil and Lucretius, I attempt to trace thematic threads through the poem that lead to the suggestion of an Ovidian poetics – even an aesthetic – of sound in the Metamorphoses. This study will thus link together aspects of the audible world in the poem that have previously tended to be studied separately, notable among them the evocation of the landscape and the speech/silence dichotomy; and this approach will serve in turn to demonstrate the significance of all these sonal aspects together in supporting the poem’s general themes of fluidity and change. The Metamorphoses begins with Chaos, and ends with Augustan Rome and the poet’s declaration of his own immortality. This apparent progression from cosmic disorder to Roman order, however, is only partially supported by the events, and the erratic soundtrack, of the fifteen books between these two points. It has been frequently noted2 that Chaos continues to be an underlying presence in the poem, a phenomenon discernible in many episodes from the consecutive creations and destructions of the world in Books 1 and 2, to the fluidity of form that makes metamorphosis possible, to the destructive immorality of villainous characters such as Procne’s brutal husband Tereus, and so on.