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Ovid and the Discourses of Love: the Amatory Works

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Ovid and the Discourses of Love: the Amatory Works 9 ALISON SHARROCK Ovid and the discourses of love: the amatory works All poets speak in quotations. In the decades immediately before Ovid wrote his love poetry, Propertius and Tibullus (and Gallus and Catullus before them) developed an elegiac genre in which the speaker is enslaved to a mis- tress, and chooses a life of decadence and devotion rather than civic and military success. The poems beseech and reproach the beloved, show her off to friends, and occasionally celebrate her and the relationship, rhetor- ically laying out in public the life of a young man in Augustan Rome: all this through a poetics which is clever, difficult, artistic, and stylized. Then Ovid did it again – differently. Much of Ovid’s amatory work is infused with an aesthetics of repetition: of material, of style, of himself, and in his characters.1 All lovers speak in quotations. This precept of the modern erotodidact Roland Barthes was implicitly foreshadowed by Ovid when he outrageously reminds us that militat omnis amans (‘every lover is a soldier’, Am. 1.9.1):2 that is, every lover enters into a discourse of erotic imagery in dialogue and in conflict with his society, literary, social, and political. Ovid’s amatory works put private life on display – or rather, show us how private life is always already on display, a fiction played out for real, a reality fantasized. The discourses of love, the erotic as discourse, discourse as erotic – these things are at issue throughout the Ovidian corpus: in this chapter, I shall confine the discussion to the Amores, the Ars amatoria, and the Remedia amoris. Ovid’s three books of Amores, which once were five (so the poems claim when they introduce themselves), are a collection of short poems playing with the topoi of love elegy: the locked-out lover, the slave go-between, the traditional symptoms of love, the rich rival, the witch-bawd, infidelity, the military, political, and poetic alternatives, and even the occasional successful 1 For help with thinking through this essay I am very grateful to Sergio Casali, Philip Hardie, John Henderson, and Duncan Kennedy. They may recognize that critics speak in quotations too. 2 On this conceit see McKeown (1995). 150 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Warwick, on 09 Oct 2020 at 16:05:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/termsCambridge Companions. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521772818.011 Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Ovid and the discourses of love: the amatory works erotic encounter.3 Then he did it all again with the Ars amatoria, a didactic poem in elegiacs which teaches the reader how to be a good lover: how to catch a woman, how to keep her, and (addressed to women) how to catch and keep a man. And then yet again with the Remedia amoris, which teaches us how to be good at breaking up. In Ovidian aesthetics, and erotics, artfully judged familiarity can breed content. Many of the issues in the discourse of Ovidian amatory poetry are raised by a poem which stands out as unusually explicit and plays with the reader’s desire to know: Amores 1.5, in which the beloved Corinna pays a midday visit to the lover-poet. Cetera quis nescit? (‘Who does not know the rest?’) The poem plays around with light and half-light, hiding and sight, covering and uncovering. As Corinna teasingly plays at refusing to uncover herself, so Ovid-the-poet plays at refusing to uncover himself, his poetry, his sex, to the reader. Moreover, the poem presents Corinna as the materia and the fons et origo of erotic poetry, but also (it is almost the same thing) as the fetishized object of the gaze, the constructed thing, the fiction that guarantees the superior status of the speaker in the scale of realism.4 He speaks, he looks, he touches, he writes. Most of all, he tells – or doesn’t. The biggest game with telling and not telling concerns the identity of Corinna. Is she ‘real’? People have been asking this since Ovid’s own day, according to the poet himself (Ars 3.538) – but of course he could be bluffing. He places Corinna in a catalogue with other elegiac women, as an example of how poetry can give fame (so love the poet for the sake of his poetry ...). But what use is fame based on a pseudonym?5 And fame which, Ovid hints, derives from a mistaken reading of the Amores. Important work has been done to show how the beloved of elegy may be seen as a manifestation of the poetry itself, rather than as a real woman. When the poet, thinking of writing epic, is forced back into elegy by the puella’s erotic coaxing (Am. 2.1, 2.18), while the personified Elegy (3.1) and the sexy Muse (various in exile) are presented also as puellae, it is impossible to resist the implication that these girls are poems.6 But Ovid won’t let us get away so easily from the tricks of realism and fiction, for Amores 3.12 plays a double bluff with the question of reality. The poet bewails the fact that his beloved is prostituted around the city, thanks 3 For more on the elegiac nature of the amatory poetry see Harrison in chapter 5 of this volume. On the didactic poems, see Schiesaro, chapter 4 in this volume, particularly for the discourse of knowledge which is at stake there. 4 On gaze-theory applied to Roman culture, including elegy, see Fredrick (forthcoming). 5 Ars 3.536 plays around with fame, the reward for being loved by a poet, and names. See Kennedy (1993) 84–5 on pseudonyms. 6 See especially Wyke (1989) and (1990); Cahoon (1985). The correlation between elegiac women and poetics is worked through by Keith (1994). For wider issues relating to women and writing/being written, see Gubar (1986). 151 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Warwick, on 09 Oct 2020 at 16:05:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/termsCambridge Companions. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521772818.011 Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 alison sharrock to the fame of his poetry. At first sight, this looks like pretty clear support for the idea of the beloved as poetry, with the poet and his readers taking the roles of lover and rivals. But then the poem develops into a disquisition on poetic fictionality, arguing that everything in poetry is a lie, all made up, complete fiction. We poets can turn Niobe into stone, make Scylla a thief and turn her into the hideous sea-monster (conflating two Scylla-myths, by the metamorphic power of poetry) – and you persist in believing that I spoke the truth about my beloved? How naive! Et mea debuerat falso laudata uideri | femina; credulitas nunc mihi uestra nocet (‘My woman ought to have been seen to be praised falsely; now your credulity is doing me harm’, 3.12.43–4). Indeed so – except that the ostensible point of the poem is to protest at the excessive erotic popularity of the beloved, whom the poet wants to keep for himself. One level of rhetorical ploy going on here is to suggest the very reality of the beloved precisely in the attempt to deny it. The poem may also be teaching us to read realism with care, realism as discourse. We (lovers, poets, readers, teachers, etc.) do manipulate discourse, but – from an Ovidian/Barthesian point of view – we are the effects of dis- course, which shapes us and figures us as real. Ovid understood this well, and so manipulated (and was manipulated by) an apparent contradiction in love poetry: the lover’s discourse desperately seeks sincerity, with a desire for immediacy and transparency seemingly incompatible with the necessary artifices of poetry. It may sound outrageously insincere when Ovid begs his beloved not to be faithful, but to act as if she were (Amores 3.14), but this too is part of the lover’s discourse: ‘if only I could avoid this suffering’, so it goes, ‘I’d be willing to undergo any indignities as long as I am granted a little love’. Moreover, this again is a poem about keeping things private (3.14.20). The contradiction of speaking publicly about privacy, of speaking sincerely (about insincerity) in a form full of conventions, is shown as essential to the workings of erotic discourse, for what Ovidian erotics expose is that the lover’s desire for immediacy and transparency is mirrored in the reader’s desire to understand, to enter and to belong. Poetic discourse constructs us as readers, just as erotic discourse constructs us as lovers. Professor Ovid tells his pupil est tibi agendus amans (Ars 1.611): ‘you must act the part of a lover’ in order really to become one. It’s easy to call Ovid cynical, and it is comments like this, together with the generic and traditional nature of many themes in Ovidian erotics, that have caused readers some dis- comfort over the question of the poet-lover’s sincerity.7 But Ovid foreknew 7 Davis (1989) is a study of the varieties of acting and role-playing in the Amores. Although it gives, from an artistic point of view, a positive evaluation of Ovid’s playful fictions, nonethe- less it maintains the judgement of ‘insincerity’, for it argues that Ovid occasionally lets his mask drop, and shows us the reality of his feelings (see particularly ch.
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