Narcissus on the Text: Psychoanalysis, Exegesis, Ethics Author(s): Micaela Janan Source: Phoenix, Vol. 61, No.

3/4 (Fall - Winter, 2007), pp. 286-295 Published by: Classical Association of Canada Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20304660 . Accessed: 21/04/2014 03:40
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NARCISSUS ON THE TEXT: PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXEGESIS, ETHICS

Micaela Janan

SYCHOANALYSIS

HAS

HISTORICALLY

BEEN

DRAWN

to

paradigms for its concepts. Sophocles' Oedipus famously inspired Freud; in the discipline's post-structuraHst turn, Jacques Lacan found himself ensorcelled by Oedipus' most famous daughter, Antigone (Lacan 1986). However, Ovid's storyofNarcissus (Metamorphoses3.339-510) has inspired relatively little interest as a positive to the normal human exemplar of deeper psychic mysteries applicable is wonder: Narcissus Small the self-absorbed seemingly at daggers drawn being.1 with a clinical and critical practice founded on intersubjectivity. Yet Narcissus has much to teach us as readers and analyzers of texts. After all, Ovid frames his tale as solving an intertextualmystery. When Narcissus' mother, thewater-nymph Liriope, asks the prophet Tiresias whether her sonwill enjoy long life,Tiresias replies "if he does not know himself -(sise non noverit, 348). Though the sage's words "long seemed meaningless" (vana diu visa est vox auguris, 349), Narcissus' story revolves around uncovering justwhat they do mean. When Tiresias will depend upon refusing predicts that the boy's longevity the he obviously parodies portal inscription of the temple of self-knowledge, at In "Know the ancient world, theDelphic oracle was Apollo Delphi: thyself." the premier locus of ambiguous utterances that demanded exegesis. But Tiresias
situates Narcissus' fate within the same conceptual domain as psychoanalysis: also

as

explicating

classical

texts

his words depict introspection as menacing to (received notions of) the self.No wonder that at either end of the twentieth century, two of Freud's "daughters" found the doomed, beautiful boy's mystery irresistible:Lou Andreas-Salom? and Julia Kristeva. The bizarre facts of the case that sparked the twowomen's imaginations may

easily be summarized. In Ovid's version of Narcissus' story, the beautiful but a ultimately untouchable boy attracts and spurns series of lovers. One rebuffed suitor finally curses his tormentor: sic amet ipse licet,sic nonpotiatur amato! ("May he lovewhat he cannot enjoy!," 405). Narcissus fulfillsthis doom when, seeing
1 Freud's 1914 essay "On Narcissism" (Freud 1957) has inspired a number of responses from his day to our own, but like Freud's own formulation, these have generally seen primary narcissism, the narcissism of childhood, as something to be transcended?an obstacle to full, adult human a development. From this perspective, narcissism that persists into adulthood at best affords window

Notable

onto those types of disorders that Freud did not attempt to analyze: the psychoses and schizophrenia. among such responses are Kohut 1971; Rosenfeld 1982; Grunberger 1979 and 1989; Kernberg 1985. The work ofAndr? Green (1983 and 1986) constitutes a partial exception. Green (1986: 167) a "narcissism of life" from a "narcissism of death"; the power of the former is to support distinguishes "unity and identity,"while only the latter aligns with the "destructive instincts."

286
PHOENIX, VOL. 61 (2007) 3-4.

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NARCISSUSON THE TEXT

287

himself in a pool, he burns for what appears to be another beautiful youth. Ovid turns the screw by having Narcissus eventuallywake up from his delusion and realize his error.He gets no joy of the revelation: enlightenment does not quiet his passion, and he dies despairing. Freud saw Narcissus' grim fate as merely logical: for him, narcissism was a stage to be quickly traversed on theway to full socialization. But Salome's and Kristeva's perspectives differmarkedly from Freud's. Salom? rescues Narcissus fromFreud's deprecating characterization by focusing on inspiration. What Freud saw as a stage that must be abandoned within a zero-sum libidinal economy,

Salom? views as a fundamental condition and a potential passageway. Narcissistic love sparks an ecstatic delirium; it lavishes the riches of the unconscious on the beloved object, thus eliminating "the frontiersof the ego." That overflow of self onto the object enables creativity: in poems, in paintings, and in other creative objects of desire, artists symbolize the ineffableplenitude whence "self emerged, and with which narcissism allows periodic reconnection (Salom? 1900; 1921).2
Kristeva shares Salome's emphasis on narcissism's creative impetus, but as

insubstantial beloved marks the absence of any referent,any flesh-and-blood person whom he could love. Yet by reproducing the gap between sign and referent, the image in the pool also encapsulates the logic of language; language is the "favorite we object" with which palliate the division between "I" and the undifferentiated semiotic continuum whence "I" first distinguished itself (a continuum figuredby thematernal body, for example). Narcissus' relation to his own image delineates
even more

a function of void rather than of plenitude. For her, Narcissus confronts the impassable gap between self and the undifferentiatedAll whence that self emerges. The boy gazes at amere mirage in the pool?an emblem of the "empty," or self-referential, sign (Kristeva 1987: 104). Like the sign,Narcissus' watery,

or the other posits a relationship between two ideas, but does not designate one as essence or origin. In self and and other, subject metaphor, object, I and a are The self in the confounded. fake Narcissan you, poet figures pleasurably 1987: of 267-279). passionately-invested linguistic images metaphor (Kristeva
Salome's and Kristeva's observations on Narcissus

specifically

the

poet's

dependence

on

metaphorical

language.

Metaphor

The

light they shed on what poets do can be broadened to illuminate both what As noted, theNarcissus poets create, andwhat we, as readers, (ought to) do with it. tale pivots on a textual exegesis. But Ovid's tale also infuses a passionately-founded ethics into the act of unfolding meaning, of knowing a cathected (image of the) with the thought of a psychoanalyst who bridges self. Here the tale intersects the conceptual distance between Salom? and Kristeva: Jacques Lacan. Ovid's Narcissus combines strands of the myth previously kept separate, between a
Schultz's sensitive and learned probing of Salome's and Kristeva's writings on love and narcissism has been indispensable in helping me formulate the following summary of the two thinkers' points of commonality and difference (Schultz 1994). 2 Karla

clarify

his

relation

to

poets.

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288

PHOENIX

Narcissus who believes he loves another person, and a Narcissus who knows better. It thereby sets the stage for an act of conscious ethical choice. Ovid evokes the possibility that once undeceived, the boy will renounce his futile passion. Yet he refuses to do so, at the certain cost of his life. The knowing Narcissus as death-bound (Ov.Met. 3.469-473): consistently speaks of himself
dolor vires adimit, nee t?mpora vitae iamque meae in aevo. superant, primoque exstinguor tonga nee mihi mors morte dolores, gravis estposituro hic, qui diligitur, vellem diuturnior esset; nunc duo concordes anima moriemur in una. nor does a now my sorrow saps my remain for my life; I am strength, lengthy span sorrows in since I shall is in my Nor death burdensome, put aside my early years. dying are two hearts in could live longer. Now, death. I do wish that my beloved dying harmony with one breath." "Even

Narcissus Uves out and dies his loyalty to the beloved object, a quintessentially ethical act. In Lacanian terms,he "does not cede his desire."3 Rather than retreat back into impenetrable subjectivity,Narcissus chooses the limited, ephemeral tears regularly erase. He object?the fragile image in the pool, which his falling even refuses oblivion in death. His mortal body gone, the boy's shade stillgazes at its own image inHades. Narcissus has apparently refused to enter Lethe and to

forget his desire. Instead, he exists in limbo. In Lacanian terms, he is suspended "between two deaths":4 between the disappearance of his mortal body and the
erasure But of the desires more than rooted therein. Ovid's Narcissus of his keeps rapture, faith persisting under the spell Narcissus absolutely. also creates

his own passion's exegesis. The knowing Narcissus still alternates between as himself, and as another. Fifteen lines after exclaiming of addressing his image the image in thewater, Iste ego sum! ("That's me!," 463),5 the boy again speaks to the image as though itwere a scornful lover. His tears have disturbed the
water's water, surface, "Quo so that he cannot see himself. He cries out to the face ("Where in the are refugisf remane, nee me, crudelis, amantem / desere!"

you fleeing? Stay, cruel boy, and don't desert me, your lover!," 477-478). His as self, and seeing it as other. monologue oscillates between seeing the image means to "know oneself?to know oneself That oscillation glosses what it fully
"Je propose que la seule chose dont on puisse ?tre coupable, sur son d?sir" (Lacan 1986: 368). analytique, c'est d'avoir c?d? 3 au moins dans la perspective

The last chapter of Lacan's discussion of Sophocles' Antigone in the Ethics ofPsychoanalysis is entitled "Antigone dans l'entre-deux-morts" (Lacan 1986: 315). A more literal translation and exegesis of Iste ego sum! is needed to reflect accurately the sentence's conflicting grammatical distances himself?"that to someone or something from whom the speaker signals. Iste should refer s.v. iste 1). one of By contrast, ego points back at the speaker, yours" (OLD sum clinches the as yet without contradiction. However, paradox necessarily involving logical though and makes Narcissus' exclamation mirror the impossibility of his situation: "that one of yours"?that designated as distant and distinct from the speaker?"I am."

one

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NARCISSUSON THE TEXT

interior. unitary.6 Narcissus overturns received notions of the self as fixed,

289

an otherwho ultimately inhabits one's as radically split, fragile, and bewitched by

autonomous,

prophecy and indirectly th? meaning of theDelphic inscription, but the proper on the image isnot simply "That is Narcissus reflected in the pool; Narcissus gloss has fallen in love with himself." Although the Ovidian narrator gleefully rings on the theme "You sillyboy, you have fallen in lovewith yourself.," even changes he knows better than that. In themidst of tauntingNarcissus formistaking his

but his interpretation itself Thus far I have focused on Narcissus as interpreter, as text. The way he fulfills Tiresias' prophecy raises the problem of Narcissus creates a link like an amplifier circuit between three texts;meaning cycles and ever finding a resting point. The three texts are: expands among themwithout the portal inscription at Delphi, Tiresias' Delphic word-play, and the image in the pool that is the gloss on both. The image realizes (themeaning of) Tiresias'

image in the pool transforms the cold, aloof, corporeal Narcissus into was. For the first time in his life, he loves something other than what he even puts his beloved's interests ahead of his own: as noted, and passionately he wishes that his beloved could live longer than himself (472). On the other hand, the image in the pool now embodies the formerNarcissus. Its gestures The
indicate

own mirrored gestures for another's signs of love and coquettishness (432-436), the narrator himself puts "Narcissus" into question. The narrator says, Is ta est ("That which you see is the shadow repercussae,quam cern?s,imaginis umbra a terms of this equation appear reversed, since of reflected image," 434). The a mere "reflected to the pool's edge theymake the flesh-and-blood boy clinging more even an impalpable, but oddly unreflexive, image." The face in the pool is What and where isNarcissus? "shadow" of this image.

audience while remaining aloof and untouchable. Like the old Narcissus, the sun neverwarms image is cold?cold both figuratively and literally,because the the impenetrable shadow surrounding the spring (412). If the cold Narcissus
the now reflects image loving Narcissus-in-the-flesh, come could not have Narcissus-lover the corporeal the into reverse is also without true: existence the

reciprocal

desire,

but

they

evade

contact;

it coquets

with

its desiring

Narcissus-image to spark his desire. So which of these two impossibly implicated existences isNarcissus? An even more puzzling question: who isNarcissus once Narcissus disappears? Ovid says of the boy's end on earth that lumina mors clausit
6The divided subject is a longstanding tenet of psychoanalysis, which partitions the self in various for example, and Ego/Superego/Id, ways: Freud's schema of Conscious/PreConscious/Unconscious, or Lacan's that intersect the subject as a larger vision of three realms (Real/Symbolic/Imaginary)

the idea is not entirely foreign to antiquity: Plato's tripartite division of the nodal point. However, soul into reason, spirit, and appetite corresponds to the psychoanalytic models of the mind (cf. Phdr. like does his theory of anamnesis (as laid forth in, e.g., Phaedo 73e-76e). Anamnesis, 253c-254e)?as the psychoanalytic theory of repression, posits that knowledge than in the forefront of consciousness. crucial to one's being lies elsewhere

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290

PHOENIX

domini mirantiaformam ("death closed his eyes,marvelling at the beauty of their owner," 503). However, it is not entirely clearwhat thatmeans: the boy's family a can find no body for the funeral pyre, only yellow-centered flowerwith white (508-510). petals which Narcissus? The Meanwhile, Narcissus enters the Underworld?but narrator had called the image in the pool an umbra (417, 434), a word that can also mean "dead spirit" (OLD s.v. umbra 7). The image-as-specter is appropriate
on two counts. First, as noted earlier, the

of the referent; it metaphorically assigns the referent to death?that is, it assigns Narcissus to death. Second, the livingNarcissus had complained that neither his reflection's gestures nor mouthed words of desire ever reached him. The image was was the locus of silent signs of desire that never reached their destination; it
in that sense a "dead letter."

image-as-empty-sign

marks

the absence

fixedly upon thewaters of the river Styx (505); untouched by Lethe, his shade ofNarcissus' still remembers and enacts his earthly desire. In contrast to the fixity now become a hall of mirrors, each reflection the mirror-text has loyalty, being same unanswerable multiplied in another reflection, and each leading to the question: Where exactly is the mirror-text and where its necessary coordinate, Narcissus? Are they in, and by, the shaded pool up on earth?or in, and by, the Stygian waters below? And what exactly does this text, and itsmultiple relays, inability to pin down precisely where and who Narcissus is,where the more image-text is, and what it says, shows Salom? and Kristeva to have learned fromOvid than has Freud.Whereas Freud sees narcissism as ultimately self-love, Salom? and Kristeva emphasize the ambiguity of narcissism thatmakes it a flow between self and other, subject and object. The narcissist projects himself onto the object, in the form of his own over-valuing fantasies; he is in turn seduced by these projections. Narcissism ultimately erases the object under the onslaught of the subject's projections.
Nonetheless, Salome's and Kristeva's assessments of narcissism do not account

So, as a shade in theUnderworld, Narcissus has assumed the ontological status of his erstwhile reflection. But astonishingly, he still apparently casts his own reflection, another image in yet other waters; even inHell he continues to gaze

say? Our

for the ethical dimension of its inaugural instance. They do not account for Narcissus' unshakeable loyalty to his own peculiar reading of thewatery image text as worth everything he has to trade for it, including himself. His devotion which the transforms reading into a game of hazard formoral stakes, a practice in textforces us to rethinkourmost fundamental assumptions about the role rational self-interestplays in ethics. But Narcissus also makes impossible a clean division between the destabilizing power of the text on one hand, and the destabilizing
of the with reader a on the other. Narcissus' to no other "text" observer. in the water His own commands admirers also his loyalty power apparent

power

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NARCISSUSON THE TEXT

291

suffered from loving his boyish visage, the face thewater returns to him?^but unlike Narcissus, none died of it.7 Lacan called Narcissus' kind of apparently idiosyncratic seduction "anamor termfrom a typeof painting that represents one photic desire." Lacan borrows the element in the picture from a distorted perspective. Viewed directly, the object appears to be a meaningless blob, but seen from a particular angle, the distortion disappears and the image in the picture looks normal. In Narcissus' case, the meanings relayed between reader and image-text also draw into their field the meanings generated between the two other texts that control Narcissus' fate. in Boeotia together unfold a mystical perspective Apollo at Delphi and Tiresias on its true cost. This on the knowledge, while imperative to know oneself, and true, can produce no rational accounting for its truth.Not only does Narcissus' text shake up the reading subject so as to make him virtually unlocateable and inconceivable, but the exact nature of the text that can do that remains perceptible to no only to Narcissus. The loyalty the image-text commands will submit text Narcissus' is his of his rational accounting. reading universally perceptible,
text; the measure of the attention that

over the boy's shoulder into the pool, is not how Narcissus might justify the reflection'spower, but what that power induces him to exchange for his reading: his life and his reason, in all senses of theword "reason." There is a type of mesmeric fascination in the history of Ovidian reception

image-text

demands

from

us, who

peer

that,while far less dramatic than Narcissus' obstinacy, is conceptually parallel. In a series of closely reasoned articles, Richard Tarrant has identified numerous to readerly suspicious lines and phrases in theOvidian corpus that he attributes verses to intervention.8Some ring false because, contrary Ovid's habit of subtlety, they spell out in flat-footed detail what is otherwise implicit in the text.Others
by grammatical or metrical solecisms; still others employ vocabulary or

are vitiated

traces more style typical of the Silver Latin writers who succeeded Ovid. Tarrant to what he calls "collaborative these the origins of intrusions interpolation"?the The apparent aetiology and purpose of these interpolations vary. The lines that make plain what Ovid left to inference look like responses tomanuscripts made obscure eitherby prior damage, or by the sheerunfamiliarity of theirLatin in an era when fullcommentaries were not readily available. These emendations predictably reflectaesthetic sensibilities shaped by knowledge of laterLatin writers. But the bolder contributions, insertedwhere no textual difficulty is attested, seem to be
7Even Echo remains impulse on the part of Ovid's earliest readers to engage the text actively as writers.

does not die; Ovid describes her as transformed. Her bones become stones, her and "there is a sound that lives within her" (sonus est qui vivit in ilia, (398-399) when Narcissus dies, she still has intelligence and memory that run counter to her 401). Moreover, mechanical echoing of his grief (quamvis irata memorque / indoluit, quotiens puer miserabilis "eheu!" / " dixerat, haec resonis iterabat vocibus "eheu!, 494-496). 8Tarrant 1987; 1989a; 1989b; 2000. voice

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292

PHOENIX

jeux d'esprit,wherein a reader enters the flow of the text by capping a clever line of Ovid's with an original sally. Tarrant points out that all these types of modification reveal a conceptualization of the text far different from our own: no sense of a pristine and inviolable original obtains here. Rather, the text is an open, fluid weave intowhich the readers' own idea of what belongs theremay freely be inserted. That response to a highly rhetorical poem like the Metamorphoses would be natural for an audience trained in declamation. Rhetorical education drilled the student in inventing variations on given themes; no small part of the exercises designed to hone oratory were the elaboration of set texts, and prosopopoeia (impersonation). Such training undermines the idea of an author and
a proprietorial text to be preserved inviolate from readers' innovations.9 You, too,

can be Ovid. But for the purposes of this essay, I pass by the more flamboyant examples of innovation fathered upon Ovid's text, and turnmy attention rather to a few as words of the Metamorphoses thatTarrant identifies out of place.10 The suspect another describes Boeotian like Narcissus' own, pivots on that, phrase tragedy fascination with the self, but of a much less attractive sort. Apollo and Diana Niobe's children she after has boasted that her slaughter lineage, fecundity, and wealth make herworthier of veneration than the divine twins'mother Latona. In themoments just before the carnage, Ovid sketches the luxurious appointments ofNiobe's sons out for the day's man?ge, innocent of their imminent doom (Met. 6.221-223):
pars ibi de septem genitis Amphione fortes suco conscendunt in equos Tyriosque rubentia auro moderantur habenis. tergapremun? gravidis Here horses' some of the seven born backs on crimson from Amphion mount stalwart horses, them with reins and seated upon gold. the

saddle-cloths,

they guide

heavy with

This
number

of modern

is the reading handed down from the oldest manuscripts?and

editions have accepted the variant auroque graves ...

yet a
habenas,

attested no earlier than the thirteenth-centuryVat. lat. 5859. Objection is raised to the paradosis on the grounds that auro gravidis produces awkward even more asyndeton, but stronglybecause gr?vidas is an odd metaphor. How can reins be "pregnant," especiallywith gold? Tarrant notes that themetaphorical uses of gr?vidas preceding the Flavian poets almost uniformly describe situations comparable to pregnancy. These instances entail the ideas of enclosure, generation, and eventual emergence, such as Latinus' city teemingwith immanentwars (Verg. Aen. 10. 87) or theTrojan horse, swollenwith theGreeks who will emerge under the cover of darkness (Ov. Ars Am. 1.364). Unless these reins inexplicably enclose
of all these ideas may be found in Tarrant Silver style, discussed most direcdy inTarrant toward interpolations' tendency 10Tarrant 1989b: 115-117. 9 The fullest articulation 1989a, 1989b. excepting the

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NARCISSUSON THE TEXT 293

a core of a coat of gold, gold in leather, rather than being ornamented with heavy more characteristic ofValerius Flaccus the description deploys a sense of 'gravidus thanOvid:

own selves, their own sense of poetic language. They became the poet's refining both the poet and the text theywere given for Doppelg?ngers, cheerfully trading an not what is evidently there on the page, in find Ovid ideal. They enchanting but?anamorphoticaUy?the
meant."

"weighed down" by something external. censures this phrase, the intrusion ofgravidus Assuming thatTarrant correctly see a who Ovid here reveals readers magnified by lens he himself had helped to shape. Ovid profoundly molded the vocabulary, usages, and protocols of Silver Latin poetry; his earliest reader-emenders threw his contribution into starker relief by revising him into the Platonic ideal of his Silver-Latin self. Like Narcissus, these earliest fans fell in lovewith an idea ofOvid that reflected their

shadow ofwhat he "must have been" and "must have

However, it is equally possible to turn the tables on this analysis, and to see an uncanny wisdom in the perhaps anachronistic use of gravidus. After all, Niobe's tragedypivots on her idea of pregnancy as cultural capital.When Niobe women out of offering worship to Latona, she claims for harangues theTheban herself a superior right to be adored by persistently conflating immaterial and material wealth. Niobe speaks of her divine ancestry and fecundity as ifboth were other species of rich possession and of the special status that affluence confers. Her ambiguous vocabulary consistently equates her children with things {Met. 6.193-200):
tutam me quis dubitetf): copiafecit, sum, quam cuipossit Fortuna nocere, ut multo mihiplura relinquet. multaque eripiat, excessere metum mea iam demi bona.fingite huic aliquid populo natorum posse meorum: non tarnen ad numerum redigar spoliata duorum, turbam: qua tat ab orba? Latonae quantum dis (hoc quoque maior "I am fortunate/fecund doubt and. if She this, too?): my stole much (forwho abundance from me,

hoc?) felixquemanebo sumfelix (quis enimneget

could deny this?) and fortunate I shall remain (who could to harm, has made me safe. I am too great for Fortune She would leave behind much more that was mine. Now from this multitude not be reduced of children could to two, like Latona's

my goods have eclipsed fear. Imagine that something I would be taken from me: even so, once despoiled, 'crowd.' How far is she from childlessness?"

"fortunate" and "fecund"?and her copia ("abundance") Niobe is felix?both ensures that she will always be so blessed. Yet the lack of a partitive genitive to delimit copia sweeps both wealth and children without distinction into her of When she claims that her bona ("goods") banish fear, synopsis superfluity. she seems at last to referunequivocally to things. Yet the primary example of

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294

PHOENIX

from her people when she peremptorily orders her subjects to honor herself over Latona. In this context, it seems not inappropriate to describe reins as "pregnant with gold." Niobe tries to turn riches, immortal forebears, and abundant scions into instruments of control, like her sons' reins.And as a description of theway these particular reins advertise the fortune of Thebes' royal house, auro gravidis isworthy ofNiobe's own delusional fusion ofmaterial capital with reproductive

her security offered is the fact that if some of her children were taken away, more would still remain. Her cold-blooded calculation poses the hypothetical case as if it were counting out coins for a tax: she speaks of aliquid ("something," 198) of her children being removed, rather than aliquem ("someone").11 Niobe's childbearing, wealth, and ancestry fuse indistinguishably in her own mind. She sees all as supporting her right to command the fullestobedience and obeisance

I adduce these nuances not in order to claim that what Ovid actually gr?vidas is wrote; among other considerations, nothing that I have said above addresses the troubling problem of the asyndeton. Rather, ifTarrant is right and gr?vidas is an early reader's contribution, then it appears this collaborator not only fell under the spell of silvering over Ovid, but also electrified a grid of meaning latent within the text. The paradosis' power to engage lies in theway its apparently
extravagant

capital.

instrumentalizing view of theworld. Ovid's revising reader has willingly traded any idea of attaining an "accurate," "original" text for the possibly deeper truthsofwhat Lacan would call m?connaissance, ormisrecognition. Misrecognition reads theworld through the shadow of oneself, but Narcissus and
Niobe's most anonymous canny where emender it is most of Classical together uncanny. Studies show that misrecognition is a perspective

aptly capturesNiobe's

metaphor

of

golden

pregnancy

casts

a wider,

subtler

net,

a net

that

Department Duke University

236 Allen Durham,

U.S.A.

Building, Box 90103 NC 27708-5076 mj anan@duke. edu

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