In Our Time - Metamorphosis

Episode Date: March 2, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet Ovid and explore the theme of metamorphosis from the transformation of Narcissus to the bug of Kafka’s story, and beyond. Ovid wrote at the beginning of The Metamorphoses - in Ted Hughes’ wonderful version - “now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed/Into different bodies/I summon the supernatural beings/who first contrived/The transmogrifications/In the stuff of life./You did it for your own amusement./Descend again, be pleased to reanimate/this revival of those marvels.”And descend they did: The metamorphoses is an extraordinarily wide sweep through the teeming, changing world of Roman and Greek mythology.The tales were immensely popular in their own day, they were an inspiration to Chaucer, Ovid was Shakespeare’s favourite poet, and two thousand years after they were written the stories of shape changing still seem relevant: Ted Hughes won the Whitbread Book of the Year with his translation of Tales from Ovid in 1997, and a new collection called Ovid Metamorphosed has garnered versions of the tales from authors and poets from all over the world.With A S Byatt, novelist and one of the contributors to Ovid Metamorphosed; Dr Catherine Bates, critic and Research Fellow, University of Warwick.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Orvid wrote at the beginning of the metamorphosis in Ted Hughes' wonderful version, Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies.

I summon the supernatural beings, who first contrived, the transmogrifications in the stuff of life. You did it for your own amusement. Descend again. Be pleased to reanimate this revival of those marvels. And descend they did. The metamorphosis is an extraordinarily wide sweep

through the teeming, changing world of Roman and Greek mythology. The tales are immensely popular in their own day. They're an inspiration to Chaucer. Ovid was Shakespeare's favourite poet. And now, a thousand years after they were written, the stories of shape-changing still seem relevant. Ted Hughes won the Whitbread Book of the Year with his translation of Tales from Hobbit in 1997.

And a new collection called Ovid Metamorphosed has garnered versions of the tales from authors and poets all over the world. To discuss their enduring appeal, I'm joined by one of those authors in that book, the novelist A.S. Byatt, and also by the critic Dr. Catherine Bates from Warwick University. What would you say to someone who hadn't read the metamorphosis? What did you say what Ovid was doing?

What was he putting human beings through? What were these metamorphoses about? I think he was doing what you quoted him as doing. He was describing the shiftingness of things, the way the whole world is constantly in flux, the way one thing changes into food for another thing, the way a thing changes shape. And he was relating this to human passions,

A man possessed by rage or a man possessed by hunger or a man possessed by lust becomes a different kind of animal from a man quietly worshipping a god in a tree-lined sanctuary. I think above all things he was interested in nothing, he says somewhere, nothing rests, nothing stays, everything moves, everything changes. And he invented an absolutely extraordinary form for disdainting. describing the shiftingness. He's writing about the time of the birth of Christ, and we're talking about a number of cultures clashing there,

and yet it does seem to come out of a time far, far back, doesn't it? Because, for instance, you've described it psychologically, but he does it very graphically. I mean, when Jupiter turns a bloodthirsty king, like Owen, into a wolf because of his bloodthirstiness, and it's very, very straightforwardly, graphically done, and yet we accept it. What we would now call fairy tale rather dismissive element,

but it isn't dismissive when you read Ovid. It makes me think of two things, really. One is that it is deep in all human beings to make metaphors of that kind. You say that is a wolfish man. You say that woman's a cat. That woman's a bitch. This woman is a bovine, cow-like sort of woman. If I try any of those, I'd be arrested.

Being a woman, I am allowed to do this. I don't know that that argument holds, but there's a different program. But there is another thing that goes deeper than that. And when the French scientist Cuvier was looking at the bones of things like whales and monkeys, he noticed that there was a kind of morphology underlying all creatures. A seal's flippers resemble our hands. We are all the same. A maggot and a grub and a worm turn into other things.

so in a sense although it is mythologically primitive in another sense it still feels extraordinarily modern Well it feels accurate I mean we turn from seeds into fetuses into who we are now and as we live and breathe around this day

we're losing hell losing teeth losing well I am anyway Catherine Bates there's the it isn't all to do with sort of punishment and bestiality is it there are some saving I'm just trying to get

a sort of little map of Obebe before we move on. There are saving tales, aren't there? Absolutely, absolutely. You know, a large part of the transformation is already punishments for overweening pride or whatever, but one of the interesting things is that

there's no sort of straight moral line. Sometimes characters are actually saved or rescued. So that Daphne, for example, is transformed obviously into a laurel bush in her flight from Apollo, but

people don't know whether to congratulate or condole her father. Is this a sort of a saving of her situation, or is it some sort of terrible transformation that is a punishment for her flight from Apollo?

And Neptune changes, is it Eric Heitner's daughter, into a fisherman to save her from being sold into slavery? Again, it's a god using or that are using their powers for what we would thought were good. We're good. I mean, is there any morality there? Can you see any concentrated morality at all?

Well, I think what's brilliant about it is precisely that the morality is metamorphose. There's no, as I said a minute ago, there's no, you know, distinct judgmental line that there are occasions where, you know, he is making a critical point. Somebody is being punished. for ambition or passion or whatever. But metamorphosis can also be a release. It can be an enabling thing. I mean, quite often characters, I think it's IFAS,

is turned from a girl into a man so that she can marry the girl she loves. So it can be an enabling moment. It can allow things to happen that wouldn't otherwise be able to happen. There's some lovely moments when women become water, and that always feels like a release, the ones who become fountains or springs.

You say, and it's very not only understandable, it have struck a chord with people listening, that men are called wolfish, and so in that case, in this case, he turns into a wolf. But what about, say, the story of fighting, the mortal boy who tries to drive his father, the sun god's chariot across the sky,

and fails? And his sisters mourn so overwhelmingly that they're spontaneously transformed into trees. Now, what is that? That's not quite as easy to read, is it? No, the kind of images of mourning tend to be images of release, I would think, of people being released from intolerable human emotions.

There's somebody who is turned into a stone that constantly weeps. That's Niobe, who is turned. And Niobe goes through a whole series, of transformation, she appears. Ted Hughes is wonderful with her. It's a terribly proud woman with her hair done up like snakes saying to the minor goddess, Leto, I have 14 children, you have only got two, but her two are Apollo and Diana and they kill all her children with arrows. And Offid can describe arrows going through human flesh like nobody. And Ted Hughes can translate it like nobody. And then, just as you,

think she's got her just desserts, she turns into some quite other creature and weeps and weeps and weeps and finally becomes a weeping stone. So there's nothing left but tears and stone. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's as if characters are reverting to some natural state. It's as if there's an inner truth or some inner reality or inner essence. I mean, this is one sense of which of it is in fact quite conservative. There's a sort of conservative shift in the metamorphoses that, yes, what we all get excited about is the universe in a state of flux and everything is ultimately mobile and changing at all times. And I do think that's the direction that his text is going in.

But at the same time, pulling against that, there's a move towards the establishment of eternal verities that every time you see a spider, every time you see a laurel bush, every time you see a bat or whatever it is, you remember the kind of mythological, typological story of methammed. and remember that, you know, that was a punishment or a transformation that was brought about by some kind of human failing or human achievement.

I don't know whether it's just, whether it's particularly pointed in Ted Hughes's adaptation, but the first three or four pages of his adaptation very much strike accord with, in generalised terms, with what's thought of, in some cases, about the way, the universe began, he uses the word chaos, uses things that can recognizably be what the cosmologists said out talking about and so and so forth. And I asked, and I asked

a few minutes ago about him, him recognizing the similarities, the sameness between things. Did he, in your view, I mean, is it something that you've looked at closely? Did he, was he unique in that kind of insight?

Did he bring that insight to that? Is that one of the reasons why his tales have had such buoyancy for 2,000 years. Well, almost all creation myths tell this story of an emergence from chaos into order or form. And perhaps one reason for that is that that's how creation myths get formed. That's how any work of art or poetry or whatever is fashioned. It comes from an unformed state or a chaotic state and then divisions and distinctions and so on are made.

so that it's almost sort of telling the metamorphosis it's telling the story of its own poetic creation. Was there anything distinctive that you know of its sources, anything that was... I'm trying to get at the particularity of it. I'm trying to get at the fact that he enters our literature through what Hughes calls the fountainhead, Chaucer. He's then taken up by Shakespeare's favourite poet.

Shakespeare Pinch's Chunks. I've just re-read Pyramus and Sizby this morning, actually, I was waiting for you to. And that's straight into Mid-Seminide's dream, accepted his turn. And so and so forth. Ted Hughes, re-translating, massive success. Ted Hughes' late-age first success was this

after a period, not neglect, but sort of neglect. So I just want to find out if there's anything that you think that's... What do you think distinguishes it particularly? I agree with Catherine. It partly has stayed alive because it makes the world inside your own head mirror some kind of description of the process in the cosmos.

the poem comes into being, and I think this appealed to Hughes, as Ovid pictures the world coming into being. I'm sure he went back to the pre-Socratic philosophers who worried about whether the world was made of water or whether it was made of fire. And at the end of the metamorphoses, he suddenly makes a great speech about Pythagoras, whom he doesn't name,

and an impassioned plea for vegetarianism. He says, you mustn't kill things. You mustn't kill and eat creatures which are on the earth with you. You mustn't stick knives into the neck of bulls and sacrifice them. And he's been going on all the way through the metamorphoses, saying, you know, if you don't make your proper sacrifice to the gods, they will turn you into something evil. And suddenly this rather urbane and yet humanly passionate,

very modern voice comes forward and says, don't kill other life. He's, there is a sort of modern. about him. His gods are not really gods. They have human passions in a larger scale than the gods. One of the things that really interested me

about trying to read the beginning of it in Latin is you read the beginning and Ted Hughes invokes the gods. It just says actually Deus, which can be translated as God or a God or the God or the divinity.

He doesn't really say what it is that created the world. It's a small deus. I feel there's an enormous amount of skepticism in Ovid, to which modern people respond. They need a kind of

religious world with full of mythology and passion. But they don't want to be told what is right. If we're talking about it in modernness this is almost a, what you've prompted me to remember in espides, it's almost a you could even, to be very crude, call it a Greenpeace message. isn't then? I wonder if this is part where he says at one stage,

Earth's and heavens' Earth and Heaven's lease for survival is nothing more than a lease. They both must fall together. The globe and its brightness combine like a tear or a single bead of sweat. Was his metamorphosis as a ways of showing this union, do you think?

Ovid the Eco Warrior. Well, I mean, I agree with what Antonia said about his appeal to us now. I mean in his his introduction to his translation, Ted Hughes talks about the

Metam offices. I think he describes it's giving a rough register of what it feels like to live at the end of an era, and the sort of psychological gulf, I think he says, at the end of an era. So there is, one of the things that we identify with Ovid is a degree

of kind of skepticism, you know, the twilight of the gods, we can no longer, you know, the Greek and Roman pantheon in his day was sort of looking increasingly human which of course it was. And, you know, what gods do we believe in and so on? So there's, there is a degree of kind of skepticism,

so that the gods, as they appear in the metamorphoses, they behave dreadfully, you know, very badly behaved. I mean, they save people from slavery and they... Yeah, well, there is this moral neutrality, yes. It's not a sort of blanket rejection. But similarly, there are the human wonder workers, the human artists like Pygmalion or Daedalus. or Arakne indeed, whose ability to create and to create worlds in art is almost Godlike.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. We've been talking for about 15 minutes, and we've had about 16 different of it already. I mean, that's part of it, isn't it, really? Can I, you mention Arachne, Catherine Bates. Can I stick there? Can we just talk in a little bit of detail? Because Antonio's written on that in this new book. And Arachne is brilliant at weaving.

Why don't you tell the story? and then we'll play around with it. Okay, well, Arakhani is a very ordinary girl. Nothing distinguishes her in terms of birth or marriage or whatever, except her ability to weave. She's a brilliant weaver. And she regards her ability as being equal to, if not greater than, that of Palace or Minerva, who's the goddess of, well,

the goddess of many things, but in this particular case, the goddess of weaving. So, of course, it being of it, the inevitable competition ensues. And arachne weaves both... She challenges... That's right, that's right. And Minerva comes disguised, the Thai has to dissuade her, disguised as an old lady and said,

look, it's better for you if you say, you've got a great gift, but you've got it from Minerva or Athene. And she says, no, it is my own skill, it is mine, yes. And then Minerva reveals herself and they set two, right. Well, then it's a wonderful description of kind of the working woman. They both roll up their sleeves and tuck up their skirts and sit down at their respective looms. Kate Hughes has them rolling down the tops of their dresses so that they're bearing their breasts so their arms will be free for the weaving. That's right. That's my translation.

Well, and the thought it's interesting that they weave such different tapestries. And both the tapestries are, of course, mini-metamorphoses because Pallasis is full of representations of the gods transformed. disobeying disobedient mortals into mountains and so on and so forth. And Palace's tapestry is very orderly, it's very symmetrical, it's very compartmentalized, it's, you know, it's very tidy. Whereas Arakhanes is much more like the Ovidian metamorphoses in that it's chaotic, it's fluid, and it shows the gods turning themselves into bulls and tricking human mortals by being bad to behave.

We've got these two tapestries, the goddess and the very ordinary girl. So you can do fastest and best. Then what happened as I espite? Then, in fact, which I didn't realise until I started working on my story, the competition is judged to be a draw. In fact, Ovid manages to describe Arachne's tapestry, so it is obviously much more beautiful and much more exciting, like his poem, as Catherine said, than that of Minerva.

This causes Minerva to lose her temper, and she tears the tapestry into shreds. If I'm right, Ted's... In Ted's use translation, Arakne's wins. Yes, it isn't quite clear whose wins, but she certainly doesn't lose, I think, in the Latin. Sort of an away draw, you mean? Yes, exactly.

And I always believed when I was a girl that at this point Minerva turns Arakne into a spider out of rage. What actually happens is that she loses her temper and hits her three times on the head with her shuttle. and a Rackney, who has been standing up rather well up to that point, goes away and hangs herself, at which point Minerva in pity turns the dangling body at the end of the rope into the spinning spider. So you've got, as it were, the threads of the tapestry turning into the rope that's hanging the woman, which is then turned again by another transmutation into what is both a saving and a narrowing.

And there's a beautiful poem by Tom Gunn in the book after Ovis. metamorphoses about the spider hanging looking hideous and crumpled and ugly and suddenly it spins this beautiful geometrical shape. It's another case though where it's not a straightforward punishment is it as you say. She doesn't sort of say you're too proud, I'll turn you into a spider just to sort of spite you. As you say it's the act of turning our acting into a spider is merciful. It's actually keeping her alive. So you're interpreters and critic at you.

What glass would you put on that, Catherine Bates? That tale from Watton, what would you draw from that? Is it to do with hubris? It's something to do with talent and something to do with talent that is borrowed? Is it the lease on talent? What sort of interpretations would you take from that? I think it's to do with art, actually.

I think it's one of the most self-conscious moments in Ovid, as I said, because the two tapesties that are produced could very easily be seen as versions or ways of reading of its own text. So that Pallas's tapestry could be the sort of, as well, the moral metaphys, like the Ovid Morales, there's a medieval moralised Ovid, where it's also with punishment and the gods are on top. And, you know, if you're an overweeding human, then, you know, beware and so on and so forth. And as I was describing it before, before, it's very compartmentalised and sort of tidy. But then there's also Arachne's tapestry, which is much more exciting and open-ended, morally speaking, too, because it shows the gods to be, you know,

What we haven't said is it shows them as rapists because they're all metamorphoses of gods who are about to rape innocent human women that she weaves. And there wouldn't be room in one tapestry for even half of the ones what Ovid most vividly describes. He is one of the most vivid describers

of objects and things in the whole of literature, I think. When he describes a tapestry of somebody raping somebody, You see every drop of blood, every shred of cloth. It's brilliant. As Ibson said, and I'm quoting from, I think I'm quoting from Ted Hughes anyway, said the Greek gods went on living while the Egyptian gods were as dead as dry stones.

Now, why do you think that is? Catherine Byte. Well, because they're not gods, really, are they? They're human. And their ways of describing poetically or metaphorically what happens Ted Hughes talks about this in his introduction as well what happens when human beings are seized by passion when you're in the grip

or when you're possessed by whatever it is rage or envy or love or lust or the desire to create or whatever it's as if one way of describing that condition is to see it almost as superhuman as transcending the limitations of the human so that the gods are just sort of you know superhumans you like.

There's an Italian writer called Roberto Colaso who wrote a book called The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which is the most wonderful modern metamorphoses. It retells the Greek myths yet again in multiple forms. And Colassos says that one of the reasons the Greek gods are alive is because they're detached from ritual. The myths of the Greek gods are somewhere between the fairy story, which we all delight in. and the sacred story which it is incumbent upon you to believe and to recite in church. The Greek gods are just wandering on the earth, turning people into things and turning things into people.

And you might suddenly bump into one. He says at any moment of very heightened consciousness, which is what you've just been saying, you suddenly notice that a god is with you. I really believe that Roberto Colaso actually does walk around Italy, accompanied by gods coming out of lakes and things. I was doing a film one then. Oh, brilliant, yes. And Italo Calvino also said about the metamorphoses.

He said, you have to realize that no one explanation is right. It's true of all stories. I mean, you can be a theologian and argue about the Christian Bible that this is the right interpretation, and that is the wrong one. but with this kind of myth, it is precisely that both Minerva was right and Eracne was right. And the story is the most important thing. And I think that's another thing that tremendously attracts modern people about it.

What about this storytelling? The tales, I think that's come out by implication, although I haven't emphasised it enough, because there are tremendous stories and very economically, very briefly told. But is it something also this continuing interest? he has for people. Is that partly to do with the direct and ferocious way?

He brings passions to the surface. I mean, all these stories are about high passions and the poison of passion, really. As I was saying, Pyramus and Thysbby, the two young lovers who can only talk through a crack in the wall between each other's houses and they arranged to meet at Ninnie's tomb and there's the lion and there's a miscalculation

of what's happened to one of the other two suicides go on of these children. Well, that story echoes all over the place. But it begins as a sort of childhood romance and ends up in this sort of fierce, tragic passion. Is there something that, Catherine Byte? In its continuing appeal? Well, I mean, you know, a lot of the point of literature and myth and poetry is sort of vicarious pleasure, isn't it?

That, you know, one's own life is sort of humdrum and boring and ordinary and so you know you immerse yourself in stories and in the case of Ovid the more mythological or fairy-like or unrealistic the better because you're as well living it gives you the opportunity to live imaginatively these experiences of extremes what did what did Freud make of

of its stories oh I need another half hour to talk about that well well I mean in some ways you know obviously things like the narcissus myth he takes more or less you know whole from Ovid but I think what's really interesting is almost to see

how Freudian Ovid is rather than to see you know just what Freud took from Ovid and what I would say about that is that there are moments in the metamorphosis particularly I think the later books books 9 and 10 where where it's a complete sort of it's totally

chaotic sexually you get everything you get bestiality, perversion, sex change, incest, you name it, it's polymorphous perversity, you know, that's what Freud would have called it, where human sexuality in its natural state before any kind of regulation or imposition of law or rule, you know, this is what it looks like. It's just completely sort of fluid and free-floating. And even things like the incest taboo, it seems something that can be thrown off. The animals don't worry about in the incest taboos. This is one of the points that Mirror makes.

son of her father. And just to pile, sort of put Peter and Osir at the moment, and Daniel, what about, what about, do you think that there's a recognition, that Ovid would have recognised what Darwin was up to? I think Ovid would have been pleased by what Darwin was up to. This morphic link for the animal world, yeah. He's got a sort of wonderful passage at the end

where he says, look how natural things change. Who would believe if they didn't know that an eagle comes out of an egg? And then he tells you a whole lot of other things, such as, which are not true, such as that a buried man's spine will turn into a snake and wriggle its way out of the ground. I think he had the basic intuition that Darwin had, that change and mutation and mutability was the nature of things,

that things were not fixed. He would have been quite happy with the idea that the species were not fixed but were in flux. It was how he saw the world. Would you agree on that? Yes, I would, and I think one of the points that people forget about the metamorphosis is that things change in both directions.

It's not only that humans who become animals, but rocks become humans so that when Deucalion throws the stones over his shoulder and they become mortal, the veins that you know the veins that you find in rock turn into human veins so that the metamorphosis works, you know, in nature it works both ways,

both towards the human and towards the animal or the natural or the mineral. It's almost like James Lovelock's Gaia myth in that sense. You have a sense that the whole of the nature of things is one thing. And it starts with the Golden Age where everything is pure and somehow in harmony. And actually owing to Jove's dethroning of Saturn before human sin, it all deteriorates into battling and violence and destruction. So you've got the two images really, one of chaos and one of a sort of total whole.

that hangs together. Well, thank you both very much. Thanks, Catherine Bates, and thank you to ASBai. Your mention of St. Antonia prompts me to say that next week I'll be talking to Ian Wilson, Victoria, Glintending, about the Victorian Age of Doubt. So there we are. Thank you very much for listening.

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