Abstract
The fable of Echo and Narcissus, read as a parable of repetition and source, is a fable of poetry—inadequate, but as complete as any we have. Our tendency in thinking about Ovid's tale is to oppose the episodes, to take them as linked but contrasting studies. Yet the two figures are expressly bound together, and they seem not only to complement, but to define one another. Narcissus, admiring himself in the pool, repeats the emotional fixation of Echo. In reflecting (on) himself, he unknowingly echoes her; even as Echo would be compelled to repeat not the words of her beloved so much as her own fantasmatic construction of those words. What happens when Echo looks at herself in the pool? Are there echoes of echo? allusive chains whose tenor or lemma is precisely some vision of what the act of allusive thinking must imply? What else can there be?
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