In Wolf’s Clothing: A Psychoanalytic Reading of the Lycaon Episode in Ovid, Metamorphoses 1

Abstract

Scholars of Ovid's Lycaon episode in Metamorphoses 1 have long been aware of text's focus on Augustan power, even as they remain divided on issue of text's or poet's allegiance. (1) In particular, much has been made of Jupiter's key role as narrator of episode, (2) and rightfully so, since surely position of speaker represents a significant locus of power; yet power is not omnipotence, even in case of Jupiter (and perhaps especially not in his case, since this is after all Ovid's Jupiter). (3) The assumption that Jupiter is master of his discourse, whether he uses it to reveal or to conceal, is challenged by a new wave of Ovidian scholarship that concentrates on essentially split nature of (speaking) subject as delineated in work of Freud, Lacan, and their disciples. (4) The divided psychoanalytic subject's discourse cannot help but betray its ambivalence, its schizoid nature, and its desire, however many lies he or she may decide to spin out (an insight shared by deconstructionist and poststructural criticism in general). One might here recall stereotypical figure of analyst dealing with a resistant patient, and her confidence that she need only sit back and let 'false' story unravel into truth. This is not to deny importance of interpretive approaches based on such considerations as narrative voice or focalization; a great deal of very good work on epistemologically troubling Lycaon episode begins with questions about speakers, witnesses, and their motivations. (5) Nor is it a plea to discard hermeneutics of suspicion. Rather, this paper attempts to demonstrate, first, that locus of suspicion can be shifted to good effect--from suspicion over individual events within narrative (that is, accepting some as 'real' and rejecting others as 'false' or 'biased') to suspicion at level of narrative discourse itself (and thus acceptance of all narrative episodes, not because they are 'real' but because they all contribute to characterizing that discourse); and second, that such a shift represents a methodologically rigorous alternative that does not sacrifice a careful regard for context. My method here will in orientation be basically Lacanian, since that psychoanalytic approach is most engaged with language. But it bears remembering that Lacan insisted that he himself was no Lacanian, but a Freudian, and that his own method was developed through an uncompromising return to Freudian text. I shall follow suit in having recourse to Freud's Totem and Taboo in a later section, though in Lacanian reinterpretation of that text as a myth of origins of personality, rather than as any kind of genuine memory of beginnings of civilization. Furthermore, in spirit of suspicion and Lacan's work on psychoanalysis and detective fiction in his Seminar on 'Purloined Letter,' it seems best to start with a Lacanian analyst's remarks on crime fiction, not least because of obvious fact that if text is taken at face value, somebody was murdered (the hostage, at first, and slightly later bulk of humankind). But first one final clarification: days of psychoanalyzing literary characters, on one hand, and authors based on their works, on other, have long been over. I am concerned here with drawing out anxieties of text as a document written at a crucial moment in Roman history; Jupiter is a fiction text gives us, and I begin by taking up that fiction. But in end this can be neither about Jupiter, who does not exist, nor about Ovid, whom we cannot reach. Turning, then, to crime at hand: Those who would, through their suspicion, outwit a wily character like Ovid's Jupiter run a risk, one summed up admirably well in Slavoj Zizek's discussion of psychoanalytic method in terms of detective fiction. (6) Zizek (1991, 53) describes how the scene of crime with which detective is confronted is also, as a rule, a false image put together by murderer in order to efface traces of his act. …