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B.R. Nagle: Ovid's Metamorphoses97 Ovid's Metamorphoses: A Narratological Catalogue Betty Rose Nagle I Scholars have yet to recognize fully the significance of the great number of stories which Ovid puts in the mouths of fictional characters. This omission is regrettable, since these embedded tales in Ovid's Metamorphoses shed much light on Ovidian narrative techniques and aesthetics. The hypothesis underlying such an assumption has been cogently articulated by John J. Winkler, at the beginning of his very fine narratological reading of that other Metamorphoses, the Asinus Aureus of Apuleius. Winkler asks: "What are the cases of reading and interpreting that are displayed in the AA itself, and what significance can these have as models for our reading and interpretation of the whole book?"1 Winkler notes that what he calls the "interpolated tales" of the Golden Ass not only account for about 60% of the text, but also form a group of themes and motifs which is possibly the most important in the novel (26-27). As a prolegomenon to a thorough narratological reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses, I now offer a catalogue, with narratological commentary, of the embedded tales.2 I include as embedded tales those which the poet does not narrate in propria persona, but instead attributes to a fictional character (including his ecphrases of characters' nonverbal, usually woven, narratives). In this I follow Tzvetan Todorov's definition of embedding ("le récit enchâssant") as "the narrative of a narrative"; also useful is Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's distinction between "narration of 1 Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading ofApuleius's The Golden Ass (Berkeley 1985) 19. 2 For a brief, uncomplicated classification employing similar principles, see the outline on pp. xiv-xxi of B.A. van Proosdij's commentary edition, P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseon Libri XV (Leiden 1975); he marks each case of embedding ("een lijstverstelling") with single quotation marks and a single marginal asterisk, and each case of embedding within embedding ("éen lijstvertelling in een lijstversteling") with double quotation marks and two marginal asterisks. 98Syllecta Classica 1 (1989) the story" and "narration in the story."3 Similar terms are "interpolated," "framed," and "inset." Of these, perhaps "inset" is closest in literal meaning to Todorov's "enchâsser." Because the reciprocal relationship of the "embedding" and the "embedded" tales has interpretative importance, I have chosen (following Todorov's translator) to use an English verb for which both the present active and the perfect passive participles are idiomatic, as would also be the case with "to frame," but not with "to inset." Winkler's "interpolated tales" and my "embedded tales" are analogous, because they are both narrated by a character within the main narrative. In both Kurt Gieseking's study of Ovid's "Rahmenerzählung" and Michel Boillat's discussion of "les récits intercalés" in the Metamorphoses, the essential feature is not the change of narrator, but any interruption, whether by the poet himself or by another speaker.4 The question I ask is "Who's speaking?", which leads to its correlative, "Who's listening?" These are versions of the questions Barbara Hernnstein Smith proposes in her discussion of the dynamics ofmotivation in "narrative transactions."5 3 Todorov, trans. Richard Howard, The Poetics ofProse (Ithaca 1977) 70-73; this discussion and definition of embedding appears in the essay "Narrative-Men" (66-79), which derives its title from the notion, so productive for the multiple fictional narrators of the Metamorphoses, that "a character is a potential story that is the story of his life" (70). Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London 1983) 91. Other narrative theorists who have influenced my thinking about Ovid include Gérard Genette, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca 1980) and Seymour Chatman, Story andDiscourse (Ithaca 1978). See RimmonKenan , Chapter 7, "Narration: levels and voices" (86-105) for a good brief introduction to Genette's complicated scheme of narrative levels, and to Chatman's inclusion of the narrator and narratee (i.e., fictional audience) in a sequence running from real author through implied author and narratorvia narratee and implied readerto real reader. 4 Gieseking, Die Rahmenerzählung in Ovids Metamorphosen (Diss. Tübingen 1965); Boiilat, Les...
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