Ovid's Met. is a complex and unsettling poem. Its single unifying theme is the change of bodies, that is, the disunity of something we usually understand as permanent and enduring. Its tone is unpredictable, in turns moralistic and amoral, serious and ironic, sympathetic and voyeuristic or even sadistic; we, as readers, are left baffled by its meaning. The difficulty of the Met. has left its tracks on Ovid's reception history too: of all the Classical authors, it is Ovid's value that has been most contested. While other authors such as Virgil have certainly seen swings in their popularity, none has swung as far and as often as Ovid. In the nineteenth century Ovid was regularly excoriated. The passage under no.1 on the handout is from a French History of Latin Literature from that period.

Such vituperation is, I would suggest, the direct result of the unsettlingness of the Met. In this lecture, I want first to examine what generates this unsettling quality of Ovid's Met. But I also want to examine the ways in which this unsettling-ness has been framed and understood in primarily ethical and political terms. This may seem odd; of all the works we have looked at this term, the Met. may seem the most distant from reality, a collection of mythological stories of fantastic happenings, told with a certain sophisticated wryness. What relevance can this have to people's everyday lives? Yet the history of the reception of Ovid's work shows that it has been understood particularly in relation to ethics (that is, a way to live your life), and politics (a particular type of government). And it has been associated especially with degraded forms of ethics and politics, the life of a dandy in a political system that robbed people of their freedom.

I am hoping to do two things, then, in this lecture: first, to analyse the particular features that make Ovid's poem interesting, that is, what makes it unsettling; and, second, to demonstrate the close relation between ethics and aesthetics, and examine the political interests that support certain types of aesthetic judgment. Part of this second aim will involve examining the literary history of Classics more generally, and looking at how Classical works were used and framed in more recent history. For when we consider a text like the Met. that has been so influential for so long, we can learn much from its history: that history can illuminate much both about the text and about the uses to which literature is put in different times.

I.1 Ovid as Unsettling: Narrative Disunity

So, first, an analysis of what makes Ovid's poetry so unsettling. One of the most difficult things about Ovid's text is that it has no unity in its plot; it is a collection of a lot of different stories. In his Poetics Aristotle demanded that a plot have not only a single unifying character, but also be centred around a single unifying action: [handout no.2]. Both the Aeneid and the Iliad follow this stricture; neither contain all the acts of their central heroes, the Iliad following Achilles for just a few weeks, and the Aeneid following Aeneas only from his landing in Libya to the death of Turnus. Ovid, however, does not have a single event around which the action is organized; there is not even a single hero.

Ovid is hardly ashamed of himself, however. He celebrates the tenuousness of his narrative connections, making them as thin as possible. The link between the Daphne story and the Io story is one of the most absurd: Ovid describes how Peneus, Daphne's father, is visited by his neighbors, the other rivers in Thessaly. Then all the other rivers come too, except for one, Inachus, who is Io's father.

This is not to say that there is no unity. Ovid offers his audience a host of thematic links. We might also add that the pleasure of Ovid's company acts as a unifiying factor: he continually reminds you that he is there, behind the characters, being very clever with words. But what is important here is that this is not the unity that Aristotle, the king of classical standards, recommends. Ovid has picked an epic which simply will not admit of an Aristotelian unity.

I.2 Ovid as Unsettling: Bodily Change

A second major way in which Ovid undermines classical standards is through the theme of bodily change itself. The body is something we take for granted as being there; we often speak of it as clay or earth, the passive material onto which is grafted the mutable, active human spirit. But Ovid's characters are wrong to take their bodies for granted: arms become branches and wings; noses become snouts; delicate hands become hooves; heads sprout horns and antlers, and throats emit growls and barks.

All changes are not, however, equal: some are permanent, others reversible; in some a greater amount of the person remains, and in others less. And it is this aspect of the change that is both the most interesting and the most unsettling. The reader is continually called upon to judge the limits of humanness, for the reader's response to a particular change must depend largely on the degree to which the person remains intact, retains his or her identity after the metamorphosis. Look at the Daphne episode in book 1. Daphne turns into a laurel tree just before Apollo is able to rape her, but does she remain Daphne? This question is crucial, because on it hangs our emotional response to the story: [reading no.1].

Ovid informs us that "all that remained of Daphne was her shining loveliness" and yet he continues to suggest that more of her being remains intact. Apollo feels her beating heart beneath the bark, and as he kisses the tree, it recoils from his kiss. A few lines later, Daphne assents to becoming Apollo's emblem. Or does she? And who assents? Ovid's qualification here, "or seemed to bend," questions the assent; and his description of what assents as "the laurel," leaves us in doubt as to what or who the tree is. Did Daphne agree? Or is this just a tree that we are reading too much into? Is this a happy ending, a reconciliation (of sorts) between Apollo and Daphne? A tragic ending in which a still conscious Daphne is trapped within a tree that her assailant will make his forever? Or a farcical non-ending, in which it is just a tree that the normally demure Apollo is making a fuss over? A difficult call, and Ovid notes that the rivers that come to see Peneus afterwards find it equally hard to judge. He says that the streams come "doubtful whether to console Daphne's fond parent or congratulate." In describing these rivers, Ovid is describing his reader.

Some changes seem to rob us of any chance to sympathize with the protagonist, and those are the changes where the subject becomes a stone. Consider the tale of Niobe in Met VI. Niobe, like any decent tragic hero, offends a god, by getting ideas above her station. Leto is the god, and Niobe has impugned her fertility since she has only had two children, Apollo and Artemis, whereas Niobe has produced fourteen. Apollo and Artemis punish Niobe by slaughtering her family, and we seem to be building up to the sort of climax which we get at the end of the Bacchae, when our sympathies are turned around, and we feel sorry for the the one who has offended the god. This is what Aristotle recommends as an essential ingredient in a proper tragedy, and so, as we might expect, Ovid avoids it, and he does so through the vehicle of bodily change: [reading no.2].

Niobe has become a stone, her weeping a waterfall. Ovid insists that she still weeps, but the 'she' seems merely an ornate way of describing an 'it,' a rock. How can we feel pity for her now? We cannot pity a rock; our emotional identification with Niobe is stopped just as it should reach its climax. We are left confused.

A third type of change seems strangely ineffectual. Tiresias shifts from man to woman and seems unchanged, He still maintains a kind of chipper Ovidian male's perspective on the world, and finds himself doing much the same things as he had as a man: [reading no.3]. Tiresias seems almost disembodied, studying his bodily fortunes with the eye of scientist who does not care very much what happens to his body, but is interested in the experiment. [cf Thuc]

The narrative device of the metamorphosis thus serves to confuse the reader. It disturbs our idea of who a person is, asking us to interrogate a boundary we do not normally question; and once this boundary becomes permeable, we lose the customary markers that help us judge how to respond to an event, and find that we re unable to grasp the moral point of the episode.

I.3 Ovid as Unsettling: Violence

The third unsettling element of the Met. that I want to focus on is the explicit, and often over-explicit description of the violent and disgusting. Perhaps the most notorious example of this process in the Met. comes in the story of Tereus, Procne and Philomela. The basic outline of this horrible story is that Procne marries the Thracian king Tereus, but Tereus also conceives a passion for her sister, Philomela. He succeeds in inviting Philomela to the Thracian court, and then rapes her. Philomela threatens to tell the whole world of his crime, and Tereus again attacks her: [reading no.4].

Ovid seems to offer a strong moral condemnation of this action, a definite guide for the reader as to how to react: the deed is a "dire" one; Philomela becomes a "poor maimed girl." Yet the very detail with which the assault is described undermines this moral position (a phenomenon we are familiar with from tabloid reporting of sexual assault and sexual harassment cases). Ovid simply enjoys the scene too much; the violence comes to assume centre stage, to be the point of the story, the star of this episode. And a new character is in fact introduced, the tongue, which literally takes on a life of its own, as it mutters to itself, jerks about and tries to return to Philomela before expiring at her feet. Against such relish, how can we accept the condemnation Ovid offers?

The moral centre is further undermined by Ovid's piecemeal, perky style, which Melville translates excellently with occasional rhyming couplets, sucha s the final two lines: "Men say (could I believe it), lusting still, / Often on the poor maimed girl he worked his will." Ovid likes to break up his lines into little pieces, that give his writing a stylized, decorative, and hence detached tone. But this tone frames the moral judgment in this passage oddly; its sophistication seems to render its content trite and trivial; the contrast between the neat, stylized poetry and its brutal content could hardly be wider.

This distance between form and content is brought out further in the final lines. As this episode reaches its climax, Ovid seems to distance himself from its truth. This is not my tale, he says; it seems too much for Ovid to believe. Imagine the messenger in the Bacchae finishing his messenger speech thus; on the contrary, the messengers insist that what they say is true; they have, after all, seen what they relate with their own eyes. Tragedy in many ways depends on a strong link between the mythical past and the present: myth must be seen as a repository of moral truth, and furthermore it must offer the audience the possibility of involvement so that it can experience the pity that Aristotle makes central to tragedy. But in Ovid's hands, myth has become distant and incredible; myth no longer offers a world we understand or inhabit, but rather a world of the grotesque and weird, a world of sideshow freaks, of things so different, their morality is no longer our main concern, and our focus turns simply to their strangeness.

Compare Livy's use of the mythical past here; Livy's moral guidance is transparent and indignant. You will all remember the punishment of the traitor Mettius Fufetius, who was torn apart by two teams of horses, but compare Livy's treatment of the horrific with Ovid's: [handout no.3]. His description of the horror is relatively brief and without detail; the reader is shown very clearly how to react by the reactions of the Roman spectators: one should turn away in disgust. But there is no turning away in Ovid's text. He forces us to look, describing in detail the antics of the tongue, even adding a simile just in case his description has not been vivid enough. By doing so, he denies us the solid certainty of moral direction that a narrator like Livy's offers.

The story of Philomela has hardly begun, however. Philomela is locked in a castle in a forest, but through her weaving is able to find a new voice and tell her sister of her husband's treachery. Together they plan an appropriate, if equally disgusting revenge; Tereus' son Itys is killed, cooked, and served up to his father (in time-honored Greco-Persian tradition): [reading no.5].

Ovid again indulges his taste for the grotesque, as the child's bloody head is thrown in his father's face; and then the ultimate paradox. Ovid finishes by noting that it was at this moment that Philomela most would have appreciated having her old tongue back. We don't know whether to laugh, or look away in disgust.

Ovid thus uses this myth as a source of weird paradoxes and extravagant events; it provides him with a chance to show off his witty and brilliant narration in opposition to the gravity of what he relates. Such examples could be multiplied; for example, just prior to this story is the story of Marsyas, the satyr, whose skin is peeled off flake by flake; or in bk. 4 there is the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in which the blood gushing out of Pyramus' chest is compared to water jetting out of a broken water pipe. But it should be clear that the various victims, Philomela included, are not the only ones being abused. The authority of myth is also abused, and along with myth, the reader also. How is the reader to react? We cannot help laughing, but we also feel cheapened by this laughter.

II.1 Aesthetics as Ethics: Ovid as Tiresias

Reading Ovid is, therefore, a deeeply unsettling experience: he ignores the classical canons of unity, asks hard questions about what it means to be human, and manipulates our emotional responses, particularly fear and disgust, so that we cannot feel comfortable. It is a masterful performance, a supreme act of control by a masterful artist.

How have readers responded? Often with condemnation; what is most interesting about Ovid's work is that its weirdness has been seen as the result of carelessness and indifference to the quality of the final product, rather than a purposeful artistic strategy. That is, an aesthetic problem in the text is metamorphosed into an ethical problem in the author. Ovid, in fact, begins to look much like the characters in the Met., crossing boundaries he should not cross and lacking the kind of discipline and integrity necessary for classical art. The problems of his text are then no longer the result of control, but of weakness, a failure to observe proper standards. The Elder Seneca, the father of the philosopher and senator that we will meet both in Tacitus and in his own writings, and someone who knew Ovid, put it thus: [handout no.4].

Note how the criticism shifts from criticism of the work to criticism of the man: the work becomes the product of a loose man unable to observe order, not of an artist questioning the boundaries of what counts as human. We may also note here a recuurent theme in Ovidian criticism, that Ovid is a flawed genius.

The idea of Ovid's life as immoral is central to the criticism of his text (despite the fact that Ovid claims that it was not his life but his verses that were impure). The association between the aesthetic rules of art and the ethical rules of behavior was natural to Roman thought: the loose artist must have been a loose man. Consider here again the Elder Seneca. In a second passage, which we can take as applying to Ovid as much to as to his contemporaries, the Elder Seneca laments the low grade art produced under the emperors, and offers a reason for it to, a lack of moral fibre: [handout no.5].

For Seneca, good art is manly art, observing a masculine adherence to the rules that have been laid down. The young men's bodies become metaphors for their speeches: too pretty, too smooth, like their hairless legs and faces, too loose. It is surely no exaggeration to say that the essence of the elder Seneca's case is that the young men fail as much in private as in public to police their orifices properly. Under such an idea of art and life, Ovid becomes even more like his own permeable and boundary-crossing characters, a kind of Hermaphrodite, a poetic Tiresias, not content with being a man, but interested in the life of the less than manly. Indeed, Ovid is not only interested in straddling the boundary between 'Man' and 'Not sufficiently a man,' but seems, horror of horrors, positively to enjoy it.

II.2 Aesthetics as Ethics: Ovid as Imperial Rome

As we can see from the Seneca passage, the problems of Ovid's poem are seen not merely as Ovid's personal failings, but as the failings of his age. Ovid marks the beginning of a decayed age, of smooth and hairless orators, and becomes emblematic of this decay, a kind of poster-boy of cultural decline. This is a remarkable exorbitation of Ovid; no one could ever accuse his critics of trivializing him, even when they do not give his poetry proper consideration. He becomes a central figure in the narrative of the decline of Roman culture, the person who could have done so much more, but put his genius to work in the service of an art that was flawed.

Many ages think their age is worse than the last; indeed we have seen Livy saying as much about his age, the one prior to Ovid's; but the idea that Ovid's age is the real moment of decay is the idea that has stuck. The century that begins with Ovid is often known today as the Silver Age, the Age in which Silver Latin was produced. The Golden Age that preceded it was an age of great talents who respected the rules and understood the seriousness of words, Livy, Vergil and the orator Cicero. But Ovid was the pied piper leading out the rats of the Silver Age, whose grammar was questionable and taste even more so. The usual features assigned to the art of the silver age are those I traced in Ovid's Met for the first part of this lecture: (1) a disregard for the classical canons of unity; (2) the confusion of the audience as to how to respond; (3) a relish for the grotesque and disgusting; and (4) an elegant, even over elegant style and the consequent mismatch between this style and a disgusting content.

But this narrative of artistic decline is again not seen as a purely aesthetic matter. The decline is seen as a result of a general decline in the institutions of the Roman world. The argument runs something like this: as the institution of emperorship became engrained in Roman governmental structures, the senatorial class, or at least the class of wealthy Romans and Italians from which most writers had come, suffered a loss of intellectual vigor. In part this was due to a loss of purpose, as their jobs became increasingly ornamental and peripheral to the real running of the empire, which was put in the hands of the emperor's freedmen and a certain group among the equites; in part, a continual fear of the arbitrary exercise of imperial power, so clearly illustrated in Tacitus, was to blame; and in part a lack of events to fire the imagination. The civil wars that wracked Italy in the first century before the common era but had also produced Cicero and Vergil were long gone; the only wars left were far away from Rome. Increasingly sidelined and increasingly fearful, the senators acceded to their lot, and turned for literary subjects to the fantastic, the Greek and the antique; but by accepting their separation from the realia of power, they lost their soul. As Gordon Williams pithily summarizes it: [handout no.6].

Commentators relate Ovid's tastes to the increasingly bizarre and disgusting shows that became popular in the first century. You all know of the frequent gladiator shows with which the emperors entertained the useless and restless urban plebs, but that was not all. In many stage plays, condemned criminals were made to act out the part of tragic victims, and were actually killed on stage. We have also seen Augustus' pride in finding rhinoceroses and giraffes for the circus; and we are also informed of one particular spectacle that an embassy from India brought to Augustus: a boy born without arms (Strabo 719, Cassius Dio 54.9.8, Williams 191-2). Ovid's age appears to be an age interested in viewing the destruction and metamorphosis of the classical body.

According to the silver age narrative, such interests produced degraded poetry to match the degraded bodies. Again we can look to Williams for the classic statement of the value, or lack of value of Silver Latin art: [handout no.7].

II.3 Two Questions for the Silver Age Narrative

Williams offers one way in which we might organize the relationship between Vergil and Ovid, between the pre-Augustan and the post-Augustan: a Golden Age gave way to a Silver Age under the pressures of political and social change, and Ovid inaugurated the change. To attempt to connect the various works of Roman literature together is a worthy and exciting task: it is important to see the wider changes in the literature, and the changes in the social conditions that were related to them. But we must understand any narrative that attempts such connections as a construction: of necessity, it substitutes groups for individuals, trends for blips, ruptures for gradual changes. One must use such narratives as tools with which to approach the individual authors and the relations between them and their culture, but not treat them as objective or set in stone.

Indeed, I think there is much in Williams' narrative, but we need to ask two particular questions of it. First, does it runs the risk of reifying an unreal level of difference between works in each period, and between the periods themselves? Does it cause us to ignore similarities between Golden and Silver Age works? And, second, we should look at the judgment that is part and parcel of this narrative and ask whose interest this narrative, and its negative judgment of Ovid, serves.

So, the first question: are the periods really so different? Are they periods at all? These are questions that you have the tools to answer. Consider especially two of the elements that are said to be characteristic of the Silver Style: a taste for the grotesque and a purposeful confusion of the reader. Can we see these in Virgil? After all, Virgil famously ends his epic, as Prof. Gilchrist demonstrated, on a very troubling note, which makes it very hard for his audience to understand the meaning of the whole. Is the way in which this ending is troubling different to the way in which Daphne's metamorphosis into a tree, or Philomela's dancing tongue, are troubling?

With respect to violence, Virgil seems to enjoy his own freak shows. We may think of Turnus' killing of Pandarus, where Pandarus falls to the ground, "his armor splashed / with brains; his head [is] dangling in equal halves / from either shoulder..." (Aeneid 9.1003-6). Or even more pertinently, the antics of Philomela's tongue as it tries to return to its owner has a clear precedent in Virgil: [handout no.8]. Virgil's own version of the body part with a life of its own may not come in such a gruesome contrext as Ovid's, but it is combined with a rather macarbre interest in how twins might be differentiated in death. Williams disagrees, arguing that Vergils' deployment of the horrific focuses our pity on the sufferer. This seems rather biased to me, its logic rooted in the schema of gold and silver that he is defending. For Williams, Vergil has soul; therefore he cannot be interested in the grotesque for its own sake.

A second way to examine the use of the notion of a period or age is to look at the unity of the age itself, and ask whether it makes sense to speak of Ovid and the other Silver Age authors as in some way related. When you read Tacitus and Apuleius for example, you might consider in what senses they are Silver Authors, and whether they share any features with Ovid.

But w should not only question the coherence of the periods; we should also ask whose interest is served by the deployment of the Silver Age narrative. When Ovid's text is read in political or ethical terms, it is read in political or ethical terms by someone. Prof. Englert (??) discussed the way that Augustus, for one, framed Ovid's work as political, by exiling him at least partly for one of his poems, the Ars Amatoria, or Art of Love, but I am interested here in a later period, the period in which the idea of a decline in Ovid's time was expressed in the actual metaphor of the Silver Age. This metaphor seems to have appeared first in its modern form in the second half of the 19th century in Germany; Judith Hallett traces its introduction into English schools to the 1877 History of Roman literature by an Oxford Classicist, C.T.Crutwell. This work was designed (quote) "mainly for students at our universities and public schools, and for such as are preparing for the Indian civil service or other advanced Examinations."

In this context, we can easily understand why Ovid was relegated to the second tier. While Ovid's work assumes that the Aristotelian canons of good art are there to be broken, questions the boundaries of the body and of human identity, and confuses the reader as to his own morality, a position in the British Civil Service, particularly in the Colonies such as India, would have required a much surer notion of the boundaries of the human and of the right, not only in terms of gender, but also in terms of race and class as well. Colonial ideology, like the Elder Seneca's, was partly structured around an appeal to an impermeable manly body. Ideas like "keeping a stiff upper lip," "putting your best foot forward," and always placing the highest value on sportsmanship are organized around this appeal. We may think here of Rudyard Kipling, so often the voice of British colonial imperialism, and also a kind of latter-day Elder Seneca. This is the last verse of his poem "If...": [handout no.9]. Kipling's poem locates virtue and identity in independence and manliness; its iconic equivalent would be the Classical statue of Apollo Belvedere with its perfect male body. But these are the very qualities that Ovid's Met. renders questionable, and that Ovid himself was and is thought to lack. In service of this idea of virtue, in service of this Apolline body, it is not surprising that the academic establishment deployed its energies in scorning Ovid's work.

What are we to learn from this literary history of Ovid's Met? First, we must be aware of the dangers of periodization in literary studies, so that we are not encouraged to make facile differentiations without a proper appreciation of the individual works. Second, and more importantly for the purposes of this lecture, we must grasp the complex relation that exists between aesthetics, on the one hand, and ethics and politics on the other. The whole notion of what is good and bad in a literary work is structured by, and itself structures, a range of cultural phenomena that may surprise us: ideas of good government, of a healthy lifestyle, of a healthy body, and of the appropriate way for men and women to behave. Even Ovid's text that seems so far removed from the real world cannot be considered in separation from its moral and political order, whether the world is the world of Augustan and post-Augustan Rome or the world of Victorian and Edwardian England. This means that we should always consider the larger context of aesthetic judgments; such judgments are never made in a vacuum. Just as I have related the nineteenth century condemnation of Ovid to a particular colonial ideology, so we might ask what the larger cultural reasons are behind Ovid's popularity in other ages. Why was Ovid's Met. considered such appropriate reading for English schoolboys in the Elizabethan period that in 1530 at Winchester College, England's leading Public School, then as now, it was prescribed that boys should learn by heart twelve lines a week (Wilkinson, 407)? Or why is it that Ovid's text is now, once again, in the latter part of the twentieth century, becoming very popular?

II.4 Aesthetics as Ethics: Ovid as Liberating

I hope I have done enough to demonstrate my central thesis, that the strangeness of Ovid's text is not simply an aesthetic problem, but an ethical and political one as well. But I want to conclude with one further reflection, that Ovid's Met. can be thought of from the other side, from the point of view of those whose interests do not lie with the prevailing social and ethical order, and from this point of view the text is not a problem, but a salvation.

One interesting thing about the Classics is that, even when certain works were deemed unsuitable and out of line with proper moral standards, their status as Classics protected them from stronger forms of censorship, such as removal from reading lists altogether. Instead, they were merely proclaimed to be in various ways unworthy as a model for oneself. This allows such works to remain as oppositional voices within a particular idea of what matters or of who we are. Some of you may have read E. M. Forster's novel, Maurice, and may remember that in that novel Maurice himself finds a solace and a justification for his feelings of desire for a male student in his readings of Plato, even though those parts of the text that describe a male's love for another male are explicitly ignored in his tutorials. The same is true of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which continued to be studied, even in places like convents, throughout the nineteenth century.

When he was working on Sexuality in the seventies and eighties, Michel Foucault published the memoirs of a young French person, called Herculine Barbin, who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century. Herculine was a hermaphrodite. At birth, she was ajudged to be a girl, but as she grew up, she found herself feeling more like a man, and was eventually judged by doctors to be a man, and was registered accordingly. This person, who found no room for herself in the nineteenth century idea of what a person was, did, however, find versions of herself in Ovid's Met, one of them presumably Hermaphroditus. Noting early on that she was "extraordinarily shaken" (18) when she read the Met., she later comments: [handout no.10]. Herculine found some comfort, as she found herself becoming less and less like a woman, in Ovid's idea of the world.

Although this was not enough to prevent Heculine, now renamed as a man, from killing herself, we can see that what is Silver about Ovid to the nineteenth century, his fallen taste for the grotesque and the permeable human body, is only Silver to the order that defines bodies as unchanging and impermeable. It can be liberating to those who find they do not fit in. The Metamorphoses is an ethics, and it is a politics. As Herculine suggests, far from being the elegant ditties of a mannered poet, Ovid's seemingly imaginary conceptions can be closer to the truth than Kipling's and Seneca's division of the world into Men and not-Men.

The narrative of Pyramus and Thisbe illustrates this device well. Pyramus and Thisbe are the Romeo and Juliet couple in Met. IV. Their fathers forbid them to marry, or even to meet; but love finds a way. Their houses share a common wall, and the two lovers find a tiny hole in it through which they can whisper messages. They arrange a meeting beneath a mulberry tree, but when Pyramus arrives he finds evidence to suggest that Thisbe has been eaten by a lioness, and so stabs himself: [reading no.4].

This is a splendidly realistic simile, but it is a bit too realistic. The jet of blood is too concrete, and Pyramus becomes a broken water main, a human pipe; I do not want to know in that much detail or with that much vividness how he died. The details actually interfere with my sympathy and pity for the star-crossed lover; I find myself getting lost in the details, wondering what they mean. I connect the pipe image to the hole in the wall, and recognize an invasion of this deserted rural space by the urban elements that previously both secured the lovers' separation and allowed their communication, and wonder what I should make of that. The violent image becomes aestheticized as I think about it, a fountain of water perhaps, and yet is not a fountain but a water pipe, which seems rather low class. The image creates a real distance between me and the scene, and thus derails my emotional response. The weird and grotesque nature of the death becomes the object of my attention, not the tragic plight of the dying man.