Loving Writing / Ovid's Amores by Ellen Oliensis

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 417 Loving Writing / Ovid's AMORES. By Ellen Oliensis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. Pp. vii, 202. The EGO of Ovid's AMORES has always been difficult to pin down, especially with regard to the nature and magnitude of the apparent gap between the lascivious chaser of romantic entanglements and the extratextual author who composed and edited the collection. Traditional assumptions about the distinction between author and persona, as Ellen Oliensis demonstrates in this book, have produced a tendency to credit poetic features to the “real” author and all things amatory to the persona. With a crucial reminder that this speaking voice is not just a lover, but also a poet, Oliensis restores to this lover-poet a dimensional identity (“Naso”) and proposes a focused intratextual reading of this Naso’s poetry on his own terms. Chapter One, “Introducing Naso” (5–53), establishes the book’s heuristic model, which foregrounds the persona’s status as both lover and poet, responsible for serious poetic features and feckless amatory antics alike. In proposing to remain firmly within the “storyworld” of the Amores, Oliensis turns deliberately away from the intertextual and metapoetic interests that have dominated Ovidian studies in recent decades. Readers skeptical of this approach should note that this disavowal of intertextuality does not eliminate other authors entirely. Naso is not unaware of his literary predecessors. He has read his Catullus, his Horace, and his Virgil, just not in the same way, or with the same priorities, as the extratextual Ovid would have done. Oliensis’s emphasis on intratext over intertext, while unusual for the present scholarly moment, is productive and compelling, and those deeply invested in intertextuality will find much to be gained in her examinations of Naso’s program of poetic interplay with his antecedents. With her approach to questions of autobiography, authenticity, and fictionality grounded in a meticulous theoretical framework, Oliensis presents an early demonstration of the efficacy of her method through a “Nasonian” reading of Amores 3.9 (the lament for Tibullus). On this reading, an earnest Naso is shown to reduce the figure of “Tibullus” to as generic and malleable a character as he is himself, so that neither poet is tethered to any world outside the fiction. In a final subsection labeled “Yes, But . . .” (39–53), Oliensis anticipates objections to her purely intratextual model, based on moments where Naso and Ovid seem to converge, by neatly accounting for these moments as evidence of Naso’s strategic deployment of his association with the “real” author. A great strength of this monograph is its careful work with poems in situ, and in particular the drawing of connections between poems not traditionally examined in communication with each other (often because they otherwise belong to closely studied pairs). Chapter Two, “The Poet’s Heart” (54–99), offers numerous such readings. The results are original, convincing, and at times delightfully bizarre. A Nasonian reading of Amores 2.5–2.7, for example, connects the lover-poet’s accusations of infidelity (2.5) to the lament for Corinna’s dead parrot (2.6) and the denial of an affair with Cypassis (2.7) via a progressive narrative of humiliation, recovery, and witness retaliation, ultimately suggesting (through persuasive linguistic resonances) that Corinna’s parrot may well have been the index of Naso’s affair with Cypassis—hence the untimely death mourned in poem 2.6. Other productive readings follow from construing declarations of poetic immortality (1.15, 3.15) alongside their preceding poems (1.14, 3.14), revealing the extent to which Naso’s sense of rivalry is displaced away from other male poets onto the women within his “storyworld” and even onto his own poems. Oliensis builds also upon her reading 418 PHOENIX of the lament for Tibullus (3.9) in Chapter One by examining the poems that precede (3.8) and follow (3.10); the markedly Tibullan character of these two poems is shown to be more than mere homage, but a sublimated expression of poetic rivalry. Chapters Three (“The Lover’s Art,” 100–149) and Four (“Loving Writing,” 150–188) pivot toward a reading of Naso’s desire as a serious aspect of his poetic project

Art · Comics · Humanities · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Literature · Persona · Poetry · Reading (process) · Romance · Skepticism · Theology · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Philosophy