Ovid's Lovers

186 PHOENIX good, respectable fun. Re-reading Aristotle's discussion against Collins's interpretation will reveal a level of incongruity that many scholars will find hard to tolerate. Still, although the book's denouement ismarred by this kind of interpretative overreach, Collins's work should challenge students of the ancient world to ponder Aristotle's potential contributions to contemporary debates, as well as his possibly significant limitations. Hobbes irreversibly damaged the cause of Aristotelianism in the modern world, but exponents of Aristotelian philosophy may yet find ways to improve the philosopher's stature among careful observers of political and ethical fife. University of Toronto Ryan K. Balot Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination. By Victoria Rimell. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. vii, 235. Rimell proposes to shift "the focus in Ovidian criticism * from intertextuality to intersubjectivity" by exploring "the relationship between self and other, and in particular that between male and female worlds" (i). She reads the Ovidian corpus as repeatedly enacting a relation between desiring subjects?specifically, a specular relation of literal or metaphorical gazes. Narcissus, an implicitly male model for seeing and desiring only the self, thus abolishing the other, and Medusa, a female model that "always involves encounters between spectators" (7), figure the two modalities of these relations. Rimell's goal is both loftyand desirable: to parse within a unified hermeneutic framework the varied poetic forms Ovid essayed and reinvented. Nonetheless, the precise logic governing her choices from Ovid's oeuvre remains obscure. The six chapters after her introduction address respectively theMedicamina, Ars Amatoria, the Orpheus tale of the Metamorphoses, Heroides 15, Heroides 16-21, and Heroides 18-19. Why three chapters? half the book's length?should be devoted to six letters of theHeroides, while one chapter on a single book of the Metamorphoses suffices for that enigmatic poem's complexity, is never explained or justified. Neither is it clear why Rimell engages Ovid's erotic elegy only through theArs Amatoria, while omitting any sustained study of theAmores. Apparent caprice vitiates more than her purview: articulating the theoretical apparatus governing her analyses, Rimell's reach far exceeds her grasp. The trouble lies in her sometimes reckless impatience with evidentiary argument. She is in good company when she bases half her theoretical model on Narcissus. Both Philip Hardie and Gianpiero Rosati gently argue that Narcissus iconically represents the poet's complicated meditations on desire (as Rimell notes, 19-20).1 Narcissus figures both the poet's and the lover's duplicity, in all senses of that word. The poet admiring his own image as reflected in his audience's reception of his ever-elusive work and the reader desiring to see himself/herself in the poetry matches the lover seeking his self-confirming reflection in a mirroring beloved. But the second half of her model depends on pure assertion rather than evidence. Rimell uses theMedusa myth "as an illustrative way into exploring how a narcissistic logic inOvidian poetry is contextualized and challenged, first of all by the troubling existence and (not quite visible) vision of the Other (paradigmatically, Woman) and secondly by an ongoing meeting/clash/interaction of desiring subjects and poetic drives, male and female .... 1 P. Hardie, Ovid's Poetics ofIllusion (Cambridge 2002); G. Rosati, Narcisso e Pygmalione: Illusione e spettacolo nelle Metamofosi di Ovidio (Florence 1983). BOOK REV1EWS/COMPTES RENDUS 187 Medusa's presence, insidious but little discussed, gnaws into and rivals the Narcissus archetype, asserting two desiring/creative subjects whose intercourse spikes the paradoxes of Ovidian illusionism. Both myths, told in Met. 3-5, are fundamental models inOvid for the birth of poetry and for the individual's path to subjectivity" (6, italics in original). Although Rimell promises that her detailed examination of Ovid's poetry will sub stantiate these claims, her unconvincing way of handling textual evidence disappoints. Even to build her theoretical scaffolding on the idea that Narcissus needs Medusa as a counterweight, poising duality against specious unity in subjectivity, undervalues the complexities of doubling in the Metamorphoses Narcissus tale. But the same bluff attitude toward careful observation of the data and rigorous argument linking data to conclusions vitiates her exegeses of individual passages. Partly

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