The Ideology of the Metamorphosis Motif
Dr. Fedya Daas
ISLT University
Tunisia
Abstract:
This paper explores the literary
reworking of the mythic motif of ‘metamorphosis’. It first reveals the thematic
move from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses to Kafka’s The
Metamorphosis. Ovid’s aetiological myths trace the causes of existence of
certain species in the ancient world in a series of explanatory metamorphoses
whereas Kafka’s short story pictures the metamorphosis of its protagonist into
an insect as the modernist ailment of the modern world. The paper, then,
catalogues two different moments in the appropriation of the Irish Sovereignty
myth by W.B Yeats in his play Cathleen ni Houlihan and James
Joyce in his Ulysses. While Yeats’s revival of the myth remains
faithful to the miraculous change of the old hag into a beautiful girl with, of
course, some changes of structure and emphasis to suit his nationalistic
project, James Joyce’s realistic framework leads to his radical revision of the
collective myth incorporating a textual metamorphosis that aims at liberating
the individual from tradition and emancipating the feminine. Briefly, the motif
of metamorphosis proves to be ideologically-driven and hence promises future
metamorphoses.
Keywords:
Ideology,
Metamorphosis, Mythic, Realistic, Nationalistic
Introduction:
This paper sets out some of the literary reworkings of the mythic motif
of metamorphosis. In order to focus on the interactions between the idea of
metamorphosis and other notions of myth, existentialism, and nation, this paper
recasts the question of the pure fascination with the idea of metamorphosis as
the question of the ideological appropriation of this motif in Ovid’s poem The
Metamorphoses and Kafka’s short story The Metamorphosis, then in W.B
Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan and James Joyce’s Ulysses (U).
I see it fit before discussing all these works to have a look at the
definition of ideology which is defined by The New Century Dictionary
as “a particular system of ideas, the characteristic way of thinking of a people,
group, or a person, as on social or political subjects” (789). While my article
may not refer too often to the word ‘ideology’, it nonetheless maps the
particular conceptions of the idea of ‘metamorphosis’ in relation to mythic,
social and nationalistic discourses. My approach is essentially comparative
which presents the metamorphosis motif as always in the process of being
created through new ideological configurations.
Ovid’s The Metamorphoses:
Ovid employs the concept of ‘metamorphosis’ or change in its broadest
sense. Circumstances are not kept unaltered as powers in the mundane world may
collapse after prosperity and may flourish after decline. For instance, Troy
falls and Rome rises. The fates of the individuals are also subject to change.
Humans are transformed into animals, birds, reptiles, insects, and all sorts of
things.
Although all the metamorphoses are represented by Ovid as
“miracles [that] seem marvellous” (426), their frequency makes of them familiar
events. In fact, these transformations are only miracles in the sense that they
are not acted by humans but by supernatural means upon humans. Cassier sees
that in the mythic world “nothing has a definite, invariable, static shape [and
that] by a sudden metamorphosis everything may be turned into everything” and
continues that “if there is any characteristic and outstanding feature of the
mythical world, any law by which it is governed it is this law of
metamorphosis” (81). Based on Cassier’s latter analysis, Natalia.R. Moehle, too,
asserts that metamorphosis “is native to the mythic world” (xvi). The
metamorphosis is the rule in mythology.
The miracle of
the metamorphosis implies two elements: the metamorphosed subject and the cause
responsible for the metamorphosis. In the invocation, Ovid points that “events
[...] take place on earth by will of Fate” (31), Gods “create”, “unlock”,
“make”, “divide” and “will” all the manifestations in the universe. God is “the
world’s master” (Ovid 32) and the power that continually controls Man’s doom.
Indeed, God; represented in the group of deities; is the chief responsible for
the metamorphoses. It is what Max Bense calls “the classical conception of
being” where God is seen as the “first cause, the ground to which all beings
are related” (51).
Except for
magic which can be possessed by humans, to transform beings into other shapes
is not within human reach. Gods “appear in human form but possess supernatural
powers, superhuman strength and ageless beauty. Each God possess[es] and implement[s]
[his] individual sense of justice. [Gods’] anger [is] harsh and Gods [are]
often vengeful” (“Ancient Greek Religion-Greek Mythology God-Greek Oracles”).
As a matter of fact, the metamorphosis of humans into animals are either pure
fancies of the Gods or punishments of those who dare to confront them. Juno’s
passions, frustrations and jealousy are behind a series of transformations. The
Goddess Pallas changes the artistically gifted girl Archane into a spider
because she achieves an amazing success over her in a weaving competition and
Jove changes Lycaon the man with “a savage soul”, “drunken tyranny” and
“hopeless hate” (Ovid 37) into a wolf.
Since; in his animal shape; Lycaon still “resemble[s]
himself” (Ovid 37) and Archane; in her new form as a spider; still weaves, one
is driven to adopt Hegel’s point of view that this punishment is “the
imprisonment of the sinful human soul in the body of an animal” (176). 1
Indeed, metamorphosed subjects can be blamed for being
bloody like Lycaon, defiant of the Gods like Archane, treacherous like the
shepherd Battus, blasphemous like Cecrops’ daughters, inquisitive and talkative
like Phocis and criminal like the Cercopians. The Gods implement their own
sense of justice upon the world.
As a punishment, the conversion of a human
into an animal represents necessarily a retrogression to an inferior status.
Hegel describes it as a “degradation” (177) and Pierre Brunel depicts the
animal as “the tool of a fall” (138). Ovid describes Priam’s wife who becomes
an animal as “the poor-she creature” (362), Hecuba the woman who is changed
into a dog as “pitiful” (367) and the transformation of the daughters of Pierus
into birds as a “sharp fall” (148).
Through his reworking of these legends and
tales in a literary work, Ovid transmits the idea that change is the cosmic
law. However, unlike the Homeric or other elder reworkings of myths whose
reverence for the Gods are unmistakable, Ovid’s text aims at ridiculing the
Greek and Roman deities by reducing their actions of metamorphosing humans to
mere fancies and desires. Ovid, in fact, metamorphoses the superior position of
the Gods in the mythological era. He discloses their scandals, their chases of
girls, their incessant sexual frenzies and their blind jealousies from each
other and especially from humans.
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis:
Heselhaus notes that Kafka’s Metamorphosis
calls to mind The Metamorphoses of Ovid. The transformation into an
insect figures in Ovid’s text. He says: “[A]rachne, the artful weaver and
worker, is transformed into a spider by the angry Athene, as a punishment for
her presumptuousness in having challenged the goddess to a contest of their
skills” (363). Yet he alludes to the difference between Arachne’s story and
Kafka’s Metamorphosis. While “Kafka depicts the life and destiny of
being who is metamorphosed – Ovid and classical writers depict only the act of
metamorphosis” (Heselhaus 363). As a matter of fact, Gregor’s metamorphosis,
Edward Moore says, has a “dangerous penetration [in the] daily life”.
Gregor lives the experience of metamorphosis within his family whose members
are fully aware of his real essence.
The event of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis
is also familiarized as it is represented in a very ordinary way: “when Gregor
Samsa wake]s[ up one morning from unsettling dreams, he
find]s[ himself changed in his bed into a
monstrous vermin” (Kafka 3). First, it is the commonness and realism of space
(Gregor’s room is “regular human” lying “between […] four familiar walls”) and
time (in the morning, the usual time to wake up). In fact, Edwin Honig remarks
that Kafka’s Metamorphosis “is conditioned differently [from
other metamorphosis tales]; that is, by a realistic milieu instead of a
mythicized fairyland” (64). The effect of total reality of the metamorphosis is
also made accessible through the choice of a travelling salesman as Gregor’s
career, a career characterized by instability.
Indeed, it is not only the reader who is
convinced by the reality of the metamorphosis; for Gregor, too, the
metamorphosis is “no dream” (Kafka 3). Greenberg asserts that
[O]f course, it is no dream-to the
dreamer. The dreamer, while he is dreaming,
takes his dream as real; Gregor’s
thought is therefore literally true to the
circumstances in which he finds
himself. However, it is also true ironically
since his metamorphosis is indeed no
dream (meaning something unreal) but a
revelation of the truth (71).
Hence, as put by
Pierre Brunel, “it happens that the extraordinary can be revealed too
ordinarily” (8).2 In this enfeebling of the unusual into the usual
and the common, Kafka and Ovid meet. That Gregor’s metamorphosis is represented
by Kafka as real goes back in fact to the existentialist conception of reality.
This conception, according to Max Bense, is radically different from its
classical counterpart. He explains the differences as follows:
In the theodicy before creation God
thinks out many possible worlds, but
realizes only one of them, and the
result of this is that in the classical conception
of being there exist at once the
ontological problem of the modal distinction of
the real world and the epistemological
problem of objective reality
(Realitatsgegebenheit). [...] The
existential mode of analysis [...] remains
basically indifferent to the classical
distinction between possible and realized,
real and unreal worlds, and
accordingly does not know the explicit problem of
objective reality. Summarized, this
state of affairs can be expressed more or less
in the following way: in the classical
conception of being the fiction of a
distinctive (ausgezeichnet) world
which represents itself as a real world is
constantly maintained and at best
aesthetically and ethically varied between
being and seeming, perfection and
imperfection; in the non-classical conception
of being, on the other hand, this
fiction of the distinctive world is either given
up from the start or successively
destroyed (51-2).
Accordingly, the distinction
between real and unreal has no ontological meaning in Kafka’s existentialist
literature. The metamorphosis of Gregor into an insect is not unreal but
surreal. The surreal literature has “a thoroughly rational structure of its
own” using “the play of modes” as an essential technique and has nothing to do
with imagination (Bense 53). Bense adds that “every neglect of reality favours
the multiplicity of possibilities, and every deformation of the form or of the
object, which the aesthetic sign lets emerge from the husk of trivial purposes,
making it recognizable and communicable, already almost implies a change of
mode. Kafka does not deform” (54). Gregor’s change into an insect is then not a
deformation but an actuality viewed from a surreal angle.
Gregor’s
situation is, in fact far away from being magical or mythological, typically
existentialist. Philosophy Professor Robert Solomon states that “the
existential attitude begins with a disoriented individual facing a confused
world he cannot accept” and continues that “the individual eventually accepts
and even embraces the absurdity of life” (“Existentialism”).3 Gregor
is immersed in the “void” and the “mud” to borrow Sartre’s terms. He is obliged
to have a job he dislikes and again obliged to deny his wills in a total
obedience to his boss. He “leads a passive, supine, acquiescent existence in a
“semi-conscious” state […] in which he is scarcely aware of himself”
(“Existentialism”). Gregor’s acceptance of his situation brings
about his metamorphosis into an insect which is a concrete representation of
his submission to the muddy life he is leading.
Kafka keeps the notion of degradation
inherent in the transformation of a human into an animal. Gregor is described
by his mother as “an unfortunate boy” (Kafka 30). Eric Santner remarks that
“the story of Gregor Samsa is an initiation into a universe of abjection” (210)
and Bachelard thinks that “Kafka connects metamorphosis to misery, fall and the
slowing down of life” (16).
In Kafka’s story, one changes and
everything changes around him too. Gregor’s long-lasting metamorphosis is a
revival of Ovid’s long lasting metamorphoses. In Kafka and Ovid’s worlds there
is no salvation, no hope for the deliverance of humanity. And if in Ovid’s
mythological world Gods are there only to punish individuals; in Kafka’s modern
world there is no God at all. The excessive reliance on reason, order, and work
brings about nothing but the destruction and the shattering of the hopes of the
modern man. Kafka depicts “the Modernist ailment of the modern world and of
contemporary consciousness = alienation, the levelling of the human personality
and the existential loneliness of the individual” (Meletinsky 317). The
capitalist society in its rush for profits and effectiveness kills mercy, love
and intimate relationships characteristic of Man. For Kafka, its individuals
must become insects forever which is a concrete representation of the
deterioration they reached.
W.B Yeats Cathleen ni Houlihan:
W.B Yeats also reworks the mythic motif of
the metamorphosis in his nationalistic play Cathleen ni Houlihan. I will
first give a brief summary of the play before tackling the theme of
metamorphosis. It is also useful to know that Cathleen ni Houlihan is the
symbol of Ireland. Michael Gillane is to marry the beautiful Delia Cahel the
next day. A stranger; an old woman appears and is invited in. She wanders from
one place to another because her four beautiful green fields were taken away
from her. She praises the men who loved her and died for her sake and promises
immortality to those who are yet to die. She sings:
They shall be
remembered forever
They shall be alive
forever
They shall be
speaking forever
The people shall hear them
forever (Yeats, Plays 26-7)
After her departure,
Michael, as if spell bound, follows her despite the pleads of his mother and
his bride. The old woman turns into a young girl with a walk of a queen.
It is worth noting
that Yeats’s Cathleen is a reworking of Celtic mythology and
specifically of the Sovereignty Myth. Yeats’s revival of ancient mythology was
part of the Irish Literary Revival movement that aims at awakening the Irish to
their heritage that legitimates the construction of a distinctive national
identity. This movement was gathering pace in the late 19th and
early 20th century Ireland both as an antidote to the cruel reality
of colonization and a precursor of a political movement for independence. As
such, myths become the site of national resistance.
The Sovereignty, Maria Tymoczko writes,
“is the most distinctive Irish goddess, whose union with the rightful king was
signaled by her metamorphosis from hag to beautiful young girl” (97). Yeats’s
remolding of the above-mentioned subtext remains faithful to the magic
metamorphosis of the old woman into a young one, yet this metamorphosis is the
outcome of the union of the Irish young men with the old woman, representative
of colonized Ireland. Only then can the woman become a young queen. Here the
metamorphosis is highly symbolic. The old woman is not a real woman, it is
Ireland under colonization suffering from “trouble” because her “land”, her
“four beautiful green fields” were “taken from [her]” by “strangers” (Yeats, Plays
23). The young woman with “the walk of a queen” is not an earthly woman as
well. It is the symbol of a free, sovereign and independent Ireland.
Like Ovid, Yeats does not detail the
aftermath of the metamorphosis event because for him as well as for the Irish
people, the metamorphosis with its symbolic connotations is a goal in itself.
Metamorphosis here, unlike the Ovidian and Kafesque metaphors of degradation,
becomes synonymous with salvation and regeneration that can be obtained only
through the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the nation. The
metamorphosed subject is elevated to a higher status. Yet, metamorphosis is
neither achieved easily as the will of Fate nor does it represent a surreal
point of view to an existentialist situation, it is the outcome of a
collaboration, a unity and a belief in the value of sacrifice.
The Irish people should labor to make “the
hope of getting [their] beautiful fields back again; the hope of putting the
strangers out of [their] house” (Yeats, Plays 25) come true. Unlike the
already-realized metamorphoses of Ovid and Kafka, Yeats’s notion of
metamorphosis is still longed for, still a project. Ireland’s independence has
not been achieved yet and the idea of a nation is the hardest to implement in
such absence of a sovereign country. Yeats explains his ideological use of the
figure of Cathleen:
There is a sinking away of national
feeling which is very simple in its origin.
You cannot keep the idea of a nation
alive where there are no national
institutions to reverence, no
national success to admire, without a model of it in
the mind of the people. You can call
it “Kathleen ni Houlihan” or the “Shan Van
Vocht” in a mood of simple feeling,
and love that image. (qtd. in Keane 1).
Cathleen with its
straightforward symbolism appeals to all men and hence becomes the fittest
emblem of national pride; a fact that Yeats exploits to send “[c]ertain men the
English shot” (Yeats, Poems 392).
Yeats’s use
of the magical metamorphosis gives hope to the Irish in times of troubles and
colonization when salvation is thought to be impossible. Independence is at
reach and the magic of the metamorphosis could be real through blood sacrifice.
The death of the individuals/sons metamorphoses into the life of the
mother/mother land. By sacrificing the individual dreams and the romance of the
family for the sake of the collective dreams and the romance of the nation, the
fantastic would be real.
James Joyce Ulysses:
Joyce has a “deep-seated
revulsion from violent Nationalism and from Ireland herself as a devouring
female” (Keane 4). In more than one occasion, he embeds parodically different
echoings of and from Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. In “A Mother” one
short story from his Dubliners (D),
Kathleen is the name of a young girl who has a talent of singing and whose
mother “[w]hen the Irish Revival began to be appreciable ... determined to take
advantage of her daughter’s name” (Joyce, D 100). Mr Holohan is an “assistant secretary of the Eire Abu
Society” (Joyce, D 99) who
refuses to pay Kathleen for her singing in concerts arranged by the Society.
The short story “A Mother” ironically reduces the national symbol of Cathleen
ni Houlihan to material transactions.
In “The Dead”, Gretta Conroy
answers her husband’s question about an old lover of hers: “And what did he die
of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?” as follows: “I think he died for me”
(Joyce, D 158). Joyce
continues: “A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer” (D 158). The author clearly refers to
Cathleen’s answer to Michael’s question about a man “that was hanged in Galway”
(Yeats, Plays 24). Michael asks: “What was it brought him to his death?”
The old woman replies: “He died for love of me: many a man has died for love of
me” (Yeats, Plays 24). For Joyce, Ireland as such has always been the
devourer, the ugly and stinky devourer indeed.
Tymoczko alludes to Joyce's use
of Irish mythology and his radical transformation of the Sovereignty myth
reworked in Yeats's Cathleen. Instead
of the shapeshifting of the old hag into a young woman, he starts his book Ulysses with an old milkwoman,
representing rural Ireland and the peasant figure endorsed by the revivalists,
to end with Molly, another woman not only fairly young and beautiful, but also
modern. Described as a “witch on her toadstool” (Joyce, U 13) with “old shrunken paps” and “wrinkled fingers” pouring
“rich white milk, not hers” (Joyce, U
13), the old woman is not fit to embody the Irish modern identity Joyce would
like to trace. She is a “poor old woman, [a name] given her in old times”
(Joyce, U 13), and she is even
ironized as “a wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror
and her gay betrayer” (Joyce, U
13). Nothing can transform the old hag into a young queen which enables Joyce
to point out to the futility of “sacrifice” as a value upheld by the
revivalists.
Joyce instead ends with Molly in
comfort, beautiful and sexually open with her “full breasts”, an
incarnation not of an ideal Irish identity but a modern and urban one that
accepts the female body. In Joyce's treatment of the Sovereignty theme, there
is a peculiar type of metamorphosis which is not magical and which constitutes
Joyce's profoundest critique of the mythology of the revival. Maria Tymoczko
explains that it is a textual metamorphosis that takes place in Ulysses and summarizes:
The two women, the two
images of the Sovereignty of Ireland, the old
milkwoman and Molly,
bracket the action of the book. Representing morning
and night, they sum up the
progress of the day. Though the land and weather
become transformed, Joyce
cannot use the motif of the physical metamorphosis
of the Sovereignty within
his realistic framework. Rather than metamorphosis
of the female figure, there
is replacement of character, transformation of the
text. The old woman gives
way to the young, the text turns from the old
woman to Molly. The
Sovereignty figure is a composite, the result of an
iconographic palimpsest;
and it is literary metamorphosis rather than physical
shapeshifting that Joyce
uses (132).
The textual metamorphosis of Molly is a radical transformation of the
nationalistic myth and it is a blatant refusal of violence aiming at
deconstructing the mythology that fosters blood sacrifice. It is this
mythologizing of nationalism that Joyce sets to decode, hence his rejection of
the magical and mythological use of the trope of metamorphosis.
Conclusion:
As has been shown in the above analysis,
metamorphosis as a trope serves to challenge the superior status of the Gods
with Ovid, to concretize an existentialist situation with Kafka, to mythologize
a blood nationalism with Yeats and to demythologize the national myths with
Joyce. Therefore, the motif of the metamorphosis proves to be
ideologically-driven and hence promises future metamorphoses.
End Notes
1 My translation.
The quotation is “[...] elles sont devenues des prisons ou les dieux enferment
les âmes des coupables.” Hegel. Esthétique. Trans. S. Jankélvitch and
Aubier-Montaingne. Ed. Claude Khodoss. 1993. All subsequent quotations by Hegel
are taken from this edition.
2 My translation: “Il peut arriver
que l’extraordinaire se révèle fort ordinaire”.
3 All the information about
existentialism are taken from J.A. Cuddon’s Dictionary
of Literary Terms & Literary
Theory. 4th ed. England: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998.
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