June 24, 2022
The single most important source of the stories of Greek mythology is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a book that had enormous influence on later poets, including Shakespeare and Milton. The Metamorphoses was and still is useful as a mythological handbook, not least because Ovid is witty and constantly entertaining: when I taught Greek mythology I used it as a textbook, supplemented by Hesiod’s Theogony (which is not witty and entertaining, but which contains stories that the Metamorphoses does not). In that way, students were learning the myths as Shakespeare and Milton and many other writers had learned them. They learned them detached from whatever their original context was in Greek religion: Ovid was an educated, sophisticated Roman, a younger contemporary of Virgil, and, like most of the Roman elite, no longer believed literally in the gods, Greek or Roman. What unites the 200 or so tales woven intricately into the Metamorphoses is not a continuous narrative but the theme announced by its title. These are tales of metamorphosis: its opening lines are “My intention is to tell of bodies changed / To different forms.” In tale after tale, human beings and gods become shapechangers, sometimes deliberately, more often as a tragic fate. At first, this may seem an arbitrary, perhaps even satiric choice, for Ovid’s tone is lighthearted and detached. Did the old times really believe in all these impossible tales? Yet Ovid’s intuition was sound: metamorphosis lies at the heart of mythology and literature, at the heart of mythology itself—despite the fact that there is something about it that is profoundly disturbing.
A typical Ovidian change involves a fall downward on the chain of being: Narcissus turns into the narcissus flower; Daphne, fleeing from Apollo, into the tree sacred the Apollo, the laurel; Jupiter changes Io into a cow to hide her—unsuccessfully, it turns out—from persecution by his jealous wife Hera. What to make of all this? In the 15th and last book, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras is dragged onstage to make a long speech in which he makes of it two kinds of thing at once. First, the Pythagorean school believed in the serial metamorphosis of reincarnation, which led to its vegetarianism. Don’t eat that cow: it may not be Io, but it might be your grandmother. Second, however, Pythagoras unfolds a startlingly modern vision of the natural world not as a divine order but as an endless metamorphosis, a process of constant change. Centuries before Lyell, we get this:
I have seen oceans
That once were solid land, and I have seen
Lands made from ocean. Often sea-shells lie
Far from the beach, and men have found old anchors
On mountain tops. (page 373)
In the organic world, he notes how worms weave cocoons and turn into moths, tadpoles turn into frogs (page 376). As for human life, it is slow motion metamorphosis, as we watch our bodies age: the old wrestler looks at his wasted arms, and, in a stunning passage, Helen of Troy weeps over her wrinkles in the mirror, so changed that it is hard to imagine that this body caused two armies to fight over its possession (page 372). If you are a Pythagorean, you have the comforting hope of reincarnation into a new body; if a Christian, the hope of escaping what the Renaissance called mutability into a spiritual world above nature. But that is later. What we endure now is metamorphosis.
There is a social aspect of metamorphosis: the world changes around us, so much so that for the old it is no longer the world they grew up in. But that is less deeply disturbing than the metamorphosis of the body, something so threatening that we repress our awareness of it most of the time. The commonsense notion of human consciousness is that of a relatively stable point of view, the ego, maintaining a kind of order and permanence despite the fluctuations of the emotions and the impulses of the body. But the detached consciousness of the ego is something of a fiction. In actuality, the ego is a ghost needing something solid to inhabit, to haunt, something to lend it at least the illusion of substantial, permanent reality, and, at a crucial moment of child development, it embodies itself, identifying itself with what is now popularly called the body-image. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan marked this milestone of development as what he called the “mirror stage,” the fateful moment when the child sees its image in the mirror and identifies it as “myself.” The identification is incomplete, intermittent, largely unconscious. Consciously we may feel that we are a consciousness trapped inside a hunk of meat, as Yeats does when in “The Tower” he speaks of “Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog’s tail.” But that kind of alienation rests atop a deeper unconscious identification with the body, an identity expressed more scientifically in the term “psychosomatic.”
The body-image is a psychological defense mechanism, a way of trying to arrest metamorphosis through identification with a relatively stable and normalized representation. I am not just a stream of consciousness, a flux of ideas, memories, perceptions, bodily sensations, emotions, intuitions, swirling without end. I have a fixed identity, and it is “normal.” Hence anything that subverts our confidence in a constant, conventionalized body-image is threatening. I think that underlying some of the fiercest ideological conflicts of our society is a latent anxiety about body-image—indeed, I think it is the real reason that the conflicts are so fierce and irrational. Abortion is one instance. There are legitimate reasons to respectfully disagree about the point at which a fetus becomes a human life. But below the level of moral abstractions, I think that hostility to abortion is a rejection of a certain conception of what a human being is: namely, the one implied by the image of the fetus in the sonogram: an alien-looking being floating in liquid, at one point with vestigial gills, constantly changing, a kind of humanoid tadpole. The pro-life position recoils from this: that is not what a human being is. A human being is an individual, established as such by God from the moment of conception, not a piece of matter in blind flux, not a growth whose first baby picture is something out of a horror film. The pro-life position denies, on a deep, no doubt mostly unconscious level, the idea of human identity reduced to matter in metamorphosis. Right-to-life polemics spend much effort trying to, well, humanize the fetus, even describe it as reacting with emotions like fear. But that anthropomorphizing is pushing back against the knowledge that we all once looked like that, grew from a tiny speck to that strange form, floating in the darkness of another human body. I think we are all haunted by that metamorphosis, whatever side of the debate we are on.
Before sonograms existed, there was pregnancy. Women know something about bodily metamorphosis because they live it for nine months. But until relatively recently the popular media had to pretend that pregnancy didn’t exist: it was considered “vulgar.” In 1928, the wife of Walt Wallet, lead character in the groundbreaking comic strip Gasoline Alley, became pregnant. The word “pregnancy” was taboo, but Walt and Phyllis never even used a euphemism like “expecting.” They simply referred to “our secret” until suddenly there was a baby in the family. Phyllis’s bulge was never shown: it was always strategically hidden behind tables, other people, and so on. And yet a discussion board recently posted a letter to a newspaper editor at the time, absolutely disgusted with the strip, as if it had drawn attention to something obscene. As late as 1952-53, Lucille Ball was not allowed to use the word pregnant on the I Love Lucy television episode in which she announced her pregnancy to her own husband, and the network did not want her to appear on camera while she was showing. Yes, there was the prudery about the obvious implication that someone had been having sex. But there is also the physicality, the strangeness of a woman’s body distended with another being inside it, one that occasionally moves around and kicks. We are no longer prudish about the sex, but the strangeness of the altered body image is something it would be considered weird and inappropriate to mention.
Body-image also enters into the ideological conflicts about gender identity. The liberal view is that gender identity and sexual orientation have nothing necessarily to do with the physical body one acquired at birth. The conservative view presents itself as a moral argument establishing heterosexuality as a norm necessary for reproduction, or as God’s will, but once again less rational feelings lurk not very far under the surface. For many people, Freud’s notorious statement that “Anatomy is destiny” is a comfort, not a curse: a secure, stable sense of identity is grounded in the image of a male or female body and the supposed responses and desires of that body type. When such norms are subverted, it is perceived—again, mostly unconsciously—as a threat to both personal and social stability. The irrationality of homophobic panic is obvious in the hysteria about “grooming.” If human sexuality were really fixed, grooming would be impossible. It is the fear that sexuality is not fixed, that human nature is polymorphic and could choose to be other than heteronormative, that drives the hysteria. That is why it does no good to say, “Why should you care what other people do?” or “But they’re people, just like anyone else.” The real fear is that human sexuality, and therefore human identity, is metamorphic and shifting. Who knows what contrary impulses might be found lurking even in one’s own unconscious?
Even more disturbing to some is the body of a trans individual: for example, someone who not only defines themselves as female but also looks female—yet who has a male reproductive organ. Once again, the bodily categories are “supposed” to fix and normalize human identity. Likewise, the idea of being non-binary or gender fluid provokes a panic response from some people because it implies that human nature is fundamentally polymorphous—a post-Freudian word for metamorphic. Gender issues can and should be debated on a level of individual rights and freedom of choice, but resistance to social change in this context has deeply irrational roots. It is more than simply illogical thinking or ignorance.
The ideal of beauty is also an attempt to arrest the metamorphic nature of human body shapes and features by prescribing a narrow set of norms. The recurrent complaint that 95% of women—for of course it is almost always women being talked about—do not and cannot fit the norms is beside the point, for that is exactly the intention, which is to control human difference, contain it within limits, not to broaden appreciation for the infinite variety of the human form. Women who do not fit the definition of “attractive” are not merely dismissed or ignored: they may be treated as deformed, and hate language employed against them (“pigs”). They are guilty of an offence, because their “ugliness” is threatening. Any proliferation of diversity on a deep level inspires fear, fear of a metamorphic generation of difference that always threatens to get out of control. To oversimplify, canons of beauty typically posit two kinds of norms. One is regularity of bodily features, especially facial features. To use the language of William Blake, this is an attempt to subdue “living form” to “mathematic form”: if anything resists the proliferating tendencies of metamorphosis it is the symmetries of mathematics. The other is body shape, which is again clearly regulatory. In our society, the ideal is of unrealistic thinness, because a full figure to some people means flesh that is burgeoning, out of control. For that reason it is difficult to find a woman in the United States who does not have at least some issues about weight, some of which may result in eating disorders whose unconscious desire is to starve away the threatening body altogether.
The anxiety intensifies with the realization that, because of the psychosomatic feedback loop, bodily metamorphoses can produce emotional metamorphoses, and in fact do so all the time, little as we like to admit it. We should not congratulate ourselves too much: terms like “hormones” and “serotonin” may be based on sounder science than the Renaissance theory of the four humors, but people in Shakespeare’s day understood perfectly well about the effects of biochemistry on temperament. Melancholy, or as we would say depression, may not be caused by black bile (one of four “humors” or bodily fluids), but its characteristics, including its frequent link with creativity, were clearly understood. Shakespeare’s most Ovidian play is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Bottom is given the head of an ass and he and his “rude mechanicals” put on a play in the fifth act that is a dramatization of the story of Pyramis and Thisbe—a story out of the Metamorphoses. That story is a romantic love story, and falling unpredictably and irrationally in love, and out of love, is the most disconcerting metamorphosis of all. Love can make an ass out of anyone, or make anyone fall in love with an ass, even a faerie queen. There was no theory that it was chemically induced, but the “love juice” used by the fairies to cause the human characters to fall in love provides a physical cause anyway.
Shakespeare is fascinated by the way that love’s “madness” can cause psychological metamorphoses, and not just in this play. Much Ado about Nothing is another “humor” play, summed up by a remark by one of its lovers: “For man is a giddy thing, and that is my conclusion.” That is the anxiety at the root of the theme of metamorphosis. Twelfth Night ventures with some boldness into gender-bending: Duke Orsino is attracted to a beautiful male youth who is actually Viola, the female lead, in male disguise. Meanwhile, Olivia is also attracted to the disguised Viola, which means she is unknowingly drawn to another woman. An additional layer of ambiguity is added with the knowledge that all the roles would originally have been played by male actors. The play’s subtitle is “What You Will,” and a scholarly footnote will inform readers that “will” in Shakespeare’s time had a possible meaning of “desire.” It is also Shakespeare punning on his own name in a way that he also does in the sonnets, in which an older male poet is in love with a beautiful male youth. It is metamorphosis that makes the world go round: and where it stops, nobody knows.
Metamorphosis descends into darker territory than any explored by Ovid himself in the Jacobean period of English drama, including Hamlet. The bodily metamorphoses of the natural world do not end in death. A body that dies is eaten by something else in the food chain, and thereby is assimilated into the body of the eater, which may be eaten and assimilated in its turn. In The Productions of Time, I quoted the passage in which Hamlet tells Claudius that “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” When Claudius asks him what in the world he is getting at, Hamlet replies, “Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.” Even the advice “Get thee to a crematorium” would not solve the problem, for the very atoms of the air we breathe may have once been part of the bodies of people in the past. In the graveyard scene, Hamlet is obsessed with the metamorphosis of Yorick, the jester who played with him when he was a child, into a grinning skull.
But the obsession is not his alone. In a poem called “Whispers of Immortality,” T.S. Eliot said that the Jacobean playwright John Webster “was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.” Nor is it confined to drama: John Donne has an unfinished poem called Metempsychosis, subtitled The Progress of the Soul, recounting the journey of a soul that begins as the soul of the forbidden fruit on the Tree of Knowledge, and later reincarnates in various vegetable, animal, and human forms. The grotesque vision of life caught up in the unending cycles of physical change and death, as if trapped and unable to get off some demonic amusement park ride, was revived, or exhumed, in the 19th century by Thomas Lovell Beddoes in one of the neglected works of English literature, Death’s Jest Book, a closet drama cast in the form of a Jacobean-style revenge play. It was in turn an influence on Dylan Thomas who, in one poem, sits watching “the worm beneath my nail / Wearing the quick away.” In popular culture, the formula plot of slasher films is a pretext for the real genre’s real motive: the horrified fascination with the metamorphoses a minute with a chain saw can work upon the frail integrity of the human body.
Some religions promise an escape from the metamorphoses of the material world into an eternal world of disembodied spirit. This was part of the appeal of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism in the early Christian centuries. Christianity itself was in a more difficult position because, popular misconceptions notwithstanding, it repudiated the idea of a disembodied soul in favor of a “spiritual body,” contrasted with a “natural body” by Paul in I Corinthians 15. Not only that, but the tradition grew up that the spiritual body would be the natural body somehow transformed, that at the Last Judgment all bodies would rise from their graves and be reunited with their proper owners. The consequence was that all the potentially grotesque implications of bodily metamorphosis were imported into the heart of Christian theology. Christine Walker Bynum explores the tortured complexity of this issue in a fascinating book, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336. As she says at one point, “If meat and drink do not merely pass through us but become us, there will be too much matter for God to reassemble; on the other hand, if people really eat other people, even God may have trouble sorting out the particles” (33). The book is an encyclopedic survey of the various solutions proposed over centuries, their unsatisfactory nature hinted at by titles of some of Bynum’s chapters, including “Reassemblage and Regurgitation" and “Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons.” The same kind of issues were involved in the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, which insisted that, once consecrated, the bread and wine of the Eucharist really were the body and blood of Christ, not mere symbols of them. Thus Communion seemed somehow akin to cannibalism, the actual eating of the body of a god.
The modern world has revived the hope of escaping from the metamorphoses of our bodily condition. In his poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” after a period of serious ill health, Yeats imagines a life “out of nature” as a golden bird upon a golden bough. It is an imaginative musing and not a serious belief, though, mind you, Yeats was capable of believing, or believing that he believed, some fairly crazy things. However, science fiction has taken seriously the notion of replacing the vulnerable, mortal body of a carbon-based biped with a potentially immortal machine body. The cybernetic revolution produced an even more radical possibility: the uploading of human consciousness in digital form, indefinite survival in a virtual state, complete with backup copies in case an accident happens to the original. This is one variation of the conviction that the future of humanity lies in some transcendence into a “post-human” form, not always out of a desire to be “as gods” but because the universe revealed by science is completely indifferent to human survival. Already in 1897, H.G. Wells in “The Star” was imagining a wandering star that enters the solar system and all but annihilates the human race. This inspired Arthur C. Clarke to write his own story, also called “The Star,” in which the narrator, a Jesuit scientist, is shattered to realize that the nova that wiped out a good and noble alien race was the star that shone over Bethlehem. In his novel Childhood’s End, Clarke imagines a human transcendence achieved by the merging of human children into a collective superhuman intelligence called the Overmind, an entity not limited by time and space, let alone by matter. But the Overmind is utterly inhuman.
In The Night Country, one of my touchstone books, Loren Eiseley, a paleontologist as well as a writer, grapples with the problem from the perspective of Darwinian evolution, but not evolution as understood by scientific materialism. In an essay titled “The Creature from the Marsh,” he describes the liminal world of the marsh, a “Darwinian world of passage, of missing links,” as a realm of metamorphosis that out-Ovids Ovid:
Parts of it are neither land nor sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment. (162)
In this “place where form itself is an illusion and no shape of man or beast is totally impossible” (163), he comes upon a Friday-like footprint and wonders for a moment what kind of missing link he has discovered, only to do a double take and realize that it is his own. He is his own missing link.
In other essays in the collection, he wonders whether the metamorphic energies of nature are not the opposite of the blind materialism they seem to be, whether they are a form of the imagination itself: “We are in a creative universe. Let us then create. After all, man himself is the unlikely consequence of such forces” (70). At one point he recommends a kind of tentative faith, a trust that “human metamorphosis may be possible” (53), though he is anything but a kind of TED-talk guru babbling about progress. It is a kind of faith that is not a faith in anything, leaving it vulnerable to allegations of helpless wish fulfilment. I think it may be more than that. Faith that is neither belief nor unbelief—that is a way of describing the creative attitude, an open receptiveness, hoping that something may turn up to answer the invitation. Let me only add a few suggestions of my own about what form a human metamorphosis might take in our time. One of Northrop Frye’s most important insights is that the modern quest myth is a “creative descent,” rather than the traditional ascent towards a heaven in the sky as seen in, for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy. While those thinking in terms of a post-human future transcendence are still questing onward and upward, I wonder whether downward metamorphosis might be transvalued from the “fall” that it is in Ovid. What might that entail?
Well, another casualty of our fear of the body is sex. The countercultural dreams of a liberated sexuality were largely unfulfilled: sex is as fraught as it ever was, even if our neuroses about it have shifted form somewhat. If we admit it, there is a disgust of sex because it reduces us to the body and its drives—its “animal” drives. When Othello thinks his wife is unfaithful, he is nauseated at her sexuality: “Goats and monkeys!” is his characterization of the sexual act, following Iago’s suggestion that Desdemona is making the “two-backed beast” with another man. But it is not just Othello. We know we are not supposed to think that way: it is old-fashioned, Victorian, puritanical. But I submit that on a deep level we do, even as we may struggle to be “sex-positive.” There is always a reason to repudiate sex. The AIDS crisis provided a powerful excuse. My relationship of the time was told by a gynecologist burned out by constant treatment of STD’s that people needed to just stop having all that sex. The younger generation has apparently taken that advice seriously, as its members are said to be less sexually active than baby boomers were, and some of them are declaring themselves asexual. Of course, #MeToo disclosed a world of predatory masculinity so toxic that there is often simply no question of healthy sexuality. But what drives toxic masculinity? Fear and hatred of the body and its desires, projected on women, who “tempt” men, and whose sexuality has to be controlled by any means possible, including violence.
Sex is regressive, if you want to call it that: it is a temporary, willing descent from the ego consciousness located in the head—D.H. Lawrence diagnosed the typical Western sexual pathology as “sex in the head”—down to the level of the body and the senses and the drives and the fantasies, to the level of the “good animal.” Science fiction, starting with Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, is full of human attempts to “uplift” animals to the level of human consciousness, and the result is always tragic, the animal cut off from natural instinct with nothing but an alienated consciousness to show for it. Again, what if we tried to at least imagine what a move in the other direction might be like, a creative descent into metamorphosis rather than a flight away from it, disregarding the inevitable accusations of “irrationalism” and “neo-romantic primitivism” and what not. The labels point to something real: the Nazis talked a lot about blood and instinct and the blond beast. But becoming a troll is not what we are talking about—rather, about the opposite of becoming a troll, something that the trolls would find horrifying, would call sick and perverted. The very thing of which they are afraid.
Two brief examples must suffice. In one of the most memorable fantasy novels of recent years, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), a human scientist, Isaac, has a movingly tender love relationship with a non-human artist, Lin. Lin is a Khepri: that is, she resembles the figure in Egyptian mythology who has a human body but whose head is a scarab beetle. Thus, Lin cannot speak, and communicates by sign language. But she is a gifted visual artist, creating sculptures out of a kind of “spit” produced by her own body: the Egyptian word “khepri” means “come into being” or “create.” Miéville does not shy away from love scenes, and they are intimate in the best sense of the term. If all human relationships were so caring, this would be a better world. It seems likely that on some level he intends a contrast with Kafka’s famous story “The Metamorphosis,” in which Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself, to his horror, in the body of a gigantic insect.
The story of Lin and Isaac ends in tragedy, but another recent tale of “interspecies romance” ends redemptively in more than one sense. I was absolutely amazed when Guillermo del Toro’s film The Shape of Water won the Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Director in 2017. It made me feel that maybe there’s hope for this society of ours yet. The Shape of Water tells with folktale simplicity a story of the love between a human woman and a humanoid amphibious creature clearly depicted to evoke The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in other words from Eiseley’s metamorphic marsh. Once again there is no shying away from the fact that the love of the two is sexual, and consummated. Moreover, the end of the story takes one more step. The villain of the piece, a power-crazed military toxic male, shoots both the creature and the woman. They fall into the water—whereupon the creature heals both himself and the woman, after which the scars of her wounds open into gills. And the two swim happily ever after. What is the shape of water? Water flows, constantly changing. It is perhaps the ultimate symbol of metamorphosis.
It is fear of death that underlies fear of the body and its metamorphoses. Caroline Walker Bynum says that “The seed is the oldest Christian metaphor for the resurrection of the body” (3). It is present in I Corinthians 15: “that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die first.” The suggestion is that the natural body is a seed that has to die so that the spiritual body may germinate out of it. The fall into the fertile earth; the return to the watery matrix whence we evolved: these are metaphors. But what is a metaphor? The verbal unit of metamorphosis, which turns out to be the lingua franca, the common vocabulary, of art, love, and the spirit.
References
Bynum, Dorothy Walker. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity: 200-1336. Columbia University Press, 1995.
Eiseley, Loren. The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Ovid. Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries. Indiana University Press, 1955. No line numbers.