2017 bimillennium, Publius Ovidius Naso d. 17 (?)
2017 bicentennial, Jane Austen d. 1817
1 Preface/Précis
Thanks to many acts of critical recuperation, large and small, the poetry from exile now feels like an integral part of Ovidâs body of work. But should it? This paper will seek to recover a sense of the strangeness of Ovidâs final works: not so much âOvid, death and transfigurationâ (in the title of the present volume) as âOvid, undeath and disfiguration.â In particular, as a guerilla response to the poetâs own habitual description of his departure from Rome in 8â¯ce as a funeral, and his existence in Pontus as that of a dead man walking, I shall mobilize a 2009 pop-culture mash-up of a literary classic which has become a break-out hit among Anglophone millennials and literary scholars alike, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (âco-authorsâ Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith; hereafter PPZ),1 a work whose literal inserts and interpolations into a canonical text are at once the opposite of allusive art and a surprisingly effective instance of it. With its deformations of a great work of polite fiction, a Regency classic, what can PPZ teach us, by analogy and contrast, about the undoing of civilized literature, and of civilized life itself, on the shores of the Black Sea? Is Tomis, like PPZâs Longbourn, Netherfield and Pemberley, the locus of a âzombieâ apocalypse? And are we sure that we still recognize the poet we love in the zombified Ovid himself, as he limps with uneven gait toward an uncertain bimillennium along with the two âco-authorsâ who have usurped his oeuvre, Augustus Caesar and âIbisâ?
2 Defamiliarizing the Exile Poetry
An inevitable consequence of close and recursive study of Ovidâs exile poetry is that, the more time one spends with it, the less strange it tends to become. On a first read of any of the exile books, from Tristia 1 to the Ibis or the Epistulae ex Ponto, it is very clear how starkly and startlingly different it is from anything written by Ovid before, how thoroughly the poet has been undone by the princeps who has forcibly ârewrittenâ his life. But the more closely we analyze the exile poetry and the more intertextual links we see between the exile poetry and Ovidâs earlier oeuvre, or between the exile poetry and Greco-Roman literary traditions at large, the more we lose that sense of the unfamiliarity of the exile poetry.
But should we lose that sense of unfamiliarity? Close up, everything in this poetic corpus is a topos: a topos tweaked, customized, even inverted, but a topos none the less. The inevitable effect of our normal protocols of intertextual readingâthe kind of reading that most of us in this volume do, the kind of reading that has transformed our close-up understanding of the exile poetry in the past forty years or soâis to normalize the exile poetry. Is that a problem?
To put the issue (again) in terms of the present bookâs title, in the intertextually rich world of Ovidian poetry transfiguration is always in some sense refiguration (of Ovidâs own verse, of someone elseâs verse), so that, at one level, Ovidian intertextuality will always involve a gravitational pull towards a familiar sense of tradition. That is fine, it is part of Ovidâs greatness, and part of what we celebrate in a bimillennial volume like this. But that does not necessarily mean that the reflex formalism which gathers any and every Ovidian coupletâeven in the Ibisâinto the soft and comforting embrace of intertextual refiguration should be left uncontested.
In other words, when we consider all the differently distinct kinds of Ovidian transfiguration after exile, we perhaps need to ask ourselves whether classic Latin philological exegesis tends to reduce these different aspects to the same figures of thought and of style. What happened to Ovid in 8â¯ce was real, and abominable; it tore apart his life, and his poetic career: it is, or should be, important to see this as a moment not just of transfiguration, not just of refiguration, but of disfiguration.
And that is where zombies come in.
My heuristic strategy in this paper is to ask a question: what if we had available some intertextual protocols exempt from the usual tendency in Latin allusive analysis to smooth edges and to accentuate continuities? What if we could read Ovidâs exile poetry in the same way as we approach an intervention like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?
3 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Let me explain. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, published in 1813, is one of the best-loved and most revered works of English literature. Austenâs portrayal of polite society in the quiet world of small-town England circa 1800 (in this novel as in others) is a comedy of manners observed by an exceptional stylist with a sharp eye and ear for wit, a shrewd observer of human behavior, a timeless and luminous storyteller (not unlike Ovid.)
Shortly before 2009 an enterprising editor (Jason Rekulak) and a media-attuned writer (Seth Grahame-Smith) came up with the idea of deforming or disfiguring Pride and Prejudice by making it into a novel about the zombie apocalypse:2 in effect, by âexilingâ the novel into a strange and dystopian world, a world in which Regency-era England is terrorized by armies of the undead, stalking the country, attacking the living and infecting them with their plague and/or eating their brains; while the local militia, along with freelance âninja warriorsâ (like Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters), attempt to battle the zombies by beheading them and burning their corpses.
And what may make this project good to think with is the way in which the writer went about it. He did not change or remove a single paragraph of Pride and Prejudice. Instead he interpolated a zombie subplot into the novel, inserting new sentences and paragraphs strategically on almost every page of Jane Austenâs novel, without taking away any of the existing sentences, thus making Pride and Prejudice into a strange and defamiliarized version of itself. This was a sort of literary vandalism, something like the opposite of allusive art: the zombies act as disruptors of Jane Austenâs world, both formally and situationally, and in ways that resist normal critical recuperation.
What I want to do in this chapterâas a kind of thought experimentâis to take a brief look at the manner in which Pride and Prejudice and Zombies goes about its business; and then to ask whether it might be possible to apply an analogous sort of âzombie disruptorâ approach to Ovidâs Pontic poetry, so as to recapture the abruptness of the break between Rome and the Black Sea, so as to accentuate the strangeness of the exile verses, and so as to startle us out of the strong normalizing pull of our more usual intertextual protocols.
This means that I am entertaining the âzombie apocalypse,â as presented in PPZ, primarily as a figure of thought (a disfiguring figure of thought), as a way of applying a new kind of narratological pressure to the exile poetry. Of course I am also drawn to the literal zombies of PPZ, who may help to return us to a more dystopian reading of the simultaneously âdead and undeadâ world of Ovidâs Tomis.
Here, then, are some excerpts from chapter 7 of PPZ to set the scene in and around the quiet village of Longbourn ⦠as disrupted by zombie interpolation. (The interpolations in the text are italicized; all the other words are by Jane Austen.)
The village of Longbourn was only one mile from Meryton; a most convenient distance for the young ladies, who were usually tempted thither three or four times a week, despite the unmentionables which frequently beset travelers along the road, to pay their duty to their aunt and to a millinerâs shop just over the way.
PPZ 23
In the course of the chapter, each of the two older Misses Bennet pays a visit to the areaâs finest house at Netherfield, newly occupied by Mr Bingley, and his aloof friend Mr Darcy; each girl encounters a little bother along the way. First Jane:
Jane was therefore obliged to go on horseback, and her mother attended her to the door with many cheerful prognostics of a bad day. Her hopes were answered; Jane had not been gone long before it rained hard, and the soft ground gave way to scores of the disagreeable creatures, still clad in their tattered finery, but possessing none of the good breeding that had served them so well in life.
PPZÂ 26
Jane avoids these âunmentionables,â but, a day later, her sister has a prolonged encounter with them:
There was suddenly a terrible shriek .... Elizabeth knew at once what it was, and reached for her ankle dagger most expeditiously. She turned, blade at the ready, and was met with the regrettable visage of three unmentionables, their arms outstretched and mouths agape. The closest seemed freshly dead, his burial suit not yet discolored and his eyes not yet dust. He lumbered toward Elizabeth at an impressive pace .... The second ⦠was a lady, and much longer dead than her companion. She rushed at Elizabeth, her clawed fingers swaying clumsily about â¦.
PPZÂ 27â28
In consequence, when arrival at Netherfield returns our heroine from this misadventure to Austenâs 1813 text,
Elizabeth found herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise â¦.
PPZ 28
her âwarmth of exerciseâ has been rather more strenuous than in the early 19th-century original.
Jane Austen is an object of almost religious devotion among English readers (hence the frisson of Grahame-Smithâs experiment); it is time to turn to our own no less admired vates. First, a small demonstration of what the same narratological intervention would look like in a familiar early elegy of Ovidâs, a generation before the sentence of exile: here in the Showerman/Goold translation [adapted] is the greater part of Amores 1.5 (let us call this the poemâs âthird editionâ), mashed up with some PPZ language from the interruption of a ball in Meryton:3
One shutter of my window was open, the other shutter was closed â¦. It was such a light as shrinking maids should have whose timid modesty hopes to hide awayâwhen lo, Corinna comes, draped in an ungirt tunic, with her divided hair covering her fair white neck, such as âtis said was famed Semiramis when passing to her bridal chamber, and Lais loved by many men. I tore away the tunic. Just then, a stream of unmentionables poured in through the still-open shutter, their movements clumsy yet swift; their burial clothing in a range of untidiness. Some wore gowns so tattered as to render them scandalous; others wore suits so filthy that one would assume they were assembled from little more than dirt and dried blood. I unsheathed my blade and set my feet.... When the last of the unmentionables lay still, I turned back to Corinna. As she stood before my eyes with drapery laid all aside, nowhere on all her body was a single flaw. What shoulders, what arms did I see, and touch â¦.
In what ways is the result like PPZ? And in what ways does this âdisfigurationâ of the world of the Amores look like or unlike the disfigurations of Ovidâs world in his own actual, later post-apocalyptic poetry from exile?
4 Zombie Apocalypse as a Figure of Thought
4.1 Zombies and Quasi-zombies
Let me revisit some of the descriptions of the walking dead (or almost dead, undead, or barely reanimated) who haunt the pages of Ovidâs last works. To re-view these familiar features of the exile poetry through a âzombie filterâ is to rediscover (from Tristia 1 onwards) the familiar Ovidian conceit of relegation as death, and the poet himself as a walking corpse (Trist. 1.3.89â90):4
egredior, sive illud erat sine funere ferri,squalidus immissis hirta per ora comis
I set forthâif it was not rather being carried forth to burial without a funeralâunkempt, my hair falling over my unshaven cheeks
It is to see anew his funeral-soiled wife (91â94),
illa dolore amens tenebris narratur obortissemianimis media procubuisse domo,utque resurrexit foedatis pulvere turpicrinibus et gelida membra levavit humo â¦.
She, frenzied by grief, was overcome, they say, by a cloud of darkness, and fell half-dead in the midst of our home. And when she rose, her tresses fouled with unsightly dust, raising her limbs from the cold ground â¦.
and later, hovering in front of the poet, a double of his own distressed corpus, the forma of his Fortunaâa zombie surrogate, of sorts (Trist. 3.8.27â31, 35â36):
ut tetigi Pontum, vexant insomnia, vixqueossa tegit macies nec iuvat ora cibus;quique per autumnum percussis frigore primoest color in foliis, quae nova laesit hiems,is mea membra tenet â¦.â¦haeret et ante oculos veluti spectabile corpusastat fortunae forma legenda meae
Since I reached Pontus, I am harassed by sleeplessness, scarce does the lean flesh cover my bones, food pleases not my lips; and my limbs have taken on such a hue as in autumn, when the first chill has smitten them, shows on leaves damaged by an onset of winter â¦. Clinging and standing like a visible body before my eyes is the figure of my fate that I must scan.
Through this filter we can become reacquainted with the exile book itself, incultus and hirsutus (1.1.3, 12), and famously dragging its elegiac feet (Trist. 3.1.11),5
clauda quod alterno subsidunt carmina versu
That the lame poetry halts in alternate verses
limping (we can say, with our newfound sensibility) with the irregular gait of a zombie. So too, in the Epistulae ex Ponto, we can re-encounter Ovidâs Amor, who arrives in Tomis as a disfigured version of the godâor indeed of the mistress6âwho had once presided over the early erotic oeuvre (Pont. 3.3.9â10, 13, 16â18),
cum subito pennis agitatus inhorruit aeret gemuit parvo mota fenestra sono.â¦stabat Amor, vultu non quo prius ipse solebatâ¦nec bene dispositas comptus, ut ante, comas.horrida pendebant molles super ora capilli,et visa est oculis horrida pinna meis
when on a sudden the air shivered with an agitation of wings and the window, moved, gave a small groaning sound â¦. There stood Amor, not with the face he used to have ⦠his locks not carefully arranged as of old. Over his uncouth face the soft hair was drooping; uncouth seemed his feathers to my eyes
âthe more zombie-like in that his affect so much resembles that of the Hector whose mutilated corpse stages a famous dream-epiphany in Aeneid 2 (quantum mutatus ab illo, 274).
All this is intensified as we move on to the exile work which has always been more resistant than the others to normalization, the Ibis. The poemâs eponymous persecutor, on my present opportunistic read, is in many ways Ovidâs zombie alter ego, a repulsive, tortured, dead undead body which causes revulsion (Ib. 165â168; 1929 translation by Mozley),
carnificisque manu, populo plaudente, traheris,infixusque tuis ossibus uncus erit.ipsae te fugient, quae carpunt omnia, flammae;respuet invisum iusta cadaver humus
The hand of the executioner shall drag thee, amid the plaudits of the mob, and his hook shall be fixed in thy bones. The very flames, which consume all things, shall shun thee; the righteous ground shall spurn thy hated corpse
but which is also all too like the vengeful body of the exiled poet himself (Ib. 143â154):7
tum quoque factorum veniam memor umbra tuorum,insequar et vultus ossea forma tuos.sive ego, quod nolim, longis consumptus ab annis,sive manu facta morte solutus ero:sive per immensas iactabor naufragus undas,nostraque longinquus viscera piscis edet:sive peregrinae carpent mea membra volucres:sive meo tinguent sanguine rostra lupi:sive aliquis dignatus erit subponere terraeet dare plebeio corpus inane rogo:quidquid ero, Stygiis erumpere nitar ab oris,et tendam gelidas ultor in ora manus.
Then too shall I come, a shade that forgets not thy deeds, and in bony shape shall I assail thy face. Whether I am consumed (as I fain would not be) by length of years, or undone by a self-sought death; whether I am tossed in shipwreck oâer unmeasured waters, and the outlandish fish devours my flesh; whether foreign fowl prey upon my limbs, or wolves stain their jaws with my blood; whether someone deign to put my lifeless corpse beneath the earth, or to set it upon a common pyre: whatever I shall be, I shall strive to burst forth from the Stygian realm, and shall stretch forth icy hands in vengeance against thy face.
A remarkable passage, this, whose dark fantasies are enhanced by the Gothic feel of Mozleyâs translation. The civilized sadness of Ovidâs exile voice, as we have come to think of it, reasoning, cajoling, complaining, self-deprecating, yields here to the shock of a projected literal attack by a zombie poet, lunging from the grave towards his prey with icy hands outstretched.
4.2 âZombificationâ and Narrative Disfiguration
As already noted, however, my strategic interest in zombies is not so much literal as narratological. And here too a âzombie filterâ can be used to recover a sense of the situational abruptness of the break between Ovidâs life before and after the âapocalypseâ of Black Sea exileâa change which has distorted familiar Ovidian habits of lifestyle and poetry into something new, incongruous, and macabre. Just as Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters have had to militarize in order to defend post-apocalyptic Longbourn, so the Roman poet, who as a youth had shunned the aspera militiae ⦠certamina, has been forced into armor in old age (canitiem galeae subicioque meam) to secure the perimeter of his new and unfamiliar home against Sarmatian incursions (Trist. 4.1.69â74). Nothing in exile is as it was in Rome (Trist. 5.7.43â46):
sive locum specto, locus est inamabilis, et quoesse nihil toto tristius orbe potest,sive homines, vix sunt homines hoc nomine digni,quamque lupi, saevae plus feritatis habent.
If I look upon the place, it is devoid of charm, nothing in the whole world can be more cheerless; if I look upon the men, they are scarce men worthy of the name; they have more of cruel savagery than wolves.
Here in nuce is the dystopia of Tomis, a locus which is not just tristis, âsadâ or âgrim,â but inamabilis, drained of Ovidian amor; the reflection about the barely human status of the local inhabitants will lead to Ovidâs famous worry about a kind of creeping barbarization in himself (57â60)â
et pudet et fateor, iam desuetudine longavix subeunt ipsi verba Latina mihi.nec dubito quin sint et in hoc non pauca libellobarbara: non hominis culpa, sed ista loci
I admit it, though it shames me: now from long disuse Latin words with difficulty occur even to me! And I doubt not that there are in this very book not a few barbarisms, not the fault of the man, but of the place
âthe fear, that is, of a kind of incremental onset of linguistic âzombification.â
Once again, these destabilizations of previous norms of lifestyle and language are intensified in the Ibisâincluding the destabilizations of the poetâs own pre-exile oeuvre. As the Ibis takes its shapeless shape, the single-mindedness of Ovidian poetic self-disfiguration becomes palpable: now only an attack poet, only a cataloguer of Tartarus, only a biographer of the doomed and a chronicler of eternal anti-time (Ib. 217â220):
lux quoque natalis, ne quid nisi triste videres,turpis et inductis nubibus atra fuit.haec est, in fastis cui dat gravis Allia nomen,quaeque dies Ibim, publica damna tulit.
Thy natal day too, that thou mightest see naught save gloom, was foul and black with pall of cloud. This is the day to which in our calendar deadly Allia gives her name, and the day which brought Ibis to birth, brought destruction to our people.
In effect, these verses (along with Ib. 63â66) launch a âzombie Fasti,â locking Ovidâs Roman calendar (after its normal pre-exilic progression from January to June) into an unending fixation on its darkest and most ill-omened day, in mid-July, the anniversary of the clades Alliensis, now also the birthday of âIbis.â8 And, fairly soon after starting to read the catalogs of the dead, damned and eternally tormented in the second half of Ovidâs curse poem, we realize that we are trapped in a zombified Metamorphoses. âZombifiedâ because the myths in the Ibis are so unrelentingly hellish; but also because the narrative structures of the Metamorphoses (major/minor, foreground/background, parallel/contrast, grouping, nesting), have given way to a relentless death march of couplet-by-couplet parataxisâperhaps drag-footed parataxis, in this post mortem version of the limp of elegyâs alterni pedes (cf. again Trist. 3.1.11â12). Yes, the Ibis catalog is not without its elements of post-Alexandian artfulness, as recent scholarship has shown;9 but on my anti-normalizing reading it is no less important to acknowledge the gulf that separates this stumbling parade of negativity from the polychromatic weave of the mythic masterwork which Ovid had written before the fall.
After the grand guignol of the Ibis let me use a quieter passage for one last push-back against the normalization of Ovidâs exile poetry (Pont. 3.7.1â4):
verba mihi desunt eadem tam saepe roganti,iamque pudet vanas fine carere preces.taedia consimili fieri de carmine vobis,quidque petam cunctos edidicisse reor.
Words fail me as I make the same request so many times; by now it shames me that my empty pleas have no end. You are all weary of the sameness of my verses and, I think, you know my petition all the way through.
An unspectacular poem-beginning, but one which comes close to the end of the final book of the final collection published by Ovid in his lifetime. Can we perhaps read this elegyâs verba mihi desunt ⦠as taking the exile oeuvre to a different zone of (un)death, as the closest Ovid comes to giving up the struggle against the apocalypse, admitting defeat, renouncing persuasion, abandoning his previously tireless new turns of rhetoric and ingenuity to trudge towards the grave (or to return to it)? Here again, zombies are good to think with, lest the well-intentioned and for many years necessary critical move of seeing such declarations of loss of poetic powers as âmeant to be humorousâ drain the force of the moment.
Here is a typical passage of recuperative modern criticism in a recent book (by Matthew McGowan, with whose detailed readings I almost always concur), refusing to take the nihilism of these lines (and others like them) at face value:10
Again, this is meant to be humorous, and clearly the remorseful exile is also the playful poet familiar from Ovidâs earlier works. Indeed, this study will show how the Tristia and Pont. fit into the whole of the Ovidian corpus.
And, yes, fit they often do. But is this the âplayful poet familiar from Ovidâs earlier worksâ? Have we lost something if we allow the Tristia and Ex Ponto to integrate seamlessly into the whole of the Ovidian corpus?
Rather, let me take Ovid at face value in Pont. 3.7 and read him as acknowledging here that there has been too much refiguration for too long, so that although every individual exile verse and exile poem is rich in ars, the accumulation of all those verses and poems is obsessive, probably depressive, and certainly symptomatic of a mind locked into repetitious patterns of thought. In terms of my working analogy, the Ovid of the latter years in Tomis walks with a zombie-like âmuscle memoryâ which keeps lurching over the same ground, through the same topoi, tropes and conceits, tropes âstill clad in their tattered fineryâ (to appropriate some zombie-language from PPZ 26, quoted earlier), but, by virtue of their sheer repetition over the actual passage of years, decreasingly in possession of the good literary breeding that had served them so well in times past.
5 Conclusions
Let me offer three final reflections.
5.1 Refamiliarizing the Zombie Apocalypse
First, let me problematize my own appeal to the âzombie mash-upâ as a means of escape from the smoothing and normalizing effects of regular allusive and intertextual analysis. A case can be made that PPZ, for all its shock value, is itself at times engaged in something beyond simple deformation and disfiguration. Grahame-Smithâs mash-up has been argued to offer substantive commentary upon Pride and Prejudice, and to editorialize on its themes, especially in respect of the anxieties of courtship and âdead marriages,â and in terms of the off-stage dynamics of empire, war and colonialism which many 21st-century critics find as subtexts in Jane Austenâs novels.11 In PPZ, Charlotte Lucasâ decision to accept the tedious Mr Collins (PPZ 98â99) goes hand in hand with her knowledge that she has been infected by the plague and that her human agency is inexorably slipping away. (Mr Collins is too obtuse to notice.) So too, the militia regiment which represents a nation mobilized for zombie war, âwresting coffins from the hardened earth and setting fire to themâ (PPZ 24), is already in Jane Austenâs original work stationed in Meryton and programmed to raise spectres of societal anxiety.
And even my own mash-up of Amores 1.5 earlier in this paper can be reappropriated in the direction of a more intertextually normal reading: my interpolated zombie attack, rather than being mere literary vandalism, may editorialize upon the latent violence of the elegyâs original Ovidian erotic encounter (âI tore away the tunic,â deripui tunicam, 13).
5.2 Fun and Joylessness
Second, let me use the following passage of PPZ, exempli gratia, to ask of the exile poetry a question that may fairly arise from our expectations of anything from Ovidâs pen: why isnât it funnier? The topic under discussion here is dancing; the interlocutors are Sir William Lucas and Mr. Darcy:
âWhat a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy!â
âCertainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world. Every savage can dance. Why, I imagine even zombies could do it with some degree of success.â
Sir William only smiled.
PPZ 22
The italics flag a perfectly timed zombie interpolation into Mr Darcyâs disparagement of the provincial ballâwhich, moreover, seems to adumbrate an archly anachronistic allusion by Grahame-Smith to a famous sequence in a 1983 music video by Michael Jackson and John Landis.12
My argument here is that the sheer mischievous humor in some of PPZâs deformations of Pride and Prejudice throws into relief the relative joylessness of Ovidâs deformations of his pre-exile world, which do not of course lack wit, but do lack joy, especially as the years go on. And that offers a serendipitous way to reject the arguments of those aberrant 20th-century readers who have famously argued that Ovidâs whole exile oeuvre is a stunt, a decade-long joke by a poet who never left Rome.13 What we can say to these ânon-exilersâ is that, if Ovidâs final works were a stunt, like PPZ, they would probably show more mischief and humor in their post-apocalyptic exploitation of paradox, incongruity and disjunction than they do. But in the end, for all its virtues, the exile poetry is bitter wormwood, cano tristia tristis (Pont. 3.9.35), the poetry of wit battling against ever more inexorable hopelessness and, if truth be told, not always winning, and all the more heroic for the evident continuation of the experiment to the point of death.
5.3 Ending/Unending
The final page of PPZ, even as it announces the continuation of the zombie apocalypse, does in fact allow a shaped and crafted conclusion to reaffirm the displaced priorities of Pride and Prejudice (p. 317):
⦠The dead continued to claw their way through crypt and coffin alike, feasting on British brains. Victories were celebrated, defeats lamented. And the sisters Bennetâservants of His Majesty, protectors of Hertfordshire, beholders of the secrets of Shaolin, and brides of deathâwere now, three of them, brides of man, their swords quieted by that only force more powerful than any warrior.
Even under a zombie apocalypse, it is still âa truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,â and the final sentence, although it contains none of Jane Austenâs words (those have already ended the penultimate paragraph), still allows some reclamation of a pre-apocalyptic closure.
Not so the final verses of the Epistulae ex Ponto (4.16.49â52):
omnia perdidimus: tantummodo vita relicta est,praebeat ut sensum materiamque mali.quid iuvat extinctos ferrum demittere in artus?non habet in nobis iam nova plaga locum.
I have lost all; life alone remains, to give me the consciousness and the substance of sorrow. What pleasure to thee to drive the steel into limbs already dead? There is no space in me now for a new wound.
Even after conventional criticism (mine, from almost forty years ago) argues for a âshapedâ allusion in these last words to the proverbial suffering of Hecuba in Ovidâs own Metamorphoses,14 this endless end remains in important ways unshaped, unredeemed, unrefigured, whether because Ovid is actually dead and hence unable to write a concluding thought for a posthumously edited book, or because even a shaped allusion by Ovid, at this point, nine years after the decree of exile, is at an important level a rote repetition of pain, one more turn of a worn-out topos from a lonely old poet who probably, if you had met him in real life on the streets of Tomis sometime in 17â¯ce, would have come across as a bit obsessive, a bit depressive, long overdue for a restâand ready to be released from the undead life of a zombie.
Acknowledgements
The present chapter was not originally conceived with publication in mind, but as an occasional piece to lighten (or darken) the mood at the gathering in Rome in March 2017. As now published, it perhaps finds a context alongside an earlier attempt of mine to respond to Ovidâs exile with a mild disruption of normal critical business, Hinds 2007. For valuable discussion and encouragement I am indebted to the participants in the original conference, to the pressâs anonymous reader, and to the participants in a panel on âspeculative receptionsâ at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest in March 2018.
Austen and Grahame-Smith 2009; I do not here pursue the workâs own considerable reception history since 2009.
Ultimately descended from the zombies of Haitian voodoo, the modern pop-culture zombie traces its immediate origin and key characteristics to George Romeroâs 1968 film Night of the Living Dead: Ruthven 2012, 156â157; Jesus and Pereira 2018, 111â114.
Amores 1.5.3, 7â13, 17â19 with PPZ 14 (and a phrase from 130, the combat at Rosings).
See e.g. Williams 1994, 12â13; and cf. now Galasso in the present volume. Translations of the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto are taken or adapted throughout from the Loeb versions of Wheeler-Goold; the Ibis from Mozley-Goold.
See e.g. Nagle 1980, 22.
That is, Amorâs exile epiphany âdisfiguresâ the original bedroom epiphany of Corinna in Amores 1.5 (a moment to be juxtaposed with my own earlier PPZ-fueled act of literary vandalism against that poem, as the pressâs reader aptly notes).
Ibis as the âevil twinâ of Ovid: Hinds 2007, 206â207.
This is to revisit Hinds 1999, 6â7.
So Krasne 2012 and 2016, impressively.
McGowan 2009, 6â7, bringing together in his discussion Pont. 3.7.3â4 and 3.9.1â2 with 39â42, and very fairly citing Hinds 1985, among others, in support of the position taken in his second sentence.
See esp. Mulvey-Roberts 2014; cf. Ruthven 2012. Such commentary begins, delightfully, with the âReaderâs Discussion Guideâ appended to PPZ itself at Austen and Grahame-Smith 2009, 318â319, very much in the manner of the study questions attached to modern editions of classic novels with the needs of book clubs in mind.
Michael Jackson, Thriller (Official Music Video), 8:28â10:35.
So Fitton-Brown 1985, among others; see the references gathered by Alison Keith in the first section of chapter 6 in this volume.
Hinds 1985, 27 = Hinds 2006, 437â438; cf. Helzle 1989 ad loc. On the matter of whether Pont. 4 is put together by an anonymous editor after Ovidâs death (as most assume) or by Ovid himself, see Holzberg 2002, 193â196. On this poem see Galasso in chapter 7 of this volume.
Works Cited
Austen, J., and S. Grahame-Smith 2009. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia.
Fitton-Brown, A.D. 1985. âThe Unreality of Ovidâs Tomitan Exile.â Liverpool Classical Monthly 10.2: 19â22.
Helzle, M. 1989. Publii Ovidii Nasonis Epistularum ex Ponto liber IV: A Commentary on Poems 1 to 7 and 16. Hildesheim.
Hinds, S.E. 1985. âBooking the Return Trip: Ovid and Tristia 1.â PCPS 31: 13â32 (= Hinds 2006).
Hinds, S.E. 1999. âAfter Exile: Time and Teleology from Metamorphoses to Ibis.â In Ovidian Transformations, ed. P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi and S. Hinds. PCPS suppl. 23. Cambridge: 48â67.
Hinds, S.E. 2006. âBooking the Return Trip: Ovid and Tristia 1.â In Ovid, ed. P.E. Knox. Oxford: 415â440. (= Hinds 1985).
Hinds, S.E. 2007. âOvid among the Conspiracy Theorists.â In Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean, ed. S.J. Heyworth. Oxford: 194â220.
Holzberg N. 2002. Ovid: The Poet and His Work. Trans. G.M. Goshgarian. Ithaca.
Jesus, I.S.S. de, and V.C. Pereira. 2018. âJane Austen e o fenômeno da autoria-zumbi em Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.â Ilha Desterro 71.2: 109â128.
Krasne, D. 2012. âThe Pedantâs Curse: Obscurity and Identity in Ovidâs Ibis.â Dictynna 9: http://dictynna.revues.org/912.
Krasne, D. 2016. âCrippling Nostalgia: Nostos, Poetics, and the Structure of the Ibis.â TAPA 146: 149â189.
McGowan, M.M. 2009. Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Mnemosynesuppl. 309. Leiden.
Mulvey-Roberts, M. 2014. âMashing up Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the Limits of Adaptation.â Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 13: 17â37.
Nagle, B.R. 1980. The Poetics of Exile: Program and Polemic in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto of Ovid. Collection Latomus 170. Brussels.
Ruthven, A. 2012. âPride and Prejudice and Post-feminist Zombies.â In Weaving New Perspectives Together, ed. M. Alonso Alonso, J. Bello Mota, A. de Béhar MuÃños and L. Torrado Mariñas. Newcastle upon Tyne: 155â170.
Williams, G.D. 1994. Banished Voices: Readings in Ovidâs Exile Poetry. Cambridge.