Metamorphosis (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK thanks for downloading the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to BBC co uk hello Ovid wrote at the beginning of the metamorphosis in Ted Hughes wonderful version now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies I summon the supernatural beings who first contrived the transmogrification 's in the stuff of life you did it for your own amusement descend again be pleased to reanimate this revival of those marvels and descend they did the metamorphosis is an extraordinarily wide sweep through the teeming changing world of Roman and Greek mythology the tales are immensely popular in their own day they're an inspiration to Chaucer Ovid with Shakespeare's favorite poet and for a thousand years and now a thousand years after they were written the stories of shape-changing still seem relevant Ted Hughes won the Whitbread Book of the Year with his translation of tales from Hamid in 1997 and a new collection called Ovid metamorphosed has garnered versions of the tears from authors and poets all over the world to discuss their enduring appeal I'm joined by one of those authors and had both the novelist AS Byatt and also by the critic dr. Kathryn Bates from Warwick University now what would you say to someone who hadn't read them madam officers what do you say what offered was doing what was he putting human beings through what were these metamorphosis about um I think he was doing what you quoted him is doing he was describing the shiftiness of things the way the whole world is constantly in flux the way one thing changes into food for another thing the way a thing changes shape and he was relating this to human passions a man possessed by rage mmm possessed by hunger or a man possessed by lust becomes a different kind of animal from a man quietly worshipping a God in a tree line churi I think among above all things he was interested in nothing he says somewhere nothing rests nothing stays everything moves everything changes and he invented an absolutely extraordinary form for describing the shifting naseeha at the time of the birth of Christ and we're talking about a number of the cultures clashing there and yet he does seem to come out of a time far far back doesn't it because for instance we you've described it psychologically but he does it very graphically I mean when Jupiter turns a bloodthirsty King like Aaron into a wolf because of his bloodthirsty nurse and it's very very straightforwardly graphically donning it we accept it is that what we would now call fairy tale rather dismissive element but it isn't dismiss it when you read of it it makes me think of two things really one is that it is deep in all human beings to make metaphors of that kind you say that is a wolf fish man you say that woman's a cat that woman's a [ __ ] this woman is a bovine cow line being a woman I'm allowed to do this program but there is another thing that goes deeper than that and when the French scientist qva was looking at the bones of things like whales and monkeys he noticed that there was a kind of morphology underlying all creatures a seals flippers resemble our hands we are all the same a maggot and a grub and a worm turn into other things so in a sense although it is mythologically primitive in another sense it's it still feels extraordinarily more accurate I mean we turn from seeds into fetuses into who we are known as we live and breathe around the stove we're losing her losing teeth losing and well I am anyway Katherine Katherine Bates there's the it isn't it isn't all to do with sort of punishment and best eality is it there are some saving I'm just trying to get us a little map of before we move on there are saving tales you know a large part of the transformation Sardi punishments for overweening pride or temper but one of the interesting things is that there's no sort of straight moral line sometimes characters are actually saved or rescued so the daphne for example is transformed of a scene to a laurel bush in her flight from apollo but people don't know whether to congratulate or condole her father you know is this a sort of a saving or purse situation or is it some sort of terrible you know transformation that is a punishment for her flight from apollo and neptune changes is it heightens daughter into a fisherman to save her from being sold into slavery again it's a God using all the towing their powers for what we would thought were good we're good I mean is there any morality that can you see any constants render morality I think what's what's brilliant about of it it's precisely that the the morality is metamorphose there's there's no as I said a minute ago there's no you know distinct judgmental line that there are occasions where you know it is he is making a critical point somebody is being punished for ambition or or passion or whatever but metamorphosis can also be a release it could be an enabling thing I mean quite often characters I think it's IFAs is turned from a girl into a man so that she can marry the girl she loves so it can be an enabling moment it can allow things to happen that wouldn't otherwise be able to happen there's some lovely moments when women become water and that always feels like a release the ones who become fountains or Springs the Ute a and it's very not only understandably they've struck a chord with people listening that that you men that call fish and answer and so in that case in this case he turns into a wolf but what about say the story of fighting the the mortal boy who tries to drive his father the son gods chariot across the sky and and fails the sisters mourn so overwhelmingly that that spontaneously transformed into trees now what is that that's that is that's not quite as easy to read is it no the kind of images of mourning tend to be images of release I would think of people being released from intolerable human emotions thus somebody who has turned into a stone that constantly weeps that's niya BAE who is turned and Niobe goes through a whole series of transformations she appears tattoos is wonderful with her as a terribly proud woman with her hair done up like snakes saying to the minor goddess Leto I have 14 children you have only got two but her two are Apollo and Diana and they kill all her children with arrows and off it can describe arrows going through human flesh like nobody and tattoos can translate it like nobody and then just as you think she's got her just desserts she turns into some quite other creature and weeps and weeps and finally becomes a weeping stone so there's nothing left but tears and stones it's it's beautiful yeah it's as if characters are reverting to some natural state it's as if there's an inner truth or some inner reality or in essence I mean this is one sense image of it is about quite conservative there's a sort of conservative shift in the metamorphoses that yes you know what we all get excited about is the you know the universe in a state of flux and everything is ultimately mobile and changing at all times and I do think that's you know the direction that his text is going in but at the same time pulling against that there's a move towards the establishment of eternal verities that every time you see a spider every time you see a laurel bush every time you see a bat Otto it is you you remember the kind of mythological typological story of metamorphosis and remember that you know that was a punishment or a transformation that was that was brought about by some kind of human failing or human achievement I don't know whether it's just whether it's particularly pointed in Ted users adaptation but the first three or four pages of his his of his adaptation very much struck a chord with with in generalize to terms with what's thought of in some cases about the way the universe began uses the word chaos uses things that can recognizably be what cosmologists are talking about and so and so forth and I'm inspired to anybody said a few minutes ago about him him recognizing the similarities the sameness between things did he had any of you I mean is it something that you've looked at closely did he what's he unique in that kind of insight did he bring that inside Tibet is that one of the reasons why his tales have had such buoyancy for 2,000 years well almost all creation myths tell this story of an emergence from chaos into order or form and perhaps one reason for that is that that's how creation myths get formed that's how any work of art or in poetry or whatever is fashioned it comes from an unformed state or a chaotic state and then you know divisions and distinctions and so on are made so that it's almost sort of telling that the metamorphosis is telling the story of its own poetic creation but was there anything distinctive that you know of about Ovid sources or anything that was trying to get at the particularity of it or trying to get of the fact that he enters our literature through what Hughes calls The Fountainhead Chaucer he's then taken up by he's Shakespeare's favorite poet Shakespeare pinches chunks I've just reread Pyramus and Thisbe this morning I was reading view two and uh that's straight into Midsummer Night's Dream except it's is it caught and so it's of a Ted Hughes d'etre translated massive success of him that the Ted Hughes late age first success was this a period and not neglect but sort of make like so I just want to find out if there's anything that you think that's what do you think distinguishes it particularly I agree with Catherine it totally has stayed alive because it makes the world inside your own head mirror some kind of description of the process in the cosmos the poem comes into being and I think this appealed to Hughes as avid pictures the world coming into being I'm sure he went back to the pre-socratic philosophers who worried about whether the world was made of water or that it was made of fire and at the end of the metamorphosis he suddenly makes a great speech about Pythagoras whom he doesn't name and an impassioned plea for vegetarianism he says you mustn't kill things you mustn't kill and eat creatures which are on the earth with you you mustn't stick knives into the neck of bulls and sacrifice them and he's been going on all the way through the metamorphosis saying you know if you don't make a proper sacrifice to the gods they will turn you into something evil and suddenly this rather urbane and yet humanly passionate very modern voice comes forward and says don't kill other life it he's um there is a sort of modernist about him his gods are not really gods they have human passions in a larger scale than the gods say the one of the things that really interested me about trying to read the beginning of it in Latin is you've read the beginning and Ted Hughes invokes of the gods it just says actually deus which can be translated as god or a god or the god or the divinity he doesn't really say what it is that created the world is small deus i feel as an enormous amount of skepticism in of it to which modern people respond they need a a kind of religious world with full of mythology and passion but they don't want to be told what is right if we're talking about his modernist this is almost that what you're prone to me to remember despite his enormous day he could even to be very crude a Greenpeace message isn't then I wonder if this is part where he says at one stage Earth's and heavens earth and heavens lease for survival is nothing more than the lease they both must fall together the globe and it's brightness combined like a tear or a single bead of sweat was his metamorphosis a ways of showing this Union you think the eco-warrior well i mean i agree with all antonia said about his appeal to us now i mean in his introduction to his translation tattoos talks about the of the imagined offices i think he describes it's giving a rough register of what it feels like to live at the end of an arrow and a sort of psychological gulf i think he says at the end of an era so there is one of the things we identify with of it is a degree of of kind of skepticism you know the twilight of the gods we can no longer hear the greek and roman pantheon in his day was sort of looking increasingly humanoid which of course it was and you know what gods do we believe in and so on so there's there is a degree a kind of skepticism so that the gods as they appear in metal in the metamorphosis or they behave dreadfully very badly I mean they save people from slavery and a yeah well there is this moral neutrality yes it's not it's not a blanket rejection but similarly there are there are the human wonder workers the human artists like Pygmalion or Daedalus or Arachne indeed whose ability to to create and to create worlds in art it's almost godlike you know I mean it's interesting we've been talking for about 15 minutes so if we've we've had about 16 different orbits already I mean that's part of it isn't it really can I you mentioned Arachna Catherine boats can I stick that can we just talk in a little bit of detail because Antonio's written on that in this new book and an Arachne is brilliant at weaving why don't you tell the story and and then we'll play around it okay well I reckon is a very ordinary girl nothing distinguishes her in terms of birth or marriage or whatever except her ability to weave she's a brilliant weaver and she regards her ability as being equal to if not greater than that of palace or Minerva who's the goddess of well I've got as many things but in this particular case I've got as a weaving so of course it being of it the inevitable competition ensues and Arachne weaves baby challenges comes disguised to tires to dissuade her disguises no leg and said look it's better for you if you say I got a great gift but you got it from Minerva or attend a and she said no I I it is my own skill yes and then we never reveals her self and they set to write well then it's wonderful description of kind of the working woman they both roll up their sleeves and tuck up their skirts and sit down at their respective loons cake Hughes has them rolling down the tops of their dresses so that they're bearing their breasts so their arms will be free for the weaving depends a bit on oh thank you well those interesting is they move such different tapestries and both the tapestries of course mini metamorphosis because palaces tapestry is full of representations of the gods transforming disobedient mortals into mountains and so on and so forth and palaces tapestry is very orderly it's very symmetrical it's very compartmentalized it's you know it's very very tidy whereas Iraq knees is much more like the avidians metamorphoses in that it's being it's chaotic it's fluid it's and it shows the gods turning themselves into bulls and and and tricking human mortals by we've got these two tapestries the goddess and the very ordinary girl you can do fastest and best and then what happens I aspired and then in fact which I didn't realize that I started working on most story it the competition is judged to be a draw in fact of it manages to describe Arachnia stepa story search it's obviously much more beautiful and much exciting like his poem as Catherine said then that of Minerva this causes Minerva to lose her temper and she tears the tapestry into shreds right Ted in touch you strands why shouldn't I write me wins yes it isn't quite clear who's wins but it she certainly doesn't lose I think in the in the in the Latin sort of an away draw you mean yes exactly and and I always believed when I was a girl but at this point Minerva turns Arachne into a spider out of rage what actually happens is that she loses her temper and hits her three times on the head with her shuttle and Arachne who has been standing up rather well that goes away and hangs herself but which point Minerva in pity turns the dangling body at the end of the rope into the spinning spider so you've got as it were the threads of The Tempest returning into the rope that's hanging the woman which is then turned again by another transmutation into what is both the saving and a narrowing and there's a beautiful poem by Tom done in the book after ovid metamorphoses about the spider hanging looking hideous and crumpled and ugly and suddenly it spins this beautiful geometrical shape it's another case though where it's not a straightforward punishment I said as you say doesn't she doesn't sort of say you know you're you're you're too proud I'll turn you despite it just doesn't respite you as you say it's the act of turning our acting into a spider is merciful yes keeping her alive so I'm your interpreters and critics what would you get what gloss would you put on that Catherine bites not that tile from of it what would you draw from that is it to do it hubris is to do is something to do with talent and something to do with talent that is borrowed is it the lease on talent what sort of interpretations would you take from that I think it's to art actually I think it's one of the most self-conscious moments in Ovid as I said because the two tapestries that's produced are could very easily be seen as versions or ways of reading of its own text that so that palaces tapestry could be the sort of so are the moral meta most it's like the Ovid Morales a visit medieval moralized of it where it's also with punishment and the gods are on top and you know if you're a an overweening human then you know beware and so on and so forth and as I was describing it Freud before it's very compartmentalized sort ID but then there's also a rack nice tapestry which there which is much more exciting and and open-ended morally speaking to because it shows the gods to be you know it shows them those rapists because they're all metamorphoses of gods were about to rape innocent human women that she weaves and there wouldn't be room in one tapestry for even half of the ones were Ovid most vividly describes he is one of the most vivid describers of objects and things in the whole of literature I think when he describes a tapestry of somebody raping somebody you see you know every drop of blood every thread of cloth it's brilliant I was absent said and I'm quoting frying up here's anyway said the Greek gods went on living while the Egyptian gods were as dead as dry stones now why do you think that is Catherine likely well because they're not gods really are they the human and their ways of describing poetically or metaphorically what happened that he stalks like this in his introduction as well what happens when human beings are are seized by passion when you're in the grip or or you're possessed by whatever it is rage or envy or love or lust or or the desire to create or whatever it's as if one way of describing that condition is to see it almost superhuman as transcending the limitations of the human so the gods are sort of you know super humans there's an Italian writer called Roberto kalasa who wrote a book called the marriage of Cadmus and harmony which is the most wonderful modern metamorphosis it retells the Greek myths yet again in multiple multiple forms and colosso says that one of the reasons the Greek gods are alive is because they're detached from ritual the myths of the Greek gods are somewhere between the fairest story which we all delight in and the sacred story which it is incumbent upon you to believe and to recite in church the Greek gods are just wandering on the earth turning people into things and turning things into people and you might suddenly bump into one he says at any moment of very heightened consciousness which is what you've just been saying you suddenly noticed that a God is with you i really believe that roberto colosso actually does walk around Italy accompanied by God's coming out of lakes and things brilliant yes and he teller Calvino also said about the metamorphosis he said you have to realize that no one explanation is right it's true of all stories I mean you can be a theologian and argue about the Christian Bible that this is the right interpretation and that is the wrong one but with this kind of myth it is precisely that both Minerva was right and Arachne was right that and the story is the most important thing and I think that's another thing that tremendously attracts modern people about it about this the storytelling the tales we I think that's come out by implication although I haven't emphasized it enough because there are tremendous stories and very economically very briefly tale but is it something also this this continuing interest he has for four people is that partly to do with the direct and ferocious way he brings passions to the surface I mean all these stories are about high passions and the poison of passion really as I was saying Pyramus and Thisbe the two young lovers who can only talk to a crack in the wall between each other's houses and they arranged to meet at Ninny's tomb and there's a lion and there's a miss miss miscalculation so what's happened to one of the other two suicides go on with of these children while that story that goes all over the place but it begins as a as a sort of childhood romance and ends up in this sort of fierce tragic passion is it something is there something that I can't remember in its continuing appeal well I mean you know to the point of literature and myth the poetry is sort of vicarious pleasure isn't it that you know one one's own life is sort of humdrum and boring and ordinary and so you know you immerse yourself in stories and in the case of all of it you know the more mythological or fairy like or unrealistic the better because you're living or gives you the opportunity to live imaginatively these experiences of extremes what did what what did Freud make of it stories you know the horror that well well I mean in some in some ways you know obviously things like the gnosis of Smith he takes more or less no whole from of it but I think what's what's really interesting is almost to see how Freudian Oviatt of it is rather than see you know just what what Freud took from it and what I would say about that is that there are moments in the metamorphosis particularly I think the later books books 9 and 10 where where it's a complete sort of totally chaotic sexually you get everything you get best reality perversion sex change incest you name it it's polymorphous perversity you know is that's what Freud recalled it where human sexuality in its natural state before any kind of regulation or imposition of law or rule this is what it looks like it's just completely sort of fluid and free-floating and even things like the incest taboo it seems something that could be thrown off here the animals don't worry about in the incest taboos there's some of the points that mirror makes and just depends so that would piano sir at the moment under what about what about do you think that there's a recognition that Ovid would have recognized what Darwin was up to I think of it would have been pleased by what was in the world he's got a sort of wonderful passage at the end where he says look how natural things change who would believe if they didn't know that an eagle comes out of an egg and then he tells you a whole lot of other things such as which are not true such as that a buried man's spine will turn into a snake and riddle its way out of the ground I think he had the basic intuition that Darwin had that change and mutation and mutability was the nature of things that things were not fixed he would have been quite happy with the idea that the species were not fixed but were in flux it was how he saw the world would you agree oh yes I would and I think one of the points that people forget about the metamorphosis is that things change in both directions it's not only the humans who become animals but rocks become human so that when Deucalion throws the stones over his shoulder and they become mortal the veins that you know the veins that you find in rock turn into human veins so that the metamorphosis works you know in nature it works both ways both towards the human and towards the the animal or the natural or the mineral it's almost like James Lovelock sky a myth in that sense you have a sense that the whole of the nature of things is one thing and it starts with the Golden Age where everything is pure and somehow in harmony and actually owing to Jove's dethroning of Saturn before humans sinned it all deteriorates into battling and violence and destruction and so you've got the two images really one of chaos and one of a sort of total hole that hangs together well thank you both very much thanks Catherine Bateson thank you to a s by your mention of sin Antonia prompts me to say that next week I'll be talking to animals in Victorian timing about the Victorian age of doubt so there we are thank you very much for listening we hope you've enjoyed this radio for podcast you can find hundreds of other programs about history science and philosophy a BBC code at UK forward slash radio for you

Channel: BBC Podcasts

Views: 2,623

Rating: 4.8974357 out of 5

Keywords: metamorphosis, found, piano (musical instrument), album, glory, new, life cycle, audiobooks, chrysalis, caterpillar (organism classification), time-lapse photography, metamorphosis (quotation subject), monarch butterfly (organism classification), classic literature, book report, humanities (field of study), education (tv genre), wisecrack, thug notes, literature (media genre), franz kafka (author), the metamorphosis (book)

Id: 32VI1J3kd7Y

Length: 30min 34sec (1834 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2018