Peter Kelly (Lecturer in Classics at the National University of Ireland, Galway)
The face of ‘intertextuality’, as a new master term, is less a simple, single, and precise image, a bronze head by Rodin, than something shattered, a portrait bust by an avid exponent of analytic cubism too poor to afford a good chisel.1
In ‘Daphne’ by the Oregon based artist Kate MacDowell, the body of Daphne is shattered at the moment she begins transforming into a tree. In the archetypal transformation from the beginning of the Metamorphoses, Ovid emphasizes the destructive force of Apollo’s voyeurism, in what has been called a moment of ‘fetishistic scopophilia’.2 Apollo’s atomization of Daphne’s body at once prefigures her metamorphosis, which will likewise occur to her individual limbs in turn, while also fragmenting her selfhood. The myth undercuts the illusion of embodied existence, as the body can prevent only temporarily an exterior reality from appropriating its interior structure.
Kate MacDowell follows Ovid in uniting the illusive dismantling of selfhood and the artistic object. MacDowell’s ‘Daphne’ is hand sculpted from porcelain, which she has also partially hollowed out. The result is a luminous fragility; yet it is also easily mistakable for a plaster-cast taken from Bernini’s ‘Apollo and Daphne’ (1622-1625) that has been subsequently shattered. It has been carefully crafted so as to appear that its act of creativity is actually the splintering of another work, yet, as MacDowell makes explicit, her method involves the continual build-up of fine details.
3 Ovid’s intertextual vision of the Metamorphoses equally depends on the illusion of the text being a fractured and disfigured mosaic. Its integration of contrary perspectives is also comparable to Bernini’s sculpture, where the spectator is induced ‘to shift his position continuously in order to see the work in constantly new aspects, as if it were in a state of perpetual transformation’.4 MacDowell explains her work as follows:
I created Daphne in part as a response to my experiences as a backpacker and hiker stumbling across clear-cut zones in Oregon and Washington. In this piece, Bernini's sculpture of Daphne pursued by Apollo is transformed by one additional step from woman to tree to clear-cut slash pile. The nymph’s distress now reflects a different kind of ‘rape.’ My work invites viewers to think about what is lost with environmental degradation, what sensory delights of texture and form are removed as we allow parts of our body to be cut away.5
This paper asks whether the contemporary reception of Ovid’s Daphne by artists such as Kate MacDowell can enrich our understanding of the Metamorphoses by placing the fracturing of human selfhood, the illusive splintering of the artistic object, and the destruction of the natural world in dialogue with each other. This paper will also discuss how the unsettling use of the theme of rape in Ovid’s work is reconfigured as a site of positive change in its eco-critical reception.
1 Clayton and Rothstein 1991: 11.
2 Hardie 2002: 46.
3 MacDowell’ portfolio and description of her work process can be accessed at : http://www.katemacdowell.com/statement.html
4 Eco 1989: 7.