Metamorphoses, by Ovid

Angry, vengeful gods. Hapless, tortured humans. Hundreds of stories ranging over thousands of years, from a giant flood which destroyed the world to Caesar’s diefiacation. Ovid’s Metamorphoses certainly covers a lot of territory and a tremenous amount of drama, but is it good narrative?

Recall that Richard Cohen, author of Writer's Mind © 1995, defines a good narrative as containing five elements:

1. We care about the character.
   
2. Something happens to him or her.
   
3. The thing that happens is significant; it makes a different in the character’s life.
   
4. The thing that happens is not a single event but a sequence.
   
5. The sequence is narrated; it is recreated by a writer.

These narrative components should seem expected and there should be surprises. Well, with stories of angry gods turning people into animals or trees, the stories are always surprising! And, because the gods are causing all this, anything is possible, so nothing could be considered unexpected or misplaced. What’s left is whether we care about the characters, whether something significant happens to them that makes a difference in their life, and whether the events take place as a sequence.

Ultimately, the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses are about humans living in a hositle, changing, uncertain, unpredictible, confusing world. Certainly we care about what happens to the characters in Ovid’s work, because we care about what happens to us and why. Ovid is deft at describing the reasons behind the gods’ actions, the emotions and interactions that drive them to their acts and he narrates this as a sequence: a human acts, a god gets angry and plans to harm the human, another god or human may intervene to a limited extent, and then the human walks into the trap, helpless, tortured, and forever changed.

Over and over, Ovid expertely narrates stories of why things happen to humans. Some of his stories explain are less familiar to us today, such as the Greek metaphorical origin of islands and animals. Some are very familiar, such as Icarus who flew too close to the sun or Jason who hunted the golden fleece. Throughout, Ovid describes events very vividly and, even, emotionally. In Book 8, he describes first the horrible death Meleager is made to suffer by his goddess mother:

And Meleager,
Far-off, knew nothing of this, but felt his vitals
Burning with fever, tried to conquer the pain,
As a man should, by fortitude, and felt the pain the deepest
In that his death seemed, like a coward's, bloodless,
Caused by no wound…. The fire burns hotter,
The pains more fierce, and then they die and dwindle,
And fire and pain go out, and the spirit with them,
Out to thin air, as the white ashes settle
Over the orange embers.

Immediately following, Ovid offers a very descriptive and intense passage of grief and mourning. Citizens of the city Calydon and family members mourn the death of their hero Meleager, even scooping up the ashes of his body and pressing them to their bodies. Finally, the goddess is satisfied and gives two of Meleager’s sisters release by turning them into birds (one of the many metamorphoses of this work):

         Calydon,
High Calydon, lies low. Young men and old ones,
Leaders and people, mourn, and women tear
Their hair and beat their breasts, and the old father
Groveling on the ground, pours the dust over
His hoary hair, and blames himself for living
So much too long. And Meleager's mother
Deals her last act of vengeance, driving the knife
Through her own heart. No poet has the power
To tell the story truly, those poor sisters
Praying, for what? beating and bruising their breasts,
Beyond all thought of decency, and while the body,
Remains, fondling the body, kissing the body,
Kissing the funeral pyre, and when the body
Is ashes, scooping up the ashes, pressing
The ashes close to their hearts, throwing themselves
Face-down on the mound of the grave, drenching the
gravestone
With tears that flood the letters of his name,
Until Diana, satisfied, made feathers
Spring from their bodies and spread long wings over
Their arms, and gave them horny beaks, and loosed them
Into the air…

In these moving passages, Ovid captures the intensity of mourning, the ravages of death, and the vengeful nature of gods. Ovid writes as carefully throughout, making his narrative a vivid presence in the reader’s mind. His stories are interesting for the starkness of their presentation, the eventful and purposeful narration, and the significance the stories have for all of us living in a changing, dangerous world.

The Woman Who Talked to Herself, by A. L. Barker

Barker’s narrator is a character we can relate to: she talks to herself. The running dialogues most of us keep internal, she speaks out loud, narrating the story of herself suspecting her husband of cheating on her. This fascinating method creates a work full of complex, rounded characters and dramatic scenes.

The stories she tells are each spurred by events in the ‘real’ life of the main plot. These stories develop the other characters, explain relationships between characters, and advance the plot. For instance, the storyteller’s daughter mentions the mother of one of her school friends. Barker’s character narrates a huge story about a complex relationship between that mother and a younger man, a story tingling with the potential for violence, both adolescent and mature at the same time, and ending with a tremendous surprise that leaves the reader reinterpreting the story’s previous events.

In another story, she imagines her son and his friend breaking into a large estate home. Her imaginings of their relationship are almost fanciful, maybe wild, but penetrating and entirely believable. She weaves what she knows about her son and his friend, and about confused and unrestrained adolescence, into a magnificent and memorable tale.

These stories within the main story are meaningful and poignant themselves; but, they way they explain and further the greater plot structure is amazing. Barker expertly uses this narrative structure to create a novel full of complex characters and significant happenings. She even ends the work with a surprise. This incredible and unique work is a strong example of purposeful writing that demonstrates the characteristics of good narration.

Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen

Dinesen’s second work on the bookshelf, Seven Gothic Tales, is a wonderful treat of carefully told stories with ‘gothic’ twists. The tales generally are of everyday bourgeoisie people (steeped in the class consciousness of the 19th century), people that are easy to relate to and emphasize with and people to whom significant, though dark and disturbing, things happen. The stories are not the least bit contrived; all the occurrences appear real and necessary to the plot; but, the atmosphere is slightly twisted and Dinesen reveals disturbing aspects of people’s lives for the reader.

In one story, a gentleman goes home with a woman he meets on the street and has sex with her. In this unseeming, darkened setting where a man brings a strange woman home for sex (in a story set in Victorian times even!), Dinesen incorporates an additional twist: she is a prostitute and he is her first client.

In another story, a deceased brother of two old women sits down to dinner with them. The expectation builds in this story for something dark to happen: the harrowing trip across a dangerous sea road by carriage; the older woman living alone, haunted by visions of her dead brother; the brother’s refusal of marriage and subsequent wild sea voyages. Dinesen sets the atmosphere expertly, and very subtly, so that when the three of them sit down to dinner, it seems quite unreasonably natural and a creepy feeling rises from inside the reader, based entirely on the untenable situation.

In other stories, the gothic element is downplayed throughout the story, but the ending has quite a twist. In one of these, a woman, attempting to set up two people for marriage, switches places with her favorite pet monkey and, at the end of the story, is left clawing and scraping at the molding around a parlor door. Because of the woman’s meddling in their affairs, two people, who do not love each other must get married, trapped in a horror of a marriage they seem perfectly made for.

As expected, Dinesen displays excellence in narrating these tales of twisted relationships, dark settings, and preternatural happenings. While keeping the stories believable, and using characters whom we care about, and to whom significant things happen, she weaves in a gothic element that surprises and disturbs the reader. In all, she offers examples of narrative fiction at its best.