Narrating Narcissus, reflecting cognition: Illusion, disillusion, "self-cognition" and "love as passion" in Ovid and beyond

2.1 Narrating Narcissus – Ovid’s myth of illusion and disillusion

The story, ornamented with much detail, is found in Book Three of the Metamorphoses, which is devoted to stories from the Theban cycle of legends.^[11] According to this narrative, Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes, was once asked whether Narcissus, son of the nymph Liriope and the river-god Cephisus, would live to a ripe old age. Tiresias replied that it was possible, provided the boy never came to know himself. Barely sixteen years old, Narcissus aroused the passions of many young men and women, all of whom, however, he rejected. While Conon refers to the "very persistent and importunate" male lover Ameinias, who killed himself (with a sword Narcissus sent him) at the very door of the beloved’s house, "after earnestly beseeching the god to avenge him,"^[12] Ovid focuses on the young maiden Echo, a mountain nymph who had been punished by Juno for her excessive chatter. One day, it dawned on the goddess that Echo’s long conversations were a ruse to distract her while her husband Jupiter went off on his sexual exploits. Furious, Juno condemned the nymph to silence, except to repeat the last words she had heard. When she encounters Narcissus, then, she is able only to repeat his utterances.

By making Echo part of the Narcissus myth, Ovid sets into play a beautiful but tragic complementarity: the boy whose relation to the other will in fact be a relation to the same is matched by a maiden whose speech is only capable of returning the same. Echo "catches sight" of Narcissus and "burns" with desire – vidit et incaluit (371) – yet, limited in the power of her voice, she is doomed to woo him from a distance by echoing his voice. Narcissus, mistaking her curtailed speech for those of his hunting partners, calls for them to "come together" (‘coeamus’, 386, 387), which Echo in turn misunderstands as an expression of reciprocated desire. Inspired by this signal for coitus, she boldly approaches and tries to embrace Narcissus. She is harshly rejected:

He runs, and says on the run,

"Take your hands off! I’ll die before I let you have me!"

And Echo comes back with nothing but "Have me!"^[13]

Immediately understanding the deception of reflected words, she withdraws, her hopes dashed, to consume herself in her passion, gradually turning into stone. Faded to nothing but a voice, she lives on in the woods, unseen, but heard by all: "It is the sound which lives in her" (sonus est, qui vivit in illa, 401). Even today, the Echo resounds.

By appending the Echo narrative to the Narcissus story, Ovid sets into motion a complex but symmetrical structure. The essence of this scheme can be roughly sketched out as follows:

Figure 1

The narrative’s pattern "delusion – revelation – understanding" © Renger (1999: 266)

The two tripartite phases of delusion and understanding are symmetrically reflected across the line of disillusion – the revelation that the hope of requited love was based on deception. The individual stages in the phases of delusion and understanding – three on each side, leading up to and away from disillusion – act as mirror images of each other, with the moment of revelation as the mirror itself. The beginning of the experience of love (catching sight) reflects its end (death), the emergence of the passion of desire reflects the wasting away with it, and the self-abandonment to illusion that the passion might become reality reflects the disillusionment. In other words, illusion and reality are refracted in disillusion. The illusion – the deceptive hope that love will be fulfilled – is established when the object of desire, Narcissus, is sighted, and in this moment, this "blink of an eye," the course of the story is set. From this moment emerges the inflaming passion of the onlooker and her abandonment to the illusion of fulfilled love. And in this moment, too, her death, the extinguishing of her sight after the blazing fire of love, is anticipated.

This pattern fits both episodes in the same way. First, Echo becomes inflamed with passion for Narcissus, then the boy undergoes the same experience. Many admirers, we are told after the Echo episode, suffered the same indignity as the nymph, until one day another spurned lover raised his hands in prayer to Nemesis (Rhamnusia, 406), asking that the prudish boy suffer the pain of unrequited love himself, The goddess of vengeance acquiesces, and one day makes Narcissus fall for his own image reflected in a pool. Not realizing that he is looking at and longing for himself, Narcissus, like Echo before him, is inflamed with passion. He talks to the phantom, woos it, tries to kiss and embrace it. As he does so, just as Echo misinterprets the reflections of words in her dialogue with Narcissus, he misreads the reflection, which shows him the image of his own wooing, as proof of requited love, until he finally recognizes the delusion. Confronted with the reality, the impossibility of fulfillment in love, he is aghast, but still consumed by passion. He wastes away, yearning for his own image until finally, exhausted, he dies (and even in the Underworld continues to gaze at himself reflected in the Styx). According to Ovid, then, even his death is followed by wasting away with desire.

Both Echo and Narcissus, through their metamorphoses, are absorbed into nature. As for Echo, "all the moisture of her body fades into air" (in aëra sucus/ corporis omnis abit, 397–398) as she becomes nothing more than an echo. As for ardent Narcissus, he fades away, burning with love for himself "as yellow wax melts over a gentle flame" (ut intabescere flavae/ igne levi cerae, 487–488). Here already we see the allusion to the colors of the narcissus flower, to which there is explicit reference at the conclusion of the episode. We are told that when mourning nymphs came to bury Narcissus, they found in place of his body a flower with a yellow throat and white petals.

The two episodes are framed by the story of the Theban seer Tiresias: his temporary sex-change, his blinding, and his gift of second sight. The seer’s prophecy at the birth of Narcissus not only sets up the boy’s narrative, but ultimately furthers his own. It is said that Tiresias’ fame spreads widely as a result of his prophecy, a fact which prompts his foretelling of the death of Pentheus. This parenthetical frame enhances the already highly symmetrical structure of the Narcissus story, in which the progression from illusion to reality, broken by a moment of revelation or disillusionment, is enacted first by Echo and later, after the invocation of Nemesis, by Narcissus. The diagram below shows this in more detail, depicting the major elements of the narrative. Secondary or transitional passages, such as those illustrating Narcissus’ behavior towards others, are omitted for reasons of clarity:

Figure 2

The narrative’s parenthetical frame and symmetrical structure © Renger (1999: 269)

As mentioned above, Ovid’s treatment in hexameters is the only extant ancient version to present the story of Narcissus in its entirety, not only in great detail but also with masterly artistry design. Other ancient testimonies are either written in prose or, where they are poetic, confined to a particular motif from the myth. In Ovid, by contrast, the episodes of Echo and Narcissus are ingeniously linked in form and content by the themes of reflection and fiery, unrequited passion.

Furthermore, illusion – the passing off of someone or something as reality – serves in Ovid as both a theme and a technique. The motif of reflection appears not only narratively and structurally in Echo and Narcissus’ illusory auditory and visual desires, but also in the poetics of the text itself. Ovid’s text creates illusions that refract at the very moment of their emergence; in this way, Ovid breaks the illusion of fiction itself. He portrays the fictional experiences of the fictional Narcissus with remarkable verisimilitude, yet simultaneously betrays his own mechanisms of illusion, revealing the construct of his fiction. This becomes most striking at one crucial point, when we believe that the narrator has been so taken in by the illusion of his own character, Narcissus, that he starts talking to the youth as a real person – in order to impress upon him that he, Narcissus, has been taken in by the illusion of a phantom image (432–435):

Gullible boy, grasping at passing images!

What you seek is nowhere. If you look away

You lose what you love. What you see is a shadow,

A reflected image, and has nothing of its own.^[14]

In this way, Ovid plays with the poetological and rhetorical possibilities of illusion. He makes visible how closely both deception and delusion and revelatory imagination are bound up in illusion. No sooner is the illusion of the narrator’s emotional involvement created in the reader than it is destroyed. The sudden presence of the narrator in the text reinforces the fictional nature of the perfectly composed myth. The narrator’s apparent emotion is not transferred to the reader, but rather introduces a distance to the unhappy protagonist. That this distance is imposed at this stage of reflection in the plot – or in narratological terms, at this point in the narrative arc – constitutes a break of its own, for it is at this point that Narcissus’ illusion overcomes him with special violence.

Ovid holds fast to this method in his retelling of the story of the beautiful youth. The motif of illusion is deployed with poetic finesse for aesthetic purpose – and not for, say, an ethical one. Ovid narrates; he does not moralize. Unlike many later re-narrations of the myth, Ovid’s version does not express any scorn or particular moral stance towards Narcissus.

2.2 Re-narrating Narcissus through the centuries – mirrors and reflections

In the course of the richly varied reception history of the myth, authors in search of support for their own arguments have repeatedly drawn on the core of the Ovidian narrative, the motif of the visual and (as demonstrated in Ovid’s integration of the Echo story) acoustic doubling and mirroring.^[15] Ovid’s version has furthermore been the primary source for philosophical and moralistic readings of Narcissus. Various versions of the myth, both ancient and post-ancient, present the mirror image as a picture of the soul, an ideal image, or an antic in the sense of an embodiment of the transient world of the senses. Beginning in late antiquity, as the Narcissus myth became overlaid with the philosophical ideas of Neo-Platonism, and Christian ethics in particular, it was often subjected to allegorical and moralizing readings. During the Middle Ages, for instance, Narcissus’ reflection became the symbolic mirror of destructive pride and vanity.^[16] These developments notwithstanding, Narcissus never became "simply a negative exemplum warning against pride and self-love, but," as Kenneth Knoespel (1985: 104) puts it, has always continued to serve as "a narrative inviting the resolution of deception through a new vision."

Throughout the eighteenth century, a period decisive for the transposition of the myth into the modern worldview, morally charged interpretations of the myth largely disappeared. This development may be traced to the strange turn that affected the Narcissus narrative during the seventeenth century. Amusing parodies of mythological material began to appear, and the myth of Narcissus shuffled off its moral "corset."^[17] One famous example is the non-tragic treatment of the material in the comedy Narcisse ou l’amant de lui-même (premiered 1752, published 1753) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), himself often viewed as a kind of Narcissus in the late eighteenth-century aesthetic debate on autobiographical self-examination and self-representation. His Narcisse, a modern comedy of manners, deals with self-love arising from a deception. A young woman means to mock her vain brother and treat his vanity with a portrait of himself dressed as a girl. But her plan backfires when the conceited youth falls in love with the portrait and renounces his fiancée, until she rouses his jealousy and wins back his love.^[18]

One reason the Narcissus narrative acquired new resonance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the emergence of the modern concept of the subject, as developed, for example, in the philosophies of René Descartes (1596–1650), John Locke (1632–1704), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). These new views of the subject informed various accounts of the self, and under their influence, a great abundance of poetic and theoretical texts in which Narcissus occupied a key position arose. Particularly important is the work of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), which interpreted the mythical youth as an exemplary figure of self-reflection by erasing the traditional accusation of vanity.^[19] Many of the Narcissus texts that appeared during and after this period link the youth lost in contemplation of himself to the Romantic poet’s abjurement of the world, to the rejection of a society in thrall to industrialization. Faced with the banalization of social relations, the Narcissus story offered an opportunity to turn towards the personality of the self, towards dream, cult, and myth. Ultimately, in the work of German philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), particularly in Eros and Civilization (1955), Narcissus became a figure of longing, a representative of an alternative reality.^[20]

Another important watershed in this development arrived at the turn of the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, Narcissus came to embody a form of deviance and a counter narrative asserted against the cultural order of ancestors and fathers.^[21] At the fin-de-siècle, the essential elements of Ovid’s narrative came to be associated with the general themes of art/poetry and artist/poet, describing images of a world within and beyond paternal structures as characterized by what Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1924) called a morbide Narcissus-Schönheit (‘morbid Narcissus beauty’) (1979: 197). More and more texts appeared that treated the soul of the artist as a mirror of the world and that dealt with the problem of artistic self-reflection.^[22] In this way, Narcissus became a symbol of the poet par excellence, only able to experience something of the world by sinking into himself. In works by Paul Valéry (1871–1945), André Gide (1869–1951), and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), for instance, the mirror becomes a medium that helps to reveal authentic reality. Here, reflection has a revelatory function. Gide already expresses this programmatically in his 1891 Traité du Narcisse, in which the poet appears as a grandiose Narcissus, creating the world out of himself in his art. Reflection and self-knowledge are the dreamlike approaches to this creativity as traditional boundaries are transgressed.

Thus poetically coming into his own, around 1900, Narcissus found his way into modern, and thence postmodern, theories of the self as a case example of the problematics of modern subjectivity.^[23] Overall, these theories are characterized by the insight that the subject constitutes no conclusive, essential coherence in relation to the object. Discussions therefore range across themes such as the double nature of the individual, gender transgression, the Sein-Ich‘being-I’ and the Schein-Ich‘seeming-I,’ the blurring of the subject-object boundary, and the riven nature of characters who are apparently sovereign in intellect, but held in check or even ruled by the unconscious.

These theoretical considerations also gave birth to the term "narcissism." Neurologists and scholars of sexuality – Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) in the United States and Paul Näcke (1851–1913) in Germany – coined the neologism in the late nineteenth century to describe their diagnoses of nervous weakness, effeminacy, and homosexuality.^[24] This culminated in Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) use of the term, whose implications varied greatly depending on context. Popularized in connection with the theory of libido, Freud’s concept of narcissism, as elaborated in his 1914 paper "On Narcissism: An Introduction," suggests that the individual in infancy – at a stage without reference to the outside world – lives narcissistically to the extent that he or she invests all available libido into the ego. If the child does not overcome this "primary narcissism" by later developing libidinous relationships to the outside world, the subject suffers a state diagnosable as "secondary narcissism," wherein the libido turns again toward the ego.^[25] Freud regards secondary narcissism as a pathological development. When a subject, in choosing an object, prefers not himself but others like him, Freud reads this as a characteristic of homosexuality. With this interpretation, Freud restores the homoeroticism of the Greek version of the myth of Narcissus – which comes down to us from the above mentioned Greek mythographer Conon – that Ovid himself had obscured.

The tensions and contradictions in Freud’s arguments (not least in relation to the ancient myth) have lent extraordinary productivity to what is, conceptually speaking, an imprecise term. Through the twentieth century, "narcissism" became an explanatory template of contemporary culture. Many scholars have taken it up, some affirmatively, expanding upon it, others critically, in an effort to free it from its psychoanalytical constraints. In addition to the aforementioned Herbert Marcuse, two examples worthy of note here are Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) and Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), who both grappled with central issues of the Narcissus myth such as reflection, illusion, and cognition. For Lacan (2006a: 75–76), these issues are pivotal to his "conception of the mirror stage," according to which infants catch sight of their own image in a mirror(-like contraption) and thus come to "assume" it "from the age of six months."^[26] After initially considering the mirror stage a moment in the infant’s life only, he later regarded it as representing a structure in which the subject is permanently caught and captured by his or her own image (Lacan 2006b). For Marshall McLuhan (1964: 41), the point of the Narcissus myth lies in "the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves." While according to Lacan’s theory, all sorts of contraptions inducing apperception can function as a mirror, McLuhan analyses technology as one such mirror. He refers to Narcissus in his elaborations on the concept of "the gadget lover" (McLuhan 1964: 41–47), comparing the effects of media with what happened to the Greek youth by the pool, and claiming that the reflection Narcissus became fascinated with was in fact his own extension:

The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. (McLuhan 1964: 41)

Like Narcissus, we consider media as something separate from ourselves and therefore do not recognize our own image in our technological mirrors. According to McLuhan, the dilemma of the gadget lover is that of Narcissus: He is not in love with himself, but so completely engaged with the other self he perceives to be separate that he loses his own being. Absorbed by the intensity of his extension and unable to avert his gaze from what he sees, his other senses become "numbed" to the point of stupor.

Lacan’s and McLuhan’s theories have stimulated a flood of studies. Their work is widely discussed today. To be sure, many speculations that refer to them have not broadened our understanding of the ancient narrative or the theories it inspired. In the absence of an authoritative definition, the term "narcissism" has come to be used in private and public contexts alike, in scholarship, feature writing, and entertainment, to indicate almost any form of reference to ego or self. Generally speaking, the term has a pejorative implication, inherited from psychoanalysis and cultural criticism. Such an implication is particularly prevalent where human conduct and social conditions are not being merely explained, but assessed in mythicizing terms.

Just as the term proliferated in non-literary texts, so too did Narcissus find himself frequently appearing in the literature of the twentieth century. Narcissus and his story’s motifs were as well fitted to preoccupations with concepts of the subject, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity as they had been to psychoanalytic theory. Writers in German, especially poets, frequently adopted the familiar motifs of reflection, desire, and fatal recognition, largely detaching them from the Ovidian context and allowing them narrative autonomy.^[27] Particularly since the 1970 s, in addition to poems in which learned familiarity with the myth and its reception can be discerned, we find others that reflect the proliferating discourse of narcissism.^[28]

The twenty-first century has witnessed the Narcissus theme emerge in yet another world, the world online, and with it McLuhan’s idea that in mass mediated society we are in a state of "Narcissus trance." The twentieth-century cinemagoer was already recognizable as a Narcissus, captivated, sometimes fatefully, via a screen – just as the youth was via the surface of the water – by images supposedly of three-dimensional others. But whoever ventures, Narcissus-like, into the world of digital reflections faces the even more daunting task of distinguishing being from seeming, the real from the imaginary, nature from technology.^[29] Here, in cyberspace, the pool is a metaphor for the digital universe that reveals itself to the eyes. Amid the continual flow of opportunities for acquiring a new (immaterial) identity, a visitor to this universe can easily fall prey to the spell of reflection. Such a visitor faces the same challenge as one who stands, enchanted, before his or her own reflection: to comprehend the benefits and hazards, advantages and disadvantages of new media – in short: to re-cognize them.