Theories of metamorphosis: from metatrope to textual revision - Rhetoric and Poetics

Style, Summer, 1996 by Kai Mikkonen

The theorization of the literary or artistic representation of metamorphosis is a rather recent phenomenon. The first sustained theoretical conceptualizations, though not yet full-length studies, of literary examples of metamorphosis were undertaken in the late 1930s by Gaston Bachelard, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roman Jakobson. During the last few decades, however, literary and artistic metamorphosis has been more widely theorized, and full-length studies have now been dedicated to this subject. Some critics apply various conceptual frames, while others map out the corpus of literary metamorphosis more generally, and still others conduct period studies of the topos or the motif of literary metamorphosis.

It is worth asking why it is that we are witnessing a proliferation or even, to use the term of Jennifer Waelti-Walters, an "epidemic," not just in metamorphic imagery in literature but also in the theoretical popularity of the metamorphosis subject (505). The increased interest cannot simply be a result of the increased volume in recent years of published literary criticism; more likely, certain predominant theoretical questions and practices in current Western intellectual cultures make this subject an attractive field of inquiry in scholarly work. One central concern shared by many of the recent theoretical approaches is that metamorphosis usually happens to someone, to a subject, and that linguistic or human being is often, in the metamorphic process, juxtaposed or interlinked with something that is not only "other" but often nonlinguistic as well. Dating at least as far back as Homer's Circe episode, the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and King Nebuchadnezzar's ordeal as a beast of prey in the Old Testament, metamorphosis has frequently been used to represent a punishment involving a nonlinguistic state of being. As such, and as is argued in many treatises on the topic regardless of their theoretical frames, literary metamorphosis provokes complicated questions concerning subject and language as well as perception, knowledge, and textuality.

It is now quite commonly accepted that literary metamorphosis tests the limits of a "character" and thus of representing a subject in writing. The important question for reading is: what characteristics must the protagonist maintain in order to be conceived as a single subject? But if metamorphosis problematizes the boundaries between the subject and its other or between language and nonlanguage, it also challenges the limits of conception. Thus, many studies of metamorphosis underscore epistemological and ontological questions concerning the subject's relationship to the world and to others as well as the subject's knowledge of itself and the world.

Metamorphosis as a tropological problem is another subject addressed in many recent studies. Most readings of literary metamorphosis - whether based, for example, on a historical, thematic, motif, or genre (such as fantasy)(1) approach - involve presuppositions of metamorphosis as a trope. One of the most common claims about the tropological status of metamorphosis is that it draws from various categories of tropes, especially metaphor and metonymy, and yet, as a representation of a striking alteration and somehow miraculous change, that it is also capable of playing with the distinction between the literal and the figurative. The paradoxical status of metamorphosis as a trope further complicates the problems concerning subjectivity and its depiction in a literary character as well as the relationship between knowledge and textuality.

I shall now review discussions of metamorphosis as a trope in order to examine more comprehensively whether it is possible that various tropological structures, fusions of tropes, and metatropological functions of metamorphosis - and not just the seemingly infinite thematic possibilities of metamorphosis - are responsible for making it such a viable image for representing change. At the same time, I shall question whether the theory of metamorphosis as a (meta)trope, as conceived by Jakobson and Paul de Man, overlooks important intertextual considerations, and finally, whether it is also possible to read the kind of metamorphosis discussed by Jakobson, de Man, and other theoreticians as a self-reflexive figure for textual combination and change. Strangely, despite their focus on the self-reflexive tropology of metamorphosis, none of these theorists seems to have noticed one of its most important and, indeed, most obvious tropological functions: the representation of textual revision.

ON THE FIGURATIVENESS OF METAMORPHOSIS

What makes metamorphosis interesting as a trope is that when something turns "metamorphically" into something else, some aspect or trace of the original always remains. Although in many modern metamorphosis stories the connection or continuum between the two things may be problematized or challenged, as Michel Foucault's study of Raymond Roussel shows, a sense of the residue of sameness is necessarily maintained. In order for a change to be described as a metamorphosis, it requires a presupposition of the original form. Consequently, we may think of the construction of the new form in terms of a metaphor that both replaces and compares one form with another and that creates two or more forms into a new, meaningful image. We can see that Lucius may become a donkey but that he remains a man, that Alice turns out the same at the end of her tales, and that Gregor Samsa continues to think despite his insect form. As Pierre Brunel has argued, this sense of continuity in the midst of radical change, as well as the comparisons made between different forms, may not be surprising since metamorphosis is, after all, only a metaphor: feigning to describe something else while also describing the sameness of the changed self - a kind of comparison between various states or beings - metamorphosis thus suggests an event that leads to something not wholly different from that which was before (178).(2) In short, metamorphosis can both dramatize the metaphoric order of discourse and thematize the relationship between the same (or the self) and the other.