Marsyas's howl: The myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert's "Apollo and Marsyas"

Comparative Literature, Spring 2001 by Nizynska, Joanna

Like Ovid, Herbert begins with a Marsyas who has already been defeated. Herbert's "as we all know" is perhaps an ironic wink at the reader who also, ideally, knows Ovid, but probably does not know the version of the story Herbert is about to tell. This parallel opening is followed by an analogous focus on the scene of punishment and a description of Marsyas's flayed body as graphic as Ovid's. In both versions, the figure of the satyr is reduced to blood-soaked flesh. However, what Ovid represents as a body watched from the outside-"blood flows everywhere; the sinews, uncovered, lie exposed, trembling veins quiver without any skin. You could count the pulsing intestines and gleaming entrails in the breast" (Met. VI. 389-91)-Herbert displays as a landscape surrounding the reader: "bold mountains of liver/white valleys of intestines/rustling forests of lungs/sweet hills of muscles/joints bile blood and shivers/the wintry wind of bones/over the salt of memory." The transformation of Marsyas's mutilated flesh into an aesthetic object de-corporealizes his body and, perhaps, makes Herbert's description ultimately more disturbing than Ovid's more overtly violent account. Herbert's transformation of the Ovidian anatomy lesson into landscape also parallels his transformation of Marsyas's howl into narrative, as the satyr "tells the inexhaustible wealth of his body."

In refusing to psychologize Marsyas, both Ovid and Herbert emphasize the brutality of the scene; if in Ovid Marsyas is "nothing unless a wound," in Herbert he is one great howl. The core of Herbert's revision of the myth-and what ultimately imbues it with a humanity and compassion only subtly and complexly evident in Ovid-is Herbert's divergence from the Ovidian paradigm in his treatment of the lament over Marsyas's fate. As noted above, throughout the Metamorphoses the traditional bucolic charm of the external landscape contrasts-often disturbingly-with the violence performed on the "mythic bodies" in the stories Ovid narrates. Herbert translates this external landscape into the internal landscape of Marsyas's body that Apollo sees as the god aestheticizes Marsyas's suffering. At the same time, Herbert's setting for Marsyas's punishment-"the gravel path/planted with boxwoods"-seems almost desolate compared to the lush "beauty" of Marsyas's body. This opposition is essential to Herbert's representation of the lament, and, by extension, of the aestheticization of violence.

In contrast with Ovid's woodland denizens whose flowing tears form the river Marsyas, only a tree and a nightingale-mute creatures of the world of nature and key elements of the traditional repertoire of "beautiful themes" in poetrywitness the satyr's suffering in Herbert's poem.Their reactions-the nightingale falls petrified to the earth and the tree turns white-deny aesthetic distance as both are ultimately destroyed by their compassion. Thus, whereas the suffering body might be, as Segal suggests, a metaphor of the human condition in the Metamorphoses, in Herbert Apollo's speculations about the aesthetic value of pain might represent the amorality of an art that feeds on the aestheticization of suffering. Unlike the howling Marsyas, or Ovid's weeping mourners, Herbert's witnesses react to Marsyas's suffering with a silence fully expressive of their horror. Upon seeing Marsyas's mutilation, the tree and the nightingale undergo metamorphoses that completely overwhelm their essential qualities: "at [Apollo's] feet falls/a petrified nightingale/he looks back/and sees/that the tree to which Marsyas/was fastened/has turned white/completely." The trauma of witnessing robs the nightingale of its ability to sing and fly; it makes the tree a desolate wintry skeleton.15