A WORLD OF WIT Garth Tissol, The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

A WORLD OF WIT Garth Tissol, The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 238. ISBN 0-691-01102-8. US$42.50/UK£26.50.

It was certainly time someone took Ovidian wit seriously. The strictures of the Senecas, Quintilian, Dryden and a host of more recent critics on the inappropriateness and excesses of his passion for stylistic display are well known.1 Tissol takes Ovid on Ovidian terms: if the mechanics of style delighted the poet so much, they must be more than merely decorative and are therefore essential to any interpretation of the Metamorphoses.

In chapter 1, 'Glittering Trifles: Verbal Wit and Physical Transformation' (pp. 11-88), he confronts 'the power [of wit] to provoke and challenge a reader' (p. 12), arguing that what some critics deem inappropriate, excessive or tasteless is in fact integral to the meaning of the narrative. Readings of the stories of Narcissus and Althea illustrate the use of paradox and etymological wordplay to destabilise normally accepted categories and perceptions: by collapsing differences, Ovid's 'transgressive language' embodies Narcissus' inability to act, Althea's moral paralysis. At the other extreme, Echo, who can only communicate by repeating Narcissus' words, appropriates them to express her own contrary views: 'she succeeds in making wordplay into an aggressive act' (p. 16). Tissol rightly emphasises 'the close connection between metamorphosis and wordplay' (p. 18) in a study of Ovid's use of syllepsis to blur distinctions between the physical and the figurative.2 'Indecorous and transformative puns' likewise suit the theme of metamorphosis as they 'stretch and burst . . . contextual limits' (pp. 22-24). And so on through the misunderstandings and irony inherent in wordplay, the accidentally overheard pun that becomes divination, puns that multiply meaning and puns that dissolve meaning, words used in a divided sense and structural emphasis, such as juxtaposition, or a play on the same word in different cases, employed paradoxically to underline separation. Wordplay does not only destabilise through disjunction; it transforms through personification, making a reality of the insubstantial or fantastic. For Tissol 'the style and content of the Metamorphoses are the same, and every element of the work invites our minds to return to its fundamental themes' (pp. 80f).

From the detailed intricacy of verbal...