ABSTRACT
Few texts possess such hypertextual complexity-or call attention to this complexity so insistentlyas Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Its many narratives of transformation may be organized by the reader according to any number of competing schemes and patterns-Viconian progression, Chinese boxes and chiasmic pairings are just a few possibilities. This structural intricacy and interconnectedness is figured in Ovid’s account of the weaving contest between Arachne and Minerva, an episode which provides us with a paradigm of Ovidian hypertextuality. The mortal girl and the goddess proclaim their ideological opposition through the very different ways in which each represents a series of collisions between humanity and divinity. Each weaver’s tapestry, like the Metamorphoses itself, is a collection of interwoven stories; indeed many have inferred an implicit alignment between Arachne’s web in particular and Ovid’s own art.1 The tale of Arachne is thus simultaneously one element within the Metamorphoses and a microcosm of the poem as a whole. The competing tapestries possess their own internal intratextuality-or, if we delatinize that curious word, interwovennessand the interface between the two webs throws up further telling parallels and disjunctures, for Minerva and Arachne perceive the relationship between gods and mortals in very different ways. But despite its internal complexity the story is but one of the strands which form the fabric of the Metamorphoses; we therefore inevitably notice where the warp of this myth intersects with the weft of another-the representation of Europa by Arachne, for example, recalls the fuller account of this story in Book II, and the tale’s focus on a clash between an erring or presumptuous mortal and an outraged god recalls other narratives, including those of Marsyas and the Pierides.2 More generally,
the emphasis on artistic genius provides yet further virtual hyperlinks, as it were, to all those other artists Ovid describes: Pygmalion, Mulciber, the creator of the world and the poet himself. Yet despite this complex network of thematic links between tales, the visible joins between stories in the Metamorphoses are often highly contrived, reminding us of the partial arbitrariness of the tales’ ordering, and flouting our expectations of linearity and closure. The poem thus fulfils Barthes’ description of an ideal textuality, wherein:
the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one…3
This hypertextual paradigm is anticipated in Ovid’s own description of Fama’s house:
From this place, whatever is, however far away is seen, and every word penetrates to these hollow ears. Rumour dwells here, having chosen her house upon a high mountain-top; and she gave the house countless entrances, a thousand apertures, but with no doors to close them. Night and day the house stands open. It is built all of echoing brass. The whole place resounds with confused noises, repeats all words and doubles what it hears.
