ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on wounds and bodily fluids in the Latin literature of the early Empire. More specifically, it examines and analyses material and symbolic representations of physical and mental wounds, as well as related secretions such as blood and tears. The discussion integrates modern sociological and psychoanalytical approaches with close reading of Latin texts, particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid. It investigates the relations between wounds, skin, and psychic boundaries; it explores wounds in relation to mental and social structures; and it addresses the intersection between wounds and melancholy. The chapter’s main argument is that wounds rupture not only the material corporeal envelope but also the psychic ego (in the mental sphere) and the textual texture and its communicative function (in the literary realm). When a wound lacerates the material cutaneous envelope, the latter loses its function as a container and ceases to hold the fluid body and the bodily fluids. When the wound is mental, the psychic envelope is perforated, the ego melts away and loses its integrity, and mental states of melancholy appear. Wounds dissolve the boundaries between in and out, self and the world, subject and object; they damage the sense of continuity, disrupt the physical and mental hierarchies, melt the language, and turn the common-sense into non-sense. Thus, along with the loss of the material and psychic envelopes and the eruption of bodily fluids, the wounded subject becomes fluid himself and transformed to a different order of being: he loses his coherent and steady subject position in favour of a fluid process of becoming that replaces ontology with metaphysics.
