In this dissertation, I read three story clusters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the intersection of temporality and (characters’ and readers’) knowledge. My reading is based on the importance, to Ovid’s account, of sensory recognition, focalization, or cognitive understanding, on the one hand, and on the other of temporality and pastness, or a narrator’s tendency to flash back to a previous moment in narrative time.

I propose that in the Metamorphoses temporal schemes are more complex than a simple present-past binary. Thus, I introduce the concept of a backstory, or of a temporal level situated at two removes from the main narrative. I also suggest that the interaction between different temporal levels may be reconstructed in different ways by readers and characters. Our reading of clusters is enriched if we compare the fullness of information we receive through reading to the limited information available to characters about previous levels.

In composing the dissertation I went through the following steps. First, I briefly mapped out each story cluster based on its inclusion of a present, a past, and a backstory level. I then explored the ways in which knowledge about one level may (not) pass along to characters of a posterior level, as well as the tension between the methods of unlocking their past that are available to the characters and the act of reading, on which we readers base our information.

Chapters II and III focus on two such character methods: visual perception in the Bacchus/Minyads cluster and information transmission in the Little Aeneid cluster. In the former, the links in the chain of visual recognition limit characters’ understanding of (a past that has shaped) their present circumstances — but there is a way of reconciling characters’ perception with the narrator’s statements. In the latter, I explore two cycles of information transmission about (repetitive) danger: a backstory-to-past unsuccessful one and a past-to-present successful one, which then helps characters navigate their future. The dependence of such success on the availability of informers shows the relative reliability of the method itself, and their marginal identity may be a comment on Ovid’s own epic marginality. In chapter IV (Ceres cluster, “Proserpina” and “Erysichthon”) I examine a case of non-contiguous backstory and past, and suggest that knowledge about the connection of personified divinities to hunger does not cross levels. Moreover, we may detect Ovid’s pervasive tendency to detach characters from any construction of meaning, even within the same temporal level — thus, the reader-character tension reaches its peak.

A story cluster thus emerges as a narrative unit stretching over three temporal layers and displaying thematic coherence. In each cluster, the ironical lack of characters’ knowledge turns them into rival narrators, who conjure up the possibility of another story than the dominant one. Conversely, repetition may cause the fusion of two stories into one, rather than the derivation of two stories from one. But, regardless of different plot possibilities, each cluster centers around one thematic question, or one way of understanding the world (visual recognition, information transmission based on repeatability, and different divine identities). Thus, I introduce a twofold macroscopic reading based on clusters: a temporal one, i.e. different story clusters governed each by its own timeline, and a thematic one, i.e. all clusters (here examined) pose a knowledge-related question.

In this dissertation, I propose that a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to the speaking subject of the lover-poet in Tibullus’ Elegies can deepen our understanding of Tibullus’ poetry, particularly with respect to his fantasy of the countryside and his relationships with Delia and Marathus. I suggest that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory provides us with a framework through which we can articulate the complex and multi-layered process of self-reflection and self-construction in Tibullus’ Elegies Book 1.

In chapter 1, I look closely at the lover-poet’s country fantasy in poems 1.1, 1.10, and 2.1. In his fantasy of rustic happiness, we see the lover-poet’s longing for a sense of wholeness and sufficiency, which he repeatedly describes as “having enough.” Yet in each iteration of his dream, Amor disrupts the lover-poet’s ideal, bringing with it the threat of dissatisfaction, excess, and even violence. I propose that the theory of Amor which we find in the lover-poet’s country fantasy invites a Lacanian interpretation of Tibullus’ poems.

Chapter 2 suggests that the structure of desire in the lover-poet’s country fantasy parallels the structure of desire in his relationship with Delia. The lover-poet’s relationship with Delia thus fits into a broader investigation of the desiring subject in Elegies Book 1. Lacan’s concept of objet a provides a way to account for the ambiguity of what the lover-poet really wants in both of these fantasies and why he never seems to be able to attain it.

Chapter 3 expands my exploration of the lover-poet’s relationship with Delia to include his representation of Delia herself. First, I explain the sense of absence and uncertainty that surrounds the lover-poet’s representation of Delia’s desire in poem 1.2, putting forth Lacan’s account of Woman’s desire as a way to interpret these ambiguities. Second, I show how Lacan’s framework provides a way to understand the lover-poet’s excessive idealization of Delia in poem 1.3 as a series of fantasies around objet a.

In chapter 4, I shift my focus to the lover-poet’s self-portrayal in his relationship with Delia. The Tibullan lover-poet casts himself in a series of enigmatic positions, such as the ianitor (1.1) and the poor attendant (1.5), where he is trapped by restrictions which simultaneously enable and prevent his access to the object of his desire. The lover-poet only ever envisions having a sense of fulfillment from his relationship to Delia when he imagines himself dying or already dead. I suggest that the lover-poet’s self-positioning in each of these scenes reflects the plight of the subject in Lacanian theory.

Finally, in chapter 5, I consider the lover-poet’s representation of his relationship with the boy, Marathus, in poem 1.8. The lover-poet’s representation of the boy first as a puella-figure and then as an amator reveals the crisis of categories that emerges when he tries to articulate the boy’s place in his poetic world. I offer Lacan’s concept of Imaginary object relations to explain why the lover-poet represents Marathus in such a paradoxical manner and why he reacts as he does to his encounter with the boy in poem 1.8.

To conclude the dissertation, I present some ways that reading Tibullus’ Elegies Book 1 through a Lacanian lens enriches our understanding of Tibullus’ poetry and its relationship to the work of the other elegists.