Lyre or Liar? The nature of Roman erotic elegy

Introductionars adeo latet arte suaqArt lies concealed by its own artqnOvid. Metamorphoses. 10.252A subjective, first person elegiac narrator, speaks to a reader, or to an addressee. Shenor he recounts situations which involve a passionate, but destructive love affair, hownit affects their lives and the chaotic culmination of beauty, adulteiy and betrayal.nInstantaneously, the reader becomes caught up in this scenario. Without the devices ofndramatic presentation or the specific division of speaker and persona, the poet impartsnan immediacy and a realism of position and situation. Indeed, it is this subjectivitynwhich legitimates the sincerity of the genre. Here is the reason for the longevity of thenappeal of the elegiac corpus. As Ovid implies in Metamorphoses 10.252, poetry reliesnon its ability to entice the reader to believe, sympathise and share in the experiencesnof the author, while hiding the artistry involved in the process. The expertise implicitnto the narrative is the poet's capacity to impart this credibility, while conforming tonthe requirements of the genre. The aim is thus to master the competence to obscurenthe combination of traditions and generic expectations, inherent to elegy, behind thenveneer of a supposedly simple, historical account. This is the literary objective.nTherefore, for literary critics, the aim is to decode and deconstruct the elements withinnthe narrative, to produce a strategy to add to our knowledge of the work.Interpretation is thus reliant on critical systems of reading elegy, which encounterntheir own set of problems. In a recent collection on Roman elegy, Trevor Fear hasnemphasised the difficulties in the formulation of a specific approach:qOf course, as readers of texts that have been in circulation, albeitintermittently and narrowly, since their conception, we are not the first toenter this textual space. Our interpretative path to the text necessarilypasses over the sharpened and splintered pencils of previous literarycritics. In this sense, as Charles Martindale has persuasively argued, theobject of investigation is inevitably not only the materiality of the textbut, more widely, qall-the-forces-that-moulded-the-text-plus-its-receptionq(1993.54) In other words, our object of concern is not merelythe textual space itself,...but also the planning that went into thearchitecture and the previous exploration of others.qnIndeed, the development of a critical model becomes, via association, influenced bynthe preceding interpretive methods. As is well known, for many years the criticalnreply to elegy's first-person narrative was to understand it as reflecting a reality enhancednby real situations expressed in the text.n n n n n