Who or what is Narcissus? Is it me staring admiringly at myself in a mirror? Or is Narcissus the image staring admiringly back at me? Does it make a difference? If so, whom does it make a difference to? Me or the image? Or both?

It’s easy to get tangled up in words here…but no, let’s not, or not yet anyway. Narcissus, one of many mythical figures in Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is too important a character in our lives today to be dismissed as a word-jumble. That’s because Narcissus’s story forms the basis for the psychological malady called narcissism. It’s a malady characterized in one dictionary as “excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance.” Maybe close reading Narcissus’s story will help us figure out who is who the next time we look in the mirror. Maybe also help us judge a little better the malady named after him.

But the figuring out and judging will be a challenge because Ovid’s Metamorphoses— or “transformations”—is all about one body turning into another, especially our own body. Whatever about our body we try to get a handle on tends to squirm out of our grasp.

The Metamorphoses itself seems solid enough. Published around the time of the birth of Christ, it is epic in scale. It is longer than its predecessor, Virgil’s Aeneid (consisting of fifteen books in dactylic hexameter meter to Virgil’s twelve), and stretches further in time, from the beginning of the universe to Ovid’s own day. But unlike the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses doesn’t tell a single story. It tells a blizzard of them, all centered around mythical figures—humans and gods—changing themselves or others into other forms. And in his Prologue to the poem Ovid makes sure that he himself is party to the changing. He begins:

My soul is roused to speak of forms changed into new bodies. O gods, inspire in what I have done (for you changed yourselves and those forms too) and tease out a seamless poetic tale from the beginning of the world to my present day!

You could say that part of Ovid wants to pen an epic in the solemn Virgilian manner, a “seamless poetic tale.” But another part wants to use the epic form to give structure to what he really wants to talk about: life’s constant flux, always taking us by surprise. Ted Hughes (deservedly famous for his imaginative reworking of the Metamorphoses in his Tales from Ovid) puts Ovid’s real subject this way:

Above all, Ovid was interested in passion. Or rather, what passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis—passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural.

But what about the effect of passion on Narcissus? Into what extremis does it drive him? And what is there about a similar passion that drives people today to become narcissists?

Marshall McLuhan argues caution here. “The Narcissus myth,” he wrote, “does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself.” Its real point is that “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.”

While McLuhan makes an important distinction, he doesn’t explain the nature of the fascination itself. Ovid does so, in his vivid almost cinematic dramatizations of the way passion possesses the characters in the Metamorphoses and, among them, Narcissus.

The trouble for Narcissus begins when the river nymph Liriope takes her boy to the prophet Tiresias, to ask if he would live to an old age. The reply: “si se non noverit.” (“If he does not come to recognize himself.”)

The prophecy is scoffed at, as making no sense.

Some years go by. Narcissus is irresistible to both male and female deities. They pursue him in vain. But he will have none of them. Finally, one of the scorned suitors implores Nemesis, goddess of retribution: “sic amet ipse licet, sic not potiatur amato.” (“Let him love someone and not be loved back!”)

Nemesis nods. And soon Narcissus, fleeing into the deep woods from the nymph Echo, finds himself near a clear pool.

The story has been moving rapidly up to this point. But now Ovid slows it to a crawl so we can watch Narcissus look deeper and deeper into the pool.

Yet we also hear Narcissus talking the whole time, imploringly, not to us, but to the image in the pool, which he clearly believes to be the most beautiful youth in the world. Of course, everyone else has been thinking the very same thing about Narcissus, and has been falling as madly and unrequitingly in love with him as he is now with the image in the pool. So McLuhan is right when he says that the myth “does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself.” But then what is Narcissus falling in love with? And why?

I’d argue that Rene Girard’s ideas about “mimetic desire” are helpful here. Girard explains that human desire is triangular. Uniquely among primates we desire a thing not for itself (food, sex, comfort, etc.) but because it is desired by someone else. Mimetic desire is rivalrous, called into being by envy. Narcissus is imitating the extremity and the hopelessness of the love that all others have for him. He cannot reciprocate because he too is a victim of the same mimetic contagion and can only love what all those others love, which is himself. Which is impossible.

Or is it? The image in the pool can serve as surrogate, can’t it? As McLuhan says, “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” The idea is: if I can’t have myself, then I’ll take everything else to fill the empty space. And so narcissism is born. A destructive malady if there ever was one, destructive of self and of anything that gets into that empty space.

Ovid at least grants Narcissus the dignity of self-awareness before he merges with that enticing image in the pool, drowning himself. So Ovid has granted him the capacity to observe himself from outside his own passionate attachment to the mimetic desire that has defined and driven him:

iste ego sum; sensi, nec me fallit imago.
uror amore mei, flames moveoque feroque

(This is me! I know it now, this is my image.
I’m burned in my own love, I both make the flame and flame in it.)

Some marvelous oxymorons follow as Narcissus wrestles with the hopeless contradictions of the exhausted state his passion has driven him into.

But Narcissus’s final words to his image show he’s resigned to the fate that awaits them both. They’ll die together. Fittingly, the image is no longer a “he” but a “you.” As his own tears disturb the image below him, Narcissus calls out:

Quo refugis? remane, nec me, crudelis, amantem
desere…

(Where are you going? Stay, don’t desert me, cruel one…)

But at least now Narcissus knows what he’s doing.

Tiresias was tricky as all prophets tend to be. If old age was Liriope’s hope for the boy, the hope wasn’t granted, But the boy does come to “recognize himself,” in more ways than one: not only as object, but victim and thoughtful student of desire. A complexity of insight to search for next time I gaze in the mirror.

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.

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