PEP | Article - Narcissus and His Discontents - Couteur, P. Le
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has recently graduated from University College, Durham with a First in English Literature BA. The essay that features in this volume was written for a course taught by Dr Sean Burke and Professor Pat Waugh, called ‘Self & Text’, which ranged very widely and allowed for in-depth study of general psychoanalytical critical theory. The essay in its current edited form was completed in the autumn of 2003. Peter has just begun an Art Foundation course in Bristol, and intends to pursue Art Therapy until he has sufficient clinical experience to train as an analyst.
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Modern Writers Have Inherited a mythological corpus of barely cogitable scope. The familiarity with one's own mythological heritage lost in the last millennium has been mediated by an unprecedented availability for the mythophile of mythic material from other traditions. No one culture, however, has bequeathed such a wealth of material as that of Ancient Greece and, as Thomas Bulfinch writes in his 1855 handmaiden to mythology The Age of Fable, ‘No one of the fables of antiquity has been oftener alluded to by the poets than that of Narcissus’ (p. 105).
It appears that this myth enjoyed similar popularity in the Roman culture; it is depicted in as many as fifty murals in Pompeii alone. By far the fullest account of the myth of Narcissus is still to be found in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Indeed, several modern summaries of the tale distort it in the telling, and even neglect what is to my mind the most salient detail; the realization by Narcissus that it is his own self that he loves. From Addison's translation of the Ovid;