The Echo of Narcissus

Certain works of art do more than just illustrate the classical myths: Rather, they illuminate the universal dynamics exemplified by these immortal stories. Nicolas Poussin's 1631 masterpiece, the Dresden Realm of Flora (Fig. 1), supports a radical interpretation of the Narcissus myth when contexualized by a close reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the canvas, the goddess Flora dances amidst the mythical figures that, in the Metamorphoses, she turns into flowers: Ajax, Clytie, Hyacinthus, Adonis, Crocus, Smilax, and finally Narcissus, accompanied by Echo. Echo loves Narcissus, but, as Poussin shows us, he is smitten with his own reflection, mirrored in a vessel of water. Many had been turned away before her.

Normally a meticulous and faithful interpreter of the poet, when Poussin departs from the text, he does so for a reason.

Largely credited with structuring the narrative of the linked myths of Narcissus and Echo, Ovid explains that one of Narcissus's rejected would-be suitors retaliated in fury, appealing to Nemesis to curse the object of his frustrated desire, making him “‘love as I have loved him… without obtaining his beloved.’ Nemesis answered his prayer.” Captivated by his image, Narcissus wastes away and returns as the narcissus flower that, in Realm of Flora, already blooms around him. Typically read as a punishment for his vain self-love (the traditional symbol of vanity being the mirror), Ovid's text specifies that Narcissus's demise is more accurately understood as a result of his failure at mature love.

The echo is the auditory analogue of the mirror. In the Metamorphoses, the “mirroring” of Narcissus and Echo is symbolically elaborated on multiple linguistic levels: Their comingled stories are “mirrored” by shared themes of impossible love and violent acts of retribution; and their text is chiastically structured, e.g., like a mirror, and pervaded by myriad semantic and syntactic doublings. The noted art historian Doris Panofsky observed that Poussin was the first painter to restore Echo to her full “Ovidian status.” Poussin specifies Echo's special connection to Narcissus by joining them around the urn that bears his reflection. Matthias Winner, classicist and art historian, identifies this vessel as an echeia—a resonating vase used to amplify sound in the ancient Greek theater, derived from the same root as “echo” (ηχη, eche; “sound”). The brimming echeia is in turn “echoed” by the overflowing fountain above it. But Ovid relates that Narcissus discovers his reflection in a natural pool, not a man-made vessel. Normally a meticulous and faithful interpreter of the poet, when Poussin departs from the text, he does so for a reason.

Mirror of Sleeping Water

Unexpectedly, Realm of Flora alludes to an anomalous metamorphic myth—one not involving flowers, but stone: the story of Niobe. The art historian Sheila Barker has discerned Niobe's iconographic posture in the bas-relief on the sarcophagus at the left of the picture. In this myth, the prideful queen Niobe angered the goddess Leto by insisting that it was she, not Leto, who should be worshipped for her riches and fecundity, having borne seven daughters and seven sons, the Niobids, as opposed to Leto's scant two.

She should have known better than to blaspheme the goddess with her hubris, as those two children were Apollo and Artemis, who swiftly defended their mother's honor by slaughtering Niobe's prized offspring with their bows and arrows. For her offense, Niobe was turned to stone, “rigid in her grief,” and condemned to lament forever.

The rocky cliff-side in Realm of Flora contains another covert reference to this myth: It follows the profile of the “Weeping Rock,” a stone formation atop Mount Sipylus in Turkey, fancied by the ancients to represent Niobe's petrified incarnation (Fig. 2). When wet, its porous limestone weeps, as if to “bathe the marble with her flowing tears.” In the canvas, this rocky embodiment is situated above the fountain, illusionistically filling it, and thence the echeia, with Niobe's tears. Her pride in her fated offspring is paralleled by that of another mother—Liriope, who consulted the oracle out of worry for the life of her aggrandized child, Narcissus. Poussin alluded to this very connection in an earlier painting of Narcissus, in which his figure is adapted from a classical statue of a slain Niobid. The plot thickens when we realize that Ovid identifies Liriope as a water nymph and Narcissus's father as Cephisus, a river god. Given this aquatic ancestry, Poussin's conjuring of Narcissus's image in Niobe's tears suggests that the painter interprets his reflection as signifying the mirroring gaze of mother—in this case, a mother who cannot but mourn her idealized child.

In 1967, Winnicott wrote, “the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face,” and offered that the mother's mirroring gaze gives “back to the baby the baby's own self.” Heinz Lichtenstein also held that the mother “reflects back to the child a configuration of its own presence,” stressing in 1964 that the “magnification and reduplication (echo)” of her “narcissistic libidinous mirroring” imbues this reflection with “the mother's unconscious needs with regard to the child.” A decade before, while Jacques Lacan was formulating the “mirror stage” of development, M. Royden Astley made the comment that “the young child can use his mother's eyes as a mirror,” relating the formation of his identity to this “primitive self-observation, the earliest mirror of self.” And even earlier, in the 1940s, Harry Stack Sullivan spoke of mirroring as a reciprocal, interpersonal interaction between mother and infant. From the perspective of myth, Marie Bonaparte has elegantly demonstrated how the eerie silence of still water traditionally evokes “the death-aspect of the mother-deities”: “the unforgettable smile of the mother,” who “seems, under the mirror of the sleeping water, to call the children who have remained under her fascination.”

Knitting together some of these threads, Leonard Shengold posits that water in the Narcissus myth “symbolizes birth and the mother; its surface is a mirror and its depths are the medium for symbiotic entrapment.” Yet the role of Echo, the mirror, and the mother had long before been meaningfully interpreted within the legend—not by an analyst, but by an artist.

Amplification of Dyadic Mirroring

Over 300 years ago, Poussin couched in aesthetic terms what psychoanalysts have adumbrated, but not explicitly specified: that the overlooked presence of Echo in the myth of Narcissus evokes an essential dynamic—the echoing amplification of dyadic mirroring. The Realm of Flora's suggestion that Narcissus's admiring mirror image is a revenant of his mother's admiring mirroring helps to explain Ovid's curious description of the visage reflected in the water as “an image of an image.” Poussin adds additional sensate dimensions to the seductive specular mirroring of the echeia via its proximity to the smiling Echo, whose postural mirroring of Narcissus complements her intrinsic auditory mirroring. And, by positioning the echeia between her legs, Poussin intimates that the site of Narcissus's death is the site of his birth.

Linking the gaze to oral incorporative processes, Otto Fenichel argued that at their inception, object representations are visual, their internalization into the forming self effected through mutual eye contact, “the magical property of a look.” In the Metamorphoses, Ovid specifies that Narcissus is drinking the water that bears his reflection when he is “overcome by the beauty of the image that he sees,” a most poetic evocation of the nursing infant riveted by his mother's eyes. Indeed, “Narcissus at 16 seemed to be both boy and man.” Ovid further suggests a devouring, incorporative quality by referring to Narcissus's “insatiate stare” and by having him exclaim, “touching is forbidden / but looking isn't: then let me look at you / and feed my wretched frenzy on your image.”

Within the set of propositions outlined here, the transformative symbolization of Liriope's mirroring gaze into Narcissus's mirrored reflection in water preserves a metaphorical trace of his watery origin. This textual transformation recursively, brilliantly mirrors and represents the developmental transformation of the mother's mirroring gaze into the forming identity reflected back to the infant.

By extension, the figure of Narcissus may epitomize how problems with loving often results from disturbances in identity, e.g., by the tendency to feel colonized, fragmented, or fused in intimate relationships. Certainly mothers like Liriope and Niobe can overwhelm and imprison their children with their seductivity, projected anxiety, and grandiose mandates, fostering a regressive, dependent attachment that interferes with the separation and identity development of the adolescent and young adult.

And if a child can devour his mother through his eyes, then the mother can also devour her child. The replacement of the mother's mirroring gaze by the symbolic mirror image in the Narcissus myth evokes how, in Stephen Frosh's words, “the extent to which what is other dominates our existence is too painful, too terrifying, to be maintained” by some individuals without regular escape to an omnipotent “fantasy of completeness, of narcissistic selfhood.” Such a periodic retreat is in fact enacted in the text, wherein the bewildered Narcissus alternates between seeing his reflection as himself and seeing it as another. Poussin inventively visualizes this dynamic flux in Realm of Flora by rendering the ghostly image floating in the echeia ambiguous, legible as a face in not one, but two distinct spatial orientations: One accounts for the expected reflection of Narcissus, but the other is summoned by an invisible presence (Fig. 3). Thus does the painter represent the blurred relationship between the inchoate embryonic self and the ever-remembered gaze of the other, which can organize, cohere, and feed but can also dominate, consume, and drown.

Aesthetic transformation negotiates and manages these tensions, and more. Poussin's aesthetic interpretations open doors to meanings embedded in a timeless text—fittingly enough, one in which vision is both metaphor and vehicle of knowledge. In Realm of Flora, Echo's echeia is a synthesthetic metaphor for the complex, resonating, multi-sensory experience of mirroring, and the tears of a mother's eyes are the matrix in which Narcissus's image, his identity, is thus constructed. A far more interpersonal and object-related figure than is usually construed, Poussin's Narcissus is forever spellbound by his elusive reflection, which carries the perpetual echo of the original unattainable love, the other that lingers “under the mirror of the sleeping water”—the enduring, alluring avatar of mother.