The Last World
By Christopher Ransmayr
Grove Weidenfeld
246 PAGES
Cotta, a young Roman citizen, travels to the town of Tomi on the Black Sea in search of the great poet Publius Ovidius Naso. Ovid has been banished from Rome for mysterious reasons, and in parting, has burned the manuscript of what was to be his greatest work, the Metamorphoses. It is as much in hope of discovering the work as in discovering the poet himself that Cotta sets out.
While the outline sounds like the makings of a historical novel a la Mary Renault, it is both more, and less, than that. It is more than that in being a novel which is, in many ways, a reading or work of criticism on another work — Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cotta’s story, and the ancient world of Ransmayr’s novel, are peopled with characters who are based on the characters (largely taken from the Greek and Roman mythology) of Ovid’s poem. Not all of the characters in the Metamorphoses are represented and the selection, and mutation, of those that are form a reading of the poem and suggest a reader who may also be the writer of The Last World.
It is less than an historical novel in that Ransmayr never sets out to re-create in his work a “realistic” ancient world. The Last World is deliberately anachronistic (daily papers and bookstores in Rome, buses and electricity in Tomi) in order to conflate our world with that of the Roman poet. The issues variously explored in the novel — creativity, perception, interpretation, fascism and freedom — are perennial, and in The Last World history is conflated to point this out and to give the lie to modern-day notions of progress and improvement.
Thus the Rome of The Last World is the state, all states, and the aspirations of political power throughout history. Rome is a Kafkaesque and inscrutable bureaucracy where a nod, or a small hand gesture from the emperor, is interpreted through tier after tier of government, and is finally translated into a death sentence, or a pardon, or an expulsion. The static structure to which this state aspires is inhuman and brutal. Ovid, the poet of love and pleasure, the poet of changes, cannot be tolerated by such a state:
In the capital city of Emperor
Augustus, the very title of the book
[Metamorphoses] had been
presumptuous, a provocation to Rome,
where every edifice was a monument to
authority, invoking stability, the
permanence and immutability of power.
This is not the only reason for Ovid’s exile; there is also a theatrical adaptation of the Midas story in which the playwright clearly associates Midas with a wealthy and powerful Roman; there is also the influence of Rumour, who wields a great deal of power in a paranoid police state.
In fact, there is never just one reason or just one interpretation of events offered in Ransmayr’s book, and this is one of its strengths. Analogies between contemporary political situations and the Rome of this novel, or between its characters and those of Ovid’s work, are never direct or simple. Echo, for instance, of Ovid’s well-known “Narcissus and Echo” story, is a beautiful young woman who can, at times, speak rather than simply repeat what is said around her. She does, however, have a patch of dry, scaly and flaking skin that travels slowly over her body. This is finally revealed to Cotta to contain within it “slate sparkling with mica … gray feldspar … chalk and coarse grained sand.”
Echo, with her dry stony patch, is at once Ovid’s Echo, who turns to stone pining for the love of Narcissus, and Ovid’s audience. She recounts to Cotta all of the stories which the exiled poet told her; they are all tales of stone, ending with the apocalyptic account of Deucalion and Pyrrah. Echo, the unfortunate and abused prostitute of Tomi, who is raped by Cotta when she gives him a place to stay, dreams of a people made from stone as the descendants of Deucalion and Pyrrah — people who cannot feel pain.
Cotta discovers that to each character in Tomi Ovid has told different stories. Ransmayr suggests that stories do not exist without an audience and are re-created by them. This is where the complexity of Ransmayr’s book is most apparent. In writing a novel he is also writing a critique of Ovid’s poem and a critique of criticism. He is suggesting readings of the poem while at the same time pointing to the provisionality of all reading strategies; i.e. no one reading is “right.” Each goes to make up the one story of changes, which is never complete.
Ransmayr’s descriptions throughout the book are rich and sensual. When they are weak, as they sometimes are, the metaphors are nonetheless unique and one can’t help but wonder how much of the novel’s original beauty (Ransmayr is an Austrian writing in German) has been lost to translation.
On the whole, the book may be faulted by detractors of Ovid’s poetry (who claim his work is too frivolous and that Metamorphoses is merely a collection of good, and not so good, yarns strung together with a paltry conceit: change) who might look down on the novel for paying too much attention to too light a work. Be that as it may, The Last World remains a compelling novel about the inhumanity at the heart of reason, the slow rot of time, big government throughout the ages, and why we read and write.
