7 - Fantastic Metamorphoses and Murderers I Have Known

Summary

We come now to Warner's very latest works, published while this book was nearing completion. Thus, what might have been a chapter of retrospective summation will have to be a chapter of prospective speculation. But this is probably all to the good, as Warner's is above all a dynamic art.

As has been the case previously, she has produced a work of fiction in close proximity to a work of mythography, with considerable overlapping of interests. Murderers I Have Known and other stories (2002) is a collection of fictional pieces, some of them commissioned during the 1990s and some of them written specially for the volume. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (2002) is based on the Clarendon Lectures which Warner delivered in the autumn of 2001, and it relates to an exhibition called Metamorphing which she co-curated with Sarah Bakewell at the Science Museum in London in the autumn and winter of 2002. Both books are about the need for change.

Turning to the latter first, we see Warner going right back to the origins of art, to consider the relationship between reality and representation. For the ‘metamorphosis’ in which she is interested is above all a process of the imagination: after all, the word ‘metaphor’ comes from the same etymological root. In other words, ‘transformation’ is above all a trope. The most famous work to celebrate the capacity to imagine what might be, or to re-imagine what is, is of course Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Warner begins by acknowledging as a lifelong inspiration to herself. That wonderful compendium of myths and legends is certainly a work of compelling fantasy, and it certainly opens out to us ‘other worlds’ which transform our perception of our own. The image of Acteon being changed into a stag after seeing Diana bathing, of Arachne into a spider for daring to challenge Minerva in a weaving competition, of Daphne into a bay-tree to prevent Apollo taking her virginity: these are endlessly absorbing images. The very idea that such bodily changes can be made so easily, that they are not exceptions to the order of the universe but rather examples of its never-ending cyclical replenishment, may seem disturbing at first.