Liriope’s Son
His name will occur on subsequent pages, so we should start by knowing his history. According to the Roman poet Ovid, when he was born, his mother, Liriope, a water nymph, had asked the blind seer Tiresias whether her son would live to enjoy a ripe old age.1 Tiresias said he would, “if he shall himself not know.” This bizarre prediction from the highly reliable Tiresias contradicted one of the most important pieces of advice of the classical world. “Know thyself” was the inscription famously written on the entrance to Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, the most important shrine in ancient Greece. The Greeks well understood that lack of self-knowledge is one of the mainsprings of human stupidity and folly. How then could ignorance of himself be the key to a long and happy life for her son, Narcissus?
By the time of the drama that answers this question, the son was some sixteen years old, a shepherd boy, and very beautiful. He had aroused sexual desire and received advances from a great many people, but “hard pride ruled in that delicate frame, and never a youth and never a girl could touch his haughty heart.” The nymph Echo was especially aflame with love for him. She had previously suffered the misfortune of annoying the goddess Juno with her chatter, so (perhaps like many of today’s twitterati) she had been condemned only ever to repeat the last thing said to her. When Narcissus said “Anyone here?” Echo answered, “Here.” When Narcissus said, “Come this way,” Echo gladly answered, “This way.” Echo threw herself at Narcissus, but he rejected her like all the others. She thereupon wasted away, eventually becoming nothing but the haunting voice we can all hear in the rocks and the woods.
Inevitably, this disdainful young man got his comeuppance, or, as the Greeks phrased it, nemesis awaited him. One day, hot and thirsty from hunting, Narcissus lay down to drink at a quiet pool in the woods where nobody ever came. Here, for the first time, he saw his own reflection:
And while he slaked his thirst, another thirst
Grew; as he drank he saw before his eyes
A form, a face, and loved with leaping heart
A hope unreal, and thought the shape was real
He became entranced and besotted, and fell in love for the first time in his life: “himself he longs for, longs unwittingly, praising is praised, desiring is desired.” But when he reached down to caress the beautiful youth in the pool, the object of his love broke away, as reflections do. He could look and sigh and pine, but he could not touch.
As Ovid tells the story, Narcissus eventually realized that it was he himself he loved, through the medium of his reflection:
Oh I am he! Oh now I know for sure
The image is my own; it’s for myself
I burn with love; I fan the flames I feel.
What now? Woo or be wooed? Why woo at all?
Would I might leave my body! I could wish
(Strange lover’s wish!) my love were not so near!
But it was too late, and loving himself to the last, he wasted away, like Echo. When others came to bury him, however, there was no body to be found, but only the white and gold flower that we now know as the narcissus. Tiresias had been right after all.
How are we to react to this charming yet more than slightly sinister myth? A superficial view would be that it tells us nothing about ourselves but is simply a story describing a particularly self-obsessed and socially defective young man. A better view—the view of Freud, for example—is that like other myths it can tell us a great deal about ourselves.2 For example, Narcissus imagines Echo’s sayings to be those of a different person, whereas in reality it is only his own voice that is being thrown back at him. So the myth might tell us that the voices we hear in our heads are often not those of other people but our own, falsely imagined to be those of others. The echo chambers of our minds tell us no more than how we appear to ourselves, or imagine ourselves to appear to others. And which of us does not at times dream of the pleasant thoughts others may entertain about us, and the songs of praise that they might, and certainly should, be singing about us? We can easily frame the right words for anyone inclined to admire us. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult and quite painful—two connected obstacles—to dwell on the faults, flaws, or mere foibles we have, and that might, realistically, loom quite large in the conversations of others.
Narcissus might remind us of the swarms of egoists who infest places of interest, art galleries, concerts, public spaces, and cyberspace. For such people, the object of each moment is first to record oneself as having been there and second to broadcast the result to as much of the rest of the world as possible. The smartphone is the curse of public space as people click away with the lens pointed mainly at themselves and only secondarily at what is around them. The egoist imagines all his or her friends fascinated by what they had for breakfast or how they looked standing in front of, or half-obscuring, the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal. It may be that this is only the contemporary manifestation of the same trait that prompted people to carve their names on monuments and buildings, supposing that for future witnesses, the most interesting thing about the Parthenon or the Venus de Milo would be that John Doe was there. However, the modern world affords opportunities for people to outdo their predecessors. A nice contemporary flowering, or emblem for our times, is the grotesque story of the “Bling Ring,” a gaggle of California teenagers whose anxiety to project themselves as celebrities led to them using Google Street View and other modern media facilities to break into the houses of noted celebrities, where they stole expensive trash to imitate the celebrities’ lifestyles. They then witlessly incriminated themselves by posting the results to all their social media.3
Narcissus did not, however, use the social medium of his day, namely, talking to someone else. He rejected the real nymph, who had a separate voice. He turned her into his own voice in his own head. But our own voice in our own head is not enough for us. However self-satisfied we may be, we need more. We actually need the real voice of others, or perhaps their touch; we are not self-sufficient and indifferent to the world and its other voices. But the egoist and Narcissus coincide in giving themselves instead the imagined voice of others, an ever-present and often reassuring substitute.
The myth also tells us of the delusions attached to desire. What Narcissus desires is unbearably close yet totally unobtainable. The obstacle is not even a solid barrier, yet it is equally impenetrable. And like Narcissus, any of us might die after a life spent chasing phantoms, objects that we cannot possess, and that, if we could but possess them, would turn out to have been nothing but ripples in our minds, illusions and dreams.
Narcissus eventually achieves a genuine self-knowledge, realizing that it is only himself with whom he is besotted. But he cannot use that self-knowledge; he cannot tear himself away from the prism that shows him not the world but only an insubstantial version of his own self. His obsession is incurable. The object of Narcissus’s love was only ever going to be himself, even when it was imagined as another. He is the only figure in the drama of his own life, and this kills him. Or rather, it simply deadens his soul; for, after all, at the end there is no body to be found. This strange feature of the myth may suggest that perhaps Narcissus is very much among us, a dead man walking. What the narcissistic self needs is a rebirth, which in a sense Narcissus was given, continuing, however, only as a humble flower whose head is always bowed toward the ground. Or perhaps the absence of a body symbolizes the completeness in the death of the narcissist—his failure to leave any achievement, any memory, or even any mourners. The world goes on as if he had never been. And that in turn might be a lesson that some of the more strident contemporary defenders of the culture of greed and self-absorption would do well to reflect upon.
The object of Narcissus’s love behaved ideally in some ways. It was always close, never withdrawing from him more than he himself withdrew from the surface of the pool. When Narcissus reached toward it, it reached forward with exactly the same eagerness and exactly the same intent. It completely reflected his emotions of passion, desire, or grief, just as he felt them. In all these respects it was the perfect object of love—the partner we might all fantasize about, especially when we resent the uncomfortable dissonances provided by other real people. But touch is a more immediate sign of the presence of something real than either hearing or vision, and Narcissus is denied this final gratification. His need and desire are forever unfulfilled.
Narcissus, of course, is besotted by his own beauty. But one might be besotted by something else about oneself: one’s own achievements, one’s birth, one’s possessions, or simply one’s own worth, or deserved standing in the eyes of the world. These introduce more complex issues that occupy us later, since they bring in the eyes of other people. Vanity, for instance, is most commonly a greedy desire for the admiration and envy of others, and it is not given in the myth that this was any part of Narcissus’s problem (we distinguish a rather different form of vanity in chapter 3).
In Ovid’s poem there are other examples in which impetuous desire is denied its end because it is fueled only by love of the self. When the god of light and poetry, Apollo, by whom “things future, past and present are revealed,” falls in love with the nymph Daphne, he tries to entice her by singing his own praises: “ask who it is who loves you,” he pleads, before reeling off his divine credentials. Daphne, of course, flees from him, deaf to these enticements. As Apollo chases her down, she prays to her father, the river god Peneus, to turn her into a tree, which he does. Apollo, however, is remarkably calm in the face of this obstacle (which, to be fair, he must have seen coming, if his own account of his prophetic powers is to be believed). He simply tells poor Daphne, now a laurel tree, that she can be his very own tree, whose wreath will be a perpetual commemoration of success and fame:
“My brow is ever young, my locks unshorn;
So keep your leaves’ proud glory ever green.”
Thus spoke the God; the laurel in assent
Inclined her new-made branches and bent down,
Or seemed to bend, her head, her leafy crown.
Thinking that the very trees obey you must be a fair candidate for an excess of self-absorption. Apollo’s desire is denied its bodily goal, but this leaves his self-image intact, suggesting that Apollo, the god of light, learning, music, and poetry, is after all not so far from Narcissus. For the laurel that Daphne turns into was the universal symbol of success and fame in the classical world. Was the great god Apollo as much ambitious for the applause and admiration of others as for the prize he seemed to have set himself?
Many subsequent poets, including Dante and Petrarch, have meditated on this myth and the dangerous way in which love of fame is just the kind of fault to which poets are especially prone. The poet is supposed to aim for perfection in his art (Daphne when she is herself). But too often he is willing to settle for mere applause from others (Daphne transformed into the laurel crown, the Olympic gold medal). Perhaps indeed he must settle for that. There may be magnificent exceptions, but for most practitioners of the arts, self-confidence is a fragile business, utterly dependent on the admiration and support of others. If you can achieve independence from this, well and good, but unless you are a rare genius, and perhaps even then, it will only be by an apprenticeship of reliance on it. The eighteenth-century moral philosopher Adam Smith reflects on the difference between those “noble and beautiful arts, in which the degree of excellence can be determined only by a certain nicety of taste” and those where success admits of “clear demonstration,” and insightfully describes how the practitioners of the first will be much more concerned with actual praise, whereas those of the second can rest content with their own certainty of their own successes. He cites distinguished mathematicians “who never seemed to feel even the slightest uneasiness from the neglect with which the ignorance of the public received some of their most valuable works,” and goes on to reflect that by contrast authors and poets squabble over praise, form literary factions, and belittle each other with mortal enmity.4
There is an enjoyable paradox here. Self-sufficiency requires confidence, and confidence can only be nurtured by the approbation of others. But the paradox is only superficial. It may indeed be true that strength of character needs to be developed by taking on the evaluation of others, but once developed, it has a life of its own. In the same way, honesty and justice in a character may only be developed by means of threats and rewards, but once developed, they render the best people firm in their principles, immune to threats and rewards. So it is that people can be enabled, by the herd, to stand out against the herd.
In principle, therefore, we have the choice of questioning and rejecting even firm and established social norms, and the tendency to do so is a more or less permanent subtext in history, arising whenever there is an open space to see the demands of convention as oppressive, legalistic, restricting, or arbitrary. One kind of reformer is the strenuous advocate of more stringent, less lax, altogether higher standards. Another is the equally common advocate of lower, less demanding, more tolerant standards, and interestingly enough, in one form (antinomianism), this is encouraged by the idea, so convenient to all churches, that faith is all that matters: sola fide. If that is so, then it is natural to conclude that as long as we have faith, our behavior makes no difference to the chance of us being saved, in which case we might as well kick over the traces. There may be a permanent tendency for religiously sustained codes to generate just this opposition. Historically, antinomian movements in the West arose when tangles over free will, fate, and God’s foreknowledge led to the similar Calvinist idea that we are predestined to heaven or hell and that nothing we can do alters this fate. It is easy to understand how this led various sects to opt for the joyful indulgence of free love, communism, nudism, and other happy aberrations.
Narcissus was in love with himself—or was he? He was in love with a reflection, just as the voices he heard in his head were only his own thoughts or sayings thrown back at him. His reflection was an insubstantial, rippling, changeable thing. It had no anchorage except Narcissus’s own face and eyes, which in any case, he could not see. It disappeared as he approached it. Surely our own selves are more substantial than that, perhaps even more fit to serve as objects of devotion than a mere image in the water? There are plenty of voices telling us that this is so, and we meet a contemporary one in chapter 3.