mythopoetics
Echo's Story? Or Mine?
by Cultural Mythologer, Louise Anagnoson, Ph.D. July, 2008
It is gaps of information in myths that contribute to their enduring nature. Myths are rich in what they omit, and therefore any number of interpretations of them is possible. The reader of myths must always be aware that their reading is not the only reading of the myth. The other point of which we must be aware in discussing a myth is that there are no absolutes in the personalities of mythological characters. While Agamemnon may have been an effective and powerful general on the plains of Troy, he was only able to arrive there by being willing to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. While Odysseus, too, may have been a fine warrior in the Trojan War, he initially feigned insanity in an attempt to avoid the war.
Echo, 1903 John William Waterhouse
My interest in the next few pages is in the nymph Echo. Her myth is often considered with the myth of Narcissus and his myth is known to us today primarily because it is a psychiatric diagnosis and is often used as an insult to a self centered person. We know little about Echo but for the two stanzas from the Roman poet Ovid shown below. We don’t know her parentage, her friendships with other nymphs, her prior relationships, if any, with either Jove or Juno, nor do we know if incessant talking was one of her personality traits or if she had a “crush” on Juno or on Jove It is in these gaps of information that the reader creates her own story.
Here is Ovid’s story of Echo:
One day as he was driving frightened deer
into his nets, Narcissus met a nymph:
resounding Echo, one whose speech was strange;
for when she heard the speech of others, she
could not keep silent, yet she could not be
the first to speak. Then she still had a body –
she was not just a voice. Though talkative,
she used her voice as she still uses it:
of many words her ears have caught, she just
repeats the final part of what she has heard.
It’s Juno who has punished Echo so.
time after time when Juno might have caught
her Jove philandering on the mountaintops
with young nymphs, Echo, cunningly, would stop
the goddess on her path; she’d talk and talk,
to give her sister nymphs just time enough
to slip away before they were found out.
As soon as Juno had seen through that plot,
she menaced Echo: From now on you’ll not
have much use of that voice that tricked me so.”
The threat was followed by the fact. And Echo
can mime no more than the concluding sounds
of any words she’s heard.... (Ovid lines 358-369).
Ovid, the poet of 1st century Rome, was the first to tell the story of Echo. This story, the one for which she is best known, appears in Book III of The Metamorphoses. The stories told in this particular book of the Metamorphoses all relate to transformations made by humans to nonhumans as a result of having angered or offended a divinity in some manner. The verses cited above are almost all that we have of the myth of Echo herself before her myth becomes intertwined with the myth of Narcissus in which he is the central character.
Ancient Greek and Roman myths abound with stories of mortals who were overtly injured, killed or metamorphosed because in some manner they offended one of the divinities. Punishments were rendered without explanation to the victim and without anything resembling a trial or jury. For the most part the divinities were laws unto themselves. The curse placed upon the nymph Echo by the goddess Juno is one of the must brutal of punishments, although initially it may sound relatively benign. Juno’s anger is usually directed toward women with whom Jove has had affairs and/or at the children of those relationships. Juno tricks Semele, another nymph, into asking to see Jove’s face, knowing that doing so Semele will be killed by the fire of Jove’s visage. Juno also has Semele’s son by Jove, Dionysos, on her lists of targets. Juno, as we would suspect, is supportive of other goddesses who condemn men by changing their shapes. In Book III she applauds Diana’s action of changing Actaeon into a stag, killed by his own hounds, because he was a male invading what was the sanctuary of a goddess.My reading based on what Ovid writes and what I know from other myths is that Juno is true to form in her behavior in this story, acting imperiously and perhaps making an error in judgment punishing Echo. She dooms Echo to echoing based on very little evidence. Rather than confront Jove directly, Juno acts out her rage on a nymph of less than divine status, one who may be no more than a bystander when Juno hurries on her way to search for JoveWe do not know from Ovid whether delaying Juno is a conscious role Echo has taken, whether it is a role requested of her by Jove. Perhaps it is a role Echo has assumed to protect Juno from the knowledge of Jove’s liaisons, either to prevent her from raging or to prevent Juno from being hurt. But, as Ovid tells us, Juno suspects the worst of Echo and places the curse of repeating the last few syllables of whatever she hears. There is no question and answer scenario between Echo and Juno before the curse is delivered. Juno is angry and expresses it immediately by placing the curse on Echo. While the curse involves only Echo’s inability to initiate speech, it results in her death. She loses all connection to others and becomes merely the echo of another’s words; her body dissolves, as had her speech.
By confining Echo’s speech to an imitation of the last two syllables she hears, Juno has essentially silenced Echo and made her sound like a simpleton by restricting any meaningful communication. Echo’s punishment does not involve her immediate death, which is the fate of women such as Semele who are actually witnessed by Juno in flagrante. But is her life not all the more horrible because it is a lingering and demeaning existence which she lives, unable to complete a thought, force to echo what anyone else says, and as her voice retreats so does her mind and body.
This myth in particular speaks to me of the relevance of all myths to speak to societies past and present, both individually and collectively, about the violence done to a person when speech is denied them. Both individually and collectively we are denied a basic need when our ability to speak is hampered either by a physical or political restriction.
Echo’s thinking capacity is crippled by her inability to express herself. Not only is writing unknown to her, so too is visual expression because she is hidden in a vale. Unlike another myth in the same book by Ovid, Philomela, despite having her tongue cut out by her brother-in-law who has raped her, is able to communicate with her sister through her weaving. Echo has no such alternative. In other situations a person with impaired speech may have access to bodily gestures or signs. But Echo has access to none of these aids, thus making her punishment that more heinous. Death is the only thing that she can look forward to. There is an element of deep sadness when one realizes that for the most part her name has become synonymous in the present day with the phenomena of shouting into a cave or a valley and hearing the echo return to us. The nonsensical final syllables we hear amuse us. Also amusing is the repetition of our last few words by a child learning to speak. Every parent recognizes the need to modify their own language when around a child, since they are guaranteed to hear just the rudest words repeated.
One final way in which the legacy of Echo has come to us is in the repetition of words said to us by significant people in our lives. These words may come out of our mouths without any though being given to any thinking or belief on our part. We say them as automatically as Echo spoke back Narcissus’s words.
Who has not hit her forehead in frustration and said “Oh, No, I sound just like my….” (Mother, father, 8th grade English teacher, Sunday school teacher, etc.). This is usually an indication that what we have said is not something we have really considered but is a prerecorded message or echo from the past.
The more dangerous aspect of echo thinking is when it is not acknowledged consciously but spoken as our truth.
Work Cited
Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. San Diego:Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Author Bio
Louise Anagnoson received her Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2005. The title of her dissertation was "Grace in Sacrifice: A Study of Iphigenia and Persephone in Myth and Popular Fiction." She has been a clinical social worker with children and developmentally disabled adults and presently spends time with grandchildren, gardening, and writing. She is planning a collection of essays on women in Greek mythology.
Extended Reading
Dennis Slattery
Moby-Dick and the Myth of Narcissus: Seeing Into and Seeing Through
Dennis Slattery
Excerpts from Psychology at the Threshold:
Irony's Resonances
...imaging Echo as irony ......................................................p20
...illusive to intellect ............................................................p67
...the myth as seminal story ............................................... p69
...water and wound.................................................................p70
...Echo's character.................................................................p71
...the aural and the oral..........................................................p72
...Echo's desire for irony........................................................p73
...untouchable Narcissus; Echo jettisoned...........................p75
...the ingested Echo................................................................p77
....limitless Echo, echoing limits; the vortex of Narcissus...p78
Poetry
Stephanie Pope
The LoveSong of Echo & Narcissus
Video Links/You-Tube
Echo & Narcissus a Group Whatever Production
The Echo Show a re telling of the Echo/Narcissus Myth by students
