Of Humans, Pigs, Fish and Apes: The Literary Motif of Human-Animal Metamorphosis and its Multiple Functions in Contemporary Fiction

HE STORY OF THE BEAUTIFUL IO, whom Jupiter transforms into a cow to hide his affair with her from his wife Juno and who, shedding bitter tears, manages to reveal her true identity to her father by tracing her name in the ground with her hoof, is just one of many instances of human- animal transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses, beyond doubt part of the canon of Western literature, has inspired many authors throughout the centuries, and it still constitutes an interesting touchstone for a discussion of literary representations of human-animal transformation in texts written in the second half of the twentieth century. The frequent explicit intertextual references to Ovid in recent literary representations of metamor- phoses is evidence of the lasting impact of the Metamorphoses on Western lit- erature and culture. The depiction of the metamorphosis in the story of Io shares a number of features with the stories about human-animal transformations that we will examine in more detail in this article. Firstly, the tension between radical physical changes on the one hand and the individual's mental and psycholog- ical state on the other hand constitutes a focal point of many stories about metamorphoses. 3 The being that undergoes a process of transformation may either retain human feelings and thoughts beneath its animal appearance, as Io obviously does, or the metamorphosis may affect the mental level as well, bringing about novel or alien ways of perceiving the world. Secondly, the story of Io, like other stories of human-animal transformation in Ovid's Meta- morphoses, suggests that the animal the human being is turned into somehow