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Dara Miller

Professor Johnson-Gonzalez

ENG 472

30 April 2012

In Ovid’s “Narcissus & Echo,” from his Metamorphoses, a young man tries

futilely to “grip an image” that “does not exist” as he pines for the love of his beautiful

reflection and ignores the pleas of the nymph who loves him, but can herself only throw

back his fragmented words. As he gazes on this “shadow” of his own “reflected form”

that has “nothing on its own,” he eventually wastes away, leaving nothing behind but a

beautiful flower and a lonely echo of the love he sought. Freud would later use the myth

of Narcissus as part of the basis for psychoanalytic thought, but it is Derrida who

playfully recreates an image of this myth in his ending to “Plato’s Pharmacy.” As Plato

finds himself “leaning over the pharmakon” he sees only a never-ending reflection of the

“Platonic phantasm” he has idealized, and as the “walled-in voice strikes against the

rafters, the words come apart, bits and pieces of sentences are separated…come back like

answers… [and] take themselves for a dialogue” (Derrida 169). Although the myth of

Narcissus was written hundreds of years before Derrida’s work, Ovid’s tale still holds

intriguing parallels to Derrida’s analysis of the differences between speech and writing.

As the self-obsessed young man effectively traps himself in a world of where he

“desires[s] to stand apart from [his] own self” (Ovid 96), so does the Platonic reader trap

himself in a logocentric tradition that leaves him only consumed by endless reflections

and refractions.

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Much of Derrida’s work centers on the metaphysics of presence; in his arguments

about speech and writing, he emphasizes that the immediacy of the speaker does not

necessarily privilege spoken language over written language. Therefore, his Plato is stuck

in the woven tapestry of his own thought deconstructed, endlessly questioning his logic

as the threads of his argument unravel in the light of the multiplicity of meanings found

in his own words. In Ovid’s myth, Narcissus becomes “the seeker and the sought, the

longed-for and the one who longs…the arsonist – and…the scorched” (94). His obsessive

desire for this unattainable relationship with his own image is comparable to the

logocentric focus held by the majority of Western thinkers; Narcissus cannot hold on to

his own image, and the superiority of speech cannot be truly be established over writing.

In the myth, speech is hobbled; Echo, as punishment for displeasing, Juno, is doomed to

only throw back refractions of others’ words as her own, and Narcissus, although he “can

see the movement” of his reflection’s “lovely lips,” cannot hear the words spoken be his

image. Interestingly, Narcissus’ understanding of the words issuing from his reflection’s

mouth moves beyond speech, as he is effectively “reading” the motion of his lips like a

text.

According to Derrida, “What is is not what it is, identical and identical to itself,

unique, unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated as such…its identity is

hollowed out by that addition, withdraws itself in the supplement that presents it,” (168)

and this idea of repetitive negation is presented in the literal withering of Narcissus. As

he gazes on his identical image, he sees the addition of his own repetition, and his

obsession with this supplement effectively consumes his identity.

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Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Harcourt Brace &

Company.