Metamorphic Rock: Ovid’s Lithosphere and the Speeds of Geohuman Time in the Metamorphoses

Alongside the stories that Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells of humans turning into other kinds of living being, the poem also recounts tales of human transformation into the elemental matter of terrestrial life: water, earth and rock, air and fire. In this article, I discuss the significance of the tales of human metamorphosis into rock, and I argue that contemporary discourses of the Anthropocene can help us make sense of these stories. The Anthropocene names a geological era in which human technoscience has so thoroughly transformed the earth’s atmosphere as to become legible in its lithosphere, imprinting humanity on its geological strata. Ovid’s stories of human metamorphosis into rock and stone provide ready parables for the Anthropocene’s parsing of geohuman hybridization, and resonate especially powerfully with its account of the inconcinnities brought about by the co-imbrication of human and geological time scales.