Joyce & Myth

ELT 38:3 1995 in the United States. So, too, are there striking contrasts in their uses of language. Shaw always aimed for the clarity and cut-and-thrust of the debater, making him the despair of footnote-prone and explicationobsessed scholars. Joyce became the century's gift to the microcosmic investigator. WMe that critical perspective offers undoubted insights, the down side of that strategy is exposed here almost as if the intention had been parody. Stanley Weintraub Pennsylvania State University Joyce & Myth Piero Boitani. The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth. Anita Weston, trans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xii + 193 pp. $39.95 IN THIS WIDE-RANGING and impressive book modestly described as an "essay... for an educated but neither specialist nor strictly academic public," Piero Boitani uses the archetypal figure of Ulysses as a vehicle for exploring "the way literature, with its weight of being and existing, dovetails into history, the world of becoming." Boitani, author of nearly a score of books in Italian and English, explores here "the interrelations between myth, poetry, and history, and between rhetoric and the imaginary" in order to show that there is such a thing as "a poetry of history." Stated simply, Boitani argues that a figure such as Odysseus/Ulysses, who carries with him an extensive and numinous mythic matrix, not only is necessarily reinterpreted by each age in its own image, but shapes the construal of certain events of history in such a way as to be typological and prophetic—as virtually to have brought the events into being. For example, in a chapter entitled The Nova Terra: Typologies, History, and IntertextuaUty," Boitani shows how, during and after the Renaissance, the image of Ulysses was an integral part of an inextricable cross-interpretation of history and poetry, such that the figure relegated by Dante to Inferno became reinterpreted not just by poets but by explorers such as Columbus and men of science such as Newton, the prototype of all exploration, physical and inteUectual. Ulysses's persistent transgression of limits that probably contributed to Dante's placing him in Inferno comes in the modern episteme to represent an admirable and virtuaUy deific act. Boitani traces such constant intertextualities among history, poetry and philosophy throughout several centuries of Western history, using as the effective climax of his book 420 BOOK REVIEWS an account of how the figure of Ulysses, and especially Dante's evocation of him in Canto XXVI of Inferno, was crucial to the tragic Ufe and work of holocaust survivor Primo Levi. Boitani incorporates into his study an impressive number of authors, works, historical figures, some discussed in surprising detail, others all too briefly. Among the versions of Odysseus/Ulysses that Boitani grounds his study in are those of Homer, Plato (the Myth of Er in The Republic), Virgil, and Dante. Other figures or works incorporated along the way include Columbus and Sir Isaac Newton, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, The Prelude of Wordsworth, the Wandering Jew, several of Poe's stories that involve whirlpools or vortexes, Walt Whitman, Melville's Moby-Dick, Tennyson's "Ulysses," several of Leopardi's works, especiaUy "L'infinito," Baudelaire's "Le Voyage," Fernando Pessoa's Mensagem, several works of Giovanni Pascoli, D'Annunzio's Μαία, Guido Gozzano's whimsical and comic "L'ipotesi," Alberto Savino's Capitano Ulisse, Pound's Mauberley (with a glance at the Cantos), Jean Giono's Naissance de l'Odyssée, Joyce's Ulysses (very briefly), a few of Conrad's works, the life and work of Primo Levi, several of Wallace Stevens's and T. S. Eliot's works, Borges's The Immortal," and ending with Kafka's The Silence of the Sirens." My experience in reading this book has been a journey, or at least a progress, in itself. At first I was awed by the scope and the multi-lingual reading and scholarship behind the enterprise, and delighted by its energy and engagement and by its refusal to succumb to the various avant garde critical approaches of recent decades. But as is so often the case with archetypal criticism, it is most impressive when dealing with texts we know least weU, but seems less satisfactory or even insufficient when...