The Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History (review)

316 Reviews argues, were an essential support for the community in its time of travail between 1922 and its return to something like prosperity in the 1940s. This is a fine little book and the story it tells is well told. On the negative side, the text has many misprints and misspellings and the quality of maps, photographic reproductions and book design is very poor. East European Monographs has become a vanity press, or next thing to one; and cutting corners with book manufacture is a deplorable consequence of the eagerness of young scholars to get their work published. Salamone's book began as a Ph.D. dissertation and it deserves a better dress than it got. William H. McNeill University of Chicago, retired Gregory Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1987. Pp. xxii 4- 193. $29.00. And finally don't forget that occasionally sophists from Syria visit us, and versifiers and other inconsequential scholars. So we're not un-Hellenicized, I suppose. "Philhellene" C. P. Cavafy The Poetics of Cavafy surveys the varied terrain which underlies the mode of poetic production of the Alexandrian Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy (1863—1933). Through a critical frame grounded in the work of M. H. Abrams and of Roman Jakobson, Gregory Jusdanis locates and traces six constituent elements of a poetics the textually generated stances toward the poet, his or her audience, the poetic text, language and writing, poetic tradition, and the world. As these components form the definitive contours of a poetics, so they form the six primary chapters of Jusdanis' work on the specific poetics of Cavafy. Taking up each of these elements in turn, The Poetics of Cavafy moves freely between Cavafy's texts, poetry, letters, prose articles, and occasional writings. The delineation of Cavafy's poetics here does not rely exclusively on the poetry. And in a similar fashion, The Poetics of Cavafy moves from the specifics of Cavafy's Reviews 317 poetics to the dominant aesthetic and cultural ideologies of late 19th and early 20th century Western Europe as a whole. Neither is there an exclusive reliance on the Greek national literary tradition in outlining Cavafy's poetic theories. It is then apparent from the description of its critical framework that The Poetics of Cavafy, unlike some of its rather more restrained predecessors, neither constructs an evolutionary paradigm of Cavafy's biographical 'development' nor postulates some essentialist unity of the body of Cavafy's poetry. Instead, focusing on what he argues are the six structural elements of a poetics (cited above), Jusdanis traces the contours of Cavafy's poetics by moving back and forth across Cavafy's textual boundaries and across national cultural boundaries without privileging chronology (a problematic concept in any event, given Cavafy's working and re-working of his poetry) or some preconception of interpretive unity. In fact, there would seem to be certain striking resemblances between the operative critical mode of The Poetics of Cavafy and the "Cavafian poetics" which the former traces. As Cavafy's poetics simultaneously situates itself (or, more accurately, themselves) in multiple contexts in a re-membering of classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Byzantine pasts and texts; in British, French or German cultural currents; in aesthetic isolationism and, virtually at the same time, in a notion of art as socially and textually conditioned so Jusdanis' critical text on Cavafy's poetics performs parallel gestures. For it is surely one of the exemplary achievements of The Poetics of Cavafy that it is as much a most accomplished critical account of European literary movements—romanticism, aestheticism, and modernism in general—as it is of the specifics of Cavafy's poetics. With consummate critical and scholarly ease, The Poetics of Cavafy maps Cavafy's poetics in relation to its contemporary Western-European cultural context(s). Thus, in a long overdue critical move, the contours of Cavafy's poetics are highlighted on its own ground but also as a configuration of responses to the critical and poetic contexts of its contemporaries: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Keats, and Wordsworth. In so doing, Jusdanis' The Poetics of Cavafy also carefully constructs and situates itself as critical discourse in multiple contexts. In...