Selves and Nations: The Troy Story from Sicily to England in the Middle Ages (review)

Wolfram R. Keller's tracing of the Troy story is a massive undertaking; but then, how could a study that covers such a vast deal of chronological and geographical ground as this one be anything else? Casting his view backward into antiquity, toward Homer and especially Ovid and Virgil, and reaching forward into the early modern as far as Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Keller crisscrosses seas and continents in the most ambitious examination of this material published to date. His book thus supersedes what has been, until now, the comprehensive standard, C. David Benson's The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne's "Historia destructionis Troiae" in Medieval England(1980). One has every expectation that Keller's fine effort will sustain its premier position for many years to come.

As he makes clear in his title, Keller's concern is the Troy story itself and the several ways it was milked and adapted to fit the demands of different authors and readerships in separate, ever-shifting centuries and circumstances. The challenge of all such undertakings is to curb the allure of centrifugal sprawl. Selves and Nationsis Keller's dissertation, still bearing many marks of a rigorous and—clearly—enlightened supervision, a genesis usually inauspicious in its promise but uniquely advantageous here. Keller's format is rigid and semi-mechanical. There is a general introduction to the work entire, three large sections, each with a separate introduction that both summarizes what has gone before and outlines the argument to come, and a conclusion, which draws together the section's major claims and indicates the direction of the section to follow. These two decisions, first to approach his subject in this way, and second to carry over this structure from dissertation to published volume, prove happy ones. Each one of the three sections ("Masking Identities: Selves and Nations in the Middle Ages," "Masking Troy: Making Personal and Collective Identities in Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae," and "Deconstructing Troy: Ovid, Virgil, and Chaucerian Counter-Nationhood") is replete with original, insightful argument and supportive Wissenschaft, sufficiently so, indeed, that in this new age of the publisher-preferred short monograph of plus-or-minus two hundred pages, each could easily have been rendered a volume unto itself. Not a book to dip a toe in, then, and in general, all should be grateful to Universitätsverlag Winter for leaving Keller thus unrestrained.

In his first section, Keller sets out the theoretical paradigm he follows throughout. This is arguably the weakest of the chapters, in which he struggles most to cast off the as-yet-to-be-digested residue of dissertation. A great deal of energy and ingenuity is expended in the first hundred pages to theorize a sociocultural scaffolding from sources as disparate as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paul de Man, Ciarán Benson, Hans Robert Jauss, Martin Heidegger, Paul Eakin, Marshall McLuhan, Slavoj Žižek, Rom Harré, Lee Patterson, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Lanham—a graduate student's earnest nightmare, in short—in which he delivers terminology and critical distinctions between, for example, persona and "the prosopagraphical self" ("autobiographical self, self narrative, and masks … fuse into one concept: the prosopagraphical self" [46], the clear result of reading too much de Man) or "transparency" and "opacity" (Ciarán Benson applied to Trojans and Greeks, respectively). The latter pair, a duality far more useful in Keller's argument, for the most part turn out synonymous with "emotionally driven" and "rationally driven," with obvious implications for the behavior of "heroes" (e.g., Hector vs. Achilles, Circe vs. Ulysses, Troilus vs. Diomede, Criseyde vs. Pandarus), polities (Troy vs. Greece, autonomy vs. empire), and poetics (Ovidian vs. Virgilian, multivocal vs. monovocal). The straining required to heave these novelties into the reader's line of sight and sustain them there is, nevertheless, all too evident in the first of Keller...