Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (review)

This is an extraordinary book. Its scholarship is dense and wide-ranging (over eras, literatures, countries, languages), its conceptual and theoretical frame and focus are developed carefully and precisely, and (what makes it extraordinary) its evocation of the many poems and texts it speaks to and through is light and clear and illuminating (despite the density of the scholarship surrounding them). One way of describing this fascinating book is to say that its 290 pages unpack the pun implicit in the etymologically unrelated Greek and Latin words for riddle (griphus) and for griffin (gryps, gryphus) by way of the sphinx (hybrid like the griffin and given to riddles, or more exactly, enigmas) and of Paul, I Corinthians 13:12 (‘now I see through a glass darkly,’ the King James translation of in aenigmate). We follow the trope of enigma (defined as a rhetorically closed simile) through Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Donatus, and along another trail from Augustine to Aquinas. Biblical scholars and rhetoricians from antiquity through the Renaissance offer another access to the fascinating issues opened up here, as do a range of figurative examples, illustrations, paintings, and sculptures. Nonetheless, as Cook cautions early on, ‘[T]he focus of the book is on enigma in its literary context and thus on the realm of imaginative literature.’ But ‘the realm of lived experience and the realm of history’ are also called upon as the rhetorical field of enigma is divided, subdivided, illustrated, and illuminated.

The table of contents offers a useful summary of the book’s structure. The three case studies (Dante, ‘Purgatorio’ 27–33, Carroll and the Alice books, Stevens’s later work) provide the major illustrations of the five masterplots into which the rhetorical field of enigma is divided: Pauline, Sphinxine/Oedipal, Cyclic, Random, Sibylline. We observe the riddling beasts of enigma personified (sphinx and griffin) and the history of enigma as rhetorical trope, leading to the Dante chapter. Riddle as scheme in the rhetorical sense and riddle as genre and mode lead to Alice, down the rabbit hole and through the mirror. The last sequence explores figures for enigma, moving to Wallace Stevens, the supreme fiction, and ‘the structure of reality.’ The Stevens case study makes clear that this taxonomy opens rather than closes questions, for ‘the answers to the great riddles may themselves be enigmatic,’ after which statement a Borges poem is quoted (‘Oedipus and the Enigma’ in John Hollander’s elegant translation) to show how ‘the answer does not end the enigma [so much] as start the story all over again.’ Stevens, however, does not offer simply another illustration; his presence infuses the book even when he is not directly cited (I don’t know if there are any better readers of Stevens on this planet).

The Dante chapter examines how Dante offers ‘an entire spectrum for the figure of enigma in a Pauline masterplot.’ Cook meditates on the possibility of an intentional pun behind the Griffin that Beatrice contemplates, and suggests a reading of the Griffin ‘as verbally a synonym for enigma and iconographically a partaker of the Eucharist,’ and thus the possibility ‘of the creature as Christ-as-Eucharist.’ Riddle and mystery in all its senses follow next as questions of mode and genre are debated and riddle poems are surveyed and played with: Old English riddles, Emily Dickinson (I wish there could have been more of her riddling), George Herbert, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, John Ashberry, A.R. Ammons, Mark Strand, and more. The section on riddle as scheme opens into the logogriph, the charade, the rebus (as, for example, our author: ‘[W]hat comes before M, but then follows after? You cannot decide? She’s at work on this feast of a book with much laughter,’ [a poor thing but mine own]), and directly into Carroll’s Gryphon who likes to pun, for after all he is one. But even if ‘we’re all mad here,’ as the Cheshire Cat claims, Cook suggests that ‘Paul’s mirror of this world, apprehended as if...