Centre and Periphery in Lawrence Norfolk’s The Pope’s Rhinoceros and Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the relationship between centre and periphery in two recent novels: The Pope’s Rhinoceros by Lawrence Norfolk (1996) and Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt (1988). Both novels are set in Rome (the first in the High Renaissance, the second during the reign of the emperor Augustus); in both, the authority and ‘centrality’ of Rome is subtly challenged and subverted. In The Pope’s Rhinoceros, monks from the Baltic island of Usedom, who travel to Rome to seek help in rebuilding their collapsing monastery, discover that the putative centre of Christendom is bereft of any spiritual authority, though extremely active in the political sphere (notably as arbiter between rising colonial powers, Spain and Portugal). Die letzte Welt, whose protagonist, Cotta, journeys to Tomi on the Black Sea coast to investigate rumours of the death of the exiled poet Ovid, portrays imperial Rome as a sclerotic regime whose ideological underpinnings are threatened by the destabilising energies of the periphery, where (as in the Metamorphoses) ‘nothing retains its form’. Finally, in both novels, the centre’s claims to temporal power and dominion are relativised by the broader, ‘geological’ timescale of the natural phenomena so vividly evoked in the marginal lands.