The Wandering Giant in Literature: From Polyphemus to Papageno by D. D. R. Owen (review)

Abstract

466 Reviews all and sundry open house. As forthis reader, now it showed me in, now it pointed to the door. If hospitality betokens opening up, then why stop at the near-exponential coverage of this compendium? Why not let in spiders and flies, Her Majesty's pri? sons, our bodies' coexistence with microbes, or sexual partners, for taking in can mean welcome, deceit, or erotic togetherness, when we are in or around each other. Hitchhikers, the editor remarks, could have had a ride. There is a huge bibliography to round offthe blanket-bombing of the subject. The essayists, all thoughtful if few original, often bang on the obvious, as when several of them discover seriatim that between outside and inside lies a threshold. A nagging suspicion remains that a goodly number are going, albeit with professional thoroughness, through various routines triggered by the overarching topic ofthe book. Among the plethora, I have had to be eclectic, nay picky. Thank you for having me, but I must move on now. University of Reading Walter Redfern The Wander ingGiant in Literature: From Polyphemus toPapageno. By D. D. R. Owen. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. 2003. vi+i53pp. ?14.99. ISBN 1-86232-127-2. So long as humans remember to exaggerate, giants will not become an endangered or extinct species; nothing can sink the titanic. D. D. R. Owen starts by stressing the giant as protean, 'the shape-shifter', though the transformations he records over the centuries turn out to be unastounding. Apart from 'the pleasures of the chase', he does not explain why his quarry lures him on. Interestingly, however, he finds that both pagan and Christian mythologies breed colossi, who in the former tradition possess greater complexity. Polyphemus is his ur-giant, the monocular, man-eating Cyclops girt by beasts. In a later avatar, Polyphemus grows love-sick and has a liaison with Galatea, while remaining painfully conscious of his unappetizing mien (the Quasimodo complex, we might say). In the pious allegories of the 'Ovide moralise', he mutates to Satan. In Irish myth, he re-emerges as Fer Caille and as Ysbaddadan in the Welsh version. Owen emphasizes the key role of oral transmission, and its concomitant doctoring, spinning, inverting, and expatiating of the trigger-story. Although regularly drawn into scholarly argy-bargies, on the controversy over Yvain/Owein, Owen's sanely settling forwhat he calls 'cultural give-and-take' seems more plausible than any one-way theory. The constants of the Polyphemus tradition as he tracks it are: the outsize figure, his blackness and shagginess, and (in variable forms) the mastery over beasts. For Owen the height ofthe curve occurs in Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight (where a verdant giant, centuries later, spawned the logo on cans of sweetcorn). Indeed, the original terrifying,if partly comic, ogre modulates over time into increasing sweetness, even a kind of gentrification. Other instances chased up by Owen include the gruffbogeyman Danger (Owen rebaptizes him 'Reluctance') in the Romance of theRose. Owen, however, escalates his leitmotif by finding Polyphe? mus yet again transmogrified in Voltaire's Candide (the syphilis-scarred Dr Pangloss), where Owen detects analogies with Aucassin et Nicolette. The final appearance, none too recognizable, is the big-talking ifun-huge Papageno in The Magic Flute. The 'wandering' of Owen's title refers to giants, or one protypical such, cropping up in differentcultures and epochs, and in changing guises, rather than to any peripatetic activity on their part. In fact, they come across as curiously home-bird by inclination. Throughout, Polyphemus gets lost periodically or goes underground, sidelined by the academic truffle-huntfor sources and similarities, and the generally polite textual in-fighting. All in all, Owen has domesticated the wild man-mountain ofthe Odyssey, and in fact engineers a happy ending. He seems to preferthe awesome MLR, 100.2, 2005 467 Titan warbling 'O ruddier than the cherry' in Handel's Acis and Galatea. Children know better. Ted Hughes's troubling fantasy forthem, The Iron Man, shows how the Goliath can remain potent in our litotic age. University of Reading Walter Redfern Why Does Literature Matter? By Frank B. Farrell. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. 2004. xi +266 pp...