Reviewed by: Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection by Michelle Zerba Vassiliki Kolocotroni (bio) Michelle Zerba, Modern Odysseys: Cavafy, Woolf, Césaire, and a Poetics of Indirection. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 241. Cloth $99.95. In “Homer’s Sticks and Stones” (1969), a classic—some might say positively antique—essay on James Joyce, modernist scholar Hugh Kenner declared Ulysses a veritable “museum of Homers” (61). The phrase points as much to Joyce’s encyclopedic approach to his novel’s Urtext and its variants as to his syncretic repurposing of the all-too-human Homeric material made of “cups and saucers, chairs and tables, sticks and stones” (62). At its best, Michelle Zerba’s imaginatively conceived study returns to the materiality of the Homeric text, its language, and its world via productive detours which yield invariably suggestive insights and resonances. Zerba’s method, more associative than comparative as such, circumnavigates reception too, foregoing accounts of an Alexandrian, Edwardian, or Antillean Homer, or indeed of a modernist Homer tout court, tracing instead metaphorical patterns woven out of “a looser set of odyssean tropes,” namely “diffusion and mixture; islands and isolation; passage and detour; and return and split endings” (17). In turn, these tropes, individually and cumulatively, are proposed as critical coordinates for locating [End Page 154] in the works of C. P. Cavafy, Virginia Woolf, and Aimé Césaire a shared “poetics of indirection,” expressed variously through “backdoor strategies, invention by circumlocution, masquerades, devious forms of linguistic play, tricks with publishing, and sometimes outright coding to avoid the censor” (20). Zerba reads a selection of Cavafy’s poetry, Woolf’s Orlando, and Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal to underscore those “odyssean tonalities” (37) that bear out the study’s core premise of “an odyssean-inflected imagination at work” (18) traceable through “weak links and oblique relations” (52), “displacement[s] of errant sexuality” onto figures of the Other (72), “katabatic journeys” of “sexual and racial transformation” (114), “mutating identities” (159), and incomplete “return[s] and split endings” (161). Sustained across four chapters, each corresponding to a discrete trope and framed by a prefatory close reading of a Homeric scene, term, or object, this plotting of affinities, echoes, and mirrorings—but also of idiosyncratic, local strategies and concerns—is a tour de force. Leaving aside the odd misconception—such as the description of Woolf as “still at the edges of the canon” (4)—and the rather rudimentary references to Joyce, Eliot, and H. D. (11), there are conceptual and interpretative riches here, and an admirably controlled movement from immersive glosses of Homeric material to large-scale but still poignant and plausible extrapolating gestures. The pairing of “the wound and the word, passage and detour” (126), set against the backdrop of a traumatized errancy or “fugue state” (116) and the vicissitudes of memory and recognition, underpins a magisterial reading of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire’s impossible, negative nostos to a colonial culture. Similarly immersive, the reading of Woolf’s Orlando follows its odyssean “dynamic of concealing and revealing” (136) through scenes of transformation, transgression, or “trans-ing as a multidirectional process at work on several levels” (146). Here, the odyssean trope of passage seems readily deployable, indeed so much so that its metaphorical momentum in Zerba’s reading almost takes over, at times detracting from the highly coded, witty, or ludic tone of Woolf’s phantasmagoric novel. For example, newly-transformed Orlando’s nostalgic vision of England on Mount Athos is aptly noticed in chapter 3, but is also under-read. The errant new woman is surely a transgressive presence as an interloper on the Athonian soil (a prohibition of which Woolf was well aware, having published in 1925 Jane Ellen Harrison’s pointed account of it in her Reminiscences of a Student’s Life), while the fantastic English scene appearing to her as if in a mirage is also presciently political given its coded palette—the green (grassy lawns), violet (shadows replacing the yellow sunlight), and white (falling snow) of the suffragette tricolor. [End Page 155] In turn, the account of Cavafy’s odyssean poetics, though cogent and...
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Oct 27, 2024
M R Babikova 
Open Access