Reviewed by: Ovid and the Moderns Jason Brooks Ovid and the Moderns. By Theodore Ziolkowski. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. xvi + 262 pp. $39.95. In 1962 Robert Graves' article, "The Virgil Cult," appeared in the winter volume of the Virginia Quarterly Review and opened with a declaration that "whenever a golden age of stable government, full churches, and expanding wealth dawns among the Western nations, Virgil always returns to supreme favour" (13). What better time, then, than 2005 for Theodore Ziolkowski's book, Ovid and the Moderns, to appear? On the surface, Ziolkowski's main concern is not strictly politics, but rather Ovidian poetics in the twentieth century. Any time one deals with Ovid's exilic writings, however, one flirts with politics if one does not try to bed them down outright. On this score, Ziolkowski illustrates that the twentieth century was an aetas Ovidiana, politically and poetically. Now, several years into the twenty-first century, churches are fuller across this country, but wealth is not expanding, governments are far from stable, and we find ourselves at a moment of frightening transition, or better, transformation. The great Roman poet, Publius Ovidius Naso, is indeed a poet for our times, a poet who richly captures the Zeitgeist of a world in peril. The daily news is alive with the renewals in religious fundamentalism at home and abroad, and the vice of God is tightening on all sides. We ask why, and perhaps Ovid can provide one (not necessarily the) answer: "expedit esse deos et, ut expedit, esse putemus" [it is useful that the gods exist and, since it's useful, let's believe that they do] (I.637). Artists have turned to Ovid for answers to many questions throughout literary history, particularly vis-à-vis the poetics of exile and, despite the [End Page 194] Roman's century, modernism. Ziolkowski's study opens with an engaging and fascinating look at the myth of Ariadne and her representations in modern art as the abandoned/exiled figure par excellence. The first analyses, focusing on Giorgio de Chirico's painting, The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, are thorough and doubtless the finest in the book. Ziolkowski's reading of de Chirico is of particular interest, showing that Ovid is not just a central figure in the development of literature but of the plastic arts, too. Not only is The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour more salient in terms of Ziolkowski's thesis, "the inventive treatment of Ovid's life and his poems that has permeated the twentieth century" (17), but his heart also seems to be closer to de Chirico than to Hofmannsthal. Following what amounts to a penetrating comparative essay on Ovid's afterlife in early twentieth-century art and opera, the rest of Ovid and Moderns, though instructive, does leave the reader wishing for less scope and more analysis. While Ziolkowski moves elegantly from literary reincarnations of Ovid (e.g., Eliot, Kafka, and Mandelstam), to the poet's influence on the other arts (e.g., Rodin, and de Chirico), his project is overall too cursory and broad to satisfy a specialist audience. The monograph is, however, an excellent starting point for research on a number of major European poets, some lesser-known writers, and for an understanding of Ovid's influence on modern literature. My concern is that Ziokowski spends only five pages on T. S. Eliot—this includes a lengthy justification to interrogate the Virgilian poet through the lens of Ovid; only three and a half pages on James Joyce; and only four pages each on Ezra Pound and Franz Kafka. The number of pages, of course, does not necessarily correspond to depth, but these brief encounters do not mine these texts satisfactorily. For example, I certainly missed any mention of Plato's Symposium in Ziolkowski's discussion of Hermann Hesse's Pictor's Metamorphoses. Similarly, I was sorry to see that Ziolkowski does not take an opportunity to explore a feminist read on Virginia Wolf's Orlando. He informs us that "the only specific reference to an Ovidian theme is the Daphne arras, which recurs like...
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Mar 14, 2024
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