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Author(s): Richard Littlejohns, Sara Soncini
ISBN(s): 9789042021471, 9042021470
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Year: 2007
Language: english
Myths of Europe
107
Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
In Verbindung mit
Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister

(Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université
Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley
(Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy
(Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred
Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)
herausgegeben von
Alberto Martino
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki
Anschrift der Redaktion:

Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
Myths of Europe
Edited by
Richard Littlejohns
Sara Soncini
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Cover Art:
Timm Ulrichs, Europa auf dem Stier, 1970-1972-1977, Sprengel Museum
Hannover, photo: Michael Herling/Aline Gwose
Cover design:
Pier Post
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents
- Prescriptions pour la permanence”.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements
for permanence”.
Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden

Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi,
Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben.
Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag,
alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi.
From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen

und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by
Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The
German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications
by Editions Rodopi.
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2147-1
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
Acknowledgments 7
Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini

Introduction: Myths of Europe, and Myths of Europe 9
Manfred Pfister
Europa/Europe: Myths and Muddles 21
Guido Paduano
Electras and Hamlet 35
Mark Rawlinson
Myths of Europe: Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid 51
Pierangiolo Berrettoni
Myths of Masculinity: Adonis and Heracles 61
Graham Jones
St Nicholas, Icon of Mercantile Virtues: Transition and Continuity
of a European Myth 73
Elena Rossi
Re-writing a Myth: Dryden’s Amphitryon and its Sources 89
Roberta Ferrari
‘A Foundling at the Crossroads’: Fielding, Tradition(s) and a
‘Dantesque’ Reading of Tom Jones 101
Antje Steinhoefel
Viewing the Moon: Between Myth and Astronomy in the
Age of the Enlightenment 113
Alessandra Grego
George Eliot’s Use of Scriptural Typology: Incarnation of Ideas 123
Mario Curreli
Myth and the Folklore of the Sea in Conrad 133
Darko Suvin
Some Differentiations within the Concepts of ‘Myth’ 147
6
Andrea Binelli
Places of Myth in Ireland 155
Richard Littlejohns
Everlasting Peace and Medieval Europe:
Romantic Myth-Making in Novalis’s Europa 171
Nuria López
British Women versus Indian Women:
the Victorian Myth of European Superiority 183
Andrew Hammond
Frontier Myths: Travel Writing on Europe’s Eastern Border 197
Tony Kushner
West is Best: Britain and European Immigration during the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 213
Donald Bloxham
Changing Perceptions of State Violence: Turkey’s ‘Westward’
Development through Anglo-Saxon Eyes 223
Nicholas Watkins
From Fascism to the Bomb: Marino Marini and the Undermining
and Destruction of the Classical European Horseman 235
Sara Soncini
New Order, New Borders: Post-Cold War Europe on the
British Stage 247
Silvia Ross
The Myth of the Etruscans in Travel Literature in English 263
Tom Lawson
The Myth of the European Civil War 275
Notes on Contributors 291

Acknowledgments
This volume is based on a colloquium entitled ‘Miti d’Europa/Myths of Europe’

held in Pisa in September 2002 within the context of a research partnership
between the Universities of Leicester and Pisa. We are extremely grateful to the
British Academy for funding the initiative, and to Martin Stannard and Carla
Dente, on the Leicester and the Pisa sides respectively, for sustaining the
partnership over the years and in particular for their support on this occasion.
Our heartfelt thanks, too, to Manfred Pfister for negotiating publication with
Rodopi and for his own definitive contribution to the volume, and to Norbert
Bachleitner for his readiness to accept Myths of Europe into the series Inter-
nationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwis-
senschaft.
We are grateful also to the Department of English at the University of Pisa,
and to the Department of English and the School of Modern Languages at the
University of Leicester, for their contribution to the costs of producing the
volume.
Finally, our very special thanks go to all contributors for remaining on board
through all the vicissitudes of preparing the volume for publication.

Pisa/Leicester, April 2006
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction: Myths of Europe, and Myths of Europe
The majority of the essays in this volume were originally delivered as papers in
Pisa in 2002, at the eighth in a series of colloquia under the general title
‘European Literature in Transition’ arranged jointly by the Universities of
Leicester and Pisa, with contributors from both universities. These papers were
subsequently expanded and revised for publication, together with a number of
others acquired later and under slightly but significantly different circumstances,
as will be explained below. The altogether 21 authors have adopted a variety of
approaches to the common topic of ‘Myths of Europe’. Manfred Pfister argues
in his opening survey that their essays can be broadly divided into, on the one
hand, contributions which discuss myths in Europe, those ‘that circulate in the
various European cultures and across the national borders, the myths shared by
Europe […] across the centuries’ and, on the other, contributions dealing with
myths of Europe, those ‘that have served to define Europe and to forge the sense
of a shared European cultural identity’. We concur in general with this division
and have employed it to structure the volume, at the same time ordering the
contributions chronologically within each of the two sections. Opening the book
are ten essays about myths in Europe from those of classical antiquity to myths
revised in the late twentieth century to reflect the contemporary threat of mass
destruction. Next, at this pivotal point and by way of taking stock, we have
placed Darko Suvin’s observations on the nature and scope of myth. After this
pause for reflection there follow a further ten essays about myths of Europe,
encompassing both those that attempt to define Europe from within and those
also which do so by contrasting it with the non-European.
The themes around which this volume rotates can be categorized in another
way. Some of the essays here focus on myths of Europe, myths in which Europe
itself is the subject. These essays discuss myths in which European society and
culture attempts to define itself, to establish an identity for Europe, often ex
negativo by contrast with the non-European Other. This Other is almost
invariably portrayed in the myths as inferior, as primitive or barbaric when
compared with European civilization, which is undialectically taken to be the
norm. In such myths Europe seeks to legitimize or justify itself. Other essays in
the volume concentrate on myths of Europe, myths which happen to originate
mainly or exclusively in Europe but may relate to any aspect of human
experience. This second group of essays discusses the ways in which myths
arise and are transformed over centuries or through dissemination. It analyses
their psychological function, seeing them in anthropological terms as essential
10 Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini
vehicles, whenever and wherever they first arose, for imaginative or literary
representation of fundamental beliefs, fears and aspirations. In this Introduction
one of us has written about myths of Europe, the other about myths of Europe.1
At the same time, however, we each take responsibility for the Introduction in
its entirety.
Myths of Europe
In January 2003 Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defense, piqued by
Western European hesitation in supporting plans for the invasion of Iraq, spoke
disparagingly of ‘Old Europe’. He was referring above all to France and
Germany, in contradistinction to the ‘New Europe’ in which, he maintained, the
centre of gravity was shifting to the East following the integration of the
accession states. His remarks were uttered in the ephemeral context of a press
conference and were clearly polemical, but they did raise the whole issue of the
identity of Europe and its understanding of itself. This issue had become acute
after 9/11, when in the context of an allegedly global conflict Europe, however
defined, was compelled to take a stance. This stance, as it turned out, was
ambiguous: whilst the leaders of Britain and Spain committed their countries to
a role in the invasion, public opinion in Europe as a whole was inclined to
condemn the war as both morally dubious and politically unwise. Such political
divisions aside, the crisis of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq provoked deeper, more
philosophical and more disturbing questions. What values does or did ‘Old
Europe’ embody? Are these values obsolete? Can or should Europe discard
them? Or do they constitute a heritage which is not only too valuable to jettison
but without which Europe’s very identity and distinctiveness would be lost? Are
these values threatened by the creation of a ‘New Europe’ including
communities which are not heir to the cultural traditions of Graeco-Roman
antiquity and Christendom? Is there a continuity in European culture which can
be traced through the centuries? If so, how are we to evaluate it? Is it worth
preserving?
These questions were still acute exactly twelve months after 9/11 when the
‘Myths of Europe’ colloquium was held in Pisa in September 2002. Most of the
contributions collected here stem from the proceedings of the colloquium itself,
but others were added during the months which followed. All of them were thus
completed or revised against the background of the continuing debate which
unfolded in Europe in 2003, precisely at the time of Rumsfeld’s remarks and the
ensuing controversy. It was during this period, for example, that articles on the
international crisis appeared in a number of European newspapers on the same
1 Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini respectively.

Myths of Europe, and Myths of Europe 11
date by an impressive group of intellectuals including Umberto Eco, Jacques

Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas. These writers were, unsurprisingly, concerned to
stress the importance of supporting international law, the United Nations and its
principles — and the moral authority of specifically European values. Jürgen
Habermas, for example, wrote that Europe’s experience of twentieth-century
totalitarianism and the holocaust made it peculiarly well qualified to resist
breaches of the rule of law, of the integrity of independent states, and of the
dignity of the individual.2
Surveying the contributions to this volume, it is at first sight indeed not
difficult to spring to the defence of ‘Old Europe’ and its traditions. Graham
Jones points to the tenacity and ubiquity of the St Nicholas myth throughout
Europe, notwithstanding its relatively recent export to the USA, as evidence of
the ‘philosophical cohesion of a continent absorbed by charity as well as by
commerce’, i.e. by altruism and generosity as much as by self-interest and
material gain. Europe prides itself on traditions of humanity, philanthropy and
liberalism. Mark Rawlinson shows how humane themes such as the
preciousness of human life in the face of war or natural catastrophe echo from
Ovid’s poetry into its translation by Ted Hughes in terms reflecting the nuclear
age. ‘Old Europe’ has been enriched by such diverse sources as Greek tragedy,
the Bible, Shakespeare and Dante, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and
Romanticism, sources which humanize and sensitize European culture right
down to the present, as becomes clear from the whole gamut of essays in the
first half of this collection. Nowhere is this more evident than in Nicholas
Watkins’s contribution, in which he traces how Marino Marini, a twentieth-
century Italian sculptor, used a medieval German statue as a model of gentle and
charitable humanity in the face first of Fascist brutality and then of the threat of
nuclear war. Not for us civilized Europeans, we may be tempted to boast, the
tactics of ‘shock and awe’.
A reading of the essays in the second half of this volume, however,
challenges this complacency. The Europa of myths is confronted by the facts of
historical Europe. First and foremost, there are the ghastly realities of modern
European totalitarianism — be it Fascism or Stalinism — which, as Tom
Lawson argues, Europe has tried to relativize by constructing a myth of itself in
which these aspects of its past are conveniently marginalized as mere
aberrations. If we can and should admire the cosmopolitanism, philanthropy and
tolerance preached in the work of Goethe and Schiller, their Kantian insistence
on altruism, we must also acknowledge that another strand of German tradition
led to an obscene creed of social Darwinism and thence to rabid racism and
2 In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [31 May 2003] Kulturchronik, 4 (2003), 22-26 (p. 26).
genocide.3 More generally, there is the fact that from the Middle Ages to the
present there is a tradition in Europe of hostility and exclusion in its treatment of
the non-European Other. From the crusades to the British occupation of India,
and now in the contemporary ambivalence about Turkey, as Donald Bloxham
shows, Europeans have conceived of the non-European — in Andrew
Hammond’s phrase — as ‘the antithesis of civilization’. Myths always have
ideological implications, as Manfred Pfister points out. Europeans have
generated myths to conceal their own barbarism in the Middle Ages, as Richard
Littlejohns demonstrates in the case of Novalis, or to characterize Indian moeurs
as inferior to western Christian values, as Nuria López convincingly reveals, or
to caricature immigrants as dangerous and immoral undesirables to be denied
entry, as Tony Kushner explains. This is a European tradition of Eurocentricity
and intolerance. It is one of which we Europeans need to be ashamed as much as
we are proud of the humanism of European culture. It is no accident that the
most quoted modern writer in this collection is Edward Said, for ‘orientalizing’
is a typical manifestation of European use of myths not only to patronize but to
subjugate the Other. Several of the contributions in this volume discuss myths
which in their treatment of the non-European echo Said’s description of
orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over’ the races or communities on which they focus.4
Perhaps Eurocentric domineering and condescension have been a function of
Europe’s own neurosis, for Europe, leaving aside its uneasy awareness of an
ancient cultural debt to the Middle East and Asia, has always been uncertain of
its own boundaries and thus of its own identity. Where does Europe begin and
end? Unlike say Australia, its territory is not entirely circumscribed by an
ocean; rather it extends indeterminately to the East and at some invisible point
slides into Asia. Or, even more unnerving, it can be regarded as no more than a
western extension of Asia, a peninsular of Asian land mass jutting out into the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Andrew Hammond shows in his essay how the
crossing of the boundary into Asia was and is a traumatic moment for
Europeans, a liminal experience which is both exhilarating and alarming — not
least because at this moment, encountering the Other at first hand, the European
is forced to define or redefine his or her own cultural and even ethnic self. Not
the least of the reasons for the success of Marco Polo’s book was the fact that he
was one of the first Europeans to experience this frisson, when in the thirteenth
century he ‘had the opportunity of acquiring a knowledge, either by his own
observation, or what he collected from others, of so many things, until his time
3 See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964).
4 Edward Said, Orientalism [1978] (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 3.
unknown, respecting the eastern parts of the World’.5 In the twentieth century
the process has been reversed, as following pogroms and the collapse of eastern
empires, the latest being the Soviet bloc, the East in the shape of exiles and
asylum seekers has migrated into Europe, causing renewed disorientation. More
than one essay in this volume shows how Europeans have interpreted this influx
as an intrusion and a threat to their distinct Europeanness — whatever that may
be. The advent of a ‘New Europe’, including territory and populations
previously felt to lie in or beyond the albeit invisible and fluctuating frontiers of
the continent, has made this crisis more immediate and brought to our attention
again that Europe is, as Tom Lawson puts it in his essay, ‘not a fixed or stable
concept’. In such circumstances the myth-making is bound to continue.
Myths of Europe
Even from a cursory glance at the table of contents, it should be apparent that a
very broad spectrum of meanings is attached to the term ‘myth’ in the essays
included in this volume. The diversity of perspectives and approaches at least in
part reflects the conceptual instability of a category that continues to defy
attempts to come up with a single, monolithic definition of the nature of the
object(s) falling within its scope. We all seem to be able to recognise a myth
when we encounter one — as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously put it, ‘un mythe
est perçu comme un mythe par tout lecteur, dans le monde entier’ (a myth is
perceived as a myth by every reader, in the whole world)6 — and yet we are
often at a loss to bring the wide variety of mythic productions under some kind
of overarching common designation. This predicament would seem to affect
laymen and specialists alike. Almost two centuries after myths, thanks also to
the contribution of nineteenth-century developments in linguistics, philology
and anthropology, had become the object of systematic scientific enquiry by an
autonomous discipline, Marcel Detienne, writing in 1981, could still sum up the
state of play of scholarly research in the field with the following words: ‘le
“mythe” est un genre introuvable, en Grèce et ailleurs; […] la Science des
mythes de Cassirer et Lévi-Strauss est impuissante à definir son “objet”…’
(myth is an elusive genre, in Greece and elsewhere; […] Cassirer’s and Lévi-
Strauss’s Science of myths is incapable of defining its ‘object’).7
A semantic looseness of some sort seems to be embedded in the word from
the very beginning of its existence, at least as far as Western culture is
concerned. In the ancient Greek language, mythos literally meant speech or
5 Manuel Komroff, ed., The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Liveright, 1926), p. 14.
6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 132.
7 Marcel Detienne, L’invention de la mythologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), p. 12.
verbal utterance, something which was told in the shape of a tale or narrative.
This broad sense, however, gave no indication whatsoever as to the particular
nature of the ‘speech’ itself and its specificity in relation to other forms of verbal
utterance or literary discourse, and as such provided no more than a lowest
common denominator allowing for a wide variety of interpretations. In classical
Athenian culture no less than today, the meaning of ‘myth’ was taken to be self-
evident from common usage and, at the same time, the term was often left
unexplained and applied ambiguously to heterogeneous objects. In Plato, the
first theorist of mythology, the category includes both the repertory of traditional
tales collected by ‘official’ mythographers such as Homer and Hesiod, and a
vast undergrowth of apocryphal tales, anonymous fables and unauthorized
stories that, as the author of the Republic observes with disquiet, mothers and
nurses pour into the ears of the future citizens of the new state. For all his
systematizing impetus, Aristotle in the Poetics defines myth only within the
context of his reflection on the nature of tragedy, and the term remains
undetermined throughout, both linguistically and categorically, shifting between
the notion of plot (mythos as the arrangement of events according to the
principles of verisimilitude and necessity) and that of a reservoir of traditional
legends known to everyone and providing the subject matter upon which
tragedies, and tragic plots, are built. A similar ambiguity persists today, with the
word ‘mythology’ referring, at one and the same time, to narrative practice as
manifested in a body of traditional tales and legends, and to the hermeneutic
interrogation of these tales and legends, that is to ‘the department of knowledge
which deals with myths’ (OED).
While Darko Suvin’s warning in this volume against the dangers of
theoretical indeterminacy should not go unheeded, the varied, and sometimes
contradictory, ways in which ‘myth’ has been understood by contributors is also
perhaps a reflection of the vitality of this category. In a way, it might be
precisely by virtue of its conceptual hybridism that ‘myth’ has been able to
provide a viable methodological perspective for the interdisciplinary dialogue
informing this collection. It would be impracticable, and indeed undesirable, to
force this variety into some kind of essential uniformity; and in these
introductory observations we can only put forward a working definition of the
term capable of accounting for such a diversity of approaches and concerns.
In this respect, the most inclusive model — and the one which is more or
less explicitly invoked on several occasions throughout the volume — can be
traced back to the structuralist (and post-structuralist) view of myth as a type of
discourse. Going back to the Greek etymology of the word, Roland Barthes in
the late 1950s defined myth as ‘une parole’, hence not an object, a concept, an
idea but rather ‘une mode de signification, une forme’ (a mode of signification,
a form).8 He was echoed by Claude Lévi-Strauss who, approaching the subject

from an anthropological angle, reached exactly the same conclusions and
identified the defining quality of myths not in their content but in their structure,
i.e. in the particular use they make of language in order to bend it to specific
ends.9 Within their respective areas of investigation, both Barthes and Lévi-
Strauss agree in seeing myth as a semiogical system functioning according to
Saussurean principles, or, more precisely, ‘un système sémiologique second’ (a
secondary semiological system)10 or a ‘méta-langage’11 wherein language itself
is made to recede from the status of sign to that of signifier so as to provide the
building blocks for a further chain of signification. In Barthes’s analysis of
contemporary French popular culture, this operation performs a markedly
ideological function, in that language is appropriated by a ‘concept’, ‘robbed’ of
its primary or literal meaning, and subjected to a process of ‘distortion’ or
‘deformation’,12 whereby a concrete historical intention is disguised, in the
resulting myth, as a universal, natural, innocent truth.13
While several of the articles featured here appear to share Barthes’s
assumptions, the aspect of the structuralist approach that is perhaps more
relevant to the collection as a whole concerns the broadening of the scope of
mythological critique. Once myth is seen as a discursive strategy, it follows that
the field of investigation can only be delimited formally, not substantially. This
opens up the possibility of applying mythological research to a vast and
8 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), p. 193.

9 ‘Le mythe […] ne tire de ses sources, individuelles ou collectives, (entre les quelles se
produisent constamment des interpénétrations et des échanges) que le matériel d’images qu’il
met en oeuvre; mais la structure reste la même, et c’est par elle que la fonction symbolique
s’accomplit’ (Myth […] draws from its sources, individual or collective (among which
interpenetrations and exchanges constantly occur), simply the imagery that it employs; but the
structure remains the same, and it is only through this structure that the symbolic function is
accomplished). Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, p. 225.
10 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 199. Italicized in the source text.
11 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris: Plon, 1973), p. 84; Barthes,
Mythologies, p. 200.
12 See Barthes, Mythologies, and in particular the paragraphs on ‘Le mythe comme système
sémiologique’ (pp. 195-202), ‘La forme et le concept’ (pp. 202-6) and ‘La signification’
(pp. 206-13).
13 The ideological interpretation of myth is already adumbrated in Platonic thought. From the
Republic to the Laws, as the political project for the new state becomes more clearly outlined,
Plato’s discourse on myth as a strategy of occult persuasion grounded on repetition becomes
ever more central. According to the philosopher, one of the crucial tasks of the state’s guardians
will be that of forging a state mythology, a system of memorial transmission capable of
‘grow[ing] into habits and becom[ing] a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind’
(Republic 3, 395 c8-d3), since this will establish and enforce a communality of thought among
the new citizens. On Plato’s politics of mythology see Detienne, L’invention de la mythologie,
and in particular ‘V. La cité défendue par ses mythologues’, pp. 155-89.
heterogeneous repertoire of cultural representations, regardless of their object

and their nature: ‘le discours écrit, mais aussi la photographie, le cinéma, le
reportage, le sport, les spectacles, la publicité, tout cela peut servir de support à
la parole mythique’ (written discourse, but also photography, cinema, reportage,
sport, performances, advertising, all of these can be used to sustain mythic
language),14 a list to which we might also add painting and sculpture, history and
historiography, religion and folklore. By looking at the way language is
appropriated for specific ends through the myth-making process, moreover, this
method of analysing collective representations combines the formal/
semiological approach and the ideological one, while preserving the specificity
of each field. This dual concern is well represented in a volume which
comprises, on the one hand, essays that focus on the transmission and formal
metamorphoses of diverse mythical nuclei throughout European history and
cultures, while at the same time asking how this intertextual web may have
contributed to knitting together an idea of Europe; and on the other, papers that
deal with ideological constructions of European identity and Otherness while at
the same time showing how these have engineered or appropriated specific
cultural representations in order to sustain their vision.
A good share of the contributions falling within the literary domain adopt
mythological analysis as a critical method for comparative studies, and one
which specifically allows us to identify and examine intertextual relations even
in the absence of an explicit ‘contract’.15 Both Guido Paduano’s essay on
‘Electras and Hamlet’ and Elena Rossi’s on the transmission of the Amphytrion
mytheme across European cultures make a differential use of the ‘myth’
category by foregrounding variants and highlighting discontinuities. By locating
the mythical quality of the thematic clusters they explore precisely within their
capability for endless metamorphosing while preserving some kind of common
identity, they also align themselves with structuralism’s deconstruction of the
original/copy hierarchy implied in the more traditional genealogical model of
literary transmission.16 Along the same lines, Mario Curreli’s work on Conrad’s
14 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 194.

15 For the notion of intertextuality as a ‘contract’ with the reader, alerting her to the existence of a
set of deliberate, intentional and acknowledged relations between a given text and one or more
pre-existing ones, see Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré (Paris:
Seuil, 1982).
16 As Lévi-Strauss points out, ‘le mythe reste mythe aussi longtemps qu’il est percu comme tel.
[…] On n’hésitera donc pas à ranger Freud, après Sophocle, au nombre de nos sources du mythe
d’Œdipe. Leurs versions méritent le même crédit que d’autres, plus anciennes et, en apparence,
plus “authentiques”’ (myth remains myth as long as it is perceived as such […] We shall thus
not hesitate to place Freud, after Sophocles, among our sources for the Oedipus myth. Their
versions deserve as much credit as other more ancient, and apparently more ‘authentic’, ones).
Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, p. 240.
sea narrative uses this approach for the analysis of both diachronic and
synchronic cross-pollination across European cultures and literatures. With
Alessandra Grego’s essay on George Eliot and scriptural typology we move
from myth as a way of reading literature to myth as a method for literary
composition, a creative option that would be resolutely taken up by the
subsequent modernist generation and that reached its most memorable
codification in T.S. Eliot’s 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses (‘Ulysses,
Order and Myth’). However, the search for some kind of ‘mythic’ paradigm
conferring order on an otherwise random fictional world proves to have been a
matter of a paramount concern throughout the history of literature, as is also
witnessed by Roberta Ferrari’s essay which provides convincing evidence of the
palimpsestic presence of Dante’s Purgatory in the central, picaresque section of
Fielding’s Tom Jones.
While all of the contributions discussed above point to this mythical
reservoir as a crucial tool in forging a shared cultural heritage and holding it
together across time, in the rest of the papers the issue of myth-making as the
key process in the construction and deconstruction of the notion of Europe takes
centre stage, with the theme of identity acting, as it were, as the unifying thread.
Following Elena Rossi’s discussion of Amphytrion as an emblematic myth of
selfhood, Pierangiolo Berrettoni also focuses on individual identity but adopts a
more decidedly cultural slant. His essay on Adonis and Heracles looks at the
way myth, as a specific kind of discourse, has contributed to the definition of
gender identities and stereotypes in European culture. In Andrea Binelli’s
contribution on ‘Places of Myth in Ireland’, on the other hand, it is myth’s
agency in the construction of national identity that comes under scrutiny, a topic
which is also central to Silvia Ross’s discussion of travel literature in English
over the last two decades. By showing to what extent and with what kind of
implications Anglo-American writers have continued to resort to the myth of the
Etruscans in their descriptions of contemporary Italy, Ross connects
generalizations about the Italian national character to be found in recent fiction
by, among others, Frances Mayes and Joan Marble to the way European myths
have been used to define and essentialize the identity of a foreign Other. Nuria
Lopéz’s analysis of Victorian women in India is carried out on a similar basis,
but in this case it is against non-European Otherness that myths are deployed to
define and consolidate a particular notion of European identity and thereby
justify the British Empire’s allegedly civilizing mission.
The continued reliance on an oppositional model of identity formation, and
the related orientalization of non-European alterity, is a shared concern in a
number of contributions in the collection, notably those by Tom Lawson on the
myth of the European civil war, by Tony Kushner on immigration and racist
thinking in Britain, by Donald Bloxham on the image of Turkey in Western
political discourse, by Andrew Hammond on travel writing and Europe’s eastern

border, and by Sara Soncini on representations of post-Cold War Europe in
British theatre. While in all of these essays myths are shown to operate as a
powerful prop to various dominant ideologies, equally pervasive is the
perception on the part of the authors of the volume that myths are also liable to
be combated on their own terrain through the creation of alternative
mythologies. If myth can turn individual, historical, cultural, and political
diversity into a single story, there is always a possibility of restoring that story to
its original complexity, fragmentariness and contradiction by bringing to light its
different, competing versions. In Nicholas Watkins’s paper on Marino Marini’s
sculpture, the transformation of the European horseman is equated to ‘a
conscious process of demythologization’, with the artist looking to Etruscan art
as an alternative to the classical condottiere appropriated by Fascism, and with
the progressive deconstruction — literally, the disintegration — of the
equestrian figure forming an apposite correlative objective to the stony, petrified
myth crumbling apart. Similarly, Mark Rawlinson weighs the disruptive impact
of Ted Hughes’s ‘mythical method’ on the Metamorphoses after the twentieth-
century poet has instilled into Ovid’s masterpiece a proleptic awareness of the
contradictions of European history to come.
This paradoxical complementariness of demystification and mythologizing at
least in part explains the pervasiveness and persistence of myths in/of Europe
which is the subject of this volume. Another factor to be taken into account is
the possibility that myth itself may provide a form of alternative discourse when
other epistemologies have proved insufficient or inadequate, especially at
moments of particularly intense crisis. This is what emerges, for instance, from
Richard Littlejohns’s essay on Novalis, which shows how in the climate of deep
instability and uncertainty following the upheavals of the French Revolution, the
Middle Ages were posited by the German poet as an alternative model for
achieving lasting peace in Europe through spiritual, instead of political, means.
Two hundred years later, the British playwrights discussed in Soncini’s essay
have reacted to the failure to put an end to armed conflict on European territory
after the fall of the Wall with a radical critique of the mythologies surrounding
the notion of a ‘New Europe’, while at the same time resorting to mythic
discourse in their effort to imagine a multicultural, border-free Europe for the
future.
Having ascertained that myth-making is intimately bound up with the (de-)
construction of identities, on an individual as well as on a collective level, and
today no less than yesterday, there remains to be assessed what it is about this
discursive practice that makes it a privileged tool for conceptualizing Europe. If
one were to draw some kind of general conclusion from the analyses collected in
this volume, this distinctive property should perhaps be located in myth’s
capacity to negotiate permanence and change. In Graham Jones’s discussion of

the process of ‘serial reinvention’ undergone by the figure of St Nicholas, it is
precisely in its metamorphic quality that the saint’s mythical nature turns out to
reside, just as in the literary myths investigated by Guido Paduano and Elena
Rossi. Mythic representations can alter radically and yet retain some kind of
recognizable identity. This is neatly demonstrated in Antje Steinhoefel’s essay
on the myth of the moon, a myth conflating immutability and cyclical change,
‘its face always the same yet always changing’. The possibility of transmuting
through time while remaining timeless is clearly a very valuable asset in the
perpetuation, consolidation, but also redefinition of identities. If mythic
discourse is capable of encompassing past, present and future within the same
picture, this should account for the continued relevance not only of myths, but
also of mythical analyses, in present-day Europe. By engaging with myths we
come to grips with the cultural and ideological legacy we have inherited as
Europeans.
A Meeting of Minds
The ‘Myths of Europe’ colloquium was primarily a Leicester-Pisa affair, but the
authors of this volume include academics from a number of other institutions. In
Britain alone, the universities of Oxford, Southampton, Winchester and
Edinburgh, and the University of Wales Newport and the Swansea Institute are
represented. Italian contributors come from Rome and Lucca as well as Pisa.
The debate in these pages about international issues is itself truly international,
with authors too from the Freie Universität Berlin and University College Cork
in Ireland. Our contributors are drawn from university departments of English,
of languages, of literature, of history, of history of art, and of politics. A variety
of discourses meet and interact here. The apparently discrete activities of
scholars operating with historiographical methods, on the one hand, and those
practising literary and textual analysis, on the other, turn out not only to
complement each other but to overlap in interdisciplinary fashion. Sara
Soncini’s discussion of contemporary British theatre marries dramaturgical
analysis to reflections on the British response to the new political geography of
Europe. Most strikingly, Antje Steinhoefel’s essay combines the history of
science and the history of art to show how in the late eighteenth century painting
and astronomy were fused in the work of one artist. Myths are of course fiction,
but this volume shows how deeply they impact, even if only latently, on the real
world.
As explained above, most of the contributions to this volume originated in
2002, but they were amplified by others in 2003, at which point the authors read
and responded to each others’ work, as is clear from numerous comments in
their revised texts. Since that point there have been delays in publication, which
may mean that some essays do not always refer to the latest state of research,
although in the final stages of editing efforts have been made to update them
wherever possible. Cumulatively, they nevertheless constitute an interactive,
interdisciplinary and international debate about issues not only of cultural
history but of continuing and immediate political relevance.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957)
Detienne, Marcel, L’invention de la mythologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1981)
Genette, Gerard, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil,
1982)
Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Plädoyer zu einer Wiedergeburt Europas’ [Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May 2003] Kulturchronik, 4 (2003), 22-26
Komroff, Manuel, ed., The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Liveright, 1926)
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958)
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris: Plon, 1973)
Mosse, George L., The Crisis of Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third
Reich (New York: Gosset and Dunlap, 1964)
Said, Edward, Orientalism [1978] (London: Penguin, 2003)
Manfred Pfister
Europa/Europe: Myths and Muddles
Mapping the Terrain: Basic Distinctions

There is a double sense to the title of this book: ‘Myths of Europe’ can refer to
myths both of Europe and in Europe.
In the first sense, the myths of Europe comprise all those myths that have
served to define Europe and to forge the sense of a shared European cultural
identity. One of them is, of course, the myth that gave Europe its name, the story
of the Phoenician princess abducted to Crete by Zeus and raped; others are, for
instance, the Judaeo-Christian myth, the imperial myths of Aeneas and
Alexander, the Faustian myth of striving towards knowledge infinite, the Hamlet
myth of self-reflexive introspection and the Don Quixote myth of idealism,
cataclysmic myths of rebirth, reform or revolution, mythical constructions of
history such as the Middle Ages or the millennium, civil war or everlasting
peace, political myths of a divine mission, a manifest destiny for Europe as
superior to the rest of the world …1
In the second, wider sense, myths in Europe are the myths that circulate in
the various European cultures and across the national borders, the myths shared
by Europe — or at least by large parts of Europe — across the centuries. To
mention only a few on which contributors to the present volume have focused:
Adonis and Hercules, Amphitryon, stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, St
Nicholas, the horseman, foundlings at crossroads, or the moon.2 These are,
naturally, no more than a handful of examples of shared European myths that
cannot exhaust the stock which the various mythological repertoires — classical
or Christian, Arthurian, or Germanic and Nordic, mythologized history or fiction
— have put at the disposal of our imagination to recycle and re-interpret across
historical and national boundaries.
Neat as this distinction between myths of and myths in Europe may sound, it
is, of course, open to, and in dire need of, deconstruction. To the extent that a
myth circulates in Europe, it becomes a myth of Europe; it becomes part of a
1 See the contributions in this volume by Sara Soncini (Europa), Alessandra Grego (the Bible),
Guido Paduano (Hamlet), Richard Littlejohns (the Middle Ages and everlasting peace), Tom
Lawson (civil war), Silvia Ross (European ancestry), and both Tony Kushner and Nuria López
(Western superiority).
2 See the contributions by Pierangiolo Berrettoni, Elena Rossi, Mark Rawlinson, Graham Jones,
Nicholas Watkins, Roberta Ferrari, and Antje Steinhoefel.
22 Manfred Pfister
Heinrich Bünting:
Europa prima pars terrae in forma virginis (1588)
European canon of myths made up of mythological, legendary, fictional and

even historical characters, sites,3 events and plots, through which Europe has
tried to fashion a sense of unity and identity as well as of difference from its
Other(s).4
To clear the ground, one would also have to distinguish between myth and
related modes of representation claiming to show why things — not just any
things, but the most elementary phenomena like birth, desire and death, the
individual and society, unity and difference, power and (in)justice — are as they
are and how they came to be so. In this respect, myth is closely related to
ideology and to discourse. Myths, though claiming to be divinely ordained and
given, and thus ‘natural’ and beyond history, always serve specific historical
purposes, representing what is in the interest of a particular ethnic, gender or
social group as the unchangeable will of God or as a law of Nature, portraying
as natural what are the workings of history and culture. This is, as Roland
Barthes wrote, ‘the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.’5 In
this sense, myths do the work of ideology, but they do it more compellingly –
not in discursive argument and generalizing abstraction, but through pregnant
and potent images and supported by visual representations, monuments, sacred
sites, rituals or performances. Where myth derives its fascinating power from
mysteries and contradictions left unresolved in its suggestively fragmentary
images, ideology together with its concomitant verbal form, discourse, strives
towards a seamless coherence and transparent plausibility. The coherence and
plausibility so gained has none of the compelling fascination of myth, and to
minimize this loss, both ideology and discourse tend to revert again and again to
the suggestive images of myth. For this reason the ideologies and discourses of
Europe constantly evoke the myths of Europe more or less latently, or blatantly:
after all, the very name ‘Europe’ evokes its Greek myth of origin!
Beginning at the beginnings

The history of Europe, as narrated in the many variants of the founding myth of
Europa by Greek and Latin poets,6 begins in deceit and violence: the Phoenician
3 See the contributions by Silvia Ross and Andrea Binelli.

4 For the construction of difference from the Other see in particular the contributions by Nuria
López, Andrew Hammond, Tony Kushner, and Donald Bloxham.
5 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Granada, 1973), p. 129.
6 See Winfried Bühler, Europa im Überblick über Zeugnisse des Mythos in der antiken Literatur
und Kunst (Munich: Winkler, 1968); for the images inspired by the myth see Die Verführung
der Europa. Katalog der Ausstellung Berlin — Kulturstadt Europas, ed. by Barbara Mundt
(Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1988) and Il Mito di Europa: da fanciulla
24 Manfred Pfister
princess Europa, gathering flowers with her companions at a beach near Tyros,
is seduced into riding a lovely white bull, Zeus in one of his amorous
metamorphoses, who abducts the girl across the sea and in the shape of an eagle
rapes her under a willow or a plane tree on the island of Crete. She gives birth to
three sons, Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon, all three of them founders of
empires, as are the three brothers — amongst them Cadmus, the founder of
Thebes — sent to rescue her by her father Agenor. The story is told famously
and movingly in the second book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (II, 833-875) and —
without the rape but with a dream of two nations — in Moschus’s second Idyll,7
and retold and recycled in all European cultures.
Three things are particularly remarkable about this foundation myth:
(1) Europe in the mythical guise of Europa is envisaged as female, and she will
remain a woman even if in later representations the vulnerable girl will be
transformed into a woman of regal authority and militant power — as, for
instance, in Heinrich Bünting’s map of 1588, Europa prima pars terrae in forma
virginis,8 which conveys a clear political message, a Habsburg vision of Europe
with Prague as its heart and centre, Spain as its head, Italy as its right arm, Sicily
as its imperial orb, and the British Isles floating outside its scope in empty space.
(2) The myth of Europa is not set at the centre of Europe — wherever that may
be — but takes place at its outer margins. Like the story of Hero and Leander,
which straddles the Hellespont dividing Europe from Asia, it is a liminal story:
situated in in-between spaces, it takes its protagonist across the sea from
Europe’s Other, Asia Minor, to an outpost of Europe, the Mediterranean island
of Crete. Moschus’s version in his second Idyll is particularly significant here:
his Europa has a dream, and in this dream she beholds ‘two Continents at strife
for her sake, Asia, and the farther shore, both in the shape of women’.9 She
dreams the other continent, which remains as yet nameless, from the outside,
and her eventual destination is its margins. Thus she provides an illuminating
model for territorial identity politics which are still operative in our present:
what is crucial for territorial or cultural unity and identity is less the projection
of some core essence than the demarcation of boundaries, and it is through
rapita a continente, ed. by Cristina Acidini Luchinat and Elena Capretti (Florence: Ministero
per i Beni e le Attività culturali, 2002).
7 See Die Europa des Moschos: Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar, ed. by Winfried Bühler,
Hermes. Einzelschriften, 13 (1960).
8 Reproduced in Annegret Pelz, ‘Europa in die Karten geschaut. Bilder und Figuren europäischer
Herkunft’, in Kein Land in Sicht. Heimat – weiblich?, ed. by Gisela Ecker (Munich: Fink,
1997), pp. 169-185 (p. 173).
9 Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, rendered into English prose, ed. by Andrew Lang (London:
Macmillan, 1892), pp. 189-199 (p. 189).
defining and policing margins and through constructing differences between

inside and outside, self and Other, more than through unification within that
cultural entities like Europe are created.10
(3) The relationship between the girl and the continent was an uneasy one from
the very beginning. Herodotus, discussing the three continents Asia, Lybia
(Africa) and Europe in the fourth book of his Histories (5th century BC), admits
ignorance:
As to Europe, it is not known by any human being whether it is surrounded by water, or where it
took its name from, or who bestowed the name — unless we say that the continent took its name
from Europa of Tyre. […] That woman, though, appears to have been from Asia and not to have
gotten to the land which the Greeks now call Europe, but only as far as Crete from Phoenicia
and then as far as Lycia from Crete.11
And even nowadays scholars by no means agree whether the name of the girl
and that of the continent have the same etymology, and whether this etymology
is Hellenic or Semitic.12 What seems to be clear, however, is that the term
‘Europe’ in Greek and Roman antiquity was used loosely to denote the
occidental mainland, without invoking a shared ethnic, religious or cultural
identity. Indeed, even as a mere geographical or territorial notion ‘Europe’ was
remarkably vague from the beginning, and as a term denoting a particular
culture it was virtually non-existent. Instead there was the notion of imperium —
the empire comprising the civilized world and contrasted with its Other,
barbarism, surrounding it on all sides.
The further fortunes of Europe

Nor did the Middle Ages develop a pointedly pregnant use of ‘Europe’ as a term
defining a shared culture across the constituent dynastic states. This entity was
invoked instead by terms like ‘Christendom’ or the ‘Christian world’; they
neutralized the internal opposition between Western and Eastern Christianity,
Rome and Byzantium, and set both off against the pagan world. The example of
Chaucer is telling here. In all his works, in spite of their decidedly European
scope, there are only three references to Europe: one to the myth of Europa and
Zeus, without any implications for Europe as a cultural unit (Troilus and
10 For the distinction between ‘difference within’ and ‘difference between’ see Barbara Johnson,
The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. x-xi and The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British
Travellers. An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Manfred Pfister (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), p. 3.
11 Herodotus, The Histories, ed. and trans. by Walter Blanco and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts (New
York: Norton, 1992), p. 126.
12 See Maria Pia Marchese, ‘Le radici di un nome’, in Luchinat and Capretti, pp. 33-34.
26 Manfred Pfister
Cressida, III.722: ‘O Jove ek, for the love of faire Europa’), two others using
Europe as a geographical term, as one third of a tripartite world as envisaged
already by Herodotus (The House of Fame, III, 1339: ‘In Auffrike, Europe, and
Asye; The Man of Law’s Tale, 161: ‘And wolde she were of al Europe the
queene’).13
This situation did not change significantly in the Early Modern period: the
relevant terms used then were the ‘West’, the ‘Occident’, the ‘(christliche)
Abendland’ or Latin Christianity. Shakespeare, the towering hero of Harold
Bloom’s ‘Western Canon’, reminds us of the Europa/Europe connection on two
occasions (Merry Wives, 5.5.4; Much Ado, 5.4.45), and uses the word ‘Europe’
ten times only in all of his plays, each time quite casually, often as a mere
rhetorical figure, of the ‘most active fellow in Europe’ variety (2 Henry IV,
4.3.24). This is the more surprising as the map of his plays — even the map of a
single play like Hamlet — encompasses the whole of Europe from North to
South, East to West. There is a paradox at work here that extends beyond
Shakespeare’s case: the increased economic, political, cultural and intellectual
traffic between the European nations, which was a hallmark of the Renaissance,
was not accompanied or underpinned by a programmatic emphasis upon a
pointedly ‘European’ cultural identity.
Such an emphatic and programmatic use of the name and notion of ‘Europe’
came late and was a product of the Enlightenment.14 Its heyday, however, was
reached only when Romantic thinkers and poets from all over Europe —
Novalis and the Schlegels in Germany; Saint-Simon and Hugo in France;
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Hazlitt in England; Mazzini in Italy; Adam
Mickiewicz in Poland — began to turn Europe from a geographical concept into
a spiritual dream, a vision.15 Where eighteenth-century politicians envisaged
Europe as a field of tension between the pentarchy of great powers (Russia,
Prussia, Austria, France, and England) charged with the task of constantly
negotiating a rational and pragmatic balance of power in order to avoid self-
destructive wars,16 the Romantics, responding in diverse ways to the French
Revolution and to Napoleon’s despotic unification of Europe, transformed the
absolutist programme of a rationally maintained equilibrium between the rival
13 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by F.N. Robinson, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University
Press, 1957), pp. 428, 295, 63.
14 Ferdinand Seibt, Die Begründung Europas. Ein Zwischenbericht über die letzten tausend Jahre
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), p. 17.
15 See the instructive anthologies edited by Paul Michael Lützeler: Europe. Analysen und Visionen
der Romantiker (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1982) and Hoffnung Europa. Deutsche Essays von
Novalis bis Enzensberger (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1994).
16 See Heinz Gollwitzer, Europabild und Europagedanke. Beiträge zur deutschen Geistes-
geschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2nd edn (München: Beck, 1964), pp. 71-77.
European powers into a vision of ex pluribus unum, into a celebration of

European variety within unity.
This vision could draw upon the rich symbolic capital of European myths
accumulated across the centuries. Napoleon, for instance, invested himself with
the mythical aura of a Roman Caesar reborn for a European population
dreaming of classical empires, or performed the role of a latter-day Charlemagne
to cater for French and German dreams of a time-hallowed European imperium
born in the Middle Ages. In response to such despotic versions of European
unification under a strong potentate, idealist philosophers and Romantic poets
projected utopian visions of an ‘Everlasting Peace’ (Immanuel Kant’s Zum
Ewigen Frieden, 1795) for Europe, which was to be brought about by a league
or brotherhood of nations and was to be based upon the shared family heritage
of the European nations. But what was this shared heritage to be? Answers to
this ranged from conservative or reactionary to liberal or revolutionary, or, as
the English would say, from Tory to Whig, and they produced competing
blueprints of a unified European identity. These extended from a theology of
history, which envisioned the re-unification of Europe as a return to the
medieval Golden Age under the banner of Christian or Catholic religion
(Novalis, Chateaubriand, Hugo) on the one hand, to Hegel’s progressivist
philosophy of history on the other, which regarded ‘Europe as the end of
universal history’17 — ‘end’ here in the double meaning of final, culminating
phase and of ultimate purpose! — as Asia was its beginning. What all these
versions shared, beyond dreaming of European unity, was that they engaged
grand totalizing myths and mythopoeic grand récits to give plausibility and
persuasive rhetorical force to the European project.
A second high water mark in the flood of myths and images of Europe was
reached in the years between the First and the Second World War. Here, the
discourses of Europe were politically related to the trauma of the Great War and
to the project of a League of Nations emerging from it.18 In France, for instance,
Paul Valéry advocated a European League; in Germany Thomas and Heinrich
Mann campaigned for it, propagating Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘good
European’,19 a transcultural nomad, in whom the dangerous one-sidedness of
17 Introduction to Philosophie der Geschichte. Hegel, Werke, vol. 11 (Stuttgart: Meiners, 1949),
p. 150.
18 See Paul Michael Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa. Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart
(München: Beck, 1992).
19 Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinare (Munich: Hanser, 1988), vol. 5, pp. 138-40, 180-82.
28 Manfred Pfister
each single national culture — for instance the destructive tendencies of the
unconscious in the German character — would find its remedial corrective.20
The third, and so far last wave of trading in myths of Europe has been that of
the immediate pre-history to the political realization of the European Union,
which is still work in progress, leading from the limited associations of the
fifties (the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Defence Union)
to the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Community
(EC) to the present, still growing European Union (EU). Having begun with
economic and military treaties, it is now striving towards a unification of Europe
that would go beyond shared laws and regulations relating to security standards
or the production-quota of milk or the purity of beer, beyond trade agreements in
a common market, beyond shared policies concerning crucial questions of
foreign relations, beyond facilitating scholastic and academic exchange (the
Bologna Decrees, and ‘Pisa’, the ‘Project for International Student Assessment’,
that has no immediate link with the city where our conference took place but
evokes its mythical prestige). It strives for a unification beyond all such
pragmatic policies, which will fashion a sense of European cultural identity and
set it off from its Other in terms of differences that make a difference. In this
again, myths and images of Europe are constantly evoked – not only in the
discourses of unification, where, for instance, the prefix ‘Euro-’ proliferates and
casts its spell across Eurostars, Eurotrains, Eurovision, even
EuroSHAKESPEAREs,21 but also in rituals, monuments, and charismatic sites
or objects. We need only look at the euro currency itself, the coins and notes
proclaiming unity on their one side and diversity on the other! Though they do
not bear the image of Europa and her bull, they feature an ever-expanding map
identifying a shared territory that may soon include what for Herodotus was
decidedly beyond the pale — the coast where Europa came from. And even our
book, dedicated to the analysis of the myths of Europe, is a part of such
endeavours.
Totalizing myths and muddled realities

How do these myths work? And to what purposes are they made to work?
One important task that myths perform is to prevent questions, to forestall
their being asked in the first place. Where nobody, from Herodotus onwards, has
20 On the European essays of the Mann brothers see Doerte Bischoff, ‘Repräsentanten für Europa?
Thomas und Heinrich Mann als Grenz-Gänger eines Europa-Diskurses in ihren Essays 1914-
1933’, in Suchbild Europa — künstlerische Konzepte der Moderne, ed. by Jürgen Wertheimer
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 18-37 (p. 25-26).
21 See EuroSHAKESPEAREs: Exploring Cultural Practice in an International Context, ed. by
Mariachristina Cavecchi and Mariangela Tempera (Bologna: Cotepra, 2002).
been in a position to define Europe even in simple, geographical terms, the

myths of Europe evoke a stable, well-defined unity. Geographically, after all,
Europe is a peninsula of Asia. Nietzsche put this in a nutshell when he referred
to ‘das alte Asien und sein vorgeschobenes Halbinselchen Europa, das durchaus
gegen Asien den “Fortschritt des Menschen” bedeuten möchte’ (‘the old Asia
and its little peninsula Europe, which insists on signifying “the progress of
mankind” in the face of Asia’).22 But where does it begin and where does it end?
At the Vistula, the Volga, the Ural, or even further to the East? Its borders are as
unstable and uncertain as are its centres and margins. In Elias Canetti’s
Bulgarian Rustchuck, people said they went to Europe when they travelled up
the Danube to Vienna (‘wenn jemand die Donau hinauf nach Wien fuhr, sagte
man, er fährt nach Europa’).23 When Charles de Gaulle once was asked to name
the three greatest Europeans ever and it was pointed out to him that he had
omitted Shakespeare on his list of three, he famously retorted: ‘Weren’t we
talking about Europeans?’. Many Britons, particularly of the older generation,
still claim to travel to ‘Europe’ when they cross the Channel for ‘the Continent’.
Or, does Turkey belong to Europe? And if so, on which terms? And are these
the same terms on which one could argue that Israel or Georgia or even Canada
or the United States belong to Europe? Obviously, the geographical, ethnic,
linguistic, religious and cultural criteria are at variance with each other — a
variance full of a potential for conflict that the totalizing myths of Europe tend
to obliterate or aim to defuse.
And where is the centre, or where are the centres of Europe? As we have
seen, its mythical origins were in Asia Minor and the Eastern Mediterranean,
and from there the centre moved westward to an imperial, then papal Rome
dissociating itself from Byzantine and Slav Christianity at, if not beyond, its
margins. And when Europe became an operative term in the eighteenth century,
the centre had already moved to the transalpine North. And where is the centre
now? In Strasbourg or Brussels? Along a German-French axis? Or further East,
in what Claudio Magris and others have called Mitteleuropa — another
powerful myth! — which extends along a line from Trieste to Vienna, Budapest,
Prague and Berlin?
Where myths invoke a totalized, transparent unity and homogeneity, reality
proves to be messy, muddled, hybrid, heterogeneous. And by totalizing, myths
conceal the fissures and fault lines created by divergent interests. After all, what
is at stake in such questions is, as always, not a matter merely of categorization
or territorial mapping but of power and hegemony, or of disempowerment and
subjection.
22 Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 72.

23 Elias Canetti, Die gerettete Zunge (Munich: Hanser, 1977), p. 11.
30 Manfred Pfister
To achieve such totalized unity, myth employs certain strategies and

embodies them in compelling images and performances. The most important
strategy resides in minimizing the ‘difference within’ and, at the same time,
maximizing the ‘difference between’.24 In the case of Europe this means playing
down the differences between the various European cultures and emphasizing
what they share, their common cultural heritage and characteristics, while, at the
same time, blowing up as large as possible the difference between Europe and
‘the rest of the world’. The second alone is then made out to be a difference that
makes a difference, whereas the first is celebrated as a mutually enriching
variety of the European regional cultures — the standard example being how
pizza, pasta and prosecco have added flavour to the dull fare of German or
English gastronomy.
The ‘difference between’ in such mythical constructions is absolute and neat,
a matter of either/or, black or white: the West versus the East, the Occident
versus the Orient, their contrast then detailed in oppositions such as activity
versus passivity, self-discipline versus self-gratification, order versus chaos,
intellectual endeavour versus mysticism and sensuous abandon, monotheism
versus polytheism, freedom versus despotism, historical progress versus
enduring stagnation beyond history, modern versus primitive or backward…
Donald Bloxham’s essay in this volume shows clearly how such constructions,
in this case in relation to Turkey, may be manipulated for diplomatic purposes.
Two further things become evident here. First, the non-European Other serves as
a projection screen for Western fantasies and anxieties about itself. It is
constructed by the West — the Orient made in Europe is the crucial insight of
Edward Said’s Orientalism — as its reverse image, and by constructing the
Other, Europe constructs its own cultural identity ex negativo, as it were,
exorcizing what it finds unacceptable in itself by projecting it upon the other.25
Secondly, such clear-cut dichotomies negate the innately hybrid character of
everything proclaimed as authentically European as well as everything that is in-
between, the non-European in the European and the European in the non-
European, those ‘figures of the third’ which partake of both worlds and which
both worlds partake in.26
Take, for instance, Europe’s attitude towards the Muslim world! The simple
opposition ‘European Judaeo-Christian monotheism’ versus ‘Oriental
polytheism’ breaks down here at once: Muslim belief is as monotheistic as any
of the Christian denominations, and even more resolutely so than some of them.
24 Johnson, The Critical Difference, pp. x-xi.

25 See Fremde Körper. Zur Konstruktion des Anderen in europäischen Diskursen, ed. by Kerstin
Gernig (Berlin: Dahlem University Press, 2001).
26 See Figuren der/des Dritten: Erkundungen kultureller Zwischenräume, ed. by Claudia Breger
and Tobias Döring (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).
There is considerable overlap between its myths and the Judaeo-Christian myth
and no less considerable overlap in intellectual traditions. Moreover, the Near
and Middle East has been for centuries a place of territorial coexistence;
European colonialism has left its mark on many Arab countries in the East and
the South; and in our present world of mass migration and nomadism Europe
itself has become the home of large Muslim communities. As these spaces in-
between and the numbers of go-between figures grow, the need for clear-cut
mythologies apparently increases – the latest and most acute being George W.
Bush’s Manichean division of the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, the Free West and
the Terrorist East or, closer to home, his Defence Secretary’s distinction
between an ‘Old Europe’, disinclined to follow the American lead, and the ‘New
Europa’ of ex-Soviet states ready to join the anti-terrorist crusade. Europe,
idealizing itself into a gemeinsames Haus, a mythical shared house or home, is
thus turned into ‘Fortress Europe’, policing its borders against an Other that is
increasingly conceived of only as a problem to be solved or an invader
menacing its integrity and identity.
In 1990, in Turin, Jacques Derrida addressed himself to such questions in a
remarkable speech on ‘The Other Cape’.27 The Cape is, of course, Nietzsche’s
— and Paul Valéry’s and Heinrich and Thomas Mann’s — Europe as the Asian
peninsula. Derrida, discussing Valéry’s writings on Europe, notices as a wide-
spread mode of thinking that each of the European countries tends to regard
itself as the crucial ‘Cape of Europe’ and that Europe in turn considers itself ‘as
the Cape of universal mankind’. Derrida sees a typically modern logic at work
here, according to which each ‘national assertion’ claims to be ‘the unique
inscription of the universal in the singular’.28 That is to say: ‘The more I am (or
the more we are) attached to a nation, the more European am I (or are we); the
more European I am (or we are), the more am I (or are we) trans-European and
international.’29 In Derrida’s analysis, this latest, and perhaps last, discourse of
Modernism employs the logic of myth in its grand gestures of totalizing and
globalizing equations; in its ‘capitalization’ of Europe, its colonization of the
Other and its deletion of the awareness of its own constructedness and relativity,
it proves to be at one and the same time ‘surpassed’, outdated, and un-
surpassable.
27 Jacques Derrida, Das andere Kap. Die vertagte Demokratie. Zwei Essays zu Europa (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) (my translations into English). See Bischoff, ‘Repräsentanten für
Europa?’, pp. 36-37.
28 Derrida, pp. 37 and 54.
29 ibid, p. 38.
32 Manfred Pfister
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2002)
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europäischen Diskursen (Berlin: Dahlem University Press, 2001)
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Geistesgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2nd edn (München: Beck,
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(Frankfurt am Main.: Insel, 1982)
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(München: Beck, 1992)
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Guido Paduano
Electras and Hamlet
The autonomy of modern mythology

In Antigones, George Steiner notoriously indicts modern culture on the grounds
of mythopoeic barrenness: in comparison with classical antiquity, only Hamlet,
Don Quixote, Faustus and Don Juan could aspire to something resembling a
‘mythic’ status. But Steiner’s attacks threaten even these strongholds:
To what extent is he [Hamlet], as Freud and Gilbert Murray noted, a variant on Orestes? To
what extent does the imaginative power which the motifs of fratricide, usurpation, incest, and
filial vengeance in Shakespeare’s play exercise upon us derive from the statement of these
motifs already made in Aeschylus’, Sophocles’, and Euripides’ dramatizations of the House of
Atreus?1
And he continues:
What one would wish for, however, is a better understanding of the ways in which the legend of
Doctor Faustus is a Christian variant on the archetype of Prometheus.2
If I were in a joking — or maybe only half-joking — vein, it would be tempting

to accuse Steiner of excessive shyness. In Plautus’s Amphitruo, in fact, Jupiter’s
sexual voracity and lack of scruples clearly anticipate Don Juan’s libertinage,
just as Mercury, his critic-assistant ‘double’, is the ancestor of Sganarello and
Leporello. Thus, only the thin silhouette of Don Quixote, cut out of a sweetly
melancholy pattern of human folly totally incompatible with the classical
theories of mind, would be left to represent modern culture.
Fortunately, there is a somewhat more serious, and therefore productive,
attitude. Steiner is perfectly right in identifying not one but three referents of
ancient myth: Aeschylus’s Choephori (the central tragedy of the Oresteia),
Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Electra. But not only because in these
tragedies a benevolent fate has preserved for us their respective treatments of a
section of the saga of the Atreides roughly corresponding to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet — that of a great King, betrayed and murdered by his wife or, with her
complicity, by her lover, also a relative of his, and eventually revenged by his
own son. What is more important is that these texts, while deploying largely
differing dramatic structures, manifest three distinct world-views. Aeschylus’s
tragedy is the benchmark for an experimental theodicy which traces in human
1 George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 129-30.
2 Steiner, p. 131.
36 Guido Paduano
guilt the origin of evil, and boldly tackles the paradox of one and the same
action — Orestes’ matricide — being ontologically both just and unjust; that of
Sophocles shows a gigantic individuality carrying upon its shoulders the all-
encompassing omnipotence of suffering; Euripides’ text, in its turn, deals with
the disruption of the ghenos, and, consequently, of the traditional religion which
sanctioned its rules and values.
Although the chronological and ideological relations between the two
Electra texts remain somewhat dim, there is no doubt that both are more modern
than the Oresteia, in the sense that they show themselves to be fully aware not
only of their thematic and textual indebtedness towards the Oresteia, but also of
belonging to a different civilization. And we all know how bitter and traumatic
this difference was to prove for Euripides.
Therefore, if we cannot but acknowledge to all these ancient texts enough
originality to make them ‘classics’, how can we deny the same distinction to
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is far richer in original traits vis-à-vis its classical
analogues?
This example offers me the opportunity to discuss a methodological
problem, which may help clarify the often ambiguous use of so dangerous and
vague a term as ‘myth’ in literary criticism.
When the swinging of the pendulum between the constants and the variants
that form a set of texts mutually linked by functional relations (that is, a
‘macrotext’) is observed in a literary perspective, I believe that it is the variants
that deserve the greater attention. This is obvious if we simply look at what
happens when both this approach and its obverse are brought to their extreme
consequences. The study of variants widens itself in concentric circles to submit
every word, syllable, even phoneme, to stylistic or lexical analysis. The study of
constants and resemblances, instead, chases backwards after a hypostatized
essence, an original wholeness, eventually coinciding with absence of meaning.
A strictly contextual example may be helpful, which I take from Murray’s
essay cited by Steiner.3 The political aspect of the twin sagas of Orestes and
Hamlet focuses on an alteration of the principle of hereditary succession, on the
basis of which a younger man takes the place of an older with the aid of a
woman who, in the basic western patriarchal system, is the old man’s property.
From this point of view, the Agamemnon/Aegisthus/Clytemnestra triangle is
isomorphic to the Laius/Oedipus/Iocaste one, but also to the two triangles that
characterize the sacred history of Greece before Zeus identified the divine with
the absence of succession: Ouranos/Gaia/Kronos, and Kronos/Rhea/Zeus. From
this point of view, therefore, Hesiod’s factual narrative, Clytemnestra’s climax
3 Gilbert Murray, ‘Hamlet and Orestes’, in The Classical Tradition of Poetry (New York:
Vintage, 1957), pp. 180-210.
of hatred and death-wish in Agamemnon, Iocaste’s ghost-like, marmoreal silence

in King Oedipus, are all equivalent within a generalizing perspective which is as
indifferent to the level of subjectiveness as to that of literary formalization: what
it pursues are the simple, basic anthropological cores from which all human
experience is made to derive. But how simple and basic can these cores be?
Arguably, the Orestes/Oedipus/Zeus myth is itself a variation on a pattern
describing cultural change as a mélange of conservation and innovation,
continuity and discontinuity, based on the seasonal rhythm. One could also
claim that the myths of political renewal are but a specific facet of a universal
élan that can be summed up in the ‘something-changes-into-something-else’
formula. At this point, generalization has reached its limit. The formula provides
a comprehensive definition of human experience in its proper habitat, that is, in
linear time, but our heuristic gain boils down to the simple observation that
Orestes and Oedipus — or any other protagonist, come to that — belong to
human experience.
The truly original features of a text, on the contrary, may even provide
precious information about other texts to which they do not belong, whenever
this absence is part of an intentional strategy. And not only about later texts,
from which these features may have been eliminated on purpose, but also about
earlier ones: all rewriting, as we know, is first and foremost an act of
interpretation, and, as such, must account also for textual silence.
This network of relations forms the great living body of literary tradition,
whose heartbeat is regulated by the systoles of conservation and the diastoles of
innovation. It is fascinating to observe the interplay between different worlds
and cultures we now call intertextuality, as long as one recognizes the dignity of
them all: providing, that is, one does not consider recent cultures merely as
decadent parasites, bred by intellectual laziness,4 nor the older ones as little
more than handy source-containers.
One last remark, bearing also on the problem of Hamlet’s relation with the
classics, which was not based on Shakespeare’s detailed study of sources, but on
the existence of a vast stock of mythological material, accessible to most (but
only touched upon by Seneca in his Agamemnon), sufficient in itself to generate
largely similar dramatic situations. The most striking correspondences between
texts are not always caused by genetic relations, that is, by a full awareness of
the models and the explicit acceptance of their influence. This does not mean,
however, that whatever cannot be described as programmatic rewriting should
be relegated to the bizarre domain of casualness. On the contrary, I believe that a
sort of poetic necessity brings about similar results out of shared premises —
but, at the same time, thematic, or even textual parallelism does not rule out
4 As Steiner does: see The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 324-29.
38 Guido Paduano
idyosincratism. The poet who, ignorant of his predecessor, independently

follows the same creative path, is the most trustworthy witness to his freshness
and authenticity.
The exorcized matricide

The first and major innovation in Hamlet has, in my opinion, a properly
metalinguistic quality. The Ghost’s request to Hamlet to spare his mother
(‘howsomever thou pursuest this act / taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul
contrive / against thy mother aught’, 1.5.84-6) detaches Hamlet from the
massive trunk of tradition. It was precisely the fundamental role of matricide —
whether in the shape of Aeschylus’s impasse, or of Sophocles’ ferocious joy, or
of Euripides’ anguished repentance — that gave these tragedies their universal
renown. Now, instead, this innovation forms the specific matrix of
Shakespeare’s, and our, modernity (1.5.86-8):
leave her to heaven
and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
to prick and sting her.
Here, the veneer of the Christian conception of guilt and conscience (albeit not
in its entirety, or else the sheer hypothesis of vengeance would be ruled out)
masks the maternity taboo. In Euripides’ Orestes — where the social future of
matricides, condemned by both their own people and the Furies, is investigated
— Orestes opposes to the dull inflexibility of the oracle the craving for human
compassion that Agamemnon too would have shown, because revenge would
bring about only further pain, with no advantage for himself (the evaluation of
action in terms of costs and benefits marks the alterity of this universe from
Aeschylus’s, which in fact is pivoted on the principle of absolute obligation).
Orestes’ pathos here is made even more efficacious by the brilliant use of
hypotyposis (ll.288-93).5
I trow, my father, had I face to face
Questioned him if I must my mother slay,
Had earnestly besought me by this beard
Never to thrust sword through my mother’s heart,
Since he should not win so to light again,
And I, woe’s me, should drain this cup of ills!6
5 I quote from the Loeb Classical Library. The translations of Choephoroe, Sophocles’ Electra,
Euripides’ Electra and Orestes are respectively by H. Weir Smith, H. Lloyd-Jones, D. Kovacs,
and A.S. Way.
6 In the same tragedy (396), the conscience about committed crime as a ‘disease’ tormenting the
culprit is the nearest notion to Christian remorse to be found in classical antiquity.
Modern tragedy thus originates in the retrieval, from the margins of ancient
drama, of a desperate longing for innocence, finally freed from a double
condition of unreality: of being considered belated, or nothing but a private
fantasy, if not a delirium.7
The discovery of truth

The mitigation of the harshest conflict that may lacerate the family — that
between mother and son — is anchored to a diversified attribution of
responsibilities.
Gertrude was not an accomplice in her husband’s murder, and her surprise at
Hamlet’s definition of the slaying of Polonius (‘almost as bad, good mother, / as
kill a king, and marry with his brother’, 3.4.28-9) makes her ignorance credible.
Hamlet’s ‘words like daggers’ refer exclusively to her adultery, or incest, with
Claudius. The Ghost accuses her of frailty in falling prey to Claudius’s
seduction: her betrayal is an axiological decay, and a perversion of value-
judgement. Gertrude-as-murderer is therefore a hyperbole, reinforced in the
grandiloquence of the actors on the subject of love in the ‘play-within-the-play’:
‘None wed the second but who kill’d the first’ (3.3.174); ‘A second time I kill
my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed’ (3.3.179-80).
The cautiously conjectural language we necessarily use in referring to the
antecedents in Hamlet defines this tragedy’s clear-cut distinction from its
classical analogues. There, the guilt of the murderous couple, Clytemnestra and
Aegisthus (no matter who actually struck the blow),8 is never in doubt, nor are
we surprised by their declared hostility towards the surviving children, both
devoted to Agamemnon. In Hamlet, Claudius’s loving graciousness shown to
the protagonist from his very first appearance on stage initiates what might be
properly called a process of detecting the truth: from the outset, the Prince is
sarcastically suspicious of the King’s overfriendliness, and this justifies his cry
‘O my prophetic soul’ at the Ghost’s revelation.
As is well known, uncertainty has a great impact on stage action: the veracity
of the Ghost has to be verified. Also in this case the boundary between the
ancient and the modern is drawn by Euripides’ distrust, not of past events, but of
the oracle’s injunction. In Electra, Orestes desperately attempts to release
himself from the moral bond of matricide, embodied by an unrelenting sister:
‘these commands [were] spoken by a spirit of destruction disguised as the God’
7 See Murray, p. 186.

8 In Aeschylus it is Clytemnestra – the chorus scolds Aegisthus for not daring to commit the
murder (Agamemnon 1643-6) –, in Euripides it is Aegisthus (Electra 10). Sophocles remains
always vague.
40 Guido Paduano
(l. 979), he suggests. And in the finale of Orestes, the hero acknowledges the
truthfulness of Apollo, who, ex machina, predicts a reconciliatory ending (as in
Aeschylus), but does not forget his own former doubts.9
Thus, to test the Ghost’s revelation, Hamlet conceives a play aimed at
challenging Claudius with a public staging of his criminal deed, in the hope of
forcing him to confess. The usurper does betray himself — at least in Hamlet’s
and Horatio’s eyes. A less obliging spectator will only have to wait until the
next scene for a more canonical form of disclosure: the villain’s monologue, as
opposed to false, public speech, sanctions Hamlet’s crusade against hypocrisy
(1.5.107-10):
[…] Meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
So, uncle, there you are.
A major theme of this tragedy is the need for transparent and sincere language.
Symbolically epitomized in the ‘Words, words, words’ which the Prince delivers
to Polonius with sublime nonchalance — one of the many all-too-famous
epigrams in Hamlet — this theme recurs obsessively throughout the play.
Suffice to remember here Hamlet’s paradoxical quest for truth through the play-
within-the-play, or his attack on Laertes’ hyperbolic burst of pain for Ophelia’s
death, or, again, the vacuity of Hamlet’s diplomatic style in the forged letter to
the King of England — which disguises a criminal plan under the noble pretence
of peace-making between two nations (‘and many such like as-es of great
charge’, 5.2.43) — and, finally, the grotesque caricature of Osric, with his horror
for linguistic propriety and directness.
Parallel to Hamlet’s quest for truth, there runs a secondary line of
investigation on the part of his enemies, in the shape of the spying strategy. First
activated as a structural model when Polonius puts Reynaldo on Laertes’ tracks,
it successively implicates Polonius himself, those two undistinguishable
nonentities Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and makes a pathetic tool of poor
Ophelia, before playing its real trump, Gertrude — and failing.
The reason is of course that Hamlet’s ‘antique disposition’ conceals in its
turn a — or the — truth. His is a feigned madness, such as characterizes many
famous legends (for instance that of Brutus, the founder of the Roman
Republic). It is pertinent here in that it allows the hero to use, under the disguise
of nonsensical language, a universalizing discourse which identifies private
adversity with universal corruption.
9 ‘And yet a fear crept o’er me, lest I heard, / Seeming to hear thy voice, a Fury-fiend’
(ll. 1668-9). On this point, Murray’s discussion (pp. 185-6) is again keen and brilliant, albeit
limited to the passage from Electra. See also Piero Boitani, Il genio di migliorare un’invenzione
(Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), p. 56.
One might compare Hamlet’s ingenuity to the false rumours of Orestes’

death, which in both Aeschylus and Sophocles are spread in order to protect
him. This, however, seems to me but a generic and ultimately barren
resemblance. For Orestes, and Hamlet as well, vengeance entails a certain
degree of manipulation of reality, since it represents the goal of a strictly
personal strategy (Sophocles’ prologue states it explicitly), no matter how great
the love that is borne to them by their own people: an affection to which
Claudius himself twice bears witness (4.3.4-5 and 4.7.16-24), as do the chorus
and the messenger who reports the death of Aegisthus in Euripides’ Electra,
when the returning Orestes is hailed by the citizens (ll.851-5).
Hamlet’s hesitation
Let us come to the Hamletic in Hamlet: the representation of the sacred duty of
vengeance as an act manqué, the perpetual postponement of which eventually
makes tragic action co-extensive with its own impossibility.
This is not the place to tackle this question — perhaps the crucial enigma of
all European literature — especially since I have been bold, or foolish, enough
to deal with it elsewhere.10 I wish to point out, though, that Hamlet’s peculiarity
is anticipated in the parodos of Sophocles’ Electra (ll.164-72).11
Yes, whom I unwearyingly await, lost, without child or bridegroom, drenched in tears, with my
never-ending fate of sorrows! But he forgets what he has suffered and what he has learned.
Why, which of his messages does not end in disappointment? Always he feels the longing, but
for all his longing he does not think fit to appear!
In the dialogue that follows, to the chorus’s justification of Orestes (‘Yes, a man
often hesitates when he is engaged in a great task’), Electra blazingly rejoins:
‘Well, it was not by hesitation that I saved him!’ (ll.320-1).
At this point, however, the audience has already seen Orestes arrive, with
Pylades and the pedagogue, and shun Electra in order to carry out the libation at
Agamemnon’s tomb first. This proves that Orestes’ shirking is nothing but a
projection of Electra’s psyche, caused by her woefully impatient wait. In a
similar fashion, the protagonist of King Oedipus is upset first by the delay of
Creon — sent to consult the oracle in Delphi — and, later, by that of Tiresias.
This points to Oedipus’s own tendency to anticipate events, thus imposing upon
time the imperious rule of his ego.
Also in this case Shakespeare has given dramatic substance to the shadows
of subjective phantasmagoria, thematizing the relation between thought and
10 Guido Paduano, ‘Il re che poteva essere’, in L’officina del teatro europeo, I, ed. by A. Simon
and A. Grilli (Pisa: Plus, 2002), pp. 191-205.
11 See Siegfried Melchinger, Die Welt als Tragödie, I (München: Beck, 1979), p. 225.
42 Guido Paduano
action. It may interest us here to note that a crucial strand of this theme will
eventually flow back into the main stream of Greek myth: in Hofmannsthal’s
Elektra (‘frei nach Sophokles’)12 the heroine, like many other protagonists of the
Austrian poet, is a devotee of action, who satisfies her unquenchable thirst for
revenge through Orestes’ hand. Now, she too suffers terribly for an act manqué,
when she forgets to hand her brother, on his way to accomplishing the gloomy
sacrifice, the axe with which Agamemnon had been smitten, and which she had
treasured for Orestes’, and her own, vengeance.13
The long time of sorrow

The latent conflict between Orestes and Electra in Sophocles’ text calls attention
to the functional distribution operated by the three classical tragedians: Orestes’
task is to carry out the vengeance sanctioned by the gods to punish guilt and
restore order; to Electra is instead bestowed the lasting agony for the deprivation
of love and moral values caused by guilt. These functions are strictly
intertwined: without Orestes’ action, Electra’s suffering would be sterile, as the
women of Sophocles’ chorus proclaim; without Electra’s motivations, Orestes’
action would seem unwarranted.
In Shakespeare, both functions converge on Hamlet. The procrastination of
the vengeance, however, annuls its sacred dimension: Claudius, as we know, is
killed almost by chance, and as a consequence of different crimes.
12 The possibility of a parallel with Hamlet was often glimpsed by Hofmannsthal. In a letter to
Richard Strauss (28 June 1912) he reassured the Master, annoyed by a presumed coincidence of
Elektra with Salome, by pointing out that Elektra was in fact much closer to the Shakespearean
masterpiece (‘da sind alle Grundmotive identisch, und doch, wer denkt bei Elektra an Hamlet?’,
Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, ed. W. Schun (Zürich: Atlantis,
1964), p. 189). In Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1959, p. 131), the author claims ‘die
Verwandtschaft und der Gegensatz zu Hamlet’, and then explicitly: ‘das Verhältnis der Elektra
zur Tat freilich mit Ironie behandelt. Elektra-Hamlet’ (p. 127).
13 Some critics who – wrongly in my opinion – see in Hofmannsthal’s Elektra the representation
of the heroine’s failure, bring to bear a parallel with Hamlet (for instance Karl J. Naef, Hugo
von Hofmannsthals Wesen und Werk (Zürich and Leipzig: Niehans, 1938), pp. 122-3; Wolfgang
Nehring, Die Tat bei Hofmannsthal (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966), pp. 50-1). If, on the contrary, the
episode of the axe is to be seen as the interlocutionary nadir of a plot hung between the euphoric
and the disphoric poles of psychic life, then one should concur with Heinrich Weinstock,
Sophokles (Leipzig & Berlin: Teubner, 1931), p. 37, and Hans-Joachim Newiger,
‘Hofmannsthals Elektra und die griechische Tragödie’, Arcadia, 4 (1969) 138-163 (pp. 153-54),
in adopting a contrastive perspective In this sense, the irony brachylogically hinted at by
Hofmannsthal (supra) could be read as a chiasmus: Hamlet has the means to act, but not the
will; Electra, instead, has the will, but not the means. This is due to the limitations imposed
upon her by her sexual role, which she wishes to overcome.
Consequently, as Wolfgang Schadewaldt observes,14 Hamlet’s role

subsumes a large part of the expressive and topical valences that had previously
belonged to Electra, especially in Sophocles’ version.
We may note in passing that this overlapping poses a not inconsiderable
problem to psychoanalytic readings. These find no difficulty in tracing in
Electra’s passionate devotion to her father’s memory what may be loosely called
the female equivalent of the Oedipus complex.15 It is a different matter,
however, when the same theme is traced in Hamlet. As a man, Hamlet’s
devotion to his father could only be interpreted in terms of censure or of an
ironical inversion of his own libido — which of course cannot be proved, unless
self-referentially.
What is more, in modern and ancient tragedies the event/duration opposition
is related to different temporal scales, involving a reversal of the signifiers
employed to illustrate it. Agamemnon’s death precedes Aegisthus’s and
Clytemnestra’s by many years, during which the child Orestes, saved by his
sister, eventually becomes a man. At the same time, Electra’s psychology has
grown and ripened through an unrelenting suffering, kept alive by her love for
her father and an obsessive hatred for the murderers. This is portrayed by all
three playwrights, but more explicitly so by Sophocles, whose Electra damns
‘who forgets the piteous end of parents’ (ll. 145-6).
In Hamlet’s case, the persistence of sorrow and memory is not qualified as
an ethical value directly, but only via his attacks on Gertrude’s ‘frailty’. Thus,
Electra’s long years are turned into a virtually indivisible time-sequence linking
the death of the King to Gertrude’s ‘overhasty’ marriage. The two events are set
by Hamlet at a distance of two months, which is reduced, a few lines later, to
one month only. In his provoking cue to Ophelia, then, these will become ‘but
two hours’, so that her correction (four months, she says) may serve as an
excuse for Hamlet’s sarcastic ‘So long?’(3.2.124).
Even more strikingly crude are the images of the ‘thrift’ which Hamlet
stigmatizes: the shoes used for the funeral were left on, and the meat for the
funeral banquet served also for the wedding (1.2.150-1): ‘O God, a beast that
wants discourse of reason / Would have mourn’d longer’.16 When her sister
14 ‘Sophokles Elektra und Shakespeares Hamlet’, in Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Hellas und

Hesperien (Stuttgart: Artemis, 1960), pp. 707-27. See also Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods
(London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 254-55. In the ‘Nobles’ Comparative Classics’ series Hamlet was
edited by E. Harding alongside Sophocles’ tragedy, as well as, curiously enough, Eugene
O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon (New York, 1939).
15 See for instance Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilisation. An Interpretation of Sophocles
(Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 261.
16 The same image recurs when Hamlet accuses himself of laziness, equated with forgetfulness
(‘bestial oblivion’, 4.4.40).
44 Guido Paduano
Chrysothemis urges her to forget, Hofmannsthal’s Elektra will disdainfully

answer: ‘Ich bin kein Vieh, ich kann nicht / vergessen!’.
The climax of the attack on Gertrude comes when Hamlet, to characterize his
mother, antiphrastically uses the simile of the most heart-rending of sufferings:
at her husband’s funeral she was ‘like Niobe, all tears’ (1.2.149) — that Niobe
who, for the loss of all her children, was metamorphosed into a rock constantly
beaten by her own tears, and became a cosmic force; the very Niobe whom
Sophocles’ Electra worships as a godlike model (ll. 150-2).
From the closet scene onwards, Gertrude is no longer accused of hastiness.
Not unlike Electra’s long duration — which defined, albeit approximately, an
eternal present — Hamlet’s blame for the hasty wedding indirectly mitigates his
condemnation of what — regardless of time — should not have happened at all.
Against the consolatory topic

To call Hamlet’s and Electra’s woe (in Sophocles’ version) ‘inconsolable’ is not
simply a rhetorical embellishment. Rather, we establish an opposition with
‘consolation’ as a structured discourse, literary and non-literary alike (Seneca
has left us the three masterpieces in this genre).
One of the most frequent motifs, usually referred to by the Latin tag ‘non tibi
soli’, is that which aims at extenuating a personal affective loss by virtually
sharing it with the whole of mankind.
Sophocles’ Electra, however, rebels against this type of emotional
compensation, which the women of the chorus genially offer her for the
presumed death of Orestes in the horse-races of the Pythian Games. To their
commonplace ‘For all mortals there is an end’, she opposes, with a touch of
sarcasm, the uniqueness of her own misfortune: ‘But an end amid the hooves of
racing horses, such as came to that unhappy one, entangled in the reins?’ (ll.860-3).17
In a similar way, Hamlet rebels against the same argument, adduced by the
Queen (1.2.72-6):
QUEEN All that lives must die
Passing through nature to eternity.
HAMLET Ay, madam, it is common.
QUEEN If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee? 18
HAMLET Seems, Madam? Nay, I know not ‘seems’.
17 Electra challenges also the other cornerstone of consolation, that is, that grief is useless because
it does not bring the dead back to life (just as revenge does not too: supra). Useless, she objects
to this, would be her leaving off weeping (ll. 352-8).
18 In the commentary to his edition of Sophocles’ Electra for the Cambridge Classics (1972,
p. 92), John Henry Kells compares this line to l. 154 of the Greek text.
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Notes on Contributors 291

This volume is based on a colloquium entitled ‘Miti d’Europa/Myths of Europe’

Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini

1 Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini respectively.

date by an impressive group of intellectuals including Umberto Eco, Jacques

a form).8 He was echoed by Claude Lévi-Strauss who, approaching the subject

8 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), p. 193.

heterogeneous repertoire of cultural representations, regardless of their object

14 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 194.

political discourse, by Andrew Hammond on travel writing and Europe’s eastern

capacity to negotiate permanence and change. In Graham Jones’s discussion of

Mapping the Terrain: Basic Distinctions

European canon of myths made up of mythological, legendary, fictional and

Beginning at the beginnings

3 See the contributions by Silvia Ross and Andrea Binelli.

defining and policing margins and through constructing differences between

The further fortunes of Europe

European powers into a vision of ex pluribus unum, into a celebration of

Totalizing myths and muddled realities

been in a position to define Europe even in simple, geographical terms, the

22 Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 72.

To achieve such totalized unity, myth employs certain strategies and

24 Johnson, The Critical Difference, pp. x-xi.

The autonomy of modern mythology

If I were in a joking — or maybe only half-joking — vein, it would be tempting

of hatred and death-wish in Agamemnon, Iocaste’s ghost-like, marmoreal silence

idyosincratism. The poet who, ignorant of his predecessor, independently

The exorcized matricide

The discovery of truth

7 See Murray, p. 186.

One might compare Hamlet’s ingenuity to the false rumours of Orestes’

The long time of sorrow

Consequently, as Wolfgang Schadewaldt observes,14 Hamlet’s role

14 ‘Sophokles Elektra und Shakespeares Hamlet’, in Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Hellas und

Chrysothemis urges her to forget, Hofmannsthal’s Elektra will disdainfully

Against the consolatory topic

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