Clayton Koelb
Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Pp. 186 $40.00
Reviewed by Patrick O'Neill

This book consists of "a set of readings of novels that seemed to contribute most to an understanding of the revolution in the 'sense of history' that has taken place from the middle of the nineteenth century onward" (ix). The choice of texts, while clearly not arbitrary, is equally clearly debatable, as the author is well aware: other choices, as he freely admits, might have illuminated other issues, might have led to different inflexions of reading and of the central issues investigated. Be that as it may, the seven major texts Clayton Koelb eventually chose to analyze (two French, two English, three German) rewardingly illustrate his thesis: Flaubert's Salammbô,Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, Thomas Mann's Joseph tetralogy, Hermann Broch's Death of Virgil, Thornton Wilder's Ides of March, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, and Christa Wolf's Cassandra.

Observing that "there is probably no issue more intellectually or emotionally sensitive than the manner in which a community structures its sense of history" (xi), Koelb opens his case by rehearsing the amazingly rapid shift that occurred during the nineteenth century in the understanding of the relationship between the past and the present. While for generations it had been held by even the best authorities, on the basis of biblical evidence, that the world was not much more than six thousand years old, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought a rapid accumulation of evidence in several complementary branches of science (geology, paleontology, archaeology, biology) that human existence needed to be envisaged in a very much longer time frame, thus in effect doing for the horizon of time what the European discovery of the New World had done for the horizon of space. Where earlier generations could look back to the beginnings of time and find a world much like their own, Flaubert's mid-nineteenth-century contemporaries and their like-minded successors found themselves looking back on a past that was at once startlingly unfamiliar and alien and implicitly raised disquieting questions about the nature of the present.

Koelb sees Flaubert's Carthaginian novel Salammbô (1862) as the first major literary text to reflect in paradigmatic fashion this fundamental shift in the conception of history, a conception marked not only by an overwhelming feeling of distance from, but also by a fascination for, the newly alienated world of the past. For Koelb, moreover, Flaubert's novel originates a rich tradition of modern novels set in antiquity that differ as a group quite radically from the progressive views of history espoused by such writers as Sir Walter Scott and such philosophers as Hegel, Marx, and Lukács. Salammbô's progeny constitute a collective attempt to come to grips with the conflicted relation of the past to the present, a complex relation constructed no longer on continuity but on distance and alterity, and on the simultaneous desire to comprehend them. While not denying that history in some sense makes us, these novels as a group thus "advance our understanding of how we also make history by our (absolutely necessary) acts of interpretation" (xviii). Koelb's own interpretations- richly textured, precisely nuanced, and strongly argued- demonstrate throughout that essentially the same relationship of mutual shaping in principle always holds between the literary text and our reconstructive acts of reading.