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Philip Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 365. ISBN 0-521-80087-0. $65.00.
At the end of the first chapter of Ovid's Poetics ofllhision, Philip Hardie states: "If future generations judge that readers like myself are in fact in the position of Narcissus able only to reflect oui' own contemporary subjectivity in the mirror of the Ovidian text, this too would be a thoroughly Ovidian illusion." With this ingenious and rather disingenuous apologia Hardie inserts himself into Ovidian poetics, and, not accidentally, identifies himself with his subject. he does not overreach in this claim; his work, which incorporates ancient, modern and post modem literary theories, and which passes easily from, for instance, philology to Freudian psychology and Lacanian philosophy, brings a new and refreshing reading to the poetry of Ovid. His ability to discuss Ovidian poetics on several levels almost simultaneously reflects and reveals Ovid's own intensely clever and profound multiplicity. And Hardie's facility at locating Ovid's poetry in the ancient. Renaissance and modern worlds confirms Ovid's lasting appeal.
In his first chapter Hardie defines his subject and, explicitly and implicitly, his approach. Beginning with a brief yet complex reexamination of the various meanings of duplex andpiipula duplex he introduces his topic as a duplicity that "equivocates between absence and presence and which delights in conjuring up illusions of presence." With this opening gambit Hardie demonstrates his facility for reshaping previous scholarship and methodologies. The idea of Ovid's duplicity is not a new realization of the poet's skill, and the examination of the roots and meanings of words continues to be the foundation of our field. But Hardie gives specificity and pervasiveness to this concept with his focus on absence and presence as a definitive structure of Ovid's work, and by seeing this structure as a product of external and internal forces. Similarly, his philological discussion, which also incorporates earlier scholarship, becomes self-reflective as Hardie teases out the implications of double meanings of a double-meaning word. Ovid the illusionist works on two levels. His illusions result from his ability to summon the absent through various reminders and remnants, and this ability often forms verbal, visual and aural illusions.
In his second chapter Hardie expands his discussion of absent presence both...