Umberto Eco’s latest novel. The Prague Cemetery, has a complicated metatextual plot in which, as the writer himself stated, he attempts to create the most repugnant of all literary characters, in other words, some sort of “perfect loather" who detests everyone, including himself. I will discuss the various stereotypes of otherness, the way these stereotypical images interact, and how the author weaves the prejudices related to almost every European nationality, but mostly to the Jews, into the image of the “supreme enemy," an image divested of any ornament and so presumptuous that it becomes almost dense. Moreover, in relation to the image I mentioned above. I analyse the mechanisms language uses as a vehicle of deception especially when it describes what is familiar in propagandist texts. I also focus on the different fictional filters applied to real historical events (and texts) in order to entice the reader into trying to decipher a complex and factitious labyrinth in which the barrier between truth and fiction no longer matters, it is purely accidental, and has only one purpose-to generate conspiracies.
Vergil described his opus magnum, Aeneis, within the poem itself - as a temple’s door ecphrasis. By introducing Daedalus’ narrative into the main narrative, he set a bunch of signs of identity, both biographical and textual, between himself and the ancient inventor, in order to show the analogous identity between Aeneis and Daedalus’ work, the double labyrinth. By that he managed to highlight the hybrid nature of Aeneis itself and also, through some textual omissions, to depict Roman superhero-to-be, Aeneas, as a traitor. Vergil also made this ecphrasis both poet’s statement about boundaries of making poetry and a masterpiece of Augustan propaganda.
LA
Romani antiqui putabant litteras aedificiis similes esse. Nonnulli scriptores Latini tali modo metaphoras suas composuerunt, ut descriptio aedificii una cum descriptione operis poetici esset. Aeneis etiam effigiem suam continet, quae est ecphrasis portae templi Apollinis. In fabulam Aeneae Vergilius fabulam Daedali introduxit, quae diu doctis ad nihil pertinere videbatur. Falsissime quidem, quia non solum coniunctio fabularum exsistit, sed etiam multae sunt causae fabulae Daedali hoc loco imponendae. Imprimis caelamen monstrat multos casus ex vita Daedali et Aeneae similes fuisse, deinde ostendere Daedalum creatorem hibridarum esse videtur. Aeneis etiam hibrida est, quia constat ex duabus partibus, quae sunt, ut ita dicam, „pars Odysseica” et „pars Iliadica”. Utri (Daedalus Vergiliusque scilicet) sunt ergo creatores hibridarum. Maximi momenti est quaestio: quis dicit “miserum!” in hac parte poematis? Auctrix commentationis censet illum clamantem Vergilium esse, quia poeta constructorem „alter ego” suum esse credebat. Auctrix scripsit etiam imaginem illam, in qua caelata est fabula de Minotauro sine Theseo, viam esse pietatis Aeneae minuendae. Scripsit verba illa quoque opinionem Vergilii de natura poesis et vocem Augusti absconditam esse.
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