Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History.

Translations of Power provides a strong challenge to new historicist readings of the Renaissance dynastic epic. Bellamy argues with passion and insight for the importance of the concept of the unconscious in any theory about how imperial ideology is internalized and at times resisted (if traumatically) by epic subjects. She thus sets out to "psycho-analyze epic history," focusing on the conditions for the emergence of what she calls "epic subjecthood." This book aims, then, to contribute to the post-1980s debates about the status and adequacy of historicist interpretation. After a first chapter that challenges new historicist critiques of psychoanalysis, and a second that interprets Virgil's Aeneid, the book turns to the Renaissance epic, with sustained studies of Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. To look at the epic in this light is, it seems to me, to connect one's reading to an allegorical hermeneutic exemplified in Fulgentius and in the Christian tradition of reading the Aeneid as an allegory of the soul. The strengths of the book emerge in part from the way in which it clarifies how and why these poems ask to be read as psychic narratives; its limitations are clearest at moments where the author seems unwilling to acknowledge the consequences or extent of her own allegorizing.

For Bellamy, epic subjecthood is a result of repression, the mechanism that subordinates libidinal desires to an epic goal associated with both dynastic celebration and the national aims of the genre. She thus connects her study of psychic struggle with a theory of ideology (although this is less worked out), and she reads the poems in part by describing how each constructs an "epic unconscious" that resists epic teleology. The thrust of epic, then, is "the denial of the unconscious" (29). Bellamy adapts here a primarily generic distinction: epic represses romance, understood as "the narrative of narcissism as the locus of ego formation" (30). To add nuance to the simplicity that this model might suggest, Bellamy focuses on the processes of condensation by which the epic tries to appropriate romance - not simply an "imperialist" appropriation but one which produces "a generic edge by means of which the aftereffects of a romance unconscious leave their repressed, but nonetheless observable, traces" (32). Her determination to describe the complexity of the relations that may pertain between genres and psychic history should make this book of real value to readers of epic poetry. It will be most useful and accessible, however, to those with some familiarity with the psychoanalytic tradition.

Bellamy's reading of the Aeneid turns on the question of memory, and "the inevitably tropic nature of origins." All these epics must negotiate the "ghost of Troy" as the origin of their narratives (34), where the fall of Troy is the "subversive other" (35) of epic history, a repressed origin or primal scene of epic that returns to haunt the poems even in the moment that it is hidden, occulted, not looked back at. In her Ariosto chapter, she argues that a figurative understanding of armor and the dispersion of armor is the privileged trope of Orlando Furioso. This chapter and the Tasso chapter - in my opinion, the two strongest in the book - focus on mimetic desire where "identification and rivalry amount to the same thing" (110). Some historical reference here might have deepened Bellamy's work - as, for instance, to mimetic rivalry in contemporary aristocratic practice.

Bellamy's interpretation of the female warrior is one of the more polemical and, for me, least persuasive parts of the book. She reads the androgyne as a dangerously divided figure. This "internal violence" (171) produces a psychic struggle for Clorinda, for example: "if . . . some portion of her arrogance is, in turn, a consequence of her own compensatory anxiety that she lacks the phallus, then the androgyne is the sight/site of the mutual interplay between narcissism and castration anxiety for both male and female" (172). Aspects of this argument recur in the treatment of Britomart, whose "pugnacious defenses of her chastity" "seem little more than a symptom of female hysteria, wherein the woman is uncertain whether she is male (refusing to accept the fact of castration) or female. Insofar as Spenser's chastity can be interpreted to mean 'chaste' love within marriage, it can only mean acceptance of castration following the 'transgression' of penis envy" (211). This reading of the female warrior strikes me as inadequate and misleading. Bellamy does not accept, one gathers, any of the feminist challenges to Freudian or Lacanian accounts of female sexuality, and tends to present their theories as a matter of inevitability.

In short, one sees in this book a little too imperial a "translation" of the epic narratives into psychoanalytic ones. A clearer and more deliberate engagement with theorists who work on ideology (Jameson, Eagleton, Macherey, Laclau and Mouffe, and especially Slavoj Zizek) might have strengthened and complicated Bellamy's own efforts to link ideology and psyche. The many moments of great critical interest and excitement in the book would be more sustained if the author's psychoanalytic paradigms were themselves more fully interrogated, whether in their own terms, against specific historic example, or in the light of these critiques of ideology.

SUSANNE L. WOFFORD University of Wisconsin-Madison