A short note at the beginning of Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity observes that ‘[t]he author would like … to respectfully distance himself from the denomination of “classics” usually employed by scholars’ (xvi). With this, Carbone alerts the reader to the fact that his volume is rooted in present-day concerns. His qualms with the ‘ideologically loaded’ and ‘exclusionary baggage’ (xvi) of Classics in general is played out in the specific case and place of the Strait of Reggio and Messina, which has long been identified with the myths of Scylla and Charybdis. He demonstrates persuasively that the attachment of myth to place is far from a benign fancy, embedded instead in ‘genealogies of meaning and power’ (6) which impact upon the economics, identities and potential futures of communities in the present day.
The volume’s urgent ideological underpinning is paired with an innovative methodological approach. In places, Carbone is a reception scholar with a focus on texts, as in his third chapter, ‘Chronotopes of Hellas’, in which he traces depictions of the Strait in Grand Tour literature, and demonstrates the ways in which these post-classical encounters continue to inform current-day tourism and myth-making. Elsewhere, however, Carbone is an ethnographer with a unique identity: a one-time native of Reggio who had become enough of an émigré to be termed by locals as a ‘pale Londoner’ (26). He describes his camera as a particularly valuable fieldwork tool: more than an instrument for recording, it helped to break the ice with both ‘fellow tourists’ and locals (24).
Carbone’s conversations with his informants represent, to me, his most compelling material. For example, the mismatch between the identification of the region of Calabria as the inheritor of ‘Greater Greece’ and its status as one of the poorest areas of Italy is captured in the lament of one fisherman who commented to Carbone that Homer ‘has done a lot, we have done little’ (59). Elsewhere, fishermen asked by an enthused academic to view themselves as ‘citizens of the former Greater Greece’ responded ‘no, as they didn’t know any Greek’ (107).
The Odyssey, of course, looms large over Carbone’s scholarly and physical journeys through the Strait. In chapter four (‘Mediterranean Place-Myths’), he assesses attempts in both textual and visual media to ‘follow in the footsteps’ of Odysseus. He acknowledges the power exerted by Homer’s epic, finding that even as a self-conscious scholar he ran the risk of inhabiting ‘the cliché of re-enacting the voyage of Odysseus’ (63). In his fifth chapter (‘Myth of Myths’), he shifts subtly from the issue of following Odysseus to that of mapping his voyage onto the ‘real world’. He concludes that ‘teleological’ narratives which identify the ‘real’ Strait as direct inspiration for Homer are problematic, but acknowledges that the landscape itself ‘created favourable conditions for it to be transformed into a place-myth’ (103). Both here and in the following chapter, on tourism in the town of Scilla, he notes the motivations for holding to that place-myth, such as arguments for making the Strait a UNESCO heritage site (104), or simply entertaining visitors. One boat tour organizer, for example, employs actresses to perform as Sirens with an inflatable monstrous Scylla (120–21).
Of course, myths also have the potential to distort and to restrict. In his conclusions, Carbone highlights the problematic essentialism of the pervasive inheritance of Graeco-Roman symbols in an area of ‘systemic racism’ and ‘colourist myths of identity’ (176), as suggested above in the comment on the shade of his own skin. Moving beyond myths of place represents in some ways a loss – Carbone admits that, to his own eyes, ‘[t]he Strait looked less magical and inspiring’ (177) once stripped of its Homeric descent – but also the opportunity to escape from the ‘gilded cage of imprisoning nostalgia’ (179). Here, really, is the root of Carbone’s concern with the terminology of ‘classics’ with which this review began: the ‘classical’ is monolithic (20) and hegemonic (179), a cultural signifier which has for centuries belonged to the privileged. Carbone argues that, in the Strait, classical historiography reproduces a sense of ‘rootedness’ which ultimately promotes division. A different, more collaborative future, he suggests, is not just possible when we move beyond myth, but urgently needed in a world of pandemics and environmental crises.
In his acknowledgements, Carbone self-deprecatingly alludes to the ‘half-handful of readers possibly interested in my work’ (xiii–xiv). This may well be true in terms of some of the fine-grained detail of the book, but in terms of his wider arguments and what it reveals of the contemporary impact of both myth and ‘classics’, I believe that Carbone’s work deserves to be considered by a far greater number.
