Presentation on Maltese writer at Harvard

Literary critic and writer Bernard Micallef has presented a paper entitled "Reading Achille Mizzi - A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of the Christian Narrative" at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the venue for an international conference on "The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Sentiment in Literature".

Mr Micallef was invited by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning to participate in both this event and an aesthetics conference, held from May 14 to 17.

Mr Micallef demonstrated the way Achille Mizzi's poetic techniques help us rehearse our mythically prescribed being into a new and enigmatic outcome. Ranging from simile to metalepsis, Mizzi's techniques were analysed as the instance when archaic meanings merge with an effective growth in meaningfulness, or when archetypal imagery is evoked only through complementary distortions that become morally significant.

In his approach, Mr Micallef followed Hans-Georg Gadamer's objective of loosening the text from its traditional fixity without yet losing its traditional effect, an interpretative method in which text and reader must primarily merge into one meaningful advance in being.

His approach was also based on Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of meaningful interpretation, which occurs when language as an inherited structure comes into conflict with language as the reader's ongoing effort and event of structuration.

Mr Micallef refers to both processes as "significant becoming", and exemplifies this concept through showing how Mizzi's resurgence of myth is simultaneously its creative emergence.

His paper will be published in the institute's yearbook of phenomenological research, the Analecta Husserliana, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.

Mr Micallef teaches Maltese literature at the Junior College, and was first inspired to write and publish analytical essays on Mizzi's poetry by their eventual editor, Tony Cortis.

Achille Mizzi is one of the leading modernist poets in Maltese literature. Works like Fission and Olympus continue to speak to us, says Micallef, because they best excel in what they provocatively recall from mythical lore: archetypes of divine preordainment, of primordial guilt, and of universal judgment evoked through an aesthetic growth in meaningfulness.

Underlying Mizzi's oracular stance and his surface texture of archetypal finality, there is a flux of unresolved mythemes that accounts for the creative dimension of his work. The poet's recourse to the age-old mytheme of primordial guilt, for instance, betrays a deeper fluctuation between its biblical version of the Fall and its Greek model of hamartia, a duality between its universal and individual dimensions.

Mizzi's poetry thus comes into its own by aesthetically exceeding the very archetypal finality which predetermines its validity. In this way it avoids, argues Micallef, the pitfalls of short-lived gimmickry and vacuous bohemianism when put to the test of critical rigour.