Derek Mahon: II: Axel’s Castle

Allusion to Classical figure Minerva’s owl, Domitian

Classical/post-Classical intertexts ‘only at dusk Minerva’s owl will fly’ is a translation from the preface to Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1820). The allusion to ‘Domitian in a hetacombe of dead flies’ recalls the hero of the ‘yellow book’ in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), who imagines himself as Domitian, Tiberius and Caligula. Mahon’s image of himself as a hermetic reader, traveling only in imagination, draws numerous intertextual references to Wilde’s novel, to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours (1884), and to the poetry of Baudelaire, amongst others (p.148 in O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003).