To Jim's observation below I would just add that Stanley illustrates the
idea of teaching by "intangling" with a reading of the Despair episode
before he goes on to develop it as a Miltonic technique.
Oh, all right, and I'll also add that when Redcrosse thinks he's slain
error and exited her tangles, he's wrong. The House of Pride and
Orgoglio's dungeon are versions of the belly of the beast. In terms of
the corporeal symbolism in Book I, RC's problem is be reborn rather than
crapped out, as in his exit via the privy posterne from the IHOP.
Errour's "sink," like the cloaca in reptilian anatomy, conflates
(entangles?) these two functions. (It also identifies them with the
printing press, but that's another tangle . . .)
D
David Lee Miller
Department of English
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
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803 777-4256 (office)
803 777-4256 (fax)
803 466-3947 (cell)
>>> "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]> 4/1/2005 12:33:37
PM >>>
Re: "...tangled in the allegory ... Sounds like a lyric
by Bob Dylan"
-- Actually, it sounds like an avoidance of the opening
episode of The Faerie Queene. If one avoids that, how can
one be said to be reading the poem at all? (Answer:
"Well, we read it in translation" --?) David Miller's
Fish is following Milton's own phrase, of course; but one
might look to Spenser as well, in that the escape from
entanglement to arrive at teaching is effected by
explication and unfolding of implications, that is, by
progressing beyond a knight errant "wrapt Errours endlesse
train"--the Error whose "huge long taile" "ouerspred" the
floor of her den, but which was was nonetheless "in knots
and manie boughtes vpwound"--and thus coming to the
repetition in the case of the dragon: "His huge long
tayle wound up in hundred foldes" also "ouerspred[s]" an
expanse (his back), and is no less perplexed, being a tail
"Whose wreathed boughts when euer he vnfoldes, / And
thicke entangled knots adown does slack ... It sweepeth
all the land." If the tail unfolds to become commensurate
with the extent of the landscape itself, it also begins to
look like it is coeval with the whole fallen world (as
Error's tail stretches across Redcrosse's tale). --Tough
to defeat it, but, like the allegory, equally hard to
avoid.
-- Jim N.
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 02:11:27 EST
Mike Shipley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
In a message dated 3/26/2005 6:18:18 PM Pacific Standard
Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
so that they need not get tangled in the allegory
right away.
"Tangled in the allegory." Sounds like a lyric by Bob
Dylan.
(Dylan croons.....)
"Someone asks me, what's the story,
But
I'm tangled up in allegory."
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:50:03 -0500
"David L. Miller" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>No, he was Surprised by Sin (Fish on "teaching by
>intangling").
>
>>>> [log in to unmask] 3/30/2005 12:46:22 PM >>>
>I thought he was "tangled up in blue."
>
>pch
>
>At 11:11 PM 3/29/2005, you wrote:
>In a message dated 3/26/2005 6:18:18 PM Pacific Standard
>Time,
>[log in to unmask] writes:
>so that they need not get tangled in the allegory
>right away.
>
> "Tangled in the allegory." Sounds like a lyric by
>Bob Dylan.
>
> (Dylan croons.....)
>
>"Someone asks me, what's the story,
>But I'm tangled up in allegory."
>
>MRS
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English
Univ. of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA [log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English
Univ. of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
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