IF I am correctly construing your shorthand, Harry, then I'd say that
the sexual politics of the dialectic between calypso and apo-calypso are
manifested in the spiritualization of birth as rebirth in the HOH. This
is anticipated by the scheme that has Arthur "deliver" Redcrosse from
Orgolgio's dungeon nine months after his own imagination was inseminated
by Gloriana.
One passage that helps me sort these things out is the opening of canto
5, where the heroic mind is with child and gives birth to glorious
deeds. This passage looks forward to Arthur, but in context it's
fiendishly sardonic, since it describes Redcrosse's long night of
anticipation before his battle with Sansjoy. In effect it suggests
that Redcrosse is whelping to Errour's brood all over again while under
the illusion that he's gestating noble deeds.
For me all of this is more or less a footnote to an old essay by
someone whose name escapes me, something about a "Prelude to
Interpretation," where I read once that Redcrosse moves "forward still"
(i.e. his progress is an illusion and he relives the same bad dream)
until the dialectic of Apocalypse starts stripping away his projections.
More recent work that I'm sure you would be familiar with suggests that
this large-scale dialectic itself is based partly on a discourse of
misogyny, and that the text calls this misogyny into question too.
David Lee Miller
Department of English
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
[log in to unmask]
803 777-4256 (office)
803 777-4256 (fax)
803 466-3947 (cell)
>>> [log in to unmask] 4/3/2005 12:47:32 PM >>>
It moves from Echidna to Apolcaypse. Some of these figures and places
are female, some male. Difference? Pattern? Anything in this poem
about being Kalypsoed?
>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
>
>[log in to unmask]
>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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