Thanks Jim and Ken.  The idea of Milton picking up pieces of the 
crucifixion in various works is very appealing. I'd want to add the 
catastrophe in /Samson Agonistes/ as a final (but not completing) limb.  
I suspect that Milton's inability or failure to write the passion 
follows, from and, makes sense in terms of, a developing and very 
radical Christology, which is strangely grounded in Milton's respect for 
the materiality of signifiers, be they words or the Word.  But I won't 
clutter up a Spenser list with the details of this half-thought thought.

Your evocation of Hippolytus as intertext for both Spenser and Milton 
reminds me of an old question about Red Cross's entering latency after 
his betrothal to Una. In the Golden Legend the fate of St George turns 
pretty ugly (or glorious in the number of important souls saved by 
witnessing his interminable suffering) after he slays the dragon, and I 
always wondered about what would have happened to him in the unwritten 
books of FQ and whether Spenser's readers would import the after story 
from the legend as a dark shadow over the "happy ending" of Book I. All 
the stuff about dismemberment and reconstituted relics is there in the 
hagiography, which suggests that the ending of FQ II is rather like the 
ending of /Paradise Regained/.  The dragon is dead and Eden is raised in 
the wilderness, but all the painful dismemberment and resurrection 
necessary to put the "good news" to work is left to a nasty future that 
Jesus anticipates but Red Cross does not.  Of course it is easier for 
Jesus to know what comes when the page is turned because he's read Judges.

James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
> Dear Marshall:  I thought you might never ask....
>
> I worked backwards on this one, i.e. retracing the trail that led from 
> Alciati's image of Isis -- she is the votive object (non tibi, sed 
> religione) mistakenly thought to be himself (as the object of worship) 
> by the image-bearing ass in Aesop.  Then one cites Plutarch's De 
> Iside, as translated by Amyot and Philemon Holland, Typhon being the 
> goddess' enemy, "enfle & enourgueilly par son ignorance" -- inflated 
> and pride-swollen [cp. Orgoglio] by his ignorance [cp. Ignaro] -- and 
> as saying in the Greek that Typhon "tears in pieces and buries out of 
> sight the holy word, which the goddess gathers up again and puts 
> together, and gives into the care of those that are initiated."  Pico, 
> in the Oration on the Dignity of Man, speaks somewhat similary about 
> the sparagmos of Dionysus by the Titans, vs. the unity of Apollo.  
> Pico gets glossed by Clement of Alexandria, Stromata I.xiii:  "For we 
> shall find that very many of the dogmas that are held by such sects 
> [as those of the pagans] have not become utterly senseless... [and] 
> correspond in their origin and with the truth as a whole.  For they 
> coincide in one.... In the whole universe, all the parts, though 
> differing one from another, preserve their relation to the whole.  So, 
> then, the barbarian and Hellenic philosophy has torn off a fragment of 
> eternal truth not from the mythology of Dionysus, but from the 
> theology of the ever-living Word.  And He who brings again together 
> the separate fragments, and makes them one, will without peril, be 
> assured, contermplate the perfect Word, the truth."  Ralph Cudworth 
> (writing after Areopagitica, I guess) interprets Plutarch's mtyh to 
> similar effect (True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678, p. 
> 355).  (My text is back in my office on college grounds--I can't quote 
> it as I'd like.)  (The Ren. idea of "the unity of truth" is the 
> subject of a chapter in Kristeller, Ren. Concepts of Man (1972), 
> 43-63; again, the text is not before me.)  The spargmos trope for the 
> reconstruction of pagan theology as the re-assembling of the disjecta 
> membra of pagan literature appears in Boccaccio's preface to the 
> Genealogia:   "I can quite realize this labor to which I am 
> committed--this vast system of gentile gods and their progeny, torn 
> limb from limb and scattered among the rough and desert places and 
> antiquity and the thorns of hate, wasted away, sunk almost to ashes; 
> and here I am setting forth to collect these fragments, hither and 
> yon, and fit them together, like another Aesculapius restoring 
> Hippolytus." (Osgood trans., LLA.) Hippoltus was resurrected by 
> Aesculapius as Virbius--I have spoken at MLA on his relation to his 
> christianized form as Saint Hippolytus as a type for Redcrosse.  
> Duessa begins by confessing she could not find the missing body of her 
> lord.  The Hippolytus project of Boccacio seems to me a precise enough 
> analogy for what Aesculapius and Duessa unconsciously and 
> proleptically intend for Sansjoy in FQ I.v, namely an analogy for the 
> archaeological reconstruction of myth-as-system:  Boccaccio and these 
> followers are  somewhat in advance of John Selden and Sir James Frazer.
>
> Be warned, that here comes a very long, Spenserian detour, before our 
> returning to the invitation re Milton.
>
> In Spenser's Book I, one strand of imagery makes Redcrosse suffer like 
> the host in the mass, another has Mistress Missa cast out like an idol 
> or false god.  Again:  one strand of imagery makes Redcrosse a mortal 
> with feet of clay, another conserves his remains like a relic in the 
> cult of a saint.  In The Faerie Queene , the true saint is always 
> being set by his or her image.  And what the dialectic of the argument 
> divides and opposes, the construction of the fiction dissembles and 
> resembles.
>  
> Contra  Virgil's Aeneid , Augustine says the dead do not have to be 
> properly disposed to work their peace.  Yet the grateful burial of the 
> dead is corporal act of mercy or charity and Sansjoy is motivated by 
> the comparable pagan consideration.  He and his kinsman Sansfoy cannot 
> rest because the latter's remains have fallen into the wrong hands.  
> In a story allegorized in the Gesta Romanorum, a knight loses his life 
> from wounds three days after a combat he has successfully undertaken 
> to deliver a lady from a tyrant; the lady devotes the rest of her life 
> to the knight's bloody arms.  The allegory identifies the relics as 
> the cross.  But according to a similar account in the Anchorites' Rule 
> , the shield of the Christ-knight who sacrifices his life to deliver 
> his lady-love from the siege of her earthen castle, "was His dear 
> body, which was extended upon the cross, broad as a shield above where 
> His arms were streched out, and narrow below [,".]  where, as many 
> think, one foot was set upon the other.  ...This shield is given to us 
> as a protection against all temptations..." ] Sansfoy's shield is hung 
> upon a tree.  Delivering the coup de grace , the victorious Redcrosse 
> tells Sansjoy to report in Hades that he now has both shields.  The 
> victor has scored a Homeric double--or fallen into scoring one.
>      
> For it is an ambiguous legacy.  That is, the veneration of the saints 
> and of their relics is an essential part of both popery and the Lives 
> of the Saints.  Moreover, the relics acquired their own 
> miracle-stories, or golden legends, when the histories of the saints 
> themselves had been forgotten. The holy grail Joseph of Arimathea 
> brought into Britain is "The sacred pledge of Christes Euangely" there 
> -- or at least so they say  (II.x.53). Relics were called pignora  or 
> "pledges" or "pawns" in medieval Latin. In the feudal world in which 
> Redcrosse operates, his word, shield, and gauntlet are all sacred 
> pledges, and his sword and spear get called his relics by the devoted 
> Una herself.
>
> Just as a vassal was bound to his liege lord, so was a penitent bound 
> to his saint by the exchange of prayers, oaths, vows, and gifts -- and 
> by a journey to his shrine.  Duessa's and Night's visit to the 
> underworld to secure the pledge of a cure for Sansjoy is essentially a 
> pilgrimage to St. Aesculapius, who once healed "the reliques" of 
> Hippolytus, and made a new man--Virbius--of him.
>
> Both Una and Duessa find, in various ways, the hero's remains.  "Go," 
> Duessa instructs the matriarch Night, "gather vp the reliques of thy 
> race," meaning the remains of the beclouded Sansjoy, as an Isis would 
> gather up the remains of her kinsman Osiris.  We recollect that relics 
> are body parts, often limbs, as many of the conformably-shaped 
> reliqueries that encase them, hand-in-glove (or gauntlet), attest.  
> Such parts are emblems and remnants of the Saint's efficacy, as they 
> were once the bodily agents of his will.  Thus Redcrosse's "byting 
> sword and his deuouring speare" are "reliques" which once bespoke "his 
> prowesse."  The forcefulness of him who bore and ruled them, "the 
> forlorne relqiues of his powre," abandons or is abandoned by them, and 
> they survive "To be the record of his ruefull losse" of potency: "O 
> heauie record of the good Redcrosse ," asks Una rhetorically, "Where 
> haue you left your Lord...?"  She could say, with Helena mooning over 
> her Count in All's Well That Ends Well (I.i.103), "But now he's gone, 
> and my idolatrous fancy / Must sanctify his relics." -- Probably a 
> strand of Bertram's cocker spaniel locks.
>   The "reliques" of Sansjoy, in the care of Night (I.v.24), are 
> mentioned in the same canto as those left from the "smart" of 
> Hippolytus (I.v.39), in the care of Diana.  The pagan Hippolytus comes 
> up as an analogate for Sansjoy because both are subject to the 
> ministrations of a healer who cannot salve himself:  Aesculapius.  
> Hippolytus is a dispersed and rejoined body, a kind of miracle 
> otherwise attributed to the Saints.  His dismemberment results from 
> being dragged to death by the horses which draw his father's chariot 
> in which he thinks to escape an overlord's wrath.
>
> A little like Joseph in the Bible, the Classical Hippolytus is accused 
> of sleeping with the mistress of the house in which he occupies a 
> junior position.  Joseph is thrown into prison, Hippolytus into Hades. 
> Christian legend transposes Hippolytus' fate into the martyrdom of a 
> Saint Hippolytus, about whom we read in The Golden Legend.  He was a 
> Roman guard involved in the arrest of St. Lawrence by the Roman 
> Emperor.  But the soldier was converted and become Lawrence's 
> acolyte.  After Lawrence's martyrdom on the grill the Emperor 
> particularly accuses Hippolytus of sorcery, because of his traffic in 
> bodies:  for he has bestowed the saint's remains, after the Emperor 
> left him on the fire.  "Hippolytus took [the body] away in the 
> morning, anointed it with spices, and ... buried it in the Veranus 
> field.   Christians kept vigil, fasting, for three days, lamenting and 
> weeping."  The soldier who honored the sainted Christian is dragged to 
> death by horses in his turn; two late medieval representations show 
> him being drawn apart in such a way that he appears in the form of 
> Christ being crucified.  He and his whole household have refused to 
> forswear their new Christian faith and dedication -- to chastity:  
> only the story of the pagan Hippolytus' rebuff of his stepmother 
> Phaedra can explain this last detail.
>  
> St. Ambrose, says Voragine in Hipolytus' golden legend, wrote that 
> this saint was a soldier of Christ who "did not resist having his 
> limbs torn asunder, lest he be mangled with eternal hooks" (that is, 
> in hell).
>
> A further story about this saint has him appear with the Virgin to 
> heal the leg of an unfortunate plowman who was struck by lightning 
> upon his using profanity, and who was healed after he had prayed to 
> the Queen of heaven. St. Hippolytus, in the part of physician, finds 
> this fellow's separated and hidden shinbone, and reinserts into his 
> body.  This is just the kind of stuff that has earned the name  of 
> Hippolytus a place in the religio  of Duessa.
>
> In this religion the saints are seen as bodies and bodily remains.  
> The Golden Legend  argues, hard upon the story of Hippolytus, that the 
> Virgin was assumed bodily into heaven, because, unlike the other 
> miracle-working dead, she left no place of earthly burial where her 
> miracles could be performed.  Her body must therefore be in heaven.  A 
> parody of this reasoning deprives Redcrosse of the mystified site of 
> Sansjoy's death:  no man knows the place of his burial because he is 
> assumed bodily into hell, where the miracle-working Aesculapius is 
> called upon to restore him to health.  But isn't that what the Golden 
> Legend  did for Hippolytus himself, with its euhemeristic 
> christianization of the pagan myth of the chaste victim of a lord's 
> jealous wrath?  Spenser does not tell us this, but neither does he 
> tell us that in Boccaccio's Latin poem, Pantheon, on various literary 
> avatars for the phases Christ's life, the character chosen to 
> represent the resurrection is Hippolytus-Virbius.  Servius has Diana 
> restore Hippolytus as Virbius, and Spenser does not tell us that 
> either.  Yet it obviously helps to know.
>
> Seldon, by letting characters out of Palestinian and Syrian pantheons 
> into the Boccaccian study of myth, of course begins to transform it 
> into anthropology.  Milton, in the same tradition, writing that "From 
> that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, 
> imitating the careful search that Isis made of the mangled body of 
> Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they 
> could find them."  Only with the Master's second coming will Truth be 
> made whole, but Nag Hamadi and the like put Milton not only on the 
> track of pre-conciliar Christianity, but also of Elaine Pagels and 
> things like the Gospel of Thomas.  But "Thomas" is half-miscalled, I 
> maintain:  it is not a "gospel" unless it offers a Passion narrative, 
> which brings us back to what is missing in Milton, namely the 
> centrality of the Crucifixion to the Christian religion.
>
> The "mangled body of Osiris" is there in Areopagitica to remind us of 
> that very Miltonic absence.  In the verse Christ's sacrifice is 
> shrunken to "On the Circumcision," the upgathered "poetic fragment" 
> "The Passion," and the exposition of the Son in PL III.  Like the 
> remains of Osiris, we have to gather it up.  But much of the 
> Crucifixion is absorbed into Satan and Adam, Satan's successful 
> harrowing of hell in Bk. X included.  As Christ brings out Adam and 
> Eve and the OT fathers and prophets, Satan brings out Sin and Death 
> and all the gods of pagan religion.
>
> -- "Mangled":  curiously, it is Moloc who threatens Gabriel "at his 
> Chariot wheels to drag him bound" (PL VI, 358), it is Beelzebub who 
> has shockingly changed into the vision of the corpse of Hector in Book 
> I, and it is the narrator Raphael's own self-apotheosizing adversaries 
> Adramelec and Asmadai who are "Mangl'd with gastly wounds through 
> Plate and Mail" -- by the narrator, Raphael, in the third person (PL 
> VI, 368).  But I guess the remains of these devils can nonetheless be 
> preserved, through e-mail.   -- Jim N.
>
>
> On Mon, 4 Jun 2007 13:29:06 -0400
>  Marshall Grossman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I wonder if I can get you to go on to speculate a bit about Milton's 
>> use of Isiris picking up the scattered limbs of Osiris as a vehicle 
>> for the "sad friends of truth" going up and down collecting "her" 
>> [Truth's] pieces while awaiting the return of "her Master"?
>>
>> Marshall Grossman
>> Professor
>> Department of English
>> University of Maryland
>> College Park, MD 20895
>>
>> 301-405-9651
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>>
>>
>> James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
>>> Yes, and the logic as to why the lewd Mistress Missa is what she is, 
>>> in Protestant polemic, is because of a kind of reactivation of the 
>>> biblical typology whereby Israelite idolatry is indissociable from 
>>> the prophetic diatribe informed by -- and reacting against -- the 
>>> temple practice of temple prostitutes in the Ancient Near East, 
>>> where religion was fertililty cult(ic).
>>>
>>> The pun on pride is essential to the meaning of FQ III.xi.32 (on 
>>> Leda and the swan), which is why I think this text, III.xi.32, in in 
>>> turn essential to the meaning of I.vii.9f ("Puft vp ... grown great 
>>> through arrogant delight" -- or swollen with phallic pride).  And 
>>> AnFQ thought -- at the point Lacan was quoted on 
>>> circumcision-sacrifice as "le phallus d'Osiris embaumé" for the 
>>> virtually entombed Redcrosse -- that "his members chast / Scattered 
>>> on euery mountaine" at I.v.38 (on Redcrosse/Sansjoy as a Hippolytus) 
>>> required glossing with the "member" delusively attributed to 
>>> Britomart at FQ III.i.60. ("The interment of Sansjoy, if our 
>>> interpretation of the House of Pride episode is correct [reading it 
>>> as a tour through an idolatrous church], might be described as an 
>>> ironic deposition of the body of Christ.  Duessa's disposal of 
>>> Redcrosse in the Orgoglio episode inviates a similar interpretation, 
>>> since Arthur's lifting of Redcrosse's 'pined corse' (I.viii.40) 
>>> decidedly suggests a pictorial 'quotation' from the deposition 
>>> subject [in church art]").  Thus one arrives at the equation of 
>>> Una's ministrations to Redcrosse -- or of Duessa's to Sansjoy -- 
>>> with those of Isis in behalf of the fallen and dis-membered Osiris.
>>>
>>> Also:  "The suggestion is that pride is always looking for an 
>>> occasion; after the Fall it is something of an independent 
>>> reflex...Orgoglio is the tumescence of the proud man to the 
>>> exclusion of any other characterization." ("The proud man becomes 
>>> human Pride, and the man himself is correspondingly emasculated.")  
>>> Perhaps it helps to remember that at the time Redcrosse succumbs to 
>>> Orgoglio Sir Satyrane (a knight of maidenhead who bears a 
>>> satyr-headed shield at III.vii.30f) is struggling with Una's 
>>> would-be rapist Sansloi, when "that proud Sarazin [= Sansloi] ... 
>>> gan reuiue the memory / Of his lewd lusts, and late attempted sin" 
>>> (I.vi.46), just before canto vii begins.  (The two episodes are 
>>> narratively aligned again, at I.vii.20, by the intervention of the 
>>> go-between dwarf.)
>>>
>>> I suppose there are practical objections to testing the matter of 
>>> the preventative application of erectile dysfunction antidotes to 
>>> jetlag on humans in the air rather than hamsters.  One "Airplane" is 
>>> enough.
>>>
>>> On Sun, 3 Jun 2007 16:43:01 -0400
>>>  anne prescott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>> I have nothing to add so wide-ranging and erudite a comment, but 
>>>> I'll just add, if with some repetition, that I myself find 
>>>> Schroeder's  essay on Orgoglio as a phallus quite convincing--and 
>>>> his evidence  about classical and early modern hydraulic theories 
>>>> about earthquakes  and erections not a little funny, although not 
>>>> as funny as recent  research showing that hamsters don't get jetlag 
>>>> if fed Viagra. The  phallicism involved plays with both the 
>>>> Elizabethan pun on sexual  swelling as "pride" but also on sexual 
>>>> swelling as "will"--which in  turn recalls the tradition of a 
>>>> rider's horse as his "will" in more  than one sense (an allegory 
>>>> I'm convinced that Spenser had read  because it's structured like 
>>>> Book I has a knight who rides a horse  named "Will"). The 
>>>> theological implications are significant because  the temptation to 
>>>> horse around with Catholicism and the Mass was also  sexualized in 
>>>> Protestant polemic--as see Douglas Waters on "Mistress  Missa" and 
>>>> some unspeakably obscene and sexualized images of the Pope  and the 
>>>> Mass. To be poured out in looseness on the grassy ground with  
>>>> Duessa is one way of indicating a loose and prideful willingness to 
>>>> ignore the Gospel. I don't think this is to "freudianize" the 
>>>> giant-- or at least not any more than was done at the time. Lust is 
>>>> one  traditional way to symbolize Luciferian pride. St. Augustine 
>>>> would  have no trouble in making a connection. As Jim says, sexual 
>>>> lust (not  the "kindly flame" of natural sexual desire, but a 
>>>> self-indulgent  "infected will" in the old punning sense) and 
>>>> spiritual pride were  not then so separate as they might appear 
>>>> now. And I say that as one  with profound doubts about Freud. Anne 
>>>> Prescott.
>>>>
>>>> On Jun 3, 2007, at 3:00 PM, James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> An off-list correspondent wanted to know why Orgoglio had to be  
>>>>> freudianized
>>>>> at all (and thus trivialized--since he represents a "Luciferian  
>>>>> pride" and
>>>>> not a libidinous lust), and, also, why Dante's giants (esp.  
>>>>> Antaeus) had to be
>>>>> phallicized or discussed in these terms at all.
>>>>>
>>>>> Respondeo:
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't think of Orgoglio as exclusively "phallic pride," quite the
>>>>> contrary, I regard the phallic giants as a symbol of quite  
>>>>> different kinds
>>>>> of spiritual fault.  Thus Don Quixote (at Pt. 2, ch. 8), in 
>>>>> explaining
>>>>> knight errantry, maintains that "in confronting giants, it is the  
>>>>> sin of
>>>>> pride we slay" (--as well as envidia, ira, gula, lujuria and  
>>>>> peroza!) -- presumably because pride is puffed up.  The expansion  
>>>>> of the list, of course, opens the way to the kind of boisterous  
>>>>> giant met in Orlando's friend Morgante in Pulci and in Gargantua  
>>>>> and Pantagruel in Rabelais.
>>>>>
>>>>> In Dante (to get back to pride in the Inferno) the arrogance of  
>>>>> Fillipo Argenti, the inveterate caste pride of the contumacious  
>>>>> grand seigneur Farinata, the injured
>>>>> vanity of suicidal Piero della Vigna, the rebellious defiance of  
>>>>> Capaneus, the blasphemous contempt of Vanni Fucci, the senseless  
>>>>> grandosity and foolish ignorance
>>>>> of the giants, and Lucifer's original self-exaltedness form a 
>>>>> chain  of desperate
>>>>> and despairing sinners who are anything but luxurious in their  
>>>>> sinning (see
>>>>> Homer to Brecht, 88-91) -- pride has hardened their hearts,  
>>>>> stiffened their
>>>>> necks, and frozen their fellow feeling.
>>>>>
>>>>> As for Orgoglio (and especially in relation to Despair in canto  
>>>>> ix), "The escape from
>>>>> the joyless House of Pride issues in a vain and shallow optimism,  
>>>>> and the
>>>>> void left by the rejected trappings of external pride is suddenly  
>>>>> filled by
>>>>> an overwhelming interior pride. The hero's 'postmortem'  
>>>>> contemplation of his
>>>>> humiliation by his pride, after its alleviation, is so dismaying  
>>>>> that it
>>>>> leads to Despair: the humiliation of the earlier episode is  
>>>>> retroactivated,
>>>>> as it were, upon the withdrawal of Arthur's support." (AnFQ.  )
>>>>>
>>>>> And: "Almost before we know it the Philistines are upon him  
>>>>> [Redcrosse in FQ
>>>>> I.vii] (Judges 16:20)  and the knight has disappeared into 
>>>>> Orogoglio's
>>>>> dungeon. In effect Orgoglio replaces Redcrosse, becoming Duessa's new
>>>>> master. And yet Redcrosse survives at the bottom of the palace,  
>>>>> Orgoglio's
>>>>> 'eternall bondslaue' (I.viii.14). Interpreting the allegory, we 
>>>>> may  say that beneath any haughty exeterior there is the fearful 
>>>>> victim  of a humiliation. He is kept by Ignaro, of
>>>>> course, since we do not usually acknowledge the poor creature's  
>>>>> existence."
>>>>> Thus the same page of AnFQ that quotes Lacan on the phallus also  
>>>>> quotes Augustine
>>>>> on the loftiness that debases, and the lowliness that exalts.
>>>>>
>>>>> If Orgoglio gets or possesses Duessa, and if in this kind of  
>>>>> projective
>>>>> allegory he is an aspect of Redcrosse, then Orgoglio's sudden  
>>>>> insurgence and
>>>>> sudden 'dejection' (as it were), are aspects of Redcrosse 
>>>>> too--his  body
>>>>> included. Thus the context for the argument about Orgoglio's  
>>>>> phallic insurgence and
>>>>> deflation is Redcrosse's being seduced in a dissolute state, and  
>>>>> committing idolatry
>>>>> with Duessa, which is adultery biblically speaking (a form of  
>>>>> political-relgious promiscuity, according to the OT prophets) 
>>>>> under  every green tree.  --Plus the feeling that Spenser 
>>>>> sexualizes  Redcrosse's experience from the outset, with his 
>>>>> nearly wet-dream  of Una as lasciviously Duessan. The argument 
>>>>> also depends on the  partial analogy of the events in cantos 
>>>>> vii-viii of Book I with  those in the same cantos of Book IV.  
>>>>> [E.g., "a captive victim  (Redcrosse, Amyas), a relentless giant 
>>>>> pagan (Orgoglio, Corflambo);  a faithful companion who sues for 
>>>>> Arthur's aid (Una, Placidas); a  jailor who
>>>>> is himself in a kind of bondage (Ignaro with 'the keyes of every  
>>>>> door'; Paeana's captive dwarf with 'the keyes of every prison  
>>>>> door' [I.viii.30, IV.viii.54]), and the unveiling of Arthur's  
>>>>> shield (I.viii.19-21, IV.viii.42)."]
>>>>>
>>>>> Antaeus in Dante -- to explain that giant's particular 
>>>>> eligibility  re damnable pride
>>>>>  -- is (implicitly) convicted of (a foolish) vanity by his 
>>>>> response  to the
>>>>> artfully flattering words -- like those of the seducer Jason --  
>>>>> that Virgil uses to
>>>>> obtain the two pilgrims' conveyance to the bottom of hell.
>>>>>
>>>>> As for Dante's immobilized giants generally, it is their position  
>>>>> in hell's
>>>>> body that determines their own bodily character. "The giants  
>>>>> themselves seem
>>>>> to sum up a vast range of doby imagery found throughout the  
>>>>> Inferno. The
>>>>> lustful are borne on the winds that are the sighs with which they  
>>>>> ventilated
>>>>> their passions. The gluttons lie under a sudden deluge 
>>>>> representing  the flow
>>>>> of matter they guzzled and relased in life. Out of such  
>>>>> observations emerges
>>>>> the image of Hell as a gigantic, shadowy creature suffering the  
>>>>> interior
>>>>> life of the fallen man. It breathes with the lovers; it is  
>>>>> nourished with
>>>>> the gluttons; it is irrigated with the polluted river of tears; it is
>>>>> steeped in the blood of our violence. It ruminates upon the 
>>>>> sinners  immersed
>>>>> in its fluids and canals, and it is half-poisoned on the wastes  
>>>>> that clot
>>>>> its visceral foul pouches. Finally, though locked by an icy waste  
>>>>> that is
>>>>> all impasse, it is voided by a cathartic vision of evil." (Homer 
>>>>> to  Brecht.)
>>>>>
>>>>> Similarly, but à la Jules Verne, rather than Dante: "Isaac 
>>>>> Azimov's  The
>>>>> Fantastic Voyage is presumably titled after a traditional, 
>>>>> Odyssean  topos of
>>>>> allegorical romance, but is concerned with the map-like tracing 
>>>>> of  a terrain
>>>>> that is physiological. The story visits the post-Vesalius and 
>>>>> post- Harvey
>>>>> topography--the body within--as presently and routinely explored 
>>>>> by  probes,
>>>>> scopes, radiation, and target-specific chemicals. Asimov's  
>>>>> narrative of an
>>>>> endo-somatic mission assigned to a miniaturized, cell-like spaceship,
>>>>> coursing through the vital passages of a stricken corpus [the 
>>>>> comatose
>>>>> patient has had a stroke], predictably traces those clinical  
>>>>> interventions
>>>>> so frequently instrumental in the modern body's preservation or  
>>>>> destruction:
>>>>> which are co-ordinated--collusively or traitorously--with the  
>>>>> body's own
>>>>> internal activity at critical sites. A loud noise rocks the ship 
>>>>> in  the
>>>>> channels of the ear, the arterial sailors run short of oxygen in  
>>>>> the lungs,
>>>>> a [heartless] traitor is discovered on board in the heart, and a  
>>>>> clot has to
>>>>> be dissolved--and the security problem resolved--in the recesses 
>>>>> of  the
>>>>> brain. Just before the miniaturization period of the mote-like  
>>>>> vessel is due
>>>>> to end, the ship is flushed through the eye. ... The visit to the  
>>>>> inside of
>>>>> a stroke victim's prostrate anatomy takes us back to traditional  
>>>>> initiations
>>>>> into allegorical underworlds and pilgrimages through figurative  
>>>>> landscapes.
>>>>> And if mutually destructive allelophagy results from the infinite  
>>>>> desire of
>>>>> bodies to consume eath other, it is logical that a ravnous white  
>>>>> corpuscle
>>>>> devour the villain cast off from Asimov's innerspaceship. 
>>>>> Moreover,  if the
>>>>> vessel deminiaturizes before it surfaces, each body will 
>>>>> annihilate  the
>>>>> other." ("Allegory De-Veiled")
>>>>>
>>>>> Analogously, the medieval and leviathanic hell is likewise  
>>>>> allelophagic, so
>>>>> at the end of the Inferno the Gospel's Satan that enters Judas  
>>>>> becomes the
>>>>> Dante's Judas who enters Satan. Our explaining of the giants as  
>>>>> located in
>>>>> the groin of hell, and as standing out phallically from the  
>>>>> perimeter of
>>>>> hell's body, and as located near that body's nadir, seems to 
>>>>> follow  the
>>>>> logic of identifying them with the genitals of hell, a nadir 
>>>>> whose  presence
>>>>> is insisted on by the course Dante shortly takes over Satan's own  
>>>>> subthoracic
>>>>> region and across his hairy flanks.  So by leaving behind the 
>>>>> reign  (Lat. regnum)
>>>>> of hell, Dante also leaves behind the devil's reins (the loins,  
>>>>> once the
>>>>> seat of the passions [from Lat. ren/es, kidney/s]).
>>>>>
>>>>> -- Jim N.
>>>>>
>>>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>>> James Nohrnberg
>>>>> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
>>>>> Univ. of Virginia
>>>>> P.O Box 400121
>>>>> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
>>>
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>> James Nohrnberg
>>> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
>>> Univ. of Virginia
>>> P.O Box 400121
>>> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
>
> [log in to unmask]
> James Nohrnberg
> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
> Univ. of Virginia
> P.O Box 400121
> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121


-- 
Marshall Grossman
Professor
Department of English
University of Maryland
3101 SQH
College Park, MD 20895

301-405-9651
[log in to unmask]