Susanne Woods writes:  <[log in to unmask]>

"Sears Jayne once told me he thought the appearance of Colin Clout near the
end of Book VI was a little like the artist's signature at the bottom of the
painting."

The word "signature" is used in this way -- and is put in quotes there
("...") -- in the 3rd of the opening paragraphs of Northrop Frye's essay on
The FQ published in January of 1961 ("Structure of Imagery," in UofToronto
Quarterly).

The Great Coda.  Let us start with the Bible, which is either a huge
anthology and miscellany without the cuts, or else the most monolithic book
ever written: one in which, properly cross-referenced, every verse-unit
connects to every other by no more than the proverbial six degrees of 
separation:
i.e., if we have faith in its unity in the first place, and call it THE word
of God, and not "A word of God."

How do we know the difference?  I.e. between atomic aggreates and molecular
wholes?  Is it all in the mind of the interpreter?  Milton's "The Passion" 
is supposedly unfinished, even while Milton is inventing the form of the 
precocious fragment -- e.g., Kublah Kahn -- whose phonetically 
self-enclosed, self-reflective, and chiasmically symmetrical first line 
itself belies the poem's incompleteness (or decrees the fullness of its 
formation).

Do we need to backtrack here, and consider the Bible as a kind of collapsed
literature, and the interpreter of it as coming upon the canon of another
culture, a bit like the reader of a work like Proust's, when at the end 
he/she's
confronted with the tremendous elevated burden of pure retrospectivity?  The 
end of
some long novels is like a funeral for us, we won't be seeing the characters
doing anything more, unless we follow them when they migrate out of the 
novel and into another one, as they sometimes do in Trollope; we can follow 
them into other
Barsetshire-like or fairyland-lilke venues.

The kind of prevenient comprehension required by faith is a subscription to
the yet-to-be manifested meaningfulness of the Word or God.  It is precisely
this kind of faith that the reading of a literary text also requires, but a
successful reading thereof ultimately dispels this expection by fulfilling
it. In the first words of Racine's Phedre, "Le dessein en est pris," such a
"dessein" being the real telos of the work, with the inaugural words' 
implications
only realized when we have finished studying the play somewhat carefully.

As the etymology of the word "design" might be wrested to mean, there is a
point where the literary form closes off its signs, "de-signs" them, as it
were.  This it does by making some claim upon them that suggests the
autonomy as a whole, or as an "autotelic" unity. When  the story ends, it
ends ever after, just as it began once upon a time.   According to this
convention, the story-pattern crosses into time and out of it at aligned
points, and this creates the "plot."  So:  The question of the completeness 
of the
literary work brings with it the quasi-Aristotelian question of its
quasi-organic unity, to which Coleridge spoke as follows:

"The common end of all _narrative_, nay, of _all_ Poems, is to convert a
servies into a _Whole_: to make those events, which in real or imagined
History move on a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a _circular_
motion--the snake with its Tail in its Mouth." (Letter to Cotttle, 1815)

Joyce's Ulysses begins in s for Stephen and ends in s for yes.  One might
say that Homer designed this principle into literature once and for all in
the conjugation between the first and last movements of the Iliad, but this 
kind of formally pre-induced comprehension -- as in the plots of Volpone, 
Epicoene, Tom
Jones, and Oedipus Rex -- need not be present for the same hermeneutic
techniques of comparison and conjugation to be applicable.  Joyce's Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man begins in a child's babble and ends in a
youth's journal, but the two forms are to be understood as being 
symmetrically
placed inventories of verbal consciousness.

Much in the Bible rewards the efforts of John the Presbyter to achieve the
self-enclosure of the literary  work.  Yet the "End" provided by the Book of
Revelation takes the form of an  unending ending, a cycle that keeps
re-cycling, somewhat like a Beethoven  coda.  This is to say that the Bible
wants to be a canon, which is the real unity of such a work, standing in
place of, let us say, Yoknapatawpha's geography and history as the
interconnectivity provided for the majority of Faulkner's novels.

It's the premature foreclosure of the purposeinesss of a text which Jesus
condemns in his conflict with the Synagogue.  He says that the Synagogue
has its Moses and its Law, and implies that, in its open-ended 
faith-relation
with God, the priesthood has broken faith by regarding Moses and the Law as
the full realization of God's intentions, particularly his intentions 
towards Israel.
This short-sighted and pre-emptive converson of a promice into a possession
has blinded Israel to the sign of the future, or New Covenant, that Jesus is
before them, and will also blind them to the Messiah, towards whom Israel
has ceased to address its real and proper expectation.  Most literary 
interpretation--this side of anagogy, at least--must err with the Synagogue. 
 The critic has his Moses and his Law.  His criticism aims at possessing a 
totality presumed to
be present in the text, a "New Critical" totality in which he is confident,
like an archaeologist looking at the sculptural torso, or looking for the 
rest of it,
but a totality with which his audience, and, in a sense, the work itself, is
as yet unfamiliar, or no longer familiar.  He essays to familiarize the
parts of the text with each other, and works from an assumption of total
coherence.

Literature as a whole, however, is not the Norton Anthology of Lit.  It
cannot conceivably achieve the totality implied by the collective singular
form of the noun presently naming it.  Literature is not THE word.  So at 
the
other pole of this discourse is the unfinished work, the one that "ends,"
when formally speaking of itself, with the pretense of the lost manuscript,
the unfinished sentence, the missing pages, etc.  Such a work is not
unrelated to the poioumena, the self-begetting novel or serial that does not
want the story to end, like Tom Sawyer trying to prolong the adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, or the cock and bull story that Tristram Shandy's last
page stands poised upon.  But all good things come to an end, and so the
exhausted Quixote tells Sancho there will be no third sally, there are no
birds in last year's nests.

This pole, I imply, also produces the sequel or indeed the burgeoning
string of sequels ("I'll be back").  Shakespeare's  Henry IV Part 1 is a
literary unity, but so is the pair it makes with Henry IV, Part 2.  The
Maharabata seems to have reached it present size by absorbing lesser pieces
in the way Rome grew into an empire, while the tellers of the Epic of
Mowindi are said to be unclear on just where such and such an episode goes
in the sequence.  Pound's anthology-like Cantos have absorbed things like
Cavalcanti's Donna mi prega and the correspondence of Jefferson and Adams,
and they originally presented themselves as works in progress, blocks, and
installments  in their very titles (A Draft of...&c.) , in contradistinction
to the "finished" and manifest membrification-architectonic of the Comedy of
Dante. Yet we cannot doubt the Cantos all belong between the covers of one 
book,
and that the fragments at book's end, shored there against the ruin of poet
or poem, are there properly, in lieu of any more formal telos.

The lost or problematic manuscript idea exists in the case of Dante himself,
tho' I'd argue it may well prove numerologically controlled. ("Let intention 
flourish.")
But it is nonetheless not altogether absent: the  poet's final vision is 
haunted by the
irrecoverability of a dream--or a retrospective shadow that is fifty
jubilees old.   It has been plausibly suggested that the near-final blinding
of the pilgrim in Paradiso XXX is an allegory for the poet’s approaching
death -- but surely the same could be said for the pilgrim’s swoon and
ascension to his own birth-sign the 'cielo stellata' in the two Saturn
cantos (Par. XXI-XXII)  containing Jacob's ladder. It is as if all the
cantos, from here on out, could  only be written posthumously.  For they
are the  first of Dante’s last thirteen, and the tale told in Boccaccio’s
Life of Dante (14) about the poet’s son discovering all these cantos (Par.
XXI-XXXIII) after the poet's death – long-sought since Dante’s passing, and
considered either lost or unwritten – seems to be itself an allegory of
death and restitution.  Divinely guided by a nocturnal visitation from his
beatified father, Jacobo was the son whose dream-vision resurrected from 
itsl crypt-like repository and hiding-place, the manuscript retailing the 
last leg of the journey.  Thus Jacobo has, in a sense, climbed the last 
extension of Jacob's
Ladder to the sun and other stars.

To come to some of the other examples found in the discussion:  a
Spenserian will hardly doubt the unity and repletion of Proust's 'roman
fleuve,' and will see in it some proportions of Spenser's own.  That is, the
seventh novel is Proust's Mutabilitie Cantos, and the great hinge in the
preceding work, corresponding to the passage dropped from the end of the
first installment upon the instantiation of the second, is the essay on the
hermaphrodite initiating the fourth of Proust's novels, that one containing
the narrator's resolve that he must marry, and so take up the social half of
story as a whole.

A work like the Orlando Innamorato looks unfinished, but
a study of its numbers (and a comparison to those of Boiardo's sonnet
series, the Amorum Libri) seems to tell another story than the unfinished
story.  The hare-brained scheme proposed as Orlando's reward by Manodante is
rejected, one might think, because it is too good to be fiscally true.  For
the treasure-stag to be captured and harvested makes gold at a great rate: 
 the
(two) antlers moult six times a day, each divides into thirty points, and
every horn weighs a hundred pounds; 2 x 6 x 30 x 100 = 36,000 lbs.
This sounds like a Platonic Great Year's worth of wealth:  and that per 
diem.
A fortune.  But numerologists will surely want to add that these numbers for 
proliferation dimly reflect those of the Orlando Innamorato itself, with its 
recurrent
narrative motif of the operations of Fortune (and/or Misfortune).

As for the Mutabilitie Cantos temselves: they offer us an argument
about the unity of The Faerie Queene, because they look like a fraction
of it, yet are a whole; and moreoever they reflect the whole of the massive
body which they are inevitably in lunar orbit around.  That is, like the
larger  work, they are in two parts, with a two part pendant.  A sixth of a 
putative Book VII, they are themselves numbered 6 and 7, suggesting they are 
the middle two
twelfths of a "zodiac" of cantos, since they feature a Virgo-figure Cynthia,
and a Libra-figure Nature with the scales of judgment.  Virgo and Libra are
the sixth and seventh signs or (Gr.) zodia.  Theses Cantoes' numerological
message is, "we are a part that can stand for a whole -- and vice versa."

With apologies for some recycling, and not, you may hope, to be continued. 
 -- 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