And, of course, should one want to know how much the word 'will' can 
signifiy, one need look no further than Shakespeare's sonnets 134, 135, 
& 136.

Paul Sutton
Flinders University
Adelaide
Australia

anne prescott 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
>