Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Hermeneutics of Social Networks

A thesis presented

by

Daniel Alan Fried

to

The Department of Comparative Literature

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of
Comparative Literature

May, 2003

1
© 2003 -- Daniel Alan Fried
All rights reserved.

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Thesis Advisor: Stephen Owen Author: Daniel Alan Fried
Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Hermeneutics of Social Networks

No matter how intent interpretation is on the object of its study, it must always

position itself in the world of readers, and stake a claim to one or another ontology.

Allegoresis is a particularly useful form of hermeneutics for revealing social contexts,

precisely because it is so disrespectful of the apparent letter of the text. Radical

declarations that a given text does not at all mean what it seems to say, divide readers into

those who know the secrets and those who do not, and thereby also assert enormous

authority for the interpreter who marks off the boundaries of such groups.

Chapter One makes an argument that the social valences of allegory and

allegoresis cannot be located in the disruptive mechanics of the allegorical sign. Chapters

Two and Three outline two separate models of how social stratification is implicated in

the standard models of allegoresis which develop in the European and Chinese traditions.

In the European model, derived largely from late-classical exegesis of Homer, allegoresis

is cast in the terms of earlier mystery-cults: the many read texts shallowly, but the few are

gifted and blessed with understanding. In contrast, the Chinese model proposes social

allegoresis akin to patronage relations. In this scheme, derived from exegesis of the

Lyrics of Chu, individual poets are themselves conceived as allegorical texts. The poet's

person is a coded secret, unappreciated by his own age, but aspiring to appreciation by

patron-like readers of the future tradition. Chapters Four and Five demonstrate how each

of the two models can reveal hidden aspects of the culture foreign to it, thus

demonstrating how standardized cultural conceptions can hide social truths as well as

explicate them.

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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Prologue: On Prologues...........................................................................................1
1. Contextualizing Failure.......................................................................................3
2. Theory as Thalia..................................................................................................7
3. Theory as Melpomene........................................................................................12
4. Taste and the Community..................................................................................20
5. Comic Structure and Allegoresis.......................................................................24
6. Allegory and Phenomenal Salvation..................................................................28
7. Allegory as Allegory (as Allegory)...................................................................35
8. Allegoresis as Archaeological Relic..................................................................50

Chapter Two
1. From Technique to Ontology.............................................................................54
2. Ontological Tautology and the Irrepressible It..................................................60
3. How to Catch a Boar (Part One)........................................................................80
4. The Homeric Mysteries.....................................................................................94

Chapter Three
1. How to Catch a Boar (Part Two).....................................................................137
2. The Semiotics of Chu.......................................................................................152
3. Philology's Dream............................................................................................205

Chapter Four
1. Ben's Big Toe...................................................................................................213
2. The Reading of Men........................................................................................219
3. Mysteries of Honor..........................................................................................232
4. The Suitor as Text............................................................................................246
5. The Problem with Pastoral...............................................................................262
6. Allegory and Failure........................................................................................276

Chapter Five
1. The Fellowship of Mount Mao........................................................................293
2. Shangqing Visionary Practice..........................................................................300
3. Daoism in the Age of Xuanzong......................................................................315
4. The Rite of the Text.........................................................................................324
5. Shangqing Exegetical Gestures.......................................................................333
Coda: Through the Looking Glass.......................................................................343

Afterword, in Lieu of a Proper Conclusion.....................................................................348

Excursus: Heraclitus and the Homeridae.....................................................................…354

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Bibliography................................................................................................................…358

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation has been most fortunate in its readers. Stephen Owen, Barbara

Lewalski, and Gregory Nagy are all scholars of the first rank, at the very top of their

respective fields, and I doubt that there is a dissertator this year with a more prestigious

committee. More importantly, they have all given generously of their time and insight ,

despite serious commitments elsewhere. This has not been one of the smallest or

simplest dissertations that has been written, and their guidance has been invaluable in

keeping control over the project, pursuing the most fruitful lines of inquiry, and avoiding

many grievous errors. There are, no doubt, errors which remain hidden in what remains,

but such are a reflection only on my own imperfect skills.

I also owe many thanks to the Department of Comparative Literature, and

especially to the former and current Chairs, Jan Ziolkowski and William Todd, and to the

Director of Graduate Studies, Jim Engell, who have given outstanding intellectual and

professional advice and assistance. Thanks also to the former and current departmental

administrators, Bette Ann Farmer and Kathy George, who have on my behalf heroically

slashed through dense forests of red tape surrounding Holyoke and University Halls.

And, of course, thanks to all of my fellow students in the department, who have been

stimulating raconteurs and good friends.

Institutional thanks are certainly owed to Harvard: though its willingness to meet

financial committments has been spotty, its collections are superb, and its students a

delight to teach and to befriend. Thanks also to the Library of Congress, where I have

spent a few crucial days of research, and to the Boston University Library, which offered

me free access to collections and study space while I lived nearby. In particular, I owe a
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large debt to the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation,

for their awarding me a Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship. Without the support that the

fellowship has provided me, there is no way that I could have finished this program in my

fifth year.

I owe much personal gratitude to my parents and my brother, as well as to my

mother's family, for all of their encouragement and support. Old friends, such as Andy

Varcoe and Nate Williams, have listened patiently to many hours of leftist ravings, and

have done their best to encourage me to remain on Earth. New friends, such as former

and current participants in the Central Street mysteries, have been excellent companions

in a project far more exciting and humbling than a dissertation.

My deepest thanks of all are reserved for Esther Xu, the one person who already

knows everything I could say. She has been humoring me for five years; as a poor junior

scholar, I have only massages and household labor with which to repay her.

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 Chapter 1

Prologue: On Prologues

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a

beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet
beginning to be a beginning.
-Zhuangzi, Qi Wu Lun

In his early, dandy days, W.B. Yeats, resplendent in his particular weirdness,

defined prosody anew. As he argued in an essay of 1900, rhythm was useful for

suspending the mind in a hypnotic state, halfway between wake and sleep, so that the

mind is liberated from the will and allowed to enter into the mystic fullness of the literary

symbol.1 Something similar might be said for prologues: they are certainly intended to

prepare the mind for the acceptance of text which is asserted to be of value, and they

certainly can put even the most caffeinated mind into a trance if carried on too long.

The strategy by which they work is the provision of a context for judgment. There

is a common assumption that texts are too odd for the world to process; prologues pretend

not to be text. They pretend to come out of the text, to stand alongside the reader and act

as guide. The prologue is a dramatic character, as he was on the Renaissance stage: he is

a gatherer who claims to invite readers into a society in which texts are appreciable.

Were one to skip the provision of context, the text itself would remain inert and

vulnerable to critique. Bald statements do not stand.

That is why I cannot simply come out and state an argument: "Allegoresis in early

Europe and China was linked to elites' attempts to define hermeneutical communities for

themselves, and shows the interplay between the assertions of historical criticism and the
1
William Butler Yeats, "The Symbolism of Poetry" Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan,
1961)

1
patronage politics of coterie networks." This would remain a crudity, unassimilable and

destined for the worst kind of rejection. Something needs to be said, a context provided,

to lead the reader into such a heightened awareness (or perhaps into so deep a stupor) that

the relevance and urgent importance of my argument will be obvious.

Consider what comes next to be an extended prologue.

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1. Contextualizing Failure

The master said, "To study and at times to practice-is this

not a delight? To have friends come from distant places-is
this not a joy? To be unperturbed though people do not
know one's worth-is this not the mark of a gentleman?"
-Confucius, Analects 1.1

Confucius begins a tradition with this series of three questions. As with all of his

questions, they are rhetorical questions, asked into the void of the text. One can

imaginatively supply the context of a bevy of gathered disciples; one could just as easily

imagine a Confucius speaking to a lone disciple, say the beloved Yan Hui; or one can

imagine him alone on his fantasized raft in the ocean, asking the questions of no one in

particular. One can even, as a reader, hear the rhetorical questions aimed squarely at

oneself, the prodding of a master who has left behind an ever-present textual ghost, even

as his own physical authorial presence has long since receded into the nothingness of dust

and chronicles.

But let us imagine a context which might have been thought plausible by early

exegetes: Confucius has failed in his job search. He has roamed across the land, seeking

employ from a king who would be willing to heed his moralistic advice. But, sadly, the

way of the ancient sages is now apparently gone, and there is no ruler in Warring States

China who is willing to offer Confucius the tenure he deserves. Having retreated to his

home base in Lu, he begins again the work of education, entrusting his knowledge to

disciples who, though powerless, could carry on the oral wisdom until it becomes

renewable again through textual definition and publication.

The rhetorical questions, then, are a defiant assertion of the value of humanistic

education in the face of disenfranchisement. Virtue is preferred to preferment; the study

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and practice of virtue is delightful in and of itself. The official centrality of a life at court

is easily replaced by the academic centrality created by the gathering of friends for lofty-

serious leisure. Gentlemanliness is an innate property, one which is coexistent with one's

natural unflappability, and which cannot be conferred by worldly acknowledgment.

We might ask questions of his questions. Why, after all, are these questions

questions? Why might one assume that it is not a delight, not a joy, not the mark of a

gentleman? Are such things thinkable? Are they, perhaps, not merely thinkable but also

the norm of worldly thought?

The Analects is, first and foremost, a record of an oral wisdom tradition. And

wisdom traditions deal in the uncommon thought, the subtle, the hidden truth in need of a

sagely spokesman. The fact that Confucius needs to defend himself against the suspicion

that he deserves pity cannot but highlight the possibility that he does. For those located in

a network of textual assumptions that included Confucius' authority or even his

apotheosis, that specter of possibility would have been immediately banished by his

denial. But a Confucius who is merely human is open to questioning. We need not resort

to the grammatically clumsy attempt to convert rhetorical questions into interrogatives.

One can assume the sincerity of Confucius' intellectual assurance, while imagining at the

same time a kernel of psychological tension that prompts such a trenchant triplicate

denial. If the life of a private itinerant teacher is such a delight and a joy, why did not the

master seek it out first, rather than aiming to manage the affairs of states? Even if we

assume moral probity such that Confucius cared nothing for personal power, wouldn't it

still have been more satisfying for him to put the Way of the sage-kings into practice once

more?

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 And then there is the progression of questions: Confucius delights in his personal

praxis; he joys in his company, the "friends" whom a reader later discovers are students of

most limited capabilities. But grant him his claim; it is then odd that joy and delight give

way to mere non-annoyance. And the souring of the utopian vision is occasioned by the

specific recollection that he is unknown, and the pointed redefinition of gentlemanliness

into spiritual quality rather than social rank. When Confucius says that, no, he really is

happy, he has his books and his students, and that, no, he doesn't care at all about the

multiple rejections, one can wonder about a wavering in the lost voice which the text

claims to represent.

But caution is called for. The text is not reducible to a psychology that we can

imagine for it. The temptation to reduction is great: there is a certain form of allegoresis

given free reign in our contemporary criticism that, like an ironic Midas, could turn a

Golden Age to rust. One can easily imagine examples: a Milton whose pathetic theodicy

is proof that Paradise Lost is about divine unjustifiability, or a Joyce whose verbal

anarchism is meant to depict the silliness of breaking accepted prose conventions. And I

do not wish the reader to see me as following suit, proclaiming a Confucius whose

assertions of contentment are mere proof of discontent.

Such readings are not wrong, merely incomplete. In the present case, an ironic

reading of Confucius has to be held in tension with the adoring reading of Confucius.

One cannot understand the heroism of a great Confucius unless one realizes the

depression which his questions allow for; but one also cannot appreciate the trauma of a

brooding Confucius unless one hears the possibility of a supreme confidence that allows

him to frame his denials as questions. Balance-like, these readings are useless unless they

5
constitute an unbroken continuum.

And the necessary fulcrum upon which these readings must operate is the

invisible axis of humanistic valuation. If one accepts the Confucian supposition that

there is value inherent to the proper practice of rites and benevolence, then the master has

achieved his goal. We can see the master's words as the successful banishment of the

need for worldly power: this need is replaced by a triumphant virtue, practiced in joyful

communion with friends. If, however, one decides that these humanistic values are

nothings, or that such systems of value can have no meaning outside those defined by

institutional centers of power, then he is enacting a doomed heroic defiance, a desperation

before the tumults of a world that will always have the upper hand against the true way of

the sages.

Thus, Confucius' success or failure in appropriating the invisible figures him forth

for us as a comic or a tragic hero, depending upon our assumptions. In this, he is a

perfect allegorical model of what it means to be a literary critic.

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2. Theory as Thalia

Despite the fears of the 1980's and early 90's, critical life after the general

acceptance of deconstruction has not dissolved into a bog of relativism. Few if any

theorists are now eager to publish jeremiads denouncing the profession and vindicating

the idea of Authorial Intent, or of transcendental signifieds (as I certainly am not). But

critical praxis, if done with an ever-evolving set of inflections and emphases, still argues.

Authors are still invoked and venerated, though authorship lies prone; texts are still

discussed as if they were repositories of inherent meaning, even by critics who loudly

deny that they would practice such naiveté.

To a large extent, this is because the jeremiads misunderstood poststructuralism

and overestimated its relativism. It was simply wrong to assume that floating constraints

on interpretation are no constraints at all, and that the denial of simplistic conceptions of

objectivity amounted to hermeneutical libertinism. But perhaps this is not the whole

story, for it seems that the canons of even the mildest forms of poststructuralism are

routinely violated-on the level of unspoken assumptions-within respected centers of

institutional power. One could hypothesize the responsibility of the slow evolution of

forms of discourse, or the fact that theory and praxis have always constituted (partially)

separate intellectual flows, or the reality of institutional politics and systems of hiring and

promotion.

Whatever the reasons, it seems that the critical enterprise is now camped

somewhere between Truth and Performance, with occasional forays into the territory on

either hand. Insofar as arguments which seem to make truth-claims are still permissible,

and, indeed, common, it is fair to judge such arguments in the terms which they request.

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Philological debates can be legitimately framed within the known rules of morphology;

historicist (even new historicist) arguments can be checked for date-name-place accuracy,

political criticism can harmlessly assume a consensus against slavery, and so on. The

critic is not (yet) free to be outlandish, and hence cannot yet be defended on the terms

that Sidney used to defend the poet, that (she or) "he nothing affirms, and therefore never

lieth."

But insofar as critics do other things besides assert eternal verities, it is valid for

us to use other standards by which to assess our enterprise. This is not a replacement, but

a supplement.

Given that the action of criticism is now so often considered in terms of

performance, there seems a certain propriety in the description of comic and tragic modes

of critique, and it is in these terms that I will outline certain aesthetic qualities. This is

not reification. I know the problems with schematic binarisms; I can spot a grand

narrative as easily as the next guy. What I offer here is not meant as an encompassing

system, but as a stopgap metaphor. It is a translation, from one system of signs to

another; and like all translators, I can only hold myself to the sloppy standard of

Procrustes: to make sure that everything, somehow, fits.

Let me put the issue coarsely: the critical enterprise was formerly structured like

comedy, and it is now structured like tragedy. This is not to say a thing about tone. In

terms of tone, if one were absolutely forced to keep the same distinction, one would

perhaps lean toward saying that the moral or aesthetic earnestness of theory in bygone

days is a better match for the tragic, and that the honor of comedy belongs to the play and

the puns and the titular cuteness unto nausea which so clearly marks off our contemporary

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work. But my argument concerns, not tone, but structure.

Comedy is that which ends with a wedding. This is too formulaic: simple

copulation, or failed adultery, can be substituted for marriage (Miles Gloriosus); the

wedding can be allegorical (the Bible); some wedding-ended works are other genres, such

as epics or romances (A Winter's Tale); farce is something completely different (Monty

Python). But the formula is an extraordinarily successful one, and, with some caveats, it

was a defining feature of the genre for most of the history of Euro-American criticism.

Between the initial infatuation and the wedding comes the blocking action or

series of actions that supplies whatever interest or humor to which a comedy can lay

claim. Jealous rivals emerge; angry father-figures interpose; doppelgangers replace each

other; letters cross and get intercepted; conversations are misheard; intentions are

misread; and through it all, a petty anarchy lays claim to rule. Then, the denouement--

explained well by Northrop Frye:

At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings hero
and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize
around the hero, and the moment when this crystallization
occurs is the point of resolution in the action, the comic
discovery, anagnorisis or cognitio.2

Usually at or just before this point, the forces opposing the wedding are either banished or

reconciled to the couple and through them to the social order. Confusion is resolved and

the now-loosened convolutions of plot are retrospectively made to serve the joy and

clarity of the finale.

The traditional critic is always a performer of comedies. He spots a Beloved,

defined usually as Author, sometimes as Text, and is in rapture. He wishes for complete

2
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. (1957; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971) 163.

9
union with the Beloved, total apprehension of her meaning. And the object of desire

seems to reciprocate his affection. But after the initial meeting of the Author and the

Critic, there are hindrances. Textual corruptions and philological mysteries screen off the

Beloved. The unnoticed subtleties of culture-specific references and aesthetic standards

mark her off as belonging to an entirely unreachable social stratum. Ambiguous symbols

contradict each other, hinting first at the availability of the text, and then signaling a cold

dismissal from the presence of meaning. Rival critics with their own claims to the text

need to be fought off, beaten down, or duped into serving the ultimate advancement of the

comic critic-hero.

When all such obstacles are surmounted, there is the concluding proof of the

critique, the ultimate resolution which has made the difficulties of interpretation

worthwhile. Indeed, in the most aesthetically satisfying criticism, the same aporias and

polysemy which threatened to block the process of interpretation are themselves

recovered and domesticated, taking their place in the celebratory feast which marks the

union of Critic and Meaning. This climax is the moment of comic discovery, the

anagnorisis or cognitio. And, just as Frye identified a crystallization of society around

the heroic couple in literary comedy, one ought to recognize the emergence of parallel

society in critical comedy. On one level, this society can be seen in the reconciliation of

irreconcilable textual problems which has just been mentioned. But criticism usually

aims for even broader society, especially as the comedy is considered as the meeting of

persons rather than texts. Performances are given for audiences, and audiences for

comedy are drawn into the society visible upon the stage. A readership may root for the

critic; it is pleasing to see the Critic apparently reach his desired union with the Author.

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The audience for this mode of critical performance cannot help but join in the celebration

of successful hermeneutics, and such an audience is drawn into harmonious society

around the Critic-Author union, and become an emotive extension of that union.

Such an account of criticism will surely sound odd to those used to figurations of

the traditional critic as the passive servant of the traditional author. If one must use the

admittedly silly schema of dramatic comedy to analyze criticism, why not figure the

Author as the active (and presumably male) lover, and the critic as the ravished and

acquiescing bride? This is a reasonable objection, and not only because it shows the

trouble with the metaphorical appropriation of complex genre theory. "Traditional

criticism" is an impossibly vague category, and one can find all sorts of power-

relationships asserted between author and critic, but there is certainly one strong stream

which treats the author as active and the critic as reactive. Analogies to mystery cults

abound, and allegoresis (which concerns the larger part of this book) is largely

announced to be the service of a literary priest to an authorial demigod. One does well to

listen to such announcements; one is wrong to take them as definitive. It is, after all, the

presence of a god, whether true or false, which empowers the priest within his

community, and sometimes, as in Ivan Karamazov's parable, empowers him over even the

god. And the history of courtship is a strange mix of aggressiveness and passivity on the

part of both Lover and Beloved. Perhaps traditional critics, as comic suitors, have

something of the Petrarchan in them-no matter how loudly they declare their abjection in

the gaze of the Beloved, they stubbornly reserve the right of representation which pins

that same Beloved into place.

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3. Theory as Melpomene

It is a shame that the vivacity of academic cocktails is rarely recorded in anything

like a transcript-the "content" is all that makes it into the conference volumes. For this

reason, the oral context of our critical praxis will presumably be invisible to future

historians of criticism. Instead of the conviviality which is often apparent to us, they will

have only our writings by which to judge us, and those are uniformly presented in the

mode of tragic heroism.

Again, mode is not the same as mood, and to say that contemporary criticism

operates within (an allegory of) the tragical mode is not to say that critics are self-

deprecating or whiny, or that they confess to being racked with deep despair. The

admission of hopeless failure, even valiant failure, is hardly the way to persuade tenure

committees.

Rather, if we follow Aristotle, tragedy is the mimesis of a complete action

performed by a character greater than ourselves, and which is (unlike epic) performed in

direct speech rather than narrative. When one acknowledges the contemporary truism

that criticism is a performance of the reader rather than a description of the work itself, it

is clear that the critical voice is, when most forthright about its assumptions, also most

like a character in a monologue rather than a rhapsode who merely presents. And the

persona of that heroic critic must indeed be made to appear greater than ourselves. There

is no critical study which does not claim to be groundbreaking. The critic is always

greater than his forebearers, who have never sufficiently explained the text in question.

The critic is also greater than her readers, who cannot realize for themselves something

about the text which the critic wishes to explain.

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 It is no use following Aristotle closely, for these characteristics would just as

easily characterize the work of traditional critics as contemporary ones. It would be

difficult to imagine a criticism that works after the fashion of Aristotelian comedy,

providing mimesis of an interpreter with claims to be worse than ourselves. But there is

another standard by which contemporary criticism stands out as tragic by explicit contrast

with older modes of commentary. Whereas earlier criticism aimed to surmount

interpretive obstacles, and thereby come into communion with the Author, contemporary

theory sees the Author as the obstacle. The fact that the Author is dead, or absent, or

imaginary does not lessen the conflict: every act of reading has become, at its most

typical, an act of assertion of the reader's power. The Critic banishes the domination of

the Author, and heroically constitutes or refuses meaning on her or his own terms.

Roland Barthes celebrates this hero, subsumed back into writing itself:

In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now

on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an
ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),
liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an
activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix
meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-
-reason, science, law.3

One might suspect that "writing" is a hypostasis of "reading," that Barthes means his

famous conclusion, expressed in terms of persons: "the birth of the reader must be at the

death of the Author." (Barthes 148) But if Barthes means nothing of the sort, let us kill

him and assert such an identity nonetheless. Then the ideal reader posited in his essay is

an anti-theological revolutionary, a tragic hero who resembles no one so much as the

Shelleyan Prometheus. This reader is a liberator, a refuser of the theological authority of

3
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," trans. Stephen Heath, Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath
(1977; New York, Hill and Wang, 1998) 147.

13
the Author who struggles heroically against that supposed omnipotence and eventually

does overcome it. And such readings are perhaps as undramatic as Shelley's closet-

drama: omnipotence is usually dispatched quite casually, and much more attention is

devoted to the celebration of the new revolutionary order.

The shade of the Aeschylean Prometheus lingers just beyond the edge of this

Romantic celebration, sullen and uninvited. It is difficult to admit the presence of a

defeat, a servile bowing before the Author-yet it cannot ever be dismissed. This is not to

say that there is an easy Author who manipulates any reading of the text or the world-as-

text. But there is the pressure of a something. It is now a relatively easy thing to tease

apart a text; the procedures have been well established. It is also an easy thing to move

from teasing to mockery, the theoretical demonstration that a text was never actually there

to be teased. What one cannot do is to perform a criticism as if one acknowledges that

there is no object whatsoever. Texts can only appear with theory as the cosmologists

describe their black holes: irresistible nothings.4

Resistance against the irresistible is a peculiar trait of tragedy. When one applies

the laws which govern literature to criticism, and abandons the notion of critical presence

in critical works, then one is free to see this doomed resistance as another structural

principle which suggests the tragic mode of contemporary work. There is nothing except

convention which keeps us from reading the voice of the critical work as that of an

untrustworthy narrator. And if we choose to read these voices at a distrusting distance,

then we are also free to read the triumphalism of writerly reading as an aesthetic object,

framed by its own object, the nothing-text. The great reader, enjoying strength and
4
This ontological vacillation may sound testy and reactive; however, it is offered much more as a reading
of Derridean erasure than as a critique of it.

14
prestige, grows into hubris and oversteps the invisible bounds of fate, and is abandoned to

blindness, unable to see that the transgression of the nomoi of reading must end in

catastrophe. We can imagine ourselves as asked to observe and judge the voice, not to

believe it, and our pity and fear arises from the irony of expressed triumph over an enemy

which is as intractable as it is insubstantial. And if it strains credulity to suggest that

some critics do not always mean what they say, we nevertheless have the freedom and the

responsibility to treat them, in their printed avatars, as personas.

One of the past century's most poignant tragedies, Paul de Man's "The

Epistemology of Metaphor", is illustrative.5 The antagonist in this tragedy is one of the

greatest: John Locke, the great father of Reason, and Science, and Law. The setting is in

Locke's Book III, on language, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and de

Man is determined to unseat Locke on Locke's own terms, to demonstrate that Locke's

plea for controlled, limitable language is itself uncontrollable, open to a deconstruction

which endlessly unravels the text. This is a grand action, and has a transcendent

importance that lends it the status of myth: though a debunking of Locke is itself only a

ghost story, it is also allegorically the overthrow, at the source, of authoritarian

authorship:

It is indeed not a question of ontology, of things as they are,

but of authority, of things as they are decreed to be. And
this authority cannot be vested in any authoritative body,
for the free usage of ordinary language is carried, like the
child [who cannot tell the figural from the proper], by wild
5
I am not the first to refer to de Man as writing in the tragic mode; so far as I know, Terry Eagleton was.
But Eagleton's vision of de Manian tragedy is a drama in which the forms of language and world are
themselves the actors, and the critic is the playwright. Eagleton's de Man asserts that "Ideology strives
to bridge verbal concepts and sensory intuitions; but the force of truly critical (or "deconstructive")
thought is to demonstrate how the insidiously figural, rhetorical nature of discourse will always
intervene to break up this felicitous marriage." Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991) 200.
However, de Man is as much an actor as a playwright, and it is to his persona that we must attend.

15
 figuration which will make a mockery of the most
authoritarian academy.6

De Man pursues Locke ingeniously, and patiently pries open his argument, and

overwhelms a reader with his demonstration of Locke's inescapable rhetoricity,

progressing on then to Condillac and Kant.

But the hamartia of de Man's narrator is exposed at near the beginning of the

work, and its creeping consequences infect the brilliance of the demonstration, even as it

rises later to a crescendo. Here is the moment of descent:

And indeed, when Locke then develops his own theory of

words and language, what he constructs turns out to be in
fact a theory of tropes. Of course, he would be the last man
in the world to realize and to acknowledge this. One has to
read him, to some extent, against or regardless of his own
explicit statements; one especially has to disregard the
commonplaces about his philosophy that circulate as
reliable currency in the intellectual histories of the
Enlightenment. One has to pretend to read him
ahistorically, the first and necessary condition if there is to
be any expectation of ever arriving at a somewhat reliable
history. That is to say, he has to be read not in terms of
explicit statements (especially explicit statements about
statements) but in terms of the rhetorical motions of his
own text, which cannot be simply reduced to intentions or
to identifiable facts. (de Man 36-37)

How does de Man know what "Locke" would or would not acknowledge? What, within

the ample dimensions of his work, could it mean to call a work "explicit"? Perhaps the

explicit Locke is a phantasm that arises merely from the commonplaces of intellectual

history-but then a phantasm that cannot be destroyed, except in the mind's eye, through a

pretense of ahistorical reading. The rhetorical exercise of the text which follows is

brilliant, masterful, stirring-but it is, even if more True than the commonplaces of
6
Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996) 39.

16
intellectual history, a confessed pretense. Locke's presence, like Banquo's ghost, may be

shooed away but not exorcised, and the more de Man denatures nature, the less we can

forget that he sees something.7

All of which is not proof that de Man is wrong here, that his explicit Locke is the

real Locke, and that deconstructive readings in general must prove the truth of the naïve

readings which they resist. There is no road back to naiveté; that gate is guarded by a

cherub with a fiery sword. There is no reason to doubt that the explicit Locke is in fact a

product of intellectual history. And in fact my personal suspicion in reading Locke is to

believe that the explicit Locke is much closer to the explicit de Man than the latter would

admit. Where de Man reads Locke's denouncements of the abuse of language as a

pathetic attempt to corral language, I suspect instead that Locke has shifted from

epistemology to ethics, and is urging conscious self-restraint, that one deliberately refuses

to exploit the irremediably anarchic character of language. Though de Man explicitly

admits that Locke is not naive about language, and freely cites Locke's suspicions, he

clearly needs an opponent in order to pursue his storyline.

For the appreciation of the tragic irony here, it does not matter in the least whether

de Man's explicit Locke or mine, or neither, was the real Locke. Part of the arresting

power of the Macbeth scene invoked above is that the status of the ghost as real or as

psychological projection is unknowable. What counts is the perception of an explicit

author who can be resisted, so that even the most trenchant resistance takes its place as an

7
Of course, de Man would be the last man in the world to acknowledge this. The standard postructuralist
view of "Author-ities", which de Man both shares and creates, is that they recede in infinite iterations,
and that any attempt to recuperate such an iteration is itself already self-displaced. But such arguments
(not of course stooping to positive demonstration) most often take the form of complex and brilliant
nominalizations of the interjection, "No!" Why take the debunking of authority on authority?

17
affirming counterpoint to authorial irresistibility.

Whereas the comic structure of older criticism posits a wedding between Critic

and Author, and the gathering of a joyful society around that pair which extends outward

into the readership, contemporary criticism draws its power from the tragic isolation of

the critic. There are to be no weddings; the Critic is deliberately alienated from the

Author. This isolation is chosen, and whether or not one understands the ghost of the

Author to be irresistible, its lingering non-presence is a tragic irony which undercuts any

critical claims to a pseudo-monadic self-sufficiency.

And in this alienation, any aesthetically sensitive readership is also alienated.

Partly this is because, in our initial sympathy for the Critic, we must follow him or her

into exile. As Frye again puts things: "The tragic hero is very great as compared with us,

but there is something else, something on the side of him opposite the audience,

compared to which he is small. This something else may be called God, gods, fate,

accident, fortune, necessity, circumstance, or any combination of these, but whatever it is

the tragic hero is our mediator with it." (Frye 207) The incompleteness of any Critic's

exorcism of the Author remains to haunt anyone with access to the spectacle; the Critic's

subjection to the irresistible becomes our own. But there is an additional level of

alienation which follows upon this one. Unlike the comic audience, the tragic audience is

repelled: the canons of infinite regression which demand the alienation of the reading

Critic from the read Author also mandate, with the inexorability of physical law, our

parallel alienation from the read Critic. The Critic is still there, but only for the

paraphrasing. And so the repellent aloneness of the Critic is still an aloneness which we

must take upon ourselves. The dramatic power of contemporary consensus thus traces

18
out all our lines of connection and fractures them, holding all parties to the ex-humanistic

enterprise in antagonistic stasis. There is pity and fear in this, but these emotions are not

so much purged as sapped out, through the familiarity of technique and the routinization

of literary labor.

19
4. Taste and the Community

Words such as "contemporary" and "traditional" are bulky things, with unnatural

corners jabbing out in ways that seem designed to deny one a handhold. One would

prefer terms that are more compact, even if more weighty-such words are more easily

manipulated. The same critique could be made of the binarism of "comic" and "tragic".

And the combination of these terms is a piling of one silliness on top of another-any

intelligent reader has the right to righteous nausea.

But I hope that the reader has realized that these clumsy monikers have been used

as ideal, and not historical categories, and that the choice of terms has been dictated for

me by the truisms which locate attitudes toward textuality on a clear timeline (pre- and

post-Paris-in-the-sixties). The status of a work of criticism as comic or tragic, even in the

bizarre usage I am proposing, cannot be decided by the date of composition. Rather,

virtually any work can be made comic or tragic by the framework of assumptions about

textuality with which one reads it.

Does one hold a pattern of assumptions which might now in passing be identified

as "traditional"? Then one's reading of criticism will be guided by the assumption that the

Critic is indeed pursuing the Author, and one's judgment of the validity of the criticism

will be predicated upon the aesthetic satisfaction of seeing a performance conform to the

genre conventions which demand that there be a wedding. This is true even when a

"traditional" reader approaches aggressively deconstructive criticism: the irked

dissatisfaction such readers seem to feel is the result of measuring it against standards

which it does not try to meet.

Does one hold a pattern of assumptions which might now in passing be identified

20
as "contemporary"? Then one's reading of criticism will be guided by the assumption that

the Critic, whether he knows it or not, is waging war against the Author. Though the

Critic usually loses this war despite his triumphalist rhetoric, gloominess is not the issue.

Rather, it is the glorious or darkened heroism of the resistance-and the acknowledgment

of resistance-which permits the enjoyment of a tragic aesthetic. When one reads

"traditional" criticism through such genre conventions, it reads as silly and pointless:

there is conflict, but no anagnorisis, no climax in which the fact of conflict is recognized

and called by its true name.

The fact that any critical work can be read through either set of genre conventions

shows that these modes of reading ought properly to be held in tension. In performance

terms, the (thankfully dead) polemics between these modes of criticism are as irrelevant

as the old debates about whether comedy or tragedy was the superior genre. Just as with

Confucius, everything turns upon one's assumptions about the relationship of the voice of

the text to the invisible world to which it addresses itself. A Critic's voice is directed to

the presence of Author, Text, and Meaning. If one has faith in the power of that trinity to

reach out to the Critic, then the Critic is taken up, despite all the stumbling blocks

inherent to hermeneutics. If one's faith is that the reality of such things is noetic only,

then the Critic, haunted by that present-absence, can only wander upon the face of the

land, exiled by an overpowering nothing.

Faith in nominalism or realism means everything to truth, but nothing to pleasure.

One of the greatest of literary pleasures is the opportunity offered to inhabit alternate

positions, and it is sad to see the operations of ideologies which insist on purity in all the

wrong objects. The critiques of the newer methods of reading which used to be so fierce

21
seemed to proceed from the same bumpkinesque coarseness which demands an infinite

series of happy endings from an infinite series of schlock Hollywood hits. But the

theoretical insistence on universal decay, the consignment of oneself and one's company

to the role of lettered dung-beetles, is of an equal coarseness, if more urbanely

misanthropic.

Nostalgia for human presence behind the text may thus be debunked, but it ought

not to be belittled. Comedy is the obverse, and not the enemy, of tragedy; and while it

may be necessary to accept alienation, there is no need to enforce it. Insofar as one

cannot compel external agents, a person has no right to society, and no deeded claim upon

friends who must come from afar. But to try to intimidate a class of readers into

abandoning the hope of society-this is schoolyard bullying. As Foucault has presented a

history of the medicalization of insanity, perhaps we also need a medicalization of the

history of reading: erudition might then be recognized as linked to the social anxiety

disorder of those unsuccessful in more public ventures,8 an escapist coping mechanism

for a world before Prozac and Zoloft and Paxil. The hope for community is what drives

the comic exuberance of traditional criticism, and it is a hope that we ought to declare

legitimate, even as we compassionately encourage the transference of that hope into the

world, and away from the field of semiotic neuroses.

This study will concern the ways in which hermeneutics has been an instrument of
8
Particularly among those elites whom Pierre Bourdieu identifies as economically dominated within the
field of symbolic domination: "The cultural producers, who occupy the economically dominated and
symbolically dominant position within the field of cultural production, tend to feel solidarity with the
occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions within the field of class relations."
Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic Field Reversed," The Field of
Cultural Production (New York: Columbia UP, 1993) 44. Undoubtedly, the greatest challenge for
Marxist workers among this class (apart from their own non-existance) is that solidarity is more often
projected diachronically than synchronically, attaching less to the laboring classes than to those past
geniuses in analogously dominated positions within the long stream of humanist tradition.

22
community-creation, and at times it will read like an anthropology of literary critics,

though it is not offered as such. However, it could also be read as a partial accounting of

the comic method in criticism. How is it that interpreters of texts have presented their

approach to the presence of the authorial Beloved? How do aspiring authors, longing to

be chased by the critical eye, offer themselves as available for interpretation by the right

sort of suitor? How does the nature of such unions depend on the harmonious gatherings

which are to constitute the wedding party? How are the invitation lists drawn up? Can

such hermeneutical unions at times be more concerned with the gathered community than

with the content of the explication?

I focus on what I have called comic structure because all of the material from

which I will draw my case studies, is pre-modern or early modern, and hence must be

grouped under the heading of "traditional" criticism. But there are a pair of caveats, one

empirical and one theoretical. Empirically, there is a vast mixture of attitudes toward the

presence or absence of the author to be found within "traditional" texts, a much greater

complexity than is usually made plain in theory. Theoretically, comedy can never exist

without the possibility of tragedy: the confirmation of the hero within a surrounding

community always works as a denial of exile and death. This is true on the stage, where

some sort of obstacle is necessary in order to have a plot, and it is necessary in criticism,

where the assertion of an attainment of the author's mind is only worth making if there is

the possibility of blankness.

23
5. Comic Structure and Allegoresis

The social possibilities and dangers of interpretation are most likely to be more

visible in texts where the act of interpretation is more obvious. There may be no reading

without interpretation, but there is certainly reading without consciousness of

interpretation. Interpretation usually becomes noticeable only as it grows more vigorous.

Otherwise the text is figured as more or less obvious; the act of interpretation is thus a

form of demonstrative tautology equivalent to mathematics, rephrasing wordily that

which the text says pithily. Such an interpreter's role is that of a teacher, perhaps,

imparting what should be common knowledge. Or else that of a janitor, cleaning up the

corners of a text whose integrity is sound.

That "obvious" texts should be unfit to show the hope for hermeneutic community

in traditional readings seems counterintuitive. When a text is obvious, then the mind of

the author ought to be seen as immediately present, available to all. All are welcome to

have fellowship with him; the hermeneut provides the formal courtesy of an introduction.

Theoretically, all of this is true: but there are equal problems caused by the perception of

textual transparency. When the author seems available, what little interpretation is done

hardly needs to stress the author's availability: it is much more interesting to try to prove

the existence of ghosts than historical figures. On the contrary, when a text is difficult,

cramped, obscure-this is the time when an interpreter needs to stress that, despite all the

gaps, there truly is an author standing behind the text whose meaning is available.

Furthermore, as a text's meaning seems more explicit, its availability becomes universal,

and there is less need to assert a community of readers. It is only when the many are

incapable of correct reading that the few can imagine bonds of union with other readers

24
which supersede the bond of common humanity.

Probably the two most extreme interpretive modes outlined in the European

classical tradition are allegory and irony; both have extraordinary resources for defining

community life. But this is a study of hermeneutics, not a study of literary creation, and

while there is a long and rich tradition of allegoresis, the thorough development of

something namable as "ironesis" has been deferred until recently. And, at least in

European tradition, there is a long association of the practice of allegoresis with the

sociological structure of the mystery cult.

(A note: allegory and allegoresis must be distinguished. This is the starting point

of most recent investigations of allegory, and it is a point that needs to be raised. Since

Quintilian at least, allegory has been a trope or a mode of creation which says one thing

but means another. Allegoresis (says the standard line) is exclusively a form of

hermeneutics, and has nothing to do with the creation of deliberate allegory.9 So:

interpretations of Homer that have him as the spokesman of Heraclitan meteorology or

Plotinian metaphysics are the ultimate examples of allegoresis, since the Homeric epics

are most obviously stories and not philosophy textbooks. The Faerie Queene is

deliberate allegory (Spenser tells us so, even if we can't figure it out). This is a good

distinction to make, so long as one can talk in the abstract about the distinction between

composition and interpretation. But Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville have made an

important critique of this easy separation: "allegory is precisely that which comes into
9
In one of the more authoritative of such assertions, Maureen Quilligan writes, "The incompatibility
between allegory and allegorical criticism is not just theoretically obvious; in practice allegorical critics
often produce quite bizarre results when they attempt to comment on actual allegories...just as the
terminology of allegoresis with its vertically organized levels is inappropriate to narrative allegory, so
the function of an allegorical critic is different from the functions that must be performed by a reader of
allegory." Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1979) 224-25.

25
being through its denunciation of, or its acknowledgment of the risk of, mere

allegoresis...In such a view allegory and allegoresis can be neither cured of nor

assimilated to one another, neither pried apart not paired in simple complementarity."10

And further critiques can be made. On the plane of technical empirical evidence,

there is often no good way to separate allegory from allegoresis. It is entirely reasonable

to be astonished at the wildness of late Neoplatonic exegesis of Homer, because our

interpretive pre-understanding occurs in a world of assumptions where the truth of

Neoplatonism is not assumed, but the truth of the histories of the late-classical

development of Neoplatonism is. But it is a leap to then say that the Homeric poems

were originally mythical and only later allegorized philosophically: such arguments,

though common, betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the Homeric corpus. After

all, there was no Homer, and there was no "original" Iliad or Odyssey, only an oral song

tradition without beginning. And, as Andrew Ford has recently demonstrated, we have

strong evidence to suggest that the rhapsodes who sung (and shaped) the poems during

the period of their stabilization into the corpus we currently possess, were themselves

allegorizers of the text.11 And a theoretical critique must be made as well: while it is fine

in principle, and unavoidable in practice, to distinguish composition from interpretation,

all the critic's work is done from this side of the text. It is only via the intentional fallacy

that one can divide the real allegorical sheep from the nasty pseudo-allegorical goats

within the work of interpretation. The claim is that some works are meant to be taken

10
Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville, "Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics"
Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3 (1991): 183-84.
11
Andrew Ford, "Performing Interpretation: Early Allegorical Exegesis of Homer," Epic Traditions in the
Contemporary World, Ed. Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999) 33-53.

26
allegorically, and others are not, and it is that intent which either justifies or rebuffs the

work of allegoresis. Biographical criticism has a certain seductiveness, but it is surely

beyond need of proof that authors cannot control the interpretation of their works.

Despite even Spenser's explicit declaration that his work was a "darke conceite", there

was nothing more to prevent Romantic readers from reading the romance for diction and

plot than there was to prevent Porphyry from reading Homer for metaphysics.)

Though I would like to avoid allegory and stick to allegoresis, I cannot. But the

entire study will be conducted with an eye toward the side of interpretation, so that even

when using the word "allegory" I will be slanting analysis toward the allegoresis for

which an allegory seems to hope.

To rehearse the long history of allegorical theory—for two distinct literary

traditions—would be dangerous folly. Something like a piecemeal sketch of parts of the

genre's history will be traced over the course of this study (though that is not its purpose).

But what is more manageable and necessary is to give some account of where the past

century of theory has left the status of allegory, and why the pace of publication on the

subject has accelerated in the past three decades. Only then will it be possible to view the

system of theory as integrated.

27
6. Allegory and Phenomenal Salvation

Phenomena do not, however, enter into the realm of ideas

whole, in their crude empirical state, adulterated by
appearances, but only in their basic elements, redeemed.
They are divested of their false unity so that, thus divided,
they might partake of the genuine unity of
truth...Conceptual distinctions are above all suspicion of
destructive sophistry only when their purpose is the
salvation of phenomena in ideas, the Platonic [ta
phainomena sozein]. Through their mediating role
concepts enable phenomena to participate in the existence
of ideas.12
-Walter Benjamin

If it were still anyone's priority to reconcile Plato to poetry, the category of genre

would look golden. If genre were a Form (and what else in that system could it be?), then

the work of art would only represent a single corruption, and not a double. Rather than

being an imitation of an imitation, art would be an imitation of the ideal reality. Oedipus

would not be a mimesis of the king of Thebes, but rather of the form of Tragedy itself.

But to effect such a reconciliation would cost the hope that individual works of art could

be more than a corruption, albeit a primary-order one.

Walter Benjamin saves Plato in a different fashion: saving the phenomenal Plato

of particular dialogues through a conceptual abstraction into ideality of what Platonic

idealism ought to be (i.e., German idealism). But his purpose in this "Epistemo-Critical

Prologue" to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, is not to defend poetry but to defend

what he would call a philosophy of art, and what we would more likely call theory. His

goal in the work is to give an aesthetic account of the Trauerspiel drama, and, as he was

writing in 1925, that account had to be made in the face of a dominant Crocean anti-genre

12
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama Trans. John Osborne (1998; London: Verso,
1999) 33-34.

28
bias. It is only fortuitous that Benjamin's brilliance made of this ad hoc introduction a

worthy philosophical meditation in its own right.

Benjamin's method is to defy the nominalist critique which Croce and others had

made of genre. This is more a denial than a rebuttal, but a pleasant one: Benjamin carries

Plato's standard from a studied unfashionableness, rather than awkward conservatism. He

fully acknowledges that it would be useless to perform criticism via an array of examples

from which one could extract a series of generic rules. Rather, his argument is that

genres are themselves self-sufficient ideas, independent of the meager world of actual

works. The concept (derived from German, rather than Platonic Idealism) may, as in the

epigraph above, play an almost Christological role in the work of criticism. But it is

ultimately only a Jacob's ladder connecting the phenomenal to the ideal. Or better yet, it

is a sacred Platonic escalator-for it is only meant to lead upwards. In Benjamin's

prologue, the work of genre criticism is to lead one up out of the muck of exempla and

into contemplation of the more ethereal system of the genre itself. To descend again, to

expect the idea to "contribute to the development of standards for the reviewer,"

(Benjamin 44) would be foolish if not boorish.

In this same introduction, Benjamin remarks that it is proper that philosophy has

always been a contest for definition. One wonders if that fact may be a part of

philosophy's own proper definition, and whether or not that which strives toward the

definitional ideal must be philosophy. If so, then much of the accelerating theorization of

allegory over the past 40 years is philosophy and not criticism. Examinations of

particular allegories are offered in order to demonstrate that the core operations are X, or

Y, or Z. Angus Fletcher, who does many things well in his encyclopedic study, clearly

29
reaches a climax as he argues for the neurotic quality of personifications, who are

possessed by a monomania corresponding to their names.13 Maureen Quilligan defines

allegory as a sort of pun, laying stress on the horizontal semiotics of allegorical markers

within a text rather than the traditional theory of vertical levels of depth. (Quilligan 33)

Gordon Teskey offers a Nietzschean vision of the mode, in which allegory is the

intellectual projection of biological hunger, attempting to consume the cosmos through

the violent assertion of meaning.14 And there are dozens of other examples one could cite

from less-read articles.

Whether one calls allegory a genre, a mode, a trope, or something else, there is

something unseemly about these definitions. Not the definitions themselves, the

particulars offered by Fletcher and Quilligan and Teskey and all the rest, which are

insightful, but the act of definition itself. There is a gauche question that must be asked:

what is the ontological status of terminology? I am not writing philosophy here, and it

would be pointless for me to re-argue the nominalist case against Benjamin's idealism.

But if one is anti-essentialist (and who isn't nowadays?) then it should be clear that

phenomena do not cohere in the unity of the Idea, but rather in the (dis)unity of the

signifier. If genre criticism is criticism and not philosophy, one can only assume that

assertions of genre are not made as statements of ideal form, but are assumed to be

historically determined traditions of word use. But it is impossible to be historically

selective and avoid the reduction to an ideality which declares some portions of the

untamable history exemplary and others deviant. Few theorists bother to try. Whatever

13
Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964; Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993).
14
Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996).

30
might be the case for other genres (or modes, or tropes), the European history of the

category "allegory" is a mess: it has been used to describe a seething sea of disparate

phenomena. (And, though one would not know it from reading the great mass of

research, allegory is not the exclusive property of Euro-America). And it has endured a

succession of literary-critical assumptions which have produced new theory and new

praxis for each successive literary age, each trying to make sense of its predecessors and

their readings of their predecessors. The only way to shape the boundaries of the term is

by exclusion of data, and hence the declaration that some writers or periods have gotten

allegory wrong, or not expressed it fully. But this privileging is possible only if there is

an extra-historical ground for the category, a ground which one assumes exists in the

saccharine world of the Forms. Typical of this problem is an announcement by Thomas

E. Maresca:

Baldly stated, [my proposition] is this: allegory has nothing

to do with personification. Corollary: an accurate theory of
allegory cannot start by accepting such texts as The
Pilgrim's Progress as bona fide allegories. Corollary: the
confusion of personification and allegory is probably a
chronologically late development (perhaps even traceable
to Bunyan) and probably successfully contaminated the
idea of allegory in the course of the eighteenth century
when great rhetorical importance was attached to the notion
of personification.15

One is shocked not merely by the pseudo-mathematical boldness with which such

dubious literary history is asserted. Much stranger is the assumption that, even if Bunyan

were the source of this "contamination," that this could somehow nullify three centuries

of usage. Historical "origin" is neither sufficient to define a genre in essentialist terms,

15
Thomas E. Maresca, "Saying and Meaning: Allegory and the Indefinable," Bulletin of Research in the
Humanities 83 (1980): 257.

31
nor is it possible to recover after a disruption. Maresca's project seems as doomed as

those noble nativisms which would seek to erase colonial pasts. History's mark is

indelible.

Maresca's distaste for prosopopoeia is not so much a mark against his scholarship

as it is a reminder that theory can never pretend to be the external analyst of the history of

criticism. Rather, there is only a continuous flow of definitional moves that extend from

the classical age to the present. Allegory has always been batted about between a host of

other terms, some fading out, others spontaneously generating themselves out of the

corpses of older forms, but always constituting a field of difference. Like any other seme,

"allegory" is given meaning not by an inherent link to an ideal genre, but by its ever-

elided difference from its partner-terms: enigma, hyponoia, parable, metaphor, irony,

symbol-and personification. When a critic makes a partial definition of allegory, he is not

getting the tradition wrong, but adding to it. And so "personification" must be a different

thing from "allegory"-precisely because Maresca has said so. It is also simultaneously

identical with allegory, because Bunyan (and so many others) have said so. And if one

were to introduce to the tradition a proof that "allegory" was only properly used when

referring to funeral orations for purple penguins, then that would also be a true (though

not conventional or useful) definition, assuming again that verbal abstractions cannot

have a reality apart from their history of use.

But more insightful critics are also driven inexorably towards exclusion when

they attempt the act of definition. How can one reconcile C.S. Lewis' assertion of

Spenser that "His chivalrous and allegorical poem was already a little out of date when it

32
first appeared,"16 with Teskey's suggestions that fully allegorical works were not possible

until the metaphysical decay of the pagan gods in the Renaissance?17 Each definition

must make its own partial historical narrative, because no catholic narrative could

produce a field of experience reducible to definition. And Maureen Quilligan holds the

act of definition so central that she has subtitled her study, Defining the Genre.

Quilligan's study is outstanding, and her contributions to our understanding are accurately

reflected in the number of citations she has received in subsequent scholarly literature on

the subject. My only complaint is her insufficient caution in asserting the definability of

genres. At the beginning of the study, she defends her method: "allegory as a form

responds to the linguistic conditions of a culture, and we shall be comparing works that

are not likely to have had any direct influence on each other. That they share so many

formal characteristics only makes the point more emphatic." (Quilligan 19) But this

methodology raises the question of selective analysis: if Quilligan can find similarities in

works not referencing each other, does that mean that there exists a "genre" out in the

realm of Forms, or is the genre merely defined as a function of her criteria of selection?

Perhaps one could indeed grant Quilligan her definition, but only on the condition that we

define her act of definition as a creative act, rather than an analytical one. The only way

to think of allegory (or any genre) consistent with a secular view of language is as the

sum total of all usages of the word: there is no abuse of words, only addition to them.

Though the tools of literary investigation are extraordinarily sophisticated, they

16
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936; New York: Oxford UP, 1961) 359.
17
Teskey, 33-34. To be fair, Teskey is not arguing exactly that all allegory was impossible during the
Medieval period, but that truly allegorical use of the pagan gods was. However, he is strangely silent
about medieval works in his otherwise comprehensive work, and strangely ambivalent about
personification. Unlike Maresca, he knows it must be called "allegory"; yet it is not nearly as conducive
to his vision of violent semiotics as the allegories of "capture" which occupy most of his attention.

33
are not immortal. Very few interpretive constructs have produced such consensus that

they seem to be guaranteed a role in any future constitution of the literary industry.18

Reasonable caution thus prompts a swerve to exemplarity, the examination of issues in a

series of case studies where the relief has been cut the deepest. But it has been broadly

recognized that the recitation of exempla is no way to derive general laws, and that the

most for which one can hope through such a method is to come to a position of insight on

the exempla themselves. Still, without the comfort of a general law, there can still be the

insight of a raised possibility.

This is the caveat and the hope with which I offer a reading of the social aesthetics

of allegory and allegoresis. The desire for community and the constant threat of

alienation seems necessarily to soak the entire field of hermeneutical activity. But this is

an infinite field, and there is no point in pretending to cover it. The comforting

boundaries of a series of exempla cannot be mapped onto an unbounded space, but they

can offer the possibility that the dynamics of one local field are analogous to those of

others. Of course, "allegory and allegoresis" is also an infinite field, as is any given text

with which I plan to work. But some infinites are smaller than others, and more

manageable: the set of odd integers is a much friendlier mess than is the set of reals, and

something similar holds for texts.

18
The few examples of irreplaceable technique that spring to mind--philology, textual criticism, oral-
formulaic theory--are powerful precisely because they are positivistic, and hence seriously exposed to a
theoretically ruthless reader. Moreover, the technicality of such methods limits their application to very
small portions of a received corpus, and hence dooms them to a bleak life in the ghetto of premodern
studies.

34
7. Allegory as Allegory (as Allegory)

A best-selling author who knew how to flatter himself would surely be an

epistemological populist. In his philosophy, knowledge would be easy to come by, and

Wisdom, as Solomon puts it, would be yodeling from the city spires. (Proverbs 9:3-6)

Within the sphere of reading, the obvious and accessible meaning, whether literal or not,

would be the valuable one. As a corollary, those works valued most highly in the public

sphere would be selling most briskly because they are the most wise. And thus prosperity

and fame could be as easily deciphered as any sign, and all the world would know that

they signified deep personal worth.

The dissertation-writer who wishes to flatter himself is forced into an elitism.

Unpopularity and value are perfectly commensurate, and one naturally assumes that it is

the former which derives from the latter (which is the objective ground). Poverty and

anonymity are signs which operate ironically, and unreadability is the indelible mark of a

great Calvinist election, elevation to the perpetual host of the Great Unappreciated. The

work of scholarship is thus transformed, in the lightning-flash: no longer an escape from

consultantdom, it becomes the proper locus of mysteries, the stand upon which hermetic

secrets may be unveiled to fellow-initiates (ideally, oneself alone). The fact that

dissertations are, perhaps without hyperbole, the least-read objects in the legible universe,

is merely a guarantee of their transcendental license to irritate and alienate.

In that spirit, I (temporarily) cast off the conventional strictures of academic prose,

and embark on a project of revelation. In the beginning, the great theorists did not

analyze and unpack, cite and dispute, leaving all arguments out in the open, unvalued,

where the vulgar could appropriate them. Rather, they concealed their insights in

35
prophecy and in poetry, in allegories which could stymie the crowds but allow insight to

the few. And because the few would have achieved their goal only through the most

exacting labor, they would learn to treasure theory as they ought.

Hear the allegory of the great semiologist, Zhuangzi:

Zhuangzi went to Chu, and on the way he saw an

empty skull with a bleached form, and he swiped at it with
a horse whip, and thereupon asked it, saying, "Did you
come to this through greed for life which passed all
bounds? Or did you manage the affairs of a dying
kingdom, and receive the executioner's axe? Or did you
have bad behavior, and were ashamed at making your
family disgraced, and come to this? Or did you catch a
disease from cold and hunger and come to this? Or did
you come to this through the natural course of your
years?" With this, he stopped speaking, took up the skull,
and used it for a pillow as he slept.
In the middle of the night, the skull appeared in his
dream, and said, "Your speech is like that of a rhetorician.
When I look at all that you said, they all are the
entanglements of the living, and death is without these
things. Would you like to hear the argument of the dead?
Zhuangzi said, "Yes." The skull said, "In death, there are
no lords above and no ministers below, and none of the
affairs of the four seasons. We have always taken heaven
and earth as the natural course of our years, and though I
had the happiness of a king on his throne, it would not pass
this." Zhuangzi did not believe him, and said, "I will send
the Commissioner of Fates to revivify your form, make you
new bones, flesh, and skin, return your parents, wife, and
children, your neighborhood and your knowledge—would
you want this?" The skull furrowed its brow and said,
"How could I quit the happiness of a king on his throne to
take up again the labor that exists among men?"

Now, the meaning of any allegory is fourfold: first, there is the historical or

literal, which comprehends the story. Above the literal, one reaches the poetic, which

manifests the intent. For those who are more gifted, they are able to pass to the

36
anagogical, in which the spiritual truths of the master are disclosed. But the highest level

of interpretation, which only the most skilled can achieve, is the literary-critical, in which

the poet has placed an eschatological [sous rature] vision of the City of Ecriture. Not

every sense is operative in every allegory, or at every point in an allegory; nonetheless,

these are the stairs upon which one ought to seek to ascend. Here is the interpretation of

Zhuangzi's allegory, in sections:

Zhuangzi went to Chu, and on the way he saw an empty

skull19 with a bleached form, and he swiped at it with a
horse whip, and thereupon asked it, saying, "Did you come
to this through greed for life which passed all bounds? Or
did you manage the affairs of a dying kingdom, and receive
the executioner's axe? Or did you have bad behavior, and
were ashamed at making your family disgraced, and come
to this? Or did you catch a disease from cold and hunger
and come to this? Or did you come to this through the
natural course of your years?" With this, he stopped
speaking, took up the skull, and used it for a pillow as he
slept.

On the historical level, this is the story of Master Zhuang, or Zhuang Zhou, a

fourth-century B.C. Chinese philosopher who has taken a journey south to the country of

Chu. He sees a skull upon the ground and he hits it, then asks it questions. Then,

because he is tired from his journey, and because it is improper for itinerant philosophers

to travel with their own cushioning, he takes the skull and uses it for a pillow.

Passing the bare facts of the event, we apprehend the poetic. Zhuangzi is
19
There is some ambiguity over whether the Chinese used here (dulou) should be taken as meaning a skull
or a full skeleton, as the later kulou. Imitations of Zhuangzi's parable by Zhang Heng and Cao Zhi, like
the original, stress those aspects of the dulou which are cranially-oriented (such as the furrowing of
brows), but are hardly conclusive. Better evidence is available from the Hou Han Shu, which cites a
geographical text, the Wanyun Nanzhou Yiwuzhi as describing a southern region named Wuhu, where
residents practiced cannibalism and "took the dulou, split them open, and drank wine out of them."
(Hou Han Shu, juan 86). Later references will be noted as HHS, with accompanying juan number.)
Since this evidence is convenient to the construction of my story here, I will assume the simple equation
of dulou with skulls; but I concede that the point could be debated further.

37
approaching Chu, the land of barbarism and miasma: his encounter with the skull is on

the road which leads away from culture. The skull is bleached and empty, hence old and

beyond decay, it is a relic of history and hence of History. The swipe may be but a nudge,

a handling for examination. But it is performed with an instrument of speed and fury,

rather than the caress of an archaeologist's hand. Zhuangzi cannot be friendly towards

this skull. And the questions-the formulaic "come to this" repeats a pitying pride, a

hesitant refusal of death which cannot be asked only once.

Rising toward the anagogical, we note that the skull cannot be a literal skull, and

it is an old principle dating back at least to Proclus that when literal becomes inconsistent,

we are forced to rise to the spiritual interpretations.20 Nor is the journey a literal journey.

And if we did not have faith in the presence of the great master urging us into the text to

receive his wisdom, we might suspect with textual critics that the Zhuangzi is not a literal

Zhuangzi, but rather a projection from a snowballing wisdom tradition that came out of

the original teacher's school. But since we do have faith, we know that Zhuangzi is trying

to tell us of his personal life story. Embarked midway upon life's way, he is lost and

tired. He sees the face of death, and he swipes at it. He pities death, he proclaims the

pride of life-but he cannot resist the continual questioning. Exhausted by his spiritual

labor, he sinks into meditation, and sets his own mind to dream upon the object of his

interrogation.

At the summit of interpretation, the literary-critical, we realize that the skull is an

20
One might naturally assume that Proclus hatched this from channelling the spirit of Zhuangzi, but Robert
Lamberton, in an excellent study, seems to think that Proclus is working out a linguistics that is able to
deal theoretically with the old Neoplatonic desire to reconcile Plato and Homer. See Robert Lamberton,
Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 164-73. More about Proclus and the Neoplatonists
generally will be coming in Chapter 2.

38
allegory of Allegory, picked clean and decayed into its exalted final state after the

upending of Romanticism. This is so because the emblem of the skull has always been

the Allegory of Allegories, and those of perception have always known this. As Walter

Benjamin has written, "Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the

transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the

observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial

landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely,

sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death's head." (Benjamin

166) Benjamin's imagery is undoubtedly inspired by the spirit of Zhuangzi, though he

perhaps thought he was under the secular influence of the Renaissance emblematic

tradition, where skulls were a common theme, meant to encourage the contemplation of

one's own impending death. But Benjamin's argument is a rewriting of the Romantics:

led by Goethe and especially influential to Benjamin through Friedrich Creuzer, their

celebration of the symbol figured it as the particular incarnation within the realm of

nature of an expansive spiritual truth. In contrast, allegory was a cheap trick of a

rhetorical mode, a shell game in which one particular image is swapped for one general

concept. Symbol was the concentration of the eternal into the instantaneous, allegory was

the lifeless reference to abstraction. Benjamin accepts the terms but not the valuation: he

rescues allegory precisely on the grounds that it is not immanence. Allegory, he argues, is

a form of expression, like speech-but even more like writing. Like writing, but even

more like hieratic writings, ideograms or hieroglyphs, for allegory must keep its secrets

locked in inscrutable, and thus arbitrary, representations. Because the allegorical image is

always arbitrary, the physical world is denigrated through the image; but because its

39
arbitrariness is the condition of its ability to signify eternal Ideas, the allegory and the

world are thereby exalted. Allegory itself is dead, always a dead fragment, but its death is

redeemed precisely because one can understand and achieve life through it. The skull

Zhuangzi finds is not merely dead, but bleached: and yet its appearance brings to his mind

all of life's traumatic pomp. Thus, by "skull," Zhuangzi means us to understand Allegory,

and by "Zhuangzi" (the character, of course, and not the author or even the narrator) he

means us to understand the reader who comes to allegory seeking insight, or perhaps the

theorist who comes to Allegory seeking insight. Both are referred back from the ever-

passing present of history (the history of a work's narrative or the history of criticism) to

the supposition of a timeless Idea.

In the middle of the night, the skull appeared in his

dream, and said, "Your speech is like that of a rhetorician.
When I look at all that you said, they all are the
entanglements of the living, and death is without these
things. Would you like to hear the argument of the dead?
Zhuangzi said, "Yes." The skull said, "In death, there are
no lords above and no ministers below, and none of the
affairs of the four seasons. We have always taken heaven
and earth as the natural course of our years, and though I
had the happiness of a king on his throne, it would not pass
this."

The letter of the text proclaims that this is a dream. Some would say that this

passage has no literal, or historical, sense, because the object of description is not

historical fact but merely dream. But this is muddleheaded, for it does not know to

distinguish between real dreams and dreamed reality. This is a real dream, and it is a

dream about a chatty cranium. However, the fact that the skull begins to lecture the

hapless master is a reminder that it is a real dream only within the dreamed reality called

fiction, since this lecturing fulfills our expectations of genre convention. The

40
presentation of a brief, epigrammatic teacher-student encounter cannot be a mimesis of

the world; it must be one in a series of enactments of the dream called "pre-Qin Chinese

philosophy."

Poetically, we are to meditate upon the fact of the dream. Zhuangzi the narrator

could have told a tale in which Zhuangzi the character met a skull which actually flew

into the air and began to speak. This then would have been a philosophical ghost story, a

rebuke from the world beyond and a precursor to the zhiguai genre. It could still be that,

and is-if one assumes a world in which dreams are the site of authentic revelation and this

is such a revelation, initiated by the magical juxtaposition of full to empty skull. But the

speaking skull could also be a psychological projection: perhaps a manifestation of the

wisdom latent in the philosopher's unconscious, perhaps a projection of contentment onto

the skull motivated by unconscious guilt and anxiety stirred by the confrontation with the

face of mortality.

Anagogically, the skull allegorizes the movement of renunciation which is bread-

and-butter Daoism. The afterlife is not a paradise, but a blissful disenfranchisement.

This meditation upon death does not work to elide the demarcation between life and

death, and recuperate the death's head into a soteric paradise. On the contrary, death in

the skull affirms its unbreachable otherness-but it seduces the philosopher into a

sympathy. That which is explicit in European early-modern skull emblems, the future

identity of gazer and gazee, has been implicit here from the start. But now, with the

speech of the skull, Zhuangzi is presented with what must be read as a seduction.

Whether on the lower levels of interpretation the dream was counted as revelation or

projection is irrelevant: the dialectic is drawn up and resolved into Wisdom, even if the

41
material cause of Wisdom is a defense mechanism of the unconscious.

But it is in the primordial pneuma of Theory alone that the expression of the

master reaches fulfillment. The skull-allegory responds to the philosopher-critic's inquiry

with a rebuke and a correction, bringing us up to fuller understanding of the mode. The

Benjaminian line of reasoning with which Zhuangzi interrogated the skull had recognized

the arbitrariness of the allegorical sign, and hence its subjection to death-but through that

ever-dying sign, it referred back to the world of life and fulfillment. Even as the allegory-

as-skull was the token of all that was untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful in the attempt of

language to attain the Idea, the fact of reference back to the Idea held out the promise of

salvation, and the reabsorption of the exiled phenomenal into the presence of the

noumenal.

But here in the dream-space of heightened perception, Allegory renounces its

claim upon the life of the Idea. It comprehends the Benjaminian theorist's reference, and

it acknowledges the possibility that its historical decay could be read into a bridge to the

undecaying present of a perfect attainment of referentiality. But it demystifies that

reading, announcing it to be rhetorical. Allegory does not despise rhetoric; it will and

does answer one kind of rhetoric with another. But it insists that the attempt to refer the

allegorical signifier to the ideal signified be recognized as mere rhetoric, with no effective

force to raise the semiologic dead.

By arranging such a response from the skull, Zhuangzi was allegorically

prophesying the response of Paul de Man to Benjamin. De Man's well-known essay,

"The Rhetoric of Temporality", is not directly aimed at Benjamin (though of course the

latter is cited), but the conclusions of the two theorists are arrayed along the same axis,

42
and the prominent places of both within the recent history of theory has bonded the pair.

De Man begins with a consideration of the contradictions within Romantic

figurations of the relationship between subject and object, and locates the Romantic

fixation on the symbol-allegory distinction within that problematic. Symbolic writing is

the hope of Romantic writers who seek to transcend their own condemnation to

temporality by discovering the unity of mental with natural life, bonding human to

universal in an organic whole. Allegorical writing is the corresponding fear that the

human experience of nature can only be a reference to the transcendent, and not a

partaking in it. But de Man faults the late and post-Romantics for accentuating that

distinction and embracing symbol naively, whereas, he claims, the pre-Romantics

flattened it. To them, the nature of the relationship between signifier and signified was

not as important as the fact of their common aspiration to transcendence, and their use of

allegory undercuts the apparent claims for the superiority of symbol, as it confesses the

impossibility of the symbolic and the necessity of the allegorical.

De Man's assertions are questionable as statements on the intellectual history of

the period, and there have been numerous rebuttals within the field of Romantic

criticism.21 They are much more worthy as theory-and in fact this particular essay is one

of the central texts through which the Yale School deconstructed the American academy.

If Benjamin theorized allegory for the age of Saussure, de Man retheorized it for the age

of Derrida. De Man's refusal to allow the recuperative movement which characterized

Benjamin's extraordinarily sophisticated naiveté is a parallel to the poststructuralist

21
For a good tracing of one of those lines of debate, see Denis Donoghue, "Murray Krieger versus Paul de
Man", Revenge of the Aesthetic:The Place of Literature in Theory Today, Ed. Michael P. Clark
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)101-116.

43
demand that the structured seme be put under erasure.

Allegory has itself become an allegory of language. The mode has always been

recognized as the visible form of its etymology ("other-language"), as that trope which

most radically places its meaning outside literal meaning. But literary linguistics have

come to consensus that all language is condemned to exile from the ideal of the literal.

Hence all language is allegorical, and allegory is language at its most typical. So long as

allegory is the mode which renounces its claim upon an "other" even as it speaks of

eternal life, it is the perfect picture of ever-deferred language.

Zhuangzi did not believe him, and said, "I will send the
Commissioner of Fates to revivify your form, make you
new bones, flesh, and skin, return your parents, wife, and
children, your neighborhood and your knowledge—would
you want this?" The skull furrowed its brow and said,
"How could I quit the happiness of a king on his throne to
take up again the labor that exists among men?"

By the letter, this is still a dream. It is also a doubling of the original question and

the original answer, a doubling which on the literal level adds nothing new.

It is in these last lines that the level of the poetic rises to climax. The dreaminess

of the dream comes to the fore: the skull, which had been weathered dry and cracked, has

now a brow to furrow. This dream skull is then a testament to the ability of the sublime

(whether spiritual or psychological) to transcend the limits of material logic. The form of

the allegory thus enforces its message-a hallucinogenic moment of Formalist

defamiliarization drags us out of the ruts which cover the way of the world.

Anagogically, this final exchange shadows forth the triumph of the philosopher's

spiritual education. He resists the lesson of death which confronts him, and also

supplies, through dream, his own rebuttal. This is the same Zhuang Zhou who had

44
dreamt of the butterfly, and then upon awaking, suspected that he might now be a

butterfly dreaming a human existence. Here we have had a similar dynamic from the

beginning of the parable. What is made explicit in the Renaissance emblems has always

been implicit here: the confrontation with a skull always requires an act of identification,

an imagination of the fit and feeling of the mask of death upon one's own face.

Zhuangzi's dialogue with his skull is the same as Hamlet's with Yorick: in both cases, a

confusion between the living self and the perished other. The fact of confusion of

persons which is only heightened by the dream is perhaps the core of the spiritual lesson.

The point of Zhuangzi's anecdote of the butterfly is probably not simply an elegant

exposition of the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, not simply that epistemology is ultimately

ungroundable in a Cartesian cogito. Rather, coming as it does at the conclusion of a

chapter of semiologic speculation (the tianlai chapter), it also suggests that

epistemological confusion is salutary, and that it is attainable through a sort of

deconstruction. It is not just that the dream proved that one cannot know whether one is

human or butterfly, but that dreams are capable of straining the normal categories of

thought, erasing the boundaries by which "human" and "butterfly" constitute a structure of

difference. And the present dream can be read in the same way: We do not know if the

animate skull is the dream of a philosopher, or if the allegorical animation of the

Zhuangzi is merely the philosophical dreaming of a skull-to-be.

The critic tries once again to bring the allegorical skull back to the life of literary

fullness. It is the terms in which he does this that count as the ultimate theoretical

revelation. The Critic attempts to revive Allegory, not simply to an idealized condition in

which representation is at last fulfilled, but specifically to a fulfillment of community.

45
Allegory is offered a return to knowledge, the condition in which signifieds are capable of

perfectly inhabiting their signifiers-but this is a fullness offered in the terms of restoration

to the world of social affairs. Return to knowledge is a return to human flesh, a return to

kinship relations, and a return to the neighborhood with all its opportunities for

advancement or constraint. By this allegory, Zhuangzi meant to prophesy the current

readings of allegory which abound in the wake of Benjamin and de Man. It is generally

accepted, following de Man, that allegories cannot be recovered into the life of true

signification-yet somehow, the inescapable death of particular allegories becomes the

opportunity for the salvation of Allegory. The mode is recoverable, in analysis after

analysis, because the very condition of inescapable metaphysical decay which it enacts in

language is itself the perfect image of social decay. The vast majority of contemporary

writings on allegory focus on the semiotics of the mode; the only field beyond semiotics

in which most theorists of allegory choose to roam is that of politics: the nature of

semiotics is seen as a key to understanding the nature of power relationships. Allegory

becomes an allegory of human interplay and conflict.

Fredric Jameson's claim that "All Third-World texts are necessarily...allegorical"22

is a fine example of what Zhuangzi was hinting at. The well-known (and widely

denounced)23 essay in which this claim was made, "World Literature in an Age of

Multinational Capitalism," is not at all an essay on semiotics-but it is semiologically

motivated:
22
Fredric Jameson, "World Literature in an Age of Multinational Capitalism" The Current in Criticism:
Essays in the Present and Future in Literary Theory Ed. Clayton Koelb and Virgil Lokke (West
Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1987) 141.
23
cf. Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory'," Social Text 17 (1987):
3-25. Ahmad's essay was a direct rejoinder to Jameson's original version of the essay, which had been
published in Social Text 15.

46
 If allegory has once again become somehow congenial for
us today, as over against the massive and monumental
unifications of an older modernist symbolism or realism
itself, it is because the allegorical spirit is profoundly
discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the
multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the
homogenous representation of the symbol. (Jameson 146)

The Third World occupies the position of the slave in (Jameson's Marxist reading of)

Hegel's master-slave allegory: the slave alone is in contact with the facts of production,

and hence cannot escape an understanding of the nature of the social order, even in his

private life. The master (the industrialized West), distanced from the hard facts of

production, can only intellectualize in a dreamy realm of Ideas, and hence is doomed to a

permanent split between the Freudian Private and the Marxian Public. So, in Jameson's

first (and most facile) example, Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" refers not just to a private

madness, but allegorizes a "literal" public cannibalism. This familiar story is offered as

the type of all Third-World texts: by unavoidably referring to the public, even the most

ostensibly private of narratives (which "Madman" certainly is not), are perfectly

polysemous and hence exemplary allegories. It even seems as if polysemy is, by the end

of the essay, that which defines the Third World for Jameson: those cultures in which the

signifiers of daily life cannot help but point obliquely to the network of late-capitalist

neo-imperialism are the only other for the massive and monumental unifications of

privileged Euro-American solipsism.

If the core of allegorical semiotics is viewed not in terms of polysemy but in terms

of deferral and difference, then Allegory can be allegorized into another set of social

relations. So, for example, Barbara Johnson reads the mode as a translation, into literary

form, of sexuality. In "Allegory's Trip-Tease: The White Waterlily," Johnson offers a

47
reading of a Mallarmé prose poem, in which the narrator imagines the plucking of a white

waterlily as a substitute for sexual intimacy with an imagined woman upon the bank near

his boat. The waterlily is a rewriting of Guillaume de Lorris' unreachable Rose, and

hence it operates as an allegory of, not sex, but rather of the blurriness of sex. Sex is

always an act of erasing and redrawing of boundaries, desire is that which can never

attain fulfillment. And so, in Johnson's analysis, it is a version of allegory, written in the

flesh and in its fancies. Allegorical semiotics also demand that the critic recognizes the

desire inherent in the act of signification, at the same time as she recognizes the

impossibility of that signification reaching fulfillment. Hence, "Division, contradiction,

incompatibility, and ellipsis thus stand as the challenge, the enigma, the despair, and the

delight both of the lover and of the reader of literature."24 Allegory is again figured as the

literary simulacrum of human sociality; the mechanisms of allegorical representation are

again seen as the literal level of a grand allegory in which the operations of the psyche are

the spiritual marrow. This method of analysis ups the ante on literary endeavor, and one

would be abashed not to call it noble, high-minded in a grand old humanistic sense. If

one assumes that literary mechanics can be reperformed in the domain of human

relations, then the study of literature is capable of teaching us what it might mean to be

human.

Besides Jameson's vision of allegory as politically salutary polysemy, and

Johnson's vision of allegory as titillating deferral, there are also darker visions. Gordon

Teskey, who has been perhaps the theorist most eager to associate semiotics with politics,

reads the modern semiological tradition in yet another way: "Meaning is an instrument
24
Barbara Johnson, "Allegory's Trip-Tease: The White Waterlily", The Critical Difference (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1980) 20.

48
used to exert force on the world as we find it, imposing on the intolerable, chaotic

otherness of nature a hierarchical order in which objects will appear to have inherent

'meanings'." (Teskey 2) Allegory is, as always, the most refined of semiotic moves: here,

it is the site of language's purest diabolism. Teskey even rechristens certain acts of

signification as, "capture," a violence in which the barbarous fact of the material world is

put under the yoke and led in triumph. His founding instance of such allegorical capture

is Francesca da Rimini, from Canto Five of the Inferno: the violence of divine wrath upon

the lover is asserted as parallel to Dante's violent fixing of her within a hierarchical

structure of meaning. She is squashed down from personhood into the constraints of a

moral box: her damnation is to be forced to signify the sin of desire, for all of future

literary history. Yet, in Teskey's reading, she is also the model of heroic resistance to the

repressive force of allegory: as her sin was to proceed from the reading of romance

narratives to the experience of adultery, she refuses to acknowledge that literary works

can adequately substitute for reality, and thus that allegory has the right to efface the

irreducible complexity of the world.

But Zhuangzi has prophetically rebuffed this last theoretical movement. The skull

refuses finally to be brought back to life, and Allegory refuses to be projected into the

world of human conflict. Politics is not a sub-field of linguistics, and we must recognize

why the bleached death's head loves the solitude which reigns in the land of the dead.

49
8. Allegoresis as Archaeological Relic

The shadow-play of signs is an engrossing drama; that does not make it into an

acceptable medium for social modeling. More than any other field, politics resists the

song of theory—even when the category of empiricism is at its nadir, political claims

perhaps must always somehow invoke the empirical. Despite several attempts, there has

not yet appeared a convincing account of how reality can be dismissed from the quest for

justice. Hence the waves of theory which assume that the mechanics of the allegorical

seme are somehow explanatory maps of human action are almost a mockery of political

satisfaction: one thinks of the gruesomeness of refugees subsisting on leaf salad and bark

soup.

There has perhaps been no option. Current reimaginings of allegory spring forth

from the history of criticism, and that field has remained stoically ahistorical. Histories

of literature have thankfully moved beyond the stage of characterizing defined periods

which progressed in abstract idealities of antithesis and synthesis. Literature has been

relentlessly historicized, and this is good when not reductive. But the history of criticism,

when practiced at all, still exists largely as a progression of forms, a debate which skims a

dimension parallel to history without ever breaking its plane. Given this, and given the

contemporary conjoining of allegory to poststructuralism, it is not odd that the brute

reality of political questions is encapsulated within a bubble of language.

Rather than being the source of metaphor in a world without literalia, language

can also be a system of relics. Archaeological methods are surely no less speculative than

literary ones; but they are more verisimilar. From a Roman coin I could imagine the

Mediterranean empire as its allegorical object: the roundness of the coin could gesture to

50
the sense of Roman destiny at achieving the unification of the orbis terrarum; its

composition might hearken to the aureate halo of a Golden Age; its visage perhaps

demonstrates that the mind of Augustus was stamped boldly across the empire. It might

be no less an act of imagination to reconstruct the date of minting from the coin, the

source of the gold which composed it, the patterns of investment and land ownership

which it enabled. But the imagination of the latter set is, if no more provable, certainly

more engaging because more complex.

Rather than use the likeness of semiotic mechanics to figure forth an image of

repression or liberation, it is more engagingly complex to track the circulation of

allegorical semiotics within the paths of historically reconstructed societies. The history

of criticism must be historicized, and if it seems a stretch to say that debates about such

matters could have had any play within the details of commerce or realpolitik, I assert that

this incredulity is itself the result of neglect of the issue. The porous borders between

literature and social movements have been long established; why should one assume that

criticism alone should be quarantined?

What follows is an interpretation of how elite readers in two societies, early

modern England and Tang China, invoked allegorical exegesis in their attempts to define

their place within social hierarchies. Both England and China have specific and different

theoretical models which are employed for such negotiations. In England, allegorical

readers choose to view themselves as members of pseudo-mysteries, largely egalitarian

formations in which the group is defined against the common lot of society by their

possession of elevated perception and spiritual insight. In contrast, Chinese interpretation

is figured on a patronage model, as poets figure themselves as the allegories to be read by

51
real or metaphorical patrons: the desire is to find a perfect exegete, a reader who can

recognize hidden worth and elevate one out of the muck of anonymity.

But I am not at all concerned to establish a binarism of social allegoresis, to say

that it either must work in way X or way Y. There are, I assume, an infinite number of

variations in which humans could employ the language of hermeneutics in conceiving

their social situations; but infinity is not a handy number to deal with. Two is much

nicer.

Nor am I fool enough to suggest that these two represent "Eastern" and "Western"

modes of relating intellectual movements to social praxis. It is true that each of these two

milieux has its own paradigm which controls how participants conceive of their

hermeneutical endeavors. Both of these paradigms are in place in their respective

cultures, at the latest, by the third century CE, and the next two chapters will be devoted

to explicating their mechanics. But in each case, these models conceal as much as they

illuminate. Theory and practice can never be separated wholly; nor can they ever be

wholly merged. Frequently, histories of both Chinese and European criticism reveal that

the practice of literature and the understanding of that practice diverge: new modes of

literature emerge which criticism cannot immediately understand, or critical theories are

propounded which only after some distance are able to inspire the production of new

forms. Sometimes, a given tradition simply does not have the conceptual resources to

ever explicitly take notice of a crucial facet of its own practice. As the final two chapters

of this study will argue, this is the case with both England and China: there is Chinese-

style patronage allegoresis to be found hidden in the literature of early modern England,

and analogues to the European mystery-allegoresis in China's Tang dynasty. In each case,

52
the application of a foreign model can dredge out for examination that which has been

hidden and forgotten, repressed by the aesthetic power of a long-standing native

paradigm.

53
 Chapter Two

1. From Technique to Ontology

At the summit of his journey, at the heart of the Empyrean, in the midst of the

thirty-third canto of his third flight of epic song, the pilgrim Dante is granted a vision, at

last, of God:

O grace abounding, through which I presumed

to set my eyes on the Eternal Light
so long that I spent all my sight on it!
In its profundity I saw—ingathered
and bound by love into one single volume—
what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:
substances, accidents, and dispositions
as if conjoined—in such a way that what
I tell is only rudimentary. (Paradiso 33.82-90)25

This is not the familiar logocentrism of theory, the posited divine guarantee of semiotic

meaning. It is not the common scholastic trope of the "book of nature," in which one

reads the character of the divine. Rather, God himself is Dante's book: there is no distant

referent to this text. Nor does the metaphor of the divine codex even, apparently, stress

the textuality of the book, its availability for reading and interpretation. What Dante does

emphasize about the book is its codecitia:26 the heart of the metaphor is the fact of

binding. God is an ingathering, a sempiternal scrapbook in which all the scattered

manuscript pages on which the universe is written have been lovingly taken up, arranged

into their proper places, and bound. Dante stresses the bookness of the book, its

physicality, just as the contents of this collectanea are themselves physical: that which is

conjoined in God is the scholastic litany of substances, their non-essential qualities, and
25
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso Trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1986) 301.
26
This, despite the fact that the particular word in question, volume, ought etymologically to refer to
scrolls rather than codices.

54
the manner of relation in which those qualities are expressed by their corresponding

substances.27 In this first metaphor for God, Dante here signifies divinity by the ultimate

image of signification, but in a fashion which transcends semiotics. God is not to be read

(and certainly not to be retold, given the inadequacy of human language in Paradise) but

to be experienced. And the pilgrim before God has arrived, not at a truth recoverable by

the process of applying hermeneutical technique, but rather at the immanence of

ingathered reality. The book of God does not function to tell anything at all, but rather to

act as the ultimate and satisfying ground in which all the facets of medieval ontology

cohere.

Ninety-nine cantos earlier, our narrator had been in the throes of an existentially

resonant mid-life crisis, somehow exiled into his famous dark wood, sadly lost (in what

way left unsaid) from the path that does not stray. There, lost in the folds of a mazy

ontological twilight, on the lam from a trio of beasts, he spots the man of Mantua who is

to become his guide. Like his last encounter in the last canto, this first in the first is with

a book. He speaks:

"O light and honor of all other poets,

may my long study and the intense love
that made me search your volume serve me now.
You are my master and my author, you—
the only one from whom my writing drew
the noble style for which I have been honored.
You see the beast that made me turn aside;
27
Textual scholarship, along with tradition dating back to Bocaccio, testify to Dante's having published the
Commedia in brief fascicles over several years. As John Ahern has argued, this fact suggests a self-
referentiality to the metaphor: Both Dante's journey and the reader's have with this last canto passed
from progressive sensus to atemporal sententia: "Only now is the Pilgrim ready to see all things in God,
just as the reader can only now hope to grasp the poem's meaning in its entirety." John Ahern, "Binding
the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33" PMLA 97:5 (Oct 1982) 803. Erich
Auerbach has argued that the quest for unity is the driving energy which arcs through Alighieri's career;
if so, this moment is as much a perfection of the life as of the work. Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the
Secular World Trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

55
 help me, o famous sage, to stand against her,
for she has made my blood and pulses shudder." (Inferno 1.82-90)

The passage not only uses the same rhyme on "book" (volume) which holds the central

place in the vision to come.28 Our author, ever the numerologist, has counted out the

lines and placed each passage in exactly the same position within its respective canto, a

trio of tercets following nine sets of nine. And Dante describes Virgil in terms more

appropriate to the divine: the Roman is his master,29 his author, his light and honor. But

the volume of Virgil is not an ontological mystery; it is the source of a noble style, which

is at the heart of Dante's oddly humble-proud imprecation: Virgil is the master who taught

Dante to write in such a way that he would gain earthly renown. No matter that that same

honored style comes up so horribly short in the vision of the divine book, as in the

Paradiso generally, where the most common trope is the poet's expression of

inexpressibility.

Dante criticism perennially asks how much the Commedia is a narrative of the

poet's internal development, rather than a narrative of the putative worlds he traverses.

This is a debate for specialist giants, and I would never dare offer a systematic theory.

But there is at least one observable shift in Dante's role: the poet begins as a reader of the

most allegorized books of antiquity, and ends as the observer of a book which cannot be

28
In fact, as Curtius points out, there is a long chain of book-tropes which span the Commedia. But
despite his wealth of examples, the Dante's first and last encounters provide the two most thematically
resonant of those tropes. Cf. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
Trans.Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP: 1953) 326-32.
29
Maestro could, as Barbara Nolan has reasonably suggested, be a pun on Vergil's status as a sort of
schoolteacher, the source of exempla for the Latin grammars. Cf. Barbara Nolan, "Dante's Vergil, the
Liberal Arts, and the Ascent to God," in Allegoresis: the Craft of Allegory in Medieval Literature Ed. J.
Stephen Russell (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988) 27-47. I think, however, that the succeeding
epithets require a grander frame of reference.

56
interpreted and does not even seem to signify so much as to bind together the universe.

Virgil is a guide to the secrets of the nether realm, and an expositor of truth; the quest

which ends at the book of God has come to a place where the dichotomy between truth

and reality no longer holds, for meaning and being are no longer separable entities.

Allegoresis has always properly been understood to be a technique of reading.

More than other variants of hermeneutics, its action upon an otherwise indigestible text is

obvious: it does things to words which are not of the words themselves. And the

obviousness of the technique was apparent to its practitioners in premodern worlds, both

those who created allegories and those who interpreted presumed allegories. This is, after

all, where Dante starts off: lost in the dark forest of worldliness, a place where he has

learned somehow to care about style and honor, he hails his master in the terms of

technique.

But just as Dante is able to reach, at last, a more perfect volume than Virgil's, and

a more sublime conception of the grounding which underlies all relation and

signification, allegorists generally were also ultimately more than technicians. Allegory

and allegoresis, in traditional theory, are able to complete their possibilities of semiotics

only because they are grounded upon a certain ontological order, in which author,

exegete, and reader must all participate. Hermeneutics, for such beings, is never simply a

skill that can and should be taught indiscriminately, for that would imply that all could

equally participate in the interpretation of texts which are manifestly obscure. The

techniques of reading can be explicated, but technique is itself dependent upon

ontological status. Understanding is a function of pre-existent status and inherent worth,

and the distinctions between classes of people who can and cannot understand a given

57
text are mapped upon social and spiritual distinctions of noble and base (sometimes

understood in terms of power and wealth, sometimes inversely to such things). The

deciphering of codes is to the Platonist and the Daoist in itself a coded mark of inclusion.

Within such systems, place and positioning matter. Dante's first narrated social

encounter is with Vergil, in the presence of beasts. The character of his relation to Vergil

and Vergil's volume is only lucid within the context of that state of existential

endangerment. Vergil's book has always been Dante's guide and master, the teacher of a

superlative style. Now he relates to the master with fondness and the full warmth of

human bonding, partly because of that prior sense of relation, but also partly because

Dante is lost among phenomena which are alien and apparently hostile, and he needs a

guide to lead him through the hidden places. His final encounter, with God, is in a place

beyond place- or rather, in a place which encompasses all other place and position. The

unity of the blessed is a unity in the divine, and Dante experiences the emanation of

divine warmth by being bound up in God, along with all the other substances and

accidents of the universe. He is not apotheosized into God, he remains within the stable

state of grace, but nothing is hostile and nothing is even external in that final canto.

Unlike his encounter with Vergil's volume, which created social bonds through the

external medium of a read text, Dante meets God in a purer plane where there can be no

externalities, and the field of relation is itself subsumed and bound within the text.

This chapter and the next will explain the basics of how allegoresis was explicitly

linked to certain types of social formation. The social formations which get elaborated

are thoroughly bound up with conceptions of the text as something received externally

and acted upon, or as something is internal and organic to the processes of exegesis and

58
transmission. The roots of this distinction are grounded deep within the existential

assumptions of interpreters, and so in order to trace the genesis and structure of such a

distinction, it needs to be understood what are the social consequences of an ontology in

which there is almost zero distance, as with Dante's bookish God, between meaning and

being.

59
2. Ontological Tautology and the Irrepressible It

Hermeneutics, before the advent of modern methods, was structured like a

comedy. The role of the interpreter was to chase the slight figure of a beloved, easy to

love yet hard to get. As in all good comedies, these hermeneutical pursuits ended

successfully, with the interpreter always able to reach his object of desire, to be united

with the alluring yet virtuous author/meaning which waited for him beyond all the

obstacles of language and culture. The Divine Comedy is only a rarefied Platonic version

of this pattern: Dante has risen on the love of Beatrice to a visionary meeting with Love

itself. Dante cannot be the exegete of his own journey: he confesses incompetence in

narration. But the moves are always the same, and the interpreter who is content to write

an exegesis rather than an epic plays the role of comic hero just as successfully as does

the poet. And this was most certainly a role—the desire to play one's part in an exegetical

comedy is a decision to act out all the familiar moves, to put oneself through the paces of

genre conventions.

But the playing of a role shuttles between the poles of technique and ontology.

Role-playing involves technique: to act (or interpret) in accordance with genre

conventions is to employ a series of skills which need to be learned. But if the role is not

thought to be merely a staged fiction (entertaining or cynical) then there are ontological

assumptions at work. An exegete takes on the role of a comic hero not simply because

the moves are fun to perform, but because he has learned to see himself and his place in

the world within a certain framework. The comic exegete announces his chase of

meaning, but the old game is more a Being-toward the text than it is an exegetical mining

of data. Traditional critics did not simply do things to texts, they also assumed things

60
about what their relationships to texts were, and what sort of possibilities welled up from

the springs of those deeply felt relations.

The vast underground stores of critical theory within the European tradition have

a great deal to say about technique. Poetry is eternally being etymologized back to its

origins in the "making" aspect of π οι/ησιϕ, and like every artisinal occupation, it has its

own rules of craft that are transmitted across the generations. The reading and explication

of literature is almost as often posited as a technical enterprise: categories of rhetoric

presumably intended to teach composition have been almost as often invoked to support

the systematic analysis of texts, and even plain-jane Grammar has claimed elite status for

hermeneutics, at least as early as Aristotle's Περι/ 9Ερµηνει/αϕ but especially in the

medieval schools. Even when interpretive process is not codified into procedural

standards, as it most often is not, discourse on readerly technique is voluminous. This is

at least as true for the tradition of allegorizing commentary as it is for other strains:

leaving aside endless medieval debates about how exactly the levels of fourfold

(occasionally threefold) allegoresis are to be ranked,30 there are obvious questions that

confront any allegorist: on what basis does one decide that the literal needs to be

bypassed? Once the decision is made to allegorize, how does one justify a particular field

of reference (i.e., why should the Iliad's theomachia be moral rather than meteorological

allegory, or vice-versa)? What powers enable the clear vision of inscrutable planes of

meaning?

The social ontology of allegoresis is everywhere within traditional theory, but it is

30
Endless, because rich and complex, not cramped and perjoratively "scholastic." See Henri Lubac,
Medieval Exegesis: Volume 1, the Four Sense of Scripture Trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1998).

61
everywhere left to the field of gesture and implication. There is a vast richness of

assumptions about authors', exegetes', and readers' places in the universe and bonds with

each other, but these assumptions are left half-hidden, the nagging ghosts which appear

only in peripheral vision. What do allegorizing exegetes think that they are doing? This

is a question which has been examined in depth, by generations of scholars. But who do

these exegetes think they are? How do they locate themselves within a cosmic order

where the macro-structures of truth are replicated in the goings-on of local community?

These questions are largely unasked, unanswered, ignored. They are summarized

away: everyone knows that the (European) pre-moderns thought of their acts of

allegoresis as participation in a mystery cult, and everyone who speaks of allegoresis

dutifully includes a few pages or paragraphs on the fact.31 There, really, appears to be

little more to be said on the topic, since the exegetes themselves took their positions in

the universe for granted and spoke much more of the techniques of explicating allegories.

Their explicit focus was on the process and the content of interpretation, and

contemporary rereadings have followed where they led.

But the great lesson that one can learn from allegorizers is, after all, that the

explicit is not always the final story. Dante spends much more time with Vergil than he

does with God, and he draws us a much more finely shaded picture of the former, but his

journey is bound together only in its ineffable goal. It is time to move on from the

epistemologies of allegoresis to its fundamental ontologies.

I have already alluded to a minor methodological problem: the absence of major

31
This critique is only aimed at the incompleteness of the field, not at the quality of the individual studies
which comprise it. Michael Murrin's summary is particularly excellent for its nuance in beginning to
address issues of allegoretical ontology. Cf. Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1969) 21-53.

62
premodern texts explicit on hermeneutical ontology. Arguments on nothing ought to be

hard to make. Part of the solution is to draw lines of descent between under-examined

texts, and part is to apply the normal craftiness that one expects from academic research.

But some importation of theory into the discussion is unavoidable. The use of theory, so

broadly accepted, hardly needs any defense now, even when applied to premodern and

non-Western texts which might seem alien to it. Still, rather than relying on any

assumptions about general defenses of theory, I would offer a brief word about why

Heidegger in particular is useful to Greek and Chinese allegoresis in particular.

Heidegger's thought is famously intertwined with Greek philosophy, and even

slightly influenced by (highly mediated reports of) pre-Qin Daoism. But the organicity of

Heidegger to such stuff ought not to be overestimated, and in fact a foreign presence is

precisely what these materials need. As there is no organic tradition of analysis which

tries to frame philosophically the social location of critical presumptions, theoretical

suppositions must be imported and overlaid from without. In this case, the foreignness of

theory can bring out the hidden peculiarities of these texts which have lain so low for so

long. Sweet accents salt; and sour, sweet. MSG accents anything less artificial than itself.

Foreign spices can mask rottenness, but (in moderation) they can also bring out the

hidden delights of the meat. The propriety of organic connection is not nearly as useful as

the ability of theory to act as a foil against which truly innate properties can be perceived

for the first time. We might as well forget about historical connection and invoke

whatever theory lies near to hand, both accessible and useful in its paradigms.

Heidegger lies near to hand.32 Ontology and hermeneutics are in no philosophy

32
Gordon Teskey has previously invoked Heidegger to provide theoretical context for a discussion of
allegory; I claim no innovation in this regard. Teskey, 143-45.

63
interwoven more systematically than in his. Heidegger, and those who invoke or parallel

him, often come close to a systematic and open expression of that connection which is

often implicit and shaded with premodern exegetes. Such systematic exposition, and its

unavoidable implication in the politics of the last century, renders this philosophical

system strangely suited to an understanding of the urgency with which premodern

exegetes did their work. It is a grid upon which the work of earlier eras becomes clearer,

because more easily mapped.

Martin Heidegger's classic statement of the relational quality of Being, the 1927

Sein und Zeit, begins as a critique of the Cartesian cogito. There can be no question for

Heidegger of founding the knowability of the world within the act of the thinking I,

precisely because the supposed obviousness of a division between I and world is itself

improperly assumed. The fact of thought which forms Descartes' first principle cannot be

understood in such a way that would limit its scope to a subjecthood easily held over and

against the object-field. Of course, Descartes wishes to prove the bridgeability of the gap,

but Heidegger is convinced that the assumption of a gap was evidence that the

"fundamental question of Being" had not yet been properly addressed. Such a beginning

sets out both points of continuity and difference with his teacher Edmund Husserl, to

whom the book is dedicated and who preceded Heidegger in his chair at Freiburg.

Heidegger, in stressing the need to lay out a fundamental groundwork for philosophy, and

in elevating the role of relational meaning, clearly follows in Husserl's phenomenological

tradition. However, he rejects Husserl's willingness to accept a transcendental subject

largely consonant with the Cartesian cogito. In a sense, this can be read as a

radicalization of Husserl: the elder philosopher had posited the locus of being in acts of

64
relation occurring purely within the conscious space of the subject; the younger remaps

that relation onto the world in a way that dissolves any distinction between the empirical

and the intentional.

Heidegger's alternative is to transfer the locus of knowable Being from the subject

to the field of relation. Moreover, this state of relation, namable as "Being-in-the-world,"

or Da-sein ("Being there", not "existence"),33 retains priority over all other possible

grounds of existence. This system is voracious: it will allow nothing to remain outside.

As just mentioned, the departure from Husserl means a denigration of the position of the

subject: there is for Heidegger in fact no such thing as a subject which can exist prior to

relation with the world. The meaning of Being is, inescapably, located in the fact of one's

presence in the world. Similarly, as there is no subject within the system, there can also

be no pure object, no empirical (or "ontic," as opposed to "ontological") given to which

relational consciousness later applies itself. Objects, so far as this fundamental ontology

is concerned, only exist as already bound up within a network of relations, and can never

have the quality of pure, unassimilated physicality.

The defining characteristic of Da-sein is a constant attentiveness to the world and

to the presence of others, labeled "Care". Appropriately enough, he introduces the term

with an allegory out of the classical canon: Care fashioned man out of clay, and Jupiter

then gave it spirit. Then Jupiter, Care, and Earth got into a dispute over ownership of the

creature, and asked Saturn to judge. "And Saturn gave them the following decision,

which seemed to be just: 'Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you should receive that
33
I will follow Joan Stambaugh in hyphenating Da-sein throughout. Heidegger specifically desired to
destabilize readers' assumptions that the word should mean existence, as he saw such a translation to
lead to unwanted psychologizing readings. Cf. Joan Stambaugh, "Translator's Preface," Being and Time
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1996) xiv.

65
spirit at death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But

since 'Care' first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives.'" (Heidegger,

Being 184)34 Care is neither coterminous with the ontic substance of the human, which is

mere empirical earth, nor is it a function of the Jove-born soul, the supposed interiority

which provided the grounding for the Cartesian cogito. Rather, Care as the body of Da-

sein is always incorporative, subsuming the rationalist and empiricist debates between I

and Not-I into a mediative position. There is no conditionality of Being which allows for

the provision of a world prior to relation; relation is instead the only possible substance

of Being in a schema where there is no "simply" material.

So: the hammer presents itself always not as an indigestible manifestation of steel,

but rather as a lump of steel with a teleology (the driving of nails) and a handle. The

yacht is not a happenstance fashioning of lumber and fiberglass, to be noted bobbing

anarchically at the marina, but rather it presents itself as a vehicle, and most probably as a

vehicle for someone else. The Others are not bipedal flesh-blobs but people with whom

we always have a Being-toward. This is true even if the Being-toward is one of

psychological exclusion: the stranger at a bus stop offers himself to subjective Care in the

relation of indifference.

Da-sein for Heidegger might thus appear to be a relativistic ontology: the Being of

both objects and even other people would be determined wholly by the nature of the

relationship projected by a given person's experience of Da-sein. But Heidegger is at

pains to deny this relativistic view, and not just because he is opposed to the idea of a

34
Heidegger's own citation notes that he gets this allegory from Konrad Burdach, who argued that Goethe
invoked this fable of the classical author Hyginus in constructing the second act of Faust. See the
material on Qu Yuan, in Chapter 4, for an analysis of handing-down in allegorical ontology.

66
transcendental subject in which a particular and exclusionary relationship could be

grounded. It may not be possible to conceive of a Heideggerian ontology not filtered

through a human consciousness, but Heidegger insists that Care does have an

fundamental grounding in itself and in the recognition of the Da-sein's own finitude.

The key to understanding Da-sein's self-orientation is the titular Zeit. Being must

always exist within time; there is no use in positing a condition of Being which is

ontologically timeless and then makes a separate movement of experiencing time.

Rather, authentic Da-sein is always inescapably anticipatory: the state of Care is not a

relation to given existence, but rather relation to a process by which the world eternally

enters into being. Most fundamentally, every Da-sein must come to the acknowledgment

of its own finitude in time. All authentic Being is a Being-toward-death. The finitude of

death is the one fact of the Da-sein which is totally inalienable from it. Despite the

entanglements of a modern society which dilute possibilities of authentic Being, death is

always inescapably one's own. The finitude of death is thus for the Da-sein not so much

an event as an autonomous ground: by the acknowledgment of the processes of time

which bring its own end, Da-sein comes to full awareness of itself, and only thereby can

reach the fulfillment of authentic existence.

This fear of losing possession of Da-sein to an amorphous society exposes the

deep socio-political tensions which inhabit Heidegger's corpus, though it probably does

not seem like an easy leap from such a fear to Heidegger's famous entanglement with

National Socialism. It is likely that his complicity with the Nazi party in the early 30's,

and his strange post-war silence on the matter, is more broadly known than is the actual

content of his philosophical speculation. A quick glance at any bibliography of

67
commentary on Heidegger will reveal the degree to which the scandal of his politics has

exercised the scholarly community. And there is still no real consensus on the depth of

his implication with Nazism: many of his political statements make gestures of

ambivalence that give strength to both defenders and detractors. Certainly, some of the

deep content of Heidegger's thought merges too well with period propaganda: the lust for

revitalized consciousness, the glorification of the hinterland, the bravado of Being-

toward-death.

Judgments on Heidegger's political guilt are too important to be dealt with in

passing, and there is no fear that such judgments will not find their appropriate forums.

But we may ask: how does this ontology lend itself to certain forms of social

imagination? How does the Heideggerian system reconstitute local human relationships,

and what assumptions about the individual's relationship to the community does it

demand?

Adorno has made a usefully biting critique of Heidegger. The Jargon of

Authenticity was written out of the context of political debate on Heidegger's historical

entanglement with Nazism; nevertheless, the work is theoretical rather than historical.

Adorno is less concerned to link Heidegger to the state than to explicate the ways in

which a certain politics is apt to flow out of the moves of the Heideggerian system.

Indeed, the critique is not even limited to Heidegger, but merely treats him as the leader

of a certain philosophical cabal, labeled the "Authentics":

In the early twenties a number of people active in

philosophy, sociology, and theology, planned a gathering.
Most of them had shifted from one creed to another...they
were less interested in the specific doctrine, the truth
content of revelation, than in conviction...They confirmed
their mutual understanding on a higher level by excluding
68
 one who did not pronounce the same credo they repeated to
one another.35

Adorno's sweet acerbity has hit this just right. Anti-theological mysticism is exactly what

one finds in the center of Sein und Zeit: Heidegger insists that his foundational ontology

needs and admits no reference to a transcendent standard, be that standard Logos, Geist,

or God. Rather, the system distinguishes the foundational from the non-foundational, the

"ontological" from the "merely ontic," by way of the "authenticity" from which Adorno

draws his vituperative title. Authentic Da-sein needs no prop beyond its own

watchfulness and attention to the world, deliberately refusing the materialist obfuscations

of an industrial modernism which is cheap and distracting. Adorno's critique is

reasonable: the system espouses the striking of a pose of being-toward more than the

maintenance of a system of belief.

Of course, the heart of Adorno's critique is not Heidegger's lack of honest

theological content, but predictable Frankfurt-style Marxism. The Heideggerian system,

by encouraging a form of consciousness which has been hypostasized into ontology, and

by directing that consciousness to bypass the alienating strictures of modernity, has

actually promoted a quiescence in the face of power. Furthermore, the denigration of the

position of the subject, the insistence that "authentic" Being is located not in a self but in

the field of relation, has exalted abasement: such a philosophy encourages subaltern

classes to transcend rather than to rise up and alter the market-driven evisceration of

human society.

Adorno's point of departure is in the cabal's renunciation of phenomenology, and

35
Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of AuthenticityTrans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1973) 3-4.

69
he blasts the decayed conception of Kierkegaardian inwardness held by Heidegger and his

followers. Inwardness itself is an ambivalent category for Adorno: he is not ready to give

up claims to autonomy on the part of the individual, but he is also not willing to vaunt

subjectivity over the empirical realities of objective existence. But to the extent that

inwardness could be valuable within a broader context of understanding structures which

surpass the subject, the Heideggerian thesis has robbed it of potential:

In the jargon, finally, there remains from inwardness only

the most external aspect, that thinking oneself superior
which marks people who elect themselves: the claim of
people who consider themselves blessed simply by the
virtue of being what they are. Without any effort, this
claim can turn into an elitist claim, or into a readiness to
attach itself to elites which then quickly gives the ax to
inwardness. A symptom of the transformation of
inwardness is the belief of innumerable people that they
belong to an extraordinary family. (Adorno 75-6)

Contentless Being, "an absolutized moment of mediation," (Adorno 75) is in the end

reducible to a state of election, driven more by tautology than theology. Only the

authentic have reached ontological fullness; ontological fullness is the state in which

one's being-in-the-World is driven by Care; Care is the condition of solicitude toward a

world whose authenticity is fully appreciated.

This critique is reductive but fair. Heidegger characteristically embraces

tautology, vaunts it: Being is, he tells us. Language speaks. His rhetoric mimics the

content of his ontological ethics, as both confess explicitly to running in circles.

Understanding comes through the appreciation of things as they are, and this process

which produces Care in one's being-in-the-world would naturally produce tautology in

one's argument. And Heidegger, naked in his circles, is not ashamed.

70
 This tautological ontology is what produces the communities of the self-appointed

which Adorno finds. The transfer of ontology to self-assembling communities is outlined

in some of the most influential portions of Sein und Zeit, the chapters on Being-with-

Others and Being-in-the-world which had a deep impact on mid-century existentialism. It

is there that the relevance of Heidegger to ancient allegory hangs.

Heidegger launches into these discussions with a grounding in the terminology of

what being and worldliness are: his focus is to delimit the boundaries of what ontology

ought to be, and specifically how notions of objective presence are insufficient for a

philosophy which wants to have a fundamental grounding. After this, while still in part 1,

he moves from an outline of the structure of the world and worldliness to an analysis of

the place of Da-sein within the social sphere. It is an odd move: why ought an ontology

which claims to be fundamental seek to incorporate the field of social relationships into

its basic structure? Yet the fact that it does so is probably what has given the system such

vibrancy for existentialism. These chapters are a perfect expression of the pathological

shyness which has dominated that tradition. Heidegger's focus is on the Others, the

"They" against whom authentic Being-in-the-world struggles to maintain itself, and the

tone throughout is one of cool paranoia. The "They" can exist with one in all the fullness

of a Mitda-sein well-realized, a state in which the innately relational quality of Being is

fully expressed as such between persons who might be shallowly described as subjects.

On the other hand, Mitda-sein can also fall prey to everydayness. One exists in

relationship with the others not in the state of ennobling Care but either in the state of

Care which treats the others as objects, or simply by the means of indifference.

Indifference is not in itself a failing of Da-sein, but a mode of Da-sein in which it does

71
not recognize its own nature. And this form of relation is characteristic of

"everydayness," it is the default position in which Da-sein finds itself thrust. This is a

profoundly alienating state, characterized by inequality and abstractions of power located

in an amorphous "They" not reducible to any individuals or groups. Heidegger writes

famously of this "They":

In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they

unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have
fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and
judge literature and are the way they see and judge. But we
also withdraw from the "great mass" the way they
withdraw, we find "shocking" what they find shocking.
(Heidegger, Being 119)

This paranoiac howl is more lucid in the context of modernist alienation generally than in

the context of the section of Sein und Zeit from which it is drawn. But the implications

for the system are still clear: there is a constant pressure exerted against the authenticity

of the Da-sein. This cannot be a pressure exerted from without, since there is properly no

good way to speak of "without" in this system. But it is something which attempts to fold

authentic Being back into the false consciousness of the inauthentic: even movements of

withdrawal are carefully (if unconsciously) patterned.

The basis for Mitda-sein, both authentic and inauthentic, is revealed in the

following chapter to be language. Logos always has an apophantic function, but the

content of the communication is not at the fullness of the communicative act. Language

does indeed point out, but not in the fashion of a transmission across the void from one

internality to another. Rather, discourse is the ontological space in which both parties to a

conversation share their being and thus realize the potential of their Mitda-sein. Indeed,

the ontological basis of communication so far exceeds the phenomenal expression that

72
Heidegger allows for the possibility of silent discourse which fulfills all the purposes of

speech. True silence is not simply the condition of not having anything to say, a blank

uncommunicativeness; rather, true silence is possible only when there is a shared Being

in an existing state of discourse. When actual words are held back, there is no disruption

of the discourse, which is primarily relational rather than informational, and thus needs no

expressed communication to be effective.

Language which slides away from this basis in discourse degenerates into "idle

talk," language which self-confidently skims along the surface of intelligibility, without

pausing to enter into relation. This is the dialogical mode of the they, and in fact the

borders between the they and those located within authentic Mitda-sein are largely

delineated by the domain of idle talk. This is a domain figured explicitly as public, a

constant passing-around of gossip-like information which never draws its participants

into a more complete relation to Being. This concept of idle talk is then expanded,

churning out related terms which also serve to mark off the behavior of the "They":

"curiosity," "ambiguity," "falling prey," "thrownness," "scribbling." In each variant, the

fuller forms of Da-sein are ensnared by the pervasive public shallowness of the They, and

are enfolded into its smothering vapidity.

This movement of social exclusion which is produced through the assertion of

levels of linguistic apprehension is critically dependent on the malleability of linguistic

consciousness rather than any instability in language itself. Nothing can remain outside

the Heideggerian system, including language. The question is only whether a particular

Da-sein is able to recognize the Being-with-ness of language and thus participate in

language fully.

73
 Hence Heidegger is forced into a criticism of the Greeks which marks a major

departure from his normal adulation. The pre-Socratic logos is deficient because it

posited the ontological basis of language as an externality. The logos is believed to have

existence prior to entrance into interpretive relation, as are the objects to which it

gestures. The category of the "objectively present," here as elsewhere, is a source of

animus; at virtually every step in his argument Heidegger feels it necessary to reject the

possible misunderstanding that he might be discussing the objectively present. In the

present case, any relation linkable to such an objectively present logos would thus be

derivative, as cognitive motions springing from the interpretation of a pre-existent

knowledge. Within the system which Heidegger has established, this is the one

impossibility for language: the ground of language is already in the interpersonal forum in

which it is manifested. There can be no double movement of existence first, and then

relation subsequently.

Here, then, is the great lesson for a Heidggerian anthropology of language: there

can be no possibility of language's externality to the system of relationships which a given

community might manifest. Linguistic signs are not independent, and certainly not prior.

They are from the first entwined with the nature of being-with. Linguistic being-with,

"discourse," (rede) can dispense with words and hold silence. But words cannot abjure

being-with, and even the false appearance of such a abjuration merely results in a

distasteful, lower-class "idle talk."

For the sake of clarity, the above exposition has been drawn exclusively out of

Sein und Zeit. However, this view of language as necessarily internal to the process of

Being-with is a constant in Heidegger's work. In some respects, Heidegger's later work

74
may be viewed as a radicalization of his views on language. Certainly, from the first,

Heidegger's own use of language in Sein und Zeit and other early works is striking: the

ever-present etymologies, the neologisms and especially the exaggerations of German's

natural tendency to compound all suggest the importance of his discussions of language.

Still, in that early work, discourse seems to be merely one among many modes of Being-

with.36

Heidegger's later essays take on a more mystical tone, and engage more

thoroughly with language, especially the poetic language of Trakl and Holderlin. The

basic assertions about language have not changed: it is still open to the possibilities of

shallow, gossipy speech, yet still is based in the fullness of human Being-with. But the

descriptions of language are more urgent in the later writings. At times, language is not

simply one among many ways to express Mitda-sein, but rather comes to the fore as the

primary locus of relational existence. In Sein und Zeit the subject was subsumed into the

contextual ontology of Care; in later essays the human person is subsumed into language.

It is no longer that man speaks language: "it is language that speaks. Man first speaks

when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal. Among all the

appeals that we human beings, on our part, may help to be voiced, language is the highest

and everywhere the first."37 Drawn from an essay which owes its title to Holderlin,

"...Poetically Man Dwells...," this quote is typical of his late sentiments on language.
36
Paul Ricoeur has gone so far as to write that "Heidegger's philosophy...is so little a philosophy of
language that the question of language is only introduced after the questions of situation, understanding,
and interpretation." Paul Ricoeur, "The Task of Hermeneutics," Trans. David Pellauer, Philosophy
Today 17 (Summer 1973) This takes things too far (important things sometimes come last), but his
point is valid that language is important in the early work not in itself but as a manifestation of deeper
principles.
37
Martin Heidegger, "...Poetically Man Dwells...," Poetry, Language, Thought Trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 216.

75
From his earliest work, Heidegger refused the possibility that language could exist

externally to the human community; now language is so thoroughly lodged at the heart of

human being-with that it seemingly takes over the position previously reserved for Care.

And as one moves past the work of Heidegger himself into the traditions of

hermeneutics which follow from him, this commitment to keep language located inside

the processes of interpretive communities is maintained strongly. The notion that

language has no prior status outside of community-determined interpretation is in fact one

of the hallmarks of Heideggerian influence in 20th-century hermeneutics. Gadamer, for

example, goes further than Heidegger in explicitly associating ontology with a linguistic

hermeneutics. All being-in-the-world for Gadamer is interpretation, and all interpretation

is conditioned by previous experience of the world through language. With regard to

human communities, this omnipresence of language as a sort of ether means that the

primary characteristic of social relations is conversation. All experience being mediated

by language, patterns of social interaction not merely feature language as an integral

element but actually are founded upon the connecting power of language. And this force

of connection is not limited to the presence of orality; textual interpretation is also drawn

into the mold, resulting in what Gadamer names "hermeneutical conversation": "It is like

a real conversation in that the common subject matter is what binds the two partners, the

text and the interpreter, to each other. When a translator attempts an interpretation, he

can make mutual understanding possible only if he participates in the subject under

discussion; so also in relation to a text it is indispensable that the interpreter participate in

its meaning."38 This formulation partakes of the crucial Gadmerian thesis that
38
Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method (2nd Revised edition) Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989) 388.

76
understanding always occurs in interpretation: understanding is not a state toward which

interpretation aims, but rather the continuous creation of interpretation. Hermeneutical

conversation, like all other varieties, is a process of creation of meaning in ways very

familiar to the contemporary canons of reading. And again, in a more specifically

literary-critical vein, Stanley Fish has earned a good chunk of his renown through his

repeated arguments that hermeneutics must be seen as necessarily contextual. For

example, as he argues in his essay, "Is there a text in this class?" the traditional fear of

postmodern polysemy as willfully mangling texts is unfounded. The nature of polysemy

is not willful at all; polysemy arises automatically and derives from the assumptions that

are in place before the utterance is heard. Those assumptions can be replaced by others,

and the meaning of the utterance will automatically shift to accommodate the new

assumptions, but there is never a willful and individual action of meaning-creation apart

from the given assumptions which one brings to the text. Most critically, the series of

assumptions in which language is always-already located is located necessarily within a

framework of interpretive communities, "shared ways of seeing" which predetermine the

possibilities of understanding. Any given observer belongs to a multitude of such

communities and shifts perspective between them as the need arises. One can easily shift

between the two senses of "text" in the anecdote so long as one has been initiated first

into the set of people who understand the basics of American university practice, and

secondly into the much smaller subset of those who understand something of the debates

of literary theory. But Fish's crucial point throughout his work is precisely that there is

not such a thing as text before interpretation, no external, pre-existent textual object on

which hermeneutical techniques are then applied. Rather, texts are always immediately

77
encountered within networks of assumptions defined by community life.

Examples of more Heideggerianism could be piled high. As the hurried gloss of

Fish ought to suggest, the process of incorporation of language into the webs of

community interpretation is kin to much of the theoretical apparatus of poststructuralism.

If there is no stable, logocentric ontology to language, then human linguistic experience

can never get outside of the assumptions which structure hermeneutics to the real core of

signs. But semiotics must be understood in a way that shades into ethics to understand

the real import of Heideggerian conceptions of hermenutical communities and their

divergence from classical models. The "ontic," or as Martin Buber more neatly put it, the

"It," is a danger to be banished to the realm of apparition. True communities in which the

fullness of social life can be grasped are founded upon a revolution in awareness, which

asserts universal relation. The Authentics' solution to apathetic modernity was to deny

that people or language or any other object could truly remain alien to a corrected

consciousness.

The solution of premodern allegorists to their own form of facelessness was to

demand the possibility of the It. The drive to instantiate ideal and humane social order

was founded upon the possibility of an eruption into the world of wisdom alien to it. The

wisdom might be revered, but it was nonetheless something which was most assuredly

not already assimilated, not the already-existent substrate of existing social relations. The

allegorized text, the sublime It, was a sort of holy beast that burst upon the world. Those

who went halfway out of the world to meet it were thereupon joined into a fullness of

being. And the process of their entrance into that rite of reading seemed something more

of blood than papyrus.

78
3. How to Catch a Boar (Part One)

A boar is a special thing of nastiness. Though cousin to a familiar object of

disgust, it is not to be contained within the usual pens of sloth and domestic filth. A boar

is not the friend of the happy Hellenic swineherd, no more than it is the genetically-

modified factor of production of the Iowa confinement-lot operator. A boar is a beast. It

has bristles, it has tusks, it has will and vitality and instinct: it is a beast. And as such, it

will not be found without a hunt, and a boar-hunt is not an occupation for one. Boars do

not stand still, nor will they be trapped or lured; they must be flushed, and driven, and

circled, and speared. Though the spearing itself, the climactic agony of porcine Sein is

the work of perhaps a single man, boars are nonetheless inescapably catalysts for a certain

type of social formation.

It is perhaps only because boar-baiting is not a game for singles, because the

object of the hunt enforces a social structure (however fleeting and qualified) of

egalitarian cooperation, that much-scheming Odysseus survived his youth. The most

serious injury which the Ithacan receives in all of the surviving Homeric corpus is

sustained on a boar-hunt while visiting his grandfather, and the future hero owes a debt to

his medically- and mystically-adept uncles:

Now
Odysseus stabbed at him, and hit him in the right shoulder,
and straight on through him passed the point of the shining spearhead.
He screamed and dropped in the dust, and the life spirit flittered from him.
The dear sons of Autolycus were busy to tend him,
and understandingly they bound up the wound of stately
godlike Odysseus, and singing incantations over it
stayed the black blood, and soon came back to the house of their loving
father.

το∴
ν δ∋ ∋Οδυσευ∴
ϕ ου)/τ ησε τυξω ν
∴κατα∴
δεχιο∴
ν ω }µον,
79
 α)ντικρυ∴ δε∴ διη∼λθε φαεινου∼δουρο∴ ϕ α)κω κη/:
κα∴ π εσ∋ ε0ν κονι/η|σι µακω ν
δ δ∋ ε1 / , α)π ο∴ δ∋ ε1π τατο θυµο/ϕ.
το∴ ν µε∴
ν α!ρ∋ Αυ0τ ολυ/κου π αι∼ δεϕ φι/λοι α)µφιπ ε/νοντο,
ω )τ ειλη∴ν δ∋ ∋Οδυση∼ οϕ α)µυ/µονοϕ α)ντιθε/οιο
δη∼σαν ε)π ισταµε/νω ϕ, ε0 π αοιδη∼ | δ∋ αι[µα κελαινο∴ ν
ε1σξεθον, αι]ψα δ∋ ι3 κοντο φι/λου π ρο∴ ϕ δω /µατα π ατρο/ϕ.
(19.452-58)39

We cannot know the exact severity of the tusk-wound represented here, nor should we

bother to spend much time asking. But to the extent that we are invited to see

imaginative literature through a mimetic lens, as a depiction of a world of logic and

consequence, the tradition which founds itself in this text asks us to be thankful for the

careful solicitude of Odysseus' uncles. Had he bled to death then, the wooden horse

would not have been built, Troy would not have fallen, Aeneas would not have left to

found Rome, and Europe would not have been Europe.

The story of the boar, and all its attendant civilizational implications, are lodged

inside a great moment of semiotic clarity, one of the classic scenes of epic anagnorisis.

The action occurs at the heart of book 19: the old nurse Eurycleia, washing the feet of a

stranger, discovers a scar above the knee and recognizes her old charge and master

Odysseus, come home at last from the wars. There is nothing original in the scene: the

recognition of a scar or birthmark is a staple plot device in literatures, elite and folk,

across the world, and even in the original performative context of the Homeric corpus,

where "cliché" is not a valid term of analysis, the scene would have been one of a type, an

utterly familiar bardic move. What perhaps has given this particular iteration of the

omnipresent moment of recognition such lasting literary life is the display of poetic skill

39
Homer, The Odyssey of Homer Trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999) 294.
All further citations of the Odyssey will be taken from Lattimore's translation unless otherwise marked.
Line references are to the corresponding lines in the Thomas Allen OCT edition.

80
and the thematic power which it enables. This is not simply a plot device (and perhaps

not a plot device at all, given that the story could conceivably be told without reference to

Eurycleia). Rather, it is a moment of clarity, a few seconds of respite, when the supposed

dead come home, and when family history is marked plainly upon the skin. Old bonds of

relationship are renewed, provided one knows how to read the signs. These possibilities

of personal legibility are only emphasized by the fashion in which the poet transitions out

of this sidelight on the scar back to the main narrative line. Eurycleia offers to her master

to point out to him which among the servant girls are loyal to him, and which worthless,

but Odysseus (apparently eager to shut her up) responds: "Nurse, why should you tell me

of them? There is no need to. I myself will properly study each and learn of each."

α, τι/η δε∴
[µαι∼ συ∴
τα∴
ϕ µυθη/σεαι; ου)δε/τι/σε ξρη/. ευ]νυ και∴
αυ0τ ο∴
ϕ ε0
γ ω∴
φρα/σοµαι και∴

ει1σοµ∋ ε9
κα/στην:] (19.500-01) Odysseus has a supreme confidence in his ability to read

people: just as easily as Eurycleia identified him, the lord of the realm has piercing sight,

which allows him to judge the heart by the outward appearance, without long

acquaintance.

Erich Auerbach directs himself explicitly to issues of signification when he

invokes this episode for his disquisition on Homeric style. "Odysseus' Scar," the first

chapter of his magnum opus Mimesis, is the most famous essay by the great Romanist and

pre-war captain of philology, and is a classic of comparative literature. The thesis of the

essay is that the Homeric style is one of loquacious clarity, and exuberant compulsion to

tell every detail, in contrast to the "equally epic" style of the pentateuch, which gives only

structure and hints as to theme and significance, always asking the reader to respect the

mystery of what is left unsaid. The latter style is exemplified for Auerbach by the binding

81
of Isaac, where a reader does not know from where Abraham and Isaac are traveling,

what happens on their journey, what they are thinking on the slow pained walk to dim

mount Moriah, the place of a sacrifice which is not to be spoken. In contrast, the

Homeric style is one of explicitness and voluptuous detail, in which the discovery of a

scar gives way to a lengthy interpolated story about Odysseus' grandfather Autolycus, his

trip to Ithaca, his pledge of gifts for the child, Odysseus' trip to collect the gifts, a family

feast, and finally a boar-hunt which resulted in the gash above the knee that the old

nursemaid now recognizes with tears. Of this style, Auerbach writes:

The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly

placed in relation to one another; a large number of
conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools,
all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in
meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents
in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them
together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like
the separate phenomena themselves, their
relationships—their temporal, local, causal, final,
consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and
conditional limitations—are brought to light in perfect
fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of
phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left
fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a
gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.40

Analyses such as this invigorate; they offer hope that stylistic analysis can be something

more than fancy and whim. For Auerbach's impressions, though they have been debated,

are still demonstrable in a fashion very odd for literary criticism. Auerbach had no access

to Milman Parry's pioneering articles on oral epic, and Albert Lord's classic study, The

Singer of Tales, was not to be published for another fifteen years. But the explicitness in

grammar and logic which Auerbach finds, and the fullness of illumination—these are
40
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis Trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953) 6-7.

82
explained perfectly by the aesthetics of performative composition. The oral-formulaic

bard performs not by the recitation of a fixed text, but by the spontaneous generation of

text out of grammatical, syntactical, rhythmic, narrative, and imagistic patterns which

have been learned through long practice and imitation of older bards. Such a performer is

judged by the richness of his creation: the operative aesthetic standard is one of

copiousness, how vivid and luxurious a composition a performer is able to make

spontaneously, without rest and without breaking tempo. It is the standard of the jazz

solo, or the concerto coda, or the improv comic: how inventively does one, without

forethought, manipulate the formulas? The best epic poet is the one who leaves nothing

singable unsung, and the result is exactly what Auerbach had found: a complete

realization of phenomena.41

But Auerbach's is not a project which limits itself to observations on style. His

aims are always civilizational in scope. He wishes not simply to describe means of

mimesis, but rather the means of mimesis as they constitute a vehicle for European

literary tradition. The Homeric and the Mosaic are two possibilities of style which

intermingle in various combinations to produce a civilizational history. Mimesis the book

consciously traces an arc from the ancients to Dante and Montaigne, Goethe and Woolf.

His other works are consistently concerned with performing criticism as a loving act of

memorial to a great tradition which he saw as dying out:

At an early date, and from then on with increasing

frequency, I ceased to look upon the European possibilities
of Romance philology as mere possibilities and came to
regard them as a task specific to our time- a task which
41
A valuable extended analysis of the value of Auerbach in the light of oral epic theory is put forward by
Egbert J. Bakker, "Mimesis as Performance: Rereading Auerbach's First Chapter" Poetics Today 20:1
(Spring 1999) 11-26.

83
 could not have been envisaged yesterday and will no longer
be conceivable tomorrow. European civilization is
approaching the term of its existence.42

The reason why Auerbach could not have had access to Milman Parry was that he was in

exile in Istanbul, having been forced out of Germany in 1935 on account of being Jewish.

There were by his testimony scanty secondary resources in the Istanbul libraries, and

Mimesis refers only to literary works themselves. Edward Said has suggested that in fact

Auerbach's project was decisively shaped by orientalist fears of his Turkish

surroundings,43 and while this view has been forcefully disputed,44 it is not contested that

Auerbach's civilizational project is written from the perspective of an exile. Exiled not

only in location (after Istanbul, Auerbach suffered a much more grievous exile in New

Haven), but also in time, caught in the ravages of a hostile modernity, this avid reader of

Dante explicitly wishes to bind up the loose leaves of a tradition into a volume of his own

that can perpetuate a certain form of community. As he writes in the last sentences of his

epilogue, "I hope that my study will reach its readers-both my friends of former years, if

they are still alive, as well as all the others for whom it was intended. And may it

contribute to bringing together again those whose love for our western history has

serenely persevered." (Auerbach, Mimesis 557) There is something stunningly

appropriate in the pattern of exegetical choices here: in order to renew the bonds of

friendship and society, the wartime exile in Istanbul chooses to start his memorial project

42
Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public In Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages
Trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965) 6.
43
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) 5-9.
44
Jan Ziolkowski (in a well-cited foreword to Auerbach's Literary Language and its Public) points out
that there is little evidence of fear of Turkey in any of Auerbach's writings, and that a late return visit to
the country suggests fondness rather than fear. Jan Ziolkowski, "Foreword," xi.

84
with an examination of the very moment in which Odysseus, just arrived home from his

own version of wartime Turkey, is semiotically re-integrated into Ithacan history and

memory.

If the Romanist himself was aware of any such parallel (and this is doubtful), he

made no mention of it. The civilizational project which he undertakes is real and clear

from comments in various works, but his touch is nonetheless light and he does not take it

upon himself to intrude autobiographically on his own exegesis. Thus, the tradition

which he wishes to capture, to bind, and to share with friends known and unknown is

presented as wholly external to himself. This is not the tradition of the Heidegger who

stayed behind in the fuhrer's Reich while men like Auerbach and Leo Spitzer were cast

out. There is no assertion that the kingdom of language must somehow be subsumed into

the community of personal relation in which it is interpreted. Rather, the great and

beloved European tradition is appreciated from the outside, and though the object of a

certain soft reverence, it is nonetheless still an object to the society which Auerbach aims

to gather around it.

And by some weird magic, this social formation which Auerbach claims to

conjure in his valediction is the precise mimic of the social formation of the boarhunt

with which he had begun. There is a purposive assembly of the few. Within this circle,

there is no obvious system of hierarchy, save for the standing-out of a particular leader.

And the leader achieves his position by acting on behalf of the group to capture the prize.

Surviving commentary stresses the way in which Odysseus is both in and beyond the

commonality of the group. The great textual critic Aristarchus (in a fragment reported by

Aristonicus) glosses the wound by extrapolating the position of Odysseus perpendicular

85
to the boar's rush, at the edge of the group.45 A reading of the same verse a millennium

later by the Byzantine scholar Eustathius suggests Aristarchan influence and is thus a

testament to the longevity of the reading.46 Auerbach's own parallel moves to constitute a

society in pursuit of an external tradition is a testament to the self-replicative power of

certain types of small-scale social structure.

And so, for all of Auerbach's brilliance in assessing the Homeric style, there are

ways in which the work is not transparent and orderly, delineated and clean. The

Homeric text cannot lay out everything because it does not possess everything: it is one of

many possible mimeses of one of many possible worlds. Each imaginable world, and the

future world in which the text is resung and redacted and reprinted, are bound up within

the text. This is Auerbach's own unwitting assertion, when he locates the germ of

European mimesis within the epic. And it is our necessary conclusion, when we note that

the Homeric poems as we possess them were not the original creation of a lone author,

but rather the slow cumulative creation of bards, audiences, epic contest judges, scribes,

and exegetes, each interweaving the text with the various contexts which their worlds

offered.

There is indeed something buried within this text. After all, at the heart of this

episode there is a hunt, and a hunt is always for that which is hidden:

45
"σηµαι/νει δε∴
π λα/γ ιοϕ ο(ρµη/σαϕ, α)π ο∴
του∼λε/ξ ριοϕ, κατα∴κοινω νι/αν τω ν
∼ συµφω /νω ν." Aristonicus
Peri Semeion Odysseias: Reliquae Emendatores Ed. Otto Carnuth (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1869) 152. The
comment is made on a duplicate phrase in Il. 14.463, and then extended to this reappearance of the
phrase.
46
"Το∴ δε∴
λικριφι∴ϕ α)ι/χ
∀αϕ, ο3ε0στι π λαγ ι/ω ϕ, ω ϕ
( η9 0Ιλια∴
ϕ δηλοι∼
, συο∴
ϕ ι1διον. ου3τ ω γ α∴
ρ σξηµατισθει∴
ϕ
ε0π ε/ρξεται π λη/χω ν." Eustathius of Thessalonica, Eustathii, archiepiscopi
thessalonicensis, commentarii ad Homeri Odysseam. Ad fidem exempli romani editi. (Leipzig: J.A.G.
Weigel, 1826) 212. Eustathius emphasizes the boar more than Odyssueus, presumably in distinction to
Aristarchus' comments on Il. 14.463, in which Poulydamas leaps away from the spear of Aias
.
86
 Now there, inside that thick of the bush, was the lair of a great boar.
Neither could the force of wet-blown winds penetrate here,
nor could the shining sun ever strike through with his rays, nor yet
could the rain pass all the way through it, so close together
it grew, with a fall of leaves drifted in dense profusion.
The thudding made my the feet of men and dogs came to him
as they closed on him in the hunt, and against them he from his woodlair
bristled strongly his nape, and with fire from his eyes glaring
stood up to face them close.

ε1νθα δ∋ α!ρ∋ ε0ν λο/ξ µη| π υκινη∼ | κατε/κειτο µε/γ αϕ συ∼ ϕ:

τη∴ν µε∴ ν α!ρ∋ ου1τ ∋ α)νε/µω ν δια/η µε/νοϕ υ9γ ρο∴ν α)ε/ντω ν,
ου1τ ε µιν ∋Ηε/λιοϕ φαε/θω ν α)κτι∼ σιν ε1βαλλεν,
ου1τ ∋ ο1
µβροϕ π ερα/ασκε διαµπ ερε/ϕ: ω ∃ ϕ α!ρα π υκνη∴
η]εν, α)τ α∴ρ φυ/λλω ν ε)νε/ην ξυ/σιϕ η1 λιθα π ολλη/.
το∴ν δ∋ α)νδρω ∼ ν τε κυνω ν ∼ τε π ερι∴ κτυ/π οϕ η]λθε π οδοι∼ ι∀
ν,
ω (ϕ ε0π α/γ οντεϕ ε)π η|∼σαν: ο9δ∋ α)ντι/οϕ ε0κ χυλο/ξ οιο,
φρι/χαϕ ευ]λοφιη/ν, π υ∼ ρ δ∋ ο0
φ θαλµοι∼ σι δεδορκω ϕ /,
στη∼ρ(∋ αυ0 τω ν
∼ σξεδο/θεν: (19.439-47)

Lattimore's good translation may not quite capture the full sense of closure and cover in

the introduction of the boar: "inside that thick of the bush" is ε0ν λο/ξ µη| π υκινη|∼
, literally,

"in its close(-walled) lair"; the same word (altered slightly for meter) is used again several

lines later, the word π υκνη∴

which Lattimore renders well as "close together."

The resonances of root word here, π υκνο/ϕ (or π υκινο/ϕ, archaically), are dark and

deep. The π υκνο/ϕ is that which is closely fit, thick, solid. It is a word which describes

well the compactness of the body and its organs: Galen's medical writings use cognates

more than any other work in the ancient corpus,47 and when Hera wants to be seductive,

eros must launch an attack on the wise heart of Zeus.48 Πυκνο/ϕ is a word for military

science, the attribute of city walls and ramparts, the attribute which protects phalanxes

47
Based on TLG searches for π υκνο/ϕcognates. Luci Berkowitz and Karl A. Squitier, ed. Thesaurus
Linguae Graecae Canon of Greek Authors and Works. CD-ROM. Irvine: University of California, 1992.
48
"ω (ϕ δ∋ ι1
δεν, ω #ϕ µιν ε1
ρω ϕ π υκινα∴
ϕ φρε/ναϕ α)µφεκα/λυψεν" Il. 14.294.

87
who march in step. Curiously enough, it is also used of words as well as of walls.

Speech that is π υκνο/ϕ is wise speech, sagacious speech, but also clever and crafty speech.

It is speech fit for a poem about Odysseus, speech especially fit for a poem perceived to

be dense with hidden meaning by generation on generation. A µυ∼

θοϕ can be π υκνο/ϕ, as

the song itself testifies: in Book 3, Telemachus complains to Athena (disguised as

Mentor): "ου0δε/τι/π ω µυ/θοισι π επ ει/ρηµαι π υκινοι∼

σιν:" ("I have no experience in close

discourse") (Od. 3.23). Even an ε!π οϕ can be π υκνο/ϕ. Nestor counsels Patroclus in Iliad

11,"α)λλ∋ ευ]οι9φα/σθαι π υκινο∴

ν ε1π οϕ η0δ∋ υ9π οθε/σθαι" ("You must speak solid words to

[Achilles], and give him good counsel.")49 (Il. 11.788)

If myth and epic can also be puknos, then it is not a long journey to see other ways

in which the story of the boar hunt is fortuitously parallel to the action of a reader. This

boar, in his walled-off grove, lies secure not in some random wilderness, but upon the

slopes of Parnassus, the Dorian mountain sacred to Apollo, and the Muses' home (or at

least their summer place, if one thinks of them as primarily residents of Helicon).

Moreover, the hunt is carried on under the auspices (though not with the participation) of

Autolycus, Odysseus' grandfather: "who surpassed all men in thievery and the art of the

oath, and the god Hermes himself had endowed him, for he had pleased him by burning

the thigh bones of lambs and kids, and the god freely gave him his favor." ο4ϕ α)νθω /π ουϕ

ε0κε/καστοκλεπ τοσυ/νη| θ∋ ο3
ρκω | τε: θεο∴
ϕ δε/οι9αυ0
τ ο∴
ϕ ε1
δω κεν Ε
9 ρµει/αϕ: τω |∼γ α∴
ρ

κεξαρισµε/να µηρι/α και∼

εν α)ρνω ∼
ν η0δ∋ ε0ρι/φ ω ν: ο9δε/οι9π ρο/φ ρω ν α3
µ∋ ο0π η/δει. (19.395-

98) Hermes is the god of thievery, and Autolycus is a thief in addition to his apparent

49
Homer, The Iliad of Homer Trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951)
255. All further citations of the Iliad will be taken from Lattimore's translation unless otherwise
marked. Line references are to the corresponding lines in the Thomas Allen OCT edition.

88
position as a prince in the Parnassus region. Hermes is the god of other things as well: he

is most famous as the Olympian messenger, the bearer of divine words, but he is also the

conductor of the dead to the hidden places beneath the darkness. And he is the god of

ε9ρµενει/α, the god who bestows himself eponymously upon the act of interpretation. We

do not know from the text whether or not Autolycus may have picked up any of the god's

more mysterious and literary traits, or whether he is a simple burglar and con-man.50 But

his sons are somehow capable of the mystic arts, for Odysseus' wound is healed

magically. Lattimore's "incantations" gets the Greek just right in this regard: the word

here is a form of ε0π αοιδη/, a chant or a sung charm, and cognate to the same singing

which the rhapsodes perform. Later, the abbreviated version ε0π ω δ| ο/ϕ will come to be a

lyric form in its own right.

Hellenistic readings of Homer frequently invoked the language of the mystery cult

to describe the social context of their exegeses. As I will argue in the following section,

these social configurations are strikingly like the hunting party which makes its raids

upon the dark places of Parnassus: when a text is inscrutable, closed-off and π υκνο/ϕ as a

boar's lair, the hunt for meaning in late-classical thought was always imagined as a

community affair. Indeed, the community was said to be defined by the action of the

hunt, just as the gathering of Odysseus and his uncles. Readerships are figured as largely

egalitarian structures which gather mystically around an elevated leader. This leader, the

50
There is a scholion on the passage which asserts that Autolycus was in fact the son of Hermes, and
learned from his father the skill of transmuting animals into different shapes, which gave him great
success and wealth as a cattle-rustler. "ει]τ α ε0κ µε∴ ν του∼0Απ ο/λλω νοϕ γ ι/νεται Φιλα/µµω ν, α)νη∴ ρ
σοφιστη∴ ϕ, ο4ϕ και∴ π ρω ∼
τ οϕ ε0δο/κει ξορου∴ ϕ συστη/σασθαι π αρθε/νω ν, ε0κ δε∴ του∼9Ερµου∼Αυ0τ ο/λυκοϕ,
ο4ϕ οι0κω ∼
ν το∴ν Παρνασσο∴ ν π λει∼στα κλε/π τω ν ε0θησαυ/ριζεν. ει]ξ ε γ α∴ ρ ταυ/τ ην τη∴ν τε/ξ νην π αρα∴
του∼π ατρο∴ ϕ, ω σ# τε του∴ϕ α)νθρω π / ουϕ ο3τ ε κλε/π τοι τι λανθα/νειν, και∴ τα∴
θρε/µµατα τη∼ ϕ λει/αϕ
α)λλοιου∼ ν ει0ϕ ο4θε/λοι µορφη∼ ϕ, ω σ# τε π λει/στηϕ αυ0τ ο∴ν δεσπ ο/τ ην γ ενε/σθαι λει/αϕ." Scholia V to Il.
18.432.

89
exegete, creates community through encounter with a text which is perceived as coming

to the group from some external source (such as a god).

That the boar-hunt should make such a convenient model is luck, a serendipitous

treasure cast up from a textual ocean. There is zero external evidence to suggest that the

narrative is somehow a metacritical interpolation by a late rhapsode or early editor, and

much evidence to suggest that such a thing is impossible. To my knowledge, there are no

extant exegeses of the story of the scar which allegorize as a type of the readerly

community. And, for the record, I am of course not claiming that an ancient author had

actually hidden allegorical secrets in his text for later sages to discern. I am not claiming

to say that the hermeneutical community is what "Homer" "meant" to represent; there is

no υ(π ο/νοια in the boar-hunt.

But one need not rely on υ(π ο/νοια and jokes to suggest that there is something

objectively decorous in the use of Homeric narrative to illustrate Homeric interpretive

practice. All that one needs to do is to assume that a tradition can assume that the

structures of texts can replicate the structures of existence, and this is exactly the

assertion of some of the great Neoplatonic allegoreses of Homer. This is not a point

about signs and referents, signification and its connections or disconnections between the

planes of meaning and being. Rather, it is an assertion that is possible in human

perception of process and relation to not think of making distinction between the systems

of moves that texts display within themselves and the systems of moves which people and

beasts make against each other. And this should itself be amply demonstrated by the

Heideggerian thesis outlined above, the utter conviction that the processes of meaning

and being are fundamentally intertwined, so that ontology itself is a state of relating-to.

90
The Homeric tradition, as oral epic traditions generally, constantly gestured beyond the

borders of its narrative in reference to the context of its performance. Famously self-

referential examples of this process occur in the scenes of rhapsodic performance:

Achilles playing for Patroclus in their tent, or Demodocus at the palace of Alkinoos

whose song (of the sack of Troy) causes Odysseus to weep and thereby incites his own

epic narrative flashback. (Il. 9.186-89; Od. 8.43 ff.) Clearly, the social situation of

hermetic literary exegesis could not have been gestured at in the oral-composition of the

rhapsodes singing of the boar-hunt. But it is not silly to presume that in the Hellenistic

world where the Homeric songs were thoroughly canonical, groups of readers infatuated

with the text and prone to allegoresis could have seen a reflection of their own group

social practice within one of the more striking moments of the text. This was, after all,

Plato's point, that poetry dominated human behavioral choice. He feared lest the citizens

of his perfect polis consciously or unconsciously took to imitation of the Homeric heroes

and the gods. (Rep. III: 394c-398b) And insofar as the allegorists were men who took

seriously the possibilities of hidden history lurking beneath the surface of the text, Plato

might have been right to worry.

There are no universals in the way that authority organizes itself, but there are

universal possibilities. Certain ways of acting out the life of a close-knit mystical society

will always be available; the bonds of cultural history re-offer these tested forms to each

new generation of readers. And this fact points out the way in which Auerbach's analysis

of Homeric transparency is demonstrably wrong. It may be that all texts exist ultimately

only within their respective histories of reception, but this is especially true of the

Homeric corpus. The closed-off places of the text which Auerbach will not acknowledge

91
do exist within the possibilities which have been denied to us by varying compositional

and editorial choices. And they also exist within the lived histories of those who felt the

text deeply enough to have been altered by it in the course of their acts of transmission.

Odysseus and his chanting uncles have had a long afterlife in the circles of readers who

have taken up their story together; eventually the chanting and the circling took on a life

of its own, migrating and morphing its way through the length of a tradition. Now it is

time to lay out the details of how that odyssey began.

92
4. The Homeric Mysteries

How self-confident is that wisdom which perceives a

closed compartment in things, reserved for the initiate and
manipulated only with the key. O secrecy without a secret!
O accumulation of information! It, always It!51
--Martin Buber

The perception of closed compartments does necessitate self-confidence on the

part of those who claim the right to open them, and any system of keys and locks implies

a social structure with a power to authorize access. Whether or not there is in fact a

secret, Neoplatonic or otherwise, buried in the Homeric text or the text of the phenomenal

world, is not the issue. Rather, one needs to ask how the perception of allegorical secrets

can ground a self-conception and expose the lines of authority in which the self is located.

Allegories are hard things to understand: they seem to say one thing, but actually

mean another. On the surface, they present the narration of a historical or pseudo-

historical story; but the real meaning of the text, located somewhere below, is a gnomic

abstraction. The masses are simple. They like stories. But the few are men of

penetrating insight, bound only to intellectual duty and their own ethereal natures. They

have inner eyes which can penetrate any surface story and see to the philosophical intent

of the one who framed the prose apparatus. And thus the allegorical text carries out its

operations by the fact of polysemy: it produces better and worse reactions in those who

encounter it. Literature which is perceived to be allegorical is thus not simply the

transcript of a communication, rather, it functions as a test with a socially determinative

outcome. Just as any test, the ideal allegory is that which divides people into grades of

understanding or of virtue, weeding out the unfit and certifying the elite.

51
Martin Buber, I and Thou Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribners, 1958) 5.

93
 In this tradition, the allegory is thus figured as a form which demarcates specific

boundaries of community. European allegoresis, derived largely from Greek origins, has

most often called this process a secret rite akin to those of the mystery cult, and an

initiation into matters too abstruse to be disseminated broadly. The text upon which such

ritual is practiced is a gate with a lock, or an unbreachable curtain: it is able to allow or to

bar entry into the inner sanctum, dependent on whether the supplicant is authorized to

partake of wisdom. Thus there are always two communities which allegoresis posits: an

elevated "us" with full access to the soteric, and a benighted "them" who will not or

cannot read the coded text correctly. The exact way in which the act of exegesis marks of

the boundaries of these communities varies, as the trope in its transmitted form often

leaves these two critical elements of text and community unsystematized, in paratactic

stasis. In some variations, it is the rite which confirms a pre-existent worth of the initiate:

the exegesis is bestowed upon those who are worthy in themselves to be advanced. In

others, the rite is actually constitutive of the process of advancement: anyone who is

drawn to the text can seek wisdom from the exegete: it is the process of working through

the exegesis of the allegory that the supplicant's mental powers are elevated and made fit

for society with the blessed.

The allegorical text is a determinative It which catalyzes community but is not

itself a part of that community. This takes nothing from the possible sacrality of the text,

which is the repository of divine wisdom. But that wisdom is in itself external to the

group: the group defines itself by the possession of the text, but the text issues from

outside of the plane of human existence. This is the It which makes possible a Buberian

Thou: the text is encountered as one might encounter a boar: as part of a hunting party,

94
joined by common purpose and mutual understanding and cooperative technique.

Interpretation, insofar as it makes its way onto papyrus or vellum, is always a hunt

conducted jointly. The object of the hunt is always to draw the beastly text out from its

close-guarded lair, and into the open spaces where humans grow into community by

exerting mastery over it. But for an outside observer, a modern scholar trying to

understand the functioning of such groups, there is no need to capitulate to the original

participants' stated and explicit goals, and affirm that gnomic content is the sole object

worth study. Standing outside their communal assumptions, we are free to focus on the

equally striking desire for the demarcated community which shared experience of wisdom

was said to produce.

Not that interpretive communities are hard to find in our own scenes of praxis.

Twenty-five years ago, in a particular forum of the wise (Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton

lectures), Frank Kermode argued that there is good reason to see the tensions of inclusion

and exclusion within contemporary debates over literary hermeneutics. In his

presentation, Kermode struggled to define the place of the interpreter within a field under

assault by the then-new and exotic "deconstruction." Working out of biblical criticism on

the Markan version of the parable of the sower, Kermode finds a resonant emblem in the

disturbing use of the conjunction ι3να: "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom

of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that they may indeed

look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand, so that they may not

turn again and be forgiven." (Mark 4:11-12 NRSV) This supposed purpose of the

parables to create division rather than to instruct is also the inevitable result of any

encounter with a literary text, since the methods of producing textual meaning are

95
themselves inexhaustible. Institutional interests may encourage the continued assertion of

interior access, but "So inalterable, so unalterable in this exclusion that it is easy to pass

from saying that the outsiders are told stories because they are dull and imperceptive to

saying that stories are told in order to keep the dull and imperceptive outside."52 Kermode

feels the continuance of texts' exclusionary power so acutely that he fashions his book's

dedication out of Mark's language: "To Those Outside: ε0κει/νοιϕ δε∴

τοι∼
ϕ ε1χω ε0ν

π αραβολαι∼
ϕ τα∴
π α/ντα γ ι/νεται." The hermeneutical communities of academic

humanism are parties of the excluded, perhaps only finding fellowship in their

inexhaustible assaults on a corpus of texts destined to remain foreign and unassimiliable.

Academic readers will decide for themselves on the propriety of such models. It

is hard to imagine, though, that the social motivations of academic researchers could be

denied flatly. It would be a blissful naiveté, for example, to assume that MLA attendees

are universally motivated by nothing more than our sheer love of the content of exegesis.

It certainly is debatable whether social and political pressures are more determinative of

scholarship than is engaged debate over content. But a refusal to essentialize either to a

heroic or cynical conception of the scholarly life would mean that both the intellectual

content and social form of research ought to be considered in comprehensive intellectual

history.

Hellenistic academic endeavor was subject to different social stresses than the

contemporary field imposes, but these were stresses of no less magnitude. The assertion

of disembodied and disinterested academic debate which rings so false as a description of

our own situation is just as partial and essentialistic as a description of premodern lines of
52
Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1979) 45.

96
thought. After all, the content of allegorized revelation changes ceaselessly with the

dislocations of cultural outflows and the revolving of currents and schools, movements

and ages. But the pattern of trying to describe this quest for exegetical wisdom within the

sociological terminology of the mystery cult is surprisingly long-lasting, reoccurring in

various guises. This, even when the terminological rhetoric is a bad match for the social

realities in which interpreters find themselves, and it is perhaps such examples which

testify most strongly to the power of the cultic dream.

The task of allegorizing Homer passed through several traditions of community

before its entrance into the Greekless middle ages of Western Europe. Our earliest

evidence about the Homeric corpus, from the period in which it was still sung, suggests

some sort of common process of interpretation which defined the body of rhapsodes in

professional terms rather than the terms of mystical cult. However, there were certainly

mystery cults operating during the archaic period, in which the texts of the Homeric

poems were gradually hardening. Evidence for cultic practice in the period is highly

fragmentary, but there have been suggestions that the Orphics and Pythagoreans practiced

mystical exegesis of Homeric and Hesiodic texts. And in fact, the fourth-century Derveni

papyrus, which contains a fragmentary allegorizing commentary on the corpus of Orphic

poetry, is the first extant example of its genre, predating any similar extended

commentary on the Homeric poems. The gestures toward religious community which

that text makes are then replicated in the "Homeric Questions" of Heraclitus the Rhetor,53

which suggests the development sometime between the first century BC and the second
53
Not to be confused with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclitus the Rhetor has suffered a
history of confusion with both that more famous Heraclitus, as well as with the fourth-century
philosopher Heraclides of Pontus. cf. Félix Buffière, "Introduction." Heraclitus, Allegories D'Homere
ed. Félix Buffière (Paris: Societe d'edition <<Les Belles Lettres>>, 1962) viii-ix.

97
century AD onward of a clearly religious group (perhaps equatable with the Homeridae)

which took the Homeric poems as sacred text with orthodox canons of allegoresis. And

finally, in the form most thoroughly relevant to the early-modern rebirth of mystical

communities, Neoplatonic exegesis from the late second-century AD constantly uses the

language of the mystery-cult to describe all its philosophical activities, including Homeric

allegoresis.54 What follows is a tracing of these movements of community-formation, and

a brief history of how the cult status became associated with allegorical interpretation.55

54
It is common in discussions of ancient allegoresis of Homer to include reference to traditions of Stoic
allegoresis, often associated with the work of Heraclitus. However, as noted below, Buffière has already
pointed out that Heraclitus is not representative of a Stoic tradition. Furthermore, A. A. Long has
argued strongly that there is no good evidence for Stoic allegoresis of Homer (A. A. Long, "Stoic
Readings of Homer," Homer's Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic's Earliest Exegetes
Ed. Robert Lamberton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 41-66.) Although Long employs a definition of
allegoresis which is perhaps too rigid, he has argued persuasively that the Stoic view of the Homeric
corpus was more interested in explicating the anthropological foundations of wisdom-myth than with
asserting an inspired and deliberately allegorizing Homer. And, given the tendency toward rationalist
empiricism in what survives of the Greek Stoic corpus, there is little in the way of mystery-cult metaphor
in the social organization of Stoic schools.
55
For much of the following material, I am indebted to Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian:
Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989).

98
 The social implications of early rhapsodic performance of Homeric poetry have

been studied in earnest since the Parry-Lord studies mentioned earlier. In demonstrating

the oral character of the Homeric corpus, this body of scholarship has also revealed

complex layers of social interaction which have been buried in the poems. Oral epic

composition interacts with its audience: names and places might be altered, scenes

deleted or added, descriptions embellished depending on the expectations for a given

performance. Context rules the text. There are different levels of concreteness about the

Homeric corpus, depending on which point in the tradition one hears that corpus. But in

the more fluid stages, the poem is continually recomposed to suit the needs of the

occasion, the site of performance, and the social standing of the audience.

Normally, this interweaving of the text with the social context of performance is

not held to have any connection with the frame of the mystery-cult. Secrets prefer silence

and hushed tones; they do not work well in the resonant voice of the professional

performer. The interweaving of a poem with the needs of an audience is a public act, and

intended to promote inclusiveness rather than social division. Much of our evidence for

rhapsodic performance centers around the very public and very inclusive Panathenaic

festival competitions.

That said, there is evidence of how social division developed around the early

interpretation of the Homeric poems. As famously attested in the Ion, there is indeed a

sense by the late fifth century that interpretation is part of the rhapsode's job; but prior to

that, the Homeric poems may have been objects of contest between rhapsodes and other

groups of interpreters, who claimed to provide access to the text on a deeper level than

rhapsodes were capable of reaching. The evidence for this hermeneutical stratification is

99
detailed and technical, and beyond the scope of this discussion. However, the

implications of division into the enlightened and the ignorant which such early exegesis

suggests are not at all surprising, given the markedly aristocratic allegories of Theognis of

Megara and others, which appear in the late archaic period.

Moreover, there has been a recent suggestion by Andrew Ford, in an article cited

earlier, that certifiable allegoresis of the Homeric poems can be traced back to the period

before a stable, written text of the Homeric poems had emerged. Ford argues that the

category of "riddle", αι]νοϕ, is in fact a conceptual precursor to the terms used to

designate allegory in later ages. Moreover, it carries with it, if not cultic connotations, yet

connotations of social division along the lines suggested above: riddles are the language

of barrier, and allow only keyed passage.

One of Ford's main pieces of linguistic evidence comes from the use of cognates

of "riddle" in the Derveni papyrus, a text which offers sacred interpretation of Orphic

poetry. Although the papyrus dates from the late fourth century, the text itself likely was

composed in the fifth century, and Ford's invocation of it as evidence for early

hermeneutical terminology appears sound. In fact, this text is extraordinarily valuable in

outlining the model of mystery-style exegesis, and deserves extended attention. Since my

concern here is to sketch out a classical model of allegoresis for the sake of understanding

later developments rather than to establish the antiquity of the model, I will not lean

heavily on Ford's work (though I think it excellent), but rather assume the fourth-century

dating as a terminus ante quem.

The Derveni papyrus, discovered near Saloniki in 1962, was unearthed from

100
conditions with strong cultic connotations: a half-burned scroll buried in a tomb.56 The

tombs date to 300 BC at the latest, and the script has been dated to 340-320.57 The text

itself is harder to date and to place: textual references demand only a composition after

Heraclitus, and the text exhibits unusual combinations of Attic and Ionic forms. As

might be expected, the text has been severely disrupted, but there are several extended

passages which remain largely intact. The thread of the discussion is snapped, but

hermetic themes weave their curious ways through the whole: there is extended physical

and meteorological allegorizing, etymological fable, and sublimating meditations on solar

genitalia. And all of this is to be expected because the text is an exegesis of the Orphic

poems which, by common consent of ancients and moderns, are downright weird.58

One of the most crucial, and debated, portions of the text is a column from the

remaining papyrus which has seemed desperately out of place to many commentators.

The contents of the surviving text as a whole are heterogeneous by any standard, but

mostly there is some consistency in the apparent point of view of the exegete: mystical

allegoresis is always encouraged. However, in the twentieth column, there is a passage

which seems to be hostile toward mystical rites, and some have suggested that it derives

56
Maria Serena Funghi, "The Derveni Papyrus" Trans. Glenn W. Most, Studies on the Derveni Papyrus
Ed. Andre Laks and Glenn W. Most (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 25.
57
Cf. K. Tsantsanoglou and G.M. Parassoglou "Heraclitus in the Derveni Papyrus," Aristoxenica,
Menandrea, Fragmenta Philosophica (Studi e Testi per il Corpus dei papiri filosofici greci e latini 3)
Ed. A. Brancacci et. al. (Florence: Olschki) 125-33.
58
Weirder still is Walter Burkert's claim: "The characteristic appeal to books is indicative of a revolution:
with the Orphica literacy takes hold in a field that had previously been dominated by the immedicy of
ritual and the spoken word of myth. The new form of transmission introduces a new form of authority to
which the individual, provided that he can read, has direct access without collective mediation. The
emancipation of the individual and the appearance of books go together in religion as elsewhere." But
putting something on paper does not guarantee direct access; that is why allegoresis exists. Coded
writing must be deciphered, and authority is as restricted as the supply of skilled codebreakers. This is
not a minor point. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion Trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1985)
297.

101
from a second author (perhaps quoted for the purpose of argument) who writes from a

rationalist perspective. Here is the text of that column, omitting only some meaningless

fragments at the end:

...those men who, while performing holy rites in the cities,

have seen them, I wonder less that they do not understand
(since it is not possible to hear and at the same time to
learn the meaning of the words). But all those (who hope
to acquire knowledge) from someone who makes a craft of
holy rites deserve to be wondered at and pitied--wondered
at, because, thinking that they will know before they
perform the rites, they go away after having performed
them before they have known, without even asking further
questions, as though they knew something of what they
have seen or heard or been taught; and pitied because it is
not enough for them to have spent their money in advance,
but they also go off deprived of understanding as well.
Before performing the holy rites, hoping that they will
know, but after having performed them they go away
deprived of hope too...

α)νθω /π ω [ν ε0µ] π ο/λεσιν ε0 π ιτ?ελε/σαντεϕ [τα∴ ι9]ερα∴ ει]δον,

ε1
λασσον σφα∼ ϕ θαυµα/ζω µη∴ γ ι?νω /σκειν (ου0γ α∴ ρ οι[ο/ν τε
α)κου∼ σαι ο9µου∼και∴ µαθει∼ ν τα∴ λ?εγ ο/µενα), ο3σοι δε∴ π αρα∴ του∼
τε/ξ νηµ π οιουµε/νου τα∴ ι9ερα/, ου[τ οι α!χιοι θαυµα/ζεσθαι
και∴ οι0κτε[ι/]ρεσθαι, θαυµα/ζεσθαι µε∴ ν ο3τ ι δ?οκου∼ ντεϕ
π ρο/τ ερον η2ε0 π ιτελε/σαι ει0 δη/σειν α0 π ε/ρξονται ε0 π ι−
τελε/σαντεϕ π ρι∴ ν ει0δε/ναι ου0 δ∋ ε0π ανερο/µενοι ω σ #π ερ
ωϕ ( ει0δο/τ εϕ τ?ι? ω {ν ει]δον η2η1κουσαν η2ε1µαθον: [οι0 ]κτε‹ι/›ρεσθαι δε∴
ο3τ ι ου0κ α)ρκει∼ ?σφιν τη∴ ν δαπ α/νην π ροανηλω σ ∼?θαι α)λλα∴
και∴ τη∼?ϕ γ νω /µηϕ στερο/µενοι π ροσαπ ε/ρξονται.
−−−
π ρι∴ν µε∴ ν τα∴ [ι9]ε?ρα∴ ε0π ιτελε/σαι ε0 λπ ι/ζον[τε]ϕ ει0δη/σειν
ε0
π [ιτελε/σ]αντ?[εϕ] δε∴ στερηθε/ντεϕ κα?[ι∴ τη∼ ϕ] ε0λπ ι/[δοϕ] α0π ε/ρξονται. 59

59
All translations will be taken from André Laks and Glenn W. Most, "A Provisional Translation of the
Derveni Papyrus," Studies on the Derveni Papyrus. Ed. André Laks and Glenn W. Most (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997) 9-22. Laks and Most have based their translation in part on a text published in
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 47 (1982), (after p. 300) and in part on further
reconstructions offered by contributors to their volume. My reproduction of the Greek will follow the
source list given by Laks and Most on pp. 9-10 of their translation. Column numbers will also follow
the Laks-Most renumbering, rather than the numbers given in the ZPE text.

102
The animus directed at the two forms of ritual practice is quite obvious. Granted that we

depend on a sole burnt papyrus for this text (and even for knowledge of the existence of

the text) there is no good way to disprove the alternate-author hypothesis. But there are

good reasons to argue against it, and insights to be gained if one does. Apart from

papyrological objections to the idea of a separate author,60 simple attentive reading

suggests that the passage is not in fact attacking the practice of rites, but the

uncomprehending practice of them. Public urban ritual is unhelpful because acts of

proclamation apparently allow no room for discussion and teaching. The expensive

private lessons which are even worse are apparently an instruction in correct practice of

the ritual forms, without instruction into the underlying meanings. The author's

assumptions suggest that the religious ideal is a questioning practice of ritual, one in

which there is dialogue leading to enlightenment. The mystery tradition represented by

the papyrus would thus be a highly text-based sect, in which ritual practice is real but

focused on initiation into textual understanding.

One of the most consistent themes of the commentary is the link between textual

understanding and the boundaries of a certain community. The author is quite clear that

the world is divided between those who understand the Orphic poems and those who do

not. The claims to secrecy which the text makes of its own interpretations are boilerplate

allegoresis rhetoric: So, for example, "This verse has been made misleading and it is

unclear to the many, but to those who understand it correctly it is quite clear that Ocean is

the air and the air is Zeus." τ?ου

? ?∼
τ ?ο το∴
ε1π οϕ π α?[ρα] γ ω γ ο/µ π επ ο/ηται και∴
το[ι∼
ϕ µ]ε∴
ν

60
See the helpful discussion of scribal practice in marking paragraphoi on pp 43-45 of Dirk Obbink,
"Cosmology as Initiation vs. the Critique of Orphic Mysteries," Studies on the Derveni Papyrus Ed.
Andre Laks and Glenn W. Most (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 40-54.

103
π ?ο?λλ?οι∼
ϕ α!δηλο/ν ε0?σ?τ ι??ν τοι∼
ϕ δ?ε∴
ο0ρθω ∼
ϕ γ ινω /σκο?υσι ευ1δηλον ο3
τ ι 0Ω κεανο/ϕ ε0στιν ο9

α0η/ρ, α0ηρ
∴δε∴
Ζευ/ϕ: (Col. 23; Laks and Most, 20) Or again, "The words that follow he

puts forward (as a screen), not wishing all men to understand." τα∴
δ∋ ε0
π ι∴
του/τ οιϕ

ε0π ι/π ροσθε π οιει∼

τ αι ου0βουλο/µενοϕ π α/νταϕ γ ινω σ
/ κειν. (Col. 25; Laks and Most, 21)

Such divisions between the muddled many and the enlightened few quickly become

standardized in the tradition. So does the insistence that the function of the poetic mask

is deliberate alienation, and hence the separation of the elect. The only thing remarkable

about the present cases is their priority: such motives are not simply the literary

appropriations of the language of cult by late exegetes, but are rather grounded in a text

which is a clear exercise in specifically religious hermeneutics.

But the papyrus is useful for more than the simple repetition of what will become

the lowest common denominator of allegorizing discourse. They give, albeit in

fragmentary form, the rough outline of a theory of how texts create social division upon

meeting the world. Here is most of what remains of column VII, heavily reconstructed by

Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou:

...And the true nature of the words cannot be said even

though they are spoken. The poem is an alien one and
riddling for human beings. But Orpheus intended by
means of it to say not contentious riddles, but rather great
things in riddles. Indeed, he is uttering a holy discourse,
and from the first all the way to the last word, as he makes
clear in the well-chosen verse too: for having bidden them
to put doors to their ears he says that he is not legislating
for the many...

[κ]αι∴ ει0π ει∼

ν ου0ξ οι[ο/ν τ[ε τη∴ ν τω ∼ ν ο0]νοµα/τ ω ν
[λυ/]σιν και/τ [οι] ρ9ηθε/ντα. ε1στι δε∴ χ?[ε/νη τιϕ η9 ] π ο/ησιϕ
[κ]α?ι∴α)νθρω /[π οιϕ] αι0νι?[γ µ]ατω δ/ ηϕ. [ο9δ]ε∴ ?[∋Ορφευ∴ ]ϕ?αυ0τ [η∼
ι]
]ρι/στ∋ αι0
[ε0 ν[ι/γ µα]τα ου0?κ η1 ?θελε λε/γ ειν, [ε0ν αι0ν]ι/γ µασ?[ι]ν δε∴
[µεγ ]α/λα. ι9ερ[ολογ ]ε?ι?∼τ αι µε∴ ν ου]ν και∴ α?)[π ο∴ το]υ∼π ρω /τ ου
[α)ει∴
] µε/ξ ρι ου?[[τελε]υτ?α?ι?/ου ρ9η/µατοϕ. ω (?[ϕ δηλοι∼ ] και∴ε0
ν τω ∼ι
104
 [ευ0κ]ρινη/τ ω [ι ε1
π ει: θ]υ/?ρ?αϕ γ α∴ρ ε0π ιθε/[σθαι κελ]ευ/σαϕ τοι∼
?[ϕ]
[ω )σι∴
]ν αυ0τ [ου∴ϕ ου1τ ι νοµο]θ?ε?τ ?ει∼
ν φη[σιν τοι∼ ϕ] π ολλοι∼
ϕ (Laks and
Most, 12)?

Some of this, again, is easy to read past. Anyone familiar with the tradition which

follows will quickly scan past this early iteration of the notion of a great mystic poet

hiding holy discourse in riddles, and thereby forcing a distinction between the many and

the chosen few. But there are also hidden quirks. The constant orality supposed

throughout the passage is proof of nothing, perhaps: thoroughly written allegorizations

often invoke the oral as an ideal. But there is a good possibility that this stress represents

a ritual practice of recitation, especially given that the commentary as a whole is clearly

focused on religious explication (and often explication of ritual practice) rather than

simply literary appreciation. Orality in itself is not useful (from the passage discussed

earlier, "it is not possible to hear and at the same time to learn the meaning of the

words"). But orality does gather a presence, which in the references to speaking and to

listening draw down becomes explicitly thematized. Centuries later, after the mode of

allegoresis has clearly dropped any real association with mystery cults, the pose of the

oral will still drive forward.

The doors of the ears (if Tsantsanoglou's reasonable conjecture holds) may be

conditioned in our reading by the much more familiar prophetic injunction from the

parable Kermode analyzed: "Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!" But the Orphic

command is ambiguous: what does it mean to put doors to one's ears? Perhaps it is the

expected: allow your ears to open to the word of truth hidden in my verses. But ears,

after all, already have holes; a door might allow not deeper hearing, but selectivity in

hearing. The ability to close oneself off to the words of the many is as important as
105
opening to the words for the few. A door, like lock and key, is a manifestation of

authority, and the "legislation" which Orpheus proposes is for a people who guard their

society religiously. Somehow, the spoken word of mystical rite and instruction is

transmuted into the founding rhetoric of a polity of initiates. The path into deep

communal being which the passage ambles along is a path of language.

But the poem is an alien thing to the human realm. It is a riddle that comes to us

bearing great things, but great things from elsewhere. There is no possibility that the

Heideggerian "always-already" could be in effect. The poem could not be always-already

understood: it is a riddle. The riddle could not be always-already subsumed within the

life of the group: it creates the group. The fact that the poem comes rushing from the

depths of Orpheus' hidden places does not make it unwelcome, for this is holy song and it

is revered-without reverence there would not even be a commentary. But its only power

to draw listeners and their reverence is its foreignness.

The first extant application of this model of religious exegesis to the Homeric

corpus is in the "Homeric Allegories" of Heraclitus the Rhetor. This is a thoroughly

minor text, forgotten from the canon and discussed only as a sidelight to the study of

ancient reception of Homer. It is, as the Oxford Classical Dictionary puts it, "a veritable

curiosity of literature,"61 a rather dull text endowed with more animus than insight. The

only sustained analyses available are the critical introductions of Félix Buffière and

Francis Oelmann in their respective editions of the text. Robert Lamberton brings up

Heraclitus only as background for the "far richer and more complex"62 allegoresis of
61
"Allegory, Greek" Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) 46.
62
Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the
Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 184.

106
Proclus and others, and that is the prevailing view of the material. And this bypassing of

the text is entirely justifiable for studies concerned with tracing the major developments

of intellectual history. While some of Heraclitus' readings of Homer are interesting, more

are either hackneyed or silly. The flow of his discussion is loquacious and annoying; the

taxis of his arguments discombobulated and disturbing. Moreover, there is apparently no

solid way to place the text. Not only is the name "Heraclitus the Rhetor" wholly

untrustworthy, the original name of the treatise is in doubt, the place of its composition

totally unknown. And the date is only limited by a rough indication that it postdated the

turn of the first century B.C. The overall picture which has thus emerged of the text is of

a third-rate piece of literary criticism composed by a no-name dilettante sometime in the

late Hellenistic or early imperial periods. No wonder it has not attracted critical debate.

But if one turns from intellectual history to a social history of the intellectual

sphere, then the text gains greatly in value. Despite the ambiguity as to its date of

composition, this is the first extant text to invoke for Homer the standards of mystical

exegesis present in the Derveni commentary. Of course, the frustrating obscurity of the

text's origins are a hindrance to placing it in a reasonably precise historical narrative–one

must inescapably proceed by conjecture, and conjecture is a dangerous business, the glory

of Icarus. But what we have in the Homeric Allegories is a disembodied voice, calling

from somewhere in the crevasses of the tradition, and to guess its location with attentive

listening is better than to consign the voice to the wind, conjecturing that it has nothing to

say to us.

It is obvious and well-acknowledged that the text is a "defensive allegoresis,"

designed to insulate Homer from the criticisms of rationalizing philosophers who have

107
attacked the anthropomorphism of the text.63 The proper title of the work, as Buffière

argues, is probably, "ΟΜΗΡΙΚΑ ΠΡΟΒΛΗΜΑΤΑ," but it is probably best thought of as a

"Homeric Defenses." The only passage critics ever cite from the text is typical: "For he

blasphemed in everything, if he allegorized nothing." (π α/ντα γ α∴

ρ η0
σε/βησεν, ει0µηδε∴
ν

η0λληγ ο/ρησεν.)64 Heraclitus is quite capable of literal reading when it suits the defense:

for example, in order to prove that Apollo's plague is meant to mean the plague resulting

from dead bodies decomposing in the hot summer, he cites a description of dust at Iliad

2.149-51 to show that the weather was in fact hot and dry. But all plot events

(particularly the troublesome ones concerning deities) can and must be understood as

allegories. He accepts that description of the gods as having human faults would be

blasphemous, but denies the possibility that Homer could have blasphemed.

The Homeric Allegories is the only extant extended allegoresis of Homer which

cannot be identified with a particular philosophical school or tradition.65 This does not

mean that Heraclitus is opposed to the idea of philosophy. There are several positive

references to philosophy scattered throughout the text, and Homer himself is called

"philosophical." But there is a great suspicion towards the philosophical tradition as

received. Only the wisest of the philosophers understand (and therefore approve of)

63
Of all the forms of allegoresis, the defensive comes in for the most consistent scorn, as a sort of
befuddled conservatism trying to pound square texts into round hermeneutical wholes. In fact, this
scorn is misplaced. Thirty years ago, Morton Bloomfield called allegory, "that which conquers time";
using contemporary lingo, we might rescue defensive allegoresis with a quick sentence featuring the
word "appropriation." Unfortunately, the powerful possibilities of the technique do not rescue
Heraclitus, who is a genuine clod.
64
Heraclitus, Allegories D'Homere ed. Félix Buffière (Paris: Societe d'edition <<Les Belles Lettres>>,
1962) 1. All translations are my own; succeeding references to section numbers will be given
parenthetically in the text.
65
Claims that the text represents a strain of Stoicism are not tenable; they will be discussed in the
excursus.

108
Homer, while most (and especially Plato) are fools who cannot see his value. Homer is

himself the only true fount of philosophy, and that his philosophical critics have actually

stolen from him whatever in their works can be considered insightful.

Contrary to common opinion, Heraclitus cannot be held to be a philosopher

addressing philosophers. When Heraclitus is classed as a philosopher, he is usually

labeled a Stoic. This classification is understandable; of the philosophers whom

Heraclitus quotes in the work, Stoics seem to be his favorite. Moreover, the use of

extensive Homeric allegoresis in the Hellenistic period was a trademark Stoic expository

method, as is well recognized. Heraclitus refers to the school as “the most perceptive of

philosophers” and cites several individual Stoic philosophers in approving tones. And

hence the OCD has the daring to say that the text was inspired by the Stoic allegoresis of

Crates of Mallow.66

However, the text will not support such claims. Though he does show general

approval of the Stoics, he does not think very highly of Crates in particular: his only

reference to the Stoic is an offhand remark about “a certain quackish philosophy of

Crates” τερατει/αν τινα∴

τη∴
ν Κρα/τ ητοϕ φιλοσοφι/an (27) Moreover, his references to

the Stoics are always as if from the “outside” of that school–he writes in such formulae as

“the Stoics say,” so apparently he isn't one himself. And, as Buffière points out, the

specific content of Heraclitus’ allegorical explanations do not make a good match with

the Stoics’. While Heraclitus offers moral, physical, and euhemeristic allegoresis, he

never attempts metaphysical allegoresis and hence has nothing to match the Stoic

conception of the divine, ordering logos. Heraclitus is not a Stoic, but draws his
66
“Allegory, Greek” OCD 46.

109
philosophical influences broadly from the whole length of the tradition. 67

Heraclitus did not even think of himself as a philosopher. One obvious problem is

the same that one runs into when calling Heraclitus a Stoic: namely, that he refers to “the

Philosophers” and what they claim, as if they are a group entirely separate from himself

and his audience. Moreover, although he does use the word “philosophy” respectfully, he

usually bends the sense of it, to include in its purest form only the Homeric poems

themselves. Toward what we think of as the philosophic tradition, he holds mostly

antipathy, and it is rare that he expresses wholehearted endorsement of any philosopher or

school, including the Stoics.

67
"Si Héraclite parlait vraiment en Stoicen, il ne dirait pas que Zeus est l’éther, Héra, l’air, Poseidon, l’eau
: il dirait que Zeus est la raison divine en tant qu’elle parcourt l’éther ; Héra, cette meme raison étendue
a l’air. Il s’exprime au contraire comme les anciens <<physiciens>> antérieurs a Socrate et Platon. Le
teinte de stoicisme, qu’il offre par endroits, n’est rien de plus, chez lui, qu’un vernis récent sur un
meuble ancien." Heraclitus (Buffière), xxxviii-xxxix.

110
 J. Tate, writing early in the twentieth century, acknowledges Heraclitus’ position

outside of the philosophical schools. In tracing the history of the reception of the text, he

writes, “[Schow] is right on one point where later writers have preferred to err with

Heyne: the pupil rightly calls Heraclitus a not unlearned grammarian; the master opines,

without adducing any argument, that he was a philosopher.”68 Assuming that Tate and

Schow, by “grammarian,” mean γ ραµµατικο/ϕ, one can see the categorization as a

reasonable one, but perhaps only if proceeding by default. Besides philosophers, what

other category of intellectual was likely to produce a reasonably long prose treatise? But

Heraclitus is not primarily philologically inclined, like the other prominent grammatikoi

of the late Hellenistic period. Certainly, his allegoresis itself, the obvious dominating

theme of the entire work, is a strange characteristic for one who would be given the same

classification as Aristarchus.

But one does not need to see Heraclitus as an intellectual. Not only does he refuse

to align himself with a philosophical camp, one can reasonably question how thorough

his understanding of philosophy really was. His citations of various authors seem to

prove that he has some knowledge of various philosophical texts; and yet his analysis is

not penetrating. He stays on the surface of texts, snatching an example of blasphemy out

of a long and complex oeuvre. In his numerous attacks on Plato, he only goes after

Plato’s most famous comments, such as his banishing of poets from the ideal city.

Heraclitus mentions Plato’s theory of forms, but only by ridiculing it in passing without

any apparent connection to his argument against Plato which centers on the status of

poetry. In general, one gets the impression of a “popular” cultural critic, the sort of
68
J. Tate, “On the History of Allegorism” Classical Quarterly 28 (1934) 109.

111
person who, in contemporary society, might know of and refer disparagingly to

“deconstruction,” but has never personally read Grammatology. Indeed, the whole notion

that all philosophers who had any ideas worth keeping must have stolen them from

Homer seems to suggest a merely cursory understanding of a long philosophical tradition.

Heraclitus' defense of Homer is a religious defense. He sets out to prove

specifically that Homer does not blaspheme the traditional Greek deities. Repeatedly, he

makes it clear that Homer was not only not blasphemous but is actively pious and even,

sacred in his own right. Zeus speaks through Homer, making him a sort of prophet of

Olympus. And, indeed, Heraclitus claims that Homer "himself is divine" καυ0τ ο/ϕ ε0στι

θει∼
οϕ. (3)

Those attacking Homer are criticized for blasphemy as much as slander . They are

foolish and unholy, liable to divine punishment for their textual pollutions. Epicurus

"died having had more diseases in his soul than in his body." 0Επ ι/κουροϕ µε∴
ν ου]ν

οι0ξ ε/σθω , π λει/οναϕ οι]µαι π ερι∴

τη∴
ν ψυξη∴
ν ε0σξηκω ϕ
∴νο/σουϕ η2π ερι∴
το∴
σω ∼
µα: (79)

Plato is a "flatterer" κο/λαχ and "slanderer" συκοφα/ντηϕ (4); and Heraclitus had

transitions to his closing by saying, "Although able to say more about Plato, I let him go,

feeling sympathetic shame for the name of "Socratic wisdom." Προ∴

ϕ µε∴
ν ου]ν Πλα/τ ω να

και∴
π λει/ω λε/γ ειν δυνα/µενοϕ ε0
ω∼, του1
νοµα τη∼
ϕ Σω κρατικη∼
ϕ σοφι/αϕ αι0δου/µενοϕ.

(79) The language which the text uses to describe orthodox and heterodox interpretations

of Homer is the language of religious purity. Attackers of Homer are "unholy" α)σεβη/ϕ

(3; 4; etc.) or even "polluted" µιαρο/ϕ (6; 76); Homer's poetry itself, however, remains

"august" σεµνο/ϕ (3). The act of (correct) interpretation is constantly described as a

tentative and respectful approach to the text, and one which requires purification.

112
 This language is not simply used metaphorically, as a way of hyperbolically

deepening his exaltation of Homer and denigration of Homer's detractors. He is

concerned about real impiety against a literally sacred Homeric corpus. So, in the

beginning of the work, he sarcastically expresses surprise at the multitude of charges

which have been laid against Homer as showing the gods in too ridiculous a fashion,

wondering why, if Homer were so blasphemous, why he would be a respected and

integral part of Greek social life: "So that these excesses have caused me to wonder, how

the god-fearing life in the temples and sacred precincts, attentive about the gods in the

festivals year after year, should thus affectionately take in its arms the Homeric

profanation, singing from memory the blood-guilty words." 3Ω στε ε1

µοιγ ε και∴
σφο/δρα

συµβε/βηκε θαυµα/ζειν, π ω ϕ
∼ ο9δεισιδαι/µω ν βι/οϕ ο9ναοι∼
ϕ και∴
τεµε/νεσι και∴
ται∼
ϕ δι∋

ε1τουϕ [ε0ν ται∼

ϕ] π ερι∴
θεω ν
∼ π ροτρεπ ο/µενοϕ ε9
ορται∼
ϕ ου3τ ω τη∴
ν Ο
9 µηρικη∴
ν α)σε/βειαν

ε0νηγ κα/λισται φιλοστο/ργ ω ϕ, του∴

ϕ ε0
ναγ ει∼
ϕ λο/γ ουϕ δια∴
στο/µατοϕ α!|δω ν. (1)

Heraclitus' world is one where the Homeric texts are vessels of ritualism, and uncleanness

and purification are realities of the greatest consequence. And so the stakes involved in

defending Homer are not merely literary or cultural, but spiritual: he does not want to let

Plato and his horrid crew get away with defaming the center of his community's religious

practice. At some places the scope Heraclitus claims seems to be society-wide:

Everyone always maintains the wisdom of Homer,

and his graces are ever young in the current age, nor
is there anyone who does not reveal an auspicious thing
on his tongue. We are all equally priests and ministers of
his spiritual words.

Τη∴ν δ∋ Ο 9 µη/ρου σοφι/αν ε0κτεθει/ακεν αι0 ω∴ ν ο9συ/µπ αϕ,

και∴ π ροι∀ο/ντι τω |∼ξρο/νω | νεα/ζουσιν αι9ε0κει/νου ξα/ριτεϕ,
ου0δε∴ει[ϕ δ∋ ε0στι∴
ν ο4ϕ ου0
κ ευ1φ ηµον υ9
π ε∴
ρ αυ0 τ ου∼γ λω ∼
τ ταν
α0νε/ω |χεν. Ι9ερει∼
ϕ δε∴και∴ζα/κοροι τω ν ∼ δαιµονι/ω ν ε0π ω ν
∼
113
 αυ0τ ου∼π α/ντεϕ ε0σµε∴
ν ε0χ ι1σου: (79)

Heraclitus' community is a community of priests, and Homer is their sacred scripture. But

why "everyone"? The priest is always the elect; to extend that franchise to all (as if via a

Homeric Reformation) empties the notion of priesthood. In fact, Heraclitus has in mind a

much smaller interpretive community than the majority of society. Consider:

If certain ignorant men misunderstand the Homeric

allegory and have not arrived at his innermost wisdom, but
unexamined the judgment of truth is cast out to them, then
he will seem to them (not knowing that he spoke
philosophically) to have formed his poems fictionally, and
they snatch this up and proclaim it. But we, who have
been purified within the inviolable sacristies, let us trace by
the right rule the august truth of the poems.

Ει0δ∋ α0µαθω ϕ ∼ τινεϕ α!νθω π οι τη∴ ν Ο9 µηρικη∴ ν

α)λληγ ορι/αν α)γ νοου∼ σιν ου0δ∋ ει0ϕ τα∴ µυ/ξ ια τη∼ ϕ ε0
κει/νου
σοφι/αϕ καταβεβη/κασιν, α)λλ∋ α)βασα/νιστοϕ αυ0 τ οι∼
ϕ η9
τη∼ ϕ α)ληθει/αϕ κρι/σιϕ ε1ρριπ ται, και∴ το∴ φιλοσο/φ ω ϕ
ρ9ηθε∴ν ου0κ ει0
δο/τ εϕ, ο4µυθικω ϕ
∼ δοκει∼π λα/σαι
π ροσαρµο/ζουσιν, ου[τ οι µε∴ ν ε0ρρε/τ ω σαν. η9 µει∼ϕ δ∋ οι4
τω ν ∼ α)βεβη/λω ν ε0ντο∴ϕ π εριρραντηρι/ω ν η9 γ νι/σµεθα,
σεµνη∴ ν υ9
π ο∴νο/µω | τω ∼
ν π οιηµα/τ ω ν τη∴ ν α0λη/θειαν
ι0ξ νευ/ω µεν. (3)

The ignorant, who are always many, are the only enemy, and they have no access to

Homer’s secret wisdom. In contrast, Heraclitus and his audience are initiates; through

purification they have been granted access to the inside of Homer’s text. It is

hermeneutical custom which both binds Heraclitus and his audience and separates them

from the rest of the world.

Such language is not just a rhetorical flourish meant to pull in an audience. It is

likely that when Heraclitus identifies himself and his audience as “priests and ministers,”

he refers to people who considered themselves in some real sense to be a clergy which
114
was focused on the Homeric epics as its sacred scripture. This may indeed sound a

strange assertion. While recitation of the Homeric epics had for centuries been a part of

Greek festival and religious life, there is no record of an official state cult of Homer, not

even on Chios which built so much of its cultural identity around him. But one need not

assume a state cult; private cults were of course common in the period, and this text may

well have been produced for a minor group which worshiped through Homer.

The group for which Heraclitus wrote must have seen itself as a bastion of

traditional Greek piety, focused around the preservation of the text and reputation of the

Homeric poems, which held the status of sacred, inspired scripture for them. Given the

evidence advanced above for Heraclitus’ positioning with regard to philosophy, it seems

likely that his community had some exposure to secular intellectual traditions and was

thus not “popular” in the sense of representing an uneducated movement, but it was also

not a philosophical school in itself, and probably had little direct interaction with

philosophers. In fact, we know of one such group: the Homeridae, a quasi-religious

group, supposedly deescended from Homer, and usually associated with the early

Hellenistic period. And there is some evidence which suggests that Heraclitus may have

been a late representative of the Homeridae or a successor organization (see Excursus).

But whatever the status of Heraclitus and his circle, they were lost to the post-

classical world. We know from his text that there was a deeply felt social reality which

hung about the rhetoric of mystery-style allegoresis; we know from it that there was a

continuity to the pose of exclusivity. It was a model endowed with power. And if we

cannot know exactly to whom Heraclitus spoke and when, we yet can indeed know that

this vague placeholder testifies to the fleshly life of an ancient paradigm. It is a small

115
marker of hermeneutical communion during a historical low tide for textualized

mysteries.

The model which Heraclitus transmitted was reinvented by its last and greatest

proponents, the Neoplatonists. Neoplatonic allegoresis is the one variety most familiar to

non-classicists. This dominance of the Neoplatonics to the exclusion of other exegetical

streams within the general critical consciousness was perhaps exaggerated by the nature

of Renaissance rereadings. But it is hard to deny the influence of two centuries of

neoplatonic exegeses of Homer and the Orphica and Chaldean Oracles on the interpretive

practice of early medieval writers.

Plotinus, the traditionally recognized father of Neoplatonic thinking, was much

more a philosopher than an exegete. There are references to Homer and to other poets in

his writings, but they are given in passing and by way of illustration. It is standard

allusive practice for late Greek prose, and it is hard to make a great deal out of the social

hermeneutics of such references, because they are much more rhetorical than exegetical.

However, from Plotinus' student Porphyry, we possess an outstanding example of

Neoplatonic exegesis. Porphyry's major exegetical work, On the Cave of the Nymphs in

Homer, is our best source for understanding this particular stream of allegoresis; and its

place within the context of the Plotinian school reveals crucial information about the

social structures of allegoresis.

116
 On the Cave of the Nymphs is perhaps the one indispensable text for the study of

ancient allegoresis. The work is not only the most complete and most renowned of the

ancient allegorizing exegeses, it is in fact the only work of extended critical explication

of any type which survives in toto from the entire classical corpus. Any study which

wants to assess ancient allegoresis must pass through this text.

The explicit claims as to the nature of its audience are soft and mild. Unlike

Heraclitus, Porphyry does not make many explicit gestures to frame Homer for a given

readership. Despite the fact that Porphyry's interpretation is clearly mystical, and treats

Homer as a mediator of spiritual truth, there is no threatened community of religious

conservatives visible from the text. For the most part, the essay is focused intently the

content: it questions what Homer meant by such-and-such a phrase, and not what it means

for us, the initiate, as opposed to the outsiders who cannot read well.

There is occasional use of the exegetical "we", as in "and we on our part must

now, with their [the ancients'] help and by our own efforts, attempt to find the

explanation." και∴
η9µα∼
ϕ µετ∋ ε0
κει/νω ν τε και∴
τα∴
καθ∋ ε9
αυτου∴
ϕ π ειρα∼
σθαι νυ∼
ν

α)νευρι/σκειν. 69 but this is not worth a great deal. Such formulations are as rhetorical and

as common in Greek as in English, and say pretty well nothing about an actual reading

audience. The closing of the treatise makes a slightly more reliable gesture toward

expected field of reception, when Porphyry makes an argument in favor of the possibility

of such an allegorizing reading as he has just laid out. Such interpretations are not to be

taken as the speculations of clever men, alien to the actual text, because the great genius

69
Porphyry, The Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey. Trans. Seminar Classics 609. Arethusa
Monographs. 1. (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Dept. of Classics, 1969) 4-5. Unless otherwise noted, texts
and translations are taken from this edition.

117
of Homer all throughout the poems demonstrates his immense intellectual power and

hence the likelihood that he has hidden abstruse philosophical texts under the guise of

fable. Such a defense does split the hermeneutical world into de facto camps, the

allegorizers who see themselves loyal to Homeric authority and the others who accuse

them of excessive cleverness. But this is hardly revelatory: the ancient disputes between

allegorizers and rationalists are well-known, and so such a passage says nothing other

than that Porphyry reaffirmed the standard structures of intellectual debate.

There is also one explicit description of Homeric readerships in the terms of the

mystery cults. This is brief, and it is not even Porphyry's, but rather a paraphrase: "After

these preliminaries Cronius goes on to say that it is evident to the learned and layman

alike that the poet is speaking allegorically and is hinting at something in these verses."

Τοιαυ∼
τ α τοι/νυν ο9Κρο/νιοϕ π ροειπ ω ν
∴φησι∴
ν ε1κδηλον ει]ναι ου0τοι∼
ϕ σοφοι∼
ϕ µο/νον,

α)λλα∴
και∴
τοι∼
ϕ ι0
διω /τ αιϕ α)λληγ ορει∼
ν τι και∴
αι0νι/τ τεσθαι δια∴
του/τ ω ν το∴
ν π οιητη/ν.

(Porphyry, Arethusa Cave, 4-5) (The seminar's "to learned and layman" is possible for

ου0τοι∼
ϕ σοφοι∼
ϕ µο/νον, α)λλα∴
και∴
τοι∼
ϕ ι0διω /τ αιϕ, but Thomas Taylor's old "not only to

the wise but also to the vulgar"70 is better.) This Cronius is a figure almost lost to us:

Porphyry cites him repeatedly as a previous author of a treatise on this same cave of the

nymphs, but besides that we know little besides his adherence to a form of middle

Platonism and a floruit of roughly the middle of the second century. But a full biography

is unnecessary here, because of the poverty of the quote. Cronius in this reporting is

merely stating the obviousness of a given point, expressed in terms of the traditional

division of wise and foolish that accompanies any society of the enlightened. In this case,

70
Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs. Trans. Thomas Taylor. (Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1991) 26.

118
the division is familiar enough that it can be negated without much ado: hence in the

generation before Porphyry the mystery-cult language was fairly cliché: familiar to quick

reference yet not a point of dogma that had to be maintained. But this tells us nothing

new, of course: all of our summaries and received wisdom tell us that this sort of

language had to be cliché by the second century, and although it is pleasant to have the

familiar reconfirmed, it is not particularly enlightening.

And yet the text does not eviscerate mystery or disband its society. The

hermeneutical community for which one can search so long and with so little reward

around the edges of this text has been removed into its center. The secret society of the

philosophically adept does not, as in Heraclitus, serve as an implied frame. The mystical

community rather makes guerilla raids upon the its subject of the allegory which

Porphyry purports to explain. Secret discourses and initiatory imagery are cast raucously

against each intractable detail of the bizarre interruption in the Homeric text, saturating

the exegesis with the feel of restricted revelation even though no such meta-textual

gestures are put in play.

So, for example, the first great hermeneutical task facing Porphyry is to explain

why the cave should be a cave. His answer is complex, but the foundation of it is that the

cave is perfectly representative of the world. After setting forth his interpretation, he

offers authoritative references to the ancients. First and foremost, the Persians made a

habit of conducting initiation rites within caves because of their similitude to the world.

Zoroaster in particular consecrated a cave to the all-creative power of Mithra, adorning it

with various symbols of the cosmos. Continuing, Porphyry asserts that the mysteries in

general performed their rites in caves: as temples were established for the Olympians, and

119
altars for heroes, mystical caves were the place of ritual dedicated to the earth and water.

Later in the text, Porphyry adds that even the sacred rites of the gods were most anciently

conducted in caves, before the invention of temples.

And again, when he reaches the strange image of bees dispensing their honey into

the amphorae which stand in the cavern, Porphyry turns to cultic vocabulary. Prior

tradition offered him a wide field of apiary allusion, but for the most part he focuses on

the mystical associations of bees in myth, and the cathartic power attributed to honey.

Naturally, such powers are evidenced in actual ritual practice: "So in the Lion mysteries,

when honey is poured instead of water for purification on the hands of the initiates, they

are exhorted to keep them pure from everything distressing, harmful and

loathsome...They use honey as well to purify the tongue from all guilt." ο3τ αν µε∴
ν ου]ν

τοι∼
ϕ τα∴
λεοντικα∴
µυουµε/νοιϕ ει0
ϕ τα∴
ϕ ξει∼
ραϕ α)νθ∋ υ3δατοϕ µε/λι νι/ψασθαι ε0
γ ξε/ω σι,

καθαρα∴
ϕ ε1ξ ειν τα∴
ϕ ξει∼
ραϕ π αραγ γ ε/λουσιν α)π ο∴
π αντο∴
ϕ λυµπ ηρου∼και∴
βλαπ τικου∼

και∴
µυσαρου∼
. ..καθαι/ρουσι δε∴
και∴
τη∴
ν γ λω ∼
σσαν τω |∼µε/λιτι α)π ο∴
π αντο∴
ϕ

α(µαρτω λου∼
. (Porphyry, Arethusa Cave, 16-17) After further exegesis of the Orphic

poems and another reference to Mithra, he transitions to a discussion of the bees who

bring the honey, and notes that priestesses of Ceres, under initiation into her mysteries,

are designated bees.

The preternatural relevancy of these invocations of cultic norms is only lucid in

the context of the large structures of Porphyry's argument. His opening reference to

Cronius the mystery-man is deliberate and considered. Cronius, as already mentioned,

was the author of a previous tract on the passage and one of Porphyry's obvious sources,

and his exegetical method is Porphyry's starting point. Cronius has checked the relevant

120
geographers and discovered that there is no mention of such a cave on Ithaca; and this

opens the door to serious investigations of the text. Geographic omission acts as a

confirmation on hermeneutical suspicion, because there can be no such thing in nature as

Homer has described. Why should nature point out one entrance for gods and one for

men? Why do bees put their honey in amphorae rather than in hives? Why (and how)

could nymphs be weaving purple cloth on stony beams within a dark cave? A solid rule

of allegorical exegesis is that hidden meaning must be at work precisely when the literal

makes no sense, and Cronius, reasonably, has discovered that the passage cannot be taken

as history.

The reconstructed Cronius exudes inanity for the obviousness of such a discovery.

The explicit Porphyry, however, outdoes him in odd exegesis. He takes issue with the

one part of Cronius' thesis that seems groaningly obvious: the fictionality of the cave. In

fact, Porphyry argues, the cave is not fiction at all: he has dug through the library stacks

and come up with geographical testimony, in the work of Artemidorus the Ephesian, to

the existence of a real cave at the mouth of the Ithacan harbor of Phorcys. Bizarrely, he is

correct: twentieth-century archaeological work has apparently discovered this very cave,

with third-century inscriptions to the nymphs.71 Of course, the existence of the cave

proves nothing about its actual mystical properties, and Porphyry is perfectly well aware

that, even if the cave in question was really Homer's, that the poetic narrative might

represent a major embellishment on the facts. He feels no strong need to decide between

a textual cave and a real one: for the remainder of the essay, he is scrupulous about his

71
cf. Sylvia Benton, "Excavations in Ithaca, iii: The Cave at Polis, i." The Annual of the British School at
Athens 35 (session 1934-35, publ. 1938): 45-73; and "Excavations in Ithaca, iii: The Cave at Polis, ii."
The Annual of the British School at Athens 39 (session 1938-39, publ. 1942): 1-51.

121
methodology and repeatedly confesses that he does not know whether he is performing an

exegesis of Homer or of the cave itself. But Porphyry clearly wishes that the cave is real

as described:

The more one attempts to show that Homer's cave is not a

piece of fiction of his own but was dedicated to the gods
before his time, the more this place proves to be full of
ancient wisdom; and for this reason it will deserve to be
investigated and require to have the symbolism of the
sacred objects in it explained.

ο3σω | δ∋ α!ν τιϕ µη∴9Ο µη/ρου π λα/σµα ε0 γ ξειρη∼

| τα∴ κατα∴ το∴
α!ντρον δεικνυ/ναι, τω ν ∼ δε∴ π ρο∴Ο
9 µη/ρου θεοι∼ϕ του∼ το
καθιερω σα/ντω ν, τοσου/τ ω | τη∼ ϕ π αλαια∼ϕ σοφι/αϕ
π λη∼ρεϕ το∴ α)να/θηµα ευ9 ρεθη/σεται και∴ δια∴του∼ τ ο α!χιον
ε0ρευ/νηϕ και∴ τη∼ϕ ε0ν αυ0τ ω |∼συµβολικη∼ ϕ καθιδρυ/σεω ϕ
δεο/µενον τη∼ ϕ π αραστα/σεω ϕ. (Porphyry, Arethusa Cave,
6-7)

There is a real sense in which the tract is about the cave itself. Porphyry never tries to

take the Homeric text, and possible fictionality, out of consideration, but he really does

seem to mean his title literally: the essay is indeed, as the title suggests, "On the Cave".

We might with reason question whether Porphyry's work deserves to be labeled as the

sole extant literary-critical essay of classical antiquity; it may rather be the world's first

(and worst) stab at archaeology.

Whereas fictionality was a major spur to allegoresis for Cronius, Porphyry asserts

that allegoresis is valid whether the cave is real or not. If indeed the cave has been

embellished by Homer and, as described, is essentially fiction, then Homer has crafted a

significant fiction and the reader's proper response is to thoughtfully dig out the meanings

which Homer has hidden in the text. If, however, Homer is merely a reporter, then there

is in fact a place which was constructed to have allegorical significance, and the proper

response is to dig out the meanings hidden in cave-form by anonymous ancients.

122
 The construction of the cave, whether stony or literary, in Porphyry's analysis

consistently expounds an allegorical narrative of the cycles of human spiritual progress.

The cave, as mentioned before, is anciently recognized as representative of the earth.

This particular cave, dedicated to the Naiads, must in particular be representative of the

sensible rather than the intellectual world, since water and humidity (via the real

Heraclitus here) are signs of physical generation. Souls passing into physical form are

given garments of flesh, woven for them like purple cloth on stone looms. Souls of the

elect who pass into generation are also like nothing so much as bees, since bees always

know to return home, and the righteous are likewise conscious to forego the

entanglements of generation and seek to rise back into intellection. There are two

entrances to the cave, because (as in Plato's myth of Er) souls passing down into

generation come by one route, and the purified and hence immortal soul must rise again

by another route. These routes are significantly placed to north and south, partly through

complex astrological considerations, but also partly because the cold northern winds

indicate the congealing into birth which souls undergo, and warm southern breezes again

allegorically lift the soul which has been sublated in death. The olive tree at the head of

the cave is the emblem of Minerva, and hence an infallible symbol of the manifest

wisdom with which such a world and such a passage through it has been ordained.

If the cave is indeed physical, then one knows after reading the tract exactly why

Porphyry had been at pains to point out the historical cultic uses of caves. A physical

cave constructed on the semiological principles explicated by Porphyry would allow

initiates to re-enact through ritual the universal processes of the spirit. Ritual reminders

about the humid nature of the world, and even the end of ritual and reascent would be a

123
goad to wakefulness and proper striving:

In this cave, says Homer, every external possession must

be laid down; and one is required, having stripped oneself
naked, dressed as a beggar, withered in body, having cast
off all superfluity, and averse to sense perception, to take
counsel with Athena, seated with her at the foot of the
olive tree, as to how one might eliminate the treacherous
passions of one's soul.

Ει0ϕ του∼ τ ο τοι/νυν φησι∴ ν Ο3 µηροϕ δει∼ ν το∴ α!ντρον

α)π οθε/σθαι π α∼ ν το∴ε1χω θεν κτη∼ µα, γ υµνω θε/ντα δε∴ και∴
π ροσαι/τ ου σξη∼ µα π εριθε/µενον και∴ κα/ρψαντα το∴ σω ∼
µα
και∴ π α∼
ν π ερι/τ τω µα α)π οβαλο/ντα και∴ τα∴ϕ αι0σθη/σειϕ
α)π οστραφε/ντα βουλευ/εσθαι µετα∴ τη∼ϕ Α0 θηνα∼ ϕ,
καθεζο/µενον συ∴ ν αυ0τ η|∼υ9π ο∴
π υθµε/να ε0λαι/αϕ, ο3π ω ϕ τα∴
ε0π ι/βουλα τη∼ ϕ ψυξη∼ ϕ αυ0 τ ου∼π α/θη π α/ντα π ερικο/ψη|.
(Porphyry, Arethusa Cave, 32-33)

There is no explicit instruction as to what a purely fictional cave would require of the

wise. What might it mean to sit at the foot of a textual olive tree? Presumably it would

mean meditation on the allegorical import of the text, but Porphyry offers us no clear

instructions on how to read. But the moral thrust of the cave's lesson should allow us to

bypass the distinctions between caves of rock or ink. If we are indeed averse to the

energies of sense, then the physical manifestation of the mystical seme ought not to be

particularly relevant. Any form which serves to signify the clinging humidity of the

sensual world allows us, if we are indeed among the wise, to strive toward the realm of

dry intellect.

And this is particularly relevant to whoever Porphyry's readership would have

been: few if any readers would have been able to make the expedition to Ithaca to find

out, and the only Phorcys they could have been able to attain to would have been the one

on the scroll. The textualized world would be their only practical font of meditation.

124
The ancients founded caves specifically to allow mystery cults to ritually replicate the

homeward meditations of always-gregarious bees; Homer, so clear in his attunement

with all the ancient wisdom, must have textualized the cave in order to allow the readerly

equivalent of the mysteries to do the same. Readers cannot, of course, physically enter

into the kind of ritual space which a text affords, nor can they rely on physical

communion with fellow-initiates. But anyone with discernment is free to sit at the foot of

the great Homeric fountainhead, and in a ritual without presence and mutual service, it is

only that purgatorial encounter which could define the borders of exegetical society.

Porphyry had many sources and many textual streams out of which to craft his

reading of the cave. Plato is right there in the open. Cronius and Numenius are cited

repeatedly. The obsessive references to Mithras and Zoroaster have perhaps sprung from

the Chaldean Oracles.72 Clever (and extensive) readings of fragments here and there

could perhaps unearth a half-dozen more references. And so the work has evolved from

too broad a selection to be dismissed as derivative: Porphyry is putting his own spin on a

common store of images and arguments which have been in play for centuries. This is

what scholars do.

Still, it makes a great deal of sense to read the exegesis in the light of one essay by

Plotinus which Porphyry never does cite, "The Soul's Descent into Body." ΠΕΡΙ ΤΗΣ

ΕΙΣ ΤΑ ΣΩ ΜΑΤΑ ΚΑΘΟ∆ ΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΨΥΞΗΣ Porphyry was the editor of Plotinus'

writings who divided them into the six Enneads which compose the traditional form of

the Plotinian corpus. Moreover, comments of Porphyry in the Life of Plotinus suggest
72
The Chaldean Oracles, a late 2nd-century text by Julianus, purported to hint at the basis of Persian
mysteries, and were influential in late Platonism (and have been compared to the automatic writing
exercises of modern sprirtualism). It is not known whether or not Plotinus and his immediate successors
knew of them.

125
that Porphyry revised Plotinus' writings, perhaps extensively, before publication. He

knew the essays well, and it shows: the narrative which Porphyry reads into the Homeric

cave is too similar to Plotinus' narrative of psychic motion to be accidental. And brief

consideration of that essay, along with Porphyry's life of Plotinus, can demonstrate how

the social yearnings of Porphyry's exegesis flow naturally through the originary impulses

of Neoplatonic thought and practice.

Plotinus' purpose in "The Soul's Descent Into Body" is to examine why souls, in a

state of ontological freedom within the realm of the Intellectual world, would choose to

descend into carnal form, with all its attendant perturbations. The primary answer is that

the effecting of the good is dependent on incarnation, but the content of the argument is

not as interesting as the scope. The question is asked on the broad scale of the life cycle,

as does Porphyry's exegesis, but also like his, it draws parallels between this grand

incarnational motion and the temporary flights of personal religious practice. Plotinus

opens the essay with an eloquent interrogation of his own moments of spiritual deflation

which follow upon tastes of transcendence:

Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into

myself; becoming external to all other things and self-
centered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than
ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting
the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine;
stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised
above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the
Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from
intellection into reasoning, and after that sojourn in the
divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be
descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body,
the Soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it
has shown itself to be. (Ennead IV.8)73

73
Plotinus, The Enneads, Trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber and Faber, 1956; 4th ed. 1969) 357.

126
 Πολλα/κιϕ ε0γ ειρο/µενοϕ ει0 ϕ ε0µαυτο∴ ν ε0κ του∼σω µ / ατοϕ
και∴ γ ινο/µενοϕ τω ν ∼ µε∴ ν α!λλω ν ε1 χω , ε0µαυτου∼δε∴ ει1
σω ,
θαυµαστο∴ ν η9λι/κον ο9ρω ∼ ν κα/λλοϕ, και∴ τη∼ϕ κρει/τ τονοϕ
µοι/ραϕ π ιστευ/σαϕ το/τ ε µα/λιστα ει]ναι, ζω η/ν τε
α0ρι/στην ε0 νεργ η/σαϕ και∴ τω |∼θει/ω | ει0ϕ ταυ0τ ο∴
ν
γ εγ ενηµε/νοϕ και∴ ν αυ0τ ω |∼ι9δρυθει∴
ε0 ϕ ει0ϕ ε0
νε/ργ ειαν ε0λθω ∴ν
ε0κει/νην υ9π ε∴
ρ π α∼ν το∴ α!λλο νοητο∴ ν ε0µαυτο∴ ν ι9δρυ/σαϕ,
µετα∴ ταυ/τ ην τη∴ ν ε0ν τω |∼θει/ω | στα/σιν ει0ϕ λογ ισµο∴ ν ε0κ
νου∼καταβα∴ ϕ α)π ορω ,∼ π ω ∼ϕ π οτε και∴ νυ∼ν καταβαι/νω ,
και∴ ο3π ω ϕ π οτε/µοι ε1νδον η9ψυξη∴ γ εγ ε/νηται του∼
σω /µατοϕ του∼ τ ο ου]σα, οι[ον ε0φ α/νη καθ∋ ε9 αυτη/ν, και/π ερ
ου]σα ε0ν σω /µατι. 74

One of the central tenets of the Plotinian system is the immovable unity of the ultimate

divine reality. "God" (perhaps with its Homeric baggage) is not a word that can capture

the ontological fullness of this unity, and Plotinus most often simply refers to the "One."

And ascent to such a place is a spelunker's return to the domestic comfort of light: "In the

cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocles, I discern this universe, where the

'breaking of the fetters' and the 'ascent' from the depths are figures of the wayfaring

toward the Intellectual Realm." (Plotinus, Enneads 358) και∴

το∴ τω ∼
σπ η/λαιον αυ0 ,|

ωσ
#π ερ 0Εµπ εδοκλει∼το∴
α!ντρον, το/δε το∴
π α∼
ν−δοκω ∼µοι−λε/γ ειν, ο3
π ου γ ε λυ/σιν τω ν
∼

δεσµω ν
∼ και∴
α!νοδον ε0
κ του∼σπ ηλαι/ου τη∼
| ψυξη∼
| φησιν ει]ναι τη∴
ν π ρο∴
ϕ το∴
νοητο∴
ν

π ορει/αν. (Plotinus, Opera 2: 166) The essay is not at all about caves, as is Porphyry's,

but Plotinus returns to the image repeatedly over the course of his exposition.

The content of Plotinus' writings is of a piece with the old Orphics: hidden forms

of spiritual reality, soteric practice, secrets of metempsychosis. And scattered over the

Enneads, there are several uses of the language of the mystery cult to describe religious

experience deployed in support of such content. Transcendent beauty lingers within the

holy place called the intellectual realm, and only rites of purification allow access. There
74
Plotinus, Plotini Opera. 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 2: 165.

127
are multiple orders of souls, some which have the ability to fly higher and penetrate to

more fundamental truths than others.

But Plotinus was not the leader of a mystery cult, but of a philosophical school.

The primary mode of operation as disclosed in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus is dialogue and

debate; despite Plotinus' reference to meditation practices in the above quote, there is no

evidence of regular ritual practice in the circle. Moreover, meetings of the school were

free and open to any who wished to attend: there is no secret and no selectivity. And

there is no hint of any desire to restrict access to Plotinus' writings after his death; on the

contrary, Porphyry and the other students were apparently eager to promote wide public

familiarity with Plotinus' thought.

But this philosophical school did often parallel the forms of religious community,

sometimes exclusively. The school, while open, was quite conscious of having limited

size and adherents, its own position as a circle of the enlightened few. Porphyry, on first

deciding to formally join the school, was required to make a public confession and

recantation of his former errors before being offered fellowship. The promotion of

Plotinian texts was in part a function of contemporary manuscript culture: there are

references in Porphyry's Life to the difficulty of obtaining accurate and complete copies of

works, and the disappointment of wisdom-seekers at not being able to access the full

thought of the master. The implication is of a milieu in which oral presence is necessary

for full enlightenment and accurate assessment of written texts. And there is participation

in explicit spiritualism: at one point in the Life, Plotinus attends a séance given by an

Egyptian priest visiting Rome's Temple of Isis.75 Another time, on a feast-day in Plato's
75
Dodds suggests with reason that the historicity of the séance is not reliable, as Porphyry's reporting is
indirect. Since our purpose here is not the actual religious practice of elite Rome, but the self-
construction of a philosophical school, testimony which seemed plausible to an insider ought to be
128
 ν ι9ερο∴
honor, Porphyry offers his own mystical poem, "The Sacred Marriage," (Το∴ ν

γ α/µον) to the assembled group, and Plotinus praises him as if another Orpheus: "You

have shown yourself at once poet, philosopher and hierophant."76 "ε1δειχαϕ ο9

µου∼και∴
το∴
ν

π οιητη∴
ν και∴
το∴
ν φιλο/σοφον και∴
το∴
ν ι9εροφα/ντην."77 And of course the inescapably

mystical side of Plotinus' metaphysics would make all such gestures appropriate forms for

such a school to employ.

Neoplatonism in its founding moment projects the discourse of mystery-

community onto the more mundane realities of a philosophical school. If this seems to be

a reconfirmation of the obvious, it is only so in hindsight, because we have always known

that the Neoplatonics were into that sort of thing. But Plotinus and his immediate circle

had no need to metaphorically cast themselves as a mystery cult. We do not know

enough about the breadth of influence of middle Platonists such as Philo to draw any

conclusions about how much Plotinus and his school drew their self-conception out of

any continuing discursive tradition. But they certainly did have a wide variety of social

models of philosophical schools from which to choose. Most obviously, the Platonic

dialogues, from which so much of the raw materials of the Plotinian system are quarried,

offers no parallel. On the contrary, the spectacle of Socrates in the agora, grabbing

people by the elbow and pestering them with questions on this or that abstraction-this is

the enduring icon of Greek rationality and free debate. There is something objectively

weird about the Neoplatonics' vision of themselves as quasi-cultic.

sufficient. cf. E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968) 289.
76
Porphyry, "On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work." The Enneads, Trans. Stephen
MacKenna (London: Faber and Faber, 1956; 4th ed. 1969) 10.
77
Porphyry, "ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΠΛΩ ΤΙΝΟΥ ΒΙΟΥ." Plotini Opera. 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 1: 18.

129
 The broad implications of such a self-conception for early Neoplatonism are

beyond my scope here. But the implications for the process of Neoplatonic reading are

visible in Porphyry's essay on the cave. Briefly put, the metaphor of the mysteries allows

the Neoplatonist exegete to transform the act of reading, from a lonely pursuit of

scholarly knowledge, into a moment of textual communion. Philosophical schools have

no temple and no rites, even when their concerns (as with Neoplatonism) are

overwhelmingly metaphysical. Plotinus describes at great length and over many essays

the exact nature of the soul, its relationship to physical matter, and its ontological

grounding in the One. He outlines processes of ascent, but his writing is theoretical and

offers no ritual prescriptions or even noetic exercises. The invocation of mystery imagery

transforms acts of ratiocination into acts of ritual. Contemplation of philosophical truth

as expounded in texts becomes the exact locus of enacting a metaphysical transcendence.

In Plotinus' system, there ought to be no scope for idiosyncratic quietism, because the

ultimate unity of all souls seems to demand a communion. Identification of exegetical

process with older forms of ritual allows the creation of readerly communion, mediated

by texts dispersed across time and space. After all, the importance of Porphyry's

allegoresis is not ultimately in its understanding of literary semiotics, since he believes

that the cave may actually be real. Rather, the crux of the text is ultimately the power of

the Homeric text to function as a substitute space of ritual for the original cave. It is in

poetry that readers are able to recognize the hallmarks of the world of humid generation,

to extrapolate the processes of incarnation and apotheosis, and to actively turn themselves

toward the plane of intellection where they will all find their unity with each other and

with the ultimate.

130
 This sublimated mystery cult is later, in very analogous form, to become a

standard trope of humanism. All who flee from the physical world into higher realms

find their society through the medium of books, joining the great invisible legion of all

those who have partaken of the wisdom of the ancients. It is not far at all from the

impulse of Auerbach all the long years later, gathering a heap of the glorious trophies of

Europe in order to preserve the possibility of a certain type of antiquarians' club. And,

though it would take a massive (and likely inconclusive) effort to prove such a thing, it is

tantalizing to speculate that perhaps the Italians' quintocento resurrections of

Neoplatonism played a role in getting that peculiar conception of reading warmed up

again.

But this proximity to humanism's social aspirations is only a quality of the initial

years of Neoplatonist allegoresis. Previous exegeses such as that of Heraclitus or the

Derveni papyrus were more clearly attached to explicitly religious forms; their readings

were of immediate theological and even ritual importance to specific delineated

communities of believers. And the later tradition of Neoplatonism returned to more

ritualistic uses of allegoresis. Iamblichus, the Syrian Neoplatonist of the late 3rd-early 4th

centuries A.D., was the pivotal figure in this reversion. Iamblichus, to our knowledge,

never engaged seriously with Homer; he did produce a commentary on the Chaldean

Oracles which now survives only in fragments and from which it is difficult to extract

principles of allegoresis. However, his major surviving work, "On the Egyptian

Mysteries," expands on Plotinus by introducing mystical ritual above contemplation as

the supreme method of ascent to the One. Proclus, the last major pagan philosopher,

continued in this vein. Although his philosophy of reading is more complex than

131
Iamblichus, and he has a good grasp of the intellectual structures of Plotinian

Neoplatonism, the ritualistic propensities introduced by Iamblichus seem determinative.

Apart from his Iamblichan fascination with the bizarre Chaldean Oracles, his reading of

Homer was also pulled into a sort of ritualism: Homeric myth was of a type "'appropriate

for hieratic custom'...and therefore reserved for the initiate." (Lamberton, 197) And the

Life of Proclus of Marinus (at times more a hagiography than a biography) stresses

Proclus' religious piety and compulsive ritualism as much as his thought and

philosophical achievement as the one of the last δια/δοξοι for Plato's Academy. In these

latter centuries of Neoplatonism, the reintroduction of real mysticism and real ritual

brought the allegoresis of texts back into the realm of secret revelation, once again

restricted to the few and once again imbued with spiritual power via exegesis itself.

The ancient world thus gives us two variations on a theme. Some ancient

allegoretes convoke physical communities around present texts, and some convoke

communities as dispersed as the scattering of editions. But the metaphorical nature of the

early Neoplatonic variety does not make it less important, a mere tropological survival of

early imagery, left bloodless. Noetic realities for this movement were much more

important than physical ones, and the mysteries which Porphyry speculated were

conducted in the original cave at Phorcys had to have their readerly counterpart. Any

adherent to the Plotinian system would have participated in a spiritual rapture just as

bookish and just as "real" as Dante's. In his "Soul's Descent" Plotinus flies into the heart

of the divine which is a place not of theological meaning (the "reasoning" in which he has

to descend) but rather of encompassing and binding Being. But different axes of division

cut through the two texts: Dante's God is the ontological ground of all being, including

132
substance and its accidents, but still keeps created beings such as poets within the

separated realms of punishment or grace. Plotinus asserts here and elsewhere that the

One excludes the ontologically deficient realm of sensual matter, but extends itself, via

souls, into that matter. Hence there is in the system a possibility of complete human

joining with the ultimate, and when Plotinus brags of reaching self-centeredness, his point

is that he has left behind sensation and reason and withdrawn back into his primordial

selfhood of the One. That is where he can find the perfect community, because he has

achieved union with all the powers of soul which extend into all beings and into the

cosmos as an ordered whole.

The system insists that the individual soul is an outgrowth of the One. The great

effluence of spirit into the world can never be perceived by the wise as the breaking-in of

a foreign force. The grand finale of the Enneads, the closing paragraphs of an essay, "On

the Good, Or the One" which Porphyry saw fit to put at the end of the collection, is an

elegant paean to transcendent unity. The paean is a long one, too long for citation, but I

would be ashamed before my imagined image of the dead, and remiss toward readers, if I

tried to evade these few sentences:

This is the purport of that rule of our Mysteries: 'Nothing

Divulged to the Uninitiate': the Supreme is not to be made
a common story, the holy things may not be uncovered to
the stranger, to any that has not himself attained to see.
There were not two; beholder was one with beheld; it was
not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended. The man
formed by this mingling with the Supreme must-if only he
remember-carry its image impressed upon him: he is
become the Unity, nothing within him or without inducing
any diversity; no movement now, no passion, no outlooking
desire, once this ascent is achieved; reasoning is in
abeyance and all Intellection and even, to dare the word, the
very self...he is like one who, having penetrated to the inner
sanctuary, leaves the temple images behind him-though
133
 these become once more first objects of regard when he
leaves the holies; for There his converse was not with
image, not with trace, but with the very Truth in the view of
which all the rest is but of secondary concern. (Plotinus,
Enneads. 624)

Του∼ τ ο δη∴ ε0θε/λον δηλου∼ ν το∴ τω ∼ ν µυστηρι/ω ν τω ∼ νδε

ε0π ι/τ αγ µα, το∴ µη∴ ε0κφε/ρειν ει0 ϕ µη∴ µεµυηµε/νουϕ, ω ϕ ( ου0κ
ε1κφορον ε0 κει∼νο ο1ν, α)π ει∼ π ε δηλου∼ ν π ρο∴ϕ α!λλον το∴
θει∼ον, ο3 τ ω | µη∴ και∴ αυ0τ ω ∼ | ι0δει∼ν ευ0τ υ/ξ ηται. ε0 π ει∴τοι/νυν
δυ/ο ου0κ η]ν, α)λλ∋ ε3 ν η]ν αυ0τ ο∴ ϕ ο9ι0δω ∴ ν π ρο∴ϕ το∴
ε9ω ραµε/νον, ω (ϕ α≅ ν µη∴ ε9ω ραµε/νον, α)λλ∋ η9νω µε/νον, ο4ϕ
ε0γ ε/νετο ο3 κει/νω | ε0µι/γ νυτο ει0µεµνω |∼
τ ε ε0 τ ο, ε1ξ οι α≅ν π αρ∋
ε9αυτω |∼ε0 κει/νου ει0 κο/να. η]ν δε∴ ε4
ν και∴ αυ0τ ο∴
ϕ διαφορα∴ ν ε0ν
αυ9τ ω ∼ | ου0δεµι/αν π ρο∴ ϕ ε9αυτο∴ ν ε1ξ ω ν ου1 τ ε κατα∴ α!λλα−ου0
γ α/ρ τι ε0κινει∼ τ ο π αρ∋ αυ0τ ω |,∼ ου0θυµο/ϕ, ου0 κ ε0
π ιθυµι/α
α!λλου π αρη∼ ν αυ0τ ω |∼α)ναβεβηκο/τ ι−α0 λλ∋ ου0 δε∴λο/γ οϕ
ου0 δε/τιϕ νο/ησιϕ ου0 δ∋ ο3λω ϕ αυ0 τ ο/ϕ, ει0δει∼και∴ του∼το
λε/γ ειν...ω σ #π ερ τιϕ ει0 ϕ το∴ ει1σω του∼α)δυ/τ ου ει0 σδυ∴ ϕ ει0ϕ
του0π ι/σω καταλιπ ω ν ∴τα∴ ε0ν τω ∼ | νεω |∴
α0γ α/λµατα, α∃
ε0χελθο/ντι του∼α)δυ/τ ου π α/λιν γ ι/νεται π ρω τ∼α µετα∴ το∴
ε1νδον θε/αµα και∴ τη∴ ν ε0κει∼συνουσι/αν π ρο∴ ϕ ου0κ α!γ αλµα
ου0δε∴ ει0κο/να, α)λλα∴ αυ0τ ο/: α∃δη∴ γ ι/γ νεται δευ/τ ερα
θεα/µατα. (Plotinus, Opera 3: 288-89)

This great and mysterious Supreme is not a boar, no rough beast which has decided

suddenly to break forth upon the world from the dark places of Being. Such an image is

excellent in fleshing forth the numinous texts of real religious rite before and after

Plotinus. But the Plotinian Supreme is the Self of every particular self, and it creates

community by drawing souls back up into their origin, rather than by uniting them in

method against a divine object. Like every image marshaled to describe a Paradise, my

Odyssean boar ultimately fails to embody the complexity of reality.

But this perfect internality, and refusal of the beast, is also not a confirmation that

here, at last, is something which expresses the fullness of Heidegger. The quality of

rapture is identical, but the nature of Being is entirely divergent. The Supreme for

134
Plotinus is never the alien. It is eternally the Self of every particular self, and the physical

world (of dubious ontology anyway) is alien to it. But Heidegger's Da-sein admits of no

foreignness of any sort, precisely because there is no division between the physical and

the ideal. Or, better still: there is for Heidegger no ideal. The Heideggerian insistence

that ontology must be fundamentally grounded in itself is a refusal to resort to the soils of

metaphysics. The soul-encompassing One is exactly what cannot be spoken of in

Heidegger. And hence any hermeneutics which aims toward a group reintegration with

the One is exactly the sort of reading which Heidegger would dismiss from serious

ontological consideration. Heideggerian hermeneutics is a process of being-in-relation

which does not deny the physical but insists that there is nothing merely physical, merely

matter awaiting interpretation. And from such a stance, the only proper community that

can be established is founded through the hermeneutics of attuned relation to the Other.

If there were a form of allegoretical community which Heidegger could fully

inhabit, it would have to be a community formed by members' direct relations to each

other as embodied in texts, not by mutual reference to an outer principle referred to by

texts. Texts, if still "it"s (and what else could they be?), would have to be domesticated

little things, thoroughly humanized beasts which eschew a life of their own, and exist

only as temporary vessels of relation.

135
 Chapter Three

1. How to Catch a Boar (Part 2)

The web of possibilities and attractions which pull the oral epic poet on, and

which allow him to weave his verse on the spot, means that at times that words and

phrases and associations can be reproduced in contexts which are, apparently, alien to one

another. Vocabulary circulates as easily as coinage, and the necessities of memory and

rhythm demand the self-replication of pattern through the mouth of the poet, even when

the persistence of pattern is inexplicable by the standards of fictional realism.

Autolycus appears again in the Homeric corpus, and this other appearance is a

perfect example of the possibilities of self-assembling pattern within an oral epic:

Meriones gave Odysseus a bow and a quiver

and a sword; and he too put over his head a helmet
fashioned of leather; on the inside the cap was cross-strung firmly
with thongs of leather, and on the outer side the white teeth
of a tusk-shining white boar were close sewn one after another
with craftsmanship and skill; and a felt was set in the centre.
Autolycus, breaking into the close-built house, had stolen it
from Amyntor, the son of Ormenos, out of Eleon,
And gave it to Kytherian Amphidamas, at Skandeia;
Amphidamas gave it in turn to Molos, a gift of guest-friendship,
and Molos gave it to his son Meriones to carry.
But at this time it was worn to cover the head of Odysseus.

Μηριο/νηϕ δ∋ ∋Οδυση∼ ι∀δι/δου βιο∴ ν η0δε∴ φαρε/τ ρην

και∴ χι/φ οϕ, α)µφι∴ δε/οι9κυνε/ην κεφαλη∼ φ ιν ε1θηκε
ρ9ινου∼π οιητη/ν: π ολε/σιν δ∋ ε1 ντοσθεν ι9µα∼ σιν
ε0ντε/τ ατο στερεω ϕ ∼: ε1κτοσθε δε∴ λευκοι∴ ο0δο/ντεϕ
α)ργ ιο/δοντοϕ υ9 ο∴
ϕ θαµε/εϕ ε1 ξ ον ε1νθα και∴ ε1
νθα
ευ]και∴ ε0
π ισταµε/νω ϕ: µε/σση| δ∋ ε0νι∴ π ι∼
λοϕ α)ρη/ρει.
τη/ν ρ9α/π οτ∋ ε0 χ ∋Ελεω ν∼οϕ ∋Αµυ/ντοροϕ ∋Ορµενι/δαο
ε0χε/λετ∋ Αυ0 τ ο/λυκοϕ π υκινο∴ ν δο/µον α)ντιτορη/σαϕ,
Σκα/νδειαν δ∋ α!ρα δω κ ∼ε Κυθηρι/ω | ∋Αµφιδα/µαντι:
∋Αµφιδα/µαϕ δε∴ Μο/λω | δω ∼κε χεινη/ι∀ον ει]ναι,
αυ0τ α∴ρ ο9Μηριο/νη| δω ∼ κεν ω |{π αιδι∴φορη∼ ναι:
δη∴ το/τ ∋ ∋Οδυσση∼ οϕ π υ/κασεν κα/ρη α0µφιτεθει∼ σα.

136
 (Il 10.260-71)

There is no possible logical relation between this episode and the narrative of how

Odysseus received his scar: and that impossibility is the source of the mystery. There is

no mention here of the fact that Autolycus is the grandfather of the scheming hero, nor is

there any apparent knowledge by Odysseus that the boar-tusk helmet was originally stolen

from Amyntor by his maternal grandfather. But there is pattern and attraction which will

not be ignored. Words turn magnetic. Autolycus permanently attracts the presence of his

grandson. Odysseus sucks in boars.78 The mention of a boar must lead in the mention of

the place where the boar resides, and that place must be closed-off: "close-built" above, is

once again a translation of π υκινο/ϕ, the same attribute as described the live boar's lair,

dark and shielded. The conjunction of dark and shielded places with the nearby presence

of Autolycus results in acts of capture and appropriation, for after all, Autolycus is the

disciple of the God of Thieves, and is skillful in the hermetic arts.

Thus, great oddities of inexplicable pattern join the two appearances of Autolycus

within the epics. This is a common quirk of oral epic generally, and it is a great prompt

to the assumption of subterranean mysteries within the Homeric corpus. If one were to

assume a demiurgic craftsman standing behind the poem, we would be forced to ask

certain types of questions. Why should Homer link Autolycus and Odysseus without the

knowledge of either? What is the author's purpose in joining grandfather and grandson

twice? And what secret intent could there be in nailing a boar to the heart of this joining?

78
Odysseus' encounters with boars are strangely common, and not at all limited to the additional
conjunction here of Autolycus. For example, he is the companion and savior of swine at Aiaia (Od.
10.383-96), and he is greeted by swine and the swineherd on his moment of reentry to Ithaca, just past
the cave of Phorcys (Od. 14.5ff).

137
Does the boar have an abstract symbolic meaning, perhaps the untameability of Autolycus

and his line? Or is the boar-tusk helmet a covert and coy allusion to Odysseus's first

experience of battle? Or is the relation of the boyhood incident, lodged in the future

history of Odysseus, an allusion to the scene of battle that the battle-scarred and voyage-

scarred schemer has passed through? And what could the divine poet possibly mean by

stressing the closed-off-ness of where boars and boar-relics are housed? Certainly Homer

has violated the canons of realistic, mimetic common sense: why should Autolycus go to

the trouble of breaking in to the house of Amyntor, merely to steal a leather helmet

adorned with tusks? It is an old principle dating back to Proclus that the point at which

logical narration breaks down is exactly the point at which hidden wisdom must be

breaking forth. Each curiosity would lead us back to another variant of the question:

what could the divine Homer have intended?

Such questions could all be swept away with a dismissive wave if one were to

employ a particularly shallow understanding of how oral epic operates. Such an

understanding could argue that since oral epic is the product of a process of formulaic

composition, the formulas can void content of all meaning and interest. Certain

grammatical and prosodic patterns have simply been practiced into second nature by the

rhapsodes; they can instinctively craft an end-stopped line of dactylic hexameter to fit any

situation. Plot elements have been wired into the brain, and so any epic is simply a

jumble of the elements of journey, battle, conference, dialogue, sporting competitions,

recognition scenes, and weddings. And certain particulars about the main characters of

the tradition get jumbled together as well. The young rhapsode, apprenticed to his craft,

listens intently and often hears stories about Odysseus which mention his grandfather

138
Autolycus, and hence Autolycus is a name ready to the tongue whenever Odysseus

appears and the meter demands. Autolycus and Odysseus have always often been

mentioned with boars, and so the rhapsode thinks to mark the helmet with boar-tusks,

simply because the memory of the boar-element is triggered by the series of names, and

oral composition is so spontaneous that it has to use whatever elements present

themselves . In similar fashion, associations of boars with close-walled lairs call another

vocabulary word to mind, and hence the obvious adjective which springs up to describe

Amyntor's house is π υκινο/ϕ. Word links on to word in a great magnetized chain

determined not by the mystical force of a semi-divine author, but by the practical

necessities of rapid-fire delivery. There would, to such an interpretation, be no

significance to the facts of pattern besides the significance it implies for the situation in

which the poem was composed and re-composed. Performers had incentive to win over

their audiences, who might well not remember the details of a different epic performance,

and they threw out names and adjectives instinctively, to keep the song rolling, without

any concern for the broad contextual implications of their compositional choices.

The hypothetical critic who would put forward such an argument is the bogeyman

of those traditionalists who have argued various forms of the case for literary single

authorship of the Homeric corpus. It is a bogus bogeyman. No one argues that the

Homeric poems are essentially shallow, slapdash productions. In fact, the mechanisms of

oral composition as described above are largely correct; it is the implications which are

off. There is in fact a process of rhapsodic acculturation to narrative forms which

produces, at every moment in the singing, a range of offered possibilities. Singers of tales

create spontaneously out of the unspontaneous, already-created forms and patterns and

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plotlines which have been handed down to them by generations of predecessors. Names

and adjectives do indeed offer themselves to the rhapsode in immediate need of a word to

fit the meter. But the verse is not reducible to the convenient impulses of a rhapsode, and

there is no reason why a simplified portrait of oral technique must be essentialized as the

only legitimate referent of oral epic. The Homeric poems as we possess them are not

transcriptions of a lazy performance, but rather the fruits of a long tradition of practice

and performed expansions. They are the repository of accumulated artistry from dozens

of high-status competitions, and while the tradition was still fluid, the performers who

continuously recomposed the epics had every incentive to adopt the artistic advances of

their predecessors while adding new richness to the mix. And so oral-formulaic analysis

does not require the abandonment of aesthetic reverie or searching analysis. Rather, it

forces a deeper understanding of the nature of what richnesses are to be found.

Words offer their most secret favors to those skilled in the oral arts. The artistry

of the rhapsode is a skill of yielding decorously to those urgings, refusing cheap

invitations but pursuing devotedly each hint of a more lofty pleasure. When words, by

whatever whim of diachronic linguistics, arrange themselves into suggestive positions,

the singer has a responsibility to remain open to any aesthetic possibilities. What surprise

then, if there should be puns79 embedded in each Homeric lay?

The rhapsode is compeer to the linguist because the pun is a mimesis of

etymology. Etymology as an analytical category certainly has its place within serious
79
Maureen Quilligan has produced the most extensive discussion of pun's relation to allegory, and her
analysis offers a particularly satisfying journey through the mysterious kingdom of Meta ("Allegories
are not only always texts, predicated on the existence of other previous, sacred texts, they are always
fundamentally about language and the ways in which language itself can reveal to man his highest
spiritual purpose within the cosmos." (Quilligan, 156) However, while Quilligan argues that pun is
antithetical to the vertical hierarchies of allegoresis, I would suggest that there is a different sort of
allegoresis which becomes lucid through the semiotics of the Homeric pun.

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study of literature, but that is a strict and narrow place. Good etymology is correct and

responsible etymology, and it tells about language itself, its structures and developments,

and is only a key to literary locks when employed with the utmost expertise. The most

that good etymology can usually do for the critic is to function as a sort of gloss for a

certain type of work. Anyone who annotates Paradise Lost had better have a good deal

of Latin, for example. Far-future readers of Dickens will need notes by a great virtuoso in

English in order to savor the names. But little is to be gained by tracing out the Indo-

European roots of average words in average works. And bad etymology is worse than

useless: it is the province of modern cranks and well-meaning ancients who were way

over their heads. Bad etymology is essentialistic and polemical (in addition to being

wrong): it asserts that the one true hidden meaning of a given word or name is disclosed

by whatever word seems to make the closest phonic match. This is the false coin of those

like Heraclitus, who insist that Hera must mean "air," and that her seduction of Zeus is

obviously a lesson in meteorology.

Puns are more amenable to intelligent analysis because they are less grand in their

claims. Pun, like etymology, is a prestidigitation of the phoneme or grapheme, and a

quick-switch assertion that this is that, a given word or usage is a stand-in for another.

But the punster plays the game for low stakes, like three-card monty on the corner. The

punster does not discover meaning buried within words, but rather expropriates the

serendipities of language and works them into an assertive creation of meaning.

The narrative of the boar-hunt of Odysseus' youth may be read allegorically or

not. But etymological analysis, so often associated with misguided mysticism and

inappropriate allegorization, is here demanded of any reader who would insist on the

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bare letter of the text. The narrator explains quite plainly that Autolycus, at Eurycleia's

prompting, names Odysseus after his own quality of being ο0δυσσα/µενοϕ, raged against

(on account of his thefts). The boar-hunt at the heart of the episode grows out of the boy's

acceptance of an invitation to Parnassus which had been proffered at that moment of

naming, and so the story is founded upon a moment of etymology. Of course, the

etymology offered is not central to the story which follows. Perhaps one could say that

the name is a foreshadowing of the boar's act of rage against Odysseus. But this is hardly

necessary, because Homeric names are regularly an expression of the namer's attributes

(e.g., Odysseus is the far-battler, and not Telemachus), and this fact is foregrounded in

Autolycus' action.

But the founding etymology slowly morphs into a pun which is central to the

episode of the boar-hunt. That pun reappears more obviously in the passage from the

Iliad, revealed both by the internal dynamics of the action and also by the angry revenant

elements which refuse to be explained. We must ask again: what is the significance of

the repeated association of Odysseus with boars' tusks? What significance can be drawn

from silent and irrepressible pattern? Without the resources of authorial intent, what

aesthetic explanations can be drawn from the mechanics of oral-formulaic technique?

"Tusk of a boar" is, literally, ο0δου/ϕ συο/ϕ. Again, this is pun and not etymology;

the name Odysseus is certainly not "derived" from ο0δου/ϕ συο/ϕ. Obviously, the narrative

δυ/σσοµαι" it decides it has found a more reasonable

itself needs no such derivation: in "ο0

explanation. But derivation is not really the point; we have shaded from etymology into

pun, and the narrative needs no official sanction. The composers of the narrative do not

try to force us to believe that somehow Odysseus as a character can be essentialized down

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to a boar's tusk, and there is no reason to, for Odysseus is a urbane politico, and not a

drooling wild man.

The narrative makes no such claims. Indeed, the status of the pun within the final

redaction of the Homeric poems is unknowable. The pun, once seen, is obvious, but the

narrative does not take pains to ensure that it is seen: two words are not joined in any one

line, so as to make the pun inescapable. Rather, the pun is able to lie dormant in its deep

lair, happy to sleep until roused by the bewildered questioning of a reader anxious to

know why Odysseus is linked repeatedly to boar-tusks. Presumably, the average Attic

hearer of epic would not have heard "boar's tusk" in every iteration of the Ithacan name

(the pronunciations, though similar, are not identical), but would have been quick to hear

just that when the hero was actually confronted by a real pork tooth. It is possible that the

later rhapsodes and the scribes and editors, confronted with a text that was fixed and

somewhat opaque, would have skimmed past the pun. But when the tradition was more

fluid, the association of Odysseus with boars' tusks was clearly, from our record of

repetition, a formulaic element, and hence an obvious one. We cannot know the record of

intent of generations through whom the text has passed, but we must surmise the presence

within a fully operative oral tradition of a vibrant pun.

However, the pun is not funny, and not meant to be. It offers not comedy, but

semiotics. Here, by making use of the chance homophonies of Greek, the old singers

have managed to create a visceral emblem of Odysseus. The tusks' semiotic function is

open and public, for the tusks are displayed on the helmet and the helmet is displayed on

the head of none but Odysseus. In its past status, the helmet has perhaps not even been

worn: it first appears as a valuable knicknack in Amyntor's house; it is then a gift between

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friends and family. "But at this time it was worn." It is only now that the helmet takes up

its function as armor, and as armor becomes a sign. Armor in Homer is always

relentlessly semiotic: apart from the shield of Achilles (and all the allegories which spin

out of that), we can recognize that the main action of the epic is impossible without the

epideictic function of this word-crafted armor. Indeed, the value of armor is much more

in its signifying value than in its protective value: Patroclus succeeds in leading his

charge for a while because the armor he wears signifies an irresistible strength which is

not his own; he fails and dies when the armor is tested as a protective device.

And now, Odysseus wears his own badge, and it is a linguistic one. The ο0δου/ϕ

συο/ϕ is the eponymous blazon of its wearer: they are the symbol which herald the arrival

of Odysseus, grandson of wrath. The tusk-helmet on his head signifies personal identity,

and it also signifies aristocratic birth, because in punning on Odysseus' name it also puns

upon the circumstances of his naming. And so, in a sense, the tusk-helmet carries in itself

the legacy of its own history of ownership: being worn by Odysseus, it also happens to

signify the man who stole it and who is ultimately responsible for putting it in play before

the walls of Troy. The tusks did have to pass from owner to owner, through the offices of

propriety and gift-ritual, handed over as lovingly as a literature. But whatever the

abilities or worth or availability to correct semiotics of the helmet's intervening owners, it

eventually finds its way to the man for whom, by his nature, it is destined.

The semiotics of the tusk which are revealed through this incident are easily read

back into the scene with Eurycleia. That scene, despite its bloated digression, expresses a

moment of epic recognition: Eurycleia sees the scar and knows the history. But the

mimetic logic of the narrative digression is supplemented by the semiotic logic of the

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mark itself. Eurycleia has seen a scar above the knee, and she knows it immediately to be

the mark of the ο0δου/ϕ συο/ϕ: her master has come home. Again, the boar's tusk functions

as a visualized emblematic projection of Odysseus's identity.

With that renewed vision of what the boar-hunt can mean in the meeting with

Eurycleia, there arise hints of a second way of spinning out tales of community. With

regard to the hunting-party, the boar and its tusks had been a thoroughly foreign object,

hidden away in its dense lair, and coming out only to attack. It was that fight against an

alien object that necessitated some sort of familial and egalitarian structure. But the

frame narrative of anagnorisis treats the diversion as shared history, a history which has

been appropriated into the system of Ithacan household-relations. Eurycleia, in washing

off the scar, reveals the emblem of the boar's tooth, and she knows instantly the name

which such a scar must embody. The history which has been written into Odysseus'

lower thigh is a history which was always-already domesticated into a badge of relation.

Eurycleia had been Odysseus' servant since his birth, since Autolycus first came to visit,

and it was she who handed over the babe to receive his etymological eponym. Now it is

she who receives back the mark of the pun, and the incessant wordplay to which she has

always been a party snaps her back instantly into relation as well as recognition. This

relation is also an exclusive one: only Eurycleia is privileged to know the secret, and she

and Odysseus thus form a unit of two defined in contrast to the rest of ignorant Ithacan

society. But this is hardly egalitarian. On the contrary; Eurycleia had been washing the

feet of a scruffy nobody; she finishes washing as a servant bonded to her master. If there

is any doubt as to class relations which are reinforced by the fact of recognition, it is

cleared up by Odysseus' choke-hold on Eurycleia following the recognition, and his

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command to her not to tell the secret.

The full possibilities of this alternate model of boar-based community are more

visible in the helmet narrative from Iliad 10. Like the exchange between the king and his

nurse, the boar tusks are integrated into the web of personal relations which they define.

For the helmet is always a gift, from Autolycus to Amphidamas to Molos to Meriones to

Odysseus. It is a gift which defines the relations which embody it, acting as the seal upon

a guest-host relationship, or as a bond of father and son. And there is a distinctly

Heideggerian internality to the character of the object within the system of relation. The

act of giving is not simply an expression of prior relationship, but is rather a moment of

re-creation of relationship, defining new levels of commitment or obligation. And thus

the deep structure of existence of the gift is no longer that of the simple ontic substance

(in this case leather and pig-ivory) but must also include the burden of the relationship it

recreates, again, through its force as seme.

Heideggerian Being, at the end, became a gift: in his late lecture, "Time and

Being," the old man set aloft a reverie, spun entirely of words. German does not say,

"Zeit ist" or "Sein ist," but "Es gibt Zeit," "Es gibt Sein." Too intelligent to claim that

quirks of grammar or etymology must necessarily be reflections of reality, Heidegger

rather claims to have found a particular felicity in the German phrasing (just as his

constant admiration of the Greek "α)−λη/θεια" ["uncovering," by Heidegger's unsound

etymology] to mean truth is a confirmation of Greek cultural achievement). Because,

after all, neither Time nor Being "is": they are not things, not even in the rarefied sense of

λο/γ οϕ or ου0
σι/α or ε0νε/ργ εια. So better to think of Time and Being of gifts, comings-

into-presence and eventful matters which have no actual matter to locate them in the

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finitude of event. And what of the It which gives? It is Appropriation (Ereignis), defined

ultimately by the maddeningly Heideggerian phrase, "Appropriation appropriates."80 But

such an It makes for no It. Or rather, Appropriation is an It which is always-already a

human It, and the gift of Being is given by a certain process of taking. Heidegger is

teasing the reader. In order to deny the metaphysical ground of Being, he could have

denounced the German phrase or simply ignored it; instead he recuperates (appropriates?)

it by a redefinition of the external It into another version of internality.

The Homeric helmet is not itself Being, even though it does have its source in a

sort of stealthy Appropriation (Autolycus' specialty, after all). But the Being which is

manifested in Mitda-sein, the Being of people across the space of relational give-and-

take, this arises and is given along with the gift of the helmet. The Being of a community

is never a simple ontic existing: even if one denies Heidegger and insists on the possible

lonely existence of discrete subjects, this is not the kind of being a community can have.

Bodies may exist in and of themselves, but communities only can have their existence in

the interchange of goods and words and acts. Each step of taking what is given, from

Amphidamas to Odysseus, creates community Being.

And Time, too, is given in the gift. Community is created sequentially, in a series

of one-to-one links mediated by the passage of the helmet from one pair of hands to

another. The encounter of the Autolycan family with the boar had been a group effort,

undertaken simultaneously and developing into a simultaneous choral chant of

incantations over the fallen spearman. Here the web of relationship is diachronic; the

community defined by the transmission of the tusks is grouped into pairs. And it is at
80
Martin Heidegger, "Time and Being," On Time and Being Trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper
and Row, 1972) 24.

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least partly anonymous: certainly each giver of the gift could not have known the gift's

future history, and there is no indication that each receiver of the gift knew its full record

of passage. There is only a movement downward in time, in which the boar-tusks are

repeatedly inscribed into moments of relation between giver and receiver, the one who

puts forth a sign of relationship and the one who understands and accepts. We do not

know the quality of the intermediate steps of giving. But we do know that eventually the

boar-tusks find their way to a place of great propriety and belonging. The boar-tusks,

however appreciated by Amphidamas and Molos and Meriones, were not fated for them.

ο0δο/ντεϕ συο/ϕ can only reach their natural state of rest when they adorn the head of

Odysseus. Here their semiotic value is at its fullest, and here also they form a link

between the last receiver and the first giver. Autolycus had (via etymology) bestowed on

Odysseus his name; now the visceral emblem of that name and of the relationship which

bind the two makes the same journey.

The boar-tusk emblem is not an ontic object, common and familiar in the world,

which is then dragged into the fabric of the poem by mimetic song. Rather, it is made of

the stuff of language from the start, a pun which has congealed into visible form. And

that language itself, as presented in the epics, is itself always-already interpreted.

Relation precedes language: Autolycus is first Odysseus' grandfather, and only then do

etymology and pun stretch out along the axis of that pre-existent bond. That fact is only

evident from the Odyssey's narrative, and could not be deduced from Iliad 10 alone. But

in the original circumstances of composition there could be no "Iliad 10 alone": the pun is

a formulaic element, with no birth date or origin, and audiences in the process of learning

to appreciate epic poetry would have to have known and understood the pun prior to any

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given iteration of it. The structures of hermeneutical relation must thus have been in

place before the boar-tusk helmet of our modern edition was ever sung. Here, then, in the

pun, is where the Heideggerian ontology of language can meet its true image. The live

boar in the lair, that lurking presence, was a thing foreign and to be hunted, but this dead

boar is inseparable from the relations which it enables.

And so, this other form of boar-based community can point serve as the emblem

for a more thoroughly Heideggerian form of allegorical community than is ever made

explicit in the Greek tradition. This form is a tradition in which allegories, so far from

being foreign, are presented as the textualization of personality. Allegorists hang their

texts about their persons as so many emblems of inner worth. And the process of

allegoresis which results is a diachronic community, a great humanistic fellowship across

the ages, in which literati read their ancestors and then appropriate their texts to signify

themselves to following generations. It is an allegorical form which realizes the

Heideggerian dream of language's internality to relation, precisely because allegorical

emblems are created out of preconceived patterns of patronage.

The tradition which so admirably expresses Heidegger does so purely by chance,

for it was developed out of the oral lyric traditions of ancient Chu, a kingdom of south-

central China. There is no link to Heidegger, and of course no link to Homer, and hence

the invocation of Odysseus and his boar-tusks is even less natural than the invocation

above of the boar-hunt to explain the patterns of Hellenistic allegorical communities. But

I am of course making no claims on nature, no more than the rhapsodes did in tying

Odysseus to boar-tusks. My game, like theirs, is three-card monty: we turn the turns of

chance to profit. Homer did not prophesy of ancient Chu, but his poem, by sheerest

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chance, puns upon it. It would be ungrateful to refuse the mnemonic and explicatory

efficacy of such an emblematic pun, even if the gift has ultimately been purloined from

the disorderly treasuries of such a non-entity as "world literature."

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2. The Semiotics of Chu

There can be no possible link between the semiotic journeys of the Homeric tusk-

helmet and the social location of ancient Chinese exegetes. The pre-Qin singers did not

know the Odyssey, and there are no Iliad scholia left in the residue of Han literati. No

responsible work of scholarship could hope to link the two: such would be an

intellectualized crackpotism.

There can be no connection. But as the previous section argued, it is often in

those places where logical connection is impossible that persistent pattern is the most

alluring. There could have been no possible narrative reason why Autolycus and

Odysseus and boars and secret places should be linked in two separate and mutually

irrelevant ways, and readers of Homer have always struggled with the mystery of such

places as this. But by way of oral composition theory, there is in fact a rational

explanation that has lain buried within the incompatibilities of the text, and which rescues

the disparate phenomena into a higher-order aesthetic whole.

The ancient Chinese songs which make up the traditional anthology, the Lyrics of

Chu (Chuci) have no entanglement with the story of the Ithacan. That does not change

the fact that the Homeric anecdote seems perfectly to describe, with a peculiar propriety,

the Heideggerian-style social ontology in which the collection and its earliest interpreters

locate allegoresis. These old Chinese exegetes announce the text to be a perfect sign of

identity, hung upon the exterior of the body as easily as a helmet is donned, which gives

the knowledgeable interpreter the key to understanding the worth and identity of the

bearer of the sign. And allegory thus embedded in person-texts is a product of

transmission, it passes from literary ancestors and is handed down so as to create

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humanistic tradition, until arriving at the rightful heir, the allegory's sympathetic

interpreter who himself takes up the same codes and puts them on. The allegorical text,

in such a tradition, is the gift of a certain type of mark, a mark which acts as confirmation

of ontological priority and depth. Transmission of an allegory thus is enmeshed by all the

webs of social necessity that determine the gift-function.

The Being of transhistorical community finds its home within the eternal handing-

down of such gifts of language. In a textual-sexual rewriting of Heidegger, Luce Irigaray

has renamed the gift a "copula" without subject or predicate, a space in which Being is

given: and this seems to get at something.81 The gifts of textual tropes as they occur

within the Chuci never claim to be successful gifts, merely texts without a contemporary

receiver. Though aspiring to give themselves to a royal patron, the poets of the collection

are lamentable outcasts, performing (as if) alone. But the handing-down of tropes and

texts creates a sort of house in which a grand society of the wretched is reconvened in joy.

Within the space of tradition, the living give favor to the dead through allegorical (hence

sympathetic) reading, and become themselves the patrons which were unavailable in the

dead present of the poets' respective ages.

So the determined fact of pattern, which unites the Homeric anecdotes with the

sociology of the Chuci, demands that something be realized. It demands that there be

another possibility for allegorized community-feeling other than the mystery-cult model,

and it offers a way of seeing that possibility and a guide for its exploration.

Allegoresis is a choosing. Just as in the case of Greek hermeneutics, the Chinese

standard encounter with a text presumed to be allegorical necessitates a deep division in

81
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1999) 91-94.

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society, between those who can fully understand the allegorical codes and those who

cannot. There is, again, a surface story, disseminated broadly across the geographical

reach of the cultural tradition, and anyone who is literate can peruse them at leisure. But

(says the model) there are in every generation only a lofty few who can appreciate the

inner sentiments of the text. Again, allegorical texts carry out a work of division which

proceeds by the method of polysemy: an author offers signs which are open to

misreading, and the text functions as a gate, only permitting entrance and inclusion to

those with a clarity of sight and a comprehension of the necessary codes to interpret

accurately. Just as much as their Greek counterparts, Chinese allegoretes posit a world

divided by texts into an "us" and a "them."

But there is in the Chinese standard model no comparison to the work of the

mystery cult. Rather, there is a diachronic analogue to the client-patron relationship,

particularly those as thrive at the royal court. The allegorical text is no longer a cover of

revelation, but it is a textualized version of the poet, craving acceptance and recognition.

Whereas in the Greek case, the text was a catalyst which created bonds of community by

entering the human sphere from an outside plane, the Chinese allegory is in an important

way much more internal to the system of human relationships. Homer was in classical

antiquity regularly imagined as a single person, but his personal attributes were largely

unimportant to the assessment of the value of his poetry. All that mattered about Homer

was his production of a text that contained great stories and perhaps abstruse wisdom.82

But the personal biography of an early Chinese poet mattered a great deal: the great

82
There were, of course, speculations and debates about the biography of Homer, and we possess an
extant Life and Poetry of Homer by ps.-Plutarch, but these were largely contests over Homer's polis of
origin, performed for the sake of local pride rather than interest in Homer's personality.

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majority of early poetry assumes a first-person narration.

To some degree, the social implications of such a court-centric mode of

allegoresis are evident in very oldest extant Chinese literature, the Classic of Odes (Shi

Jing ), and its history of interpretation. That collection, which has strata dating back to

the 10th century BC, is fraught with exactly the type of philological difficulties that are

ripe to give rise to wild interpretive movements. In addition, the frequent device of

yoking natural scenes paratactically to human sentiment has been a traditional prompt to

exegesis both in terms of allegory and in terms of xing (a trope whose closest European

parallel is probably Eliot's "objective correlative")83 And, as so often happens with texts

which fall into classic status, divergent intellectual and political agendas on the part of

traditional readers have tugged allegoretically on the canon in several directions. But

often these interpretative traditions supported a strong link with court allegory: many

ostensible folk songs have been read as the covert plaints of one or another historical

figure. And the evidence we possess as to court rhetoric in the first millennium suggests

that the anthology was routinely cited, with apparently standardized allegorical meanings,

to score points in political oratory.84

But the construction of the Odes in the classical Chinese critical imagination is

not quite equivalent to the parallel Hellenistic vision of Homer. There was no single poet

who stood behind the text of that anthology: there was not even one time or one locale

with which it could be identified, as the first division of the collection claims to mark off

83
Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge: Harvard Council on East Asian
Studies, 1992) 587.
84
Stephen Van Zoeren, Poettry and Personality: Reading, Exegesis, and Hermeneutics in Traditional
China (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 38-44.

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the lyric songs of various independent principalities. This was in large part an anthology

of folk poetry, and one of the strongest strains of traditional criticism identified the

anthology as folk songs which had been collected to serve as the barometer of public

opinion.

The Lyrics of Chu, the second great poetic anthology of the tradition and often

paired with the Odes in critical discourse, is in the presumption of authorship much closer

to the Homeric model. In its received form, it is not at all the work of a single author,

but it the entire collection is permeated by the presence of a guiding spirit, the Chu state

minister Qu Yuan. He is the ostensible author of the most famous poem in the collection,

the "Li Sao" ("Encountering Sorrow"), and was either ascribed to be or served as the

inspiration for most or all of the other poems in the anthology. The Odes was China's

first and most important poetic anthology, but Qu Yuan was really the tradition's first

named poet to be famous as a poet. The model of what a poet was, who he was supposed

to be, how he was supposed to interact with his social situation: these were to a large

degree defined by the model of a poetic persona which was available in the person and

the poetry of Qu Yuan.

According to traditional biographies, Qu Yuan was a noble of the kingdom of Chu

in southern China, active during the fourth and third centuries B.C. A member of the

extended royal family, Qu Yuan served at the royal court in Ying as a trusted councilor.

At some point, one or more jealous rivals at court slandered Qu Yuan to King Huai,

asserting his disloyalty; the king believed the criticism and promptly banished Qu Yuan.

During a period of military adventurism which the same king subsequently pursued, Qu

Yuan tried from exile to persuade Huai against foolish actions, but the king refused to

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listen and was eventually killed while on a diplomatic mission to a neighboring state.

King Xiang, who succeeded him, recalled Qu Yuan for a short time, but slanders by the

new prime minister soon resulted in his re-banishment. During both periods of

banishment the minister wandered the face of the land, pouring forth his complaints in

song; eventually he threw himself into the Milo River, to join the ancient worthies in

death.

The whole of this biography matters intensely to the poems of the anthology and

to the larger poetic and hermeneutical traditions which grew from it. It mattered that he

was a slandered aristocrat, it mattered that he was unjustly exiled, and it mattered that he

drowned himself, loyal to the last. The text of the great "Li Sao" is a disorderly and

plaintive recitation of Qu Yuan's wrongs and his subsequent travels around the Chinese

cosmos in a search for advice and sympathy, and many of the other poems are either

pieces of alternate origin and genre interpreted through the lens of this plaint, or else are

later oral or literati imitations of the plaint. The key issue for a social hermeneutics of Qu

Yuan is that interpretation becomes a way of reaching out across time to the forlorn poet.

During the minister's lifetime, he was "read" incorrectly by the bad kings of Chu, who

listened to external defamation and could not understand Qu Yuan's pure intentions;

allegorical reading becomes a means of righting the historical wrong. The process of

writing and reading Chu-style verse is a process of personal allegoresis conducted

diachronically. Forbearers represent themselves in exotic and obscure poetry; they crave

from the reader the understanding which they were unable to gain in life from doltish

political patrons.

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 But to understand the model of community life available through this persona, it is

not sufficient to examine Qu Yuan himself (even if it were possible to make definite

attributions to him). Rather, one needs to ask how the persona of Qu Yuan is constructed

in the centuries between the original, apparently oral, poetry of the "Li Sao", and the

standard edition of the anthology, the Chuci Zhangju, compiled and annotated by Wang

Yi in the second century AD. There is a paradox at the heart of this construction: the

anthology is a layered thing, representing mixed modes of shamanistic ritual, oral

rhapsody, gnomic verse, and belles lettres imitation pieces. And then there are the layers

of commentary overlaying all of this and interpenetrating it: the Wang Yi commentary is

the first extant, but it contains hints of earlier levels of exegesis carried out alongside the

later strata of composition. The search for the historical Qu Yuan in all of this, though

continued ad infinitum in traditional and modern criticism, is frustrating. But the

motivation which drives this long story of song and collation and reperformance and

imitation is the utter conviction that there was a historical Qu Yuan whose inner nature is

valuable and knowable, and, most importantly, imitable. To participate in the

performance of Chu-style poetry or to give one's energy to its explication, was to join a

club of righteous exiles, wandering through a base age and achieving community through

humanistic mechanisms of textual dispersion similar to those of the Neoplatonic

exegetes. But unlike Homer, Qu Yuan was his text: the act of appreciative reading was

not a doctrinal assertion or even a spiritual transcendence, but a decision to count oneself

among the friends of the great poetic forebearer.

To explicate this further, it is necessary to examine the moves which the text

makes and how the various strata, especially as presented in the final form which was

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transmitted to later dynasties, worked together to establish certain critical characteristics.

The editor, Wang Yi, has been subject to the same rationalist disdain as European

allegorists have received since the Enlightenment. Wang Yi, the story goes, is something

of a hack, valuable for philological glosses but guilty of excessive allegorizing. As David

Hawkes puts it: "He does not seem to have been a particularly distinguished or talented

person. Indeed, the frequent imbecilities of his commentary tend to make one forget

that...he often provides us with the only key to what would otherwise be insoluble

difficulties."85

But Wang Yi is no arrogant upstart, whipping around with careless hermeneutical

fury a tradition totally alien to him. When he gets things wrong, it is not because he does

not understand the tradition but because he lives and writes so thoroughly within it that he

has become blinded to how the standardization of interpretive patterns has hidden

peculiarities in the earlier strata of the text. His commentary grows out of the tradition,

and the edition which he has left us is an organic summation of that tradition. Oral

performance and written interpretation are more easily separable as mental categories

than as historical developments, and one can trace a slow progression from the songs

performed at the Huainan court, through Chu-inspired Han fu, and eventually to Wang

Yi. Neither Hawkes nor any other scholar would argue that the entire corpus was

composed by Qu Yuan and his most immediate disciples, and that Wang Yi mangled a

text which had been stable for centuries. Traditional attributions, literary style, and

linguistic change all confirm what Wang Yi tells us: that there is a largely continuous

tradition of engagement with Chu-style poetry for at least three full centuries prior to the

85
David Hawkes, Ch'u Tz'u: the Songs of the South (London: Oxford UP, 1959) 170.

158
compilation of the anthology. A largely oral regional form with roots in shamanistic

practices evolved forms of more literate, if still fluid, verse, and those produced

deliberate literary composition and imitation. Eventually imitation of Qu Yuan spun out

poetry about Qu Yuan, and ultimately exegesis of Qu Yuan. The allegoresis that Wang

Yi applies to the poems derives from them, and not just because they contain moments of

what seem indisputably to be deliberate allegories. Qu Yuan's story does not merely

require interpretation, it is about interpretation, and the speaker of the "Li Sao", whether

Qu Yuan or not, sees himself as an allegory, a misunderstood mystery. There is no

uniform process divisible into stages: the division between imitative composition and

exegesis is blurred, and Wang Yi himself performs both. But this blur is just the point:

this poetic tradition offers as subject matter dilemmas of personal interpretation and tragic

misreading which mirror the anxieties of textual hermeneutics. The Chuci Zhangju is not

so much a exegetical attack upon a foreign object as it is a history of the unfolding of an

allegorical semiotics of personality.

Allegoresis is not only about texts; it is also about author and audience. What

kind of author wants to use allegory, and why? What kind of audience is able to decode

the allegory, and what is enabled by decoding? Wang Yi has his own answers to these

questions, and they, too, derive from the tradition of which his commentary is an organic

outgrowth. Traditional narrative moves in the poems of the Chu Ci imply certain social

interactions, and he uses interpretive principles which imply the same patterns. His

methodology unfolds organically from the content itself. And as a result, Wang Yi

himself and his readers do not remain aloof from the poems in the position of analytical

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students; rather, they bring themselves into Qu Yuan's universe, as the act of reading

implicates them in the master poet's arch-narrative.

The Chuci Zhangju must be read as an anthology of rereadings. Every piece is a

reperformance or a revision or a retelling, and the relation of reader to author is one of

politicized humanistic kinship. Every participant re-enters the great and lonely game and

the fellowship of those who have played it. Hermeneutical moves spiral out from Qu

Yuan's original complaints about being misunderstood, and transform themselves from

content to formal technique over the course of their long arcs.

The only way to delineate this process is to catalogue a few of the moves and to

show how they are transformed from thematic trope to hermeneutical method. This is

done below. In addition, the order of this catalogue is mapped very loosely upon a rough

historical progression of the strata in the anthology, so as to give the non-specialist reader

some vague sense of the diachronic development of Chu-style poetry and its readings.

But this map is in no way intended to be exclusive: no model or sub-model can be

identified exclusively with a particular work in the anthology or with a particular period.

The forms merely constitute a serene and liquid indifference through which the moments

of a slowly hardening allegorical tradition are obliged to swim.

Model A: Up and Down

Linguistic usage is one of the few reliable guides to dating the completion of

given texts, and by this standard there is little question that the second piece in the

anthology, the "Nine Songs" (Jiu ge) represents one of the earliest strata of the Chuci.

There are also other standards to judge compositional priority, more interesting but much

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less reliable: works are deemed early if the content presumes the reality of animistic

beliefs, the focus is local rather than cosmopolitan, the style is primitive and raw rather

than polished and literary. And the Nine Songs, which purport to be religious hymns of

the Chu countryside, fit all of these criteria as well.

They are poor criteria. There is no reason why such poetry must be "authentic"

folk poetry, no reason why folk poetry cannot exist contemporaneously with literati

poetry, even into the modern period, no reason why the impressions of raw religious

orality must always be something organic to a text, rather than a production of

communities enamored with the category of the folk. But if one is aiming to understand

the production of traditions of reading, then such sloppiness is invaluable. Premodern

readers were just as conscious of the possibilities of the folk as were Victorian

ethnographers, if much less systematic, and ancient cosmopolitan literati were perfectly

capable of viewing certain genres as expressions of authenticity.

As the presented in the Wang Yi text, the Nine Songs are presented as a mediated

authenticity, the literary reworking by Qu Yuan of clumsy peasant song. In his preface to

the Nine Songs, Wang Yi explains that after Qu Yuan was banished, and his heart was

brimming over with melancholy thoughts, "He went out and saw the sacrificial rites of the

commoners, the music of their song and dance, and their words were base and vulgar. So

he composed the tunes of the Nine Songs, above presenting respect in serving the gods,

and below revealing that his own resentment has congealed, writing allegories to make a

criticism. Thus his text and the thought behind it are not the same, stanzas and verses are

uneven, and its meanings are broad and varying."86

86
Wang Yi, Hong Xingzu, Chuci Zhangju Buzhu, ed. Zhang Lihua (Jilin: Jilin Renmin, 1999) 54-55. All
translations are my own unless otherwise noted; because my focus here is on the construction of a
reading tradition, my translations will attempt to replicate Wang Yi's understanding of the lines as
161
 The categories of upper and lower are perfectly classic terms of allegoresis, and

not only in China. In Greece, the word α)λληγ ορι/α was a replacement for an older term,

υ9π ο/νοια, "under-thoughts." Perhaps nothing is natural in literature, nothing is universal;

but certain patterns are disturbingly common across cultural settings, and there are

reasons. It would be bizarrely reductionist to deny a culture the frequent recognition of

physical examples of surface and depth, and the concomitant needs of people to peel and

lift and pry, to unbutton, unzip, and strip to get at what they want. And it is fitting

enough that Wang Yi brings in the old trope for his analysis of the various sections of the

Chuci, which are filled with upward and downward motions. Speakers hitch up flying

dragons and go roaming around the circuit of the heavens; they descend into the depths to

visit the palaces of river gods. The final lines of the "Li Sao" have the speaker climb the

Kunlun mountains; the coda sees him throw himself into the waves to meet Peng Xian

´^«w.

But Wang Yi does not talk about allegoresis in terms of upper and lower levels in

most of his other prefaces; only here is the distinction highlighted. The Nine Songs

demand vertical hermeneutics because they sing a vertical ontology. They are songs of

sacrifice and songs of imprecation; the place of the spirits is above and the place of the

shaman and worshippers is below. The purpose of ceremony in a poem like "Lord in the

Clouds" (Yunzhong jun) is to get the divine lord to descend to (or into) the shaman who

cries out to him/her/it: "The spirit is beautiful and has descended; it quickly rises far up

into the clouds." (58) The poems do not describe these actions of the gods as rising

(shang) and falling xia); as in this case, the standard terms are ascending (jiang) and

presented in the notes, even when these notes are clearly wrong. Readers interested in an attempt to
reconstruct more accurate meanings of the poetic text should consult David Hawkes's translation.

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descending ( ju). But Wang Yi's glosses point out that the words are interchangeable:

here, for example, he thinks it necessary to write, "'Descended' means 'came down.'"

Shang and xia do not merely describe the positions of god and shaman; they also

mark the stances of ruler and subject. Wang Yi allegorizes political relations out of the

theological relations in the Nine Songs, but he is hardly responsible for inventing the

comparison of god and ruler. The identity of theology and politics is even inscribed in

the titles of the songs: Lord in the Clouds, Lord of the East, Lord and Lady of the Xiang,

Earl of the River, The Greater and Lesser Commissioners of Fates. As in so much other

religious writing of imperial China, spiritual realms are governed by their own political

orders which run parallel to earthly counterparts. Hence when Wang Yi interprets

addresses to numinous powers as covert versions of plaints to human ones, he is

practicing a form of allegoresis which works hidden meanings up out of the latent

tendencies of the text itself.

And so it is hardly surprising that vertical distances between the physical and

metaphysical are reworked in interpretation into the social distances which separate

political orders. In exegesis of many of the poems, vertical imagery is explicated

formulaically as a simple political axis. For example, in his comment to the "Li Sao"

line, "He said, 'Exert yourself in rising and sinking up and down,'" Wang Yi writes, "'Up'

speaks of the lord, 'down' speaks of the minister." (37) The point, repeated everywhere, is

that Qu Yuan goes up to seek a worthy lord to serve and down to seek fellow-ministers to

share his plight. In the Nine Songs, more detail is given in an explanation of the lines

from the Xiang Furen, "Swaying, the autumn wind blows;/ Dongting waves, leaves fall."

(64) He says, "This is used to say that when the lord's governance is hurried, then the

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people are sad, and worthies are hurt." Worthies are the leaves falling from the tree;

when a worthy lacks an understanding ruler to lift one up, he is left to molder. Zhu Bilian

quite appropriately bashes the aesthetics of this interpretation, charging Wang Yi with

having "obliterated the artisty of the work,"87 but the very fact that Wang Yi returns to

allegoresis to explain such a line is a testament to the political power of words like

"wind," with its constant implication of moral influence flowing to or from the ruler.

Similarly, the end of the Xiang Jun says, "I pluck pollia from the fragrant isle; I will give

it to the woman below." (63) Wang Yi usually sees beautiful women as allegories of the

ruler; this is even a general principle he declares in his introductory preface to the "Li

Sao". But here, the word "below" determines a different interpretation: "This is used as

an allegory for a minister, speaking of his companion. It says he wishes to go to a

fragrant and unique island, to pick pollia, and to give it to a pure and upright person who

will share his aims and never change." (64) Xia means not the woman physically below

the speaker as the easiest reading of the line suggests, but rather the minister who together

with Qu Yuan shares the feeling of being ignored by the ruler and left in a subordinate

position.

It is there, down below, that true aims are expressed, understood, and shared.

Above is the place of the mastering spirit or the numinous lord: distant and cold, such

beings listen or go deaf to entreaties at their own pleasure. And this is the key to the

principle of allegory expressed in the preface to the Nine Songs. Just as Wang Yi's own

bylines testify, the act of offering literature (again, shang ) is an aspiration upward to the

notice of the ruler. Geoffrey Waters may be right in suggesting of the preface to the Nine

87
Zhu Bilian Chuci jiangdu. (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1986) 34.

164
Songs (cited above) that Wang Yi probably shares the assumption of the "Great Preface

of the Mao commentary on the Odes" that the purpose of allegory is safe remonstration.88

But the dynamics of the myth work against such an assumption, for Qu Yuan is not

concerned with personal safety, a fact which Wang Yi repeatedly stresses. So perhaps it

is better to read Wang Yi's preface as suggesting Qu Yuan's desire for openness, while

still respecting the needs of political decorum. Certainly, in Wang Yi's schema, the Nine

Songs is a series of decorous songs which mimic traditional piety, and which in offering

service to the gods also pledge service to the king. If the foolish King Huai wanted to

stay above, on the level of hymnology, he could do so. But Qu Yuan's hope is that the

king will descend past the text to the meaning below, the place of dejection where he

lives intently, and in bringing that hidden meaning to the surface of understanding, would

also raise the worthy minister back to his rightful position.

Model B: In and Out

The proposition that a text has outer husk and inner meaning is just as standard a

description of allegory as the assumption of surface and depth. Spatial coordinates

change, but the impulse is identical.

The "Li Sao", the most revered poem of the Chuci, is also the one most

consistently tied to the personal biography of Qu Yuan. This is the great founding lament

of the tradition, and laments are momentous things which lumber from deepest troughs of

the psyche to the broad plazas of public address. The lament, to fulfill its generic

conventions, must be an outpouring, a massive attempt to turn the poetic self inside-out.
88
Geoffrey R. Waters, Three Elegies of Chu: An Introduction to the Traditional Interpretation of the Ch'u
Tz'u (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) 39.

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Qu Yuan's lament is that, and appropriately so, for the cause of his grief was the failure of

the king of Chu to penetrate to the minister's inner heart. Qu Yuan had been loyal inside,

but was slandered on the outside. The king only looked upon outer appearances, and

could not delve into the inner truth of Qu Yuan's hidden nature. The lament of the "Li

Sao" is just this political ambition which has been sublimated into genre. The poem

becomes a compensation for political exclusion, and somehow the content (Qu Yuan's

description of his attempts to make his loyalty known to the king) is merged with the

form of its own allegory (the lament as such). So, for example, one of the most

noticeable elements is the repeated action of the narrator to hang fragrant grasses upon

himself to contrast with the stinky weeds which allegorically adorn the lapels of toadies.

Allegoresis of the text itself, which would explain the flora as indicative of loyal

sentiment and virtuous action, is precisely the hermeneutical action which the king cannot

perform of his subordinates, mistaking fragrant for foul. As Stephen Owen has put it,

"The desire to be known and the fear of being misunderstood reveal a potential

disjunction between outward appearance and inner truth. To defend against this

possibility, some robe themselves in flowers, and all compose poems to make the outer,

manifest version of the self correspond to inner worth."89

The speaker of the "Li Sao" is obsessed with matching insides to outsides. The

impulse to reconcile the two is figured as a part of the harmony of nature in the opening

of the poem, a blessing which results from the auspicious birth the stars announce. The

poet says, "Abundantly I already possessed this inner beauty, and then I matched it with

far-reaching ability." (5) "Inner beauty" is a sappy cliché in modern English, but the
89
Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985) 258.

166
original, nei mei, is somewhat stranger, a noticeable paradox. And this logic fills the rest

of the poem: the incessant search for floral coats and jade pendants is a search for signs of

the inner beauty. Occasionally the inner beauty is itself literalized by the eating of the

flowers and jades. Indeed, the assumption that external signs can be comestibles is strong

enough that Wang Yi seems to extrapolate lithophagy on very little provocation:

"Sweetness and smoothness mix and combine" ªÚ»P¿A¨äÂøæߤ¼ is glossed: "This says

my outside has the virtue of fragrant grasses, and my inside has the substance of jade

smoothness; the two beauties mix and meet, and are both present in myself." (18) To

Wang Yi, Qu Yuan's great characteristic is the complete fusion he makes between inside

and outside.

Wang Yi knows the hermeneutical implications of this quest for ornament.

Commenting on lines 273-74, which describe the inability of people to distinguish plants

and jades, he writes, "This holds that grasses and trees are easier to distinguish than fowl

and beasts, fowl and beasts are easier to distinguish than pearls and jade, and pearls and

jade are easier to distinguish than loyalty and slander, so knowing people is the hardest."

(36) Because people's hearts are the hardest to understand, self-decoration is self-

revelation: jades and flowers are the elements of a didactic allegory which try to teach the

ruler one's inner worth. And Qu Yuan's problem is a semiotic one. He assumes that he

should be as transparent as Angus Fletcher describes the daemonically driven

embodiments of Western prosopopoia to be: "It will be natural for him to have hieratic

emblems associated with him, specific ornaments, specific garments, specific sacred

names, and specific duties assigned to him, so there will be no mistake that a specific Idea

possesses him and governs all he does."90 But in a hypocritical world where names like
90
Angus Fletcher, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1964) 60.
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"Pepper" and "Orchid" are given to slanderous careerists, Mistake reigns. The signs

which Qu Yuan chooses to hang about his body cannot be interpreted correctly by the

king, and so the driven minister remains as opaque as personification is transparent.

Hence Qu Yuan's perpetual quest: he needs to find a community of good readers,

understanders who will by their own virtue be able to interpret his own.

In the few places where Wang Yi does provide theoretical adumbrations of his

own allegoresis, he does not explicitly use the words nei and wai. They were, however,

well-established as literary-critical terms. Consider the comments of Wang Chong,

writing a few decades before Wang Yi:

Roots and trunk are on the bottom, blossoms and leaves are
on the top; fruit and core are on the inside, skin and rind are
on the outside. The words and discourses of literary ink,
these are the blossoms, leaves, skins, and rinds of
gentlemen. The fruit is truly in the breast; when literary ink
is marked on silk scrolls, then outside and inside,
appearance and what is within match each other. The
thought is grasped and the pen is set loose, and so literature
reveals and the fruit is exposed91

One might expect that Wang Chong, in the course of expounding his materialist

philosophy, should advocate a theory of literature which stresses the need to match words

with tangible substance. What might seem more unusual is that Wang Chong's

understanding of words and substance is expressed in exactly the same terms as Qu

Yuan's obsession with internal and external. The substance to be displayed is, for Wang

Chong, the real inner worth of the literary gentleman, and the only difference from Qu

Yuan is that it is words, not herbs, which do the revealing. But, of course, even in Wang

91
Wang Chong, Lun heng-chao qi reprinted in Zhongguo lidai wenlunxuan , ed. Guo Shaoyu· 4 vols.
(Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979) 1: 110.

168
Chong's analysis, the words are figured in botanical metaphor; it is then not surprising at

all when, later in the same essay, Wang Chong reveals his respect for Qu Yuan's poetic

abilities.

Wang Yi gives some indication that he accepts Wang Chong's standards. For

example, in commenting on the evil turtledove who proved a false matchmaker, he

writes, "He speaks many words but lacks the necessary fruit, so he cannot again be trusted

and employed." (33) Similarly, the editor's admiration is similarly balanced between Qu

Yuan's inner worth and his poetic talents: "Of all gentlemen, none do not admire the

height of his purity and esteem the brilliance of his text." (3) And the preface to Wang

Yi's own "Nine Broodings" (Jiu si) says (also of Qu Yuan), "None are not upset, their

hearts saddened, valuing highly his principled behavior and wondering at his beautiful

refinement." (309) These are cliches, not used only about Qu Yuan, nor first applied to

him by Wang Yi-similar descriptions are found in Sima Qian's biography of Qu Yuan, for

example. Both the texts of the Chuci and the texts written about it are moments in an

ongoing cultural desire to match inner worth with outward expression, even as they

recognize the possibility of mismatch and miscommunication.

Thus Wang Yi can hardly be blamed for the allegoresis which this duality

encourages. The speaker of the "Li Sao" explicitly describes his frustration in trying to

make others understand the herbs which he puts about himself, and the literary tradition

Wang Yi inherited had identified such flora with texts themselves. Wang Yi, like his

sources for the commentary, was living in a closed system: the requests for discerning

interpretation which the speaker of the "Li Sao" makes could not have been ignored. To

interpret Qu Yuan's flowers and jades as mere flowers and jades, as fu (exposition) rather

169
than as bi (metaphor) or xing (objective correlative), would have been to ally oneself with

Pepper and Orchid. What reader would want to stand accused by the poem? Because Qu

Yuan could never find a matchmaker to explain himself to the king, Wang Yi takes upon

himself the role of matchmaker, explaining the misunderstood man to his own

contemporary king and literary worthies.

Model C: Brightness and Obscurity

Qu Yuan craves recognition, and the "Li Sao" is a harried plea for understanding.

The strong binary opposition of inside to outside is simultaneously a reproach to the

ignorance of political leadership and an appeal to the patience and perception of later

readers. Outside, he hangs signs: flowers, jades, words. These signs ought to be easy to

read, but whether through the tangles of semiotics or simply the grand stupidity of

political leadership, he has been misread incessantly. Qu Yuan hovers between

personality and textuality; he is simultaneously a text harboring an unvaunted meaning

and a person harboring an unread righteousness.

Use of the word "meaning" is hard to find remarkable in any commentary; that it

has a prominent place in the prefaces of the Chuci Zhangju is an obvious necessity, given

how much the apprehension of meaning seems like an accomplishment in reading

through the textual confusions and corruptions. But at the same time the sheer difficulty

of the text makes the assertion of meaning noticeable, even polemical. Often the word is

used to declare the failures of transmission, as in his justification of his own edition of the

collection in the general preface, Wang Yi comments of his predecessors Ban Gu and Jia

Kui that "they took 'strong' for 'form', and in the meanings there many perversions and

170
mistakes." (48) Nevertheless, Qu Yuan himself is not responsible for the unclarity of the

texts; he took steps to express himself clearly: "The text of the 'Li Sao' invokes the Five

Classics to establish its meaning." (49) As a result, in the preface to the "Li Sao" itself,

he notes that "His words are gentle and refined; his meanings are bright and crisp." (3)

Wang Yi does not blithely prance through the great field of bizarre usages unaware of the

problems of the text, but he does assert that meaning shines through despite all the

problems.

But, by an inescapable irony of pun, the character yi ¸q is itself open to a polysemy

which resonates in the commentary. For Wang Yi's commentary also consistently

invokes yi ¸q in its alternate meaning, "righteousness," as in the preface to the "Far

Roaming": "But he still missed Chu, and lovingly longed for his old home: such was the

extent of his loyalty and faith, such the depth of his benevolence and righteousness!"

(158) Similarly, in the preface to the collection, together with the examples of yi as

"meaning" quoted above, he writes, "The people of Chu valued the righteousness of his

behavior and treasured the brilliance of his writing, and so they passed on these songs to

each other." (47) There is, of course, nothing spectacular about a writer using both senses

of the word; nor is there much of deliberate compositional choice in Wang Yi's usage.

But there is a peculiar appropriateness of using this blurry word in conjunction with Qu

Yuan: consider the quote given above in its larger context: "His words are gentle and

refined; his meanings are bright and crisp. Among all gentlemen, none do not admire his

purity and height, value the brilliance of his literature, mourn his not meeting, and pity his

aims." (3) The second sentence follows Wang Chong in matching literature with personal

substance. Although the best official translation of the first sentence would have to

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translate yi as "meaning," the word is opened up to speculation nonetheless. If text is the

outer body, which is the inside of the self? It is a question which cannot be answered in

this case: the meaning of Qu Yuan simply is righteousness. This was his meaning for the

mythicized historical tradition,92 but it is also more fundamentally the meaning which the

speaker of the "Li Sao" inscribes on himself. He is convinced that his own entire

existence is the expression of righteousness, and his mission is to find someone to whom

he can communicate this deeply felt meaning.

Communication makes clear or bright, and images of brightness likewise spin out

from allegorical image to hermeneutical shop-talk. One of the more obvious and useful

examples of brightness motifs in the Chuci is the Nine Songs poem, "Lord of the East."

The first couplet sets the terms on which the god appears: "Shimmering, he is already

come out from the east...the night shines and already grows bright." (73) The poem ends

again in darkness, as the sun passes murkily under the earth from west back to the east,

but this obvious denouement is not the only darkening to which the sun is liable. In mid

course, the god is blocked by his own attendants: "The coming of the spirits blocks the

sun." (74) This is an invocation of a cliché, usually used in military contexts: the way to

describe a vast army is to say that its banners are numerous enough to block out the sun.

But this usage is transformative: in this case, the military liege is the sun itself. He

himself is the essence of brightness, yet his retinue imposes as a dark numinous swirl

between himself and his worshippers.

Whether in conscious imitation of the earlier poem or not, the speaker of the "Li

Sao" invokes this transformed metaphor in his description of court politics, in repeated

92
Not, of course, as prosopopoiea, though perhaps as exemplum for later tradition.

172
suggestions that even a bright king can be shut off by a screen of slanderers. But within

the fiction of the poem as within the Qu Yuan story, there was no bright king, only the

foolish Kings Huai and Xiang. It is Qu Yuan himself who is bright, a fact drilled home

both by the poet and Wang Yi:

This age is dim and turgid and jealous of worthies; it loves

to block worthies and call them evil.
In again saying that the age is dim and turgid, he means the ages of
Huai and Xiang are not bright, and thus the crowd of lower-class
people love to block the loyal and upright nobleman, and lift up wicked
people.
The rooms of the palace are deep and distant; the wise king
is thus not awoken.
This says that in the midst of the lord's palace, the rooms are deep and
distant, and loyal words have difficulty reaching through, and guiding
language does not arrive, so that even the former bright and wise kings
were unable to be conscious of good and evil feelings...how much
more, then, unwise kings, even though this plentiful darkness and
covering is precisely what confirms [Qu Yuan's] fitness [for
office]?(34)

Raising the possibility of kings who themselves are bright might seem to guarantee a

match with the bright minister. That is the gist of both poem and commentary in other

uses of ming elsewhere; there are plenty of explicit statements that if only King Huai

were bright, then he would be able to see through the blocking screen of toadies. Here,

both are more pessimistic; perhaps true communication really is impossible between the

good minister and the good lord. But the real problem is clearly the courtiers: they are the

darkness that interposes between brightnesses, and there is even the suggestion that their

darkness is naturally attracted to the brightness. Allegory always means something other

than what it says: the king should know that those made to look evil are the only men of

virtue.

Qu Yuan hates being covered, but he does not slacken his self-brightening.

Explaining a refusal to seek a matchmaker, Wang Yi writes, "'Those who make matches'

173
is a metaphor for the ministers around him. This says that if he is honestly able in his

heart to maintain a love of goodness, then his essence and feelings will be divinely bright,

and a worthy lord would raise and employ him of his own accord, and so he would not

need the recommendations of those around him." (37-38) Inner brightness is the direct

effluence of moral uprightness; both brightness and goodness are natural to Qu Yuan, and

he could not be anything else if he tried.

The self-decoration with flowers and jades is explicitly an act of self-brightening:

Wang Yi repeatedly comments that he adorns himself to make himself bright. It is a

consummation of the external with the internal, as well as an attempt to make clear his

own loyalty to the king through the screen of sycophants who block him off. It is, in fact,

Qu Yuan's bright righteousness (ming yi) which communicates his meaning (ming yi).

Naturally, Wang Yi uses ming in explicitly hermeneutic ways. Although he never

calls the more mysterious passages dark, (bi), he is quick to point out when a passage is

unusually clear. For example, when explaining the point of the coda to the "Li Sao", he

explains that after all the extravagant passages which come before, the last stanza acts as

a summary to make clear his thoughts. And this clarity of communication is very often

still linked to the subject of its communication: the minister's moral worth. In the preface

to the "Nine Pieces" (Jiu zhang), he (incorrectly) explains the title as if it meant, "Nine

Clarities," using a gloss which he had used to explain line 124 of the "Li Sao". The

preface reads, in part, "Zhang means 'clear,' i.e. 'bright.' This says that the way of loyalty

and faith which he presented was very clear and bright." (117) In the prefaces to

individual poems which follow, Wang Yi repeatedly invokes the categories of ming and

bi, mixing morality and interpretation along the way. In his explanation of the final line

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of the "Li Sao" before the coda, the ambiguity of yi worms its way into what one at first

assumes is a simple comment: "This is revealing himself by words, this is making himself

clear by meanings." (47) It is tempting to retranslate (very much against the grain,

certainly), "in righteousness he makes himself bright." The second translation is entirely

consistent with a moral ontology which both poet and critic are constantly explicating. It

is not less parallel to "words," since words and righteousness are linked throughout the

poems and the commentary. And the tie to morality would make sense of the insertion of

the line here, immediately following a seemingly unrelated series of comments on Qu

Yuan's (and his horse's) virtuous homesickness.

Ultimately the polysemy of ming yi calls out to the reader and the critic. Qu

Yuan's attempts to enlighten his kings failed because of their own dim-wittedness and

because of the blocking effect of the crowds of courtiers; only a lord who himself was

bright with virtue could have understood him. Readers of the Chuci are confronted with

the dark semiotic block between corrupted text and obscure meaning. If however, they

can transcend that gap (or claim to have transcended it), then they are themselves

logically also bright with virtue. The tradition which encompasses myth, text, and

commentary also sucks in the reader, and offers him allegoresis as the only morally

acceptable reading.

Model D: Reperforming Qu Yuan

The historical Qu Yuan is a shadowy figure. His existence is not generally

doubted, as there is no reason in particular to doubt it. But the historical record is diffuse:

the state of Chu left no records for us, and so we have no good biography of the man until

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Sima Qian's histories, two centuries later. Certainly there are plenty of references to Qu

Yuan before that, and plenty of biographical details are available in the text of the earlier

poems of the Chuci. But, however biographical in theme, these are after all cycles of

poems which describe mysterious spirit-journeys through the heavens, and meetings with

ancient gods and monsters.

We cannot be sure of the historical Qu Yuan. We can, however, be sure of the

existence of a Qu Yuan persona which had become relatively formalized by the founding

of the Han dynasty. This persona must have been a combination of both biographical

cliché, and of fantastic modes of expression: Qu Yuan was an image of outrageous

suffering and extravagant lament. And as a persona, he was available to be performed

and reperformed; and this is what the record of development in the Chuci shows. Vague

and fungible moments of role-playing not limitable to Qu Yuan are performed in fluid,

apparently oral contexts; these moments are gradually formalized into literary imitations

of Qu Yuan, particularly of the "Li Sao". The key is that this re-performance is not an

external action to any detectable "original": performance and interpretation are

thematized in the earliest strata of the Chu poetry. And both performance and

interpretation spiral out of the texts to encompass readers in a tradition of emulation and

role-playing which has discernible phases but no clear borders.

The ur-texts for Chu Ci performance are the Nine Songs. The shamans of the

songs, in their roles as mediators, both interpret and perform the god. Linguistic

ambiguities about speaker shifts in these poems blur the identities of shaman and divinity,

perhaps deliberately. Apparently the vessel for ecstatic possession, the shaman speaks

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both about the god, for the god, and as the god. The shaman becomes an actor, taking on

the persona of the lord he beseeches.

The same pattern appears in the text of the "Li Sao". Though the narrative of the

poem is composed only of series of fragmentary motifs, there are clearly places in which

a single motif is developed in ways which show Qu Yuan as playing a role. For instance,

in lines 23-24, the poem introduces the theme of the chariot ride, with the narrator acting

as an expected outrider to a king riding inside: "He rides fine steeds and gallops; Come, I

will guide you on the road ahead." (7) But later, in lines 197-200, the narrator himself

assumes the role of chariot-riding king, taking divinities as his own servants: "Ahead I

send Wang Shu to ride before me; behind, I make Fei Lian be my outrider. The phoenix

acted as herald for me, the thunder god told me all was not ready." (28) Similarly, in other

places in the poem, the narrator chases divine beauties and then becomes a divine beauty.

Whatever the circumstances of composition for the "Li Sao" really were, the genre

conventions evidently encouraged identity-shifting and role-playing. When combined

with the story of Qu Yuan, the chief poet emerges as a sort of doppelganger, taking on the

attributes of those whom he desires and pursues.

The earlier layers of the Chu Ci were themselves performance pieces, a fact even

acknowledged by Wang Yi in his repeated statements that the people of Chu "taught and

passed on" the songs out of respect for Qu Yuan. The earliest history we can trace for

them is as songs performed at the Huainan court, and so in their historical appearance

they existed not as the voice of Qu Yuan himself speaking from a text but as the voice of

a troubadour himself taking on the persona of the statesman. Hence, when the speaker in

the first two lines of the "Li Sao" declares his ancestry, it is easy to picture the genealogy

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as a performance convention, a means for the singer to announce to his audience which

specific persona he is taking on, even as characters in European classical drama often do

on their first entrance.

This performance tradition became a contributing stream to the early development

of Han fu, and it is often difficult to draw demarcations between the two. Most famously,

the "Far Roaming," (Yuan you) which can be read as a Taoist rewriting of the "Li Sao",

has long been recognized to share significant portions of its text with the "On the Great

Man," of Sima Xiangru. The poem is not in the voice of Qu Yuan (and Sima Xiangru's

version is a deification of the emperor Wu-di), but it could not have come into being

without the clear creation of a type of persona associated with the Chu-style fu. Where

the "Li Sao" vacillates and ends in despair, the "Far Roaming" is determined, starting also

from the position of disgust at the ways of the world, but then setting off confidently into

an unhesitant spirit journey which culminates in Daoist apotheosis. It is a variation on a

theme, and shows the fluidity of the genre conventions which had been developed.

However, other selections, both early and late, are quite explicitly put into the

mouth of Qu Yuan in particular. Apart from the "Li Sao" itself and the possible

performance identification of the opening lines, several of the pieces in the anthology

invoke particular details from the life of Qu Yuan and are obviously meant to be in his

voice. This fact has certainly contributed to the traditional expansion of the scope of Qu

Yuan's authorship. For example, section titles like "Mourning for Ying" (Ai Ying -Ying

was the capital of Chu) and "Embracing the [Riverbed] Sands" (Huai sha) no doubt

convinced Sima Qian to attribute them to Qu Yuan, and Wang Yi follows this attribution

with reference to the "Nine Pieces" (Jiu zhang) in which both appear. At least parts of the

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Nine Pieces are relatively early compositions, but all of it differs in usage and style from

the "Li Sao", whose claim to authorship by Qu Yuan is stronger.

Even in the later poems of the collection, which Wang Yi knew enough to assign

to specific Han literati, were still a part of this tradition of imitative reperformance,

though the nature of the reperformance has become less oral and generic, and more

textual and allusive. The best example is the "Nine Sighs" (Jiu tan) of Liu Xiang, an

aristocratic court literatus of the first century B.C. Liu Xiang's personal biography

mimics that of Qu Yuan: as his surname Liu suggests, he was a distant member of the

royal family, and like Qu Yuan he rose relatively high in the imperial administration

before falling into disfavor, badmouthed to the emperor by a eunuch faction and then

imprisoned as a result. And much of the "Nine Sighs" takes pains to replicate the Qu

Yuan persona. In addition to the constant and characteristic use of tropes culled from the

earlier poems with strong associations to Qu Yuan personally (travels to and from Ying

specifically, verbose grief for floral semiotics), there are several direct announcements of

Qu Yuan's identity. "One says, 'I am a descendant of Gao Yang, I am a kinsman of Huai

of Chu,'" (278) the narrator announces at the opening of the first section. The narrator

takes time out of one lament to put in a plug for his previous works: "I sighed out the 'Li

Sao' to hold up my intent, and I was unable to finish the 'Nine Pieces'." (296) And there

are several more or less clear variants in the other sections of the great man's ending: "I

rushed into the Miluo's eternal flow. I followed its winding riverbends." (284)

There is thus a spectrum of ways to act out the persona which are articulated

through the developing tradition. The early spirit-possessions of the Nine Songs are akin

to the contemporaneous role-playing of songs which do or do not deliberately assume the

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Qu Yuan identity, but always seem to trope off the archetype of the roaming, lamenting,

misunderstood state minister. Liu Xiang's later efforts evince a more bookish pleasure,

allusively rewriting a culture-hero. The constancy is the process of imaginative

identification which a certain poetic discourse allows. Somehow, a rhetoric of tropes is

developed and associated with the pose of the noble exile: a decision to write within the

scope of the genre frees one to play a part, and to join the company of a great host of

worthies who have done the same.

Model E: Matchmaking & Atemporality

Personas are hard to shake, and role-playing is dangerously addictive. The

problem with literati masks, as with any other kind, is that they do not hide the soul but

transform it.

There is good evidence that Liu Xiang was starting to lose himself within the

capacious Qu Yuan mask. If in fact Liu had been consistent, if he had been dreadfully

dull in dredging up every possible biographical detail to insert with perfect precision into

the narrative of the Nine Sighs, then there could be no such fear. Obsessive biography

would not have made for a good cycle of poems, but it would have been a demonstration

of near-mechanical control.

In fact, Liu Xiang is not consistent: the invocations of Qu Yuans voice detailed in

the last section are mixed in, haphazardly, with Liu's own voice (or at least with a

narrative voice capable of referring to Qu Yuan in the third person). The simple

genealogy of the first section, quoted above, is prefaced by a disclaimer that what follow

are the words of Qu Yuan. A similar couplet at the end of the section creates a frame: the

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author is explicitly presenting us with a Qu-in-a-box. Some of the following sections

omit the frame, and claim to be the real true Qu Yuan; others speak him as a distant

literary hero: "I observed Mr. Qu's 'Li Sao' and my heart is saddened and gloomy." (292)

The feeling of control evaporates when Liu switches at random in and out of the Qu Yuan

persona: this is the sort of poetry that Hitchcock's Norman Bates would write.

Even when poets working in the tradition were more in control of their own

language, and could consistently invoke Qu Yuan in the third person, there is still

irreducible identification. A third-person Qu Yuan was always also a mirror of the self;

even when he is abstracted back into a long list of worthies, the power of the persona

continues to haunt the poet. He retains his ghostly power because he is always the perfect

icon of bureaucratic angst for Han intellectuals. Every allusion to an external Qu Yuan is

also an internalization of his story and a decision to cast oneself within the mold which

the genre provides. It is a resonant merging of the self with the textualized other, and like

nothing so much as sex.

Qu Yuan had hoped for a mate: one of the most consistent allegorical tropes in

Chu-style verse is the description of a feudal lord as an object of sexual desire.

Banishment from the presence of the beloved is an acute (and mushy) Petrarchan pain,

and the only remedy is the offering of floral or textual tokens of one's constancy. When

utterly in despair, the Qu-type poetic narrator must search heaven and earth for a new and

improved beloved, one who can truly understand and appreciate. And again, the method

of the search is the offering of signs; semiotics and romance were appropriate partners in

their joint obsession with matching. Outer appearance had to be matched with inner

reality, fragrant flowers and jades matched to inner loyalty and straightness. The person

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who could understand Qu Yuan's semiotic matches would be the one appropriate for a

personal match with him.

Following his cues, Wang Yi explains the principles of allegoresis also as a series

of semiotic matches:

The text of the "Li Sao" takes the method of xing from the
Odes, using categories to draw metaphors. So good birds
and fragrant grasses are used to match the loyal and true,
while evil birds and stinking things are used for
comparison with slanderers and toadies; divine beauties are
used as pairings for the lord, while the consort Mi and
women at ease are used as metaphors for worthy ministers;
young dragons and phoenixes are used to allegorize the
gentleman, while wafting winds and clouds and rainbows
are used to make the base. (3)

Allegoresis is perhaps inescapably hermeneutics by fiat, the authoritative declaration that

this equals that. But Wang Yi certainly did not see himself as the authority: not only are

such pairings brought out organically from the parallel grammar of formal prose which he

is obliged to use in his explication, but he is working with a text which is all about the

equation of outer signs with inner realities. It is no surprise that from the passage quoted

above, he goes on immediately to describe the admiration of "all gentlemen" for Qu

Yuan. The match of sign to referent, in this system, is the necessary and sufficient

condition for personal matches between men of worth.

The plot of the "Li Sao" (such as it is) is readable as the search to find a mate.

When in the capital, Ying, Qu Yuan turns inward to King Huai, hoping to make him

love/employ him. When he despairs because of flattery, and is banished, he turns

outward, roaming through the borderlands of the Warring States universe, seeking for a

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different goddess/king. He then stops, pauses, turns around, and goes back to try King

Huai again.

Because Qu Yuan never did find his mate, the traditional task for Qu Yuan fans

was to find one for him-or, better yet, to become one for him. Neither Wang Yi nor

anyone else called themselves matchmakers or suitors, but those were exactly the roles

they took on for themselves. Of all of the parallel lives Sima Qian wrote, perhaps the

pairing of Qu Yuan with Jia Yi is the most appropriate--not that they are necessarily the

most similar, but because Qu Yuan's story is so fundamentally about finding a match, and

because Jia Yi's fu, "Lament for Qu Yuan," is partially about seeing himself as a match

for Qu Yuan. Similarly, in writing about the pair, Sima Qian may well be seeing himself

as a member of the club. The act of writing "Li Sao"-esque fu in the Han became in part

a matching of oneself with Qu Yuan, and a use of Qu Yuan to allegorize one's own

dejection.

Wang Yi's own introductions to the Chu Ci pieces not attributed to Qu Yuan show

his own appreciation of the tradition of identification with the master. Starting with Song

Yu, who Wang Yi claims (as author of the Great Summons) was actually calling Qu

Yuan back to Ying, the prefaces to the poems narrate a series of attempts to fulfill the

poet's desire by men who admire his principles and would, presumably, have been good

mates for him.

And the basic grammar of the poems is even conducive to readers in the tradition

who would want to see themselves in the role of Qu Yuan's ideal match. The one sought

for is "the woman," but by the magic of a standard character substitution, this becomes

"you." If one were to read the character this way, Qu Yuan could be speaking to the

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beloved also in the text with him‹ but no such character ever gets a speaking part. No

specific "you" is ever even definitely identified, and this is a good reason for us to read

the character as "woman." But to a traditional reader determined to read the other way, it

could well have seemed that Qu Yuan was calling out of the text to him. Actually, Wang

Yi does not encourage such readings directly; he usually reads the character as "woman."

But the basic grammar, plus the fondness of other later allegorists such as the "five

ministers" for the reading of "you" shows that the possibility was always open to

traditional readers.

Clearly, readers did read themselves as the object of poetic address. When not

actually assuming the Qu Yuan persona as in Liu Xiang, the parallel move of comparative

admiration is prevalent. Wang Bao, in the "Nine Regrets," (Jiu huai) thinks of Qu Yuan

and Wu Zixu (another self-drowned worthy) while staring at the Huai river, and although

he wimps out of such an elegant suicide and merely takes a boat ride downstream, the

poet has clearly learned to read his experiences in parallel to textual precedent. (271)

Wang Yi himself, in his own "Nine Longings" which ends the anthology, makes a similar

stab at pairing his life to the Qu Yuan story.

Such moments are in appearance contradicted by the eternal wails of loneliness.

Wang Yi, despite his many encouragements of a cult of Qu Yuan, seems often skeptical

on the possibility of his finding a true mate. On one level, this doubt is simply expressed

as a standard reverence for a lone master. In his preface to the book, he describes how all

famous scholars have admired Qu Yuan and imitated his poetry, and then writes, "This is

what is called, 'Gold appearance and jade substance,' and he will be eternally without a

peer." (49) But there is also the haunting remembrance that the master died alone, and no

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amount of admiration can solve his loneliness. As the last lines of Wang Yi's own "Nine

Longings" say, "Matched with Ji and Qi, Yao made his accomplishments; Alas, such

heroes no longer can make pairs!" (327)

But this paradox dissolves with a recognition of the role that time plays in this

overly textualized realm of courtship. All of this lovemaking is pursued across the gaps

of centuries, and there is no contradiction between utter abandonment in one's own

century and perfect fulfillment in the atemporal stretches of literary tradition.

Abandonment is in fact the seal of eligibility, as significant as a wink or a boar-tusk

helmet. The deep communion of great minds who belong to each other across the ages is

only possible (and perhaps only desirable) for those who have lost all hope of more

quotidian and worldly communion.

Chu cosmology and modern scientific cosmology are in agreement on one point.

The farther one looks toward the edge of the universe, the more ancient the objects one

sees. This fact is, for the speaker of the "Li Sao", one of the main benefits of travel‹ it

allows him to actually meet up with Shun and other semi-divine heroes of mythical

history. The whole poem is filled with the rhetoric of past models‹ rhetoric both in the

speaker's own voice and in the voices of those who counsel him. It is a poem which lives

on the fictions of the distant past and tries to connect with and re-enact that past. The

final plunge into the Miluo, to meet Peng Xian, is a decision to join him in death, but it is

also a decision to join him as historical legend. Peng Xian, at least in Wang Yi's

description of him as a self-drowned minister, becomes the model for Qu Yuan, even as

he claims in the poem that he will take Peng Xian for a model.

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 The speaker of the "Li Sao" travels into the past because he cannot remain in the

present. The center of his world, Ying, is wholly corrupt, and this geographical center is

repeatedly identified with the age as a whole. "People of this age lift each other up and

love their friends; how solitary I am! And so they do not listen to me. I rely on the

former sages by measuring their mean." (20) Wang Yi emphasizes Qu Yuan's historical

particularity in standing out from the Dark Ages of the Warring States:

Formerly, Confucius was clear, sagely, bright, and

philosophical. Heavenly-born and not of the crowd, he
canonized the Classics, compiled the Odes and Records,
corrected the Rites and Music, and composed the Spring
and Autumn Annals, to give a rule for later kings. His
disciples were 3,000, and none did not fully understand. At
their deaths, the great meaning was perverted and the subtle
words were cut off.
Afterwards, when the house of Zhou declined and
the warring states struggled together, virtue grew sluggish
and mendacity sprouted; thereupon the disciples of Yang,
Mo, Chu, Meng, Sun, and Han each wrote biographies and
records according to what they knew, some to narrate the
past, some to enlighten the age.
But Qu Yuan behaved loyally and was slandered,
and grew pensive and depressed, and he alone relied on the
principles of the Odes poets, and composed the "Li Sao",
remonstrating above and comforting himself below.
Meeting the dark commotion of the times, he was not
retained, and he could not subdue his ire, so he again
composed other pieces starting with the Nine Songs. The
people of Chu highly valued the righteousness of his
behavior, and treasured the brilliance of his text, so they
transmitted his literary works. (47)

Qu Yuan's biggest problem in this narration is temporal: he was born in the wrong time, a

common enough complaint. Though the narrative does not explicitly say so, it is is clear

that Qu Yuan is a distant inheritor of the Confucian mantle-not only in his claim to an

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Odes-style poetics, but in his being "not of the crowd." His only companions are trans-

historical ones.

Interestingly, Wang Yi does not figure that crossing of history as solely a return to

the past. After the passage quoted above, Wang Yi goes into a narrative of the history of

Chu Ci reception and editions. Apart from a few noteable sourpusses like Ban Gu, the

narrative asserts a general admiration for Qu Yuan's principles and poetic skill. As a

result, Qu Yuan's age comes off as a low ebb between peaks of noble community, starting

with the 3,000 disciples of Confucius and ending with the worthy scholars of the Han.

Qu Yuan could have looked to the future for solace instead of the past.

Though its speaker does speak of taking thought for the future, there is not much

cognizance of communion with future worthies in the text of the "Li Sao". However, this

cognizance does appear in the poems belonging to later historical layers of the Chu Ci.

The "Far Roaming" and its commentary provides a good example:

Those going off I cannot reach,

I cannot catch up to the three emperors and five divine lords
Of those to come I will not hear.
Though there will be sages after me, I will not see them in person. (159)

This poem itself had the benefit of a history of Chu Ci appreciation: Sima Xiangru had

the chance to admire Qu Yuan admiring the worthies before him. Thus he could see

himself in a historical progression that linked worthies of all ages stretching ahead and

behind, whereas the composer of the "Li Sao" could only see decline from glory to

sycophantry--people with hope for the future rarely drown themselves.

Wang Yi was not subtle enough to see the differences in expectation between the

"Far Roaming" and the "Li Sao", and of course he had mistakenly assumed that both

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pieces were by Qu Yuan himself, who was the paragon of consistency. And hence Wang

Yi reads the hope for future worthies back into the "Li Sao", in comments to lines 63-64

("Old age slowly reaches me; I fear that I have not established a good name." (12)), he

writes, "Qu Yuan's resolve is pure and white, so he is eager for a name which can flow to

later ages." (12) Establishing a name does suggest a concern for the future, but Wang Yi

expands on this with the language of "later ages" which incorporates his contemporary

readers into the text. For those within the traditional hermeneutics, it would have been

hard not to think of a Qu Yuan reaching out to oneself. The reader, in admiring Qu Yuan,

merely fulfills his wise prediction: reader and presumed author lift each other up in

mutual election.

Oddly enough, Wang Yi comes off as a vaunter of the modern: he asserts that the

present age, at last, is full of worthies able to appreciate Qu Yuan and his text. Though

he presents the text of Qu Yuan's poems as having a unifying force in the present, there is

apparently no need to leave one's age to find others of like intent. Not that Wang was a

great minister to whom the system would pay honor: he rose from accounts courier

(shang ji li), to titled clerk (jiao shu lang), to palace steward (shi zhong), and never held a

position of any great power. (HHS, 80A) But at least he was an unbanished part of the

government. For those of his age and later who were not so fortunate, the attraction of

Qu Yuan must have been in part that he offered the possibility of transcending the age to

find the approbation which one's current court would not offer.

Model F: Center and Margin

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 Analysis at some point leaves behind its quasi-scientific quest for knowledge and

expands laterally, seeking its own proper networks. Interpretive method does not merely

determine how I judge, it announces my allegiances. Interpretive skill does not only bring

me fuller understanding of the object of study, it ushers me into the inner sanctum, into

the company of the elitely wise.

Entrance into the understanding of the master was, in early imperial China, also a

physical entrance. Favored disciples were those "inside the gates." It was the parallel of

political attainment by which one gained access to court. It is this latter form of entrance

that most concerns the speaker of the "Li Sao": although the Qu Yuan story is all about

interpretation, it is others' interpretive ability that is of concern, not his own. So his great

sadness is his undeserved political passage from ru to chu, and his great voyage is also, in

part, figured as an attempt to enter back in: "On approaching, I could not enter because of

encountering trouble; On retreating, I shall again repair my former clothing." (17) Even

in the heavens, he gets the cold shoulder, as the gatekeeper for the divine Di leans on the

gate and stares at Qu Yuan.

In the world of the Chu Ci, the marginalization of being tossed out of court is

translated quickly into a geographical marginality. If court life at the civilized capital city

represents a central home, then banishment in any direction is a move toward borderlands

where loneliness and barbarity is the norm. The "Li Sao" traces a constant movement out

from Ying to the wilds and back again: each turn is either a despairing flight from the

presence of the foolish lord, to seek some alternate understander, or else a desperate

return in the hopes that the speaker might at last make the king understand. The center is

the position where loyal service in the Confucian mold is needed and recognized; the

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margins are where human relations are foregone, and the only solution to such a

banishment is recall or eremitage. The backtracking hesitancy which makes the "Li Sao"

so long is a dilemma of inability to accept either the reality of banishment or the

possibilities of the margin.

And the attitudes toward this margin are similarly troubled across the various

poems of the collection. The "Summoning the Soul" is the ultimate in centrism, laying

out the monstrous evils that lie at the compass points and urging the soul to return home--

in Wang Yi's commentary, this shamanistic healing song is transformed into a political

statement by Qu Yuan's disciple Song Yu, calling his master back to Ying. At the other

end of the spectrum, the "Far Roaming" does nothing more than nod to the idea that the

home at the center would be a place worth staying at: the narrator is determined to get to

the outer rim of the universe. In this poem, with its embedded Daoism, the journey itself

becomes a new sort of entrance, the entrance into the company of the Immortals. The

center is relocated at the margin. The "Li Sao" represents a middle position, as the

speaker can never commit to either full return to the center (impossible) or complete

desertion of it for the margin.

Wang Yi was a product of the margin, in an age when the spatial coordinates had

shifted. Writing after the turn of the second century A.D., Wang Yi was a minor

functionary in the Han capital of Luoyang, several hundred miles north of the old Chu

lands. Here is his biography as listed in the History of the Later Han:

Wang Yi, also named Shushi, was a man of Yicheng in

Nanjun. In the Yuanchu period (of An-di), he was received
an appointment as a accounts messenger, and then became
a titled clerk. During the time of Shun-di, he became a
steward. His writing, the Chuci Zhangju, has been read
broadly. His poetic expositions, eulogies, letters,
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 discourses, and mixed prose altogether are 21 pieces. He
also composed a "Han poems" with 123 pieces. (HHS,
80A)

Nanjun is a Later Han name for the region around old Ying, the former capital of Chu

from which Qu Yuan had been banished. But while Ying was for the Qu Yuan persona

the center of civilization, by the Later Han it had become (for Luoyang sophisticates, at

least) a backwater. Wang Yi must have lived there at least until early adulthood,

receiving enough of an education (in classics which by then had become identifiable as

"northern culture") to be entrusted with the minor responsibility of accompanying

provincial statistical reports to the capital bureaucracy. At some point, he demonstrated

enough skill (or facility in getting favors) to remain in Luoyang as a clerk, and eventually

to rise to the palace administration.

The upshot of this is that whereas Qu Yuan's journey away from Ying was one of

banishment and disgrace, Wang Yi's parallel journey is an integration into the life of the

civilizational center. But Wang Yi was apparently not willing to accept such a mapping

of civilization and barbarity, for his project in compiling the Chuci Zhangju is noticeably

civilizational in scope. In part, the commentary works as a justification of southern

culture as represented in the one great cultural stream known in the north.

Wang Yi's admiration of Qu Yuan was in part an expression of regional

sympathies. There is consistent evidence that these regional loyalties toward Chu were a

recurrent theme for Wang Yi, as images of a valorized south return repeatedly in his own

poetry. One of his poems is titled "Zither Yearning for Chu"; fragments of another

composition about lychees (Lizhi fu) vaunt the fruit which, though not of Chu

specifically, is certainly a product of the far south. Apparently an imitation of the similar
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"Orange Ode" of the "Nine Pieces," both fruits (like the flowers of the "Li Sao") serve as

allegorical emblems of personal worth.

It is hard to know exactly how to place such hints from Wang Yi's own poetry.

We have enough material to note that issues of place were a pressing concern to him, but

we do not have enough to identify the content of that concern. It would be satisfying to

be able to place Wang Yi definitely within one of the various frameworks of postcolonial

theory, to argue perhaps that he is some version of the conflicted nativist wrestling with

an adulterated cultural past. But the evidence is simply not there, for that or any other

strong claim.

But we do have enough evidence to put forward softer claims. We can know for

sure that Wang Yi's attention to the Chuci corpus was at least partially driven by regional

considerations. And we can also know that the exegetical project he takes on in the

Chuci Zhangju is an attempt in part at cultural preservation and justification, even though

the motives which drove such a project are unknowable.

Start with the bare fact of southern sympathy. The anonymous preface to Wang's

own "Nine Longings" says that "Yi was of the same land and country as Qu Yuan, so his

grief for him was beyond the ordinary." (309) So, clearly, there is regional interest: while

all scholars sympathize with Qu Yuan, Wang Yi feels a special tie. And it makes sense to

stress this aspect of Wang Yi in relation to the commentary: the great value of Wang Yi's

commentary has always been his philological notes, and presumably their helpfulness

derives from the fact that he was a native speaker of Ying dialect, and was familiar with

some of the more authentic Chu usages from the earlier strata of poetry in the collection.

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 The problem for a southern fan of southern poetry writing in Luoyang is that the

collection still had overtones of strangeness. It was clearly popular, but popular perhaps

as a sort of alternate mode of expression, even quasi-"ethnic." It had recently picked up

the denomination of "classic" but only as a sign of informal respect: it certainly did not

have the orthodox status of the Odes or the other Confucian classics. And although Wang

Yi makes no grand protest against orientalism, his commentary consistently works to

rehabilitate the civilizational possibilities of the old South.

For example, by making Song Yu the composer of the "Summoning the Soul," as

mentioned, Wang Yi is locating the beautiful, safe center at Ying--supposedly, Song Yu

is describing how barbaric the lands are in any direction from Ying (including north). In

the preface to the Nine Songs, Wang Yi does admit that the style of the songs derives

from the crude and superstitious peasantry some distance south of Ying:

"The jiu ge was composed by Qu Yuan. Formerly, in the

town of Nanying in Chu, between the Huan and Xiang
rivers, the commoners believed in ghosts and loved
sacrifices In their sacrifices they always made music and
sung and drummed and danced, in order to delight all the
gods. When Qu Yuan was exiled, he fled through their
region and harbored bitterness and poison and his thoughts
were gloomy. On going out, he say the sacrificial rites of
the commoners, and their music for song and dance, and
their words were vulgar, and thus in composing the jiu ge,
he presents on top the respect one has in serving the gods,
but below reveals his own grievances, and thereby uses this
to reprimand, and thus this text and meaning are not alike,
and the lines are ragged and mixed, but there is broad and
unusual meaning in them." (54-55)

Wang frankly admits, the culture of the southern peasantry is vulgar. But the specific

songs are attributed to Qu Yuan, the cultured emigré from Ying, who reworked the

material and made it allegorical. On the surface, the poetry may smack of rudeness and
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unrefinement; but it actually conceals the deep resonant sentiments which are to be found

in literati poetry. Regionalism is transmuted into classism: the clearly localized Chu-

nature of the songs which appears to represent a vulgar tradition is merely an external

appearance, covering thematic exposition which is universally approachable on class

basis.

Most revealing of all is the general introduction to the anthology, cited earlier:

Formerly, Confucius was clear, sagely, bright, and

philosophical. Heavenly-born and not of the crowd, he
canonized the Classics, composed the Odes and Record,
corrected the Rites and Music, and composed the Spring
and Autumn Annals, to give a rule for later kings. His
disciples were 3000, and none did not fully understand. At
their deaths, the great meaning was perverted and the subtle
words were cut off. Afterwards, when the house of Zhou
declined and the warring states struggled together, virtue
grew sluggish and mendacity sprouted; thereupon his
followers Yang, Mo, Chu, Meng, Sun, and Han each wrote
biographies and records according to what they knew...But
Qu Yuan behaved loyally and was slandered, and grew
pensive and depressed, and he alone relied on the principles
of the Odes poets, and composed the "Li Sao",
remonstrating above and comforting himself below...The
people of Chu highly valued the righteousness of his
behavior, and treasured the brilliance of his text, so they
transmitted his literary works. (47)

The litany of great names is a standard rhetorical device to introduce the place of a work

in literary history. But the placing of Qu Yuan within such a line was a polemical

assertion: Qu Yuan was certainly much-admired throughout the Han, but also much

maligned. Ban Gu, for example, thought of him as somewhat of a whiner.93 And it was

certainly a strange claim to assert that Qu Yuan alone was the proper nexus through

93
Wang Yi takes deliberate exception to Ban Gu's assertion that Qu Yuan was "immodest and self-
promoting" (48)

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which the high style of the Odes was preserved. We honestly do not know enough about

the history of Chuci reception prior to Wang Yi to know how original such an assertion

would have been, but it is safe to assume that Qu Yuan was not considered a pivotal

figure in the transmission of orthodox lines of culture.

So, through all of this, Qu Yuan emerges as sort of a culture hero for northernized

southerners like Wang Yi. Despite the true strangeness of the poetry of the Chuci by the

standards of the Odes, Wang Yi's valorization of Qu Yuan is not as the representative of

any valuable indigenous southern tradition. Rather, he is offered as proof that southerners

can be just as cultured and moral as northerners, by the standards of northern moral

culture. As the poems themselves raise the possibility of an alternate center at the

margin, Wang Yi tries to incorporate the southern margin into the northern center.

Though Qu Yuan himself had only apparently wanted to re-enter court, ru chao, Wang Yi

is bringing him ru men, into Confucius' door.

The ingathering of the Chuci Zhangju is a civilizational project, and Wang Yi's

role is a very little bit like Erich Auerbach's in the preparation of Mimesis. A scholar with

useful philological knowledge to offer, in a position of no great authority beyond the

borders of his native country, Wang has undertaken to preserve and to praise the native

cultural tradition of that distant homeland. In both cases, the tradition in question is no

longer what it used to be: Wang Yi is certainly aware of the way in which Chu-style verse

has become a boutique genre in a cultural context alien to it, and Auerbach is sedately

apocalyptic in his understandable wartime laments for the death of a continent.

But the differences are more telling than the similarities. Auerbach was ultimately

writing for a remnant of like-minded appreciators, a very few whom he considered to be

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capable of the mastery and joy of an aesthetic object. Western civilization had come to

its end, and he saw himself bound to living and future readers by their joint appreciation

of an inert crystalline thing, set off behind the unbreachable glass of the past. Wang Yi

was an appreciator not of a great mountain of dazzling cultural production, but of a man.

Chu and its contexts were gone, but the valorization of Chu culture had always passed

through the persona of Qu Yuan, and whatever regional sympathy Wang works out in his

exegesis, it is a sympathy tied always to the personal qualities of the unknown worthy.

And this attachment to the cultural past as the manifestation of a personality rather than

the display of an artifact means that Wang Yi intrudes on his text in a way that Auerbach

cannot. Auerbach, appropriating the Western tradition from the outside for the sharing at

a distance which he proposes, only briefly mentions himself in the introductory or closing

remarks to any of his books. Scholarly notes on Auerbach's biography are necessary for

any thorough assessment of his personal investment in his work. Wang Yi is open about

his own personal engagement with the mystique of Qu Yuan, and in fact ends the

collection with his own imitative poetic cycle. His own biography is as much to be found

inside the anthology as it is in sources like the dynastic history. He places himself at the

tail end of a diachronic polity of appreciators, and in the end his relocated centrality in

Luoyang is not as important to him as that alternative community in which texts are the

instantiation of their authors.

The spatial coordinates are neither irrelevant nor deterministic in their scope for

Wang Yi and for others, before and after, in the literati tradition of appropriating Qu

Yuan. The vectors of entering and exiting are remapped to other, more ephemeral grids

of center and margin, where centrality is a state of inclusion in political favor, and

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marginalization is a long reluctant journey away from the personal and political networks

that offer recognition. The allegorization of the movements of banishment and return is

entirely predictable, given the fact that the great treks of the paradigmatic "Li Sao" mix

geography with myth.

Geography never did disappear from the resonances of the Qu Yuan persona in

later imperial rewritings: disfavor continued to result often in literal banishment. But it is

the allegorizable side of banishment, geography's inseparability from larger cultural

concerns which allowed the Chuci to define an indispensable model. Qu Yuan, after all,

was one in a long series of banished worthies stretching out before and after him: the fact

that few if any of the poems are really attributable to Qu Yuan is a testament to this fact,

for there were plenty of other banished worthies and sympathizers with banished worthies

to write all of the poems. And later, with the growth of the examination system,

banishment eventually became superfluous to the system: geographical and political

marginality was the lot of those who never got called up to the capital with a passing

grade. The great effect of texts like the Chuci is that they allowed the geographically and

politically marginalized to imagine themselves at the center of something more

intellectual and spiritual. If Qu Yuan and dozens of other worthies roamed eternally

through the wilderness, than any provincial who could read and claim their texts was also

"in the door."

At the center of the Chuci Zhangju there is a short poem called "Divining a

Dwelling" (Bu Ju. Wang Yi claims that the piece is by Qu Yuan, although that is clearly

not the case: apart from stylistic differences with the earliest material in the anthology,

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the piece refers to Qu Yuan in the third person, and is told as a fable. Once, when Qu

Yuan had been banished for three years, having exhausted his knowledge and loyalty to

the king but still blocked by toadies, his mind was in turmoil, and he did not know which

path to follow. So he went to visit a diviner, Zhan Yin of Zheng,94 and asked him to cast

the lots and tell him which mode of life one ought to follow. Is it better to remain pure

and upright and endure disgrace? Or should one bend with the times and rise in the world

by shady behavior? Wang Yi summarizes the piece in his introduction:

"Divining a Dwelling" is a work by Qu Yuan. Qu Yuan in

his nature embodied loyalty and purity, and he met with
envy. He thought on how the slanderers and toadies acted
as yes-men to the lord and received wealth and honor. He
himself had upheld loyalty and straightness and was cast
aside, and so his mind strayed and his thoughts were
confused, and he did not know what to do. So he went to a
diviner, to test the gods' understanding and decide this by
the sticks or the tortoise shell, and to divine what was
appropriate behavior for his dwelling-in-the-age; and he
hoped to receive some extraordinary result, in order to
settle his doubts. So he called this the "Divining a
Dwelling." (171)

There is a great scope for divination in the Chuci: this canon is a tradition which mixes

the natural, supernatural, and political quite thoroughly, and in which these different

spheres act as signs for one another. A flower or bird always means something, a spirit-

journey is always linked to the political implications of exile and self-exile; there are

plenty of portents found in the stars and comets which appear at the outer reaches of the

Chu universe; the blocking actions of cliques around the ruler are posed as darkenings of

the sun. And the period of Wang Yi's exegesis was a golden age of omenology: amid an

eclipse and several earthquakes, the emperor Shun solicited critiques which offered
94
Or, perhaps, the diviner is named "Zheng Zhanyin"; the text is indeterminate.

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explanations for the imbalances of nature. (HHS, 6) The court astrologer, Zhang Heng,

invented the world's first seismograph after a Luoyang earthquake in A.D. 133, allowing

supernatural motion to be translated into readable pattern. And Wang Yi was a devotee

of the mystical arts as well: he was friends with the famous Daoist magician Fan Ying

¼Ô-^ ( HHS, 82A; Li Xian commentary citing Xie Chengshu), and he also traveled to Mt.

Tai to learn divination himself from one Bao Zizhen. (HHS 80A; Li Xian commentary

citing Zhang Hua)

But this divination poem (from an earlier period anyway) does not have so much

faith. After Qu Yuan finishes a long recitation of his wrongs, phrased in the form of

questions as stilted and uninterrogative as those of any game show, Zhan Yin places his

divining-sticks to the side and excuses himself. There are limits to the power of

divination, he explains: "In numbers there is that which cannot be reached, and in the

divine there is that which cannot be arrived at." (174) The only assistance which the

diviner can offer is an unhelpful moral nostrum: "Use your mind and put your thoughts

into practice. Tortoise-shells and lots honestly cannot know of such things." (174)

Divinations manifest pattern, and cull intelligibility from the fields of randomness.

This is especially true of the tortoise-shells mentioned in Zhan Yin's occult arsenal: held

to a fire, the shells would crack into systems which could be read by the specialist. As all

sinologists know, these cracks were understood as wen, a word which encompasses

natural pattern but also human script and the intellectual products mediated by script.

There was a latent semiotic continuity between the manifestation of supernatural intention

in divinatory practice and the manifestation of inner personality through poetry.

But here the availability of supernatural guidance is cut off. There will be no

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divine wen available for the reading on the subject of how Qu Yuan should frame his

being-in-the-world. This is the second time in the anthology that questions of heaven

have gone unanswered; the much more famous gnomic verse of the "Heavenly

Questions" (Tian wen) puts forward a long list of questions on cosmology and mythical

history, and these questions are asked into the void. Wang Yi's preface, which asserts

that Qu Yuan wrote the questions on the murals in old kings' ancestral temples, suggests

no answer would have been expected. But Zhan Yin's response is the first explicit refusal

of external answers. The divinities of Zheng were no doubt extremely reliable in

providing some sorts of information: the selection of auspicious ceremonial dates and

such stuff. But the fundamental human ontological status is, in any sober system, limited:

there are some things that cannot be arrived at, and some subjects on which the celestial

orders will never speak.

Qu Yuan is left to find his his Da-sein by a return to the world and to the putting-

into-practice of his thoughts which have been so relentlessly relational. There is no way

in which an external metaphysical ground somewhere in the field of ethereal ideas can

serve as a guide for his desire to seek a mode of dwelling within the world.

This is the dilemma and the opportunity of all poets who saw themselves within a

continuous line of descent from Qu Yuan. Theological claims of various sorts abounded

in early China, but literati did not need to rely on theological forms to enter into

hermeneutical communities. Often this meant objective loneliness: the only possible way

for Qu Yuan to dwell in the world is by himself. But the possibilities of the allegorical

semiotics which had been developed allowed for the construction of diachronic

communities to be formed, centered upon texts. They mirrored the structure of those

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whom Adorno called the "authentics," possessing mystical-seeming elevation without any

real religious content.

In this tradition, allegoresis did not enable the demarcation of lines of community,

between those who possessed access to the interpretation and those who did not. Rather,

the community was created in allegoresis, because every act of interpretation was an act

of personal appreciation. The content of deliberate allegories in the original material was

transformed into hermeneutical-relational procedures which then allowed authors'

supposed expectations of reader response to be read back into the text.

When vertical motion was thematized in the collection, either in the Nine Songs'

imprecations to gods or else in various spirit journeys, political relations were understood.

And because the spaces of above and below were simultaneously levels of allegorical

hermeneutics, theme was transformed into method. The upper space, in which indifferent

beings of higher power live and observe, is the realm in which only the surfaces of those

below are visible. The king has looked down on Qu Yuan and seen only what the toadies

allowed; he never penetrated the surface. The lower space is where the loyal excluded

reside, and it is the place of deeper meaning, where true sentiment is available. The

reader, as judge of the poem, is asked to go down below the surface of the poem, to the

depths of Qu Yuan's righteous exclusion, and to raise him up by properly allegorical

method. To do so is not merely to understand a text, but to establish a bond with the man

who had left the text behind as his only monument.

When Qu Yuan lamented about the failure of those outside to understand the

flowers and jades he hung all around himself, readers were taught to look for inner

meanings of allegorical markers, and by correct deciphering to reach the inner heart of the

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great man and his imitators. When Qu Yuan extolled his own inner righteousness, and

decried those sycophants who blocked him, an exegete's job was to clear away the blocks

to appreciation of that righteous meaning. When narrators of the earlier strata of poems

were able to morph identities, to project themselves onto the personae of their objects of

affection, later imitators were only dutiful to assume in turn the persona of Qu Yuan.

When Qu Yuan roamed the universe in search of a mate, and that mate was defined as

someone who could truly understand him, the understanding interpretations of

understanding readers were expressions of a sort of humanistic love, and it is natural that

Wang Yi should have framed the creation of readerships for the poems in terms of finding

matches for the poet. When Qu Yuan traveled to the borders of the Chu universe, in

flight from a corrupt court, every reader who felt himself marginalized by the callous

obtuseness of power was able to allegorize out of that exile a new center of welcome and

acceptance for himself.

In each case, there is a handing-down of language. Tropes and rhetoric change

hands as each new generation joins into the community by virtue of its own

recompositions or imitations or exegeses. And each writer takes the signs of established

meaning, and by their use, hangs them again on himself, as something destined and

decorous. Again and again, the thematic tropes of the Chuci allegories are transformed

within the reading tradition into hermeneutical tropes, and from there into patterns of

relation. There is no need to hypothesize a method of allegory whose obscurity is

guaranteed by a metaphysical lock. Misunderstanders will still always outnumber the

understanders, but appreciative interpretation is something that can proceed from the

natural and innate abilities of the just. And hence the just are given the freedom to

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establish their own shadow polity across the ages, whose community life is located in the

text itself. And so those who are unfortunates in this world, the excluded and the

forgotten, they can find a truer being in the poetic dialogue that progresses one way down

through ages.

It is as Heidegger quotes Holderlin, "Full of merit, yet poetically, man/ Dwells on

this earth."95 Qu Yuan, never apotheosized or providentially placed, had no other options.

But textual tradition, for himself and for his emulators, was at least a homey wilderness.

95
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 216.

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3. Philology's Dream

and then Tiresias Theban

Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
"Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
"Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
"For soothsay."
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: "Odysseus
"Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
"Lose all companions."
--Ezra Pound, Canto I

Western worthies, too, are knowable. Not by all: they code themselves, appear

only in disguise, hide themselves under lambswool or in equine thoraces. But things are

easier in the land of the thirsty dead, and easier for those gifted in certain of the mystic

arts. Tiresias is one of those blind fellows with the inward eyes, and such people are

good at discerning the inner meaning and nature of the hearts of worthies. Their job title,

"seer," is meant to refer to their meticulous inspections of fate, but among the heroes

personality is fate. Tiresias (more in Homer than in Pound) knows the full arc of a life as

determined as the flight of an artillery shell, and sees an essentialized being whose inner

nature has cleared its path from the start.

This was as true for Qu Yuan as for the noble Greeks. His meaning was his

righteousness; within his particular milieu of courtly corruption, his unbending

personality determined from the start his exile and watery end. But those generations of

readers who came after him, and came to know him through text, and emulate and adore

him through more text, did not simply decode. They pitied and loved. Fate was not

simply a historical abstraction of the world-system, but a present danger which replicated

itself for every generation's dispersed cohort of the lonely.

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 Greek heroes inspire pity and fear. Even Pound's Tiresias, himself in hell, seems

shocked that Odysseus would drive himself back to the land of the dead. "A second

time? why?" The passage here rewritten is not Odysseus' second time, but his first. His

second trip will be the end of the journey which Pound has edited out, the famous final

voyage which Tiresias prophecies Odysseus will undertake after the end of the Odyssey.

In the original (Od. 16), Tiresias is properly cryptic, saying that Odysseus will meet death

upon the water, while on a journey to a place beyond all sea and salt.

The identity of that place is revealed in the Inferno, the place of Odysseus' second

(and unending) nekuia. Vergil and his charge draw to the edge of a ridge in Malbolge of

the Fraudulent, and, peering into the eighth pit of that eighth circle, see a myriad of

penitential flames, like fireflies, wafting. Each flame roasted its own sinner with the heat

of his own unbearable guile, except for one particular tongue of flame, forked to chain

two souls. They were Odysseus and Diomedes, and Vergil gets the former to tell the

story of that final voyage of which Tiresias had once riddled: after having reached home,

Odysseus was still restless, eager for more raw experience of the world. He gathers his

companions, and having reached the Pillars of Hercules, addresses them:

'Brothers,' I said, 'o you, who having crossed

a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.
(Inf. 26.112-120)

They turn south and sail for five months into the southern hemisphere. At last they see a

dark mountain rising out of the ocean, taller than any other peak. But they cannot reach
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it, as a tempest rises and beats them back, capsizes the ship and sends the lot to the

depths.

The European allegoresis of personality is usually an operation performed on

bloodless pseudo-persons. The named nothings of personification flaunt their identities:

they are like real persons turned inside-out, so that the mind and heart become surface

marks rather than hidden attributes. It is even hard to think of such deliberate allegorical

abstractions as the object of any real allegoresis: it is no discovery of hidden meaning to

see that a character called "Justice" represents justice. Still, the texts of deliberate

allegories most often claim or pretend that the personification is a true mystery which

calls for care in the deciphering. And at least the process of such narratives claims a need

for deciphering: personifications are asked to wear certain costumes, to bear certain

emblematic trinkets in order to be decipherable. Justice bears a blindfold, scale, and

sword. But there is no communion found by any such act of interpretation. By

identifying a personification correctly, and understanding its motions within the

framework of an allegorical narrative, one might come to a fuller understanding of truth;

but one will not have found a kindred spirit.

This quick cut from personality to systematic truth is visible in other kinds of

allegoresis. Dante's, for example. The pilgrim encounters personality after personality,

and each one reveals to him or to his guides the deepest inner truth that has driven him or

her to present bliss or misery or hope. Some are as eager to speak and to find a listener as

Qu Yuan, accosting Dante and blabbering out their lives. Others speak from shame and

slink soon away. But each begins as an apparition of a soul marked by its atonement,

punishment, or reward, and then from visual display is turned to the speaking oracle of its

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own divinely-assigned truth.

It is frankly hard to know how to take Dante's assertions in the "Letter to Can

Grande" that the Commedia was thoroughly allegorical. The personages he meets are real

or semi-real persons, not abstractions. The journey itself cannot be translated, step by

step, into any historical event or any theological principle beyond the literal depiction of

the afterlife. But the poem delineates a process of allegorical reading and interpretation

of personal character. Personification allegories often devolve into flat parades of

characters named and described in turn for a reader; Dante's poem is a sublime parade.

Even though his characters are concrete and usually historical, there is no postmodern

fragmentation about them, no irreducible knots of character, no one who cannot be

accurately judged and assigned a proper place within the cosmic order. Of course, Dante

was no simpleton, and like his contemporaries knew well enough that personhood is an

intricate construction. His decisions to place characters in Hell, Heaven, or Purgatory

were frequently polemical, and he knew it. What the Divine Comedy asserts is not the

absence of human complexity, but rather the absolute decipherability of personality

within the divine order.

All of Dante's characters are immobilized by the system of grace and retribution

which besets them. All serve to delineate the form of the system by cleaving to or butting

up against it. But none in hell does so more poignantly than Odysseus. Odysseus must

be in the eighth circle for his frauds, and Vergil confirms this: his fire punishes him for

the Horse, the lonely death of Achilles' wife Deidamia, and the theft of the Palladium

(and hence the joining with Diomedes). But the great last journey hinted at by Tiresias

and here narrated explicitly is not a fraud of the same order. Rather, it is a narration of

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the limits of Odyssean π ολυµητι/α, and by extension, all mortal wiliness. In Dante's

geography, the only land mass of the southern hemisphere is the island mount of

purgatory, and this is what Odysseus and his shipmates saw before their stormy

drownings. Odysseus, in his unending thirst for higher and more extreme experience,

transgresses the bounds of his allotted mortal sphere and is struck down by Providence. It

is a remarkably Greek ending, only more dazzling in that it is made to testify to the unity

of a medieval vision of the cosmos.

This is the fate of the innate character which both Homer's and Pound's Tiresias

descried in the Ithacan: it was a natural arc determined by an essentialized personality.

And it is a common reaction to Dante's characters. Gordon Teskey, in one of his finest

analyses, uses Dante's Francesca di Rimini as a foundational summation of the divine

violence inherent in allegory, forcing the complexities of an irreducible personhood to

bear a solitary meaning in eternal punishment for one particular sin. (Teskey, 25-31)

Erich Auerbach builds an argument around Dante's subsuming of individual difference

into an organic whole, and gives his book on Dante an epigraph from Heraclitus: " ]Ηθοϕ

α)νθρω /π ω | δαι/µω ν, A man's character is his fate." (Auerbach, Dante viii) In fact,

Auerbach's systemizing urge was so strong that, in his analysis of this passage on

Odysseus, he abstracts the Odyssean character into two separate contexts. The second

and higher one is the one organic to Dante's, a version of the same argument on

personality's place within the trecento Catholic cosmos. But his initial reaction is an

abstraction which speeds directly to Auerbach's own cosmos:

In this narrative, which like a dream that interprets reality,

discloses the unity of the European character in the spirit of
world conquest that has carried down from the Greek to
modern times, one might be tempted to find an
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 autonomous invention of character in the modern manner.
(Auerbach, Dante 151)

This study on Dante was published long before Mimesis, and in 1929 there was still much

about the European character that had yet to be learned. But the first third of the century

had already seen the legacy of conquest, and Auerbach had a character and perhaps a

fated trajectory of his own to fulfill. But Auerbach's allegoresis of Odysseus to reveal the

entire character of European historical expansion is still striking. It is itself a telling

example of the standard European allegorization of personality. The textual heroes of the

past, even when examined for their personalities, are quickly made to refer exclusively to

the conceptual systems in which they live and move and have their being. The mode of

Qu Yuan's dwelling was not to be revealed by Zhan Yin or his divinities; the great man

was cast back upon his own world of textual plaints, to make whatever home he could

within a diachronic realm determined humanistically. Odysseus' place in the world was

prophesied from his first visit to the Kimmerian shores, and like most other allegorized

personalities in his tradition, his final resting place was determined for him from without.

Of course, Qu Yuan was a real person, at least to his readers, and Odysseus could

be nothing but a grand fiction to Auerbach and most other readers of the European

tradition. Much less could any abstraction of Virtue or Vice have a personality of urgent

importance in itself. But fictionality is part of the issue at stake. In a sense, the sort of

allegoresis which Wang Yi and other traditional exegetes perform on the Chu poetic

corpus is just as reductive as any self-exegesis by the Dantean damned. The story of the

slandered but righteous minister became a role that migrated away from Qu Yuan's

specific history, taken up again and again by outcasts who wished to find themselves a

209
more simply self-justificatory narrative than the world would afford them. But this

reductiveness did not reduce the assumptions of historicity on the part of re-writers and

re-readers: it is the reality of Qu Yuan in and for himself which made the role so powerful

and hence so portable. The hidden natures of Dante's characters, even when mimeses of

historical figures, are fictional, for the Commedia claims to be a vision of structure, rather

than an inspired reporting of particular fates. And readers are not asked to feel kinship

with them, but love for the divine wisdom which could arrange them all with such

unflagging propriety.

There are no degrees of kinship in Hell. When Pound's Tiresias predicts

Odysseus' loneliness, he refers as much to his Dantean end as to his companionless

beaching on the Phaiakian shores. Odysseus is bound together with Diomedes in flame,

but Dante tells us that the double tongue resembled the pyre of Eteocles and Polyneices,

which forked in fratricidal hate. He has no society, and we readers, like the pilgrim, are

meant to pass by. Unlike the Chinese exegetes who allegorized a person's meaning for

the sake of finding readers who would esteem him, Vergil pulls Dante on and us with

him, and for our sake will not let us linger.

Western allegoresis has its own stimulants to community life, but (at least in the

standard model)96 these bonds are with circles of readers rather than with the text-

persons themselves. There is no omnivorous Care which chomps all phenomena down

into its gullet, and hence no method of conceiving a Being-with in that netherspace of

textual tradition. The men and women who inhabit Philology's dreams can indeed
96
The final two chapters of this dissertation will provide counter-examples to the standard model of each
tradition; as explained at the close of Chapter One, these remarks are not meant as essentializations of
"Eastern" and "Western" allegory, merely as presentations of what each tradition chose to recognize
explicitly.

210
 interpret reality: they step forward from their bloody meals to tell us about how we

should be with each other in this world. But as long as there is something knowable as

dream, they will forever stand apart, their voices muffled behind Gehenna's plexiglass.

To hold faith with them, we must lose ourselves in text: neither waking nor sleeping,

minds muddled with companionable ghosts.

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 Chapter Four

1. Ben's Big Toe

He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his

great toe, about which he hath seen tartars & turks Romans
and Carthaginians feight in his imagination.
--William Drummond, on Ben Jonson97

Epic is normally a genre that appears to come from someplace outside the realm

of its enjoyment in the reader's (or hearer's) present. It comes from some past in which

the physical world was closer to the divine; to some degree, it may come from the divine

itself: numinous powers are invoked for its smooth narration to the poet. There is little

importance to the epic "I" before the marvelous navel-gazing of Wordsworth's "Prelude."

Even Dante's journey and Milton's obsessive invocations (genre oddities though they are)

do not harp upon their noticeably first-person perspectives: the two poets record

themselves encountering stories which flow from God. A foregrounding of the narrator

does not internalize the narration.

The metaphysical origins of epic determine its exegesis. As has been discussed in

a previous chapter, the standard rhetoric of allegoresis inherited from the old readings of

Homer stress the divine secrets buried in text. The putative structure of hermeneutical

communities which are invoked in allegoreses are dependent on this entrance of the text

from some realm outside of human purview. The august presence of the divine, breaking

into human culture through a process of revelation, flattens the worldly differences

between those who have been called to hear the secrets of the other world. To some

degree, the interpreter may be lifted above the common lot: priests are raised in their

97
Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems Ed. George Parfitt (London: Penguin, 1975) 469.

212
intermediary function, and likewise, allegoretes raise themselves by claiming to be the

conduits for the only true access to the hidden meanings of the allegorical text. But those

who have ears to hear are put on a level plane, all equal before the revealed meaning of

the allegorical text. They are the un-Heideggerians: to them, the finest objects are those

which cannot enter consciousness as always-already-interpreted. Their society rests upon

the act of interpretation, and its possibilities of failure, and thus the difficulty and

privilege of catching the word which has materialized in this world in the form of

allegory.

Heideggerian epic ought to have inchoate boundaries between the grandeur and

the "I". Sense of self would not be a foregrounded interruption in a divine narrative, but

rather a narrative of its own and the allegorical cabinet of its own precious mysteries.

Words might even be superfluous to reading, as the knowing exegete performed his deep

scansion upon the person of the epic poet.

On the unknown night of some lonely Stuart-era bedchamber, Ben Jonson's toe

sung out an epic struggle, for no audience at all but himself and his demented muse. The

incident is perhaps the best confirmation of the otherwise anomalous assertion in the

Conversations with Drummond that Jonson felt himself "Oppressed with fantasie, which

hath ever mastered his reason, a general disease in many poets." If that were the one

thing that Drummond had remembered and left to us, we would be tempted to count him

a crank: in our literary annals, Jonson is the most careful and deliberate poet of his age,

and he took pains to promote such an image of himself.98 He was, after all, a translator of

98
Arthur Marotti, also departing from the toe anecdote, has offered a fine analysis of the ways in which
Jonson is more prone to bizarre fancy than we are accustomed to assume. Arthur F. Marotti, "All About
Jonson's Poetry," ELH 39.2 (June 1972) 208-37. See especially section 1, 209-19.

213
Horace, and he acted like it: Shakespeare may have wanted art and Donne may have

deserved hanging, but in Jonson's views, he himself was the true son of the ancients, and

he alone of the Stuart poets knew the sober art of making poems.

The toe is no testament to sobriety. Drummond recalls several weirdly clever

incidents culled from Jonson's confidences, but perhaps none is as curious as this

hallucinatory night which the great Horatian spent absorbed in his own toe and its

miniature epics. This seems grotesquely out of character: one thinks most quickly of a

lasting image out of Donne, the linkages of bodies and maps and beds which lasted from

the prurient delights of "O my America! my new-found-land!" to the threnody in which

"Physitians by their love are growne/ Cosmographers."

We hear, however, that the private Jonson is a weirder character than the public

braggart. His sweet and fluid and restrained verses are not the product of an imagination

which was deficient in comparison to that of the metaphysicals, and could rise only to

more modest heights, but rather the product of the stricter restraints which he espoused

and self-importantly claimed. And the fury which circled for one long night around Ben's

big toe is perhaps even weirder for having been lived experience rather than crafted

imagery. After all, allegorical confoundings of the body with greater forces of the world

are commonplace, whether the body is the tenor (Spenser's House of Alma, Phineas

Fletcher's Purple Island) or the vehicle (Hobbes's famous frontispiece, any court

masquer). Most personification tends this way, and a good example is the only other

memorable period invocation of great toes:

MENENIUS: The senators of Rome are this good belly,

And you the mutinous members. For examine
Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly
Touching the weal o' th' common, you shall find
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 No public benefit which you receive
But it provides or comes from them to you,
And no way from yourselves. What do you think,
You, the great toe of this assembly?
FIRST CITIZEN: I the great toe! Why the great toe?
MENENIUS: For that, being one o' th' lowest, basest, poorest
Of this most wise rebellion, thou goest foremost. (Coriolanus I.i.146-156)

Shakespeare's fable of the belly is a nice invocation of a cliché, the state-as-body, and the

decorative rhetorical use which Menenius gives is typical. Bodies most often become

troped as illustrative metaphors, and the bodies themselves are the conceptual

abstractions used to illustrate more present realities. Even in the rarer cases in which it is

the body which acts as vehicle, such as the examples from Donne, what we get is

witticism.

In contrast, Jonson's acontextual anecdote is both obsessive and private. His body

is real, and yet it is felt to be the site of epic motions, even in its lowliest and most

forward part. This was, of course, in character: "He is a great lover and praiser of

himself, a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest,

jealous of every word and action of those about him...a disembler of ill parts which reign

in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth."99 This is the sort of man who we would

not be surprised to find engorged with something of his own greatness (if that's what this

was), prone to a bit of mock-epic humor at his own expense, but also willing to fritter

away restfulness in insomniac fantasy. Jonson did feel strongly the rousing motions of

worth in himself; the only verses we know he had by heart were Spenser's lines on

inspiration, (from "October" of the Shepheards Calender):

Let powre in lauish cups and thriftie bitts of meate,

For Bacchus fruite is frend to Phoebus wise.
99
Jonson, 479.

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 And when with Wine the braine begins to sweate,
The nombers flowe as fast as spring doth ryse.
Thou kenst not Percie howe the ryme should rage.
O if my temples were distaind with wine,
And girt in girlonds of wild Yvie twine,
How I could reare the Muse on stately stage,
And teache her tread aloft in bus-kin fine,
With queint Bellona in her equipage.100 ("October," 458)

And the wine and the motions infected his sense of self: his "Ode to Himself" scorning

the "loathsome age" marked Jonson at his most controversial and his most typical, and he

spent years turning back the jibes at his self-righteous conceit.

Whatever drove Jonson to his vision, the image is a quaint Renaissance miniature

of a great client in pathetic plight, unable to reconcile epic dreams with a social status

reeking of lowness, baseness, and poverty. The man of worth who labored to break into

the circles of power and influence by his cultural attainment always hovered on the cusp

of greatness. Literature was enough to bring a man to within view of grandeur, as when

Spenser's Redcrosse is granted a view of the New Jerusalem from afar. But actual

entrance into the circles of lordly worth and confidence was rare, and those who had spent

their youth in deep conversation with the textual pantheons of ancient worthies were left

unconsulted, half-noticed, by the worthies of their own world. Men who had labored to

make great their souls felt themselves full of goodness and genius, and yet as illegible as

hieroglyphs to anyone whom the world had lifted up.

Cockiness is nothing new; bitterness at being misunderstood is a basic human

right. But it is not universal or common for these emotions to be frames in terms of a
100
Edmund Spenser, The Poems of Spenser Ed. J.C. Smith, E. de Selicourt (London: Oxford UP, 1963)
458. There is reason to believe that Jonson had indeed memorized the verses. There is a strong hint
here of Jonson's lines on Shakespeare, that he would call in the ancients "to hear thy buskin tread/ And
shake a stage..." As it happens, "E.K." (most likely Spenser under a pseudonym) glossed his own
reference to Bellona with the myth of how she "shaked a speare" at Vulcan, to dissuade his advances.
(Spenser, 459)

216
given literary mode or exegetical process. Chinese literary patronage was understood as a

form of allegoresis of persons, as has been demonstrated; this chapter will argue that

Elizabethan and Stuart literary patronage was as well. The analysis is in part an

anthropology of courtly aspirants, how they used literary versions of semiotics to make

their way up the heap of social codes. It is also, however, about acts of reading in the

period: allegoresis claims for itself the mysteries of closed circles, but finds its true social

energies in the thick vertical lines of hierarchy.

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2. The Reading of Men

there is a saying much usurped of late, That Wisedome is

acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men...the
characters of mans heart, blotted and confounded as they
are, with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous
doctrines, are legible onely to him that searcheth hearts.
--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan101

Plot has a bountiful workshed, overstuffed with quaint and curious gadgetry. All

things in the worlds of fate or accident have their hooks: oracles of just or capricious gods

hang from above; crucial chance encounters are strewn about the ground; wars erupt or

are stoked; political consensus is enforced and reacted against; overreaching hubris

chases at the heels of success; quests beckon like supposed coquettes; obstacles loom and

the divine cavalries ride in on their machines. And this is to say nothing of all the inner

motions which begin as character traits and become arcs of epic, the premodern passions

which seethe in their simplicity, or the modern monsters of the unreconstructed id.

In a poem as long as The Faerie Queene, with such variety and successive speed

in the episodes, one would expect that Spenser would want to make full use of whatever

tools the tradition offered. There is some breadth: a small range of plot-inducing

emotions drives forward the counteractions to the six heroic virtues. The overall work is

structured as a series of quest-directives issued by the Faerie Queene herself. There are

accident and inspiration, bonds and enmities, and all of these drive along the plot. One

might even claim that Allegory itself becomes a driver of plot: there is philosophical

content buried here under the clouds of fiction, and the introduction of given allegorical

terms sometimes requires a certain pattern in events which follow, if Truth is not to be

horribly mangled.
101
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Ed. C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1985) 82-83.

218
 But recognition is the great animal vitality which surges up through the poem, and

which informs most of the major action. Recognition is one of the most fundamental

tools by which plots have always been given tension and sudden reversals, from the most

ephemeral oral epic songs to the most overwrought daytime soaps. Much of this

recognition is a recognition of identity, the placing of a name and a history with a

birthmark. There is often little inner probing, and many of the identifying marks have all

the interest of a social security number. Frequently, though, early modern culture offers a

recognition of personhood, a deciphering of inner natures from outer exteriors, so that

ontology becomes a semiotics and every meeting is framed as an allegoresis of persons.

Recognition is key to The Faerie Queene, and its centrality there is an icon of the

interpersonal exegesis which lubricated the operations of English power until Charles was

deprived of his head. Many of Spenser's great monsters, from Duessa to the Blatant

Beast, are monsters which work by either self-disguise or the disfiguring of others. More

importantly, recognition is forced onto the reader's psyche by the act of allegoresis--we

are parallel to the characters in the poem, and our job is to interpret them while they

interpret each other. Readers' position as allegoretes is mapped on to a network of

approbation and disdain which the characters have for each other; allegoresis as a mode

of understanding text is overlaid upon the structurally similar process of reading men,

who write their outer appearances in virtuous ornament, but may hide within themselves

the stink of reckless ambition.

The ways in which Elizabethan and Stuart courtiers learned to read each other can

be seen in miniature in through Spenser's uses of such readings. The verb "to read," one

219
of Spenser's most distinctive archaisms, was itself used to indicate a variety of intellectual

operations.102 In "Faery lond," to read is to see, to discern, to ascertain, to tell, and to

judge, from the very first canto, when Una "read[s] beware" to Redcrosse about the

dangers of Errour's den. "Read" (in various grammatical forms) is the most frequent

word used for any and all of these cognitive processes, and it is particularly prominent in

any scene in which recognition is key to the action.

The "salvage nation" of satyrs (I.vi) reads Una and her sorrow when they meet her

alone in the woods, though she is wary of committing "her single person to their

barbarous truth." (I.vi.11) Paridell woos Hellenore, "With speaking lookes, that close

embassage bore, He rov'd at her, and told his secret care: For all that art he learned had of

yore. Ne was she ignorant of that lewd lore, But in his eye his meaning wisely red and

with the like him answered evermore." (II.ix.28) Merlin tells the future of Britain after

having "ared" (III.iii.20) Britomart and Glauce through their disguises. At the beauty

contest of IV.v, the false Florimell is as hard to be read as is a cheap idol covered in gold.

(IV.v. 15) The slanderous poet Bonfont, whose tongue is nailed to a post in Mercilla's

palace, is marked with his sin "in cyphers strange, that few could rightly read," but it is

plainly to be read that on his nameplate the "Bon" has been scratched out and replaced

with a "Mal." (V.ix.26) Most importantly, the characters of nobility are easily read: in

Book VI, Artegall and Calidore read each other easily (i.4) and Calidore knows to

102
"Hence, for Spenser, we construe or read the world in the same way that we make sense of poetry. As a
result, the interpretative skills of the reader are taxerd in The Faerie Queene with particular intent. By
problematising our ability to decipher and understand, the text aims at educating and controlling our
political responses." Anne Fogarty, "The colonisation of language: narrative strategy in The Faerie
Queene, Book VI" Edmund Spenser Ed. Andrew Hadfield (London: Addison Wesley, 1996) 198. The
continuity of interpretation between text and world here is exactly right; I only quibble with Fogarty in
suspecting that the continuity is a function of a general cultural habit, and not anm intentional program
specific to this epic.

220
approve of Tristram's gentility: "Well may I certes such an one thee read,/ As by thy

worth thou worthily hast wonne,/ Or surely borne of some Heroicke sead,/ That in thy

face appears and gratious goodlyhead." (VI.ii.25) Electronic searches of the text for

"read" cognates reveal dozens of further examples, some critical and others trivial.

What matters, though, is not the vocabulary but the situations of reading. For

instance, when Britomart dines with Malecasta (III.i), there is no need to use a specific

word, so obvious is the process of mutual erroneous judgment by appearances. Malecasta

cannot see through the virile armor of the chaste faery-Amazon, and projects a desire to

match her own beneath the gender-inflected metal husk. Britomart assumes that

Malecasta's physical beauty matches to an inner virtue, as it indeed does in her own case.

Each performs a conscious exegesis of the other, based upon their understanding of how

signs operate in the world, and the resulting double misconstruction is what leads later

that night to their awkward sexual encounter, and thus pushes Britomart's quest forward

in offended chastity.

Here (as frequently elsewhere) our relationship to the characters is defined by

dramatic irony. But at times they are as perspicuous as we are; in any case, personal

mysteries are always revealed in the end. Because the personages we meet are

allegorical, our reading of them is our judgment of them, and whether they lag or not, the

characters themselves also live in a land in which discernment and interpretation are

necessary to progress on their appointed quests.

And it is at the more sophisticated levels of allegoresis in the poem that personal

valuation and exegesis seem the most like lived experience, and most completely fuse

with our readerly allegoresis. There are several kinds of allegorical figures in the poem.

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At the simplest level, there are the transparent personification allegories, but these are

relatively few and mostly minor: capitalized emotions or conditions which appear in the

train of major characters, or as attendants in one of the castles. More important are most

of the functional characters in the poem, the lovers and the evil knights and the monsters.

These can be usually attached to a stable allegorical identity, but identities which seem

not as abstracted concepts but as characters from the character books: "the lover", "the

liar", "the braggart", "the miser", etc. But above the fray we have the heroes of the six

virtues, where the allegoresis is perhaps most difficult. Though there have been many

attempts to read these heroes as true personifications of their respective virtues, they are

characters with some bit of realism to them. They are not abstractions in the least; they

have inner lives, they have character flaws, and they show development and growth over

the course of their adventures. They do not embody their respective virtues, but rather

grow toward them over the course of their quests--and our understanding of Spenser

grows along with them as we slowly learn the definition of those virtues through the

action of the poem. To follow their slow attainment of virtue does not sap out their

fictionality into abstraction, but credits them with these virtues even in the midst of their

fictionality. Attentive reading appreciates them as people, and is willing to see beyond

their real quirks to establish a generous appraisal of what they undertake.

This process is inextricably expressed in the language of aristocracy, appeals to

understand and be understood, to have the community and the patronage of the true-

sighted (e.g. Gloriana), who can properly evaluate worth in a complex system of real

detail and baseless accusation. This is, ultimately, where the unfinished poem finishes:

Calidore's quest is the quest for righteous aristocracy, where the rhetoric is matched to the

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reality. The final escape of the Blatant Beast into the world, where he can wreak havoc

on contemporary courtiers, including the erstwhile Colin Clout, maps the method of

allegory onto the social givens of aristocracy. The more one reads early modern England,

the more it starts to resemble this bizarre fantasy-world: everyone gazes, every gaze lays

bare.

After laying out his dissatisfaction in the passage cited in the epigraph to this

section, the "Monster of Malmesbury" offers a solution to the difficulty of personal

semiotics: Nosce te ipsum. Only by reading oneself can one come to a knowledge of

others, and introspection is the ultimate key to understanding the psychological

imperatives which drive social organization. This sounds simplistic, but Hobbes was an

intelligent monster, and at least stipulated that the objects of men's passions are not to be

known by self-reading, but only the structure and disposition of those internal motions,

otherwise one would propose "to decypher without a key, and be for the most part

deceived...as he that reads, is himself a good or evil man."103 From the perspective of

structure, one could know the mental patterns of man well enough at least to construct a

system of legal and political surrender, in which the particular objects of desire, known or

not, would be made irrelevant by submission to the sovereign.

The problem, then, for Hobbes, was not that the reading of Men was wholly

wrong, but that men read and were read for the wrong objects. The universals of

mankind were indeed to be read (in oneself) but the particulars of personality were

impossible to decipher, mysteries indefensible against the semiotic outrages that govern

103
Hobbes, 83. Precisely the problem which Britomart and Malecasta encountered.

223
life in the social sphere. Hobbes even takes umbrage at the use to which readings are put:

dissemblers put forward erroneous signs and readers mainly read in order to carp, as

gossip and backbiting are the prime expressions of this reading.

Hobbes general observations may have been insightful or not, but we do at least

have the objective fact of a cultural nostrum. He could not have deplored the abuse of a

saying about the reading of men unless there were such a platitude in common

circulation. From at least the middle of Elizabeth's reign until the chaos of the civil wars,

the convergence of a growing literati culture and an appetite for patronage combined to

produce an incessant, obsessive reading of persons. This was no quirk of Spenser only;

the trope's reappearance in Hobbes should be proof enough that this was a trope of

consequence. For decades, all would-be clients felt themselves to be the sites of epic

actions, noble heroisms of the mind which somehow needed recognition; their fear was

that the real (i.e., titled) nobility could only see an endless multiplication of great toes.

By the time Hobbes wrote, real war was already in its heat, and all the great toes of the

body politic were soon loosed to make their own epic actions stick. But before things had

spun out of control, the primary route to greatness was still semiotic.

The most consequential readings of men were the readings of would-be clients by

their prospective patrons. But the reverse are more common by far, and more available to

initial analysis. The reasons why are not hard to understand: even those among the

aristocratic elite who were lovers of literature were not wont to compose anything at all

for their clients. The system worked in one direction: up. When it came time for the

actual patron to do the reading of his or her inferiors, the positive responses came not in

text left for us to analyze, but in the much more desirable favors which were the object of

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the suits in the first place: bureaucratic positions, or stipends, or (in response to sonnets)

amorous favors.

One of the most obvious sites for the allegoresis of the great is in the emblem

tradition. Emblematics in England were crude compared to what was being done on the

Continent; after Italians pioneered the form, Dutch engravers were producing works of

outstanding artistic quality before the end of the 16th century. In contrast, the work done

decades later by Henry Peacham, probably England's best emblematist, were still stick-

figurish. However, England's lack of lasting merit in the graphic arts of the period does

not reduce the value of the form as a marker of cultural standards. And because emblems

were a strong hinge between the hermeticism of cultic-imagery and the patronage

conditions of the age, they contain invaluable examples of the allegoresis of persons.

This was not the case at the beginning of the English emblem tradition.104 The

strongest traditions inherited from the Continental emblematic tradition were of moral

exemplification, combined with the attempts to reproduce Egyptian hieroglyphs, as

promoted through the Italian Neo-Platonists after the 1505 publication of Horapollo in

Latin translation. Many of the English emblems were actually translations of emblem

books from elsewhere; even the original compositions often borrowed or simply

reproduced devices from other editions. One of the best examples comes from Spenser:

his Theatre for Worldlings (1569) was an anonymously published translation of Jan van

der Noot's Het theatre oft toon-neel, and Spenser's first publication. Those emblem-

books of the Elizabethan period which did not stress hieroglyphic aspects of the form

tended to moralism. Geoffrey Whitney's 1586 A Collection of Emblems, was perhaps the
104
For a summary of the history of emblematics in England, see chapter six of Barbara Lewalski,
Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979).

225
most prominent Elizabethan emblem book, and composed in circumstances ripe for the

use of a patronage-based allegoresis of persons: it was originally prepared, in manuscript,

as a gift for and patronage play toward Leicester. However, its addresses to Leicester and

others are often little more than conventional moralism which leaves little room for the

particularity of a tailored personal exegesis.

This changes. The 1618 Mirrour of Maiestie is an alchemy of allegoresis,

transmuting the leaden tradition of mystery-rhetoric into a relentless allegorical reading of

great persons of the Jacobean court. The author, identified only as "H.G." is thought to be

Henry Goodyere (one of James's privy gentlemen), partially on the strength of Ben

Jonson's eighty-fifth epigram, which commends Goodyere for his work of "few days'

sport" which seems to be the Mirrour. The next epigram, also addressed to Goodyere,

offers a telling conflation as its driving witticism:

When I would know thee Goodyere, my thought looks

Upon thy well-made choice of friends, and books;
Then do I love thee, and behold thy ends
In making thy friends books, and thy books friends:
Now, I must give thy life, and deed, the voice
Attending such a study, such a choice.105

The Mirrour's primary operation is a confusion between person and text: the work is

arranged largely as a pairing of heraldic arms on verso pages with original imprese on the

recto, each pair representing a particular man of power. H.G. would not have dared

called his addressees "friends" in this work, and it is not clear to what Jonson might be

referring, but the line gets at the semiotics of the work. Naturally, the work begins with

an address to James, and the sovereign is a solemn allegory for guarded exposition:

Those (mighty Soveraigne) are your Graces text,

105
Jonson, 61.

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 Right King of Heralds, not to any, next:
You might their mysticke learning blazon best,
But you reserve your knowledge unexprest:
As being most peculiar to you:
And yet because the people may allow
That which concerns your selfe: Let me to them
Unlock the value of this prizeless Iem:106

The rhetoric of mystic allegoresis is just as much in play with the deciphering of Prince

Henry's fleur-de-lis device: "Your Princedome's Ensigne here (Right-Royall Sir)/ May

pinion your up-soaring thoughts, and stirre/ Them to a pitch of loftier eminence,/ Then

can be reached by base vulgar sense." In each case, the actual list of secret virtues which

follows is unremarkable, a mess of flattering platitudes. Here, form trumps content: and

the redirection of the model from its basis in mystery to its usage in a patronage-ploy is

the most sustaining interest of the form.

The actual processes of allegorical semiotics in the book is constantly one of

twisting and rescuing, a need (like in all the old defensive allegoreses) to declare

significations in the most favorable possible light. It is a process of radical reading, as the

outer emblems of aristocratic decoration must be turned to the praise of the addressee. A

typical example is the emblem "To the Lord Zouch":

See, how a worthy spirit not imployde

May seeme to lookers on, or vaine, or voyd:
These golden peeces thus unshap't, uncoin'd,
Seeme as if worth and they were quite disjoyn'd:
When brasse or copper being stamp't or fram'd
Into the shape of plate, is oft misnam'd,
And oft mistaken for the purest gold:
But you are ever active, and unfold
Your pretious substance, that your selfe may take,
Honours true stampe, what's counterfeite forsake.107
106
H.G. The Mirrour of Maiestie (London, 1618) 1.
107
Mirrour, 46.

227
As it always is, allegoresis is a denial of the obvious face of interpretation. In this case,

the heraldic emblem featuring coins is itself a sign of a sign, and puns upon the semiotics

of worth. Somehow, the blankness of Zouch's sign (normally suggestive of both

roughness and forgery) is transmuted into the perfect representative of character, ever-

ready to receive the impress of the great. Non-signification is turned to signification, a

reading of the great in which sycophantic sympathy poses as readerly insight.

Henry Peacham's Minerva Britanna is not as relentlessly patron-oriented as was

the Mirrour of Maiestie; there are plenty of emblems done in the continental style, with

the pictorial element as a rebus of (not-so-)covert moral instruction. But he does not

shirk from readings of contemporaries (and mostly his social betters). There are emblems

dedicated to James, of course, and to Henry and to Princess Elizabeth; but also to

Salisbury, Wootton, Essex, Lennox, Henry Howard, Francis Bacon, several knights, and

even foreign sovereigns: Maurice Prince of Orange, Louis 13th, even Philip Xth. More

compelling than a list of patronage emblems, though, are the circumstances of the

collection's composition: the emblems were originally offered to Prince Henry as a gift,

illustrating the principles behind his father's Basilikon Doron. This was a fairly obvious

plea for patronage from Henry and from the higher luminaries in his circle (though an

unlucky one, offered in 1612, the same year as Henry's early death).

Peacham's emblems are the most interesting English examples of the form,

because he toys with the conventions of visual culture which others invoke thoughtlessly.

Earlier works were too simply moralistic or tried to reproduce too neatly the mystique of

hieroglyphs, to see much artistic innovation. Later and more publicly popular

emblematists, such as George Wither, were the writers of visual devotionals. Peacham

228
does a little bit more, and his innovations are particularly striking for what they add to the

tense reading of men. His emblem for an unidentified "Silvius" is a good example; the

text plays upon the paradox at the heart of personal emblems, the ostentatious display of

secrets:

A SHADIE Wood, pourtraicted to the sight,

With vncouth pathes, and hidden waies vnknowne:
Resembling CHAOS, or the hideous night,
Or those sad groues, by banke of ACHERON
With banefull Ewe, and Ebon ouergrowne:
Whose thickest boughes, and inmost entries are
Not peirceable, to power of any starre.

Thy Imprese SILVIUS, late I did devise,

To warne the what (if not) thou oughtst to be,
Thus inward close, vnsearch'd with outward eies
With thousand angles, light should neuer see:
For fooles that most are open-hearted free,
Vnto the world, their weakenes do bewray,
And to the net, the first themselues betray. (182)

The wood portrayed does indeed seem dense, impenetrable, but the notion of making an

emblem of such a personage is troubling. It is fine enough to hide oneself, but why put

hiddenness on display? Moreover, Peacham seems to slyly reveal Silvius even as he

counsels cloaking: the wood he describes is sad, baneful, chaotic, infernal, and while we

do not know Silvius's name or his circumstances, we can guess at his melancholy and

might suspect that his friend Peacham does him no service here. The usual reading of

personality in emblems is a claim of hermeneutical skill, that the author is wise enough to

decipher a legend of inner triumph from outer mystic icon. Here Peacham sees

depression and counsels the exploitation of the natural obscurities in the system of

interpersonal exegesis.

Or again, in the emblem to Princess Elizabeth, Peacham offers a blank frame

229
within his own impresa's frame. In crediting Elizabeth with his own inspiration, Peacham

declines to represent her; rather, he offers blankness as his own emblem. The princess,

rather than being interpreted in a well-meaning or psychosexual scopophilia, is offered

the authorship. Peacham has invited the royal personage to sit with him in a hall of

mirrors, and the reading of souls is made into a reflective enterprise. It is a remarkably

witty ploy for a seeker of powerful friends: by inviting Elizabeth to draw out his fate, he

begs demandingly, and never breaches decorum.108

108
The invitation to judgment was too powerful to resist for one (probably juvenile) reader: a copy of the
book in Harvard's Houghton Library has a couplet scribbled into the space which had been intentionally
left blank: "'All praise I will to Peacham give,/ you Muses! Let him ever live?' Oxynthes R.B. August
15, 1687"

230
3. Mysteries of Honor

by the sinister practice of certayne mechanicall Trades-

men, as Painters, Glasiers, Stone-cutters, Caruers, and
many other Artificers, trading in Armoury, who presuming,
without authoritie, to intermeddle with the marshalling of
Armes, the erecting of Monuments, whereon Armes are to
be fixed, Coats quartered, due differences to be onserued,
being mysteries of Honour...many great errors are daily
committed, to the great offense and preiudice of our ancient
Nobilitie and Gentrie of this Kingdome, and to the breeding
of many ambiguous doubts and questions...
--"By the right Honorable the Lords,
Commissioners for the Office of Earle Marshall of
ENGLAND," 1618.109

This edict is one of the more weaselly documents in Stuart legal history. The

official concern is with the usurpation of heraldic arms by the unentitled, and the fear is

that the confusion of social signs will lead to more dangerous tumults in the body politic.

But James was part of the problem: he had been selling the title of baronet for years and

the ever-increasing sales of ever-loftier titles remained and grew as an important revenue

stream for the cash-strapped monarch. Unsurprisingly, the primary method of regulating

arms which is promulgated in the edict is a new funerary fee, ranging from three pounds

and change for a gentleman, to forty-five for a Duke or Archbishop. Upon payment of the

fee, heraldic emblems would be recorded in a "Booke of Monuments" which could testify

to future ages about what arms descendants were entitled to wear. It is not difficult to

read the law as a cynical attempt to squeeze out a few more pounds for the exchequer

while also quashing the suspicion that the king was responsible for the confusion of social

order.

But social realities are not as much our concern as perceptions, and in the edict's
109
"By the right honorable the lords, commissioners for the office of Earl Marshall of England," 1618.
Early English Books Online (http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo, accessed 17 Dec 2002) Proquest.

231
view, it is the sinister mechanical tradesmen who are really to blame. These

representatives of the commercial order encroach upon the aristocratic order, moving

from their allotted sphere of manual labor into the ethereal realm of signs. The creation

of icons was a necessary part of the branding and promotional activities of shop-owners

in the urban centers of early modern Europe: specialists will be familiar with the

convention of title-page mini-advertisements that a given book or pamphlet was available

by the sign of this or that in whatever street.110 But when the sign-making skills of

artisans are transferred from their own commercial sphere to the realm of titles which

ought to be governed by the sovereign, edicts had to be passed.111

Authority had to be exercised precisely because heraldic arms are allegorical.

Portraits and statuary and miniatures are mimetic forms of representation: the likeness

declares the authenticity. But there is no hint of naturalness about the armorial sign: it

can only authentically represent the worth of a noble house through royal fiat, acting as

surely as an inspired exegete to declare official signification.

This seems to put things in terms alien to the culture. It does not. We are not

used to thinking of European allegory in terms of the patronage relations it enabled, and

this may be because the mystery-cult model is so vociferous. But the patronage model is

not silent: the concern with gentlemanly self-presentation which animated aspirants to

110
Richard Argall, who wrote the letter to the reader for Gerard Legh's The Accedens of Armorie (1562),
writes, "The common saying is, the Iuy bushe is hanged at the tauerne dore, to declare the wyne within.
But the narrow searchers of nyce and curious questions, affirme this the secrete cause. For that tree by
his natiue propertie, fashioned into a drinking vessell, plainely descryeth to the eye, the subtell arte of
the vintener in mingeling licoures: whiche els woulde lightly deceive the thirstie drinkers taste. And
therefore, where good wine is, according to the prouerbe, nedeth no bushe at all."
111
It probably did not help the artisans' case that by 1596 at the latest, all of the major London guilds had
commissioned heraldic arms for themselves. cf. "The armes of all the cheife corporatons [sic] of
England," 1596 Early English Books Online (http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo, accessed 17 Dec 2002)
Proquest.

232
worldly status was routinely and explicitly put in the terms of allegory. If the reading of

men had been reduced to a proverb, the allegorical interpretation of men should be no

surprise.

The most frequent references to Allegory in the abstract are listings in the various

rhetoric manuals. Most of these spin out from Quintilian as their primary influence, and

most confirm the standard nostrums about allegory-as-mystery that come out from the

classical inheritance. But George Puttenham rewrites the sociology of allegory with a

statement which is astounding if true:

The use of this figure is so large and his vertue of so great

efficacie as it is supposed no man can pleasantly utter and
perswade without it, but in effect is sure never or very
seldome to thrive and prosper in the world, that cannot
skilfully put in ure, in so much as not onely every common
Courtier, but also the gravest Counsellor, yea and the most
noble and wisest Prince of them all are many times
enforced to use it.112

Allegory is no longer a mode for those who hide themselves away from the world, and

propose communities of unworldly approbation. It is placed back into the center of the

world, in the midst of the halls of power, and is there so esteemed as to be basic to courtly

effectiveness. The reason is that power needs lies, and allegory stands at the head of a

host of tropes which say one thing and mean something else. Daniel Javitch has argued

the point forcefully in an extended and insightful chapter on the Arte: "Puttenham's

confident endorsement of deceptive verbal devices reflects the important support a

courtly code of dissimulation offers his rhetorical prescription."113

112
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie Ed. G.D. Wilcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1936) 186.
113
Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) 61.

233
 Even more interesting than Puttenham is Spenser's explanation of the allegorical

structure of The Faerie Queene in his "Letter to Raleigh" What Spenser seems to offer

Raleigh is a summarizing allegoresis, a record which lays out the true meanings of the

poem, beyond misconstruction, by the authority of the poet's own unique insight into his

work. But it is really the opposite of allegoresis. The depths of the dark conceit are

indeed dark, but not dark enough: Spenser implies that there is merely fictional surface

where the hints of controversial depths are perceived. It is a dis-allegoresis, a considered

flattening of his own work conducted under the guise of an initiation.

To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt,

which had rather haue good discipline deliuered plainly in
way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they vse, then
thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises. But such,
me seeme, should be satisfide with the vse of these dayes,
seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing
esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to
commune sence. 114

This is an odd avenue to self-justification. One might think that allegory might be

justified in the terms of eternity, as it often has been. Contradictory are the twin claims

that allegory hides truths from the unworthy and also elevates the unworthy by teaching

them to read more closely, but they are alike in being structural arguments good for any

age. Allegory, by what it is, ought to have certain properties which are beneficial in any

imaginable social context.

Spenser eschews eternity: he claims the sanction of the times and the mores. All

things are accounted by their shows. Nothing is esteemed that is not delightful to the

114
"Commune sence" is not the modern concept of a quotidian wisdom, but rather a specific term in
Renaissance psychology (taken from Aristotle) which holds that the five senses are all mediated and ordered
by a "common sense" before being passed on to cognition and ratiocination. It seems that Spenser uses the
phrase to imply pleasure to all the senses in unison.

234
senses. Such a defense springs from a tragic vision of the times, and the clodliness of

those who would wish for plain instruction without embellishment is renounced only

wistfully. It is also intensely personal: Spenser is defending himself from "gealous

opinions and misconstructions." The long poem is filled with the reading of men; no

surprise that he wishes to steer readings of himself. Not just through self-allegoresis,

through composition as well. The world loves colors and shows, so Spenser has come

bearing before himself a long, technicolor extravaganza.

The poem is the poet's textual front, the prime attribute of his self-presentation to

power. It is also a training manual for others in those elevated fora: "The generall end

therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle

discipline: Which for that I conceiued shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being

coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather

for variety of matter, then for profite of the ensample." In early modern England, there

were plenty of "How to" books in circulation, from treatises on mechanical engineering

and agriculture, to sports and swimming, to cooking and child-rearing. For elite males,

there was also the genre of gentlemen's manuals which flourished until the 1630's, and

The Faerie Queene is a sublimation of the genre into high art. A sublimation, and a

brutal dig at the conditions which created the genre. Some of the manuals teach virtue as

the gentleman's proper complement, and some teach self-presentation. Spenser's poem is

of the former sort, and we are given legends of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity,

Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy (this last radically redefined, as I will argue below).

But everywhere throughout, these virtues struggle to make themselves known past the

gealous opinions and misconstructions of Allegory-land.

235
 The dichotomy between virtue and presentation which characterizes the genre

requires an extended examination.

The first gentleman's manual of significance was (as so much else) an Italian

import, Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, and it ran through five Latin editions and four

editions of the Thomas Hoby translation between 1561 and 1612. Castiglione's was only

the first gentleman's manual of influence, not the first. According to the STC, there were

at least two previous works by English authors: an anonymous 1492 work, The Booke of

Curtesye now lost except for a copy of its final page, in the Bodleian library; and

Humfrey Braham's The Institucion of a Gentleman, of 1555, imprinted again 1568.

Braham's work does briefly address semiotic issues of proper ornament for the courtier,

but for the most part, the book is confused and trite, a recitation of moralistic advice

combined with justifications of hierarchy in the abstract. Castiglione's advance is to be

smarter. It is a philosophical dialogue, and the discussion rises at the end to a meditation

on love which recalls the Symposium. Would-be courtiers are encouraged to be

Neoplatonists, and the work affirms a standard mystical allegoresis of texts, but there is

very little that explicitly encourages the transferrence of the Platonic mysteries to the

reading of men. Texts are dark, but people are open books, not veiled and not

particularly difficult to read. There is little opposition to the viewpoint put forward in the

fourth book that "doth very seldom an ill soule dwell in a beautifull bodie. And therefore

is the outwarde beautie a true signe of the inwarde goodnesse"115 which is, in

interpersonal exegesis, tantamount to an injunction to read literally. There is no hint that

115
Castiglione, 309.

236
the outer visage might hide a meaning other than what it seems to say: noble appearances

are the outcome of noble natures, and there is not much difficulty in the expression of

inner truths. There is some discussion of what we have been calling a personal semiotics:

the accomplishments of the courtier are decorative markers of worth. But for the most

part, there are few worries that the courtier will be misread, slandered, alone to

contemplate his illegible worth. Castigllione's first English imitator took from him this

idea of courtly decoration, though with even less depth: Simon Robson's The Courte of

Civill Curtesie (1577) is little more than a selection of convenient phrases with which to

beautify one's verbal presence at court.

After a lull upon James's ascension, a renewal in the genre of gentleman's manuals

began in the 1620's, and the clear favorites among this literature were Henry Peacham's

The Compleat Gentleman, and Richard Brathwaite's The English Gentleman (later

supplemented by The English Gentlewoman). Both works continue to invoke the terms

of Neoplatonic allegoresis; Braithwaite, for example, opens his epistle dedicatory to

Wentworth:

Vertue the greatest Signall and Symbol of Gentry: is rather

expressed by goodness of Person, than by greatnesse of
Place. For, howsoeuer the blear-ey'd vulgar honour, the
purple more than the person, descent more than desert, title
than merit: that adulterate Gentility, which degenerats from
the worth of her Ancestors, derogates likewise from the
birth of her Ancestors. And these be such, whose infant
effeminacie, youthfull delicacie, or native libertie hath
estranged them from the knowledge of morall or divine
mysteries.116

For Brathwaite, however, this is about the extent of his entanglement with the mysteries

of personal worth, and the discrimination of proper signs. As the passage suggests, he is
116
Richard Braithwaite, The English Gentleman (London: 1630). "Epistle Dedicatory" 1-2.

237
concerned with virtue above all, and the majority of the book consists of a very traditional

moralism, offering instruction on how young gentlemen ought to behave. Because

Brathwaite advocates virtue as entirely sufficient, there is little need to discuss the

gentlemanly complements of lineage or titles or apparel, and the issue of how to position

one's virtue so that it is properly understood is simply ignored.

Brathwaite's work was published in 1630, eight years after the first edition of

Peacham's Compleat Gentleman, and the end of the epistle to the reader, he explicitly

disclaims any imitation. The works are alike "rather in Title than Tenour, Name than

Nature."117 This is largely correct. Peacham would not disagree with Brathwaite's

morals, but his focus is on the display of gentility, the learned accomplishments that are

proper to the young gentleman of taste and breeding. Peacham has little to say about the

cultivation of virtue, because he takes for granted that his readers possess it; and while his

work is no rake's manual, it is concerned above all with the presentation, rather than the

virtue itself: how does one use the right signs to display worth to the world? Peacham

cares about the reading of men, and the puzzle for him is how to overcome the inevitable

misreadings which cause virtuous men to go unrecognized.

The key is ornamentation: activities and abilities are signs of breeding, and one

must pick up cultured habits. Much of the substance of Peacham's work is dedicated to

overviews of those activities which would serve as appropriate ornamentation: clothing,

travel, military arts, rhetoric (his father, the elder Henry Peacham, was the author of a

popular rhetorical work, The Garden of Eloquence). Even when he advocates the use of a

rhetorical plain style in speaking and writing, the reason is, paradoxically, ornamental: the

117
Brathwaite, "To the knowing Reader," 2.

238
plain style best shows one to be open and frank, and the simplicity of style betokens an

inner virtuous austerity.

Curiously, many of the ornamental accomplishments Peacham urges are described

themselves in the terms of personal allegoresis. The practice of a gentlemanly sort of

reading is recommended, not for the sake of gaining knowledge, but because that

knowledge can act as "ornaments...above the robes and riches of the most magnificent

princes."118 Art appreciation is another valuable pursuit: the book is dedicated to the son

of Lord Arundel, who had an excellent collection of statuary, and Peacham takes pains to

expound the glory of learning the field. Not surprisingly, the task of appreciation is one

of personal allegoresis: as one beholds a statue, one ought to be in the company of a

learned gentleman, who can read the tokens used conventionally for each figure of myth

or scripture, and expound the hidden ideas which each figure represents. Something

similar goes for the art of numismatics: it is a pleasant enough thing to hold the objects

used by the ancients, and to have from their obverse sides accurate representations of the

old architecture. But most of all, "it is no small satisfaction to an ingenuous eye to

contemplate the faces and heads, and in them the characters of all these famous emperors,

captains, and illustrious men whose actions will be ever admired, both for themselves and

the learning of the pens that writ them."119 Once again, coin and personality are merged:

one reads value from the face, and outer form is understood as a guarantee of inner purity.

The mechanics of the aristocratic seme run through the work, in example after

118
Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in
London. Ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1962) Ch. 6.

119
Peacham, Ch. 12.

239
example such as these. Much of this is haphazard, a barrage of unsystematized

assumptions about the way that personal worth is to be made legible. Peacham does,

however, offer at least one organized field of conscious and deliberate ornament which

aspiring gentleman can appropriate: heraldic arms. Three chapters of the work are

devoted to the exposition of armory, and they constitute the longest discussion of any of

the aspects of gentlemanliness. It is reasonable to give the field attention, for it was one

of the few recognized and explicit ways in which one expected the fraught semiotics of

personal worth to be the framework of deliberate composition:

how should we give nobility her true value, respect, and

title without notice of her merit? And how may we guess
her merit without these outward ensigns and badges of
virtue which have anciently been accounted sacred and
precious, withal discern and know an intruding upstart,
shot up with the last night's mushroom, from and ancient-
descended and deserved gentleman...?120

Of course, Peacham is quite well aware of the abuse of heraldic arms, and is acerbic

toward the multiplication of arms and their easy distribution for those who deserve none.

He is, however, hopeful that the 1618 edict cited at the beginning of this section would

cure the abusive multiplication of the marks of merit. (Sadly, the edict failed: heraldic

arms are, predictably enough, now sold online; and outrage at unrepresentative signs of

worth is reserved for university grade inflation.)

By the time of Elizabeth's reign, heraldry was seen as an old art in disarray:

nobility were familiar with their hereditary crests, but could often not interpret their

significance, or trace the lineage of forms. Visual records of arms were scattered all

across the great houses and cemetaries of the country, but they had not been catalogued.

120
Peacham, ch. 15.

240
Whatever native writing had been done on the subject, there was little in print: only a

chapter in three editions of Juliana Berners's Boke of Hawkynge and Huntynge, in 1486,

1496, and 1518. It was long after the study of arms had been popularized again by other

writers that Berners's work was reprinted again in 1595; and so any enthusiasts at the

beginning of Elizabeth's reign (there were very few) had to rely upon French and Latin

works, few of which bothered to mention specific English examples.

As is well-known, the rising tide of nationalism in the late 16th century stimulated

broad interest in local history, and interest in the lineage of arms and monuments

followed apace. The publishing boom on heraldic subjects which followed can be

partially accounted for by this antiquarian bent in the culture: the authors of books usually

claim to have studied a broad range of continental treatises in researching the theory of

armorial symbolism, but they also often claim to have conducted extensive field research,

visiting various great houses across the country, in order to gain accurate reproductions of

the arms held at each. But the status of heraldic arms as markers of worth and as

allegorical guarantors of social hierarchy are stressed even more than the antiquarian

aspects. Writers build up semiotic systems of heraldic arms, with meanings assigned to

each color, emblem, division of the field (e.g., into quarters or eighths, etc.), and motto,

as well as to their combinations. Even from Bernars there is assumption that the orders of

heraldic arms are important allegories of the hierarchies of the natural as well as the

social world, and that the system of stratified honors was thus divinely instituted at the

foundation of the world. But this assumption becomes more explicit in later works. John

Ferne begins his The Blazon of Gentrie (1586) with a narration of the divine institution of

hierarchy among Adam's sons, and then moves on to assert that the creation is not merely

241
operated hierarchically, but honored hierarchically as well: "Thus hath the God of nature,

caused her to forme some creatures to honor, others for dishonor: some to shine with

nobilitie, others obscured, with ignobility." John Gwillim, whose Display of Heraldrie

(1610) was largely a systematization of the great mass of heraldic theory of previous

decades, compares his labors to those of God.121

Of all of the works on heraldic arms, however, the most theoretically rigorous is

Edmund Bolton's Elements of Armories, published in 1610, the same year as Gwillim's

more popular Display. Bolton's founding argument for the importance of heraldic arms is

"that the notion of ensignement is universal, and natural."122 What Bolton understands

by "ensignement" is what we have been calling the semiotics of personality: a process by

which societies devise signs to hang upon the outside of individual bodies, both for the

purpose of announcing some particular characteristic of that individual, and also for the

sake of maintaining visible markers of social difference. Bolton's method is

anthropological: he refers to various sources about the practices of European and non-

European cultures (the latter, both via passages of ancient ethnography, and also through

the reports from contemporary exploration). He argues that not only are the semiotic

processes identical, but the signs adopted by widely disparate cultures are even often

identical; and since this so across cultures with no cultural relationship to Europe, the

121
"How difficult a thing it is to produce forme, out of things shapelesse and deformed, and to prescribe
limits to things confused, there is none but may easily perceiue, if hee shall take but a sleight view of
the Chaos-like contemporation of things not onely diuers but repugnant in nature, hitherto
concorporated in the generous profession of Heraldry: as the formes of the pure Celestiall bodies, mixt
with grosse Terrestrials; Earthly Animals, with Watery; Sauage beasts, with Tame; Whole-footed
beasts, with Diuided; Reptiles, with things Gressible; Fowles of prey, with Home-bred; these againe,
with Riuer fowles; Aery Insecta, with Earthly; also things Naturall, with Artificiall; Arts Liberall, with
Mechanicall; Military, with Rusticall; and Rusticke with Ciuil." Gwillim, "To the Courteous Reader"
122
Edmund Bolton, Elements of Armories B7.

242
gradations of nobility which are identical everywhere must be built into the fabric of the

world, rather than being the subjective observations of fallible cultures. One of his

examples is an armorial crest of a lion, supposedly from China, and reproduced from

Camden's copy of a text by Marcus Velserus (Marcus Welser, 1558-1614):

it neuer proceeded from imitation, but from wise nature, or

more immediately, and truly from almighty God himselfe,
as planting in his best mortall worke...certain sparkes of the
diuine intelligence to Enlumin the Microcosm. By the
onely light whereof, nations most distant touch often vppon
the same thinges, without hauing the least correspondence
one with the other. As these of CHINA doe not onely
concurre with vs in the notion of ensignement, but also in
the regularity, and whole complement of Armes.123

Heraldry's guarantees under natural law are deduced from its universality; its divine

institution is assumed from its status as natural law. Bolton's is a more systematic version

of the assumptions of all the writers on heraldry in this period of its faddish celebration:

God has not merely guaranteed the orderly stratification of society, but also provided for

its stable demarcation via a system of honorable signs whose referents were guaranteed.

This is a logocentrism in which the sign is a shield, and the indwelling fullness of a

referent happens to be the noble and virtuous and manly spirit of this or that aristocrat.

Fanciers of heraldry were not the only claimants to God, and most of them take

enough space out of their discussion to lash out against Puritans everywhere. The

armory-books were high-culture defenses of the established social order, supposedly

established by God but certainly upheld by kings and their edicts. Even before they

became openly rebellious and anti-monarchical, the more radical sects were always

disinclined to accept the systems of signs promulgated by worldly powers. Ornamental

123
Bolton, 42-43.

243
displays of wealth and prestige were not ordained by God, but were rather foolish

boastings of the pride of life, empty and vain shows by those not fully conscious of their

need for grace.

Those who tried to work their way up in the system, even when they despised

Puritan faith, usually ran up against the hard truths of Puritan semiotic skepticism. No

seeker of patronage ever felt himself unworthy; no seeker of patronage was ever allowed

explicitly to claim worthiness. For many, the only viable solution was allegory.

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4. The Suitor as Text

In the science of heraldic arms, the word "blazon" had a variety of significations.

The blazon could be any prose interpretation of a given coat of arms; it could be the

motto which acted as a pithy exegesis upon the visual image of the arms; or it could even

be the visual forms themselves in their function of cataloguing the bearer's inner qualities.

The constant is the hermeneutical function: arms constitute a series of nested exegeses,

with the pictorial emblem manifesting the soul of the person, the motto revealing the

inner significance of the pseudo-hieroglyphic imprese, and the prosaic labors of the

armorist cataloguing the secret truths for general approbation within the social order.

Any student who passes through the usual run of English surveys will now be

most familiar with the word "blazon" as a technical term for the poetic listing (usually in

sonnets) of the wondrous body parts of a given love-interest. The feminist critique of

blazonry is quite justified, and the disturbing, dissecting power of the male gaze in the

Petrarchan mode is quite properly emphasized in education on sonnetry. It is simply not a

broad enough critique, if limited to a gender-dynamic: one must see the larger

methodologies of power and interpretation of which the Petrarchan scopophilia seems to

be a phenomenal expression. The blazoning of the lady was a male attempt at control,

and it was also more than that, a gendered example of the broad-based semiotics of

personality.

The usefulness of sonnets (at least those of the Elizabethan craze) is their lyric

voice, their intensely concentrated first-person sensibility which drives the form through

its witty switchbacks. This is no register of honesty: the intensity is a genre convention

like any other, and is no guarantee of any actual emotion bubbling within the poet. And

245
yet this possibility of insincerity is exactly the problem that motivates the repeated

professions of frustration with the reading of persons. When one's economic, political,

and sexual status is dependent on being read correctly, then the great necessity is always

how to prove the validity of whatever rhetorical signs one can offer. If most rhetoric is

insincere, and most signs empty, then what is the client-suitor to offer within the resulting

climate of hermeneutical suspicion?

Produced at the heart of a culture mad with patronage, the suits offered in even the

most ostensibly private proposals replicate more official power dynamics; and this fact is

nothing new to scholarship.124 Most obviously, a great deal of the language of Petrarchan

submission is directed specifically at Elizabeth. Spenser's Amoretti 74 is a well-known

example of the kind, as it harps on the name Elizabeth to honor the poet's mother, queen,

and fiancé (Elizabeth Boyle): "Ye three Elizabeths for ever live,/ That three such graces

[body, fortune, and mind] did unto me give." (13-14) That sonnet works from an obvious

trope on power, though, like certain parts of the Faerie Queene, it seems to elevate the

monarch only to second place in the poet's affections.

There are, however, better (if less-known) examples which do much more to trope

on the reading of the Lady, and the hopes for a sympathetic reading in return. Fulke

Greville's sonnet 55 (short by a quatrain) is a good example:

Cynthia, because your Hornes looke diuerse wayes,

Now darkned to the East, now to the West;
Then at Full-glorie once in thirty dayes,
Sense doth beleeue that Change is Natures rest.
Poore earth, that dare presume to iudge the skye;
Cynthia is euer round, and neuer varies,
124
Arthur Marotti has provided the most thorough overview of the political motivations implicated in
Elizabethan sonnettry, and the argument of this section is in debt to his work. Arthur F. Marotti, "'Love
is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order" ELH 49.2 (Summer 1982) 296-428.

246
 Shadowes and distance doe abuse the eye,
And in abused sense truth oft miscarries:
Yet who this language to the People speaks,
Opinions empire senses idoll breaks.

In this case, the standard identity of Elizabeth as Cynthia is put to the service of rebutting

the quite common dissatisfaction with the queen's (supposedly) vacillating style of

governance. One would have to call the linkage of moon, queen, and classical persona,

"allegorical", and yet there is no darkness and mystery about the trope. That mystery is

displaced from the image onto the person of the queen: she always rests in her

unchanging fullness, but the masses are deceived by their inability to perceive truly.

Greville knows his science, has the penetration of vision beyond sight, and can interpret

"Cynthia" correctly in her virtues, but finds her fullness impossible to explicate:

iconoclastic speaking of the secret would require smashing an empire. Sadly, Greville as

so many others felt that Cynthia would not return the favor of sympathetic reading: "Why

cast you clouds on your sweet looking eyes?/ Are you afraid they shew me too much

pleasure?" complains sonnet 17.

Spenser is more relevant when he is more self-conscious about the act of poetic

composition. Sonneteers were presenting themselves as texts, and their sexual success

was folded into their textual reception. Most first poems in the sonnet cycles are heavily

self-conscious, and therefore most explicit about the poet's stakes in a favorable reading.

Samuel Daniel, for example, wants in his opening sonnet to trope upon his love as a

financial record, but cannot avoid focusing the metaphor on the bookishness of the

ledger: his imperative verbs which tell Delia how to treat him are "Looke", "Looke",

"see", "Examine", "crosse", and "Reade". Spenser, in his first, addresses his own lines in

terms that highlight the irony of the situation:

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 And happy lines, on which with starry light,
Those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
And reade the sorowes of my dying spright,
Written with teares in harts close bleeding book.

The lines are happy, because they will be regarded, and they will be the manifestation in

language of the poet's inner love-angst: but will reading lead to understanding and favor?

Again, in Amoretti 43, he seems to be playing Paridell to his Lady's Hellenore:

Yet I my hart with silence secretly

Will teach to speak, and my just cause to plead:
And eke mine eies with meeke humility,
Love learned letters to her eyes to read.
Which her deep wit, that true harts thought can spell,
Will soone conceive, and learne to construe well.

But one of the most telling moments in the Amoretti comes in 28-29, because they seem

to be drawn from a real incident, and also seem to replicate perfectly the weird reading of

persons in his surreal epic. Allegorical characters have their typical marks: appropriate

attire, meaningful names, a branch of this or that symbolic flower, a tool or a weapon or a

shield with more ornamental than practical use. And Elizabethan courtiers had their

typical tokens as well: a sash or a lady's glove pinned to the joust-armor, ornamental

shields to distinguish their inner worth, noble names that preceded them, a sprig of

rosemary or fennel or rue. Spenser, somehow, bore a badge of laurel leaf, and his lady

has the power to raise his hopes by taking her sign upon herself:

The laurell leafe, which you this day doe weare,

Gives me great hope of your relenting mynd:
For since it is the badge which I doe beare,
Ye bearing it doe seeme to me inclind (Amoretti 28)

But any sign is open to perversion, misreading or lisibility which redefines the power

relationships of such acts of marking and reading:

See how the stubborne damzell doth deprave

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 My simple meaning with disdaynefull scorne:
And by the bay which I unto her gave,
Accoumpts my selfe her captive quite forlorne. (Amoretti 29)

This is the great fear of life within a world of patronage: that one's simple, honest, inner

virtues will be depraved in the act of evaluation, and the reward-deserving self be dragged

along with the inefficacious text into rejection and enthrallment. Here, the fear is simply

transposed to the language of love, where it can serve as effective mere metaphor; but the

power of power lingers.

Shakespeare would have reason to forego the common fascination with reading of

people. In his own age, he was as socially distant from the centers of power as any poet

of importance, and his sonnets do not seem to hope for much. Most sonneteers oscillate

wildly between bitter plaint and exultant panegyric; Shakespeare hovers in pessimism,

and his pleas often have a hopelessness about them.

Yet he does not yield up the possibilities of self-textualization; he only seems to

be more of a sad realist, morose in the recognition that readings go awry. Fear and

confession of inability to communicate precede his famous injunction:

O let my books be then the eloquence,

And domb presagers of my speaking brest,
Who pleade for loue, and look for recompence,
More then that tonge that more hath more exprest.
O learne to read what silent loue hath writ,
To heare wit eies belongs to loues fine wiht.

The problem is that the beloved would not merely need to read, but to learn to read.

Elsewhere, he attests to incessant writing and reading: "What's in the braine that Inck may

character,/ Which hath not figur'd to thee my true spirit," (108.1-2) but here, the books

may not even be available. The text in question is a play (the speaker opens by naming

himself an "unperfect actor" unable to get his lines out), and Shakespeare does not
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necessarily have real or figurative volumes to offer.

Nonetheless, when Shakespeare gives way to the full rush of pessimism, he still

invokes the same language. Sonnet 49 invokes legal proceedings as its ultimate image,

but the process leading up to the suit is visual:

Against that time (if euer that time come)

When I shall see thee frowne on my defects,
When as thy loue hath cast his vtmost summe,
Cauld to that audite by aduis'd respects,
Against that time when thou shalt strangely passe,
And scarcely greete me with that sunne thine eye,
When loue conuerted from the thing it was
Shall reasons finde of setled grauitie.
Against that time do I insconce me here
Within the knowledge of mine owne desart,
And this my hand, against my selfe vpreare,
To guard the lawfull reasons on thy part,
To leaue poore me, thou hast the strength of lawes,
Since why to loue, I can alledge no cause.

The searching gaze of the beloved is fated to pass over the surface of the aging

Shakespeare, finding no signs of worth remaining. The only solution is to "insconce"

himself within the interior of the self, on the back side of the withered signs of desart.

Here, the speaker convinces himself of interior worthlessness to match the exterior.

Elsewhere, as in sonnet 69 (where, Qu Yuan-like, distinctions are between fragrant floral

tokens and the warning stink of weeds), he is aware that the same dichotomy of inner and

outer is frequently split and useless to indication of worth. The very next sonnet

elaborates: there can be no good connection between outer reception and inner worth;

"The ornament of beauty is suspect," and hence slander is praise. The turmoil and

frequent deflation of Shakespeare's sonnets comes not because he believes the unkind

readings given his person, but because he knows that, even absent genuine reasons for

self-doubt, he would have no solid way of representing those hypothetical virtues to either
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the youth or the dark lady.

However, the fullest and most enlightening sonnet-explorations of how to read the

figure of the textualized Lady are in the first great English cycle. Later echoes of the

trope have been useful in introducing the mechanics of the allegoretical sonnet, but one

must go backward to Sidney in order to observe the high mark of how this hermeneutical

anxiety could pervade the form. Sidney, of course, denies figuration: "You that with

allegory's curious frame/ Of others' children changelings use to make,/ With me those

pains, for God's sake, do not take" (Astrophil and Stella 28) but this is absurd on the face

of it: "Astrophil" and "Stella" are not allegorical personages? And, in fact, there is plenty

of the rhetoric of allegory and allegoresis within the collection: the seventh sonnet, for

example, talks of the blackness of Stella's eyes as a veil to keep the over-brilliance of

inner truth from blinding the world (the same language Spenser uses to justify hiding

Elizabeth in the veil of "Gloriana" [FQ II.proem.5]). The thirty-fourth sonnet has the

speaker tell himself to keep his words "close" to avoid offense or embarrassment; and

closes by suggesting that some readers will find these close words' true referent to be

Stella's overmastering powers. The Defense of Poetry is strongly in favor of allegoresis,

and is happy to contend that poetry reaches its heights when concealing sacred mysteries;

we might not automatically aver to Astrophil's suggestion that the sonnets should not be

taken as philosophical instruction. If nothing else, the well-remarked puns on "rich"

("Stella" is the alter ego of Penelope Devereux Rich) tell us that Sidney was playing

literary games with his readers, offering verbal keys to divide the knowers from the

ignorant.

Sidney's moves to deny his own rhetoric are frequent enough. In the third sonnet,

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he eschews poetry and ornament: "in Stella's face I read/ What love and beauty be; then

all my deed/ But copying is, what in her nature writes" as if this were not in itself a trope.

In fact, of all the period sonnets which try their hand at the deep blazon, the sympathetic

reading of the beloved, this initial collection is the most thorough and most self-

consciously textual. Stella is consistently read as a text, and her virtues are consistently

understood allegorically from those outward marks. Sonnet 58 plays with images of the

orator and political power, and Sidney's oratory is read right off of Stella; number 63

parses Stella via the rules of grammar; 71 turns revises the "book of nature" trope into a

book of Stella which naturally and easily tells of her inner virtues. Sonnet 11 is perhaps

most convincing parallel of Stella to a book: Love is chastised for reading Stella as a

child reads a book, getting only the surface of a text, never penetrating to "the fruit of

writer's mind" (i.e., never leaving the adornment of Stella's body to affect her heart).

Even if Stella is a book, the curious framings of allegoresis which Sidney denounces

elsewhere are, at times, useful in extracting a favorable reading from Stella's text:

Hope, art thou true, or dost thou flatter me?

Doth Stella now begin with piteous eye
The ruins of her conquest to espy;
Will she take time, before all wracked be?
Her eyes' speech is translated thus by thee:
But fail'st thou not, in phrase so heavenly-high?
Look on again, the fair text better try;
What blushing notes dost thou inmargin see?
What sighs stol'n out, or killed before full born?
Hast thou found such, and such-like arguments?
Or art thou else to comfort me forsworn?
Well, how so thou interpret the contents,
I am resolved thy error to maintain,
Rather than by more truth to get more pain. (Astrophil and Stella 67)

Usually, misreading is reserved for the complaint: it is the Lady or the patron who

misreads the suitor/client. Here, the work of wit is not to invent a new trope of
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misreading intent but to capture deliberate misreading for the action of the poor poet, turn

it into an opiate for the palliation of rejection.

The power of the beloved's fixing gaze is hinted at in that sonnet ("Doth Stella

now begin with piteous eye/ The ruins of her conquest to espy;") but not elaborated upon.

Elsewhere, however, Sidney leaves no doubt that Astrophil is just as textual a personage

as is Stella, and just as locked within a hermeneutical game. From the very first sonnet,

the self-referential strain of the cycle is introduced: Astrophil is stuck with love which

needs somehow to be expressed, and the great trick is how to convert emotion into

acceptable words. Eventually, rhetoric is (with a flourish) rejected in favor of the plain

style: "'Fool,' said my muse to me; 'look in thy heart, and write.'" The anxiety about self-

expression lasts through the length of the collection, and he offers contradictory answers.

In one place he remarks, "My words, I know, do well set forth my mind" (44), and in

another the thoughts "swell and struggle forth...So that I cannot choose but write my

mind,/ And cannot choose but put out what I write." (50)

The tension over not knowing how one can use rhetoric effectively while

pretending to a simple honesty, ultimately puts these love lyrics into the realm of the

political. "What may words say, or what may words not say,/ Where truth itself must

speak like flattery?" (Astrophil and Stella 35) The place where truth itself must speak

like flattery is a court, and court-imagery suffuses the collection. Penelope Rich was a

woman of the court, and the "riddle" of sonnet 37 naturally places this "nymph" in

"Aurora's court." According to 54, the other nymphs at this transparent allegorical court

are skeptical of Astrophil's devotion, and there is considerable chattering about his

intentions. The reason his intentions are doubted? Precisely because he does not know or

253
use the signs in which love is conventionally expressed. He wears neither Stella's colors,

nor any lock of her hair, and can't manage the right rhetoric, but of course he protests his

sincerity by insisting that internal referents make their own signs: "[Cupid's] right badge

is but worn in the heart." Elsewhere, Cupid's contrasting skill in his own language is cast

in the form of an allegory:

Phoebus was judge between Jove, Mars, and Love,

Of those three gods, whose arms the fairest were.
Jove's golden shield did eagle sables bear,
Whose talents held young Ganymede above:
But in vert field Mars bare a golden spear
Which through a bleeding heart his point did shove.
Each had his crest: Mars carried Venus' glove,
Jove on his helm the thunderbolt did rear.
Cupid then smiles, for on his crest there lies
Stella's fair hair, her face he makes his shield,
Where roses gules are borne in silver field.
Phoebus drew wide the curtains of the skies
To blaze these last, and sware devoutly then,
The first, thus matched, were scarcely gentlemen.(Astrophil and Stella 13)

Sidney uses the technical terms for heraldic arms with ease, and he was himself a

composer of heraldic arms; there is a representation of one set of arms Sidney made for

himself, printed on the fifth page of Thomas Lant's engraving of Sidney's funeral

procession.125 Of course, the vocabulary of love and that of heroic heraldry go easily

enough together: chivalric culture was in a late high bloom, and this sonnet's tale reads

very much like accounts of the Elizabethan tilts.

Sonnets outlasted their craze. They did, however, disperse from the tight core of

generic conventions which had been operative in the 1590's. The form loosened up; there

are many pieces labeled "sonnets" in the decades before the civil war which seem to be

simply irregular love songs. And when the form was maintained, the themes were often
125
Thomas Lant, Sequitur celebritas & pompa funeris 1587.

254
abandoned: love-petitions and rivalries and covert pleas for patronage often gave way to

occasional verse, satire, philosophical meditations, elegies, and devotional works. With

this dissipation in the form, the tensions of reading are frequently emptied out or ignored,

because the sonnets are not being put to the same uses. When blazon turns into anti-

blazon, as in Nicholas Hookes's "Mock-sonnet"

...when thou blow'st thy snottie nose,

The bellows of thy nostril blowes
The fire of love into a flame,
And th'oile of Arm-pits feeds the same,
Thy legges, breast, lips and eyes inslave me,
But if behinde thee once I come,
Ond view the mountains of thy bum,
Oh then
I'm mad to have thee126 (59-67)

then the catalogue of outer parts is simply a flat surface, and the real referent is not the

goodness or ugliness of the soul, but the silliness of the genre and its rhetoric. Still, there

are occasional invocations of the old tension. Hookes's irony renounces the old method

for the sake of jest, but Donne infuses a serious irony into the act of personal legibility:

If faithfull soules be alike glorifi'd

As Angels, then my fathers soul doth see,
And adds this even to full felicitie,
That valiantly I hels wide mouth o'rstride:
But if our mindes to these soules be descry'd
By circumstances, and by signes that be
Apparent in us, not immediately,
How shall my mindes white truth by them be try'd?
They see idolatrous lovers weepe and mourne,
And vile blasphemous Conjurers to call
On Jesus name, and Pharasaicall
Dissemblers feigne devotion. Then turne
O pensive soule, to God, for he knowes best
Thy true griefe, for he put it in thy breast. (Sonnet 8)

The idea of divine omniscience which extends to the whole reading of men is hardly a
126
Nicholas Hookes, "A Mock-Sonnet", Amanda 1653.

255
new sentiment; it predates Christianity. But the rhetoric of complete legibility in God

was gaining strength in the period, driven often by Puritan reaction against the claims to

exclusivity of internal worth which resonated through the upper echelons of the social

hierarchy. Donne still actually uses the old rhetoric of inner worth, though he radically

revises it into the terms of Christian repentance. But the semiotic pessimism shared by

Shakespeare is supplemented by a dour sort of hope: even the blessed dead might misread

him, but God at least will always correctly interpret the soul beyond whatever tokens its

works have left it.

Donne's extreme acts of praise-reading come outside the form of the sonnet, and

the continuing life of the trope outside the strict confines of the sonnet form can be seen

in other of his lyrics. Something of the Petrarchan ethic is infused into the two

Anniversary poems, composed for the first two anniversaries of the death of Elizabeth

Drury, a teenage girl and family friend. Donne did not know Drury particularly well; the

poems were likely begun as a show of sympathy. And the poems are consequentially

vague about the object of their praise: there is no sense of the life of this girl which makes

it into the poems, no data on her habits or passions or appearance. She is a vague cipher

of transcendent goodness, identified always only as "She" and quite understandably read

allegorically by generations of critics as one or another of the virtues or spiritual realities

of the Protestant cosmos. But the case for a perfectly allegorical Elizabeth Drury is hard

to maintain; ultimately she is more like Spenser's knights, a roughly-drawn example of

the virtues. Or, better yet, as Barbara Lewalski has argued, she is the type of the

regenerate soul;127 and in a 1612 letter to George Garrard, he suggests that the praises
127
Barbara Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1977) 243-47.

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offered to Elizabeth Drury could apply to any woman who made herself fit for them. In

confronting the poem, we are thus left with an object of praise that is figured as a

particular real person, but without any available details to convince us of her particularity.

Donne is able to invoke the prevalent trope of the textual Lady, as in these examples from

the Second Anniversarie:

shee hath, ever since to Heaven shee came,

(In a far fairer print,) but read the same...
shee tooke,
(taking herselfe) our best, and worthiest booke. (2.313-14, 319-20)

for shee rather was two soules,

Or like to be full, on both sides written Rols,
Where eies might read upon the outward skin,
As strong Records for God, as mindes within (2.503-06)

But the trope remains an assertion of exalted legibility; Elizabeth Drury is never actually

read. Given Donne's small acquaintance with the girl, he would have made a poor

exegete if he had ventured into specifics.

In an odd sense, however, Elizabeth Drury is transformed into a more exalted

illegibility: she is a referent rather than a sign.

She to whom this world must it selfe refer,

As Suburbs, or the Microcosme of her,
Shee, shee is dead; shee's dead (235-37)

The prevailing trope of the First Anniversarie, subtitled "An Anatomy of the World," is

that Drury was the vital force inhabiting the world (she is sometimes identified as its soul,

elsewhere its heart), and that with her gone, the world is left as a corpse exposed for the

poet's dissection. In the glum satire which is rolled out, the perfections of Elizabeth

Drury appear by negative relief: she is the ethereal soul not subject to the litany of vice

and decay which Donne anatomizes. Details about her person become unnecessary

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because she is so constantly unworldly, a corporeal world's escaped soul, knowable by a

sort of negative hagiography. It is the worldly body which Donne reads, and in directing

that reading toward its departed soul, he performs an allegorical version of the same

"personal" allegoresis typical of the sonnet culture.

Donne did not always compose at such an ethereal pitch; much more standard and

obvious examples of patronage reading of the great lady are available in the verse letters,

especially to Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford. The countess was head of a

little circle of her own at Twickenham, one with which Donne had considerable traffic,

and which must have seemed a reasonable source of support.128 She was also apparently

one of the women who took offense at Donne's lengthy extravagant praises of Elizabeth

Drury, who was after all an unknown girl of lower station. Uncomfortably, Donne writes

to her in an unfinished and presumably unread verse-letter:

Next I confesse my'impenitence, for I

Can scarce repent my first fault, since thereby
Remote low Spirits, which shall ne'r read you,
May in lesse lessons finde enough to doe,
By studying copies, not Originals, (21-25)

Here, the logic of the trope alone is what drives Donne's unfinished argument: the "copy"

which Donne offered the world was not Drury herself, but an encomium in terms which

could as easily have been dedicated to a living patroness. Of course, tropes are fungible,

and as easily put to the service as one patroness as another: in the aftermath of the flap

over the Anniversary poems, Donne made a new approach to Catherine Howard Cecil,

Countess of Salisbury, in the same terms of gradations in the value of personal readings:

128
Milgate suggests that Donne's introduction was provided by Henry Goodyere, the suspected author of
the Mirrour of Majestie. Cf. John Donne, The Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters ed. W. Milgate
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) 253.

258
 So I am debtor unto them, whose worth,
Enabled me to profit, and take forth
This new great lesson, thus to study you;
Which none, not reading others, first, could doe.
Nor lacke I light to read this booke, though I
In a darke Cave, yea in a Grave doe lie;
For as your fellow Angels, so you doe
Illustrate them who come to study you. (67-74)

Curiously enough, Donne ends that letter by invoking the extra-sensory powers of the

blind Homer, mapping the old invocations of mystery and supra-textual insight onto the

person of this new possible patron. The Countess of Bedford, herself the Original of

Elizabeth Drury's copy, is reduced to a sort of primer in which the real depths of the

Homeric Countess of Salisbury can be plumbed. Still, probably the most striking of

Donne's uses of the trope of reading came in one of the first letters to Bedford:

Therefore at Court, which is not vertues clime,

(Where a transcendent height, (as, lownesse mee)
Makes her not be, or not show) all my rime
Your vertues challenge, which there rarest bee;
For, as darke texts need notes: there some must bee
To usher vertue, and say, This is shee. (7-12)

This stanza is as perfect a description of the role of the client-poet as survives from the

period. The patroness herself, at her transcendent height, is the true equivalent to those

old secrets of the darke texts, and the praises of a poet, so far from being flattery, are

simple annotation. The hierarchies affirmed by acts of annotation are mentioned

parenthetically, as if only incidental to the enterprise of praise.

From Sidney through Donne, in mutating combinations, the elements of the trope

remain always the same: there is a fascination with the reading of persons, and the

expression of inner truths in believable signs. The interpretation of persons is always an

allegoresis, because writers always recognize the fact that there is no hope of classical
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mimesis in the representation of complex psychologies, and one can only hope to succeed

with the quackish alchemy which says one thing and means another. What these and

other sonnets teach is that this expectation of allegoresis has no proper limits: it is a

modular narrative of exegesis, which can be detached from one register and re-used in

another. Suitors who wrote sonnets were much less literally in thrall to their beloveds

than they figured in these verses; but the sonnets were in part a way for them to play out

the fantasies and fears of ambitious men in a country ruled by a queen. The personal

hermeneutics followed along, and while they are inflected differently for the different

contexts, the fantasized exegetical operations (or failures) remain the same.

If one were to go further, to speculate vainly at authorial intent, then the modular

use of the rhetoric of personal allegoresis might not be a simple cross-pollenization

between forms. One might speculate that when the language of court is used to allegorize

love, that the ostensible tenor and ostensible vehicle ought to be reversed, and that the

playing of love-games is a mere cover for suits to the great and the well-connected. If

that were so, then the switch in register from heroic to amorous would itself stop being

merely an alteration in the context of personal allegorism, and become a part of the

exegetical process. The outer token is a text in the language of love; the inner meaning

intended is loyalty and usefulness. The mode itself would be part of the allegory.

In some of the sonnets, such a scenario might actually be the case (especially

those addressed to the beloved "Cynthia"). Usually it is too strong a claim. The genre for

which the theory does work is pastoral.

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5. The Problem with Pastoral

Some one his song in Jove, and Jove's strange tales, attires,
Broidered with bulls and swans, powdered with golden rain.
Another, humbler, with to shepherd's pipe retires,
Yet hiding royal blood full oft in rural vein.
--Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 6

In modern prejudices, pastoral is a vile mode: as cloying and as insincere as spray-

can whipped cream. It is a monotonous repertoire, and a melodramatic one, and perhaps

an occupational hazard for those of us who are devoted to Elizabethan and Stuart poetry:

it is far too easy to overdose on swains and pitch-pipes and flocks and country maids. It

is a distant object from us and from our modern cultural practice, and not the kind that

allows us a glance in the mirror of the past. It is rather the distance that is dismissible, the

distance of that which is in simple bad literary taste.

There is no accounting for taste. But there is some accounting for the history of

taste, and we ought to be aware of the ways in which approaches to pastoral have been

shaped by the massive intellectual projects of high modernism. Thankfully, we also have

our own newer projects, and recent historicist readings have reminded us that the rococo

puffs of story which constitute this mode are abstracted cut-outs of the forms of real

political stresses.129 Pastoral was a literary fashion, but not an empty fad: the trite

language of the rural offered poets a means to speak, a conventional code in which to hide

their impolitic politics. Convention allows communication; allegory preserves

deniability.

What the pastoral allowed for was the creation of a shadow-universe, in which all

the traumas of the real world could be replayed, with authorial commentary built into the

129
See Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

261
narrative. This use of allegory to mask critique is an old ruse: no particular object of

criticism can protest without giving away his or her own insecurities, and the poet can

always feign innocence of any guile or malice. (The same technique is also used in

vituperative epigrams directed at pseudonyms.) Through standardization of trope,

pastoral became an easily-read alternative to the world and to direct speech. There was

allegory and even the traditional assertion of mysteries, but no real mystery to fit the

assertion.

This is broadly true of pastoral, but most obviously so in the case of the mixed

modes, the heroical-pastoral (or even the Polonian tragical-comical-historical-pastoral).

In an uncontextualized scene of shepherds tripping to their merry lays, any hiding of

personality within the context of standard imagery would have to refer to readerly

knowledge of the circumstances of composition. But the mixed modes offer something

else: a chance for heroes to enter into disguise, to replay their sacrifices or machinations

in the fantasy realm of the swains, where the passions and the melodrama run just as hot,

just for smaller stakes.

Putting things this way, we uncover no truth about the period that was hidden

from its own understanding. George Puttenham, explaining the difference between truly

archaic oral song of shepherds and the literary reproductions of oral song transmitted with

the classical canon, put it this way:

The Poet deuised the Eglogue long after the other

dramatick poems, not of purpose to counterfait or represent
the rusticall manner of loues and communication, but vnder
the vaile of homely persons and in rude speeches to
insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as
perchance had not bene safe to haue beene disclosed in any

262
 other sort.130

The justification is put in the clearest terms of allegory, and of course that is what

Elizabethan and Jacobean pastoral was. The curious thing is that this argument, if

generalized from the exegesis of particular characters or actions, is almost always put in

terms of the fiction: a writer uses fable to insinuate truth. But here Puttenham has put

things in terms of generic register (the low style), and class division is crucial: greatness

is hidden in homeliness, and a sort of refinement beneath the rude.

William Empson did a fine thing when he proposed that the comic portion of a

double-plot be understood as a version of pastoral.131 There is also a way in which the

reverse is true. Pastoral was an allegory of greater actions, and usually writers used it to

create comic and containable parallels to their own noble actions in the world. It is like

Ben's big toe: a place in which delusions of self-importance can be imagined in safety.

Writers, caught up in their quests for advancement, liked the heroic mode for their

actions: the realm of poetry was one in which the frustrations of heroes could be cast up

into the light as harmless fiction. The exaggerated distance of pastoral from reality could

seal off lightness and lowness and neutralize it; like any form of allegory, pastoral's

purpose was to make its readers assume depth and gravitas. The fiction rephrases the life.

The low style makes the high.

Sidney's Arcadia is a low-style work that heightens the political drama of its

author's biography. The work is rich in the semiotics of personality: given space, one

could catalog long lists of quotes testifying to the ways in which characters decorate their
130
George Puttenham, "The Arte of English Poesie," Elizabethan Critical Essays vol. 2 ed. G. Gregory
Smith (London: Oxford UP, 1904) 40.
131
William Empson, "Double Plots" Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974) 25-86.

263
bodies with allegorical tokens. The reading of men continues relentlessly through the

long convolutions of the loquacious romance, and it is all reading with political

consequences. Characters repeatedly get themselves into positions of seeking favor from

power, and the mini-denouements derive from staccato anagnorisis.

There is no room here to haul out all aspects of that evidence. Readers familiar

with the work will need none, and these are the tendencies of romance anyway. Nor is

there time to provide a full accounting of the plots of either version: romance rarely lends

itself to summary. Those large-scale motions of the plot are useful, though, which can

tell us something about Sidney's use of pastoral mode. (In what follows I will restrict

myself to the Old Arcadia; the revised New Arcadia contains much more heroic romance

and less pastoral romance.)

The Arcadia is framed around a threatening oracle to King Basilius, who in order

to escape danger, removes to the countryside with Queen Gynechia and their daughters

Pamela and Philoclea. Travelling princes from neighboring Greek states, Pyrocles and

Musidorus, fall in love with the princesses and disguise themselves as an Amazon warrior

and a shepherd, respectively, in order to woo them. Through their exploits, "Cleophila" is

accepted as a companion to Philoclea, and "Dorus" is made guardian to Pamela, who has

been lodged in the home of a shepherd, Dametas. Dorus eventually succeeds in courting

Pamela while pretending to offer suit to Dametas's daughter Mopsa. When Dorus reveals

himself to Pamela as Prince Musidorus, she agrees to run away with him. Meanwhile,

Basilius and Gynechia each secretly fall in love with Cleophila, the queen guessing at the

Amazon's true sex. They court her, and she responds by arranging separately with each to

meet for a tryst in a certain cave; the king and queen meet each other there and have sex,

264
with Gynecia realizing she has been fooled but Basilius thinking he is with Cleophila.

After the sex, Gynecia confronts Basilius, who repents; in his thirst, he drinks down a

glass of something that Gynecia had obtained as a love-potion for Cleophila-Pyrocles.

However, the king falls down into a coma, and Gynecia is found blaming herself for

regicide. During this time, Cleophila had revealed herself as Pyrocles to Philoclea, and

they spend a night together; they are caught by the minister of state, Philanaz, who

accuses Pyrocles of complicity in the murder of Basilius. In the meantime, Pamela and

Musidorus have also been caught and returned, and the princes are put on trial; Pyrocles's

father Euarchus is asked to judge the case and condemns the two to death. As the

sentence is rendered, Basilius wakes and all difficulties are resolved.

The primary plot-arc is driven by a double disguise; the disguise consists not of a

simple concealing of identity but of a shift in cultural registers. Pyrocles moves on the

axis of gender and Musidorus on the axis of class, and both of them move downward.

And both of them move in a direction parallel to the motion of the text itself, as a fiction

offered by a highly regarded young noble. The lowness of pastoral romance is a class-

inflected lowness, certainly, and it is not hard to see the self-disguising of Musidorus as a

parallel to the compositional action of Sidney. Interestingly, though, pastoral lowness is

also gender-inflected: there is something vaguely effeminate about the genre. This

Arcadia is the Countess of Pembroke's, and Sidney makes plain in the letter dedicatory to

his sister (and in scattered addresses to "lady" readers within the narrative) that the whole

fiction is a toy and a feminine trifle for her and her friends. When Sidney composed the

work, he was away from court, hidden in the rural Pembroke estate at Wilton; but he was

also hidden in a sphere of leisure and domesticity, away from the affairs of state which

265
marked his stays at court and abroad.

To examine how the motions of textual register parallel biographical motions, it is

necessary to consider Sidney's own alias within the work. He inserts himself repeatedly

in the eclogues as a swain named "Philisides": the character is, within the fiction, no

prince like Pyrocles or Musidorus, but rather a real and permanent shepherd. That is

necessary to the irony of allegorical usage here, for of course the character is a noble in

disguise: just as Pyrocles has become Cleophila, and Musidorus, Dorus, Sidney has put

on his own coat of rural weeds.

Four eclogues are inserted between the five acts of the main story, and it is mostly

in these that Philisides comes out to sing. The relation of the eclogues to the main line of

the plot is complex: they are at most only marginally tied into the flow of the story, and

feature characters who have little or no connection to the main line of action. Moreover,

there is a heightening of the sense of pastoral register: the protagonists of the five acts are

princes in shepherds' disguise, but the actors in the eclogues are "real" shepherds. The

story is told in third-person prose; the eclogues are done mostly as first-person songs,

with brief prose sections to mediate the change of speakers. Most importantly, the

eclogues are designed thematically to comment upon the action of the main plot, without

direct reference to it: in each eclogue, the real shepherds sing of small travails which

mimic the great ones of the pseudo-shepherds in the five acts. Sidney is explicit about

this function of the eclogues: in introducing the first, he writes,

But, of all other things, they did especially delight in

eclogues; wherein sometimes they would contend for a
prize of well singing, sometimes lament the unhappy
pursuit of their affections, sometimes, again, under hidden
forms utter such matters as otherwise were not fit for

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 delivery.132

This sentiment, the same which Puttenham would voice for pastoral,133 is limited strictly

to the eclogue interludes, but might as well be about the whole of the Arcadia. We have a

nesting of allegorical comments: the heightened sensibility of the shepherds in the

eclogues comments upon the action of the main plot; that plot in turn is a series of veiled

comments upon the politics of England and its queen. At the center of it all is Philisides:

he appears in each eclogue, singing in shadowy terms about a loss he has suffered; but

unlike any other swain, he consistently refuses to confess the meaning of his riddling

complaint.

The game begins two-thirds of the way through the first eclogue, with Philisides's

first entrance. A senior shepherd ("Geron," of course) turns from the company to a young

shepherd who had made a point of sitting alone and sighing to himself beneath a cypress.

Philisides "explains" his melancholy:

Philisides. If fortune's lap became my dwelling place,

And all the stars conspired to my good,
Still were I one, this still should be my case,
Ruin's relic, care's web, and sorrow's food;
Since she, fair fierce, to such a state me calls,
Whose wit the stars, whose fortune fortune thralls.
Geron. Alas, what falls are fall'n unto thy mind
That there where thou confessed thy mischief lies
Thy wit dost use still still more harms to find?

Geron then offers advice, which Philisides rudely rejects with a disparagement of age,

and the flow of the scene again turns away from him, following Geron's annoyance back

132
Sidney, Arcadia 56.
133
It is possible that there was direct influence from Sidney's passage to Puttenham's: aside from the
similarity of the quoted sentiments, the contexts of each refer to the way in which archaic property
ownership (of the sheep) contributed to the predilection to sing well.

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to the group. Philisides's next appearance is in the next eclogue; his song there is a

generalized plaint, an echo-song done in quantitative verse. More interesting than the

verse is the way in which the performance is set up: "Philisides...sat so melancholy as

though his mind were banished from the place he loved to be, imprisoned in his

body...Then the duke willed Philisides to declare the discourse of his own fortunes,

unknown to them as being a stranger in that country."134 In the third eclogue, Philisides is

once again the outsider, who is called briefly into the flow of song and then allowed to

return to the margins. Here, however, his song is larger and more noteworthy: it is an

allegorical beast-fable about the animals' creation of man, who then ruled as tyrant over

them. Philisides says that he learned the song from "old Languet" on "Ister bank," and

this is an uncoded reference to Sidney's time spent with Hubert Languet in Vienna during

the Augusts of 1573 and 1574, the romance's most direct tie yet to the real world in which

Sidney composed it. The song is offered in the midst of a wedding celebration; Philisides

knows he should be singing sweetly of love. Instead, he offers a cautionary tale about

tyranny: the allegory is structurally parallel to the Biblical narrative of Saul's election to

the kingship of Israel (1 Samuel 8), one of the most frequently debated texts in early

modern theological debates on kingship. The political theme of Philisides's melancholy

climaxes in the fourth and final eclogue, where he at last explains his sadness by relating

an allegorical vision about judging a contest between Diana and Venus (i.e., Elizabeth

Tudor and Mary Stuart), and declaring them both unfit to rule in comparison with one of

Diana's ladies in waiting, "Mira." Philisides in his vision is then cursed by the pair to

chase Mira fruitlessly, which occurred upon his waking. Mira's identity remains

134
Sidney, Arcaadia 159.

268
unknown (the Arcadia was too early for it to have referred to Penelope Devereux) and

perhaps not important to the dynamics of Philisides's reticence. What does matter is the

circumstances of the Arcadia's composition, because Sidney's life tells what Philisides

could not bring himself to say.

The work was written during visits to Philip's sister Mary at the Pembroke estate

at Wilton, at first in 1577 but especially during a later visit in 1580.135 In the late 70's,

Sidney was at court after an extended series of continental travels and time with his father

in Ireland. He was at court and he was frustrated there: primarily, it seems that he was

there to represent the interests of his father, who was Lord Deputy of Ireland. Sir Henry

Sidney was not pulling in enough tax revenue for Elizabeth's satisfaction, but the Queen

was taking exception to Sir Henry's attempts to impose a property-tax on the "Old

English" (i.e. the descendants of Norman-era immigrants) under his jurisdiction. Philip

Sidney was at court to fight a losing battle; even his father suspected that he would soon

be recalled, as he mentioned in a letter to Leicester.136 This indeed happened by 1578,

and Sir Henry was replaced by Lord Grey; a memorial by Philip to Elizabeth on the state

of Ireland had perhaps delayed the recall by a few months, and perhaps softened the form

of Elizabeth's rebuke.

Another major frustration centered around Sidney's involvement with the

European Protestant cause. He had strong connections with several Protestant players on

the continent, including William of Orange and Johann Casimir, brother of the Elector of
135
The 1577 date comes from a comment by Edmund Molyneux, cited in the notes to the Chronicles of
Holinshed. Jean Robertson argues in notes to the critical edition of the Old Arcadia that the 1580
completion date is consistent with manuscript evidence, although this evidence is not cited. Jean
Robertson, "General Introduction," in Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old
Arcadia) Ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) xvi.
136
Cited in Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000) 194.

269
Palatine. Through an ally (Hubert Languet, honored in the Old Arcadia's beast fable),

Casimir proposed that Elizabeth delegate Sidney at the head of an English force to assist

an assault on Flanders. Elizabeth at first assented in the spring of 1578, but then by that

summer restricted his action. At first she disassociated herself from the enterprise,

allowing Sidney to go only as a private citizen; then she forbad him altogether and in fact

asked him to act as the envoy to Casimir to announce England's withdrawal, a humiliating

mission more in line with Elizabeth's general treatment of Sidney. He declined the

mission.

The Duke of Anjou moved to fill Elizabeth's vacuum in the Netherlands, and his

alliance with a reluctant William of Orange ultimately led to Elizabeth's marriage

negotiations with Anjou. Anjou aroused enormous suspicion among English Protestants:

he was an ex-Huguenot-sympathizer and was connected with a 1577 massacre of

Huguenots. The English court fractured over the issue of the marriage negotiations,

resulting for Sidney in the "tennis-court controversy" with Edward de Vere, Earl of

Oxford. Oxford, a member of the pro-Anjou faction, wished to play tennis without

waiting his turn, and ordered Sidney off of a court. Name-calling and talk of a duel

ensued, and Sidney was later chewed out by Elizabeth for not yielding to his betters, a

very public humiliation. When Sidney shortly thereafter served as the mouthpiece for the

Leicester clique, writing a letter to Elizabeth in formal opposition to Anjou, the queen's

displeasure was easily read. Soon after the letter's reception, Sidney left the court, and

would not return for years.

The Pembroke estate at Wilton became Sidney's attractive retreat: Mary had

married Henry Herbert, then-current Earl of Pembroke, in April 1577, and Philp visited

270
frequently. Various biographers attest to a close bond between Philip and Mary; Aubrey's

Lives reports gossip of incest between the pair. However, it seems more convincing to

believe, as Alan Stewart has argued, that the sexual scandal is a fantasy version of the real

political subversiveness that Wilton represented: "In such a group [of Herberts, Dudleys,

and Sidneys], so closely knit by familial and marital bonds, it was difficult to spot where

a family gathering ended and a political summit began."137 None of these families were

rebels; all of them were committed to the cause of pan-European Protestantism, and were

frustrated in their several attempts to push Elizabeth toward a more activist position. The

clique was out of favor: Leicester's marriage to Lettice Knowles was exposed in 1578,

and Philip's father was recalled from Ireland at the same time. Wilton for those years

became a comfortable and friendly retreat away from court for allied families.

Wilton was, in a sense, a real-life change of "register" for Sidney, the primary up-

and-coming member of this clique; and this is where he composed the Arcadia. Court

was a place of display and rhetoric and the negotiation of interests, not to mention

powerful enemies, an unreceptive ruler, and ruinous expense. The countryside, always a

cultural margin to the events at London, offered in Wilton a place of deliberate retreat at

that margin. By 1580, Sidney had decided to stop returning to court, at least temporarily,

and he lived most of the year with his sister and her friends. It has been suggested that

the primary reason for Sidney's absence from court at the time was specifically Elizabeth's

displeasure over the letter against Anjou. This may or may not be the case; if so, it is only

the culmination of a series of frustrations and setbacks at court. The court had also turned

out to be the place where Sidney's earnest advice and missives to the sovereign were

137
Stewart, 202.

271
ignored, and the place where his worth was judged (and condemned) by the standards of

his inferior station rather than by worth.

What we get in the Old Arcadia is a record of flights from court into the

countryside, where political maneuvering is hidden under the guise of shepherds. It was

written by a courtier who composed in deliberate retreat, and who hides himself under the

guise of a sorrowful shepherd. But it is not only the character of Philisides which acts as

an allegorical veil for the poet; the work itself does, by the fact of its genre. The trip

away from court to Wilton did not delete Sidney's ambitions, and his use of pastoral was

no renunciation of politics. Retreat into the hinterlands of recognition was a masking and

a strategy. If worth was going to be misread by the queen, why not turn the power of

misrecognition to one's advantage? Pastoral allegory provided the same sort of safety as

rural retreat, where one could, with sympathizers, "under hidden forms utter such matters

as otherwise were not fit for delivery."

The Old Arcadia is a solid example of the tense choice between court and country,

self-explication and self-masking that Sidney was offered. However, though the work is

consistently willing to critique power, it has no apparent program: the romance needs the

narrative power of misreading, thrives by characters' emblematic expression of their

natures, but has little comment on the process. The allegorical vision which Philisides at

last spills out seems disappointingly random: there should have been more personal

political concerns to Sidney than the conflict between Mary and Elizabeth, which by 1580

had long been decisively resolved. Mira is an unknown to us, and her placement at the

climax of a political allegory seems jarring.

Philisides's only appearance in the New Arcadia confirms the suspicion.

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 Against him came forth an Iberian, whose manner of
entering was with bagpipes instead of trumpets, a
shepherd's boy before him for a page, and by him a dozen
apparelled like shepherds (for the fashion, though rich in
stuff) who carried his lances which, though strong to give a
lancely blow indeed, yet so were they coloured, with hooks
near the morne, that they prettily represented sheephooks.
His own furniture was dressed over with wool, yet so
enriched with jewels artificially placed that one would have
thought it a marriage between the lowest and the highest.
His impresa was a sheep marked with pitch, with this word:
"Spotted to be known."138

The joust is between Philisides and "Lelius," a version of Sir Henry Lee; the scene is a

replication of a real tilt whit pitted Sidney against Lee in the Accession Day games of

1578. The device is a version of Sidney's own, a sheep with a star and the motto,

"Macular modo noscar".139 And the blazon of the alter-Sidney is a perfect example of the

semiotics of worth: the costume is that of a shepherd, but the costume is no disguise. The

pastoral get-up is deliberately artificial, sewed out of expensive fabrics and studded with

jewels. It is a costume meant to announce the discrepancy of its facade with its wearer's

worth, and the most striking aspect is the mix of registers, a marriage of low and high.

The scene is about Sidney and his self-presentation, but there is no apparent

political message; the scene is marginal. The only gesture to the great affairs of the real

world is perplexing: Philisides is identified as an Iberian. This is precisely the wrong

nationality for an allegorical version of an activist Protestant who composed the revision

while campaigning with Leicester in the Netherlands.

When he hides himself in wool, we know something is going on with Sidney. He

138
Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The New Arcadia) ed. Victor Skretkowicz
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) 255.
139
See D. Coulman, "Spotted to be Known," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xx (1957),
179-80.

273
knows how to play the games of courtly semiotics, and he lets us know. He does not,

however, offer a coherent message about those games. For that, one must consult again

with Spenser.

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6. Allegory and Failure

The hinterland of pastoral merges ever with the rural districts and colonies of the

real world: both are green and barren alternatives to the recognition which is available

only at court. In Spenser's case, the largely rural and wild worlds of Faery have always

been read as a version of Ireland, where Spenser spent most of his time after his departure

from court in 1580. The move to Ireland was not a banishment, no more than Spenser's

knights were banished to their milieu. Geographical margins are more complex than that,

and several readers have suggested that Spenser's move was a positive career move, in the

fashion that later ambitions drove men to make their fortunes off of India. Nevertheless,

it is a fact that Spenser was to a degree forced out: he had been carefully building up a

relationship with Leicester, and something clearly happened in 1579-80 to lose him the

earl's favor. Richard Rambuss speculates that Spenser may have played a role in the

queen's discovery of Leicester's secret 1578 marriage to Lettice Knowles,140 but the

specifics are impossible to say with certainty.

We know that Spenser left to serve as Lord Grey's private secretary in Ireland.

The appointment did not last as long as its influence: Spenser criticism rightly stresses his

relationship with Grey, and especially his witnessing of the massacre of papal troops at

Smerwick; but Grey was recalled in 1582, only two years into Spenser's twenty-year life

in Ireland. For the next several years after that, Spenser leased some property at New

Abbey, in County Kildare (and picked up the title of "gentleman"), but this should not be

read as a dissociation from service, and certainly not the monastic renunciation of

ambition which one might assume from reading the Faerie Queene Book VI version of

140
Richard Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 19-24.

275
Ireland. In 1584, he snared a secretaryship with John and Thomas Norris, the Presidents

of the Council of Munster, and participated with them in 1588 in a small campaign

against the survivors of the Armada who had washed up on the island. But the greatest

importance of the position was not the events proper to the job, but the connections and

the advancement it enabled: he was given the responsibility to dispose of local land, and

this enabled both speculation, and the acquisition of a large Munster property.

The most important perk which Spenser had, though, was being in a position

where he could get noticed when the policies of resettlement of English families into

Ireland was adopted. Large plantations had to be redistributed, and in this climate,

Spenser was able in 1589 to wrest Kilcolman, a 3,000-acre plantation, from Lord Roche,

a member of the Old English. From this point on, Spenser could think of himself as

landed gentry, and there are hints that this is the point at which he began to view his stay

in Ireland as permanent: he married the daughter of local nobility, and Kilcolman was the

"home" of "Colin Clout's Come Home Again." And it was Kilcolman that Spenser had to

flee, as the "Great Earl" Tyrone (Hugh O'Neill) came burning and sacking in 1598,

shortly after the English debacle at Yellow Ford. When he fled, he went to London, to

report the news; and when Spenser died three weeks later, the court itself had become the

scene of his final exile.

The biographical details have a theme to them, but no easy meaning (as lives do

not). There is a constant tension between metropole and colony, center and periphery,

power and exclusion, but these terms do not retain the stable mappings one would expect.

Spenser may well have gone to Ireland as an exile, but he made it into something of a

home. He consistently describes it in the View to the Present State of Ireland (composed

276
by 1596, published 1633) as a wild waste, but in that wasteland he found for himself all

the tricks and the power plays which had sent him out from Leicester and away from the

court. None of Spenser's allegory gives us a simple equation of image to biographical

datum; no matter how hard we historicize literature, this is not the way art pulls against

life. What we do get in the allegory is a chance for Spenser to make art out of the

tensions which he was offered by life in Ireland.

Colin Clout's Come Home Again is a splendid witness to these tensions. The title

puts a question: what is Spenser's home? Within the fiction of the poem, it is Ireland:

Colin Clout has recently traveled over the seas with the "Shepherd of the Ocean" (i.e.,

Raleigh) and is now home in southwestern Ireland, narrating the journey to a group of

local shepherd wits (including Cuddie, from the Calender). But this narration to the Irish

was itself narrated back to the English: it was of course published in London, by William

Posonby (who had already published the 1590 Faerie Queene). It was the English

readership which was familiar with the Colin Clout persona (through Skelton as well as

Spenser) and whatever readership Spenser had would be inclined to assume, on first

seeing the title, that the voyage to court was the trip home. And the way that the

allegorized Ireland and England are portrayed in the poem supports the contention that

Spenser still felt himself an exile in Ireland, even if he had accepted the permanence of

his stay there. Raleigh, as the shepherd of the Ocean, is said to come upon Colin

"banisht...like wight forlore,/ Into that waste, where I was quite forgot" (182-3); in

contrast, England is portrayed as a place of all heavenly graces, a place where (unlike

Ireland) there is no need to fear war or brigandry or famine, where learning and wealth

and proper religion abound.

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 But in the poem, as in life, Colin/Spenser still returns "home" to Kilcolman, and

the pastoral companions demand to know why. The problem in the English paradise is,

of course, one of semiotics. The Queen at the center of it all, of course, retains her ideal

status. But the approaches to her are guarded, and the signs by which one ascends are

liable to counterfeiting:

he doth soonest rise

That best can handle his deceitfull wit,
In subtil shifts, and finest slights devise,
Either by slaundring his well deemed name,
Through leasings lewd and fained forgerie:
Or else by breeding him some blot of blame,
By creeping close into his secrecie;
To which him needs, a guileful hollow hart,
masked with faire dissembling curtesie,
A filed toung furnisht with tearmes of art,
No art of schoole, but Courtiers schoolery. (ll. 692-702)

Spenser has always craved recognition at court, and on this journey he does actually

receive some measure of it: the poem recounts Spenser's own reading to Elizabeth from

his new epic dedicated to her glory. But recognition is fraught and difficult; reading of a

poem is easy enough, but the reading of men is difficult and dangerous for the misread.

Raleigh was at this time himself misread, out of favor with the queen for his secret

marriage to the lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and the poem tries to do a bit of

p.r. work for its patron, by bemoaning the unfair treatment given the Shepherd of the

Ocean. For the most part, in the poem itself there is little hint that Spenser feels himself

to be similarly victimized: Colin is mostly a lowly and untouched outside observer of

court manners. But the brief dedication to Raleigh asks for protection against "the malice

of euill mouthes, which are alwaies wide open to carpe at and misconstrue my simple

278
meaning."141 This is a standard enough request to a patron, but the theme of the poem

puts the imprecation outside the scope of meaningless convention. Spenser very much

worries about misinterpretation of his person, and as much as he loves England and

perhaps regrets his sojourn in the wilds, there is something for him deeply frightening

about a discourteous court, the masked (and masquing?) center of "faire dissembling

curtesie."

This critique of false courtesy is the driving concern of FQ Book VI, the Legend

of Calidore. It is a climactic chapter for the poem, never mind the Spenserian assertions

that it was only meant as a halfway point: Book VI is the climax to the poem which we

possess (apart from the Mutabilitie coda), and we have the right to analyze what Spenser

and the libraries have passed on to us. Despite the curious lightness of such a topic as

courtesy when compared against the braver moral virtues which have preceded it, we

have to deal with a text which rises up to give to courtesy its final emphasis and climatic

exploration.

It is hard to know exactly what courtesy is in Spenser's rendition, and not simply

because the ages have reduced its scope from something great-hearted and noble to mere

quotidian politeness. Spenser admits quite freely that the term is open to definitional

question, and in fact the great quest of the book, nominally Calidore's attempt to bind the

Blatant Beast, is simultaneously a quest for definition of the term and for Calidore's own

self-definition.142 "Of Court it seemes, men Courtesise doe call,/ For that it there most

141
Spenser, 536.
142
It is worth remembering that "Blatant" was also the object of a sort of definitional quest: according to
the OED, the word was Spenser's own invention, and a neologism is the perfect moniker for a monster
who spits out suggestive but empty words.

279
vseth to abound;" (VI.i.1) but there is no other knight in the poem who flees royal courts

as assiduously as Calidore. The climax of this climactic book is a pastoral within a

pastoral: Calidore explicitly puts off the mantle of chivalric heroism and takes up with a

community of shepherds, and competes for the hand of "Pastorella."

It is a strange fear of courts which animates this quest for courtesy, and we are told

why in the proem. In a romance of definition, it ought not be a surprise that the primary

problem is one of semiotics:

Amongst them all growes not a fayrer flowre,

Then is the bloosme of comely courtesy,
Which though it on a lowly stalke doe bowre,
Yet brancheth forth in braue nobilitie,
And spreds it selfe through all ciuilitie:
Of which though present age doe plenteous seeme,
Yet being matcht with plaine Antiquitie,
Ye will them all but fayned showes esteeme,
Which carry colours faire, that feeble eies misdeeme.

But in the triall of true curtesie,

Its now so farre from that, which then it was,
That it indeed is nought but forgerie,
Fashioned to please the eies of them, that pas,
Which see not perfect things but in a glas:
Yet is that glasse so gay, that it can blynd
The wisest sight, to thinke gold that is bras.
But vertues seat is deepe within the mynd,
And not in outward shows, but inward thoughts defynd. (VI proem.4-5)

The disgust with fayned showes is, if we still needed it, further proof of the dissatisfaction

which Spenser has with his own allegorical method as explained in the "Letter to

Raleigh." Spenser hates the gaudiness of mere show; he demands substance in the virtue,

and not a surface virtue of ostentation only. Moreover, the preference is aligned upon a

temporal axis, he yearns for the substantive courtesy of plain Antiquity (allegorized as

"Priscilla," "the little Ancient"), and true courtesy has declined into what is apparently

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mere narcissism, the aureate perfection available only in the looking-glass. It is against

this sort of verbal barrage that we can remember the more ironic undertones of the

defense of allegory to Raleigh: people need to learn to satisfy themselves with the "use of

these dayes," as people have become so shallow and hypocritical that all they can

appreciate about moral instruction is the gaily-colored narrative wrappings in which it

might be bound.

This goes in dangerous directions. If courtesy is properly derived from the court,

and the chivalric virtues one would expect to find there, and if it has now grown decrepit

and been replaced by the forgerie of outward shows, what might this say about the current

reigning court? Spenser, of course, ends his proem with an immediate and forceful denial

of the hint, but as elsewhere in the poem, the suddenness and the hyperbole of the praise

of the queen undercut the strength of the panegyric. And as elsewhere, panegyric happens

to highlight the very mixed images of Elizabeth which seem to be refracted everywhere in

the long work.

In this sixth book, we need only to follow our hero Calidore and his struggles to

make sense of the virtue which he exemplifies. After the first canto, with its standard

introduction of the narrative leitmotif which will dominate the rest of the book, Calidore

quickly runs out of the reader's line of vision, chasing the Blatant Beast. The better part

of six cantos are then filled with the heroic escapades of Calidore's courteous proxy,

Calepine, and Calidore himself does not re-enter the narrative until canto nine, in hot

pursuit of the slanderous Monster:

Him first from court he to the citties coursed,

And from the citties to the townes him prest,
And from the townes into the countrie forsed,
And from the country back to priuate farmes he scorsed. (VI.ix.3)
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Spenser would not have written such lines if he had cared as much as Tasso for a classical

mimetic standard. By whatever paltry realism this particular poem could muster, there is

no way to describe Calidore as having first chased the Blatant Beast from the court;

things began in the middle of the Faery wilds, just after Calidore met with Serena. The

list we have here is part of the allegory: not a deep secret, but part of the allegorical

assumptions which must for Spenser follow on the naming of a monstrous personification

of slander. The beast travels by nature up the social ladder, like any of the ambitious ones

whom he pursues, and ought by a law of nature to move from the wilds and the manors to

the burgs and towns, and from there up to Faery-London and the presence of the Queene

herself. Only under the duress of pursuit by a knight of courtesy can the Beast be chased

back down the ladder again.

When Calidore arrives in the sticks, the Blatant Beast is nowhere to be found.

Instead, he has arrived at the home of Pastorella, the girl of (yet-unknown) royal stock

who was raised from infancy by the shepherd Meliboe. It is under Meliboe's humble roof

that Calidore, apparently for the first time, comes to find a felicitous courtesy that he

apparently had never found among the showes of Faery court, and even expresses envy

for the pastoral life. Meliboe responds with a paean to the virtues of contentment with

what one has; strikingly, the old shepherd announces that he had been ambitious in his

youth, and had gone to seek his fortune at court for ten years before becoming disgusted

with the whole scene and returning home to his flocks.

To them, that list, the worlds gay showes I leaue,

And to great ones such follies doe forgiue,
Which oft through pride do their owne perill weaue,
And through ambition downe themselues doe driue
To sad decay, that might contented liue.
Me no such cares nor combrous thoughts offend,
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 Ne once my minds vnmoued quiet grieue,
But all the night in siluer sleepe I spend,
And all the day, to what I list, I doe attend.

This is a movement of renunciation which runs strong in the book, and in which the

pastoral frames are consistently preferred to the urban and courtly alternatives with which

they are held in tension.

Meliboe himself has a very close parallel in the figure of the hermit who took in

Serena and Timias in cantos five and six, and cured them of the rankling inner wounds

gotten from the poisonous bite of the Beast. The hermit, too, was once a man who had

been abroad much in the world, and even more then Meliboe: he had been himself a

knight, before growing weary of the world and its vanities, and retiring to his hermitage.

That hermitage embodies Spenser's constant preference for the inward substance over the

outward display; the place doesn't look like much, but is at least "inly neate and clene."

(VI.v.38) And again, the treatment he offers is a rescuing of true and honest courtesy

from the shallow standards of its courtly etymology:

Therein he them full faire did entertaine

Not with forged showes, as fitter beene
For courting fooles, that curtesies would faine,
But with entire affection and appearaunce plaine. (VI.v.38)

This is the perfect place to cure a wound given by the Blatant Beast, and in fact the

Hermit is a skilled healer, and knows the perfect antidote to its bite. After treating the

pair unsuccessfully with purely medicinal means, he tells them that to cure themselves of

the inner poisons gotten through the slanderous infections of the thousand-tongued Beast,

they must quiet themselves in the inner parts, and cut themselves off from the desires of

the senses which continue to stimulate and inflame the poison in their wounds. The only

positive cure for the bite of slander is a withdrawal from the pursuits of sensuality.
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 Similarly, one of the clearer pictures of courtesy in the book is the "Saluage Man,"

who is naked and even totally non-verbal, communicating his basic emotions with the

simplest of tokens. The Saluage Man is no Romantic Noble Savage; he is not pure and

Edenic, but clearly crude and violent, quick to wrath. He is at least partially an Irish

refugee; the View of the Present State of Ireland describes the nakedness of the natives

reduced to savagery through war and famine. And yet he is spontaneously chivalric,

coming to the defense of Serena and to the comradely aid of Calepine against Turpine,

even though he had no arms with which to join the battle. We are given, once again, a

redefinition of the aristocratic virtues and status:

O What an easie thing is to descry

The gentle bloud, how euer it be wrapt
In sad misfortunes foule disformity,
And wretched sorrowes, which haue often hapt?
For howsoeuer it may grow mis-shapt,
Like this wyld man, being vndisciplynd,
That to all vertue it may seeme vnapt,
Yet will it shew some sparkes of gentle mynd,
And at the last breake forth in his owne proper kynd. (VI.v.1)

The easiness of descrying gentility is at least half-ironic: it is hard to have read through

five and a half books of this poem without realizing how dangerously difficult it is to

discern virtue: false faces abound even in Faery. But the semiotic key which Spenser

goes on to offer in the next stanza is hopeful: one can tell a gentleman by his actions, and

the actions of the Saluage Man in defense of the weak spoke to the fact that he must have

gentle blood, no matter how he came to be in the state of nature in which he appears in

the verse.

All things in Spenser rise to the summit of Acidale, in the tenth canto. The canto

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has always been read as a climax both of the epic and of Spenser's career; it marks the last

and greatest entrance of Colin Clout into his own oeuvre. Like most of the great

memorable scenes which any canon produces, it is a complex construction, sublime and

untidy, and the hermeneutical possibilities proliferate in all the directions that generations

of readers have found to commend. But for an understanding of Courtesy and its place in

the Spenserian cosmos, there is no venue more compelling.

Canto nine is the most traditionally pastoral moment in the entire poem: it

involves rustic songs and swains in sport for the love of a country lass (who happens to be

named "Pastorella," as if the mode were not obvious enough). As the action passes into

canto ten, Calidore is content within the rural life, and seems ready to eschew the heroic

mode for the pastoral. Roaming the countryside as pastoral-types are want to do, he

comes upon a clearing in the forest, with a high hill named Acidale. On the top, there are

a hundred maidens, all nude, and dancing in a circle: at the center, Colin Clout is playing

his pipes for an inner circle of three particularly lovely maidens who themselves are

circling round the one most radiant. Calidore at first plays the peeping Tom from the

edge of the wood, but eventually is so overcome with the pleasure and curiosity of the

spectacle that he approaches to learn the truth of the affair. As soon as he nears the

circles, however, all of the maidens vanish, leaving only a sullen-looking Colin Clout,

who explains that the maidens were Graces, the three of them circling in the middle being

the chief Graces, Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia. The one fairest maiden, at the center of

all this grand festivity, was a simple "countrey lasse," and yet also more than that:

Another Grace she well deserues to be,

In whom so many Graces gathered are,
Excelling much the meane of her degree;
Diuine resemblaunce, beauty soueraigne rare,
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 Firme Chastity, that spight ne blemish dare;
All which she with such courtesy doth grace,
That all her peres cannot with her compare,
But quite are dimmed, when she is in place.
She made me often pipe and now to pipe apace. (VI.x.27)

This is an allegorical cover for a real person (presumably his wife Elizabeth, though

"Rosalind" of the Shepheards Calender has also been suggested), and Colin Clout has to

go on in the next stanza to apologize to Gloriana for memorializing someone besides

herself in the poem.

The top of Acidale is in fact the answer to Spenser's original invocation, "Revele

to me the sacred noursery/ Of vertue, which with you doth there remaine,/ Where it in

siluer bowre does hidden ly/ from view of men, and wicked worlds disdaine."

(VI.proem.3) The quest for a courteous alternative to court, the quest to redefine

Courtesy away from the rankling etymology of false and painted show--this is what is

revealed in the place where Colin Clout pipes his last lay.

The meaning of Acidale is launched by the introduction to the tenth canto, where

we are told that Calidore has firmly decided to give up his quest for the Blatant Beast, and

settle down in pastoral. The first four stanzas of the canto are transitional; and it is not

easy to tell whether the renunciation is clinched by the chasing of Pastorella which is just

past, or the vision on Acidale to come. But the source is less important that the thematics

of the rhetoric, the way it introduces the new canto with a firm decision to abjure the

court, for this cannot help but inflect the reading of the court of the Graces of which he is

to be granted a vision.

That from henceforth he meanes no more to sew

His former quest, so full of toile and paine;
Another quest, another game in vew
He hath, the guerdon of his loue to gaine:
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 With whom he myndes for euer to remaine,
And set his rest amongst the rusticke sort,
Rather then hunt still after shadowes vaine
Of courtly fauor, fed with light report
Of euery blaste, and sayling alwaies in the port.

Ne certes mote he greatly blamed be,

From so high step to stoupe vnto so low.
For who had tasted once (as oft did he)
The happy peace, which there doth ouerflow,
And prou'd the perfect pleasures, which doe grow
Amongst poore hyndes, in hils, in woods, in dales,
Would neuer more delight in painted show
Of such false blisse, as there is set for stales,
T'entrap vnwary fooles in their eternall bales.

For what hath all that goodly glorious gaze

Like to one sight, which Calidore did vew?
The glaunce whereof their dimmed eies would daze,
That never more they should endure the shew
Of that sunne-shine, that makes them looke askew.
Ne ought in all that world of beauties rare,
(Saue onely Glorianaes heauenly hew
To which what can compare?) can it compare;
The which as commeth now, by course I will declare. (VI.x.2-4)

Again, Spenser returns to his theme of the shadowy vanity of court, for the purpose of

what seems to be a firm and final renunciation. The "painted show/ Of such false blisse,

as there is set for stales,/ T'entrap vnwary fooles in their eternall bales" is a lovely

description of the Bower which Guyon mowed down so temperately four cantos earlier,

but we are not in the least surprised by this point in canto six that the lines are directed at

court life.

Newer than the denigration of the court is the alternative which is offered. Painted

shows are not moaned over, but replaced with a vision of true and unfading splendor.

Even the obliging parenthetical exception for Gloriana is brought to the service of the

exceptionalism of the vision to come: there is deliberate composition in the syntax of the

287
line "To which what can compare?) can it compare." Such rhetoric leads us to believe that

if any real vision could compare to the breathless hyperbole reserved for Elizabeth, then it

will be the substantial vision to be laid out in this very canto. And with all the circles of

gracious dancers, the suggestion that they form the "traine of beauties Queene," (VI.x.17)

the talk about sovereignty, it is hard not to see Acidale as the seat of the alternative court

and source of true courtesy which Calidore has been seeking.

The country lass must be a real and particular object of Spenser's devotion. She is

also something more: the divine circles in which she turns expand her from object of

devotion to object of quest. The entire spectacle is not simply a celebration of one

woman, but an exposition of the attendant graces which make for the true alternative to a

shallow and painted courtesy:

These three on men all gracious gifts bestow,

Which decke the body or adorne the mynde,
To make them louely or well fauored show,
As comely carriage, entertainement kynde,
Sweete semblaunt, friendly offices that bynde,
And all the complements of curtesie:
They teach vs, how to each degree and kynde
We should our selues demeane, to low, to hie;
To friends, to foes, which skill men call Civility.

Therefore they alwaies smoothly seeme to smile,

That we likewise should mylde and gentle be,
And also naked are, that without guile
Or false dissemblaunce all them plaine may see,
Simple and true from couert malice freee:
And eeke them selues so in their daunce they bore,
That two of them still froward seem'd to bee,
But one still towards shew'd her selfe afore;
That good should from vs goe, then come in greater store (VI.x.23-24)

This is paradox: the Graces are naked, but their primary function is to deck and adorn.

The tension is at the heart of what has been endangering courtesy since the proem:

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"Courtesy, if it has its hidden origin 'deepe within the mynd' (5.8), may also emerge as

mere bel sembiante, a contrast to the nakedness of the Graces (x. 24)."143 The solution is

delicate but not difficult. Calidore (and Colin Clout) have been in flight from courts

where courtesy is empty show and vain shadow. The Graces at this alternate court, out on

a clear peak in the heart of the pastoral woodlands, teach full show, the gestures and

expressions which flow naturally from an innate virtue. Just as Christian grace is not

attainable by works, so these half-pagan Graces do not allow for artifice in the fashioning

of a gentleman, and the necessary displays of inner worth which they teach are displays

which ought to flow from the goodness of inner nature.

A more vexing problem is the ontology of the Graces. In every way, the poem

offers them as an alternative court, in which courtesy arises from substance rather than

show. The problem is that the vision is show: from the covert of the woods, Calidore

suspects that the scene might be "enchaunted show,/ With which his eyes mote haue

deluded beene" (VI.x.17) and when he approaches to test their reality, they do indeed

vanish.

The vanishing frustrates both Colin and Calidore, but neither are disillusioned,

disgusted with the all-too familiar vanity of spectacle. Colin offers the observation that

the maidens of the vision are real in their way, but that they vanish and they appear upon

their own whim, and are not to be recalled by any effort. And this makes a sort of sense:

they are Graces, and they ought to come of their own volition and not by call or artifice.

Among other things, these Graces are poetry. It is far too easy now to expose the

143
Patricia A. Parker, "The Romance of Romance," from Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of
a Mode, reprinted in Edmund Spenser: Modern Critical Views Ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea
House, 1986) 185.

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meta-ness of virtually anything: the techniques of doing so are well-worn ruts. But here

there is something which cries out meta! in clarity. The entrance of Colin Clout into this

scene (which has been so meticulously set up) should be proof enough, but there is more.

After the disappearance of the dancing nudes, they can only be replaced by talk, and the

talk happens to be allegoresis.144 Colin's speech is a delineation of the vision of the

Graces, explaining the moral significance of their attributes (their smiles represent

mildness, their nakedness represents guilelessness, the way they look to each other

represents the need to do rather than receive good). The voice at work, if we did not

know it to be Colin's, would sound most like that other exegetical persona, "E.K.," from

the Shepheards Calender. As it happens, one of "E.K."s glosses, the "Argument" from

the October eclogue, tells us a good deal about what is really happening on Acidale:

[Poetry is] no arte, but a divine gift and heauenly instinct

not to bee gotten by laboure and learning, but adorned with
both: and poured into the witte by a certaine
ε)νθουσιασµο∴ ϕ, and celestiall inspiration.145

The Graces, who come not by art but by divine gift, are the stuff of song: they circle and

dance as Colin plays his pipes, and disappear as soon as he is forced to break off.

The alternative court and its alternative vision of Courtesy cannot be reduced to

one place or one set of mores. That is not the way allegory works, and this study has

already discussed the ways in which Ireland functions as an antidote to England, and how

this fact is paralleled in the poem by the pastoral antithesis to heroic epic. It seems that

one more of the axes of reference needs to be the tension of Poetry (the real land of

144
Paul Alpers has found this exegesis curiously typical of pastoral, in that the attempt to restore a loss of
vision is parallel to the genre's conscious humility before heroic modes. Paul Alpers, "Spenser's Late
Pastorals," ELH 56.4 (Winter, 1989) 807.
145
Spenser, 456.

290
Faery)146 against the world. The real world is a place in which one has to get used to the

times and the mores, and accommodate oneself to the vanity of shadows which passes for

courtesy. Poetry can remake courtesy into a heroic virtue, and one with fulfillment and

purpose, in which all relations move in harmony with their degrees, and all inner kindness

is matched only with its appropriate semblance.

It is a Courtesy that can only come from a court of the imagination. Once the

music is disturbed and the dream is dispelled, there is no court in which to practice the

new fulfillment of the virtue. One can talk about the vision, but that is all. Once the

Graces disappear, Calidore and Colin chat for a long time in stanza 30, but there are only

the two of them, out in a hill in the woods. It is not a social setting, and Acidale allows

only for the vision and theoretization of Courtesy, and not for its practice, which would

have to be done back in the real world. And the world was most real precisely where it

was most false: at Whitehall.

146
David Shore finds this tension to be the culmination of a career arc for Spenser. See David Shore,
Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral (Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 1985) 160-69.

291
 Chapter Five

1. The Fellowship of Mount Mao

During the reign of Emperor Mu of the Eastern Jin dynasty, on the tenth night of

the eleventh month of the third year of Shengping (359 AD), a daimon named Greenbud

Blossom descended to Mount Mao, just south of modern-day Nanjing. She was dressed

in azure robes and wore a countenance of great propriety and appeared to be about twenty

years old; in fact, she was nine hundred years old, having attained the Way on Mt. Jiuyi.

In her mortal life, she had been a governess who had poisoned her charges, and because

her former sins had still not been expiated in the mysterious realms, she had been ordered

descend on revelatory errands into the world of stink and confusion.

When she arrived, Greenbud Blossom gave the following poem to Yang Quan, a

relative of Yang Xi, a recorder of visions:147

Over the divine marchmount the clouds rise

Flying peaks swell up a thousand yards high
Vast and encompassing, Spirit Valley is empty
The alabaster forest, thickly leaved, dense and austere
Mr. Yang has a tall handsome stature
In settling the passions he resembles "Hui Jin"
In passing beyond form he is like "Wei Lin"
He shines brilliantly within the noble gates,
Inside, there is a mind which surpasses the common...
Silently seeking, I enjoy this meeting,
I pray the elegant gathering will last many years.
Who says that the secluded mirror is hard to find?
You can achieve it in your mind...
"Pronouncements of the Perfected" (Zhengao), juan 1148
147
Yang Quan (not to be confused with a Song Daoist of the same name) is presumably a relative; the
editor of this text, Tao Hongjing, notes in a later gloss only that Yang Xi, being of the same surname as
Yang Quan, had the opportunity to ask him about this event and recorded his answer. No other
information about Yang Quan exists.
148
Daozang vol. 20 (Beijing: Wenwu Publishing House, 1987) 491. This text is # 1016 in the Daoist
Canon (Daozang) according to the list of K. M. Schipper, Concordance du Tao Tsang: Titres des
Ouvrages (Paris: École française d'Extrême-Orient, 1975). Future references will be marked
292
 According to the mainstream of traditional Chinese literary theory, this is not

how poetry is supposed to happen. According to certain classical clichés, poetry is that

which speaks the mind's intent. The encounter with a rich, immediate reality stirs up

thought or passion, and the passion must find release in words. This was a consensus

model for poetic creation which evolved though many generations of literati, as each age

put forth its own permutation on an old theme.

There are numerous exceptions in the details of generations of texts; this is a

broad characterization rather than a law. But the alternative models which one finds in

the exceptions are not quite as codified. The history of Chinese criticism is just as

complex as that of Europe; however, in the foundations of that history there is not quite

as dramatic or explicit a split as in the classical European case. The careful craftsmanship

later identified as a peculiarly Horatian characteristic was defined as hostile to the

frenzied inspiration of the mad poet, who took dictation from the divine and produced

bizarre beauty which transcended human understanding. There was some Chinese

allowance for transcendent inspiration, but it was not theorized as fully nor as explicitly

in opposition to other discourse. This is not to say that early Chinese poetry was

uniformly cool and controlled. Ecstatic imagery has a long tradition, and the transcendent

journeys of the Chuci were replicated and eventually even standardized. However, there

seems little evidence that many poets or readers took this imagery literally, or turned

transcendence into a theory of poetry: the ecstatic journey was an allegorical trope of

more human events.

parenthetically in the text, with "DZ" and the Schipper number, followed by the volume and page
numbers (if applicable) of the Wenwu edition, which is a reduced photoreprint of the Baiyun Monastery
texts.

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 There is much in Yang Xi and his later imitators that can be properly called

allegorical, but the tropes of transcendence are invoked with a reinvigorated literality.

Yang Xi and his immediate circle, in fact, had great traffic with the spirits, and this was

only one of many revelations recorded by Yang between the years 363 and 368. Yang's

chief guide in his own visions was the Lady Wei Huacun, one of the Perfected who had

been charged with delivering a series of sacred texts to Yang Xi, and through him to the

elect of the world. The records of his revelations, and these sacred texts that Lady Wei

and others transmitted to him, were the foundation of the Shangqing ("Supreme Purity")

school of Daoism, and Yang is properly remembered as the school's founder. The texts

which he received are bizarre, frenetic, mesmerizing (the poem cited above is fairly

typical)--qualities which have led several Western scholars to write of Yang's ecstasies as

"genuine experience."

It is not my concern to decide whether Yang was an earnest medium or a gifted

huckster. What seems important about Yang and the Shangqing tradition, whatever its

provenance, is its model of hermeneutically-defined community which stands in strong

contrast to the models of more traditionally "literary" modes of intellectual history.

Take Greenbud Blossom’s poem. Marvelously odd, it is exactly the sort of text

that one would expect a minor deity to come bearing, if she were to show up in her azure

robes on some November night. It is not necessarily a mystery, in the sense that one

would use of the Orphic hymns. Some of the poem is difficult to interpret, but more due

to textual corruptions than deliberate obscurantism. And this poetry of the Perfected

picks up a great deal from the Chinese literary mainstream: the poem begins with an

ecstatic journey that has plenty of models going back at least to Qu Yuan. Greenbud

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Blossom’s poem is less easily mapped onto signs in the manner that Wang Yi took with

the Chuci, but it offers a similar and more generalized mechanics of aspiration. There is

blockage and closeness at hand; the speaker of the poem must rise up and out in her

quest. The universe is understood though its confining properties, but it is a cage from

which one is meant to escape.

The ecstatic journey is then stilled; the speaker roosts within herself. She has

passed beyond outer form to something more essential. Signs, even esoteric ones, may be

helpful to the completion of that progress. But they are helpful in the manner of a door,

or of the gate of a great house: the sign is a barrier which admits those who deserve to

know. And the knowledge which lies hidden behind those gates is socially inflected.

There is that which leaves behind the common mind, and su immediately calls forth its

correlate, ya; and with that pair there is the establishment of social stratification. It is

particularly difficult to understand what is reached through the marking of the yi gram,

but it has something to do with elegant society, gathered far beyond the petty boundaries

of legibility.

The texts given to Yang were the proximate causes of certain forms of religious

community which culminated in the high Tang. Yang’s immediate social context is in

fact built into the revelations which are given to him: the daimons make clear that the

revelations are not meant for him alone, but also for his patrons, the Xu family. Xu Mi

and his son Xu Hui were aristocrats of northern descent, who had probably emigrated to

the south in advance of a great wave which arrived in the wake of Toba incursions in the

north.149 Modern research has suggested that these families, whose exposure to ecstatic
149
For an extended discussion of the Xu family, see Michel Strickmann, Le Daoïsme du Mao Chan:
Cronique d'un Révélation Mémoires de l'Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises 17 ([Paris]: Collège de
France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1981) 122-208.
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traditions came through literary knowledge of Huang-Lao works as well as familiarity

with the Celestial Masters, were cut off from indigenous “Daoists” who practiced a

salacious shamanism.150 The Shangqing revelations were the first high-culture texts of

religious Daoism to emanate from the South. They were elite texts for a displaced elite.

To some extent, the social implications of the revelations conform to the

patronage model which has already been delineated. Xu Mi, as the patron, was confirmed

in his worth by the ability to receive and to read a text. Yang Xi, in becoming the sudden

conduit for primordial revelation flowing out upon the house of Xu, must have made a

convincing case for continued financial support. But there is something quite new here as

well. The mystery which arrives through Yang is not of him. He is not the wounded

courtier-poet, a la Qu Yuan, wandering the universe in search of a master who can read

his textual person right. The allegories are not internal to his relations with the Xus.

Rather, the allegory comes from outside, very far outside, at the furthest limits of

imaginable time and space, translated and passed down through generations and ranks of

Being, spreading slowly outward at last into the ontologically coarse realm of human

action and legibility.

Moreover, the Shangqing revelations did not simply reinforce preexistent

structures of power relationships. They displaced or inverted them: Yang Xi was, in the

order of the world, a client to the Xu family, but he became their spiritual patron. He was

given divine authority to induct Xu Mi and Xu Hui into the mysteries, and he was the

only designated human representative of Lady Wei and the more exalted spirits which

150
Cf. Michel Strickmann, "The Mao Shan Revelations: Taoism and the Aristocracy" T'oung-Pao 63
(1962): 1-63.

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hovered above and behind her. It was a pattern repeated on ever-greater scales: at the

height of his power, the Tang emperor Xuanzong acknowledged the 12th Shangqing

patriarch, Sima Chengzhen, as his spiritual master. The receipt of vision did not

categorically invert power relationships, but it did set them adrift upon the flows of

transformation. In the secular world, a ruler ruled and a subject was subject, fathers

fathered and sons obeyed. In the revealed world, the ordinand of today became the

ordinant of tomorrow: Xu Mi and Xu Hui transmitted the scriptures they had received to

others, and they passed them on in turn.

Of course, each iteration of textual transmission contained its own temporary

structure of relation, because it confirms the authority of the transmitter. But the primary

social logic of the Shangqing was a division of the elect understanders from the benighted

commons; internal hierarchies existed but were downplayed. This was true of the

Shangqing establishment which eventually arose because it is a textual motion lodged in

the original corpus of the revelation to Yang. The transmissions from Lady Wei are

accompanied by stern warnings against the improper transmission of divine secrets to the

unworthy, and this gesture was then replicated in the subsequent rounds of human

transmission, and eventually codified into the ceremonial guides which were collated in

the Tang.

The Shangqing school which developed forms a rare Chinese analogue to the

mystery-cults of classical and Hellenistic Greece which modeled the social construction

of so much later European allegoresis. There is no need to force an identity between

distant and unyokeable traditions: the points of difference between Orphism and

Shangqing need hardly be enumerated. But the religions managed to imagine similar

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relationships between revelation and community formation, with the result that in both

cases there is a veneration of textual secrets as the boundaries of elect society. Because

the Greek case led to such a strong and well-articulated exegetical tradition, its example

becomes a useful analytical model for the Chinese materials. Not a model for imposition

or simple assertion, but a model which offers possibilities for exploration. The Chinese

critical tradition offers its own range of conceptual frameworks for positing the operation

of exegesis, but the foreign model adds possibilities of range and depth. Histories of

Chinese literature have rarely bothered with Shangqing; through comparative

methodology, we can recover new possibilities for characterizing exegetical and social

processes which have been downplayed by the critical tradition.

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2. Shangqing Visionary Practice

Master Si, Master Yu, Master Li, and Master Lai were
speaking with each other, saying, “Who is able to take
nothingness for his head, take life for his spine, and take
death for his orifices? Whoever knows that death and life,
existence and annihilation are of one body, with him will I
be friends.” The four men looked at each other and
laughed, and thereafter befriended one another.
--Zhuangzi, Da Zongshi

There are individual Shangqing allegories. These are unimportant in comparison

to the allegorical structure of the large-scale Shangqing worldview. The key to this

structure is the correspondence between the heavens and the adept’s own body.

Shangqing did not produce anatomies of the human body, but cartographies.

There is, of course, a relatively sophisticated knowledge of bodily structure: medical

science had its own ancient traditions, but the links between medicine and Daoist theory

became stronger and more numerous as the institutional Daoist church grew. After all,

the ultimate goal of the Daoist practitioner was immortality, and this was always

conceived in relatively physical and technical terms. Daoist immortality bore little

resemblance to Buddhist salvation (apart for some rhetorical syncretism in the Lingbao

school) and the adept hoped not for a spiritual liberation from the body, but rather for a

complete understanding of the proper techniques that would allow for the body to be

refined and purged of its deadly elements. The obsession with alchemy is typical of the

worldview, but all meditation practices were understood in terms of their corporal

processes and effects.

However, the depth of Shangqing medical knowledge and interest in the physical

form and location of organs is not primarily directed toward an understanding of the

interrelation of overlapping tissues. Instead, it distinguishes a system of independent

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locations for the purpose of correlating each with larger parts of the visible and invisible

universe, and each is designated as the proper home for one or more divinities.151 Thus,

the kidney is understood as the source of sperm, but as such is drawn into the web of

traditional significations of sperm: seed, growth, generation. The kidney, as the

receptacle of the sperm, is the region of hidden renewal, yang within a field of yin and

seed hidden beneath frozen ground. The kidney is thus associated with the extreme north

of the physical world, and with the metaphysical regions of the Prime (yuan).

Similarly, the spleen is the center of the body, the axis upon which yin elements

are balanced with yang, feminine with masculine, lunar with solar; it is the home of both

its own particular deities (sometimes Zidan, sometimes the trio Yuanlao, Xuanlao, and

Huanglao) and also of the deified avatar of Lao Tzu, “Taishang Laojun.” The stomach is

in some texts the “Yellow Court” (huang-ting); but in the Scripture of the Yellow Court,

it is the “Great Storehouse” (taizang) which is allied with the spleen and which holds the

body's solar energies at night. The brain is the repository of cavities known as the “Nine

Palaces” (jiugong), which are connected to certain of the more important stars (e.g., the

Palace of Mysterious Cinnabar (xuandangong) is contiguous with the pole star) and are

associated with the ninefold layers of heaven and their resident deities. And then there

are points mapped onto the body at specific locations but which are not matched to

particular organs. Of the three “Cinnabar Fields” (dan tian), a system of linked cavities,

one might imagine that the uppermost (a region three inches behind the center of the

eyebrows and also named the “Muddy Pellet,” (ni-huan)) might refer to the pituitary

151
The summaries of this and the next paragraph are highly indebted to Isabelle Robinet, Taoist
Meditation: the Mao-Shan Tradition of Great Purity trans. Julian F. Pas and Norman J. Girardot
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) 100-03.

300
gland, but there is certainly nothing to match to the middle and lower fields, located near

the heart and three inches below the navel, respectively. Liver, lungs, heart, testacles—all

border on real or fantastic realms, and all have their attendant spirits.

Systems of celestial correspondence were nothing new to China; the epigraph

from Zhuangzi shows in embryonic form the rhetoric that would be developed into more

literal celestial anatomies in the Taiping jing152 and then later in Yang Xi’s revealed texts.

Apart from this particular stream of correspondences, there were others: the tendency of

heaven to pattern itself forth on earth is a basic assumption of both the Yijing and also the

slightly more sedate Confucianism of Dong Zhongshu and later political theory. But

there had been little precedent outside occasional Huang-Lao references for a matching of

the ethereal to the corporal, and the new twist to the theme has practical results for the

qualities of the systems of correspondence. Whereas most such systems are temporally-

oriented, with heaven responding to events on earth and putting forth its judgments in

omens, Shangqing corporal spirituality is conceived spatially, as each delimitable point

on the body is mapped one-to-one with the geography of the outer realms. Secondly,

while the various omenologies conceived of correspondences as primarily or exclusively

semiotic (physical manifestations having no metaphysical reality except in their

representations of transcendent intent), the Shangqing body is both semiotically and

ontologically linked to its heavenly counterparts. So, for example, the points two inches

in from the brows, the heart and the navel are representative of those alternative planes of

existence called the "Cinnabar Fields", but they also are the Cinnabar Fields: some
152
Discussion of the Taiping jing has been omitted for reasons of brevity; a discussion of the work's
relationship to Shangqing corporal theory can be found in Max Kaltenmark, "The Ideology of the T'ai-
P'ing Ching," Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, ed. Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 19-52, esp. 41-44.

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portion of the actual metaphysical realm is spatially available within the body. Taiyi, the

Supreme Unity, exists on a plane above describable reality, also has a residence within a

brain-cavity in each adept. The cavity is a miniature sign of the supreme “cavern-heaven”

(dong tian), but it is also contiguous with the cavern-heaven and ontologically identical

with it.

The importance of these corporal cosmologies are best seen in the primary

scripture of the Shangqing tradition, the Perfect Scripture of the Great Cavern (Dadong

Zhenjing). This was the most famous of the revelations to Yang Xi, and also the most

important to later liturgical and ecclesiastical practice. As will be described below, the

Daoist hierarchy during the Tang was demarcated by a series of initiations into sacred

scripture; the Perfect Scripture was one of the texts in the most exalted and final cluster

of initiations.

The Perfect Scripture is a ritual text, and gives detailed instructions on how to cut

off the sources of death in the body through meditative approach to the various corporal

deities. It would not be a strain to call the text “liturgical,” even though it is addressed to

the individual adept, practicing contemplation alone. The entire first fascicle of the most

reliable edition153 is devoted to a complicated and extended set of purification exercises,

consisting largely of directional bowing, teeth-clacking, and saliva-swallowing, along

with sets of visualizations and prayers to various gods of the cardinal directions.

Following the purifications are thirty-nine mini-rituals delineated in thirty-nine “Dao

153
Partly because of its reputation, and perhaps partly because of restricted access to the most authoritative
rituals, the extant versions of the text are all corrupt to some degree, and several texts with no relation to
the original have accumulated related names. There is as yet no scholarly edition of the text; however,
Isabelle Robinet has identified HY6 as the most reliable edition, and I follow her lead in citing from
that. Preliminary comparison with another version in HY103 has revealed no significant differences in
quoted sections. Cf. Robinet, La Révélation de Shangqing Dans L'Histoire du Taoisme vol. 2 (Paris:
École Française d'Extrême-Orient, 1984) 29-44.

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scriptures,” each one addressed to one of the deities associated one of the important sites

of the body.

The structure of each small Dao-scripture is a curious mirror of the Shangqing

structure of revelation, offering revealed text as the conduit between levels of reality.

Each Dao-scripture opens with a short preparatory ritual in which one concentrates upon

the appropriate body part and its celestial resident, and asks for the deity's assistance in

purification. The text then moves to poetic liturgies: first, an invocation to the primary

deity of the organ; then, a selection from a heavenly text called the “Jade Scripture”

(Yujing) which is either about the deity or speaks in his or her voice. A variable number

of alternate invocations to secondary deities resident in the given organ may then follow.

Finally, an exorcistic talisman is given which derives from the deity addressed, with

instructions for its use. The whole is centered around the verse portions, revealed

mysteries which seem to respond to the invocations as the effusions of the Beyond; the

adept who recites them both makes a plea and also, by taking on their textualized voice,

locates himself among the powers he addresses. And of course, this is only fitting: the

gods live in the body, and live in it more fully as one pursues Shangqing methods with

more frequency and piety.

Even more telling than the structure are the visualizations which infuse all of

these imprecations and revealed poems. Typical of the series is the eighth Dao-scripture,

a liturgy addressed to a divinity named Supreme-One Ruddy Infant (Shang-yi Chizi), who

lives in the "Muddy Pellet" (the pituitary gland, or something near it).154 The scripture
154
Stephen Bokenkamp has suggested an identity between this Ruddy Infant and the cinnabar used for a
certain alchemical preparation; the suggestion underscores the complexity of Shangqing systems of
correspondence which must be abbreviated for this analysis. cf. Stephen Bokenkamp, Early Daoist
Scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 292.

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opens with instructions to the practitioner:

Carefully invite the heavenly thearch of the Muddy Pellet,

Supreme-One Ruddy Infant, [saying]: “Heavenly word of
congealed mystery, first eternal of the three primes, guard
my phenomenal Muddy Pellet, the windows of my nine
orifices and the gates of deadly qi. Cause my phenomenal
Muddy Pellet, my jade firmness and gold brilliance to
pattern forth perfection, embody life, and treasure up light;
and cause my nine orifices to receive the spirit. Bid the
seven ancestral parents [within me] to always be at peace,
and release me from my indwelling sins, that I may together
with you ascend to the Supreme Purity.”

Then truly meditate on the heavenly thearch of the Muddy

Pellet, Supreme-One Ruddy Infant, the heaven-perfected qi
of congealed mystery, [and meditate on] the color of
treasured light covering the top of your head. (DZ6, 1.525)

A later meditation is even more specific:

Then meditate on the treasured light coming and

manifesting itself in the Muddy Pellet, and descending to
manifest itself in the nai-kou. Then suck the divine clouds
into the mouth and swallow the saliva thrice in order to
knot the Triple-Divine, [and visualize it] like a triple-purity
in form, with purple clothing and cap, which, going down,
enters the "crimson palace", pierces the bladder and
rectum, and exits through the anus. [Meanwhile, that of it
which] goes up enters the spinal column, pierces the
topmost vertebra, and enters the inner palace of the Muddy
Pellet. At the proper time, exhale. (DZ 6, 1.526)

The strongly visual aspects of the prayer and meditation are typical of all thirty-nine of

these exercises which comprise the scripture, especially a fascination with light: many of

the exercises require the visualization of collected solar, lunar, or stellar light being

transferred from organ to organ. Also typical are the fixations on the architecture of the

body: the spirit which lives within the adept’s own Muddy Pellet is called out to cast

beneficent influences on the whole corporal system; other gods are invoked in the quest

for a transcendent medical harmony. But the linchpin of the system is the conjunction of
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the visual with the interior: the inner landscape of the body is awash in invisible light. A

prayer which follows brings the point home:

Silently say this invocation:

“Supreme-One Ruddy Infant, also called Supreme Perfected,
Flying clouds and feathery robes, bathed in splendor of purple smoke,
From above, invite me to the gated light to face the thearch-king
Cause treasured light, gleaming, to shine on my body.
May my body grow wings that I might ascend the ninefold heavens.”
(DZ 6, 1.525)

Remembering that the heavens are all available internally makes the prayer weirder: the

hope is then that light will stream out across the inside of the body from its source locked

up behind internal heavenly gates.

One of the more curious elements in this opening is the address to the Supreme-

One Ruddy Infant as a “Heavenly Word” (tian zi); the character used strongly suggests

writing rather than speech.155 This is unusual; these bodily deities are not generally

referred to as words, though there are other examples in this particular scripture. Here, as

in some of those other usages, the verb, “congeal” (ning) is highly resonant. This is the

standard word used to describe the formation of texts in the Shangqing corpus: before

they are actually legible texts, these scriptures possess their uncorrupted meaning as

undifferentiated mysterious qi in the being of the Divine One (Di yi). They trickle

downward: qi coagulates into heavenly script, which is then translated into lower and

lower languages until it reaches earth, the revelation to Yang Xi. It is a process of

thickening and coarsening, the encapsulation of spiritual originals within grosser visible

form. It is a process structured in perfect parallel to the relation of the adept to his gods:
155
There is some relationship between these deities and the talismans which take the form of magical
compound words at the end of each section of scripture. However, these talismans are not usually
described as containing deity; further research would be required to determine the nature of the
relationship more precisely.

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the heavens and their deities exist in their own realms, but make their entrance into tiny

cavern-heavens within the body. If the spiritual core is ignored, the body dies; if it is

cultivated, the body itself grows more refined and ethereal until immortality is attained.

The image of the heavenly word brings out a fundamental characteristic of

Shangqing Daoism: divinity is accessed through textual means. Transmission of texts

was the central marker of spiritual advancement, and it is often hard to distinguish such

advancement from textual access and understanding. The “Jade Scripture” to be recited

before the Supreme-One Ruddy Infant says, "The Jade king reveals the mysterious

tomes," (DZ 6, 1.525) and a later invocation to the “Superlative Supreme King of Jade

Purity” asserts that “Above, one enters the rooms of the thearch/ And receives the book of

Cinnabar-Brightness.” (DZ 6, 1.525) The rituals of transmission and advancement which

become thoroughly hierarchical by the Tang, are present in the content of the very texts

which are later transmitted.

Finally, the spiritual advancement that comes with access to finer texts and purer

versions of knowledge creates a community of the spiritually empowered. An invocation

to the “High-Supreme Exorcist King of Jade Purity” elsewhere within this same Dao-

scripture reads, in part,

If you would like to know where I am

Secretly inquire of the Great Subtlety
The Jade thearch of the Great Subtlety
And the three sages pace back and forth
They make all those around me
Able to fly in unison
Through the six offices of the Chaos Cavern-Heaven
Where the sun and moon are equally resplendent.
(DZ 6, 1.526)

The six "offices" (fu) are also the six organs (fu) of the chest cavity; this is standardized

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terminology throughout Yang’s revelations, and reminds us that we are still in the body of

the adept even as we roam the stars. The unity of flight with one's compeers is just as

internal as the heavens and their gods. And this points up another trait of Shangqing: the

strongly emotive character of its community. The real spiritual community available to

Yang Xi was very small: he had his disciples, the Xus. Only the imagined community

was large, the litany of ancient worthies and imagined sages, names that came to him

through his readings and his ecstasies.

The situation was quite altered by the institutional realities of the Tang. There

were many more companions available in the flesh, though their number was still limited

in a relative sense: only the spiritually elite ever received Shangqing ordination. Even if

one had a small society of fellow-believers present to one in the flesh, though, the

experience of community was still largely internally projected. The religion retained its

basic internal orientation from the revelations to Yang, and Shangqing cultivation

remained a largely private practice. Whereas the mystery-cults of Greece and those who

later used their rhetoric were entranced by the idea of group practice, and communities

which convened in the flesh, Shangqing built its mystical communities out of the

sympathies of separated individuals. For its entire history, Shangqing was the most

focused on private cultivation of the major sects. The Celestial Masters had organized a

local theocracy every bit as complete as Calvin's Geneva, and the Lingbao, with its

Buddhist syncretism, maintained strong populist gestures, especially the regular

performance of public ritual and group worship. But Shangqing masters ascended by

themselves. They were not all recluses; they were almost always first inducted into lower

orders, like the Lingbao, which had responsibility for public liturgy, and Shangqing

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ordination did not require removal from that public context. But as Shangqing, the

camaraderie of a fellowship of initiates was manifested in the way in which practice was

theorized, not in any predilection to group practice.

There is some evidence that the complex and specific corporal cartographies of

the central Shangqing revelations were read in more generalized and allegorical fashion

during the high Tang. There is a large treatise literature addressing issues of meditation,

especially by Shangqing initiates, and most of that literature does not discuss the arcana

of the Perfect Scripture and related texts. Interior visualizations are still encouraged, and

meditation is still mapped onto the body, but these mappings are usually conceived as

motions of transcendent mind, and not as imprecatory approaches to internally-

manifested deities.

For example, one of the most influential treatises of the 8th-century was the

Treatise on Sitting in Forgetfulness (Zuo wang lun), by the 12th Shangqing patriarch,

Sima Chengzhen. The work offers a staged entrance into meditation, with the adept

passing though the stages of "Respect and Faith" (jing xin), "Interception of Karma"

(duan yuan), "Taming the Mind" (shou xin), "Detachment from Affairs" (jian shi), "True

Observation" (zhen guan), "Intense Concentration" (tai ding) and "Receiving the TAO"

(de dao). Each stage is a form of withdrawal from sensory perception, not with the

Buddhist sense of a vitiating unreality--the real world is real to Sima--but with the sense

that the world reachable through sense will inevitably drown out the Dao for all but the

most advanced practitioners. Livia Köhn translates a typical sentiment: "The perfect

TAO goes so far beyond sensual perception, true inner nature is so far apart from

anything gained by craving, that it is impossible to hear the inaudible, perceive the subtle,

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and believe one's sense, to listen to the formless, recognize the symbolic, and not be

perplexed."156 Curiously, the fear of sensory beguilement extends to language and

suggests the benefits of a plain style: in a postface, the earlier Treatise on Sitting in

Forgetfulness of one Zhao Jian is denigrated for having a dazzling literary style which

draws attention away from the truly mysterious and onto the outer form of his words.

Given that the revelations to Yang Xi were anything but plain, one can only guess that the

patriarch read his school's most sacred texts in a detached fashion.

The construction of meditation as a non-imprecatory form of internality is

common to other of Sima's treatise literature: the Storing of Thought and Strengthening

of Qi (Cunxiang lianqi), the Scripture on Settling the View (Dingguan jing), and an

annotated abbreviation of the now-lost original Tianyinzi. Of course, one might argue

that these works seem to be addressed to the younger initiate into the lower Daoist orders,

and that they are basic manuals for those who cannot yet attain to the fullness of the

practices described in the Perfect Scripture. This is probably partly true, but we also have

independent confirmation of a high-Tang trend toward allegorization of the bodily deities.

Wu Yun was one of the most prominent Daoists at the court of Xuanzong, and a

biography in the Daoist Canon describes his initial meeting with the emperor:

The emperor asked him about the methods of the Dao, and
he answered saying "For the essence of it, nothing was as
good as the 5000-word classic, and all the branches and
vines of discourse were just a waste of paper and bamboo
slats." He then asked about the affairs of divinities,
immortals, and self-purification. Yun answered saying,
"These are the affairs of barbarians. One ought to put
accomplishments into effect year by year and month by
month; to seek it is not fit for the lord of men." And every
156
Livia Köhn, Seven Steps to the TAO: Sima Chengzhen's Zuowanglun Monumenta Serica Monograph
Series XX (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1987) 85. The translations of the section headings are also Köhn's.

309
 monk and priest with the assembled court ministers
memorialized on what Yun had presented. (DZ 1053,
23.682)

Wu Yun certainly did know the abstruse language of the corporal heavens; he employed it

in his own poetry. Furthermore, it is hard to know how widespread his denigration of

divinities was: the flood of memorials to the throne implies only controversy, not

agreement. And, of course, this was to some extent a smart political move: Wu was

exalting the emperor's ancestor, and the biography goes on to record the great imperial

favor Wu received; the only court Daoist honored more was Sima Chengzhen, who had,

like Wu Yun, been apprenticed to the 11th Shangqing patriarch, Pan Shizheng, at the

latter's monastery on Mt. Song. But even if Wu is giving a cynical response, the end

result is a public construction of the religion away from the more complex ritual

practices.

An extended example of this less worshipful corporal spirituality is available in

Wu's own "Discourse of Mind and Eyes" (Xin mu lun DZ 1038). The work is a

philosophical dialogue between allegorical abstractions, a genre common enough

throughout the history of Western philosophy, but noticeably odd in the Tang context.

Yet this debate framed between mind and eyes, however odd in form, seems at first to be

rather conventional in its content: the heart wishes to be at peace, and castigates the eyes

for entangling it with all of the pleasures of the senses.

The case which the eyes make for themselves is surprisingly strong, however, and

they ultimately win the debate. They do not advocate a hedonism which wins out over

the heart's spirituality; rather, they propose a subtler understanding of the role of sense-

perception in the spiritual life. Any corruption which might enter through the senses is a

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function not of sense but of the mind's relation to objects. The mind is ruler over the eyes

and any bad influence is the result of their improper management. Furthermore, the eyes

assert that the objects available to sense are not uniformly predisposed to roil the mind,

and that there are in fact some sensory objects which allow passage to higher realizations

of spirit. The mind is reluctant, but eventually accepts the eyes' argument (a concession

which mirrors in its allegorical structure the principle which the eyes are asserting: the

mind learns from the eyes).

The essay seems to have been influential in Tang Daoist conceptualization of the

body; primary evidence is available in a brief “Commentary on the Scripture of

Embryonic Breath” (Taixi jingzhu) by a “Master Illusory-Perfected” (Huan-zhen

xiansheng, DZ 130, 2.869-70). The text of the “scripture” is quite brief, and perhaps

what survives is a fragment of something longer, but the term “scripture” was used

generously, and the actual text of this scripture is a simple gnomic verse. Moreover, the

exegesis offered is pitched at a basic level, with clear glosses: one suspects that the text

and commentary were intended for child-initiates in the Daoist academies (who were

often as young as seven or eight). As the title of the piece suggests, it is gnomic verse

about the Daoist body, and the pseudonymic commentator is not shy about explaining the

details of the corporal cartography. The commentary to the first line, “The embryo is

knotted out of the underbelly qi” goes into a long discussion of the lower cinnabar field

and its alternate names, and why the “general populace” (shi ren) mistake the

terminology. But there is no discussion of internal divinities; instead we are given a

familiar (though much-simplified) argument that the spirit is the ruler of the body and

must make judicious use of the organs. Wu Yun is not cited in that explanation, but a

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citation of his Xuanganglun which follows immediately after demonstrates that the

exegete at least had him in mind.

These examples are offered by way of honest qualification, rather than denial: the

Perfect Scripture retained its place as the highest text in the revealed corpus, and the

extant evidence is not strong enough to suggest that its addresses to the internal heavens

were radically redefined by most or all practitioners. Rather, we should probably hold the

Tang Shangqing body to be a semiotic field in flux. The original force of the Yang

revelations was strong, and these texts had been ensconced at the center of liturgical and

meditative practice; we can assume at least some strong continuance of the belief that

internal organs were physically mapped onto the heavens. At the same time, there appear

to be at least hints that the language of individual divinity is being reinterpreted. But the

difference ought not to be construed as literalism versus allegorism. The Perfect

Scripture maintains a system of correspondences between bodies and heavens which is

hardly a literal equality. It is also not what might ordinarily be called "allegory"; but the

theorization of both scripture and body as grosser, more solid coagulations of ethereal

powers, perhaps authorize the term.157

Rather, even if Tang practitioners are emphasizing the mechanics of internal

meditation over the supplication to internalized deities, the difference would not be

primarily in the semiotic principles at stake, but the way in which those internal motions

produce community. Yang Xi had divine visitors, and he apparently found society with

the spirits inhabiting his own body. If Tang readers of these most elite texts perhaps took

157
The use of the terminology of literary semiotics here is not entirely original on my part, as Kristofer
Schipper has already suggested that Daoist corporality should be understood as "symbolic vision."
Schipper, The Taoist Body trans. Karen C. Duval (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 104.

312
the divinities as nominalizations of spiritual states, then they would have had no daimonic

community within themselves. Instead, their society would have had to to be manifested

as an imagined sympathy with other initiates, defined by a shared isolation from the

world. It would have been the perfect spirituality for the upper echelon of an exclusive

hierarchy.

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3. Daoism in the Age of Xuanzong

The Tang dynasty is called a Daoist golden age. But it is golden primarily in

those qualities which are stereotypically un-Daoist: power and prestige, worldly wealth

and the favor of imperial endowment, codification and hierarchical entrenchment.158 The

ecstatic revelations of the "Pronouncements of the Perfected" (Zhengao) or the "Scripture

of Salvation" (Durenjing) are (largely) over: the only major composition of authoritative

scriptures which occurs during the Tang is the production of apocrypha to match the

bodiless titles which floated down from the Six Dynasties obscurantists.

Daoism reached these institutional heights through a firm alliance with the ruling

Li clan. The alliance between Daoism and the house of Tang is well known, and begins

in the founding of the dynasty. The Li family was an aristocratic clan from the northwest,

and there was evidently some contemporary suspicion that the Lis had a mixed ancestry,

including roots in the non-Chinese western peoples with whom the state had relations that

ranged between war and uneasy truce. Li Er, also known as Lao Tzu, who had

legendarily disappeared into the west, and supposedly bestowed the Tao Te Ching on the

keeper of the last pass before the wilds of the western mountains, became a conveniently

"authentic" ancestor. Portents and signs revealed during the Sui dynasty foretold the

rising of a new dynasty by one surnamed Li, and Wang Yuanzhi, who had studied at Mt.
158
The historical sketch which follows draws heavily from the following sources: Ren Jiyu, Zhongguo
Daojiaoshi (Shanghai: Renmin Publishing House, 1990) 249-457; Timothy H. Barrett, Taoism Under
the Tang: Religion & Empire During the Golden Age of Chinese History (London: Wellsweep Press,
1996); Charles D. Benn, "Taoism as Ideology in the Reign of Emperor Hsuan-Tsung (712-755) Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977; Russell Kirkland, "Ssu-Ma Ch'eng-chen and the Role of
Taoism in the Medeival Chinese Polity." Journal of Asian History 31.2 (1997): 105-38; Livia Köhn and
Russell Kirkland, "Daoism in the Tang" in Daoism Handbook ed. Livia Köhn (Leiden: Brill, 2000) 339-
383; Edward H. Schafer, Mao Shan in Tang Times (Boulder: Society for the Study of Chinese
Religions, 1989); Kristofer Schipper, "Taoist Ritual and Local Cults of the T'ang Dynasty" in Tantric
and Taoist Studies ed. Michel Strickmann, 3 (1985): 812-34; and Stephen R. Bokenkamp, "Time after
Time: Taoist Apocalyptic History and the Founding of the T'ang Dynasty" Asia Major series 3, 7
(1994): 59-88.

314
Mao, communicated the good news to Li Yuan, later known as Emperor Gaozu.

Obviously, the historical sources are slanted retrospectives, and it is open to debate

whether Lao Tzu was connected to the original formulation of this prophecy, or whether

it may have flowed from a general millenarian rhetoric of traditional founder-figures,

with the sage only added to the story after the founding of the dynasty.159 Certainly, much

of our knowledge depends on the legitimizing propaganda of the new dynasty. But one

fact is notable: Wang Yuanzhi, whatever the content of his prophecies, was installed as

the tenth Shangqing patriarch. In fact, it is unclear that there had been a formal lineage of

Shangqing masters; the Tang's retrospective creation of one is part of the initial

institutionalizing impulse.

Whenever the millenarian portents merged with the myth of descent from Lao

Tzu, the myth was an important part of state ideology by the end of Taizong's reign in

650. Lao Tzu had already grown into divinity over the course of the Six Dynasties,

receiving the new name of "Supreme Lord Lao" (Taishang laojun), one of the highest

divinities in the (knowable) pantheon, and his "Five-Thousand-Word Scripture" stood

firmly at the entrance to the fundamental Daoist corpus. The further honorific of

"Emperor of the Mysterious Prime" (Xuanyuan huangdi) was added by Emperor Gaozong

in 666. Divine ancestry never hurt an emperor, and the Tang ruling house thus had

political motivation to promote the Daoist ideology that supported it, and establish the

Daoist church on more solid grounds than it had previously enjoyed. When Wu Zhao

usurped the throne in the late seventh century, and founded her short-lived Zhou dynasty,

the downplaying of Daoist interests which she pursued was a natural course of action.
159
For a convenient collection of the relevant historical citations, with sensible commentary, see Sun
Kekuan, Hanyuan Daolun (Taipei: Lianjing Publishing, 1977) 64-74.

315
She herself was the incarnation of the Guan Yin Buddha, and there was little room for a

hierarchy which had sanctified her predecessors.

The fact that Empress Wu's daughter, the Taiping Princess, had under Gaozong in

670 become the first of many Tang princesses to be installed as Daoist priests, says little

about the religion of either mother or daughter. In Taiping's case, this was a transparent

excuse to refuse a request for marriage by the Tibetan king, and there is little evidence

that she paid much attention to her vows. However, it began a tradition, and at least

sixteen more princesses under seven later Tang emperors were also ordained, and many

of them appointed abbesses. The first of these investitures, of Princesses Xining and

Changlong, discussed below, coincided with the beginning of the reign of Xuanzong

(713-756). It was only during his reign that the ideological alliance between the throne

and Daoism was translated into a firm program of institution-building, and the continuing

ordination of princesses should be seen as part of that institutionalizing impetus. There

was also a great impulse of monastery-construction and endowment across the empire,

and while there was little formal ecclesiological system to the church establishment, there

was high central authority of the Daoist leaders of the capital over these provincial

organs. For the first time, there grew up something that could be reasonably considered

an extensive Daoist church, and its personal and political links with the ruling house were

so great that it became to some degree an organ of the state.

Of course, Xuanzong continued the spectacular patronage of individual Daoist

masters who caught the attention of the court from the beginning of the dynasty: first

Wang Yuanzhi and then his Shangqing successors, Pan Shizheng (585-682), Sima

Chengzhen (647-735), and Li Hanguang (683-769); the capital abbot Cheng Xuanying (fl.

316
632-650); the poets Li Rong (fl. 683-85) and Wu Yun (d. 778). The more important

patronage which developed, however, was a system of average and regularized patronage

that operated through new Daoist academies and civil-service exams. Lecturers on the

Daoist classics were hired into the new “Academy of Worthies” (Jixian yuan), and the

idea of a Daoist academy was replicated broadly, as smaller, regional schools were

attached to the temples to Lao Tzu which Xuanzong had established in each prefecture.

Through these organs Xuanzong established a parallel track to the traditional Confucian

training for scholar-officials, so that knowledge of the Daoist classics (mostly the pre-Qin

philosophical writings and later Han-era forgeries) became sufficient qualification for

passage into government service.

One of the most telling facets of Tang Daoism is the degree to which the church

structure became integrated with the official organs of the state and the ruling house. The

great wave of monastery and temple-construction throughout the empire, under direct

imperial sponsorship, has already been mentioned. Even at the beginning of the Tang,

monasteries had been under state control, governed by a Daoist bureau in the central

government. In 743, however, the administration of the church was transferred to the

Court of the Imperial Clan (Zongzheng si). There was an official blurring of the line

between church and ruling house; monasteries were even renamed, from “Abbey” (guan)

to “Palace” (gong). One particularly resplendent temple to Lao Tzu in the capital

featured a statue of Xuanzong side by side with his “ancestor”, and the place became the

site of regular and highly austere sacrifices which Victor Xiong has identified as a form of

the imperial “report” to heaven which had long been practiced in the legitimization of

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earlier dynasties but never previously linked to the Daoist cultus.160

Institution-building is not simply the establishment of titles and schools and

sinecures. The Daoist church did indeed profit massively from the power and prestige of

the Tang state and the largesse of the imperial purse: the institution which arose was

thoroughly a product of its legal and financial emoluments, and it started slipping into

decline as the royal purse declined after the An Lushan rebellion. But Tang emperors did

not simply fling cash about: one of their most important contributions to the institutional

development of Daoism was their sponsorship of a broad intellectual program which

consolidated the texts and tenets of a highly erratic tradition.

Consensus was built. It would be too much to say that theological orthodoxies

were laid down: religious claims were not evaluated in binaries of heterodoxy or

orthodoxy, but rather in graduated scales of completeness. The fullness of truth was only

available in the regions of the Prime, where texts were formed of eternal qi, uncomposed

and without beginning. Revelation was always an act of translation downward into the

lower heavens or the material universe, where the semiotics was less potent because the

ontology was coarser. The variant schools of Daoism which gradually coalesced over the

Six Dynasties saw each other not as infidels, but as the recipients of more-imperfect

revelations. Even the anti-Buddhist polemic was framed along these lines: the most

controversial text in the debate was the Hua Hu Jing ("Scripture on the Conversion of the

Barbarians") which asserted that the Buddha was actually Lao Tzu, who translated and

simplified his doctrines into a form which Indians could understand. What had been

lacking, however, was a consensus as to which school indeed possessed the fullest of the

160
Victor Xiong, “Ritual Innovations and Taoism under T’ang Xuanzong.” T’oung-Pao 82:258-316.

318
revelations which had been given to humanity. This was solved via the authority of the

imperial state: by a process of ecclesiastical consolidation still not well-understood, the

Sui and Tang emperors authorized an emerging ranking of Shangqing as the highest

revelation, followed by the Lingbao and then the Celestial Master corpuses. With this

consensus, a new social reality formed: the divisions in the scriptural corpus gradually

lost their character as separate schools and became stages which marked one's upward

progression. The aspiring Daoist no longer was to choose a sect for initiation into its

texts; he or she rather began with the Celestial Master initiation after preparatory

schooling in the Daoist classics, and slowly rose to Lingbao and Shangqing as ability

permitted.

This convergence of separate schools into a unified spiritual career track is

mirrored by the convergence of texts and the creation of a comprehensive anthology, the

first ancestor of the Ming Daoist Canon.161 This was ordered in 675 by Gaozong, and

successive projects grew in scope: Xuanzong, at the beginning of his reign, ordered the

compilation of a "complete" commentary to all Daoist scriptures. The work is now lost

except for prefatory materials (which will be discussed below) but it totaled 140 fascicles,

certainly a sizable corpus if not a complete one.162

In addition to this anthologizing work and the redaction of editions into standard

texts which necessarily preceded it, there was an equally important burst of compendium-

161
Although this is a consensus view, Ninji Ofuchi has suggested that the root of canon-formation should
be pushed back into the late Six Dynasties development of the "three cavern" system, and that that
system is inseparable from the later canon for which it became the organizing principle. Ninji Ofuchi,
"The Formation of the Taoist Canon," Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, ed. Holmes Welch
and Anna Seidel (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 253-267.
162
A commentary to all previous Daoist writings, and not simply the "scriptures" would no doubt have been
quite a bit longer than 140 fascicles.

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composition. Much of what we know about church organization and ritual practice in the

medieval Daoist church comes from a series of ritual encyclopedias compiled in the 7th

century: Wang Xuanhe’s “Sack of Pearls from the Three Caverns” (Sandong zhunang)

and “Shangqing Daoist Categories of Affairs and Items” (Shangqing daolei shixiang), the

anonymously compiled “Essays on Daoist Classics” (Daodian lun) and the especially

well-cited “Key to Daoism” (Daojiao yishu) It seems likely that the encyclopedias drew

from materials that been previously only informally circulated, scripts for ritual

performance that were gradually elaborated during the Sui and early Tang; but they are

also clearly called forth by and for the new institutional context that was created at the

beginning of the dynasty.

These encyclopedias and the systematizing impulse which drove them are

symptomatic of the situation of Tang Daoism. As political forces moved to consolidate

the Daoist priesthood, there was an attendant cultural need to consolidate the numerous

loose strands of doctrine and practice. Revelation was left to the glorious past, the chaos

of the Six Dynasties. Tang Daoists redacted. They collated, compiled, collected,

commented, annotated, anthologized, systematized, and built up a great literature of

treatises on astrology, thaumaturgy, meditation and alchemy. But they rarely claimed to

reveal: their endeavors were responsible and scholarly. Emperor Xuanzong even

personally joined in the scholarly endeavor, publishing a commentary on the Tao Te

Ching.163

163
There seem to be three separate commentaries, DZ 355-57, while the historical sources mention only
one. To my knowledge no one has discussed the possibilities of later recension; Isabelle Robinet,
focused on the development of Chongxuan commentaries, discusses only textual issues for those earlier
works. cf. Robinet, Les Commentaires du Tao To King jusqu'au VIIe siècle Mémoires de l'Institut des
Hautes Études Chinoises 5 ([Paris]: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1977) 209-
60.

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 As a result of both the broad-based imperial sponsorship and also this movement

toward intellectual consolidation, there were two important results for the creation of

hermeneutical communities in forms roughly analogous to those invoked in Hellenistic

allegoresis:

First, there was a noticeable regularization of text-centric ritual forms, and the

creation within the Daoist community of a general acknowledgment of the efficacy of

those forms. Previous sectarian and regional differences were elided in the process of

summary into compendia. The rhetoric of the special sacrality of the revealed text, which

had been most strongly voiced in the Shangqing tradition, was emphasized and replicated

down to the base of the new ecclesiastical hierarchy in each level of initiatory rites.

Because of the new riches available through imperial endowment, the invisible power of

texts was manifested in increasingly extravagant pledges of faith and ritual objects

employed in the transmission of texts. The power and wealth of the Chinese state merged

with the authority of the heavens, and both cooperated in the construction of a visible

hierarchy demarcated by the right to certain esoteric texts.

Secondly, the shift away from new revelation and toward the compilation and

processing of old revelations resulted in a flowering of exegesis. There are far more

commentaries being written in the Tang than earlier: even the greatest of Six Dynasties

editors, such as Tao Hongjing (456-536) (the collector of Yang Xi’s revelations) and Lu

Xiujing (406-477) (the primary editor of the Lingbao corpus) spend more effort on the

collection and authentication of rare texts than on exposition. More important than the

number of extant commentaries, however, is the fusion of ritual-consciousness with

exegesis. Texts are not simply glossed; they are pitched to exclusive audiences. The

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supernatural restrictions which have been placed upon textual access are merged in these

exegetes’ rhetoric with the more quotidian difficulties of reading: the exegete becomes a

self-conscious ordinant, bringing readers into the text through a rite of hermeneutics.

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4. The Rite of the Text

When a tradition of spiritual experience coalesces into an organized church, it

requires more explicitness in its legitimizing principles. It is one thing for metaphysical

ideas to float about a population, it is another to invoke such ideas to demarcate the

boundaries of a community. Churches need principles of authority in a way which beliefs

do not; they require some analytical method of self-definition, something to separate the

church from the non-church, the sheep from the goats. Commitment to orthodoxies and

morally obedient praxis are obvious examples, such as for the Abrahamic faiths. One

could easily suggest alternative markers of division: membership in an ethnic or national

group co-extensive with the cultus (for most Judaisms, or Showa-era shinto), the

contribution of required monetary dues (Scientology), or the participation in ritual secrets

(the Orphics and Pythagoreans).

In fact, all of these are also to some degree defining characteristics of the Tang

Daoist church; but the latter most of all. Above all, inclusion was determined by a ritual

transmission of texts which supposedly represented an unbroken apostolic tradition of

master-pupil inductions going back to the original revelation to Yang Xi by the Lady Wei.

This is an impulse driven from the original revelations themselves: before there was a

Daoist hierarchy in the Chinese empire, propagated by the ritualized transmission of

texts, there were eons and world-ages of transmission from divinity to attendant divinity

within the ineffable ziggurat of heavens. From the early history of Shangqing, when it

was still a movement rather than a church or even a school, there are repeated references

to "adherents" who do not care much for Daoist belief or meditative practice, but are

eager to possess the sacred texts. To some degree, the sacrality of text itself is a

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commonality with some other sects, particularly the Lingbao with its multitude of textual

talismans used for various medicinal or apotropaic functions. Catherine Bell has

additionally argued that the Lingbao corpus as edited by Lu Xiujing became the focus of

community-defining scriptural rites similar to what has been suggested so far for the

Shangqing.164 But the Shangqing scriptures go the farthest in the veneration of all aspects

of received scripture, including its physical manifestation; they also go farther than the

vaguely proselytizing Lingbao in separating their authorized readers from the rest of the

community. Repeatedly, the sacred revelations announce at their openings or closings

that authorized possession of the text is in itself soteric, and that unauthorized

transmission will damn. There are other factors which do come into play in determining

who is authorized and who is not: from the beginning, inductees were expected to make

"pledges" of gold and other valuables in order to demonstrate their sincerity in seeking

the sacred texts. And with the coming of Tang institutional structure, courses of doctrinal

understanding and meditative practice were built into the upward course of progressive

initiations. But whatever merits such study and practice was thought to have in itself,

their importance to the delimitation of a membership and a hierarchy was only insofar as

they demonstrated qualification to be confirmed in the textual ritual. It was the ritual

itself which held the power to create church structure, and consideration of ritual practice

should demonstrate the extent to which Tang Daoists saw textual access as the key to

community.

We possess only one extended description of a specific Tang investiture

ceremony, the ordination of Princesses Xining and Changlong in 711. This was a
164
Catherine Bell, "Ritualization of Texts and Textualization of Ritual in the Codification of Taoist
Liturgy" History of Religions 27.4 (1988): 366-392.

324
Lingbao ordination, not Shangqing, and furthermore the actual details of the ceremony

are glossed over. Our informant, one Zhang Wanfu (a secretary to Sima Chengzhen

about whom little else is known), was apparently dazzled by the richness of the imperial

version of this investiture ceremony, and the vast bulk of his narrative is dedicated to a

catalogue of the rich silks and brocades, exotic woods, pearl, jade, and gold used to

construct and adorn the altar, rugs, lanterns, banners, ewers, lamps, and the numerous and

frighteningly expensive pledges of faith which the Princesses were expected to offer as

testament to their sincerity. Later, in 712, the two princesses did receive Shangqing

ordination, and at the end of his description of their Lingbao ordination, Zhang continues:

They further received the Shangqing scriptures and their

methods [of incantation]. Everything was in order; the altar
was set up in the courtyard of the palace annex. In
imitation of the images of heaven, the inner ground was
round and the outer was square. Their clothing was both
austere and amazingly beautiful, and the tokens of method
and faith which they presented were things like great
brocades and long-life ribbons, and their value was a
hundred or a thousand or ten thousand times greater than
the value of those which they had presented before. The
scriptures and methods [of incantation] were together in
gold books, treasure scrolls of silk with embroidered
covers, all sewn up with pearl and jade. DZ 1241, 32.197

This description is paltry compared to the full narration of the Lingbao ordination;

Charles Benn has reasonably argued from this fact that Zhang himself was probably not

permitted to attend, and could not have attained the Shangqing investiture until some

point after the composition of the treatise in 713.165 If so, even the sketchy outline he

gives us might be thought suspect; but it does suggest a strictness about the regulation of

textual transmission and any ceremony associated with it. Sima Chengzhen was the 12th
165
Charles D. Benn, The Cavern-Mystery Transmission: A Taoist Ordination Rite of A.D. 711 Asian
Studies at Hawaii No. 38 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991) 20.

325
patriarch of the Shangqing school, and if Zhang was truly his secretary and possessed no

detailed knowledge of the ceremony, then the lines between the initiate and the outsiders

must have been maintained vigorously.

Thankfully, this is not the only data we possess about the nature of Shangqing

investitures and ordinations. Zhang Wanfu’s description is offered at the end of a longer

treatise, the “Brief Account of the Transmissions of the Scriptures, Injunctions, and

Ritual Registers of the Three Caverns” (Chuanshou sandong jing jie falu lueshuo) which

gives catalogues of the various types of transmission for the different orders, along with

definitions of and commentaries on the various objects. Zhang’s account stresses the

transmission of injunctions (written lists of the new additional behaviors required of the

initiate at the higher level) rather than scriptures, and the lists are conspicuously short on

the details of Shangqing ritual, no doubt for the same reasons mentioned above.

However, the details which the work does offer are quite similar to a mid-sixth century

ritual encyclopedia (Dongxuan lingbao sandong fengdao kejie yingshi DZ 1125)

attributed to "Jinming Qizhen" (or, "The Seven Perfecteds of Gold Brightness"), which

lists the newly-accepted hierarchy of sects in terms of their texts transmitted during

ordination. There were some minor alterations to the order of the hierarchy in the first

century of the Tang, but Shangqing remained unchanged at the top, and the continuity of

detail between the Jinming Qizhen and the Zhang Wanfu accounts suggests that the

former text is a reliable guide for Tang Shangqing practice. That account defines three

levels of ordination: Canon-Preceptor of Cavernous Perfection (Dongzhen fashi),

Shangqing Mysterious-Capital Great Cavern Disciple of the Three Luminaries

(Shangqing xuandu dadong sanjing dizi), and Supreme Canon-Preceptor of the Three

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Caverns (Wushang sandong fashi). The first was the recipient, at ordination, of nine

texts, only one of which was specifically identified as Shangqing but all of which were

primarily talismanic or diagrammatic.166 The transmitted texts for the two higher orders

were identical, the Shangqing Dadong Zhenjing, a title which refers not to the meditation

text discussed earlier in this chapter, but a much larger compilation of scriptures in 92

fascicles. We know that the smaller text is the original bearer of the name, and it was

included as the first title in the larger anthology to which it lent its name (DZ 1125,

24.759-60). In any case, the significance of the list is not so much in the specific titles as

in the assertion of a fairly uniform hierarchy, in which the transmission of sacred texts

which was stressed so much by Yang Xi has penetrated down to define all ranks of the

unified Daoist church, and where the lingering prestige of that revelation has kept the

Shangqing ordinations at the top of the hierarchy.

But the best view into the meaning of this pervasive emphasis on textual initiation

is available in a surviving text of ritual instruction in the Tang compendium Ultimate

Secret Essentials (Wushang Miyao). There work offers generalized instructions for how

to perform a transmission of Shangqing scriptures; there is no distinction made between

the talismanic collection for the lower Shangqing order and the scriptural collection for

the two higher, and it is unknown whether this reflects a uniformity of practice or whether

the ritual text was a template which allowed for variation with the texts transmitted.167
166
The nine were: "Illustrations of the Five Marchmounts' True Forms" (Wuyue zhenxing tu), "Illustrations
for Worshipping the Five Marchmounts" (Wuyue gongyang tu), "Preface to the Illustrations of the Five
Marchmounts' True Forms" (Wuyue zhenxing tuxu), "The Five Talismans of the Numinous Treasure"
(Lingbao wufu), "Preface for the Five Talismans" (Wufu xu), "Transmission Tablet for the Five
Talismans" (Wufu chuanban), "The Shangqing Writ of the Northern Sovereigns' Divine Incantations"
(Shagnnqing beidi shenzhou wen), "The River Chart of the Great Mystery" (Taixuan hetu) and "The
Treasure Register of the Nine Sovereigns" (Jiuhuang baolu). Cf. Benn (1991), 95.
167
I suspect the latter, as the text is explicit in allowing variation of altar sizes depending on the size of the
room and the assembly, and a variation in the richness of ritual objects with the status of the ordinand.
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 The text begins by describing the arrangement of the ritual room. First are the

acceptable dimensions and orientation of the altar, then a list of needed accessory objects:

nine gold dragons (weighing one liang each), five mirrors, five bolts of brocaded cloth in

different colors, a red and green cloth wrap in which to place the scriptures to be

transmitted. After a night of contemplation, the master and disciple enter the ceremony

room, clacking their teeth thirty-six times and visualizing purple qi descending upon their

heads. They then invite the five thearchs and their 100,000 divine troops to descend, with

the following invocation:

Gods and Perfected, come travel to us

You myriad thearchs, gallop down.
Mysterious guardians of the jade void,
May the heavenly mansions be emptied.
Administrators of the five sacred peaks,
All attend upon the spirits.
Put forth a levy in all the ten directions,
Rush all the heavenly troops
From all areas under heaven
To come to this imperial courtyard
And bid me to ascend to the immortal realms
Penetrate and obtain the essence of the Dao,
There to know everything inauspicious
To understand the hidden and investigate the dim
And everyone whom I turn toward and address
Will unite with me in Jade purity. (DZ 1138, 25.132)

The master and disciple then walk a circuit around the altar, continuing to clack their

teeth. They light incense-burners on the altar and address an incense-lighting prayer to

the Ultimate Triple Heavenly Mystery, the Primordial Triple qi, and the Supreme Lord of

the Dao. After this, they face north, clack their teeth another thirty-six times and recite a

long incantation for the protection from evil. The text is too long for citation, but its

focus is on recalling the same heavenly powers just addressed, and asking for their help in

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repelling the “massed demons” (qun mo) and “myriad monsters” (wan yao).

When this is done, the pair begin a long and complex set of directional bowing

and teeth-clacking, and then kneel, facing north, to recite the text. This is the high point

of the ceremony, and their address must be cited at length:

Triple light of the great cavern in the mysterious capital, my

disciple, this ordinand, Perfected of such-and-such sacred
mountain, Mr. so-and-so , makes this petition:
High supreme empyrean lord,
Spirits and gods of the nine heavens,
Superior perfecteds and mysterious ancients,
My head is secluded in the jade heights.
All the constellations revolve,
My "seven residences" change mornings.168
May the emperor of the void reign me in,
May the jade thearch settle me as an immortal,
In the green palace to take the registers,
And to take the numinous mountains as my charm.
Today’s originary blessing
Is opened and revealed by the myriad perfected.
I have arisen and studied from first to last
About the consequences of my life before this point.169
I come into possession of these divine scriptures,
The numinous works of Shangqing.
Carefully, before this numinous altar
I swear to the nine heavens above
And tell the five thearchs below
And the twelve river sources
And beg you to take note.
I memorialize up to the high morning lights
And universally declare to the myriad spirits
I float my body onto the imperial altar
And in my humours I extinguish striving.
My case is as a great perfected
I need to arrive at the bright sun
And I bid you to grant this transmission. (DZ 1138, 25.133)
168
The meaning of this line is obscure; it may refer to the circulation of solar essences through the different
organs.
169
This line could be given a strongly Buddhist translation, "About former lives and karmic retribution."
The rhetoric has unquestionably been borrowed from Buddhism, but also clearly redefined. There is
generally no reincarnation theorized in any of the Daoist orders; instead, the passage from mortality to
immortality is stressed as a single, decisive event.

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When this is done, the master and disciple light more incense, with an appropriate

invocation, and walk a circuit around the altar while singing a hymn. Earlier elements of

the ceremony are then repeated, first the invocations to the same deities and then the same

prayers of protection from the demons. After all this, interspersed with more turning and

clacking, the master brings the ceremony to a close, saying:

I, so-and-so, now pass to my disciple so-and-so the highest

class of treasure scriptures of the nine heavens, the jade
taboo of the ultimate supreme, and the pure high lodgings.
I request that his qi and his fate be united with perfection,
and beg that the lower functionary-perfected and the jade
immortals enroll him in the registers. (DZ 1138, 25.133)

The absolute exaltation of the text in these rites is clear enough: the rites exist for the sake

of the text, and transmission is the highest mark of divine favor. Less immediately

apparent is that the sacred scripture is treated as a gateway to joining with celestial

society.

The language of the rite is borrowed from the mechanics of government: the

master offers a “memorial” (zou) to the gods, while the disciple makes a formal

“declaration” (gao) of allegiance. There is no sense that either of the participants aspire

to (immediate) equality with the transcendent powers they address. Nonetheless, the rite

constantly figures itself as asking for admission to the lowest rank of an exalted society.

There is not one deity or one heavenly party invoked, but the whole known and unknown

pantheon: the ritual room is filled with thousands upon thousands of divine warriors, and

the celebrant prays to all the gods and perfected that they would help him in unison. The

help that they might offer is to allow the transmission of a scripture, but it is also

simultaneously the recording of the adept’s name in the heavenly registers, and the

admittance of the adept to the lands of the immortals, where he can at last obtain the Dao.
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 Just as important as the angelic society to which the adept requests admission is

the demonic mob from whom he requires protection. The gods are many in this system,

but the devils are many as well, and a line needs to be drawn. Human authorities could

keep the unqualified mortals (like Zhang Wanfu) out of the room, but only the gods could

expel the unqualified and dangerous immortal powers. Exorcistic prayers and talismans

are a common feature of all the streams of religious Daoism after the Celestial Masters,

and it is no particular surprise to find exorcistic elements incorporated into this ritual.

But these are given great emphasis, in long and repeated invocations. And they are

invocations which stress the exclusion of the demons from the ritual space: this is an

event dedicated to the transmission of scripture, and the undesirables must be purged.

Thus, the social barriers which mark the elect upon earth are in fact mirrored in heaven:

several levels of ontology coalesce around the single act of textual transmission, and the

scripture is the marker of social stratifications which run the length of the cosmos.

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5. Shangqing Exegetical Gestures

I have heard that the great Dao is secluded and deep,

and that the miraculous gate is void and desolate.
The patterns of Mt. Kunlun cannot be fathomed,
and the directives of Longhan are difficult to spy
out. How much more so when corruptions in the
records have over the years made them more
distant? Some of the miraculous slats of the Yellow
Court have met with the suspicion of scribal error,
and many of the perfected words within the green
scroll-covers have encountered textual corruption.
Therefore I have commanded that the latter-born of
the Jade Capital be able to observe the secret
records, and not follow the masses of those roaming
the golden towers, to employ their “spiritual”
talismans and pick up their errors. The Lord Lao is
honored above all as the founder of the state...
--Emperor Xuanzong, “Preface to the Commentary on the
Complete Daoist Scriptures” (DZ 1123, 24.720)

The imperial preface to this massive lost commentary is not a particularly brilliant

document. After the quotation cited here, it merely goes on to describe how the emperor

called on both palace scholars and the monks of all the monasteries to carefully compile

and annotate a set of accurate texts.

The assumptions of the preface, and its authorship, have always been the primary

draw for the few readers who have particularly cared about the text. First of all, it is of

course a testament to the institutionalization of the Daoist Church in the Tang which has

been described in the previous section. This was, to date, the most ambitious effort at

Daoist scholarship, both in its length and in the resources devoted to it by imperial

mandate. It is a testament to the centrality of texts to that institutionalization, and also to

the continuing incorporation of the Lao Tzu-as-Li progenitor myth into the Tang ruling

ideology.

But the institutional and political motives of the preface are not its only curious
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assumptions. Just as curious are the ways in which the emperor frames a large but fairly

musty and mundane project in the same terms of ecstatic vision which lie at the heart of

Shangqing Daoism. The proximate cause for the project is the prevalence of textual

corruption, and the apparent harm that does to the institutions of church and state.

However, the logic of the opening brings out a broader context: textual corruption lies on

a continuum with the inescapable semiotic difficulties of the approach to transcendent

mystery. It is a hard enough thing that the Dao is so mysterious and upparoachable in

itself; why should a state founded on the Dao permit the unnecessary confusions of poor

editions? The approach to the mystery is, of course, highly visual and highly textual even

in its more airy and recondite forms: the name used for Kunlun here is Mt. Tortoise (gui

shan), and “pattern” is wen, the word which connects ancient tortoise-shell divination to

to natural and cultural manifestations of pattern and thence to writing and particular texts.

And error is just as visual: the loose translations for “scribal error” and “textual

corruption” above are substitutes for particular examples of corruption, two pairs of

characters with similar appearances (“Yan” with “zhi” and “Lu” with “yu”) whose

conjunction is made to stand for the general processes of miscopying. There is a

continuum of visual hermeneutics implied, from the difficulties of the most minor scribal

error to the grand allegories of the spirit which the Dao has written into the world.

The Shangqing assumptions of the hermeneutical basis of community are here as

well. There is compassion for posterity in Xuanzong's preface, as he wishes later

generations to have better texts. But one cannot exactly equate this with public-

spiritedness or missionary zeal; the emperor wishes to separate these future believers

from the erroneous masses. This assertion is in complete conflict with the political

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ideology which Benn and others have emphasized in this brief piece: the Daoist corpus is

valued in large part because its founder is revered as a “Father of the Nation” figure, and

the implication ought to be that Daoism is a system of belief which is intended for the

masses (or at least does not exclude them). This could be taken too far: Tang China was

a feudal kingdom rather than a modern nation-state. But that fact does not relieve the

tension between a broad, institutional project and its opening rhetoric of mystery and

exclusion.

Tension between the institutionalizing forces and the exclusionary rhetoric is a

prime factor which has determined the nature of the Tang exegetical corpus left to us.

There are no extant exegeses, convincingly dated to the Tang, of the elite core of

Shangqing scriptures. In a sense, this is only natural for what they were: as has already

been argued, these texts were closely guarded, not at all for public distribution. There

were horrible curses built into the texts for anyone who presumed to transmit or receive

the scriptures without proper spiritual authorization. The center of Tang Daoist ritual was

the transfer of texts, and this was a stern moment, access to which was highly restricted.

The references to exegesis of the highest Shangqing scriptures which we do possess

suggests that these exegeses remained as oral instruction throughout the dynasty: as

preparatory to the process of textual initiation, the adept would receive oral instruction in

the text from a master.

But even if we possessed a complete set of such exegeses, it would be a

methodological error to classify exegeses into a hierarchy which mirrored the hierarchy of

orders. As has been stressed above, these orders, which represented separate schools

during the Six Dynasties period, were united into a common ecclesiastical structure by the

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beginning of the Tang. Most initiates into the Shangqing did not get to leap directly to

that level, but were first inducted into the lower orders (as has been seen in even the royal

case of the Princesses Xining and Changlong), and by transforming the network of

competing schools into a sort of cursus honorum, the Tang certainly did succeed in

blurring lines of ideological distinction.

Even with a complete set of texts, one would have to seek not for exegeses which

embodied the Shangqing ethos perfectly, but exegetical gestures deriving from that

tradition and floating through the broader corpus of Tang Daoist hermeneutics. The

Shangqing mysteries themselves may have been severely restricted, but their rhetoric was

not: those on the wrong side of a “Keep Out” sign understand it perfectly.

One of the best-known of Tang Daoist exegeses offers a good case of this melange

of hermeneutical rhetorics. The “Wondrous Scripture of Limitless Salvation” (wuliang

duren shangpin miaojing) is the central text of the Lingbao revelations, and stands first in

the Ming Canon because of the reverence accorded it by the Ming emperor Huizong

(ruled 1465-88). Several extant commentaries reproduce the text within the Ming Canon

and the commentary which has received the most scholarly attention is the “Quadruple

Commentary to the Primal Wondrous Scripture of Limitless Salvation” (Yuanshi wuliang

duren shangpin miaojing sizhu), a Song-dynasty compilation of earlier commentaries to

the work, three of which were by the 7th-century Tang writers Xue Youqi, Li Shaowei,

and Cheng Xuanying. Xue’s original preface to his own commentary is reproduced just

after the Song editor’s introduction, and reads in part:

The meanings and messages of this scripture are dark and

mysterious, and its tones and rhymes hide things and keep
secrets. They all lay out the principles of the empyrean but
are not didactic words for those of the common path.
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 Therefore it says that only the superior sage who has
already become one of the Perfected can attain to the
mysteries and exhaust the subtleties of all of its pieces.
And so: those who recite it are many, but those who arrive
at its essence are few. (DZ 87, 2.188)

This passage might as well come straight from the numinous brush of Wei Huacun

herself. For that matter, it might be the introduction to a Neoplatonic reading of Homer,

if Greek writers were in the habit of using parataxis and parallelism. But the text is

thoroughly Lingbao, and even in its title displays the influence of Buddhist universalism

on that school: the point of Lingbao scriptures is to save as many as possible, not to

restrict access to the superior sages. Even a cursory survey of the actual content of Xue's

comments, moreover, suggests a popularizing commentary, one which replaces earlier

understandings of the scripture as a repository of liberatory gnosis with a new emphasis

on public ritual and recitation, whose salutary effects include the salvation of dead

ancestors. What we have here is evidence here of a rhetoric only tenuously bound to its

origin in the revelations to Yang Xi: the language of secrecy and exclusion has emigrated

to the prefatory apparatus of a text where it does not particularly belong.

The looseness of rhetoric went in both directions. One Tang commentator with

impeccable Shangqing credentials was Li Hanguang, the 13th Shangqing patriarch,

successor of Sima Chengzhen. He was one of the few prominent Daoists favored by

Xuanzong who actually acted like the stereotypical Daoist, refusing requests to come to

court and maintaining a monastic residence on Mt. Mao. Very little of Li’s oeuvre

survives; it is hard to generalize about his exegetical attitudes. But one prominent preface

he wrote to an older text does survive, and it begins with a standard narrative of restricted

revelation, describing how the text was transmitted to Ge Xuan (the putative first

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recipient of Lingbao scriptures) by Xu Laiqin, a Perfected of the Supreme Extremity

(taiji), in heavenly books with characters of jade. Ge Xuan meditated on the scripture,

alone on Mt. Lu, for several dozen years until he attained divinity. Scripture is

appreciated alone; society is with the elite inductors.

But the scripture in question is another Lingbao work, the “Repentance from the

Supreme Compassionate Sacristy for the Dispelling of the Nine Hells,” (Taishang cibei

daochang xiaomie jiuyou chan) and the evangelizing logic of the Lingbao then comes to

the fore in this preface by the Shangqing patriarch. Ge Xuan converts the mountain- and

wood-spirits around him, and is then inspired to transmit the text broadly to the world,

that all might have an opportunity to hear and see its efficacy and ascend through it to

more ethereal realms. Moreover, the text enjoys great success: “After this, [of those who

read it] not two or three in a hundred pursued evil attachments, and at least eight or nine

of every ten came to a realization of goodness. Therefore, the work of the immortals is

gradually completed, and the virtuous achievements of transformative guidance are

almost at their fullness.” (DZ 543, 10.18)

This is self-contradiction, the fusion of incompatible rhetorics, but it is not

surprising for Tang Daoism, nor for exegesis broadly considered. The contradiction of

institutionalizing a religion of exclusive revelation leads quite naturally to a rhetorical

hesitancy between exposition and concealment. But it is also a hesitancy which is latent

in most exegeses of hermetic texts. Oral induction into the mysteries is one thing: the

grain of the voice dies out beyond the context of immediate presence. But committing

such inductions to paper sets them free to accidental transmission, circulation,

publication, corruption. The Daoist Canon, from Tang and other periods, is littered with

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titles that promise “The Esoteric Meaning of X” or “The Secret Instructions of Y”, but

inclusion in the anthology is strong evidence that such texts enjoyed broad enough

distribution to provide the Ming editors with editions. Only spoken words and lost texts

can keep secrets well.

Occasionally, however, the tradition floats forth a text to us that seems to match

all the ideals. Such is the Tang work, “Notes on the Jade Scripture of the Esoteric Light

of the Yellow Court” (Huangting neijing yujingzhu), by “Liang Qiuzi,” a pseudonym of

Bai Lizhong (fl. 729). The original “Scripture of the Yellow Court” is an old text, one of

the primary revelations to Yang Xi, and it is dedicated to explaining the visualization of

viscera; this "esoteric" text, which treats the same issues, is only slightly later. Even more

than works like the Perfect Scripture, the Scripture of the Yellow Court and its knockoffs

were central to the Shangqing understanding of the inner geography of the body, and how

the organs were manifestations of the cavern-heavens.

The exegesis which Liang offers harps upon this matching of the body to the

heavens, and he puts it in semiotic terms. For example, in glossing a word from the title

he remarks, “Jing means image. External images in this text are images of the sun and

moon and stars, or the clouds and dawn, that kind of image. Internal images are images

of blood, flesh, joints, bones, and organs. The mind, residing in the body, holds within

itself a view of the images and appearances of the entire body. Thus this is called the

‘Esoteric Light’.” (DZ 402, 6.516)

But the key to the text is in its preface, where the author has the most room to

expand upon his exegetical principles. The preface is filled with all the gestures of the

Shangqing tradition: the primacy of the text, the status of the text as a manifestation of

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ethereal Dao, the transmission of text from higher orders to the lower, and the restricted

circle of initiates. Since the commentary is on one of the addenda to the primary scripture

of corporal spirituality, the introductory materials also entertain a healthy discussion of

the principles of corporal encapsulation of ethereal powers, so central to the spirituality

and central rites of the original school. Liang’s curious tendency is to map one set of

rhetorical gestures upon the other, to conflate the semiotic processes of reading with the

associative structures which link the organs to the heavens. “This text lays out the spirit

of the entire form, and settles the dwelling of the embryonic spirit.” The dwelling evoked

by reading is an odd mix of the lonely and the companionate, perhaps the type of the

lonely hermitage which is packed full of spirits:

Those who read the “Esoteric Scripture of the Yellow

Court” always in a separated room burn incense and purify
the ritual vessels, and only then do they pick it up. All
those who have this scripture escape the hundred evils, just
as if they had entered the mountains and forests, and arrived
at a place of empty quietude. Those who are agitated in
their minds can straighten their minds. They are to turn to
face the north, and read through the esoteric scripture once,
and their spirit will immediately grow quiet and their
thoughts level, just as if they had roamed and come to a halt
with a thousand companions. Those who are able to read
through it ten thousand times will reveal to themselves their
five organs, the intestines and stomach, and all the spirits
under heaven who have been given commissions inside
themselves. (DZ 402, 6.515)

The lonely hermitage is the interior of the body, a structure where one can hear the echo

of one's own voice, and both are the sites of manic discussion, criss-crossing

conversations among the demigods.

In effect, the confusion between corporal and elysian, inner and outer worlds that

is built into the Shangqing scriptures is brought to the fore by the process of reading.

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Scripture does indeed come into the world from the outside, just as the European ancients

were wont to speak of Homer. Just as in the case of the Greek allegoreses, the Shangqing

rhetoric of revelation wants to highlight and thicken the boundaries between inner and

outer; the sacred text which comes from outside the world also divides the world, keeping

most outside itself but calling a select few into the text and its divine fellowship, where

there are light and warmth and ontologically grounded referents.

This rhetoric seems so tightly bound to the logic of social exclusions that it tends

to sound as if it were an innate property of communities which define themselves

hermeneutically. That it is not should be evident from previous analysis, where the

models of patronage allegoresis have been explored. But additional evidence is available

even here, in the Shangqing, because the rhetoric of hermeneutical inclusion and

exclusion which is so familiar from Hellenistic allegoresis is muddled by the content of

Shangqing spirituality. One is not exactly led into the interior of a text, even though the

text is itself an "interior" or "esoteric" (nei) revelation directed at the elite. Instead, the

text is a tool whose recitation produces positive health, and in fact a gate into the real

interior, the inside of one's own organs and cavities, where the space of limitless

dimensions passes through the liver and navel and pituitary. The community posited is

indeterminate: is the person of the adept inducted into celestial society or does he encase

it? Does allegorical vision have to penetrate the surface of the text, or must the eyes roll

back in the head, and send that vision piercing back through the skin?

Both, or neither. The system of Tang Daoism does not consider the question, it

does not bother to order itself according to the rules of a Heideggerian literary

proposition. There are, however, waves of social gesture running through the exegetical

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corpus which approximate, if not replicate, the model of hermeneutical community

proposed by European allegoresis and analyzed earlier in terms of Heidegger. There is

exterior revelation, there is reception and induction into the interior of a text, there is the

secrecy of rites which separate the understanding from the benighted. And if there is also

a weird indeterminacy to the arrangement of those gestures, so be it. One expects

weirdness from the world on the far side of a mirror.

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Coda: Though the Looking-Glass

Suddenly that day, a lame-footed Daoist priest came

begging for food, saying that he was an expert at healing
karmic illnesses...from his satchel he took out a mirror,
reflective on both sides, and with four words inscribed onto
the handle: "Treasure-Mirror for Ribaldry". He gave this to
Jia Rui, saying, "This object comes from the Empty-Spirit
Palace of the Illusory Realms of the Great Void, and was
made by the Wakes-from-Illusions Immortal for healing of
the illnesses contracted through evil thoughts and wicked
deeds, and it has the power to preserve life and help one
escape the world...but by no means look in the front, only
the back!"
--Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber Ch. 12

The world of the genteel Qing novel is a world away from the bizarre ecstasies of

Yang Xi on Mount Mao, and almost as far from the historical sweep and grandeur of

Xuanzong and his court. But the most famous of Chinese novels does share the

conviction of those earlier ages that the higher planes of reality have a habit of breaking

in upon the humdrum corners of the dowdy world, and taking whom they will. (In this

case, Jia Rui is taken to hell in shackles, having used the front of the mirror for sexual

fantasies about his sister-in-law, rather than observing the calming face of death in the

back). This incident is one such interruption, but Cao's idea for the image was not

inspired; there were real "treasure-mirrors" in the Tang and presumably later. Cao did not

research the appropriate materials in the Daoist Canon for his brief episode, and there is

no sane way to trace a millennium of mirrors in search of the genealogy of an image.

For that matter, mirrors are not the exclusive property of Daoism. Cosmological

mirrors were a commonplace of the Han intellectual milieu, along with other physical

manifestations of universal structure, such as the “Hall of Brightness” (ming tang) Texts

were occasionally identified as mirrors, the later "Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of

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Governance" (Zizhi tongjian) of Sima Guang is only the most famous and expansive

example of a titular genre, in which the virtues and follies of the past serve up reflective

Confucian moralism. Then again, the image of the self as a cleaned mirror, purified of

obstructing desires, is a common one in Buddhist gathas.

However, traditional Daoists seem to have had a particular fascination with

mirrors. It will be remembered that one of the central groups of ritual objects needed for

a proper transmission of the Shangqing canon was a set of five mirrors. The purpose was

to reflect and in effect "contain" for the ritual grounds the directions of the compass

points, plus the center (though how a mirror was set up to reflect the "center" is never

explained). Or, again, the poem of Greenbud Blossom posited an internal mirror (similar

to those of Buddhist exposition): "Who says that the secluded mirror is hard to attain?/

Reflection soars within the heart."

The internalized mirror found its way to the front of one of the more important

Daoist commentaries of the dynasty, Xuanzong's own imperial commentary to the text of

the Lao Tzu. Near the beginning of the text, he offers an interesting gloss to the line,

"Persist without desire in order to observe the miraculous." (Chang wu yu yi guan qi

miao). The emperor expounds:

"Miraculous" here means the essential subtlety. "Observe"

here means to inspect one's own reflection. This says that
if a person is able to persist without desire and without
action, in the utmost emptiness and silence, then he would
be able to mirror (from close by) the miraculous Dao within
his own body, and mirror (from afar) the essential subtlety
of the utmost principle. (DZ 677, 11.811)

In the annotations to the same line in the other two extant versions of the Xuanzong

commentary, the emperor is more loquacious; but in each he brings up the image of the

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mirror. The body, purified, can make a mirror of the Dao in its immediate and universal

contexts; there is a hint that the text is also a mirror in which can perform the purgative

introspections.

It may be that the general rhetoric of Daoist mirrors was strong enough to suggest

this gloss to the emperor; we do not know much about circumstances of composition of

the commentary and can only be certain of the general cultural context in which it was

produced. However, Xuanzong had a very particular encounter with Daoist mirrors, and

it is tempting to read his comments in the light of that encounter. One day (we have no

particular date) Sima Chengzhen gave the emperor gifts: three magic mirrors, and one

magic sword, each item carved and inlaid with seal-script inscriptions, pictures of

auspicious animals, and diagrams of the constellations.170 These mirrors were inscribed

with verse-incantations in a form of seal-script; the inscription on the first read,

Heaven and earth hold images,

Sun and moon put forth brightness.
The reflecting disc [contains] all things,
The penetrating mirror [holds] the hundred spirits.
(DZ 431, 6.684)

The importance of encapsulation expressed in these lines was not lost on the emperor.

He thanked the patriarch for both the mirrors and the sword with a poem which, though

mediocre, makes an important link between containment and semiotics:

The treasure-reflection holds heaven and earth

The divine sword unite yin and yang.
Observe the light of sun and moon
Constellations are patterned on them.
The reflecting mirrors reveal surface and substance
170
A bronze mirror similar to those described, and dated to the Tang, was unearthed in Zhejiang province
in 1973; Edward Schafer has argued that the find demonstrates “the mass production of cosmic mirrors”
in a workshop associated with Sima Chengzhen. Cf. Edward Schafer, “A T’ang Taoist Mirror” Early
China 4 (1978-79): 56-59.

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 One wears the sword for bodily protection.
From now on, as soon as you appreciate them,
Their eternal virtue will preserve long life.
(DZ 431, 6.685-86)

But the key to the language of containment is best explained in a brief prefatory essay,

now attached to the Daoist Canon piece which reproduces the mirrors ("Diagrams of

Shangqing Swords and Mirrors for Containing Images" [Shangqing hanxiang jianjian

tu]):

The reason why these mirrors are round on the outside and
square on the inside is so that they can pick up the images
of heaven and earth. The trigrams arrayed in the middle
show the full range of yin and yang. The essence of
supreme yang produces the sun through the trigram "li",
and the essence of supreme yin produces the moon through
the trigram "kan".171 The five planets make their course as
part of the seven lights of heaven. [i.e., planets, sun, and
moon] Lightning makes thunder via the trigram “zhen”,
and the heavenly depths produce moisture via the trigram
“dai”. Clouds divide the eight trigrams and the seasons
move in due measure; these things all manifest the patterns
of heaven. Around the outside of the square flows water, in
order to fill the four seas, and on the inside is placed a
range of mountains which represent the five marchmounts.
Qi flows through the mountains and lakes, and categorized
objects are kept therein. And these things establish the
patterns of earth. Four sentences are carved on it whose
principles answer to these three categories [of heaven, man,
and earth] and by extending these words by analogy, one
can use this idea to grasp those principles. This is
"investing words" in order to clarify the pattern/writing of
humans. For this reason I have called it a "Mirror for the
holding of images" in order to sum up these meanings in it.
(DZ 431, 6.683)

The mirror-function is effected by the back of the mirror as well as the front. The power

171
The system of omenology referred to here is the basis of the Classic of Changes (Yijing); the two
trigrams referred to are complementary sets of three lines which refer to lightning and moisture (or
swamps) as their primary meanings. On a basic level, Sima is simply pointing out that he has marked
the traditional trigrams on the back of the mirror to invoke thunder and humidity; but the reference
invokes a complex omenological tradition which matches cultural to natural manifestation of pattern.

345
of the mirror to catch the images of heaven and earth is effected directly through its

reflective side, but on the back through the semiotic imprinting. Not that all objects in

heaven and earth were represented on the back of the mirror, but that heaven and earth

themselves were encapsulated in the arrangement of signs; a representative enumeration

of objects would have been superfluous.

Mystical texts are the flip side of physical realities, and both are systems which

attempt to contain the universe. Reflection can be a property of polished metals or of the

human body: both are natural containers of all that they encounter, the heavens and earth

reflected in them or the cavern-heavens which connect to the inner sanctum of the organs.

It is also, conversely, a property of texts, whether inscribed on the back of a metal disk or

lovingly written onto scrolls of the finest silk, for secret transmission in the initiatory

rites. Texts, like the body, contain worlds.

346
 Afterword, in Lieu of a Proper Conclusion

Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll
tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First,
there's the room you can see through the glass -- that's just
the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other
way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair -- all but the
bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see THAT
bit! I want so much to know whether they've a fire in the
winter: you never CAN tell, you know, unless our fire
smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too -- but
that may be only pretense, just to make it look as if they
had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our
books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that,
because I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then
they hold up one in the other room.
--Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass, ch. 1172

Alice has a particularly formalist mirror: despite an admirably mimetic surface (or

perhaps because of it), its power lies within its small failures of imitation. It opens up

new possibilities of relation: "things go the other way," and, more importantly, the mirror

hides critical information, keeping secrets about the bit behind the fireplace. The

seemingly natural bond of smoke to fire is opened for deconstruction, and Alice realizes

the difficulty of projecting intention behind a mimetic surface. As a result, the familiar

world which it contains is destabilized just as thoroughly as if it had been captured in a

Russian lyric instead of a looking-glass.

Formerly, the generic conventions of scholarly work in the humanities assumed an

older mirroring function. If art holds the mirror up to nature, then criticism was properly

to be holding the mirror up to art. Empiricist standards were invoked with less
172
Text has been taken from the Project Gutenberg edition. For some scholarly uses, Project Gutenberg
texts are unacceptable, as they are not meant to be critical editions. Nonetheless, that and similar efforts
at disseminating free electronic texts deserve academic support: in addition to their obvious
convenience, they offer a needed protest against the damage being done to education and research by
increasingly restrictive U.S. copyright laws. Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass. (Project
Gutenberg, http://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/looking/looking.txt.gz, accessed 11 May 2003) Project
Gutenberg.
347
embarrassment; fidelity of the critical mimesis was paramount. These standards, widely

denounced, are also still widely employed in the evaluation of scholarly work, but the

non-mimetic or anti-mimetic standards are full supplements. Few would praise criticism

in the terms of mimetic failure, but there is a new appreciation of the dislocating

properties of the medium.

This dissertation has roamed far and wide; it would have roamed farther and wider

but for the constraints of Time and Space, which have proven themselves stern entities

with little indulgence or imagination. Such a study, with broad aspirations and

abbreviated exposition, is certainly the type in greatest need of a proper conclusion,

which could offer a synthesis to capture and thus justify the labor of writing and reading.

It is also the type of study for which an over-eager grasping at propriety could result in

dangerous impositions on a disparate body of phenomena.

I do claim accuracy, and I do think that the argument which has driven this long

romp should be clear and persuasive to a reader who has accompanied me for hundreds of

pages. Hermeneutics is a grab bag of interpretive techniques; it is also a repertory of

social poses. No matter how intent interpretation is on the object of its study, it must

always position itself in the world of readers, and stake a claim to one or another

ontology. Allegoresis is a particularly useful form of hermeneutics for revealing social

contexts, precisely because it is so wild, so disrespectful of the apparent letter of the text.

Radical declarations that a given text does not at all mean what it seems to say, divide

readers into those who know the secrets and those who do not, and thereby also assert

enormous authority for the interpreter who marks off the boundaries of such groups.

In the mystery-cult model of allegoresis and its social contexts, interpretations

348
presented themselves as giving inner access to the mystical secrets of those texts, the

secrets which would forever lie inaccessible to the many, but which were promised to the

worthy few. The social implications of these interpretations are an odd mix of authority

and egalitarianism: there is a real sense of communal equality and fellowship among

those privileged to be of the school that can interpret the poet rightly; yet this fellowship

is founded upon the authority of the interpreter, who acts as a priest to the quasi-divine

poet. The extreme authority of the interpreter is required by the extremity of the

interpretation: the allegoresis is so unintuitive that it requires (or perhaps creates) an aura

of revelation around the interpreter's approach to the text.

In the other, patronage-based model, allegoresis also implies an interpretive

community, but it is a community constituted diachronically. One may be alone and

unappreciated (and unsponsored) within the court culture of one's own time, but this

loneliness is countered by one's membership in the silent community of great readers,

past, present, and future, who both understand the poet and reperform him. There is no

mystery cult, no divinely ordained priesthood of letters here. The allegorist by his

allegoresis is not explaining revelation to a group of equally elect disciples; rather, his

allegoresis works as a replication of the patronage conditions which lie at the root of

literati anxieties. The exegete uses his authority to make a recommendation of an

underappreciated worthy: the reader is, at least in part, a possible patron.

Moreover, neither of these two models can or should be limited to the traditions

which formulated them. A given period in English allegory, strongly influenced by issues

of patronage, reads suspiciously like a Chinese model says it should; a given religious

movement of medieval China sacralized the interpretation of received texts in a way that

349
would have felt familiar to many a Hellenistic mystagogue. But what could one

conclude? That European and Chinese traditions are "natural" complements? That

allegoresis is not only a hermeneutical mode in which social contexts are easily

reconstructed, but that it is more innately "social" than other modes? That these social

contexts are the most fundamental context for understanding the history of criticism?

That patronage and mystery-religion form a definitive spectrum on which all allegoresis

can be placed? Without ungrounded speculation, there can be no proper conclusion for

this thesis. In this particular case, one could conclude only with a representation of what

has been offered: not a mass of uninterpreted, raw "empirical" fact, but a stream of

interpretation too nervous to further abstract itself.

Once that has been done, there is room only for a moment of methodological

reflection before passing into the great extra-textual beyond. Comparative literature is a

discipline (one is told) in crisis, lacking a cogent definition or raison d'être; its

comparative and theoretical functions are at war with each other, and both could be

abstracted back into national literature and cultural studies programs. Intra-European

comparison seems rather safe, founded on historical fact: it is hard to deny international

cultural influence, and even-handed treatments of English-French-German Romanticism

will never be victims of departmental consolidation.

Comparisons between literatures with no historical connection are immensely

difficult to justify, even to broad-minded scholars in the humanities. A dissertation

comparing Hellenistic and early modern European materials with Han- and Tang-dynasty

Chinese was bound to be a catalyst for quizzical politeness, and it has been. My hope is

that the quality of analysis in this particular study has contained its own justification for

350
anyone who might actually read it, small as that number might be.

My argument has not concerned with a justification of comparative methodology,

but with the social contexts of allegoresis. But there should be room to say a word about

how comparison has worked here, and in what ways it would fail. It seems that the act of

comparison, especially unnatural comparison, has the same destabilizing properties as

Russian art or Wonderland mirrors. These are the same properties usually attributed to

theory itself, especially when defined in pointed opposition to the empirical: the power of

a foreign discourse is to liberate invisible realities and lines of connection from among

conglomerations of supposedly self-explanatory material fact.

Textual mirrors allow one to realize that reading backward can be a surprisingly

fruitful activity. One can love theory without assuming that only the particular canon of

theory which we currently possess is capable of revealing the invisible. Disparate cultural

traditions can be brought together, and conjoined at analytical mirrors. It would be false

to assume that they could mirror each other without the analyst's mediation: that is not

how criticism works. Still, if one is careful in how one constructs the analysis, then the

respective cultures can perform some share of the work of exegesis by the fact of their

imperfect similarities to one another. Offered alternative possibilities, it becomes easier

to imagine worlds in which smoke issues from something other than fire, or in which

exegesis finds alternate ways to imagine a community of readers. Often, in order to

perceive hidden truths, it becomes necessary to rewrite the clichés which have

accumulated around culturally delimited realities. Bringing a pattern of literary practice

face-to-face with a speculative Other should be one acceptable way of doing so:

untheorized details are brought into what Lacan once called "a symmetry that inverts it, in

351
contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him."173 The

half-comprehensible cultural motions, never addressed by traditional criticism, are

brought into form and focus through the meeting with the culturally alien.

The great problem with this approach is that mirrors are binary devices, and the

system of world culture is not. Mirroring European with Chinese allegoresis privileges

each as the proper match of the other, but there is no authorization for such privileges.

Mirrors have only the this-world-side and the looking-glass-world-side; theses in

comparative literatures might by some magic pull in an unimaginable third side, or even a

fourth. But the proper scale in which literary comparison would be reliable would be a

universalist one: all the cultural moments of all literatures brought face-to-face-to-face,

all the marks and gestures and theories of each sphere illuminating the hidden processes

of the others across the unbounded barrier of some impossible, extra-dimensional mirror-

text. Such an analysis, however, would be beyond the scope which Time and Space could

allot to any dissertation.

173
Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience." Écrits: a Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. 2.
352
 Excursus: Heraclitus and the Homeridae

The most recent extended discussion of the Homeridae available is Chapter 2 of

Thomas Allen's 1923 work, Homer: the Origins and the Transmission. Allen's project is

now somewhat embarrassing; his main argument is that, since "Homeridae" is a

patronymic, it must have been applied to a real family descended from a real ancestral

Homer. But he does provide some useful information. Allen cites no direct evidence of

the Homeridae having continued as an organized group into the late Hellenistic period,

but does cite Strabo 645, showing that they were at least still in historical memory until

after Heraclitus likely wrote his work. And his discussion of the understanding of the

Homeridae by late classical sources suggests a group very similar to the one apparently

addressed by Heraclitus. After citing Isocrates (Helena 64), Allen writes, "The Sons of

Homer again have the facts of their father's life and assert divine interposition in it. They

know more than the generality. they know the inspiration he received...We find then in

literature that while to Pindar the Homeridae are reciters or rhapsodes, to the fourth-

century writers they are persons who possess the mystic history of Homer, a body of

recondite verse, and issue rewards to the benefactors of their parent."174

If so, then the text may very well represent a late product of the Homeridae. The

text demands a literal religious community dedicated to Homer, and no cult we know of

matches these criteria better. Given the poor state of available evidence, it would be

irresponsible to assert that the ΟΜΗΡΙΚΑ ΠΡΟΒΛΗΜΑΤΑ was actually written by or

for a late group of Homeridae who were the actual successors of the classical Chian

174
Thomas W. Allen, Homer: the Origins and the Transmission (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) 44-45.

353
organization. But it may well be that the author thought of himself and his group as the

successors of the Homeridae. In any case, he was a member of an explicitly religious

community, and this fact is essential. Whether or not the specific community is locatable,

the allegoresis performed as religious apologetic, not for purposes of proselytizing, but

for reassuring the faithful of their exalted place. The crux for linking Heraclitus to the

Homeridae would probably be dating the text, as an early date would put the text at the

tail end of what the life span of the Homeridae would likely have been. Dating this text is

difficult: the strongest evidence that the text was produced no later than the first century

C.E. has been offered by Buffière: namely, that the author would have been forced to

incorporate some reaction to Plutarch’s commentary on the mystical Homeric allegoresis

of the Pythagoreans.175 One might add that exposure to Neoplatonist allegoresis would

have been even surer to have drawn some kind of reaction, given that Heraclitus takes

such an anti-Platonic stance. One might add a small piece of circumstantial evidence

from the record of quotes Heraclitus provides. These quotes are numerous and well-

distributed through the length of Greek intellectual history through the second century

B.C.E. Apart from Homer himself, Heraclitus refers to 22 datable or roughly datable

authors; of these, three are seventh century or earlier, three sixth century, four fifth

century, five fourth century, four third century, and three second century. And there the

record stops. Argument from the absence of evidence is always iffy, and it is certainly

possible to imagine that Heraclitus could have simply found nothing of interest to cite

after the second century, even if he were writing three hundred years later. But there

might be some room in this particular case to admit it as circumstantial evidence, given
175
Heraclitus (Buffière) ix-x.

354
Heraclitus' purposes. He was trying to defend traditional religion against more modern

philosophical encroachments, it seems more likely that he would have wanted to respond

to contemporary critiques as well as ancient ones.

More importantly, the mere fact that Heraclitus was trying to defend traditional

Greek religious dogma and practice seems to mandate that we assume an earlier date

rather than a later one. After the creation of a highly cosmopolitan and multicultural

religious scene under the Roman imperium, it seems doubtful that Heraclitus could take

the position that he does. Not only would his overriding concern with blasphemy be less

likely, it would, if present, be more likely to be directed against foreign cults. And it

would be hard to see the Homeric poems as having such a large role in civic life as

Heraclitus assigns him later than the first century B.C.E., and hard to see them treated as

sacred scripture.

One might well object, given the common view of Hellenistic religion, that such

critiques would apply just as well to the first century B.C.E. According to this view,

while traditional state cults were maintained through the Hellenistic period, the old deities

no longer inspired any personal devotion. The traditional religion was, it is assumed,

merely a hollow shell. If so, then there would be no religious milieu possible for

Heraclitus: he must simply have been an iconoclast, totally at odds with the religious

reality of whatever age he lived in.

But as Jon Mikalson has argued from epigraphical texts, this view of Hellenistic

religion has been greatly overstated. He writes, “the distinguishing feature of Athenian

religion in the Hellenistic period is continuity, a conscious continuity of the Lycourgan

period with the classical period and an implicit continuity of Hellenistic times with the

355
 Lycourgan age.”176 Piety and faith in traditional religion among average Athenians (as

opposed to metics and philosophers) was not at all extinguished, but experienced a series

of revivals until the destruction of the city's religious infrastructure by Sulla in 86.

Mikalson does limit his study to Athens, and we do not have external proof that the text

under consideration is Athenian (though the use of Attic forms is suggestive). But his

study has at the least given us a reasonable (if small) window of time in which to place

Heraclitus’ text against a religious milieu that would render his project understandable.

There is no hard evidence, but given the specific nature of Heraclitus’ religious concerns,

an early first-century date seems our best bet. If so, then there seems to be a real

possibility that this text could be a product of the Homeridae.

176
Jon D. Mikalson, Religion in Hellenistic Athens (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998) 315.

356
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2. Greek

Primary

Aristonicus, Peri Semeion Odysseias: Reliquae Emendatores. Ed. Otto Carnuth. Leipzig:
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Homer, Opera. Ed. Thomas Allen. Oxford: Oxford UP (OCT), 1902-12.

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Secondary

Allen, Thomas W. Homer: the Origins and the Transmission. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1924.

Benton, Sylvia. "Excavations in Ithaca, iii: The Cave at Polis, i" The Annual of the
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Mikalson, Jon D. Religion in Hellenistic Athens. Berkeley: University of California

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Tate, J. "The Beginnings of Greek Allegory." Classical Review 41 (1927): 214-15.

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3. English

Primary

Bacon, Francis. New Atlantis. London, 1631.

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Beaumont, Joseph. Psyche, or, Loves mysterie: in XX canto's, displaying the intercourse
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Bolton, Edmund. The Elements of Armories. London, 1610.

Brathwaite, Richard. The English Gentleman. London, 1630.

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Carew, Thomas. The Poems of Thomas Carew, with his Masque Coelum Britannicum.
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Castiglione, Baldassarre. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Sir. Thomas Hoby. 1561. Rpt.
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Chapman, George. Seaven bookes of the Iliades of Homere, prince of poets translated
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---, Chapman's Homer: the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the lesser Homerica. Ed. Allardyce
Nicoll. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.

---, The Poems of George Chapman. Ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett. New York: Modern
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---, The Plays of George Chapman: the Comedies, a Critical Edition. Ed. Allan Holaday
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---, The Plays of George Chapman : the Tragedies with Sir Gyles Goosecappe, a critical
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Chester, Robert. Robert Chester's "Love's martyr, or, Rosalins complaint" (1601): with its
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Crashaw, Richard. Carmen Deo Nostro, Te Decet Hymnus. Paris, 1652.

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Estienne, Henri. The Art of Making Devices. Trans. Thomas Blount. London, 1646.

Fletcher, Phineas. The purple island, or, The isle of man : together with Piscatorie eclogs
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Fraunce, Abraham. Insignium Armorum, Emblematum, Hieroglyphicorum, et
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Guillim, John. A Display of Heraldrie. London, 1610.

H.G. [Henry Goodere?] The mirrour of maiestie, or, The badges of honour : conceitedly
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Hall, John. Emblems with elegant Figures: Sparkles of Divine Love. London, 1658.

Hall, Joseph. "The Imprese of God." A Recollection, etc. London, 1620-21.

Harvey, Christopher. Schola Cordis, or, The Heart of it selfe, gone away from God,
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Hookes, Nicholas. "A Mock-Sonnet" Amanda, a sacrifice to an unknown goddess

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Legh, Gerard. The Accedens of Armorie. London, 1562.

More, Henry. Psychodia platonica: or, A Platonicall song of the soul, consisting of foure
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---, Democritus Platonissans : or, An essay upon the infinity of worlds out of Platonick
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 Song of the soul. Cambridge, 1646.

---, Philosophicall Poems. Cambridge, 1647.

Pathomachia: or, The Battle of Affections. Shadowed by a Faigned Siedge of the Citie
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Peacham, Henry. Minerva Britanna, or a Garden of Heroical Devices. London, 1612.

---, The compleat gentleman. Fashioning him absolute in the most necessarie and
commendable qualities concerning minde or bodie, that may be required in a noble
gentleman. Whereunto is annexed a description of the order of a maine battaile ... as
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---, Emblemata Varia. Ilkley : Scolar Press, 1976.

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Quarles, Francis. Emblems. London, 1635.

---, Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man. London, 1638.

---, Emblems, divine and moral; The school of the heart; and Hieroglyphics of the life of
man. London, 1866.

Saltmarsh, John. Holy Discoveries and Flames. London, 1640.

Sandys, George. Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in

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Smith, Gregory. Elizabethan Critical Essays. 5th ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964.

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Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia). Ed. Jean
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Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. 1977 New York : Longman,
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Willet, Andrew. Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una, etc. Cambridge, 1592.

Wither, George. A Collection of Emblems, Ancient and Moderne. London, 1635.

Secondary

Allen, D.C. Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical
Interpretation in the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970.

Alpers, Paul. "Spenser's Late Pastorals" ELH 56.4 (1989) 807.

---, What is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Bednarz, James P. "Ralegh in Spenser's Historical Allegory." Spenser Studies: a

Renaissance Poetry Annual. 4 (1983): 49-70.

Berger, Harry W., Jr. The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser's
Faerie Queene. 1957. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967.

Bond, Ronald B. "Invidia and the Allegory of Spenser's 'Muiopotmos'."

English Studies in Canada. 2 (1976): 144-55.

Borris, Kenneth. "Elizabethan Allegorical Epics: The Arcadias as Counterparts of The

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Cinquemani, A.M. "Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes and the Continuity of Ancient Modes
of Allegoresis in Seventeenth-Century England." PMLA 85 (1970):1041-49.

Clements, R. J. Picta Poesis: Literary and Humanistic Theory in Renaissance Emblem

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Coulman, D. "Spotted to be Known." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.

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Cummings, Peter M. "Spenser's Amoretti as an Allegory of Love." Texas Studies in

Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities. 12 (1970): 163-79.

Dieckmann, Liselotte. Hieroglyphics: The History of a Literary Symbol. St. Louis, 1970.

Dundas, Judith. "Ben Jonson and Van Dyck: A Study in Allegorical Portraiture."
Emblematica: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Emblem Studies. 7 (1993): 61-78.

Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions, 1974.

Fletcher, Angus. The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser. Chicago: Univerity of

Chicago Press, 1971.

Fogarty, Anne. "The Colonisation of Language: Narrative Strategy in the Faerie Queene
Book VI" Edmund Spenser. Ed. Andrew Hadfield. London: Addison Wesley, 1996.

Freeman, Rosemary. English Emblem Books. Chatto and Windus: London, 1948.

Fruen, Jeffrey P. "The Faery Queen Unveiled? Five Glimpses of Gloriana." Spenser
Studies: a Renaissance Poetry Annual. 11 (1994): 53-88.

Gransden, K.W. "Allegory and Personality in Spenser's Heroes." Essays in Criticism. 20

(1970): 298-310.

Hamilton, A.C. The Structure of Allegory in the Faerie Queene. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1961.

Javitch, Daniel. Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1978.

Lemmi, Charles. The Classic Deities in Bacon. A Study in Mythological Symbolism.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1933.

Lewalski, Barbara. Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1977.

---, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1979.

Lord, George DeF. Homeric Renaissance: The Odyssey of George Chapman. New
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Marotti, Arthur. "All About Jonson's Poetry" ELH 39.2 (1972). 209-37.

---, "'Love is not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order" ELH 49.2
(1982) 296-328.

Miller, David Lee. The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

---, "Figuring Hierarchy: The Dedicatory Sonnets to The Faerie Queene." Renaissance
Papers (1987): 49-59.

Miller, Jacqueline T. "The Courtly Figure: Spenser's Anatomy of Allegory." Studies in

English Literature 1500-1900. 31 (1991): 51-68.

Moore, Dennis. "Philisides and Mira: Autobiographical Allegory in the Old Arcadia."
Spenser Studies: a Renaissance Poetry Annual. 3 (1982): 125-137.

Mueller, Robert J. "'Infinite Desire': Spenser's Arthur and the Representation of Courtly
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Murrin, Michael. The Veil of Allegory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

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Nelson, T. G. A. "Sir John Harington and the Renaissance Debate over Allegory."
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Pendergast, John S. "Christian Allegory and Spenser's 'General Intention'." Studies in

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Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660. New York :
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Rossi, Paolo. Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science. Trans. S. Rabinovich. Chicago:
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Shore, David. Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral. Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 1985.

Stewart, Alan. Philip Sidney: A Double Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000.

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Weinberg, Bernard. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. Chicago:

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Wilson, Rawdon. "On the Spoor of the Blatant Beast: Allegory and the Political Mind."
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Wofford, Susanne Lindgren. "Gendering Allegory: Spenser's Bold Reader and the
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Literature & the Arts. 30 (1988): 1-21.

4. Chinese

Primary

Bai Juyi, Bo Juyi ji jianjiao. 6 vols. Ed. Zhu Jincheng.. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1988.

Cao Tang, Cao Tang Shizhu. Ed. Chen Jiming. Shanghai : Shanghai guji, 1996.

Chen Ziang, Chen Ziang shizhu. ed. Peng Guangsheng. Chengdu: Sizhuan renmin, 1981.

Chen Zizhan, ed. Shijing zhijie. Shanghai: Fudan daxue, 1983.

Daozang [Daoist Canon]. 36 vols. Beijing: Wenwu, 1987.

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Dong Hao, et. al. ed. Quan Tang Wen. 11 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1983.

Du Guangting, Daojiao Lingyan ji. Jinan: Qilu Shushe, 1997.

Du Fu, Du Fu Shishuo Ed. Shi Hongbao. Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1962.

Gu Kuang, Gu Kuang shiji. Ed. Zhao Changping. Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin, 1983.

Guo Shaoyu, ed. Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan. 4 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1979.

Li Bai, Li Bai quanji jiaozhu huishi jiping 8 vols. Ed. Zhan Ying Tianjin: Baihua wenyi
chubanshe, 1996.

Li Shan, et. al. Liu Chen Zhu Wenxuan. Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu, 1983.

Liu Yuxi, Liu Yuxi ji. Ed. Bian Xiaoxuan. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990.

Liu Zongyuan, Liu Zongyuan Shi Jianshi. Ed. Wang Guoan. Shanghai: Shanghai guji,
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Laozi, Laozi Shiyi. Ed. Lu Yusan. Tianjin: Tianjin guji, 1999.

Pi Rixiu, Pi Rixiu Shiwen Xuanzhu ed. Shen Baokun. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1991.

Quan Tang Shi. 25 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1985.

Sikong Tu, Sikong Tu Xuanji Zhu ed. Wang Jiheng and Gao Zhongzhang. Taiyuan:
Shanxi renmin, 1989.

Tao Hongjing, ed. Zhen'gao. Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu, 1983.

Wang Yi and Hong Xingzu, Chuci Zhangju Buzhu Ed. Zhang Lihua. Jilin: Jilin Renmin,
1999.

Wuchen ¤-¦Ú, [Commentary to Chuci Selections], Wen xuan ¤å¿ï Shanghai guji,
Shanghai, 1986.

Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi quan ping Ed. Fang Yong and Lu Yongpin. Chengdu: Bashu shu
she, 1998.

Secondary

Barrett, T.H. "The Fen-tao k'o and Printing on Paper in Seventh-Century China." Bulletin
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Bell, Catherine. "Ritualization of Texts and Textualization of Ritual in the Codification

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Benn, Charles D. Taoism as Ideology in the Reign of Emperor Hsuan-Tsung (712-755)

Unpublished dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977.

---, The Cavern Mystery Transmission: A Taoist Ordination Rite of A.D. 711. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1991.

Bokenkamp, Stephen R. "The Peach Flower Font and the Grotto Passage." JAOS 106.1
(Jan.-Mar. 1986), pp. 65-77.

---, "Taoist Literature, Part I: Through the T'ang Dynasty." The Indiana Companion to
Traditional Chinese Literature. Ed. William Nienhauser. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
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---, "Taoism and Literature: The Pi-lo Question." Taoist Resources. 3.1(1993): 57-72.

---, "Time After Time: Taoist Apocalyptic History and the Founding of the T'ang
Dynasty" Asia Minor series 3, 7 (1994). 59-88.

---, Early Daoist Scriptures. 1997. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Cahill, Suzanne. Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in
Medieval China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

Guo Shaoyu. Zhongguo wenxue piping shi. Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1979.

--- .”Zhongguo wenxue piping lilunzhong ‘dao’ de wenti” Zhaoyushi gudian wenxue
lunji. Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1983.

Hawkes, David. Ch'u T'zu: Songs of the South. Oxford, 1959; revised edition, London,
1985.

Hou Naihui. Shiqing yu youjing: Tangdai wenren de yuanlin shenghuo. Taibei: Dongda
tushu, 1991.

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