Rebel Angels Research Articles

The Fool and the Physician

72 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews One of the great merits of Formas para volver a casa is that it is a book that no previous Chilean author has written about the dictatorship ; a necessary and beautiful story that captures the complex experience of daring to face banality, which reminds us that sometimes what we find upon returning home is something we had not wanted to see in the first place, or at least not see so close up. Marcelo Rioseco University of Oklahoma Verse Andy Brown. The Fool and the Physician. London. Salt. 2011. isbn 9781844713462 From the mid-1990s, Andy Brown has emerged from the small-press scene to become an important voice in the British poetry revival. As director of Exeter University’s Writing Programme and a former Arvon Centre director, he has also played a significant part in institutionalizing and promoting the growth of creative writing within the British academy. His recent selected poems, Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996–2006, made available over a decade of seminal work from his formative years. Sparing and judiciously chosen, the poems show Brown’s gradual movement toward the deep lyric of his collaborative book with John Burnside, Goose Music (2008). His new book, The Fool and the Physician, continues Brown’s openness to formal experiment, re-positioning and re-sounding a wide and eclectic range of traditional verse patterns. The nineteen poems of part 1 center on the figure of the clown and are, as Luke Kennard observes, as “funny and curious” as they are “poignant and moving.” In “A Clown in the Moonlight,” which draws on a quote from Lon Chaney, we’re challenged: “How we feel about the clown / depends on where we see him— / a circus or party, no problem, / but ringing your doorbell at sundown?” Brown skillfully displaces our common assumptions with his own poetic clowning, which is simultaneously hilarious, serious, and disturbing in its playfulness and mocking. In “Pretending to Be Me,” he blasts: “I’m two faced, a Janus, inverting truth / and illusion . . .” But it is in the book’s second part, from which the collection as a whole takes its title, that Brown’s inversions practice their most potent lyric alchemy, “As when the inconceivable bursts through / the surface of our lives” (from “Jeroen van Aken”). Based on the life and work of the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch, the poems echo the kind of visceral fetish for bodily particulars , dark secretions, and slitherings found with frequency in their source. Fittingly, Brown is at his most formally amorphous in poems carefully crafted and shaped. And still, despite the fabulously baroque emotive force of poems like “The Garden of Earthly Delights” and “The Adoration of the Magi”—among Brown’s best achievements —there is time for humor: “This painting’s made as an Imago mundi— / where the mundane and the devil’s cargo / fuse in a delicious farrago / of licentiousness à gogo.” It takes daring and a cool nerve to juxtapose such energetic variety under one cover and keep it under control. The Fool and the Physician does that, and more. George Messo Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia Édes hazám: Kortárs közéleti versek. Tibor Bárány, ed. Budapest . Magvető. 2012. isbn 9789631430233 Hungarian poetry is traditionally more engaged than private. Poems like Sándor Petőfi’s “National Song” ushered in the March revolution of 1848, and Endre Ady became a mouthpiece of socialist ideas in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both the interwar Horthy era and the thirty-three-year-long communist Kádár regime had its prominent social and political poetrebels : Attila József and György Petri. When the latter emerged from samizdat in 1989 and anything could be published, it seemed that the days of political poetry were numbered, but this was an optical illusion—Hungary ’s problems did not cease with the change of regime, and they had to be addressed by its poets. Tibor Bárány, editor of the new anthology Édes hazám (My sweet homeland), chose “engaged” poems from the output of the past twenty years. Although he stresses in his afterword that this is “not a...

“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

“By force or fraud / Weening to prosper”: Milton's Satanic and Messianic Modes of Heroism

A Fall From Grace To… Virulence?

In Bruegel’s painting of The Fall of the Rebel Angels we are witness to a tumbling maelstrom of falling rebel angels outcast from Heaven. Within the fray stands St. Michael in gilded armor, and his angels-at-arms serenely in pale albs, and almost as if threshing grain, hewing and striking down this inconceivable rout. The main focus of the image and what draws the eye is the extraordinarily creative melange of creatures; mixtures of human, animal, plant, and inanimate objects slashing and stabbing as they fall from the great battlefields in the skies. They pour down in a vast column that stretches infinitely from the luminous sun; they fall from the light to the darkness. The column of falling angels is so numerous that it widens to encompass the whole lower canvas as it approaches the viewer. With a start, then, we realize that Bruegel intends that we too are in the thick of this. Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle? Clearly Bruegel intended for us to identify with St. Michael and his comrades. The classic imagery of religious battles between humanity and evil, is straightforward fodder for us to digest, but is there another metaphor here? If the fallen angels represent the evil mirror image of St. Michael and his cohort, so they also represent the mirror image of our own genetic kind—pathogenic organisms which are otherwise just like us, but have fallen from grace through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh. On closer scrutiny, we can see that Bruegel has depicted the Natural World—specifically chosen it as proxy for the fallen angels—for both its fascinating wonder and horror. Thus may we surmise that nature was, in Bruegel’s mind, itself as strange, wondrous, and horrific as the fallen angels that he depicted in the juxtaposed forms of otherwise anatomically correct fishes, bats, and frogs? Bruegel was an urban man and precisely because of his lack of intimate knowledge of Nature, he was likely able to observe it with such precision. No doubt he was influenced during time spent in France & Italy by that unique Renaissance creation, the scientific method, or means to learn about phenomena via empirical evidence. Today, we are not unlike Bruegel as we view the wondrously diverse animals and plants that represent nature, peering beneath this palimpsest the pathogens that threaten to plague us? AIDS, SARS, Malaria, West Nile Virus, and Avian Influenza are but a few of these fallen angels that have burst from out of the Natural world to wreck havoc causing countless deaths and economic losses. In Bruegel’s curious chimeras, we find yet another analogy—for the genetic recombination, mutation and evolution that negative-stranded RNA viruses in particular undergo as they shift, morph and adapt to their changing habitat—animal cells. Here St. Michael is at risk of more than just the prodding of a sword. Here he is at the mercy of the tooth and nail of glycoproteins sharpened and honed to strike with precision through the gaps in his golden armor. As Pulliam shows in this issue of EcoHealth, this battle continues in reality as human encroachment into wildlife Published online: March 5, 2008

Bruegel’s Falling Figures

Reformation iconoclasm imposed intense pressure on the relation between pictorial images and their viewers. Medieval techniques used in the interpretation of biblical texts as well as processes of association involved in systems of mnemotechnics contributed to the process of redefining their function as images intended for spiritual meditation. This essay examines five paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (“Fall of the Rebel Angels,” “Conversion of Saul,” “Fall of Icarus,” “Parable of the Blind,” and “The Peasant and the Birdnester”). Each presents a moment of transformation associated with the biblical narrative of the Fall of Man. In this context, incomplete actions are held within a larger pattern of divine justice and promised redemption. During the turbulent 1560s, for a contemplative viewer, such representations of change as a phase in the cycle of becoming rather than an irredeemable rupture served to reaffirm the possibility of controlling spiritual and political chaos.

Rebel Angels (review)

Reviewed by: Rebel Angels Elizabeth Bush Bray, Libba Rebel Angels. Delacorte, 2005 [560p] Library ed. ISBN 0-385-90257-3$18.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-73029-2$16.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 In dabbling with her schoolmates in the fantasy-fulfilling delights of the Realms (A Great and Terrible Beauty, BCCB 5/04), Gemma Doyle unleashed a fierce power play for magic now left unbound. Rich, headstrong Felicity and plain, self-deprecating Ann pressure Gemma to continue hosting their pleasure trips into the Realms, but Gemma realizes her mission must be to assure that magic doesn't spill out into the everyday world. The alluring Kartik, about whom Gemma continues her romantic fantasies, steers her toward securing magic for the Order, while a new teacher at Spence Academy seems equally determined to corral Gemma's powers for her own suspect motives. The catty boarding-school drama that spiced Bray's first entry has largely dissipated, and with the players' characters well established, there's little new interest in that corner. Romance is perfunctory, limited now to an attempted seduction by handsome viscount's son Simon Middleton (armed with a bottle of absinthe), a slow dance in the coach house with Kartik, and requisite breathy prose: "If I've injured Kartik's pride, he doesn't let on. He paces, passing so near that I can smell him, a mixture of smoke, cinnamon, the wind, the forbidden. I clutch my robe tightly about me." Even Gemma's travels through the Realm feel programmatic as she follows carefully allotted clues to complete her mission, and a red herring as big as a whale is unlikely to divert attention from the story's true villainess. Still, readers who prefer their fantasy with fewer historical trappings may actually appreciate the neater plot trajectory and welcome the fact that Gemma is now buckling down to the business of otherworldly adventure. Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Fall and Redemption

The current essay is the third paper in a long drawn-out series that examines the temporality of created beings in Paradise Lost. The first paper (The AnaChronisT 1996) discussed the pristine condition of humans in an Eden characterised by dynamism rather than stasis. The second article (The AnaChronisT 2004) examined the temporality of Milton's angels, both loyal and fallen. The present investigation returns to Adam and Eve but looks at their life in time as we know it. I will show that the first human pair's initial reaction to the altered situation, their perception of time and despair after the fall parallel those of the fallen angels. The destinies of rebel angels and of disobedient humans diverge in that God bestows grace on the latter and reverses their fate, which betokens time's new significance for humanity as the potentiality to be redeemed. As part of the redemptive process, Adam and Eve must come to terms with death, foreknowledge and history. While the 1996 paper mostly concentrated on the paradisal books, and the previous essay on books i-ii and v-vi, I now turn to the last third of the epic. Taken together, the three articles thus provide a sustained reading of the whole poem.

Some Observations on Domenico Beccafumi's Two "Fall of the Rebel Angels" Panels

Domenico Beccafumi's two Fall of the Rebel Angels panels are discussed. An unfinished figure in the lower right corner of the Pinacoteca Fall is related to two works by Beccafumi, executed between 1519-1523, confirming an early 1520s date of execution for the panel. The more structured second version in San Niccolo is proposed to derive from a traditional Sienese typology for the Fall of the Rebel Angels theme. The commingling of angels alongside nudes with no angelic/demonic markers in both panels is connected to theological and literary traditions surrounding the Fall of the Angels which intermingle men and angels.

A "Secret and Feverish Genesis": The Prefaces of the Old English Hexateuch

The open folios of a medieval manuscript, like parts of the human body, phenomenologically generate meaning. The first opening of the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, a translation of the first six books of the Old Testament produced in eleventh-century England, contains two prefaces: an illustration of the Fall of the Rebel Angels and AElfric of Eynsham’s Preface to Genesis. Previously read by scholars as separate discourses, these two structures together introduce the translated text that follows, situating the reader/viewer between a series of dichotomies: proper and improper interpretation, good and evil, incorporation or exclusion from the Christian community.

Who's Who in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture's Reluctant Self-Revelation

Not until the 1870s, following the first publication of photographs of the Sistine Ceiling, did anyone notice significant presences under God's backward arm in the Creation of Adam. Since then, the identity of the two embraced figures—Eve and the Christ Child—has been either ignored or contested. Also ignored, under God's outstretched arm, was the presence of the rebel angels, the origin of sin in Satanic envy, and Lucifer's imminent confrontation with Michelangelo's name saint, the Archangel Michael. There is apparently more between the median and the right edge of the fresco than was dreamt of in our historiography.

Murther & Walking Spirits

Anthony Burgess listed Davies' The Rebel Angels among the 99 best novels of our time and declared that Davies himself is without doubt Nobel Prize material. In this unusual novel, Davies' protagonist is murdered in the first sentence of the book, but he lingers as a ghost to view the exploits of his ancestors, from the American Revolution to the present.

Villainy, Humor, and Heresy

“Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, written within a year of each other, present a striking pair of books on the theme of heresies—ideas considered beyond the pale…. The modern university and the medieval monastery are able, in these writers' hands, to show us ourselves and our intellectual heritage.”

The Professor's Novel: David Lodge's Small World

Although often proclaimed dead, the British University Novel and the American Campus Novel or College Novel-these terms are used synonymously by critics-seem to be in vigorous health. The somewhat recent and diverse additions to the hundreds of extant titles such as Amanda Cross's (i.e., Carolyn Heilbrun) detective cum feminist novel, Death in a Tenured Position (1981), Robertson Davies's intriguing tale of murder and a missing manuscript by the seventeenth-century poet Andreas Gryphius, The Rebel Angels (1982), and last but not least, David Lodge's Small World (1984) attest to the continuing popularity of campus fiction. In contrast to Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, there is no indigenous campus novel in the German-speaking countries-owing primarily to the absence until very recently in the German university system of a campus. In fact, what might be called the German equivalent of the campus novel, the Professorenroman, a minor genre that enjoyed a brief flourishing during the second half of the nineteenth century, is defined in terms of the authors' profession rather than the subject matter and setting of the novels. Thus we are faced with the curious paradox that one of the very few examples of a genuine German campus novel, Martin Walser's Brandung (1985; translated as Breakers, 1987), takes place on an American campus on the West Coast.1

Robertson Davies by Michael Peterman

N O TES 1 These interviews, held in 1974 and 1976, appeared in Ronald Hayman, Tom Stop­ pard (London, 1978). 2 David Gollob and David Roper, “Trad Tom Pops In,” Gambit 10 (1981). 3 Tom Stoppard, “Ambushes for the Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas,” Theatre Quarterly 4 (May-July 1974) : 4. Cited by Jenkins, p. 184. 4 Ibid., p. 12. Cited by Jenkins, p. too. 5 Ibid., p. 14. Cited by Jenkins, p. 118. St a n l e y g. m u l l in s / Laurentian University Michael Peterman, Robertson Davies (Boston: Twayne, 1986). 175. $19.95 (u.s.) Robertson Davies has recently emerged as one of Canada’s most important authors. Despite the confines of the Twayne format, Michael Peterman makes a valuable contribution to our critical understanding of the nature of Davies’s vision and his art. This study is more than an introduction to an important writer’s work; it marks an original intervention in the debate about the ethics and ultimate achievement of Davies’s fiction. Peterman argues that Davies’s sustaining theme is “the importance of self in modem life” (ii) and that the “egoism of the hero figure . . . dominates his work” (iii). Such an approach represents the critical consensus about Davies’s writing in Canada. Continuing with the psychological and thematic focus that has dominated Davies criticism to date, Peterman provides a balanced introduction to this aspect of Davies’s writing. He notes that “most of the critics who have quarreled with Fifth Business have at the heart of their complaints a dissatisfaction with egoism as the novel celebrates it” (127). Peterman shares some of this dissatisfaction. He is critical of Davies’s tendency to “romantic hero worship” and to the celebration of an “autocratic worldview” (130). In World of Wonders, Peterman sees this tendency leading Davies to depict “a persistent kind of moral and aesthetic bullying by dominant and domineering figures whose credentials are their successes in the undemocratic world of art and theater” (149). Although he never accuses Davies himself of similarly bullying his readers, one could logi­ cally draw that inference from Peterman’s reading of these texts. He sees Davies the author as the true subject of the Salterton novels. He believes that, in The Manticore and The Rebel Angels, the very strength of Davies’s per­ sonal voice creates problems in differentiating among his characters’ narrative voices. Finally, Peterman acknowledges that the “ essentially religious and moral” commitment to self that he argues is at the heart of Davies’s work is 16 also “selfish, undemocratic, and elitist” (159). These characteristics seem all the more disturbing to Peterman in that they do not bother Davies himself in the least. Peterman’s consistent elaboration of his thesis enables new insight into the continuities of Davies’s work. It allows him to see Eisengrim as “an extraordi­ nary reincarnation of Samuel Marchbanks” (152). It alerts him to the con­ tinuity of the Prospero figure, the didactic, manipulative, dogmatic teacher, as a recurrently privileged type in Davies’s fiction. It leads him to note the similarities between the final volumes of the Salterton and Deptford trilogies, both of which focus on the “sustaining selfhood” of the artist (147). His argument also leads to clear differences between his readings and those of other Davies scholars. It causes him to modify Patricia Monk’s Jungian emphasis on Marchbanks as Davies’s “shadow self” to argue instead that Davies “was in complete control of the energy of his mouthpiece, of what both he and his mouthpiece chose to reveal” (33). Peterman’s reading of Marchbanks restores the satiric wit to the dark energies highlighted by Monk, and it places Davies the conscious artist clearly to the fore. In his emphasis on the monologic nature of Davies’s fiction, Peterman also implicitly sets himself in opposition to Barbara Godard’s’ attempts to claim that Davies’s writing exemplifies the Bakhtinian dialogic imagination of the camivalesque. Peter­ man’s stress on the conservative form and didactic manner of Davies’s fiction remains persuasive. Indeed, Peterman is most convincing when he points out the thematic and stylistic implications of Davies’s undoubted emphasis on the...

Hercules belegerd door de Pygmeeën, schilderijen van Jan van Scorel en Frans Floris naar een Icon van Philostratus

Hercules belegerd door de Pygmeeën, schilderijen van Jan van Scorel en Frans Floris naar een Icon van Philostratus

The Rebel Angels: Robertson Davies and the Novel of Ideas

The Rebel Angels: Robertson Davies and the Novel of Ideas

"Hate in Heav'n": Milton and the Odium Dei

In his recent discussion of Paradise Lost, John T. Shawcross formulates what he feels to be underlying theme of Milton's epic. According to Professor Shawcross, the theme in simplest terms is love. We see it in providence of God which poem asserts, in of Son for God Father and thus for man, and in realization of Adam in Book XII, which thus justifies God's ways. By contrast, we see hate of Satan and its generation of revolt, revenge, and deceit. Love leads to eternal life; hate, to eternal death. ' As a succinct and cogent statement of theme of Milton's epic, foregoing observation has support of Milton's God, who declares that Heav'nly shall outdo hate, / Giving to death, and dying to redeem, / So dearly to redeem what hate / So easily destroy'd (3.298-301). At very thematic center of Paradise Lost, then, one discovers all-important triumph of Heav'nly love over Hellish hate. In its assertion of eternal providence, Milton's epic represents a veritable celebration of that triumph. Despite paradigmatic sense through which theme of Paradise Lost is articulated in triumphant assertion of God's over Satan's hate, one must nevertheless come to grips with an aspect of Milton's epic that has received little or no attention in history of Milton scholarship. This aspect might be called odium Dei, a phenomenon that finds its fullest expression in Son's statement to Father just before Son ascends The Chariot of Paternal Deitie to overwhelm rebel angels in book 6 of Paradise Lost. Responding to his Father's directive to Pursue these sons of Darkness, drive them out / From all Heav'ns bounds into utter Deep (715-16), Son says, whom thou hat'st, I hate, and can put on / Thy terrors, as I put thy mildness on, / Image of thee in all (734-36). As this response suggests, it is not only through an encounter with Satan that Adam and Eve come to discover things to thir thought / So unimaginable as hate in Heav'n (7.53-54). One must likewise acknowledge that this discovery includes an encounter with a Being who is customarily

The “Master of the Rebel Angels” Reconsidered

Two small trecento paintings representing the Fall of the Rebel Angels and Saint Martin dividing his cloak with the Beggar, originally covering opposite sides of the same panel, have been attributed to a Sienese painter named the Master of the Rebel Angels and dated into the forties. Examination of them reveals that they are by different painters. Giovanni da Milano painted the Saint Martin and Naddo Ceccarelli most probably the Rebel Angels. Accordingly, the essay observes an exceptional collaboration of a Sienese with a Florence-trained painter. The closer examination of these paintings contributes to understanding of Sienese painting preceding the Black Death and of the artistic formation of Giovanni da Milano.

The "Master of the Rebel Angels" Reconsidered

The "Master of the Rebel Angels" Reconsidered

THE SACRED HEAD: MILTON'S SOLAR MYSTICISM

ABSTRACT Milton aspires to light, to free himself from the body. A celebrant of the solar Logos, he is preoccupied with the conflict between spirit and nature and the frightening possibility of the dissolution of consciousness. The central figures in Milton's poems are associated with the death and rebirth of the sun. In his early poems the figure of Orpheus, whose Apollonian song tamed Dionysian nature, inspires the triumph of the Christ-child over the pagan deities, the death and rebirth of Lycidas, the mystique of the Lady's “sun-clad power of chastity.” In the later poems solar power tends to become apocalyptically destructive: Samson annihilates the Philistines, and the Son overwhelms the rebel angels in his solar chariot. Milton's ideal, symbolized by the chariot of Deity, is to harness physical energies in service of the Logos. This ideal of sublimation, which has alchemical affinities, is displayed in A Mask. Ideally, sublimation should lead to integration and higher wholeness. Yet in Milton, transcendence seems ultimately based upon dismemberment—the mortification of nature in the interests of spirit.

Milton's Gunpowder Poems and Satan's Conspiracy

ABSTRACT The gunpowder sermons, preached in annual celebration of the discovery of Guy Fawkes's plot (1605), were powerful influences on the young Milton's treatment of this conspiracy in his Latin epigrams and In Quintum Novembris. The sermons also influenced the mature Milton's depiction of Satan's conspiracy in Paradise Lost. The influence of the gunpowder sermons is apparent in the many striking resemblances between them and Milton's work, early and late. The preachers and Milton alike regard Satan as the archetypal conspirator, who invented gunpower as a weapon to rival God's thunderbolt. They are alike in dramatically characterizing God as the unmoved deity, who easily defeats the most subtle of intrigues. For example, both the preachers and Milton are indebted to Psalm ii, the spectacle of God laughing at his enemies. Finally, the particular ironic contempt which Milton affects toward the rebel angels in Paradise Lost may be traced to the irony employed by the sermonists to mock the pretentious futility of the gunpowder plotters. The gunpowder sermons, then, bring into sharp relief some political contours of Paradise Lost.