VLVL2 (9.5): "Tales of Dispossesion"

Glenn Scheper glenn_scheper at earthlink.net
Sun Nov 30 23:48:11 CST 2003


> "... the whole concept of the Tristero seems to derive
> linguistically from a reference in Eliot's The Waste
> Land to 'le Prince d'Aquitaine a tour nobile' (line
> 430 [sic--try line 429]).  This line itself bears a
> cryptic reference to Gerard de Nerval's poem 'El
> Deschidado,' in which most of the major themes of the
> Tristero are sounded (the exile into a shadowy,
> marginal world; the former prince whose 'tower' has
> been 'abolished'; the 'black sun of melancholia'). 
> Nerval's poem, in turn, takes its titles from the
> motto on the shield of the mysterious Disinherited
> Knight who turns up at the beginning of Walter Scott's
> Ivanhoe, and who will eventually represent both the
> Saxons and the Jews evicted from their estates by
> Norman chivalry...."

A mention of dead-but-different raised me again.

Here's that Gerard de Nerval poem translated to Engish:
I find typical autofellatio/psychosis tantric material.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/dec00/nerval4.htm
Chimeras, by Gerard de Nerval
 Les Chimeres translated by Daniel Mark Epstein

        ---

And as for towers, I cataloged not a few texts that
mention towers falling, after 9/11, see esp. Dante
for the closeness of his vision to the WTC epochal
cataclysm, whereas in Ozymandias, pat autofellatio
caricature, the towers are his thighs.

http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/wtc.htm
The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center is at the heart of prophetic
symbols

        ---

Both tower themes appear in WL:

http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html
 Eliot, T. S. 1922. The Waste Land

 370

 What is the city over the mountains

 Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

 Falling towers

 Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

 Vienna London

        ...

 380

 And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

 And upside down in air were towers

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.




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