Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 17:03:09 -0500
From: Gregory {Greg} Downing <downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Dante's possible sources


At 01:20 PM 11/23/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Greg,
>
>We'll talk more about this at some point.  When I saw Dante mentioning
>Avicenna and Averhoes but not Maimonides, it dawned on me that he had no Jews
>in Limbo, only virtuous heathen.  So the rest of Commedia, up until parad. 32
>(Saint Bernard of Clairvaux) is a question of what happened to the Jews. 
>
>pat
>

Whenever you want -- there's actually a very crucial passage early in
Ulysses's crucial crucial crucial episode 14 (it's precisely because it is
so crucial that it linguistically and stylistically the most challenging) --
Stephen is trying to dominate he discussion in the maternity-hosp conference
room among the young "medicals" (and Bloom), and he mentions Averr and
Maimon in the same clause, about one page before he quotes from Paradiso and
Bernard in elaborating his own highly particularistic version of
monotheistic theology centered on the relationship between the immanent and
the eschatic realms, and likewise on the issue of sexuality and organic
continuity and what they have to do with the time/eternity relationship.
(Eve is the villainess, Mary perhaps but perhaps not the heroine.) Joyce as
teenage head of the Marian sodality has gathered a lot of apparently useful
conceptual and cultural material....

Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing-AT-nyu.edu or downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu



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