SECTION TWO—
EPIC AND AUTHORITY

5—
Metamorphosis, Metaphor, and Allegory in Latin Epic

Philip Hardie

Philip Hardie focuses here on the ways in which metamorphosis can serve as a guide to understanding the differing kinds of figurative meanings in epic narrative. Using Ovid's Metamorphoses as his principal example, Hardie explores the relation between metaphor, personification, allegory, and metamorphosis and argues that metamorphoses in Ovid's epic create an unresolved and shifting exchange of literal and figurative meanings that precludes identifying heroic essence as something stable or certain. Hardie shows that earlier epic, including especially Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey, can be profitably reinterpreted through this Ovidian lens, and concludes that both the Odyssey and the Aeneid, poems central to traditional definitions of epic, demonstrate the impossibility of pinning down the epic man as the philosophical personification of a perfected humanity. In this essay Hardie shows the centrality of Ovid for an understanding of epic and indeed suggests that as a strong rereading of its literary precursors, Ovid's poem makes visible hidden aspects of the figurative and moral construction of earlier epics.

My essay seeks to make a contribution to the history of the allegorical epic through consideration of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a poem undoubtedly central to the tradition of Latin hexameter narrative, but whose status both as an epic and as an allegorical poem is problematic. Metamorphosis as a narrative device is often supposed to be inimical to the deepest concerns of the epic genre, not least because by denying death as the end of human stories it is held to destroy the moral seriousness of epic. I shall press the generic issue in two directions: first by exploring the connection between the moral allegoresis of epic and metamorphosis, and second by asking why it might be that a poem of transformations should mark so significant a point in the development of personification allegory in ancient epic. Common to both parts of my discussion will be the emergence of a tension between the allegorical drive to fix and define univocal categories, and the text's resistance to interpretative fixation. If I wanted to give these two opposing tendencies allegorical labels, I could call the first Atlantean, after the giant immobilized through petrifaction, and the second Protean, after the shape-shifter who performs a whole series of transformations in order to elude those who would pin him down.^[1]

Metamorphosis and Allegory: The Linguistic Turn

The linguistic turn has become perhaps the favorite strategy of modern critics of the Metamorphoses: Ovid is read as the poet who (re)fashions the world in his own words. Already in Amores 1.3 the poet's promise to give immortality through his poetic language—indeed to give existence itself— to his as yet scarcely fashioned, and pointedly unnamed, mistress is set on a par with the poetic immortality of women famous for their involvement in tales of metamorphosis (Io, Leda, Europa). The linguistic screw is given another turn if we attend to the language itself of metamorphosis, as Frederick Ahl has done, with reference mostly to the lexicon of phonetic and morphological change, by way of prolegomenon to his discussion of Ovid's use of punning techniques. For Ahl the fundamental equivocation is that between the two senses of Latin elementa, "(physical) elements" and "letters of the alphabet." He claims: "As the material elements shift, transforming man into animals or plants, so the elements in words are shuffled to reproduce the changes in language itself."^[2] But the correspondence between the physical and the verbal may also be traced at the semantic level, of metaphor, simile, allegory, and other transferred uses of language, including translation and allusion. In Latin the lexicon of physical metamorphosis largely overlaps with the lexicon of linguistic change. Tra (ns )latio, "metaphor," is a verbal noun from transfero, which may mean "transform" (and also our "translate," for which Latin also uses uerto, literally "turn, change"). Cicero uses immutatio, "a changing," as a label to cover the Greek terms tropos, "trope" (literally "a turning"), and schema, "figure" (Brutus 69). Quintilian defines a figure (figura, literally "shape") as "arte aliqua nouata forma dicendi," "a shape of speaking altered by some art" (Institutio Oratoria 9.1.14). Cicero's definition of allegory as "continuae tralationes," "continuous metaphors" (Orator 94) might equally be translated as "successive transformations," a precise description of the Metamorphoses.

These lexical equivalences open up the possibility for metamorphosis to function as a narrative figuration of figurative language, as linguistic events are projected into the world "out there" as narrative fictions. The connection between metamorphosis and allegory may be envisaged as an axis between the literal and the figurative. Allegoresis (interpretative allegorization) takes a fragment of literal narrative and converts it into a figurative discourse. Thus the literal narrative of Circe's transformation of human beings into animals is converted into a tale about the figurative bestialization of the human soul through enslavement to the passions. A theory of allegory based on authorial intention will hold that originally a figure of speech has been literalized as the basis for a narrative. Paul de Man puts it thus: "From the recognition of language as trope, one is led to the telling of a tale. . . The temporal deployment of an initial complication, of a structural knot, indi-

cates the close . . . relationship between trope and narrative, between knot and plot. If the referent of a narrative is indeed the tropological structure of its discourse, then the narrative will be the attempt to account for this fact."^[3] Just so, a tale of metamorphosis may take a figurative expression and spin from it a narrative fleshed out with persons, times, and places, converting the paradigmatic structure of metaphor into a syntagmatic chain. Many critics have pointed to Ovid's habit of generating tales of transformation out of a literalization of the figurative;^[4] not so many, incidentally, have observed that this is one of the ways in which Ovid continues what had become a central feature of the Latin hexameter tradition through the structures of analogy and image deployed by Lucretius and Virgil.

This is a road open to two-way traffic: Jonathan Bate has noted recently, speaking of the bestial in Lear, that "Shakespeare converts literal Ovidian metamorphoses into metaphors."^[5] This shuttling between the verbal and the physical also characterizes Ovid's dealings with similes, figurative adjustments in perception or conceptualization that often anticipate physical transformations—what Leonard Barkan has called "protometamorphoses."^[6] For example, Apollo's dying boyfriend Hyacinthus is compared (in a traditional kind of simile with a specific Virgilian model) to a series of drooping flower heads; a few lines later the boy's blood is (literally) transformed into the flower that bears his name.^[7] Given the loss of most of the poetry of metamorphosis prior to Ovid, in particular that of the Hellenistic period, it is difficult to say how specifically Ovidian this constant allegorical matching of shape to narrative is, but the surviving fragments of the earlier tradition hint at a fair degree of innovation, or at least systematization, on Ovid's part.^[8]

Anthropologies Homeric, Virgilian, and Ovidian

The first regular tale of human metamorphosis in Ovid's poem is that of Lycaon ( 1.209-243). As the first such narrative, it invites us to accord it a paradigmatic status within the poem as a whole.^[9] Here the metaphor "Man is a wolf"^[10] becomes the occasion for a story about a savage man whose figurative wolflikeness finally turns him into a wolf. At the end of the tale Ovid makes very heavy use of what W. S. Anderson has labeled the "vocabulary of continuity" to ram home the underlying points of similarity between the man Lycaon and a wolf.^[11] This handling of a terminal metamorphosis "fixes" the meaning of the story, "making sense" of a bizarre and "primitive" tale.

Or so it would seem. Denis Feeney has properly located Ovid's Lycaon narrative within a centuries-long tradition of defining the human with reference to the categories of god and beast that lie on either side.^[12] In the Homeric epics the boundaries between the three categories are tested, but ultimately no transgression is possible. Jasper Griffin and others stress that Homer imposes a kind of censorship on the marvelous and the magical, in-

cluding the motif of metamorphosis. "The Homeric world is characterized by a rigid distinction between the main categories of existence that offers little room for compromise or ambiguity."^[13] The other obstinately remains the other. The Homeric anthropology emphasizes the inescapably fixed limits of human nature through a systematic set of contrasts with the not-human, on the one side the divine and on the other the bestial. And it is true that the chief examples in the Odyssey of a transformative power that transgresses these limits, the figures of Proteus and of Circe, are encountered by the human heroes in places on the margins of the human world.

Allegorization, especially moral allegorization, threatens this rigid classificatory system, to the extent that the gods and the animal (and inanimate) world become figures of, and thus collapse into, the category "human." Take two versions of the Circe story: in the Homeric narrative the companions of Odysseus have the heads, voice, bristles, and appearance of pigs, but "their nous remained fast in its place as before" (Odyssey 10. 240). Here, despite the radical physical alteration of the companions, we are left in no doubt as to what is human and what is not. On the other hand, the moral allegorization, which extracts from the Circe story a lesson about the dehumanizing effects of the passions, inverts the Homeric narrative by replacing a tale of physical transformation and mental fixity with a tale of mental alteration within an unaltered body, and as a result the limits of the human are put in question. But in a developed system of philosophical allegorization this propensity to alteration away from the "human" is controlled by an a priori, philosophically defined conception of what humans are (or should be). That is to say that the nonhuman is still exploited as a source of figures with which to prescribe the properly human.

In Ovid the figuration of the human is not controlled by an overriding philosophical authority. Many readers have of course been tempted to find just such an authority in the Speech of Pythagoras in the last book of the Metamorphoses, and to see in it a ground for the interpretation of the rest of the poem. But the Pythagorean version of change simply will not fit as a model for the greater part of the mythological metamorphoses. A lack of fit, incongruity, it must be said, is the usual impression of the modern reader when confronted with ancient philosophizing allegorizations of myth, and it is tempting to see an implicit comment to this effect on the part of Ovid himself. That is, the Speech of Pythagoras presents itself as a mimicry of allegorizing commentary, a kind of explanatory appendix, but we are duped if we take this autoallegorizing seriously. The apparently authoritative speech of the philosopher Pythagoras provides no external point d'appui outside the poem from which finally to make sense of the poem but is itself inescapably implicated in the fictional web of the Metamorphoses. It succumbs to what we might now regard as a postmodernist failure of metanarrative and ends up as simply another set of stories about change.^[14]

Any attempt to press Lycaon's wolf-metamorphosis into the service of a definitive statement of what humans are must confront the previous history of the race of which Lycaon is a member.^[15] Lycaon is the kind of human that he is because he is one of the race of humans born of the blood of the Giants blasted by Jupiter (1.156-162). His attempt on the life of Jupiter is another version of the Giants' assault on Olympus; the two stories could even be thought of as allegorical retellings of each other. To become human, the Giants have already undergone a metamorphosis: "Lest no. . . memorials should remain ["ne . . . monimenta manerent"]^[16] of her offspring, Earth changed their blood into the shape of men" (159-160). Here the vocabulary of permanence^[17] will be betrayed (in typically Ovidian fashion) by the further transformation to which the Giants' son Lycaon, himself one of those "enduring monuments," will be subject. It is becoming very difficult to say what exactly does constitute the human.

As we read on in the Metamorphoses, the external policing of the boundaries of the human becomes harder to maintain. The open-ended set of analogies between the human and the nonhuman that is constructed by the relentless series of transformations in the poem has the effect of emptying the category of the "human" of any substantial content that is not "other." Recently Ernst Schmidt has argued that the metaphorical function of metamorphosis is the key to the understanding of the Metamorphoses, which he describes as "the narrative aetiology of the world as a store of metaphors for mankind."^[18] But this is a world where the literal meaning of humanity has become impossible to define, where "this isthmus of a middle state" has been washed over by the seas on either side, and the only enduring image for the human might be that Renaissance favorite, Proteus.^[19] Schmidt is reduced to an empty essentialism that cannot proceed beyond talking about "man in his unalterable human nature."^[20]

Schmidt also understands the Metamorphoses' focus on humanity to function as a generic marker of the work's status as epic, but an epic that represents "instead of the one epic hero, man of all times."^[21] The Odyssey's first word, andra, "man," marks that poem's concern with the nature of the one man, Odysseus, who to some extent may be exemplary for all people. That man is immediately qualified in the first line of the Odyssey as polutropos, literally "of many turns."^[22] The versatility of Odysseus, his ability to turn to all manner of shifts, to disguise himself physically or verbally, is of course the quality through which he successfully returns to his centered place in human society on Ithaca. Odysseus's changeability is at the service of the hero's own mastery, of himself and of others, and is not the sign of an essential instability. "The polutropos . . . is always master of himself and is only unstable in appearance."^[23] Quite the opposite is true of the many turnings of Ovidian humans, very few of whom have any control of their own mutability.

I tentatively raise the possibility that viewed from a generic perspective,

this feature of the Ovidian "epic" world may be understood as a reflex of the distance between Homeric and Virgilian anthropologies. The Aeneid, like the Odyssey, has the central agenda of defining a "man" ("arma uirumque"), a task given greater urgency by the contemporary relevance of this act of definition (what and who is Augustus, what should the Romans be?). Instead of a polutropos hero, we find a man forced to "tot uoluere casus," "roll around so many misfortunes" (Aeneid 1.9); the incongruity of an active verb applied to the passive sufferings of a hero rolled around by misfortunes was resolved by the ancient commentators through its classification as an example of hypallage.^[24] The career of Aeneas in the Aeneid is one that begins and ends with doubts about the stable identity of others, and possibly of the hero himself, as an examination of the language of transformation at the beginning and end of Aeneas's story will demonstrate. In book 2 Aeneas is confronted with the dream-vision of a Hector strangely altered from expectation: "Alas, the look of him! How much changed from that Hector," "ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo" (2.274). At the end of the poem, after a scene of literal metamorphosis as the Fury sent down by Jupiter transforms herself into a screech owl in order to terrify Turnus, Turnus is first taunted by Aeneas with the impossibility of escape through shape-shifting (12.891-893): "Turn yourself into all shapes [uerte omnis tete in facies], summon up all your nerve and skill; pray to fly aloft on wings to the stars, or to bury yourself close in the hollow earth."^[25] But if this taunt has the immediate effect of reinscribing the Virgilian narrative within the limits of reality and mortality that prevail in the Homeric poems, Turnus then undergoes a different kind of metamorphosis through diminution of powers, changing into a shadow of his former self, unrecognizable to himself. The approach of death seems to undermine his self-definition, rather than confirm it in the Homeric manner: "As he ran and came on he did not recognize himself" (903); "Our tongue is powerless, our body's familiar strength does not hold up, and not a sound or word will come" (911-912, in the dream-simile).^[26] "Quantum mutatus ab illo! " Both passages are used by Ovid in tales of metamorphosis: with the description of Hector compare, for example, Metamorphoses 6.273: "Alas how very different was this Niobe from that Niobe of before" ("heu quantum haec Niobe Niobe distabat ab illa"), a figurative mutation, consequent on the mother's loss of her sons, that will soon be followed by the literal metamorphosis through petrifaction of the living woman. Valerius Flaccus, humorously perhaps, reuses Aeneas's anguished exclamation in the context of a narration of the story of Io in Argonautica 4.398: "How she looked, how much changed from the heifer that she was to begin with!" ("qualis et a prima quantum mutata iuuenca!").^[27] Less humorously Virgil places the image of Io transformed into a cow on the shield of Turnus at the end of Aeneid 7 (789-792), a book very much under the sign of Circe, whose palace and weird animals are described right at the beginning. The "great matter" of the shield

device of the transformed Io is an emblem of the dehumanization suffered already in Aeneid 7 by the Italians, and by Turnus in particular. If Turnus's realization near the end of book 12 that Jupiter is his enemy appears to mark his emergence from his "Circean" bestialization, Ovid spots the irony in Turnus's final loss of identity through transformation into a dream-shadow of himself when he picks up a detail of that passage in his own account of Io at Metamorphoses 1.647: "And, if only the words would come, she would have asked for help, and told him her name and misfortune" ("et, si modo uerba sequantur, / oret opem nomenque suum casusque loquatur").^[28]

But Io's metamorphosis is one of those in which a personal, human consciousness does survive change into animal shape (see above). The Aeneid's parting irony lies in the implicit contrast between the defeated enemy Turnus, sadly changed but in a sense also restored to humanity, and the conquering hero, for Aeneas's identity—and humanity—are subjected to an intensive destabilization at the end of the poem, as the violence of his emotions sways him between identifications with a fulminating Jupiter, a storm wind, an avenging Fury, and a reincarnation of the dead Pallas.^[29] This scene of alienation, as has often been noted, presents the strongest contrast with the scenes of reintegration within the society of living humans that conclude the two Homeric epics. If then the world of the Metamorphoses is one in which it is impossible to identify and stabilize the centrally and inalienably human, can we understand this as a commentary on—even an implied allegorization of—a Virgilian anthropology?

Personification Allegory

The Metamorphoses are not in fact usually accorded an important place in the history of the allegorical epic, save in one important respect: Ovid's development of personification allegory. What intrinsic relationship might there be between metamorphosis and personification? Joseph Solodow comments well on one of the connections, seeing in the univalent and abstracted nature of the personification "brilliant examples of the general striving towards clarity", which for him is the defining feature of Ovidian metamorphosis, as a making visible, plain and clear, of essences. "The figure of Hunger displays the same clarity as does Lycaon after his metamorphosis. Essence lies on the surface. Though in one it is the end of a process whereas in the other it is a given, the result is the same."^[30] There is a paradox in this affinity between personification and metamorphosis, for a personification seems to represent the unchanging essence of some abstraction; and this paradox Solodow resolves thus: "Metamorphosis. . . is. . . a change which preserves, an alteration which maintains identity, a change of form by which content becomes represented in form." Thus for Solodow metamorphosis is to be understood as primarily a process of abstraction. The difference between

metamorphosis and personification might appear to be that the abstraction involved in metamorphosis usually results in theriomorphic representation rather than anthropomorphic personification. Yet of the four major personifications in the Metamorphoses, Envy (Invidia, 2.760-782) and Hunger (Fames, 8.799-808) are persons of a distinctly dehumanized and desocialized character. Fame's (Fama, 12.39-63) shape and personality are left very indistinct, but she is the immediate descendant of a very inhuman Virgilian personification. Only Sleep (Somnus, 10.592-645) might unproblematically be described as a sleeping human being. The active personifications in his house, however, are the artificers of dreams: Morpheus, Icelos, and Phantasos, "persons" who between them are responsible for the whole gamut of mutable forms, human, animal, and inanimate, that populate the stage of the Metamorphoses.

But if metamorphosis considered in its aspects of abstraction and fixation tends to coincide with personification, conversely personification betrays an inherent shiftiness. The "givenness," as Solodow would have it, of a personification is in fact bound up in process. In the first place a personification may be regarded as the product of a process of metamorphosis, the changing of a linguistic abstraction into a concrete person. As Georgia Nugent puts it in her study of Prudentius's Psychomachia, "Personification allegory performs yet another substitution, in fact, an inversion: allegory attempts to turn the word back into an object, to reify it. This is a fraudulent turn, or trope, which is inherent in the making of allegories."^[31] Personification is a particularly visible example of the deceptive and transformative power of words, the ability of words to construct a reality and impose it on the "real world." And this, as we have seen, is as fair a description as any of what is going on throughout the Metamorphoses.^[32] Personifications may also be the de facto end product of that kind of allegorical interpretation whereby a person, human or divine, possessed of a highish degree of mimetic reality is transformed into a figure for a virtue or mental attribute: Athene is changed into wisdom, or polutropos Odysseus, the versatile and manifold human hero, is turned into the monolithic paragon of philosophical virtue.

The personification thus appears in the disguise of immutability, a mask concealing the processes of metamorphosis that brings it into being. Further, when a personification is put to work in a narrative, her (or his) actions are radically transformative: the personification has the power to change "real" human actors into versions of herself. Ovid's Erysichthon is the type of this kind of transformation. He steps into the narrative as a stagy villain, but nevertheless an epic actor of full human status; once Hunger has got at him he is turned into a demonic eating machine, not surprisingly, since Hunger has "breathed herself into him" (Metamorphoses 8.819).^[33] While it may be strictly true that "metamorphosis into an abstraction is not something that ever happens in Ovid"^[34] in the way that in Spenser Malbecco is transformed into an

abstraction with the name Gealosie, Erysichthon is well described by Harold Skulsky as a "victim . . . refined into an abstraction."^[35]

The two Ovidian personifications whose direct action on human characters is narrated, Envy and Hunger, are both closely related to the Virgilian Fury, Allecto, by origin a fully mythological being, but one who has almost been sublimed into a personification. Feeney writes of her: "She is a creature who embodies [my emphasis] and revels in all manner of evil. . . . She need not necessarily have been so. Euripides' Lyssa is an interesting case of a divine agent of madness who remains rational, emancipated from her characteristic effect. Allecto, on the other hand, is her essence." After thus virtually defining Allecto as a personification of madness, Feeney goes on to note that "above all, Virgil stresses how variable and multiple she is: "tot sese uertit in ora," "She turns herself into so many shapes."^[36] For Feeney this variety is the occasion for a discussion of the variety of Allecto's modes of action within the narrative. This is a perceptive move, but it obscures what I think is another important point about Allecto's multiformity and changeability, namely, the close connection with her status as a personification. Her primary mode of action is indeed to transform her victims into versions of herself.

Virgil's narratives of the approach of Allecto to her victims, most clearly in the case of her assault on Turnus, establish a transformative pattern followed by Ovid and Statius. The personification approaches the human, often initially in a disguise (another kind of transformation) that is then cast aside; she then infects or inspires her victim, the crucial point of metamorphosis, simplified by Ovid, followed by Statius, into expressions of the kind "She breathes herself into the man." The effects of the personification then find two forms of expression: first in the use of abstract nouns and verbs referring to the passion or emotion of which the personification is an abstraction, and second in a simile or similes, a "purely" linguistic kind of transformation.^[37] The narrative action of the personification has the effect of triggering a hallucinatory explosion of figurative language, for in the personification resides the essence of language's power to reshape the world in its own image.

Fama

The one Ovidian personification taken directly from the Aeneid is Fame, Fama. In the Metamorphoses she appears appropriately at the beginning of book 12 at the point where Ovid sets out to rework the subject matter of the Homeric epics themselves (12.39-63) ^[38] She is the personification of Homeric epos (but also the spirit presiding over Ovid's own retelling of the Homeric epics). In the Aeneid Fame is the most developed example of a personification allegory. She is introduced as a negative force, an evil (malum ) a female demon

spawned by an angry Mother Earth to oppose the dispensation of the masculine ruler of Olympus; yet curiously she also insists on being read as a figure for the male poet's own propagation of words.^[39] As chthonic source of disruption she has strong affinities with Allecto; there is also a marked parallelism between the representation of Fama and that of the Jovian double of Allecto, the Dira whom Jupiter dispatches at the end of book 12 in order to effect a closure within the human narrative.^[40] These connections form part of a wider pattern of association within the Aeneid, and in later Latin epic, between fama, female rumor-mongering, and lament, madness, and infernal demons.^[41] And like Allecto, Fama is a distorter and a shape-shifter, whose twistings and perversions have the effect of transforming the human narrative. For a personification she is notably inhuman; the genealogy that makes of her a sister of the giants Coeus and Enceladus might incline us to visualize her as an anthropomorphic monster, but she is then represented as a far less humanoid monstrum, with a multiplicity of wings, eyes, tongues, mouths, and ears, and in her nocturnal flight and rooftop perching she turns into a kind of bird.

Fama is a linguistic construction of the linguistic slipperiness that has infected the story of Dido at this point. Jon Whitman, in his excellent discussion of Fama, observes that she appears at a "moment of moral and linguistic breakdown,"^[42] immediately after Dido's attempt to impose her own reading on events: "She calls it a wedding, with this name she disguises her fault" (Aeneid 4.172).^[43] But Fama may also be read in a larger context as a figure for the fictional powers of the epic poet himself: Fama herself is self-reflexively caught up in the chain of fama, "as they relate," "ut perhibent" (4.179).^[44] Furthermore the whole Dido and Aeneas story, a meeting that could never have taken place, is notably a fiction of epic fama.

The intervention of Fama in Aeneid 4 is the beginning of a narrative structure, which interrupts the primary action of the Dido and Aeneas story and which continues at 198-221 with the African prince Iarbas's transmission, through prayer, of the human rumors about Dido and Aeneas up to the divine level of Jupiter, an upward motion reversed when Jupiter sends down his conveyor of words, Mercury, as winged messenger-god, the Jovian double of the chthonic Fama, to order Aeneas to leave Carthage. Mercury breaks his downward journey to alight on the weird mount Atlas (246-258). Elsewhere I have analyzed this sequence with reference to the trope of hyperbole (in generic terms, the "greatness" of epic).^[45] I now wish to shift my ground and consider it in the light of the trope of allegory. And allegory, it will appear, is inseparable from metamorphosis.

Right at the beginning hyperbole and metamorphosis are united in the allegorical image of Fama's expansive power: "Small at first through timidity, but she soon raises herself into the sky" (4.176). This is a kind of metamorphosis recognized by Ovid (Metamorphoses 15.434, Pythagoras on the city

of Rome): "Through growth she changes her shape." Pythagoras's authority for this statement is none other than Fama herself: "Even today rumor [fama] has it that a Trojan city, Rome, is rising" (431-433).^[46] But quantitative change, hyperbolic exaggeration, is not the only effect of Virgil's Fama. She is also responsible for the qualitative change involved in distortion and misrepresentation: "as persistent in fictions and distortions as she is the messenger of truth" (4.188). This echo of the Hesiodic Muses' claim "We know how to speak many falsehoods like true things, and we know how to utter true things, when we wish" (Theogony 27-28) is usually referred to the power of the epic poet to create fictions.^[47] But the "fictional/true" opposition also structures the practice of allegory: Jesper Svenbro analyzes the interpretative practice of Theagenes, the first recorded allegorizer of Homer, in terms of a transposition of the Hesiodic distinction between truths and lies from the social conditions of poetic discourse to the interior of the discourse, where it becomes the binary opposition between surface sense, the "lies", and the deep allegorical sense, the truth.^[48] Fama's account of the winter of luxury in Carthage tells the story in another way, but her form of "all-egory," "other-saying," perverts the expected distribution of truth and falsehood.^[49] Her version of the story moralizes, with a tendency to reduce the complex human situation to the abstractions of luxus and cupido (Aeneid 4.193-194); it is like a prevalent moralizing interpretation of the Phaeacian court in the Odyssey, on which Dido's court is modeled, as a figure for decadent luxury and hedonism, an "Epicurean" voluptuarism.^[50] One might think also of that reductive moralization of the real-life history of Cleopatra and Antony, a clear example of "allegorizing" to ideological ends. Iarbas's account to Jupiter of what is going on (206ff.) repeats this "allegorical" version of "reality" but then adds another layer of allegory when he calls Aeneas a Paris (215) .^[51] The Epicurean color of the moralizing interpretation of the Phaeacians seems to tinge Iarbas's own rebuke to Jupiter at 208-210: "Do we shudder for nothing when you hurl your bolts? Are they blind, those flames in the clouds that fill our minds with terror, and is it empty rumblings that they stir up [inania murmura miscent]?" This materialist view of the thunderbolt would transform Jupiter and the other gods into nothing more than the "empty report," inanisfama (or Fama ) the words with which Iarbas concludes his complaint (218).^[52] At this point the literal reality of the epic narrative is in danger of drifting before the winds that lead to allegorization. The primary narrator lays his hand on the tiller to guide us back to a very present and very epic (and Ennian) Jupiter "the all-powerful heard," "audiit omnipotens" (4.220).^[53]

The initial expansion and subsequent upward progress of Fama thus generate a series of competing interpretations of the epic action and of the cosmic order of epic. Jupiter's authoritarian intervention, through his straight-speaking messenger Mercury, aims at reimposing an Olympian order on the narrative and its meanings. This is the context for the description of the

strange figure of Atlas, the man-mountain on whom Mercury alights on his downward flight. The mountain is the product of a metamorphosis, but change in the past is now memorialized in an image of eternity: mountains are proverbially the most enduring of monuments. This terminal metamorphosis contrasts with the indefinitely proliferating, Protean, metamorphoses of the giantess Fama. Atlas within the Aeneid is also a figure for the origins of epic, for at the end of the first book we learned that he had been the teacher of the exemplary bard Iopas (1.740-741). We might say then that the source of epic tradition has been set in stone. Moreover, this terminal metamorphosis is of the kind that does not alter the subject's previous shape: Atlas still has a head, shoulders, chin, and beard.^[54] The petrified Atlas remains in some sense the same. However, as we advance through Aeneid 4 we will find that he may also be read allegorically, but in the manner of that kind of philosophizing allegory that attempts authoritatively to fix meaning: the picture of the ever-during Atlas foreshadows the famous simile later in book 4 that compares Aeneas unmoved in the face of Dido's pleas to an oak weather-beaten but fast-rooted on a mountaintop (4.441-446), an image of Aeneas in his ideal role as the impassive Stoic hero, unchangeable in his inner self while outside only tears are "rolled over," "mens immota manet, lacrimae uoluuntur inanes" (449).^[55] This heroic role corresponds to the philosophizing abstraction of Odysseus into a figure of the wise man.^[56] But, as we have seen, the events of the poem will finally demonstrate the impossibility of pinning down the epic man as the philosophical personification of a perfected humanity.

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6—
Tasso's Trees:
Epic and Local Culture

Jane Tylus

Although Virgil's Aeneid— one of the two literary epics addressed in this essay—is known to most students of epic, Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, written in 1579, is not as familiar to modern audiences. A product of Italy's Counter-Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century, Tasso is a testimony to the contradictions of that era. His ambitious epic poem about the First Crusade of 1099 is both a nostalgic return to a period when all of Christian Europe was united against a common enemy—Islam—and a demonstrably hollow attempt to make the contemporary Church and its imperial aspirations a new vehicle for unification. By focusing on an episode common to both the Aeneid and Jerusalem Delivered, that of the "bleeding tree," Tylus demonstrates that Virgil and Tasso reveal the tensions involved in generating universal agendas from local, cultic narratives, and her reading allows us to explore a dialectic that may be as crucial for traditions of oral epic as it is for written epic.

Even as he protested the annihilation of local cultures by the totalitarian regimes that flourished during his lifetime, T. S. Eliot was defining literature as an art form that in its most ideal manifestations escaped from vulgar provincialisms to embrace a universal poetics. Virgil and Dante in particular tend to be singled out in Eliot's writings of the 1930s and 1940s as the writers who best exemplified the kind of universality that Eliot so highly privileged. That both of these writers produced epics suggests the extent to which Eliot perceived literature's traditionally "highest" genre as one that left mundane, local concerns aside for the sublimely cosmopolitan.^[1] It is no surprise that in his influential essay "Virgil and the Christian World," Eliot celebrates the Trojan hero's willingness to become a "fugitive from a ruined city and an obliterated society" and embrace the imperium Romanum that was his to bring into being.^[2] For Eliot, who saw tradition as the great impersonal force into which poets' individual talents were subsumed, Aeneas's willingness to pursue his destiny is ultimately a figure for Virgil's decision to follow his, as he exchanged linguistic and cultural variety for "a language of the classics" that transcends local origins to speak to audiences of all places and all times.^[3]

This essay will attempt not so much to counter Eliot's provocative and influential reading as to ask how epic itself has taken part in the splintering

of literature into "high" and "low," if not always with the kind of confident assurance that Eliot's critique implies. Such splintering might best be approached by way of the definition of epic we have proposed in the introduction to this volume: epic tends to focus on deeds of significance to a community. How a community is defined, however, and what qualifies as "significant" are contested issues not only among contemporary scholars, but often within epic poetry itself. The tendency of much epic to employ, both implicitly and explicitly, the figure of analogy—masterfully epitomized in written epic by the ubiquitous simile—attests to a poetic sensibility anxious to include within its domain a unified and sympathetic audience. Homer's evocative similes comparing the shipwrecked Odysseus to a hungry wolf, the incomprehensible Trojans to squawking geese flying overhead, and the sounds of battle to a rushing waterfall functioned among other things to make a distant narrative more immediate, much as the analogies between the Moors and diabolical practices made Roland's exotic enemies more terrifying to a twelfth-century Norman audience. Complex patterns of analogy can thus be said to function as an ever-widening gyre within which a particular narrative is circulated and rendered relevant and familiar to a community that may be —as Homer's audiences clearly were—at some distance from an original story.

It can even be said that many poets of epic undertake to thematize precisely this journey toward significance. As in the Aeneid, epic frequently involves the plight faced by a hero who chooses or is forced to leave his home. His departure into and circulation in a world that transcends his immediate community become the very conditions for his own, and by extension, the poem's significance, a topos that involves any number of works from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and Paradise Lost. But the creation of such significance for a larger community that the poem seeks to define and expand through analogy may have its costs, as the hero's departure from his home and, in many cases, his failure to return often suggest on an overtly thematic level. This is particularly the case when the aspirations of the epic poet coincide with the aspirations of a specific religious or political ideology (to which Eliot was acutely sensitive). The recent work of Gregory Nagy has been crucial for many reasons, and certainly not the least is the extent to which it has tied numerous heroes of the Greek nostoi (the stories of return) to particular localities where they were objects of cultic worship. As Nagy elaborates, the development of Homeric epic in archaic Greece submerged and synthesized "the diverse local traditions of each major city-state into a unified Panhellenic model."^[4] In this process, the timeless Olympian gods become the (new), powerful deities from whom favors must be sought and from whom they are granted, whereas "the central heroes of th[e] epic tradition [no longer] have an overtly religious dimension in the narrative."^[5] Even as the hero wanders far from home to gain a reputation

and a name—the kleos sought by Achilles and Odysseus alike—he suffers a corresponding dwindling of his demonic powers, tied as they necessarily are to a particular place.

Writing in a period when epic had recently reappeared on the European horizion, the Italian poet Torquato Tasso turned to his own two most influential models in the genre and declared that "in writing [epic] poetry, [neither Virgil nor Homer] wished to narrate particulars, like the historian, but like the philosopher, to form universals ["gli universali"], whose truth is much more stable and certain."^[6] Virgil (and the collectivity of poets we call Homer) would no doubt have found this latter-day account of their poetics baffling, much less correct. And yet in pinpointing the desire to "formare gli universali," Tasso both reveals something inherent in his own epic agenda during the years of the Counter-Reformation in which he was writing his massive Gerusalemme liberata and touches on something crucial in many other epics. This is the tension involved in producing a work that would be "Panhellenic," "Roman," or in Tasso's case, "Roman Catholic": one that transcended the contingencies and limitations of immediate communities and local cults in order to fashion universal audiences and heroes with universal reputations. For Virgil and Tasso in particular, this move also involves the conscious shaping of a universal culture, that of the fledgling Roman Empire or a Catholic empire attempting to recuperate its losses after the Reformation through overseas expansion. Yet both poems become the hallmark of an elite culture no longer rooted in local landscape but divorced from, even antagonistic to, the practices of local, popular culture.

This is a divorce on which both Virgil and Tasso consciously reflect. As Eliot noted, Virgil's poem is the first epic to make its hero a "truly displaced person," a hero who has no Troy to which he can return.^[7] Tasso's poem elaborates the journey of its central character, Godefroi de Buillon, from his homeland in France to a new home, Jerusalem, in the course of the First Crusade. But in so thematizing what is seen as the necessary loss of an immediate homeland, the two poems also derail the very system of analogy by which epic poets traditionally seek to make their local stories accessible and significant to a wider audience. In Virgil, as will be seen, analogy threatens to become only a poetic figure rather than a magically expansive system linking a local hero to universal traditions. And with Tasso, analogy becomes ultimately suspect, as the resemblances that it generates come to imperil the work's ideological distinctions between Christian and Muslim, sacred and demonic. In both cases, the building blocks used to turn a "local" story into an epic are infected, on the one hand, by their potential impotence in the face of other forces, and, on the other hand, by their daunting uncontrollability.

One result of Tasso's and Virgil's labors is the kind of high literature that can easily be read apart from its local contexts and grasped from within the canon of "Literature" itself, the touchstones, to cite Eliot once again, that

supposedly compose the cultural landscape of Europe. But even as both poems articulate for their respective eras a definition of epic as elite—as over against the lies and unpolished manner of Homer's poetry, in the case of the Aeneid, or the vulgarities and irreverence of Ariosto's Orlando furioso, in the case of the Gerusalemme liberata—they likewise call attention to the insufficiencies of that definition. As the following pages will recount, Virgil's and Tasso's shattering of the comforting systems of analogy provokes critical reflection on the process through which high literature is fashioned and forces us to question where, pace Eliot, epic's roots in fact reside.

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Virgil's fifth Eclogue, the center and perhaps central poem in the Roman poet's slender collection of bucolic verse, features two shepherds whose lament for the death of their friend Daphnis becomes a celebration of his entrance into the realm of Olympian deities. Set within a calm, rustic landscape, the song is based on a consoling system of correspondences that attest to the vital and reassuring harmony between heaven and earth that the singer Menalcas alludes to at the end and Mopsus at the beginning: "vitis ut arboribus decori est, ut vitibus uvae,/ ut gregibus tauri, segetes ut pinguibus arvis,/ tu decus omne tuis" ("As the vine gives glory to its trees, as the grape to the vines, as the bull to the herd, as the corn to rich fields, you alone give glory to your people," Eclogue 5.32-34] ) .^[8] Composed of short phrases linked by the quiet repetitiveness of "ut . . . ut" ("as . . . as") and the less frequent "qualis" ("as when," the Latin word that in Virgilian epic will typically launch an extended simile), this and other passages like it assume a vision of community in which human life echoes the order and predictability of agrarian life, and divinities in turn guarantee the fertility that allows the farming year to be an orderly one. Analogy thus serves to express the intimacy between the local community of which Menalcas and Mopsus are a part and the newly established cult of Daphnis, who despite his Olympian status takes special pride in attending to his own people's needs. Having become his community's attendant spirit, Daphnis has not so much died by the end of the poem as assumed a role that will ensure the future of the rustic populace. The eclogue as a whole thus defines for its readers the creation of a local and popular cult, the purpose of which, to quote Pierre Klossowki, "is to intercede with a deity in order to avert his anger, gain his assistance, or remind him of favors granted."^[9]

It is precisely this vision of centeredness and intimacy between the human and divine that other eclogues in the collection challenge—eclogues written, like the fifth, in one of the bleakest periods of Roman history, the long decade of civil wars in the 30s that were precipitated by the assassination of Julius Caesar. In this light, Eclogue 5 constructs against all odds a mag-

ical vision of Roman community based on simple ritual and reverence for a stable past. And not surprisingly, the other eclogues threaten to destabilize the system of correspondences and control found at the book's center. Eclogue 1 in particular reveals how precarious this control is as it conveys the bleak reality of Italy's current political situation. The poem stages the melancholy confrontation between two very different protagonists, the happy, elderly Tityrus, recently freed by the triumvir Octavian after long years of slavery, and the despondent Meliboeus whose lands have been taken from him by the same Octavian, who wants to reward his soldiers for their fidelity. The space of local cult that served as the link to Olympian deities in Eclogue 5 thereby becomes a contested space in a manner prescient for Virgil's later epic. For the fortunate Tityrus, the local cultus has been radically unproductive; he had to travel to Rome after his own sacrifices to local gods had gone unanswered. He had offered many a victim, he had turned to many gods while he labored usefully in his village. Only in the great city did the new, young deus, Octavian, become "the first to respond" to his request for freedom. For Meliboeus, however, the land from which he is banished held for him precisely the promise and productivity Tityrus claims he was denied, and he lovingly dwells on the "fontes sacri" he must leave behind.^[10]

The disjunction that Meliboeus's and Tityrus's exchange belies is most explicit in Tityrus's bitter line that it is impossible to compare his rustic village to the great city in the way that one compares great things with small: "putavi/ stultus ego huic nostrae similem," he abruptly claims (Eclogue 1.19 20). The failure of analogy that Tityrus's line implies suggests not so much a challenge to the local vision celebrated in Eclogue 5 as an inevitable incommensurability between the city with its great deus and the village with its minor ones. And yet such incommensurability by no means prevents the "urbem, quam dicunt Romam" ("the city they call Rome") from ruling over the distant village from which Meliboeus is exiled. At the end of the dialogue between the freed slave and the departing farmer, the "local" haunts that are praised and fondly remembered by Meliboeus in the form of "familiar streams and sacred springs" are gradually overset by an umbra. This is no longer the nurturing beech shade with which Meliboeus opened the poem or the cavernous shade beneath which Menalcas sings in Eclogue 5, but the long shadows falling from mountains whose heights return us to the "height" of Rome. ^[11] In Meliboeus's absence, the fontes sacri will fall victim to the impius miles, or cruel soldier. Tityrus's god is not Meliboeus's: "iste deus qui sit, da, Tityre, nobis"—"Who is your god?" Meliboeus asks after Tityrus's panegyric, with a possibly pejorative emphasis on the "iste."^[12] And yet he is a god who has established control over Meliboeus's former farm.

If Eclogue 5 presents us with an agrarian community linked both to the harmonious patterns of the seasons and human labor and to the reassuring links between human and divine, Eclogue 1 traces a pattern of discomfitting

propriations and expropriations, as a distant cult of a Roman leader is transported to a place of fontes sacri. This displacement of local rural deities by the urban deus whose reign extends over the vast Roman Empire is developed on a much broader scale in the Aeneid. The precursor to the exile Aeneas, who carries his di penates to a land that remains for much of the poem unknown, is a Meliboeus who had likewise been exiled to "shores unknown." Yet throughout the Aeneid Virgil goes to great efforts to suggest that the ruler for whom he was writing—no longer called Octavian but Augustus, recently proclaimed emperor of Rome when Virgil began the Aeneid in 27 B.C. greatly respected a local cultus that long predated the arrival of his Trojan ancestors on Italy's shores.

Book 8, Aeneas's journey to Evander's kingdom, is one such example of the supposed reverence for the local in the imperial age. After finally arriving in Italy and being blessed by an image of pater Tiber and a white sow, Aeneas walks through the "thick underbrush" of the Capitoline Hill, where he observes the cavern called Pan's grotto, restored by Augustus as the Lupercal at the base of the Palatine. The Capitoline itself is said to be a place whose "dread sanctity had awed the trembling rustics" (Aeneid 8.349).^[13] Even Aeneas and Evander (and by implication, present-day Romans) "shuddered at the woods and the rock" (8.349-350). Yet Evander, the Arcadian king who befriends Aeneas upon his arrival, points out that although the local god who inhabits "this grove, this hill" is unknown, the Arcadians believe that "they have looked on Jove himself. . .  as he summoned the storm clouds" (8.352-354). On the one hand, Virgil's self-conscious allusions to the Arcadians who inhabited ancient Rome return him to the rural poetics of the Eclogues. On the other, in the context of Aeneid 8 itself, it is clear that this Arcadia is already in the process of yielding to the superior culture of future Romans. As the poem reminds us throughout, Saturn is the original god of Latium, having arrived there as an exile himself. That Jupiter should take prominence over his exiled father, Saturn, in the farmers' uncertain minds suggests the pattern of displacement that was at work in the First Eclogue. Rural inhabitants such as Tityrus and the simple Arcadians, that is, have chosen a cosmopolitan deity over a local one.

One must look to the real local cultus of Italy—that of the Latins, who maintain their fidelity to Saturn^[14] —and to Aeneas's response to them in order to discover the true dynamics of apotheosis at work in Roman ideology. When finally landing in Italy after his many wanderings, Aeneas immediately prepares to build a city, following what may be called an innocent and even naive policy of diplomatic engagement. In each place he has landed, in fact, he has imagined the possibility for a peaceful coexistence of cultures that does not preclude the mingling of the advena (the newcomers) and the indigenous inhabitants. Again and again after leaving Troy, Aeneas arrives with his household gods in order to duplicate and to parallel in his own fashion what

he already finds. Thus he establishes a settlement in Crete, begins to build a city that mimics Dido's Carthage, and eventually erects a city in Latium near the town of Latinus. But these attempts to create a space for a new community alongside a prior one are continually met with cries of sacrilege that suggest that two local cultures cannot exist together in peace. On Thrace, Aeneas wounds the transformed Polydorus and must flee the "cursed land"; on the island of the Harpies, his men slaughter the Harpies' cattle and must flee; in Carthage, Aeneas's liaison with Dido leads to his hasty abandonment of the queen and her suicide. Once in Italy, Aeneas's son wounds the cherished stag of the Latin princess and thus helps to initiate the war between Latins and Trojans that takes up the better part of the work's second half. All of these incidents point not to the coexistence of local cults but to the necessary clashing of local cultures that are not bound beneath a single law.^[15]

It is, to be sure, coexistence that Aeneas and even the gods seem to desire, a coexistence that is often implied by the analogy of marriage. But with its failed narrative of a marriage between two different leaders and two different communities, the Dido story that is so central for the Aeneid's first half has obvious implications for the second half of the poem, in which Aeneas and King Latinus alike are continuously told that they can expect a peaceful and fruitful marriage of their peoples: one that will result, for Latinus and his Italian deities, in a blazing apotheosis. In lines recalling the fifth Eclogue, in which Daphnis moves from his rural community to the Olympian heights, Latinus is told that marriage to the "externi" will "exalt his name to the stars" ("nostrum / nomen in astra ferant," Aeneid 7.98-99). That Faunus is the source of the oracle suggests that Faunus himself, grandson of Saturn and father of Latinus, will also be so venerated, and the prophecy is indicative of an assumed commensurability of what would seem to be two separate, local cultures. Yet the last action of the poem takes place near a wild olive tree long sacred to Faunus ("forte sacer Fauno," 12.766) from which the Trojans had "shorn the sacred stem" so that they might do battle, a violation that calls attention to a more pervasive disrespect for ancient local custom ("nullo discrimine," 770). For in truth, the local cultus of Italia never possesses the kind of force it is prophesied as having. Rather, it is supplanted by an Aeneas who requires a connection to the land on which that cultus is based in order to become Italy's new ruler. Only through marriage to Lavinia, the Latin princess and thus the descendant of ancient Saturn, can Aeneas be bonded peacefully to this land. The child of this marriage, however, young Silvius, does not figure in the genealogical chart of the deity who is apotheosized in the Aeneid, Julius Caesar. Nor is he an ancestor of the reigning deity of Virgil's own time, Augustus (who presides in book 8 over a glorious triumph in which Egypt's "monster gods" who parade, subdued and submissive, before him, bear a stunning resemblance to the hybrid deities of Italy of which we as readers have just learned: the bird-man Picus, the satyrlike

Faunus). The "local" line that Silvius represents, the cultus that reaches back to the Italian Faunus, Picus, and Saturn himself, is merely one line, the failed line of Saturn's rustic progeny.^[16] It is Saturn's other line, the line that expelled him from power, that of Jupiter, Venus, Aeneas, Aeneas's Trojan son Iülus, and finally Julius Caesar, that will "triumph" over the Italians' local haunts. "Hither now turn your two eyes: behold this people, your own Romans," Anchises tells Aeneas in Hades. "Here is Caesar, and all Iülus's seed, destined to pass beneath the sky's mighty vault. This, this is he, whom you so often hear promised, Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who shall again set up the Golden Age amid the fields where Saturn once reigned" (6.788-794). Saturn is mentioned, to be sure, but only in the context of the end of his reign: "regnata. . . Saturno quondam." Jupiter rather than Saturn has absolute authority over Italia and the promises of Faunus's apotheosis through Lavinia's marriage are revealed to be deceptive at worst; at best, misleading.

Virgil thus articulates the demonstrable need, if not the unequivocal desire, for a single law, for a universalizing deity who will bring coherence and order to a disorderly empire composed of various popular and local cults. It is in this light that one might glance at an episode that is surely one of the eeriest in the Aeneid, Aeneas's confrontation with the mangled body of Polydorus. An episode that Virgil added to the considerable legacy of Aeneas at a rather late stage of his poem,^[17] this event seems to represent Virgil's belated commentary on the role of Eclogue 5, with its comforting correspondences between loving cultivation of the land and reverence to one's local deities. Aeneas's landing on the isle of Thrace at the beginning of book 3, his first stopping place after fleeing Troy with a group of exiles, is celebrated with a ritual of thanksgiving for having arrived at what he imagines to be a permanent haven. But the ritual he begins to celebrate as he tears boughs from overhanging trees to prepare an altar is abruptly brought to a halt when the plant bleeds and unnaturally speaks. Aeneas only then learns of the horrible murder of a Trojan comrade who fell prey to a greedy king. In an eerily disembodied voice that emanates from the very plant Aeneas has torn, Polydorus recounts that the Thracian king killed him after he carried Troy's gold to Thrace for safekeeping, and begs Aeneas to put to rest his mangled body. Thanksgiving gives way to burial, safe haven retreats before a "terra scelerata" ("cursed land," 3.60), and Aeneas journeys tirelessly, along with the patient reader, for nine more books.

The meanings of this curious exchange and its long literary aftermath have been plumbed by numerous critics, not the least of whom was Sigmund Freud.^[18] Freud's psychoanalytic treatment and the many studies it has influenced have largely omitted, however, the deeply religious overtones connected to the episode and ones that demonstrate why the passage serves as a powerful example of the tensions at work in moving from the local to the "universal." As he assembles the altar on which he will make his sacrifice, Ae-

neas declares his wish to name the land as his own. His first task after leaving Troy is to build a city that he calls "Aeneadae" ("moenia prima loco. . . ./ Aeneadasque meo nomen de nomine fingo," 3.17-18). It is shortly after this declaration that the earth recoils, spewing forth black blood, filling the hero with horror ("A cold shudder shakes my limbs, and my chilled blood freezes with terror," 29-30). Naming an alien land after himself is something Aeneas will never try to do again in the course of the poem, and his reluctance or refusal to do so is instructive. Virgil wrote his poem in an age when Aeneas was enjoying a cultus of his own, both in the city of Lavinium, which he purportedly founded, and among elite Roman families eager to link themselves to Augustus. ^[19] The incident with Polydorus abruptly silences Aeneas's cultic aspirations, and Virgil pointedly resists referring to them later when in book 7 he shows us Aeneas surveying the land that would indeed become Lavinium. But the failure of Aeneas to name a land after himself is important in a more general way, insofar as it suggests that this father of a "universal" people will never be able to make the local land of Italy his own. Thrace, of course, is not Italy, and Aeneas must leave the place where he finds Polydorus's body if he is to be the father of the future Romans. But with its clash between Aeneas's intentions and the "terra scelerata," the episode is a harbinger of the reality that Aeneas will be forced to confront throughout the poem: one in which land and genealogy are continually divorced, as apparent from the unfulfilled prophecy spoken by Anchises in the underworld that the Trojans will link their universal gods to the woodland deities of Italy's countryside.^[20]

Figuratively speaking, Aeneas is always a wanderer, exiled from the terra he plaintively evokes in Aeneid 12 before his final battle with the Italian Turnus. This is the same terra that will groan for Turnus's death—a Turnus who dies defending his own boundaries, his cultus and his bride. Indeed, as Turnus falls in battle, "up spring with a groan the Rutulians all; the whole hill reechoes round about, and far and near the wooded steeps send back the sound" ( 12.928-929). With these lines we see the final echoes of what Virgil evokes as the once-harmonious link between a leader, his people, and the land. The embodiment of the Latin past and its popular cults, Turnus must die so that Aeneas and the universal Jupiter can triumph: Jupiter, Turnus declares shortly before battling with Aeneas, has always been his sworn enemy ("'Tis the gods daunt me, and the enmity of Jove," 12.895) But even though the price Turnus must pay for his defense of Italia's local religion is the ultimate one of death, the price that Aeneas must pay for universality is high as well: his alienation from the consoling systems of correspondences mapped out by Eclogue 5 and alluded to before Turnus's death, and his demise as a hero of local cult. Aeneas is thereby free to become the "public property" of an entire people, as Karl Galinsky has usefully suggested.^[21] But this freedom also attests to the failure of local culture in the world of empire,

even as Augustus was trying to reclaim a local Italian ethos as a basis for his own legitimacy. The Aeneid can thereby be said to articulate an unresolvable tension between fontes sacri —the culture of Meliboeus of Eclogue 1 and the Latins of the Aeneid —and an imposed family of deities and the heroes who escort them to unfamiliar soil.

As we will see, the Polydorus episode returns vividly in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, a poem indebted to the Aeneid and one whose central character remains like Aeneas in permanent if chosen exile. This is a character who refuses to be engaged in the episode that recapitulates Aeneas's encounter with Polydorus, one in which landscape acquires a valence unprecedented in the history of epic: the forest of canto 13 into which countless Christian knights wander only to return, haunted by the speaking plant life that mimics Polydorus. Yet this landscape is the product of cultic projections tied not to a Christian piety centered, as so much late medieval piety was, in local practices revolving around saints' images, relics, and shrines but to a demonic ritual associated with the enemy's Islam. In a strategy hardly unique to the Gerusalemme liberata, the iconoclastic Muslims are ironically associated with an idolatrous, cultic religion that becomes the dark double of Catholicism itself—a Catholicism invested in various expressions of popular piety. These expressions vie in turn with the universalizing principles espoused by the Tridentine Council in the years immediately following the Reformation, and by a Tasso interested in imposing on the local history of the Crusades a universalizing dimension he associated with epic. If Virgil sought to make Aeneas and his poem the "public property" of the Roman people, Tasso likewise attempts to make his own epic and its central character, Godefroi or Goffredo, the public property of a Counter-Reformation Europe anxious to establish its hegemony not only over the Muslim and Protestant worlds but over a newly discovered America as well.

As Timothy Hampton has demonstrated, the Liberata attempts to escape from the particularities of history—the particularities not only of the First Crusade, but of a Reformation that is never far from Tasso's poem—into the realm of universal truths.^[22] A reclaimed Jerusalem long seen as the geographical and symbolic center of the universe serves appropriately as the goal of a reunified Christendom, brought together in the opposition to a common enemy, Islam. But Tasso's Christians are themselves caught up in the kind of local and pietistic worship that the Church in Tasso's era was anxious to control, and the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem are at times depicted as uncannily similar to Christ. If the analogies that link the local to the universal are deceptive in the Aeneid-Aeneas cannot lay claim to any single local landscape in the poem, and the Italians fail to raise their deities to universal status—in the Gerusalemme the system of correspondences on which epic significance depends is at odds with the very Catholic and, as we will see, elite Counter-Reformation ideology that Tasso articulates. In the course

of fashioning a universal epic program and audience, the poem forcibly wrests itself from the practice of the vulgo: the rustic sentiments of Virgil's fifth Eclogue and, more immediately, the dominant Italian legacy of a communal poetic found in Dante, Ariosto, and the popular genre of hagiography. With Tasso, epic and a universalizing Catholicism are severed from their origins in local cult and the local community of a Jerusalem that the Crusaders wrest from the Muslims—only, as the poem itself prophesies, to lose Jerusalem again less than a century later when the Muslims take it back.

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In their first sighting of the poem's sacred center, Tasso's Crusaders memorably link the wounding of Christ on the cross with the staining of Jerusalem itself:

Dunque ove tu, Signor, di mille rivi 
sanguinosi il terren lasciasti asperso, 
d'amaro pianto almen duo fonti vivi 
in si acerba memoria oggi io non verso? 
(3.8)^[23]

Thus where you, Lord, have left the earth stained by a thousand rivers of your blood, shall I not at least pour forth two living fonts of bitter plaint for such a harsh memory?

The implicit connection between Christ's blood and the Crusaders' tears suggests that the warriors about to liberate the holy city will symbolically cleanse the earth where Christ was crucified, purging the crimes that the present Muslim inhabitants cannot extirpate themselves. Indeed, between the third canto, where this prayer appears, and the last one, when the Crusaders finally "liberate" Jerusalem from its Muslim usurpers (usurpatori ) the warriors fall prey to a series of errors for which they must perform often elaborate penance. It is only in the poem's final moments that they appear capable of extirpating land that Christ's enemies, new and old, have contaminated. Curiously, however, the penultimate stanza of the poem evokes not an act of cleansing but an act of bloodshed that mirrors the Crusaders' earlier allusion to Christ's bleeding body:

corre di tenda in tenda il sangue in rivi, 
e vi macchia le prede e vi corrompe 
gli ornamenti barbarici e le pompe. 
(20.143)

Blood runs in rivers from tent to tent and stains the booties there and spoils their barbaric ornaments and their pomp.

The blood that "runs in rivers" is the blood not of Jerusalem's illustrious warriors but of defenceless fuggitivi (fugitives) whom Goffredo, the Christians' holy captain, has pursued to their stockade and killed ("segue il corso poi de' fuggitivi./ Fuggon quegli a i ripari, ed intervallo/ da la morte trovar non ponno quivi"; "He follows the path of the fugitives. They flee to their stockades, and here they find no interval from death"). The poem ends with the victorious Goffredo approaching the sacred shrine of Christ's tomb while still dressed in his own "sanguinoso manto," his bloody mantle stained, like the "barbaric ornaments," with the fugitives' blood.

The verbal echo remarks not only on a failed ritual of purgation—the "terra" is more bloodstained than ever before—but on a haunting parallel between the pagan fugitives and Christ, pursued and victimized by powerful enemies.^[24] More suggestively, it links the Muslim fugitives and Christ with the land itself, a unification that seems to elude the victorious Christians who come to Jerusalem to reclaim what is supposedly their own. Worshipping at Christ's tomb in his "bloody mantle," a tomb that was liberated not for all time but only until the Muslims reconquered Jerusalem some ninety years later, Goffredo seems paradoxically alienated from Christ and the very land he has sought to recover, covered as he is with victims' blood.^[25]

On the one hand, it could be argued that Goffredo's bloodthirsty pursuit of fugitives after the battle has already been won is simply in keeping with the character he has demonstrated throughout: that of a capitano who is supremely directed in his goal to recapture Jerusalem and render it safe for future pilgrims. In the opening stanzas of the Liberata, God "looks down" at the sluggish Christian army and notes that Goffredo alone "longs to drive the wicked pagans from the holy city" ("vide Goffredo che scacciar desia/ de la santa città gli empi pagani," 1.8). This unwavering devotion motivates God to make Goffredo the captain of the army, and Goffredo does not disappoint his maker. Unlike the other Christian warriors, Goffredo is unmoved by anything "earthly" that might distract him from his task, such as the pagan sorceress Armida, who has been sent into the camp to lure away its most renowned heroes, and whose charms Goffredo steadfastly resists. And, unlike most of the other warriors, Goffredo never leaves the poem's symbolic center, never straying from the Christian camp outside Jerusalem's walls. His only ventures outside the rigid constraints he has set for himself in fact involve two visions that suggest that he has been temporarily given the ability to witness "universal" truths. In the first vision Goffredo is translated to heaven, where he learns that God will bring back his "wandering companions" (14.18); in the second the archangel Michael "to other men unseen" invites Goffredo to "see all the mighty host of Heaven assembled" about Jerusalem as the Crusaders finally prepare to take the city (18.92, 96).

It is precisely of Goffredo that Tasso seems to speak when, in an "Allegoria" he appended to his poem when it was virtually complete, he notes that

"allegory. . . [which deals with] passions and opinions and manners, not merely as they are in appearance, but principally in their intrinsic essence ["essere intrinseco"] . . .  [can] only be understood fully by those who comprehend the nature of things ["solo da i conoscitori della natura delle cose possono essere a pieno comprese"] .^[26] Taken to heaven to learn of "la natura delle cose," beneficiary of a divine vision that purges for him the "thick cloud of humanity" (18.93) by which others are hampered, Goffredo is the poem's singular example of a figure to whom it is given to know the essere intrinseco, and thus to appreciate what the "Allegoria" posits as the absolute divide between good and evil. Goffredo embodies a universal moral standard that is impervious to the nuances and peculiarities of local usage, and hence resistant to any similarities between the "empi pagani" he longs to drive from Jerusalem and the Christians. Whereas the other warriors will assist an admittedly false Armida who doubles as a damsel in distress, Goffredo lets it be known that he "well understands that there is no believing anyone who denies belief to God" (4.65). He thereby refuses to read into the body of the Muslim any saving grace. His unwillingness to see in that body anything other than "belve in fèro ludo/ cinte d'intorno, o 'n sanguinosa caccia" ("beasts encircled all around in fierce game or bloody chase") ^[27] suggests that for him, the "local" is always to be read in universal, and hence allegorical, terms: pagans are bad, Christians are good, to recall a line from the earlier crusading poem, the Chanson de Roland. The belief in these absolutes allows Goffredo to take Jerusalem from Muslims who, as in the Chanson de Roland, are simply called heathens, and to slaughter the fuggitivi in the poem's penultimate stanza.

But the fact that the verbal echo at poem's end creates an analogy between Christ's bleeding body and those of the fugitives, and the fact that the imitation is articulated in a visually evocative language common to contemporary traditions of local and popular piety that existed outside the official domain of the church, must give one pause. This is a language that was becoming increasingly suspect with the Counter-Reformation's attempts to refute charges of Catholicism's ostensible paganism, for as such was it characterized by the Reformation's most ardent spokespeople.^[28] The Church's distrust of the politics of local piety was manifest in its decisions during the final meetings of the Tridentine Council in the 1560s to centralize the process through which "local" heroes became saints and to interrogate more fully those who proclaimed themselves the recipients of divine or mystical visions.^[29] Moreover, an earlier incarnational theology that had informed not only popular piety but early humanism was countered by an official insistence on the ineffability of the Christian mystery. What then is Tasso's relationship to a tradition that had thrived into the sixteenth century, one grounded in a radical Franciscanism that preached the doctrine of Christ's essential imitabil-

ity, and one that the Church wanted to replace with something more in keeping with a hierarchial and doctrinaire Catholicism?

This is where we may turn to the figure in the poem who is most skillful at creating analogies disturbingly reminiscent of the very traditions that Tasso's Church had begun to question: the sorcerer Ismeno. Just as the closing stanzas threaten to elide the differences between the Muslim fugitives and Christ, Ismeno, a Muslim convert, exemplifies a threatening mixture of Islamic and Christian earlier in the poem ("Questi or Macone adora, e fu cristiano,/ ma i primi riti anco lasciar non pote;/ anzi sovente in uso empio e profano/ confonde le due leggi a sé mal note"; "He now adores Mahoun [Muhammad], and he was a Christian; but still he cannot abandon his first rituals but often mingles in impious and profane use the two laws that he ill understands," 2.2). The sorcerer's most daring feat, his enchantment of the forest outside Jerusalem, typifies this mingling of laws in such a way as to paralyze the most ardent of Crusaders. In order to stop the Christians from cutting down the trees to construct huge siege towers to attack the city's high walls, this figure who confounds the "due leggi" of Islam and Christianity enchants the forest by calling up spirits from Averno. In a terrifying scene, warrior after warrior enters the selva to try to chop down the trees and again and again fails, overcome by the illusion (simulacro ) that there are living bodies incarnate in the wood.

No one is more affected by the enchantment than Tancredi, whose own attachment to the Muslims is apparent in his passion for the enemy warrior Clorinda. Shortly before Ismeno enchants the forest, Tancredi unknowingly and fatally wounds Clorinda in a midnight skirmish outside the walls of the city. In a dramatic scene of revelation, Clorinda removes her helmet, Tancredi recognizes the woman he fought, and she asks to be converted to Christianity at his hands. Still in mourning when the forest becomes enchanted, Tancredi offers to go into the wood and conquer the spell that has driven away other Christian warriors (one was frightened by the eerie noises issuing from the wood, another by the fire that seemed to destroy the trees and threaten his life). When Tancredi enters the wood, the forest in contrast is utterly serene. Yet when he draws his sword and strikes a tall cypress at its center, suddenly "manda fuor sangue la recisa scorza,/ e fa la terra intorno a sé vermiglia" ("the split bark issues blood and stains the earth about it crimson," 13.41). Horrified, Tancredi nonetheless proceeds to strike the cypress again, causing the wounded tree to speak—not in the voice of Virgil's Polydorus, but of Clorinda, who accuses Tancredi of killing her a second time: "Tu dal corpo che meco e per me visse,/ felice albergo, già mi discacciasti:/ perché il misero tronco, a cui m'affisse/ il mio duro destino, anco mi guasti?" ("From the body that was with me and through me lived, happy abode, you have already cast me forth; why do you yet lay waste the wretched trunk to

which my harsh lot bound me?" 13.42). Paralyzed by the encounter, Tancredi returns to Goffredo and admits ignominious defeat, even as he continues to acknowledge the similarity between tree and flesh: "Stilla sangue de' tronchi ogni ferita,/ quasi di molle carne abbian persona" ("Any wound distills blood from the trunks, as if they had an embodiment of soft flesh," 13.49).

This passage is one of Tasso's most evocative allusions to Virgil, as Polydorus returns in the forest of Ismeno, a "terra scelerata" from which Tancredi, like Aeneas, is forced to flee. And, like Virgil's eerie passage, Tasso's handling of the Polydorus episode, mediated though it is through the later epics of Lucan, Dante, and Ariosto, is deepened and enriched by an understanding of its precise cultic valences, the Christian imagery with which it is preoccupied.^[30] The staining of the ground with blood recalls us not only to the preceding canto of Clorinda's death, in which her blood is said to flow like a warm stream ("caldo fiume") over her vestment (12.65) but to canto 3, where, as we have seen, the Crusaders portray for themselves in prayer the image of Christ's bleeding body. But it is not only the bleeding body of Christ that the scene in the forest threatens to evoke. The incarnational language in which the canto is cast links a Clorinda ostensibly trapped between life and death to a Christ who took on human flesh to save humankind and, in the evocative imagery of late medieval piety, enable humans to imitate him. In short, just as Christ's body will reappear in the poem's penultimate stanza as the bleeding bodies of the fuggitivi and thus as an ironic index of Christ's universality, so does it reappear in the thirteenth canto as the suffering Clorinda—the bleeding body trapped in a tree—reproduces Christ crucified on a tree.^[31]

In refusing to strike the tree again, Tancredi reveals himself not only as "pius Aeneas" but as a character who privileges incarnational fictions over the ethereal, "bodiless" Clorinda he witnessed shortly after Clorinda's death in canto 12. One of Clorinda's final acts is to request baptism at Tancredi's hands as she dies, a baptism made poignant by the fact that as Clorinda (and we as readers) only belatedly discover, she was born to a Christian mother. Although she cannot speak, "she seemed to tell Tancredi, 'Heaven is opening; I depart in peace"' ("e in atto di morir lieto e vivace,/ dir parea: 'S'apre il cielo; io vado in pace,"' 12.68), and it is as a newly baptized Christian, now in heaven, that she appears to the grieving Tancredi in a dream later that night. With Tasso accentuating the language of seeming (parere ) Clorinda "seems to dry [Tancredi's] eyes with sweet acts of pity and say that he removed [her] from those who are living in the mortal world" and made her worthy "to rise to God's bosom amid the blessed and immortal ones" (12.91-92). Tancredi awakens "consoled" and proceeds to prepare her funeral rites. But his subsequent refusal to strike the tree attests to his privileging the bleeding body over an intangible vision of a woman supposedly in heaven. The Clorinda whose blood had flowed from her breast in a "caldo fiume" in canto 12 has become the Clorinda who in canto 13 protests one more act of suf-

fering, this time on the "misero tronco" to which she is bound by her "harsh destiny." Like Goffredo's slaughter of the Muslim fugitives, Tancredi's slaughter of Clorinda, not once, but twice, has the effect of turning her into Christ; and in many ways Tancredi's second act of violence makes that analogy even more tangible. That Tancredi hesitates, that he leaves the forest and admits to Goffredo that he is unable to "split the bark," suggests the extent to which he recognizes the power of an analogy to which Goffredo will be subsequently and purposefully blind when he pursues the fuggitivi.

Indeed, from Goffredo's Counter-Reformation perspective, only in a world controlled by forces from the underworld are such analogies possible at all. This is an underworld controlled by Ismeno, and one that insists on comparisons between ancient and contemporary, between local spirits incarnated in trees and universal deities incarnated in Mary's womb. And yet in the popular and hagiographical tradition from which Ismeno no less than Tancredi might be said to emerge, such analogies are ubiquitous, as one exemplary story from the late medieval Libro dei Cinquanti Miracoli della Vergine attests. Like so many of the accounts of miracles provoked by Mary, this story has at its heart a tale of Ovidian metamorphosis and enchantment: the staff that thieves left on top of the grave of a saintly man they had killed in the forest begins to grow roots that thrust into the dead man's mouth and leaves that are inscribed with the first words of the Ave Maria, "come piacque a messer Domenedio . . . e alla gloriosa vergine Maria" ("as it pleased God our Lord and the glorious virgin Mary").^[32] The wonder inspired by such a supernatural event ("fuori di natura") ultimately leads to the community's sanctification of the place in the forest ("quella luogo fu avuto in grandissima riverenzia") and the establishment of a local cult of Mary.

These are the popular marvels that Ismeno imitates, Tancredi reveres, and Goffredo rejects, and one might venture that Tasso himself rejects them as well. The enchanted forest finally does get cut down by the Christians' most valiant warrior, Rinaldo, and his refusal to listen to the cries of the trees and their infernal simulacrae—and hence to Polydorus—is portrayed not as an act of sacrilege but as an unequivocal victory for the Christians. Like Goffredo, Rinaldo too has been chosen by God above, as we know from Goffredo's heavenly vision.^[33] His conquest merely confirms what Virgil's poem likewise made clear: land is given to one by the "universal" gods, not because of any painstaking and intimate relationship with it and the customs and culture that derive from caring for it (hence the etymological links between cultivation, culture, and cult at work in the late medieval narratives recounting miracles of the virgin). Tasso's emphasis on the poet's interest in "universals" follows naturally from the poem's plot, in which epic significance can be imparted only from above—by those who know the essere intrinseco of things—not from below, within a world of tangible local customs and stories that devolve around the body of Christ rather than official doctrine.

With Rinaldo's victory over the enchantment, the Christians beseige the santa città, and Goffredo claims Christ's sepulchre as his own. If the parallelism between Christ and the fuggitivi just before Goffredo reaches the sepulchre does not unsettle, it is only because, like Goffredo, we too have come to resist the work of analogy as demonic and to see any commensurability between the local and the universal as inherently suspect. But the price of that decision is high. For one thing, in ignoring the ironic reproduction of Christ's bleeding body in the very place where he was crucified, and in thereby ignoring the poem's penultimate stanza, we ignore the analogies between two "local" religions that share common ground. Tasso himself lets us know that he is well aware of Islam's essentially iconoclastic nature at the same time that he generates a generally unconvincing view of the Muslims' diabolical practices. They are labeled "pagani" and accused of worshipping idols, "adoring" Muhammad, and consorting with demons such as Allecto, of whom it was also Juno's fate marginalized local deity such as she is in the Aeneid —to call up from hell.^[34] For another thing, we thereby consent to a vision not only of epic poetry and the religion it celebrates as virtually severed from their basis in a material landscape of shared stories and communities, but of Tasso's poem as severed from the epic tradition itself. Cutting down the forest both deprives its local inhabitants, the birds and the beasts, of their nests—"Lasciano al suon de l'arme, al vario grido,/ e le fère e gli augei la tana e '1 nido" ("With the sounds of arms and the varied outcry the beasts leave their lairs and the birds their nests," 3.76)—and uproots those earlier selve of the epic canon, Dante's, Ariosto's, and Virgil's as well, relegating them to the status of a poetics not ordained by God.^[35]

One moment at the exact center of the poem marks precisely this severing of vulgo from elite, as the warriors gather together for Mass on the very site where Christ had experienced the Passion. The captains and clergy sit close to the altar, the common soldiers farther away, and so it falls out that the "primieri" are able to hear and see the Mass, the others able only to see it from afar. Turning the Last Supper, which the Mass commemorates, into a ritual that only the elite can fully experience separates the epic narrative at the heart of Tasso's Christianity into two very different stories. On the one hand, a story for and about a Goffredo who has learned to renounce not only earthly delight but, as in the heavenly journey he takes shortly after Tancredi's failure in the wood, the earth itself. On the other hand, a story for and about the vulgo, who are drawn to the palpable and bodily, to that which can be manifested as physical presence. Illiterate in Latin and Tasso's learned Italian, they can only see the mysteries that depend on local manifestation for fulfillment. These are precisely the bodily manifestations that Goffredo and the Counter-Reformation poem that glorifies him need to contain and critique, with the aim of ensuring that the world will no longer suffer from enchantments of any kind. In a decisively different vein from Vir-

gil but with strikingly similar results, Tasso charts a narrative whereby epic poetry and the imperial projects to which epic attends efface their origins in local cults and local communities, thereby silencing what for Eliot would be the taint of provincialism. The result, as Tasso himself seems to have realized, given his painstaking revisions of the Gerusalemme liberata after it was published, was a dazzling, but finally disappointing vision of universality.

Works Cited

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Bellamy, Elizabeth J.

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1988.
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Tre variazioni romane sul tema delle origini. Rome: Anteneo.

de Luca, Don Giuseppe, ed.

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Derla, Luigi.

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"Sull'allegoria della Gerusalemme liberata." Italianistica 7: 473-488

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1982.
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1990
Writing from History. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

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1990.
Diana at Her Bath/ The Women of Rome. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli and Sophie Hawkes. Boston: Eriadnos Press.

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On Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

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7—
Appropriating the Epic:
Gender, Caste, and Regional Identity in Middle India

Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

Indian epic includes not only the well-known Mahabharata and Ramayana— narratives dating from antiquity that have survived for centuries—but also a myriad of other traditional stories in verse that vary in their themes and social meanings from community to community. In the central Indian region of Chhattisgarh, the Candaini epic vividly draws on the local folklore repertoire; it is an oral tradition performed—like other contemporary Indian epic—in discrete episodes that figure in the larger narrative known to the audience. The narrative, a distinctly nonheroic tale that challenges conventional notions of epic, relates a love story and features a female heroine. Joyce Flueckiger argues that it derives much of its cultural and political meaning from its strong identification with the region and thus stands as perhaps the most resonant expression of what might be called Chhattisgarhi folklore, constantly viewed by the community as its "own" epic.^[1]

In the first essay of this volume,^[2] Gregory Nagy suggests that a particular genre can be identified as epic only by placing it in relationship to other genres performed within a particular folklore community. Accordingly, features of narrative, poetic composition, and heroic characters and themes that have typically characterized the analytic category of epic would not in and of themselves be enough to give definition to "epic."^[3] Such is true in India, where there are numerous folk narrative traditions that are long, sung, and heroic but that do not hold the significance of "epic" for the communities in which they are performed. What distinguishes "epic" from these narratives is the nature of the relationship epic narratives have with the communities in which they are performed: "Epics stand apart from other 'songs' and 'stories' in the extent and intensity of a folklore community's identification with them; . . . the oral epic is the most geographically wide-spread form that still preserves a community's identity."^[4]

Thus narratives that serve as "epic" in one region, in which performers

and audiences self-consciously identify the narrative as "theirs," may be performed in another region without the level of necessary self-identification to be categorized as "epic." For example, the Dhola-Maru epic tradition of northern and western India is also performed in the central Indian region of Chhattisgarh, the area of study for this essay, and yet it is known here specifically as a Rajasthani (western Indian province and cultural region) story, representing a somewhat exoticized "other," exemplified by the hero flying away on a desert camel not native to Chhattisgarh. The northern and central Indian martial epic of Alha is also performed in Chhattisgarh but is associated with specific historical kingdoms outside the region and is perceived to be someone else's history. Likewise, although the pan-Indian Ramayana epic tradition is arguably the most significant religious narrative in the plains of Chhattisgarh, its singers and audiences call it a Hindi, rather than Chhattisgarhi, story (katha ) The hero and heroine, Ram and Sita, are divine royalty and, in dramatic performances of the tradition, are dressed in generic north Indian royal costuming rather than Chhattisgarhi dress and jewelry that would identify them by region and caste. Placed in the context of these long, sung, heroic narratives available in the repertoire of Chhattisgarhi regional performance genres, the epic of Candaini stands apart in the extent to which it has been appropriated by various communities within the region as "their own." This essay examines the ways in which this process of appropriation has identified and given identity to the folklore region of Chhattisgarh.

Geographic and Social Boundaries of the Epic

Performance of the Candaini narrative is not limited to Chhattisgarh; its performance spreads across geographic and linguistic borders, from Chhattisgarh to the Gangetic plains of northern India, in the province of Uttar Pradesh (or U.P.). The tradition is called Candaini in Chhattisgarh and Canaini or Loriki (from the names of its hero and heroine) in U.P. Candaini differs from many Indian epic traditions in that it is not associated with a particular caste or regional historical events, nor is it associated with a religious cult. Thus it can and has been appropriated by a spectrum of communities as "theirs" in a way in which many other narrative traditions cannot be.

While folklorists may identify the narrative traditions in these two regions as "the same" because of their shared characters, constant plot elements, and shared motifs, it is important to point out that the wide geographic mapping of Candaini is a reality to those folklorists and not to the epic's performers and audiences. They know and understand the tradition as rooted in geographically circumscribed performance and social contexts, as being identified with—"belonging to"—specific communities, in this case, a cowherding caste in U.P. and the broader regional folklore community in Chhattisgarh. None of the singers whom I met on the plains of Chhattisgarh knew the

"same" story was sung in U.P. When I mentioned this to one of the epic singers, he exclaimed: "Do you mean they really sing our Chhattisgarhi Candaini way up there?"

When I went to Chhattisgarh to begin my dissertation fieldwork in 1980, one of my first "strategies" was to elicit from villagers a core repertoire of folklore genres that they considered to be "Chhattisgarhi," unique to or characterizing that linguistically and historically defined region. I would ask something like "What do you celebrate here in Chhattisgarh, what do you sing?" A core repertoire gradually emerged from the varied responses. Its genres did not exhaust their performance repertoire but included those traditions whose performance the inhabitants themselves perceived to be identified with and give identity to the region. The epic traditions of Candaini and Pandvani (a regionalized variant of the pan-Indian Mahabharata tradition) were always on this list.

The longer I was in Chhattisgarh and as I became more knowledgeable about its various performance traditions, and thus not perceived to be quite such an unknowing outsider, indigenous commentary began to break down the nature of the social communities with which performance traditions were identified, by caste, age, and gender. Candaini and Pandvani most always retained their regional identification, however; the community with which they are primarily identified is more inclusive, having a wider geographical and social spread, than that of any other genre from the core repertoire. Candaini was repeatedly identified as "a Chhattisgarhi story," "our story."

The social boundaries of the performance communities (and note I have shifted to plural here) associated with the Candaini epic tradition in Chhattisgarh have shifted rather dramatically in the last twenty to twenty-five years; so it is important to look carefully at what it means for an epic to be "ours," asking who is the "we" that is being represented. Further, at what level is identification being made, textually, performatively, or both? I suggest that increasing mass media and literacy in Chhattisgarh in recent years have affected both the performances that identify and the identity of the "we."

The Epic Story

Epic narratives exist both as oral and performance traditions, a distinction Laurie Sears and I made in Boundaries of the Text between a general knowledge of the "whole story" (a summary) that many in the folklore community would be able to relate and the epic as it is performed in a marked, artistic enactment of that oral tradition.^[5] The performed epic in India is sung in episodes,^[6] with the assumption that audience members frame the performance both within the larger epic story (oral tradition) as well as within the folklore repertoire of which it is a part. Thus while scholars have spent considerable energy recording epic stories "from beginning to end," counting

the number of hours and pages required to do so, this is not how the epic is received by indigenous audiences. Further, there are certain episodes of the epic that are more frequently performed than others; and there may be episodes that exist only in the oral tradition, and not in performance at all.

What follows is a narrative summary of primarily the Chhattisgarhi epic variant, drawn from the oral tradition (summaries that were told to me) and performances I attended. I have noted some of the major differences between this and the U.P. variant of the epic, and more of the substantive differences between the two variants will become apparent in the analyses that follow. In Chhattisgarh, Candaini is the story of the hero Lorik and heroine Candaini, both from the Raut cowherding caste. The hero and heroine are each married to other partners, but Candaini leaves her husband when she learns he has been cursed by the goddess to be impotent for twelve years. On her way back to her maternal village, Candaini is accosted in the jungle by the untouchable Bathua. She cleverly escapes his evil intentions, but he chases after her and terrorizes the inhabitants and cattle of the village. In desperation, the villagers ask the hero Lorik to rescue them; ultimately he defeats Bathua through nonmartial (and, I might add, rather unheroic) means. During this contest, Candaini first lays eyes on him, falls in love, and proceeds to seduce him. After some delays, primarily due to Lorik's hesitancy and cowardice in decision making, the hero leaves his wife Manjari, and he and Candaini elope together to Hardi Garh.

In Chhattisgarh, Candaini performances center upon and elaborate various adventures from this elopement journey (urhar; literally, "flight"). In fact, when I asked villagers what the story was about, most responses began with some variant of "It is the story of the elopement of Lorik and Candaini." Eventually, Lorik receives word that his brothers have all died in battle, and their wealth and cattle have been dissipated throughout the Chhattisgarhi countryside, leaving his mother and wife destitute. Lorik returns home with Candaini to avenge his family's honor. He succeeds in reclaiming his cattle, through battle in the U.P. variant and by wandering the countryside as a mendicant, collecting his cattle, in Chhattisgarh. When the task is completed, he takes up the position of head of the surviving extended family, including his first wife. But, it is said, Lorik did not take pride in his success. In U.P. versions, he finds that his former physical prowess and strength have dissipated, and he kills himself. In Chhattisgarh, sad and dissatisfied after his return, Lorik one day mysteriously wanders off into the countryside, never to be seen again.

In the Chhattisgarhi village of Garh Rivan (home of Lorik in the epic and a present-day village near the cattle bazaar town of Arang in Raipur District), one performer sang the epic's closing episode as that of a lovers' argument. As the couple was sitting in a boat in the middle of the village tank (or pond), the argument got so vehement that the boat overturned. Candaini swam to the bank and took refuge in a goddess temple. The goddess was so angered

at Candaini's sudden and inauspicious intrusion that she beheaded our heroine, only to regret her action later and restore the head. In a village goddess temple on the banks of the tank of Garh Rivan, there are today two images (one beheaded and the other whole) of the heroine Candaini, which keep the goddess company. The heroine is not called a goddess, but simply honored as "our rautin," or cowherdress. Lorik, it is said, was never seen after this episode and is presumed to be still wandering in the Chhattisgarhi countryside.

The narrative as performed in both Chhattisgarh and northern India is not a religious epic, nor are its performances an integral part of any particular ritual or festival, although it is often performed at two festivals that have themselves been "imported" into the Chhattisgarhi ritual calendar, ganes caturthi and durga puja, perhaps as a way of localizing them. Villagers say the epic is sung primarily for "entertainment" (manoranjan ) nonprofessional performers may sing for small groups of friends and neighbors, and professionals may perform at annual village fairs or provide entertainment during long winter evenings. These nonritual performance contexts do not, however, diminish the significance of the epic for the communities in which it is performed. In U.P., while the characters are not deified, they are they held up as models to be emulated, of "who we would like to be." In Chhattisgarh, by contrast, they are "who we are," in larger-than-life proportions.

The U.P. Variant as Caste Epic

To understand the differences in the performatively identified communities of the Gangetic plains of U. P. and Chhattisgarh, it will be useful for us now to take a closer look at both narrative and performative variation in these two areas. My analysis of the U.P. epic variant is based on two published versions of the epic collected and transcribed by S. M. Pandey in the 1970s, one in the dialect of Awadhi and the other in Bhojpuri, as well as upon personal communication with Pandey in the early 1980s.^[7] I will call this U.P. variant the Loriki/Canaini tradition, taken from Pandey's titles. The Chhattisgarhi data is drawn from my own fieldwork (1980 through 1993, intermittently) and Verrier Elwin's translation of a partial version.^[8]

Uttar Pradesh is in the heartland of orthodox Brahminic Hinduism, while Chhattisgarh lies on its periphery. Chhattisgarh's cultural and religious traditions are influenced by the high percentage of tribal groups that have now been integrated into the Hindu caste system. These include folk performance and festival genres, social and marriage patterns, and women's dress, tattoos, and jewelry. Of particular interest to us in our examination of the epic is the relatively higher status of women in Chhattisgarh compared to women in U.P. This may be partially explained by tribal influences, but also influential is the fact that the rice-growing economy of central India requires a higher

proportion of female labor participation than does the wheat-growing economy of the north. Thus women in Chhattisgarh are not considered to be quite the economic liability that they are in U.P.^[9]

In both performance areas, U.P. and Chhattisgarh, the epic tradition seems to have originated with the local cowherding castes—Ahirs in U.P. and Rauts in Chhattisgarh. In U.P., where Ahir males continue to be both primary performers and audience members, however, the tradition has remained more closely identified with that caste. Pandey cites two Awadhi proverbs in U.P. that clearly identify Canaini with the Ahir caste:

However clever an Ahir be 
Nothing but Canaini singeth he.

However many times an Ahir may read the Puranas 
He will not sing anything but Canaini. ^[10]

Certain clans of Ahirs in U.P. identify with the epic more than just performatively; they look to the epic as the history of their caste. Gwal Ahir singers of the contemporary folk-song genre called virha believe the Loriki-Canaini to be the oldest extant record of their caste group. Although most of them admit to not knowing the epic well, they claim that many of their songs and narratives are based upon it, and many social and religious traditions unique to the caste derived from it.^[11]

The differences between caste-epic identification in U.P. and Chhattisgarh can be partially attributed to the differences in each caste's self-perception, status, organization, and ideology. The Ahirs of U.P. have traditionally viewed themselves as a local warrior caste and continue to promote that image of themselves. As certain Ahirs gained in political and economic power in the late nineteenth century, they joined forces in an effort to raise their caste status by appropriating customs (such as donning the sacred thread) and ideologies of the ksatriya varna caste category (a process the Indian anthropologist Srinivas has called "sanskritization"). ^[12] Another way to confirm their warrior status was to try to associate themselves with the Yadav cowherding caste of the divine cowherder Krishna, calling themselves Yadavs instead of Ahirs. Ahir intelligentsia "rewrote" certain historical documents to prove this connection^[13] and formed a national Yadav organization that continues to coordinate and promote the mobility drive of the caste. Integral to this movement are retellings of caste history that reflect its martial character; the epic is an important channel for some of these retellings. Hence the cowherder Lorik is portrayed as a warrior first, whose primary role is to defend the honor of the caste, often through a defense of the honor of its women. Consequently, epic battles rather than the elopement become the central episodes of the narrative, and the elopement is consciously underplayed. Elopement and the freedom of individual choice it implies threaten caste

endogamy and the strict maintenance of caste boundaries necessary in the effort to raise status. Further, the implicit freedom of elopement contradicts the social control of women articulated elsewhere in the U.P. variant of the epic.^[14]

Further, the male hero Lorik is the central character of the U.P. variants, rather than the heroine Candaini, as is the case in Chhattisgarh. The northern tradition is, in sum, a male, martial epic tradition that has been appropriated to promote a particular image of the Ahir caste.^[15] A common saying in eastern U.P. asserts: "If Loriki is recited for one month, somewhere there will be a battle."^[16] The martial ethos of the epic is perhaps most dramatically visualized in a bazaar pamphlet titled (in Hindi) Lorikayan: The Battle of Hardigarh (interestingly, this episode is the only one that has been published in this popular format).^[17] Its cover pictures Lorik as the classical indian warrior, standing on a battlefield, holding up a broken chariot wheel, with bodies and weapons strewn across the field and arrows flying through the air.

The Chhattisgarhi Variant as Regional Epic

Older Chhattisgarhi informants told me in 1980 that in Chhattisgarh, too, Candaini singers used to be primarily from the cowherding Raut caste. Its multicaste audiences and the seemingly easy adaptation of the epic to innovative performance styles available to performers from a wide spectrum of castes suggest, however, that it was never "caste-owned" in the sense that it is in U.P. A possible explanation for differences in the caste-epic relationship are the respective castes' self-image.

One fifty-year-old Raut male gave the following account of the dispersion of the caste. In "former days" all the Rauts of the area used to go to Garh Rivan (the home of Lorik in the epic and the present-day village mentioned above) to celebrate the Raut festival of matar.^[18] Then one year, King Kadra, of a basket-weaving caste, battled against the Rauts. Many Rauts were killed, and the survivors scattered from Garh Rivan and settled "here and there." Since that time, according to the informant, Rauts have no longer gathered at Garh Rivan to celebrate matar, but rather celebrate it in their own villages. We cannot know from such an account whether or not the caste was, in fact, ever a cohesive martial or administrative power. Their perception, however, is that they were once stronger and more unified than they are now.

In the more recent past, Chhattisgarhi Rauts have traditionally seen themselves as "village servants," who herd and milk the village cattle, rather than as warriors who protect caste honor and boundaries.^[19] Lorik, as a Chhattisgarhi Raut, is not portrayed as the U.P. martial hero brandishing a sword, riding on a horse, but primarily as a lover whose only weapon is his herding staff and who travels on foot. Further reflecting a Chhattisgarhi ethos in which women have more mobility and arguably higher status than their sis-

ters in the Gangetic plains, the heroine is the primary initiator of action in Chhattisgarhi performances; it is frequently she who protects and saves Lorik rather than the other way around. Thus, although the singing of the epic may have been first associated with the cowherding caste of its singers, the tradition as it has been documented in the last fifteen to twenty years does not suggest a strong caste identity.^[20]

Part of what gives the epic tradition its regional identification in Chhattisgarh is its performance contexts and the broad social base of its audiences and performers today. Two basic performance styles of Candaini have developed in Chhattisgarh. Both styles are most commonly called simply Candaini, but when the styles are distinguished, the first is called Candaini git or song, and the second naca, or dance-drama. As mentioned earlier, traditionally, Candaini git singers were male members of the Raut caste who sang the epic both professionally and nonprofessionally to primarily male audiences, but with women sitting on the sidelines. Rauts sang without musical accompaniment; but essential to their performance was a companion (ragi or sangvari ) who joined in the last words of every line and served as a respondent. Today, it is difficult to find Rauts who still sing in the git style without instrumental accompaniment. The only such singer I knew died in 1988, and none of his sons were interested in learning or continuing his father's tradition. As one informant observed, "How can this [that is, style with no musical accompaniment] compete with video halls?" The repetitious response by the ragi, however, is still one of the primary characterizing features of both instrumentally accompanied git and naca Candaini performance styles.

The dates and circumstances in which members of the Satnami caste took up the git style of Candaini performance are undocumented and vague in caste and regional memory. Yet when I was looking for epic performances in the 1980s, I was frequently told that I would find Candaini only in those areas with large numbers of Satnamis. The Satnamis are a sect that converted in the 1800s from the outcaste Camar, a leather-working caste, but whose conversion did not raise their status from that of the lowest caste groups. It is probable that when they began to sing Candaini professionally, it began to attract more diverse audiences and to take on its current regional identification. The Satnamis added musical accompaniment to the git performance style, including, minimally, harmonium and tabla; but, as mentioned above, they have retained the combination of lead singer and one or more "companions," whose response lines end with mor or tor.^[21]

Because I have little comparative data to use from "purely" Raut performances, it is difficult to know exactly how the narrative may have shifted when the Satnamis began to sing the epic professionally, particularly in its portrayal of the "villain" character, the Camar Bathua who tries to accost Candaini in the jungle. In one Satnami performance, however, Lorik meets Bathua again

after their initial confrontation in the heroine's maternal village. Bathua reappears as the bodyguard of a foreign king whom Lorik has offended (by chopping off the nose of one of his subjects), so the king sends Bathua to punish him. This time their confrontation is martial, and Lorik is unable to defeat the untouchable physically. He is pinned to the ground, and Candaini has to beg Bathua for mercy. The Camar gives in but says Lorik must tie him up so that the king will think he has been defeated, not compassionate. Lorik eventually wins the kingdom through both battle and trickery and names it after the untouchable Bathua. When I later discussed this episode with several non-Satnami villagers, they told me that Satnamis have tended to glorify the character of Bathua and that a Raut singer would never have included such an episode, glorifying the heroism of the Camar.

The second Candaini performance style, called naca (literally, "dance"), includes song and dance, spoken conversations between characters, and narration in the git, responsive style.^[22] According to naca performers, the naca is said to have developed in the early 1970s in response to the strong influence of the increasingly popular Hindi cinema, an essential element of which is also song and dance. A naca troupe consists of up to eight or ten performers, some of whom are actors and others musicians. An important feature of the naca is the inclusion of costuming and minimal props. The hero Lorik carries a herding staff and wears traditional Raut festival dress, decorated with peacock feathers and cowrie shells; male performers put on saris and typical Chhattisgarhi jewelry to act out the female roles. The musicians sit at the side of the stage and accompany the songs of the actors or provide their own sung narration in the Candaini git style. Candaini is only one of many narratives performed in the naca style, but naca troupes that specialize in Candaini do so to the exclusion of other narratives. Although this style has grown in popularity, it is expensive to patronize. When sufficient funds for the naca cannot be raised, or if troupe members are singing nonprofessionally, the git style, without dance, can still be heard.^[23]

The performance context of the naca is important in establishing the epic's regional character. Troupes are usually multicaste, heavily represented by Satnamis, but also by other middle-level castes, including Rauts. One performance troupe I met consisted of ten members from six different castes. Troupes are hired by village/neighborhood councils for annual village fairs or festivals or as independent entertainment events. Occasionally, a family will sponsor a performance to celebrate the birth of a son or a wedding. Naca audiences, too, represent the caste spectrum of a particular village or urban neighborhood, male and female. Nacas are performed in public space such as a village or town square or main street, accessible to everyone. Persons from surrounding villages frequently walk several miles to attend nacas in neighboring villages, and audiences may reach as many as 200 participants.

The enthusiastic and responsive participation of women in the primary

audience of the Candaini naca stands in sharp contrast to the all-male audiences and performance contexts of the U.P. variants of the epic. In 1980 when I asked female audience members if women ever sang Candaini in Chhattisgarh, they all answered negatively. I did hear segments of the epic narrative and reference to its characters in other female performance genres, which they did not, however, identify as "Candaini" because of the performance context and singing style. "To sing Candaini" means to sing in a public context and, more specifically, to incorporate at some level the responsive singing style of the Candaini ragi, with his end-line words of tor or mor. What these women were singing was identified by context as a harvest-dance song, not by content as Candaini.

In recent years, there have been a handful of individual female performers who have performed professionally the git style of Candaini, accompanied by male ragas and musicians. They are usually self-taught and have gained meteoric popularity because of their unusual position as professional, public female performers. Several audience members told me: "Who wouldn't go to hear a woman? There's more entertainment in that!" One such female performer is Suraj Bai, who, in 1987, was hailed in a local English-language newspaper as "the melody queen." She had represented Chhattisgarh at national and state folk festivals and had performed on nationwide television and radio; yet, the newspaper article bemoaned, she still worked as a daily-wage laborer. Over the last five years in Chhattisgarh, the epic tradition of Pandvani is experiencing a similar rise in popularity, primarily attributable to the fact that the tradition is being performed by two professional female singers, Tijan Bai and Ritu Varma, who have gained notoriety through their performances on television and radio. Both women have traveled extensively around India and even as far as Paris and New York for festivals of India.

Although Candaini female performers are still unusual, the worldview expressed by both female and male performers of the Chhattisgarhi epic is a female-centered one.^[24] The heroine Candaini is the dominant character in the pair of lovers and the initiator of most of the epic action. She and other women are not portrayed as property to be exchanged and protected (as they are frequently depicted in the U.P. variants); rather, they are resourceful and take initiative, relying not on the ritual power of their chastity, as women frequently do in dominant-discourse narratives, but upon their own intuitive common sense.

Candaini's dominant role in the Chhattisgarhi epic first becomes evident when she makes the decision to leave her husband when their relationship is not fulfilling to her. Then it is she, rather than Lorik, who initiates their relationship; she sees him in the competition with her assailant Bathua and sets about to seduce him. In one version, she asks her brother to build a swing for her next to the path that Lorik uses every day to get to his wrestling grounds. As Lorik passes by, Candaini asks him to swing her. When he de-

clines, she curses him. This so angers him that he violently swings her, causing her to fall off the swing and giving him the opportunity to catch her.^[25]

The next time they meet, Candaini suggests a joking sexual relationship with Lorik by calling him her devar (younger brother-in-law), with whom such a relationship is permissible. Having grown up in the same village, they would normally call each other brother and sister, precluding a sexual relationship; changing the terms of address is often one of the first indications of a change in the nature of a relationship in Chhattisgarhi rural life and oral traditions. Finally, Candaini openly invites Lorik to visit her during the night, telling him how to get past various guards that stand at the entrance to her palace. As their relationship develops, it is also she who suggests and pushes for the elopement to Hardi Garh.

Candaini's resourcefulness and courage are illustrated by numerous examples from Chhattisgarhi episodes of the epic. In one performance, when the couple is eloping and their way is blocked by a flooded river, Candaini, not Lorik, figures out how to cross. She first procures a small boat from the ferryman stationed at the crossing. Lorik accuses her of negotiation of more than transportation with the ferryman, however, and in jealousy splits the boat and its owner in two with his sword. He then goes into the jungle and cuts down some green wood to build a raft, which, of course, immediately sinks. It is Candaini who knows it must be built with dry bamboo, tied together with lengths of a forest vine. When the ferryman's wife comes to bring him his breakfast and sees him dead, she immediately suspects the eloping couple of murder and creates a magical mouse to hide in their raft.

Halfway across the river, the stowaway mouse bites through the ropes holding together the raft. Candaini manages to reach the far shore, but Lorik does not know how to swim and starts to drown. The heroine unties her braid, jumps in, and saves him, presumably by pulling him ashore with her hair.^[26] Candaini's ingenuity and physical strength in this episode stands in sharp contrast to a similar scene in the U.P. variant in which Lorik's wife calls upon the power of her chastity (her faithfulness to her husband, sat ) to cause the waters of a river to part.

A female worldview is again reflected in a wonderful episode of the eloping couple's journey through a kingdom of all women. Candaini sends Lorik into the town to buy them some betel leaf (pan ) He is tricked by the pan- seller to follow her home, where she "keeps her best pan" (to feed pan to a member of the opposite sex in Chhattisgarhi folklore is often to initiate a sexual relationship, or may be used as a metaphor for intercourse itself). Once the pan-seller has trapped Lorik in her house, she threatens to beat him with a bamboo pole and stuff his skin with straw, poke his eyes out with a needle, and, finally, brand him with a hot crowbar unless he promises to marry her. After each threat, he gives in, only to recant a few minutes later. Finally, Candaini comes looking for her partner and meets the pan -seller in

the bazaar. The pan -seller begs the epic heroine to help her with a man who refuses to marry her. Candaini discovers a sari-clad Lorik in the woman's courtyard, having been so disguised so as to hide his male identity in the all-female kingdom. Once his identity is made known, the two women agree to play a round of dice to determine who will win him as husband. Note that although this is a reversal of the gender roles in Sanskritic, male dicing games, which are played to win a woman in marriage or as a sexual partner, the motif of women dicing over the fate of men is found in other Chhattisgarhi folk narratives. Candaini triumphs in her dice game with the pan -seller and frees Lorik from his captivity. One can hardly imagine the martial hero of the U.P. variants of the epic permitting the pan -seller's physical humiliations to be forced upon him or to be dependent upon rescue by a woman in a women's world.

Even in several episodes in which Lorik takes the primary role in a confrontation, it is still a woman who tells him how he can win, and the means are rarely traditional "heroic" ones. The first such confrontation is between Lorik and the Camar Bathua. Candaini's mother says the only man who can successfully confront Bathua is the "sporting hero Lorik."^[27] Lorik's wife, Manjari, however, warns him that he will not be able to defeat the Camar in a normal wrestling competition. She suggests that the confrontation be one in which the men are buried up to their waists in separate pits by the other man's wife. The man who can first get out of his pit and beat the other man will be the winner. Lorik agrees to this. When the women are burying each other's husbands, Manjari begins to throw gold coins on the ground. This so distracts the Camar's wife that she only loosely packs the dirt around Lorik and then runs to pick up the coins. Meanwhile, Manjari has time to bury Bathua firmly. When the time comes for the men to try to get out of their pits, Bathua is stuck. Lorik jumps right out and soundly defeats the Camar.

Candaini's beauty and a male's desire for her are the source of several major conflicts in the Chhattisgarhi variant, and in these situations she is physically threatened and needs physical protection like the women in the U.P. versions. As we have seen above, however, if Lorik is left to his own strength and resources, he may or may not be able to provide Candaini with the necessary protection. Judging by her resourcefulness in other situations, one senses that if she had no male to protect her physically, Candaini would come up with alternative solutions. Furthermore, when her chastity is protected by Lorik, only her personal honor is at stake. The personal honor of a Chhattisgarhi Raut woman does not necessarily extend to the honor of her family and caste. One of the main episodes in the U.P. variant making this connection between the three levels of honor—the story of Lorik saving Manjari from having to marry a king outside the Ahir caste is not present at all in the reported and performed versions I have seen in Chhattisgarh. The other U.P. episode making this association explicit is Lorik's defeat of Bathua,

which saves the honor of Candaini and the Ahir caste. In Chhattisgarhi versions, Candaini's mother, in asking Lorik for help, is not as concerned with honor as with physical safety: Bathua is terrorizing the entire village, so that everyone is afraid to go out of their homes, and the cattle are dying from lack of fodder and water.^[28]

As the role of women increases in importance in the Chhattisgarh variant, we have seen that the character of the hero also shifts. He is no longer the ideal protector and warrior. When he does engage in battle, he usually employs nonmartial, often unheroic, means to win; when the battle is honest, he battles without the aid of large armies, elephants, or other military paraphernalia, which support him in U.P. versions. He is a simple cowherder whose weapons are his own physical strength and herding staff. In this epic variant that centers around elopement love, the hero's status as warrior is less important than that as lover.

An important way Lorik's lover role is highlighted in Chhattisgarh is through the elaboration of the character of Bawan Bid, Candaini's impotent first husband. His impotence and passivity give emphasis to Lorik's sexual prowess and virility. One naca performance portrayed Bawan as a buffoon who is always wiping his nose with his fingers and licking the snot off of them. During the twelve years of his impotence, he wanders the forest as a sadhu (religious ascetic) but is easily frightened by any strange noise and welcomes Canda's company when she comes to the forest to try to persuade him to give up his asceticism. Both Satnami and Raut versions agree that Bawan Bir's impotence is the result of a curse cast upon him by the goddess Parvati. A Satnami version of the curse incident recounts that Bawan used to tease the Raut girls who picked up cow dung in the jungle every day. One day, Parvati took the form of one of these girls, and Bawan began to tease her. She revealed her true form to him and cursed him with impotence for his audacity. The Raut version says that one day Bawan Bir left a leaf cup of milk sitting on the ground, from which he had drunk. Shiva, in the form of a snake, came up to the cup and drank out of it. Subsequently, he began to acquire the rather obnoxious personality of Bawan Bir, quarreling with and scolding his wife, Parvati. When Parvati realized why this personality transformation had occurred, she cursed Bawan with impotence.

Bawan Bir is also impotent in the U.P. epic variant; the fact, however, is given little elaboration in the performances reported by Pandey. In the Awadhi version, we learn of the impotence in a single line. The performer tells his audience that Bawan is a eunuch with no hair on his body, but he gives no reason for the condition, although the audience knows the reason is a curse from Durga. Another story circulates in Ballia, U.P., that Bawan encircled his large penis around a Shiva liniga, a phallic representation of Shiva, and that the god cursed him with impotence for trying to compete with him.^[29] Whatever the reason, Bawan's impotence is overshadowed in the

U.P. versions by his martial nature. He, too, is a powerful warrior when he battles and defeats Lorik's older brother and confiscates all of their family wealth and cattle, and again in the battle in which Lorik regains this wealth at the end of the epic.

Appropriating the Performative "Exterior" of the Tradition

As varying social groups have appropriated the epic within its traditional performance range from U.P. to Chhattisgarh, both the textual content, "interior," and performative "exterior" of the tradition have responded to and reinforced the identities of these groups. While the epic in U.P. has served to represent the caste both to itself and to other castes in the region, in the Ahirs' effort to consolidate and raise their caste status, in Chhattisgarh, traditionally, it has been self-reflexive, mirroring the region to itself, contributing to a Chhattisgarhi self-awareness of difference, particularly, for example, regarding the status of women and marriage customs.

To say that the region has "appropriated" the epic in the Chhattisgarhi contexts described above is, perhaps, to give unwarranted self-conscious agency to a relatively loose social body.^[30] In the last ten to fifteen years, however, "appropriation" is the word to describe the emergence of "new" performance contexts and audiences for Candaini, both within and outside of Chhattisgarh. The tradition has been self-consciously crafted and packaged for both Indian and international audiences as representative of the region (not a particular caste, class, or gender). This appropriation coincides with increased availability of mass media technologies and communications (television and radio), as well as the academic and popularized interest in "ethnicity" that has developed in India over the last decade (as evidenced, for example, in international festivals of India and modified "ethnic dress" as high fashion among the upper middle class of urban India).

Radio, television, and the cassette industry have provided significant new contexts for folklore performance, including the epic. Akashvani (All India Radio) has both local (Chhattisgarhi) and national (Hindi) programming, with regularly scheduled folklore programs as a part of both. Such programming expands the social boundaries of groups to whom many performance genres are traditionally available; songs that women used to sing among themselves while transplanting rice or in the privacy of their courtyards are now blared over speakers from tea stalls and bus stands in urban neighborhoods and village main streets. Although prior to its appearance on media channels, the epic was spoken of as being "Chhattisgarhi," its performance on radio and television has solidified the epic's geographic regional identity, drawing its boundaries more literally than "live" epic performances, since such programming is limited to specified districts but also

has become uniformly available throughout those districts, even in those villages and neighborhoods in which the epic has never been performed.

In 1985 when I was trying to trace down various performance traditions in the burgeoning town of Dhamtari, I was frequently asked why I didn't simply turn on the radio on Wednesday afternoons for Akashvani's Chhattisgarhi folklore programming, from which I could simply tape the "best singers" directly from the radio, without all the complications of live performance. Both radio and television performances are taped in rather sterile recording rooms, with specific time frames (much abbreviated from any live performance), without a live audience with whom to interact and jointly craft the performance. Further, these performances are taped under the direction of radio-station personnel who often have certain aesthetic criteria that they feel "typify" the particular genre in question, although most of them are not "native" to the region. These criteria include less repetition, more instrumentation, and particular voice quality and stage presence of singers. When I articulated some of these differences between a half-hour radio performance of a Candaini episode and its elaboration during a four-hour, late-night epic performance in a village square, adding that there was little manoranjan (literally, "entertainment," but with the implication of emotional satisfaction) hearing it over the radio, these same informants generally wholeheartedly agreed, although they often felt somewhat differently about television performances. In the mass media, the epic is taken out of its traditional performance contexts and recontextualized in a setting in which it "represents" on an external performative level through style and instrumentation, but in which its interior is frozen, unresponsive, generic.

Radio and television programming has affected the careers of particular singers who are chosen and promoted by the staff. This has been the case especially for the female epic performers referred to above. Once heard repeatedly on local radio or television, they are then invited to statewide folklore singing competitions and folklore festivals in major urban centers, such as New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and even London, to "represent" Chhattisgarh. As individual singers themselves become famous, the genres associated with them become more popular as well, both within and outside of the region.

Representative of the growing "academic" interest in Chhattisgarhi folklore by members of an urban, educated class, who have not traditionally participated in epic performance as singers or audience, is the playwright/director Habib Tanvir, a Muslim born in Chhattisgarh's heartland, now living in New Delhi. His troupe, Naya Theatre (New Theatre), consists of a majority of actors and actresses drawn from Chhattisgarh's villages, nonliterate "traditional" dancers and performers. Along with his interest in experimental theatrical forms, an overriding concern of Tanvir's is to promote the appreciation and preservation of Chhattisgarhi folk performance traditions.

To this end, he has held numerous folklore workshops in Chhattisgarh itself for performers of these traditions. The aim of these workshops is for performers to share with each other their repertoires and for Tanvir himself to document them, often then integrating their themes and forms into his "new theatre." In a 1985 interview, while in Calcutta staging his play Charan Das Chor, Tanvir explained this task as follows:

I had to work in two ways. I had to purify their forms and themes to make them more authentic and contemporary. I found that the folk form was getting spoiled and diluted by the combined influence of urbanization, mass media, and low-grade Hindi films. The first part of my job was to weed out the falsities and purify the form. Not for the sake of purity, but because the folk form is both beautiful and a powerful medium for a message.^[31]

For one of his Chhattisgarhi folklore workshops, held in the late 1970s, Tanvir called together the "best" Candaini singers he had met in his tours of the region. Singers from a range of castes shared their stylistic and thematic repertoires. One of these singers was the Satnami Devlal; he was also one of several workshop participants chosen to go to Delhi to work with Tanvir for several more weeks. According to Devlal, Tanvir stressed to the singers the importance of keeping their tradition alive, and that one of the ways to do this was to keep the entire narrative in performance, singing it "from the beginning," when the hero and heroine were children and so on, rather than focusing so exclusively on the elopement episode.

I attended (and was the primary patron of) one of Devlal's Candaini performances that resulted in what I have called a "failed performance," with most of the approximately 200-member audience walking away within the first hour of the performance. I have analyzed the reasons for this elsewhere,^[32] but one important reason cited by audience members was that he was singing "stories we don't know," from this reconstructed larger repertoire of epic episodes. What they expected and wanted to hear was some variation of the elopement narrative. Devlal was also experimenting with form. He framed the performance as if it would be a naca, a form influenced by the corrupting "low-grade Hindi films" to which Tanvir referred, but did not wear the expected costuming, did not perform the expected "song and dance"; so that another major complaint of the dissatisfied audience was that "he should have worn a sari."

Literate and nonliterate residents of Chhattisgarh alike have voiced, over the years during which I have returned to Chhattisgarh since 1980, a certain unease about Tanvir's appropriation of Chhattisgarhi folklore for display outside the region. Even as he is attempting to promote an appreciation of the region and its performance genres, many inhabitants feel that the process serves no benefit to Chhattisgarh itself. Several residents of the town in which Devlal performed, who have known him since his childhood and over the

years in which he developed his epic-singing skills, complained that when Tanvir chose particular singers such as him, they often forgot the Chhattisgarhi roots from which they had come, were no longer satisfied to sing in "traditional" contexts, demanded too much money, and were no longer responsive to their audiences.

Drawing on a workshop held for Candaini performers, Tanvir later wrote a script based on the epic to be performed by his Naya Theatre troupe, called Son Sagar, the name of one of Lorik's beloved cattle. I was able to sit in on one of the rehearsals of this play in 1985. The actors and actresses of the troupe are Chhattisgarhi, as is the language of the play; it opens with a traditional vandana invocation to the goddess Sarasvati) and is framed and interspersed with lines sung in the traditional git style. But, performed on a modern stage, outside of traditional performance contexts, it is not Chhattisgarhi Candaini, at least as it is understood by the folklore regional community. Although, according to Tanvir, there is room for improvisation, the lines are relatively fixed, memorized, and unable to be responsive to particular contexts and audiences—and if even if they were, the performance contexts would not be Chhattisgarhi.

In newly emerging performance contexts such as radio, television, and the modern stage, the epic has become decontextualized, so that it can be performed anywhere. In a sense, the audiences are not "live"; they are dispersed, unknown, and unseen. Further, the Chhattisgarhi dialect of the sung "text" is itself often not understood fully, if at all, by newly emerging Hindi or English-speaking audiences. What characterizes the epic for these audiences is its performative exterior, the unique singing and instrumental styles of epic performance, which themselves become relatively frozen, or at least enough so that they are recognizable as "Chhattisgarhi." In these contexts, the epic tradition has become an artifact, frozen in time and space, held up for admiration and nostalgia; thus though perhaps unresponsive to what may be perceived to be more traditional shifting performative and social contexts "on the ground," so to speak, it is responsive in a very different way to newly emerging middle-class audiences.

The Candaini living epic tradition has shown a tenacious ability to adapt to shifting and emergent performance contexts: to take up the cause of a caste trying to raise its status in U.P., and in Chhattisgarh to integrate non-Raut singers into the circle of its performers and instrumentation and the naca song and dance into its performance style as it competes with Hindi cinema and video halls. Over the last decade, however, while performers continue to be drawn from low-caste groups, the performance contexts of the Chhattisgarhi epic have bifurcated. The first are those live performances in traditional, late-night, open-air village squares in which primarily lower-class/caste audiences continue to interact with and help to shape the interior "text" of the tradition. It remains to be seen how flexible this interior

can be in its interaction with a rapidly changing social world, how long or in what ways its performances can compete with video halls, movie theaters, and television, and who the singers and performers will be in the next generation. The second context is physically distanced from its audiences, on stage or over the airwaves, audiences that now include an increasingly educated middle class. For these audiences, the epic's narrative interior no longer reflects "who we are," but its performative exterior may remind them nostalgically of "who we were."

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