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.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

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.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

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

Barberi-Squarotti, Giorgio.

1993.
Il sogno e l'epica. Turin: Genesi.

Bellamy, Elizabeth J.

1994.
"From Virgil to Tasso: The Epic Topos as an Uncanny Return." In Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, edited by Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz, 207-232. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Berger, Harry, Jr.

1988.
Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brelich, Angelo.

1976.
Tre variazioni romane sul tema delle origini. Rome: Anteneo.

de Luca, Don Giuseppe, ed.

1977.
Scrittori di religione del trecento. 4 vols. Turin: Einaudi.

Derla, Luigi.

1978.
"Sull'allegoria della Gerusalemme liberata." Italianistica 7: 473-488

Eire, Carlos.

1986.
War against the Idols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eliot, T. S.

1988.
Christianity and Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.

1957.
On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber.

Ferguson, Margaret.

1982.
Trials of Desire. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Freud, Sigmund.

1961.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Norton.

Galinsky, Karl.

1969.
Aeneas, Sicily, and Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hampton, Timothy.

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

Klossowki, Pierre.

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

Momigliano, Arnaldo.

1987.
On Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

Murrin, Michael.

1980.
The Allegorical Epic: Essays in Its Rise and Decline. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nagy, Gregory.

1979.
Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Niccoli, Ottavia.

1987.
Profeti e popolo nell'Italia del Rinascimento. Rome: Laterza.

Quint, David.

1993.
Epic and Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1983.
Origin and Originality: Versions of the Source. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rhu, Lawrence.

1993.
The Genesis of Tasso's Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of Their Significance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Tasso, Torquato.

1987.
Jerusalem Delivered. Translated by Ralph Nash. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

1982.
Gerusalemme liberata. Edited by Fredi Chiappelli. Milan: Rusconi.

1934.
Gerusalemme conquistata. Edited by Luigi Bonfigli. Bari: Laterza.

1875.
Le prose diverse di Torquato Tasso. Edited by Cesare Guasti. 2 vols. Florence: Le Monnier.

Virgil

1974.
Virgil. With an English translation by H. Ruston Fairclough. 2 vols. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Williams, Gordon.

1989
Technique and Idea in the "Aeneid " New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wofford, Susanne.

1992.
The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic. Stanford: Stanford University Press.