Alliterative Revivals by Chism Christine;

Author:Chism, Christine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Moses’ victory over Pharoah has been claimed by the Christians and inverted. The next day, the Romans plunder the bodies and glean enormous riches. Then they pile the bodies into heaps and make “wide weyes” (642) through them. This parting of the piles of bodies on the land reads Jewish body into Jewish territory and resonates with the poem’s larger alienating agendas—its need to bisect the Judeo-Christian body/territory with its intricate genealogies, obligations, likenesses, and anxious assimilations through a military incision that will once and for all define their relationship in a way that keeps the Christians on top and in control. And it is a typological vivisection as well. Although the poem refrains from underlining the link between Caiaphas’s lesson and the battle’s outcome, the message is clear. The Red Sea has been parted anew—as a sea of Jewish flesh.

The cruel irony of such inversions seems to delight the poet; he indulges in them repeatedly, and whenever there is the possibility of incorporating one from a source, he uses and expands upon it. These scenes deflect religious retribution into a destructive economy of bodies. They gruesomely concretize the traditional letter/spirit hierarchy as a description of the relationship between Jews and Christians but make it explicitly an exercise of forceful Christian agency. Christians consolidate a newly energized and invulnerable spirituality by violently reducing Jews to passive and vulnerable bodies. The text recounts tortures of the Jews that (I) take the skin from the body; (2) force the blood from inside to outside (all the Jews); (3) force the body to consume its own flesh and blood (Mary and the Jews in the city whose water is flavored by the ashes of their burnt dead and whose air is tainted by the corpses piled in their streets); and (4) spill internal organs into the light of day (the Jewish man whose brains are hurled a mile from his head, and the Jewish woman whose unborn child is knocked out of her body and over the city walls by a catapult stone). Caiaphas’s death is a tour de force: he is flayed alive, drawn with horse on the field, and then hanged on a high gallows feet upmost, with honey anointed on the “hydeles” (698) [skinless] parts, or worse, as manuscript A figures it, “hiddlills” [secret parts, crevices], with four sharp-clawed dogs and cats attached to his thighs, and two apes attached to his arms “to rend the raw flesh into red pieces” (702).25 Ralph Hanna felicitously describes the Siege as the “chocolate covered tarantula of the alliterative movement.”26 I tend to see more tarantula than chocolate but that doesn’t impair the metaphor. In fact many of the poem’s critics note with varying degrees of repulsion the inventiveness of the poem’s inseparably brilliant and gruesome imaginary. Even in a genre where battle eviscerations are more or less de rigueur, The Siege of Jerusalem has the dubious distinction of being the most inventively vicious poem of the alliterative revival.

Why does the poem move

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