Looney: Freedom Readers

Dennis Looney,  Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press

Reviewed by Ronald Herzman (herzman@geneseo.edu)

Dennis Looney's Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy convincingly and importantly argues that Dante's critical fortunes in the United States are entangled more closely to the history of the country's black and white citizens that we have ever imagined.  Freedom Readers examines how "African Americans have read, interpreted, and responded to Dante and his work over the last two centuries..."(p. 2).  It would be an important book if only for the new material that the author has discovered and brought together that links Dante to traditions of African American literature and culture.  But it is also an important book for understanding issues connected to the reception of Dante more generally. To provide the context that fits Dante with the African American tradition, Looney presents an enormous amount of information about the way that the Divine Comedy has been understood and interpreted throughout its long afterlife.

The connection goes something like this:  Dante was a hero, indeed in many ways the poster child, for the architects of the Italian Risorgimento.  There was a great deal of cross-fertilization between that set of intellectuals and many of the leading American abolitionists, with the result that Dante also became something of a poster child for abolition.  As Looney carefully and memorably phrases it:  "... this dependence on Dante to make sense of perceived injustice and to effect a change in politics to which one is opposed, underlies the play on words in the book's title, Freedom Readers" (p. 2).  And again:  "They all turn to Dante for help in interpreting their paradoxical experience as citizens of the United States of America whose ancestors were likely to have arrived on a slave ship" (p. 3).  Although the main lines of the story are clear, there are complex ramifications, and Looney has done an excellent job of gathering and distilling an enormous amount of source material.

After an introductory methodological chapter, rich in its implications and inferences, the study moves through two centuries of African American culture and literature's encounter with Dante.  The chapter titles suggest that more is at issue than chronology, however.  Each chapter highlights a different kind of encounter between African American Culture and Dante as well as an analysis of the most interesting texts by the African American authors who engage him.   "Colored Dante" covers the nineteenth century and highlights Henrietta Cordelia Ray, whose fifty-two line poem "Dante" (1885) shows a "deep understanding of Dante's life and poetry as well as a strong emotional and intellectual response to the man and his work" (p. 56).  "Negro Dante" moves from 1900 to 1950, and covers such canonical and important writers as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, and less canonical but perhaps more interestingly Spencer Williams, an African American filmmaker better known for his role as Andy in the controversial TV sitcom Amos 'n' Andy.    In his film Go Down, Death! (1944), Williams intersperses clips from the 1911 Italian silent film of the Inferno into his work.  As Looney has it, "...the quality of the final product does not detract from the deliberate, intelligent reading of Dante behind Williams's allusive adaptation of the cinematic Inferno, from whose fifty or so scenes he chooses six that suit the allegorical purposes of Go Down, Death!" (p. 77).  In a book full of surprises, this might be the biggest.

Chapter 3. "Black Dante," covers the period from the late 50's through the mid-70's.  In it, Looney presents his most elaborate and extended analysis of a single text, Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones' The System of Dante's Hell (1965).  Looney makes the claim that his is the first attempt to actually sort out the allusions to Dante in this autobiographical novel in a systematic way (p. 106). Looney's analysis shows the extent to which Baraka (pictured) was using, maybe even abusing, Dante for his own paradoxical purposes. One of the important themes that Looney foregrounds throughout Freedom Readers is the relationship between high culture Dante and popular Dante:  the Dante of the footnotes and the Dante of street singers.  The African American appropriation of Dante provides Looney with a very clear lens to look at this theme, with The System of Dante's Hell providing the most extended test case of someone whose agenda is to reject the very notion of a high-culture Dante as simply not relevant to his own enterprise.  The System of Dante's Hell is not really about Dante, even though there are more explicit references to the Comedy in this work than in any of the others that Looney analyzes. Nevertheless, Dante as constructed in The System "enables Baraka to understand better his own experience of hell on earth..."(p. 107).   Baraka appropriates for his own purposes a Dante that does and that does not in some recognizable way actually exist.  It does in that System refers to Dante's categories in very explicit ways.  It does not in that they become starting points for rearrangement, rejection, and reinterpretation of the text.  It does not in that as often as Baraka refers to the text of Dante, he more often refers to the scaffolding that the Sinclair edition provides for naming categories and mapping out the terrain. It could be argued that the system that Baraka appropriates belongs more to Sinclair the editor than to Dante himself. Rather than digging into Dante, he holds on to what Dante provides him by way of a system.  Baraka is using one of the icons of European high culture to measure the growing distance between himself and European literature.  There is an obvious paradox here, in that the very process of separating himself from Dante and from European culture more generally can only be done with Dante's help, even if the Dante that Baraka appropriates is sort of a stick-figure Dante, useful to play off but without any, one might also say in deliberate defiance of any, attempt to see what the real Dante might have been getting at.  To concede more to Dante would have been to defeat Baraka's purpose in his use-cum-rejection of the Commedia.  Looney is sensitive to all of the complexities this position entails, and more than respectful of Baraka's enterprise, and perhaps that explains why The System of Dante's Hell receives such detailed analysis in Freedom Readers. 

In chapter 4, "African American Dante," Looney examines Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.  Linden Hills is an interesting counterweight to Baraka because its juxtaposition of European and American cultural values depends on a much more nuanced appreciation of Dante and a much more thorough appropriation of him in her novel.  Looney calls Naylor "the most educated" of the writers he considers in his work (p. 158), and the one most steeped in the tradition of black literary culture.  Looney gives a persuasive account of the way she utilizes Dante and in the process he provides a key to the major contours of Freedom Readers as a whole.  He sees Naylor as someone "who learned Dante in school, but whose experiences out of the academy put her in touch with that other version of Dante that has its origins in the abolitionists' practical reading of the medieval poet and politician. Her imitation of Dante bespeaks a familiar dichotomy of highbrow and lowbrow culture, of establishmentarian and radical responses to Dante, of aesthetic and political readings of Dante."  (p. 159).  How these two trajectories interact is the essence of Freedom Readers no less than Linden Hills.

For Naylor an interesting moment of both convergence and conversion occurred in college when she read Dante the same year (1977) that she read Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, in which, as Looney tells us, "Dante plays a small but significant part" (p. 183). Looney's look at The Bluest Eye shows us something of the extraordinary precision of Morrison’s artistry in her appropriation of Dante. Through the character of Soaphead Church, "a hybrid product of mixed colonial culture," Morrison imagines someone whose reading of Dante is dazzlingly defective, someone who uses Dante "for a moral system that coheres with his perverted sense of the world" (p. 187).  Morrison "takes the reader into Soaphead's warped mind for a theological disquisition on good and evil, with Dante as arbiter" (p. 185).  If Dante is everywhere in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, which is in effect a modern recreation of the Inferno, his appearance in The Bluest Eye is carefully circumscribed, injected by means of a brilliant surgical strike, with a laser-like intensity that provides evidence that Morrison knew the Dante that she was withholding from her character.

In this schematic summary I do not mean to give the impression that there is more unity in the African American experience of Dante than there actually is.  Looney understands the degree to which any reception study that spans two hundred years is going to be both complicated and a little bit messy.  The study asks questions and provokes further investigation.  Nevertheless, I think that it is interesting that my response to the book was of a piece with other important studies of Dante that have changed my way of looking at him. After assimilating any new and cogent interpretation of Dante, something I have never thought of before, something clicks in, and the new interpretation becomes part of the way I look at Dante as though it had always been there, and as though it would be perfectly obvious to everyone else as well. Such is what happened after my first experience of Freedom Readers.  Despite an obvious connection between the two traditions--the Exodus narrative after all is the structural and thematic skeleton onto which the Commedia is fleshed out as well as the defining master narrative of the movement from slavery to freedom in the African American tradition--before Looney's work, I had never made any kind of connection between Dante and the African American experience.  After reading the book (and, spurred by my reading, teaching a course called "Dante and African American Literature" with my African-Americanist colleague), its revelations, some of them stunning when I first came across them, now seem in my mind to belong to the "everyone knows this" category.  But everybody does not know them, and so Looney has opened up for us huge possibilities.  It will be interesting to see how much more we find now that we have found a new way to look.

Ronald Herzman

SUNY Geneseo

Risden: Alfgar's Stories from Beowulf

Edward L. Risden, Alfgar’s Stories from Beowulf.  E-book: Witan Publishing, 2013.

Reviewed by A. Keith Kelly, Georgia Gwinnett College (akelly@ggc.edu)

Revisiting the Middle Ages in order to find inspiration for the creation of something new is not a rare technique among authors.  Revisiting the Middle Ages to create something new that also seems like it is an authentic part of the Middle Ages, however, is a bit less common.  The latter is precisely what Ed Risden endeavors to accomplish in his book Alfgar’s Stories from Beowulf—and with notable success.  In this relatively short book—it comes in at 134 pages—Dr. Risden offers readers four original works of fiction (with a smattering of poetry embedded throughout), each connected in various ways to Beowulf.  “Grendel’s Mother” retells Beowulf from the somewhat removed and intensely personal perspective of the more celebrated monster’s mother.  “Lay of the Last Survivor” is the tale of a man devoted to a blood feud that leaves him bereft of hearth, kin and even his humanity. “Scyldingasaga” serves as a prequel to Beowulf, reaching back to the exploits of the hero’s renowned ancestors, Scyld and Beow.  The final tale, “Freawaru’s Lament,” expands upon a story hinted at in Beowulf about a woman whose peace-weaver marriage leads to life-long tragedy and grief.  The four tales are framed by the character of Alfgar, who is a poet, or scop, in the service of a monastery around the year 1000 (he asserts that his grandfather served King Æthelstan).  He is regaling a young monk in the scriptorium with stories that are a marked departure from the Christian tales prescribed by the abbot.  The young man listens eagerly and even consumes valuable parchment to record Alfgar’s words.  There is the suggestion that Alfgar may be the teller of Beowulf itself, and the young monk the reason it survives in manuscript form.  The interaction between these two characters bookends the tales, serving as Prologue and Epilogue.

Dr. Risden’s book really operates on three levels: one, as a work of carefully studied medievalism that echoes elements from Beowulf and early Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian culture, two, as a resonance of what might best be termed an Old English or Old Norse voice, and three, as a stand alone narrative work to be considered on its literary aesthetics.  As a notable medieval scholar it should come as no surprise that Dr. Risden provides rich material in accomplishing the first.  The second level of achievement is much more challenging, and Risden’s success there is noteworthy.  There exists—in three of the four stories at least—a real echo of the voice found in the early medieval epics and sagas.  The only shortcoming of the book, and this is not a failing but merely a limitation, lies in its aesthetics as a work of contemporary literature.  In large part because of how well Risden captures an archaic style of story-telling, some readers less attuned to the medievalisms in the book may find the narrative style of Alfgar’s Stories sparse and underdeveloped.

As a work of aesthetic fiction, “Grendel’s Mother” is the strongest in the collection and it should appeal to the widest variety of readers. Risden’s choice to place it in the primary position was well-advised as it is both haunting and compelling to the reader, and will undoubtedly be recognizable because of its direct connections with Beowulf.  Risden’s tight, first person narrative delves into the psychology of the monstrous mother, and the entire piece is spun out as an internal monologue by a beast that lacks the ability of speech but who possesses a complex identity.  She is a reclusive figure who is descended from Cain and powerfully connected to the natural, pagan world—while her beginnings were somewhat human, by the time of the story she has become something of an earth spirit who is strongly connected to the water as well.  Tormented by her own muteness and the violent, abusive passions of her son, Grendel’s mother in the end must seek the path of vengeance prescribed to all who have had a kinsman slain.  The presentation of her character invokes sympathy and pity, and not a small amount of respect as she fulfills the role of the devoted mother as well as the avenging kinswoman.  The first person perspective, that is so well-suited to psychological reflection, is reminiscent of John Gardner’s Grendel, and it is likely that Gardner’s novel served as an inspiration for Risden.  This tale is the most appealing in the book from a literary perspective, though on the other hand it contains fewer medievalisms than the other stories. 

While “Grendel’s Mother” is the leading literary achievement in the work, the “Lay of the Last Survivor” is arguably the most successful as a work of literature and medievalism.  With allusions to “The Wanderer” and Volsunga Saga, and a surprise connection to Beowulf at the end, this tale is rich with the spirit of early medieval Germanic culture.  The opening scene demonstrates all too well how fragile peace can be in a society dedicated to family honor, warfare and vengeance.  From a bloody beginning the account follows the character of Ormr, who over a life-time treads a path of violence in pursuit first of revenge, then glory, then material gain until he is literally the last man left alive from two feuding tribes.  From that point Risden goes on to explore what becomes of the life of a man who has devoted himself to the destruction of life and the attainment of material things once all are slain and those things have lost all satisfaction.  The result is a loss of humanity that becomes more than metaphorical.  In addition to its connections to several medieval sources, the “Lay of the Last Survivor” shares resonances with a number of Tolkien’s works—not surprising given Tolkien’s fascination with the same material that inspires Risden, and the latter’s interests in the works of the renowned author.  The story covers a wide swath of years and the pace of the narrative is consequently swift.  Missing throughout most of the story are narrative features such as dialogue, character development and detailed descriptions of action, place or person.  The style is rather that of an oral storyteller spinning out what is the story of a whole lifetime in the span of an hour.  This heavy reliance on exposition is precisely what marks Alfgar’s Stories as being what meadhall tales might have actually been like.  The story is stark in theme, tone and presentation, concerned more with the medieval ideas conveyed than the modern art of fiction writing.  While the tale itself is fascinating, the result of the style is one that creates a sense of authenticity that will appeal to some, and leave others perhaps a bit wanting. 

In both “Scyldingasaga” and “Freawaru’s Lament” Risden picks up threads of stories found, but not expounded upon, in Beowulf.  The former is simply, and quite entertainingly, the story of Scyld Scefing, his son Beowulf the Dane (referred to in the tale as Beo), his son Halfdane and ultimately, though not treated in the work itself, Hrothgar.  As heralded in the opening lines of Beowulf, Scyld and his son are remarkable heroes, giant-slayers and templates for “good kings.”  The story, with its mythical beasts, legendary accomplishments and fast pace smacks of the Old Norse fornaldarsögur, as is appropriate for their characters and content.  There is a celebratory feel to the exploits of these figures of a legendary past that echoes the enthusiasm of the Beowulf poet.  In contrast, “Freawaru’s Lament” picks up on the tragic undertones of Beowulf’s words to Hygelac concerning the marriage of Hrothgar’s daughter to Ingeld of the Heathobards.  Beowulf’s remarks—beginning at line 2025—forecast a bleak outcome and Risden’s tale carries through on that promise.  In an effort to weave peace between the Danes and the Heathobards, young Freawaru is married to Ingeld, the heroic warrior king.  In spite of Hrothgar’s intentions, however, the peace is broken.  Ingeld ends up lost, wandering the world, and Freawaru is as steadfast in her devotion to finding him as she is bound to the grief caused by the loss of her family.  As someone on both sides of the feud she is the ultimate tragic figure.  While the view of the past in “Scyldingasaga” is as glorious and joyous as its heroes, the view of the future in “Freawaru’s Lament” is as desolate as the broken heart of Freawaru herself.  This split view of the past and the future echoes the northern pagan beliefs themselves—the concept of a glorious past and the bleak future of Ragnarok.  The dichotomy likewise captures a very real sense of the tensions and struggles of the Christian/pagan world of the northern Germanic peoples around the year 1000.  And though both texts also move quickly and somewhat sparsely in terms of narrative craft, they offer tantalizing and once again compellingly authentic looks into the literary past.

The book closes as it opens, back in the scriptorium with Alfgar speaking to the young scribe.  While there is the promise of more tales to come, the entrance of Father Alaric—one of the most austere and pious of the monastery’s denizens—brings to an abrupt end the stories of Alfgar.  Admonishing the story-telling as a waste of time, Alaric condemns such heathen tales, echoing Alcuin’s words of centuries earlier, “What has Ingeld to do with Christ?”  This epilogue, by describing the disdain for the past, offers a counterpoint to the prologue, which expressed a youthful enthusiasm for the old stories.  Again, these contrasting views present the dichotomy between past and present, pagan and Christian, that must have been a real struggle for the English at the turn of the millennium.  It also, in an indirect way, highlights the strengths and limitations of Risden’s book.  As an echo of a medieval past—in tone, in themes, in voice, and in style—it is a distinctive and captivating achievement.  As a work of contemporary fiction—which its author may not even intend it to be—it is certainly unique, but perhaps some will view it as being a bit scant in its narrative craft and stylings.  As a work of medievalism it is inarguably a success.

A. Keith Kelly, Georgia Gwinnett College

Mad Max: The Fury Road

Mad Max in the Castle of the Grail Maidens

Mad Max: The Fury Road, dir. George Miller (Kennedy Miller Productions and Village Roadshow Pictures, ©2015)

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University (harty@lasalle.edu)

This, the fourth installment in director George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, is neither sequel nor prequel nor remake.  Rather, it is simply a continuation of the eponymous hero’s quest for meaning in life, albeit a continuation in which he plays a decidedly secondary role.  Just before the final credits as the screen fades to black, the following title appears: “Where must we go . . . we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves.”  The quotation is attributed to the “First History Man,” an attribution—the source is the screenwriters themselves—both puzzling and problematic depending upon how gendered the word man is meant to be.  Fury Road is, at its heart, a radical regendering, if not queering, of the Mad Max franchise.  Bits and bobs, small (a wind-up music box played by the Feral Kid in the second film) and large (the preciousness and scarcity of gasoline), reappear in Fury Road from the three earlier films: Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), but Fury Road is a very different kind of film about very different issues.

Decidedly less plot driven than its three predecessors, Fury Road in the main consists of two extended chases, one away from and one back to the Citadel, the castle-like base of the tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a disfigured hunk of a man who recalls the Humungus in Road Warrior.  Joe enslaves the remnants of humanity in a vast wasteland by controlling the supply of water, oil, and, interestingly, mother’s milk, as he sets out to breed a progeny to ensure dynastic continuation of his control.  He has already fathered two sons, one a horribly deformed dwarf ironically named Corpus Colossus (Quentin Kenihan) and the other a mindless hulk of an automaton named Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones), and Joe keeps a Harem of five women to impregnate to bear him even more sons.  Joe’s army consists of white skinned genetic mutant fanatics called War Boys, who regularly require periodic blood transfusions from captives who have been turned into human blood bags.

The earlier three Max films had been less than subtly homoerotic.  The leather uniforms, souped- up cars and motorcycles of the first film gave way to outright homosexual couplings and torture scenes in the second to a gay icon, Tina Turner, as female lead in the third. Fury Road is devoid of any hint of the homoerotic; indeed, there is very little sex at all in the film.  But the central character, who constantly upstages Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky, is Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa, whom we later learn is a member of a matriarchal tribe called the Vuvalini.  With her almost-shaved head and prosthetic right arm, Furiosa is a match for anyone, male or female, and her actions drive the plot.  She decides to rescue Joe’s five brides—“We are no man’s property” reads a slogan painted on their Harem chamber wall.  She devises a plot to exchange oil for safe passage through enemy lands, she rescues Max, and she is the character who finally comes to seek redemption—and unlike the three previous films in the franchise, Fury Road, is, in the final analysis, a film about finding redemption—by returning to the “Green Place.”  She queers the franchise in a number of other ways.  Her title “Imperator” is the masculine form in Latin, but her name, “Furiosa,” is the feminine, and that name recalls the hero of Ludovico Ariosto’s early sixteenth century epic poem Orlando Furioso, another character bent on rescue and redemption, who abandons his leader.  While Joe’s five brides may dress in at times admittedly ridiculous variations on wedding dresses, Furiosa’s outfits are decidedly non-gendered, and her hair style and grease-painted forehead further queer her identity.

Paul B. Sturtevant has recently discussed the ways in which The Road Warrior is and is not a Grail film and Max himself is and is not a Grail Knight (“A Grail or a Mirage? Searching the Wasteland of The Road Warrior,” pp. 173-186 in The Holy Grail on Film, Essays on the Cinematic Quest, ed. Kevin J. Harty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015).  Fury Road is much more decidedly a Quest film.  The Grails here are several: water, gasoline, mother’s milk, the elusive Green Place, the Valhalla that Joe promises his young followers, even Joe’s Harem who are referred to as “breeders.”  And the Grail questors are many: Max, Furiosa, the Mad Boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult) who eventually abandons Joe and joins Furiosa in opposing him, and all the Vuvalini.  And both the presence of the Vuvalini and the film’s conclusion in which the matriarchy trumps the patriarchy as the Citadel, like the now-lost Green Place before it, becomes a gynotopia are what most radically queer the Max franchise.  

As the film opens, Max is alone, haunted by memories of his daughter and wife, whose death he was unable to prevent earlier in the films in the franchise.  His meditative moment literally lasts just a moment, as he is immediately captured by a marauding group of Mad Boys and turned into the most-prized of blood bags because he is O negative, once thought the blood type of those who were safely universal donors.  The film never quite explains what is wrong with the Mad Boys, but their anemic appearance, their lack of body hair, and their regular need for blood transfusions suggest some kind of fatal hemolytic genetic disorder and their tumor-like lumps suggest some form of cancer.  That there are no old Mad Boys also suggests that their life span is decidedly limited.  In addition to frequent transfusions, they are further sustained by their rabid devotion to Joe who rewards them by spraying their mouths with chrome-colored paint, which presumably induces some kind of high, and who promises them glory in Valhalla if they should die fighting for him. Religion in the film is at best murky—later in the film, one of Joe’s brides prays for deliverance while admitting that she has no idea to whom (or what) she is praying.  In Norse mythology, Valhalla is, of course, the heaven that welcomes warriors who die weapon in hand, but the youthful unswerving fanaticism of the War Boys who keenly expect paradise in exchange for martyrdom has contemporary echoes not easily lost on moviegoers today.

Max and Furiosa cross paths when she decides to liberate Joe’s brides—the Harem being yet another nod to contemporary religious issues—and to return with them to the Green Place of her youth.  Since the mythological quest in general and the Grail quest in particular are always fluid, just who plays which role in a retelling of either quest can vary.  If, in the earlier films, Max was Perceval like, it is tempting, at first, to follow Chrétien’s lead and see Furiosa as Gauvain (Gawain) to Max’s Perceval, but given the narrative arc of the film, it is Furiosa who better fits the role of Perceval and Max, that of Gauvain.  In Chrétien, while the narrative tracks the parallel adventures of both knights, it eventually comes to focus solely on those of Perceval.  So too in the film, Furiosa becomes the final focus—the Imperator of the Citadel—as Max fades into the crowd at the end of Fury Road, perhaps to return in future films, perhaps not.

As I indicated earlier, Fury Road queers the Mad Max franchise, but it also queers the Grail quest.  There are five Grail maidens locked in a castle and in need of rescue, and that castle is the main repository for three of the film’s Grails: gasoline, water, and mother’s milk. Elsewhere in the castle, women are literally milked by machines for their breast milk. And Furiosa’s War Rig is stocked with gasoline and with mother’s milk.  In one telling scene, Max washes the blood of those whom he has just killed from off of his face and hands in a bucket of mother’s milk—pace Freud!  Fury Road’s Max is as taciturn as his franchise predecessors, and it is Furiosa who asks him the key question—“what is your name?”—to which she receives no immediate reply—again in the legend, it is Perceval who must ask a question.  Eventually he will tell her his name is “Max.”  The first word of the film’s subtle nods to Furiosa, and it is Furiosa who is intent upon seeking redemption, specifically by returning to, or ultimately by reinventing, the Green Place.  At first, in the franchise, Max is looking for revenge; here, he has settled for looking for meaning in life. It is Furiosa, who heals all wounds, though she does first need a transfusion from Max, and her final act is to unleash the healing waters of Aqua Cola from deep within the Citadel, as she and her Vuvalini sisters recreate the Green Place on its site.  Joe’s Harem are also hardly blushing brides.  Despite their peculiar names—Toast the Knowing, The Splendid Angharad, Capable, The Dag, and Cheedo the Fragile—each holds her own in a number of battle scenes.  But it is Furiosa who becomes the Perceval figure in what is admittedly a fascinating, and perhaps brilliant, queering of the traditional Grail quest.

Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University