Shirt of Nessus
In
Mythology
Fearing that Heracles had taken a new lover in
Metaphorically, it represents "a source of misfortune from which there is no escape; a fatal present; anything that wounds the susceptibilities"[3] or a "destructive or expiatory force or influence".[4]
Historical references
Münster Rebellion
During the
Hitler plot
Major-General
References in literature
John Barth
The Shirt of Nessus (1952) is the master's
Robert Duncan
In the "Introduction" to Bending the Bow: "Pound sought coherence in The Cantos and comes in Canto 116 to lament 'and I cannot make it cohere.' But the 'SPLENDOUR, IT ALL COHERES' of the poet's Herakles in The Women of Trachis is a key or recognition of a double meaning that turns in the lock of the Nessus shirt."
In Audit/Poetry IV.3, issue featuring Robert Duncan, in his long polemic with Robin Blaser's translation of The Chimeras of Gérard de Nerval, which Duncan believes deliberately and fatally omit the mystical and gnostic overtones of the original, Duncan writes: "The mystical doctrine of neo-Pythagorean naturalism has become like a Nessus shirt to the translator, and in the translation we hear Heracles' tortured cry from Pound's version of the Women of Trachis from Sophokles: 'it all coheres.'"
Hyam Plutzik
In Hyam Plutzik's poem "Portrait", which appears in his collection Apples From Shinar, the poet writes of a Jewish-American character in the late 1950s who has successfully assimilated, and is able to "ignore the monster, the mountain—/A few thousand years of history." Except for one problem, "one ill-fitting garment…The shirt, the borrowed shirt, /The Greek shirt." The last line reveals the "Greek shirt" is "a shirt by Nessus."
Other appearances in fiction
- In Jurgen, the title character dons the shirt of Nessus and is transported by it on his travels, in the end of the story he is allowed to take it off, in contradiction to the usual conventions.
- Lucy Larcom's anti-war and anti-slavery ballad "Weaving" is a soliloquy of a northern factory woman working at her loom who compares the cloth she weaves with a Nessus-robe for the Southern slave women who suffered to produce the cotton.
References in Film and Television
- In the 1994 movie Hercules in the Underworld, similar to the original myth, Nessus tricks Deianeira into believing his blood will keep Hercules faithful. When she suspects Hercules is having an affair with Iole, she sends him a cloak smeared with the blood. When he puts it on, it comes to life and tries to strangle him, but he manages to tear it off and destroy it.
References in non-fiction
- The Shirt of Nessus is a 1956 non-fiction book dealing with anti-Nazi groups in Germany during World War II.
- The Polish dissident writer Jan Józef Lipski published a collection of essays called Tunika Nessosa ("The Shirt of Nessos"), dealing with, and critical of, Polish Catholic nationalism. Lipski called nationalism the shirt of Nessos, which destroys the cultural genius of a nation.
- Uri Avnery has compared the territories occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War to the Shirt of Nessus.[6]
References
- ^ Aarne-Thompson motif D1402.5 "Nessus shirt burns wearer up", as described in Mayor
- ^ Biblioteca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, Section 2.7.6
- ^ E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898. online
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary
- ^ Mommsen, H., Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance Under the Third Reich (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p. 7.
- ^ Avnery, Uri (15 June 2013). "Triumph and Tragedy". Gush Shalom. Archived from the original on 18 June 2013.
Bibliography
- Baughman, Ernest W., Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America, Walter De Gruyter, June 1966. ISBN 90-279-0046-9.
- Mayor, Adrienne, "The Nessus Shirt in the New World: Smallpox Blankets in History and Legend," Journal of American Folklore 108:427:54 (1995).
External links
- Hercules Poisoned by the Shirt of Nessus, a 15th-century illumination at the Getty Museum.