The Jesuit and the Alien Brothel; Or, The Poetics of Problematic Historiographies in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow by Kenneth Miyazaki, San Diego State University

July 30, 2009 by Leave a Comment

The provocative novel, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, begins in the year 2060, 40 years after humans first discovered hauntingly beautiful music being broadcasted from the Alpha Centauri system.  The world voyeuristically awaits any snippets of news about Father Emilio Sandoz, a priest and the only surviving member of an exploratory mission commissioned by the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, to seek out the origin of these strange broadcasts.  The novel then makes an abrupt and dizzying jump 40 years back in time to 2020 and relates the fateful events that led Jimmy Quinn, an astronomer and friend of Father Sandoz, to extract the strange alien hymn from a sequence of radio waves.  Russell creates her own idiosyncratic but elegant progression as her narrative alternates between the exuberance of first contact in 2020 and the physically and emotionally broken Father Sandoz returning to earth in 2060.

Within months of the revelation of sentient life in the Alpha Centauri system, the Jesuits quietly financed a mission to explore the alien civilization, directed by their credo, ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God.  When word of the mission goes public, the United Nations then sends another mission to retrieve them.  When the rescue mission arrives on the alien planet, Rakhat, three years after the Jesuit mission made first contact, they discover that the sole survivor of the party is Father Sandoz.  He is then recovered by the U.N. mission and sent back to Earth in a ship set to autopilot.  Preceding him are lurid reports broadcast by the U.N. crew that he had killed the child who led the U.N. crew to him and had become a prostitute in an alien brothel while stranded on Rakhat.  Because of the physics of going at near light speed, the rest of the world has aged forty years while Father Sandoz has barely aged six when he finally returns to Earth more dead than alive.  Among his many infirmities, the aliens of the planet Rakhat surgically removed the muscles from his palms before grafting them onto his fingers, grotesquely elongating them.

As Father Sandoz recovers under the care of his superior, the Father General of the Society of Jesus, he must decide whether he will explain himself to the Father General or remain silent.  By finally deciding to justify himself by participating in a tribunal convened by the Father General, Father Sandoz not only defends himself, but the act of telling his own story allows him to reconnect with the traditional sources of his identity, such as his place within the Jesuit hierarchy, and also suture his own fragmented self.  Furthermore, his testimony not only restores mental and communal integrity, but also it provides the occasion that allows the voices of his dead friends and crewmates to be rescued from silence and oblivion: they live again in the dialogic space that Father Sandoz opens up.  Father Sandoz’s act of recounting the tragedy on Rakhat not only allows Father Sandoz to lay the ghosts of his friends to rest, but also Father Sandoz’s willingness to testify in the tribunal is the event that symbolically permits the events on Rakhat to be revealed both within the novel and at the metatexual level.  The finally, Father Sandoz’s testimonial performs one more function: it disrupts the seemingly insuperable forces that dominate both the novel and the real world of the reader, namely the governing discourse of transnational capitalism.

The novel’s plot has two narrative strains that switch back and forth with each other as the novel progresses.  The first strain begins in 2060 with Father Sandoz returning from the Alpha Centauri planet of Rakhat.  It covers his convalescence, his decision to participate in an inquiry into the expedition and his subsequent testimony before the Father General, Vincenzo Giuliani.  The second strain is positioned 40 years earlier in 2020.  It begins with the first discovery of the Rakhati broadcast, the events of the expeditionary mission on Rakhat and the mysterious disaster that leaves everyone but Father Sandoz dead.

While this narrative split is at first disorienting, its broken and fractured structure is meant to mirror the recently returned Father Sandoz’s precarious mental state.  Discussing two authors, Bao Ninh and Erich Maria Remarque, who were both combat veterans before becoming authors, Jane Robinett writes that, “the recursive, splintered, tangled cadence of psychological trauma” can “[provide] the essential framework” for the shape of a narrative.[1]  She goes on to write, “If Remarque and Bao Ninh are to successfully re/present the experience of war and of the combat soldier in texts that bind narrative and experience into a homologous relationship capable of reconstructing and recuperating the traumatic experiences they have survived, they must find appropriate structures to embody these disruptions.”[2]

Even though Russell, as the author, is the creator and mediator of Father Sandoz’s experiences, she nevertheless remains sensitive to how Father Sandoz’s trauma shapes and warps the novel’s narrative landscape.  Rather than Russell using a straightforward linear narrative that begins in 2020 and ends in 2060, she instead makes the death of the expeditionary mission, Father Sandoz’s internment in the alien brothel, and the death of the Rakhati child the center toward which both narrative strains move.  It is as though these traumas act as a black hole with Father Sandoz’s psyche unable to escape their gravity.  The trauma must be obsessively revisited, even if it is never to be truly transcended.

With each recursive reevaluation, the significance and meaning of the trauma changes as the victim attempts to transform the trauma from an incongruous and anomalous event to one that can be integrated into the victim’s traditional “belief systems on which [she builds], and with which [she defends], [her] individual and collective [identity].”[3]  The narrative is structured such that the traumatic events on Rakhat become the telos of both narrative strains: the second narrative strain, which begins in 2020, ends with the U.N.’s rescue of Father Sandoz from the alien brothel, and it seamlessly dissolves into the 2060 narrative strain at the point of Father Sandoz’s climactic avowal of innocence before the Father General at the novel’s conclusion.

When Father Sandoz testifies before the Father General, his testimonial is both a public act of defense before his superior and a very private meditation on the nature of God’s engagement with Creation.  What makes Father Sandoz’s reflections on what led to the disaster on Rakhat so painful is not just the trauma of the events themselves, but also the ironic juxtaposition of the broken down Father Sandoz of 2060 against the Father Sandoz of 2020 who naively believes that God is calling him to the Alpha Centauri system.  When Jimmy Quinn, the astronomer who first uncovers the radio broadcast from Rakhat, shares his discovery with his close friends, among them Father Sandoz, Sandoz is immediately convinced that it is more than a coincident that they are together to hear the alien music.  For Father Sandoz, it is a sign from God that they are all meant to travel to the origin of the broadcast as a group.  For Father Sandoz, atheism or agnosticism had never been a possibility, but until then he had only felt God’s presence obliquely through his work with the poor, the oppressed and war refugees.  When he hears the broadcast from Rakhat, for the first time in his life Father Sandoz believes that God is directly communicating with him.

But the reader is already aware of the dramatic irony embedded in Father Sandoz’s initial exuberance and knows how his mission to Rakhat will end.  Furthermore, the Father Sandoz of 2060 is also keenly aware of this irony.  It is as though by allowing her readers to share the same perspective as Father Sandoz, Russell forces both to puzzle over the questions together.  The novel dramatizes ancient but enduring questions of people trying to identify God’s presence in the world: do our experiences point to a God actively and intimately involved in the temporal world, or do they instead give evidence of a silent and distant God?  If they point to a God who personally intervenes in the world, how does one act in accordance with His will?  When Father Sandoz returns from Rakhat, there is one more question that he is desperate to answer: do his traumatic experiences stand as evidence of God’s mysterious and inscrutable ways, or do they instead demonstrate His intentional malevolence?  Thus questions that begin as a search for God’s immanence in the world end as questions of theodicy.

Russell works to make these questions relevant and relatable to a contemporary audience.  One way she accomplishes this is by using technology to dramatize much older orders of religious experience.  For instance, first contact with the inhabitants of Rakhat is analogized to the dynamics of divine call and response.  The astronomer and computer programmer Jimmy Quinn discovers the alien music by running a collection of radio waves through an audio synthesizing program.  Quinn says that most astronomers who had been searching for extraterrestrial life had expected first contact to come in the form of binary codes, not music.  Quinn’s decision to run the radio waves through an audio synthesizing program to yield music was pure intuition.  The analogy to divine call and response is unmistakable: only through intuition can one properly interpret the “broadcasts” of God in the midst of the seemingly random events of one’s life.

According to the dynamics of call and response, God calls each person to participate in His divine plan.  Each person’s ability to recognize and respond to this calling is an act of grace, but it is also voluntary: one is free to either accept or decline the divine call.  If one does accept, one enters into a covenant with God.  This covenant is never permanent, irrevocable or definitive; rather, its continuance is based on the human party’s willing performance of God’s will.  Furthermore, the human party’s participation in the covenant is always based upon its consent and it is always free to opt out of the covenant.[4]  For the Father Sandoz of 2020, the call from God seems unmistakable, and he willingly and freely responds to it.  Even after the mission to Rakhat is overtaken by tragedy, Father Sandoz testifies that he never sold his body, an act that would violate his vow of celibacy.  It is as though even if Father Sandoz feels himself to be in a covenant with a malevolent God, he is still unwilling to repudiate his covenant with God, as though to spite Him.  Remaining faithful to his vows seems more significant to Father Sandoz himself as a sign of his dignity and personal integrity than his fidelity to God.

The subjective nature of divine call and response betrays its disquieting indeterminacy.  Though God’s will in the world will theoretically further our progress toward the “one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves,”[5] in practice knowing exactly what God is calling each of us to do is a much more dicey proposition.  If God is indeed broadcasting messages to all of us here on Earth, what exactly is He asking us to do?  What are the terms of the covenant?  Is there even a covenant?  This is to say, is God even calling us, or rather is what one believes to be a divine call simply one projecting one’s own ego into the world and mistaking its echo for the voice of God?  For Father Sandoz there is no doubt: because each member of his circle of friends has a specialty that would be indispensable for a mission to the Alpha Centauri system, he believes that God is obviously calling them all to the stars.  Quoting Mother Theresa, Father Sandoz says to his friend and subsequent crewmate Dr. Anne Edwards: “‘“God does not require us to succeed.  He only requires us to try,’”[6] which is to say, God requires us to respond to His call.

Another factor that Father Sandoz interprets as signaling that he is meant to travel into space is that by 2020, interstellar space travel is technologically possible, if untried.  The Alpha Centauri system is the closest solar system to our own.  According to Jimmy Quinn’s calculations, the system itself is four light years away, but for a ship to accelerate to near light speed and then decelerate at the proper rate, the travel time would be 17 years for people living on Earth relative to an interlude of seven months for the people on board the ship.[7] If divine call and response masquerade as radio broadcasts, radio telescopes and audio synthesizing programs, then traveling at light speed also assumes a religious significance.  Speaking to Father Sandoz about the quirks of traveling near the speed of light, his friend and subsequent crewmate George Edwards says, “‘Nobody understands this the first time they hear about it […] And most people who think about it at all just accept that the math works out this way.  But let’s say you go to Alpha Centauri and come straight back.  When you get home, the people you left would be thirty-four years older but you’d only have aged about a year, because time slows down when you’re near light speed.’”[8]

The first part of George’s statement, “Nobody understands this the first time they hear about it . . . And most people who think about it at all just accept that the math works out this way,” is a declaration of faith in an abstract system that could be Einsteinian physics just as well as religion.  The second part of his statement is less reassuring: traveling at the speed of light will radically disrupt one’s communal ties, a traditional foundation of identity.  At this point, Russell performs a cunning sleight of hand that transforms a cultural anxiety about speed into something that has a distinctly religious resonance.  The disruptive effects of traveling at the speed of light address the anxieties of speed: the discourses that speed privileges emphasize “production, consumption, acceleration, modification, termination, recuperation” as “the definitive measure of […] value,”[9] discourses that are inherently dehumanizing and alienating.  But what could become a heavy-handed critique of our culture’s obsession with speed is transformed into something else.  Not speed, but responding to the divine call profoundly breaks the expeditionary crew’s communal ties.  This is because one “will stand out as anomalous, impossible to integrate, ‘other’”[10] if one obeys the prerogatives of a divine call above the priorities of the community.  This elegant symbolism follows a pattern Russell uses consistently throughout the novel of imbuing technology with religious significance.

Speed has other disruptive effects that the novel suggests can be salutary and potentially liberating.  Russell does highlight some particularly disruptive effects of time travel.  For instance, Father General Vincenzo Giuliani entered the Formation for Priesthood three years after Father Sandoz, but while Giuliani is in his late seventies in 2060, Sandoz is in his mid 40s.  But for a novel that is set in the near future and that makes such rapid chronological leaps, what is perhaps even more surprising is just how predictable and recognizable are Russell’s 2020 and 2060.

Though this at first seems counterintuitive, if the reader notes the lines of continuity from the real world to the fictional world of The Sparrow, Russell’s 2020 and 2060 do not only seem plausible but downright inevitable.  Among political, economic, technological and social changes, Puerto Rico has become the 51st state, the United States has lost its superpower status after being outfoxed by Japan in a trade war, Poland has become a volatile but rapidly emerging economic power akin to the real world India or China, and the field of Artificial Intelligence has advanced to the point that not even scientists and linguists are above being replaced by computer programs.

In the fictional 2020, war and poverty are so endemic that private individuals and companies are allowed to sweep the war zones and overcrowded orphanages and “adopt” children who show promise.  The children are then educated, and in return they are indentured for as much as 25 years to their patrons, a system likened to intellectual prostitution.  Sophia Mendez, one of the crewmembers of the Rakhati mission, was one of these indentured servants after being culled from an Istanbul devastated during the Turkish Civil War.  It is no mistake that before Sophia sold herself intellectually to her patron, Jean-Claude Jaubert, she survived by selling her body after both of her parents were killed.

By Sandoz’s return in 2060, these centrifugal forces have taken their logical course: among other developments, the United States is no longer a single nation and the Society of Jesus has seceded from the Catholic Church over the issue of birth control and the fallout from the Society’s unsanctioned mission to Rakhat.  In our post-national, post-industrial and increasingly privatized world, Russell’s postulations do not seem all that far-fetched.  Indeed, just as Father Sandoz is never portrayed as astonished by these developments, the reader too accepts these as well within the range of possibility.  In the near future of Russell’s The Sparrow, wealthy private citizens and powerful corporations (like the Society of Jesus) seem unbound by the laws of traditional nation-states.  For instance, the alacrity and vigor of the Jesuits in organizing the expeditionary mission to Rakhat is contrasted against the United Nations, which is impeded by years of bureaucracy and squabbling before they reach a consensus.  Russell constructs a near future that is neither apocalyptic nor utopian; rather, her near future is one that conforms to her reader’s reasonable expectations concerning the rise of corporate power.  In essence, she plays out the deterministic forces that are transforming her reader’s own world in less spectacular, but in no less radical ways.

The complexity of Russell’s novel is built on an intricate and dazzling interplay between contemporary real world trends, their persistence into the landscape of her novel, and the shared circumstances of both her reader and her characters as they are both forced to adapt to and negotiate within systems that work to silence them or rob them of agency.  In other words, Russell recognizes real world dynamics, that of the emergent domination of corporations and transnational capitalism at the expense of traditional nation-states, and then she project them into her fictional world. By confirming the ascendancy of corporations in her fictional world, it seems as though Russell imbricates both her readers and her characters in the same ineluctable totality. Contemporary readers who have been laid off of from their jobs or have had their homes foreclosed during the recent economic crisis immediately empathize with the plight of Sophia Mendez, all victims of forces beyond their control.  And the reader is taken aback when Russell discusses Father Sandoz’s humanitarian work in, of all places, Sudan.

When the expeditionary crew travels to Rakhat, the act of traveling at the speed of light is used to symbolically reach escape velocity from these politically and economically deterministic forces.  If these overweening forces dictate the arc of the linear timeline of 2020-2060, then the act of traveling at light speed is what grants the explorers the ability to defy and transcend them and write their own unique, if tragic, narrative.  It introduces a different type of temporal consciousness, a religious consciousness that privileges repositories of memory and sites of experience.  Charles Taylor distinguishes between different registers of time in his book, A Secular Age.  He contrasts linear, “temporal” and “secular” time against an order of time that is pegged to some eternal order, such as Platonic Forms or Christian eschatology.  This register of time is what Taylor calls “higher times”:

“Secular” time is what to us is ordinary time, indeed, to us it’s just time, period.  One thing happens after another, and when something is past, it’s past.  Time placings are consistently transitive.  If A is before B and B before C, then A is before C.  The same goes if we quantify these relationships: if A is long before B, and B long before C, then A is very long before C.[11]

Applying this simple, linear schema to The Sparrow, it is as though the reader is living in A, and the novel depicts the events of the near future in B and C.  Even though B and C may exist in a fictional world, the genealogy that Russell constructs is so insidious and seemingly inescapable because it is anchored in real world dynamics.  Seemingly self-evident and inviolable divisions between the real world and Russell’s fictional world become fluid, and both seem to occupy the same unsettlingly liminal space.
Taylor then goes on to describe what constitutes “higher times:”

Now higher times gather and re-order secular time.  They introduce “warps” and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering.  Events which were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked.  Benedict Anderson in a penetrating discussion of the some of the same issues I am trying to describe here, quotes Auerbach on the relation prefiguring-fulfilling in which events of the old Testament were held to stand to those in the New, for instance the sacrifice of Isaac and the Crucifixion of Christ.  These two events were linked through their immediate contiguous places in the divine plan.  They are drawn close to identity in eternity, even though they are centuries (that is, “aeons” or “saecula”) apart.  In God’s time there is a sort of simultaneity of sacrifice and Crucifixion.

Similarly, Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997.  Once events are situated in relation to more than one kind of time, the issue of time-placing becomes quite transformed.

Why are higher times higher?  The answer is easy for the eternity which Europe inherits from Plato and Greek philosophy.  The really real, full being is outside of time, unchanging.  Time is a moving image of eternity.  It is imperfect, or tends to imperfection.[12]

Taylor provides a theoretical framework through which the novel’s two structures of time can be compared. Secular time corresponds to the linear timeline of 2020-2060.  Of course, the narrative structure of the novel does not follow a strict linear path.  This essay has already argued that the novel’s narrative structure is warped in order to reflect Father Sandoz’s trauma.  Another factor shaping the unique narrative structure is the distinctive qualities of “higher times,” where time is organized around events that resonate from and point towards an eternal order.

Another parallel that trauma and higher times both share is their recursive natures.  Colin Burrow, discussing the “temporal uncertainty” of John Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity writes, “the events of the Christian ritual year have the unique quality of being at once single historical actions (Christ was born on one day) and repeated ritual events (Christ is born on every day on which Christmas is celebrated.)”[13] These events that are ritualistically commemorated are similar in nature to Father Sandoz’s trauma: they are both anomalous, but ultimately they must be integrated into the flow of history in order to be of communal significance. Father Sandoz’s experiences, especially his trauma, take on the characteristics of an organizing locus of “higher times.”  He is at once a freak, anomalous, “other,” marked by his mysterious surgery and an object of curiosity for the voyeuristic public, but he must also ritualistically reenact and re/present his trauma before the Father General if he is to transform his experience into something beyond the bitterness trauma.

At the climax of his testimony, Father Sandoz finally begins to reveal what led to the catastrophe on Rakhat.  When the expeditionary crew reaches Rakhat, they meet two sentient species, the Runa and the Jana’ata.  The Runa is the prey species and their movements and reproductive rights are controlled by the Jana’ata.  When the expeditionary crew teaches the Runa how to cultivate gardens, the excess calories in their diets trigger their reproductive cycles, causing them to breed without Jana’ata consent.  When the Jana’ata retaliate against this breach of protocol, the expeditionary crew is slaughtered along with the offending Runa and Father Sandoz is taken captive.

Eventually, Father Sandoz is put into the custody of a Jana’ata merchant whom he had befriended, but when it seems that Father Sandoz is safe, the hand mutilating surgery is performed on him without the significance of the procedure ever revealed.  Symbolically, it represents the cost of transcending the flow and flux of secular time, of daring, first, to enter “higher times,” and then introducing it as a disruptive force within the diachronic, linear flow of the narrative.  Father Sandoz’s testimony is such a defiant challenge to the seemingly inescapable logic of the dominant discourse because it seemingly does the impossible: it provides alternatives.

The introduction of an alternative way of valuing and accounting for human experience reveals the possibility of evading and subverting the dominant discourse. Indeed, this dominant discourse’s tacit representation of itself shadows the more visible but tentative self-representation of Father Sandoz, silently fashioning the myth of its omniscience and omnipotence.  This myth always threatens to co-opt the narrative structure or efface the personal stories of the characters.  This is most evident in the case of Sophia Mendez, who literally becomes a commodity and a token of commercial exchange within this system. The excursion to Rakhat, far from posing a danger to Father Sandoz’s life, becomes the “proof” of his existence and enables him to become the symbolic and literal incarnation of “higher times.”

Eventually, Sandoz is exchanged one more time and put into the brothel of Hlavin Kitheri, an aesthete and member of the Jana’ata royalty.  Sandoz’s encounter with Hlavin is saturated with ironies.  For instance, he learns that the songs that first brought him to Rakhat were composed by Hlavin.  The subject of these songs, so beautiful that most people on Earth believed them to be liturgical music, were at best ephemera and at worst pronographic.  In fact, Hlavin even composed songs extemporaneously and broadcast them as he was raping Father Sandoz.  Thus if the temporal call to Rakhat (i.e. the radio broadcast) originated from a truly despicable source, Father Sandoz is tortured by the possibility that the divine call to Rakhat comes from an equally malevolent source (i.e. God).  There is one other crucial tie between Hlavin and God: Sandoz identifies both of them as his rapist.  To the Father General, he says, “‘Can you guess what I thought just before I was used the first time?’ he asked them as he began to pace.  ‘This is rich.  This is very funny!  You see, I was scarred but I didn’t understand what was going on.  I never imagined—who could have imagined such a thing?  I am in God’s hands, I thought.  I love God and I trust in His love.  Amusing, isn’t it?  I laid down all my defenses.  I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God.  And I was raped.  I was naked before God and I was raped.’”[14]

Father Sandoz’s testimony of his rape is itself a kind of performance, a ritualistic identification with and reenactment of his own passion: it is at once his justification that he had remained faithful to his holy orders (i.e. he was raped and did not sell his body) and his means of healing his own sense of personal violation and his loss of faith in a benevolent God.  His reenactment in and inward interpretation of his own existential drama supplants his earlier performative response to God’s call. Perhaps most significantly, it is not portrayed as his definitive reconciliation with or renunciation of God.  Rather than creating a resolution, his testimony makes possible the discursive space necessary to give expression to the hostile, ambiguous and unstable feelings of betrayal which coexist with his lingering faith in an inscrutable God.

Finally, Father Sandoz’s testimonial introduces “higher times” into the narrative. “Higher Times” explode the hermetically sealed and hermetically sealing poitical and economic forces that dominate Father Sandoz’s world as well as our own.  Father Sandoz is a character of possibilities: the possibility of writing our own stories despite the deterministic forces that would write them for us, and the possibility of enduring long enough to rediscover ourselves despite the enthropy and inertia of an exhausted world.

REFERENCES

Castle, Gregory. The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell  Publishing, 2007.

Burrow, Colin. “Poems 1645: the future poet.” The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Ed. Dennis Danielson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 54-69.

Ecstasy of speed: SDSU crisis carnival 2009. (2009). Retrieved May 13, 2009, from http://crisiscarnival.sdsu.edu/

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. By Michel Foucault. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 139-164.

Khan, Victoria. “The metaphorical contract in Milton’s Tenure of King’s and Magistrates.” Milton and Republicanism. Ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 82-105.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. By Virginia Woolf et al. Ed. Francine Prose. London: Harcourt Inc., 2003. 119-135.

Robinett, Jane. “The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience.” Literature and Medicine. 26.2 (Fall 2007): 290-311.

Russell, Mary Doria. The Sparrow. New York: Ballantine Books-Random House, 2008.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. London: Belknap-Harvard, 2007

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. In Memoriam. 2nd ed. Ed. Erik Gray. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

 

ENDNOTES

 

[1] Robinet, “Traumatic Experience,” 296.

[2] Ibid., 297.

[3] Ibid., 293.

[4] Khan, “metaphorical contract,” 86-87.

[5] Tennyson, In Memoriam, 101.

[6] Russell, The Sparrow, 97.

[7] Ibid., 96.

[8] Ibid., 97.

[9] Ecstasy of Speed, accessed May 13, 2009.

[10] Mendelsohn, 126.

[11] Taylor, 55.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Burrow, “the future poet,” 59.

[14] Russell, The Sparrow, 349.

 

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A Redemptive Economy: Corpus Christi Pageant Cycles as Liturgical Relativization of Secular Time by Gaelan Gilbert, San Diego State University

July 29, 2009 by Leave a Comment

1. Modern Secular Time

Charles Taylor has recently argued that in modern societies “we tend to see our lives exclusively within the horizontal flow of secular time,”[1] to the point that time “has become a container, indifferent to what fills it.”[2] What Taylor means by “secular time” pertains to both contemporary American and European culture and, as globalization continues, other parts of the world, as will be explained below, as well as the culture of the late-medieval period in Europe. Taylor extends his observation by saying, the disciplines of our modern, civilized order have led us to measure and organize time as never before in human history. Time has become a precious resource, not to be ‘wasted.’ […] We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done.[3]

One contemporary way of controlling time is through speed, since speed is often conceived as a way of ‘beating the clock’ so as to not ‘waste’ the precious resource of time. There is thus a ‘need for speed.’ And if speed is merely an increased rate of movement over a given area of space in a specific segment of time (think of MPH, RPM, etc.), then – as the effects of globalization indicate – speed necessarily treats the unique particularities of places – such as buildings or forests – as ultimately eliminable obstructions to the accelerating progress of goods and capital. In other words, a need for speed “displaces” places, flattening and reducing them to the mathematical concept of space, which remains indifferent to its contents. In this sense, space, like secular time, also becomes a homogenous container. Both are problematic inasmuch as they occlude and neglect temporal and local differences, thus emptying times and places of gathered and complex significance.[4]

Such is symptomatic of what William Cavanaugh has called the “global monoculture” of the market. In order to slake the market’s ‘need for speed,’ temporal and local dedifferentiation erodes local communities and their trans-local traditions, while responsibility is shirked, on all levels. As John Wright acutely observes, “[w]e’ve learned that we have to detach our lives from any particular place so that we might be accessible to a global market, career advancement, with no lasting moral ties to anyone. The market place is universal, abstract, not local and particular. By denying the particularity of place, all might supposedly belong, be absorbed into the producer-consumer cycle that continuously repeats, going no where.”[5]

Another negative aspect of this ever-accelerating production-consumption cycle is disembodiment.[6] For example, today the global market proffers not a local marketplace (like the piazza of a medieval Italian city) but an electronically generated cyberspace whereby (and “in” which) disembodied individuals instantaneously “connect,” often to purchasable commodities, in only a “virtual” present. And all the while the homogenous tick-tock of technologically regulated clocks reminds us that time is running out.

Granted, there are benefits to the speed at which information, via the internet and other electronic technologies, is afforded to those who can afford them, so to speak. But these advantages in no way outweigh the negative effects of homogenous time and space characteristic of this, “a secular age,” especially considering the damage already and continually done to local communities by the pretensions and consequent expansion of the market, which itself relies on the internet for its extreme instantaneity and global scope. To reiterate, in the context of such expansion, overlapping places and complex remembered times are subjected and dissolved within the meta-physic of a uniform spatial grid (res extensa) and the accompanying univocal ‘secular’ time of which Taylor speaks. According to the (Cartesian) logic behind such a grid, every place can be mapped, plotted and even leveled for military or capitalist purposes, while time, as beating to only a single measure, can be regulated with mechanical, and now even digital precision.

In light of this state of affairs, we are led to ask: what sort of community could both differentiate and thus resist, by a means other than acceleration this harmful homogenization, while maintaining individual differences? What embodied practices could serve as the means to ‘thicken’ and ‘punctuate’ temporality, and allow the particularity of places to persist peacefully? And what sort of economic ‘production-consumption’ cycle would such a community enact as a way of relativizing the secular order?

In order to better reply to these queries, we shall first investigate the early emergence of profit-driven, mechanically implemented ‘secular time’ in late medieval Europe. Based on this brief investigation, we shall describe the dichotomy which Taylor employs, that between secular and what he calls “higher” time(s). We shall then move on to a particular example of a community of the late medieval period which was faced with the emergent technological homogenization of time, and explore how its doxological and economic practices reoriented the emergent possibility of a purely secular temporality by relativizing it in light of the sacred.

2. Medieval Secular Time

Jacques le Goff, in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, notes that “[i]n 1355, the royal governor of Artois authorized the people of Aire-sur-la-Lys to build a belfry whose bells would chime the hours of commercial transactions and the working hours of textile workers.”[7] Like merchants today, so were medieval merchants empowered by the mechanical standardization of time, since “the exact measurement of time”[8] was “a prime opportunity for profit.”[9] The Artois governor’s authorization for what le Goff deems the “rationalization of time was [also] responsible for [time’s] secularization,”[10] for “merchants and artisans began replacing Church time with a more accurately measured time useful for profane and secular tasks, clock time.”[11] For the purposes of this paper, we shall accept le Goff’s representation of the introduction of the clock-tower as a culturally “discontinuous” event.[12]

Thus, instead of an “imprecise and variable” ecclesially-based temporality in Aire, secular “labor time” was technologically granted autonomy; rather than the monastically rung bells, it functionally presided with mechanical precision over the economic and bodily practices of that community. We are perhaps reminded of Taylor’s description of “an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done,” especially when we acknowledge that one of the effects of the clock-tower, as the harbinger of mechanically regulated time, was the extension of working hours into the night, which had hitherto remained a time of rest and charitable fellowship with kin.[13]

We should now clarify more specifically the meaning of “secular,” a term we have been using much. In the late medieval period, the Latin term saeculum denoted a century, or an age, of the temporal world. It is this sense of ‘secular’ which Charles Taylor employed above. Thus ‘secular time’ connoted “ordinary as against higher time.”[14] This distinction between ordinary and higher temporalities is important. In ordinary, secular time, “one thing happens to another, and when something is past, it’s past.”[15] This is a rectilinear, non-recursive model of time, like Deleuze’s Aionic time which, in his own words, is a “pure empty form of time, which has […] unwound its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line.”[16]

In regard to the late medieval period, after the implementation of the clock-tower, the “labor time” of which le Goff speaks was basically aligned with secular time. In our own day and age, as Taylor contends, secular time is equivalent to the “‘homogenous, empty time’ which [Walter] Benjamin makes central to modernity.”[17] They are ultimately the same in a key philosophical aspect, namely their acknowledgement of only the reality of the ontologically immanent, which is to say the refusal of the valid existence of that which transcends or exceeds their chronometric scope.[18]

On the other hand, what Taylor calls ‘higher times’ refer human existence to that which exceeds and thus differentiates time. As he shows, in the late medieval period it was the ontologically transcendent eternity of God which exceeded temporal being and thus imbued it with deeper meaning. But in what way? For Taylor, ‘higher times’ “gathered, assembled, reordered, [and] punctuated profane, ordinary time” [as] “kairotic knots.”[19] ‘Higher times’ even “introduce ‘warps’ and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering [so that] Events which [are] far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked.”[20]

Circa 1400, such “knots” and “warps” primarily included feasts, fasts and holy-days from the Church’s liturgical calendar. As Taylor argues, “the Church, in its liturgical year, remembers and re-enacts what happened in illo tempore when Christ was on earth. Which is why this year’s Good Friday can be closer to the Crucifixion than last year’s mid-summer day. And the Crucifixion itself, since Christ’s action/passion here participates in God’s eternity, is closer to all times than they in secular terms are to each other.”[21]

In this sense, eternity and time are not opposed, but temporal being participates in eternity even as the eternal – liturgically acknowledged as it is in the celebratory events of ‘higher times’ – breaks into, gathers and differentiates secular time. Taylor thematizes this multi-layered account: “as well as the ‘horizontal’ dimension of merely secular time, there is a ‘vertical’ dimension, which can allow for the ‘warps’ […] so that everything relates to more than one kind of time.”[22] As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur contends, “it [is] necessary to confess [eternity as] what is other than time in order to be in a position to give full justice to human temporality and to propose not to abolish it but to probe deeper into it, to hierarchize it, and to unfold it following levels of temporalization.”[23]

It was precisely this hierarchically differentiated temporality that in the 14th century was arguably first threatened by the technology of the clock tower, which – for economic purposes – threatened to reduce this “multiplex time” to a univocal secular time. As le Goff says, “[t]ime was no longer associated with cataclysms or festivals but rather with daily life, a sort of chronological net in which urban life was caught.”[24] This ‘labor’ time and the ‘higher times’ of the Church’s liturgical year thus met in opposition. In some cases, a deterritorialization of bodily praxis bore witness to this. For example, le Goff notes how the concept of a schedule, a method which quickly became crucial for the hourly ordering of daily servile labor, was appropriated from the initial “monastic manner of regulating the use of time,” namely the schedule of hours for prayer.[25]

In light of such an opposition between temporalities, then, in what embodied way did particular communities, by reference to ‘higher times,’ effectively gather and reorder a ‘labor’ time with mechanically supported pretensions of autonomy?

3. Corpus Christi Pageant Cycles as Liturgical Punctuation and Reorientation of Secular Time

While le Goff concludes with resignation, saying, “[h]enceforth, the clock was to be the measure of all things,”[26] I want to focus on a particular late medieval urban community’s dramatic practices of festivity as a mode of liturgical action which in some degree served to resist the emergence of a secular temporality. That community is the city of York, circa 1380. In this case, the reason for its festivity was the feast of Corpus Christi, first introduced by Pope Urban IV in 1264 to honor the sacramental body of Christ, the Eucharist.

The feast was first introduced in England in 1318 and was “seized on by the authorities as an occasion for the promotion of both charity and Christian catechesis [and] rapidly won popular allegiance.”[27] Yet the practice upon which I want to focus, namely Corpus Christi pageant cycles, first occurred later and thus much nearer in time to the technological institution of ‘labor time,’ beginning as they did in the late 14th century. In fact, the earliest record of their production places their emergence within twenty years of the technological implementation of ‘labor time’ at Aire.[28]

The Liturgical Nature of Corpus Christi Pageant Cycles

Corpus Christi pageant cycles, in Sarah Beckwith’s words, “are best understood as a form of liturgy.”[29] Speaking of the cycles, Beckwith elaborates: “[t]hrough the resources of theater, ritual and liturgy, they narrate the Christian myth, and in this most fundamental of senses, they remember the life of Christ and the eucharistic imperative the invitation celebrated in the Feast of Corpus Christi: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’”[30] The cycles exemplify “the tendency in late medieval England to elaborate and make more explicit the representational and dramatic dimension of the liturgy.”[31] Rather than detailing the structural parallels between the cycles and such high-medieval doxological innovations as the Easter trope, Quem quaeritis?, which increasingly formed a part of special holy-week Masses, it suffices for our current purposes to briefly explicate the term ‘liturgy’ here, despite its marginalization from many modern academic forums due to its ritualistic – and thus supposedly hegemonic – connotations.

Catherine Pickstock destabilizes such connotations: “[t]o say that human life has a fundamentally […] liturgical character is […] a way of indicating that the most realistic actions with a pragmatic and functional character nonetheless also exceed themselves by indicating the […] transcendent, which is the horizon in which they operate.”[32] Liturgy is a doxological practice which, because of its intricate and necessary bodily involvement, fundamentally stands firm against any gradual cultural proclivity for “‘excarnation’, [considered as] a transfer out of embodied, ‘enfleshed’ forms of religious life, to those which are more ‘in the head.’”[33] As Pickstock writes elsewhere,

the liturgy of the Middle Ages was embedded in a culture which was ritual in character. This was a time when the Offertory gifts were not disconnected from the produce of everyday life; indeed, the category itself of ‘everyday life’ was perforce a thoroughly liturgical category. For the community was not something which existed prior to, or in separation from, the Eucharist as a given which simply met at regular intervals to receive the Sacrament. Rather, the community as such was seen as flowing from eternity through the sacraments.[34]

Here we see Pickstock’s emphasis on the participation of temporality in eternity via liturgy. Indeed, liturgy both relativizes time in light of the eternal and keeps faith grounded in the physically, which is to say visibly contingent reality of embodied human existence; in being a performance which ‘re-members’ the body of Christ, it allows for the non-identically repeated practices so vital for a proper maintenance of individual difference in community through time.[35]

In the Greek, leitourgia etymologically means a ‘work’ of the ‘people,’ an ergon of the laos. The significance of this becomes clear when we recall, with le Goff, that it was precisely an economic, and even ergonomic, shift which resulted from the late-medieval technological standardization of ‘labor time.’ In relation to a contrast between temporalities, then, we have a parallel contrast between two conceptions of work, which is to say, two economies. One is profit driven, and constitutes the practical structure of a form of proto-capitalist social organization reliant on precision and uniformity, while the other pertains no less to work and life, but does so in a way that does not neglect to acknowledge the dependence of the world upon the goodness of the eternal God, which is to say the status of all that temporally is (even monetary profit) as gift.

Context and Performance

Corpus Christi pageant cycles were performed only during the feast of Corpus Christi, which occurred once a year, ten days after Pentecost. The pageants themselves dramatically narrated anywhere from fifteen to forty of the more significant events in salvation history, such as the Creation and Fall (of Lucifer and humanity), the Flood, a diverse scattering of other core Old Testament events, the Nativity, sometimes various events from Christ’s life, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension and the Last Judgment. The pageants were staged at varying times on mobile wagons positioned in multiple locations throughout the streets of York, often according to the interlinking of several routes along which groups of people could serially ambulate.

These locations at which people congregated both figuratively and topologically instantiated distinct episodes in the narrative of salvation history, so that a unique meshing of time and space was effected. In this way, not only was an entire portion of the year reordered by a festive cycle of “higher times,” and thus suspended from ‘labor time,’ but the entire particular urban place of York was transformed into a network of dramatic performances, a veritable urbs signorum. As if on a pilgrimage which nonetheless remained within the city walls, people walked from one stage to the next, reliving as a social body the narrative of the eternal God’s creation and redemption of the temporal world.

This practice of staging active representations of the biblical narrative operated along the ‘vertical’ dimension of which Taylor speaks, and thereby constitute precisely one of those “kairotic knots” of ‘higher times’ which thicken and reorient secular time.[36] Moreover, by theatrically signifying the core events of the Christian narrative (particularly the “historical” corpus Christi itself as the body of an actor), the York cycle of pageants comprised an interactive arena in which every citizen could conceive and (in the sense of Ricoeur’s “forward-directed reference”) consequently proceed to enact the stories of their own lives within the determinative yet ‘open’ context of that larger narrative.[37]

Indeed, besides signifying God’s body on stage, the pageant cycles, by involving the participation of the entire socio-ecclesial body, also made present the corpus Christi off stage, as the gathered local community. Corpus Christi theatre, as Eamon Duffy notes, “encourag[es] an ever deeper or immediate sense of imaginative participation in the biblical event[s]by gild members than that offered by the prescribed liturgy.”[38] It is in this sense that some scholars have called the pageant cycles a sacrament of theatre, as something more than mere spectacle. Sarah Beckwith convincingly contends that “these plays actualize the body of Christ.”[39] Duffy, too, goes on to describe the feast of Corpus Christi as “conceived and presented in late medieval communities as a celebration of the corporate life of the body social, created and ordered by the presence of the Body of Christ among them.”[40] We would do well to remember here, however, that the presence of Christ’s corpus is always already manifold and complex, with historical, sacramental, ecclesial dimensions. During the feast of Corpus Christi, a uniquely theatrical dimension was added, and the concomitant affectivity altered the dynamic of the other three, as I argue below.

Reconciliatory Affectivity

It was a unique admixture of relation between the latter three of these dimensions – sacramental, ecclesial and theatrical – that actively encouraged a common move toward penance in the form of embodied reconciliation between persons. As a total, open-ended series of affective events, “Corpus Christi theatre explores […] the embodiment of forgiveness.”[41] As the initiative for the feast, the sacramental corpus Christi held a position of prominence. Indeed, as Beckwith articulates, the underlying impetus for social reconciliation was the consumption of the Eucharist: “preparation of the soul and reconciliation […] entailed not merely self-examination but actually restoring damaged bonds of love between people.”[42] Here we can recall Pickstock’s earlier point regarding the community as being given through the sacraments. But with the pageant cycles, the theatrical supplements this: “[Corpus Christi theatre] animates the intersubjective dimensions of theater to show that the presence of Christ and his absence are utterly bound up with our presence to each other in bonds of charity.”[43] This, in turn, leads to an emphasis on the socio-ecclesial aspect, so that “confession and penance are acts that concern the community as a whole.”[44]

Yet we must interject here with the qualification that in the late medieval period, even while (as Duffy indicates) “the Host […] was the source of human community,”[45] the doctrinal emphasis of the Mass had shifted, from a participatory and mysterious event to a more causal mediation of grace received visually.[46] This is what makes the pageant cycles so interesting, with their parallel aspects of communal participation and theatrical spectacle. The tensions here between participation and causality mirror those in the very late medieval Mass itself; after all, and as we mentioned above, the cycles themselves grew out of the liturgical tropes during the Mass.

I thus propose that the pageant cycles represent a lay desire for a participatory eucharistic schema whose recognition of the re-membering and congregating of the ecclesial corpus Christi each week was somehow absent from the structure of the Mass itself, having been “displaced” by a terminological inclination toward the causal power of Sacrament as the “enchanted” object. The form of participation which the cycles foregrounded was primarily economic.[47]

An Alternate Production-Consumption Cycle

In other words, the bonds of charity Beckwith mentions were fundamentally economic bonds, involving merchants and artisans who joined together in producing these plays. To begin with, as a feast, on Corpus Christi “total or partial abstention from servile work was required and the laity were expected to observe the Sunday pattern of attendance at matins, Mass, and evensong, fasting on the preceding eve.”[48] In this sense, “labor time” and its “servile work” are utterly suspended and relativized by the feast, as an instance of ‘higher times.’ Moreover, each pageant was funded by York’s artisan gilds, so that the pageant cycle unified the local economy with a common practice to which each gild uniquely contributed. For instance, the shipwrights’ guild was in charge of the ‘Building of Noah’s Ark’ pageant, the Baker’s guild of the Last Supper pageant, etc.[49] Funding was also donated from annually accumulated earnings and so was returned to the entire community.

Granted, “[c]raft gilds and urban corporations saw in the ritual order of the great [Corpus Christi] processions associated with the feast an opportunity for civic and social iconography, the display of piety an opportunity for the display of the worship and the social clout of those involved.” Yet it is in materially engaging both the work and time of the citizens of York that Corpus Christi pageant cycles proffer a radical critique of the regulation of time for the sake of monetary profit, particularly in light of the late-medieval possibility of an emergent autonomous secular temporality.

We can describe the content of this critique in noting how, by means of their complex and pervasive dramaturgical series of “kairotic” performances, Corpus Christi cycles relativized the “everyday” (i.e. secular time) in light of the eternal God. This liturgical relativization relied upon the freely offered resources stemming from a vital economic base, and constituted a reemphasis on the participatory nature of the eucharistic corpus Christi as a socio-ecclesial event.

Therefore, in contrast to the capitalist production-consumption cycle operative in the context of modern secular time, which was first emerging in the late-medieval period by way of technological advancement, late-medieval Corpus Christi pageant cycles embody an alternative production-consumption cycle: the production of dramatic performances which, in encouraging the move to penance and communal reconciliation, restored the bonds of charity necessary for the proper consumption of the Eucharist. And this cycle fits within the divine economy of redemption whose very narrative the plays perform. It is in this way, then, that Corpus Christi pageant cycles truly are a ‘work of the people,’ a liturgy, to the point that they pervade, relativize and thereby reorient the temporal economy of York, reconciling people in ways which balance communal corporeality and appearance with differential variety in celebration and individual penitential piety.[50] We can accordingly describe the cycles as imperfect embodiments of a redemptive economy.

Conclusion: A Redemptive Economy

Like the Sacrament they celebrate, Corpus Christi theatre, in William Cavanaugh’s words, “performs a narrative of cosmic proportions, from the death and resurrection of Christ, to the new covenant formed in his blood, to the future destiny of all creation.”[51] And, to indicate their relevance for modern temporality, with the reorientation of secular time that Corpus Christi theatre affects, “[t]he consumer of the Eucharist is [thus] no longer the schizophrenic subject of global capitalism, awash in a sea of unrelated present [moments], but walks in a story with a past, present, and future.”[52]

By enacting the pageant cycles – without any ‘need for speed’ or ‘excarnation’ – the community of York was “[p]articipating now in a new, dynamic economy […namely] the relations that constitute the body of Christ.”[53]As an alternate, yet no less ‘economic’ production-consumption cycle which freed time from the clock-tower, Corpus Christi theatre differentiated time in relation to the eternal and reoriented human existence within the narrative context of God’s incarnate entrance into and redemption of temporal being.[54] This narrative is contrasted to the exploitive trajectories of early capitalist organizations of labor. The festive performance of the pageant cycles thus reestablished the community of York[55] as first and foremost a pilgrim people of God, travelling principally through time in productive cycles of penitence and reconciliation, rather than standardizing temporality for profit.

In closing, we can hope that a contemporary recognition of the reductive nature of strictly secular “labor time,” and a resultant desire for temporality’s differentiation will animate the production of equally creative models of social praxis such as Corpus Christi theatre embodied in late medieval York.[56]

 

 


REFERENCES

 

Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York

Corpus Christi Plays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

 

Berry, Wendell. “An Entrance to the Woods.” The Art of the Personal Essay.

New York: Anchor Books, 1997.

 

— Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. Lon

-don: Routledge, 1993.

 

Cavanaugh, William T. Theopolitical Imagination. London: T&T Clark, 2005.

 

De Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centu

ries. Vol. 1. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1992.

 

—, The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1984.

 

De Lubac, Henri. Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. Trans.

by Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sister Elizabeth Englund. San Fran

cisco: Ignatius Press, 1988.

 

Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale.

Ed. by Constantin V. Boundas. New York : Columbia University

Press, 1990. p. 165

 

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England

1400-1580. 2nd Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

 

Kinghorn, A. M. Medieval Drama. London: Evans Brothers, Ltd., 1968.
Leff, Gordon. The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook: An Essay on the Intellec

tual and Spiritual Change in the Fourteenth Century. New York: Harper

& Row, Publishers, 1976.

 

Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago: Uni

versity of Chicago Press, 1980.

 

Pickstock, Catherine. “Liturgy, Art and Politics.” Modern Theology 16.2

(2000): 159-180.

 

— After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

 

— “Liturgy and Language: The Sacred Polis.” Liturgy in Dialogue. Ed. Paul

Bradshaw & Bryan Spinks. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press,

1994. pp. 117-138

 

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and

David Pellauer. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

 

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Har

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Ward, Graham. Christ and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

ENDNOTES

[1] Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. p. 59

[1] Ibid. p. 58

[1] Ibid. p. 59

[1] From this stem negative psycho-somatic effects. As Wendell Berry notes, “we seem to grant to our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported […] the faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over – and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything” (Berry 672).

[1] Wright, John. “The Mission of the Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City, Sermon #3.” October 22, 2007. http://www.pastorjohnwright.org/archives/2007/10/the_mission_of.html#more

[1] In regard to Christian religious praxis, Charles Taylor has coined the term “excarnation” (Taylor 554); this term will be advantageous for us below.

[1]Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. p. 35

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid. p. 30

[1] Ibid. p. 36

[1] Ibid. Le Goff argues that “once commercial networks were organized […] time became an object of measurement” (35). We see similarities here with Taylor’s argument concerning the secular time of today.

[1] I am implying Gordon Leff’s usage of ‘discontinuous’ here, as opposed to ‘continuous’. See Leff, Gordon, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook : An Essay on Intellectual and Spiritual Change in the Fourteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1976.

[1] This encroachment on the nocturnal has of course exponentially increased today, so that now 24-hour stores are common, and the city, as they say, never sleeps. Such represents a distortion of even a purely mundane time, that is, a time based only upon the movements and rhythms of the seasons and processes of the world. With this in mind, the secular time of the clock-tower is doubly problematic, for it threatens to usurp and displace both the liturgical temporality of the ecclesial calendar, as well as the ‘natural’ oscillations of cosmic temporality.

[1] Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. p. 55

[1] Ibid.

[1] Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. by Constantin V. Boundas. New York : Columbia University Press, 1990. p. 165

[1] Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. p. 54

[1] Within the medieval period, the mutual indifference of secular time, regardless of what happens ‘within’ it, arguably proffers a parody of the Augustinian-Boethian doctrine of God’s immutable “present,” which “contains” all times; secular time does so by constituting a rival schema that, like a Scotist univocal ontology, posits itself as a “container,” albeit a totalizing one.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid. p. 55

[1] Ibid. p. 58 My italics.

[1]  Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. p. 57

[1]  Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984. p. 30

[1]  Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. p. 48

[1] Ibid. p. 51

[1] Ibid. p. 52

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. 2nd Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. pp. 43-4

[1] I am aware at the ‘leap’ I am making by linking such geographical distances without further research; I hope to extend my study – which is at this point preliminary – in the future in order to build upon these potential lacunae. To continue, the clock-tower began in 1355 and the York cycles were first performed circa 1375. But we must underline that the reasons for the institution of the Corpus Christi feast itself are complex, and involve a shift in understanding regarding the Eucharist itself, which – considered as the true body of Christ – was the celebrated object of this week long feast. Henri de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum traces the high-medieval doctrinal shifts that led to this consideration. In brief, for approximately a thousand years, the body of Christ was considered in three ways, which were nonetheless unified. First, there was the historical body, which was Jesus Christ, God the Son incarnated as a particular Jew in first century Palestine and raised from the dead. The second corpus Christi was that of the Church which after Christ’s ascension, was considered as the real, or true body, the corpus verum. The third corpus Christi was the sacrament of the Eucharist, which was considered the corpus mysticum, or the mystical body.  William of St. Thierry puts it this way:

Whenever the intelligent reader finds in a book anything about the flesh or body of the divine Jesus, he may apply this threefold definition of his flesh or body […] For he must think in one way of that flesh or body which hung on the Cross and is sacrificed on the altar, in another way of his flesh or body which is abiding life to the person who received it in Communion, and in yet another way of that flesh or body which is the Church…Not that we would depict Christ as having three bodies, like Geryon in the fable, since the Apostle testifies that the body of Christ is one. But the mind or heart makes the distinction with a certain relation to faith, though the reality maintains the undefiled truth in its simplicity. (On the Sacrament of the Altar, c. 12 {PL 180, 361-2}; quoted from Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. p. 388)

During the first millennium or so of the Christian tradition, the constitution of the latter two bodies (ecclesial and sacramental) occurred as a reciprocal event, as both a physical assemblage in a single geographic location and a consecrated liturgical transformation which, in their shared relation to the risen historical body of Christ (‘which hung on the Cross’), were kept in a tension that defied conceptualization, and thus avoided a binary opposition in which one was privileged over the other.

However, as Michel de Certeau notes, “after the twelfth century, the expression [corpus mysticum] no longer designated the Eucharist, as it had previously, but the Church. Conversely, ‘corpus verum’ no longer designated the Church but the Eucharist. The adjectives ‘mysticus’ (hidden) and ‘verus’ (truthful, real and knowable as such) were reversed […] the change was in the form of a chiasmus between the signifier and the signified” (de Certeau Mystic Fable 82). Accordingly, instead of the visible body of the church and the invisible sacramental body, after this reversal “the Church, the social ‘body’ of Christ, is henceforth the (hidden) signified of a sacramental ‘body’ held to be a visible signifier, because it is the showing of a presence beneath the ‘species’ (or appearances) of the consecrated bread and wine” (82).

No longer were Church and the Sacrament held in a fruitful tension as ontologically equidistant from the historical ‘body’ of the risen Christ. Rather, the sacrament, as the third ‘body,’ came to be more closely associated with the historical ‘body,’ to the exclusion of the social, ecclesial ‘body.’ It was this emphasis on the Eucharist as the ‘true’ body that led to the institution of the Corpus Christi feast, which honors the object of the Sacrament with a revered status it traditionally did not possess. But there were other, politically significant repercussions, not the least of which was a move from a doctrine which was grounded in salvation as participation, or incorporation, whereby those socially gathered were considered the visibly ‘real’ ecclesial corpus Christi, to one reliant upon efficient causality, whereby emphasis was placed on the priest, who was seemingly endowed with a power to ‘make’ the ‘real’ sacramental corpus Christi, and which itself, in turn, was held to have transmitted the force of grace to the sacrament’s consumer.

When abused, this shift transformed the laity, during the mass, into a mere audience who waited expectantly for the ringing of the bell (during the epiclesis) and the elevation of the host as the spectacle of spectacles. In this sense, the term ‘liturgy,’ which in Greek etymologically denotes a ‘work’ of the ‘people’, (an ergon of the laos) arguably no longer applied accurately to the Mass. An unnecessary opposition was thereby established between the ecclesial ‘body,’ and the clerics, who were associated with the Eucharist. It was this seeming opposition against which Wyclif reacted, but it concerned an issue which would have been nonexistent in an earlier period.

See also John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology in the Church.” Conflicting Allegiances: The Church-Based University in a Liberal-Democratic University. Ed. Michael L. Budde & John W. Wright. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004.

[1] Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. p. 100

[1] Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays. p. 3

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 20

[1] Pickstock, Catherine. “Liturgy, Art and Politics.” Modern Theology 16.2 (2000): 159-180. p. 160 This distinction between the ontologically transcendent and immanent parallels the eternal/temporal relation. Another way of saying this is that “the liturgical relativises the everyday without denying its value” (161).

[1] Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. p. 554.

[1] Pickstock, Catherine. After Writing. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. pp. 170-1

[1] In regard to the positive nature of liturgical repetition, Pickstock’s words are worth including here: “It is a quotidian error to suppose that repetition requires identity between things […] Positive repetition, then, emerges from difference, and it constitutes development; each new assertion of an element, over and against the disparate world, has absolute significance in relation to what has gone before […] Commemorative repetition cannot be dissociated from the event to which it refers. There was repetition in the original event of the Last Supper, not simply in the parallelism of Jesus’ words, but also in his repetitive call to repeat and remember. Without that provision for repetition, the event itself would be incomplete. […] While in the quotidian aren paratactic repetition signals a decline in meaning, proliferation forming a broad-scale grammaticalization, sacral repetition produces an intensification of meaning, a perpetual lexical reassertion, the cumulative effect of which is the suspension of mundane time. Events are transposed from linear time into a perspective of eternity” (“Liturgy and Language: The Sacred Polis.” Liturgy in Dialogue. Ed. Paul Bradshaw & Bryan Spinks. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1994. pp. 136-7). In the same article, Pickstock extends the significance of non-identical repetition in relation to mundane, or secular, time: “The Eucharistic present does not persistently enter the repeated interstices of our diurnal order to reside passively in them, but rather to transpose the horizontal into the vertical, the quantitative into the qualitative, chromos into kairos. […] Repetition in the sacred polis seeks to harness the present not by annihilating the past, but rather by vivifying it, and by setting the present in the context of eternity. The cumulative effect of such recursive present moments is to suspend the ravages of mundane time and to establish a vertical plane where each event points simultaneously behind and in front of itself, filling each moment of history with meaning and purpose” (137). In regard to this, we can recall Taylor’s similar mention of the twin axes of horizontal (ontologically immanent/secular/finite) and vertical (ontologically transcendent/sacred/eternal) times, the latter imbuing the former with ‘meaning’, and thus disallowing nihilism.

[1] And this in part by materially involving the formation of ‘kairotic knots’ or locative clusters of ‘pilgrims’ at multiple urban positions. In Michel de Certeau’s words, a ‘kairotic knot’ “mediates spatial transformations. In the mode of the ‘right point in time’ (kairos), it produces a founding rupture or break. […and] modifies the local order. The goal of the series is thus an operation that transforms the visible organization. But this change requires the invisible resources of a time which obeys other laws (The Practice of Everday Life 85). For the ‘series’ of Corpus Christi pageants, such an ‘other’ time is the eternal which, in de Certeau’s words, ‘produces a founding rupture or break.’ And the resultant transformation of visible organization which Certeau considers essential to the enactment of narration occurs in the production and reception of the pageants themselves, as I shall argue below.

[1] What Paul Ricoeur notes in regard to the narrative of Augustine’s Confessions applies here: “the attraction of the eternity of the [divine] Word felt by temporal experience is not such as to plunge the narration, which is still temporal, into a contemplation free from the constraints of time” (Ricoeur 29). Moreover, the residual nihilism which accompanies an over-emphasis on the capacity for independent self-determination (arguably the myth of modernity), as opposed to dependence on others and God, is avoided (a emphasis which we see emerge, for example, with Chaucer’s ‘self-narrating’ pilgrims, also in the late 14th century).

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 21 I should note here that Duffy is specifically referring to Candlemas celebrations, but says in the succeeding paragraph that “it is the liturgical celebration which shaped and defined such gild observances, and the same centrality of pattern of the liturgy is evident in a number of the surviving Corpus Christi plays of the Purification” (Duffy 21).

[1]  Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays. p. 116

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 26

[1] Sarah Beckwith Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. London: Routledge, 1993. p. 91

[1] Ibid. p. 92

[1] Ibid. p. 101

[1] Ibid.

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 92

[1] The history of this doctrinal emphasis is traced briefly above. See note 25

[1] This was in part due to the terminological shifts which both de Lubac traces in Corpus Mysticum and de Certeau retraces in The Mystic Fable regarding the threefold body of Christ. See note 26 above. Whether there exist substantial links between the univocity of secular time and the “loss” of participation remains to be explored. If said temporal univocity stems from Scotus’s univocal ontology (which disallowed metaphysical participation), then this exploration would certainly bear fruit.

[1] Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. p. 42

[1] Duffy notes that “the gilds, not the clerks, took over the management of the processions.” Ibid. p. 44.

[1] They also provide an opportunity for the lively education of the mostly illiterate, yet increasingly literate, late medieval laity. As Duffy observes, “[w]hatever their precise content, these plays clearly involved massive corporate effort by the laity of York to foster knowledge of the elements of the faith” (Ibid. p. 67).

[1] Cavanaugh, William T. Theopolitical Imagination. London: T&T Clark, 2005. p. 118

[1] Ibid. Moreover, during the ‘higher time’ of the Corpus Christi feast, the future of all persons itself is made visible in the final pageant, the Last Judgment, as the gathering of all peoples and time itself into eternity at the eschaton, which, as Beckwith notes, is the “crucial horizon in these plays”: “[a]s an eschatological feast, the future breaks into the present […] it has happened already and is yet to come” (Beckwith 113).

[1]  Ward, Graham. Christ and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. p. 84

[1] In this vein, Corpus Christi theatre arguably functions as a quasi-liminal result of the dialectical relation between medieval academic doctrine, occupying the Bakhtinian authoritative primary genre of the treatise or summa (always composed in Latin), and vernacular, ‘literary’ texts, themselves occupying various secondary genres. Indeed, liturgy is arguably the a priori conflation of these two, as a communally enacted praxis of doctrinal poesis. But, while Corpus Christi plays stem from liturgy, they come more and more to respond to the doctrinal and ecclesial shifts first occurring in the late medieval period (regarding the Eucharist and the overall increase in clericalization).

Thus, by commenting on the consequences of certain doctrinal shifts – that is, the transference of the phrase ‘corpus verum’ from the ecclesial body to the sacramental body – Corpus Christi theatre constitutes a founding moment in the historical and cultural dialectic between texts of hierarchically differentiated genres, on the (Bakhtinian) primary and secondary levels. And such interaction in this case precisely exposes on the level of culture the displaced role of liturgy as a mode by which immanent ‘everday’ life is relativized and made meaningful in reference to the transcendent. The very production of Corpus Christi cycles, then, when considered as culturally enacted yet ecclesially sanctioned, summons a community – in this case York – to hearken back to the previous balance between the threefold body of Christ, which is to say back to a time when the social Corpus Christi received equivalent emphasis with the sacramental Corpus Christi, bears witness to the threat of a loss of a liturgical way of life. The trajectory of this loss, in all its manifold aspects, and this hearkening back functions as a principal motivator of the transition from the late medieval to the early modern periods, respectively.

[1] Which was more definitively determined by the fact that the minster of York, like the respective cathedrals of all medieval towns, was presided over by a single bishop.

[1] Interestingly, such has arguably occurred; the York Corpus Christi pageant cycles have, since the mid-twentieth century (although more so in the last two decades), once again become an aspect of cultural life in York, however contrived. Do they serve the same function? Of course not. A valid inquisition, then, would concern the worth of the performance of these pageants if, for example, they do not function simultaneously both as a genuine celebratory expression of an ecclesial feast and as an artistic medium for the encouragement of penance and communal reconciliation. Must they inevitably be construed as a nostalgic form of entertainment which ambivalently pays homage to a ‘lost past’? How lost, in fact, is this past? Or, rather, could the initial function(s) of Corpus Christi theatre be legitimately reinstated, so that their performance occurred within a cultural context which itself gave primacy to the ecclesial and doctrinal ties? Would such a move require the fundamentally private, and thus supposedly ‘sectarian’, nature of these performances, or not? Such investigations regarding the modern resuscitation of the pageant cycles should be undertaken, insofar as suggested conclusions may indicate the contemporary significance of these cycles, and thus assist in determining the nature of their alteration and outlining their current function in more detail.

In fact, Sarah Beckwith has outlined in detail the various complications and ambiguities surrounding the 20th century stagings of the ‘mystery plays’ in York, particularly during the 1951 Festival of Britain which, as Beckwith quotes one author as having argued, was to be both a post-war cultural exhibition and “a concerted attempt to construct a ‘new secular mythology’ through which to constitute a future” (Beckwith Signifying God 5). Beckwith further contends that these post-WWII stagings were intended, via the “revisiting [of Britain’s] own ancientness” (180), to contribute a positive ethos within “the twin contexts of populism and nationalism and state subsidy in England after 1945” (180-1). Surely this is a far cry from the cycles’ original, late-medieval functions. 

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Diversions and Deceit: Eliot, Nabokov, and the Art of Misdirection in a Speed-Reading Society by Rose Burt, San Diego State University

July 18, 2009 by Leave a Comment

In the preface to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the character Charles Kinbote urges the reader to refer to his annotations to a poem and to “study the poem with their help, rereading them of course.”[1]  Critics who followed this advice soon published labyrinthine notes with annotations of the annotations of the poem, “Pale Fire.”[2]  In his review of such criticism, Charles Ross writes of academics: “We are a busy people.  Not many can wile away the hours in graduate school trying to construct a grammar of Zemblan.  Give the public the solution it wants; then let us reread…a great short essay might have been a better choice than a spiraling critical study.”[3]  While at first Ross’s statement seems merely like the late-night grumblings of an overloaded student, in a society increasingly concerned with industrial efficiency and measuring success in terms of output (as the pressures of promotion on the tenure-track would suggest), Ross’s outlook on the ideal forms of reading and criticism echoes the sentiments of many academics.  Ross’s comment is indicative of two prevalent attitudes of academic scholars that have prevailed even into this century: first, the desire for linear arguments and graspable solutions, and second, the preference for packaged critical inquiry with portable, concrete analyses.  When we read a poem or novel, we often want to end our first reading with a sense of satisfaction and comprehension.  When we read criticism, we seek clear, structured, theory-based studies that give us answers to questions of relevance and literary significance.  At the very least, thinking about “re-reading” and “spiraling critical study” strikes us with some trepidation.

In this sense, we are not so far off from the speed-readers we criticize outside of academia.  When faced with challenging texts, the first inclination for many is to turn to other sources to do the deciphering on our behalf, and to spend our time in traditional forms of criticism aimed to identify cohesive taxonomies and formulaic approaches to the keys of a text.  Although we often wax poetic to our friends, colleagues and students on the virtues of close reading, library research and reading in isolation, many of us are not beyond using sources that will do the work of summarizing the text on our behalf.  We explain to ourselves (and sometimes, to others) that we are merely trying to understand the discourse that has already been written on the text so that we can add something fresh rather than re-iterating previous arguments or following a cold trail.  However, we might as well just use Ross’s excuse: “We are a busy people.”  We, too, calculate the line of best fit that will help us reach our “solution” as quickly as possible.

The task of writing to keep a reader’s interest and to challenge methods of reading is not a new one, and many entertainers and artists alike have undertaken diverse strategies to pull the reader back into the text.  So, too, might we identify a variety of writers like Spenser, Pope, Byron, and Beckett who annotated their own texts in order to comment on forms of literary criticism.[4]  Few texts, however, have managed to actively engage the reader and parody inconsequential criticism to the extent that T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov have.  Both Eliot and Nabokov take on the task of devising new methods of interacting with the reader to supplant the speed-reading process and to re-engage the reader in the joys of textual manipulation.  To do so, Eliot and Nabokov integrate their own summaries, endnotes, and annotations that reiterate the theme or refer the reader back to the text at hand. Famously, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Nabokov’s Pale Fire extend their arguments through the inclusion of diversions, extended annotations, and mock authorial explanations in published endnotes accompanying poems of the same name. In effect, these diversions misdirect the reader into trusting sources which complicate and extend the arguments presented.

Eliot’s inclusion of the endnotes in the second publication of The Waste Land has long been a matter of controversy, if not reproach.  Eliot himself has fueled the fire by intimating that the notes were composed along with the poem and embellished later, and included in the new edition both to “ward off possible accusations of plagiarism”[5] and to produce the material needed for the poem to meet the 32-page length printing requirement to be sold as a book.  As Eliot remarks, the notes “‘became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day…I regret having sent so many inquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.’”[6]  Eliot’s metacommentary serves to confirm the use of endnotes as a significant source of misdirection in the text. The Waste Land, when it was published as a poem without the notes, was noted as an “‘ample test of the reader’s ability and maturity in the skills of reading poems.’”[7] To call the reading a test is an understatement, as Eliot’s network of complex allusions and fragments is meant to instill in the reader some sense of dislocation and insecurity.

The Waste Land is characterized by a mixture of memory of things past and present desires for unity, related in “a heap of broken images.”[8]  The use of multiple languages, narrators, and fragments serves to engage the reader in an attempt to find unity in a world that has been shattered.  Eliot writes, “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,”[9] futilely attempting to put back together the pieces.  The poem is accompanied by Eliot’s somewhat candid endnotes which often seem to explain the origins of an allusion but divert the reader from ascertaining the connection.  In his note on “The Fire Sermon,” Eliot writes, “The complete text of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon…will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series).  Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.”[10]  Other notes refer the reader to passages of “anthropological interest,”[11] admirations of the interior of a church,[12] to conversations in Australia,[13] and, most notably, to passages of texts in foreign languages without translations.[14]

The deceitful lack of clarity present in the endnotes has been documented by many other authors (most notably, in Kaiser’s “Disciplining The Waste Land”), so I won’t dwell on it here.  Most importantly, although the endnotes seem inconsequential, they replicate the effect of the poem itself in diverting the reader from finding a satisfying, coherent truth.  If another editor had added endnotes, it is almost certain that we would have had English translations of all verses of the poem.  Critics and publishers are noted for their meticulous desire to make texts accessible and easy-to-read, feeding the closet inclinations of scholars who would much prefer to have all the notes in one edition.  However, if such endnotes had been provided, it would have required less participation on the part of the reader and would have undermined the poem’s representation of the impossibility of collecting fragments into a unified whole.  To re-engage the reader into the task and to reinforce his message, Eliot provided his own notes on the text, which tempted the reader into new forms of critical inquiry and imposed a critical lens for which to view the text.

Like those following The Waste Land, the annotations in Pale Fire also serve to divert the reader into new methods of reading and to mock traditional forms of critical approaches to a text, though they do so in even more pronounced ways.  Unlike The Waste Land, where the endnotes provide referential information to support the poem, for Pale Fire “the commentary is the novel,” as Nabokov wrote in a 1961 letter.[15]  In the prologue to the novel, we understand that it is the voice of Kinbote who will narrate the poem and the reflections for us, and that it will be “the commentator who has the last word.”[16]  Whether the reader decides to read the novel from beginning to end or to follow the narrator’s directions for jumping from annotation to annotation, it is revealed fairly quickly that Charles Kinbote is not who he initially made himself out to be, and that the notes have very little to do with the realistic life or intentions of a Mr. John Shade, if such a character exists.

More often than not, the choice of anecdotes to go along with the lines of verse seems purely coincidental.  For example, when the poem reads “I never bounced a ball or swung a bat” (line 130), the narrator’s explanation reads: “Frankly I too never excelled in soccer and cricket,”[17] and continues to detail the accomplishments and proclivities of the narrator, rather than focus on a close reading of the poem.  Even in glossing the annotations we get a sense that reality and fiction are blurred.  In the notes on line 149, the narrator mentions “illusion,” “ripple-warped reflection,” “doubleganger,” “deceived,” and “counterfeit” within five sentences.[18]  Other diversions include the narrator’s occasional misdirection, as when the reader is referred to a “nice response to line 312,”[19] when no notes were included for that line.  The structure of the annotations force the reader to choose what information to deem as relevant, and the undertones of deceit cause the reader to reassess both the content of the poem and the annotations.

In addition to subverting the reader’s intentions of quickly finishing the novel with a solid understanding of its message, the annotations to Pale Fire frequently mimic, comment on, and exaggerate traditions of literary criticism so as to parody the ridiculousness of analyses that make themselves out to be wholly comprehensive or capable of understanding the author’s full intentions.  The usurping of traditional standards of criticism takes a number of forms in the text, but most often includes either direct disapproval or exaggerated representation.  As an example of the former, John Shade is related as saying, “‘when I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool.’”[20]  This directly contradicts Kinbote’s preface to the poem, where he asserts the seriousness of the poem as he believes it was intended to be written.

Other examples of satirical mimicry of literary critics abound in the text.  The structure of the novel itself, with over two hundred pages of commentary for a one thousand line poem – “smothering the poem with its notes”[21] – is an absurd relation of how critics can dig for clarifications and connections that far exceed the intention of the author.  To this extent, some of Kinbote’s methods of explaining Shade’s supposed intentions also amplify some of the less reasonable approaches of critics to a text.  Kinbote relates that the name “Vanessa” (line 270) must be “an allusion to Vanhomrigh, Esther!”[22]  At times, Kinbote relies on many pages of analysis to annotate a single word from the poem.  Nabokov uses the annotations to suggest that a more appropriate critical analysis of Pale Fire would be one that leaves off trying to distinguish reality from illusion, using theoretical terms from foreign languages, and trying to figure out the “sincerity” of the novel, and instead to acknowledge that a single text may have many layers and narratives that intermingle. As Véra Nabokov wrote in a letter to friends just after Pale Fire was published, the novel “is indeed a very funny book, and only a few reviewers realized what it was really about.”[23]

In The Death of Literature, Alvin Kernan describes Pale Fire as a novel “grappling with a growing narcissism and solipsism in modern life that are making any kind of communication, including the privileged literary kind between authors and readers, increasingly difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible.”[24]  Nabokov often represents his narrator as speaking directly to the reader, with comments like “I trust the reader has enjoyed this note,”[25] and “I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.”[26]  In other words, the narrator is afraid that he will lose connection with the reader, with the understanding that if the reader is unable to accept the same emotional responses and judgments as the storyteller, all reading and writing become irrelevant.  Even more significantly, the novel comments on the beauty of a text’s ability to affect our reactions – a sentiment that we are beginning to lose.  When the narrator describes the moment where he will read the finished version of the poem, he writes: “We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing…I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.”[27]  This is what fiction provides us with, and what we are in danger of losing by getting swept up into the world of seeking concrete solutions and efficient ways of analyzing a text rather than interacting with it.  Eliot and Nabokov urge us to acknowledge that we will never simply grasp a fragmented or multi-layered reality.  Rather, they encourage us to re-immerse ourselves in the text and to revel in the truths it can show us.

REFERENCES

“At The End of the Book.”  Editorial.  New York Times 7 Dec 2006 late ed.

(East Coast): A38.

Eliot, T.S.  “The Waste Land.”  The Oxford Book of American Poetry.  Eds.

David Lehman and John Brehm.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.  351-365.

Golding, Alan.  From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry.  Madi

son, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Grabes, H.  “The Combination of Autobiographies as ‘correlated pattern in

the game’: Pale Fire.”  In  Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov’s Eng

lish Novels.  The Hague: Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, 1977.  54-69.

Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green.  “Disciplining The Waste Land, or How to Lead Crit

ics into Temptation.”  Twentieth Century Literature, 44 (Spring 1998):

82-99.

Kernan, Alvin.  The Death of Literature.  New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1990.

Nabokov, Vladimir.  Pale Fire.  New York: Vintage International, 1989.

—.  Selected Letters (1940-1977).  Eds.  Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J.

Bruccoli.  San Diego: Harcourt Publishing, 1989.

Ross, Charles.  Rev. of Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery,

by Brian Boyd.  Modern Fiction Studies 49.2 (2003): 374-375.

Woodward, Daniel H.  “Notes on the Publishing History and Text of The

Waste Land.”  The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 58.3 (July-Sept 1964): 252-265.

ENDNOTES

[1] Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage International, 1989): 28.

[2] One of the more famous works documenting such criticism is Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Princeton University Press, 1999).

[3] Ross, Charles, Rev. of Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, by Brian Boyd.  Modern Fiction Studies 49.2 (2003): 374.

[4] Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green, “Disciplining The Waste Land, or How to Lead Critics into Temptation.”  Twentieth Century Literature, 44 (Spring 1998): 86.

[5] “At The End of the Book.”  Editorial.  New York Times 7 Dec 2006 late ed. (East Coast): A38.

[6] Woodward, Daniel H., “Notes on the Publishing History and Text of The Waste Land.”  The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 58.3 (July-Sept 1964): 260.

[7] Golding, Alan, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995): 108.

[8] Eliot, T.S., “The Waste Land.”  The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Eds. David Lehman and John Brehm.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.  351-365): line 22.

[9] Ibid, line 431.

[10] Ibid, endnote on line 308.

[11] Ibid, endnote on line 218.

[12] Ibid, endnote on line 264.

[13] Ibid, endnote on line 199.

[14] Ibid, endnotes on lines 60, 63, 64, 92, 218, 293, 367-77, 412, and 428.

[15] Nabokov, Vladimir, Selected Letters (1940-1977) (Eds.  Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. San Diego: Harcourt Publishing, 1989): 332.

[16] Nabokov, Pale Fire 29.

[17] Ibid, 117.

[18] Ibid, 143.

[19] Ibid, 218.

[20] Ibid, 156.

[21] Grabes, H., “The Combination of Autobiographies as ‘correlated pattern in the game’: Pale Fire,”  In Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov’s English Novels (The Hague: Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, 1977): 65.

[22] Nabokov, Pale Fire 172.

[23] Nabokov, Selected Letters 339.

[24] Kernan, Alvin, The Death of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 199): 206.

[25] Nabokov, Pale Fire 147.

[26] Ibid, 207.

[27] Ibid, 289.

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FACEBOOK’S DA BOMB by Lisa Hemminger

July 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Hi! H-I-G-H. I am a middle-aged teacher living most of my waking hours among young adults. After an appendectomy with some complications, I am floating in a thin atmosphere of pain and morphine. But I just had a visitor, and now, as many artists in fugue are wont to do, I’d like to philosophize about her.

Her name is Tomato Berk. Tomato is a product of the aforementioned young adult environment, which also means she’s a speed freak.  Not that kind. She loves fast things, thinks and acts fast, and lives fast, which means something totally different than living fast meant 60 years ago.  I’ll tell you about her wild world of fast, but first … a word about time.

If Jim Croce had put time in a bottle, teens and young adults would be buying it (especially if that bottle were recyclable and sold at Jamba Juice.) While linear time is arguably something man created, the internal time clock of the human body works like this: the first time a young person becomes aware of a “day,” it seems really, really long. After that, every day lived and noticed seems a little shorter until the “day” disappears completely. Somewhere in the middle of this process, people try and do everything possible to stop that shrinking down of time and sometimes they actually do slow it down—by cramming it full of stuff that weighs human body time down, stuff such as responsibility, work, and guilt. This self-burdening, by inverse proportion, makes life (which is out-of-body for most intents and purposes) seem “fast.” Residents in the current cramming era of the 21st century have more doodads, gadgets, and flibbertigibbets than ever to help their cramming. This brings me back to Tomato.

I am coming in and out of my oxycontin fugue, and I hear Tomato texting her friends on her Blackberry. Tomato is fast because she abbreviates everything; Tomato can text 90 words a minute.  I wonder how someone in B.B. (Before Blackberry) would contextualize this fuzzy cacophony of clicks punctuated with sniggers, harrumphs, and chuffs. The modern young adults are cyborgs just like the prescient Donna Haraway predicted: wired up and downloaded, always a bell or buzzer going.

Fast also means taking shortcuts. Tomato likes to abbreviate beyond the typical text abbreviations. She finger-shapes “whatevs,” substitutes “tank” for apartment, “bf” for best friend.  She is “ti-ti” (tired), “flunk” (feeling sick), and “prool” (pretty cool.) She and her friends like music that accentuates an absent portamento over a long glissando. (To experience this, listen to Cher’s “Believe” for absent portamento, an early Judy Garland tune for glissando.)

Tomato and her group move so fast, they live in a kind of blur, very similar to the shimmery thing I am seeing at the foot of my bed. Hello there, hallucination!

Tomato and her group talk fast…physically.  Sometimes I don’t fully decipher Tomato’s message until she is 20 feet from me. It’s as if she is moving forward with ever increasing speed to catch up the next big thing, while the next big thing speeds away from her. At the end of the chase, I am in a time zone way behind them. In other words, Tomato and her peeps are riding the front end of a cyber-driven train, and as an older adult, I am living in their Doppler Effect.

Fast means other things in this youth’s world. For instance, Tomato has a streamlined red fades haircut for speedy skateboard, rollerblade, and boogie board turns. Her retro Vega stocks nitro. Tomato, like many enthusiasts of Motorcyclist Magazine, believes that speed limits are ridiculous because 1) they are geared to the lamest driver and 2) nobody obeys them.

Tomato follows no one and everyone. To get all of the experience that she can, she lives in a nether world between male and female. She is very girly at times, and at others, she is downright macho. In the middle, she is a very androgynous individual, and amalgamation of everyone she sees, hears, and admires.

“Tomato Berk” is even a truncated name; it’s the one she uses at Starbuck’s and speed dating.

On that fast front, Tomato has “finished” (her word) her third boyfriend this semester.  She is a big fan of speed dating, and reminisces on one of her speed dates as “the love of a nighttime.” She and that young man made a pact to have a whole relationship over the course of one night. By the middle two “dates” they had talked about their favorite bands and music, summarized the “tank sitch,” and told each other their …ahem…current sexual fantasy (which is a lot sexier than having sex for reals, Tomato says.)

This Aesop‘s fable dilution by sheer quantity is a new defense young people have created for the war on time and its deadly march. The best example of its effectiveness in action is Facebook. Tomato loves Facebook. And she loves playing games with her friends on it, games like who can find the most friends? And who can reject the most friends? And who can add and then reject the most of the same friends in the littlest amount of time?

Ah, here comes my nurse who smells like coffee with my noon pillow fluff and some more medicine. And now the shimmery thing at the bottom of the bed is coming over, too…

Hi Schmoo! Can I call you Schmoo? You and I don’t like to go fast, do we Schmoo? What’s that, Schmoo? Oh, you like what I was saying about Facebook? You agree that its whole goal is to speed up the natural aging of people’s relationships? You understand that Facebook especially targets people who can’t say “no, PeteFeet, I don’t want to be your friend just b/c you were in my kindergarten class!” It searches out people who are afraid to hit the reject a friend button because they remember that episode of Twilight Zone with the black box and the button! On the other hand, it teaches some loving children to reject others with glee… while answering inane quiz questions!

You’re so right, Schmoo! Facebook does allow strangers and stalkers who know someone who knows someone who knows you to read some of your silly notes on a wall, or make a much bigger deal than is necessary over a lapsed response; it allows these Faces to flip through your photo albums and find out what color you are! It encourages people to join cliques! Facebook makes you have so many friends, friendship as a valuable commodity becomes cyber-thin! It uses up all your free time by hypnotizing with the same quiz over and over! It makes some people you really want to be your real friend add you to their friend list just because they are afraid not to! It makes people believe that everyone on this planet wants to know 10, 15, 25, 1,000 inane details about their life! It makes them spread fake flowers and fish across the world! It causes ennui, drama, revulsion, and compulsion.

Schmoo! I call shenanigans! Schmoo! Facebook’s …da bomb! Tomato!

She’s back, beside my hospital bed. But why is Tomato smiling? I must have blurted out the secret that Facebook is the ultimate bomb! Is she involved with the Facebook conspiracy? Where is Schmoo, nurse???? Where is Nurse Percocet, Schmoo????

I have to save Tomato from herself so I grab her bouquet of real-life flowers in one hand and her real-time face in the other. Then I shove both our faces into the authentic greenery, where all we can hear is the vibration of the leaves.

Proooooool.

 

 

 

 

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The Industrial Town: Representations of a Changing Way of Life in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times by Anna Rogers, San Diego State University

July 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment

The mid-nineteenth century in England was a period of considerable social upheaval produced by widespread economic, political, and technological shifts. The decades following the Napoleonic wars brought repeated class conflicts and economic depressions as well as continual expansion of British imperial interests and increasing industrialization.  The 1850s, in particular, were a period of intense social redefinition in England.  The widespread introduction of steam power into manufacturing brought about what many have identified as the Second Industrial Revolution.

This was the development that completed a final transformation of Britain’s home economy from a rural agrarian model to an urban industrial one. In addition, the empire was being actively enlarged and solidified which supplied a massive influx of wealth and goods. In 1858 the British Raj was established in India when the government assumed direct rule after the failure of the British East India Company to effective put down the Sepoy Rebellion, and the Australian Gold Rush began in the early 1850s, which added to the mineral wealth already being extracted from Southern Africa.   The wealth and raw materials obtained through these expansions of Britain’s international interests provided additional fuel for the industrial transformation at home.  Attendant on these radical social changes were artistic and literary developments, the rise of the novel as a popular literary form being one of the most significant.

In some capacity, the novels of the mid-nineteenth century respond to the pressures shaping Victorian society, particularly those produced by increased industrialization.  In some, this response takes a direct and easily recognizable shape, while in others, the effect of contemporary societal pressures is less overtly detectable.  Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) each take shape as a response to shifts occurring during the period when they were written.  Numerous aspects of these two novels reflect the concerns of mid-century British life but for the purpose of this essay, only the emergence of these concerns in relation to the specific authorial choices of setting will be examined.

Each of these novelists crafts a vivid picture of the town where the events of the narrative takes place.  For these two authors, the setting of their stories plays an important role, not only as a force in the lives of characters, but as a lens through which to understand the social, economic and political structures that affect their lives.  Both George Eliot and Charles Dickens place a specific town at the center of their novels.  Each town is impacted in some way by increases in industrialization, but they differ dramatically beyond this.  Perhaps most obviously, the authors diverge in their choice of the period that they portray in their novels, a divergence which, in turn, profoundly affects the depiction of the settings in which their respective characters operate.

Eliot’s novel takes place earlier in the century, though it was published in 1860. This places St. Ogg’s, her fictional town, at a point sometime around the 1830s, when it began its transition into an industrial center. Eliot’s depiction of St. Ogg’s reflects her upbringing in the Midlands during this period when “local time was replaced by standard time…, and local dialects were gradually supplanted by standard English.  In the villages, farms and towns of [her] upbringing, new time and old time, new social formations and old, local and global concerns, all coexist.”[i] Rather than addressing the world as it was at the time of composition, Eliot takes a somewhat nostalgic look back at a time prior to total industrialization.  The portrait she paints of this period through her description of St. Ogg’s and its citizens is a strange mixture that celebrates the great age of the town, its connection to the fields and the natural world around it, along with its growing industry and prosperity, even while it exposes the great vulnerability of all these. In like manner, its people are both venerated for their deep ties to their homes, lands and families and exposed for their narrow-minded backwardness and hypocrisy.

Dickens’s Coketown, on the other hand, is a fictionalized representation of a contemporary industrialized town. Dickens’s novel was published in 1854 and very purposefully presents the reader with a contemporary view of an industrial environment:  “Hard Times takes place in and near a contemporary city and deals with a problem (the attitude responsible for such a city, as well as numerous other ills) that was very much a part of the world in which Dickens lived.  His decision to add the subtitle “For These Times” to the first edition of Hard Times in volume form… only intensified the connection between this novel and its contemporary milieu.”[ii]

The portrait Dickens constructs of Coketown is devoid of the ambiguities of St. Ogg’s. Dickens presents the reader with a dark vision of a fully industrialized town that consumes its human inhabitants as fuel.  He makes no pretenses of identifying a thriving, if flawed, current of humanity running through it, as Eliot does.  Instead, his depiction of the town is a lament for what is being wasted there under the oppression of life in such an environment. In this regard, his treatment of Coketown in relation to the contemporary social and economic conditions in Britain is more straightforward than Eliot’s, but by no means less effective in conveying the social critique he undertakes. So emphatic is he on the importance of the town in relation to this, that he titles chapter 5 The Key-note and, before launching into a lengthy and detailed description of the town, suggests, “Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune” ( Hard Times 27).  In doing this, he is indicating to his reader that all else will ultimately follow, which is to say that Coketown and what it represents is at the heart of this tale.

Though Dickens tackles the effects of industrialization on human beings directly and performs the majority of this work through his construction of the town, it is also a clear concern for Eliot, though the relationship to progress that emerges in her novel is more ambivalent:

It is by no means insignificant that the impact on the life of the Tullivers—and particularly Maggie—of external social and economic forces is invariably negative: although St. Ogg’s shares in the early nineteenth-century economic and technological progress, its results on the novel’s central protagonists are ultimately destructive… it is ultimately the modernity of the new, industrial England that quite literally kills [Maggie] when the boat she and Tom are using to escape from the mill during the flood is hit by fragments of ‘some wooden machinery [which have] just given way on one of the wharves.’ This conservative Wordsworthian vision of a traditional order of rural life being destroyed by the arrival of the progressive but ruthless forces of modernity is of course in line with the novel’s presentation of the world of the Tulliver’s Dodson relatives, personifying the very attitudes and values that made the development of the modern, nineteenth-century England possible.[iii]

The problem of industrialism clearly plays a major component in the construction of each of these settings.  In addition, both towns share further similarities that result from the social changes of the mid-nineteenth century.  Civilization’s relationship to nature, the dehumanization of history, and the often troubled dichotomy between the individual and the mass, are common to both towns, although their expressions of these themes are achieved through very different means.

Before proceeding, let us examine some of the aforementioned similarities, since they are quite striking, between the authorial descriptions of the two towns.  Eliot begins her book by laying out the setting and describes St. Ogg’s as such:

The town of St. Ogg’s, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river brink, tinging the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun.  Far away on each hand stretch the rich pastures and the patches of dark earth, made ready for the seed of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-sown corn. (The Mill on the Floss 1)

While Dickens’s Coketown picks up a similar red building material and is situated along a river, the treatment is very different:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. (Hard Times 27)

What is beautiful in one becomes distorted in the other.  The red brick has been dimmed by pollution and the river described as taking on a purple hue in each book does so from very different sources.

Of particular interest in these passages are the references to nature. Dickens, in describing the development of his town, points out the absolute absence of any form of nature in its benevolent growth:

Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death. (Hard Times 67)

The denizens of Dickens’s city are alienated from all contact with the natural world, but this does not mean that nature is totally absent; instead, it has gone horribly wrong.  Rather than escaping it completely, as one could imagine might be the ultimate achievement of the Industrial Revolution, the commercial progress of humanity has transformed nature into a distorted and malevolent force, as suggested by the smoke serpents and the mad elephants to which he refers throughout the book.  Tamara Ketabgian links these images with the Victorian idea of the “animal machine” which possessed a very specific resonance for the Victorians:

The animal machine conveyed soullessness and degeneration at their worst, epitomized by the figure of an instinctive body absent of all dignifying human emotion.  Such visions of mechanical instinct resonated with popular concerns surrounding the Condition of England, and in particular, England’s new industrial culture.  Saturated by anxieties about working class unrest, these bestial images multiplied around the factory, the factory town, and a population that, at least according to observers, worked more closely with machines that ever before.  A symptomatic figure for modernity, the animal machine defined both everything that the human body was and everything that the Victorian industrial masses threatened to become.[iv]

At St. Ogg’s, however, nature is very much present and, though it is both benevolent and destructive (the latter by gently foreshadowing their doom), for the majority of The Mill on the Floss it is used to heighten the sense of a possibility for peace or fulfillment for the main characters.  Eliot creates the sense of a shared local history and connection to the past through the natural world, even though that history also ominously includes the floods of St. Ogg’s. Here Eliot describes the town itself as being intimately linked to nature.

It is one of those old, old towns, which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature as much as the bower birds or the winding galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legion turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside. (The Mill 123)

Interestingly, Eliot also uses nature to identify the flaws of the townsfolk who will cause Maggie much suffering:

You could not live among such people; you are stifled for want of an outlet towards something beautiful, great, or noble: you are irritated with these dull men and women, as a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on which they live – with this rich plain where the great river flows forever onward and links the small pulse of the old English town with the beatings of the world’s mighty heart. (284)

Eliot’s use of natural imagery is multifaceted, and she employs it to very different ends than Dickens, identifying to some extent the complexities of her main character’s situation through the novel’s relationship to the natural world.  Nature in relation to these two towns (one locating the dehumanization of its inhabitants in their separation from a benevolent natural world and the other identifying a degree of dehumanization in the inhabitants’ inability to appreciate the glorious natural world around them) suggests, in some degree, a conflicted dichotomy between the human and the inhuman.

This separation of human beings from their humanity, which is dehumanization, is thematically central in each of these books and is carried further by each in a variety of ways.  Its manifestation is relatively straightforward in Dickens’s novel.  Dickens clearly locates the source of the dehumanization of Coketown’s inhabitants in the grinding factories that consume their lives, day after day. Moreover, he names his town after ‘coke,’ the end product of a treatment process for coal that makes it more efficient as fuel.  Coketown is named for what it consumes; the fuel that keeps it alive.  That fuel is not just the coal burning in the furnaces; the real coke is the thousands of human lives burnt up in the factories of the town, the “people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next” (Hard Times 28).  The name that Dickens gives his town, when combined with the descriptions he provides of its inhabitants as they go through the machinations of their daily lives, indicates the total dehumanization that Dickens himself sees happening in the fully industrialized city. Indeed, for Dickens, dehumanization seems to naturally accompany industrialization.

In The Mill on the Floss, the threat to Maggie’s humanity is embedded in the deeper idea of individual self-agency that was emerging in the mid-nineteenth century.  Annette Federico has argued that at the heart of Maggie’s struggle is the rising notion of self-determination and the conscious choosing of an appropriate mode of living:

The story that Maggie, other young people in the novel, Marian Evans, and the reader find themselves a part of is the story of nineteenth-century liberal individualism, and in particular the liberal-existentialist predicament of choosing how one wishes to live.  It is a problem that occupies the ethical center in many Victorian novels, for “making a choice,” as John Stuart Mill maintained in 1859, is both the prerogative and burden of the modern liberal subject.[v]

St. Ogg’s is named for the boatman who ferried the disguised Virgin Mary across the Floss simply because it was “enough that [her] heart need[ed] it,” without questioning her or attempting to dissuade her, as the other townspeople did (The Mill 124).  In other words, St. Ogg’s is named after an individual who understood an individual human desire. This identifies the heart of the struggle taking place within St. Ogg’s as constituted by the tension between that individual desire and what is perceived within the context of this town to be the rational and correct way of thinking and acting. Thus, the way the people of St. Ogg’s ostracize Maggie because she has chosen the only course of action acceptable to her heart is paralleled in the townspeople’s treatment of the Virgin before St. Ogg agrees to ferry her across in the storm.  Their response to her when she asks them for help is to execute the conventional course of action they always already dictate: “Wherefore dost thou desire to cross the river?  Tarry till the morning, and take shelter here for the night: so shalt thou be wise, and not foolish” (124).  The people of St. Ogg’s see the equally simple solution to Maggie’s problem of marrying Stephen Guest, and when she will not take it, she is punished by them because they cannot conceive of a morally correct situation which would justify her course of action.

Clearly, the relation between the individual and the mass, and how it should be understood, is one of the most important ideas expressed through the towns in both Hard Times and The Mill on the Floss. A great anomaly persists within each town regarding this. In Coketown, it is the grotesque of the faceless masses that Dickens achieves by focusing on the absolute annihilation of the individual. Yet, due to Coketown’s total industrialization, this annihilation has already been achieved; Dickens’s goal is to make the reader understand the consequent implications. Her asserts,

So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good and evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions. (Hard Times 71)

Although there is struggle on the part of the two characters singled out of this mass, there is no triumph.  Stephen dies as a victim of a system that uses him and suspects him at the same time, while Rachel, who remains alive, returns to her long-suffering life to live out the rest of her days laboring in the factories of Coketown with no promise of relief.

In contrast, Maggie is the anomaly in St. Ogg’s. The town here is undone by the individual in the face of the mass and, in this way, it resists the view of humanity that Dickens presents.  The force of Maggie’s life and the force of the flood can be seen as bound together since the flood comes in the moment when she has found a final resolve to her course of action and is only left to lament the great length of the life that remains to her.  The flood comes to release her from suffocation under the condemnation of the society of St. Ogg’s. It comes to deliver her and mete out punishment on the townspeople since, in the words of Dr. Kenn, “[t]he persons who are the most incapable of a conscious struggle such as yours, are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you on the ground of an unjust judgment; because they will not believe in your struggle” (516). Significantly, in this case such persons also did not believe a terrible flood would ever come again.

St. Ogg’s represents a type of passive consumption that produces a terrible effect which culminates in a single catastrophe.  Although the catastrophe comes in the form of a flood, more truly catastrophic is the conflagration of a single life under the insidious resistance of a weak-minded society to a morally higher creature. In Coketown, the consumption is aggressive and relentless.  The thing consumed is not the one that resists the general current of societal feeling, but the many who are, in effect, the living fuel of the town. For the synecdochic “Hands” of Coketown, however, there will be no great final conflagration. Coketown has been burning all the while.

REFERENCES

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. London: Penguin Group, 2003.

Dolin, Tim. George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. London: Penguin Group, 2003.

Federico, Annette R. “Being Torn: The Mill on the Floss.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 12 (2001): 359-79.

Jedrzejewski, Jan.  George Eliot. New York: Routledge, 2007

Ketabgian, Tamara. “‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times.” Victorian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies 45 (2003): 649-76.

Thomas, Deborah A. “Hard Times”: A Fable of Fragmentation and Wholeness. New York: Twayne, 1997.

ENDNOTES


[i] Dolin, Tim. George Eliot. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 46

[ii] Thomas, Deborah A. “Hard Times”: A Fable of Fragmentation and Wholeness. (New York: Twayne, 1997), p. 5

[iii] Jedrzejewski, Jan. George Eliot. (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 49

[iv] Ketabgian, Tamara. “‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times.” Victorian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies. 45 (2003): 649-76. p. 653

[v] Federico, Annette R. “Being Torn: The Mill on the Floss.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 12 (2001): 359-79. p. 362

[1] Dolin, Tim. George Eliot. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 46

[1] Thomas, Deborah A. “Hard Times”: A Fable of Fragmentation and Wholeness. (New York: Twayne, 1997), p. 5

[1] Jedrzejewski, Jan. George Eliot. (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 49

[1] Ketabgian, Tamara. “‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times.” Victorian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Social, Political, and Cultural Studies. 45 (2003): 649-76. p. 653

[1] Federico, Annette R. “Being Torn: The Mill on the Floss.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 12 (2001): 359-79. p. 362

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