Since I can't be in class tomorrow, I thought I would voice a few questions and observations I had about the text.
First of all, I was wondering if it would be useful to return to the friend/enemy/neighbor distinction. As I understand Reinhard's assessment, the idea of a neighborhood with open boundaries is an alternative to the interior/exterior qualities that Schmitt respectively ascribes to friends and enemies. Indeed, at the beginning of the Man of Law Tale, boundaries seem very permeable; there is clearly trade between Rome and Syria, and a conversion allows the Sultan to marry Lady Constance. Of course, the conversion is a significant condition--the Emperor would never have married his daughter to a Muslim, and it converts the marriage into a type of evangelization project-- but regardless, these peoples are clearly able to coexist and make connections among each other. To a certain extent, it seems like the marriage, with its homogenizing condition, solidifies the open neighborhood boundaries so that they now delineate Christian friends, thus excluding those such as the Sultaness who do not want to belong to this particular community. She is not allowed to remain a mere neighbor, but forced to choose and thus reacts violently. I'm not completely sure where I'm going with this; perhaps it just reinforces the need Reinhard expresses for a third way of relating to others, a way that avoids seeking "friendship" based on the homogenizing tendencies Kristeva criticizes.
Anyway, regardless of where the different faults may lie for motivating the Sultaness' actions, I'm also interested, again, in the pragmatic dimension of what we do when someone does choose to be an enemy. The Biblical parables directly related to "love one's neighbor" do not deal with someone who is actively attacking you, nor is turning the other cheek always realistic in the political world. What is one's obligation to the enemy? On the other hand, if the two mothers made themselves enemies, choosing to be foreign to their families, because they felt they were the victims of injustice, perhaps they felt they only had power to react through violence. If this is the case, how would neighbor love apply to those who are not in a position of power or on equal footing? I think the element of hegemony that came up in class a few weeks ago complicates the theories of foreignness and neighbor love; loving a perceived oppressor would entail different processes than, from a position of power, trying to promote equality and respect.
I am also still interested in the role of "Satan," as I mentioned with the Prioress' tale, as a medieval way of labeling "das Ding," the impenetrable core of the Other. Perhaps there's a connection with this and the "hardening of the heart" in Biblical stories; any foreign behavior, or perceived clinging to foreign ideas, would be attributed to demonic agency. Of course, this is unfair to the other, but it would explain how communities living as neighbors could destroy each other with such ease. It also reminds me of our comments about St. Augustine, and sin as the uncanny element of oneself. In this case, it would be important to follow Kristeva and recognize the foreignness in ourselves, so as not to condemn the foreignness in others. And yet, there is ambiguity in the Sultaness--I find her discourse uncannily Christian, as she says would rather die than renege her faith (330-336). Perhaps there is an unconscious recognition of similarity in foreignness that the Christians do not recognize.
Finally, I find it intriguing that at the end of the story, Lady Constance returns home. Does the narrator feel a need for this to happen so that the story can conclude? Are there limits to integration with our neighbors? Will we always prefer to return to our own home? I don't have any formed ideas yet, but I'd like to know what you think.
I've been thinking a lot about these mothers - they're exposing a disjunct in my understanding of Kristeva and ZSR. The Sultan and the pagan king Alla seem to me to be a very clear instance of the sort of chosen "strangerness" Kristeva talks about in the first part of her book - they chose to leave the mother/tongue, to become foreigners in their own homes, to abandon their native cultures. And the relationship in hat case between mother and son is, just as Kristeva says, a traumatic one centering on rejection.
ReplyDeleteWhat I can't wrap my head around is how this relates to the political category of the neighbor - and of the exact relationship between Kristeva's stranger and ZSR's neighbor. Both are foreigner of some kind, but Kristeva's idea of the stranger involves the agency of the one choosing to be strange. In a case where a son chooses to be strange to his mother, are they reciprocal neighbors? Do they (ideally) owe each other the same kind of neighbor-love?
I don't mean to be all questions and no answers, but I can't seem to get clear!
Lots of great thoughts and questions! I want to pick up on something Teresa said that I think is a helpful way to think about it. The marriage between Constance and the Sultan, as she points out, seem to solidify boundaries that previously seemed more open--and those boundaries, drawn as they are, seem intolerable to the Sultaness whose violence erupts as a result (leaving to one side, for the moment, the question of either judging or justifying that violence.)
ReplyDeleteAnd this lead Teresa to some musings about our responsibility, or not, to love our "neighbors" who are attacking us, who are acting as our enemy. I think this gets at the heart of the radical nature of R/S/Z's claim: if we think of the "enemy" as, instead, the "neighbor," then we are asked to "love" the enemy in the very midst of her most violent impulses. To love the neighbor as the self would mean to appreciate, in this case, the Sultaness' extraordinary violence as an eruption of her jouissance--a jouissance that I am capable of sharing, but that I, instead, fear and try to avoid/dismiss/repress.
In Kristeva's terms, this might mean recognizing in the Sultaness' violent response a hint of my own inclination to violent outrage, eruption, aggression--she seems foreign because she externalizes a part of myself that I don't readily acknowledge--a way in which I am strange to myself.
The Man of Law, of course, castigates the Sultaness as evil, in Satan's thrall, etc. And Teresa rightly, I think, wonders if this idea of Satan operates as Das Ding, impinging on the traumatic kernel of the Real. This seems right to me: so yes, I think so.
So the interpretive question, then, becomes, does the Man of Law, teller of the tale (or Chaucer, author of the tale) love the Sultaness as his neighbor? Where in the tale might we go to find an answer to this question?
One more thought, related to Carina's post: It does seem that in the MLT, as Carina points out, the two "mothers-in-law" react out of anger at their sons' decisions to, as C. puts it, "leave the mother/tongue . . . abandon their native cultures." The Mothers (does the "in-law" part matter here?) side with cultural constancy, stability, homogeneity, while the sons seem to side with heterogeneity, cultural diversity, mobility.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a moment where we can see the different emphases in Kristeva, as distinct from R/S/Z. (Our difference to our self may be important to all the theorists, but Kristeva emphasizes dislocation/movement/foreignness whereas R/S/Z emphasize, perhaps, how our repressed desires trouble a stable sense of self.)
But this also seems a moment where we might push on the question of gender. What does it mean that in BOTH the MLT and Kristeva the maternal principle is associated with homogeneity, with sameness, with (in MLT a kind of obdurate) constancy? While the Man of Law and Kristeva no doubt pursue different implications (Kristeva doesn't castigate the mother as evil for instance), both seem to identify a productive kind of cultural mobility with the ability of subjects (sons?) to leave their mothers. I wonder what you think of this.
I also wonder if this marks a place to track a disagreement between Kristeva and Reinhard: there seem real differences between her notion of the "maternal principle/mother tongue" and his notion of the position of female sexuation as the open set, the not-All. Hmm. More thinking to do about this.
I'm also struck by the richness of these posts--there are so many productive ways you are engaging the theory and the literary texts! Keep at it! Feel free to choose one notion, or set of ideas and follow those where they take you!
So many questions here, again, but I just wanted to choose the one at the end of Patty's first comment here about whether the teller of the MLT loves the Sultaness as his neighbor. I'm intrigued by the comment that the Sultaness's discourse seems to be Christian in an odd way. She says, "But oon avow to grete God I heete,/ The lyf shal rather out of my body sterte/ Or Makometes lawe out of myn herte!" (334-336 in the Riverside).
ReplyDeleteOn one level, we could see this as the teller imposing his own discourse on the Sultaness--wanting to see her as like himself, then pushing her away with his (rather virulent) commentary later on, "O Sowdanesse, roote of iniquitee!" (358), etc. Perhaps he tries to set up a binary, to make her like himself only in order to highlight how she is NOT like the Christians in the story.
On the other hand, we could also say that the teller is actually trying to provide some explanation or justification for the Sultaness's actions. By making her discourse quasi-Christian, he's maybe trying to use her faith to explain her violence.
Of course, that could also just be one of the reactions to foreigners that K. blames, the temptation to assimilate.
Basically I don't know how to answer this question, but those are some of my initial thoughts!
If we identify with Constance, which I believe the Man of Law asks us to do, then her interaction with the Sultaness presents an interesting case of self as neighbor. The Sultaness is "forced" into a horrifying confrontation (a la R/S/Z), but I don't mean this in the pejorative sense that (I think) Carina does.
ReplyDeleteThe Sultaness's horror, however, does not solely stem from Constance as the neighbor in need. Constance is making a profound impact on the Sultaness's locale. She is indeed a threat to her mother-in-law's status quo, though passively, and based on her reaction, the Sultaness interprets this as a threat to self, preferring no son to "othered" son. The Sultaness seems to see an othering of kin as an attack on her own identity and chooses to avoid self reflection in favor of neutralizing the external conditions that might cause it.
And all this because of Constance's passivity. She makes no gesture at evangelism (thought Man of Law does). Again, it is the mere confrontation, the fact of proximity, neighborliness, that forces a decision on (but does not rob the volition of) the Sultaness.
I am still playing with this idea, but I think that the Man of Law does not love the Sultaness as his neighbor. In the introduction to the MLT, the Man of Law is primarily concerned with oaths, justice, and time, concerns fitting with his position. It is the Man of Law’s insistence on fulfilling his oath that brings about his narration of the tale. It seems that this anxiety about oath-breaking is at the heart of the Man’s (it’s more fun to call him “the Man!”) disdainful attitude toward the Sultaness. She outwardly seems to have converted, but the reader and the Man know that she is a secret Muslim (like Obama!). Immediately after she conceives of her plan to kill her son and his fellow Christians and before her false conversion, the Man doles out his harshest criticism:
ReplyDeleteO Sowdanesse, roote of iniquitee!
Virago, thou Semyrame the secounde!
O serpent under femynynytee,
Lik to the serpent depe in helle ybounde! (358-61)
The Sultaness is one of many oath-breakers in the tale, and this falsehood is coded as feminine: “Makestow of women, whan thou wolt bigile” (371). Of course I think my argument is troubled a bit when the Sultaness says, before she asks her council to agree to her plan, to make an oath:
“What sholde us tyden of this newel awe
But thraldom to oure bodies and penance,
And afterward in helle to be drawe,
For we reneyed Mahoun oure creance?” (337-40)
Here the Man as narrator, speaking as the Sultaness, clearly is identifying with the neighbor, himself imagining what it would be like to convert to another religion. I am hesitant to call this neighbor-love, but at the very least, it is a gesture toward it.
Ok - this is the second time I tried to post this (my internet connection timed out last time) and I just wanted to pose a few questions, thoughts about the Man of Law's Tale that I think may be relevant to our discussion:
ReplyDelete1. Based on what we talked about as the role of trade in bringing together foreigners or at least bringing foreigners into contact, it was interesting to me that Constance's whole journey was started by merchants telling stories of her beauty in Syria. Without trade, the subsequent encounters between foreigners would not have been possible. Trade seems to be central to our understanding of foreigners' interactions, but it's not an aspect of foreignness that Kristeva wants to deal with very often.
2. It would seem that the Sultan's choice of wife would lead to an encounter with the foreigner, which it does, I think, but the only conditions under which this encounter is possible are the conditions of his conversion and the conversion of his whole family. The encounter is predicated on assimilation of foreigners into Christianity. This aspect of the story seems to foreclose the possibility of Kristeva's ideal interaction with the foreigner.
3. It was curious how much Constance wants to return to her father's home, even though she is, ostensibly, quite happy with her (formerly) pagan husband Alla. Is it that her encounter with the foreigner is necessarily brief? That she does not want to sustain a relationship with a foreigner, even one who has likely converted for her sake, seems to trouble this potentially fruitful interaction with an other/foreigner. (Not to mention his religious assimilation, similar to the Sultan's - though his seems to be more sincere than the Sultan's which was seemingly just so he could marry Constance.)
4. I was thinking about Kristeva's account of Christian hospitality in connection with this tale and it was interesting to me that the only real account of hospitality for Constance, a foreigner, comes from pagans. She is taken in and cared for by complete strangers, and complete strangers to Christianity - the constable and Dame Hermengyld. It would seem that placing this characteristic in pagans would allow for the possibility of understanding foreigners, at least on their part. It is interesting that this characteristic is not found in Christians, but in so-called heathens or pagans.
I'm not sure what all of these points are leading toward (and I think they were much better articulated in my first attempt to post - sorry) but it seems useful to think about these aspects of the story, especially in connection with Kristeva.