Well, we seem to have arrived at the difficult, harried middle of the semester--it's own "traumatic kernel," if not of the Real, than at least of calendar! (That's a joke! she hastens to add . . .)
I was struck, in reading the Marshall essay alongside the excerpts from Foxe, that this week usefully returns us to some of our preoccupations from early in the semester: viz., the contrast between "love" and "justice," the contradiction of a "universal" religion (Christianity has this ambition) that is nonetheless regularly obsessed with different degrees of "insider"/"outsider" status. The Pagan, the Jew (from the Prioress' Tale), the Saracen (from the Charlemagne Romances), the Virtuous Pagan (from Erkenwald), the heretic (from Foxe, but also related to the Saracen), and the problem (raised in the Man of Law's Tale, and explicitly addressed by Shibanoff) of which kind of outsider might more troubling: near or far, heretic or religious other? It's increasingly interesting to think about the degree to which medieval and early modern Christian texts worry over the limits to Christian universalism--in terms of our concerns this semester, this is also to say that such preoccupations register doubts about the very universalism to which Christian redemption lays claim. If not the virtuous judge from Erkenwald (left, sorrowfully, for hundreds of years in "hell"), then who? But if that virtuous judge then why not any virtuous person with or without belief?
But, back to Marshall: on p. 102, when she turns to the question of "neighbor-love," Marshall descibes Lacan's understanding of this as an "anti-morality," and quotes Lacan quoting the Marquis de Sade: "To love one's neighbor may be the cruelest of choices." She continues with the quote (this is Lacan): "my neighbor possesses all the evil Freud speaks about,but it is no different from the evil I retreat from in myself. To love him, to love him as myself is necessarily to move toward some cruelty" (102; quoting Seminar VII).
I'm struck by Lacan's phrase: "to move toward some cruelty." This is a delicate way to put it--it's not, for instance, to "be cruel" or to "enact cruelty"--and, in fact, Marshall is quite clear that the cruelty imagined (and textualized) in Foxe is very different from actual torture. What does it mean to "move toward" cruelty without inflicting it? Do any of the texts we've read "move toward" some cruelty in a way that seems to involve either 1) "loving" the cruelty of the neighbor? or 2) loving the cruelty of the neighbor as part of the desire for cruelty within myself? It might be more useful in this regard NOT to focus on particular characters so much as to focus on how the TEXT approaches these issues overall.
Sorry this post came so late this morning--I'm indeed in the middle of some traumatic kernel of a schedule!
I'm still interested in this question after the discussion in class yesterday. Looking over the account of Hooper's martyrdom, I was struck by the way the text uses verbs on pg. 657. Those in charge of Hooper's execution are very seldom referred to directly; instead, "his doublet, hose, and waistcoat were taken off," "the hoop of iron prepared for his middle was brought," and "was fastened." It's just interesting to me that the people actually enacting this scene are elided (as happens in other places in Foxe's text, too). I think maybe this is another example of a place where room is left for the reader to look out of the torturers' eyes.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, of course, that reading may be questioned by the scene on the next page where "he that was appointed to make the fire, came to him, and did ask him forgiveness" (658) since there we get a more specific reference to a person.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great way to think about this question through the details in the text! What occurred to me, though, as I read is that this mode of description enables us to look *into* the torturers' eyes. I'm thinking about the conversation in class about the text's investment in universality--how a text that is all about demonizing the persecutors can't in fact fully commit to demonizing them without undermining its own paradoxical claim to a truth that is both universal and exclusivist. So both details that you point to, Evelyn, seem telling if we have this reading in mind, since when the torturers aren't elided they're presented as remorseful, and thus not wholly outside the pale.
ReplyDeleteThings look a little different if we think about neighbor love as a reading strategy, as Patty suggested on Thursday, since then the question is about the pleasure we take in cruelty, and how cruelty is necessarily part of neighbor love. If that's the case, then I wonder if those details aren't actually a way that the text distances the readers from its own insight, enabling us to imagine cruelty *without* an actor, and thus without having to identify with those who inflict cruelty or to in some way acknowledge the capacity for cruelty in ourselves.
Marshall is so great on showing us how the elaborate descriptions of torture are essential to the appeal of the text, but our conversation--and the reading experiences we all reported--helped me see just as clearly that the text has numerous ways of minimizing our encounter with cruelty. As Libby's memory of a horrific illustration suggested, the pictures then may be so important because they reveal (and dramatize) what the text in many ways elides.