So I must confess that even as a medievalist, I find "The Prioress's Tale" one of the more disturbing of the Canterbury Tales narratives. The image of the young child with his throat cut sitting up and singing praise to the Virgin Mary is like something out of a nightmare (l. 649 in the Riverside). On one level, I wonder how the undead child may perhaps correspond to the image of the Muselmann that we encountered in The Neighbor. The child has witnessed a traumatic event, his own death, but he continues to sing the praises of the Virgin, which were partly the cause of his death. He presents a mystery to the abbot until the abbot commands him, with words reminiscent of a magic spell, to give the reason for his strange behavior (l. 644-648). How does the child embody the trauma he witnessed? How does his culture react to this, and how might it tie in with our discussion of the undead neighbor?
On the other hand, it's quite arguable that the problems of neighbor-love arise cluster in this tale around the Jews. The Jews are portrayed as a "waspes nest" of Satan (559), "cursed" (670), etc. They appear to be most definitely outside the boundaries of civilization, opposed to all that is Christian, foes. Yet I find it interesting that the Jews don't do anything until "the serpent Sathanas" (558) incites them to violence. Could the dead child, as the embodiment of the Jews' violent act but also as a (possibly) positive embodiment of Christian praise, work as some sort of figure of mediation between the completely opposed communities? I'm playing with the idea that the Virgin is praised perhaps even more as a result of the murder, which is only possible at the hands of the Jews.
Perhaps I'm trying to be too positive about this, but it seems to me that the tale is much more complicated than it appears at first reading.
These are great observations and questions. I, too, was immediately struck by the provocative nature of “the serpent Sathanas” – and the fact that the “waspes nest” in which it allegedly resides is in the “Jewes herte.” In what sense can we conceive of the serpent as symbolizing the ‘alien kernel’ within the body of, here, the Jewish other? Is the provocation of the boy’s murder an example of the kernel’s hystericizing function? That is, the kernel represented by the serpent hystericizes both the person in which it resides (causing him to murder the boy), as well as the Christian ‘other,’ who responds with hate and retributive murder/capital punishment (i.e., definitely not neighbor-love - unless, I suppose, we can construe the act of punishment as a form of love: consider that the Prioress does wear a brooch with the inscription “Amor vincit omina”).
ReplyDeleteAnd I’m intrigued by the idea of the dead child as a mediating figure – especially, if we consider that the child is the site of an ‘actual’ miracle within the story; he continues to sing after death because Mary placed a “greyn” upon his tongue. Leaving aside the significance of the “greyn” as such, if we can relate the Santner-ian “miracle” to the miracle in the Prioress’s Tale, then there’s seems to be a good argument for understanding the child as a point of mediation. Yet, do we see the sort of “reorientation” that Santner seems to demand from a successful miracle? In the last stanza of the tale, we see the abbot referring still to the “cursed Jewes.” So maybe this is a failed miracle/mediating event?
I admit that I’m still finishing the Fradenburg piece, so maybe I will find some enlightenment there. Right now I often feel like I’m just grasping at words that look the same, but may not be useful points of comparison (the Chaucer “miracle” vs. the Santner “miracle,” for example).
I find Evelyn’s posting quite thought-provoking, since in my reading of “The Prioress’s Tale,” I was stumped as to determining the neighbor category within the story. This is the most basic of questions, but is there really a neighbor in this context and how would we go about defining it?
ReplyDeleteIt will probably be unsurprising, since I am a music historian, that what most struck me within the tale was the child’s desire to learn and sing the Marian antiphon, Alma redemptoris mater, a particularly popular chant within the office and one that would have been sung during the Advent season when this story is roughly taking place. What incites the Jews to violence is not that the boy is passing through the village, but that he is singing a Marian chant (quite emphatically), a primary indicator of difference. At times music is spoken of as a unifier, but it can also, as it does in this case, signal someone or something alien to another, something completely foreign and external to the experience of other people. In my reading of the tale, then, this is what is taking place: the boy sings a Marian chant, a piece not only in Latin but also praising the Virgin Mary (in other words, completely unaligned with Jewish practices), the Jews hear this and recognize the boy is not like them, and so they kill him. In light of Biddick’s essay and her discussion on Peter the Venerable, who in the crusade spirit attacked Muslims and Jews in the medieval period, it further makes sense to me to see the characters more along the lines of the enemy distinction. (Again though, I am currently puzzled, as Evelyn also remarks, on how the boy himself may be a type of mediator and not strictly opposed to the Jews himself.) Perhaps this is a simplistic reading, but I am still grappling with the terminology we have been discussing in class and am hoping to make more sense of it as the semester continues. I do feel, however, that song within the story plays a crucial and an interesting role in triggering an animosity that at its roots reveals the traumatic kernel in not knowing someone else and in realizing that there is no bridge to comprehending those differences.
Quickly I wanted to mention how I was struck by Fradenburg's defense of the use of psychoanalysis to examine medieval subjects.
ReplyDeleteFrom page 75: "If we deny ourselves the opportunity for cultural analysis...we risk confusing "the Middle Ages" with the ways in which the Middle Ages (mis)represented itself to itself. By, for example, taking hegemonic positions--parts of the whole--for the whole itself, we risk taking for a "reality" the ways in which powerful elites, spiritual or temporal, justified their claims to eternity and superreality."
It is interesting to also juxtapose Fradenburg's idea of the medieval miracle (or what its stakes are in the Prioress' tale) with Santner's meditations on the miracle. I am still trying to understand his argument in its entirety, but consider how they both situate the miracle as a kind of "unmaking" of history:
(Fradenburg) "The miracle is the manifestation of that force which emanates unilaterally from God, a force figured as contrasting with, and bypassing, human creative activity and the historical processes by which human production and reproduction make the world" (86). Here I am struck by the way this language is echoed in our discussion of the "sovereign"--a position which maintains its power through its ability to "subvert" or in some ways "step around" the law.
Now Santner: "the new thiknking does not so much eliminate the function of the witness as compel us to rethink the very nature of the past, the nature of historical testimony itself...this is a past that has, so to speak, never achieved ontological consistency, that in some sense has not yet been but remains stuck in a spectral, protocosmic dimension." (86)
These may be unrelated issues altogether, but I thought that interrogating the way the two defined miracles was at least somewhat interesting...
On the subject of the Prioress, I think the people who have already posted are really onto something. The beginning of the line mentioning the serpent in question is interesting though: "Oure first foo" is presented here in the serpent--but we are not entirely sure who the prioress means by this first person plural. Is Satan a foe of the body of Christian worshippers, or indeed of all mankind, Christian and Jew alike? Could she be talking about the very jews who satan has made his wasps nest in as another group of people who are "foes" to Satan? The problem of Satan-as-inciter to violence is precisely that it means the Prioress recognizes at some level a kinship (maybe neighborship?) with the very Jews who provide her tale with the cleansing violence and torture which pierces center of the story (only dwelled upon for one stanza).
I thought this was interesting in connection to another of Fradenburg's ideas--how the violence displaced within the ghetto in this tale are perhaps a legitimizing projection of Christian society (with its physical coercion to learn holy writ) onto the "neighbors" here.
I know most of this is disjointed, I hope I make more sense tomorrow!
It's hard to find a neighbor here, for sure, though we've got more than one miracle and plenty of enemies. So if the line about "Oure first foo" and the chilling image of the undead child offer, as these posts demonstrate, the most intriguing way of questioning whether the tale might yet hint at the spectre if not the reality of a neighbor, I'm interested especially in following on the point Molly made, about the role of the Marian antiphon and the insistence on Mary in this tale, as compassionate, redemptive mother.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, this tale thus indicts compassion, by vividly demonstrating its limits. This is a point our triumverate of R, S, and Z would want us all to appreciate: those most invested in compassion focus on particular objects to the exclusion of others. On the other hand, as Jerrell pointed out in an email (which I hope he'll post!), Mary shows the power of compassion, which here enables the child to speak and thus provides an alternative to a semiotic system rooted in conventional forms of authorization (aka the phallus or, in this cultural context, adult men with ecclesial authority, for example). The story also makes much of how the mother's grief inspires compassion from Jesus and Mary alike.
But compassion is exclusivist, and requires a warrant. The point of neighbor love is to imagine a compelling connection, an imperative to aid, that is not rooted in the sympathetic visage of the one who is helped. With this in mind, the child is everything the neighbor is not. I look forward to thinking about this together with the intriguing points made above about the child as a mediating figure.
This may be a wild tangent (for which I apologize). In regards to the focus on the Madonna, I found it very interesting that the Prioress opens the tale with "Domine dominus noster." What hand does God the Father play in this story when so much of the focus is father-les?
ReplyDeleteThe story is about a widow's son, who has no earthly father. I found it interesting that instead of focusing on praising his heavenly father (perhaps to fill an almost Lacanian need), he chooses to praise God's Mother.
This question of the father also seems to me to be connected with the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Abraham and Moses are "founding fathers" of Judiasm, but as we've seen in the case of the capital at Vezelay, Moses in particular still retains some importance in Christianity. Focusing on God the Father or a common father figure (Abraham, Moses) may have been a point of connection between these two faiths ("the similar"). The boy's choice to sing praises to a mother figure is alienating to the Jewish community ("the traumatic kernel").
How does the absence of a father complicate the reading of the boy in regards to the Law of the Father? Does the boy find his voice to sing praises to Madonna because the voice of the Father is absent? Does the focus on Mary encourage compassion, or does justice (not justice prime) exhibited by the Old Testament God the Father come into play?
These are really extraordinarily fine comments--particularly given the difficulty of the questions we're engaging.
ReplyDeleteI just have a couple of things to add at this point: first of all, I think we might use Biddick to think through the differences between what Scott astutely terms a "Santnerean" ("post-secular") miracle from a medieval ("sacred" miracle). Biddick seems to want to suggest that the differences aren't as easily established as Santner argues.
Secondly, its useful to recall the Prioress' tale as partaking of particular genres: both a standard "Blood Libel" tale, and a (somewhat unstandard) "Miracle of the Virgin." So, in addition to being embedded, as Molly points out elegantly, in Christian liturgical form, it is also embedded in two textual genres that--as Fradenburg points out--had more than an incidental relation to medieval Jewish pogrom. From one view this is just to remind us that the story of the Jews murderous violence toward the little boy is a Christian (paranoid?) fantasy of Jewishness--not an actual Jewish reaction. We might think about what difference that makes to whether or not "neighbor-love" is legible in this tale. [And we might want to think along with Jerrell here about the complicating evidence of the Prioress' Prologue and her portrait in the General Prologue.]
One other thought: Rather than decide, definitely, if the "neighbor" is really in the tale, I wonder if it might be useful to put the
question this way: Are there resources in the tale for an account of medieval neighbors? [I think the "undead" boy might be, as Evelyn and others are suggesting, one resource; also, perhaps, the "kernal" (hah!) placed by the abbot on the little "undead" boy's tongue that puts an end to (is that right?) the Christian "miracle."
Looking VERY forward to seeing you all soon!
Here is the email Constance was referring to. It is pretty disjointed but may be interesting. (I will talk about some of these things in class today as well).
ReplyDeleteAmor vincit omnia (nisi vicinos) [love conquers all, (if they are not neighbors)]
(Forgive my Latin, I can not pen it quite as well as Chaucer)
My Title here is almost a reflection of how the class is trying to see if these concepts are portable to the Middle Ages. Here (carved into her locket) the prioress is associated with a kind of perverse, romantic love--not the type expected of her as a member of the clergy. But does she possess a kind of love for the neighbor? Can we call the prioress’ relationship with the Jews who she seems so interested in talking about a neighborly one?
The prioress is more unsettling when her anti-Semitism is juxtaposed with her melodramatic affect regarding the pain of animals-- “she woode wepe, if that she saugh a mous / Kaught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde” (144). Her failure to recognize the Jewish “neighbor” as a site available for her compassion to be expressed places her one step away from the “guilt-laden liberal” of the modern era--who insists on seeing the trauma their position causes as a kind of cathartic “knowing” of the neighbor.
Indeed, the historical record suggests the Prioress, had she lived in Chaucer’s day, would not have been exposed to any Jewish people at all--she is a provincial, speaking only the “Frensh” she learned at her English school, not from any continental culture.
But this is again troubled by a kind of kinship the prioress seems to set up when she contends that it is “the serpent Sathanas” “Oure firste foo” who entices the Jues to murder the child. “Oure” takes on a strange kind of meaning here--is she recognizing an almost “neighborly” mutual submission to the sovereignty of God (or in this case, Satan?) of the Jews and Christians? Is she merely speaking of “Oure firste foo” only in terms of Christianity--that Satan’s actions are only working through the Jews to attack Christians?
On the question of who is the “sovereign” here, that symbolic position of “the Law” Zizek and Reinhard seem to gesture towards, there is a bit more friction in the prologue the prioress offers. The prioress only seems to pay lip service to the masculine God who is able to step outside of the law, here--the Mother Mary (a kind of sovereign without a phallus!) is called upon to provide the prioress with forgiveness for not being able to speak of her with the “grete worthynesse” she deserves. Indeed, we could speak of the feminine position being able to blur the lines of a “speaking position” because it seems to be Mary who enables the child to speak with his throat cut.
This post may come too soon before class for anyone to have a chance of seeing it, but I'll get it down in this public space anyway...
ReplyDeleteIt struck me as I was reading Reinhard, knowing that the Prioress was coming up, how much his "not-all" open set--the position of the neighbor, or from which neighbor-love is possible--resonated with the Prioress's description of the openness of the Jewery in her tale. It is "Amonges Cristene folk," "free and open at eyther ende," and "thurgh this strete men myghte ride or wende." It seems to me that we have a very interesting neighbor-hood here, in the pyschoanalytic sense of a place where boundaries between outside and inside are blurred, where the identity of a person on the street is unstable (both Jews and Christians apparently walking about mixed together). The little clergeon walks through everyday, and the widow searches through it, calling for her son when he fails to come home. Christians on the street come into the place where the privy is when they hear the boy singing (not Christians who were searching for the boy, but apparently just the people around, who are always around). In this sense, I would read the Prioress's account as one set in a neighborhood, in which people are constantly encountering their neighbors, but just as constantly turning away from neighbor-love in the face of such encounters (the terrifying blurring of distinctions that incites us to violence and re-affirmations of easy and simple identity categories). So as the clergeon's singing "marks" him indisputably in the Jews' eyes as other and Christian, it facilitates violence against him (rejection of neighbor-love, naming him instead as enemy, or "dead neighbor," to use Biddick's term). They treat him as such, although the fact that he is undead complicates this situation. The Jews' violence toward the boy marks them (or the Prioress's representation of the Jews as the kind of people who kill boys marks them) as the enemy, not the neighbor, against whom violence may be indulged. So this is a tale of dead neighbors, an account that shows the representational strategies at work in the Christian psyche that drive toward violence and against the terrifying proximity and self-revelation that neighbor-love would have us embrace.
I think there is a lot more than this going on in the Prioress's Tale, but this was one thing that struck me on this reading.
After class today I had some afterthoughts on “The Prioress’s Tale.” I noticed that when the undead boy speaks “in honour of that blissful Mayden free,” language does not function as compensation for relinquishing the mother’s body (664). His language originates from the Eucharistic ritual, performed by the mother of God. It would be problematic for Mary to give a corpse Eucharist – the boy tells us that she gives it “whan that I my lyf sholde forlete”(658). Zizek notes that Eucharist is “the partial object, the undead substance which redeems us and guarantees that we are raised above mortality…that we already participate in the eternal divine Life” (173). Oddly, the undead substance creates an undead child, not (immediate) eternal life. While divine in origin, the image is horrifying. Zizek associates Eucharist with horror, noting that we are “terrorized by an alien monster which invades our body” (173). I think we see another oscillation in the text here: horror and the divine. It’s interesting that Chaucer associates Eucharist with the horrifying/divine image of a shit-covered corpse, gaping at the neck, animated by the Host, and singing Alma redemptoris. The image amplifies the entanglement of horror and the divine, which, according to Zizek, is already present in the Eucharistic ritual. It is the removal of the “partial object” that results in “eternal divine Life” (Zizek 173).
ReplyDeleteEmilie: I think this is a really stunning observation. There's still a lot to work out here--like the relationship of the Eucharist to the idea of the neighbor--but what a great evocation to more thinking/reading!
ReplyDelete