We Learned to Love the Hard Way / You're Going to Learn it Too

by Karl Steel

One of the books I picked up at Kzoo was an anthology of hagiography and miracles by Aelred of Rivaulx, The Lives of Northern Saints. Here we can find his version of the life of Ninnian, stories of the miracles of the saints of Aelred's ancestral home, Hexham, and what I present to you here, the miracle of the Nun of Watton.

Some of you, perhaps most, undoubtedly already know the story. Those of you who don't, hold onto your cowls and grip your soft bits: a Gilbertine nun, admitted as an oblate somewhere around her fourth year (and we might better say: abandoned to the nuns by her father), never quite takes to the calling. No wonder: there's doesn't seem to have been any institutional support in this convent for oblates (see Boswell 310 n50). She grows up to be flirty, dirty-minded, and, inevitably, she gets mixed up with a fellow--a conversus (lay brother?) a canon?--who rapes her. Their relationship, such as it is, continues, and, when she discovers herself pregnant, the man runs off. She's beaten, imprisoned, and fettered by her scandal-fearing sisters, who top the torture off by compelling her to betray her lover, such as he was. When he's been captured, he's brought before his lover, who--again, under compulsion--castrates him. After the sisters throw the bloody penis in the chained sister's face, they drive the castrate out.

My summary leaves a lot out.

EDIT: several years later (like, just shy of EIGHT YEARS), it's just come to my attention that some fellow, who characterized this as a "fashionable" blog, is eager to demonstrate that the nun is NOT raped, and that her mouth is stopped to keep her from crying out in her pleasure. Here's the Latin: "Egreditur, et quasi columba seducta non habens cor, mox accipitris excipitur unguibus. Prosternitur, os ne clamaret obstruitur, et prius mente corrupta carne corrumpitur" (PL 195:792C). The first sentence is an allusion to Hosea 7:11, in the Douay Rheims translation, "And Ephraim is become as a dove that is decoyed, not having a heart: they called upon Egypt, they went to the Assyrians." It's a bizarre chapter in a bizarre book, not easy to understand. What's needed is a bit of a dig into the exegetical history of the passage. Aelred is, indeed, unclear about precisely what's happening or why; and indeed he may be alluding to "covering the mouth of the wicked"; but it's undeniable that there's no small element of violence implied in this passage. Whether Aelred believes that this is violence against the monastic order, or violence against an individual woman is truly unclear. But to use this story as proof positive -- as my critic does -- of an anti-male bias in American society etc etc is truly unpleasant, misguided, and frankly sick. So I'm updating this post, now,  just in case someone comes upon it through an internet search.

Now let us return to the original post, written way back in 2008.

A list of the stranger bits, each of which merits more attention, maybe in your Fall courses:

• The varying translation of one of the most shocking moments, "sicut foeda sanguine in ora peccatricis projecit": the Cistercian Pub. version (trans Jane Patricia Freeland) reads "flung them as they were--foul and covered with blood--into the face of the sinful woman"; in an exuberant, outrageous stretch, Boswell does it as "foul and bloody just as they were, [one of them] stuck them in the mouth of the sinner"; and the Gutman, splitting the difference, does is as "threw them into the mouth";
• The conversus rapes the nun at first, covering her mouth "lest she cry out." But the relationship continues, and the other nuns grow suspicious because of "the sound they often heard," which is, presumably (?), the sound of pleasure. Yet when the pregnancy's first revealed, the nuns are all amazed;
• The punishments the sisters initially want to inflict on the pregnant nun sound shockingly like a précis of the typical delights of martyrdom: "Zeal immediately flamed up in their bones, and, looking at each other and striking their hands together, they rushed upon her, tearing the veil from her head. Some thought she ought to be given to the flames, others that she should be flayed alive, and others that she should be put on a stake to be burned over live coals" (115; Salih, 161, also makes this point);
• Her lover is captured as follows: he returns to the grounds of Watton, which indicates that he had not entirely abandoned his lover; he rushes at what he thinks is her; it's one of brothers of the community, disguised with a veil [irruit in virum quem feminam esse putabat], and, for his misdirected lust, he's beaten and taken to what Aelred describes as a "spectaculum," a show.

The actual miracle is, of course, not the Grand Guignol of the prison: the spectaculum is not the miraculum. The miracle is the salvation of the pregnant nun from producing another of what she was, an unwanted birth. Swollen with child in a cell scarcely able to contain her bulk, gray with exhaustion, she finds relief of a sort in a dream. Archbishop Henry Murdac of York, who had overseen her oblation, appears and berates her. Thanks a lot, Henry. On the next night, he appears again, this time accompanied by two women. Murdac covers her face with his pallium, and after a while, she sees the two women carrying an infant wrapped in white silk. She feels her belly, and it's gone slack. A miracle!

I was reading this episode on one of my flights home from Kalamazoo, and, at the same time, was aware that Pope Benedict had just reaffirmed his church's stance on birth control (for example, see here). With Benedict's words in my mind, I had to ask: what happened to the fetus (or infant, or parasite, &c.) of Watton? Compare this story to another, somewhat similar story Boswell translates (459-60) in which the infant's taken to "a certain hermit...who should bring the baby up in [the BVM's] service." We might also recall Marie de France's "Lai de Fresne," or the many stories of the abandoned child who should have stayed lost (see Oedipus and ff.) But in this story, here, the two women simply leave with the baby.

This miracle is not--apparently not--an abortion. The nuns accuse her of it, but she claims, rightly, that she doesn't know what's become of her infant. It's alive, somewhere, maybe: but I wonder about the silk wrapping: as sideways as such a thought is, I can't help but be reminded of funeral wrappings (and how might a child in 12th-c. Yorkshire be buried?), or of the folds of cloth holding souls in the lap of Abraham, which could function as a sort of antechamber for souls awaiting entry into paradise (see Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory 122).

At Watton, we have, on the one hand, a miracle of astonishing naivete: pushing past a fundamental contradiction, Aelred wants to condemn abortion while maintaining compassion for what his own condemnation causes, viz., the social and emotional catastrophe of forced pregnancy and unwanted children (represented here by the nun of Watton herself and what she carries). On the other hand, we should not simply sniff at Aelred's compassion: is it simply that he wants the impossible, judicial judgment without violence (he explains "I praise not the deed but the zeal; I do not approve the shedding of blood, but I extol the fervor of the holy virgins against such infamy," 117), or can we feel in his desire for the impossible, driven as it is in part by compassion, some possibility of the force of law opening up into something else? Might the law be dissolved by the mixture of Aelred's tears with those of the pregnant oblate?

(Creative Commons photo from here)

Further Reading:
For the Latin: PL, vol 195:780-96
Other translations: John Boswell The Comfort of Strangers 452-58 (for a brief discussion, see 310)
O. Gutman in Carolyne Larrington, ed, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook 128-33;
Other discussions Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England 152-65, which admirably treats the complexities of space in the story; and Giles Constable, "Ailred of Reivaulx and the Nun of Watton: An Episode in the Early History of the Gilbertine Order," in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978): 205-226, which I read in my pre-database days and hence do not remember: did he write about double-monasteries and scandal?

The Last One to Die, Please Turn Out the Light

I finally viewed Children of Men last night, and first, I have to say, I loved the film while also being highly discomfited by it, on many different levels. I found myself gasping and wincing and feeling as if I had almost been physically assaulted at certain moments in the film, while I also felt myself being swept away, emotionally-operatically, by its trajectory of redemptive fertility mythos [which I kept thinking I should reject, but just couldn't].

I want to [hopefully] set aside, for the moment anyway, all the obvious ways in which we could critique the film's uncritical and/or unconscious anti-feminism [because the future is dependent on a kind of Christian-inflected "miracle" birth, produced by a child-woman, with the midwife being a man who plays, further, a sort of typically reluctant yet still overly masculinist sacrificial hero], as well as its politics of "humanist" reproduction. Instead, I would like to adopt a kind of enthusiastically Zizekian appreciation of the film as a powerful form of cinema art that, as Zizek argues, makes the background [the state/end of the world] more important than the foreground [hero and girl-with-baby quest/escape narrative]; indeed, the backgrounds that were staged in each scene were clearly designed to, I believe, insist that the viewer watch and see what every day we refuse to see: for example, the outstreched arms of a refugee reaching through the wire mesh of a cage to plead for help, and in another instance, immigrants being hoarded onto buses by guards wielding machine guns and attack dogs]. The ending of the movie, which essentially erases the background until the very last moment when a ship named "Tomorrow" arrives over the horizon, is all foreground: a small boat bobbing on tossing water in the fog, with child-mother, baby, and dying man held together in a pose of historical *waiting*--for Zizek, this is the film's most important contribution, and I agree, to our understanding of how history might turn out well, but only if we understand our utter rootlessness, our position as needing to be untethered to either deadly pasts or immanent futures if we are ever going to hope that things might turn out differently than the nightmare Alfonso Cuaron depicts in his film [which is mainly our *present* transposed on a larger scale to 2027]. As Zizek puts it, "The condition of renewal means you cut your roots. . . . This is the future."

As a side note, I would just say, too, that in reflecting further upon Lee Edelman's book No Future, a book that can't help but come to mind when watching Children of Men, that I find myself more persuaded by his argument, but only when I take it completely and only through its own metaphorical terms [in other words, it is not really against children so much as it is against the strangulating figure of the child as the only route to the future; it is not against the real future, per se, so much as it is against the imposition of particular futures, figured in tropes of reproduction and child-bearing and child-caring, upon the ways in which we are allowed to conceptualize how we want to live our lives now, regardless of issues of inheritance and descendancy that always belong to someone else who is likely going to enforce their rights with regard to "how things turn out"; to embrace the death-drive, then, in this scenario, is not to embrace self- or other types of social destructiveness, but rather, to embrace the idea of a limit to our obligation to the real, actual future--a limit, moreover, that might also be imagined as a limn, or margin, within which queer lives can be more fully actualized because they are, in a sense, more free, [i.e. free from the future's grasp/hold on them]. Maybe this isn't Edelman, and maybe it's just me riffing off Edelman, but I can see some benefits to be gained, in terms of political energies, from this line of thinking, but only if we conceive of the future, and ways of thinking-forward, as always already belonging to those who believe in gates and walls and borders. But I also find myself still not wanting to embrace Edelman's so-called "polemic" as much as I would rather embrace Zizek's idea that what "infertility" [and therefore, fucking/negating the future] really is is the negation of meaningful historical experience. Keep in mind that Children of Men is a movie about a future in which, since infertility is the dominant reality, there really is "no future." The "true despair" of the film, in Zizek's words, comes from its perfect representation of a "society without history," which is revealed in all the ways in which the film's background [the future, but also, our present "history" being represented as: 1) a kind of chaos that ensues when history and the world come to an end, but also as: 2) the very world that we live in now that we don't look at or "see": refugee camps, ethnic cleansing, Baghdad's "Green Zone," etc.] overtakes the foreground hero-quest narrative. Here are Zizek's further comments from the DVD on this point:

I think that the true infertility is the very lack of meaningful historical experience. It's a society of pure meaningless historical experience. Today ideology is no longer big causes such as socialism, equality, justice, democracy. The basic injunction is "have a good time" or to put it in more spiritualist terms "realize yourself" . . . . I think that this film gives the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history, or to use another political term, biopolitics. And my god, this film literally is about biopolitics. The basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally biopolitics: how to generate, regulate life.

In addition, Zizek notes that one of the true points of genius in the film [and here I think queer theorists, especially, need to "listen up"] is that the one instance of fertility in the film is completely divorced from "coupling"--we never have a sense of who the father might be and it clearly doesn't matter--but also, the fertility is divorced from sex. As Zizek puts it, fertility is "re-installed, but not in the form of a couple being created. The fertility is spiritual fertility--it's to find the meaning of life and so on." Fertility, in other words, as figured in this film, is about a type of creativity--of thought, of art, of life--that is both tied to history but which can also break free from history in a way that is [re]productive of a better future. But I think where Edelman and Zizek and I might all gather together in agreement is in the idea that "cutting one's roots" is absolutely essential to "renewal" [although perhaps Edelman also rejects renewal], but this does not mean forgetting what Edelman calls "the deadly past," although it does mean, I think, letting go of the idea that the past is "fixed" somehow--it is no more rooted, no more "fixed," than we ourselves are in time. It does not mean refusing the future, just actively "producing" it in a different way. But creativity is the key and creativity will always be--deep down--[re]productive, tied as it is to very old biological and other forces that gather and coil in our bodies and minds. [On this point, too, please see Anhaga's beautiful post on the French film La Jetee and Gilliam's 12 Monkeys and time here.] It has something to do with what "being human" means.