Medieval society in imagination and reality

One of my sisters went to a Convent school and the nuns there decided to have each girl provide a write up about their best friend for graduation. This had a funny unintended consequence because an awful lot of girls praised their friends not for qualities they had but for qualities they wished they had. The wallflower was described as social and outgoing and so on.

A lot of the images of medieval society tend to do something like that. Paintings and stories of cloistered life, for example, belie the fact that such peace and security was virtually non-existent in the medieval world. Stories of tightly knit communities where everyone had a place likewise don't match up with Peter the Hermit managing to collect thousands of transients together in very short order for an ill-fated crusade.

I have always liked the way Alasdair MacIntyre put it:

Of all the mythological ways of thinking which have disguised the middle ages for us none is more misleading than that which portrays a unified and monolithic Christian culture ....

For a thinker like Aquinas, MacIntyre tells us the problem was

... how to educate and civilize human nature in a culture in which human life was in danger of being torn apart by the conflict of too many ideals, too many ways of life.

For Gothic literature, on the other hand, medieval society was a unified mass where there was all too much unity.

And this illusion carries on today. Look at Goth culture and you see nothing that even remotely connects with well, anything at all, besides a desperate-to-the-point-of being-pathetic need to be noticed as "individual" on the part of members of the subculture. A need which, in the typical fashion of youth efforts to be different, Goth kids seek to meet by joining a narrow and close-minded culture where everyone dresses alike, talks alike, reads the same literature and listens to the same music.

But, even though based on illusions, Gothic literature produced some really great stuff and even today's Goth culture has produced some music and art that is pretty good as greasy kids' stuff goes.

(The desperate need to be noticed and recognized that typifies Goth culture is also typical of rampage killers. Goth culture does not, of course, cause people to become killers but the fact that a kid is suddenly attracted to it is a fairly reliable marker that something has gone wrong.)

Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes

Gothic Manners and Greek Morals (revised)
I had thought of going through this poem in a systematic manner but, on second thoughts, decided that such an approach would ruin the thing.

Instead a general observation leaving readers to decide for themselves. There is a fascinating similarity between the Beadsman and Madeline in this poem. Both have elected to reject the appeals made by the men of the house. He won't go where the music plays and she won't pay heed to the appeals of the various courtiers who are clearly interested in her.

If we look at Psalm 141 again, we find this:

Incline not my heart to any evil thing,
to practice wicked works with men that work iniquity;
and let me eat not of their dainties.

Both the Beadsman and Madeline are fixed on heavenly matters.

Of course, Madeline will eat the dainties provided by a man who some might argue is trying to work iniquity but she rejects others. Is her moral judgment god or bad? She seems fooled by the illusions of "faery fancy. But is she?

I am still reading Powell and I found this fascinating bit of dialogue between Nick and Mr. Deacon about Gypsy Jones, a young woman whom Mr. Deacon is putting up at his shop, a situation that is delicate if not outright disreputable. Ralph Barnby, a womanizing painter who also uses space provided by Mr. Deacon does not approve.

I asked about the nature of Barnby's objections to Gypsy Jones.

'When Gypsy and I were first acquainted,' said Mr. Deacon, lowering his voice, 'I was given to understand—well, hasn't Swinburne got some lines about "wandering watery sighs where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories"? In fact restriction to such a coastline was almost a condition of our association.'

'Did Barnby object?'

I think he undoubtedly felt resentment,' said Mr. Deacon 'But, as a very dear friend of mine once remarked when I was a young man—for I was a young man once, whatever you think to the contrary—"Gothic manners don't mix with Greek morals. Gypsy would never learn that.'

What does that mean? Your guess may be better than mine here. Anyway, my short answer is that Mr. Deacon is saying that publicly flouting social norms (Gothic manners) does not go well with privately flouting sexual norms (Greek morals). The long answer could go on for quite a while not least because our  pictures of both the ancient Greek and the medieval Gothic societies are, as Le Bas would have it, largely of our own imaginings.

In a classical conception, social goods and the individual pursuit of happiness line up.  If we think of Pride and Prejudice, we see a novel where it turns out that Elizabeth Bennet's personal quest for sexual happiness through marriage and what is best for the community ultimately line up in a marriage that is good for her and good for the community. Gothic literature was quite different because medieval society was believed to be so rigid and it often featured plots where heroes romantically ran against the norms and desires of parents, family and community to try and find individual happiness. Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes, for example, we don't get the impression that Porphyro and Madeline are going to bring their neighbours and families together for the greater good of the community by running away as they do.

Because they are so at odds with social norms, a Gothic hero must justify themselves in our eyes through the purity or intensity of their love relationship. To put it crudely, Tristan and Iseult would not be nearly so moving if their love was founded on a shared fetish.

This is something worth keeping in mind when reading The Eve of Saint Agnes. Here, quite the opposite of my argument with Brideshead Revisited, I think people project a notion of sex that is far too Greek. To be sure, Porphyro and Madeline have sex but that sex does not occur quite the way people imagine. The poem remains true to Gothic manners and Madeline is, I think, fully aware and in full consent. That puts me in the minority.

Tomorrow I will tell you exactly where I think the sex happens.

Note: I have revised the above to respond to a problem pointed out in the comments.

This astrology stuff and the ten-year rule

I have decided it's a good thing that some astronomer has forced the entire world of astrologers to revise their beliefs.

I've decided to take a strong stand on this because it's really important to take strong stands on something that anyone with the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year old should be able to spot as a foolish superstition.

Mostly because of the year of the rooster. I know, wrong baseless superstition—but, bear with me, this is all going somewhere. You see I missed the year of the rooster. If I'd been born just a little earlier, I would have been a rooster but as it is I'm a dog. This shouldn't bother me as actual dogs are vastly superior to actual roosters. But I read the personality charts and, at the age of 19, I saw myself as being more rooster like.

So I'm happy to be Ophiuchuan. I used to be a Sagittarian and had no problems with that but now I'm something new and exciting. Ophiuchus was apparently the snake grasper. I like that. Puts any mere rooster in the shade if you ask me.

Which brings me to the ten year rule. Over at The Art of Manliness yesterday there was a post about making an adventure out of vacations. It included one of those bits of advice that get retailed by advice givers because it sounds good:

Basically, whenever you are presented with a choice, ask yourself which option you would prefer to have taken in ten years. 

As anyone who has actually lived a bit of life can tell you, that is absolutely useless. You have very limited control over how your vacation or anything else is going to turn out. Kuala Lumpur could turn out to be a deadly bore, and I suspect it often does, whereas Madison, Wisconsin could surprise you with romance and adventure.

Far better to do it the other way around. Look back on what you were doing ten years ago and ask yourself how you would prefer to remember it. Don't lie to yourself, just emphasize those aspects that you like to remember and forget about the false hopes, betrayals and stuff like that. Try it, you'll like it. Start with your ex loves. Just make sure you are looking back at least ten years on them.

Back to Keats with a bonus Powell reference this afternoon.

This is neat

So, here I am reading and thinking about The Eve of Saint Agnes and I go to say Vespers or the Evening Prayer and I hit the responsory which reads as follows:

Accept my prayer, O Lord, which rises up to you.

Like burning incense in your sight.

And I think, of course, of this bit from the opening stanza of the Keats poem:

Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

The particular responsory I used this evening is from a formula that only dates from 1970 but it's not impossible that it draws on a much older prayer. It would be really neat if it drew from a prayer used in January in Keats' time. It would, in fact, pretty much revolutionize scholarship regarding this poem.

But that's all speculation, all we have for certain is this lovely coincidence.

**UPDATE**
Okay, this should have been obvious. As soon as I looked around a bit I found Psalm 141. Read this and tell me that Keats didn't mean to connect the Beadsman's experience to this:

Let my prayer be set forth before these as incense;
and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.
Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth;
keep the door of my lips.
Incline not my heart to any evil thing,
to practice wicked works with men that work iniquity;
and let me eat not of their dainties.

That's pretty much the set up.

I pretty confident that this is not a coincidence but a definite allusion by Keats.

Conversation overheard on a bus

There were four journalism students riding the bus and talking about their classes. Three of them were girls and I'm pretty sure the one boy was wearing mascara. He isn't gay. He is clearly a heterosexual, I suspect maybe even a little too heterosexual from his interactions with the girls. (You can draw whatever good or bad conclusions about the future of journalism you want from that.)

The boy was complaining about having to go to Vanier to take a picture. Vanier, for those who don't know Ottawa, is a section of town that used to be ethnic and poor and is now partly gentrified. It's a neighbourhood where you can walk from a street where all the houses list for between seven hundred thousand to a million and, in the space of a few blocks, be on a street where you can find hookers and drug dealers.

The boy had suggested a generic person on the street picture for his professor and the prof told him that wasn't good enough so now he was having to ride a crosstown bus to take a photograph. At least part of the point of his complaining, as my grandmother used to say, was to brag. He was hoping, and in fact succeeded, in impressing the girls with the fact that he was going to take a man-on-the-street picture in a neighbourhood where the men on the street can be pretty rough characters. He said, "if I don't get shot doing it," in a tone that suggested he wasn't afraid at all. The only thing he was unhappy about, to hear him tell it at least, was having to waste all this time riding on the bus to fulfill what he saw as whim of his professor's.

But, you know, I see the professor's point entirely. The day journalists start thinking that any old person the street shot can be used—and, tragically, lots of them do—is the day they stop doing their job well.

And what a pathetic lack of interest by the kid himself. Think of that neighbourhood. Rich people living in close proximity to the poor and to criminals. Oh, what opportunity a real journalist would see in that.

Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes

Some academic over at CUNY (City University of New York) has helpfully posted a background file on The Eve of Saint Agnes. If we read that site, we can get a  grasp on the sort of meanings critics go hunting for in the poem:

Splendid language, sharply etched setting, and vivid mood--"The Eve of St. Agnes" has them all. What the poem lacks for some readers is significant content; it is, for them, "one long sensuous utterance," "a mere fairy-tale romance, unhappily short on meaning." Clearly, the portrayal of ardent young love dealing with a hostile adult world and contrasted with aging and death has an inherent appeal. A closer reading reveals more than just a gorgeous surface; it reveals many of the same concerns that Keats explores in his odes--imagination, dreaming and vision, and life as a mixture of opposites.

 That's my emphasis. And this is true as far as it goes, those are the "issues" that Keats explores in his odes and you can find them in this poem if you are really determined to do so. None of the odes, however, is halfway as captivating as The Eve of Saint Agnes. And, however brilliant they are as poetry, Keats' philosophical ideas in the Odes never rise above the level of clever sophistry. (This is also true of the letters, BTW, there are few more reliable signs that you are dealing with an intellectual fraud than finding the expression "negative capability" treated at length.)

No, what makes this poem so powerful is the wonderful story in it.

And if we read the poem as a story, one of the really interesting questions about is whether it is a heroic story. At first glance, it really seems like one but it seems to keep refusing to be heroic just when we want it to.

What do I mean buy a heroic story?

Read any mythological or religious literature and you will find there is a progression. At first you have the era of the gods. Huge, supernatural figures clash and the result of their clashing is the creation of the world with its tensions. The next step is heroic literature. Heroes are human but they interact with gods. They can see them and talk to them. Gods show up and help or hinder their efforts. The heroic era tends to connect to the creation not of the world but to particular parts of: the founding of nations, creation of cities, even such small things as the digging of certain wells. Both the Greek myths and the Hebrew Bible have their heroic stories*.

But Keats seemingly heroic lovers refuse to connect to history. They ride out into the storm and are gone: aye, ages long ago. Abraham and Achilles, by comparison, keep breaking into history. Real nations are founded, real cities are destroyed. Even a complete fraud and liar like Dan Brown, has characters who connect to big historical events.

But Madeline and Porphyro just float through a story that, although it has the seeming trappings of a heroic story, just exists to be a story. And I think that is the glory of the thing. It may have some of Keats usual sophomoric concerns with imagination, truth and reality and so forth, but they don't matter to us. The thing that troubles Abrams is in fact the glory of the poem. It is a great romance.

It's almost like an allegory where we have forgotten what the allegorical comparison was supposed to be. Imagine some future era where the Soviet Union has been entirely forgotten and some archeologist finds a copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm. And people read it and love it having no idea that the pig Napoleon is supposed to recall Stalin and the pig Snowball is supposed to recall Trotsky. They might read it and think they had found a fairy tale romance that they might imagine people of our era would read to their children (which is exactly what it is slowly becoming). And, in some ways, they would be less deceived than we are. Trotsky was actually a brutal psychotic thug and not the attractive character Snowball is in Orwell's mythology.

More to the point, we might imagine a world in which Queen Elizabeth I and the English reformation were completely forgotten and someone found a copy of Spenser's The Faerie Queen. Again, the story could be read with great pleasure and even with meaning of a certain sort. No doubt some critics would come along to torture us with the thought that the poem is no good unless we can decipher some deeper points about perception and reality but them, let us wish away. Let's read the poem all by itself and think of the questions only in reference to things in the poem itself.



* What makes them different is not the kind of story but the moral derived from the stories. In the Greek heroic stories, as was the case for almost the entire ancient world, the gods created human beings in order to serve them and to suffer:

                    ... This is the way
the gods ordained the destiny of men,
to bear such burdens in our lives, while they
feel no affliction. Iliad

(Bk 24 as translated by Fitzgerald)

The great moral conclusion of the Iliad, by the way, is that that's just the way it is so no need to make it worse. The problem of evil is often taken as a strike against the Judeo-Christian world view but it is  actually one of the uniquely distinguishing facts of Christianity that it recognizes that suffering is not simply a normal fact of human life; that this is not the way it should be. Some, like Homer, simply accept evil and others, like the Buddha, decide that the only solution to suffering is to cease being human.

The English Romantic Catholic Tradition

The Eve of Saint Agnes
This Friday is the feast day of Saint Agnes and that makes Thursday evening the eve of Saint Agnes all of which makes this week the perfect one to consider Keats' greatest poem. I think that of all the elements of what I call the English Romantic Catholic Tradition, this poem is the most important.

But what the heck is the English Romantic Catholic tradition? What I mean by that is the way England's Catholic past haunted her poets and artists in the 19th century. Catholicism was just there and it became an opportunity to dwell on something a little mysterious and weird. And it became an opportunity to be, to use one of the critics' favourite words, a little transgressive.

The settings in question were, quite literally, Gothic. Writers like Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe had set their Gothic novels in a Catholic culture but were careful to always set the drama in foreign countries. It didn't escape readers' attention, however, that England herself was dotted with Gothic architecture. Thus Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey has no trouble projecting her fantasies onto a house built on an old abbey. Austen means to mock the romantic idea.

Keats moves everything a  step closer with his poem which is clearly set in England. He keeps some distance by keeping it in the past.

What I think is most fascinating about the poem is the poem itself. What I mean by that is that it is just a great read and there is nothing better to do with it than just read it. If I get ambitious, I may create an audio file of it and put it up here. In the meantime, the good folks at Bartleby have put it up on line for us to read it ourselves.

And it is really good to read it. This is one of those poems that critics love to torture us with. They do this because critics tend to think they are more important than the works. 'Pay attention to me,' they scream endlessly.

To wrap up, let me cite you an interesting line from a man who may well be the stupidest critic of modern times. Being the stupidest critic of modern times has not stopped him from being deeply revered. I mean Meyer Howard Abrams, better known as M.H. Abrams. He said this of the poem that people who praise it 'tend to confirm one's uneasy feeling that what is sometimes called "the most perfect" of Keats' longer poems is a mere fairy-tale romance, unhappily short on meaning.'

Because what a poem is really for is so some monster bore can stand up in front of a classroom and tell you about the meaning. Or you could just read it:

ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

The rest is here.