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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
This article on Julian of Norwich struck several chords with me:"I found the place unsettling. For a start there was the cold silence of the empty church and the bare room adjoining it: the site where Julian spent years of her life secluded from society, immersed in hallucinatory visions that she was convinced were sent to her direct from God... In this atmosphere of desperate piety, it wasn't too hard to imagine a 14th Century divine chuntering away to herself about bodily sickness, wounds and the stench of the Fiend... But the bonds of time have been broken. The sign went on to say: "War destroyed the building …" In 1942, a German bomb hit the building where Julian had spent so much of her lonely life as an anchoress. The church I was standing in was a reconstruction.
I felt similarly cut off when I read Julian's writing. There's a saying about writers and intellectuals holding hands across the ages, their linked arms forming a barrier against the cruel incursions of time. It's a lovely and persuasive thought, but it doesn't always hold true. Sometimes writers also push us away: reminding us just how foreign a country the past is – and how differently they do things there. Certainly, Julian's thought processes, even in Elizabeth Spearing's elegant translation in the current Penguin edition, are alien to me... The Christian guardians of her shrine and this website claim that her message is one of hope and love, but to me it seemed one of dread and cruel masochism. Julian begs to be hurt and abased before her God – a God she obsesses over in pages and pages of contorted, twisting theology that neither makes sense nor is, to be blunt, at all interesting - even if she took the daring step of attributing feminine aspects to Him."
I often wonder why people often seem to characterise literature as an atemporal phenomenon that transcends the time and place that produced it and is as readily comprehensible centuries later as it was at the time. The above was essentially my response to the majority of medieval literature and its concern with the extinction of the self in favour of the divine (I particularly recall Eco's description of medieval literature as a place where everything was subordinated to the theocratic). In an age where writing has been primarily interested in the individual consciousness for hundreds of years, the likes of Margery Kempe are not especially congruent with the modern sensibility. Even in the case of Chaucer I always had the sense that his characters were two dimensional replicas of what a character in a more modern work might look like, filtered through a rather narrow set of social and religious concerns that were all he had to hand to create consciousness out of. The only exceptions that I can immediately recall were, rather oddly, Langland (being too heterodox to fit in with conventional religious categories there's a form of inadvertent invididualism to his work) and Malory.Labels: Religion
posted by Richard 2:05 pm
