Читать книгу Form and Foreskin - A. W. Strouse - Страница 8

INTRODUCTION

Some medieval tales grasp the foreskin as an organizing principle of style. They play with the prepuce to feel out how textual bodies may stretch, pull back, reveal, and perform a dramatic cut. If a book has a body—with a header and a footer, and a spine and index—then a textual corpus may also sometimes undergo circumcision. In Form and Foreskin, I explore this idea by retelling three medieval stories (stories by Saint Augustine, the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Geoffrey Chaucer).

Although I will focus here on works by three medieval Catholics, the foreskin as a literary concept has many antecedents, with analogues or roots in the ways that other traditions have talked about language. In the book of Exodus, for example, Moses shied away from public speaking because (supposedly) the prophet spoke with a lisp. When called upon to converse with the Egyptian Pharaoh, Moses lamented that he was not a great candidate for the job: Moses grumbled twice to Yahweh about what he called his “uncircumcised lips” (6:12, 6:30).¹

Relatedly, several ancient Romans wrote manuals about how to deliver persuasive public speeches. In these schoolbooks about rhetorical style, the Roman orators commonly used the Latin word circumcisus to describe brief or spare speech, language whittled down to the bare minimum. For the Romans, rhetorical concision was circum-cision.²

Ideas about how to stylize the penis diverged dramatically. On the one hand, circumcision is extremely important to Jewish male identity and hence covenantal for Moses. The Greeks and the Romans, on the other hand, often condemned circumcision and may have even revered the foreskin as practically sacred.³

In the first century of the Common Era, the early Christians proselytized throughout the Roman Empire. They felt the influence of both of these distinct attitudes toward the foreskin. One early Christian, Saint Paul the Apostle, frequently writes about the penile top in his letters, using circumcision as a metaphor for understanding how to read God’s commandments. Under Paul’s influence, the foreskin became shorthand for thinking about interpretation and for marking a distinction between a text’s body and its meaning. Paul’s theo-poetics of circumcision—a kind of response to both Jewish and Gentile attitudes toward the foreskin—shaped the medieval textual bodies I play with in this book.

EMBODIED METAPHORS

Paul reinterpreted the law of circumcision as an allegory rather than an actual surgery. Paul argued that true circumcision is “of the heart” (a spiritual practice performed inwardly) and not “in the letter” (a literal cut performed on the body). He conceived of the divide between the letter and the spirit in terms of circumcision, making the foreskin a synecdoche for human embodiment generally and for textual embodiment particularly.

To take a step back, let’s first consider that words often seem like containers for meaning. The text-is-a-container-that-holds-meaning metaphor feeds off of the parallel assumption that the body-is-a-container-that-holds-the-soul.⁴ For the textual bodies that I study here, the foreskin—a kind of container, likewise, for the male member—conceptually bridges the human body and the textual body. Text is to meaning as body is to soul . . . as foreskin is to glans. Flourishes of literary style, like a dermatological substrate, may glide between the body of letters and their soulful meaning.

My literary-theoretical praeputium draws meaning from Paul’s theology, but implicated as well are the elemental realities of evolutionary biology and erotic experience. Spiritual, mystical, anatomical: The overdetermined foreskin is fleshly; it disappears and reappears, and connotes the slippage between body and soul, text and meaning.

FORESKIN FORMS

The foreskin’s fleshiness energizes my literary-theoretical concept, so that the tissue stands as a symbol for the “letter” of textuality and especially for those elastic adornments that most appeal to our sensual appetites. Historically, Christians after Paul used the praeputium to describe certain literary devices. This book performs a biopsy on one particular literary structure—the allegorical narrative. To start out, though, I offer a brief survey of a few other forms that have been understood under the sign of the foreskin.

The literary preface, for instance, may have preputial connotations. Medieval wordlists (not exactly the same as modern dictionaries) would sometimes categorize the Latin noun praeputium (“prepuce” or “foreskin”) under the verb putare (“to think”). Taken literarily, the “foreskin,” then, is a “forethought.”

This etymology seems nonsensical. But the notion actually dovetails neatly with Paul’s belief that circumcision “in the letter” anticipates (as a kind of allegorical premonition) a spiritual circumcision “of the heart” (Rom. 2:28). Similarly, medieval Catholics sometimes assumed that the cut of Jesus’s circumcision served as a kind of preface to Christ’s biography: The excised foreskin foretold the suffering of the Crucifixion.⁵ A literary foreword—the text’s gratuitous tip—anticipates the inner meanings that a textual body has yet to expose.

Although my book will not focus on prefaces, what you need to know, for now—and what I will dwell on, at length, later—is that medieval writers sometimes viewed the foreskin as a way of thinking about both form and time, of cutting temporality into a “fore” and “aft.”

The inner/outer structure of the uncut penis—like the husk on a kernel of grain—was also useful for thinking about other doubled structures (like puns, which signify on two levels). This becomes especially true after Paul, who described circumcision as doubled (literal and figurative). As though to emphasize that point himself, Paul used wordplay in his writings on circumcision (like when Paul joked that his opponents should be “cut off”: Gal. 5:12; Phil. 3:2–3). Medieval monks sometimes described witty speech as “uncircumcised.”⁶ Later, the poet John Donne justified his use of puns by celebrating the “holy juvenility” of Paul’s writings on circumcision. One early admirer of Donne, writing an elegy for the poet immediately after his death, celebrated Donne’s witty poems for being wrapped up in “the foreskin of fancy.”⁷ Many famous poets, besides, have written humorous poems about foreskins, even explicitly calling attention to wit and its relation to uncircumcision.⁸

Along the same vein, the literary-theoretical foreskin has also become the plaything of vicious bigots. For centuries Gentiles have charged that Jews, by practicing circumcision, thereby become spiritually calloused, insensitive to certain scriptural truths. In the sixteenth century, for example, Martin Luther argued that Jewish circumcision produced a thick, deforming epidermis. Cutting off the literal foreskin, Luther said, cuts off Jews from true spiritual perception and prevents them from properly reading the Bible.⁹

Versions of this slander have had a long life. They also circulated in the letters of Ezra Pound, a fascist who—though his stock has fallen—remains a prominently canonized poet. Pound, the editor of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, believed that he had incubated that poem inside the womb of his foreskin. From his preputial womb, Pound gave birth to the poem’s textual body, and then he supposedly circumcised the poem by excising Eliot’s womanly excesses (thereby making the poem modern and manly).¹⁰ He exposed the glans of Eliot’s text, he thought, in a process that he described in both anti-Semitic and misogynist terms.

Pound follows a long tradition of Christian theologians reading the praeputium as able to encapsulate a reinterpretation of an existing text and regarding literary appropriation as an act of “circumcision.” In the fourth century, for example, Saint Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, argued that, when reading Greek philosophy, Christians must notice that these works possess a “fleshy and alien foreskin” of fallacious doctrines. Gregory argued that, in order to cite pagan sources, they first require imaginative interpretations that read out whatever feels “fleshy and uncircumcised.”¹¹ Appropriation, with this view, demands a circumcising hermeneutics.

I have already noted that the Romans used circumcisus to describe speech cut short through rhetorical abbreviatio. Some medieval Latin Christians, borrowing this term from the classical rhetorical tradition, more explicitly linked circumcisus with the foreskin. One interesting tidbit: In the fourteenth century, Nicholas Love, in The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, advised his readers to regard the Circumcision of Christ as proof that Christians must “circumcise” their speech by practicing silence or decorum. Love rendered more explicit how Christ’s circumcision (in its exegetical and incarnational proportions) could give meaning to a monastic style of abbreviated speech. He even put this theory of circumcised speech into practice: He abruptly ended his chapter on the Circumcision, cutting it short.¹²

One of my favorite examples illustrates how several of these devices work all at once. In a twelfth-century sermon on the Circumcision of Christ (celebrated as an annual festival by medieval Christians), Bernard of Clairvaux used the metaphor to think about reading and writing. Bernard’s homily focused on interpreting one line from Luke’s Gospel, which is the only scriptural mention of Christ’s circumcision: “And after eight days were accomplished, that the child should be circumcised, his name was called Jesus” (2:21). Opening his lecture, Bernard described circumcision itself as a literary act—an “abbreviation”—and he stylized his own interpretative method as a kind of circumcision. To quote the sermon’s opening:

We hear in these little words [from Luke] a large sacrament of piety expressed. We hear the whole lecture which the Lord has composed over the earth with the abbreviated Word. He had been abbreviated in the flesh, and was even more abbreviated in accepting the circumcision of the flesh. He was reduced a little lower than the angels, the Son of God, clothed in human nature; for now not spurning [to be] the remedy of human corruption, plainly [he is] indeed lower than them. We have, therefore, here, a large document of faith, and a manifest exemplum of humility.¹³

The wit of Bernard’s sermon derives from the play between “big” and “small.”¹⁴ Bernard contrasted Luke’s “little words” with their “large message.” After divine circumcision “abbreviates” the “lecture” of the Godhead, human interpretation unpacks this concision. Interpretation then expands abbreviation into its fuller meaning, as a “large document.”

Meaning shrinks, lengthens, and shrinks again. And, as Bernard repeats later on in his sermon, Luke’s little line makes an “abbreviated” account of the bigger truth of the Gospels. Circumcision, figured as a textual event, makes sensible Luke’s literary abbreviation and Bernard’s interpretative amplification. The play between circumcised, short speech—as a placeholder for the spiritual essence of witty, long speech—makes brevity truly the “soul” of wit.

As Bernard suggests, abbreviatio (circumcision) is the obverse of amplificatio (giving flesh to interpretation through long, interpretive discourses). I take Bernard as a cue to use uncircumcision as a way to apprehend literary amplificatio, the process of embellishing texts by drawing them out into long narratives (often with allegorical personifications as extra adornments).¹⁵

As will become clear, my three texts aesthetically embody this notion. They employ narrative forms that are modeled upon the foreskin. They create doubled layers of meaning, which are to be read under the circumcising aspect of allegoresis. In other words, each possesses a narrative body that unfolds as a fleshy plot—stretching out and pulling back, and climaxing with a sharp, circumcising cut that exposes (under the tale’s outer skin) the inner nut of allegorical essence.

FORETHOUGHTS AND METHODS

In a tradition that stretches from Moses to the modernists, writers have thought about language under the sign of the foreskin.¹⁶ Much of this material now looks bizarre and, frankly, a bit hard to stomach. And at least one bigoted strand of this tradition is foully smegmatic. Indeed, Paul’s interpretation of circumcision resonates with the core metaphysical problematics of the Jewish/Christian divide or dialectic.¹⁷ But for the most part, this book will address only a tiny sliver of the subject.

I will not delve deeply into the anti-Jewish dimension of this tradition, since smarter writers than me have already examined this topic.¹⁸ Though I am truly tempted to suggest that debates about the foreskin may have something to do with the racialization of skin, this claim is, for now, well outside of my knowhow. Likewise, medieval texts circulated on parchment—actual skin—yet this book will not deal in manuscript studies nor even, for that matter, have much to say about wounds or violence in general. Neither does the book investigate works by women (like the twelfth-century visionary Agnes Blannebekin, who, in a divine revelation, received Christ’s own Holy Prepuce to eat like a Eucharist).¹⁹

My choices may seem odd, especially in light of how medieval studies must contend not only with the field’s characteristic exclusivity but also and relatedly with how white supremacist groups have frequently employed medieval symbolism.²⁰ If I seem too circumspect about these issues, I nevertheless hope to address them indirectly.

My purpose, however, is more modest than the kind of far-reaching cultural study that would adequately treat the prepuce, as a literary-theoretical construct, in its cultural, political, religious, and ethical proportions (as these pertain to questions of sex, gender, and ethnicity). My approach is more thematic than historical.²¹ Form and Foreskin chooses one peculiar metaphor and traces that metaphor’s movement in a narrow choice and number of texts.

My main concern is to complicate received scholarly wisdom, which has taught that premodern people often viewed the textual body as a female body. Pioneering feminist medievalists, to whom I am deeply indebted, have noted that medieval theologians sometimes understood the body of the written word as feminine (in a heterosexist fashion that constructed interpretation as a masculine act of “penetration,” patriarchally trafficking in women through reading and writing).²² To this proposition, I want to offer a queer complication. Alongside the paradigm that grasped textuality as feminine, the foreskin also codified a hermeneutics more ambivalent about heterosexism.

Perhaps counterintuitively, I find value in my minuscule scope and fractional method. I focus on the works of three canonical, presumably cisgendered, Christian male authors precisely in order to revel in how these authors relished in the foreskin as an ironizing adornment.

In opposition to the many nasty forces who conceive of a “Western Culture” as a phallic, fascistic unity—with a unique claim to Truth—I wish to advance how an apparently phallic tradition (a tradition preoccupied with penises) actually has grasped Truth not only as unitary but also as plural, and not only as eternal but also as temporal, and not only as transcendentally meaningful but also as experientially available through the messy shuttling of narrative (of plot, story, rite, process). My apparently canonical texts are, as I show, mysteriously double, slippery, elastic—enigmatically sliding from literal to figurative—praeputia fully available to poetry and parable and play.

This investigation, ultimately, is an experimental, maybe campy, contribution to the relatively understudied subject of medieval narratology. By narratology, I simply mean a theory of narrative. And I mean, moreover, the underlying theory of narrative that governs the ordering of story, the construction of character, and the (allegorical) interpretation of the text.²³ Here I explore how the foreskin, as a literary-theoretical idea, conditions narrative bodies and implicitly interrelates narrative bodies with broader questions of temporality and embodiment.

Form, like the foreskin, may seem trivial. But, as our fragile public life becomes increasingly diced up into opposing factions, I imagine that poetic form may actually interest readers from many positionalities. I would like to write for lay Catholics, who are immersed in a living tradition; for wicked sinners, who are irresistibly curious about the genitals; for progressive scholars, who are eager to queerly reread the past; for practicing poets, who are keen to locate offbeat sources of inspiration; and for readers of literature generally, who may simply desire a quirky perspective on some of the old classics.

Tightly circumscribed, Form and Foreskin may not fully satisfy scholars of medieval cultural studies, but it may appeal to anyone who loves poetry, outré readings, queer readings, and/or who is interested in homosocial conversations and in the body-as-text metaphor. Each chapter, to invite such readers, is divided into almost epigrammatic sections, so that you may feel free to skip around. And since—as I have said—medieval writers understood witticism as a foreskin, I have used a lot of cheesy wordplay. And since—as I have said—Roman rhetoricians understood concision as circum-cision, I also try to write succinctly. And since—as is likely already clear—I am a champion of stigmatized body parts, I also urge you to read the endnotes, a textual erogenous zone fully worthy of the numerous scholars in whose footsteps I follow.²⁴

But of course, I cannot become all things to all men. Nor will taking a cue from Saint Paul necessarily win me many fans: I risk sounding like a heretic to those whose are devoted to Paul sincerely, and I risk sounding like a reactionary to those who, long ago, lost interest in Paul. Nevertheless, I have tried to write this book with some pep and zing because I want to make a tiny bit more space for a medievalism that is a kind of liberal art.

If I can show how a small school of poetics developed around metaphors of circumcision, maybe this will help to deheterosexualize, in some small way, the corpus.²⁵ This book is just the tip.

THUMBNAILS

Each of the following chapters retells a peculiar tale by a major canonical author. You could say, then, that this book is a kind of critical anthology organized around themes of circumcision and attuned to questions of narratology. You could say, further, that I am trying to identify a literary genre. Call it the circumlogical narrative.

In broad strokes, I would categorize a genre by its typical themes and by its typical, formal structures. In this case, I am characterizing the circumlogical narrative by its emphatic themes of circumcision and by its narrative patterns, which draw upon Paul’s theology of circumcision. Foregrounding their own allegorical meanings, these tales amplify their textual bodies precisely in order to stage an unveiling of their inner, spiritual meanings. All the while, these stories revolve around cuts, nicks, and even actual foreskins. Implicitly underlying this structure—and rendered explicit by themes of circumcision—is Paul’s theory that the uncircumcised “letter” contains the circumcised “spirit.”

I should stress, however, that the stories in this collection are not one-to-one uses of Paul’s theory. Instead, the stories that I discuss are attempts—experiments, even—by later writers to work out how Paul’s attitude toward circumcision may (or may not) provide a sound model for rhetorical composition.

In my first chapter, “The Gospel According to the Foreskin,” I will explicate Paul’s theory and focus on Saints Peter and Paul. These Apostles argued vehemently about whether Christians needed to circumcise. Imaginatively, Paul reinterpreted circumcision under an allegorical aspect—as not a literal but a metaphorical commandment. I will detail Paul’s formulation as my theoretical groundwork for thinking about narrative bodies and explain how his writings on circumcision have caused considerable debate, providing an open-ended and contested model for literary craft (and hence for the diverse narratives that I will go on to discuss). I will also read the story of Peter and the Sheet Let Down from Heaven (Acts 10:9–20, 11:2–5). This allegorical vision teaches Peter that he may befriend “uncircumcised men,” wrapping up the veil of visionary allegory with the prepuce.

Also seeming to employ Paul’s praeputium as a model for allegorical narrative, Saint Augustine tells of a boy whose abundant foreskin throws him into ecstatic trances. My second chapter, “Saint Augustine and the Boy with the Long Foreskin,” illustrates how the prepuce—literal and theological—underwrites this allegorical narrativity. I examine the literary strategies that Augustine uses to relay this story in his Literal Meaning of Genesis, showing how a hermeneutics of circumcision shapes Augustine’s style (especially his control of narrative time). But I show, as well, how the dissonances in Paul’s theory led Augustine to find this vision utterly incomprehensible.

A rather more secular story—but one collected in a manuscript of religious material—the romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight takes place on the Feast of the Circumcision. In my third chapter, “Nicking Sir Gawain,” I demonstrate how Pauline circumcision controls the poem’s narrative trajectory (where flesh wounds mark major narrative turns and intercut scenes enflesh the narrative body). I also discuss how my interpretation may pertain to the Middle English tradition of alliterative poetry, to chivalric masculinity, and to the poem’s manuscript context. This story, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is the circumlogical narrative par excellence—in my view, a classical realization of the genre.

More speculatively, I turn next to a work that less clearly thematizes circumcision. In my fourth chapter, “The Foreskin of Marriage,” I treat Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. As I will show, medieval theologians used Paul’s theory of circumcision to theorize the sacrament of marriage, leading an early glossator to refer to the Wife as her husband’s “foreskin.” After I establish an interrelationship between marriage and the allegorical praeputium, I argue that the Wife’s Tale applies a hermeneutics of circumcision to the allegorical structure of her tale’s marriage plot. I suggest that the Wife vernacularizes and feminizes the Latinate praeputium in order to circumcise the marriage plot.

Finally, I will try to get a grip on how this medieval metaphor illuminates some contemporary controversies. I want to graft onto my textual body still more organs. This book ends with a Coda (from the Latin for “tail”).