Vertigo and Violence
Les
confréries d’hommes masques maintiennent ainsi la discipline sociale, de sorte
qu’on peut affirmer sans exagération que vertige et simulacre, ou du moins
leurs dérives immédiats, la mimique terrifiante et ‘effroi superstitieux,
apparaissent de nouveau non comme des éléments adventices de la culture
primitive, mais véritablement comme les ressorts fondamentaux qui peuvent le
mieux servir à en expliquer le mécanisme.[i]
These secret brotherhoods of masked men thus
maintain social discipline, of a sort that can affirm without exaggeration that
vertigo and simulation, or at least their immediate derivatives—terrifying
mimicry and superstitious fright—appear anew, not as mere adventitious elements
of a primitive culture, but actually as fundamental sources of power which can
better serve explain its own mechanism
Ironically
(perhaps) the above citation from Roger Caillois is part of a discussion of the
Klu Klux Klan in America in the years following the Civil War. Not only does it bring into play a seeming
contrast or tension between the terror and fear of a masking society that forms
itself and acts to reassert what it believes to be the collapse of normal and
meaningful order, but Caillois sees in this form of play-acting a juridical
action that collapses into real violence and murder. For it is not merely the spectators and
victims of this hooded mob that fall into the dizzy spell of fear and confusion
when the masked riders raid isolated farms and small towns to assert the
supposed Christian order of traditional southern society but the Klansmen
themselves who are over-awed by their own simulation, taken in by their
collective rituals of force, and believe in the justice of their own racial
cause. Applied to the late
fourteenth-century play we have been discussing, there is, not so much a
perfect fit, as a provocative simklarity : the medieval city, nearly on
the verge of feudalism’s collapse and
the unquestioned hegemony of the Catholic Church, pretends that all is well and
as it always has been and always must remain.
This processional
play of welcome occurred in 1389. Black
Plague has struck several times already.
Famines, droughts, and wars—the Hundred Years War—is raging. Faith in the old dogmatic and sacramental
system is in decline. The rise of the
guild-ruled cities, the appearance of new regional power-bases beyond feudal
allegiance, and the very need of all formal bodies to pressurize one another,
all this forms the context of the dramatic festival. Even mror, though, it is not so much a
context, a mutually-supporting ring of concentric circles, but rather a
collision of text and anti-text—different explanations considered equally valid
clashing against one another ; or even of texts versus
anti-texts—intellectual and epistemological systems seeking to undermine the
authenticity of the other in great acts of sustained violence.
The City Welcome
does not show any coherent dramatic form such as will be found in the pageant
units of the Corpus Christi Day plays—the great mystery cycles—not the
psychological coherence evident in the mysteries and moralities, the one
seeking to represent the sacred history of the church in the world, the other
the soul under the aegis of Christ’s sacramental system. Despite some random symbols, gestures and
performing tricks pointing towards elaborate renaissance theatres in Italy and
elsewhere, its sense of movement through space, passage in time, and
characterization of persons involved in these actions is static, except insofar
as Froissart shows how easily the accidents and foibles of humanity breaks the
structures of its argument: the simple rite de passage of transforming an
outsider into an insider, the giving of gifts which are meant to exalt and
flatter the guests while displaying and upholding the power of the hosts. We also note the undermining of pomp and
circumstance by the sheer pressure and consolidation of mortal flesh within the
limited volume of the city, with its stone cathedrals and public monuments, its
temporary fixtures set up in the winding narrow streets and the small enclosed
spaces of town squares, plazas, and courtyards.
It would seem that only by pressing together—with all their sweaty,
stinking and noisy bodies—can they all confront the great mystery of a
boundless heaven and imagine themselves as a little world made cunningly, a
microcosm of the divine order shrunk to the dimensions of a mob in motion. Yet as we shall see anon, there is also something
basically lacking in dynamic, sense of justice, and individuality here that is
absent because the Jews of Paris are made invisible and the text of the Hebrew
Bible distorted into the allegorical emblems of the New Testament.
The Second Day of the Pageant
Stage 15. We then move to Act II of this drama in Paris
and what happened on Tuesday. Before he begins to describe and discuss the
gift-giving, gift-givers, and speech-makers on this day, Froissart tells us
there had to be another, subordinate welcome for Lady Valentine, daughter of
the Duke of Milan and wife to Duke Louis of Touraine. Because she had never been to the city
before, “the citizens [of Paris] rightly owe her a warm welcome.” It is right and proper because each time an
important person wishes to come into the city for the first time they must be
properly assimilated: the city has to show off its wealth, power and loyalty,
and demonstrate its own autonomous powers and dignities. The welcome is proper also because the Queen
needs to demonstrate her own new responsibility as a member of the French nation,
the crowd, to enjoy the coming in of a stranger and thus claiming her right to
be the representative of the court in the city on behalf of the nation. Obviously a lesser event than that which was performed
for Isabella, the welcome of Valentine nevertheless is of a similar kind. The young Valentine, already in the city,
does not have to be brought in, but needs to show herself to the crowds and be
given a gift on behalf of the Queen and her citizens.
Stage 16. Meanwhile, the welcome ceremonies for the
Queen continue. A representation is
performed in procession to bring gifts from the city of Paris to Isabella. “It was carried on a litter of beautiful
workmanship by two strong men disguised as savages.” Look at what is going on here. The beautiful workmanship means that the
litter has been well-crafted by the expertise of various guild members of the
city, made of material that is valuable in itself, and symbolic of the
occasion. “The litter had a canopy of
fine silk crêpe, through which could be seen the treasures which it
contained.” The elegance, sophistication
and costliness of the treasures contrast with the savages who carry the litter
into the King’s chamber.
Stage 17. The so-called savages are stereotypical wild
men, wodwoses, as often seen in
pictures of emblems and shields: they represent the natural powers of the
indigenous peoples who constitute the nation, the raw strength cultivated and
controlled by the city and the state, and the naked sincerity of the gift-giver
and the participating spectators. The
men disguised as wodwoses then make
formal speeches. They speak on behalf
but of the liveried burgesses, and address the king not his wife; just as he
responds, rather than she. The reason
for the elegance and the expense is obvious enough, but why all the
indirection? Why disguises, men speaking
to and on behalf of women, and other acts that skirt around the real politics
of the occasion? We have indicated the
importance of contrast—the savages and the refined treasures they carry, but
also the confusion of crowds and the strict hierarchical distinction between
estates and individuals. The whole royal
welcome into the city is a fantasy, a mythic representation of the ideals that
everyone wishes to live by and pretends to embody. In such a public dreaming, too, there is more
than meets than eye and more that lurks in the interstices of silence and noise
between the spoken words. Note how, only
after the burgesses have departed from the room, the king speaks to Sir
Guillaume des Bordes and Montago: “Let us have a closer look and see what the
presents are.” It would not be decorous,
not in keeping with their royal and aristocratic postures in front of the
middle class citizens for these men to exhibit their curiosity as to what
actually has been presented, and certainly not to be thought of as greedy or
mercenary. They should not be thought of
as bourgeois—or less than semi-mythical personages in a great pageant play
celebrating the marriage of Queen Isabella.
Stage 18. Instead of telling
readers what the king and his friends did when they looked into the litter and
how they reacted, Froissart substitutes his own perceptions and reactions. He can, as a mere servant in the court,
report on the objects included and what they are worth in monetary terms. Speaking of such mundane, hard and cold facts
would be out of character for those who pretend to live at a higher, more refined,
rarified level of existence; but who, of course, are very interested in such
matters and send spies out to find out exactly this kind of information. The action, too, like the confusion of the
massed spectators and participants, exposes a seething mass of bodies and of
consciousness and unconsciousness.
Stage 19. Only after this does the author continue to
say that other citizens then took the elegant litter with the treasures into
the Queen where they made their fine speeches.
Froissart describes the golden boat, the salt cellars and so forth, all
worth £250 (an enormous sum, perhaps a thousand times its nominal value in
today’s terms) This time the men
carrying the litter are dressed as a bear and a unicorn, two emblematic figures
familiar as symbols of the monarchy. The
contrast between the apparent poverty and natural nakedness of the bearers of
these gifts and the weight of the gifts, on the one hand, emphasizes the great
distance between the historical reality of the pageantry and the symbolic
universe it projects into what is imaginable and speakable; and on the other,
it presents an ironically humble statement of the real power the organizers of
the procession wish to impress on all the visitors—including the royalty and
aristocratic visitors from elsewhere in France and Europe.
Stage 20. The third present comes to the Duchess of
Touraine and is borne by “two men disguised as Moors, with blackened faces,
rich costumes and white cloths wrapped round their heads, as though they had
been Saracens or Tartars…” Again the
representation is symbolic rather than realistic, the speeches declamatory
rather than mimetically dramatic, and the response artificial rather than
spontaneous or sincere. The black-faced
Moors represent the exotic otherness of the East, the great and powerful Ottoman
Empire and the fabled wealth of the Orient.
They also represent—and this is most important—the commercial wealth and
ties of Parisian merchants with the trade-routes and connections of the eastern
Mediterranean. How did the Duchess
react? She “was greatly pleased with the
gifts—and naturally, for it was handsome and costly.” Her pleasure is a scripted component of the
performance that she plays in concert with the gift-bearers on behalf of the
Parisian merchants. But she also
displays a spontaneous delight in the receipt of such an expensive gift, a
reaction she is allowed, we must suppose, because, though a Duchess, she is
also a woman. But perhaps too, as with
the private moment of curiosity by the King and his courtiers to peek behind
the veil to see what gifts they have received and find how much they are worth,
Froissart is revealing something a little naughty about England’s enemies, the
French and Italians.
Stage 21. Finally, though, Froissart gives himself the
last word on all this. “Such were the
gifts presented on that Tuesday to the King, the Queen and the Duchess of Touraine. Their great value was a sign of the wealth
and power of the Parisians, for I, the author of this chronicle, who saw them,
was told that their cost had amounted in all to more than sixty thousand gold
crowns.” After a bit of ironic ambiguity
in the antecedent to the plural pronoun “they”, the author makes sure the
reader knows that what has wealth and power to give is the collectively
embodied city of Paris, and the value does not necessarily pass over to the
royal recipients who only have symbolic and temporary ownership: it is the
burghers of the city who create the wealth, manufacture the treasures, and
offer it to their ceremonial overlords.
At the same time, in the wodwoses,
emblematic exotic figures, and frightening characters drawn from folkoric tales
of wildness, lack of control and hidden forces in the forests, villages and
people who are not named, the procession reminds everyone that none of them can
claim to represent the whole of the little world of men and history, no more so
than their games and boastful speeches can grant special access to, let alone
manipulative powers over, the spiritual dimensions of the infinite and the
eternal.
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