Acts of Love and Light
If as I have suggested Chaucer’s family background at some point in the
late thirteenth century at or even earlier than the expulsion of Jews in 1290
included a conversion made out of sincere religious reasons or merely from a
commercial strategy to preserve the family’s interests in the international
wine trade—if not some other adherence to the shoemaking business (chausseur), hence the
family name, there are justifications for believing that the poet grew up with
some residual knowledge of rabbinical lore, attitudes honed by the
child-rearing practices of his parents, and the conversations overheard with
sailors, merchants and perhaps even visiting relatives from northern France
where the Chaucer’s originally came.
This would not imply that Geoffrey was not a Christian and educated in a
church school of some sort. It would,
though, give him an interest in his own background and suggest further that in
his travels to Spain and France he went out of his way to visit Jewish
communities.
In addition, putting aside the historical question of his own
affiliations or private associations with Judaism, he was aware of modern
history. The curiosity of the poet led
him to become multi-lingual—like John Gower his contemporary—he could probably
understand and on occasion write in Latin, French and English, as well as
perhaps some Italian and Spanish. He
seems familiar with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, if not in the original
languages, then at least in French versions.
His knowledge of Hebrew is more questionable, but not impossible. There were courses taught at Oxford and the
recent Popes had sanctioned the study of the ancient oriental languages as an
aid to biblical studies. What is evident
in Chaucer’s work is more than just a flitting acquaintance with Jewish texts,
but also an ability to make clever allusions, play on multilingual puns, and to
operate in the various modes of midrash. In times of crisis or at least heightened
tensions between Jewish communities and their contextual societies the use of
such word games and cultural subversion becomes most evident, processes that go
back into very ancient times when Jews lived amongst Babylonians, Sumerians and
other civilizations. It is argued that
perhaps the special Jewish sense of regarding the universe and the creator God
as a literary or verbal force comes from a shared experience among all those
ancient peoples once they developed book-based legal systems, philosophical
questionings of their archaic modes of worship, and the need to update and
correct inherited revealed texts.[1]
At the end of the last section, we began to parse the long speech Hende
Nicholas makes from the street to
Alisoun, a discourse he aims up to her from his prostrate enthusiastically
receiving his seductive words. The whole speech he makes and the erotic spiel
of Nicholas are riddled with echoes and allusions to Scriptural passages that
set the moral context for the Miller’s joke: the woman taken in adultery, the
good wife of Proverbs, and always the Song
of Songs. The language is also a
tissue of double-entendres, sexual innuendos and puns, so that in the course of
the triple avenues of banter—the wife, the husband and wooing lover; and
quadruple level as well, in the parish clerk’s grotesque get-up and
misperception of himself when he begins to woo the wife from below on the
street as he assumes she is eagerly awaiting his arrival. So too does the carpenter condemn himself by
his own arrogance and pride as he hides in the kneading trough hoping to be
able to discover the betrayal by his wife and young tenant, and then believes
himself privileged to survive the second flood.
Above all it is hende Nicholas
who condemns himself—just as he establishes the grounds on which the elaborate
hoax will turn against himself and Alison.
What none of them have planned on is the sexual invasion by Absolom the
parish priest, yet when it comes they think they can easily manipulate
circumstances to entrap the intruder and increase their own enjoyment of their
sexuality and wit.
What they are not aware of—and neither is the Miller who tells the tale,
and probably not even all or at least most of the pilgrims, that is, the
fictional listeners of the performance within the narrative that Symple
Geoffrey records: he is the mask, the persona, of Chaucer the poet, Geoffrey
Chaucer, master of ceremony, servant of the court in charge of their
entertainment—what none of these people are aware of except Geoffrey Chaucer
the timeless artist and his few intimates, fellow intellectuals at the Inns of
Court—what they are not aware of is the iconological and literary resonance of
the words and gestures in the poetry.
And if they are, as we are—and we are, as you know, aware only because
we think of secular performative poetry in the same way as people used to think
about sacred writings, Scriptures, the Bible.
Thus we take seriously the joke the Miller tells. We hear the pattern and rhythmic repetitions
of words and phrases that belong to the Song of Songs and hence to the
liturgical praises of the Virgin Mary and the subtle interpretations of the
story of Noah and the Ark. Take, for
example, the farcical trick of the misplaced kiss: when Absolom stands at the
window of Alisouns’s bedroom and begs a kiss, at lines 3723 ff.
This Absolom doun sette hym on his knees
And seyde, “I am lord at all degrees;
For after this I hope ther cometh moore.
Lemman, thy grace, and sweete bryd, thyn oore!”
At this point, we hear his name as a biblical name, the brother of King
Solomon, that is, the other side of Solomon author of the Song of Solomon, Canticum Canrticorum, an erotic and
mystical love song read in Christian terms as a marriage hymn, epithalamium, for the sacred wedding, hieros gamos, of the Soul and Christ, an
approach in the spirit of the soul of mankind to the Godhead, there to cleave
in ecstatic union, sexual passion raised and purified to its highest
extent. But as we have said earlier, in
the Jewish explanations of how sexual conjugation between a married man and wife
can have theurgic influence—to make an impact on the world above by inviting
the divine into the copulating couple, in their imitation of the Godhead
uniting with the Shekhina, the bride who
is the shadow extension of His own self, completing the male-female wholeness
of the ineffable sacred—the man must show respect for the woman, prepare her
gently and guide her with patience into the ecstatic act itself, both of them embracing
in love and sharing or drawing that love from the third party, the other of the
divine, that sanctifies the embrace, the zivoug.
None of the characters, including Symple Geoffrey the pilgrim, hear the
Jewish subversion of this sequence of allusions, not so that Chaucer the Poet
can find comfort in a secret Jewish identity superior to that of anyone in his
fictional world or in the audiences at the royal residence or the Inns of Court
where his poems are performed: but a different sense of pleasure in his teasing
of conventional wisdom and received beliefs and his ability to playfully
display to himself—and maybe a few well-chosen intimates of his
acquaintance—the sceptical view of language itself, of laws, customs and
feelings that are inadequate to the realities of the harsh and often offensive
environment they live in.
The Song of Songs opens with
the line, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” in which the word for
mouth in the Vulgate is ore, orifice,
an abstract rather than a fleshly term, and the normal glosses interpret this
to signify that it is in the rarefied perfumes of their mingled breaths that the
two lovers achieve their unio mystico,
or put negatively, as Hugh of St Cher put it: Sicut odu malorum fut alliciat at ad gustum invetet, vel ut ex fructus sucubitate
laudentur, The taste of any other odour is foul and evil and only the fruit
of this osculation is worthy of praise.
In this way, Absolom, already a villainous, treacherous and dangerous
character in Scripture becomes the foil of his brother Solomon and the author
of a twisted and deceitful Song of Songs of his own.
Odors are often neglected in our senses, except when they are sweet and
lovely, or have value as incense and a component of gustatory tasting of food.[2] But during the Enlightenment in Western
Europe it was increasingly feared that disease was spread through a miasma, a
disgusting set of smells that could be seen, smelt and felt in the air, through
liquids, oozing through the soil and in the walls or ceilings of houses. Before that, for the most part, the bad
smells were considered part of life—the product of animal and human waste, the
accompaniment of most activities, and the essence of organic processes. Nevertheless, having a stench or being forced
to pass through its presence was a sign of lack of refinement, and
sophisticated people attempted to block it through perfumes, incense and other
agents. Fine—sweet, exotic, tasty—odors
could in themselves be the sign of high birth, sanctity, health and sexual
vigor. In Jewish tradition, the Sabbath
was welcomed in and bid farewell by the smell of burnt spices in a ceremony of
separating the profane from the sacred.
Other smells, like tastes, could be given symbolic interpretations,
particularly during ceremonial occasions.[3]
The infamous foetor
Judaicus, the Jew’s stench, that forms part of the scandal of
anti-Semitism may come not, as supposed from a mistaken biological dislike of
Jews as creatures of the devil—or as devils themselves[4]—but
from a fact that in real life, because Jews washed before meals, changed their
clothes for the Sabbath, and in other ways crated hygienic domestic spaces for
themselves, they had a much less pungent and fetid smell than their non-Jewish
contemporaries in Europe; and it was this lack of a stench, which most people
had become used to and accepted before well into the eighteenth century, that seemed
peculiar.
Absolum kneels down before the window of Alisoun’s bedchamber, placing
himself in the posture of adoration and worship, and proclaims that “I am the
master of all degrees,” arrogantly and hubristically placing himself on a level
with the divine powers and claiming he is the equal of Solomon and of Christ
and the Holy Spirit.. He therefore seeks
to capitalise on his power—his mastery of sexual energy, his dominance over
women, and his office as a priest—to attain the next level of this adoration. He prays her for her grace, a term common to
religious discourse, where it means the merciful gift of God’s favour, and
refined courtly love, where it serves as a euphemism for possession of the
lady’s body in a sexual manner.
He also speaks of “sweete bryd”, an even thicker semantic layering of
meanings: on the one hand, he speaks of Alisoun as a sweet bird, a love-bird,
a dove, emblematic of Venus and her rites of erotic play, but also of the dove
as the symbol of the Holy Spirit and therefore of Christian love, caritas and
agape, mystical union. Yet in Middle
English bird and bride are common forms of each other through metathesis, the
shifting of syllables. As a bride,
Alison is turned into the sponsa, the
bride of the Song of Songs, and hence the Bride of Christ, the Virgin Mary his
mother, sister, and wife. At another
level, however, this sweet bird/bride is a slang expression for the female
genitalia, and so it is expanded to cover as well her ore. The word ore is a multilayered and multi-lingual
piece of paronomasia, puns or word-play: (a) or is orifice, a hole, in the rude sense; (b) or is orarere, a speech, oration or prayer;
and (c) or is gold, but also by metonymic extension, a gift and a show of
grace.
In Hebrew, though, or is
light, the divine purity made visible, in the flame of the candle or its
many-branched holder, the menorah, the
eternal light, miraculous in the celebration of Hannukah, the Festival of
Lights. In the late Middle Ages and in
the early Renaissance, Jews, especially in Italy, placed on the top of the menorah, the hannukiah, the figure of Judith,[5]
the Jewess, the Shekhina, who defeats
the enemy general Holofernes by seducing him, getting him drunk, and then
beheading him. Instead of deflowering the virgin or violating the chaste widow,
breaking her hymen, she emasculates the foe of Israel who threatens to starve,
besiege, and raze the holy city of Jerusalem. Playing the eiron by her feminine cunning and charm, her mētis, she undercuts the pride of the alazon and turns his masculine prowess into a sign of her victory
on behalf of God. He is made impotent,
though his hairy head—like that of Samson, Shimshon
the Judge—acts as an apotropaic symbol to frighten away his followers who have threatened
to invade the Holy Land, to rape its women, contaminate its sanctity.
[1] A. Cavigneaux, “Aux sources du Midrash: l’herméneutique babylonienne »
Aula Orientalis 5 (1987) 243-255.
[2] Alain Corbin, The Foul and the
Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination (London and Basdingstoke:
Papemac, 1996). Originally Le
misasme et la jonquille (1982).
[3] Dovid Zaklikowski, “The Kabbalah of Smell” Chabad-Lubavitch Media Centre online at http:www.
chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/464473/jewish/The-Kabbalah-of-Smell.
[4] An interesting brief discussion appears in “The Case of Wagner” on YDS: The Clare Spark Blog (2 August
2012) online at clarespark.com/tag/folkoore-attacking-jewish-0bodies drawing on
Sandor Gilman, The Jew’s Body (1991).
[5] Still later, in a reaction against the exaltation of the female, some
Jewish patrons commanded that the figure at the top of the hannukiot they used at home be that of Judas Maccabeus, the
military hero of the Hannukah story.
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