Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (54 page)

the Law of the Father; Freud articulated the normative modern narrative of male heterosexual identity formation, whereby the well-adjusted boy successfully nav- igates the necessary trauma of being forced to distinguish his identifi with his mother from his desire for her, shifting his identifi to his father.
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This traumatic initiation into law, rhetoric, and correct desire is also pow- erfully explored in Christian theology. Paul identifies the letter with the Jew- ish law, in opposition to the spiritual essence of Christian spirituality; and, as he writes, “the letter kills” (2 Corinthians 3:6). In Romans 7:8–11 Paul teach- es: “I lived some time without the law. But when the commandment came, sin revived. . . . . For sin, taking advantage by the commandment, seduced me, and by it killed me” (Romans 7:8–9:11). I quote Hawkins quoting Jerome explicating Paul’s seduction.

The imagery assumes special importance for the Prioress’s Tale when we find Jerome explaining that this death through the law occurs at the end of infancy. St. Paul [wishes] “to show that as long as we are infants, we are wholly ignorant of what concupiscence is.” But when we begin to grow, and can tell the difference between right and wrong, the law con- demns our concupiscence.

Hawkins explains in his footnote: “Here Jerome apparently means the Mosa- ic law.”
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Note the naunce of Hawkins’s paraphrase of Paul: sexual desire is not introduced where it was absent; rather, ignorant innocence is replaced by
awareness
of the sinful nature of sexual desire. Within this system Christiani- ty is represented by a Pauline mysticism, the unmediated ecstasy of an infan- tile, translingual, and image-based spirituality; Jews and Judaism are aligned with corporal punishment and grammar lessons, with rapacious rhetoricity and legalism that is “literally” murderous. Now that our boy has reached the age of seven he must be initiated into the phallic skills of Jewry, where the mechanisms of literacy are located and where the regime of law and language by its mere existence engenders horrors previously unnamed
and therefore pre- viously nonexistent
. The boy is asked to cease to be a feminized sign, the em- bodiment of Christian virtue, and instead become a rapacious reader, repre- sentative of Satanic Judaism.
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In very relevant musings Leo Bersani has defined phallocentrism as a negation of a negation—“above all the denial of the
value
of powerlessness in both men and women. I don’t mean the value of gentleness, of nonagressiveness, or even or passivity, but rather of a more rad- ical disintegration and humiliation of the self.”
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The clergeon’s mystical Christianity, after the example of the Virgin Mother of the prologue, is pre-

cisely this “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self.” And it is pre- cisely this that he is called upon to give up.

Yet this particular boy would sooner be a martyr. While studying his primer—which, in Chaucer’s day, would have consisted of lessons in Latin grammar—he overhears other children singing the anthem
Alma redemptoris
, and his interest is piqued—even though he does not understand its meaning. Chaucer does not reproduce the text of this hymn, but his readers would have been familiar with it. It opens with the following lines:

Kindly Mother of the Redeemer, who art ever of heaven The open gate, and the star of the sea, aid a fallen people Which is trying to rise again.
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The boy is thrilled by this new song, and he learns the first verse, including the above lines, by heart, on his own. The clergeon thereby successfully evades “language,” as it is conventionally understood, altogether, steering a steady and independent course of spiritual devotion to the principle of protecting maternal power even within the alien context of the text-based patriarchal law of the school, disdaining the laws of grammar in favor of the spiritual essence of the song. The boy has accessed the meaning of the anthem without textu- al mediation; his body produces the song without having read it.
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The clergeon’s shirking of the rhetorical imperative is not, however, com- plete. It turns out that he is curious about the meaning of his song after all, and he appeals not to his teacher but to “His felawe, which that elder was than he” (“His friend, an older boy than he”; 96) and “preyde he him to construe and declare / Ful ofte tyme upon his knowes bare” (“He begged him to trans- late it and explain— / On his bare knees he begged him many a time”; 94–95). Just a few stanzas earlier the boy was on his knees to the feminine principle—now, in apparent loyalty to this principle, and in an attempt to learn the lessons of his school outside its boundaries, he is on his knees to an older classmate. The homosocial environment of the school is replaced by the homoerotic charge of the private encounter.

Upon determining that this hymn is indeed in praise of the Virgin, the clergeon determines to learn it all,

Though that I for my prymer shal be shent And shal be beten thryes in an houre,

I wol it conne, oure Lady for to honoure.

(107–9)

[Even if, because my primer isn’t learnt, They scold or beat me three times in an hour, I mean to learn it for Our Lady’s honour.]

Here the boy acknowledges that his continued devotion to the honor of Mary brings him into direct conflict with the law of the school. At the expense of learning to read, he will memorize the song he has heard, and, though he does not understand the meaning of its words, the (inaccurate) paraphrase of his classmate will suffice. The boy succeeds in maintaining his identification with the penetrable sign as opposed to the penetrating reader. He fully expects to receive literal, physical punishment as a consequence of this choice—it can only be assumed that this punishment is meant to come at the hands of a schoolmaster, but, in a manner consistent with the tale’s larger evasion of mas- culine authority, such a figure is nowhere explicitly visible in the text. In the meantime he has successfully solicited the complicity of the older boy—“His felaw taughte him homeward prively” (“in secret, on his homeward way, / His friend taught him”; 110). No longer receiving direction from his mother, the boy has refused affiliation with the patriarchal institution of conventional lit- eracy, relying instead on illicit, private, and punishable encounters with a fel- low schoolboy, outside of all institutional frameworks, allowing him to evade the imperative to break from the maternal principle.

The clergeon succeeds in memorizing the song in its entirety:

Fro word to word, acording with the note; Twyes a day it passed through his throte,

To scoleward and homeward whan he wente On Cristes moder set was his entente.

(113–116)

[Confidently word for word, tuned to the note. Twice every day the song passed through his throat. Once on the way to school, once coming back;

On Christ’s dear mother his whole heart was set.]

Twice a day it passed through his throat, this song in praise of Mary as an “open gate.” The boy “cam to and fro” (118) in the “Jewerye,” which, rather than being understood as a neighborhood, is quite explicitly mapped as being more like a
passageway
: “And thurgh the strete men might ryde or wende, / For it was free, and open at either ende” (59–60). The clergeon’s mastery of this song is an intensely pleasurable, immensely repeatable triumph.

The swetnesse his herte perced so

Of Christes moder, that, to hire to preye, He can nat stinte of singing by the weye.

(121–23)

[The sweetness of Christ’s mother had pierced through His heart until he could not, come what may,

Cease singing of her praise upon the way.]

The image of the boy on his naked knees before his friend, their repeated il- licit encounters, an extreme interest in the open passageway of the boy’s throat in constant juxtaposition with an extreme interest in the open passageway of the Virgin Mary’s vagina, the recurrent language of repeated back and forth movement, the pleasurable “piercing” the boy experiences in the passage above, and the framing of all this as a triumph of maternal identification over the forces of masculinizing homosocialization—together evoke the clergeon as not only engaging in male-male sex acts but also, unavoidably, engaging in these acts because of who he “is,” in a sense that places this tale in a direct line of descent with the minoritizing psychological discourse of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century “homosexual.”
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I hasten to note that medieval Eng- lish culture generally did not associate the performance of male-male sexual acts with gender transgression.
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Indeed, many agree that the idea of sexual behavior as a basis for identity was simply not available in Chaucer’s age.
58
Yet some of these same scholars have stressed the degree to which seemingly com- peting conceptions of selfhood coexisted among medieval thinkers.
59
Excep- tionally, Chaucer here experiments with a conception of selfhood that resem- bles the hegemonic modern one.
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The stanza describing the clergeon’s bliss at having mastered his new song, consolidating his
successful
negotiation of identity—though certainly not het- erosexual identity—is followed immediately by the “swelling up” of the pun- ishing law of patriarchy, the existence of which was intimated by the boy’s ear- lier evocation of an unnamed force of masculine discipline.

Oure firste fo, the serpent Sathanas That hath in Jewes herte his waspes nest Up swal.

(124–26)

[The serpent Satan, our first enemy,

Who has his wasps’ nest in the hearts of Jews, Swelled up.]

While Christianity is subsumed under the dominating figure of the maternal and virginal body of Mary, the Jews are identified with the law of patriarchy and endowed with Satan’s punishing phallus. Just as the Jews in historical ac- counts of ritual murder use the body of the boy to perform a perverse traves- ty of the crucifixion, the Jews of the Prioress’s tale use the body of the boy to perform a perverse hermeneutic travesty: this is a sign they can penetrate.
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The murder is quick, and, in contrast to contemporary “historical” ac- counts of ritual murder, is not preceded by torture. Or is it?

An homicyde therto han they hyred, That in an aley hadde a privee place; And as the child gan forby to pace,

This cursed Jew him hente and heeld him faste, And kitte his throte, and in a pit him caste.

(133–37)

. . .

I saye that in a wardrobe they him threwe Where as these Jewes purgen hir entraille.

(138–40)

[an assasin was hired

Who lay in ambush for him in an alley. This cursed Jew, as the little child passed by, Grabbed him and held him in a cruel grip, And cut his throat and threw him in a pit

. . .

It was a cesspit that they threw him in,

Where these Jews used to go to purge their bowels.]

The Jew pins down the mobile boy, bringing his free and easy back and forth movement to a halt. With a cut the Jew obstructs the open passageway, the instrument of the boy’s pleasurable song. And if we continue to follow the otherwise gratuitously scatological imagery to the bodily orifices it evokes— this death takes place “in an aley” in a “privee place,” the body is dumped in a shit-filled pit—we are pointed toward a final, anal rape.

How to understand this boy’s fate? Among historians of medieval sexual- ity much has been made of the cognitive break between commonplace, casu- al male-male sexual contacts—say, between two preadolescent schoolboys— and the theological and moral shop of horrors that was “sodomy.” The Jewish

assault upon this queer boy can be read as allegorizing precisely this traumat- ic collision between cognitive frames—one that could be phrased in terms of the crash of the word upon the “thing,” the violent imbrication of “reality” into rhetoric.
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In the prologue to this tale we are told that Mary was the agent of her own violation—she “ravysedest doun” the violent attention of the Holy Ghost. This is the master trope for the second rape of this tale as well: the boy’s heroic maintenance of his cross-gender affiliation and its concomi- tant expression in same-sex desire,
themselves conjure up
the stock goblin fig- ure of the sodomitical Jew. The evocation of consensual sex between school- boys is rapidly ellided by the fantasy of the rape of a boy by adult sexual predators. No matter how horrifying such a rape fantasy is, it is not nearly as threatening as what it effaces. The sequence of images has its own logic. The Jew functions as a kind of
diabolus ex machina,
reintegrating the newly ex- posed queer-Christian alliance into the discursive realm of sodomy. Simulta- neously, the tale does not quite dispense with the sense that being raped by a Jew is as much a rare privilege as a horrible punishment. If one’s model of male sainthood valorizes spiritual receptivity and cross-gender identification, why not conceive of its mystical ecstasy in terms of a fantasy of anal rape?

The second half of the Prioress’s tale is, unsurprisingly, devoted to recon- solidation of a Christian social order, focused on the question of what the het- erosexual patriarchy is meant to make of this heroic and impossible little cler- geon. Upon the boy’s disappearance his distraught mother combs the city looking for her lost son—ultimately, she enters the Jewry and approaches the pit that holds his corpse, at which point he miraculously begins to sing
Alma redemptoris
once again. The “provost,” representative of the state, is sum- moned; at last Christian patriarchy appears in person. Predictably, the provost subordinates the maternal principle, praising “Crist that is of heven king, / And eek his mother” (“Jesus, heaven’s king, / Also His mother”) and imposes the law upon the demonic Jews: “with wilde hors he dide hem drawe, / And after that he heng them by the lawe” (“he had them by wild horses torn, / To be hanged later, as the orders ordain”; 199–200). The state having dispensed with the Jews, the boy’s corpse is turned over to the church. But, before bur- ial takes place, the holy abbot asks the boy to explain how it is that he can still sing, “Sith that thy throte is cut, to my seminge?” (“Although it seems your throat is cut”; 214). The boy responds that the mother of Christ came to him as he was dying and bade him sing this anthem, “and whan that I had songe,