Margery Kempe
Page 14
How to use historical matter and be true? True to what? Over the course of five years I grappled with this question. I had to import a version of integrity into the genre. How do you not lie in fiction? Some modernist (and premodern!) answers: to “bare the device”; to assert the reader’s present time (the time of the reading, art as object); to challenge linear time; to expose the writer’s point of view; to meld figure and ground. Then how to use historical matter? I pressured the genre by bringing my relation to this slice of history into the book. History is endlessly porous; so instead of creating a middle distance, I used extreme close-ups, historical long shots, and autobiography.
My books usually contain an element of collaboration; in this case I asked about forty friends for observations and memories about their bodies. Those intimate details are applied to—that is, stitched into—remote fifteenth-century characters. Interior life is clearly attributed—in the acknowledgements! Some of these observations have been published by their authors. They are not descriptions of fictional characters in the usual sense, but random pleasures and fears that couldn’t possibly be known from the middle distance. They atomize interior life, pressure the idea of historical recreation (locating Ed’s fear of death inside the Vicar of St. Stephen) and at the same time they summon a community (of friends, of physical anarchy) in which to stage my obsession. Physical life, obsession: history as disjunction, a gap.
I created an aesthetic relationship with history by setting limits. I refrained from reading a book about Margery till I was done with the novel, confining myself to her self-description. I limited descriptions to certain aspects of fifteenth-century life, especially clothes, food, and physical gestures. I did not read conventional histories to “fill in.” Instead, I married my prose to Margery’s, confecting a sentence halfway between us, feeling Margery and the period through the rhythm of her language (another kind of collaboration). Most of the texts I used were books of hours, saints’ lives and such from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, following the model of Tzvetan Todorov’s beautiful Conquest of America, a reading of many texts from the period.
I am interested in the puzzle of using real people in fiction; my fictions have been autobiographies. I suppose I have staged Margery’s story in the theater of autobiography, building aesthetics out of the interpenetration of fact and fiction. For me, the world of fact is made up of fiction, from “ideological state apparatuses,” to the sale of lifestyle, to the all-and-nothing of language itself. And, of course, the world of fiction is a fact.
Is autobiography a subset of history? I’m an autobiographer, and Kempe, the failed saint, wrote the first autobiography in English (in about 1430). This is only one of the parallels I make to give the historical matter a vector. I draw together the emergence of the modern self and the end of the modern self, the decaying society in which Kempe lived, the decaying society in which I live, and our respective plagues. L.’s ruling-class status equals the divinity of Jesus. (In the fifteenth century, gods were closer to mortals—about as close as a Rockefeller.) The two stories are like transparencies; each can be read only in terms of the other.
The present extends in all directions; it orders the future and reorders the past. Margery’s story can be taken as one huge metaphor to describe Bob’s state of mind. That is, as the second term of a metaphor that describes the present.
But writing about a historical subject does not mean writing from the other side of history. That’s what makes me uneasy about the fashion for movies and books that seem to “restore” a period as one would restore a house—a distasteful tourism masquerading as good taste. Antique restoration is a postmodern mode, from Masterpiece Theater to the many fundamentalisms in this country and abroad. It is a postmodern desire to want a city or even a parlor to be an exact duplication of an earlier period. These fundamentalisms all speak to the yearning to be authentic, to be part of a recognizable order.
Instead, I feel I am a contributor to Margery’s life, an event in her posthumous life, and she has certainly contributed to my own sense of myself. Our lives are intertwined. Her posthumous life’s twists and turns allow me to adopt that line of thought. Margery did me the favor of disappearing for four centuries. She was all but forgotten except for a few lovely prayers. She is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Her book was discovered in the library of Col. Butler-Bowdon’s sixteenth-century manor house and published in 1934. Margery wakes up in this century as though she experienced a wonderfully prolonged coming out in which the necessity to tell her story prevailed. But Butler-Bowdon, her Prince Charming, referred to her in his preface as “poor Margery.” She was disappointing—her vulgarity, self-aggrandizement, and the faults in her piety. The distinct phases of her reputation duplicate other coming outs: first the establishment was ashamed of her because she was a noisy woman and inadequate saint; then feminism glorified her strength; and now the great maw of cultural studies absorbs her life, which becomes one more example in the history of subjectivity and daily life.
“Queering” the past (as the MLA puts it) is hardly an issue for me: What else can I do? Margery prostrated herself “with inordinate lust” before the “members” of world religions—I can do no less. I am more attracted to dubious moments of explosion and disjunction than, say, to the life of Michelangelo, the world-historical genius who defines his period. Margery is a queer version of disintegration that includes (takes with it) a central myth of our culture. Perhaps I am as angry as Cousin Bette, and perhaps anger is a defining position. I don’t mind a reaction of shock—there’s plenty of aggression in the book. Shock, confusion, sexual arousal—all acceptable.
The actual forms we take are a kind of extremity we are driven to in a quest for love. We exist to desire and be desired. Or, more roundly, we make ourselves “different” and “same” in order to be loved (if only by the world). And behind this is the mystery of form, how weird and even unendurable it is to be one thing (race, sexuality, gender) rather than another.
When I become Margery, I can no more “control” the import of my literary drag than I could if I dressed as a woman, pursuing an inner necessity whose explanations and effects would be contradictory at best. But maybe that impurity, which is an expression of a problem rather than a way of containing or explaining it, is the way I handle the ever-crossing circuits of narration.
To make an object of the book, to suppress figure and ground, I developed a kind of minimalism amid the excess. I piled up declarative sentences. I used birds and bird calls every few pages. I researched where a certain bird would visit during a given season, say, “the whickering trill of a grebe” in Margery’s vision of the Holy Land during December, 0000, the year of Jesus’ birth. And I hung the novel on four words—exalt, exasperate, abandon, amaze—that appear again and again, a reduced version of the whole book.
Margery is a tale of middle-aged breakdown (those other middle ages) for Margery and Bob equally. By the end of the book, both accept the partial truth of life in the moment—including an acceptance of death, which in the logic of the book means the reduction of the fear of death, and so the end of obsession. Still, Bob and Margery persist in wanting to be lifted out of history and see their books as another stab at rewriting the end.
—ROBERT GLÜCK
2000