4. Membranes of Things Past
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0149.04
Misremembering and Remembering
I told the joke about the woman who asked her lover “Why is your organ so small?” He replied, “I didn’t know I was playing in a cathedral.”
—Prince, “Vicki Waiting”
If Blechman’s animated short could be televised in the holiday season alongside one of the juggler segments from the Waring show, the collocation would deliver the invigoration of roving into the past through a time machine. While accessible to the youngest children, the juxtaposition would be provocative to adults receptive to cultural history, since it would throw open windows that faced in opposite directions from the start of the 1950s. The bandleader’s program looked across an all-embracing vista of America back toward the diva Mary Garden earlier in the century: it transported the spectator to the first quarter of the twentieth century. In contrast, the cartoon surveyed a panorama forward toward a future that included hazily even what has become the present day: it anticipated the last quarter of the century, if not even beyond. But let us face the facts. Setting side by side a seventy-year-old snippet from an old television show and a sixty-year-old animation, no matter how absorbing and excellent they may be, respectively, would deliver more in deep critical appreciation than in fast commercial gain. Both a clip from the variety hour and the short animation have the wrong duration for today’s market, which favors the extended viewing of feature-length movies. This is to say nothing of attention spans: who could seduce viewers nowadays into watching a long snippet of very old-time television? Eyes are glued too much on this day and age. Scant breathing room is left for the bygone.
Trying to hinge together a diptych of two old versions on the big or small screen would make a start, but better would be to stimulate live performances and delivery. Before radio, cinema, and television took hold of mass culture, the tale insinuated itself most durably into hearts and memories through the magic of musical drama, shows recreating opera in more intimate settings, and bedtime reading. Both children and adults could be engaged through song, dance, juggling, mime; medievalizing costumes, sets, and artwork; or any or all of these in combination. The challenge would be to achieve the coziness of modest-sized groups without battering the narrative into mediocrity. One conduit for innovation could be to act out the story as a vignette within a longer form, whether novelistic or cinematic. The decision by a single filmmaker to retell or reenact the exemplum somehow as a scene in a hit movie could bring Our Lady’s Tumbler or The Jongleur of Notre Dame back into common parlance. In turn, that might be enough to generate imitations in other genres, or at least casual ponderings on old literary and operatic acquaintances that have been forgotten. All of these hopes may be unrealistic: the presence of Christianity within the narrative as it has traditionally been told may raise an insuperable barrier to its absorption into broader circles of the humanities and arts. In this case the legend may persist only where it has become deep-seated, first and foremost in children’s books.
A recurrent phenomenon in this study has been clusters of groundbreaking adaptations and of knowledgeable interest that have come on the heels of performances, or even just of publications. An epidemiologist with a taste for investigating how literary-historical contagions ramify could secure fascinating results by logging into a spreadsheet the assorted dates and places where texts have been written, music composed, and ballets and operas staged. Obvious patterns would materialize. For instance, the sustained familiarity with the story among students and staff of the University of Notre Dame should catch no one unawares, since the juggler is by way of being an unofficial college mascot there. Less expected are the many other clumps of curiosity about the miracle.
For the tale to have become less well known than it was back in the day could be a resoundingly good thing. Now the narrative can be the secret discovery of every group or individual that usurps it through recitation, retelling, or performance of some kind. The story occupies an odd position. It became excessively familiar off and on for a century, but its pervasive familiarness led less to contempt than to oblivion. Since then, long neglect has made it seem a private discovery, a personal eureka for a multitude of individual authors and artists. Older ones remember having read it or seen it performed in school, heard it on the radio, or watched it somewhere else decades ago. Younger ones chance upon it much more randomly.
In the end, what matters is that people should have the chance to encounter and relish the tale and its events and characters, especially the protagonist. The specific vehicle in which the doings of the tumbler or juggler are purveyed matters less than the overall quality and spirit. A first-rate reenactment sets the bar high. It makes the fictional events memorable and allows audience members the latitude to interpret them independently—and to accommodate them to their own values and applications. The experience would be enhanced if readers, listeners, or viewers could be exposed to two or more versions of the narrative, preferably in separate media, to ease comparison of the various messages that have been encoded and decoded in the jongleur.
The broadest and richest approaches to literary pièces de résistance—as to life—require interpretive pluralism, which is not identical with cultural relativism. We need to view each text from multiple perspectives, just as if we circumambulated a cathedral to peer at it and appreciate it from different vantage points. In Hugo’s sprawling novel about Notre Dame of Paris, we are encouraged to think about how the great church appears to a gypsy girl, a hunchback, churchmen, students, and others, as they meet the building from outside, inside, above, and below. Our tale is shorter and simpler, but it too takes us down and up, from the world outside into the one within, from the laical to the monastic. Another set of outlooks is diachronic. To cast our net wide, further viewpoints would include those of the researchers and artists who composed, recorded, received, and transmitted to us the medieval poem and its sundry subsequent rehandlings. In Our Lady’s Tumbler, any effort to gain entry to these chronological contexts constrains us to engage with bygone days which (truism alert!), thanks to the inevitabilities of passing time, are ever more distant from us.
On the off chance that anyone has failed to notice a blatant conflict of interest, here comes my full disclosure. As a professional medievalist, I cannot pretend to have a disinterested outlook. A playwright responsible for a not very successful revamping of our story inaugurated his rollout of it with the observation: “It is possible to love the Middle Ages, or to detest it; but not to ignore it.” The medieval miracle warrants much more examination and appreciation than it has earned, except from a handful of specialists. In 1921, Maurice Vloberg served up a long and mannered retelling. In his concluding apparatus he sung the praises of the “delightful short story from the beginning of the thirteenth century.” By his reckoning, its desirability overtopped that of any modernization, and he challenged his audience to compare the original for themselves with the other versions then to be had. The Old French might still win a taste test hands down, even against a liqueur glass poured to the brim with a stiff snort of Bénédictine. Despite the many redeeming qualities of later permutations, the earliest is the best. To sever contact with it would be tragic.
Passing nods to the juggler are legion. Not ten years ago, the author of a book on the style of “the Monumental City” in Maryland made the oddly counterintuitive move of likening an immobile edifice to the protagonist of our tale. Calling an unpresumptuous apartment house “a gem of nonimportance,” he ventured the view that “this building stands as Le Jongleur de Notre Dame of Baltimore architecture. It’s not important, but it does what it does perfectly, and more people should notice.” Less foreseeably, the juggler of Our Lady bid fair for a while to become boilerplate in Festschriften. Meaning in German literally “celebration writings,” these omnium gatherums of learned articles have traditionally afforded a means for students and colleagues in academic settings to commemorate the advancing years and careers of esteemed professors. At the same time the editors and contributors demonstrate their solidarity and heighten their own visibility through affiliation with those same worthies. Even scholars as far removed from tumbling, juggling, the Middle Ages, and literature as physicists have liked to acknowledge the jongleur when proffering lectures or essays to honor senior members of their guild.
For want of detail, it is usually impossible to pin down whether such citations of the story result from viewing a film, perusing a literary variant, or being acquainted with allusions made to it in earlier scientific writings. These glancing references mean that the gist of the tale remains well enough known not to seem hopelessly recherché, while they also portend that the narrative still retains enough prestige to make mention of it a feather in the cap—if such a head-covering makes a suitable image for cultural literacy. The invocation of the juggler in appraisals of collective volumes is attested already at the latest by 1960. In that year, a reviewer of a book on evolution praised the essay-writers for having offered, “like the juggler of Notre Dame,” their best expositions of general topics on which they had written more specialized or longer studies.
If a fiction may be viewed as a living creature, such usages make this one an oyster spooned alive and raw from a shell for consumption. Alternatively, it could be likened to molten metal that loses its quickness upon being struck for a low-denomination coin. Another example is the way the author of a tome on jurisprudence discusses in wearisome detail the comparability of the juggler and a judge. To the writer quoting, the authority put on parade, and their presumptive readers, the medieval exemplum is as well known as a parable. Still, whereas an allegory formulated by Christ has had the power of a faith behind it, the account at this point was put on the line by becoming too well known. Outside religion and high culture, familiarity, sooner or later, breeds contempt. The same point could be made when a thumbnail précis of the late nineteenth-century French short story makes clear how poor command of orthography can dent popular trust in the competence of professionals such as medical doctors.
If a physician would spell as follows, he would certainly have great difficulty in gaining people’s confidence in his knowledge of medicine: “Barnaby [in Anatole France’s ‘Our Lady’s Juggler’] found faveror in her [the Virgin Mary’s] I by puting his hole hart and sole in his jugling.”
Already by the same date, exhaustion or even exasperation with the miracle had become evident in some quarters. In the United States, at the very start of the 1960s, the jongleur’s jig was up. A kind of “fable fatigue” or “tale tiredness” manifested itself long ago among foreign-language instructors in the United States. At the time French, which since then has been unhorsed by the surging advance of Spanish, reigned preeminent in many regions of the country among modern languages studied in high school and college. The curriculum rested heavily on poring over literature, especially prose fiction. In anthologies relied upon by teachers, Le jongleur de Notre Dame was all-too-regular fare. Enough decades have elapsed for the familiarity-bred contempt to dry up and blow away. A tale that seemed shopworn more than a half century ago may have been rejuvenated in the meantime. Still, huge challenges exist now in the American market for schoolbooks. One is that the status of French among foreign languages has declined precipitously. Another is that the short story (and even fiction as a whole) has been displaced by other types of fare—and language learning is ever less text-based anyway. A third is that in many public schools almost nothing remotely religious can be introduced into a classroom without fanning controversy over the division between church and state.
Upon close inspection, data-driven research may turn out to be data drivel. Tritely, statistics can be manipulated to prove anything. That said (more than thirty-five million times), interesting explorations can be transacted within the vast Google Ngram database of digitized books written in English for the phrases “Jongleur de Notre Dame” (see Vol. 1, Fig. 4.1), Our Lady’s Tumbler (see Vol. 1, Fig. 4.2), and “Juggler of Notre Dame” (see Fig. 4.1 below). The graphs that result from such inquiries force the conclusion that these designations have declined steeply from their apogees. The first two titles or characters crested in use around 1920. At that time, Mary Garden had singlehandedly heaved Massenet’s opera to its all-time high of popularity. Moreover, countless editions and translations of the medieval original in translation and of Anatole France’s story in both his language and English circulated, being used in schools as well as in pleasure reading. After the French phrase was nativized, “Juggler of Notre Dame” rose to a peak just as the Second World War was getting under way. These inferences from the outcomes of word searches are undergirded by evidence that can be amassed by rummaging in archives of historical newspapers.
Do the diagrams establish that the narrative has become familiar to fewer people? Not unavoidably. Before leaping to any hasty conclusions, we ought to recollect that the jongleur, tumbler, and juggler have metamorphosed by turns into the acrobat, clown, and jester, while Our Lady or Notre Dame has given way to God or an angel. In at least one instance the name of the main actor has even been modified, by conflation with Notre Dame of Paris, to become “Le jongleur de Paris.” The same designation, as for example in the title of a 1969 oil-on-canvas painting by the artist Marc Chagall, may serve to denote a Parisian circus-type entertainer, rather than the hero of our story. As the protagonist’s profession has changed, and as the nature of the higher power who materializes on his behalf has varied, so too the proper nouns deployed to identify the leading character have proliferated. In 1920, one could have ascertained whether another person had encountered the narrative simply by asking about jongleur or tumbler, Barnaby or Jean, and Notre Dame or Our Lady. All these features, and even the involvement of a statue, have grown into more of a mare’s nest. Consequently, straightforward consultation of data sets by two or three phrases will not unmask the realities of popular exposure to the tale as well as it would have done a half century ago. Don’t expect an all-purpose algorithm for the purposes of this cultural-historical search-and-destroy anytime soon.
The account of the jongleur is hardly impervious to being misremembered and re-membered as well as misrepresented and re-presented. It even thrives under such treatment and mistreatment. The gist of the narrative in all its major guises is so pithy and punchy that it must seem needless to check it before referencing it. And why scruple about verifying anyway, since no single definitive version exists? In the past, people formed their impressions and memories of the tale from many different media and forms. Few individuals would impose upon themselves the punctilio or pedantry of tracking down a text to see if they had the fine points right when adducing, especially just offhand, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, or other fairy tale greats. Why should they do so when instancing the juggler, who could be cousin if not brother to such literary-cultural personages? In fact, the medieval performer gives even more pause to those who might long for definitude. Is the miracle to be designated as Our Lady’s Tumbler, Le jongleur de Notre Dame, or one of the dozens of other titles? Is the protagonist a tumbler, juggler, joker, jongleur, dancer, buffoon, gymnast, or fool; an adult or child, well-to-do or destitute? Is he anonymous, or called Barnaby, Cantalbert, Jacob, Jean, Jean Vapeur, Pierre, Pietro, or by another name? Do the events take place in Clairvaux, Cluny, Compiègne, Piegne, Touraine, Tourlaine, Sorrento, or somewhere else real or fanciful?
The tale’s instability in such rudimentary characteristics has helped to maintain its essence and status in the common domain. In turn, the story’s belonging to everyone but no one has freed the hands of artists who have wished to remake it as their own. The downside? The malleability sometimes leaves the down-and-out juggler prey to deformation. He can be handled or mishandled, sometimes deliberately, even by those with a genteel sensibility. When credited only incidentally, he can turn out to be the equivalent of literary-historical roadkill—a wretched creature that has been struck and left to expire on the shoulder of the cultural throughway.
Here we may ponder another example, this one from the Slavic world. Czesław Miłosz (see Fig. 4.2) characterizes his fellow Pole Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (see Fig. 4.3) not only as a buffoon but also as having “assigned to himself the role of the medieval jongleur de Notre Dame, of a weak man, a drunkard, a vagabond thrown into a world alien to the true desires of his heart, but trying to survive and to bring people something of beauty.” Precise as the Polish winner of the Nobel Prize in literature tends to be in his choice of epithets, this analogy gives an inadvertently blurred impression. Not all these traits would very aptly fit either the medieval tumbler or the jongleur of either Anatole France’s or Jules Massenet’s versions. The three protagonists were vagabonds, but none of them truly an incorrigible inebriate, and the jury would be out on the fairness of calling any of them a spineless weakling. For all that, the likeness is not an out-and-out mistake. The most scathing adjectives are meant to qualify Gałczyński more than the tumbler or the jongleur. Renowned for alcoholic overindulgence and especially for vodka-saturated binges, he was the impotent vagrant whom the 1980 laureate sought to describe.
To look toward a different point of the compass and another hemisphere, an argument has been advanced that the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, in his bestselling 1988 The Alchemist, relied heavily on the narrative treasury in the anthology of children’s stories by the Mexican Arreola. Whatever the merits of the case, the original Portuguese edition and translations into many other languages (but not the English) contain a preface that ends with a very distinctive redoing of what is ultimately a heavily modified form of the Anatole France version. In the novel, the eponymous alchemist speaks about three types of practitioners who exemplify his profession. To illustrate the third, he tells the young protagonist Santiago a tale in his laboratory. Once, he says, Our Blessed Lady, with the infant Jesus in arms, resolved to return to earth and to visit a cloister. The brethren lined up so that they could step forward one by one before the Holy Virgin to show her honor. One recited beautiful poems, another displayed his miniatures of the Bible, and the third reeled off a list of all the saints. Thus all of them, one monk after another, proved their reverence for the Mother and Child. Backmost in the line stood the lowliest among the brothers, who had never had their noses in learned books. His parents had been simple circus folk who had imparted to him no skill beyond a negligible amount of juggling. When his turn rolled round, the other community members wanted to cut the homage short, because the former juggler had nothing suitable to offer and might become a blot on the monastery’s reputation. But he felt an irrepressible insistence to give something to Jesus and the Holy Virgin. Abashed, with the reproachful looks of the contemplatives weighing heavily on his back, he held a pair of oranges and began to juggle with them, since that was the only thing he could do. In response to his antics, the infant Jesus gurgled, giggled, and clapped his little hands on the bosom of Our Blessed Lady. The Virgin extended her arms to the juggler and allowed him to hold the baby.
Getting a Rise from the Male Member
A peculiarity of the piece is that it contains only male parts.
Gothic architecture can be sexual and even sexy. Most familiarly, in novels of the genre the dark byways of abbeys and churches can morph into erogenous zones. Sometimes they furnish settings for venery that range from the titillating to the tormented. Even apart from any literary traditions of sexualizing buildings, the femininity of Notre Dame—Our Lady, the Virgin—has entailed opportunities first to personify the constructions and then to eroticize them. The cathedral can be conceived as a living body of flesh and blood, and not just any physique, but specifically a sexualized womanly one. In the late-nineteenth-century Parisian beauty contest between Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, the great place of prayer was dolled up as a belle.
In the mid-twentieth century, the whole point of Gothic could be condensed in an advertising showcard to the sultry geometry of female breasts as shaped by a brassiere (see Fig. 4.4). If men could have their heads lidded by the angular rigidity of hats with “Gothic crowns,” women could have their figures cupped and girdled in similar architecture. The American artist Anne Stokes, who has illustrated books and record jackets, created in 2007 an image “Gothic Siren” that portrays a tattooed Goth-style vamp(ire) against the backdrop of a many-spired tower in the expected architectural vernacular, adorned prominently with skulls and crossbones.
The most artful equation of a shapely woman and a Gothic cathedral comes in a snapshot. An illustrious French photographer has nimbly brought out correspondences and complementarities between the soft slopes and sinuous swells of a voluptuous feminine figure, as seen from the rear, and the lancets, rose windows, and flying buttresses of Notre Dame in Paris (see Fig. 4.5). Called Bettina Rheims, the professional who conceived this ravishing image has good reason even solely from her family name to be attuned to houses of worship from the late Middle Ages; the great church of the French city in question has made repeated appearances in this book. Beyond such onomastic coincidence, Rheims manages in this photograph to point to the resemblance between the rounding of a buttock and the circularity of a rose window. The draping of the lines on the model’s dress, and the triangular neckline dipping down to the middle of her back, enhance the similarities between the inanimate medieval edifice and the animate human being. Both are well-proportioned.
However propitious Gothic generally and Notre Dame particularly may have become to sexualization, the suggestiveness in treatments of the juggler relates more often to the male than to the female body. Our Lady’s Tumbler in its earliest incarnation involves an athletic man, au naturel apart from his most intimate apparel. Although the medieval poem leaves no doubt that the acrobat is scantily clad rather than nude, at least one modern reader completed the striptease in his mind. The gymnast, often pictured as a virtually and virtuously naked young man, exerts himself to the utmost for a woman and falls prone from debilitation in the finale of each encounter. Described thus, the story could spark connotations that are anything but pious. In this context, the French idiom of la petite mort for a sexual climax is not of no consequence: the phrase for this sometimes athletic but always unascetic type of catharsis means literally “the little death.”
Our Lady’s Tumbler has much to say about love, but the tale may be far from romanticism or eroticism and even further from libido. The thirteenth-century poem is no limerick. In a highly reductive interpretation, the meaning of Anatole France’s narrative is too wholesome to require any mincing of words: “The essence of religion is the love of God and of our fellow men.” The ease of arriving at such a reading explains why the narrative would be absorbed into anthologies entitled Treasures of the Kingdom: Stories of Faith, Hope, and Love or groupings headed “Love Never Ceases”: the issue is not stamina in intercourse. In Mary Garden’s usurpation of Massenet’s male lead, and in countless recreations of her cross-dressing by other women who have acted, sung, danced, or juggled the part, the leading role has been made pre- or parasexual. He is not record-low- but no-testosterone. The character has not been neutered, but in effect any overt sexuality has been sublimated for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Androgyny has worked well for the hero of Our Lady’s Tumbler and its descendants. Then again, we may be justified in wondering whether the passion is so unearthly, or whether the tale exudes no earthly and earthy passion. Look at the cover of another collection into which the story has been incorporated, this one entitled A Century of Love Stories (see Fig. 4.6). Does the monastic setting restrict the relationships in our story to ones among men? Is any romantic attraction between males and females dormant in the medieval original—as in the tales we have seen of youths who plight their troth before (and with) statues that turn animate?
The narrative’s intrinsic piety would seem to present an insuperable obstacle to a sex-driven explanation. Why should anyone seek to advance such a reading of the poem, anyway? In the end, the relative importance of a libidinal charge in the medieval text matters less than whether the writers, artists, composers, and filmmakers who have reworked the tale have sensed in it or sought to impose upon it any sexuality. Those intent upon finding hot-and-heavy sex will discern double entendres wherever they train their gaze, but what one woman or man views as a provocative innuendo may spark no response at all in another. An old chestnut, ascribed with no real basis to Freud, holds that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” By the same token, sometimes a half-naked jongleur is just that and nothing more. The mind of the entertainer in the medieval poem, insofar as we are granted any entrée into his interiority, is planted in the crypt and not in the gutter.
The entertainer is French. Strange presumptions about his nation—even though if truth be told, it was not yet one in the Middle Ages—have long been rife, nowhere more than in the English-speaking world. Consequently, some broad stereotypes about Gallic gayness and garrulity have come into play in exegesis of our story. In such pigeonholing, a common factor of Frenchness, at least in the eyes of foreigners typecasting it, across the ages has been sensuality. If we cruise for sexual elements within the tradition of Our Lady’s Tumbler and Le jongleur de Notre Dame, we might evaluate differently some of the works we have surveyed.
We saw how in 1898 the boutique-like Boston firm bankrolled by Fred Holland Day published Isabel Butler’s translation of the medieval poem. Yet although we met a few of the cronies with whom Day banded together to launch the visionist movement, we did not delve into the sexuality with which he has become aligned. In 1894, Copeland & Day brought out Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, and for two years afterward the ten American issues of The Yellow Book. The company’s list of titles in print alone cements its ties to the aestheticism and decadence of the Irish author, who in 1895 was convicted of sodomy. In fact, the inaugural volume, printed by the publishing house in 1894, was even entitled The Decadent: Being the Gospel of Inaction. Although written by Ralph Adams Cram, it was left anonymous by its author for fear of adverse consequences: slings and arrows, sticks and stones. Association with the bohemian counterculture of the visionists that it depicted fancifully might not have resonated well in Boston, which was then still a conservative city.
Day was close-mouthed and buttoned-up about his sexuality as about much else in his private life. All the same, he became deservedly known for his inclinations toward a personalized and (homo)sexualized brand of philhellenism. In the ambit of late nineteenth-century Boston, his predilections approached closely to outright “Greek love.” To make known same-sex proclivities was already skating on thin ice. For evidence, we need rummage no further than his many photographs of young men posed nude or half-clothed. Such images have been diagnosed as symptomizing proto- or crypto-gay sexuality and culture. The male-male eroticism sometimes simmered in conjunction with a turn to the Middle Ages. The relationship between the two phenomena was undebatable, for instance, in one of Day’s role models as a cultural figure, John Addington Symonds, the English poet whose translation of medieval Latin student songs made famous the phrase “wine, women, and song.” Do such scattered facts render plausible the inference that Copeland & Day selected Our Lady’s Tumbler for publication because they perceived affinities between the story and their decadent aesthetic values, or between the protagonist and their gay subculture? Members of their coterie may have felt a yank toward the Middle Ages for many reasons, sexuality being only one of them. Day’s 1900 photograph Monk in Cell has nothing overtly erotic about it (see Fig. 4.7). The cast of Massenet’s musical drama in its original form was, at least from what could be seen on stage by spectators before the conclusion, all male. But did Le jongleur de Notre Dame harbor elements we might suspect of being intentionally or unintentionally gay? For that matter, did the opera acquire any hitherto-absent sultriness—heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or all three (and more?)—when Mary Garden pulled on pants and took over the lead en travesti? To hopscotch forward several decades, Auden’s “Ballad of Barnaby” gave its tumbler, we may recall, blue eyes, a svelte figure, and an aura of conceited and even cocksure heterosexuality, and these qualities may well relate to Auden’s own gayness and affinities; but it would require considerable, even exorbitant, ingenuity to argue that the poem is mostly or even largely concerned with sex.
Less arguable cases in point of how banally susceptible to sexualization the story can become may be gleaned from literary and movie criticism of the 1970s and 1990s. First, a 1973 interview of the American pornographic filmmaker and distributor, Radley Metzger, devolves at one moment into a raunchily outré interchange between him and the influential American cinema critic Richard Corliss:
CORLISS: What might be called the obligatory shot in a Metzger picture is a closeup of the heroine simulating orgasm as the man performs cunnilingus. In hardcore it’s usually the reverse.
METZGER: The only example of that in one of our pictures was The Dirty Girls, where the prostitute is in a commercial situation. But there the motive wasn’t commercial. The woman was expressing her gratitude to the man—a little like the Anatole France story, “The Juggler of Our Lady.” Where the juggler in front of the icon can only juggle, the only thing she can do is give him the best lay he’s ever had. Mind you, I’m not saying I’m not a male chauvinist pig. I’m not saying I am, either.
Come again? Our Lady’s Tumbler may give evidence of being a short religious tale at its most basic, with the jongleur representing humanity; the brethren, formal religion; and the image of the Virgin, God. The protagonist’s stance vis-à-vis the Madonna has been described as gratitude by interpreters as far apart in attitudes as Charlie Chaplin and William F. Buckley Jr. Here the same religiosity of a male devotee of Mary is desacralized within the mind of a pornographer inured to thinking in the physics and physicality of smut. In this context, the narrative and the manner of conveying appreciation are boiled down to man, sexual exchange, and woman. From devout monks we have moved to consenting adults.
Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, coined the notion of what is called the Madonna-whore complex. The theory runs that men are inclined to demarcate between some women whom they respect but do not desire and others whom they desire but disrespect. Such binary processing divides females into two groups, virginal mothers and continent homemakers in contradistinction to sexual sluts and promiscuous slatterns. Whether knowingly or not, Metzger’s off-color color film rings a strange change upon the antithesis of Madonna and whore in the foundational Freudian formulation. Two acts in seclusion are compared, a fille de joie’s thankful fellating of a man and the jongleur’s pious juggling before the Madonna. Such reduction of Our Lady’s Tumbler could be a deathblow, if that choice of words may be forgiven, to the story.
The motion picture under discussion is not Hollywood, in either place of production or style. The skin flick could be better called sexploitation: taking commercial advantage of sexually explicit material. Nonetheless, the interview demonstrates, whether consciously or not, a degree of cunning subtlety. Through the deft crudity of its allusion to the French short story, it props the sleek and slick pseudo-Europeanism of Metzger’s films such as The Dirty Girls, released in 1965. Many of his motion pictures, filmed in Europe, were based heavily on French and Italian literature. Early ones were directed by him under the telling pseudonym of Henry Paris—fortuitously, Henry Adams bumps into Gaston Paris in the strangest context! Small wonder that the director’s corpus has been called “erotic kitsch” and “glamorous European-accented romances.” The article based on the conversation between the cinema critic and the filmmaker was subtitled “Aristocrat of the Erotic.”
At the same time, it would be misreckoning to attach too much importance to the sheen of urbanity in Metzger’s remark. By no stretch of the imagination are we dealing here with an auteur. He does not so much wink as leer at the audience. In the end (and take that phrase as you wish), what gets worked out in his films are not mental powers but body parts. We find ourselves in the very zone of deliberate shock and schlock that the Mexican edition of Playboy for December of 2008 inhabited (see Fig. 4.8). For this solecism against mores, the central office in the United States apologized, while in the same breath gainsaying any intended blasphemy. The front photograph of the offending publication showed, expectably, a topless and ostensibly nude young female: what cover of this monthly has failed to flaunt such a vista? The provocation was that the model in question, not likely to be either immaculate or virginal, was draped from head to foot in unblemished white cloth. The seemingly nubile knockout was an Argentine named, conveniently, María Florencia Onori. Furthermore, she stood in an obviously Marian pose, with her hands placed to herald the absence of the infant Jesus a Madonna would usually hold. Whereas Christianity originates in a baby conceived without sexual congress, the porn magazine is all about coitus without procreation, getting without barnyard begetting, and fertility without fertilization. In sum, the religion and the review set their sights upon altogether different dream girls.
Heightening the air of pseudoreligiosity, the flesh-and-blood mannequin was positioned with a colored window just behind her left shoulder. The lancet signified church and religion. The substance may also have recalled medieval iconography. In common symbolism, the conception of Jesus by parthenogenesis resembled the penetration of lumens through unruptured panes. Stained glass allows translucence: rather than being reflected, light pierces—but it does so without causing fragmentation.
Just below the level of a partially unconcealed breast ran Spanish words translatable as both “we adore you, Mary” and “we love you, Maria.” A quick theological aside: in Catholicism, Mary may receive veneration or devotion but not adoration or worship. Inside the periodical, a spread of eight photos employed to provocative effect such accompaniments from the cult of the Virgin as white veils, blue mantles, flowers, and crowns. Everything about the cover conveyed a calculated effort to affront by presenting this supposititious Mary all but full frontal.
The decision to publish in December was an added calendrical irritant. The month is chockablock with Marianism everywhere where Catholicism is found but nowhere more than in Mexico. For all the foregoing reasons, the issue triggered immediate and intense protest. What to do? The front shot and centerfold feature pages were too extensively offensive for expurgation. Instead, the whole run was pulled from newsstands. Even after its removal from the kiosks, the hue and cry among devout Catholics continued, leading to such grumbling headlines as “Playboy’s Not So Virgin Mary.”
The jongleur has a reputation for being pure, simple, and childlike. The last quality, owing to the very definition of child, would extend to being asexual or presexual. Like the proverbial red flag before a bull, these very associations have incited some later authors to mutiny by mentioning the star of the miracle in overstatedly sexual contexts. Fifteen years before Metzger drew his parallel between oral sex performed by a female sex worker on a male client and the devout juggling done by the jongleur for the Virgin, René Étiemble lambasted André Malraux’s Encyclopedia for its superficial and self-absorbed mix of sham exoticism, pseudoheroism, and sexual excitement. In doing so, the French comparatist likened the encyclopedist to the protagonist of Our Lady’s Tumbler:
Until this juggling of proper nouns, I admit to imagining a pathetic version of the Jongleur de Notre-Dame—the second transformation of a man who, disappointed by the gods of many revolutions, has come out of it by making himself the pious juggler of simultaneously Notre Dame and the Buddha of Nara [in Japan], the Lady of Elche [an ancient stone bust in this city in Spain] and the Devout Christ of Perpignan [a carved crucifix in this southern French city]: tossing into the air heaps of names, he succeeds marvelously in catching them without too much breakage, although he has made them collide in the air for a coitus interruptus that makes a pretence of overcoming fate.
The old entanglement of the Middle Ages with orientalism, eroticism, and primitivism has died an awfully slow-paced death.
A third, later example of an analogy that sexualizes Our Lady’s Tumbler (or that pinpoints a sexuality latent in it?) would be in a book published in 1991 about Djuna Barnes, a poet, novelist, and journalist of early American modernism. In one essay, a literary critic stakes the claim that in the acclaimed 1936 avant-garde novel Nightwood
Barnes privileges the penis. But she celebrates the nonphallic penis, the limp member of the transvestite Dr. [Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-] O’Connor—who masturbates in church like the Jongleur of Notre Dame doing tricks for the Virgin Mary. …
Doughboys in World War I dubbed “Our Lady of the Limp” the shell-shocked effigy that sagged at less than half-staff atop Notre-Dame de Brebières. They had no premonition what kind of legs (if that is even the right limb) their five-word witticism would have three quarters of a century later, when a lesbian socialist feminist intellectual would liken the juggler’s devotion before the Madonna to misfired onanism. Service to the Virgin becomes sexual self-service. In neither this academic prose nor the preceding paradigm does the original work, the film, or the novel allude explicitly or even implicitly to the story of the juggler. Both similes are formulated by exegetes altogether independently of the content of the creations they make a pretense of elucidating. They impose the performer upon the movie and the book, just as they foist carnality upon the juggler.
A 1994 artwork entitled Jongleur de Notre Dame, by a French-born American who went by the name of Arman, also sexualizes the entertainer (see Fig. 4.9). The designer dubbed this kind of fabrication transculpture, on the model of the term transsexual. In such sculpting, the artist crosses compositional and generic boundaries, just as individuals who undertake sex reassignment surgery do in sex and gender. In these works, he joined classical statuary with found objects, everyday items that are not recognized for their artistic potential because they customarily fulfill a nonartistic function. In this sculptural composition, the sculptor sliced a replica of an antique bronze statue, with gold and gray patina (now weathered to a bright green), to form out of its membra disiecta the juggler. In so doing, Arman perhaps held unwittingly true to the frequent medieval practice of spoliation: he took conventions from antiquity and reshaped them to achieve a revolutionary reuse.
The eight orbs juggled by the male figure double as lighting fixtures welded to his body. In the medieval tale and its modern adaptations, a carving comes to life. In this sculpture, Arman takes a different approach so as to freeze motion in unmoving mineral matter. He transmutes into light the kinetic energy of the juggler and his balls. But even more is going on. The lamp is simultaneously a lampoon; the bulbs, burlesques. Viewers cannot help but observe the bottommost globe, which is mounted right where the glans of his engorged male member would be expected. The shank projecting from his pelvis that the glass fitting rounds off is larger than those for all the other spheres, apart from the main one that transects the juggler’s whole torso. The projection makes the construction resemble the type of ancient Roman statue known as a herm, a squared stone pillar topped with a head and often adorned also with an erection midway down the block. In this case, the rod for the wiring to illuminate one electric light was one of the creator’s tools. The stiff shaft protrudes ithyphallically from the title character’s groin, more out of deliberate whimsy than structural necessity. This clever placement obviates the need to cover the man’s genitalia, but it is anything but a stock sculptural fig leaf. The device also casts the spotlight (very really) upon the well-endowed organ it removes. The protrusion, with its well-hung and nonlimp lampshade, evokes the tumid bulge of a phallus. The entertainer, as the sculptor represents him, was first effectively castrated and then, before the eunuchism became irreversible, shorn of his scrotal sack but outfitted with a prosthetic penis of the most awe-inspiring dimensions: no call for any Freudian envy here. As we see him, he holds himself erect, frozen forever in a paroxysm of untreatable priapism. Despite needing to be turned on by a switch, he is in other ways perpetually aroused.
The desire to upset prudes by playing upon prurience may be categorized among the phenomena captured by the French phrase épater la bourgeoisie. In plainer English, the objective of such objectification is to scandalize the bourgeoisie or middle class. A demonstration of fin-de-siècle decadence, this impulse can lead to many ends. The same ambition to prize shock value from a story and character perceived to be staid and traditional can go in various directions. Sex is not the only one; other bodily functions and products can become equally involved.
The painter Chris Ofili, British-born of Nigerian parents, kindled a public outcry for a few years in the late 1990s with a piece of art entitled The Holy Virgin Mary (see Fig. 4.10). The assemblage, created in 1996, includes a lacquered sphere of elephant dung on the canvas, while the whole rests on two more balls of the same scat. Furthermore, the depiction of the Virgin is swarmed by collaged images of naked female derrières and crotches clipped from pornographic magazines, resembling the angels that often encircle the mother of Jesus in more conventional artworks. Like Gustav Klimt’s Woman in Gold, this painting nods toward Byzantine and medieval representations of Mary. The composition is also a Black Madonna, in this case an African Virgin that neighbors on the parodic in its physiognomy and endomorphic body type. Like many medieval Madonnas and Byzantine Panagias, this Mother of God faces out and stares directly at the viewer.
Ofili has explained the depiction as transposing paradoxical elements in Christianity into the terms of modern mass culture. He was exposed to conventional features of Marianism as a youth, raised in the Catholic Church. If we follow this line of argument, the sexuality is not imposed by the artist today. Rather, it highlights what is present but unrealized already in medieval icons and paintings. A glancing connection with our story comes into sight in a scholarly article that describes the inclusion of a pachyderm’s droppings in the canvas as “an ironic symbol of Ofili’s African heritage (as if he had been staging himself as a kind of postcolonial hip-hop ‘Jongleur de Notre Dame’).” The writer reaches for a correlative that will distill the painter’s relationship to the Virgin Mary he has depicted. Through the seeming incongruity, the researcher also aims to match at least a little the potential of the construction itself to provoke disgust.
Is our tale’s condition to be deemed to be terminal when its narrative and message can be rendered as superficially simple as the jongleur became after the mid-twentieth century? The sexualizing of the narrative, both heterogeneous and erogenous, looks like the flares from a dying star, except that the cosmology of human art and creation defies the usual fiats of astrophysics. What does it augur, that the key pair of figures in the story can be reduced to shorthand symbols of sexual and even pornographic act? For the asexual account of the jongleur of Notre Dame to have been sexualized with the world’s largest penile implant and even to have been caricatured may betoken vivacity. At the same time, it may form an inevitable counterweight to the po-faced solemnity with which the miracle has been treated by some of the preachier authors who have invoked it. In literature familiarity leads to special manifestations of contempt. An axiom of literary theory could be concocted: once a tale has become trite, it will be coopted in one direction for children’s literature and in the opposite for parodic reformulation in adult media. The fate of a classic is to be treated as plastic, to be spun out and shortened, stretched and stunted, solemnified and satirized, but never set aside and disregarded. The juggler, holding his arms akimbo and tapping his toes, awaits his Chris Ofili.
Jung’s Jongleur
Q: Who’s the toughest guy in the circus?A: The juggler, of course: he’s got the most balls.
The founding father of psychoanalysis could have made much from the opportunities supplied by the “transculpture.” For obvious reasons of chronological impossibility, Sigmund Freud never had the chance to put on a well-upholstered sofa for talk therapy any of the sculptures, films, photos, or texts we have been dissecting. Indeed, he gave no sign of having known the tale in any of its forms, or at least did not take the trouble to mention it if he did. But even without recourse to the grand master himself, Freudian readings could be constructed. In fact, a 1915 tractate by John Cowper Powys (see Fig. 4.11) draws to a close with a highly pertinent peroration on the essence of poetry. In it, the jongleur stands for any and every human being who yearns for a lover forsaken. The final pair of sentences in his essay presents the inmost desire of the heart as a shrine, in front of which the poetic soul dances stark naked:
Not one human heart but has its hidden shrine before which the professional ministrants are fain to hold their peace. But even there, under the veiled Figure itself, some poor poetic ‘Jongleur de Notre Dame’ is permitted to drop his monk’s robe, and dance the dance that makes time and space nothing!
The scene summoned up calls to mind King David’s wild dance, as D. H. Lawrence transmogrified it. In Powys’s interpretation, the official practitioners of religion, learning, or anything else can furnish no help in such instances. Individuals must depend upon their poetic spirits if they wish to cope through art with frustrations too secret to acknowledge outright.
To move from the covert to the overt, a thinker who showed an easy acquaintance with the story was Carl Gustav Jung (see Fig. 4.12). His abstract idea of the soul emphasizes what he termed the process of individuation: the integration of opposites within the individual, among which the conscious and the unconscious are an important match. The great thinker advocated for the existence of a collective unconscious that all human beings share. In Jungian psychology, archaic images that he called archetypes derive from this common pool.
Jung’s theories arose from his correspondingly excursive interests in religion, literature, and art, among other things. From them, he would have had ample motive for being riveted by the tale of Our Lady’s Tumbler. His conception of the unconscious mind rested heavily upon a syzygy—a pairing of two connected but opposite qualities. He differentiated between a feminine inner personality within the male, called anima, and a masculine inner personality within the female, called animus. The psychologist regarded the first in this coupling as having four separate levels. The progression began with the biblical Eve, woman in a purely biological sense, as a mother to be fertilized. The next stage led to Helen of Troy, a muse associated with artistry. In turn, she yielded to the Virgin, who spiritualizes eros. Lastly, Sophia embodied an undiluted, transreligious all-knowingness. In this framework, Jung named Mary after the one in Christian theology. He paid phenomenal attention to the Virgin, going so far as the label the Church’s official edict, at the end of 1950, of her bodily and spiritual assumption into heaven “the most important religious event since the Reformation.”
In the 1950s, the narrative of Our Lady’s Tumbler attracted no small share of attention in German-speaking Switzerland. This Alpine mini-boom stands out as imbalanced in contrast to what Germany produced during the same decade. Four instances will suffice. First, we have seen already that for Christmas of 1955 the Swiss graphic designer Fritz Bühler dealt out copies of his hand-painted little juggler book as gifts among confidants and colleagues in Basel. A second example is Josef Elias (see Fig. 4.13), who in 1958 printed his detailed script, with sketches and photographs (see Fig. 4.14), for a school production of The Dancer of Our Dear Lady: A Play for the Stage, Based on an Old Legend. Third comes Rudolf Moser, a Swiss music professor and composer who at some point before his death composed a work on the same theme. Finally, in 1964, Wilhelm Preetorius published in Zurich his calligraphed version with his own illustrations. The fact that he took the same title for his effort as Elias did is suggestive—but what were Preetorius’s specific inspirations? To pan back further, another issue thrusts itself forward. Did these four individuals chance to learn of the story and to be enthralled by it independently? Was there a shared conduit, a buzz caused by school reading, radio listening, or opera going? Or was the cultural macroclimate for other reasons especially hospitable to miracle tales of the Virgin Mary?
The question about the reticulation and distribution of influence becomes even more tantalizing when as noted and transformative a person as C. G. Jung enters the scene. His reference to the Le jongleur de Notre Dame surfaces in a letter to a female therapist in London. The document is a masterful performance of effective concision. The renowned psychologist has been sent unsolicited paintings by the English analyst. In replying to her, he responds to the interrogative she directed at him: “For whom did I paint these pictures?” His goal is to shift the interpretive task back on her, and to return her personal portfolio to her.
As we have seen, Anatole France and Jules Massenet treated the medieval exemplum with an ironic compassion that would have left an opening for both believers and unbelievers among their readers or listeners to construe the account to their satisfaction. Although the Madonna plays an essential though silent role, the author and composer of the fin-de-siècle versions presented the events in such a way that they could later be desacralized or at least secularized. In the process, the focus came to rest ever more firmly and fixedly on the jongleur or tumbler, particularly as an image of the individual artist.
Jung may have encountered such an interpretation of the story in a literary rewriting of it. Then again, he may have arrived at his analysis all on his own. He was a lifelong, professional explicator of people and peoples as well as of works by both individuals and collectivities. As such, he would have been well positioned to peruse an already existent decoding of the miracle, or to proffer one himself. The twists and turns that he contributed make the tale’s dynamics relevant to his disciplinary theories. In his reading, the action of the narrative is functionally solipsistic. Both the jongleur and the Virgin to whom he devotes his energies are beings who create art for their own selves. While laying hold of the entertainer as an exemplum, the Swiss scholar displays his own deftness in both rhetoric and etiquette as he graciously declines to retain artwork he does not want either to keep or to analyze. Mailing back the packet of images, he states that they must remain with the person who produced them, since “they represent the drawing together of the two worlds of spirit and body or ego and self.” Touché.
More than a half century later, the letter provides a verbal portrait of a busy and brainy man who brings into service a clever allusion and employs it as a means of acknowledging receipt, extending spiritual guidance, and concurrently parrying or at least holding back. Through the simple story and its central figure, all these ends are made gentler and more resonant than a bald “return to sender” with an accompanying manicule would have been. He takes for granted that the protagonist will be immediately understandable to a professional and peer in Britain, just as within his milieu in Switzerland. At that moment, the juggler still had not budged from the cultural lexicon with which well-educated Westerners were assumed to be conversant. But culture undergoes constant renegotiation, and a few decades after Jung, Our Lady’s Tumbler ceased to be an essential term in the horse-trading. The jongleur, while not a deal-breaker, was no longer a deal-maker.