10
Bronwyn V. Wallace
According to the gospel of John, following Christ’s resurrection, Mary Magdalen arrives at his empty tomb with John and Peter, who promptly flee. ‘But Mary stood at the sepulchre without, weeping’ (20:11).1 Unlike the synoptic gospels, John leaves Mary alone there by the empty tomb, and leaves her there for some time, fixed in place by her loss and her confusion. When the angels who attend the tomb ask the potentially consoling question, ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’, she takes it literally, and expresses in reply her basic misconception: ‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him’ (20:13). She has failed to recognise the resurrection. When Christ does arrive, she still does not recognise him – he, too, asks her (woman) why she weeps. Taking him for the gardener, in a moment of desperate irony she asks if he knows where his own body might be (20:15). It is not until he says her name that realisation dawns: ‘Jesus saith to her: Mary. She turning, saith to him_ Rabboni (which is to say, Master)’ (20:16). In this scene of divine interpellation, Mary turns from bereft longing toward the plenitude of perfect presence. As Robert Southwell describes it in his 1591 treatise Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, the reconstitution of her mourning as intimacy with the risen Christ provokes ‘so strange an alteration in her, as if she had beene wholie new made when she was onlie named’.2 But in the next verse, the prohibition of touch comes so abruptly and so starkly that it has disoriented centuries of commentators: ‘Jesus saith to her: Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended to my Father’ (20:17). There is another turn to come: he dispatches her to tell the other disciples of the resurrection, and she goes. The interpellative scene of the turn moves into her commission as apostola apostolorum – it sets her on a new path, directs her into a new orientation toward the community, a new relationship to the apparent absence of Christ from the world.
But Mary stood at the sepulchre without, weeping. Before that transformative turn can occur, she must stand there, arrested by her extremity of feeling. But: her divergence from the path laid out by John’s and Peter’s flight is her refusal to move or be moved, a standing still that is also an extension into her desire for the absent body of Christ. The others move on, but Mary stood. Lancelot Andrewes identifies this as one of the ‘arguments of her great love’ in the text of John 20:
But Mary stood (that is as much to say, as) others did not, But, shee did. […] But Mary went not, shee stood still. Their going away commends her staying behinde. […] Fortior eam figebat affectus, saith Augustine, a stronger affection fixed her, so fixed her, that shee had not the power to remove thence. Goe who would, shee would not, but stay still. To stay, while others doe soe, while company stayes, that is the worlds love: But Peter is gone, and Iohn too: all are gone, and we left alone; then to stay, is love.3
But has at least two functions here according to Andrewes: to signal the distinction between Mary and the others, and to signal the difference between going and staying. Her fixity becomes her exceptionality, and in turn her exemplarity. In Andrewes’s citation of Augustine, we discover that it happens to her: affectus is the subject of this fixity and she its object; she has no power against it. But to be thus overcome is her virtue: to stay still, to be unmoving and unmoveable, is the necessary condition of her being in the way of Christ when he arrives. It is this period of prolonged stasis in extreme feeling, in the space opened by the deferral of Christ’s arrival, that Southwell takes as the occasion for his meditation: his dilation of the text of John resists movement, exerting on the time of the gospel text the same kind of refusal to move on that Mary’s standing and weeping embodies.
Dilation
The dilation of Mary’s mournful desire is the condition of her disposition toward Christ upon his arrival. Southwell expands the time of that delay to include the reader in Mary’s longing, deferring the end that we know (though she doesn’t) must arrive in order that we might dwell in that suspension of desire. In one of Southwell’s source texts, a sixth-century homily on John 20, Gregory IV likewise invests in delay, configured as dilation in both senses of expansion and of deferral, as he reads Mary’s ‘dilated desires’ as the very mechanism of her seeking and eventual finding of Christ. ‘She sought for him’, Gregory writes, and ‘burned with desire for him’, and ‘so it happened that she who stayed behind to seek him was the only one who saw him [Unde contigit ut eum sola tunc videret, quae remansit ut quaereret]’.4 What appears to be a tautology – Mary is the only one who found him because the only one who sought him – creates in syntactic parallel (videret; quaereret) a strong relation between seeking and seeing. By remaining, by refusing to move on, in the paradoxical simultaneity of seeking and stasis, Mary gains access to the object of her desire. The condition of that remaining is indeed her burning desire itself: ‘It came about that her unfulfilled desires increased, and as they increased they took possession of what they had found [desideria dilata crescerent, et crescentia caperent quod invenissent]’.5 If ‘holy desires […] increase by delay [dilatione crescunt]’, that increase only enables the eventual seizure of the desired object.6 Crescentia caperent: the expansion of desire – its crescence; its dilation – is itself the mechanism of possession. In that homely little conventional contigit – ‘contigit ut eum sola tunc videret’; ‘contigit ut inveniret’ – is revealed the contingency of Mary’s seeing or finding of Christ. Contingent, of course, on her desire: first, ‘ardebat desiderio’, she burns with desire, unde contigit: her sole seeing of Christ is predicated on her ardour. Gregory then repredicates her finding of Christ on the perseverent seeking that arises from that desire: ‘unde contigit ut inveniret’. From contingency to contingency, Mary eventually arrives at the moment of finding and of taking hold – in the subjunctive; the verb itself registering its own syntactic contingency. As Carolyn Dinshaw has observed, ‘contingency’ as com+tangere, touching-with, has a special value for queer literary history in its emphasis on the ‘sensible’ and the ‘tactile’.7 Gregory’s emphasis on contingency thus accrues a crucial kind of irony, as it describes the uncertain route to a touch that is at first deferred and ultimately prohibited.
It matters, too, that Gregory describes what happens as finding: contigit ut inveniret. As a term of rhetoric and hermeneutics, inventio here invites us to understand Mary’s desire as an interpretive disposition. In the very first sentence of De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine turns rhetorical inventio – the discovery of topics for argument – toward scriptural hermeneutics: ‘There are two things on which all interpretation of scripture depends: the process of discovering [modus inveniendi] what we need to learn, and the process of presenting [modus proferendi] what we have learnt’.8 For Augustine, the ‘most hidden meanings’ of scripture are ‘discovered [inventa sunt]’ by the interpretation of figures and tropes.9 The term is everywhere in De Doctrina, as in this passage on the pleasure of figurative difficulty: ‘no one disputes that it is much more pleasant to learn lessons presented through imagery, and much more rewarding to discover meanings that are won only with difficulty [Nunc tamen nemo ambigit et per similitudines libentius quaeque cognosci et cum aliqua difficultate quaesita multo gratius inveniri]’.10 The obscurity of the difficult text that yields pleasure in inventionem is analogous to the impassable difficulty Mary encounters at the empty tomb: the yawning absence of Christ is a figure she does not (yet) know how to interpret. The challenge of comprehending the resurrection, the peculiar mixed presence and absence of Christ, aligns with the challenge of interpreting the gospel text, and Mary’s dilated desire provides the opportunity to dwell in the difficulty, to experience it with her as an emotional as well as interpretive challenge.
It is error, a mistake of doctrine, that motivates the scene in John 20, and Southwell’s whole project in Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears: Mary’s misrecognition of the resurrection. Yet that failure creates space for her mourning desire and motivates the extensive discourse between her and the narrator. For Southwell, that is, error is an opportunity in itself: his aim is not to contain but to inhabit Mary’s debilitatingly desiring femininity – and to invite his reader to inhabit it too. Mary’s weeping is excessive, her faith imperfect, but precisely in her somatic affective disorder, she offers an alternative to the patriarchal rhetoric in which feminised textual dilation is always already the object of a disciplinary apparatus that seeks to neutralise it.11 The most striking feature of Southwell’s text might be that its motive is not containment but empathy.
Intimacy
Seeking to capture the interpretive register of empathy, the ‘intimacy’ of my title indexes several circuits of attachment and feeling in the rhetoric and hermeneutics of devotion: the relation in devotional reading and writing between the scriptural text and its expansion in interpretation; the relation these texts sought to provoke with their contemporary readers; the relation between these texts and the modern reader. My interest is thus engaged in its own intimate way with studies in queer literary history that articulate a ‘queer temporality’ in the relation between modernity and premodernity: the encounters across the gulf of history that do not proceed according to the ordinary unfolding of linear time or according to the progressive logic of literary-historical reproductivity and inheritance. Studies in queer temporality are dense with the metaphorics of the senses, especially touch. For Elizabeth Freeman, the ‘close’ in the ‘close-reading’ that sutures gaps in historical time is characterised by ‘a grasp, a clutch, a refusal to let go’.12 For Carolyn Dinshaw, the affective and often erotic charge of intimacy with the past is a ‘touch across time’.13 Meanwhile, scriptural hermeneutics routes interpretation through the dialectical system of spirit and body: for example, in his figure of scripture as ‘treasure in earthen vessels’ (2 Corinthians. 4:7), Saint Paul conflates the capacity of the gospel as text to express divinity in human terms and the capacity of the base material of humanity to exceed itself in preaching that gospel – that is, for Saint Paul here as elsewhere, the body and spirit of scripture and of human being are so nearly analogous as to be almost identical. The shared set of concerns between these two apparently disparate bodies of work thus seems to offer a ready explanatory apparatus for how reading generates a presence that can be intimately felt – can be touched.14
How, then, to address a text in which the senses are compromised, and such a touch or grasp remains out of reach? Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears centers on an absence, dilating the few verses in which Mary Magdalen stands disconsolate before the empty tomb of Christ – the first confrontation in Christian history with the absence of Christ from the world. In Mary, Southwell makes a study of the defeat of the senses in John 20, a text whose climactic noli me tangere expressly renders touch problematic. As Shelly Rambo has argued, the gospel text ‘dismantles sight, sound, and even touch as vehicles constituting Mary’s witness’:
[Mary] points to a different kind of presence, whose form cannot be readily identified or can only be received through multiple experiences of misrecognitions. She encounters not simply the absence of Jesus, but a mixed terrain of his absence and presence. He is there but not there; he is present in a way that she has not known before.15
Something must take the place of, or at least supplement, the bodily senses in the scene of Mary’s longing for and eventual apprehension of Christ. As Joe Moshenska has observed in his recent study of touch in the Renaissance, ‘feeling’, like ‘touch’, has a peculiar relationship to language, ‘shifting restlessly between literal and metaphorical’, productively capacious and gesturing simultaneously to the materiality of the body and to a spiritual or emotional dwelling in that body.16 Feeling as affect, I further argue, captures the circuit that runs between text and reader, as between soul and body, in the procedure of interpretation, providing a response to the dilemma of overinvestment in touch as the primary category of phenomenal experience, be it of divinity or of literary history. In devotional reading, feeling mediates between the letter of the text and its figurative resources, as it does between the material body and the perceiving mind or soul. For Southwell, it is such feeling that mediates the problem of partial and difficult knowledge in the gospel scene he dilates. And it is feeling, too, that structures his text’s disposition toward its reader. In order to access the devotional amenities of affect, Southwell invests his reading of Mary Magdalen with an empathy that solicits her feeling in order to make it available to the reader as her own empathetic investment, as a way of feeling with Mary as she mourns for and desires the body of Christ, as she copes with the peculiar problem of his simultaneous presence in and absence from the world following the resurrection. Tracing Southwell’s method in this essay, I hope that it will offer, if only implicitly, something to our own critical practices: what might it mean, I ask, to feel with the texts we read, as Southwell does with his gospel-reading?
Tears
As his epistle dedicatory to Dorothy Arundell indicates, Southwell’s project is in part a manifesto of devotional eroticism in poetry: he makes a strong claim for the orientation of erotic poetics toward divinity (a claim about writing) that also entails a claim for the capacity of feeling to generate meaning (a claim about reading).17 Drawn into the ‘right chanel’, desiring inclination – ‘passions and loves’ – takes the path it was always already supposed to take: toward God (A3v). A ‘floud of affections’ that might otherwise register as excess is perfected by its object: Mary’s ‘passions’, Southwell writes, were ‘commaunded by such a love as could never exceede, because the thing loved was of infinite perfection’ (A5v). Southwell’s habit of positioning Mary and her thought as the objects of verbs whose subjects are terms of feeling – love, desire, passion – emphasises how, like Augustine’s affectus, ‘passion’ is something that happens to her.
In order to pursue his reading of John 20, Southwell locates in Mary’s wet, desiring femininity – in her tears – the ground of his exegetical method, mobilizing embodied affect for meditative and interpretive purpose. Mary’s weeping, as the index of her error of doctrine, her ostensible ‘weakenes’ (A5v), becomes an occasion to inhabit her extreme longing for the presence of Christ, the scriptural ground on which Southwell builds his investment in the affective phenomena of devotional reading. In the letter to Arundell, Southwell further declares that ‘among other glorious examples of this Saints life, I have made choise of her Funeral Tears, in which as shee most uttered the great vehemencie of her fervent love to Christ, so hath she given therein largest scope to dilate upon the same’ (A3r-v). As utterance, as the embodied sign of mourning and desire, Mary’s tears constitute the kind of exegetical ground usually associated with the text of scripture. Their capacity – their scope – demands interpretation and commentary, demands dilation. In his more sober preface ‘To the Reader’, Southwell situates his work in the context of a long exegetical tradition, ‘the ground therof being in scripture, and the form of enlarging it, an imitation of the ancient doctors’ (A8v). Taken together, the two prefaces sketch an analogy between Mary’s capacious tears and the capacious text of scripture, between dilating on her love and enlarging the gospel text, between emotion and interpretation. Feeling – love, desire, mourning – itself emerges as the ground of interpretation, and also as a method of reading.
Southwell’s method turns the text of John back on itself, taking up each of its verses in turn in order to dwell in them, perhaps most importantly in its abiding question of affect: Woman, why weepest thou?, Southwell’s major refrain in his meditation’s opening movements. The question is the occasion for Southwell to dwell at length on the question of the propriety of Mary’s weeping (did not Christ forbid the daughters of Jerusalem to weep for him?), on her preference for weeping over reasoned thought, and on the excessive somatic femininity of her weeping. With its emphasis on woman (and ‘too much a woman’ [E6v]), the repeated citation challenges at once her mourning itself (apparently causeless) and the peculiarly feminine mode of her mourning (too wet, too porous, too undisciplined).18 As a result of her ‘incredulous humor’ (E6v), her unbelief coded as a somatic disorder, Mary’s ‘wittes are smoothered with too thicke a mist, to admit these unknown beames’ of right belief (F1r). Yet the question also gestures to the most generative problem posed by this passage from John: in Southwell’s appropriation of it, we might also paraphrase ‘Why weepest thou?’ as ‘What is the significance of this figure of weeping in the gospel text?’ Southwell recreates a problem of the gendered embodiment of feeling as a problem of interpretation: his questions excavate the surface of John’s text, bringing Mary’s consciousness into the frame. When Mary’s reply comes at last, she objects that ‘if this [weeping] be a fault, I will never amend it […], for my part, sith I have lost my myrth, I will make much of my sorrow’ (C8v). As she later protests, ‘What needeth my answere, where the miserie itselfe speaketh?’ (F3v). Voicing Mary’s own defense of her weeping and her static standing by the tomb creates the dilated space in which the importance of ‘making much of sorrow’, of dwelling in feeling, can be elaborated and understood.
Dwelling
Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears faces a dilemma in the historical gulf between its reader and Mary’s scene of feeling. Her misery speaks, but how are we to hear it? How, more importantly, are we to inhabit it, from our so distant vantage? Southwell confronts this challenge by stalling his reader alongside Mary, making the time of reading coextensive with the long period of Mary’s astonishment and confusion. Convinced of Christ’s death, in the worldly sense, Mary can only conclude that his body has been stolen: ‘They have taken away my lord, and I know not where they have laid him’, reads John (20:13). For Southwell’s Magdalen, this proves to be an epistemological problem so profound that it dislocates her very self: ‘She was not there where shee was, for shee was wholly where hir master was, more where she loved then where she lived, and lesse in her selfe then in his bodie, which notwithstanding, where it was shee could not imagine’ (B6v). Like the misty cognitive challenge posed by her weeping, this disarticulation or distension registers first as an impairment. Reduced to her tears, she is deprived of even the basic cognitive capacity that would enable her to recognise the resurrection, or to react to the pastoral empathy of Southwell’s narrator, or to answer the angels who seek to comfort her with anything but irrational refusal of clarity, or indeed to make any decision at all that would enable her to pursue the knowledge she seeks: ‘Her wittes were astonied, and all her senses so amased, that in the end finding she did not know, seeing she could not discern, hearing she perceived not’ (B6v). Yet Mary’s astonishment is also distension, not there where she was, more where she loved than where she lived: it is a signal characteristic of devotional desire. As Pseudo-Dionysius writes, arguing for the recuperation of eros as a vital theological category, ‘divine yearning [eros] brings ecstasy so that the lover belongs not to self but to the beloved’.19 Mary’s astonished weeping, ostensibly an impairment, replaces the orderly mechanics of the senses with a counterintuitively generative ecstasy. What began as a cruel dramatic irony (Mary in her mistakenness looking ridiculous to the knowing reader) becomes an empathetic investment in the impasse Mary faces.
As Southwell argues in the epistle dedicatory, Mary’s ‘perfect love’ repairs her ‘want of beliefe, with the strange effectes of an excellent charitie’ (A5v-A6r). Mary echoes this sentiment: ‘as in him alone is the uttermost of my desires, so he alone is the summe of all my substance’ (G7r-v), and from such desires, such substance, ‘such effectes must follow as are without example’ (H1r). The strangeness, the unexampledness of the ‘effectes’ of Mary’s love register the central paradox of Southwell’s text: that feeling both debilitates and enables devotional disposition toward divinity, that desire and delay, indices of radical absence, are at the same time the very mechanisms of presence and possession. Yet Mary’s disarticulated self remains the site of a fundamental impairment: she remains stubbornly stuck in the problem of the absence of Christ’s fleshly body. Southwell in turn commits to remaining with her in that stuckness, engaging his narrator in a debate with Mary on her own terms: unable to persuade her out of her stasis, he must accept her faulty premise in order to contend with her at all. Or rather, instead of persuading her, he provides an opportunity to her voice.
In the text’s most stunning account of its own method, Southwell breaks off mid-argument to make an extradiegetic observation on his practice: ‘But to feel more of their sweetnesse, I wil pound these spices, and dwell a while in the peruse of thy resolute fervour’ (G5v). The material, sensory quality of meditative prose emerges vividly here in the relentlessness of a stylistic pestle releasing the sweet essential property of spiritual spice. In the ambiguity of Southwell’s sensory lexicon, the sweetness of spice is not to be smelled or tasted specifically but more generally, and perhaps more capaciously, felt. Mary Carruthers, in her study of sweetness as a medieval term of aesthetics, suggests that a sensibility of sweetness as a ‘definable sensory phenomenon’ coordinates feeling with perception, with affect, bodily sense, and knowledge, bringing to a kind of aesthetic fruition the ambiguity that always resided in Latin sentire.20 In a sixteenth-century variation on this perceptual figure, Southwell’s conspicuous attention to the sensory as a figurative vehicle for a method of reading (and of writing, even of the movement from reading to writing) recalls Ignatius of Loyola’s insistence in the Spiritual Exercises on the sensory involvement of the ‘the whole composite self, I mean body and soul together’, in the process of meditation.21 Southwell’s complex figure may after all be more literal than it appears, extending the moment of ‘dwelling’ by insisting on its activation of embodied perception. The metaleptic movement from the figure of spice-pounding to the figure of dwelling, itself a ‘strange effecte’, registers the challenge of spending time with a text, of an act of meditation that is also necessarily an act of interpretation and an act of writing. The figure renders the dilation of the text as a felt phenomenon, an embodied experience simultaneously receptive and appropriative, passive and active, dwelling and pounding – and, as the figure’s contortion suggests, difficult or even impossible to describe. What is clear is that the pounding of spices means internalising the text, consuming it bodily, in order to have an experience of Mary Magdalen’s ‘fervour’ – in order, through a meditative interpretation, to approach her affectively. Southwell’s figure makes clear the significance of the body to interpretation, to this process of turning and returning to the text that shapes the reader in the most material ways: to feel and to know are not so dissimilar; to desire is not merely to lack but to move toward the sweetness of knowledge. Yet the figure also risks catachresis at the site where the sensory meets the affective, in the difference between the sensory ‘feeling’ of spice and the affective ‘feeling’ of fervour. Southwell, in other words, materialises the figure of dilation to explicitly include the circuitry that runs between affect, embodiment, and interpretation. The aim is to distort the time of reading, to produce in the devotional sensorium a means of extending that time. The figure’s own contortion registers its resistance to the normal order of time in reading, the bind of dwelling like a gloss on John 20:11, ‘But Mary stood without at the sepulchre, weeping’.
Mary echoes this language of dwelling, too, as she begins to recognise the impossibility of moving out of her grief-stricken stasis into action: ‘stil I am forced to dwel in this answere. They have taken away my Lord, and I knowe not where they have put him’ (H3v). She dwells in a citation of her own words in John (20:13), as Southwell dwells in his perusal. As Mary begins to speak in the terms of Southwell’s method, the full richness of the text’s master tropes of speech and address begins to emerge. ‘Still I am forced to dwell in this answer’: Southwell’s meditative method enacted in Mary’s impassioned stasis. Just as earlier she queries the angels’ response to her weeping, here she performs Southwell’s method of putting interpretive pressure on the text of John. At the first citation of this ‘answer’ in which she dwells, the text draws the reader’s attention to the textuality of her words: ‘They have taken away, O unfortunate word. They have taken away my Lord’ (F3v). Mary’s interjection reads like a reader’s response to the gospel text, a kind of affective gloss. The typographic distinction between the conventional italics of citation and the roman type of Mary’s lamenting interjection creates a strange effect of its own: Mary’s speech comes to us as always-already citational, as though she is quoting the text of John and issuing a commentary on it. It is as though she reads the same gospel text that we do: a dizzying historical impossibility. When she later reiterates the verse, slightly paraphrased, it is no longer italicised and thus easier to understand as proleptic, as historical speech awaiting its record: ‘And nowe (O griefe) because I know not where he is, I cannot imagin how to help, for they have taken him away, and I know not where they have put him’ (F8r). But when at last she observes her enforced static dwelling in her answer, the verse is once more citational, in italics emphasised by her deixis, this answer. She dwells as we do, caught in the time of this one half-verse by Southwell’s spice-pounding. Southwell’s implicit argument is that understanding the gospel text requires the reader’s empathetic investment: in order to read John adequately, we must be able to think and feel as Mary Magdalen does. We must, in other words, be able to speak in her voice. And when we do, historical time seems to collapse.
Time binds: prosopopoeia
The strange effect of Mary’s anachronic citation registers as what Elizabeth Freeman calls a ‘time bind’: the moment when ‘an established temporal order gets interrupted and new encounters consequently take place’, interruptions that constitute ‘points of resistance to [the] temporal order that, in turn, propose other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present, and future others: that is, of living historically’.22 For Freeman, the ‘bind’ of queer temporality is multiple: it signifies asychronous attachment (willing or otherwise) to moments in history, the possibility or the danger that such anachronic investment might bind the subject in time, and also that the subject might create in her temporal resistance an effect of ‘drag’. Drag both in the sense of dressing-up out of time and in the sense of kinetic resistance – the capacity, as a young Shulamith Firestone put it, to ‘catch time short, and not just drift along in it’.23 ‘Temporal drag’, for Freeman, registers the importance of ‘retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past’ to the unfinished business of queer feminism_ how a return, in the present, to the stylised intellectual modes of an earlier moment of feminist history can constitute ‘a productive obstacle to progress, a usefully distorting pull backward, and a necessary pressure on the present tense’.24
The invitation to identification in feeling that occurs through the pressure Southwell’s method puts on the ‘present tense’ of the time of reading the gospel is a signal feature of prosopopoeia, in both classical and early modern understandings of its rhetorical capacities.25 As a figure of speech that is also a figure of speaking, prosopopoeia necessarily demands identification. The long history of rhetorical personification in the Christian tradition is richly suggested by Paul de Man in an otherwise archly secular essay on prosopopoeia, where the ensouled body serves as his aptest analogy for figurative language in general: ‘The language of tropes […] is indeed like the body, which is like its garments, the veil of the soul as the garment is the sheltering veil of the body’.26 But where de Man understands prosopopoeia to be therefore (only) ‘privative’ – because the very purpose of the figure is to revive the voice it stages only to replace it – the tradition on which he calls for his analogy of embodiment has a more complex understanding of the relationship of language to absence. The Pauline lexicon at work in de Man’s analogy is the source of Origen’s foundational hermeneutics of the inner and outer senses of body and of text, the spiritual sense finding expression in the material of body and letter, just as prosopopoeia gives voice to what is missing, what is inapprehensible. In this tradition, figure can never be privative: on the contrary it is the vehicle of the ongoing process of interpretation, of what Origen called the transformation of ‘the sensible gospel into the spiritual’.27
As the reader takes on the voice (puts on the persona) of the speaking figure, she also internalises the text – transforms its sensible letter into spiritual apprehension of figurative meaning. That interpretive performance is what is happening in Southwell’s personation of Mary Magdalen quoting from the gospeller’s account of Mary Magdalen’s speech: amplified by its italics, it stops us short. Like Mary, still – stalled in long duration, unmoving in extended time – we are forced to dwell, literally arrested by the site where prosopopoeia meets citation, figure meets interpretation, rhetoric meets hermeneutics. If, as John Parker wryly suggests, the mimetic personifications of poetry are themselves in some way ‘even more hollow’ than the casual deceptions of theatricality,28 do they not then also, as Parker writes elsewhere of typological figures, ‘yawn for fulfillment’?29 And what might fulfill them but the investment of a reader’s attention – her identification with the voice that speaks, her inhabiting of the text she reads, filling it out?
As the problem of Mary’s gospel-citation makes clear, voice puts pressure on the present tense. For Freeman, rhetorical figures of time and its order or disorder signal those sites where queer ways of being in time surface in literary language: hysteron proteron, prolepsis, anastrophe, asynchrony, anachronism, delay, repetition, all resist the ostensible linearity of historical life and register in reading the felt experience of time out of order.30 I’ll add to her list Southwell’s dilatory metalepsis in the figure of spice-pounding, as well as prosopopoeia. Not conventionally understood as a figure of time, prosopopoeia nevertheless demonstrates its anachronic potential as it asks us to cross a historical divide in order to inhabit Mary Magdalen’s voice, and as it forces us to dwell in Mary’s stalled time of loss and longing. As Margreta de Grazia has suggested, prosopopoeia ‘encourages anachronism’.31 In voicing the past, and in asking a reader to dwell with that voicing, the figure necessarily stands outside of ordinary time. Southwell understands this problem of time also as a problem of feeling. Mary’s grief has removed her from herself in more ways than one: she’s not only ‘not there where she was’, but not, in a sense, when she was, either. This challenging temporality is vital to those aspects of Southwell’s project that require the reader’s investment in and identification with the text of Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears in order to have the affective purchase that motivates them. Southwell’s dilation of the text of John, configured as delay, exerts the ‘distorting pull’ of kinetic and interpretive drag: in order to ‘dwell a while’, to persist in perusal, his text resists the ordinary progress of reading in time. In the language of ‘dwelling’, Southwell conjoins his own meditative method with the anachronic quality of Mary’s voice and with her suspension in time, her recalcitrance and refusal as well as her cognitive impairment. Mary’s citation of her own words in John exhibits the dangerous side of this: to be forced to dwell in one fixed moment, to be unable to move into a more promising future, is to live the discomfort of being caught in time, trapped in the undertow.32
Collation, or repair
At the climax of Southwell’s work, just before Christ appears at last, the narrator apostrophises him in a desperate defense of Mary’s desire: ‘To what end, O sweet Lord, doest thou thus suspend hir longinges, prolong hir desires, and martyr hir with these tedious delaies?’ (H5v) By now this is the reader’s own question – but Southwell has already answered it. Not only do holy desires increase by delay, but delay itself gives to desire an interpretive force, by making time and space for the process of reading. An analogy emerges between Southwell’s method – his own suspension and delay – and the apparent belatedness of Christ’s appearance to Mary, between the sweetness of extended dwelling in the text of scripture and the sweetness of Christ himself. When Christ finally does appear, Mary makes, of course, one last mistake: taking him for a gardener, she asks him, too, whether he might know where her lord’s body has been laid. The outrageous irony of her misprision is initially an opportunity for the narrator to excoriate her: how could she not recognise him for whom she has so longed? ‘But’, Southwell writes, ‘thy mistaking hath in it a farther mysterie’ (H7v). The consonance of mistake and mysterie in sound contravenes their dissonance in sense as once more, Mary’s error provides an opportunity. Southwell takes Mary’s mistake as an occasion to enlarge on the conventional typological association between Christ and the first gardener, Adam, according to which Christ sows salvation to cancel Adam’s condemnation, and labours in death to provide the fruits of the heavenly banquet to come. ‘For this’, Southwell writes, meaning this reading in ‘mysterie’, this interpretive gesture, ‘for this also was Mary permitted to mystake, that we might be infourmed of the mysterie, and see how aptlie the course of our redemption did answere the process of our condemnation’ (H8v-I1r).
‘O woonderfull effectes of Maries love!’ (H6v): Southwell cannot stop commenting on the strangeness, the wonder, the unexampledness, of the ‘effectes’ of Mary’s passion for Christ. There is one more wonderful effect to come, of course, in the moment of recognition, the anagnorisis that transforms Mary’s tragedy into a comedy of devotional ecstasy. The dilated desire that has yawned for fulfillment all this time at last reaches its climax when Christ at last says Mary’s name, and at last she turns and sees him, in the scene of salvific interpellation that creates in her ‘so strange an alteration […] as if she had been wholie new made when she was onlie named’ (K7r). Her strange alteration repeats the trope that characterises the ‘strange effectes’ of her love: in some sense, the affective movement of Southwell’s text lies just beyond language, registered in his repeated insistence on the ineffable. In only the single word of Mary’s name – the little word spoken by the Word, as Southwell wonderingly observes (K7v) – can the full erotic potential of the prolonged period of Mary’s longing at last achieve some release: ‘And as all this while she hath sought without finding, wepte withoute comforte, and called without answer: so now thou satisfiest her seeking with thy coming, her teares with thy triumph, and all hir cries with this one word, Mary’ (K7r). In the voice of god, interpellation becomes consummation, becomes erotic and literary climax.
Or, as it turns out, not quite a climax, or at least not the final one: after this exuberant erotic communion, the noli me tangere that inevitably arrives registers as tragedy, as a scene of devastation. Ventriloquizing the bafflement of commentators on this verse, and perhaps anticipating the reader’s own shock, hurt, and disappointment at the evident violence of Christ’s prohibition, Southwell’s narrator launches an indignant protest:
O Iesu what mysterie is in this? […] If the multitude of hir tears have won that favor for hir eies, and hir longing to heare thee so great a recompence to hir eares, why doost thou not admitte her hands to touch, & hir mouth to kisse thy holy feete, sithe the one with many plaints and the other with their readinesse to all services, seem to have earned no lesse reward.
(L3r-L4r)
In querying the mysterie of Christ’s words, Southwell continues to make explicit the interpretive posture of the work: as in the mystery of Mary’s mistaking, the interpretive and affective crux must be dwelled in. The answer to the question will be the conventional one of the commentary tradition: that Mary has failed to proceed from devotion to Christ in his humanity to devotion to Christ in his divinity, so that ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’ stand in for spiritual perception whereas in ‘mouth’ and ‘hands’ is located the fleshly grasp that is prohibited. To resolve the pain of the apparent rebuff, then, Southwell first ventriloquises Christ, expanding on his words in a mild chastisement of Mary’s ongoing misprision: ‘O Mary know the difference betweene a glorious and a mortall body, betweene the condition of a momentarie and of an eternall life’ (L4r). This lesson in trinitarian spirituality may be the standard line on the noli me tangere, but for Southwell and others this alone cannot suffice.
Southwell looks to collation as a method of repair, as though the prohibition of touch is too unbearable to sustain. He makes recourse to the text of Matthew in the work’s sole moment of deviation from the Johannine account, an act of collation not unusual in itself but exceptional in Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears.
But as she was in this perplexed manner, now falling, now rising in her own uncertainties, shee findeth on the waie, the other holy women that first came with hir to the grave, whom the angels had now assured of Christes resurrection. And as they passed all forwardes towardes the Disciples: Behold Jesus met them, saieng: All hail. But they came neere, and tooke hold of his feete, and adored him. Then Jesus said to them, feare not. Go tell my brethren, that they goe into Galilee, there they shall see me.
(M1v, quoting Matthew 28:9–10)
In this quotation, unmarked by the text’s usual habit of marginal citation, Southwell sutures the events of John to those of Matthew with this brief narrative in which Mary finds the other two Marys on the way. Her finding returns us to Gregory’s inventio: Southwell’s act of interpretive collation encoded as Mary’s discovery repairs her solitude and prepares for the moment of touch that John alone prohibits. Southwell characterises his act of collation – of finding on the way through scripture – as a curative gesture inherent to the scene itself: ‘But O most milde phisition’, he apostrophises Christ, ‘wel knowest thou that thy sharp corrosie, with bitter smart angred hir tender wound, which beeing rather caused, by unwitting ignorance then wilfull error, was assoone cured as knowne’ (M2r). This touch is the source of Mary’s ultimate ‘satisfaction’: it precipitates the ecstatic, even orgasmic, climax of the whole work. This careful affective physics, in which the pain of the noli me tangere’s rebuff is recompensed with perfect pleasure, the injury of alienation cured by the miracle of communion, is for Southwell the purpose of interpretation. The exegetical gesture of collation, in which Matthew supplies an absent encounter, could likewise be described as a ‘cure’ to the ‘corrosie’ of John, the ‘requital’ of John’s ‘refusall’. It is an act of intimate mercy on Southwell’s part.
What has happened between corrosie and cure is, in some sense, a reorientation of the logic of embodiment itself: a transformation of the devastated space of mourning conditioned by Mary’s fixation on Christ’s fleshly body and by the reduction of embodiment to flesh alone, into a new mode of ensouled embodiment, the restoration of Ignatius’ ‘whole composite self’ and the recuperation of all the senses into the interpretive frame of the dialectic between inner and outer, spiritual and material, figurative and literal. For Augustine, too, collation provides relief from the exegetical and affective difficulty of the text of John: ‘Who could be so absurd’, he writes in his homily on the passage, ‘as to affirm that He was willing indeed to be touched by the disciples before He ascended to the Father, but refused it in the case of women till after his ascension?’33 But it is impossible to ‘run into such folly’ because of the account in Matthew:
This was passed over by John, but declared as the truth by Matthew. It remains, therefore, that some sacred mystery must lie concealed in these words, and whether we discover it [quod sive inveniamus] or utterly fail to do so [invenire], yet we ought to be in no doubt as to its actual existence.34
Inventio is once again at stake in the process of interpretation. For Augustine, the mystery lies in determining the moment at which Mary Magdalene developed an adequate understanding of the Trinity:
[T]he words, ‘Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my father’, had this meaning, […] that in this way Christ wished Himself to be believed on; in other words, to be touched spiritually, that He and the Father are one. For He has ascended to the Father, to the inward perception [intimis sensibus] of him who has made such progress in the knowledge of Christ that he acknowledges Him as equal with the Father: in any other way He is not rightly touched, that is to say, in any other way He is not rightly believed on. But Mary might have still so believed as to account Him unequal with the Father, and this certainly is forbidden her by the words, ‘Touch me not;’ that is, Believe not thus on me according to thy present notions; let not your thoughts stretch outwards to what I have been made in thy behalf, without passing beyond to that whereby thou hast thyself been made.35
The intimus sensus on which Augustine calls here invokes the ‘inner senses’ of both the body and the text of scripture as developed by Origen, the spiritual reading of Christ’s presence that both depends on and supersedes Mary’s more material desire for his bodily presence. What is rebuked by the noli me tangere, according to Augustine, is Mary’s mistaking of Christ in his divinity for Christ in his humanity – a failure, in other words, of Trinitarian doctrine. Augustine interprets the prohibition further as an injunction to transcendence – and a transcendence, moreover, with a futural orientation: ‘believe not […] according to thy present notions’; ‘pass beyond’. Allowing her thought to ‘stretch outwards’, gesturally like an embodied reach, toward the incarnational Christ is only the first movement in a becoming, toward the almost apophatic ‘that whereby’ (‘per quod’), the demonstrative pronoun standing in for the threefold divinity that stands behind and before all created things. In going on to collate John with Matthew, Augustine suggests that Mary and the other women must by the time of embracing Christ’s feet have likewise embraced this Trinitarian extension of thought and passed beyond the incarnational moment to, paradoxically, the time of belief in which embodied touch is not only not forbidden, but commended. To believe and to touch ‘rightly’, then, is not to depart from the body but to return to it. In Augustine’s pun, the ‘intimus sensus’, the innermost sense that makes this movement possible, is then also ‘the most intimate sense’.
Mary’s inventio provides a model for interpretation, for intimate reading. As Debora Shuger expresses it, in early modern Magdalen narratives, ‘the movement from desire to enjoyment, from deferred longing to loving union, configures knowledge as an erotic praxis’.36 This is true not only diegetically, of the longing Magdalen, but also of the reader, whose procedure through interpretation, motivated by her own devotional desire, brings her into a queer kind of loving union with the text she reads. Reading, too, is an erotic praxis. If dilation implies an opening, the generation of space, of capacity, the rhetorical maneuvers of prosopopoeia fill and amplify that space and give it meaning, make it legible. Yet Southwell’s investment in Mary’s spatial and cognitive stasis – ‘But Mary stood alone at the sepulchre weeping’ – stalls the time of Augustine’s futurity, Shuger’s ‘movement’. Mary’s intensity of affect is her way of refusing to move, or to move on. This is in some way the answer to Southwell’s earlier question: the end to which Christ suspends Mary’s longings, prolongs her desires, martyrs her with delay. In the dilation of desire resides the time and space of exegesis. In the dilation of a gospel scene in meditative prose, in the pounding of the spices of scripture, Southwell undertakes a mode of reading and of writing that assumes the dilated time of afflicted feeling – of passion – as the very ground of both reading and writing. In the exegetical analogy between the senses of the ensouled body and the senses of scripture, reading is necessarily an embodied, phenomenal event: to read is to feel the thing read; feeling is in turn an act of interpretation. What, then, is Mary Magdalen’s desire for Christ but the reader’s desire for the text she reads?
Notes
1 All citations from the Douai-Rheims Version.
2 Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares, 2nd ed. (London, 1592), K7r. Further citations noted parenthetically. I have silently expanded contractions and regularised u/v, i/j, and the long s, but otherwise preserved original spelling and punctuation.
3 XCVI Sermons (London, 1631), Bbb5r. Italics original.
4 English taken from ‘Homily 25’, in Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 188; Latin from the digital Patrologia Latina, http://pld.chadwyck.com, vol. 76, XL Homiliarum in Evangelia, XXV.1.
5 Homilies, 188; Homiliarum, XXV.2.
6 Homilies, 189; Homiliarum, XXV.2.
7 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 39.
8 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8; Patrologia Latina vol. 34, I.i.1.
9 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 88; III.xxix.41.
10 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 33; II.vi.8; my emphasis.
11 See Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); ‘Dilation and Delay: Renaissance Matrices’, Poetics Today 5 (1984): 519–35; Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Routledge, 1988); ‘Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the “Secret Place” of Women’, Representations 44 (1993): 60–95. Parker’s expansive body of work on Renaissance dilation demonstrates its centrality as a ‘semantic crossroads’ that becomes ‘a synonym for temporality itself’ (‘Matrices’, 520). Her important argument that Renaissance rhetoric produces ‘the dilation and control of a copiousness figured as female […] in order finally to dramatise the very process of its containment, the limiting structures of authority and control’ (Fat Ladies, 31) helps to demonstrate the particularity of Southwell’s dilatory method in Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, where his purpose is not to contain but to dwell in Mary’s dilated affective and rhetorical femininity.
12 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xx.
13 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 21.
14 Such an understanding would be in line with the recent a vogue for ‘sacramental poetics’, in which scholars have read devotional poetry as performing the presence-making work of the sacraments, or as a replacement for that work, with a particular focus on the sacrament of the eucharist as the semiotic sine qua non of post-reformation Christianity. See e.g. Regina Schwarz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
15 Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 89–90.
16 Joe Moshenska, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 12, 7–8. For Moshenska, crucially, the historical specificity of this semiotic and phenomenal challenge disappears in casual appropriations of touch as a model for engagement with the past such as those that characterise Carolyn Dinshaw’s work (11–12).
17 Dorothy Arundell, daughter of a prominent recusant family and later cofoundress of the English Benedictine convent in Brussels, is identified as the patroness of Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears by Pierre Janelle in his literary biography of Southwell, Robert Southwell the Writer: A Study in Religious Inspiration [1935] (Mamaroneck, NY: Paul Appel, 1971), 59. Christopher Devlin speculates in his biography on the encounter that brought Arundell and Southwell together, citing a spy’s report to Walsingham on a sermon at Marshalsea Prison: ‘Among other guests were three gentlewomen very brave in their attire, two of them daughters to Sir John Arundell… It was Magdalen’s day, and the priest catechized the company with the doctrine of popish reprentance, taking for his theme the story of the Magdalen’. Devlin suggests Southwell as the anonymous catechist, and that his sermon prompted from Arundell a request for a lengthier meditation. See The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1967), 117–18.
18 On the excessive humoral wetness of femininity, see Gail Kern Paster, ‘Leaky Vessels: the Incontinent Women of City Comedy’, in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 23–63.
19 Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘The Divine Names’, in The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Colm Lubhéid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 82.
20 Mary Curruthers, ‘Sweetness’, Speculum 81 (2006): 999–1013 (at 999).
21 Ignatius of Loyola, ‘Spiritual Exercises’, in Personal Writings, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (London: Penguin, 1996), 295. Emphasis mine.
22 Freeman, Time Binds, xxii.
23 Cited in Freeman, Time Binds, 77.
24 Freeman, Time Binds, 62 and 64, italics original.
25 On Renaissance prosopopoeia, see Gavin Alexander, ‘Prosopopoeia’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 97–114; John Parker, ‘Persona’, in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 591–608; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom_ Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
26 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN 94:5 (1979): 929–30.
27 Origen, Commentary on John, Book I in Origen, ed. and trans. Joseph W. Trigg (London: Routledge, 1998), 109.
28 ‘Persona’, 605.
29 John Parker, The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 50.
30 Time Binds, xxii.
31 Margreta de Grazia, ‘Anachronism’, in Cultural Reformations ed. Cummings and Simpson, 22.
32 Freeman’s epigraph to her temporal drag chapter is a quotation from Meryl Altman on ‘Teaching 70’s feminism’: ‘Every wave has its undertow’. Time Binds, 59.
33 Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. John Gibb and James Innes, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 437.
34 Ibid., 437–8. Latin from the Patrologia Latina online, vol. 35, Tractatus CXXI.3.
35 Ibid., 438.
36 Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 187.