Tuesday, November 15, 2022

VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS #2: VOX CLAMANTIS

 



Hello everyone, and welcome to our second posting for 'Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects', an informal poetry workshop with a particular focus on writing and writing through the abject animal other. The content I'm going to share today covers our IRL session for the 16th of November, as well as a bit of supplementary material for the week we missed, starting with this wee video version of our talk:

https://youtu.be/j0KqqbGWJp8

We start by looking at the dehumanising or animalising of ‘others’ in poetry and beyond, and delving into some of those strategies of representation and the long shadows they cast. We’re going to begin with a text that holds a particular kind of morbid fascination for me: the thirteenth century Latin poem, Vox Clamantis, by John Gower.

Vox Clamantis or The Voice of One Crying Out is both a dream vision and an estate satire of the 1381 Peasants Rebellion. The title is well chosen, it comes of course, from the Book of Isaiah, roughly, ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Make his paths straight.’ And in this proselytising vein, Gower’s poetic persona is both stridently moralising and prophetic. He claims to record the complaints of the vox populi, to speak on behalf of 'the people', to reform while embodying his very particular vision of its collective concerns and voice. The cry, in its various guises, is central to Gower’s text, whether as articulate lament or feral howl.

The poem itself is a startling allegorical vision of social revolt, where rebellious peasants are transformed – literally – into wild animals, and London becomes a terrifying and bestial wasteland. These peasants are struck by the curse of God, morphing into pigs, dogs, and monstrous poultry. As they begin their transformations their voices degrade into animal cacophony, they leave their cosy heaps of dung and descend upon London like a biblical plague.

For Gower, the ‘common people’ speak – and cry – with one voice, they have the same needs, aims and ambitions: social harmony brought into being through good governance. The problem with society – the source of the cry – is that nobody is fulfilling his divinely ordained role: from ineffectual kings to worldly clergy; from supine nobility to lazy and feckless peasants. To speak as one – in God’s name – is the medium through which discontent is expressed, but it’s also a powerful force of social and spiritual cohesion, language is the instrument of redress and healing.

It is really telling, then, that the peasantry in Vox Clamantis are singing off-key. Gower excludes them from the mass of common humanity by transforming their voices into discordant war whoops and animal grunts. He shuts them out (and up) of the vox populi, which is besieged by and cries out against them. As Sarah Novak writes in her fab essay ‘Braying Peasants and the Poet as Prophet: Gower and The People in the Vox Clamantis’, Gower believes ‘in the power of language to repair the ills of society, to compose peace. However, just as God denies wealth and freedom to the peasant class for the common good — because someone must work the land — Gower deprives them of language, which would prove too dangerous in their mouths.’ (Novak, 2013).

Thinking back to our discussion last week about how we characterise the feral, do we think Gower’s peasants qualify? What’s different and monstrous about Gower’s rebellious peasants? Where in the text do we see the best evidence of their feral nature? I think feral here is not merely about wild or morally disquieting behaviour. I think this is feral as a form of potentially liberating refusal. (Here's a picture of Watt Tyler to celebrate).



Something we might usefully think about is the way in which the ‘curse’ renders literal the peasants' abject separation from the mass of obedient, patient and pious poor, and Gower’s text is both compelling and uniquely nauseating in this regard. It’s frustrating, because on one level the Vox Clamantis acknowledges the prevailing attitudes towards the poor held by their superiors, and the degrading treatment that results. To that rather limited extent, Gower is sympathetic to reform, but he is only able to advocate for these decent poor through the imaginative creation of a feral underclass, who don’t accept their lot, who dare to demand better. All peasants are equally lowly and coarse, but the humble and suffering peasant is closer to God, the rebellious peasant nearer not only to the beast, but the wild, dangerous, and unpredictable animal. 

The subjects of Gower’s divine curse are doubly monstrous, then: they regress first to the level of animals, but those animal forms are themselves subject to distortion, exceeding their known, stable parameters. Chickens become vultures, dogs become wolves. The domesticated beast suddenly bites the hand that feeds it, runs wild, goes rogue. Gower’s therianthropes are in violation of both natural law and social order. Natural law and social order are, in fact, presented as synonymous. The poor have always been one rung below personhood; this inherent inferiority excused their relative lack of freedom, and justified their exploitation. But the pacified poor, like their animals, were at least fit to be harnessed as edible resources or sources of labour. The rebellious poor turned the world upside down, a shapeless, surplus, violent mob. Yet, perhaps we could argue that they still possess a different kind of symbolic value: as scapegoats.

Bataille is really useful here, I think, when he notes that although association with the scummy, wretched masses is forbidden to the sovereign subject, this same feral population must remain as an ever-present cipher of disgust and fascination: an ob/abject lesson that sustains and contours the oppressor’s sovereignty and self-rule.  Law and Order governments need a criminal underclass. Nobody is working to put themselves out of business. But society needs its underclass for less tangible reasons too: in order, for example, to constitute an ideal expression of identity, to enact and reaffirm this identity against a mass of abject, subaltern others; to maintain and propagate this identity by fomenting and policing distinctions between citizen-subjects and across communities until this strict division of identities becomes naturalised as inevitable. I think we’ve got a nice contemporary example of this in the political evocation of “hard working families”, which pits poor, normative workers against unwaged, single, or non-normative social units.

So, one interesting thought might be that while the abject other disrupts and threatens social and political boundaries, they also function as a key component in the work of category maintenance, something for ideal or ‘sovereign’ subjects to measure themselves against. Their exclusion from society serves as a warning to the would-be deviant; the revulsion they excite and the banishment that results, solidifies those categories – hard working vs unemployed, sedentary vs traveller, etc. – as meaningful, in the face of those who would menace and disturb them. The oppressor, if you like, recuperates their use value as symbolic and political tools, as bogey men, as propaganda.

All of which is very interesting (at least I think so) but what is perhaps most germane to us as poets is how bound up this is with language, with the idea and status of language itself, with whose voice is allowed to be heard, and whose speech is ascribed the the status of language.

As a for instance, and to provoke a bit of discussion, I offer the following from my personal bette noir, the Victorian novelist, ethnographer, and self-proclaimed Gypsylorist, George Borrow. Borrow set himself up as an expert in and arbiter of “Gypsy” language and culture. He and his fellow “experts” coined of the phrase “poggado jib” (or “chib”), which they translate as “broken tongue”, to describe the degenerate speech of impure itinerants as opposed to that of the “true” or “pure” Romanies. Here’s a lovely wee quote to give you an idea of the man:

‘These people [“Abraham men” or “Pikers”] have frequently been confounded with the Gypsies, but are in reality a distinct race, though they resemble the latter in some points. They roam about like the Gypsies, and, like them, have a kind of secret language. But the Gypsies are a people of Oriental origin, whilst the Abrahamites are the scurf of the English body corporate. The language of the Gypsies is a real language, more like the Sanscrit than any other language in the world; whereas the speech of the Abrahamites is a horrid jargon, composed for the most part of low English words used in an allegorical sense’ – George Borrow, Romano Lavo-Lil (1874).

Again, I think Bataille offers us a useful lens to read through here, when he writes about peoples disenfranchised to such an extent that they are ‘disinherited [from] the possibility of being human’.  He refers to classes of humanity so thoroughly omitted from the usual processes of representation as to render them paradoxically classless. These, the feral, whom Bataille calls the abject. He states that the process of abjection is an essential component of sovereignty, which must, as an imperative, constitute a portion of the population as moral and spiritual pariahs, ‘represented from the outside with disgust as the dregs of the people, populace and gutter’ (Bataille, 1993). Oppression must concentrate within its static, self-contained, highly individual form, whereas ‘the oppressed are formed out of the amorphous and immense mass of the wretched population’, its voice a discordant animalistic babble.

When Borrow refers to Travellers as the ‘scurf of the body corporate’, he is evoking both the diseased bodies of the poor white other, and the besieged body of the state or the national culture. Here is the other at metonym for an embattled and infected whiteness. Scurf is from the Old English for to gnaw: to burrow under, undermine, to wear away with the termite teeth of poverty. Scurf is also to cut and to fragment. The “pure” body broken up from within. The social body, and the body of language.

I wonder what are some of the implications for poetic – especially lyric – practice? Which in itself is predicated upon a selective and highly controlled mastery over its materials? How do we communicate the complex set of power dynamics between languages and modes of speech? How do we make space for a collective and amorphous voice? 

As both a bonus, and one attempt to answer this question (and we're definitely going to talk about this more next session) please enjoy Sean Bonney's The Commons:

http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/436447/4272776/1254103816363/sean-bonney-the-commons-ii.pdf?token=EHpW4Qw3Jn3ZiwXqzRWun2386Jw%3D

Embedded in the way we use language are a whole host of assumptions about degrees of agency and sentience. The thing with Man™, is that Man™ is a domestic animal. That is, he frames himself as uniquely artificial: his signal qualities are language, artifice, and the abstract thoughts which these things frame. He is the animal that domesticated itself. This idea is what Donna Haraway refers to as the doctrine of ‘human exceptionalism’ (Haraway, 2008), and it has been used as a lever to deny variously sentience, soul, mind, language, self-consciousness, technology, morality etc., to both nonhuman subjects and to animalised humans, so that the meaningful body becomes mere flesh, ripe for exploitation. In When Species Meet one of Haraway’s chief and most compelling contentions is that ‘The philosophic and literary conceit that all we have is representations and no access to what animals think and feel is wrong’. It’s an expedient position that justifies their death and suffering, every bit as contingent and socially created as Gower’s notion that God created the peasants to labour and struggle. How do we feel about that? Can we know an animal ‘other’? If they can be represented in writing, what are the ethics of this proposition?

We might ask what does it mean to represent and to be represented? We might ask, like Spivak in her landmark essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) Is speech for the nonhuman or even the feraltern subject possible or safe in a language that enables only its colonised (tamed and domesticated) forms? Can we, as Derrida suggests, render ‘delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us’, or will our attempts to “get at” the animal ultimately dissolve into mediation, metabolising, assimilation?





Another of my trade-mark seamless segues leads us to language and imperilled animality through the lens of wolves, starting with the Topographia Hiberniae (1188) – an account of the landscape and peoples of Ireland by Gerald of Wales –  which depicts the Irish as bestial beings who express their inhumanity through intercourse with animals. It's a brilliantly bonkers text in which werewolves are a significant feature: a race of mainly treacherous, occasionally pious, human-shaped Irishmen, exemplars of low-cunning, and dirty animality. What has always struck me about this characterisation is how deep rooted and persistent it is. John Taylor would come to metaphorise the killing of protestants by howling ‘Irish wolves’, and Heylyn famously described an Irish race as behaving ‘scarcely like men’. For Cromwell, of course, the Irish were simply ‘beasts’ (Bartlett, 2010), candidates all for occupation, imprisonment, exile or extermination. We can bring this back to Spivak again through the idea that the barbaric practices of these wolfish Irish create a pool of victims who must be 'saved' from them via the forces of colonisation and civilisation.

Fun fact: the occupying English’ original name for Ireland was Wolf Land, an appellation that links the very real dangers of that country’s animal population with the presumed national character of its human inhabitants.

Wolves were one of the first known targets of animal destruction, and they became extinct in Ireland by 1770, an active project of annihilation that ran concurrently with Cromwell’s determined – but by no means novel – efforts to exterminate the Irish language. Attempts to render Ireland less ‘savage’ through the suppression and control of its language had been frequent throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The 1537 Act for the English Order, Habit and Language stated that in Ireland ‘the English tongue’ must be ‘used by all men’, associating ‘diversity’ of language with a ‘savage and wild kind and manner of living’ among Irish persons. A 1657 proclamation stated that citizens must raise their children to speak only English or face forcible transplantation to Connaught (a territory reserved for those who continued to practice Catholicism despite laws to the contrary).

The Irish had long been supposed to have wolfish and even hyenic tendencies. Edmund Spenser’s hysterical polemic A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) claimed that the Irish were in the habit of eating wolves, forming various relationships with them, and ultimately transforming into them. This is a characteristic Spenser ascribes not only to the Irish, but to other others: ‘the Scythians sayd, that they were once every yere turned into wolves, and soe it is wrighten of the Irish’ etc. The text presents the Irish as ‘creeping forth’ on all fours from every corner of the ‘woods and glynnes’ to ‘eate the dead carrions’. This intimate association of the Irish with wild – and abject – animal behaviour has a poetic, but also a deeply political basis. As early as 1610, Lord Blennerhasset, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer, describes outlaw ‘woodkernes’ – peasant rebels – who reside in the forest as ‘human wolves’ who ought to be tracked down ‘to their lairs’ and destroyed. Deforestation becomes a potent symbolic act, and political resistance is repeatedly coded as inherently bestial, with the hunting of both wolves and dissenting humans celebrated and rewarded by the state. Ireland’s status as a colony has long been linked to its identity as a fearful and fascinating ‘wolf-land’ for the occupying English. this feral disobedience concentrates in Irish bodies: in the 1650s a Captain in general Ireton’s regiment described the slaughter of an Irish garrison at Cashel. He claims that among the bodies were found ‘divers that had tails near a quarter of a yard long’. The amorphous hybrid nature of those bodies justifies the logic of producing them. Feral subjects. Matter out of place.

So here’s a related question: how do we describe the destruction of a language or a dialect when the language we use is implicated in that very destruction? For those of us with only fragments of an ancestral or prior cultural tongue, how are we to articulate loss when the thing that is lost is language itself?

And if that wasn't enough, here’s another difficulty, especially for those of us writing primarily in English. The Māori poet Vaughan Rapatahana speaks eloquently about the ‘Hydra-like dominion’ of the English language across the globe, pushed by agencies such as the British Council, for reasons of economic and cultural power. Rapatahana describes this as a form of linguistic neo-imperialism, stating that ‘the more we are pushed and pulled into Anglo English language entrapment, the further we are also lured into learning that dominant language’s distinct cultural tropes at the expense of our own.’ We might add this cautionary observation from Ann Wierzbicka, writing in Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language (Oxford University Press USA, 2014): ‘while English is a language of global significance, it is not a neutral instrument or one that, unlike other languages, carves nature at its joints […] if this is not recognized, English can at times become a conceptual prison’.

In his essay ‘Ecopoetics’ (more of that anon) Jonathan Skinner writes about how a variety of poetic modes or tactics modelled on the natural world – such as non-linearity, recycling, complexity, collage – work to 'diversify the ‘monocrop of a hegemonic language like English’. Here Skinner is using an analogy from agricultural practice. Monocropping is growing a single crop year after year on the same land, in the absence of rotation through other crops. We know now that planting the same crop in the same place each year removes nutrients from the earth and leaves soil weak and unable to support healthy plant growth. Furthermore, because soil structure and quality is so poor, farmers are forced to use chemical fertilizers to stimulate growth. Skinner compares this practice of monocropping to what he calls ‘hegemonic English’, deliberately reducing space for linguistic and cultural difference as an expression of power. It tells us there is a proscribed way to write and to sound and to think, and it marginalises or erases contributions to culture that don’t conform to those narrow parameters. As Donna Haraway writes in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Taylor & Francis, 2013), ‘Grammar is politics by other means.’

Heavy stuff which lead to this week’s prompt: try to find some of endangered words from within your own life and experience. They might belong to another language or dialect; they might describe a place or an occupation that no longer exists; they might refer to extinct species from your local environment, they might be rooted in folklore or legend or belong to a particular vanished cohort or subculture. Draft a poem that uses any number of these endangered words to write a poem that addresses both environmental and linguistic threat, united animal and language together.

 


PS: Remember! Extinction is not primarily cultural. It is environmental. While language and nature are inextricably linked, ecological decline is also its own distinct species of horror. As Ursula Heise writes in Imagining Extinction (University of Chicago Press, 2016), narratives of ecological destruction, which often borrow from genre conventions such as tragedy and elegy, can easily turn into narratives of human decline. Environmental crisis ‘typically becomes a proxy for cultural concerns’, writes Heise, and this risks erasing the very ‘others’ we seek to signify and mourn.


Delve a little deeper?

 Here are some interesting and provocative ideas from the works cited in this week's discussion. A strange world of anxiety and affinity. Dive in!

* Novak, Sarah, 'Braying peasants and the poet as prophet: Gower and the people in the Vox clamantis', Études anglaises, vol. 66, no. 3, 2013, pp. 311-322

file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/ETAN_663_0311%20(3).pdf

"Before fleeing in terror, the dreamer sees the curse of God strike bands of peasants, who are all transformed into domestic and wild animals, such as donkeys, pigs, poultry, dogs and flies  and then descend upon London. They leave their cozy heaps of dung— a number of the groups of animals are described as sleeping contentedly in their own filth, fimum, before they leave it to join the crowd. [...] The morphed animals deviate from their nature: the newly-formed pigs are like wild boars, the dogs like wolves, the chickens like vultures and so forth. Thanks to this dream device, Gower can give free range to hyperbole and has no obligations to fact or even to verisimilitude: rivers flowing with blood, Gog and Magog, the race of Cain, Cerberus and Ulysses’ former companions all join in the peasants’ march. [Gower's text] precariously unites the voice of God with that of the people, both urging him to record the unspeakable crimes of the serfs. Meanwhile, before this heavenly voice intervenes, the only voice to be heard is that of the mob of peasants, and they do not speak as one—they roar, bray, hiss, snort flames, and most of all, they act. They pillage, burn, hunt down innocent prey, and commit gory murders in hordes. When all these creatures are assembled, their collective noise convinces all who hear it that the Apocalypse is at hand"

* And you can check out an English translation of the Vox for yourself here:

http://gowertranslation.pbworks.com/w/page/149185233/Vox%20Clamantis%20Book%20I

*Our old friend Bataille again. Bataille Georges, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, More and Less, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Yvonne Shafir (1934; MIT Press, 1993) on the heterogeneus society:

"basic element of subversion, the wretched population, exploited for production and cut off from life by a prohibition on contact [...] the dregs of the people, populace and gutter"

* A fascinating essay on Borrow and the abject othering of Travellers, here:

Lee, Ken, ‘Orientalism and Gypsylorism’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 44, no. 2 (2000): pp.129–56. 

* Here's a link to a totally crazy undertaking, specifically and English translation of Topographia Hibernia:

 the https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/topography_ireland.pdf

* My personal favourite. Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (Free Association Books, 1991) p.36:

''Our relations with 'nature' might be imagined as a social engagement with a being who is neither 'it', 'you', 'thou', 'he', 'she" nor 'they' in relation to 'us'. The pronouns embedded in sentences about contestations for what may count as nature are themselves political tools, expressing hopes, fears, and contradictory histories. Grammar is politics by other means. 'What narrative possibilities might lie in monstrous linguistic figures for relations with 'nature' for ecofeminist work?"

I was able to find a pdf of the text as well. Enjoy!:

https://ia903101.us.archive.org/34/items/harawaydonnajsimianscyborgsandwomenthereinventionofnature/Haraway_Donna_J_Simians_Cyborgs_and_Women_The_Reinvention_of_Nature.pdf

* And here is Spivak's landmark 1988 essay, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'

https://abahlali.org/files/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf

* And Johnathon Skinner's essay (p.105):

https://ecopoetics.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/eco1.pdf

* Bunce, Pauline with prof. Robert Phillipson, Vaughan Rapatahana, Ruanni Tupas, Why English: Confronting the Hydra (Multilingual Matters, 2016).

* Wierzbicka, Ann,  Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language, (Oxford University Press USA, 2014)

* You may or may not also be overjoyed to hear that I found a complete pdf of Ursula Heise’s brilliant Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species:

ursula-k-heise-imagining-extinction-the-cultural-meanings-of-endangered-species

* Do also check out Haraway, Donna When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and the brilliant The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003) which I happen to have a pdf of.

haraway_companion.pdf

Finally, here is an extract from Vox Clamantis


From Vox Clamantis by John Gower

Trans. Robert J. Meindl and Mark Riley

 

 

Here begins the Chronicle called Vox Clamantis.

 

 In the beginning of this modest work, the author intends to describe how the peasant serfs rashly arose against the freeborn and the nobility of the realm. And because an affair of this sort was like an abominable and hideous portent, he says that he saw in a dream various mobs of the rabble transformed into different kinds of domestic animals. However, he says that those domestic animals, turning away from their nature, took upon themselves the savagery of wild beasts. Concerning the causes for which such outrages occur among men, he discusses further according to the divisions of this book, which is arranged in seven parts, as what follows below will clearly show.

 

[…]

 

I thought I walked in fields to gather some flowers,
When Mars himself venerates his own day.  
My way had not been long, when near at hand I saw                                   
A host of very frightening portents,                                       170
Many malicious sorts of the common people,
Wandering through the fields in untold mobs.
And while my eyes thus looked upon the swirling crowds,
And I marvelled at so much peasantry,
Lo! the curse of God flashed suddenly upon them,
And, changing their shapes, turned them into beasts.
Those who before had been men, of innate reason,
Took the likeness of irrational beasts.
Different shapes characterized different mobs,
Marked each one by its own occupation.                                   180
Since dreams signify, I’ll show the wondrous events
That make me yet more fearful now I wake.
 I saw rebels, by sudden novelty, prideful
Asses, and nobody held their bridles.
For, their guts suffused with the fury of lions,
They ventured forth in search of their own prey.
For halters are useless, and can’t control their heads,
While the asses prance wildly through the fields;
Lo! their racket terrified all the citizens,
While they bray their hee-haws all together.               190
The donkeys have become violent wild burros,
And what had been useful is now useless.
They decline further to carry sacks to the villes;
They don’t want to bend their backs with the weight;
Nor do they care for the coarse grasses in the hills,
But from now on seek something more tasty.
They drive others from their homes, and want without right
To have the rights of horses for themselves.
 The asses from now on presume to enjoy jewelled
Saddles, and to have their manes always combed.                 200
As old Burnellus once so foolishly wanted
His own docked tail to be lengthened anew,
So these wretches seek in vain for new spacious rears,
To be from behind alike lion and ass.
 The ass adorned his back with a leonine pelt,
And his vainglory overstepped all bounds.

 

[…]

 

Great things suit great people, and small things, small people,
But those who are born low want to be grand.
A thought that has lasting effects is sudden born,
And lightly incurs an endless burden.                                    220
So the foolish asses, whom arrogance stirs up,
Refuse neglected duties set by every law.
The insanity in the air corrupted them,
So they were changed as if portents for me.
Those whom I had known formerly by their long ears
Bore long horns in the midst of their foreheads.
The two-edged sword does not cut more fiercely than those,
And they were drenched with the blood from fresh wounds.
They who, lazy by nature, were wont to loiter,
Ran at the fore with the quickness of stags.                           230








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VULGAR ERRORS/ FERAL SUBJECTS: BONUS ROUND!!!! COMPOSITE BEASTS AND ‘MATERIAL-SEMIOTIC KNOTS’

  Hello everyone and welcome to a strange wee bonus posting for Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, an informal poetry workshop with a particular...