Tuesday, August 14, 2012

That's So Raven!

I probably go to too many conferences. Conferences can be very productive - they put you on a deadline and compel you to find your argument. But whenever I have a presentation scheduled, it becomes an anxiety-ridden month of doom and gloom. Not the most pleasant experience, but I still go and I'm glad I do. Graduate school can be such a solitary existence. All the more reason to desire community. Graduate school seminar papers can get so caught up in minutiae. All the more reason to want to believe that what you do matters in larger sense. This July's New Chaucer Society conference had all that. The community was vivacious and supportive. The papers were genuinely inspirational.

I won't get into the papers I heard (not right now, anyway) (besides better accounts can be found here here here here here), but I will say how much I loved the conference format. The threaded format was brilliant. I felt like I was reading two or three edited collections-in-production over a week. I came away with oodles and oodles of notes and musings and questions that I know I'll be coming back to for years to come. I also loved how many of the papers really worked as Talks. That is, they weren't documents written to be read, but written to be presented. Alex Gillespie's virtuosic performance, the ambience of Jeffrey Cohen's prismatic Thames, and the stirring homily given by Cary Howie on illumination and the presence of the divine. Is this a particular skill of medievalists? At any rate, it's something I hope to emulate in my career.

Sincere thanks go out to the organizing committee for putting me on a wonder panel titled "Human/Nonhuman/Animal." It was just about the last session of the week - something I quite like. I like being able to absorb all of the other papers first, so I can figure out where my argument might differ and so I can anticipate difficult, knotty questions (and just who might ask them). My co-panelists were great - it's always exciting to see nonhumans engaged in such diverse ways.

As for my own paper, it was on the York Play of the Flood. The paper is a reflection of my recent interest in systems theory and complexity. Now that animal studies has successfully dismantled the human/animal binary, the work shifts toward understanding the differences that remain and constructing a politics that respects the different unique needs, capacities, and faculties of each species. Too often, I think, the posthumanist practitioners of animal studies still commit the same "sin against rigorous thinking" that plagued those they critique. If each animal is unique, how can we respond to each animal uniquely? How can we be hospitable to what each animal needs, desires, and deserves?

More on how this fits into my dissertation soon, I hope. It's been a busy year so far - studying for exams (I passed, thank heavens), co-chairing the department's biennial medieval-early modern conference, presenting at RSA and NCS, and going through draft after draft of the prospectus. But now that I'm free from course work and exam studying, I hope to use this blog more.

You can find my paper below - comments, criticisms, suggestions welcome.

---

On Refusing Noah As an Instrument of God's Will



Set three over the three days prior to a storm of biblical proportions, Wes Anderson’s recent film Moonrise Kingdom is about two animals who don’t want to get on the ark before the Flood. Sam -- with his signature coonskin cap, an orphan and the least popular boy in his Khaki Scout troop -- and Suzy -- the “emotionally disturbed” and painfully lonely raven – first meet during a local production of Benjamin Britten’s 1957 children’s opera, Noye’s Fludde, an adaptation of the Chester Noah Play. Sam wanders backstage, pushing past the children dressed as animals marching two-by-two in the other direction. When he reaches the dressing room, he finds six young girls putting the final touches on their avian costumes. “What kind of bird are you?” Sam asks. “I’m a sparrow, she’s a dove,” one girl responds, before Sam interrupts and clarifies. “No. I said, what kind of bird are you?”pointing at Suzy. Suzy blinks – not sure what to say, not sure whether to strike or recoil – before recognizing in Sam a kindred melancholy. After a penpal courtship, they decide to flee the confines of their stigmatization.

This paper is about such animals, like Sam's raccoon and, especially, Suzy’s raven, who want no part of Noah’s new covenant with God. They are the kind of animals characterized by Manuel De Landa in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History as “weeds,” victims of “organic chauvinism.” Biomass that is devalued in human society and its anthropocentric economy is separated out into categories of the unclean or pests. While Noah and his sons tend to the animals that will benefit human society, the animals that confirm humanity’s pride of place, the raven, the raccoon, and all the other castaways must instead build their own home in an inhospitable world.

The Noah Plays are, as Rosemary Woolf argues, part of the cycle’s great pattern of Jesus “summoning the sinner into the church.” Several studies have examined Noah’s wife as such a sinner who, fitting with the play’s theme of establishing right order, eventually submits to her husbands’ will. But Noah’s raven has received much less attention as a sinful animal. Unlike Uxor Noah, the raven does not submit, and thus provides a counternarrative to the progressive vision of the cleansed earth and the pattern of salvation. To my knowledge, literary scholarship has not examined the political theology of human-animal relationships in the Noah Plays. That is, the animals have not been examined as animals, as MPs in a Latourian Parliament of Things.

In the Noah story, God plans to flood the earth because creation has rebelled. The stops and false starts of the Book of Genesis are repeated attempts to craft order out of chaos, and make meaning out of the meaningless. But the nonlinear system dynamics – geological, biological, and cultural - of the earth and its inhabitants always run into disruption and further complexification. According to God’s decree, these nonlinear dynamics have to be corrected and reset to fulfill the obligations of the prescribed, teleological, linear hierarchy. And so, God declares in the York Building of the Ark: “Sythn hays men wroght so woefully / And synne is nowe reynand so ryffe, / That me repentys and rewys forthi / That ever I made outhir man or wiffe.”

The Chester Noah, like Britten’s opera, gives more attention to the other animals destroyed in the flood, and in that play God makes clear that it is not just humans who have disobeyed: “Man that I made I will destroye, / Beaste, worme, and fowle to flye; / For on eairth they me deny.” Humans thus have their lot tossed back in with the nonhumans as they are sentenced to drift together in the Flood.

But when the waters recede, God does not reinstate Paradise. Noah neither achieves the William Empson’s “pastoral trick” of a seemingly, but only seemingly, sustainable static Eden, nor is Noah able to reach “buoyancy,” to use Steve Mentz’s recent term, in the nonanthropocentric ecology of the Flood. Instead, human-animal relations run aground on the mountains of Ararat. As the ocean recedes and the earth materializes out of the primordial soup of the sea, Noah selects one of each of the clean fowl and clean beasts for sacrifice in honor of God’s grace. Noah and God’s new constitution for human-animal relationships is written in blood. This new constitution was dramatized, and celebrated, with the comedic Noah Plays performed in Hull and as part of the York, Chester, Newcastle, Towneley, N-Town cycles. Celebrated because human dominance of animals also structured the English economy. As Karl Steel argues in How to Make a Human, this systematic violence against animals enables the ideology of human exceptionalism.

It makes sense, then, that the political theology undergirding the economy would be recapitulated in the great English cycle plays sponsored by the same zooeconomic complex. The hierarchy of the biological regime is evident throughout the cycle plays. Humans continually renew their own humanity and ingratiate themselves to God through an often violent separation from the realm of animals. This makes the comedy of human salvation from animal rebellion and the animalistic behavior of the antediluvian humans a covenant worth celebrating.

The destigmatization of eating of animals provides a new foundation for the animal economy. By dramatizing the theological understanding of Genesis and its application to contemporary life, the Noah Plays model how ecological complexity or fluidity is reduced to the solid hierarchies of economic order. By commanding the construction of the ark, the Noah story quickly reasserts that animals are not only made for human use, but also that animals need humans to survive. Noah’s willingness to act as savior to the birds, the cattle, the wild beasts, and the creeping things having life puts them in his debt. But some “organic chauvinism” is demonstrated here as well. God tasks Noah with saving seven pairs of each clean animal, the animals with a greater perceived value to human society, but the animals who are not perceived to be matters of human concern, the unclean, the creeping things having life, were less worthy of human economic, ecological, and moral consideration, and so only one pair of each are saved.

But what about the lives who do not need or want to be saved? Can one really say that Noah saves the rats, the pigeons, the fleas, the lice, the parasites - all stowaways who mock the Noachian Covenant? Would these “weeds,” creatures resistant to human domination, have been left behind in any case or would they have found their way aboard the Ark regardless? These less visible animals are the ones who stalk the margins of the economy or lurk in the dark corners of the ecological mesh, those animals that feed off the waste of human society. This brings us to Noah’s raven.In the second half of this paper, I would like to consider this disobedient bird, who, like Noah’s wife, refuses to accept Noah as the instrument of God’s will. In the York Play of the Flood, after nine months at sea, Noah and his family emerge from the ark’s cabin and wait for ‘the worlde [to] waxe agayne.’ After testing the depth of the water, Noah decides to send forth a bird to scout the horizons:

“Therfore a fowle of flight
Full sone sall I forthe sende
To seke if he have sight
Som lande uppon to light;
Thanne may we witte full right
When oure mornyng sall mende.”


These lines hint at the damage that has been done to the human psyche and humanity’s assumed place of divine privilege during these months at sea. The sponsors of the York Play of the Flood, the Fishers, Fishmongers, and Mariners Guilds, would have understood the fragility of the human when faced with the immense power of the sea, teaming with sharks and leviathans threatening to swallow them whole. With Noah shut in the ark with the animals human exceptionalism is temporarily held in suspension, biding its time. Noah and his family, scan the horizon for mountaintops so they may find the surety in their humanity on the shore.

Noah’s choice for a scout is the raven, “The raven is wighte and wyse is hee” but also “full crabbed.” Bold and intelligent but ill-mannered and untamed, the raven takes off and does not return. Six lines later, Shem expresses concern that the bird has not come back: “Fadir, this foule is forthe full lange, / Uppon sum lande I trowe he lende, / His foode therfore to fynde and fange: / That makis hym be a fayland frende.”

Theologians have a tradition explaining the raven’s AWOL joyride: released into the world, the raven sank back into sin, by gluttonously feeding on the dead victims of the flood. The carrion-eating bird feasted on the waste produced by God’s plan and Noah’s salvation and thus freed himself from participation in Noah’s new world order.

A second bird is sent out, the faithful dove – not as intelligent, but dutiful. This time, of course, six lines later the dove does return bearing evidence of his completed mission. While the York play lacks the explicit stage directions of the Chester play, we might assume that, like its counterpart, the bird nestles in Noah’s arms, happy to confirm man as his master. As Noah takes the olive branch, he sees in the distance the hilltops of Hermony – that is, Armenia – where humans and other animals are meant to share a common, harmonious destiny.

Several scholars have argued that the Noah story as told in Genesis and in medieval English Noah Plays is, as one scholar puts it, a “recapitulation of [God’s] first Creation. Through Noah’s obedience, he and his family come to participate in this re-Creation as Adam and Eve had participated in the first.” But this is not exactly the case. The ark does not run aground on a land of peace, but on a ruined world, littered with the detritus of its ancestors. God’s Creation 2.0 is an Anti-Eden, with an economy based on dominance rather than benevolence, stewardship, or horticulture. It is an economy that maintains the right to human ascendancy through blood sacrifice and systematic violence.

Noah’s triumph would be total if not for the raven. The dove confirms the privilege God has assigned to humans, but the raven does not affirm the status of his designated master, and instead feeds on human corpses. While the Flood Plays celebrate as a comedy - the most violent thing to ever happen as a comedy! - Noah’s new beginning , the new covenant with God, and the edibility of flesh, the raven’s rebellion injects doubt into this newly reestablished anthropocentric world. Noah’s response to the raven’s defection is then to pass judgment, to curse the rebel creature:

“Sen he for all oure welthe gon wende,
Then be he for his werkis wrange
Evermore weried withowten ende.”


Noah is in a strange position to be cursing the raven’s wrong works, since at the time Noah remains holed up in the ark and the raven has achieved his own salvation, having found food and freedom. Meanwhile, as one of the clean fowl, this dove that has saved Noah and his family may be the very same that is scheduled to be sacrificed for the glory of God upon landfall. Shem accuses the raven of being a false friend, but the raven and the dove may have a very different perspective on the matter.

In closing, I would like to suggest that this curious notion of salvation for some, sacrifice for others bears on current debates about sustainability and the ecological crises of the 21st century. The most recent volume of PMLA features a cluster on the buzzword sustainability and its deployment in contemporary green discourse. The authors repeatedly ask the question, “what do we mean by sustainability,” “sustainability of what and for whom”?

The question applies to the animals on the ark – for whom are they being saved? On his own, the raven decides he is being saved for no one and flies in a different direction. As a result, he is cursed for not fulfilling the assignments of his human master.

But rather than curse the raven, we must, as Steve Mentz argues in his article in the Sustainability cluster, “learn to love disruption, including the disruption of human lives by nonhuman forces…. After sustainability, we need dynamic narrative about our relation to the biosphere.” As Timothy Morton and others have shown, ecological thinking does away with the outdated models of equilibrium, homeostasis, and covenants that too easily exceed human control.

Even as a new anthropocentric system comes into being after the flood, the conditions for the disruption of that system are also created. The Flood marks an increased effort to control the animals and animalistic human behavior, but it leaves in its wake an ocean full of carcasses. The Flood does not purify the earth; it creates the conditions for the disruption of the newly instituted anthropocentric system. Rather than curse the raven who flouts human control, humans would do better to understand how that desire for control, the desire for Edenic stasis, causes the disruptions in the system. If we accept the ecological principles of dynamic coexistence, we might then write a constitution of human-animal relationships rooted not in gratuitous violence, but humble hospitality.Image credit: Image 229 from the Holkham Bible, BL AddMss 47682, fol 8r