Rhetorical Violence and Actual Violence (trigger warning)

I’m reading a lot about rape at the moment, which makes me an exceptionally cheerful person to be around. Specifically, I’m reading about rape in medieval romance, but it’s hard to separate that from contemporary debates about violence, and rhetoric, which seem to be everywhere at the moment. So, I’m writing this to try to set out some of my thoughts. I’m going to start by talking about an academic article and a medieval text, but I think what I’m saying isn’t just relevant to academia or medievalists.

The article that’s been nagging away at me is in many ways a great read. It’s amazingly detailed in its close reading; it’s full of insight about the influence of Biblical hermeneutics on medieval romance.* It’s also fifteen years old, so I am sure there are things that might have been written differently now. But, it bothered me.

The author, Monica Brzezinski Potkay, is talking about the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – a romance in which a married lady exerts some considerable pressure on a man to sleep with her. She surprises him as he’s naked in bed, and – as Potkay points out – she draws on the romance convention of treating rape as a normal form of interaction between men and women to imply, archly, that he could force her to have sex if he wanted.

This is quite disturbing for modern readers. But Potkay’s point is not about the suggested rape – which doesn’t happen – but about the rhetoric of the romance in general. She makes reference to Saint Jerome’s predictably misogynistic comparison of a person interpreting Scriptural text to a man forcibly ripping off a woman’s clothing in order to sleep with her. This, she explains, is also offered as a mode of interpretation in the romance text, with the hero, Gawain, attempting to ‘interpret’ the women he meets through this form of figurative rape. Yet, the text performs a ‘critique’ of this mode of interpretation, empowering its female characters with the capacity to interpret for themselves. Thus:

“Sir Gawain can teach that men should acknowledge and beware the violence concealed in their own behavior, for that violence can be turned against them. The rapist can easily become raped.”

There are two things going on here. The first is the structure of the text, and the kind of interpretation it invites: this, as Potkay argues and as many people would agree, shows the women of the romance to be rather more skilled than the hero in controlling the twists and turns of narrative. The second, however, is that metaphor of rape. As a metaphor for textual interpretation, it has plenty of interest, and Potkay is, of course, doing nothing so crude as to think literally about raped women raping men.

Yet, still, that claim bothered me. The rapist can easily become raped. Easily? Raped? Well, no. In the space of that romance, in medieval culture, in modern culture, women do not ‘easily’ rape their rapists. Nor do I find it easy to imagine anyone would want to. There is a gendered structure to sexual violence, which is not easily flipped around, as if both men and women were equal. At this point, then the metaphor fails: if interpretation of a text is something that can be gender-flipped without unsettling the underlying gender hierarchy, then no, it is not like rape.

This is a point which, I suspect, plenty of queer theorists would find deeply crude and unsubtle. You don’t understand. She doesn’t mean it literally. She’s just opening up the transgressive possibilities of the text. The term ‘rape’ isn’t meant that way. It’s only rhetorically violent.

Yes: this is all true. But, it is also true that, in this article, the word rape has ceased to mean what it means. It has ceased to be a useful term for describing that act, and has instead become just one more way to imply that gender hierarchies can be playfully flipped over.

My title for this post might seem a problem to some. Rhetorical violence is, after all, difficult to separate from ‘actual’ violence: should we even make a distinction? After all, most people will know what it’s like to read something and feel a very real physical response to it: pulse leaping, hands shaking, the works. And it’s not just about personal responses: the very fact that a debate exists about whether there are ‘grey areas’ in rape, itself contributes to keeping alive the view that there are grey areas, and perpetuates rape. A conversation about whether or not women lie about rape gives rapists crucial cover to do what they do. And so on. These are not ‘performative acts’ of speech, speeches that enact what they describe, such as saying ‘I do’ at a wedding. But their consequences can be measured quite directly in the real world. And what is at stake, in some rhetoric, is not the fictional power structure in a medieval romance, but the real relationships between living people.

So, why distinguish between rhetorical violence and actual violence? My difficulty with Potkay’s article (and with this debate more widely) is that I know who is allowed to interpret text. If I say, this article is rhetorically violent, that it is using the concept of rape in a way that contributes to rape culture and makes it harder for us to talk about the gendered power structure behind the act, then I will be held to be ‘misinterpreting’. I will be told I do not understand the subtle nuances of Potkay’s use of the term ‘rape’ in this context. And yet, that’s not a criticism everyone is expected to take.

Something I have found difficult, recently, has been the response to the letter in the Observer about debate in universities, which I signed. It’s a tiny, tiny issue if you’re not in certain circles, and a rather bigger one if you are (as Mary Beard found out). I haven’t kept up with all of the responses, partly because there were many signatories (many of whom I don’t know personally, and some I’m proud to say I do know). But I have noticed that a common response has been to characterise this letter, and the debates it discusses, as literally violent. Not rhetorically violent, but violent in the way a performative speech act might be violent, or even violent in a direct physical sense. Discussing the Nordic model (the context here is sex work, if you’re not familiar), for example, is characterised as a form of violence that ‘endangers lives’ (I’m quoting Marika Rose, who spoke to me about this on twitter, but similar phrases were flying about everywhere). In this context, there is no ‘interpretation’ to be done: the gap between rhetorical and actual violence has closed up fast, for there’s no comeback to people repeatedly telling you there mere fact you have spoken, is violence.

Patently, these two attitudes towards ‘rhetorical’ violence should not be able to coexist. The one presumes the speaker’s perfect right to define the terms of debate, and to describe any violence in language as merely rhetorical, and therefore beyond the reach of critique. Thus, I am misinterpreting Potkay: violence is only rhetorical. The other presumes that the mere act of speaking is, in itself, actual violence, and no amount of interpretation can change this. In my experience, an awful lot of people seem to hold both positions simultaneously, and so the position from which we can speak becomes wafer-thin.

The result is the more general application of the specific problem Potkay’s article gives rise to. Just as, there, rape becomes something we can no longer properly name, something divorced from its social context, so too here, violence becomes impossible to pin down, impossible to name. And that means it’s impossible to fight.

Note

* Monica Brzezinski Potkay, ‘The Violence of Courtly Exegesis in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, inRepresenting Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, eds. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 97-124.

To be clear: I don’t believe (honestly) that discussion of the Nordic model does do violence to women. Nor do I even believe supporting it does violence to women. I’m not sure I’m right here, and I wouldn’t set myself up as such. But, I think my views here are less important than the shape of this wider issue of how we communicate about rhetorical and actual violence.

How we explain misogyny in fiction: Malory’s Morte Darthur and Game of Thrones

I spent this past weekend at the Romance in Medieval Britain conference in Bristol, which was one of the nicest conferences I’ve ever attended. We listened to a lot of serious academic papers. But we also did the less serious stuff, including an obligatory moan about the number of mind-numbingly bad articles that seek to validate Game of Thrones with spurious parallels to medieval England*.

George R. R. Martin in happier times. From Robert de Boron’s prose Merlin.

I have been struggling with this issue. I enjoy GoT. I don’t enjoy the standard terminology for explaining away the misogynistic dodgy bits. ‘Sexposition’ casts the nastiest scenes as  mere narrative devices (albeit an unpleasant ones). The term takes agency out of the picture. We’re supposed to place the messy situation where we sympathise with characters whom we know to be propping up Westeros’s thriving brothel culture beyond the reach of analysis. That’s comfortable, but it’s also reductive and silencing.

Yet, an increasing number of people who seem to feel that it’s terribly important to explain away the misogyny in a rigorous, real-world way. The most inane arguments are a straight draw between ‘well, it was all, like, violent and nasty in history too ….’ or ‘but they’re Strong Women so it’s less upsetting seeing them raped/murdered/treated like objects‘.

I’m never quite sure how to respond to this last one, except to gawp a little bit at the levels of (unintentional, I am aware) offensiveness in that argument. What bothers me about these articles isn’t that they’re dubious history or dodgy feminism (though they’re often both), but that they’re trying so hard to insist that we need to be educated in the real, concrete, intellectual arguments in favour of GoT. If you don’t get it, well, you’re just less subtle, less sophisticated.

The parallels between GoT and medieval romance are actually pretty striking, much more so than between the TV show and the Wars of the Roses. We have an icestuous brother and sister … their murderous, throne-stealing offspring … dead warriors who come eerily back to life**… a lot of in-fighting between rival kings … prominent bastard children … lots of men called Sir this and that who carry complicated pictorial banners … oh, and dragons. Yep, full house. And that’s just Malory’s Morte Darthur.

Morally ambiguous and Not Dead Yet: that’s pretty much King Arthur.

The Morte, if you don’t know it, is a long, rambling, chaotic series of Arthurian stories, mostly translated and partly composed by a prisoner of war at the end of the fifteenth century, and printed by Caxton a little later. The story, like Game of Thrones, starts out looking like traditional fantasy epic: lots of complicated family trees and awkward exposition dialogue, a rape presented as sex, and set-piece battles I skip over feeling vaguely guilty. It veers towards Raymond E. Feist on a bad day.

But, much like GoT, it does get better.  Malory has a thing for delivering revelations with a casual, heartless speed that somehow underlines their poignancy. There’s a scene where Balin, the hero of the early part of the story (spoiler: he dies. Everybody dies) runs through a castle fighting his enemy King Pellam. As he lands a blow on the king, the castle collapses around them and they lie crushed in the rubble for three days:

“And then came Merlin there, and took up Balin, and gave him a good horse, for his own was dead, and told him to ride out of that country. ‘I would have my damosel,’ said Balin. ‘Look,’ said Merlin, ‘where she lieth dead’.” 

‘Look where she lieth dead.’ The woman in this effigy is actually Philippa Chaucer, and the picture is from Jonathan Hsy’s information-packed site on Chaucer, Gower, and late-medieval literature.

It’s at this point that Balin finds out that his sword blow has not only wounded his enemy and caused the castle to fall, but has also reverberated through the surrounding country, killing the people, and ultimately setting in motion the search for the Holy Grail, which carried the blood of Christ, to heal the striken king again.

Angel bearing the Grail before the king. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Fr. 1453, f. 283.

This is all beautifully written – and you really need to read it or buy the audio tape (there is one), because it’s great. But you notice that the woman, Balin’s lover, is just so much collateral damage, killed horribly as a result of something even Balin did not intend to set in motion. It doesn’t stop there: Malory’s Guinevere is morally ambiguous at best, and narrowly escapes being burnt alive only to die almost forgotten in a nunnery. Her opposite number (think Caitlyn Stark to Guinevere’s Cersei Lannister … ish …) is Elaine, who acts out every misogynist twit’s favourite cautionary tale that never, ever happened.

Attitudes towards sexual violence in the Morte are, again, disturbingly close to what we see in Game of Thrones. Malory makes rape an essential element of his fiction, which you can’t avoid any more than the ‘sexposition’ of the TV show. For example, there’s the giant rapist of Mont St Michel, who serves as an example of brute force against whom Arthur can show off his strength, landing a blow that “swappis his genytrottys in sondir” (cleaves his genitals apart) and disembowels him. The word ‘genytrottys’ is picked out in gory red on the page, the colour usually reserved for proper names. But Malory doesn’t leave this as a simple issue: rape is a fact of life in the Morte, responsible for the conceptions of both Arthur and (arguably) Lancelot’s son Galahad. The moral status of rapists is ambiguous, and the grey area around the act itself is about a mile wide. 

Now, some would argue this is just a failure to understand historical context. In medieval England, the meanings of the word ‘rape’ include abduction, and even, it’s been suggested, the abduction of a perfectly willing woman against the will of her male relatives. Both Malory and Chaucer were accused of this crime in real life, which makes their prominent stories of Arthurian rape more than a little bit difficult – triggering, even – for students to talk about in class.

This is something that was never acknowledged when I was studying these texts for the first time. In fact, to my shame, I only really thought about how to make it an explicit issue in my teaching when I was preparing for next term’s workshop on tragedy, and came across Liz Gloyn’s insightful post. She writes about how she deals with teaching rape narratives in Classical Literature to classes which, as she points out, are statistically almost certain to contain rape survivors. This made me realize that, while most books I read on Malory and rape are quick to point out the historical differences that allow us to avoid the uncomfortable thought that this author might have been a rapist in the modern sense, they seldom dwell on the other side of the issue. We are in exactly the same situation as modern media, quick to pre-empt the tide (yes, this is sarcasm) of false rape allegations but slow to acknowledge the commonness of the crime.

There’s a worrying situation where people who feel uncomfortable with certain texts or certain authors don’t speak up for fear of sounding like philistines. I’d like to think that most people who write about the sexism in GoT, and most people who work on historical fictions of sexual violence, are aware that these fictional texts can be triggering. But it’s not the fiction that needs explaining away, with neat terms like ‘sexposition’ or with the claim that it’s really a history lesson. What we need to tackle are the expectations around the fiction, that stress historical ‘reality’ or ‘authenticity’ but fall silent before acknowledging the reality of readers’ experiences that form a less comfortable context.

Notes

* Yes, I do know that’s what George R. R. Martin says. No, I don’t think that makes him right.

** Ok, I admit: I’m thinking of Malory’s Sir Colgrevaunce of Gore, and we’ve never been sure if he’s actually dead, or just a continuity error. But I’m sure there are zombies kicking around somewhere, too.