The (Extra)ordinary of Humbleness and Mutual Recognition in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary1
p. 91-104
Résumé
Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013. It has been widely praised for its style: exquisite, lyrical and moving, but also devastating and unflinching. So much success contrasts with its humble de/re-construction of the Virgin Mary. Tóibín’s novella features a real woman mourning the death of her son while she is being watched over and silenced by his followers who plan to create Christianity. The reduction of the New Testament to a fable designed by Marcus and the Apostles makes the ‘true’ story Mary tells more humane and (extra)ordinary. Her confession is the way for us to reconcile with our vulnerability and humanness and that of the Other. In this light, the paper analyses the novella as an exercise of ethical compromise from Emmanuel Lévinas’s openness to the Other and Paul Ricœur’s conception of reciprocity. With this purpose, the analysis focuses on four axes whereby, I contend, The Testament of Mary reconfigures the Gospel in the voice of a first-century woman who happens to be the Virgin Mary: the humbleness of a) her discourse, b) her role as mother and human, c) her spirituality, and d) her land, then a Roman colony.
Texte intégral
1From Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary2 this paper claims the Virgin to be a controversial figure needing revision. In re-appraising the mythical persona through the flesh and blood person behind, the novella brings forth issues like vulnerability, humbleness, reciprocity, and trauma feeling/transference and representation. The Testament of Mary features a ‘real’ woman who mourns the death of her son while she is being watched over and silenced by his followers who plan to create Christianity. Tóibín himself argues he found inspiration for his ambivalent character from two paintings of the Virgin in Venice. Titian’s Assumption in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, he argues:
Is almost seven metres high, it hangs behind the altar of the church. There are two lovely divisions in the composition. The first division is the pale sky between the shocked mortals who stand on the ground and the cloud above them, lifted by angels, which bears the mother of God in her wonderful red robe, with a blue robe falling away. The second division is the golden sky above Mary, to which she soars with her arms outstretched towards God who is above. This is the sky of heaven.3
2In contrast, though complementing the former, Tintoretto’s Crucifixion in The Scuola Grande di San Rocco:
[i] s rooted in the real world, rather than the world of dreams [. . .]. The painting [. . .] is more than 12 metres wide. Its size means that the idea of transcendental space soaring towards the heavens above is replaced with the vast, long, busy world around. Tintoretto shows that while Jesus hung on a cross until he died, many other things happened too. If the sound of the Titian is of angels’ unearthly voices, this painting by Tintoretto is filled with the brutal noise of the world.
(Tóibín 2012)
3Tóibín’s novella is therefore a metafictional (inter) text where the religious and human referent is doubly deferred through painting and writing. The present paper primarily addresses how the gap between both paintings explains the genesis of The Testament of Mary as a liminal event. The novella is torn between tradition and revision, Truth and sincerity, Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘grand narratives’ and humble words, the Same and the Other, the sacred and the mundane, being and doing. Such tension, as will be shown, does not downgrade the Virgin as a cultural referent. Instead, her humbleness and relationality rely on, redefine and enhance the myth.
4All this said, I contend that The Testament of Mary is a thought-provoking text which relies on humbleness, love and truth-seeking for readers to reconcile with what it means to be (a) human; i.e. to be human per se, and to be human in relation to others. With this purpose, the protagonist’s story revises truth as an elusive (yet desirable) concept that the novella, this paper argues, articulates in four main axes, namely Mary’s discourse, her role as mother and human being, her spirituality, and her land, Rome-dominated Israel. Thus, the text raises some current concerns mentioned above, albeit vicariously. To prove my point I will firstly make reference to the religious iconography The Testament of Mary relies on. Next, I will briefly address Emmanuel Lévinas’s and Paul Ricœur’s clashing conceptions of alterity and relationality and decide which, if any, applies to Tóibín’s novella. Finally, Dominick LaCapra’s ‘empathic unsettlement’ will help to delve into Mary’s traumatic witnessing of her son’s death as the ultimate manifestation of relationality in the text.
5Tóibín’s Mary’s discourse is not only her voice but also the iconography through which she is revealed. The Testament of Mary recasts the twofold conception of the sacred in Christianity. The Kyrios image (Greek: ρ), as ‘the Lord and Master,’ and its equivalent of Mary as Queen of Heaven, merge with the Franciscan ideal of Jesus, who is born and dies in humility for the infinite Other, and the Virgin as the Cistercian intercessor. The Testament of Mary invokes both iconographies, as Tóibín’s own references to the paintings of Titian and Tintoretto prove. It is ambivalent, standing at the intersection between the verticality of the former and the horizontality of the latter. In other words, the novella is torn between the view of the arriviste followers of Jesus, who dream of a Titian-like Virgin ‘in all its glory,’ and her ‘nightmares about [. . .] an untidy cruelty,’ (Tóibín 2012) as in Tintoretto’s. The Virgin’s Assumption is seven metres high whereas Christ’s Crucifixion is thirteen metres wide; one appeals to the mystical and metaphysical, the other to the bodily and human.
6As the primordial mother, Tóibín’s Mary is devoid of everything: her son, her memory, her house, even her husband’s chair. When her captors take hold of it, she rebukes them earnestly: ‘“Do not sit in that chair,” [. . .] “The chair,” I said, “is left for someone who will not return”’ (Tóibín 2013, 20–21). The chair is here a symbolic token. It is related to the Western preference for verticality and height to represent power over ground-level nature as opposed to the horizontality of lines in Eastern cultures.4 The throne, ‘chair’ or ‘seat’ in its Greek original, is thus a mark of (meta) physical superiority and power. Yet the iconography of the scene goes beyond. When Tóibín’s Mary claims for a chair not for herself, but for her husband, she is drawing on the ‘Madonna of humility.’ This type of late-Medieval painting portrays a haloed, yet dethroned, Virgin sitting on a cushion or on the ground, the ‘humus’ in Latin and the etymological origin of ‘humility.’ Like this iconographic representation, Tóibín’s character holds an ambiguous position, both earthly and heavenly. In being often represented as a Maria lactans, the twofold nature of the ‘Madonna of humility’ only increases. She breast-feeds her baby, who, however, happens to be God’s son.5 Tóibín’s Mary addresses and updates this ambivalence again when reproving her adult son, a powerful man with ‘no memory of years before, when he needed [her] breast for milk’ (Tóibín 2013, 54).
7Despite being Jesus’s mother, the character is just a woman, a prisoner, living frugally and frightened. Paradoxically, though, her humbleness is challenging. It is a whisper, but also a scream of pain and grief. Her vulnerability is also her strength. Forced to remember the story her captors wish, and although ‘memory fills [her] body as much as blood and bones,’ (Tóibín 2013, 4) she finds the satisfaction ‘which comes from the certainty that [she] will not say anything that is not true’ (Tóibín 2013, 4–5). The reduction of the New Testament to a fable designed by the Apostles to reach power makes the ‘true’ story Mary tells the reader more humane and closer; her confession is the way for us to reconcile with our vulnerability and humanness and that of the Other. The novella is an exercise in ethical compromise, for it is fundamentally the story of a sincere woman who opens herself to the face of the Other, here embodied in her primordial conception of spirituality. Thus, such an apparently simple tale told by an apparently ordinary woman addresses (and is addressed by) the ethics of alterity in both Emmanuel Levinas’s and Paul Ricœur’s terms. And once again, The Testament of Mary proves dual, endorsing and rebuffing their opposite views.
8Tomás Tratanský proposes a ‘reciprocal asymmetry’ to reconcile Levinas’s ‘ethical asymmetry’ and Ricœur’s claim for reciprocity and recognition in the encounter with the other.6 Before Tratanský, some voices had considered Levinas’s stand with respect to the Other as unfeasible, if not straightforwardly excessive, empty and radical. Ricœur’s Oneself as Another7 and Autrement8 are particularly insightful. What he most firmly disapproves is that ‘Lévinas’s entire philosophy rests on the initiative of the other in the intersubjective relation.’ (Ricœur 1997, 188) For Levinas, the ‘I’ is completely subsumed into the Other. He argues that ‘The Other [Autrui] would count more than me.’9 There is no correlation whereby the ‘I’ would achieve its identity and the Other its alterity. The Levinasian Other is alien, independent, and transcendent, thus making up a dissymmetry with respect to the ‘I’ that cancels out the giving and receiving that Ricœur’s ethics of mutuality elicits (Ricœur 1992, 189–90). The superiority and unassumable nature of the Other in Levinas result in a triple lack in selfhood, namely ‘reception, discrimination, and recognition.’10 Accordingly, Ricœur considers Levinas’s self as deeply irrelational, solipsistic, and desperately passive, ‘to the point of substitution. A subject, he points out, is a hostage.’ (Ricœur 1992, 112) Richard Cohen argues that the clash between both philosophers responds to Levinas’s radical rejection of a Cartesian epistemological framework Ricœur still holds to, albeit in a critical fashion. Levinas’s rupturist face-to-face relation, which precedes justice itself, is illogical, if not scandalous, for critics like Ricœur, whom Richard Weaver calls literalist readers (Cohen 316). By contrast, drawing on Weaver, Cohen suggests that Levinas’s discourse transcends any literalism. Instead, it appeals to ‘a real potentiality or possible actuality, the priority of goodness over being’ because ‘the human is not the measure, but is measured by morality’ (Cohen 316).
9Levinas’s Other is ‘not reduced to somebody or something in the world’.11 In this sense, the Other in The Testament of Mary could not be Christ, no matter how ‘full with power’ (Tóibín 2013, 54) he is. Tóibín’s Mary constitutes a problematic junction between Levinas and Ricœur which seems to draw on the feminist ethics of care.12 Such ethics is a feminist reappraisal of caring relations and practices traditionally assigned to women. Mary is both self and other as woman and mother of Christ, protagonist and spectator of her own life. Yet, it is her human side and how it is articulated with respect to the Other that, this paper contends, prevails. Mary’s rapport to others endorses and challenges Levinas’s ethics. She apparently subsumes her ‘I’ to the Other, but eventually re-appraises herself by claiming her humanness. Drawing on the philosopher, Mary is responsible for the Other,13 her neighbour Farina, her son, the reader and her spirituality. However, and here is where the novella distances from Levinas, she eventually claims for reciprocity. The infinite responsibility of the ‘I’ to the Other/‘neighbour,’ as is claimed in the Gospels, is cancelled out in The Testament of Mary. Thus, the unbalanced giving and renunciation to the Other paradigmatic of Christ’s passion,14 whereby ‘he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,’15 is turned against itself. That is why, when the non-reciprocal self-sacrifice of Christ’s followers culminates in the Crucifixion, Tóibín’s Mary claims it worthless: ‘When you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it’ (Tóibín 2013, 102).
10Tatranský rejects Levinas’s stand whereby reciprocity ‘is a matter of politics, not ethics,’ since ethics and asymmetry precede and overcome politics and reciprocity (Tatranský 299). In a sense, the humanity of Tóibín’s character is so extraordinary that it merges the extreme moral potentiality claimed by Levinas with a sense of mutuality with the Other. Being part of a primordial pre-Christian culture that values truth, neighbourhood and simple life over Lyotard’s ‘grand narratives’ like the Sapiential Scriptures, Mary cannot understand the logic of her captors’ discourse. Hence, she prays to Artemis as the Goddess of fertility instead (Tóibín 2013, 13). Her extreme humanity paradoxically makes her transcend her human nature, which draws her close to Levinas’s moral ‘I.’ However, Mary also re-appraises Ricœur’s poetics of reciprocity and the relationality of the ethics of care. Unlike Kantian moral rationalism and universalizing discourse that sets subjects’individuality and independence, the caring interdependency that, in my view, Tóibín’s Mary embodies helps reconcile Levinas with Tóibín’s text. As a carer herself, she appreciates ‘emotions and relational capabilities that enable morally concerned persons in actual interpersonal contexts’ (Held 2006, 10). Tóibín’s heroine questions Christ’s Levinasian crucifixion as a gesture of hyperbolic love and passive submission to the Other. Being herself a hostage to the other (her son’s followers in the novella), she renounces being an eternal hostage to the Other and decides to reciprocate with those around her. Hence, Mary not only ‘is’ but also ‘does,’ caring for the other, ‘acting for self-and-other together’ (Held 2006, 12). This logic supports her relation with her neighbours—particularly Farina—with whom, using Ricœur’s term ‘agape,’ she establishes an asymmetric giving-receiving relation. This bilateral process, which breaks with Levinas’s unilaterality, is not simplistic, though. In its Greek original, the ‘agape’ addressed the love for humanity and truth as a whole. The hybrid status of Tóibín’s Mary explains her re-appropriation of ‘agape’ from her humble position: her love for the Other is as much as any human being’s can be. However, it is not, as Tatranský would argue, a ‘mere contractual agreement’ (Tatranský 301). It is from the irreducible otherness of each other that the reciprocal giving-receiving takes place. Each act is an ‘original act’ (Tatranský 305) with a logic of its own and not a mere reversal of the act that originally underpinned it.
11In embracing a (post-) Levinasian stand, the novella and its main character conflate Levinas’s (for some critics) unfeasible ethics and Ricœur’s epistemology. The result is a tension where Jesus’s unilateral sacrifice is both admired and rejected; likewise, motherhood is (a priori) an irreducible and asymmetrical (kind of) love, though it eventually ‘fails’ to be a total renunciation/giving to the O/other. In this sense, when Jesus dies in The Testament of Mary, and Mary leaves others to bury him, she suffers ‘grief [. . .] shock and shame’ (Tóibín 2013, 92). Her (liminal) humanity is proved by her vulnerability. Her drive for survival makes her fallible as a mother and as a human. And although the conscience of that fallibility/humility comes back to her just as trauma reverberates long after the traumatic episode itself takes place, it substantiates Mary’s inherent humanity and transcendence. Her divine/humble humanity is patent in her way of being and doing; particularly in the four aspects mentioned above that I will develop in what remains, namely her discourse, her role as a mother and a human being, her spirituality, and her motherland.
12Mary’s is not a Gospel, but neither is it a mere testimony. The hybrid status of the text is thus confirmed in its very name: Being called a ‘Testament,’ it constitutes an act of legal/religious truth. However, the fact that The Testament of Mary is written as a novella (instead of a novel) by a hostage is a statement of humility against the Bible and its Testaments. As concerns Mary’s voice (for it is narrated in the first person), it is exact, plain, bare. It is as if the economy of language and the simplicity of the truth her words exude granted her a moral legitimacy over her captors.’ The effect is thrilling, almost painful, for them and readers alike. The novella closes with Mary whispering words, ‘knowing that words matter,’ knowing that the words of the powerful ‘will thrive and prevail and [she] will die’ (Tóibín 2013, 103–104). She is (her words). And her words being humble and silenced, she has been effaced from history and her story. As the text progresses, she learns to decode that what she firstly does not ‘understand [. . .] is slowly growing in the world’ (Tóibín 2013, 3). Her revenge against her captors, her son’s murderers, is truth: ‘I no longer need tears. [. . .] I seek [. . .] merely solitude and some grim satisfaction which comes from the certainty that I will not say anything which is not true’ (Tóibín 2013, 5). Her truth is humble, devoid of the artifice her enemies look for. When she hears about the faith they are devising, she decides to boycott it by remaining silent (Tóibín 2013, 63). During the persecution, martyrdom and crucifixion of Christ, Mary’s discourse is reduced to virtual nothingness, a whisper, almost a silence. She becomes a spectator of pain and hatred whereby the reciprocity with the other is problematised. The mob’s satisfaction ‘could come only with shrieks of pain and torn flesh and broken bones’ (Tóibín 2013, 69). Once more, the bareness of her discourse renders her a reliable narrator and witness: it is truth in the nude, for she does not interfere in an apparently self-begetting discourse. Her pre-cortical fear humanises and ‘naturalises’ her (re-) actions. Being watchful, always alert, like a wild cat (Tóibín 2013, 95), Mary actively renegotiates the painful encounter with the other that, for Levinas, is the offender to be pardoned. Her initial passive reaction is a way of ‘non-doing.’ A witness to her son’s prosecution, she says nothing, does nothing, makes every effort not to be noticed (Tóibín 2013, 70). Her pain is so ‘real’ that it recalls that of an animal, i.e. pure and not culturally ‘infected’: ‘I cried out [. . .] and the cry would come from a part of me that is the core of me’ (Tóibín 2013, 74).
13Mary is (as) heavenly (as) Titian’s Assumption suggests; i.e. as long as she is able to reduce herself to her humanity, and her humanity to the essentials. That is why she can prove how discourse denies and elicits its own validity:
I don’t know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence. [. . .] I tell the truth not because it will change night into day [. . .] I speak simply because I can, [. . .] because the chance might not come again. (Tóibín 2013, 86–87)
14However, her humble discourse hides a humbling mission. She rearticulates the words ‘being written down,’ (Tóibín 2013, 99) those her son’s followers devise as the Christian dogma (such as her virginal conception or Jesus being the son of God) and that, in their words, ‘will change the world’ (Tóibín 2013, 99). She does so by mixing night and day, dreams and reality, the Virgin of Titian and Tintoretto, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Jesus’s resurrection is reduced to a dream both Mary and her niece Mary share. And although, she confesses, ‘it is hard to understand that our dreams matter,’ (Tóibín 2013, 88) she eventually confines dreams to the night and, hence, to the ‘unreal,’ (Tóibín 2013, 93) and she moves forward.
15Unlike her biblical alter ego, Tóibín’s protagonist is devoid of any mythic aura, at least in the classic sense. She is primarily a human being, a woman who gave birth to Jesus and, knowing him to be in danger, she tries to save him and, eventually, herself. As a mother, she loves and mourns him; as a human subject, she fears his enemies. In brief, she assumes her vulnerability and suffers for it. The novella starts featuring Mary as a prisoner leading a humble life. Afraid of human contact, she lives isolated until she approaches her neighbour Farina, whom she likes because ‘she [is] small, or smaller than [herself], or weaker-looking’ (Tóibín 2013, 11). Mostly in humble others does Mary expect to find truth and reliability and, most importantly, reciprocity. As hinted at above, the heroine and the novella identify genuine humanness with the animal, primitive and pre-cultural. Being left to tend the goats and watch over the olive trees grants Farina an authenticity to reciprocate with (Tóibín 2013, 12). Mary herself is closer to ‘truth’ when she leads a simple life: ‘I spent my days easily, [. . .] I went out once a day to draw water and feed the animals and tend the garden and the trees [. . .] But I did not need much’ (Tóibín 2013, 53). This life, close to nature and the animals, recalls St Francis Assisi’s ideal of contemplation and communion with God, as well as veneration of poverty. Drawing on the saint, Mary’s poverty prompts her to approach/open to the Other: ‘I needed very little nourishment. Sometimes one of the neighbours left food hanging from a hook [. . .] and when night fell I collected it’ (Tóibín 2013, 55). Her extreme humanity relies on a twofold contradictory drive. Mary does not trust others, living in the dark. But she must open to the Other in an asymmetrical mutuality if she wants to survive as human body and spirit.
16Apart from being a human, the Virgin Mary is the quintessential Mother in the Christian tradition. The way The Testament of Mary de-sacralises and re-sacralises the religious figure into a character is praiseworthy. On being extremely vulnerable, all too human, Tóibín’s protagonist loses and regains the aura of the ‘actual’ Virgin. She refuses almost everything and, being extremely poor and humble, she is only left the essentials of humanness. Paradoxically though, such an act of denial goes beyond the common human. Her total acceptance of herself as vulnerable is grandiose. This duality between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary is patent when she goes to the Wedding Feast at Canaan with Jesus. There she claims and refuses to be the mother to the man her son has become: ‘And then time created the man who sat beside me at the wedding [. . .], the man not heeding me, hearing no one, a man filled with power who seemed to have no memory of years before, when he needed m [e]’ (Tóibín 2013, 54). However, Jesus’s power proves ephemeral and she returns to him. When he is made a prisoner for blasphemy, she dreams of escaping with him from the furious crowd (Tóibín 2013, 64). She does so in dreams because in the reality of fiction she feels paralysed, a mere ‘thing,’ when her son screams in pain: ‘I watched in horror, but I did not move or make a sound [. . .] It would have made no difference. I would have been cast aside like something blown in on the wind’ (Tóibín 2013, 77). Although Mary tries to justify her inaction, she cannot help the traumatic recurrence of guilt, the transference of pain from her son’s body to her conscience, which definitely conflates giving-receiving in Ricœur’s (and the ethics of care) with Mary’s Levinasian ‘passivity’ addressed above. If she had fought for him, her conscience speaks, ‘ [i] t would not have mattered, but at least [she] would not have to go over and over it now.’ (Tóibín 2013, 77). Yet, in line with her sincere discourse, the heroine claims her right to be afraid, to disengage from her son in danger, which explains why she empathises, though not over-identifies, with her son (as) the other. As a witness to Christ’s crucifixion, the ultimate gesture of humility in Western culture,16 Mary’s role draws on Dominick LaCapra’s ‘empathic unsettlement.’ For LaCapra, it is ethically dubious for the witness to identify with the victim and thus appropriate his/her position and voice. Therefore, the role of empathic unsettlement, he argues
[i] nvolves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place. Opening oneself to empathic unsettlement is, as I estimated, a desirable affective dimension of inquiry which complements and supplements empirical research and analysis.17
17As a witness to her son’s death, Mary feels her pain, without objectifying his pain as her own: ‘Despite the panic, despite the desperation, the shrieking, despite the fact that his heart and his flesh had come from my heart and my flesh, despite the pain I felt [. . .], the pain was his and not mine’ (Tóibín 2013, 84). Thus, although his pain is somehow transferred onto her, she eventually confesses her truth, namely that mother’s love cannot rival the survival drive: ‘I will say it because it has to be said [. . .]: I did it to save myself’ (Tóibín 2013, 85). Once more, Tóibín’s protagonist defies an orthodox conception of divinity, opening to the Other bilaterally.
18Mary’s re-appropriation of motherhood prompts a thorough revision of her Biblical alter ego. Thus, like (and connected with) her discourse, motherhood and humanity, her spirituality transcends Christianity. The Virgin is traditionally represented as a caring or suffering mother. As such, she ‘is’ as far as she relates to the Other. The caring practice of mothering Mary symbolises is the utmost expression of the emotional relationality of ‘the ethics of care’ that defies Kant’s categorical imperative and individual rationalism (Held 2006, 24, 26). However, in The Testament of Mary, she ‘is’ paradoxically because she is both related to and autonomous from the other’s pain. In consequence, she suffers, but also tries to survive, leading a spirituality of her own. In a significant cultural re-turn defying the iconic Virgin in the Pietà, she worships Earthly Goddess Artemis.
19‘Pietà’ in Latin made reference to the act of bowing down before the Gods out of emotion and fear. In Catholic iconography it has come to represent the Virgin holding and crying over her dead son’s body. Titian’s rare ‘Pietà’ will help illustrate Mary’s spirituality in The Testament of Mary. In the painting, Moses and the Sybil of the Helesponto flank the Virgin. The Sybil being a prophetess in Greek mythology, her presence draws a link with the novella. Tóibín’s heroine confesses she has heard no one speak about the future (Tóibín 2013, 25). Thus, she points to how Christianity transcended the real, i.e. the present, with Christ’s resurrection as a promise of future. The act of returning to life after death, which Mary demystifies twice (Lazarus’s resurrection being a condemnation rather than a bliss, and Jesus’s being just a dream of hers and her cousin’s), clashes with her down-to-earth conception of spirituality. In other words, her captors claim a mastery over time that Mary’s presentness cannot even figure out. Titian’s Sybil is akin to the equally pagan Artemis. The character does not think of her Goddess as a prophetess, but as an interpellator and mother: ‘I speak to her in whispers [. . .] bountiful with her arms outstretched and her many breasts waiting to nurture. [. . .] I tell her how much I long now to sleep in the dry earth, to go to dust peacefully’ (Tóibín 2013, 103). Death, as a return to the earth, is thus the closest Mary comes to Christian resurrection. Death is far more sacred for her than it is for her captors. She opens to the spiritual Other from perfect humbleness. No one, she argues, ‘should tamper with the fullness that is death. Death needs time and silence’ (Tóibín 2013, 31). Such respect does not prevent her from being active, moving to Artemis, her own Sybil, her warranty and conception of the ‘future.’
20Mary bemoans her son’s followers’ Church, hierarchical and male-chauvinist: ‘Within the group of men I noticed that there was a set of hierarchies [. . .] who demanded food from the other women’ (Tóibín 2013, 67). A ‘mere’ woman confronted with the immense Other (related to Levinas’s), which for her is both spiritual and physical, Mary feels bewildered and disempowered. Yet, such disempowerment is not negative. It just confirms how capable she is of understanding what it takes for a human to be conscious of his/her limits. Drawing on Aquinas,18 Mary submits to the Other, but also reacts to the other. That is, she ‘is below’ what she cannot understand—the physical and metaphysical limits of her experience—but acts against those who threaten that order with business-like projects. The strength of Mary’s spirituality is rather original, rising inextricably from her own materiality. Apart from the maternal instinct to protect her son, she claims to be ‘merely flesh and blood and bone’ (Tóibín 2013, 74). Even mothering Christ is a simple spiritual event: ‘It comes from the body itself and makes its way into the spirit and it does not seem ordinary.’ (Tóibín 2013, 100)
21Finally, The Testament of Mary features Israel as a marginal Roman colony controlled by Imperial and local authorities. The echoes of the British rule over Ireland and its political implications (particularly on rebellion, contestation and terrorism) are also a referent that puts forward the ambivalent poetics and politics of power and submission/humility addressed so far. I do not mean the religious outburst in first-century Israel can be plainly extrapolated to post-colonial Ireland. But the confluence of both scenarios in the novella’s discourse can help delve into current politics more satisfactorily. In the text, Christ is a martyr not for being the son of God but because a group of followers say so. Moreover, this religious movement seems to follow a teleological pattern the narrator-character cannot work out:
There is a new strangeness. [. . .] There is talk of a revolt against the Romans, or a revolt against the teachers. Some people say that the Romans will overthrow the teachers, and others that the teachers are behind it all, but it is also possible that there will be no revolt or indeed that there will be one against everything we have known before. (Tóibín 2013, 39)
22Mary censors the atmosphere of conspiracy whereby Jewish leaders and Roman authorities seem to control each other, as both of them do with Jewish people. The crucifixion is merely a political act, a down-to-earth event closer to Tintoretto’s painting than to Titian’s. Trivial (rather than extraordinary) things happen whereas Christ is dying on the cross.
23Despite the overall sense of confusion and the surveillance of authorities, Mary acknowledges an unprecedented atmosphere of freedom: ‘The talk was freer than I had heard before, and it was against the Romans, the Pharisees, the Elders, against the Temple itself, against laws and taxes. And women spoke almost as much as men’ (Tóibín 2013, 61). Issues like free speech—particularly that of minorities— against power is a form of action Mary values. As mentioned above, it would be rather simplistic to equate the Irish question with the Jewish revolts against Roman rule. Yet, in both cases, power structures, both domestic and from abroad, menace the right to spirituality Mary advocates. Tóibín’s text places human rights (as both ethics and politics) before power structures and organisations that, with more or less legitimacy, struggle for supremacy. I am not equating the coloniser with the colonised, be it Rome and England, or Israel and Ireland. I am not equating either the IRA with the religious (for some also political) movement led by Christ in first-century Palestine. The Testament of Mary only draws our attention to what happens in the margins whereas grand narratives narrate what is alleged to really matter. In the current crisis, the novella and its protagonist’s human-inflated spirituality and rebuke of power structures prove culturally significant and politically edifying.
24Tóibín’s Mary is disturbingly human. She is paradoxically granted a divine humanness that threatens the narratives that co-opted the religious/historical figure. The character’s humility both endorses and contests a long tradition. She adopts the essentials of Christianity, revising Jesus’s love for the other/neighbour by reconciling Levinas’s extreme submission to the other and Ricœur’s mutuality. The effect is, as mentioned above, close to the current feminist ethics of care. Thus, the novella updates the way Christ’s message has been transmitted for two millennia. Rather than assuming humility as a ritual, as Christian tradition (particularly in the Crucifixion) has done, it is inscribed in Mary’s life and conscience. She assumes her selfhood as a principle of love, but also one of active and asymmetric mutuality with the other and of ‘truth.’ In fact, her conception of truth comes from her vulnerability and fallibility, not from Kant’s rational thought. She is sincere because she is truthful to herself, as her discourse, humanness, motherhood, spirituality and subaltern status prove in her ambivalent narration.
Notes de bas de page
1 The research carried out for writing this article is part of a project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) (code FFI2012-32719). The author is also grateful for the support of the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H05).
2 Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (London: Penguin, 2013).
3 Colm Tóibín, ‘The Inspiration for The Testament of Mary,’ The Guardian 19 October 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/19/inspiration-testament-mary-colm-toibin.
4 John Fraim, Battle of Symbols (Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 2012) 147–148.
5 Nuria Blaya Estrada, ‘La Virgen de la humildad. Origen y significado,’ Ars Longa 6 (1995): 163–171.
6 Tomás Tratanský, ‘A Reciprocal Asymmetry? Levinas’s Ethics Reconsidered,’ Ethical Perspectives 15.3 (2008): 293–307.
7 Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992).
8 Paul Ricœur, Autrement (Paris: PUF, 1997).
9 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969) 277.
10 Richard Cohen, Ethics Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Lévinas (Cambridge: CUP, 2001) 300.
11 Simon Critchley, The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas (Cambridge: CUP, 2008) 65.
12 Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care. Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford: OUP, 2006).
13 Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique et Infini (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2000) 94.
14 Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2001) 216.
15 Philippians 2: 8.
16 Philippians 2: 8 and Isaiah 53: 3.
17 Dominick Lacapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001) 178.
18 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gent, book 4, ch. 55, passage 17, trans. Joseph Rickaby (London: Burns and Oates, 2005) 647–648.
Auteur
Centro Universitario de la Defensa, University of Zaragoza, Spain
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
À la rencontre de la différence
Traces diasporiques et espaces de créolisation
Robin Cohen et Olivia Sheringham Elise Trogrlic (trad.)
2020
L’androgyne dans la littérature britannique contemporaine
Métamorphose d’une figure
Justine Gonneaud
2020
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean
Cultural and Literary Perspectives
Markus Arnold, Corinne Duboin et Judith Misrahi-Barak (dir.)
2020
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 1
Diasporas and Cultures of Migrations
Judith Misrahi-Barak et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2014
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 2
Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy
Sarah Barbour, David Howard, Thomas Lacroix et al. (dir.)
2015
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 3
African Americans and the Black Diaspora
Corinne Duboin et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2016
Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature
Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier (dir.)
2013