The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity VOLUME 6: WAR and PEACE, SEX and VIOLENCE
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The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity VOLUME 6: WAR AND PEACE, SEX AND VIOLENCE JAN M. ZIOLKOWSKI THE JUGGLER OF NOTRE DAME VOLUME 6 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity Vol. 6: War and Peace, Sex and Violence Jan M. Ziolkowski https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Vol. 6: War and Peace, Sex and Violence. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0149 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://www. openbookpublishers.com/product/822#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers. com/product/822#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-539-5 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-540-1 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-541-8 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-542-5 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-543-2 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0149 Cover image: Arman, Jongleur de Notre Dame, 1994, cast bronze statue with light fixtures, 231 x 90 x 82 cm, Arman Studio, New York. Photographer: Francois Fernandez, courtesy of Arman Studio, NY. Cover design: Anna Gatti All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Note to the Reader 3 1. Juggler Allies 5 France 8 Great Britain 33 United States 34 2. The Juggler by Jingoism: Nazis and Their Neighbors 39 Virginal Visions 39 Belgium 45 The Netherlands 53 Germany 67 Curt Sigmar Gutkind 69 Hans Hömberg 73 After the War 76 Austria 77 3. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Juggler 89 Richard Sullivan, Notre Dame Professor 92 R. O. Blechman, Cartoon Juggler 103 Robert Lax, Poet among Acrobats 116 Tony Curtis, Prime-Time Juggler 120 W. H. Auden, The Ballad of Barnaby 123 Music from Massenet to Peter Maxwell Davies 135 4. Membranes of Things Past 147 Misremembering and Remembering 147 Getting a Rise from the Male Member 155 Jung’s Jongleur 167 5. Positively Medieval: The Once and Future Juggler 173 The Juggler’s Prospects 173 Gropius vs. the Gothic Ivory Tower 181 The Tumbler’s Tumble 186 Michel Zink Reminds France 192 We All Need the Middle Ages 197 The Simplicity of Atonement 199 Acknowledgments 209 Notes 217 Notes to Chapter 1 217 Notes to Chapter 2 228 Notes to Chapter 3 248 Notes to Chapter 4 270 Notes to Chapter 5 276 Notes to Acknowledgments 284 Bibliography 285 Abbreviations 285 Archives 285 Referenced Works 285 List of Illustrations 305 Index 315 To Frits van Oostrom “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” —George Orwell, 1984 Note to the Reader This volume completes a series. Together, the six form The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity.1 The book as a whole probes one medieval story, its reception in culture from the Franco-Prussian War until today, and the placement of that reception within medieval revivalism as a larger phenomenon. The study has been designed to proceed largely in chronological order, but the progression across the centuries and decades is relieved by thematic chapters that deal with topics not restricted to any single time period. This sixth and final installment, labeled “War and Peace, Sex and Violence,” follows the story of the story from the Second World War down to the present day. The narrative was put to an astonishing range of uses during the war years. In the fifties and sixties, it experienced what turned out to be a last hurrah in both high culture and mass culture. Afterward, it became the object of periodic playfulness and parody before slipping into at least temporary oblivion. The chapters are followed by endnotes. Rather than being numbered, these notes are keyed to the words and phrases in the text that are presented in a different color. After the endnotes come the bibliography and illustration credits. In each volume- by-volume index, the names of most people have lifespans, regnal dates, or at least death dates. One comment on the title of the story is in order. In proper French, Notre-Dame has a hyphen when the phrase refers to a building, institution, or place. Notre Dame, without the mark, refers to the woman, the mother of Jesus. In my own prose, the title is given in the form Le jongleur de Notre Dame, but the last two words will be found hyphenated in quotations and bibliographic citations if the original is so punctuated. All translations are mine, unless otherwise specified. 1 The six-volume set is available on the publisher’s website at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/ section/101/1 1. Juggler Allies It would occur to only the most limited soul to investigate the Middle Ages in order to make them applicable to the present. At the same time, it confirms equal dullness if a person wished to reject the influence that the period must have on the understanding and proper treatment of the present. —Wilhelm Grimm Our Lady’s Tumbler and its prolific progeny have beguiled artists and authors of children’s books again and again through the innocence of the protagonist, who is both firm and fragile, durable and defenseless. His unquenchable gusto for expressing devotion has voyaged in tandem with self-deprecation and self-doubt. Then again, compound words that get across the strength of his selfhood fail to do justice to his supreme selflessness. Even if the multitalented but unpresuming jongleur must enact his athletic art secluded under curfew in a private space rather than before a gawking public in open commerce, performing his routine means so much to him that he will pursue it through thick and thin. No matter what toll the practice exacts on his carnal constitution, he presses on with his worship through dance, and shows no fear in kicking up his Achilles’ heels. In vexed times, these same qualities of emotional vulnerability, passionate creativity, and ceaseless persistence have rendered the entertainer irresistible to adults. As much as youngsters, these fans have craved the hope that can radiate from such a character—from such an underdog. Grown-ups in the belly of the beast have identified with the minstrel from the Middle Ages. The most conspicuous pattern of all emerges during World War II, in tracts of land overtaken by the German army. The story elicited heightened engagement in those regions, subjected as they were to the humiliations and horrors of National Socialist racial laws and all the rest that Nazism entailed. Both the medieval tale and the many offshoots of Anatole France’s and Jules Massenet’s versions ignited special interest among Catholic writers, but the seductiveness of the narrative transcended denominations and religions. One noteworthy phenomenon was the attraction that Our Lady’s Tumbler held for wretches who had been billeted in concentration camps or otherwise incarcerated. Jails and prisons of the mid-twentieth century shared a few © 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0149.01 6 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 6 arresting parallels with thirteenth-century monasteries. The later penal institutions were mostly single-sex places whose denizens were recluses in cells, and often such establishments imposed rigid rules and rituals upon their communities. Consequently, imprisoned individuals identified with the entertainer’s esprit in outclassing those in the hierarchy above him and for establishing supernatural contact with the divine. Consciously or not, hounded minorities and Resistance fighters may have found the dancer’s activities apposite to their own wartime circumstances. Like them, he refused to conform to what happened above ground so that he could go truly underground. In subterranean solitude he acted in accord with his conscience, only to be spied upon by alleged comrades. The action unfolds in a setting that centuries of Gothic fiction and art certified as sunless and sinister, shadowy and Stygian. The crypt may have made even the mildest monks seem a bit malevolent and monstrous. In the sentence that caps The Education of Henry Adams, its strangely forward- looking author speculated plaintively about the contingency that after his demise he might reunite with his closest coevals and return to a better present in 1938.