Much like oil and water, humor and liberal academia do not mix. Anyone who has spent time in the fusty Victorian halls of the gowned knows this well. Despite its pretensions to transgression, the world of the liberal humanities is a dour place indeed.
This makes a recent trend in cultural history particularly “problematic,” to use a favorite term of the anointed ones. In the past few years, historians have stormed the archival vaults in search of jokes. No, they are not looking to get a ribald laugh from, say, the Carmina Burana—as many serious scholars probably have for centuries. Rather they are looking for what they think to be a deep, untapped cultural vein showing that some historical period or other is not what it once seemed to be. This historiography is nauseatingly Whiggish: The modern liberal permissive present is Good, while the old classical “repressive” period is Bad. Bawdy jokes are exhumed and their skeletons made to dance to prove this unspoken point. Plaudits are especially in order if the results are tied to some tired old horse of the contemporary humanities: feminism, queer theory, watered-down Marxism. Pick your poison.
The latest in this “outrageous” genre is Emma Maggie Solberg’s The Virgin Whore, a title that drips with the contradictory language Orwell called the hallmark of propaganda. Solberg’s thesis is straightforward: Representations of the Virgin Mary are not what we think they are; far from being a pure white flower, Mary was often portrayed as a harlot.
Why did no one realize this before Solberg? “Contrary to the pull of empiricist and fundamentalist habits of modern thought, Mary’s purity functions in accordance with the laws of magic and metaphor,” Solberg writes. She has escaped the twin pulls of empiricism and fundamentalism in English literature criticism. Thank goodness for that!
She informs us that Bernard of Clairvaux chastised “those who let their love of Mary carry them beyond the bounds of reason and decorum,” but adds that a rather nasty joke later arose about Bernard begging Mary to breastfeed him. “So much for restraint,” writes Solberg. I wonder what Solberg thinks of the vicious jokes spewed online about feminists. Likely, she would see this rhetoric as crude and malicious, and would prefer us to take the arguments of said feminists on their own terms. Poor Bernard does not get the same courtesy. Solberg uses the mean-spirited jokes of the mob to condemn him as prudish and out of touch.
Solberg also attempts to decode medieval imagery. Christ is occasionally shown clutching a cuckoo, she explains, because the term “cuckoo” and the term “cuckold” are etymologically linked. Therefore, she sleuths, the artist must be poking fun at Joseph for being God’s cuckold.
An alternative—and more obvious—reading would consider the fact that medieval Christians often used the song of the cuckoo to symbolize new life, as the cuckoo was thought to hold within its little chest the first song of spring. This would fit with standard conceptions of Christ as the New Man. Unfortunately, Solberg spends far too much time taking bad jokes and strained wordplay too seriously, and too little time taking basic theology seriously enough.
I could go on for hours. Solberg’s book is filled with willful misreadings of high art, and everything is geared toward a justification of contemporary biases. Nowhere does she entertain the notion that old cultural artifacts should be read on their own terms. When reading a recent cultural product such as Solberg’s book, I can only wonder what future historians will think.
As for jokes? Casual observation suggests it is those who take jokes too seriously who are often the victims of the crueler forms of humor. Today it is much easier to get a cheap laugh by inserting the term “academic feminist” into your joke than it is to summon a chortle by mocking the Bible. History flows from upstream. The historians are often stuck splashing about where the river meets the ocean.
John William O'Sullivan writes from Dublin, Ireland.
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