The text as a fabric, the author as a weaver. A reading of M.Morazzoni’s

L’invenzione della verita’   

 

„Si possono immaginare cose false, e comporre cose false; ma solo la verita’ puo’ essere inventata” [Fake things may be imagined and composed, but only the truth may be invented] -  is a quotation from J.Ruskin which closes the book. It is then, at the closure of the novel, that the author explains: what you’ve just read is but an imaginative reconstruction of the past events. I made it all up. And it’s true.1

If, as Althusser asserts, we only become an individual subject when we are addressed as such by others (when they refer to us as “situated”), the price to pay for identity could be high and involve a series of exclusions. This is why Judith Butler turned hastily her back on the category of  the ‘subject’ as a whole. The notions of subjectivity and identity immediately imply the risk of alienation, exclusion, non-identification with others, cast-out.

Yet there is more to the identification of the self  by non-identification with others: to stick to otherness, to extraneity means to oppose assimilation, resist to simplistic ties and structures of the prevailing culture, but it also means -even more importantly so- to recognise and to respect the right of others to be different, not-same, and to affirm such difference, seclusion, apartness in the name of identity. Attempts of a positive identification of the subject could entail different patterns, prompting us to enquire what possible roles could discourses (including literary discourse) play in the self-identification? Radical gender performativity makes us look at identity as at a  dynamic process, subject to change. Even if we refuse the radicalism of the performative discourse, we will yet be able to accept some of its consequences: the shift that takes place as  the subject (like Braidotti’s nomad) moves from one territory to another, and by so doing allows for a different meaning, could perhaps disclose female subjects effaced throughout the history. It is often in the non-belonging, in rootlessness that values come into being. We may easily trace this process in many works of the 20^th century writers (Proust, Musil, Gombrowicz). And it is in the literary discourse where I chose to look for the subject’s identity and self-identification process (assuming that identity is not pre-linguistic), namely in a book by M.Morazzoni Invenzione della verita’, a reconstruction of the making of the embroidery, very much like her  heroines who reconstructed the battle and sea trip of their men.

I will make use of the metaphor of a text as a canvas-shaped labyrinth, and of a literary discourse as the act of weaving or embroidering - inspired by Barthes’ hyphos,  N.K.Miller’s aracnology, and C.Heilbrun’s theory - as a lens through which to read Morazzoni’s novel telling a story of this seemingly feminine occupation. What R.Barthes means to attain by proclaiming the author’s death back in 1968 is actually the disappearance of subjectivity from the text: writing is a sphere of neutrality, non-transparency, non-identity2. The Author is to disappear as One, but may return as Many, or one-of-the-many. The Text is seen as a polysemic space in which many possible meanings intersect. Signifiance is a process, not a condition, it is not but becomes and is subsequently dissolved; the term differance should be used instead of difference. In 1970, in S/Z considered a sort of „Bible of the intertext”, Barthes also states that the text is not a finished product, instead it is like a starlit sky, the reading is never linear but hierarchic and anarchic3, is made of heterogeneous matters,  coming from elsewhere. The Text is a tissue or a fabric within which the subject is dissolved, and thus the author’s engendered body is absorbed and neutralised as well. Barthes invites us then to disregard the author(-spider) and pass onto the his/her spider’s web4, i.e. to the Text.

            To recapitulate: for Barthes - the text is a hyphos, a spider’s web, an ultimate product of the spider become autonomous, distinct from its maker whose figure (and whose hand, gender and signature) should be effaced, disregarded. Against Barthes’ hyphology, as a  reading practice, N.K.Miller shifts attention from the Text as finished product (spider’s web) back to the spider(man) or spider(woman) at work, to the material and existential circumstances of an individual spider’s web maker, to the process of the making of the Text-web or Text-lace. Aracnology as a practice of reading should seek reconstruction of  a gendered subject, recover its identity from beneath thick strata which absorbed and apparently dissolved the spider. It should start with a simple recognition that it is women whose texts were woven, only that they let men take over this metaphor.5 Male critics, like Ovid once was, are interested merely in different forms taken by a transfigured  female body (a body which does not matter) - a spider (instead of Arachne) a thread (instead of Ariadne). Female’s referential claims of her female body in representation for representation are aestheticized (N.K.Miller, p.287), and the question of her identity neutralized. We end up remembering the spider, not the woman. This means we under-read, hence what becomes „part of the public fund of allusion and quotation” is not a female body, not she as a living figure (N.K.M., p.281). Many male critics, like Geoffrey Hartman’s6 who reads the Philomela’s story as an universal metaphor of the „voice of the shuttle”, a muted language, instead of a woman’s emergence from silence by means of weaving a tell-tale account of her violation. Hartman simply fails to „meet” the female in the text. How, then, asks N.K.Miller, can we  - at least in critical practice - preserve women from the fate of „woman”? (p.283), if poststructuralists (like Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze) only follow the thread of Ariadne, a thread handed to them by the „woman in the text” to enable them to weave their way back out, and whom we admire are the male critics whose claims to fame must seem legitimate. So, whose story is it? Of Ariadne, or of the thread, or perhaps of a male critic (who entered to kill not the Minotaur, but the living figure of the woman) and a woman in the text who helped him to exit alive? Or, hints further on N.K.Miller, of their heterosexual bond? (p.284). At any rate - Ariadne (the woman in the text) is there only to help men (a hero-like figure, whether Theseus or a male critic) reassure their mastery. Eternal return of the narcissistic desire.... , which N.Schor called the „Ariadne’s complex”7 . No, rebuts N.K.Miller: we will read Ariadne’s story in the context of the Arachne’s tale: as a parable of women’s writing, understanding how it has classically been read (i.e. as a „public fund of allusion and quotation”), shifting attention to weaving (plotting) as an activity which entails a use, consumption and expenditure of her own body. The spider is a symbol of bodily sacrifice, a sacrifice made of the maker’s (author’s) body. (Literary) works are like a spider’s web in that they are actually attached to the author-spider’s body, so they enable subjectivity of gendered bodies that may have lived in the history and that may have produced them. So the task of the feminist reading is to over-read, deciphering and recalling the hand of the author inside her work. Trace back the hand of the weaver, that hand which is not apparent in the Text-web. Weaving, plotting or embroidering for that matter is a typically female talk, a female language, female history: meant to uncover, to tell. Aside from the Ovidean Arachne who denounced in her work the „failings” and „errors” of the gods such as deceit and rape (hence Ariadne is a possible intertext of the Arachne’s representation8 ), mythology knows another example of weaving as a form of communication, a means of telling a gruesome and terrifying truth (by Philomela to Prochne). Arachne’s (like Philomela’s) task is to tell the story, let it not be forgotten. To over-read is to read for Arachne (and to read for Ariadne) in the text, to read women back in their texts, means to read for emblems of a female signature, female identity inside her work.

N.K.Miller exhorts to a reading against indifference, against  indiscriminate merging of the text and the author, at the obvious expense of the latter. Where a male author could die for the Text’s unlimited meanings, a female author still cannot withdraw from her work9: whatever she creates she uncovers and inscribes herself. The motive of the spider is widely used by the recent feminist critics and by a number of writers - it neatly illustrates the irony and the absurdity of female creation throughout history and paradoxical nature of art practised by women as well: this is why women do not win without  paying the price of their own body, without suffering damage10. Weaving-writing-embroidering is a well-fit metaphor: as a physical activity it involves body and mind of the author. These patterns are archetypal representations of the female body in her own art, of the artist’s body.

            C.Heilbrun, in turn,  reminds us of the Freud’s put down of creative women (Freud observed that the only thing women contributed to the development of civilisation was inventing the art of weaving, an occupation typically feminine -as he contends- and to which women massively turned in order to hide, to cover-up for what they were missing11. The chapter entitled What was Penelope unweaving, is a re-reading of the story of this mythological wife who, seen traditionally as an example of faith and patience, now turns out a spokeswoman of female freedom. Heilbrun asserts however that Penelope will have to undo during the night what she does during the day as long as she is unable to represent a story different from the tale of her wifely faithfulness. Undoing the fabric-text as if she wanted to unravel the „Grand History” including women’s life scenario readily written by men, refusing to tell her story according to his scenario. Heilbrun’s interpretation of Penelope’s story is to be seen as a radical refusal of Barthes’ theory according to which the Text should be considered as a palimpsest. Heilbrun and Miller, both critics ponder on the question of  how the art representation  (in a work of art or literature) affects the social perception of the artist and models his or her work’s place within the canons of culture.

            In Morazzoni’s novel we come across 300 „Penelopes”, abandoned each by her „Ulysses” (the outline of the images to be represented on a 70 meter-long canvas point in fact to a martial, or any rate to a military reason of their absence: what we see is a vessel amidst a rough see, William’s royal troops, and perhaps adverse winds preventing them from coming back home), the most apt embroiderers arrived at Amiens in order to „invent the truth”, i.e. to represent -without having seen and without having taken any action- actions taken by other. Each element of the picture would imply some real experience, even the marine waves, ignored by the women. Anna Elisabetta (said „Amienoise”), whose outstanding skill and craftsmanship (or craftswomanship) is recognised equal to her own by the queen herself, to the extent of stirring her anger and envy, had never before seen the sea, but the Somme river, where she and many others would beat dirt out of laundry on washing days. So she goes to the shore, plunges into water up to her thighs to feel the waves strike her skin. Sea water, she discovers, is -unlike the chilly, slow and  narrow water of the river- „continuously fluid”. The next morning she sets her hand to reproduce the imperceptible pressure of water against the knees of men unloading ships, and the queen realises the effort to invent the truth that busied her12.

            Since the embroiderers’ effort is conceived as complete devotion to their job, their conduct is extremely serious proportionally to the challenging task. We notice in fact that these most skilled and experienced among the craftwsomen are frequently compared to audacious warriors as they approach the city of Amiens (not free from erotic overtones underlying the creative act): each of them set out with a thimble and an armoury of needles of different dimensions, resembling the diminished war tools (p.7) After all we are in France, the land of the chivalric genre -jests the narrator- as the queen lays out the strategy of the embroidery as if she were distributing tasks to a “battle detachment” . Meanwhile, the immaculate linen, awaits the assault of 300 needles as a „valley expecting the combat” (p.35). On the other hand, compared the historical impact of the two battles - the real one (William fought) and the imaginary one (they represented), their job might seem ridiculously insignificant.

As they go on, advancing their tense job, two further aspects are highlighted. One: that the embroidery is like a text: they move their needled hands as if they were writing13. Early in the book we come across a passage which could be illuminating to the understanding of the whole novel. The sense of the writing lies in the embroiderers’ hands: the preliminary sketch drafted by others could do nothing, and the representation is to owe its meaning exclusively to them. Indeed, the canvas remains raw until they set their hands to it, as if the design were not there. Embroidering, with word-like images they will give back a veneer of life, or rather than veneer, sometimes life itself (p.40). Upon the end of the first week of their work, one night the queen sneaks into the empty room to contemplate the embroidery, and reads with concern the story it represents (p.72). As the work goes on, out of the words, of the text written on canvas (and this is the second of the two aspects I mentioned before), emerges its more figurative and unitary dimension, and it is then likened to a painting or a sculpture. Such is the sense of the competition: „The queen measured herself with the art of painters and sculptors” (p.128).

Here the two motives -dating back to the 11^th and to the 19^th century- of the Morazzoni’s novel meet for the first time. The embroiderers whose story she tells try to „stand out in clear relief” from their work, trying to impress a signature of their own (a metonymy, like Arachne did). However, once the canvas is complete, they pledge it to Amiens’ cathedral, and from that moment on the history absorbs them, doing them away. Although it is with grief that Anna Elisabetta parts with her work, yet does not unweave or undo what they did. Rather than Penelopes, they are like Arachnes14.I go back to the book’s closing remarks once again: of the convocation of 300 embroiderers, not a trace is left - remarks the narrator - not a single testimony. It is only rumoured it had taken place. Yet the doubt persists: had Tapisserie de Bayeux been conceived by the Norman duchess Matilda (the wife of William the Conqueror) who intended to commemorate and celebrate the victory over the English king, Harold - October, 14 of 1066), or by another Matilda, the wife of Gottfried Plantagenet, an English sovereign, about a century later? And the person of its originator seems to have lost its importance at all, confronted with the images the canvas represents: of men of high rank, armed knights, and scenes of bloody battles, of slain and slaughter.

The historical record, sometimes uncertain as it is of many paramount facts, here left the question of the tapestry’s origin unbearably blurred. Distressfully blurred. The historians (art historians) are unable to uncover, to refer to, to represent the engendered human body of the author. Human body escapes literary or artistic representation due to virtual lack of adequate language tools, argued both J.Kristeva and H.Cixous, as they appreciated the latent power of the body. Cixous seems to this day a far too far-fetched an optimist in that respect15. Will word-like images on the tapestry do?

            What happens during the second week of embroidery is that the queen, anguished by the skill of Anna Elisabetta, sneaks into the chamber where they meet each morning to work, and after reading the images represented, rushes to execute the passage which would otherwise be executed by the Amienoise, the helm. But her hand steps literally out of line. The helm and the waves overlap (p.112-113). Is it a sign of imperfection? Of lack of experience falling besides the limited range of every-day domestic (or courtly) life? Or still, a sign of an inability to be in charge, of not being -in fact- in charge? This episode is surely a crucial starting point of analysis16. This tiny, but pregnant error of the queen, invites and in a sense authorises us to look for the author, to explore the reasons of the imperfection, concurrently stressing the importance of the author’s body, and of the bodily experience. Note that Anna Elisabetta left the helm at the very end, and when she was not sure how to represent the sea she simply went to the sea-side. So the images we first see when looking at the tapestry are perhaps a cover-up, or a veil, hiding another scenes: the ordinary and every-day-life scenes, of the embroiders’ life, contest between the embroiderers and all that is less apparent at first sight.

If  approximately a half of  Morazzoni’s plot is an imaginative re-working of  the making of the grand tapestry, every other chapter recounts another historical event, dating back the 19^th c. (Ruskin’s trip to Amiens)  and associated to the 11^th c..  plot by their common relation to the materiality of every day life17 . Johh Ruskin, the famous Victorian eclectic and a gothic art expert and historian (and art history professor at Oxford), who embarked on a research trip in 1879 to Amiens (his last trip to the continent which brought forth the Bible of Amiens, dedicated to the Amiens’ cathedral), by his contemporaries was commonly called the „word-painter”, as he described works of art by means of ink in a way equalling the scenes and images of painters and sculptors. He stood out for descriptive precision, expressive eloquence. The first task of a writer, he would contend, is to make you see. Which would be the reverse or the complementary side of what the embroiderers would do (i.e.writing with images, so as people could read their tapestry).

Ruskin was obsessed with labyrinths, with weaving and with cathedrals18. The first labyrinth of Ruskin’s life was the back garden at Herne Hill, the London house where he grew up. Fors Clavigera is the Latin title of his book (written between 1871 and 1884) where he first expressed his ideas on life as a maze of sudden and unexpected turns, as a labyrinth exactly. The book’s hero is Theseus, whose Ariadne resembles very much Rose La Touche, and the Mintaur is the economics of capitalism. Classical situation of a hero faced with the monster, threat, a dragon, a demon perhaps? A transparent existential situation. But among the 250 titles of Ruskin complete work only the Bible of Amiens is mentioned in Morazzoni’s novel19. It is there that the motive of the labyrinth is resumed. Ruskin’s passion for labyrinths brought him to cease to believe in the historical truth of the Bible, which he knew by heart (and -it goes without saying- Victorian period saw some of the earnest questioning of the truth of the Bible). The labyrinth is the first figure that puzzled him and brought him, at a later stage, to wonder about the structure of fabric and of the gothic cathedrals, of which both have to do with the labyrinth, he insisted. In the Bible of Amiens he wrote something curious - we find it in the Morazzoni’s novel - that the outer structure of the gothic church is like the reverse side of a fabric, and that it must surprise for such an ordinary term of comparison. Weaving or embroidering is an activity one gets familiar with in the home, in a fabric shop or at the market-place, all of which are places traditionally attributed to women. Ruskin, nonetheless, sees an intimate likeliness between a cathedral and a fabric (p. 51). Contiguity with material things, familiarity with the ordinary day-to-day course of life has never been the object of serious enquiry, states the narrator amazed. To how many art historians or scholars in general it would occur to compare works of art. to a fabric and to weaving? Yet for Ruskin it makes sense to draw the unusual parallel and seek correspondence between architecture and weaving: a cathedral seems a fabric of stone that does not obscure from the outside its stitches (p.57). Each cathedral has a labyrinth of its own (p.125) Both a fabric and a church hide a labyrinth. The labyrinth is a sign of conjunction between the pagan times of bewilderment and dismay on one hand, and the Christian refuge - Ariadne holds at the entry to the Minos’ palace the thread of hope handed to Theseus before he were to face the Minotaur. The Virgin Mary, to whom are dedicated the cathedrals, is a Christian Ariadne for Ruskin, she who has the clue, who holds the hunk of thread, and knows the way back out. The Virgin Mary, not any less then the Cretan princess, is aware of the human distraction (perhaps it was out of distraction that the queen’s hand went out of line) or the frailty of human memory (like of Ruskin’s), but she has never -so they say- let fall of her hand the hunk of thread. By now, the meaning of the labyrinth and of the Christian Ariadne should be evident: „What the labyrinth itself means does not imply any  divination or intelligence of interpretation: it is all written out between the lines of every person’s life” (p.125-7).

At the very end of his stay inside the cathedral, Ruskin goes to his knees to see more clearly and skims the surface of the black and white pavement stones, to follow the line to the centre (p.127). What is he looking for? For signs of imperfection, „unfaithfullness’”, grasping the sense of the chequered tassellation? Looking for the Christian Ariadne to help him find his way out of the prison of the Minotaur?

In Il profumo della maestra L.Muraro argues that female knowledge forms one with the experience and the physical, material, “craftsman” (or craftswoman) side of life. Giving up the power of abstraction, of the a-corporeal, women often chose knowledge not independent on experience, relying on day-to-day routine life. Unlike men, always attracted to the abstract, universal a-corporeal20. The embroidery contest and the research trip meet here - in their relationship of the text-canvas-web, and writer-artist-spider simile. The tapestry as much as the cathedral are tracked down to a labyrinth, which for Ruskin could trivially stand for a metaphor of human life entrusted to the Christian Ariadne, while to the embroiderers - it should remind us that somewhere there, on an island there is Ariadne, whom the hero left behind, or that inside the labyrinthic plot of the texture there is a forgotten body spider-shaped. A tale about remembering and about forgetting. Let’s see. At the end, though he tried to avoid suppressing the materiality from the creation’s origin, Ruskin yields to the anti-corporeal abstraction typical of male thought: turning up an engendered subject, plunged into a partial perspective, when inside the architectural labyrinth he figures a “new”, Christian Ariadne”, who is there on purpose to help Theseus (heroes like him) defeat the enemy. C.Heilbrun observes that Joyce was only interested in male’s labyrinth, made to challenge a male-hero. We saw that type of behaviour is typical of Ruskin - fitting the description of a male critic by N.K.Miller. In Morazzoni’s text we have also this other point of reference: women’s task is to remember -she hints in the afterword- unlike Theseus. A new Ariadne will remember and make us remember21. While the male’s enemy is typically physical death (possibly symbolised by the Minotaur - however the Minotaur could also be the „woman in the text” , in the labyrinth, to be killed to reassure the hero’s mastery)22, to women artists and writers the Minotaur might stand for threat of  spiritual death due to oblivion.

The most monstrous (Minotaur-like) meaning of the tapestry is that the embroiderers represented their men were who were off  fighting battles and crossing seas, and did not represent themselves at work, other women spinning or weaving, or any other female occupation of that time, such as washing clothes at the riverside. What they depicted, „wrote” with images, were their fighting men, shedding rivers of blood. The gendered subject suspended in a limbo of non-fulfilment (Anna Elisabetta) yet managed to convey -by reference to her bodily substance- the message of the violence to the teller (her task usurped by the queen). What we write  is like a spider’s web, attached to life at all four corners23. We are able to see this and clearly understand when we (like in Morazzoni’s novel) reconstruct the making of the text, to recapture the female body behind her metonymic signature.

As much as female (artists or writers) still cannot afford to play the game of „not-being-there” (the death of the author), they still cannot play at not remembering. Morazzoni acts like Arachne, she is an author who builds into her text-web-tapestry a story like of Ariadne’s, of a female abandoned, betrayed or perhaps violated in a way. She teaches us that by fleeing, leaving for good, we embark on the most mistaken of trip, we choose the most mistaken of paths. Amnesia is bad, because it can never be absolute24. 

            Identity of a subject within the literary discourse is here a relational fact, and is as such relative: not granted once and for all. R.Barthes and N.K.Miller do not contradict each other in that matter: identity (whether situated, eccentric, transient, nomadic or relational) of an author is to be found (takes residence) inside his or her work, inside the text-canvas by reconstructing the very moment of its creation. H.Arendt, inspired by the thought of Aristotle, asserts that identity has a basically narrative nature. Our singularity relies on narration25. It is inside Morazzoni’s novel that the hero and the heroines acquire identity, though to avoid under-reading them  is not an easy task26. In the final analysis, the imposing canvas, long 70 meters, depicting glorious and memorable battle and victory scenes, ended up inside a cathedral, becoming the notorious tapestry of  Bayeux of unknown origin and author. Along with the craftswomen’ body, their gender was cancelled, and the path to the constitution of a subject debarred, while the meaning of the text/canvas blurred. Many women authors -we know it now- did not make it to the official history as ‘subjects’, their names and their hands were overshadowed. This is why we should dig for female signature under the thick palimpsest-like strata  (rather than look at what women did or wrote in the past as a sort of palimpsest itself), and reconstruct the gendered subjects at work, situated “when and where” they created.

            Ruskin, an model of art historians, liable for the mise en abime of the female signature, for historical palimpsests, had overlooked the pagan (i.e. human) side of Ariadne’s story, seeing her exclusively as the Virgin Mary helping him to find his way out of the existential labyrinth. Yet at the very end, we are told,  Ruskin looses his faith: what, or rather whom did he find at the heart of the maze?

           

A digression instead of conclusion.

            Morazzoni’s contrapuntal plot, as it unravels two threads in parallel, beckons to a second book by Melania G.Mazzucco, La camera di Baltus27. What remains obscure here too, is how it came about that the room took the name of the Napoleon’s official, who -when wounded- took refuge in Italian countryside back in 1796. The hero of the novel is a young  art historian who comes to a castle under restoration in order to ascertain the origin of the Quattrocento frescoes. The woman he comes across is the estate ousted heiress. Their affair echoes the tragic love story of the Maestro Enrico da Sorano (who painted the walls of the Baltus’ room with scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses back in 1492 on commission of the noble Tristano Boccadiferro) and Tristano’s dame. Not a trace is left, we read, of their tragic story.