Receptive Bodies
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
leo bersani
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago
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Published 2018
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isbn-13: 978-0-226-57962-7 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-57976-4 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-57993-1 (e-book)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bersani, Leo, author. Title: Receptive bodies / Leo Bersani. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes index. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 2018000462 | isbn 9780226579627 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226579764 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226579931 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Human body (Philosophy) | Human body—Erotic aspects. | Sex (Psychology) | Sexual excitement. | Psychoanalysis. Classification: lcc b105.b64 b4695 2018 | ddc 128/.6—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000462
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Forewarning
Passion is an obstacle to pleasure. I would like this to be received as a reformulation of Michel Foucault’s opposition, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, of two regimes of subjectivity: one based on a hermeneutics of desire and sexuality and the other on the discovery and practice of new bodily pleasures. In the following inquiries into the vicissitudes of somatic and psychic receptiveness to the world, passion could be thought of as covering various instances of immobilized reception. I begin with the most extreme example of the human subject’s attempt to block all reception, to reduce the other to an enslaved receiver of the subject’s will. If the fascistic masters of Salò—Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 filmic rethinking of the Marquis de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom—receive anything from the young people they imprison, sexually coerce, torture, and murder, it is the suffering they inflict, a suffering reenacted as an intellectual, moral, and erotic excitement in the torturers. Any possibility of receptive exchange is erased by the passion for absolute control. If, however, this curiously affectless passion reduces the world to unqualified obedience, it also condemns Pasolini’s masters to a rageful suffering in the midst of a murderous orgy, the suffering of never being able to kill enough. The furious orality represented twice in Derek Jarman’s 1987 film The Last of England
viii Forewarning (briefly discussed in chapter 3) could be thought of as the failure of an analogous human resolution to transform reception into incorporation—as if a non-digestible difference could be chewed and swallowed into sameness. Finally, as I argue in my study of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in chapter 4, Hermione’s physical violence toward Rupert is, as Rupert himself bizarrely acknowledges, the only “right” response to his unshakeable refusal to become the consenting agent of Hermione’s will.
By beginning my introduction to these essays with instances of a willed nonreceptivity (and by beginning the collection itself with my discussion of Pasolini’s film, the only previously published essay in the book), I mean to emphasize the nonsystematic nature of these analyses of “receptive bodies.” They are not meant to constitute an exhaustive study of either receptiveness or nonreceptiveness. There is no single argument about receptivity, and I don’t move toward a conclusion of my various arguments. In the type of essayistic writing which I believe I have always practiced (this book ends with a consideration of what I understand essayistic writing to be), an epigraph to my work might be Flaubert’s dictum, “One must never conclude” (“Il ne faut jamais conclure”). Those readers interested in (the illusion of) starting at the beginning of a more or less systematic development of ideas are invited to begin with chapter 5, which is as close as I get to a genealogy of the receptive body. The human body is, from its intrauterine origin, a body that receives. The dual moment constitutive of reception can be observed most closely in our earliest postnatal life: breathing in and breathing out, ingestion of food and excretion of waste, entering sleep and emerging from sleep into wakefulness. The receptive body is, then, an incomplete category: reception is inseparable from expulsion. I go on in chapter 5 to discuss this double rhythm as it characterizes sexual penetration and, especially, sleep (with a long detour on the perhaps not infrequent fear of sleep).
Chapter 5 ends with a discussion of a philosopher I have only recently discovered and whose work (in particular, the threevolume Spherology) interests me very much: Peter Sloterdijk.
In Bubbles, the first volume of Spherology, Sloterdijk insists on the importance of supplementing the three relational stages proposed by psychoanalytic theory with three pre-oral relational models: the placental, the acoustic, and the respiratory. To rediscover, most notably, extensions of placental relationality in our adult lives would, Sloterdijk persuasively argues, provide a life-enhancing alternative to the conflict-ridden subjectobject relational model dominant in Western philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Lars von Trier’s magnificent film Melancholia will provide our most spectacular case of receptiveness. The planet Melancholia has mysteriously left its orbit in space and is headed toward Earth. Although the film’s prologue lets the spectator know that Melancholia will strike and destroy Earth, the characters are, until late in the film, uncertain about whether the planet will hit Earth or narrowly miss it. They will—uncertainly, tragically— receive Melancholia; only one figure welcomes its coming. Justine, whose wedding banquet occupies the first half of the film, seems from the very start to have a mysterious affinity with the planet hurtling toward Earth. In one extraordinary scene she appears to be offering her naked body to the enveloping light of the approaching star. Melancholia has become her cosmic groom, replacing the pitiable human she has just married. Melancholia will allow us to speculate on a nonhuman receptivity perhaps lodged within the human body since the beginning of human life. Receptivity has a cosmic dimension. If, as cosmologists claim, our organism still carries atoms from the Big Bang, an impersonal cosmic being coexists with the mind and the person each of us has become in the course of human evolution. We are psychologically motivated to move; but we are also propelled mindlessly, atomically. It is this pre- or extra-human pure thrusting forward in space to which Justine recognizes that she belongs and which, in Hermione and ultimately in Gudrun, Lawrence anatomizes as an unstoppable destructive movement toward and, “ideally,” through others. Lawrence psychically metaphorizes this movement as murderous will.
It is more than doubtful that our entire relational life could be modeled on the self-extensive connectedness that defines our intrauterine beginnings. Becoming an individual in our postnatal life is to discover otherness, that is, our difference from the human and nonhuman objects that are the necessarily alien world into which the individual subject is born. How could we be merely receptive to the massive influx of stimuli that would, as I argued in The Freudian Body, destroy us if we failed to take pleasure in being nearly overwhelmed by them? In chapter 3 I revisit those speculations from my 1986 book with, however, an important qualification. If we survive by masochistically receiving a mass of stimuli that would otherwise break down the fragile ego structures of early childhood, this early pleasure in pain should probably also be thought of as our first active resistance to the world. That resistance initiates an eroticized aggressiveness toward the world which will help us to understand Freud’s tantalizing but undeveloped claim in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual drive.
The early twentieth-century American thinker George Herbert Mead provides a philosophical elucidation of the indissoluble bond between reception and resistance. Setting out to explain and to justify his claim for the “sociality in nature,” Mead (whose complex argument I follow in some detail in chapter 3) gives a brilliant account of the interrelatedness of objects and human subjects. Objects resist our manipulation of them. This is obvious enough; Mead’s originality is to claim that in pressing against an object we arouse in ourselves the object’s “attitude” of counterpressure. “There is continuity of the experience of pressure in the organism and of resistance in the physical object.” We respond, both in immediate contacts with objects and at a
1. George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 149.
Forewarning xi
distance from them, to our own responses to the effects that resistant objects have on us. And objects, Mead profoundly suggests, acquire depth, or a kind of innerness, by virtue of their calling out in the human organism the object’s resistance to that organism. I attempt to unravel Mead’s intricate phenomenology of the play between receptivity and resistance in what he describes as a dialogue, or negotiation, between the human subject and objects. For Mead, that internal dialogue constitutes what we call rational thought.
Mead’s analysis, for all its complexity, has as its object the most ordinary communication between the external world and the subject’s internal world. In chapter 6 I conclude these essays with another extreme example of nonreceptivity (two very different examples of which thus constitute the conceptual bookends of this collection). Bruno Dumont’s 1999 film Humanité is perhaps his strongest evidence for the claim he has made that film is “an extraordinary way of doing philosophy.” By way of a police investigation into the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-yearold girl in a village in northwestern France, Humanité becomes a filmic speculation on the enigma of human violence.
Except for his asking early in the film, “How can anyone do that?” the speculation is conducted wordlessly by Pharaon, the police lieutenant investigating the crime. Furthermore, “speculation” inadequately qualifies Pharaon’s response to the murder. For Pharaon, the world that accommodates such acts not only resists all attempts to understand it, but, strictly speaking, it is a world that cannot even be looked at, or watched. It can only be stared at—a visual mode joltingly at odds with cinema’s customary privileged looking, probing, and detecting. Pharaon stares, and my essay on Humanité is in large measure a phenomenological analysis of the stare. And yet, if the world has become for Pharaon a place that can no longer be seen or understood (understanding is a promise inherent in seeing), it can perhaps be related to otherwise. Human and nonhuman bodies and objects can be touched, if, like Pharaon, we practice a nonviolent penetration, a contact we might also call a penetrative touching.
Having indulged in a grumpy attack on the presumed need for prefaces in my reluctant preface (titled “Against Prefaces?”) to my 2005 book Thoughts and Things, I naturally hope that readers of the present collection will benefit from my compliance with the prefatory mandate in critical writing. It has, however, occurred to me that even the most traditionally structured preface is not unambiguously helpful. A preface is a promise—but aren’t our promises always tainted by a warning? In preparing us for what lies ahead, the most preface-friendly author can’t help but make us somewhat nervous. To fulfill a promise is, inevitably, to encounter contingencies that will inflect (at the limit, betray) that for which the maker of the promise has confidently, generously prepared us. Even when the preface to a piece of writing has been written after the writing has been completed (which is usually the case), the author, in the interest of providing a kind of pre-intelligibility to what awaits the reader, inevitably neglects or “forgets” certain aspects or moments that were present in the full deployment of the preface’s argument. I’m thinking of those moments when the argument has more or less significantly swerved from the involuntarily duplicitous clarifications to which the preface will reduce it.
Readers are right to be somewhat fearful in entering the terrain that has been cleared for them. Crossing the terrain will be—perhaps should be—more hazardous than the brief journey leading to it. We are justified in being suspicious of whatever comfort is the result of that preliminary journey. And that affective mix may be exactly what the “good” preface produces. Prefaces succeed if they encourage a blend of security and suspicion that gives to the act of reading the at once pleasurable and painful tension of a mind at work.
But enough! Let’s end and start, just a bit perversely, with Samuel Beckett’s brave promise of failure in the face of his discouraged recognition of having always failed to keep that promise: Worstward Ho!
Merde alors
Et le scélérat, en enconnant Adélaïde, se figurait comme le duc qu’il foutait sa fille assassinée: incroyable égarement de l’esprit du libertin, qui ne peut rien entendre, rien voir, qu’il ne veuille à l’instant l’imiter!
« Marquis de Sade, Les 120 journées de Sodome »
The vagina is a logical defect in nature. “By and large,” the Duke warns his female slaves just before the orgies of sex, violence, and storytelling get under way in The 120 Days of Sodom, “offer your fronts very little to our sight; remember that this loathsome part, which only the alienation of her wits could have permitted Nature to create, is always the one we find most repugnant.”
Sadean misogyny is based on the libertine’s view of the female genitalia as a scandalous offense to reason. Nature orders us to live only for the pleasure of our senses at the same time that she continues to produce millions of creatures sexually equipped to repel us.
This repulsion need not be explained in the most familiar
This essay was originally published in the journal October. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “Merde alors,” October 13 (1980): 23–35; doi:10.2307/3397699.
1. The Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York, Grove Press, 1966), 252. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page no. in the text.
Freudian terms. It is unnecessary to think of the libertine’s distaste for the vagina as a disguised fantasy of female castration. Instead, it is a logical consequence of some rigorous speculation about sexual intensities. The most intense Sadean—and sadistic—sexuality depends on symmetry, and with women, Sade’s men enjoy the diminished pleasures of asymmetrical sex. In arguing that it is always better to have sex with boys than with girls, the Bishop in The 120 Days explains, “Consider the problem from the point of view of evil, evil almost always being pleasure’s true and major charm; considered thus, the crime must appear greater when perpetrated upon a being of your identical sort than when inflicted upon one which is not, and this once established, the delight automatically doubles” (458). The appeal of pleasure is inseparable from the appeal of evil, and a crime against another version of ourselves—against someone “absolument de [notre] espèce”—doubles our pleasure. The female victims easily outnumber the male victims in Sade, but it might be ar-
figure 1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò (Produzioni Europee Associate [PEA]; Les Productions Artistes Associés, 1975)
gued that the torture and murder of women is merely a preliminary to the more enjoyable torture and murder of other men. The most spectacular sadism is specular sadism.
In what sense does a symmetrical partnership provide the highest sexual pleasures? Sexual excitement is a shared commotion. Sade suggests that we do not have sex with others because they excite us; excitement is the consequence of sex rather than its motive. And this is because it is essentially a replay in the libertine of the agitation he produces in the other’s body. In the funny physiological terms in which Sade sums up the Duke’s ideas in The 120 Days, “He noticed that a violent commotion inflicted upon any kind of an adversary is answered by a vibrant thrill in our own nervous system; the effect of this vibration, arousing the animal spirits which flow within these nerves’ concavities, obliges them to exert pressure on the erector nerves and to produce in accordance with this perturbation [ébranlement] what is termed a lubricious sensation” (200). The missing link here would seem to be the means of transport from the other’s “commotion” to the libertine’s “vibration.” But the latter can only be the agitated perception of the former. The “vibration” that produces recognizable signs of sexual excitement is the spectacle of the other person’s commotion. Sexual excitement must be represented before it can be felt; or, more exactly, it is the representation of an alienated commotion.
Sadism is the necessary consequence of this view of sexuality. If erotic stimulation depends on the perceived or fantasized commotion of others, it becomes reasonable to put others into a state of maximal commotion. The libertine’s erection-provoking vibrations increase in direct proportion to the visible intensification of his victim’s suffering. These remarks will remind many readers of Freud’s genealogy of sadomasochism in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” as well as of Jean Laplanche’s reading of that passage in Vie et mort en psychanalyse. A rereading of Sade in the light of these texts suggests, first of all, that the pain inflicted by the sadist on others may, as Freud writes, “be enjoyed masochistically by the [sadistic] subject through his identification
of himself with the suffering object” and, second, that mimetic sexuality is essentially sadomasochistic sexuality. These two points are intimately related. The libertine’s pleasure depends on the transmission of his victim’s “commotion” to his own “nerves.” In one sense, crime is life-preserving in Sade; it creates spectacles of movement without which individuals might remain dangerously inert. “Crime is a natural mode,” Durcet proclaims, “a manner whereby Nature stirs man” (427). Sexuality is a psychic mobility that depends on scenes of mobility in others; the libertine’s movements are a kind of imitation of their movement. In a profoundly ironic way, Sade’s sadism is consistent with the theories of benevolent sympathy that he scornfully rejects. For what he rejects is not the mechanism of sympathetic projection assumed by theories of benevolence, but the pious view that we are stirred by virtuous identifications with others. Virtue is irrelevant to the agitation induced by the suffering of others. It is the identification itself—that is, a fantasmatic introjection of the other—which appears to be intrinsically sexual. Such introjections make us “vibrate”; they destroy psychic inertia and shatter psychic equilibrium. Interestingly enough, both Sade and Laplanche use the word ébranlement to describe this psychic shattering, which produces what Sade calls “une sensation lubrique” and which, for Laplanche, characterizes our inescapably fantasmatic sexuality.
Laplanche emphasizes that sexual pleasure in the Freudian scheme “resides in the suffering position.” The activity of fantasy which constitutes sexuality in human beings is inherently an experience of “psychic pain”—or, in other terms, a psychically disruptive or destabilizing experience. From this perspective, sexuality would not be an exchange of intensities between individuals, but a condition of broken negotiations with the world. The introjection of the other (the transmission of his “violent commotion” to the libertine’s own nerves) is a movement away from difference and toward replication. The ontological justification for the Sadean preference for boys over girls is that boys present the libertine with an anticipatory image of this reduction
of the world to a replica of the self. Masochism is the exciting pain of such psychic dédoublements. And since sexual excitement (according to Sade, Freud, and Laplanche) depends on the fantasmatic circuit by which the subject appropriates the other’s “violent commotion,” sexuality—at least in the mode in which it is constituted—might almost be thought of as a tautology for masochism.
We can now see that Sade’s famous “order of nature” is really a movement toward universal destruction. The destruction is, however, both a function and a consequence of mimetic orders. The libertine’s most intense jouissance comes from a murderous relation with “a being of [his] identical sort”; it is a phenomenon of suicidal symmetry. Nature, in order to move men, incites them to crime. In the Sadean scheme, psychic mobility depends on scenes of destruction which, once internalized, produce the “vibrations” necessary for sexual excitement. The system that must always be followed, as the Bishop puts it in The 120 Days, is that “the more pleasure you seek in the depths of crime, the more frightful the crime must be” (364). Nature’s strategies for stimulating human desires lead, ideally, to Curval’s annoyance with the modest range of crimes available to us and to his thirst for cosmic havoc: “How many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world?” (364). The teleology of nature’s order in Sade is the destruction of nature itself.
In the Sadean cult of mimetic violence, the appropriation of the other’s “commotion” makes the other ultimately unnecessary. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, the transposition of The 120 Days of Sodom to a fascist enclave in Northern Italy toward the end of World War II appropriately suggests that modern fascism is the (belated) form of political organization most congenial to Sade’s theory of sexuality. The political setting in Salò is not exactly a “comment” on Sade but gives to the Sadean epic an important dose of verisimilitude lacking in the fairy-tale kidnappings and the Black Forest slave palace of The 120 Days. The Sadean argument that Salò implicitly makes is that if sexuality is intrinsically
masochistic, it requires a fascist state. That is, to the extent that sexual excitement depends on the “sympathetic” appropriation of the “violent commotions” experienced by others, the only truly erotic society is the Sadean and fascistic society of masters and slaves.
Pasolini argues far more effectively for the connections between sex and power than does Cavani in her much-acclaimed and consistently mediocre Night Porter. The latter film, in which Dirk Bogarde treats us to the same portentous twitching with which he made low comedy of Death in Venice, carries what Cavani clearly takes to be an illuminating and shocking message about the sexual appeal of politically enforced violence. (The message is not only banal; any shock it might have is also conveniently dissipated in the sentimental conversions toward the end of the film.) Pasolini’s—and Sade’s—statement is more radical. Neither The 120 Days nor Salò is at all about the complicity between torturers and victims. In both works, there are slaves who more or less ally themselves with the masters—Julie in Sade, and the boy who becomes the Duke’s favorite in Salò—but in none of these cases is it a question of the irresistible appeal of being tortured. This appeal doesn’t even have to be denied; it would simply be a superficial point, and in works so profoundly investigative about sadomasochistic sexuality and politics as The 120 Days and Salò, it can be ignored. The larger point in Sade, as we have suggested, has to do with the use of violence in order, quite literally, to make the victim give birth to sexuality in the torturer.
In a sense, there is no relation at all between the Sadean libertines and their victims. It is precisely the illusion—deeply characteristic of our culture—that every contact produces what we repulsively call a relationship which makes the sentimental denouement of Night Porter inevitable. In Sade and in Pasolini, a potential masochistic complicity on the part of the victims would be superfluous to a view of masochism as already in the sadistic operation. There is a perfect identity between the masochistic and the sadistic impulses: the slaves are killed so that the masters may, as it were, appropriate their suffering as their own sexuality.
Pasolini has the Duke in Salò say that ideally one should be both the executioner and the victim; sex is limited by the need for a partner. Fascism is the political system best suited to Sadean sex because it allows for the elimination of partners; the agony of the victims is refined into their executioners’ sexual vibrations.
Perhaps the only way to escape from such conclusions would be to present a convincing theory of nonmimetic sexuality. By that we mean a theory which could account for sexual excitement in terms no longer dependent on the fantasyrepresentations of the excitement of others. In a sense, such a task is enormously difficult, for it involves proposing an alternative not merely to Sade, but also to Freud—and ultimately to the massive training that we receive in the art of mimetic stimulation, a training which surely provides the cultural “ground” for psychoanalytic theories of fantasy as a sexualizing replication of the world.
Pasolini’s treatment of Sade depends, it seems to us, on his having recognized such cultural continuities. Thus the fascistic setting is by no means intended to help us judge the Sadean imagination as aberrant or alien to us. Such judgments could only make us feel comfortable: both Sade and the fascists are monsters and can therefore be historically sequestered. But Pasolini brings Sade close to us by placing him in a historically familiar context, and this is one of the ways in which Salò diminishes the grotesqueness of the literary text. Pasolini’s mistrust of the alienating aspects of The 120 Days even leads him to a certain embellishment of Sade’s work. No one in Salò has the physical grotesqueness of Sade’s characters; it is, for example, symptomatic of Pasolini’s emphases that the four impressively disgusting servants of The 120 Days have simply disappeared, and none of the jazzy female narrators even vaguely resembles La Desgranges, “cette généreuse athlète de Cythère,” as Sade calls her, who had lost one nipple, three fingers, six teeth, and an eye in her many “combats.” Even more crucially, the four friends are all rather ordinary-looking. The cross-eyed President is hardly a match for Sade’s Curval, who is described as having, in the way of physical charms, “drooping buttocks that rather resembled a
pair of dirty rags flapping upon his upper thighs; the skin of those buttocks was, thanks to whipstrokes, so deadened and toughened that you could seize up a handful and knead it without his feeling a thing” (205). The acceptable appearances of Pasolini’s characters make it impossible for us to ignore their considerable intelligence and their considerable elegance—both of which, while they also characterize Sade’s friends, are somewhat obscured (and may therefore even be dismissed) by all the reminders in the book of their sensationally repellent bodies. By making his libertines presentable, Pasolini corrects Sade’s own willingness to allow us not to recognize them.
In Salò, these recognitions are mainly the result of various aesthetic seductions. Both Pasolini’s film and Sade’s text are very self-consciously “works of art.” At least half of each work is devoted to stories within the main story. And, particularly in Sade, the account of the libertines’ activities is organized according to the principles that govern the reminiscences of the four female narrators. As a result of this dependency of the Sadean narrative on other narratives within it, Sade’s work is exceptionally instructive about the affinities between violence and the ways in which we organize experience in order to make sense of it. The carefully constructed stories of Mme Duclos and her colleagues have an aphrodisiac effect on the libertines. But storytelling is valued because it is already a certain type of erotic activity. Like much erotic literature, The 120 Days moves from comparatively mild sexual anecdotes to orgies of erotic violence. But Sade points out that this is not the order in which his characters have the experiences being related. We are told that on a particular day, for instance, Sade’s heroes were engaged in activities that would be narrated only as part of the record of a later day. In other words, the progress from one day to the next in Sade’s book is not determined by “real” chronology (by the lived experience of the characters designated as real people by this fiction); rather, the work is organized in order to produce a certain type of narrative progression which is itself erotically stimulating. The purpose of the book is, we might say, to create its own narrative.
While Sade’s narrative doesn’t reproduce the “actual” simultaneity of fellatio, flagellation, and coprophagia, it does reproduce the pacing that is more deeply characteristic of Sadean sex than the sexual content of any one day’s adventures. That pacing could be characterized as a calculated movement toward explosive climaxes. This movement is made possible by the isolation and imprisonment of the object of desire: the Sadean master removes his victims from the world, or a particular desire “removes” a part of a body from the rest of the body. The master’s authority and self-possession in Sade depend on the limited relations available both to his own desiring fantasies and to the “detached” object of desire as a result of such removals. In other terms, the calculation, preparation, and control of climaxes result from the establishment of foregrounds (objects of desire) and backgrounds (insignificant, undesired reality). This is also a narrative strategy: the climactic significances of narrative are made possible by a rigidly hierarchical organization of people and events into major and minor roles. In narrative, coherent orders are the privilege of a world in which relations have been limited to precisely those forms from which a central coherence can be made to appear “naturally” to emerge.
Narrativity sustains the glamour of historical violence. Narratives create violence as an isolated, identifiable topic or subject. We have all been trained to locate violence historically—that is, as a certain type of eruption against a background of generally nonviolent human experience. From this perspective, violence can be accounted for through historical accounts of the circumstances in which it occurs. Violence is thus reduced to the level of a plot; it can be isolated, understood, perhaps mastered and eliminated. Having been conditioned to think of violence within narrative frameworks, we expect this mastery to take place as a result of the pacifying power of such narrative conventions as beginnings, explanatory middles, and climactic endings, and we are therefore suspicious of works of art that reject those conventions. In short, we tend to sequester violence; we immobilize and centralize both historical acts of violence and their aesthetic
representations. A major trouble with this is that the immobilization of a violent event invites a pleasurable identification with its enactment. A coherent narrative depends on stabilized images; stabilized images stimulate the mimetic impulse. Centrality, the privileged foreground, and the suspenseful expectation of climaxes all contribute to a fascination with violent events on the part of readers and spectators. As Sade spectacularly illustrates, the privileging of the subject of violence encourages a mimetic excitement focused on the very scene of violence. All critiques of violence, to the extent that they conceive of it in terms of scenes which can be privileged, may therefore promote the very explosions they are designed to expose or forestall.
In Sade, the libertines’ violence is both provoked and monitored by carefully constructed verbal narratives. In Salò, violence is at once served and kept at bay by a minor festival of the arts: in addition to the Sadean stories, we have some dancing (Signora Vaccari does a few campy steps on her own; Signora Maggi dances with the Monsignore), music (a pianist accompanies the narratives, and we also hear “serious” and popular music over a radio), and a small gallery of modern painting. Finally, we come closest to cinema itself when, like the libertines, we watch from inside the house the scenes of torture and murder in the courtyard through a pair of binoculars. Pasolini almost succeeds in making sadistic violence part of an entertaining spectacle, and in so doing he appears to have accepted an extraordinary degree of complicity with his fascistic libertines. The horror of the film’s narrative progression—from the Circle of Manias to the Circle of Shit and finally to the Circle of Blood—is considerably diminished by the lateral divertissements of dance, music, and painting. By pleasantly scattering our aesthetic attention, Salò keeps us from focusing directly on narrative centers of violence. What we referred to a moment ago as a tendency to sequester violence is continuously frustrated; as a result, Pasolini deprives
2. We have made a similar argument in the context of a discussion of neo-Assyrian palace reliefs. See “The Forms of Violence,” October 8 (Spring 1979), 17–29.
us of the narrative luxury of isolating the obscene or violent act and rejecting it. He turns us away from sadism gently—in order, it would seem, to prevent us from turning away from it violently. Horror is almost constantly forestalled by a multiplication of aesthetic appeals.
Pasolini gives us the model for such an easy and radically frivolous turning away from torture and murder in the President’s jokes. These jokes are not in Sade. They are a debased but nonetheless significant version of a major strategy in the film. Immediately after each of three scenes of murder or mutilation, the President tells a terribly corny joke. (Example: “What is the difference between the number 8, a gate, and the family? An 8 is always closed, a gate is sometimes open.” “And the family?” asks the other person. “They’re fine, thanks,” answers the President, overwhelmed with glee.) If the pattern were just psychologically illustrative, its heavy-handed repetition would hardly be necessary. Rather, this diversion from violence through a (supposedly funny) little story is an anecdotal replica of a rhythm that characterizes the entire film. It parodistically reflects a visual mobility which would seem to indicate Pasolini’s refusal to be fixed— better, to be transfixed—by his subject.
In Salò there is almost always something else going on, something which prevents us from focusing for very long on any one aspect of a scene. Our attention is divided between the content of the stories told by Signore Vaccari and Castelli, and the coquettish campiness of the former and the considerably harsher camp of the latter. The three libertines putting the finishing touches on their dresses before going down to their marriage ceremonies are set against the massive, austere, abstract Léger paintings on the walls around them. The drag diverts us momentarily from coprophagia and murder, and Léger diverts us from the drag. The most intricate example of the film’s distancing tactics is Pasolini’s presentation of the tortures at the end only through binoculars. The President and His Excellency go between the courtyard and the chair from which they watch the burnings, scalpings, and so forth through the glasses. One might say that by remov-
ing themselves from the sadistic festivities below, the men gain a greater control over them. They are no longer subject to the contingencies and distractions of actual participation. Now they perceive only what they are focusing on; the binoculars create a frame that excludes everything but the visual subject of violence. But Pasolini exploits the very strategy designed to isolate and contain scenes in order to distract us from those scenes. The instrument itself occupies a large part of the screen, both in the dividing lines between the two halves of the image and in the dark ellipse surrounding each image. And this elliptical frame is, of course, itself framed by a rectangular movie screen; the libertines’ framing instrument is included within Pasolini’s. Thus the doubled voyeurism of the sequence (both the President’s eyes and the camera’s eye are looking at the scene through binoculars) is undermined by the supplemental vision of the cinematic eye. Pasolini’s most original strategy in Salò is to distance himself from his Sadean protagonists by going along with them. He duplicates that from which he wants to separate himself. There is no Brechtian distancing from Sade; the relation of Salò to the literary text is one of subversive passivity. The duplicating intent of Pasolini’s film is pointed to by several curious repetitions within the film itself. Salò frequently displays a kind of mimetic attachment to its own devices. The music during the two boys’ dancing at the end, for example, is the same song that accompanies the titles at the beginning. The boys’ dancing also reminds us of the sequence during which the Monsignore and Signora Maggi briefly dance. In the earlier scene, the camera itself seems to be imitating the dancers’ steps as it moves with them around the room. In the final sequence, the elliptical shape of the back of the chair is repeated in the ellipse made by the shaded area in the scenes viewed through the binoculars. And in one of the most curious touches in the film, Pasolini has placed a statuette of a woman fixing her stockings in front of the table mirror in the room where Signora Maggi dresses before going downstairs to start her narratives. The object is reflected in the mirror, and the scene it depicts is repeated by Signora Maggi,
who stops to arrange her stockings a few feet from the dressing table. Finally, the Sadean libertines’ habit of acting out the passions that excite them after they are narratively described by one of the female storytellers is, toward the end of the film, adhered to in a manner which makes the subversive intent of all these repetitions, duplications, and symmetries especially clear. We refer to the pianist’s suicide: her death leap from a window into the courtyard “illustrates” Signora Castelli’s anecdote about girls being brutally pushed across a room and out of a window into a cellar torture chamber. More exactly, the pianist’s leap refers us to Signora Castelli’s story, but the two are, so to speak, imperfectly symmetrical. One event evokes the other, but with a disquieting difference—in somewhat the same way as the cross-eyed President reminds us of the symmetry of the human face by virtue of that which violates it, a comically displaced eye.
Pasolini’s brilliant trick in Salò is to use repetition and replication as distancing rather than imitative techniques. It is as if a fascinated adherence—to Sade, to Pasolini’s own cinematic libertines, to the techniques of his film—were, finally, identical to a certain detachment. Pasolini exploits film’s potential for a vertiginous passivity (its eagerness merely to register), and then, having allowed his work to abandon itself to all sorts of submissive doublings and pacifying symmetries, he creates a type of non-imitative recognition, which is his distance from Sade and sadistic violence. But what we recognize is nothing more than our pleasure at being carried along as spectators. It is as if the ease with which we “go along” with Salò’s sadists included a folding movement of cognition—a repliage which constitutes our simply recognizing that ease. Thus the distance Pasolini takes from his subject consists in an excessive indulgence toward his subject; he moves away from images and styles by duplicating them rather than “criticizing” or “opposing” them.
The logic of this strategy could be defined in these terms: moral consciousness is the replication of aesthetic consciousness. Or, to put this in another way, the folding back we referred to a moment ago is also an enfolding, a thorough assuming or taking on of the
pleasures of mimetic spectatorship. The Sadean libertines are experts in this type of pleasure, but their activities are also designed to rid them of the very “vibrations” which they seek in torturing others. The appropriation of the other’s “commotions” in Sade is meant to serve a narrative denouement that kills excitement: the great test by which all acts are measured in The 120 Days is la perte du foutre. Sex in Sade is essentially the loss of cum, the coming to a loss, the climactic explosion which confirms the success of an aesthetic limited to the madly rigorous schedules of Sade’s narrative orders. In the Sadean system of phallic machismo, nothing is viewed more contemptuously than the weak orgasms of modestly endowed males. Sadism is an aestheticized erotic, but the aesthetic is limited to the controlled movements of narrative progressions. Salò multiplies aesthetic seductions and, appropriately, almost neglects the orgasm. Pasolini has simply let all that prideful Sadean foutre drop. . . . He makes us into more willing, less purposeful spectators than his sado-fascistic protagonists. In a sense, this means that we never tire of being spectators; but it is the very limitlessness of our aestheticism which constitutes the moral perspective on sadism in Salò. The saving frivolity with which we simply go on looking creates a consciousness of looking as, first, part of our inescapable implication in the world’s violence and, second, a promiscuous mobility thanks to which our mimetic appropriations of the world are constantly being continued elsewhere and therefore do not require the satisfyingly climactic destruction of any part of the world.
The four friends in Salò kill Ezio for sleeping with a black servant-girl. The Duke then approaches the girl, who is crouched by a chair, and shoots her in the head. When the Duke steps away, Pasolini shows us the dead girl. There is no blood, and there are no signs of a violent death; instead we have the beautiful lines of the girl’s nude, lifeless body propped against the chair, with one arm gracefully thrown over its seat. This potentially sentimental but, in fact, healthily cruel little scene is a fine example of the way in which Pasolini is always helping us to
see that we are not blind. The effects of violence—like any other scene in the world—can always be viewed with a certain pleasure. The morality of the scene consists in our having been compelled to see the nonmoral nature of our interest in violence. It is as if Pasolini had divided an act of violence into two parts—or, more accurately, doubled it, let us see it twice—in order to make us experience more vividly the wholeness of our perception. The first shot is the pistol shot, the shocked perception; the second shot is the pleasing perception of a beautiful human design. Of course, the point—and it could be thought of as a major point of the entire film—is that two are always in one. But it is perhaps precisely because the purely agreeable perception is isolated and emphasized that our aesthetic awareness is, so to speak, saturated into an acceptance of itself. That acceptance is a replica of Sade’s horrendous appropriation of others; it is our sensuous enfolding of the Sadean imagination, with, however, the supplemental pleasure of our knowing that there is no reason to destroy the world in order to conclude our perceptions of it. Tu vois; you see.
Pasolini’s pianist is the logical defect in a Sadean world. Salò’s near duplication of The 120 Days of Sodom involves in this instance the presence of four women, as in the book, but in the film only three of them narrate stories. The fourth is their silent musical accompanist, the enigmatic piano player who throws herself from a window at the end of the film, presumably immediately after seeing the tortures in the courtyard. That jump is perhaps the most shocking movement in the film, but it is also somehow outside the film. Pasolini has changed a narrator into a portentous but impenetrable blankness. Each of Sade’s four women has an absolutely clear narrative function: each takes one of a predefined group of passions, thus advancing our knowledge of the human heart, as Sade would have it, and also providing the boundaries for each part of Sade’s own account of the libertines’ behavior. In contrast to this, Pasolini’s pianist doesn’t help
to move anything forward. Somewhat like ourselves (and like Pasolini’s camera), she simply goes along with things; quite literally, she plays along. She is an extra entertainment.
The pianist’s strangely haggard yet also childlike face tells us nothing. It is tempting but useless to try to interpret her look the few times she turns from her piano, as if struck (why? how?) by something that has been said or done in the room. The only time she speaks is to enliven the three libertines’ wedding ceremony; she drops the accordion which has temporarily replaced her piano and, with Signora Vaccari, does a vaudeville number designed to cheer everyone up. The performance ends with the pianist screaming; even Signora Vaccari has trouble deciding if it’s part of the act or not. Perhaps it is; at any rate, they both laugh raucously, stop abruptly, and the enigmatic musician returns to her place, all signs of agitation gone. She picks up her accordion to accompany the wedding with a look one is almost
figure 2. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò (Produzioni Europee Associate [PEA]; Les Productions Artistes Associés, 1975)
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the East with that German power, Venice would be politically overshadowed.
It is alleged by some writers that Philip himself was proposed. He was at the time, as we have stated, contesting the sceptre of Germany with Otho, who had been approved by the Pope. Philip’s acquisition of the Eastern sceptre might give him predominant weight in the West and possibly convert the Pope to his interests, especially as thus the union of the churches would be facilitated. Thus the reasons urged against Boniface were of equal force against Philip.
Dandolo declared his preference for Baldwin, Earl of Flanders. This chieftain was but thirty-two years of age, a cousin of the King of France, and of the blood of Charlemagne. He had proved his bravery on many a field, and was, moreover, unobjectionable to the more ardent among the crusaders from the fact that, unlike Boniface, he had taken no active part in originally diverting the movement from its legitimate destination against Syria and Egypt. The French, who were the majority in the host, sided with him. Between the parties of Boniface and Baldwin it was agreed that, in the event of either attaining to the immediate government of the empire, the other should acquire as his special dominion the Peloponnesus and the Asiatic provinces beyond the Bosporus.
While the electors deliberated the crowd without waited with anxiety. At midnight, May 9th, the doors of the church were opened. The Bishop of Soissons announced the decision: “This hour of the night, which saw the birth of God, sees also the birth of a new empire. We proclaim as emperor Earl Baldwin of Flanders and Hainaut.” The successful candidate was raised upon a shield and carried into the church, where he was vested with the vermilion buskins. A week later he was solemnly crowned in St. Sophia. At the coronation Boniface attended his rival, carrying in the procession the royal robe of cloth of gold.
But Boniface’s loyalty scarcely endured the strain put upon it. He soon exchanged the dominion of the Peloponnesus and Asia Minor, which had been assigned to him by the electors’ agreement, for that of Salonica. Over this he and Baldwin incessantly quarrelled. This
both as against their common enemy Though the capital had fallen, the Greek everywhere was still the sworn enemy of the Latin.
In the meantime the Moslems were compacting and extending their military power. They were growing in multitude by the migration of new swarms from the original hive in the farther East. They were destined to become too strong for Christendom to resist, to move steadily on to their own conquest of Constantinople, and even to knock at the gate of Vienna. The words of Edward Pears are undoubtedly warranted: “The crime of the fourth crusade handed over Constantinople and the Balkan peninsula to six centuries of barbarism.”
CHAPTER XL. DISASTER OF MARIETTA.
Pope Innocent III. comforted himself for this “slaughter of the innocents” by making the incident the basis of a new appeal for the relief of Palestine. “These children,” said he, “reproach us with being asleep while they were flying to the assistance of the Holy Land.” In his exhortation to Europe the Holy Father ventures to interpret the mysterious prediction of the Book of Revelation regarding the duration of the Antichrist symbolized by the beast. Some Protestants have presumptuously applied the figures to the destiny of the Roman Church. Innocent regarded Mohammedanism as meant, and, counting from the hejira of Mohammed (622) to his own day, announced to the people, in the name of God, whose infallible vicegerent he was, “The power of Mohammed draws towards its end; for that power is nothing but the beast of the Apocalypse, which is not to extend beyond the number of six hundred and sixty-six years, and already six hundred have been accomplished.” Europe was asked to believe that the marshalled nations of the East, then so threatening, would only furnish the funeral cortège of Antichrist, after which the world would enter upon its millennium of peace.
Every crowned head, every noble, every knight, every city, every church, received its especial appeal from Rome to offer men, ships, money, and incessant prayers for this last holy adventure. With equal assurance Innocent addressed letters to the sultans of Damascus and Cairo, giving them an opportunity to voluntarily restore the holy places before the final vengeance of the Lord. Ardent orators, like Cardinal Courçon and James of Vitri (an original chronicler of these events), went everywhere, firing the passions of the people. Philip Augustus appropriated for the project two and a half per cent. of the territorial revenue of France. King John of England promised to make amends for his many sins by taking the cross; he was the more inclined to this from the fact that his barons had just wrenched
from him Magna Charta, and the Pope had put him under excommunication; his pretence of piety was the policy of the moment. Frederick II. of Germany, to secure the papal favor in his contest with Otho for the imperial throne, assumed the rôle of a crusader.
The movement was, however, halted by the affairs in France. England, Flanders, Holland, Boulogne, with the aid of the German Otho, invaded France. At the battle of Bouvines (1214) this combination was overthrown, and the French monarchy, with restored territory and prestige, assumed the independence which it maintained until recent times.
In 1215 the Lateran Council issued the grand order for the crusading expedition. The Pope and cardinals taxed themselves a tenth of their income, and all ecclesiastics a twentieth. So great was the excitement for war that two astounding phenomena were observed: luminous crosses appeared in the heavens, and the Troubadours sang only of battle, no longer of love. Innocent III. proposed to head the crusade in person, but when his example had wrought its full influence discreetly retired from the leadership. Shortly after he died, and Honorius III. came into the pontificate.
In 1217 the mighty armament was in motion. Andrew II., King of Hungary, was designated chief. Germany, under its representative dukes of Bavaria and Austria, followed in his train. The host was augmented by those from Italy and France and the islands of the Mediterranean. According to the Arabian historian, it was the largest force ever at one time pitted against them in Palestine.
The army landed at Acre. The new soldiers signalled their arrival by an impressive exhibition of their pilgrim zeal. They formed an immense procession. At their head was the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who bore aloft a piece of wood which had been surreptitiously cut from the True Cross at the time it was captured by Saladin at Hattîn. With utmost pomp they passed over the land from the sea to the Jordan, bathed in the waters of the sacred river, and lingered to pray amid the ruins on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias. They gathered many relics, and did not hesitate to take as their pious plunder many
of the people of the land, whom they brought with them as prisoners to Acre.
No enemy molested them. Malek-Ahdel had advised that the invaders be left to their own dissensions, which, judging from previous observation, were sure to follow as soon as they should attempt to divide the spoil they might take. The martial spirit of the Christians did not resent this idleness, and stagnation of energy bred moral malaria. Camp vices thrived to such an extent that the leaders were forced to drive out the soldiers in search of manly adventures. Mount Tabor, the Mount of Transfiguration, lifted high its head, crowned with Moslem forts in place of the Church of St. Helena and of the two monasteries which had formerly commemorated the tabernacles of Moses and Elias. The crusaders were ordered to capture the holy mountain. That all doubt of Heaven’s favor in the enterprise might be removed, the patriarch read the gospel for the day, first Sunday in Advent, and interpreted the words, “Go ye into the village over against you,” to mean the castle on Tabor.
Led by this high dignitary, who carried the ubiquitous piece of the True Cross, they made the ascent through a shower of Moslem arrows and an avalanche of stones. The defenders at first retired within their citadel, but an unaccountable panic seized the assailants: they deserted their own cause at the moment of victory, and made a disorderly retreat down to the plain. Their piety was, however, compensated by the capture of a number of women and children, whom they forced to be baptized. The anticipated dissensions followed. Each leader reproached the others. On Christmas eve a terrific storm swept the camp, which, in the general discouragement, they attributed to the displeasure of Heaven. Lack of provisions forced them to encamp in different neighborhoods— Tripoli, Acre, Mount Carmel, and the plains of Cæsarea. The commander-in-chief, the King of Hungary, returned to Europe, consoling himself for lack of martial laurels by the possession of the head of St. Peter, the hand of St. Thomas, and one of the seven water-jars in which Christ had made water wine at Cana. The sacred relics did not, however, prevent his subsequent excommunication.
This crusade was saved from utter and ignominious failure only by the arrival of fresh enthusiasts from the West. Bands from Friesland and the banks of the Rhine had taken ships on the Baltic and coasted by France and Portugal. They told of the luminous crosses which appeared in the heavens and signalled them by moving towards the East, and how squadrons of angels had fought with them against the Moors on the Tagus.
The courage of their brethren was thus rekindled to venture at the opening of spring (1218) upon an invasion of Egypt. The chronicler tells us of a favorable omen here observed by the crusaders: the water of the Nile, which was sweet to the taste on their arrival, afterwards became salt.
The city of Damietta was guarded by a strong tower, which rose from the middle of the Nile, and was connected with the walls by an immense chain which impeded the passage of ships. The crusaders attacked this unavailingly. There were in the host certain skilled mechanics, who, “by the inspiration of the Almighty,” constructed an enormous wooden tower, which floated upon two vessels and overtopped the walls of the great citadel. In vain did the Moslems set fire to this with streams of liquid flame. The prayers of the monks on the shore, together with the “tears of the faithful,” and, we may add, the abundant oblation of the buckets, soon subdued the conflagration. The huge drawbridge which dropped from the top of the floating tower successfully landed upon the walls three hundred brave knights. Their valor, together with the spiritual prowess of the patriarch, who lay stretched on the ground wrestling with the will of Heaven, was resistless, and soon the flag of the Duke of Austria was flying from the ramparts; not, however, until the usual band of celestial knights in white armor had dazzled the eyes of the Moslems, so that they could not see where to strike their foes. This was on August 24th, which, being St. Bartholomew’s day, enabled the crusaders also to see that saint, clad in red, at the head of their celestial assistants.
Mastering the tower of the Nile and breaking the chain which obstructed the channel, the Christian fleet lay close to the walls of the city.
Seventeen months were destined to pass in the siege of Damietta. In September Malek-Ahdel died. He had before formally laid down the chieftainship, and divided his realm among his many sons; but his prestige and continually sought counsel made him until his death the virtual head of the Moslem power. He maintained a sumptuous court and a splendid palace, the recesses of which were regarded by the faithful as a sanctuary where Heaven daily blessed its favorite son. The various courts saluted him as “king of kings,” and the camps hailed him as saphadin, the “sword of religion.” His death threw a shadow upon the Moslem world.
Instead of taking advantage of this providence, the Christians seemed to emulate the divisions of their enemies. Many grew weary of the task they had vowed to Heaven, and returned to Europe. The priests pronounced a curse upon the deserters. This malediction was regarded as inspired when it was learned that six thousand of the crusaders from Brittany had been wrecked off the coast of Italy, and that the returning Frieslanders reached their homes only to witness the wrath of the North Sea, which broke the Holland dikes, submerged their richest provinces and cities, and drowned one hundred thousand of the inhabitants.
But new warriors were excited to redeem the opportunity. France and England sent much of their best blood and many of their most famous names. Among the multitude of celebrities was one who was destined to bring the entire crusade to a fatal ending. Cardinal Pelagius was delegated as papal legate. He was a man of arrogance, and asserted his right to supersede even John of Brienne, the King of Jerusalem, in the military command. This position was refused him by the soldiery He at length accomplished his ambition by threatening all who opposed him with excommunication.
The coming of these auxiliaries spurred the Christians to take advantage of contentions among the Moslems and make a forward movement. They crossed from the west bank of the Nile and invested Damietta. The menace reunited the Infidels. Battles were of daily occurrence, in which whole battalions, now of Christians, now of Moslems, were driven into the Nile, and perished.
One beautiful episode redeemed these hellish scenes. St. Francis of Assisi visited the camps; he went among his brethren with consolations for the sick and wounded, his presence redolent with heavenly charity. No labors could weary this man, who already seemed divested largely of his physical nature, and to be sustained only by the power of his inward spirit. His zeal for God led him to visit even the camp of the Moslems. He preached his doctrines before Malek-Kamel, the Sultan of Cairo; he alternately threatened the sultan’s infidelity with the pains of hell, and sought to win his better faith by promises of heaven. Francis proposed to test the truth of either religion by passing with the holiest Moslems through an ordeal of fire. This being declined, he offered himself to the flame, provided that the sultan’s conversion should follow the refusal of fire to burn the representative of the faith of Christ. With courteous words the test was declined. Moslems reverenced insane persons as in some way under a divine influence; Malek-Kamel treated his uninvited guest as one of this sort. The Moslem doctors of the law commanded Malek-Kamel to take off the head of the intruder, but the warrior was either too much amused with the simplicity, or too much amazed at the sincerity, of his visitor to harm him, and dismissed him with presents, which, however, Francis’ vow of poverty would not allow him to accept.
Whether persuaded by the holy eloquence of the saint, or by the rumor that Frederick of Germany was approaching with fresh armies, the sultan proposed peace. He offered the flattering condition of giving up Jerusalem to the Christians. The warriors would have assented thus to secure as the reward of their valor that which had been the object of the entire crusade; but Cardinal Pelagius forbade, in the name of the Holy Father, the cessation of arms at any less price than the entire subjugation of the Moslem power.
Damietta was therefore more closely invested; its garrison was reduced to starvation. To prevent possible defection among his miserable soldiers, the commander of Damietta walled up the gates of the city. The Christians made an assault in full force; the rams battered the trembling towers; ladders swarmed with assailants; no one opposed them. Sweeping over the ramparts with naked swords,
they found the streets and houses filled with the dead. Of seventy thousand scarcely three thousand of the inhabitants had remained alive. The air was fraught with poisonous stench from the decaying corpses; as the chronicler says, “the dead had killed the living.” The crusaders could abide only long enough to gather the booty, and left the city to be cleansed by carrion-birds and the air of heaven.
This temporary success of his policy inflamed the conceit of Cardinal Pelagius. According to his own people, the “King of kings and Lord of lords” had given him the city; “under the guidance of Christ” the soldiers had scaled the walls. The victors took as their reward the rich plunder of the place, and gratefully “baptized all the children who were found alive in the city, thereby giving to God the first-fruit of souls.”
The Moslems, afflicted by these reverses, enlarged their conditions of peace to the yielding up, not only of Jerusalem, but all the Holy Land. The cardinal refused even these terms, and proposed to march to the capture of Cairo, the capital of Egypt. In vain did the military leaders protest against that which they esteemed impracticable in itself, and which, in the event of its success, would leave on their hands a land which they could not hope to defend against the myriads who were swarming from all parts of the Moslem world. The cardinal accused the warriors of timidity and irreligion. This was too much for John of Brienne, who would have dared to sheathe his good sword in the bowels of Lucifer himself. Orders for the ascent of the Nile were given. At the junction of its two branches, the southern extreme of the Delta, the Moslems made their fortified camp, and built what has since been known as the city of Mansourah. The enemy approached; once more the sultan offered peace, including now the gift of the Delta, together with the previously offered conditions.
The refusal of this exhausted the patience, not only of the sultan, but seemingly of Heaven also. With the rising of the Nile the Moslems opened the sluices, flooded all the canals of Lower Egypt, and inundated the Christians’ camp. Simultaneously the Moslem ships made their way up through the canals and destroyed the vessels of their foes. The Infidels occupied every rising knoll; “while,” says a
letter from the camp, “we were thus caught in the midst of the waters like fish in a net.” In vain did the Christians endeavor to force a battle. Shrewdly retreating from the arbitrament of the sword, the Moslems left the invaders to the destruction which they proclaimed Allah had prepared for His insolent adversaries.
Cardinal Pelagius now begged for the peace he had despised; nor did he stop with the old conditions. He would yield all he had taken or claimed, if only he might be permitted to lead the armies of Europe safely into the walls of distant Acre. This capitulation was reluctantly accepted by the Sultan of Cairo. The haughty cardinal, the brave King John of Brienne, the Duke of Bavaria, and many of the nobles meditated their disgrace as hostages in the hostile camp, while the Christian soldiers were still waiting the will of their conqueror in the marshes. King John of Brienne one day sat down at the feet of the sultan and burst into tears. The Moslem respected his courage and was grieved at the distress which seemingly had shaken it. “Why do you weep?” he asked. “To see my brave people perishing with hunger amid the waters.” The sultan immediately provisioned the Christian camp, and sent his own son to conduct the host in safety out of the land they had come to conquer (autumn, 1221).
