Rude Strength Essay, Research Paper

[T]he

bleding continued a while til it migt be sene with avisement. And this was so

plenteous to my sight that methowte, if it had be so in kind and in substance

for that tyme, it should have made the bed al on blode and a passid over aboute.1This

passage, which I affectionately refer to as "the bloodbath scene," is

from Julian of Norwich’s description of Christ’s bleeding during the

Crucifixion as it was revealed to her in the Fourth Showing. While none of her

renderings in A Revelation of Divine Love lack graphic specificity, I cite this

passage as a particularly obvious example of Julian’s penchant for enthusiastic

description. Having received the vision while she lay ill, Julian suggests

that, if it were present in actuality as it was in the Showing, Christ’s blood

would have saturated the bed she was confined to and overflowed. By allowing

vision to spill into reality, Julian makes a crude but carefully wrought mess

that I offer to you as an example of "rude strength."2 Rude

strength is a term I learned from Walter Pater, who used it in 1873 in his

volume of essays titled The Renaissance to describe the essential quality of

art in the Middle Ages. A fairly ingenuous first-year doctoral student, I read

Pater’s description and recognized precisely that quality of the literature of

the Middle Ages that I find so compelling. Soon enough, however, it became

clear that "rude strength" was not something Pater meant as a

compliment; he was giving a description of medieval artistic efforts I have

since learned that many who champion the Renaissance are apt to give. What

Pater was identifying was a lack-a lack of conscious aesthetics, of a

"purely artistic quality."3 The Middle Ages, in his estimation,

produced art that was unpolished, roughhewn. I disagree with many of the

conclusions Pater comes to concerning medieval art, but I still believe it has

rude strength. I am amazed that he could so misrecognize a virtue for a fault.When Pater

considered the rude strength of the Middle Ages, he surely did not have Julian

of Norwich in mind, but I did-specifically, I had in mind the bloodbath scene

and its direct, determined treatment of its extreme and gory subject. The

virtue of this passage, I think, is its persistence, its insistence on explaining

the mess it describes. It is, to borrow from the aesthetic approach of another

era, the overflow of powerful feeling recollected with dogged determination. A

Revelation of Divine Love is rife with these kinds of descriptions; Julian’s

analogies, explanations of her emotions, and theology are all related with the

rough eloquence of exigency and furor. This is a story, the language of A

Revelation of Divine Love demands, that needs to be told. Knowing that we have

Julian’s descriptions through a scribe only increases their imperative tone for

me; behind the words I can hear her perseverance and caution. "I have

something to say," I hear Julian of Norwich say between the lines of The

Showings, "and I want to get it right." That is the virtue of her

text, its rude strength.I am quite

familiar with this virtue; I grew up reaping its benefits. My father, along

with his four brothers and sisters and my grandparents, immigrated to the U.S.

in the 1950’s from a small village in Italy. My mother was raised in the house

adjacent to the tavern her parents owned and operated, and in which I myself

spent a lot of time, when I was young, visiting my grandparents. What this

means is that I grew up listening to people for whom, for one reason or

another, language was often difficult, cumbersome, but who nonetheless had a

lot they wanted to say. These

people were poor, uneducated, and foreign to the language they were speaking,

or drunk, or simply speaking in the unaffected, slipshod discourse used by the

working-class folks I grew up around. I listened to the stories my father’s

sisters told me, in awkward, broken English, about their lives in Italy. I sat

with my seven year-old legs dangling from a barstool in the tavern drinking

strawberry soda pop and overhearing conversations between my grandparents’

patrons-it was there, in fact, that I heard my first bloodbath narrative when a

steel worker explained a car accident he had seen on his way from the mill:

"You shoulda seen it," I remember him exclaiming, "there was

blood on the road, blood on the car, blood on the cop. There was blood

everywhere, an’ then some!" I used to listen to my mother gossip on the

phone, speaking as though every single topic was pressing, choosing just the

right locution to allow her to say what she meant-so-and-so better "get

the lead out" and get a job, or quit "livin’ hard" and settle

down, or stop thinking "that no-good guy hung the moon." When I read

The Showings, I recognized Julian’s voice as one of these voices. She speaks

with the same urgency, struggle for clarity, and unfailing determination to

make her point that I heard in the people I listened to as a child-and that,

indeed, I hear in myself. I would be

remiss if I did not mention that it was listening to the people I grew up

around that taught me to respect words, to care about language and narrative,

and that eventually led me to study texts. That is the first benefit I reaped

from my childhood of listening. The second is that it was by listening that I

learned to talk, that I found my own voice: I have something of a rude strength

of my own.

The first member of my family to go to college, let alone pursue a graduate

degree, the language I brought with me to school was not quite the typical

language of the academy. It was the piecemeal language of immigrants, of the

tavern, of the factories and warehouses where I worked before becoming a

student. When I went to college, I could hear the difference between my voice

and the others I heard in classrooms and in the books I read, but it was the

only voice I had ready to hand, so I used it.After

seven years of higher education, it is still the only voice I have most

immediately at hand, so, although the language in which I write, carefully

edited and mediated by the conventions of scholarly discourse, reflects at

least some of my academic training, the language in which I speak still betrays

my differentness in the academy. Now, among my fellow doctoral students, most

of whom speak in calm, objective-sounding, and measured words, my language

sounds even stranger than it did when I was an undergraduate. Often, I feel

like my Italian aunts must have felt when they tried to articulate stories

about their native village to me; I feel like I am translating my ideas. My

language betrays my excitement, anger, and impatience, and I pause often to be

sure that I’m being understood, making sense. "I have something to

say," I hear myself saying behind my words, "and I want to get it

right." When I teach, this is even more noticeable because I have more space

at my command, more room to make use of as I gesture and pace out my words. I

slide into my working-class vernacular much more easily, joke with my students,

punctuate our discussions with damn-rights and hell-yesses. Last semester, a

friend and colleague told me that, in class, when I explain my ideas or take

issue with someone else’s, or even when I just make a comment, I speak with a

rough grace and intensity that makes me sound like the speaking equivalent of a

bar fighter. He knows how I grew up and meant this as a compliment, but even if

he had not, I do not think I could have taken it any other way.But that

was not always the case. I heard my fair share of insults about my background

before I learned to take them as compliments. At the large research university

where I began my graduate work, a university I commuted three hours round-trip

three days a week to attend because I could not quit my job mopping floors and

still afford to attend classes, one of my professors said one morning in class,

in all seriousness, that people from blue-collar backgrounds could never

succeed in the academy because, as children, they were not taught to value

learning. I dropped out of graduate school after I heard that comment, which

made me more aware than I ever had been of the difference between my fellow

students and me-not just my speech, but my clothes, my posture, everything

about me marked me as more than different now, as poorer, too poor to handle

the big ideas these other students tossed around with ease and familiarity. A

year later I enrolled in a smaller graduate program, hoping that the more

intimate atmosphere would facilitate my acceptance. To a large degree, it did,

and it was there that I began to recognize the virtues of my upbringing-often,

vocally. Irritated, one of my professors suggested I abandon all thoughts of

entering a doctoral program until I learned to stop trying to integrate my

working-class roots into my academic career.Obviously,

I did not follow his very bad advice, and I cannot say I have any reason to

think that I should have. But this professor’s words have remained with me, a

reminder always in the back of my mind when I speak, write, and teach not to

make the same error of judgment that he did about the relationship between my

background and my academic career. My roots are not something that need to be

left out, something inadequate-they are not a fault but a virtue. The economic

poverty of my childhood does not translate into a poverty of intellect; the

language I grew up listening to and that I speak is not inarticulate or

unenlightened, but a different way of being articulate and differently

enlightened. I was taught to speak with excitement and even a little anxiety,

but to be invested in and concerned about getting said what I had to say rather

than how I said it. I speak in a voice largely foreign to the academy, but

certainly not antithetical to it. It is, above all, my voice. It helps make me

a good teacher, and my best scholarship comes from it. This voice is often halting,

or reckless, or a little too fervent, but it has rude strength, and that, any

way I look at it, is a virtue.It is very

convenient to misrecognize a virtue for a fault; doing so prevents whoever is

doing the misrecognizing from really having to consider and make sense of

things that may be complicated, or troublesome, or different. When Pater

misrecognized the rude strength of the Middle Ages as a lack, it allowed him to

herald the Renaissance as the era with a more sophisticated, more enlightened aesthetic

sense. "These revelations were shewed to a simple creature that cowde no

letter," says Julian of Norwich near the beginning of A Revelation of

Divine Love, revealing what I take to be the wellspring of her rude strength,

the source of all the power behind her text.4 A simple creature? I am not

fooled. Julian’s words, like the words of the people I grew up listening to,

are not polished or eloquent in the conventional sense of the word, but they

have a sophistication and enlightenment all their own, and most importantly,

they say something. Their rude strength may prevent them from having the

"real, direct aesthetic charm" that interested Pater, but, in itself,

it is not a lack.5 It is the force that gets the story told despite the lacks. If

it is a fault at all, then, it is a lucky one.Making the

connection I did between Pater’s conclusions about the Middle Ages and Julian

of Norwich has helped me come to terms with my own rude strength. I would like

to say that I have always been this calm and self-confident about what marks me

as different in the academy, but that isn’t the case. I have learned, though,

that I do not have to make excuses for my difference and that I do not have to

be embarrassed of the qualities I have by virtue of my upbringing, qualities

that allow me to make the work I do my own. I realized this one night when I

was out with some other students in my doctoral program, people who did not yet

know me very well. As we talked, I noticed one of the older students watching

me with particular attention when I spoke. Obviously amused by the substance

and quality of my contributions to the conversation, half-drunk, and trying

very hard to condescend to me, he eventually pointed to me across the table and

said, "Hey, you’re poor, aren’t you?" Yes, well,

we all have our faults.