Talking Turkey at the TurkeyBlog

Monday, December 20, 2004

My knowledge of Abélard and Héloïse is limited to a stanza from Villon's "Où sont les neiges d'antan?" and the footnote at the bottom of the page in my edition of his Testament (was it the big one or the little one? - must have been Le Grand Testament). Here is the stanza:

Où est la très sage Héloïse,
pour qui fut châtré, et puis moine,
Pierre Abélard à Saint Denis ?
Pour l'amour d'elle il eut cette peine.
Semblablement où est la reine
qui commanda que Buridan
fût jeté dans un sac en Seine ?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan ?
Where is the good Heloise,
For whom was castrated, then a monk,
Pierre Abélard of Saint Denis?
For her love he suffered this penalty.
Likewise where is the queen
Who ordered that Buridan
Be thrown in the Seine in a sack?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?
-Tblog translation

Funny thing, though. You take a story of forbidden love and a castrated monk and some on the left think, "He's our boy." GetReligion notes how a commentator in Salon assumed that Abélard's prosecutor must have been the W of his day. Cicero points out how interesting it is that if the liberals find someone to have been transgressive, they assume they've found a kindred spirit.

Actually, sadly, curiously, the liberals' best friend in this whole game is the decidedly illiberal Sade, who was not only transgressive but assumed that his physical power and power as a noble gave him the right to make use of people from the lower orders however he saw fit. Strangely, the man gets quasi-celebrated in films like Quills, even though he carved up and abused prostitutes among other things. It is left to relatively conservative academics like Roger Shattuck to answer De Beauvoir's query, "Faut-il brûler Sade?" with something approaching a "oui." (The libertarian leaning TurkeyBlog says, pourquoi pas? I'd oppose banning him, but if the reprints slowed and he disappeared from the 18th c. French lit reading list, I don't think the wolrd would be missing much.) The Abélard issue comes from the other direction, with the transgressiveness being assumed due to the transgression, though it appears Abélard's biggest sins were doctrinal, not sexual. The Salon article that launched the discussion seems to really fall into the trap. At least, GetReligion reports that its author was disappointed by the lack of exploration of Héloïse's S&M fantasies. The TurkeyBlog suspects some serious overreading of texts regarding submission to God's will, something they took pretty seriously back in the day.

posted by gbarto at 2:51 AM

Monday, December 20, 2004

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