We invited Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, the author of Making a King: The Political Theology of Joan of Arc, and a prominent scholar of religion, to reflect on the poet Jake Rose’s new book JOAN. Next week, we will run an essay by Rose reflecting on Sullivan’s book.
JOAN is a book of war. No book about Joan of Arc could be anything else. Joan lived in a time of war. Of the so-called Hundred Years War. Of forever war. Like our time. Her life was consumed by war. Too often condescended to as an illiterate peasant or enlisted as an icon of romantic medievalism or xenophobic French nationalism, Joan was smart, informed, and deadly serious. It was a war of survival for her, and for her friends; it was, one might say, a politics from below—a politics of war refracted by way of a vibrating queer genius who talked to God.
Joan of Arc lived six hundred years ago, in the beginning decades of the fifteenth century. She died at the age of nineteen. And yet she is present to us today across the world, mediated through music, film, art, fashion, theatre, video games, and prayer, brand new works as well as old, old ones. The historical traces of her short life are voluminous, and continue to be unearthed—in court records, letters, chronicles, memoirs. We know a lot about her day-to-day living. We have her own words in her letters and in her testimony and in the reports of those who encountered her on her journeys. We have the words of her friends and enemies. And yet, maybe we know almost nothing. She exhausts the categories and the clichés. We want to know her. We want her to save us from our humanity. And yet what we find, indeed our consolation, is what she does to confirm it.
In this book of astonishingly intimate poems, Jake Rose speaks in Joan’s own voice, Joan’s voice to herself, narrating the experience of living with war. But the poems are at the same time a conversation with god, a coming out to god.[1] Opening in her father’s garden with “I spent all my loneliness with you here” (6), the book ends with these two lines:
I kinda want you to see me now
because that’s how much I believe in (99)
In the words of the poems in between these two, “you” is lover, god or angel, divine and perhaps human, at the same time. To see her now is to see a person of brilliance and courage and sacrifice, clear-eyed about what she has done and what has been done to her, regretful but not broken.
JOAN is a complex mixed media work that engages in a thick way with many sources. This complexity, even density, means that a few words can sometimes stop you in your tracks—”I dreamed a hole so big we had to fill it with our ribs/ pulled one at a time & stacked like sticks” (39)—or open on to whole vistas, aesthetic vistas both personal and political:
no one’s been eating they’ve just been
praying for pieces of me to believe in
while I’m fasting away the best
years of my life lost in the mist
knitted mornings where robins catch
the shaded clefts that fall along the
wooded road (32)
Others linger in place, inviting us to dwell in the grass, along the road, in her cell observing the dawn sky.
The book has three formal elements. The lovely, lovely poems, each of which rewards repeated, even obsessive, reading and savoring. Images, also created by Jake Rose, fragments, as I see them, cuts, perhaps, expressing the wounds of Joan’s life. And epigraphs, short, attributed, historical quotations. Together, these three elements triangulate Joan across time and space. Their combined effect is visceral, full of pain and joy and growing self-knowledge. They also have an elegiac quality. We mourn her even as we get to know her. And maybe ourselves as well. Our bodies touch her body.
The images in JOAN appear to be manipulated and superimposed details of stills excerpted from the great 1928 silent film about Joan, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, photographic collages. Not immediately recognizable as such, perhaps, if you have not seen the film many times, and yet, even so, they bind us to Dreyer’s stark and terrifyingly memorable reading of her trial and the virtuoso performance in that film by French actress Renée Falconetti. The small bits from the film, excerpted and magnified, re-cut and re-assembled, as well as the section titles, printed in white on black, trigger the distinctive emotional terror of the film in the material conditions of her imprisonment, trial, and execution, pushing back against the seductive interiority of lyric poetry. They also pull in the strong reading of her life as expressed in the title of the film, a mimesis of Christ’s passion.
The short epigraphs, for their part, ground Joan in a very specific archive, the received fifteenth-century evidence of her life as collected in books produced at the turn of the twentieth century. They give us sightings of her by way of the authorities in her life: church, state and family. The books from which Rose takes these references, as they note in their acknowledgments, are two English language sources, a documentary history of her life and a biography by prolific Victorian writer Mrs. Oliphant, as well as a compilation of the letters of Antonio Moroni, a fifteenth-century Italian diplomat living in Paris. These three books appeared in the time leading up to Joan’s canonization in 1920, a time when there was a burst of interest in her, in France and elsewhere. Joan was a great favorite of the Victorians and of the Bloomsbury group.
JOAN is divided into four sections, each titled with the names of places that Joan inhabited. All are retrospectively recalled by Joan. The first, “Domrémy 1412-1425,” is named for her home village in the Meuse River Valley on the edge of what is now France. The second, “Vaucouleurs to Orléans January 1429-May 1429,” marks her initial journey into France, to the court of Charles VII and to the siege of Orléans. The third, “Reims to Compiègne July 1429-May 1430,” is named for the time of her campaign for Paris, after the coronation. And, finally, “Rouen May 1430-May 1431,” is titled by the city in which she was imprisoned, tried and executed. Interestingly omitted are the time just before she went to France, 1425-1429, and the time from Orléans to Reims, May 1429 to July 1429. Those omissions remind us that Rose has made a selection from the archive, refusing a continuous biographical narrative. One effect is to honor the incompleteness of what we can know about her; but another is that by choosing to focus on the times of her becoming rather than those of her overt political activity, Rose suggests that the political and military effort might now look different to her, cut off as she is at the end from the life and companionship of the court and the army. Each section of JOAN assembles poems, images, and epigraphs to draw us in to a time of Joan’s life recollected by her as she nears death. We experience with her the seasons and places and plant life, the people, evoked in spare and precise images. Ice, sawgrass, pine trees, jean, guillaume, and “you.”
“Domrémy” contains three poems, beginning with a sonnet recalling Joan’s first youthful encounter with god. “I spent all my loneliness with you here.” Almost a pastorale. Grass and cows and bells, a young woman on the cusp … evoking the well-known paintings of her in a rural paradise, listening in wonder. Until the last two lines when the voice of her wartime squire suddenly intrudes, reminding us that these poems are poems from her captivity. Letters from prison, perhaps. The time of her public life and of her imprisonment and trial is latent in these three poems, even while they take us to her childhood. The frontispiece for this first section is a pastiche from the scene of her burning in the Dreyer film, a scene of bodily disintegration. The epigraph is in her father’s voice, a famous quote in which he claims to have dreamt that she would leave with the soldiers and threatens to drown her if he begins to think that she would do it. It was used at her trial as evidence of her disobedience to her parents. I understand Rose to see “Domrémy,” together with the last section, “Rouen,” as bookending the intermediate time of the two sections of discovery with times of patriarchal confinement.
“Vaucouleurs to Orléans” contains four poems. Having embarked on her venture to rescue the French king, “god sent me an absence to tend” (9) she begins. We see Joan learning to accept her mission and the sometimes bewildering ways it bound her to the expectations of others.
I became a pavilion where
others rested like a long sentence
separated by clauses where
you may take your breath (12)
I collected men’s dreams in my hair
in the crook of my neck I gathered their fears (13)
The one epigraph in this section underlines that others perceived her as a skilled military leader: “According to my knowledge [Joan] was quite innocent, unless it be in warfare.” Many others made similar attestations about her prowess in the record made to challenge the trial of condemnation. Others also attested in various ways to what Margerite La Touroulde names her sexual inexperience.
These first two sections are something of a prologue to the longer final two sections. Now the work begins. And also, the exhilaration. The image accompanying the title of the third section, “Reims to Compiègne,” uses footage from the end of the Dreyer film, after Joan’s burning, when riots break out and are suppressed by the English soldiers. The camera angle sees the brutality from above, with helmets and spears and iron flails set against the rising smoke. This is her time of becoming, personal and political. Charles has been crowned and has gone off to do his aristocratic thing. The first of the twenty-five poems in this section begins, “all my friends are going to Paris.” She now has friends. The poems are tender and filled with longing.
. . . I hang splendor on my
torn sleeve so god will see its edges and notice me raw as a seam (25)
jean moved his neck & the helmet
creaked . . . (31)
Finally, then, “Rouen May 1430-May 1431.” This is the longest section of the book, taking up the last half of the pages, the time of her imprisonment. The very last poem of the section is double-spaced. It follows ten black pages on which altered fragments of images of Joan’s chained feet from the Dreyer film are placed. Her booted feet straddle a crack in the floor that festers like an open wound. After the Whitmanesque coming into being of the previous section, these last poems express a life now severely constrained by the harsh conditions of her imprisonment. The endless questioning by her judges. Unbowed.
The ampersand, &, is used throughout these poems. It does not always replace “and.” Some poems have both. But the & is an important formal element of JOAN. Maybe a fourth formal element, in addition to the poems, the images, and the epigraphs. I read the & as being an inclusive and reparative gesture to be sure. The & came into being originally as a typographical fusion of the e and t in the French word for “and,” et. A ligature, in typographical lingo. The repairing of a wound. As in LGBTQ+ and all that has flowed from that +, the images and the texts of these poems—and the &—show us the wounding, and Joan’s own work of reparation, of coming out and of conjoining.
Talking to god. Religious studies scholars have tried out a range of approaches to describing what this is. One might argue that we should leave that to the poets and the mystics! Yet a recent book by anthropologist Amira Mittermaier resonates in valuable ways for me with what we know of Joan’s experience. In Giving to God, an examination of Muslim almsgiving, Mittermaier compares three Egyptian food charities and the ways in which those who lead them describe the work they do. She contrasts what she calls the neoliberal transactionalism of contemporary charitable work in Cairo and elsewhere with the food charity of a woman who says she does not care about the poor–what she is doing is giving to God. Sounding harsh in its first expression, Mittermaier teaches us to see how talking to god, even when the work itself is done through home-cooked meals delivered to the recipients, relieves the human relationship of the burden of condescension and of the need for the poor to perform that they are deserving. The three-pointed agency Mittermaier describes and Joan enacts, and the community it founds, is a performance of vernacular political theology. The human, god, and the work before them. When Joan first encounters Charles, the would-be king of France, she asks him to give his kingdom to god and to receive it back from god. Through that ritual gesture and his subsequent anointing, midwifed by Joan, Charles likewise takes on an obligation to the people, one commanded by god.
***
I should disclose that I have just finished my own book about Joan of Arc. A different kind of book. A book of political-theological experiment. I was a little afraid when I picked up Rose’s book. Would they love her as I do? Certainly Jake Rose loves Joan. Maybe a slightly different Joan. But that is always the case, isn’t it? No one is exhausted by one lover.
It was thrilling for me to recognize Joan in these poems. But it was also thrilling to get to know her better through the words and images of such a fine artist and poet. The historical archive I know only partially is there in Rose’s work, but it is differently excerpted and encountered. There is a multi-dimensional effect to the combination of poems, quotes and images, further refracted than through my own reading of the historical documents and that of other interpreters of her life. There are many, many works about Joan. Joan emerges through our collective imagining. A séance of summoning. JOAN belongs among the very best of those works. Incandescent really. I had to resist adding many more fragments of these poems to this essay. Read them yourselves. Savor the re-reading, the varied rhythms of the poems, moving between the languor of the French countryside and Joan’s self-discovery and the purpose and terror of her political work.
One of the blurbs on JOAN suggests that the book is more about Jake Rose than Joan. I disagree. The poems are very, very specific and precise. They place us in fifteenth-century France. At the same time, they are personal, perhaps autobiographical—and crushingly beautiful. But also, importantly, they speak to the thousands of nineteen-year-olds today and throughout history whose lives have ended in war just as they were coming into their strength and joy of being.
from standing apart of myself
I can see how lovely it’s been living
I love it when the churchbells ring
when the isle is full of grass and
I’m never dying (76)
Thank you to Alexandra Brown, Jeremy Biles, and Spencer Dew for reading versions of this essay.
[1] Sullivan uses a lower case “g” for “god” throughout this essay in reference to Rose’s poetic interpretation of the name.
