Salome:
The Fetishization of a Textual Corpus
Megan Becker-Leckrone
[This article was first published in New
Literary History Volume 26 No. 2 1995,
and is here republished by kind permission, under the condition that further
permission to quote the article must be sought from the author. See the end note.]
I. The
Salome Effect
I have been
considering, under different aspects, some of the forces that make
interpretation necessary and virtually impossible, and some of the constraints
under which it is carried on. I have spoken of deafness and forgetfulness as
properties not only of texts, but of history, and of interpreters.... And I
have suggested that interpretation, which corrupts or transforms, begins so
early in the development of narrative texts that the recovery of the real right
original thing is an illusory quest. –Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy
The
Salome theme, or just ‘Salome,’ as the narrative has come to be named by
gestures motivated by more than mere efforts at shorthand, is said to originate
in the gospels and then reemerge in the nineteenth century, appropriated by
European Decadence as a representative myth of eroticism, taboo, and
transgression. Brian Parker asserts this
characteristic critical observation in an essay in Modern Drama: ‘The
centrality of the Salome motif to European painting and literature from about
1860 to the outbreak of World War I is now widely accepted. Artists and writers 'depict [Salome] so
often,' says Philippe Jullian, 'that the little Jewish princess ... may be
regarded as the goddess of the Decadence.’[1] Critics largely concur furthermore that this
revival chose a natural and logical source:
Mark's and Matthew's understated reporting of how John the Baptist met
his death, they agree, is replete with decadent potentiality.
Often
cited in such arguments is the famous passage from Huysmans' A Rebours, in which protagonist Des
Esseintes breathlessly exalts Salome and describes a rich symbolism, a
description that is seen as setting the tone for modern treatments of the
myth. For Des Esseintes, Salome is ‘the
symbolic incarnation of undying lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, ...the
monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning ...
everything she touches.’[2] Des Esseintes' ‘Salome,’ obviously, is the
woman rather than the story, a body rather than a text. ‘She’ is his object of his fascination, his
desire ‘incarnate,’ his fetish.
Contemporary
criticism generally seconds this assessment of ‘Salome,’ taking the symbolism
involved a step further: Salome
represents Decadentism's ideals; Des Esseintes (only the ‘character’ of Oscar
Wilde is called upon more often to play the role of famous dandy) represents
the Decadent. The seductive appeal that
‘woman’ effects on that ‘man’ is representative of the myth's effect on an
entire artistic movement. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Oscar Wilde
employs the trope of female seduction to describe the intertextual transmission
of the Salome myth: ‘Salome, having danced
before the imaginations of European painters and sculptors for a thousand
years, in the nineteenth century turned her beguilements to literature’
(339). With a deliberate slippage
between woman and text that is meant to be clever but is nevertheless not
disinterested, Ellmann's metaphor characterizes a recurring critical stance:
figuring the peculiar intertextuality of the Salome story by mimicking the
fetishistic gesture. Not only Decadents
but also their commentators conflate character and plot, woman and text. And the fact that Ellmann's approach is
self-consciously figurative does not exonerate the gesture. Rather, it underscores what is fetishistic
about his reading: that the conflation
depends upon a disavowal. Disavowal,
Octave Mannoni argues in the classic essay on fetishism after Freud, is a
psychic economy that, importantly, does not operate in the field of belief.[3] Rather disavowal (Verleugnung in Freud's texts) operates in the field of knowledge,
that is in spite of knowledge. Mannoni's title is a paraphrase of the
fetishist's disavowal, and it aptly describes Ellmann's gesture. Ellmann, like Mannoni's fetishist, knows very well that a story and a woman
are not identical, but just the same...
But
the logic of fetishism I would like to outline in the commentary surrounding
the Salome myth goes beyond the sort of thematic figuration I describe
above. Criticism's conflation of woman
and text involves a fetishism that, like Freud's theory of infantile sexuality,
is ultimately an issue of interpretation.
‘Fetishism,’ as Freud describes it, involves a managed relation to that
‘lost’ object, the maternal phallus.[4] The peculiarly ‘double attitude of
fetishists’ involves a pragmatic contradiction; the fetishist ‘retains this
belief’ in the existence of the maternal phallus ‘at the same time he gives it
up’ (218, 216). In other words, the
‘fact’ of female castration is managed by a disavowal – a disingenuous ‘belief’
in some past when she was not castrated, when her body was whole. That phallus she once had, always already
lost, is the part for which the fetish is a substitute. It is a ‘penis-substitute,’ a fiction of
sorts which completes the body of the woman, interpreted as incomplete (214). In short, fetishism revolves around the fiction
of the maternal phallus, the thing which, despite the fact that it never
existed as such, made the woman whole in some always distant past, despite the
fact that she was never incomplete as such.
I
would like to analogize the circular, irreducibly contradictory situation of
Freudian fetishism to the system of logic that informs and perpetuates the
textual discourse on ‘Salome.’ Salome
criticism, I will argue, operates out of a subtle and disavowing logic of deferred
action and retroactive interpretation, going back into the past and reading
into it a scene of seduction.[5] For it
founds itself upon a valuation of the Salome myth as a substantial,
pre-existing object that may be regarded as a whole before the nineteenth
century ever set its sights upon it.
Criticism,
reading two thousand years of cultural discourse on the Salome myth,
nevertheless presupposes this intertextual dispersal as something existing
somewhere as a body, an organic whole: a
‘textual corpus.’[6] Criticism fetishizes this ‘corpus’ just as
persistently as it says Herod and the Decadents fetishized the body of the
dancing woman.
Marjorie
Garber, in her book, Vested Interests,
notes the persistent contemporary interest in this biblical myth and comments
on the various uses academic discourse has found for the Salome myth, for
Salome:
French writers and painters of the nineteenth century had a field day with Salome, and both feminists and deconstructive critics of the twentieth century have had a field day with them ... Salome and her dance have become a figure for that which can – and cannot – be represented, as well as for the putative cruelty and inscrutability of Woman.... In its non-description, in its indescribability, lies its power, and its availability for cultural inscription and appropriation (340-341).
Garber's
observation of critical trends is apt, but it reveals her own participation in
Salome's fetishization. For she asserts
the term ‘indescribability’ as if it were identical to, or merely a subtle
apposition to the term that proceeds it.
But ‘non-description’ and ‘indescribability’ are not identical
terms. Garber's critical posture, which
effaces their difference, is precisely illustrative of the disavowal I wish to
trace. It is part of the same logic of
textual criticism that confuses (or pretends to confuse) a story with a
woman. It moreover marks the moment in
that logic that confuses a secret (‘indescribability’) with a secret-effect
(‘non-description’).
So
what makes Salome so continuously fascinating?
Why does she persist as a provocative femme fatale, even, if not especially, by ‘feminists and
deconstructive’ readers who are urgently interested in exposing the patriarchal
assumptions of those who have fetishized and refetishized Salome as Woman through
glorification and/or condemnation, by making her a symbol, an object? I would propose that the singular charge
‘Salome’ continuously seems to provide for discussions of fetishism,
Decadentism (its authors serving as literary criticism's fetishists par excellence),
and finally Oscar Wilde himself (the man as much as the author serving as
criticism's Decadent par excellence), is fundamentally tied to the
irreducibility of the myth's textual genealogy.
Playing out the analogy to Freudian fetishism, and indirectly coming to
terms with the conventional notion of fetishism which surrounds the Decadent femme fatale, I will ask how a narrative
has become a woman, how the gospel story has become the Salome myth, has become
Salome. For I suspect that the intrigue,
the mystery, the secret of that ‘Woman’ and her enduring captivation has much
to do with the labyrinthine genealogy of the narrative which characterizes
her.
That
is, the ‘secret of Salome’ is a secret-effect
of this narrative and its intertextual transmission. The Gospel story, the Salome myth, Salome –
the ‘Salome© Effect’ is not the essence or secret of Woman; it is a
condition of narrative. I mean this distinction to offer more than the standard
objection to characterological reading that a story is not the same as a
person. Rather, I make it as an
hypothesis for investigating the fetishistic logic which marks seemingly all
textual references to Salome, and which invokes a fetishism that is far more
than thematic.
The
textual fetishism I would like to identify is precisely the sort of faith in
the ‘real right original thing’ which Frank Kermode, who has been speaking of
the narrative of the New Testament gospels and of the narrative effect their
subsequent interpreters generate, refers to in the epigraph which heads my
essay. Kermode argues that the notion of
an objective referent at the foundation of the gospels, each one somehow
presenting a version of one historic reality, one ‘fabula,’ is undermined by
their intertextual constitution. The supposed
core text of the gospels is actually a situation of borrowing and rewriting and
reinterpretation: ‘Mark is already an
interpretation; Matthew and Luke are in large part interpretations of Mark.’[7] Even the
so-called historical referent of the Passion is an intricate weave of Old
Testament allusion and appropriation.
This intertextuality marks the specific role these religious narratives
were to hold: the purposely multidimensional
story that is at once historical ‘report,’ symbolic narrative, and theological
interpretation (Kermode, 114-115). Kermode explains how this narrative and/as
interpretation comes about in the gospels:
There comes a point where interpretation by
the invention of new narrative is halted; in the present instance that point
was reached with the establishment of a canon of four gospels. Interpretation thereafter usually continues
in commentary. These interpretive continuities are illuminated, I have
suggested, by the practice of midrash. By midrash the interpreter, either by
rewriting the story or explaining it in a more acceptable sense, bridges the
gap between an original and a modern audience.
The word derives from darash, to probe or examine; however the work is
done, whether by fictive augmentation and
change or by commentary, its object is to penetrate the surface and reveal a
secret sense; to show what is concealed in what is proclaimed (Kermode, x,
italics mine).
Kermode
does not present this argument in order to expose gospel authority as a fraud;
he points out, rather, that, as midrash, such narrative construction was
rigorous institutional practice. In the
proper sense of the term, midrash refers not to Christian narrative or
exegesis, but specifically to a practice of rabbinical biblical interpretation
and commentary. For Kermode to align
the gospels with midrash as a narrative/interpretive model is to challenge the
chauvinism of Christianity's conventional model of biblical interpretation –
typology or figural interpretation – and to expose its foundations upon
presuppositions of closure, wholeness, and simple, linear textual genealogy.[8] Kermode suggests that for New Testament
writers, not yet girded with the dominant cultural authority Christianity would
come to have, midrash was a means of establishing authority, of creating a
history-effect to the gospel's ‘witness’ to the teachings of Christ.
What
I find most useful in his discussion, then, is that Kermode implicates the
‘source’ within an already existing intertextuality. Mark, he explains, appropriates, alters,
alludes to previously established narrative elements, and does so not to
demonstrate allusive flourish, but to assert historical authority. This argument regarding the gospels informs
the argument I would like to make regarding the instrumentality of
intertextuality in the Salome narrative on two levels.
In
a more obvious sense, Kermode's qualifications of the gospels narrative
‘originality,’ not only among themselves, but also in regard to the Old
Testament, could cast doubt on the idea of Mark or Matthew single-handedly
creating ‘Salome,’ or even that they ‘first reported’ her real-life
exploits. But more importantly, I think
Kermode's definition of ‘midrash’ – and the way in which the term serves as an
explanation for the chicken-and-egg interrelation between narrative and
interpretation – provides an excellent
model for critical discourse's relationship to the Salome story.
Kermode
further explains midrash as ‘a way of finding in an existing narrative the
potential of more narrative’ (Kermode, xi).
Perhaps ‘midrash’ is a narratological analogue to what I am calling
textual fetishism.[9] In any case, I am interested in exploring
‘midrash’ not as an ancient, exotic practice of writing but as a logic that is
operative whenever the line between telling, retelling, and telling about a
story is blurred; whenever interpretation, even summary is also telling again,
telling in a different way, telling more.
I am interested in suggesting that this whenever is really always.
II. Matthew, Mark ... and Josephus: The Real Right Original Thing?
The
story of the ‘daughter of Herodias'‘ dance and the subsequent beheading of John
the Baptist is first written in the Gospel according to Mark (6:14-39) in 65AD,
and soon after in Matthew (14:1-12) in approximately 75AD.[10] Both tell the story retrospectively, or
rather framed as a past-perfect reference to the past tense narrative of
Christ's life, and tell it in order to make explicit John's role as a precursor
to Christ.[11] Matthew, for example, makes this transition
to the framed tale: ‘At that time Herod
the tetrarch heard about the fame of Jesus; and he said to his servants, 'This
is John the Baptist, he has been raised from the dead; that is why these powers
are at work in him'‘ (14: 1-2).[12]
Of
course, criticism has widely acknowledged that the problem with looking simply
to the gospels for a clarification of Wilde's source is that Salome is never
mentioned by name. Many critics note,
however, that she is named by a first-century source nearly contemporary with
Matthew and Mark: Flavius Josephus' Antiquities
of the Jews. Here the incredibly
intricate genealogy of Herod's infamous family is laid out, and here Salome is
named all over the place (through at least three generations of the family – so
that at various times, some ‘Salome’ manages to be sister, mother, daughter,
granddaughter, niece, and so on to some equally recurring ‘Herod’). What is notably missing from Josephus,
however, is any mention of the dance for the head (see Appendix I). So whereas in the gospels, we had a deed
without a name, here we have a name without a deed. For modern treatments of the Salome story, to
connect ‘Salome’ with the story,
Josephus' text is one part without which there is no whole.
Of
course, many critics indisputably point out that ‘Salome’ becomes a fuller
figure, name and more, in nineteenth century rewritings than she is in these
sources. The Salome myth is certainly
more often identified as a European artistic ‘standard tune’ than it is as a stock
lesson in Bible study. Anthony Pym, in
‘The Importance of Salomé: Approaches to
a fin de siecle Theme,’ elaborately
supports this rather obvious claim with statistical evidence. He reports that Salome's ‘corpus is very
convincingly centered on the end of the nineteenth century: 82% of the original versions were produced
between 1860 and 1920’ (Pym, 312).[13]
Pym
enhances the bland task of describing the gospel's Salome plot by prescribing
what ‘fulfills the minimum requirements’ (that is his actual unironic
terminology) for the ‘Salome's’ thematic legacy (316). He specifies with structuralist faith that:
the theme enables a limited network of
references to form a historical place of its own. ... In the case of Salomé,
the major presupposed reference is a singularly well-known point of
departure: the Bible. The pertinent passages in the Gospels are not
merely two more versions in a circular chain of reference, but function as the
underlying retainers of narrative elements that, once evoked, form a stable and
generally accessible unit. This biblical
base in fact enables the Salomé topic to be described in the following
way: four characters – John the Baptist,
Herod Antipas, his second wife Herodias and her daughter whom tradition has
named Salomé – are narratively interrelated in such a way that the first is
ultimately beheaded at the instigation of one of the latter two. ... A specific
property of this particular theme would appear to be that the topic could not
be evoked in this way if the [work employing the theme] were merely of one of
the men: a version of Salomé must focus on one or both of the women. (312,
emphasis Pym's)
Pym's
discussion will go on to demonstrate his assumption that the gospels are not
only a source narrative for this ‘theme,’ but are moreover an ‘historical
object’ to which the recurring theme refers (316). Yet he also evaluates this original object,
and despite its privileged primacy, its subsequent retellings render it
quantitatively and qualitatively unimportant.
And Pym is imminently concerned with Importance. He believes firmly in
the validity of measuring the ‘weight’ (again, his term) of a text, and while
the gospel narrative inspired great things from great minds, it is not in
itself heavy (313).
There
is, however, an inherent contradiction, or disavowal, in Pym's argument.
According to a pattern I will explore in all of my examples, he privileges the
gospel narrative as a source, a location, an historical object as the common
referent of all ‘Salome stories’ which follow it. It is the original whole to which all later
versions refer. At the same time, Pym
blames this whole for its lacks, its incompleteness. The problem with this whole, he implies, is
that it is not.
It
is telling that even within this supposedly original thematic entity, this
‘stable and generally accessible unit’ he maps out, Salome is constituted
retroactively, ‘named’ by ‘tradition.’ Pym might have been more precise had he
cited the text contemporaneous with the Gospels that does initially name Salome in the context of Herod, Herodias, and
John's beheading: Josephus' first
century Antiquities of the Jews, outlined above.
But
there is perhaps a reason why he did not. For despite the claim that historical
text could make for establishing the Salome's nominal status, the Antiquities
ironically cannot meet Pym's ‘minimum requirements’ for a proper Salome©.
For John's fatal meeting with Herod involves neither a dance nor a female
request for the beheading. Josephus
names Salome repeatedly; there is no ambiguity that she is Herodias' daughter
and Herod's stepdaughter. But she dances
no dance, asks for no head, follows no requests for her mother, because her
mother never asks for a head either. In
fact, John's decapitation here involves no women whatsoever, rather it is
wholly Herod's politically-motivated doing.
Josephus' would-be ‘Salome narrative’ is a scene between two men. And that's not good enough, Pym would say,
which is utterly ironic in light of that fact that what Josephus describes
(exclusively male exchange) is just what Pym values so highly. In any case, what I wish to point out here is
the way in which this interpretive logic fetishizes Salome's textual genealogy. He insists on a whole the constitution of
which depends upon an interplay of parts whose whole Pym does not
acknowledge.
This
textual fetishism is played out on another level as well. His ‘Salome’ is not only a substantial
object, it is a feminized object that is a commodity of and for men. He fetishizes ‘Salome’ as a ‘corpus,’ but
more than that, one which is not even her own so much as that of the men who
use and trade her. Tellingly, he calls
the history of the myth ‘our original corpus’ (319).
Pym's
possessive hold on Salome's textual body, furthermore, is not simply
articulating the professorial ‘we.’
Salome might somehow embody the idea, the theme, but it is not her body. She is an essential ingredient
in the theme, but is not the agent who activates it. ‘The simple weight and concentration of this
corpus should suggest that Salomé was of some historical importance’ (Pym,
313). But whose ‘corpus’ is so
heavy? Pym implies, with an underlying
misogyny that allows him actually to exclude women as anything other than
‘theme’ or ‘topic’ (as characters, as authors, as audience) from his
objectified categories (‘strong,’ ‘serious,’ and ‘important’) that it is not
Salome ‘herself’ who is weighty and dense, but rather the male artists who
selected to use her for a theme.[14] Not an important woman, but rather important
men who make the corpus important, by deeming it worthy of their attention.
Salome ‘herself’ has no importance, only value:
Salome©. And her value
is measurable as an object of exchange, between men.[15]
In
other words, Pym establishes a logic presupposing a whole, stable, and
accessible origin for ‘our original corpus’ that inscribes the very uncertainty
it seeks to order out (319). The ‘place’ of her naming, according to his logic,
is nevertheless not part of her ‘textual corpus.’ At the original place where Salome's corpus
is supposedly grounded, we have two codependent sources; no whole, only
intertextual parts on whom the idea of a whole is tacitly founded. Pym's extensive system of value and
measurement must disavow this feature of his ‘original corpus’ and cannot
account for its fundamental contradiction:
that one of the intertextual parts that makes up his idea of the whole,
the very standard by which all else is measured, does not itself measure up.
Pym's
contradictory logic of weights and measures is perhaps asking to be exposed,
because the general premise of his argument is, to put it plainly, slightly
ridiculous. While the relative merits
and shortcomings of structuralist reading is at least considered worthy of
debate, there is no discernable consensus that a statistical reading of literature is ultimately useful. In that sense, he is an easy target. But what I found is that Pym's logic, while
extreme, was not atypical, and perhaps, finally, not even the most problematic
treatment of the Salome narrative I encountered. For if his terms are
self-revealing and his approach naive, at least he literalizes a logic that
many more subtle readings assert by implication.
Pym
weaves Josephus into his summary by sleight-of-hand, so that he may more
efficiently avoid disturbing the integrity of his Salome's ‘corpus.’ The readings I will examine next do something
much stranger: they weave in Oscar
Wilde, again without acknowledging the gesture, and again with a disavowing
faith in some real, right original thing, in an original textual corpus of
which he becomes an anachronistic contributor.
III. Writing (about) Salome: Contemporary Midrash
I
marvel at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty.
– Gospel
According to Thomas[16]
King
Herod holds a banquet while John the Baptist is imprisoned on the King's
premises. During the banquet, Herod
requisitions his wife's daughter for a dance, promising her anything she wants
in return. She accepts, dances, and asks
for the head of John the Baptist on a charger.
Herod obeys her request and has John beheaded.
Such
is the plot summary whose presentation, in some form, is de rigueur for commentary or criticism on any one of the many
fictional accounts of what is called the Salome myth – commentary and
criticism, that is, which feels responsible for pointing out that the
nineteenth century did not invent ‘Salome,’ that someone recorded the story
before Oscar Wilde wrote it or Gustave Moreau painted it. The obligatory gesture acknowledging that the
Bible told it first is made persistently; it is a complicated response (whether
explicit or implicit) to a responsibility to privilege the original Word.
Nearly
all critical accounts go beyond my summary at least far enough to endow the
dancing daughter with a name:
Salome. Even strictly
informational Biblical scholarship tells us what to call her. For example, Who's Who in the New
Testament acknowledges that the name is not given in the gospels ‘except by
implication,’ but nevertheless records her information under ‘S’ – ‘SALOME (Gk. from Hebrew for peaceful)
... 2. Salome, daughter of Herodias’
– and freely employs the name throughout the entry.[17]
Most
summaries, however, go beyond simply supplying the dancer with a name. Some also name the dance. For reasons I will address later, the two
most noteworthy and problematic instances of this nomination that I came across
were in self-avowedly feminist readings of the Salome myth. Indeed, Barbara Walker's account in The
Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets is such a remarkably wild and
improvisational approach to textual history that I have reproduced it, because
it deserves to be read in full and examined with much more detailed scrutiny
than I can offer here (see Appendix II).
The supposed distinction between objective commentary and speculative
criticism becomes swiftly blurred when an ‘encyclopedia’ can provide the
provocatively unconventional, but ultimately deceptive summary Walker
gives:
Salome
The Bible presents the Dance of the Seven
Veils as a mere vulgar striptease performed by Salome to ‘please Herod’
(Matthew 14: 6-8). Actually, the Dance
of the Seven Veils was an integral part of the sacred drama, depicting the
death of the surrogate-king, his descent into the underworld, and his retrieval
by the Goddess, who removed one of her seven garments at each of the seven
underworld gates. ... Salome represented Ishtar as the third of her three high
priestesses or ‘Marys.’ ... She may have
been identical with the sacred harlot Mary Magdalene, or Mary of the Temple.
... The dancing priestess was more than a trivial entertainer. Salome's husband Joseph was killed after he
lay with the queen, Mariamne or Miriam (Mary).
Salome was present with the virgin Mary – the same Mary? – at the birth
of Jesus; some said she was the midwife who delivered the holy child. Salome was present with all three Marys at
the death of Jesus (Mark 15:40).
Obviously she was also involved in the death of John the Baptist, which
seems to have been not a murder but a ritual sacrifice. ...Though only a
fragment in its present form, the story of Salome presents evidence for the
survival of the Tammuz-Ishtar cult in Jerusalem, where someone periodically
died in the role of the god, and the women raised the ancient lament for the
victim in the temple (Ezekiel 8:14).[18]
Walker's
mythological history is itself an intricate midrash which patches together
supportable textual data with dizzying anachronism, tenuous speculation,
slippery genealogy, and urgently interested feminist revisionism. Her reading depends upon a ‘creative’ – or,
less generously, logically circular – approach to nomination. The name of the dance is crucial to the
pre-Biblical lineage she traces, for the Ishtar narrative has nothing in common
with the Salome narrative except the name of the dance. Begging the question, Walker herself provides
a name for a dance that then becomes her evidence for that dance's bounding
mythical legacy.
But
of course, Walker did not make up the name.
The ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ sounds familiar to those who are
acquainted with the Salome story.
Besides, she is not the only one to call it by that name. Another feminist reading of ‘Salome,’
Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests
devotes part of one chapter to a discussion of the Salome story, and the ‘Dance
of the Seven Veils’ is again the conspicuous additional detail to a summary of
the Salome story, though here with a scholarly sobriety Walker's account
certainly lacks. Garber efficiently performs the perfunctory story-telling as
follows: ‘Here, in brief, is the
familiar Salome story ... Herod watches Salome dance the Dance of the Seven
Veils and is enraptured, inflamed. He
says he will give her anything she wants, and she asks for the head of John the
Baptist on a platter. Herod is dismayed
by the request, but capitulates – yields up the head. Salome takes it and gives it to her mother’
(340). Just as the ‘Dance of the Seven
Veils’ serves as the crucial link for Walker's intertextual history, so does it
serve as the crucial symbol for Garber's reading. In an analogy Garber herself implies, her
reading will lift veils and reveal truth just as Salome's supposed striptease,
from seven veils to none, ultimately revealed her body.
Other
summaries rely equally on the dancer and the dance, if not necessarily by name,
to extrapolate the symbolic truth they see as implicit in the narrative. These accounts take it upon themselves to
make the implicit explicit. ‘Historical’
accounts bring little-known details to their summaries of the narrative and its
legacy. In his essay, ‘Scandal and the
Dance,’ René Girard focuses solely on the gospel according to Mark – or rather
claims he does – in order to make a highly intricate argument about Mark's
decidedly unadorned mention of ‘the dance.’ Yet, to authorize his
claims, Girard lifts his narrow textual focus and provides one notably strange
elaboration of the gospel story: ‘There
is a popular legend regarding the death of Salome. She was skating on the ice and she lost her balance;
her neck hit upon a sharp edge in a sheet of ice, and in the fall, her head was
severed from her body.’[19] Though he provides no source for this
‘popular legend,’ it becomes the typological evidence for the truth of his
esoteric interpretation, which I will not attempt to explain: ‘This legend confirms the association between
the dance and the sacrificial death in the popular mind.... Being one with the
intersubjective process of mimetic desire in its progress towards a sacrificial
denoument, our text is one with the dance’ (323). It is even evidence, he implies, that his truth is somehow really ‘in’ the
original, only understated, because that folk version is essentially the
layman's interpretation of that original as well. Girard states this logic with a pithy
understatement of his own: ‘Even though
he barely mentions it and above all does not attempt to describe it, Mark says
a lot’ (323-4). Interestingly, Brian
Parker too reports the ‘folk version in which she is decapitated’ using
Girard's report (and only his) as his authority (474).
So
what we gain from the collective information of the summaries I have surveyed
is substantial: the dancer's name, the
dance's name, lust, seduction, incest, intrigue, perversion, and startling
conclusions. My own summary suddenly
seems sparse. For the sake of
illustration, I have been careful not to
stray from the information given in the Bible narrative, retelling only what
Mark and Matthew include. In neither of
the ‘original’ gospel texts do we have: a named dancer to a dance, a named dance, lust for John the Baptist
or his head, personal motivation from Salome for the beheading, incestuous
desire of Herod for Salome, Salome's death, veils of any kind, seven of
anything.
My
reasons for presenting the story as such are heuristic. I do not mean to correct what I see as sloppy
textual histories, nor do I aspire to offer a summary more true to the source
than others. But I do construct it to
provide a point of comparison to the critical treatments of the Salome myth I
examine, because I think it highlights the aspect of incompleteness a whole
discourse of critical summaries casts upon the ‘source’ they claim to
describe. Most accounts, that is,
readily fill out the gospel story with particularly telling elaborations
(occasionally while remarking on the dramatic ‘inadequacy,’ thematic ‘lacks,’
and generally ‘thin stuff’ of its narrative substance).[20]
These
additions are not merely the fantastic embellishments of a few careless
authors. Rather, they are narrative
effects of the intricate intertextuality which has not only perpetuated but
actually constituted the Salome myth from the first (at least) to the twentieth
century. In other words, the critics I
examine do not individually improvise their summaries, but rather rely on
certain standard elaborative details gleaned from several centuries of creative
cultural discourse upon the Salome myth.
What
I find particularly interesting is that critical summaries serve to render that
history of intertextuality virtually invisible.
They convey a sense that the myth derives from some original whole,
residing in a proper place within the Bible, existing as an objective referent,
instead of a narrative constituted out of a two-thousand-year-old game of
textual telephone.
All
of the explanatory details that provide a ‘background’ to the gospel narratives
are post-biblical additions, so that the ‘fuller’ descriptions which so many
summaries offer to make up for the supposedly taciturn Biblical narrative are actually
the very constitutive elements that make ‘whole’ what critical discourse refers
to as the Salome myth's ‘textual corpus.’ Moreover, many of these elaborations
are not only nineteenth century additions, where Pym tells us the ‘weight and
concentration’ of that corpus was its most substantial, but fictive
contributions from Oscar Wilde specifically.
In some way, each of the summaries I highlight above brings in Oscar
Wilde's Salomé as an unacknowledged
source.
Brownrigg,
in his Who's Who, implicates Wilde as
a source when he tells how Salome comes to her end in Strauss's opera ‘based on
the play by Oscar Wilde’ (395).[21] Perhaps he does so because in the gospels,
only the story ends, not the
woman. Girard's ‘popular legend,’ and
Parker's hearsay reference to it, also appears to be a folk story which
circulates chiefly not among folks but in critical texts. Because the only ‘source’ of this ‘folk’
version I could find was not in the Lives
of the Saints (where some Salome falls in the Danube, but never through ice
and never resulting in decapitation), but in Richard Ellmann's synopsis of a
conclusion Oscar Wilde wrote and then rejected for his play (Ellmann, 343).[22] And Garber and Walker, with their central
focus on Salome's dance, are also reading Wilde, though I will explain how they
do so below. By a deferred action logic
I am calling fetishistic, whereby Wilde's ‘present’ is imposed upon the
biblical ‘past,’ each of these summaries reads him into the original ‘corpus’
of the myth, not as a notable elaborator upon it, but as an invisible, effaced
creator of it.
These
critics' strange allegiance to Wilde as a source involves their disavowing
position to the ‘original.’ It seems to me that Salome criticism's readiness to
compensate for what it acknowledges as the ‘incompleteness’ of the ‘original’
actually disavows that very incompleteness.
And it is this peculiar role of intertextuality and its effacement that
I want to posit as the fetishism of ‘Salome’ (the myth, but through a
concurrent disavowal, also the ‘woman’) which informs not only the artistic,
thematic fetishism of, for example, Huysman's breathless exaltations of That
Woman, but also the critical, even supposedly informational discussions of That
Story.
IV. The Dancer from the Dance
Die
Musikanten beginnen einen wilden Tanz... Salome noch bewegungslos... Salome
tanzt den Tanz der sieben Schleier.
– from the
score of Richard Straus's Salome[23]
In
Salome criticism, what receives almost as much attention as the woman ‘herself’
is her dance. But while seemingly
offering a less problematic critical gaze than do discussions that focus on the
dancer, it is in treatments of the dance that the critical rhetoric is actually
its most fetishistic, and where it is most directly dependent upon the deferred
action of nineteenth century narratives upon their ‘source.’ And especially, it
is where criticism most depends upon Oscar Wilde's play.
I
have alluded above to Marjorie Garber's Vested
Interests and the fact that it gives an extended reading of Salome based on
her interpretation of the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils.’ Her attention to the pernicious gender
politics which have been the undercurrent of the Salome myth, if not its
guiding force, is not only welcome, but sophisticated. In the context of a much larger discussion of
transvestism in cultural dynamics, Garber confronts the patriarchal,
Orientalist tradition of fetishizing Salome by outlining the disavowing logic
on which it is founded. Nevertheless this reading ultimately falls back onto
thematic fetishism itself.
Garber
argues convincingly that the Salome myth provides a much more equivocal
narrative than the symbolist, essentializing exaltation of ‘the exotic,
feminized Eastern Other’ allows (340).
Indeed, she sees the vital stakes in searching for alternatives to
readings of the Salome myth which merely perpetuate feminine
fetishization. Garber puts into
political and cultural context the danger of making a woman a truth, in that it
also relegates her to otherness, makes her object never subject. Furthermore,
by putting her discussion of Salome within a larger discussion of the ideology
of orientalism, she argues that this gesture is part of a ‘cultural Imaginary’
that is imperialist as well as sexist (342).
Garber disagrees with critical treatments
(Said's for example) of Orientalism's fascination with the dance, because they
uphold that ‘the Otherness that produces unbounded desire is a woman’
(341). She compliments Joseph Boone who
counters that patriarchal assumption by pointing out the homosexual subtext of
such exaltations of the exotic. In the
case of Flaubert, Boone ‘proposes to substitute a dancing boy for the dancing
girl, as an equally appropriate, and more destabilizing, reading of the
Orientalist impulse in Western culture’ (342).
But Garber wants to take this reading a step further: ‘As politically necessary as this
substitution may be, it is not sufficient in reading the riddle of Salome and her
veils’ (342).
If
Boone's reading takes the flip side to the Orientalist impulse, Garber stands
it on its head, offering ‘the substitution not of a regendered dance but of a
transvestite dance ... the dancer is neither male nor female, but rather,
transvestic – that is the essence of the dance itself’ (342) This move, however, ultimately replaces one
mystification for another, dispensing with the dancer for the dance. That dance is the truth of the ‘riddle,’ but
the riddle itself, indeed the notion that there is a riddle, is Garber's interpretive creation. Positing its existence as the ‘essence of the
dance itself,’ Garber founds her reading upon a belief in the secret. The answer to the riddle is her reading: the secret unveiled, the truth. Rather than the text of his play, Garber
reads a photograph to glean the ‘truth’ – a self-consciously staged photograph
of Wilde in drag, on bended knee, reaching towards a dummy's head on a
platter. Through the photo, she asserts,
Oscar Wilde whispers a secret into her subtle ears attuned to the play of
transvestism. His Salomé – more
precisely he as Salomé – is a ‘radical reading that tells the truth’ of the
ancient myth (339). But just as the riddle is her own invention (allowed by her
conflation of the secret with the secret-effect), so is Oscar Wilde's truth
dependent upon her own midrash of the ‘original story’ she reads him
reading.
Despite
her careful criticism of interpretations that are too decidedly binary, Garber
is actually quite certain where undecidability lies, essentially. Garber uncovers, ‘unveils’ a ‘truth’ that centuries
of patriarchal textual appropriations had forgotten, neglected, a truth that
gains meaning only through retroactive interpretation. There is no self-consciousness in Garber,
though, that she might be reproducing the logic of the very activity she
condemns in orientalists and other objectifiers of women. She counters their binarism with a move
towards undecidability, but only by making certain objectifications of her
own. She argues in favor of seeming (of which transvestism is the
privileged signifier) rather than being
so that we may move away from essentialism, so that we may recognize in
fetishism the potential power of undecidability. But in doing so she asserts an essentialism
of another kind. In order not to
fetishize Salome ‘the Woman,’ ‘the Dancer’ Garber essentializes, capitalizes
(on), and, I would argue, fetishizes the Dance. Undecidability for her is transvestism, and this is embodied in the Dance. In doing this, she falls into precisely the
logic I have been tracing: Garber accuses
the ‘sources’ of amnesia – but how can you forget something that was never
there in the first place?
It
is thus Garber's alternative to
Salome's fetishization that I find problematic: instead of fetishizing the woman, she
fetishizes the dance. By still
conflating character with narrative – though for Garber that character is
Wilde-as-Salome rather than just Salome-the-woman – she still fetishizes
Salome. Garber's argument is based upon a disavowal of the role of Wilde's narrative in the ‘cultural Imaginary’
which has sustained the Salome myth, and not just because her argument founds
itself upon reading a photograph of Wilde rather than his play. With its reliance on not merely the dance,
but the name of the dance, her
argument is indeed authorized by Oscar Wilde, but in a way Garber does not
acknowledge.
Let
me make clear the crucial stakes of interrogating the entrance of Wilde's
narrative upon the ‘scene’ of Salome's textual drama. A dance might have occurred in the gospels;
it might even lend itself to the intricate network of meaning someone like
Girard assigns it. But it is Wilde himself who names that dance the ‘famous’ dance of the
seven veils. Its appellation simply did not exist in relation to Salome's
dance before his play. The many critical
accounts which slip it in for the supposed sake of making their own summaries
coherent act out a disavowal that would be analogous to identifying Alfred
Hitchcock solely as a minor cameo actor in some well-known thrillers. What is ‘forgotten,’ that is, is Oscar
Wilde's retroactive instrumentality in the Salome myth. Because not a single Bible concordance,
Saints' Lives, dictionary of symbols, or encyclopedia of mythology I consulted[24], Christian
or pre-Christian, western or non-western, connects that name to that dance or
to that dancer.
It
does get named before Oscar Wilde,
indeed long before any of the supposed Salome sources, but in the Babylonian
myth of Ishtar. Walker's Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
makes this ancient mythological connection, or rather refers back to the
ancient ‘source’ where the dance is named, but utterly effaces the ‘source’
(Wilde) that allows such a textual link.
Commentary on Ishtar regularly names this dance, and so do translations
of the remaining Babylonian manuscripts connected to it – the familiar story of a woman going to the
underworld to rescue her beloved. If
anything, subsequent retellings become the myth of Persephone, not Salome. That, as far as I can tell, is the narrative
from which Wilde must have ‘plagiarized’ the name. But the connection of that name to the dance
done for Herod by Salome has no discernable textual history connected with the
Salome myth until Wilde supplies
it. It is his signature contribution to
the practice of secular midrash (in Kermode's sense of interpretation and/as
allusive appropriation) that constitutes the Salome myth.
I
am not accusing Garber of not doing her homework on the history of this
myth. That would be not only arrogant,
but uninteresting. She knows very well
that there is no named dance, indeed no named dancer in the first century
sources she cites: ‘Though both Gospels
say she danced, neither mentions the famous Dance of the Seven Veils or,
indeed, characterizes the dance at all:
they say only that 'the daughter of Herodias danced.'
Out of this thin stuff grew up the legend’ (340). But just the same, she retroactively reads
the named dance into that source narrative, for in the lines above this very
intertextual background, Garber reconstitutes textual history with a compact
introduction of authors and key terms:
‘Here, in brief, is the familiar Salome story as it is reported by the
Jewish historian Josephus and in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Herod watches Salome dance the Dance of the Seven
Veils and is enraptured, inflamed’ (340).
She offers the characteristic critical summary which prepares the Salome
myth with Matthew, Mark, a little Josephus, and just a hint of Wilde. Matthew and Mark provide this story. Josephus
did not at all; he just provides a name.
It is only the unnamed source, Wilde, who provides named dancer, story,
and named dance as Garber offers it here.
This
retroactive interpretation, placing the nineteenth century Dance into the past
narrative, does more than simply confuse textual history. With a logic like the logic of deferred
action as Freud outlines it, Garber ‘unveils’ this narrative element of the
present as if it were the repressed content of the narrative of the past. Her reading depends upon begging the question
in this way; she needs it to accuse all previous Salome interpreters of
‘forgetting’ or disavowing what Oscar Wilde remembers, but actually
creates. Wilde's enigmatic Dance of the
Seven Veils, Garber reasons, ‘is not only a rewriting of the Salome story but a
rereading of it that makes all the sense in the world – makes sense, for
example, of the cultural amnesia that omits to mention that dancer's name, or
the name of her fabled dance’ (343).
Recognizing that Wilde himself invented that name for that dance renders
Garber's claim somewhat suspect. Her accusation is a little like blaming Mark
and Matthew and Josephus for neglecting to mention television.
The
dance of the seven veils – as Salome's dance – is Oscar Wilde's invention. And the Dance of the Seven Veils, the
‘essence of ... what was already inscribed in Salome, under the veil,’ is
Garber's fetish. Rather than an object
of evidence for ‘cultural amnesia,’ the Dance is the element that Garber exploits
in her own midrash of the Salome story (343).
As Kermode describes this interpretive practice, her ‘object is to
penetrate the surface and reveal a secret sense; to show what is concealed in
what is proclaimed’(x). It is Garber who
capitalizes (on) it for her reading, which, like midrash, is also a
rewriting. And if two thousand years of
writers are guilty of sustaining the Salome myth through a logic of disavowal
(I do not at all dispute Garber's observation on that point), so is Garber
herself.
The
secret here operates within the logic of what I have been calling the
secret-effect, a logic which is fundamentally fetishistic. Garber depends on the dance of the seven
veils for the useful metaphor of veiling and unveiling it yields: the trope of secrecy. She exploits this secrecy, but exculpates
herself from the traditionally (male) fetishistic treatment of ‘Salome’ by
essentializing a dance instead of a woman.
Logically, this shift only gets her so far away from the treatments of
‘Salome’ she deplores (she means the woman, I mean the ‘textual corpus’). As do all the critical treatments I examine,
Garber's reading shifts the fetishism of Salome from a thematic to a rhetorical
register.[25]
Ultimately,
Garber is complicit in sustaining the fetishist's hold upon some object's
secret, like a Herod dressed up in different theoretical vestments. She concludes her ‘flirtation’ with Oscar
Wilde's Salome – the reading is itself a kind of ‘tease’: she playfully reads a
photograph of the author as if it were his written text – holding onto the woman's
secret/seduction trope, relying upon the play of the veil:
In the early, hopeful days when it looked
as if Bernhardt could produce the play in London, before the intervention of
the licenser of plays ...,the designer Graham Robertson asked the actress
whether she wanted a stand-in for the dance.
Bernhardt replied equably, 'I'm going to dance myself.' 'How will you do the dance of the seven
veils?' he asked, and she answered, smiling enigmatically, 'Never you mind'
(345).
Garber's
implication is finally the same as Walker's, the latter only stating it much
less subtly: woman holds the secret;
interpretation can unveil the secret's true meaning. Ultimately, Garber leaves the secret with a
woman, smiling her Mona Lisa smile, saying less than she means or knows: Bernhardt's non-description is turned into
indescribability.
Perhaps
it is harder to dispense with the ‘necessary fictions’ Salome interpreters
depend on than it is to cast off a veil after all (Garber, 343). The power of the secret, it seems, is too
appealing, and too fruitful, for interpretation to give up. Garber's reading still needs the secret, even
if she shifts its embodiment from the dancer to the dance. I would suggest that the slippery
intertextuality of the dance of the seven veils, and the unspoken way in which
Wilde's own practice of midrash gets woven into Salome's textual corpus, is not
simply a sign of weakness in Garber's reading.
The fact that the dance of the seven veils yields such potent
interpretation, the fact that it seems to mean much more than it says, rather,
is an effect of its very place within the textual history. No more than the dancer's, the dance's ‘secret’
is not reducible to truth, the source of what it means behind what it seems,
because there is no one place where such a truth could be found, no real right
original thing for which it stands. The myth resonates because of this very intertextuality. There must be something to ‘Salome’ because
we recognize ‘her’ in so many guises (she is like Medusa, is like Judith, is
like Salammbô, is like Ishtar, is like...).
But this is not Woman veiled and unveiled again and again; this is
intertextuality. Though my argument certainly cannot explain interpretation as
a whole, I would suggest that my examination of the intertextuality surrounding
Salome signals a dynamic within intertextuality more generally: we see so much in Salome because so many
writers have seen so much in Salome, because in writing Salome, so many writers
have seen ‘the potential for more narrative.’
Perhaps Kermode's term and his definition can save such a statement from
tautology. The secret-effect is the
practice of midrash which authorizes interpretation by saying ‘she is like ...,
she is like ...’ It is our consistent
willingness to leave this practice invisible, our disavowal of overlooking it
even when we see it which is fetishistic.
The power of the secret still offers interpretation too much.
· Megan Becker-Leckrone is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Her most recent book is Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory (Palgrave, 2005). In 2006 she was awarded the University’s Morris Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship in 2006. For permission to quote from this article, please contact Dr Becker-Leckrone @
