The mess of art on suffering
From Dialogues des Carmelites to Silence to Godland. (You gotta see Godland.)
Tom and I went to the Met on Sunday afternoon for Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites, an opera about a convent of nuns who are executed during the French Revolution, having been branded by the new government as seditious enemies of democracy. The story is inspired by the true story of the Martyrs of Compiegne, and the opera, first performed in 1957, is quite striking. It opens with the nuns laying prostrate on the stage, both their individual bodies and their collective formation cruciform. The production design felt clearly inspired by film noir: long shadows, simple black-and-white tableaux, starkly evoking in contrast the line between the secular and the sacred.
Between acts, we went out to the balcony for what would be a smoke break if we smoked, but was actually an eating-spicy-pistachios break. (Look, operas are long, and we get hungry.) And also, a talking-about-suffering break. Dialogues des Carmelites is about suffering, principally. Its protagonist is a daughter of nobility named Blanche (an allusion to purity), an eager but easily frightened novitiate who joins the convent seeking peace. Instead, she finds martyrdom looming on the horizon. Throughout the opera, she’s caught between her fear of death and her fear of abandoning her calling.
At the end of the first act, the ill Mother Superior, so far resigned to death, becomes agonized by the unknown, by what is unknowable, and dies a rather tortured death, to the horror of the other nuns. In a sense their martyrdom is preferable; at least they know how they’ll die. But Blanche, urged to return to her father’s house, ultimately chooses to die with them.
It’s all very romantic and stirring, and moving, but out on the balcony I found myself talking about how tricky this suffering thing really is to navigate. There are plenty of strains of Christianity that seem to idolize suffering for its own sake, which leads to all kinds of terrible conclusions. Both of us were brought up in religious contexts where we nearly idolized certain figures of missionary history as martyrs, and I am not here to decide whether or not individual cases were worthy of that. But from the distance of time you find yourself wondering whether that’s appropriate in all cases, whether there are cultural sensitivities and other factors that some missionaries — invariably white, and sometimes expressing a dim view of the intelligence, customs, and culture of the people they intended to serve — ignored entirely, putting themselves in the way of unnecessary harm in some potentially misbegotten attempt to earn the admiration of others and God.
This is not, in the end, the story of Dialogues des Carmelites. The women — who committed only the great crime of practicing their faith in the convent — are given the choice to renounce their vows or face martyrdom, and they choose the latter.
Stories about nuns are always interesting, because for a lot of Christian history, the choice to become a nun was both about serving God (and often choosing suffering) and about escaping the secular order of things, in which your fate as a woman was probably to be married off to someone (who you probably didn’t know, who maybe would treat you poorly) and bear children. The convent, as I’ve written in the past, is a place away from the world and also inherently a threat to the male order; though a man is still ultimately in charge, the hierarchy within the walls is female, and thus a bit dangerous. It makes for good art — and for a good lens to see Blanche’s choices through.
Anyhow, all that said: the story put me in mind of Silence, and more specifically Martin Scorsese’s masterful cinematic adaptation of Shusako Endo’s book, which was itself published nine short years after Dialogues des Carmelites premiered. (What was in the air, exactly?)
The story is often seen as an exploration of the silence of God toward the suffering believer, and so, seen through one lens, it is. But it’s less about the suffering Christians of Japan, who worship in secret and fear their own government, than of the priest’s discovery that their ministry is less joy than endless suffering. So I’ve never shaken the sense that it’s also a story about religious motivation and religious hubris — about a priest named Rodrigues, a man of God who discovers his mentor has turned apostate, then is tortured and forced to stomp on a picture of Christ. His lofty ideas of his own necessity to God’s work are crushed underfoot, somewhat literally, and the end of the movie is open-ended, with Rodrigues’s self-image shattered and his sole, secret faith held in secret himself.
In writing about the film, I concluded:
Silence is the kind of film that cuts at everyone’s self-perceptions, including my own. I haven’t been able to shake it, because I need to remember — now, frankly, more than ever — that I am not able nor responsible to save the world, let alone myself. How the world changes is a giant, cosmic mystery. To grow too far from that and become hardened in my own belief is a danger: I grow complacent and deaf, too willing to push others away.
In Silence, nobody is Christ but Christ himself. Everyone else is a Peter or a Judas, a faltering rejecter, for whom there may be hope anyway. What Scorsese has accomplished in adapting Endō’s novel is a close reminder that the path to redemption lies through suffering, and that it may not be I who must save the world so much as I am the one who needs saving.
Where Scorsese’s film is lush and questioning, Hlynur Pálmason’s new film Godland — out this week in limited cities — is bleak and questioning, and also gorgeous and upsetting. This one centers on a 19th century Danish priest named Lucas, sent to Iceland to build and pastor a church there.
Full of himself, he elects to cross the country on foot to his new parish, figuring that it’s how he’ll come to understand the people and the landscape and, one comes to realize, spread the word that he is there to save them. But he’s guided by a gruff Icelander named Ragnar, who isn’t interested in his piety. And he discovers that Iceland isn’t particularly interested in him either. The physical trials of crossing go far beyond anything he could have imagined, and when he finally arrives half-dead at his goal, the limitations of his devotion are sorely tested by the parish itself.
Godland’s suffering priest is more obviously pompous and kind of terrible, and it’s not wholly unpleasant to watch him suffer. But the key to the movie is in the name: The land acts as God, a refining fire by which Lucas refuses to be refined. (Ragnar is a bit like the land in human form.) It is much bigger and wilder than he believed, presenting an unstoppable will against his own is useless. In this case suffering ought to humble him, but like more than a few of us, he chooses bitterness instead.
All of this art — and a lot more besides — is toying with the interplay of suffering and devotion, and the fact that the impulse to pastor and lead and serve is not always (ever?) untainted by hubris and dread and fear and a desire for glory. Even Blanche is drawn to the convent by something bigger than just love for God. There’s a romance to her view, a desire for safety and for glory.
This all might make very little sense to the nonreligious, but I think there’s a reason this art captures audiences at the Met and the multiplex (well, the art house cinema) over and over again. Sure, most of us have bumped into religious leaders who haven’t had a real encounter with suffering, and are perhaps more interested in causing it.
But within each of us lies a set of warring desires: to do the right thing, and also to feel good about ourselves. (To put it in Friends terms: to do the selfless good deed, but also feel a twinge of our own awesomeness.) When we suffer in doing the former, it can spark the latter.
What I like most about thinking about this in artistic terms, rather than abstract ones, is that it’s all very complex, which is to say human. Each of these leave us wondering if, in the end, everyone did what they ought to. Should the nuns have renounced their vows and kept serving the world in the secular context their new government demanded? Should Rodrigues have done what he did or submitted to martyrdom? Should Lucas have even gone to Iceland? What am I capable of?
With good art you don’t get answers — only questions. And some of those questions are directed within.
By the way, if you can, you’ve got to see Godland.
Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.