William Vollmann - Kissing the Mask - Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

The grim suspense of Njal’s Saga does not abate on rereading, because understatement creates its own homeopathic richness of effect, and one never tires of seeing how one laconically described episode gives rise to another. Doom’s patterns surpass so much other richness that doom grows beautiful in and of itself. The conflict between the dictates of common sense, or even peacefulness, and one’s duty to participate in kinship and therefore to protect the clan by avenging their deaths, or to defend one’s lonely honor from sudden assault, simply cannot be reconciled. Such triumphs of self-laceration must surely be universal. Far away from the saga lands, and contemporaneous with the sagas themselves, in the Ashikaga era of Japan, we find in the equally understated Noh play “Kagekiyo” the conflict between the necessity to fight for one’s lord in a battle not at all of one’s own making, and the Buddhist dictates of nonviolence. But Japanese understatements of doom seem to me to partake more of resigned sadness than their Norse equivalents. I would be the last to deny the horrifying beauty of a yase - onna , Dojoji or hannya mask; but against these we must set the sad and ecstatic tranquilities of ever so many others. Doom is a frequent result in Japanese literature; it is rarely a cause. In The Tale of the Heike , when it comes time to decapitate an eight-year-old son of the defeated side, his wet nurse holds him in her arms, weeping. The chief executioner, after weeping himself, says to her: “Your little lord cannot escape this by any means.” Then he orders the swordsman: “Execute him at once!” Why did the child have to die? Why did the Heike fall from power in the first place? They were arrogant, we are told in the very beginning of the tale; but even if they had been otherwise, it would have made no difference, because of the theme of this great work, as of so many others, is evanescence . But while the Heike family’s doom may prefigure itself through its own sinister tokens and omens, the doom of a Norse saga protagonist is more actively baleful and threatening. The prophecy of doom, personified sometimes in a doom-bringer such as Hrapp, sometimes in a far-seeing, unwilling kinsman as occurs in Laxdaela Saga and The Saga of the Volsungs , cannot be withstood. Our doom itself, says Odin, cannot die. And in the sagas as in our life, it comes in equal part to the good and the wicked. In Eyrbyggja Saga the witch Katla saves her son from vengeance three times, magicking him first into her distaff, then her goat, then her pet hog, but on the fourth occasion the men are accompanied by the rival witch Geirrid, who throws a sealskin bag over Katla’s head, and this time the son is found and hanged, the mother stoned to death. As her enemies approach for this final fatal encounter, Katla remarks that a strange feeling has come over her. This feeling must have been similar to Sigmund’s when Odin broke his sword. The saga informs us that no one feels sorry over the killings of Katla and Odd, but I myself cannot forbear from pity for people who, however uncanny they might be, share my fate.

Doom will find a way in. Doom will strike us all down. But six and seven hundred years after they were written into life, Sigurth, Grettir, Egil, Njal and the beautiful Gudrid of Laxdaela Saga live within my brain. Although their renown, like that of the sagas themselves, and of the earth, the sun and all things, must someday dwindle, within the cross-referential metatext of the sagas together, these people remain as changelessly bright as gold in a barrow’s hoard. Njal has outlived his doom triumphantly; his triumph grows all the greater in that he foresaw it and made it his own. The Norse virtue of steadfastness, which in a Noh protagonist would be a sad symptom of illusion and attachment, remains gloriously eternal in him. When Egil Skalagrimsson’s brother Thorolf agrees to be separated from him when fighting a battle for King Athelstan, Egil says, “Have it your way, but it’s a decision I’ll live long to regret.” Thorolf lives yet in Egil’s verses; Egil himself, that brutal, brave, merciless, enduring, vicious, brilliant word-smith, I cannot dismiss from my horrified regard.

HILDIGUNN’S GIFT

The voice of doom is often a woman’s. In Njal’s Saga , the lovely, vindictive Hallgerd orders her share of murders, and when her beleaguered husband’s bowstring gets slashed by one of his enemies, she refuses to give him two locks of her hair in substitute, remarking: “I shall now remind you of the slap you once gave me.” “To each his own way of earning fame,” Gunnar replies, and in due course his foes bring him down. Njal’s wife Bergthora, who will die bravely beside him, feeds revenge’s maw nearly as often. In the sagas, women often assault their kinsmen with the grisly relics of murdered men; and Njal’s Saga sports a typical case: When the powerful chieftain Flosi dines with her, the widowed Hildigunn opens a chest and withdraws a cloak. “She threw the cloak around his shoulders, and the clotted blood rained all over him. ‘This is the cloak you gave to Hoskuld, Flosi,’ she said, ‘and now I give it back to you.’ ” Flosi calls her a monster. All the same, he cannot then refrain from avenging Hoskuld; and so, in spite of the efforts of many goodhearted arbitrators, Njal and his sons are doomed to burning.

Norse femininity, like Norse masculinity, can certainly be notable for its aggressiveness. In the Elder Edda, Brynhild and Guthrún are both murderesses; the latter is called by one commentator “demonic.” A demonic Japanese heroine would find no rest, but golden-clad Guthrún maintains to the end a grim joy in her vengeance. When she calls her little sons to her side in the bedchamber, they submit to her power even while remarking, much in Gunnar’s style, that she will not enhance her reputation by what she is about to do to them. In her next marriage, she sends a new crop of sons to kill and die. They set off, remarking that she will soon be sorry. They are right. Meanwhile, her will is inevitable.

“THE QUEENLY WOMAN”

The power of the Norse feminine is great not only because it can rule others, but also because it can rule itself. Guthrún may know quite well that she will be sorry when her sons are dead. Alternatively, she may be effective at ignoring or denying it. All the same, she never flinches from harming herself and those she loves in order to carry through her purpose. Neither did Brynhild, when after inciting Sigurth’s murder she stabbed herself and commanded that she be burned beside him on his pyre. Self-possessed to the last, she doled out gold to her bondsmaids, offering more if they would die with her. To her unloved husband she remarked: “Thy brow-white wife awaiteth death.” She calculated, foresaw and defyingly accepted.

When Sigrún the Valkyrie 5enters the funeral mound of her husband Helgi, she says that she is as eager to be with him “as Othin’s hawks” are “hungry for meat, / when war they scent and warm corpses, / and dew besprent the daylight see.” Having elaborated his pallor and ghastly wounds, she prepares a bed and lies down with her darling. I stand in awe of her brave and ferocious love. In my imagination, the rank darkness of the barrow is illuminated only by her forehead, in whose reflected light shine her golden arm-rings as she slips them off one by one. The dead man praises her as “woman sun-bright” and describes her as “Hogni’s white-armed daughter… the queenly woman.” Then comes that night-long embrace between living and dead, supernatural and human, female and male, beauty and horror, which Sigrún’s love alone saves from ghastliness. Who can she be to me, but every woman I have ever loved? Before cockcrow he goes to Valhalla and returns no more; she soon dies of grief. But they had already lived and died once before; it may well be that their love will be reborn eternally — a tormenting thought in Japanese Noh drama, but to Helgi and Sigrún surely their most luminous hope. As I said, a preeminent Norse virtue for both genders alike is ruthless steadfastness . No wonder that the phrase “sun-bright” is reserved not for beautiful women alone; they and swords can both shine like suns.