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

A LADY’S SLEEVE

What if the beauty of women were no more than a simplified, stylized fetish made up of a very few characteristics? I refuse to believe this, but I may be outnumbered. “The nape of the neck is the glamor spot in kimono,” advises a modern Japanese publication. (What might the Norse glamor spot be? White arms, of course.” 6For Kenneth Clark, historian of the Western nude, the glamor spot appears to be the relative distance between the lower breast and the navel. If this is called one unit, then the ideal classical female body, in artistic representation, at least, will likewise measure one unit between the breasts and one unit from the navel to the separation between the legs. In Gothic art, all these figures will remain the same except for the breast-navel distance, which doubles. Clark makes no secret of his feelings about that alteration, writing: “The basic pattern of the female body is still an oval, surmounted by two spheres; but the oval has grown incredibly long, the spheres have grown distressingly small.” Of course actual female bodies vary dramatically, and a promiscuous lover such as myself cannot but pity someone such as Clark, whose feminine ideal incarnates itself in a relatively rare number of women. 7All the same, I cannot but wish him well when he undertakes “that search for finality of form which, on our definition, is the basis of the nude.” Who would not want to know exactly what beauty is? What does a ko-omote Noh mask have in common with a great-breasted, great-buttocked prehistoric fertility goddess such as the Venus of Wurttemberg? To me both are beautiful, erotic. Were I to do as Clark did, and choose one over the other, I would be proclaiming that finality of form has been determined to my satisfaction, when in fact I do not wish my search ever to end. Here the beauties of understatement take me into their affectionate embrace. Among her list of elegant things, Sei Shonagon in her Pillow Book includes a counterpart to a Valkyrie’s sun-white arm: the sleeve of an Imperial concubine-to-be’s lady in waiting, deliberately shown to a messenger. She is on the right track, but why couldn’t it be any woman’s sleeve? I like another of her fancies better: Two lovers grow so well acquainted with each other’s particularities that his knock and her sleeve-rustling are mutually identifiable. Meanwhile, I remain free to imagine their faces and dispositions as I will.

The old Norse tales and poems afford me the same pleasure. 8Thanks to narrative genius, understatement and subtly chosen discriminations, their formulaic epithets of female loveliness escape vacuity. Rarely individuated descriptions of women do creep in, like serpents in a treasure-cave; I remember Thorgunna of Eyrbyggja Saga , who was “a massive woman, tall, broad-built, and getting very stout. She had dark eyebrows and narrow eyes, and beautiful chestnut hair.” In Egil’s Saga , the eponymous, famous and infamous hero’s daughter Thorgerd is introduced to us as “a fine-looking woman, very tall, intelligent, and proud, but usually rather quiet.” But then we return to the indistinguishable flock of white-armed ones.

In kennings and love poems a woman is customarily the goddess, tree, land, or Valkyrie of the bed, 9of nice clothes, of mead, or most often of gold and silver. Whereas the potent man is called ring-breaker , meaning apportioner and generous giver of treasure, the worthy woman, although she too is generous, is somewhat more likely to express her relationship to these beautiful things by adorning and being adorned by them. The blonde beauty of gold, so appropriate to Norse women, demonstrates that she is powerful, cherished, or both. She becomes land of gold , or more elaborately land of the serpent’s bed . Among the Younger Edda’s recommended kennings for women, we find dealer of gold , and flood-fire-keeping Sif , which latter can be parsed into “gold-keeping goddess of the golden hair.” Indeed, Sif’s hair is real gold, for in one of his many acts of meanness Loki stole the hair she was born with, so Thor made him replace it with something better. (One kenning for gold: “Sif’s hair.” Another: “Freya’s tears.” The latter goddess is said to weep tears of red gold.) Generally speaking, the Younger Edda advises, a woman may be referred to “by all female adornment, gold and jewels, ale or wine or other drink that she serves or gives.” Thus the lovely Oddny Isle-Candle gets praised by her poet-lover as “the elegant arm-goddess,” or goddess of the hand-fire, hand-fire of course being golden finger-rings. (Poorer women must content themselves with arm-ice , or silver.) Helga the Fair is called “the fresh-faced goddess of the serpent’s day,” which is to say of gold, whose radiance is the only sun the “land-fish” sees as it slithers deep in dead men’s treasure-barrows. Her lover boasts: “I played on the headlands of the forearm’s fire / with that land-fish’s bed-land,” meaning that he toyed with or caressed the gold-ringed fingers of her gold-ringed arm.

Laxdaela Saga , whose bloody plot owes much to the irresistible attractiveness of certain women, leaves them in a more enigmatic invisibility than the faces of the hooded Norns who were engraved on the Franks Casket. The subtlety of the narrative is such that a single adjective inevitably portends the future: “Jorunn was a good-looking, imperious woman of exceptional intelligence; she was considered the best match in all the Westfjords.” Upon her marriage, the spouses “got on well together, but they were usually rather reserved with one another.” No wonder that the husband gets a concubine. “The one sitting at the edge of the tent caught his eye; she was shabbily dressed, but Hoskuld thought her beautiful, from what he could see.” What the saga writer considers relevant is not the particulars of her beauty, but simply that she was beautiful. I remember seeing in a performance of Kojiro’s “Ataka” a fairly young boy in beige, maybe nine, on the very edge of the Noh stage, 10standing straight in that eerie immobility from which a sweeping gesture is even more dramatic; it is precisely this method that the Norse tales and poems employ, not least in their portrayal of women. The radiant one waits within the text, understating herself until the time comes for her to make her next gloriously fatal movement. It is her beauty which empowers her to alter the lives of mine. It is thanks to temporarily availing attempts to mitigate effects of the rivalry between her and Jorunn (both of whom are exquisitely realized as characters; one knows them through what they say and do), that the central tragedy gets prepared.

As for the saga’s femme fatale , Gudrun, “she was the loveliest woman in Iceland at that time, 11and also the most intelligent,” which commits what Hemingway considered the cardinal sin of telling instead of describing. What does she look like? Her face must be the face of beautiful doom, as brightly hidden to the gaze as the sun’s disk. I’m more than willing to suppose that rings of red gold adorned her white arms. Seid , the magic art somehow related to females, with which Freya seems to have been associated, is nearly unknown to us; likewise the workings of Gudrun’s magic. Her true love and victim, Kjartan, gets a good two sentences of description; we are informed of the colors of certain horses; Gudrun for her part is a disir figurine. The only detail we ever learn of her looks and gestures is that when her third husband’s murderer wipes his bloody spear on the sash around her pregnant belly, she smiles. 12The child inside her will take vengeance in due course.

IN THE SERPENT’S BED

As Odin says, we are all doomed to die. Doom’s strides are as long as Sleipnir’s eight legs on an ancient picture-stone — but I prefer to reify doom as Hallgerd, the vengefully irresistible heroine of Njal’s Saga . “She was very tall, which earned her the nickname Long-legs, and her lovely hair was now so long that it could veil her entire body.” Ketilrid Holmkellsdaughter of Viglund’s Saga , who is “blessed with beauteous hair” and a “fair white brow,” enthralls her own Viking-poet, who praises “the bright lady’s nature, like a swan swimming.” She dooms him to love her forever. And in the old tales and lays, and in every magic mirror and unexpected darknesses of the world, the white arms of half-known women prepare to ensnare me in ambushes of overpowering glamor. It is not so that they are all alike; they are sisters merely in their blinding brightness.