Литература народов стран зарубежья | Филологический аспект №01 (117) Январь 2025

Вызов Новому Завету, или Возрождение сакрального женского начала в романе Мишель Робертс “Тайное Евангелие от Марии Магдалины”

Пиняева Елена Вячеславна
старший преподаватель кафедры английского языка отделения языковой подготовки Института общественных наук Российской академии народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте РФ (Москва), el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Аннотация: В статье рассматривается представленное в романе Мишель Робертс фиктивное Евангелие от Марии Магдалины, написанное в традициях постмодернистского историографического метаромана. Используя символику гностиков и их концепцию андрогинного Бога, М. Робертс предлагает новое восприятие текстов Священного Писания. Для устранения влияния религиозной догмы М. Робертс использует пародию, подрывающую авторитет текстов канонического Нового Завета, поместив при этом дискурсы истории и фикции в рамки интертекстуального контекста, ставящего под сомнение любую попытку единственного прочтения истории. Данное исследование демонстрирует, что основная цель в использовании двух оппозиционных нарративных дискурсов – исторического и фиктивного – состоит в разрушении попытки в реконструкции “аутентичных” исторических событий, традиционно рассматриваемых как единый монокультурный метанарратив. В статье делается вывод о том, что, стирая различие между “нормативным” и “другим”, роман М. Робертс предлагает более широкое представление о духовности, основанной на текстах гностиков, вытесняющих ортодоксальную патриархальность для постановки радикальных феминистских идей.
Ключевые слова: историографический метароман, переписывание Нового Завета, пародия, Мария Магдалина, сакральное женское начало, гностицизм, Робертс

Pinyaeva Elena Vyacheslavna
Senior Lecturer at the English language chair of the Department of language training at the Institute for Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow), el.pinyaeva@yandex.ru

Abstract: This paper examines Michèle Roberts’s representation of the fictional gospel in Mary Magdalene’s narration, relating it to the tradition of historiographic metafiction. By exploiting Gnostic imagery and the concept of an androgynous God she promotes a new perception of the holy text concerned. To subvert the impact of the religious dogma Roberts engages parody to undermine the authority of the canonical New Testament by locating the discourses of fiction and history within an intertextual background that mocks any notion of their single interpretation. The essential objective of Roberts’s using of the two oppositional narrative discourses – historical and fictional – is to disrupt attempts at reconstructing an “authentic” chronicle of historical events seen as totalizing monocultural metanarrative. This paper argues that while Roberts’s metafiction aims to destroy the distinction between the “normative” and the “other”, it ultimately suggests a broader notion of spirituality based on the Gnostic texts that replace orthodox patriarchy for setting radical feminists’ agenda.
Keywords: historiographic metafiction, the New Testament rewriting, parody, Mary Magdalene, sacred feminine, Gnosticism, Roberts

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction … We need to know the writing of the past and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but break its hold over us.  (Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken, 1992: 369)

 This paper analyses M. Roberts’s The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene (2007; initially issued as The Wild Girl in 1984) in the light of postmodern historiography that pays heed to the suppressed notions of the past, which does not fit on ideological grounds. It presents the fifth gospel in the Magdalene’s narration, which embraces her highly controversial fictional autobiography for setting the feminists’ agenda, and by showing the female equally with male it celebrates the renewal of the sacred feminine and the spirituality of women. M. Roberts’s metafiction incorporates two conflicting narrative modes: the evangelistic and the Gnostic, combining them in hybrid mixing of intertextual mosaics due to enclosure of echoes of the previously accumulated texts that destabilize the authority of its hypotext and enable its multiple interpretations. As S. Falcus suggests, Roberts’s metafiction “[does] not simply leave patriarchy in its unquestionable dominance, but introduce[s] into Christianity elements long repressed and subsumed” [1, p. 59-60]. It challenges the unitary perception of Christianity seen as “an ideological construct” by emphasizing the impact of the female voice in the bible discourse, and by presenting Mary Magdalene as a Gnostic visionary.

 As a seemingly universal account of a logical sequence of events, which are causally linked, history is one of the master narratives of western philosophy, and as such, it has been considered to be problematic. With reference to Lévi-Strauss and his disciples who rejected the idea of a monolithic history and promoted partial readings of historical events instead, many postmodern theoreticians proclaim “the end of history”. It has by now become a commonplace to share a widely accepted view that postmodern historiography not only breaks down History into histories, but that history is also acknowledged as a fictional construction to be based on narration. L. Hutcheon who coined the term “historiographic metafiction” points out that “both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from that identity” [2, p. 93]. Parallel to the common view that historiography is a literary endeavor, E.D. Ermarth argues that “history is an invention, one of the great fictions” [3, p. 114], and thus supports H.White’s well-known notion of metahistory. In a similar vein, Alison Lee points out that in “postmodernism, the narratives of both history and fiction are examined as narrative constructions rather than as timeless truths [4, p.217]. As a reaction to the questionable status of history in postmodern literature and culture, historiographic metafiction thus interprets history as the ever changing, instable discourse, as a hybrid construction based on both historical fact and fiction. As a result, such hybrid blending of heterogeneous discourses – fact and fiction - provides the grounds for history to be rewritten and revised.

 At the same time, historiographic metafiction, according to Peter Brooker’s view, “neither repudiates nor simply ironizes the past; nor does it merely reproduce the past as nostalgia”, but instead “reveals the past as always ideologically and discursively constructed” [5, p. 229]. Moreover, the existence of the past is bound by its textuality: all historical knowledge including chronicles, memoirs, testimonies and diaries is retrieved from written texts that tend to be contradictory and subjective, mostly built on the second-hand discourse that “negotiate debatable hypothetical assumptions, individual points of view and controversial explanations” [6, p. 170]. In other words, this type of the self-conscious fiction prompts questions not only about “the” authentic truth, but rather “whose” truth predominates in the process of making of historical events into widely accepted historical facts, and as its consequence, M. Roberts’s metafiction seems to rather privilege the recognition of multiple truths; above all, these truths have always been neglected by the officially acknowledged History and read only as “subjective storytelling that contains unconventional contradictory endings” [7, p. 96].

 Feminist theorists and historians, in their turn, emphasize the fact that history is an ideologically bound discursive construct that in prevailing cases is also “imbued with perspective, written as it is from an official, masculine point of view that omits the private, the personal - and the feminine” [8, 245]. This process of radical fictionalization of history has clearly enabled women to de-authorize dominant, or patriarchal discourses, and to reevaluate the potential of the petites histoires that have led to the discovery of women’s submerged or unrealized past, and to the creation of “her story”. As L. Pykett observes: “When one turns to ‘historical novels’, however, it does seem to be the case that at this particular point of the twenties century, while male writers seek to challenge the authority of the past by deconstructing the idea of history and converting it into a series of fictions, female writers are more likely to seek to recuperate the past from a female perspective and to make tell a different story: her story not history” [9, p. 77]. In this light, Julia Kristeva’s notion of an ‘historical’ or ‘cursive’ time, which is associated with a linear concept of history, and a ‘monumental’ or ‘cyclical’ time, the one where the history-story of events transcends linear time [10, p. 189] has been useful for feminist readings of history due to their relation with the changing aims of feminism, with the first stage, ‘cursive’, corresponding to women’s desire to establish a female genealogy, and with the second one, ‘monumental’, to praise female subjectivity and the maternal [10, p. 193-95]; the third stage, a ‘mental’ one, in which ‘re-imagining’ plays a key role, refers to the double process of women’s insertion in history, in L. Anderson’s term, to what she considers their textual presence, and to contributing to women’s historical ‘archive’ [ 11, p. 129]. Beate Neumeier claims that this is why the historiographic metafiction is the genre contemporary women writers return to over again, and places this interest in the historical “in the context of a literary rebellion against the exclusion of women from historical discourse” [12, p.3]. In other words, women writers have engaged in the project of recovering the lost female voice of the past in their desire to reclaim a feminine past as an objective.

 In this sense, the use of historiographic metafiction for feminist purposes has enabled women to recover female memories from notorious oblivion, and to emphasize the subjectivity of the historical narration, and, to highlight the obvious connections between history and the genre of autobiography. Both of the latter rely on memory, and account for the particular and the individual, and they tend to involve similar practices connected with reconstruction and remembering. Their primary function is to tell the ‘truth’, or rather ‘other truths’ [13, p. 19], with the issue of gender that lies at the center of both historical discourse and autobiography. Moreover, the creation of “her story” signifies a political act, since “it asserts a right to speak rather than to be spoken about” [13, p.40]; besides this, it amounts to “imagining multiple subjectivities” in the attempt not to succumb to “masculine subjectivity which saw itself as unitary and complete” [14, p. 85]. In Roberts’s metafiction, Mary Magdalene also creates a typical “her story” by presenting the advancement of Christianity and its struggle with conservative Judaic community’s taboos from her individual and female perspective.

 In an attempt to attack the patriarchal intertextual inheritance, Roberts deploys parody in her deliberately inauthentic reconstruction of evangelistic figures and events and undermines a commonly acknowledged recognition of the biblical past to subvert stereotypical perceptions of historical realities. Moreover, parody can be seen as “one of the major ways in which women and other ex-centrics both use and abuse, set up and then challenge male traditions in art”, [2, p.134] as L. Hutcheon authoritatively claims. By representing a fictional kind of “her story” – of the Magdalene’s becoming a full messenger of the Word and Jesus’ concubine – Roberts examines how different thematic deviations from the initially narrated Scripture and the Gnostic/apocryphal tales taken from the Nag Hammadi Library function to finally alter the discourse of the conventional religious dogma and suggest creative possibilities opened by their visible confronting and reconfiguring.

 The appropriation of the previously adapted or “familiarized” versions of the bible discourse results in their parodic renewal. In the first place, it concerns Jesus’ unorthodox preaching and his inverted private life, which seems to be given a different and unexpected meaning. Jesus tends to oscillate between a mother and father God, and his image as dyad is in line with the Gnostic writings, which appeal to a dual deity: “Every woman who will make herself male and every man who will make himself female will enter the Kingdom of Heaven” [qtd in 8, p.61]. His figure is altered almost beyond any recognition, for he is displayed as a “wandering, sexually active and a very tired prophet” [1, p. 54] endowed with the grace and gestures of a woman suggesting the concept of an androgynous God. His androgynous nature combines oppositional pairing of masculine and non-biological feminine attributes inside himself, and reveals itself even in his final words: “Mother […] look, I am going back to my Mother” [20, p. 100] which imitates ironically his famous farewell in Luke: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit” [qtd in 1, p. 60]. Moreover, the super-human powers of Jesus are also demythologized, since the Magdalene’s brother Lazarus is not resurrected from the dead through the prophet’s miracles, but is healed with the help of a pagan ritual instead. It follows from Roberts’s text that it was Mary who cured her brother of a fatal disease by performing on his body magic widely practiced in Alexandria; the same explanation gets the mysterious feeding of the five thousand organized in fact by the Magdalene’s sister Martha: “People called it a miracle afterwards. I called it good housewifery. I daresay we meant the same thing” [20, p. 76]. Above all, Roberts’s fiction drawing on an apocryphal tradition describes Jesus as a preacher who prompts the kingdom of heaven on earth, and even his resurrection conforms to the Gnostic conception of the risen Christ as spiritual: “I’m here with you now, he said: and I shall be with you always […]. But I am not in the body as I was before” [20, p. 104]. As it follows from these examples, Jesus is unambiguously exposed as “invented”, since he loses connections with his stereotypical biblical referent.

 Apart from Mary of Nazareth, Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene is the second most significant female figure of the New Testament who has gained popular attention. The four existing synoptic gospels describe her as one of Jesus’ female followers who is a witness to the entombment of Christ and his Resurrection. Although she is such an important figure in the gospels, her descriptions reveal a tendency to marginalize her and identify her with the unnamed whore who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, anoints them with oil and wipes them with her hair. She is thus often associated with sexuality and interpreted as a redeemed sinner by the Catholic Church. As Roberts observes, she can be described as “the very image of the return of the repressed: the numinous body, sexiness and holiness intertwined, God as immanent not transcendent, the desires of the body as sources of religious joy” [15, p. 28]. Although there is no evidence for this identification in the New Testament, it has started to constitute the traditional image of Mary Magdalene, who “is nearly always shown with her head uncovered, her hair loose and long” [16, p. 97] in the history of art and culture: Titian, Bernini, El Greco, Rubens and Caravaggio, among many others, presented her either as a contrite hermitess or a beautiful seductress, almost semi-naked, in deep contemplation with a skull, a symbol of Golgotha, and a jar of expensive ointment, and sometimes with a cross by her hand, as a “highly coloured version of the eternal feminine” [15, p. 27].

 At the same time, there is no direct indication anywhere in the canonical Gospels that Mary Magdalene is a prostitute. A thorough study of the cult of Mary Magdalene as the remorseful whore demonstrate that it had been constructed and perpetuated by the Catholic Church as a model reflecting its patriarchal teaching about women. It was Pope Gregory I who in Homily 33 of 591conflated the Magdalene with the unnamed woman in Mark and Mary of Bethany, Lazarus’s sister in John, and identified her as a harlot on the basis that she was healed “from the possession of seven demons”, which in Pope Gregory’s interpretation were converted into “the seven deadly sins”: “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? … It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts” [17, p. 93]. The Pope Gregory’s perception of the Magdalene, however, stems from his erroneous interpretation of the Greek word ‘harmartolos’, which is not translated as the word ‘sinner’, as D.Tresemer and L.Cannon claim: from a Jewish perspective it might mean someone who “did not pay their taxes”, or someone who “has transgressed Jewish law”, while originally in Greek it was used to define someone who “does not play by the rules" [18, p. xvi-xvii]; moreover, the Greek word for a street-walking woman, ‘porin’, which is used in the Gospel by Luke, does not refer to the Magdalene as well. On the contrary, since Mary’s name is associated with the one who waits at the foot of the cross during Jesus’ Crucifixion and with the first one who was chosen to see Christ resurrected from the tomb, she is then regarded as one of Jesus’ leading followers and a great preacher, as the “apostle of apostles” in the canonical Gospels, which the Gnostic Gospels from the Nag Hammadi Library expand upon: “Where I shall be, there will be also my twelve ministers. But Mary Magdalene, John, and the Virgin will tower over all my disciples and over all men who shall receive the mysteries in the Ineffable. And they will be on my right and on my left. And I am they, and they are I” [18, p. xxi].

 In her rewriting of the Magdalene’s life, Roberts utilizes the canonical Gospels, the traditional French legends about the saint’s coming to France, and the Gnostic apocrypha, and combines all three Marys from the New Testament – the unnamed whore, the sister of Martha and Lazarus of Bethany, and Jesus’ disciple in one image, which gives her an opportunity to recognize the bodily and the spiritual in the Christian concept of the sacred feminine. In her homodiegetic narrative, Mary Magdalene offers her secret gospel as a testimony of her life with Christ and her own reading of Jesus’ message based on the concept of an androgynous God. The Magdalene in Roberts’s metafiction is an extremely marginalized figure, since every possible feature of otherness can be ascribed to her; she is a stranger even in her own community whose Judaic patriarchal restrictions she wishes to escape by undertaking a dangerous quest to the city of Alexandria where she learns from Sibylla, a Roman hetaira, not only the arts of female seduction, but also that “the life and love of the body is a noble thing, against which the intellect and the spirit need not wage war” [20, p. 22]. Set early in her testimony, this wild girl’s motto runs through the entire narrative, so that on returning to Bethany she earns her living by prostitution to be freed from the authority of the men and later finds her love in Jesus, still evoking the unruly sacred feminine among his disciples. At the end of her homodiegetic narrative, the Magdalene intends to bury her heretic testimony, but she does not refuse to preach “an Idea” [20, p. 197], which can be summarized in the words that she delivers to her daughter Deborah: “I shall tell her that through her woman’s body she knows the Spirit and the Word, that through her body she experiences God, and I shall pray that Wisdom may come to her and enable her to open herself, when the time is ripe, to that mystery of love which brings the Resurrection, and the Life” [20, p. 198]. As the Magdalene clearly states, it is the female body, which is a channel for touching God and the sacred feminine. Therefore, not only does the Magdalene’s narration rehabilitate the female body to the sacred realm, but it also undermines the phallocentrism subjacent to the Christian Church by modifying the conventional image of Jesus who preaches a sexualized spirituality.

 The major theological arguments of Roberts’s metafiction refer to Jesus’ prophetic teachings and the Magdalene’s dreams. Since Mary’s narrative offers the way to the divine through the unity of traditional opposites – light and dark, matter and spirit, woman and man, it can be read as a “Jungian version of androgyne perfection” [1, p. 56]. Moreover, in contrast to his canonical evangelistic preaching, Roberts’s Jesus, emphasizes the female constituent in God – the Mother Goddess – who deserves the same authority as her dualistic counterpart, and explains Mary’s vision as a warning against the consequences of abandoning in God a twin essence of two antagonistic pairs: “Men have forgotten the feminine and the darkness and praise only the masculine and the light” [20, p. 84]. In incorporating the Gnostic idea of a dyad God consisting of both masculine and feminine elements Jesus advocates the neglected proto-Christian tradition reflected in the texts from the Nag Hammadi Library: “When you make the male and the female one in unity, so that the male is no longer male and the female is no longer female, then will you enter the Kingdom” [20, p. 60]. Mary Magdalene’s romance with Jesus is both psychic/religious and sexual, and becomes an ideal of a sacred marriage – “the marriage between the inner woman and the inner man” [20, p. 116] – where an immanent, carnal rite reaching for the divine represents a deep unity with her male Other. Bodily union becomes also a way of contacting the Magdalene’s own psyche, inherently religious in C.D. Jung’s term, when sexuality becomes a rite, a “sacred marriage” in which she experiences the immanent sacred through her body.

 Since the Magdalene’s gospel argues that men and women have equal access to the divine and that the sacred is reached through the physical body, it is regarded to be dangerous, while her irrational inclination to proclaim her unorthodox visions in trance leads Mary to her confrontations with Simon Peter, the leader of the early Christian Church and the first Roman Catholic Pope; the latter’s views on the Magdalene’s interpretation of the two-fold nature of an androgynous God establish a connection between Catholicism and notorious patriarchy, and his prejudices are akin to the Judeo-Christian tradition: “monotheistic defamation of the acceptance of a female principle as heathen; the creation of woman after man; woman as the gateway to all evil; and her uncleanness” [19, p. 89]. Simon Peter’s refusal to accept the Magdalene’s account of Jesus’ resurrection and his denial of female priests give a new twist to the interpretation of her visions; his unveiled resistance can be read as a fictional reconstruction of the suppression of the Gnostic texts by the patriarchy and the more influential orthodoxy: “You are only a woman, he said: and your grief has possessed you to make your words unreliable and wild. You need to rest, Mary” [20, p. 118]. As the Magdalene’s vision of the risen Lord “was with the eyes of the spirit and not the body” [20, p.138], she was finally accused of being a practicing witch who might damage the reputation of Jesus disciple’s holy community by associating them with the “abominations of wizards and necromancers” [20, p. 142]. Moreover, since she emphasizes the role of the body as “the mirror of the soul”, her testimony in Simon Peter’s view is considered as invalid. In other words, the Magdalene’s eventual exclusion from priesty office signifies the defeat of the marginal and the weaker by the more powerful and dominant; it can also suggest the difficulty for women in renegotiating the past and history.

 At the same time, by utilizing the original evangelistic accounts that depict the Magdalene as a close eyewitness to Jesus’ life and His Passion, Roberts presents the hitherto undiscovered gospel of the fifth female apostle whom she interprets as the prototype of a female myth. By including into the Magdalene’s narration her adventure to the ancient Egypt, where she is taught philosophy, pagan rituals and magic at the hetaera’s house in Alexandria, Roberts establishes the essential precondition for her heroine’s capability to write her Testament to make it archive-bound and preserve it in the cultural memory which can move neglected tales of women into the public domain of collective remembrance. In so doing, she opposes women’s traditions of mainly oral storytelling to masculine ones of history in written texts. Since Mary Magdalene’s rewriting appears in the archive, and integrates with that institutional repository of officially accepted documents it can therefore be evaluated as worth remembering, while her act of critical revision might lead to a reordering of the archive considered as the instrument of power and repression that tends to privilege objectivity. Emphasizing the predominance of the more durable and more authoritative written word over the spoken one seen as ephemeral and thus non-existent, Roberts grants authority to the Magdalene’s life story, when identifying it as a book of testimony, that exists in real name and in form – a thing buried in the stone jar that had been discovered in the parched soil of the French Provence, “dug up” and “uncovered”, as well as “copied” and eventually “passed on” [20, p. 198], indicating meanwhile the obvious fact that the materiality of the newly found book serves a guarantee to its undisputed reality.

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