Dear Owen Wilson/Eli Cash,

I'm reading Robert Glück's 'Margery Kempe' and thinking about the shinbones of saints

Dear Eli Cash,

Hello beautiful. I remember your interview where you said that everyone knows that General Custer died at the battle of Little Bighorn, but you were writing a book that was like, “Right? But wait a second: what if he didn’t?” And I thought that was really smart because that’s like the foundation of a literary principle in storytelling, like, hey, look, here’s the world and here’s the facts about it, but this thing is slightly different from what we know to be true about reality. So what does it tell us, this newly imagined reality?

I recently read this novel where one of the principles of the story is pretty similar to yours: that we have all spent our whole lives being told that Jesus was such a great guy, so worthy if you will, but actually what if he was a complete asshole?The novel, Margery Kempe, is by the New Narrative poet and writer Robert Glück. If you don’t know, Kempe, born in Bishop’s Lynn, Norfolk in 1373, was a devotional mystic commonly said to have written one of the first biographies, called The Emancipation of Mimi. On a pilgrimage rich in fortuitous happenings, Glück takes the historical figure of Kempe, switching her obsession for the spiritual body of Jesus Christ for erotic passion, and mixes in descriptions of Kempe’s straining obsession with the author’s own love for a young rich American man.

Eli Cash in The Royal Tenenbaums

In Glück’s version of Margery’s world: “The strongest pleasure that can exist occurred in Jesus’s cock.” (p.70 -- all quotes hereafter references from the NYRB edition). What a conundrum! The novel is so gorgeous that I accidentally swallowed it one morning about a month ago and it’s been breaking down into tiny chunks in my stomach ever since. I left the house to go for a walk to rid myself of the anxiety of being alive and underemployed. The postman handed me a package on my way out, I ripped it open, pulled the book from inside, and devoured it on a sharp autumn morn amid the slow decay, faced with the death of the natural world bathed in a light flitting through cold, even birds singing, shit like that. Similarly to me on my walk, Margery Kempe sets out on a pilgrimage, and as Glück writes: “Into our most intense union the opposite feeling enters—disorder.” (p. 28). The novel straddles this erotic tension between the order of story and the disorder of desire.

Glück’s retelling of Margery’s devotion to Jesus works on the basis of a series of switches of what we know to be historically true: “What if I am Margery Kempe?”, “What if Jesus was alive in the Middle Ages?”, “What if Kempe was not only devoted to the religious figure of Christ, but also in a sexual relationship with him?” Eli, I have yet to read your best-selling novel Wildcat, for shame. I know the sales were good and the reviews less favourable, and that your novel was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular, a way of dealing with the grand old problem of history and its continuous passing, where one traverses the distance in language between now and the past by thrusting archaisms into the centre of the sentence.  The most fascinating thing about Glück’s Mimi is that it’s a kind of series of sentence length sucker punches in an absolutely modern vernacular: the pleasing pipework of many cistern chapels, praise be to shit and piss that flushes away. Yet, our cup runneth over.

On Friday I went to the cinema to see a pretty entertaining film about how Timothee Chalamet wants to fuck Rebecca Ferguson in a space desert, but they can’t fuck because they are screen son and mother. Everyone wants to kill them for so obviously wanting to break the incest taboo that they chase son and mother across the space desert, firing rockets at them or trying to stab them. In the trailers before the space incest movie every story was one I had seen before: Spielberg does West Side Story, Ghostbusters again, or the man who thinks he’s a spider; these trailers were jammed with flags waved in excitement to tingle our sense of recognition, that’s the comforting familiarity of seeing the same story over and over. No more new ideas for you, silly-billy.

The reason I am telling you this Eli, is that Glück’s Kempe plays with this comfort of anticipation and expectation. The novel presents itself with plenty of what we might call ‘structure’. “Margery went out to beg from the Romans” (p. 83), but also, “Margery met a handsome man and told him the story of her life up to that moment, as though it held unique, coherent importance. A linear narrative, tunnel vision caused by fear.” (p. 83) Among these tidbits of narrative progression, Margery chases Jesus around England and Rome in the Middle Ages, and the pummeling shape and force of Margery’s slow dance through the universe of things is propelled by the sublimation of her intense desire into acts of constant devotion. Story hangs around these acts of devotion as if it were draped from the nails of the cross itself: “where I erotically dismantle him.” (p. 103). Glück knows both the satisfaction of story and what cannot fit in it, taking the familiar and jabbing lots of holes in it , out from which spills angelic light in bathetic showers: ‘“The bear ate all the flowers, turned his tail, and sprayed the priest with watery shit.” (p. 114).

This is as much to say that the most brilliant thing about Glück’s Kempe is it contains many many rhetorical imitation of the tropes of storytelling, littered with signs pointing toward narrative sustenance, but any kind of logic of story development (such as commonly occurs in tales, fables and myths) is illusory. As we follow Kempe following Jesus, desired acts and their sublimation droop around all gloopy and unsatiated, never able to find space in the narrative because desire is beyond narrative but always beside it. There are no moral lessons in this book, no progression, no improvements, just sex, obsession and pain:

“A priest from England arrived bringing money for Margery. She was so relieved she told him the story of her life up to that minute. Her nipples and cunt were raw and alert from tasting Jesus, stretched and prickly, sweet and bosky. She ate with this priest and his party every day.” (p. 93).

I hope that your Wildcat is a bosky puss-puss, too. 

Margery Kempe is a novel that is a bit like a novel but says “what if novel but no story?” And some novels with no story are terrible, often because they are far too long, like films from the Marvel franchise or Transformers. But this one has asshole-Jesus in it to save the day—a two millennia old Transformer. 

Even though Jesus treats Margery like shit she’s still extremely sad when the Romans take him away: “Because she desired Jesus she didn’t realize that in their separation he got what he wanted.” (p. 153). In this respect, Jesus is like a trendy French psychoanalyst. He takes all your desire and shows you, you are a greedy piggy for wanting more. When Margery fears Jesus has abandoned her forever, she is at a total loss, quivering, burnt out by oversexed exhaustion: 

“Her cunt dripped like the shinbone of a saint that weeps in continuous relation to God. Her hips rolled, her nipples hardened, her tissues heart with pleasure. Her body was still his lover. Ecstasies boiled up and popped just under her skin in steady bursts, the physical evidence of destitution. She rubbed herself wearily. What gesture indicates the desire for more life?” (pp. 153-154).

A few pages later, Jesus briefly reappears and consoles Margery with a large amount of money before disappearing again. Glück’s voice re-enters and tries to wrestle with his own loss of love. And where the spiritual discipline of the teachings of Jesus, or the psychic discipline of the teachings of the analysts and therapists, or the moral discipline of the teachings of literature are supposed to contain the total sum of human experience through the creation of a boundaried space, a clearly defined box into which the clipped and chopped up processed meat of experience is chucked in, marked healthy enough for consumption, it is not only narrative coherency that Glück’s words exceed, but also the scope of the discohering story as a space through which feelings pulse, throb, cum, sweat, bleed, burst and boil—the post-exertion stench of eviscerating desire lingering in the cloister of alienation, as flesh yearns to forget the brain it throbs for. I hope that unmakes sense.

Hey, Eli, look I’m really sorry but I’ve got to go because the Student Loans Impressment Service are at the door saying they’re going to deport me to the Hogwarts penal colony to clean shit from the underside of Shai Hulud forever if I don’t increase my crypto returns threefold before the end of next Johnson’s mass. There’s really loads more I’d like to say about what this incredible novel does. But, alas, I’ll have to write you again, after the sparkling shite has been barnacled and folded into the depth of next dawn’s returns.  

More later,
- Ed Luker

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