Notes after my reading of the novel
(The novel is set during the Inquisition. It concerns the confession of wine taster Osvaldo Alonza de Zamora, and a priest who reads his confession to a character known as "Samaritan.")
1. Wittgenstein holds that not even pain is private. Pain is signalled by a limp, a grimace, a scowl, a pointing indication. Even "being alone with pain" assumes a social from which you are alienated.
2. Cloak upon cloak upon cloak. Even an erect penis is cloaked with meaning (The Inquisitor's Tongue (264), especially when it reveals itself in an unexpected context.
3. The naked body is never naked, but the sign of a sign of a sign.
4. "Exposing the truth of pretense can never be forgiven" (118).
5. "Speak for yourself and become someone else or be what you can be called" (66). We represent ourselves not as we are but to cause shifts and moves in a social matrix. If we don't play the game, we will be played.
6. "The spectacle will lead us to the knowledge that other people possess interiors as dark and as turbulent as our own, the writhing made finally peaceful in the lifeless cords of sinew and shapeless mire of muscle and soft tissue, that, given time, pools upon the stones of the Plaza" (74). Ritual killing—brutal, spectacular killing where the body is tied to horses who charge in opposite directions—is replete with meaning, replete with lessons, is abhorrent and strangely true. It is a horrific act that serves to define the limits of the acceptable: You may not live here as a Jewish person. You may not do this, you may not do that.
7. "The criminal must have a deed to confess or his execution will have no meaning" (87). If need be, a confession (semi-private), any confession, must be tortured out of the "criminal" to make the public execution significant and worthwhile.
8. The theatrical stage is a social context, frame, and ritual. A certain wildness is allowable there. To show that the religious stage is nothing but theater is to court a hellfire on earth. When frames of spectacle are traversed, anything is possible.
9. Anything, that is, until the authorities crack down in a vivid and public display of the limits of the allowable: blood and muscle pool and stain the stones of the Plaza. Reminders.
10. "She would see me pulled to pieces upon the slick stones of the Plaza de la Salvacion" (135).
11. "He had already crooked his arm, signalling..." (152). Why "crooked"? To signal that this signal is itself crooked, stemming from devious motives, ensnared in a body of subterfuge, as scary as a man in a black robe behind a big desk, holding a gavel.
12. "The Inquisition waits upon the word. Is it not an expiation to serve the Auto de fé?" (189). From the perspective of the Inquisitor, "sinners" invite the pain, the public torture-to-death, the spectacle, because they sinned in the first place. To sin is to ask for the nail in the palm, as Christ did. To sin is to cordially ask the Inquisition to rip you while alive, rip you apart.
13. "The body does not suffer fully except in a state of nakedness" (192).
14. "The meaning of it is clear" (250). But not really.
15. Clarity itself is a cloak. Of a cloak. Of a cloak.
16. We clearly do not live in the Inquisition in the contemporary U.S., and it would be an act of true insensitivity to pretend we did. However, we cannot help when reading a historical novel to compare our time to the one being represented. We, too, live in a bevy of signs: simmering, contradicting, demanding, decaying, transforming. We, too, live amid spectacles that attach to the body like rope: handcuffs, blood, prison spires. Today, we often like to pretend these symbols have gone, that we live amid practicality, that our prisons are not Gothic architecture but built simply to get a job done most efficiently.
17. Efficiency is its own sign. Who we lock up is in part an ode to our love of efficiency, among many other signs (things.)
18. What spectacle or threatened spectacle is holding your body in place right now?
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