Only Murders in the Cathedral
J.C. Scharl’s new verse play is unexpected, experimental, liturgical, and a truly worthwhile piece of art.
Review by Benjamin P. Myers
Jane Clark Scharl’s new verse play runs for hundreds of lines before one of the characters proclaims that “The danger / of a three-way conversation’s too acute. / The dialectic loses all its force[.]” This admission seems both playful and daring, considering that it comes so deep into a play composed almost entirely of discussion among three characters. Luckily, these aren’t just any three run-of-the-mill interlocutors but rather three particularly brilliant figures of a brilliant age. Scharl’s fanciful account of an evening shared by Ignatius Loyola, John Calvin, and Francois Rabelais, far from losing its force, maintains its energy and interest up to and through its closing monologue. This is a verse play that is also a play of conversation, more about the questions raised and the wit exhibited than about any final pronouncements or conclusions.
Taking place on a Shrove Tuesday evening “sometime in the 1520s,” the play imagines Ignatius, Calvin, and the Renaissance humanist and comic novelist Francois Rabelais as young students in Paris. When one of them stumbles upon the body of a young woman, all three become entangled in a murder mystery that seems part Murder in the Cathedral and part Dial M for Murder. Each suspicious of the others, the three geniuses interrogate one another in repeated rounds of dazzling conversation. In this process, each reveals something of himself. The pious Calvin is secretly plagued with doubt. Noble and courageous, Ignatius learns that he must confront his pride and embrace a new humility in the church. Perhaps the most interesting character of the three, Rabelais reveals himself to be full of contradictions in a deeply human way. All three characters are compelling and well-drawn, but it is really Rabelais who is the focus of the play and who gets the last word.
The most immediately striking thing about Sonnez Les Matines is its ambition, or, rather, the artistic ambition of its author. We are stocked to the top shelf with “experimental” verse, but it is rare to see a work that is actually experimental, a work that is willing to take an artistic risk. What we usually mean by “experimental” now is that the poet repeats a number of shop-worn gestures toward the instable and self-referential nature of language. We call a poem “experimental” if it “gestures toward its own erasure” or “challenges our definitions of the poem” in more or less the same way the mainstream of poetry has for at least the last twenty years and the avant garde has, relentlessly, for the last hundred years or more. Scharl’s book is, thankfully, in no way “experimental” like that. It is, rather, a true experiment, a work that seems to be born out of curiosity, out of the spirit that says, “I wonder what would happen if….” This is the kind of ambition, not mere careerism, that produces worthwhile art. Sonnez Les Matines takes up serious matters, but it also fairly sings with the joy of experiment, of trying things out.
Scharl offers a powerful counterpoint to the Gnosticism that so easily besets us.
Verse drama tends to push a play back toward the ceremonial roots of the theater, transforming all action into ritual and all dialogue into liturgy. Scharl embraces this liturgical element with both high seriousness and whimsy. Faced with an unsolved mystery, the three interlocutors are constantly calling us into contemplation of yet higher mysteries, such as when Ignatius suggests the mystery of transcendent beauty:
All things
beautiful are also frail; the least brush
with ugliness spoils them forever.
The good can withstand grim battle
with evil; truth can wrestle chest to chest
with lies; yet beauty must have champions.
She cannot wage her war alone; for her
to enter the struggle is to lose.
This is the sort of noble sentiment we might expect from Loyola. The thought is profound, and it seems exactly right, until Rabelais responds to the contrary: “She’s a scrappy one, beauty; the merest / trace of beauty countermands the worst / of things and seals for them a spot / in Paradise, if only cleaning out the pot.” This opinion too seems exactly correct, if less reverentially delivered. And, when Calvin adds that beauty has no business among the horrors they have discovered in the Paris night, his observation that “Beauty’s withdrawn / herself so far from this that it is folly / to discuss her” also seems like a species of tribute to the transcendent, a sort of via negativa. The point is not to pinpoint which character gets beauty right but rather to accept the liturgical call into contemplation. The contemplative weight of the book comes from the interaction of the three young geniuses. The courage of Ignatius, the conscience of Calvin, and the earthy levity of Rabelais work like strophe, antistrophe, and epode in classical tragedy, helping us see the same thing from differing angles.
But it is, in the end, Rabelais who seems to take the last word most often. With Rabelais so often getting the epode, the real focus of the play is on embodiment. This is a “murder mystery” that is really not about the mystery of a body but rather about the mystery of the body: what to make of our own soul/flesh unity. Ignatius worriedly asks, “Do we leave no device of God unstained?” Calvin says what you might expect him to say: “Corruption, rank around us, creeping through / our flesh like ants through earth; our every making— / kingdoms, thrones, sees and statues—all / with death swelling in our veins.” The saint-to-be and the soon-to-be-reformer wrestle with their fleshly selves and display at times a Hamlet-like disdain for the body. Rabelais, however, is perfectly at home in his “too, too sullied flesh.” In a closing soliloquy, he offers this advice:
Love
Wisdom, say I, but not with what’s above!
She’s a pretty girl, and ripe; love her
with your body, your skin and bones, the gurgle
of your gut; love her with your rutting heart.
The lines are evocative of the figure of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs and also, faintly, of W.H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.” Both are excellent sources of down-to-earth wisdom. It may seem funny, in a play featuring a great saint and a great theologian, to give the final word to the author of Gargantuan and Pantagruel, a work that features an entire chapter on the benefits of wiping one’s butt with the neck of a goose, but Rabelais’ corporeal wisdom is a fitting end to a play about the mystery of the body. His final words do what both carnival and Lent do in their own way: draw our attention to our own embodiment. Scharl offers a powerful counterpoint to the Gnosticism that so easily besets us, our tendency in the church and in the larger culture to separate ourselves from our bodies and to treat them like foreign territory merely to be conquered and subdued. Scharl’s Rabelais, very much in the spirit of the actual Rabelais, calls us into a bemused contemplation of our bodies as an essential element of the self.
Rabelais gets the last word, yet, as Lent begins at the play’s closing, perhaps even the fleshy zest of Rabelais is tempered, though far from canceled out. We could perhaps say that it is not Rabelais who has the final word but rather the dance of time and eternity that is the liturgical year. Carnival gives way to Lent, which in turn gives way to the joy of Easter. Setting the play so clearly within liturgical time calls our attention to our own situation within time. We are, in this play, suspended between carnival and Lent, analogous to our suspension between body and spirit. This is perhaps why the bridges of Paris play such a prominent role in Scharl’s play. Much that is important happens in the space in between.
Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry: The Family Book of Martyrs (Lamar University Press, 2022),Black Sunday(Lamar University Press, 2018), Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains(Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in Image, The Yale Review, Rattle, 32 Poems, The Cimarron Review and many other literary journals. He has written essays and reviews for many prominent publications, including First Things, World Literature Today, and The American Conservative. Myers lives with his wife and three children in Chandler, Oklahoma, and is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he directs the great books honors program. His first book of non-fiction, A Poetics of Orthodoxy, was published by Cascade Books in 2020.
Sonnez Les Matines was published by Wiseblood Books on February 1, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy for our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
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