Amanda Watson
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
GEMCS 2002 conference paper abstract

"Every Red Letter":
Richard Crashaw's Perverse Art of Memory

In this talk, I will examine the connections between the classical art of memory and the seventeenth-century English religious lyric by way of a reading of two poems about the Crucifixion by Richard Crashaw, who is frequently considered to be among the most "perverse" English poets of his time.  Most of Crashaw's critics have tended to read his poems as lurid, excessive, and disturbing, so much so that Richard Rambuss remarks that "reading Crashaw has been critically constituted as something of a dirty pleasure" (Closet Devotions, 141 n.11).  I will argue that the very elements of Crashaw's poetics that his twentieth-century readers have found most upsetting—in particular, Crashaw's fascination with the violently marked, flamboyantly visible body of the crucified Christ—are elaborations of two interrelated strains of the "art of memory" tradition.  In one type of mnemonics, which has been amply documented by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers, material to be remembered is linked to vivid mental imagery.  This mnemonic method has much in common with early modern Jesuit meditation practices (discussed by Louis Martz in The Poetry of Meditation), in which devotion begins with a detailed visualization known as "composition of place" or compositio loci.  As Martz observes, Crashaw and his fellow religious poets draw on this technique frequently in their poems about Christ's wounds.  The other mnemonic technique that informs Crashaw's poems—and the one that will primarily concern me in this talk—is the use of writing to reinforce memory.  The connection between memory and writing in the early modern period can be seen, for example, in the use of commonplace-books and transcribed quotations to assist in remembering, and in certain mnemonic manuals which describe how to memorize words and phrases by imagining them inscribed in large, distinctive letters on walls or tablets.

The poems I will discuss stage the Passion as a scene of reading, in which the devout speaker studies traces that are both verbal and visual.  In a very literal fashion, these poems explore what Derrida calls "the violence of the letter."  In the short poem "On the still surviving markes of our Saviours wounds," Crashaw's speaker imagines Christ's body covered with "legible" wounds that are also "red letter[s]" spelling out a characteristically "metaphysical" ambiguity: Christ's suffering can be read "in another sence" as the speaker's salvation.  In "Sancta Maria Dolorum," Crashaw's elaborate paraphrase of the Latin "Stabat mater dolorosa" hymn, the Crucifixion is also pictured as a scene of reading, with both Mary and the speaker reading Christ's body as if it were a book: "O teach those wounds to bleed / In me; me, so to read / This book of loves," the speaker prays at one point.  But here the memorable, inscribed trace migrates between each of the three participants in the scene, from Christ's side to Mary's (and the speaker's) heart.  Finally, the uncanny mobility of what Crashaw calls "wing'd wounds" becomes an allegory of the transmission of texts—in this case, the transmission of the religious lyric itself, from Crashaw's predecessor George Herbert (who was particularly fond of the metaphor of the heart as writing-tablet) to Crashaw to his readers.  Part of Crashaw's disturbing impact, I will argue, stems from his representation of memory traces that are not confined to the individual subject, but can migrate from one reader/writer to another, problematizing the bounds between persons through a rhetoric of overflowing, excessive, and memorable bodies.

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