“Dramatic Immediacy and Imaginative Distortion in Robert Olen Butler's ‘Anne Boleyn,’ Severance"
A look at Butler’s previous writing corroborates the fact that he had begun thinking about severing as a means of making creative connections as far back as A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Pulitzer Prize, 1993). This collection of short stories explores the voice of immigrants who severed ties with Vietnam and resettled in New Orleans, Louisiana. In contrast, Severance (2006), a selection of memory flashes, ushers in a vast range of voices far surpassing his Pulitzer. The stories in Severance begin at a moment in prehistory (with the beheading of a man by a saber-toothed tiger), and move on through Greco-Roman civilization, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, and finally end with the decapitation of Butler himself. Severance inaugurates a period of increasing stylistic challenges where Butler’s writing is marked by the complete suppression of capital letters and periods, and the near absence of time markers.[1] In a final act of crowning defiance to literary tradition, Butler restricts each memory clip to exactly two-hundred and forty words. It should be noted that the potentially morbid implications of decapitation are rarely exploited by Butler who eschews dwelling on the lurid, preferring instead to give voice to his characters’ deepest yearnings.[2] So, Severance is not about confronting the blade or the axe; it is about unearthing the most fundamental human desires such as maternal longing in “Anne Boleyn.”
This paper will consider the extent to which “Anne Boleyn” informs core creative writing concepts that Butler develops in From Where You Dream.[3] He argues that the process of writing fiction requires that the artist tap into the unconscious so as to access a story-telling space infused with a sense of immediacy and bodily presence. If the writer succeeds in tapping into this creative writing space, in limbo, the borders between the conscious and the unconscious break down; the memory flash begins to take shape and dramatic immediacy can be voiced within the text.
In “Anne Boleyn” (77) the last moments of King Henry VIII’s wife are evoked through internal focalization. Anne’s memories command narrative voice as she recalls her surviving three-year old daughter Elizabeth, and her two stillborn sons. Following a narrative process which combines dramatic immediacy and imaginative distortion, the last moments of the second wife of Henry VIII are recorded in a turbulent narrative voice where specific historical facts intermingle with inchoate sexual and maternal longings. Butler’s creative writing process allows fictional elements and factual memories to flow into the narrative as they flash through Anne’s mind during the last ninety seconds of her life. As a result, this paper proposes to examine how the process of imaginative distortion in "Anne Bolyen" allows historical and fictional narratives to coalesce and express themselves through dramatic immediacy.
Butler devotes a considerable number of micro- narratives in Severance to the Tudor period of history; each memory flash provides a historically documented reading of what might have gone through the head of Henry VIII’s numerous victims at the moment of execution. One of the most moving accounts is registered in the voice of the Mouldwarp’s[4] wife, Anne Boleyn, repudiated and condemned to the Tower after only three years of marriage. Her life flash is poignant and yet devoid of language eliciting defense mechanisms of any kind. The text opens with the elliptic words “tiny and gray is the boy and I am undone” (77). The reader is thus introduced in medias res to Anne Boleyn’s story of maternal loss “him being no living boy and no heir to my husband, though I hold his body close and I am breathless with love for him”. The memory clip moves on to evoke a second son “and the next is merely a lump of blood between my legs, and he was my last chance to live”. So, after the birth of Anne’s first stillborn son she miscarried a second, and the death of these two sons brought on her own demise as “I am undone”, and “he was my last chance" suggest. Under Tudor law, a queen’s life was defined by centuries of kingship contingent upon a set of laws which conceded privilege to male successors. In the case of Anne Boleyn, her biological incapacity of producing a male heir for the state, following the first three years (1533-1536) of her marriage to Henry VIII, was the main cause for disqualifying her as a legitimate figure for bolstering the monarchical power her husband so adamantly sought. If Anne Boleyn had won the conquest of the body natural (the mortal king), she had not won over the body politic (the immortal body of kingship linked to the state), for she had failed to produce a male heir. This conflict between body natural and body politic pervades the text. Stephen Greenblatt insists that the Tudor monarchy tried to resolve this conflict by creating a myth where : “the body of the flesh would age and die, but the body politic, which is not subject to Passions, nor to Death, would continue to live on timeless in the body of the state”.[5] As Kantorowicz points out, the Tudor dynasty’s desire to reflect itself as a unified power finds its base in a dual representation where mortal imperfections are absorbed by the larger immortal body: “The King’s Two Bodies form one unit indivisible, each being fully contained in the other. Not only is the body politic ‘more ample and large’ than the body natural, but there dwell in the former certain truly mysterious forces which reduce, or even remove, the imperfections of the fragile human nature”.[6]
Circulating within Anne Boleyn’s memory flash is the awareness that the maternal body is contingent upon the political body for survival, and vice versa. The lifeless figures of her babies recall her failed attempts to produce a male heir for the throne and point to the cause, ab ovo, of her own doomed fate as queen. Consequently, she is portrayed in a womb-tomb locus: with no crown and no ladies-in-waiting; as for the king, he is conspicuously absent. Though never mentioned directly in the memory flash, Henry VIII looms ominously over the body of Anne Boleyn whose femaleness is reduced to a metonymy of reproductive parts: “between my legs…this wet-cleansed spot in my place of sex...” culminating in a voice of dignified despair: “I am undone”.
If Anne was considered the perfect woman courtier: sensual and beguiling, possessing formidable wit and political acumen which had contributed to getting Henry VIII to remarry, then the weight of biological necessity - of begetting a male heir - was a painful reminder that she had not fulfilled the body politic contract. In the text, the dramatic immediacy of Anne’s voice signals an acute awareness that she must pay for this progenitive deficiency, “I am who I am to the man who must cast me off now”. The understatement “cast me off” conveys the full irony of her situation. Anne Boleyn, the all powerful seductress for whom the king had had the audacity to divorce from Catherine of Aragon (a decision which brought on the wrath of papal power and encouraged Henry to isolate himself from allied kingdoms), was now being sentenced to death by this one same man. The ageing king, suffering from gout and increasingly temperamental due to his health problems, had come to view Anne’s body as an empty vessel which needed to be discarded and replaced by more fertile ground. Fixated on his desire to have a male heir, Henry VIII’s greatest fear was to perish without having a son to fulfill the mystical legal fiction of the King’s Two Bodies.
The story of Anne Boleyn exposes the realpolitik attitude of the Tudor dynasty that placed political expediency high on their list, demanding that the bodies of female autocrats function as reproductive machines for male progenitors. This is corroborated by the graphic description of her post-mortem births, connected to her fear of death “my last chance to live”. Although focalization on the dead male heirs suggests acta est fibula, the emergence of Elizabeth in the memory clip points to a vector of hope amidst the wreckage of maternal loss, “but still there is my sweet girl my Elizabeth […] she turns her gray eyes to me”. If the the text's chromatic register links Anne's male babies to red (blood clots, bleeding, and stains), then her little girl is associated with whiteness “her pale face and the pale fire of her hair”, and with celestial light “her hair the color of the first touch of sun”. Further chromatic insistence on gold and purple is conveyed with dramatic immediacy; this is proleptic of the power that Elizabeth will wield later in life as the most prestigious of all Tudor monarchs, “I know I am soon to leave her and she is dressed in russet velvet and a purple satin cap with a caul of gold”. Caul, signifying a head covering in Middle English, also refers to the amniotic membrane enclosing a fetus: part of this membrane was found occasionally on a child’s head at birth, and was considered to be a sign of good luck. As Anne’s memories unfurl, focalization centers on her daughter's link to the lucky fetus - the one who survived. The text evokes Elizabeth with pictorial immediacy. Infused with light “gold and candlelight”, the girl functions as the external representation her mother's last inner ray of hope. Anne’s desire to assume the maternal role, which has been denied her, is expressed as a sense of intense urgency: “I say to her Lady Princess I will always be your mother”. The stress on “always” - emphasizing the immutable quality of maternal bonds - contributes to this sense of yearning. However, the formal attitude that the little girl adopts toward her mother “she says in her wee voice madam you are my Queen and she bows as she has been taught”, suggests a desire for maintaining distance. As narrative voice suggests, Anne’s daughter simply does what “she has been taught” by retaining her gravitas no matter what the circumstances. Elizabeth does not jump into her mother’s arms, but rather stands her ground as a royal figure, bows to her mother and calls her “Queen”. In this way, Elizabeth implicitly denies the filial affirmation her mother is so adamantly seeking: “I ache to take her up but she is right, of course”. Despite Anne’s insistence, her daughter never calls her by the name “mother.” In addressing her mother, Elizabeth pointedly insists on Anne’s monarchical status: “you are my Queen”. This substantiates the fact that the representation of Elizabeth is yoked to the demands of the court - with its aloofness, protocol, and denial of affection.
The life flash closes in on an image of Anne taking her daughter’s head in her hands, “I say rise my sweet child and she straightens and lifts her face and I bend to her, I draw near to her, I cup my daughter’s head in my hands”. These highly visual and dramatic gestures suggest a sense of spiritual resuscitation as Anne fights against her condition of bereaved motherhood. The micro-narrative suggests that Anne’s maternal function is empowered by the bodily presence of her daughter. Indeed, it is Elizabeth who elicits a sensual flow of maternal desire in Anne. In this way, the text moves full circle, starting under the sign of Thanatos with focalization on the locus of Anne’s dysfunctional maternal body: “this wet-cleansed spot in my place of sex…from which her entrails pour out death…no living boy…tiny and gray is the boy”. The narrative moves gradually towards the sign of Eros where the locus of the maternal body is finally rejuvenated through the lucky child with a caul of gold, Elizabeth. So, in retrospect, the figure of Anne Boleyn as mater dolorosa, begetting male progenitors doomed to die, triumphs over - or rather trumps death - through her religious sense of maternal devotion. Thus, her memory flash can be read as a hymn to maternity. Anne is depicted as an adoring mother for both her dead and living children, “I hold his body close and I am breathless with love for him”. “Breathless” corroborates the sense of dramatic urgency inherent to the passionate nature of maternal bonds Anne has cultivated for her children regardless of gender.
This representation of Anne Boleyn as a maternal icon succeeds in fully occulting the eroticized, even demonized image associated with the “king’s whore” that ran the gamut of the Tudor court.[7] In Butler’s narrative there is essentially no trace of the black-haired, sexually magnetic gentlewoman who had mesmerized Henry. Instead, the narrative focuses on Anne as a maternal figure and any allusion to her royal status as Queen of England is mentioned only elliptically through her daughter, Elizabeth. Donning the purple satin cap of royalty, and demonstrating monarchical aplomb, she outshines the diminished royal stature of her mother in a most dramatic way. The text suggests that Anne’s life flash incorporates memories between 1535 and 1536, which correspond to her condemnation of treason and her death sentence, so that her memory frame crystallizes around a sequence of events related to her imprisonment in the Tower while waiting to be beheaded after miscarrying. Her memories are narrated without periods or coordinating conjunctions so that they flow along smoothly: “and I am undone…and I am breathless…and the next is merely a lump…and he was my last chance…and I know…and I say”. The effect of narrating in the present tense creates a sense of leveling off of time so that events appear to move within the same temporal locus - unified - rather than stratified by time markers. From this perspective, the memory frame produces the mimetic effect of a highly visual dramatic representation and functions in much the same way as a play where space and time are condensed into a unified narrative space for presentation on the stage. A glance at the structure of the micro-narrative substantiates the fact that the first quarter of the life flash concerns Ann’s experience of bodily dissolution and the remaining three fourths is devoted to the painful yearning for maternal rejuvenation through Elizabeth. Anne’s visceral memories of the loss of her sons and her attempt to connect with her daughter evoke the white-hot center Butler seeks to express through the dramatic immediacy of art: “people do not go back to ideas, or philosophy, or dogma. None of that stuff that they used to protect themselves from their own bodies [...] they go back to those sensual moments when you live fully present in your body, full of feeling”.[8] The figure of Anne Boleyn captures this sense of yearning through her visceral desire to be a real flesh and blood mother, and in this sense she incarnates the white hot center of Butler’s creative writing process.
As a result, narrative voice in “Anne Boleyn” yields to a particular trait of Butler’s writing in that it undergoes a process of dramatic immediacy and imaginative distortion. By fully occulting the Tudor story of a queen demonized for her mysterious erotic powers, and sent to the gallows on charges of incest and treason, Butler creates a new story where Anne’s desire is translated into maternal yearning. In this way we can read a more intimate story of immediacy where her last moments are fully experienced through the presence of her child, Elizabeth. This penchant for imaginative distortion permits the creative writer to shape historical facts into his own fictions, or in other words - to mould history into a creative scenario. Anne’s voice thus channels the imaginative synthesis of private and political desires. This is indicative of Butler’s creative writing process in Severance where imaginative distortion allows fact and fiction to mingle within a form of mediated reality.
NOTES
[1] In order to facilitate the flow of language, Butler omits the use of the period in Severance. This stylistic innovation contributes to the narrative flow of the text. In order to avoid unnecessary repetition in quoting from “Anne Boleyn,” the page number is cited only once. See Robert, Olen Butler, Severance, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006, p. 77.
[2] Butler affirms : “Severance isn’t about the blade or the ax, or even death, but about life : the phenomena of life passing before our eyes.” See Donna Seamen, “An Interview with Robert Olen Butler,” Web, Bookslut, February 2007, p. 5.
[3] In From Where You Dream, Butler takes a firm stand against writing from the head : “Art doesn’t come from the mind; it comes from the place where you dream [...] when you write you have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place [...] that’s the only place to create a work of art,” p. 18 . See Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream The Process of Writing Fiction, Ed. Janet Burroway, New York Grove Press, 2005.
[4] “Henry VIII became, in the words of one of his courtiers ‘the most dangerous and cruel man in the world.’ On the continent he was called ‘the English Nero.’ His subjects referred to him, in whispers, as ‘the Mouldwarp’, a man/beast whose coming had been prophesied by Merlin centuries before. The Mouldwarp, according to the prophecy, was to be a heroic figure, praised by his people, but ultimately destroyed by sin and excessive pride.” E.,Carolly. Brief Lives of the English Monarchs, London, Constable, 2007, p. 207.
[5] Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh, the Renaissance Man and His Roles, London, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 52.
[6] See Ernst H., Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, a Study in Mediaeval Poltiical Theology, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965, p. 9. Kantorowicz takes ample evidence from Plowden’s Reports, Ch. VII, nos. 302ff, the Case of the Duchy of Lancaster. Edmund Plowden’s reports were collected and written under Queen Elizabeth.
[7] “King Henry fostered rumors that Elizabeth was the child of one of Anne’s many lovers. Anne was accused, not only of infidelity and promiscuity, but of incest and murder, and of conspiring to kill her royal husband. Indeed the catalogue of Anne’s crimes included transgressions so unspeakable that they had never been divulged - but were known to those who sent her to her death.” (E.,Carolly, op. cit., p. 233).
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