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by Walter Wangerin, Jr. HarperSanFrancisco, 2003 210 pp.; $19.95 |
Walter Wangerin's Saint Julian defies easy categorization. Neither novel nor traditional saint's tale nor romance, it combines elements of all three. Whatever else we call the story, it is, in one reader's words, "an act of literary sorcery—white magic, to be sure"—which suggests something of its poetry, intensity, and depth of insight.
The tale is that of Saint Julian the Hospitaler, of whose historical existence, according to The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, there is no record. The legend has intrigued readers and been retold many times since its first appearance in Varagine's 13th-century Golden Legend. A great hunter and warrior, Julian sins exceedingly in his bloodlust for both animals and men. He hears a prophecy that he will kill his parents and, like Oedipus, in trying to avoid it, brings it about. Like Oedipus he spends the rest of his life fleeing from his furies, in his last years offering aid and shelter to pilgrims as a simple hospitaler and ferryman.
In Wangerin's hands the medieval saint's tale is marvelously transformed to speak to a contemporary audience while it takes a deep and steady look at the mystery of Julian's iniquity. Extremes of goodness and sinfulness dwell side by side in the soul of this reluctant saint. Without diminishing the final, miraculous grace, the author fixes most of our attention on the depth and breadth of evil. When the teenaged Julian stands horrified after nearly killing his father, the narrator comments,
Like smoke are the laws of God!—unable to bind the heart, and blown apart by mere human breathing! …
How thin is the glaze 'twixt love and brutality. A little heat only, and kissing is killing instantly.
Perhaps the most notable version of the tale before Wangerin's is Flaubert's "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler," in which the author of Madame Bovary briefly abandoned his beloved realism. Wangerin's treatment contains even more color and detail than the French master's. It is filled with solid colors and sharp lines like those medieval miniatures painted by Froissart, Van Eyck, and others. There is a surreal clarity to it; everything is itself but more so:
Pavilions filled the the eastern reaches of the field, heraldic colors, banners displaying dragons, wyverns, lions, fishes, harps. Bristles of weapons sprouted under their canopies … great trees embordering the field itself in a pageantry of yellows, oranges, and fire-burst vermilions.
Here is the color and composition of a tapestry, the light and line of stained glass, yet the real, physical world is caught simply and solidly.
The miraculous is a seamless part of this world. The tale is narrated by an aging priest who lives two centuries or so after Julian, preserving a medieval flavor in the prose, a magical, timeless quality. The sheer poetry of it often stuns:
"He flies in a ruby silence. … His head is a flame of fire," sang the songs, in an inhuman adoration, "for as he rides his black Arabian wings to the attack his great red beard and his cardinal hair stream backward like flames from a torch."
The sharp heraldic colors—the sensuous surface of this medieval world—contrast with Julian's interior abyss of anguish. Indeed, he lives both on the surface and in the abyss. For most of his life he is a profound sinner while regarded as a saint by the world. The reader can easily identify with him, unlike the usual heroes of hagiography, ancient or modern, whose vaunted perfection we suspect even as we admire it.
Born to nobility and with every advantage at birth, not to mention signs and prophecies of his eventual sainthood, Julian succumbs early to a secret bloodlust unleashed in the slaughter of animals. At the age of five he kills a mouse he catches eating crumbs from the altar. In its detail the mouse's death suggests the beginnings of the workings of guilt on Julian, in many ways a sensitive, high-minded child who is his parent's pride and joy:
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