Killed by Words: Grotesque Verbal Violence and Tragic Atonement in French Passion Plays

Abstract

In his classic essay Violence and the Sacred Rene Girard explained that the sacrificial victim unwittingly conjures up a baleful, infectious force that his own death or triumph transforms into a guarantee of order and tranquillity.3 In the context of the Christian theology of redemption, Christ's sufferings are indeed directly connected to the atonement of humanity; and so it could be said that the more Christ suffers, the better the atonement. I have had the occasion to study how in French Passion plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the dramatic matter grows, from the earliest ones in the fourteenth century, in which a few thousand lines suffice to tell Christ's story, to the fifteenth-century cyclical monuments not to say monsters which were performed over several days. I have shown how in that textual expansion the sequences devoted to Christ's torments are fundamental; indeed, I have argued that they are expanded because they are important and the modalities of their expansion are rooted in their meaning.4 In this essay I would like to take a closer look at the issue of verbal violence against Christ. After all, even in the silent medium of pictorial arts, we find suggestion of words being uttered through open mouths. In depictions of passion scenes the degrading nature of the words is implied by the ugly and caricatured features of the henchmen, often reinforced by the offensive gestures they perform.5 On the stage, even though torture is obviously of a primarily physical nature, the playwrights always strive to include speech in scenes of torment. The reasons are