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Performng/Annht h e W o r d

BodyAs Erasuren theVisionsof a FlorentineMystic

ArmandoMaggi

The object of this study is a unique case in the history of Western spiritual-ity. I colloquiThe Dialogues), the transcriptionsof the mysticalmonologues ofSaint Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (Florence, 1566-I607), questions the mean-ing of "text" and "genre," the word's intrinsicperformativity,the relationshipbetween authorshipand readership/audience, and, finally, the connection be-tween gendered/sexual presence and discourse. Unlike any other mysticalbook, I colloquis not the diegetic reportageof the ecstatic encounters betweenthe divinity and a "blessed soul." Maria Maddalena did not intend to commu-nicate/teach us anything; not only did she not care for any form of audienceor readership,she did not even want this book to be written. Indeed, to ap-proach I colloqui orrectly, two essential elements must be kept in mind: First,Maria Maddalena'smystic performanceshad a specific goal: the expression ofthe Word. The mystic believed that through oral language she might be ableto evoke the Word's being. I colloqui eportsthe mystic's reiteratedattempt tofulfill her task;I colloqui,we may say, is a work in progress. Second, I colloquiwas not written by Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. Her sisters of the Carmeliteconvent SantaMariadegli Angeli (SaintMary of the Angels) in Florence tran-scribed, corrected, edited, and censored her monologues. As soon as the mys-tic entered a rapture, the nuns took pen and paper andjotted down as muchas they could of her spoken words. When she whispered, trembled, screamed,performed a solo "mysteryplay," spoke with a male voice in the person of theFather and/or the Word, Maria Maddalena was notaddressingher audience,her convent sisters. She spoke exclusively because the Word wanted her tosummon His being/voice. In the mystic'smonologues the Word is the Other,that nonbeing that, as Emmanuel Levinas writes, both dominates and asksusto respond fully to His request for existence; it is that which gives and sub-tractssense from our own existence (I98I:2I). Three brief passagesfrom themystic's monologues summarize this fundamentalpoint:The Drama Review 41, 4 (Tis6), Winter 1997. Copyright ? 1997New York University and the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology.

II0

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II2 Armando Maggior performances. The nuns/authors originally meant to compose somethinglike a Catholic hagiography, inserting only a few utterances of the visionarywithin their moralizing narration. The nuns attempted to follow thehagiographic genre (the description of the inspired life of a "blessed soul"),even though they knew that the genre traditionally dealt with deceased andoften canonized religious figures. Thus, the first chapters/visions of I colloqui(approximately from vision I to vision I8) resemble Medieval hagiography,but they do not coincide with it because they, paradoxically,recount a seriesof mysticalevents as if the occurrences were both live (and thus not-yet-inter-preted by the Inquisition)and past (andthus already approved by the Church).These first chaptersare ratherbrief; they often merge several visions togetherand reportonly those utterancesthat the nuns still rememberat the moment oftheir writing. In these firstsections, the nuns invert the sequence of the utter-ances themselves, in order to "clarify"the visionary's discourse.6Moreover,since the mystic's performancesoften include long silences, the nuns also feelfree to make up dialogues between the "blessed soul" and the Savior. Theymake the divinity speakthrough a patchworkof biblical quotations:

My dear daughter,I want to spend time enjoyablywith you [...] giventhat today is that day in which I decided to shed so much Blood for mycreatures'sake, now I want to drawyou, my creature,toward me [admeipsum].You know that I saidthat when I was on the cross, I would draweverything to me: Omniatraham d meipsum;and the other [sentence]:Etdelitiemeeessecumfilijshominum. I:55)7

However, the mystic's orality is given progressivelymore space within thenuns' manuscripts.Her sisterscannot help noting the "greatand beautifulwayshe speaks" and her imposing gestures (2:336). Finally, they also insert themystic's silences and exclamations in the attempt to recreate the orality of herdiscourses. The nuns are so overwhelmed by the mystic's performances thatsometimes they forget to write down her words and to describe her move-ments. They simply enjoy the "show." As a consequence, in most cases thenuns' reportagesare a mixture of hagiographic narrations,brief summaries ofthose partsof the mystic's monologues that they have missed, long sections ofthose very monologues along with the mystic's silences and exclamations, de-scriptionsof the mystic's gestures, of her walking through the convent, of herrunning up and down the stairstoward the kitchen garden or the chapel, andalso their (the nuns') subsequent interpretations of almost every part of themystic's performances. The length of the transcribers'intrusions varies dra-matically. Their "explanations"can be either a few words placed into brack-ets, or short paragraphs,or even entire pages, when the mystic's discourse hasbeen particularlycryptic to them. As will be apparentin my analysisof vision48, the mystic's words often do not have a particularaddressee.Her utterancesmay be either partsof a solo mystery play, responses to the Word's questions(unheardby the transcribers,who perceive only one side of the dialogue), pri-vate musings, or, finally, expressionsof sheer physical suffering.I colloquihus defies any classification.Its performativityis random and mul-tifaceted. Even its authorshipis questionable, primarilyif we consider that themystic abhors her sisters'work. Left alone with some of the nuns' books, sheburnt them, provoking the rage of her confessor (de' Pazzi I96o-1966b, I:32-33). Maria Maddalena believed that the written page betrayed her effort to"belch forth" the Word. The Word can only be uttered through oral lan-guage. As the quotation at the beginning of this article demonstrates,the mys-tic considers the Word a voice. In order to give the Word a body, she must

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FlorentineMystic I 13articulate His voice. Thus, we might say that the written I colloquis a text/performance rejected by its main performer in the very act of performing it,since each performanceis a mere attempt to give the Word a body/voice.As Louis Marin reminds us, every text possesses both a body and a space,the space of the text being that of the text's body as it is dismembered or ar-ticulated in its existence, i.e., in its being performed. The text is thus "themost powerful revenant of its own body" (1971:386). I colloqui s a body is notonly "dismembered,"as Herbert Blau defines the postmodern physicality;it isdenied/annihilated in its actualization (1991:83). For that matter, I colloquisharesinteresting aspectswith specific forms of contemporary performanceart,heir to the so-called "Happenings."8After analyzing Maria Maddalena's vi-sionary performances, I will compare I colloquiwith Linda Montano's mono-logue Mitchell'sDeath (1978), a "visionary"work that has striking similaritiesto the Florentine nun's discourses.

"The Word" is an index that points to a void and that obligesthe erased main performer, the mystic, to hold a diegetic dis-course on His nonbeing.

First of all, it is essential to understand hat MariaMaddalena'sperformanceshave "a nondiegetic structuringof time and space."In fact, the mystic'smono-logues question any form of structure, including narrativity,time, and space,but they also question the denial of structure. Her performancesoccur s a lin-guistic flux which both acceptsand denies any structuring.Some sections of herperformancesare "decontextualized,"nondiegetic, and thus make the transcrib-ers feel compelled to insert their exegesis, which itself decontextualizesthe fluxof the mystic'sdecontextualizedorality(Erickson1992:5 ).A second crucial element of MariaMaddalena'sraptures s that, as RichardSchechner writes about Happenings, they "deal with all three terms of theperception triad. [...] The thing-done is no longer any more important thanthose who do it and those who witness it" (I995a:217). Both the mystic'sorality and the nuns' transcriptionsmake the "message"dependent upon boththe performer'sbody/voice and the audience, that is, the transcribers hem-selves. In I colloqui he three terms of the aesthetic triad interact with eachother in a rathercomplex manner. For the moment it will suffice to say that Icolloquis the performance not only of the mystic, but also of the nuns who"are there" when the "thing" happens and who "make the thing happen" bywriting down the "happening of the thing." I colloquithus results from adouble performance,a performancewithin and after a performance.Other fascinatingelements come to the fore if we examine chapter 48 of Icolloqui, he most disturbingvision in the entire book. In the previous visionsthe mystic has gone through a severe process of internal purification, whichconcludes with her mystical marriageto the Word. According to her sisters'manuscript, in vision 39 the mystic mimes the act of receiving a nuptial ringfrom the Word. The nuns connect the mystic's silent gestures to a topos ofMedieval hagiography, the narrationof Saint Catherine's spiritualmarriagetoJesus. Since she has completed her purification, in the vision 48 MariaMaddalena is allowed by the divinity to participate in the Word's funeral.This is a crucialmoment in MariaMaddalena'smysticalexperience.

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FlorentineMystic I15gestures express despair, the nuns point out; she seems to be cleaning theWord's corpse of his clogged blood and of the spit of the Roman soldiers.While she kisses the floor as if, the nuns write, she were kissing that corpse,MariaMaddalena articulatesher sorrow by referringto the Word both as "mySon and my Groom" (2:287).

This is one important aspect of the liminal performancesof the Florentinevisionary.We must keep in mind that the meaning of her gesturesis the resultof an interpretation. The nuns are adamant about this. They state that themystic's movements remind them of some Pieta--the cliched image of theWord's deposition from the cross,with his mother and the other pious womenbent over his body ("she seemed as if she had before her one of those imagesof Jesus when he is removed from the cross, as one sees in some Pieta"[2:287]). The mystic's performativeidentity is givento her by the anonymouswriter(s) who see(s) her vision as a form of "translation"of a pictorial imageonto a body performance."? I colloquis thus a text performedin complete ano-nymity. The editor(s)/transcriber(s)/narrator(s)efer to herself/themselves ei-ther as "one," or "we," or "I," although we have no clue who this "I" is.Moreover, the mystic herselfhas noname; at the most she is called "the blessedsoul." Her name "MariaMaddalena" s totallyabsent rom I colloqui.The mystictakes up several (fictional) identities, starting from the Virgin, whose name"Mary" s clearlystated on the page, later the "Magdalen,"and finallythe "Fa-ther." Otherwise, MariaMaddalenadoes notexist within the performance;sheis erasedin the act of performing.She actsherself xclusivelys a body npain:

Oh Word, no more offenses [silence] o more offenses [silence]where areyou, goodJesus? [silence]Oh Word, so much pain [silence]Oh goodJesus.(2:3 I)"

Therefore, by becoming/identifying with/playing the role of the Virgin,the mystic enters a diegetic performance. However, later she discards heridentification with the Mother; she isa physicality that allows the perfor-mance to perform itself at random. I willbelchforth,I mean,I will pronounce hegoodIndeed, after contemplating thecorpse of the Word, she walks to the word,thegoodWord,myJesus, ince holdyou in mychoir in the chapel. The choir be- hcomes the sepulchre of the Word. heart. (1:12)She mimes the act of deposing abody on the floor and says: "Thehead will be here" (2:290). Expressingher despairbefore that dead body, shefirst talksin the person of the Mother ("Come, Angels, take and bury my Sonand your Creator [...] please, come take it" [2:290]); then she is a virgin, theSpouse of the Word: "I prided myself on having an immortal Groom andnow I see them bury you [...].""2This constant transformationof performed identities is a basic trait of MariaMaddalena's text. MariaMaddalena has no identity by herself. Her identity isthe diegetic flux of the performance itself. The main performer of the visionacts "in-between identities; in this sense, performing is a paradigm ofliminality" (Schechner 1985:295). This essential anonymity/liminality of thetext primarilyinvolves the divinity, the Word. The entire text, one must re-member, is the descriptionof an occurredabsence;the Word is a non-Word, isa nonexistent presence. The Word is a reminder,a sense of guilt for the mystic.Her performance s a paradox;she must articulate/summona deadword.After having meditated upon the Word's corpse, the mystic addressestheMagdalen: "Oh Magdalen, what are we going to do without our Love? [si-

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I 6 ArmandoMaggilence]Be hopeful, my daughter" (2:292). Then, walking as if she were partici-pating in a funeral, Maria Maddalena enters the nuns' scriptorium, which inher "mystery play" becomes the Virgin's house. Here she meets with herSon/Groom's disciples (2:293). Peter arrivesfirst: "Come in, come in, Peter,come, come here, although you have betrayed my Word, he is benign, and ifhe has forgiven you I forgive you myself. You know, he has forgivenMagdalen, and he will forgive you as well" (2:293-94). Maria Maddalenamimes the act of accompanying the invisible Peter to a chair. Then, John("Oh John, please come in!"), Jacob, and Joseph step into her room.Magdalen, Peter,John, Jacob, andJoseph pay a respectfulvisit to the Mother/Spouse of their dead friend. The burial has alreadytaken place in the chapel;in the scriptorium the deceased is commemorated by his family and hisfriends. The vision/narration in fact revolves around a silent/silenced corpse.The performer without a name performs/utters an absent word/Word. Onlyinvisible presences are allowed to be called by their names (Magdalen, Peter,John, etc.). The text is grounded on an absence; its diegesis acts out theWord's erasure. "The dead, rotten body is this thing that no longer has anyname in any language [...,] and the unnamed God has vanished together withthis unnameablething" (Nancy 1994:18).It is crucialat this point to discuss the absence of the name of the third per-former, the Word Himself. If, as Marin underscores, every first name is aPeircieanindex-a sign thatrefersto an object in a "dynamicway" since it refersboth to the object itself and to the memory f that object (like a hole in a wallmight be a reminderof a bullet)-we may infer that a firstname is similarto agesturethat at the sametime signifiesand shows its object, even if this object isabsent (I97I:24). Therefore, a firstname says nothingand everythingf its object(25). This is a crucial element of MariaMaddalena'sperformance.Is "the Word"a firstname?"The Word" is an index that points to a void and that obliges theerasedmainperformer, he mystic,to hold a diegeticdiscourseon His nonbeing.That the deceased Word in vision 48 possessesno given identity is evidentby the way the mystic uses His two "first"names, "the Word" and "Jesus."Whereas during the diegetic sections of the vision-the mysteryplay concern-ing the burial of the Son of God-the mystic addresses the second person ofthe Trinity as "the Word" (thus summoning His nonpresence, his being as a"rotten" corpse), when she embodies her self in her expressionsof sheer painshe pronounces the term "Jesus."However, "Jesus" s not an index;"Jesus" sthe annihilation of any diegetic performance."Jesus,"or "myJesus,"or "goodJesus" all signify a despairthat imposes itself as an absolute, all-erasingsaying."Jesus"and "the Word" thus indicate two different "objects." "The Word"exists as an absent actor of a mysteryplay. "Jesus" s not a firstname of some-one whose first name is "Jesus.""Jesus"s the name of someone else's disquiet.I colloqui, nd in particular ision 48, is the biographyof a void, or, betteryet,this text is the biographyof a performer(the mystic) who performsthe biogra-phy of a void (the Word). However, I colloquis also the auto-biographyof thetranscribers who performtheir own biography by withdrawing from theperformer'sperformance.As Marin states,"the subject, the 'I' constitutes itselfby quoting the other andby appropriatinghe other" (1981:46).The transcribersreveal themselvesby exposing the performerto her performance,as, in a similarmanner,the performer(the mystic) is therewhen she performsthe absenceof theWord, who makes the mystic perceive His presenceas guilt. At least in the firstsection of vision 48, the Word enacts the mystic's guilt for being unableto sum-mon His being. In other words, the mystic, the Word, and the nuns are bothperformersandperformed,both presencesand silencedbodies.'3The act of performing one's self and being performed through one's ownperformance is one of the major aspects of Linda Montano's video Mitchell's

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Florentine Mystic I 17Death, a monologue recounting the moments after her husband's suicide oraccidental death. Like Maria Maddalena'sdiscourse, Montano's monotonousrecitation does not have a specific addressee.Montano reads a text into a mi-crophone without looking at her audience; like the Florentine mystic,Montano speaksan absence o an absence.We have seen that Maria Maddalena isaware of the fact that, although she is compelled to speak, her speaking willnot give a body to the Word. Similarly,Montano repeats her words with noactual pathos; her narration will not summon her husband's presence. Shespeaksas if she were reciting the rosaryin a Catholic church. Montano knowsthe rhythm and the cadence of the rosary. Indeed, like Maria Maddalena de'Pazzi, she studied to become a nun (Shank I979:44). Through an electronicdevice Montano's voice echoes as if she were a member of a chorus. She ismerely a voice among other voices; her words are often blurred,indistinct.The comparisonbetween Montano's monologue and MariaMaddalena's l-luminates some fundamental elements of both performers' "philosophy of lan-guage." In the act of reciting the rosary, the subject does not focus on thecontent of his/her saying. The "mysteries" repeated throughout the rosaryre-volve around a death-the Word's withdrawal from the world-and the"others"' (his mother's, the Magdalen's,his disciples', etc.) mourning over hisoccurred absence. The event narrated s a void articulatedby a voice that aimsto "absorb," to appropriate that very void. More than remembering theWord, the subject memorializes the Word's absence by reproducing that ab-sence in the physicalityof his/her voice.Both Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi and Linda Montano perform a death (theWord, Montano's husband) and are performed through their "silencing"voices. Both of them speak in order to originate silence. Silence does have a"story," a plot, which is secondary to the act of "giving life" to silence itself.Maria Maddalena participates in the Word's funeral; Montano gazes at herhusband'scorpse:

I can't believe what I'm seeing his face bloated a bit certainlydistorted ahole the size of a silver dollar on his right cheek his face intact but sochanged a pink putty fills thehole little pieces of it in his hairhis eyebrows ruffled not neateverything impassivenot mo-bile like sleep but too still forsleep areyou asleepMitchell Itouch his arm [...]. (1987)

Reading this passagecould be mis-leading. In fact, in addition to thoserhythmical pauses present at the endof each "mystery" of the rosary,Montano's voice has a repetitiousin-tonation. Montano's brief silences,moreover, do not follow a narrative/

Oh, it willhappeno me whathappenedoJobthatwasprovedirst in his thingsandthen n himself si-lence] beforen theneighborsndthen n myselfbe-forein thebodyand then n thesoul.[...] MyJesus,I don'tknowif you wantthebody ofinish in thisway. silence] I don'tknowwhether'm on earthorin heaven,in hell orin theabyss.2:311-12)

rhetoricalpattern.The speakerbreathes n and out the "stations"of her narratedvoid (Montano'scalling up her friends to tell them about Mitchell's death;hermoments of sudden despairand fatigue;her drivingto KansasCity to attendhisfuneral); t is throughbreathingthat the void is narrated.Mitchell's death is em-bodied in a breath:"Don't be afraidMitchell it's ok pups go on don't be scaredsurrenderwhatever fearsyou are experiencingare only illusionsgo on and don'tfear don't worry no more worry [...]" (1987). Montano's words are a litany. Alitanyis a speech with no silences thatonly articulates ilence.

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I 8 ArmandoMaggiMariaMaddalenaconsidered silence a crucial element of her performances.Indeed, in "colloquio" 48, afterhaving met with her Son's/Groom's disciples,she lowers the tone of her voice to a barely audible mumbling (2:299). Thenuns write that "one could understandwhat she was seeing better through hergesturesand movements than through the words she was saying" (2:299-300).All of a sudden, the mystic stands up and opens the window, exclaiming:"Yes, confused before but now in everything [silence]and he placed them inhell. [silence]Who has ever seen such a speed?"According to the nuns, the vi-sionaryis being attackedby a horde of devils. She defends herselfby throwingthe "badangels"out of the window down into the courtyard:

Go [silence]ell, scream as much asyou want [silence] nd he sublimatedourhumanitywith their confusion [silence] othing more is known. (2:300)Her fight with the devils introduces the most dramaticpassageof the text.The devils have instilled in the mystic's mind the awareness of the Word's ir-

revocable death. The mystic is "enlightened" by the devils. The sepulchre(the choir in the chapel) contains nothing but a mute body. The devils exposethe mystic to "the vortices in which the body that lets loose its hold on thelevels of the world [...] gets drawn" (Lingis 1994:23). By recognizing theother's/the Word's nonexistence, the mystic's body "becomes the double ofthe other," putting itself "wholly in the place of the death that gapes open forthe other" (Lingis I994:18I). MariaMaddalena'sbody startsshakingand wrig-gling, "as if she were dismembering herself inside." Her broken discourse be-gins as follows:Oh, it will happen to me what happened to Job that was proved first inhis things and then in himself [silence] efore in the neighbors and then inmyself, before in the body and then in the soul. [...] My Jesus, I don'tknow if you want the body to finish in this way. [silence] don't knowwhether I'm on earth or in heaven, in hell or in the abyss. [silence]Ohgood Jesus. [silence]You that walk by tell me if someone has ever sufferedlike me. [silence]Oh good Jesus. [silence]Oh good Jesus. [silence]Oh goodJesus, it's clear to me, yes [silence]f I ascend to heaven you'll be there, ifI descend to hell there you are. [silence]Oh goodJesus [silence]Oh goodJesus, you are all Love but you are all purity. [silence]Oh Word, whenareyou coming? [silence]Oh good Jesus. [silence]My Jesus, you want it,yes, yes. [silence]Good Jesus, good Jesus [silence] perceive neither younor myself. If I am in you, you know it. [...] I'm a nothingness [...].(2:311-12)

Still engrossed in her vision, Maria Maddalena participates in the nightMass. Throughout the celebration, she shivers and whispers, "My Spouse, myLover, my Beloved, tell me, why are you waiting so long?" When she takesCommunion, her mystical performance acquires a drastic shift. The mysticstartscommenting on the nature of "the Soul, the Body, and the Blood." ForMaria Maddalena, Communion equals physicality, blood, and the Word'sblood. In order to "be ready," the mystic says, "one must fulfill three condi-tions, in the soul, in the body, and in the blood" (2:313).14The transcribers are astounded by the fact that, after speaking of "soul,body, and blood," all of a sudden MariaMaddalenahas acquireda male voice.She is no longer the Mother/Spouse; she speaksas the Father(2:314). The Fa-ther is entitled to specify the modalities of the soul's purification. Whereas sofarthe vision has focused on the Word's corpse, now it relates the word of theFather. The mystic "lends" her female body, her mouth, her tongue, to the

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FlorentineMystic I9

I TheyoungCatarina e'Pazzi wasthedaughter f~~~~~~~~~~~clusively, theather's~Florentine nobilityefore shejoinedtheconventSantaMariadegliAngeliasMariaMaddalenan

1582. (Photo ourtesyofArmaindoMaeOi)

Fatherwho states His Law. From now on the text is essentially,but not exclusively, the Father's sermon. The mystic performs a male preacher whodelivers a well-articulated speech concerning two major themes: the proce-duresnecessaryto attainan interiorpurity;and the "acts" that the dead Word"operated"/"operates" in His, the Father's, bosom during the three days ofHis, the Word's, death.the extremely long and convoluted sermon is performed by a body de-prived of a fixed identity/sexuality. Following the structure of the so-called"9thematic"ermon practiced/theorized by the German mystic and preacherJohannes Tauler (ca. 1300--I36I), the Father makes use of two basic rhetoricaldevices: dilation and amplification.After having announced the theme of hissermon, He divides it into several sections (divisions), and then He amplifiesthem in specific subchapters(distinctions).A "clausio,"a sort of summaryofboth divisions and distinctions,will lead to a brief closing prayer(see SchmidtI985).'s However, His discourse is intersectedby two different kinds of asidediscourses: the mystic's (female) voice, who often asks herself/the (male)preacherto repeatand to clarifyhis sentences because they are too "hard"for

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I20 Armando Maggiher; and the mystic's (female) expressions directed to the Word's corpse. Infact, in this final section of her vision the mystic performstwo double perfor-mances at the same time. First, she is herself a female disciple/daughter wholistens to the Father, who imposes His discourse/narration on/of the Word,the deceased Groom of the (male) Father's (female) audience. Second, themystic also is/performs the (female) soul who at moments feels lost because of"her Word"'s absence, and thus cannot help interrupting her (male) mono-logue with expressionsof despair.It is crucial to remember that the Father's "violation" of the female bodyhas occurred when the mystic suffered from intense physical pains and thencame into contact (through Communion) with the divinity's flesh. The Fatherthus enters her body in order to impose His discourse about physicality, gen-der, and the Word's relation to the (female) soul. For that matter, I find astunning similitude between the Florentine mystic's sexual ambiguity and "thepostmodern dissociation of presence and discourse," asJill Dolan says aboutthe performances of the male-to-female transsexual Kate Bornstein. "Her[Bornstein's] monologs traded among shifting, constructed identities, layeredon a body that has experienced all of these constructions"(1989:66).It is also importantto remember that in the Renaissance a shifting sexuality,a "constructed identity," as Dolan says, was usually seen as the mark of a de-monic body (devils, witches, possessed souls). As Lyndal Roper points out,"possession [became] a kind of hypermasculine caricature" (I994:I9I). Re-counting the trial of a possessed woman in Germany at the end of the I6thcentury, Roper underscores that the "witch" "display[ed]all the emblems ofthe classicmale vices-drinking, hunting, swearingand whoring. [...] The suc-cess of the exorcism was proven when the woman resumed her feminine per-sona." In another case of possession,the possessedwoman reversed her gender:

Instead of using [the woman's] female voice and comportment, the Devilspoke through her "with a coarse and almostmasculinevoice." [...] Thepossessedwoman had two voices, one her normalvoice, "natural,small,feminine and virginal,"and the other "strange,coarse, unnatural,heavy,masculine snufflingand rasping."(Roper 1994:176)

Whereas so far the vision has focused on the Word's corpse,now it relates the word of the Father. The mystic "lends" herfemale body, her mouth, her tongue, to the Father who statesHis Law.

The similarities between Maria Maddalena'sperformances and that of thepossessed are undeniable. In both cases the female sexual identity becomes acaricatureof the masculine one when a "superior,"male presence enters herbody. In this sort of transsexual,liminal presence the woman, both "blessed"and "damned," is a field upon which masculinityperforms itself. The womanbecomes a hybrid, a suspicious entity whose actual nature and destiny are de-fined by the male addressee of the woman's performance itself (the judges ofthe Inquisition, the mystic's confessor, etc.). In other words, man is entitled to"read" the signs that his (the Father's, the Devil's) "writing" has marked onthe woman's physicalself.

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122 Armando Maggithe "soul" and the Church. The Fatherspeaksin the name of the Institution;His Law/springs "sprinkles" he Church and makes it "fructify" 2:352).After 15 pages of an uninterrupted (male) speech, the (female) soul sud-denly remembers that, while she is listening to this sermon, the Word is stillin the tomb:FEMALE VOICE: But, oh my soul, you love the Word so much, rememberthat he is in the sepulchre. [silence]Yes, the Soul must go to the sepulchre toglorify the body, and then to limbo [silence]and I don't know. [silence]Ohlack of time [silence]Oh Soul of the Word, come back to glorify the body inthe sepulchre [...]. (2:353)

A final change occurs in the text at this point. The male voice disappears;the mystic herself carrieson the male discourse. The conclusion of the sermonis performed by a female "voice" that develops the themes initiated by the Fa-ther. In other words, the Father has molded the mystic's discourse. Eventhough the transcribers ail to mark the gender of the speaker, the structure/ideology of the speech itself is male-gendered.Once she has embodied the Father'sdiscourse, the mystic is allowed to goback to her diegetic performance.The Father has conceived of his speech as asermon;the style of the mystic'smonologue becomes eloquent and solemn. It isalso importantto note that the mystic'sgestureshave disappearedrom the text.The nuns do not reporther movements anymore.The text hasbecome opaque.As we have pointed out, the male discourserejects any form of improvisation.Improvisationdisturbs he structureof the male sermon. The absence of impro-visation (for instance, the mystic's sudden exclamations, her bodily perfor-mances, her moving from one room to another,her miming the battlewith thedevils) negates the creation within the text of "a symbolic interpretive space"(Smith I995:42). The negated body of the performer s in fact the negatedspati-ality of the text itself.As GillesDeleuze states,the body/subject "is not exactlyapoint but a place, a position, a site. [...A] subject will be what comes to thepoint of view, or ratherwhat remains of the point of view" (I994:19).

The negated body of the performer is in fact the negated spati-ality of the text itself.

The vision concludes with the resurrection of the Savior. The other invis-ible charactersalso come back. The Virgin, John, Magdalen, even the devilsappearon the "stage"for a final salute to the performer/audience. Since shehas incorporated the Father'sLaw, the mystic may "speak"the Savior's vic-tory over death. However, as the mystic herself states, the Word/Jesus doesnot perform His resurrection in the mystic; he "narrates" t to His Mother:"Oh, you narratedyour operations, and now you narrateyour operations toMary, yes, they will generate admirationand love in us" (2:368).The mystic does say that she is seeing the resurrectedJesus ("Oh my Wordand Spouse, how beautiful you are!"),but she also stressesthat the Word "isvisiting" his Mother and that the "soul" (the mystic's soul? whose soul?) mustfollow the Father's instructions if she wants to be visited by the Word(2:369). The vision thus ends as the Father'ssermon was supposed to end: byreminding the audience of the procedures necessary to attain a perfect inter-nal purity, which equals a perfect internal "fragility."The mystic is both thesoul who has already married the Word and the soul who wishes to be al-

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Florentine Mystic 123lowed to marry the Word. One more time, the text is the instability of theperformer's identity.I colloquiperforms the ungrounded foundations of any performance. MariaMaddalena de' Pazzi is and is not herself. Her being as spatiality is made ofremnants, debris, memories, images of previous performances/performers/narrations.The mystic attempts to "utter" the Word by summoning identi-ties, physicalities,"spaces"that have the consistency of"pure" emptiness.Notes

I. Furthercitations for I colloquiwill indicate the volume andpage number.2. The translations of I colloquiused in this paper are from my forthcoming MariaMaddalena e'Pazzi: SelectedRevelations. ormy translation use the sole edition of themystic'svisions: Tutte e Opere196o-I966).The expression"to belch forth the good word"has a totallydifferentmeaning n SaintBernard'sOn theSongof Songs. n sermon67, 3-5, Saint Bernardactually nterprets heverb "eructare" s "to belch forth."He holdsthat,when the soul is full with God'sgrace,she "belchesforth" the Word. The differencebetween MariaMaddalena'snterpretationand SaintBernard'ss apparent:whereas n SaintBernard he act of belchingout the Wordsignifiesthat the soul is content with His grace,in MariaMaddalena"eructare"primarilymeans"givelinguisticexpression"o the Word. "Eructare"s asynonym or"speaking."3. With the word "liminal,"I referto Victor Turner'snotion of an intermediary ield thatspansacross wo or more areasof performativity.4. Here I refer to Richard Schechner's response to W.B. Worthen's "Discipline of theText/Site of Performance."Although Worthen astutelyinterpretsBarthes'snotion oftext as "the field of the signifier, of textuality, of play, of production" (I995:I5), heequals "text" with "play on stage" (Schechner I995b:37), thus limiting the infiniterangeof textual "performances,"which transcend he theatricalstaging. I colloqui ro-vides one exampleof contradictory/ambiguous/self-denying erformativity.5. I borrow these basic biographicalelements from the following texts: Catena (i966a;i966b); Secondin (I974); Pozzi (I984).The firstbiographyof the Saintwas a brief reportwritten by one of her sistersnineyearsbefore the Saint'sdeath. The first actualbiographywas composed by VincenzoPuccini, one of her confessors,andwas published n Florence in 1609.6. The nunsopenly recognize their intrusion n the mystic'sdiscourse n I colloqui1:320).7. Refer to Omnia raham d meipsum John I2:32) and Et delitiemeeessecumfilijshominum(Proverbs8:3 ).8. As Darko Suvinwrites:

Happeningsare a genre of theatrespectacle,usingvarioustypesof signsandmediaorganizedaround the action of humanperformersn a homogeneousand thematically unified way, and a nondiegetic structuringof time andspace. (I995 [I97o]:294-95)9. I do not translate entences that the mysticpronouncesin Latin.In the firstpartof thisexcerpt Maria Maddalenasays:"I will offer you, Father,for every creature the bloodthatyour Only Begotten shed for the humanredemption."Io. Speakingof the Indiandancer-choreographerUday Shankar, oan Erdmanreminds usthatShankar:

translated he dance from its informalpresentation n the royal householdand temple sanctuaries nto productionsconstructedin a Western format.[...] As in the translationof literary exts, a translationof performance s fora particular ime (one's own) and audience (whetherliterary,artistic,schol-arly,immigrant,elite, public, national,or international). I987: 65, 69)MariaMaddalena"translates"he deposition, both a cliched paintingand a group per-formance(the Catholic theatricalprocessionsof Good Friday), nto a solo monologue/performance hatdeniesany audience.I . In the Old Testament "God's invisible presence is asserted,made visible, in the per-ceivablealterationsHe bringsabout in the humanbody" (Scarry 985:I83).

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124 Armando Maggi12. As SlavojZizek remindsus, when

I am driven to despair,thrown into absolute solitude, I can identify withChrist on the Cross. [...] My personal experience of being abandonedbyGod thus overlapswith the despairof Christhimselfat being abandonedbythe divine Father.[...] In Lacanian erms,we are dealingwith the suspen-sion of the big Other, which guaranteesthe subject'saccess to reality:inthe experienceof the death of God, we stumbleupon the fact that "thebigOther does not exist." (1995:4o-42)

Ziiek refersto Lacan's"Subversionof the Subjectand Dialecti of Desire" (1977:317).Thus, we may say that MariaMaddalenandirectlyperformsone more identification-with the Word himself,abandonedby the Father.13. Interesting similarities can be found between Maria Maddalena'svisions and JerzyGrotowski's "ritualperformances,"as he startedcalling his work when he moved toPontedera, Italy, in 1985. According to Zbigniew Osinski, Grotowski's "theater"re-spondsto "aspecialcalling"(I99I:99). Indeed,like MariaMaddalena's isions,his work"is not easy to verbalize"(IO5).Following the gnostic tradition,both Grotowski andMariaMaddalenaare in searchfor the "directexperience,"the sudden contact with anonhumanpresence.A certainmysticalcharacter s certainlypresent n Grotowski'sper-formances.As one of Grotowski'sperformerswritesin his privatediary:

Saturday,May 5: During a heavy dance-song sequence Jerzy extractedmefrom the groupandaskedme to sit in the yurt. He told me to see if I couldperceive any type of spirit in the yurt. [...] He said that both he and an-other member had seen something, some sort of spirit. (Winterbottom1991:142, 145)

14. I examine the crucial role played by the term "blood" in the mystic's rapturesin"Blood asLanguage n the Visions of Saint MariaMaddalenade' Pazzi"(I995).15. On Tauler'spresence in Italy, see Walz (1961), Kennedy (1980:190-92), and Murphy(1974:269-355).

ReferencesBernardof Clairvaux1980 On the Song of Songs. Translated by Irene Edmonds. Kalamazoo, MI:CistercianPublications.Blau, Herbert1991 "The SurpassingBody." TDR 35, 2 (TI30):74-98.Catena,CarmeloC.1966a "Ambiente del monastero di Santa Maria degli Angeli ai tempi di SantaMariaMaddalenade' Pazzi." Carmelus3:21-95.I966b SantaMariaMaddalenae' Pazzi carmelitana;rientamentispiritualidambientencuivisse.Rome: Edizioni del Carmelo.Cixous, Helene1984 "Allera la mer."ModernDrama27, 4:546-48.Deleuze, Gilles1994 The Fold:Leibniz andtheBaroque.Translatedby Tom Conley. Minneapolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress.Dolan,Jill1989 "InDefense of the Discourse."TDR 33, 3 (TI23):58-71.Erdman,Joan L.1987 "Performance as Translation: Uday Shankar in the West." TDR 31, I(Ti I3):64-88.Erickson,Jon1992 "The Spectacleof the Anti-Spectacle:Happeningsand the SituationistInter-national."Discourse4, 2:36-58.

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126 Armando MaggiSmith, Christopher1995 "A Sense of the Possible: Miles Davis and the Semiotics of ImprovisedPer-formance."TDR 39, 3 (TI47):4I-55.Suvin, Darko1995 [I970] "Reflections On Happenings." In Happeningsand OtherActs, edited by

MariellenR. Sandford,289-309. London:Routledge.Turner,Victor1990 "Are There Universals of Performance n Myth, Ritual, and Drama?" n ByMeansof Performance,dited by Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, 8-I8.New York: CambridgeUniversityPress.Walz, A.M.1961 "Tauler im italienischen Sprachraum." InJohannes Tauler, ein Deutscher

Mystiker, 71-95. Gedenkschrift um 600. Todestag.Essen: n.a.Winterbottom,Philip, Jr.1991 "Two Years before the Master." TDR 35, I (TI29):140-54.Worthen, W.B.1995 "Disciplineof the Text/Site of Performance."TDR 39, I (TI45):13-28.Zizek, Slavoj1995 The MetastasesfEnjoyment. ondon: Verso.

Armando Maggi is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the University ofPennsylvania. He has published several articles on female mysticism, Renaissanceneoplatonism, Luso-Brazilian poetry, and romancephilology. His volume, I1 fermofluire delse, a study of Renaissance emblematicliterature,will bepublished in 1998 byLongo. He is currentlystudying Renaissanceperformancesof exorcism.