The Gates of Paradise (1960, Jerzy Andrzejewski, translated by James Kirkup)

The paucity of contemporary sources concerning the story of the Children’s Crusade of 1212 makes it difficult to disentangle history from legend. Two young shepherds, Nicholas of Cologne and Stephen of Cloyes, claiming divine inspiration, led expeditions of thousands of people, the German group going no farther than Italy, the French reaching as least as far as Marseilles. Later accounts conflated these two mass movements into one, creating an edifying tale of courageous, innocent children seeking to reclaim Jerusalem through the peaceful conversion of Muslims to Christianity, only to be betrayed by perfidious merchants and sold into slavery in Tunisia. Andrzejewski is not interested in uncovering the historical truth, but in using the legend as a vehicle for his own concerns: faith and fanaticism, the entry of young people into the corrupt world of adults, narration and the distortion of truth, the tortuous complexity of human motivation. The most immediately striking thing about the book is that, apart from a few words at the very end,* it is almost entirely composed of one enormous sentence (mercifully, the novel is quite short). Throughout this syntactical monstrosity, the point of view changes from that of a third-person narrator to those of the characters, and it is far from obvious when these shifts occur. Punctuation, while sparing, is not absent―dashes, commas and semicolons perform services more usually carried out by periods―but it is used as much as to confuse and to wrong-foot as it is to clarify. Of course, there are obvious correlations here between the length of the sentence and the length of the never-to-be-completed journey to Jerusalem, and between the contorted style and the mental convolutions of the characters. Andrzejewski reinforces these correlations through his masterly and varied use of repetition, which both extend our sense of time and space, and add further stylistic, psychological and thematic intricacies. Anthony Burgess praised the work as ‘incredible tour de force’, and it’s hard to disagree with him.

The most obvious way Andrzejewski uses repetition is to repeat, with variation, phrases that occur frequently throughout the book, each variation calling to mind the ones that have preceded it and opening up possibilities of succeeding variations. The feet of the old priest who accompanies the crusaders, hearing their confessions, are at different points referred to as ‘his heavy, swollen feet’, ‘the bare and swollen feet of the old man’, ‘the confessor’s bare, swollen feet’, ‘his feet, his bare feet’, ‘his great swollen feet’ and ‘his weary feet’ as they continually move forward, pressing down into the earth. The same priest repeatedly implores God that a nightmarish vision of the future he has had never be realized: ‘let this dream never become reality’, ‘let my cruel dream never become reality’, ‘let the day never come when my cruel dream becomes reality’, and so on. Another character, a witness to a death by drowning, remarks on the ‘yellow and foam-flecked’ waves of the Loire in flood, and thereafter mentions its ‘yellow and impetuous waters’, ‘flood of yellow foam’, ‘muddy yellow waves’, etc. The longest passage to reappear are the words with which the leader of the band, here called Jacques rather Stephen, inspires his followers, which are first given as:

God the Almighty has revealed to me that because of the blindness and cowardice of kings, princes and knights, it is fitting that the children of Christ should go, for the love of God, unto the relief of the city of Jerusalem that is fallen into the hands of the infidel Turk, for the confident faith and innocence of children, greater than all the powers on land and sea, are able to accomplish the most holy miracles

This version is repeated once verbatim, but in every other instance it is either truncated or altered slightly in phrasing and/or punctuation. The question of the provenance of Jacques’ revelation, and how exactly it came to set in motion the journey of thousands of children and youths, is of great importance to the novel; the subtle variations exemplify the unreliability of narrators and the difficulty of arriving at a consistent, truthful account. From this passage, the line about relieving Jerusalem from ‘the hands of the infidel Turk’ is also excerpted and repeated, with further variations (sometimes it is the whole city that is to be liberated, sometimes just the tomb of Christ). The frequency of the repetition takes on the quality of a mantra, except that the mantra cannot settle on an agreed wording, and so becomes suspect; the more that the loftiness of the crusaders’ goal is invoked, the more it is undermined, the text’s suspicions magnifying as the priest’s doubts about the crusade grow.

Further instances of repetition occur in short, localized bursts, such as the ‘darkness and despair’ that one narrator mentions four times on one page. Another technique is the use of keywords that crop up again and again, sometimes in different contexts and for different purposes. Among the most prominent are ‘shadow’, ‘voice’, ‘silence/silent/silently’ (characters are forever breaking off from speech and lapsing into silence), ‘eyes’, ‘hands’, ‘feet’, ‘heart’, ‘love’, ‘desire’, ‘dream’ and ‘dark/darkness’. Somewhat less frequent are repeated occurrences of certain adjectives, such as ‘sombre’, ‘indifferent’, ‘cold’, ‘radiant’, ‘pure’, ‘innocent’ and ‘naked’. As an example of the creative variety Andrzejewski’s repetitions, the word ‘penetrate’ can refer not only to sexual acts, but also to feet pressing into the earth, to feet pressing into a body that has fallen to the ground, to an unrequited desire, to a feeling of languor, to a feeling of joy, to a knowledge of one’s condition, to an awareness of another’s presence. Visual motifs also abound, among them the crosses, banners and baldaquins carried by the crusaders, their white robes, the purple mantle belonging to one of the narrators, and his white steed. Repeated references to certain places (the plains, valleys and forest through which the crusaders journey; the desert surrounding Jerusalem; the tomb of Christ; the tomb of a morally debased count; the gates of the holy city; Jacques’ hut; Chartres cathedral) form associative links between them. There are multiple descriptions of the weather, which have the hallucinatory vividness of a garishly colored etching:

the rain had now stopped completely, there arose from the sodden earth the heady odour of wet soil and spring grass, while in the distance, as if already in another world, the thunder went on rolling and the fires of the setting sun one more unleashed their washes of tender colours over the level valley, the green pools glimmered out of the shadows, the earth beneath the children’s feet was clarty and lit with still pools of rain, he could see the rainbow’s lifting arc and went on

One of the effects of these elaborate authorial schemes is to simultaneously pull apart and bind together all the voices at play. Pull apart, because some repetitions and motifs are peculiar to individual narrators; bind together, because those repetitions and motifs that are found throughout the book make all the voices sound the same even as they are quite distinct. The control Andrzejewski exerts over this potentially cacophonous mix is what gives his prose such tremendous accumulative and rhythmic power.

A couple of flaws must be noted. First, the confessions of two of the characters, Jacques and Alexis, are accorded much greater length and weight than the others, which throws the book a little off-balance. As a consequence, the two female narrators seem rather sketchy in comparison, and come regrettably close to conforming to Madonna/whore stereotypes. This doesn’t seem to have been Andrzejewski’s intention, as his attempts to imbue these characterizations with some complexity are evident, but he hasn’t given himself enough space to succeed. It is a brilliant work nonetheless. It takes a jaundiced view of human relations, presenting them as based on deceit and incomprehension. The debauched, exploitative cruelty of the count, who acts with the arrogance of the authority his position confers, is one representation of adulthood; the well-meaning but ineffective and compromised earnestness of the priest is another. Between these two poles, the younger characters attempt to find a path; their crusade is in part a rejection of the moral failures of the adults who direct their lives, the innocence of youth set in relief against the corruption of age. It is a mission doomed to failure, not only because youth is shown to be far from innocent, but also because the value of innocence as an ideal is shown to be illusory. Ironically, it is the most corrupt character (whose own crusading exploits were nothing more than bloody plundering) who most idealizes innocence, and it is he who is idealized by the most innocent character; it is the most innocent character who is the most dangerous corrupter of others, an unwitting Pied Piper who earns the curses of the relatives whose children have abandoned them. There is no denouement in Andrzejewski’s telling, the only hint of the crusade’s fate being the priest’s nightmare.** There is only endless continuation, the awful conclusion deferred until beyond the point his language is able to reach. Andrzejewski stretches his gargantuan sentence to the point of exhaustion, but the feet march on and on.

 

*The final sentence contains four words in the original Polish, five in English translation.

**Andrzej Wajda’s 1968 film adaptation includes a coda that conforms to the traditional account of the children all either perishing during the journey or being sold into slavery.