What do You think about Joan Of Arc (2000)?
Mary Gordon's little biography of Joan of Arc is an absolute treat. She tells us Joan defies categories and that her personal Joan is a young girl with “… a young girl’s heedlessness, sureness, readiness for utter self-surrender.” Gordon pursues Joan as this young girl which gives her work warmth and power and provides a context in which faith, courage, brashness, cross-dressing and virginity sit comfortably.While Gordon believes Joan is much more interesting as herself than as the hero of our need of her, she also says that “… everyone who uses words to describe her must understand that her project is impossible.” So Gordon goes beyond the trial transcripts, fictional portrayals and millions of words already written about Joan to reach for the “… cocky, pure, maddening, unwise girl…” at the heart of the myth. A distinguished writer and Professor of English at Barnard College in New York, Gordon’s work includes five novels, The Rest of Life (novellas) and The Shadow Man, a memoir about her father. She brings to her study of Joan of Arc a novelist’s right to sort wheat from chaff and make the real world work on the page. A lesser writer might dress up a historical figure about whom little is known and much has been said, using fiction or fat facts to compensate. But Gordon is too committed and skilled a biographical chef to either stuff the reader with muddling detail or starve them of story. These 163 pages leave us satiated, or wanting just one more morsel.For Gordon, Joan “… stands on a bare plain, unresembled. She has neither forebears nor descendants… Her rivals are the characters of myth. Robin Hood, King Arthur. But Joan lived in history…” Gordon gives Joan a place to live in history and the reader a place to meet her there.
—Mary-Rose MacColl
FROM THE INTRODUCTION: "If I could, I would begin this study in a way that would defy the limits of space and time. I call it a study, or a meditation, hesitating over the honorable term biography, with its promise of authority, of scholarship, of scope and sweep. Ideally, I would present you not with pages, but with an envelope of paper strips, each with some words written on it, and a series of snapshots. I would have you open the envelope, drop the strips and photographs onto the floor, then pick them up and read them in whatever order they had arranged themselves in your hand. I would require, then, that you replace the strips in the envelope and empty them again. And pick them up again. And read and look again. And again, and again, giving pride of place to no one order. Until you had felt that you had understood something in a way that refused finality. That you could tolerate an understanding that allows that the fragments can be endlessly reordered, must be, and thatthe sense of knowing is always temporary, subject to revision, reversal, recombination, and a relaxation of the compulsion to know what is unknowable."
—Marcelle
I would have given the book a higher rating if it hadn't been for the last chapter. I had no desire to read about all the things ever created using Joan of Arc as the protagonist. Boring. Gordon went a long way in establishing the context surrounding Joan; how Joan fit into society and how that society was created the myth, legend and icon that is Joan of Arc. It very intriguing how an uneducated, religious peasant girl is able to lead the army of France into battle to allow the dauphin Charles to be crowned King, establishing her place in the larger theatre that was 16th century French politics, religion and royalty is fascinating. Nowhere else could it have happened and had Joan not perished the way she did, she would not be the legend and icon she is. The books is not long, and it can be choppy in places, but it is a different kind of biography. Not one of names, dates and places but of the context and historical significance of an individual.
—Julia
