Dennison: Heaven Sent

Kara Dennison, Heaven Sent, The Black Archive, 21. Edinburgh: Obverse Books, 2018.

Reviewed by Gayle Fallon (lgf0012@auburn.edu)

Kara Dennison’s Heaven Sent stands as the 21^st installment in The Black Archive, a series commissioned by Obverse Books. The series offers book-length studies of single Doctor Who episodes. Contributions to the Archive span the television show’s impressive airing history, including episodes in the first long series run from 1963-1989 as well as the latest episodes in the current run of the rebooted series that began in 2005. Heaven Sent is an extended exploration of the eponymous 2015 episode starring Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor.[1] This episode is set inside a medievalesque clockwork castle that contextualizes an astronomically long, recursive journey through countless instances of confession and reincarnation. Dennison does not focus on medieval symbols or spirituality specifically in her book, but her analysis of the castle setting and the episode’s treatment of confession and rebirth (both physical and spiritual) is likely to draw the attention of anyone whose research interests include medievalism.

Like Dennison’s book, this review must include a short summary of the primary material at hand. The episode focuses almost solely upon the character development of one of the most complex psyches in television history. At the beginning of the episode, the Doctor appears in a teleportation chamber that has placed him inside his own Confession Dial, a piece of Time Lord technology meant to record a last will and testament. The Doctor’s Confession Dial contains a moated clockwork castle filled with shifting, labyrinthine corridors and rooms. The only other creature in the castle is a faceless specter-like figure called “the Veil,” who lumbers after the Doctor as he tries to escape the Dial. As the Doctor flees through various parts of the castle, he finds clues that, he eventually realizes, he must have left for himself in the past. The Doctor learns that the Veil is impeded by confession and that self-disclosure can spark a shift in the castle’s clockwork mechanism. Every time the Doctor confesses a secret, the castle rearranges its floorplan. When the Veil finally reaches the Doctor, its touch is so injurious that the Time Lord must crawl back to the teleportation chamber in which he first arrived and use his dying body’s energy to reactivate the teleportation device. The Doctor burns himself away and is reincarnated by the chamber, only to navigate a reset castle configuration once again. It becomes clear that the Confession Dial is being used as a torture mechanism by Time Lords hoping to glean information about a nebulous prophecy involving the Hybrid, an unidentified creature that will stand over the ruins of the Doctor’s home planet. The Doctor, ever stubborn, becomes intent on escaping the Dial instead of satisfying the Time Lords. Consequently, the cycle lasts a veritable eternity for the Doctor: over four and a half billion years.[2] During this time, once during every reset, the Doctor manages to punch an Azbantium[3] wall labeled “HOME” in the subterranean heart of the castle. This wall, the Doctor believes, hides a pathway out of the Dial. Ultimately, the Doctor pummels his way through the Azbantium and absconds with his unconfessed secret. He later tells the Time Lords who trapped him in the Dial that the Hybrid foretold in the prophecy is “Me.”[4]

Dennison reads Heaven Sent through Jungian symbolism, beginning the first chapter with a comparison between the Doctor’s multi-storied castle and Carl Jung’s depiction of the human psyche as a house.[5] The connection between the castle and Jung’s house is evident, as the Doctor’s castle maps loosely onto Jung’s construct. The top of the castle, where the Doctor observes the stars and calculates how much time has passed in the Dial, does seem to be the highest point of the engineering-oriented Twelfth Doctor’s conscious mind, while some of the lower parts of the castle could easily be read as reflections of the Doctor’s subconscious. Dennison is quick to note, though, that the shifts in the castle following the Doctor’s confessions, coupled with the inscrutable positions of several of the interior rooms in the structure, complicate the Jungian house model. The Doctor’s movement through his own psyche is therefore not vertical as in Jung’s illustration but confusingly “staggered” (16). Like the mutable spaces of the castle, the Doctor’s mind is more difficult to map than the domestic pathways of human thought. The ambiguities of this clockwork space contain a puzzle that only the Doctor can hope to fathom. [6] This is a perfect bespoke challenge for Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor, “an incarnation that is not only willing to turn inward and analyse himself, but really quite desperate to” (23). This self-reflection is achieved through the innumerable confessions the Doctor makes to stall the Veil.

Confession is the result of the Doctor unraveling his own mind and the key to both his literal and metaphorical freedom. The refusal to confess fully and be absolved, Dennison observes, fashions the Dial into a sort of sci-fi purgatory that fosters character development in lieu of admission to paradise. Dennison cites the links among purgatorial temporal loops, confession, and character development in several other instances of pop culture: Stephen King’s short story “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French” is a poignant example. The revelation of a temporal loop in the works Dennison mentions is always accompanied by a sense of dawning horror, usually experienced by protagonist and audience member simultaneously. Temporal loops tend to serve as climactic revelations, narrative ends in themselves, as characters discover that they are being punished for sins from which they have not been absolved. In Dennison’s analysis, the Doctor’s temporal loop, though certainly horrific, exists to achieve a more omphalic end: the loop drives the Doctor to acknowledge and explore his Jungian Shadow self. A confrontation with his Shadow self, Dennison explains, is possible only through confession and is catalyzed by the deadly Veil: “[W]ith the Veil, we do not see the Doctor’s fear and hatred of his own darker tendencies manifest. Rather, we see a creeping, rotting terror whose job is to bring those fears and darker tendencies to the surface in his own words. [The Veil] isn’t technically his Shadow herself—but she does give it form” (31). Additionally, the Veil prompts confession at the threat of imminent death. She is a slow-moving Danse Macabre, reminding the Doctor of his mortality and failures. Yet, she also makes the promise of reincarnation the ironic method by which the Doctor can continue to encounter a mortal self that is, for all intents and purposes, immortal given its ability to rematerialize in the Confession Dial and to regenerate in the wider universe (31). The Veil, like an exceptionally dour priest, confirms the link between a confession and rebirth that will lead to the fulfilment of a greater plan.

Dennison stresses that the Time Lords intentionally facilitate the Doctor’s reincarnations as a way to coax confession from an extremely defiant individual (37). The structure of the castle itself thus becomes a microcosmic gesture—if not to divinity, then to a certain kind of intelligent design that uses resurrection to realize a goal. It is interesting, however, that Dennison steers clear of Christian associations with resurrection and incarnation, associations we might expect with a castle that contains purgatorial punishment and appears in an episode named Heaven Sent. In fact, Dennison seems to purposefully avoid the word resurrection (and also reincarnation) in reference to what happens to the Doctor in the teleportation chamber, preferring instead terms like “‘rebooting’” and even “‘rebirth,’” which she carefully surrounds with quibble marks (37, 40). She suggests at one point that Moffat may be referencing something more akin to samsara in this episode, given the cyclical nature of the temporal loop and the nearly ineluctable integrity of the Dial mechanism (33). Though the Time Lords’ machinations are unsuccessful, the character development that stems from endless “reboots” in this castle is profound—the Doctor is changed at last, Dennison argues, into someone who accepts both the persona of the Doctor and whatever parts of himself remain that cannot be absorbed into that persona (84). This acceptance is a spiritual rebirth or resurrection, of sorts, that enables the Doctor to move on from past grievances. Dennison’s commentary tacitly highlights the fact that the rematerialized Doctor is no self-sacrificing Christ figure associated with spiritual redemption; he is, nevertheless, fully equipped to save the tangible, physical universe in episodes to come.

Though the author does not focus directly on the medieval connotations that arise from the castle setting and its contextualization of confession and rebirth, Dennison’s work is nonetheless valuable to those investigating medieval echoes in Doctor Who. Any reading of the medieval motifs in this episode would be incomplete without a careful consideration of how those motifs interact with Jungian symbolism. Furthermore, Dennison’s analysis offers an astonishingly comprehensive portrait of a mind that, prior to reading Heaven Sent, I would have described as incomprehensible.

Gayle Fallon

Auburn University

---

[1] This episode is written by Steven Moffat and directed by Rachel Talalay. At the time of publication, Heaven Sent ranks second in IMDb user ratings for all episodes in the rebooted series. It is second only to the episode Blink (2007).

[2] Those outside the Dial do not experience this length of time.

[3] This fictional substance is harder than diamonds.

[4] Dennison marks that this is capitalized in Moffat’s script (8). Whovians will recognize the ambiguity here—the Doctor’s final revelatory confession is enigmatic, as this pronoun could refer to the Doctor, to the immortal character Mayor Me/Ashildr, or to combinations of characters, such as the Doctor and Clara. We learn that the Hybrid is likely the Doctor and Clara in the next episode (Hell Bent), though later characters, such as Sacha Dhawan’s version of the Master, seem to fulfill at least parts of the Gallifreyan prophecy, as well.

[5] Dennison references Richard and Clara Winston’s English translation of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963).

[6] Those who study medievalism may also draw some tenuous connections between the clockwork space of the Confession Dial and Johannes de Sacrobosco’s idea of the machina mundi in his thirteenth-century astronomy textbook Tractatus de sphæra.

1381, 2021, And All That

Below please find Alfred Thomas’ response to Miriam Müller’s Revolting Peasants, Neo-Nazis, and their Commentators, itself a response to his original piece, Politics in a Time of Pandemic. We will end the published collegial exchange with this third contribution. However, both colleagues may continue the discussion, perhaps together with others, on our Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/medievallyspeaking. I am pleased to note that several of the readers of this exchange have already decided to include it in their spring courses on late medieval studies and medievalism. This is exactly the kind of communication Medievally Speaking would like to engender. After all, our own position toward historical events needs continual revision and reinterpretation, and questions of temporality and temporalization are at the heart of our work.   Richard Utz, editor

==================================

 

1381, 2021, And All That

I read Professor Mueller’s response to my essay with great interest and respect for her learning, but I would like to clear up a couple of misunderstandings.

First, I never claimed that the rebellion was exclusively focused on London. As my colleague points out, the Peasants’ Revolt originated in the countryside and moved gradually toward London. It was mainly the Kentish rebels who confronted the King at Mile End. I was writing a blog, not a monograph, so I think I may be forgiven for not providing a history of the rebellion in its entirety. I don’t think it is quite fair to accuse British historians of Londocentrism. Juliet Barker has written an excellent history of the rebellion as a whole, including many learned chapters on the provincial roots of the rebellion. Given these roots and the similar provincial origins of the invaders of the Capitol, I think Professor Mueller’s focus on the regions actually strengthens rather than undermines my modern-medieval parallel. 

The second caveat I have with the author’s response is its rather Whiggish assumption about progress. She states that the medieval rebels wanted equality. Well yes, they wanted to abolish serfdom, and that was a good thing, but they were hardly socialists in our sense. Their loyalty to the king complicates any notion that these people were modern progressives. In fact, it could be argued that their loyalty to the Crown cost them dearly when the king reneged on his promises.

The temptation is to project our own liberal values onto past people or movements we approve of. There is a long tradition of this from William Morris idealizing the English peasants of the fourteenth century and the Czechoslovak philosopher-president T.G. Masaryk identifying with the Hussites as a progressive movement. The sad truth is that the Hussites would have burnt liberals like Masaryk at the stake as a heretic. Historical objectivity is not only a desideratum, it is an imperative if we want to avoid repeating the disasters of history. 

I never denied the peasant component of the rebellion, merely that the revolt was more heterogeneous than the name Peasants’ revolt implies. Here too the analogy with the American storming of the Capitol is intriguing: there was even a Hassidic Jew from Brooklyn involved in the assault on the Capitol! Hardly a homogeneous mob of Southern rednecks.

Thirdly, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to assume that the rebels would have murdered Jews along with the Flemish weavers if the former had been around in London at the time of the assault on the Tower. If English writers like Thomas of Monmouth and Geoffrey Chaucer could imagine the killing of Jews for alleged wrongs in their writing, it is hardly unreasonable to assume that the killing of real Jews would have taken place in 1381. As a literary historian, I can find numerous examples of how discursive violence ends in real violence. As the great German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine said: “When one begins by burning books, one inevitably ends by burning bodies.”

Finally, I want to make it clear that I was not saying that the two events were the same, merely that they share certain similarities. If we undermine the impact of pandemic then and now, we do so at our own peril. What late-fourteenth century England and twenty-first century America have in common is a political crisis that correlates with a biomedical crisis. The crisis is marked by the breakdown or failure – call it what you will – of ideological ruling systems: feudalism in the fourteenth century, democracy now. We have only to look back to the catastrophe of the twentieth century to see what a fragile thing democracy can be and still is.

Alfred Thomas

Müller: Revolting Peasants, Neo-Nazis, and their Commentators

Miriam Müller

It is understandable to observe current political events and be tempted to draw comparisons to what superficially may look like historical precedent. Yet to take such a path is fraught with problems. In a recent contribution by Alfred Thomas it is argued that two rebel crowds, those of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the pro-Trump supporters with their far right agenda – albeit separated by over 700 years – have quite a lot in common, and might even appear similar, especially if we consider that both uprisings occurred at times of pandemics. Yet they do not.

On the one hand I am pleased that the peasantry – or may I say the rebels – of 1381 are being drawn on for analogy and inspiration to explore and explain the events we recently observed on our television screens when a Trump-supporting mob entered Capitol Hill and thereby directly attacked the core of liberal democracy in the USA.  The shock of these events reverberated across the globe – I was watching events unfold sitting in our living room in Germany, at the same time as friends were following events in other parts of Europe and the Americas – and I dare say it will be one of those key events in history people will see in future as a hook for other memories. It was at the time when – at least in Germany – we were in our second lockdown in the second wave of the SARS Covid 19 pandemic. But I digress. It makes me happy that the rebels of 1381 are discussed again because I happen to like them as much as I despise the hate-filled speeches and sentiments emanating from the pro-Trump crowd.

To start with, it is a common mistake to see the 1381 revolt as an event centred around London. I blame British historians for this entirely as the London-centric view of political, cultural and economic events so common to Britain has often not sufficiently been tempered by the research scope of historians of the fourteenth century. Indeed, one overriding factor which has always fascinated me about the rebellion is just how widespread it was. Unrest was not just occurring near and around London, but in other large sections of England. The whole of East Anglia, for example was in revolt. Here, historians have reconstructed and painstakingly tracked rebel movements across villages and towns, who were often very probably in contact with rebels from further south and west through mounted messengers who carried word and news quickly through the countryside and into towns, promoting and maintaining the revolt as it spread to the centre of England, where unrest was felt in Reading, Worcester and other places and as far to the southwest as Berkshire and Somerset.[1]  Yet in their localised actions they remained autonomous rebel bands of men and women who left us, in the local indictment records, many very precious clues as to their aims and aspirations. Theirs was a communal uprising peaking around Corpus Christi day, when villagers traditionally danced around bonfires and followed processions through the centres of towns and villages with their local priests.[2]

This matters of course. It was a widespread movement of angry people on the move who were tackling their own local sources of government corruption and exploitation, their target was therefore not the seat of Government nationally, but very locally.  Thomas argues that the rebels were not ‘a homogeneous group of ignorant peasants’. True, I completely agree that the rebels were neither a homogeneous group nor ignorant, yet peasants they were for the most part. Peasants could be well off or dirt poor, they could hold a lot of land or little from their local lord, some were free, some were unfree (customary villein peasant tenants) and some were both; that is, they held some land freely and some in serfdom. There was therefore little that can be called homogeneity at home in rural communities. Village officials, reeves, haywards, even in some cases bailiffs also came from peasant families and high-ranking village officials like reeves were usually drawn only from unfree villein families.  These were therefore not people separate from peasant society as Thomas suggests, but rather an integral part of it.

These were not ignorant people, some could even read and write, and they were very well versed in law, common law and local manorial law. They enforced law and order locally and had the duty to speak in the manorial court. Yet they were peasants indeed. That is, they made the majority or all of their living through agriculture. I therefore do not think that calling the Peasants’ Revolt a ‘peasants’ revolt’ is a misnomer. Even when townspeople participated in larger numbers – such as in London – it is worth remembering that towns had higher death than birth rates. This means that the existence of towns was only possible because of immigration, mainly from villages. In other words, most townspeople would still have had very strong rural roots and came from peasant stock.

The men and women of 1381 had many good reasons to be dissatisfied. The Black Death – we are back at the pandemic – had ravaged villages with a terrifying death rate, which reached over 60% to 70% or more in some places, leaving survivors traumatised yet also in a very powerful bargaining position to better their lives. Yet instead of being able to benefit from rising wages and cheaper land they encountered lords who attempted to turn back the clock, put the brakes on economic change and impose a second serfdom. These rebels were not just thinking of themselves. They thought of their children and children’s children, they rebelled for the futures of their offspring. Their violence against property, which Thomas draws attention to, was moreover very deliberately targeted. They burned legal records which contained proof of their serfdom, they pulled down manor houses and requisitioned livestock to sustain their endeavours. They did not do these things because they wanted to steal and loot, rather their message was political. When the rebels sacked the Savoy in London they did not carry off John of Gaunt’s treasure but ceremoniously threw it in the Thames or on a bonfire. They wanted to destroy lordship and the records of their serfdom. They were not against law, they wanted a just law. They did not want to steal but stop exploitation.

It is true that some Flemings are reported to have been killed, in London as well as in King’s Lynn in Norfolk. There is much uncertainly around why these people were targeted and I have never found any evidence which helps to explain the actions of the rebels who killed them. Without such evidence we might make educated guesses or speculate, but as a historian this seems dissatisfying, as without a single solid piece of evidence, reasons might range as widely as personal vendetta or feud to, indeed, a hatred of foreigners. Yet even here we must tread with caution. Any historian of English villagers will have come across many villagers who are noted in the local manorial records as ‘the foreigner’, or ‘the Frenchman’ or, especially in the Midlands of England which regularly saw an influx of Welsh migrants during harvest seasons, ‘The Welshman’. They might be people who were identified as originating outside the village through such explanatory suffixes, but I have never in such cases seen any tangible evidence indicating that these people, if they decided to settle, were not accepted once they took on local land. In the village it was land that accorded status, not where one originated from.

Anti-Semitism is another problematic area. Accusations of Jews poisoning wells were far from uncommon in continental Europe but not in England, very probably because Jewish communities had been expelled previously. Yet to assume that that had Jewish people lived in London the rebels of 1381 would have killed them is an ahistorical as well as an illogical reading of the Revolt, which had nothing at all to do with fear of the Black Death, as had the persecution of Jews in Europe. We have furthermore no evidence at all of what the rebels of 1381 thought about Jews.

Instead, we know that they hated inequality: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentylman?’, John Ball is famed for proclaiming in 1381: a radical brand of Christianity which calls for equality and even suggests that no man is lord over his wife, something which would sit very uneasily indeed with most Trump supporters on Capitol Hill. Neither could I imagine any of Ball’s other proclamations attributed to him by contemporary and hostile commentators to fit into the pro-Trump Proud Boys camp: ‘How can they claim or prove that they are lords more than us, except by making us produce and grow the wealth which they spend?’[3]

Instead of fear and anger, as Thomas suggests, I see in 1381 an immense expression of hope for a better future. It was a forward-looking movement built on the hard work of ordinary people who attempted to build a better life after the ruins left by the first arrival of the plague, Yersinia pestis, in 1348-9. From what we can piece together, the rebels of 1381 were hoping for some form of representative government with the king at its head. They wanted to get rid of lords as the enforcers of inequality and serfdom, whom they saw as corrupt and ‘traitors’ as they stood against what the rebels saw was the true commons, the loyal and trustworthy subjects of the king - themselves. They wanted freedom from the shackles of servitude for their offspring and to enjoy the fruits of the land which they felt should be held in common. They were, by definition, not in favour of the destruction of democratic principles. This might be a more positive message to take from 1381, and one which is thereby wholly and totally at odds with the scene at Capitol Hill, and yet still very relevant for our current time dominated by pandemic fears. 1381 for me is above all about survival and hope for a better future of greater equality and better standards of living for ordinary people.

Miriam Müller, Solingen, Germany

Relevant publications:

Miriam Müller, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs in Medieval Rural England; Growing up in the Village (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

Miriam Müller, ‘Conflict and Revolt: The bishop of Ely and his peasants at the manor of Brandon in Suffolk ca. 1300-1381’, in Rural History, 23, 1 (2012), pp. 1-19.

Miriam Müller, 'Arson, Communities and Social Conflict in Later Medieval England', in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 43, 2 (2012) pp. 193-208.  

Miriam Müller, ‘The Aims and Organisation of a Peasant Revolt in Early Fourteenth-Century Wiltshire’, in Rural History, 14, 1 (2003), pp. 1-20.

---

[1] Herbert Eiden: „In der Knechtschaft werdet ihr verharren …“ Ursachen und Verlauf des englischen Bauernaufstandes von 1381. (THF, Trier 1995); C. Dyer, ‘The Rising of 1381 in Suffolk: Its Origins and Participants’, in C. Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (Hambledon and London, 2000) pp. 221-239. Miriam Müller, ‘Conflict and Revolt: The bishop of Ely and his peasants at the manor of Brandon in Suffolk ca. 1300-1381’, in: Rural History, volume 23, issue 01, (April 2012), pp. 1-19; Miriam Müller, 'Arson, Communities and Social Conflict in Later Medieval England', in:Viator Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 43, no.2 (2012) pp. 193-208.

[2] M. Aston, ‘Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasants' Revolt’, in Past and Present (1994), pp. 3-47.

[3] J. Froissart, Chronicles, ed. by G. Brereton (Penguin Classics 1978), p. 212.