When asked why he preferred blondes in his movies, director Alfred Hitchcock claimed, "Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that show up the bloody footprints." Essentially it was the contrast between the pure innocent with the extraordinarily guilty that made fairer-follicles so fascinating and attractive for Hitchcock, a disjunction he often used to play with conceptions of good and evil.
I also feel the need to reference, rather inelegantly, the Marquis de Sade, a writer of such carnal vulgarity I almost feel guilty making reference to him and/or admitting to having read some of his works, especially in a blog dedicated to my schoolwork. Almost. Alas, I'm not guilty enough to abandon his name now that I've made mention of it. No, I'm not attempting to draw any comparisons between de Sade and Hitchcock, partly because I don't feel either gentlemen would appreciate that kind of comparison, but mostly because the points of comparison are rather limited: Hitchcock was a light-hearted trickster, almost boyish really, even though his darker, more violent films would suggest otherwise. He sought to peel back the artifice just to show that there was artifice in the world, not because he thought that artifice was necessarily evil. Actually, I would argue he found that kind of artifice humourous, about as much as he found tarnishing the ideological purity of the blonde entertaining. The Marquis, on the other hand, was sick, perturbed, and angry. Exposing the powers-that-be as frauds, hypocrites, liars, and cheats wasn't enough for him; he was out for blood and sex and pain and anarchy. I'm invoking both men to make a point about Christopher Hitchins, Mother Teresa, the Catholic Church, and symbols.
Speaking of symbols, here's one more cultural allusion for you: in the movie V For Vendetta, the anarchist V says, "Symbols are given power by people. A symbol in and of itself is powerless, but with enough people behind it, [a symbol] can change the world." Thanks to the power of Google, I've just discovered that Charles Baudelaire said something similar. "The whole universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value," he wrote, "it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform." I agree with M. Baudelaire: thanks to human sensory perception, the world exists as nothing more than a representation of a representation of a representation of something that never existed.
Now, just what does all this have to do with Christopher Hitchins and Mother Teresa? I've just illustrated above that Hitchcock, de Sade, V for Vendetta, and Charles Baudelaire have very little to do with each other, let alone anything to do with Hitchins and Mother Teresa. And yet, there is an overlap in what occurs within the texts that I've mentioned, just as there is an overlap between Hitchins's book The Missionary Position and other literary texts I haven't mentioned above. All of these cultural artifacts - from Hitchcock's films to de Sade's books to Alan Moore's entire corpus of graphic novels to Baudelaire's poetry to Hitchens and Mother Teresa - are concerned with stripping the gaudy veneer from ideologically revered symbols, each in varying capacities, and all of them present different ways to respond to the revelation that there is no virgin snow in society, no more than there are bloody footprints clearly visible atop it, if you'll pardon the metaphor.
My grandmother is a devout Roman Catholic, and she is a wonderful, generous person. These two concepts - my grandmother, the Catholic, and my grandmother, the kind, wonderful person - are sometimes conflated, but I know they're independent of one another, at least in part. Anyways, my grandmother is enamoured by Mother Teresa, as are, I believe, most Catholics. Just this past Christmas, we - my mother and I - gave her a copy of Where There is Love, There is God, and I think it was one of the best gifts she could have ever received. Then again, she's my wonderful, generous grandmother: she treated every gift like it's the best gift she ever received. I have never read a book by Mother Teresa, but I can imagine the kinds of things that can be found in a book of hers given my Catholic upbringing and my knowledge of religious doctrine from throughout history. "Love thy neighbour," the book likely reads in some capacity, "and be happy with your life for what it is. And love God. And don't use contraceptives." All great teachings that, if implemented by the readers, could lead to an enriching and wonderful life. If my grandmother is any indication, those kinds of teachings do lead to fulfillment.
In 2006, Oprah Winfrey discovered that a supposedly autobiographical book, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, was actually a work of fiction masquerading under the heading of non-fiction. I don't want to rehash the endless arguments about the validity (or lack thereof) with regards to Frey's claim that the book was autobiographical. What I want to emphasize here is the main argument that Oprah and her critics engaged in about whether or not the genre of Frey's novel was important. Was the book any more or less meaningful as a fictional text as opposed to a non-fictional text? The answer, I think, depends on the reader, since meaning is the reader's business, not a billionaire's. A Million Little Pieces is meaningful when someone reads it and finds it meaningful; it isn't meaningful when someone reads it and finds it lacks meaning.
By the same token then, Mother Teresa is meaningful when someone - my grandmother, for instance - finds her work meaningful. Whether her good work actually exists or not is irrelevant, just like it's irrelevant as to whether or not A Million Little Pieces is fiction or non-fiction. If a book written by Mother Teresa can give someone hope, courage, and understanding, if it can make someone think twice before they're an asshole to another human being or inspire people to give money to charity, that book is meaningful, and it has done good work. The idea of Mother Teresa is a lot like society's idea of blondes and figures of church authority. Their very role as an idea makes them a good thing. They can't exist in cultural consciousness or, indeed, in any consciousness - remember, consciousness is based off of sensory perception, and all sensory perception renders the world a representation of a representation of a representation of something that never existed - because consciousness doesn't have the capacity to recognize others in their full, complicated glory, especially when those objects have achieved status as symbols. Symbols are, as Bruce Wayne says in Batman Begins, "incorruptible...everlasting." Dom Cobb says of the projection of his wife in Inception, "I can't imagine you with all of your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection." Symbols are uncomplicated; they're artifice, but they're uncomplicated.
So I can agree with Christopher Hitchens about Mother Teresa. She was corrupt, she was a hypocrite, and she wasn't the devout woman the world believed her to be. And, as a symbol, that image can't be supported, not without a complete reevaluation of her as an artifact. In Hitchockian terms, one is either the virgin snow or the bloody footprint. To de Sade, it's all hell. This doesn't make Hitchins's reading of Mother Teresa as wrong. It doesn't make his interpretation any less meaningful, not to me anyways, but to my grandmother, Hitchins's reading would be seen as an attack because of the way Mother Teresa operates as a symbol in her mind.
None of the readings of Mother Teresa are incorrect. Like all human beings, she was flawed, she was sinful, she was limited to a singular cultural context. But like all symbols, she does still have a fundamentally good message to spread to the world. People just need to be careful to live their lives in her image as a symbol and not in her image as a woman. Or not. If there's no meaning for you in Mother Teresa, there's probably meaning for you in something else. I just hope that symbol preaches love and compassion, even if they don't practice it.
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